Costs of Affluence
By benaxiom@yahoo.com

Affluence can be thought of as a synonym for, a perhaps no less ambiguous
term, "civilization". Civilization is simply a derivative of term "civis"
meaning "city"(Heinberg 1997). It is important to understand exactly what the
development of cities, and the organization of human societies in urban
environment represents. Popular knowledge dictates that civilization came
about as the agricultural mode of production enabled populations to increase,
and food sources to be more plentiful and reliable. In turn, the
newfound "liberation" from nomadic foraging, allowed for ever-increasing
stratification and specialization of labor, class, prestige, and power.
According to our culture's mythology, it was exactly this stratification that
paved and plowed the way for the state, technological advancement, and most
importantly, abundance and affluence. In other words, civilization and
agriculture provided the ability, through complex social and political
organization, to produce ever-increasing amounts of food, to feed ever-
increasing numbers of people.
Embedded in our culture's consciousness is the understanding that these
profound changes in human society, in essence, created the affluent society.
What is lost in this romantic view of the ascension of "civilized man", is
the understanding of the significance of the effect such societies had and
have on not only the natural environment, but on other societies and
cultures, that had and have no desire to be assimilated into a civilized and
agricultural existence.
The "affluence" that civilizations have created for themselves, or more
accurately, for their rulers and elites has always been at the expense of
those around them. Heinberg summarizes this well in writing, "...The history
of civilization in the Near East, Far East, and Central America, is also the
history of kinship, slavery, conquest, agriculture, overpopulation, and
environmental ruin (Heinberg 1997)." This quote identifies many of the major
costs of civilization, or "the affluent society." The area, in which I will
focus on is that of conquest.
As Heinberg suggests, we may think of the history of civilization and
affluence as synonymous with the atrocities he listed; of which, conquest,
may be the one of the most important. This phenomenon has been integral to
the creation of civilized "affluent societies" for millennia. Here, I will
address the phenomenon of conquest, within the context of modern history.
Using the case of New World conquest, and the current case of oil drilling in
U'Wa land, I will show that the inherent logic, structure, and ideology that
is implicit in building and expanding historic and modern empires, is
consistent with those of the first ancient civilizations.
The case of New World conquest is broad and may even appear to be trite,
as traditional myths have been increasingly challenged in recent years.
However it is, and will continue to be, important to study and understand, as
the same fundamental logic and ideology that legitimized mass genocide is
still with us today in the form of corporate globalization.
After 32 days at sea the ships found land. At first site the ships, the
natives approached, welcoming with gifts. Columbus first thoughts, as
recorded in his journal, were: 'With fifty men we could subjugate them all
and make them do whatever we want (Zinn: 1997c: 3).' His motivation to make
this a reality was clear, he would get 10% of whatever riches were obtained,
control over the discovered lands, and the honorable title: Admiral of the
Ocean Sea.
Columbus noticed that the natives wore gold in their ears. To him, this
was license to capture them and force them to lead his associates to the
source. The fever for gold field discovery took greater hold, upon the sight
of gold specks in a river in Haiti and the sight of a gold mask shown by a
native chief (Zinn 1997c: 5). Despite the existence of gold, it did not turn
out to be quite as abundant as expected. In order to have something to show
for this expedition, Columbus took slaves back to Spain. Many of them died in
transit.
Upon returning to Madrid, he gave a report to the royal court in which he
spoke of the rivers, "of which the majority contain gold...There are many
spices, and great mines of gold and other metals...(Zinn 1997c: 5)." The
report Columbus gave was far from accurate. It ended up being more of a
desperate attempt to attribute divine ordinance to the continuation of his
mission to provide slaves and gold to the state, and the word of god to the
savages. However, his acting before the elites worked; he was given 17 ships
this time and over 12,000 men (Zinn 1997: 6).
To officiate the purpose and instructions of the second voyage, a memorial
was written on the "settlement and government" of the islands of Indies. This
formal document served, more accurately, the purpose of the laying out
instructions as to how to deal with the immense amounts of gold expected to
be retrieved. Sale writes on the nature of this document, "Above all, as we
might by now expect, the overriding concern was for gold, with nearly two-
thirds of the document given over to the process by which the governor (Colon
himself, of course) and local officers would control the gathering, melting,
storing, selling, and shipment of the metal (Sale 1991: 127)." He goes on to
quote a direct line from the document in which Columbus states, "owing to the
greed for gold, everyone will prefer to seek it rather than engage in other
necessary occupations (Sale 1991:127)."
The intent of conquest was clear: gold was to be obtained at all cost. At
this point, Columbus had many more grand promises to fulfill than he did
initially. This fact and many other factors led to the realization of
indescribable suffering for the natives. Here I will detail the costs of
creating the affluent society in terms of the immediate and gradual effects
of conquest on the natives of the New World.
Though, as word spread of the intent of the invaders many tribes abandoned
villages, the immanent threat was unavoidable. Those that were rounded up
were forced into slavery to seek out gold fields. All individuals that were
14 years of age or older were forced to retrieve a set amount of gold every
quarter of a year. If they were able to meet the quota, they were given
copper necklaces to denote their tribute, if they were seen without these
symbols, they were killed (Zinn 1991: 6). On Haiti alone, after mass
suicides, and mass murder of the 250,000 natives alive prior to contact, half
were dead (Zinn 1991: 7).
The same fate would come for peoples all over the New World. Ponting sums
up the costs of creating the affluent society in the New World in writing:
"Just how rapidly the vulnerable native societies in the Americas could
collapse is demonstrated by events on Santo Domingo, one of the first islands
to be discovered by Columbus. At the time of the Spanish conquest the
population was about one million, yet within forty years, after intense
exploitation, slavery and many deaths through European diseases, there were
only a few hundred natives left (Ponting 1993c:130)."
The monetary gain to be acquired by civilized nations was the initial
impetus for the genocide that occurred in the New World. Zinn characterizes
this impetus clearly, "It seems there was a frenzy in the early capitalist
states of Europe for gold, slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the
bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical
bureaucracies rising in Western Europe...These were the violent beginnings of
an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would
dominate the world for the next five centuries (Zinn 1997:12)."
But underneath this superficial reasoning, lies deep theological,
intellectual, and ideological roots of European expansion and conquest. An
understanding of the paradigms expressed by figures such a Christopher
Columbus is just as integral to understanding the costs of creating the
affluent society, as an understanding of the reasons to obtain material
wealth. In other words, we can recognize reflectively that greed is morally
corruptive, but if we look no further than this, we may never question the
fundamental intellectual, ideological, and theological pretexts that allow
civilizations to conquer other lands and peoples.
The first layer beneath the outright greed, is that of Christopher
Columbus' utilitarian view towards the natural world. Columbus expressed
appreciation for the beauty of the lands he had discovered, was inextricably
tied to his vision of the beauty transformed into to tangible riches. To
Columbus, the beautiful trees represented a limitless supply of ships that
could be built; and the exotic plants would certainly provide medicinal
spices (Sale 1991:105).
A utilitarian view of the natives themselves would follow Columbus in the
form of the reading of what was called "the Requerimiento", to the captives.
This statement was a like reading them their rights, so to speak. It informed
them of their immediate obligation to recognize the divinity of God and the
Spanish Church, to relinquish all of their possessions, and to be wholly
obedient to the conquerors. Of course none of this was translated, nor even
delivered with a pretense of an attempt to send a clear statement to the
Indians themselves. Rather, writes author David E. Stannard, "the
proclamation was merely a legalistic rationale for a fanatically religious
and fanatically brutal people to justify a holocaust (Stannard 1992: 66)."
Clearly, in order for such an arrogant, inhumane, and utilitarian practice
to occur these men must have been very certain of the legitimacy of their
actions. In order to be impervious to remorse and moral questioning, more
than simple greed must have guided these men. The use of religious
superiority appears to have been a perfect justification for the subjugation
of "lesser" peoples.
The Swiss philosopher, Paracelsus, dealt with the concept of what would
later be termed "poly-genesis" in the early 16th century. According to him,
all colored people were not descendants of Adam and Eve; rather, they were
descendent from inferior and separate progenitors (Stannard 1992: 209). This
view of non-Christian colored people as "inferior," falls in line with
Aristotle's Great Chain of Being upon which all life forms are assigned a
position based on advancement toward the anthropocentric and ethnocentric
climax of high civilization.
This logic has been at the core of western thought, and the premise
responsible for expansion and conquest for millennia. In Columbus' time, it
was enough to identify the people as savages without god, nor civilization.
Author, Francis Jennings writes on this,
"The conquerors of America glorified the devastation they wrought in
visions of righteousness, and their descendants have been reluctant to peer
through the aura. Decent men with pigmentless skins no longer overtly espouse
delusion of peculiar grandeur, but the myths created by the cant of conquest
endure in many forms to mask the terrible tragedy that was Europe's glory.
Although the ideologists of conquest can no longer evoke admiration for holy
wars or pseudobiology, they have yet one great and powerful system of myth
among their resources. In it the Christian Caucasians of Europe are not only
holy and white but also civilized, while the pigmented heathens of distant
lands are not only idolatrous and dark but savage. Thus the absolutes of
predator and prey have been preserved, and the grandeur of invasion and
massacre has kept its sanguinary radiance (Jennings 1975: 6)."

Ultimately, the costs of creating the affluent society in the case of New
World conquest have resulted in nothing short of genocide for the indigenous
people enslaved and decimated in the name of Christianity and civilization.
Beyond this example (of the inherently exploitative nature of civilization
based on the accumulation of wealth in the form of land, labor, and natural
resources), what is most insidious about the history of European atrocity in
the New World is the ideological framework from which it operates. This
framework can be observed in action as we speak; though now it appears within
the new methodological framework of corporate globalization.

Part II: The U'wa, 500 Years Late

The name U'wa means "the thinking people" because of the fact that for
thousands of years they have avoided conflict with neighboring tribes with
the use of communication. Today, 5,000 U'wa exist in the cloud forests of the
Colombian Andes. They were once a tribe of around 20,000 which occupied
territory from southern Venezuela all the way into northeastern Columbia, an
expanse of approximately three million acres. The Colombian government has
since seized 85 percent of the U'wa tribe's traditional land. In 2000, only
about 247,700 acres were officially recognized by the Colombian government
(Rainforest Action Network 2000).
At the time of the arrival of Conquistadors in Columbia, the U'wa migrated
far into the hills to avoid being enslaved and forced to dig for gold. When
they were found by the conquistadors, according to the oral history of the
tribe, they committed mass suicide in an effort to die with dignity and avoid
the fate of the tribes that had been enslaved. According to myth, thousands
of tribespeople committed collective suicide by walking off of a 1,400-foot
cliff. The U'wa say that so many people were piled in the river below that
its course was changed forever (RAN 2000).
After the Spaniards abandoned the area, the remaining U'wa lived
unaffected by civilization until the 1940s and 50s when roads were built that
allowed for the settlement of displaced Colombian nationals during Colombian
civil conflict. The settlers brought diseases that lowered the defenses of
the indigenous population, making them more susceptible to cooperation with
the medicine-offering Western missionaries (RAN 2000).
Oil exploration has occurred since then in territories outside that of the
U'wa; they have only recently been directly affected. In 2000 Occidental Oil
planned to extract 1.5 billion barrels of oil from the fields below U'wa
land. Their plan to drill has been halted by global resistance and outcry.
The U'wa have been aware of the existence of oil for millennia. For them it
represents something far different from what it has come to mean for
industrialized nations. To the U'wa, oil is one of the five cosmological
elements that make up their universe. These include earth, sky, water,
mountains and oil. In their mythology, oil is the blood of the earth. It is
called Ruiria, and it sustains life on Earth, which is the mother of life.
To the U'wa, the extraction of the blood of the mother is a desecration that
can only lead to the death of their people (RAN 2000). The U'wa have promised
to commit collective suicide once again if the oil project currently proposed
occurs. They would take death over the acceptance of the loss of their sacred
land and culture (RAN 2000).
It is clear that in this case the resource being targeted is oil. Though
slavery -- in the typical sense -- is not imminent, as it was 500 years ago
for these people, the same threat exists in the form of assimilation into
civilization and the wage slavery that would inevitably follow their being
forced into cities. Here the cost of creating the affluent society would
mean, for the U'wa, the abandonment of all they hold sacred: their land,
their traditions, their ability to live as they have for millennia. These are
the costs being incurred so first world consumers can continue in their path
of waste.
The reasons oil is being extracted from the region are much more complex
than those that brought explorers here in the first place to seek gold. Five
hundred years ago, the sole purpose was the bolstering of the economic power
of individual nations and the elites within them; now every endeavor is tied
to a world-wide economic network of debt and investment. The recent protests
against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC shed
light on this system. Now there are several layers of interests that are
involved in the creation of the affluent society. The pressure to exploit the
people and resources of Columbia is many times greater under the institutions
and corporations of modern capitalism than it was in a time when Europe was
only beginning to shed its backwater marginality by betting on the riches of
the New World (Ponting 1993 c: 117). What oil drilling in Columbia represents
today is profit for the government, for the oil companies, for the markets
into which the oil flows, and for the investors that fund not only
the "development" of the country, but the projects themselves. I will discuss
some of the details of this system in a moment, but first, a brief overview
of oil drilling in Columbia and the effects it has had.
Since 1984, Occidental Oil has been operating in Colombia (outside of U'wa
territory). In 2000 it claimed that there are approximately 1.5 billion
barrels of oil to which it must have access. Because U'wa land is legally
protected, Occidental Oil is basing their interpretation of U'wa land on a
narrow definition that excludes the protection of their greater traditional
land. As mentioned above, the pressure to start extracting oil from this
territory is great.
Right now oil is Columbia's largest export commodity, generating one
fourth of its official export revenue. Colombia is the fourth largest and
fastest growing oil exporter in South America; in 1995, Columbia increased
its oil output by 30 percent. The United States is the largest importer of
Colombian oil and, of all of the oil exported, the U.S. takes about 260,000
barrels a day (RAN 2000).
The reasons for these developments are not solely based on Columbia's
voluntary expansion of oil extraction. Rather, what's pushing these
advancements is Columbia's need to satisfy debts to the United States and
international financial institutions. International financial institutions
(IFIs) are organizations such as the World Bank (WB) and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). These organizations are publicly funded, and though
quite powerful, they pale in comparison to private financial institutions.
One such private institution involved in Columbia's oil economy is Citigroup.
Citigroup is the world's third largest financial institution. To put this
into scope, a comparison can be made between the currency exchange of public
versus private financial institutions (RAN Presentation 2000). Four days of
private financial institution currency exchange is equal to an entire year of
public financial institution exchange. The money is truly in the hands of
private investors.
The strength of these lending institutions exerted over small "developing"
countries forces them to accelerate already unsustainable industrial
practices. The real losers in this equation are the indigenous cultures and
ecosystems that stand in the way. The real costs of creating the affluent
society are incurred at this level.
Perhaps this might be a good time to address the concept of the affluent
society again. It is clear that ecosystems and cultures are destroyed to
create affluence for some. It is important to consider exactly who the
affluent of the world now are. To an extent, all first world consumers should
consider themselves the beneficiaries of the affluent society, but really,
the affluence is funneling straight into the hands of monstrous global
corporations and financial institutions. Though, as first world consumers, we
may feel helpless in this situation, we can do a lot to protect the rest of
the world from the costs of the affluence that exists in our countries.
Consumers can, at the very least, boycott Occidental Oil, or if so inclined,
take direct action, violent or non-violent. They can also organize awareness
and opposition to drilling on U'wa land. What must be learned is that our
affluence does not come cheap for the rest of the world on whose back we
stand, blind to the costs we create.
It is the same old story of conquest. The differences between what's going
on today and what occurred 500 years ago are few. Though the methodology of
the expansion of resource extraction may involve less outright bloodshed, it
has only become more efficient as technological advancements have allowed for
the expedient extraction and transport of raw materials from anywhere in the
world. Though the names of economic systems have changed from colonialism, to
imperialism, to neo-liberalism, the underlying paradigm has remained
unchanged. In essence, what guides these endeavors is the deep-rooted belief
that all of the universe, living and nonliving, is at the disposal of not
only mankind, but the masters of mankind, the white capitalists. Christianity
need no longer be the intellectual justification for genocide, rather all
that is required now it the "bottom-line" defense. We all are expected to
accept the notion that corporations have no obligation to be moral or
ethical; their only obligation is to make money for shareholders. The bottom
line equals profit.
The motivation for inflicting costs to create affluence is not new. Again
the motivation is the same: power and profit. All that has changed is the
methodology and the expression of ideology. The fact is, that though the
conquest of indigenous cultures, to create civilized affluence, is no longer
guided by outwardly racist religious doctrines, the blatant disparity in
worth and rights between the "civilized" and the "savage" is as present as
ever. First peoples are still viewed as valueless obstacles to be managed and
overcome in order to secure the resources they negligently refuse to exploit.
The logic of industrialization and corporate globalization is rooted in
Aristotle's Great Chain of Being. To states and corporations, indigenous
people are impoverished savages who are stuck at the lower end of the
spectrum of cultural evolution. Implicit to this logic is the assumption that
civilizations -- more specifically, modern industrial capitalist societies --
are superior to all other "less developed" societies. This "View from
Olympus" has been at the heart of the ideological framework that has
justified the subjugation of simple societies for all of history (Hubbard:
2000).
Until this ideology is recognized, questioned, and destroyed, the affluent
societies will continue to expand, exploit, and conquer. Furthermore, the
rapidly diminishing indigenous peoples and ecosystems of the planet will
continually suffer the costs incurred. Without the mobilization of a movement
to end the intensification and further expansion of natural resource
exploitation, we can reasonably expect to lose forever all cultures that have
evolved free of civilized and material affluence.
As awareness of the costs of first world lifestyle and consumption has
become more inescapable, movements have arisen. However, at this point in
history, reforms will simply continue sustaining an inherently destructive
and unsustainable system. Movements of the future must attack the systemic
and ideological foundations of civilization itself, as well as the costs that
its ever-changing, symptomatic leaders, nations, and corporations incur upon
the earth.

Literature Cited:
Burger, Julian. 1990. The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples. New York: Anchor Books.
Heinberg, Richard. 1997.Was Civilization a Mistake? Green Anarchist, Fall.
Hubbard, Lyle. 2000. Anthropology 102, Intro to Archeology and Prehistory.
Lecture 1/4/00. Portland: Portland Community College.
Jennings, Francis. 1975. The Invasion of America. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Ponting, Clive. 1993c. A Green History of the World. New York: Penguin Books.
Rainforest Action Network. 2000.
http://www.igc.org/ran/ran_campaigns/beyond_oil/oxy/index.html
Rainforest Action Network Presentation. 2000 Oil and Indigenous Cultures. End
Corporate Dominance Conference. 5/20/00. Portland. Portland State University.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1991d. The Conquest of Paradise. New York: Alfred A Knopf
Inc.
Stannard, David. 1992. American Holocaust. New York. Oxford University Press.
Zinn, Howard. 1997c. A People History of the United States. New York: The New
Press

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