Is the Logic of our "Younger Culture" Harmful to our Planet?

If we were to adopt the Older Culture view of all things having value and a sacred right to live on this planet, then the odds of our unwittingly taking planet-scorching actions plummet...

Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay

There was a time when, anthropologists like Peter Farb or David Graeber tell us, the majority of people from what I call Older Cultures understood how to live in balance with nature. What happened?

Psychologists agree that being separate from others is generally harmful to our mental health and well-being. To be well, we must connect with others.

Louise and I once lived with a cat named Flicker, a beautiful spayed black female with a thick gray mane that made her look like a miniature lion. Flicker was nuts. The person we got her from told us that Flicker is quite certain that every human in the world is out to kill her and, we found, that appears to be true. A “scaredy-cat,” she was paranoid, in the clinical sense.

One day I came across Flicker in the hall, on my way to the living room via the kitchen. She looked at me in bug-eyed fright, spun around, and ran toward the kitchen. I was heading in the same direction, so kept walking: now she was certain that I was coming to get her. In the kitchen she paused for a moment, but I kept coming, as the way to the living room is through the kitchen. She glanced around with a panicked look, then ran toward the living room: I was still behind her.

I tried purring at her, making soft sounds, and calling her, but nothing works with this cat: she knew that I was coming to hurt her. In the living room I encountered her again, which sent her flying up into the air and then out to the safety of another hall that leads to the front door.

Flicker’s world is a hostile place filled with malevolent giants. In the years we had her, we’d managed to get close to her from time to time, but there was always that once-feral wildness in her, that latent certainty that she can trust only herself for her own safety.

I was a guest on a nationally syndicated radio show a few weeks ago, talking about some of these issues, and a man called in from someplace in Kansas.

“Do you mean to say,” he said, “that plants and animals have a right to life on this planet?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Older Culture values and how such people would thank the animal they were about to kill for its being their food. “That’s exactly what I mean to say.”

“You know that that’s the position of the ‘deep environmentalists,’ don’t you?” he said. “The radical tree-huggers?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I said. “What’s your position?”

“That we have to assign a value to things, using science and economics. Some forests are worth keeping and others are not. Some species can survive along with us, like cows and dogs and deer, and others can’t, and so we shouldn’t worry about them.”

“So where do you draw the line?” I asked. “How do you know which species we should keep and which we should wipe out to make more room for the ones we like or to make more room for more people?”

“Keep the ones that are useful!” he said, as if the answer were obvious. “Who needs a spotted owl or a snail darter, for God’s sake? We need jobs, economic security, clean streets, and safe cities. Those are the important things.”

I pointed out to him that even if his assumption (that the world is only here for humans) was true, such massive tinkering as wiping out hundreds of thousands of species and altering the chemistry of the atmosphere might still create unintended results that would end up making the planet inhospitable to our “master species.” And, in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what’s happening, documented in this book and many others.

If we were to set aside the assumption of our supremacy and instead adopt the Older Culture view of all things having value and a sacred right to live on this planet, then the odds of our unwittingly taking planet-scorching actions plummet.

Like Flicker, the caller to this radio show sees only one world. That world is a place populated by bright and colorful and “real” human beings, and every other living thing has a dimmer presence. Every “thing” is here to serve us, and we are given the knowledge and power over what shall live and what shall die. If it is to our advantage to strip the world naked, down to a single species of tree and grain and vegetable and fish, then so be it. We have decided that it is right, because we see and understand the world as it really is. And for those who don’t believe it’s possible, we have the words of several of our gods, reported by humans who are incapable of error, to prove it.

This is the logic of the mentally unhealthy or ill. It’s the logic of our Younger Culture.

Just as Flicker is certain she has the world figured out, and that my walking from the bedroom to the living room—regardless of what I may think my motives are—is proof positive of the malevolent intent of all humans, the caller is certain that everything he sees in the world was put here for him, and if I assert it has its own right to existence, then I am conspiring to take it away from him.

Paranoids construct a detailed and  well-organized  world where everything makes sense and is self-reinforcing. That man on the corner who is looking at you is the CIA spy who put the transmitter in your brain.

He looks away because he doesn’t want you to know that he is the spy. He glanced at you not because you were staring at him but because he is wondering if you have figured out that he is responsible for the transmitter. He gets on the bus not to go to work but to follow you. And on and on.

Similarly, whatever our worldview, we collect evidence to support it. Flicker believes people are chasing her, and sees signs of it everywhere. So if you believe everything is a resource that we can use to our advantage, you’ll see signs of that everywhere, too.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and the man to whom many today look for definitions of what is “sick” and what is “healthy” mentally, made some interesting observations along these same lines in the years before he died. He pointed to his belief that what our civilization refers to  as a “healthy ego” is, in  fact, “a shrunken residue” of what we had experienced early in life when the ego experienced a “much more inclusive” and “intimate bond” with the world around it.

Many psychologists  say that one result of this “shrinking process” is that the third most common cause of death for Americans between 15 and 27 years of age, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health, is suicide.

This shrinking into separateness, this breaking of the intimate bond with the world around us, this separating ourselves into isolated “boxes,” was largely unknown for the first 300,000 years or more of human history. It is still largely unknown by tribal people around the world, which, among those who have little contact with Younger Culture people, have a suicide rate so low as to be almost unmeasurable.

University of California at Hayward professor Theodore Roszak uses the word “ecopsychology” to define the study of the relationship between humans and the natural environment. In his books The Voice of the Earth and Ecopsychology, Roszak eloquently shows how the physical, mental, and spiritual disconnection of modern people may be responsible for entire realms of personal and cultural mental illnesses, and how reconnecting with nature can be a powerful therapeutic process both for the individual and for society.

But this disconnection from nature has been at the core of “civilized” human experience since the formation of the first such agriculture-based “civilization” seven millennia ago. It was celebrated by Aristotle in his writings on how the universe and natural world were merely collections of simple particles (atoms) that humans could manipulate once they understood them, and refined by Descartes, who argued that the entire universe was a giant machine, and this machine-like nature echoed all the way down to the smallest level. If we could just figure out where the levers and switches were, we could always figure out a way to control the machine.

We withdrew from the natural world and created an artificial world around us, in our cities and towns, which is quite alien from that in which we first evolved. We even asserted that animals were just biological machines, incapable of feelings or emotions.

As time went by, we decided for ourselves that various things were right and wrong with the rest of the planet, and set about organizing things “out there” to comply with our needs “in here.”

We placed our planet at the center of the universe and ourselves at the top of the hierarchy of our world. Our Younger Culture religions and philosophers proclaimed, both explicitly and implicitly, that all of creation is made only for man. Galileo even went so far as to propose that if humans were not present to observe the world, it would cease to exist, the ultimate Younger Culture statement of reality.

When it was finally accepted that our planet wasn’t the pivot-point of all creation, we simply shifted our language to accommodate a fundamentally unchanged worldview: it is now the assumption of almost every “religious” citizen of any “civilized society” that we are at the spiritual center of the universe.

From this story, this view of the world—that our man-made cities are civilized and the natural world is wild and people who live in it are primitive or uncivilized or savages—we have developed a psychology that acknowledges and praises only itself and its own culture and has lost contact with the real physical world and its extraordinary powers and mysteries.

When the early European/American settlers fanned out across the prairies and killed every buffalo  they could find, the Native Americans watched in shock and horror at what they considered a senseless act of insanity.

How could the settlers take the life of the plains? How could they parcel up the flesh of Mother Earth? How could they be so crazy as to cut down every tree in sight?

The settlers looked at the Indians and thought they were crazy to not take and eat all the buffalo they could. How could they have sat on this valuable resource for 20,000 years and not have used it? They had to be savages, uncivilized half-humans who didn’t  have the good sense to know how to use nature’s bounty for the good of the human race.

For a while, this worked for the conquering “Americans.” Just as Gilgamesh could cut down the cedars of Lebanon, just as the Greeks could destroy their own forests, just as Americans could strip half their topsoil from the land and pump tons of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere daily, the rapid consumption and destruction of “out there” to satisfy the needs of us “in here” worked for more than a few generations.

No more, as we’re seeing in the “early warning system” of the Third World. In their inner cities where people are afraid to drive with their doors unlocked or windows down, on our farms where dioxin or PCB-laced waste is spread across food plants as fertilizer, in our hospitals where the primary waste from the manufacture of nuclear weapons (yttrium) is being promoted as an experimental “cure” for cancers (which are caused in large part by the air and food and drugs of our civilization)—in  all these places we see that this world we have created can work only for a very few. It is the nature of hierarchical, dominator systems to end up that way.

Older Cultures are older because they have survived for tens of thousands of years. In comparison, Younger Cultures are still an experiment, and every time one has been attempted (Sumeria, Rome, Greece, etc.), however great its grandeur, it has self-destructed,  while tribes survive thousands of years.

Now, scientists have discovered that even minor contacts with nature — having a window overlooking a forest in a hospital room, for example — measurably increases survival time and rates for seriously ill people. And regularly walking or living in nature improves mental and emotional regulation and well-being.

Younger Cultures are built on a foundation that is psychologically and spiritually ill: Freud’s “shrunken residue” of the true and historic beauty of human life lived in intimate connection with the natural world. Increasingly,  we live in isolation, in “boxes”—and suffer for it.