11.6: Understanding How and Why We Continue to Wage ‘Our War Against Nature’ and Reversing Course

If we are to have any hope of calling off our war against nature, it will be helpful to examine, through several different academic lenses, the ways in which we create and perpetuate our present ‘social reality,’ which, broadly understood, is what generates and structures all of our human activities on the planet, and the current configuration of which must be at the root of why we are continuing to wage this war.

Our Ability to Abstract and Symbolize Enables Us to Construct the Linguistic Core of Our ‘Social Reality’

Becoming increasingly aware of how our minds operate allows us to become reflexive, to ‘catch ourselves in the act’ of shaping the way we think, and this move opens us up to yet another step, actively changing not only how we think but what we do. Most of what we do in the world, however, we do working together as social animals, and analytic philosopher John Searle focuses attention on our social nature in his account of how we humans ‘construct culture out of nature,’ in a sense taking up where van Schaik’s account leaves off. Searle’s account deals largely with current practices specific to western, industrial cultures, but presumably the basic moves he describes would be species-wide. His analysis is also almost entirely focused on the linguistic and therefore predominantly left-hemisphere process whereby we build up our symbol-world. Although he doesn’t speak of this,the fact that he attempts to describe the process itself and situate it within the larger context of our biological propensities attests to his own ability to employ some right-hemisphere skills as well.

In The Construction of Social Reality, Searle (1995) tells us that he was struck early on by what he calls ‘the metaphysical burden’ of the world we live in, the fact that, in addition to those parts of our reality that exist independently of us, the things that are studied by the natural sciences, there are also a large number of things that do not exist other than by virtue of the fact that we, as human subjects, believe in them–things like money, governments, property, marriages and the like. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that investigates existence, so Searle terms the former, independently existing things, ontologically objective, and the latter, those things that exist only by human agreement, ontologically subjective. As he explains, these latter ‘things’ come into existence just as the words of our language come into existence, by our doing something we humans are very, very good at: collectively agreeing to give certain sounds, marks and objects symbolic meanings so that we can use them to convey information and coordinate our human activities. Searle defends a correspondence theory of truth, the notion that a ‘true’ statement describes fairly accurately how things are in the world, i.e. the way it re-presents the world corresponds to the way the world actually is. He is quite clear about the difference between what is ontologically subjective—our human belief systems, from our re-presentations of concrete things to increasingly abstracted concepts that have no referent in the actual world—and that which is ontologically objective—the things that actually do exist in the world, independently of whether we ‘believe in them’ or not.

To explain how the process of symbolization works to allow us to construct our ‘social reality,’ Searle asks us to imagine a stone wall built by an early band of humans to keep others out of their territory. At first, the wall is a physical barrier; over time, it crumbles into a line of stones that one could easily step across, but it continues to exclude members of other groupings because it has attained symbolic significance as a boundary marker in the minds of all the people of the region, reminding outsiders to the original grouping that the area has been cordoned off, excluding them–it could perhaps be said to signify early ‘ownership’ and to demarcate an aspect of group identity as well. When entire groupings of humans agree, explicitly or implicitly, to behave as if particular things are invested with a certain symbolic meaning or status, then those things can function as if they actually had certain physical properties, even if there’s nothing correspondingly physical about them. Since it is not just any one individual’s thought or desire that brings those symbolic properties into being, but rather the whole human community’s shared belief—what Searle calls their collective intentionality–the ‘barrier’ presented by the symbolic line of stones will be experienced as something substantial insofar as it is outside of any one person’s ability to alter. Nevertheless, its existence is utterly dependent upon the continued belief of the larger group, and it would cease to exist when the group died out, or in the moment they decided to change their minds and drop it–it remains something entirely ontologically subjective. Searle provides a formula to represent the way this process of social construction works in general terms. He claims our social institutions are created through many iterations of ‘constitutive rules’ that take the linguistic form of ‘X counts as Y in context C’. A group invests an object, X—the line of stones in the example above—with a symbolic meaning, Y—being a boundary marker–in a particular context, C—demarcating the limits of the homeland. As long as most everyone in the larger community behaves in a way that follows the ‘rule,’ recognizing the attachment of symbolic status Y to object X, even if they don’t think consciously about it, X ‘is’ that Y for them.

Our notion of value has become abstracted from natural contexts through the action of such a process, becoming increasingly expressed in numerical units with less and less connection to things in the real world. Money, as Searle explains, has evolved from ontologically objective commodity money like gold or silver, which most people found desirable in itself, for ornamentation if not for utility, subjected to repeated agreements of the declaration ‘X counts as Y in context C’ to become contract money in the form of promissory notes exchangeable for specified amounts of bullion, and finally fiat money, paper currency or electronic traces in computer banks, that governments have declared ‘by fiat’ to ‘count as’ a certain amount of value—a purely linguistic/symbolic entity. Our conceptions of wealth, as positive value, or of debt, as negative value, are similarly socially constructed. Nevertheless, their hold on us is remarkably strong; anthropologist David Graeber traces it back to our sense of moral obligation, as beings who necessarily depend upon social cooperation, which includes keeping our agreements and fulfilling our responsibilities, in order to sustain our societies (Graeber, 2011).

Searle’s theory is developed largely in terms of a very sophisticated linguistic philosophy that focuses on the logical structure of our social institutions, emphasizing abstraction and rule-following. He is forced to develop a concept of ‘the background’ in order to account for the fact that no conscious (or, he claims, even ‘unconscious’) rule-following or other abstract thinking seems to be involved in the day-to-day participation of most people in economic or other social institutions. This background includes a set of dispositions that we ‘evolve’ as we grow up within society and receive positive or negative social feedback for our actions—dispositions toward ways of thinking and acting that will presumably thereby be ‘sensitive to the rule structure’ underlying established institutions even if it is never brought to our conscious attention (Searle, 1995, pp. 144-145). In a more recent work, however, Searle reaffirms his theory’s dependence on abstract logic with the claim that “all human social institutions are brought into existence and continue in their existence by a single logico-linguistic operation that can be applied over and over again.” Searle (2010, p. 62), outlining the legal process of creating a corporation through a succession of verbal declarations or ‘speech acts.’ Later, however, he asks—since there is nothing ‘there’ to an institution before its linguistic creation, “and since its creation is really just words, words, words”—given that this is how all ‘facts’ regarding the existence of our social institutions come about—“how do we get away with it?” His short answer—which must be rooted in the processes he lumps together under the background—is that ‘we’ get away with constructing and maintaining our institutions, even some that perpetuate highly unjust social arrangements, “to the extent that we can get other people to accept it.” A deeper question, of course, is why people do accept the current structure of our social reality, and in answering this question Searle points to a prominent feature of most cases, ”people do not typically understand what is going on.” Most people do not understand that things like money, or private property, or corporations, are human creations; rather, “they tend to think of them as part of the natural order of things, to be taken for granted in the same way that they take for granted the weather or the force of gravity” (Searle, 2010, pp. 106-107). Most people simply grow up within a culture and absorb the ability to live in accord with all of its various symbolic meanings, acquiring a set of ‘background’ capacities without ever thinking about how they originated. In other words, they fail to see that a large part of the ‘world’ that they take for granted is socially constructed, maintained in its particular form simply by collective human agreement—and therefore open to re-construction if only enough of us could come to realize its true ontological status, and our own capacity to make alterations when and where we determine that they are necessary—this, however, is not something discussed to any extent by Searle.

There Are Other (Social) Reasons Why We Do What We Do (and Don’t Do)

Searle’s analysis of the logical structure of our social institutions can be helpful if we are to make an effort to bring about some deliberate, fundamental changes in their structure, but it is obviously not the whole picture of how our ‘social reality’ comes about, as he admits. His explanation of how the ‘ontologically subjective’ comes into being is what is most relevant to our war against nature, since it provides necessary insight into how we might eventually end it—if our creations foster this war, we can re-create or un-create them. To fill out our understanding of ‘why we do what we do’—and what we don’t do, including get to the root of major problems—we must look beyond the ‘single logico-linguistic operation’ postulated by Searle, and draw insights from the fields of social psychology and what Eviatar Zerubavel terms ‘cognitive sociology.’ Cognitive sociology recognizes ‘an intersubjective social world’ that lies in between the personal, inner ‘subjective’ world and the manifest, ‘objective’ natural world, a world of ‘shared mindscapes’ that are neither naturally nor logically inevitable but are rather often ‘utterly conventional’ (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 9), meaning that they’re largely arbitrary, established simply because groups of people come to adopt, for whatever reason, certain shared ways of thinking and acting.

Zerubavel recognizes, as does Searle, the role played by social feedback—often in the form of “tacit pressure which we rarely even notice unless we try to resist it.” In what he calls “the process of cognitive socialization,” whereby we “learn to see the world through the mental lenses of particular thought communities,” subtle social signals teach us things like what to pay attention to and what to ignore, what sorts of behavior to expect, and how to “reason in a socially appropriate manner” (Zerubavel, 1997, pp. 13-15). He points to the Solomon Asch experiment in the social psychology of conformity—in a test of comparative line lengths, many subjects are so strongly influenced by the expressed beliefs of others that they deny the evidence of their own eyes ^[12] —as a small-scale example of what he terms ‘social optics.’ It can also be seen as an illustration of the result of following ‘the coherence theory of truth,’ holding that what makes a statement ‘true’ is merely the fact that it coheres with the beliefs and statements of most of the other members of the group, not whether it corresponds with reality (a person adhering to this theory of truth can dispense with the notion of ‘reality’ altogether). He notes, in agreement with Searle’s defense of the existence of a real world independent of our representations of it, that, while people from different human cultures can have different pictures of how the world is configured, this kind of ‘optical’ pluralism or ‘perspectivism’ does not preclude the existence of an ‘objective reality’. What it does is “tie the validity of the different ‘views’ of that reality to particular standpoints” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 30), particular ways that groups may be situated within the larger reality, in order to ‘see’ it that way.

Our ways of ‘dividing up’ the world are largely shared within our thought communities and are therefore social- this includes the tendency to draw sharp, dualistic divides between certain kinds of things (see Section), which is especially pronounced in some cultures. That this tendency toward dualism is a cultural construction rather than a reflection of an ontological chasm within nature can be illustrated by “the fact that many young children are totally oblivious to the conventional distinction between humans and all other living creatures,” an observation which “makes it quite clear that such a distinction is neither natural nor logical” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 47). Like Searle, Zerubavel draws attention to the “tendency to mistake intersubjectivity for objectivity,” forgetting the conventional nature of our symbols and thereby falling victim to what we will call, later on in this chapter, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and he emphasizes the importance of the ‘cognitive flexibility’ that results from maintaining awareness of our ability to consciously alter the meaning of our symbols, contrasting with the rigidity thought that results from ‘reifying’ our shared symbols, confusing them with objectively real things in the world (Zerubavel, 1997, pp. 78-80). People’s willingness to die ‘in order to protect their national flag’ is an example of such reification, he explains, since “we sometimes confuse totemic representations of collectivities with those collectivities themselves.”

Kari Marie Norgaard draws on Zerubavel’s work in analyzing the way the residents of a small rural community in Norway ‘don’t do’ something—they don’t generally acknowledge the very obvious effects of climate change on their local landscape, or its implications, and thus they don’t take any actions to address it. Bringing in issues of emotion, ideology, and power that are omnipresent contributors to the ‘background’ of which Searle speaks, Norgaard describes what she terms the social organization of denial:

Everyday reality is structured through social, political, and economic institutions and produced through ordinary actions and practices, in particular following (and thereby reproducing) the interconnected cultural norms of what to pay attention to, feel, and talk about. Just as social norms of attention, conversation, and emotion create the sense of what is real, they also work to produce the sense of what is not real, what is excluded from the immediate experience of normal reality. (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 132)

Zerubavel uses the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes to illustrate the social nature of the way a distortion in our collective perception of reality can be propagated: surrounding the emperor’s nakedness was a ‘conspiracy of silence’, “whereby a group of people tacitly agree to outwardly ignore something of which they are all personally aware.” This kind of collective denial is not just a failure to notice something but rather “entails a deliberate effort to refrain from” noticing things “that actually beg for attention” (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 9)—things so big and conspicuous that they often become referred to as the metaphorical ‘elephant in the room.’ In studying examples of collective denial as it occurs in a variety of contexts, he has observed that “the pressure toward silence gains momentum” in proportion to the number of people involved in maintaining it, and increases the longer the denial is maintained (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 15). The wider the circle of conspirators, the more powerful the group pressure not to violate “a collectively sacred social taboo”—”thereby evoking a heightened sense of fear” should one dare to break the silence (Zerubavel, 2006, pp. 56-57). Zerubavel quotes Paul Simon in noting that such silence ‘like a cancer grows’—”which is indeed how an entire society may come to collectively deny its leaders’ incompetence, glaring atrocities, and impending environmental disasters” (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 58).

Our war against nature is starting to boomerang back upon us by unleashing a variety of ‘impending environmental disasters,’ one of which is climate change. Norgaard’s analysis will be valuable in helping us to understand what we’re dealing with here–not only why we continue doing what we’re doing when we know it worsens the problem but why we seem to be so powerless to even address it. Norgaard lived in Norway growing up and speaks fluent Norwegian. She returned there in 2000 “with a concern about global warming and an intention to conduct research on how the environmentally progressive Norwegians made sense of it” (Norgaard ,2011a, p. xviii). What she found, in the community she visited—where she knew people were quite knowledgeable, abstractly, about global warming—was that, despite one of the warmest winters on record, resulting in an “unprecedented” need for artificial snow and loss of the ice fishing season because the lake failed to freeze, everyday life “went on as though it didn’t exist”; people listened to news coverage of unusual weather, and of climate talks going on internationally, but then they “just tuned in to American sitcoms.” As far as she could tell, they did not spend much time thinking about how global warming was impacting their own community, and rarely brought it up in conversation; “they did not integrate this knowledge into everyday life” (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 4).

To her outsider’s eyes, Norgaard could detect a well-coordinated if not consciously arranged dance around an ‘elephant in the room,’ and she brought the thinking of a number of other academics focusing on such phenomena to bear on what she saw. Socially enforced ‘norms of attention’ can rope off large realms of reality from people’s perception, thus constituting ‘a particularly insidious form of social control.’ This sort of attentional norm-setting is an example of Steven Lukes’ ‘third dimension of power,’ she maintains, less visible than the first and second dimensions—’outright coercion and the ability to set the public agenda’—but perhaps even more dangerous because of its ability to, as Lukesputs it, shape people’s “perceptions, cognitions, and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable”—an analysis that agrees with and further fills out the answer to Searle’s query, ‘How do we get away with it’?

Looking more deeply into the community’s failure to take or even envision any climate-change-countering actions, Norgaard found that a desire to avoid unpleasant emotions, including the unpleasant sensation of cognitive dissonance, was likely to be operative not only on the level of individual psychology but also at the social level. Cognitive dissonance is ‘a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions’—beliefs, attitudes, worldviews—‘that are psychologically inconsistent’ (Tavris & Aronson, 2007, p. 13), and it can cause a great deal of discomfort, so people generally do whatever they can to reduce it, usually by trying to deny one or the other of the conflicting cognitions. For example, thinking about all the bad effects on one’s health while continuing to smoke cigarettes creates dissonance, so minimizing the health risk by emphasizing smoking’s prevention of weight gain might be one way of reducing it. Belying their image as “a simple, nature-loving people who are concerned with equality and human rights,” Norwegians are now among the larger per capita contributors to global warming, the country having tripled its oil and gas production over the decade preceding her study to become the second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 88), permitting them to enjoy quite a high standard of living, and yet, by the time of Norgaard’s study, they had done “not so much” to meet their emissions reduction goals despite their awareness of the consequences of climate change for less fortunate nations—a thought that must be suppressed because of its threat to personal and cultural values. According to Norgaard, members of the community were able to maintain their distance from the issue of global warming “via a cultural toolkit of emotion management techniques” and the employment of “social narratives” of national identity (Norgaard, 2011a, pp. 213-214); they tended to hold fast to old traditions, maintaining a sense of the past within the present, while refraining from thinking too much about the future, telling and retelling stories of ‘Mythic Norway,’ displaying images of an unspoiled land and emphasizing the small size of the country in relation to other greenhouse gas emitters—all serving to minimize their responsibility in contributing to the global problem and keeping the dissonance at bay.

Though not the focus of her study, Norgaard also uncovered efforts to avoid “guilt, fear and helplessness” through similar maneuvers in the United States, where she found the thought of climate change to be just so much “background noise.” One of her young American interviewees even posed the crux of her angst as follows: “How many of us can really imagine that the war against nature will really be over and we will come out alive in a world where continuing ecological destruction is not the order of the day?” (Norgaard ,2011a, p. 197, emphasis added). Moreover, Norgaard worries that, “with the dynamics of global capitalism in which gaps between rich and poor increase,” the tendency toward denial of mounting ecological and social problems will likely increase for those with the economic ability “to build physical, mental, and cultural walls around our daily lives,” and she muses as to whether this kind of denial may be “a new psychological predicament for privileged people” (Norgaard, 2011b, p. 410).

Keeping unpleasant emotions at a distance by enabling collective denial of a problem does not contribute to its solution, however—it prevents it. As Zerubavel observes, “conspiracies of silence prevent us from confronting, and consequently solving, our problems.” He explains:

it is precisely the effort to collectively deny their ubiquitous presence that makes ‘elephants’ so big. As soon as we acknowledge it they almost magically begin to shrink. And only then, when we no longer collude to ignore it, can we get the proverbial elephant out of the room. (Zerubavel, 2006, p. 87)

The most effective way of dealing with cognitive dissonance is to confront the problem head-on and start taking the steps that are needed to solve it—which are often well known, but for some reason or other need to be avoided, often in order to maintain a position of privilege, to keep up with others’ expectations, or out of fear of what significant change to our human status quo might bring. The status of nature is deteriorating all the time now as a result of our collective human actions, however, so this elephant is getting harder and harder to ignore—and besides, won’t we all feel a great relief when we can stop expending so much energy pretending it isn’t there?

Acting to Reverse Course: Overcoming Denial, Correcting Our Metaphors, Righting the Ontological Reversal, Rebalancing Our Cognition

Along with many others, Norgaard claims that “climate change is arguably the single most significant environmental issue of our time” (Norgaard, 2011b, p. 399. I would argue the point, insofar as the cumulative impacts of our ‘war against nature’ include but far exceed climate change, which is just the most dramatic and rapidly progressing result of this misguided ‘war.’ Our direct assault on nonhuman life and the natural landscape has not let up even in the face of an accelerating extinction event that may be precipitating ecological collapse around the globe, and changes in planetary chemistry have already gone well beyond their consequences simply for the planet’s climate. In examining the way the residents of a Norwegian community were ‘paralyzed’ (Norgaard, 2011a, p. 208) in the face of obvious, locally significant climate change, however, Norgaard has uncovered some of the psychological and social processes that are currently operative to ‘keep everything the same’ pretty much everywhere, maintaining our life-threatening trajectory even as scientists document its disastrous effects in minute detail. The purpose of doing such a study, presumably, was, at the very least, to help us figure out how to release the ‘paralysis’ and get some large-scale movement going in a different direction, just as the aim of this chapter is not only to make its readers more aware of some of the whys and hows of our ‘war against nature’ but also to raise the possibility of ending the war, by seeking alternatives to the things that stoke its furnaces now, of which one is denial itself.

Just as there are national and other group narratives that play and replay to distract from visible contradictions in Norgaard’s Norwegian community, there are images, narratives and metaphors that explain and justify this war deeply embedded within our globalizing culture, blocking our ability to see nonhuman nature in any other way than as rightfully the spoils of the conquering species, the supposed ‘winners’ of this war. Many of these depictions have been found to be quite misleading in light of contemporary science, but since much of their effect occurs below the level of consciousness, and their implications are continually reinforced socially, it can be quite difficult to correct them in people’s minds. As it becomes more and more necessary to speak about what’s happening, however, discussing the errors and confusions that these images, narratives and metaphors contribute to our ‘social optics’ should also become easier to do, and once we are made fully conscious of them, they are likely to lose much of their power.

By considering the extent to which our metaphors structure our thinking, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson lay some groundwork for a radical revisioning of western thought in their impressive tome Philosophy in the Flesh. On the basis of recent discoveries in cognitive science, they maintain that our minds are not separate from but are rather a result of our embodiment, highly structured by the organization of our perceptual and motor systems, and that our concepts are largely metaphorical, based on relationships we discover in the real world as we explore it with our bodies and then imaginatively project into logical entailments among our thoughts. The common notion of causality, for example, usually envisioned as the application of an outside force to effect a change in the properties of an object, is the likely result of projecting our human experience of forcibly imparting momentum to a billiard ball, made general and presumably universal through our capacity for abstraction. They claim that the vast majority of our thinking processes are below the level of our conscious awareness, making up what they call the ‘cognitive unconscious,’ but they maintain that through empirical study we can become more aware of the way these processes structure our thinking, and as we do so we can learn, to some extent, how to alter, update, or reprioritize the metaphors we import into our thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 537).

And there is a powerful metaphor at the heart of Descartes’ metaphysics that we desperately need to correct, because it still seems to be operative within the culture that is enveloping the globe: it conveys the notion of a disembodied reason—pure ‘mind,’ supposedly inherent only in us human beings—confronting something of a completely different order, a mindless mechanism, lacking any purposiveness within—pure ‘matter’—that may be endlessly manipulated, by us humans, from without. Physics and biology have both come a long way since the ideas of Bacon, Descartes and Newton; physicists have discovered that atoms aren’t like billiard balls at all, for example, and biologists know that organisms must be conceived as living systems, quite different from mindless machines. ^[13] A growing number of scientists and philosophers, therefore, have turned their attention to correcting this mistaken conception. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has demonstrated that ‘reason’ cannot be separated from body and emotion, at least not without seriously impairing the judgment of patients who have damage to the emotional circuitry in their brains. In Descartes’ Error, Damasio points out, not only that it was a mistake to take “clockwork mechanics as a model for life processes,” but that Descartes had his metaphysics exactly backwards in presuming that the mind was a “thinking thing” separate from the body – instead of “I think, therefore I am,” conscious thought arose somewhere during the process of biological evolution—”in the beginning it was being, and only later was it thinking” (Damasio, 1994, p. 248). What exactly we mean by ‘consciousness’ may be endlessly debated; however, in the words of Evan Thompson, “a purely external or outside view of structure and function is inadequate for life,” since “a living being is not sheer exteriority.” Instead, as noted earlier, embodying an inwardness, an “immanent purposiveness” (Thompson, 2007, p. 225) within itself. A better image for the living organism, human or nonhuman, then—as replacement for the Cartesian wind-up toy or the heap of colliding billiard-ball atoms—would be a dynamic system that is both autopoietic—self-organizing–and cognitive—intelligently related to its environment; in other words, a being for which a ‘self’ and a ‘world’ emerge simultaneously, as it interacts with its environment in the process of staying alive (Thompson, 2007, p.158). Seizing hold of our metaphors, myths, and ‘imaginative visions’ and correcting some of them in light of contemporary science was also a central concern of the late philosopher Mary Midgley. In The Myths We Live By she adds her voice in criticism of the Cartesian vision, asserting just how much “we profoundly need to get rid of something”–the notion of the valuelessness, if not the complete lifelessness, of the natural world that was ushered in by the mechanistic, reductionistic science of three to four centuries ago (Midgley, 2004, p. 250). The time has come to purge these dangerously misleading metaphors from our minds.

If a new image is needed to capture our more sophisticated understanding of the individual living being, however, there is also a pressing need for us to update the way we picture the larger system that keeps us alive. It seems there is a powerful image, taken from neoclassical—which now dominates ‘mainstream’– economics, that is responsible for structuring much of our contemporary thought. It is an image of a circular flow of money and commodities, regulated by a perfectly competitive market, and operating as a kind of perpetual-motion machine propelled by the maximization of utility and profit– whatever does not have a place in the incessant cycling is considered an inconsequential ‘externality’ and disregarded. While the mechanistic mindset of the left hemisphere is implicit in this conceptualization, it is the wholly abstract realm of our words and symbols—including that most powerful of all our symbols, money—that is the left hemisphere’s proudest achievement, and it is the possibility of conceptually taking flight into that abstract economic realm that reinforces the Cartesian illusion that we can escape the constraints of the real world altogether.

Searle’s analysis offers a helpful vocabulary for describing what is happening here: we have effected an ontological reversal in our minds. Many people do not grasp the crucial distinction between the ontologically subjective and the ontologically objective–they don’t get the difference, nor the difference it makes. In essence, they are falling victim to what Alfred North Whitehead identified as ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,’ mistaking the abstract for the concrete, taking the concept itself for the underlying reality from which it is derived. Previous generations of humans must have grasped the fundamental ontological order of things—aware of the reality of the natural world, and our dependency upon it, even if they conceived of themselves as engaged in a ‘battle’ to wrest grain from the soil or fish from the sea. But a large number of people now to seem to share in a mindset that takes such ontologically subjective ‘objects’ as ‘the economy,’ or the corporation, or the nation-state, or just ‘money’ itself, to be somehow more existentially substantial than the living organisms making up the biosphere. Unless they contribute to the circulation of money in some way, they are assumed to be simply ‘externalities’ that we can get by without. To the vast majority of people living in industrialized societies, therefore, ‘the economy’ is of far more concern than the ecology–in contrast to land-based peoples, of course, for whom the two are necessarily inseparable. Most Westerners–and now a growing number of people on the planet as a result of economic and cultural globalization–having accepted the Cartesian metaphysics ‘unconsciously’ at the level of metaphor, seem to conceive of themselves as separate from nature and able to live independently of it, in the Platonic realm of our symbols. They are taking the sphere of our collectively accepted and mutually reinforced beliefs and expectations–the world of our social construction, centered on an image of money and goods revolving in an endlessly turning circle, detached from any larger context–as being more ‘real’ than our actual planetary reality. We need to learn to ‘see through’ the money game to what’s really happening on the ground, and do the right thing there.

Lakoff and Johnson pick up where the analyses of Searle and McGilchrist leave off, pointing out what’s wrong with the kind of thinking inculcated by mainstream economics, which they term ‘the theory of rational action’. ‘Rationality’ itself is construed in terms of translating whatever is deemed desirable or valuable into numbers–performing the ultimate abstraction by converting all quality into sheer quantity, in other words–and then reasoning on the basis of the metaphor ‘well-being is wealth’ so as to ‘maximize’ these empty placeholders. The utilitarian ethicists of the 19^th century, while similarly fascinated with mathematics, at least construed well-being in units of pleasure or happiness, but we 21^st century humans of industrial culture now think almost solely in units of currency. Moreover, what are taken to be the rational actors in the current scheme of things are often themselves ontologically subjective, socially constructed superorganismic entities like corporations and nation-states, which are conceived as being in competition with one another in a race to garner the largest sum of such symbolic wealth. From a perspective that willingly accepts all the layers of projected symbolic status required to divide our social reality up in this way, such an approach may seem rational. “From an ecological and cultural perspective,” however, Lakoff and Johnson observe, “it is profoundly irrational, that is, destructive of other vital forms of well-being–the long-term well-being of the natural world, of indigenous forms of cultural life, and of values crucial to the human spirit” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 532).

A contrasting type of rationality is what ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood has described as ecological rationality. It “includes that higher-order form of critical, prudential, self-critical reason which scrutinizes the match or fit between an agent’s choices, actions and effects and that agent’s overall desires, interests and objectives as they require certain ecological conditions for their fulfillment” (Plumwood, 2002: 68, emphasis added). And in the interests of promoting such an ecological rationality, I propose substituting, at the center of our thought, instead of the contextless, self-enclosed circular flow of abstractions, the following image invoked by Aldo Leopold. “Land,” he tells us, “is not merely soil.” Rather:

it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. (Leopold, 1949, p. 252)

This ‘fountain of energy’ powering all life, surging upward to circulate throughout the ‘biotic pyramid,’ rising within trophic levels from soil to plant to grazer to predator (see Section), is not something tangible that can be ‘seen’ directly in any landscape, of course. To that extent, the image is like the circular ‘engine’ of economics, a representation, an abstract conceptualization—but it is a conceptualization of something real. The relationships that are described scientifically, though represented abstractly in terms of producers and consumers, trophic levels and food webs, are not arbitrary social constructions; they can be discovered in the structure of ecosystems as different as rainforests and deserts and coral reefs, ecosystems that are themselves, in Searle’s terminology, ontologically objective. We should learn to respect both the systems and the structure, since how well we can mesh our lives with these will ultimately determine how we will sustain our lives in the years ahead.

The fixation of our collective attention upon the abstract symbols of economics serves to conceal from conscious awareness the destruction we are wreaking on the natural world, just as metaphysically ‘reducing’ nonhuman organisms to machines or collections of billiard-ball atoms conceals their aliveness and intrinsic value as centers of self-organizing agency. The very language that we use when speaking of the natural world—so often cast in terms of resources or as the provider of ‘ecosystem services’ just for us–further blocks our ability to see living beings and their ecosystemic patterns of interaction as they are in and of themselves. It is a maneuver that reduces the dissonance we feel if we admit to ourselves the degree of nonhuman distress and suffering our actions are creating, a way to achieve and maintain denial. Eileen Crist focuses attention on our use of the term resources, calling it “a corrupt concept which continues to masquerade as merely a descriptive word,” a concept that “reconfigures the natural world in terms of how it is usable, thereby entirely bypassing . . . nature’s intrinsic standing, both as being and as value” (Crist, 2014, p. 7). Continual linguistic employment of this term could be considered another example of the “social organization of denial,” insofar as the awareness and agency of nonhuman organisms are obscured or erased by collective collusion, and its influence is pervasive. As Crist observes, “the transfiguration of the natural world into resources has come to shape human thought and action at such an encompassing level that people largely perceive the natural world through this single framework: of how it is usable and/or profitable” (Crist, 2014, p.7; emphasis added).

Crist’s observation serves to reconnect us with McGilchrist’s detection of the role of the left hemisphere in our escalating collective environmental destructiveness, since in his view its fundamental attitude is a use-orientation toward whatever is in front of us. As our technologies of brain imaging become increasingly refined, it is likely that a much more nuanced picture of the relationship between our two cerebral hemispheres will emerge– a possibility that McGilchrist seems to acknowledge at the end of his heavily annotated book. He maintains, however, that what he has presented offers, at the very least, a model or metaphor for two “consistent ways of being” that can be tracked over the development of western culture, two ways of being that “are fundamentally opposed” (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 461). They are at least two identifiably quite different clusters of propensities that appear relevant to our dealings with nature, so we might want to take to heart his descriptions of the characteristic “ways of being” of each of our two hemispheres, and strive to rebalance the contributions of each, such that they come into play appropriately within their different realms. There are occasions when what he describes as the workings of the left hemisphere are precisely what we need—when we’re doing scientific work, or analyzing an argument, for example—but we must not allow the talents of our right hemisphere to atrophy, or be overshadowed by their opposites. McGilchrist claims that the right hemisphere has “primacy” over the left, since, being open to the initial presencing of what’s around us, it “starts the process of bringing the world into being,” and is thus “more in touch with reality.” The left hemisphere, on the other hand, “is a useful department to send things to for processing, but the things only have meaning once again when returned to the right hemisphere”—where “the parts, once seen, are subsumed again in the whole” (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 195). If the proper sequence of mental processing is thus RH > LH > RH, as McGilchrist suggests, then it means that the outcomes of the ‘single logico-linguistic process’ of which Searle speaks—if this is indeed what generates the institutional structure of our social reality—must be reintegrated back into our understanding of the larger context, in all its concrete ecological reality, such that those outcomes which are further disruptive of the natural world will be rejected.

Moreover, as McGilchrist explains, one way—the way of the right hemisphere—is:

to allow things to be present to us in all their embodied particularity, with all their changeability and impermanence, and their interconnectedness, as part of a whole which is forever in flux. In this world, we, too, feel connected to what we experience, part of that whole, not confined in subjective isolation from a world that is viewed as objective. The other [–the way of the left hemisphere–is] to step outside the flow of experience and ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: to re-present the world in a form that is less truthful, but apparently clearer, and therefore cast in a form which is more useful for manipulation of the world and one another. This world is explicit, abstracted, compartmentalized, fragmented, static (though its bits can be re-set in motion, like a machine), essentially lifeless. From this world we feel detached, but in relation to it we are powerful.

. . . the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself. (McGilchrist, 2009, p. 93)

As the above passages suggest, an additional benefit of taking the right hemisphere approach is that it will enable us to become the humans who experience ourselves in relation to nature in a wholly different manner than one of coldly utilizing its resources. If McGilchrist is right, this will relieve the loneliness of ‘detachment’ that presently seems to haunt our global enterprise, and may even lead to experiencing the ‘awe’ with which some become infused in the presence of nature.