| Back | The Nature of Nature |
|
LETTING THE WORLD GROW OLD An Ethos of Countermodernity FREYA MATHEWS ABSTRACT 'Nature' may be understood, for environmental purposes, as whatever happens when we, or other agents under the direction of abstract thought, let things be. From this point of view it is accordingly never too late to 'return to nature'. To do so is not to restore a lost set of things or attributes, but rather to allow a certain process to begin anew. This process recommences whenever that which already exists - whether it be of nonhuman or human provenance - is permitted to endure. 'Environmentalism' is thus conceived in broadly Taoist rather than ecological terms, as involving the affirmation of the given. 1. WHAT IS NATURE? What is nature, and how are we to live with it rather than against it, as ecophilosophers enjoin? I would like to outline my current answers to these two questions, and then explain, briefly, how I think these answers have been shaped by my experience of living in this Great South Land. My understanding of nature and of the appropriate form for our relation to it is ultimately traceable to a metaphysics that could be broadly described as panpsychist, in that it attributes an internal principle, or subjectival dimension, to matter generally. I have explored, and am still elaborating, such a metaphysic elsewhere, and do not propose to detail these studies here . My purpose is rather to consider the implications of such a broadly panpsychist premise for specifically environmental approaches to 'nature'. There have of course been multifarious answers to the question, 'what is nature?' (Rolston 1988, Brennan 1998, Seddon 1997). One of the most common has been that 'nature' denotes the domain of physics - either the physical universe in its entirety or the laws that undergird it. In this widest sense, nature will not be of particular interest to environmentalists, since such a nature cannot be threatened, and does not, on the face of it at any rate, stand in need of human protection or conservation. In what sense then is nature understood by environmentalists as in need of defence? It is often assumed that, in speaking about nature, environmentalists are referring to the domain of biology, the realm of living things - forests and swamps, for instance, or plants and animals generally, or wildlife in particular - since it is this biological realm which is clearly under threat from the engines of industry and the appetites of global markets today. However, where the cosmological definition is too wide, this strictly biogical definition of nature will usually turn out to be too narrow for environmental purposes, since many environmental battles are fought over inorganic, or only partly organic, features of the environment, such as rivers, dunefields, caves, mountains and rock formations, as well as over organic systems. What environmentalists in fact usually seem to have in mind, in their references to nature, is parts or aspects of the world which have not been created or unduly modified by human agency. Is this a tenable environmental definition of nature? Implied in the definition is a distinction between the artefactual and the natural. I however, like many others, would immediately question the validity of defining the natural in contrast to the artefactual in this way, on the grounds that, since human beings, as biological organisms, surely belong to nature, and since making things comes to us as naturally as eating and drinking do, our handiwork itself has as much a claim to be considered part of nature as the handiwork of spiders, insects and marine life does (Mathews 1996). Therefore to regard trees and rocks and animals, not to mention webs, hives, termite mounds and coral reefs, as falling within nature, and cars and ships and fax machines as falling outside it, is to over-simplify the issue. However, there is a distinction buried within this over-simplification which does, I think, call for further investigation. This is the distinction between what happens when things are allowed to unfold in their own way, or run their own course, and what happens when, under the direction of abstract thought, agents intentionally intervene to change that course of events for the sake of abstractly conceived ends of their own. From the point of view of this distinction, nature might be understood as whatever happens when we, or other agents under the direction of abstract thought, let things be, while artifice is what happens when such agents redirect events towards their own ends. It should be pointed out that the distinction between processes under the direction of abstract thought and processes which unfold of themselves does not coincide with the distinction between conscious and unconscious processes, or even living and non-living ones. That is, it is not a distinction between processes which occur in, or as a function of, consciousness, and processes which occur in, or as a function of, unconscious matter. All things, whether conscious or unconscious, living or non-living, have laws of their own unfolding. In the case of the non-living, these laws may be embodied in the physical and chemical dispositions of the things in question. In the case of living beings, they may reside in biological or instinctual dispositions, which may be described as their immanent telos or conatus . Even conscious beings such as humans are imbued with an underlying conatus, an inherent 'law' of self-realization which is not a product of our own reflection or ratiocination, but which already informs our instincts, reflexes, and other spontaneous responses . All these processes however, whether in ourselves or in the world, are capable of being re-routed by the interventions of intentional agents, where by describing the agents as 'intentional' here, I mean that they are acting in order to realize abstractly conceived end-states rather than unthinkingly following their own immediate impulses. Thus inorganic physical processes can be redirected by intentional intervention; the behaviour of organisms can likewise be modified; and spontaneous impulses in human beings can be suppressed or sublimated by the intentional interventions of the individuals themselves or by societies. At each level a contrast can be drawn between an undisturbed state of affairs, in which everything unfolds or behaves in accordance with its intrinsic dispositions or an innate conatus, and a state of affairs in which the dispositions of things are diverted by agents to produce end-states which match those agents' abstract ideals or imagined scenarios. The undisturbed unfolding of events may be described as 'natural', according to the present definition, and the intentional re-direction of such a course of events as 'artificial'. The contrast between the natural and the artificial, drawn this way, though not absolute , is I think, a significant and defensible one for environmentalists. For the primary aim of environmentalists is to protect the biosphere from the depredations of modern civilizations, and it is arguable that when all things are left to realize themselves in their own way, the life process will be assured, at least in the long term. This conclusion is supported by commonsense and evolutionary theory: 'nature knows best' because life has had countless millennia to adjust itself to terrestrial conditions. But in many ecophilosophies, this faith in the capacity of the life process to take care of itself rests on deeper metaphysical foundations, involving an attribution of purpose or intelligence to reality. My own argument for this position rests on a view of the world as constituting on the one hand a subjectival whole (the One) imbued with its own conatus, or impulse towards self-realization, and on the other hand a manifold of relatively self-realizing individuals (the Many), whose conative impulses generally intermesh to further the self-realization of the whole (Mathews 1998). To affirm the view that nature knows best is not to deny that when things are left to their own devices, the interests of individual organisms and smaller-scale ecosystems might not be subordinated to those of greater ecosystems or the biosphere as a whole: competition, predation and disease may further the ends of the greater systems at the expense of the smaller ones. But by and large, when the Many are following their own innate individual patterns or principles of self-realization, the self-realization of the One is assured. If this is accepted, then to allow the Many to unfold in their own distinctive ways is presumably the surest approach to the protection of life on earth . How different is the outcome when agents under the direction of abstract thought take control of events however. In accordance with their abstract ideas, such agents may make arbitrary interventions: they may kill off a particular species for the sake of its coloured feathers, for instance, or pollute a lake with manufacturing dye for the sake of people who have decided they want purple hair. With our powers of abstract thought we can conjure up inexhaustible numbers of ways the world could be, ways ranging from the demonic to the absurd and whimsical through to the humanitarian or utopian; and with the same powers of abstract thought we can, increasingly, devise means for making the actual world conform to our fantasies, at least in the short term. Historically speaking, abstract thought has developed hand in hand with civilizations dedicated to the remaking of the world in accordance with variable human interests, values, dreams and conceits. By 'civilization' here I mean that form of social organization that was initially characterized by a settled way of life involving both the building of cities and the practice of agriculture and animal husbandry. The salient feature of civilization as a form of life is, in this context, its refusal to live within the terms of the given, as earlier hunter-gatherer societies had by and large done. Instead, civilized societies have sought to change those terms - they have striven to re-shape the world to suit their own purposes. They imagine categories of possibility beyond the already manifest - new kinds and classes of things in addition to those already in existence: houses to provide shelter, for instance, and wheels for transport, and animals subdued into pulling the wheeled vehicles, and succulent leafy vegetables growing in neat rows right at the back door of the houses. In order to conceive of these new kinds and classes of things, it was necessary to abstract quite radically from the world as it was, to look beneath the appearances at the underlying structures, and then to imagine ways those structures could be reassembled. This kind of thinking involves a different level of abstraction from that of the hunter imagining a kangaroo roasting on the fire at the day's end. Hunters and gatherers seek to satisfy their material and spiritual needs and desires within the categories of the given. They carefully study all the subtle particularities of life's tides, and learn to swim intelligently with those tides in order to achieve their ends. Civilized societies, in contrast, seek to transcend those particularities - the various vicissitudes of fortune, the reversals of the seasons, the manifold burdens of the flesh - by remaking the world to their own design. Rather than swimming with the tides, they try to uncover the laws of hydrodynamics and gravitation, in the hope of re-orchestrating and maybe even abolishing tides. At the level of self, latterday civilizations have involved the re-deployment of our instinctual self-realizing energies in the service of socially prescribed ideals of individual selfhood. Our intelligence has been harnessed to abstract self-images and self-stories rather than to the deeper imperatives emanating from our conatus. Instead of letting ourselves be, we compulsively make ourselves over to match external ideals, where this can result in all kinds of aberrations, from neurotic individualism to fanatical collectivism or patriotism. At the level of both world and self then, civilization tends to induce a preference for the abstractly imagined over the given, and seeks to substitute the possible for the actual. This tendency of civilization has become progressively more pronounced in the modern period, with its repudiation of tradition and its exponentially increasing power to manipulate matter, until it has resulted, today, in the dizzying regime of international capitalism, involving almost incessant, runaway erasure of the actual in favour of the possible, a regime euphemistically going under the name of 'development'. When human beings are freed from excessively abstract thought however, and restored to their conative nature, then the world is relatively safe from such 'development'. For the conative natures of all beings are, from an environmental point of view, relatively trustworthy, simply because, as I have already noted, all have evolved in concert with one another, with the consequence that their natures are mutually cross-referencing. Self-realization is achieved, at the conative level, within the parameters of the already existent rather than the merely possible, and thus, at a conative level, all beings have a broad interest in maintaining the world as it is. To recapitulate then, when 'nature' is defined, as it has been here, in contrast with artifice, it is arguable that generally, on the terrestrial scale, though not perhaps in every conceivable circumstance, nature knows best . By this I mean that when things are left to themselves, the biosphere is likely to fare better than it is when things are subject to our arbitrary interventions. There will of course be casualties at the level of individuals and smaller-scale systems when things are left to unfold in their own way, and as beings with a constitutive interest in our own self-preservation and the preservation of our nearest and dearest, we are on occasion called upon to intervene in these unfoldings, just as hunter-gatherers do in the course of their daily lives . Such interventions will not count as arbitrary however, and will be compatible with a general attitude of letting things be, an attitude which renders the overall project of life on earth relatively assured . 2. LIVING WITH NATURE The trap for environmentalists, in thinking about nature, is to reify it, to conceive of it in terms of things rather than processes. When we think of it in this way, we understand it as consisting of all those things which are not the product of abstract human design: forests, swamps, mountains, oceans, etc. We then contrast nature with the human-made environment, consisting of cities, artefacts, technologies, etc. We make the same mistake in thinking about nature at the level of the self: the natural self is equated with the body, the instincts, intuitions, emotions etc, and this is contrasted with the civilized self, consisting of the controlled rational ego. The environmentalist's defence of nature is accordingly read as a project not only to save existing swamps, forests, etc, but to restore lost ones. Introspectively it is taken to imply a counter-cultural ethos of spontaneity, eros, intuitiveness and instinctuality. From the present point of view, this is a mistaken reading. To 'return to nature' is not to restore a set of lost things or attributes, but rather to allow a certain process to begin anew. This is the process that takes over when we step back, when we cease intervening and making things over in accordance with our own abstract designs. Such a process can recommence anywhere, any time. It is not logically tied to those aspects of the world that we mistakenly reify as nature - the forests, swamps, instincts, bodily functions, etc - but can start to unfold again in the midst of the most intensively urbanized and industrialized environments on earth and in the most controlled and civilized of persons. In a world already urbanized, 'returning to nature' means not tearing down the cities and factories, and planting woods and gardens in their stead. Such action would merely perpetuate the cycle of making the world over in accordance with abstract designs - albeit in this case ecological designs - and would reinforce the mind-set involved in living against nature. Rather, 'returning to nature' in an urbanized world means allowing this world to go its own way. It means letting the apartment blocks and warehouses and roads grow old. Yes, we shall have to maintain them, since we shall need to continue to use and inhabit them. Inhabitation will also call for adaptation and aesthetic enhancement. But this is compatible with a fundamental attitude of letting be, of acquiescence in the given, and of working within its terms of reference, rather than insisting upon further cycles of demolition and 'redevelopment'. Gradually such a world, left to grow old, rather than erased for the sake of something entirely new, will be absorbed into the larger process of life on earth. Concrete and bricks will become weathered and worn. Moss and ivy may take over the walls. Birds and insects may colonize overhangs and cavities within buildings. Green fingers will open up cracks in pavements. Bright surfaces will fade, acquiring natural patinas. Under the influence of gravity, the hard edges of modern architecture will soften, and imitate the moulded contours of landforms. Given time, everything is touched by the processes of life, and eventually taken over by them, to be fed into the cycle of decay and rebirth. Left to itself, the living world reclaims its own. Things which initially seemed discordant and out of place gradually fall into step with the rest of Creation. Old cars take their place beside old dogs and old trees; antiquity naturalizes even the most jarring of trash . When the world is allowed to grow old, when things are retained, or left to unfold in their own way, then it is possible truly to inhabit places, to come to belong to them, in ways that are undreamt of in change-based societies. As years pass, and places retain their identities, they can, if we let them, come to be inscribed with our histories and the histories of our families and communities. They acquire meaning for us as our life experiences are woven into them. Here, on this road going down to the creek, where I walk my dog every week, is the house my great grandfather built. I have a faded photograph of it on lock-up day, sometime late in the 19th century. Around the corner is the store my grandfather ran, and over there is the park in which my parents walked, each evening, holding hands, for sixteen years. Here, alongside it, is the cemetery where I roamed in my gothic youth, looking for the grave of that same great grandfather, keeping trysts in the peppercorn groves, composing poems about roses. And it was along the tree-lined avenue at the edge of this cemetery that I pushed my baby son to creche. Layers and layers of significance accrete as our lives unfold amidst familiar spaces, significance that can for us never be reproduced in any other setting. The setting itself infiltrates our identity. This irreplaceable significance of our own place or places for us binds us to them. We become their natives. This belonging is reinforced in another way when we let our world - whether urban or rural - grow old. For when the lay-out and structures and constellation of physical features that define a particular place are allowed to endure for a long time, then not only can it become interwoven with our individual and collective identity in a way that binds us to it, but, from a panpsychist point of view, it can come to know us . In time, and only in time, a place can, if we commit to it, come to accept us, open its arms to us, receive us - it agrees to be our place, attentive to us, attuned to us. We become its people. The land, or place, claims its own. It can never receive the casual or expedient sojourner or stranger in such familiar fashion. In this way too then, through time, and the reinhabitation of places that are allowed to be, we become native to our world . The self-realization of the biosphere - which is to say, the unfolding of nature on earth - involves a pattern of gradual but continuous change - a pattern of aging and decomposition followed by spontaneous reconstitution into new forms. This is what happens to things when we let them be. Artifice, as here understood, correspondingly consists in any regime of abrupt, wholesale change, change that involves the erasure of one environment, or order of things, and its replacement with an entirely new one. Such regimes generally come about only at the instigation of agents in the grip of abstract ideas or images which they are intent on actualizing irrespective of context - irrespective of what existed before and what surrounds the new 'development'. In this sense an old factory site, overlaid with grime and saturated with heavy metals, but in its cracks and neglected crannies also burgeoning with hardy and creative biological and social forms of life, is more natural than a town planner's lush park stocked with store-bought indigenous plants and subject to wholesale redesign or 'redevelopment' at any time. I should note here that by making the point that 'nature' in its deeper sense connotes not trees and grass and wildlife, but the processes which occur to any and all things when they are no longer subject to intentional control, I am by no means wanting to say that the conservation of trees and grass and wildlife - which is to say, environmentalism in its traditional form - becomes superfluous. Existing ecosystems should, like cities and selves, be allowed to unfold in their own way, free from undue human disturbance. Where such ecosystems have already been modified by the introduction of exotic species however, the present view entails that the new and old species should in principle - though there may be many countervailing considerations in practice - be left to sort it out. To respect nature in this connection does not imply that we should eradicate the exotics and restore the indigenous. It means that we should forego interventionist 'management' and allow natural processes to reassert themselves. It may be deeply distressing to watch native plants and animals disappearing under the onslaught of aggressive invaders, and there may be many compassionate and practical reasons for attempting to temper this onslaught, but, to the extent that we opted out of the whole affair, we would at any rate have the satisfaction of knowing that what we were witnessing was in fact a return to nature. In this scenario it is likely that some of the original species would decline, and new ones would steal their niches, but as soon as competition had stabilized, speciation would begin again in situ, because we would no longer be intervening to reverse this trend. A certain stepping back, then, is what is involved in 'returning to nature' in the outer world. At the level of self, making the transition from civilization to a more natural state is no more a matter of trying to reinstate an instinctual, free-and-easy, impulsive regime than returning the world to nature is a matter of restoring lost forests and swamps. To try to transform the tensed, guarded, rationally-minded self of civilized society in this way would only be to perpetuate the process of control - the process of making the self over to match a socially approved ideal. At deeper psychic, and perhaps somatic, levels, such an attempt, with the self-rejection it implies, would presumably only exacerbate the tension to which the self in question is subject. The way for a self-censoring self to 'return to nature' is simply for it to stop altogether the business of attempting to make itself over in accordance with abstract ideals, and surrender instead to what it already is. When we give up being dissatisfied with ourselves, and reconcile ourselves to our 'unnaturalness', our tedious up-tightness, for instance, then, ironically, we start to relax anyway; as we stop forcing ourselves to follow the latest social prescriptions, our own instinctual conatus has a chance to make itself felt again. Gradually we become re-animated with our native will to self-realization. The point I am making here, at the level of both self and world, is that it is never too late to return to nature. No matter how artificial our self or world has become, they can always, at any given moment, become subject again to natural processes, simply by our decision to call a halt to 'development' and 'progress' and 'self improvement', and to allow things to remain as they are, to be retained rather than replaced. In saying this I am not of course intending to ban change altogether, but to insist that change should not disrupt the general unfolding of things. It should not raze the old and superimpose on the space that is left something unrelated to what preceded it. Change should carry us gently and smoothly into the future, respecting the cycles of creation, decay and regeneration. It should grow from within the shell of the given. It might be objected at this point that the attitude of letting things be that I am recommending here is too passive to be of use to the environment movement, that in the end it amounts to little more than a laissez-faire acquiescence in the political status quo. To dispel this fear, let me explain in a little more detail how such an attitude would, if adopted by a significant proportion of the populace, in its quiet way thoroughly disable the present world-destroying order of capitalism, by systematically negating the following values on which that order rests. Consumerism. When we embrace those things that are already at hand, we do not seek to replace them with new ones. Such embracing of the given is thus an antidote to the culture of disposability and conspicuous consumption fostered by capitalism. From the viewpoint of letting things be, we would be most pleased, not with our brightest and newest things, but with those that were our oldest and most well-worn, things which had long figured in our lives, and mingled their identity and destiny with ours. 'Keeping up with the Joneses', if it applied at all in the letting-be scenario, would entail having fewer and older things than the Joneses. (Of course it would not apply, since in the new scenario we would not be measuring ourselves against the kind of social expectations personified by the Joneses.) Acquisitiveness, and hence consumerism, melt away in the face of an attitude of letting be. Commodification. When we value things and places for the meaning that our own lives have invested in them, via our relationship with them, this removes them from the market place. They cannot be replaced by other things and places, even things and places of the same type, since the substitutes will not share our history nor hence be imbued with the same meaning for us. From this point of view, I could no more buy or sell things or places which had become part of the landscape of my life, part of my very identity, than I could buy or sell members of my family. Thus the pool of commodities is continually diminished. Productivity. When we embrace the world as it is, and are no longer forever seeking to make it better, according to abstract (generally egocentric or anthropocentric) conceptions of the good, then greed is effectively abolished. We no longer crave bigger and better houses, cars, roads, cities, whatever. We are instead attached to what is already given. There is thus no call for ever-increasing productivity. Progress. When people no longer believe that the world can always be improved, the slate wiped clean and a better world, a better society, inscribed on it, then the ideological rationalization for capitalism viz that it can continue to improve peoples' 'standard of living' indefinitely, collapses. Efficiency. In late capitalism, efficiency - patently a notion pertaining to means - has acquired an almost fetishistic status. Tools (where this includes all kinds of techniques and procedures as well as implements and technologies) are valued not so much for what they do as for their efficiency, and they are retained only so long as their efficiency is perceived as maximal. When the attitude of letting be is assumed however, tools are valued not merely for their efficiency, but for their meaning. I may continue to use an old plough, or a leaky fountain pen, or a certain laborious method for making dough, simply because this is the plough, or pen, or method, that my mother or grandfather used. Efficiency may still be a consideration, but it will be only one factor determining the means I choose to achieve my ends. Industry/business. These are the two definitive modalities of capitalism - industriousness and busy-ness - both connoting a certain kind of externally driven, externally focussed, hectic state of doing or acting. Those who are busy and industrious act on the world, they take initiatives and make things happen. When we assume the attitude of letting be however, we let the world do the doing, and we fit in with it. We favour 'inaction' , which is not passivity, but action which is effortless because emanating from our own conatus and meshed with the conatus of other beings rather than driven by external social expectations or ideologies. Development. When we understand 'development' in terms of the transformation and regeneration that eventually transpires when things are left to grow old, to unfold in their own way, then we will not tolerate the erasure of the given which is the precondition and prelude to 'development' in the capitalist sense ie the replacement of the given by the decontextualized abstractly imagined new. Profit. If we do elect to let things be, it is on the assumption, as I explained earlier, that nature knows best - that nature, left to itself, conserves itself, does not exhaust itself, but rather replenishes itself, in accordance with the law of birth, decay and rebirth. To sustain itself in this way, nature returns everything to the life cycle, it recycles everything. There is no 'surplus' in this system, and hence no accumulation. The law of return makes nonsense of the notion of 'profit'. 'Profit' in one part of the system merely signals loss and depletion in another part. Automation. For the capitalist, labour is merely a means to production; if automation provides a cheaper, more efficient means, it will be preferred. From the viewpoint of letting things be, human labour is, or can be, a vehicle for meaning. Things become significant to us partly as a result of our building, making, repairing or decorating them ourselves. How much more of a presence in our lives is a church - like the Russian Orthodox Church in my neighbourhood - which is built by the hands of the parishioners themselves, over a period of many years, than one which is contracted out to professional builders and erected 'efficiently' in eight weeks. To 'mix our labour' with things is, as Locke said, though with entirely different intent, to make them ours, in a sense analogous to that in which our family is ours. To make things ourselves, or to have them made by the hands of others, then, is in certain respects preferable, from the present point of view, to mechanization of the processes of production . Property. When people honour the world as it is - honour its immanent telos, its capacity to unfold in its own way - they no longer seek to own the world, but rather to belong to it. They belong to their world by being faithful to the things it contains, keeping and tending them and letting the world manifest through them as they endure. The world expresses itself, reveals itself, through the changes it induces in these things, through the lichen on the walls, the cracks in the glaze, the slow, stooping, inevitable return to earth. By continually replacing things we never witness the way the world reclaims its own, so we miss out on knowing it, encountering it. Strangers to the world, we do not belong, we are anything but natives. We comport ourselves as invaders, conquerors, buying up the matter which means nothing to us, and trashing it when we are tired of it. We treat ourselves, our own bodies, in the same way, truculantly professing to own them and reluctant to allow them to be reclaimed by the world, reluctant to see the world tenderly revealing itself to us through them, through the fading and crazywork and mute surrender of flesh to gravity. But of course, at the final call, the world claims us anyway, and we go, back into the earth, but no wiser, and a lot lonelier, strangers to the end. To assume a panpsychist worldview, and to express this worldview via an attitude of letting be, is thus inevitably to extricate oneself, to a significant degree, from the ideological grid of capitalism. It is to begin to shift towards an entirely different form of praxis and of management of the material dimension of life - in other words, to an entirely different 'economics', or way of ensuring the satisfaction of our material wants and needs. Since economics involves a certain engagement, on our part, with the world of matter, an economics with panpsychist presuppositions will obviously differ from an economics based on a mechanistic worldview. For when the material world is viewed as a subject, or as a manifold of subjects, then economics constitutes an opportunity for encounter: the ways in which we utilize matter must not conflict with, but enhance, our intersubjective engagement with it. An economics in accordance with the principle of letting be is an economics of the given, an economics which respects the world as it is, and finds metaphysical sufficiency in it. 3. THE POLITICS OF REINHABITATION I have argued that when we assume the attitude of letting things be, we cease to be interested in consumerism and the pursuit of wealth and become defectors from capitalism. We become children of nature again, true natives, of our cities, of our world. When a significant proportion of the population adopts this attitude, the capitalist system, robbed of its consumers, would presumably wither away. But is such 'inaction' enough? In a society in which this is not the majority position, a society dedicated to relentless progress and development, with the insatiable bulldozers and chainsaws and toxic spills that this entails, can we stand by and 'do nothing'? Wouldn't our attitude of letting things be merely abet the destruction in this scenario? Isn't resistance rather than acceptance the appropriate political response to a system which will not let things be? I think there is indeed a place for resistance in the politics of letting be. The impulse to let things be, after all, springs from cherishing the given, embracing the world as it is. This commitment to the given is primarily a commitment to things, to concrete particulars and places. It implies a commitment to protect those things and places against arbitrary erasure undertaken for the sake of abstract ideals. We will thus defend the things and places to which we have pledged our loyalty, and we will do so, not in the name of an abstract ideology, but simply because a world which is allowed to grow old claims us as its own, and we shall spring to its defence as surely as natives have perennially sprung to the defence of their lands. But how can we neo-natives, a tiny minority, conduct such defence against the forces of capitalism? Our defensive resources are no greater than those of a small country facing a large-scale foreign invasion. But just as civilian defence seems to be the principal strategy for small populations in this situation, so such a form of defence might provide a key to imagining resistance from the perspective of letting things be. Civilian defence, of course, involves bands of individuals from the occupied territories withdrawing to secret, often inaccessible, locations in the countryside or city, and, through sniping and ambush, making it impossible for the invaders to move freely through the occupied regions. By analogy, followers of the politics of letting be could block the expansionism of capitalist interests by reinhabiting places earmarked for the inevitable 'development'. What does reinhabitation mean in this context? It signifies people acknowledging particular places as the inalienable landscape of their lives. Just as civilian defence requires of citizens that they get to know the lie of their own land intimately, so that they can live off it, and disappear into it when the heat is on, so the politics of reinhabitation requires of its followers that they explore and research their own homeplace or region thoroughly, discovering its secrets and substrata, checking titles offices and municipal and historical records, for instance, so that the offensives of planners and developers can be anticipated. It involves finding means of sustenance, on every level, within their own neighbourhood. To reinhabit place in this way is to enter into an indissoluble metaphysical relationship with it. And to acknowledge the metaphysical relation between people and places is to begin to resacralize those places, a resacralization which can be consummated and proclaimed in art and poetry, in festivals and ritual performances. Every place could eventually, in principle, be thus 'sung up', and assume the status of a sacred site for some band of people, a site sacralized and immortalized in song, verse and dance. To reinhabit the world in this way, ensuring that every place was unnegotiably, metaphysically home to someone, would provide a formidible obstacle to a system which has relied, for its justification, on its rendition of the entire world as, at a metaphysical level, a vast terra nullius, spiritually belonging to no-one, and hence up for grabs. If each place had its own true inhabitants, who could demonstrate its unique metaphysical significance for them, and who could not be bought out or 'compensated', where would the developers go? The rules of the capitalist game no longer allow, at least explicitly, for bona fide natives simply to be shot, or forcibly removed. Their relationship to place has to be accommodated. So a politics of reinhabitation calls for us to find creative and forceful ways of both re-establishing and proclaiming ourselves as natives in the the midst of the industrial and urban devastation of the world today. It also calls on us to recognize that global capitalism represents nothing short of an invasion of our world, and requires that we organize and comport ourselves with corresponding tenacity in our world's defence. 4. FROM MODERNITY TO COUNTERMODERNITY From a panpsychist perspective, respect for nature, as we have seen, is not a matter of protecting only ecosystems, but all material things, from undue human disturbance, including things that do not usually arouse the concern of environmentalists, even non-anthropocentric environmentalists, such as deep ecologists. This view of nature, and what it is to live with rather than against it, implies an ethos that is far more encompassing than that of the traditional environment movement. It is an ethos as encompassing in fact as the ethos of modernity that it seeks to reverse. For the hallmark of modernity is radical change - in the form of development, control, management, design, intervention, progress, improvement, even salvation. (This is reflected in the very etymology of the word, 'modern', which is derived from 'mode', meaning 'of the present', as in 'a la mode', keeping up with the latest. Modernity is that period which can be characterized in terms of its commitment to the ever-emerging new, its dissatisfaction with the given, its radical discontinuity with the past and its dissociation from tradition.) The ethos of letting be challenges modernity head on, trusting as it does the innate wisdom of things, and eschewing as it does the definitive ambition of modernity, to remake the world in accordance with abstract ideas. From the present point of view, not only is environmentalism, even in its deep-ecological forms, missing the larger metaphysical picture in its approach to modernity; it is also itself deeply entangled or imbued with the modernist ethos in its understanding of its own mission; it needs to extricate its legitimate concern for nature from heroic modernist assumptions about its own world-changing, world-saving role. I am suggesting that instead of perpetuating this profoundly modernist ethos of changing or saving the world, the environment movement could assume what I would venture to describe as a countermodern attitude of letting things be. We could step right outside the presuppositions of modernity, and dare not to try to make things better, at any rate if 'making things better' is a rationalization for continually replacing one regime with another. When we say, 'let's fix the world up - let's pull down these slummy old tenement blocks and build a brand new eco-permacultural-urban-village in their stead' - we are just as much in the grip of the old ethos of domination and control as the city fathers were. We are rejecting the given in favour of an abstract or imagined alternative of our own - we are refusing to 'let things be' - and it is this hubristic mentality which is the motor of modern civilization and the source of the environmental crisis. In remaining in the grip of the old ethos, in nursing the desire to make things better, we are simply continuing to water the deeper modernist roots of the present predatory economic system. An ethos which tries to avoid the pitfalls of this mentality will, of course, be an ethos of conservatism rather than radicalism. This conservatism has always been implicit in the environment movement, as plainly betokened by the fact that the term 'conservation' is often regarded as synonymous with 'environmentalism'. However, such conservatism does not imply that the attitude of letting be is aligned with the political right. The political right has historically, of course, been conservative, that is, committed to the given, while the left has been opposed to the given, and committed to the abstract possible or ideal. The historical right however, though conservative, differed from the present position inasmuch as it was socially rather than ontologically motivated - it was at heart a defence of social, political and economic privilege, rather than a defence of the world for its own sake. In other words, the right insisted on the preservation of traditions and institutions because it was through these traditions and institutions that the upper classes retained their privileges. A degree of ontological conservatism - the conservation of architecture and landscapes, for instance - was implicit in this position, but this ontological conservatism was in reality a mere spin-off from a self-interested politics of oppression. The historical left rejected this politics of oppression, and demanded the overthrow - and ongoing readjustment - of the existing social order, in order to end the systematic privileging of the powerful few at the expense of the many. This revolutionary or radical politics however sustained an unremitting antagonism not only to traditions and institutions, but to the world that these traditions and institutions had built, and this legacy has served, in the long run, to legitimate a rapacious contempt for the given in all its social and ontological forms, where this contempt is the hallmark of late capitalist modernity. The attitude of letting things be, in contrast, is conservative out of genuine respect for the world, for the capacity of things to unfold in their own way. Its conservatism is ontologically rather than socially motivated, and it extends primarily to material things rather than to cultures, traditions and social institutions. This attitude certainly does not spring from a desire to preserve the privileges of the few, as that of the historical right has done. Indeed, it tends, almost incidentally, towards a de facto form of non-hierarchism, inasmuch as it is antithetical to the accumulation of wealth, as I have explained above. It achieves this 'equalizing' effect, however, without recourse to the radicalism, to the ethos of intervention and overthrow, of the historical left. So, without itself resorting to the ideality of morality, the ethos of letting be reconciles something of the custodial role of the right with something of the moral intent of the left. In this respect it is in fact the reverse image of the market-driven politics which is achieving hegemony in the industrialized world today, and which is also neither of the left nor the right. This latter politics - the new 'economism' - combines the old rightwing investment in the perpetuation of minority privilege, and moral indifference to the suffering of the majority, with the old radicalism of the left, its dissatisfaction with the given, and its dedication to building ever new, ever more extravagant, worlds. In other words, 'economism' has managed to combine the downsides of both the right and the left. In this unholy new regime, nothing is sacred, everything - every being, every object, every place, every institution, every element of culture and society, every relationship - is subject to obliteration or co-optation by a commerce that sustains fewer and fewer. The attitude of letting things be effectively inverts this nightmare and, by stepping outside the game of left and right altogether, inadvertently combines the essence of the upside of each of the old right and left. The aim of such a conservative ethos then is not a brave new world, but an old world, a world unfolding naturally, redolent with meaning, beauty, and its own life and terms. The only way of achieving such a world, without engaging in further interventions, is, as I have explained, to let the present world grow old - to let the cities weather and fade, and the ivy creep up the walls. That the ethos of letting be is counter- rather than post-modern is clear from the fact that its opposition to modernity is based not on the deconstruction of metaphysics, as postmodernism is, but on the substitution of some version of panpsychist metaphysics, broadly construed, for the materialist metaphysics of modernity. The project of modernity - of remaking the world according to our own abstract specifications - rests on the materialist assumption that matter is sheer externality, devoid of its own informing telos - putty for us to shape to our own designs. The relativist outlook of postmodernity presents no challenge to this view: by insisting on the entitlement of different cultures to live by their own metaphysical lights, postmodernists imply that there is no way the world is in itself, and to that extent they indirectly underwrite the message of modernity: the world has no informing meaning or purpose of its own. It follows from the meta-level assumptions of postmodernism then, just as it follows from the object-level assumptions of mechanism, that we can do with the world as we will. The present position overturns both these sets of assumptions, and thus puts an end to the project of modernity, by reintegrating human subjectivity and agency into the subjectivity and agency of a re-awakened world. DISCOVERING THE TAO IN AUSTRALIA The position that I have outlined in this paper is basically a Taoist one. Nature, according to my definition, is more or less equivalent to the Tao: it is the wise way the world unfolds when left to its own devices (Mathews 1996). The Taoism of Lao Tzu does not announce itself as panpsychist, but clearly a world animated by the Tao is one which is possessed of some intelligent inner principle, a principle that can be trusted to guide us into the deepest channels of life. It is not my place to comment in detail here on the affinities between the broadly Taoist attitude of letting be and certain fundamental characteristics of Aboriginal thought. Suffice it to say that Aboriginal cultures evince a powerful engagement with the given that ensures their continuity with their own past but also their flexibility in the face of an almost unimaginable scale of externally imposed change. For while not craving the possible and the ideal, they exhibit a genius for accommodating the new once it has become actual. One of the flashpoints in the evolution of my own thinking occurred when a non-indigenous friend who had married into an Aboriginal family in the far north-west of Australia told me about an elder there who included motorboats in his Dreaming stories. Years later I happened to find myself living for a while in the very community to which the old man - by now deceased - had belonged, and I was enchanted by the way in which the people in this community refused nothing. They accepted - though they never craved - anything and everything that drifted their way, all the trappings and junk of modern civilization. But in the process of accepting this tawdry stuff, they also uncannily Aboriginalized it, so that it assumed an entirely different significance in the context of their community from its intended significance within the framework of a capitalist culture. Somehow, through this affectionate trust in the given, the everyday was rendered numinously spiritual, and the spiritual unpretentiously everyday. Mary Graham has declared that one of the most taken-for-granted assumptions of Aboriginal thought is that spirit is real; another is that land is all there is (Graham 1992). That is to say, spirit has a status, in Aboriginal thought, as incontestable as that of energy and matter; and, since there is no heaven and hell, and since theories and ideas, however dazzling, are not real, land is ultimately the only thing that exists. If 'land' is expanded to encompass the concrete given - all that is actual in a physical sense - then I think that the attitude of letting be follows from these twin premises: spirit animates the given rather than existing in the realm of the abstract, so we connect with spirit by engaging - and not unnecessarily interfering - with the given. By embracing the given even in its most adulterated forms, we reinhabit our own contemporary, mundane reality in the same kind of profound way that traditional Aboriginal peoples inhabited their reality, the still edenic land. Aboriginal peoples learned to inhabit the real rather than escaping into the ideal by remaining attuned to the wisdom that this peaceful old land imparts to those who pay attention to it. I believe that my own early glimpses of this way of living came to me not in the first instance through explicit Aboriginal influences - though these influences later helped to bring it to consciousness - but through the opportunities for such attentiveness that were vouchsafed me as a child. Born into this intimately companionable land that has for so long been singing along, humming along, with its human inhabitants, non-Aboriginal Australians might also, if we collectively pause to feel the resonance of the endlessly poetic communiques that surround us, rediscover, in a contemporary context, some of the fundamental aspects of the Aboriginal relation to the world. References Brennan, Andrew 1998, Thinking about Nature, Routledge, London Graham, Mary 1992, interviewed on Aboriginal Perspectives, Caroline Jones and Stephen Godley, ABC Religious Program Mathews, Freya 1991, The Ecological Self, Routledge, London _ 1994, 'Relating to Nature, The Trumpeter vol 11, no 4, pp 159-166 _ 1996, 'The Soul of Things', Terra Nova vol 1, no 4, pp 55-64 _ 1998, 'The Real, the One and the Many in Ecological Thought' in David Cooper and Joy Palmer (eds), The Spirit of the Environment, Routledge, London, pp 57-72 Rolston III, Holmes 1988, 'Following Nature' in Environmental Ethics, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, pp 32-44 Rose, Deborah Bird 1992, Dingo Makes Us Human, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Seddon, George 1997, 'The Nature of Nature' in Landprints, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, pp 7-14 www.freyamathews.com |
| Back |