The Idea:
A Canadian naturalist argues that civilization has obfuscated important
truths about our world in a defensive and overwhelming mythology of
prosthetic anthropocentrism, and that it is not too late to turn away
from this disconnected mythology and rediscover our true purpose and a
higher, wilder consciousness.
It must be hell to be a decade
ahead of your time. Canadian naturalist, environmental filmmaker (with
David Suzuki) and retired Environmental Studies professor John
Livingston's 1994 psychological and phenomenological review of man's
relationship with nature, Rogue Primate, presages the flurry of subsequent studies on this topic, but besides a Governor General's award did not net him much fame.
Livingston believes the root of Earth's environmental problems is man himself, "the animal with something askew":
Alone among the beings who have
arisen on Earth, we have evolved into virtually total dependence upon
not our nature but our nurture...a fabricated prosthetic [replacing a
missing part] device...a surrogate mode of approaching and apprehending
the world, to stand in the place of natural, biological, inherent ways
of being..."Software technology" -- storable, retrievable,
transmissable technique, is the human specialty...The dependence into
which we have grown has made us not merely the servants of this
technique, but one of its very artefacts, its own domesticate.
This self-domestication, he argues, is synonymous with civilization. We
are now utterly dependent on learning the technique of how to live, and
on other humans whose roles in this awkward way of living dovetail with
ours. To make it work, we have invented and imposed a "linear, vertical
hierarchy".
These constraints, especially in a species that is both social and
cooperative, are psychologically suffocating, he says. And "the most
barbaric punishment that can be visited upon such a species is dense
confinement." But we were genetically vulnerable, perhaps even
genetically predestined, to be self-domesticated because we have all
the qualities needed for a domesticated species: Docility and
tractability, a pliable or weak will, susceptibility to dependence,
insecurity, adaptability to different habitats, inclination to herd
behaviour, tolerance of physical and psychological maltreatment,
acceptance of habitat homogeneity, high fecundity, social immaturity,
rapid physical growth, sexual precociousness, poor natural attributes
(lack of speed, strength, and sensory acuity. We share these qualities
with all the creatures (and many plants) we have domesticated. The only
difference is, we domesticated ourselves.
Once domesticated, dependent on ideology and learned technique, we and
our fellow domestics have been 'transplanted' across the globe,
replacing, as Richard Manning subsequently explained in Against the Grain,
robust natural ecosystems with poor, fragile artificially-sustained
ones. Genocide of all undomesticated species, including gatherer-hunter
humans, followed, and an ideology of apology and denial for our
devastation was constructed to justify this behaviour: Myths that
'wild' creatures and cultures lived 'short, nasty, brutish' lives, that
all life was inherently competitive not collaborative, that
'development' was a natural and evolutionary driver, that hierarchy and
'pecking order' is natural, that everything is property to be claimed
and fought over, that domesticated humans were 'the crown of creation',
that life was inevitably a struggle in a 'market' economy of scarce
resources, and that the "simplified, homogenized, monoculturalized
industrial-growth imperative" was ordained by God and confirmed by
Darwin. These myths prevailed, and still prevail, despite overwhelming
ecological, anthropological, sociological and scientific evidence to
the contrary.
Livingston carefully dispels these myths. For example, Alpha males, he
shows, are not the top of a hierarchy but the centre, the glue of
community circles, with responsibility far outstripping the reward of
the position. And marking territory is not making a property claim, but
is a natural way of establishing sufficient distance between creatures
of a particular species to ensure a comfortable level of food for each
and prevent overpopulation of the species messing up the ecological
balance of the community. He argues that, far from being less conscious
than civilized man, wild animals and wild human cultures actually have a greater
'participatory collective' consciousness beyond the our primitive
individual consciousness, that extends to their ecological community
and to the entire Gaia organism of the planet, an interconnectedness to
which we, and other domesticates, have become numb, have lost from
disuse or ideological counter-programming.
The most important question he asks, I think, is whether, once we reach
adolescence, it is too late to acquire this greater consciousness, much
as it becomes too late to learn language -- our brains have been wired
for good, and the capacity for it is lost forever. This is a terrifying
possibility, but one that explains why so few humans 'get' the message
of environmentalists, even though it is imprinted in their DNA. In
young wild animals a key experiential learning is the bonding of the
youth to the rest of its ecosystem, reverence for balance, respect for
predator and prey alike, attentiveness and sense-ability that in our
simpler, sheltered human world we never really acquire, just as animals
domesticated from birth cannot be 'reintroduced' much later to their
true natures. If we could
acquire this consciousness, this 'becoming a part of the whole',
Livingston argues, we could not possibly continue to tolerate the
"aberrant and deviant" destruction of nature -- it would be as
unthinkable and unforgivable as destroying an integral part of our own
bodies. The amputation of wildness from our collective psyche would be
seen as no different from the amputation of our own limbs.
Livingston goes on to show the absurdity and chauvinism of the idea of
animal 'rights' -- an impossibly poor substitute for 'rightness', and
concludes with an analysis of our psychological condition and options.
"There must be an alternative way of human being in the world", he
says, though "there is little reason to think that the human community
is about to address the ideological content of our cultural
prosthesis". It is all too easy, he laments, to go back to incremental
work 'within the system': "Why try to blow up the entire human
metaphysical dome when there is so much within it calling for immediate
attention? Why not attempt to do what is possible, what works? When one
is very tired, or very discouraged, these can be attractive
propositions. But they are not good enough." We must, he insists, stop
equating 'environment' and 'nature' with something 'other', outside us,
a set of "free material commodities and garbage commons". He concludes
poetically with this portrait of the appreciation of and belonging to
wildness which he says we must rediscover:
[By wildness] I mean the
dissolution of the ego-centred self, as when one was drawn close, ever
closer and at last into the gold-flecked eye of a toad, or when one
melted into black earthy humus, laced with wintergreen, on a cool
forest floor. Or when one's cry of joy was transposed into a gull
clamour by a sea wind pungent with the scent of rotting kelp. When one
sought, and found; when one relinquished, and was free...Look at a
child gently holding an unfledged young robin that has fallen from its
nest. Look in that child's eyes. The sweet bondage of wildness is
recoverable.
Although Livingston's portrait of our predicament and our possibilities
is more upbeat than the one painted by John Gray that I reviewed two
days ago, it is also more tentative, and ten years older. In 1994 the
world seemed to have turned around, and for the first time since the
late 1960s anything seemed possible. In the light of the grim and
relentless legacy of human destruction, deceit and denial of the past
ten years I wonder if Livingston, who has been strangely silent for a
decade and who lamented to interviewers that his students never really
understood or accepted the message of his work, would today be silently
nodding his assent to the much darker view of Peter Brown or John Gray.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
