Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

trust your instincts

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	November 8, 2004

WHY I SOMETIMES DON'T MAKE 'SENSE' I write about so many topics that my audience is quite diverse, which is why I have the six categories listed at right, each individually subscribable and each with its own Table of Contents. About 70% of my readers tend to read everything I write, while about 30% read only the business posts, those that relate to innovation, social networking, knowledge management, and entrepreneurship. What has intrigued me is that most of the business readers have no problem with my left-of-centre political views, but many get quite distressed about my radical environmentalism. The politics they find quite rational, while the environmental philosophy is "too new-agey by half" and "not well reasoned". In fact, they say its irrationality undermines, to them, the credibility of everything else I write. They're worried about my mental health, worried that I'm going to do something crazy, something that "makes no sense". I confess that I have not articulated well my impatience with both the rational/logical and moral/emotional constructs that, in combination, lead most of us to live our lives as we do, to believe what we believe, to do what we do, and to not do what we don't do. When I was younger, I was a fervent rationalist: If there was no scientific logic behind someone's belief, I disdained it. I disliked religion because it appealed to emotions, mostly (in organized religions anyway) negative emotions ( fear most of all). I saw it as manipulative, using a mob of people brainwashed into accepting certain things on faith to pressure others, notably children, into accepting the same things. It's a weapon for subjugation of the human spirit. I still believe that most adherents of organized religion are weak-willed people who prefer to belong rather than to think for themselves. I abhor the 'ends justifies the means' immorality of most organized religions, which have no compunction about lying, stealing, destroying, torturing or even killing if it brings about the religion's goals: conversion, growth, reduction in the ranks of non-believers (you have to confess your sins, but all is forgiven). History is largely a record of atrocities systematically committed by fanatical adherents to one religion against others. In the process, the land, money, property, power and souls of non-believers are appropriated for the church. Neo-conservatism, in its various guises (corporatism in the late 1800s and again today, Stalinism, Fascism and Maoism in between) subscribes to the same orthodoxy of blind faith backed up by ruthless power, reliance on fear-mongering to keep subjects from thinking rationally, and end-justifies-the-means immorality. These isms, disguised under a veneer of secularism and populism, are modern evolutions of organized religion, whose end is always power and whose means is always fear. So for many years I was a rationalist, a disdainer of religion, and constantly astonished that the vast majority of people seemed to be either too dumb or too brainwashed to 'get it', to think logically, to think for themselves, to see the immorality of their beliefs and behaviours. I remain astonished at these things, though I understand them better (religion is at heart a coping mechanism, and the more stress there is, the more such a mechanism is needed) but now I am not a rationalist either. When I was in my 20s, I became an environmentalist. On the surface, that means I believed it was important to protect the environment, and to preserve wilderness for the vast majority of Earth's creatures who can't thrive in habitats transformed, by urban or intensive agricultural or extensive monoculture development, into alien landscapes suitable only for humans, a dozen species of genetically modified farmed and domesticated animals, fifty species of genetically modified plants, and the insect, rodent and weed parasites that are readily adaptable to these alien landscapes. I also believed that our ultimate social, political and economic goal should be to reduce and minimize the aggregate suffering of all creatures on the planet. My socialist friends pounced on my new beliefs as a straying from rationalism, from their espoused secular humanism to fuzzy, illogical spirituality. We had fierce arguments where my belief in the value and critical importance of wilderness was thrown at me as anti-human (and in fact many socialist organizations today continue to oppose environmental organizations like WWF for paternalistically 'stealing' valuable farmland from third-world peasants to make into wildlife refuges to salve the first-world consciences for their failure to save wilderness at home). For many years I was philosophically at odds with myself, and came to conclude that my environmentalism was ultimately spiritual, rather than rational -- the argument that without wilderness and biodiversity our world would be too fragile and depleted to support human beings (taken up by environmental rationalists who say they want the Kyoto Accord in order to defeat global warming for man's sake) was so transparently thin and feeble that even I couldn't buy it. I wanted wilderness and biodiversity for its own sake. If I wanted to reduce suffering to animals, my socialist friends said, I should be in favour of their extinction. I analyzed my environmental beliefs and passions intensely, to try to convince myself that they made sense, logically. After all, if I were to confess that my environmentalism was a spiritual rather than rational belief, how would my beliefs be any more credible, deserving, moral, than the 'spiritual' beliefs of neoconservatives, abortion-doctor killing religious wingnuts, animal-sacrificing cults, or Amish with their horrendous puppy mills? At that time I started using a term as a 'place-holder' for something I couldn't quite figure out, something neither rational nor spiritual. The term was instinctive. I believed and believe that all practices that cause suffering -- war, torture, child and spousal abuse, factory farming, laboratory experimentation on animals, and so on -- are repugnant. I become completely irrational when I hear of these things, let alone see them first hand. I know many people who have to change the station when such things are portrayed or described, not because they find them irrational or immoral or guilt-inducing, but because they physically can't bear to watch them. These acts are, according to most worldviews, inhumane. Repugnant and inhumane are interesting words. On the surface, they're not really rational terms. You would be hard put to set out a logical argument against doing something simply because it was repugnant or inhumane. In fact, you could probably just as easily set out a logical argument for doing something despite acknowledging it was repugnant or inhumane. Without putting animals through excruciating pain and endless suffering, we could not have developed many of the drugs that have vastly improved quality of life for billions of humans, and for some pets as well. But these terms are not moral/emotional terms either, even though we try to make them so by putting the word 'morally' in front of 'repugnant'. You would be hard put to set out an emotional or moral argument against doing something simply because it was repugnant or inhumane. In fact, you could probably just as easily set out an emotional or moral argument for doing something despite acknowledging it was repugnant or inhumane. To some, killing abortion doctors is defensible, even though killing is a sin. To many, going to war to defend a principle is justifiable, even though the process is horrible. The end justifies the means. So if repugnant and inhumane are not rational/logical or moral/emotional constructs, what are they? What is it that we feel when we see an animal tortured in a laboratory to test a new bleach, that makes us want to burn the place to the ground? What is it that makes us cry in despair, pain and fury when we see the once staggeringly beautiful old-growth forests of Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia clear-cut, bull-dozed to the ground to make cheap newsprint? What is it that makes us so incoherent with rage when we see thousands of acres flooded, millions of animals drowned, whole communities eradicated, to build a new dam to power a new factory to make SUVs? I would argue (though it's hard, because I'm limited to a few words like inhumane and repugnant that haven't been appropriated by rationalists and moralists) that it is instinct. When we hear about or witness these things, there is somethings deep in our bones that screams in revulsion. If a young child were to witness these things he or she would react exactly as we do, because you don't need to be taught what is rational or moral to know that this is awful, ghastly, repugnant. You just know. Instinct is knowledge that is ingrained in your DNA. Before man evolved a big brain, and created the complicated rational and moral codes that we now live by, before even there was language, we had this instinctive knowledge. We have it still, though it is usually drowned out in the noise of man-made rational and moral argument. I have used negative examples, but there are positive ones as well, though they are more elusive and subtler these days. Sunrises and sunsets, the smell of rain, the sound of birds, all appeal directly to our instinctive selves, they bring us joy that does not require us to understand the concept of beauty, or learn the words to describe the scenes, or to have an aesthetic or intellectual appreciation of why these things bring us joy. I would argue they don't even need a large brain. All they need is senses. If you spend much of your life close to nature, or even if you only occasionally get away from the man-made artifice that blocks us from realizing the joy that these sensory pleasures bring, a joy that is completely different from, and even more profound than, intellectual delight or emotional happiness, you just know. You know it is right, it is how we were meant to live. Not right, or wrong, rationally or emotionally, but instinctively. This is knowledge that you don't have to learn. Reason Morality Instinct Interface with the world Left Brain Right Brain, Heart Senses Centre of the world Man God Nature Goal in life Understanding Righteousness Harmony, Happiness Central discipline Science Humanities Art Knowledge acquisition Learned Evoked, Nurtured Encoded What you trust most Logic Feelings Intuition Unacceptable behaviour Irrational, Uninformed Immoral, Evil, Heartless Inhumane, Unsustainable Frame to justify violence Enlightened self-interest God's will; Rid world of evil Restore balance I can hear you saying, ironically, I am still not making sense. Ironically, because if you can't use rational argument, or moral argument, with languages that are utterly and completely preoccupied with rational and moral argument, you can't 'make' sense. Intuition, instinct, is purely 'sensible', it is the way our bodies 'made sense' out of sensory stimuli before we had brains cluttered with abstraction and logic and language and moral precepts. When we shut our eyes instinctively when someone brushes up against our face, we do so in an infinitessimally small fraction of the time our brains would take to think through the threat to our eyesight and relay the decision to our eye muscles. Without instinct we would all be blind. When we smell a perfume or a plant that we haven't smelled since we were children our response is immediate, overwhelming, and it short-circuits and renders unnecessary any analysis our brain may attempt to make of it. What is amazing is that, with our complicated rational and moral codes, our learned logic and morality and language, we no longer trust our instincts. We are suspicious of them, because they defy analytical and emotional justification. It was our instinctive knowledge that saved us from extinction before we had science, religion, or language, that evolved our brains to compensate for our rather pathetically ill-suited and weak bodies and senses, to the point where we could develop rational and moral codes and abtract reasoning and language. So now we are out of touch with our instincts, and our senses, and hence we are disconnected from all other life on the planet. And we live in cities and farms that have been largely transformed into alien landscapes to obliterate as much of the need for, and applicability of, instinct as possible. For most of the people of the world, they cannot even really imagine wilderness, let alone have any appreciation for its powerful, connecting effect on the psyche, the soul, the senses and the body. So when I tell you that my instincts tell me: that human ingenuity isn't going to get us over the hoop this time, that as wilderness and biodiversity is disappearing in this century at a rate faster even than most of the great extinctions that have wiped out most life on Earth in previous cycles, we are losing our last chance to save our world, that if we can't bring about a drastic reduction in human population and in resource consumption (and the resultant pollution, degradation of the land and ecosystems and waste) in this century, our world, not just our species, is doomed, and that the only sustainable way to live is in harmony and in communion with nature and with the other creatures with which we share the planet (that does not mean going back to being hunter-gatherers, but rather using knowledge and innovation and technology to move past our consumer-acquisitor growth society to a new relater-sharer society), I'm not surprised that some of you tell me I'm not making 'sense', that I've gone off the deep end and should perhaps seek professional help. I can't explain rationally why I know this, and I'm sure that is troubling (believe me, it troubles me to, I don't like believing what I can't prove scientifically). I certainly can't justify it morally, since I'm just not a 'means justify the ends' kind of guy. I just know these things are true. I'm not asking you to accept them on faith, or at all for that matter. Maybe there's no point me saying these things at all, if I can't justify them in words and in arguments, and I can't. But there's something about human nature that makes us want to say what we believe, whether we can convince others or not. I don't think my beliefs are spiritual, because spiritually they trouble me as well. But I don't think I'm insane either. I'm just telling you where I stand, and trying, incoherently, to explain why. Derrick Jensen says "If you listen to the land, in time, you will know exactly what to do." He is talking about paying attention to our senses and our instincts. But to the vast majority of people I know, including many that I have come to love and respect, this advice makes no sense. The radical actions he encourages (though he's not that prescriptive: he uses examples of what he'd like to do, and will do if and when we pass the point of no return) are thought by most to be either immoral ("eco-terrorist") or irrational ("emotionally damaged and insane"). OK, I'm done. Another raid on the inarticulate, not very successful. Or, perhaps, a futile attempt to teach what cannot be taught, communicate what cannot be communicated. You just know, or you don't. 5:39:47 PM  trackback []  comment []

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