Chapter 3: Organic Society

Introduction

In Bookchin’s view, society and culture must be understood by examining not only what they are at present but their origins and subsequent development over the course of history. Thus, to rescue a tradition of freedom in support of his ecological society, he traces a “legacy of freedom” that has run as an alternative libertarian undercurrent through Western history. In his 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom he gave particular attention to what he calls “organic society” — that is, the preliterate band and tribal cultures that preceded recorded history in Europe and America and that persisted far longer in other parts of the world. Insofar as a number of its features hold relevance for the creation of an ecological society, organic society is part of the “legacy of freedom.”

Perhaps the most important of these features is the relatively egalitarian nature of individual organic societies in their earliest phases. Initially such groups were internally free of social hierarchythat is, institutionalized systems of rank based on status distinctions. Lacking social hierarchies, organic societies also lacked domination, or the subordination of one sector of the community to another. Finally, lacking domination, the group also lacked concepts of domination, not only of dominating people but of dominating first nature.

As part of this egalitarianism, organic societies had strikingly communistic principles of social organization. An organic community, for example, would compensate for individual handicaps and weaknesses rather than let such individuals fend for themselves, fulfilling what Bookchin calls “the inequality of equals” or “complementarity.” To all individuals in the community, it would provide the means necessary to sustain life, regardless of their individual contribution to it; it would guarantee what Bookchin, following anthropologist Paul Radin, calls the “irreducible minimum.” And all individuals in the community would have general access to the community’s resources based on their need for them, rather than limited access based on ownership or other exclusive rights, in what Bookchin refers to as th~ principle of “usufruct.”

These three principles — complementarity, the irreducible minimum, and usufruct — reflected a high level of cooperation and mutual care within a community. (This description, it should be emphasized, applies only to the internal life of a tribal community and not to its relations with other communities; as Bookchin later emphasized, tribal life in organic society was not only parochial but was characterized by frequent intertribal wars.)

Bookchin also explored a number of religious aspects of the internal life of organic societies in The Ecology of Freedom. While writing these chapters in the 1970s, he was influenced by the New Age anthropology that was fashionable at the time. In subsequent years, however, this very anthropology contributed to developments in ecological thought that he would reject as regressive. Neopagan religions, for example, underwent a revival and became popular in the late 1980s as a supposed antidote to an antiecological worldview. Aboriginal peoples came to be romanticized as models of ecological thinking, supposedly exemplifying lifeways that are harmonious with first nature from which modern societies could learn. Some parts of the ecology movement adopted as a slogan, “Back to the Pleistocene!”

Bookchin later regretted the influence that this anthropology had on The Ecology of Freedom, as he wrote in his introduction to the second edition, published in 1991:

I examined organic society’s various religious beliefs, and cosmologies: its naturalistic rituals, its mythic personalizations of animals and animal spirits, its embodiment of fertility in a Mother Goddess, and its overall animistic outlook. I believed that the Enlightenment’s battle against superstition had been long since won in American and European culture, and that no one would mistake me for advocating a revival of animism or Goddess worship. As much as I admired many features of organic cultures, I never believed that we could or should introduce their na’ive religious, mythic, or magical beliefs or their cosmologies into the present-day ecology movement.[31]

Bookchin took particular exception, in this 1991 introduction, to the notion that people in organic society are “ecological mentors” for people today to follow. Although the world of preliterate peoples was animistic, he pointed out, they could not have consciously lived in harmony with “nature,” since they had no concept of nature as such, as distinguished from culture or society. Thus, they could have held no specific conscious attitudes toward it — neither one of domin’ation or harmony. Moreover, despite their belief in animistic spirits, they still had to kill animals in order to obtain food, clothing, and shelter — and their approach in doing so was primarily instrumental. Nor, finally, were they necessarily restrained by concepts of limit and moderation, Bookchin observes; on the contrary, they appear in numerous cases to have engaged in overkill and hunted species to extinction needlessly.

Insofar as organic society lacked a concept of nature, it lacked a consciousness, as well, of humanity’s role in natural evolution. To have gained this self-consciousness has been a major advance in human thinking. If in one sense the demise of organic society represented a “fall from Eden” — the Eden of primitive egalitarianism and complementarity — in another sense it was a major step toward enlightenment. Once humanity gained self-consciousness of itself and of first nature, becoming increasingly innovative and creative, human beings could consciously choose the role they would play in it and adopt those virtues and practices that supported that role. They could begin to do so as a matter of conscious ethical choice — not out of blindness or mystification.

Thus, in a dialectical progression, human society forsook a way of life that was, in some ways, benign, but that lacked the universality and consciousness necessary for men and women to realize their latent human attributes. Indeed, this great sublation of humanity beyond both organic society and a Janus-faced civilization that has legacies of both freedom and domination, into a rational, ecological society that preserves the liberatory aspects of both, is the project of social ecology.

Usufruct, Complementarity, and the Irreducible Minimum

(from The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)

It is easy to see that organic society’s harmonized view of nature follows directly from the harmonized relations within the early human community. Just as medieval theology structured the Christian heaven on feudal lines, so people of all ages have projected their social structures onto the natural world. To the Algonquians of the North American forest, beavers lived in clans and lodges of their own, wisely cooperating to promote the well-being of the community. Animals also had their magic, their totem ancestors (the elder brother), and were invigorated by the Manitou, whose spirit nourished the entire cosmos. Accordingly, animals had to be conciliated or else they might refuse to provide humans with skins and meat. The cooperative spirit that formed a basis for the survival of the organic community was an integral part of the outlook of preliterate people toward nature and the interplay between the natural world and the social.

We have yet to find a language that adequately encompasses the quality of this deeply embedded cooperative spirit. Expressions like “love of nature” or “communism,” not to speak of the jargon favored by contemporary sociology, are permeated by the problematical relationships of our own society and mentality. Preliterate humans did not have to “love” nature; they lived in a kinship relationship with it. They would not distinguish between our “esthetic” sense on this score, and their own functional approach to the natural world, because natural beauty is there to begin with — in the very cradle of the individual’s experience. The poetic language that awakens such admiration among whites who encounter the spokesmen for Indian grievances is rarely “poetry” to the speaker; rather, it is an unconscious eloquence that reflects the dignity of Indian life.

So too with other elements of organic society and its values: cooperation is too primary to be adequately expressed in the language of western society. From the outset of life, coercion in dealing with children is so rare in most preliterate communities that western observers are often astonished by the gentleness with which so-called primitives deal with even the most intractable of their young. Yet in preliterate communities the parents are not “permissive”; they simply respect the personality of their children, much as they do that of the adults. Until age hierarchies begin to emerge, the everyday behavior of parents fosters an almost unbroken continuity in the lives of the young between the years of childhood and adulthood....

The word property connotes an individual appropriation of goods, a personal claim to tools, land, and other resources. In this loose sense, property is fairly common in organic societies, even in groups that have a very simple, undeveloped technology. By the same token, cooperative work and the sharing of resources on a scale that could be called communistic is also fairly common. On both the productive side of economic life and the consumptive, appropriation of tools, weapons, food, and even clothing may range widely — often idiosyncratically, in western eyes — from the possessive and seemingly individualistic to the most meticulous and often ritualistic parceling out of a harvest or a hunt among members of a community.

But primary to both of these seemingly contrasting relationships is the practice of usufruct, the freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact that they are using them. Such resources belong to the user as long as they are being used. Function, in effect, replaces our hallowed concept of possession — not merely as a loan or even “mutual aid,” but as an unconscious emphasis on use itself, on need that is free of psychological entanglements with proprietorship, work, and even reciprocity. The western identification of individuality with ownership and personality with craft — the latter laden with a metaphysics of selfhood as expressed in a crafted object wrested by human powers from an intractable nature — has yet to emerge from the notion of use itself and the guileless enjoyment of needed things. Need, in effect, still orchestrates work to the point where property of any kind, communal or otherwise, has yet to acquire independence from the claims of satisfaction. A collective need subtly orchestrates work, not personal need alone, for the collective claim is implicit in the primacy of usufruct over proprietorship. Hence even the work performed in one’s own dwelling has an underlying collective dimension in the potential availability of its products to the entire community.

Communal property, once property itself has become a category of consciousness, already marks the first step toward private property, just as reciprocity, once it too becomes a category of consciousness, marks the first step toward exchange. Proudhon’s celebration of “mutual aid” and contractual federalism, like Marx’s celebration of communal property and planned production, mark no appreciable advance over the primal principle of usufruct. Both thinkers were captive to the notion of interest, to the rational satisfaction of egotism.

There may have been a period in humanity’s early development when interest had not yet emerged to replace complementarity, the disinterested willingness to pool needed things and needed services. There was a time when Gontran de Poncins, wandering into the most remote reaches of the Arctic, could still encounter “the pure, the true Eskimos, the Eskimos who knew not how to lie” — and hence to manipulate, to calculate, to project interest beyond social need. Here community attained a completeness so exquisite and artless that needed things and services fit together in a lovely mosaic with a haunting personality of its own.

We should not disdain these almost utopian glimpses of humanity’s potentialities, with their unsullied qualities for giving and collectivity. Preliterate peoples that still lack an “I” with which to replace a “we” are not (as Levy-Bruhl was to suggest) deficient in individuality as much as they are rich in community. This is a greatness of wealth that can yield a lofty disdain for objects. Cooperation, at this point, is more than just a cement between members of the group; it is an organic melding of identities that, without losing individual uniqueness, retains and fosters the unity of consociation. Contract, forced into this wholeness, serves merely to subvert it — turning an unthinking sense of responsibility into a calculating nexus of aid and an unconscious sense of collectivity into a preening sense of mutuality. As for reciprocity, so often cited as the highest evocation of collectivity, it is more significant in forming alliances between groups than in fostering internal solidarity within them.

Usufruct, in short, differs qualitatively from the quid pro quo of reciprocity, exchange, and mutual aid — all of which are trapped within history’s demeaning account books with their “just” ratios and their “honest” balance sheets. Caught in this limited sphere of calculation, consociation is always tainted by the rationality of arithmetic. The human spirit can never transcend a quantitative world of “fair dealings” between canny egos whose ideology of interest barely conceals a meanspirited proclivity for acquisition. To be sure, social forces were to fracture the human collectivity by introducing contractual ties and cultivating the ego’s most acquisitive impulses. Insofar as the guileless peoples of organic societies held to the values of usufruct in an unconscious manner, they remained terribly vulnerable to the lure, often the harsh imposition, of an emerging contractual world. Rarely is history notable for its capacity to select and preserve the most virtuous traits of humanity. But there is still no reason why hope, reinforced by consciousness and redolent with ancestral memories, may not linger with us as an awareness of what humanity has been in the past and what it can become in the future....

Freedom, an unstated reality in many preliterate cultures, was burdened by constraints, but these constraints were closely related to the early community’s material conditions of life. It is impossible to quarrel with famine, with the need for coordinating the hunt of large game, with seasonal requirements of food cultivation, and later with warfare. To violate the Crow hunting regulations was to endanger every hunter and possibly place the welfare of the entire community in jeopardy. If the violations were serious enough, the violator would be beaten so severely that he might very well not survive. The mild-mannered Eskimo would grimly but collectively select an assassin to kill an unmanageable individual who gravely threatened the well-being of the band. But the virtually unbridled “individualism” so characteristic of power brokers in modern society was simply unthinbble in preliterate societies. Were it even conceivable, it would have been totally unacceptable to the community. Constraint, normally guided by public opinion, custom, and shame, was inevitable in the early social development of humanitynot as a matter of will, authority, or the exercise of power, but because it was unavoidable.

Personal freedom was thus clearly restricted from a modern viewpoint. Choice, will, and individual proclivities could be exercised or expressed within confines permitted by the environment.... But organic society, despite the physical limitations it faced (from a modern viewpoint), nevertheless functioned unconsciously with an implicit commitment to freedom that social theorists were not to attain until fairly recent times. Paul Radin’s concept of the irreducible minimum rests on an unarticulated principle of freedom. To be assured of the material means of life irrespective of one’s productive contribution to the community implies that, wherever possible, society will compensate for the infirmities of the ill, handicapped, and old, just as it will for the limited powers of the very young and their dependency on adults. Even though their productive powers are limited or failing, people will not be denied the means of life that are available to individuals who are well-endowed physically and mentally. Indeed, even individuals who are perfectly capable of meeting all their material needs cannot be denied access to the community’s common produce, although deliberate shirkers in organic society are virtually unknown.

The principle of the irreducible minimum thus affirms the existence of inequality within the group — inequality of physical and mental powers, of skills and virtuosity, psyches and proclivities. It does so not to ignore these inequalities or denigrate them, but on the contrary to compensate for them. Equity here is the recognition of inequities that are not the fault of anyone and that must be adjusted as a matter of unspoken social responsibility. To assume that everyone is “equal” is patently preposterous, if their “equality” is to lie in their strength, intellect, training, experience, talent, disposition, and opportunities. Such “equality” scoffs at reality and denies the commonality and solidarity of the community by subverting its responsibilities to compensate for differences between individuals. It is a heartless “equality,” a mean-spirited one that is simply alien to the very nature of organic society. As long as the means exist, they must be shared as much as possible according to needs — and needs are unequal insofar as they are gauged according to individual abilities and responsibilities.

Hence, organic society tends to operate unconsciously according to the equality of unequals — that is, a freely given, unreflective form of social behavior and distribution that compensates inequalities and does not yield to the fictive claim, yet to be articulated, that everyone is equal. Marx was to put this well when, in opposition to “bourgeois right,” with its claim of the “equality of all,” he remarked that freedom abandons the very notion of “right” as such and “inscribes on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Equality is inextricably tied to freedom as the recognition of inequality and transcends necessity by establishing a culture and distributive system based on compensation for the stigma of natural “privilege.”

The subversion of organic society drastically undermined this principle of authentic freedom. Compensation was restructured into rewards, just as gifts were replaced by commodities. Cuneiform writing, the basis of our alphabetic script, had its origins in the meticulous records the temple clerks kept of products received and products dispersed — in short, the precise accounting of goods, possibly even when the land was “communally owned” and worked in Mesopotamia. Only afterwards were these ticks on clay tablets to become narrative forms of script. The early cuneiform accounting records of the Near East prefigure the moral literature of a less giving and more despotic world in which the equality of unequals gave way to mere charity. Thereafter “right” was to supplant freedom. No longer was it the primary responsibility for society to care for its young, elderly, infirm, or unfortunates; their care became a “private matter” for family and friends — albeit very slowly and through various subtly shaded phases. On the village level, to be sure, the old customs still lingered on in their own shadowy world, but this world was not part of “civilization” — merely an indispensable but concealed archaism.

Romanticizing Organic Society

(from “Twenty Years Later ... , “ 1991)

We are faced with the difficulty that few people seem to know how to build or develop ideas anymore. They promiscuously collect intellectual fragments here and there, like so many dismembered artifacts, drawing upon basically contradictory views and traditions with complete aplomb. Indeed, any serious attempt to rationally discuss the very troubling issues of our time in a coherent manner is often treated as a symptom of psychopathology rather than an earnest effort to make sense of the ideological chaos so prevalent today. Ironically, in its own quixotic way, postmodernism often inadvertently works with a rationality of its own that is nonetheless opaque to itself, and it often strives for the very coherence whose existence it denies to its critics.

The intellectual tendencies that celebrate incoherence, antirationalism, and mysticism are not merely symptoms of a waning intellectuality today. They literally justify and foster it. The massive shift by many people away from serious concerns with the objective conditions of life — such as institutional forms of domination, the use of technology for exploitative purposes, and the everyday realities of human suffering — toward an introverted subjectivism, with its overwhelming focus on psychology and “hidden” motivations, the rise of the culture industry, and the intellectual anxieties over collegiate issues like academic careers and pedagogical eminence — all testify to a sense of disempowerment in both social and personal life.

That the mystical ecologies are becoming popular today is not a mere intellectual aberration, any more than the popularity of postmodernism. To the contrary, their popularity expresses the inability of millions of people to cope with a harsh and demoralizing reality, to control the increasingly oppressive direction in which society is moving. Hence myths, pagan deities, and “Pleistocene” and “Neolithic” belief-systems together with their priests and priestesses provide a surrogate “reality” into which the na’ive acolyte can escape. Indeed, when this preening emphasis on the subjective is clothed in the mystical vapors and inchoate vagaries of fevered imaginations, any recognition of reality is dissolved by beliefs in the mythic. The rational is replaced by the intuitional, and palpable social opponents are replaced by their shadows, to be exorcized by rituals, incantations, and magical gymnastics.

All of these practices are merely socially harmless surrogates for the authentic problems of our time. Ghosts from a distant past, the products of our ancestors’ own imaginations, in turn, are invoked as objects of our reverence in the name of an “earth wisdom” that is actually as ineffectual as we are in our everyday lives. The new surrogate “reality” that is becoming a widespread feature in our time percolates through the mass media and the publishing industry, which are only too eager to nourish, even celebrate the proliferation of wiccan covens, Goddess-worshiping congregations, assorted pantheistic and animistic cults, “wilderness” devotees, and ecofeminist acolytes — to which I can add a new “deep ecology” professoriat that is increasingly prepared to feed a gullible public with “biocentric” pablum....

These ideologies, from postmodernism to ecofeminism, subtly enchant the new human commodities with the mental fireworks, amulets, charms, and brightly tinted garments that provide them with a mystical patina to conceal their empty lives. Capitalism has nothing whatever to fear from mystical and “biocentric” ecologies, or their many high-priced artifacts. The bourgeoisie easily guffaws at these absurdities and is only too eager to commodify them into new sources of profit. Indeed, to state the issue bluntly, it is profit, power, and economic expansion that primarily concerns the elites of the existing social order, not the antics or even the protests of dissenters who duel with ghosts instead of institutionalized centers of power, authority, and wealth.

... It has become all too fashionable among many mystical ecologists to condemn human intervention into first nature, except to meet the minimal needs of life and survival. We are enjoined to “let nature take its course,” to avoid any alteration of first nature except for what is “necessary” — a word that often remains ill-defined — to keep human beings alive and well. Such noninterventionist attitudes are commonly imputed to prehistoric and aboriginal peoples, who presumably lived in total “Oneness” with first nature and the wildlife around them. Taking Aldo Leopold’s phrase “not man apart” to its most extreme conclusion, mystical ecologists call for a complete integration to first nature — by “returning to the Pleistocene,” as many “biocentrists” demand....

These forebears of our species and our own ancestors lived in a climatically turbulent era, marked by advances and retreats of glaciers, wide swings in temperature, and a feast-or-famine diet. Their lives were often very precarious, despite the periodic abundance of game. Nor were they fully equipped with the means to deal with the natural vicissitudes that white middle-class people today take so readily for granted, such as the certainty of warmth in cold weather, adequate shelter, and the ordinary creature comforts to which middle-class people are wedded — leaving all luxuries and pleasures aside. They lacked a written body of knowledge by which a complex tradition of ideas could be handed down; the writing materials with which to express thoughts and reflections that were more complex than those involved in meeting the needs of everyday life; the libraries in which to meditate, research, and gather the wisdom of past ages — in short, the vast array of intellectual and spiritual materials to sensitize their outlook and sensibilities.

It might seem more plausible for deep ecologists to call for a return to the sensibility of these distant times, rather than an actual physical return. But here too we are besieged by a barrage of unanswered questions. We would want to know what kind of sensibility Pleistocene and Paleolithic hunters had in their dealings with the multitude of animals they encountered in the “Great Age of Mammals,” as the two periods have been called. After all, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers developed the stone-tipped spear, the all-important spear-thrower — which made it possible to effectively pierce very tough hides and muscles — and the bow and arrow, which could inflict mortal damage over a sizable distance. The more sophisticated and lethal their hunting kit, the greater an impact these humans must have had on the large mammals of the late Pleistocene and the Paleolithic. If we are to return to the sensibility of these epochs, we would want to know if they really viewed the animals they killed “reverentially,” as so many mystical ecologists claim, or if they had a more pragmatic attitude toward them, using magic to propitiate a “bison spirit” or “bear spirit” in rituals before and after kills. We would want to know if they really did feel themselves to be absorbed into an all-encompassing “Oneness” with the animals around them, or whether they had any sense of human self-identity that involved feelings of “apartness” from those animals. We would want to know if they really chose not to intervene in first nature any more than was absolutely necessary, as mystical ecologists believe, or if they significantly altered their surroundings. We would want to know if they really did behave toward wildlife as “tender carnivores” in pursuit of “sacred game,” as Paul Shepard’s evocative book on hunter-gatherer sensibility is titled, or if they held a more mundane attitude toward animals as means for satisfying their very material as well as subjective needs.

Actually, we will never know with certainty the answers to these questions of sensibility. The outlook that today’s mystical ecologists cultivate toward the Pleistocene, the Paleolithic, and the Neolithic is often highly romanticized and certainly does not correspond to many things that we do know about those eras. If I am to examine the nature of aboriginal sensibilities, I must do so as honestly as possible and decide which characterizations probably apply better to our ancestors of the distant past. This much is clear: much of the archaeological evidence does not support the ecological-romantic view of early peoples, however unpleasant the data may be. Researchers have argued with good reason, for example, that effective human hunters in the Pleistocene may have played a major role in killing off some, if not most, of the great Pleistocene and Paleolithic mammals. Which is not to deny that others have claimed that climatic changes, with important ecological consequences in the Pleistocene and Paleolithic, are more likely to have ended forever the lives of mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinoceroses, cave bears, and giant sloths, among others.... [Much] evidence throws factual weight on the side of the “overkill,” as distinguished from the primarily climatic approach, and supports the view that early hunter-gatherers contributed to exterminating or may have exterminated many Pleistocene animals.

After so much has been written by romantics of the last century and mystical ecologists today about the “Oneness” that preliterate peoples felt for the game they hunted, should we be shocked by this conclusion? I believe not — unless we choose to simplify the complex dialectic involved in what we regard as an “ecological sensibility.” Indeed, that early hunters — whose “ecological sensibility” is so revered by mystical ecologists — would try to satisfy their needs in any way they could should not surprise us. In fact, these hunters were predatory opportunists, no less than wolves or coyotes, precisely because they were very much part of “Nature” (to invoke that much-abused word), just as were all the life-forms around them. Early hunters did not live in Disneyland, where sociable “mice” and gleeful “rabbits” jostle with human visitors in a pseudo-animistic, cartoonlike world.

Another area in dispute is the extent to which preliterate peoples altered the wild environments in which they lived. We know that early hunters were clearly not devout conservers of the original forests, for example. As Stephen]. Pyne emphasizes in his informative study Fire in America, “the virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For this condition Indian fire practices were largely responsible.”[32] Hunter-gatherer foragers, in fact, used fire on a global scale to create grasslands for herbivores. The great prairies of the Midwest were literally created by Indian torches, which were systematically applied, long before those lands were expropriated by Europeans. Since humanity’s discovery of fire, few forests that we can call “virgin” remain today, however large the girth or height of their individual trees. Great forests of the eighteenth century were often restorations of trees that had been cleared and reduced to parkland and prairies in pre-Columbian times. The “forest primeval” that Longfellow celebrated in his poetry was often made up of trees that European settlers had permitted to come back after Indians had turned the forests and the areas they occupied into parklands. That European settlers permitted the trees to return in order to use them to build ships and homes does not alter the fact that these forests were anything but “primeval,” or that Indian communities were anything but reluctant to “tamper” with “Nature.” ...

It is not my intention to defame aboriginal hunters or to place their behavior on a par with that of lumber companies or the meat-packing industry. No Paleo-Indian and Indian overkills and deforestation compares even remotely to the terrifying ecological devastation and the genocide practiced by Euro-American settlers on the New World and its native people. The greed and exploitation that has destroyed Indian cultures over the past five centuries can in no way be justified morally or culturally. The interaction of European settlers and Native Americans could have opened a new opportunity for a sensitive integration of both cultures, but that opportunity was lost in an orgy of bloodletting and plunder by European settlers, particularly land speculators, railroaders, lumber barons, and capitalist entrepreneurs generally.

But with all due regard to the many remarkable features of Native American cultures, pre-Columbian hunters took a large toll in wildlife, often showing few, if any, concerns for conservation. From such overkills, game animals took years to regenerate. Nor was this regeneration helped by their hunters’ fertility rituals, unless we are to naively believe, like modern believers in magic, that they served to increase animal fertility. “Thanks to their hunting prowess,” observes Alston Chase in his superbly researched and well-written book, Playing God in Yellowstone, “the Indians of the Yellowstone region — the Shoshone and their cousins, the Bannock and Lemhi — had eaten themselves out of house and home. When Lewis and Clark first met the Shoshone in 1805, they were starving. Their chief told the explorers that they had ‘nothing but berries to eat.”‘[33] ...

Far from seeking to defame aboriginal peoples, I think we must examine the rationale for their seeming “insensitivity” to animal life and forests. Hunter-gatherers were not motivated by a desire for profit, like competitive rivals in a capitalist marketplace whose behavior is guided by the maxim “grow or die.” As I have emphasized, these hunters were living beings like other life-forms, and as any life-form would, they tried to survive by any means possible. At the same time, the needs of these humans were greater and more complex than those of other life-forms. As creatures endowed by natural evolution with highly intelligent minds, they would not only have required animal and vegetable food to meet their immediate needs; they would also have wanted a secure supply of food once they knew how to preserve meat and plants. Owing to their naturally endowed intelligence, they would have wanted good clothing, even “luxuries” such as comfortable bedding, sturdy skins for homes, plumage and carved bone amulets, beadlike teeth for ornaments, magical artifacts, an assortment of tools and medicines, and coloring matter for esthetic purposes. That the needs of these humans were greater and more complex than those of other life-forms was due not to any perverse traits on their part but to endowments that stemmed from their evolution as unique animals. These wants, in short, shaped their behavior, as they would have for any nonhuman being. And these wants were a product of an intelligence that had been formed as a result of eons of evolutionary development, not any demonic or mysterious impulse that is vaguely “unnatural.”

Inasmuch as preliterate people were human, moreover, they were capable of reasoning conceptually, of speaking fluently, and of feeling abiding insecurities. Early humanity can hardly be faulted for behaving more intelligently than bears, foxes, and wolves; natural evolution endowed them with larger brains and a capacity for making tools and weapons to enhance their powers of survival and for changing their environment to abet their well-being. They had amazing memories, and of extreme importance, they possessed vivid imaginations. They decorated their weapons, painted animals and designs on rocks and caves, engaged in analogical thinking, created myths, and felt passions incomparably more compelling than any that are discernible in animals.

Yet they were also truly part of “Nature.” In the late Pleistocene and early Paleolithic, it was their very “closeness” to first nature, coupled with their emerging second nature, that would have caused them to act in ways that contradict our present-day romanticized notions of their behavior. They were undergoing a major transition from the domain of biological evolution to that of social evolution. As such, they could variously exhibit utter indifference to the pain they inflicted on animals and a strong affinity for them in their rituals — contradictory forms of behavior that occurred almost simultaneously. In these respects, their sensibility was shaped by animalistic as well as cultural needs, indeed by their very “Oneness” with first nature. In turn, their sense of “Oneness” with first nature was shaped by a mental repertoire that could make for what we today would regard as cruelty as well as empathy toward nonhuman life, depending upon the extent to which they identified themselves with it and the kind of society they created, which led to a sense of “apartness” from it — a thoroughly dialectical tension in their outlook....

Looking back to the very beginnings of second nature, it should be emphasized that humanity’s consciousness of first nature, as distinguished from a consciousness of its specific, narrow ecological niches, presupposes that it separate itself from a purely nichelike animal existence. Human beings at some point had to at least begin to see first nature generally as an “other” if their self-identity and self-consciousness as human beings were to emerge. Without a sense of contrast between the human and nonhuman, people are limited to the bedrock existence of seeking mere survival, to a way of life so undifferentiated from that of other living things that they know little more than the unmediated confines of their limited ecological community. This way of life is bereft of purpose, meaning, or orientation, apart from what people create in their imagination. And it is a way of life that no human being could endure except by ceasing to think.

Which is to say that, epistemologically at least, differentiation would not exist and the evolution of a human psyche would never get under way. In order for human beings to differentiate themselves in natural evolution, there must be duality, such as dualities between self and other and between the human and the nonhuman. Here, duality must not be confused with dualism. Today, in fact, the danger that confronts ecological thinking is less a matter of a dualistic sensibility — a dualism that mystical ecologists have criticized to the point of pulverization — than of reductionism, an intellectual dissolution of all difference into an undefinable “Oneness” that excludes the possibility of creativity and turns a concept like “interconnectedness” into the bonds of a mental and emotional straitjacket. Without otherness, duality, and differentiation, “interconnectedness” dissolves psychological and personal heterogeneity into a “night in which all cows are black.” Without “otherness,” duality, and differentiation, all heterogeneity of life-forms would have been limited to a deadening homogeneity, and organic evolution would not have occurred. In terms of natural history, the biosphere would indeed still be a “Gaia” covered by Lynn Margulis’s soup of prokaryotic cells.

Today, to follow a mystical path to “Oneness” is to sink back into the timeless, ahistorical, misty island of the Lotus Eaters, who in Homer’s Odyssey have no recollection of a past and no vision of a future but vegetate in an unperturbable existence that consists of eating, digesting, and defecating, like animals that live on a strictly day-byday basis. This is a world that has no sense of “otherness,” no sense of self, no sense of consciousness — indeed, no sensibility at all beyond the mere maintenance of life, presumably in the bosom of an equally vacuous “cosmic Self.” To understand early sensibilities and their development, we must acknowledge that humanity had to break with the purely animalistic sensibility — if sensibility it can be called at allthat had confined it to a mere ecological niche, if it was to enter into and know the larger world around it. Human beings had to regard first nature as “other,” however much romantics of all sorts bemoan the loss of a universal “Oneness” in a golden Pleistocene, Paleolithic, or Neolithic past. Given their naturally endowed potentialities, humans had to go beyond a realm of mere survival into one of creativity and innovation, and satisfy their naturally endowed capacity to adapt environments to meet their own needs.

The terrible psychological upheavals produced by the twentieth century have made us truly wary of social history, of “otherness,” of the dualities of separation from nonhuman nature. But “separation” and “otherness” are human facts of life, if only because natural evolution has produced a life-form — humanity — whose very specificity is premised on a conscious sense of “separation” that can increasingly distinguish human from nonhuman reality. “Otherness” must be conceived of as a graded phenomenon, to be sure, one that may result in any of several kinds of society. It may eventuate in very destructive relationships characterized by opposition, domination, and antagonism, as we know today — the results of which stain the social history that lies behind us and possibly the precarious future that lies before us.

But “otherness” may also take the form of differentiation, of articulation, of complementarity, as it did in the early history of humanity. As human beings began to emerge from first nature, possibly in the Pleistocene and certainly in the Paleolithic, their relationship to animals as “others” was largely complementary. Hunters know that they are dealing with a nonhuman “other,” but animism may have been a form of solicitation rather than coercion. Early animism imparted a cooperative impulse to these cultures, despite the fact that animal spirits had to be propitiated. Game, it was assumed, could then be lured to “accept” the hunters’ spears and arrows, as Paleolithic cave paintings suggest. Even the overkills of the late Pleistocene and early Paleolithic may have arisen not from a sense of the “other” as an opponent or foe, but from a na·ive ignorance of the ecological impact these overkills would have on the great Pleistocene megafauna. In this respect, early hunters merely combined the behavior of an ordinary animal predator with that of an increasingly socialized, animistic human being....

I regard it as a form of ahistorical arrogance, so characteristic of recent times, to look back at preliterate peoples’ behavior and cast it in forms that suit modern standards of ecological morality, or respond with pious disappointment to their cruelty or indifference to other living beings. It is a form of modern ahistorical arrogance to expect that they would not use their environments up to the hilt or change them as they needed to. What we should properly ask, if we are not to sink into the fatuities of romanticism and mysticism, is not whether humans should intervene into nature — for nothing will stop them from trying to fulfill their most basic “natural” potentialities — but how they should intervene and toward what ends. These are really the profoundly ethical questions that we must ask, and they can only be answered in a thinking way — by unscrambling the virtues and vices of humanity’s social development, by determining if evolution has any meaningful thrust toward increased subjectivity and consciousness in the great evolutionary parade of life-forms, and by bringing greater mind to bear on the pivotal role of social development in all of these issues....

Natural evolution, given its marvelous creativity, its fecundity, its growing subjectivity, and its capacity for innovation, deserves our respect and love for its own attributes. We do not have to create ideological artifacts like deities — female or male — or use magical arts to appreciate first nature as a wondrous phenomenon — including such wonders as the human mind and humanity’s capacity to act morally and self-consciously. An appreciation and love of first nature should properly stem from a clear-sighted and esthetic naturalism, not from a supernaturalism, with its projection of sovereign humanlike “beings” into the biotic world and its canny use of terms like immanence and “earth groundedness.” Indeed, whether we truly know and fully appreciate first nature depends very much on having the intellectual and emotional ability not to confuse ourselves as human beings with coyotes, bears, or wolves, much less with insensate things like rocks, or rivers, or even more absurdly, with the “cosmos.” ...

For early hunters themselves, their animistic sensibility was a mixed blessing. Clearly, it featured a cooperative spirit in their relations to animals as “others,” and it certainly alerted hunters to the attributes of the animals they stalked. Nevertheless, however much preliterate peoples’ animism includes a cooperative dimension, we know today that insofar as it rests on a belief in spirits or a supernature, it clearly rests on a false image of the natural world. Besides boxing them into inflexible customs and traditions, animism involves an innocent belief in magic that rendered aboriginal peoples very vulnerable to the technology, particularly the weaponry, of Europeans who awed or, with their bullets, bloodily disabused them of the spells with which their shamans had “protected” them.

To believe that animism has any objective reality, as many mystical ecologists suggest, is simply infantile, not unlike the behavior of a child who angrily kicks a stool over when he or she falls. In view of what we know today about first nature, animistic souls and magical methods of reaching them have no more basis in objective reality than the visions that many North American Indians traditionally induced in themselves by fasting, self-torture, auto-suggestion, and similar techniques that distort the human sensorium. In a preliterate community, inducing a vision of a guardian spirit by warping one’s senses might enhance one’s own sense of self-worth, courage, and bravado, thereby making one a better hunter, but these visions tell us no more about the reality of first nature than Castaneda’s tales about talking coyotes. Mythic knowledge and the belief in magic, so important to animism, are a self-delusion — one that is understandable as the beliefs of preliterate peoples, but among modern people they are explicable only as evidence of the extent to which they are removed from reality, indeed, the extent to which they lack authentic “earth wisdom.”