I watched a deer die this week. It took about ninety seconds, which is a lot longer than I hope for, and the deer fought hard to live. The shock, pain and fear it was experiencing as it struggled against the death spreading from the bullet wound in its chest was not pleasant to watch, but I didn’t turn away.
That was Thursday.
On Wednesday, the Archdruid releases his regular post, and this week he clarified his thoughts on a rising ecological sensibility. I found this paragraph to be particularly resonant:
It’s one thing to proclaim salvation from nature, history, and the human condition to those who want that salvation but no longer believe that the ideology you’re offering can provide it. It’s quite another to [proclaim salvation] to people who no longer want the salvation you’re offering—people for whom nature, history, and the human condition aren’t a trap to escape, as they have been for most people in the western world for the last two millennia, but a reality to embrace in delight and wonder.
This quote draws heavily on a topic Greer has been exploring recently, the Civil Religion of Progress, in which, he argues, Progress has pretty much been swapped point-for-point for God in the Judeo-Christian framework.I think the Archdruid is one of the most interesting synthesizers out there, so I would love it if you would add him to your reading list. Go back to the beginning and read forward. Or, since his blog is essentially the rough draft for his books, go the library and start reading with The Long Descent. Follow that with The Ecotechnic Future and The Wealth of Nature. I also very much enjoyed Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth.
If I can paraphrase—Life is Hard. It is uncertain: you never know when your crops will fail, your company will downsize, or the river will flood. There is interpersonal pain: first as a child, then as a teenager going through high school, then trying to find your way as an adult, then coping with the realities of adult and romantic relationships, then death of friends, family and yourself. There is lots of hard work: school and training, the grind in the fields or the office, the maintenance of hearth and home, cooking and cleaning. You will encounter a lot of stress, anxiety and pain.
So step right up. Who wants salvation?!? We got a lovely god promising eternal life in heaven, reunited with your loved ones and with not a scrap of work to do. We got machines that will eliminate toil and kitchens that will clean themselves and food heated with just the press of a button. We got rocketships to take us off this damn dustball.
And especially, if you are sick or dying or aching with worry for a loved one, we have God’s Plan, or modern medicine, and funeral homes so you don’t need to touch the dead, and hearses so you don’t need to carry the weight of the casket, and backhoes to dump the dirt back in the hole.
So, the goals are the same—salvation from pain and toil—but the ideologies used to achieve those goals are different, theism or progress.
But what if you don’t want to be saved from pain and toil? What if you don’t want to escape the human condition?Please preemptively note I do not consider the human condition to require living in a cave without antibiotics and dying by the age of 40, as some worshippers of the Religion of Progress may suspect.
I have come to think the desire for salvation from toil is a very big problem. Instead, I am trying to learn to love the work of providing for myself and my family. I don’t mean going to an office and making money to pay someone to do everything for me, I mean growing the food for our table, grinding the grains and baking the bread, brewing the cider. It is repetitive and difficult and capricious, but it feels very real.
Regarding salvation from pain, I have been influenced by Stephen Jenkinson, another wise, bearded man. From The Star:
Formerly a director of children’s grief and palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Family and Community Medicine, Jenkinson now makes a living running workshops on care of the dying, dealing with grief, and what he calls deep living.
“Death isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you do. You get to choose the manner in which you die: the quality of it, the nature of it.”
The National Film Board produced a film about Jenkinson, Griefwalker, which we watched at one of his talks. I don’t remember the film well, as it was sandwiched between several hours of mind-blowing oratory about death and the meaning of words. You can watch it on the NFB website.
And that brings me back to the deer. As Jenkinson says, “We don’t have to like death, who would? But we do have to befriend it.”If Jenkinson is interesting to you, here is a nice short video of him talking about the meaning of death.
I think there is meaning in killing what you eat. Our rabbit tastes all the richer stewed with the difficulty of taking their lives. It is not just the flavour of meat and vegetables, it tastes like connection to the ecosphere. It tastes like I am a little closer to knowing my position on the food chain.
So that deer had the worst two minutes of its life in front of me. Then I helped gut it, and a couple of days later we skinned it and butchered it into various cuts for freezing. But that night we ate the tenderloin, which is cut from inside the haunches, alongside the spine. Carmen pan-roasted it in cast iron, then cut it into medallions and served it with a sauce of jus and chantrelle mushrooms, which came from the same forest as the deer, abundant after the recent rain.
My eyes welled up as I took the first bite. I believe our world would be healthier if we saw ourselves as part of nature, not above it—but abstract thoughts like that are made up of many little specifics, and I felt bad for taking that deer’s life.
I felt bad. I hurt—but I don’t need saving from the human condition.
[…] I Don’t Want Salvation riffs on hunting for deer, the Civil Religion of Progress being explored by John Michael Greer, and befriending death à la Stephen Jenkinson. […]
[…] tastiness in our back yard, but that is how it sometimes must be. I have written a bit about this before, and I frequently struggle to put my feelings into […]
very good article. well thought and writ. thank you. in reply to the last line: “I felt bad. I hurt—but I don’t need saving from the human condition.” — i shall quote stephen jenkinson: “don’t feel bad… feel more.” — said to us orphan wisdom scholars one cold, rainy, meaning-full living day on his farm in canada.
Thank you for reading this, and commenting, Shana.
That deer might’ve had a hard death, but it probably had a much better life and death than most factory-farmed livestock. As well as being healthier, too.
It is an interesting philosophical question James. Is life “better” if you are a farm animal that gets fresh grain and a head scratch every morning, but is kept fenced? Or is it better to be a free deer, always on the lookout for predators? It may die sooner, but it lives a life that is very real.
I have just been reading Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, which is fantastic. He repeats how many billions of iterative tests nature has made, compared to our few hundred or few dozen. I have been toying with the political description of Evolutionary Conservative—when in doubt, do it the way nature figured out. There is something that feels solid to me, about simply accepting my place in the community of beings, even though it can be hard and sad.
But I think you are right, factory farming is no way to treat animals.
I was alluding to the horrific example of factory farming, which seem to use Auschwitz or Buchenwald as their model. I’ve heard of smaller farmers who’ve felt that the animals they’re raising should have only one bad day in their lives–their last one, but the conditions prior to that should be as humane as possible.
But your point of more humane livestock raising is interesting, although I’d see it as more of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Since livestock is raised primarily for harvest and consumption, I’d somehow doubt it would really compare to venison. We’d have to keep in mind that livestock has been domesticated for out use; I’d rather not expect that most farm animals would survive in the wild for very long, as opposed to wild life that nature selects for survival.
Just keep in mind I’m trying to be concise, not argumentative.
No, I think I got exactly where you were coming from—which is why I thought you might enjoy a little philosophizing… 🙂
A data point from factory farms: Here in British Columbia a few years ago the government tightened up slaughter regulations for “food safety”. As a result, some small producers quit. They couldn’t afford the new standards, and didn’t believe in the new standards.
In one case, the farmers would kill one animal per day, completely cleaning the slaughter area between animals in order to remove distress in their animals. They quit raising animals entirely, because if they had to have someone else kill them, they would rather not do it at all.
The new regulations are an improvement I guess, like waterboarding is not torture.
This is a great article, thank you for sharing this story and the insights it inspired.
It reminds me of a similar experience I had (with a slightly less dramatic animal) which lead to similar lines of thought. Thoughts which I would like to share with you, if you are interested:
http://www.themodernnatural.com/2009/12/clam-and-muder.html
Have a great day!
-J
Thanks for sharing your post, Joby and adding to the conversation. I enjoyed looking though your site, and was interested to see your earthbag work. I have been thinking of making an earthbag root cellar in our crawlspace and I didn’t know the tubes came in a huge roll. I’ll ask around our local green builders.
Cheers,
Ruben.
Writing about killing the deer touched me and helped me understand hunting for food and even reconcile with the idea. I witnessed several times chicken, ducks and rabbits being slaughtered on the farm when I was very young and I always found it very disturbing.
Without hunting the first humans might not have survived the harsh conditions. First nations are usually thank the animal for giving up his life when he is killed. Eating meat was necessary. Today we have more options and we can choose.
But at least today, I feel as if a bit of the anguish I felt when an animal was slaughtered has been……….feels less heavy….
I understand a bit more….
Thank you for sharing your experience on that difficult subject.
Thank you for commenting Lindda, and especially on this post.
I still find the death throes of animals to be very disturbing. By the end of rabbit slaughter day we are emotionally drained. My whole focus goes to reducing their suffering to the shortest time possible.
And I spend years as a vegetarian, because I couldn’t get meat from animals that had lived well. But, as my view of the complex interrelationships of our ecosystem has grown, I now think animals are critical to the health of our biosphere. And that means I have to do my part in that relationship, as hard as it is.
This is a wise and beautiful post. I read most of it earlier but on the mobile, did not get around to commenting. I so totally agree, I have not learned to hunt deer yet, and am not likely to do so. But it is more because I don’t have good aim than because I would not want to. I do take pride in satisfaction in my ability to kill and butcher my own chickens. Even the feet get used.
I fully admit to wanting to avoid the harsh labor that is life. I am trying to learn to embrace it. However, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I disagree with the sentiment that salvation is only seeking for absolution from labor. We believe that we must each be self sufficient (in both temporal and spiritual ways) and that is why we have a lay priesthood. No one is paid to preach or serve, we all do it because we want to, or because it is the right thing to do. We also believe that the after life is a time of progression and work, there will be no basking in ethereal glory, striving to have to opportunity to become like God and continue a perpetual process.
Thanks for reading this Sarah, and for offering your thoughts.
The Mormons are certainly known for hard work, so if you want salvation from labour, you are in the wrong church. 🙂
But in my post I talked about salvation from toil and pain, and I wonder if the thought of a time without pain resonates for you?
Of course, I would love to have a life without pain, even as I know how boring that would be. But my worldview, and the experience I was trying to share, is closer to the Buddhist stereotype—Life is Suffering.
I think the sensibility Greer is talking about is one of learning to love the suffering, and to accept it as an inseparable part of being human. We might as well ask birds to not fly and fish to not swim as ask humans to not hurt.
But, on the other hand, Byron Katie asks an interesting question for both of us: Who would you be if you didn’t have that belief?
This is a great post about how embedded we are in the ecosystem of the planet, but also within our local systems. I don’t know of a single time I’ve watched someone well-up when eating a steak at a restaurant, but the difference between taking an animal’s life for food and eating an animal that someone else raised and killed (and cleaned and cured and butchered) is one of connecting action with consequence. I think everyone should have to bear witness to and be part of the creation of their food – be that a carrot from your garden or a chicken breast. Good on you for taking responsibility for what you eat – I think more people should do it.
Thanks Tom. I went vegetarian for many years because I grew up eating animals I knew, and when I moved out I didn’t want to eat mass-produced meat. I think animals are critical to healthy ecosystems, and so I think thoughtful meat-eating is often better for the ecosphere than vegetarianism. But, this step into participating in the hunting is a big one for me. One of these days I will have to write about the rabbits, too.