Fear of a Living Planet
Charles Eisenstein
Does the concept of a living planet uplift and inspire you,
or is it a disturbing example of woo-woo nonsense that distracts us
from practical, science-based policies? The scientifically-oriented
nuts-and-bolts environmental or social activist will roll her eyes upon hearing
phrases like “The planet is a living being.” From there it is a short step to
sentiments like, “Love will heal the world,” “What we need most is a shift
in consciousness,” and “Let’s get in touch with our indigenous soul.” What’s
wrong with such ideas? The skeptics make a potent argument. Not only are these
ideas delusional, they say, but to voice them is a strategic error that opens
environmentalism to accusations of flakiness. By invoking unscientific
concepts, by prattling on about the ‘heart’ or spirit or the sacred, we will be
dismissed as naive, fuzzy-headed, irrational, hysterical, over-emotional
hippies. What we need, they say, is more data, more logic, more numbers, better
arguments, and more practical solutions framed in language acceptable to
policy-makers and the public. I think that argument is mistaken. By shying away
from the idea of
The Psychology of Contempt....
To see that, let’s start by observing that the objection to
“Earth is alive” isn’t primarily a scientific objection. After all, science can
easily affirm or deny Earth’s aliveness depending on what definition of life is
being used. No, we are dealing with an emotional perception here, one that goes
beyond ‘alive’ to affirm that Earth is sentient, conscious, even sacred. That
is what upsets the critics. Furthermore, the derisiveness of the criticism,
encoded in words like ‘hippie’ or ‘flake,’ also shows that more than an
intellectual difference of opinion is at stake. Usually, derision comes from
insecurity or fear. “Judgment,” says Marshall Rosenberg, “is the tragic
expression of an unmet need.” What are they afraid of? (And I—the voice of the
derisive critic lives in me as well.) Could it be that the contempt comes in
part from a fear that one is, oneself, ‘naive, irrational and over-emotional?’
Could the target of the derision be the projection of an insecurity lurking
within? Is there a part of ourselves that we disown and project, in distorted
form, onto others—an innocent, trusting, childlike part? A feminine part? A
vulnerable part? If so, then critics of the infiltration of New Age ideas into
the environmental movement may not be serving the movement at all.
They may be enacting their own psychological dramas instead.
If you are one of those critics, I am not asking you to join hands with me and
sing Kumbaya. I ask only that you soberly and honestly consider where your
discomfort comes from. Certainly, much of the discomfort is a healthy revulsion
toward the escapism, spiritual bypass, and cultural appropriation that plague
so much of the New Age. Certainly, there is a danger that, intoxicated by the
idea of cosmic purpose or some-such, we ignore the pain and grief that we must
integrate if we are to act effectively and courageously. Certainly, dogma like
“It’s all good” or “We’re all one” can blind us to the exigency of the
planetary crisis and discourage us from making changes in our lives. Certainly,
borrowed rituals and concepts of sacredness can be an insidious form of
colonialism, a strip-mining of cultural treasure to compensate for and enable
the continuation of our own cultural vacuity. However, such criticisms address
a mere caricature of the thoughtful work of generations of philosophers,
scientists and spiritual teachers, who have framed sophisticated alternatives to
conventional phenomenological, ontological and causal narratives.
Phew, that was a
mouthful. What I’m saying is not to hide behind facile criticisms. The fear of
being emotional, irrational, hysterical, etc. is very close to a fear of the
inner feminine, and the exclusion of the fuzzy, the ill-defined, and the
emotionally-perceived dimensions of our activism in favor of the linear,
rational, and evidence-based, mirrors the domination over and marginalization
of the feminine from our social choice-making. Part of our resistance to the
notion of Earth as a living being could be the patriarchal mind feeling
threatened by feminine ways of knowing and choosing. But that’s still pretty
theoretical, so let me share a little of my own introspection. When I apprehend
concepts such as “Earth is alive,” or “All things are sacred,” or “The universe
and everything in it bears sentience, purpose and life,” there is always an
emotion involved; in no case is my rejection or acceptance. Either I embrace
them with a feeling of eager, tender hope, or I reject them with a feeling of
wariness, along the lines of “It is too good to be true,” or “I’m nobody’s
fool.” Sometimes, beyond wariness, I feel a hot flash of anger, as if I had
been violated or betrayed. Why? That wariness is deeply connected to the
contempt I’ve described. The derision of the cynic comes from a wound of
crushed idealism and betrayed hopes. We received it on a cultural level when
the Age of Aquarius morphed into the Age of Ronald Reagan, and on an individual
level as well when our childish perception of a living, personal universe in
which we are destined to grow into magnificent creators gave way to an
adulthood of deferred dreams and lowered expectations. Anything that exposes
this wound will trigger our protective instincts. One such protection is
cynicism, which rejects and derides as foolish, naive or irrational anything
that affirms the magic and idealism of youth.
Our perceived worldview has cut us off, often quite
brutally, from intimate connection with the rest of life and with the rest of
matter. The child hugs a tree and thinks it feels the hug and imagines the tree
is his friend, only to learn that no, I’m sorry, the tree is just a bunch of
woody cells with no central nervous system and therefore cannot possibly have
the qualities of beingness that humans have. The child imagines that just as
she looks out on the world, the world looks back at her, only to learn that no,
I’m sorry, the world consists of a jumble of insensate stuff, a random melee of
subatomic particles, and that intelligence and purpose reside in human beings
alone. Science (as we have known it) renders us alone in an alien universe. At
the same time, it crowns us as its lords and masters, for if sentience and
purpose inhere in us alone, there is nothing stopping us from engineering the
world as we see fit. There is no desire to listen for, no larger process to
participate in, no consciousness to respect.
“The Earth isn’t really alive” is part of that ideological
cutoff. Isn’t that the same cutoff that enables us to despoil the planet? The
wounded child interjects, “But what if it is true? What if the universe really
is just as science describes?” What if, as the biologist Jacques Monod put it,
we are alone in “an alien world. A world that is deaf to man’s music, just as
indifferent to his hopes as to his suffering or his crimes.” Such is the wail
of the separate self. It is loneliness and separation disguised as an empirical
question. While no amount of evidence can prove it false, we must acknowledge that
the science that militates against an intelligent, purposeful, living universe
is ideologically freighted and culturally bound. Witness the hostility of
institutional science to any anomalous data or unorthodox theory that suggest
purposiveness or intelligence as a property of inanimate matter. Water memory, adaptive
mutation, crop circles, morphic fields, psi phenomena, UFOs, plant
communication, precognitive dreams…and a living Earth, a living sun, a living
universe, all incite scorn. Anyone who believes in these, or even takes them as
a valid topic of investigation, risks the usual epithets of ‘pseudo-scientist,’
‘flake,’ or ‘woo-woo,’ regardless of the merits of the theory or the strength
of the evidence. Of course, simply by making this assertion I open myself to
the very same calumny. You can conveniently dismiss me as irrational, scientifically
semi-literate, gullible at best and delusional at worst, perhaps knowingly
dishonest, bamboozling my audience with learned allusions to impart an illusion
of scientific probity to my ravings. But if you really care about this Earth,
you’ll want to be curious about the emotional content of this judgment. What hides
behind the contempt? The reactivity? What Moves the Environmentalist? Our discomfort with New Age-sounding concepts
like “The planet is alive” is not entirely rational, but comes in large part from
a wound of betrayal, cloaked in the pervasive ideology of our culture. Is it
true though? We might play with various definitions of life and come up with
logical, evidence-based arguments pro and con, just as we could debate the
veracity of anomalous data and unconventional theories, and never come to an
agreement. So let us look at the matter
through a strategic lens instead. What belief motivates effective action and
real change? And what kind of action results from each belief? Most people
reading this probably consider themselves to be environmentalists; certainly
most people think it is important to create a society that leaves a livable
planet to future generations. What is it, exactly, that makes us into
environmentalists? If we answer that, we might know how to turn others into
environmentalists as well, and to deepen the commitment of those who
already identify as such. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t become an
environmentalist because someone made a rational argument that convinced me that
the planet was in danger. I became an environmentalist out of love and pain:
love for the world and its beauty and the grief of seeing it destroyed. It was
only because I was in touch with these feelings that I had the ears to listen
to evidence and reason and the eyes to see what is happening to our world. I
believe that this love and this grief are latent in every human being. When
they awaken, that person becomes an environmentalist. Now, I am not saying that
a rational, evidence-based analysis of the situation and possible solutions is
unimportant. It’s just that it will be compelling only with the animating
spirit of reverence for our planet, born of the felt connection to the beauty
and pain around us.
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