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Title: Biophilia: Toward Re-Humanization Author: William Manson Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #360, health, psychology, technology Notes: William Manson has taught anthropology and sociology for many years, and is the author of Riddles of Eros (University Press of America, 1994). From Fifth Estate #360, Spring 2003
As techno-urbanism extends its dominion, imposing mechanized
regimentation on all modes of experience, human nature with-ers for want
of living sustenance. Deprived of the life-enhancing conditions for
expressive self- development, humans in the megamachine become
self-alienated rather than self-actualized. The world as mechanized
market-place: calculable “market-values” almost entirely replace
experiential values (revering, loving, wonder-ing, feeling). The
individual increasingly perceives herself as a commodity to be trained
and sold to the highest bidder.
The dehumanized “cheerful robot,” whose stunted sensibility is an
adaptive advantage in competi-tive commerce, may thrive — but the
unique, all-round, developed human being is threatened with
extinction.[1] The whole individ-ual, uniquely autonomous, is fully
formed, and cannot be conformed to the increasingly standardized and
overspecialized regime of technical expertise. The relatively unformed,
generic inmate of the technocratic system, by contrast, can more readily
be reformed (and farther deformed). Those per-sons most susceptible to
dehumanization are therefore most “adaptable” to techno-urbanism.
With the progressive atrophy of fragile modes of feeling and relat-ing,
rhomme machine increasingly exhibits an affectless, calculating,
“technomorphic” mentality. The year 2000, Erich Fromm prophe-sied in
1968, might be “the begin-ning of a period in which man ceases to be
human and becomes transformed into an unthinking and unfeeling
machine.”[2] In the context of a prevailing dehuman syndrome [3],
spontaneous human expression becomes pathologized: “Being open in
speech; being unashamed of one’s body; relating to nature; hugging,
touching, feeling and making love to other people; refusing to serve in
the army and kill; and becoming less dependent on machines are generally
considered ‘disturbed behavior’ by a society of robopaths.”[4] Of
course, behavioral “modification” is facilitated through ideological
training, expanding law enforcement, and emotion-al anesthesia
(psychopharmacology).
In my view, revitalization of one’s desiccated human-ness first and
foremost requires a renewed con-tact with the web of evolved life, with
Walt Whitman’s “primal sani-ty” of nature. Transcending the blinkered,
bourgeois-utilitarian (mechanistic-industrial) world- view, one can
embark on a purification of consciousness, a purging of the detritus of
cultural pollution (and a recovery of emotional inno-cence). Withdrawing
from the world of urban commerce (and its mind-numbing “messages”), one
severs the flow of media propaganda and ceaseless “information”
(relating to the ubiquitous “buy-ing” and “selling”). Compulsive
“having” is the pathology of deficient “being.” Aesthetic simplicity
means disconnecting from repulsive superfluity.
Seeking sanctuary in wilder-ness surroundings, one rediscovers the
gentler rhythms of low-cost rural living: walking instead of driving,
and prevention of disease through a style of living consonant with
ecological wisdom. Moreover, “information-process-ing” is largely
replaced by an unmediated, sensuous experience of forest, landscape, and
isouciant creatures. The graceful, animated flight of a single bird,
when per-ceived by the newly-innocent eye, discloses the“expressive
language of the living [5]
Withdrawing from the brutaliz-ing techno-marketplace (and its
ideological delusions), one begins to move more freely as a vital being
connected to an infinitely greater, evolved whole. Deficiency-based,
culturally programmed “desires” give way to a more unified flow of
consciousness — what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed
“being-cognition.”[6] This transcendent level of con-sciousness, an
intimation of the evolved unity of all things, is the true religiosity
discernible in animistic creeds and pantheistic cosmologies. From the
perspective of such heightened awareness of meaning, the senseless
follies (and horrors) of modernity are simply transient aberrations.
Joyful alive-ness is renewed when one feels exuberantly free from
societal constraints and yet intimately connected with the world of
living nature. Biophilia, the affinity and reverence for life, has been
empha-sized as an innate human predisposition by the biologist Edward O.
Wilson, as well as by countless artists and philosophers.[7] Drawn to
contact with living nature, healthy human beings in turn avoid the
life-less, sterile, pre-programmed techno-system. One’s own spontaneous
experience is enlivened by die expressive insouciance of kindred
creatures, including of course children and “unarmored” adults. Indeed,
such healing communion with nature should be complemented with the
shared human affections of cooperative living (sociability which, sadly,
has been virtually crushed by the competitive narcissism of
hyper-capitalist society).
To be sure, such a life of natural reverence and aesthetic simplicity
will still include an unswerving commitment to social and environmen-tal
activism. Such “conscientious non-participation,” in itself a
comprehensive form of protest and resistance, is also a model for sane,
ecologi-cally responsible living. A renewed reverence for the
interdependent web of life, sustained by daily contact with wild nature,
is a (partial) anti-dote to the despair afflicting sensitive, aware
individuals longing to escape from “patholopolis”[8] At the gates of a
great city, an embittered citizen warns Zarathustra: “Here you have
nothing to seek and every-thing to lose... Here all great emotions
decay.” The life-loving Zarathustra, angered by the spiritually infected
critic, was quick to retort: “Why did you not go into die forest?” [9]
[1] “.. .will (here come to prevail, or even to flourish, what may be
called the Cheerful Robot?... In our time, must we not face the
possibility that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating
in quality and cultural level, and yet not many would notice it because
of the overwhelming accumulation of technological gadgets?” C. Wright
Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959), pp.
171,175.
[2] Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
(Harper & Row, 1968), p. 29. A versatile, radical humanist and
psychoanalyst, Fromm could also be described as a libertarian socialist.
See also his important books Marx’s Concept of Man (Continuum, 1966),
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973),
and To Have or to Be? (Harper & Row, 1976).
[3] Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson, The Dehumanization of Man
(McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. xi
[4] Lewis Yablonsky, Robopaths: People as Machines (Penguin, 1972), p.
43.
[5] Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, third edition (Fairrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1949), p. 357.
[6] Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, second edition (Van
Nostrand, 1968). I might add that intense aesthetic experiences of great
music, as diverse as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Copland’s
anarchically exuber-ant Third Symphony, awaken and cultivate “modes of
being” otherwise degrad-ed and stunted in contemporary society.
[7] Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Harvard University Press, 1984). See
also, E. O. Wilson and Stephen Kellert (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis
(Island Press, 1993). It should be noted that Erich Fromm first
introduced the term, and out-lined the optimal conditions conducive to a
love of life, in The Heart of Man (Harper & Row, 1964). Theologian and
doctor Albert Schweitzer emphasized “reverence for life”; and the
biologist Konrad Lorenz, in The Waning of Humaneness (Little, Brown,
1987), stressed the importance of human contact with wild, living nature
as an authentic source of spiritual meaning in an alienat-ed, urbanized
world.
[8] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
[9]
F. Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. Hollingdale. (Penguin,
1969), pp. 195–198.