Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [64]
I could tell he didn’t like my answer.
I didn’t like it either. I continued, “There’s a deeper point here, which has to do with our attempts to separate ourselves from the rest of the world, to pretend we’re not natural, to consider ourselves exempt from the ways the world works. Consider our utter disregard for overshooting carrying capacity—our belief that somehow these ecological principles don’t apply to us. Consider also our denial of death and our deification of humans, especially civilized humans, most especially rich white civilized humans. All of this has to stop. The truth is that I’m going to die someday, whether or not I stock up on pills. That’s life. And if I die in the population reduction that takes place as a corrective to our having overshot carrying capacity, well, that’s life, too. Finally, if my death comes as part of something that serves the larger community, that helps stabilize and enrich the landbase of which I’m a part, so much the better.”
“By what right,” asked someone in the audience, “can you make that decision for others? Don’t they have the right to extend their life by any means possible?”
A third person raised her hand, then said in response to the original question, “Every disease mentioned here is a disease of civilization. Civilization causes those diseases. The questioner seems to be implying that to talk about taking down civilization is to somehow not care about sick people. But to want to get rid of the thing that’s making them sick—civilization—seems far more compassionate than to allow civilization to continue, and then to try to palliate.”
That reminded me of a question my friend Carolyn Raffensperger, co-founder of the Science and Environmental Health Network, likes to pose, not necessarily about civilization but more specifically about the medical industry: “What are we going to do with the irony that industrial health care is one of the most toxic industries on earth? We produce PVC medical devices to treat someone’s cancer, then put them in the hospital incinerator to send back out and give someone else cancer. Or we use mercury in our thermometers in the hospital, and then send that up the incinerator to be deposited in fish and to eventually give more children—human and nonhuman—brain damage. Where does any of this make sense?”
Yet another person pointed out that when we talk about the wonders of modern medicine, we need to remember that on the main it is the rich who receive these ecologically and economically expensive treatments: “Modern industrial medicine cures the cancer of some rich American who became sick because of the toxification of the total environment, and these processes lead to even more toxification, causing yet more poor people—and nonhumans—to die. The real wonder of modern medicine is that the poor buy into this at all.”
The room was abuzz. Someone else stated, “You’ve talked a lot about the power of unstated premises, and this is a great example. No one in here has mentioned two of the most important premises behind the belief that taking down civilization will harm the sick. The first is that the western industrial model of medicine does in fact save people. Sure, industrial medicine saved my life, but only after nearly killing me several times through misdiagnoses and the toxicity of the whole process. And industrial medicine never made me well: what accomplished that were so-called alternative medical treatments such as herbs, energetic work, and changing the emotional, relational, and physical circumstances of my life. That leads to the second premise, which is that if we don’t have industrial medicine we don’t have anything. People talk about how advances in western medicine have decreased morbidity, and on some levels that’s clearly true, but they’re only comparing a more refined version of the same model to a less refined version of it. There have been plenty of studies showing that traditional hunter-gatherers were extremely healthy, with long life spans. There were often high rates of infant mortality, as is true for many creatures,