11.5: The ‘War Against Nature’

A Certain Kind of Culture Pits Humans Against Nature

At some time in their histories, all human societies must have taken that fateful step into shared cultural symbolism and language; however, not all proceeded along a path that led them into a ‘war against nature,’ certainly nothing so extreme as what’s going on now in a near-global assault. Recurrent themes in the stories told by Native Americans and many other land-based peoples told of the interrelatedness among lifeforms and the need for mutual respect and harmony; moral responsibilities extended to nonhuman life, and when life was taken, grateful acknowledgment was required. ^[11] Humans were distinct, everywhere; but a further move along the trajectory, a separation of the human from the natural, seems to have been a cultural peculiarity that not all human societies enacted. In what became known as the ‘Western’ world, however—the culture which has given rise to the industrialism that has taken hold in most parts of the globe today—that further move was, and largely still is, much celebrated. It is the culture that originated in Western Europe that Iain McGilchrist sees as having first given expression to the increasing domination of left-hemisphere cognition, with its theme of division, separation, abstraction from context, and us-vs-them thinking, and some of the central myths and metaphors of that culture are still actively structuring the way many of us think today, even if they receive little conscious attention–issues that will be considered at some length later on in this chapter.

The Culture of Western Europe and the Emergence of ‘Modern’ Science

Writing some of the seminal texts to emerge from the culture of the ancient Greeks, Plato accorded more reality to an immaterial world of Ideas, perfect and eternal, than to the messy and changeable actuality of our embodied lives here on Earth. Aristotle, more appreciative of biology than Plato, nevertheless exalted humanity above the rest and pointed to our rationality, our recently evolved ability to abstract and separate in thought, as the feature that not only singled us out from the other animals but gave us moral priority. Nature was still alive, however, in the Greek society of more than two thousand years ago; Aristotle understood all living things to be animated with a soul that initiated movement, humans, animals and plants alike. But he conceived of our human minds or souls as divided into parts, of which our reason, or rationality, was supposed to govern and rein in the parts given to feelings and baser appetites, in parallel with our efforts to control an unruly world of nature that couldn’t always be counted on to deliver the harvest, initiating an internal as well as an external division that might well be conceived in terms of struggle if not an all-out war. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle became intertwined with Christian thought in medieval Europe, and, as historian Lynn White details in a famous essay (White, 1967), the latter, growing in influence at the same time that technology was developing, served to justify an increasingly violent relationship between human society and the natural systems of the land. According to White, the major thrust of the Christian religion, claiming both God and humanity to be transcendent of the created world–deepening the dualistic divide in western thought—urged the ‘chopping down of sacred groves’ as part of its assault on paganism, and thus explicitly endorsed our war against nature.

It took around 2,000 years from the time of Plato and Aristotle for a victory to be declared in this war. In the wake of the great scientific revolution that began with Nicolaus Copernicus’s shifting our worldview from a geocentric universe to a heliocentric solar system and culminated in Isaac Newton’s inscribing the laws of both celestial and terrestrial motion in precisely formulated mathematical terms, all traces of animism were finally swept out of our accepted metaphysical scheme. Living things were no longer to be seen as agents generating their own motion and directing their own lives; the apparently purposive actions of animals and plants came to be ‘reduced’ to the mindless movements of machinery. From the time of this scientific ‘enlightenment’ forward until, for many, the present day, we were instructed that what was ‘really real’ was only ‘atoms in the void,’ a pronouncement that led people to imagine the universe as being nothing but a collection of tiny, separate, solid, billiard-ball-like particles colliding with one another in the empty vastness of space- particles that could be further ‘reduced’ in our minds to pure mathematical description in terms of mass, velocity and direction. Mathematician Pierre-Simon LaPlace summed up the enormous change in worldview that resulted from this new metaphysical metaphor–the universe as a machine–in his depiction of a fantasy figure that came to be known as ‘LaPlace’s demon,’ an intellect that, given the positions of all the particles and the magnitude of all the forces acting on them at any one instant of time, could calculate all past and future configurations of the universe, thus removing even human agency from what was now a completely deterministic piece of clockwork.

Exactly how our human lives and our sense of free will could be reconciled with this imaginative cosmology was never quite resolved, but mechanistic science worked beautifully for allowing us to describe, predict, and thus control the movements of macroscopic physical objects, and if the complexities of living organisms lay beyond its grasp, it was not from lack of trying to put them ‘on the rack,’ as Francis Bacon is said to have urged, to lay bare the ‘mechanisms’ undergirding life itself. The desire for control over the other while alive and agentive has now turned into pretending that the other has been killed, is dead, has become machinelike and therefore is completely in the power of whatever intellect has access to nature’s laws. Rene Descartes made the separation between one part of us, our ‘rational’ minds, and the rest of nature complete, inscribing in what are still considered the foundational texts of modern philosophy a dualistic metaphysics that remains deeply embedded in our psyches today: all of nature is a vast, mindless machine, including our own bodies, while we are of a different sort altogether, detachable minds or souls that are eternal, suitable to inhabit Plato’s abstract realm of perfection and immutability, and free to manipulate the mechanistic sphere without repercussion, since we do so from our existential positioning safely outside the realm of this ‘nature.’

Iain McGilchrist has interpreted the major milestones in the evolution of Western European culture, from Plato’s exaltation of a realm of abstraction to Descartes’ severing of our minds from our bodies, through the Industrial Revolution’s assault on nature and finally to our forlorn detachment in Postmodernity, as evidence for an increasing left-hemisphere dominance in the approach to the world being taken by all who have come under its influence, which in this dawn of the Anthropocene epoch seems to extend to almost everybody—a growing species-wide hemispheric imbalance that may be leading us all toward a literal, not simply metaphorical, ‘death of nature.’

The Death of Nature

The disappearance of all notion of souls, spirits or vital forces in the natural world, or indeed of there being any difference at all between the living and the nonliving, was the apparent result of this great revolution in western thought that spanned the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries, a consequence that Carolyn Merchant has called ‘The Death of Nature’ (Merchant, 1980). Westerners were thereby freed from any moral reservations they might have had about seizing hold of other living creatures, and eventually entire ecosystems, and twisting them to serve particular exploitative human purposes; if there was nothing with will or agency there in the first place, nothing but mindless clockwork, to what could we possibly owe any measure of ethical respect? The Cartesian fantasy of ‘our’ splendid isolation–or perhaps, rather, that of a certain part of us, our rational minds or souls, as conceived by our increasingly dominant left hemispheres, increasingly detached from right-hemisphere input–coupled with a manipulative approach to the natural world justifying itself on the basis of what is now a very out-of-date physics, appears to be the foundation of what is given the appellation ‘our war against nature’ today, an orientation that serves to sanction an increasingly violent assault on nonhuman life, and on an important but generally unacknowledged part of our own human lives as well. If nature were really dead, of course, it would make no sense to speak of waging such a war—the ‘enemy’ would already have been killed and conquered; but then again, with nature dead, there wouldn’t be any of ‘us’ alive to wage such a war in the first place. There is a deep flaw in the logic underlying this anti-nature, anti-self stance, one that will return us to the question with which this chapter started: who are ‘we,’ such that ‘we’ can be proud to embrace as its own and carry out a ‘war against nature,’ and is this ‘who’ we choose to be?