What do You think about A Language Older Than Words (2004)?
I will be the first to acknowledge that there are problems with our civilization in general. It is unsustainable. It depends on an ever increasing population. It depends on us depleting non-renewable resources (minerals, fuels, species, etc.) at increasing rates. it depends upon all of us adapting to lifestyles that are contrary to the lifestyles our species are specialized to and that all but the last very few of our previous generations have lived. In short, it depends on impossibilities, and we are beginning to see the decline already, a mere 150 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution. It's been a good run, but the party, while not technically over, is not much fun any more, and people are starting to leave. Things are only going to get worse in the long run.Derrick Jensen also understands these things. However, he is bothered by it a lot more than I am, and he has a lot more guts to act on his feelings than I do. Every morning, he says, he asks himself if he is going to write or blow up dams. And so he writes. He is a very talented writer. This book was extremely interesting. He makes some very powerful and poignant cases against the modern industrial system. Throughout the book he references his childhood experience of abuse at the hands of his father and compares it to the abuse of the earth at the hands of the people who run the system. He compares most of us to himself and his family members who, feeling powerless, simply looked away when the abuse was happening to someone else.I never agree with everything a writer of a controversial subject writes, and the same goes for the author of this book. At times I was cringing as I read some of his extreme views, even though I was usually able to understand and appreciate where he is coming from.Overall, this was a very interesting and thought-provoking book.
—Kurt
This is one of the few books I have consciously decided not to finish in recent years. I agree wholeheartedly with Jensen's basic premise-- that we are rendering the world uninhabitable and committing atrocities against its human and nonhuman residents, and that our ability to do this depends on our denial of reality and our disconnecting from the people around us. I cannot, however, support the belief structure he builds up around this premise. Jensen equates studying science with raping children, and treats public schools as analogous with genocide. He condemns all modern western social structures and sources of knowledge, and offers only eco-terrorism and unverified personal gnosis as alternatives. I was reading this book hoping for solutions I could apply in my own life, and I found only contempt for my not having found them already. In my opinion, A Language Older that Words leaves the most important questions unanswered. If medical animal research can never be justified, should all the advances of modern medicine be reversed? If factory faming is never acceptable, must every person (including the entire continent of Africa and most of Asia) who does not have access to sustainable farmed staple foods starve? Does Jensen actually believe that every human whose children, pets, or livestock have been killed by a wild animal simply failed to communicate with the predator? And if he believes that we participate in structures of oppression by participating in society, just how far has he dropped out? He owns a car-- how does he justify driving it? Does he wear clothing whose fibers were cultivated on industrial farmland or synthesized in a third world factory, whose threads were spun by children in China and whose pieces were assembled in a sweatshop? Or does he go naked? Does he use only products (silverware, cleaning products, furniture?) whose origins are ethical and verifiable? He turns such a condemning eye to everything he sees in our society, and yet never presents a viable alternative, or turns his scathing contempt on himself. Jensen's own fatalism, hatred and hypocrisy are as sickening to me as is the abuse he experienced as a child. Two wrongs don't make a right-- hatred and rage in the name of the environment is no less damaging than hatred and rage in the name of the ego.In the end, one absolutist ideology is much like another. Jensen is an environmental fundamentalist-- he believes that there is no room for compromise or even discussion with conflicting viewpoints. As such, I see no reason to continue reading his opinions; he would have no interest in mine.I give this book two stars because I think it has something to teach. I'll leave it at my local coffeehouse because I hope its ideas may be valuable to some people who can use them constructively. I, alas, wasn't able to find anything constructive here.
—Anne
Great book. All of it being good, a few passages stuck out at me. The first was an explanation of where the dinners of he and a friend came from, going from origin to the plate. The second was a good part of the chapter "A Time of Sleeping," which helped me out by providing something to go to to point out why I want nothing to do with the wage economy.The whole book, more than anything else, also echoes something I've tried to keep in mind for a long time: to overcome the present predicament will require more than simple policy changes, more than a little activism here and there. What is needed is an awakening of consciousness, a rebirth of sorts. Nothing else will do it. We have thousands of years worth of damage to the collective human psyche, and nothing less than a healing of the psyche will amount to any change that's worth a shit.Overall: Read it. You might feel like killing yourself half-way through like I did, but he cheered me up, as I was promised he would.
—Anthony
