Addiction & Reparative Psychology

This second addendum to my Four Essays was written in response to a reader who wanted to know more about my sense and understanding of the psychology of white supremacy. Specifically, the reader wanted to know what I thought the origins of white supremacy were.

Not without a fair bit of hesitation, I offered the following response.

Growing up black in the United States of America during the halcyon years of the neoliberal New World Order, I was taught from a very young age that I was descended from African peoples that were either uncivilized or less (than) civilized.

I was taught, sometimes implicitly but often quite explicitly, that white peoples from Europe had developed the world’s most advanced civilization, enabling them to conquer and dominate the world. My teachers couldn’t tell me for sure whether this was because white peoples were naturally superior to other peoples (making black peoples naturally inferior) or because white peoples were on the fortunate side of a series of historical accidents (making black peoples victims of their misfortunes). In the end, however, such details didn’t really matter. Africa, the land of black peoples, was the exemplar of the “underdeveloped” or “developing” world, characterized by less (than) civilized peoples. Europe, the land of white peoples, was the exemplar of the “developed” world, characterized by its advanced civilization. And last but not least, of course, the United States of America—an experiment in “democracy” launched by enlightened white peoples from Europe who had settled the “New World”—was the apotheosis and crowning achievement of advanced civilization.

By the age of twelve, I had learned this lesson well and I had taken it to heart. Taking it to heart, however, brought a compound question to mind, “What is civilization and what good is it anyway?”

I asked myself this question incessantly for more than two decades, seeking to answer this question by and for myself. I first found my own answer to this question nearly a decade ago but I could not accept it. My answer frightened me. I tiptoed around it and I sought for other answers in vain. I knew full well that the answer I had first found was the answer that I needed, but the answer demanded too much of me at the time. It has taken me nearly a decade to find the courage to stop tiptoeing around it and to embrace my answer. Having finally embraced my answer, I now profess it so that I may act on it. 

So, what is civilization and what good is it anyway? 

As I know it, civilization is another name for a complex of addictive behaviors to which many peoples have become vulnerable and to which many peoples have succumbed: the more advanced a people’s civilization the more addicted that people, the less advanced a people’s civilization the less addicted that people. The wretched history of civilization begins some five thousand years ago when peoples first became addicted to patriarchy, addicted to the rush of conquest and domination. The history of civilization has progressed in its wretched fashion for the past five thousand years with notable grace periods, but recent centuries have seen its wretchedness redouble and accelerate ever since peoples became addicted to capitalism, addicted to the rush of growth and progress in addition to the rush of conquest and domination.

To say that white peoples from Europe developed the world’s most advanced civilization is to say that white peoples from Europe have been the most addicted to the speedball of patriarchy and capitalism, to the rush of conquest and domination commingled with the rush of growth and progress. Indeed, white peoples from Europe have not only sought to conquer and dominate the entire world in order to get their fix, they have also threatened to destroy the entire world in the process. 

During the twentieth century, having come to dominate the world, white peoples from Europe in search of a fix were the instigators of two hotly contested world wars that were premised on prospects for genocide, and they were the instigators of a cold world war that was premised prospects for mutually assured destruction and nuclear holocaust. Far more profoundly and far more importantly, jonesing white peoples from Europe also instigated the still raging War on Terra, a war premised on prospects for ecocide.

The War on Terra, which I have taken to calling the “Last War”, has killed off half the world’s wildlife, it has cut down half the world’s forests, and it has wiped away half the world’s topsoil. The Last War has created a suffocating atmosphere, fouled by high concentrations of greenhouse gases that threaten to increase aridity inland and rising sea levels along littorals, displacing untold numbers of human and nonhuman beings from their dwellings. Alongside mass extinction, habitat destruction, soil degradation, and climate change, the Last War has precipitated a great thinning of nature: “the numerical robustness, the plenitude within nature, has dwindled.” A naturalist writes, “Half a century ago, there was simply much more of everything – more wild flowers, more birds, more butterflies and moths, more insects [...] the fabric of life in the natural world, once so rich, [has] become threadbare, ragged and frayed. ” The species managing to survive the Last War are becoming ever more scarce, small fractions of their populations survive.

Never has an addiction caused so much death, destruction, and suffering, and yet, at the same time, never has an addiction been so poorly recognized by both the addict and the enabler alike. To bring the Last War to a halt and to give life on earth a chance to thrive again, we must treat clinging to civilization as the addiction that it is and we must recognize its addicts for what they are: desperate peoples. Yes, though many of them live lives of extreme luxury, the white peoples of Europe and America and others who continue to cling to advanced civilization are desperate peoples. 

On this point, the point of desperation, I would like to quote at length from In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a book by the physician of addiction Dr. Gabor Maté.  

The mind and brain processes are the same in all addictions, no matter what form, as is the [despair] that resides at its core. [...] 

[A]ddiction is neither a choice nor primarily a disease. It originates in a human being’s desperate attempt to solve a problem: the problem of emotional pain, of overwhelming stress, of lost connection, of loss of control, of a deep discomfort with the self. In short, it is a forlorn attempt to solve the problem of human pain. All drugs—and all behaviours of addiction, substance-dependent or not, whether to gambling, food, sex, alcohol, cigarettes, the internet or cocaine—either soothe pain directly or distract from it. Hence my mantra: “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.”

[...] Not only is the urge to escape pain shared by all addicts, substance users or not, the same brain circuits are involved in all addictions, from shopping to eating to dependence on heroin and other opioids. The same brain circuits, the same brain systems involving pleasure and reward and incentive, the same neurochemicals—not to mention the same emotional dynamics of shame and lack of self-worth, and the same behaviors of denial and dishonesty and subterfuge.

Addiction to civilization is, like all other addictions, an escape from pain. The white peoples of Europe addicted to civilization are not evil peoples; they are traumatized peoples who desperately need care and compassion from other peoples. Their claims to natural superiority and to historical good fortune are subterfuges that express shame and lack and that endeavor to project shame and lack on others. Alas, the subterfuges of white peoples have been remarkably successful: they have traumatized, shamed, and deprived many, many other peoples, spreading desperation and addiction across the globe.

I do not want to speculate here upon the specifics traumas that white peoples are escaping in and through their addiction to civilization. Instead, what I want to do now is make it clear that the art of making reparations is an art that endeavors to heal the traumas of all sorts of peoples, white peoples and nonwhite peoples alike, and it endeavors to heal all sorts of traumas, including traumas that pre-date the plague of whiteness. Many peoples had already been addicted to patriarchal civilization and its rush of conquest and domination for a long time before white peoples started using and pushing the modern speedball of patriarchy and capitalism, that potent cocktail of conquest, domination, growth, and progress. For many peoples, the art of making reparations will have to involve exposing and healing much older, pre-colonial and pre-modern traumas.

I shall stop here, leaving you with a hypothesis that would put all that I have said to the test. Consider this: if the advance of patriarchal capitalism is the worsening of an addiction, perhaps the treatment of addiction and the rehabilitation of the addict might constitute the return of primitive matriarchal communism.