A New [Old, Very Old] Consciousness of Nature by Kirkpatrick Sale
A New [Old, Very Old] Consciousness of Nature
Kirkpatrick Sale
It has been argued that by the 21st century Western civilization's opposition to all that is not civilized and domesticated has been so successful that, in one sense, as critic Frederic Jameson has said, "nature is gone for good." By which he means that the instruments of advanced capitalism, including industrialism, commercialism, financial markets, agribusiness, tourism, trade, media, advertising, all on an encompassing global scale, have caused, at least on the effective conceptual level, "a radical eclipse of Nature itself."
But the fact is that nature is not gone from our souls, no matter how much capitalist civilization has distorted and dismantled it or driven it from our daily sensibilities. It is there deep in our primal selves: we are indeed genetically encoded to understand and appreciate nature as did Homo erectus, which is what humans were for 95 per cent of our time on earth. We evolved in a wilderness of extraordinary diversity where we lived in daily intimacy with animal life and plant variety, upon which we depended completely and unbrokenly for survival, and that has only been reinforced by natural selection through 72,000 generations over the long millennia.
Hence under our modern veneer, and in spite of the multiple obfuscations of capitalist culture, we still have an innate need for connections to nature, we have an ineradicable appreciation of its flora and fauna, and we have the capacity and somewhere the felt ability to achieve a communion with beings other than ourselves and settings other than those we create. Edward Wilson, the Harvard biologist, has named this "biophilia," and he says that it is "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms…[that is] hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature."
It is upon this that a modern Erectus consciousness of nature can be built.
It would begin with a basic understanding that nature is good, just as the Mbuti in the Congo forest and many other original tribes know. That seems simple enough a concept, but it is not one that our culture has fostered: we are taught to know that we have been expelled from the good world of the garden of Eden into the bad and fierce and wild one of nature—"cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life"—and we are told that it is our task to subdue it. It is true that in some societies at some times there have been some few who express appreciation for nature, but that is not the same thing as a society-wide deep understanding of nature as a benevolent force and the earth as a living, giving source of all life. Nor does it embody the Mbuti sense of daily life as a rich, full, easy, bountiful endowment of nature, rather than something that must be wrested from the world by human effort in a never-ending battle of drudgery and challenge and competition.
Then it might seek a thoroughgoing reintegration with nature, a conscious
identity with it and its species, something very like the feeling of loss of self and ego, an at-one-with-the-world sensation, that comes when the right temporal lobe of the brain takes control during deep meditation, or when in Zen Buddhism the initiate is lost in the immediate moment and perceives, non-verbally, the law of interdependence. Psychologist Hans Loewald, like Carl Jung himself, has suggested that the "quest for boundary loss, for the merger of Self and Other," is a fundamental human search, and it may be so because that is the "interpenetration with the non-human world" the Erectus psyche seems to have known. .
One more aspect of the Erectus understanding of nature available to us is the essential wisdom of biocentrism, a way of coming to regard the human, as the ecotheologian Thomas Berry has put it, "on the species level," as one more creature on the earth in essence no grander and greater than the rest, and at heart ultimately dependent upon them and their continuing healthy interactions for our very lives. We are so cocooned in our human-centeredness in most of our existence that this sort of humility seems well-nigh degrading, or juvenile, but it is of course the crucial element of a worldview that knows domination to be wrong and integration to be right. As Berry has phrased it:
Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law of the integrity of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality and of value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth.
All life is sacred, say the Indians, including the stones and waters and clouds and the earth itself, and there is no hierarchy determining that humans are supreme and can dominate and direct the others. We have lived as if there were one, and now we must live another way. The Erectus way.
Kirkpatrick Sale
It has been argued that by the 21st century Western civilization's opposition to all that is not civilized and domesticated has been so successful that, in one sense, as critic Frederic Jameson has said, "nature is gone for good." By which he means that the instruments of advanced capitalism, including industrialism, commercialism, financial markets, agribusiness, tourism, trade, media, advertising, all on an encompassing global scale, have caused, at least on the effective conceptual level, "a radical eclipse of Nature itself."
But the fact is that nature is not gone from our souls, no matter how much capitalist civilization has distorted and dismantled it or driven it from our daily sensibilities. It is there deep in our primal selves: we are indeed genetically encoded to understand and appreciate nature as did Homo erectus, which is what humans were for 95 per cent of our time on earth. We evolved in a wilderness of extraordinary diversity where we lived in daily intimacy with animal life and plant variety, upon which we depended completely and unbrokenly for survival, and that has only been reinforced by natural selection through 72,000 generations over the long millennia.
Hence under our modern veneer, and in spite of the multiple obfuscations of capitalist culture, we still have an innate need for connections to nature, we have an ineradicable appreciation of its flora and fauna, and we have the capacity and somewhere the felt ability to achieve a communion with beings other than ourselves and settings other than those we create. Edward Wilson, the Harvard biologist, has named this "biophilia," and he says that it is "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms…[that is] hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature."
It is upon this that a modern Erectus consciousness of nature can be built.
It would begin with a basic understanding that nature is good, just as the Mbuti in the Congo forest and many other original tribes know. That seems simple enough a concept, but it is not one that our culture has fostered: we are taught to know that we have been expelled from the good world of the garden of Eden into the bad and fierce and wild one of nature—"cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life"—and we are told that it is our task to subdue it. It is true that in some societies at some times there have been some few who express appreciation for nature, but that is not the same thing as a society-wide deep understanding of nature as a benevolent force and the earth as a living, giving source of all life. Nor does it embody the Mbuti sense of daily life as a rich, full, easy, bountiful endowment of nature, rather than something that must be wrested from the world by human effort in a never-ending battle of drudgery and challenge and competition.
Then it might seek a thoroughgoing reintegration with nature, a conscious
identity with it and its species, something very like the feeling of loss of self and ego, an at-one-with-the-world sensation, that comes when the right temporal lobe of the brain takes control during deep meditation, or when in Zen Buddhism the initiate is lost in the immediate moment and perceives, non-verbally, the law of interdependence. Psychologist Hans Loewald, like Carl Jung himself, has suggested that the "quest for boundary loss, for the merger of Self and Other," is a fundamental human search, and it may be so because that is the "interpenetration with the non-human world" the Erectus psyche seems to have known. .
One more aspect of the Erectus understanding of nature available to us is the essential wisdom of biocentrism, a way of coming to regard the human, as the ecotheologian Thomas Berry has put it, "on the species level," as one more creature on the earth in essence no grander and greater than the rest, and at heart ultimately dependent upon them and their continuing healthy interactions for our very lives. We are so cocooned in our human-centeredness in most of our existence that this sort of humility seems well-nigh degrading, or juvenile, but it is of course the crucial element of a worldview that knows domination to be wrong and integration to be right. As Berry has phrased it:
Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law of the integrity of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality and of value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth.
All life is sacred, say the Indians, including the stones and waters and clouds and the earth itself, and there is no hierarchy determining that humans are supreme and can dominate and direct the others. We have lived as if there were one, and now we must live another way. The Erectus way.
posted by Earth Spirit Rising at 12:15 PM
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