Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [65]
A couple of days after the talk I got an email from someone else weighing in on this whole question: “I didn’t have the wherewithal to speak up at the time, but I’d offer the following counter-question: ‘What would a diabetic or heart patient do if the drugs she needed to stay alive were integral to an economic system that exploited workers, degraded the environment, and increased the suffering of indigenous peoples?’ To answer that she still wanted the drugs would expose the narcissism—the extreme emphasis on the individual, even at the expense of the larger community—that so dominates Western Culture. That’s the root of much of our trouble.”142
What do we do with this information: Phoenix, Arizona, could sustain a human population of maybe one hundred and fifty. What about the rest of them, living right now on stolen resources? The land under New York City could probably sustain several thousand, or at least it could have if there were still passenger pigeons, bison, salmon, eel, and Eskimo curlews. What happens to the rest? I’m a bit luckier here in Tu’nes. The population might be remotely sustainable at a hunter-gatherer level, if salmon, steelhead, elk, and lamprey were still here in significant numbers.
To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I—or does anyone else—have to destroy them?
At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?
I’ve been thinking more about rights, and I’ve come to the conclusion that defensive rights always take precedence over offensive rights. To take an example especially close to the heart of many women, given the high regard sexual coercion is evidently given within this culture, one person’s defensive right to bodily integrity always trumps—or rather would always trump, within a workable morality—another’s perceived right to sexual access.
In my life I’ve been in a couple of romantic relationships I would define as emotionally abusive. The women would call me names, and harangue me for days about this or that characteristic of mine they didn’t like. When I asked (begged, pleaded with) them to stop, they became all the more angry, and of course refused. When I told them to stop, they exploded, and let me know in no uncertain terms that I had no right to censor them. “Don’t you think it’s ironic,” they’d say, “that you, a writer who rails at the emptiness of this culture’s discourse, are trying to limit mine?”
This clash of my defensive right to not be mistreated with the other’s perceived right to shower displaced rage upon me has never been a problem in normal relationships, where the right to say no—to whatever action, for whatever reason—trumps all others. This doesn’t mean there are no consequences for saying no. To go back to the sexual example, if one person wants to be sexual and another person does not, there is no sex. That cannot be in question. But within the context of a sexual relationship, if one person consistently doesn’t want to be sexual, the two involved may wish to re-examine the form of their relationship. Similarly, I’m certainly not going to force anyone to talk about what’s wrong