This essay starts with a personal story, and proceeds into something I have learned over my life.
I grew up post- World War II with the sense that our country was progressing in a continuous movement toward better things. This view was and mostly still is embedded in the culture that surrounds us, entering our minds as easily as breathing brings air into our lungs.
When the New York World’s Fair was held over about a half year in 1964, I was living in New York State and visited the Fair three times. I was dazzled by the international tents and the shiny products displayed. However, there’s been little realization of the specific promises laid out there. We have had remarkable new technologies of space travel and the Internet along with personal computers.
I was an opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1969 the results of a poll were released showing that 50% of the respondents either didn’t know the war was still going on or didn’t care. I realized this was an indicator of a very dysfunctional society, and I set out to understand why. It led to a lifelong search for what is wrong with our culture. I came to the realization that the concept of Progress is phony, if people don’t feel good about themselves or their culture.
Philosophers and students of myth say that a culture or a civilization begins with and depends on the common stories that people tell themselves and others around them. What is the story behind Western Civilization? (When I use the term “Western Civilization”, I mean the 2000-year-old European-based civilization that evolved from Roman culture after Constantine. I don’t know enough about the Greek and Roman civilizations to make a judgment.) I claim that the story is expansion and possessiveness, leading our citizens in a mysterious collective vision to continuously extend our influence over the world.
I’m surprised that in my reading various historians, philosophers and mythologists I’ve never seen any of them acknowledge the above, except one. In his book The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley comments that our Western Civilization was originally based on converting everyone in Europe to Christianity, with attendant wars and crusades.1Apparently even scholars assume that expansion and possessiveness is natural and to be expected. This behavior is not natural to humanity, because indigenous people around the world have different values.
When the European ships went out to the Western Hemisphere, they established colonies on all the eastern shores of North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Over the centuries, their descendants occupied more and more lands, moving west and also starting on the west coasts after ships started sailing around Cape Horn.
In the land that became the United States, there was a deliberate pattern to settlement. First the Army moved the Indigenous people onto reservations. Then wealthy Easterners invested in the railroads to take new settlers west, with villages at designated places along the tracks. New States were established to join the Union. Gradually new local and regional economies were established, with some Federal money as an aid. There was a long period of time when children of the Indigenous people were forced to go to special schools, where they were taught to adopt Christianity and the materialist values that were becoming predominant in our culture.
The possessiveness of the people infused with Western Civilization in the United States is rather horrifying if you examine it from outside. It’s not remarked on enough in our discourse. The following are examples – you could probably add others. African slaves brought in to every colony in all the Americas since the beginning of settlement. Chinese brought to the West Coast to build the railroads and then not considered citizens. African-American freedom from slavery followed by Jim Crow. Houses in Suburban areas built on land that used to have value as farmland. Trees arbitrarily cut down. Corporations dedicated to the wealth of upper management while their workers are subject to performance standards and low wages. History courses talk about reforms of labor practices but law is one thing and what employers impose is another.
The corporations are too big to control. They are based on expanding their activities, using more and more of the world’s resources. No wonder we can’t bring down our carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. We’re caught in a machine that keeps ramping up, to the pleasure of the politicians.
We should change the story, if we can. Ecologists predict that the natural resources that support humanity are running out of their capability. Many ecologists are saying that the correct story, taken from baseball, is that “Nature Bats Last.”
1Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper and Row, 1970, page 242.
Coyote Vision 