Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [86]
This all made me think of my relationship with my mom. I live very close to her—three-eighths of a mile—and will live near her for the rest of her life. Part of this has to do with health problems on both my and her parts—I have Crohn’s disease, she has vision problems—part of it has to do with the fact that she is family, and part of it has to do with the fact that I like her company. She presumably likes mine as well. Through my twenties and early thirties I took a lot of flak for this arrangement from some of my white acquaintances—never friends—who told me I was suffering from what they called separation anxiety, and that in order to grow up and become fully myself, I should move far away. I didn’t really understand this, because I have a life of my own (as does she), and because the arrangement—at the time we lived probably five miles apart—works well for both of us on both practical and emotional levels, and because I knew that for all of human existence—save the last hundred years—it was expected that elders would live with or near one or more of their children. It’s been a sudden shift. It struck me as significant that none of my indigenous or third world friends have ever found the arrangement anything but expected. In fact, when I’d tell my white acquaintances that part of the reason we can live so close is that I’m very clear about saying no to the things I don’t want to do for her—for example, I dislike going to the grocery store so I don’t usually take her—they’d nod and tell me what good boundaries I have. When I’ve told my indigenous or third world friends this same thing, they’ve looked at me, pained and disgusted, then asked, “With her vision problems, how does she get to the grocery store?”
Catherine continued, “There are many problems with the belief that separation prepares the way for self-hood, not the least of which is that it doesn’t match reality. We know that on a physical level one is not ‘on one’s own,’ that we have to breathe and eat and excrete, and that even on a molecular scale our boundaries are permeable. The same is true psychically. Life feeds off life, Whitehead says, and if we cut ourselves off from the way we psychically feed each other, the texture of our lives becomes very thin and flat. When we live in a state of defense, there is no moment-to-moment feeding from the richness of the endless relations in which we exist.
“For the system of dominance to perpetuate itself there must be clear rewards for those who manage to maintain a state of disconnection. People must be trained and initiated into that state, and they must be rewarded with a sense of dignity, indeed of manhood, if they are able to maintain a sense of selfcontrol—as opposed to being present to their experience—and a sense of control over their surroundings, which would include as many people as possible.
“When you have a society organized so those at the top benefit from the labor of the majority, you have some strong incentives to develop the kind of selfhood that gets you there. The only kind of selfhood that gets you there is the kind of selfhood that allows you to numb your empathies. To maintain the system of dominance, it’s crucial that the elite learns this empathic numbness, akin to what Robert Jay Lifton calls ‘psychic numbing,’ so its members can control and when necessary torture and kill without being undone. If its members are incapable of numbing, or if they have not been trained properly, the system of domination will collapse.”
That’s one of the reasons, she said, that civilization so often co-opts movements opposing domination. “Society as we know it may well need,” she continued, “to live off of the energy of alternative movements. It needs to suck our blood in order to feed itself,