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Title: Re-enchanting Humanity
Subtitle: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism
Date: 1995
Source: Retrieved on 2019-09-19 from [[https://archive.org/stream/ReEnchantingHumanity/Re-Enchanting%20Humanity_djvu.txt][Internet Archive]]
Authors: Murray Bookchin
Topics: technology, critique, primitivism, social ecology, deep ecology, ecology, dialectics, humanism, anti-humanism, anarcho-primitivism, human ecology, misanthropy

Dedication

For my dear friend of fifty years, David Eisen

A caveat to the reader

Today, when environmentalism is under assault by Republican reactionaries in the United States, Tory reactionaries in Britain, and apologists for

corporate interests everywhere, I wish to reiterate my emphatic support

for *all* environmentalist tendencies that seek to preserve biotic diversity,

clean air and water, chemically untainted foods, and wilderness areas.

Much of my life — some forty years as a writer, lecturer, and activist in

various movements — has been and remains assiduously committed to

these environmental goals. It would be gross demagoguery for antihumanists, misanthropes, and primivitists — who in my view are seriously

damaging the environmental cause — to identify their own regressive

ideas with ecology *as such* and to challenge any criticism of them as an

endeavor to subvert the ecology movement.

I find it necessary to make this statement to the reader because some

years ago, a leading light in the deep ecology tendency scandalously

accused me in *The Progressive* of capitulating to reactionaries in the

United States after I criticized his ecomystical views as deleterious to the

environmental movement. Nor is he the only one who has done so over

the years in one way or another.

I have encountered such cynical behavior only once before in my lifetime — during the 1930s, when devotees of Stalin’s version of

Communism designated all of their critics as ‘fascists’ and worse for

daring to challenge their policies. Such behavior should be severely

reproved as cynical and demagogic if environmentalists are not to surrender the moral integrity that they claim for themselves and their ideas.

What is at stake in such rhetorical charges is whether dissenting views

within the ecology movement (which should be encouraged if the

movement is to advance) are even possible or whether criticisms that

concern the welfare of that movement can be intelligently explored on

their own terms.

Having expressed this concern, it would be foolhardy to ignore the

tendency of antihumanism (particularly trends like sociobiology,

Malthusianism, and deep ecology) to feed into the politically charged

social Darwinism that is very much abroad today. The animalization of

humanity that I believe these trends foster, their regressive absorption of

major social concerns into biology — be they expressed in terms of genetics, demographics, or biocentrism — is now being stridendy echoed by

reactionary legislators who use zoological reductionism as an ideological

weapon for waging war on the poor, the underprivileged, and the helpless. Thus in debates in the US Congress on reducing welfare benefits to

the needy, a legislator from Florida who opposes such aid is reported to

have held up a sign that said ‘Do Not Feed the Alligators’ and noted, ‘We

post these warnings because unnatural [sic!] feeding and artificial [sic!]

care creates dependency’. A legislator from Wyoming is reported to have

drawn ‘a similar parallel with wolves’ (Robin Toner, Resolved: no more

bleeding hearts, *New York Times*, ‘Week in Review’ section, July 16,

1995).

In my view, this kind of ‘natural law’ mentality, directed overwhelmingly against the poor and underprivileged who desperately need

material assistance, can very easily be derived from ideologiews that

reduce human attibutes to the interplay of genes, to a demographics

based oil the behaviour of fruit flies, and to a biocentrism that renders

human beings interchangable with alligators and wolves in terms of their

‘intrinsic worth’ . Flow precariously close these variants of antihumanism

are to the lethal social ideologies that swept through Europe and America

in the 1920s and 1930s, I shall leave it to the informed reader to judge.

Murray Bookchin

May 1995

Acknowledgments

I cannot sufficiently thank my companion and colleague, Janet Biehl, for

her scrupulous reading and copyediting of this book, as well as for her

advice at every point in its preparation and her assistance in researching

material for certain chapters. Her own unfinished book on deep ecology

was one of the major sources for material on which I relied in writing my

chapter on ecomysticism. To my editor, Steve Cook of Cassell, I owe a

genuine debt for encouraging me throughout the preparation of the

manuscript and for his patience in delays that were caused by ill health. I

would also like to thank Steven Best and Richard Wolin for reading and

advising me on my chapter on postmodernism. Their own work in this

area has been immensely stimulating and deserves the widest reading

public.

For the rest, the views I express in the following pages are entirely my

own, and I alone must claim responsibility for any defects the book may

contain. These views have been in the making for years and reflect

changing polemical emphases in my writings that have emerged over

time.

Prologue

This book deals with one of the most troubling conditions that afflicts

society at the present time: a sweeping failure of nerve. I am speaking of

a deep-seated cultural malaise that reflects a waning belief in our species’ creative abilities. In a very real sense, we seem to be afraid of ourselves —

of our uniquely human attributes. We seem to be suffering from a

decline in human self-confidence and in our ability to create ethically

meaningful lives that enrich humanity and the non-human world.

This decline in human self-confidence, to be sure, is not new. The

ancient Mediterranean world fell into a period of declining moral

stamina and self-worth that contributed to the onset of the so-called

‘Dark Ages’ in Europe. Medieval Europe, particularly in the fourteenth

century and after, was torn apart spiritually and materially by dislocations

so formidable that, as François Villon, France’s greatest poet, lamented,

roaming wolves from the countryside ‘ate wind’ in the dangerous and

famine-stricken streets of Paris.

Yet in both of these periods, a sense of hope still lingered on in the

human spirit, a belief in the moral and social redemption of humanity.

Leprous as the human condition seemed to men and women in those

demoralizing times, they shared a belief that our species was capable of

achieving a better moral and social dispensation. Early Christianity, as it

emerged from the dying ancient world, proclaimed the ultimate power

of human virtue to achieve an earthly paradise and affirmed the existence

of a providential design to guide errant souls. The Protestant

Reformation that took form as early as the fourteenth century advanced

a new message of individuality, self-certainty, and, in its more radical

forms, the aspiration toward a sharing communistic society free of

hierarchy.

In contrast to these earlier times, our own era, as the third millennium

comes into view, proclaims a very different spiritual and social message.

Even as technological advances offer the possibility of unprecedented

material security, free time, physical well-being, and a reharmonization

of our relationships with the natural world, a growing number of writers

and speakers tell us that our very ingenuity in technology is really evidence of a chilling failure — resulting from our ‘innate hubris’ — to integrate our lives with the natural world. Indeed, we are asked to regard our

remarkable human abilities for thought and innovation as attributes

destructive of our very selves as well as the natural world. We are being

taught to mistrust our abilities as human beings, to constrain our ‘preening arrogance’, presumably because we have set ourselves up as a species

against the rest of the world of life. Such writers often personify our various institutional and technological achievements as demonic extensions

of our own anthropocentric impulses and indifference to other living

beings. Amidst a farrago of essentially misanthropic proclamations, we

are hard put to know whether our own achievements are our ‘friends’ or

‘foes’.

Yet in a certain sense some forces are demonic indeed — particularly

giant corporations and nation-states. These very forces act oppressively

upon own lives, effacing our faith in freedom and community by their

commanding influence and complexity. The more intimate social life

that: existed in villages, towns, and neighborhoods only a century ago has

yielded to an overpowering institutional gigantism that determines all

aspects of our lives, from the ordinary affairs of everyday life to great

social upheavals on a worldwide scale.

Hence it is not surprising that social life appears to unfold like an inexplicable mystery, beyond our ordinary understanding and control.

Whether we see ourselves as villains or victims, we feel ourselves sinking

into a morass of commanding social forces, ideological as well as institutional, that define our behavior and drain our very ability for self-determination in personal and public affairs. Helplessly at the disposal of vast

socio-economic cross-currents, we are manipulated by a Kafkaesque

world too cryptic to fathom. Our domestic politics are becoming too

national in scope to allow for local forms of intervention, even as our

international politics are becoming too worldwide in scope to be comprehended amidst the rhetoric of’global markets’ and ‘global dependencies’.

Our lives include even more grim realities, such as the proliferation of

nuclear weapons and materials, the socially induced famines that plague

the so-called ‘Third World’, the almost unimpeded destruction of aboriginal cultures and the biosphere, the spread of tyranny over much of

the planet even as world leaders smugly extol new advances in personal

and social freedom. The list of contemporary malfeasances at every level

of life could be extended endlessly, from the implosion of the inner cities

to the destruction of the ozone layer. Hence the loss of self-certainty that

marked popular attitudes only two generations ago and the susceptibility

of the public to an inwardly oriented — often misanthropic — spiritualism

and a privatistic withdrawal from public life into mystical or quasi-

mystical belief systems.

It is precisely these belief systems that this book seeks to examine and

sharply criticize. I am acutely aware that many apparently similar books

have already appeared, deriding the innovative ideas generated by the

radical 1960s and calling for a conservative cultural retrenchment to traditional family values, religious beliefs, conventional virtues, and right-wing political ideologies. We have more books these days on ‘virtues’ —

cultural and social — than we know what to do with. As a lifelong social

radical, I have no intention of adding to the regressive litany of woes presumably caused by radical lifestyles and values, or calling for the revival of

established traditions, many of them repellent. In the ‘cultural wars’ that

American conservatives have proclaimed in recent years, I stand basically

with their opponents: women seeking full equality in a largely patricentric society; the underprivileged and victims of racial discrimination;

environmentalists who are seeking to rescue our life-sustaining planet

from corporate depredation; and the diminishing number of radical

people who are seeking to create a rational society.

----

It is largely because of my commitment to these people and causes, in

fact, that I have written this book. I am deeply disturbed by the conservative literature that invokes a ‘traditional’, usually hierarchical, hidebound past. But paradoxical as it may seem, I am also deeply disturbed by

its pseudo-radical complement:, the so-called ‘new paradigm’ or genetically ‘New Age’ literature that ‘disenchants’ us with our humanity,

indeed, that summons us to regard ourselves as an ugly, destructive

excrescence of natural evolution — whether as a species, a gender, an

ethnic group, or a nationality.

Like its conservative and traditionalist counterpart, the New Age

mentality that demonizes human beings in whole or in part is not necessarily unified or coherent. Unlike many conservative traditionalists, New

Age mystics celebrate the contradictions of their ‘paradigm’, its languid

intellectual irresponsibility, and its seeming pluralism. More than one

proponent of the view that humanity is a delinquent species in an otherwise amiable biosphere or ‘circle of beings’, as the Reverend Thomas

Berry puts it, will sharply disclaim my characterization of their views.

Yet one does not have to look too far beneath the surface to find a

common underlying theme that unites the highly particularistic, theistic,

biocentric, postmodernist, misanthropic, and genetically mystical literature. What I believe brings them together — and many of them express

their views in the same journals and anthologies — is a common deprecation of the remarkable features that make our species unique in the biosphere. Whether explicidy or implicidy, they deride humanity’s ability

for innovation, its technological prowess, its potentiality for progress,

and, above all, its capacity for rationality. I have thus found it appropriate

to call this ensemble of deprecatory attitudes *antihumanism*.

Antihumanism — in sharp contrast to the humanistic ideologies

advanced by rationalism, various socialisms, and some forms of liberalism

— is a world view that places litde or no emphasis on social concerns. The

message it offers is primarily one of spiritual hygiene, personal withdrawal, and a general disdain for humanistic attributes such as reason and

innovation in impacting upon the natural and social wodds. It offers no

serious challenge to modern secular power. Rather, it tilts, when it does

not tumble headlong, toward self-oriented nostrums — and disturbingly

regressive ones at that. Antihumanists commonly extol an intuitionism

supported by the mythopoeic mentality of the distant, preliterate past of

our species. In varying degrees, they demean civilization, progress, and

science, denying either their reality or their value as goals worthy of

respect.

Above all, antiliumanists deprecate or deny humanity’s most distinctive hallmark — reason, and its extraordinary powers to grasp, intervene

into, and play a guiding role in altering social and natural reality. Many

antihumanists harbor a static mindset, partly the result of their reverence

for a mythologized ‘Nature’ — sometimes seen as a realm of cyclical ‘eternal recurrences’ — in which they strive to passively *dwell* rather than

actively *live* as innovative beings; and partly, too, the result of their

entombment in a pantheistic ‘cosmic womb’, a ‘night in which all cows

are black’ (to use a favorite aphorism of Hegel’s), imbued with an outlook that dilutes active selfhood and social involvement. So wide-ranging

and multifarious, in fact, are the antirational moods in contemporary

Western culture that they often defy clear characterization apart from

their shared antipathy for reason and the mostly intuitive nostrums with

which they propose to replace it.

In exploring these moods, the reader will often be obliged to deal with

criss-crossing ideas that are poorly formulated or directly expressed.

Indeed, some antihumanists do not hesitate to invoke science, a *bête noire*

to the more naive antihumanists, in support of their views. Nor will the

reader encounter many spokespeople who synthesize coherence in their

antihumanism. Elusiveness, prettified as pluralism and diversity, has

become a well-cultivated art in the world we shall be entering.

Invoking the simplest rational canons of logical discourse is fiuidess in

a realm that regards reason *as such* as a form of tyranny or ‘logocentricity’.

Not infrequently, antihumanist moods are viscerally predisposed not

toward discovering truth but toward gaining ritualistic and non-rational

‘insights’. Apart from the extravagant use of words like *oneness*, *interconnectedness*, *cosmic*, and *ecological*, the antihumanist vocabulary is almost

willfully vague. Quite often, in a dazzling display of eclectic pluralism — a

euphemism for contradiction — almost anything goes, without any regard

for consistency or clarity.

I find it particularly ironic that at a time when so many of these anti-humanistic books and articles exalt the need to ‘re-enchant Nature’, the

‘Planet’, indeed the entire ‘Cosmos’, the most pronounced effect they

have had is to ‘disenchant’ humanity itself: specifically, its unique potentiality for rationality.

Which raises a central concern of this book: the assault antihumanism

has mounted against the rational faculties that make us human. For it is

not specific traits of individual human beings that antihumanists attack

but the general and unique attributes that *define* human beings as a

species. In the end, it is our claim to be able to reason and to rationally

intervene in the world around us that is under siege. The special features

that make us remarkable products of natural evolution are in one way or

another viewed with acute suspicion or forcefully maligned.

To unravel the ensemble of convoluted, contradictory notions that

can be characterized as antihumanist, with their tangled roots in a highly

intuitive psychology, is the task of this book. Each form of antihumanism, be it cultural primitivism, mystical ecologism, or a variety of postmodernism, must be examined on its own terms. Suffice it to say here

that far too many antihumanists see the malaise that afflicts modern society as rooted not in irrationality, be it in the spiritual or material sphere of

life, but in precisely the opposite: in rationality and a humanistic ‘anthropocentrism’. Beyond this basic premise, antihumanism strays in every

conceivable direction such that it defies clear categorization and logical

coherence. Normally this *modus operandi* would be regarded as an intellectual failing, but antihumanism cherishes it as evidence of flexibility.

----

One word in particular needs explication if this book is to be properly

understood. Inasmuch as I argue for a secular and naturalistic view of the

world, I feel obliged to justify my use of the word ‘re-enchanting’ in the

tide of this book. This word, after all, suggests a mystical bewitchment

consistent with views held by many antihumanists, not humanists. My

reasons for employing the word are simple: I am using it pardy as a spoof,

and pardy as a metaphorical expression of my respect for what the human

species could be and what it could achieve if it applied its intellectual

faculties to the creation of a rational society.

I do not mean ‘rational’ here in a purified, abstract, merely philosophical sense, but rather in the sense of a lived rationality that, at its best,

fosters cooperation, empathy, a sense of responsibility for the biosphere,

and new ideas of community and consociation. A society guided by this

existential form of reason must replace the present predatory society tiiat

I am convinced threatens the survival of human and most non-human

life. It is this socially critical vision that I hope to commend to the reader,

a vision I have held in more than six decades of struggle against oppression, domination, hierarchy, class rule, and the debasement of life to a

mere resource for personal enrichment and greed.

For this book advocates no compromise with the *status quo* and the

mentality it fosters. I am as much opposed to a humanism structured

around self-aggrandizement and plunder as I am to an antihumanism

structured around humanity’s self-effacement in a mystical all-embracing

‘cosmos’.[1] While human beings differ fundamentally from other life-forms in their ability to bring meaning and reason to the world, *precisely*

because of these remarkable abilities they are ethically obliged to develop

a firm sense of responsibility to non-human beings and the planet as a

whole.

Indeed, this book advances a view that is based on neither a Pollyanna

• philanthropos* nor a repellent *misanthropos*, but on a transcendence of both

of these one-sided views. There is, I submit, an outlook that goes beyond

the dichotomy of an angelic and demonic humanity to a sublation that

gives due emphasis to humanity’s affinities with non-human life on the

one hand and to the satisfaction of its own special requirements on the

other.

The current literature all too often offers readers either one extreme or

another — either the biocentric or the anthropocentric — rather than a

wide spectrum of views that allows for a sense of social and ecological

responsibility. It is the one-sided, mutually exclusive dogmas exemplified

by these two ‘centricities’ that I emphatically wish to transcend.

Tragically, more and more people today agree with one or the other of

the extreme, nonsensical notions: that human beings are inherently deleterious to almost everything around them, or that everything around us

was ‘created’ exclusively for human use. I would hope that these pages

provide a better map to negotiate the conflicting centricities in the

modern cultural landscape.

More specifically, the void created by these extremes must be filled by

a *new humanism* based on an ‘ethics of complementarity’, as I called it in

my 1982 book *The Ecology of Freedom*.[2] There are many reasons for

frustration and anger about the human condition, but there are none, I

submit, for demeaning humanity, let alone for viewing its unique rational

abilities as demonic. Indeed, there are good reasons to cherish our species

for the splendors it has achieved, often against incredible odds, and that it

certainly *can* achieve if reason in all its fullness can be brought into the

world — most particularly, into the management of social and ecological

affairs.

February 1995

[1] Whatever its chronology, the use of

‘humanism’ to mean a crude anthropocentric and technocratic use of the planet in

Ntrictly human interests (often socially

unspecified) has its contemporary origins

in Martin Heidegger’s *Brief uber den Humanismus* (Letter on Humanism), written in 1947, which gained favor among

t he postwar French *philosophes* of the existentialist and later postmodernist vintage.

Heidegger’s very flawed and sinister *Brief* is

a masterpiece of misinterpretation and irresponsible reasoning. The humanist—antihumanist dichotomy has its historical

roots primarily in the postwar cynicism

and nihilism of the 1950s and 1960s.

[2] Murray Bookchin, *The Ecology of Freedom*

(Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982;

republished, with new introduction, by

Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991).

Chapter 1: Becoming human

Until recently, the belief that the human species is qualitatively different

from non-human life-forms has been one of the most abiding notions of

nearly all sophisticated civilizations.

The nature of this difference, to be sure, was defined in a great variety

of ways. Human beings generally assigned to themselves the possession of

souls, moral sensibilities, immense technical powers, and remarkable

mental faculties. These traits were often melded into various combinations and ascribed to some social strata by others to distinguish various

strata from one another and from the proverbial beasts in the field. Even

tribal peoples, who professed to see similarities between themselves and

the animals around them, indirectly gave a commanding identity to their

own kind by attributing human speech, motives, and interests to animals

in the anthropomorphized universe of their mythology.

Western civilization in particular singled out reason as the faculty that,

more than any other, gave humanity a unique status among all other

forms of life. The West saw reason as the generative source not only of

logic, discourse, and reflection but also of moral awareness and empathy.

The ancient Greeks gave to thought an eminence so great that it

acquired almost heroic proportions, both in the classical era of Athenian

philosophy and as a major legacy in the ages that followed. Socrates, designated by the Delphic oracle as the ‘wisest man in Greece’, became the

prototypical symbol of human genius, and Western civilization saw the

jurors who sent him to his death for his intellectual independence as the

collective embodiment of intolerance and ignorance, men who defiled

the noblest traditions of Hellenic civilization.

Even theology, Eastern as well as Western, despite its emphasis on the

validity of faith over reason, commonly used reason to justify faith to its

followers. Augustine’s *The City of God*, Christianity’s ideological bridge

from the ancient to the medieval world, remains to this day a closely

reasoned masterpiece of dialectic, its authority partly supplanted centuries

later by the scrupulously analytical *Summa Theologica* of Thomas Aquinas.

The notion that the Middle Ages was entirely an age of faith that

elbowed reason and philosophy to the sidelines of culture is a myth,

invented chiefly by later rationalists to free themselves from clerical

authority. The biblical crossroads between man and the gods intersects

precisely at the point where Adam eats of the tree of moral knowledge,

to be expelled with Eve into ‘the east of Eden’ by an anxious Yahweh

who warns his fellow deities (or angels) that man ‘has become like one of

Us’ — in fact, that he will become a deity — if he eats from the tree of life

and becomes immortal (Genesis 4:22—24).

By the eighteenth century, reason had not only been elevated to the

Status of a defining human trait; it was seen as the arbiter *par excellence* for

critically evaluating human social progress and moral development.

Indeed, by virtue of its speculative capacities, reason had the all-important power to critically search *beyond* the past and present, to transcend

the given state of affairs, and to stake out the contours of a progressive

future literally defined as a rational society. Turgot, Diderot, and

Holbach, among the great Enlighteners of the eighteenth century, conjoined reason with freedom in an intellectual partnership that prepared

the ideological climate for the French Revolution and the emergence of

modern socialism. Reason would illuminate the path to liberty, they

believed, by destroying the fetters of superstition and domination.

Diderot, for Iris part, gave to reason a suppleness and a nuanced sensibility equaled only by the greatest dialogues of Plato. A generation after

Diderot, Hegel equipped reason with a system of logic that emphasized

the creative dynamics of development over the arid statics of formal

Aristotelian analytics.

The Enlightenment, as the rational and humanistic movement in eighteenth-century Western Europe came to be called, was appropriately

named for its all-embracing rationalism. To the thinkers of the time, the

world *itself* was inherently rational. Newton had shown that its physical

aspects were marked by order and intelligibility; Montesquieu broadened

this outlook to society and its history; Voltaire challenged the authenticity of supernatural agents; and German idealists from Kant to Hegel

incarnated man from an Edenic malefactor into a creative subject who

had the power to know himself and his own destiny. This sweeping

vision of‘man the knower’, as *Homo sapiens* (a name that dates from 1802),

helped to reinforce the emerging natural sciences in their struggle against

theological restrictions, fostered a belief in social progress, and nourished

the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution, whose limits,

if it had any, have since bounded beyond the reach of prediction.

Classical humanism, as the humanism of the Renaissance was called,

was bom in the fifteenth century. Embodied in men like Erasmus and

Leonardo da Vinci, it tried to orient European sensibilities toward the

intellectual achievements of the ancient world, particulady Greek culture, and its naturalistic aesthetics, in sharp opposition to the dogmatism

and artistic rigidities of medievalism. But its outlook was basically retrospective. By contrast, Enlightenment humanism was bom in the intellectual and scientific ferment of the eighteenth century. It was oriented not

toward a pagan past but toward a rational future. It was to be embodied

not only in the Encyclopedists but in the theorists of various nineteenth-century socialisms, with their shared principles of futurity and hope.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, both forms of humanism —

the Renaissance and the Enlightenment — melded into what I shall call an

‘enlightened humanism’ that united Renaissance aestheticism with

Enlightenment rationalism, an outlook that pervaded the thinking of

most socialists. The formidable prestige of enlightened humanism

remained triumphant for a century, despite the assaults that were directed

against it by mystics, romantics, and nationalists, all of whose ideas converged in the proto-fascistic *völkisch* movement of the *fin de siècle*. In the

postwar era it is due in no small part to Martin Heidegger’s anti-Enlightenment and anti-rational tract, ‘A Letter on Humanism’ (1947),

that the word ‘humanism’ has acquired its present-day pejorative meaning as an amoral, narrowly anthropocentric and ugly technocratic outlook.

----

My expanded interpretation of humanism is not free of paradoxes —

indeed, of paradoxes within paradoxes. Rousseau, to cite a striking

example, who was no less a rationalist than the mathematician

D’Alembert, nonetheless placed an emphasis on *sensibilité* so maudlin that

he may be broadly called the ‘father’ of much of the anti-rationalistic

romanticism of the nineteenth century. Voltaire was no less a progressivist than Turgot, yet the pessimism of his novella *Candide* fed into the

misanthropic attitudes of later generations. Adam Smith, still another

case, absorbed the altruistic moral philosophies of Shaftesbury and

Hutchinson as a young man, yet he became the voice of ‘enlightened

self-interest’ and the amoralism of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie..

All of these paradoxes came to a head in the French Revolution, whose

universalistic declarations heralded the unity and fraternity of humanity,

only to plummet into a strident nationalism and Napoleonic imperialism.

Within these major paradoxes lurked seemingly minor ones that

emerged full-blown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: technological advances were rational, yet they brought terrible misery to the

working classes of the Industrial Revolution. The national rights of

peoples were regarded as rational, yet asserting them brought a host of

parochial cultural and ethnic hatreds. The growth of cities, commerce,

manufacturing, and self-interest was rational, yet they despoiled the land,

wrought havoc on the natural landscape, and destroyed the very aboriginal cultures that the enlighteners in their own writings had celebrated for

their ‘natural virtues’.

Even as these paradoxes increased in number and intensity, fostering a

xcntimental and moral counterweight to the overriding ideal of value-free scientific objectivity, the arguments between the rational enlightened humanists and their anti-rational romantic critics (who may be

loosely called the antihumanists of their day) were eminently ideological

in the strictest meaning of the word. Ideas were pitted against ideas,

however passionate the poetry of the romantics and cold the prose of the

rationalists. Even as reason was denounced by romantics as ‘meddlesome’

or hypostatized by rationalists as ‘sovereign’, it was in fact reason that

informed both parties to the debate. Apart from sheer rhetoric, few were

prepared to challenge the validity of rationality on its own terms or to

deny its powers of clarification and conviction.

In fact, the paradoxical fact that rationality was an approach shared by

enlightened rationalists and romantic anti-rationalists alike became all the

more marked in the late nineteenth century.[3] Both fervently parochial

racists like the Comte de Gobineau and universalistic social visionaries

like Karl Marx cast their views in scientific or at least rational terms, as

did heated romantic nationalists like Garibaldi and sober revolutionary

internationalists like Eugene Varlin. The great Western tradition of

reason, indeed, of an expansive humanism that included the natural

iciences, not only served as the arbiter of truth but constituted the

formative core of human self-definition. Enlightened humanism retained

its influence even when it was under assault by its opponents. For upon

whatever grounds anti-rationalists and rationalists differed in specifics,

they usually shared an implicit common concern for humanity.

In any case, the influence which the romantic anti-rationalists exercised was largely confined to an intellectual and aesthetic elite. On society as a whole, it had a very limited influence. Conventional nationalism

and religion had a much stronger impact on the social attitudes and emotions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europeans, albeit generally as viscerally existential phenomena with no discursive appeal to

‘man the knower’. Creditably, the most significant and intellectually

demanding popular movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries was formed around ideas attributed to Karl Marx, which

appealed not only to the proletariat’s material interests but, with varying

degrees of success, to its mind and its presumed internationalism. Apart

from the intellectuals who debated, often in aesthetic realms, the virtues

and filings of reason, the heritage of enlightened humanism acquired a

mass outreach in Marxian socialism and, to a considerable degree, in

classical anarchism.

----

The ideological situation we face, today, is significandy different. The

current crop of antihumanists are coarser, intellectually shoddier, and,

alas, far more influential than the romantic anti-Enlightenment writers

and poets of a century ago.

Worse, contemporary antfiiumanism tends to be more blurred than its

predecessor in its approach to the grave concerns that face humanity and

those that lie on the social horizon. If most of our ills — ecological as well

as social — arise from increasingly dangerous dislocations in the existing

society, the problem of how we deal with each other and with the

powerful technological means that society has at its disposal for reshaping

the planet is a matter of paramount importance. To slight these eminendy

social problems, to play down the importance of reason in resolving

them, indeed, to ignore the need to achieve what socialism in all its

forms called a *rational* society, is in my view suicidal. Owing to the

immensity of our social and ecological problems, the turn to an irrational

antihumanism serves to paralyze our capacity to act with purpose and

sanity.

Indeed, at a time when the world seems to be descending into cultural

and ecological chaos, to deprecate the very means for creating a rational

society — notably, an enlightened humanism — should be cause for great

alarm..This is especially so when antihumanism is on the point of

becoming the conventional wisdom of our time. It surfaces today in

ordinary table conversation as a chic state of mind from the households

of American suburbia to the regal domiciles of England. Not much of

this ‘conversation, to use the language of postmodernism, is entirely

intelligible; nor is it notable for its consistency. It is rare these days to

come upon any single work drat is reasonably coherent and free of juvenile exhortations and unthinking waywardness, or that tries to follow out

with relative completeness the logic of its premises.

----

In this ideological quagmire, several antihumanist works can be singled

out that typify those which fill libraries and bookstores today. Perhaps the

most characteristic work that lends itself to coherent analysis — which is

not to say that it is free of contradictions — is David Ehrenfeld’s

• The Arrogance of Humanism*[4] Written by an academic at Rutgers University

who holds numerous degrees in history and science, Ehrenfeld s book is

possessed of a literacy and pithiness that are unusual in current antihumanistic literature, much of which is drenched in New Age metaphors

and heady exhortations. ‘When one chooses a guiding philosophy of

life’, Ehrenfeld sternly warns his readers, ‘and the modern world has

chosen humanism — one becomes responsible for all the consequences

that flow from that choice’.[5] This demand that we follow the logic of a

choice to its end is entirely laudable.

What, then, is the humanism of which Ehrenfeld is so suspicious? His

definition is unerring in its certitude and disturbing in its implications.

Humanism, we are told, is

a supreme faith in human reason — its ability to confront and solve the

many problems that humans face, its ability to rearrange both the world of

Nature and the affairs of men and women so that human life will prosper.

Accordingly, as humanism is committed to an unquestioning faith in the

power of reason, so it rejects other assertiom of power, including the power

of God, the power of supernatural forces, and even the undirected power of

Nature in league with blind chance.

In the humanist outlook, notes Ehrenfeld reprovingly, neither the

‘power of God’ nor the ‘power of supernatural forces’ exist, while the

‘undirected power of Nature’ can ‘widi effort be mastered. Because

human intelligence is the key to human success, the main tasks of

humanists is to assert its power and to protect its prerogatives’.[6]

Ehrenfeld’s definition of humanism may be less than satisfactory, particularly when he casts adherence to humanism in theistic terms, like

‘uupreme faith’ and ‘unquestioning faith’. But inverting Ehrenfeld’s definition of humanism supplies us with a pithy definition of humanism:

notably, a faith in the powers of God, of supernatural forces, and of

‘Nature’. Precisely what these cryptic powers and their sources are

remains disturbingly unclear. Even more disturbing are the archaisms

contained in both these definitions. Ehrenfeld seems to believe in the

very powers of God and powers of the supernatural diat it took enlightened minds centuries, if not millennia, to exorcise, together with necromancy, superstition, and religious fanaticism, a struggle literally waged in

tile torture chambers of the Church and State.

By no means is Ehrenfeld alone in criticizing enlightened humanism

for its ‘degoddedness’ or *Entgöttering* in viewing reality. We also have it

from E. F. Schumacher in his *Guide for the Perplexed* that

faith in modern man’s omnipotence is wearing thin, Even if all the ( new 3

problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder,

and corruption would remain.... More and more people are beginning to

realize that **‘the modern experiment’ has failed.** ... Man closed the

gates of Heaven against himself and tried, with immense energy and

ingenuity, to confine himself to the Earth. He is now discovering that the

Earth is but a transitory state, so that a refusal to reach for Heaven means

an involuntary descent into Hell.[7]

Clearly, ‘faith in modern man’s omnipotence’ is a pejorative interpretation of the humanistic commitment to rationality. Perhaps even more

explicitiy than Ehrenfeld, Schumacher, the guru of ‘small is beautiful’

(the tide of his most influential book), tilts toward the transcendental, if

not the ecclesiastical. Still other antihumanist authors, such as William

Irwin Thompson, Thomas Berry, and Matthew Fox, would likely have

few disagreements with Ehrenfeld’s and Schumacher’s antihumanism.

These seemingly reflective judgments by presumably sophisticated

antihumanists are often the stuff from which the crassest of vulgarities are

written for consumption by the New Agers of California and, in recent

years, neady all other points of the compass. Neither Stonehenge nor the

romantic cliffs of the Rhine can be excluded as a center for those ‘Higher

Levels’, as Schumacher calls them, ‘that alone can maintain [man’s]

humanity’.[8] Cruder forms of this extremely loose verbiage can be found

snugly ensconced not only in esoteric periodicals that proclaim ‘Nature’

as ‘the gates of Heaven’ but in the Anglo-American mass media.

Consider the characteristic opening of a recent cover article in *Time*,

the American mass-circulation weekly. ‘How Man Began’, professing to

tell its readers about ‘sensational’ developments in human evolutionary

anthropology, declares: ‘No single, essential difference separates human

beings from other animals — but that hasn’t stopped the phrasemakers

from trying to find one’.[9] Whereupon the article proceeds, presumably

under a tyranny of archaeological facts, to tell us, quite inadvertendy, diat

the differences between humans and other animals are not only essential

but really quite staggering. Filtered down to ever lower layers of literacy,

the article’s sensationalistic opening — the facts notwithstanding — produces a vision of the human condition that is ultimately opaque, mysterious, and necromantic to millions of ordinary readers.

In contrast to nineteenth-century debates between romantic antihumanists and the enlightened humanists, rationality rarely, if ever, enters

into current antihumanist affirmations. Statements that are not simply

declarative are filled with theistic metaphors that seem bent on making

the skeptical reader feel like a heretic who violates God-given (or

Goddess-given) injunctions. Intonations replace insights, dull repetitious

mantras replace the evocative poetic recitations of the old-time romantics, and reason gives way not only to intuition but to vague allusions to

cryptic ‘powers’ that allow for no explication, much less analysis.

No less irritating is the fact that this stuff not only blurs the boundaries

between the human and non-human; it obliterates the very identity of

human beings in the great drama of biological evolution and their self-consciousness in the equally important drama of social evolution.

Whatever the ‘gates of Heaven’ may be, we have no way of knowing

where they are located, still less how to open them. The spiritual geography of these freely drawn and inspirationally guided maps, so currendy

popular in Anglo-American bookshops, constitute a cartography guided

by the viscera rather than by the brain, and by visions that are more hallucinogenic tiian insightful. Antihumanism provides no compass for *this*

world, yet it has no other world to offer, short of an imaginative one that

differs in considerable detail with each guru, periodical, or book consulted.

----

In the light of the public confusion about the human condition, particularly with respect to humanity’s identity, it behooves us to ask ourselves

• who* we really are as a species and *what* would constitute a society that

fulfills our potentiality as rational and creative agents in the world. Let

me stress the word *potentiality*, a word I use to emphasize what we *could*

be if we brought reason into our affairs rather than what we *are* today in

a mad and meaningless world.

Our being as a species is closely related to our being as social creatures.

To discuss them requires asking what constitutes our place in what is

broadly called ‘Nature’ and what constitutes a rational society. Certainly,

if we stumble blindly into the future with no sense of the characteristics

that make us uniquely human, antihumanists would have a prima facie

case for designating people a ‘cancer’ in natural evolution, with little

promise of doing more than destroying the biosphere and most of themselves.

In trying to define our humanity as organic beings, we will not get

very far unless we define words that are usually used very loosely in reference to our status in the biosphere. I refer especially to the word

• Nature*, one of those very complex words that is used glibly and whose

meaning becomes more elusive the more we examine it.

No one doubts that ‘Nature’ is, minimally, a wilderness area that one

can see from a mountain top, a scenic view of valleys, fields, forests, and

streams, indeed, of all that lies so magnificently and invitingly within our

purview. Nature, to many people, is simply a vista free of human beings

and hence ‘authentically’ natural. Such vistas adorn picture postcards,

particularly in the Far West of the USA, and the canvases of ‘nature

painters’.

On the surface, this definition is partly true — and also partly false. That

Nature is a vista. bereft of human presence is a convention deeply

ingrained in the modern mind, especially in North America, where

• Nature* and *wilderness* are widely regarded as synonymous. More important, the notion that Nature has eternal attributes as wilderness is so commonplace that it has become a frozen image in innumerable artistic,

literary, and documentary works and a staple in a pseudo-philosophical

New Age literature that extols the need to ‘dwell in’ and ‘abide with’ an

unchanging, eternal ‘balance of Nature’.

Yet this frozen image of Nature is extremely deceptive. The *fixity* of a

breathtaking vista simply does not exist. Nature is not only dynamic at

every moment of the day but, above all, is highly developmental. Plants

and animals are generally not only active in maintaining themselves hut

are interactive in creating new eco-communities.[10] Life-forms are continually being bom, maturing, and dying, entering into elaborate food webs

or networks that make possible the vistas we admire.

Most important for the purposes of our discussion, what we call

Nature is continually *evolving*: plants and animals vary within the same

species and mutate into new life-forms. They are continually transforming themselves, at times so gradually that their evolution is completely

unnoticeable; at still other times with great rapidity, in what some biologists call ‘punctuated equilibria’.

----

What makes our notion of Nature as a mere vista particularly misleading

is that it ignores *humanity’s* place in the natural world. That is to say, it

obscures the fact that human beings are not aliens in a dichotomy of Man

pitted against Nature. Rather, human beings are a result of the long evolutionary history of the natural world.

In fact, they are a very special result of that history. They are possessed

of abilities no other life-form has equaled in kind. Indeed, if Nature is a

cumulative evolutionary process — in the case of organic evolution, from

the earliest prokaryotic cells through eukaryotic cells and their elaboration into the aquatic, terrestrial, reptilian, mammalian, and primate

groups — the word Nature becomes more than a metaphor for mere

‘Being’, an abstract existence.

The challenge of thinking about Nature as a cumulative evolution

arises from the duality of the evolutionary process itself. On the one

hand, human beings have qualities that can be found in nascent form in

other animals as a result of their shared evolution. But by virtue of a twist

In the evolutionary process, they have also developed well beyond their

animal ancestors. They have created a new realm of evolution based on

their extraordinary intelligence, anatomical flexibility, unprecedented

communicative abilities, distinctly mutable and highly malleable institutions (that we can properly call society), and extraordinary capacity for

innovation.

I cannot emphasize the institutional, mutable, malleable, and innovative nature of society too strongly. Society, properly speaking, is a strictly

human phenomenon, one that stands in significant contrast to the genetically imprinted collectivities of so-called ‘social insects’and the relatively

loose, developmentally static animal aggregations of herds, troops, and

similar groups. Although such animal aggregations change in population

numbers and are found in a wide range of different species, animal communities undergo very little variation; nor do they possess an institutional

framework formed by conscious design. Human beings, by contrast,

form bands, tribes, tribal federations, monarchies, democracies, and

republics, among others, each of winch has richly articulated structures,

intersubjective relationships, and cultures, and which can be changed by

popular action, *coups*, and upheavals of one kind or another.

The majority of animals, moreover, merely dwell in their environment. If they alter that environment, they do so primarily inadvertently,

merely by their presence in it, or by nascent choices from among naturally available possibilities. With a few and very limited exceptions, they

do not consciously remake the conditions they find but rather try to live

within them. By sharp contrast, human beings consciously act upon their

environment, and with new material techniques, they intentionally try to

shape it to meet their own needs. Put simply: animals generally *adapt*,

while human beings generally innovate*. This distinction is a difference

not merely in degree but in kind.

Even so, our unique human capacities do not constitute a complete

breach with the natural world — even as we innovate, we simultaneously

incorporate our animal heritage into our lives. Indeed, one of the great

problems in social development is our animalistic inertia — our conservatism — in retaining obsolete social traditions that act as a brake on

much-needed social changes and innovations. Although as human beings

we are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and. retain certain instincts and

vaguely understood impulses that are rooted in our inescapable animality,

we are also capable of transcending our adaptive animal attributes and in

the process becoming less animalistic than our remote hominid forebears.

If we are to advance beyond metaphorical concepts of Nature and see

the organic world *as an evolutionary process*, we have to view Nature in a

less simplistic and more graded way than the romantic image of a mere

vista. To understand the emergence of humans and their creation of culture requires that the conventional image of Nature as the striedy organic

be differentiated in such a way as to distinguish the social world from the

merely biological. While acknowledging that all humans are necessarily

mammals, we must also recognize that all mammals are not necessarily

humans — indeed, between them is not only an evolutionary continuity

but also an immense divide. Insofar as Nature includes the biological

realm of animality that precedes the emergence of society, we are

obliged, following the Roman orator-philosopher Cicero, to speak of

biological evolution as ‘first nature’ and social evolution as ‘second

nature’. And while we wish to recognize humanity’s filiations with its

organic evolution or first nature, second nature evolves from and also

includes first nature. By the same token, we do not dissolve the very real

qualitative distinctions between human and non-human life-forms in a

reductionist quagmire. First and second nature — the biological and the

social — form a richly differentiated continuum in which second nature

emerges from first. While each interacts with the other, second nature

marks a transcendence of first nature, a sublation of an adaptive animality

to an innovative humanity.

----

Given the distinctions as well as the continuities between first and second

nature, antihumanists who view human beings merely as another animal

are making fools of themselves — and have a narrowly reductionist image

of the natural world as well.

If humans were merely animals that just happen to be acutely intelligent — and if intelligence were an attribute no different in kind or value

from, say, the ability of birds to navigate or caribou to migrate — their

strictly animalistic behavior in exercising that faculty should be cause for

little concern.[11] If people are no different from other animals, why

shouldn’t they limitlessly populate the planet, as all animals would if they

could? Rabbits, after all, might very well have overpopulated the

Australian continent to the detriment of its flora and other fauna if

human beings had not taken radical measures to control their reproduction rates. Or why shouldn’t people devour the earth’s resources, or even

tear down the entire biosphere merely to gratify their immediate needs

and impulses? If ratio nahty is comparable to the navigation of birds or the

migration of caribou, humans are under no obligation to behave differ-’

ently from any other animal. Indeed, the fact that all non-human animal

species are occupied exclusively with their own well-being and their

need to reproduce should countervail the antihumanist view that ill-mannered human beings constitute an ecological cancer on the planet.

My point is that antihumanists unthinkingly **presuppose the very exceptional rational faculties human beings alone possess**, even as they denounce

these faculties as the source of human ‘hubris’ and ‘arrogance’. Indeed,

even as they belitde ‘faith in the power of reason and human capabilities’,

to cite another of Ehrenfeld’s formulations,[12] they implicidy rely on reason to criticize that seemingly sinister ‘faith’. That antihumanists can

even communicate with other human beings on morally and religiously

charged issues — that would be utterly meaningless to animals, indeed

completely beyond their understanding — reveals the unstated presuppositions of their denunciations of humanism. Moreover, if they denounce

reason as a ‘power’ supported by a misplaced ‘faith’, their alternative cognitive faculties — intuition? — would also require the ‘power of reason’ to

explain why an intuitive ‘faith’ has any validity at all. That is to say, they

must turn to reason to wriggle their way toward a belief system or any

eminendy *human* form of knowledge, with all its evident or concealed

ways of thinking — be it a faith, belief, or insight.

Whether one chooses to anchor human knowledge in faith based on

intuition or on reasoned elucidation, there is not a shred of evidence to

support a belief that animals have faith in anything. Nor do we expect

them to have faith, let alone act rationally, with respect to anything aside

from their survival. Belief systems are beyond the competence of any

known animal species apart from human beings. Ironically, we tend to

judge the competence of animals in the survival game more on their

‘intelligence’ than on any belief sys tems we may impute to them — that is,

on an attribute denigrated in human beings.

Finally, human beings are distinctive and different from animals

because they are consciously innovative, not merely adaptive. They do

not merely dwell in given habitats; they create *new* environments. Their

innovativeness, like their power of reason, was not given to them by

heavenly beings, mythic figures, or ‘alien’ visitors from another galaxy;

rather, they are products in great part of biological evolution itself — of

first as well as second nature.

It is to this evolutionary process — biological development and the

emergence of society — to which we must turn for an understanding of

what it means to be human.

----

Anatomically, human beings are not an abrupt branching away from a

long flow of evolutionary development. Quite on the contrary, they are

the outcome of trends in natural evolution that are not only explicable

but are in a sense quite logical, to an extent that paleoanthropologists,

even nominalistic ones, are still learning.

If biological evolution is entirely a hit-or-miss matter of chance, it is

inexplicable and meaningless; unique human qualities would seem to

have emerged *ab novo* with no basis in a long process of organic differentiation. If, conversely, biological evolution is predestined in unwaveringly teleological terms, so that the appearance of humanity was already

inexorably prefigured from the very beginnings of life, the emergence of

humanity — or any life-form — acquires a mystical dimension that presupposes the existence of the very phenomena we are attempting to explain.

Between a strictly nominalistic conception of evolution and a strictly

teleological one, there is a middle and more plausible ground that is

worth examining. If we think of how certain, specific evolutionary attributes developed, our image of their development becomes both less nominalistic and less teleological. Consider how the nervous system evolved,

for example. Organisms with complex nerve networks can be traced

back to the distant Devonian epoch, more than a hundred million years

ago, when fishlike animals began to leave the ancient seas for terrestrial

shores and the open air. These Chordata, with their spinal cords and

simple brains, adapted themselves to so many different ecological niches

that their ultimate occupancy of trees was quite as comprehensible as

their occupancy of swamps, arid lands, caves, and the like.

In the tight of the eminently attractive ecological forest niches that

were open to them, the evolution of primates and their differentiation

into monkeys, apes, hominoids, and hominids seems far less chancy a

development than strictly empirical paleoanthropologists often lead us to

suppose. Recent discoveries suggest that it was in densely forested areas —

not necessarily in arid open savannahs — that bipedal primates began to

evolve. Indeed, the discovery in 1994 of an ancestral fossil,

• Australopithecus ramidus*, has left paleoanthropologists speculating that a

bipedal link between apes and humans walked on forest floors nearly four

and a half million years ago, about a million years before *Australopithecus*

• afarensis* of ‘Lucy’ fame appeared, and long before savannahs emerged in

areas of Ethiopia that are rich with hominid fossils today.

Is this mere accident? Possibly — in a very narrow view of natural

selection. Or is it the fulfillment of a potentiality? Certainly, because such

bipedal hominids *did* appear after all, they did not emerge from smoke.

Their development toward bipedatism built on earlier anatomical

changes that had taken place long before primates descended from tree

branches to the ground. What we call human 7 patently evolved from

within an immensely important tendency — in biological evolution: the

enormous specialization of an organ system whose development makes

for greater behavioral flexibility — the *nervous* system — in contrast to

highly specialized anatomic attributes such as scaled, armored hides,

fanged jaws, and immense claws. Leaving aside ironclad teleology,

human evolution occurred within a number of specific *tendencies* in animal development that are thoroughly consistent with Darwin’s

• Origin of Species*, and reveals the potentiality for *social* evolution.

Human beings are primates, a group of animals with highly flexible

physical attributes. The primate body has free forearms that allow it to

adapt easily to a great variety of environmental conditions. It has stereoscopic vision, which makes it possible to judge distances ranging from the

most minute to the far horizon. Primates can see colors, a capability not

given to mammals generally, remarkably enhancing primates’ knowledge

of the similarities and differences between the things that make up its

environment.

Human hands, distincdy primate in origin, are puny by comparison

with a lion’s claws, and human arms are weak by comparison with a

bear’s forelegs. The relatively hairless human skin is more vulnerable than

the hides of most mammals to changes in weather, insect bites, thorns,

and abrasions. These anatomical failings would have made humanity s

survival impossible without a brain that was ultimately capable of generalizing and memorizing to an unprecedented extent. These brains, which

evolved together with a vocal apparatus, bipedalism diat freed the arms

for a greater variety of tasks, stereoscopic and color vision, and highly

manipulative fingers, conferred on human beings an unprecedented

capacity not only to survive but to radically refashion the natural environment to suit their needs.

Not all of these attributes emerged at once. Indeed, it would render

biological evolution miraculous to maintain that they emerged simultaneously in a single creature. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of

only half a century ago, which regarded brain development the earliest

step toward human development, evidence today shows that bipedalism

preceded humanity’s advance beyond the mental equipment of a modern

chimpanzee.

Whether bipedalism conferred rudimentary social advantages upon the

earliest hominids by freeing the arms to carry food back to a family unit

or a group, or to fashion simple implements, or both, is a question we

may never be able to answer definitively. Greater brain power came later,

as the evidence suggests, as did elaborate tool-making. Each may have

had social consequences: bipedalism leading to closer association; free

arms to a growing sense of responsibility to one’s kin group rather than

to a single or several offspring; tool-making enhancing mental astuteness.

----

The emergence of humanity was part of a strong overall biological trend,

spanning hundreds of millions of years, that gave rise within first nature

itself to a species that transcended its mere animality and produced a second, distinctively social nature, just as the development of the inorganic

world had previously given rise to the organic. Having developed t vithin

first nature and as part of its very evolution as an animal, humanity

evolved further to produce a second or social nature.

No ‘faith in a higher authority’ , be it the ‘power of God’ or the

‘power of the supernatural’ (Ehrenfeld) or any power to ‘open the gates

of Heaven’ (Schumacher), need be invoked to explain how — or why —

human beings, over the course of their evolution, achieved their eminently natural capacity to consciously alter their environment and make

them more amenable to human well-being.

Nor did any of this ability evolve because primates, hominids, and

humans perversely ‘willed 7 it into existence. Throughout, natural selection shaped the human ancestral line, no less than it was shaping the

ancestral lines of contemporary wolves, bears, whales, tigers, and all the

furry little creatures we find so endearing and of which we feel so protective.

Natural selection worked on features that already existed, ‘selecting’

certain possibilities or potentialities that arose from previously advantageous developments, be they simple nerve ganglia that *could* become

brains, legs that *could* become arms, a rudimentary upraised stature that

• could* become fully bipedal, bones that *could* become fingers, and so forth

— ranging across the anatomical and organ systems of the earlier, more

generalized mammals.

Thus humanity is not some sort of freak in organic evolution. In fact,

increasing subjectivity, intelligence, and physical flexibility would confer

enormous advantages on *any* animal species. Early human beings initially

did no more than what any versatile animal would do: they used their

remarkable and developing brains to meet their own needs. If their

highly generalized anatomy required still more brain power to compensate for their very limited muscle power, they fortunately continued to

evolve more brain power.

The *natural* component of becoming human, then, consists in the fact

that biological evolution enhanced rationality — the very ability that so

many antihumanists regard as one of humanity’s troubling attributes. To

be a human animal, in effect, is to be a reasoning animal that can consciously act upon its environment, alter it, and advance beyond the passive realm of unthinking adaptation into the active realm of conscious

innovation. A mystical faith in the ‘supernatural’, ‘God’, and ‘the gates of

heaven’, as an alternative to reason, not only catapults humanity, out of

natural evolution; it creates out of pure smoke a mythic transcendental

realm that severs the ties of our species to the natural world. Not only do

antihumanists denigrate the naturally endowed power of human beings

to reason; they open a vast chasm between the human and their revered

Nature that no wispy metaphors, alluring rituals, lofty pretensions of naturalness, or mystical rubbish can fill. However much they may claim to

deny that they see any opposition between human beings and the natural

world, they are implicitly among its principal ideological architects today.

Finally, the supernatural, God, and the gates of heaven are crassly

anthropomorphic illusions, like Disney cartoons that present talking

bears, soulful deer, commanding lions, malicious wolves, and gloved

mice, recreating the a nim al world in the most pedestrian human forms.

In movies, talVing lions are imparted with missions acceptable to a highly

moronized public, then sent forth to carry the burdens of lionhood onto

the African savannahs. Conversely, in real life, full-grown men and

women try to establish an identity with wolves hy childishly howling

around campfires — which would probably panic any nearby wolf and

cause it to rush back to its lair. Others speak as the ‘representatives’ of

stones, rivers, and — with excessive hubris of entire mountain ranges in

a juv enil e ‘Council of All Beings’, as though the animal world — prey and

predator alike — ever created so natural an institution as parliamentary

government.

Naive as these antics may seem, their impact on the human condition

can easily become sinister when they axe used to create atavistic movements, socially reactionary impulses, and dangerous fantasies that obstruct

attempts to change an irrational society into a rational one. Such movements bear disturbing parallels to earlier movements that offered biologistic explanations for the world’s troubles — movements that melded

a romantic ecologism with nationalism and racialism, to make the

twentieth century one of the bloodiest in history.

----

Having defined Nature as a cumulative evolutionary *process* and suggested

humanity’s place in it, we are in a better position to deal with human

beings as social creatures.

Our highly complex brains, our capacity to make tools and to vocalize

syllabically, our dexterous fingers, bipedal gait, and stereoscopic vision,

all taken together would not provide us with startling advantages over

instinctively programmed, heavily muscled, roaring, and swift beasts of

prey if each of us lived isolated in forests and on savannahs. Indeed, many

human attributes — such as our relatively feeble muscles and slow gait —

would be outright fiabilities, especially if our highly imaginative minds

panicked us with fantastic as well as real fears. The distant Pleistocene

world of our ancestors was anything but safe, carefree, and liberating. It

does not take an abundance of knowledge to recognize how appallingly

dangerous an African night is to any creature, even to animals that five in

herds.

By bringing a camera with infrared fights onto the African savannah,

Donald Johanson and others have dramatically shown that all hell breaks

loose when the sun goes down: Hyenas attack lone lions, while lion

prides attack elephant calves and even pull down a burly, formidable

buffalo of enormous strength and bulk.[13]

Humans are immensely vulnerable animals — more vulnerable than

arboreal primates — and our ancestors, such as Lucy, in the remote

Plio-Pleistocene, were even more vulnerable than we, who at least have

nearly three times the brain size for our weight than she. Our rich cultural heritage enhances our versatility in the most challenging and unfamiliar conditions. It is doubtful that lone, bipedal hominids could have

survived the furious predation that normally occurs in African forests and

savannahs at night without some system of common defense. And it was

in Africa, in a wilder and more dangerous world than the cold north-lands, that our ancestors originated.

Significandy, hominids honed to a fine degree precisely those traits

that made for effective cooperation. Their traits for expression, communication, guardianship, care, and cooperation seem to have increased

rather than diminished. They increasingly developed skills that depended

upon cooperative activity rather than individual physical strength. If

bipedalism had any value to our ancestors, it was to carry food and young

juveniles — to acquire food for a group of some sort, not merely to feed

oneself. Like many paleoanthropologists, I wish to emphasize that an

integral part of our first nature — our biological evolution — is our ability

to function cooperatively with others of our own kind. The extent to

which we can call this ability social is difficult to say. It is striking that the

physically strongest of the early hominids, *Australopithecus robustus*, with

its massive jaws and frame, was extinct by the eady Pleistocene, while the

more gracile *Australopithecus afaremis*, which may have been ancestral to

all *Australopithednes*, gave rise to the early *Homo* genus from which we are

all direcdy descended. Nor was Lucy, some three and a half million years

ago, any less an object of prey than baboons, chimpanzees, and other primates. What is remarkable is that the diminutive hominids of the late

Pliocene and early Pleistocene were not extinguished like so many other

species in those remote periods, and it is this fact that requires explaining,

not simply their anatomical and cranial evolution.

By no means, in fact, did social life or second nature suddenly emerge

in our species from first nature and abruptly ‘disconnect’ us from the

natural world. Inscribed on our physical anatomy are the incipient elements of social life that make it possible for us to be sharing, cooperative,

and family-oriented animals. Human first nature is shaped not only by

anatomical developments that make for greater intelligence in getting

food and outwitting predators — developments we might expect to find

in all animals; it is also shaped, especially in early hominids, by developments that yield complex forms of consociation and interaction. For an

immensely long span of time, rudimentary forms of consociation provided an advantage to one hominid fine over another that was selective

socially as well as naturally, much as mutual aid provided a marked

advantage to one animal species over another.

To speak exclusively of natural selection without reference to the

advantages conferred on hominids by social selection, then, would be

simplistic. To the extent that early hominids formed social groupings

without complex institutions, the two were tied together very closely.

Thus traits favoring cooperation, intercourse, group protection, and

scavenging-foraging (our ancestors were more likely scavengers than

hunters) were ‘selected’ for the same survival reasons that fangs and claws

were ‘selected’ for lions.

----

The earliest institutions that distinguish a society from a herd were probably structured around eminently biological facts, such as extended infantile dependence, age difference, gender distinctions, and blood ties.

The newborn human child is a strikingly unfinished and vulnerable

creature. U nlik e many newborn ungulates, which can rise to four legs

within a matter of hours and run with the herd in a day or two, it is

totally helpless at birth. It takes years for a human infant to gain the competence to care for itself. Depending upon individual differences, some

thirteen years may pass before a child is sufficiently developed to function

as a responsible person. During this protracted period of dependence,

children retain a mental plasticity that makes it possible for them to learn

a great deal of knowledge, much of which they will need to survive

under very rudimentary material conditions of life.

By contrast, a newborn chimpanzee completes its infancy in half the

time of a newborn baby, and it ends its juvenile phase in half the time

required by a human child. Five years or so after a chimpanzee is bom, it

can fend for itself within its habitat more effectively than can any human

child of the same age, even in simple band or tribal communities. Once

it has reached maturity, however, a chimpanzee’s learning capacity is

very limited; a human being, on the other hand, can absorb knowledge

throughout much of its life.

The protracted dependence of the human child leads to bonds of lifelong commi tm ent, even as the mother becomes occupied with the care

of new and younger siblings. Sharing food, collective care taking for the

young, an abiding sense of responsibility to the infirm and to the family

group as a whole — all yield a clearly discernible human family structure,

to an extent that is largely unknown in chimpanzees, our closest primate

relatives, among whom even the sharing of food is idiosyncratic at best

(apart from the mother-offspring relationship), and the sick are actually

shunned.

Given the human child’s ever-increasing mental faculties, its wide-ranging emotional repertoire, and its growing sense of self-awareness, it

becomes the cement, as it were, of a distinct institution, the family,

together with its mother and others by whom it may be raised The biological imperatives of childrearing for a long period of time constitute the

point of departure for building an institutionalized *society*, rather than a

loosely bound community.

The next major biological fact that seems to have played a constitutive

role in forming early society is old age. In the demanding world of prehistory, the physical vulnerability of aging adults would tend to foster a

commonality of interests among them that led to a simple, mild stratification in which they were mutually protective against neglect or abandonment by the community. In cultures that lacked writing, elders were the

all important repositories of community knowledge, the heirs of the

group’s wisdom, which would give them an enhanced position in band

and tribal communities. It was they who taught the young the arts of survival and who brought their experience to the service of the community

— and made themselves indispensable as teachers. Respect for elders,

often in powerful gerontocracies, is almost universal among the remaining preliterate peoples, and It is not difficult to believe that they were

highly respected in early organized societies and were ultimately given

privileged positions.

Of immense importance as well were the institutionalized differences

in gender that emerged in early social development Certainly, the sexes

took on different material tasks. Women were responsible for child-bearing, food-gathering, and food preparation, while men engaged in scavenging, tool-making, hunting in varying degrees, and protecting the

group from marauding men of other communities. Although both sexes

did many things in common, the more the human tool-kit expanded and

new ways of securing a livelihood emerged, the more likely it was for

work to be divided functionally along gender lines so that a true division

of labor occurred in most cases, even leading to a cultural division along

sexual lines, in which females formed their own sororal groups and males

their own fraternal groups.

Finally, the most obvious institutional forms of affinity were organized

around kinship, the most universal form of relationships in contemporary

preliterate communities. Just as childrearing, age differences, and gender

groupings are based on biological facts, so too are relationships structured

around blood ties (whether real or fictitious). Within a recognizable

circle of blood brothers, sisters, parents, and other relatives, strong obligations existed that formed the sinews of social ties. One’s basic allegiances

were owed first to one’s immediate kin, the members of one’s family.

These were slowly extended outward to include allegiances to cousins

and to offshoots of one’s group, clan, and tribe, until kinship ties became

so remote that in their most extended forms, they implied no obligations

at all.

----

We can only guess when clearly definable institutions like the family

appeared in human evolution. One of the earliest hominid ancestors,

• Australopithecus afarensis*, about four feet tall but clearly bipedal, appeared

on the semiforested African savannahs some four million years ago.[14] It

had a brain that was no larger than that of a chimpanzee. Far from resembling the ‘killer ape’, as Australopithecines were called years ago, the

predators of other animals, *afarensis* was more likely the fairly docile,

omnivorous prey of leopards and hyenas. The fact that it was undoubtedly bipedal, which qualifies it as a direct ancestor of modern human

beings, provides reason to suspect that mother-child relationships in

these hominids were more structured than those of chimpanzees, among

whom maternal bonds to the young are relatively loose and easily separated after a couple of years. In 1976 in Tanzania, the distinguished

paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found free-striding, distinctly bipedal

footprints of what appears to have been two *afarensis* adults and a child,

preserved by overlays of volcanic ash. Very much like our own, they

suggest close bonding among our early ancestors — possibly even a

permanent family unit that walked upon ashy soil some three and a half

million years ago.

The first hominid to earn the generic name of *Homo*, specifically *Homo habilis* (that is, ‘handy man’) appeared about two million years ago, leaving not only distinctly humanlike fossil remains but recognizable stone

tools. Litde more than a half-milfion years later, its descendant, *Homo erectus*, emerged, and with its appearance we can speak plausibly of some

kind of lasting institutionalized form of social organization. *Homo erectus*

clearly crafted tools and learned to use fire. Indeed, until this indisputably

human species appeared, our ancestors were confined geographically to

the African continent.

• Erectus* was not only technically versatile but, given its capacity to use

fire, may have been a hunter, setting grasslands afire to trap and harvest

animals, possibly stampeding herds over cliffs, and effectively defending

itself against predators with torches. This constellation of developments —

particularly the ‘taming’ of fire — must have been a turning point in

human evolution. Probably, **erectus**‘s main source of animal proteins and

fats came from scavenging, especially using stone hammers to break open

the long bones of prey animals that even hyenas, with their powerful

jaws, could not crack, and consuming the rich marrow that was left

behind after the animal’s flesh was consumed. It is also possible that

erectus did some hunting and fishing, built shelters, and lived an organized

group existence. Finally, *erectus* was the first hominid to leave the African

cradle of human evolution, migrating as far east as Java, which suggests

that these humans may have known how to clothe themselves against

inclement weather.

• Erectus* had a brain that was about two-thirds the size of its modern

descendants. Within a span of about a million years, humans like

• Homo sapiens neanderthalensis* (now classified as a form of *Homo sapiens*) appeared

with brain sizes comparable to our own. They probably carried spears,

hunted collectively, engaged in seemingly ceremonial.burials, and lived

in small organized communities. In the absence of any art-like remains, it

is hard to say with assurance that they held complex religious beliefs; nor

is it clear that they could articulate words and sentences with any proficiency. But their burial sites suggest that they may have had some kind of

belief system and form of family organization.

The physical features that distinguish authentic humans from their

Neanderthal cousins is more marked than the more genteel current literature on Neanderthals would have us believe. Contrary to what some

paleoanthropologists have contended, it is very unlikely that

Neanderthals would be indistinguishable from modern men and women

if they were dressed in modern clothing. Not only were they unable to

use articulated language but they would be noticeably different in their

very rounded facial profiles. We have no reason to believe that they had

the artistic sense that modern humans possess, or the power to generalize

in such a way that their cultures resembled even the mythopoeic cultures

of present-day aboriginal peoples. They were sluggishly adaptive rather

than excitingly innovative, and more passive in response to the world

around them than experimental and innovative. Indeed, although they

were the most important human types for nearly a hundred thousand

years, they left no significant evidence of artistic or ongoing technological development. Ironically, Neanderthals may well qualify as the prototypical ‘primitives’ revered by primitives and ecomystics today, that

lived in ‘harmony’ with ‘Nature’ — but if diey did, it was in a harmony

that they did not know existed, produced by their inability to change the

environment in which they lived, not by any sensibility that could be

called ecological.

Not until some ninety thousand years ago did our own species,

• Homo sapiens sapiens*, become a clearly visible presence in the evolutionary

process, essentially crossing the line between its animal ancestry and its

human future. The famous Magdalenian peoples of southern France and

northern Spain, who left behind the remarkable cave paintings and

sculptures of some 15,000–20,000 years ago, as well as related groups in

central Europe and Asia, created a definitely human-conditioned *environment*, one that they had significantly altered to meet their survival and

mental needs. Theirs was no passive culture, despite obeisances made to

it by modern primitivists extolling stone age ecological communities. Far

from merely dwelling in a habitat, they innovated technologies unknown

to any previous human community: bows and arrows, sophisticated

spears and spear-throwers, weaving, elaborate decorative clothing,

amulets, extraordinary depictions of themselves (males and females), and

complex shelters, on the tundras of Eurasia.

As their burial sites indicate, they probably had increasingly elaborate

status groups structured around elders, shamans, and outstanding hunters,

and they were likely to have developed complex systems of sympathetic

magic. Over time they seem to have developed rationalized techniques

for making things to supply not only themselves but the growing trade

networks of which they were part — even an ‘assembly-line’ system in one

case, in which each participant made a portion of an implement that was

ultimately exchanged in finished form across the European continent.

From the mammoth hunters of the Eurasian tundra to the

Magdalenian foragers of southern and central Europe, *Homo sapiens* collectively produced a virtual explosion of creativity in technology and art,

aggressively intervening in the surrounding world. Stone Age Man, as

we like to conceive ‘him’ , is less likely to have been a somnambulant

worshiper of Nature than a wandering, curious, and immensely inventive being who hunted with vigor and tried in every way to improve Ins

everyday lot, even to the point of exterminating existing species to meet

Ins needs (including the need for goods to trade), then migrating into

areas that contained more plentiful sources of food and other resources.

The theory should not be excluded that these migrations required them

to displace other hunters — that is to say, through warfare.

Clearly, no mystical reverence for Nature that gives rise to an ecological sensibility inheres in human beings like a gene in a double helix.

Only an *ethical* intention to behave with a sensitive concern for other

life-forms and their needs — a uniquely *human* trait — could yield an ecological sensibility that goes beyond the gratification of material needs.

Such an ecological sensibility is the result not of a ‘Pleistocene consciousness’ , to use the jargon of modern day primitivists, but of a rich civilization, of the nuanced sophistication of the human mind, and of sensitive

advances in humanistic values.

----

An institutionalized community, composed of structured family groups,

constitutes the initial biological basis of second nature. Added to this

minimal society, so to speak, are institutions formed around age groups

that conferred authority on the old as the repositories of wisdom, around

kinship ties as the sinews of social obligation, and around an emerging

division of labor based on gender differences.

These institutional bases for social life were initially grounded in biological facts: childrearing, age, blood kinship, and sexual traits. Thus it is

fair to say that second nature ‘eased’ in a graded way out of first nature.

The separation between first and second nature may have been very

gradual; in fact, the quasi-biological institutions that mediated this separation — family, kinship, age, and gender — are still a major presence in

modern social life, however much their institutional forms have changed

over time. For all the difficulties that besiege it, the family is still regarded

as the cellular tissue of society, age is still viewed as a source of wisdom,

and ‘blood’ (often in the form of raging ethnic solidarity and nationalism)

is still ‘thicker than water’.

Even as these biological facts were increasingly acculturated, transporting humanity from first into second nature, their impact was as confining

as it was liberating. Social structures based on blood ties, such as bands

and tribes, could be very parochial. Generally they tended to deny to

outsiders or strangers the customary protective rights that all the kindred

members of their groups enjoyed. An outsider or stranger who visited a

group or lived in its midst could be treated quite arbitrarily and might

easily be killed because of a whim or a minor quarrel.

Gender differences, which probably took the form of a complementary relationship between the sexes in early human communities, ultimately led to the domination of women by men. Indeed, in almost every

ancient civilization, the truly patriarchal family, in which the *eldest* male

exercised life-and-death powers over *all* members of a familial or clan

group, placed domestic life under an absolute tyranny. Nor did the male’s

authority, whether as father or husband, disappear until faidy recently,

however much it was attenuated over the passage of time.

By the late Paleolithic, when *Homo sapiens sapiens* cleady replaced the

Neanderthals, animistic and probably quasi-religious belief systems had

become an integral part of hunting-gathering or foraging societies.

Whatever meanings can be imputed to the paintings and sculptures in

European caves, there is every reason to believe that they were partly if

not entirely magical. By 18,000 years ago, as the last glacial period drew

to an end, people were painting figures that are remarkably redolent of

Siberian and American Indian shamans. Burial arrangements suggest a

belief in an afterlife, and statuettes are intended to have unknown but

apparendy potent magical or quasi-religious powers.

To the extent that modern aboriginal cultures are a creditable guide to

the past, we may speculate that *Homo sapiens sapiens* was ideologically suffused by a belief in the portentous functions of dreams, the presence of

ancestral ghosts, the power of magic to assure success in hunting, and the

ubiquity of demons that caused illness and death.

But if our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a world so ‘enchanted’ , it

was built overwhelmingly on illusions, as I cannot stress too strongly —

given the specious primitivism and mysticism so much in vogue among

today’s bored middle classes. Needless to say, people in Paleolithic cultures experienced tangible dangers, too, from marauding groups, warfare,

and the sacrifice and torture of captives — and from very real material

uncertainty, dangerous predators, and early death. Indeed, judging from

their remains, few if any Pleistocene peoples survived beyond the age of

fifty, and only half reached twenty. There should be no illusions that

Nature closed around this human world any less harshly than it did

around the animal world.

Moreover, the limits imposed by first nature or the ‘natural life’ were

not only physical but mental. Lacking syllabic writing, our early ancestors

had no means of clearly recording their thoughts and experiences.

Pictographs may provide a concrete story to those who inscribe and read

them, but only modern syllabic writing provides the means for sophisticated generalizations that can be elaborated from one to another. Hence

much that preliterate human beings knew, aside from what they acquired

from experience, was handed down by word of mouth — a technique for

conveying knowledge that is patently limited.

Important as spoken language is — indeed, it is one of the most important

distinctions between human and non-human beings — the fund of knowledge it can provide, even in the most practical matters, is markedly limited.

A preliterate community’s history and experiences can reach back no

further in time than to what is retained in the memory of an individual

narrator. However keen the narrator’s memory may be, it is immensely

limited by comparison with the knowledge contained in the books of even

a modest library. Moreover, the very *idea* of a history has little meaning in

a preliterate society. There, events of the past take on a fabulous form that

slowly drops a veil between past experience and reality, or else their

memory simply fades away as one generation replaces another.

----

Is the prevalence of reason the sole criterion for defining our humanity?

Should an ethics of complementarity, rectifying the unavoidable inequalities that exist between individuals within a community — even within

the same individual at different times in the life-cycle — be ignored in the

light of cold reason? Do aesthetic sensibilities, intuitions, spiritual

insights, and personal uniqueness have a place in a rational society? My

response would be that reason and imagination, thought and passion,

have be to combined.

In sum: to become human is to become rational and imaginative,

thoughtful and visionary, in rectifying the ills of the present society. By

extension, our capacity for compassion *obliges* us to intervene in the evolutionary process of first and second nature and to render them a rational

and ethical development. To become human, in effect, is to become

Nature-rendered self-conscious, to *knowingly* and *feelingly* participate as

active agents in the natural and social worlds. As the potentially conscious

products of first and second nature, we are the lone agent who can meld

them in a higher transcendence I have called ‘free nature’ that eliminates

needless pain, destruction, catastrophes, and regressions.

This free nature would be a ‘thinking nature’, a fulfillment of the evolutionary process in the natural world that tends toward ever-greater subjectivity and flexibility in dealing with environmental challenges. Social

life, far from being divided from or placed in opposition to the natural

world, would then be rationally integrated with first nature as a self-conscious dimension of a new, creative, richly differentiated, and meaningful whole. These goals, rooted in the still-unfinished Enlightenment,

constitute a unified vision and passion that takes full note of humanity’s

singularity and potential ability to ultimately create ecosocial institutions

— institutions that will bring human beings into harmony with one

another and humanity into harmony with the natural world.

Enlightened humanism is the hopeful message that society can be rendered not only rational but wise and not only ethical but passionately

visionary. If this message remains no more than a hope today — and no

movement for a rational and ecological society is possible unless it is permeated by *hope* — it would nonetheless validate my claim that humanity is

the most ‘enchanted’ species on this planet. For only human beings can

hope rather than merely exist, foresee rather than merely remember, five

as active agents rather than merely dwell as passive beings, change the

world for the better rather than merely accept it, innovate rather than

merely adapt.

But humanity today fives in the tension between the utterly irrational

society that has brought us two monstrous World Wars, the unforgivable

horrors exemplified by Hitler’s extermination camps and Stalin’s gulags,

seething nationalisms, and ethnic hatred on the one hand — *and* generous

ideals of freedom, cooperation, sharing, empathy and an ecological sensibility on the other. However important sentiment, intuition, feeling, and

spirituality are as part of our being, reason must always stand like a sentinel, a continual challenge and corrective, lest our animality conspire

with our intelligence or cunning to yield unforeseeable terrors and unexpected horrors in our still-unfinished development as human beings.

Unfortunately, removing these tensions and failings in such a way that

humanity can undertake its movement toward a rational society is more

problematic today than it has ever been in the past. The very means that

exist to achieve a rational society — technological proficiency, wide-ranging instruments of communication, enormous knowledge of the natural

wodd, and great intellectual powers — can be dangerously deployed by

the present irrational society against the attainment of a better wodd.

Today, simplistic appeals to our ‘intuitions’ and ‘spirituality’, to the

‘power of the supernatural’, to our ‘inner child’, and to the wisdom of

various gurus are leading not only to futile introspection and an irresponsible narcissism but to social inaction.

Attaining the realm of freedom requires replacing the demonic powers

diat keep us in various degrees of servility — be it to the dominant political and economic powers or psychic charlatans — and presupposes the

existence of freely acting rational as well as imaginative human agents. It

is precisely this much-needed consciousness that is under formidable

assault from the antihumanistic ambience of our time. Seldom have we

been invited so insistently to regress to modes of ‘Being’, to use

Heideggerian language, that emphasize our animality. Whether this animality takes the form of our genetic makeup, our undifferentiated

‘Oneness’ with an indefinable Nature, our intuitions, or our ancestral

primitivity, it involves a loss of our rationality, human distinctiveness,

capacity for innovation, and active agency in changing the world for the

better.

These antihumanistic trends, in their intangible but all-encompassing

ambience, have gained an influence that obstructs our fulfillment as a

meaningful result of natural and social evolution. Until the current antihumanistic tendencies are subjected to serious criticism, we cannot even

begin to address the more tangible problems of our time that antihumanism obscures and distorts. It is to tills critical task that we must turn if there

is to be even the remotest prospect of achieving the social fu lfillm ent and

ecological responsibilities that implicitly constitute our humanity.[15]

[3] The accusations within the antihumanist

camp that their own members are

enveloped in the very rationalism they

denounce persists to this very day, as witness Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche as a

captive of rationalism and humanism and

charges by certain postmodernists, in turn,

that Heidegger was no less a product of the

rationalists and humanists whom he for a

time denounced. See my discussion of

Jacques Derrida in Chapter 7.

[4] David Ehrenfeld, *The Arrogance of Humanism* (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1981).

[5] Ibid., p. viii.

[6] Ibid, pp. 5–6.

[7] E. F. Schumacher, *A Guide for the Perplexed* (New York and London: Harper

and Row, 1977), pp. 138–9.

[8] Ibid., p. 139.

[9] Michael D. Lemonick, ‘How Man

Began’, *Time*, 14 March 1994.

[10] The word *eco-communities* is used quite

deliberately. I have deep reservations about

the word *ecosystem*, except when a systems

analysis of the energy flow between plants

and animals is involved. Systems theory has

little if any applicability to qualitative as

distinguished from quantitative discussions

of ecological issues. However popular it

may be in mechanistic views of the natural

world, systems theory cannot exhaust our

knowledge of plant-animal and human

interactions.

[11] An argument equating the ‘navigational

skills’ of birds with the intelligence of

human beings has actually been advanced

by a deep ecologist in a serious academic

journal. See Robyn Eckersley, ‘Divining

evolution: The ecological ethics of Murray

Bookchin’, *Environmental Ethics*, vol. 11

(Summer 1989), p. 115.

[12] Ehrenfeld, *Arrogance*, p. viii.

[13] In a 1994 documentary series, *Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins*, on NOVA.

The book accompanying the documentary

is Donald Johanson, Lenora Johanson, and

Blake Edgar, Ancestors: In Search of Human

Origins (New York: Villard Books, 1994).

[14] *Australopithecus ramidus*, discovered in

north-central Ethiopia by Gen Suwa, is

believed to be some 4.5 million years old.

According to Suwa in the October 1994

issue of *Nature*, this hominid was bipedal

and lived in a forested area; if this is true, it

raises problems for theories of bipedalism

as an adaptation to savannah lifeways.

Some experts have reportedly declared that

the fossil remains are the ‘missing link’

between apes and hominids. More data

must be made available before the role of

• ramidus* in human evolution becomes clear.

[15] *See also* Derek Joubert and Beverley Joubert, ‘Lions of Darkness’,

• National Geographic*, August 1994, pp. 35ff.

Chapter 2: From ‘selfish genes’ to Mother ‘Gaia’

Among the most insidious challenges to human uniqueness today are

two self-proclaimed sciences, both of which first appeared in the mid-1970s. One, sociobiology, is a form of biological reductionism that tends

to ascribe human agency to our genetic makeup; the other is the planetary Gaia Hypothesis, according to which human beings are ‘intelligent

fleas’ that feed on the pristine body of‘Mother Earth’.

That both these challenges wear the mantle of science makes them

particularly insidious. Theoretically, the scientific mande should place

them at odds with the expressly anti-rational and antiscientific bias held

by most antihumanists, yet diey are not. The reader who finds this state

of affairs inconsistent is quite justified.

But intellectual consistency has never been a hallmark of antihumanism, still less of mysticism, necromancy, and various forms of deep ecology. In fact, by no means are ostensibly scientific antihumanists very far

apart from their anti-rational counterparts. Even legitimately scientific

disciplines allow for wild extrapolations into the mystical, as witness the

growing number of physicists who have recendy written books professing to prove mathematically the existence of a deity, a heaven, and

immortality. Science and pseudo-science alike blithely drift hand-in-hand into a shared mythopoeic antihumanism. While sociobiology

essentially reduces human intellectuality to a mere by-product of ‘selfish

genes’, the sweeping planetary vision of the Gaia Hypothesis trivializes

human beings as mere parasites on the Earth.

----

The word *sociobiology* seems to have been invented by E. O. Wilson, a

professor of science at Harvard University and curator in entomology at

the University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. An engaging writer

with a solid reputation for research on ‘social insects’, Wilson’s magnum

opus, *Sociobiology: A New Synthesis*, was originally published in 1975.[16]

That was a strategic year in the evolution of the American environmental movement. The waning New Left in the eady 1970s was still sufficiently influential to exercise a radical influence on environmentally

concerned young people by focusing their attention on the social causes

of ecological dislocations. To any thoughtful young environmentalist at

the time, it seemed patendy clear that a profit-oriented and competitive

market society was plundering the planet with the serious consequences

of widespread pollution and ecological dislocation.

Precisely as the New Left began to wane, a countervailing view

appeared. A harshly Malthusian approach toward environmental problems emerged, principally advanced by Paul Ehrlich in 1969 in his very

widely read **The Population Bomb*.*[17] Ehrlich stridently linked the causes of

the environmental crisis to population growth, particulady in the so-called Third World. An entomologist-cum-ecologist, like Wilson,

Ehrlich significantiy helped to sidetrack environmental concern away

from serious social criticism and toward essentially biological issues, dealing with population growth as though people were asocial beings who

mindlessly proliferated like fruit flies. Indeed, far from challenging the

existing social order, Ehrlich and his increasingly numerous admirers

called upon American governmental authorities to establish a bureau of

population control — all the more scandalous because the demand for

such a patently invasive bureau was made of the Nixon administration.

In this growing conflict between the socially critical tendency in the

environmental movement and the crudely biologistic orientation,

Wilson’s *Sociobiology* played a major role in tilting environmentalists

toward the asocial and politically inert attitudes fostered by Ehrlich.

Wilson’s work, to be sure, did not focus on population issues, but he

clearly enhanced a narrowly biologistic approach toward environmental

problems by reducing human behavior to the restrictive operations of

genetic selection and emphasizing their role in shaping the human condition. Since 1975 his views have increasingly sedimented themselves into

the minds of many literate people, particularly scientists, and they are

becoming the received wisdom in a wide diversity of fields, from anthropology to social theory.

----

Sociobiology is basically the theory that animal behavior — and for the

purposes of our discussion, human behavior — is overwhelmingly determined by the species’ genetic makeup. This theory is not particularly

new: ever since genetics became recognized as a scientific discipline,

some geneticists have always ardently privileged the role of genes in

determining human social and mental traits.

But in the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate over the respective roles of

inherited as against socially conditioned traits, contemporary sociobiologists have added several new twists. E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins,

an Oxford University ethologist, have imparted a veritably metaphysical

quality to ‘the gene’, endowing it with extraordinary autonomy, often at

the expense of the organisms it presumably ‘controls’.

For Wilson as for Dawkins — whose popular work. *The Selfish Gene*,

also appeared in 1975,[18] genes are ends in themselves more than means

that contribute to the functioning of a given species. Species seem to

exist mainly to perpetuate genes, to foster their well-being and development. Species, in effect, are primarily the media for genetic evolution — a

crudely reductionist view that has far-reaching implications for biology

and ethics.

Consider, for example, Wilson’s observation on the opening page of

• Sociobiology* that an ‘organism does not Eve for itself’, nor is its ‘primary

function ... to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it

serves as their temporary carrier’.[19] Whether knowingly or not, Wilson

essentially reduces human beings, with all their personality traits, willfulness, passions, and intellectuality, to molecular units with an intentionality of their own. His sweeping contentions advance a narrowly

biochemical and genetic teleology that places fully developed and complex organisms at the service of self-perpetuating and developing DNA

molecules. Indeed, in one of Wilson’s pithier statements, an ‘organism is

• only* DNA’s *way* of making more DNA’.[20]

Nor did Wilson modify this simplistic view of organisms three years

later in his Pulitzer prize-winning *On Human Nature*,[21] despite stormy

debates about the soundness and reactionary implications of his ‘synthesis.’ In *On Human Nature* we learn that ‘*no species, ours included*, possesses

a *purpose* beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species

may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack

any immanent purpose or guidance from agents *beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal* toward which their molecular

architecture automatically steers them.’[22]

What is clearly disturbing about these passages is that Wilson’s teleological bias is simply causality reduced to the narrow molecular level. He

exhibits little appreciation of any evolutionary tendency that imparts

value to subjectivity, intelligence, creativity, and ethics, apart from the

service they perform to the well-being of genes. Indeed, where cultural

and subjective attributes exist, they are mainly the work of genes, which

are ‘intent’, as it were, on perpetuating their own kind through behavioral traits favorable to themselves. Entire levels of organic development

are dissolved into DNA, much as a reductionist in physics might dissolve

all phenomena into atomic or subatomic particles.

With the tunnel vision characteristic of so many sociobiologists, Robert

Wright, in *The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology*

(1994),[23] suggests that compassion, love, parenting, and the like have

genetic sources, so that ethical behavior merely serves a genetic self-interest that cannot be grounded in humanistic principles and sentiments.

Using this kind of reasoning, one may claim that there are genes for capitalism, socialism, conservatism, liberalism, racism, sexism, and fascism.

And if one is a sociobiologist, why not ascribe social forms to humanity’s genetic makeup? Societies and movements that have used sociobiologistic ascriptions in their ideology have indeed existed. But by what

magic wand do sociobiologists decide that some societies and ideas are

genetically determined while others are not? How to determine the

extent to which a society or idea is biologically offensive? Is it based

merely on the personal inclinations of the sociobiologist? For many

sociobiologists, in fact, the mere existence of various social phenomena

like capitalistic egoism and socialistic altruism seems to suffice as proof

that our genes are responsible for them. Indeed, in Wilson’s view,

the human mind is constructed in a way that *locks* it inside this fundamental [genetic] constraint and *forces* it to make choices with a *purely biological* instrument. If the brain evolved by natural selection, even the

capacities to select particular *esthetic judgments* and *religious beliefs*

must have arisen by the *same mechanistic process*.... The essence of

the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly . The human

mind is a *device* for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of

its various *techniques*.[24]

Self-evidently, Wilson is placing the cart before the horse — the autonomy of the gene before the seemingly heteronomous organism it steers

so automatically. Radically inverting Wilson’s formulation, we can far

more plausibly claim that genes which abet the increasing sophistication

of brain power and the mind tend to *free* a species, like humanity, from

iron genetic constraints such as sociobiology would impose upon it.

Given sufficient rationality in human beings, we can more plausibly

claim that they have evolved a degree of free will, intentionality, speculative insight, and ethical standards so that their behavioral traits are effectively removed from their dependence on the ‘molecular architecture’

that is supposed to ‘automatically steer’ them.

This view, so easily justified by humanity’s ideals, aspirations, and

social development, helps us to recognize the fact that we have developed as a species into a realm of second nature — a moral, intellectual and

social realm that sociobiology crudely reduces to molecules arranged in a

double helix. That sociobiologists are obliged to offer obeisances to nongeneric factors in accounting for human behavior is due less to the flexibility of their views than to the untenability of their simplistic biologistic

premises. For if their premises were consistently carried to their logical

conclusion, highly advanced mammals and human beings would indeed

be reduced to mere vehicles for DNA with a metaphysical autonomy of

its own.

Wilson’s mechanism and reductionism are often as crude as Descartes’s

machine-like view of the body, however liberally he sprinkles his pages

with caveats, personal opinions, and asides designed to soften the genetic

tunnel vision of his argument. His *chef d’oeuvre*, *Sociobiology*, is riddled

with behavioral constraints that rest on genetic predeterminations,

indeed with anthropomorphic metaphors that seem to impart to genes an

intellectuality and intentionality that properly belong in the realm of

culture and to complex forms of social life.

The first chapter of *Sociobiology*, for example, is entitled ‘The Morality

of the Geneb a phrasing that beguiles the reader to suppose that genes are

not only sovereign in determining the behavior of all life forms but,

given the sizable number of amoral people in the world, possess a self-awareness beyond that of the very animals they presumably ‘construct’.

This grossly unwarranted phrasemaking, I would hold, is more misleading than clarifying.

It is highly unlikely that human beings could transcend their ‘molecular structure’ if, as Wilson explains in *On Human Nature*, ‘the [human]

intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even to understand

itself but to promo te the survival of human genes.’[25] In fact, the human

intellect was ‘constructed’ not only ‘to understand itself’ but to understand the world and even the cosmos upon which it reflects — indeed to

create art, music, literature, and philosophy, which in no way serve to

perpetuate the existence of its ‘molecular structure’.

----

The title of Richard Dawkins’ book, *The Selfish Gene*, speaks for itself.

To most literate people, selfishness is a distinctly psychological orientation, not simply a metaphor for biological self-maintenance and self-preservation. Nor is there any reason to believe that Dawkins is using the

term as a metaphor. The opening pages of the book disabuse us of the

suspicion that Dawkins regards genes as anything but crass egotists. ‘The

argument of this book is that *we*, and all other animals, are *machines* created by our genes,’ writes Dawkins; ‘... I shall argue that a predominant

quality to be expected of a successful gene is *ruthless* selfishness.’

Moreover: ‘ [t]his gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in

• individual* behaviour.’[26] Thus morality has a simplistic one-to-one

relationship with genic morality, rooted in molecular ‘selfishness* that

allows for no independence on the part of living beings.

Lest this dazzling concept be left to stand on its own precarious

ground, Dawkins quickly modifies it. ‘However, as we shall see’he adds,

‘there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. “Special” and “limited” are important words in the last

sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love

and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do

not make evolutionary sensed.’[27]

This is an extraordinary passage — partly because of the unstated conditions it presupposes, and partly, too, because it seems to worsen rather

than mitigate the Dawkins claim that genic selfishness usually gives rise to

human selfishness. In Dawkins’ world, genes are not only selfish but

manipulative to boot. They have subtle ways — these devilishly clever

DNA molecules! — of getting *us* to behave in seemingly altruistic ways,

on behalf of their own egotistical ends. If this conclusion seems like a

distortion of Dawkins’ views, the reader who consults Dawkins’ book

is regaled with chapter titles like ‘The gene machine’, ‘Genemanship’,

and, of course, the ‘Immortal coils’ of DNA.

I will not try to second-guess Dawkins, Wilson, or for that matter any

sociobiologists on whether they impute any real morality, emotional

state, or intentionality to genes apart from their specific biochemical

functions. If the selfishness of a gene is causally related to human selfishness, and a gene can exhibit the guile to use individual altruism to serve

its own egotistical ends, I fail to see what doubts remain about the autonomy sociobiologists impute to human genic equipment.

Yet in the closing pages of a book structured almost consistently

around a genocentric interpretation of animal behavior, Dawkins suddenly reverses his entire thrust. Making no discernible argument so far as

I can see to support his case, he singles out humans to advance the claim

that culture can indeed supplant the authority of genetics over a wide

range of behavior. After some two hundred pages of support for the

sovereignty of selfish genes, the reader suddenly learns that almost .all of

Dawkins’ contentions can be annulled by the human species. ‘Are there

any reasons for supposing our own species to be unique?’ he asks. To

which he responds with a proud ‘yes.’[28]

What, it may be asked, gives us this privilege? ‘We have the power to

defy the selfish genes of our birth,’ Dawkins responds,

and, if necessary ’ the selfish memes [units of cultural transmission] of our

indoctrination . We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing

pure, disinterested altruism — something that has no place in nature,

something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we

have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel

against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.[29]

Dawkins’ ‘memes’, in fact, are the cultural analogues of genes, transferred

from the biological to the social by means of the same naive atomism that

characterizes Wilson’s ‘molecular machinery’. Like genes, memes are

mimetic replicators; they duplicate cultural traits by means of imitation,

just as genes duplicate biological traits by means of sexual reproduction.

Accordingly: ‘[j]ust as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by

leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate

themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process

which, in a broad sense, can be called imitation.’[30]

Not surprisingly, given sociobiology’s highly deterministic way of

dunking, they too have a life of their own.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my

brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way

that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell .,.

Imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicated.[31]

But what of their ‘copying-fidelity’? After all, a song, which Dawkins

regards as a meme, is altered ever so slightly each time it is sung until,

perhaps, it no longer sounds like its original. Here, Dawkins acknowledges ‘I am on shaky ground’.[32] Indeed, taking Dawkins’ forceful comparisons of selfish genes and selfish people too seriously causes the ground

beneath us to shake. Before long we are confused over what is metaphor

and what is not in this thoroughly curious argument. In a grand finale,

Dawkins tells us that ‘we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes [!] them behave

rather *as if they were purposeful*, and it has been *convenient*, as a shorthand,

to refer to genes in the language of purpose.... [But] the idea of purpose

is only a metaphor, but we have already seen what a *fruitful* metaphor it

is.’[33] The same, I suppose, could be said for memes, which, like genes

that struggle with rivals, compete with each other in the ‘computers’ that

are ‘human brains.’[34]

• The Selfish Gene*, which opens with an association between genetic

selfishness and human selfishness, closes by producing a certain vertigo —

it may be a geno-mimetic reaction — caused by Dawkins’ failure to

explain where his metaphor ends and his reality begins. ‘Genes have no

foresight,’ he warns us. ‘They do not plan ahead. Genes just *are*, some

genes more so than others, and that is ail there is to it.’[35] Genes and

memes float in the air with the same stability of a kite in a hurricane.

Such stirring acknowledgments of humanity’s uniqueness are rare.

----

What we certainly learn, even with Dawkins’ memes, is that culture is

reducible to biosocial atoms — cultural particles, so to speak — that are no

less reductionist than genes. This close analogy between culture, indeed

of society in its broadest sense, and genes is as stifling as a genetic interpretation of human behavior.

That *The Selfish Gene* plays into the antihumanist leveling of human

beings to all biota, despite Dawkins’ protestations of human uniqueness,

is suggested by Robert L. Trivers’ foreword to the book. Trivers, who

seems to enjoy Dawkins’ highest esteem, is at pains to inform us:

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above

another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over

some three billion years by a process known as natural selection. Within

each species some individuals leave more surviving offspring than others, so

that the inheritable traits (genes) of the reproductively successful become

more numerous in the next generation. This is natural selection: the non-random differential reproduction of genes . Natural selection has built us,

and it is natural selection we must understand if we are to comprehend our

own identities.[36]

So much for human uniqueness — and memes. Antihumanists nevertheless belie their very act of leveling human beings to the simplest organisms by burdening our species with the extraordinarily unique

responsibility of, as Trivers put it, ‘understanding’ sweeping biological

facts £ if we are to comprehend our own identities’. Although humans are

‘objectively’ interchangeable with chimps, in Trivers’ view, only *our*

species, it would seem, is competent to understand that all-encompassing

reality or comprehend its own identity. Chimps may lack even a knowledge of death, as recent evidence has shown, let alone a comprehension

of natural selection. But antihumanist protocol insists that there is no

objective basis for elevating humanity over the most elevated of apes in

the primate world.

----

Wilson seems far less equivocal than Dawkins about humanity’s inability

to transcend its genetic ensemble through culture, even through morality. He asks:

Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and

momentum of its own and completely replace genetic evolution? I think

not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but

*inevitably* values will be constrained in accordance ivith their effects on the

human gene pool. Tlie brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—

like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it

— is the circuitous technique by which human genetic matenal has been

and will be kept intact. Morality has *no other* demonstrable *ultimate*

function.[37]

If Wilson’s views are ultimately unequivocal, he nonetheless peppers the

most dogmatic passages in his book with highly equivocal sentences. To

the question of whether ‘*higher* ethical values’ — not mere customs, opinions, or moral injunctions — can transcend the grip of genocentiicity,

Wilson responds with an opinion, then proceeds to graduate his opinion

into a fact by asserting that ‘genes hold culture on a leash’. It may be a

‘long leash’, to be sure, but even ‘higher ethical values’ (which Wilson

has mutated into mere ‘values’) are ‘inevitably’ constrained by ‘the

human gene pool’. Conclusion? ‘Morality has no other demonstrable

ultimate function’ than to keep ‘human genetic *material*’ intact.[38] These

careless remarks, taken from his strategic chapter, ‘Altruism’, in

• On Human Nature*, reveal how Wilson advances a mere opinion to support

liis genocentric approach — then changes the subject.

In the debates that followed the publication of *Sociobiology*, Wilson’s

capacity to mingle dogmatic statements with equivocal adjectives and

subclauses, often shifting the scope of his arguments and backtracking to

less committed positions, made it virtually impossible to subject Iris views

to critical interpretation. Ajnidst a flurry of claims that his critics ‘misinterpreted’, ‘maligned’, or ‘misstated’ his ideas, Wilson managed to wear

so many different ideological hats that it was often impossible to determine the head they covered. We shall see that this game of musical chairs

is played out repeatedly in sociobiology and even more outrageously in

other antihumanist works.

----

The subject of altruism vexes sociobiologists for obvious reasons: its

existence militates against the image of selfish genes (a term Wilson also

uses as well as Dawkins) that ostensibly produce selfish individuals. In

that case, *why* do human beings ever behave altruistically at all? How can

selfish genes explain the common fact that people exhibit concern for

others, indeed for individuals whom they do not know as well as

their immediate circle of friends?

In no small part, the answer to these questions depends upon how

we define altruism. *Webster’s Third International Dictionary* calls it ‘uncalculated consideration of, regard for, or devotion to others’ interests,

sometimes in accordance with an ethical principled This reasonably balanced definition patently applies to the majority of altruistic acts, from

personal charity to a commitment to social ideals, whose memes are perhaps too intertwined with genes and other memes to be extricable.

By contrast, sociobiology’s definition of altruism is far removed from

the balanced and commonplace. Wilson’s *On Human Nature* defines

altruism as ‘*self-destructive* behavior performed for the benefit of others.

Altruism may be entirely rational, or automatic and unconscious, or conscious but guided by *innate* emotional responses.’ [39] His elucidation of

altruism is one of the most genocentrically convoluted arguments I have

encountered in the antihumanistic literature.

Thus the chapter tided ‘Altruism’ opens with an allusion to the ambiguities of religious martyrdom and its high estate in Christian precept. It

seems the Church found it difficult to reconcile an elite of martyrs with

its belief in the deity’s egalitarian view of humanity as a whole. Wilson

thereupon obliges us to ‘drop to all fours’, as Voltaire once caustically

remarked that the noble savage’ in Rousseau’s writings inclined him to

do, by showing that altruism usually becomes selfishness. We sanctify

• true altruism* in order to reward it’, he observes, and thus to make it less

than true, and by that means to promote its recurrence in others. Human

altruism, in short, is riddled to its foundations with the *expected mammalian ambivalence*’ [40] — a sufficiently ambiguous expression if there ever

was one!

Whether rewarding true altruism makes it less than true I cannot say.

What does Wilson regard as true altruism? The really authentic stuff, I

take it, is ‘self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others’,[41]

as his glossary claims, as exemplified by Christian martyrs. Thus, true

altruism is depicted as a form of grisly self-sacrifice — as, for example,

saints boiled in oil by pagan barbarians or thrown to Hons.

But is this really true altruism? Martyrs to Christianity or, for that matter, Islam and other crusading refigions, were probably less concerned

with ‘the benefit of others’ than they were with their personal salvation

and the rewards (in the case of Islam, very material ones) of a future life.

Lest we are too puzzled by the phrase ‘expected mammalian ambivalence’, Wilson quickly plunges into portrayals of the most *supreme* kinds

of true altruism: soldiers who bodily throw themselves upon five enemy

hand grenades to shield their comrades, who rescue others from battie

sites ‘at the cost of certain death to themselves’, and other such fatal decisions.[42] Very few such cases are illustrative of ‘expected mammafian

ambivalence’, least of all in attempts to ‘rescue others’ in battle situations

with the certainty of being killed.

But let us agree that passion, a pure impulse whether of anger or affection, can inspire true altruism, as can a genuine, sober concern for the

well-being of other human beings. In fact, the most *sustained* examples of

altruism occur in daily social Hfe. Altruism is also found in people who

engage in struggles for freedom, be they the volunteers who join armies

to oppose tyranny and social privilege at grave risk to their lives, or the

revolutionary *dinamateros* in the Spanish Civil War of 1936—39 who

exploded Francoist tanks with dynamite strapped to their own waists. We

need not turn to warfare to find extraordinary examples of altruism —

take for example the civil rights workers who drove into the American

South in racially mixed buses and faced armed white mobs, vicious

pohee, and pohee dogs in civil rights marches..

Wilson takes no note of such commonplace examples of everyday

altruism. Indeed, a reflective and abiding concern for social justice and

freedom is perhaps a *truer* expression of sustained altruistic behavior than

are impulsive actions, heroic as they may be, which are Hkely to be

driven by the passions of the moment. Is it possible that such everyday

and abiding behavior reveals ‘a transcendental quafity that distinguishes

human beings from animals’, to use Wilson’s words? Perhaps it does, ‘to

put the best possible construction on the matter,’ Wilson generously

advises us, but he then warns that ‘scientists are not accustomed to

declaring any phenomenon off limits’[43] — a gratuitous remark, I may add,

since few responsible people would want scientists, like Wilson himself,

to take recourse to the transcendental as they perform their work.

Whereupon Wilson proceeds to survey presumably altruistic forms of

animal behavior (‘minor’ altruism, to be sure) in robins, thrushes, and titmice, who alert one another that a hawk is approaching, by changes in

posture (crouching) or acoustical signals (whistling). Is this altruism, or is

it self-protection? Or fear? Alas, we lack the abifity to penetrate into the

minds of robins, thrushes, and titmice, but Wilson somehow seems to

know that instead of issuing a warning to alert other birds, ‘the caller

would be wiser not to betray its presence but rather remain silent.’[44]

----

Allow me to suggest that attributing altruism to birds is too anthropomorphic to allow for credufity. It is no less anthropomorphic for Wilson

to tell us that in three recorded cases at the Gombe Stream National Park

in Tanzania, chimpanzees have taken over the care of the orphaned

infants of their deceased sibfings. Is this altruism, or is it a sibfing recognition that might be expected in an ape that has been called man’s closest

cousin?

Far more striking, in fact, is what our ‘closest cousins’ do *not* do that

human beings do with extraordinary frequency. They never share food,

except for meat after a kill, which is idiosyncratic at best: it normally

requires a great deal of ‘begging’ and cajoling on the part of the hunter’s

companion to gain the meat. Equally important, chimpanzees normally

distance themselves from an ill or injured member of their group and

leave them to survive their infirmities on their own. They exhibit no

knowledge of death: when they capture prey, such as a pig or an infant

baboon, chimpanzees have been known to literally eat it alive, despite

the victim’s struggles and cries before a vital organ of its body is chewed

away.

I am not trying to characterize chimpanzees as ‘cruel’, a value-laden

term that has no meaning in the non-human world. Chimpanzees are

busy being c him panzees. I am, however, criticizing anthropomorphic

primatologists for overemphasizing the extent to which chimpanzees are

like people, searching out qualities in them that render them affines of

humans, and attributing to them moral responsibilities and cognitive

abilities that they probably do not possess. A very considerable amount of

material has been published about chimpanzee ‘wars’ and ‘sacrifices’ that

reads far too much human behavior into a species that is removed from

humans by more than five million years of evolutionary development.[45]

Wilson’s authority on the mindless world of genetically programmed

bugs is unquestionable, although his beguiling stories about ‘kamikaze

attacks’ by bees on intruders and African termite ‘soldiers’ whose ‘caste’

members ‘are quite literally walking bombs’ seem too metaphorical.[46]

Even Wilson, I should note, does not accept an equivalence between the

behavior of insects and that of human beings; indeed, he prudently warns

that ‘sharing the capacity for *extreme sacrifice* does not mean that the

human mind and the “mind” of an insect (if such exists) work alike.’[47]

But Wilson’s point is that inasmuch as kamikaze bees and soldier termites, like all creatures capable of making the ‘extreme sacrifice’ for the

common good, systematically. self-destruct and hence do not pass on

their own genes to others, these ‘self-sacrificing’ or ‘altruistic’ bugs make

it possible for their ‘more fertile brothers and sisters to flourish’. In fact,

there are *two* kinds of genes among the many that control insect behavior: ‘selfish genes’ *and* ‘altruistic genes’.[48] And if we are to accept the tide

of Christopher Will’s recent book on genetics, there are ‘wise genes’ as

well.[49]

But how can self-destructive altruistic genes ever survive the harsh

imperatives of natural selection when they exist in ‘competition’ with the

self-perpetuating selfish genes? Wilson invokes ‘kin selection’ to meet

this challenge: that is, genetically governed behavior by which individuals sac rifi ce themselves to enhance the survival of their kin, who possess

altruistic as well as selfish genes. And with kin selection at hand, Wilson

now feels that it is ‘natural, then, to ask whether through kin selection

the capacity for altruism has also evolved in human beings’.[50]

Wilson’s response, of course, is an unqualified yes. Among humans, he

allows, ‘the form and intensity of altruistic acts are to a large extent culturally determined’. Actually, they would seem to be ‘culturally determined’ to an *immense* extent, or as Wilson puts it: ‘Human social

evolution is obviously more cultural than genetic. ’ To one who has read

so far in *On Human Nature*, culture’s power over genetic imperatives

would not at all be ‘obvious’, and, in fact, lest we take Wilson’s fleeting

emphasis on culture too seriously, we leam that ‘the underlying *emotion*,

powerfully manifested in virtually *all* human societies, is what is considered to evolve through genes’.[51]

What is vexing about this passage, all its backtracking aside, is that

human altruism, conceived as a concern for other people and the human

condition generally, is by no means reducible to the underlying emotions

that are considered to evolve through genes. Indeed, innumerable

thinkers and many revolutionary social movements in the past were

guided not by kin selection but by great ideals, be they ‘Life, Liberty, and

the Pursuit of Happiness’ or ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’. For profoundly cultural reasons they evoked strong passions in many idealists and

produced passionate social upheavals, guided by great ideas that had no

evident association with genes or memes. Yes — human genetic equipment was involved in the *emergence* of passions, as were hormones like

epinephrine. But the evolution of these passions, their sophistication, and

the extent to which they powered ideas rooted in intellection were too

evidently cultural to reduce to genetic influences.

----

What is fundamentally wrong with Wilson’s genocentrity is that concepts such as ‘selfishness’ and ‘altruism’ presuppose the existence of a culture that gives them *meaning* and a morality that explains why primordial

‘underlying emotions’ can be active in *social* causes. If one reduces society

from a human phenomenon to mere aggregations of living things — not

only *organisms* but genes and memes — culture is inconceivable. We

would have a collection of living beings, but not a *society* organized into

mutable institutions.

Sociobiology, with its atomized genes and memes, patently deals with

collections, aggregations, and heaps of organisms rather than with

authentic societies characterized by a radically different level of association and organization of superficially discrete beings — specifically, *human*

beings. Human beings exist in relationships with each other that are not

defined by genes alone, if at all. In this respect, sociobiology is not *social*

at all. It deals with biology, specifically with genetics, and gives them a

social patina, generally by using antiiropomorphic metaphors. It describes

genes not only as “selfish’ but as ‘altruistic’ and even as ‘wise’. Given this

luxurious moral life of genes, it seems impossible that we are mote than

mere ‘genetic machines’, and yet we plainly are, just as we are not simply

atoms, electrons, or protons.

----

Inasmuch as genes determine human development, aggression, sexual

behavior, altruism, and religion, to cite the principal concerns of *On Human Nature*, how are modern humans to cope with a genetic ensemble

that evolved when human beings, according to Wilson, were ‘Ice-Age

hunter-gatherers’? How can we readjust our glacial genes to deal with

the era of the information superhighway? The answer, Wilson tells us, is

an exercise of will’.[52] Where will this ‘will’ come from? Perhaps it will

come from a gene that makes for obduracy, intentionality, purpose, and

who knows what other willful character traits that lurk in the human

genome, not to speak of one that will evolve. If evolutionary genetics

places a high premium on adaptation, as do all theories of natural selection on which Wilson relies, the genetic sources of will may be uncertain

indeed.

But by what right can Wilson claim that the human genetic ensemble

was shaped by Ice-Age hunter-gatherers when a substantial proportion

of *Homo sapiens sapiens* never left the warm climate of Afiica in which

they evolved? Indeed, they may never have encountered the glaciation

that covered much of the northern hemisphere through the Pleistocene.

Amusingly, Wilson’s theory might be mistakenly seen as a risible converse of that of Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New

York, the chairman of the school’s African-American studies program,

who has gained considerable notoriety for emphasizing that blacks,

evolving in sunny climates, have ‘shiny genes’ by comparison with the

‘dull genes’ of white ‘ice people’, apparently rendering Africans innately

superior to Europeans.

Such genetic ping-pong would be silly were it not redolent of reactionary ideologies that axe less sophisticated than modern sociobiology.

Needless to say, an animal’s genetic make-up plays a major role in guiding its behavior. The simpler the life-form, the more thoroughly genes

determine its actions and the more limited is its genetic repertoire.

----

Sociobiologists are at their worst when they try to deal with social phenomena. In Wilson’s glossary, the definitions — and their implications —

of words like *society, hierarchy’, dominance, aggregation, band, caste, communal,*

and *competition*, reveal his orientation toward social structures and ethical

phenomena. Where these concepts have clearly social premises, Wilson

tends to restrict them to narrow biological definitions, in a reduction of

social phenomena to genetics that obscures the discontinuities as well as

the continuities between biology and society.

Consider, for example, Wilson’s definition of *society*, which he

describes as ‘a group of individuals belonging to the same species and

organized in a cooperative manner.’[53] Only a devout acolyte would ffil

to require Wilson to explain what he means by *organized* and *cooperative*,

two culturally, philosophically, and ethically laden words that have far-reaching implications in social theory. Different societies have been organized and cooperative in very different ways — as despotisms, democracies,

republics, monarchies, patriarchies, and the like. Nowhere does Wilson

tell us what kind of cooperation and organization he means. What would

seem to count, in his definition, is whether a society’s form of cooperation and organization make it genetically fit to survive the challenges of

natural selection.

All of Wilson’s effusions about his liberal beliefs to the contrary, socio-biological thinking is crude. Yet given the increasing fascination of

scholars and the public with genetics these days, sociobiology is making

its way into many social disciplines that were once distinguished for a relative degree of sobriety. To cite only one of many examples: a recent

issue of *Current Anthropology*, a highly reputable scholarly quarterly, contains a discussion article entitled ‘On Human Egalitarianism’, in which

the authors, puzzled by the virtual ubiquity of egalitarian values and institutions among hunter—gatherers, assume that the ‘ancestors of

• H. sapiens*’

were innately ‘hierarchically oriented’, and that ‘cultural elaborations of

food sharing, pair bonding, and egalitarianism [are grounded] in inherited tendencies’, in natural selection rather than consciousness.[54] So widespread is sociobiology today that we are now told that apparently there

are genes for hierarchy and domination on the one hand and genes for

egalitarianism and food sharing on the other. Perhaps one set of genes is

dominant and the other is recessive, or perhaps dominance depends upon

the adaptive advantages the genes confer in natural selection. Whether

consciously or not, the proponents of such sociobiological interpretations

— and they are growing steadily in number — diminish the role of ethics

and social relations in determining human behavior and social development.

• Hierarchy* is in fact a social term — hierarchies are found nowhere in first

nature. A hierarchy is based on domination by institutionalized strata,

such as gerontocracies, patriarchies, warrior sodalities, shamanistic guilds,

priesdy corporations, and the like over subjugated strata who are visibly

underprivileged on an ongoing basis. To dissolve hierarchies into the

person of an alpha chimpanzee, gorilla, or baboon, as so many primatologists do, is to make a mockery of a term which has its origins in

pyramidal ecclesiastical structures. A hierarch goes with an institution

such as a monarchy, bureaucracy, or even a stable patriarchal family

relationships that are not institutionalized in the animal world.

Protests by sociobiologists to the contrary notwithstanding, they eventually do reduce human beings to ‘gene machines , and by extrapolation,

they deal with society, mind, and great social ideals from a preponderantly genocentric viewpoint. We do not have to turn to Max Weber to

lament the ‘disenchantment of the wodd’; it is very much under way

because of the genetic noose sodobiology is tightening over humanity

and its greatest endeavors.

----

Before leaving the realm of the genetic, let us examine the so-called

‘microcosmos’ itself, as seen through the. eyes of two antihumanists who

dismiss human beings and their achievements as mere by-products of

bacteria and cells.

This thesis has been strongly promoted by Lynn Margulis, professor of

biology at Boston University, who, in a book entided

• Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution* written in collaboration with Dotion

Sagan, really puts humanity in its trivial place.[55] Indeed, the real wonders

of biotic evolution, Margulis and Sagan argue, are the microorganisms

that have been on the earth for five-sixths of organic evolution, in contrast to hum an s, who have been around for only one thirtieth of 1 per

cent of that time. Bacteria hold first place in the drama of life — whereas

we humans are ‘a sort of mammalian weed, with all our accomphshments

and personality we are still the result of aeons of microbial evolution’[56] —

which presumably puts us in our place.

Precisely why Margulis and Sagan selected microbes over the more

basic and older chemicals that make up life is puzzling. Carbon, so indispensable to the formation, sustenance, and evolution of organic things

has been in the universe for many billions of years, much closer to twelve

billion than to a measly four or five. Certainly hydrogen, no less important than carbon, has been around even longer. Ammo acids have been

around for so long that a figure as small as four billion hardly does justice

to their longevity. Are they less important to life than microbes are to

recendy arrived humans?

This numbers game rests on the omnipresent fallacy of mistaking a

necessary condition for advanced life-forms for their sufficient condition.

There is nothing stunningly new in the fact that cells of one kind or

another are needed to produce multicellular life-forms. Nor is there anything stunningly new in the fact that microbes of a vast variety and in

staggering numbers are necessary to render complex multicellular life-forms functional. Yes, the earth would be covered with nothing but

debris if wastes were not broken down, recreated, and reworked by

microbes, just as it would be very messy indeed widiout trillions of ants

to reprocess detritus into forms usable to ants and other life-forms.

One may reasonably wonder, to be sure, how much of a mess would

exist in the first place if complex animals were not present to produce it.

Even more troubling, why would microbes be of any interest at all if

they did not produce, facilitate, and help — as well as injure through

disease — complex life-forms that engage in a good deal more than the

biochemical and reproductive activity of microbes — such as *thinking*, for

example? or exhibiting acute *self-consciousness*? or *knowing* the world, or

• exploring* it, or exercising *will*?

When microbes can do these exceptional things, they may indeed be

considered the marvels of life. Yet Margulis and Sagan seem to give primacy to microbes largely because they are indispensable to the development and existence of such biota as mammals, primates, and of course,

human beings. Indeed, as one chapter of their book breathlessly follows

another, describing how during dramatic environmental changes organic

molecules combine to produce cell membranes, DNA, RNA, anaerobic

cells, and aerobic ones, we are always reminded that human beings are

dependent upon microcosms and their ability to survive human depredations.

Thus we axe told with much aplomb that ‘the visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only

because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm’s activities.... Grasping as best we can the formidable powers of the biosphere

in which we live out our lives, it is difficult to retain the delusion that

without our help nature is helpless.... We may pollute the air and waters

for our grandchildren and hasten our own demise, but this will exert no

effect on the continuation of the microcosm’ which, in fact, ‘is still

evolving around us and within us. You could even say ... that the microcosm is evolving *as* us.’[57]

It is a novelty to learn that many people these days harbor the ‘delusion that without our help nature is helpless’. Margulis and Sagan engage

in the usual overstatement of humanistic views all the more easily to

demolish them. It is no less a novelty to learn we, like all multicellular

life-forms from jellyfish to wolves, are simply an ‘overgrown portion of

the microcosm’. That we cannot function without microcosms is a trite

biological fact; their activities in maintaining the earth, the biosphere,

and even our digestion of food are well-known facts of paramount

importance. But why not include all the chemical elements that make up

our genes and protoplasm?

Margulis and Sagan seem to confuse ‘information’ with wisdom,

intelligence, and innovation. We are told:

For sheer scope, human information systems have only Just begun to

approach the ancient bacterial systems which have been trading bits of

information like a computer network with a memory accumulated over billions of years of continuous operation. As we move from a purely medical

view of microbes to an understanding of them as our ancestors, as planetary elders [!], our emotions also change, from fear and loathing to respect

and awe. Bacteria invented [!] fermentation, the wheel in the form of the

proton rotary motor, sulfur breathing, photosynthesis, and nitrogen fixation, long before our evolution. They are not only highly social beings, but

behave as a sort of worldwide decentralized democracy, Celb basically

remain separate, but can connect and trade genes with organisms of even

exceedingly different backgrounds. Realizing that human individuals also

remain basically separate but can connect and trade knowledge with very

different others may be taking a step toward the ancient wisdom [!] of the

microcosm.’[58]

This passage, to speak frankly, is entirely anthropomorphic. We have no

reason to believe that the parallels drat Margulis and Sagan draw between

microcosmic attributes and human behavior have anything in common,

that microbes exhibit any ability that compares with the foresight that

went into invention of the wheel, institutionalized social relations, ‘a

worldwide decentralized democracy’, reflective ‘wisdom’, and self-conscious individuality.

Having indulged in this paean to microbial inventiveness, wisdom,

and democracy, Margulis and Sagan invite us to regard ‘man’ as ‘the consummate egotist’.

Human beings are not particularly special, apart, or alone....It may be

a blow to our collective ego, but we are not masters of life perched on the

final rung of an evolutionary ladder.... Objective scholars, if they were

whales or dolphins, would place humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans in

the same taxonomic group. There is no physiological basis for the classification of human beings into their own family (Hominidae — the manapes

or apemen), apart from that of the great apes (Pongidae — the gibbons,

siamangs, gorillas, chimps, and orangutans). Indeed, an extraterrestrial

anatomist would not hesitate to put us together with the apes in the same

subfamily or even genus.[59]

To argue down this taxonomic rhetoric demeaning the human species as

a mere primate would be an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Neither

whales nor dolphins can ever be objective scholars for a multitude of

anatomical, environmental, and even mental reasons diat actually explain

why human beings *are indeed unique* and why apes must be placed in a

separate taxonomic family. Indeed, evolutionary biologists can easily

make fools of themselves when they use microbiology, anatomy, and taxonomy to subvert the uniqueness of human beings, whose biological

evolution has opened up cultural development.

Still, Margulis and Sagan do not deny us the benefit of a few homilies.

We should be consoled to know that if human beings became extinct, if

even all primates disappeared, ‘the microcosm would still abound in

those assets (e.g. nervous systems, manipulative appendages) diat were

leveraged into intelligence and technology in the first place.’[60] These

‘assets’ would not be nervous systems or ‘appendages’, however, since

Margulis and Sagan seem to regard any microbial trait, such as flagella, as

means of communication comparable to a nervous system and a means of

locomotion comparable to bipedal walking. Alas, flagella do not constitute arms or legs; they are simply whiplike appendages that give greater

motility to microbes and cells. One might, with equal superficiality,

regard the wind as a means of communication for the earth and waves as

seaside vocalizations.

So abundant are ‘human’ characteristics among microbes that should it

come to pass that humanity is destroyed by a nuclear bomb and its

radioactive fallout, Margulis and Sagan console us with their ‘doubt that

the overall health and underlying stability of the microcosm would be

affected.... Nor would the destruction of the ozone layer, permitting

entry of torrents of ultraviolet radiation, ruin the microbial underlayer.

Indeed, it would probably augment it, since radiation stimulates the

bacterial transfer of genes.’[61]

I will not dwell on the various scenarios Margulis and Sagan offer for a

‘future supercosm’ in which, among other possibilities, technology gains

such autonomy that it masters humans rather than the reverse and carries

‘the wet, warm environment of the pre-Phanerozoic [or Present Era]

microcosm into a future as fascinatingly nonhuman as the past.’[62] Exactly

what will constitute ‘fascination’ or who will be ‘fascinated’ when human

beings are not around remains something of a puzzle — unless computers

are given the emotional as well as the mental equipment to replicate

these distinctiy human attributes.

----

If sociobiology has effectively reduced human beings to ‘gene machines’

and micro cosmology seems to reduce them to bacteria, the Gaia

Hypothesis reduces them to ‘intelligent fleas that infest’ Mother Earth or,

more theistically, ‘Gaia’. The image of humanity as fleas appears in James

Lovelock’s stridendy antihumanistic 1988 book,

• The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Planet.*[63]

Much, of the science Lovelock brings to the Gaia Hypothesis (as he

called it on the inspired suggestion of a novelist friend, William Golding)

seems to be basically sound. Dating from the 1970s, it advances the

hypothesis that life over the course of organic evolution has interacted

very creatively with its inorganic or abiotic environment. The earth as

we know it today and as it has been for many millions of years was not in

any sense ‘given’ to human beings; life-forms played a decisive role in

creating it. Thus ‘the atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, and the crust

of the Earth are regulated at a state comfortable for life because of the

behavior of living organisms’ . Specifically, a homeostatic mechanism of

feedback loops between the earth’s biota and its abiotic environment

keeps the acidity, temperature, oxidation state, and ‘certain aspects of

rocks and waters’ constant at any given time. This close coupling of biota

and its environments suggests that the planet’s biosphere and its abiotic

realm actually *constitute* a distinct system, ‘Gaia’. [64]

This thesis is plausible and inviting. But like a number of earlier

Gaians, Lovelock, in my view, is a reductionist — albeit on a more cosmic

scale than sociobiologists and microcosmologists. And he is a misanthrope. ‘There is no clear distinction *anywhere* on the Earth’s surface

between living and nonliving matter,’ he tells us. ‘There is merely a hierarchy of *intensity* going from the “material” environment of the rocks

and the atmosphere to the living cells’.[65] Bypassing the graded but highly

qualitative differences between non-living and living ‘matter’ for a simplistic ‘hierarchy’ of energy levels, Lovelock’s notion of Gaia exhibits no

real concern for or interest in specific life-forms. Given the confusion

that permeates New Age thinking, the fact that the Gaia Hypothesis is

even more simplistic than Descartes’ view of life has not deterred its

acolytes, including Lynn Margulis, from hailing it as a new view of

reality.

Admittedly, the biosphere is indispensable to the existence of Gaia, but

Gaia nonetheless ‘is not a synonym for the biosphere..... Still less is Gaia

the same as the biota, which is simply the *collection* of all individual living

organisms.’ Calling biota a *collection* is indicative of a quantitative antihumanist orientation that sees ‘heaps’ and ‘aggregates’ rather than self-transformative organisms that defy the narrow physicalist mentality of

positivistic scientists. Yet for Lovelock Gaia emerged with life in its

earliest forms ‘and extends into the future *as long as life persists*’.[66]

Lovelock’s *The Ages of Gaia* contains an interesting account of the

Earth’s evolution, from its Archeon to its Middle and Modern age, in

which we finally arrive at ‘man’ and ‘his’ doings. The fact that, for

Lovelock, specific life forms are merely the fleeting cells of a superorganismic body permits his antihumanism to run riot. ‘Our humanistic concerns about the poor of the inner cities or the Third World,’ he declares,

‘and our near-obscene obsession with death, suffering, and pain as if

these were evil in themselves — these thoughts divert the mind from our

gross and excessive domination of the natural world.’ With the social

insight of a Margulian microcosmologist, Lovelock declares: ‘Poverty

and suffering are not sent; they are the consequences of what *we* do.’[67]

The identity of Lovelock’s ubiquitous *we* here is surprisingly cryptic.

Perhaps it includes the disempowered masses of the ‘inner cities or the

Third World’, who ‘grossly and excessively dominate the natural world’

as much as Lovelock appears to give a damn for humanity. Or perhaps it

includes the competitive and immensely empowered bankers, industrialists, stockbrokers in all their sinister mutations, political mafias, and similarly privileged strata who have brought societies around the world to

virtual ruin.

Amid his dismissal of the distractions created by social issues, Lovelock

the biologist rather contemptuously tells us: ‘Pain and death are normal

and natural; we could not long survive without them.’[68] What Gaia doth

deliver, this we must suffer in the name of a biologism that overrides

social abuses, perhaps even social horrors.

Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis might pass for mere amoralism, which

would be troubling enough in the age of Auschwitz, were it were not so

banal. ‘When we drive our cars and listen to the radio bringing news of

acid rain,’ Lovelock advises, ‘we need to remind ourselves that we, *personally*, are the polluters.... We are therefore accountable, *personally*, for

the destruction of the trees by photochemical smog and acid rain. We are

responsible for the silent spring that Rachel Carson predicted.’[69] Indeed,

‘we’ are absorbed in a ‘city life [that] reinforces and strengthens the

heresy of humanism, that narcissistic devotion to human interests

alone’.[70] Not only is humanism a heresy, but cities — that is, the one

• universalizing* medium by which humanity began to overcome its barbarous parochialism and ethnic hatreds — are a blight.

Not surprisingly, Lovelock exhibits little concern for such humanistic

problems as pollution, nuclear power plants, and other environmental

dislocations, his pious references to Rachel Carson’s warning of a ‘silent

spring’ without birds notwithstanding. ‘Gaia, as I see her, is no doting

mother tolerant of misdemeanors, nor is she some fragile and delicate

damsel in danger from brutal mankind,’ we are firmly advised. ‘She is

stern and tough, always keeping the world warm and comfortable for

those who obey the rules, but ruthless in her destruction of those who

transgress. Her unconscious goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in

the way of this, we shall be eliminated with as littie pity as would be

shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile

in full flight to its target.’[71]

These strident remarks are meant to defend the author from the charge

that he is a ‘champion [of] complacence’ who claims that ‘feedback will

always protect the environment from any serious harm that humans

might do’.[72] One could, in fact, make a very persuasive case that pollution is a form of natural selection, in which Gaia, ruthless in her

destruction of those who transgress’ her ‘rules’ or ‘unconscious goal is

merely another natural phenomenon among the many that have doomed

countless species to extinction. Yet Lovelock’s cosmic antihumanism

takes on strong theistic features, however much he bases his hypothesis

on science. In his ‘testament built around the idea of Gaia,’ confesses

Lovelock, ‘I have tried to show that God and Gaia, theology and science,

even physics and biology are not separate but a single way of thought.’[73]

Having obscured the boundary between science and religion rather

definitively, Lovelock wanders through citations from Jacques Monod (a

stern materialist and determinist), and Erich Jantsch and Ilya Prigogine

(advocates of system self-development), concluding that for the present,

my belief in God rests at the stage of a positive agnosticism’,[74] after which

he drifts into quasi-philosophical fantasies of an island five hundred million years from now, in which bionic philosophers and speechless vegetative males have neither the means nor the need to argue about the

origins of life to understand the evolution of Gaia.

Lovelock’s personal predilections and aspirations aside, what is surprising is that his works on Gaia have been earnestly embraced by a huge

number of New Age ‘spiritualists’, whose understanding of his views

leaves much to be desired. Once it leaves the plausible domain of earth

science, *The Ages of Gaia* is so much at war with itself, so contradictory,

and so anthropomorphic, that anyone looking at it from the standpoint

of consistency and coherence may well be astonished that so many

Gaians populate the privileged middle-class world of the late twentieth

century.

----

Between the selfish gene, the sovereign microcosmos, and Gaia, there

appears to be little room for human uniqueness as a product of evolution,

no belief in the potential nobility of the human spirit, indeed, no authentically *naturalistic* grounding for great social ideals and ecological insights.

Reason barely factors in Wilson’s and Lovelock’s elucidations of sociobiology and Gaia, respectively, only biochemistry and a vaguely

conceived ‘science’ that becomes a euphemism for mind. Nearly all the

works on sociobiology, microcosmology, and Gaia that essay the

Olympian project of ‘re-enchanting’ the world depict humanity

variously as gene machines, an assemblage of microbes, or intelligent

fleas. If this is not an edifying characterization of the human species, as

bad an image or worse emerges from other parts of the contemporary

repertoire of antihumanism.

[16] E. O. Wilson, *Sociobiology: A New Synthesis* (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1975).

[17] Paul Ehrlich, *The Population Bomb* (New

York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

[18] Richard Dawkins, *The Selfish Gene* (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

[19] Wilson, *Sociobiology*, p. 3. How ‘new’

this ‘synthesis’ is can be argued at considerable length. Many of Wilson’s notions

were previously advanced by the quasiromantic biologistic movements of central

Europe during the 1920s, movements that

took an exceptionally reactionary form

between 1914 and 1945 and that fed

directly into National Socialist ideology.

[20] Ibid., p. 3, emphases added.

[21] E. O. Wilson, *On Human Nature*

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1978).

[22] Ibid., p. 2, emphases added,

[23] Robert Wright, *The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology* (New

York: Pantheon Books, 1994).

[24] Wilson, *On Human Nature*, p. 2,

emphases added.

[25] Ibid., pp. 2–3.

[26] Dawkins, *Selfish Gene*, p. 2, emphasis

added.

[27] Ibid., pp. 2–3.

[28] Ibid., p. 203.

[29] Ibid., p. 215.

[30] Ibid., p. 206. Here Dawkins explains

the origin of the word *meme* as follows:

<br>

‘We need a name for the new replicator, a

noun which conveys the idea of a unit of

cultural transmission, or a unit of *imitation*.

“Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek

root, but I want a monosyllable that

sounds a bit like “gene”. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate

mimeme to *meme*.’

[31] Ibid., pp. 207–8.

[32] Ibid., p.209.

[33] Ibid., pp. 210–11, emphasis added.

[34] Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added

[35] Ibid., p. 25. We are also warned by

Dawkins on page 95 that he is exercising

license’ in ‘talking about genes as if they

had conscious aims’ and in an earlier passage on page 59 he tells us that ‘drey do

not think at all’. But much of Dawkins’

account is couched in words like *selfishness*,

• loyalties*, *aims*, and *goals*, so that a few disclaiming sentences here and there barely

serve to support his contention that he has

not attributed unwarranted intentionality

to his ‘immortal coils’.

[36] Robert L. Trivers, ‘Foreword’, in Ibid.,

p.v.

[37] Wilson, *On Human Nature*, p. 167,

emphasis added.

[38] Ibid., p. 167, emphasis added.

[39] Ibid., p. 213, emphasis added.

[40] Ibid., p. 149, emphasis added.

[41] Ibid., p. 213.

[42] Ibid., p. 149.

[43] Ibid., p. 150.

[44] Ibid., p. 151.

[45] For an eminently readable critical

review of the primatological material that

is being inflicted on the public by

researchers like Goodall, the reader would

do well to consult Lord Zuckerman’s caustic ‘Apes R Not Us’, in

• The New York Review of Books* (30 May 1991), pp. 43—9.

[46] Wilson, *On Human Nature*, pp. 152–3.

[47] Ibid., p. 152, emphasis added.

[48] Ibid., p. 153.

[49] See Christopher Wills, *The Wisdom of Genes: New Pathways in Evolution* (New

York: Basic Books, 1989).

[50] Wilson, *On Human Nature*, p. 153.

[51] Ibid., p. 153, emphasis added.

[52] Ibid., p. 196.

[53] Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 221.

[54] David Erdal *et al*, ‘On Human

Egalitarianism: An Evolutionary Product of

Machiavellian Status Escalation’, *Current Anthropology*, vol. 35, no. 2 (April 1994),

pp. 169–70. In a laudatory account of

Wilson’s achievements in the *Boston Globe Magazine*, Scott Allen aptly describes

sociobiology today as ‘a fast-growing field

of science’ . Today, indeed! In the 1970s,

when progressive social sensibilities still

had a voice in the United States, Wilson

was justly criticized by a wide spectrum of

scientists and political activists for speculating that ‘even with identical education and

equal access to all professions, men are

likely to play a disproportionate role in

political life, business, and science’ , as

Wilson said in *The New York Times* in

1975.

[55] Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan,

• Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution* (New York: Simon & Schuster,

1986).

[56] Ibid., p. 228.

[57] Ibid., pp. 66–7.

[58] Ibid., pp. 95–6.

[59] Ibid., pp. 193, 195, 214.

[60] Ibid., p. 236.

[61] Ibid., pp. 238–9.

[62] Ibid., p. 262.

[63] James Lovelock, *The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Planet* (New York:

Bantam Books, 1988). On human beings

as ‘intelligent fleas’, see p. 155.

[64] Ibid., p. 19.

[65] Ibid., p. 40, emphasis added.

[66] Ibid., p. 19, emphasis added.

[67] Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added.

[68] Ibid., p.211.

[69] Ibid., p. 211, emphasis added.

[70] Ibid., p. 210.

[71] Ibid., p. 212.

[72] Ibid., p. 212.

[73] Ibid., p. 212.

[74] Ibid., p. 217.

Chapter 3: The new Malthusians

A narrow biologistic mindset that has reduced human beings to gene

machines, microbes, and intelligent fleas need make little further effort to

view people as the biotic equals of fruit flies, whose high reproductive

rates are often adduced by popular writers on demography to warn of the

dangers of unlimited human population growth.

A population of fruit flies, however, is very easy to decrease or eliminate. We can swat them, starve diem, or diminish their numbers with

pesticides. Such ways of dealing with population problems, as they are

called, can give rise to a rather unsavory cast of mind. Viewing human

beings as merely another animal species — such as fruit flies — creates an

ideal setting for thinking about how their numbers can be reduced by

foul means as well as fair.

One does not have to be a sociobiologist, microcosmologist, or a

Gaian to think this way — aldiough it does help. The idea of coercively

diminishing human numbers has a long pedigree in the history of reactionary ideologies. Antihumanistic demographics begin to seem plausible

once we begin to diminish humanity’s uniqueness and evolutionary

stature by viewing people merely as animal organisms which can be

delivered over to their destiny — the harsh laws of natural selection. We

can then claim that the social factors that lead to hunger, famine, and

disease are actually biological, in the name of, say, ecological imperatives.

The most impressive success story in fostering this way of thinking

over the past two generations has been a small book, *The Population Bomb*, written by a then-relatively obscure Californian entomologist,

Paul Ehrlich, and first published in May 1968.[75] The year of its publication was a climactic one in the history of the New Left. Following the

uprising of French students in the famous May—June events of that year

and the general strike that swept France, the New Left was beginning to

abandon its earlier 1960s populist doctrine of ‘participatory democracy’

by the autumn of 1968 and was veering sharply toward a doctrinaire,

largely authoritarian Marxist—Maoist orientation that completely marginalized it on its own campus spawning grounds. Gradually a reaction

against radicalism — and ultimately against humanism — set in, making

biologistic interpretations of social problems a fairly common

viewpoint.

These sectarian maladies notwithstanding, radical sentiments remained

fairly strong in the 1970s. Indeed, the possibility of combining the

lingering libertarian features of the early New Left with an emerging

environmental public consciousness opened the realistic possibility of

developing a *social* ecology movement: one that clearly singled out the

profit-oriented, competitive market system as the principal source of

environmental degradation and that raised the need for a radical restructuring of society along free and ecologically oriented lines.

Based on my own experience as a very active participant in this

momentous period, I can say that if there was any single work that

aborted a confluence of radical ideas with public environmental concerns, it was Paul Ehrlich’s *Population Bomb*. By the early 1970s, Ehrlich’s

tract had significandy sidetracked the emerging environmental movement from social critique to a very crude, often odious biologism the

impact of which remains with us today.

The shift that Ehrlich’s book produced was eminendy suited to the

Cold War ideology and suffocating reactionism of the Nixon administration. Whatever Ehrlich personally thought he was doing, the crudity of

the book’s message, indeed its ugly misanthropy and antihumanism, provided an ideological prop for highly regressive political views. For years

thereafter, the book served as something of a reactionary manifesto for

narrowly biologistic interpretations of demographic and ecological issues.

----

The one-paragraph-long opening of *The Population Bomb*, entitled ‘The

Problem’, remains, in my view, an offensive set of observations such as is

rarely encountered in the unsavory demographic literature of recent

times.[76]

Ehrlich describes a taxi trip he, his wife, and daughter made through a

New Delhi slum, where, to his shock ‘one stinking night’, his cab’s passage was impeded by throngs of people. ‘People eating, people washing,

people sleeping’, Ehrlich exclaims with revulsion. ‘People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses.

People herding animals. People, people, people, people.’

People living in New Delhi’s slums have been known to do many

other things, such as carve beautiful artifacts, make love, practice humane

religious beliefs’, play, dance, sing, laugh, and socialize with each other

with great warmth. Despite the desperate conditions of the India’s poor,

an earthy cultural vitality persists among them. Certainly Ehrlich saw

what *he* seems to have wanted to see — people begging, defecating,

urinating in the streets of a terribly impoverished area of the city that is

notoriously lacking in shelter and means of transportation, and that still

suffers from disparities of wealth and status deeply rooted in an ugly

history of European colonialism.

Our worthy entomologist from the academic groves of California then

goes on to declare: ‘As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn

squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, fiankly,

Tightened.’ Having negotiated dieir way through the inferno, this

middle-class Californian family found itself in the comforts of a fairly

modern hotel, after which Ehrlich opined that ‘since that night I’ve

known the *feel* of overpopulation.’[77]

This depiction of extreme poverty is so offensive, so elitist, and so

arrogant that any humane reader of the book might well regard it as a

moral nightmare. Regrettably, most readers seemingly did not. Although

Ehrlich later did suffer reproaches from a small number of critics, their

numbers were relatively few, and Ins book became immensely popular, as

its long publishing history indicates. Indeed, Ehrlich still figures as an

eminent figure in the ecology movement today, and in recent years he

has gained favor among the same liberals and radicals whom one would

expect to have found his *Population Bomb* completely repugnant, even as

he has lauded reactionaries such as Garrett Hardin.

The remaining pages of *The Population Bomb* offer us little respite from

the antihumanism and arrogance of its opening chapter. ‘Too many cars,

we leam, ‘too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide,

multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little

water, too much carbon dioxide — all can be traced easily to *too many people.*’[78] The emphasis is Ehrlich’s — and one feels obliged to ask, *all*? In

view of the relatively small number of cars and factories in late 1960s

India, is Ehrlich possibly thinking of California, where cars, factories, and

excessive pollution were major problems for decades before Ins epiphany

in New Delhi?

Leaving aside some of Ehrlich’s science fiction scenarios, we are told

that family planning will not suffice to reduce population numbers. It is

not enough to offer couples the ‘means’ to control the birth of children,

since they may, after all, ‘plan’ to have too many. Stronger measures are

required. ‘Everywhere’ in the Third World, ‘people *want* large families.

They *want* families of a size that will keep the population growing —

whereupon Ehrlich regales the reader with statistics that show that Third

World women who seek guidance in family planning are mainly those

who have already had several children. But then, Ehrlich brightly cautions, ‘remember that planned, well-spaced children will starve, or

vaporize in a thermonuclear war, or the of plague just as well as

unplanned children.’[79] This statement was egregiously false — family planning has done a great deal to reduce rates of population growth. For all

the noxious methods that Indira Gandhi’s government used to force sterilization on India s poor and despite China’s scandalously restrictive measures, in many places women embrace technologies to limit the number

of their offspring and recover their humanity as someone who is more

than a reproductive factory.

How are Americans to overcome their propensity for large families, in

Ehrlich’s view? Aside from bringing their own population numbers and

growth-rates down, ‘we are ... going to have to adopt some very tough

foreign policy positions relatively to population control, and we must do

it from a psychologically strong position.’ Thus: ‘[m]any of my colleagues feel that some sort of *compulsory* birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the

addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of

the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce

the desired population size.’ ‘Rest easy,’ Ehrlich assures the shocked

reader; the scientific means for instituting this salutary solution are not

even open to us, thanks to the *criminal* inadequacy of biomedical

research in this area.’[80]

----

Still, ‘it might be possible to develop such population control tools,

although the task would not be simple.’[81] If there is a will, there is a way.

But then, Americans would not stand for it. In a breathtaking shift in

perspective, we pass from authoritarian solutions (for the Third World?)

to financial solutions (for the First World). The US tax structure could be

changed to reward citizens for not having children and to punish those

who do, Ehrlich proposes. Additionally, we might also consider higher

taxes on such perilously dangerous items as ‘layettes, cribs, diapers, diaper

services, and expensive toys’, with due allowance that ‘the essentials be

available without penalty to the poor (just as free food now is).’[82]

Ultimately, however, we must face up to the fact that these and other

such measures ‘would need coordination by a powerful governmental

agency. A federal Department of Population and Environment pPE)

should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to

establish a reasonable population size in the United States and put an end

to the steady deterioration of our environment.’ This agency ‘would

promote intensive investigation of new techniques of birth control, possibly leading to the development of mass sterilization agents .’ Indeed, the DPE

‘would encourage more research on human sex determination, for if a

simple method could be found to guarantee that first-born children were

males, then population control problems in many areas would be somewhat eased’ — since cultural biases usually favor having sons instead of

daughters — especially ‘where couples with only female children “keep

trying” in hope of a son.’[83] Readers in the 1990s who care to commend

Ehrlich for foreseeing current sex-selective technologies are welcome to

do so, but the logic of this practice is self-evident, as is revealed by recent

sex-ratio figures in China that abnormally favor the birth of male over

female babies. I may add that the extent to which outright female infanticide has increased in China as well as gender-detection techniques, has

disconcerted some of the most resolute of Western ‘population bombers’.

As for American foreign policy cast in the form of ‘population control’, Ehrlich urges his readers to accept ‘the concept of “triage” borrowed from military medicine. The idea is briefly this: When casualties

crowd a dressing station to the point where all cannot be cared for by the

limited medical staff, some decisions must be made on who will be

treated.’ Accordingly, ‘all incoming casualties are placed in one of three

classes’: those who are mortally wounded and should be left to die; those

who can survive irrespective of how quickly treatment is given; and

those for whom immediate treatment may be a matter of life or death.[84]

Even though we are far from any immediate demographic apocalypse,

American aid to famine-stricken or destitute countries, Ehrlich suggests,

should be guided by the principle of triage. Indeed, what seems to determine whether a country should be denied food and medicine is its fertility rate. Following William and Paul Paddock, two cold warriors whose

1967 book *Famine — 1975!* never lived up to its predictive title, Ehrlich

perhaps unwittingly casts population control policies along the Cold War

alignments of the day. We might give food aid to Pakistan, he suggests,

under ‘the tough-minded leadership of President Ayub Khan’, who,

Ehrlich neglects to tell us, was the notoriously authioritarian *General*

Muhammed Ayub Khan, who came to power in a military *coup* against a

constitutional government and ruled by decree, despite the facade of

democratic ‘elections’.[85] Pakistan, not coincidentally, was on the

American side of the Cold War — in contrast to non-aligned India, which

Ehrlich suggests (in agreement with the Paddocks) should be denied

American food under the triage system.

In Ehrlich’s dazzling view of social and political reality, ‘there is no

rational choice *except* to adopt some form of the Paddocks’ strategy as far

as food distribution is concerned.... The Paddocks deserve immense

credit for their courage and foresight in publishing *Famine — 1975!*,

which may be remembered as one of the most important books of our

age’ — nothing less![86] Doubtless such architects of the Cold War as John

Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles would have heartily agreed, albeit for

reasons that have nothing to do with demographic considerations.

----

More or less anticipating the authoritarian measures of Indira Gandhi in

India and the Communist totalitarians in China, Ehrlich reproves the

American government for opposing the suggestion of an Indian official,

Dr S. Chandrasekar, that all Indian males who fathered three or more

children should face compulsory sterilization. Verily, he declares: ‘we

should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with

the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of

helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid the program by setting up centers for training para-medical

personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good

cause’ — at which point Ehrlich expresses astonishment at ‘the attitudes of

Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting

on population control as the price of food aid.’[87]

Forced sterilization in the name of a good cause may look uncomfortably like authoritarian measures taken by some of the more reactionary

regimes in recent history. If his good cause entails the forcible sterilization of a Third World people — or any people, for that matter, who happen not to accept the demographic apocalypse that explodes on the pages

of *The Population Bomb* — such authoritarian measures would produce

immeasurably worse problems in the social and political spheres than the

ones they were intended to solve. Coercive measures here or harsh

demographic policies there do not usually come in bits and pieces, like

candy bars from a slot machine. They are adopted in a general authoritarian context whose logic leads to more encompassing social controls in

ever more spheres of life, with a growing state apparatus to enforce them.

As it turned out, Ehrlich’s predictive abilities were imprecise at best.

Extrapolating from a number of his premises and forebodings some

twenty-five years ago, we should now be wracked worldwide by

famines, shortages of raw materials, and rising prices. The planet’s basic

resources should be largely depleted, and demo graphically induced starvation should be haunting wealthy and poor regions alike. During my

lecture tours in the late 1960s, members of Zero Population Growth

(ZPG) would raise dire warnings that the immediate future was terribly

portentous.’Not only would there be famines, civil wars induced by

hunger, and intolerable congestion, but fortunate would be the

Americans who found some living space on man-made islands in the

world’s oceans.

Actually, between 1950 and 1990, worldwide grain production nearly

tripled, increasing from 631 million tons to 1,780 million tons, at an average rate of some 29 million tons annually. Beef and mutton production

rose 2.6 times, from 24 million tons to 62 million. The supply offish rose

nearly five times, from 22 million to 100 million tons. Nearly all the

major mineral resources rose at comparable or higher rates. All of these

increases by far outstripped population growth and — potentially, in a

more rational society — might have amply met the needs of the wodd

population. The famines that swept over areas of Africa were induced

more by political conflicts and World Bank policies than by desertification and lack of land. Today, as new agricultural and industrial technologies emerge, it would be naive to make the inflexible predictions that

many Malthusians have advanced over the past twenty-five years, just as

it would be naive for so-called ‘Cornucopians’, who see population

growth as a desideratum — to claim that the larger the number of the

people on the planet, the better.[88]

E hrli ch’s assertion in *The Population Bomb* that ‘population is far outstripping food production’ proved, in fact, to be grossly erroneous.[89] Nor

was the harshness of his recipes for India matched in the advice he

offered his American readers. ‘There are some very distinguished economists who do not feel that our capitalist system must be fueled by an

ever-growing population or ever-continuing depletion of resources

(both of which are impossible anyway),’ he prudently noted. ‘There, in

fact, seems to be no reason why the GNP [gross national product] cannot

be kept growing for a very long time *without population growth*’ — which

indeed would be entirely possible if the business community could

induce consumers to buy several motor vehicles, television sets, computers, and so on, per family.[90] Which would, of course, raise serious problems about the waste of resources, despite the multitude of recycling

centers that have sprung up in recent years. In short, the GNP could

grow and grow — but what, alas, would be the fate of the planet as

industry turns soil into sand, oceans into sewers, forests into timber, and

devastates the planet in the process? The social myopia that marks *The Population Bomb* is nothing less than appalling: a rising GNP is yearned

for, amid panic that population growth will deplete planetary resources!

----

The book found readers across political, social and cultural fines with the

carelessness of an infant scrawling on a blank page. It educated people to

regard the causes of hunger as resource depletion rather than exploitation, civil war, political instability, and economic greed; imminent

resource depletion, in turn, was grossly exaggerated and projected into

the near future. Where Ehrlich could even remotely or indirecdy ‘biologize’ a social cause that was producing a deterioration in the human

condition, he seemed to do so with gusto, as have his admirers among

the quasi-mystical tendencies in the environmental movement. Ehrlich

has since retreated from the crassly coercive positions he advanced in *The Population Bomb* (and *How to Be a Survivor*, written more than a decade

later), yet biological reductionism still pervades his writings. The social

conditions that make for population growth and stabilization generally

take a back seat to a zoological outlook that nuzzles closely to some

extremely unsavory political views.

Not only did *The Population Bomb* sell some two million copies in

numerous reprintings, but Ehrlich personally became a *cause celebre*,

appearing on television shows, at widely heralded conferences, and on

the lecture circuit. He addressed thousands of adoring listeners and either

directly or indirectly aided in the formation of a particularly rancorous

organization, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), of which he became

chairman. In sidetracking public discussion of the social sources of

environmental deterioration — notably, global corporate capitalism, with

its plundering of forests, natural resources, and, significantly, the labor

force of underprivileged countries — it set the narrowly biological agenda

that increasingly marked the environmental movement in the 1970s and

1980s. ZPG zealots and neo-Malthusians dismissed criticism of the social

and economic irrationalities of the decade as leftist dogma’ or ‘radical

sectarianism’ .

The slogan that came to forefront of the 1970s — one that by no means

has faded — was ‘*People are Pollution*’, a theme that pervaded an appreciable part of the educational curriculum in American elementary and high

schools. Two sixth-graders in Kensington, Maryland, for example, composed a poem that drew approval from the growing ‘population

bombers’ and budding misanthropes of the time:

If we didn’t have people

We wouldn’t have pollution,

Get rid of people

That’s the only solution.

Meanwhile the New York Museum of Natural History orga niz ed an

‘environmental exhibition’ in which schoolchildren were trotted past

one case after another that showed wanton environmental damage. The

last exhibit (if memory serves) was headed: ‘The Most Dangerous Animal

of All’ . It consisted of a full-length mirror, in which visitors could see

themselves in the full splendor of their terrifyingly human attributes.

When I fingered near this distasteful exhibit, nothing impressed me more

than the sight of a middle-class white, teacher explaining to a black child

the ‘meaning’ of the mirror and the title that surmounted it. Ehrlich, alas,

had done his work only too well.

----

By no means was Ehrlich alone in his views in 1968; nor has he been the

most chilling and coercive of the ‘population bombers’ in the checkered

history of demography. The antihumanistic message of *The Population Bomb* dates back most notably to the publication of Thomas Malthus’s

• An Essay on the Principle of Population* in 1798, known more briefly today as *On Population*.[91]

The influence of Malthus’s work lasted much longer than its author’s

own life, as he died in 1834. Indeed, it gave rise to a militant credo,

Malthusianism, that enjoys a vigorous existence even in the closing

decade of the twentieth century. To ignore the influence of *On Population* would be to ignore its socially malignant ramifications, which

have nourished some of the most reactionary ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• On Population* remains an unsavory, class-oriented, and often cynical

tract, despite some mitigating observations Malthus made over the course

of seven revisions. Although its admirers often see it exclusively as a

work on population, it is actually an ideological diatribe against the

humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment. Aimed against such distinguished Enlightenment theorists as the English anarchist William

Godwin and the French progressivist Marquis de Condorcet (Thomas

Paine’s *Age of Reason* is a minor target), Malthus’s tract is not only an

expression of concern over population growth; it is a pessimistic attack

upon the egalitarian ideals of his two principal targets and their belief in

humanity’s capacity to significantly improve itself. Like the theories of

many sociobiologists today, Malthus’s views subvert the belief that

human beings are anything more than simple brutes. Not only must their

numbers be kept under control by fair means or foul; people must be

kept severely in tow psychologically by their well-to-do betters and by

the harsh constraints of natural law.

Malthus’s attack on William Godwin’s ‘system of equality’ — and on

Godwin’s belief that the ‘amelioration of society to be produced merely

by reason and conviction — drips with sarcasm. ‘In short,’ Malthus

declaims after a tongue-in-cheek devotional to Godwin’s humane and

rational society, ‘it is impossible to contemplate the whole of this fair

structure, without emotions of delight and admiration, accompanied

with ardent longing for the period of its accomplishment.’[92]

Having delivered his breast of ‘delight and admiration’ for Godwin’s

vision, Malthus quickly turns to a misanthropic evocation that subjects

such reasoned and humane utopianism to withering scorn. ‘Man cannot

five in the midst of plenty,’ we are told *ex cathedra*. ‘All cannot share alike

in the bounties of nature. Were there no established administration of

property [i.e. the state], every man would be obliged to guard with force

his litde store. Selfishness would be triumphant. The subjects of contention would be perpetual. Every individual mind would be under constant anxiety about corporal support, and not a single intellect would be

free to expiate in the field of thought.’[93] These are the standard arguments that have been used from Aristotie to Hobbes to justify ruling

classes and, in Hobbes’s case, the state.

Condorcet’s belief in ‘the indefinite perfectibility of man’ is treated in

much the same way as Godwin’s belief in an egalitarian society based on

reason: it is rejected largely on grounds of natural law and its immutability. ‘The constancy of the laws of nature and of effects and causes is the

foundation of all human knowledge,’ Malthus writes, ‘though far be it

from me to say that the same power [i.e. the deity] which framed and

executes the laws of nature, may not change them all “in a moment, in

the twinkling of an eye.”’ Following this nod to the deity, Malthus

advises his reader:

All that I mean to say is that it is impossible to infer [such a change] from

reasoning. If without any previous observable symptoms or indications of a

change, we can infer that a change will take place, we may as well make

any assertion whatever and think it as unreasonable to be contradicted in

affirming that the moon will come in contact with the earth tomorrow, as

in saying that the sun will rise at its usual time.’[94]

Accordingly: ‘population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical

ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.... By that law

of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects

of these two unequal powers *must* be kept equal.’[95] Malthus’s conclusion

is not only descriptive, based on assumptions or ‘postulata’, as he puts it;

it is also prescriptive, a guide to human action.

Although in later editions of his essay Malthus imparted some value to

the efficacy of ‘moral restraint’ by individuals in controlling their own

reproductive behavior, he never retracted the conclusions that logically

followed from his earlier steps. Thus, bistory presumably demonstrates

that ‘the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice’. Indeed, charitable behavior by the rich ‘contribute [s] frequendy to prolong a season of distress among the poor, yet

no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of

misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality [as existed

in Malthus’s time], and upon all, if all were equal’ — as in Godwin’s egalitarian social vision.[96]

Thus: ‘[t]o prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alasi beyond the

power of man’, and all parish poor laws meant to alleviate this inexorable

destiny of the poor serve only to deceive them.[97] Indeed, we are told

with pious concern, ‘Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful

resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power

in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in

some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are

active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the

great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves.’[98] Between original sin (‘the virus of mankind’) and the workings

of the mundane world (the limited ‘bounties of nature’), Malthus

manages to leave us no alternative: neither heaven nor earth can come to

our aid.

If the ‘preventive checks’ that thinking people deploy cannot inhibit

the production of large families, diminish vice, and make for a better life,

Malthus holds, then inexorable ‘positive checks’ on population growth

come into play. These positive checks

are extremely various, and include every cause, whether arising from vice

or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration

of human life. Under this head, therefore, may be enumerated all the

unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to the seasons,

extreme povertybad nursing of children, great towns, excesses of all kinds,

the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, and

famine.[99]

The poor generally come in for a drubbing at Malthus’s hands:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the

society do not want his labour; has no claim of right to the smallest

portion of food, and, in fact, has not business to be where he is, At

nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him, She tells him to be

gone from his place at her table] and will quickly execute her own orders,

if he do not work on the compassion of some of her guests.[100]

This is a compassion that Malthus, often tongue-in-cheek, derides.

Indeed:

Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to

be held disgraceful . Such a [moral] stimulus seems to be absolutely necessary to promote the happiness of the great mass of mankind; and every

general attempt to weaken this stimulus, however benevolent its intention,

will always defeat its own purpose. If men be induced to marry from the

mere prospect of parish provision, they are not only unjustly tempted to

bring unhappiness and dependence upon themselves and children, but they

are tempted, without knowing it, to injure all in the same class with themselves.[101]

Malthus’s later disquisitions on humanity’s moral, sense and its capacity to

voluntarily control population growth and invent technologies that

could increase food production are more than overshadowed by his

heartless, class-oriented hunger politics. From the first edition of the

essay to the seventh, Malthus mercilessly accepts the ‘positive checks’

that reduce population.

Indeed, in the second edition of *On Population*, Malthus proposes horrendous ‘positive checks’ that stigmatize his ideas as utterly unfeeling.

Nonetheless they had a considerable influence on the antihumanistic

demographic and sociobiological literature that has appeared more

recently. ‘In all old states,’ Malthus tells us, ‘the marriages and births

depend principally upon the deaths, and ... there is no encouragement to

early unions so powerful as a great mortality.’[102]

To insure that the poor do not reproduce, Malthus proposes quite

concretely that far from

recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits.

In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into

the houses, and court the return of plague, In the country, we should build

our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in

all marshy and unwholesome conditions. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but

much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to

mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.[103]

These prescriptions were written, let me note, by a Christian parson

who gained considerable honor not only in his day but also in our own.

----

Like a growing rhizome with innumerable offshoots, Malthusianism

brought forth demo graphically based and racist social theories that have

beleaguered humanity ever since. The ideology, even as Malthus formulated it in 1798, already nourished the mean-spirited egotism, ‘free enterprise’, and a vicious exploitation of the poor that found such vivid

expression in the socially critical novels of Dickens and Eliot. England

soon became not only the industrial center of the world but its human

charnel house, where the bones of grossly exploited men, women, and

children were to be deposited in vast numbers to the ever greater glory of

profit. Robert Owen, a truly benevolent manufacturer of the period

(whom Malthus criticized) showed at his factory in New Lanark that relatively decent working conditions did not conflict with the making of

substantial profits. Visitors from different parts of England and abroad

readily celebrated this enlightened industrialist for his human and economic successes — only to return home and visit a veritable hell upon

their own working class with little regard for Owen’s practices.

Such Victorian hypocrisies were not the product of Malthus’s demographic views, but the *Essay on Population* provided an ideological patina

for the notorious brutality of English orphanages and poorhouses, and.

the execution of poor people for what we today would regard as relatively minor offenses. Above all, it justified the ruthless exploitation of

the industrial working class in the decades that followed. Malthusian

ideology was employed very effectively to buttress the mean-spiritedness

of the time and support the crass exploitation of factory and farm labor,

often with a zealotry that was devoid of feeling for human welfare and

the simplest of moral decencies.

Charles Darwin’s use of Malthus’s theory of population in *The Origin of Species* was added an even more chilling tenet to what could, by then,

be called *social* Darwinism. By no means was Darwin responsible for the

ideological transformation that his theory of natural selection underwent.

But with acolytes like Herbert Spencer *et al.*, natural selection became a

ruling-class social ideology of enormous influence. Dissolute scions of

British noble houses, predatory bankers and industrialists, even small proprietors and manufacturers with ‘expectations’, and various strata of the

labor aristocracy could now conceive of themselves as ‘nature’s elect’, the

product of natural selection and the ‘survival of the fittest’ transposed to

the social realm.

Accordingly, the ‘failures’ in the competitive game of British capitalism — notably the working classes and the poor — were seen disdainfully

as the inevitable victims of evolution’s onward march toward selecting

more ‘fit’ individuals. Natural law itself dictated their exploitation for the

glory of enterprise and profit — or their disposal on the scrap heap of

humanity once they could no longer fulfill their responsibility to the

naturally endowed elite, selected for survival and success.

Moreover, social Darwinism was transposed from the domain of

domestic affairs to world affairs, providing the rationale *par excellence* for

imperialism — the ‘improvement’ of the dark races of the world who

lived in demonic ‘barbarism’. There seems to be an infinite capacity,

deeply rooted in tribal dependencies and a darkly primitivist sense of

parochialism, to regard outsiders or strangers as non-human and thus as

potential enemies. Starting as early as the fifteenth century, Europeans

and later Americans had engaged in a genocidal frenzy against native

peoples on both continents of the New World and the enslavement of

African tribal people. Now, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

armies marched forth from Europe to ‘tame’ the ‘uncivilized’ continents

of the planet, presumably a ‘noble’ calling for which the conqueror, colonizer, and missionary deserved a ‘just reward’. The barbarities that

Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany inflicted on the territories they claimed and conquered in Africa and Asia read like the horrors

Dante described in the lower depths of hell. Even after the slave trade

was abolished, imperialist practices were greatly reinforced by social

Darwinist ideologies. Profoundly influenced by Malthusian doctrines,

almost no restraint was placed on the cruelties that the so-called Age of

Imperialism inflicted on the dark regions of the earth, as the literature

and vernacular of the time called today’s Third World.

The sense of imperial destiny that social Darwinism imparted served

this Euro-American barbarism very effectively. The French transformed

the homebred British version into a vulgarized mission to spread the

Enlightenment, even the ideals of their great Revolution, to the ‘less

endowed’ peoples of the world. The German version took on a specifically racial form, celebrating the virtues of Teutonic Man over all other

ethnic groups, particularly people of color. Empire, dressed up as the

‘white man’s burden’, became in all its various nationalistic mutations

specific forms of social Darwinism, each with its barely concealed roots

in Malthus’s notion of‘fitness’ — namely the ability of the ‘able’ to survive

and ‘feast’ at the table of nature.

That the number of places at Nature’s table on which to feast were

limited, as Malthus had opined, inexorably raised the question of who

was most fit from a *eugenical* standpoint to find a seat. It was asked which

racial traits were worth fostering through breeding techniques and

which were not. Flat or hooked noses were apparently not, especially if

they were attached to people with the brown or black skin so common

in the ‘dark lands’ of the world. Eugenics, whatever its scientific value,

was quickly socialized into insidious racial ideologies. Concepts of

‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ races came so much into vogue that at the

turn of the century, even a Socialist like Jack London celebrated his

sturdy Anglo-Saxon lineage. Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’ became a

metaphor for Germanic virtues that many of the Kaiser’s troops carried

in their minds as they marched into the trenches of the Western front in

1914.

----

Nearly all social Darwinist, eugenicist, and nationalistic racism, as well as

myths of the ‘white man’s burden’, are deeply rooted in Malthus’s writings, reaching their apogee in the last quarter of the nineteenth century

and the first half of the twentieth.

Ideologically, this medley of views provided the rationale for the terrible slaughter that occurred in Europe between 1914 and 1918, initiating

what Axno J. Mayer has called the ‘thirty years war’ of the twentieth century — the three decades that immersed a suffering humanity in blood

until 1945.[104] Prior to 1914, only one institution seemed capable of countervailing Europe’s drive toward self-annihilation: the Socialist or Second

International. Its anthem, ‘The Internationale’, called upon the working

classes of the world to maintain a steadfast class solidarity in the interests

of humanity as a whole. In ringing prose, Marx and Engels’s *Communist

Manifesto* declared that the proletariat had no country, and it closed with

with the slogan: ‘Workingmen of all countries, unite!’

The collapse of the Second International in August 1914, when the

French and German socialist parties voted in favor of war credits for their

respective countries, provided tragic evidence of the power of nationalist

sentiments, even within the working class itself. A primal tribalism had

reasserted itself, and for more than four years of terrible slaughter it

retained a vigorous hold upon the armies of the Allies and Central

Powers.

This tribalism was shaken to its foundations by the promise of a new

socialist future which the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 seemed

to initiate. In proclamation after proclamation, the new Soviet regime

upheld, to its lasting credit, an unwavering internationalism in the face of

Euro-American national chauvinism. The years that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution were heady with hopes for achieving a

new worldwide solidarity between the working classes of the belligerent

countries and a revolutionary restructuring of society along rational and

humanistic lines.

Indeed, seldom had history been imbued by so striking a sense of universality, of the ‘fraternity’ heralded by the Great French Revolution in

1789, and of a cooperative dispensation of human affairs. In the span

between the First and Second World Wars — one of the most decisive

periods in the history of humanity — repeated social upheavals posed the

crucial question of whether the Enlightenment and its humanistic ideals

could be embodied in a rational society. The radical political hopes of the

1920s and 1930s reached their climax in the Spanish Civil War of 1936,

the most ideologically charged class struggle of the twentieth century.

This conflict, virtually ignored in history textbooks today, placed upon

the agenda of the modern era all the ideals that various socialisms had

spawned, from the closing years of the French Revolution up to the

Second World War. The crushing of the revolution in Spain — in a

struggle that lasted nearly three years — marked the end of an era of

classical socialism and, above all, internationalist universalism.

The Second World War, its claim to support the Tour Freedoms’ in

the Atlantic Charter of 1940 notwithstanding, was fought out along

largely chauvinistic and nationalistic lines. Still, never before in history

had a bloc of Allied powers — the Western democracies — confronted so

radically antihumanist a foe as German National Socialism. There is no

historical precedent for the systematic extermination of European Jews.

I refer not only to the immense number of lives that were claimed by

the Nazi camp system and the special execution squads in German-occupied Poland and Russia; the past had seen numerically comparable

massacres in, say, the Mongol invasions of Eurasia. Nor was the Nazi

attempt to exterminate an entire people entirely without precedent in

the ancient world. But National Socialism conducted its genocidal

policy against the Jews on an *industrial* basis, in which millions of people

were ‘processed’ to their deaths through a camp system that was essentially an abattoir more ruthless and inhumane than a typical slaughterhouse.

Malthusianism, eugenics, social Darwinism, and racial nationalism

contributed profoundly to producing the reality of Auschwitz by creating an outlook that made it possible to regard human beings as pestiferous animals. Denied all personality, individuality, recognition, and

subjectivity, European Jews in particular were beaten, shot, and gassed as

though they were bothersome fruit flies or fleas. National Socialism,

ideologically similar to the sociobiological images of human beings so

widespread today, can be regarded as the practical culmination of

Malthus’s view that the poor are merely objects to be systematically

starved, afflicted with disease, and driven to death wholesale.

----

Barely had the Second World War come to an end and its dreadful genocidal tallies had been made, when neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, and

‘scientific’ racism emerged with all the ferocity that had marked its

existence in the decades that preceded the war.

Eugenics, whose abuse accounts for the racist American immigration

laws of 1924 that privileged, supposedly ‘northern’ European immigrants

over eastern and southern Europeans, created a new basis for the

Malthusian literature of the interwar period and resurfaced in the late

1940s in the United States. Barely two years after the Second World War

came to an end, Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell published

• Human Breeding and Survival; Population Roads to Peace and War.*[105] Even while

trials for crimes against humanity — the mass murder of millions of Jews

and Gypsies — were still going on, this book discoursed on ‘social bases’

of using sterilization to attain ‘peace goals’.

Burch and Pendell repeated an old Malthusian class orientation:

Looking toward a possibly economic test, are persons who are on relief to

be encouraged to reproduce while they are on relief, as they have been? ...

Are their children more likely to be social burdens than are the children of

those who are in better control of their own environment? ...Is it reasonable to ask other citizens to pay more taxes in order that relief recipients

may reproduce?[106]

The passage shares a very close linguistic kinship to the reactionary

verbiage of the right-wing groups that had gained so much prominence

during the years directly preceding the Second World War. That it has

persisted for over half a century and is gaining an extraordinary prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, not only among right-wingers but among

some liberals, is evidence of its tenacious hold on the public mind.

It is hard to regard the ‘economic test’ to which Burch and Pendell

allude as strictly economic. The mid-1940s were a time of sweeping

social and cultural dislocation in the United States. Millions of people

had been demobilized from the military, and many rural southern blacks

were migrating to northern cities. To prepare for the postwar era, all of

them required a host of welfare measures, from direct material assistance

to government-subsidized educational programs.

The reader of their 1947 book would be justified in feeling uneasy that

the authors quote approvingly from the writings of H. L. Mencken, who

had achieved considerable notoriety for his misanthropy, elitism, and

cynicism.

In basing sterilization on social criteria such as criminality, low earnings,

poor health, and lack of education, H. L, Mencken has probably gone

farther than anyone before him, in suggesting a large-scale use of the

economic test for the right to have children].

In the American Mercury for August, 1937, he observes that in general the sterilization laws apply only to persons who are defective in some

gross and melodramatic way. Said he: ( Let a resolute attack be made upon

the fecundity of all the males on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, and

there will be a gradual and permanent improvement.’[107]

Whereupon the authors coolly discourse on the practicability, as advanced

by Mencken, of offering a financial reward to ‘prospective steriles’ that

would doubtless ‘result in a stampede to the sterilizing physicians’. Owing

to their shiftlesness and infirmity, we are to suppose, the poor and uneducated would be only too eager to make a hundred or even twenty-five

dollars to be sterilized (the remuneration suggested by Mencken).

Mencken had belonged to the generation of the ‘roaring twenties’,

one of the most racist and nativist decades in the United States. The generation that fought the Second World War, it might be supposed, had

outgrown the influence of the Menckens and their kind. But by the closing years of the 1940s, a public debate arose on the need to control world

fertility rates by almost *any* means. Scarcely a year after the Burch and

Pendell book appeared, William A. Vogt, chief of the Conservation

Section of the Pan-American Union, attracted considerable public attention with his particularly acerbic Malthusian tract, *Road to Survival*, [108] a

postwar precursor of Ehrlich’s *Population Bomb*. This book was graced by

an introduction by Bernard Baruch, whose reputation as a confrere of

American presidents seemed to give the book a semi-official imprimatur.

‘It is certain that, for all practical purposes,’ Vogt wrote, ‘large areas of

the earth now occupied by backward populations will have to be written

off the credit side of the ledger’ — that is, left to die of starvation.[109]

‘Perhaps the greatest asset’ of Chile, Vogt wrote, ‘is its high death rate’,

while ‘the greatest tragedy that China could suffer, at the present time,

would be a reduction in her death rate.’ Since China ‘quite literally cannot feed more people’, Chinese ‘men and women, boys and girls, must

starve as tragic sacrifices on the twin altars of human reproduction and

uncontrolled abuse of the land’s resources.’[110]Thus, Vogt argued, it was

incumbent upon the newly established United Nations not to ‘ship food

to keep alive ten million Indians and Chinese this year, so that fifty

million may die five years hence.’[111]

As if to anticipate the pollution exhibition at the Museum of Natural

History of ‘The Most Dangerous Animal’, Vogt directed his harshest

criticisms against ‘The Dangerous Doctor’:

The modern medical profession, still framing its ethics on the dubious

statements of an ignorant physician [Hippocrates] who lived more than

two thousand years ago — ignorant, that is, in terms of the modern world

— continues to believe it has a duty to keep alive as many people as possible. In many parts of the ivorld doctors apply their intelligence to one

aspect of man’s welfare — survival — and deny their moral right to apply it

to the problem as a whole. Through medical care and improved sanitation

they are responsible for more millions living more years in increasing

misery. Their refusal to consider their responsibility in these matters does

not seem to them to compromise their intellectual integrity.[112]

Vogt’s attack on medical attempts to save lives is all the more callous

when it is placed in the context of the Second World War period. To a

world traumatized by Nazi genocide, it seemed more than ever that the

value of human life had to be esteemed and honored as a moral recompense for the sixty or seventy million people whose lives had been

brutally claimed by warring powers over a span of some five years. Much

of Europe and Asia had been reduced to a cemetery — a devastating consequence that had to be countervailed psychologically by a new respect

for human life.

What made Vogt’s book particularly repellent was its revival of the

antihumanistic mindset, advancing a moral cost-accounting principle in

dealing with matters of life and death — a principle that was to be raised

repeatedly in the postwar Malthusian literature. Survival issues, for all

practical purposes, were translated into a social ledger of debits and

credits, as though human beings were mere commodities whose value

was to be inscribed or erased by virtue of their usefulness to American

self-interest in world affairs. Starvation, famine, disease, and poverty

were seen primarily in *amoral numerical* terms, with complete disregard for

the uniqueness, creativity, and personality of the individual.

Yet nearly every specific prediction Vogt advanced in his book proved

to be wrong. The newly established Socialist [Labour] government of

Britain did not, as Vogt predicted, plunge the country into famine

between 1948 and 1978. Nor did the Japanese and Germans outbreed

the ‘carrying capacity’ of their lands and succumb to famine, as Vogt suggested. Preceding Ehrlich by some two decades, Vogt, his nose highly

sensitized to various demographic odors, argued: ‘Anything we do to

fortify the stench — to increase the population [of Europe] — is a disservice

both to Europe and ourselves.’[113]

----

Around the same time, Garrett Hardin of the University of California at

Santa Barbara entered the demographic debate with his own eugenic

recipes. In his *Biology: Its Human Implications*, published in 1949,[114] Hardin

was vexed by the lack of concern over the hereditary nature of individual IQ. To allow environmental factors an influence on human intelligence, in Hardin’s view, was to disallow the results of animal

experimentation altogether and espouse for humans a ‘doctrine of exceptionalism that is repugnant to scientists’.[115]

A strong dehumanizing thrust runs through even the seemingly

neutral observations in Hardin’s writings, resonating as they do with an

elitist bias that is distinctly unsavory. Consider, for example, the way

Hardin treats the matter of ‘charity’ in a later (1951) edition of Biology:

‘When one saves a starving man, one may thereby help him to breed

more children. This may be a good or a bad thing, depending upon the

facts.’ Precisely what the ‘facts’ are that distinguish ‘a starving man’ from

one who is affluent and well-fed — his class status, social misfortunes, and

lack of privilege — remains unstated.

Some people maintain that very poor people are, on the average, less able

and intelligent than the rich, and that their deficiencies are, in part, due to

hereditary factors. Others maintain that pauperism *[sic]* is exclusively a

matter of bad luck; or that paupers are better genetic material than millionaires . There is a need here for indisputable facts; but whatever the

facts, aid to paupers undoubtedly has genetic consequences.[116]

Amazingly, Hardin may not know what the facts are, but he seems to

know without doubt that assistance to paupers c has genetic consequences’.

To readers in the early 1950s, a statement of this kind, however equivocal, would have left a strong impression that poverty is the result of

genetic failings. As the recent publication of Charles Murray and Richard

Hernnstein’s *The Bell Curve* shows,[117] a genetic explanation is now settling

into racially oriented studies of IQ as well as material deprivation. Given

the very complex social, political, and cultural factors that interact to

produce economic disparities for different sectors of a given population,

any genetic relationship between poverty and wealth can be justly

dismissed as specious.

As might be expected, Hardin’s view of Malthus is cloyingly reverential. The parson and the professor are cheek-to-jowl on most of the basic

tenets of Malthus’s famous essay. Hardin’s reverence for the parson is not

merely declarative but poetic. Thus he declaims:

Malthus! Thou shouldst be living in this hour:

The world hath need for thee: getting and begetting,

We soil fair Nature’s bounty.[118]

Around the time these tender lines were penned, Malthusians, in fact,

were flourishing all over the place, but the literary abandon Hardin

exhibited in a collection of readings, presumably for university students,

makes his tribute to Malthus unique, at the very least.

It was not until 1968, however, that Hardin’s views reached a wider

public with his ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.[119] Published in a distinguished scientific journal, the paper became one of the most widely

reproduced works in the Malthusian environmental movement of the

late 1960s and is still regarded as a classic among antihumanist spokes-people and movements in the EngHsh-speaking world. Hardin’s basic

contention was that ‘a finite world can support only a finite population;

therefore population growth must eventually equal zero.’ In a common

pasture that several herdsmen share, ‘it is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons’. Wars,

disease, and poaching keep the number of catde down for some time, but

ultimately, ‘each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain’. Although all the

herdsmen doing this will lead to overgrazing and the destruction of the

commons, ‘each man is locked into a system that compels him to

increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited’, which must

lead to ruin for all, indeed to widespread pollution as well as resource

exhaustion. Judging from this scenario, one would suppose that Hardin

would put capitalism in the dock because of its drive for endless accumulation and expansion.

Alas, this was not the case. In Hardin’s view, it is not corporate interests and the market economy that are devouring the commons; it is

• people*, more precisely, ‘population density’, winch ‘overloads natural

chemical and biological recycling processes’. Since ‘freedom to breed

will bring ruin to a11’, so ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other

and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed,

and that very soon.’

By the summer of 1987, Hardin’s genteel poetry had mutated still further into bitterly antihumanistic verbiage, comparable to that of Vogt and

Ehrlich. In *The New York Times* in 1987, Hardin declaimed, ‘There’s

nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking, compassionate person.

God, he can cause a lot of trouble.’[120] Shallow thought and compassion, in

this case, meant the desire to aid starving children in Ethiopia. ‘Since

Ethiopia has far too many people for its resources,’ Hardin declared, ‘if

you give food and save fives and thus increase the number of people, you

increase suffering and ultimately increase the loss of life.’

Hardin was echoing a theme from the hunger politics of

Malthusianism that had been resonating for decades in antihumanism

generally: a species that has exceeded the ‘carrying capacity’ of its ecosystem should in fact be permitted to starve — partly to ‘strike a balance with

Nature’; partly, too, to weed the fit from the unfit in the struggle for survival. Sometimes it was adorned with genteel qualifications, but not so

with Hardin.

Finally, Hardin coined what he calls the ‘lifeboat ethic’. The biosphere

in Hardin’s view is akin to a lifeboat of survivors from a sinking ship —

perhaps one whose more privileged passengers have secure places in the

lifeboat. Those who are flailing in the water must be kept out if the

lifeboat is not to sink. This ‘ethic’ rests on undisguised self-interest. Far

from constituting a description of the human condition as we know it

today, it is a prescription of what the human condition should be, as

Hardin seems to see it, in the biosphere.

----

I have focused on Malthus, Vogt, Ehrlich, and Hardin because of their

wide influence: views akin to theirs are all too frequently found in anti-humanist literature. That their demographic predictions have been nearly

consistendy erroneous has not dampened the conviction of contemporary Malthusians and antihumanists that their explanations for the ills of

the modern human condition are sound Yet to allow ourselves to be

guided by triage and the lifeboat ethic is to open our thinking to the

potentially genocidal and immoral mentality that has made the twentieth

century one of the bloodiest in human history.

What are the facts about population growth? Recent demographic

data (1990—92) do not support the thesis that population growth is ‘out

of control’, although the constant revisions in population statistics and

projections make it far from clear which demographic data are credible.

A widely distributed brochure prepared by Zero Population Growth in

February 1993, for example, assures the reader with much bombast that

the present world population of 5.5,billion will ‘double in approximately

39 years’, presumably to 11 billion by 2032, assuming ‘the current

growth rate continues’. This reckless and apocalyptic assumption tends to

panic rather than to clarify.

Thereupon the brochure pits jobs against the environment and an

open immigration policy against a restrictive one, with minimal evidence

of why such an opposition is inherently necessary. Indeed, a strong argument could be made that increased population can give rise to more jobs.

Still, ZPG warns ominously: ‘*The Population Bomb* Is Still Ticking’,

indeed with each tick of a metronome (‘at 176 ticks per minute’), ‘the

world’s population grows by another person (i.e. *net* growth, not just

births)’. Returning to the fruit fly image of demographic projections, the

ZPG brochure warns that ‘if current population growth rates continue,

the world will become so densely populated that by the year 2537’ — a

truly dazzling sprint into the future — ‘there will be only one square

meter per person’.

We have heard similar ‘projections’ before — for the 1970s, 1980s, and

1990s, if not for the year 2537 (the exactitude of this date is truly marvelous!). Not only have most of them proven wrong, but the most recent

data contradict ZPG’s predictions. According to a report released in

March 1993 by the European Population Conference in Geneva, birth

rates in the most populous areas of the continent have declined so precipitously that there will be 100 million fewer Europeans by 2043 than

there are today. Italy’s population is expected to shrink from 54 million

to 40 million; in the northern part of the peninsula, despite high marriage

rates and low divorce rates, the fertility rate is already less than 1.0 per

cent. (It requires 2.1 per cent simply to reproduce a given population

without a decline.)

Greece’s fertility rate has dropped from 2.2 per cent to 1.4 per cent —

a rate that will lead to an absolute decline in the population if it continues. Such negative fertility rates are occurring in Germany, Denmark,

Norway, France, Spain, and most dramatically, in many Eastern

European countries, especially, Russia, where the decline is precipitous.

Only in Poland, Turkey, Sweden, Iceland, and Ireland ‘is the population

expected to increase naturally’, observes an article in *The European* of 1

April 1993, ‘and even among these, there are signs of moves toward

smaller families ’.

What of the ‘Third World’ — that is, Ehrlich’s UDCs, or industrially

underdeveloped countries? The soaring predictions of growth advanced

by antinatal demographers has not been substantiated. In Egypt, the average number of children for each woman has declined from 5.3 to 4.6

(1980—88); Morocco, from 5.8 to 4.0 (1979–92); Kenya, 8.3 to 6.5

(1977—89); Cameroon, 6.4 to 5.9 (1978—91); and Sudan, 6.0 to 4.8

(1978–89). In impoverished Bangladesh, the average number of children

for each woman has dropped from 6.1 to 5.5 (1975—91); Colombia, 4.7

to 2.8 (1975–90); El Salvador, 6.3 to 4.6 (1978–88); Indonesia, 3.2 to 3.0

(1987–91); and Thailand, 4.6 to 2.3 (1975–87).[121]

Unlike Western Europe, where demographic declines are usually a

product of economic and educational advances, declines in the Third

World have been correlated with ‘vigorous’ efforts to encourage family

planning and the use of contraceptive devices like condoms — precisely

the measures Ehrlich deprecated as insignificant thirty years ago in *The Population Bomb*. In what Steven W. Sinding, director for population

sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sheldon J. Segal, a staff

member at the Population Council, call a ‘contraceptive revolution’,

women in Third World countries ‘are averaging 3.9 children ... a stunning change’ from the more than six children they had a decade and

more ago. ‘The global population’s growth rate has declined faster than

many experts thought possible in the late 1960’s. This decline has come

mainly as a result of the voluntary use of public and private family planning services, not through coercive measures some advocates once

thought necessary.’[122] Ironically, India’s birth rate declined from 5.3 in

1980 to 3.9 in 1991, while Pakistan, so often favored at India’s expense

by the triage and ‘population bombers’ of the Cold War era, retains its

traditionally high birth rate owing to Islamic religious scruples.

The impact that such marked declines in Third World fertility figures

may have on the grim predictions of ZPG, the United Nations, and the

‘population bombers’ is unclear. But only a generation ago few if any

neo-Malthusians seemed to think that Western Europe was capable of

reaching zero or negative fertility rates. As it turns out, Europe vindicated the demographic principle that improved living standards and

education *did* lead to population diminution. The demographic declines

registered in the Third World have very different sources.

Certainly some Third World countries have used very ugly techniques

to ‘persuade’ families to reduce the number of children they have. China

has not been alone in imposing involuntary methods that require each

couple to have only one child. The principal victims of these methods

have been women, particularly in agrarian areas and among the poorest

classes of society. For a while, getting Third World women — and men —

to allow themselves to be sterilized was a lucrative business that provided

a fairly good bonus for so-called ‘agents’ of family planning organizations

and governmental institutions. In still other countries, such as Brazil,

where the average number of children for each woman dropped from

5.75 in 1970 to 3.2 in 1990, it was desperate poverty, neglect, and often

illness that led to this sharp decline. In Russia, economic destitution and

disease threaten to literally depopulate entire areas of the country — this, I

may add, in a land that has already suffered the terrible afflictions of

Stalinist and Nazi genocide.

But there are other signs that women in the Third World are taking

their reproductive destiny into their own hands, due in great part to their

growing desire to carve out lives of their own rather than allow men and

archaic traditions to determine their behavior and future. At least half of

all Third World women in the early 1990s are using contraception, an

immense increase from the one in ten who used contraception during

the mid-1960s. This drop, it is generally believed, is the result not simply

of improved living conditions — which are ultimately of decisive importance — but of improved education, as Kenya’s dramatic efforts to

improve literacy among both sexes suggest. To an extent almost

unknown in sub-Saharan Africa, about half of Kenyan women and

three-quarters of Kenyan men are literate. Nor is it possible to ignore the

growing urbanization of the world, particularly the Third World. City

dwellers in Thailand, for example, have only 1.6 children per couple,

compared with 2.4 in rural areas.

I am not trying to argue that urbanization on the massive scale it is

occurring today is desirable or ecologically sound. My own books on this

subject have long argued that we need new types of communities —

towns and cities — that are scaled to human and ecological dimensions.[123]

What I am emphasizing is that many dismal population projections and

images of demographic apocalypse are not only highly uncertain; they

are often very flawed. They have been used to create an antihumamstic

ambience among environmentally concerned people that is worse, in

terms of its moral effect, than the most outlandish and direst predictions

advanced by the Ehrlichs, Hardins, and ZPG acolytes.

Still another compelling issue has not been confronted in the debate

around population. Given a market-oriented society that professes to

identify economic expansion and profit with progress,

• would an appreciable reduction of population yield a corresponding decline in production, in the waste of natural resources, or in the consumerism on which the modern economy depends?*

Can we blame the ecological despoliation of North America, large parts

of Europe, and particularly the former Soviet Union on population

increases when, in fact, population in these areas has been relatively

stable over the past few decades? Indeed, let me put the issue as bluntly as

possible: If the American population were halved from what it is

today, *would American corporations halve their output, their destructive ecological impacts, and their appetite for ever-larger profits?*

This question, I submit, can be answered only in a context much

broader than extrapolations of the fertility rates of fruit flies and other

bugs. Human beings, let me reiterate, are not simply insects, rabbits, or

deer; their potentiality for conscious agency makes them unique in the

biosphere. Far more relevant to models of human demography is the

social milieu in which population issues arise, specifically, the compatibility between a growth-oriented market economy and a viable and sound

environment.

That Ehrlich waxed over the possibility that the gross national product

(GNP) could merrily continue to grow ‘for a long time *without population

growth*’ reveals, in its own way, the social mypoia that characterizes antihumanists who are prepared to reduce population by any means with

little concern about the disastrous ecological impacts of capital expansion.

‘Population bombers’ have addressed demographic issues in narrowly

statistical terms, based on a highly simplistic, indeed static, ecological

notion — the ‘carrying capacity’ of a region or country. This seemingly

fixed capacity, so far as human beings are concerned, is actually very

much a function of technological development and social relationships

that, in turn, involve such searing issues as the material security, productivity, creativity, and the status of people — women no less than men —

not of the crude biologism fostered by Ehrlich, Hardin, and their

admirers.

Ecology would be ill-served as a cause as well as a discipline (social as

well as natural) if it became a mere justification for a pseudo-naturalism

that takes litde or no account of human agency and the social factors that

profoundly determine the environment in which we live.

[75] Paul R. Ehrlich, *The Population Bomb*

(New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

[76] This opening paragraph was deleted in

later, revised editions of *The Population Bomb* ,

[77] Ehrlich, *The Population Bomb* pp. 15–16.

[78] Ibid ., pp. 66—7.

[79] Ibid., p. 83.

[80] Ibid., pp. 135–6, emphsis added.

[81] Ibid., p. 136.

[82] Ibid., p. 139.

[83] Ibid., pp. 138–9, emphases added.

[84] Ibid., p. 159.

[85] Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 160.

[86] Ibid., pp. 160–1. Happily, the Paddocks’

book has been completely forgotten. 1975

came and went with no famine that could

be attributed to population size and fertility

rates.

[87] Ehrlich, *Population Bomb*, p. 165–6.

[88] Recent declines in the world grain harvest, which the ‘population bombers’ have

been only too quick to celebrate as evidence of lasting food shortages, seem to be

due mainly to weather conditions in the

United States, which resulted in a heavy

loss of corn. Per capita availability of grains

have been fairly steady, generally hovering

around 323 kilograms. Meat and fish output has also held steady. Aquaculture, still

relatively marginal, holds enormous

promise as a source of food if serious

attempts were made to develop it.

[89] Ehrlich, *Population Bomb*, p. 177.

[90] Ibid., p. 150.

[91] Thomas Malthus, *An Essay on the Principle of Population*, originally published

in 1798. Except where indicated, all references herein are to the original 1798 version as republished in Gertrude

Himmelfarb, ed. *On Population* (New

York: modern Library, 1960).

[92] Ibid., p. 64.

[93] Ibid., p. 66.

[94] Ibid., pp. 59–60.

[95] Ibid., p. 9, emphasis added.

[96] Ibid., p. 17.

[97] Ibid., p. 38.

[98] Ibid., pp. 51–2.

[99] Ibid., p. 160.

[100] T. R. Malthus, *An Essay on the Principle of Population*, 1803 edition, ed. Patricia

James, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), p. 127.

[101] Malthus, *Population*, p. 367.

[102] Ibid., p. 506.

[103] Ibid., pp. 506–7.

[104] Arno J. Mayer, *The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War* (New

York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 3.

[105] Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell,

• Human Breeding and Survival: Population Roads to Peace and War* (New York:

Penguin Books, 1947)

[106] Ibid., p. 97.

[107] Ibid., p. 99.

[108] William F. Vogt, *The Road to Survival*

(New York: William Sloane Associates,

1948).

[109] Ibid., p. 47.

[110] Ibid., pp. 186, 224—5,

[111] Ibid., pp. 281–2.

[112] Ibid., p. 48.

[113] Ibid., p. 211.

[114] Garrett Hardin, *Biology: Its Human Implications* (1949), as cited in Allan Chase,

• The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism* (1975; Urbana,

Chicago, and London: University of

Illinois Press, 1980).

[115] Ibid., p. 372.

[116] Ibid., p. 375.

[117] Charles Murray and Richard

Hernnstein, *The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life* (New York:

Free Press, 1994).

[118] Garrett Hardin, ‘To Malthus’, in

Garrett Hardin, ed. *Population, Evolution, Birth Control: A Collage of Controversial Readings*, (San Francisco: W. H, Freeman

& Co., 1969), p. 88.

[119] Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the

Commons’, *Science*, vol. 162 (13 December

1968), pp, 1243–8.

[120] John Noble Wilford, ‘A Tough-Minded Ecologist Comes to Defense of

Malthus’, *The New York Times*, 30 June

1987.

[121] *The New York Times*, 3 January 1994;

the data are based on a report by Bryant

Roby et al. of *American Demographics* magazine.

[122] Steven W. Sinding and Sheldon J.

Segal, in ‘Birth-Rate News’, *The New York Times*, 12 December 1991.

[123] See especially my *The Limits of the City*

(New York and London: Harper and

Row, 1979; reprinted by Montreal: Black

Rose Books, 1986); *Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future* (Boston: South

End Press, 1990); and *From Urbanization to Cities* (formerly Urbanization Without Cities )

(1986; London: Cassell, 1995),

Chapter 4: From ecomysticism to angelology

Sociobiologists, microbiologists, Malthusians, and among the Gaians

James Lovelock profess to be scientists who are dealing with facts and

statistical projections. As such, their ideas and conclusions are open to

critical analysis, to acceptance or rejection based on scientific criteria. If

their views and conjectures are found to be incorrect, they may be

modified or rejected on the basis of the evidence.

Alas, such intellectual responsibility is absent from religion generally,

and particularly in the burgeoning credos of ecological mysticism, or

ecomysticism. To attempt to critically explore contemporary ecomysticism is to enter a hall of mirrors, wherein we encounter a host of multiple reflections, double-takes, confusing images, and false leads that are

mercifully absent in sociobiology, Malthusian demography, Margulis’s

microcosmology, and Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. We may think that

Wilson, Malthus, Margulis, and Lovelock are wrong in their use of data

and their extrapolations, but at least their premises and conclusions can

be checked.

By contrast, mysticism generally celebrates its very imperviousness to

rational analysis. Explicitly **anti**-rational, it makes its strongest appeal to

the authority of belief over thought. Reason, mystics usually tell us, is

cold, objective, indifferent, and, according to some of its feminist critics,

even masculine. Not so with mystical outlooks, we are told, which are

warm, subjective, caring, and feminine. Mystics enjoin us to ‘listen’ to

our intuitions and feelings, to live with a sense of mystery about the

world and our ‘interconnectedness’ with the ‘whole’ that surrounds us.

<em>Eco</em>mystics, in particular, tend to add a quasi-ecological dimension to

mysticism by imparting a preternatural dimension to the interconnected

natural world. They commonly advance a spirituality that is litde more

than outright spiritualism, adorned with expressions like ‘reverence’ and

‘adoration’. Dressed in ecological trappings, such spiritualism has the

dubious advantage of being so ‘global’, even ‘cosmic’ in its outlook that

‘nature’, conceived either as a deity or as a pantheistic, all-embracing

‘Oneness’, vastly overshadows human beings. One may literally get lost

in this ecomystical shuffle. What at first glance seems like a generous

approach to the natural world sometimes conceals a highly deprecatory

view toward one of natural evolution’s own species, notably humanity.

Which is not to say that all ecomystics are necessarily misanthropes,

unsympathetic to the human condition. In the best of cases, many of

them are essentially conservationists, imbued with a sensitive regard for

the well-being of animal and plant life, which they see as a continuation

of their concern for social justice. Hardly anyone with a sense of responsibility to the natural world can fault them for attempting to deepen public concern for the loss of wildlife, forests, and unsettled land. This

laudable impulse is eminently desirable in a time of growing ecological

devastation.

But still others advance far more than a conservationist viewpoint.

They propound a quasi-religious philosophy that is explicitly antihumanistic. Even as their outright spiritualistic beliefs immunize their intuitive

views to rational inquiry, their explicitly anticivilizatory and antitechnological views yield a far-reaching deprecation of humanity and its interventions in a presumably pristine natural world.

----

This description of ecomysticism is by no means extreme or tendentious.

The attributes I have touched upon appear very clearly in the body of

views called ‘deep ecology’, as named by the Norwegian philosopher

Arne Naess in a 1972 lecture.[124]

Naess’s brief,’ often obscurely worded lecture advances seven theses

that are actually more proclamatory than expository. He makes very little

attempt to argue out his conclusions but instead essentially announces

them under the catchy name of the ‘the deep ecology movement’ — in

contrast to ‘the shallow ecology movement’, which he views with

unmistakable disdain. Where the shallow ecology movement is simply

occupied with a ‘fight against pollution and resource depletion’ and seeks

to preserve ‘the healdi and affluence of people in the developed countries’, the deep ecology movement, according to Naess, sees all living

tilings, including humans, as ‘knots in the biospherical net or field of

intrinsic relations’.[125] His use of the word *movement* in 1972 was at best

metaphorical; there were no deep ecology and shallow ecology *movements* in the English-speaking world when the article was written. Naess’s

names refer to two of several environmental tendencies that were beginning to attract public attention. Indeed, deep ecology was virtually

unknown until the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Nor was Naess’s distinction between the anti-pollution and antiresource-depletion activities of environmentalists and something ‘deeper’

an original theory. A similar distinction had been made in a multitude of

books and articles throughout the 1960s, not only in my own writings

but in those of Barry Commoner, Leo Marx, and R.ene Dubos. Nor was

it fair on Naess’s part to confuse Western economic affluence with the

very reasonable concerns of ‘people in developed countries’ for their

health.[126] By the late 1960s, a very sizable literature — and mounting evidence — had appeared in the United States and Europe on the dangers

that food additives, heavy metals, pesticides, nuclear wastes, and exotic

chemicals presented to public well-being.

In fact, by the early 1970s, American environmentalists (or what Naess

called shallow ecologists), were very deeply concerned with the environmental impact of‘the affluent society’. They made symbolic protests like

the public burial of automobiles — naive gestures, perhaps, but expressly

demonstrative actions against ‘consumerist’ values. What they lacked was

not an explicit opposition to consumerism or affluence but a clear understanding of the profound social sources of pollution and the destruction

of wildlife habitats.

Nor did 1970s environmentalists have to be told about the need for

biological diversity and symbiosis — themes that form one of Naess’s

theses in his *Inquiry* article. Such ideas had been percolating within

anarchic New Left ecological tendencies since the mid-1960s, and a literature was emerging that stressed the need for diversity as a basic

requirement for ecological well-being. Naess’s thesis on local autonomy,

decentralization, and ‘soft technologies’ was also old hat by 1972; I had

personally advanced it in a comprehensive inventory of alternative

energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal power as early as 1962.[127]

Finally, it is worth adding that apart from his general references to

decentralization, diversity, and symbiosis, little in Naess’s remedies for

the environmental crisis distinguished his ideas from the reformist activities of shallow ecologists. Indeed, deep ecology was quite tame in its

vision of a new social dispensation. But Naess and his acolytes during the

1970s, confined to their fastnesses in the academy, were basically isolated

from the new ecological trends — technological, communitarian, and

political — that were emerging in the United States. Their writings reveal

little lived contact with the international environmental movement that

was unfolding. If deep ecology was a movement, it was overwhekningly

a cerebral one that had little interaction with groups actively trying to

expand public consciousness of environmental hazards and indeed of the

need to change society’s way of interacting with the natural world.

----

From a theoretical standpoint, in what way did Naess distinguish deep

ecology from shallow and other ecologies?

Naess’s formulation that constituted deep ecology’s most distinctive

contribution to environmentalism was ‘biospherical egalitarianism’.

What Naess meant by this expression was ‘a deep-seated respect, or even

veneration, for ways and forms of life’.[128] ‘To the ecological field-worker,

Naess added, ‘*the equal right to live and blossom* is an *intuitively* clear and

obvious value axiom.’[129] In the closing sentences of his two-paragraph

thesis, Naess went on to address the extent to which such respect and

reverence are important for the quality of human life, indeed, ‘the deep

pleasure and satisfaction we receive from close partnership with other

forms of life’, as well as the ‘alienation’ we feel from each other in the

absence of such a ‘partnership’.

What is striking about these passages is precisely the intuitive basis on

which they rest and the extent to which Naess’s ‘biospherical egalitarianism’ — or what was later called ‘biocentrism’ by his acolytes — is oriented

toward our own human, perhaps even anthropocentric ‘pleasure and satisfaction’ in living in ‘close partnership with otiier forms of life’. In this

respect, Naess’s rather anthropocentric concern for human pleasure and

satisfaction is exceptional among the many people he and his followers

were to win over to deep ecology and their wildlife and conservationist

concerns.

In time, Naess elaborated his position of ‘biospherical egalitarianism’

into a self-proclaimed bio centric *ethic* that professed to intuitively endow

every life form with an unquestionable ‘intrinsic worth or intrinsic

value’. In a ‘biospherically egalitarian world’, according to this ethic,

hu man beings are intrinsically of no greater (or lesser) value, than any

life-form, be it a wolf, bear, eagle, or fruit fly. Like all other animals,

Naess allowed in his later writings, human beings have a ‘right’ to kill

other life-forms to meet their ‘vital needs’ — which raises the very

arguable question of what constitutes human vital needs. To this question

Naess and his acolytes were essentially to respond by asking us to reduce

our needs and ‘five simply’ — which again raises the question of what one

means by simply. In Naess’s *Inquiry* paper, all of these arguable issues

were resolved with a catchy slogan: ‘Live and let five’ — apparently with

the exception of predation to acquire food and meet other vaguely stated,

needs.

In fact, many deep ecology acolytes used this slogan to justify — in

theory, at least — a minimalist, indeed primitivist vision of human interaction with the natural world. Which is not to say that all deep ecology

theorists necessarily gave up their computers, sophisticated binoculars,

and other high-tech accoutrements of the ‘affluent’ society in favor of a

‘primitive’ lifestyle. But interference with the ways of ‘nature’ was

viewed askance. Indeed, the worid view of primitive or primal peoples —

who, it was assumed, lived in a joyously simple partnership with and love

for the virginal world around them — became a model for contemporary

ecological visions of behavior and reality.

Naess, for his part, enjoined deep ecologists to ‘fight against economic

and cultural, as much as military, invasion and domination, and to

oppose ‘the annihilation of seals and whales as much as to that of human

tribes or cultures’.[130] Such injunctions, too, were becoming the conventional wisdom of environmental groups in the 1970s throughout much

of the Western world, not only in the United States but in Britain and

Germany, where Naess’s *Inquiry* paper was virtually unknown. Indeed, so

embedded were antimilitarist and conservationist views in the conventional wisdom of environmentalists by the 1960s and 1970s that, when

wedded to the New Left activism of those decades, they acquired a

radical political and social form.

There is precious litde in Naess’s *Inquiry* paper that was not old hat at

the time he wrote it. Even Naess’s bio centrism, seemingly the most original feature of the paper, had become the stock in trade of conservationists influenced by the writings of John Muir and his conscious or

unconscious devotees. Yet despite its brevity, Naess’s paper unavoidably

— and perhaps deliberately — raised but left unanswered a number of

problems that still haunt the deep ecology movement to this very day.

----

Why did such a patently simplistic and singularly unoriginal body of

views as deep ecology take root in the first place — initially in the United

States and later in Europe?

To a great extent, it was the very simplicity — indeed, the simple-minded message — of Naess’s ecological philosophy that made it attractive. Deep ecology makes no great intellectual demands upon its

followers. Its intuitions and a priori concepts, usually presented as simple,

homilies and metaphors, make it accessible to anyone who vaguely ‘loves

nature’. More a mood than a body of ideas, deep ecology derives its message from the same intuitive materials that have long been exploited by

assorted gurus, shamans, priests, fakirs, and dubious psychotherapists.

Deep ecology, in effect, makes its appeal to the heart rather than to the

head, and little intellectual effort is required to absorb its maudlin message of how to live the ‘simple life’ and behave ‘ecologically’.

But what accounts for its rise to popularity, rather than the similar,

equally intuitive ecological tendencies that surfaced almost simultaneously with it? One of Naess’s more staid academic admirers, Warwick

Fox, explains its influence as the result of a remarkably successful public

relations job. As Fox observes:

the ecophilosophy community’s acceptance of the shallow/deep ecology distinction is due far more to the powerful advocacy that the distinction

received from a couple of uniters from 1979—80 on, rather than to any

kind of collective decision on the part of the ecophilosophy community. In

other words, as with so many ideas, the shallow/deep ecology distinction

was effectively thrust upon its relevant intellectual community rather than

elected to office’.[131]

The ‘couple of writers’ to whom Fox alludes are two Californian academics, George Sessions and Bill Devall, who zealously promoted deep

ecology among a newly emerging environmental professoriat at academic

conferences and particularly through Sessions’ newsletter *Ecophilosophy* in

the mid-1970s. In Fox’s view, if a given ‘typology’ (Naess’s, in this case)

finds ‘a couple of persuasive, committed, industrious, and eloquent supporters where the other typologies did not... you have the beginnings of

an identifiable intellectual movement/grouping/school.’[132]

Indeed, so important were Devall and Sessions to the promotion of

deep ecology that Fox, in his highly sympathetic account of the movement, observes that the two men

are generally, and rightly, acknowledged by ecophilosophers, first, as being

almost wholly responsible for having introduced Naess’s distinction

[between deep and shallow ecology] to the ecophilosophical community (in

about 1979–80); second, as being very largely responsible, along with

Naess, for having influenced the ecophilosophical community in general to

the point where reference to Naess’s typology became accepted as standard

within the space of a few years (by around 1983—84); and, third, as

being very largely responsible — again, along with Naess — for having

influenced a number of individual ecophilosophers to the point where these

individuals now identify themselves and/or are identified by other

ecophilosophers as deep ecologists — or, at least, as close relatives.[133]

In fact, Devall’s and Sessions’ promotion of deep ecology occurred overwhelmingly within the framework of a collegiate-professorial world during the late 1970s, in backwoods campuses like Sierra, Pitzer, and

Humboldt Colleges. Sessions’ general appeal may have been more the

result of his interest in Spinoza and Whitehead than in Naess, whose

work he does not seem to have known until 1973. Naess, in turn, apparently attracted Sessions because of their shared interest in Spinoza. Devall

appears to have followed Sessions more as a wilderness conservationist

than as an ecological theorist.

In any case, in journals, bulletins, conferences, and seminars, academics

generally deal with other academics. Like any professional coterie, they

cite one another’s works and form clubby enclaves, quite apart from the

movements — social or environmental — that swirl around their campus

world. Not surprisingly, deep ecology in the late 1970s and early 1980s

was mainly a campus-oriented phenomenon. Its following seems to have

been composed mainly of teachers and the students they influenced, many

of them were locked into their own disciplines with only glancing contact

with the actual environmental movements around them.

But of the greatest importance to deep ecology’s rise — far greater than

Sessions’ and Devall’s efforts in promoting it — was the ideological

climate that followed the decline of the New Left, a climate that favored

intuitive and mystical notions. These notions had already existed in the

1960s counterculture, which had mixed sporadic political activism with

an abiding fascination for Asian mysticism. With the demise of the New

Left, the counterculture’s mysticism literally exploded in California in

the £ New Age’. As the tidal wave of mysticism, with all its narcissistic byproducts, rolled across the Sunbelt, it created a cultural region that can be

justifiably called the Mystical Zone of the United States.

Judging from the writings of Devall and Sessions, their academic cloister did not render them immune to the mystical viruses that were

exploding in the collegiate and countercultural worlds of their region.

Drenched in Taoist, Buddhist, pagan, magical, and genetically mystical

notions, the California air has proverbially produced eclectic versions of

the occult, indeed, of the cultic, to an extent that gives it few equals elsewhere in the Western world.

The New Left of the radical 1960s had more or less steadied the various spiritualisms that flourished in that culture area by freighting them

with political ballast. Mere intuition alone did not suffice to fight institutionalized racism in the South or to protest the repression of flee speech

in northern universities, let alone to maintain a viable political organization on campus. At the national level, overheated notions of imminent

social revolution created a degree of political zealotry that overshadowed

the more or less zany religious cults that flourished in California’s

bohemias.

Once the secular constraints that the New Left imposed on

California’s counterculture were removed, however, the mindless spiritualism of the Mystical Zone reclaimed its traditional territory. Worse

still, it rebounded militandy against the high politicization of the decade

from which it had been expelled; pardy as an anodyne for the anomie,

the meaninglessness and deadening mediocrity that marked American life

in the 1970s and 1980s; partly too as a highly profitable source of income

for the gurus who supplanted New Left organizations. Ideas — and the

need to think them out or seriously deal with them, which the New Left

had at least professed to demand in its debates and factional conflicts —

were increasingly replaced by the fantasy world that the Mystical Zone

had nourished over previous generations. Vaporous ‘feelings’ displaced

the ‘mindbending’ challenges of rationality, while the delights of

mythopoesis and mystery displaced the cold demands of secularity and

intellectual clarity.

Quite bluntly, the late 1970s were an ideal time for deep ecology to

take root in California, indeed in the Mystical Zone generally. It was an

ideal slogan for reprocessing, in typical Sunbelt fashion, into a

• Weltanschauung* superficial enough for anyone to adopt and spiritually

uplifting enough to offer a restful soporific for all troubled souls. Indeed,

deep ecology was an excellent analgesic for the intellectual headaches of

a culture that felt more at home with Disneyland and Hollywood than

with political radicalism.

Nor was the Mystical Zone, which pioneered deep ecology, alone in

seeking relief from the demanding political and intellectual tribulations of

Western civilization. The antihumanism, mysticism, and misanthropy

that are now sedimented into present-day culture have long roots in the

social decay of our time. Deep ecology is a symptom of that decay even

more than it is one of its causes.

----

What eventually catapulted deep ecology from the campus into the

broader public realm was a conservationist direct action movement —

• Earth First!* — that gave Naess’s notion of ‘biospherical egalitarianism’ or

‘biocentrism’ headline quality.

Inspired by Edward Abbey, whose books such as *Desert Solitaire* had

gained a wide audience of nature-oriented readers, a number of fairly

young wilderness enthusiasts in the American southwest embarked on a

direct-action ‘monkeywrenching’ campaign to preserve and, if possible,

enlarge as much of ‘primordial’ America as they could. The concept of

monkeywrenching came from Abbey’s popular novel, *The Monkey Wrench Gang* (1975), hi which a conservationist band of saboteurs

wander through American deserts, demolishing billboards and earth-moving equipment, and ultimately plan an ill-starred attempt to blow up

the Glen Canyon Dam.

• Earth First!* was ostensibly founded by five men in April 1980 — David

Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron Kezar —

of whom four came from cons_ervationist organizations and one, Roselle,

from a New Left-antiwar activist background. Judging from Foreman’s

• Confessions of an Eco-Warrior*, the name *Earth First!* was chosen to express

the primacy of the planet above such ‘humanistic’ notions as ‘People

First’.[134] Foreman, at one time a Barry Goldwater admirer and political

conservative, is credited with inventing its name and Roselle is credited

with designing its logo — a clenched fist in a circle. If Foreman’s title

denoted his misanthropic attitude toward the human species, Roselle’s

logo reflected the influence of the leftist tradition from which he ostensibly derived some of his social views; he later broke with Foreman

presumably because of his misanthropy.

Organizationally, *Earth First!* never became more than a very loosely

formed tendency within the environmental movement. In fact, most of

its activities in the United States were essentially theatrical. More rhetorical than real, with its slogans favoring ‘monkeywrenching’ and ‘ecotage’,

the group made headlines because of its threats to sabotage lumbering

operations. Its colorful guerrilla theater antics at lumbering sites, in

which supporters dressed in animal costumes and carried large, decorative banners, were mediagenic photo-opportunities that made the front

pages of newspapers.

• Earth First!* also became an excellent and much-needed target for

industry’s cries against ‘environmental extremists’, which tended to give

a ‘terrorist’ patina to the entire environmental movement. In fact, the

• Earth First!* tactics of sitting before bulldozers, occupying tree branches,

and blockading small tracts of forest land were largely symbolic: the

movement was generally more of a media creation than a serious challenge to polluters, lumbermen, and developers. To be sure, *Earth First!*,

at least while Foreman led it, added a sharper edge to the demands of

conventional environmental organizations and even embarrassed them,

but its achievements, in fact, were modest, and after much infighting, the

extent to which *Earth First!* can still be said to be a stable or definable

movement is arguable.

In its ‘heroic’ days, however, *Earth First!* members and supporters

shared certain views that were expressly antihumanistic. Although its

members-supporters (the distinction is difficult to make) had diverse

environmental agendas, its most articulate and best-known leaders were

avowed Malthusians and even crude misanthropes. Their New Left tactics and logo notwithstanding, they advanced no serious criticism of the

social *status quo*. As a number of their most articulate spokesmen were to

emphasize, *Earth First!* regarded social issues as ‘humanistic’ — they concerned the much-despised human species, not the furry or feathery nonhuman ones. By the early 1980s — whatever the clenched fist logo that

appeared on its periodical, *Earth First!*, may have originally meant — the

periodical’s editors and principal writers had adopted deep ecology as

their theoretical framework, and the periodical opened its pages to deep

ecology’s leading proponents in the United States — Bill Devall and

George Sessions.

In 1980 and 1981, in fact, it would have been hard to decide whether

deep ecology was a movement or an academic ripple. Inasmuch as

Naess’s *Inquiry* article was unknown beyond a few campuses even in

California, deep ecology’s influence seemed to depend upon the number

of people who read Sessions’ newsletter, Ecophilosophy or were privy to

hearing Devall’s papers at academic conferences. Oddly enough, even

Naess, who did not meet Sessions until 1978, used the phrase *deep ecology*

rather sparingly. It was Devall who, according to Warwick Fox, ‘elaborated the basic ideas of deep ecology at greater length [than Naess]

• under the name of deep ecology* and surveyed and classified much of the existing

literature in terms of its points of contact with these ideas.’[135]

In a second series of newsletters, Sessions — even more than Naess —

seems to have established the ‘typology’ that currently passes under the

name of deep ecology. Despite his penchant for a Spinozistic pantheism

and Asian quietism, Naess retains strong roots in his background as a

logical positivist, winch is to say that he often takes recourse to precise

mathematical and logical definitions, so akin to the analytical formalism

that constituted his earlier philosophical training. By contrast, Sessions is

so patently mystical that Ins writings contrast markedly with those of

Naess. As Fox observes:

Under deep ecology [Sessions] classified Christian Franciscans (as opposed

to Benedictine resource stewardship); the philosophy of Spinoza; the later

philosophy of Martin Heidegger; the pantheistic ecophilosophy of

Robinson fejfers; Aldo Leopold’s ecosystem-oriented ethics; John

Rodman’s ecological resistance/ecological sensibility; Eastern process philosophy (Taoism and Buddhism); Western process philosophy

(Heraclitus, Whitehead, and, for Sessions, Spinoza as well); the ecological wisdom of various tribal cultures.[136]

In short, this ‘typology’ is an eclectic hodgepodge. Spinoza allows for

no comparison with Heidegger, and that Taoism and Buddhism can be

‘ regarded as ‘process philosophies’ is, to put it mildly, arguable. But what

most of — although by no means all! — these philosophies have in common is a strong mystical undertow more characteristic of Californian

notions of ‘wisdom’ than Norwegian notions of analytical sobriety.

Moreover, apart from Spinoza, who by no stretch of the imagination can

be regarded as ‘biocentric’ (indeed, quite the contrary is true) and possibly one or two others, many of the proto-deep ecology thinkers Fox fists

are essentially anti-rationalists.

Thus, precisely what constituted a wide-ranging or coherent theory of

deep ecology was anything but clear — a problem that beleaguers it to this

day. The deep ecology literature was confined for years mainly to academic

papers and Sessions’ newsletters. By the eady 1980s, in fact, no single volume had yet appeared in English that could be called a definitive deep

ecology book. To the extent that deep ecology has since become an ‘established’ ecophilosophy, it was primarily among some two hundred or so

professors and/or their students whom Sessions and Devall could reach

with their newsletter and conference papers. Despite growing support

today, many academic environmentalists viewed deep ecology with considerable skepticism or rejected it outright. For the rest of the Mystical

Zone, deep ecology was more of a rumor that denoted deep thinking than

a movement or coherent outlook.

Not surprisingly, the phrase *deep ecology* first appeared as the tide of a

book which was in an anthology edited by Michael Tobias in 1984.[137]

Tobias seems to have used it as a catchall phrase to denote any insight that

seemed more searching than the popular environmentalist literature of

the day. Not until 1985 did Devall and Sessions write and edit a collage

entitled *Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered*, making a definitive

statement of deep ecology available to the English-reading public.[138] The

book was indeed definitive, for it reflected the eclectic typology of deep

ecology that Sessions had formulated more than any book on the subject

since.

----

By their own admission, the central theses of Devall’s and Sessions’ Deep

Ecology are ‘two *ultimate norms* or intuitions which axe not themselves

derivable from other norms or intuitions ... *self-realization* and

• biocentric equality*.’[139]

Like Naess before them, Devall and Sessions use the terminology of

‘intuitions’, not reasoned reflection. Intuitions constitute our ‘sense’ or

feelings about something. As a momentary personal apprehension, they

are notoriously unreliable; indeed, they constitute precarious grounds

upon which to base any outlook, much less the veritable *Weltanschauung*

that deep ecology professes to offer. It is my intuition, for example, that

Devall’s and Sessions’ intuitions are outrageously wrong — which says

nothing whatever about the validity, soundness, or insightfulness of

either my or their conflicting intuitions. Lacking divine guidance, I fail

to see how this conflict can be resolved except by the intuitions of our

readers.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Devall and Sessions tell us that

their two ultimate norms ‘cannot be validated, of course, by the methodology of modern science based on its usual [!] mechanistic assumptions

and its very narrow [!] definition of data.’[140] This loaded and highly pejorative statement encloses deep ecology’s norms’ in a closet beyond the

reach of critical analysis, immunizing deep ecology to the ‘methodology’

of science and the challenge of reasoned argument. By casting aside

reason, deep ecologists may dismiss — presumably intuitively — any

method or data that are critical of their views.

In the process, deep ecology appeals to an increasingly popular but

erroneous image of scientific method as ‘mechanistic’ and confines its

terrain of inquiry to a ‘very narrow definition of data’. This antiscientism

may go over well in the scented ashrams of the Mystical Zone, but ‘the

methodology of science’ merely requires experiential proof that various

ideas are *real*, not divinations spun out by mystical gurus with or without

Ph.D.s. In other words, the methodology of science constitutes a minimal objective criterion by which we may judge ideas on the basis of *reality* and not on the basis of the self-proclaimed insights of spooks. This is

no trivial problem in a world increasingly beset by supernatural, manipulative, and, dangerously authoritarian intuitions that range from experiences with angels to fascistic fears of racial ‘pollution’.

Nor is the methodology of science always mechanistic. Apart from

what is commonly called ‘scientific method’, a phrase that I believe

requires restatement, the specific *techniques* associated with scientific

analysis often vary from science to science. Hence deep ecology plays

upon a popular prejudice that ‘the methodology of science’ is confined

to ‘a very narrow definition of data’. Cosmology today is such a sweeping, extravagantly creative, and even dialectical field of study that to call

its methodology narrow is, to put it gently, evidence of gross ignorance.

Its ever-changing and expanding vision of the origins, nature, and future

of the universe defies some of the most imaginative plots dreamed of in

science fiction.

Chemistry, in turn, with its ‘dissipative structures’, is the scientific discipline *par excellence* for deriving systems theories, in which some of the

most mystical of the Mystical Zone’s theorists dabble. Biology, for its

part, abounds with a wealth of speculations and experiments that make

the insights of deep ecology’s founders seem singularly unimaginative.

Paleoanthropology, ethology, and geology all have thrown more light on

the marvels of the natural and human worlds in single papers than can be

found in all the tomes on spiritualism and deep ecology in New Age

bookstores.

What Devall and Sessions seem to be telling us, in effect, is that *they*

have an ideology, called deep ecology, that rests on *their* intuitions, and

diat to challenge *them* is to be captive to the narrow and mechanistic

method *they* impute to the sciences. Worse still, their intuitions cannot

be judged by rational criteria, which presumably originate in a narrow

and mechanistic methodology. And herein lies the rub: we cannot,

by Devall’s and Sessions’ criteria, enter into a rational or scientific

exploration of their intuitions because to do so would challenge the

authority of their personal faith.

Thus, for Devall and Sessions to claim that their intuited norms are

‘arrived at by the deep *questioning* process and reveal the importance of

moving to the philosophical and religious level of *wisdom*’ is rhetorical.[141]

No ‘deep *questioning* process’ can rest exclusively on intuition, least of all

that of Arne Naess, to which they are referring here. If Devall’s and

Sessions’ ‘deep questioning’ cannot be supported by experiential reality,

other than what *they* regard as valid experience, it simply cannot be challenged. One cannot attain a ‘philosophical and religious wisdom’ without acknowledging the *premises* of objective knowledge (which include

science) and the need for logical consistency, both of which stand at odds

with the privileged claims of intuition. A questioning process that is insulated from rationality and experience can hardly be said to involve very

much questioning at all. Nor is one intuition true and its contrary false if

both rest *merely* on a personal belief

This is no trivial matter. It took thousands of years for humanity to

begin to shake off the accumulated ‘intuitions’ of shamans, priests, chiefs,

monarchs, warriors, patriarchs, ruling classes, dictators, and the like — all

of whom claimed immense privileges for themselves and inflicted terrible

horrors on their inferiors on the basis of *their* ‘intuited wisdom’. Once we

remove the imperatives of rational inquiry that might challenge their

behavior and the scientific criteria of truth that might challenge their

mystical claims to insight, social elites are free to use all their wiles to subjugate, exploit, and kill enormous numbers of people on the basis of

unsupported belief systems, irrational conventions, and purely subjective

views of society and the world.

A multitude of intuitions and irrational belief systems are returning to

the foreground in the closing years of this century. From mystical divinations to ethnic hatreds, these belief systems have grave implications for

the future of modern society and the way people view reality. That deep

ecology has contributed to this regressive trend with hortatory claims

that are strictly subjective, even personalistic, and often reactionary

cannot be ignored — and must be seriously probed.

----

Of the two ‘ultimate norms’ Devall and Sessions intuit, the first, ‘self-realization’ is the more wayward.

In the counterculture of recent years, few terms have been tossed

around more frequently than this eminently Western philosophical, religious, and psychological expression. If self-realization means anything, it

certainly implies the *free* development of a person’s distinctive and individual potentialities. This Euro-American image of selfhood and individuation has been centuries in the making. Devall and Sessions dismissively

caricature it as ‘the modern Western *self* which is defined as an isolated

ego striving primarily for hedonistic gratification or for a narrow sense of

individual salvation in this life or the next.’[142]

Western culture has nurtured a sense of individuality that is vastly *more*

than isolated, hedonistic, and materially egoistic. Indeed, self-realization

as a fulfillment of individual intellectual and spiritual potentialities was a

major goal, if not *the* major goal, of thinkers such as Socrates, Plato,

Aristotle, Aquinas, the Renaissance thinkers, Luther, the French

Enlighteners, Hegel, Marx, and Freud, among many others, whose

names are conspicuously absent from Devall’s and Sessions’ book.

The reason these names do not appear in their book is obvious. By

‘self-realization’, Devall and Sessions leave little doubt that they mean a

certain type of *religious* notion of the self that can more properly be called

• self-effacement*. We have to shed, as they put it, the ‘modern Western *self*’

and return to the traditional Asian notion of the individual, who *disappears* in a “‘self-in-Self” where “Self” stands for organic wholeness’.

More precisely, we have to return to a self for whom ‘the phrase [sic!]

“one” includes not only me, an individual human,’ Devall and Sessions

emphasize, ‘but all humans, whales, grizzly bears, whole rain forest

ecosystems, mountains and rivers, the tiniest microbes in the soil, and so

on.’[143] Subsumed in the unending natural cycles of ahistorical cosmologies, this self (or more precisely, the lack thereof) is divested of control

over its destiny. Historically, such a self was long subjugated to despotic

monarchs and lords — all of whom have spoken in the name of a ‘natural

order’, ‘natural forces’, and a divine or ‘cosmic’ power, ideologies that

drained peasants, craftspeople, and slaves of the will to transform their

destinies, not to speak of the spirit of revolt.

This self-**abnegating** notion of individuality resonates with precisely the

animal deities and spirits that humanity had to eventually exorcise in

order to render social life secular and divest itself of imperial rulers who

claim ‘naturally’ endowed powers for themselves. A ‘self-in-Self’ that

‘re aliz es’ itself as part of an unthinking ‘community’ of‘whole rain forest

ecosystems, mountains and rivers, the tiniest microbes in the soil, and so

on’ has not *merged* its identity with a larger cosmic whole; it has *lost* its

identity, its distinctively *human* qualities as well as individual contours.

Moreover, imputing a notion of the self to non-human beings and

even inorganic entities presupposes a very anthropomorphic treatment

of these phenomena, winch cannot constitute a self in any meaningful

sense of the term. The ‘and so on’ invites us, once we have imparted

selfhood to mountains and rivers, to think of the barren moon, the stars,

interstellar space, and galaxies — in terms of a degree of ‘self-in-Self’,

perhaps in ‘harmony’ and ‘interconnected’ with the entire cosmos!

----

This rhetorical recycling of Taoism and Buddhism, and their Western

filiations, into a vulgar Californian spiritualism leads us, almost unerringly, to the other ‘ultimate norm’ on which deep ecology rests: ‘biocentric equality’. Simply put:

The *intuition* of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have

an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual form

of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization. This

basic *intuition* is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere as parts

of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.[144]

This stunning doctrine literally defines deep ecology. ‘Deep’ it is in every

sense — not only in the intuitions that the authors and their acolytes hold,

but in the many presuppositions they make.

If the self must merge — or *dissolve*, as I claim — according to deep

ecologists, into rain forests, ecosystems, mountains, rivers ‘and so on’,

these phenomena must share in the intellectuality, imagination, foresight,

communicative abilities, and empathy that human beings possess, that is,

if ‘bio centric equality’ is to have any meaning.

On the other hand, we may decide to agree with Robyn Eckersley, a

champion of bio centrism, that no such abilities are necessary, that the

‘navigational skills of birds’ are themselves on a par with the wide-ranging intelligence of people.

Is there not something self-serving and arrogant in the (unverifable) claim

that first nature is striving to achieve something that has presently reached

its most developed form in us — second nature? A more impartial, biocentric approach would be simply to acknowledge that our special capabilities

(e.g. a highly developed consciousness, language and tool-making capability) are simply one form of excellence alongside the myriad others (e.g. the

navigational skills of birds, the sonar capability and playfulness of dolphins, and the intense sociality of ants) rather than the form of excellence

thrown up by evolution.[145]

Whether birds have navigation *skills* — which assumes conscious agency

in negotiating their migratory flights over vast distance with clear geographical goals — or primarily tropistic reactions to changes in daylight

and possibly the earth’s magnetic fields of force, need not occupy us here.

What counts is that Eckersley’s state of mind, like that of deep ecologists

generally, essentially debases the intellectual powers of people who, over

previous centuries, consciously mapped the globe, gave it mathematical

coordinates, and invented magnetic compasses, chronometers, radar, and

other tools for navigation. They did so with an intellectuality, flexibility,

and with techniques that no bird can emulate — that is, with amazing

skillfulness, since skill involves more than physical reactions to natural

forces and stimuli.

When Eckersley places the largely tropistic reactions of birds on a par

with human thought, she diminishes the human mind and its extraordinary abilities. One might as well say that plants have skills that are on a

par with human intellectuality because plants can engage in photosynthesis, a complex series of biochemical reactions to sunlight. Are such reactions really commensurate with the ability of physicists to understand

how solar fusion occurs and of biochemists to understand how photosynthesis occurs? If so, then corals ‘invented’ techniques for producing

islands and plants ‘invented’ techniques for reaching to the sun in heavily

forested areas. In short, placing human intellectual foresight, logical

processes, and innovations on a pax with tropistic reactions to external

stimuli is to create a stupendous intellectual muddle, not to evoke the

‘deep’ insights that deep ecologists claim to bring to our understanding of

humanity’s interaction with the natural world.

Eckersley’s crude level of argumentation is no accident; Devall and

Sessions prepare us for it by approvingly citing Warwick Fox to the effect

that we can make ‘no firm ontological divide in the field of existence:

That there is no bifurcation in reality between the human and the nonhuman realms ... to the extent that we perceive boundaries, we fall short

of deep ecological consciousness.’[146]

No one has quite told whales, I assume, about this new evolutionary

dispensation. Still less are grizzly bears, wolves, entire rainforest ecosystems, mountains, rivers, ‘and so on’ aware of their community with

human beings. Indeed, in this vast panoply of life-forms, ecosystems,

mineral matter, and ‘so on’, no creature seems to be capable of *knowing* —

irrespective of how they communicate with members of their own kind

— about the existence or absence of this ‘firm ontological divide’ *except*

• human beings*. If, as Devall and Sessions seem to believe, there is ‘no firm

ontological divide’ between the human and non-human realms, it is

unknown to every species in the biosphere, let alone entities in the

abiotic world — except our own.

In fact, the ontological divide between the non-human and the human

is *very* real. Human beings, to be sure, are primates, mammals, and vertebrates. They cannot, as yet, get out of their animal skins. As products of

organic evolution, they are subject to the natural vicissitudes that bring

enjoyment, pain, and death to complex life-forms generally. But it is a

crucial fact that they alone *know* — indeed, *can* know — that there is a

phenomenon called evolution; they *alone* know that death is a reality;

they *alone* can even formulate such notions as self-realization, biocentric

equality, and a ‘self-in-Self’; they *alone* can generalize about their existence — past, present, and future — and produce complex technologies,

create cities, communicate in a complex syllabic form, ‘and so on 3 ! To

call these stupendous attributes and achievements mere differences in

degree between human beings and non-human life-forms — and to

equate human consciousness with the navigational skills of migratory

birds — is so preposterously naive that one might expect such absurdities

from children, not professors.

What apparently worries deep ecologists about this ‘divide’, with all its

bifurcations and boundaries, is not so much that its existence is obvious

as that it is inconvenient. Beclouding their simplistic monism, we may

suppose, is a fear of the dualism of Rene Descartes, which they feel

obliged to dispel. Ironically, they seem incapable of coping with this

dualism without taking recourse to a Bambi-style anthropomorphism

that effectively transforms *all* non-human beings into precisely what they

profess to abhor — namely, anthropomorphisms. If they cannot make

human beings into non-human animals, they make non-human animals

into human beings. Accordingly, animals are said to have ‘skills’ in much

the same sense that human beings do. The earth has its own ‘wisdom 3 ,

wilderness is equated with ‘freedom 3 , and all life-forms exhibit ‘moral 3

qualities that are entirely the product of human intellectual, emotional,

and social development.

Put bluntly: if human beings are ‘equal in intrinsic worth 3 to nonhuman beings, then boundaries between human and non-human are

erased, and either human beings are merely one of a variety of animals, or

else non-human beings are human.

But then, why should they not be in the Disneyland world of deep

ecology?

----

Having entangled the reader with extravagant claims for a set of unsupported personal beliefs, Devall and Sessions proceed in the name of an

exclusively human ‘active deep questioning and meditative process’ to

reduce readers to the status of ‘ “plain citizens” of the biotic community,

not lord or master over all other species.’[147]

Devall and Sessions use words with multiple meanings to give the

most alienating interpretation to people. Whatever a democracy could

possibly mean in the animal world, human beings are not mere ‘plain

citizens 3 in a biospheric democracy. They are immensely superior to any

other animal species, although deep ecologists equate *superiority* with

being the ‘lord and master of all other species’, hence an authoritarian

concept. But *superior* may mean not only higher in rank, status, and

authority but ‘of great value, excellence; extraordinary’, if my dictionary

is correct. That superiority can simply mean ‘having more *knowledge*, *foresight*, and *wisdom*’ — attributes we might expect to find in a teacher or

even a Zen master — seems to disappear from the highly selective deep

ecological lexicon.

Deep ecology’s contradictory presuppositions, intuitions, anthropomorphisms, and naive assertions leave us spinning like tops. We are

enjoined to engage in ‘deep questioning’ in order to decide on *intuitive*

grounds that we are *intrinsically* no different in ‘worth’ or ‘value’ from

any ‘entity’ in the ‘ecosphere’. Yet the deep questioning so prized by

Devall, Sessions, Naess, et ah , is something that *no other life-form can do* —

besides us. In the vastness of the ecosphere, nothing apart from human

beings is capable of even voicing the notion of‘biocentric egalitarianism’,

much less *understanding* any notion of‘rights’, ‘intrinsic worth’, or ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’. It is the ultimate in anthropomorphism to

impute a moral sense to animals that lack the conceptual material of

abstract thought provided by language and the rich generalizations we

form in our minds from our vast repertoire of words.

Stricdy speaking, if we were nothing but ‘plain citizens’ in the ecosphere, we should be as furiously *anthropo-centric* in our behavior, just as a

bear is *Urso-centric* or a wolf *Cano-centric*. That is to say, as plain citizens of

the ecosphere — and nothing more — we should, like every other animal,

be occupied *exclusively* with our own survival, comfort, and safety. As

Richard Watson has so astutely noted: ‘[i]f we are to treat man as part of

nature on egalitarian terms with other species, then man’s behavior must

be treated as morally neutral true’ — that is, as amoral. In which case,

Watson continues, ‘we should not drink diere is something morally or

ecosophically wrong with the human species dispossessing and causing

the extinction of other species.’[148]

Yet deep ecologists ask us precisely in the name of a biospheric ‘citizenship’ not to be occupied exclusively with our survival. Put simply:

deep ecologists ask us to be plain citizens and at the same time expect —

even oblige — us to think and behave as very uncommon, indeed quite

extraordinary onesl In a perceptive article, critic Harold Fromm states

this contradiction with remarkable pithiness:

The ‘intrinsic worth’ that biocentrists connect with animals, plants, and

minerals is projected by the desiring human psyche in the same way that

‘the will of God’ is projected by human vanity upon a silent universe that

never says anything.... The ‘biocentric’ notion of ‘intrinsic worth’ is even

more narcissistically ‘ anthropocentric’ than ordinary self-interest because it

hopes to achieve its ends by denying that oneself is the puppeteer—ventriloquist behind the world one perceives as valuable.[149]

As biocentrists, deep ecologists ask us take the role of the invisible puppeteer — pulling the strings and ignoring the fact that we are pulling

them.

----

If human beings are to regard themselves merely as plain citizens or

equals to all other species in the biosphere, they must be invisible puppeteers: they must be guided by ethical canons that exist nowhere in the

animal world and, at the same time, deny that they differ in their rights

and intrinsic worth from the amoral world of nature, in short, bereft of

ethics. Indeed, deep ecologists urge us to do this because we will aesthetically, materially, and spiritually ‘benefit’ from holding such an attitude

toward the natural world — a crassly anthropocentric argument. That

only human beings in the entire biosphere can confer ‘rights’ upon nonhuman beings precisely because as humans they are so radically different

from other life-forms seems to elude most deep ecologists.

Where deep ecologists try to resolve this conundrum, their solutions

are sophistic at best and circular at worst. ‘Employing ethics and values,

which are cultural objects,’ observes Christopher Manes, one of the most

misanthropic of the deep ecologists ‘may appear to contradict the content

of bio centrism, and it is undoubtedly incongruous to talk about the rights

of nature when the concept of legal rights is traditionally associated with

the triumph of culture over nature, or, in Kantian terms, duty over

instinct.’[150] Despite the pejorative characterization of rights as the ‘*triumph*

of culture over nature’ , ‘legal rights’ are not necessarily or often commonly equatable with ‘ethics’ and ‘values’ , which may often stand in fiat

opposition to a culture’s laws. In the absence of human beings, moreover, Nature cannot of itself generate any system of rights — which still

leaves us in a puzzle. To resolve it, Manes invokes Naess’s point that ‘our

self includes not only our ego and our social self, on which the imperatives of ethics play, but also a broader identification with ecology itself.’

Speaking bluntly: this is pure rhetoric, not a ‘deep’ reply. Indeed, broadening our ‘ego and our social self’ does not necessarily bring about ‘a

broader identification with ecology’ , that is with other life-forms, mountains, rivers, and so on. There are many examples of selfhood in which

the self is formed in contrast to other *human* selves, not necessarily in

contrast to an encompassing natural world.

In another ideological strategy, Manes asserts that ‘in the concept of

the Ecological Self, human *interests* and natural *interests* become fused and

there is no need to appeal to the *traditional* discourse of rights and values.

The *integrity* of the biosphere is seen as the *integrity of our own persons*; the

• rights* of the natural world are implied in *our right to be human and humane*.’[151]

This amounts to a white flag of surrender. What ‘interests’ can be

imputed to ‘Nature’ that are even definable in ethical terms? How do

they become ‘fused’ with the ‘interests’ of humans, those ‘plain citizens’

whose ‘intrinsic worth’ is equal to that of all other life-forms? What constitutes the ‘integrity’ of the biosphere? Why are the ‘rights’ of the natural

world ‘implied in our right to be human and humane’ ? Where did ideas

of ‘interests’ and ‘integrity’ come from, if not from human morality and

an anthropomorphic conceptualization of ‘human interests’ ?

----

To mechanically transfer the complex repertoire of rights, moral strictures, wisdom, and philosophy that exists in society to the biosphere, as

though this repertoire could arise, let alone exist, without human beings

is to grossly mystify humanity’s interaction with the natural world and

neutr aliz e the rich content of these distincdy humanistic terms. Divested

of their historical, social, and cultural moorings, these social ideas and

practices are cheapened into slogans. This divestiture renders it impossible to formulate a serious ethics that can be used in humanity’s relations

with the natural world, as well as between human and human in the

social world. Reduced to abstractions that float in an intuitional cloud,

‘values’ , ‘rights’, and ‘humane’ behavior, are more transcendental than

real, in a *de facto* dualism that simply bypasses their human origins — and

actually becomes captive to the very origins it seeks to avoid. As Manes

writes, invoking Warwick Fox, the real goal of this ecological ethics is

‘the decentering of humankind’ — as though it were not human beings

alone and only alone who could follow ethical injunctions in relation to

the natural world.[152]

While deep ecology trivializes the human spirit, it depends immensely

on humanistic appeals to support its most basic tenets. Moreover, its

absorption of human individuality into a mystical self-in-Self of cosmic

proportions advances a reactionary message. In a mass society, where selfhood is atrophying under the assault of social forces and institutions over

which the individual has virtually no control; when disempowerment has

become an epochal social pathology; when women, people of color, the

poor, and the underprivileged are asked to surrender what fragments of

autonomy and freedom they still possess to the power of multinational

corporations, impersonal bureaucracies, and the state — the ‘decentering

of humankind’ opens the way for a cultural and social barbarism of

frightening proportions.

Equally troubling is the outright misanthropy that many deep ecologists advance. To Christopher Manes, for example, humanity is a ‘*relatively expendable part*’ of the environment.[153] Such derogatory views of

humanity are matched by the icy indifference to human life and suffering

in the writing of deep ecology’s most important theorists. Consider the

following dilemma: an active rattlesnake takes up residence under a family house, posing a grave danger to the child who lives there. The father

must decide whether to kill the snake or risk the death of his child. For

most people, this would not be a difficult decision; but for deep ecologists, the vital needs of the child and the snake — for life — are equal. Bill

Devall, who actually cites such a case in his book, *Simple in Means, Rich in Ends* (1990), advances a principle of ‘species impartiality’ by which

such decisions can be made. Devall’s principle reads: ‘[fjairness in resolution of real conflicts can only occur when humans are not given any

special privileges because they are humans.’ By this principle, that is,

humans should allow themselves no ‘special privileges’ in coping with

such problems merely because ‘they are humans’.[154] The child’s father,

who has already survived several bites from ratdesnakes, opts for killing

the snake, earning Devall’s reproval: ‘I urged [the father] to make peace

with the rattlesnake the way St. Francis made peace between a wolf and

villagers in northern Italy in the famous thirteen-century story.’[155] Alas,

we are not all ‘saints’ like Francis with a special pipeline to God.

Lest we suspect that Devall is merely fatuous, arrant misanthropy

emerges in the closing pages of his book: ‘[w]e lack compassion and seem

[!] misanthropic if we turn our backs on hundreds of millions of humans

who reside in megalopolises. However, when a choice must be made, it”

seems consistent with deep ecology principles to fight on the side of

endangered species and animals’[156] — and presumably ignore the plight of

congested urban dwellers, which is a concern of ‘misplaced humanists’.

What concerns Devall about cities is not only the absence of ‘wild animals’ [!] there but the extent to which ‘urban elites’ exercise power with

their ‘materialist ideology and nihilism’. This trend, too, is a concern

only of ‘misplaced humanists’, who also would wrongheadedly — in

Devall’s view — justify ‘large-scale in-migration to Western Europe and

North America from Latin America and Africa’.[157] Such views are redolent of the reactionary ideology currendy abounding in the First World

against people of color from the Third World.

Finally, deep ecology is heir to the fingering legacy of Malthus, whose

warning about population growth outstripping food production ‘was

ignored by the rising tide of industrial/technological optimism’, according

to Devall and Sessions.[158] Whereupon they extol William Catton, Jr, author

of *Overshoot*, for applying ‘the ecological concept of *carrying capacity*’ and

remind us that William Vogt, who ‘articulated’ the environmental crisis,

‘anticipated] the work of radical ecologist Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s’.

Vogt’s recipes for diminishing population by withholding antibiotics from

Third World countries go unmentioned. (See Chapter 3.)[159]

----

The misanthropic orientation of deep ecology was taken to its logical

conclusion by *Earth First!*’s founding thinkers who, unencumbered by

academic peer pressures, were more outspoken than Naess, Devall, and

Sessions.

An inglorious moment of truth occurred in an interview with David

Foreman, *Earth First!*’s indubitable leader, conducted by Bill Devall and

published in an Australian periodical, *Simply Living*, in 1986.[160] Devall’s

introduction to the interview was inimitable in its admiration of

Foreman. ‘One of [Foreman’s] quotes,’ Devall exudes, ‘is from John

Muir concerning the relations between bears and people. Muir wrote,

over a hundred years ago, that if a war should come between bears and

humans, he would be sorely tempted to fight on the side of bears. Says

Foreman: “That day has arrived, and I am enlisting in service to the

bears.’”

Devall first asked Foreman, ‘What is the relation between deep ecology and *Earth First!*?’ To which Foreman replied: ‘I drink deep ecology

is the philosophy of *Earth First!* They are pretty much the same tiring

[but] I think EF! is a *particular style* of deep ecology.’ The moment of

truth, however, followed Devall’s pointed question: ‘Do you think population is an important issue?’ To which Foreman responded:

When I tell people how the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give

aid — the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let

the people there just starve there, they think that is monstrous. But the

alternative is that you go in and save these half-dead children who will never

live a whole life. Their development will be stunted. And whafs going to

happen in ten years time is that twice as many people will suffer and die.

These charitable remarks were followed by an opinion on immigration

by Latin Americans to the United States. ‘Letting the USA be an overflow valve for problems in Latin America is not solving a thing. It’s just

putting more pressure on the resources we have in the USA. It is just

causing more destruction of our wilderness, more poisoning of water and

air, and it isn’t helping the problems in Latin America.’ Devall — a pillar

in the triune propagators of deep ecology in the United States —

found nothing to object to in these statements; indeed, he seemed to

acknowledge the legitimacy of Foreman’s concern by offering the helpful query: ‘Why haven’t mainstream environmental groups dealt with the

population issue?’

Foreman’s mentor, Edward Abbey, intmded ethnic chauvinism,

indeed, elements of nativism, into the debate that followed this interview. Abbey wrote:

There are a good many reasons to call a halt to further immigration ...

into the United States . One seldom mentioned, however, is culture: the

United States that we live in today, with its traditions and ideals, however

imperfectly realized, is a product of northern European civilization. If we

allow our country — our country — to become Latinized — we will be

forced to accept a more rigid class system, a patron style of politics ... and

a greater reliance on crime and violence as normal instruments of social

change.[161]

Elsewhere he repeated this theme:

Perhaps ever-continuing industrial and population growth is not the true

road to human happiness.... In which case it might be wise for us as

American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass iirflux of ever more

millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically

impoverished people.[162]

‘*Genetically* impoverished’, no less? One is prone to cry: really!

In fact, an article I wrote in response to these remarks and the

Foreman—DevaU interview, ‘Social Ecology Versus “Deep Ecology”: A

Challenge for the Ecology Movement’, was greeted with savage acrimony, sprinkled with a measure of red-baiting, over several issues of

• Earth First!*.[163] To this day, I can only wonder if academic deep ecologists

would ever have dissociated themselves from the misanthropic and

nativistic views Foreman expressed in the *Simply Living* interview had I

not criticized it.[164] Even after my intervention, it took a year, to the best

of my knowledge, before Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions, and

Warwick Fox renounced Foreman’s position with varying degrees of

emphasis.[165] Still later, Foreman in a debate with me seemed to withdraw

his harsher misanthropic formulations. For some two years, the environmental press resounded with the criticism and countercriticisms between

supporters of Foreman’s *Simply Living* views and my own — nor have

they entirely quieted down to this day.[166] Sessions’ dissociation from

Foreman’s views, in fact, proved to be equivocal. Writing in Foreman’s

new magazine, *Wild Earth*, in 1992, Sessions declared:

In 1981, Murray Bookchin and his Social Ecology group attacked Earth

First! and the Deep Ecology Philosophy, Certain casual remarks by individual Earth Firsters (made, to some extent, for their shock value to drive

home the message of how out of balance contemporary humans are on the

planet) concerning allowing Ethiopians to staive, and AIDS as Nature’s

population control device, provided Bookchin with the opportunity he

needed.[167]

Sessions’ expression of solidarity with Foreman’s behavior, which he had

previously renounced, hardly merits comment. At the time the *Simply Living* interview was published, to the best of my knowledge, neither

Foreman, Devall, or other luminaries in the deep ecology ‘movement’

characterized Foreman’s observations as ‘casual’, still less delivered simply

for their ‘shock value’. Quite to the contrary. Foreman and many of his

supporters defended these remarks militandy.

----

Deep ecology and much of its literature is unnervingly redolent of the

reactionary views chronicled by Fritz Stern and George Mosse in

Germany prior to the rise of National Socialism.[168] Cries like ‘Back to the

Pleistocene!’ during *Earth First!*’s militant days contribute to a mentality

that denies human uniqueness even as it appeals to human beings to carry

out an ethics that no animal can possibly have. At the same time, deep

ecology views humanity rather cheaply. Its literature abounds with

denunciations of humanity as a ‘cancer’ on the planet and human intervention into the natural world as demonic. Hardly any connection is

shown between the social maladies that afflict our age and their role in

determining society’s relationship to the natural world. It holds the basic

assumption of Lynn White, Jr, that our present environmental problems

stem from cultural origins — that is, Christianity’s disdain for the natural

world.[169] This argument reduces society’s relationship to the natural world

to simplistic psychological terms. If we merely remedy our drinking and

living habits, individual by individual, we shall presumably become ‘plain

citizens’ of the biosphere with agreeable ecological habits. The impact of

this personalistic view of the ecological crisis and its sources, has — like

sociobiology and ecomysticism — significandy shifted public attention

from the social roots of our ecological dislocations to a psychological

level of discussion, if not a religious view.

Arne Naess, perhaps the most socially concerned of the deep ecologists, merely collapses into extreme inconsistencies when he deals with

Iris social ideas. In his *Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy*, Naess avers that deep ecologists ‘seem to move more in the

direction of nonviolent anarchism than towards communism.

Contemporary nonviolent anarchists are clearly close to the green direction of the political triangle.’ Whereupon Naess quickly catapults from

Iris seemingly gende anarchism into claims that ‘with the enormous and

exponentially increasing human population pressure and war or warlike

conditions in many places, it seems inevitable to maintain some fairly

strong central political institutions.’[170] Indeed, lest this not seem demanding enough, he adds that c the higher the level of local self-determination

the *stronger the central authority* must be in order to override local sabotage

of fundamental green policies.’ Aside from the element of ‘Newspeak’

here, in which the ‘higher the level of local self-determination’, the

greater is our need for a ‘central authority’, such calls for a strong central

authority, let it be noted, have become the bedrock credo of extreme

right-wing ‘environmentalists’ in Europe.[171]

In the light of Naess’s commitment to a strong state, what happens to

free choice, idiosyncratic behavior, personal talents, and individuality?

Or, for that matter, to his ‘nonviolent anarchism’? And, if the Cosmic

‘Self’ into which the ‘self’ should dissolve is a suprahuman organism, a

‘whole’ — a ‘totality’? — that blots out personal identity in traditional families and communities structured around castes, deep ecology can easily

become an ideology for a strong centralized state in the name of perpetuating the ‘rights of Nature’.

----

Ecomysticism is part of a larger spectrum of mysticism that plagues the

Anglo-American and German consciousness on a scale that seems very

much like a throwback to medievalism. It is smug, indeed, to express

worried concern about the rise of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism

while ignoring phenomena like channeling, astrology, feng shui, tarot,

Jungian archetypal psychology, infantilism, and angelology, to cite some

of the more prominent ideologies on the ever-widening landscape of

spiritualism and mysticism.

Despite two centuries of enlightened humanism and rationalism, the

past few decades have seen an appalling regression by a sizable part of the

public into supernatural and supranatural cults. More than 90 per cent of

Americans, for example, believe in the existence of a supernatural deity.

A comparable number believe in the immortality of their souls, and a few

individuals have ‘tested’ this conviction with ‘near-death’ experiences, in

an effluvium of recent books. Sixty-seven per cent of the American public claims to have experienced ‘extrasensory perception’ (ESP); 42 per

cent allow that they have had (or have) contact with the dead; 31 per

cent claim to possess clairvoyant powers; and 29 per cent have had

visions of one kind or another.

Andrew Greeley, who conducted this survey with the University of

Chicago’s National Opinion Research Council in the late 1980s,

observes: ‘Our studies show that people who’ve tasted the paranormal,

whether they accept it intellectually or not, are anything but religious

nuts or psychiatric cases. They are, for the most part, ordinary

Americans, somewhat above the norm in education and intelligence and

somewhat less than average in religious involvement.’[172] Nor should

Europeans be consoled that this problem is strictly American: the scale in

Western Europe may not be as great as in the United States, but there is

prima facie evidence of mysticism’s rapid growth on the continent.

Indeed, at a time when Nobel laureates in physics and other leading

figures in high culture argue quite seriously about the existence of deities

and spirits, we have reason to shudder about what is going on among the

less educated, ordinary people surveyed by Greeley and Ins associates.

Seekers in the realm of the paranormal who undertake a survey of the

cults themselves are likely to suffer few disappointments about their grip

on the public mind.

A veritable jungle of paranormal cults and nostrums abounds in the

United States. Broadcast airwaves are filled with fundamentalist preachers, of often dubious theological credentials and even more dubious

morals; the advertisements of psychics and astrologists (many of whom

profess to possess a license to engage in their crafts by ‘professional’ societies’) are everywhere. These tele-‘visionists’ are prepared to offer their

insights on life and destiny over the telephone for a suitable charge, characteristically at $3.95 a minute (a bargain compared with a $4 charge!).

Such sums are likely to chill the ardor of the most parsimonious mystics,

who have to make do with the advice and predictions they glean from

the astrology columns of the daily newspaper or from periodicals with

names like *Miracles*. The airwaves are cluttered with the shrieks of strident ‘opinion makers’ who variously bark their views on God and interview people who claim to have communicated with extraterrestrials.

Tabloid newspapers in supermarkets celebrate everything from the

revival of Egyptian mummies to parents whose youngest child is half-fish

and half-human.

To be sure, mystical cults are as much a part of Euro-American life as

apple pie in the United States, fish and chips in Britain, knockwurst in

Germany — or perhaps McDonald’s hamburgers everywhere. We need

not look to ancient Rome, the medieval world, or the Reformation to

find evidence of how readily cults have turned into sedate, even universalist religions or demonologies. The explosive growth of the Church of

Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) beyond its home terrain in Utah to all parts

of the United States and to numerous countries abroad attests to the

growing gullibility of people who live in an era that has actually

unearthed the ‘secrets’ of life and matter. The influence of Mary Eddy

Baker’s gospel of Christian Science, with its rejection of modern medicine in favor of the therapeutic powers of biblical precept, by far exceeds

the influence of Mark Twain’s scathing books on Mormonism and

Christian Science alike. Yet Christian Science has been only a century or

so in the making, while Mormonism began to surface on a worldwide

scale only in the past two generations.

----

What makes the present-day cults a unique phenomenon is that they are

appearing at a time when there is no *lack* of secular knowledge, such as characterized past ages, but rather when there is a *surfeit* of such knowledge.

Mystical and particularly **anti**rational and **anti**humanistic cults are

becoming prevalent because more and more people know too much, even

if vaguely, about the nature of reality — and they are frightened by what

they know. Science and reason have ‘told’ them that they are on their own

— with enormous powers to change the wodd around them, for better or

worse. Lest we exaggerate the impact of metaphysics and high culture,

their problem is not that Hegel and Nietzsche have told them that ‘God is

dead’ , or that Max Weber has told them that the wodd is ‘disenchanted’ ,

however much these notions have been played up by academics.

Few of the modern cultists have ever read Nietzsche, still fewer Hegel,

nor are they likely to be familiar with Weber. It is a vanity that academics

entertain that their own interests correspond to those of the non-academic public. Moreover, as history has shown, people can behave

quite frightfully or carry the burden of terrible afflictions, from famine to

war, on their shoulders in the full belief that ‘God is alive’ and the world

is ‘enchanted’ . Far more important than the archaic beliefs they hold or

have discarded are the contradictions in the human condition itself. The

enormous promise of technology to provide a world of material abundance, security, and freedom from toil has not been fulfilled for most of

humanity, and it is largely the mystification of social reality, not the

power of ideological hyperreality, that has produced a desire to escape

from the existing state of affairs.

Put simply: modern people adhere to traditional beliefs with the same

devotion that filled the hearts of their ancestors of earlier times. The

enormous revival of religion in Russia, following the breakdown of a

militantly atheistic Communist state, together with the growth of a

bourgeois mean-spiritedness and anti-Semitism after two generations of

‘socialist’ re-education between 1917 and the 1980s, attests to the tenuous hold of belief systems when they are *merely* systems of belief. A good

deal more than beliefs account for human behavior, even for the beliefs

people profess to hold.

----

For most people, what truly counts is whether their beliefs are consistent

with the reality around them. If they are not, people may shift their

beliefs, adopting either an enlightened humanism that explains reality, or

superstitions that allow them to escape from reality. In our own time,

belief systems are particularly tenuous because the social world is changing too rapidly to support any ideology for a great length of time. An

ideology that seems acceptable today quickly becomes obsolete tomorrow, even before it can be elaborated and become deeply entrenched in

the popular mind.

The consequence of these rapid social transformations is that we five in

a world of cults rather than entrenched traditional Ideologies, of lightly

held myths rather than seriously considered convictions — and, above all,

of easily adopted absurdities that are only half-believed and discarded as

easily as garments. Psychic instability reflects, in great measure, modern-day social and technological instability. The sillier a given craze, the more

likely it is that it will be adopted as an ideological plaything and then let

go as a passing absurdity. Its future depends upon whether it provides

people with respite from the demands of a changing world that is very

much in need of rational control and whose management seems to be

clouded in mystery. Thus present-day cults, from ecomysticism to various theisms, ‘reenchant’ nothing, despite their extravagant claims to do

so. In a broad sense, they are merely means to avoid an extravagandy

mobile reality that must sooner or later be engaged by using candor and

secular understanding, if its potentialities for a rational way of life are not

to be aborted — be it by an ecological, social, or military disaster.

The process of psychologically eluding reality has been very much

under way since the early 1970s. Its roots can be found in the 1960s

counterculture, which, once it lost its political direction, rapidly disintegrated into privatism, an ever-changing collection of nostrums for personal development, and a mysticism inherited from the beatniks. An

‘omnibook of personal development’ , published in 1977 with the imprimatur of *Psychology Today*, lists more than a hundred strategies for variously finding, sedating, and/or improving oneself.[173] Some of these

strategies have gone out of fashion, after only a fairly short lifespan;

others persist marginally, almost by sheer psychic and social inertia; quite

a few are now ‘established’ techniques; and still others are quasi-religious

and religious belief systems in their entirety. Their greatest merit, in most

cases, is that they are ‘usable’ , ‘practical’ , and possibly ‘interchangeable’ ,

each adding synergistically to the other for enhanced ‘re-enchantment’

or therapy.

Acupuncture, of course, enjoys the prestige of antiquity. Just as the

ancient Greeks thought Egypt was the font of wisdom because of its long

history, so acupuncture, to which we can also add shamanism, tantra, and

yoga, shares the pedigree of ancient Oriental origins. But much of the

omnibook is filled with techniques and belief systems popular in the

1970s whose heyday has long since passed, supplanted by what I can best

call ‘old-new’ mysticisms and theisms — the recycled products of traditional, even long-discarded, beliefs leveraged into usage for the end of

the century and the beginning of the new one. They are marked by

juvenility, by a steady retreat into a world of fairy tales and childhood

phases of life. They are the stuff of primality, closed to critical examination and intellectual growth, with all its phases, pains, and demands.

An exemplary primal fad is the pursuit of the ‘inner child’ , a psychomystique that was born decades ago when a cult shaped by the notion of

a ‘fall’ horn innocence in private life focused on an ‘inner nature’ of the

individual that adulthood had tainted with experience, rationality, and

responsibility. Synergized by neo-Freudian notions of infantile polymorphousness, Jungian archetypes, and the like, it can even be traced back to

a Christian precept, which gives childhood innocence and sheeplike

meekness a high degree of valuation over maturity and its overly civilized

doubts about the world.

Like the new popularity of *The Simpsons*, a television cartoon series for

adult audiences, the new infantilism seems to appeal to a still surviving

sucking instinct in the psyche that is beyond the constraints of age and

experience. As *Newsweek* reports, ‘With grown baby boomers acting like

perpetual teens, real teens are acting like infants.’ At a juice bar in a fashionable New York dance club, a man wears ‘a pajamas top and a Donald

Duck backpack’ , while in a corner, ‘Dr. Seuss-style stocking caps flop

madly. Nearly everyone at the dance hall is adorned with pacifiers, kiddie

charms, doll-like figurines, and playing with toys. A sturdy construction

worker in his early twenties declares: “We’ve got to be tots again. That

life was so cool. You just sucked.”’[174]

Infantilism persists in modish stores that sell toys and games expressly

designed for adults of all ages. Not only juvenile amulets but giant Panda

bears are available to any middle-class man or woman who may want to

cuddle up with ersatz furry things in the journey to sleepland. Tapes can

be bought that bring on a gradual dozing — if not nostalgia — with songs

like ‘London Bridge Is Failing Down’. *Batman* and *The Flintstones*,

movies based on cartoons popular when the baby boomers were children, draw record adult audiences today.

If these juvenilisms do not improve our knowledge of the world,

people who say they have had near-death experiences assure us all will

end well in the next one. Everyone, it seems, will be well received in

heaven. An increasing number of articles, books, and radio and television

interviews describe the contours of the afterlife. For those who doubt the

immortality of the soul, most near-death experiences describe a glowing

fight after life has temporarily ended that is iridescently inviting, which

should cause us to wonder — given the sales figures these books rack up —

why the reader desires to remain in this earthly vale of tears at all.

----

Ecomysticism may be for highbrows, but angelology is for everyone.

This latest extension of biblical theology into modern Yuppie and

plebeian culture alike has a number of clergymen worried — for if we all

have angels with whom we may directly communicate, what need have

we for clerics? In any case, the growing public fascination with ‘the

angels among us’ , to cite the title of a feature article by several writers in

• Time* magazine, may be taken as an example of how the modern

mystical Zeitgeist relies on materiality and tangibility, not merely on

the invisible and metaphysical.[175]

Clerical trepidations aside, such prestigious institutions as Harvard

Divinity School and Boston College, among others, offer courses on

angels, and the potentiality for a growing audience of believers should

not be sneezed at. A recent **Time**/CNN telephone survey reports that

nearly 70 per cent of the American public believe that angels exist. Fifty-five per cent believe that they are higher spiritual beings created by the

deity who has empowered them to act as his agents on earth. Another 15

per cent believe that they are the spirits of people who died. Only 7 per

cent b eh eve that angels are a figment of the imagination, while 18 per

cent regard them as symbolically important.

Inasmuch as angels are annoyingly invisible, certain techniques are

obviously important to force them to materialize. A veritable industry

has grown up to give angels tangibility. A recent article in *Time* read:

In their modern incarnation, these mighty messengers [angels] have been

reduced to bite-size-beings, easily digested. The terrify ing-chembim have

become Keivpie-doll cherubs. For those who choke too easily on God and

his rules, theologians observe, angels are the handy compromise, all fluff

and meringue, kind, nonjudgmental. And they are available to everyone,

like aspirin. ‘Each of us has a guardian angel’, declares Eileen Feetnan,

who publishes a newsletter *AngelWatch* from her home in Mountainside,

New Jersey. ‘They are nonthreatening, wise and living beings. They offer

help whether we ask for it or not. But mostly we ignore them.

If we do, we are ungenerous — and the closing years of the twentieth

century suggest that we may soon be giving them more attention than

our medieval ancestors in the thirteenth century gave them. Authors

seriously speculate about their form and fallibility, the reasons that they

intrigue us, the nature of angel encounters, and their functions.

Theologians are now beginning to complain that the trivialization of

‘angelology’ has reached a point where ‘popular authors who render

angels into household pets, who invite readers to get in touch with their

inner angel, or summon their own “angel psychotherapist” or view

themselves as angels in training,’ write the *Time* reporters on the subject,

‘are trafficking in discount spirituality’.

Initiates to this fascinating field may acquire a ‘practical guide to working with the messengers of heaven to empower and enrich [their] lives’

by consulting *Ask Your Angels*. To gain so commanding a power for only

$10 is a literary bargain by any current standard.[176] Indeed, as the book

cover advertises: ‘If you’ve picked up this book, the angels have already

touched you’, which may well obviate your need to buy it. But should

you do so, you will find within a winsome, fair, fight-brown female

angel, with flowery wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. The

sketches inside the book show angels blowing trumpets — whether to

attune themselves to the ‘music of the spheres’ or avoid oncoming traffic

is not clear.

Most of the book is loaded with practical details on how to ‘ask your

angels’ or, more inspirationally, ‘The Grace Process’, which subdivides

into ‘Grounding’, ‘Releasing’, ‘Aligning’, ‘Conversing’, and ‘Enjoying’.

You can learn how to work in ‘partnership with the angels’ by ‘fine-tuning the angelic connection’, ‘writing letters and dreaming with the

angels’, ‘working with the angels to advance your goals’, ‘working with

the angels in recovery and healing’, and if all the bases aren’t covered,

‘working with the angels in all your relationships’. Indeed, lest your burdens be too heavy for one angel to handle, the book closes with a chapter tided ‘working with the angels in groups’. It will help, the writers

advise, to use a tape recorder so you can listen to the way you address

angels — thus does the technological age intrude upon the divine and its

blessings.

This kind of mentality falls within the province of sympathetic magic,

an oudook that Sir James Frazier’s *The Golden Bough* explains and illustrates in considerable detail. Its primitive ancestry is fairly assured: angels

were variously deities and, earlier, spirits that people created out of their

own fertile imaginations with the aid of shamans and later of priests. If

Christianity ranks people just below ‘angels’, they are, in all truth, below

nothing; and if ‘re-enchanting’ the world or rendering it ‘sacred’ means

looking up to nothing and populating it with figments of its own imagination, enlightened humanism demands that humanity look to reality

and try to understand its own place in the world.

[124] Naess’s lecture was published as ‘The

Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range

Ecology Movement’, *Inquiry*, vol. 16

(Spring 1973), pp. 95–100.

[125] Ibid., p. 95.

[126] For my own part, I had made a distinction between *environmentalism*, which I

respectfully regarded as single-issue but

often socially unsophisticated and instrumentally oriented struggle against pollution, nuclear power plants, road-building,

and the like, and *ecology*, which located

environmental dislocations in ‘the very

constitution of society as we know it

today’. I presented this distinction in a lecture at the University of Buffalo in 1971,

which was published first in a small periodical called *Anarchos* in 1972 under the title

‘Spontaneity and Organization’ and republished in my collection

• Toward an Ecological Society* (Montreal: Black Rose Books,

1980), pp. 270—2. In 1971, to the best of

my knowledge, neither Arne Naess nor

the phrase deep ecology was known to most

environmentally oriented people. My

own lecture and subsequent related articles

like my 1973 ‘Toward an Ecological

Society’ (in the anthology of the same

name) called for a radically different sensibility toward the natural world and the

need for a total remaking of society, in

which I rooted the environmental crisis.

[127] *Our Synthetic Environment*, under the

pseudonym Lewis Herber (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); and ‘Towards a

Liberatory Technology’ , republished in

• Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (San Francisco:

Ramparts Press, 1971).

[128] Naess, ‘Shallow and Deep’ , p. 95,

emphasis added.

[129] Ibid., p. 96, emphasis added on the word

• intuitively*.

[130] Ibid., p. 96.

[131] Warwick Fox, *Toward a Transpersonal Ecology* (Boston: Shambhala Publications,

1990), p. 58, emphasis added.

[132] Ibid., p. 59.

[133] Ibid., p. 60. Fox’ s account of deep

ecology and its development is among the

most serious to appear in the ‘movement’

— regardless of whether he himself is a

member in good standing.

[134] Dave Foreman, *Confessions of an Eco-Warrior* (New York: Crown Trade

Paperbacks; 1991), p. 26.

[135] Fox, *Transpersonal*, p. 66.

[136] Ibid., pp. 66–7.

[137] Michael Tobias, ed., *Deep Ecology* (San

Diego: Avant Books, 1985). At the time, I

protested the use of this title for an anthology containing my article, ‘Toward a

Philosophy of Nature’ , only to be reassured by Tobias that the anthology contained many people who were not deep

ecologists, including Garrett Hardin!

[138] Bill Devall and George Sessions, *Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered*

(Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985).

[139] Devall and Sessions, *Deep Ecology*, p. 66,

emphases in the original.

[140] Ibid., p. 66.

[141] Ibid., p. 66, emphasis added.

[142] Ibid., p. 67.

[143] Ibid., p. 67, emphasis added.

[144] Ibid., p. 67, emphases added.

[145] Robyn Eckersley, ‘Divining Evolution:

The Ecological Ethics of Murray

Bookchin’ , *Environmental Ethics*, vol. 11

(Summer 1989), p. 115.

[146] Devall and Sessions, *Deep Ecology*, p. 66.

Actually, this quotation from Fox comes

from a criticism of deep ecology in

• The Ecologist*, vol. 14, no. 5–6 (1984), pp.

194—200 and 201–4. Which does not

prevent Devall and Sessions from bringing

it to the service of deep ecology.

[147] Ibid., p. 68.

[148] Richard Watson, ‘Eco-Ethics:

Challenging the Underlying Dogmas of

Environmentalism’, *Whole Earth Review*

(March 1985), pp. 5–13.

[149] Harold Fromm, ‘Ecology and

Ideology’, *Hudson Review* (Spring 1992), p.

30.

[150] Christopher Manes, *Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization* (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,

1990), pp. 147–8.

[151] Ibid., p. 148, emphasis added.

[152] Ibid., p. 147.

[153] Ibid., p. 71, emphasis in the original.

[154] Bill Devall, *Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology* (Salt Lake

City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1990), p.

176.

[155] Ibid., p. 177.

[156] Ibid., p. 189.

[157] Ibid., p. 189.

[158] Sessions and Devall, Deep Ecology, p. 46.

[159] Ibid.

[160] Bill Devall, ‘A Spanner in the Woods’,

interview with David Foreman, in *Simply Living*, vol. 2, no. 12 (c. 1986–87), pp. 3–4.

• Simply Living* is published in Australia.

[161] Edward Abbey, letter to the editor,

• Bloomsbury Review* (April-May 1986), p. 4.

[162] Edward Abbey, ‘Immigration and

Liberal Taboos’, in *One Life at a Time, Please* (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,

1988), p. 43.

[163] Murray Bookchin, ‘Social Ecology

Versus “Deep Ecology’”, *Green Perspectives*,

no. 4–5 (September 1987). *Earth First!* (1

November 1987), pp. 17—22. For an

exchange between myself and Edward

Abbey, see *Utne Reader* (January-February

1988), pp. 4–8, and (March-April 1988),

p.7.

[164] George Bradford was another early

critic of Foreman’s interview, in ‘How

Deep is Deep Ecology?’ initially published

in *Fifth Estate* (Fall 1987) and republished

under the same title as a pamphlet (Ojai,

CA: Times Change Press, 1989), p. 49.

But Bradford was by no means unsympathetic to deep ecology’s wilderness cult.

More opposed to technological innovations than even most deep ecology theorists, he wrote: ‘Deep ecology loves all that

is wild and free, so I share an affinity with

deep ecologists that has made this essay difficult to write.’

[165] See Bill Devall, ‘Deep Ecology and Its

Critics’; George Sessions, ‘Ecocentrism and

the Greens: Deep Ecology and the

Environmental Task’; and Arne Naess, ‘A

European Looks, at the North American

Branch of the Deep Ecology Movement’,

all in *Trumpeter*, vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring

1988). See also Warwock Fox, ‘The Deep

Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate and Its

Parallels’, *Environmental Ethics*, vol. 11

(Spring 1989), pp. 20—1, note 38.

[166] My debate with Foreman was published

in book form, entitled *Defending the Earth*

(Boston: South End Press, 1990).

[167] George Sessions, ‘Radical

Environmentalism in the 90s’, *Wild Earth*

(Fall 1992), p. 66, emphasis added.

[168] See Fritz Stern, *The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology* (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1961); and

George L. Mosse, *The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich*

(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).

[169] Lynn White, Jr, ‘The Historic Roots of

Our Ecologic Crisis’, *Science*, vol. 155 (10

March, 1967), pp. 1203–7.

[170] Arne Naess, *Ecology, Community and Lifestyle* (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), p. 157, emphasis

added.

[171] Naess, *Ecology, Community*, p. 157,

emphasis added.

[172] Andrew Greeley, ‘Mysticism Goes

Mainstream’, *American Health*

(January-February 1987), pp. 47–9.

[173] Katinka Matson, (The Psychology Today*

Omnibook of Personal Development (New

York: William Morrow & Co., 1977).

[174] Ned Zeman, ‘Who Let the Inner Child

Out?’ *Newsweek*, 28 December 1992, p.

67.

[175] Sam Ellis et at, ‘The Angels Among

Us’, *Time*, 27 December 1993, pp. 56–5.

[176] Alma Daniel, Timothy Wyllie, and

Andrew Ramer, *Ask Your Angels* (New

York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

Chapter 5: The myth of the primitive

There is a perverse irony in the fact that, after a virtual consensus has

been reached about the abuses that European colonialists inflicted on

aboriginal peoples, the possibility of attaining a realistic and sympathetic

view of ‘the primitive’ is being gutted by assorted ecomystics, anticivilizationists, and more generically, self-avowed primitivists who have

made ‘the primitive’ into a postmodern parody of the noble savage.

Today Euro-American primitivists have grossly distorted our understanding of the lives and cultures of aboriginal peoples by attributing to

them suprahuman, paradisiacal dimensions. By turning ostensibly primitive lifeways into models for ‘simple living’ and ‘closeness to nature’ , they

have not only made tribal cultures into romantic caricatures of social harmony and virtue but reared them up as a standard that privileged, urban

white people should emulate.

Not only is this romanticization extremely naive, it imposes an ideological burden on aboriginal peoples that downplays their real problems,

needs, and hopes for a better future. Worse still, the ‘noble savage’ myth

obliges aboriginals to be superior beings, indeed almost angelically virtuous and exemplary in behavior and thought, if they are to enjoy the prestige of Euro-American recognition and the rights to which they are

entitled.

This conflict between the realities that aboriginal ‘primitives’ face and

the taxing expectations that Euro-American primitivists impose upon

them is eminently tangible. In the mid-1970s Northwest Indian communities were beginning to use technologically sophisticated methods to

breed and harvest salmon. After years of neglect and poverty, the pride

they took in their achievements was as moving as it was admirable.

During a conference I attended in Bellingham, Washington, to my utter

astonishment, some white ecomystics and primitivists reproached them

for using modern technological, presumably ‘non-ecological’ methods.

Having been degraded and exploited for centuries as ‘savages’ , these

Indians were now being told that they were being too civilized. By

adopting advanced aquaculture techniques, they failed to qualify for their

high estate in the ecomystica1 firmament. Having been defamed for being

primitives in an earlier time, they were now being defamed for not being

primitive enough.

Such ecomystical and primitivistic arrogance is epidemic today.

Primitivism, to be sure, has many faces, ranging from a wholesale rejection of civilization (commonly designated as industrial and technocratic)

to compromises with civilized practices guided by a ‘primitive sensibility’

or spirituality . Thus the late Edward Abbey — whose writings were

inspirational for *Earth First!* and are recited reverentially by self-styled

‘radical’ environmentalists — expressed his preference for ‘the coming

restoration of a higher civilization’ than the present military-industrial

one. This preference would certainly be laudable by any progressive

standard. But Abbey’s ‘higher civilization’ , as it turns out, is one in which

‘scattered human populations modest in numbers [would] live by fishing,

hunting, food-gathering, small-scale farming and ranching’ — a curious

mix of occupations that would seem to stand at odds with each other

(‘small-scale ranching’ mingled with ‘food-gathering’?). The new ‘primitives’ would ‘assemble once a year in the ruins of abandoned cities for

great festivals of moral, spiritual and intellectual renewal — a people for

whom wilderness is not a playground but their natural and native home.’[177]

The rums of abandoned cities would become at one and the same time

the despised playgrotmd for a ‘moral, spiritual and intellectual renewal’

and, oddly enough, the theater for the ‘higher civilization’s’ festivals —

which should put city life in any shape or form in its place!

For all its incongruities and its total failure to appreciate the universalizing historical role of the city, Abbey’s vision is by no means the most

extreme example of chic primitivism. *Earth First!*ers commonly sport

bumper stickers with the slogan ‘Back to the Pleistocene!’ As John Davis,

onetime editor of *Earth First!*, wrote, ‘Many of us in the *Earth First!*

movement would like to see human beings live much more like the way

diey did fifteen thousand years ago as opposed to what we see now’,

which, Christopher Manes soberly explains, means, ‘the kind of

hunter-gatherer, shifting agricultural economies of tribal peoples.’[178]

Precisely why modern humanity should draw a straight line from Sunbelt

cities direcdy back to the late Paleolithic is a problem I shall leave to the

reader to resolve.

Judging from the examples usually given by ecomystics and primitivists,

‘primal’ sensibilities correspond to beliefs and practices imputed to

American Indians. This identification of Indian peoples with archaic practices and Paleolithic views has led to bitter conflicts between the expectations of Euro-American primitivists and the very peoples they extol.

Ecomystics, primitivists, and deep ecologists have challenged the rights of

native Americans to divert water from rivers for irrigation purposes and

harvest timber on their tribal lands. Their lands stolen by European settlers

and their cultures subverted, victimized by genocidal attacks and denied

free access to game and fertile soil, native peoples are now ejected — if

ecomystics have their way — to reject the ‘technocratic-industrial’ support

systems that the privileged white world takes for granted.

----

I make no claim that a competitive ‘free enterprise’ economy, rendered

even harsher by a highly sophisticated technology, is a desideratum —

either for aboriginal peoples or for Euro-Americans. Quite to the contrary, I argue for a way of life that is not focused on capital accumulation

and profit. Nor do I favor a ‘technocratic-industrial’ society that centers

its concerns on the privileged few. Quite to the contrary: human life is

meaningless if it is not enriched by art, ideals, and a spirituality that is

ecological and humane.

But a way of life burdened by material insecurity and toil cannot nourish the kind of individual and social freedom that makes human life

meaningful and creative — indeed, that is likely to foster a rich ecological

sensibility. Materially deprived and socially underprivileged people

whose bellies are empty are not likely to be much concerned with the

integrity of wildlife and forests. What they need is food and a decent life

before they can think of the welfare of other life-forms.

Nor can an ecological sensibility be found by trying to return to an

idealized primitive’ world. In the band and tribal societies of prehistory,

humanity was almost completely at the mercy of uncontrollable natural

forces and patently false and mystified visions of reality.

Like ecomystics, primitivists are shifting public attention away from

the tasks of seriously remaking society along rational lines, toward dubious — and often contrived — arcadian cultural attitudes that are imputed to

the long-lost past. For a humanistic vision of a future that has yet to be

won, both for native and Euro-American peoples alike, they are trying to

substitute mythic notions of a pristine and primitive past that probably

never existed.

Understanding aboriginal life requires that we find a *balance* between

the ‘primitive’ and the civilizational that corresponds to what we really

know, based on evidence provided by paleoanthropology and anthropology. This problem cannot be sloughed off with dreamy accounts of what

we would *like* to believe our Paleolithic ancestors did or thought. The

evidence we have about ice age people and existing aboriginals must be

examined seriously on their own terms, untainted by wishful thinking.

Whatever natural features we impute to the primitive world, and

whatever synthetic features we impute to the civilized world, the old

Victorian image of the demonic aboriginal savage and the contemporary

ecomystical image of the angelic aboriginal saint are myths we can no

longer entertain. Modern civilization is too dynamic to be dissolved into

a largely mythic past. In the next generation or two humanity is likely to

move ahead technologically, scientifically, and industrially even more

rapidly than it did during the past three centuries.

But what *direction* will these changes take? Toward a rational future

that creates a sensitive balance widiin society and between society and

the natural world? Or toward a domineering and exploitative social order

that makes earlier systems of domination seem benign?

----

If primitivists use the word *primitive* to refer to ‘closeness to nature’ , the

phrase *primitive culture* is simply an oxymoron, for culture — or society — is

hardly a ‘natural’ phenomenon, a phenomenon of first nature.

Although animals may be more or less *sociable*, their sociability is not

evidence of the existence of a *society*. Society is unique to human beings.

There is a crucial difference between *society*, with its distincdy structured

and mutable institutions, and *community* with its simple, often undifferentiated relations between organisms. Societies, however well or poorly

entrenched their institutions, can be *changed* by human action; animal

communities are either the product of genetic factors, such as beehives,

or they are relatively formless and unstable. Non-human animals can be

very sociable indeed, as are wolves, African dogs, and baboons; but sociability does not make for a *society*, any more than the *ad hoc* use of stones

by sea otters to open oyster shells or the use of twigs by c him panzees to

get at termites constitutes a technology (or what anthropologists call a

tool-kit) with its carefully shaped permanent or semipermanent implements. In the absence of social institutions that can be modified or radically changed — a phenomenon that is distinctly human — non-human

animals may form and dissolve groups, but apart from genetically

induced aggregations, like those of ‘social insects’ , they have minimal

structure and permanence.

Hence no culture is ‘natural’ in a strictly biological sense. To be sure, a

tribal culture may be ‘close to nature’ in that its environment is relatively

pristine, but its members usually know of no other habitats than the ones

in which they find themselves, formed by natural evolution. The forests,

grasslands, and mountains that surround them may have been countless

years, indeed aeons, in the making, together with the wildlife and plants

on which they rely for food, clothing, and shelter, but it is a world seemingly unbroken by changes, apart from the few that they, as humans,

have produced.

Such tribal cultures may base their social institutions on biological

facts, such as age groups, gender relations, and kinship ties, which may

seem natural because of their biological premises — age, gender, and kinship — but they are part of second nature, not first nature. No such institutional ensembles exist among non-human animals. Non-human

animals have no gerontocracies, patriarchies, or systems of rights and

duties based on a common ancestry — apart horn mother-offspring relations, and even these relations tend to be unstable and tentative where

they persist for any great length of time.

By contrast, the human societies of second nature are a qualitative

departure from animal communities, an alienation from stricdy biological

phenomena, however much they initially rest on certain biological facts*

A ‘primitive’ culture that is ‘close to nature’ is not in any way congruent

with the natural world, or first nature. Once hominids and early humans

fashioned, retained, and elaborated a tool-kit, established a division of

labor (however rudimentary), shared food, acted altruistically, and organized their relationships into definable structures, they no longer merely

adapted to their environment; they began to significantly change it with

a distinct purposiveness. The second nature they created fundamentally

separated them from their first nature as mere animals. Hence, however

primitive a human culture may have been, it was not identical with

purely biological lifeways — indeed, not even with the fairly sociable relations that exist among chimpanzees and baboons.

Humans were now engaged in doing firings and using means that,

nascent as they may be in other animals, sharply distinguished them from

other life-forms. They began to *transform* their environment willfully,

often with a clear idea of the means they required to create a more congenial habitat and way of life.

A ‘primitive culture’, then, is actually very ‘unnatural’. It marks a decisive break with the largely passive and adaptive nature of animal behavior. To speak of a ‘primitive culture’ is to thoroughly mystify the

‘primitive’, not to speak of the concept of society. “With the emergence

of society, a qualitatively new realm of evolution, of subjectivity, and

potentially, at least, of freedom developed *out* of a realm that was essentially biological, rooted in great part by genetically guided behavior.

----

Odd as it may seem, the fact that band and tribal cultures broke with first

nature is most clearly seen in the appearance of what ecomystics and primitivists enthusiastically celebrate today — notably, ‘primitive spirituality’.

Whether it is ‘primitive’ or not, spirituality is entirely *ideological*. That

is, it is a process of thinking, of symbolizing, and of reflecting about

experience. However clever or intelligent many animals may seem, they

have no ideologies; by contrast, humans definitely do. They have systematic ways of trying to understand their environment in symbolic

ter m s; they possess the complex form of expression that is language; they

usually work collaboratively to gain the means of life and distribute

goods according to certain accepted rules; they assume communal duties

and demand certain rights. In short, they develop credos that render their

activities intellectually and emotionally coherent.

Whether these forms of thinking are based on custom, or are

enshrined in morals and guided by magico-religious beliefs, or are based

on ethics and guided by canons of rationality, they clearly influence how

people do things in the real world. Indeed, however mutable they may

be, these influences often have the tenacity of animal instincts.

Precisely such belief systems, or forms of spirituality, markedly *alienate*

humans from the natural world around them and distinguish them from

the animal inhabitants that coexist with them in a shared natural environment. That is to say, the very *ideational* systems that ecomystics cite to

distinguish ‘primitive’ sensibilities from civilized ones are already highly

complex, and by acting according to precepts they formulated in their

minds, band and tribal peoples transcend first nature; indeed, as social

beings who act consciously upon the world, they manipulate their environments as best they can, indeed change them. In this respect, band and

tribal peoples open a chasm between themselves and first nature for

which there is no precedent in first nature, either in degree or in kind.

Even more disturbing for ecomystical and primitivistic notions of

‘primitive’ sensibilities, the spiritual views of aboriginal cultures often pit

them against their environment. The exigencies of life in a demanding

world usually throw aboriginals into competition with other life-forms, a

conflict that may lead to severe environmental changes that render a

given habitat unfit for other animals. These changes, in turn, may result

in the complete extermination of food animals, indeed their wanton

destruction on a large scale.

It insults the intelligence of aboriginal peoples to burden their lifeways

and spirituality with New Age interpretations that make them more selfless and less opportunistic in satisfying their material needs than modern

people. Although aboriginal methods of dealing with a given environment differ appreciably from modern ones, no human beings could survive if they fatuously sacrificed their own needs for food, shelter, and

self-defense in favor of other species — unless, to be sure, they attained a

modern level of technical development that left them sufficiently privileged and leisured to be concerned about the welfare of non-human

creatures: that is, unless they were well-fed, well-housed, and affluent —

like many ecomystics and primitivists today.

----

I do not wish to deprecate the good intentions of many ecomystics and

primitivists who ferventiy urge us to develop a ‘Paleolithic consciousness’

out of a concern for protecting the biosphere. But certain troubling features of that ‘consciousness’ stand in the way of achieving so laudable an

end.

To begin with, modern people certainly are not like Paleolithic or ‘ice

age’ people. During the Euro-American ice ages, probably the great

majority of Paleolithic people, as I have already noted, lived in the relatively warm or balmy climates of Africa and southern Asia. Nor do we

know with any certainty how ice age people and warm-climate people

really viewed the immensely different worlds in which they lived.

Paleolithic people lived in such vasdy diverse climatic and environmental

conditions that they could hardly have shared a common sensibility — still

less the unified set of values and beliefs that ecomystics and primitivists so

eagerly impute to them.

Values and beliefs in today’s aboriginal communities often do not conform to what ecomystics and primitivists think aboriginal peoples should

think. Aboriginal sensibilities are generally more pragmatic and less ‘spiritual’ than Max Oelschlaeger in *The Idea of Wilderness* would have us

believe.[179] As foragers, they have to know their enemies from their friends.

They have to understand the behavior and habits of the animals they

hunt, often in competition with animal predators. They have to develop

practical techniques for coaxing herds into traps and develop systematic,

carefully coordinated methods of hunting large, dangerous game lest they

themselves become victims of the animals they hunt. In the uncertain

and precarious wodd in winch they five, these problems could be almost

endless.

In the fight of these realities, many of Oelschlaeger’s notions of

‘Paleolithic consciousness’ are far-fetched. Some seem to rest on inferences made from modern aboriginal values, which may have fitde to do

with ‘Paleolithic values’. Indeed, many values held by aboriginal peoples

today are likely to have been significantly shaped by their centuries-long

contact with Western and Islamic cultures.

Oelschlaeger means to convey the idea that Paleofithic foragers spiritually viewed their world as pristine, and regarded first nature as ‘feminine’ , ‘alive’ , and ‘sacred’, a world in which time ‘folded into an eternal

mythical present’ and ‘ritual was essential to maintaining the natural and

cyclical order of life and death.’[180]

Yet Oelschlaeger is looking back upon the Paleofithic world — which

lasted some two million years and which including hominids and humans

that ranged from Australopithecines through *Homo erectus*, Neanderthals,

prot o-*Homo sapiens sapiens*, and modern *Homo sapiens sapiens* — from a

naively retrospective view. He infers from modern romanticizations of

band and tribal peoples the ‘consciousness’ that a wide variety of hominid

and human species held in a world that was extremely varied and notable

for its different and fluctuating environments.

----

To begin with, the very concept of ‘Nature’ involves a long process of

abstraction that reaches well into historical times. A duality between the

natural and unnatural is necessary to bring the natural into clear relief

conceptually. Paleofithic foragers, to be sure, were probably thoroughly

informed about their habitat; indeed, a pragmatic and highly concrete

knowledge of its features would have been indispensable for the survival

and well-being of *any* foraging community. In this respect, our

Paleofithic ancestors were no different from ourselves: they had, in

effect, to be ‘street wise’ , completely familiar with strategies to survive.

But they would have been unable to distinguish contrasts between the

natural and unnatural, or to call their own world natural, for what we

blithely call ‘Nature’ was *all* that existed around them and all they could

have possibly known — that is, their habitat. The concept of Nature, in

effect, could have emerged only when human beings began to transform

the natural world significantly enough to bring what was not Nature into

relief against a notion of Nature.

Nor is it clear that Paleofithic foragers thought of the natural world as

‘intrinsically feminine’ — whatever Oelschlaeger means by this — unless

we are referring to a Mother Earth Goddess or an all-pervasive, pantheistic feminine principle associated with fertility. The very notion of a

Mother Earth goddess is a blatantly anthropomorphic interpretation of

ordinary natural facts of life. Such goddesses are usually embodied as distinctiy *human* deities with female breasts, buttocks, legs, and heads. We

cannot even be sure that some female representations, like the goddess

Astarte, signified a maternal principle in any general sense. In any case,

goddesses like Astarte are not Paleofithic; they seem to have emerged for

the first time in Neolithic and Bronze Age societies, which already

approached the high civilizations of historical times.

The most widely cited evidence for the claims that ice age foragers

‘regarded nature as intrinsically feminine’ are the ‘goddess’ figurines — the

‘Venuses’ — found in upper Paleofithic caves and in early or middle

Neolithic dwellings. The assumption that these remains are almost exclusively deities is a matter of pure faith rather than accurate knowledge; nor

has much attention been given to the uses to which similar ‘Venuses’

have been put by aboriginal peoples in modern times.

Margaret Ehrenberg, in her splendid study, *Women in Prehistory* , warns

us that these Stone Age figurines by no means support the notion that a

Mother Goddess religion. — or, I would add, a view of Nature as ‘intrinsically feminine’ — pervaded prehistory. Such figurines may well have

been used for pragmatic and magical ends rather than for reverential and

religious ones. Ehrenberg writes:

The use of figurines in sympathetic magic to aid fertility is attested in

many ethnographic examples and may have been perceived as even more

important in societies where the link between male impregnation and

childbirth was not fully understood . A woman wishing for a child would

make, or have made, a model either of herself pregnant, or more commonly in known ethnographic examples — of the hoped-for child, perhaps

shown as the adult they would eventually become. She might then carry

the image around, perhaps sleep alongside it, or use it to perform other

rituals.[181]

Such practices, Ehrenberg tells us, occur among a number of West

African and American Indian tribes. Once the woman became pregnant,

the figurine would be discarded, in much the same way that a sorcerer or

shaman discards a representational figurine after completing a magical

ritual. ‘The fact that both Paleolithic and many Neolithic figurines are

commonly found within houses and home bases, and often among

debris, would strengthen this possibility, if the image could be cast aside

once it had fulfilled its function, while the idea of discarding the image of

a specific deity seems less likely.’

----

It is undeniable that goddesses existed in high civilizations throughout

the world — at times as creative deities, at other times as destructive ones,

at still other times both, but by no means always holding a supreme

status in diverse pantheons. Goddesses, earth or otherwise, abounded

throughout the pagan world and, in the Mary image, in Christian societies. But Ehrenberg’s highly suggestive hypothesis that female figurines

do not a ‘Mother Eardi goddess’ religion make — indeed, that the figurines were merely magical and highly personal fertility symbols — is far

more plausible than the belief that they enjoyed pantheistic supremacy in

the Paleolithic world.

What casts even more doubt on the existence of an upper Paleolithic

Mother Earth goddess religion is evidence that many upper Paleolithic

figurines are not exclusively female. As Prichard E. Leakey observes,

citing fifty-seven engravings of isolated human heads on the walls of the

La Marche cave in Western France: ‘the so-called Venuses, statuettes

with bulbous buttocks and breasts ... supposedly embody a fertility or

mother-god image. Statuettes of this type are certainly very striking in

their emphatic sexuality.’ But, Leakey warns,

Of the many hundreds of carved figures so far discovered throughout

Europe, some can be identified as female, although most of these have natural rather than exaggerated proportions, some are clearly male, but most

are, to our eyes at least, sexless , The idea of a continent-wide cult of the

mother-god, symbolized by the bulbous ‘Venuses*, appears to have been

greatly overstated.[182]

Perhaps the earliest known Paleolithic figurine, at this writing, is that of

a male, found in a cave some 32,000 years ago at Hohlenstein, Germany.

He seems to be wearing a lion’ s mask or have a lion’ s head and a male

body, not unlike ancient Egyptian deities that were part human and part

animal. It is impossible to say whether the figurine signifies a deity, a

shaman, or a ‘big man’ endowed with community respect, but it was

decidedly not female.

No less dramatic are the full-face carvings and wall-sketched profiles of

male individuals who are remarkably individuated. Staring in fascinating

detail and with arresting strength of character — a distinct personality and

a dignified mein — is the head of a man, carefully sculpted from the ivory

of a mammoth tusk, found near Dolni Vestonice in Czechoslovakia. The

head dates back to some 26,000 years ago.

Upper Paleolithic sketches show men in profile whose appearance is

very individuated, indeed, who seem like playful caricatures, as witness

the engraved (largely male) human faces from La Marche.[183] In fact, upper

Paleolithic peoples may have created artistic works for purposes no more

magical than artists have today — notably portraiture and head carvings

that were meant to delight or to record an image of an individual for

posterity — or simply as graffiti. We can only guess at what they were

meant to convey: in some cases probably magical figures, in others fertility figures, and still odiers striedy personal sketches, including caricatures.

To lump all of these figures together as ‘feminine’ symbols of all-living

Nature is to read back, over a span of 30,000 years, a vision that all too

many mystics *want* Paleolithic people to have believed — not what is

revealed by the evidence at hand.

----

If it is true that, for Paleolithic foragers, ‘the entire wodd of plants and

animals, even the land itself, was sacred,’ as Oelschlaeger asserts,[184] this

assumption would hardly make them unique, even by comparison with

much-maligned Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. In his very influential

‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ , Lynn White, Jr, gave a

warped image of the Christian tradition as inherendy antinaturalistic.[185]

Although by no means alone in this fine of thinking, White’s overwhelming subjectivist and ideological explanation of the present ecological crisis greatly contributed to the ecomystical and New Age accounts

of ecological problems that are so pervasive today.

However much ecomystics and primitivists may quote biblical scriptures that assign to man ‘lordship’ — more properly, *stewardship8 — over the

biosphere, the fact is that Yahweh in Genesis is no less fecund and

creative than any Mother Earth goddess. In scripture, the Judeo-Christian deity created the universe, light, and all manner of living

beings. He created a ‘garden in Eden in the east’ , causing ‘every kind of

tree that is pleasing to see and good to eat’ to ‘grow from the ground’

(Genesis 2:8–9). He is an aesthetic as well as a functional deity. He is also

an adoring biologist who causes ‘the water [to] teem with an abundance

of living creatures, and [lets] birds fly above the earth under the ceding of

the sky.’ Apparently biocentric in His oudook, despite assigning the role

of stewardship to ‘man’ , He even creates ‘the great monsters of the sea

and all living animals, those that teem in the waters, according to their

kind, and every winged bird, according to its kind’ . He blesses them and

enjoins them to be ‘fruitful and increase in number, fill the waters of the

sea, and let the birds increase on the earth’ (Genesis 1:20–23).

Indeed, Ecclesiastes informs us that ‘God wants to test [humans] and

let them see that *they themselves* are animals. For the destiny of humanity

and animal is identical: death for one as for the other. Both have the *same*

• spirit*; humans have *no superiority* over animals for all passes away like

wind. Both go to the same place, both come from dust and return to

dust’ (Genesis 3:18–20, emphasis added). Could biocentrists ask more of

the most generous Mother Earth goddess in religious literature, east or

west?

The ‘sacredness’ of the world would have not been specific to

Paleolithic foragers, then, assuming with Oeschlaeger that they held such

a view, or for that matter, to contemporary Judaism and Christianity,

which are consistently disdained by ecomystics and primitivists as ‘anti-naturalistic’ . The attempt to impute to Paleolithic foragers a uniquely

naturalistic spirituality to which we must somehow return — despite all

we actually know today about the causes of phenomena that were

complete mysteries to them — reflects not only bad anthropology but

disquieting naivety.

----

• Any* religion that included a creator deity, male or female, treated the

creator’s work as divine or ‘sacred’ . Indeed, far more problematical today

is whether Paleolithic foragers were actually religious in the sense that we

ordinarily define that word, or whether their belief systems, to the extent

that we can guess what they were, were mainly pragmatic and instrumental.

What ‘primitives’ really believed may be very different from what is

generally supposed. Nearly all foraging societies known to modern

anthropologists had already been affected by Western cultural mores and

religions before trained Euro-American investigators reached them.

Artifacts from Paleolithic foragers allow us to make *guesses* about what

they thought, but in an era awash with mysticism like our own, it is necessary to show great prudence in making inferences about the figurines,

sketches, paintings, and other materials from late Paleolithic caves — and

not to leap from these remains to mystical notions about the psychological ‘archetypes’ and ‘innate’ gender sensibilities, so much in vogue today.

Aside from their aesthetic value, these Paleolithic remains seem to be

primarily magical in function, particulady those that depict animals.[186]

Paintings, drawings, and sculptures that survive from the Aurignacian and

Magdalenian foragers of some 30,000 years ago in the caves of southern

France and the Spanish Pyrenees (the so-called classic area of the late

Paleolithic remains) commonly depict animals, in some cases clearly being

attacked by hunters. Are these depictions magical efforts to assure success

in the hunt? Are they evidence of magical efforts to increase the dwindling population of overhunted game animals? Do they reveal a respectful

attitude toward the animals pursued? These questions are impossible to

answer — nor are there any Paleolithic hunters around to answer them

for us.

In fact, the range of functions these paintings, sculptures, and drawings

had may have been legion. Circular incised dots on an ivory plaque suggest that Paleolithic people may have developed some sort of calendar; a

cave lion engraved on a stalagmite is pitted by marks that suggest it was

used as a target for throwing stones. Many animals are depicted in such

amazing and sensitive detail that it is hard to suppose some aesthetic

intention was not as important as ‘religious’ ones. Hunting scenes may

have been painted to celebrate episodes of specific hunts rather than as

magical and ritual symbols, or they may have been used to instruct the

young in hunting techniques. Although most paintings and sketches portray animals, hundreds of them depict human beings — and of both sexes.

A multitude of possibilities could have led our late Paleolithic ancestors to produce the artifacts, figurines, and paintings in their caves and

dwelling sites. The most likely common denominator that provides us

with a plausible account of the animal figures and the scenes involving

them is that they served the ends of sympathetic magic: the simulation by

means of figurines, paintings, and drawings of successful events, like

hunts and pregnancies. They are hardly evidence of‘reverence’ either for

a nim als or for a Nature that presides over human welfare and destiny.

Such concepts are strikingly historical, as distinguished from prehistorical,

more the products of civilization than we would like to think. Again,

a concept like Nature has meaning only to people who have already

created ‘unnatural’ environments like villages, towns, and cities, pushing

forests and wildlife back to ever more secluded areas where they did not

interfere with such ‘unnatural’ activities as agriculture and urban life.

It is eminently reasonable to suppose that the paintings and sculpture

we find in Paleolithic caves and dwelling places had basically pragmatic

functions. They were most likely meant to assure success in pregnancies

and hunts and help people acquire the material means of life. Magic and

the implements used to deploy it were ultimately guided by an everyday

means-ends or instrumental rationality — not simply by a mysterious ‘wisdom’ about an incomprehensible Nature — to acquire meat, skins, bones

for implements, and the like. We cannot fault Paleolithic foragers for

employing specious magical techniques that, apart from the confidence

they gave them, in no way enhanced their success. The figures painted

on cave walls were *not* the living animals they hunted, and the images

that they or their shamans depicted were strictly analogies. As such, they

were no more effective in luring game into the range of their weapons

than a board game of Monopoly makes its players wealthy or poor.

Whether these magical practices enhanced their respect for animals or

wilderness is doubtful. The attitudes of modern band and tribal peoples

toward the game they kill, even toward their domesticated animals like

dogs, are anything but gende. Suffice it to say that respect is a vague

word, with multiple meanings. To ecomystics and primitivists it might

mean love, awe, reverence, a religious intuition, or ‘biophilia — some

allegedly instinctive longing for wilderness and wildlife. All of these

possibilities actually presuppose a host of unstated beliefs or beg the

questions they are meant to answer.

If anything meaningful can be said about Paleolithic paintings and

carvings, it is that the foragers who produced them held a pragmatic

belief in the power of magic, or what Sir James Frazier regarded as

primitive man’s science.[187] That our prehistoric ancestors held such belief

systems is completely understandable in view of how litde they knew

about the often frightening natural forces that determined their wellbeing. What is incomprehensible is that millions of ostensibly civilized

people today, even educated urban dwellers, firmly believe that

Paleolithic and modern aboriginal beliefs provide a more valid, insightful, and superior account of the natural world than the brilliant explanations given by modern science.

----

That magic was not the sole component of Paleolithic ideologies is suggested by basic belief systems found among aboriginal peoples almost

everywhere: the belief in spirits, in visions, and in spectral powers that

were either beneficent or harmful and in one way or another had to be

propitiated — a belief, alas, that is only too present today, in our chrome-plated techno-industrial-cybemetic society.[188]

Judging from what we know about existing band and tribal peoples,

probably all Paleolithic people believed in the existence of ‘spirits’, a

‘spirit world’, and later some kind of spiritism. What is the source of their

beliefs, how did they develop, and what attitudes toward wildlife and

wilderness did they reflect?

The most likely source of primitive spiritism seems to be dreams, a

night-world sort of wisdom that is still practiced among ecomystics today.

Among aboriginal believers, spiritism gives supernatural explanations for

phenomena that we can now explain in strictly naturalistic and scientific

terms.[189] Aboriginals who lack an understanding of dream images (a vexing

problem even until well into modern times) would take recourse to

spirits to explain the reappearance of the dead in dreams, or the occurrence of bizarre events in sequences that were out of the ordinary.

Dreaming itself would have suggested the existence of another world,

possibly more potent one than the waking world, a *spirit* world that presides over human welfare and to which the individual and the community held some sort of obligation. This sense of obligation may have been

induced by outright fear — not necessarily by ‘reverence’. Shamans

embroidered tins spirit world into a complex universe in its own right,

embellishing dream materials in ways that gave these often cynical practitioners considerable personal power and many material privileges. Since

dreams can be very complex, bizarre, and frightening, people who could

not account for them would be vulnerable to the claims of any canny

individual who professed to be able to interpret them, as is the case even

in a secular society like our own that minimizes the importance of the

supernatural. Shamans have always been available to give interpretations

of inexplicable occurrences for suitable rewards.

The shamanistic imagination should not be underestimated: it can be a

formidable power in elaborating myths as well as magical practices.

Figures on late Paleolithic cave walls suggest that they were present very

early on in foraging cultures. They probably provided increasingly complex magical techniques, devised assorted myths and rituals, explained the

meaning of individual dreams, and preyed on collective fears, especially

those engendered by hghtning, thunder, and earthquakes. Much to their

material advantage, shamans would have exploited these inexplicable

phenomena and given interpretations of portents and dangers in dreams,

as well as more mysterious phenomena like storms, meteorites, comets.

Actually, we probably tend to overstate the simplicity of late

Paleolithic cultures and their resemblance in this respect to band or

tribelike cultures today. There is ample evidence, as I have suggested that

in the great Pyrenees mountain passes, late Paleolithic hunters were

creating hierarchical forms of social organization, mainly gerontocracies,

and fabricating tools on a markedly industrial basis — not unlike handworked assembly lines of present-day vintage. Mass manufacture was not

restricted to modern times by any means.

----

Late Paleolithic foragers, to be sure, knew very well how to survive

under extremely inhospitable conditions. They were familiar with animal

behavior and developed superb techniques for harvesting game. They

knew how to select nutritious food plants and avoid toxic ones. Their

knowledge of their habitats and their ability to gain subsistence horn

them was exceptional in every degree.

But their knowledge about the real sources of climatic, geological, and

stellar events — would have been minimal. Their spiritism was in large

measure a compensation for their ignorance, an attempt to explain the

unknown and all that which was clouded in mystery. In the absence of

authentic knowledge about dreams and seemingly cosmic phenomena,

their shamans contrived a highly imaginative corpus of explanations

structured around analogies and fancies, often blatantly serving social

interests that involved power relationships within and between their

communities.

Much of this knowledge was patently anthropomorphic, filled as it

was with talking animals, mysterious omens, and a multitude of humanlike myths and analogical magical techniques designed to give order,

meaning, and stability to the world. Accordingly, myth, magic, and cosmic narratives made the puzzling and mysterious facts of life comprehensible to human minds. More commonly than not, they were probably

contrived not simply to explain phenomena but to legitimate the authority of emerging hierarchical strata.

To show how the dream and spirit wodds are rendered anthropomorphic and subject to shamanistic control, the belief system of the Makuna

Indians of Colombia is a valuable example. As Kaj Arhem, who spent

two years with these people, observes:

When Makuna men go hunting and fishing they also, in their conception,

carry out an exchange with the animal world, They believe that in another

dimension of reality, all animals are people; they have houses and gardens,

musical instruments and ritual ornaments, chants and dances, as people

do. They are grouped into communities inhabiting particular territories

and also have their headmen, or ‘masters of the animals’. Before major

hunting and fishing expeditions — such as those preceding the [community’s] Spirit Dance — a shaman must visit the long houses of the fish and

game animals and negotiate with their headmen. The shaman offers them

spirit foods, coca and snuff, and is promised fish and game in exchange.[190]

What is intriguing about the Makuna cosmology is not only the reciprocity between humans and animals and the active role shamans play in

negotiating the interactions between the two; this can be expected in

most animistic views of reality. But the ‘spirit world’ in Makuna cosmology mirrors in every detail all the features of Makuna society and culture.

That is to say, Makuna society is completely extrapolated into a spirit

world.

What is reality here, and what is not? Do the Makuna regard the animal world as sacred, or have they merely recreated animals as spirits that

institutionally and culturally suit their own needs? Indeed, where does

the patent anthropomorphism of the Makuna turn into a *de facto* anthropocentrism that transmutes all animals into human beings — socially as

well as individually — thereby rendering them objects of human manipulation in shamanistic ‘negotiations’? The fact that the Makuna ‘animals’

behave like human beings and are organized into distinctly human social

institutions with headmen is a patently anthropomorphic view of the

‘spirit world’ that cleady belies the popular myth that aboriginal peoples

identify with non-human life-forms. It is not humans who ostensibly

become’ or even co-exist with animals; it is animals who apparently

become human.

Nor does it follow that, because the Makuna have turned animals and

their communities into exact replicas of their societies, they believe that

the entire world is ‘alive,’ as many ecomystics and primitivists claim.

‘Animism’ , as the nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Tylor

called the view that *everything* in the world is living, by no means leads to

seeing life everywhere in one’s surroundings. Tylor’s assertion that an

American Indian would ‘reason with a horse as if rational’ should not be

taken to mean that an Indian regarded inanimate things *as such* as alive.[191]

Aboriginal peoples are not so absurd as to view stones and horses, for

example, as equally alive. However ‘animistically’ they regard the natural

world in theory, in practice they apply their animistic views with considerable discretion. In everyday life, as Bronislaw Malinowski has shown,

they dealt with rocks and animals on very different terms, just as many

religiously inclined people today separate their belief systems from the

practical demands of survival in the mundane world.[192] When A. Irving

Hallowell asked an old Ojibwa Indian if ‘*all* the stones we see about us

here [are] alive’ , he received a very shrewd response. ‘No!’ replied the

old Ojibwa emphatically, ‘But *some* are’ Perhaps he meant those that

were useful in one way or another to his people.[193]

None of these observations are meant to claim that techniques discovered by band and tribal peoples are lacking in practical value* Quite to

the contrary: if anyone today wanted to hunt mammoths, mastodons,

giant sloths, and longhorn bison with spears and with bows and arrows,

the lore about animal behavior accumulated by our late Paleolithic

ancestors might indeed be invaluable* Should a time come when society

returns to a world of ‘scattered human population that lives by fishing,

hunting, and food-gathering’ , as Edward Abbey suggests, we might want

to invoke their ‘wisdom’.[194] Perhaps we could ‘re-enchant’ the world

with the fables that they believed in — assuming we could empty our

heads of all the scientific and technical knowledge that presumably burdens our civilization* Whether such a return or revival is possible in a

culture that knows a great deal about phenomena that were complete

mysteries to men and women of the remote Paleolithic period, the

reader will have to decide.

----

The notion that their ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ fostered in our distant

ancestors a conservationist and respectful attitude toward wildlife, forests,

and the various ecosystems they inhabited is perhaps the main reason that

the virtues of a revived ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ are promoted today by

ecomystics and primitivists, few of whom are themselves likely to really

befieve that animals live under headmen in a: ‘spirit world’ or that the

dream world is as real as the objective world around them.

How ‘Paleolithic’ or ‘primitive’ are modern aborigines, who seem to

live like our Paleolithic ancestors and presumably provide us with evidence of the prehistoric world? Most anthropologists now agree that the

foraging communities they encounter have already been profoundly

altered by earlier Euro-American contact, particularly by missionaries,

traders, and soldiers. As the eminent social anthropologist Clifford Geertz

warns: the remote ‘ “out-of-the-way 55 peoples’ whom cultural anthropologists in the past studied as ‘natural communities’ were not relics of

the distant past. Geertz writes:

The realization, grudging and belated, that this is not so, not even with

the Pygmies, not even with the Eskimos, and that these people are in fact

products of larger-scale processes of social change which have made them

and continue to make them what they are — has come as something of a

shock that has induced a virtual crisis in the field [of anthropology].[195]

The 15,000 or 20,000 years that have passed since the late Paleolidiic

were not a cultural and social vacuum but deeply affected even the most

isolated aboriginal peoples today. Today’s ‘primitives’ — and they are disappearing like snowflakes in a summer heat wave — underwent complex

developments that separate them from the late Paleolithic peoples whose

remains are the objects of extravagant fantasies.

In the 1960s many anthropologists adopted idealized visions of‘primitive’ innocence and well-being. A ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium, held at

the University of Chicago in April 1969, promulgated a myth of ‘affluent’ foraging cultures and the existence of pristine ‘primitive’ communities.[196] It gave the mystical ‘counterculture’ and later New Age children an

idea that they wanted to hear: namely, that civilization is bad, and that

neo-primitives (an oxymoron) adorned with flowers and beads are

deliriously good* Various ‘Pleistocene’, ‘Paleolithic’ , and ‘early Neolithic’

spiritualities sprouted up like mushrooms after a rain.

Careful research done since the ‘Man the Hunter’ conference indicates

that people in foraging cultures suffered and suffer from considerable

material insecurity. Monographic material reviewing aborigines at various levels of‘primitivity’ are at odds with 1960s myths that our ancestors

enjoyed ‘affluence’ and lived enviably pacific or untroubled fives. Many

of the modern-day foragers whom anthropologists once described as

enjoying ‘affluent’ , even leisurely fives actually suffered serious material

deprivations, and their fives were often quite short.

Nor should we be under any illusions that aboriginal foragers are a

direct continuation of Paleolithic foragers; rather, they were driven from

stable, largely horticultural ways of life into inhospitable deserts and

forests* The Kalahari desert San people, or Bushmen, are a striking case

in point, as Edwin N. Wilmsen and his colleagues have shown.[197] These

hunter-gatherers, so widely celebrated in the pop anthropology literature

of the past few decades as a leisurely and materially secure people, seem

to have undergone several transitions from food cultivators and pastoralists to hunter-gatherers. To call them Paleolithic, let alone idealize their

fifeways as ‘affluent’ , is arguable to say the least. Their much-lauded

cooperative oudook and tendency to share things was easily undermined

in recent decades, and they now seem to be as acquisitive as the

Europeans with whom they have been favorably contrasted.

Reasonable speculations based on similar facts can be made about

many other present-day bands that were probably pushed back into

inhospitable areas by competing tribes as well as by Europeans, and who

were obliged to use very simple, often attenuated tool-kits by comparison with the more advanced techniques they had developed earlier*

Some were forced to adopt simpler and less satisfactory ways of life

because of invaders and competitors for resources. Thus the Yuqui

Indians, ‘discovered’ in the 1950s, initially seemed free of European

influence and ‘blessed’ with tools that were even more primitive than

those of late Paleolithic peoples of some 30,000 years ago.[198] The Yuqui

had never seen Europeans until their lands were invaded by missionaries

(whom they initially killed) and the Amazon jungle near their community domain was deforested. They wore no clothing, and their weapons

consisted exclusively of bows and arrows. They had no tools apart from

the clawed legs of animals.

But significantly, their society had a slave caste, and after further study,

anthropologists have good reason to befieve that their ancestors had once

had a fairly complex horticultural society with pottery and social hierarchies. They became foragers because centuries earlier they were obliged

to flee farther and farther into the Amazon forest to escape predatory

European colonists, until they lost all memory of their past.

----

Present-day band and tribal peoples must have undergone considerable

cultural changes since the late Paleolithic. Indeed, due not only to their

contact with other cultures, as well as Euro-American ones, they probably differ considerably from their own ancestors of only a few centuries

ago.

Our early ancestors were probably not hunters, despite many claims by

primitivists and sociobiologists that human beings are genetically predisposed to hunt or have an inborn love of wildlife. As I have noted ealier,

archaeological artifacts and a growing body of anthropological opinion

now support the view that, until the middle Paleofithic, about a million

years ago, early hominids were more likely to be the prey than the predator. Using stone implements to crack open the long bones of herbivores

for marrow, they were more likely scavengers than predators.

This way of acquiring protein-rich foods countervails the present-day

image of ‘man the hunter’. As Robert J. Blumenschine and John A.

Cavallo observe: ‘This question [of Man the Hunter] matters perhaps as

much as any in evolutionary studies because it touches on the definition

of human nature. Unfortunately, the answer given by the theory of Man

the Hunter is based more on sexual and other prejudices than on the

fossil record and the ecology of finding food.’[199] The literature on this subject has grown so considerably that the conclusion of‘man the scavenger’

is now becoming the conventional wisdom of paleoanthxopologists.

After tracing the ‘Man the Hunter’ notion from the 1969 conference,

Blumenschine and Cavallo show that closer studies in the late 1970s and

the 1980s produced increasing evidence that our hominid and even

• Homo* ancestors were sophisticated scavengers, gaining an edge on other

scavengers by developing increasingly effective crushing and cutting

tools. Although the opportunistic hunting of small animals probably

always existed among hominids and humans, it is likely that until human

beings developed projectile weapons like spears and later bows and

arrows, they scavenged on the prey of powerful predators, particularly

leopards, who often leave their partly eaten kill in trees. Their sharp cutting tools and hand axes may have given them key advantages over other

scavengers: they could quickly butcher animal remains before they were

driven away by large predators, and they could crush open long bones

that contained nutritious marrow and that even hyenas, with their powerful jaws, could not crack open. This scavenger position has been supported most recently by the detailed studies of Donald Johanson, the

discoverer of the Lucy fossil, and his colleagues.[200]

In what paleoanthropologists increasingly call the ‘Human

Revolution’ — reflected in changes in the technological and artistic evidence of *Homo sapiens sapiens* in Europe some 40,000 years ago — a rich

repertoire of implements was developed, as well as art, with a rapidity

and on a scale that has no precedent in earlier times. In part, tins revolution can be attributed to the development of syllabic languages; partly,

too, the revolution can be attributed to a very rich cultural evolution, the

elaboration of human communal ties into fairly complex social institutions like clans and probably tribal forms of organization.

In a sense, human beings as we know them had arrived. They were

rich in potentialities for self-consciousness, complex communication,

rationality, cooperation, and social organization, marked by innovative

abilities and a capacity to know, intervene, and change the natural world

purposefully to a degree unknown to any other life-form.

How did these people deal with the world *practically*, whatever their

spiritual equipment may have been? “What can we tell from the archaeological and ethnographic evidence about Paleofithic attitudes toward

conservation and wildlife? How ecological were they in dealing with

other life-forms *existentially*, not only spiritually?

We have every reason to befieve that as far back as the times of *Homo erectus*, our ancestors were prepared to alter their ‘wild’ environment in

every way that served their advantage. Having gained the ability to use

fire, *erectus* probably burned away forests to create grasslands on which

game were to subsist for millions of years. Moreover, we have every

reason to suspect that *erectus* cunningly used torches to stampede game

animals over cliffs and chase off predators to gain access to their kills.

If *Homo erectus* altered the environment over time with fire, it is certain

that more evolved forms of the human genus did so on a sweeping scale.

Much of what seems like original grassland in Eurasia, Africa, and the

Americas might still be covered by dense forests were it not for the burnings our distant ancestors systematically practiced over many thousands of

years. Indeed, large parts of pre-Columbian America looked more like

parkland than forest at the time of European contact, because of the

repeated fires native peoples fit to provide open spaces for large herbivores, for the removal of brush that could conceal their enemies, and for

gardening.

As Stephen J. Pyne observes in his detailed study, *Fire in America*, ‘the

virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For this condition, Indian fire practices were largely responsible.’[201]

Evidence of human activities in dense forest areas appear to be sufficientiy widespread for modern anthropologists and botanists to question

how ‘original’ many tropical forests actually were, even in the Amazon

and certainly in tropical Africa.

----

Our Paleolithic ancestors, like any other life-form, almost certainly used

their habitats to the full. In North America, the retreat of the last glaciers

about 11,000 years ago was marked by the rapid extinction of more than

80 per cent of the great Pleistocene mammals — an immensely higher

percentage of extinctions than those that occurred in the immediate

postglacial period on other continents. As Paul S. Martin has put it, the

last retreat of the glaciers in America was probably marked by ‘overkill’

of large mammals, primarily by peoples with increasingly sophisticated

weapons and hunting techniques.[202] Long before Europeans landed on

American shores, fauna like the mammoth, mastodon, giant ground

sloth, huge armadillos, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, large beavers,

and various bear species, as well as camels and horses — which had

evolved on the continent and survived only because they had migrated

to Eurasia — were completely gone.

Some have tried to explain the disappearance of these species as a

result of the ecological changes that followed the retreat of the glaciers.

Perhaps, but many of these mammals had survived previous glacial and

interglacial alterations, giving us little reason to suppose they could not

survive the last of the postglacial climatic and ecological changes. What

makes it difficult to accept an explanation based entirely on climatic

change is the fairly recent discovery of a remarkably well-preserved

mastodon, an animal presumably dependent upon the widely prevalent

spruce-tree environments of the glacial period. The stomach remains of

this extinct animal indicate that it had adapted quite satisfactorily to the

bog-type environment favored by animals like the moose, which was

widespread in the immediate postglacial world.

Significantly, the many ecological niches opened by these extinctions

of Pleistocene fauna in North America were subsequently occupied by

the Old World animals, which gave North America its celebrated character as a biotic ‘paradise’: short-horned bison, elk, moose, caribou,

bighorn sheep, and the like. Unlike camels and horses, these animals did

not evolve on the American continent but rather migrated to it from

Eurasia.

Still, we are not obliged to accept the ‘overkill’ argument to agree that

many now-extinct fauna were hunted down by proto-Indian foragers

and ultimately exterminated, without any ‘spiritual’ restrictions on their

ways. Whatever their ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ may have been, they were

prepared to hunt game with few ‘spiritual’ constraints. Deep layers of

bison bones have been found at the foot of cliffs, over which Indians

stampeded thousands of animals for centuries, probably in numbers that

far exceeded the uses to which their carcasses could have been put.

Accumulations of bones at one site examined by Brian Reeves of the

University of California reached a depth of thirty-five feet. At still

another site. Jack Brink of the Archaeological Survey of Alberta estimates

that, over the centuries, 123,000 bison were stampeded over a single

‘jump site’ by Indian hunters. As Brian Fagan observes in his survey of

such cliff sites, ‘the Blackfoot practiced bison hunting and butchering on

a near-industrial scale for many centuries’, settling down nearby in semipermanent camps, ‘trading the spoils of the chase to people living long

distances away.’[203]

Native Americans were by no means the only foraging peoples who

engaged in the massive and systematic killing of animals. Late Paleolithic

hunters in Syria, for example, seem to have learned how to ‘funnel’

gazelles into killing and butchering sites during their seasonal migrations

until they were completely exterminated.[204] In Pyrenean passes and other

mountain areas, such practices occurred until game was virtually or completely wiped out. Indeed, fertility rituals may have been a very practical

response to the decline of the great faunal herd animals that had fallen

prey to late Paleolithic foragers. The disappearance of these game animals

can hardly be attributed to climatic changes alone. The domestication of

animals may even have preserved certain species whose extinction was at

risk, as the hunting prowess of late Paleolithic peoples became increasingly sophisticated and deadly.

No native American hunting practices, to be sure, exculpate the

massive extermination of wildlife that followed the settlement of the

Americas by Europeans. The destruction of the great bison herds on the

plains — possibly exceeding forty million in two or three decades — by

white hunters in the nineteenth century has no equal among native

peoples. I wish only to emphasize that the American Indian, Pyrenean,

and Syrian hunters of thousands of years ago did no more than what any

animal would have done: they tried to find ample quantities of food and

good shelter — in short, to survive and to use their intelligence to make

their fives as comfortable as possible.

----

Nor is there any reason to believe that quasi-religious scruples about the

‘sacredness’ of life made our prehistoric ancestors necessarily kinder or

gender in their treatment of wildlife than people axe today.

Modern aborigines notoriously mistreated the animals they caught,

often indicting needless pain upon them. For generations, gardening

peoples in Borneo made a practice of killing pigs by furiously beating

them to death, on the theory that their roasted fiesh was particularly

tender after these practices. Eskimos were extremely harsh in dealing with

their huskies, often kicking and striking them with little or no compunction, as were many Plains Indians in their treatment of their own dogs.

Colin Turnbull, in his generous and appreciative account of the Ituri

forest pygmies of Central Africa, was shocked to see how a sindula, a

tasty dogfike creature, was tormented after it was caught in a net following a collective hunt. Repeatedly speared to the laughter of the pygmies,

observes a shocked Turnbull, the animal ‘still writhed and fought’ until ‘a

third spear pierced its heart’, and it was finally put out of its misery.

Turnbull reports:

At other times I have seen Pygmies singeing feathers off birds that were

still alive, explaining that the meat is more tender if death comes slowly .

And the hunting dogs, valuable as they are, get kicked around mercilessly

from the day they are born to the day they die... When I talked to the

Pygmies about their treatment of animals, they laughed at me and said,

‘The forest has given us animals for food — should we refuse this gift and

starve?’ I thought of turkey farms and Thanksgiving, and of the millions

of animals reared by our own society with the sole intention of slaughtering them for food.[205]

These are the remarks not of an arrogant European but of an anthropologist whose affection for the pygmies is attested in every fine of his

writings.

My point is not to exculpate abuses of animals today by adducing abusive attitudes among ‘primitive’ peoples — cruelty to animals is inhuman

and insupportable wherever and whenever it is practiced. But it is the

height of naivety to suppose that because Paleolithic or modern foragers

occasionally exercised a pragmatic restraint on killing certain species or

tabooed them altogether, they regarded them or their fives as ‘sacred’.

Often a wide gulf existed between what they seemed to believe (generally for very utilitarian reasons) and what they actually practiced.

Seemingly uplifting exclamations by certain *modern* native American

shamans and spokespeople, for example — to the effect that the wolf,

bison, bear, or eagle is ‘our cousin’ or ‘our brother’ — do not mean that

their ancestors treated these animals with fervent consanguinity only a

few generations earlier.

Rituals centering on food animals like bison or bears were often performed for very practical reasons: to ‘coax’ them into becoming prey

during a hunt or to allay their ‘spirits’ after they were killed. The pragmatic core of these ceremonies rested on analogical premises that are no

different in principle from childish fears of encountering werewolves or

vampire bats. Their ceremonies took the form they did because they

knew little about the biotic factors that produce game for hunts. To early

peoples, spirits abounded everywhere, not because they thought everything was alive but because the dream world itself was a continual source

of perplexity. These spirits were not necessarily benign; indeed, if anything, they were often malevolent. Disease, it was believed, was caused

by spirits, as were births, be they of children, bison calves, or bear cubs.

If our late Paleolithic ancestors probably knew little or nothing about

human reproduction, why should they have known more about animal

reproduction? If they believed that human children are created by spirits,

why should they have had a different view of bison calves or bear cubs?

----

Superstition being superstition, aboriginal spirit-beliefs were not only

wrong but often ecologically deleterious. Calvin Martin has recently

opined that before European contact, boreal forest Algonkians were conservationists who hunted selectively, in a ‘contractual’ relationship with

game animals by which both humans and animals agreed not to ‘ruin’

each other. After contact, when the Algonkians died of European diseases in great numbers, they regarded the animals as having violated the

‘contract’ and spread epidemics among the tribes. As a result of this

alleged breach of faith, so Martin’s thesis goes, the Algonkians slaughtered animals wantonly in the belief that they were malevolent disease

agents.[206] This thesis has been strongly controverted; some anthropologists

have found that the Cree, with whom Martin deals, may never have

been conservationists at all.

Indeed, Crees seem to have believed ‘that game animals killed by

hunters spontaneously regenerate after death or reincarnate as fetal

animals’, as Robert A. Brightman observes in a fascinating review of the

literature on their magico-refigious concepts.

Manitoba Crees in the 1980s call this process akwanaham otoskana,

‘[animal] covers its bones’. Such events are taken for granted by some

Cree trappers. I was told on a number of occasions that an adult , trapped

animal was ‘the same one’ that had been killed the previous winter,

Modern Crees also state that ritual procedures for disposing of animal

bones and blood prefigure and influence animal regeneration and rein-carnation. This knowledge was present in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and probably derives from archaic strata of Algonquian culture.[207]

Brightman’s conclusion from Cree attitudes toward animals demonstrates

that ‘ecological wisdom’ depends far more upon knowledge and rationaL

behavior than upon the vagaries of spiritism. Brightman observes:

If hunters are unaware that animals can be managed, they may also be

unaware that they can be hunted to depletion. It cannot be assumed that

Crees and others involved in game depletions initially understood their

own role as determinants. Rather than inhibiting overkillreligious definitions of the human-animal relationship encouraged it insofar as they

premised an environment of primordial abundance in which game could

not be destroyed but only temporarily displaced. Some contemporary Rock

Crees reproduce this traditional understanding, Similarly , some

Osnaburgh House Ojibwas stated in the 1960s that conservation was

unnecessary because animals were ‘given’ to hunters when they were

needed. These understandings are held also by subarctic Athapaskan

groups.[208]

The Ojibwa view that animals are ‘given’ to the hunters, presumably by

beneficent spirits, is very similar to the Ituri forest pygmy’s view, as it was

presented to Turnbull. As we have seen, the pygmies frankly declared

that they could torment animals mercilessly because the forest spirit gave

captured game to their community for their own disposition. In fact,

although there is a certain amount of evidence for conservation among

the forest Indians of North America, far more evidence exists for *lack* of

conservation among forest tribes such as the Montagnais and very strikingly among Iroquoians in the Great Lakes region, who believed that,

‘for all kinds of animals, whether they need them or not, ... they must

kill all they find, for fear, as they say, that if they do not take them the

beasts would go and tell the others how they had been hunted and that

then, in times of want, they would not find any more.’[209] There are as

many, possibly more, reasons for believing that precontact Indian

spiritism fostered overkill of game animals rather than for holding the

ecomystical belief that they lived in ‘fraternal’ solidarity with them.

----

Again, these examples are not intended to defame native American or

African foragers, still less exculpate the predatory behavior of Euro-Americans for their wanton destruction of wildlife environments

throughout the world. I simply wish to explode ecomystical and primitivistic myths that foragers were somehow less pragmatic in dealing with

their environment than any other life-form. In fact, they used it to the

hilt, all their spiritism to the contrary notwithstanding. Moreover, the

relationships of foragers to animals were very tenuous. The fact that late

Paleolithic hunters painted animals on their cave walls or sculpted them

does not mean that they viewed them as ‘brothers’ any more than they

would view a mushroom as kin. The notion that a particular species, or

for that matter, all animals, had a Chief Spirit was no inducement for

treating *individual* animals with any more ‘respect’ than the worship of

God, in the Western world, has made individuals ooze with kindness for

the less fortunate humans in their midst.

If foragers regarded the world as alive, as ecomystics claim, this view

can he explained by the fact that much of it *was* alive. Their world was

largely organic, and it was the *only* world they knew. If it was sacred in

their eyes (assuming they conceived of the sacred in any modern Euro-American sense), it may very well be due to their strong and pragmatic

need to ‘communicate’ with their environment — more realistically, to

• control* it to some degree. Magic and rituals were seen as effective means

of attaining very pragmatic ends and of explaining an unknown spirit

world that appeared in their dreams. Unlike modern humans, they did

not understand the real origins of disease, the causes of sudden changes in

the weather, eclipses, earthquakes, even the full meaning of death.

To extol magico-religious attitudes irrespective of their truthfulness,

simply because they have a superficial affinity with certain ecological sensibilities today is grossly misleading. If modern foragers hold an idyllic

‘Paleolithic spirituality’ as though time had not affected their thinking

after 20,000 years, they hold such beliefs because of ignorance, not

because of any archaic wisdom. Notions celebrated as ‘Paleolithic’ by

modern ecomystics and primitivists rest more on analogy than on supportable ideas, and they are inspired more by a spirit world deriving from

inexplicable dreams than by ecological understanding.

To call for the revival of‘Paleolithic spirituality’ is to ask human beings

to accept ignorance as a value, indeed, to ‘disenchant’ the fascinating

world that has been opened to them by science, philosophy, social

theory, and psychology. Humanity’s hope, I wish to contend, lies not in

a return to a mythopoeic past that was riddled by ignorance and superstition and naive awe; nor does it lie in a passive acceptance of the *status quo*, riddled by greed, competition, and domination. It lies in a future

that will draw from the past whatever is worth retaining, including the

highly cooperative spirit that existed within foraging but largely parochial

‘primitive’ communities on the one hand, as well as the universalism and

sense of human commonality that movements for emancipation have

advocated in the modern era.

If cooperation and universality can be melded together, there is a possibility that a truly rational society might emerge in which a ‘reenchanted’ humanity nourishes a spirituality informed by sharing, a

society informed by cooperation, and by a sensibility that gives due

recognition to the well-being of the natural as well as the social world.

Primitivism stands woefully at odds with any attempt to achieve such a

sensibility. In one sense or another, it seeks to turn back the clock, to go

back to a mythic Golden Age of intellectual and social innocence that

never existed. In the best of cases, primitivism argues for a non-rational

mentality based on contrived myths about ‘primitive reverence’ for a

mystified Nature in which humans can intervene only for the most limited reasons. In the worst of cases, it offers a misanthropic view of

humanity, an identification of Nature with pristine wilderness, and a

hatred of rationality, science, and technology.

Both views are antihumanistic. Resting on deep ecology’s biocentrism, and on a host of ideas developed by postmodernists, they deny the

unique position of humanity in social evolution, or worse, they dissolve

it in a mythic animal-human community that renders any distinctions

between animals and humans impossible to make — ironically depriving

human beings of any responsibility for non-human life and its welfare.

Once again, Harold Fromm’s ‘invisible puppeteer’ is at work, mistaking

the seemingly autonomous antics of the puppets for the puppeteer’s

manipulation of them.

[177] Edward Abbey, ‘A Response to

Schmookler on Anarchy’, *Earth First!*, 1

August 1986, p. 22.

[178] Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical

Environmentalism and the Unmaking of

Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,

1990), p. 237.

[179] Max Oelschlaeger, *The Idea of Wilderness*:

From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

[180] Oelschlaeger, *Idea of Wilderness*, Table 1,

‘Conjectures on a Paleolithic Idea of

Wilderness’, p. 12.

[181] Margaret Ehrenberg, *Women in Prehistory*

(Norman and London: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 75.

[182] Richard E. Leakey, The Making of

Mankind (London: Abacus Books, 1981),

p. 180.

[183] The very old sculptures of human heads

can be seen vividly in National Geographic,

vol. 174, no. 4 (October 1988). The

engravings can be found in Michel

Lorblanchet, ‘From Man to Animal to Sign

in Paleolithic Art’, in Howard Morphy,

ed., Animals into Art (London: Unwin

Hyman, 1989), p. 136.

[184] Max Oelschlager, *The Idea of Wilderness*,

p. 12.

[185] Lynn White, Jr, ‘The Historical Roots of

OurEcologic Crisis’, Science, vol. 155 (10

March 1967), pp. 1203–7.

[186] It should be obvious that I am speaking,

here, of late Paleolithic people — Homo

sapiens sapiens — not Neanderthals, Homo

erect us, Homo hablis, and any remaining

Australopithecines, who can also be

regarded as Paleolithic ‘people’, but who

left no artistic remains behind.

[187] Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough,

1890 edition (New York: Avenue Books,

1981), p. 120.

[188] A belief in the existence of spirits

should not be equated with ‘spirituality’, a

word that can mean anything from the

shared features that make a particular culture distinctive to a belief in a variety of

ineffable, indeed metaphysical phenomena,

be they the product of philosophical speculation or religious vagary. My own use of

this word is primarily philosophical and, to

some degree, cultural; I never use it to

denote ‘spirits’, ‘spiritualism’ (a belief in

spirits of various kinds), or religion of any

kind unless in quotation marks.

[189] I use the word supernatural with reference to aboriginals advisedly. The spirit

world — the dream world — may have

seemed quite ‘natural’ to diem, and the

distinction between sleeping and waking

would have been understandably problematical.

[190] Kaj Arhem, ‘Dance of the Water

People’, Natural History, January 1992,

p. 51.

[191] Edward Tylor, Primitive Cultures

(London: Murray, 1873); excerpted in V.

F. Calverton, The Making of Man: An

Outline of Anthropology (New York:

Modern Library, 1931), p. 646.

[192] See Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic,

Science and Religion and Other Essays

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1945).

[193] A. Irving Hallowell, ‘Ojibwa Ontology,

Behavior, and World View’, in Stanley

Diamond, ed., Culture in History: Essays in

Honor of Paul Radin, (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1960),

pp. 19–52.

[194] Edward Abbey, ‘A Response to

Schmookler’, *Earth First!*, 1 August 1986.

[195] Clifford Geertz, ‘Life on the Edge’, The

New York Review of Books, 7 April 1994,

P-3.

[196] See Richard B. Lee and Irven Devore,

ed., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine

Publishing Company, 1968).

[197] See Edwin N. Wilmsen, Land Filled

With Flies (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1989).

[198] See Allyn Maclean Stearman, Yuqui:

Forest Nomads in a Changing World (Fort

Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

1989).

[199] Robert J. Blumenschine and John A.

Cavallo, ‘Scavenging and Human

Evolution 1 , Scientific American (October

1992), pp, 90–6.

[200] See Donald Johanson et at. Ancestors: In

Search of Human Origins (New York:

Villard Books, 1994).

[201] Stephen J. Pyne, *Fire in America*

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1982), p. 71.

[202] Paul S. Martin, ‘Prehistoric Overkill’,

in P. S. Martin and FI. E. Wright, Jr, ed.

Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a

Cause, (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1967), p. 75.

[203] All cited in Brian Fagan, ‘Bison Hunters

of the Northern Plains’, Archeology

(May-June 1994), p. 38.

[204] Anthony J. Legge and Peter A.

Rowley-Conwy, ‘Gazelle Killing in Stone

Age Syria 1 , Scientific American, vol. 257

(August 1987), pp. 88–95.

[205] Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People: A

Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New

York: Clarion/Simon and Schuster, 1961),

pp.101–2.

[206] Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game:

Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur

Trade (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1978).

[207] Robert A. Brightman, ‘Conservation

and Resource Depletion: The Case of the

Boreal Forest Algonquians’, in Bonnie J.

McCay and James M. Acheson, ed.. The

Question of the Commons: The Culture and

Ecology of Communal Resources, (Tucson:

University of Arizona Press, 1987), p. 131.

[208] Ibid., p. 132, emphasis added.

[209] C. LeClerq, First Establishment of the

Faith in New France (1691), p. 125; cited in

Brightman, ‘Conservation’.

Chapter 6: Technophobia and its tribulations

From the eighteenth century onward, enlightened humanism advanced

three basic ideals that it identified with progress.

The first and most important of these ideals was a renewed focus on

reason: the use of logical thought in dealing with reality. Since the time

of the classical cultures of ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome,

reason had been relegated, at best, to a handmaiden of theology. Since

that time, social arrangements, not to speak of the natural world, had not

been explained in rational terms. Feudal hierarchies and royal power

were looked upon as God-given, while social inequities were seen as the

unchallengeable dispensation of a deity whose judgment was taken on

faith. This outlook was reinforced by the State as well as the Church,

indeed by tradition as well as by biblical precept, however much radical

heretics and popular uprisings disavowed them from time to time.

The eighteenth-century Enhghtenment stridendy and effectively challenged this theistic view of worldly affairs. It persistendy counterposed

rational understanding to unthinking belief in claims to knowledge and

truth, be they in the realm of human relationships or in the natural

world. In this respect, the Enhghtenment surpassed the Renaissance of a

century or two earlier, which invoked Greco-Roman canons of art and

rhetoric, revering that highly idealized ancient past rather than an innovative present and a rational future.

Second, and following from its emphasis on reason, the

Enhghtenment advanced an increasingly secular view of social reality — of

a new polity that enhanced individual freedom and legitimated social

institutions rationally, be they part of responsive constitutional monarchies or repubhcs. Voltaire’s famous cry ‘*Ecrasez l’infame!*’ meant not necessarily a denial of the Church doctrine and institutions but rather its

infamous control over political, moral, and civil affairs on the strength of

dogma, fear, and tradition. Many of the Enlighteners sought to separate

Church from State, leaving the Church with the authority only of a

moral force on society.

This demand, to be sure, was more than an attempt to obviate ecclesiastical meddling in the civil life of a polity. As rationalists, the

Enlighteners were deeply concerned with the adverse role of superstition, mysticism, and mindless beliefs in determining human behavior.

Superstition, in particular, they believed, had to be banished from the

way human beings viewed each other, through scientific explanations of

reality in strictly naturalistic terms. Even more than Enlightenment

‘mechanists’, whose influence has been deprecated and exaggerated by

antihumanists these days, the subder critical thinkers of the time, such as

Denis Diderot, stressed the focal importance of the natural world as an

arena of human inquiry, indeed, as a guide to human behavior. To equate

the Enlightenment’s naturalism with narrow-minded mechanism, without regard for the evolutionary and dialectical theories that were also

very much in the air, is to caricature it in support of modern-day mystical and irrational ends.

Last, and very significant, the Enlightenment placed a strong premium

on the need to control natural forces on behalf of human material wellbeing. The appalling disparities in wealth in eighteenth-century society;

the persistent famines that plagued France; the dire misery of the underclasses in cities and villages (all bucolic images of rural society notwithstanding); the uncertainties of economic life; material scarcity and the

necessity for arduous toil, which limited participation in public life — all

contributed to the enthusiastic embrace of advances in science and technology, with their potential for extending human freedom and personal

dignity.

This point cannot be emphasized too strongly. Although the

Enlighteners did not challenge private ownership of land and the means

of production — worked mainly by peasants and craftsmen — they were

almost one in their commitment to support scientific and technological

advances for social purposes — not ideological ‘hubris’ for the purpose of

‘dominating nature’. As the lavish technical illustrations in Diderot’s

monumental *Encyclopedia* indicate, the Enhghtenment celebrated human

ingenuity and its promise to produce a sufficiency in the means of life,

indeed, to ease labor — with its implicit message of a more participatory

polity — not to ‘subdue’ natural forces out of a lust for domination.

If the Enlightenment saw Prometheus as the mythic agent for promoting human welfare, it was not because it no longer respected first nature;

indeed, few centuries exhibited a greater devotion to the ‘natural’ than

the eighteenth century — be it technologically, behaviorally, educationally, or morally. Rather, the Enhghtenment directly associated the

removal of want and toil from humanity with social improvement and a

relatively free polity.

The great democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century — particularly the American and French — were predominandy political events,

although they had widespread economic ramifications for the redistribution of property ownership. Their greatest long-range achievements

were in the realm of personal liberty, upholding the autonomy of the

individual in a volatile economic world. The cry of‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ rang somewhat hollow, however, as the great majority of people

who had made these revolutions continued to live in material want, toiling on the land and in newly emerging factories from dawn to dusk.

‘Liberty’, without the means of life and the free time to exercise it,

seemed merely rhetorical. ‘Equality’, in turn, became a mockery of revolutionary ideals as old privileges based on status differences were

replaced with new privileges based on differences in wealth.

In the nineteenth century the focus of radicalism shifted overwhelmingly from exclusively political egahtarianism to *material* egalitarianism, to

a form of equality that allowed not only personal political freedom but

also dignity and leisure to all laboring classes, be they on the land, in craft

shops, or in factories. More specifically, the various socialisms of the early

nineteenth century avowed the need for a cooperative society that would

bring not only political but economic egalitarianism to humanity — a

society based on the satisfaction of human material needs with minimal

toil. If humanity were to achieve a truly democratic polity, working

people had to acquire the means of life and sufficient free time to parti

cipate in it.

It was in *this* context that the underprivileged masses of Europe and

the Americas viewed technological advances. Despite Luddite opposition

to the use of machinery that subverted traditional crafts (a provisional

opposition, let me add, that did not challenge technological advance as

such, present-day distortions of Luddism to the contrary), the laboring

classes viewed the potentialities for human betterment opened by the

industrial world with considerable hope and incorporated them into their

programs for social change.

Indeed, the resistance to industrialism came mainly from the romantic

intellectuals, artists, and mystics who decried the loss of a rural society

that they idealized, steeped it in quasi-feudal traditions and a mythopoeic

mentality. Not only did these romantics damn the patendy harmful

effects of capitalist self-interest and exploitative methods of production,

they decried reason and the Enlightenment itself Whatever the benign

intentions of the nineteenth-century romantic movement, their ideas

later fed into a seemingly ‘populist’ movement that culminated in

German fascism.

Significantly, Karl Marx, the most influential socialist theorist of the last

century, identified the achievement of the material preconditions for a

cooperative and free society with the spread of capitalism. He held this

view not because he admired capitalist social relations but because he

believed that a market economy based on competition would yield vast

advances in technological development. Such advances, he contended,

would eventually establish the technical basis for achieving the largely

political and cultural goals of the Enlightenment as well as the material

goals of the emerging socialist movement.

There is a tragic irony in the fact that Marx enshrined a class and

exploitative social system — capitalism — as an ‘historically necessary’ stage

for achieving an economically emancipated society. Even as capitalism

corroded the hereditary ruling stratum of feudalism, it did not challenge

domination as such — capitalists were no less domineering than their feudal predecessors. The bourgeois system of domination that they created,

however, was harder to define — and hence all the more effective. By

creating a myth of individual autonomy — and identifying it with the

achievement of the great democratic revolutions — the emerging bourgeoisie could legitimate its *de facto* rule over society. It made capitalism

seem like the result of gritty personal enterprise, parsimony, and ingenuity. Its precept of *formal equality* — be it before the law or in the name of

‘equality of opportunity’ — concealed the *substantive inequality* in wealth

and influence in society. Indeed, capitalist apologists even denied that

capitalism was, properly speaking, a class society at all, inasmuch as ‘anyone’ could become a capitalist if he or she so chose.

Marx was intensely aware of this obscurantist subterfuge and properly

designated capitalist social relationships as the most mystified in history: a

system whereby class rule was shrewdly concealed by the myth of‘equal

opportunity’. This mystification of social relationships remains one of the

most compelling facts of modern-day class rule. In the past two centuries,

it has greatly conditioned ways of thinking generally toward mystification, from which current antihumanistic ideologies strongly benefit.

Marx’s claim that capitalism provided the technological preconditions

for socialism and hence was ‘progressive’, however, raised problems in

transforming society that he never theoretically anticipated. How could a

society structured around competition lead, even after a social upheaval,

to one structured around cooperation? How could a society, sedimented

by a long history of class rule, lead, even after a social upheaval, to one

structured around substantive equality? These problems were not adequately resolved by the socialist movements of the nineteenth and early

twentieth century — and they finger with us to this day.

----

Yet in many respects, Marx’s emphasis on the impetus that capitalism

gives to technological development was prescient.

The market economy that attained predominance in Europe and

America during the past two centuries *did* innovate an industrial apparatus unprecedented in human history. It fostered a broad naturalistic and

scientific understanding of the world, greater by far than the mythopoeic

insights of the past, clouded as they were in naive illusions. At least on a

strictly pragmatic and instrumental level, capitalism carried much of the

world out of an illusory animism, religiosity, and parochialism — the

‘enchanted’ world so treasured by the romantics — and into a secular

world that encouraged human activity and rational inquiry.

At the same time, the capitalist system was a class and exploitative society that was riddled by contradictions and that made for profound social

and ultimately ecological instability. From the 1830s to the turn of the

century, the ‘progressive’ dimensions often overshadowed its ugly and

deeply antihumanistic aspects, although exploited classes waged desperate

struggles against them throughout the Euro-American world.

Yet even these conflicts were eventually marginalized by reforms won

by trade unions and labor parties of one kind or another. Inevitably,

European socialist movements flirted with the idea of sufficiently

improving the capitalist order so as to render it more equitable and ultimately more cooperative — perhaps even more socialistic. Even as

European and American socialist parties were drenched in the radical

rhetoric of the previous century, they made socialism in England,

Germany, and France increasingly parliamentary rather than insurrectionary, and they themselves became loyal oppositions rather than revolutionary challenges.

The First World War exploded the myth of a slow, progressive social

evolution from a capitalistic society to a cooperative society. Beaten

down by four unrelenting years of trench warfare and horrifyingly lethal

weapons, soldiers from the mass armies of Europe returned home either

to topple an entrenched social order in the East or threaten it menacingly

in the West.

It was during the interwar period, between 1918 and 1939, that

European society faced its greatest moment of truth: either it would carry

out the historically crucial task of replacing a market society with a cooperative one, or it would spin off into an ominous period of terrible reaction. The tragic failure of various socialist movements in this period to

achieve the great goals they had elaborated over the nineteenth century

served to nourish the epochal crisis opened in August 1914 — a crisis

which even the Second World War, bloodier and more destructive than

the First, has failed to resolve.

In fact, the Second World War formed a sharp boundary between one

era of capitalist development and another. The preindustrial culture of

the 1920s and 1930s in America and Europe had not yet been entirely

absorbed by the economy; indeed, as dominant as capitalism had become

by the end of the nineteenth century economically, it was far from all-pervasive socially. Its system of market relationships — what early twentieth-century social theorists called commodification — had not yet fully

penetrated into the largely preindustrial everyday life of family relationships, personal associations, and community ties.

In the years following the Second World War, however, this disparity

between culture and economics changed drastically. Starting in the early

1950s the capitalistic market expanded throughout the world, to a point

where it is now ubiquitous and ail-penetrating, even by comparison with

the capitalism of merely a generation or two ago. It now permeates

nearly every facet of ordinary life, from the bedroom to the schoolroom,

from the kitchen to the church. This market society, with its defining

values of production, consumption, profit, and growth, was only dimly

anticipated by Marx in the 1850s, even as his major works unmasked the

competitive imperatives of capitalist expansion and its accompanying

culture of material acquisition. Consumption for the sake of consumption, or what we now call ‘consumerism’, which Marx could not have

foreseen, became the counterpart of what he had denoted as ‘production

for the sake of production’ — a driven form of general economic growth

that has enveloped the consumer as well as the producer, and has become

an end in itself, irrespective of social needs or consequences.

Capitalism, abetted by its ‘progressive’ technological achievements, has

thereby acquired a *technological persona* — a projection of itself as the industrial ‘logic’ of science and technology as such. Thus, added to its selfmystification as a society of ‘individual autonomy’ and ‘political

freedom’, it has acquired still *another layer of mystification* — the myth that

science, technology, and even reason constitute its imperative for unrelenting expansion.

This cunning mystification has beguiled nearly all ecomystics and has

enhanced the ‘mystery’ surrounding capitalism’s economic and market

operations. Not only has the specious sobriquet *industrial society* become

synonymous with *capitalism*, but today it has virtually replaced it, compounding the mystification that surrounded capitalism from its inception.

This mystification may be the most obstreperous of all, having generated a sizable literature, even a tradition, that assigns uncanny powers to

technology *apart* from the social context that determines its use. It

becomes difficult for the ordinary person to see that it is not science and

technology that threaten to turn the entire world into a huge market and

factory; rather, it is the market and factory that threaten to ‘technologize’, to *objectify* or commodify the human spirit and reduce the natural

world to mere raw materials for capital expansion.

Thus, the dazzling scientific leaps and technological innovations that

have occurred since the Second World War *are the product of very distinct social relationships and an ever-growing market society*. The notion that science

and technology are ‘autonomous’ of society, that they themselves are

controlling factors in guiding society, is perhaps one of the most insidious

illusions of our time. That science and technics conduct lines of research

and open visions toward new developments is certainly true, but these

developments are rigorously guided by the prevailing market society

rather than the other way around.

Although society abets scientific and technological developments,

society also *aborts* the exploration of new techniques, depending upon

the needs that guide corporate research. These needs are overwhelmingly

economic, centering on corporate profit and expansionary interests, as

witness the stimuli given by large enterprises to lines of scientific research

that promise to give them economic hegemony, while willfully ignoring

others that, although interesting to scientists or engineers, are not considered sufficiently profitable from a business standpoint.

Thus it took years to arouse the interest of business in organic agriculture, solar and wind power, non-polluting fuels, recycling techniques,

and many other inviting technologies. Indeed, with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, it was often necessary for scientists

and engineers to establish precarious and privately funded institutes in

which they could devote themselves to developing ‘environmentally

friendly’ technologies that industry obdurately ignored or even disavowed. Where large corporate enterprises and governmental agencies

finally undertook research to explore the possibilities of what I have

called ‘ecotechnics’, they commonly did so only after considerable public pressure. Even today, various technologies that would improve safety

in transportation — alluring as they may be to engineers eager to sophisticate them — still lie woefully on drawing boards because they are either

too costly or too unprofitable from a corporate standpoint. Notoriously,

the profit-oriented approach guides research in a host of technical areas,

including steel-making facilities that, were they put to use, would yield

products that are lasting, unlike the ‘planned obsolescence’ worked into

appliances, cars, homes, and even tools today.

----

The factory model around winch capitalism is structured has given social

relationships themselves a technological form, just as in the Middle Ages

Christianity gave social relationships a religious form. In a sense, every

factory is a ‘megamachine’, to use Lewis Mumford’s word for ways of

mobilizing labor. Nor are megamachines peculiar to modern societies

based on high technology. They existed thousands of years ago, in the

Near East and in the Roman world, when tools were hardly more

advanced than in the Neolithic period. The pyramids of ancient Egypt,

the temples of Mesopotamia, and the roads of Rome were constructed

primarily by the brute labor of serfs and slaves. In the early modern

period, capitalism simply mobilized labor more mechanically by making

the rural cottage worker an appendage to the spinning wheel and hand

loom. In time, the two were brought together in the form of a factory

that now encompasses society as a whole, not only its economy.

Today, the unbridled expansion of the market transforms nearly all traditional personal relationships into commodity ties, fostering a belief in

the merits of consumption and a highly synthetic image of’the good life’.

Technological innovation has merely made this commodification of

everyday life easier to achieve. To be sure, modern technologies may be

used, as in the case of television, to promote the sale of goods, to influence taste, and to create new ‘wants’. Yet by the same token, advertising

techniques were *always* in use, whether in medieval fairs, Renaissance

markets, or large precapitalist commercial centers. For centuries, the

churches and mosques of precapitalist society were immensely effective

networks for promoting ecclesiastical, noble, and royal interests, preaching messages of quiet acceptance of duties, awe toward saints, and deference toward one’s social ‘betters’. Deep-seated social crises were

necessary before the captives of clerics could dislodge ecclesiastical

control over the minds of the oppressed — a process that is far from

completed today, with or without televangelists.

Conversely, even the highly civilized societies of the ancient world

regarded technological advances with astonishing indifference at best and

active hostility at worst, primarily because servile human labor was cheap

and readily available. Not that the steam engine and the paddle wheel

were unknown, but they were never put to industrial uses. Ironically,

well into the Middle Ages, when Christianity (which technophobes

regard as one of the most antinaturalistic of ideologies) reached its height,

the powers that be often saw technological advances as demonic, not as

an inspiration for pursuing the ‘domination of nature’.

While capitalism has turned to technology with a fervor unknown to

any previous society and dressed it in the mystifying garb of an ‘industrial

society’, capitalists have notoriously neglected very important technologies and chosen to develop precisely those techniques that benefit its

unique imperative for growth and its inflated appetite for profit.

----

I have examined at some length the extent to which technology is a heteronomous or dependent phenomenon because ecomysticism tends to

emphasize its autonomy from society and the mystique of a ‘technological imperative’, crudely obscuring the profoundly social factors that promote or inhibit technological innovation. Given this simplistic view,

modern technology and a ‘technological mentality’ become the principal, often the exclusive causes of environmental ills, cultural malaise, and

the loss of‘primal’ innocence.

Moreover, contemporary critiques of technology often go hand-in-hand with primitivism and ecomysticism. The sophistication of technics,

we are often told, has alienated us from ‘nature’ and our primal’ roots,

rendering us merely parts of a vast ‘megamachine’ that threatens not only

to destroy the natural world but to diminish our awe before the ‘sacred’

in the biosphere, our ‘feeling’ for life, and our contact with the ‘spiritual’.

From the romantics of the last century, to German conservative writers

early in the present one, an effluvium of books and periodicals has surfaced, stressing the ‘autonomy’ of technological development and either

explicitly or implicitly calling for a return to technically simpler ways of

life. The more primitivistic of the recent technophobic writers call for a

return to the pristine lives of Paleolithic cave dwellers, Neolithic horticulturists, or medieval serfs and craftspeople.

Whether such views can be accepted at face value is, to put it gently,

arguable. Owing to the massive inroads personal computers have made

into the lives even of technophobes, who are usually unprepared to

sacrifice this highly sophisticated device for the quill, one would think

that they are as natural as fruit and thrive in Californian orange groves.

Indeed, few of technophobia’s outstanding spokespersons have abandoned the horrors of the civilization they decry to five hermetic lives free

from technological subversion; nor do they desist from accepting fees for

books and lectures that inveigh against the megamachine and its ‘despiritizing’ impact on the individual and society. Indeed, one primitivistic,

technophobic periodical confessed, ‘We got a computer — and we hate

it!’[210] Which causes one to wonder: why acquire one at all when the great

revolutions of the past were summoned to action by simple handpresses?

----

If this kind of cant and silliness were all that technophobia produced, it

could easily be disregarded. But technophobia raises serious antihumanistic issues that require critical examination.

First, technophobia sets up a misleading enemy for committed environmentalists and culture critics, redirecting their attention away from

patently social concerns. Well-meaning people are urged to focus on a

problem that cannot be seriously fought — specifically, technology —

assuming they agree it is a problem In the first place.

Second, technophobes leave unanswered the strategic question of how

a truly democratic society could be possible, if its members lacked the

means of life and the free time to exercise their freedoms. Claims that a

‘primitive’ way of life would allow for ‘banker’s hours’, to use Jerry

Mander’s expression, are simply fallacious.[211] Mander’s sources, nourished

on the 1960s and 1970s craze for the virtues of aboriginal ways of life, are

now very questionable, if not completely specious, as we saw in Chap ter

5. Unless people are prepared to give up literacy, books, modern music,

physical comfort, and the great wealth of philosophical, scientific, and

cultural ideas associated with civilization, the basic decision they face is

• how* to use their vast fund of technological knowledge and devices, not
• whether* to use them.

This decision is of momentous social proportions — and must not be

based strictly on a subjective love or distaste for technological innovation. In a better world, humanity might choose to discard many components of its current technological equipment, possibly sophisticate others,

and innovate ecologically more desirable ways of producing things. But

without a technics that will free humanity from onerous toil — and without values that stress democratic forms of social organization in winch

• everyone* can participate — all hopes for a free society in the future are

chimeras.

Technological innovation, in itself, will not increase the free time that

is needed for a democratic political culture. Indeed, in class societies the

use of technologies to displace labor by machines, to deforest vast areas of

tlie planet, to exploit low-wage populations in the Third World — all

raise precisely the social issue of the *ways* in which technology is used.

Nor are all technologies neutral in their impact on social and ecological well-being — or even necessarily desirable. Clearly some technologies,

such as nuclear weapons and power plants, should be banned completely.

The same can be said for agricultural and industrial biocides, surveillance

devices, high-tech weaponry, and a host of o ther socially and ecologically

harmful techniques.

But to glibly abstract technology from its social context, to let destructive current uses of technologies outweigh their potentially more rational

application in a better society, would deny us the opportunity to choose

what technologies *should* be used and the forms they will take. Various

societies use a given technology in radically different ways: some for personally profitable and exploitative ends; others use it restrictively, owing

to traditions of parsimony or fears of social instability; and still others

might well use it rationally, to advance human freedom, self-development, and an ecological sensibility.

----

Modern technophobes, especially of the mystical persuasion, tend to

confuse social with technological factors. Langdon “Winner, one of the

more informed critics of technology, indiscriminately intermingles social

with technological factors, an approach that often makes the most specious defenses of technophobia seem almost plausible. Winner observes:

If the experience of modern society shows us anything it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity ; but also powerful forces acting

to reshape that activity and its meaning . Tlte introduction of a robot to an

industrial workplace not only increases productivity, but often radically

changes the process of production, redefining what ‘work’ means in that

setting, When a sophisticated new technique or instrument is adopted in

medical practice, it transforms not only what doctors do, but also the ways

people think about health, sickness, and medical care. Widespread alterations of this kind in techniques of communication, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and the like are largely what distinguishes our times

from early periods of human history. The kinds of things we are apt to see

as ‘mere’ technological entities become much more interesting and problematic if we begin to observe how broadly they are involved in conditions of

social and moral life.[212]

But how a technology affects social context depends entirely on which

new technologies are introduced and the reasons for introducing them.

In a cooperative society — unlike the one in which we live today — a

robot introduced into a factory environment might remove people from

onerous toil and assembly-line drudgery, leaving them free to engage in

pleasurable and creative activity. On the other hand, in a market, profit-oriented society like the one in which we five today, a robot would

probably intensify the exploitation of workers whose tasks are orchestrated by the presence of a robot and increase the economic problems of

diose who are displaced by it. Winner’s unitary statement about the

impact of a robot on work, in effect, lacks sufficient social contextuality

and tends to be more obfuscatory than illuminating.

----

Implicit in Winner’s notion of‘technological somnambulism’, in which

‘we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence’, is Iris own *social* somnambulism.[213] For

Winner, the existing society is a given, seemingly unalterable phenomenon, the background for existing and future technological innovation.

That technology autonomously orchestrates rather than is orchestrated

by the social context in which tools and machines exist is essentially

assumed. That the reduction of work by a robot may, in fact, make life

easier, indeed richer, that its effects could be minimal or even desirable, is

not spelled out in his book, which is tilted toward theorists who see technology as shaping society.

Like many technophobes who are preoccupied with unexplained

‘technological imperatives’ and the psychic effects of technological

change, Winner marginalizes the centrality of social issues. Thus, he calls

upon his readers to be aware of the ramifications of technological change

upon society and its values — a rather foggy request, since the nature of

the present society, its conflicting interests, and rational alternatives to the

present human condition remain unexplored and are as problematically

intermeshed as ever with each other. So are questions about who controls the development of technology. In the harsh, real world, those who

decide which new technologies are or are not to be introduced into

workplaces, hospitals, offices, and factories are the proprietors of those

operations. Not even managers, engineers, and scientists — or what has

been loosely called the ‘new class’ — make long-range decisions about the

use of technologies in the modern economy. Ultimately, it is the owners

and directors of a particular concern — least of all ordinary citizens — who

decide what kind of technology will be used in a given enterprise, as the

formulation of recent ‘down-sizing’ policies by large corporations

throughout the world so clearly reveal.

These owners and directors are concerned less with the social, psychological, and ideological impacts of a new technology than with the profit

and competitive advantages it may yield. Less socially visible than the

corporate ‘bosses’ of an earlier era, like the old John D. Rockefeller, contemporary ‘bosses’ are often highly professional and well trained in the

more complex aspects of business management and engineering. And

their authority stems ultimately from dieir power as owners and directors

at the apex of the economic pyramid, not merely as knowledgeable

technical personnel.

Winner’s outlook tends to conceal the real issues of *social power*. Much

as technology may enhance the operations of a given society, it is a distinct means deployed by self-serving owners and directors to exercise

their power and increase their gains. By emphasizing the *effects* that new

technologies have upon people and dieir values, Winner’s book keeps us

from clearly understanding that these effects are the results of manipulations by definable social elites whose behavior, in real life, is guided

overwhelmingly by economic facts — not by the extent to which ordinary people suffer from ‘technological somnambulism’.

Doubtless, as Winner argues, technological changes ‘affect the texture

of modern life’, but social changes affect modern life far more drastically.

Thus, a Renaissance banker of some four hundred years ago — say, a

member of the Fugger banking family — held a view of the world,

possessed an individualized sense of self, and had political values that

were much more akin to those of a modern businessman than, say, of an

Athenian citizen in Periclean times. Yet Greek and Renaissance technologies were remarkably similar by comparison with Renaissance and

modern ones. Both the Fugger banker and the modern banker lived in a

calculating, money-oriented, egoistic, and commercial world that for

many Greeks would have seemed debasing and asocial. Athenians of the

fifth century BC were expected to place the interests of the polis or so-called ‘city state’ before personal considerations and generally viewed

commerce as a degrading activity, unfit for an authentic citizen, an attitude that stood in marked contrast to Fugger and modern bankers.

Although the technological distance between commercially oriented

Renaissance bankers and Athenians was relatively small, the psychological distance between the two was immense.

Winner’s assertion of technological autonomy ultimately becomes

technological determinism. If ‘our instruments are institutions in the

making’, as he fatalistically declares, and ‘*techne* has at last become

• politeia*’, then our behavior is determined by technological factors. Nor is

there any real hope that the ‘political wisdom of a democracy’ can ‘discipline’ technological innovation, since ‘it would require qualities of judiciousness in the populace that have rarely been applied to the judgement

of instrumental/functional affairs.’’[214] His book, *The Whale and the Reactor*

ends with a question: ‘[a]t present our society seems to prefer ... monuments to gigantism, wax, and the overstepping of natural and cultural

boundaries. Such are the accomphshments we support with our dollars

and our votes. How long will it be until we are ready to do anything better?’[215] Which question sidesteps the issue of how effective voting can be

in a political system that is an oligarchy of the powerful and wealthy — a

fact that leaves the preferences of ‘our society’ very much in doubt and

its exposure to radically fresh alternatives very limited, so say the least.

----

Among the less sophisticated technophobes, like Jerry Mander, the ambiguities that mark Winner’s treatment of technology become wild

sloganeering, laced with appeals to the ‘sacred’ and genuflections before

‘primitives’, whom Mander ecumenically calls ‘Indians’ whether they are

native to the Americas or not.

Intellectually, Mander’s *In the Absence of the Sacred* is a cacophony of

wildly discordant arguments that intermingles the social and the technological with a degree of abandon that verges on the embarrassing.[216]

Technology, we are told, is all-pervasive. It invades our consciousness

and, with each generation of technical development, separates us from

the natural world by enfolding us in a purely technological environment.

Again, the megamachine image rears its terrifying head: ‘The web of

interactions among machines becomes more complex and more invisible, while the total effect is more powerful and pervasive. We become

ever more enclosed and ever less aware of that fact. Our environment is

so much a product of our invention that it becomes a single worldwide

machine. We live inside it, and are a piece of it.’[217] In Mander’s view, this

‘web of interactions’ is almost entirely a product of technology as such

and the mentality it breeds.

A director of the Berkeley-based Elmwood Institute, Mander delivers

what Kirkpatrick Sale enthusiastically lauds as a ‘skewering critique of

modern technology, in which cars, telephones, computers, banks, bio-genetics and television ... all are shown to be part of a mad megatechnology” that is destroying the world’s resources and robotizing its

peoples.’[218] The reader cannot help but wonder which of these terrifying

technological artifacts are actually used by the Elmwood Institute’s members and associates. Indeed, Mander, who robustly celebrates the fact that

he merely uses ‘an old IBM Selectric’, may well be an exception among

his associates.[219] In any case, like personal computers, not even old, indeed

ancient IBM Selectrics grow on trees.

In a heady passage, Mander celebrates his technologically simple childhood world in the Bronx of the 1930s and 1940s, during which time his

mother’s ‘favorite activity was shopping’ and a physician, whose principal

pharmaceutical seems to have been aspirin, attended to his family’s health

needs. The Mander family of this blissful era had a television in the living

room that featured Milton Berle, at a time when broadcasting was

happily restricted to seven hours each day. Mander senior’s prize possession was a Buick sedan that he rotated only every three years and the

Manders were satisfied with annual family trips to Florida, plus a stay at

summer camp for Mander junior.[220]

Yet how free of ‘consumerism’ and ‘technology’ was this halcyon era,

forty or fifty years ago? Did Mrs Mander beat the dirt out of her family s

clothing with a scrub board and squeeze out the water with rollers, while

Mr Mander indulged his passion for new Buicks? Did she clean the floors

on her knees? Did she carry heavy shopping bags, filled with food staples,

or was she driven to and horn market by Mander senior in a new Buick?

Mander junior does not enter into these trivial details. But having

grown up in the same Bronx milieu a generation or so earlier, I feel

obliged to protest that the Manders enjoyed eminently privileged

middle-class comforts and technological goodies that were entirely

unknown to me, my family, and my friends. From the very beginning of

the 1920s to well into the 1930s, my own family did not even own even

a radio, still less a car, television set, or telephone. Nor were they so

privileged as to make trips to Florida or send me to summer camp. At the

onset of the Depression, my mother and I did not even have a family

physician. Instead, when we were sick, we sat for hours in the clinics of

New York City’s public hospitals, hoping to receive any kind of medical

attention.

I am not trying to guilt Mander or trade experiences with him. His

technophobia is premised on a fairly well-to-do way of life, as is the

technophobia of so many baby boomers of late. His deprecation of

antibiotics rings hollow at a time when children underwent dangerous

mastoid-bone surgery for deadly ear infections and elderly people

became seriously ill from even minor wounds. Without antibiotics, I

would probably have died of a streptococcus infection in the early 1940s.

There is a sickening arrogance in technophobes who, having enjoyed the

fruits of middle-class, even wealthy life-styles, condemn appliances that

freed women from considerable domestic drudgery, machines that freed

workers from mentally debilitating tasks on assembly lines, and opened

alternatives to starvation in lands that were once completely at the mercy

of ‘Mother Nature’ and ‘Her’ many climatic vagaries.

In extolling the relative technological simplicity of his Bronx childhood, Mander, in fact, is extolling a *culture* — the Jewish immigrant

middle-class way of life — that was preindustrial in many respects, that

had not yet been completely penetrated by the marketplace. Its language,

values, family structure, and ideals were ultimately eroded not by technology — which, in fact, its members generally prized as much as Mr

Mander did his Buick — but by the socially invasive power of capitalism

and its commodity orientation.

My own mother, an Eastern European immigrant, welcomed with

almost sublime ecstasy her first ‘Frigidaire’ and her access to washing and

drying machines. To own a motorized vehicle in my childhood and

youth would have been regarded as an unimaginable luxury, indeed a

mark of new social status. Summer vacations were hardly common

among poor people who had to haggle for lower food prices. As an adult,

I worked as a foundryman and auto worker; to be finally free from that

toil was an occupational epiphany of a kind at least as intense as the one

Mander himself seems to have experienced after he left his work with

advertising agencies and drifted into the Elmwood Institute.

----

Mander’s careless confusion of the preindustrial cultural roots of his family with the social uses of technology lead to the same ideological disarray

that marks Winner’s more sophisticated book. Despite their different

levels of discussion, both writers repeatedly confuse the promise of

technological innovation in a *rational* society with its abuses in the *present*

irrational one. With considerable aplomb, we are shown that technology

does not, after all, produce more leisure today — as diough ‘today’ were

somehow ‘forever’ — or that radicals of past generations did not know

that technology can be used for exploitative ends under capitalism, as it

can be for liberating ends in a cooperative society.

Worse still, *technology* creates more work, we are told — with minimal

references to society, because people must now hold two jobs instead of

one, as a. result of the way an innovation currently yields partial employment and lowered income. That an avaricious class of proprietors and

administrators must — and want to — gain a ‘competitive edge’ in the market with unseemly profits and that money leads to exploitation all but

eludes Mander, who develops a serious case of social somnambulism.

The vested economic interests that use technological innovations to

exploit rather than diminish labor are not only freed of their odium, but

scented by flamboyant denunciations of technics as such.

Thus, after conceding that medical technology ‘on the whole, aids

longer life and that is good’, Mander, as a constrast, then mingles apples

with oranges by reminding us that the murder rate in the United States

has skyrocketed, that the prison population is bursting, that suicide and

drug use have reached epidemic proportions, that 32 million Americans

live in poverty, that 13 per cent of the population has no health insurance, that 3 million people are homeless, that 27 per cent are functionally

illiterate, and that 28 million American adults suffer from one or another

kind of mental disorder.[221] One is obliged to ask — is all this really because

of *technology*?

Finally, having recited more statistics on the extent of environmental

degradation, Mander might be expected to deliver a powerful rebuke

against a society that permits, indeed fosters, these terrible, patently

social, abuses. Instead, we are told: ‘Given that technology was supposed

to make life better, and given its *apparent* failure in both the social and the

environmental spheres, shouldn’t reason dictate that we sharply question

the wild claims we have accepted about technology?’[222]

Permeated as his book is by social amnesia, the reader often has the

feeling that if only people could all get together in a huge encounter

group, possibly at the Elmwood Institute, all our problems could be

happily resolved. We are, it appears, entranced by a ‘pro-technology

paradigm’ that has dazzled us into a belief in the promise of ‘technotopia’.

If only we could remove its *inherent appeal* to our psyches, we might —

guided by the ‘sacred,’ as defined by California’s version of native

American sensibilities — find our way to self and possibly social redemption.[223]

As to society, Mander’s insights are sparse. The most seminal thought

in *In the Absence of the Sacred* is that ‘corporations are machines’by which

he means that corporations constitute a business technology and are the

product of a ‘technological mentality’[224] That corporations are impersonal

and amoral — hence, machinelike — might make this formulation a reasonably good metaphor, provided that Mander explored their function as

sources of profit and capital accumulation. But these basic attributes of

any capitalistic enterprise are given minimal attention. ‘The Profit

Imperative’ , one of his subheadings, receives four scant lines, and no

analysis is given to back up his conclusion that ‘profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions’[225] ‘The Growth Imperative’ , which immediately follows Mander’ s impressively abbreviated discussion of profit,

occupies less than half a page, and it too is notable for its lack of serious

analysis of the impelling factors in capital expansion. Last, Mander sees

‘Competition and Aggression’ primarily as an internal problem within

individual corporations, a form of personal agonistic activity comparable

to the behavior of competing professional football players.[226]

----

Mander’s interpretation of technology is basically obscurantist: conceived

as a quasi-mystical ‘web of interactions’ , technology not only takes on an

almost psychic and self-generative life of its own, but it is given an overpowering presence in every dimension of human affairs. In Marx’s concept of the ‘fetishism of commodities’ , people who make the things they

consume seem under capitalism to be mysteriously ruled by them; so for

Mander, technology, which results from interactions between human

beings and the natural world, becomes a mysterious ‘autonomous’ force

that plays a formative and overriding role in the human condition. To

understand the authentic reality of the human condition today, we are

thus obliged to strip away not only the fetishism of commodities but also

the fetishism of technology. Not only do we five far more within a very

real web of commodity relationships than technological ones, but we are

justifiably far more afflicted by a market-oriented mentality than by a

technological one. We are far more concerned with securing a living

than with assessing the extent to which technology affects our psyches.

Our thinking is fashioned along quantified fines more because of our

attempts to balance a dwindling domestic budget than because of the

influence of Cartesian mechanism.

The social amnesia that afflicts technophobes and antihumanists generates an arrogance toward the seemingly mundane problems that people

ordinarily face, a New Age arrogance much greater than the arrogance of

so-called ‘technotopians’ (a category that seems to include almost everyone who is seriously concerned with human welfare and the achievement of a materially abundant society). Indeed, left to its own devices,

the present society might well produce environmental dislocations so

profound that humanity will be obliged to five in a ‘technotopia’ , an artificially created environment, and no appeals whatever for a return to the

‘sacred’ , least of all to a contrived ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ , will be able to

bring back the ozone layer, restore a breathable atmosphere, undo the

damage to basic biogeo chemical cycles, and cleanse a hopelessly poisoned

water supply. If such a sweeping ecological regression were ever to

occur, future generations might well have to build domes over their

cities, create oxygen-making machines, and produce synthetic food.

Such a nightmarish future — with its despotic political consequences —

would not be the product of technological innovation or thinking. It

Would be the product of a social system that, by its competitive nature —

with or without technological innovations — is incapable of placing any

limits on growth and limits on the acquisition of profit with which to

grow. If the competitive market society continues to expand unopposed,

it will be because the serious radical movements for social change of

former decades have been supplanted in recent years by antihumanist,

mystical, and technophobic cults for selfiredemption and narcissistic

epiphanies.

As to Mander s knowledge of the ‘sacred’ , much of the anthropology

in *In the Absence of the Sacred* is questionable, drawn largely from the

native ‘Man the Hunter’ school of the 1960s and 1970s.

----

Mander is characteristic of the more widely read antitechnological writers around these days, and like many of his pop confreres, has nourished

a great deal of today’s rising technophobia. But other theorists deal philosophically with technology, in writings that have broad implications for

the conflict between enlightened humanism and antihumanism. Jacques

Ellul’s *Technological Society* , one of the ancestral literary sources of present-day technophobia, criticizes not only technology as such but *technique*;

indeed, he gives the term such a broad scope that it can essentially be

defined as nearly any means for effectuating a goal today: ‘The term *technique*, as I use it,’ he writes, ‘does not mean machines, technology, or this

or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, *technique* is the *totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency*

(for a given stage of development) in *every* field of human activity.’ It

might well be supposed that Ellul is talking as much about human-generated causality in the modern world as he is about tools and machines.[227]

Although Ellul gives us no specific reason to believe that *technique* as

such is good or bad, it clearly becomes degraded when reason and consciousness enter into technical operations. Inasmuch as every technical

operation unavoidably involves reason and consciousness, it is hard to

believe that *technique* can ever exclude thought. Thus the two words are

functionally interchangeable. Indeed, if Ellul is to be taken seriously,

humanity has always been living in a technological age insofar as thought

and tools have been operationally interactive with each other.

Claiming that he does “not deny the existence of individual action or

of some inner sphere of freedom,’ Ellul notes that “these are not discernible at the most general level of analysis.’[228] This entrance into the

‘inner sphere of freedom’ necessarily renders his book into an interpretive, not merely a factual, work — which means drat we can only ask

whether his interpretations are true and his facts accurate. On both

accounts, Ellul significandy fails us. In a work that grandly marches from

the “primitive’ to the Industrial Revolution and “reports’ on the “characterology of technique’ in general — its “modern characteristics’, its influence on the economy, its interaction with the State, and so on through a

host of highly nuanced issues and topics — interpretation, of course, is

utterly unavoidable. Indeed, from the moment he enters into a discussion

of‘primitive technique’, he expresses views on magic that rest on uncertain and speculative grounds. So too in his discussion of the ancient

Mediterranean, Asian, and Christian worlds, during which, apart from a

tangential reference to Archimedes, he completely omits the extraordinary technological achievements of the Hellenistic age. But what is at

issue, here, is not that Ellul is to be faulted for loading his book with

interpretations. Quite to the contrary, the fault lies with his utterly

bizarre insistence that he *doesn’t* do so!

Although Ellul asserts that in bis book he has “deliberately not gone

beyond description’ and denies that he is ‘a pessimist’, the conclusions of

his considerable tome flagrantly belie these disavowals.[229] In fact, he is a

clumsy technological determinist — perhaps not a ‘rigorous’ one, as he

puts it, but significantly so. And he is *immensely* pessimistic. What Ellul

does is to formulate a ubiquitous “dialectic’ of technique that inexorably

ends in a dictatorial ‘megamachine’. His closing chapter, “A Look at the

Future’, which ends with “A Look at the Year 2000’, describes

the monolithic technical world that is coming to be. It is vanity to pretend

it can be checked or guided. Indeed, the human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe. The new [technological] order was meant to be a buffer between man

and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way

that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do

only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations

both with the world of life and the world of brute matter.[230]

Anticipating Mander and others like him, Ellul declares: Enclosed

within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he

cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to

which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.’[231]

----

This prelapsarian vision of an “ancient milieu to which [man] was adapted

for hundreds of thousands of years’, the most ragged mydi advanced by

primitives, ecomystics, and technophobes, collapses under critical

scrutiny. Aldiough the different hominid species were variously vegetarian food-gatherers, scavengers, and — perhaps only within the past 60,000

years — fairly sophisticated hunters, there is even evidence that they began

to systematically cultivate food during certain seasons in the Nile valley

some 30,000 years ago, when much of Europe was still glaciated and the

famous Magdalenian culture was flourishing in southern France and the

Pyrenees.

It is important to stress these variations not only because they controvert the fiction of a single ‘Paleolithic sensibility’ but because Ellul, like

so many other technophobes, bases his account of ‘why the first steps

were taken’ toward a “technological society’ exclusively on ideological

and subjective factors. After rejecting the common notion that these

“steps’ were the result of scientific progress, “which prepared the way for

technical progress, but it cannot explain it’, and noting that it would

“exaggerate the force of pBnhghtenment] philosophic ideas and systems’

to give them “the highest place in the history of techniques’, Ellul settles

upon “the optimistic atmosphere of the eighteenth century, more than

[Enlightenment] philosophy.[232]

This explanation is extraordinary. Relying on Lewis Mumford’s very

uneven account of the development of technics — the descriptive vividness of Mumford’s narrations and style can easily be mistaken for a causal

account — Ellul concedes that the accretions of small technical advances

finally laid the basis for a qualitative leap, together with population

increases, a flexible economic life, and, most decisively, ‘the plasticity of

the social milieu.’[233]

But as to what *made* for this ‘plasticity’ and, presumably, the receptivity of ‘people’ to sweeping technological innovations, Ellul gives us a

jumble of ideological reasons ranging from the impact of Christianity to

the breakup of traditional social groups. To be sure, the bourgeoisie, Ellul

concedes, *did* play a role in catapulting the preindustrial eighteenth century into the highly industrial nineteenth century, ‘but it was not enough

to carry the whole of society along with it.’[234] That the bourgeoisie did

not need “the whole of society’ to go along with it owing to its economic

power seems to elude Ellul. In fact, rather absurdly, Ellul tells us that

“Karl Marx rehabilitated technique in the eyes of the workers’ by

preaching that it ‘can be liberating’ — as though Marx were that influential in ‘the middle of the nineteenth century’, which Ellul regards as his

golden moment — and the industrial proletariat sprang up like mushrooms after a vigorous rain following the publication (barely noticed) of

the *Communist Manifesto* in 1848![235]

----

Philosophically sophisticated technophobes who find the likes of Mander

particularly crude can always turn to the works of Martin Heidegger,

who essentially elevates *techne* (and presumably technology) to a, largely

metaphysical category. The tortured complexities of Heidegger’s ontology of Being are beyond the scope of this chapter, nor is it possible, here,

to cope in any detail with a philosophy that notoriously followed so

many different ‘woodpaths’ and engaged in so many ‘turns’ — to use

Heidegger’s own jargon. My account of Heidegger s ‘ontology’ is admittedly selective and focused on its unadorned essentials. I may add that

Heidegger, not to speak of his many disciples, was very much at odds

with himself from the 1920s to the last years of his life in the 1970s.

Insofar as Heidegger can be said to have had a project to shape human

lifeways, it was as an endeavor to resist, or should I say, demur from,

what he conceived to be an all-encroaching technocratic mentality and

civilization that rendered human beings ‘inauthentic’ in their relationship

to a presumably self-generative reality, ‘isness’, or more esoterically,

‘Being’ (*Sein*). Not unlike many German reactionaries, Heidegger

viewed ‘modernity’ with its democratic spirit, rationalism, respect for the

individual, and technological advances as a ‘falling’ (*Gefallen*) from a primal and naive innocence in which humanity once ‘dwelled’, remnants of

which he believed existed in the rustic world into which he was bom a

century ago.

‘Authenticity’, it can be said without any philosophical frills, lay in the

pristine Teutonic world of the tribal Germans who retained their ties

with ‘the Gods’, and with later peoples who still tried to nourish their

past amidst the blighted traits of the modern world. Since some authors

try to muddy Heidegger’s prelapsarian message by focusing on his

assumed belief in individual freedom and ignoring his hatred of the

French Revolution and its egalitarian, ‘herd’-like democracy of the

‘They’, it is worth emphasizing that such a view withers in the light of

his denial of individuality. ‘The individual by himself counts for nothing’, he declared after becoming a member of the National Socialist party

in 1933. ‘The fate of our Volk in its state counts for everything.’[236]

As a member of the Nazi party, which he remained up to the defeat of

Germany twelve years later, his antihumanism reached strident, often

blatantly reactionary proportions. Newly appointed as the rector of the

University of Freiburg upon Hider’s ascent to power, he readily

adopted the Ew/irer-principle of German fascism and preferred the tide

• Rektor-Fuhrer*, hailing the spirit of National Socialism as an antidote to

‘the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the

earth [by technology], the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred

and suspicion of everything free and creative.’[237] His most unsavory

remarks were directed in the lectures, from which these lines are taken,

‘from a metaphysical point of view’, against ‘the pincers’ created by

America and Russia that threaten to squeeze ‘the fardiermost corner of

the globe ... by technology and ... economic exploitation.’[238]

Technology, as Heidegger construes it, is ‘no mere means. Technology

is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm

for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of

revealing, i.e., of truth.’[239] After which Heidegger rolls out technology’s

transformations, indeed mutations, which give rise to a mood of anxiety

and finally hubris, anthropocentricity, and the mechanical coercion of

things into mere objects for human use and exploitation.

Heidegger’s views on technology are part of a larger *Weltanschauung*

which is too multicolored to discuss here, and demands a degree of interpretive effort we must forgo for the present in the context of a criticism

of technophobia. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of primitivistic

animism in Heidegger’s treatment of the ‘revealing’ that occurs when

• techne* is a ‘clearing’ for the ‘expression’ of a crafted material — not unlike

the Eskimo sculptor who believes (quite wrongly, I may add) that he is

‘bringing out’ a hidden form that lies in the walrus ivory he is carving.

But this issue must be seen more as a matter of metaphysics than of a spiritually charged technique. Thus, when Heidegger praises a windmill, in

contrast to the ‘challenge’ to a tract of land from which the ‘hauling out

of coal and ore’ is subjected, he is *not* being ‘ecological’. Heidegger is

concerned with a windmill, not as an ecological technology, but more

metaphysically with the notion that ‘its sails do indeed turn in the wind;

they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing’. The windmill ‘does not

unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it’.[240] Like man in

relation to Being, it is a medium for the ‘realization’ of wind, not an

artifact for acquiring power.

Basically, this interpretation of a technological interrelationship reflects

a regression — socially and psychologically as well as metaphysically — into

quietism. Heidegger advances a message of passivity or passivity conceived as a human activity, an endeavor to let things *be* and ‘disclose’

themselves. ‘Letting things be’ would be little more than a trite Taoist

and Buddhist precept were it not that Heidegger as a National Socialist

became all too ideologically engaged, rather than letting things be’.

when he was busily undoing ‘intellectualism’democracy, and technological intervention into the ‘world’.

Considering the time, the place, and the abstract way in which

Heidegger treated humanity’s ‘Fall 7 into technological ‘inauthenticity’ — a

‘Fall’ that he, like Ellul, regarded as inevitable, albeit a metaphysical,

nightmare — it is not hard to see why he could trivialize the Holocaust,

when he deigned to no tice it at all, as part of a techno-industrial ‘condition’. ‘Agriculture is now a motorized (*motorisierte*) food industry, in

essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and

extermination camps,’ he coldly observed, ‘the same as the blockade and

starvation of the countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen

bombs.’[241] In placing the industrial *means* by which many Jews were killed

before the ideological ends that guided their Nazi exterminators,

Heidegger essentially displaces the barbarism of a *specific* state apparatus,

of which he was a part, by the technical proficiency he can attribute *to the world at large!* These immensely revealing offhanded remarks, drawn from

a speech he gave in Bremen in 1949, are beneath contempt. But they

point to a way of thinking that gave an autonomy to technique that has

fearful moral consequences which we are fiving with these days in the

name of the sacred, a phraseology that Heidegger would find very congenial were he alive today.

Indeed, technophobia, followed to its logical and crudely primitivistic

conclusions, finally devolves into a dark reactionism — and a paralyzing

quietism. For if our confrontation with civilization turns on passivity

before a ‘disclosing of Being’, a mere ‘dwelling’ on the earth, and a ‘letting things be’, to use Heidegger’s verbiage — much of which has slipped

into deep ecology’s vocabulary as well — the choice between supporting

barbarism and enlightened humanism has no ethical foundations to

sustain it. Freed of values grounded in objectivity, we are lost in a quasireligious antihumanism, a spirituality that can with the same equanimity

hear the cry of a bird and ignore the anguish of six million once-living

people who were put to death by the National Socialist state.

[210] E. B. Maple, ‘The Fifth Estate Enters the

20th Century. We Get a Computer and

Hate It!* Fifth Estate , vol. 28, no. 2

(Summer 1993), pp. 6–7.

[211] Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred:

The Failure of Technology and the Survival of

the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra

Club Books, 1991), p.248.

[212] Langdon Winner, The Whale and the

Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High

Technology (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 6.

[213] Ibid., p. 10.

[214] Ibid., pp. 54, 55.

[215] Ibid., pp. 177–8.

[216] Mander, Absence of the Sacred.

[217] Ibid., p. 32.

[218] Ibid., back cover.

[219] Ibid., pp. 33.

[220] Ibid., p. 11–24.

[221] Ibid., pp. 28–9.

[222] Ibid., p. 29, emphasis added.

[223] m, p. 381.

[224] Ibid., p. 121. In fact, Chapter 7 of the

book is entitled ‘Corporations as

Machines’.

[225] Ibid., p. 129.

[226] Ibid., pp. 129–30.

[227] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

(New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. xxv.

[228] Ibid., emphases added, p. xxviii.

[229] Ibid., p. xxvii,

[230] Ibid., p. 428.

[231] Ibid., p. 428.

[232] Ibid., pp. 46, 47.

[233] Ibid., p. 48–9.

[234] Ibid., p, 54.

[235] Ibid., p. 54. The clumsiness of Ellul’s

argument has to be read to be fully appreciated.

[236] Quoted in Richard Wolin, The Politics

of Being: The Political Thought of Martin

Heidegger (New York and Oxford:

Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 4.

[237] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to

Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1959), p. 38.

[238] Ibid., p. 39.

[239] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question

Concerning Technology’, in David Farrell

Krell, ed, Basic Writings, (New York:

Harper & Row, 1977), p. 294.

[240] Heidegger, ‘Question Concerning

Technology’, p. 296.

[241] Cited in Wolfgang Schirmacher,

Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach

Heidegger (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag

Karl Alber, 1983), p. 25. This mean-spirited and unrepentant passage appears in

English translation in Victor Farias’s

Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1989), p. 287.

Farias’s extraordinary, brilliantly researched

study of Heidegger covers his repellent

ideas, career, and attempts at subterfuge

after Hitler’s collapse-and the academic

enterprise of his acolytes to see this self-anointed Fiihrer of National Socialist

philosophy as more than an ideological

miscreant. No less is Farias’s book an

indictment of Heideggerian mandarins, big

and small, in the academy today.

Chapter 7: Postmodernist nihilism

The most academically entrenched attack upon humanism, the

Enlightenment, and reason are the highly influential philosophical tendencies that go under the name of postmodernism. It is arguable whether

this name adequately encompasses such disparate, even idiosyncratic

views as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel

Foucault, Jacques Derrida and a constellation of former French leftists

such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, to

cite the most well-known to an Anglo-American readership.

Yet certain basic commonalities, I believe, justly designate their work

as postmodernist or poststructuralist (the two words are often used interchangeably). To be sure, Nietzsche and Heidegger belong to a time

when anti-Enhghtenment sentiments were still rooted in the romantic

reaction to the effects of the French Revolution and the emergence of

industrial capitalism. Although these two thinkers expressed their sentiments in very different tones and formulations, they were alike part of an

antimodernist tradition that dates back to the nineteenth century and the

early part of the twentieth. To many elite intellectuals of these generations, the mechanization of society by capitalism and the rise of a growing socialistic working-class movement seemed equally repellent

alternatives to a vaguely ‘heroic’ and ‘inspired’ past.

Basically, however, Nietzsche and Heidegger advanced philosophies of

disillusionment and disenchantment. The world to winch Nietzsche

spoke was undergoing the cultural transition from a seemingly colorful

preindustrial society to a gray, deadening commercial one. Heidegger,

although himself a product of south German Catholic reactionism, found

an audience in Weimar-era disillusionment — not only with German

imperial pretensions during the Great War but with the pretensions of

the socialist movement, which had patently failed to fulfill the promise

opened by the Bolshevik Revolution.

Despite their differences in style and their different social pedigrees,

however, both Nietzsche and Heidegger addressed the fragmentation,

anomie, and loss of belief in progress that increasingly troubled intellectuals of their respective times. Although a generation apart, they provided a common cultural field, so to speak, within which later thinkers

and journalists found the resources for basically antimodernist sentiments,

especially as additional disillusionments arose in the troubled postwar

world of the mid-twentieth century.

The years following the Second World War produced a new sense of

failure, particularly in France, which was not really one of the ‘victors’ in

the conflict. Defeated by the Nazis in 1940, France had had to be liberated

by mainly Anglo-American armies. Nor was France quite an ‘occupied’

power like most countries the German armies had taken over in Europe;

indeed, given the degree of French co-existence and even collaboration

with the Nazis in the early years of the wax, many of its citizens joined

the Resistance only when it became clear that Germany was destined to

lose the war. After the liberation and a brief social honeymoon of

national unity — in which leftists, moderates, and conservatives professed

to join hands to achieve national rejuvenation — the country was wracked

by the Cold War policies of its most prestigious party, the Communists;

by the Third Republic’s efforts to retain its holdings in Indochina; by

its debacle in Algeria; and in the 1950s, by a Gaullist Fourth Republic

that was determined to radically modernize the country, at least

economically.

Culturally, French intellectuals tried to relive the hopeful mood of the

liberation days for as long as possible, particularly in the form ofJean-Paul

Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, with its strong emphasis on individual

autonomy and its professed commitment to humanism. But Sartre and his

colleagues had badly misjudged the roots of their largely personaHstic

philosophy of ‘existence’ — namely Heidegger and even more absurdly,

Soren Kierkegaard, whose angst-ridden personalistic theology never

found a congenial home among liberal or radical French intellectuals.

Although Heidegger himself publicly renounced Sartre’s humanistic

thrust in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, the German thinker, largely discredited at home because of his Nazi affiliations, had now acquired a Gallic

audience for his antimodernism and anti-rationalism — an audience that

was to grow significandy and reach into the English-speaking world.

Sartre, in turn, behaved with the notorious flippancy that was to be the

ultimate undoing of his influence in French cultural life. Skipping from

Russian Communism to Chinese Maoism and thence to various shades

of anarchism (the latter, as he professed in the last years of his life, was the

abiding basis for Iris views), he made somewhat of a political buffoon of

himself, despite the influence of his humanism among young independent-minded French radicals.

No minor factor in shaping the direction of postwar French thinking

was the Communist Party, which initially seemed to offer a viable foundation for many French intellectuals, who joined it, however temporarily, in considerable numbers. Its enormous influence with the working

class — a class that was historically detached from, indeed hostile to

France’s seemingly effete intellectuals — appeared to offer an earthy alternative to Sartre’s existentialist ambiguities.

Not that Sartre was oblivious to the social problems of France; quite to

the contrary, he was the-engaged intellectual *par excellence*, however naive

and unstable his politics. But the Communists seemed like a pillar of

strength beside the cafe intellectualism that Sartre seemed to embody.

The morally rejuvenating’ and earthy working class to which the

Communists were tied offered a kind of social and personal therapy to all

who fell within the party’s orbit.

----

Examining the problems that besieged French intellectuals from the end

of the war to the 1960s helps to understand how French postmodernism

arose and, more importantly, how it acquired its enormous influence. So

far as the leftist’ postmodernists are concerned — such as Lyotard,

Deleuze, and Baudrillard — the influence of postmodernism must be

related to the aborted student uprising of May-June 1968, particularly

in Paris, and the failure of the uprising to enlist the support of the

Communist Party, which turned upon the students with what seemed to

many like counterrevolutionary fury.

The student revolt and the working class general strike that erupted in

May had nothing to do intellectually with postmodernism, which was

still largely unknown even to many politically sophisticated student radicals. The emerging academic ‘stars’ of the 1960s like Michel Foucault did

not directiy influence the French student movement and its May-June

uprising, or the *evenements* as they have been called. It was mainly Sartre’s

humanism, the largely Parisian libertarian socialism of Cornelius

Castoriadis’s *Socialisme ou barbarie* group, Guy Debord’s Situationists,

Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life, and an indefinable cultural

anarchism that nourished the views held by most of the radical

students.[242]

But the failure of the uprising, together with the decline of the New

Left generally in Europe and America, opened the way to a nihilistic

reaction whose effects are still being felt to this very day. Postmodernism

is not only a nihilistic reaction to the failures imputed to Enlightenment

ideals of reason, science, and progress but more proximately a cultural

reaction to the failures of various socialisms to achieve a rational society

in France and elsewhere in our century. This historic failure reached its

nadir in the defeat of the May-June events of 1968 — which is not to say

that *all* major postmodern thinkers can be so situated in this historical

framework and sequence.

It may well be that the immediate factors leading to the ascendancy of

postmodernism will be forgotten in the future and that postmodernism

itself will give way to an even more antihumanistic reaction in its

academic strongholds. But the specific circumstances that catapulted

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, *et al* to such prominence in

the last two decades of the twentieth century can be located in the inability of revolutionary movements up to and including the 1960s, to eliminate the massive obstacles that an increasingly industrial and commercial

society places in the way of achieving a rational society.

----

Not surprisingly, there is a certain symmetry between the emergence of

postmodernism as a widely accepted ideology and the emergence of the

social circumstances that have made it so widely acceptable. Various societies *do* foster ideologies that render their pathologies tolerable by mystifying the problems they raise. From the primitive world through the

ancient to the medieval, world views concomitantly sought to uphold

the hegemony of those in power and to explain the crises that unsettled

those eras. But they also took on a cathartically rebellious form against

the established social order. Early Christianity, like Mithraism before it

and the Reformation later on, is a striking case in point.

Today’s market society is no exception to this rule. The very tendency

of mature capitalism to fragment traditional social and cultural relations

by means of commodification yields reactionary cultural sequelae of its

own: specifically, a consolidating ideology that holds the mind captive to

the social order *in the very name of fragmentation and its alleged virtues*. If the

social order cannot make a virtue out of hope, it can try to make a virtue

out of despair. I am not claiming that postmodernists necessarily bear a

personal intention of becoming ideological supports for any social system

or that they are the mere creatures of capital. But what makes any given

body of ideas acceptable or academically respectable more often has to do

with the social functions it serves rather than with the quality of the

insights it offers. Indeed, many of the insights that have made postmodernism so attractive are not very new and have been recycled, often

unknowingly, from a warehouse of Western and even Eastern ideas that

were available in various forms for several centuries, indeed several millennia.

The more one feels disempowered about the human condition and

bereft of social commitment, the more one becomes cynical and thereby

captive to the prevailing social order. To the extent that hope and belief

in progress are lost, a disarming relativism, ahistoricism, and ultimately

nihilism replace any belief in the objectivity of truth, the reality of history, and the power of reason to change the world. Beliefs that foster

social quietism and a withdrawal into personal life, in turn, tend to

neutralize an activist and interventionist mentality oriented toward the

public sphere.

By contending that reason is questionable as a path to ascertaining

truth, indeed that it is simply a social artifact and that truth is merely a

social artifice, postmodernism advances this process, as does its denial that

an objective history exists — a denial that divests the present of any ethical moorings and social meaning. Civilization ceases to be regarded as a

realm of rational attainments; indeed the very idea of progress as a basis

for hope and social foresight begins to fade, if not disappear completely.

Moreover, such sweeping claims tend to obscure the social factors that

have created the ‘postmodern condition’ (to use Jean-Frangois Lyotard’s

phrase); in fact, by rendering social analysis anemic, even bloodless, postmodernism tends to underpin the *status quo* precisely by challenging its

effects rather than its underlying workings. Considerations of space make

it impossible for me to explore postmodernism generally, still less provide

an exposition of its ever-changing, even convoluted ideas. Rather, I shall

confine myself to examining those aspects of postmodernism that are

antihumanist in the sense I am using the word in-this book — as subverting a belief in the power of reason, science, and technology to render

society and the human experience rational and free.

Within this delimited scope, postmodernism can clearly be seen as a

fragmenting and relativizing ideology *par excellence* that reflects the

anomie and despair so widespread in the closing years of the century. In

this respect postmodernism, precisely *because* it is a ‘weary’ and nihilistic

body of ideas, may very well serve to validate the present society or even

render it possible for its acolytes to ‘dwell’ rather innocuously within the

existing set of social conditions, however much they regard themselves as

social rebels, especially concerning issues that do not challenge the structure of the present society.

Its denigration of reason, coherence, and historicism, can hardly provide a sense of direction for popular restiveness or the intellectual means

for contesting the anti-ecological and multinational capitalism of our

time, still less provide the bases for a serious project for social change.

Rather, it more often leads to a pervasive relativism and to a dismembering of the ‘universalist’ projects initiated by Enfightenment thinkers and

their more radical descendants), so as to produce a form of social myopia.

Put bluntly: it disarms all serious oppositional tendencies toward the prevailing society, apart from the narcissistic adventures of mere personal

rebellion in dealing with the frustrations the society arouses in oppressed

but marginal cultural groups.

To understand how this often socially deflective approach of postmodernism has emerged, we must look, if only cursorily, into the proximate

ancestors of the postmodern outlook and the way they provided the

premises for the *devaluation* of all values — rather than responding seriously to Friedrich Nietzsche’s call for a ‘transvaluation of all values’.

----

That Nietzsche’s name appears in nearly every discussion of postmodernism is by no means accidental. Indeed, he has been embraced by

otherwise opposing theorists across the philosophical and political

spectrums, even before his deadi in 1900, with an enthusiasm that is

little less than extraordinary. The extent of his influence today has few

precedents, with the exception of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

Until fairly recently, Nietzsche’s name conjured up an elitist belief in a

‘Superman’, a hatred of Christianity, and corrosive attacks on socialism,

democracy, and the slavish masses or ‘herd’. Indeed, his philosophy was

seen as ideological furniture for the various reactionary beliefs that flourished in his time and that came to terrifying fruition in our own century.

The favorable recognition he received from rabid reactionaries, and even

the imprimatur of the Nazis on his writings, as edited by Iris reactionary

anti-Semitic sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche — together with a personal visit by Hitler to the Nietzsche archives — reinforced the belief that

Nietzsche was a precursor of National Socialism.

Yet Nietzsche’s proclivity for slapping the face of bourgeois philistines

earned him encomiums from socialists and anarchists as well. Radicals of

all kinds delighted in his militant individualism, with its kinship to the

ideas of the alleged anarchist Max Stimer. He enjoyed great popularity

among militant syndicalists, such as Salvador Segui, a leader of the

Spanish syndicalist union, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT),

and the anarchist, Emma Goldman, who praised his vibrant iconoclasm

and hatred of the German state, as did socialists like Jack London. Many

Marxists solidarized with Nietzsche’s biting criticisms of bourgeois

mean-spiritedness and vulgarity, while the father of Zionism, Theodore

Herzl, admired his strident contempt for anti-Semites and the praises he

heaped on the Jews.

That Nietzsche was neither a German nationalist nor an anti-Semite,

as so many supposed, no longer requires elucidation today. He was

indeed individualist, and a biting critic of mass culture and the ‘slave

mentality’ inculcated in the ‘herd’ by Christianity. His broader philosophical notions of the *Ubermensch*, of eternal recurrence, of life as the

‘will to power’, and his personal values shall not concern us here.

Nietzsche’s thinking provides a base for postmodernist thought in that,

more brilhandy than any other writer of the last century, he made relativism a pivotal tenet of his outlook. By doing so, he called into question

all the seeming certainties of traditional philosophies based on objective

truth. Not that he denied the existence of an objective world, or, more

properly, even cared very earnestly to discuss this traditional philosophical question; the most important conclusion he drew from his relativism

was his reduction of facts to interpretations with no objective validity of

their own. His views thereby seemed to permit the freedom to shuffle

opinions around without concern for whether they axe verifiable independently of the observer who formulates them. Nietzsche’s agnosticism,

if such it can be called, implied that it is meaningless to speak of an objective realm in which values, theories, and experience can be based. •

This relativism or ‘perspectivism’, as Nietzsche called his view, is built

on Gustav Teichmuller’s notion that every body of ideas is a simple, partial, and incomplete perspective on a highly complex world. Each view

of the world, for Teichmuller, was equally valid with any other — a pivotal contribution to postmodern thinking — although his views are rarely,

if ever discussed these days. Yet his approach that any body of ideas is

partial, indeed that it contributes to an increasingly broader understanding of reality — was hardly new: Hegel, and much earlier Aristotle,

assumed such a ‘perspectivist’ approach to the philosophical views that

preceded their own. Moreover, Teichmuller assumed that there is a reality, however complex and unfathomable, that is beyond mere interpretation, and that it can be known by reason as well as by experience.

Nietzsche questions this traditional conclusion. In a posthumously

published fragment he asks:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymns, and

anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, ivhich have

been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,

and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people:

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten this is what they are;

metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which

have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.[243]

By omitting the certainties of truth from his discussion, Nietzsche presents a radical relativism — a subjective, even linguistic relativism — that

has entered into postmodernism with a vengeance. Thus:

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena — ‘TJtere are only facts’ —

I would say: No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations.

We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’ ... ‘Everything is subjective,’ you

say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given,

it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. —

Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretations?

Even this is invention, hypothesis.[244]

None of these statements prevent Nietzsche, in principle, from exercising the privilege of saying as much as he cares to say about ideas and reality, least of all within the very philosophical realm he professes to reject.

He even has a full philosophy, by no means far removed from the metaphysics he denounces. Nietzsche presents his ‘perspectives’, such as his

notion of eternal recurrence, as though they have objective validity or

facticity. Notwithstanding recent attempts to give this notion a

metaphoric quality, Nietzsche himself actually wanted to study the

natural sciences to find ontological evidence for this cyclical belief.

Although a number of Nietzsche’s failings — arguably — were criticized

by Heidegger and later by postmodernists, his lasting imprint on postmodernist thought cannot be ignored. By reducing truth to linguistic traditions and facts to interpretations, he provides postmodernists with the

means — as well as the stylistic brilliance and fervent militancy — to radically subjectivize truth and facts, and to deny the validity of any objective

concept of history as universalistic, indeed as more than a disjointed,

variable, and free-floating collection of narratives. The same fragmenting

and seemingly subversive strategy could also be applied to science,

reason, the subject, and social theory, all of which postmodernists were

to cast as specific social or even personal creations.

In a harsh deprecation of ‘man’ and reason, Nietzsche regales us with

the fable of an inconsequential ‘star on winch clever animals invented

knowledge’ during ‘the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of

“world history” — yet only a minute’ in cosmic time, after winch ‘the star

grew cold, and the clever animals had to die’. Nor does the fable sufficiently illustrate, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘how wretched, how shadowy and

flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.

There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for

again, nothing will have happened.... There is nothing in nature so

despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a

bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge.’[245]

Nietzsche’s explicit depreciation of humanity, his denigration of

reason, and his view of truth as little more than metaphor reverberated

among many reactionaries who followed him, people whom he probably

would have denounced as *Reichsmenschen*, as he was to designate Richard

Wagner for surrendering to German nationalism. His idiosyncratic mind

and his brilliant style lures us too easily into his literary orbit and mystifies

us with pithy and colorful generalizations. Yet the misanthropic attitudes

that underpin so much of his thought should not be ignored. Nietzsche

was no angel, and to his credit, he would-have despised anyone who

called him one. His irascibility, at once coaxing and bullying, selfl-certain

and contradictory, may account for the ability of his books to speak to a

very broad spectrum of thinkers at different times.

As criticism of the late Victorian world whose philistinism infected

Germany no less than England, his work is sparkling when it is not recklessly self-adulatory. Waves of metaphors and an unrelenting linguistic

brilliance carry the reader away. That his works were taken seriously during a period of social reaction some seventy or eighty years after his

death, and elicited a vast number of commentaries on him as one of the

three most influential philosophers of our era, side by side with Marx and

Freud, is not surprising. Social reaction breeds cultural decadence, and

the most articulate academic critics of that decadence, drawn in great part

from a disillusioned French left, came to be among the most compelling

symptoms of decadence itself

----

What filiations do postmodernists claim with Nietzsche, and what have

they added to his putative insights?

Certainly, Nietzsche’s immediate, indeed ‘programmatic’ contribution

is his perspectivism, his radical if undertheorized relativism. To tins we

must add his candid anti-rationalism, his linguistic interpretation of facticity, his denial of objectivity, and his view of the subject as something

‘invented and projected behind what there is’ — even to the point where

he challenges the existence of ‘an interpreter behind the interpretation’.

Not only are these paradoxes dizzying, but Nietzsche himself was hardly

prone to deny that they existed unresolved.

In the Paris of the 1950s and early 1960s, however, poststructuralist

and later postmodernist intellectuals were not disciplined readers of earlier philosophers and tended to glide over such paradoxes, which often

verge on outright contradictions. In fact, they even celebrated, when it

was opportune, the needed ‘ambiguities’ that challenge the so-called

‘logo centric’ thinking of modernity and humanism.

The most important of French postwar philosophers to claim the

direct heritage of Nietzsche — and stylistically the most bewitching — was

Michel Foucault. Eschewing labels like postmodernism, he simply

declared, ‘I am a Nietzschean’, shordy before his death in 1984, and with

wry humor he deprecated postmodernism as a fad. Although Foucault

earned a growing audience with his early works and some distinction as a

thinker inside France, he really catapulted into the public eye after the

May—June events.[246]

Foucault’s readership grew with the publication of *Madness and Civilization* in France in 1961 and its translation in an abridged form into

English in 1963, followed by his best-selling *The Order of Things* in 1965.

Yet his work seemed no more relevant to the radical culture of the time

than Norman O. Brown’s *Life Against Death*, to which it was compared

in a *New York Times* book review. His reputation swelled with the publication of *Discipline and Punish* in 1975, followed by its translation into

English within two years. In the nine years that remained to him,

Foucault became one of the most lionized, sought-after, and acclaimed

intellectuals on the academic scene, not only in France but in the United

States. By the 1980s many critics hailed him as the greatest thinker of the

late twentieth century.

Why this enormous acclaim for a historian whose work is often anecdotal and who as a speculative thinker is not very searching? Foucault

owes a great deal of his immense reputation to the failure of 1968 and its

aftermath, not to any role he played as an initiator of or even a major

influence on the May—June events. His books unquestionably speak to an

intellectual need associated with the *evenements*: the critique of power,

the ideology of the traditional left, and the celebration of marginalized

life-styles. He is deeply concerned with the masked forms of domination

in everyday life that rarely reach the level of ordinary consciousness. In

this respect he often followed paths reconnoitered by Henri Lefebvre,

who pioneered the study of everyday life (*le quotidien*) as far back as the

1940s. Moreover, many of his readers saw Foucault’s books as critiques

of civilization *as such* and of any belief in progress, a view that was to

come very much into vogue in the seventies and the decades that

followed.[247]

----

Foucault is above all a chronicler of domination, regarded by many of his

readers, all his excursions into language and the ‘human sciences’

no twithstanding; indeed, many present-day Parisians see him primarily as

a historian, not as a philosopher. In the early and mid-1970s, Foucault’s

critique of domination, if by no means original, seemed particularly

appropriate. The 1968 student uprising in Paris had been not only a

revolt against the myth that socialism existed in Stalinist Russia but evidence of a growing sensitivity on the part of French academics to youth

subcultures that placed an expanded interpretation of selfhood on the

agenda of social liberation. In this respect the New Left initially stood in

marked contrast to the economistic doctrines of the Old Left, which, in

France, at least, was still organized into powerful parties. Freedom and

domination seemed to acquire a broader meaning than they had had in

the past, especially when colored by a radical aestheticism steeped in

Dadaist and Surrealist traditions rather than in Marxist or Communist

ones.

Understandably, the failure of the May—June revolt did not diminish

the new fascination with largely cultural interpretations of social development. Quite to the contrary: radicals of nearly all kinds saw a need for

studies of *concrete* forms of domination; for investigations into the oppressive dimensions of everyday life, whether in the past or the present;

indeed, for accounts of subjugation and coercion that eschewed ‘grand’,

seemingly abstract, and finalistic theories about history and the future of

society.

Foucault’s critique of domination and power now became increasingly

popular: it managed to satisfy these needs in varying degrees, earning

considerable, and in France, popular acclaim. Not only did his books,

interviews, and lectures describe oppressions that ordinarily take the form

of rational and humane dispensations, such as asylums that profess to

‘treat’ the insane and prisons that profess to ‘rehabilitate’ their inmates;

his criticisms of domination and power were ubiquitous, extending from

asylums and prisons to the most minute features of everyday life.

Moreover, whatever he intended his work to achieve, Foucault

attacked *institutions* as such. In one of his most interesting dialogues —

with a Maoist, Pierre Victor — he defends the 1792 September massacres

during the French Revolution, in which seemingly uncontrolled crowds,

fearing ‘internal enemies’ of the Revolution, brutally killed thousands of

prisoners in the jails of the Paris area; most of the latter were not political

prisoners but prostitutes, debtors, and minor malefactors. The massacres,

Foucault declares, were ‘a political act against the manipulation of those

in power, and an act of vengeance against the oppressive classes.’ He

favorably contrasts this ‘popular justice’ executed by a crowd with the

institutionalized ‘authoritarian manner’ in which the Paris Commune of

1792

set about staging a court: judges behind a table, representing a third party

standing between the people who were ‘screaming for vengeance j and the

accused who were either ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’; an investigation to establish

the ‘truth’ or to obtain a ‘confession; deliberation in order to find out

what was ‘just’.... Can we not see the embryonic, albeit fragile form of a

state apparatus reappearing here?[248]

This passage is plainly directed against institutionalization in any form —

as though the crowd’s behavior were entirely spontaneous (which it

probably was not) and the Commune’s creation of an *ad hoc* ‘court’ constituted an ‘embryonic ... state apparatus’ (which it did not, under the

circumstances). Lacking any searching theoretical or historical contextuality, Foucault’s statements on the profoundly important issue of just

treatment for criminal behavior axe completely reckless and only seemingly radical. To see an ‘embryonic’ state power in institutionalized

human interaction, even in its strictly functional and *ad hoc* forms, is as

simplistic as it is misleading. Carried to its logical conclusion, Foucault’s

view essentially excludes the possibility that *any* kind of society can exist

without domination, unless it is a free-wheeling mass of individuals who

somehow congeal into ‘functional’ bodies like the September crowds.

That the arbitrariness of crowd ‘actions’ may undermine the imperatives

of organized and rational human behavior seems to have been undertheorized at best or barely reached the level of conscious formulation at

worst. Foucault’s anecdotal and almost microscopic treatment of power

notwithstanding, his very endeavor to show its ubiquity in fact makes

power too cosmic and elusive to grasp. We know the details of power —

often quite marginal details — but we do not know the *premises* and the

• structure* of power, notably, the crucial social relations that underpin it.

Seen only as the exercise of coercion (which the crowds of September

1792 cert ainly exercised!), power becomes too ubiquitous to cope with.

It is everywhere — and, functionally, beyond comprehension — however

much it may vary in degrees or be concentrated by institutions. There is

no good reason why the September massacre crowds that brutally slaughtered the prisoners were more ‘free’ or desirable than a court set up by

the Paris Commune to sift enemies of the revolution from petty criminals.

More specifically, power itself is not something whose elimination is

actually possible. Hierarchy, domination, and classes can and should be

eliminated, as should the use of power to force people to act against their