The satiric faux-journalism of last week’s post here on
The Archdruid Report was meant as a bit of edged humor at
the expense of the overinflated self-image of humanity that’s been fostered by
the cult of progress, and I’m glad to say that most of my readers took it as
such. I fielded a few quibbles, but most of the commenters took the joke in
good part.
I was amused to note that a noticeable fraction of the
hilarity focused on the use of “frack” as a swear word. No, it wasn’t a Battlestar
Galactica reference; those who are familiar with fracking—that is,
hydrofracturing technology, the latest popular excuse for ignoring the
narrowing walls of industrial society’s increasingly harsh destiny—will
understand the usage at once. Since fracking is a penetrative act carried out
with no thought for anything but immediate gratification, it certainly counts as a profanity, and I’d like to encourage my
readers to use it in everyday conversation whenever strong language is called
for. For that matter, a good case can be
made that those who think it’s appropriate to treat Mother Earth that way
deserve to be called “motherfrackers.”
All jokes aside, though, last week’s post also drew on what
was once a traditional way of talking about deep changes in the inner life of
peoples and civilizations. That’s why, for example, the Greek scholar Plutarch
wove a very similar story into his dialogue on the twilight of the ancient
Greek oracles.
During the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, a character
in the dialogue claims, passengers aboard a ship sailing from Greece to Italy
heard a mysterious voice calling out from the island of Paxi, telling the
ship’s steersman to pass on word to the coastlands further on that Great Pan
was dead. The steersman, an Egyptian named Thamus, relayed the message as
directed, and a great cry of lamentation went up from the uninhabited shore.
Word of this got to the emperor, who was himself a serious student of
mythology; he referred the matter to a committee of experts, who determined
that the Pan who had just died was the third of that name, the son of Penelope
by Hermes (or, in a scandalous variant, by all of her suitors during Odysseus’
absence—thus the name given the horned and horny god).
There’s a fine irony, and probably a deliberate one, in
Plutarch’s choice of an Egyptian as the message bearer in his story. The
Egyptians of Plutarch’s time were no strangers to dead gods; Osiris, one of the
greatest of the Egyptian deities, was believed to have died twice, and only
rose from the dead the first time, a detail that apparently did nothing to
interfere with his performance of his divine duties. That’s commonplace for
divinities: pilgrims to Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Japan, for example, can visit
the grave of Sarutahiko no Okami, whom believers in Shinto consider to be the
chief of all the earthly kami (divine powers, more or less)
and still very much a living presence. Two millennia ago, in much the same
spirit, pilgrims on Crete paid their respects at the grave of Zeus and then
offered prayers and sacrifices to him as an immortal god.
All this came to mind a few weeks back when the news carried
a belated silly season story about the campus atheist organizations at a couple
of American universities. The groups in question celebrated Halloween by
setting up “god graveyards” full of paper tombstones naming allegedly defunct
deities, along with signage hinting broadly that the Christian god was next.
The smug and self-satisfied ignorance that’s practically the trademark of
evangelical atheism these days was very much on display here: the deities consigned to these cemeteries,
for example, included quite a few who are still being worshipped, some of them
by tens of millions of people. (Of course those tens of millions don’t include
many white middle class American college students, and doubtless that’s why the
sophomore atheists involved in the stunt didn’t get around to noticing them.)
It also seems to have escaped the attention of the
graveyard-builders that Christians believe that their god died once already,
and wasn’t noticeably slowed down by the experience. As noted above, gods do
that sort of thing all the time. This is true, curiously enough, whether you
think of gods as bodiless superhuman beings, archetypes of the collective
unconscious, narrative figures
portraying the highest ideals of a culture, or what have you: death simply
isn’t a great inconvenience to deities. It’s only human beings who find
mortality awkward to deal with.
And abstract representations of humanity, like the one whose
rise, fall, and wretched end was the subject of last week’s post? That’s
another matter still.
Every human society has its own collective image of what
human beings are like, which serves more or less the same role in that society
as the ego or self-image does in the psychology of the individual. That image
is always a polymorphous thing, subject to constant redefinition in the
competing interests of subgroups within the society, and it’s also subject to
changes driven by historical cycles as well as to something not far removed
from genetic drift. Still, variants of the collective human image in any human
society always have a close family resemblance with one another, and very often
a set of common features that aren’t subject to change, no matter how much
debate piles up around other aspects of the image.
The imaginary figure of Man, conqueror of Nature, parodied
in last week’s post is exactly such an image. For the last few centuries, that
has been the dominant image of humanity in Western industrial societies. As
mentioned in an
earlier post in this sequence, Man isn’t you, or me, or anyone else
who ever lived or ever will live. He’s a
fictional character who plays the central role in the grand mythological
narrative at the core of the civil religion of progress, the mythic hero whose
destiny it is to conquer Nature and march gloriously onward and upward to the
stars.
To refer to the abstraction Man as the protagonist of a hero
myth is not merely a figure of speech, by the way. In a brilliant book,
Narratives of Human Evolution, paleoanthropologist Misia
Landau showed that the stories that have been spun around “the ascent of
Man”—think about that phrase for a bit—are in fact classic hero tales embracing
all the conventions of that very distinctive genre, complete with all the
standard motifs that are traced out in studies of the subject by Joseph
Campbell and other scholars of mythology.
She examines the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of
human evolution in detail, and shows how in every case, the facts unearthed by
scientific research were hammered into shape to fit a far from scientific
narrative.
It probably needs repeating that the narrative in question
is not evolution. The evolution of species is one of the facts unearthed by
scientific research; in the case of the hominids, in particular, the rambling
family tree that led from East African forest apes to the author and readers of
this blog has been worked out in ample detail, backed up by an assortment of
fossils and artifacts impressive enough that the term “missing link” dropped
out of use a long time ago. No, what’s
happened is that the normal process by which a successful species adapted to
challenging conditions and spread beyond its original ecosystem has been
rewritten as the central myth of a civil religion and used to redefine the
entire two million years or so of hominid existence in the image of the last
three centuries of western history.
If you want to see the resulting mythology in full flower,
all you need to do is pick up a book by an evangelical atheist who tries to
deal with human history—Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is a good if
well-aged example. It’s not just that every human society and historical epoch
that comes up for discussion is judged according to its contribution to Man’s
conquest of Nature, though this is generally the case; it’s the way that the
conquest of Nature, or more precisely our conquest of
Nature, the specific way of conquering Nature that modern industrial society
thinks it’s engaged in, is treated as the only normal and natural goal of human
aspiration, to such an extent that any deviation from that agenda has to be
explained. Thus Sagan, in the book just cited, devotes an extended passage to
trying to figure out why the ancient Roman world never got around to having an
industrial revolution. The suggestion that they might have had better uses for
their time and resources, needless to say, doesn’t enter into the discussion at
all.
There’s a rich irony in the fact that very often, even those
who hate Man, conqueror of Nature, and everything he stands for are as
convinced as any Carl Sagan fan could be that this cultural construct, this
abstract and arbitrary fictional character who represents nothing more solid
than one civilization’s currently popular notion of human nature and destiny,
is the simple and literal truth about our species. Those of my readers who’ve
spent time in the peak oil blogosphere will have read plenty of posts and
comments describing humanity as “the ecocidal ape,” helplessly programmed by
its genetic heritage to blunder along its current path toward imminent
extinction. This is the same myth of progress we’ve discussed here so often,
changed only by having the black and white hats switched around. Man the enemy
of Nature remains as central, strong-jawed, and omnipotent as in the more
popular versions of the tale; it’s just that in this version he’s the villain
and victim of the piece rather than its hero.
Now of course those who raise ethical questions about Man
the conqueror of Nature as an image of human nature and destiny have a point—is
it wise, or for that matter sane, to envision collective humanity as a
megalomaniac in jackboots whose sole purpose in existing is to bully the entire
universe into complying with his whims?—but there’s a deeper point at issue.
The vast majority of humans, across the vast majority of the time our species
have been around, have lived in relative balance and harmony with the
ecosystems around them. The vast
majority of the exceptions have taken place either when humans reached a part
of the planet they hadn’t settled before, when humans were in the early stages
of adopting some new means of subsistence and hadn’t worked the bugs out yet,
or when environmental changes driven by planetary forces have destabilized
existing human ecologies and left the survivors scrambling to find some new
means of subsistence. Other species in similar situations undergo the same
kinds of crisis, and then find their way back to balance—and so do we.
It so happens that all of us were born and raised, and are
descended from a dozen generations of people who were born and raised, during a
period of drastic instability caused by the second factor just listed: some
members of our species stumbled onto a new means of subsistence, which we
haven’t yet figured out how to use in a sustainable manner, and at this point
almost certainly never will. This sort of thing has happened many times before
to our species, and to countless other species as well. One of the core
features of our predicament, though, is that this unusual set of conditions is
all any of us has ever known, and since human beings are noticeably less
sapient than the moniker of our species would suggest, many of us have taken
the temporary state of instability that’s dominated the last few centuries, and
projected it onto the far from blank screen of human history and the universe
as a whole.
One core dimension of the crisis of our age, in other words,
is that our sense of the meaning and destiny of our species is well past its
pull date. The image of Man the conqueror of Nature was adaptive, in the strict
Darwinian sense, during the brief age of extravagance that arrived when we
first figured out how to break into the planet’s cookie jar of fossil sunlight.
Those who embraced that image prospered and reproduced their kind, both in the
straightforward biological sense and in the subtler, cultural sense by which
success attracts imitators. Now that the rate at which fossil fuels can be
extracted from the planet is running up against hard geological limits, and the
net energy yield from such exercises is stuck in a remorseless decline, the
image of Man the conqueror of Nature has stopped being adaptive, but a
significant lag time has opened up between that change in circumstances and the
recognition that it’s time to find a less dysfunctional way to understand who
we are and what we’re doing on this planet.
That’s a common challenge in individual psychotherapy, or so
I’m told, and it’s certainly a challenge in the training of the personality
that’s a crucial part of the spirituality I practice. People reliably cling like grim death to the
most disastrously dysfunctional self-images, and defend them fiercely against
the suggestion that they could see themselves in a different way. Our need for
a sense of stable identity is so powerful that many of us would rather be
wretchedly miserable than risk the leap into the unknown that surrendering a
self-image always involves. One of the great challenges of the teacher in an
initiatory school—and I suspect that psychotherapists see things the same
way—is to find ways to encourage students to get to the point at which they’re
willing to risk treating their self-concepts as concepts, abstractions created
by the mind, rather than simply the way things are.
The difficulty we face in the modern industrial world is
that very few people have gotten to the point at which they’re willing to risk
this same shift on a collective scale. There’s a voice calling out to all of us
from the island of Paxi, announcing that Great Man is dead, but few are
listening and fewer still show any willingness to carry the message to those
who are waiting to hear it. Thus we’ve
circled back around to the place where this series of posts began, Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation of the
death of God, for it was that death—less metaphorically, the collapse of
Christianity as the foundation of Western cultures—that made the manufacture of
Man the conqueror of Nature as a collective human identity both possible and
(in a certain sense) necessary.
The problem with Nietzsche’s proposed solution, in turn, was
that it simply postponed for a little while the problem it was meant to
address. The Overman, the free human being who flings himself into the abyss of
a meaningless universe to give it meaning through a sacrificial act of endless
self-overcoming, was never much more than a pale reflection of the Christian
god, who descended into the universe of matter and human incarnation on much
the same mission. It was a brave attempt but not a particularly smart one, and
the results, both for Nietzsche and for the European society he proposed to put
on new foundations, were far from good.
Dying, as it turns out, isn’t the only thing that gods do
easily and human beings find considerably more awkward. Nietzsche may have been
right when he wrote that “one must have chaos within one to give birth to a
dancing star;” he certainly had the chaos, and arguably gave birth to the star,
in the form of some of the most brilliant of all German prose and some of the
most challenging philosophical writings in any language. Still, it’s probably
fair to extend the metaphor a bit further, and suggest that the radiation
emitted by his newborn star proceeded to fry his brain and reduce one of the
keenest minds of Europe to the status of catatonic vegetable. As any
astrophysicist could have told him, human beings are simply not equipped to
give birth to stars.
In less metaphorical language, the ramshackle structures of
the human mind tend to break down in predictable ways when pushed beyond the
tasks for which evolution has equipped them. The plunge into nihilism I’ve
discussed in several recent posts is one of these predictable malfunctions. In
Nietzsche’s case, that ended up taking the form of a mental illness that,
though it’s been blamed on syphilis, had all the symptoms and progressive
course of acute schizophrenia, paranoiac at the time of his psychotic break in
Turin and phasing gradually into catatonia before his death in 1900. In the
case of European society as a whole, a strong case could be made that much the
same thing happened in the half century or so after Nietzsche’s time: the collapse of Europe into a maelstrom of
war, delusion, and mass murder over the decades that followed the
continent-wide psychotic break of 1914 was only brought to an end by the
exceptionally harsh therapy of Russian and American tanks and bombs.
In effect, Western cultures in the nineteenth century
replaced their traditional monotheism with a newly minted monanthropism—a
belief system that flattened out the rich diversity of humanity into a single
abstract figure, Man, and loaded that figure with most of the titles and
attributes of the divinity he was expected to replace. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century
writings that referenced our species almost always made use of that capitalized
abstraction, and proclaimed him the lord of creation, the goal of evolution,
the inheritor of the cosmos, and so on through the whole litany of self-important
hogwash that surrounded the human project in those days. At that time, as I’ve
suggested, it was adaptive in a purely pragmatic sense; it helped to encourage
the rapid growth of industrial systems during the brief historical epoch when
abundant fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources made such systems
possible. The downside of the experiment was that it left very few barriers in
place to the barbarism of reflection, and those barriers fell down promptly
once kicked by jackboots.
Still, the era when that expedient seemed to work is over,
terminated with extreme prejudice by the relentless realities of dwindling
resource stocks and an increasingly unstable biosphere. Whatever form the
Second Religiosity of our age happens to take, whatever ways we and our
descendants cobble together to counter the barbarism of reflection and keep the
unsteady structures of human thought from the same plunge into chaos that left
Nietzsche babbling incoherently with his arms around the neck of a beaten
horse, among the basic requirements of the time before us are giving the
conception of Man the conqueror of Nature a decent burial, and finding a way to
imagine ourselves that has some relation to the realities of the human
condition in a world on the far side of a failed industrial project.
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