The Parable of the Tribes

Once upon a time, I was on an internet mailing list that jabbered about “saving the world.”  Industrial civilization was hammering the planet.  What should we do?  Some advocated dropping out and creating self-sufficient eco-villages.  Others thought that industrial civilization had to be smashed first, because nothing would be safe until then.  A philosopher from Florida persistently asked: “How can we expect to stop them by emulating those that have been destroyed?”  His question was not easy to dismiss, and it made the pacifists squirm. 

Andrew Bard Schmookler’s book, The Parable of the Tribes, takes a long hard look at the problem of power and exploitation.  Schmookler believed that wild humans enjoyed lives of wholeness and freedom that modern folks can barely imagine.  In the good old days, human societies were stable, because our development was guided by genetic evolution, a slow-moving process.  Nature provided our sustenance, and we took only what we needed.  We were not in control of the world, nature was.  Humans were just one member of the great family, and nothing more.

Slowly, very slowly, over the course of many generations, cultures began to emerge.  Gradually, cultures passed more and more knowledge from one generation to the next, which improved our skills at exploiting nature.  Eventually, our growing cleverness led us to attempt an escape from the control of nature, and its limits — an impossible goal in the long run, but we tried.

We moved away from the wild buffet, and began producing our own food, in abundant quantities.  We cut down forests and replaced wild ecosystems with colonies of domesticated plants and animals.  By doing this, we were able to temporarily extract far more energy from nature, and this moved us into the fast lane.  The monstrosity that we were creating made us unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous.

Of course, more food always leads to more hungry mouths, and farming societies grew and grew.  First, they expanded by swiping the lands of wild humans, and when they ran out of those lands, they had to make a choice.  They could either limit their population, or they could conquer other farming societies.  Well, the farmers were bloated with overconfidence.  If they were powerful enough to escape from the limits of wild nature, then they were certainly powerful enough to swipe the lands of their lazy, stupid, sub-human neighbors.  Fetch the war paint, lads!

In the struggle between growing societies, the process selected for power.  Aggressive ruthless bullies were the most likely to come out on top.  Eventually, this led to hierarchical society and civilization.  Most humans were reduced to bondage, and legions of slaves built awesome monuments celebrating the gory glory of notorious bullies.  Warfare became a popular pastime.  For the first time, domination and control — power — was introduced into the world.

“Power” is a keyword in this book.  It meant forcing your will against the will of another.  Power provided the black magic juju for dancing to the beat of conquest and exploitation.  It was a new form of energy on the planet.  Wild people had no use for it, because they lived within nature, and all was well.  Power was the mother of “civilization,” another disgusting profanity.

Schmookler wrote that this struggle between societies was rooted in “anarchy” — meaning a dangerous, uncontrollable, state of disorder.  This confused me at first, because anarchy can also simply mean the absence of government.  For almost all of human history, anarchy worked wonderfully well in isolated wild societies that were based on self-control, cooperation, sharing, and freedom.  Wild societies were a normal functional component of the natural order; they had no need for rulers.  Anarchy is not a four-letter word.

Our school systems teach a “commonsense” version of history that ignores almost everything that preceded civilization.  It’s a mythical story of progress, in which highly intelligent humans made continuous advancements by deliberate choice, bringing us to the techno-utopia of modern times.  Schmookler hates his myth because, in reality, civilization has generally done a poor job of meeting human needs, except for the elites — and it’s been a huge disaster for ecosystems.

Schmookler offered a very different story, which he called the parable of the tribes.  He thought that as civilizations grew, they began to bump into each other, leading to conflict.  One day, tribe A massacred tribe B and — shazaam! — power was introduced into the world, like the rat-infested ship that delivered the Black Death to Europe in 1347.  When one society in a region began to utilize power, stability came to an end, replaced by treacherous anarchy.  At this point, it became impossible to choose a life of peace.  The only way to survive with a bully in the neighborhood was to become a bully too — only power can stop power.

The bottom line is that Schmookler foresees two possible outcomes for humankind: (1) mutual annihilation or (2) a global civilization that can unify humankind, and put an end to the struggle for power — a just world order guided by reason and values.  To stop the never-ending conflicts between civilizations, the solution is to create the mother of all civilizations.  It’s a surprising idea in a book that majors in tirelessly criticizing civilization from every conceivable angle. 

“How can we expect to stop them by emulating those that have been destroyed?”  Who is “them?”  Would the mother of all civilizations be emulating Uruk, Babylon, and Timbuktu — proud civilizations destroyed long ago?

Schmookler does not recommend solving our problems by violent revolution, because revolutions have a reliable habit of replacing old tyrants with new ones — a bloody waste of energy.  We’re so far from home that simple strategies are not enough.  Utopia is not just a revolution away.  Healing will take generations, and the disease will leave permanent scars.

Years ago, before I became politically correct, I used to cite Reese’s Law: “The <sphincters> always win.”  It was so frustrating that the savages with the spears almost never massacred the white dudes with the smallpox, artillery, and machine guns.  The beautiful wild folks who lived sustainably, and treated the land with respect and reverence, always got stomped by ecocidal maniacs.  Where was the justice?  Why did they have to die running?

Well, Schmookler gives us a model that makes our predicament comprehensible, and that’s what makes this book important.  It delivers pieces missing from the great puzzle.  Power just happened, by accident, and once it was born, nothing could stop it.  So, humans aren’t evil.  There’s no need to feel guilty about our ancestors’ boo-boos.  We’ve inherited problems that have been growing for thousands of years.  It feels better to understand this, but it doesn’t rinse away the bitter taste of tragedy and injustice.

His solution is a throwaway, because predicaments have no solutions (only problems can be solved).  I think that there are many more than two possible outcomes.  Mutual annihilation will remain a real risk.  A benevolent global civilization is highly dubious on the grounds of human nature alone, but Peak Cheap Energy will render it impossible.  Industrial civilization is in the beginning stages of collapse, and we are moving toward a future that is going to be local and muscle-powered.  Current patterns of living and thinking will disintegrate.  This will open the doors to many new possibilities, one of which is a return to sustainable living.  As Schmookler says, “the future remains to be written.”

Today’s benediction comes from J. C. Smuts: “When I look at history, I am a pessimist… but when I look at prehistory, I am an optimist.”  Amen!

Schmookler, Andrew Bard, The Parable of the Tribes — The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, SUNY Press, Albany, New York, 1995, second edition.

The End of the Line

Charles Clover’s book, The End of the Line, is a heartbreaking story about the seafood industry’s War on Fish.  The poor fish don’t have much of a chance anymore, because there’s nowhere to hide from the latest technology.  The eventual outcome of this systematic massacre is already obvious — both sides are going to lose.  When the nets finally come up empty, the unemployed fishers will shape-shift into burger flippers, security guards, and homeless panhandlers.  But until that final day, they’ll keep expanding the fleet, and fishing like there’s no tomorrow.

Back in the good old days of the Stone Age, there were vast numbers of fish, and a few scattered clans of low-tech subsistence fishers.  Most people in prehistoric Europe lived near the water, because that’s where the food was.  In the days before trawlers, the oyster population was astonishing.  Many were the size of dinner plates, and some oyster reefs were so big that they hindered navigation.  The Thames and Rhine rivers had huge salmon runs.  There were massive sturgeons in the Rhine delta.  It was an era of glorious abundance.

With the passage of centuries, tribal subsistence fishing eventually mutated into a business, and sustainability drifted away into the mists of the past.  Commercial fishers had an entirely different mindset, one with vivid fantasies of wealth and power.  Some refer to it as get-rich-quick fever, a painful incurable spiritual disease.  Using the technology of the day, they caught as many fish as possible, and converted them into money.  No matter how much they made, their burning hunger for treasure could never be satisfied. 

Over time, new technology enabled fishers to increase their landings.  By 1848, the “inexhaustible” halibut fishery on Georges Bank crashed, after a mere decade of overfishing.  It was once common to catch halibut as big as a man, but these fish are rarely seen at markets today.  The advent of steam-powered trawlers radically increased overfishing.  Today there are $89 million floating fish factories, 480 feet long, that can catch and freeze 440 tons of fish per day, and store 7,700 tons in the hold.  The Technology Fairy is a demon.

In 1500, there were 4,400,000 tons of cod off Newfoundland.  By 2003, there were just 55,000 tons.  Cod fishing was shut down in 1992, and 44,000 people lost their jobs.  The cod have yet to show signs of recovery.  The same is true for the North Sea mackerel, which collapsed in the 1970’s.  Tuna, sharks, and swordfish are swimming briskly down the Dinosaur Trail.

Experts calculate that global fish production peaked in 1988, and may now be declining at a rate of 770,000 tons per year.  Production statistics don’t include bycatch — the fish, sea mammals, birds, and turtles that are caught but tossed back, because they can’t be sold.  Nobody keeps records on bycatch, but some believe that one-third of the global catch is dumped overboard, almost all of it dead or dying, usually because of ruptured swim bladders or drowning.

Clover complains that we can put a man on the moon, but no nation does a competent job of managing fisheries, with the possible exception of Iceland.  Everybody can see that the industry is heading for disaster.  There are already plenty of intelligent rules on the books, but effective enforcement is almost non-existent.  Overfishing generates good income, fuels the economy, and hurts no one except for our children, the aquatic ecosystem, and poor people in foreign countries — none of whom can vote.  The bottom line is that nobody will voluntarily back off, because the fish that you don’t catch will be caught by someone else. 

Monthly payments on modern boats are huge, and for many fishers, the only way to pay the bills is to catch and sell illegal fish.  There are many ways of getting illegal fish to market.  Port inspectors often look the other way, especially in Spain and Portugal.  Extremely inaccurate paperwork is submitted and accepted.  Illegal fish are delivered in mismarked boxes.  If an inspector appears at port A, the boat will unload at port B, and truck the catch to the processor.  Few violators get busted and punished.  The huge economic benefits of pirate fishing far exceed the trivial risks.

Four times every day, all fish stop what they’re doing, bow their heads, and fervently pray for World War III on the dry land above, because world wars put a halt to most fishing activities.  War provides a much-appreciated break from the underwater mass extermination.  They also pray for skyrocketing energy prices, catastrophic stock market crashes, and major bankruptcies in the seafood sector.  They’re sick and tired of being the target of genocidal maniacs.  Who can blame them?

During the research process, Clover was surprised to discover that McDonalds got a top score for their fish, all of which is certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).  At the opposite end of the spectrum are most chi-chi restaurants.  World-famous celebrities, who would never dream of wearing a fur coat, are often photographed with famous chefs who serve the seafood equivalent of rhinoceros steaks or condor barbeque — species on the brink of extinction, like the extremely endangered tuna served at gold-plated sushi places.  MSC-certified fish is also sold at Wal-Mart.

Clover has no kind words for aquaculture, which many perceive to be the amazing high-tech “solution” to all of our seafood problems.  Industry is vacuuming up the smaller fish in the ocean to make feed for high value fish raised in horrid concentration camps.  This game cannot last long.  Be aware that “organic” farmed salmon is given feed made from overfished species.

Thankfully, Clover provides us with a brilliant alternative to aquaculture.  Rather than feeding low-value fish to concentration camp salmon, why don’t we simply eat the perfectly edible blue whiting, herring, horse mackerel, and sand eels?  They could provide us with excellent high quality protein and oils that totally bypass the mega-harmful worlds of agriculture and aquaculture.  Eating small wild fish is healthier for us, much less cruel, causes less harm to the seas, and makes us feel like an intelligent species.

Did you know that recreational fishers catch 30 percent of the cod taken off the coast of Maine?  Did you know that about 25 percent of “catch and release” fish die soon after being returned to the water?  Sport fishers now have sonar, fish finders, GPS systems, and small fast boats.  Their impact is not insignificant.  Anglers often break the rules, and their chances of getting caught are close to nil.

Clover provides us with intelligent, effective, commonsense solutions that are politically impossible, unfortunately.  We should set aside 50 percent of the ocean as reserves where fishing is prohibited.  We should also cut back industrial fishing by 50 percent.  We should create an aggressive full-scale oceanic police force that would have absolute authority to promptly end illegal fishing, and provide extra-generous punishment to offenders.  We should consume less fish, and shop more mindfully.  And so on.  “We have on offer two futures.  One requires difficult, active choices starting now.  If we don’t take those choices, the other future will happen anyway.”

Clover, Charles, The End of the Line, The New Press, New York, 2006.

Swimming in Circles

Swimming in Circles is an unflattering exposé on salt water aquaculture and the mindset that promotes it.  Author Paul Molyneaux has watched Maine's fishing industry go from boom to bust in his lifetime.  Old timers lament that the coast was once so crowded with big fish that you could almost walk across the water on their backs — no more.  In recent years there has been a growing exodus of ex-fishermen, and many communities are in the process of becoming boarded-up ghost towns.  Buying a pair of shoes can require a 100 mile round trip.

Maine’s seafood industry was driven into the ground by perpetual overfishing.  Despite sharply declining catches, the industry vigorously resisted stronger regulations and better enforcement.  Instead, they got bigger boats, and they fished harder.  They bought the latest technology, which allowed them to locate and land surviving schools of fish.  Powerful magical thinking insisted that abundant fish were still out there, somewhere, regardless of the increasingly empty nets.  Economic growth was their one and only sacred objective, and they were committed to pursue it by any means necessary.

Just in the nick of time, the Technology Fairy appeared and filled the coast with salmon farms — a new fish industry!  Hooray!  These were huge cages in which salmon were raised in high density, and spent their miserable lives swimming in circles in filth and pesticides.  Of course, when any creatures exist in unnatural crowding, diseases hear the call to duty.  The farms were owned by multinational corporations and they did an excellent job of spreading pests and diseases to other sites around the world.  They also excelled at automation — producing more fish while shrinking their workforce to barebones, much to the displeasure of impoverished coastal communities.

A virus called infectious salmon anemia (ISA) has killed millions of captive fish, and it readily spreads to wild fish communities outside the pens.  Farm salmon receive vaccine, but the virus displays an impressive ability to rapidly mutate and evade silver bullet cures.  Each rise and fall of the tides flushes the toilet for the fish farm, sweeping pests, pathogens, antibiotics, and poop soup out into the open sea, much to the displeasure of the wild ecosystem.

Salmon farming seems to be on a collision course with disaster.  Industry boosters boast that salmon convert two pounds of feed into one pound of fish, which is far more efficient than chicken or pigs.  But farm salmon consume feed made from fish meal and fish oil, which come from low-value wild fish that are being harvested at unsustainable rates.  Rising energy costs, combined with over-fishing, ensure rising prices for fish feed, and raise questions about its future.

Cattle consume the primary production of the land: grass.  Likewise, wild salmon consume the primary production of the sea: plankton, which provides 85 percent of their diet.  But feed made from fish comes from higher on the food chain, so its ecological footprint is far greater than the normal healthy diet that majors in plankton.  Thus, the amazing efficiency of salmon farms is based on expensive feed that is the equivalent of super-charged rocket fuel.

Feed pellets for salmon contain processed low-value fish (and their pollutants), dye (to make the flesh orange, like wild salmon), pesticides (for sea lice), and vaccines.  Salmon that consume this fish-based feed have been found to contain 13 organic pollutants at levels ten times higher than in wild fish — and half of them remain in your body ten years after dinner.  Because of the high PCB levels, pregnant women, and women who plan to become pregnant have been advised not to consume farm salmon.  Slice, the sea lice pesticide, contaminates the scallops living in the region.

Several chapters in the book discuss shrimp farming, which is popular in warmer regions.  It’s extremely profitable, extremely vulnerable to viral diseases, extremely harmful to traditional subsistence fishing, and it ravages coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves.  Many of these farms have gone belly up because of bad management and disease.  Tyson lost a billion dollars when it tried to cash in on shrimp farming.  Some folks are experimenting with land-based operations, where the shrimp are raised in aerated tanks.  This isolates the process from the disease pathogens that frequently ravage coastal shrimp farms.

Salt water aquaculture is not about producing low-cost protein and reducing world hunger.  It’s about providing highly profitable seafood products to a well-fed (and poorly informed) elite.  Profit is the keyword here.  Problems could greatly be reduced by raising the critters in lower densities, but stockholders won’t trade profits for quality.  They demand perpetual growth and maximum profits.  In its current mode, this is not an industry with a long-term future. 

Salt water aquaculture is fundamentally unsustainable, and Molyneaux sees no light at the end of the tunnel.  Wild fish are also in poor shape.  In 1992, the famous Newfoundland cod fishery crashed, and Canada banned cod fishing.  The cod have yet to recover.  Possible reasons include pollution, habitat destruction, and overfishing.  The tsunami of human overpopulation is causing severe damage to aquatic ecosystems.  Some worry that growing acidity may make the oceans uninhabitable for most forms of sea life, which may lead to a golden age for jellyfish.

Freshwater aquaculture is beyond the scope of this book, but it is rapidly growing, producing fish like carp, tilapia, and catfish.  Chinese peasants have been farming fish for 3,000 years, using a time-proven, low-tech system that recycles wastes and produces fish in a manner that may actually be sustainable.  Modern profit-driven corporate freshwater aquaculture is an entirely different matter, of course.

Molyneaux concludes: “The only hope springs from a sober realization of how far off course the ship of humanity has strayed, and how absurd the suite of technological solutions we are presented with really is.  If the future belongs to everyone, then it requires new models and a different way of thinking.”

I cannot disagree, but I think Peak Cheap Energy is going to be a godsend for the oceans.  Fish mining is resource-intensive, especially in its twenty-first century mode of energy-guzzling, high-tech floating seafood factories, towing miles-long nets.  The transition to sailboats and rowboats will sharply reduce fish-mining efficiency, and will likely destroy corporate fish mining as we know it.  Oceanic ecosystems will never return to what they were 500 years ago, but it seems likely that Peak Cheap Energy will sharply cut current forms of destruction, and this fills me with limited optimism, sort of.

Molyneaux, Paul, Swimming in Circles — Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2007.

A Forest Journey

Once upon a time, at the dawn of civilization, the planet’s forests were in peak condition, in terms of their age, range, and health.  Wildlife was thriving.  Modern lads and lasses would not believe their eyes if they could dream their way back to 10,000 BC and observe the stunning abundance of birds, fish, and wild grazing animals — and the absence of cities.

Sadly, on a dark and stormy night, some wise guys figured out how to smelt ore and forge ax heads, and things have been going downhill ever since.  Axes did make it much easier to cut down trees, but the mad scientists totally failed to imagine the unintended consequences of their brilliant invention (as usual).  But this was an era when it was quite popular to invent technologies that would have negative effects for many, many centuries.  It was the trendy thing to do.

For example, the digging stick.  Agriculture preceded metal making.  First, they farmed shorelines and riverbanks until the soil fertility wore out.  Then, they cleared forests, and wore out the soil there.  Then they moved to a different forest, killed the trees, and wore out that soil.  And on and on.  This cycle has been repeated for thousands of years. 

Prior to the digging stick, hunter-gatherers simply limited the number children they allowed to survive.  By keeping their numbers low, they could live in a wild and healthy land, and enjoy a life that required far less effort and drudgery.  Remember that!

John Perlin’s book, A Forest Journey, is a history of forest destruction, with stops including Mesopotamia, Crete, Greece, Cyprus, Rome, Venice, England, Brazil, and America.  Humans have always used wood in a number of ways, but the era of agriculture has shown little mercy for forests, and it has turned more than a few of them into barren wastelands and urban wastelands.

A healthy forest grew in healthy fertile soil, but wheat would not grow in the shade, so the trees had to go.  The wood was used to build houses, bridges, temples, and palaces.  It was made into fences, docks, wagons, furniture, tools, and barrels.  It heated homes and fueled industries that produced metal, glass, pottery, lime, sugar, and salt.  Staggering quantities of wood were consumed by industry.  Very importantly, wood was used to build cargo, fishing, and war ships.  In earlier times, almost everything moved via water.

A civilization with access to abundant forests had great potential power.  It could grow, create profitable industries, participate in trade networks, defend itself from conquest, and conquer new forests.  Be careful not to confuse this glorious enterprise of never-ending growth with a free lunch.  The path of never-ending growth always seems to end at a mountain of skulls.  Typically, it allows for a few generations of excess and debauchery — and then the bill arrives.  Holy expletive!

Perlin discussed the pattern repeated by the civilizations of the Mediterranean Basin.  The trees were cut, then the heavy winter rains came, the soil eroded from the hillsides, the ports and bays were buried with eroded silt, and flash floods roared through the valleys.  Eventually, the prime soil was sent to the bottom of the sea, and the remaining wasteland could produce little more than olives, grapes, and goats.  The fuel for industry was gone, population plummeted, and the forest could never again recover on ruined land.  Most of the arid wastelands of today’s Mediterranean Basin used to be forests. 

Even the ancients understood that their civilizations were unsustainable.  In the epic poem Cypria, Zeus started the Trojan War to thin the bloated human herd so the weary earth could recuperate.  Plato wrote a bitter lament about the devastated land of Attica, a sickly skeleton of its former vitality.  In Works and Days, Hesiod described the decline of humankind from the wonderful Golden Age to the horrid Iron Age.  In Genesis, the Hebrew deity observed the stunning wickedness of humans, regretted creating them, and sent a huge flood to eliminate his multitudes of embarrassing mistakes.

Well hey, if they could see that what they were doing was really dumb, then why didn’t they just stop?  They could have quit cutting trees, thrown away their icky plows, implemented a draconian population reduction regime, and lived happily ever after, right?  Our modern consumer society has similar healthy options.  Why don’t we just stop? 

The bottom line was that people who preferred to limit their numbers, and continue living in harmony with nature, had no future.  Their thriving unmolested forests looked like mountains of treasure in the eyes of civilized sailors cruising by — and civilized people cannot tolerate the sight of unmolested forests; it drives them nuts.  In other words, if you didn’t destroy your forest, someone else would.  If you didn’t build war ships, you were a helpless sitting duck.  Thus, civilization bounced from region to region, repeating the same mistakes, turning countless paradises into parking lots.  Progress!

That was the story in the Mediterranean Basin.  It was a completely different story along the Pacific coast of America and Canada.  In this region, the people remained hunter-gatherers, and their ecosystem stayed as healthy as it had been 10,000 years earlier (until you-know-who arrived).  In the absence of agriculture and civilization, life can be far more pleasant for one and all, including the entire ecosystem.  Remember that!

Perlin concluded with two huge chapters on industrial England and America, for which large quantities of written records still survive.  He described greedy industrialists, corrupt politicians, exploited peasants, and several centuries of ridiculous environmental destruction.

By the end of the book, alert readers will recognize similar patterns of unwholesome behavior that continue to this very day.  The rate of destruction has skyrocketed — and so has our understanding of the harm we are causing.  Alert readers will be compelled to discard all fantasies of quick and easy remedies.

This book makes me crazy.  Why isn’t ecological history a compulsory subject throughout every student’s education?  Why are we still training our youth to be mindless consumers, and punctual obedient industrial robots?  There is more important information in this book than I learned during most of my school years.  Imagine what could happen if we ever produced a generation of well-educated children.  Hug every tree you see.

Perlin, John, A Forest Journey — The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.  [1989]

Inquisition — Part 3 of 3

The Inquisition was certainly a memorable era in human history, but modern society prefers to forget it, because it’s a dark and creepy skeleton in civilization’s closet (one of countless thousands).  What can we learn from the Inquisition?  For many years I filed it under simple insanity — medieval society was insane, and the evidence for this was overwhelming.  Case closed. 

My diagnosis of insanity was correct, but incomplete.  I had assigned full blame to twisted religion, and by doing this, I missed much of the story.  I was recently looking at Witchcraze, by Anne Llewelyn Barstow, and it gave me a brisk eye-opening dope slap.

For example, around 1550, as the witch craze was picking up steam, Europe was being flooded with precious metals stolen from the Native Americans, and serious inflation was driving up the price of everything.  Population now exceeded the stratospheric levels that existed prior to the Black Death, but this time around society wasn’t rescued by major pestilence.  “Overpopulation created a land shortage, followed by the inevitable food shortages, hunger, unemployment, and unrest.” 

The merchant class remained fat and happy, but the 99% suffered in wretched poverty.  “Begging, vagabondage, homelessness, and theft increased; a vast underclass was created.  As the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer, tension between them rose.”  Old ladies and odd people weren’t the cause of the economic turbulence, but they were blamed for it, and burning them provided an effective solution, according to the magical thinking of the day.

With the arrival of the seventeenth century, conditions worsened.  Barstow described a 100 year depression that hit most of Europe.  From the early seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century, Europe was rocked with turbulence, an era that historians have labeled the General Crisis.  It was a time of abundant warfare, political conflicts, religious battles, and intellectual disputes.  Inflation led to rising prices.

The bubonic plague did not walk off the stage in 1350.  Smaller epidemics struck periodically in various widespread regions (life remained rich with filth, rats, and fleas).  English records indicate that the plague returned in 1361, 1363, 1365, 1369, 1371, 1373, 1375, 1378-82, 1390, and 1399-1400; followed by 20 acute epidemics in the fifteenth century, five in the sixteenth, and four in the seventeenth. 

For excitement and variety, Mother Nature also threw in periodic epidemics of typhus, smallpox, malaria, measles, syphilis, and dysentery.  She also thinned the cattle herds.  Rinderpest moved into Europe, and it killed 1.5 million cattle between 1709 and 1714.  During the Inquisition years, rabies spread across Europe, turning numerous canines into vicious mad dogs that aggressively attacked people without provocation, spreading an extremely painful disease that was always fatal.  This led to extermination campaigns, like one in Madrid, in which up to 900 dogs per day were killed.

Throw in a long list of regional famines.  Then add a longer list of regional wars and rebellions, like the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), in which six million died.  It’s easy to see that the Inquisition era was not a time when obese peasants sat on plush couches in air conditioned family rooms, munching on corn chips, guzzling cola-flavored sugar water, playing video games, listening to music, smoking their bong, and texting their friends.

Today, trend watchers understand that collapse is now unfolding before our eyes, as we move beyond the era of cheap and abundant energy.  Time is running out for the world as we know it.  There is not unanimous agreement as to whether our collapse will be slow or catastrophic, because the future remains unknown, as usual.  But most would prefer a kinder and gentler slow collapse.  Viewed from the peak of the Roman Empire, which maintained a functional economy across much of Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa, the Inquisition era can be seen as part of a slow collapse, when centralized control gradually disintegrated into chaos.

The prosperous consumer societies of today are living in a manner that is radically different from the historic norm for civilized people.  Let me say that again, because this is something that most people cannot comprehend — in the 8,000 years of civilization, the normal life for most working people more closely resembled the Inquisition era than how industrial consumers live today.  In his incredible book, A New Green History of the World, Clive Ponting came to the stunning conclusion that prior to 1800 “almost everyone, everywhere in the civilized world, lived on the edge of starvation.”  Only in the last 200 years has a significant portion of humankind temporarily escaped from the traditional (civilized) norm of living in close proximity to poverty and malnutrition.

A 200 year binge on cheap fossil energy has temporarily replaced a muscle-powered way of life.  The temporary era of antibiotics, vaccines, public sanitation, and high-tech medicine has given us a brief vacation from the traditional nightmares of contagious diseases.  The temporary era of chemical-guzzling industrial agriculture had created an obesity epidemic and a catastrophic population explosion.  The temporary era of soil mining, fish mining, water mining, forest mining, and mineral mining has produced a bizarre way of life that is notable for its extreme levels of waste and pollution.  It’s hard to imagine what life in 2100 will look like, but it will bear little resemblance to the “prosperous” societies of 2000.

It is very important to understand that all of the serious crises that confront us today seem to have their roots in the domestication of plants and animals.  Prior to domestication, the wild and free way of life was vastly more functional, despite its defects.  Wild freedom was the norm for almost all of human history — it’s not a theoretical concept that dropped out of a shimmering rainbow cloud of magical thinking.  All of us carry the blood of our wild and free ancestors, and all of our newborns remain wild and free animals for the brief period prior to their plunge into the enculturation process.

Today, we are depressed, obese, unhealthy, and spend the best years of our lives performing robotic work routines in order to acquire trade trinkets that allow us to shop for things we do not need because we have an insatiable hunger for the social status that comes from hoarding vast quantities of frivolous belongings.  We periodically have large yard sales to make space in our basements and garages for piling up even more stuff that we have no real need for.  We believe that endless economic growth is possible, because we believe that technology has unlimited power to convert the living planet into unnecessary consumer products forever.

If there are still people in 2100, who will they consider to be crazier — the consumers or the witch killers?  Yes, the Inquisition may have brutally murdered a few million people, but the consumers have blindsided the health and stability of the entire living planet — the land, the seas, and the atmosphere.

It is as if our entire culture is possessed by an evil spell of self-destruction.  But spells can be broken, and curses can be lifted, if sincere bold efforts are taken, and good luck prevails.  Remember that the Inquisition ended long ago — the evil energy dispersed.  Be aware that there will also be a day when consumer society passes into history, and gets pushed into our skeleton closet of creepy old stories.  There will be a day when the last civilization dies.  One way or another, sooner or later, the craziness will pass, and the Earth will heal.

This may be the only life we ever live, and the evil curse commands that we spend it working, shopping, and being awesomely trendy — a spectacularly meaningless living-death existence — planet-killing Zombie hoarders.  We don’t have to follow the crazy herd.  We don’t have to throw away our lives foolishly obeying the fashionable whims of a crazy peer group.  If our insane society demands that we burn old ladies, or destroy living planets, we don’t have to play the game.  There are better paths.  It’s time to imagine them and pursue them.

Inquisition — Part 2 of 3

Witch Hunting

The Inquisition took a break for the Black Death (1347-1350).  Millions died in the plague — somewhere between one-quarter and three-quarters of Europeans.  For the next hundred years, those who survived enjoyed a number of benefits from the downsizing.  Labor shortages led to higher wages and cheaper rents.  Unused cropland returned to forest and pasture.  Meat and milk became more common in the peasants’ diet, and better nutrition led to better health.  Cities were cleaner and less crowded.  Wildlife populations surged and, unfortunately, so did the human population.  By 1500, Europe was once again overpopulated, undernourished, filthy, diseased, and miserable.

In the aftermath of the plague, the prestige of the Church was weakened.  People noticed that the priests, who had spent a lot of time visiting the sick, died in great numbers.  In other words, God could not be bothered to protect His own officers.  Because of this, many ceased to perceive of God as benevolent, wise, or powerful.  Many lost their faith.

After the plague, as overpopulation returned, the Church directed its attention to witches.  The peak of the Inquisition madness lasted 300 years, from 1450 to 1750.  The Inquisition ranged as far east as India, where Hindus and Muslims were fed to the holy fires.  It also went far west, to New England, where more than 35 were killed, including a five year old girl and a demonic dog.  Overall, estimates of the dead range from 60,000 to ten million, while most scholars say between 100,000 and two million.

Both the Catholics and Protestants engaged in the brutal savagery, believing that confessed witches should be burned — even if the confessions were the result of brutal bloody torture, which they considered to be an appropriate investigative tool.

A turning point came in 1487, when the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was published.  It was written by two Dominican priests, Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, not long after the new printing press technology arrived in Europe.  It was translated into several languages, and outsold all other books except for the Bible.  This book was essentially Witch Burning for Dummies, and it reveals the incredibly deranged mentality of the era.  Prior to this book, the Church murdered men and women in roughly equal numbers.  Once the book was printed, the focus shifted to primarily murdering women.

Witch’s Crimes

According to the Christians, witches committed a number of serious crimes.  They conjured hailstorms, sea tempests, floods, droughts, and lightening.  They caused impotence, sickness, still births, miscarriages, and death.  They were the reason why cows quit giving milk, why trees were fruitless, why wells dried up or soured, and why fields were damaged by winds, disease, or pests.  People were burned as witches for reasons including the following:

·         Smoking tobacco, the devil’s weed. 

·         Being a werewolf (a surprising number burnt for this).

·         Reciting the Lord’s Prayer to an inquisitor, and leaving a word out, or even mispronouncing a word. 

·         Being an unpopular person when sheep died, cattle were barren, crops were damaged by storms, ships sunk, or any other misfortune occurred.

·         Talking to yourself (i.e., talking to the devil).

·         Being a skilled healer — especially a female healer.  Indeed, two prime targets for inquisitors were healing witches and blessing witches.

·         Living in a manner that was “different from the faithful.”  This included people who lived alone, people who didn’t attend mass regularly, retarded or mentally ill people, and people who talked to animals, plants, or themselves.  Especially suspect were those who “cherish some inordinate love or excessive hatred.”

·         Meeting together with others, by day or night, in sheds, barns, remote fields, or woods.  Especially suspect were those who sang, recited verse, or danced.

·         Being a friend, relative, servant, or guest of a suspected witch — or giving gifts to, visiting, or providing shelter to a suspect.

·         Weeping for a beloved friend or relative who was screaming at the top of her lungs while being burned alive.

·         Being a woman and having a “privie marke” (birthmark, scar, mole, etc.) on your lips, buttocks, genitals, or under your arms or hair.  The inquisitor Reginald Scot noted that the discovery of these marks was “a presumption sufficient for the judge to proceed and give sentence of death upon her.” 

Witch Finding

Witch finding became a profitable profession.  Skilled men wandered from town to town exposing suspected heretics.  Some of these witch finders were called common prickers.  They drove long needles into suspected witches and watched for blood to emerge.  If there was no blood, this was proof of heresy, and the suspect was burned. 

Other witch-finders exposed heretics by swimming them.  Suspects were tied up, wrapped in a large sheet, and put into deep water.  If they sank, their friends and relatives had the poor consolation that the drowned woman was innocent.  If they were carefully laid on the water, they usually floated (the wrappings contained enough buoyant air).  Floating was certain and indisputable evidence of heresy, and floaters were burned.

Once women came under the suspicion of being witches, their lives became hell.  One story tells of two old grandmother types who were thus suspected.  They went to a herring market and ordered fish.  When the shopkeeper refused to serve them, one of the ladies gave him a piece of her mind.  Shortly after, the daughter of the herring dealer died — proof of a witch’s curse — and two old ladies burned.

In another case a little girl had repeated neurotic experiences and blamed these on an old neighbor lady.  Her father grabbed the old lady, stuck her with pins to see if she bled, and pulled out a chunk of her hair to use as a charm.  For some reason, the old lady cursed him.  Fifteen months later the girl died — proof of witchcraft.  The old lady was burned, along with her husband and daughter.

The more witches that were burned, the more they found to burn.  In the rural township of Piedmont, France, every family had lost at least one member to the witch finders.  The Inquisition became a major industry, with the victim’s assets being seized and split up between the judges, priests, scribes, guards, physicians, and torturers.  Innkeepers became wealthy providing lodging to the surging crowds of execution spectators.  Workaholic executioners wore the finest clothing and glittered with gold and silver ornaments.

Old women were the primary targets.  During one period, zero woman over 40 remained alive in some regions of Germany’s Rhineland.  People of both sexes, all professions, and all social classes were burned.  The poor, the unwell, the simple, and the mentally ill had the most to fear.  In some places the fear got so big that poorer women prayed that they would not live to grow old. 

With time people became wary of talking to one another.  Even boys from wealthy and noble families were burned.  Nobody was immune from the holy savagery.  Nobody was safe to talk to.  If someone was arrested, tortured, and commanded to identify their demonic accomplices, they would likely name their friends — the first names to come to mind. 

The Holy Process

If you were named by a friend who was out of her mind with excruciating pain, because she was being burned with a red-hot iron by her parish priest in the church basement, you were promptly arrested, and brought in for questioning.

Questions included:  When did you become a witch?  Why did you become a witch?  If you refused to answer these loaded questions you were displaying the well-known demonic trait of taciturnity.  If you displayed taciturnity you were promptly taken to the torture chamber, to loosen up your wicked tongue. 

Torture took a number of forms, and all were brutal, violent, and painful.  It was common to die while being tortured.  The torture continued until you confessed or died.  There were no limits to how cruelly or how frequently the priests could torture you — they were free to do whatever they wanted.  It was OK to viciously torture you 20 times — cut you, burn you, break your bones, rip out your fingernails — as befitted the mood of the day.

So, let’s say that you were named by a friend, brought in for questioning, survived the torture, and confessed.  You would then be taken back to the interrogation room and asked to confess once again, without torture, so that this confession would be “freely” given, without coercion.  If you refused to make a free confession then you were taken back to the torture chamber for another round of unbearable pain.

Once having made a “free” confession you were handed over to the courts.  In some cases, the authorities would not even inform you of the charges against you.  Generally you were charged with impossible acts like flying on a broom to a witch’s gathering and having sex with demons.  You were presumed to be guilty and the burden was on you to prove your innocence.  The names of your accusers were often kept secret.  Trials were not open to the public. 

Unlike ordinary civil law, the prosecutors of the Inquisition accepted testimony from anyone — even children, felons, mortal enemies, and notorious liars.  Bizarre hearsay and outrageous rumors were gladly accepted as valid evidence.  You could not bring in witnesses to offer testimony about your good character.  In fact anyone who spoke in your defense was assumed to be an accomplice in evil.

Judges were interested in two things only — your confession of guilt and the names of your accomplices.  Nobody was ever found to be not guilty.  At best, and rarely, the court would find that the charges were “not proven” — which left the door open for another round of the game later.  Essentially, everyone accused was found guilty.  The lucky ones were mercifully strangled before being burned.  The less lucky ones were burned alive.  The least lucky were sent to miserable, filthy, verminous dungeons for a slower version of death.

For centuries the skies of Europe were darkened by the smoke of burning witches.  The Inquisition was run by the most educated, most Christian, most respectable people of the era.  They apparently believed that decent society was in immanent threat of overthrow by subversive forces — who were mostly harmless old ladies, mental cases, and eccentric folks.  Or was it simply mass hysteria?  The reign of terror was enthusiastically promoted by both church and state.

After years and years of exposure to the murderous madness, children were brainwashed into believing that the Inquisition’s portrait of diabolical witchcraft was real.  Adults were terrified to utter a single peep of protest.  With the passage of generations the belief that little old ladies flew off on brooms to have sex with demons became an accepted and unquestionable “truth.”

The Inquisition was a war on heresy, to reinforce the power of an entrenched plutocracy.  Having an official enemy to fear and hate diverted attention away from the lavish lifestyles of the elite, and the misery of daily life in medieval times.  Was this a cleverly-planned strategy of domination, or was it simply an unconscious outburst of collective bad craziness?

Today, the highly-educated leaders of prosperous industrial nations are united in a loud chant: “More growth!  More growth!  More growth!” — as the human juggernaut races past countless flashing warning signs towards the edge of the cliff.  Bad craziness often seems to be civilization’s shadow. 

Continued…

 

Barstow, Anne Llewelyn, Witchcraze, Pandora, San Francisco, 1994.

Kramer, Henry and Sprenger, James, Malleus Maleficarum (1487).

Lea, Henry Charles, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887), abridged by Margaret Nicholson, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1961.

Mackay, Charles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Vol. II  (1841), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1932.

Robbins, Rossel Hope, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, Crown Publishers, NY, 1959.

Inquisition — Part 1 of 3

This is the first of three blogs on the Inquisition, which occurred during an era of corruption, plutocracy, overpopulation, homelessness, crime, health crises, and economic breakdown.  During periods of heightened social stress, there seems to be a tendency to create scapegoats and lash out at them.  Pressurized fear and anger need a relief valve, and when mass hysteria arrives, reason and compassion go out the window.

Hitler stomped the Jews, the Rwandan Hutus stomped the Tutsis, and in the twenty-first century, I sense that immigrants are becoming the preferred scapegoats in America, Europe, and elsewhere.  Today, we have no quick and easy solutions for overpopulation, Peak Cheap Energy, or a global economy that is terminally ill.  The pressure is growing.

Wealth & Corruption

The Inquisition had two phases, separated by the Black Death.  In the first phase, heretics were the primary targets.  In the second phase, it was mostly witches.  The official kickoff began in 829, when the Council of Paris fearfully announced that the whole country was swarming with enchanters, prophets, gonfaloniers, sibyls, poisoners, diviners, and necromancers.  The council issued a decree that all of these satanic forces should be punished without mercy.  Despite these threatening pronouncements, not much happened at first.

Trouble intensified in the mid-eleventh century, when the Catholic Church officially began requiring the priesthood to remain celibate, which separated them from the people.  This created two classes: shepherds and sheep.  Henry Charles Lea wrote that the church became exceedingly corrupt, and it attracted large numbers of “worldly, ambitious, self-seeking, and licentious men.”  Most priests had at least one concubine, few were truly celibate.  They made fortunes by fleecing their flocks.  Lea said that abbeys often “became centers of corruption and disturbance, the nunneries scarce better than houses of prostitution, and the monasteries feudal castles where the monks lived riotously and waged war upon their neighbors….”  

Many thousands of Catholics abandoned their religion because it had become obscenely corrupt.  They joined other spiritual movements.  Two of the most popular alternatives were the Waldenses (Poor Men of Lyons), and the Albigenses (Cathars).  At their peak, these two groups were more popular than the Catholic Church in southern France, northern Italy, and northern Spain.  Some scholars claim that these groups were vestigial survivors of the original Jesus movement — older than the Catholic Church.  In 1184, Pope Lucius III declared both groups to be heretical.  In 1209, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against them — their existence could not be tolerated.

Waldenses

The founder of the Waldenses was Peter Waldo, a rich merchant from Lyons, France.  In 1175 a preacher instructed him to give his belongings to the poor and follow the teachings of Jesus.  So he did.  Waldo became a begging teacher and quickly had a large following.  At a time when the Catholic Church was rotten with riches, Waldo taught that apostolic poverty (voluntary simplicity) was the way to perfection.  The pope did not allow lay people, like Waldo, to teach.  But he did.

The Waldenses’ big offense was making Bible scriptures available to ordinary people.  In the Catholic Church the scriptures were written in Latin, and only clerics could read them.  The Waldenses translated the scriptures into the local languages, and laboriously duplicated them by hand, with pen and ink.  Many also committed large portions of the scriptures to memory. 

In this era, it was common for successful people to donate their property and treasure to the Church when they died.  As the centuries passed, the Church amassed huge amounts of land and riches.  Popes lived lavish lives of phenomenal luxury in massive palaces.  Many members of the clergy lived in great affluence.  Arnold of Brescia was a renegade cleric who taught that the clergy should give away all property and power, and live as beggars — in order to be authentic disciples.  Pope Innocent II didn’t care for this teaching, and in 1130 he excommunicated and banished Arnold.  Two hundred years later, the Church officially banned anyone from teaching that Jesus and his apostles lived a life of poverty.

Well, if you couldn’t read the Bible, you couldn’t know that the Church was wrong.  When the Waldenses gave common people access to the scriptures, they could readily perceive the Church’s profound deceit and hypocrisy.  The story about Jesus and the rich man is not the slightest bit fuzzy or ambiguous.  “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” he said.  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”  Can you understand that?

With access to the scriptures, ordinary folks soon saw that few Church officials were living in accordance with the teachings of the Bible.  Meanwhile, the Church was extremely faithful about eagerly collecting tithes and fees from everyone, at every opportunity.  This made folks angry.

Waldenses regularly disputed the false teachings of the priests, and embarrassed them by accurately quoting the scriptures in the Bible.  This made the Church patriarchs hopping mad, and eager to burn them all.  The Waldenses grew quickly and spread.  Their goal was to illuminate the masses, and cleanse Christendom of its entrenched exploitation, thievery, lies, and corruption.

In a nutshell, the Waldenses believed that people should interact directly with God — no clerical intermediary was needed — prayers spoken in a stable were as effective as prayers said in a great cathedral.  They did not see the Pope as being the supreme leader of Christendom.  They detested indulgences — paying money to priests to have sins forgiven.  They didn’t believe that prayers could inspire the salvation of those already dead.  They allowed women to be teachers.

Even their enemies said that the Waldenses were pious, virtuous, and peaceful — they authentically walked their talk.  Their crime was that they wouldn’t dance to the pope’s music, and the Church persecuted and exterminated them.  Many Waldenses, when offered the opportunity to return to the Catholic fold, preferred prison or death.

Albigenses

The Albigenses similarly lived simple lives of voluntary poverty, and rejected the authority of the Catholic Church.  They were pacifists who believed in celibacy (even between husband and wife), and they shunned foods related to sexual reproduction — eggs, cheese, milk, and meat.  They baptized by laying on hands, instead of using water.  God and Satan were equal in power — God ran the spiritual business in heaven, and Satan ran the evil business on Earth.  They did not accept the Old Testament as a sacred text.  They translated the New Testament books, and made these scriptures available to common people.  They were hard working folks who always treated others with kindness, honesty, and fairness. 

The Albigenses were extraordinarily pious and morally rigorous.  All they wanted was to be left alone, to worship as they pleased.  The Catholic Church was close to disappearing in southern France, because of large-scale abandonment.  To re-conquer this region, the pope launched the Albigensian Crusades in 1209.  The invasion lasted more than 20 years, and hundreds of thousands died. 

The local Catholics joined the Albigenses in resisting the pope’s invaders.  In July 1209 the crusaders came to Béziers and demanded that the Albigenses be turned over to them.  The request was refused.  The city was invaded and burned down.  Everyone was exterminated — man, woman, and child.  When the head crusader was asked if the Catholics should be spared, he spoke the famous response: “Kill them all!  God will recognize His own.”  Up to 20,000 were exterminated that day — about 200 were Albigenses and the rest were Catholics, according to some sources.  Four years later, in 1213, the crusaders exterminated 20,000 people in Garonne.  In 1218 another 5,000 were killed in Marmande.  There were many other massacres in this crusade.

The Waldenses and Albigenses suffered mass extermination because they questioned authority, because they would not submit to authority, and because they would not hand their hard-earned money over to an authority that they considered to be corrupt.  These exterminations were not isolated events.  Many groups of non-conformist Christians were crushed in the history of Christendom, and countless people perished.

For example, on August 24, 1572 the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre took place.  This time, the victims were Huguenots — French Protestants.  Estimates of the dead range as high as 100,000.  The nation’s rivers were filled with corpses.  This massacre has been cited as a major reason why the US Constitution includes the right to own guns — so citizens could protect themselves from fanatical religions.  Many early American colonists were Protestants fleeing from the tyranny of the Vatican (but most of these escapees then turned around and violently tyrannized the indigenous Native American inhabitants). 

Continued…