A Language Older Than Words (2 page)

What else do we forget? Do we think about nuclear devasta
tion, or the wisdom of producing tons of plutonium, which is
lethal even in microscopic doses for well over 250,000 years?
Does global warming invade our dreams? In our most serious
moments do we consider that industrial civilization has initiated
the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet? How
often do we consider that our culture commits genocide against
every indigenous culture it encounters?
As
one consumes the products manufactured by our culture, is s/he concerned about the atrocities that make them possible?

We don't stop these atrocities, because we don't talk about
them. We don't talk about them, because we don't think about
them. We don't think about them, because they're too horrific to
comprehend. As trauma expert Judith Herman writes, "The or
dinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to
utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word
unspeakable".

As the ecological fabric of the natural world unravels around us, perhaps it is time that we begin to speak of the unspeakable,
and to listen to that which we have deemed unbearable.
A grenade rolls across the floor. Look. It won't go away.

Here's what I've heard about your typical slaughterhouse.

The room sounds for all the
world like a factory. You hear
the clang of steam in pipes and the hits
of its release, the clank
of steel on steel at chains pull taut, the
whirr of rolling wheels on metal runners, all punctuated every thirty seconds or so bythe pop of the stunner.

The rooms are always humid, and smell of grease
as much as blood. The walls are often pale, the floor usually
concrete. I have
a
picture from a slaughterhouse that will forever be etched in my
mind. No matter how I try to look elsewhere, my eyes return to
the newly painted chute that leads in from outside, not only
because of the chutes contents, but because the color—electric
blue—contrasts almost painfully with the drabness of the rest of
the room.

Inside the chute, facing a blank wall, stands a steer. Until the
last moment he does not seem to notice when a worker places a steam-driven stunner at the ridge of his forehead. I do not know
what the steer feels in those last moments, or what he thinks.
The pressure of contact triggers the stunner, which shoots a re
tractable bolt into the brain of the steer. The steer falls, some
times stunned, sometimes dead, sometimes screaming, and
another worker climbs down to attach a chain to the creature's hind leg. Task completed, he nods, and the first worker—the
one who applied the stunner—pushes a black button. There's
the whine of a hoist, and the steer dangles from a suspended rail,
blood dripping red to join the coagulating river on the floor.

The steer sways as wheels roll along the rail, causing the fall
ing blood to describe a sinusoidal curve on the way to another worker, who slits his throat. There is barely time to follow his
path before the chute door opens and another animal is pushed
in. There goes the stunner again, the hoist, metal, steam, the
grind of meshing gears. It happens again and again, like clock
work, every half-minute.

We live in a world of make-believe. Think of it as a little game—
the only problem being that the repercussions are real. Bang!
Bang! You're dead—only the other person doesn't get up. My
father, in order to rationalize his behavior, had to live in a world
of make-believe. He had to make us believe that the beatings and rapes made sense, that all was as it should, and must, be. Now, it will be obvious to everyone that my fathers game of
make-believe was far from fun—it was destructive. My father rewrote the script on a day-to-day basis, thereby making every
thing right—he
created
the reality that he
required
in order to continue his behavior.

In attempting to describe the world in make-believe terms,
we have forgotten what is real and what isn't. We pretend the
world is silent, whereas in reality it is filled with conversations.
We pretend we are not animals, whereas in reality the laws of
ecology apply as much to us as the rest of "God's Creation." We
pretend we're at the top of a great chain of being, although evolution is nonhierarchical.

Here's what I think: it's a sham. It's a giant game of make-
believe. We pretend that animals feel no pain, and that we have
no ethical responsibility toward them. But how do we know? We
pretend that other humans—the women who are raped, for ex
ample (a full twenty-five percent of all women in this culture
have been raped, and an additional nineteen percent have had to
fend off rape attempts), or the one hundred and fifty million
children who are enslaved to make soccer balls, tennis shoes,
Barbie dolls, and the like—are happy and unaffected by it all.
We pretend all is well as we dissipate our lives in quiet desperation.

We pretend that death is an enemy, although it is an integral
part of life. We pretend we don't have to die, that modern medi
cine can cure what ails us, no matter what it is. But can modern medicine cure a dying soul?

We pretend that violence is inevitable, and in some ways it is.
But can it be mitigated through better science? Rather than answer that question, most often we pretend, sheepishly, that violence doesn't exist.

Science, politics, economics, and everyday life do not exist separately from ethics. But we act like they do.

The problem is not difficult to understand: we pretend that anything we do not understand—anything that cannot be mea
sured, quantified, and controlled—-does not exist. We pretend
that animals are resources to be conserved
or consumed, when, in reality, they have purposes entirely independent of us. It is
wrong to make believe that people are
nothing more than "Hu
man Resources" to be efficiently utilized,
when they too have
independent existences and preferences. And
it is wrong to make
believe that animals are not sentient, that they
do not-form so
cial
communities in which
members nurture, love, sustain,
and
grieve for each other, that they do not manifest
ethical behavior.

We
act like these pretenses are reasonable, but
none of them
are
intuitive or instinctual; nor are
they logically, empirically, or ethically defensible. Taken together, a
way of life based on these pretenses is destroying life on this planet.

But a real world still awaits us, one that is ready to speak to us if only we would remember how to listen.

When I was a child, the stars saved my life. I did not die because they spoke to me.

Between the ages of seven and nine, I often crept outside at
night to lie on the grass and talk to the stars. Each night I gave
them memories to hold for me—memories of beatings witnessed,
of rapes endured. I gave them emotions too large and sharp for
me to feel. In return the stars gave me understanding. They said
to me, "This is not how it is supposed to be. This is not your
fault. You will survive,
We
love
you. You are good."

I cannot overstress the importance of this message. Had I
never known an alternative existed—had I believed that the cruelty I witnessed and suffered was natural or inevitable—I would have died.

My parents divorced during my early teens. It was a bitter
divorce in which my father used judges, attorneys, psychologists,
and most of all money, with the same fury and relentlessness
with which he had once used fists, feet, and genitals. The stars
continued to foster me, speaking softly whenever I chose to listen.

Time passed. I grew older. I went to college, received a degree
in physics, and on my own read a fair amount of psychology. I
came to a new understanding of my place in the world. It had
not been the stars that saved me, but my own mind. My earlier
thesis—that the stars cared for me, spoke to me, held me—made
no physical sense. Stars are inanimate. They don't
say
anything. They can't, and they certainly couldn't care about me. And even
if they had cared there remained the problem of distance. How
could a star a thousand light-years away respond to my emo
tional needs in a timely fashion? It became clear that some part
of my own psyche had known precisely the words I needed to
hear in order to endure, and had projected those words onto the
stars. It was a pretty neat trick on the part of my unconscious, and this projection business seemed a wonderful adaptive mechanism for surviving in a world that I had come to recog
nize as largely insensate, with the exception of its supreme ten
ant—humankind.

I've often wished that I could have been in the room when
Descartes came up with his famous quip, "I think, therefore I
am." I would have put my arm around his shoulder and gently tapped, or I would have punched him in the nose, or I might
have taken his hands in mine, kissed him full on the lips, and
said, "René my friend, don't you
feel
anything?"

I used to believe that Descartes' most famous statement was
arbitrary. Why hadn't he said, "I love, therefore I am," or "I breathe, therefore I have lungs," or "I defecate, therefore I must have eaten," or "I feel the weight of the quill on my fingers and
rejoice in the fact that I am alive, therefore I must be"? Later I
grew to see even these statements as superfluous; for anyone liv
ing in the real world, life
is
: existence itself is wondrously suffi
cient proof of its own existence.

I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.

Descartes had been attempting to find one point of certainty
in the universe, to find some piece of information he could trust. He stated, "I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false;
I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my
fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no
senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and
place are but the fictions of my mind. What then can be es
teemed as true? I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the
world." Estranged from all of life, Descartes thought that every
thing was a dream, and he the dreamer.

You may have played this game, too. During tenth grade I
occasionally bedeviled a friend of mine by saying, "Jon, the en
tire world doesn't exist. You'll be glad to know that includes you.

You are nothing more than a figment of my imagination. Be
cause you don't exist, everything you do is a result of my having
willed it." Since Jon was a good friend, and because we were
high school sophomores, his response was a fairly straightfor
ward sock in the arm. I then countered by smiling and saying, "I
willed you to do that." He'd throw a couple more jabs for good measure, and then we'd go to the gym and shoot baskets.

I guess Descartes didn't have a close friend with Jon's good
sensibilities. So, instead of going to play basketball, he found
himself pushing his philosophy of narcissism to its logical, albeit
empty, conclusion. He realized that since he was thinking his
thoughts—because he was doubting the existence of the universe—then he must exist to be doing the doubting. "I think,
therefore I am." So far, so good. But as Descartes continued his line of reasoning, the world congealed for him into two groups,
the thinker, in this case Descartes (or more precisely his disem
bodied thought processes), and that which he thought (i.e., everything and everyone else). He who matters, and that which doesn't.

Had Descartes stopped there, the response by other philosophers would probably have been similar to Jon’s: a violent back
lash at having been philosophized out of subjective existence.
But he didn't. He and many other philosophers eventually agreed
that subjective personhood should certainly be granted to all of
them, as well as to others with political, economic, or military
power, while they decided that just as certainly it should not be
granted to those who could not speak, or at least those whose
voices they chose not to hear.