The Body (Politic) in Pain: Violence Institutionalized as the Subjugated Subject (Torture, Terrorism, Refugees)

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee, Summer 2015

The enclosed is a draft of a paper I have the pleasure to present at the 30th Retrospective Conference  of Elaine Scarry's landmark work, The Body in Pain at University of Brighton. Following out some of the themes of my original critique of what I argue is Scarry's implicit dualism, (On the (im) materiality of Violence), I argue here that her analysis of the body in pain is distorted by the absence of any really probing account of the role that institutionalized violence plays in the formation of identity. Rooted as far back, at least, in Aristotle's re-inscription of mind/body dualism in de Anima and the social order it legitimates, Scarry's "body in pain" reiterates that dualism, and in so doing reinforces the very "spectacles of power" she'd no doubt see undermined. Perhaps more importantly, however, Scarry misses an opportunity to articulate the ways in which subjugation--even in its most brutal forms--can inform identity, and thus give voice to resistance.

I sincerely appreciate any and all comments, suggestions, criticism my fellows might have, and I am very grateful to the organizers of the conference at University of Brighton for giving me the opportunity to present my work.

Thanks,

Wendy Lynne Lee

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Mind/Body Dualism as the Algorithm of “Civilization”

In “On the (Im)Materiality of Violence” I argued that the dualistic impulse Bibi Bakare-Yusef identifies in Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the experience of pain is rooted in Western philosophy reaching back at least to Aristotle’s hylomorphic conception of the subject, and that an understanding of the role that impulse plays in Scarry’s view sheds valuable light on the strengths and limitations of The Body in Pain. For Aristotle, the hylomorphic “soul” (psyche) acts as the principle of animation of a living thing—not as a separable entity (de Anima, hereafter DA 414a 26-8). “Hylomorphism… comprehends ‘mind’ not as something external to ‘body,’ but as a defining ontological and existential algorithm which differentiates species according to the unique characteristics of their form (DA 412a 19-21, 412a 27-8, 412b 5-6, 412b 15-17). The trouble with hylomorphism, at least for Aristotle, is that it fails to differentiate within species, or at least within the human species, in the manner necessary to legitimating a hierarchical social order anchored in subjugation according to race, sex, and class. It’s thus not surprising that he retreats to dualism in order to posit intellect as the un-enmattered potential for the activity of knowing (a pure becoming of the object known) available exclusively to those whose leisure of mind is guaranteed through the laboring bodies of others. While scholars debate the best way to interpret these passages, it seems clear that for Aristotle the subject of the intellective “soul” is essentially dualist, reasserting the authority not only of mind over body, but of all those identified with mind over those identified with body in Aristotle’s psychic hierarchy.

Aiming to reserve knowing to a knower “unpolluted” by embodied experience (DA 429a 10-13, 429a 21-8), Aristotle’s turn to dualism naturalizes a social order within which race, sex and class determine social status for the hierarchies of household and state, themselves analogues of his psychic hierarchy—and the contortions it undertakes to exempt its privileged knower. That aristocratic Greek men occupy the Zenith of this hierarchy isn’t surprising; in the end, the ethnocentric and masculinist social order of the Politics triumphs over de Anima’s fleeting intimation of epistemic, moral, and civic equality. Or perhaps closer to the truth: the need for slaves (war booty or wives) to perform the labor that liberates the patrician class to its philosophical pursuits wins out over the integrity of such pursuits themselves. In any case, what in Aristotle is legitimation of a regime rooted in race, sex, and class is for many to follow, Scarry included, a missed opportunity to theorize a “subject” in whose identity these factors play a formative role. This is not to say that Scarry fails to recognize that institutions play key roles as causal agents in the somatic, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and epistemic experience of slaves, torture victims, rape victims, prisoners of war, refugees, and others. She clearly recognizes this, if somewhat obliquely, when she observes of slaves that

The slave still authorizes the movement of his body as he each day wakes up, walks to the pyramid, puts his hand to the stone, and begins to lift and carry. Perhaps he believes that the very beautiful artifact to which he contributes his embodied labor implicitly includes him in its civilizing embrace, that he is its partial author. Perhaps instead he perceives himself as excluded, but chooses… to devote his lifetime to this aimless project rather than to the shorter life’s project of rebellion. (The Body in Pain (TBIP), p. 156-7).

Although Scarry situates her example in the Egypt of the pyramid builders, it feels as if it could have hailed from anytime, anywhere. Indeed, she reinforces this sentiment when she later remarks that “[s]lavery, whether occurring in ancient Egypt or in the nineteenth century American South, was an arrangement in which physical work was demanded of a population whose membership were themselves cut off from the ownership, control, and enjoyment of the products they produced” (TBIP, p. 170).

The trouble with this approach, however, is that while it’s true that varieties of subjugation like slavery share similar practical characteristics across time, these facts cannot speak to the specific ways in which the institutions responsible for enslavement affect and actuate the identity of the slave. Speculation about what slaves might believe, in what they might be invested, what they fear isn’t the same thing as investigating how pyramid building as an artifact of ancient Egyptian civilization, its cultural practices, its structures of government, agriculture, arts, its military conquests, its language, and its specific forms of institutionalized violence—the ways in which “the slave” instantiates “the laboring body”—inform not merely the slave’s beliefs, but the experience of the stone under his hands, the feel of his “lift and carry,” the attenuation of his hope by the end of the day. Recognizing in ancient Egypt, nineteenth century America, or 21^st century Malaysia causal agents responsible for the production of “the body in pain” qua slavery isn’t the same thing as probing the specific conditions under which subjugation imbues identity—how the “civilization” of such regimes is made manifest in the very ways in which the subjugated experience and conceive themselves, their lives, and their labor. The ways in which pyramid building might be inscribed on the Egyptian’s body may resemble the scars of the slaver’s whip on the back of the nineteenth century African’s or the bruises disfiguring the face of a 21^st century sex-trafficked child. But recognizing family resemblances among enslaved “bodies in pain” is no substitute for interrogating how “civilization” comes to be inscribed on the identities of those whose laboring bodies form the brick and mortar of its achievements.

The Vocabulary of Torture

In a fashion similar to her discussion of slavery, Scarry argues that the language used in acts of torture “goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of the very thing it has objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power,” (TBIP, p. 27).  Scarry recognizes, in other words, that as a “spectacle of power,” violence functions to legitimate and enforce the hegemonic institutions that deploy it, and that the words used to “convert the vision of suffering” into that spectacle are crucial not only as manipulative or misleading—but as weapons every bit as important to the interrogator’s “achievement” as are the physical tools of his trade. She writes that it’s “precisely because that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used” (TBIP, p. 27). And this is equally true of the language through which confession, information, or capitulation is “achieved.” Not only, however, does language facilitate and augment acts of torture, torture also demolishes the use of language for its victims. When Scarry argues, for example, that “[a] fifth dimension of physical pain is its ability to destroy language,” and that among the achievements of torture is the damage it does to the capacity for speech, (TBIP, p. 54), she implicitly acknowledges the extent to which the formulation of words is embodied in the tongue, mouth, and vocal chords, and that this ability is vital to the identity and integrity of the tortured.

It’s thus that much more disappointing that Scarry’s insight about the relationship between language and torture is obscured by her omission of that relationship’s role in the larger context of institutionalized violence. As Ludwig Wittgenstein might put it, the meaning of a word is not merely its use, but its usefulness, in this case, for maintaining the spectacle of power personified in the intimate relationship between the torturer and the tortured. It’s the destruction of the latter’s capacity to give voice to pain that the interrogator can count on, indeed by design, to be among his first achievements. This isn’t because the subjugated is deprived of words per se; it’s because the right to speak is itself preemptively precluded for any utterance other than that elicited by the torturer. What such preemption shows is that the interrogator isn’t just a worker hired to do a grisly job; indeed, he’s situated epistemically, kinesthetically, psychologically, socially in that larger context as a candidate for a position elevated and concealed by its title: “interrogator.” He’ll have a suitable disposition for achieving the presumptive goals of torture, and he’ll likely be a male beneficiary of the regime.  Yet without an analysis of that larger context, including how language comes to be appropriated by the regime that empowers the torturer, the picture that ultimately emerges is bound to omit precisely the factors that make the institution of torture possible.  

Scarry’s missed opportunity is thus threefold:

·      First, even an insightful description of the effects of the uses of violence—such as silencing the subject—isn’t the same thing as an analysis of the institutions that incorporate violence as a naturalized part of their claims to power. Power cannot come to be the “spectacle” Scarry references save for the larger context within which it can create lexicon of its enforcement.

·      Second, omitting to examine how such “spectacles” come to be institutionalized itself exemplifies the dualist impulse Bakare-Yusef identifies in Scarry’s view of suffering, particularly with respect to how that impulse seduces us to believe that we can turn to “the body in pain” without undertaking an investigation into subjugated subject’s identity as enslaved, tortured, raped, imprisoned, evicted, etc.

·      Third, however otherwise insightful Scarry’s discussion of language and torture, references to the “body in pain” as if these could be made sense of in abeyance of that dualist impulse reinforces the role language plays in subjugation .

Abstracting “the body in pain” as an object dissociable from the specific contexts within which its subjects are likely already positioned as vulnerable to subjugation reiterates a psychic hierarchy within which even language functions to insure the segregation of laboring bodies and the regimes who subjugate them. Hence, giving examples from Greece, Chile, the Philippines, or South Vietnam—but treating “the body in pain” as if its experiential characteristics are largely the same for each—functions not only to elide the many ways in which violence is utilized to specific objectives, it effectively erases it as institutionalized, yielding a distorted picture of a subject embodied in and by that violence, yet without moorings in the very institutions responsible for it.

Other as points of reference or departure, the bodies of Scarry’s ruminations seem to float free of any facts that might get in the way of turning to the pain. Yet it’s precisely the historical, cultural, political, and religious facts of these institutions that inform the processes through which any subject comprehends and affects herself as a subject, that is, as a subject of experience. We call such processes “subjectification.” The subject whose identity is affected as an instrument for maintaining institutions that rely on the threat of violence, we call the subjugated subject. Such subjects experience pain not only in the body, but in expectation itself formed within regimes whose oppressive “spectacle” pervades every aspect of experience, emotion and perception; institutionalized violence is that violence which saturates every facet of a subject’s epistemic situation—not only that which we identify as suffering.  Put differently: did we take Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of living things seriously all the way up the psychic hierarchy, we’d see that human identity consists at least in crucial part in our relationship to and within the institutions that affect or actuate us as subjects; so too as subjugated subjects. The key difference is that in a society not only stratified on the basis of race, sex, and class, but segregated into privileged minds and laboring bodies, many institutions (if not all) must sustain themselves via whatever forms of repression are necessary to preserve that status quo. That language is such a regime’s primary weapon and the first casualty for the body in pain is hardly surprising, though it seems symptomatic of Scarry’s dualist impulse to align words with a still composed subject and inarticulate wailing with the body in pain, as if minds speak but bodies wail.

The upshot is this: Mind/body dualism functions as an institutionalized algorithm to naturalize authority, affect the subjugation of bodies for the performance of labor, and justify whatever means are necessary to maintain those institutions for their beneficiaries. It facilitates the elision of the destructive effects of that subjugation, and it contains admission of its bodily and psychic damage to specific instances of violence, effacing the roles that race, sex, and class play in the larger context. Mind/body dualism functions to institutionalize violence as both immediate spectacle and enduring imprimatur of regimes that reserve even language—the crucible of the knower—to themselves. To ignore these dynamics is to effectively re-inscribe them by omission. To invoke the body in pain as if it can be dissociated from the histories within which violence has become as ordinary as a language that swaps words like “Muslim” for “Nigger,” “Democrat” for “Commie,” or “migrant” for “alien” is to effectively muzzle its subject long before pain becomes the warp and woof of her/his reality. Such bodies can generate empathy—but they cannot foment resistance. And that is what the regime counts on.

The Function of Erasure, Elision, and Effacement

Scarry recognizes that erasure of the effects of institutionalized violence is crucial to legitimating a social order whose beneficiaries, like its casualties, are defined by race, sex, and class. Of torture, she argues for example that “[t]he most radical act of distancing resides in [the torturer’s] disclaiming of the other’s hurt. Within the strategies of power based on denial there is… a hierarchy of achievement, successive intensifications based on increasing distance from… the body” (TBIP, p. 57).  By attributing to the torturer as achievement the capacity to distance himself from the body of the tortured, however, Scarry not only re-inscribes mind/body dualism to the purposes of the torturer, she describes—though unwittingly—one of the ways in which the subject becomes the subjugated through the torturer’s “achievement.” The subject is affected as subjugated not only in the torture, but through the torturer’s disclaimer with respect to the subject’s pain (as ancillary, for example, to acquiring information). The subject is affected as subjugated, in other words, through the torturer’s social position as empowered to inflict pain under specific (and further empowering) conditions.

While the torturer, for example, is likely paid for his services, the tortured subjugate can never in fact be recognized, much less humanized, as a subject. The achievement of the torturer is to distance himself from the body in pain; the subject never enters this equation; he/she is simply a conduit for information (or the fiction of information), a public iteration of repression understood by that public as such. Put differently: the infliction of pain legitimated through the institutionalization of violence can be applied only to bodies, and only to particular bodies, and in that context torture forms a specific commission or service. The torturer’s job is to actuate “the body in pain” and what this requires is ignoring the fact that the wails emitted from the mouths of the tortured belong to a subject, and thus constitute atrocity. Ignoring inconvenient facts is part of the design not only of torture, but of terrorism, rape, and war, as it must be if their commissioned agents are to ascend in the hierarchy of achievement. That design comes to form what is expected not only by the subjugated, but by the body politic. The social hierarchy is itself, after all, dependent upon eliding the subject as subjugated in that “subjugated” implies repressive action undertaken to enforce otherwise unjust convention, a human-made artifice. But the goal of violence institutionalized is to naturalize subjugation within the very processes through which subjects comprehend themselves as, say, black, or female, laborer, or refugee, terrorist or insurgent. From this perspective, the torturer (like the terrorist, the sweatshop capitalist, the slaver, the rapist, the war-monger) stands merely as a metaphor for an achievement of much greater magnitude, namely, insuring that the subjugated conceive themselves not as subjugated but simply as victims of particular events, horrific to be sure, but not necessarily an indictment of civilization.

A perverse metaphor for Aristotle’s psychic hierarchy imposed on the body politic, acts of torture, terrorism, rape, slavery, and war signify “civilization” insofar, as Scarry puts it, “[e]very act of civilization is an act of transcending the body in a way consonant with the body’s needs” (TBIP, p. 57). No doubt, Scarry would find my formulation of “civilization” anathema to any transcendence “consonant with the body’s needs.” But insofar as the laboring body is a projection of the dualist algorithm, its only needs are to sub-serve civilization’s transcendence—and these can surely be met more effectively through torture, terrorism, rape, slavery, and war than through art, music, philosophy and literature. Transcendence, in other words, is itself a euphemism. It serves to elide the objectives of institutionalized violence; it tamps down the possibility of revolt against an unstable regime by offering cursory acknowledgement to the body as a locus of need. But it nonetheless accords to acts of violence a legitimate and natural vehicle for transcending, or better: walking over, the bodies of labor that form the stepping- stones of that hierarchy.

“Torture,” writes Scarry, “is a condensation of the act of “overcoming” the body present in benign forms of power” (TBIP. p. 57). Indeed, but what Scarry fails to see is that the algorithm that informs her construal of bodies, subjects, and power precludes the benign in favor of a regime whose stratification of race, sex, and class into laboring bodies has less benevolent objectives. She turns to the body in pain, but away from the “civilization” through which the subject is affected, a social order whose survival depends upon the elision of subjugation as subjugation. “Elision” elicits two meanings in this context: first, and most obvious, as the dissociation of the “body in pain” from the epistemic situation of the experiencing subject from the point of view of transcendence, and second as a metaphor for a subject preemptively silenced, a subjugate whose voice is elided, “suppressed, struck out, left out of consideration,” by the terror which inscribes her epistemic situation as, for example, enslaved, tortured, raped. Turning to the “body in pain,” Scarry forecloses the side of affect; she leaves out of consideration violence institutionalized as a strategy to sustain the regime, legitimating its effacement as the cause of suffering, and thereby helping to elide, in both senses, the subjugated subject.

The Algorithm of the Regime:

The “Body in Pain” and the “Reader of the Body in Pain”

Scarry is not alone in what constitutes a kind of existential myopia. As reader/listeners we too turn to the body in pain, and away from the violent dynamics responsible not merely for suffering itself, but for the subject who suffers. Perhaps we do so because, confronted with suffering our first reaction is empathy or compassion. Perhaps we value opportunities to be modest heroes. Where suffering is compounded by injustice, we’re indignant and incredulous. We respond with an all-encompassing compassion; we’re outraged by the Islamic State bombings in Paris; we demand a higher minimum wage; we condemn Malaysian sex-traffickers. Still, insofar as we attend solely to “the body in pain,” we’re as liable as any for silencing the subjugated subject—regardless how loudly we may evince our incredulity. Indeed, we may even delude ourselves into thinking that calling out the injustice of suffering counts as calling attention to the institutions responsible for it. But discharging anger is in no way the same thing as engaging in resistance, though the former all too often passes for the latter, thereby effacing even more effectively the subjugation of those whose bodies function both as laboring disposables and as opportunities for privileged others to discharge empathy.

Perhaps, however, it’s an overly cynical reading of empathy to cast it as something merely discharged. Empathy, evinced through the ministrations of others, argues the reader/listener is what helps the subjugated subject to regain her voice. The trouble is that it doesn’t; indeed, precisely the reverse may be true. Insofar as we as privileged others undertake no real risk in attending to the body in pain, insofar as our actions, even if voluble, remain well behind the safe walls of any substantive challenge to the social order, “discharge” is all that remains. Getting to be those who turn to the body in pain reminds us that we’re good, that we’re capable of empathy, and that we’re not them—either the tortured or the torturer. Theorizing the body in pain helps to reinforce our exemption from whatever amalgam of race, sex, or class that might otherwise threaten us with subjugation. In effect, we turn to the body in pain in order to turn away from the subjugated subject and the possibility that we stand on the side of the torturer’s civilization, legitimating subjugation not merely by turning away, but by reinforcing the mind/body dualism that underwrites it.

The turn itself is structured to reassure the reader/listener of The Body in Pain that it will not be interpreted as resistance to the institutions culpable for it; it’s myopia makes it safe. Its discharge of anger sans any substantive demand for change reinforces the regime’s spectacle of power by omission. However contrary to Scarry’s intention, The Body in Pain invites just such a reading when she argues that pain is unlike other states of consciousness because, unlike love of, fear of, or hatred of, “physical pain has no referentiality.’” As Bakare-Yusef puts it, its nonreferentiality,

prevents and inhibits the transformation of the felt experiences of pain, leaving it to reside in the body, where the sufferer reverts back to a prelinguistic state of incomprehensible wailing, inaudible whisper, inarticulate screeching, primal whispering, which destroys language and all that is associated with language: subjectivity, civilization, culture, meaning, and understanding (Bakare-Yusef, 1999, p. 314).

In other words, according to Scarry, pain de-subjectifies; it deconstructs the subjective integrity of the subject by undermining the safety and self-possession of her body. Pain, for Scarry, “resides in the body” like the horrific infection depicted in The Walking Dead; it compels the “sufferer” to revert to a primal state, inarticulate and screaming, and in so doing its nonreferentiality posits the reader/listener of “the body in pain” as “empathetic” precisely because we recognize and accept pain’s nonreferentiality. We’re neither required nor solicited to look further.

The trouble with this construal is that both the subject who’s reduced to inarticulate wailing and the reader who empathetically turns to her are in fact fictions supplied by the institutions in whose interest it is to create occasions for deflating the tension and anguish that foment resistance. On the side of the body in pain, that occasion consists either in resignation, dissimulation, even death, or in the promise that should any turn in its direction, it will be to the pain alone—that its nonreferentiality will be honored, that empathy will fill the vacuum where language has been abandoned. On the side of the reader/listener, it consists in getting to be the one who extends concern—so long as the rules that govern turning to the pain are strictly observed—that any further analysis of its responsible parties is strictly omitted. In other words, the relationship of the de-subjectified subject—the body in pain—and the empathetic reader are not merely contained by the institutionalized violence of “civilization,” they are an essential part of its algorithm, its legitimation and maintenance. Neither can be made sense of outside the dualistic impulse that governs turning to “the body in pain,” yet neither in fact exist or could exist outside the regime which deposits each in their respective places as “the sufferer” and “the angel of mercy.” Both are therefore subjugates.  

It’s only, moreover, within the context of this perverse fiction that we can make sense of the reversion of the subject to a prelinguistic state: only that subject could be so destroyed since only that subject would be unprepared to experience that pain. If, in other words, the experience of pain has no causal reference, no origin not preemptively consigned to the merely incidental, the subject’s in no position to expect it. But this seems absurd since, however cursory is the acknowledgement of the reader/listener, it’s also because the causes are, for example, torture or slavery, that the reader turns to the body in pain at all. It will do no good to object that my critique of Scarry’s nonreferentiality downplays the experience of pain as a blocking out of all but the pain itself—that such is the phenomenal character of at least great pain. Pain is at least in part made great by being expected; yet expectation precludes nonreferentiality. Indeed, terror—expecting a future infliction of pain—forms a crucial feature of subjugation, insuring compliance not through pain itself, but through the terrorizing anticipation of suffering. We can make no sense of this anticipation save for the institutionalized violence that makes it real for the subjugated subject.

Pain cannot, therefore, be nonreferential. It can be overwhelming; it can crystallize the meaning of subjugation; it can render the subject temporarily speechless. But insofar as terrorizing expectation is an aspect of pain at least under the conditions Scarry discusses, pain always and necessarily refers—even if the subject doesn’t know it, and even if the reader is destined to ignore the object of that reference. A subject subjectified via the terror intrinsic to institutionalized violence experiences pain as no less painful, but also as no less subjectifying since its systemic effect in undermining her bodily self-possession—its capacity to affect subjugation—is itself intrinsic to her identity. The experience of pain thus signifies the subject’s status both as a laboring instantiation of “body” and, however epistemically opaque to her, as a subject capable of resistance if only to particular experiences of pain, if only to herself, and even if as an act of sheer survival.

“Civilization”

A final, perhaps maximally concrete, way of articulating the trouble with The Body in Pain is that Scarry has the relationship between particular experiences of subjugation and the regimes responsible for them backwards. While she insists pain de-subjectifies the subject by destroying the subject’s linguistic tether to “civilization, culture and meaning,” thus reducing the capacity for resistance to inarticulate “whispers,” she casts “civilization” as largely generic, eliding the constitutive role played by violence in the institutions within which “civilization” itself consists. To attribute the silencing of the subject to the experience of subjugation miscasts the silencing and the subjugation as effects when they’re in fact essential preconditions of the social order. This isn’t just because silence is a constitutive characteristic of the subjugated subject, it’s because the infliction of pain cannot be understood as a threat to that constitution except under conditions where it’s unexpected; and it isn’t unexpected.

Torture doesn’t subjugate; it signifies subjugation. Torture doesn’t threaten to unravel civilization; it instantiates it as the terror necessary to preserve its always unstable spectacle of power.   The terrorist, for example, is well-acquainted with the protocols of water-boarding; the slave comprehends whipping as a regular feature of life; the sex-trafficked child learns very quickly to associate sexuality and brutality. The meanings of words like “expectation” or “silence” are, as Wittgenstein might have it, in their uses; their acculturated meaning inseparable from the institutions within which language functions to naturalize power. Thus it cannot be the particular experience of pain that affects the silence, but rather the expectation of its recurrence; silence is not an effect of suffering, but rather its precondition. It’s not that the de-subjectified subject is reduced to pre-linguistic whispers; it’s that the regime assigns voice only to its beneficiaries. The best description of a civilization that relies on institutionalized violence might, indeed, simply be “terror.”

In his 2013 review of The Body in Pain, Samuel Moyn offers one way to conceive this form of terror. He argues that “between the nether pole of torture and the high summit of creation, a crucial piece of terrain is missing in Scarry’s thought: the place where the real politics of workaday institutions—the very ones that both cause torture and can avert it—happen,” (https://www.thenation.com/article/torture-and-taboo-elaine-scarry/). These “workaday” institutions turn out to be critical to understanding the extent to which Scarry’s argument that the experience of pain (necessarily) agitates against the processes of subjectification is undermined by her failure to appreciate the role that even the most violent and oppressive of institutions play in it. The issue here is not, however, merely that she misses the possibility of conditions under which the experience of pain contributes to subjectification, but that because these are the conditions of institutionalized violence, she misses what’s essential to subjectification in a world made and unmade by the beneficiaries of that violence, namely, the many varieties of resistance through which the subject can reclaim themselves against the relative safety of conformity to subjugation.

It’s hard to imagine an example of either the material or the psychic space where such a reclamation might occur than along the unstable interstices which characterize the relationship between the terrorism of the Islamic State, calls in the United States and elsewhere to return to methods like water-boarding to extract information from ISIS suspects, and the current flight of Syrian refugees. But in light of our subversive reading of Scarry’s  “body in pain,” I think we can say this much:

·      The acts of terrorist organizations like the Islamic State are not departures from civilization, but realizations of it. However much terrorism is cast as a reaction to Western values, culture or consumption; however much ISIS represents itself as religious jihadism, its carefully orchestrated brutality instantiates “civilization” as one of its most unadorned “spectacles of power” to date. The Paris bombings illustrate the “workaday” politics of an organization that could not have come into being without the ideological and material infrastructure supplied by a militarized and fully capitalized planet that depends at a minimum on war, torture, and the subjugation of laboring bodies human and nonhuman. That this regime can trace its roots to ancient efforts to justify a stratified social order based on race, sex, and class only restates the claim that “the body in pain” is best understood as a meme for the relationships upon which civilization is realized as terror, or perhaps a metaphor for the sheer intransigence of a dualist worldview instantiated not only in beheadings and bombings, but in sweat shops and factory farms, drug cartels and the Syrian, Mexican, or Aboriginal Australian flight from drought.

·      Calls to bring back, say, waterboarding as a strategy to extract information from Islamic State terrorists is neither surprising nor inconsistent with “civilization.” Just as terrorism instantiates “civilization” as a challenge to the claims of the nation state to authority, so too torture legitimates the utility of violence in the “good” nation, that is, the regime that wages so-called war on terror. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, for example, recently said that he “would bring it [torture] back,” and that “waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they’d do to us…” (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/trump-would-bring-back-waterboarding-216133#ixzz3svMpDPMi). While there’s much to say here, what’s especially significant is that Trump has been treated to considerable applause for an argument that’s plainly retributive—not in keeping with at least our more romantic notions of “civilization.” Consider too his speculation that Syrian migration might be a Trojan Horse for Islamic jihadists. Although (or perhaps because) no reliable evidence supports such claims, what allows him to make them and rewards him for doing so with rising poll numbers, is that these are the claims we expect to hear because we identify the war on terrorism with what a civilized society is entitled if not morally required to do. What’s remarkable about Trump is not that he’d “bring back” a torture strategy outlawed by the Geneva Conventions; it’s not that the evidence is abundantly clear that torture doesn’t work. It’s that the claim passes for unremarkable in a country that advertises itself as the epitome of Western civilization. The irony, of course, is that that may well be true.

·      Lastly, were we to stick to Scarry’s view of how pain desubjectifies the subject, we’d not be able to adequately or accurately understand the actions—much less the lives—of, for example, the Syrian refugees. Dehumanized in the mercenary rhetoric of privileged men like Donald Trump, forced from their homes by not merely civil war but the creeping effects of desertification, the plight of Syrian refugees—like nearly all refugees—indicts “civilization” as the abject failure of power wielded as capitalist excess, military incursion, religious unreason, and government sponsored oppression. As we’re now beginning to experience via anthropogenic climate change, violence institutionalized as multinational capitalism may foreshadow the most damning evidence to date of the consequences of “civilization.”

Should our focus remain squarely on the “bodies in pain” of the Syrian refugees, we’ll not only fail to comprehend the larger forces at work in their migration, we’ll also not be able to see how these forces that subjugate simultaneously subjectify. But they do. From the young man or woman who becomes radicalized by Islamic State recruiters to the family who waits the 22 months to be approved to move to Indiana—only to be told they can’t settle there—subjugation creates the subject of “civilization” as surely as its hierarchy of race, sex, and class creates its buildings, its machinery, its weapons, and its institutions. That such a subject is judged to be damaged can only be assessed from the point of view of some more ideal, even romanticized, notion of civilization. But while that may form the un-interrogated backdrop of Scarry’s “body in pain,” it does not describe the world that, even in Aristotle’s flirtation with justice and equality, bears little more than a family resemblance to our own. Hence we cannot judge the radicalized jihadist to be “damaged,” at least not more so than the sweatshop laborer or the sex-trafficked teenager. Each mirrors the social order of the subjugated subject upon whose bodies are inscribed quite literally the body politic in pain.

Each, however, are also potential sites of resistance. The trouble is that what “resistance” can mean in this context is more than murky since it can as readily take the form of the Jihadist’s explosive belt, the laborer’s suicide from the factory roof, or the sex-trafficked girl’s retreat into heroin. That is, insofar as institutionalized violence remains the hallmark of “civilization,” insofar as it constitutes the primary ingredient in what subjectifies us all, affecting our dispositions and dispossessing us of the capacity for epistemic dispassion, we have no obviously stable ground upon which to stake a claim for humanity, and against which we can decide to condemn the jihadist, unionize the laborer, treat the child-addict, or resettle the Syrian refugees. Crucial, nonetheless, is that insofar as we can get even to this juncture, we can be sure of one thing: we are not reducible to bodies in pain, and while the silence of conformity may form the conditions of our workaday lives, we cannot be de-subjectified short of death.

We have already said too much. 

Open Letter to Radical Environmental Writer, Derrick Jensen, best-selling author of Endgame.

Dear Mr. Jensen:

I have read Endgame—as well as several other of your works directed at diagnosing our present environmental crisis and fomenting a revolution directed against, as you put it, “civilization.” I have also tried to engage you concerning some things that, to be quite honest, really trouble me about your claim that all of civilization must be brought to an end.

But engaging you turns out to be very difficult.

For example, while you invite participants to join you in your reading club devoted to drafts of your newest works, you explicitly forbid criticism of any kind:

“I want no criticism or editorial suggestions. I cannot stress enough how unhelpful I find criticism or editorial suggestions from people I don't know. I only accept criticism or editorial suggestions from my closest friends (and then only when I ask) and the book's editors. Praise is welcome. Also, if you happen to see an incorrect fact or a typo, I would appreciate learning of those. This latter is NOT an invitation for criticism” (www.derrickjensen.org/readingclub.html).

Moreover, a book club participant must actually pay for the privilege of offering you only praise: $10.00, one month, $35.00, six months, and a discounted rate of $60.00 for a year. I can only assume the content of this work is spectacular since, as you apparently believe, it cannot benefit from criticism, evaluation, alternatives, challenges, or questions AND one must pay for the privilege showering you with applause.

I’m afraid I would not be able to refrain from asking you questions, possibly even challenging some of your assumptions—so I opted not to join. I think I’m just not very good at being that kind of true-believer, but then again, I wasn’t a very good Christian either.

So I decided to try an alternative, and I signed up for the Derrick Jensen Forum (forum.derrickjensen.org/). There were conditions here too: “You agree, through your use of this forum, that you will not post any material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, or harassing,” but these seemed quite doable in comparison with the conditions for the Derrick Jensen Book Club.

I had no interest in posting anything that was false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, or harassing.” So this seemed a go. What I wanted to do was offer some questions and—admittedly critical—observations about the 20 core “premises” you elaborate in Endgame. I have posted them below, along with my premise for premise questions and observations.

But I am mystified. Within less than an hour, I was banned from your forum for being “rude.” This was the specific category of banning. I was certainly querying and critical, but I was not “rude,” and “rude” was not actually a category for which a poster could be banned. “Rude” is not defamatory, inaccurate, etc. So, I would like to be reinstated—not that I expect to be.

I am endeavoring, then, to reach you here—not that I expect this venture to be successful either. But it is enough for others—your would-be readers—to have the opportunity you in fact refuse to offer them: A chance to read your premises for the end of civilization, think about them, and actually offer commentary—including criticism. My commentary follows:

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.
Endgame vol. 1, pages IX-XII


Here then is what I posted to your Forum, Mr. Jensen—for which I was banned. Readers can determine for themselves whether my comments meet the criteria for “banning,” and they can let me know (and they can find what Jensen means by toxic mimic here: www.endgamethebook.org/Excerpts/8-%20Abuse%20pt2.htm, and here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7ONYP0CaZs.)

Dear Derrick Jensen Forum participants,

My name is Wendy Lynne Lee, and having read a fair lot of Jensen's work--most importantly both volumes of Endgame, as well as Jensen's premises posted here. I am a committed environmentalist, feminist activist, animal welfare activist, and social/economic justice advocate.

My question has to do with the notion of a "toxic mimic." Jensen claims that "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." I gather what he means by this is that a toxic mimic is an oppressive and likely violent substitution for a relationship that does not have these features. But if my understanding is correct, then this forum--given its premises and conditions of participation--is itself an example (and a deeply troubling one) of a toxic mimic.

Here's why:

1. The requirement that--as a condition of participation--I must accept any of the 20 premises, and that such participation counts as a community is a toxic mimic of a real community. A real community embraces the examination--even debate--of its premises. Unless we are prepared to jettison the idea that this particular community moves forward via democratic interaction, it cannot constitute a community at all. In the scientific community, for example, what actually bonds participants to one another is not prescribed agreement, but honest interaction--agreement or disagreement--and even on fundamental principles. Indeed, as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued in 1963's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there is no genuine progress in coming to understand the natural world without the refinement of ideas that can come only through interaction that risks disagreement. Debate, moreover, is not inherently violent. In fact, what makes this pretense to community truly toxic is that it excludes the possibility of debate at the outset. THIS, I'd argue is truly oppressive--and because it seeks to censor and cauterize alternative, competing, dissenting points of view--it is also inherently violent--despite the disclaimer to the contrary. Perhaps I will be automatically banned for daring to air such a view here (though this is precisely where it needs to be aired)--but if I am, it will prove my claim beyond doubt. So, my question: How can a forum devoted to meaningful discourse about how to address our current environmental catastrophe possibly move toward accomplishing this goal while simultaneously excluding those voices with which it disagrees? How can such a forum promote itself as liberating--all the while restricting what can be expressed within its borders?

2. There is another--perhaps even more disturbing--sense in which the premises of this forum constitute a toxic mimic, namely, that in delimiting discourse to that which adheres to the 20 premises, it in fact mimics some of the most oppressive and egregious abuses of the authoritarian far right. Advocates for the Tea Party, for example, actively seek to limit free speech rights--and I'll bet most here find this appalling, and rightly so. But what differentiates this forum from the exclusionary practices of the Tea Party? The practice of exclusion is not consistent with ANY movement's struggle for justice. The feminist movement lost considerable credibility for a time when it endeavored to exclude lesbians from its activist ranks. The environmental movement faces a similar danger right here. In excluding voices that do not adhere to the 20 premises, you act in a fashion that can only be described as oppressive in the same way that the feminist movement behaved oppressively when it sought (and failed) to exclude lesbians. So why would you set up the conditions in this fashion?

3. There is a third way in which the premises and conditions of this forum are a toxic mimic: The forum--perhaps unwittingly--mimics Jensen's website book group in that he expressly excludes all criticism--though he solicits praise. This strikes me as profoundly toxic (as well as narcissistic) in that if it's true that good ideas and arguments grow from being examined and challenged, then--entertaining no criticism--how can Jensen possibly know which of his ideas are good? How in this forum can we come to be able to distinguish good ideas from bad, rational from irrational without the possibility of critique, debate? Why doesn't it count as monumentally oppressive that these quarters offer no way to distinguish good from bad claims? Are we to simply concede that ANY claim that coheres with Jensen's 20 premises is good? Why? Why shouldn't I simply call that fascism?

4. With respect to the premises:

Premise one: What does Jensen mean exactly by "civilization"? Does this include art? Music? Architecture? All science? How about medicine? Does the end of civilization include the end of medicine? Are adherents to the premise that civilization must end prepared to commit themselves to foregoing chemotherapy in case of cancer? Antibiotics in case of serious staff infection? Insulin in case of Type 1 diabetes? How about surgery for a ruptured spleen? It strikes me as easy to say we want to see the end on civilization, but a far harder thing to contemplate its implications. If what Jensen is advocating really is a return to anarcho-primitivism, are we prepared to witness the deaths of the millions of human and nonhuman animals that this return would absolutely require? Are we prepared to participate in this genocide? I recognize that the response is that we are already participating in a kind of genocide--indeed. But the notion that there are NO alternatives to either genocide via corporate capitalism or via radical environmental revolution has to be shown on argument and evidence--the possibility of which is excluded here.

Premise two: This claim is factually false. Ancient human cultures contributed significantly to their own demise or necessity to migrate by destroying their land bases. This is not speculation; this is well-established fact. To romanticize native cultures as if they were not environmentally destructive will not help us formulate a genuinely effective environmental strategy.

Premise three: Yes--this certainly contains a great deal of truth--but industrial civilization does not encompass ALL civilization even if industrialization consists as an element in every enterprise. To throw out civilization per se is throwing out the baby with the bathwater--or if it's not, it's a claim that needs an argument not provided in Endgame--and it cannot be provided here without violating the conditions of posting.

Premise four: This is also largely true--but the implication that such oppressive hierarchies exist deliberately--as if by design or conspiracy--so grossly oversimplifies the diversity of culture, tradition, and local practice that to accept it is to accept the oppressive premise that no practices/traditions are able to be salvaged--even those that, say, an indigenous people might want to maintain. What confers on Jensen--or any of us--the authority to claim that all hierarchies involve oppression and fetishizing? Jensen, indeed, does not say "all." But he offers us no way to distinguish between "good" and "bad" hierarchies--hence we are left--given the context--to conclude that all are bad.

Premise five: Jensen mistakes capitalist production for all production. The criticism of capitalist production is also well-established by others whom he does not adequately credit--Marx, for example, or Bakunin, among others. This, moreover, is a gross oversimplification of the notion justice--even in our current incarnation of "civilization." I understand that Jensen's claim is there there is a system which is broken, and a system that therefore must be overthrown. Fine. But this system is not identical with "civilization," and if it is, again, destroying it will require the commission of immense violence--including homicide.

Premise six: What does Jensen mean by a sane and sustainable way of living? It cannot be a return to our ancient past. Or if it is, what will compel us--other than the threat of violence--to stay there? What WILL we do with inventors? What WILL we do with discoverers? Execute them? Why shouldn't I read these premises as a manifesto for a kind of new age Inquisition of all those deemed guilty of environmental wrong-doing?

Premise seven: If we can no longer wait for civilization to crash, what is Jensen actually advocating we do? Blow up dams? OK--why isn't Jensen himself leading this specific action?

Premise eight: Why exactly are the needs of the natural world greater than the needs of the economic system? I am the first one to agree that global capitalism is massively destructive of both human and nonhuman life and welfare, but what do we say to the poor whose dependence on the economic system--however vile it is--is their only guarantee against death--today? The poor would be the very first to die in the environmental revolution Jensen seems to promote. Why should they--especially as so many are women, children, and indigenous peoples--regard this as liberating? As good? Why shouldn't I regard this claim as sexist and racist?

Premise nine: Why would a poor woman accept a "softer" version of population reduction when her old-age depends on the compassion of her children? Gas chambers are painless. But none of us regards this as a remotely acceptable form of population reduction. How does premise nine rule out gas chambers?

Premise ten: What authorizes anyone to make this claim? What authorizes Jensen? That Jensen refuses to brook criticism does NOT solidify his authority, and a quasi-Freudian interpretation of "insane" and the Death Drive" need to be shown. Jensen does draw such comparisons over and over in his writing--but repetition is not an argument. Moreover, if the culture is driven by a death urge--if WE are by NATURE so driven, then there simply is no saving us. We will repeat the "sin" of civilization over and over--a more apt comparison in this dismal case may be Nietzsche's eternal return.

With the posting of just these ten observations, I was banned. But I would like to complete my observations of Jensen’s 20 Premises:

Premise eleven: What is a “culture of occupation”? Do you mean via cultural imperialism? Industrial appropriation? Please clarify, and give examples that show that such a culture is as all-encompassing as you appear to assume, and that this is a justification for ending it in toto.

Premise twelve: OK—so there are actually no rich and no poor, but indeed there are those empowered and those who are not. Why would the “end of civilization” put an end to the deeply ingrained beliefs of people that they are among the rich and the poor? In other words, if this amounts to nothing more than belief, what do the concrete facts of civilization have to do with it?

Premise thirteen: OK—those in power rule by force. But this does indeed involve fire power like guns and tanks, nuclear bombs, and the like. You insist over and over that you oppose violence, but how do you propose the resistance then proceed against those who rule by force? Is all rule bad? Is this like all hierarchies?

Premise fourteen:This, I’m sorry to say, is just a specious argument. What is the evidence that we are all “enculturated” to hate the world and everything in it, including ourselves? Why does this translate into “If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes”? We don’t allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. Many of us act quite conscientiously against such destruction; many of us could not survive at all did we not participate in some destruction. Do you really think the woman gathering wood for a cooking fire in the Sudan has been taught to hate everything? If this premise is true, perhaps we should simply commit mass suicide. Would you be comfortable with that?

Premise fifteen: You bet: Love does not imply pacifism. Who says it does? What is your point?

Premise sixteen: The notion that there exist such things as “spirits” is a gigantic claim in need of an equally gigantic argument replete with evidence. There is a long historical and philosophical tradition relevant to this claim—but you make no mention of it. In any case, without such an argument, why should I accept this claim? After all, there are far more compelling arguments for the other side—that the material world is what there is, that science reveals it to us, and that when we die, we die. History also has it that folks who hold onto notion like that they have a spirit are actually less likely to take the material world seriously—as you advise us to do. Many Chirstians, for example, see this world merely as a kind of trial-run to see whether they have the mettle required for the afterlife. But it’s the afterlife that matters. So if you really think it’s the spirit and its world that matters, why get so worked up about the destruction of this one?

Premise seventeen: OK—so who cares about the “fence-sitters”? But, honestly, who are they? The folks who don’t agree with you?

Premise eighteen: What is “our current sense of self”? Is this one-size-fits-all? How do you know what, say, my “sense of self” is? Please clarify how you come to this insight.

Premise nineteen: I understand, I think, what you mean when you saythat “controlling and abusing the natural world is not justifiable.” But it strikes me as pretty arrogant to think we DO have such control. We have created LOTS of destruction, but this is manifestly NOT control. If we continue on our current climate-changing path we and lots of other species of creature will suffer and die. True. But the natural world will certainly recover—because we do not control it. Indeed, that WE will suffer and die as a consequence of our actions makes it quite clear what’s in “control.” Moreover, you can only abuse something that can experience pain. The world qua world is no such thing. The earth is not a conscious being; it is not our “mother” other than figuratively. We can destroy conditions for our own survival—and very well may, but we cannot ultimately injure something that cannot experience.

Premise 20: There is a great deal to be said about global capitalism, and many worthwhile critiques of which you could avail yourself—beginning with Karl Marx. You have a good point here—but capitalism is still not the same thing as civilization. Hence you have still not made out the case for ending civilization.

I will look forward to your response, Mr. Jensen. And in the meantime, I hope others will avail themselves of your forum (though not your book club—I just don’t think we should have to pay to say only nice things to you); I hope they will respond to either you or even to me right here.

Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu