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By Root 1165 0

single out the authors of Demonic Males, they serve as important examples. These authors are not exceptionally bad scholars. They have simply said what people want, and perhaps need, to hear. Our culture has never lacked for apologists, and, as was true of Chivington, Descartes, St. Paul, St. Crysotom, and Martin Luther, the authors of Demonic Males are not alone. As is true for much religion and philosophy, a primary purpose of anthropology has been the legitimization of behavior patterns. Among many others, the anthropologists E.E. Evans Pritchard("men are always in the ascendancy"), E.R. Leach ("male domination has always been the norm in human affairs"), Claude Levi-Strauss ("women are commodities"), and Steven Goldberg (The Inevitability of Patriarchy) have attempted to naturalize male domination. Like the authors of Demonic Males, the Jewish symphony members who ignored their burning synagogue, me as I gave away memories of my own experiences, or my mother as she obscured signs of sexual abuse in order to get through the day, our society simply ignores any evidence that could potentially threaten our view of the universe. Unstated always, and ignored as surely as the evidence itself, are the ulterior motives that hide beneath. It should not be terribly surprising that people would ignore the world to rationalize exploitation. In order to exploit, we must deafen ourselves to the voices of those we are victimizing. The justification of this exploitation would demand that we continue with our selective deafness, selective blindness, and selective stupidity.

But maybe I'm proceeding as selectively as the authors whose work I have maligned. Perhaps I, too, am trying to impose an order on the universe to match the needs of my interior life. Stars speak? Cradle me? Coyotes agree to deals, and ducks offer their lives to me? Mice retaliate on my bathroom counter, and we all participate in a dance of courtesy and the giving of gifts? There is no blood in this, no sharpness of tooth and claw. Perhaps my efforts at ordering the universe are as pathetic as those I criticize. Maybe, after all these years, I'm still a frightened little boy trying desperately to find love (or at least safety) in a violent household—in a violent universe—where none exists, and so I project, ignore evidence, do everything I have accused others of doing; I will do anything to avoid that one most basic truth of all—that I am entirely alone.

I do not know the interior nature of the universe, nor the essential truth about evolution. But if there is one thing I know about natural selection it is this: creatures who have survived in the long run, have survived in the long run. It is not possible to survive in the long run by taking from your surroundings more than you give back, in other words, one cannot survive in the long run through the domination of one's surroundings. It is quite clearly in the best interest of a bear to make sure that the salmon return and that berries ripen. They can eat them, but they cannot hyperexploit them and still expect to survive. Insofar as competitors enrich and enliven the natural community in which they live, it is in the bear's best interest to see that they, too, thrive, which it does by doing nothing—by simply being a bear. The same can be said for deer, who couldn't survive without wolves or other predators, and for wolves, who couldn't survive without deer. The same can be said for all of us—human and nonhuman alike—that we cannot long survive unless we cooperate with those around us.

It seems likely that no one living today will ever experience a fully natural interaction with either another human or nonhuman. All observations, including my own, are made as through a glass darkly, because we now live in a world of refugees.

The Yanomame Indians are a violent and misogynistic group of people, but how much of that violence has developed in defensive response to marauding Europeans? We shall never know what they were like before, nor will we know anything about peaceful groups. After encountering the Arawaks, Christopher