Endgame Vol.1 (3 page)

Several years ago I interviewed a long-term and well-respected Gandhian activist. I asked him, “What if those in power are murderous? What if they’re not willing to listen to reason at all? Should we continue to approach them nonviolently?”

He responded, reasonably enough, “When a house is on fire, and has gone far beyond the point where you can do anything about it, all you can do is bring lots of water to try to stop its spread. But you can’t save the house. Nonviolence is a precautionary principle. Before the house is on fire you have to make sure you
have a fire hydrant, clearly marked escape routes, emergency exits. The same is true in society. You educate your children in nonviolence. You educate your media in nonviolence. And when someone has a grievance, you don’t ignore or suppress it, but you listen to that person, and ask, ‘What is your concern?’ You say, ‘Let’s sit down and solve it.’”

I agreed with what he said, so far as it went, but that didn’t stop me from understanding that he’d sidestepped the question.

Before I could bring him back, he continued, “Say a father beats his children. Once he has already reached that stage, you have to say, ‘What kind of a childhood did he have? How did he not learn the skills of coping with adverse situations in a calm, compassionate, composed way?’”

This Gandhian’s compassion, I thought, was entirely misplaced. Where was his compassion for the children being beaten? I responded that I believed the first question we need to ask is how we can get the children to a safe place. Once safety has been established, by any means possible, I said, and once the emotional needs of the children are being met, only then do we have the luxury of asking about the father’s emotional needs, and his history.

What happened next is really the point of this story. I asked this devoted adherent of nonviolence if in his mind it would ever be acceptable to commit an act of violence were it determined to be the only way to save the children. His answer was revealing, and symbolizes the hole in our discourse: he changed the subject.

After I transcribed and edited the interview, I sent it to him with a new question inserted, attempting once again to pin him down. What did he do this time? He deleted my question.

Too often this is the response of all of us when faced with this most difficult of questions: when is violence an appropriate means to stop injustice? But with the world dying—or rather being killed—we no longer have the luxury to change the subject or delete the question. It’s a question that won’t go away.

I had two reasons for telling the four versions of the World Trade Center bombing.
¹¹
The first was to point out that all writers are propagandists. Writers who claim differently, or who otherwise do not understand this, have succumbed to the extremely dangerous propaganda that narrative can be divorced from value. This is not true. All descriptions carry with them weighty presumptions of value. This is as true for wordless descriptions such as mathematical formulae—which
value the quantifiable and ignore everything else—as it is for the descriptions I gave above. The first version, by giving only current actions—“the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, killing hundreds of people”—devalues (by their absence) cause and context. Why did the towers collapse? What were the events surrounding the collapse? This neat excision of both cause and context is the standard now in journalism, where, for example, we often hear of devastating mudslides in the colonies killing thousands of people who, seemingly unaccountably, were foolish enough to build villages beneath unstable slopes; toward the end of these articles we sometimes see sidelong references to “illegal logging,” but nowhere do we see mention of Weyerhaeuser, Hyundai, Daishowa, or other transnational timber companies, which cut the steep slopes over the objections—and sometimes dead bodies—of the villagers. Or we may read of the rebel group UNITA slaughtering civilians in Angola, with no mention of two decades of U.S. financial and moral support for this group. So far as the bombing of the World Trade Center, despite yard after column yard of ink and paper devoted to the attacks, analyses of potential reasons for hatred of the United States rarely venture beyond, “They’re fanatics,” or “They’re jealous of our lifestyle,” or even, and I’m not making this up, “They want our resources.”

The second, patriotic version carries with it the inherent presumption that the United States did nothing to deserve or even lead to the attack: if the United States kills citizens of other countries, and survivors of that violence respond by killing United States citizens—even if the casualty counts of the counter-strikes are by any realistic assessment much smaller—the United States is then justified in killing yet more citizens of those other countries. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”
¹²
Another presumption of the patriotic version is that the lives of people killed by foreign terrorists are more worthy of notice, vengeance, and future protection than those killed, for example, by unsafe working conditions, or by the turning of our total environment into a carcinogenic stew. Let’s say that three thousand people died in those attacks. In no way do I mean to demean these lives once presumably full of love, friendship, drama, sorrow, and so on, but more Americans die each month from toxins and other workplace hazards, and more Americans die each
week
from
preventable
cancers that are for the most part direct results of the activities of large corporations, and certainly the results of the industrial economy.
¹³
The lack of outrage over these deaths commensurate to the outrage expressed over the deaths in the 9/11 bombings reveals much—if we care to reflect on it—about the values and presumptions of our culture.

The third version, from the perspective of the bombers or their supporters, presumes that there are conditions under which it is morally acceptable to kill noncombatants, to kill those who themselves have done you no direct harm.
¹⁴
It also presumes that to kill people within the United States (by bombs, of course, since carcinogens spewed in the service of production evidently do not count as causes of atrocity) may cause those who run the governments of the United States—both nominal, that is, political, and de facto, that is, economic—to re-think their position of violently dominating the rest of the planet.

The fourth version presumes it is possible to halt or significantly slow violence through nonviolent means.

Here’s a question I’ve been asking: can the same action seem immoral from one perspective and moral from another? From the perspective, for example, of salmon or other creatures, including humans, whose lives depend on free-flowing rivers, dams are murderous and immoral. To remove dams would, from this perspective, be extremely moral. Of course the most moral thing would have been to not build these or any other large dams in the first place. But they’re built, and they continue to be built the world over, to the consistent short-term fiscal benefit of huge corporations and over the determined yet usually unsuccessful resistance of the poor. The second most moral thing would be to let the water out slowly, and then breach the dams more or less gently, taking the survival needs (as opposed to the more abstract requirements of the dominant economic system) of all humans and nonhumans into account as we let rivers once again run free. But the dams are there, they’re killing rivers—because of dams in the Northwest, for example, salmon and sturgeon are fast disappearing, and in the Southwest, I’m not sure what more I need to say except that the Colorado River no longer even reaches the ocean—and the current political, economic, and social systems have shown themselves to be consistently unresponsive to and irredeemably detrimental to human and nonhuman needs. Faced with a choice between healthy functioning natural communities on one hand and profits on the other (or behind those profits, and motivating them, the centralization of power) of course those in power always choose the latter. What, then, becomes the moral thing to do? Do we stand by and watch the last of the salmon die? Do we write letters and file lawsuits that we know in our hearts will ultimately not make much difference? Do we take out the dams ourselves?

Here’s another question: What would the rivers themselves want?

I’m aiming at a far bigger and more profound target than the nearly twelve million cubic yards of cement that went into the Grand Coulee Dam. I want in this book to examine the morality and feasibility of intentionally taking down not just dams but all of civilization. I aim to examine this as unflinchingly and honestly as I can, even, or especially, at the risk of examining topics normally considered off-limits to discourse.

I am not the first to make the case that the industrial economy, indeed, civilization (which underpins and gives rise to it), is incompatible with human and nonhuman freedoms, and in fact with human and nonhuman life.
¹⁵
If you accept that the industrial economy—and beneath it, civilization—is destroying the planet and creating unprecedented human suffering among the poor (and if you don’t accept this, go ahead and put this book down, back away slowly, turn on the television, and take some more
soma
: the drug should kick in soon enough, your agitation will disappear, you’ll forget everything I’ve written, and then everything will be perfect again, just like the voices from the television tell you over and over), then it becomes clear that the best thing that can happen, from the perspective of essentially all nonhumans as well as the vast majority of humans, is for the industrial economy (and civilization) to go away or, in the shorter run, for it to be slowed as much as humanly possible during the time we await its final collapse. But here’s the problem: this slowing of the industrial economy will inconvenience many of those who benefit from it, including nearly everyone in the United States. Many of those who will be inconvenienced identify so much more with their role as participants in the industrial economy than they do with being human that they may very well consider this inconvenience to be a threat to their very lives. Those people will not allow themselves to be inconvenienced without a fight. What, then, is the right thing to do? Is it possible to talk about fundamental social change without asking ourselves the question the Gandhian refused to answer?

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

IF I’M GOING TO CONTEMPLATE THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries.
Webster’s
calls civilization “a high stage of social and cultural development.”
¹⁷
The Oxford English Dictionary
describes it as “a developed or advanced state of human society.”
¹⁸
All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, helped me not in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: define
high
,
developed
, or
advanced
, please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of “a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society”?

I suddenly remembered that all writers, including writers of dictionaries, are propagandists, and I realized that these definitions are, in fact, bite-sized chunks of propaganda, concise articulations of the arrogance that has led those who believe they are living in the most advanced—and best—culture to attempt to impose by force this way of being on all others.

I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts—that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (
civilization
, see
civil
: from
civis
, meaning
citizen
, from Latin
civitatis
, meaning
city-state
), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (
meadow long
in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville.
¹⁹
Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its
inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth.
²⁰
Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.