What A Crow Warrior Can Teach Us About Academic Tyranny
Two-Leggings first scalp. Intellectual utopianists. No one's slave.
Thinker. SEAL. Dispatches on human meaning. Also, figs and dogs.
Welcome back to What then?
Today’s theme: sovereignty in the face of tyranny.
Let’s get to it…
Our individual sovereignty has always been under attack. But the line of attack originating in the academy is the most stimulating, mostly because of how deceptive it is. An entire intellectual class who trades in ideas and nothing but ideas has a striking capacity to manipulate bad ideas into sounding like good ideas.
There is an academic worldview that is at war with the word “anthropocene.” Their fear is this word, which refers to the age in which human activity is the dominant influence in the world, emphasizes the value of humans over the value of the planet. The idea is that humans have caused too much harm to Mother Earth and ought to be reined in. There is tremendous merit to this idea.
The solution offered by one academic sect, however, makes it hard to believe they are innocently passionate about the earth. They feel that humans should no longer be considered “global agents,” but “planetary subjects.”1
I had a hunch this seemingly altruistic semantic shift to describe nine billion human beings was actually an ontological assault on what it means to be a human being. It struck me we are seeing this ideology gain momentum not only in academia, but media, Hollywood, private enterprise, and everywhere else. It is an ill omen.
What, then, are the consequences for the human animal of this slight semantic shift? For me and you? Our ancestors and our offspring?
As a knuckle-dragger I am suspicious of abstract ideas and books written by academics. So let us pressure test their idea against a concrete. Two Leggings was a Crow warrior. He gives this bit of academic sophistry the nuance—and human complexity—it deserves. He wrote about the first scalp he ever took in a fight with an enemy tribe, the Piegan. It is a revealing tale:2
“As they fell back to reload, I ran out screaming a war cry. One hung behind and I shot him in the shoulder. Reaching back, he jerked out the arrow, broke it, and threw it on the ground. He pulled out his knife and ran at me. Jumping aside, I shot him in the breast. He also pulled out that arrow, broke it, and threw it down. I tried to keep out of his reach, yelling to get him excited. Then I shot a third arrow into his stomach. He made a growling sound, but after he broke that arrow he made signs for me to go back. I made signs that I was going to kill him. Then he made signs for me to come closer so he could fight with his knife, and I made signs that I would not. He was almost dead and there was no reason to be afraid, so I suppose I played with him. He was my enemy and had probably killed some of my relatives. He tried to dodge my next arrow but it went into his chest and came out of his lower back. Blood ran from his mouth and nose as he walked slowly towards his friends. I shot once more. He stumbled and fell and died a moment later. Then I scalped him and tied the hair to my bow… I sang my first victory song. Taking his warbonnet out of its rawhide case I put it on my head and danced around his body… I was only a boy and now I had my first coup. I sang and thanked the Great Above Person. I danced until the sweat ran down my body. Eight men came back, and when they saw the Piegan they divided the rest of the scalp and joined in my singing, shooting arrows into the body.”
We are left with a fascinating impression. If we offered this man the chance to relive this savage fight an infinite number of times, he would say Yes Yes Yes. What, then, is it to be Two Leggings? It is to be momentously alive dancing over the body of an enemy that wanted every last Crow wiped off the face of earth; it is to sit beneath the moon later that night and tell his tale to boys and girls with eyes reflecting firelight.
We are done with the scalping and murderous midnight raids of the primal world. This is to our benefit. And yet it is a paradox this exact benefit has created a crisis of misanthropy and meaninglessness our primal ancestors could never have imagined—until its members woke up in the post-primal world one day and said No. This is to our detriment.
This is the paradox of the primal world, of the human living in accordance with nature, of the global agent—so wretched, and yet so alive.
This is our common heritage.
We can now redefine “global agent” and “planetary subject” in terms of sovereignty.
Global agents care more for humans than for the planet. Sure enough, this makes them madly in love with the planet for it is she who gives humans the privilege of existence. Her black streams, mahogany eagles, appaloosa horses, nutrient dense buffalo meat, god-infused mountains, lakes, evergreens, stars, and lightning. When they stalk an elk, skin it, and feel its blood on their fingers, they thank this elk for sacrificing its life-force to sustain their own. They fight for land with such zeal we realize they not only do so because they must but because they want to.
Nearly all pre-state peoples do not refer to themselves by the names we give them. Rather they call themselves “We” or “The People” or “Human Beings.” They refer to themselves with pride rather than disdain. They savagely proclaim—and fight with tooth and knuckle—for their right to say Yes, and No, and the freedom to maintain these primal and unalienable rights given us by Nature in her wisdom. In the end, both the earth and the enemy want them dead. It is by virtue of this test, this grind, this endless pressure to fight and rage for their freedom and thus earn their right to live on this earth, that they love both the earth and their people.
What, then, is a planetary subject? It is darkly amusing to look up just about any definition of the word “subject” as either a noun or a verb. When we do so, the gig is up: “To bring under one’s control, typically by using force.” It also means “A person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.” Finally, it could mean “A citizen of a state other than its supreme ruler.” It seems, then, the human is a sack of skin and bone that ought to be “dealt with” by “force” and placed under a “supreme ruler.” It staggers the mind no other academic raised their hand and said “Maybe we should be a bit more subtle and pick a different word.”
The crucial point is the enemies of the Anthropocene do not love the earth so much as they hate mankind. It is clear the supreme ruler they have in mind is not Mother Earth, but an academic Philosopher King with a “utopia” in mind. It is clear if we waved a magic wand and academicized human existence on a global scale we would sever the last primeval thread binding us to our ancestors. A dehumanization beyond even the greediest dreams of the totalitarians of old.
It seems, then, the downstream impact of this academic agenda is either mistaken or malicious. If it is mistaken, we should probably never take them seriously again. And if it is malicious, well… we can thank the gods we still share a strong kinship with Two Leggings.
To be human is to be an unfinished and imperfect animal. We are born with the explosive burden of perpetual self-creation. We are born free to fuck things up, fail, build a tribe worth fighting for, find the passion projects that brighten our eyes and infuse our lives with meaning. We are born to discover how to remain authentically and savagely human in this modern world we have inherited no matter how much scar tissue we accumulate on our hands and our brains along the way.
We should care more for the earth which we have treated terribly. We should be stewards of nature as our primal forebears once were. At the same time, the solution is neither ideological extremism disguised as environmental altruism any more than it is to bring back scalping raids with midnight fire dances.
I do not know the answer. Still, this much is clear to me: we are not born to be submissive, content to drop to our knees before a Supreme Ruler. Rather we are born to dance freely below the Great Above Person. Fighting for this freedom is, in itself, a profound source of meaning in life.
What says Epictetus? This is a man whose aversion to academics and tyrants echoes across two thousand years: “The man over whom pleasure has no power, nor evil, nor fame, nor wealth, and who whenever it seems good to him can spit his entire wretched body into some tyrants face and die—whose slave can he any longer be? Whose subject?”
I italicized the Old Man’s last word. My feeling is he would agree.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Nabokov, Peter. Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior. Bison Books, 1982.