They assume that this “Way” is an ensemble of qualitative features — indeed, as Pythagoras was to see, of form that every object uniquely possesses. Lastly, they assume that this form and these qualities comprise a “Way” that exists in a larger constellation of interrelationships — one that a strictly cerebral mentalism commonly overlooks. Ivory does have its “grain,” its internal structure and form; good craftspeople must know where to carve and to shape if they are to bring a material to the height of its aesthetic perfection. Any result that is less and less perfect than it could be is a violation of that “grain” and an insult to its integrity.
CHAPTER IV. SURVIVAL IN CULTURE (continued).
There is no “scarcity” and “want” in nature, only needs that must be satisfied if life itself is to be maintained. Indeed, the material fecundity of nature, prior to history’s “negation of Nature” (to use Marcuse’s language again), might have completely stunned its earliest hominid offspring, had they even been mindful of “scarcity” as a social category. I cannot emphasize too strongly that nature itself is not an ethics; it is the matrix for an ethics, the source of ethical meaning that can be rooted in objective reality. Hence nature, even as the matrix and source of ethical meaning, does not have to assume such delightfully human attributes as kindness, virtue, goodness and gentleness; nature need merely be fecund and creative — a source rather than a “paradigm.” The matrix from which objective reason may yet derive its ethics for a balanced and harmonized world is the nature conceived by a radical social ecology — a nature that is interpreted nonhierarchically, in terms of unity in diversity and spontaneity. Here, nature is conceived not merely as a constellation of ecosystems but also as a meaningful natural history, a developing, creative, and fecund nature that yields an increasing complexity of forms and interrelationships.
In addition to subverting the integrity of the human community, capitalism has tainted the classical notion of “living well” by fostering an irrational dread of material scarcity. By establishing quantitative criteria for the “good life,” it has dissolved the ethical implications of “limit.” This ethical lacuna raises a specifically technical problematic for our time. For the present, however, I must emphasize again that terms like “small,” “soft,” “intermediate,” “convivial,” and “appropriate” remain utterly vacuous adjectives unless they are radically integrated with emancipatory social structures and communitarian goals. Technology and freedom do not “coexist” with each other as two separate “realms” of life. Either technics is used to reinforce the larger social tendencies that render human consociation technocratic and authoritarian, or else a libertarian society must be created that can absorb technics into a constellation of emancipatory human and ecological relationships.
The reconstructive and destructive tendencies in our time are too much at odds with each other to admit of reconciliation. The social horizon presents the starkly conflicting prospects of a harmonized world with an ecological sensibility based on a rich commitment to community, mutual aid, and new technologies, on the one hand, and the terrifying prospect of some sort of thermonuclear disaster on the other. Our world, it would appear, will either undergo revolutionary changes, so far-reaching in character that humanity will totally transform its social relations and its very conception of life, or it will suffer an apocalypse that may well end humanity’s tenure on the planet.
Like the natural world around us, we will become the victims of a simplification process that renders us as inorganic and mineral as the ores that feed our foundries and the sand that feeds our glass furnaces. Preliterate societies never held this view; ordinarily they resisted every attempt to impose it. What we today would call “onerous toil” was then spontaneously adapted to the community’s need to communize all aspects of life in order to bring a sense of collective involvement and joy to the most physically demanding tasks. Rarely did the “savages” even try to “wrestle” with nature; rather, they coaxed it along, slowly and patiently, with chants, songs, and ceremonials that we rightly call dances. All this was done in a spirit of cooperation within the community itself, and between the community and nature.
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Each segment was permitted to plummet off on its own, while the philosophy that unified them into an integrated whole was permitted to languish. Decentralization entered city planning as a mere strategem for community design, while alternative technology became a narrow discipline, increasingly confined to the academy and to a new breed of technocrats. In turn, each notion became divorced from a critical analysis of society — from a radical theory of social ecology.
Even where economic factors seem to be evident, their significance in guiding human action is often highly obscure. When John Ball or Gerrard Winstanley describe the greed of the ruling classes of their day, one senses that their remarks are guided more by ethical ideals of justice and freedom than by material interest. As a unique product of natural evolution, humanity brings its powers of reasoning, its creative fingers, its high degree of conscious consociation-all qualitative developments of natural history-to nature, at times as sources of help and at other times as sources of harm. Perhaps the greatest single role an ecological ethics can play is a discriminating one-to help us distinguish which of our actions serve the thrust of natural evolution and which of them impede it.
The bodily attitude brought on by a particular
state of mind affects the position of the organs of speech,
both the internal larynx, &c., and the external features
whose change can be watched by the mere looker-on. Even
though the expression of the speaker’s face may not be seen
by the hearer, the effect of the whole bodily attitude of
166which it forms part is not thereby done away with. For on
the position thus taken by the various organs concerned in
speech, depends what I have here called ‘emotional tone,’
whereby the voice carries direct expression of the speaker’s
feeling. Writers who desire to show that, with all our faults, we
are wiser and better than our ancestors, dwell willingly on
the history of witchcraft between the middle and modern
ages. In
those dreadful days, to be a blear-eyed wizened cripple was
to be worth twenty shillings to a witch-finder; for a woman
to have what this witch-finder was pleased to call the devil’s
mark on her body was presumption for judicial sentence of
death; and not to bleed or shed tears or sink in a pond was
torture first and then the stake. Reform of religion was no
cure for the disease of men’s minds, for in such things the
Puritan was no worse than the Inquisitor, and no better.
Nor will they challenge in any significant way the systems of hierarchy and domination that originally reared the mythology of a nature “dominated” by one of its own creations. Like flowers in a dreary wasteland, they will provide the colors and scents that obscure a clear and honest vision of the ugliness around https://www.loveconnectionreviews.com/ us, the putrescent regression to an increasingly elemental and inorganic world that will no longer be habitable for complex forms of life and ecological ensembles. It infiltrates those levels of our bodies that somehow make contact with the existing primordial forms from which we may originally have derived.
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Women gathered plants, men shaped hunting implements, and children contrived games according to logical procedures that were closely akin to our own. But social ecology provides more than a critique of the split between humanity and nature; it also poses the need to heal them. Let me emphasize that the failure to explore these phases of human evolution — which have yielded a succession of hierarchies, classes, cities, and finally states — is to make a mockery of the term social ecology.
The myth of a purely coercive, omnipresent State is a fiction that has served the state machinery all too well by creating a sense of awe and powerlessness in the oppressed that ends in social quietism. Without a high degree of cooperation from even the most victimized classes of society such as chattel slaves and serfs, its authority would eventually dissipate. Awe and apathy in the face of State power are the products of social conditioning that renders this very power possible. Hence, neither spontaneous or immanent explanations of the State’s origins, economic accounts of its emergence, or theories based on conquest (short of conquests that yield near-extermination) explain how societies could have leaped from a stateless condition to a State and how political society could have exploded upon the world.
The “gnostic revolt,” as it has been so broadly depicted, formed a radically unique reinterpretation of the Judea-Christian doctrine and of the early Church’s conciliatory attitude toward political authority. Viewed from a religious aspect, gnosis is literally “illuminated” by its Hellenic definition as “knowledge.” Its emphasis on religion tends to be avowedly intellectual and esoteric. But more so than the Greek ideals of wisdom (sophia) and reason (nous), its emphasis on revelation is consistently otherworldly.