"What is needed is a new radicalism which openly goes to the roots of
the ecological crisis and the crisis of civilization" - Rudolf Bahro
"What is needed is a new radicalism which openly goes to the roots of
the ecological crisis and the crisis of civilization" - Rudolf Bahro
This far, we have been viewing the Green Path in terms of the Five Limits that address the physical context of our world view. In terms of our species and planetary predicament, this is like looking at the branches and leaves of a tree - we need to get to the root.
Our beliefs about how the world is organized, our mental conditioning, begins the process of doing just that. Just as a great skyscraper began as an idea, so our whole Industrialist structure began as an idea. The path to a new world is fundamentally a path of mental and spiritual transformation. We must confront our dearest prejudices and most cherished opinions... we must liberate ourselves from the effects of mental colonization produced by consumer capitalism.
"Beyond Humanism, Modernity, and Patriarchy"
Excerpt from Charlene Spretnak "The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics"
(Bear and Company, 1986) pp. 27-34
Any delineation of spiritual values within the vision of Green politics must reflect three essential elements of the cultural direction in which the movement is growing. First, Green politics rejects the anthropocentric orientation of humanism, a philosophy which posits that humans have the ability to confront and solve the many problems we face by applying human reason and by rearranging the natural world and the interactions of men and women so that human life will prosper. We need only consider the proportions of the environmental crisis today to realize the dangerous self-deception contained in both religious and secular humanism. It is hubris to declare that humans are the central figures of life on Earth and that we are in control. In the long run. Nature is in control.
Commenting on the delusion of our anthropocentric self-aggrandizement, the biologist Lewis Thomas has written
Except for us, the life of the planet conducts itself as though it were an immense,
coherent body of connected life, an intricate system, an organism. Our deepest folly
is the notion that we are in charge of the place, that we own it and can somehow run it.
We are a living part of Earth's life, owned and operated by the Earth, probably specialized
for functions on its behalf that we have not yet glimpsed.
(Lewis Thomas, "Human Responsibility", Phenomenon of Change)
In rejecting humanism. Green politics separates itself from much of the "New Age" movement and the belief that humans are the epitome of creation rather than being part of the far more glorious unfolding universe. Our goal is for human society to operate in a learning mode and to cultivate biocentric wisdom. Such wisdom entails a sophisticated understanding of how the natural world - including us - works.
I disagree with most critics of humanism when they declare that our problem has been too much reliance on "reason" and not enough on emotion. In fact, we have been employing merely the truncated version of reason used in mechanistic thinking to focus attention on only the most obvious "figures" in a situation while ignoring the subtle, intricate field around them. In the area of human systems, emotions are always part of the field. If we valued a comprehensive grasp of the context, or gestalt, of various situations, we civilized humans would not have to stumble along ignoring most of the contextual data, arriving at inadequate conclusions, and congratulating ourselves on our powers of "reason." In Germany I sometimes heard fears that any turn away from rationalist solutions is extremely dangerous because it could lead to the kind of mass manipulation the Nazis employed so successfully. The essential point is that holistic, or ecological, thinking is not a retreat from reason; it is an enlargement of it to more comprehensive and hence more efficient means of analysis.
Green politics goes beyond not only the anthropocentric assumptions of humanism but also the broader constellation of values that constitute modernity. Modern culture - as we all recognize since we live in the belly of the beast - is based on mechanistic analysis and control of human systems as well as Nature, rootless cosmopolitanism, nationalistic chauvinism, sterile secularism, and monoculture shaped by mass media. Some critics of modernity have noted that it consists of revolt against traditional values even to the extent of being "an unyielding rage against the official order." An enthusiast of modernity has little use for the traditional institutions that further human bonding - the family, the church or synagogue, community groups, ethnic associations - championing instead an "individual-liberationist stance."
The values of modernity inform both socialist and capitalist nation-states. It is not surprising that citizens' resistance networks in socialist countries often find a resonant home in the churches, that both liberal and conservative churches in capitalist countries are rethinking religion's contemporary role as an inconsequential observer who is to make accommodations to the modern world and not interfere with "progress."
Many critics of modernity, while unable to suggest a comprehensive alternative, conclude that the transformation of modern society is "going to have something to do with religion." Whatever the particulars of postmodern culture, it will not signify an uncritical return to the values of the medieval world that immediately preceded the Enlightenment or those of the Gilded Age preceding World War I and the aggressive burst of modernism that followed it. The pioneers of modernity were right to reject certain conventions and restrictions that were stultifying to the human spirit. But, with the impulses of a rebellious adolescent, they destroyed too much and embraced a radical disregard for limits, especially concerning the natural world. What we need now is the maturity to value freedom and tradition, the individual and the community, science and Nature, men and women.
The third cultural force that Green politics counters is patriarchal values. In a narrow sense these entail male
domination and exploitation of women. But in a broader sense the term "patriarchal culture" in most feminist circles connotes not only injustice toward women but also the accompanying cultural traits: love of hierarchical structure and competition, love of dominance-or-submission modes of relating, alienation from Nature, suppression of empathy and other emotions, and haunting insecurity about all of those matters. These traits usually show up in anyone, male or female, who opts to play by the rules of patriarchal culture.
In recent months I have been reading all the critiques of modernity I could find. Most of those that made it into print are by men, and I must note that "postmodern" seems to be edging out "postpatriarchal" as the blanket term for our evolving stage of transformation. I do not object to that actually; it will probably play better in Peoria. I believe those male authors are sincere in including and valuing the feminist critique of contemporary society - and I even came across a male Catholic theologian who declared that we live in a "hyper-masculinized modem culture." Imagine my surprise. (I must also note, however, that these well-intentioned men never seem to notice, while rhapsodizing over the need to return the "feminine symbol" to our notion of deity, that no flesh-and-blood females have been invited to speak on their panels, at their conferences, or in their journals.)
It is not when postmodern critics examine the present or the future that feminist insights are missing but, rather, when they analyze history, that is, the historical roots of modern society. Nearly always they lay blame at the door of the Enlightenment, which bequeathed upon us the mechanistic worldview of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. This, they maintain, was the beginning of modern perception, before which there was the era of classical or traditional religion (Christian, Jewish, Roman, and Greek), and, before that the tribal era. They are forgetting a little detail: the neolithic era! We did not leap from the tribal stage into classical Greek society. For several thousands of years our neolithic ancestors lived in agricultural settlements. The archaeology of such settlements in Old Europe has revealed sophisticated art and religious symbols reflecting reverence for Mother Earth, the elements, and animals; egalitarian graves; and no fortifications or evidence of warfare before the invasions of the barbarian Indo-European tribes from the Eurasian steppes."
Picture yourself as a witness of that decisive moment in history, that is, as a resident of the peaceful, artful,
Goddess-oriented culture in Old Europe. (Don't think "matriarchy"! It may have been, but no one knows, and that is not the point.) It is 4500 B.C. You are walking along a high ridge, looking out across the plains to the east. In the distance you see a massive wave of horsemen galloping toward your world on strange, powerful animals. (The European ancestor of the horse had become extinct.) They brought few women, a chieftain system, and only a primitive stamping technique to impress their two symbols, the sun and a pine tree. They moved in waves first into southeastern Europe, later down into Greece, across all of Europe, also into the Middle and Near East, North Africa, and India. They brought a sky god, a warrior cult, and patriarchal social order. And that is where we live today— in an Indo-European culture, albeit one that is very technologically advanced.
(I am not suggesting that the pre-Indo-European neolithic era was perfect, nor that we should attempt to return to it. However, their art and artifacts demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of our interrelatedness with Nature and her cycles. Their honoring of those contextual processes contains lessons for us in sustainability.)
Once reverence for the mysteries of the life force was removed from Nature and placed in a remote judgmental sky god - first Zeus, then Yahweh - it was only a matter of time before the "Great Chain of Being" would place the sky god at the top of "natural order" and Nature at the bottom (trailing just behind white women, white children, people of color, and animals). True, that medieval schema was rather organically conceived, but was it really such a radical break for the superstars of the Age of Enlightenment to look at the bottom of the chain and declare that Nature was actually an inert mechanism much like a clockworks, fully suitable for firm and systematic management by man? There is absolutely no doubt that the Enlightenment altered the course of human culture a great deal, but regarding it as the only source of our contemporary crisis reveals a shallow sense of history. Gary Snyder, who is a deep ecologist and a historian of culture as well as a poet, has expressed the matter quite succinctly: "Our troubles began with the invention of male deities located off the planet."
The spiritual dimension of Green politics, then, will have to be compatible with the cultural direction of Green
thought: posthumanist, postmodern, and postpatriarchal. That direction will probably come to bear the inclusive label "postmodern"— unless that tag has already been ruined almost before we have begun. Ever alert for the word of the moment, designers and advertisers have seized upon it to the extent that I now receive circulars in the mail urging me to purchase postmodern furniture, postmodern clothing, postmodern jewelry, postmodern haircuts, and so forth. Not only has the term been trivialized but these products lack any harmony, grace, or organic beauty — being, in fact, terminally modern, punky, disjointed, and ugly. The term may indeed be lost.
"Problems with the Enlightenment"
Excerpt from Vandana Shiva "Staying Alive"
(Zed Books, 1988) pp. xiv-xviii.
The Age of Enlightenment, and the theory of progress to which it gave rise, was centered on the sacredness of two categories: modern scientific knowledge and economic development. Somewhere along the way, the unbridled pursuit of progress, guided by science and development, began to destroy life without any assessment of how fast and how much of the diversity of life on this planet is disappearing. The act of living and of celebrating and conserving life in all its diversity - in people and in nature - seems to have been sacrificed to progress, and the sanctity of life been substituted by the sanctity of science and development.
Throughout the world, a new questioning is growing, rooted in the experience of those for whom the spread of what was called 'Enlightenment' has been the spread of darkness, of the extinction of life and life-enhancing processes. A new awareness is growing that is questioning the sanctity of science and development and revealing that these are not universal categories of progress, but the special projects of modern western patriarchy. This book has grown out of my involvement with women's struggles for survival in India over the last decade. It is informed both by the suffering and insights of those who struggle to sustain and conserve life, and whose struggles question the meaning of a progress, a science, a development which destroys life and threatens survival.
The death of nature is central to this threat to survival. The earth is rapidly dying: her forests are dying, her soils are dying, her waters are dying, her air is dying. Tropical forests, the creators of the world's climate, the cradle of the world's vegetational wealth, are being bulldozed, burnt, ruined or submerged. . . .
With the destruction of forests, water and land, we are losing our life-support systems. This destruction is taking place in the name of 'development' and progress, but there must be something seriously wrong with a concept of progress that threatens survival itself. The violence to nature, which seems intrinsic to the dominant development model, is also associated with violence to women who depend on nature for drawing sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies. This violence against nature and women is built into the very mode of perceiving both, and forms the basis of the current development paradigm. This book is an attempt to articulate how rural Indian woman, who are still embedded in nature, experience and perceive ecological destruction and its causes, and how they have conceived and initiated processes to arrest the destruction of nature and begin its regeneration. From the diverse and specific grounds of the experience of ecological destruction arises a common identification of its causes in the development process and the view of nature with which it is legitimized. This book focuses on science and development as patriarchal projects not as a denial of other sources of patriarchy, such as religion, but because they are thought to be class, culture and gender neutral.
Seen from the experiences of Third World women, the modes of thinking and action that pass for science and development, respectively, are not universal and humanly inclusive, as they are made out to be; modern science and development are projects of male, western origin, both historically and ideologically. They are the latest and most brutal expression of a patriarchal ideology which is threatening to annihilate nature and the entire human species. The rise of a patriarchal science of nature took place in Europe during the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as the scientific revolution. During the same period, the closely related industrial revolution laid the foundations of a patriarchal mode of economic development in industrial capitalism. Contemporary science and development conserve the ideological root and biases of the scientific and industrial revolutions even as they unfold into new areas of activity and new domains of subjugation.
The scientific revolution in Europe transformed nature from terra mater into a machine and a source of raw material; with this transformation it removed all ethical and cognitive constraints against its violation and exploitation. The industrial revolution converted economics from the prudent management of resources for sustenance and basic needs satisfaction into a process of commodity production for profit maximization. Industrialism created a limitless appetite for resource exploitation, and modern science provided the ethical and cognitive license to make such exploitation possible, acceptable - and desirable. The new relationship of man's domination and mastery over nature was thus also associated with new patterns of domination and mastery over women, and their exclusion from participation as partners in both science and development.
Contemporary development activity in the Third World superimposes the scientific and economic paradigms created by western, gender-based ideology on communities in other cultures. Ecological destruction and the marginalization of women, we know now, have been the inevitable results of most development programs and projects based on such paradigms; they violate the integrity of one and destroy the productivity of the other. Women, as victims of the violence of patriarchal forms of development, have risen against it to protect nature and preserve their survival and sustenance. Indian women have been in the forefront of ecological struggles to conserve forests, land and water. They have challenged the western concept of nature as an object of exploitation and have protected her as Prakriti, the living force that supports life. They have challenged the western concept of economics as production of profits and capital accumulation with their own concept of economics as production of sustenance and needs satisfaction. A science that does not respect nature's needs and a development that does not respect people's needs inevitably threaten survival. In their fight to survive the onslaughts of both, women have begun a struggle that challenges the most fundamental categories of western patriarchy - its concepts of nature and women, and of science and development. Their ecological struggle in India is aimed simultaneously at liberating nature from ceaseless exploitation and themselves from limitless marginalization. They are creating a feminist ideology that transcends gender, and a political practice that is humanly inclusive; they are challenging patriarchy's ideological claim to universalism not with another universalizing tendency, but with diversity; and they are challenging the dominant concept of power as violence with the alternate concept of nonviolence as power.
The everyday struggles of women for the protection of nature take place in the cognitive and ethical context of the categories of the ancient Indian world view in which nature is Prakriti, a living and creative process, the feminine principle from which all life arises. Women's ecology movements, as the preservation and recovery of the feminine principle, arise from a non-gender based ideology of liberation, different both from the gender-based ideology of patriarchy which underlies the process of ecological destruction and women's subjugation, and the gender-based responses which have, until recently, been characteristic of the west.
Inspired by women's struggles for the protection of nature as a condition for human survival, this book goes beyond a statement of women as special victims of the environmental crisis. It attempts to capture and reconstruct those insights and visions that Indian women provide in their struggles for survival, which perceive development and science from outside the categories of modern western patriarchy. These oppositional categories are simultaneously ecological and feminist: they allow the possibility of survival by exposing the parochial basis of science and development and by showing how ecological destruction and the marginalization of women are not inevitable, economically or scientifically.
* Highly Recommended *
"Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World" Judy Grahn Beacon Press 1993
"The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy" Allan G. Johnson Temple University Press 1997
"States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age" Charlene Spretnak HarperSanFrancisco 1991
"The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World" Charlene Spretnak Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1997
"The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics" Charlene Spretnak Bear & Company 1986
