Polly Higgins 05.06.18

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-polly-higgins-050618/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WNCmyQeVBwY

(Sound of dolphins)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Polly Higgins. She is an international lawyer, UK based barrister, award-winning author and lead Ecocide law expert. Her proposal to expand the remit of the International Criminal Court to include Ecocide as an international crime (to stand alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression) will ensure global governance and protection against some of the most egregious crimes, namely State and corporate crime that causes or fails to prevent climate disasters as well as other ecological catastrophes. Polly has been hailed as one of the World’s Top 10 Visionary Thinkers by the Ecologist and celebrated as The Planet’s Lawyer by the 2010 Change Awards. Founder of the Earth Law Alliance, she has garnered a number of awards for her work advocating for a law of Ecocide.

So first, thank you for your work, and second, thank you for being on the program.

PH: Well thank you! It’s a delight to be on it. 

DJ: So let’s just start off with a definition of “ecocide.” What is ecocide?

PH: What I’ve done is I’ve given legal definition to the word. The word itself has actually been around since the 1970’s. The definition I’ve given in law is ecocide is the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory. What I’ve actually done by giving it legal definition is also framing it to become an international crime. Because at the moment it’s not a crime to cause mass damage and destruction to the earth. So we’re missing law here, right? To criminalize the serious crime being inflicted through essentially state-sanctioned industrial activity. At the moment, what is happening is, in effect is state-sanctioned industrial immunity. Immunity from prosecution, which means that business, and not just the corporate world but also governments, are able and capable of continuing this ecocide without being accountable within the criminal courts system itself. So you have this kind of upside down scenario where activists who are standing up to protect their patch of the planet are the ones who end up criminalized and being taken to court for preventing the dangerous industrial activity that has the state’s approval to move forward, regardless of how serious the harm is that’s occurring.

This of course has huge implications for climate change, climate change being driven by dangerous industrial activity such as fossil fuel extraction, amongst others. But also it has huge implications for holding the state to account for failing to take action to seriously abate climate change. So climate ecocide is part of this equation, how we bring climate change not so much to a standstill but significantly abate the most serious excesses of what is emerging here as a result of climate change that’s driven by human, specifically industrial activity. 

DJ: So if we step away from the eco part of this, and step toward the legal part for a moment, what are some of your, the precedent movements that you look toward? Do you look primarily to the slavery abolition movement? Do you look primarily to the Nuremberg trials?

PH: Actually this is really interesting. And you’re someone who’s really investigated in America, you know, those kind of resistance movements that have really brought about seismic change. In Europe, the starting point, in fact it was Britain, was the abolition of slavery. I really do believe that we’re looking at something on the scale of the abolition of slavery when we’re dealing with ecocide. But also it’s just not the parallels with then, and indeed what was very interesting with slavery was big industry saying you can’t stop slavery, it’s a necessity, stopping it will lead to economic collapse, and in any event the public demands it. Those three key propaganda statements were proven to be wrong, of course, with the abolition of slavery. Once it’s criminalized things actually change very very fast.

But also I’m very much informed by the likes of Rafael Lemkin. He was the lawyer who got on a  soapbox and advocated that genocide should be an international crime. And indeed, after World War II it was codified as an international crime. That was when we codified international crimes. And the journey that he took was very similar to the one that I’m taking, not least of all because when he first did start getting out there and kind of banging his drum, he was told he was absolutely crazy and that it would never happen, and indeed when I first started advocating that ecocide should be a crime I had many lawyers and non-lawyers around me saying that as well. And many of them now are coming on board to say that actually this is precisely what’s required, to unlock justice for the Earth and all who protect her. 

DJ: So can you tell me about the process – I guess first, very briefly, on your own thought processes and how you came to the realizations that you needed to do this work, as opposed to somebody else. How did you get activated? And the second part of the question will be; you’ve talked a little bit about some of the prior examples but can you also talk about some of the challenges and successes that you have encountered as you have carried this movement forward? 

PH: Yeah. What activated me into engaging with this to start with was as a practicing advocate, barrister we call it here, a court advocate, I was representing big transnational corporations in court and I was finding myself becoming increasingly concerned and uncomfortable with the fact that here were people I got on with perfectly well, but our values were so misaligned. There was this normative that it was perfectly acceptable to make huge profit out of industrial practices that were enormously destructive. And as I was beginning to engage with environmental issues more and more, and that had really started in my childhood, I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with this narrative that I was hearing from others that culture will kind of magically work it out. For me, that was hugely unsatisfactory, and I still see it with some of my friends who are quite spiritually engaged, that if we just kind of hope and pray we’ll get there. I don’t agree with that. It’s maybe just the way I’m wired, but actually this is really strategic for me. Unless we fundamentally realign law – the law, at the moment, is prioritizing profit over the interests and health and well-being of people and planet – then we will continue on with that normative.

So I’m very interested in how we disrupt that normative through realigning law. And for me this is realigning human law ultimately with a higher law that starts with the premise of “first do no harm.” Now that might seem absolutely naive and wide-eyed and stupid, but in truth there’s something far more important here, the recognition that in law we draw a line where we say “we can’t cross here, this is fundamentally unacceptable.” And that’s what criminal law is all about. It’s about justice. What is it that’s going to cause serious harm? And if so, we have to stop that. We got to a certain point where we recognized that actually, enslaving blacks was wrong, was inherently wrong. And there is a phrase in law that we have, when malum in se becomes malum prohibitum, when something is so wrong in and of itself. And so this is a fundamental recognition that it’s so wrong, in itself, to keep on destroying the earth, whether or not it’s for profit. The fact of destruction per se is inherently wrong. 

So my starting point was really coming from a place of a deeply embedded intrinsic value within me of, actually, the interconnectedness of life. If we destroy Earth, we destroy our own health and wellbeing. If we destroy Earth we destroy the health and wellbeing of all Earth. By destroying Earth we destroy the health and wellbeing of human as well as nonhuman life. And that cannot be right. It’s a recipe for disaster. Valuing being life-destroying over life-affirming is never going to serve people and planet to our highest purpose. So it seems to me common sense ultimately at the end of the day that we should have a law put in place that criminalizes the destruction of our ecosystems and holds industry, not just corporations but also governments to account at the very highest level for the decisions that they make, and also for the failure to take action where it is recognized that indeed harm is occurring. 

DJ: Before we go to the second question, I just want to be clear. So are you saying that you would want to prohibit hurting or harming or in fact destroying life on the only planet that we know of in the universe that has life? That seems kind of crazy to me. 

PH: (laughing) What I’m dealing with here is serious harm.

DJ: I was totally joking.

PH: (laughing)

DJ: It appalls and amazes me that you even have to make the argument. That’s the sort of sarcastic point I was making. “Oh wow. It should be wrong to actually harm life, do significant harm to life on the only planet we know of that has life in the universe.” What a novel idea!

PH: You would think.

Very interestingly, I’ve actually just read, literally today, that Chevron has agreed in court – this is a case in San Francisco that’s happening at the moment – they have agreed that human activity is changing the climate and that it warrants action. This is actually a seismic step in a courtroom for that to be admitted by one of the most destructive industries we have in the world. And how remarkable it is that that’s actually coming from within the destruction itself. When governments have only gotten as good as voluntary agreements such as the Paris Agreement, to agree that dangerous industrial activities are causing climate change. 

If you like, law is having to play catch-up here. We’re way behind on where the majority of the world understands this to be. And it’s not really rocket science. We don’t have to go deep into science to understand the cause and effect that’s occurring here. And yet we still are in this situation where there’s a certain element of giving conflicting, confusing information going on, and propaganda, on what is harmful and what is not. Here in the U.K. we have a fracking industry that’s pushing as hard as it can, and a government that’s removed laws and paved the way to make it as simple as possible for the fracking industry to move forward, and hundreds and hundreds of activists being arrested and charged and taken to court for standing up and trying to protect that patch of the earth. This is something I and my team are addressing through our campaign. 

But I’m really jumping ahead here. Derrick, here’s the thing. Yes, you have an audience that understands this. But actually the remarkable thing is that there’s still a world out there that is burying its head in the sand on all of this. 

DJ: Oh, I completely agree. I’m sure it’s the same for you. Three quarters of my neighbors, or half of my neighbors, are the same. 

PH: Well, I live on in an exceptional patch of the planet. I live in an incredibly ecologically oriented town called Stroud, which is really the heart of all ecological activity in the U.K. But yes, there’s a lot of the world out there that just refuses to engage on these issues, for whatever reason, whether it’s fear or lack of understanding. 

But then again, there’s this other side to it. It’s those who do engage in it that do effect change, and they’re the ones whom I’m interested in. And that applies to, whether or not it’s ministers or state or grassroots activists, those who stand up and take action and perceive themselves as Earth protectors, or the ones who fundamentally are helping change this narrative, and helping pave the way for a new law to be put in place to protect the Earth and hold governments and big business to account on this. 

DJ: I feel the same way. When I do a talk, say there are 100 people in the audience. I’m really talking to about three or four people, and everybody else, I’m just giving them “let’s have a nice night.” 

In any case, the second part of the question was –

PH: And actually Derrick, they’re the ones – there can be just one or two people in the audience who can effect great change.

DJ: Yes. I don’t disagree at all.

So the second part of the question was: What are some of the, both challenges you’ve faced and successes you’ve had in – just a little bit of history in the actual movement to do this. 

PH: Yeah. When I first started advocating this, which was about eight years ago, my biggest challenge really was that I was taking people on a narrative that hadn’t been heard before. And actually, to this day there still exists to some extent, where yes, there are hundreds of thousands of organizations out there, protecting the planet in one way or another. Save the whale here, stop this over there, the Amazon dam, what have you. Which is all good and well. Yet not one of them is saying “This is a crime, this has to stop, and this should be a crime.” So what I was doing was I was taking people on a kind of journey of demystifying how law operates. And often there’s a lot of fear as well, and cynicism as to how law operates, especially when we’ve dealt with 24 years worth of climate negotiations that are going nowhere. So even explaining to people how climate negotiations work, who finances climate negotiations; well that’s big business. It’s done on the basis of how many negotiators can you bring to the table? So inevitably you have this arm-wrestling that happens, political arm-wrestling at the lowest common denominator. When you have maybe a couple of thousand negotiators turning up, for instance, for the U.S., and smaller developing states may have one negotiator for five states, five countries. 

Inevitably, when you have working group meetings at the interim climate negotiations running 34, maybe, interim working group meetings running in tandem, it’s absolutely impossible to have enough representatives attending the right meetings, and inevitably the ones that suffer the most are those front-line countries, those nations that are, you know, those little equatorial belts, tiny dots on the oceans that have rising sea levels and floods and what have you. So there’s an an enormous amount of cynicism that I’m having to counter, while I’m actually dealing with a completely different process here. With international criminal law it’s just one vote per member state. And when America isn’t even a signatory to their own statute and therefore has no say on this, this can be quite beneficial, especially under your political regime at the moment. Indeed, the small guys could take this law forward and tip the balance in a very big way, especially when you’re looking at 56 small island developing nations. That’s a huge amount of leverage, in essence, for something that is a kind of epic David and Goliath rebel alliance against the empire of greed scenario.

So that’s been a huge challenge, taking people on a journey of how this law can operate and why it operates in a very different way. Criminal law is a different level of government from soft law, international agreements such as the Paris Agreement. And indeed it’s very different from civil litigation, where individuals or communities are suing big business or suing governments. We’re dealing with what’s known as top tier governance where it’s about justice. When you criminalize something, when you outlaw it, then you’re holding individuals to account in a criminal court of law and they can be sent to prison for their actions, and companies can be closed down. That’s very different from civil litigation where at best a corporation ends up with a fine but can continue with business as usual, which often is too little, too late for the community that’s being severely adversely impacted ten years past, or hence, the case actually being brought.

It’s inherently unsatisfactory, the system we have at the moment, and my challenge is, of course, to take that law forward. And not just me. I have a team of fantastic progressive lawyers as part of my team, who offer their services pro bono. But actually, in truth the largest challenge I have is lack of political will. And the lack of political will from the countries that are most important in this, which are the small island developing states, is in part because of misinformation. I’m having to come on the back of legal advice being given to these small island developing nations where they are told that if they speak out against big countries, then they will lose their financing, and they mustn’t do that. And this is legal advice that’s being given to them, with the threat of litigation against these small islands. So I’m having to deal with a culture of misinformation and a lack of political will that’s born of fear of losing either their financial assistance that they already gained from various other countries, or the fear that they will be in some respect taken to court over it themselves if they dare to challenge the existing system. 

So, it’s going in there and demystifying that, explaining that actually that’s illegal, for a country to threaten another country in that way, and indeed that the power lies within these small islands to take this law forward. My biggest challenge there is of course to finance that, because for most of these small islands, to attend meetings is just financially out, with their wherewithal. It costs on average, to bring a team of delegates from any given country to the annual Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court, around 50 to 60 thousand euros, and that’s often way out of the reach of these small island developing states, especially if they’ve just had rising sea levels or a tsunami or a typhoon kicking in that has wiped out the equivalent of 1/5 of their GDP and they want to put that money into rehousing the very people who require the law to protect them. So that’s why we’ve put in place now an international campaign, Mission Life Force, where we’re inviting existing earth protectors, those who are already out there helping protect the earth, to become an earth protector in law and sign up to the Earth Protectors Trust Fund, to finance those small countries.

https://www.missionlifeforce.org

And I guess part of that success is that we finally got that campaign off the ground in November last year, and on the back of it, within three weeks we were able to take a team of seven people to the United Nations for the annual Assembly of States Parties in New York in December, which was fantastic, to make representations. And this year we want to do it in a far bigger way, and that’s really about rolling out our campaign. We want to take it up a quantum leap. We want to get ourselves onto a bigger and better platform. It needs to be more secure. It needs a bit of backing, it needs a bit of help to really take this forward in a big way and accelerate what we’re doing. Because this is the thing: law is largely made now by the person who can pay for it. And that tends to be big transnational corporations. They have the funding, the finance to lobby the governments to get the laws in place, or to have the laws removed that they want, to move forward. That’s very much, from the mid-20th century, how laws end up being created.  

There have been smaller wins by communities pushing forward, but never before has it been essentially crowdfunded to take a law forward into the International Criminal Court. And that’s what we’re doing with our campaign. We’re essentially crowdfunding it. We’ve put it on a legal platform, so it’s a trust fund document, and that’s to provide security and safety for those small islands taking it forward, so that they can never be legally challenged. It’s just a crowdfunder. That makes it more complex as well, inevitably. But we want to create a safeguard and safety for those countries that wish to take this forward and will be, in due course, committed to taking it forward. And I believe we can do that through civil society and in that way bypass corrupt governments who have vested interests in preventing this law from being moved forward.

DJ: As you were talking, I was thinking about, when you talked about how laws are made by the big players, I was thinking; this has to do with the absolute necessity of your work. I was thinking of a couple of jokes that I’ve told for years, that are not funny at all.

The first one is – they’re two riddles. The first one is: what do you get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun? And the answer is: Two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. And the second one is: What do you get when you cross two nation-states, a large corporation, 40 tons of poison and at least 8000 dead human beings? The answer is: retirement with full pay and benefits. 

PH: Absolutely! I’m completely there with you, especially if it’s two western states, yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.

DJ: And that was Bhopal and the CEO of Union Carbide. 

PH. Yeah yeah yeah! Absolutely! And indeed there are many, many other examples as well. This is it: the law is upside down. This is a ridiculous scenario. This is exactly what’s occurring today  and is a normative. 

DJ: We can bring this up to date by saying: What do you get when you kill, I think it was eight workers on your oil platform on the Gulf of Mexico? You get, I think it was a $36 million severance package. 

PH: Yeah. Which of course doesn’t help anyone. It’s a payoff to continue with business as normal. And it will happen again, and indeed has happened again in many other places around the world. 

We held a mock ecocide trial. We road tested this as if it had already become an international crime, in our Supreme Court here in the U.K. back in 2011. And we used some of the brightest legal eagles that we have, top human rights specialists, Michael Mansfield QC and Chris Parker QC.  They headed up the prosecution and defense teams. It was a real judge and a real jury, and we used as part of it, one of the counts on the indictment was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, to examine whether or not that was an ecocide. And we were also looking at the Athabasca tar sands for two other counts. 

http://eradicatingecocide.com/the-law/mock-trial/

And that was hugely instructive, because the evidence we used was evidence that was out in the public domain. And what we discovered was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the environmental impact assessment for that particular well was a generic environmental impact assessment that had been used to sign off on 500 wells. 

DJ: Oh, if I recall correctly, they mentioned the impact on walruses. 

PH: (laughing) Yes. But it didn’t actually address – in fact, one of the things it said three times in this environmental impact assessment was that the risk of anything going wrong was so small as to be de minimus, which means, in essence, “not worthwhile looking at.” So it didn’t have to be addressed. And on the back of that, billions of dollars were financing that project. So, of course, when something did go wrong, it took three months to do anything about it, which is an incredible scenario to have. Environmental impact assessments are meant to create some form of protection, but at the moment, because it’s not a crime to commit ecocide, you don’t have to ask certain questions in an EIA, one of them being what will be the consequences if something goes wrong? So it’s not a risk analysis that happens. When ecocide becomes a crime, it becomes a consequence analysis; and indeed, the person who’s signing off on the environmental impact assessment can be held to account in a criminal court of law if they haven’t investigated that. Which means then you have a completely different scenario playing out, where those who are hired to write the EIA’s make absolutely sure that they do address those issues, and certainly won’t sign off on them themselves, and you’ll have banks and investors not wanting to touch anything that could give rise to the consequence of a potential ecocide. So what you find is unconventional oil extraction just won’t survive under a different regime with ecocide as an international crime in place. 

One of the challenges I discovered that predates my involvement was that ecocide was going to become an international crime back when the Rome Statute, which is the governing document for the International Criminal Court, was being drafted up. From 1985 to 1996 when it was being drafted, ecocide was to be included, alongside genocide and war crimes and crimes against humanity. But what we discovered after some credible research that was undertaken by the University of London, where they sent students into literally the basement of the United Nations to track records, was that at the eleventh hour ecocide was removed as an international crime. And in fact, we discovered just a couple of years ago that at the same time there were crimes of responsibility being drafted that were to do with holding governments to account for certain criminal actions, and ecocide was going to be included within that as well. Within six months of it being removed as an international crime, it also was removed from crimes of responsibility, state crime. 

So there seems to have been a very concerted effort to have ecocide removed, and indeed we found records of the then-U.N rapporteurs who were so appalled at this being removed without any debate on it, without any discussion; it was just announced that it’s being removed – that they lodged into the U.N. basement their own opinion as to what had happened. And in their opinion, back in 1996, this was a result of corporate lobbying behind the scenes. We know that it was four countries that had wanted it removed, and that was the U.S., unsurprisingly; the U.K., my country; and also the Netherlands and France. 

And in their opinion this was corporate lobbying from fossil fuel industry, the nuclear industry, and the genetic modification one as well. Because they were all industries that were going to be under serious threat of having to fundamentally rethink how they operate and in fact what they considered to be acceptable, and this would fundamentally change their industries overnight. 

DJ: You know, that last story reminds me of a question I’ve been going to bring up, which has to do with part of Hermann Goering’s attempted defense at the Nuremberg Trials, which was that he tried to say, you know, “this whole trial is a sham because if Germany would have won, then we would not be on trial.” And in fact Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt – “you could all be in the dock if you’d applied the same standards to yourselves.” And basically his argument, which the Nuremberg trial did not allow him to make, was that the victors declared the terms.

And so that’s one of the many, many reasons that I admire your work so much, is that you are going up against that power, as you work on the law. 

PH: Yeah. In a way I am, and in a way I’m not. It still doesn’t get him off the hook. Yes, the victors did write it in their terms, but at the end of the day that doesn’t mean that he can slide on committing genocide. He can say “You did it too” and that’s a whole bigger discourse, of course. The interesting thing is, and in fact this was also what he put as a defense, and indeed many of them did, was that “I was just following orders.” 

And that is actually very interesting, because yes, they were following orders. But it depends on what your state of mind was. Did you actually know what was happening and were you recklessly turning a blind eye? What was the intent behind this wanting to kill? The interesting thing of course with genocide is that it’s very specific in intent. Yes, you are, you’re wanting to kill a race, by dint of their beliefs. What we’re dealing with, with ecocide, is slightly different in that it’s not necessarily – it can be a crime of intent, but the starting point is recklessness, that you knew it was going to cause harm. And this is why it’s so exciting to read that Chevron just agreed in court that humans cause climate change. Because actually that’s a recognition of their own complicity in the harm. And that’s very intriguing. 

I’m not sure whether or not Chevron have recognized just how important that statement is. From their own lawyer, in court. Because one of the things that, actually what’s happening here, and this – much as I’m very cynical about climate negotiations, what is very important to come out of that is that governments have signed off in recognition that climate change is human-driven by dangerous industrial activity. “Dangerous” is my word, but industrial activity drives instability in the atmosphere through excess greenhouse gas emissions. So for legal purposes, what we’re dealing with is the causality, the link and the knowledge behind it. So for instance Donald Trump may argue that because he’s pulled out of the Paris Agreement that he’s not hidebound by that. However, that doesn’t get him off the hook, because he has the knowledge. Whether or not he agrees with it is irrelevant, but he does have the knowledge, and you can say that objectively speaking, even if he claims he didn’t have the knowledge that climate change was occurring and that has arisen as a result of dangerous industrial activity, then he ought to have known, given how much it’s out in the public domain. 

So this is really about how you bring a criminal court case. What are the elements of your crime that you have to establish? And the Chevron case – this interim announcement that’s just come out on this case is very interesting because actually it’s paving the way for criminal prosecutions further down the line. 

DJ: So we have about five minutes left. Can you talk a little bit about how people, you know, somebody listening to this in Kentucky, or in Cambridge, can push these ideas forward? And then also what are your next steps? 

PH: My next steps are actually fundamentally determined by civil society, if you like. What we’re wanting to do next is really bring together not just civil society but those kind of small associations and organizations that are fighting in their patches of the planet to protect them. And saying “Here’s the law that unlocks justice for all the work that you’re doing.” It unlocks it actually for the earth and all who are protecting her. I’m very interested in how we kind of weave together a kind of rebel alliance of those who are engaging with protecting the earth, and bring this forward and create that platform of support to take this law forward. And that’s what our campaign Mission Lifeforce is really about. Our challenge is actually a financial one, in truth. To really take this to a slightly higher level. But, you know, this is the really interesting thing. We actually did a kind of number-crunching exercise. We worked out that we’re probably looking at a $10 million campaign, which is tiny in the scheme of things. How much does it cost to make a Hollywood film these days? So we’re really interested in how we kind of bring those rogue funders to the fore, but also we’d like civil society to even engage with this for as little as five dollars, to put it into the pot. We want to map it, as well, because that creates its own safeguard, a safe space for these small islands to operate in. And start truth-telling about the situation. We’re going to go back into the Assembly of State Parties in December. We’re going to be more resourced and we’re going to tell stories about the pushback that happens from the states that don’t want this. And by doing that kind of truth-telling about the situation, it can act as a safeguard for those countries to know that actually they can operate here, they can take this law forward because civil society is with them on it. And I think this is going to be really important. 

I mean, ultimately actually I’d like to see it go really big in America. I think it could be really, really exciting. There’s some amazing stuff happening in America at a grassroots level. And also there’s some really interesting cases happening. I just heard the other day; for the very first time activists fighting against the pipeline were successful in court in raising the defense of necessity. And that was accepted by the criminal court judge. That’s about being conscientious  objectors. Here we’ve got activists whom we’re working with that are going to be bringing to court their right to freedom of conscience, just as the conscientious objectors used it during the first and second world wars, where they were imprisoned for this and some of them were shot. And how eventually then that became lawful to be a conscientious objector, and was enshrined in our Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That now, in the 21st century, our 21st century crime, instead of being genocide it’s ecocide, and instead of it being conscientious objectors, it’s conscientious protectors. 

So there’s a kind of progressiveness happening, a progression in law where, you know, the most progressive lawyers and judges are beginning to recognize that it’s really important to stand up and speak out. And we really want to engage with those who are prepared to do that, in a big way. It’s not time to start another international negotiation. The Earth is not up for negotiation. This is time to draw the line in the sand and say “Enough. No more.” And make it a crime.

DJ: Well thank you so much for that. And thank you for being on the program. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Polly Higgins. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. 

(Sound of a tawny owl)

Jeremy Lent 02.25.18

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-guest-jeremy-lent-022518/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vUEhXTmOTrY

(Sound of an elephant trumpeting)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen, and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Jeremy Lent. He is an author and founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. The Liology Institute, which integrates systems science with ancient wisdom traditions, holds regular workshops and other events in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy is author of the novel Requiem of the Human Soul. Formerly, he was the founder, CEO, and chairman of a publicly traded internet company. Lent holds a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

So first, thank you for being on the program again, and second, thank you for your work.

JL: Thank you, Derrick. It’s always such a pleasure to be with you. 

DJ: Well, thanks. It’s a pleasure to talk with you, too. 

So today, you and I have planned on talking about how corporate capitalism, or the dominant culture more broadly, coopts everything. But before we get there, can you reintroduce The Patterning Instinct, both the book and the concept, because I’m sure that’s a concept we’ll be talking about through the rest of the interview. 

JL: The book itself is called The Patterning Instinct and it’s subtitled A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search For Meaning, which pretty much describes what the book is about. It looks at the different ways in which cultures have made sense of the universe, all the way from earliest hunter-gatherer times to our present day, and in fact, even looking out into the ways in which the kinds of meaning we make may affect the future, which I think is going to be really relevant to our conversation today.

So, the pattering instinct itself is what I describe as the kind of instinct that we humans have, that we have to a far greater degree than other mammals. And it’s really the identifying characteristic that makes humans unique among all other creatures. And it’s an instinct that works to drive us to find meaning out of everything around us. Think of a little baby who hears the sounds around her, and feels and touches everything. Nobody says to her “You’ve got to learn language.” But because of this instinct to pattern meaning into everything around her, she learns how to speak and how to become part of her culture. So it’s an instinct that humans apply from the earliest days, when we first had language, maybe a couple hundred thousand years ago or so; to look at everything around, like the stars, nature, what was going on, and try to make some meaning out of it, and create stories about the universe. 

And those are the underlying foundational structures of thought that led to different cultures, and ultimately led to bifurcation of cultures and to the culture that has become dominant today.

So today, of course, we use our patterning instinct in very different ways. But for all of us, it’s what we use to make sense of things. But what’s so critical is that it’s our culture that we’re born into that really shapes how we make sense of the world. So a big part of the book is helping us to recognize – it’s almost like an archaeology of the mind. Helping us to recognize where some of the things that we take for granted, where these ideas actually came from. Where the idea that maybe by recognizing them, we become more free to really question them, and perhaps even shift our values and our meaning-making to something that might be more harmonious for ourselves and for our place in the earth.

DJ: Thank you for that, and you’ve done a wonderful job of introducing, I think, the instinct in itself, and can you give – I’m going to say a silly example, and can you give examples of what you think are helpful or harmful patterns that we perceive. You can disagree with the words “helpful” and “harmful” too, that’s perfectly fine. I’m thinking of – obviously language is an example of the patterning instinct going right, that a child learns to speak, or that the parent knows that if the child is crying, that means there’s something wrong with the child and something needs to be fixed. 

And then I’m also thinking – and I don’t want to disrespect lucky socks. But one can – you know, if a baseball player is in a slump and then they get three hits and then they don’t change their socks and they wear the same socks the next day and get three hits again, they could end up wearing the same socks for the entire…

JL: I love it. 

DJ: Which may be – I mean, once again, I don’t want to disrespect lucky socks, but that may be a time where you’re seeing a pattern…oh, I know a great example, a better example, causation vs. correlation. You can go “Gosh, have you ever noticed that there are a lot firefighters at a fire? Firefighters must cause fires.” 

JL: Right.

DJ: And so you’ve got a pattern, but you’ve seen it backwards. 

I’ll shut up now, and can you talk about helpful, harmful, spurious, non-spurious?

JL: That’s great. We can go one layer deeper and looking at what you’re raising. And just think about what is a pattern in itself? Think for example about, like, you look at the night sky. There are gazillions of stars out there. And if anyone has taught you your constellations; basically every culture looks at those stars and they identify constellations, and that’s like a great example of patterns. But when you make a pattern you’re doing two things. You’re including certain things in that pattern, and you’re excluding the stuff that doesn’t fit in that pattern. And it’s part of the way our patterning instinct works. Once we’ve created that pattern, we think in terms of it, which means we keep looking just at the stuff that fits in that pattern. And other stuff that doesn’t fit in that pattern, we kind of ignore, until maybe it becomes so critically extreme that we have to change our pattern in order to include that. 

And so it’s important to realize that essentially any way in which we make meaning – and I love some of your examples, but any way we do that is never 100% right. Because by making the pattern we’re framing things, fitting some things in and some things out. The great example is to go back to language. Like you said, language is incredibly important for an infant to learn her own culture’s language. And what they found by a really sophisticated test studying infants is that as early as nine months, a baby has learned to notice the sounds natural to her country’s language and ignore those that don’t fit in that language.

We know that somebody who’s been born and raised in Japan has trouble distinguishing between “luh” and “ruh” sounds, which to us in English is kind of obvious. But because there’s no distinction about that made in Japanese, their patterning instinct wipes that out. 

What’s so important about that is when we look at the ways in which we make meaning out of the world today, or the way the dominant culture makes meaning out of the world, it does the same thing. We can look at a certain pattern and somebody in the dominant culture might see one thing, and somebody from a different cultural complex might see something completely different.

DJ: You know, a really great example of that in my own life is that I was raised, like most of us in this current culture, to believe that evolution, natural selection is based on strict competition, and it’s basically survival of the meanest. Fittest. And I remember when John Livingston – I read his book and then interviewed him. And he argued that evolution is in many ways based on cooperation and fitting into your niche in the larger community. When he first said that I was thinking “God, he’s crazy! That makes no sense at all!” And it took a few years for me to come around to see it. And now, when I look at the natural world, I see all these examples of cooperation more than I see examples of specific, strict competition.

I’m just saying I used to see it one way, and then it was through other people pointing out patterns that had never occurred to me that I was able to start seeing it differently.

JL: Yes. And what you are describing, as I see it, is actually one of the fundamental, foundational flaws of what our modern civilization’s worldview is based on. It’s not just something that relates to biology or evolution. It’s something that people have inculcated in their lives. And that’s the sense that somehow because of this belief that evolution works through this, what Richard Dawkins is famous for, calling it the “selfish gene.” That actually it’s okay for humans to be selfish. In fact, that’s one of the fundamental philosophical justifications for capitalism. Since we’re all selfish, just like the way the world works out there – evolution works through everyone, through each gene and every animal trying to do its thing and be as competitive as possible. So capitalism is basically like the most efficient way for humans to evolve their society. And it’s completely flawed, and yet it’s such a powerful way for people to justify the incredibly unfair and destructive economic system we live in now.

So I do think that’s one of the foundations. And in fact, I’ve gotten in hot water in the last year or so by writing articles about what I call “The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins.” People get so upset! A lot of them email me back and say “He doesn’t support selfishness. He’s really a good person and you shouldn’t attack him like that.”

And I totally believe he’s a good person. I have no real question about that. But he’s really been promulgating bad science that has been outmoded now for decades. And that science has served as a foundation for people applying it to economics, and capitalism, in a very false way. Even highly intelligent people. This is not something people do without thinking about it, and I think it’s very dangerous. 

DJ: What’s that line from the end of Casablanca? “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.” 

JL: (both laughing) Right. Exactly.

DJ: I mean I really agree with you on that. 

So before we go to how capitalism coopts everything, which you’ve really given us a good entré to, and I should probably take it but I want to do one more little parenthetical comment. 

Also, the world itself is so complex and there is so much information out there – like you said, there are bazillions of stars, and we have to choose some and leave out others in order to perceive “Orion the Hunter” or “The Big Dipper” or anything else. Life is so complex that it’s possible to project so many different patterns onto it, and even completely mutually exclusive patterns onto it, because the patterns that we can recognize are so less complex than the real world. 

JL: Yes. I think that’s true. And in a way that kind of leads into the way in which, if you look at the modern mainstream way of looking at the world, making sense of it. And ultimately it’s something I can identify as reductionism. It’s this way of saying, essentially, starting with the scientific revolution hundreds of years ago, some of the most brilliant minds would look at this complexity, and they’d say “We want to try to understand it.” And at the time, they were the progressive ones who were really moving things forward. And they’d say “In order to understand it, we need to break it down, think of it like a machine, and reduce it to its specific parts so that we can really understand how these work.” And so cut this out, look at this, separate it from that, and we’ll understand it better. 

And by doing that, looking at things by separating things out, thinking of them like incredibly complex machines, they did amazing things. They came up with this scientific understanding of the universe, leading to these amazing technologies, a lot of which we take so much pleasure from. Even right now, we have to recognize the fact that you and I are able to talk or share our ideas with people listening here, and through technology that only developed as a result of this reductionist approach.

But the thing is; they were so successful in what they did that they began to think that their pattern of separation that they were applying meant that the whole universe actually was that. They kind of mistook a particular technique for learning how to manipulate the natural world all around them and started to believe that technique was the actual reality. And by doing that, they lost the ways things connect. So one of the ways in which I think we have hope for the future is to focus our attention on the ways in which things connect up rather than the ways in which they’re separate. And that leads to fundamental shifts in our worldview. And I think it also relates a lot to the different ways in which earlier traditional and indigenous cultures around the world made sense of the world. They saw this kind of amazing distinction between, on the one hand, there’s so much disparate and incredible complexity to the world, but on the other hand, they sensed something unifying that pulled it all together. 

That was sometimes called the riddle of the one and the many. And many different cultures tried to come up with a story of the universe that incorporated the one and the many. And that’s something that our mainstream reductionist viewpoint has absolutely lost. If we want to get to a flourishing place we have to find that again. 

DJ: Yeah, I completely agree. And I’m thinking of a couple of things. One of them is that 14 years ago I wrote this thing – I was by a stream and I wanted to write about what a stream is. You know, when we give definitions, the definitions are, by definition, “this is here and this is there.” There is a square and there is a space inside the square and there is a space outside the square, and the lines delineate. And that’s real, that’s true. And then at the same time I wanted to define the stream by its relationships rather than by “here is the water, here is the bank.” Because I’d been talking to some people who really know rivers, and they were saying we misdefine rivers, because a river doesn’t really end at the bank. It reaches underground, and it’s also flowing under the bottom of the bank. And then where does the water end and the mist above it begin, the solid water? There’s this permeability.

And so that really helped me to try to start perceiving…where I am sitting is not in the stream. There is a stream and there is not-stream. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the boundaries between stream and not-stream are not quite so rigid as we believe. 

JL:  That’s so true, Derrick. And of course they’re related to the self. You know, another of these foundational views coming in our mainstream dominant culture, from a couple of millennia of western thought, is that the self is this fixed entity and that the self is completely separate from another self, and that the human self is separate from nature. And I think part of what we need to do is recognize, just like you were describing the river there so beautifully, that there is actually this really fluid interactivity. That, in fact, what I am as a self doesn’t end at my skin. Just physically, I’m absorbing things and putting things out there in the universe all the time. But even at a deeper place, in terms of this kind of connectivity, the things that I do, the things that I hear, everything that is affecting me and shifting who I am. Every single word, every single activity that I do out there puts out these ripples that become part of the world around us. And actually, once you begin to see the world in terms of connectivity, rather than separation, you begin to realize that there is no fixed self, that it’s amorphous, just like the river. And humans, in the same kind of way, are part of the natural world. Even as we’re destroying it, we’re also part of it in a way that makes it so much more complex. 

DJ: That seems to me a good place to transition into how the dominant culture co-opts everything. Because I agree with everything you’re saying. You put it beautifully and wonderfully. And then I have also seen people argue, then, for example, that because humans are part of the natural world, therefore the fact that humans are killing the oceans is O.K. and natural.

JL: Yeah.

DJ: If you want to, we can talk about that specific example, but what I really want to get to is that it doesn’t matter what idea we’re talking about – I mean, Christianity is such a great example. That you have – let’s pretend that Jesus is real for a second. It doesn’t matter if he was or not. He’s saying “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he’s talking about all this peace, love, groovy stuff, and within 400 years, or 300, however long it took; you’ve got Constantine saying “Let’s go out and conquer under the sign of the cross.” And you have untold millions of people dying. Indigenous people given the choice of Christianity or death. 

It doesn’t matter. We can talk about love, or we can talk about this connection. But there’s this – it seems to me that you are the person, in the entire world, to talk to about how this patterning instinct leads to the cooptation of everything. Do you see what I’m trying to get at? 

JL: I do. I absolutely do. The book The Patterning Instinct really is tracing, almost like a detective story, tracing where, how this happened, from where humans first evolved to where we are now. And I do think that you can actually detect a few key stages. I’ll name them briefly, but I want to focus on the later stages. I don’t want to go into too much detail on the earlier ones. But there’s this stage when humans developed this advanced prefrontal cortex, giving us this patterning instinct, and developed language and stuff like that, giving us essentially an imbalance of power over the natural world. So even hunter-gatherers, who saw the world as like a giving parent, and saw themselves as being in harmony with nature, caused some of the greatest mass extinctions in all of the earth’s history. So we have to look at that as an imbalance created from humanity’s unique powers of this patterning instinct. 

Then the next big stage is when agriculture first arose, about 12,000 years ago, which caused a significant major separation between humans and nature and between humans and other humans, and ownership and hierarchy. And a lot of the things that we take for granted now are only really 12,000 years old in human history. 

Then the next big step came with the scientific revolution in Europe around the 17th century, and that’s where I want to begin to focus a little more, because along with that scientific revolution was this Puritan value system about the individual making wealth and using private property, like improving the land, was considered to be fulfilling God’s command on this earth. This became the fundamental value structure for the United States. Puritans and Protestants were some of the earlier people to invade and colonize the country and take it away from the indigenous people who lived here. I think we have to look at those underpinnings to get a sense of what’s happened right now, how those layers of thoughts arose. I think it’s around the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th and early 20th century in the U.S., that you see the rise of what’s become this massive global corporate takeover of humanity that we’re experiencing in the world today. 

So that’s from a big picture point of view, the way I see how things developed stage by stage to where we are now. 

DJ: I’m going to throw out a cynical statement that I say when I am feeling not particularly optimistic about the future, which is that sometimes it feels to me like humans spend a lot of our intellectual energy rationalizing our pre-existing, I’ll use a nice word, predilections? Rationalizing what we want to do anyway as opposed to actually thinking through a subject. 

There’s another thing here, too, which is I always think about how they ended chattel slavery in the United States in 1865. And then it didn’t take very long for the Jim Crow laws to be put in place. And then once they started getting rid of the Jim Crow laws, you have the prison-industrial complex arising. It’s like whack-a-mole. Every time you succeed in stopping one form – this relates to cooptation. I’m sorry this is such a broad and terrible question, but it feels like there’s a connection between this cooptation question and this question of underlying bigotries ending up manifesting again. And we can of course talk about this in terms of hatred of the natural world, too. 

One of the things that gets to me is that over the last 30 years the environmental movement has really been coopted from being about trying to save wild places and wild beings, into “sustainability,” by which is meant, by the sort of technotopians, sustaining this culture. So somehow the environmental movement has been coopted into serving the high tech system. So how does the patterning instinct relate to this – do you see what I’m trying to get at? How does it relate to this sort of constant cooptation? 

JL: Yes, I do. I totally get what you’re saying. It’s something I think we touched on when we talked last time, how even where we’ve seen major shifts in cultural norms – like you say, the great example is the end of slavery, which turned into yet another boon for capitalism. And then even in the last few decades we had a real shift away from patriarchal value structures, since the 1960’s and 70’s, and that’s great progress culturally. And yet somehow the capitalist system will just absorb any kind of shift that happens culturally and go: “Great! Let’s make this another way to start some new disruptive company that makes billions of dollars and destroys the earth in some new way.” 

I do think that in order to look at how that happens, we have to look at what are the underlying structures that enable it. When I look at what evolved in the last 120 or so years since the beginning of the 20th century, we see a couple of things. One is this implicit acceptance of the notion of the corporation as being an entity that is necessary and valuable in our world. Everyone thinks “Well, the only way things work is you have to have corporations doing stuff for us, and look what happened with communism. What a disaster that was.” As if the only two choices out there for the global economy, or for humans, to start to organize themselves, are capitalism or communism. And parenthetically, communism is just intent on destroying the natural world as capitalism, every bit as much. 

So when you look at that, you begin to realize – you can ask these questions. Why is it considered acceptable for this kind of artificial entity called a corporation to be created, to serve just the ends of making more money for its shareholders, with no other ethical obligation whatsoever? How can we allow that? And I think that is one of the – that’s become this sort of tenet of capitalism. That you have to allow these gigantic corporations and give them the power to do what they want to do. And I think that’s really one of the major things we have to look at. 

I wrote an article just a few months ago talking about – a lot of the time you’ll read the newspapers nowadays and some of the leading scientific thinkers will be talking about the risk of AI taking over, artificial intelligence. There’s this theory that we can try to develop an artificial intelligence that is there for humanity’s good, but there’s a risk that it can become so powerful that its goal can be different from humanity’s and it can end up destroying the world. There’s one futurist called Nick Bostrom who gives as an example “Suppose we develop a super intelligence with just the goal of manufacturing paper clips? And then it turns the entire earth into a giant paper clip manufacturing facility.” And that’s what they’re worried about. My article said, basically: “It’s already happened. Artificial intelligence has taken over and it’s called the corporation.” We created this structure, of our society, that gives this incredible power beyond any kind of political organization, beyond any kind of government, to essentially turn the world into a kind of paper clip, which in this case is commodifying the world, to create more and more shareholder value, as they call it. And returns to investors, by taking human activity, taking the natural world, and transforming it into the monetized economy. 

And that’s what’s out of control. And until we look at some of the structural levers to control that – that’s where it can take over everything, including environmentalist groups, as you pointed out. 

DJ: I think everything you said is completely brilliant. I love it. It’s so great. And I’m going to focus on maybe in some ways the most innocuous word, or maybe the most dangerous word, that I think you said in that whole beautiful commentary; which is that at one point you said the word “somehow.” Do you see where I’m going with this? 

JL: I do.

DJ: You were talking specifically about slavery. But slavery’s not the point here. The “how” of how this happened. The end of slavery somehow got turned into a means – became profitable, even more profitable for capitalism. And we can say “Somehow the corporation got hold.” What’s the relationship between that word “somehow” and your entire, big, beautiful book?

JL: I hear what you’re saying. Again, we look at the underlying value. The “somehow” is that we  live in a society whose roots are in western Europe and that has now become a global, sort of globally prevalent, which is based on the core values of competition. That humans are meant to be what they call “selfish maximizers” of their own financial needs. A society that applies status  to what somebody is earning, how much they’re consuming, how much they can be seen to be consuming, and that destroys some of the core values of what humans actually evolved to live according to. Things like community, connection. Connection with each other, connection with the natural world. Even connecting within ourselves. 

And I think that when we look at how slavery got coopted into basically a new form of capitalism, or how even some of the advances in social concepts of the last few decades got coopted into capitalism. It’s because those underlying values are still what people live their lives according to. Those are the rules by which people live their lives. Those are also the messages people get from when they’re infants looking at a television screen or a video screen all the time every day as we watch the news. The messaging that comes at us all the time is messages like “Humans are fundamentally selfish.” We’re meant to compete against each other and outdo each other. Our society is happy when it’s growing more. Growth is good. We can grow indefinitely. Don’t even think about any limits to that growth. And we can grow through this kind of notion of freeing, of freeing markets and freeing society so that wealthy billionaires can do whatever they want and ultimately that’s good for all of us because it enables more growth.

And these are some of the fundamental values that we have inculcated in us, and the rules according to which we live our lives unthinkingly. And both those values and those rules have to change for us to shift the trajectory of that. And they can change. It’s doable.

DJ: So what I’m hearing you say, the image that was coming to mind as you were saying all that is that there are layers. And these layers are going to be miscible some. It’s not just a bottom layer, but sometimes the bottom layer moves up through the next two layers. You have all these layers of beliefs and patterns. And you can have the pattern that says it is acceptable to enslave others, and that belief system, and then you can chip away at that. And so you outlaw slavery within a nation but if you still have the belief below that, that whites are fundamentally superior to African-Americans, and the belief that those with white skin are entitled to the labor and lives of those with other-colored skin, then you’ve gotten rid of chattel slavery but you’ve still got this pattern belief that those are, that they are entitled to their labor and lives.

So as long as that other layer still remains, it will find some new way to manifest itself. Am I understanding you correctly? 

JL: I think you’re describing it really beautifully clearly. And then you can keep going down those layers. Imagine what the world fleetingly felt like when Obama was elected president. And we can imagine even in a positive direction of some of those cultural norms going forward. Imagine a world where it’s generally agreed on that there is no difference between people based on the color of their skin. Where that kind of horrendous racial prejudice has become so weak that it’s no longer dominant in driving society. 

But as long as you still have some of these fundamental capitalistic precepts, which basically say that the right way for society to work is for people to compete against each other, and that there’s something intrinsically good about each person seeking their own end at the expense of others, because it leads to a more efficient society and a more efficient economy and that’s ultimately good for everyone. As long as those underlying implicit patterns of thought remain, we’ll still be in this trajectory towards complete collapse of our civilization and disaster for the natural world. 

So something has to shift where we look at these deep underlying values that our capitalist system is based on and make new rules up to control the corporations, based on a different set of values. And also instill – cause media to change so that those destructive values are not instilled in our children from the earliest times that they begin to make sense of things. 

DJ: So what I hear you saying now is that even if we were able to get rid of this overt racism – well, shoot: I just won’t exploit the African-Americans. Instead I will exploit the Syrian refugees who are coming over and are desperate for a job, or the people from Mexico. Or poor white people. Doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s cheap labor. 

JL: That’s right. And that’s how the world currently works, so that – basically nations will compete against each other just to try to entice some corporation to open some new manufacturing facility in their country, to get the pollution and virtual slave labor just because they’re so desperate to compete in this marketplace where it’s the corporations that essentially choose what they do and essentially make their own rule books. 

DJ: So we have about ten minutes left. You have brilliantly, I think, discussed the cooptation. And can you now, for ten minutes, discuss the “somehow” of moving away from this, considering that those with this perspective own the major forms of media, considering the effectiveness of their propaganda. So somehow we need to change these values and help people – I love the line “Unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture.” And that’s one of the beautiful things that your book accomplishes, is that you help us to question some of these assumptions. So how do we do this, how do we somehow move people or help people move themselves to perceiving the world in these different ways? And that also manifesting in the real world? 

JL: Such important and profound questions, Derrick. I think the first place for each of us to begin is really looking at our own unquestioned assumptions, which is obviously hard to do. The very fact that they’re unquestioned makes them very difficult to even identify. Just like we were saying about the constellations. Once you see these constellations in the sky, you don’t even realize there are other stars out there to even look at. So I think that all of us have to look at what is it in our lives, what are the ways in which we’re choosing values, choosing what we do that has been ingrained in us as part of this dominant system and is destructive. 

And of course many people listening to this kind of discussion have already done a lot of that work and are aware of some of the fundamental things that need to be reoriented and have already changed a lot of things in their lives. And that’s where we have to recognize that because these big corporations own the mass media, it is so incredibly important for us to work on the power of the network, the power of our self-organization as human beings to relate to each other and to work together. Even if it’s below the surface.

You know, an analogy that I really love is this sense of, you know, in a forest, when you’re walking through a forest you can see the trees, and if a big tree falls down everyone can see that, you know what’s going on, but what you don’t know is happening is this mycelial network,  this fungal network, and below the earth the trees are communicating with each other. Well, they’re actually helping each other, and they’re actually using these networks to transmit carbon and different nutrients from one tree to another and there’s all this kind of communication going on, and that’s the thing that actually allows the health of the forest. And I think we, as humans, are involved in these kind of mycelial networks, through things just like what we’re doing today, these kinds of conversations with each other, helping each other become aware of what’s going on. And when we do that, I think what’s so important is to not judge others, to not make them feel bad about the ways in which they are engaging in destructive behavior. Because then that just leads to further separations. It leads people to close off. 

But to really connect with people’s sense of humanity, with their sense of kindness, their sense of these deep human virtues, of empathy and compassion, and really bring people into that mycelium network, invite them in to recognizing that we can do things in a different way. There are possibilities for us. And then begin to offer some possibilities, visions of what is possible. A world that is really different from the one we live in today. 

DJ: Well thank you for that. And we have like two or three minutes left. To sort of wrap up, do you have any workshops coming up? How can people learn more about your work? And also I’m going to throw in a joker here. As well as that, how can people move from the level of these personal mycelial networks to organized political action? And I’m sorry to drop the big one in.

JL: (laughing) I love that. I’ll try to get to all of that in two to three minutes. But thanks for that, Derrick. I guess first off, if anybody wants to connect with me and my work, a good place to begin is my website jeremylent.com. And if you want to look at a different kind of worldview that I’m talking about, one that can lead to a sustainable flourishing, I have another website to do with liology; liology.org, which you might find really interesting. 

Something that I do have coming up fairly soon: if anybody happens to be in Seattle, I’ll be in conversation with David Korten Sunday February 25th. Also in March, in Sonoma in California I’m co-facilitating a series of three workshops on just this issue, on transitioning culture, understanding the patterns and reshaping them for a flourishing future. So you can find more information on my website about that and if you happen to be in the area that would be great. 

To answer that bigger question: How do we, if we have these different values and we want to kind of plug in to what is possible – I do think it’s important to connect up with organizations that are out there, that are doing really important things to shift where we’re going. 

I’ll just give a plug for one that most people may not have heard of. It’s to do specifically with climate change but it works at a much deeper level. It’s called “Climate Mobilization.” You can find it at climatemobilization.org. And what I love about them is that they are recognizing that we are heading at an absolute existential crisis, and we can’t just be looking at incremental changes. And what we have to do is mobilize society. They use as a kind of metaphor; what FDR did after Pearl Harbor in 1940 in the U.S. Where he transformed society in order to face an existential threat. And that’s what we need to do to face our world now. I love the way that they’re shifting this kind of metaphor of meaning in a way that I think Americans even outside the environmental movement can get and understand.

DJ: Well thank you for that, and thank you for your work. And I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Jeremy Lent. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. 

Susan Cox 01.29.17

Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-susan-cox-012918/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DWXHbrt3kvU

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Susan Cox. She is a feminist writer, activist, and educator in Philosophy. She is a regular contributor to Feminist Current and a member of the Women’s Liberation Front board of directors.

So first, I’d like to thank you for your work, and second, I’d like to thank you for being on the program.

SC: Thank you, Derrick. Thanks for having me.

DJ: Today I’d like to talk about queer theory. It feels like there has been something of a coup in academia, sort of silent coup and also in discourse in general. At this point, this thing called “queer theory” frankly seems to control all of academia these days, and a lot of public discourse. But I am sure that a lot of people haven’t heard of it. What is queer theory?

SC: Derrick, you are certainly right that there has been this massive coup in academia of queer theory. We see it pretty much everywhere, especially in feminism today.

Queer theory problematizes what is called “the binary opposition.” For example: Man versus woman. Queer theory argues that binary oppositions are inherently hierarchical, in that one term is privileged over the other as the primary, and the other term is merely its deviant, or derivative. For example: Man is primary and woman is merely the negation of man.

In psychoanalysis, women were theorized as being merely “the lack of the penis.” So queer theory argues that we need to deconstruct all of these social binary oppositions. For example, man versus woman, heterosexual versus homosexual, natural versus artificial, nature versus culture. And we do this through the strategy of queering. And queering is basically a strategy of conceptual and categorical border transgression, in which each category becomes essentially meaningless and not distinct from the other. For example, if we take “man” and redefine “man” as not being a male person, but whoever feels like man, then we have queered that category and it is no longer distinct from “woman.” And this is seen as a progressive movement in getting rid of social oppression, because queer theory sees oppression as springing not from one class of people subordinating another and exploiting them for labor and resources, for their material benefit; but instead oppression comes from this very act of labelling these groups in a binary fashion, which is seen as restrictive and oppressive and people cannot express their authentic selves in this binary opposition.

DJ: Wait – I want you to keep going with this, but I’m guessing that, just like my brain is exploding from the nonsense of what is being conveyed here, that a lot of listeners’ brains will be kind of exploding too. I just want to give us a second to let our brains explode, and now, can you go on? This all … is just striking me as crazy. But keep going.

SC: When oppression is seen not as arising from these material relations of power, these class relations, but instead from the labelling of these relations in a binary fashion, from putting people into these groups of categories, then it really drops power out of the equation.

For example, Judith Butler; in her seminal text Gender Trouble, which came out in 1990, at the beginning of the third wave of feminism and was hugely influential to the third wave; argues that patriarchy is a… she celebrates the fact that the term “patriarchy” has lost currency in recent feminist theory, and that we cannot identify males as a class, as the oppressors of females, because this is too totalizing a gesture and actually this is not how it works, but oppression springs from these discursive structures of binary oppositions, and, if we identify males as the oppressor class, that only works to strengthen the binary opposition.

DJ: So let me get this straight. Even though 25% of all women in this culture have been raped in their lifetime by males, and another 19% percent have had to fend off rape attempts, this is not – naming the fact that it is males who are raping females, does not actually help to at least begin to address this atrocity, but instead … please finish that sentence, because I can’t.

SC:  But instead, when females unite together in feminism, this would only strengthen the gender binary, which is the source of all oppression. So it became really popular in feminist theory in the 80’s and 90’s to say that women are not oppressed by virtue of these material relations of power, but by the category of “woman” itself. They argued that feminism needed to proceed without reference to the category of “woman,” and that females could not be the subject of feminism as it was an exclusionary move, and that all of feminism’s actions had to be inclusive of all individuals.

DJ: So the abolition movement, the attempt to abolish chattel slavery in the United States, could, according to this idea, not reference the fact that it was white people enslaving African-Americans? And attempts to stop genocide against American Indians is then not supposed to acknowledge that? The problem is that there are the categories “settler” or “colonial power” and “indigenous persons,” the problem is that these categories exist, the problem is not that white people are stealing Indian land?

SC: Exactly. What happened with the rise of queer theory is that feminism became very symbolic, the idea being that the war that feminism needs to fight is merely on the symbolic level of erasing certain categories from language, through the process of queering. And when we drop power out of the equation we can see what happens, for example like you were saying about racist global colonization.

Take for example the surrogacy industry. Queer theory views surrogacy not as this racist, sexist system of exploitation, but as a positive movement. It does not view the exploitation of, for example, a woman in India as inherently…it basically… Say there are two gay white males in America who wish to have a baby. So they hire a surrogate in India to gestate their child; and they take the egg from another woman, through this painful and harmful extraction process, because the Indian woman’s eggs are of an undesirable race; and they implant it into her womb and this is not considered exploitation, but it’s rather a progressive movement of the queering of birth! Because it is seen as queering the binary in sexual reproduction of male and female, as well as queering the relationship between the natural and the artificial. It’s celebrated in what’s known as “cyborg feminism” as this utopian melding of man and machine, and as this blurring of these “oppressive boundaries.”

DJ: So I’m still finding that my brain is exploding. How did this ever get – this all seems like such nonsense. How did it ever take hold?

I want to read a quote from a queer theorist, and then I want to comment briefly on that, and then turn it over to you.

The comment from the queer theorist is that queer theory “seeks to answer a series of questions about what is normal, how normal comes to exist, and who was excluded or oppressed by these notions of norms.”

And that part, I think, is desperately important. We should ask ourselves, for example, how rape became normalized, how pornography became normalized. They call prostitution “the oldest profession,” which is certainly attempting to normalize this sexual exploitation of women. Likewise, how did it became normalized for this culture to have an economic system that destroys the planet? I think that that question is really important.

But it seems to me that that’s not all they do. There somehow is this pretense in there, because… Well, why don’t I just let you take over. Because that part I think is helpful. Separate out for me, if you can, where it went from a useful discussion like that – well, first off, do you agree that that’s a useful discussion, how things become normalized? And second, then how did this become so – how did they come to these really bizarre conclusions from that decent start, or that decent question?

SC: I agree with you, Derrick. It is an important discussion to interrogate how norms come to be norms, and what is this process? And feminist theorists certainly did this with the question of social construction, the social construction of gender. For example, Simone de Beauvoir is famous for saying “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” to try to interrogate this mechanism of social construction.

Queer theory is very much influenced by Michel Foucault, who is called the father of queer theory. He really popularized this method of what he calls “historical genealogy”. He originally got it from Nietzsche, but he popularized it in 20th century as a part of postmodernist thought. So he performs these historical genealogies, for example history of madness, history of sexuality; to show how homosexuality became seen as deviant.

And this is an important thing to do. But what queer theory does is it takes power out of the equation and says that these norms happen almost by chance, which is also from Foucault. Foucault argued that these norms kind of happen through contingency. And contingency is basically chance. They just sort of form that way, they just get momentum for some reason and keep going. No one knows quite why and they don’t really benefit any specific group of people.

Similarly, Judith Butler said that women are not oppressed for the benefit of males, but that these norms simply come to be and that they are very restrictive and oppress people in that fashion.

So take for example gender. The feminist theory of the social construction of gender is that it is coercively instated, so that female persons are organized into the subordinate class of women. And women are positioned as being illogical, frivolous, subservient, naturally caring, and sexually subordinate to males. And men are characterized as brave, active, intelligent, logical, leaders. So we can see how gender is basically the ideology that props up these two classes.
But in queer theory, they took the feminist theory of gender and made it into this all-pervasive plot to capture complex individuals into these restrictive binary boxes, and that itself is considered oppressive.

So queer theory idealizes individual performances of the self that exceed these binaries. For example Eve Sedgwick says that subversive binary performances of the self include BDSM practitioners. She says something like “radical fairies,” leather men, all of these sort of surprising performances of the self. And for queer theory, you can’t simply break out of the binary opposition, or refuse one pole of the binary opposition, because this only strengthens it. And the second wave of feminism identified heterosexuality, and more specifically compulsory heterosexuality, as a main regime of women’s oppression.

So queer theory took that and said that for example radical lesbianism, or political lesbianism, was not a productive feminist strategy at all. Because merely refusing heterosexuality strengthened the binary between heterosexual and homosexual, and what instead needed to happen was the queering of the binary entirely, thus blurring the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual.

Eve Sedgwick argues that lesbianism is not a subversive refusal of male power at all, but instead what is really subversive is for lesbians to have sex with men. And Judith Butler said pretty much the same thing. She said that lesbianism was not productive, but rather a man who is performing femininity, wearing feminine clothing, and that sexual relation is a much more complex production of power, and subversive.

DJ: Once again, my brain is continuing – it’s past exploding. It’s simply melting at this point. Part of what you’re saying is that – it seems like your perspective would be that a little girl should not be forced into “femininity” by being disallowed from working on a car engine, and instead being forced to play with dolls. You would say that that is forcing her into the structure of femininity, if she is not allowed – I mean, if she wants to play with dolls, that’s fine, but if she wants to work on a truck that’s fine too. Is this correct so far?

SC: Yes, that’s correct. That is the feminist theory, the feminist stance on the matter.

DJ: And so the queer theory perspective would be that the little girl who likes to play with trucks, or likes to work on trucks is…. is…. Finish the sentence, please.

SC: Is not a girl at all, basically.

So what queer theory argues; because you cannot refuse one end of the binary opposition, or strengthen the oppressed end of the binary opposition; is that we need to do away with the binary opposition entirely. So it argues that women are – you cannot merely be a woman, and say “I am a female, but I do not ascribe to femininity, I do not do femininity. I like things which are traditionally relegated to the realm of men.” This is no longer seen as something productive.

Instead, queer theory asserted the theory of performativity. So this is what Judith Butler is very famous for. She said that “woman” is not just a female person, but it is a performance. There is no such thing as real women, as “woman” is nothing but a parody without origin. So we are all just performing this idea of femininity and there is no such thing… there is no femaleness underneath femininity. So queer theory focuses on subverting the distinction between sex and gender. Originally feminist theory said there is sex, there are males and females, and then there is all this made up nonsense which is gender.

DJ: Obviously there are males and females or there wouldn’t be babies.

SC: Yes, but queer theory says no, males and females are just as fictitious as the gender categories of what’s feminine and masculine. And this has been really harmful for asserting any sort of positive feminist image of the woman who flouts femininity but is still a woman, nonetheless.

DJ: It seems to me – I’m going to throw out a philosopher here, too. There is what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which is where you forget – in non-philosophical language, that’s confusing the map for the territory. And it seems to me – we’re all aware of that? If you have a map and if the map does not fit the real world, then you know there is a problem with the map. But it seems to me that – aren’t these queer theorists are saying that there is actually no real world and that there is only the map?

SC: Yes. The queer theorists are saying this, which is very much influenced from postmodernist philosophy, which basically says there is no “real world” onto which the illusions of society are cast, but instead it is nothing but a world of smoke and mirrors. So there is no such thing as a “real woman” or “real man,” aka males and females.

DJ: Or real nature.

SC: Or real nature.

That is also a motif of the cyborg feminism – there is no such thing as a natural person, we are all really cyborgs and there is nothing real and there are no boundaries that we can actually point to between the natural and the artificial, or the real and the apparent world.

DJ: This is not just in – If we expand this beyond queer theory, this is not just in sex. This is also in – there’s a huge movement – this is just one part of a larger movement There are the neo-environmentalists who say “There is no wild nature, there are only gardens. There is only what we make of it and we are going to run this.” They believe that what is – what we feel about the world is more important than the world itself. We see this in many different – we see this in the attempts to co-opt or eradicate indigenous nations and indigenous sovereignty. We see this all over and this is just fundamentally… I’ve seen a lot of mainstream articles about how people are suggesting, famous people are suggesting that the world is nothing but a giant computer simulation, like a computer game, as opposed to the real world. Basically this is like the triumph of what we think about what is real, over what actually is real. The triumph of solipsism, where the real world does not exist.

This was a joke we used to play with when I was in high school. I read in a science fiction story one time that oh, the world is nothing but my imagination. So I would say to my friend Ron: “You don’t really exist because I’m the only being in the world that exists and everything else is a figment of my imagination.” And since we were high school boys, he would punch me in the arm, you know?

My voice is getting thin not just because I have a cold, but because this is so crazy.

SC: It is crazy, and it’s a very harmful ideology, because when we cannot assert that there is something real, as for example, the natural world; when we cannot say that there is something real or there is truth, then we cannot fight for the truth and what is right.

And the real tragedy of queer theory and postmodernism in general, postmodernist thought, is that it actually comes from a good place in some ways. For example, postmodernism emerged as a critique to modern philosophy. And modern philosophy is characterized by asserting universal truths which are usually Eurocentric truths; objective reality and an appeal to nature. For example, women were excluded from much political theory because their nature was merely inferior and they could not have access to the levels of rationality required for participating in political life.

DJ: And the same is claimed to be true for Africans, American Indians and these so-called “lesser breeds,” that whites are – whites have conquered the world because they are naturally superior, not through their application of organized violence.

SC: Yes, exactly, because that is just “the nature of civilization” and the European civilizations are, well, you know; through such philosophers like Hegel, they viewed the Germans as the inheritors of the mantle of civilization from the Greeks. Also in Heidegger, he also espoused that, and he was a Nazi. We don’t talk much about that in philosophy. So postmodernist thought emerged as a critique to modern philosophy, which, for example, they said… It was basically an assertion of neutral objectivity. And so when all of these voices suddenly became more legitimate… There was, you know, in the 20th century, it had seen the end to a lot of injustice, the end to much colonialism and sexism, and the voices of women were actually becoming legitimate.

So these claims to universality from which women were excluded no longer held water. And when the modern philosophy would say “This is an expression of my neutral objectivity,” feminist philosophy looked at that and said, “Ahh, no, it’s not. It’s actually just an expression of your subject position as a white European male.”

So this was actually a very good critique. But then postmodernist thought took the turn to say, you know, not that this truth was incomplete or wrong, but to say that there is no such thing as objective truth, and there is no such thing as objective reality that can be observed. That everything is subjective, is a manifestation of one’s own cultural position. We see this also in postcolonial theory, which argued that instead of critiquing the Eurocentric universalism and saying “You were wrong” or “This is incomplete,” instead argued that there is no such thing as universal truth, that everything is merely culturally relativist.

When we cannot assert the truth, we cannot fight for the truth. It’s actually quite convenient to power when there is no such thing as objective truth, so people can’t say, “You are wrong.” They say “Well, everything is subjective, and a manifestation of your own personal reality.”

DJ: A couple things. One of them is that the best refutation of this that I saw early in my adult life was by Charlene Spretnak, who said that “For those who say there are no truths, I say there is this truth, which is that you need water to survive. So drinkable quantities of clean water are a good thing and we can build our truth from there.” The point being that we are animals and we require clean water to survive. We require air to breathe. I mean, if somebody were to start strangling you, or somebody were to start strangling a postmodernist, the postmodernist, one would hope, would quickly realize that there is a truth, which is that you need air to live, and you can build things from there.

SC: Mm-hmm. When we cannot assert the truth, you know, we cannot fight for the truth. It’s actually quite convenient to power when there is no such thing as objective truth, when people can’t say “You are wrong.” You can say “Well, everything is subjective, and a manifestation of your own personal reality.”

DJ: So I would then not be allowed to look at you and say “You are a female,” even if you are pregnant.

SC: Mm-hmm.

DJ: If you are pregnant, obviously you are a female, because males don’t get pregnant.

SC: Yes.

DJ: The point is that even on that level of truth, we’re not allowed to assert it. Correct?

SC: That is correct. This is also ideology that is very useful for power because when females do not actually exist, but when they’re just a performance, like we for example see this ideology in the sex trade industry, when women have to tell themselves, “Oh, I’m OK. I’m not selling myself. This is just a performance. I’m selling a service. I’m just pretending to be this thing and that’s what I’m selling.” The flesh and blood existence of women conveniently disappears into the commodity when they are nothing more than a performance. They’re nothing more than a text.

Judith Butler’s later theory, she argued that “women” is nothing more, gender is nothing more than an utterance, as a citation of certain norms.

And you know, I met a very smart feminist theorist at a philosophy conference and I said something critical of prostitution and she said, “Oh but, you know, sex work is not bad. I know one young woman and she’s more like an actress. She acts in a certain way that her clients like, and she has to change her personality and be an actress, depending on which client she’s with.” So it’s all very convenient when women don’t actually exist.

DJ: Let’s talk about pedophilia. It seems to me one of the arguments that’s made by queer theory; which you mentioned once, but you haven’t really hit, and you can hit it if you want; is the importance of transgressing social norms. And I think you and I would agree that there are certainly certain social norms that it is important to transgress. But it seems to me that queer theory, with denying that truth exists, is arguing that transgressing of social – that since some norms are… I’ve seen the argument made that because this culture has asserted that homosexuality is wrong, and that obviously is an unfair stricture, an unjust stricture, they then argue – I’ve seen a lot of queer theorists make this argument – that all restrictions against all forms of sexuality are restrictive and bad.

SC: Yeah…

DJ: So can you talk about that and include in this a discussion of the role of pedophilia in the formation of queer theory?

SC: Yes. Queer theorists certainly do make exactly that argument you just made. Actually, I recently saw that argument be made in a legal brief by the ACLU. It was a legal brief petitioning the State of California to legalize prostitution and their argument was that since there were once laws against sodomy, restricting adults’ sexual expression, that they should abolish any restrictions on prostitution, which restrict adults’ sexual activities. And this is a real thing. I can’t believe that’s the argument they made. It is ridiculous, but this is our ridiculous world.

And queer theorists do make the argument that all social norms need to be transgressed and that is a progressive force of queering. For example, BDSM is seen as a “queer” identity. And queer theory argues that there is not material harm done by, for example, someone beating someone with a whip and getting sexual pleasure from it, but that the social harm comes from the marginalization of certain groups who are seen as deviant, such as BDSM practitioners or pedophiles.

For example, Michel Foucault, in a 1978 radio interview, was advocating for France to abolish the age of sexual consent –

DJ: As in down to infants, as in down to any age?

SC: As in down to infants, yes. Make it so there was no restriction on sexual consent.

DJ: He’s not unique. Pat Califia also said that any child old enough to be able to choose whether he or she wants to wear shoes is old enough to participate in sex, by which she doesn’t mean playing “doctor,” but instead Pat Califia has written child torture porn.

SC: Oh my god.

DJ: Anyway, so go ahead.

SC: So yeah, this is quite a common argument amongst queer theorists, and Foucault himself made the argument in a radio interview. He said that there is not actually harm done by adult males raping children, but rather that children are merely constructed, socially constructed as a vulnerable population through various psychological, medical and legislative discourses, and that the pedophile is merely socially constructed as a figure, as a phantom. They’re nothing more than a phantom, and that the creation of this phantom through the law on sexual consent would actually cause the social harm and be carried out on the bodies of men, and women and children throughout society.

So this is what queer theory does. There are no material relations of power or exploitation or harm. There are merely these phantoms of social norms that are causing the harm, these categorizations of people, the categorization of pedophile, or the BDSM or the sadist, even.

DJ: So to be clear – this is all pretty complex material – the problem, according to queer theory, is not what happens, the problem is not the actual rape of a child by an adult – or they would not say “rape,” they would say “consensual sexual activity between a 4 year old and a 37 year old” – but the problem is not the sex act itself, or what you and I would say the act of rape itself, but the problem is how society responds to that act? And the problem is our discourse surrounding it, which is that’s where the harm comes to the child? Is this the argument, essentially?

SC: Yes. The argument is that it’s how society responds to it and it’s also the naming of it. So what queer theory advocates for is basically to render language meaningless, so that this action of naming harm cannot actually occur. You know, when we cannot actually name the class of males as the oppressors of females –

DJ: Or adults as adult pedophiles raping children.

SC: Exactly. When we cannot even name them –

DJ: Or white people stealing from indigenous people

SC: Exactly. You know post-colonial theory idealizes this process of hybridization where it blurs the line between oppressor and oppressed, and we can no longer make a distinction between them, because everything is this sort of queer mush of hybridization. And that is seen as the way to progress and liberation.

This is actually a real problem, because as Mary Daly said, “We cannot fight against oppression when there are no namable oppressors.” So this is a real problem for feminism, and also for any sort of activism or revolution, political revolution, when we cannot establish class consciousness and identify the division of classes. Who are the exploiters, who are the exploited?

This is the real mistake in the social theory of “othering,” or this is the vulgar misreading of the theory of “othering.” The idea of the “other” is that this social group is seen as this coherent group and distinct from the dominating group. And postmodernist theory argues that we need to deconstruct the creation of the category of “other” and make it so that there is no distinction between groups, and everybody is recognized as infinitely unique individuals who are irreducible to any social category of description. But in reality you actually need to identify yourself as member of an exploited class and unite together in class interest to be able to fight any power that is oppressing you.

We see this throughout history, throughout any act of slavery, colonization, or oppression. The dominant group can’t subordinate another group merely through brute force. They also need to engage in this sophisticated process of dismantling the group as a group, and this is done through banning their language, their religion and destroying their way of life.

For example, in the history of the western civilization, western civilization, the Romans, were able to consolidate their hold on diverse cultural territories by instituting a hierarchical system of spiritual authority, Christianity. And they were able to suppress paganism by burning pagan temples and executing pagan practitioners, but it still wasn’t enough. They had to appropriate certain elements of paganism into Christianity, like Yule and Easter.

For example, Easter is the Christian holiday of celebrating the day that Jesus rose from the dead. But Easter, where does that come from? Where do the bunnies come from? Where do the eggs come from? And it’s actually an appropriation of the Goddess of the Dawn, whose name was Ēostre. And it’s really a fantastic example of queering, when this goddess’s name was rendered totally meaningless, emptied out of all meaning that was subversive to the powers.

DJ: Can you talk more about colonialism? We had a talk a couple of days ago, sort of preparing for the interview. Can you remember the stuff that you said about colonialism that I teased you that I really wanted you to put in?

SC: Mm-hmm.

DJ: Do you remember what I’m talking about?

SC: I think so.

DJ: It had to do with commodifying – go ahead.

SC: Back to the theory of the “other.” The “other” was originally theorized by Simone de Beauvoir, and she said that “man” is the subject and woman is the “other;” “man” is the absolute and “woman” is inessential. And so this was taken up to be that, you know, the whole fashionable trend of feminist theory that woman cannot be the subject of feminism, that feminism needs proceed without referencing women, and everything is exclusionary and everything needs to be inclusive of all individuals, etc. etc.

DJ: So when indigenous rights actually includes, has to include – environmentalism has to include industrial humans. And indigenous rights has to include white people’s right to take from indigenous people.

SC: Yes, because the “harm” is the identification of indigenous people as “other,” according to post-modernist thought and queer theory. So Simone de Beauvoir, when she theorized this, she meant it in a way that when woman is the “other,” she doesn’t exist at all. Like she is given no existence apart from men.

And this is also what happens in any strategy of oppression. The oppressed group is turned into nothing more than a parody of what they once were, and a commodity, like sacred cultural symbols are turned into this exotic pattern that the dominant group will tile their bathroom with. Or religious garb will just turn into this fun costume that the dominant group will use when they’re at a costume party and play. So it reduces the people, the oppressed group to nothing more than a performance, and a parody.

And this is what it’s being advocated for in queer theory, that a woman is nothing more than a performance, she is just a citation of a norm, and anyone can put on this costume. It’s basically the obliteration of the oppressed group.

DJ: So we have about five minutes left. There are a couple of areas – everything you’re saying is, I think, really really important, and we have a couple of areas left. One of them is can you talk for a moment about the McCarthyism that seems to be inherent in queer theory, because their arguments don’t make any sense. It seems to me that what’s happening in the academia is there’s a litmus test, that if you don’t agree with queer theory, you’ll be kicked out, you’ll be deplatformed, you’ll be not allowed to speak. It’s become clear to me that the only way that queer theory can win arguments is by silencing its opponents, because it doesn’t make any sense. So do you want to talk for a minute about how this notion that it’s all just narratives – it keeps reminding me, I can’t help but think about Animal Farm. All animals are created equal except the pigs are more equal. It’s like all narratives are created “equal,” except that queer theory is the only narrative you can have.

SC:  Oh, that’s really a good parallel. I like that.

In academia, you know, or just the greater population; yes there is that whole – the McCarthyism of – and it’s definitely – a part of it is that because everything is just narrative and symbols and there is no material reality, words turn into violence. So if you say something that is dissenting, like a feminist critique of gender, of genderist ideology; that is seen as a literal act of physical violence. Because, you know; “words are reality,” “the world is a text,” etc.

But you know, in academia, really, there’s … or just in the world in general; like in feminism, I feel like there are a lot of women who are really open to critiques of this whole ideology. Because, you know, they are not actually – they don’t actually want to do bad things. They want to make the world a better place, actually. They have good intentions, a lot of people who are very invested in queer theory. I’ve met a lot of professors and academics who are very much into queer theory but it’s coming from a good place. They think that it is actually the path to fighting oppression in the world and it’s kind of sad.

I think that feminism, right now – we really do have a good opportunity to get our message out there, and to have it be well received, because I think women are just starving for some straightforward answers, because everything is to topsy-turvy. Like in gender studies departments, there are just so many reversals. If you pick up a Judith Butler book, which every gender studies department will have you read, it is just reversal after reversal. You can’t even read it. It’s just so bizarre and terrible. I feel like women are starving for something real.
They’re starving for real feminism.

I always think of, you know, to go to George Orwell; I always think of 1984, because it’s so descriptive of our current world. But I also think of a very particular character in 1984, whose name is Syme. And he works with Winston at the Ministry of Truth, and Winston likes to talk to Syme. Syme is very much, he’s taken all the ideology of Big Brother, hook line and sinker. But he’s very intelligent, and he’s fun to talk to. So Winston is having this conversation with Syme, and ironically Syme’s job at the Ministry of Truth is actually to “queer” language. And he’s talking about how the English language has so many different words for “good.” It has “splendid,” “fantastic,” “wonderful.” And obviously these words are totally useless when you could just use “good” or “ungood” or “doubleplusgood.”

So his job at the Ministry of Truth is to remove the specificity from language. And they’re at lunch break and Big Brother comes on to make an announcement, and Big Brother says things like “War is Peace,” “Peace is War,” and “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” And of course last week they weren’t at war with Eastasia, but this is what the ideology is currently telling people to accept. And most of the people are just always so buffeted by all of these reversals that they kind of just accept whatever comes, but Syme is so intelligent that Winston looks at Syme when the announcements are saying “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia, and he sees him internalizing it in a more sophisticated way, to “doublethink.”

So it’s really sad. I think that a lot of the people who are very invested in queer theory are very intelligent, and it’s such doublethink. There are so many reversals. That’s Syme. He’s kind of the postmodernist academic I always think of.

DJ: We have like a minute left. Either a) could you say anything you wanted to say that I haven’t given you a chance to; or b) could you say how do you think we should go forward? How do we combat queer theory and try to bring back reality to our discourse, and to reality?

Or both.

SC: We need the specificity of language. George Orwell, in his book 1984 was really good in talking about language, because whenever it loses its specificity it always serves power, because you can’t challenge power, you can’t even name it. And so we just need to reach out to women. Like I said, women are all starving for something real, for real feminism. And I think there’s a lot of hope right now, and that good things are possible.

DJ: So how do you see queer theory then getting deconstructed? How do you see moving beyond it? How do you see this hope manifesting?

SC: Queer theory, like you were saying before; when you actually say what it is, it’s just obviously so ridiculous. And talking about Judith Butler, about picking up a Judith Butler book; it’s just so abstruse. You can barely read it. You can’t understand it at all. You’re like “What is she saying?!?”

And it seems very intelligent because of that. It’s given this sort of aura of authority through this academic language. And that’s how a lot of queer theory is. But I think queer theory is very much vulnerable in that if you actually just outright say what it is, it’s like “Well that is really dumb.” So I think if we’re talking about it, and just describing it as what it is, and also identifying queer theory and postmodernist thought in our conversations, and in the political environment around us, that it’s very vulnerable to critique. So there is hope there.

DJ: Yeah, I think any philosophy that can be used so easily to promote pedophilia is obviously very vulnerable.

SC: Yeah. That is just so obviously unacceptable.

DJ: Well thank you so much for the interview. I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Susan Cox. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

 

Saba Malik 05.24.14

 

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Podcast: http://resistanceradioprn.podbean.com/e/resistance-radio-saba-malik-052514/

Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xfBXbQsj5bY

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Saba Malik. Saba Malik is is a board member of Fertile Ground Environmental Institute, a non-profit dedicated to political and environmental education. She is a mother of two and has been a feminist and anti-racist activist for most of her adult life.

Thank you so much for being on, Saba.

SM: Thank you very much for having me.

DJ: Today I was thinking that – it seems that there’s really four questions around which we’ll center the whole discussion. So I thought I would ask all four questions and after that we can take them piecemeal or however you want. The first question is “What is misogyny?” The second question is “What is ecocide?” The third question is “What is the relationship between those two?” And the fourth question is “What does all this have to do with the creation of gender, whatever that means?”

So can we start with “What is misogyny, what is ecocide, and what is the relationship between them?”

SM: Okay. Well, they’re great questions, and they’re big questions. So let’s start with misogyny. Misogyny, the word actually comes from the Greek miseó: , which means to hate (μισέω), and gyne, which means “woman,” and we’re talking about a cultural attitude of hatred for females because they are female. And this is an essential part of sexist prejudice and the ideology of rape culture. And so it’s an important basis for the oppression of females in male-dominated societies such as ours. And I would say today that most cultures worldwide are patriarchal or male-dominated. And misogyny is used to justify male supremacy.

So male supremacist cultures systematically extract resources, like labor, sexual gratification and reproduction from female people. And rape cultures are constructed around the breaking of women’s boundaries, physically and psychologically, through violation and extraction.

And if I quote some basic figures, if we talk about the fact that women are roughly half of the population and yet we are 70% of the world’s poor, we produce half the world’s food, yet we own only 1% of the world’s property. Women and girls represent 55% of the estimated 20.9 million victims of forced labor worldwide, and 98% of the estimated 4.5 million forced into sexual exploitation.

Upwards of one in four women in the U.S. currently is raped in her lifetime, and the rest of us live with the terror of it. So even these facts and figures are horrific, they don’t really fully describe the experience of being female in a male supremacist culture. Misogyny is manifested in so many different ways, from jokes, to pornography, to violence, to the contempt and disgust that women are routinely taught to feel towards our own bodies. Male supremacy means that male individuals are more likely to be able to attain positions of power and they’re more likely to have their basic needs met, and it means that the social systems of cultures like ours are set up to prevent women from collectively resisting the conditions they’re forced to endure, from the pay gap to abortion criminalization to sexual and domestic slavery, to foot binding and female genital mutilation. The institutions of male supremacy form the bars of the cage that restrains women from upsetting this hierarchy, and that is what I would say misogyny constitutes.

DJ: I know that this is in some ways kind of a trivial example, but I was thinking about this a couple of days ago, because I had to go from San Francisco for a meeting, and then I was stuck overnight because my flight got cancelled. And then the second night I’m staying there, I asked the guy at the hotel where I can get some food. And he said you gotta walk a mile south of the hotel and then walk down this street and there’ll be a restaurant. And it reminded me of a time on tour when I got into a town at like one in the morning, all my flights were late. I get into this town at one in the morning, I go to the hotel, and then they tell me that the nearest place that’s open for food at that time is a Denny’s that’s like a mile and a half down this long dark highway. And I start walking, and it’s about one thirty in the morning by now, and there’s a white van sitting in the middle of a parking lot. And I walk by, and I start thinking all these bad thoughts. And whenever I talk about this at a talk, I stop right there and say “Okay, at this point I’m a little bit nervous, but I kept walking. What would you women have done in this situation?”

And so many women in the audience say “Are you kidding? At 1:30 in the morning, walking down a deserted highway? We would never have left the room, much less walk through a parking lot with a van sitting there.” And I always think about that, in terms of it’s a real tangible example, and a really simple example of male privilege and how for me, going walking a mile and a half on a dark highway at one o’clock in the morning is slightly creepy or slightly scary, vs. for a woman it could actually be a matter of life and death.

SM: Exactly. And I’m sure that we’re both aware of, this is something that – is it Catharine MacKinnon? Or maybe it’s Robin Morgan – who calls that the democracy of fear for women. You can be a woman pretty much anywhere in the world at this point, walking down a dark street, and if you hear footsteps behind you, you have good reason to be afraid. That’s a really great example.

DJ: Yeah, that was Robin Morgan. So there’s misogyny, and you’ve done a great job of that. So do you want to move to ecocide or do you want to talk more about misogyny first?

SM: Let’s talk about ecocide. So ecocide is what it sounds like. It’s the killing of the ecological community, and it has a similar ideology, which is the ideology of progress, of human ownership of and domination over the earth. And it’s the myth of infinite growth on a finite planet. And the ideology of ecocide is regarded by industrialized people today as dogma. And it’s this ideology that is used by extractive cultures to justify the wholesale destruction of ecological communities, and, particularly, of the non-industrialized indigenous human cultures that depend on those communities. And that ideology of ecocide, that’s what fuels our food, and our wars. It requires rape culture, not only breaking the boundaries of women and girls. I’m now talking about the breaking of boundaries of nonhumans, and of people of color, of the land, the ocean, the air.

There are many ways in which ecocide and misogyny have connections. And I think that if we look from the very beginning of this culture, and when I say this culture I’m talking about civilized culture, what we call civilization today, which on this continent, when the first settlers arrived, from the first moment of colonization all the way up until today, indigenous women experienced significantly higher rates of male violence than the general population. And that’s still true today.

And the other thing that’s really important about this is the violation of ecocide and of misogyny. It’s really important. It’s not violation for its own sake, although that may be a factor. The question is always rooted in the service of resource extraction. So it’s making someone rich somewhere. Those members of a society have an ideology of hatred towards women. They’re less likely to resist or even notice as our bodies are systematically mined for labor or sexual or reproductive resources. And it’s the same with the land that we live on. If we are benefiting from the mass destruction of entire living communities because we have more conveniences in our life, like phones and televisions and big TV screens to placate us, then we’re not going to notice as the earth around us is systematically destroyed.

DJ: I keep thinking about one of my favorite lines from my book The Culture of Make Believe, which is “any hatred felt long enough no longer feels like hatred. It feels like religion, or economics, or science. It feels like the way things are.”

And I’m reading, right now, a mystery by Rex Stout, and it’s one of the Nero Wolfe books. And he’s a really good writer and there are some parts of the book I like, but I’m going to see if I can find this really quickly. It’s just a throwaway line that shows the hatred of women, which is, oh, I can’t find it. But basically it was, the main character, Archie Goodwin, is having this conversation with a woman over lunch, and she is increasingly annoying him, and he ends up – there’s a line where he thinks “I don’t know whether I want to slap her and then kiss her, or kiss her and then slap her.” And that’s pretty much it right there, isn’t it?

SM: That’s dead on. I was going to actually refer to your book, The Culture of Make Believe, because when I first read it that was a powerful part, that any hatred that is practiced long enough stops feeling like hatred. It just feels like the way things are. And I believed that you were talking about racism at the time specifically, but that’s so true for any kind of oppression or hatred that we experience in today’s culture.

DJ: I was just reading an article yesterday about these sea creatures, a type of jellyfish. First off the article called them “aliens,” which is really extraordinary. And then in addition – the thing that’s really extraordinary about these is the capacity of this type of jellyfish to regenerate, including regenerating neurons, regenerating brain matter. The subtext of all this is that what they’re doing is capturing these jellyfish and cutting them into bits. And then some types will regenerate and some won’t. And whenever I see something like that, I always think about how that article would be presented if they were space aliens who were catching humans and then cutting off their hands, cutting out parts of their brain matter to see if they would regenerate. And it always strikes me as – I mean, the article didn’t talk about how appalling it is that someone would capture these creatures who were minding their own business and then cut them up to see if they can regenerate.

SM: Nowadays, we can talk about ecocide because it’s in the service of humans, or humanity, and then that makes it okay. Because nonhumans are of course less equal than we are, apparently. And it’s that same mindset that says women are the Other, they’re less than men.

DJ: So tell me some more about the resource extraction that is at the base, or not at the base, but is so often involved – the relationship between hatred and resource extraction, because I don’t think that’s something that a lot of people will understand, or will be familiar with.

SM: It’s basically that this dominant culture is based on the extraction of resources, which economically benefits the powerful, and that’s true whether we’re speaking about economic gains, for example, for oil titans, so the extraction of oil from the earth. It’s true if we’re talking about the economic gains for sweatshop owners, or, I like to call them “slave traders.” Or, again, we can talk about the men who traffic in the bodies of women and girls and make a large amount of money through prostitution and pornography. All oppression has its base in resource extraction of some kind. Slavery was an excellent form of resource extraction. White people were able to, white men mainly, were able to extract the labor from black people who were kidnapped from Africa. They didn’t have to pay them.

And I want to say that it’s really important to remember that the way we live now is simply the predominant culture of our time. But it’s not the predominant culture of human history, as popular opinion often has us believe. More than 90% of our existence on this planet was spent in what I would call non-civilized cultures and I know you would agree with me. Homo sapiens reached, I think, anatomical modernity around 200 thousand years ago. But our most immediate ancestors, particularly Homo erectus, is currently set as arriving around 1.9 million years ago. So when we take that, when we think about the beginnings, the traceable beginnings of today’s culture, industrial civilization, that began with the emergence of agriculture and the starting point of that is only ten thousand years old. So geographically we’re talking about a blip in time.

Misogyny is like civilization. It’s anything but eternal and it does have traceable beginnings. That’s another connection. In fact, the traceable beginnings of both civilization and patriarchy as we know it today, they’re intimately intertwined. These two systems developed together and they’re dependent on one another. Civilized agricultural societies are patriarchal. But prior to those extractive social arrangements, a significant number of non-industrialized cultures were not rape cultures. Some of them even organized their spiritualities and worldviews to be – shock! – women-centered. God has not always been male.

For me this was made really clear in the 80’s when I first became politicized through feminism and I’d read a wonderful book by a historian and feminist by the name of Gerda Lerner. She wrote a book called The Creation of Patriarchy. And she says that patriarchy as we know it today is a historic creation, and it took 2500 years to form, as we know it today in its entirety, so it’s now very well established today. And it began – this is a direct quote from the book – she says “The sexuality of women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified with the advent of agriculture.” And the reason is, one of the reasons is the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period that started the intertribal exchange of women, one; as a means of avoiding incessant warfare, that was one reason, it was cementing marriage alliances. But also, and much more importantly, because societies with more women could produce more children. And of course, in agricultural societies, in contrast to the economic needs of say hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies need the labor of children, and need the labor of humans to increase production and to accumulate surpluses. So agriculture developed concurrently with the early commodification of female bodies, labor, and reproductive extraction.

DJ: That’s also interesting because agricultural societies, based as they are by definition on overshoot, and thus, by definition, on conquest, are based necessarily on infinite growth, as opposed to a non-agricultural society. So that would be another reason that an agricultural society would want to be having women as basically brood chambers, because they want to produce as many eventual warriors or slaves as possible.

SM: Absolutely.

DJ: Which would be inconsistent with a non-infinite growth culture.

SM: Of course. Yeah. It wouldn’t make sense. Before, when the earth was all common land, it’s not that human cultures didn’t assert territoriality. They did. Tribes were territorial, but misuse of any land meant that you’ve perished, or that you had to move on. It became apparent really quickly. We’ve been able to avoid that so far because we’ve had this kind of gift of free energy known as fossil fuel. I think one of the most significant traceable convergences between the development of patriarchy and the development of civilization is the advent of agriculture. Because it was the main means of sustaining the human population. And really, agriculture should be the focal point of any discussion of sustainability in the modern movement. So often nowadays it’s not. There are a few voices out there, in the wilderness, talking about it, but for the main part people don’t see it as the destructive feedback loop that it is.

DJ: Also, when you mentioned that patriarchy and agriculture really sort of moved hand in hand, developed hand in hand, the other thing that developed simultaneously with that was economic-based slavery. The first slaves that I know about were probably through either agriculture, because this was back-breaking work, and also mining, because nobody in their right mind wants to go underground and spend a life digging at rocks underneath the ground. So those are really the two geneses of that form of chattel slavery.

SM: I agree.

And time and again, when you look at anthropological evidence – in her book, Gerda Lerner shows that the emergence of agriculture led to widespread shifts in the ways of living, and relationship, to land and people. And the agricultural people were marked by increased warfare, increased poverty, increased destitution, an increase in sex inequality and the concentration of resources towards the few at the expense of the many. Does that sound familiar? That’s the way we are right now, in an extreme way.

In contrast, subsistence cultures or hunter-gatherer cultures or land-based cultures, if you like, are generally marked – not always, but generally were marked by low levels of sexual inequality, vastly lower levels of pollution and resource depletion, and much less warfare. Cultures that are willing to break the boundaries of the land in order to control and to extract are also willing to break the boundaries of women and girls in order to control and to extract. So, as we see the advent of agriculture take place, males, as a group, start to have rights over females, which females as a group did not have over males. The women themselves then become a resource. They become acquired by men much as the land was required by men. Women were exchanged, or they were bought in marriages for the benefit of their families. And then later they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were also part of their labor and where their children were the property of their owners or their masters. This still happens in so-called developing countries. I can speak about India and Pakistan because it’s where I hail from, and this is very much the norm, especially for the poor.

And, you know, in every known society, it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved. When a tribe would conquer another tribe, and with the advent of agriculture the men would be killed and the women would be kept because they could produce children. And it was only after men learned to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers that they then learned how to enslave men of those groups, and later, subordinates from within their own society.

So this enslavement of women, which combined both racism and sexism, this was a precursor to the formation of classes, and class oppression. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations.

DJ: I don’t understand what you just said. That last sentence.

SM: Class differences? When we talk about people as a class. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations.

DJ: Let’s back up, and tell people what a class difference is. Give some examples, and then show what you mean by it having started with patriarchy. What are some classes? Name some.

SM: Okay. So, as a radical, when we talk about classes of people we are talking about, for example, women as a class. And we are talking about people of color as a class. We are talking about poor people as a class, as opposed to rich people. And then women as a class as opposed to men as a class. What benefits do men have, for example, over women in our society? What benefits, what privileges do rich people have over poor people? What privileges do white people as a class have over people of color? That’s what I mean by “class.”

Gerda Lerner was the first writer who made me realize that class differences were, their beginnings started in what she called “genderic terms.” And the reason that she said that was because men learned to – its ultimate origins, “difference” as a distinguishing mark between the conquered and the conquerors, was based on the first clearly observable difference, and that was the difference between the sexes. Okay? And once men had learned how to assert and exercise power over people slightly different from themselves, in the exchange of women, they then acquired the knowledge necessary to elevate that “difference” of any kind into a criterion for dominance and subjugation. So then you have racism come along, subjugation of the Other. And it’s the same ideology that allows civilized humans to classify nonhumans, people of color and the earth itself as alien Others who are ripe for domination and exploitation.

Is that clearer?

DJ: Let’s try to be really clear. So basically what you’re saying is – let me know if this is right. That this model takes a difference, a real difference – whether we’re talking about women having perceptibly different body types, or people who are from Africa being generally darker skinned than those who were later enslaving them, who were lighter-skinned – am I right so far? A perceptible physical difference, right?

SM: Yes.

DJ: Okay, and it would be the same with – there is a perceptible difference between me and a prairie dog, or between me and a coho salmon, or between me and a willow tree, right? So we have a perceptible difference, and then… I’m thinking about what so many indigenous people have said to me about the primary difference between indigenous and western ways of being is that for many indigenous people the world consists not of resources to be exploited, but of other beings to enter into relationship with. And I’m thinking about something that, Richard Drinnon, I believe it was, said to me years and years ago when I was saying, y’know, indigenous people, they had enemies too. The Dakota and the Anishinaabe have a long history of not liking each other. So what’s the difference? And Richard Drinnon was saying that it’s not that you define another as inferior. They’re still – they’re others. Definitely, you, as a woman, are different from me in terms of physical – we can tell these discernible differences. But the problem is not noticing the differences, if I am correct. The problem isn’t noticing the differences. Of course I’m different from a coho salmon. But the problem is using that difference as an excuse to justify my feeling of superiority. Is that it?

SM: That’s absolutely correct.

DJ: Oh, I want to finish the thing with Richard Drinnon. What Richard Drinnon said is that in his perspective, a lot of indigenous people would have, a lot of indigenous names for who they are, their names simply mean “the people.” And he said that the others, just because they’re not “the people” doesn’t mean they’re inferior. What it means is, essentially they are the Other who completes me. I remember reading something about some Anishinaabe person saying that even though there was – even though they did not like the Dakota, they called the Dakota their “honored enemy.” And you could never conceive of committing genocide against them, because they are necessary for the universe to function too.

Is all this even vaguely where you’re going, too?

SM: That’s absolutely along the same lines of what I’m thinking. You’re explaining it, I think, much more clearly, a little bit more more simply, for people.

DJ: I’m not sure about that. I’m just trying to understand it. But thank you. So basically – I interrupted a long time ago. So basically you have this difference that you now use as a rationale for your self-perceived superiority, and then what happened? You’re saying that the gender difference is a model for what came later with others, right? Is that what you’re saying?

SM: Yeah. So first of all, the ultimate origin of difference, difference to be exploited as a distinguishing mark came as that clearly observable difference between women and men. And then once men – this is what Gerda Lerner says in her book. She says it’s pretty much, if you look at nearly every society that became an agricultural society or a civilized society, the same pattern followed. That once men had learned how to assert and exercise power over people slightly different from themselves, then they acquired the knowledge to elevate or extend that difference, difference of any kind into a reason or a criteria for dominance and subjugation of the Other.

So, I don’t know whether you, or we, can begin to see how misogyny and ecocide are connected. Because for a start, they developed concurrently, and in many ways they’re dependent on each other. Agriculture depended on the extraction of labor from women and on the extraction of children from female bodies to grow the labor force.

DJ: And also on the extraction of labor from nonhuman slaves, such as oxen to pull your plow.

SM: Exactly. I was just about to come to that. So they also used the extraction of labor from nonhumans to till the soil, which is, of course the tillage of soil means the destruction of the soil, so we can’t ignore that parallel between agriculture, which is the extraction of soil from the land, and it’s fueled by the extraction of human labor from females. It’s this horrible feedback loop.

DJ: And where it comes back to resources is; agriculture is the conversion of the land specifically towards human use, and what you’re saying, if I’m understanding you correctly, is that it’s the conversion, that patriarchy is the conversion of a woman, who has her own uses and her own, I mean her own uses for herself, and her own desires and her own beingness; it’s the conversion of a woman who has her own being, into a commodity to be used by men. And so that the connection is turning the ocean into a place that exists solely for use by humans, a mountain into a place that solely exists for use by humans, and turning Africans into a population that is to be used for white people, and turning women into a population that’s to be used by men. Is this what you’re saying?

SM: It’s absolutely the same ideology. If we get back to – I just want to back up a bit. So the first gender-defined social role for women in civilized agricultural societies was to be people who were exchanged into marriage transactions, okay? In marriage transactions. And so the obverse gender role for men was to be those who did the exchanging. More importantly, actually, as those who defined the terms of the exchange. And another gender-defined role for women, around that same time, was that of what was known then as the stand-in wife. That then becomes established and institutionalized for women of elite groups. That becomes more of an elite role. And later, that role is sanctified by religion and it comes to be a position that women aspire to, as many still do today. And this role, the one of wife, it gave those women considerable power and privileges, but of course that power and privilege depended largely, or completely, on their attachment to elite men. And so it was based in some part on their satisfactory performance in rendering to those elite men sexual and reproductive services.

DJ: You know what this makes me think of? Henry the VIII.

SM: Right? Yeah. Absolutely. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was unable to give him a son, and it’s the reason that England removed itself, or King Henry VIII decided that England would no longer be a Catholic country, and he created a new religion called the Church of England, just so he could divorce his first wife, so that he could marry again, to be able to have a son with another woman. And when she was not able either to give him a son, he then cut off her head, and he married a third woman. He just went on and on.

DJ: She was supposed to produce and she didn’t.

SM: Yeah, she didn’t. And so he found a reason to execute her. He then moved on to the third wife, Jane Seymour, who did give him a son but as a result died shortly after childbirth, was unable to survive the pregnancy, and so he married a fourth time, and this time, this was much more of a business marriage. Anne of Cleves was from the German nobility, and when she arrived, because she was, in King Henry VIII’s estimation “ugly as a horse” were the words that are used in history, how he described her; he – because he couldn’t kill her, because she was from a powerful family, what he did was he made her his sister, and divorced her, and then he married Catherine Howard, who was 18 years old at the time he married her. And she couldn’t give him any children, so he executed her, and finally married Catherine Parr, whom he was also thinking of executing but he died before he could do that. Yes, it’s a great example. It’s a terrifying example, when you think about it, when you talk about what he actually did.

DJ: And it all comes back to production.

SM: Yeah, it all comes down to reproduction. He wanted a son, to carry on his name.

And so if we back up to what I was saying, if you don’t mind, if we go back to what I was talking about as the gender-defined roles when they first started, that what we observe is that from the beginning, from its beginning in slavery, class dominance of any kind, it took different forms for enslaved men and women. Men eventually, when they weren’t killed, they were primarily exploited as workers, whereas women were always exploited as workers but in addition they became providers of sexual services and reproducers. And, you know, Gerda Lerner, in her work she shows very thoroughly that the historical record of every slave society offers evidence for this same pattern. And so the sexual exploitation of, especially, low-class women by upper class men, that can be shown throughout civilized history until the modern day. Under feudalism, in bourgeois households of 19th and 20th century Europe, in the sex/race relations between women of colonized countries and their male colonizers, it’s ubiquitous and it’s pervasive.

So, for women, sexual exploitation is what I would call the mark of class exploitation. And this, the class position of women becomes consolidated and actualized through their sexual relationships with men. And it’s always expressed within degrees of limited freedom. It ranges on the spectrum from the slave woman, who obviously has no rights, and whose sexual and reproductive capacity is commodified, as she herself is. Then we go to the slave concubine, whose sexual performance might elevate her own status, or that of her children, and then the so-called “free” wife, whose sexual and reproductive services to one man of the elite classes entitles her to property and legal rights. But that’s obtained only through her relationship to her husband.

And so, while each of these groups have vastly different obligations and privileges in regard to property, law, economic resources; they still share the limitation of being sexually and reproductively controlled by men. And this specific exploitation happens to females because they are female. And you know the interesting thing is that class, for men, was, and still is, based on their relationship to the means of production, and that’s another connection. So those who owned the means of production could dominate those who didn’t. So the owners of the means of production also acquired the commodity of female sexual services, both from women of their own class and from women of subordinate classes, and they also get to extract and exploit the land, at the same time.

DJ: So we have about four or five minutes left. So can you do like a two minute introduction to the fourth question we talked about, and you talked about this, but what do you mean by the creation of gender? Can you do that in two minutes?

SM: (laughing) That’s a very difficult thing to do in two minutes. My point in relating this history of how we moved from subsistence cultures into agricultural cultures was to show how men and women’s roles significantly changed. And so women become, in agricultural societies, and with the advent of agriculture and what we call civilization, their gender role became one of a person who is used for their sexual services and for their reproductive services, and are at the behest of men to be exchanged and bought and traded and sold off and owned. Whether it’s by their fathers or their brothers or their husbands or their masters, or their owners.

And, you know, conversely, men have the role of being the ones that define the terms of those exchanges. And whether they were rich or poor, men always had more rights than women, because they could not be sold by, at least by a woman. They could not be sold by a woman. They could be sold by a man who was in authority over them. But they would not be sold by a woman. If they were sold by a woman who was their master’s wife, that was because that was what the master wanted. And that was my point in saying whether women of elite classes who were married to elite men – of course they had more privileges in regard to property, law, and all of that. But, you know, they had those because of their relationship with an elite man. It wasn’t because of themselves.

DJ: So maybe what we should do is hold off on the whole creation of gender. I’ll have you back on another time, and then we can do a short version, or reintroduction, so we can move to that. In the one or two minutes left, can you say what you want people to do with the information you’ve given them today? Somebody’s listening to this interview, what do you want them to do with this information?

SM: Well, I think that one of the really important things is we have to understand that the dominant culture is not only hierarchical, but it’s also patriarchal. And it’s not only anthropocentric, but it’s male-centric. And that the social origins of the current ecological catastrophe that we find ourselves in, they can’t be overlooked. And unless we make those connections, that the subjugation of the earth and the subjugation of females as a class can’t be disentangled from one another, we won’t be successful in fighting the systems that are currently killing the planet. And that’s why militarism is a feminist issue. It’s why rape is an environmental issue. It’s why environmental destruction is an anti-racist issue.

And making that connection is really really important. I don’t want to downplay the importance of it. But it’s not enough. We need organization. We need strategy. We need to materially, physically halt the extraction of resources from female bodies and grant women the right to a future that’s free of exploitation in the same way that we need to physically halt the extraction of resources from the earth, especially fossil fuels, if we want there to be a future at all.

And, just in conclusion, I’ll say that the last, and the most important parallel between misogyny and ecocide is that they both can and must be fought, and resisted.

DJ: Well thank you so much for saying all that. And thank you for being on the show. And I would also like to thank the listeners for listening. My guest today has been Saba Malik. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio, on the Progressive Radio Network.