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By Root 2268 0

but Indians were not allowed to return the favor. And it’s true of our interspecies relations, as industrial production systematically devours the living planet, any nonhumans who threaten productivity must be destroyed. A functionary for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans expressed this perfectly—to present just one example among an entire planet full of them—in regards to the now-extinct Great Auk: “No matter how many there may have been, the Great Auk had to go. They must have consumed thousands of tons of marine life that commercial fish stocks depend on. There wasn’t room for them in any properly managed fishery. Personally, I think we ought to be grateful to the old timers for handling the problem for us.”81 If we could change the culture such that this premise were no longer true, the calculations of the Danish statistician would be recognized for the insanity they represent, prisons would not be stocked with small-scale criminals, and civilization would collapse in a heartbeat.

IRREDEEMABLE

I think we must face the possibility that something is dreadfully wrong with society and that this is somehow connected to the bloody history of Western culture, a bloodiness that surpasses all others.

Deborah Root 82

THE SIXTH PREMISE OF THIS BOOK, THE ONE ALLUDED TO EARLY ON, is that civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been asking: if this culture’s destructive behavior isn’t making us happy, why are we doing it?

I’ve come up with many answers so far. All of them, unfortunately, point toward the intractability of this culture’s destructiveness. In my book A Language Older Than Words, part of my answer was that the entire culture suffers from what trauma expert Judith Herman calls complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or complex PTSD. By now most of us are familiar with normal PTSD, if not in our bodies then at least from having read about it. PTSD is an embodied response to extreme trauma, to extreme terror, to the loss of control, connection, and meaning that can happen at the moment of trauma, the moment when, as Herman puts it, “the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force.”83 This force may be nonhuman, as in an earthquake or fire; or inhuman, as in the violence on which this culture is based: the rape, assault, battery, and so on that characterizes so much of this culture’s romantic and childrearing practices; the warfare that characterizes so much of this culture’s politics; and the grinding coercion that makes up so much of the rest of this culture, such as its economics, schooling, and so on. Herman states, “Traumatic reactions occur when no action is of avail. When neither resistance nor escape is possible, the human [and the same is clearly true for the nonhuman] system of self-defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized.”84 Traumatized people, she writes, “feel and act as though their nervous systems have been disconnected from the present.”85 They may experience hyperarousal, sensing danger everywhere. Certain triggers may stimulate “flashbacks,” so that a child who was beaten by a parent while on a water skiing trip, for example, may even as an adult become terrified or full of rage when faced with this stimulus. The same may happen to a woman who was raped in a certain make and model of car. And the adult may wonder at the source of this sudden fear or anger. Those who have been traumatized may go into a state of surrender. Having been brought to the point of powerlessness, where any resistance was futile, this feeling may continue later into life. Faced with any emotionally threatening situation, these people may freeze, failing to resist even when resistance becomes