The End of Earth as Sacred
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOD4ZSt2IPo
To disabuse us of the notion that the evolution of human consciousness is smooth, simple, and continuous as the chart and metaphors (of amoebas, budding roses, and overlapping bells curves) may suggest, Gebser proposed that “A true process always occurs in quanta, that is, in leaps; or, in mutations. It occurs spontaneously, indeterminately, and consequently, discontinuously.”[i] The “mutational process we are speaking of is spiritual and not biological or historical,” he clarified. “Moreover, we become aware of such presumably invisible processes only when they have reached sufficient strength to manifest themselves on the basis of their cumulative momentum… The apparent continuity is no more than a sequence subsequently superimposed onto overlapping events to lend them the reassuring appearance of a logically determinate progression.”
Image: https://selfishactivist.com/what-quantum-physics-can-tell-us-about-the-future-of-activism-that-change-is-messy/
There exist numerous other significant intricacies to the models being considered here. Given our multiple “intelligences,” a person may be highly developed cognitively and yet be emotionally and ecologically immature.[ii] In a lifetime, few people make it through all the developmental stages at all the various intelligences. Most “get stuck” along the way, content to worship their powerful god, for example, or to analyze the world through a rational, scientific lens only. However, any one individual and each society may sit anywhere along the vast (many-dimensional) spectrum of possibilities. This would be their center of psychic gravity. But we do not consistently inhabit this statistical center. We may, for instance, as a thirty-year old American worker bee generally reside at the scientific-rational level. We are reasonable and honest, neither unduly selfish nor altruistic. But on Monday we behaved like a child, throwing a tantrum because we had to wait at the Walmart checkout line longer than we figured was fair, and then on Tuesday we helped a stranger jump his car battery although we knew this might make us miss an appointment with an important client.
Image: https://sma.sou.edu/exhibitions/from-ignorance-to-wisdom/
No less complicated has been civilization’s path to our present predicament. For along with a rise in cognitive maturity, technological sophistication, and material comfort have come horrific ways to kill, maim, and torture, and increasing inequality and environmental destruction. When humans developed the power to domesticate animals and to enslave each other, to exploit others’ somatic energy to fulfill their own material desires, the psycho-spiritual relationship changed. No longer could a person have the Animist’s sense of the sacred for other creatures. Nor for the rest of nature when we harnessed wind and water power for travel and to replace muscle power, or when—with iron—we cut down forests and plowed deep furrows into the Earth to fulfill our desires. Of this agricultural development, the anthropologist Lynn White suggested in the journal Science in 1967, “Man’s relationship to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly, man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature.” [iii] Our spiritual/ecological maturity was arrested and our cognitive maturity went into overdrive.
Photograph: Broken Clouds And Chopped Cotton Georgia Agriculture Farming Art, by Reid Callaway
According to White, the cycles of nature were replaced by the linear (more advanced) Christian model of progress. And, through the generations, as they moved from the forests to the fields, people’s worldviews changed. From experiencing (mostly unconsciously) an intimate relationship with nature, perhaps not even really differentiating themselves from nature, unaware of nature as “other,” to viewing nature as wild, dangerous, and very much other.[iv] In the Bible’s first chapter of Genesis, “God said onto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion… over the fish of the sea… fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” A few short pages later in the seventh chapter of Genesis, God kills nearly every creature of the Earth in a great flood: “And every living substance was destroyed.” Then, as the philosopher Frederic Bender puts it, “Evidently acting from remorse, God… gives the biosphere to humans as an outright gift.”[v] Or as the King James version has it: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. Nature becomes man’s (by this point, it had become man’s world) to do with as he wishes.
Image: The Flood, by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel
Although nature was made by God and then pronounced good, it is not sacred. Only God is sacred and only God can be worshiped. He is a jealous God after all. Humans, made in the image of God, become God’s main concern, and the biosphere is left for humans to subdue and terrorize.[vi] Fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution—including the three-and-half billion years of Life—becomes null and void.
The Rape of Europa, by Titian (1560-1562)
The Classical Civilization of the ancient Greeks and Romans had independently come to similar conclusions about nature’s lowly place.[vii] The death of the goddess religions had, by 600 BCE, become near complete, with Zeus and his extended family of rapist males at the top of Mount Olympus. The nature cults of Dionysus were replaced by the Orphic cults, where union with nature was supplanted by transcendence away from nature to some separate higher godly realm. Divinity was separate and outside of nature. According to Frederic Bender, “The [Greek] mystery religions’ focus on the soul’s destiny after death both denigrated and desacralized nature, making Earthly existence seem merely temporary and almost painfully imperfect. Thus, according to Orphism, the body is the soul’s temporary prison or tomb.”[viii] Socrates and Plato, too, accepted and expounded on this dualistic split between matter and mind, between the base and the transcendent, between the ever-changing earthly world and the eternal, universal, spiritual realm of Forms. For them, truth, beauty, and the good exist in a perfected ideal realm. Not on Earth, not in ourselves, but in an afterlife.[ix] Urban dwellers with little time for nature outside their city’s walls, these two most influential philosophers contributed greatly to the West’s unremitting devaluation of nature.[x]
The School of Athens, by Raphael (1509-1511), in the Vatican. Socrates is missing, and so —except for slivers of sky and clouds— so is any hint of non-human Nature.
ENDNOTES
[i] This and the rest of the quotes in paragraph from Gebser, J. (1953:37) The Ever-Present Origin (Translation by Noel Bardstad with Algis Mickunas). Ohio University Press, Athens, OH.
[ii] Wilber, K. (2007) Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, Boston.
[iii] White, L. (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, Science, v. 155, pp. 1203-1207.
[iv] This idea is taken from Wilber (1983), Hughes (2001), Bender (2003), Harper (2004).
Wilber, K. (1981) Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. Shambhala, Boulder, CO.
Hughes, J.D., (2001) An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life. Routledge, London.
Bender, F.L. (2003) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology, Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.
Harper, C.L. (2004) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
[v] Bender (2003:183).
[vi] Bender (2003:171-185).
[vii] Though Greek and Hebrew notions of dualism were different, they both traveled down the same patriarchal split between man and nature (Bender, 2003).
[viii] Bender (2003:199).
[ix] Sagan (1980:186), Bender (2003:160).
[x] Bender (2003).
