|
GREEN PARADISE LOST |
|
3. Psycho-Sexual Roots of Our Ecological Crisis It is warm and the sun is hot on my body as I lie on the beach. I can feel the sun's warmth not only on my sunward surface but also where I touch the warm sand, which has been saving for me the heat of the day's sun. I am not too hot because the strong wind caresses my body as a lover would, up my arms and down my legs and over my breasts and face, continuously and constantly stroking my tiny surface hairs with freshness, with exhilaration, with movement. The lapping of the water in a never-ending rhythmic melody caresses my ears, punctuated sporadically by the cries of the seagulls. My body and mind feel intimately connected as my body floods with total awareness of itself. I also feel connected to the rough warm sand, to the caressing wind, to the lapping water and the nearby gulls. I feel gloriously alive -- and connected. Severing Connections with "The Other" Hierarchical paradigms and pyramidal views of the world would not have to concern us if they were not also powerful shapers of our attitudes toward nature, teaching us to hold at an emotional distance our experiences of being connected with nature. The cosmic vision of a hierarchically ordered universe sets us off as "Other" than the earth. Yet the earth is our home, the animals are our travelling companions. We are certainly different from plants, but we are not apart; they are the original producers of all the food energy we consume. We can see this severing of connections with "The Other" most clearly of all in the dissociation which takes place within ourselves as we cut ourselves off from full awareness and acceptance of our connectedness with the physicalness of our own bodies. This severing is expressed in our Western tradition in the dualisms of mind/body and spirit/flesh which haunt so much of our theology, philosophy and even our psychology. Much of what has been thought and written in the West is an outgrowth of this hierarchical paradigm which places Nature "below." And from this belowness of Nature has followed the lowly status we assign to our human and mortal bodies, which so obviously participate in the change-processes of that denigrated Nature. The Small God Who Nonetheless Will Die Our Western tradition not only seeks to sever these connections; it poses for us a terrible question about our human meaning and identity, as Ernest Becker has pointed out in his Pulitzer Prizewinning book The Denial of Death. Becker lays out the development of psychology from Freud as well as existentialist thought from Kierkegaard on. Becker sees man confronting the existential paradox of his own life when he faces death. Becker writes: We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals. It was something that had to go right to his core, something that made him suffer his peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape. For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his "essence," something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found ... was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic .... It was Kierkegaard who forcefully introduced the existential paradox into modern psychology, with his brilliant analysis of the Adam and Eve myth that had conveyed that paradox to the Western mind for all time.... We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways -- the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening, and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days -- that's something else. [1] (Emphasis added.) Here you have the whole ideology of hierarchy laid out in a single passage: Man's uniqueness which "sticks out of nature with a towering majesty"; the aversion to and horror of the body; the "lower animals" with their "dumb being" which gives us our total freedom to kill them without a pang -- while we humans cry for ourselves because we marvelous humans still participate in that awful mortality of the natural world. The Severing of "Nature's Values" from "Human Values" In other passages Becker spells out further the dualisms implied by what he and others in the Western tradition now have seen to be the existential paradox of a "splendid uniqueness" that nonetheless "aches and bleeds and will decay and die": Nature's values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. [2] • • • Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neurochemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man, the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She [-- note Becker's use of the female pronoun when referring to nature --] created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience .... He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now ... Man's body is a problem to him that has to be explained ... "This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods" [Maslow]. There it is again: gods with anuses. [3] (Emphasis added.) It is important to note here that Becker's horror of the body is not found in the Genesis myth, which looked upon the bodily creation of man and -- unlike Becker -- pronounced that it was good. Yet the extreme hierarchicalism of the biblical view has provided fertile soil for the growth of the mind/body split which is so pronounced in Becker. This body/mind split was taken up into the Christian tradition from the remnants of the Greek thought world which were still powerfully present in the Roman Empire in the early centuries of the Christian era. About these Greek antecedents Rosemary Ruether has written: Greek culture developed the experience of body alienation and suppression in ... philosophical terms. It regarded the true self as the soul or consciousness and saw the body as a demonic alien that must be suppressed in order to develop the integrity of the true self. This dualism of body and soul was read out into the dualism of male and female to symbolize women as the expression of the demonic agency of the sexual and the carnal that attacks and subverts the regnant mind or reason. Men identify themselves with the mind, women with dangerous carnality. This identification of women with the lower half of the body-soul dualism is especially developed in Aristotle, who divided humanity along the lines of this dualism into the "head people" and the "body people"; the dominators and the dominated. Males are by nature the "head people" who dominate; women are the "body people" who are by nature to be dominated. [4] The Fear of Physicalness As with the body, so too with sex. Sex is supposedly good in the biblical account, but has not been so interpreted throughout Christian history. Rosemary Ruether traces the development of this dualistic Greek tradition in Christendom. This tradition was inherited by the Church Fathers who typically defined men and women along the lines of mind and body. But because they also saw the body as an evil and demonic principle and defined salvation as the suppression of bodily feelings, women came to be seen as special incarnations of evil or "carnality." The flight from the body and the world became specifically the flight from woman.... It was out of this dual level of male-female symbolism that there developed the split image of the feminine in Christianity -- the split between spiritual femininity, symbolized by the Virgin Mary and Christian virgins, and carnal femaleness, which is seen as the incarnation of the diabolic power of sensuality. This split continued to grow more and more intense during the Middle Ages until it erupted in a veritable orgy of paranoia in the late medieval period [1300s-1600s]. It can hardly be a coincidence that the same period that saw Mariology reach the greatest heights of theological definition and refinement with the triumph of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in nominalist theology also saw the outbreak of witch hunts that took the lives of upwards of one million women between the 14th and the 17th centuries. [5] Becker goes further, and sex comes to be linked with the body and thus with death: Sex is of the body, and the body is of death. As [Otto] Rank reminds us, this is the meaning of the Biblical account of the ending of paradise, when the discovery of sex brings death into the world. As in Greek mythology too, Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; death is the natural twin brother of sex. [6] If this is the place of sex, what is the place of women in this extremely male-oriented view of life derived from Freud? You guessed it! It's bad news for women. Becker discusses the temptation of the genius to bypass normal human reproduction: After all, anything that detracts from the free flight of one's spiritual talent must seem debasing. The woman is already a threat to the man in his physicalness; it is only a small step to bypass sexual intercourse with her; in that way one keeps one's carefully girded center from dispersing and being undermined by ambiguous meanings. [7] Motherhood in Becker's view ties the woman to all that is dark and fearful about the body and nature: The real threat of the mother comes to be connected with her sheer physicalness. Her genitals are used as a convenient focus for the child's obsession with the problem of physicalness. [It seems obvious that Becker here is taking a boy-child's viewpoint to be the child's.] If the mother is a goddess of light, she is also a witch of the dark. He sees her tie to the earth, her secret bodily processes that bind her to nature: the breast with its mysterious sticky milk, the menstrual odors and blood, the almost continual immersion of the productive mother in her corporeality, and not least -- something the child is very sensitive to -- the often neurotic and helpless character of this immersion. After the child gets hints about the mother's having babies, sees them being nursed, gets a good look at the toiletful of menstrual blood that seems to leave the witch quite intact and unconcerned, there is no question about her immersion in stark body-meanings and body-fallibilities. The mother must exude determinism, and the child expresses his horror at his complete dependency on what is physically vulnerable. And so we understand not only the boy's preference for masculinity but also the girl's "penis-envy." [Note the shift, verbalized, to the viewpoint of a girlchild.] Both boys and girls succumb to the desire to flee the sex represented by the mother; they need little coaxing to identify with the father and his world. He seems more neutral physically, more cleanly powerful, less immersed in body determinisms; he seems more "symbolically free," represents the vast world outside of the home, the social world with its organized triumph over nature, the very escape from contingency that the child seeks. [8] (Emphasis added.) The Deeply-Felt Roots of Our Culture's View of Nature We owe Ernest Becker a debt of gratitude. The way we think and feel about nature has roots which are both intellectual and psychosexual. Distorted though I feel Becker's world view is, the widespread acclaim his book has received in literary and academic circles suggests that the view of our Western heritage he presents is not his alone. Becker illustrates with marvelous clarity the point I wish to make: Our culture's view of nature is deeply embedded not only in a hierarchical view of reality but also in deeply-felt attitudes toward what it views as the bearers of sheer physicalness, namely, sex, women, mother, and death. I will explore in the next two chapters how these attitudes toward nature and physicalness came to be so deeply rooted in the male psyche.
|