If you want to become better at joining the dots... read this

I've since come to understand the reason why school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure...

I'm not saying by all this that Mrs. Calloway, my first grade teacher, was trying to murder the souls of her tiny charges, any more than I have been trying to say that individual scientists are necessarily hell-bent on destroying the planet or that individual Christians necessarily hate women and hate their bodies.

Derrick Jensen argues that the dominant culture's processes are psychopathic and destructive and that this destruction is often rendered invisible, or seen as "normal". The culture rapes and exploits because Darwin (and later Richard Dawkins' selfish genes) tells us this is what dominant cultures do. But Jensen reminds us that bears do not dam rivers and kill all the salmon, nor do they harvest all the berries until there are no more left. They understand that if their food supplies are healthy so are they. Thus they don't bred beyond the land's capacity. This model is what Herman Daly calls steady-state economics. The dominant culture's selfish genes destroys traditional communities in order for civilisation to expand. For those who survive, assimilation is absolutely necessary so as we no longer witness how these communities had got it so right for so long. And this is why it's so important not to use words like abuse, genocide or destruction when it comes to teaching our children about what we have done to traditional communities and ecologies. Instead destruction and violence must be rationalised to appear virtuous and reasonable – the characteristics of a psychopath.

"We're here to liberate the people of Iraq and spread democracy".

Jensen illustrates that the dominant culture's unwellness is due to its disembodied state, devoid of feeling, devoid of the visceral, creative and spiritual dimensions of life. At a systems level school traumatises us, the trauma is normalised over thirteen years, and we become competitive, destructive capitalists ready for work. Jensen argues we were not born this way. Modern schooling came with industrialisation, developed simply as a way to sever the body from the head, a necessary performance in the manufacturing of the modern wage-slave. 

We constrain children spatially, we give them highly processed, out-of season food and when they fly off the walls we label them with disorders such as ADHD. Our culture is pathological and cruel, however by investing in Descartian science or in a Descartian God we can avoid admitting we are truly unwell peoples. 

In A Language Older than Words, Jensen is mapping out a comprehensive third option.

Open wound, closed-mind

This time last week I had just opened up my knee up with my trusty old Husqvarna 394. In the meantime, as you might of gathered, I've been reading Derrick Jensen's brilliant critique of René Descartes' "I think, I am". Are we to assume by this maxim that Descartes, a hero of modern science and philosophy, didn't experience bodily pain?

"René, my friend, don't you feel anything?" asks Jensen.

This is what my wound looks like today.

I used to believe that Descartes' most famous statement was arbitrary. Why hadn't he said, "I love, therefore I am," or "I breathe, therefore I have lungs," or "I defecate, therefore I must have eaten," or "I feel the weight of the quill on my fingers therefore I rejoice in the fact that I am alive, therefore I must be"... I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body. Estranged from all of life, Descartes thought that everything was a dream, and he the dreamer.

Does Descartes' ever-expanding dream explain why companies like Monsanto dump millions of tonnes of poisons into the world's environments and strut about as though they have delivered the world a gift? Does it explain why animals are often the subjects of our abuse, or why all the ecosystems our culture comes into contact with are unwell? Does it explain why Aboriginal peoples are still largely treated with contempt or simply silenced and ignored? When we dream, Jensen is suggesting, the bombing of innocent civilians, the rape of women, the beatings of children, the genocide of indigenous people, the stealing of another's resource, the polluting of the atmosphere are all made very possible. 

I am, I think, I deny (Ian Plimer)

Clive Hamilton, in his feature, "Nature will deal with skeptics", critiques climate change denier, professor Ian Plimer's monological world-view. Hamilton describes Plimer's "reason" as coming from one whose ego has been bruised by a new era of ecologically embedded science. 

Read his article here.

While permacultural and biodynamic science are making inroads into modern existence methods (by recalling ancient methods), tech-driven science persists with its make-believe: we can invent our way out of ecological crisis with more product and more technology. The former system understands ecology and promotes steady-state economics, the latter persists with aggregate-growth economics and thus relies on continued resource wars.

Cuts, Descartes and compost

I put a chainsaw into my leg this morning because I am enjoying Derrick Jensen's A Language Older Than Words so much I wanted to get off working to read more. It's true. Well partially true, I did put a chainsaw into my knee this morning, and I did get to read more of Jensen's brilliant book in all the waiting rooms I sat in.


I talked to the physician as he stitched 6 internal and 10 elegant black knots across my knee, finding out about his most difficult jobs – the violent attacks by bottle cut drunks, the vomit he's endured while being on duty, the guy who bit half through his own tongue – it took three hours to stitch, he told me, with perspiration beading along his forehead.

After he cleaned up he left me to wait for the nurse to come and jab me a tetnis shot. While I waited Jensen was in full swing critiquing René Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' maxim, arguing Descartes as the father of the disembodied; the father of aggression against sentient non-human nature. 

Because life is uncertain, and because we die, the only way Descartes could gain the certainty he sought was in the world of abstraction. By substituting the illusion of disembodied thought for experience (disembodied thought, of course, not possible for anyone with a body), by substituting mathematical equations for living relations, and most importantly by substituting control, or the attempt to control, for the full participation in the wild and unpredictable process of living, Descartes became the prototypical modern man. He also established the single most important rule of Western philosophy: if it doesn't fit the model, it doesn't exist...Welcome to industrial civilization. Jensen p10.

Swine flu is just another recent event that shows Descartes' philosophy, like its counterpart Christian-capitalism, to be so utterly misguided. But, this is supposed to be a week of compost related posts. 

Change and flexibility, though not in my left knee right now, are also constant subjects for any garden. Blood and bone is, of course, also required material for any healthy garden, and equally good for a compost. When a chook of ours dies or I have to kill one because she is not well, I bury her in the compost respectfully. Her body feeds the brew, drawing greater diversity of microbial life to the heap. When I die I want to be composted aerobically, I couldn't think of a better way to spend my death but sequestering carbon for future life. Speaking of which, here's a pic of Zeph gleaning old grass clippings for compost along a public laneway close to home.