Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [85]
All last week two words have kept coming to mind: toxic mimicry.
I used to believe that civilization is a culture of parodies. Rape is a parody of sex. Civilized wars are parodies of indigenous warfare, which is a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play,168 meaning civilized warfare is a parody of play. Abusive relationships are a parody of love. Cities are parodies of communities, and citizenship is a parody of being a member of a functioning community. Science—with its basis in prediction and extreme control—is a parody of the delight that comes from being able to predict and meet the needs or desires of one’s friends and neighbors (this one came clear to me the other day on seeing my dogs’ joy at guessing whether I was going to turn left or right on a walk, and feeling my own joy at guessing the same for them). This culture’s recreational use of altered states is a parody of their traditional uses. Each of these parodies takes the form yet ignores the soul and intent of that which is being parodied.
But recently a friend convinced me that’s not entirely accurate: the parody doesn’t ignore the intent, but perverts and attempts to destroy it.169 Rape is a toxic mimic of sex. War is a toxic mimic of play. The bond between slave owner and slave is a toxic mimic of marriage. Heck, marriage is a toxic mimic of marriage, of a real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves.
I like the phrase toxic mimic, but it didn’t quite help me uncover the relationship between these types of dependency. I asked my mom.
She gave me the answer in one word: “Identity.”
“Really,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Abusers have no identity of their own.”
I was going to ask what she meant, but I suddenly remembered a conversation I’d had years before with Catherine Keller, a feminist theologian and philosopher, and author of From A Broken Web. We’d been talking about how abuse communicates itself from generation to generation, and about what that abuse—on both personal and social levels—does to who we are. She talked about how not all cultures have been based on domination, then spoke of the rise of this culture, and the effects of this rise: “Within a group in which warrior males are coming to the fore and dominating the tribe or village, everyone in the group will begin to develop a sort of self that is different from that of earlier peoples, a self that reflects the defenses the society itself configures. . . . Another way to put this is that if people are trying to control you, it will be very difficult for you—in part because of your fear—to maintain an openness to them or to others. Quite often the pain you received you will then pass on to other people. Over and over we see the causing of pain—destructiveness and abuse—flowing out of a prior woundedness. We’re left with an incredibly defensive fabric of selves that have emerged from this paradigm of dominance. And because the people who embody the defensive persona will dominate these societies, this kind of self-damaging and community-destroying and ecology-killing defensiveness tends to proliferate cancerously.”
I’d asked her what she meant by defensiveness.
She’d responded, “Alan Watts said one of the prime hallucinations of Western culture—and I would add of the paradigm of dominance—is the belief that who you are is a skin-encapsulated ego. And just as the skin defends you from the dangers of the physical world, the ego defends you from