Return to the State of Nature - Arts, Culture and Heritage

Many years ago, I lived down in the Mackenzie Delta, wearing the hat of a small town journalist, with the coolest job in the world, publishing a bilingual newspaper serving the Inuvialuit villages of the Western Arctic, with half the page in English and the other half in Inuvialuktun, trying to balance two worlds, two traditions, at a fascinating but uneasy crossroads. By day I was a journalist, but by night I was fast becoming an amateur historian, learning as much about the grand sweep of northern history so I would understand the issues of the day with greater depth and clarity.

In the course of being a journalist, from time to time I would report on what might be viewed by political elites as bad news, the kind they hoped might never be written – stories of local corruption, land claims money wrongly spent, placed into the pockets of a few board members and not the people for whom it was meant. The more I read and the more I learned, though, the more I came to understand that these setbacks were temporary, that these early scandals in the post-land claim era appear to be a common growing pain across the entire North, and reflect a common vulnerability for all societies new to capitalism, where democracy and accountability have yet to mature, so when the windfall comes, temptation soon follows, and before you know it corruption sets in. But if you wait around long enough, that corruption is eventually unmasked, as newer, wiser leaders step up to fix what's broken, to reboot a system that is not irreparably damaged, but merely off course.

This happened in Alaska in those first post-land claim days, and sadly recurred in the Mackenzie Delta after its claim was settled in the mid 1980s, and followed in turn to Nunavut and Nunavik further east. It’s not that the North is inherently corrupt; in fact, it is one of the most honest, wholesome places on the Earth, a place with no secrets. It’s just that the rapid introduction of capitalism and with it economic modernization, in a culture where subsistence reigned supreme for untold millennia, is at heart a traumatic change to undertake in a single generation. Heck, on Wall Street, the ground zero of modern capitalism, two centuries of experience has not yet been enough to purge the system of a recurring greed that rises up anew each generation, resulting in a crisis of trust and confidence in the system itself.

Indeed it was not much more than a year ago that we all appeared to be poised at the very edge of a global systemic collapse on a scale comparable to that which destroyed world communism. Only one generation later and nearly on the eve of the Berlin Wall’s remarkable fall, the globalizing system of world capitalism nearly imploded, taking with it the wealth of an entire generation. This, in the very nerve center of our global economy, where a deep and festering fraud set in, exacerbated by the complacency of regulators and fueled by the greed not just of the elites but those who aspired to join them. It will be some time before the mess that we created is sorted out, and while the crisis seems to have subsided, a total collapse of a system that is rooted ultimately in fallible humanity seems to be inevitable, some day. Few systems endure so long; even the template of endurance, the Roman Empire, would prove to be as mortal as the rest, collapsing in the end after a millennium of rule.

So what does this mean for us? First, it means that when we watch capitalism, modernization, and globalization take root in the Far North we should not forget how new modernity itself is here, how young remains the very presence of the modern state. It was not that long ago that the Age of Empire brought Europeans to the North, from both the East and from the West. It was not that long ago that colonization quietly surrendered to self-government of a sort, albeit one from afar; that Alaska ceased to be Russian and Canada ceased to be British, all within a single day in 1867. Fast forward only a century and we see territorial status give way on our side to a state, and on the Canadian side to a process of northern balkanization resulting in three distinct territories north of sixty, one overwhelmingly non-Native, but still partly indigenous; one about half non-indigenous and half indigenous; and the newest, Nunavut, still 95 percent indigenous: three snapshots of northern demographic evolution, one taken after the Klondike gold rush; one taken after World War II; and one taken just a decade ago.

Each has had its own unique relationship with the southern world, its own level of economic integration and modernization. And each retains its own connection with its indigenous past, to varying degrees. Each, as well, has experienced the land claims process, the shift of investment capital to new Native elites, that first generation of growing pains before the new system takes root, and in the end, a new balance between the forces of tradition and modernization.

But just as the modernity of land claims eventually affected the entire Arctic rim of North America, the persistence of indigenous subsistence also unites the Far North. And it is this endurance that I believe is the greatest lesson the North can teach the South. When the world economic order looked like it was on the edge of an abyss, as if a great depression might once again restore poverty to the most modern of the world’s nations, as retirement nest eggs evaporated, housing prices collapsed, and banks collapsed like dominos, nearly taking the world economic order with it, the places that proved most resilient were those where subsistence economics, subsistence values, subsistence culture, remained. And some newly modernizing corners of the North, like the island-state of Iceland, saw their new and shiny modern economies collapse entirely, realizing at the end that their humble yet self-sufficient roots as fishermen were what would get them through their cascading economic collapse, as their currency quickly became worthless, their stock market a field of dreams that in the end did not come true.

Their banks went under, taking into oblivion the investments of countless millions, from not just Iceland’s 300,000 citizens, but from many more citizens of the UK and mainland Europe, drawn to the icy waters by high (and in the end unsustainable) interest rates. The shiny office towers, not so different from those that sprouted up in Anchorage or Inuvik or Yellowknife with new land claims money, emptied out, the fishing boats were once again full, and subsistence proved to be Iceland’s constant, its connection to a more natural temporal flow.

Sometimes the villages of the Far North are called a “Fourth World” and the lack of cash economies perceived to be a failure in economic development. But the absence of a vibrant cash economy masks the presence of something more enduring, a subsistence economy well suited to the land, one that is self-sufficient, whose values tie humanity to the land from which we evolved, and upon which we still depend. The hunters and the trappers of the world possess a wealth and a power that investment bankers and hedge fund managers will never know, something enduring, something spiritual, something that is more essentially human than any modern artifice. The same is true of fishermen and farmers, who live on a more harmonious plain. Many post-apocalyptic and sci-fi stories speculate that the future world, after a great calamity, whether by alien invasion or some Armageddon-like event induced by fallible man, will be one where subsistence once again is essential, whether the surviving humans waging war against the machines as in the Terminator saga, or in another more recent James Cameron tale, the idyllic people of Pandora, the Na’vi, who are hunters still, and who live in perfect harmony.

Their collision with modern, corporatized, invading humanity, while simplified for the sake of the big screen, captures an essential truth: that there is much of beauty worth preserving in the traditional life, a beauty we can still find here, amongst ourselves. And that much of our modern world, for all its many advantages, should never entirely replace that which came before. Just as there is wisdom in the elders and their stories, there is something sacred in the values that they’ve carried across history to us. Even as we continue on the path of modernization, we should therefore maintain our connection not only with the past, but with the land in its most natural form – something we in the North can still do with relative ease, the footprint of modernity being still just a tiny part of our world.

II.

During the last few years, I published what started out as a trilogy on how the Arctic has transformed and modernized, as the two worlds collided: the modern, globalizing world, and the traditional, indigenous world. Along the Arctic coastal plain, and Canada’s high northern archipelago, this collision of modernity and tradition has been one of the final chapters in the expansion of the modern state, a half-millennium journey of which we get a front row seat to the final chapter. The expansion started out brutal, a conquest by war and later treaty, an imposition of alien values, and the oppression of memory and language. But as time flowed, the conquest shifted in style and tone, as culture, language, and identity began to mix into something new. What was once European became Americanized, and what was now American began to modernize and mature, growing confident in itself and becoming more sensitive to its many distinct voices, past and present. While the journey is ongoing, and my trilogy completed, I realized I left one piece of the puzzle unexamined.

That piece is really a story of philosophy: that commonly referred to as the “state of nature.” When philosophy re-emerged during the Renaissance amidst a fractious but increasingly secular chaos, and medievalism surrendered to the rise of the modern state, many grappled with the fundamental question of humanity: what is our fundamental nature? Men like Hobbes feared the worst, while Locke and Rousseau hoped for the best. Even now, echoes of their ideas play out in the TV show Lost, where characters named for history’s greatest state of nature theorists are thrust onto a tropical island not unlike that explored by Huxley in his final novel, or more darkly by Wells on his lost island where Dr. Moreau darkly reversed evolution in order to unmask the human soul. Which island are we on? One of darkness and despair, or one of light – or a bittersweet mix of the two?

We of the North, newcomers and oldtimers alike, have a special insight into these essential questions of humanity’s essence. We are closer to nature, inspired by its presence, humbled by its power, and blessed by a remarkable mixture of peoples, some whose roots to this land date back millennia, others like myself still newcomers, still in awe that so special a place can exist. So in my newest book project, I’m revisiting these classic works that address the riddle of the state of nature, wondering if a mix of philosophy, and fiction, and traditional myth and legend, might shed some light on who we are, and where we’re from – and more importantly, where we might be going.

My new work dives into the ambiguous and haunting imaginations of philosophers of the state of nature, that allegorical, proto-historical realm of pre-history that describes mankind before the erection of political artifice. Even the classical era’s city-states, as fractious as they were in their constant state of war with their neighbors, are well beyond the primitivist world that these guys were trying to conjure up. Hobbes’ massive tome Leviathan has become an archetype for the darkest view of man, though only one chapter in his million-word, four-part tome is widely read, and one sentence quoted (and misquoted), the one that describes life in nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” if my memory serves me still.

When I went north in 1988 for what I had imagined would be a short motorcycle journey to the end of the road, I found that life truly began where the road came to its own gravelly conclusion. I had until then been imprisoned by the hive constructed two and a half millennia earlier by Aristotle, the Academy, actually Plato’s invention, placed outside the city gates to prevent the demos from lynching any more of its high faculty as they did poor Socrates, who practiced his new art of philosophy in the marketplace of Athens, royally pissing off the men of wealth who felt impoverished by his constant questioning. So they killed him, and in response Plato exiled the Academy, for its own protection. Then came Aristotle, Plato’s best student who strived to outsmart his teacher and create the very philosopher king that Plato had imagined but tragically failed to nurture in Sicily, nearly dying in the process. Aristotle founded his own competing institution of learning, the Lyceum, which he opened in Athens after returning from his own exile to the Macedonian court, which now ruled over Greece as its hegemon. There, Aristotle had tutored and unleashed upon the world his most infamous student, Alexander, who went on to swiftly impose regime change upon Persia, breaking the back of its empire and usurping its King, hoping to export not democracy per se but Hellenistic values to the entire world, but which, upon his untimely death, instead planted the seeds of lasting chaos, and even more so than Herodotus or Xenophon, poisoning relations between East and West.

My issue with Aristotle was not his bold ambition to unleash upon the world a grand vision of unification as practiced by Alexander. Indeed, had Alexander lived he would likely have conquered India, and from there, China, so in the end, one vast, ethnically intermixed and rebalanced society would remain, as old and new co-mingled: One world, one empire forged of so many peoples, a world with no more war. Maybe not so bad an idea? But after Aristotle unleashed Alexander, he came back to Athens to open his Lyceum, where he put pen to paper just the way I like, writing in longhand all of his great works, in essence creating the superstructure of the modern academic world to perpetuate his new intellectual order, an edifice of ideas and observations as grand as Alexander’s military conquests. But what resulted was as vast a bureaucracy, a realm where administrators rule, and where ideas reify into a bureaucracy that replicates the polis in its conquest of nature.

Blame it on Aristotle. He not only sought to have his pupil conquer the world. He sought to systematize all knowledge, and did a remarkable job when you consider this was only the third generation since the very birth of philosophy. But his legacy has been oppressive, as knowledge, meant by Socrates to illuminate, became transformed into a tool that crushes the very spirit of mankind, and rids it of all natural instinct. So when I came North, I was in search of a world still free, not subdivided by academic disciplines and its many morsels of disaggregated knowledge or its institutional resistance to cross-pollination across disciplines, its impulse to crush contrary views that did not conform to party line and which threatened to upend this new artificial order.

And so I headed north, to the end of the road, thinking it might be refreshing to see the last frontier. What I did not anticipate was that the frontier itself was an interface between ages and cultures, that where the road ended, a pre-existing world re-emerged, one that is still with us, one beyond the road’s end, beyond our own divisions, beyond Aristotle’s superimposed vision that presumes the known world defines the whole world, when it is the world unknown that we should aspire to know. Alaska is like that, a special blend of known and unknown, a realm where roads are still the exception. It has a tiny road network around which is clustered a world familiar to anyone from Outside, with its same Starbucks and Fast Food, the same McCulture that has replaced Alexander’s vision with its own world conquest. Alaska is blessed to remain mostly unpaved, where roadways seem to give up without a fight, and surrender to the predominance of nature, with the exception perhaps of the Alcan which the necessity of war precipitated, enabling one major push across fifteen hundred miles of taiga and bog, forever binding here with the there of the Outside. One long, thin line, like a slender intravenous tube connecting us to the machine that keeps us on life support, unable to survive on our own.

If only we had the courage to cut that line. To cross into the realm where there are no roads, where no roads are wanted, nor needed. That world is our state of nature, the world that has been here long before we even knew there was a here to come to. A world as God imagined it, a promised land as innocent and pure as He conceived it. Not without heartbreak or tragedy or malice, no Rousseauian paradise. A rough and tumble and cold and forbidding land, one that is harsh but is also full of beauty and grace.

When I first came North, I put pen to paper to describe the world that re-appeared as the road ended, a world I felt more intuitively at home in than any place else the road interlinked, any place else I had ever been. When the road disappeared, replaced by river and lake, I could breathe deeply, for the first time, knowing the air that I inhaled was my first taste of nature’s purity. Though I put pen to paper for the first time twenty years ago this week, the words I wrote, my first impression, my first taste of freedom and my first intuition of the state of nature, were my most insightful observations, as if my eyes had opened for the very first time ever. I met the editors of a now defunct magazine called Dannzha, which aspired to be a Tundra Times for the Yukon but which was doomed by a lack of funds and a tiny market to a short life. But in its brief reign, it gave me my first opportunity to publish my thoughts twenty years ago this week (April 1, 1990), with no editorial constraints. I was free to write what I truly saw for the very first time. Here’s how it began:

In October of 1988, I hopped on a small, cherry red Honda Rebel 250 motorcycle, and rode up the ALCAN to Alaska. I stopped in the Yukon and NWT, discovering a unique world that reminded me of my own heritage – as a Jew, a wandering Jew in a strange and in so many ways foreign land. I found the Aboriginal peoples of the North to be in a state similar to my own people, in conflict with a White European culture that rejects tribal relations and nations without states as anachronisms, primitive and obsolete in a modern age. My people were almost exterminated by the hatred of the Nazis, and brutally suppressed by the Spanish Inquisition and repeated European pogroms. My people almost lost their Old Law and their old ways, and by almost forgetting their old knowledge came close to cultural extinction.

I saw the First Nations at a similar crossroads, with signs of cultural renewal mixed with the decay of the traditional ways. Each revival and remembrance seems to come at the expense of several things forgotten - be it language, religion, social relations or other aspects of aboriginal culture. The fate of the First Peoples seems to hang in an unsteady equilibrium, much as Judaism did throughout the modern era.

After describing in brief the historical struggle of the Jewish people to survive a world of pogroms, inquisitions, and holocausts, and the modern world’s constant effort to oppress its tribal remnants from an earlier time, I went on to describe the world I found in the North, a world I fell in love with:

Up here, I found the first landscape that truly felt welcoming to me. Vast, open spaces; large gaps between those ugly pockets of civilization with Fast Food and shopping malls. I wandered up the Dempster, staying a while in McPherson and Inuvik, and later Tuktoyaktuk. I met the Gwich'in and Inuvialuit and I discovered people not unlike my own. Fellow wanderers, who went east instead of west, and who crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia; the people of the north came to North America thousands of years before my people crossed that hot, dry desert to build their nation. The people of the North are still wanderers of a sort, hunting the migrating caribou or living along the icy Arctic coast. They follow the seasons and live close to the land – just as my people subsisted in the desert, rendering dry waste land into fertile and productive soil, living in a place considered barren by those who knew less, and by those who failed to see life growing where their minds said it couldn't.

... I met Elders that still spoke their native tongues, who still wore traditional clothing. Who still ate of the caribou or the Beluga whale, and lived close to the land. And this made me happy. But I met so many – especially among the young – who knew not their traditional language and customs. Like my people, they had become assimilated, their culture eroded and consumed. Many had been forced by missionaries to abandon their native language, torn from their families and ripped out of the fabric of their societies … I full well understand the power of the white world, as I am borne of it. I likewise know its danger: I saw so many young people turn to the poison of alcohol and drugs and to the temptations of the bootlegger… poisoning themselves with an opiate foreign to their land, and introduced as a tool of repression. The cross and the bottle seem to have come together, agents of a slow and silent conquest. And this made me sad, and sometimes frightened.

But while I saw much to fear, I knew from my people’s own struggle to survive, and to overcome its brush with cultural extinction, that there still remained much reason for hope. Since in the end survival comes to those who hold on and ride out the storm – and who never give up:

The strength and power of my people came from within, by resurrecting our old ways. It came from the heart and soul, the very source of our identity. And it came from the faith that we kept, in the face of adversity, condemnation and ridicule. White society has the powers of numbers, just as Ancient Egypt did. And it has the wizardry of technology. But its power is not eternal nor is it infinite. The Jews learned this by keeping their Faith, and after almost losing it, restoring it with a cultural renewal and national rebirth. We did not fight back so much as we held on, until they stopped beating us into submission. Our victory came from our endurance against all odds. And so can yours.

About the Author

Barry S. Zellen is author of three books on Arctic politics and history: Breaking the Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic (Lexington Books 2008); On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (Lexington Books 2009); and Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic (Praeger, Security and the Environment series, 2009). He is also author of the forthcoming four-volume book set: States of Mind: The Realist Tradition and Foundation of Western Order (PSI, 2011).

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