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Jensen: You've also said that numbers themselves alienate us.Zerzan: When members of a large family sit down to dinner, they know immediately, without counting, whether someone is missing. Counting becomes necessary only when things become homogenized. Not all peoples use number systems. The Yanomamo, for example, do not count past two. Obviously, they are not too stupid to count further; they simply have a different relationship with the world.
The first number system was almost undoubtedly developed to count domesticated animals, as wild creatures were enslaved and harvested. We next see mathematics being used in Sumer about five thousand years ago, to facilitate business. Later, Euclid developed geometry -- literally, "land measuring" -- to measure fields for purposes of ownership, taxation, and the assignment of slave labor. Today the same imperative drives science, only now it is the entire universe we are trying to measure and enslave. Once again, this isn't obscure anarchist theory. Rene' Descartes, considered by many to be the father of modern science, declared that the aim of science is "to make us as masters and possessors of nature." He also declared the universe a giant clockwork, neatly tying these two forms of domination -- numbers and time -- together.Jensen: But isn't growth of new technology driven by simple curiosity?
Zerzan: You hear people say that all the time: "You can't put the genie back in the bottle"; "you're asking people to forget." But that's just another attempt to rationalize craziness by calling it human nature. And it's a variant of the old raacist intelligence theory: because the Hopi didn't invent backhoes, they must not be curious. Sure, people are naturally curious -- but about what? Would you or I aspire to create the neutron bomb? Of course not. But the fact that I don't want to create a neutron bomb doesn't mean I'm not curious. Curiosity is not value-free. Certain types of curiosity arise from certain mindsets, and our culture's curiosity follows the logic of alienation -- not simple wonder, or the desire to learn.
Jensen: What does alienation mean to you?
Zerzan: Karl Marx defined alienation as being separated from the means of production; instead of us producing things for our own use, the products of our labor are used against us by the system. I would take it a step further and say that alienation means being estranged from our own experiences, dislodged from our natural mode of being. The more technologized and artificial the world becomes, the more the natural world is evacuated, and the more
alienated we become.
I think predomesticated people were in touch with themselves in ways we can't even comprehend -- on the level of the senses, for example. Laurens Van der Post gives accounts of the San, a tribal people in southern Africa, hearing a single engine plane seventy miles away, and seeing four of the moons of Jupiter with the unaided eye. He also says that the San seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, or an antelope. What's more, this understanding was apparently reciprocated by the animal. There are scores of accounts by early European explorers describing the lack of fear wild animals showed toward humans.Jensen: Just last year I came across something written by eighteenth- centuryexplorer Samuel Hearne, the first white man to explore northern Canada. He described Indian children playing with wolf pups. The children would paint the pups' faces with vermilion or red ocher, and, when they were done playing with them, return them unhurt to the den. Neither the pups nor the adult wolves seemed to mind at all.
Zerzan: Now we gun them down from airplanes. That's progress for you.
Jensen: More broadly, what has progress meant?
Zerzan: Progress has meant ecological collapse and the near complete dehumanization of the individual. I think there are fewer people now than ever who believe in progress, but many still perceive it to be inevitable. We're certainly conditioned to accept its inevitability; we're held hostage to it, even. The idea of progress now is make everybody increasingly dependent on technology. We need high-tech medicine to keep us well, for example, but we're supposed to forget that technology created our health problems in the first place. Not just cancers caused by chemicals, but nearly all diseases are a result of either civilization, alienation, or gross habitat destruction.
Jensen: I have Crohn's disease, a chronic digestive ailment that is virtually unheard-of in nonindustrialized nations, becoming common only as those nations industrialize. Industrial civilization is literally eating away at my guts.
Zerzan: I think many people are beginning to understand how hollow the progress myth is. In fact, those in charge of the system don't even use the word progress much anymore. They talk about inertia, meaning, "This is it. Deal with it or get screwed." These days you don't hear about the American Dream or the "glorious new tomorrow." Now it's a global race to the bottom, as trans-
national corporations compete to see which can exploit workers and degrade the environment the most. Competition at the individual level works the same way. If you don't understand computers, you won't get a job. That's where progress has brought us.
In spite of all this, I'm optomistic, because never before has our whole lifestyle been revealed -- at least, to those willing to see it -- for the sham that it is.Jensen: Even if we do see through the lies, what is there for us to do?
Zerzan: The first thing is to question the status quo, to make certain that public discourse deals with these life-and-death issues, rather than avoiding and denying them. This denial can't hold up much longer, because there's such a jarring contrast between reality and what we're being told, especially in this country.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can go on living with that contrast forever. The Unabomber posited in his manifesto that people could wind up so conditioned they won't even notice there's no natural world anymore, no freedom, no fulfillment. They'll just take their Prozac every day, limp along, dyspeptic and neurotic, and figure that's all there is.
The Unabomber is a perfect example of why we need to redefine acceptable discourse in this society. His point of view was so supressed that he thought he had to kill people to bring it up. That says something about the level of denial and repression in our public discussion. This denial is not going to be changed by little reforms, any more than the planet is going to be saved by recycling. To think it will is not just silly, it's criminal. We have to face what's going on. Once we've faced reality, then together we can figure out how to change it.
Personally, I'm betting that demonstrable impoverisment on every level will goad people into questioning the system and mustering the will to confront it. Perhaps, right now, we're in the dark before the dawn. I remember Herbert Marcuse's One Dimentional Man was published, around 1964. In it, he was saying that people were so manipulated by modern consumerist society that there could be no hope for change. And then, within a couple of years, people woke up.
The sixties helped shape my own optimism. I was in the right place at the right time: in college at Stanford, then living in Haight-Ashbury, with Berkley just across the bay. I agree with people who say the sixties didn't even scratch the surface of what needed to be done, but you could get a sense of possibility then, a sense that if things kept going the way they were, there was a chance of society finding a different path.
Things didn't keep going that way, of course, but thirty years later I still carry that sense of possibility, and it warms me, even though the situation is frozen and awful. Sometimes I'm amazed that young people today can have any hope, because I'm not sure they've seen any movement succeed even partially.Jensen: Some say that the sixties were the last big burst of social change, and from then on it's been downhill.
Zerzan: I sometimes think of it that way, as if it was the big bang, and everything's been cooling ever since. The punk explosion in 1976 was very exciting, but there was no sense that it would kick-start a new round of change.
I think we're coming up on something much bigger than the sixties, however -- not only because we have to in order to survive, but because we have fewer illusions now. Back then we had a tremendously high level of idealism, much of it misplaced. We believed it wouldn't take a lot of effort to make a change. We had an unwarranted faith in institutions and didn't think things through. We weren't grounded in reality. If that revolutionary energy comes back now, it's going to be far more effective.Jensen: In Elements of Refusal you describe how, in the early part of this century, there was a tremendous amount of revolutionary energy in the air. In many ways, you say, World War I was a state-sponsored attempt to destroy that energy through violence.
Zerzan: War, of course, always requires a good excuse -- especially when the state's real enemies are its own citizenry. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand suited the needs of a dying Austro-Hungarian regime, but it by no means caused the war.
The real reason for the war, I believe, was the tremendous unrest in all of Europe. In 1913 and 1914 there had been immense strikes throughout Russia. Austria-Hungary was on the verge of civil war. Revolutionary movements and radical unions were on the rise in the United States, Germany, France, Italy, and England. Even King George V of England acknowledged this when he said, in the summer of 1914, just before the war, "The cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people." Things had to explode, but how, and at whom would the explosion be directed? What better way to control the release of this energy than a long and pointless war?
And it worked. Most unions and left-wing parties backed the war, and those that didn't -- like the Wobblies here in the U.S. -- the state simply destroyed. After the war, few people had the heart to pursue revolution, and those who did, like Mussolini and the Bolsheviks, were not true revolutionaries but opportunists who turned the postwar power vacuums to their own advantage.Jensen: Where do you think all this alienation today is going to go? Will it explode?
Zerzan: I don't know. I definitely know we aren't the happy, mindless consumers we're supposed to be. We may think we are, but our bodies know better. I recently reviewed Elaine Showalter's book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. In it, she talks about the "hysterias" of the nineties: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome, recovered memory, satanic cults, and so on. Some people are offended by her book, because it sounds as if she's saying these problems are all in people's heads. It seems to me, however, that she's proposing something more profound: she's saying that these crisis arise with or without physical causes. You might argue, for example, that in the vcase of Gulf War Syndrome her point of view lets the government off the hook. But, in fact, her theory is more radical than the theory that the government poisoned Americans -- which it's done so many times as to be almost clich'e. To say that modern life is so crippling, alienated, and bizarre that it spawns psychogenic disorders indicts not just the government but the whole system.
Jensen: But what does it mean that our own government would poison us? It's a problem we've not yet addressed: that even if we do learn -- or relearn -- how to live sustainably, we may lhabve to deal with forces out to destroy our new way of life. We all know what would happen if we developed sustainable communities and the dominant culture wanted our resources: our communities would be destroyed, and our resources would be stolen.
Zerzan: That's the reality. We'd like to think that violence isn't a necessary response, but I'm not sure. Of course, if the upheavals are large enough, there doesn't have to be much violence. In May 1968, ten million French workers -- astronomers, factory workers, you name it -- went on a wildcat strike and began to occupy their workplaces. Student demonstrations provided the trigger, but once it started, all these greivances came out in a rush. The police and the army were completely helpless, because nearly the whole country was involved. For a time the government considered sending in NATO forces. Unfortunately, the uprising was brought under control, mainly by the leftists and unions who wanted to co-opt the revolutionary energy for their own less radical agendas. But for a time the people really had control of the entire country. And it was totally nonviolent.
Jensen: But the uprising acheived no long-term change.
Zerzan: No, but it did expose how really fragile the state's powers of coercion are. Against that kind of mass uprising, the state is helpless. We saw it happen again with the collaple of state capitalism in the Soviet Union and The Eastern bloc. There wasn't a lot of violence. It all just fell apart. I'm not saying the collapse let to lany sort of radical shift, just pointing out that there have been bloodless upheavals in history -- even in our own time.
Jensen: How does one respond sanely and effectively when there is violence? How do you make peace with the fact that, in order to end coercion, you may have to coerce the coercers?
Zerzan: That is a tough one. When Christopher Columbus arrived on these shores, the peaceful indigenous people greeted him with open arms. The smaart thing to have done, I suppose, whould have been to cut his throat. I don't theink many people would argue with that, or if they would, they probably have not experienced violence to their own person, family, or community. But the question arises: among these peaceful people, where would the idea to use violence have come from? It was not their way.
Perhaps we must be what we must overcome. German philosopher Theodore Adorno talks aout overcoming alienation with alienation. How does that work? I don't know, but I think about it. I've thought a lot about how I can best serve -- and I realize that I'm privileged with a greater number of options than many -- but for right now I'm comfortable with cultural critique. For me, words are a better weapon than a gun.Jensen: Obviously, I've made the same choice. But still, every morning when I awake, I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam, because it's not a lack of words tha't killing salmon here in the Northwest, but the presence of dams. We kill by inaction as surely as by action.
Zerzan: That reminds me of a quote by Exene Cervenka, the singer in the punk-rock band X. She said, "I've killed way more people than [Unabomber Ted] Kaczynski, because I've been paying a lot of taxes in the last fifteen years, and he hasn't." It was a reminder that we're all implicated.
I spoke on a lot of these topics in a recent talk I gave at the University of Oregon. Near the end I said, "I know that a call for overturning of the system sounds ridiculous, but the only thing I can think of that's even more ridiclous is just to let the system keep on going."Jensen: How do we know that the alienation we see all around us will lead to breakdown and rejuvenation?
Zerzan: It's a question of how reversible the damage is. Sometimes in history, when the physical world intrudes to knock us off balance, a situation is reversed in a moment. There's a lovely true story that gives me tremendous hope: The dogs in Pavlov's laboratory were famously conditioned to respond to certain stimuli. They were also fully trained and domesticated. But when there was flood in the basement where they lived, they forgot all of their training in the blink of an eye. We should be able to do at least as well.
sewwatt
