A Language Older Than Words (30 page)

The Parable
of the Box

"Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are." Arsene Houssaye

SOMETIMES IN THE DARK gray of false dawn I awaken with a start. In the confusing moments between dreaming and waking I occasionally trick myself into believing none of the problems we've been discussing exist. No genocidal impulse. No wage slavery. No anthropogenic climate change. No ecological collapse. No tyranny of money. In those brief moments I believe I can walk to the Spokane River and once again see rapids get "lashed into whiteness" by uncountable salmon, salmon that—in this nightmare of the waking world—I have never seen, and never will. In those moments the awful reality of what we have done and continue to do seems so nonsensical as to be implausible. It makes sense in those moments, for example, to ask whether I dreamt or read that the government of the United States (it, too, a figment of this dreamscape) smuggled crack cocaine into slums (crack and slums are in these moments figments as well)—raising a generation of American addicts and enriching gangs that control their lives—then used profits from drug sales to kill peasants in Central America. This is all too stupid, too cruel, too absurd. It couldn't be real.

No matter how hard I try, the morning inevitably intrudes on these reveries, and I awaken. But later, all through the day and into the evening as I now write these words, the problems I describe become no less absurd, no less cruel, no less stupid.

A parable of this stupidity centers around a box. The box is full of salmon, and a man sits atop the box. Long ago this man hired armed guards to keep anyone from eating his fish. The many people who sit next to the empty river starve to death. But they do not die of starvation. They die of a belief. Everyone believes that the man atop the box owns the fish. The soldiers believe it, and they will kill to protect the illusion. The others believe it enough that they are willing to starve. But the truth is that there is a box, there is an emptied river, there is a man sitting atop the box, there are guns, and there are starving people.

In the 1930s, anthropologist Ruth Benedict tried to discover why some
cultures are "good," to use her word, and some are not. She noticed that members of some cultures were generally "surly and nasty"—words she and her assistant Abraham Maslow recognized as unscientific—while members of other cultures were almost invariably "nice."

Benedict is of course not the only person to have made this distinction. The psychologist Erich Fromm found that cultures fell,
sometimes easily, into distinct categories such as "life-affirmative," or "destructive." The Zuñi Pueblos, Semangs, Mbutus, and others that he placed in the former category are extraordinary for the way in which they contrast with our own culture. "There is a minimum of hostility, violence, or cruelty among people, no harsh punishment, hardly any crime, and the institution of war is absent or plays an exceedingly small role. Children are treated with kindness, there is no severe corporal punishment; women are in general considered equal to men, or at least not exploited or humiliated; there is a generally permissive and affirmative attitude toward sex. There is little envy, covetousness, greed, and exploitativeness. There is also little competition and individualism and a great deal of cooperation; personal property is only in things that are used. There is a general attitude of trust and confidence, not only in others but particularly in nature; a general prevalence of good humor, and a relative absence of depressive moods."

Readers may more closely recognize our own culture in Fromms description of the Dobus, KwaikutI, Aztecs, and others he put into the category of "destructive." These cultures, he said, are "characterized by much interpersonal violence, destructiveness, aggression, and cruelty, both within the tribe and against others, a pleasure in war, maliciousness, and treachery. The whole atmosphere of life is one of hostility, tension, and fear. Usually there is a great deal of competition, great emphasis on private property (if not in material things then in symbols), strict hierarchies, and a considerable amount of war-making."

Fromm also defined a third category, "nondestructive-aggressive societies," which included Samoans, Crows, Ainus, and others who are "by no means permeated by destructiveness or cruelty or by exaggerated suspiciousness, but do not have the kind of gentleness and trust which is characteristic of the . . . [life-affirmative] societies."

Given the ubiquity of this culture's destructiveness as well as its technological capacity, there has never been a more important time to ask Ruth Benedict's question: Why are some cultures "good" and others not?

Benedict found that good cultures, which she began to call "secure," or "low aggression," or "high synergy cultures," could not be differentiated from "surly and nasty" cultures on the basis of race, geography, climate, size, wealth, poverty, complexity, matrilineality, patrilineality, house size, the absence or presence of polygamy, and so on. More research revealed to her one simple and commonsensical rule separating aggressive from nonaggressive cultures, a rule that has so far evaded implementation by our culture: the social forms and institutions of nonaggressive cultures positively reinforce acts that benefit the group as a whole while negatively reinforcing acts (and eliminating goals) that harm some members of the group.

The social forms of aggressive cultures, on the other hand, reward actions that emphasize individual gain, even or especially when that gain harms others in the community. A primary and sometimes all-consuming goal of members of these cultures is to come out ahead in their "dog eat dog" world.

Another way to put this is that social arrangements of nonaggressive cultures eliminate the polarity between selfishness and altruism by making the two identical: In a "good" culture, the man atop the box from the parable above would have been scorned, despised, exiled, or otherwise prevented from damaging the community. To behave in such a selfish and destructive manner would be considered insane. Even had he conceived such a preposterous idea as hoarding all the fish, he would have been absolutely disallowed because the box was held at the expense of the majority, as well as at the expense of future generations. For him to be a rich and influential member of a good culture, he would have had to give away many or all of the fish. The act of giving would have made him rich in esteem. But he would never have been allowed to strip the river. There would have been no fear with regard to the "gift" of fish, for social arrangements would have made him secure in the knowledge that if his next fishing trip failed his more successful neighbors would feed him, just as this time he had fed them.

It all comes down to how a culture handles wealth. If a culture manages it through what Benedict called a "siphon system," whereby wealth is constantly siphoned from rich to poor, the society as a whole and its members as individuals will be, for obvious reasons, secure. They will not need to hoard wealth. Since this generosity is manifested not only monetarily but in all aspects of life, they will also not need to act out their now-nonexistent insecurities in other ways. On the other hand, if a culture uses a "funnel system," in which those who accumulate wealth are esteemed, the result is that "the advantage of one individual becomes a victory over another, and the majority who are not victorious must shift as they can." For reasons that should again be obvious, such social forms foster insecurity and aggression, both personal and cultural.

One of the primary problems with our system of social rewards is its tautological nature. We grant communal responsibility and esteem to those who have accumulated and maintained power; but the primary motivation for those who are responsible for decisions affecting the larger community lies in the accumulation and maintenance of power. The good of the community does not matter. In time, the community takes on the character of these esteemed leaders. This happens primarily through direct decisions, the inculcation of citizens to emulate those who receive this respect, and the institutionalization of the leaders' drive for power. Institutions—be they governmental, economic, religious, educational, penal, charitable—will mirror their founders' proclivity for domination. It's inescapable. The system of rewards guarantees that responsibility for community decisions falls to those least capable of making decisions that will benefit the community, to the indecent, to the
wetikos,
the cannibals, to those who would destroy. The French anarchist Sebastien Faure located two principles that govern all politics within our system: first, the acquisition of power by all means, even the most vile; and second, to keep that power by all means, even the most vile.

At some point in the ceaseless expansion of our cultures realm of control, the notion of a community was replaced by the acceptance of communal control by distant and increasingly unresponsive institutions. The larger the institution, the more accumulated power it takes to reach the top. It would follow that the primary motivations of those at the top are founded in the acquisition and maintenance of power, which means the more likely that the institution will manifest this particular form of destructive (and psychotic) behavior.

I received peculiar confirmation of this self-evident tendency a few years ago—as well as additional confirmation that the political is the personal—when I came across a study of the sexual habits of politicians. The study grew out of psychologists Dr. Sam Janus's and Dr. Barbara Bess's work with drug addicts. Realizing that a good portion of their clients supported drug habits through prostitution, their emphasis shifted toward the study of prostitutes. Eventually their work focused on "elite prostitutes" who "catered to an entirely different type of client." Finally, they realized that the "missing link in understanding the function of the prostitute in contemporary society" consisted of an examination of the women's customers.

The psychologists conducted extensive interviews with eighty high-priced prostitutes about their 7,645 clients. They found that sixty percent of the clients exercised some form of political power, while the remainder were mainly wealthy businessmen. The authors required two independent sources for each report on the sexual habits of the clientele before accepting it. The results are disturbing: "Very seldom (only about 8 to 10 percent of the time) does a politician ask a call girl for straight intercourse," instead primarily requesting "games of humiliation and dominance." The authors report that "the women whom we interviewed reported that their clients went much further than that, often demanding them to act out complicated scenes of torture and mortification of the flesh, involving floggings, lacerations, mock crucifixions, and mutilation of their genitals." The authors conclude, and I quote this in full because it stands so central to our culture: "To understand why so many politicians are not merely promiscuous but are addicted to sadomasochistic practices for which they need the expensive services of a 'paraprofessional sex therapist' requires a deeper look into the psychodynamics of the power seeker. These are characterized by a strong need to dominate which co-exists in precarious equilibrium with an equally intense need for submission. This psychological pattern is manifested outwardly by a drive to subjugate and control others (but always in obedience to some higher ideal), and in private by imperious demands for violently aggressive sex which upon orgasm abruptly becomes transformed into an equally sharp state of infantile dependence."

What is writ large in the destruction of the biosphere is writ small on the bodies of women, and inscribed on the psyches of these, our leaders, the men who will determine for us whether we as a species survive.

In 1994, the Mayan Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, began a revolution, calling themselves Zapatistas. The revolution was their response to extreme poverty caused by control of their homeland by distant economic interests. ("Where I live, everyone dies of illness—they die without anyone having to kill them.") Soon after the beginning of the insurrection, an advisor to Chase Manhattan Bank wrote a memo advising, "While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy."

What is writ small in the bedrooms of politicians is writ large across the south of Mexico, and anywhere else that anyone resists the control of their lives by those who would destroy.

It is 5:30 in the morning. A few moments ago I awoke with a start. This time I am not confused. I have never been more clear. I know the nightmare can have only one conclusion, and 1 know also that the nightmare cannot be defeated on its own terms. It is not possible to fix this culture, to halt or even significantly slow its destructiveness. Nightmarish shape shifter, as I hope by now I've made clear, this cultures destructive urges can yoke all circumstances to its advantage. A parable of this adaptability begins with a single person. He or she wakes up from the nightmare to reject the behavior modifications of our culture. He or she becomes the catalyst of a popular movement advocating cooperation, sharing, and love. Call this person Jesus, or Spartacus, or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, and this movement the Zapatistas, or the Anabaptists, or any number of names. The response by authorities, those atop the box and the soldiers who also dream the nightmare, is swift and certain. First, the authorities eliminate the offending person or group, "to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy." This elimination has been the fate of all who effectively oppose the perceived divine right of the wealthy to control the lives of those they impoverish or enslave: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., the Anabaptists, the Arawaks, the Khoikhoi, the San, and tens of millions of other individuals and groups; if we go back far enough, it happened to the ancient indigenous Europeans and Middle Easterners.