We Bought a Zoo: Humanity in the Technological Milieu
Every time there is a
war, or, to use the palatable neoliberal term, a “humanitarian intervention,”
or a midwifing of a new “liberal democracy,” the media are sure to run a story
about the innocent zoo animals caught in the crossfire. This concern with the
innocent animals victimized by human conflicts was used effectively in Emir
Kusturica’s film Underground, set in
late 20th century Yugoslavia, and it is interesting to examine this fascination
with zoo animals in wartime. Perhaps there is more to it than a mass media
trope.
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| Air raid on a zoo, from Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) |
The film Underground was a sensation in 1995 for having won the Palme d’Or while having also committed the sin of creating a sympathetic portrayal of Serbs and Montenegrins during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The film also reminded world audiences about the Nazi-Croatian collaboration that perpetrated a genocide in the Balkan peninsula—one that shocked even the Nazi officers managing the occupation. In the 1990s, as now, the public was largely oblivious to the disturbing link between this history and the role that Germany and other NATO powers had played in enabling Croatia to break from Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Even the sympathetic film review by Giorgio Bertellini—used as promotional material in the Blu-ray disc edition of the film—contained no challenge to the Western demonization of Serbs and the blaming of them for all the atrocities that occurred in the Balkan wars. The review merely describes the ways in which the film’s producers and financers skirted around the controversy and managed to distribute the film.
While some Serbs and
Montenegrins were moved by the story that lamented the loss of Yugoslavia,
others protested the crude depiction of the Serbian and Montenegrin resistance
leaders as reckless and brawling drunks, arms merchants, and misogynists. The
tale begins during WWII, then continues in Yugoslavia under Tito’s rule. One of
the resistance leaders, Marko (a Serb), becomes an official in the party while
growing rich in arms manufacturing. He keeps his best friend and rival in love,
Blacky (a Montenegrin), now disabled from battle injuries, in the basement of a
farm house. Marko keeps him there, along with a small community of veteran
resistance fighters, manufacturing weapons for what he makes them believe is an
endless resistance against fascist occupation. Meanwhile, he lives above ground
with Natalija, the woman Marko and Blacky had both wanted and “liberated” from
her Nazi officer boyfriend during the occupation. The people in the basement
don’t know the war is over until they escape in the 1990s and find their
country overrun with UN peacekeepers, refugees and nationalist fighters of
various kinds. Blacky emerges from underground and stumbles across the set of a
movie in which an actor is playing him as the national hero who died in the
great war against fascism.
One could dwell on the
controversies that the film generated during the disintegration of Yugoslavia,
but one could also say it is about Yugoslavia to the same extent that Hamlet is about Denmark. The reckless
passions of the two partisan heroes made them look hypocritical and turned them
into objects of satire. However, this exaggerated contrast highlighted the
contradiction found in all revolutions. The world that revolutionaries try to
change is also the world that traumatized them as children and turned them into
damaged adults. But you wage revolution with the partisans you have, not ones
you wish you had.
This broader message about
the human condition was portrayed by the images of a zoo being bombed in a Nazi
air raid, and in the chimpanzee who remained as a loyal companion of one of the
characters who lived underground for forty-five years. In one haunting shot, a
goose and a tiger lie dying side by side, injured and bloodied. The goose pecks
at the tiger’s head until the tiger gets annoyed and goes for its jugular. I
have no idea how such a scene was captured on film, but it works as a fleeting
metaphor for what the entire story is about. The oppressor and the oppressed
lie together, mortally wounded, and the oppressed takes advantage of the moment
to take a swipe at the oppressor, who then uses his last burst of energy to
crush his natural prey.
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| From Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) |
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| From Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) |
Dr. Gabor Maté, a man
of medicine who has also become a revered “medicine man” for spiritual seekers
in recent years, explained the zoo succinctly in one of his interviews:
Until about 9,000 years ago, virtually all human beings lived in small
hunter-gatherer bands… You
might liken modern society to a zoo where you take animals from a natural
habitat and you put them in a completely artificial, restricted situation, and
you expect them to stay as normal as they were out there in the wild.
Essentially, that’s what has happened to human beings. In a very short space of
time, in the blink of an eye, from the perspective of evolution, we’ve gone
from the hunter-gatherer small band, communal, attachment-based group to a
society which is alienated, disconnected, and that disconnection is
accelerating at a tremendous rate throughout the world. Urbanization is taking
people out of their villages to the big cities where they are alone. Here in
Britain there was quite a deliberate assault on community under the Thatcher
regime, with the destruction of neighborhoods and communities and so on, and
that trend has continued. So what we are having is societies that are less and
less natural to the actual make-up of human beings from the evolutionary
perspective, which means that children are being brought up under increasingly
artificial and disconnected circumstances. These lost connections characterize
the modern world and as they do, you’re getting the spread of auto-immune disease
into countries that never used to have it before, or addictions for that
matter. So if you look at the rate of addiction now in countries like China and
India, it’s going up exponentially. It’s not a question of idealizing the old
way of life. We can’t go back, and of course there are all kinds of benefits to
progress and industrialization. The trouble is that as we progress, we forget
what we’ve lost. So instead of trying to hold onto what was best about some of the
old ways, we just throw everything out, and we think we can re-invent
ourselves, and as we do, we are making ourselves sick.[1]
Elsewhere, in books
and dozens of lectures and interviews that can be found on the Internet, Dr.
Maté has elaborated on these connections between the polluted environment,
toxic society, and mental and physical illness. In an interview with Russell
Brand he stated:
… physical ailments like rheumatoid arthritis or cancer are not abstract
or isolated biological incidents. They actually have something to do with
people’s emotional and spiritual lives, and that could be affected positively
by taking a broader view. There’s all kinds of science for that. The science is
not even controversial, but it’s not taught in the medical schools. …
fundamentally, for this society to function, it has to separate the soul from
the body because we wouldn’t treat people the way we do if we thought they had
souls… Rationalism means cutting off from the heart, and so, basically, Western
science very much starts from the neck up, and you can do a lot of great things
with the intellect, and the hyper-rationality, and the research, and so on, but
it also leaves us short of our humanity, and that integration is not taking
place because it threatens the social structure.[2]
Dr. Maté’s approach to
disease is not beyond questioning. There are a lot of uncertainties involved in
determining the causes of disease, and it may not be useful for some people to dwell
on the unanswerable question of whether they were held enough in the first year
of life. Dr. Maté has often mentioned that children in polluted environments
who develop asthma are the ones who have the most stressful family situations.
This may be true, and he certainly has good intentions in focusing on this
cause, but it provides the chemical and nuclear industries with just the sort
of support they always want. The nuclear industry’s supporters, for example,
have always been eager to tell people living in the radioactive aftermath of
Chernobyl and Fukushima that they are merely making themselves sick with “radiophobia.”[3] Dr. Maté often mentions the toxic culture as
the root cause of disease, but I haven’t heard him state a position on the role
of chemical and radiological toxins in the diseases he talks about. I suspect
he would agree that toxins are obviously a cause of disease and victims shouldn’t
be told they have radiophobia, but it is odd that he doesn’t clarify this point
more often. Obviously,
stress is a contributing factor for people living in polluted environments, but
there is a vicious circle of both the pre-existing stress from the family and
social environment and the stress of knowing that one has been exposed to
toxins—toxins that cause damage by themselves, with or without psychological
stress (see the chart below).
This attention to the
technological environment we live in is, of course, nothing new. American rock
legend Jim Morrison spoke about it 1970 in an interview with a CBC journalist.
Throughout the interview he sounded alarmingly sober, old and resigned—more
Apollonian than Dionysian, which makes it hard to believe he died within a year
from alcoholism:
The repression of sexual energy has always been the grandest tool of a
totalitarian system. If everyone was free in their sexual activity, how many
people would show up for work? That is the basic problem: whether progress, the
progress of civilization, the evolution of a civilized culture, is really worth
it. And there have been some amazing accomplishments, beautiful
accomplishments, but the question is: Is it worth it? Is it worth the
repression? And that’s something everyone has to answer, every second of their
life.
From the late 1980s
until the early years of the 21st century, film director Godfrey Reggio produced
the Qatsi film trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi—all
titles derived from the Hopi language) which dealt with the same theme. About
this trilogy he said:
The greatest event, or the most important event of,
perhaps, our entire history—nothing comparable in the past to this event—has
fundamentally gone unnoticed, and the event is the following: the transiting
from all-nature, or the natural environment as our host of life for human
habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the
environment of life. So these films have never been about… the effect of
technology… Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we
are no longer conscious of its presence. (source here)
Powaqqa is a black magician, an entity that eats the life of another person, that consumes the life of another, in order to advance her own or his own life. Powaqqa operates through seduction, through allurement, not through the obviousness of “I’m coming to get your heart!” or something like that. In other words, not like a horror show, and powaqqa, when it’s joined with the word qatsi, means a way of life that consumes another way in order to advance itself. So, the film Powaqqatsi is about the southern hemisphere; Koyaanisqatsi, the northern hemisphere—hyperkinetic, industrial, technological grid. Powaqqatsi, the southern hemisphere, cultures of orality, people who have a hand-made living of tradition.
So the present puts us in this conundrum of no exit out from this new universe that we’ve been put in—the technological order—that really we know nothing about. Nothing… Naqoy means war, to kill another, to take the life of another. When you put it together it means a life-way of war, a life-way of killing. That’s its etymology… the war that this word describes is a war beyond the battlefield, a total war. War as ordinary daily living… I would summarize the whole meaning of the word to be encapsulated in the shibboleth “civilized violence.” (source here)
These contemplations
of the technological milieu pose the question of whether humans could ever
adapt to it, or adapt it to their natural requirements. The energy sources and
the machines were supposed to be our new slaves, but slavery always erodes the
soul of the master. One could look back at the 20th century and say that Soviet
and Chinese socialism also produced an oppressive technological tyranny, but
who knows what they might have achieved if they had not been opposed by an
archaic form of oligarchic capitalism draped in the structures of liberal
democracy—a structure that was invented as a cure for feudalism and hasn’t been
updated in the last two centuries.
Peter Joseph, author
of The New Human Rights Movement, has
been writing about the need for a radical reformation and rethinking of how we conceive
the links between politics and economics and the potential for technology to
finally be used to support human needs. In a critique of Bernie Sanders and the
American left he said:
Governments are fundamentally premised economically… if you examine the
nature of governments since the Neolithic Revolution, you will see that they
are first and foremost concerned with economic behavior. Feudalism,
mercantilism, capitalism and even socialism and communism, as they have
existed, have had institutions of governance that organize around those
economic foundations, explaining their differences. This only makes sense since
the economy is what produces survival… Libertarians see a false duality between
markets and government, and as the argument goes, government is a problem, as
it restricts the so-called free market… The truth is government and business
are inseparable because you have to have regulation of the individualistic and
self-interest-driven anarchy that defines market behavior… Markets simply are
not a viable system when it comes to accounting for human sustainability or
social stabilization… If government did magically vanish, the negative
externalities produced by market behavior would pretty much destroy the planet
overnight.
Once we understand
that every economic system is planned and therefore “socialist,” it is a matter
of deciding only for whom it is planned. If we want to preserve the ecosystem,
we need to sustain life rather than capitalist development, and that will
require a massive transformation in the way we live within the technological
milieu. It is not the technology that has to change but rather the way we use
it to reduce its toxic effects and distribute its surplus value equitably.
For Lenin the solution
was relatively easy. The Bolsheviks’ goal was to have state ownership of the
means of production and divert the surplus value toward public benefit instead
of to private interests. They would do exactly what the capitalist nations were
doing to apply technology in pursuit of their goals: strengthen military
defense, create a national electrical grid, build transportation networks, dams
and factories, and use fertilizers and mechanization to increase agricultural
output. Under both capitalism and Soviet socialism the endeavor created toxic
wastelands, filled the atmosphere with high levels of CO2 and radioactive
fallout, and led to increasing numbers of people who are traumatized and ill
due to the environment they inhabit, even though many of them evaluate each
other as “well-adjusted” and choose leaders who are sicker than themselves.
The next revolution
won’t be able to resort to technology as a way to advance living standards.
Been there. Done that. The toxic impacts of technology are the enemy now. We
have contradictory goals that necessitate a radical re-imagining of the way we
live. Stop using fossil fuels, stop producing nuclear waste, clean up our
garbage and become responsible stewards of permanent toxic legacies like
Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi (and all nuclear waste), and the Alberta Tar
Sands—and do all this while forcing some to accept having much less while we
ensure that everyone else gets what is minimally required for a decent life. The
ecological economist Clive Spash makes the point that this can’t happen within
the existing economic order:
The climate movement runs along a knife edge between re-establishing another
phase of competitive economic growth, and making radical economic and political
reform a reality through social ecological transformation. The current thrust
is to the former and will remain so as long as the potential forces for change
operate via corporations and remain committed to productivism, equitable
materialism and nationalism. The climate movement is a real threat to powerful
elites and that is exactly why it is being infiltrated and invited to have ‘a
seat at the table.’ Climate change has been and is being used to wipe off the
agenda all other environmental issues and to impose singular ‘solutions’ to
systemic problems.[4]
It is not like this is
a new thing that just became apparent during the new panic about mass
extinction and runaway feedback loops. The futurist R. Buckminster Fuller wrote
back in 1975:
Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to
get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous
social behaviors that will avoid extinction.[5]
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| Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome "Biosphere" on the St. Lawrence River, Montreal, Canada |
Notes
References to previous
posts on this blog are hyperlinked in the text above. Other sources are listed
in the notes below.
[1]
Rangan Chatterjee, “How Our Childhood Shapes Every Aspect of
Our Health with Dr. Gabor Maté,” Feel Better, Live More Podcast,
Episode 37, November 21, 2018, 40:54~.
[2]
Russell Brand, “Damaged Leaders Rule an Addicted World,” Under
the Skin Podcast, Episode 53, November 10, 2018, 41:50~.
[3]
Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (W. W. Norton
& Company, 2019), 256. In this comprehensive study of the nuclear age and
the Chernobyl aftermath, the author identified highly contaminated villages,
distant from Chernobyl, where villagers lived for years without knowing that their
land was saturated with high levels of Chernobyl fallout. They complained of a
sudden rise in numerous health problems, but because they were unaware of the
hazard, their illnesses could not be explained away as stress-induced “radiophobia.”
Kate Brown formulated a ten-point list of methods used by the global nuclear
establishment to make sure no widespread health crisis would ever be recognized:
(1) classify data, (2) limit questions, (3) stonewall investigations, (4) block
funding for research, (5) sponsor rival studies, (6) relate dangers to “natural”
risks, (7) draw up study protocols designed to find nothing but catastrophic
effects, (8) extrapolate and estimate to produce numbers that hide
uncertainties and guesswork, (9) privately slander and threaten dissenting
scientists, (10) and cast doubt on known facts so that scientists must pursue
expensive and duplicative investigations to prove what is clearly evident.
[5]
R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (Macmillan
Publishing, 1975), xxviii.
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