Recovering From Western Civilization

Chellis Glendinning (her friends call her Che) is a psychologist, political activist, and writer. Her books include: Off the Map: An Expedition Deep Into Empire and the Global Economy, which won the National Federation of Press Women 2000 Book Award for General Non-Fiction; My Name Is Chellis and I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization; When Technology Wounds: The Human Costs of Progress, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1991; and Waking Up in the Nuclear Age. She has also written for all kinds of newspapers and magazines and journals. Chellis lives in Chimayó, New Mexico, and is currently working on a book about the illicit heroin trade that’s called Chiva: the Ups and Downs of a Heroin Village.

The first half of this interview appeared in the previous issue of Green Anarchy – Fall 2003 (#14) and focused mainly on her life, the work she is involved with in her community, and the direction of her current writing.


GA: The most intense aspects of your work connect the traumatic experiences of surviving within modern civilization. Could you briefly discuss how the complex web of trauma, addiction, abuse, and dysfunction on a personal level is entwined with ecological destruction?


Che: Trauma, addiction, abuse and dysfunction are being experienced on a personal level. In other words, each person that is harmed in some deep, cracking-open kind of way, is saddled with that experience, that struggle. And the means to healing that person is through that person. However, after a lifetime of exploring the relationship between the personal and the collective, I’ve truly come to see our personal struggles as reflections of the basic dynamics of the entire society. So that when a client comes to me and says, "My son is breaking up his marriage, and he’s an alcoholic, and he’s very aggressive when he’s drinking, and no wonder his wife is leaving, and he’s hitting bottom financially, and as his mother I’m so distraught, and I’ve come all this way, and now I’m saddled with this, why me?" And whereas I feel for this sudden intrusion of a terrible situation that she will have to grapple with, there’s a way in which "why me?" — while it’s certainly how she feels — I can immediately see that there is no "why me?". I see it as a huge kind of snowball that’s just rolling along, and it’s made me really reflect on the basic nature of the human psyche. I believe that our psyches were created as mirrors of the environment around us, to help us be participants of the whole of the natural world. So if we grow up in, say, a land-based tribal community, our psyches are made to reflect, for instance, the seasons. Our psyches are made to reflect the wholeness of the environment, the completeness, the way in which we are not separated from it. The dark and the light, the unceasing parade of natural phenomena. The family. The connection to not just the animals and the seasons and the plants, but also the human family. And so what’s happened as that relationship, that basic split between human and nature, and all the other splits, have come to be — some believe as far back as paleolithic times, others go back to the neolith, others go back to just the industrial revolution — but as that split has become manifest in our human community, so it has become manifest in the human psyche.

So what if we are to go along with the work of Kirkpatrick Sale in a book that he’s writing right now, in which he says that the split began when humans stopped being scavengers and began active hunting. And that split then separated us from the great round, from the sacred hoop, demanding that we begin to make rituals to try to mend that hoop. If you follow Kirkpatrick’s line of thinking, that’s what the beginnings of ceremonial life are all about, the effort to heal that split we made by beginning active hunting. If you look at it from a psychological perspective, it’s the beginning of subject/object. Because of the profound identification that we have with animals, with other live creatures that are like ourselves, in order to kill one, we have to objectify, we have to distance ourselves. And indeed, one of the main qualities of a traumatic experience is the dissociation, the parceling off of different aspects of our psyche that previously were kind of elliptical or like a mobius strip inside of us, where everything is connected and there are no divisions; suddenly we would have to make that division in order to cage off, to corral off, the feeling of horror and grief that takes place when we engage in the act of killing.

John Zerzan speaks of a similar event or development in paleolithic times, when people began division of labor. And again, it requires a split. Division of labor comes to require a whole different way of thinking, whereas before, pretty much anybody could do almost anything to survive in the group. There is a split that takes place, a separation, whereas now these people do this and those people do that, and some people can sing, and some people can go in the spirit world, and others are to hunt, and others are to take care of the children, and that act is not sudden, but it gets rolling, and eventually there become these major divided arenas existing in the human psyche, so that in today’s world, not only does trauma create those splits in our psyches, but those splits in our psyches make us candidates for perpetrating trauma. So you ask about the web of trauma, addiction, abuse and dysfunction on a personal level and its relationship with ecological destruction. That kind of a split, it’s really the ultimate in us and them, is the human/nature split. Many writers have explored the relationship between the personal and the political in this arena, and Susan Griffin is one of the writers who I think has explored it most powerfully, particularly in her book Woman and Nature. The reflection between themes of, for instance, discrimination or violence against women, against animals, and against the ecology, the basic ecology of our existence.

So, when a client comes to me and says, "I’m bereft because my son is a raging alcoholic and is in bankruptcy and his marriage is splitting up, and we all now have to take this on," and then concludes "poor me," that "poor me" is that kind of throwing your hands up — and I’m speaking very compassionately of this — you know, it’s throwing your hands up and saying, "My god, what situations we have to deal with in our lives." But I would almost at this point say about this moment of grief and shock that it’s more accurate to say, "poor us."


GA: What is the role of technology in this process of alienation and degradation of life?


Che: You know, maybe it’s a testimony to the essential wholeness of the human psyche that it’s difficult to answer questions like this. Maybe in a way that wholeness still very much exists. Because it is hard to pick apart one thread or one aspect of this whole dysfunction that’s going on. You know, here’s Kirkpatrick and he comes along and he points to the contribution of active hunting. And here’s Zerzan, and he comes along, and he points out the contribution of division of labor. And it’s all kind of a whole clock, you know, it’s all of a piece. But then, the parts of our mind that have been separated off, and the kind of language that has emerged from that separation, it does make it possible for us to begin to grapple with a fatal aspect of the whole, which in this case is technology.

I see technology not as the manifestation of scientific discoveries that were meant to be discovered, that we then call "progress." I see technology and those kind of discoveries as existing in the context of a certain mindset. And this mindset that produced the kinds of technologies that we have today is a mindset of separation, of being split off from the natural world. And in fact, the great discoveries of modern Western science have been about picking things apart, right down to picking apart atoms or picking apart genetic material, picking apart the body, picking apart everything in sight. And another theme of Western science, and therefore the technologies that spring from it and manifest it, is the theme of universalization, the sense that everything on this planet is of a piece, and can be picked apart universally, and maybe on some level that’s true — earth, water, air, fire. But the thought doesn’t translate socially or culturally, because every culture, every grouping of human beings and the physical ways as well as the thought-form ways that they have evolved to survive on this planet are unique. Certainly there are archetypal forms like the group and the family and the male and the female, but each culture is very individual and springs from the particular ecology of the place where it exists. And so, the universalization is a kind of a basic thought of the beginning of empire — to spread out, to "make it all mine," to make it all the same. These are the times we’re living in. We’re living in the end stage of imperialism, when the entire world is now being held together and exploited, used, by the technologies that are holding it all together. So obviously in a situation like that, a rake and a straw just doesn’t cut it. An arrowhead doesn’t cut it. You need technologies that express and manifest that view. And therefore, as Gerry Mander was quick to point out back in the 1970s, technologies are political. So that you need computers that can link people up instantaneously around the world. You need travel that can move people very quickly around the world. You need satellites, you need technologies that can look down and determine where everything is, whether it’s where stores of coal are, or it’s where people who are disgruntled and are rebelling are.

So the kinds of technologies that are taking a hold of our lives today are the technologies of the end stage of imperialism, the end stage of that manifestation of universalism in science. And these technologies are very destructive, because in order to mow over all of those sustainable, very unique cultures that evolved as the human way of surviving on this planet, you need technologies of war so that you can take that basic quality of splitting which I’ve been talking about that possibly dates back to the paleolith, and apply it on the most minute or the most grand levels — for instance, to split the atom, to create a technology that can destroy huge portions of the planet.


GA: How does the system recuperate and use dysfunction and alienation to perpetuate itself?


Che: When I think about this question, I think about the ways in which the system is ever-dedicated to alienation and universalism and degradation and abuse. Trauma, how does it use the resulting qualities in the human psyche, which are dysfunction and alienation, to perpetuate itself? Thus we are very, very needy. The natural stages of development to go from being a newborn into being a mature human being — and I will refer to Erik Erikson’s work here, are not being answered in the society that we live in. The first stage of human development, that the human psyche naturally is drawn to answering in itself so that it can go on to the next stages of development, is the sense of belonging, the sense of security. And here you are born not into a chanting, natural birth in nature, but you are born into a sterile room and brought out and slapped, and perhaps you’re even brought out of your mother’s body using drugs and metal forceps to pull you out. And you come into a family that in many, many cases is a family that is experiencing insecurity, uncertainty, perhaps some manifestation of the dysfunction in the form of alienation or abuse, and that need to come into being held and being welcomed, and feeling the connection between mother’s breast and the river running by is not answered. And there is not a sense of security. There is not a sense of belonging coming into this world. And then your psyche, in time, naturally moves on to the next stage, which is a series of stages that have to do with developing one’s sense of will and individuation, but you’re not standing on solid ground. So you can’t move into those stages as a full human being, as we were meant to, And then on top of that, whatever traumas and violence and discriminations that you experience in this society based on who you are and what particular realm of it you are born into. We become very needy. And then here comes the media, and here comes the mall, and here comes the military, and they are offering images that somehow replace real experiences that we should be having, and they are offering up the lunge toward artifacts and things that we can acquire to make us feel better, to make us perhaps feel more powerful, and we can join the military, and, by the way, fight for imperialism, but along the way learn to be somebody’s conception of "all we can be." So that’s, I think, at least one angle on how the system perpetuates itself, because in the system, we are — this is another example of all of a piece here — we are so very insecure.


GA: In My Name is Chellis, you say you are in recovery from Western civilization. No doubt, Eurocentric imperialism has destroyed more quickly and thoroughly than perhaps any organized activity in history. Yet all civilization is based on domination of the earth and all of its life. What are some of the specific factors that give Western civilization its particularly destructive quality?


Che: Because I have lived my life within Western civilization, it’s a little hard to bring a lot of perspective to this question. Actually, it’s curious because I just learned from a client of mine, who has family in China, that Alcoholics Anonymous and its many offshoots have not made any headway in China, that it just doesn’t fit with the culture. So it’s hard for me to propose that one day there might be a book or perhaps there is a book called My Name is So-and-So and I’m in Recovery From Chinese Civilization. Or My Name is Somebody Else and I’m In Recovery From Meso-American Civilization. But I do know that Western civilization, perhaps through its vast and quick exploration of the world — the "Age of Exploration" in the 1400s and 1500s — and its grasp of so many resources around the world (including, by the way, China, a place of amazing biological resources), and because of the kinds of technologies that Western civilization was able to develop on its own or to borrow from other civilizations, like Chinese civilization, and use for its own purposes. Maybe in some way it was a function of just the timing, that Western civilization came along at a time when other civilizations had developed certain technologies that could be taken even further. It’s hard to really know. Maybe it’s because of the severe wounding of the peoples of northern Europe that came about through earlier conquerings. Maybe it tracks all the way back to the development of active hunting in northern Europe. Whatever it is, we know that Western civilization is particularly destructive, and its values and its ways are the juggernaut of the destruction of life on the planet at this point.


GA: In Off the Map, you link imperialism and domination to concepts of abstraction, as in maps, borders, cybernetics. Do you see this separation from direct experience as the root of control?


Che: I see it as a root of control in the sense that those who are actively engaged in perpetrating the kind of control that causes so much suffering, so much destruction, and so much death, are themselves the "way out there" manifestations of the kind of alienation of parts of oneself, disconnected from the natural human heritage, which is our connection to our environment, to the earth. And you can see this separation. As a psychologist, I’m very attuned to it. You can see it — one of the things I really like to do is when "our" President is giving one of his addresses, I like to turn on the TV and turn the sound off and look at the body language. And there is an individual who is highly alienated from himself and is clearly enacting some need for control that springs from an immense insecurity. Now, here’s a little tidbit, which is that there is a person in my village in northern New Mexico who was George Bush’s teacher at Phillips-Exeter Prep School. And while we were standing around the post office, this individual tells me about experiences with George Bush when he was in high school back in the ’60s, and that there was already a haughtiness and an urge toward hurting other people manifesting in his psychology, a kind of bully nature that was already there. So this curious little tidbit that I picked up at the post office (and I know that there are other people who have done and are doing a more extensive psychological analysis or diagnosis of certain people in power) is quite revealing.

But I also see the separation from direct experience — it’s not just the root of control; it’s also the root of acquiescence, because the more that the people of this planet receive our understanding of the world, receive our knowledge, through a screen, the more that we are disconnected from ourselves through these technologies whose hallmark is the expression and the perpetration of alienation, the less likely we are to respond in any meaningful way. And I think that this leads into why it is that the most powerful movements challenging the destruction of the planet are not springing from the most industrialized nations. They are not springing from the United States, nor western Europe, nor, say, Japan. Not that there aren’t right-on movements in these societies, but the bulk of people who are highly aware and highly conscious of what’s going on in the world today are people who have learned power relations through direct experience. And that is people who don’t have computers and don’t have cellphones, largely springing from Third World countries. Just last week, I had the opportunity to participate in a demonstration at the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, and I took some cabs to get to the demonstration. It was October 11, a Columbus Day sort of thing. And I was really taken with the level of sophistication and knowledge of the cab drivers. These were Mexican cab drivers driving cabs in El Paso. And their analysis of American power, of corporate power, of the source of the murders of so many women, the reasons for poverty in the Third World, were absolutely "state of the art", but did not come from reading literature on the internet, but through direct experience. When I speak to my Mexican indocumentado friends here in the United States, they often say, quite cold-facedly — it’s even shocking to me, because I still live in the world of order, where there is still some semblance of order that’s being held together in the United States — that the answer is revolution.


GA: Your writing style, it seems, has been strongly influenced by Susan Griffin. How much does the work of Griffin and other eco-feminists influence your work in general? What other eco-feminist authors could you suggest to our readers that could further deepen the anti-civilization critique?


Che: Well, I just adore the work of Susan Griffin. She is one of the first writers that I have encountered who writes the way I think. When I read the work of Susan Griffin — Woman and Nature, A Chorus of Stones — it’s as if my own mind is being reflected back to me. And that had a very major impact on my own writing, because the more I read Susan, the more I wanted to write in a way that reflected the way that I think.

Susan also was one of the early feminists to make some very startling observations of the society that we live in. It’s really mind-blowing to realize that she wrote Woman and Nature, which was, in a very poetic way, drawing forth the metaphors between woman, animal, nature, and oppression. The work was written in the mid-1970s, so she was alone in her vision, and it came through her.

So what other eco-feminist authors would I suggest to readers that could further deepen the anti-civilization critique? Well, I have a confession to make, and that is that I really do view all feminists as eco-feminists, and I view all women writers who are coming from land-based cultures that still exist to some extent but are probably being destroyed, as feminists. And so I see them as eco-feminists too. But let me just name a few authors who have been meaningful to me, and it goes back to the beginning of the women’s movement, when we didn’t have access to very much material, and so we were kind of scraping into some of the early works of women writers in the ’40s and ’50s and digging out Esther Harding and Helen Diner and writers like this, and we were also uncovering the socialist Evelyn Reed, Marie von Frantz , a Jungian. And out of that nascent excavation, some of our own writers emerged to comment on women’s history and women’s spirituality and women’s politics, like Merlin Stone, who was one of the early writers, Mary Daly, Charlene Spretnak, Susan came out of that tradition as well. Sally Gearhart, Hallie Austen, Judith Plant — these are some of the people who came out of that early exploration in the second wave of the women’s movement. I also love to read and really appreciate the work of Lucy Lippard, who is a very respected art critic who has, in recent years, lent her very intelligent eye into issues of place and ecology; Rebecca Solnit, who is a wonderful essayist; Marjorie Agosin, who writes tremblingly about Latin American life and politics; Isabelle Allende from Chile; the poet Gloria Anzaldua ; Joy Harjo - her poetry is a thing of ecstasy in its simple connection to the music of the land; and Arundati Roy from India; Stephanie Mills; Terry Tempest Williams — these are just some of the fantastic women writers who are, on some level, writing about the earth, its glories, and our potential for survival against the ravages of civilization.

Taped Oct. 16, 2003


* Off the Map is in bookstores. My Name is Chellis and I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization can be ordered from a bookstore or via underthesurface [at] clerk.com


* Also, check-out: U.S. Off The Planet: An Evening With Ward Churchill And Chellis Glendinning, a wonderful documentation of two speeches delivered by Ward and Chellis on June 17th, 2001, for the two-year anniversary of the anti-capitalist insurgency in Eugene. Available from the Green Anarchy Distro on CD or Video (see last page to order).




GREEN ANARCHY#15 (Winter 2004) is Out!
(In a new 72-page magazine format)
An Anti-Civilization Quarterly Publication
Featuring: theoretical and practical ideas on the "Destruction of Civilization and the Re-connection to Life", analysis of anarchist and other resistance movements, action reports from around the world, news, prisoner updates, reviews, letters, and more!



Feature Articles include:
The Psychopathology of Work by Penelope Rosemont, Fawda (an anarchist look at the Palestinian struggle) by the Friends of Al-Halladj, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun: The U.S. Military Continues to Get Hammered in Iraq, The Way of History — Today by Thomas Manning, Impassioned Violence, Justified Violence, Recovering From Western Civilization: An Interview with Chellis Glenndenning - Part II, Electric Funeral: An In-Depth Examination of the Megamachine’s Circuitry by the Havoc Mass, Notes On Summits and Counter-Summits, Riding the High of Cancun and the Dangers of a Crash by Blackbeard, Under the Palms of Miami…This Season’s #1 Tourist Trap by E. Lou Civ, it’d feel so funny to be free, Feral Visions: A Journal of an Anti-Civilization Roadshow by Felonious Skunk, Notes on the Function of the Outlaw as Anti-Role by Thomas Tripp, Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology, by John Armitage, Reclaiming Thoreau for Anarchy, and Colonization, and Self-Government and Self-Determinatioin British Columbia by Insurgent-S.



The Usual Features:
The Garden of Peculiarities by Jesus Sepúlveda, State Repression News, Political Prisoner Listings, Reviews, Letters and News from the Balcony with Waldorf and Statler.



Extensive Direct Action Reports, including:
Ecological Resistance, Anti-GE Actions, Indigenous and Campesino Resistance, Anarchist Resistance from Around the World, Political Assassination Attempts in 2003, Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Imperialist Resistance, The Wild Ones Fight Back, Animal Liberation Actions, Further Symptoms of the System’s Meltdown, and Prisoner Uprisings and Revolts.



This issue also contains the special "Back To Basics" volune two: The Problem of the Left, which includes: The Nature of the Left, Leftism 101 by Lawrence Jarach, Liberation, Not Organization by A. Morefus, and The Left-Handed Path of Repression by Crocus Behemoth.




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