Predator

For a few days, I've been looking for a word to use as a name for a pattern I see which has shaped human civilization -- a pattern which I think is rooted in the ability people have to detach from their reactions to violence. This pattern makes it possible to create social institutions which systematically perform acts of dehumanization.

At the most blunt are institutions like death camps, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war. Such things are carried out by their perpetrators with the air of a bureaucrat rubber-stamping a stack of paperwork. (Or at least, this is the ideal which is striven for; frequently the people enlisted by these institutions return to society as broken people, carrying within them some repressed glimmer of recognition of what they've done.)

Another manifestation is oppression: employing the threat of violence to create an atmosphere of fear which allows for exploitation. Oppression is a sublimation of violence. Sexism is the most fundamental such oppression; yet our vision is trained so that it is possible for us to avoid seeing the terror which is visited upon half the population. In many cultures women are not even allowed to leave the house, except under supervision, and so in such cultures it is not possible for women to compare experiences and recognize the pattern for what it is. The pattern is kept invisible because it is communicated non-verbally.

Economic exploitation is another tier, a sublimation of oppression, which is in turn a sublimation of violence. People who are oppressed do not have the same access to scarce economic resources as their oppressors; and so dehumanization is played out in the economic sphere, where starvation, poverty, and sub-standard healthcare silently perform the duties of the dehumanizers.

The name I settled on for this pattern is Predator.

Human beings have become capable of preying on one another. Civilization however does not allow us to literally eat one another; and so this predation has taken on an economic and cultural form, whereby predators consume the resources which would have been eaten by their prey. It is possible to turn humans into prey, because humans have not always been at the top of the food chain and so we retain instincts suited for prey. If we recognize that we are being preyed upon, we react as such. We also retain primate instincts for social heirarchy, which are co-opted by Predator.

It occurred to me today that this is why some religions require their adherents to become vegetarians. My analysis will attempt to show that mystical movements and religions start out as movements of resistence against Predator, but are co-opted and turned into part of Predator's empire. Ranching is systematic predation of animals; war, oppression, and exploitation are akin in that they are systematic predation of human beings. Those mystics who have opposed the workings of Predator grok this link.

Predator is the king who employs Viceroy. Predator and its agents might also be called demons, or Archons, or the Powers and Principalities.

(no subject)

Civilization depended more on the harnessing of death than on the harnessing of fire.

Humanity is not unique in the strategies of ranching and farming. But certainly there is no evidence that they have ever occurred at the scale or level of efficiency which humans bring to the task. But these tasks create a fundamental disconnect which allows the memeplex Cannibal to thrive.

Instead of hunting prey and killing it right before we eat it, we nurture our prey, feed it and protect it from disease and weather, and then, dispassionately, we slaughter it. We do the same with crops: we nurture them, and then reap them.

I am beginning to suspect that it is the same thing which allows us to be able to do this, that makes Cannibal possible. I'm not sure whether that means that we have to divorce ourselves from agriculture to remove Cannibal from our lives, though that is a strategy that mystics (the perennial foes of Cannibal) suggested throughout antiquity (and in modern times).

Civilization requires in several ways a denial of the predatory instinct. So a memetic whitewash is put in place which allows us to be blind to the ways in which we have harnessed death.

This concept is kind of a watershed for me, in that it ties together so many of the disparate threads that I have been following for years. The implications of that will play out over the coming weeks and months. But here's an opening thought:

The Temple at Jerusalem, where the Lord was worshipped whom the Gnostics called the chief Archon, was among other things an abattoir. This was one of the primary functions it served in Judean society. The Gnostics promoted vegetarianism, which can be seen in this light as another expression of rebellion against the ruling cultural edifices.

It also explicates this passage in the Gospel of Thomas:

(60) [They saw] a Samaritan carrying a lamb on his way to Judea. He said to his disciples, "Why is that man carrying that lamb?"
They said to him, "So that he may kill it and eat it."
He said to them, "While it is alive, he will not eat it, but only when he has killed it and it has become a corpse."
They said to him, "He cannot do so otherwise."
He said to them, "You too, look for a place for yourself within repose, lest you become a corpse and be eaten."

He was carrying the lamb to Judea because it was necessary at that time to have your animals slaughtered at the Temple. Samaria was a nation which had historically sought to develop its own competing temples where sacrifices could be offered. Requiring Samaritans to bring their sacrifices to Judea was a symbol of Judea's dominion over them.

(no subject)

The discussions this weekend about the difficulties of seeing outside of a system which has oppressed you has given me a new understanding of why many Jews feel criticism of Israel is anti-semitic. Whether or not criticism of Israel's actions is rooted in anti-semitism is largely immaterial from the Jewish perspective, because global rhetoric on the subject has been poisoned by the persecution of Jews.

That's not to say that I agree with everything the Israeli government (or ANY government) has done. It means I will be more sensitive to this aspect of things.

Gods as Predators

In a comment to my post about Predator, I mentioned some of the inspiration behind this post. Here is another bit which led me to this idea.

Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, argues that one reason which gods, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors ("supernatural agents") are so important is that our brains treat them as predators.

When we see branches moving in a tree, or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is. ... Some inference systems in the mind are specialized in the detection of apparent animacy and agency in objects around us.

... According to psychologist Justin Barrett, this feature of our psychological functioning is fundamental to understanding concepts of gods and spirits, for two reasons. First, what happens in religion is not so much that people see "faces in the clouds" as "traces in the grass." That is, people do not so much visualize what supernatural agents must be like as detect traces of their presence.... ... Second, our agency-detection system tends to "jump to conclusions" -- that is, to give us the intuition that an agent is around -- in many contexts where other interpretations (the wind pushed the foliage, a branch just fell off a tree) are equally plausible. ...

For Barrett, there are important evolutionary reasons why we (as well as other animals) should have "hyperactive agent detection." Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to overdetect agency than to underdetect it. The expense of false positives is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. In contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around could be very high. (pp. 144-146)

All well and good, but the limitation which Boyer sees in this is that we have plenty of "false positives" which do not linger as gods and spirits, but instead are dismissed as innocuous 'bumps in the night.' Boyer answers by explaining that predation-avoidance is only one of several systems in the mind which activate in the perceived presence of gods. To summarize the rest of this part of the argument very briefly:

Interacting with other human beings requires the ability to handle expediently a large amount of social information, and the human brain has several faculties which evolved to handle certain kinds of social information: information about certain people's reliability, the cues people use to indicate that they can be trusted, who has what relationships with whom, and so on. What people have been up to -- the kinds of thing that usually fill gossip. Boyer calls this strategic information, and adds that who knows what and who doesn't know what about what you've been up to is also strategic. But gods, spirits, and ancestors are person-like agents who have full access to strategic information. He illustrates by comparing two sets of sentences.

God knows the contents of every refrigerator in the world.
God perceives the state of every machine in operation.
God knows what every single insect in the world is up to. (p. 158)

These kinds of things are far less relevant to our attitudes towards gods than statements like

God knows whom you met yesterday.
God knows that you are lying.
God knows that I misbehaved. (p. 158)

Gods and spirits, then, are typically seen as person-like beings who know when you're awake, when you're sleeping, if you've been bad or good (so be good for goodness' sake!), and who, as predatory beings, have the capacity to punish ill-doers.

Gods as predators (a more personal note)

Another thing which has been on my mind lately is a dream I had 13 years ago, which I still consider the most disturbing dream I've ever had.

Dee complains to me about cockroaches which have taken up residence under the bed, so I crouch down, ready to kill them. When I get down there, I see that the cockroaches have built a whole city, which I am suddenly small enough to enter. The cockroaches greet me with cheers and worship; they explain that they are aware of their ugliness and repulsiveness and are glad that I have come to liberate them from their wretched existence.