Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist whose assessment of Western civilization or the dominant world system mirrors my own.

His message and passion matches the urgency of the predicament we find ourselves in.

Jensen’s ideas are considered radical, but that is precisely the type of action we need at this stage of impending civilizational and biospheric collapse.

A look at Dictionary.com’s definition of civilization.

Word Story
Civilization  entered the English language in the mid-18th century with the meaning “the act or process of bringing out of a savage or uneducated state.” In this preimperialistic age of exploration, it was popular to view people from less-developed lands as barbaric and in great need of cultural edification. As political scientist and historian Anthony Pagden wrote in a 1988 paper, 18th-century social theory held that a civilization was “the optimum condition for all mankind.”

He continued that “only the civilized can know what it is to be civilized,” pointing out the implicit elitism of this concept. As imperialism boomed in the 19th century, this meaning of civilization  gained popularity, but today it is considered narrow-minded, except when used in a historical context.
Once a nation, culture, or group of people has been brought out of the “savage” darkness into an enlightened and advanced state, it becomes a civilization.

The word civilization has come to connote or mean a superior cultural state of being. Those who consider themselves civilized presume superiority to those considered "uncivilized".  And nobody considers themselves more civilized than Western Europeans. At this point in the evolution of human culture, the Western version of civilization has by sheer brute force, overrun all other cultural modes of being.

According to Western standards the world is now largely civilized. So that means that the world should now find itself in a better state due to the civilizing efforts of Western Europeans. That is if you consider the following conditions to exemplify "cultural edification".

Those who define civilization fail to include the following characteristics in their dictionary and text-book definitions.

The Western European Model of civilization is largely characterized by...

• Imperialistic aggression euphemized as colonialism and now neocolonialism.
• Parasitically designed economic system that leads to the social imbalances seen everywhere.
• Economically incentivized militarism masked as humanitarian wars and wars against whatever.
• Political charades that give the illusion of democracy.
• Predatory and parasitic social policy in which the politically and economically disempowered are ruthlessly exploited by those who control the law making-enforcement aspects of civilization.
• Imperialistic worldview which presumes that their worldview should prevail over all other worldviews. (Judeo-Christianism overlaid with psuedo-democratic secularism)
• Indifference to environmental impact of cultural practices.
• Blind economic growth and profit polices at any and all costs.
• Gender Imbalance that presumes the inferiority of feminine values.

The foregoing aspects of “high culture” are for some reason not included in formal definitions of Western styled civilization.

Imperial civilization is the precise term for the type of civilization that has overrun the world and Derrick Jensen’s 20 premises elaborate on the defining characteristics of Western European styled civilization. Militarized cultures would be synonymous with imperial civilizations.

My own assessments concur with Jensen’s 20 premises except two, The first or premise Ten states that the culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise 10 is a great over generalization of imperial civilization’s members. Encultured and/or inherited psycho-sociopathlogy affects anywhere from 1 to 6 percent of the general population. Those with the most serious anti-social/other traits are in the minority, yet imperial civilizations are largely defined by their psycho-sociopathological behaviors.

We must bear in mind that imperial civilizations are composed of militaristic cultures. Meaning that the “greatest” warriors become kings and all the kings men.  That is the most savage, ruthless (read least empathic) and power hungry members of a given culture become its leaders.

The offspring of the warrior kings and their men fill the positions of leadership as the empire grows.(inherited psycho-sociopathology) Military cultures are the bedrock of Western civilization starting with Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, German-Francs, Spanish-Portugues, Moors-Turks, English and now ending with Europe-America (NATO).

In other words our ruling classes are descended from the most savage, ruthless and avaricious among us.

The savage and ruthless are now known as psycho-sociopaths aka the ruling classes. The ruling classes then sponsor, dictate, write and enforce the laws and social policies that drive and define Western culture/civilization. They take the public’s resources in the form of taxes and they create their world.  Bear in mind that over 50 percent of the US government’s budget goes to militarism.

The remainder of the population is encultured or brainwashed to believe a narrative that says… government is all knowing, benevolent and always looking out for your interests. For a sobering look at the ruling classes’ system of enculturation please have a look at The Matrix Reloaded Again and Now Demetaphoralized.

The other premise that I find to be overstated, over generalized and imprecise is premise 14. But a thorough reconsideration of premise 14 would be too lengthy for the purposes of this article, so I will write about premise 14 in another article.

The source and nature of our collective problems are well defined. The better defined a problem, the better the defined the solution. Now what?  What comes after imperial civilization? That will be the subject of a near future article entitled.  What is a Planetary Culture and Who is a Planetary Citizen?

Before we get into Jensen’s 20 premises here is a little more about Derrick Jensen from wikipedia.

[Wikipedia Excerpt]
Jensen’s work is sometimes characterized as anarcho-primitivist,[4][5] although he has categorically rejected that label, describing primitivist as a “racist way to describe indigenous peoples”. He prefers to be called “indigenist” or an “ally to the indigenous,” because “indigenous peoples have had the only sustainable human social organizations, and… we need to recognize that we [colonizers] are all living on stolen land.”[6]

Jensen sees civilization[7] to be inherently unsustainable and based on violence. He argues that the modern industrial economy is fundamentally at odds with healthy relationships, the natural environment, and indigenous peoples.

He concludes that the very pervasiveness of these behaviors indicates that they are diagnostic symptoms of the greater problem of civilization itself. Accordingly, he exhorts readers and audiences to help bring an end to industrial civilization.

In A Language Older Than Words and also in an article entitled “Actions Speak Louder Than Words”, Jensen states “Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I’m not sure that’s right”.

Jensen proposes that a different, harmonious way of life is possible, and that it can be seen in many societies including many Native American or other indigenous cultures. He claims that many indigenous peoples perceive a primary difference between Western and indigenous perspectives: even the most progressive

Westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world works. Furthermore, these indigenous peoples understand the world as consisting of other beings with whom we can enter into relationship; this stands in contrast to the Western belief that the world consists of objects or resources to be exploited or used.

Writings

Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing modern civilization and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame.

A Language Older Than Words uses the lens of domestic violence to look at the larger violence of western culture. The Culture of Make Believe begins by exploring racism and misogyny and moves to examine how this culture’s economic system leads inevitably to hatred and atrocity. Strangely Like War is about deforestation. Walking on Water is about education (It begins: “As is true for most people I know, I’ve always loved learning.

As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?”).[9] Welcome to the Machine is about surveillance, and more broadly about science and what he perceives to be a Western obsession with control.

Endgame is about what he describes as the inherent unsustainability of civilization. In this book he asks: “Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” Nearly everyone he talks to says no.

His next question is: “How would this understanding — that this culture will not voluntarily stop destroying the natural world, eliminating indigenous cultures, exploiting the poor, and killing those who resist — shift our strategy and tactics? The answer? Nobody knows, because we never talk about it: we’re too busy pretending the culture will undergo a magical transformation.” Endgame, he says, is “about that shift in strategy, and in tactics.”[10]

Resistance Against Empire consists of interviews with J. W. Smith (on poverty), Kevin Bales (on slavery), Anuradha Mittal (on hunger), Juliet Schor (‘globalization’ and environmental degradation), Ramsey Clark (on US ‘defense’), Stephen Schwartz (editor of The Nonproliferation Review, on nukes), Alfred McCoy (politics and heroin), Christian Parenti (the US prison system), Katherine Albrecht (on RFID), and Robert McChesney (on (freedom of) the media) conducted between 1999 and 2004.

Documentaries

Jensen was featured in the documentaries What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire (2007), Blind Spot (2008), First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture (2009), Call of Life (2010) and END:CIV (2011).

Awards and acclaim

• 2008: Named a “visionary” as one of Utne Reader magazine’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.”^[12]
• 2008: Grand Prize winner, Eric Hoffer Book Award for Thought to Exist in the Wild, Derrick Jensen, Photographs by Karen Tweedy-Holmes.^[13]
• 2006: Named “Person of the Year” by Press Action for the publication of Endgame.^[14]
• 2003: The Culture of Make Believe was one of two finalists for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.^[15]
• 2000: Hackensack, NJ, Record declared A Language Older Than Words its best book of the year.
• 2000: Language was nominated for Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Vision Award.
• 1998: Second Prize in the category of small budget non-profit advertisements, as determined by the Inland Northwest Ad Federation, for the first ad in the “National Forests: Your land, your choice” series.
• 1995: Critics’ Choice for one of America’s ten best nature books of 1995, for Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros.^[2]

 

Derrick Jensen’s 20 Premises on Civilization as we know it.

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash.

Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default.

Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world.

Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows.

t means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

 

What would you add, modify or delete? Your comments please!

Related Posts:

• STATE OF THE WORLD REPORT 1st Qtr 2012: World on The Brink of The ENDGAME?
• SOLAR MAX 2012: Imperialist Civilization Has Run Its Course. The Birth of a Planetary Culture is Upon Us.
• Global Transition Report #3: From OccupyWallSt to Occupy Earth 2012 – The 5th Alarm is Here
• World Macro-Trends Report for August 2011: The 5th Alarm Approaches
• The Matrix Unmasked: The Matrix Movie is a Symbolic Masking of the Human Condition.
• A Citizens Assembly: From Occupy Movement to a Permanent Political Force
• Chris Hedges and the Occupy Movement Put Govcorp on Notice !
• GLOBAL CRISIS BRIEF: Some Silver Linings and The Osama Bin Laden Caper
• THE GREAT OCCUPY MOVEMENT: The Intensifying Apocalypse And Your Two Choices
• The World Economic and Geo-Political Game Plan Unveiled