Reenchantment of the World 1995 version
Over ten years ago at Harvard's Divinity School I wrote a paper--"Reenchantment of the World". Al Gore was our Vice President and I had high hopes for change. I still do. I have attached this paper below since only myself and my professor ever read it and I'd like to share it further. It is somewhat dated but some of it seems timeless.
Reenchantment of the World
By Nancy Jo Craig
Harvard Divinity School
Environmental Ethics
Spring 1995
INTRODUCTION
The Paradox
As members of western culture we are faced with a paradox that may threaten our very survival: 1) humans are one biological species among many in the biosphere and, as such, are dependent on natural functioning ecosystems and bio-geo-chemical processes from which even the most sophisticated science and technology cannot exempt us; but 2) modern civilization and technology are based on a system of belief in human dominance over a "disenchanted" nature--a belief that has led to the degradation of the life support systems we need for our survival. Since we cannot change the first set of circumstances, the only solution to this paradox is a change in our values and beliefs concerning our relationship with the environment.
Background
This paper will examine the prospect of a reenchanted worldview as a path to environmental values. My interest in this topic is both personal and professional. As a very small child, close to two years of age, I had a transcendental nature experience: I was standing barefoot in the backyard at summer's twilight and suddenly felt that everything around me was vividly alive, the grass beneath my toes, the fireflies, the air. Standing there I knew I was a part of a great oneness. That sense of wonder and oneness has been the central theme of my life, the basis of my sense of coherence and spirituality, and the root of my drive to be of service in protecting the natural world. I have always experienced the world as an enchanted, "magical" place. That direct experience with the "connectedness of the world� has provided a strong sense of place and belonging that have served as the foundation for my own environmental ethics.
On a more pragmatic level, I have found as a professional conservationist that it is critical to be able to understand what kind of long-term strategy would be required to keep the public engaged in environmental protection. The current gloom and doom of the environmental movement is starting to be a losing strategy. A recent article in the New York Times with the headline "Big Environment Hits a Recession" reported that 1994 was a very troubling year for most of the large environmental organizations including the Natural Resource Defense Council, the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society. One reason cited for their precipitous loss in funding and members was the fact that such organizations "have used fear and apocalyptic prophecies to further their political objectives. For example, a recent fund-raising mailing from the National Audubon Society said the group could 'project with some accuracy the eventual end of the natural world as we know it...That is no trees, and no wildlife.' " Theodore Roszak, in his book "Voice of the Earth: An Explanation of Ecopsychology", says "the environmental movement's habitual reliance on gloom, apocalyptic panic, and the psychology of shame takes a heavy toll in public confidence." He asks, "Are dread and desperation the only motivators that we have to play with? What are we connecting with in people that is generous, joyous, freely given, and perhaps heroic?"
Thesis
This paper examines the disenchanted worldview of western culture and the systems of knowledge and beliefs that need to change in the development of an environmental ethic. A model of metaxis developed by Wilson and McAuliffe identifies four domains or poles of existence: 1) the natural pole (physical world, science), 2) the social pole (community, relationships), 3) the divine pole (spirituality, transcendence), and 4) the subjective pole (individuality, mental health). I will discuss the "reenchantment of science" (natural pole), a "sense of place" (social pole), the world as God's body (divine pole) and the newly emerging field of ecopsychology (subjective pole) as means to a reenchanted worldview. The thesis of this paper is that the fastest and most effective way to reconnect with nature is through direct emotional experience.
DISENCHANTMENT
Max Weber identified "disenchantment of the world" as the root of modern discontent. The predominant view of nature before the scientific revolution was that of an enchanted world. "Rocks, trees, rivers, clouds all were seen as wondrous, alive and human beings felt at home in this environment...the cosmos was a place of belonging." Berman contends that our history has been one of progressive disenchantment, primarily as a result of science with its mechanistic view of the world and total removal of mind from nature. "Disenchantment" literally means, "taking the magic out", and with a mechanical philosophy nature is stripped of experience, feeling, and subjectivity.
"The modern consensus,...has been that science and disenchantment go hand and hand. On the one hand, it is assumed science can only be applied to that which has already been disenchanted, which means deanimated. To deanimate is to remove all anima or soul....On the other hand, it is assumed that the application of the scientific method to anything confirms the truth of the disenchanted view of it, that it can be adequately understood in purely impersonal terms, as embodying no creativity, no self-determination in terms of values or norms, and nothing that could be considered divine."
This scientific worldview is integral to modern life, and as Berman points out science and modern western society are mutually reinforcing. The universe is measured and quantified, yet pointless. It is difficult for the human spirit to feel a sense of belonging in such a place. Everything is reduced to object, including ourselves, and our experience is in extreme isolation and alienation from the living world. This is starkly different from the nonwestern worldview of Islam, which describes humans as travelers on this beautiful earth. According to Islamic belief, the enchanted nature, which surrounds us, is not simply the background for the trajectory of our lives, but rather a reflection of the paradise that is in the depth of our souls.
We find ourselves in a declining society. The symptoms--the breakdown of families, violence in our schools and neighborhoods, jobs that are numbing, increasing addictions and suicide rates, child abuse, environmental degradation--may find their root cause in our alienation and disconnection with nature. To continue on this path, Berman warns, is to lose forever what it means to be human. He suggests that what is needed is to restore a participatory, reenchanted consciousness in a way that is scientifically or at least rationally credible and not merely a relapse into naive animism.
REENCHANTMENT
I. Reenchantment of Science
Since science and its mechanistic and objectifying worldview deanimated our sense of nature, what are the prospects for reenchanting science? Science and technology are certainly powerful tools that have in the short run provided humankind with tremendous advances in every aspect of living. The long-term impacts are, however, very grim: global climate change, thinning ozone layer, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic-resistant microbes, declining fisheries in every ocean, destruction of the world's forests, loss of topsoil, etc. The list is sobering and suggests a dramatic need for a new science that is ecological, holistic, and reenchanted.
In the book, "The Reenchantment of Science" , David Griffin proposes several ways to build the bridge between the science of today and a reenchanted science. The first is to develop a new view of the very nature of science. Science purports to be a value-free system of inquiry, but instead is simply one worldview among many. The "truths" science seeks are selected to our culture's particular interests, including political and social prejudices. It should be recognized that science is capable of discovering some truths. Yet these are not the only truths: what is observed in nature is not nature itself, but nature exposed to the scientific method of questioning. The first step to reenchanting nature is to see science for what it is: the mythology of industrial society.
Secondly, the origins of science must be better understood. The founders of modern scientific views were embedded in an alchemical context, and they later adopted a mechanistic view of nature more for social and political reasons than for empirical ones. "The emergence of a mechanistic view of nature, which denied to nature any purpose, capacity for self-movement, or interiority, was not a necessity of science. As least in part, it was designed to support theological voluntarism, the idea that the transcendent God imposes 'His' will by fiat on the world."
Finally, three substantive developments in science shake up the mechanical worldview and move it towards a more holistic, reenchanted science: ecological science, and the Gaia and Biophilia hypotheses.
Ecological Science
One of the most revolutionary shifts in science has been in the field of ecological thought. Ecology, a rigorous field of study since 1900, describes the complex, dynamic interconnectedness of living systems, with the concept of ecosystem as its central theme. It presents an epistemological model of the world that is fundamentally distinct from the rest of science. According to ecological principles, nothing can be understood except in relationship. We humans find our place again as part of natural functioning ecosystems that we depend on for the foundation of our culture and our very lives. As a species we do not have a separate existence outside the boundaries of the "bio-geo-chemical" cycles, and we ignore this interrelationship at our own peril. A fundamental understanding of ecology is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the functioning of an ecosystem cannot be understood merely by knowing the component parts. This theory of integrative levels reminds us of the old adage, "you can't see the forest for the trees." "Conservation of natural resources, a most important practical application of ecology, must be built around these viewpoints. Thus, if understanding of ecological systems and moral responsibility among mankind can keep pace with man's power to effect changes, the present-day concept of unlimited exploitation of resources will give way to unlimited ingenuity in perpetuating a cyclic abundance of resources."
The theory of ecological systems based on cybernetics or homeostatic systems, as further developed by Gregory Bateson in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", postulates that all biological and evolving systems (individual organisms, animal and human societies, and ecosystems) consist of complex cybernetic networks with interconnecting loops of information. Bateson not only places humans back into nature but places mind there as well. "The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by God but is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology." When humans start with the premise that only our species matters ignoring the fact that the rivers and lakes are part of our larger "eco-mental system", decisions are made which lead to polluting rivers or lakes with our waste-products. Bateson concludes that if these systems are "driven insane", that insanity is incorporated into the larger system of human thought and experience. See below for a comparison of worldview of modern science and Bateson's holism. Mind is immanent in Bateson's "reenchanted" vision of ecology.
Figure 1. Comparison of Modern Science and Bateson World Views
World View of Modern Science
1) No relationship between fact and value.
2) Nature is known from the outside.
3) Goal is conscious, empirical control over nature.
4) Descriptions are abstract, mathematical, what is real is what measured.
5) Mind is separate from body, subject from object.
6) Linear time, infinite progress.
7) Atomism: only matter and motion is real. The whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. Nature is ultimately dead.
World View of Bateson
1) Fact and value are inseparable.
2) Nature is revealed in our relations to it.
3) Unconscious mind is primary; goal is wisdom, beauty, and grace.
4) Descriptions are a mixture of abstract and the concrete.
5) Mind/body, subject/object are each two aspects of the same process.
6) Circuitry.
7) Holism: process, form, relationship are primary. Wholes have properties that parts do not have. Nature is alive.
Gaia Hypothesis
The Gaia hypothesis is ecology extended to the biosphere: the earth as a single self-regulating organism. Although the concept anima mundi, the World Soul, as the governing intelligence of the universe has been around since Plato, Gaia was hypothesized in the early 1970's by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This theory holds that the goal of life is global homeostasis and evolution is seen as a single, indivisible process. "Life, or the biosphere, regulates or maintains the climate and the atmospheric composition at an optimum for itself." Cooperation, or the symbiotic integration of life, predominates when the basic unit of survival is the entire biosphere rather than competition of species. In this biospheric theory, humans are a species that can be dispensed with if our activities endanger the larger system. Lovelock and Margulis go to great lengths to disclaim any intentionality and teleological undercurrents in their theory, since modern science is based on a nature that is mindless, valueless, and without purpose. But as Roszak points out, Lovelock's theory and language are up against the profound issue in the metaphysics of science. If the language they use is simply metaphor (a word that stands for other words), then "it should be possible to say what those other words are, and those words, once given, should communicate our meaning as clearly or even more so." But other words cannot be found. A reenchanted science, instead of trying so desperately hard to read purposiveness out of Gaia, would as Bateson does, conceive of intelligence beyond human terms. And a reenchanted world view would embrace the wonder and beauty of Gaia, as well as her dark side, which has little care for a harmful species such as our own.
Biophilia Hypothesis
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Gaia--from biosphere to genetic footprint--the Biophilia Hypothesis illuminates the human's intrinsic emotional affiliation with life. Although it focuses on the specific, it is still holistic in its approach and is viewed by many as a subsystem of the Gaian view. It is the biological way humans know and experience, as individuals and as a species, that we are a part of the greater whole. The Biophilia Hypothesis asserts a human dependence on nature that extends beyond a material, mechanistic view and underscores the deep human desire for aesthetics, intellectual and spiritual meaning, and satisfaction derived from nature. This theory of an innate genetic predisposition to react both positively and negatively (for instance to spiders and snakes) to the biological world leaves ample room for the role of culture in our feelings for nature. If biophilia is innate, this adds "weight to the argument that nature and organisms are essential to well-being and growth (self-realization)." Biophilia says that our love for the earth is in our basic personal hardware. We have in the depths of our bodies a deep, emotional connection with nature. Reenchantment is in our bones. Michael Soule states that for biophilia to create the political momentum for conserving the natural world, it must begin with the development of a bioregional sense of place.
II. Sense of Place
The human sense of place derives directly from our experience of the actual places and situations of daily life: our homes, the places we work, and the places where we go about the busy-ness of our lives. "To be human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: to be human is to have and know your place." Places are where the natural, cultural, individual worlds meet. Edward Relph, in "Place and Placelessness" contrasts these two experiences:
"Places are not abstractions or concepts, but are directly experienced phenomena of the lived-world and hence are full with meanings, with real objects, and with ongoing activities. They are important sources of individual and communal identity, and are often profound centres of human existence to which people have a deep emotional bond....Placelessness describes both an environment without significant places and the underlying attitude which does not acknowledge significance in places. It reaches back into the deepest levels of place, cutting roots, eroding symbols, replacing diversity with uniformity and experiential order with conceptual order."
Today's society is highly mobile: every three years the average American changes residence. Our cities are becoming increasingly homogenous with the "McDonald's look". This results in a lack of rootedness and sense of belonging not just in the natural world but also in our communities and homes. Simone Weil calls this rootedness the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. There is evidence that children bond with their surroundings around the age of five, but this process is often interrupted in our culture. Most children grow up "to be prisoners of technology and materialism." Placelessness eliminates distinctive places to which humans can bond, which they love intimately. As places matter less and less, the whole notion of environment loses meaning.
Relph argues for a renewed sense of place. Because there exists a deep attachment by people to the places they live, often as important as their relationships with other people, this loss of place furthers the feeling of disconnection with the natural world. Bioregionalism, as a means of reconnecting with a sense of place, can on a social and political level be the path to a reenchanted world.
Bioregion literally means "life territory", a term first coined by poet Allen Van Newkirk and Peter Berg, founder of the Planet Drum Foundation. Bioregionalism is an emerging social movement that stresses ecosystem management and a sense of place within a regional context. From its beginnings in a liberal "New Age" movement, bioregionalism has become a more mainstream concept with a growing supportive body of research. For instance, David Glassberg of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has held regional workshops throughout New England to discuss a "sense of place" as a means of clarifying the interrelationship of human and natural systems within the context of a "bioregion". "People naturally perceive themselves as inhabiting a region, even if not a bioregion per se. As they grow more aware of the natural features where they live, the idea of 'home' becomes biological as well as social."
In many ways bioregionalism bridges the gap between liberal and conservative political viewpoints. It is local and decentralized in nature, and shifts activity away from reliance on the federal government. Daniel Kemmis, a former Speaker of the House of the Montana legislature and current mayor of Missoula, envisions bioregionalism as the "politics of place".
"What holds people together long enough to discover their power as citizens is their common inhabiting of a single place. No matter how diverse and complex the patterns of livelihood may be that arise with the river system, no matter how many perspectives from which people view the basin, no matter how diversely they value it, it is, finally, one and the same river for everyone. There are not many rivers, one for each of us, but only this one river, and if we all want to stay here, in some kind of relation to the river, then we have to learn, somehow, to live together."
Kemmis calls for a "politics of reinhabitation" in which local communities and their surrounding bioregions are the basic political unit of American life. The political and social identity of a bioregion is critical for "reinhabitation", as is knowledge of the area's ecology and natural/cultural history. Terry Tempest Williams believes this renewed relationship, the politics of place, is "not radical, but conservative, a politics rooted in empathy in which we extend our notion of community, as Aldo Leopold has urged, to include all life forms--plants, animals, rivers, and soils, The enterprise of conservation is a revolution, an evolution of the spirit." It is our deep affinity to particular places that can lead us back to a sense of place and belonging, revival of a larger sense of community, and a reconnection with an enchanted world.
III. The World as God's Body
As with science and our sense of place, religious and spiritual beliefs are seminal to our deeply held worldviews. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which has strongly influenced western thought, has contributed to a disenchanted worldview and must be addressed as well. Some have charged that this religious tradition is the principal cause of the current environmental crisis and must be replaced by other spiritual practices, such as Buddhism. Others, such as Sallie McFague and Alfred Whitehead, suggest that by examining our metaphorical and analogical tools for describing our relationship with the divine, the Judeo-Christian faith may actually be a path to "reenchantment".
The mechanistic, dualistic paradigm, which underlies the scientific worldview also, dominates Judeo-Christian theology. Spirit is separate from flesh, mind from body, God from creation. These metaphors may lock our species into a future in which we may not want to live, simply because "we construct the worlds we inhabit but also we forget we have done so." A new enchanted theological paradigm would be based on a holistic, ecological vision:
"The ecosystem of which we are part is a whole: the rocks and waters, atmosphere and soil, plants, animals, and human beings interact in dynamic, mutually supportive ways that make all talk of atomistic individualism indefensible. Relationship and interdependence, change and transformation... are the categories within which a theology of our day must function."
In her book, "Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age", McFague deconstructs the traditional imagery of a patriarchal, monarchical, transcendent "sky" God. These abstract appropriations of God, she suggests, are outmoded and aggressive. In place she "remythologizes" the relationship between God and the world with new images of God as mother, lover, and friend of the world, and the world as God's immanent body. It is this last powerful image which from my perspective is the most viable avenue to a reenchanted worldview.
Instead of a "disembodied" separate God, the divine permeates nature by our imagining the world as God's body, the "incarnation". According to McFague, a central issue of this metaphor is whether this is a return to pantheism. The world as God's body does not reduce God to nature but instead incorporates the world into God's self-expression. The world as God's body does, however, put God at risk from human environmental degradation. This has the biblical parallel of Jesus, as the body of God, willing to suffer at human hands. In Whitehead's thesis of an "Ecological God", "the world lives by its incarnation of God itself; God is "essentially the soul of the world."
The world as God's body, the divine immanent in nature and ourselves, profoundly changes our relationship with the natural world. The world as God's body "must be tended,... nurtured, protected, guided, loved and befriended both as valuable in itself and as necessary to the continuation of life." We are called upon to know and love this world again as part of the divine, to once again know our sense of place. We are summoned like Job by the Voice out of the Whirlwind: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding...Dost thou know when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? Or canst thou tell when the hinds do calve?
IV. Ecopsychology
Finally, we will examine the path to reenchantment for the individual in our culture. Ecopsychology is a newly emerging field with the goal of bridging the gulf between the psychological and the ecological; to see the needs of the person and the planet as a continuum, and to heal the alienation between the individual and the natural environment. The basic premise of ecopsychology is that environmental problems are a result of the psychopathology of our culture's everyday life. The psychosis is living the lie that humans have no connection with nature or ethical obligation to the places we live. As with bioregionalism, ecopsychology is making its way into mainstream American culture: the April 16th Parade Magazine of this year featured an article on ecopsychology.
As individuals we are dis-connected, we are dis-eased, and in the rush of our days we are dis-tracted. We find ourselves in the midst of disintegrating environments, communities, neighborhoods, families, and individual well-being. Ecopsychology contends that the motivation for change on a planetary scale may very well come from a deeply felt personal need for a new quality of life. Many of our physical and mental illnesses are seen as symptoms of the biosphere registering at the most intimate level of life. We are facing a psychological, spiritual, and ecological crisis: they are different facets of the same phenomena--our disconnection with an enchanted world.
Repression of this profound and essential connection is at the core of the collusive madness in industrial society, and opening this access is the path to sanity. To escape the pain and trauma of disconnection, the loss of belonging, we have become techno-addicts. In his book, "Earth in the Balance", Vice-President Al Gore states, "I believe our civilization is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of nature."
"Fax machines. Fax machines with built-in answering machines. Fax machines that interface with built-in computer networks. Cellular phones. VCRs. Cappuccino makers....Electronic date books. Jet planes. Shopping malls. Fiber optics. Space shuttles. Chemical weapons. Nanotechnology. Biotechnology. Cyberspace. The technological fix."
Techno-addiction has many of the characteristics of other addictions: compulsive/out-of-control behavior, denial, and attraction to repeated trauma. Bateson characterizes cancer, alcoholism, and our culture's compulsive consumption as "runaway systems". "Techno-addiction is a way of seeing the world, a way of asking certain questions and not others, a way of feeling certain emotions and not others, a way of experiencing that is linear, mechanistic, exculsionary, and distorted" The first step to recovery is to acknowledge the addiction: then the process of healing and reconnection can begin. Helen Caldicott observes that the only way to break an addiction is to love and cherish something more than the addiction. Roszak agrees that love and compassion are the paths to an individual's reenchanted worldview. The psychological dimension of the environmental crisis must be addressed to reconnect mind and the world. "How clearly we understand the world depends on the emotional tone with which we confront the world. Care, trust, and love determine that tone, as they do our relationship to another person." Instead of gloom and doom, fear, and apocalyptic panic, environmental values can be based on the profound love and compassion derived from our deep connection with the world around us.
CONCLUSION
The crisis we face, as a culture is one that is registering at many levels of experience. On multiple fronts, individuals are seeking a new paradigm, an ecological and holistic worldview, which can reconnect our species with an enchanted natural world. A reenchanted science can free our information- and knowledge-based systems from outmoded mechanistic thinking. Reconnecting with a sense of place in the communities and bioregions in which we live can fulfill our deep desire to belong in the world. Reimaging our religious traditions can help us see divinity as immanent in nature and ourselves.
Most important, in my view, is the ability to reconnect with the wonder, creativity, and beauty of the natural world through our deepest emotions of love and compassion. Cutting through our techno-addiction, while not rejecting the life-enhancing qualities of science and technology, allows us to feel the pain and sorrow of our loss of connection. This opens the pathway to a reenchanted world. The feeling of reenchantment is as difficult to describe as the profound emotion a mother and father feel when first holding their newborn child: a bonding that is unimaginable until actually experienced. We are not aliens here, but are a truly wondrous part of the fabric of life. We are a part of the family of things. To live in a reenchanted world is to have not only a future, but a present that is joyous and fully lived.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
--Mary Oliver
Ervin Laszlo teleseminar on Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos
