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Title: Nature and Madness Author: Paul Shepard Language: en Topics: anti-civ, ecology, health, primitivist, psychology Source: Retrieved on 24 August 2010 from www.primitivism.com/nature-madness.htm
My question is: why does society persist in destroying its habitat? I
have, at different times, believed the answer was a lack of information,
faulty technique, or insensibility. Certainly intuitions of the
interdependence of all life are an ancient wisdom, perhaps as old as
thought itself that is occasionally rediscovered, as it has been by the
science of ecology in our own society. At mid-twentieth century there
was a widely shared feeling that we needed only to bring businesspeople,
cab drivers, homemakers, and politicians together with the right mix of
oceanographers, soils experts, or foresters in order to set things
right.
In time, even with the attention of the media and a windfall of
synthesizers, popularizers, gurus of ecophilosophy, and other champions
of ecology, and in spite of some new laws and indications that
environmentalism is taking its place as a new turtle on the political
log, nothing much has changed. Either I and the other “pessimists” and
“doomsayers” were wrong about the human need for other species and about
the decline of the planet as a life-support system; or our species is
intent on suicide; or there is something we overlooked.
Such a something could be simply greed. Maybe the whole world is just
acting out the same impulse that brought an 1898 cattlemen’s meeting in
west Texas to an end with the following unanimous declaration:
“Resolved, that none of us know, or care to know, anything about
grasses, native or otherwise, outside the fact that for the present
there are lots of them, the best on record, and we are after getting the
most out of them while they last.”[1]
But it is hard to be content with the theory that people are bad and
will always do the worst. Given the present climate of education,
knowing something about grasses may be the greedy course if it means the
way to continued prosperity.
The stockmen’s resolution might have been in response to newfangled
ideas of range management. Conservation in the view of Theodore
Roosevelt’s generation was largely a matter of getting the right
techniques and programs. By Aldo Leopold’s time, half a century later,
the perspective had begun to change. The attrition of the green world
was felt to be due as much to general beliefs as to particular policies.
Naturalists talking to agronomists were only foreground figures in a
world where attitudes, values, philosophies, and the arts — the whole
weltanschauung of peoples and nations could be seen as a vast system
within which nature was abused or honored. But today the conviction with
which that idea caught the imagination seems to have faded; technology
promises still greater mastery of nature, and the inherent conservatism
of ecology seems only to restrain productivity as much of the world
becomes poorer and hungrier. The realization that human institutions
express at least an implicit philosophy of nature does not always lead
these institutions to broaden their doctrines; just as often it backs
them into a more rigid defense of those doctrines.
In the midst of these new concerns and reaffirmations of the status quo,
the distance between Earth and philosophy seems as great as ever. We
know, for example, that the massive removal of the great Old World
primeval forests from Spain and Italy to Scandinavia a thousand years
ago was repeated in North America in the past century and proceeds today
in the Amazon basin, Malaysia, and the Himalayan frontier. Much of the
soil of interior China and the uplands of the Ganges, Euphrates, and
Mississippi rivers has been swept into their deltas, while the world
population of humankind and its energy demands have doubled several
times over. The number of animal species we have exterminated is now in
the hundreds. Something uncanny seems to block the corrective will, not
simply private cupidity or political inertia. Could it be an inadequate
philosophy or value system? The idea that the destruction of whales is
the logical outcome of Francis Bacon’s dictum that “nature should serve
man,” or René Descartes’s insistence that animals feel no pain since
they have no souls, seems too easy and too academic. The meticulous
analysis of these philosophies and the discovery that they articulate an
ethos beg the question. Similarly, technology does not simply act out
scientific theory, or daily life flesh out ideas of progress, biblical
dogma, or Renaissance humanism. A history of ideas is not enough to
explain human behavior.
Once, our species did live in stable harmony with the natural
environment (and in some small groups it still does). This was not
because people were incapable of changing their environment or lacked
acumen; it was not simply on account of a holistic or reverent attitude;
rather, there was some more enveloping and deeper reason. The change to
a more hostile stance toward nature began between five and ten thousand
years ago and became more destructive and less accountable with the
progress of civilization. The economic and material demands of growing
villages and towns are, I believe, not causes but results of this
change. In concert with advancing knowledge and human organization it
wrenched the ancient social machinery that had limited human births. It
fostered a new sense of human mastery and the extirpation of nonhuman
life. In hindsight this change has been explained in terms of necessity
or as the decline of ancient gods. But more likely it was irrational
(though not unlogical) and unconscious, a kind of failure in some
fundamental dimension of human existence, an irrationality beyond
mistakenness, a kind of madness.
The idea of a sick society is not new. Bernard Frank, Karl Menninger,
and Erich Fromm are among those who have addressed it. Sigmund Freud
asks, “If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching
similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the
same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that,
under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizanons — or some
epochs of civilization — possibly the whole of mankind — have become
neurotic?” Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman observes that the
doctrine of cultural relativism, which has dominated modern thought, may
have blinded us to the deviate behavior of whole societies by denying
normative standards for mental health.
In his book In Bluebeard’s Castle, George Steiner asks why so many men
have killed other men in the past two centuries (the estimate is
something like 160 million deaths). He notes that, for some reason,
periods of peace in Europe were felt to be stifling. Peace was a
lassitude, he says, periodically broken by war, as though pressures
built up that had little to do with the games of national power or
conflicting ideologies. He concludes that one of those pressures found
its expression in the Holocaust, motivated by unconscious resentment of
the intolerable emotional and intellectual burden of monotheism. Acting
as the frenzied agents for a kind of fury in the whole of Christendom,
the Germans sought to destroy the living representatives of those who
had centuries ago wounded the mythic view of creation, stripping the
Earth of divine being and numinous presences, and substituting a remote,
invisible, unknowable, demanding, vengeful, arbitrary god.
Steiner approaches these seizures of extermination in terms of
collective personality disintegration; his framework has something to
offer the question of the destruction of nature. What is indicated by
the heedless occupancy of all earth habitats; the physical and chemical
abuse of the soil, air, and water; the extinction and displacement of
wild plants and animals; the overcutting and overgrazing of forest and
grasslands; the expansion of human numbers at the expense of the biotic
health of the world, turning everything into something human-made and
human-used?
To invoke psychopathology is to address infancy, as most mental problems
have their roots in our first years of life, and their symptoms are
defined in terms of immaturity. The mentally ill typically have
infantile motives and act on perceptions and states of mind that
caricature those of early life. Among their symptoms are destructive
behaviors through which individuals come to terms with private demons
that would otherwise overwhelm them. To argue with the logic with which
people defend their behavior is to threaten those very acts of defense
that stand between them and a frightful chasm.
Most of us fail to become as mature as we might. In that respect there
is a continuum from simple deprivations to traumatic shocks, many of
which act on fears and fantasies of a kind that normally haunt anxious
infants and then diminish. Such primary fantasies and impulses are the
stuff of the unconscious of us all. They typically remain submerged, or
their energy is transmuted, checked, sublimated, or subordinated to
reality. Not all are terrifying: besides shadows that plague us at
abyssal levels with disorder and fear, there are chimeras of power and
unity and erotic satisfaction. All send their images and symbols into
dreams and, in the troubled soul, into consciousness. It is not clear
whether they all play some constructive part in the long trail toward
sane maturity or whether they are just flickering specters lurking
beside that path, waiting for our wits to stumble. Either way, the
correlation between mental unhealth and regression to earlier stages of
mental life has been confirmed thousands of times over.
The passage of human development is surprisingly long and complicated.
The whole of growth through the first twenty years (including physical
growth) is our ontogenesis or ontogeny, our “coming into being.”
Dovetailed with fetal life at one end and adult phases at the other,
ontogeny is as surprising as anything in human biology. Anyone who
thinks the human creature is not a specialized animal should spend a few
hours with the thirty-odd volumes of The Psychoanalytic Study of the
Child or issues of The Journal of Child Development. In the realm of
nature, human ontogeny is a regular giraffe’s neck of unlikely
extension, vulnerability, internal engineering, and the prospect of an
extraordinary view from the top.
Among those relict tribal peoples who seem to live at peace with their
world, who feel themselves to be guests rather than masters, the
ontogeny of the individual has some characteristic features. I
conjecture that their ontogeny is healthier than ours (for which I will
be seen as sentimental and romantic) and that it may be considered a
standard from which we have deviated. Their way of life is the one to
which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering
cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a
mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life
were embodied in natural things, where everyday life was inextricable
from spiritual significance and encounter, and where the members of the
group celebrated individual stages and passages as ritual participation
in the first creation.
This seed of normal ontogeny is present in all of us. It triggers vague
expectations that parents and society will respond to our hunger. The
newborn infant, for example, needs almost continuous association with
one particular mother who sings and talks to it, breast-feeds it, holds
and massages it, wants and enjoys it. For the infant as person-to-be,
the shape of all otherness grows out of that maternal relationship. Yet
the setting of that relationship was, in the evolution of humankind, a
surround of living plants, rich in texture, smell, and motion. The
unfiltered, unpolluted air, the flicker of wild birds, real sunshine and
rain, mud to be tasted and tree bark to grasp, the sounds of wind and
water, the voices of animals and insects and humans — all these are not
vague and pleasant amenities for the infant, but the stuff out of which
its second grounding, even while in its mother’s arms, has begun. The
outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of
the fetal landscape (which is not so constant as was once supposed). The
surroundings are also that which will be swallowed, internalized,
incorporated as the self.
From the start, the experience of such a world is one of constancy.
Following an easy birth in a quiet place, the mother is always there, a
presence in the tactile warmth of her body. For the infant there is a
joyful comfort in being handled and fondled often, fed and cleaned as
the body demands. His is a world of variation on rhythms, the
refreshment of hot and cold, wind like a breath in the face, the smell
and feel of rain and snow, earth in hand and underfoot. The world is a
pungent and inviting place with just enough bite that it says, ‘Come
out, wake up, look, taste, and smell; now cuddle and sleep!’
It is a world of travel and stop. At first the child fears being left
and is bound by fear to the proximity of his mother and others. This
interrupted movement sets the pace of his life, telling him gently that
he is a traveler or visitor in the world. Its motion is like his own
growth: as he gets older and as the cycle of group migrations is
repeated, he sees places he has seen before, and those places seem less
big and strange. The life of movement and rest is one of returning, and
the places are the same and yet always more.
There is a constancy of people, yet it is a world bathed in nonhuman
forms, a myriad of figures, evoking an intense sense of their
differences and similarities, the beckoning challenge of a lifetime.
Speech is about that likeness and unlikeness, the coin of thought. The
child begins to babble and then to speak according to his own timing,
with the cooperation of adults who are themselves acting upon the deep
wisdom of a stage of life. Initially it is a matter of rote and
imitation, a naming of things whose distinctive differences are
unambiguous. Nature is a lexicon where, at first, words have the solid
reality of things.
In this bright new world there are as yet few mythical beasts, but real
creatures to watch and to mimic in play. Play is an imitation, starting
with simple fleeing and catching, going on to mimic joyfully the
important animals, being them for a moment and then not being them,
feeling as this one must feel and then that one, all tried on the self.
The child sees the adults dancing the animal movements and does it too.
Music itself has been there all the time, from his mother’s song to the
melodies of birds and the howls of wolves. The child already feels the
mystery of kinship: likeness but difference. Animals have a magnetic
attraction for the child, for each in its way seems to embody some
impulse, reaction, or movement that is “like me.” In the playful,
controlled enactment of these comes a gradual mastery of the personal
inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships. In stories told, their
forms spring to life in the mind and are represented in consciousness,
training the capacity to imagine.
The play space — trees, shrubs, paths, places to hide and climb — is a
visible, structured entity, another prototype of relationships that hold
fast. It is the primordial terrain in which games of imitating adults
lay another groundwork for a dependable world and prefigure a household,
so that, for these children of mobile hunter-gatherers, no house is
necessary to structure and symbolize social status. Individual trees and
rocks that were also known to parents and grandparents are enduring
counterplayers having transcendent meanings later in life.
To be sure, there is discomfort that cannot be avoided. The child sees
with pride that he can endure it, that his body profits by it so that on
beautiful days he feels wonderful. He witnesses sickness and death, but
they are right as part of things and not really prevalent (how could the
little band of fifteen continue if there were dying every day?).
The child goes out from camp with playmates to imitate foraging and then
with adults to actually forage. The adults show no anxiety in their
hunting, only patience; one waits and watches and listens. Sometimes the
best is not to be found, but there is always something. The world is all
clues, and there is no end to their subtlety and delicacy. The signs
that reveal are always there. One has only to learn the art of reading
them.
In such a world there is no wildness, as there is no tameness. Human
power over nature is largely the exercise of handcraft. Insofar as the
natural world poetically signifies human society, it signals that there
is no great power over other people except as the skills of leadership
are hewn by example and persuasion. The otherness of nature becomes
accessible to humans in fabulous forms of incorporation, influence,
conciliation, and compromise. When the male juvenile goes out with
adults to seek a hidden root or to stalk an antelope, he sees the
unlimited possibilities of affiliation with the environment, for success
is understood to depend on the readiness of the prey or tuber as much as
on the skill of the forager.
The child is free. He is not asked to work. At first he can climb and
splash and dig and explore the infinite riches about him. In time he
increasingly wants to make things and to understand what he cannot touch
or change, to wonder about that which is unseen. His world is full of
stories told; hearing of a recent hunt, tales of renowned events, and
epics with layers of meaning. He has been bathed in voices of one kind
or another always. Voices last only for their moment of sound, but they
originate in life. The child learns that all life tells something and
that all sound, from the frog calling to the sea surf, issues from a
being kindred and significant to himself, telling some tale, giving some
clue, mimicking some rhythm that he should know. There is no end to what
is to be learned.
The child does not yet philosophize on this; he is shielded from
speculation and abstraction by the intimacy of his psyche with his
environment. The child is free, much as the creatures around him — that
is, free to be delicately watchful, not only of animals but of people,
among whom life is not ranked subordination to authority. Conformity for
him will be to social pressure and custom, not to force. All this is
augured in the nonhuman world, not because he never sees dominant and
subordinate animals, creatures killing other creatures, or trees whose
shade suppresses the growth of other plants, but because, reaching
puberty, he is on the brink of a miracle of interpretation that will
transform those things.
At the end of childhood he comes to some of the most thrilling days of
his life. The transition he faces will be experienced by body and ritual
in concert. The childhood of journeying in a known world, scrutinizing
and mimicking natural forms, and always listening has prepared him for a
whole new octave in his being. The clock of his body permits it to be
done, and the elders of his life will see that he is initiated. It is a
commencement into a world foreshadowed by childhood: home, good,
unimaginably rich, sometimes painful with reason, scrutable with care.
The quests and tests that mark his passage in adolescent initiation are
not intended to reveal to him that his love of the natural world was an
illusion or that, having seemed only what it was, it in some way failed
him. He will not put his delight in the sky and the earth behind him as
a childish and irrelevant thing. He will graduate not out of that world
but into its significance. So, with the end of childhood, he begins a
lifelong study, a reciprocity with the natural world in which its depths
are as endless as his own creative thought. He will not study it in
order to transform its liviness into mere objects that represent his
ego, but as a poem, numinous and analogical, of human society.
Western civilized cultures, by contrast, have largely abandoned the
ceremonies of adolescent initiation that affirm the metaphoric,
mysterious, and poetic quality of nature, reducing them to aesthetics
and amenities. But our human developmental program requires external
models of order — if not a community of plants and animals, then words
in a book, the ranks and professions of society, or the machine. If the
ritual basis of the order-making metaphor is inadequate, the world can
rigidify at the most literal level of juvenile understanding and so
become a boring place, which the adult will ignore as repetitive or
exploit as mere substance.
Harold Searles’s remark is to the point: ‘It seems to me that the
highest order of maturity is essential to the achievement of a reality
relatedness with that which is most unlike oneself.” Maturity emerges in
midlife as the result of the demands of an innate calendar of growth
phases, to which the human nurturers — parents, friends, and teachers —
have responded in season. It celebrates a central analogy of self and
world in ever-widening spheres of meaning and participation, not an
ever-growing domination over nature, escape into abstractions, or
existential funk.
The twenty-year human psychogenesis evolved because it was adaptive and
beneficial to survival; its phases were specialized, integral to
individual growth in the physical and cultural environments of the
emergence of our species. And there is the rub: it is to those
environments — small-group, leisured, foraging, immersed in natural
surroundings — that we are adapted. [2] For us, now, that world no
longer exists. The culmination of individual ontogenesis, characterized
by graciousness, tolerance, and forbearance, tradition-bound to
accommodate a mostly nonhuman world, and given to long, indigent
training of the young, may be inconsistent in some ways with the needs
of “advanced” societies. In such societies — and I include ours — the
persistence of certain infantile qualities might help the individual
adapt better: fear of separation, fantasies of omnipotence, oral
preoccupation, tremors of helplessness, and bodily incompetence and
dependence. Biological evolution cannot meet the demands of these new
societies. It works much too slowly to make adjustments in our species
in these ten millennia since the archaic foraging cultures began to be
destroyed by their hostile, aggressive, better-organized, civilized
neighbors. Programmed for the slow development toward a special kind of
sagacity, we live in a world where that humility and tender sense of
human limitation is no longer rewarded. Yet we suffer for the want of
that vanished world, a deep grief we learn to misconstrue.
In the civilized world the roles of authority — family heads and others
in power — were filled increasingly with individuals in a sense
incomplete, who would in turn select and coach underlings flawed like
themselves. Perhaps no one would be aware of such a debilitating trend,
which would advance by pragmatic success across the generations as
society put its fingers gropingly on the right moments in child
nurturing by taking mothers off to work, spreading their attention and
energy too thin with a houseful of babies, altering games and stories,
manipulating anxiety in the child in a hundred ways. The transitory and
normally healthful features of adolescent narcissism, oedipal fears and
loyalties, ambivalence and inconstancy, playing with words, the gang
connection, might in time be pathologically extended into adulthood,
where it would be honored in patriotic idiom and philosophical axiom.
The primary impulses of infancy would be made to seem essential to
belief and to moral superiority, their repressive nature masked by the
psychological defenses of repression and projection. Over the centuries
major institutions and metaphysics might finally celebrate attitudes and
ideas originating in the normal context of immaturity, the speculative
throes of adolescence, the Freudian psychosexual phases, or in even
earlier neonatal or prenatal states.
Probably such ontogenetic crippling carries with it into adult life some
traits that no society wants but that ours gets anyway, because such
traits are coupled in some way with the childish will to destroy and
with other sometimes useful regressions, fellow travelers with ugly
effects.Perhaps there is no way to perpetuate a suckling’s symbiosis
with mother as a social or religious ideal without dragging up painful
unconscious memories of an inadequate body boundary or squeamishness
about being cut loose.
In our time, youthfulness is a trite ideal, while the idealization of
youth becomes mischanneled into an adulthood of simplistic polarities.
Adolescent dreams and hopes become twisted and amputated according to
the hostilities, fears, or fantasies required by society. Retarded in
the unfolding of his inner calendar, the individual is silently
engineered to domesticate his integrity and share the collective dream
of mastery. Changing the world becomes an unconscious, desperate
substitute for changing the self. We then find animal protectionism,
wild-area (as opposed to the rest of the planet) preservation, escapist
naturism, and beautification, all of which maintain two worlds, hating
compromise and confusing complicated ecological issues with good and
evil in people.
The trouble with the eagerness to make a world is that, because the
world is already made, what is there must first be destroyed. Idealism,
whether of the pastoral peaceable kingdom or the electronic paradise of
technomania and outer space, is in the above sense a normal part of
adolescent dreaming, like the juvenile fantasies of heroic glory. Norman
Kiell observes that the “pubescent” is called on to reform while his
precognitive self is at the world center, and hence acts to “save
mankind from his own nonhuman status” — that is, from the temporary
identity vacuum in the transition from juvenile into adult life. [3] The
difficulty for our time is that no cultus exists, with its benign cadre
of elders, to guide and administer that transition.
And so we come to our own time. The same questions are asked: To what
extent does the technological/urban society work because its members are
ontogenetically stuck? What are the means and the effects of this
psychological amputation? We inherit the past and its machinations.
White, European American, Western peoples are separated by many
generations from decisions by councils of the whole, small-group nomadic
life with few possessions, highly developed initiation ceremonies,
natural history as every person’s vocation, a total surround of
nonhuman-made (or “wild”) otherness with spiritual significance, and the
“natural” way of mother and infant. All these are strange to us because
we are no longer competent to live them — although that competence is
potentially in each of us.
The question of our own disabilities of ontogeny cannot be answered
simply as the cumulative momentum of the past coming to bear on the
present. The culture of urban technicity works out its own deformities
of ontogenesis. Some of these are legacies, while others are innovative
shifts in the selective perpetuation of infantile and juvenile concerns.
Many aspects of the urban hive are shaped by the industries of
transportation, energy use, and state-of-the-art synthesis of materials
and products. On the other hand, the city is shaped, designed
consciously and unconsciously, by identity cripples, who are deprived in
various social and ecological dimensions, yet who are also cripples in
the sense of potential capacity, the possibilities of personal
realization in the archaic and magnificent environments of the deep
past.
Whether blindness is pathological to those living in a cave depends on
whether you think of it in terms of personal adaptability or of the
inherent potentialities of every member of our species. My view is the
latter, but adaptability is the more vaunted trait-adaptability, that
is, in the sense of flexibility, a readiness to change jobs, addresses,
or beliefs — celebrated by the technocratic ideal of progress in
convenience, comfort, safety, insulation, and the stimulus of novelty.
This kind of adaptability is not of a citizenship that transcends place
and time, but of not yet being adapted, of never finding one’s place or
time.
Cultural anthropology has often been used as evidence of this
contemporary notion of heroic flexibility. A great many ethnographic
studies do impress us with the various ways of being human, but few of
them emphasize the inexorable direction in all human societies: what all
cultures seek is to clarify and confirm the belongingness of their
members, even at the expense of perpetuating infantile fears, of
depriving their members of the object of their quest for adaptedness,
and making their only common ground their nonrootedness.
In this connection it is no surprise that the “adaptability society”
celebrates childhood, admires youth, and despises age, equating
childhood with innocence, wisdom, and spiritual power. Its members cling
to childhood, for their own did not serve its purpose. To those for whom
adult life is admixed with decrepit childhood, the unfulfilled promise
cannot be abandoned. To wish to remain childlike, to foster the
nostalgia for childhood, is to grieve for our own lost maturity, not
because maturity is synonymous with childhood, but because then it was
still possible to move, epigenetically, toward maturity.
Wide-eyed wonder, nonjudgmental response, and the immediate joy of being
are beautiful to see; I hope some kernel of them remains in the heart of
every adult. They are sometimes presented as appropriate models for
adult attitudes toward nature. But the open ecstasy of the child has its
special purposes: a kind of cataloging, preconscious order finding, and
cryptic anthropomorphizing that have to do with personality development
— at least for the child with a good mother bond. The poorly bonded
child, even though troubled, goes through this nature-wonder period, for
it is a new “maternal” reality and perhaps is therapeutic. In any case,
there is no figurative nature for the child; all is literal. Even in
pretending, there is only one reality. The children playing delightedly
on the green grass or in awe at an owl in the woods will grow up
oblivious to the good in nature if they never go beyond that momentary
fascination. When, as adults, they will weigh the literal value of the
owl (already realized, for it taught them the name and owlness) against
other literal values, such as replacing the forest with a hospital, a
sewage system, or an oil well, their judgment is likely to be for
progress. With poor initial mother symbiosis, with an inadequate or
lackluster place-and-creature naturizing, or without the crucial
adolescent religious initiation that uses the symbiotic, literal world
as a prefigured cosmos, the adult cannot choose the forest and the owl.
The self is still at the center of a juvenile reality. It may be true
that the purpose of the childlike pleasure in the outdoors is an end in
itself; it is also necessary to the further work of the self going
beyond the self.
But I have oversimplified the choices in order to make a point. There is
not a choice between the owl and the oil well at all. In our society
those who would choose the owl are not more mature. Growing out of Erik
Erikson’s concept of trust versus nontrust as an early epigenetic
concern and William and Claire Russell’s observation that the child
perceives poor nurturing as hostility — a perception that is either
denied and repressed (as among idealists) or transferred in its source
so as to be seen as coming from the natural world instead of from the
parents (as among cynics) — there arises an opposition that is itself an
extension of infantile duality. Fear and hatred of the organic on one
hand, the desire to merge with it on the other; the impulse to control
and subordinate on one hand, to worship the nonhuman on the other;
overdifferentiation on one hand, fears of separation on the other — all
are two sides ofa coin. In the shape given to a civilization by
totemically inspired, technologically sophisticated, small-group,
epigenetically fulfilled adults, the necessity to choose would never
arise.
The effects of the historical march away from nature, resulting in
socially assimilated deprivation, can be seen in key elements of the
European American personality. The American is not the profligate
anti-European; he is, in respect to certain characteristics, the full
embodiment of Western, classical, Christian human, enabled by the
colossal richness of an unexploited continent to play out the wrenching
alienation that began five to ten thousand years ago, with the advent of
agricultural practices. Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse,
exterminating enemies, having everything now and new, despising age,
denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, being
swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent: all
are familiar images of American society. They are the signs of private
nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climates where
technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening
problems-private nightmares expanded to a social level.
All Westerners are heir, not only to the self-justifications of recent
technophilic Promethean impulses, but to the legacy of the whole. We may
now be the possessors of the world’s flimsiest identity structure, the
products of a prolonged tinkering with ontogenesis — by Paleolithic
standards, childish adults. Because of this arrested development, modern
society continues to work, for it requires dependence. But the private
cost is massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of
destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that
exhibit this callow ineptitude at every level, and, perhaps worst of
all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly
perceive as having failed us. From this erosion of human nurturing comes
the failure of the passages of the life cycle and the exhaustion of our
ecological accords.
In the city-world of today, infinite wants are pursued as though the
environment were an amnion and technology a placenta. Unlike the
cultures of submissive obedience, those of willful, proud disengagement,
or those obsessed with guilt and pollution, this made world is the home
to dreams of omnipotence and immediate satisfaction. There is no mother
of limited resources or father of rigid discipline, only a self in a
fluid system.
The high percentage of neuroses in Western society seems often to be
interpreted as a sign of a highly stressful “life-style.” If you add to
it — or see it acted out as — the insanities of nationalism, war, and
biome busting, it seems a matter less of life-style than of an epidemic
of the psychopathic mutilation of ontogeny. Characteristic of the
schizoid features of this immature subjectivity is difficulty
differentiating among fantasy, dream, and reality. The inability to know
whether one’s experiences originate in night dreaming, daydreaming, or
veridical reality is one of the most familiar disabilities of seriously
ill mental patients. Drug use and New Age psychedelic athletics in
search of a different reality, even the semantics of using “fantasy” as
synonymous with creative imagination and “dream” with inspiration,
suggest an underlying confusion. They are like travesties of the valid
adolescent karma that expresses the religious necessity of
transcendence. The fears associated with this confusion in adults are
genuinely frightening. The anguished yearning for something lost is
inescapable for those not in psychiatric care or on weekend psychic
sprees, but who live daily in time-serving labor, overdense groups, and
polluted surroundings. Blurry aspirations are formulated in concealed
infantilisms and mediated in spectator entertainment, addiction to
worldwide news, and religious revivalism.
Much of this has been said before, but not so often in terms of the
relationship of the human to the nonhuman. Even as socially intense as
we are, much of the unconscious life of the individual is rooted in
interaction with otherness that goes beyond our own kind, interacting
with it very early in personal growth, not as an alternative to human
socialization, but as an adjunct to it. The fetus is suspended in water,
tuned to the mother’s chemistry and the biological rhythms that are
keyed to the day and seasonal cycles. The respiratory interface between
the newborn and the air imprints a connection between consciousness (or
wisdom) and breath. Gravity sets the tone of all muscle and becomes a
major counterplayer in all movement. Identity formation grows from the
subjective separation of self from not-self, living from nonliving,
human from nonhuman; it proceeds in speech to employ plant and animal
taxonomy as a means of conceptual thought and as a model of relatedness.
Games and stories involving animals serve as projections for the
discovery of the plurality of the self. The environment of play, the
juvenile home range, is the gestalt and creative focus of the face or
matrix of nature. Initiatory ordeals in wilderness solitude and the
ecological messages conveyed by myth are instruments in the maturing of
the whole person.
Only in the success of this extraordinary calendar does the adult come
to love the world as the ground of his being. For the child, immersed in
the series of maternal/ecological matrices, there are inevitable normal
anxieties, distorted perceptions, gaps in experience filled with
fantasy, emotional storms full of topical matter, frightening dreams and
illusions, groundless fears, and the scars of accident, occasional
nurturing error, adult negligence, and cruelty. The risk in epigenesis
is that the nurturers and caretakers do not move forward in their role
in keeping with the child’s emerging stages. If such deprivations are
severe enough, the normal fears and fantasies can become enduring
elements of the personality. The individual continues to act from some
crucial moment in the immense concerns of immaturity: separation,
otherness, and limitation. Wrestling with them in juvenile and primary
modes, even the adult cannot possibly see them holistically. Some of
these omissions and impairments enhance the individual’s conformity to
certain cultures, and the culture acts to reward them, to produce them
by interceding in the nurturing process, and so to put a hold on
development. In this way, juvenile fantasies and primary thought are
articulated not only in the monosyllables of the land scalper, but in
philosophical argument and pontifical doctrine. Irrational feelings may
be escalated into high-sounding reason when thrown up against a
seemingly hostile and unfulfilling natural world. The West is a vast
testimony to childhood botched to serve its own purposes, where history,
masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action to alter the world to
match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity.
The modern West selectively perpetuates these psychopathic elements. In
the captivity and enslavement of plants and animals and the humanization
of the landscape itself is the diminishment of the Other, against which
people must define themselves, a diminishment revealing schizoid
confusion in self-identity. From the epoch of Judeo-Christian emergence
is an abiding hostility to the natural world, characteristically fearful
and paranoid. The sixteenth-century fixation on the impurity of the body
and the comparative tidiness of the machine are strongly
obsessive-compulsive. These all persist and interact in a tapestry of
chronic madness in the industrial present, countered by dreams of
absolute control and infinite possession.
There are two ways of seeing this overall sequence. One is as a serial
amputation of the maturing process, in which the domesticated world
deflects adolescent initiation and rigidifies the personality into
clinging to the collective loyalties, feats of bravery, and verbal
idealism of pubertal youth. The era of Puritans and machines fixated on
childhood anxiety about the body and its products. The urban/industrial
age keyed on infantile identity diffusions, separation fears, and the
fantasies of magic power. These truncations of epigenesis are
progressive amputations, first at infancy and finally at adolescence.
Alternatively, the initial domestication may be seen as a calamity for
human ontogeny, against which subsequent history is marked by cultural
efforts to recover a mature perspective without giving up the
centralization of power made possible by unleashed fecundity and urban
huddling. In this sense, history is characterized as the
self-contradictory will to recover the grace and poise of the mature
individual, initially reduced to a shambles by the neolithic, without
giving up the booty. For example, the psychology of self-actualization,
group dynamics, and personal therapy, aimed at healing individuals
deprived of appropriate adolescent religious experience, though helpful
to the individual, is basically antagonistic to the modern state, which
needs fearful followers and slogan-shouting idealists. Thus, the culture
counters these identity therapies, and the philosophical realism of a
cosmopolitan and sophisticated kind that could result from them, with
prior wounds — damage to the fetus and neonate in hospital birth,
through the anxieties of the distraught mother; asphyxiation;
anesthetics; premedication; the overwhelming sensory shock of bright
lights, noisy surroundings, and rough handling; impairment of delivery
by the mother’s physical condition and delivery posture; and separation
of the infant from the mother — all corroding the psychogenic roots of a
satisfactory life in a meaningful world. [4]
What can one say of the prospect of the future in a world where
increasing injury to the planet is a symptom of human psychopathology?
Is not the situation far worse than one of rational choices in an
economic system or the equilibration of competing vested interests?
In some ways the situation is far more hopeful. An ecologically
harmonious sense of self and world is not the outcome of rational
choices. It is the inherent possession of everyone; it is latent in the
organism, in the interaction of the genome and early experience. The
phases of such early experiences, or epigenesis, are the legacy of an
evolutionary past in which human and nonhuman achieved a healthy
rapport. Recent societies have contorted that sequence, have elicited
and perpetuated immature and inappropriate responses. The societies are
themselves the product of such amputations, and so are their uses and
abuses of the Earth.
Perhaps we do not need new religious, economic, technological,
ideological, aesthetic, or philosophical revolutions. We may not need to
start at the top and uproot political systems, turn lifeways on their
heads, emulate hunters and gatherers or naturalists, or try to live
lives of austere privation or tribal organization. The civilized ways
inconsistent with human maturity will themselves wither in a world where
children move normally through their ontogeny.
I have attempted to identify crucial factors in such normal growth by
showing what might have been lost from the past. Some of this, such as
life in a small human group in a spacious world, will be difficult to
recover-though not impossible for the critical period in the individual
passage. Adults, weaned to the wrong music, cut short from their own
potential, are not the best of mentors. The problem may be more
difficult to understand than to solve. Beneath the veneer of
civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian
and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and
necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich
nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the discipline
of natural history, play at being animals, the expressive arts of
receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the
cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all
kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and
liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult
mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of
the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their right moments in
our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms in modern
society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos,
decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness
subverted by the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of
pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or otherworldly religion
instead of an ecosophical cosmology.
We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only
an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the
theme of a reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical
subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield
its own healing metaphysics.
[1] Hervey Kieckly, The Masks of Sanity (St. Louis. Mosby, 1976).
[2] Kenneth Kenniston, “Psychological Development and Historical
Change,” in Robert Jay Lifton, ed., Explorations in Psychohistory (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1974).
[3] Norman Kiell, The Universal Experience of Adolescence (New York:
International Universities Press, 1964).
[4] Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Magical Child (New York: Dutton, 1977),
pp. 45–50, 56–60.