Living Earth Community - 8. Affectual Insight
Living Earth Community
8. Affectual Insight
8. Affectual Insight: Love as a Way of Being and Knowing
David L. Haberman
© David L. Haberman, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.08
There is a poetic phrase commonly known in the north Indian region of Braj: pritama prita hi te peyi, which means ‘the Beloved is found precisely through love’. I would like to meditate on this seemingly simple sentence for the deeper meaning it has to offer our considerations of multiple ways of being and knowing, particularly as they relate to the living Earth community.
The Krishnaite traditions of Braj are informed by early Hindu Vedantic texts that give philosophical expression to an understanding of all life as simultaneously radically unified and bountifully diversified. This is recognized as the siddantik perspective that provides the philosophical basis for understanding the true nature of all life. Since accounts of creation are productive points of entry into the general worldview of a particular tradition, I begin with the emergent understanding of creation that is encountered in the foundational Vedantic texts, the Upanishads. One of the major tenets of Vedantic religious philosophy is non-duality (advaita). Principal Upanishadic texts recount that in the beginning the One Ultimate Reality (Brahman, atman, purusha) was lonely and bored, as there is not much joy in playing with one’s self alone (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4).1
Hence, the One desired others, and, as a result, divided itself and proceeded to interact with itself in a multitude of manifest forms (nama-rupa). Through this creative process, the unmanifest One produced out of itself the manifold world of all entities, both animate and inanimate. Accordingly, everything in the world is concurrently non-different and different, one and many. Although difference is acknowledged — and even celebrated — sharp ontological divides do not exist. It is all Brahman, for the fundamental Upanishads declare: ‘this whole world is Brahman’. Significantly, the sacred totality includes a manifest (adhibhautik) as well as an unmanifest (adhyatmik) dimension. In contrast to, for example, a Calvinistic view, there are no impenetrable boundaries between the supreme reality (Brahman or God) and the visible world. As it says in the important Vedantic text the Bhagavad Gita, ‘God is everything’ (7:19).2 Therefore, everything in the world is a part of the ultimate Whole, and, as such, is sacred. Animated presence pervades everything. The religious studies scholar Emma Tomalin calls this ‘bio-divinity’, the notion that Nature is infused with animated divinity, an idea widespread in India for a very long time.3 An intellectual understanding of the siddhantik philosophical assertion that a sacred presence pervades everything, however, is not enough; it must be realized. And this leads us to another important perspective: the bhavatmik.
Bhavatmik is an adjective meaning the perspective ‘whose essence is bhava’. The key term in this compound is bhava, a complex Sanskrit word with multiple dictionary meanings that include a state of mind, manner of being, way of thinking or feeling, emotion, attitude, affection, disposition, or realization.4 In the Braj Krishnaite traditions, this word is best and most simply translated as ‘love’. It is this term I had in mind in assigning the title to this short essay. A common way of expressing the goal of the Braj religious traditions is with the word sarvatma-bhava, which I would render as ‘a loving realization of the divine in everything’. The crucial question is: how does one actually come to know the sacred or divine presence in some living entity? I return to the poetic phrase that I began with; the answer is precisely through love. When someone approaches us with aggression, shouting with rage in our face, we tend to pull back protectively and conceal ourselves. On the other hand, when someone approaches us with tender love, we are drawn out and reveal much more of ourselves. Might it be this way with all entities?
Conversations with religious practitioners in Braj suggest that it might indeed. There is a common thread that runs through hundreds of interviews I have had with worshippers of sacred rivers, trees, and mountains in northern India. Many reported that what formerly seemed like an ‘ordinary’ river, tree, or mountain revealed its divine nature or true sacred form (svarupa) after a period of interacting with that entity through loving acts of worship (seva). I met a young man on the bank of the Yamuna after watching him perform a very moving worship of the river. He explained to me how he had come to this: ‘I used to see Yamuna-ji as an ordinary river and treat it badly. But then I met my guru, and he told me to start worshiping Yamuna-ji. At first I was a little resistant, but I did what he said. Soon, I began to see her svarupa (true divine form) and realized how wonderful (adbhut) she really is. So now I worship her everyday with love. The main benefit of worshiping Yamuna-ji is an ever-expanding love. I want to live in her world of love’.5 This man suggests something very important. Loving attitudes and actions lead to a perspectival awakening; through a reverent approach one comes to know the true nature of some entity in a manner that exceeds mere intellectual knowledge. Once that true nature is revealed and one has an experience of its marvelousness, one enters spontaneously into an appreciative and worshipful attitude, and engages naturally in acts of loving care.
This is a common story. A woman I met who lovingly revered a neem tree daily with worshipful acts of service told me the result of this was that ‘Mother revealed herself to me, which has led me to a very close relationship with her. I cannot now ever imagine cutting a living tree’.6 A woman who worships a stone from Mount Govardhan in her home every day reported that after some time, this stone revealed its svarupa, or true nature, and that this has led to a deep relationship in which the stone sometimes even talks to her. ‘Before I began my worship, I never imagined how truly wonderful these stones were’.7 During my visits to an outdoor shrine housing a stone from Mount Govardhan, a man I spoke with explained: ‘When people lovingly decorate a Giriraj shila (Govardhan stone) and worship it, the personality comes out. Look, there are many Giriraj shilas here, but the svarupa is really showing itself in this one (svarupa nikal deta hai) because people have added eyes and decorations, and have worshiped it’.8 Love is both a way of acting and an emotional state of being, and loving attitudes and actions are the very doorway into an insightful world of realization; they are concrete levers for opening up new perspectives. This is what I mean by ‘affectual insight’. Many claim that through love the face of the Beloved is available in every entity.
This sense of the value of loving relationality has also been underscored by some important western scientific thinkers. For example, the 1983 Nobel Prize winning biologist Barbara McClintock promoted a ‘feeling for the organism’ as a crucial element in knowing it.9 She called herself a ‘mystic in science’ and endorsed a form of attention based on loving relationship as a way of seeing things not available to the more aggressive approaches represented by such figures as Francis Bacon. In seeming agreement, Norman Brown promotes Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of ‘a science based on an erotic sense of reality rather than an aggressive, dominating attitude towards reality’.10
How does one develop a loving connection with the living Earth community that leads to affectual insight into its true nature or divine presence (svarupa)? Though the whole world is sacred, human beings are not good at connecting with abstract universalities. We are embodied beings designed to connect with tangible particularities. Our nature is such that our most powerful relationships are with specific, individual beings. Universal love, for example, is a noble sentiment, but it cannot begin to compare to the passionate engagement with the intimate love of a particular person. Intimate interaction with natural entities in northern India tends to be directed toward individual trees, rivers, and stones. There is an element of personal possession (mamata) in matters of love, as ‘this is my child’ or ‘here is my lover’. A woman who maintains a Govardhan stone shrine in her home confirmed this viewpoint with a familiar example: ‘There are many men in the world who are husbands, but the one who lives in this house is my husband. Likewise, there are many Giriraj shilas, but this one (gesturing to the Govardhan stone in her home shrine) is mine’.11 But as love of a particular matures with concomitant knowledge, the scope of that love tends to broaden, just as people with no prior regard for dogs tend to look at dogs differently once they become friends with one particular dog.
The possibility of reverent interaction with a particular entity opening up to a more universal reverence was highlighted for me during an instructive conversation. One day I visited a large peepul tree shrine in Varanasi, and there I met a woman who was a sadhvi, a female practitioner who had renounced ordinary domestic life to devote herself to spiritual pursuits. At one point in our conversation, she explained what she thought was the real value of worshiping a tree: ‘From the heartfelt worship of a single tree, one can see the divinity in that tree and feel love (bhava) for it. After some time, with knowledge one can then see the divinity in all trees. Really, in all life. All life is sacred because God is everywhere and in everything. This tree is a svarupa of Vasudeva (Krishna). As it says in the Bhagavad Gita, from devotion to a svarupa (one’s own particular sacred form of God) comes awareness of the vishvarupa (universal form of God)’.12 In brief, this knowledgeable woman was advancing the idea that the love of a particular has the possibility of opening up a more reverent attitude toward the universal. Regarding trees, her point was that loving interaction with a particular tree could lead to the realization of the sacrality of all trees — and by extension, of all life. With the comprehension of the universal via the particular, we return full circle to the notion of sarvatma-bhava, the idea that everything is sacred. What first began as a proposition, is now deeply realized through affectual experience.
I close by suggesting that a new and special kind of love is available to us during these challenging times; a possibility is being offered to us that has perhaps never existed before. This may be the great redeeming feature of this troubled age of massive extinction, the silver lining in the proverbial dark cloud of our times. It is a love that is both astonishingly sweet and extremely urgent. Earth is singing us a special love song, if we can only open our hearts to hear it.
Today, we have the possibility of loving the living Earth community, of loving old-growth forests for example, in a manner that has perhaps never been possible before, for we now experience them at once as overwhelmingly beautiful and as tremendously vulnerable. The powerful, vibrant forests that frightened the early Puritans when they landed on the eastern seaboard and led them to conquer and clear-cut them have now been replaced by forests vastly diminished — and perhaps even dying. Much of the success of the great work we are being called to depends on understanding the nature of and embodying this special love. Although as a lifelong student of religion I would insist that love is fundamentally unified, I want to assert that the love we seem to be called to today has a dual nature: it is a boundlessly joyful love, and it is an affectionately concerned love. It is somewhat similar to the love a parent feels for a child ill with a life-threatening disease: the parent feels deeply moved by the child’s smile while simultaneously being aware that the disease may take the child before her time. The intensity of the love is increased by the vulnerability of the child, and now so much of the living Earth community is endangered. The joyful dimension of this love has to do with opening ourselves to a power and wondrous presence in the world beyond even our greatest knowledge. The caring dimension of this love has to do with being sensitively attentive to the needs of particular threatened forms of life. This insightful, tender love offers a pathway to a deeper way of knowing and a more sensible way of being in the world today. Long live the whole living Earth community!
Bibliography
Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013).
Haberman, David L., Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).
— People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929177.001.0001
— River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Keller, Evelyn Fox, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1984).
McGregor, R. S., The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Olivelle, Patrick, trans., Upanishads (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Tomalin, Emma, ‘Bio-Divinity and Biodiversity: Perspectives on Religion and Environmental Conservation in India’, Numen, 51.3 (2004), 265–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527041945481
Sargeant, Winthrop, Shri Bhagavad Gita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
1 For an English translation of this text, see: Upanishads, trans. by Patrick Olivelle (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13–14.
2 My translation of the Sanskrit ‘Vasudevah sarvam’ from the Bhagavad Gita 7.19. For the Sanskrit original with a readable English translation of this text see Winthrop Sargeant, Shri Bhagavad Gita (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
3 Emma Tomalin, ‘Bio-Divinity and Biodiversity: Perspectives on Religion and Environmental Conservation in India’, Numen, 51.3 (2004), 265–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568527041945481
4 See R. S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 765–66.
5 David L. Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 185.
6 David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929177.001.0001. Selected from additional notes from ethnographic interviews with tree worshipers for this book project.
7 David L. Haberman, Loving Stones: Making the Impossible Possible in the Worship of Mount Govardhan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 210.
8 Ibid., p. 208.
9 See Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1984). The phrase is found throughout the verbal expressions of McClintock. See, for example, p. xxii.
10 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), p. 316.
11 Haberman, Loving Stones, p. 198.
12 Haberman, People Trees, p. 197.
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Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories
Living Earth Community
7. Fluid Histories
SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY
Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Prasenjit Duara
© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07
Time and tide wait for no man.
The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.
I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows
In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.
My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.
Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.
The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.
The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.
This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.
Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.
Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8
Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.
Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.
Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.
We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.
On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12
The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.
Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History
What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?
Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.
Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13
Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.
While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:
Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17
Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.
The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.
Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.
Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.
The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.
Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.
The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.
It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.
The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.
Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.
I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?
Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.
The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography
Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222
— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841
Lozier, M. Susan, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
Peters, John Durham, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114.
Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
Robbins, Jim, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marin Life’, New York Times, 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
Slif, Brent D., Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).
Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
Weintraub, Karen, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985).
1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.
4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.
6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.
7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.
8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.
18 Ibid., p. 88.
19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
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7. Fluid Histories
SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY
Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
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7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Prasenjit Duara
© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07
Time and tide wait for no man.
The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.
I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows
In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.
My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.
Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.
The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.
The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.
This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.
Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.
Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8
Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.
Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.
Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.
We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.
On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12
The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.
Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History
What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?
Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.
Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13
Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.
While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:
Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17
Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.
The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.
Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.
Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.
The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.
Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.
The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.
It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.
The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.
Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.
I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?
Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.
The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography
Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222
— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841
Lozier, M. Susan, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
Peters, John Durham, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114.
Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
Robbins, Jim, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marin Life’, New York Times, 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
Slif, Brent D., Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).
Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
Weintraub, Karen, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985).
1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.
4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.
6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.
7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.
8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.
18 Ibid., p. 88.
19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
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Living Earth Community - 3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Living Earth Community - 3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Paul Waldau
© Paul Waldau, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.03
In preparation for the workshop’s dialogue on ‘multiple ways of being and knowing’ in our shared ‘living Earth community’, I attempted to ascertain themes relating to the following question: how might an individual today choose actions that celebrate the plain fact that each of us is a member of a species that has only sometimes, and not often lately, been a responsible member of the Earth community? I present my findings in this exploratory piece.
My framing of these issues focuses particularly on the importance of different forms of humility. I suggest that different forms of humility are needed because each of us is a member of human-centered communities that have, whether intentionally or not, produced diverse harms beyond the species line that many individuals within our own species and, in particular, the major institutions of modern industrialized societies have long celebrated rather than condemned.
My framing also foregrounds our obvious animality, although again I want to spur my own thinking by using the plural ‘animalities’, since lives on this planet are unbelievably diverse and always embedded in a more-than-animal context. I refer here both to those nonhuman lives we name with words like ‘plant’ and phrases such as ‘the material world’ to denote those parts of the universe that our host culture overwhelmingly treats as non-living, and thus merely a resource for our use and benefit.
My experience over the last half-century has suggested to me that no rich form of ‘self-actualization’ is possible for us when humans claim to be separate and superior, as occurs habitually through the demarcating property of language that produces categories such as ‘humans and animals’. I take human exceptionalism to be the dominant narrative of our time, even though in our received wisdom traditions there are many profound formulations about recognizing the importance of both human and nonhuman ‘others’ whenever any human individual or group seeks full self-actualization.1 I offer here a few forthright statements that make plain the importance of such wisdom. The first is from Viktor Frankl.
[S]elf-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.2
A pair of comments from Thomas Berry takes the issue well beyond the species line:
[W]e must say that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
Indeed we cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.3
Beware Bootlegging. I also use the plural ‘self-actualizations’ in this chapter because I intentionally want to call out another issue — it does not follow that one’s own notions and/or attempts at self-actualization provide any sort of paradigm by which the self-actualization of other animals, whether human or not, can be measured. Instead, I go forward on the assumption that, in any group (and this gathering of chapters would provide a paradigmatic example of the following), there will be different forms of self-actualization. One widely successful form appears in service traditions, and yet other forms appear in meditation traditions. Many other forms appear in instances where individual humans have found a way to stand outside the penchant for self-preoccupation that individuals in our own species so often exhibit. In such instances, these individuals have thereby approached particularly fulsome forms of self-actualization.
Based on the personal and communal experiences that have led me to describe issues as I do above, and based on the challenges I tried to meet in my previous book-length projects (both single-author publications and the two edited collections A Communion of Subjects and An Elephant in the Room),4 I am currently finishing a book that will carry the title The Animal Invitation: Science, Ethics, Religion and Law in a More-Than-Human World. This book is an attempt to say what five different human domains — science, ethics, religion, law, and education — might look like if we took our animality seriously.
To introduce the issue further, I include next the opening two paragraphs of the book, after which I will try to sketch out ways in which I think each of the four eminently human efforts described in the subtitle — science, ethics, religion, and law — must always be living efforts (this claim, which is by no means novel in regard to any of these four domains, is related to how I discuss our own animality throughout the book). In my closing comments below, I will address both formal and informal education, since this theme is a meta-topic, as it were, of the chapters addressing science, ethics, religion and law.
Animals invite us. This world-constituting fact is true whether we are talking about humans inviting humans, or, the focus of this book, nonhumans inviting human awareness, co-existence, appreciation, and even awe. One domain after another of our human existence, including often our daily lives, reveals the astonishing variety and depth of these invitations.
It is both of these features — variety and depth — that are, tellingly, reflected in the human domains we know as ‘science,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘religion’ and ‘law.’ Admittedly, the great variety of approaches, which has spawned many different ways of talking and thinking about the animal invitation, reflects both deep acknowledgements and facile dismissals. Considered alone, the variety is revealing, for it reflects basic features, especially the finitudes, of our human capacities. But it is the depth evident in many humans’ recognition of the animal invitation which, though less commonly encountered than diversity, reflects best the fecundity and vivifying power of human thinking and action. As this book will show, human possibilities, narrow and broad, play out in the depth and variety of responses to the animal invitation that are evident in different human groups’ claims of identity, community, compassion, awareness, self-delusion, self-inflicted ignorance, and so much more.
In the following four sections, I raise the issue of whether our astonishing achievements in science, ethics, religion, and law are (i) helpfully seen as eminently animal achievements, and (ii) better understood when each of these four domains is discussed primarily as an ongoing commitment of our kind of animal that must be understood and experienced as ‘living now’, rather than ‘eternally fixed’ or as an ‘absolute truth’. Correspondingly, treatment of any of these domains as irrevocably fixed defeats what can be thought of as the vivifying and enabling genius of each of these living domains as a human achievement. I suggest in the book, then, that it takes truly living, responsive forms of each of these human achievements to move individual humans in the direction of full actualization of our human animality.
Human Science in a More-Than-Human World
That our sciences have organic features is strongly hinted in the long history of shifts in ideas and changes in governing paradigms across the centuries. Organic features of many sciences are also seen in the unbelievable rate of new discoveries in recent decades, for these discoveries have produced shifts in particular scientific communities’ dominant ways of thinking. I want to add, though, that it remains my impression (perhaps a result of my ‘education’) that the western science tradition in some ways still does not feature ‘living aspects’ quite as fully as do ethics, religion, and law.
Human Ethics in a More-Than-Human World
I’m only too aware that ethics has long been taught in the western intellectual tradition as a set of answers to questions such as ‘what is the right thing to do?’ and ‘what does it mean to be a moral and/or good person?’ Having taught ethics now for over twenty years, I do not think such formulations are helpful, nor do I think these formulations reflect that ethics is, and always needs to be, very alive indeed. For this reason, I have come to see such views of ethics as a failure to detect the true heartbeat that takes place as we embrace, develop, and seek full actualization of our human ethical abilities. A question that does prompt us to hear more clearly the heartbeat of our ethical abilities is what I have come to call ‘the root question’ of ethics, namely, ‘who are the others?’ This is an abbreviated version of what is, in our daily lives, a far more complicated rendition of this root question, which can be stated in a variety of ways — here’s one version that I think captures some of the animal and human genius of the abilities we call ‘ethics’: ‘Who are the others about whom I should care given that I have finite abilities and there are, as a practical matter, many other limits on my ability to care?’
The principal point in the book’s chapter on ethics is that such root questions, and of course the abilities that we use in pursuing our own answer, reflect what can only be described as eminently animal abilities. I do not mean to suggest with ‘eminently’ in the prior sentence that each and every kind of animal features the high-level abilities we call ethics — my guess is that only some animals do (caring about ‘others’ is more common, I suspect, in mammals, but there is much to suggest that some birds and a variety of non-mammals also have some feature in their life that, in effect, can be described as a version of the ‘who are the others?’ question).5
In this chapter, I suggest that one cannot understand an ability of the ethical sort without affirming that ability’s animal origin and nature. As a segue into the following comments about humans’ spiritual/religious awarenesses, let me add that I have come, after a half-century of studying religious traditions, to think that much, if not all, of great value in our religious traditions follows from the eminently animal nature of ethics. Religious traditions are of particular interest to me on account of their following aspects: the role of narrative; the pervasive degree to which our worlds feature sacredness and gift in connection with real places and other living beings; and the insightful observation that relational epistemologies are crucial to each of us recognizing much of who we are.
Human Religion in a More-Than-Human World
Here I tread on sensitive ground — I do this intentionally and reverentially, recognizing that there is no single definition of religion that I might employ to argue that ‘religion must be alive in order help humans self-actualize.’
As I get older, I’m less inclined to preface the following claim with mea culpa, but perhaps I should as a way to underscore my theme of ‘humilities’ — much that is called ‘religion’ fails to help ‘adherents’ or ‘believers’ self-actualize (in the sense I use this term in these short comments). Yet our spiritual/religious domains seem to me, after a half-century of immersion in studying religion, to include a great variety of options, some of which embrace responsibly rather than repudiate what it means for religious awareness to respect and nurture our many animal-based abilities, finitudes, fragilities, organic births, decline, and eventual death. Religious awareness, when it acknowledges our animality in responsible, foundational ways, will itself be truly alive and living in every sense that I am an animal now alive and living.
Human Law in a More-Than-Human World
Law (by which I mean ‘legal systems’, of which there are at least seven distinct major traditions and obviously many different minor variations) may also seem, like science, somewhat of a challenge to fit into the ‘living’ paradigm. Yet any study of comparative law makes it obvious how fully constructed each individual legal system is, and how such ‘construction’ has features that are easily discerned to be ‘living’, in the sense that I’m using that broad term in this short paper. This can be observed in these two comments by Robert Cover:
To live in a legal world requires that one know not only the precepts, but also their connections to possible and plausible states of affairs.6
Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.7
The need for stability in legal systems, especially as they are part of complex societies, creates features and pressures that tend to make legal systems ‘conservative’, ‘predictable’, and subject to forces that easily and often have made enactment and enforcement of ‘law’ the prerogative of reactionary forces.8 Consider the exclusion implied in Cicero’s seemingly inclusive comment that ‘we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.’9 The ‘we’ today might seem to refer to the human group alone, but Cicero through this claim in actuality hides two recurring facts. Human groups now use, and seemingly forever have used, ‘law’ (developed legal systems) to subordinate not only nonhuman animals and the more-than-human Earth, but also marginalized, politically powerless human groups.
Although the contemporary movement widely known as ‘animal law’ has for the last two decades challenged such a narrow construction of law, public policy circles today nonetheless remain ignorant of and unconcerned about the ‘animal question’. There are changes afoot today by which the living features of law can be seen, but since, characteristically, ‘the political trumps the legal’, the full potential of public policy for the more-than-human world remains, as of yet, unrealized.
Some Final Comments on Human Education
The education theme is, as noted above, a meta-theme in the forthcoming book. In my Animal Studies — An Introduction, I worked with both formal and informal education, both of which are encapsulated by an observation made by the English philosopher Stephen Clark: ‘one’s ethical, as well as one’s ontological framework is determined by what entities one is prepared to notice or take seriously’.10 I entered the academic world because, for me, it is a place a daring, and so much so that, at its best, the academic world fosters critical thinking that allows for self-criticism along the lines of Theodore Roszak’s ‘But then let us admit that the academy has very rarely been a place of daring’.11 David Orr adds a further dimension to this discussion, extending the issue across the species line — ‘The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth’.12
One way in which our society has been equipping ‘educated humans’ to be ‘effective vandals’ (or, in Aldo Leopold’s phrasing, ‘conqueror of the land-community’ rather than ‘plain member and citizen of it’) is categorical division of humans from other animals.13 This framing defeats us even as it prompts ignorance that leads to great harms to other animals and their local communities. Teachers and students who insist on language that foregrounds a ‘human/animal dualism’ seem to me to have less chance, often none at all, of accurately assessing themselves or counseling other humans in ways that lead to greater prospects of self-actualization. Why do I suggest this? Because our evident mammality, primatehood, and ape-ness are radically (that is, at the root) denied by the dualism.
A key feature of our local formal education — the two-part division of ‘higher education’ into the sciences, on the one hand, and the ‘arts and humanities’, on the other — continues to foster the notion that human possibilities are the paradigm of achievement for any living being. In effect, the two-part university has features that legitimize human exceptionalism in a more-than-human world — this is one way that it equips us to be effective vandals of our shared world. Moreover, education further vandalizes in those areas of formal education where the ideology ‘all humans matter’ inadvertently masks harms done to many human animals as well. Thus, in the book, I suggest that teaching about science, ethics, religion, and law in virtually all mainline institutions today presents a face of human exceptionalism that goes beyond harms to nonhumans and their communities because, ironically, formal education in practice continues to hold in place the privilege of only some humans.
A Near-Term Task
I have come to think of our personal and social tasks as finding ways to re- assert our animality, even though these fundamental features of our lives are hidden in plain sight, as it were. These animal abilities are, I suggest, the very condition of our (i) doing science thoroughly and effectively, (ii) pursuing ‘living’ forms of ethics, (iii) fostering diverse opportunities for spiritual and religious awareness that are truly alive and free, and (iv) creating legal systems that create and project for ourselves a future of responsible membership in the larger community.
A Longer-Term Task
My sense that we can do such work by returning to a full, gracious acknowledgment of our own animality needs, I think, to be supplemented by affirmations of the fact that ‘our larger community’ includes more than animals alone — insights about the plant world are cascading into our awareness again by virtue of creative scientific work, and our connection to the whole earth is, of course, something that many small-scale cultures have long known. The senses of ‘gift’ and ‘community’ found in writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, and Linda Hogan reveal that our human forebears knew a great deal about setting the stage for the emergence of a larger community and for forms of self-transcendence that such a community offers, and thereby helps make our own self-actualization possible and fuller.
Let me end on notes that are intentionally provocative and personal — I have come to think of denials of humans’ evident animality as cowardice in the face of reality. I am an animal, and so are members of my human community. I love them not in spite of their animality, but because of their animality. And I have come to recognize that I cannot ‘know myself’, nor it seems to me can any human come to know the possibilities of their life well, without coming to terms with the plain fact that we are now and have always been and will always be animals. By acknowledging our animality, we stand to open up key possibilities for self-actualization. This is why my forthcoming book, as well as the present volume in which this chapter appears, attempts to explore our scientific, ethical, religious, and social sensibilities that permit forms of life and a rule of law that are fair to all members of our extended, larger community.
Bibliography
Abram, David, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010).
Ackerman, Jennifer, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016).
Balcombe, Jonathan, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
Bekoff, Marc, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).
Berry, Thomas, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10.
Cicero, M. T., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu
Clark, Stephen, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Cover, Robert M., ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Forward: Nomos and Narrative’, 97 Harvard Law Review, 4 (1983).
— ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).
Forthman, Debra L., Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau, eds, An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
Haskell, David, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017).
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013).
Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991).
Olmert, M. D., Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009).
Orr, David, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994).
Roszak, Theodore, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42.
Shubin, Neil, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
Waldau, Paul, Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
1 I have previously defined ‘human exceptionalism’ in my book Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), as follows (p. 8): ‘Human exceptionalism is the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightfully enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms. Such exceptionalist claims are well described by [James] Rachels as “the basic idea” that “human life is regarded as sacred, or at least as having a special importance” such that “non-human life” not only does not deserve “the same degree of moral protection” as humans, but has “no moral standing at all” whenever human privilege is at stake’.
2 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 115.
3 The second quote is from Thomas Berry, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10 (p. 5). The first quote was said by Berry on multiple occasions, and it appears at p. 7 of the same collection.
4 An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity, ed. by Debra L. Forthman, Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
5 Note, for example, the great range and diversity of life explored in the following titles: Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013); David Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017); David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010); M. D. Olmert, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009); Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016); Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016); Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
6 Robert M. Cover, ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review, 97.4 (1983), 4–68, at 10.
7 Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, at 1604, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
8 It should be noted that my generalizations here do not apply to Indigenous legal systems.
9 Cicero makes this comment in ‘The Speech of M. T. Cicero in Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus’ (M. T. Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu). See paragraph LIII, paragraph 146.
10 Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 7.
11 Theodore Roszak, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42, at 4.
12 David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), p. 5.
13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991), p. 240.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter
Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
3. Humilities, Animalities, and Self-Actualizations in a Living Earth Community
Paul Waldau
© Paul Waldau, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.03
In preparation for the workshop’s dialogue on ‘multiple ways of being and knowing’ in our shared ‘living Earth community’, I attempted to ascertain themes relating to the following question: how might an individual today choose actions that celebrate the plain fact that each of us is a member of a species that has only sometimes, and not often lately, been a responsible member of the Earth community? I present my findings in this exploratory piece.
My framing of these issues focuses particularly on the importance of different forms of humility. I suggest that different forms of humility are needed because each of us is a member of human-centered communities that have, whether intentionally or not, produced diverse harms beyond the species line that many individuals within our own species and, in particular, the major institutions of modern industrialized societies have long celebrated rather than condemned.
My framing also foregrounds our obvious animality, although again I want to spur my own thinking by using the plural ‘animalities’, since lives on this planet are unbelievably diverse and always embedded in a more-than-animal context. I refer here both to those nonhuman lives we name with words like ‘plant’ and phrases such as ‘the material world’ to denote those parts of the universe that our host culture overwhelmingly treats as non-living, and thus merely a resource for our use and benefit.
My experience over the last half-century has suggested to me that no rich form of ‘self-actualization’ is possible for us when humans claim to be separate and superior, as occurs habitually through the demarcating property of language that produces categories such as ‘humans and animals’. I take human exceptionalism to be the dominant narrative of our time, even though in our received wisdom traditions there are many profound formulations about recognizing the importance of both human and nonhuman ‘others’ whenever any human individual or group seeks full self-actualization.1 I offer here a few forthright statements that make plain the importance of such wisdom. The first is from Viktor Frankl.
[S]elf-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.2
A pair of comments from Thomas Berry takes the issue well beyond the species line:
[W]e must say that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
Indeed we cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.3
Beware Bootlegging. I also use the plural ‘self-actualizations’ in this chapter because I intentionally want to call out another issue — it does not follow that one’s own notions and/or attempts at self-actualization provide any sort of paradigm by which the self-actualization of other animals, whether human or not, can be measured. Instead, I go forward on the assumption that, in any group (and this gathering of chapters would provide a paradigmatic example of the following), there will be different forms of self-actualization. One widely successful form appears in service traditions, and yet other forms appear in meditation traditions. Many other forms appear in instances where individual humans have found a way to stand outside the penchant for self-preoccupation that individuals in our own species so often exhibit. In such instances, these individuals have thereby approached particularly fulsome forms of self-actualization.
Based on the personal and communal experiences that have led me to describe issues as I do above, and based on the challenges I tried to meet in my previous book-length projects (both single-author publications and the two edited collections A Communion of Subjects and An Elephant in the Room),4 I am currently finishing a book that will carry the title The Animal Invitation: Science, Ethics, Religion and Law in a More-Than-Human World. This book is an attempt to say what five different human domains — science, ethics, religion, law, and education — might look like if we took our animality seriously.
To introduce the issue further, I include next the opening two paragraphs of the book, after which I will try to sketch out ways in which I think each of the four eminently human efforts described in the subtitle — science, ethics, religion, and law — must always be living efforts (this claim, which is by no means novel in regard to any of these four domains, is related to how I discuss our own animality throughout the book). In my closing comments below, I will address both formal and informal education, since this theme is a meta-topic, as it were, of the chapters addressing science, ethics, religion and law.
Animals invite us. This world-constituting fact is true whether we are talking about humans inviting humans, or, the focus of this book, nonhumans inviting human awareness, co-existence, appreciation, and even awe. One domain after another of our human existence, including often our daily lives, reveals the astonishing variety and depth of these invitations.
It is both of these features — variety and depth — that are, tellingly, reflected in the human domains we know as ‘science,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘religion’ and ‘law.’ Admittedly, the great variety of approaches, which has spawned many different ways of talking and thinking about the animal invitation, reflects both deep acknowledgements and facile dismissals. Considered alone, the variety is revealing, for it reflects basic features, especially the finitudes, of our human capacities. But it is the depth evident in many humans’ recognition of the animal invitation which, though less commonly encountered than diversity, reflects best the fecundity and vivifying power of human thinking and action. As this book will show, human possibilities, narrow and broad, play out in the depth and variety of responses to the animal invitation that are evident in different human groups’ claims of identity, community, compassion, awareness, self-delusion, self-inflicted ignorance, and so much more.
In the following four sections, I raise the issue of whether our astonishing achievements in science, ethics, religion, and law are (i) helpfully seen as eminently animal achievements, and (ii) better understood when each of these four domains is discussed primarily as an ongoing commitment of our kind of animal that must be understood and experienced as ‘living now’, rather than ‘eternally fixed’ or as an ‘absolute truth’. Correspondingly, treatment of any of these domains as irrevocably fixed defeats what can be thought of as the vivifying and enabling genius of each of these living domains as a human achievement. I suggest in the book, then, that it takes truly living, responsive forms of each of these human achievements to move individual humans in the direction of full actualization of our human animality.
Human Science in a More-Than-Human World
That our sciences have organic features is strongly hinted in the long history of shifts in ideas and changes in governing paradigms across the centuries. Organic features of many sciences are also seen in the unbelievable rate of new discoveries in recent decades, for these discoveries have produced shifts in particular scientific communities’ dominant ways of thinking. I want to add, though, that it remains my impression (perhaps a result of my ‘education’) that the western science tradition in some ways still does not feature ‘living aspects’ quite as fully as do ethics, religion, and law.
Human Ethics in a More-Than-Human World
I’m only too aware that ethics has long been taught in the western intellectual tradition as a set of answers to questions such as ‘what is the right thing to do?’ and ‘what does it mean to be a moral and/or good person?’ Having taught ethics now for over twenty years, I do not think such formulations are helpful, nor do I think these formulations reflect that ethics is, and always needs to be, very alive indeed. For this reason, I have come to see such views of ethics as a failure to detect the true heartbeat that takes place as we embrace, develop, and seek full actualization of our human ethical abilities. A question that does prompt us to hear more clearly the heartbeat of our ethical abilities is what I have come to call ‘the root question’ of ethics, namely, ‘who are the others?’ This is an abbreviated version of what is, in our daily lives, a far more complicated rendition of this root question, which can be stated in a variety of ways — here’s one version that I think captures some of the animal and human genius of the abilities we call ‘ethics’: ‘Who are the others about whom I should care given that I have finite abilities and there are, as a practical matter, many other limits on my ability to care?’
The principal point in the book’s chapter on ethics is that such root questions, and of course the abilities that we use in pursuing our own answer, reflect what can only be described as eminently animal abilities. I do not mean to suggest with ‘eminently’ in the prior sentence that each and every kind of animal features the high-level abilities we call ethics — my guess is that only some animals do (caring about ‘others’ is more common, I suspect, in mammals, but there is much to suggest that some birds and a variety of non-mammals also have some feature in their life that, in effect, can be described as a version of the ‘who are the others?’ question).5
In this chapter, I suggest that one cannot understand an ability of the ethical sort without affirming that ability’s animal origin and nature. As a segue into the following comments about humans’ spiritual/religious awarenesses, let me add that I have come, after a half-century of studying religious traditions, to think that much, if not all, of great value in our religious traditions follows from the eminently animal nature of ethics. Religious traditions are of particular interest to me on account of their following aspects: the role of narrative; the pervasive degree to which our worlds feature sacredness and gift in connection with real places and other living beings; and the insightful observation that relational epistemologies are crucial to each of us recognizing much of who we are.
Human Religion in a More-Than-Human World
Here I tread on sensitive ground — I do this intentionally and reverentially, recognizing that there is no single definition of religion that I might employ to argue that ‘religion must be alive in order help humans self-actualize.’
As I get older, I’m less inclined to preface the following claim with mea culpa, but perhaps I should as a way to underscore my theme of ‘humilities’ — much that is called ‘religion’ fails to help ‘adherents’ or ‘believers’ self-actualize (in the sense I use this term in these short comments). Yet our spiritual/religious domains seem to me, after a half-century of immersion in studying religion, to include a great variety of options, some of which embrace responsibly rather than repudiate what it means for religious awareness to respect and nurture our many animal-based abilities, finitudes, fragilities, organic births, decline, and eventual death. Religious awareness, when it acknowledges our animality in responsible, foundational ways, will itself be truly alive and living in every sense that I am an animal now alive and living.
Human Law in a More-Than-Human World
Law (by which I mean ‘legal systems’, of which there are at least seven distinct major traditions and obviously many different minor variations) may also seem, like science, somewhat of a challenge to fit into the ‘living’ paradigm. Yet any study of comparative law makes it obvious how fully constructed each individual legal system is, and how such ‘construction’ has features that are easily discerned to be ‘living’, in the sense that I’m using that broad term in this short paper. This can be observed in these two comments by Robert Cover:
To live in a legal world requires that one know not only the precepts, but also their connections to possible and plausible states of affairs.6
Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.7
The need for stability in legal systems, especially as they are part of complex societies, creates features and pressures that tend to make legal systems ‘conservative’, ‘predictable’, and subject to forces that easily and often have made enactment and enforcement of ‘law’ the prerogative of reactionary forces.8 Consider the exclusion implied in Cicero’s seemingly inclusive comment that ‘we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen.’9 The ‘we’ today might seem to refer to the human group alone, but Cicero through this claim in actuality hides two recurring facts. Human groups now use, and seemingly forever have used, ‘law’ (developed legal systems) to subordinate not only nonhuman animals and the more-than-human Earth, but also marginalized, politically powerless human groups.
Although the contemporary movement widely known as ‘animal law’ has for the last two decades challenged such a narrow construction of law, public policy circles today nonetheless remain ignorant of and unconcerned about the ‘animal question’. There are changes afoot today by which the living features of law can be seen, but since, characteristically, ‘the political trumps the legal’, the full potential of public policy for the more-than-human world remains, as of yet, unrealized.
Some Final Comments on Human Education
The education theme is, as noted above, a meta-theme in the forthcoming book. In my Animal Studies — An Introduction, I worked with both formal and informal education, both of which are encapsulated by an observation made by the English philosopher Stephen Clark: ‘one’s ethical, as well as one’s ontological framework is determined by what entities one is prepared to notice or take seriously’.10 I entered the academic world because, for me, it is a place a daring, and so much so that, at its best, the academic world fosters critical thinking that allows for self-criticism along the lines of Theodore Roszak’s ‘But then let us admit that the academy has very rarely been a place of daring’.11 David Orr adds a further dimension to this discussion, extending the issue across the species line — ‘The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth’.12
One way in which our society has been equipping ‘educated humans’ to be ‘effective vandals’ (or, in Aldo Leopold’s phrasing, ‘conqueror of the land-community’ rather than ‘plain member and citizen of it’) is categorical division of humans from other animals.13 This framing defeats us even as it prompts ignorance that leads to great harms to other animals and their local communities. Teachers and students who insist on language that foregrounds a ‘human/animal dualism’ seem to me to have less chance, often none at all, of accurately assessing themselves or counseling other humans in ways that lead to greater prospects of self-actualization. Why do I suggest this? Because our evident mammality, primatehood, and ape-ness are radically (that is, at the root) denied by the dualism.
A key feature of our local formal education — the two-part division of ‘higher education’ into the sciences, on the one hand, and the ‘arts and humanities’, on the other — continues to foster the notion that human possibilities are the paradigm of achievement for any living being. In effect, the two-part university has features that legitimize human exceptionalism in a more-than-human world — this is one way that it equips us to be effective vandals of our shared world. Moreover, education further vandalizes in those areas of formal education where the ideology ‘all humans matter’ inadvertently masks harms done to many human animals as well. Thus, in the book, I suggest that teaching about science, ethics, religion, and law in virtually all mainline institutions today presents a face of human exceptionalism that goes beyond harms to nonhumans and their communities because, ironically, formal education in practice continues to hold in place the privilege of only some humans.
A Near-Term Task
I have come to think of our personal and social tasks as finding ways to re- assert our animality, even though these fundamental features of our lives are hidden in plain sight, as it were. These animal abilities are, I suggest, the very condition of our (i) doing science thoroughly and effectively, (ii) pursuing ‘living’ forms of ethics, (iii) fostering diverse opportunities for spiritual and religious awareness that are truly alive and free, and (iv) creating legal systems that create and project for ourselves a future of responsible membership in the larger community.
A Longer-Term Task
My sense that we can do such work by returning to a full, gracious acknowledgment of our own animality needs, I think, to be supplemented by affirmations of the fact that ‘our larger community’ includes more than animals alone — insights about the plant world are cascading into our awareness again by virtue of creative scientific work, and our connection to the whole earth is, of course, something that many small-scale cultures have long known. The senses of ‘gift’ and ‘community’ found in writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, and Linda Hogan reveal that our human forebears knew a great deal about setting the stage for the emergence of a larger community and for forms of self-transcendence that such a community offers, and thereby helps make our own self-actualization possible and fuller.
Let me end on notes that are intentionally provocative and personal — I have come to think of denials of humans’ evident animality as cowardice in the face of reality. I am an animal, and so are members of my human community. I love them not in spite of their animality, but because of their animality. And I have come to recognize that I cannot ‘know myself’, nor it seems to me can any human come to know the possibilities of their life well, without coming to terms with the plain fact that we are now and have always been and will always be animals. By acknowledging our animality, we stand to open up key possibilities for self-actualization. This is why my forthcoming book, as well as the present volume in which this chapter appears, attempts to explore our scientific, ethical, religious, and social sensibilities that permit forms of life and a rule of law that are fair to all members of our extended, larger community.
Bibliography
Abram, David, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010).
Ackerman, Jennifer, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016).
Balcombe, Jonathan, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
Bekoff, Marc, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).
Berry, Thomas, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10.
Cicero, M. T., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu
Clark, Stephen, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Cover, Robert M., ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Forward: Nomos and Narrative’, 97 Harvard Law Review, 4 (1983).
— ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016).
Forthman, Debra L., Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau, eds, An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
Haskell, David, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017).
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013).
Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991).
Olmert, M. D., Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009).
Orr, David, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994).
Roszak, Theodore, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42.
Shubin, Neil, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
Waldau, Paul, Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
1 I have previously defined ‘human exceptionalism’ in my book Animal Studies — An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), as follows (p. 8): ‘Human exceptionalism is the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightfully enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms. Such exceptionalist claims are well described by [James] Rachels as “the basic idea” that “human life is regarded as sacred, or at least as having a special importance” such that “non-human life” not only does not deserve “the same degree of moral protection” as humans, but has “no moral standing at all” whenever human privilege is at stake’.
2 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 115.
3 The second quote is from Thomas Berry, ‘Loneliness and Presence’, in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 5–10 (p. 5). The first quote was said by Berry on multiple occasions, and it appears at p. 7 of the same collection.
4 An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity, ed. by Debra L. Forthman, Lisa F. Kane, David Hancocks, and Paul Waldau (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
5 Note, for example, the great range and diversity of life explored in the following titles: Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2016); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013); David Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York, NY: Penguin, 2017); David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Essay on Wonder (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2010); M. D. Olmert, Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009); Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016); Jennifer Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (New York, NY: Penguin, 2016); Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy, and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).
6 Robert M. Cover, ‘The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review, 97.4 (1983), 4–68, at 10.
7 Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal, 95.8 (1986), 1601–29, at 1604, https://doi.org/10.2307/796468
8 It should be noted that my generalizations here do not apply to Indigenous legal systems.
9 Cicero makes this comment in ‘The Speech of M. T. Cicero in Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus’ (M. T. Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DClu). See paragraph LIII, paragraph 146.
10 Stephen Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 7.
11 Theodore Roszak, ‘On Academic Delinquency’, in The Dissenting Academy, ed. by Theodore Roszak (New York, NY: Vintage, 1968), pp. 3–42, at 4.
12 David Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), p. 5.
13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1991), p. 240.
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Living Earth Community - Introduction
Living Earth Community - Introduction
Introduction: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Valuing Nature
John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker
© John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.22
The contemporary market-driven worldview relies upon and legitimates rational, analytical ways of knowing, often to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. Support for a consumerist ideology depends upon and simultaneously contributes to a worldview based on the instrumental rationality of the human. In this worldview, rational choice is seen as that realm of common sense in which both the world and human demands on the world are laid out as commensurate, equal realities that confront decision-makers. That is, in this rational scheme, the assumption for decision-making is that all choices are equally clear and measurable. According to that perspective, the challenge is to find a common metric for evaluating the quantitative differences among the relevant factors. Different values are integrated into this metric by assuming that all values are relative and that trade-offs are made between these values in order to arrive at a choice.
The metrics used may vary, but in the current market-driven worldview, metrics such as price, utility, and efficiency dominate. This can result in highly diverse views of a forest, for example, as a certain amount of board-feet (a unit for measuring lumber-volume), or as a mechanistic complex of ecological systems that provide previously unmeasured services to the human. In environmental policy, ecosystem services and cost-benefit analysis have been used as metrics to determine how a plant or animal species contributes to human welfare in a quantifiable way. These modes of commensuration may provide invaluable bridges into the business community for bringing environmental issues to their attention for serious consideration. Moreover, ecosystem services analysis certainly manifests a form of the transformation of consciousness urgently needed at this time. However, it is also important to ask if such rational perspectives that transform reality into information — namely, manageable, quantifiable data — alter or eliminate other significant ways of knowing reality in relation to decision-making.
One long-term effect is that the individual human decision-maker is distanced from nature because nature is reduced to measurable entities. From this perspective, humans become isolated in our perceived uniqueness as something separate from the biological web of life. In this context, humans do not seek identity and meaning in the numinous beauty of the world, or experience themselves as dependent on a complex of life-supporting interactions of air, water, and soil. Rather, this logic sees humans as independent, rational decision-makers, who find their meaning and identity in systems of management, that now attempt to co-opt the language of conservation and environmental concern. It is a short step within this commensurate worldview to psychological reflection on happiness as personal power derived from simply managing or having more ‘stuff’.
This modern, mechanistic, utilitarian view of matter as material for human use and benefit arises in part from a dualistic Western philosophical view of mind and matter. Adapted into Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious perspectives, this dualism associates mind with the soul as a transcendent spiritual entity given sovereignty and absolute control over wild matter. Many traditional values embedded in religions, such as the sacred, the placement of the sacred in particular geographical locations, the spiritual dimension of the human, and care for future generations, are incommensurate with an objectified reality, and are not quantifiable. Thus, they are often ignored as externalities, or overridden by more pragmatic, profit-driven, bottom line considerations.
Yet, even within the realm of scientific, rational thought, there is not a uniform approach. Resistance to the easy marriage of applied science and instrumental rationality comes from what we might call ‘science-that-sees-the-whole.’ By this we refer to a lineage embedded in the world of empirical, experimental science of valuing wonder, beauty, elegance, and imagination as crucial components of knowing the world. Knowing, within these perspectives, stresses both analysis and synthesis — the reductive act of observation, as well as placement of the focus of study within the context of a larger whole. ‘Science-that-sees-the-whole’ resists the temptation to take the micro, empirical, reductive act as the complete description of a thing, but opens analysis to the history of a large interactive web of life. It helps to illustrate the radical interdependence of life that characterizes all ecosystems.
From the Enlightenment period in Western Europe some three centuries ago, the human community has increasingly gravitated towards rational, scientific ways of knowing the world. Modern mechanistic worldviews engender value orientations that separate humans from the Earth. Simultaneously, modernity encourages the primacy of human extractive use and dominion over material reality. The Enlightenment legacy emphasizes knowing the world rationally and scientifically, not religiously or ethically. Rather, religion in modernity orients one away from the immanent and towards the transcendent; whereas ethics examines behavior between humans or between humans and the divine. Moreover, in its economic dimensions, modern worldviews rationalize nature. In this sense, the world at large is without intrinsic value, unless it is calibrated in a metric based on its use value for humans.
This human capacity to imagine and implement a utilitarian-based worldview regarding nature has undermined many insights from the ancient wisdom of the world’s religions by segmenting any meaningful religious values as psychological choices or subjective interests. More insidiously, some religions, allured by the individualistic orientations of market rationalism and short-term benefits of social improvement, seized upon wealth and material accumulation as containing divine approval. Thus, early in the nineteenth century, Max Weber identified the rise of Protestant Christianity in Northern Europe with an ethos of inspirited work and accumulated capital. Interestingly, Weber also articulated a disenchantment from the world as this rational, analytical, profit-driven worldview became dominant as global capitalism.
The prior enchantments of the old creation stories were burned away in the critical fires of rationality. Wonder, beauty, and imagination as ways of knowing were gradually superseded in a turn from the organic wisdom of traditional worldviews to the analytical reductionism of modernity. A mercantile mindset sought to shift the play and sport of the world in ways that accorded with modern industrial productivity as the epitome of progress.
Ways of Knowing the World
Certainly, the insights of scientific, analytical, and rational modes of knowing are indispensable for understanding and responding to our contemporary environmental crisis. So also, we will not bring ourselves out of our current impasse without the technologies that brought us into it. Indeed, these technologies are being reshaped in more ecological directions as witnessed in such developments as industrial ecology and green chemistry. But it seems important also to recall that other ways of knowing are manifest in culturally diverse cognitive pathways that treasure emotional intelligence and affective insight. These are evident in the arts — music, painting, literature, poetry, drama — that celebrate human experience in a more than rational mode. Moreover, in their explorations of embodied experience of humans and nature, many aspects of Western culture, such as visual aesthetics, literary arts, narrative poetry, and cinema are far from dormant in modern consciousness.
What is especially striking in this regard are the versions of empirical observation found among Indigenous, or aboriginal, peoples that have both rational and affective components. This involves knowledge of lands and ocean, animals and fish, plants and trees. These many ways of knowing appear in an amazing variety of human interactions with the natural world that include: the development of traditional herbal knowledge, proto-chemical understandings, healing practices, philosophical reflection in oral-narrative traditions, and agricultural cultivation. These diverse ways of knowing-dialogues are evident in the domestication of various crops such as rice, millet, wheat, corn, and tobacco. Much of modern science was built upon these foundational insights. Such understandings must have come through a wide range of careful observation and attention to seasonal changes and animal interactions. Similar observational knowledge of the migratory patterns of plants, animals, birds, and fish is evident among many native cultures. Almost uniformly, the remaining Indigenous oral narratives describe this trial and error in experimental usage along with inspired reflection on the beauty and profundity of an in-spirited world. One insight is that many modes of Indigenous knowledge often refer to these connections with the world as kin relationships.
Thus, it is becoming clearer that new modes of integrating traditional environmental knowledge and science are emerging.
Bridging multiple knowledge systems requires drawing on natural and social sciences’ methodologies and constant consideration for the value systems of all knowledge holders, a process that is based on ongoing iteration and feedback. The Mi’kmaq principle of ‘Etuaptmumk’ or ‘two-eyed seeing’ captures the concept of bringing different knowledge systems together to increase our collective bread and depth of understanding: ‘learning to see from one eye with the strengths of indigenous knowledges…and from the other eye with the strengths of western knowledges…and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all’.1
Science-that-sees-the-whole is beginning to appreciate these other ways of knowing without giving over its foundational analytical approach. In recent years, science has returned to study Indigenous knowledge not simply as idiosyncratic experiences, but as connected to larger social and ecological phenomena. Increasingly, these connections are understood as creative entanglements of the senses and the cognitive faculties. Over the last century, new ways of understanding reality have moved from the periphery of our knowledge into more common usage that increasingly tip us toward creative engagement with cosmology. For example, ways of seeing reality at the quantum level as simultaneously particle and wave, as multicentered, and as foaming into and out of existence are beginning to challenge creatively our articulation of everyday life. Our mental horizon now embraces the comprehensible and the intuitive in ways that formerly would have been dismissed as contradictory or logically incompatible.
In addition, there is a growing appreciation for the multiple ‘intelligences’ in the world. This book aims to explore some of those intelligences from plants and animals, to trees and forests. It recognizes both Indigenous ways of knowing and modern ecological ways of knowing. In both cases, organic interconnectivity is acknowledged and affirmed. Those participating in this book bring an appreciation for multiple ways of knowing and multiple intelligences in the world. Their work reflects the careful attempt to ‘see the whole’. Our work collaboratively aims to bring that sensibility toward an embodied ethic for nature.
Bibliography
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1996).
Bachelard, Gaston, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. by Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983).
Basso, Keith, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
Berkes, Fikret, Sacred Ecology, 2nd ed., (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203928950
Berry, Thomas, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco and Berkeley, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1988).
— The Great Work (New York, NY: Bell Tower, 1992).
— Sacred Universe: Earth Spirituality and Religion in the 21st Century, ed. by Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Cordova, V. F., How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, ed. by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2007).
Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, NY: Grosset/Putnam, 1994).
— Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York, NY: Harcourt, 2003).
Denny, Shelly K., and Lucia M. Fanning, ‘A Mi’kmaw Perspective on Advancing Salmon Governance in Nova Scotia, Canada: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Co-Existence’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 7.3 (2016), 1–25, https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2016.7.3.4
Dewey, John, Experience and Nature (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Co., [orig. 1925 edition, Paul Carus Lecture] 1929).
Glacken, Clarence J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).
Goodenough, Ursula, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Grim, John, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).
Grim, John., ed., Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions, 2001).
Grim, John, The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
Harrod, Howard, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2000).
Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971).
Holmes, Barbara, Race and the Cosmos (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002).
Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000).
Jenkins, Willis, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, eds, Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315764788
Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Jullien, François, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007).
Kellert, Stephen, and Ed Wilson, eds, The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993).
Kellert, Stephen, and Timothy Farnham, eds, The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).
Kutz, Susan, and Matilde Tomaselli, ‘Two-Eyed Seeing Supports Wildlife Health’, Science, 364.6446 (2019), 1135–37, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau6170
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999).
Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Boston, MA: M. Nijhoff, 1981).
Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. by Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Egan, 1962).
Midgley, Mary, The Myths We Live By (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2003).
Milton, Kay, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002).
Nabhan, Gary Paul, and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Ground of the Image, trans. by Jeff Fort (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005).
Slingerland, Edward, ‘Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body’, in What Science Offers the Humanities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 151–218, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511841163.007
Swimme, Brian, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019).
Swimme, Brian, and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1992).
Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Human Phenomenon, trans. by Sarah Appletone-Weber (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1999).
Toulmin, Stephen, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds, Confucian Spirituality, 2 vols (New York, NY: Crossroads, 2003, 2004).
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter their Ecological Phase (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002).
Yellowtail, Thomas, Yellowtail: Crow Medicine Man and Sundance Chief, as Told to Michael O. Fitzgerald (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
Zizioulas, John (of Pergamon), Remembering the Future: An Eschatological Ontology (London: T&T Clark, 2009).
1 Susan Kutz and Matilde Tomaselli, ‘Two-Eyed Seeing Supports Wildlife Health’, Science, 364.6446 (2019), 1135–37, at 1136, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau6170; inner quote from Shelley K. Denny, Lucia M. Fanning, ‘A Mi’kmaw Perspective on Advancing Salmon Governance in Nova Scotia, Canada: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Co-Existence’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 7.3 (2016), 1–25, at 16, https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2016.7.3.4
Introduction: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Valuing Nature
John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker
© John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.22
The contemporary market-driven worldview relies upon and legitimates rational, analytical ways of knowing, often to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. Support for a consumerist ideology depends upon and simultaneously contributes to a worldview based on the instrumental rationality of the human. In this worldview, rational choice is seen as that realm of common sense in which both the world and human demands on the world are laid out as commensurate, equal realities that confront decision-makers. That is, in this rational scheme, the assumption for decision-making is that all choices are equally clear and measurable. According to that perspective, the challenge is to find a common metric for evaluating the quantitative differences among the relevant factors. Different values are integrated into this metric by assuming that all values are relative and that trade-offs are made between these values in order to arrive at a choice.
The metrics used may vary, but in the current market-driven worldview, metrics such as price, utility, and efficiency dominate. This can result in highly diverse views of a forest, for example, as a certain amount of board-feet (a unit for measuring lumber-volume), or as a mechanistic complex of ecological systems that provide previously unmeasured services to the human. In environmental policy, ecosystem services and cost-benefit analysis have been used as metrics to determine how a plant or animal species contributes to human welfare in a quantifiable way. These modes of commensuration may provide invaluable bridges into the business community for bringing environmental issues to their attention for serious consideration. Moreover, ecosystem services analysis certainly manifests a form of the transformation of consciousness urgently needed at this time. However, it is also important to ask if such rational perspectives that transform reality into information — namely, manageable, quantifiable data — alter or eliminate other significant ways of knowing reality in relation to decision-making.
One long-term effect is that the individual human decision-maker is distanced from nature because nature is reduced to measurable entities. From this perspective, humans become isolated in our perceived uniqueness as something separate from the biological web of life. In this context, humans do not seek identity and meaning in the numinous beauty of the world, or experience themselves as dependent on a complex of life-supporting interactions of air, water, and soil. Rather, this logic sees humans as independent, rational decision-makers, who find their meaning and identity in systems of management, that now attempt to co-opt the language of conservation and environmental concern. It is a short step within this commensurate worldview to psychological reflection on happiness as personal power derived from simply managing or having more ‘stuff’.
This modern, mechanistic, utilitarian view of matter as material for human use and benefit arises in part from a dualistic Western philosophical view of mind and matter. Adapted into Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious perspectives, this dualism associates mind with the soul as a transcendent spiritual entity given sovereignty and absolute control over wild matter. Many traditional values embedded in religions, such as the sacred, the placement of the sacred in particular geographical locations, the spiritual dimension of the human, and care for future generations, are incommensurate with an objectified reality, and are not quantifiable. Thus, they are often ignored as externalities, or overridden by more pragmatic, profit-driven, bottom line considerations.
Yet, even within the realm of scientific, rational thought, there is not a uniform approach. Resistance to the easy marriage of applied science and instrumental rationality comes from what we might call ‘science-that-sees-the-whole.’ By this we refer to a lineage embedded in the world of empirical, experimental science of valuing wonder, beauty, elegance, and imagination as crucial components of knowing the world. Knowing, within these perspectives, stresses both analysis and synthesis — the reductive act of observation, as well as placement of the focus of study within the context of a larger whole. ‘Science-that-sees-the-whole’ resists the temptation to take the micro, empirical, reductive act as the complete description of a thing, but opens analysis to the history of a large interactive web of life. It helps to illustrate the radical interdependence of life that characterizes all ecosystems.
From the Enlightenment period in Western Europe some three centuries ago, the human community has increasingly gravitated towards rational, scientific ways of knowing the world. Modern mechanistic worldviews engender value orientations that separate humans from the Earth. Simultaneously, modernity encourages the primacy of human extractive use and dominion over material reality. The Enlightenment legacy emphasizes knowing the world rationally and scientifically, not religiously or ethically. Rather, religion in modernity orients one away from the immanent and towards the transcendent; whereas ethics examines behavior between humans or between humans and the divine. Moreover, in its economic dimensions, modern worldviews rationalize nature. In this sense, the world at large is without intrinsic value, unless it is calibrated in a metric based on its use value for humans.
This human capacity to imagine and implement a utilitarian-based worldview regarding nature has undermined many insights from the ancient wisdom of the world’s religions by segmenting any meaningful religious values as psychological choices or subjective interests. More insidiously, some religions, allured by the individualistic orientations of market rationalism and short-term benefits of social improvement, seized upon wealth and material accumulation as containing divine approval. Thus, early in the nineteenth century, Max Weber identified the rise of Protestant Christianity in Northern Europe with an ethos of inspirited work and accumulated capital. Interestingly, Weber also articulated a disenchantment from the world as this rational, analytical, profit-driven worldview became dominant as global capitalism.
The prior enchantments of the old creation stories were burned away in the critical fires of rationality. Wonder, beauty, and imagination as ways of knowing were gradually superseded in a turn from the organic wisdom of traditional worldviews to the analytical reductionism of modernity. A mercantile mindset sought to shift the play and sport of the world in ways that accorded with modern industrial productivity as the epitome of progress.
Ways of Knowing the World
Certainly, the insights of scientific, analytical, and rational modes of knowing are indispensable for understanding and responding to our contemporary environmental crisis. So also, we will not bring ourselves out of our current impasse without the technologies that brought us into it. Indeed, these technologies are being reshaped in more ecological directions as witnessed in such developments as industrial ecology and green chemistry. But it seems important also to recall that other ways of knowing are manifest in culturally diverse cognitive pathways that treasure emotional intelligence and affective insight. These are evident in the arts — music, painting, literature, poetry, drama — that celebrate human experience in a more than rational mode. Moreover, in their explorations of embodied experience of humans and nature, many aspects of Western culture, such as visual aesthetics, literary arts, narrative poetry, and cinema are far from dormant in modern consciousness.
What is especially striking in this regard are the versions of empirical observation found among Indigenous, or aboriginal, peoples that have both rational and affective components. This involves knowledge of lands and ocean, animals and fish, plants and trees. These many ways of knowing appear in an amazing variety of human interactions with the natural world that include: the development of traditional herbal knowledge, proto-chemical understandings, healing practices, philosophical reflection in oral-narrative traditions, and agricultural cultivation. These diverse ways of knowing-dialogues are evident in the domestication of various crops such as rice, millet, wheat, corn, and tobacco. Much of modern science was built upon these foundational insights. Such understandings must have come through a wide range of careful observation and attention to seasonal changes and animal interactions. Similar observational knowledge of the migratory patterns of plants, animals, birds, and fish is evident among many native cultures. Almost uniformly, the remaining Indigenous oral narratives describe this trial and error in experimental usage along with inspired reflection on the beauty and profundity of an in-spirited world. One insight is that many modes of Indigenous knowledge often refer to these connections with the world as kin relationships.
Thus, it is becoming clearer that new modes of integrating traditional environmental knowledge and science are emerging.
Bridging multiple knowledge systems requires drawing on natural and social sciences’ methodologies and constant consideration for the value systems of all knowledge holders, a process that is based on ongoing iteration and feedback. The Mi’kmaq principle of ‘Etuaptmumk’ or ‘two-eyed seeing’ captures the concept of bringing different knowledge systems together to increase our collective bread and depth of understanding: ‘learning to see from one eye with the strengths of indigenous knowledges…and from the other eye with the strengths of western knowledges…and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all’.1
Science-that-sees-the-whole is beginning to appreciate these other ways of knowing without giving over its foundational analytical approach. In recent years, science has returned to study Indigenous knowledge not simply as idiosyncratic experiences, but as connected to larger social and ecological phenomena. Increasingly, these connections are understood as creative entanglements of the senses and the cognitive faculties. Over the last century, new ways of understanding reality have moved from the periphery of our knowledge into more common usage that increasingly tip us toward creative engagement with cosmology. For example, ways of seeing reality at the quantum level as simultaneously particle and wave, as multicentered, and as foaming into and out of existence are beginning to challenge creatively our articulation of everyday life. Our mental horizon now embraces the comprehensible and the intuitive in ways that formerly would have been dismissed as contradictory or logically incompatible.
In addition, there is a growing appreciation for the multiple ‘intelligences’ in the world. This book aims to explore some of those intelligences from plants and animals, to trees and forests. It recognizes both Indigenous ways of knowing and modern ecological ways of knowing. In both cases, organic interconnectivity is acknowledged and affirmed. Those participating in this book bring an appreciation for multiple ways of knowing and multiple intelligences in the world. Their work reflects the careful attempt to ‘see the whole’. Our work collaboratively aims to bring that sensibility toward an embodied ethic for nature.
Bibliography
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1996).
Bachelard, Gaston, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. by Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983).
Basso, Keith, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
Berkes, Fikret, Sacred Ecology, 2nd ed., (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203928950
Berry, Thomas, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco and Berkeley, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1988).
— The Great Work (New York, NY: Bell Tower, 1992).
— Sacred Universe: Earth Spirituality and Religion in the 21st Century, ed. by Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Cordova, V. F., How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova, ed. by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2007).
Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, NY: Grosset/Putnam, 1994).
— Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York, NY: Harcourt, 2003).
Denny, Shelly K., and Lucia M. Fanning, ‘A Mi’kmaw Perspective on Advancing Salmon Governance in Nova Scotia, Canada: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Co-Existence’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 7.3 (2016), 1–25, https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2016.7.3.4
Dewey, John, Experience and Nature (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Co., [orig. 1925 edition, Paul Carus Lecture] 1929).
Glacken, Clarence J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).
Goodenough, Ursula, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Grim, John, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014).
Grim, John., ed., Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions, 2001).
Grim, John, The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
Harrod, Howard, The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2000).
Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971).
Holmes, Barbara, Race and the Cosmos (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002).
Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000).
Jenkins, Willis, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, eds, Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315764788
Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Jullien, François, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007).
Kellert, Stephen, and Ed Wilson, eds, The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993).
Kellert, Stephen, and Timothy Farnham, eds, The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).
Kutz, Susan, and Matilde Tomaselli, ‘Two-Eyed Seeing Supports Wildlife Health’, Science, 364.6446 (2019), 1135–37, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau6170
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999).
Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Boston, MA: M. Nijhoff, 1981).
Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. by Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Egan, 1962).
Midgley, Mary, The Myths We Live By (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2003).
Milton, Kay, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002).
Nabhan, Gary Paul, and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Ground of the Image, trans. by Jeff Fort (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005).
Slingerland, Edward, ‘Embodying Culture: Grounding Cultural Variation in the Body’, in What Science Offers the Humanities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 151–218, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511841163.007
Swimme, Brian, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019).
Swimme, Brian, and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1992).
Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Human Phenomenon, trans. by Sarah Appletone-Weber (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1999).
Toulmin, Stephen, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds, Confucian Spirituality, 2 vols (New York, NY: Crossroads, 2003, 2004).
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter their Ecological Phase (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002).
Yellowtail, Thomas, Yellowtail: Crow Medicine Man and Sundance Chief, as Told to Michael O. Fitzgerald (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
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1 Susan Kutz and Matilde Tomaselli, ‘Two-Eyed Seeing Supports Wildlife Health’, Science, 364.6446 (2019), 1135–37, at 1136, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau6170; inner quote from Shelley K. Denny, Lucia M. Fanning, ‘A Mi’kmaw Perspective on Advancing Salmon Governance in Nova Scotia, Canada: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Co-Existence’, International Indigenous Policy Journal, 7.3 (2016), 1–25, at 16, https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2016.7.3.4
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