Chapter 4 : From Ecomysticism to Angelology

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Chapter 4

Chapter 4: From ecomysticism to angelology

Sociobiologists, microbiologists, Malthusians, and among the Gaians James Lovelock profess to be scientists who are dealing with facts and statistical projections. As such, their ideas and conclusions are open to critical analysis, to acceptance or rejection based on scientific criteria. If their views and conjectures are found to be incorrect, they may be modified or rejected on the basis of the evidence.

Alas, such intellectual responsibility is absent from religion generally, and particularly in the burgeoning credos of ecological mysticism, or ecomysticism. To attempt to critically explore contemporary ecomysticism is to enter a hall of mirrors, wherein we encounter a host of multiple reflections, double-takes, confusing images, and false leads that are mercifully absent in sociobiology, Malthusian demography, Margulis’s microcosmology, and Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. We may think that Wilson, Malthus, Margulis, and Lovelock are wrong in their use of data and their extrapolations, but at least their premises and conclusions can be checked.

By contrast, mysticism generally celebrates its very imperviousness to rational analysis. Explicitly anti-rational, it makes its strongest appeal to the authority of belief over thought. Reason, mystics usually tell us, is cold, objective, indifferent, and, according to some of its feminist critics, even masculine. Not so with mystical outlooks, we are told, which are warm, subjective, caring, and feminine. Mystics enjoin us to ‘listen’ to our intuitions and feelings, to live with a sense of mystery about the world and our ‘interconnectedness’ with the ‘whole’ that surrounds us.

Ecomystics, in particular, tend to add a quasi-ecological dimension to mysticism by imparting a preternatural dimension to the interconnected natural world. They commonly advance a spirituality that is litde more than outright spiritualism, adorned with expressions like ‘reverence’ and ‘adoration’. Dressed in ecological trappings, such spiritualism has the dubious advantage of being so ‘global’, even ‘cosmic’ in its outlook that ‘nature’, conceived either as a deity or as a pantheistic, all-embracing ‘Oneness’, vastly overshadows human beings. One may literally get lost in this ecomystical shuffle. What at first glance seems like a generous approach to the natural world sometimes conceals a highly deprecatory view toward one of natural evolution’s own species, notably humanity.

Which is not to say that all ecomystics are necessarily misanthropes, unsympathetic to the human condition. In the best of cases, many of them are essentially conservationists, imbued with a sensitive regard for the well-being of animal and plant life, which they see as a continuation of their concern for social justice. Hardly anyone with a sense of responsibility to the natural world can fault them for attempting to deepen public concern for the loss of wildlife, forests, and unsettled land. This laudable impulse is eminently desirable in a time of growing ecological devastation.

But still others advance far more than a conservationist viewpoint. They propound a quasi-religious philosophy that is explicitly antihumanistic. Even as their outright spiritualistic beliefs immunize their intuitive views to rational inquiry, their explicitly anticivilizatory and antitechnological views yield a far-reaching deprecation of humanity and its interventions in a presumably pristine natural world.

This description of ecomysticism is by no means extreme or tendentious. The attributes I have touched upon appear very clearly in the body of views called ‘deep ecology’, as named by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in a 1972 lecture.[124]

Naess’s brief,’ often obscurely worded lecture advances seven theses that are actually more proclamatory than expository. He makes very little attempt to argue out his conclusions but instead essentially announces them under the catchy name of the ‘the deep ecology movement’ — in contrast to ‘the shallow ecology movement’, which he views with unmistakable disdain. Where the shallow ecology movement is simply occupied with a ‘fight against pollution and resource depletion’ and seeks to preserve ‘the healdi and affluence of people in the developed countries’, the deep ecology movement, according to Naess, sees all living tilings, including humans, as ‘knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations’.[125] His use of the word movement in 1972 was at best metaphorical; there were no deep ecology and shallow ecology movements in the English-speaking world when the article was written. Naess’s names refer to two of several environmental tendencies that were beginning to attract public attention. Indeed, deep ecology was virtually unknown until the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Nor was Naess’s distinction between the anti-pollution and antiresource-depletion activities of environmentalists and something ‘deeper’ an original theory. A similar distinction had been made in a multitude of books and articles throughout the 1960s, not only in my own writings but in those of Barry Commoner, Leo Marx, and R.ene Dubos. Nor was it fair on Naess’s part to confuse Western economic affluence with the very reasonable concerns of ‘people in developed countries’ for their health.[126] By the late 1960s, a very sizable literature — and mounting evidence — had appeared in the United States and Europe on the dangers that food additives, heavy metals, pesticides, nuclear wastes, and exotic chemicals presented to public well-being.

In fact, by the early 1970s, American environmentalists (or what Naess called shallow ecologists), were very deeply concerned with the environmental impact of‘the affluent society’. They made symbolic protests like the public burial of automobiles — naive gestures, perhaps, but expressly demonstrative actions against ‘consumerist’ values. What they lacked was not an explicit opposition to consumerism or affluence but a clear understanding of the profound social sources of pollution and the destruction of wildlife habitats.

Nor did 1970s environmentalists have to be told about the need for biological diversity and symbiosis — themes that form one of Naess’s theses in his Inquiry article. Such ideas had been percolating within anarchic New Left ecological tendencies since the mid-1960s, and a literature was emerging that stressed the need for diversity as a basic requirement for ecological well-being. Naess’s thesis on local autonomy, decentralization, and ‘soft technologies’ was also old hat by 1972; I had personally advanced it in a comprehensive inventory of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal power as early as 1962.[127]

Finally, it is worth adding that apart from his general references to decentralization, diversity, and symbiosis, little in Naess’s remedies for the environmental crisis distinguished his ideas from the reformist activities of shallow ecologists. Indeed, deep ecology was quite tame in its vision of a new social dispensation. But Naess and his acolytes during the 1970s, confined to their fastnesses in the academy, were basically isolated from the new ecological trends — technological, communitarian, and political — that were emerging in the United States. Their writings reveal little lived contact with the international environmental movement that was unfolding. If deep ecology was a movement, it was overwhekningly a cerebral one that had little interaction with groups actively trying to expand public consciousness of environmental hazards and indeed of the need to change society’s way of interacting with the natural world.

From a theoretical standpoint, in what way did Naess distinguish deep ecology from shallow and other ecologies?

Naess’s formulation that constituted deep ecology’s most distinctive contribution to environmentalism was ‘biospherical egalitarianism’. What Naess meant by this expression was ‘a deep-seated respect, or even veneration, for ways and forms of life’.[128] ‘To the ecological field-worker, Naess added, ‘the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom.’[129] In the closing sentences of his two-paragraph thesis, Naess went on to address the extent to which such respect and reverence are important for the quality of human life, indeed, ‘the deep pleasure and satisfaction we receive from close partnership with other forms of life’, as well as the ‘alienation’ we feel from each other in the absence of such a ‘partnership’.

What is striking about these passages is precisely the intuitive basis on which they rest and the extent to which Naess’s ‘biospherical egalitarianism’ — or what was later called ‘biocentrism’ by his acolytes — is oriented toward our own human, perhaps even anthropocentric ‘pleasure and satisfaction’ in living in ‘close partnership with otiier forms of life’. In this respect, Naess’s rather anthropocentric concern for human pleasure and satisfaction is exceptional among the many people he and his followers were to win over to deep ecology and their wildlife and conservationist concerns.

In time, Naess elaborated his position of ‘biospherical egalitarianism’ into a self-proclaimed bio centric ethic that professed to intuitively endow every life form with an unquestionable ‘intrinsic worth or intrinsic value’. In a ‘biospherically egalitarian world’, according to this ethic, hu man beings are intrinsically of no greater (or lesser) value, than any life-form, be it a wolf, bear, eagle, or fruit fly. Like all other animals, Naess allowed in his later writings, human beings have a ‘right’ to kill other life-forms to meet their ‘vital needs’ — which raises the very arguable question of what constitutes human vital needs. To this question Naess and his acolytes were essentially to respond by asking us to reduce our needs and ‘five simply’ — which again raises the question of what one means by simply. In Naess’s Inquiry paper, all of these arguable issues were resolved with a catchy slogan: ‘Live and let five’ — apparently with the exception of predation to acquire food and meet other vaguely stated, needs.

In fact, many deep ecology acolytes used this slogan to justify — in theory, at least — a minimalist, indeed primitivist vision of human interaction with the natural world. Which is not to say that all deep ecology theorists necessarily gave up their computers, sophisticated binoculars, and other high-tech accouterments of the ‘affluent’ society in favor of a ‘primitive’ lifestyle. But interference with the ways of ‘nature’ was viewed askance. Indeed, the worid view of primitive or primal peoples — who, it was assumed, lived in a joyously simple partnership with and love for the virginal world around them — became a model for contemporary ecological visions of behavior and reality.

Naess, for his part, enjoined deep ecologists to ‘fight against economic and cultural, as much as military, invasion and domination, and to oppose ‘the annihilation of seals and whales as much as to that of human tribes or cultures’.[130] Such injunctions, too, were becoming the conventional wisdom of environmental groups in the 1970s throughout much of the Western world, not only in the United States but in Britain and Germany, where Naess’s Inquiry paper was virtually unknown. Indeed, so embedded were antimilitarist and conservationist views in the conventional wisdom of environmentalists by the 1960s and 1970s that, when wedded to the New Left activism of those decades, they acquired a radical political and social form.

There is precious litde in Naess’s Inquiry paper that was not old hat at the time he wrote it. Even Naess’s bio centrism, seemingly the most original feature of the paper, had become the stock in trade of conservationists influenced by the writings of John Muir and his conscious or unconscious devotees. Yet despite its brevity, Naess’s paper unavoidably — and perhaps deliberately — raised but left unanswered a number of problems that still haunt the deep ecology movement to this very day.

Why did such a patently simplistic and singularly unoriginal body of views as deep ecology take root in the first place — initially in the United States and later in Europe?

To a great extent, it was the very simplicity — indeed, the simple-minded message — of Naess’s ecological philosophy that made it attractive. Deep ecology makes no great intellectual demands upon its followers. Its intuitions and a priori concepts, usually presented as simple, homilies and metaphors, make it accessible to anyone who vaguely ‘loves nature’. More a mood than a body of ideas, deep ecology derives its message from the same intuitive materials that have long been exploited by assorted gurus, shamans, priests, fakirs, and dubious psychotherapists. Deep ecology, in effect, makes its appeal to the heart rather than to the head, and little intellectual effort is required to absorb its maudlin message of how to live the ‘simple life’ and behave ‘ecologically’.

But what accounts for its rise to popularity, rather than the similar, equally intuitive ecological tendencies that surfaced almost simultaneously with it? One of Naess’s more staid academic admirers, Warwick Fox, explains its influence as the result of a remarkably successful public relations job. As Fox observes:

the ecophilosophy community’s acceptance of the shallow/deep ecology distinction is due far more to the powerful advocacy that the distinction received from a couple of uniters from 1979—80 on, rather than to any kind of collective decision on the part of the ecophilosophy community. In other words, as with so many ideas, the shallow/deep ecology distinction was effectively thrust upon its relevant intellectual community rather than elected to office’.[131]

The ‘couple of writers’ to whom Fox alludes are two Californian academics, George Sessions and Bill Devall, who zealously promoted deep ecology among a newly emerging environmental professoriat at academic conferences and particularly through Sessions’ newsletter Ecophilosophy in the mid-1970s. In Fox’s view, if a given ‘typology’ (Naess’s, in this case) finds ‘a couple of persuasive, committed, industrious, and eloquent supporters where the other typologies did not... you have the beginnings of an identifiable intellectual movement/grouping/school.’[132]

Indeed, so important were Devall and Sessions to the promotion of deep ecology that Fox, in his highly sympathetic account of the movement, observes that the two men

are generally, and rightly, acknowledged by ecophilosophers, first, as being almost wholly responsible for having introduced Naess’s distinction [between deep and shallow ecology] to the ecophilosophical community (in about 1979–80); second, as being very largely responsible, along with Naess, for having influenced the ecophilosophical community in general to the point where reference to Naess’s typology became accepted as standard within the space of a few years (by around 1983—84); and, third, as being very largely responsible — again, along with Naess — for having influenced a number of individual ecophilosophers to the point where these individuals now identify themselves and/or are identified by other ecophilosophers as deep ecologists — or, at least, as close relatives.[133]

In fact, Devall’s and Sessions’ promotion of deep ecology occurred overwhelmingly within the framework of a collegiate-professorial world during the late 1970s, in backwoods campuses like Sierra, Pitzer, and Humboldt Colleges. Sessions’ general appeal may have been more the result of his interest in Spinoza and Whitehead than in Naess, whose work he does not seem to have known until 1973. Naess, in turn, apparently attracted Sessions because of their shared interest in Spinoza. Devall appears to have followed Sessions more as a wilderness conservationist than as an ecological theorist.

In any case, in journals, bulletins, conferences, and seminars, academics generally deal with other academics. Like any professional coterie, they cite one another’s works and form clubby enclaves, quite apart from the movements — social or environmental — that swirl around their campus world. Not surprisingly, deep ecology in the late 1970s and early 1980s was mainly a campus-oriented phenomenon. Its following seems to have been composed mainly of teachers and the students they influenced, many of them were locked into their own disciplines with only glancing contact with the actual environmental movements around them.

But of the greatest importance to deep ecology’s rise — far greater than Sessions’ and Devall’s efforts in promoting it — was the ideological climate that followed the decline of the New Left, a climate that favored intuitive and mystical notions. These notions had already existed in the 1960s counterculture, which had mixed sporadic political activism with an abiding fascination for Asian mysticism. With the demise of the New Left, the counterculture’s mysticism literally exploded in California in the £ New Age’. As the tidal wave of mysticism, with all its narcissistic byproducts, rolled across the Sunbelt, it created a cultural region that can be justifiably called the Mystical Zone of the United States.

Judging from the writings of Devall and Sessions, their academic cloister did not render them immune to the mystical viruses that were exploding in the collegiate and countercultural worlds of their region. Drenched in Taoist, Buddhist, pagan, magical, and genetically mystical notions, the California air has proverbially produced eclectic versions of the occult, indeed, of the cultic, to an extent that gives it few equals elsewhere in the Western world.

The New Left of the radical 1960s had more or less steadied the various spiritualisms that flourished in that culture area by freighting them with political ballast. Mere intuition alone did not suffice to fight institutionalized racism in the South or to protest the repression of flee speech in northern universities, let alone to maintain a viable political organization on campus. At the national level, overheated notions of imminent social revolution created a degree of political zealotry that overshadowed the more or less zany religious cults that flourished in California’s bohemias.

Once the secular constraints that the New Left imposed on California’s counterculture were removed, however, the mindless spiritualism of the Mystical Zone reclaimed its traditional territory. Worse still, it rebounded militandy against the high politicization of the decade from which it had been expelled; pardy as an anodyne for the anomie, the meaninglessness and deadening mediocrity that marked American life in the 1970s and 1980s; partly too as a highly profitable source of income for the gurus who supplanted New Left organizations. Ideas — and the need to think them out or seriously deal with them, which the New Left had at least professed to demand in its debates and factional conflicts — were increasingly replaced by the fantasy world that the Mystical Zone had nourished over previous generations. Vaporous ‘feelings’ displaced the ‘mindbending’ challenges of rationality, while the delights of mythopoesis and mystery displaced the cold demands of secularity and intellectual clarity.

Quite bluntly, the late 1970s were an ideal time for deep ecology to take root in California, indeed in the Mystical Zone generally. It was an ideal slogan for reprocessing, in typical Sunbelt fashion, into a Weltanschauung superficial enough for anyone to adopt and spiritually uplifting enough to offer a restful soporific for all troubled souls. Indeed, deep ecology was an excellent analgesic for the intellectual headaches of a culture that felt more at home with Disneyland and Hollywood than with political radicalism.

Nor was the Mystical Zone, which pioneered deep ecology, alone in seeking relief from the demanding political and intellectual tribulations of Western civilization. The antihumanism, mysticism, and misanthropy that are now sedimented into present-day culture have long roots in the social decay of our time. Deep ecology is a symptom of that decay even more than it is one of its causes.

What eventually catapulted deep ecology from the campus into the broader public realm was a conservationist direct action movement — Earth First! — that gave Naess’s notion of ‘biospherical egalitarianism’ or ‘biocentrism’ headline quality.

Inspired by Edward Abbey, whose books such as Desert Solitaire had gained a wide audience of nature-oriented readers, a number of fairly young wilderness enthusiasts in the American southwest embarked on a direct-action ‘monkeywrenching’ campaign to preserve and, if possible, enlarge as much of ‘primordial’ America as they could. The concept of monkeywrenching came from Abbey’s popular novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), hi which a conservationist band of saboteurs wander through American deserts, demolishing billboards and earth-moving equipment, and ultimately plan an ill-starred attempt to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

Earth First! was ostensibly founded by five men in April 1980 — David Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron Kezar — of whom four came from cons_ervationist organizations and one, Roselle, from a New Left-antiwar activist background. Judging from Foreman’s Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, the name Earth First! was chosen to express the primacy of the planet above such ‘humanistic’ notions as ‘People First’.[134] Foreman, at one time a Barry Goldwater admirer and political conservative, is credited with inventing its name and Roselle is credited with designing its logo — a clenched fist in a circle. If Foreman’s title denoted his misanthropic attitude toward the human species, Roselle’s logo reflected the influence of the leftist tradition from which he ostensibly derived some of his social views; he later broke with Foreman presumably because of his misanthropy.

Organizationally, Earth First! never became more than a very loosely formed tendency within the environmental movement. In fact, most of its activities in the United States were essentially theatrical. More rhetorical than real, with its slogans favoring ‘monkeywrenching’ and ‘ecotage’, the group made headlines because of its threats to sabotage lumbering operations. Its colorful guerrilla theater antics at lumbering sites, in which supporters dressed in animal costumes and carried large, decorative banners, were mediagenic photo-opportunities that made the front pages of newspapers.

Earth First! also became an excellent and much-needed target for industry’s cries against ‘environmental extremists’, which tended to give a ‘terrorist’ patina to the entire environmental movement. In fact, the Earth First! tactics of sitting before bulldozers, occupying tree branches, and blockading small tracts of forest land were largely symbolic: the movement was generally more of a media creation than a serious challenge to polluters, lumbermen, and developers. To be sure, Earth First!, at least while Foreman led it, added a sharper edge to the demands of conventional environmental organizations and even embarrassed them, but its achievements, in fact, were modest, and after much infighting, the extent to which Earth First! can still be said to be a stable or definable movement is arguable.

In its ‘heroic’ days, however, Earth First! members and supporters shared certain views that were expressly antihumanistic. Although its members-supporters (the distinction is difficult to make) had diverse environmental agendas, its most articulate and best-known leaders were avowed Malthusians and even crude misanthropes. Their New Left tactics and logo notwithstanding, they advanced no serious criticism of the social status quo. As a number of their most articulate spokesmen were to emphasize, Earth First! regarded social issues as ‘humanistic’ — they concerned the much-despised human species, not the furry or feathery nonhuman ones. By the early 1980s — whatever the clenched fist logo that appeared on its periodical, Earth First!, may have originally meant — the periodical’s editors and principal writers had adopted deep ecology as their theoretical framework, and the periodical opened its pages to deep ecology’s leading proponents in the United States — Bill Devall and George Sessions.

In 1980 and 1981, in fact, it would have been hard to decide whether deep ecology was a movement or an academic ripple. Inasmuch as Naess’s Inquiry article was unknown beyond a few campuses even in California, deep ecology’s influence seemed to depend upon the number of people who read Sessions’ newsletter, Ecophilosophy or were privy to hearing Devall’s papers at academic conferences. Oddly enough, even Naess, who did not meet Sessions until 1978, used the phrase deep ecology rather sparingly. It was Devall who, according to Warwick Fox, ‘elaborated the basic ideas of deep ecology at greater length [than Naess] under the name of deep ecology and surveyed and classified much of the existing literature in terms of its points of contact with these ideas.’[135]

In a second series of newsletters, Sessions — even more than Naess — seems to have established the ‘typology’ that currently passes under the name of deep ecology. Despite his penchant for a Spinozistic pantheism and Asian quietism, Naess retains strong roots in his background as a logical positivist, winch is to say that he often takes recourse to precise mathematical and logical definitions, so akin to the analytical formalism that constituted his earlier philosophical training. By contrast, Sessions is so patently mystical that Ins writings contrast markedly with those of Naess. As Fox observes:

Under deep ecology [Sessions] classified Christian Franciscans (as opposed to Benedictine resource stewardship); the philosophy of Spinoza; the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger; the pantheistic ecophilosophy of Robinson fejfers; Aldo Leopold’s ecosystem-oriented ethics; John Rodman’s ecological resistance/ecological sensibility; Eastern process philosophy (Taoism and Buddhism); Western process philosophy (Heraclitus, Whitehead, and, for Sessions, Spinoza as well); the ecological wisdom of various tribal cultures.[136]

In short, this ‘typology’ is an eclectic hodgepodge. Spinoza allows for no comparison with Heidegger, and that Taoism and Buddhism can be ‘ regarded as ‘process philosophies’ is, to put it mildly, arguable. But what most of — although by no means all! — these philosophies have in common is a strong mystical undertow more characteristic of Californian notions of ‘wisdom’ than Norwegian notions of analytical sobriety. Moreover, apart from Spinoza, who by no stretch of the imagination can be regarded as ‘biocentric’ (indeed, quite the contrary is true) and possibly one or two others, many of the proto-deep ecology thinkers Fox fists are essentially anti-rationalists.

Thus, precisely what constituted a wide-ranging or coherent theory of deep ecology was anything but clear — a problem that beleaguers it to this day. The deep ecology literature was confined for years mainly to academic papers and Sessions’ newsletters. By the eady 1980s, in fact, no single volume had yet appeared in English that could be called a definitive deep ecology book. To the extent that deep ecology has since become an ‘established’ ecophilosophy, it was primarily among some two hundred or so professors and/or their students whom Sessions and Devall could reach with their newsletter and conference papers. Despite growing support today, many academic environmentalists viewed deep ecology with considerable skepticism or rejected it outright. For the rest of the Mystical Zone, deep ecology was more of a rumor that denoted deep thinking than a movement or coherent outlook.

Not surprisingly, the phrase deep ecology first appeared as the tide of a book which was in an anthology edited by Michael Tobias in 1984.[137] Tobias seems to have used it as a catchall phrase to denote any insight that seemed more searching than the popular environmentalist literature of the day. Not until 1985 did Devall and Sessions write and edit a collage entitled Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered, making a definitive statement of deep ecology available to the English-reading public.[138] The book was indeed definitive, for it reflected the eclectic typology of deep ecology that Sessions had formulated more than any book on the subject since.

By their own admission, the central theses of Devall’s and Sessions’ Deep Ecology are ‘two ultimate norms or intuitions which ax not themselves derivable from other norms or intuitions ... self-realization and biocentric equality.’[139]

Like Naess before them, Devall and Sessions use the terminology of ‘intuitions’, not reasoned reflection. Intuitions constitute our ‘sense’ or feelings about something. As a momentary personal apprehension, they are notoriously unreliable; indeed, they constitute precarious grounds upon which to base any outlook, much less the veritable Weltanschauung that deep ecology professes to offer. It is my intuition, for example, that Devall’s and Sessions’ intuitions are outrageously wrong — which says nothing whatever about the validity, soundness, or insightfulness of either my or their conflicting intuitions. Lacking divine guidance, I fail to see how this conflict can be resolved except by the intuitions of our readers.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Devall and Sessions tell us that their two ultimate norms ‘cannot be validated, of course, by the methodology of modern science based on its usual [!] mechanistic assumptions and its very narrow [!] definition of data.’[140] This loaded and highly pejorative statement encloses deep ecology’s norms’ in a closet beyond the reach of critical analysis, immunizing deep ecology to the ‘methodology’ of science and the challenge of reasoned argument. By casting aside reason, deep ecologists may dismiss — presumably intuitively — any method or data that are critical of their views.

In the process, deep ecology appeals to an increasingly popular but erroneous image of scientific method as ‘mechanistic’ and confines its terrain of inquiry to a ‘very narrow definition of data’. This antiscientism may go over well in the scented ashrams of the Mystical Zone, but ‘the methodology of science’ merely requires experiential proof that various ideas are real, not divinations spun out by mystical gurus with or without Ph.D.s. In other words, the methodology of science constitutes a minimal objective criterion by which we may judge ideas on the basis of reality and not on the basis of the self-proclaimed insights of spooks. This is no trivial problem in a world increasingly beset by supernatural, manipulative, and, dangerously authoritarian intuitions that range from experiences with angels to fascistic fears of racial ‘pollution’.

Nor is the methodology of science always mechanistic. Apart from what is commonly called ‘scientific method’, a phrase that I believe requires restatement, the specific techniques associated with scientific analysis often vary from science to science. Hence deep ecology plays upon a popular prejudice that ‘the methodology of science’ is confined to ‘a very narrow definition of data’. Cosmology today is such a sweeping, extravagantly creative, and even dialectical field of study that to call its methodology narrow is, to put it gently, evidence of gross ignorance. Its ever-changing and expanding vision of the origins, nature, and future of the universe defies some of the most imaginative plots dreamed of in science fiction.

Chemistry, in turn, with its ‘dissipative structures’, is the scientific discipline par excellence for deriving systems theories, in which some of the most mystical of the Mystical Zone’s theorists dabble. Biology, for its part, abounds with a wealth of speculations and experiments that make the insights of deep ecology’s founders seem singularly unimaginative. Paleoanthropology, ethology, and geology all have thrown more light on the marvels of the natural and human worlds in single papers than can be found in all the tomes on spiritualism and deep ecology in New Age bookstores.

What Devall and Sessions seem to be telling us, in effect, is that they have an ideology, called deep ecology, that rests on their intuitions, and diat to challenge them is to be captive to the narrow and mechanistic method they impute to the sciences. Worse still, their intuitions cannot be judged by rational criteria, which presumably originate in a narrow and mechanistic methodology. And herein lies the rub: we cannot, by Devall’s and Sessions’ criteria, enter into a rational or scientific exploration of their intuitions because to do so would challenge the authority of their personal faith.

Thus, for Devall and Sessions to claim that their intuited norms are ‘arrived at by the deep questioning process and reveal the importance of moving to the philosophical and religious level of wisdom’ is rhetorical.[141] No ‘deep questioning process’ can rest exclusively on intuition, least of all that of Arne Naess, to which they are referring here. If Devall’s and Sessions’ ‘deep questioning’ cannot be supported by experiential reality, other than what they regard as valid experience, it simply cannot be challenged. One cannot attain a ‘philosophical and religious wisdom’ without acknowledging the premises of objective knowledge (which include science) and the need for logical consistency, both of which stand at odds with the privileged claims of intuition. A questioning process that is insulated from rationality and experience can hardly be said to involve very much questioning at all. Nor is one intuition true and its contrary false if both rest merely on a personal belief

This is no trivial matter. It took thousands of years for humanity to begin to shake off the accumulated ‘intuitions’ of shamans, priests, chiefs, monarchs, warriors, patriarchs, ruling classes, dictators, and the like — all of whom claimed immense privileges for themselves and inflicted terrible horrors on their inferiors on the basis of their ‘intuited wisdom’. Once we remove the imperatives of rational inquiry that might challenge their behavior and the scientific criteria of truth that might challenge their mystical claims to insight, social elites are free to use all their wiles to subjugate, exploit, and kill enormous numbers of people on the basis of unsupported belief systems, irrational conventions, and purely subjective views of society and the world.

A multitude of intuitions and irrational belief systems are returning to the foreground in the closing years of this century. From mystical divinations to ethnic hatreds, these belief systems have grave implications for the future of modern society and the way people view reality. That deep ecology has contributed to this regressive trend with hortatory claims that are strictly subjective, even personalistic, and often reactionary cannot be ignored — and must be seriously probed.

Of the two ‘ultimate norms’ Devall and Sessions intuit, the first, ‘self-realization’ is the more wayward.

In the counterculture of recent years, few terms have been tossed around more frequently than this eminently Western philosophical, religious, and psychological expression. If self-realization means anything, it certainly implies the free development of a person’s distinctive and individual potentialities. This Euro-American image of selfhood and individuation has been centuries in the making. Devall and Sessions dismissively caricature it as ‘the modern Western self which is defined as an isolated ego striving primarily for hedonistic gratification or for a narrow sense of individual salvation in this life or the next.’[142]

Western culture has nurtured a sense of individuality that is vastly more than isolated, hedonistic, and materially egoistic. Indeed, self-realization as a fulfillment of individual intellectual and spiritual potentialities was a major goal, if not the major goal, of thinkers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, the Renaissance thinkers, Luther, the French Enlighteners, Hegel, Marx, and Freud, among many others, whose names are conspicuously absent from Devall’s and Sessions’ book.

The reason these names do not appear in their book is obvious. By ‘self-realization’, Devall and Sessions leave little doubt that they mean a certain type of religious notion of the self that can more properly be called self-effacement. We have to shed, as they put it, the ‘modern Western self’ and return to the traditional Asian notion of the individual, who disappears in a “‘self-in-Self” where “Self” stands for organic wholeness’. More precisely, we have to return to a self for whom ‘the phrase [sic!] “one” includes not only me, an individual human,’ Devall and Sessions emphasize, ‘but all humans, whales, grizzly bears, whole rain forest ecosystems, mountains and rivers, the tiniest microbes in the soil, and so on.’[143] Subsumed in the unending natural cycles of ahistorical cosmologies, this self (or more precisely, the lack thereof) is divested of control over its destiny. Historically, such a self was long subjugated to despotic monarchs and lords — all of whom have spoken in the name of a ‘natural order’, ‘natural forces’, and a divine or ‘cosmic’ power, ideologies that drained peasants, craftspeople, and slaves of the will to transform their destinies, not to speak of the spirit of revolt.

This self-abnegating notion of individuality resonates with precisely the animal deities and spirits that humanity had to eventually exorcize in order to render social life secular and divest itself of imperial rulers who claim ‘naturally’ endowed powers for themselves. A ‘self-in-Self’ that ‘re aliz es’ itself as part of an unthinking ‘community’ of‘whole rain forest ecosystems, mountains and rivers, the tiniest microbes in the soil, and so on’ has not merged its identity with a larger cosmic whole; it has lost its identity, its distinctively human qualities as well as individual contours.

Moreover, imputing a notion of the self to non-human beings and even inorganic entities presupposes a very anthropomorphic treatment of these phenomena, winch cannot constitute a self in any meaningful sense of the term. The ‘and so on’ invites us, once we have imparted selfhood to mountains and rivers, to think of the barren moon, the stars, interstellar space, and galaxies — in terms of a degree of ‘self-in-Self’, perhaps in ‘harmony’ and ‘interconnected’ with the entire cosmos!

This rhetorical recycling of Taoism and Buddhism, and their Western filiations, into a vulgar Californian spiritualism leads us, almost unerringly, to the other ‘ultimate norm’ on which deep ecology rests: ‘biocentric equality’. Simply put:

The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual form of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization. This basic intuition is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.[144]

This stunning doctrine literally defines deep ecology. ‘Deep’ it is in every sense — not only in the intuitions that the authors and their acolytes hold, but in the many presuppositions they make.

If the self must merge — or dissolve, as I claim — according to deep ecologists, into rain forests, ecosystems, mountains, rivers ‘and so on’, these phenomena must share in the intellectuality, imagination, foresight, communicative abilities, and empathy that human beings possess, that is, if ‘bio centric equality’ is to have any meaning.

On the other hand, we may decide to agree with Robyn Eckersley, a champion of bio centrism, that no such abilities are necessary, that the ‘navigational skills of birds’ are themselves on a par with the wide-ranging intelligence of people.

Is there not something self-serving and arrogant in the (unverifable) claim that first nature is striving to achieve something that has presently reached its most developed form in us — second nature? A more impartial, biocentric approach would be simply to acknowledge that our special capabilities (e.g. a highly developed consciousness, language and tool-making capability) are simply one form of excellence alongside the myriad others (e.g. the navigational skills of birds, the sonar capability and playfulness of dolphins, and the intense sociality of ants) rather than the form of excellence thrown up by evolution.[145]

Whether birds have navigation skills — which assumes conscious agency in negotiating their migratory flights over vast distance with clear geographical goals — or primarily tropistic reactions to changes in daylight and possibly the earth’s magnetic fields of force, need not occupy us here. What counts is that Eckersley’s state of mind, like that of deep ecologists generally, essentially debases the intellectual powers of people who, over previous centuries, consciously mapped the globe, gave it mathematical coordinates, and invented magnetic compasses, chronometers, radar, and other tools for navigation. They did so with an intellectuality, flexibility, and with techniques that no bird can emulate — that is, with amazing skillfulness, since skill involves more than physical reactions to natural forces and stimuli.

When Eckersley places the largely tropistic reactions of birds on a par with human thought, she diminishes the human mind and its extraordinary abilities. One might as well say that plants have skills that are on a par with human intellectuality because plants can engage in photosynthesis, a complex series of biochemical reactions to sunlight. Are such reactions really commensurate with the ability of physicists to understand how solar fusion occurs and of biochemists to understand how photosynthesis occurs? If so, then corals ‘invented’ techniques for producing islands and plants ‘invented’ techniques for reaching to the sun in heavily forested areas. In short, placing human intellectual foresight, logical processes, and innovations on a pax with tropistic reactions to external stimuli is to create a stupendous intellectual muddle, not to evoke the ‘deep’ insights that deep ecologists claim to bring to our understanding of humanity’s interaction with the natural world.

Eckersley’s crude level of argumentation is no accident; Devall and Sessions prepare us for it by approvingly citing Warwick Fox to the effect that we can make ‘no firm ontological divide in the field of existence: That there is no bifurcation in reality between the human and the nonhuman realms ... to the extent that we perceive boundaries, we fall short of deep ecological consciousness.’[146]

No one has quite told whales, I assume, about this new evolutionary dispensation. Still less are grizzly bears, wolves, entire rainforest ecosystems, mountains, rivers, ‘and so on’ aware of their community with human beings. Indeed, in this vast panoply of life-forms, ecosystems, mineral matter, and ‘so on’, no creature seems to be capable of knowing — irrespective of how they communicate with members of their own kind — about the existence or absence of this ‘firm ontological divide’ except human beings. If, as Devall and Sessions seem to believe, there is ‘no firm ontological divide’ between the human and non-human realms, it is unknown to every species in the biosphere, let alone entities in the abiotic world — except our own.

In fact, the ontological divide between the non-human and the human is very real. Human beings, to be sure, are primates, mammals, and vertebrates. They cannot, as yet, get out of their animal skins. As products of organic evolution, they are subject to the natural vicissitudes that bring enjoyment, pain, and death to complex life-forms generally. But it is a crucial fact that they alone know — indeed, can know — that there is a phenomenon called evolution; they alone know that death is a reality; they alone can even formulate such notions as self-realization, biocentric equality, and a ‘self-in-Self’; they alone can generalize about their existence — past, present, and future — and produce complex technologies, create cities, communicate in a complex syllabic form, ‘and so on 3 ! To call these stupendous attributes and achievements mere differences in degree between human beings and non-human life-forms — and to equate human consciousness with the navigational skills of migratory birds — is so preposterously naive that one might expect such absurdities from children, not professors.

What apparently worries deep ecologists about this ‘divide’, with all its bifurcations and boundaries, is not so much that its existence is obvious as that it is inconvenient. Beclouding their simplistic monism, we may suppose, is a fear of the dualism of Rene Descartes, which they feel obliged to dispel. Ironically, they seem incapable of coping with this dualism without taking recourse to a Bambi-style anthropomorphism that effectively transforms all non-human beings into precisely what they profess to abhor — namely, anthropomorphisms. If they cannot make human beings into non-human animals, they make non-human animals into human beings. Accordingly, animals are said to have ‘skills’ in much the same sense that human beings do. The earth has its own ‘wisdom 3 , wilderness is equated with ‘freedom 3 , and all life-forms exhibit ‘moral 3 qualities that are entirely the product of human intellectual, emotional, and social development.

Put bluntly: if human beings are ‘equal in intrinsic worth 3 to nonhuman beings, then boundaries between human and non-human are erased, and either human beings are merely one of a variety of animals, or else non-human beings are human.

But then, why should they not be in the Disneyland world of deep ecology?

Having entangled the reader with extravagant claims for a set of unsupported personal beliefs, Devall and Sessions proceed in the name of an exclusively human ‘active deep questioning and meditative process’ to reduce readers to the status of ‘ “plain citizens” of the biotic community, not lord or master over all other species.’[147]

Devall and Sessions use words with multiple meanings to give the most alienating interpretation to people. Whatever a democracy could possibly mean in the animal world, human beings are not mere ‘plain citizens 3 in a biospheric democracy. They are immensely superior to any other animal species, although deep ecologists equate superiority with being the ‘lord and master of all other species’, hence an authoritarian concept. But superior may mean not only higher in rank, status, and authority but ‘of great value, excellence; extraordinary’, if my dictionary is correct. That superiority can simply mean ‘having more knowledge, foresight, and wisdom’ — attributes we might expect to find in a teacher or even a Zen master — seems to disappear from the highly selective deep ecological lexicon.

Deep ecology’s contradictory presuppositions, intuitions, anthropomorphisms, and naive assertions leave us spinning like tops. We are enjoined to engage in ‘deep questioning’ in order to decide on intuitive grounds that we are intrinsically no different in ‘worth’ or ‘value’ from any ‘entity’ in the ‘ecosphere’. Yet the deep questioning so prized by Devall, Sessions, Naess, et ah , is something that no other life-form can do — besides us. In the vastness of the ecosphere, nothing apart from human beings is capable of even voicing the notion of‘biocentric egalitarianism’, much less understanding any notion of‘rights’, ‘intrinsic worth’, or ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’. It is the ultimate in anthropomorphism to impute a moral sense to animals that lack the conceptual material of abstract thought provided by language and the rich generalizations we form in our minds from our vast repertoire of words.

Stricdy speaking, if we were nothing but ‘plain citizens’ in the ecosphere, we should be as furiously anthropo-centric in our behavior, just as a bear is Urso-centric or a wolf Cano-centric. That is to say, as plain citizens of the ecosphere — and nothing more — we should, like every other animal, be occupied exclusively with our own survival, comfort, and safety. As Richard Watson has so astutely noted: ‘[i]f we are to treat man as part of nature on egalitarian terms with other species, then man’s behavior must be treated as morally neutral true’ — that is, as amoral. In which case, Watson continues, ‘we should not drink diere is something morally or ecosophically wrong with the human species dispossessing and causing the extinction of other species.’[148]

Yet deep ecologists ask us precisely in the name of a biospheric ‘citizenship’ not to be occupied exclusively with our survival. Put simply: deep ecologists ask us to be plain citizens and at the same time expect — even oblige — us to think and behave as very uncommon, indeed quite extraordinary onesl In a perceptive article, critic Harold Fromm states this contradiction with remarkable pithiness:

The ‘intrinsic worth’ that biocentrists connect with animals, plants, and minerals is projected by the desiring human psyche in the same way that ‘the will of God’ is projected by human vanity upon a silent universe that never says anything.... The ‘biocentric’ notion of ‘intrinsic worth’ is even more narcissistically ‘ anthropocentric’ than ordinary self-interest because it hopes to achieve its ends by denying that oneself is the puppeteer—ventriloquist behind the world one perceives as valuable.[149]

As biocentrists, deep ecologists ask us take the role of the invisible puppeteer — pulling the strings and ignoring the fact that we are pulling them.

If human beings are to regard themselves merely as plain citizens or equals to all other species in the biosphere, they must be invisible puppeteers: they must be guided by ethical canons that exist nowhere in the animal world and, at the same time, deny that they differ in their rights and intrinsic worth from the amoral world of nature, in short, bereft of ethics. Indeed, deep ecologists urge us to do this because we will esthetically, materially, and spiritually ‘benefit’ from holding such an attitude toward the natural world — a crassly anthropocentric argument. That only human beings in the entire biosphere can confer ‘rights’ upon nonhuman beings precisely because as humans they are so radically different from other life-forms seems to elude most deep ecologists.

Where deep ecologists try to resolve this conundrum, their solutions are sophistic at best and circular at worst. ‘Employing ethics and values, which are cultural objects,’ observes Christopher Manes, one of the most misanthropic of the deep ecologists ‘may appear to contradict the content of bio centrism, and it is undoubtedly incongruous to talk about the rights of nature when the concept of legal rights is traditionally associated with the triumph of culture over nature, or, in Kantian terms, duty over instinct.’[150] Despite the pejorative characterization of rights as the ‘triumph of culture over nature’ , ‘legal rights’ are not necessarily or often commonly equatable with ‘ethics’ and ‘values’ , which may often stand in fiat opposition to a culture’s laws. In the absence of human beings, moreover, Nature cannot of itself generate any system of rights — which still leaves us in a puzzle. To resolve it, Manes invokes Naess’s point that ‘our self includes not only our ego and our social self, on which the imperatives of ethics play, but also a broader identification with ecology itself.’ Speaking bluntly: this is pure rhetoric, not a ‘deep’ reply. Indeed, broadening our ‘ego and our social self’ does not necessarily bring about ‘a broader identification with ecology’ , that is with other life-forms, mountains, rivers, and so on. There are many examples of selfhood in which the self is formed in contrast to other human selves, not necessarily in contrast to an encompassing natural world.

In another ideological strategy, Manes asserts that ‘in the concept of the Ecological Self, human interests and natural interests become fuzed and there is no need to appeal to the traditional discourse of rights and values. The integrity of the biosphere is seen as the integrity of our own persons; the rights of the natural world are implied in our right to be human and humane.’[151]

This amounts to a white flag of surrender. What ‘interests’ can be imputed to ‘Nature’ that are even definable in ethical terms? How do they become ‘fuzed’ with the ‘interests’ of humans, those ‘plain citizens’ whose ‘intrinsic worth’ is equal to that of all other life-forms? What constitutes the ‘integrity’ of the biosphere? Why are the ‘rights’ of the natural world ‘implied in our right to be human and humane’ ? Where did ideas of ‘interests’ and ‘integrity’ come from, if not from human morality and an anthropomorphic conceptualization of ‘human interests’ ?

To mechanically transfer the complex repertoire of rights, moral strictures, wisdom, and philosophy that exists in society to the biosphere, as though this repertoire could arise, let alone exist, without human beings is to grossly mystify humanity’s interaction with the natural world and neutr aliz e the rich content of these distincdy humanistic terms. Divested of their historical, social, and cultural moorings, these social ideas and practices are cheapened into slogans. This divestiture renders it impossible to formulate a serious ethics that can be used in humanity’s relations with the natural world, as well as between human and human in the social world. Reduced to abstractions that float in an intuitional cloud, ‘values’ , ‘rights’, and ‘humane’ behavior, are more transcendental than real, in a de facto dualism that simply bypasses their human origins — and actually becomes captive to the very origins it seeks to avoid. As Manes writes, invoking Warwick Fox, the real goal of this ecological ethics is ‘the decentering of humankind’ — as though it were not human beings alone and only alone who could follow ethical injunctions in relation to the natural world.[152]

While deep ecology trivializes the human spirit, it depends immensely on humanistic appeals to support its most basic tenets. Moreover, its absorption of human individuality into a mystical self-in-Self of cosmic proportions advances a reactionary message. In a mass society, where selfhood is atrophying under the assault of social forces and institutions over which the individual has virtually no control; when disempowerment has become an epochal social pathology; when women, people of color, the poor, and the underprivileged are asked to surrender what fragments of autonomy and freedom they still possess to the power of multinational corporations, impersonal bureaucracies, and the state — the ‘decentering of humankind’ opens the way for a cultural and social barbarism of frightening proportions.

Equally troubling is the outright misanthropy that many deep ecologists advance. To Christopher Manes, for example, humanity is a ‘relatively expendable part’ of the environment.[153] Such derogatory views of humanity are matched by the icy indifference to human life and suffering in the writing of deep ecology’s most important theorists. Consider the following dilemma: an active rattlesnake takes up residence under a family house, posing a grave danger to the child who lives there. The father must decide whether to kill the snake or risk the death of his child. For most people, this would not be a difficult decision; but for deep ecologists, the vital needs of the child and the snake — for life — are equal. Bill Devall, who actually cites such a case in his book, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends (1990), advances a principle of ‘species impartiality’ by which such decisions can be made. Devall’s principle reads: ‘[fjairness in resolution of real conflicts can only occur when humans are not given any special privileges because they are humans.’ By this principle, that is, humans should allow themselves no ‘special privileges’ in coping with such problems merely because ‘they are humans’.[154] The child’s father, who has already survived several bites from ratdesnakes, opts for killing the snake, earning Devall’s reproval: ‘I urged [the father] to make peace with the rattlesnake the way St. Francis made peace between a wolf and villagers in northern Italy in the famous thirteen-century story.’[155] Alas, we are not all ‘saints’ like Francis with a special pipeline to God.

Lest we suspect that Devall is merely fatuous, arrant misanthropy emerges in the closing pages of his book: ‘[w]e lack compassion and seem [!] misanthropic if we turn our backs on hundreds of millions of humans who reside in megalopolises. However, when a choice must be made, it” seems consistent with deep ecology principles to fight on the side of endangered species and animals’[156] — and presumably ignore the plight of congested urban dwellers, which is a concern of ‘misplaced humanists’. What concerns Devall about cities is not only the absence of ‘wild animals’ [!] there but the extent to which ‘urban elites’ exercise power with their ‘materialist ideology and nihilism’. This trend, too, is a concern only of ‘misplaced humanists’, who also would wrongheadedly — in Devall’s view — justify ‘large-scale in-migration to Western Europe and North America from Latin America and Africa’.[157] Such views are redolent of the reactionary ideology currendy abounding in the First World against people of color from the Third World.

Finally, deep ecology is heir to the fingering legacy of Malthus, whose warning about population growth outstripping food production ‘was ignored by the rising tide of industrial/technological optimism’, according to Devall and Sessions.[158] Whereupon they extoll William Catton, Jr, author of Overshoot, for applying ‘the ecological concept of carrying capacity’ and remind us that William Vogt, who ‘articulated’ the environmental crisis, ‘anticipated] the work of radical ecologist Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s’. Vogt’s recipes for diminishing population by withholding antibiotics from Third World countries go unmentioned. (See Chapter 3.)[159]

The misanthropic orientation of deep ecology was taken to its logical conclusion by Earth First!’s founding thinkers who, unencumbered by academic peer pressures, were more outspoken than Naess, Devall, and Sessions.

An inglorious moment of truth occurred in an interview with David Foreman, Earth First!’s indubitable leader, conducted by Bill Devall and published in an Australian periodical, Simply Living, in 1986.[160] Devall’s introduction to the interview was inimitable in its admiration of Foreman. ‘One of [Foreman’s] quotes,’ Devall exudes, ‘is from John Muir concerning the relations between bears and people. Muir wrote, over a hundred years ago, that if a war should come between bears and humans, he would be sorely tempted to fight on the side of bears. Says Foreman: “That day has arrived, and I am enlisting in service to the bears.’”

Devall first asked Foreman, ‘What is the relation between deep ecology and Earth First!?’ To which Foreman replied: ‘I drink deep ecology is the philosophy of Earth First! They are pretty much the same tiring [but] I think EF! is a particular style of deep ecology.’ The moment of truth, however, followed Devall’s pointed question: ‘Do you think population is an important issue?’ To which Foreman responded:

When I tell people how the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid — the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve there, they think that is monstrous. But the alternative is that you go in and save these half-dead children who will never live a whole life. Their development will be stunted. And whafs going to happen in ten years time is that twice as many people will suffer and die.

These charitable remarks were followed by an opinion on immigration by Latin Americans to the United States. ‘Letting the USA be an overflow valve for problems in Latin America is not solving a thing. It’s just putting more pressure on the resources we have in the USA. It is just causing more destruction of our wilderness, more poisoning of water and air, and it isn’t helping the problems in Latin America.’ Devall — a pillar in the triune propagators of deep ecology in the United States — found nothing to object to in these statements; indeed, he seemed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Foreman’s concern by offering the helpful query: ‘Why haven’t mainstream environmental groups dealt with the population issue?’

Foreman’s mentor, Edward Abbey, intmded ethnic chauvinism, indeed, elements of nativism, into the debate that followed this interview. Abbey wrote:

There are a good many reasons to call a halt to further immigration ... into the United States . One seldom mentioned, however, is culture: the United States that we live in today, with its traditions and ideals, however imperfectly realized, is a product of northern European civilization. If we allow our country — our country — to become Latinized — we will be forced to accept a more rigid class system, a patron style of politics ... and a greater reliance on crime and violence as normal instruments of social change.[161]

Elsewhere he repeated this theme:

Perhaps ever-continuing industrial and population growth is not the true road to human happiness.... In which case it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass iirflux of ever more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically impoverished people.[162]

‘Genetically impoverished’, no less? One is prone to cry: really!

In fact, an article I wrote in response to these remarks and the Foreman—DevaU interview, ‘Social Ecology Versus “Deep Ecology”: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement’, was greeted with savage acrimony, sprinkled with a measure of red-baiting, over several issues of Earth First!.[163] To this day, I can only wonder if academic deep ecologists would ever have dissociated themselves from the misanthropic and nativistic views Foreman expressed in the Simply Living interview had I not criticized it.[164] Even after my intervention, it took a year, to the best of my knowledge, before Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions, and Warwick Fox renounced Foreman’s position with varying degrees of emphasis.[165] Still later, Foreman in a debate with me seemed to withdraw his harsher misanthropic formulations. For some two years, the environmental press resounded with the criticism and countercriticisms between supporters of Foreman’s Simply Living views and my own — nor have they entirely quieted down to this day.[166] Sessions’ dissociation from Foreman’s views, in fact, proved to be equivocal. Writing in Foreman’s new magazine, Wild Earth, in 1992, Sessions declared:

In 1981, Murray Bookchin and his Social Ecology group attacked Earth First! and the Deep Ecology Philosophy, Certain casual remarks by individual Earth Firsters (made, to some extent, for their shock value to drive home the message of how out of balance contemporary humans are on the planet) concerning allowing Ethiopians to staive, and AIDS as Nature’s population control device, provided Bookchin with the opportunity he needed.[167]

Sessions’ expression of solidarity with Foreman’s behavior, which he had previously renounced, hardly merits comment. At the time the Simply Living interview was published, to the best of my knowledge, neither Foreman, Devall, or other luminaries in the deep ecology ‘movement’ characterized Foreman’s observations as ‘casual’, still less delivered simply for their ‘shock value’. Quite to the contrary. Foreman and many of his supporters defended these remarks militandy.

Deep ecology and much of its literature is unnervingly redolent of the reactionary views chronicled by Fritz Stern and George Mosse in Germany prior to the rise of National Socialism.[168] Cries like ‘Back to the Pleistocene!’ during Earth First!’s militant days contribute to a mentality that denies human uniqueness even as it appeals to human beings to carry out an ethics that no animal can possibly have. At the same time, deep ecology views humanity rather cheaply. Its literature abounds with denunciations of humanity as a ‘cancer’ on the planet and human intervention into the natural world as demonic. Hardly any connection is shown between the social maladies that afflict our age and their role in determining society’s relationship to the natural world. It holds the basic assumption of Lynn White, Jr, that our present environmental problems stem from cultural origins — that is, Christianity’s disdain for the natural world.[169] This argument reduces society’s relationship to the natural world to simplistic psychological terms. If we merely remedy our drinking and living habits, individual by individual, we shall presumably become ‘plain citizens’ of the biosphere with agreeable ecological habits. The impact of this personalistic view of the ecological crisis and its sources, has — like sociobiology and ecomysticism — significandy shifted public attention from the social roots of our ecological dislocations to a psychological level of discussion, if not a religious view.

Arne Naess, perhaps the most socially concerned of the deep ecologists, merely collapses into extreme inconsistencies when he deals with Iris social ideas. In his Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, Naess avers that deep ecologists ‘seem to move more in the direction of nonviolent anarchism than towards communism. Contemporary nonviolent anarchists are clearly close to the green direction of the political triangle.’ Whereupon Naess quickly catapults from Iris seemingly gende anarchism into claims that ‘with the enormous and exponentially increasing human population pressure and war or warlike conditions in many places, it seems inevitable to maintain some fairly strong central political institutions.’[170] Indeed, lest this not seem demanding enough, he adds that c the higher the level of local self-determination the stronger the central authority must be in order to override local sabotage of fundamental green policies.’ Aside from the element of ‘Newspeak’ here, in which the ‘higher the level of local self-determination’, the greater is our need for a ‘central authority’, such calls for a strong central authority, let it be noted, have become the bedrock credo of extreme right-wing ‘environmentalists’ in Europe.[171]

In the light of Naess’s commitment to a strong state, what happens to free choice, idiosyncratic behavior, personal talents, and individuality? Or, for that matter, to his ‘nonviolent anarchism’? And, if the Cosmic ‘Self’ into which the ‘self’ should dissolve is a suprahuman organism, a ‘whole’ — a ‘totality’? — that blots out personal identity in traditional families and communities structured around castes, deep ecology can easily become an ideology for a strong centralized state in the name of perpetuating the ‘rights of Nature’.

Ecomysticism is part of a larger spectrum of mysticism that plagues the Anglo-American and German consciousness on a scale that seems very much like a throwback to medievalism. It is smug, indeed, to express worried concern about the rise of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism while ignoring phenomena like channeling, astrology, feng shui, tarot, Jungian archetypal psychology, infantilism, and angelology, to cite some of the more prominent ideologies on the ever-widening landscape of spiritualism and mysticism.

Despite two centuries of enlightened humanism and rationalism, the past few decades have seen an appalling regression by a sizable part of the public into supernatural and supranatural cults. More than 90 per cent of Americans, for example, believe in the existence of a supernatural deity. A comparable number believe in the immortality of their souls, and a few individuals have ‘tested’ this conviction with ‘near-death’ experiences, in an effluvium of recent books. Sixty-seven per cent of the American public claims to have experienced ‘extrasensory perception’ (ESP); 42 per cent allow that they have had (or have) contact with the dead; 31 per cent claim to possess clairvoyant powers; and 29 per cent have had visions of one kind or another.

Andrew Greeley, who conducted this survey with the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Council in the late 1980s, observes: ‘Our studies show that people who’ve tasted the paranormal, whether they accept it intellectually or not, are anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases. They are, for the most part, ordinary Americans, somewhat above the norm in education and intelligence and somewhat less than average in religious involvement.’[172] Nor should Europeans be consoled that this problem is strictly American: the scale in Western Europe may not be as great as in the United States, but there is prima facie evidence of mysticism’s rapid growth on the continent.

Indeed, at a time when Nobel laureates in physics and other leading figures in high culture argue quite seriously about the existence of deities and spirits, we have reason to shudder about what is going on among the less educated, ordinary people surveyed by Greeley and Ins associates. Seekers in the realm of the paranormal who undertake a survey of the cults themselves are likely to suffer few disappointments about their grip on the public mind.

A veritable jungle of paranormal cults and nostrums abounds in the United States. Broadcast airwaves are filled with fundamentalist preachers, of often dubious theological credentials and even more dubious morals; the advertisements of psychics and astrologists (many of whom profess to possess a license to engage in their crafts by ‘professional’ societies’) are everywhere. These tele-‘visionists’ are prepared to offer their insights on life and destiny over the telephone for a suitable charge, characteristically at $3.95 a minute (a bargain compared with a $4 charge!). Such sums are likely to chill the ardor of the most parsimonious mystics, who have to make do with the advice and predictions they glean from the astrology columns of the daily newspaper or from periodicals with names like Miracles. The airwaves are cluttered with the shrieks of strident ‘opinion makers’ who variously bark their views on God and interview people who claim to have communicated with extraterrestrials. Tabloid newspapers in supermarkets celebrate everything from the revival of Egyptian mummies to parents whose youngest child is half-fish and half-human.

To be sure, mystical cults are as much a part of Euro-American life as apple pie in the United States, fish and chips in Britain, knockwurst in Germany — or perhaps McDonald’s hamburgers everywhere. We need not look to ancient Rome, the medieval world, or the Reformation to find evidence of how readily cults have turned into sedate, even universalist religions or demonologies. The explosive growth of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) beyond its home terrain in Utah to all parts of the United States and to numerous countries abroad attests to the growing gullibility of people who live in an era that has actually unearthed the ‘secrets’ of life and matter. The influence of Mary Eddy Baker’s gospel of Christian Science, with its rejection of modern medicine in favor of the therapeutic powers of biblical precept, by far exceeds the influence of Mark Twain’s scathing books on Mormonism and Christian Science alike. Yet Christian Science has been only a century or so in the making, while Mormonism began to surface on a worldwide scale only in the past two generations.

What makes the present-day cults a unique phenomenon is that they are appearing at a time when there is no lack of secular knowledge, such as characterized past ages, but rather when there is a surfeit of such knowledge.

Mystical and particularly antirational and antihumanistic cults are becoming prevalent because more and more people know too much, even if vaguely, about the nature of reality — and they are frightened by what they know. Science and reason have ‘told’ them that they are on their own — with enormous powers to change the wodd around them, for better or worse. Lest we exaggerate the impact of metaphysics and high culture, their problem is not that Hegel and Nietzsche have told them that ‘God is dead’ , or that Max Weber has told them that the wodd is ‘disenchanted’ , however much these notions have been played up by academics.

Few of the modern cultists have ever read Nietzsche, still fewer Hegel, nor are they likely to be familiar with Weber. It is a vanity that academics entertain that their own interests correspond to those of the nonacademic public. Moreover, as history has shown, people can behave quite frightfully or carry the burden of terrible afflictions, from famine to war, on their shoulders in the full belief that ‘God is alive’ and the world is ‘enchanted’ . Far more important than the archaic beliefs they hold or have discarded are the contradictions in the human condition itself. The enormous promise of technology to provide a world of material abundance, security, and freedom from toil has not been fulfilled for most of humanity, and it is largely the mystification of social reality, not the power of ideological hyperreality, that has produced a desire to escape from the existing state of affairs.

Put simply: modern people adhere to traditional beliefs with the same devotion that filled the hearts of their ancestors of earlier times. The enormous revival of religion in Russia, following the breakdown of a militantly atheistic Communist state, together with the growth of a bourgeois mean-spiritedness and anti-Semitism after two generations of ‘socialist’ reeducation between 1917 and the 1980s, attests to the tenuous hold of belief systems when they are merely systems of belief. A good deal more than beliefs account for human behavior, even for the beliefs people profess to hold.

For most people, what truly counts is whether their beliefs are consistent with the reality around them. If they are not, people may shift their beliefs, adopting either an enlightened humanism that explains reality, or superstitions that allow them to escape from reality. In our own time, belief systems are particularly tenuous because the social world is changing too rapidly to support any ideology for a great length of time. An ideology that seems acceptable today quickly becomes obsolete tomorrow, even before it can be elaborated and become deeply entrenched in the popular mind.

The consequence of these rapid social transformations is that we five in a world of cults rather than entrenched traditional Ideologies, of lightly held myths rather than seriously considered convictions — and, above all, of easily adopted absurdities that are only half-believed and discarded as easily as garments. Psychic instability reflects, in great measure, modern-day social and technological instability. The sillier a given craze, the more likely it is that it will be adopted as an ideological plaything and then let go as a passing absurdity. Its future depends upon whether it provides people with respite from the demands of a changing world that is very much in need of rational control and whose management seems to be clouded in mystery. Thus present-day cults, from ecomysticism to various theisms, ‘reenchant’ nothing, despite their extravagant claims to do so. In a broad sense, they are merely means to avoid an extravagandy mobile reality that must sooner or later be engaged by using candor and secular understanding, if its potentialities for a rational way of life are not to be aborted — be it by an ecological, social, or military disaster.

The process of psychologically eluding reality has been very much under way since the early 1970s. Its roots can be found in the 1960s counterculture, which, once it lost its political direction, rapidly disintegrated into privatism, an ever-changing collection of nostrums for personal development, and a mysticism inherited from the beatniks. An ‘omnibook of personal development’ , published in 1977 with the imprimatur of Psychology Today, lists more than a hundred strategies for variously finding, sedating, and/or improving oneself.[173] Some of these strategies have gone out of fashion, after only a fairly short lifespan; others persist marginally, almost by sheer psychic and social inertia; quite a few are now ‘established’ techniques; and still others are quasi-religious and religious belief systems in their entirety. Their greatest merit, in most cases, is that they are ‘usable’ , ‘practical’ , and possibly ‘interchangeable’ , each adding synergistically to the other for enhanced ‘re-enchantment’ or therapy.

Acupuncture, of course, enjoys the prestige of antiquity. Just as the ancient Greeks thought Egypt was the font of wisdom because of its long history, so acupuncture, to which we can also add shamanism, tantra, and yoga, shares the pedigree of ancient Oriental origins. But much of the omnibook is filled with techniques and belief systems popular in the 1970s whose heyday has long since passed, supplanted by what I can best call ‘old-new’ mysticisms and theisms — the recycled products of traditional, even long-discarded, beliefs leveraged into usage for the end of the century and the beginning of the new one. They are marked by juvenility, by a steady retreat into a world of fairy tales and childhood phases of life. They are the stuff of primality, closed to critical examination and intellectual growth, with all its phases, pains, and demands.

An exemplary primal fad is the pursuit of the ‘inner child’ , a psychomystique that was born decades ago when a cult shaped by the notion of a ‘fall’ horn innocence in private life focused on an ‘inner nature’ of the individual that adulthood had tainted with experience, rationality, and responsibility. Synergized by neo-Freudian notions of infantile polymorphousness, Jungian archetypes, and the like, it can even be traced back to a Christian precept, which gives childhood innocence and sheeplike meekness a high degree of valuation over maturity and its overly civilized doubts about the world.

Like the new popularity of The Simpsons, a television cartoon series for adult audiences, the new infantilism seems to appeal to a still surviving sucking instinct in the psyche that is beyond the constraints of age and experience. As Newsweek reports, ‘With grown baby boomers acting like perpetual teens, real teens are acting like infants.’ At a juice bar in a fashionable New York dance club, a man wears ‘a pajamas top and a Donald Duck backpack’ , while in a corner, ‘Dr. Seuss-style stocking caps flop madly. Nearly everyone at the dance hall is adorned with pacifiers, kiddy charms, doll-like figurines, and playing with toys. A sturdy construction worker in his early twenties declares: “We’ve got to be tots again. That life was so cool. You just sucked.”’[174]

Infantilism persists in modish stores that sell toys and games expressly designed for adults of all ages. Not only juvenile amulets but giant Panda bears are available to any middle-class man or woman who may want to cuddle up with ersatz furry things in the journey to sleepland. Tapes can be bought that bring on a gradual dozing — if not nostalgia — with songs like ‘London Bridge Is Failing Down’. Batman and The Flintstones, movies based on cartoons popular when the baby boomers were children, draw record adult audiences today.

If these juvenilisms do not improve our knowledge of the world, people who say they have had near-death experiences assure us all will end well in the next one. Everyone, it seems, will be well received in heaven. An increasing number of articles, books, and radio and television interviews describe the contours of the afterlife. For those who doubt the immortality of the soul, most near-death experiences describe a glowing fight after life has temporarily ended that is iridescently inviting, which should cause us to wonder — given the sales figures these books rack up — why the reader desires to remain in this earthly vale of tears at all.

Ecomysticism may be for highbrows, but angelology is for everyone. This latest extension of biblical theology into modern Yuppie and plebeian culture alike has a number of clergymen worried — for if we all have angels with whom we may directly communicate, what need have we for clerics? In any case, the growing public fascination with ‘the angels among us’ , to cite the title of a feature article by several writers in Time magazine, may be taken as an example of how the modern mystical Zeitgeist relies on materiality and tangibility, not merely on the invisible and metaphysical.[175]

Clerical trepidations aside, such prestigious institutions as Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, among others, offer courses on angels, and the potentiality for a growing audience of believers should not be sneezed at. A recent Time/CNN telephone survey reports that nearly 70 per cent of the American public believe that angels exist. Fifty-five per cent believe that they are higher spiritual beings created by the deity who has empowered them to act as his agents on earth. Another 15 per cent believe that they are the spirits of people who died. Only 7 per cent b eh eve that angels are a figment of the imagination, while 18 per cent regard them as symbolically important.

Inasmuch as angels are annoyingly invisible, certain techniques are obviously important to force them to materialize. A veritable industry has grown up to give angels tangibility. A recent article in Time read:

In their modern incarnation, these mighty messengers [angels] have been reduced to bite-size-beings, easily digested. The terrify ing-chembim have become Keivpie-doll cherubs. For those who choke too easily on God and his rules, theologians observe, angels are the handy compromise, all fluff and meringue, kind, nonjudgmental. And they are available to everyone, like aspirin. ‘Each of us has a guardian angel’, declares Eileen Feetnan, who publishes a newsletter AngelWatch from her home in Mountainside, New Jersey. ‘They are nonthreatening, wise and living beings. They offer help whether we ask for it or not. But mostly we ignore them.

If we do, we are ungenerous — and the closing years of the twentieth century suggest that we may soon be giving them more attention than our medieval ancestors in the thirteenth century gave them. Authors seriously speculate about their form and fallibility, the reasons that they intrigue us, the nature of angel encounters, and their functions. Theologians are now beginning to complain that the trivialization of ‘angelology’ has reached a point where ‘popular authors who render angels into household pets, who invite readers to get in touch with their inner angel, or summon their own “angel psychotherapist” or view themselves as angels in training,’ write the Time reporters on the subject, ‘are trafficking in discount spirituality’.

Initiates to this fascinating field may acquire a ‘practical guide to working with the messengers of heaven to empower and enrich [their] lives’ by consulting Ask Your Angels. To gain so commanding a power for only $10 is a literary bargain by any current standard.[176] Indeed, as the book cover advertises: ‘If you’ve picked up this book, the angels have already touched you’, which may well obviate your need to buy it. But should you do so, you will find within a winsome, fair, fight-brown female angel, with flowery wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. The sketches inside the book show angels blowing trumpets — whether to attune themselves to the ‘music of the spheres’ or avoid oncoming traffic is not clear.

Most of the book is loaded with practical details on how to ‘ask your angels’ or, more inspirationally, ‘The Grace Process’, which subdivides into ‘Grounding’, ‘Releasing’, ‘Aligning’, ‘Conversing’, and ‘Enjoying’. You can learn how to work in ‘partnership with the angels’ by ‘fine-tuning the angelic connection’, ‘writing letters and dreaming with the angels’, ‘working with the angels to advance your goals’, ‘working with the angels in recovery and healing’, and if all the bases aren’t covered, ‘working with the angels in all your relationships’. Indeed, lest your burdens be too heavy for one angel to handle, the book closes with a chapter tided ‘working with the angels in groups’. It will help, the writers advise, to use a tape recorder so you can listen to the way you address angels — thus does the technological age intrude upon the divine and its blessings.

This kind of mentality falls within the province of sympathetic magic, an oudook that Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough explains and illustrates in considerable detail. Its primitive ancestry is fairly assured: angels were variously deities and, earlier, spirits that people created out of their own fertile imaginations with the aid of shamans and later of priests. If Christianity ranks people just below ‘angels’, they are, in all truth, below nothing; and if ‘re-enchanting’ the world or rendering it ‘sacred’ means looking up to nothing and populating it with figments of its own imagination, enlightened humanism demands that humanity look to reality and try to understand its own place in the world.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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Re-enchanting Humanity — Chapter 4 : From Ecomysticism to Angelology

By Murray Bookchin

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Author : Murray Bookchin

Chapter 4: From ecomysticism to angelology

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