Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion

Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion

Also by David W. Kidner NATURE AND PSYCHE: RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE POLITICS OF SUBJECTIVITY

Nature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion How Industrial Society Lost Touch with Reality David W. Kidner Nottingham Trent University, UK

David W. Kidner 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-33910-5 ISBN 978-0-230-39136-9 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230391369 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2012

Contents Preface vi 1 Symbolism Breaks Free 1 2 The Natural and the Industrial 37 3 Growing Out of the World 84 4 Lost in (Symbolic) Space 100 5 How the Mind Took Over the World 143 6 The Industrialised Individual 221 Notes 283 Bibliography 305 Index 323 v

Preface Douglas Adams novel A Hitch-Hiker s Guide to the Galaxy begins with the stealthy approach of huge inter- stellar Vogon spaceships, unnoticed by the world s combined military defences a source of obliteration that emerges, as we say, out of the blue. This seems an apt parable for current threats to human being, which also emerge from within systems we have not evolved to recognise. Unlike the Vogon spaceships, however, the threats that face us are not simply external, since they arise out of the same systems that we ourselves are intimately and often unknowingly entangled with. For similar reasons, and despite their passion and often heroism, environmentalists have generally been no more successful than Arthur Dent in stemming industrialism s accelerating destruction and commodification of the natural world. This is often taken to indicate the failure of environmental activism; but it is more realistically understood as a measure of the power of the forces ranged against the natural order and our difficulties in identifying these forces. What has befallen the world since the advent of industrialism is a catastrophe. Despite the torrent of denials, evasions, excuses, compartmentalisations, talks about changing cultures, contested natures, and discursive mediation, I know of no other intellectually honest reading of the history of the colonisation and destruction of bioregional ecosystems, cultures, and languages. When academic writing ignores, conceals, intellectualises, justifies, or celebrates this history, it simply reveals its infection by the forces of colonisation. This book is the story of a conquest one that is changing the lives of every creature on earth, while saving its most drastic consequences for future generations. Despite its momentous character, the process of conquest is barely reported; indeed it has become a taken- for- granted aspect of living, corroding the health of cultures and individuals from within as it simultaneously restructures both the natural world and our experience of that world to fit the emerging industrial order. Indeed, it is highly significant that reality has become a dirty word in many quarters today, especially but not exclusively within academia. In a reaction to scientism that is as simplistic as the understanding it tries to replace, some writers tell us that reality is simply a product of culture and language. If this is the case, then the decline of the natural world becomes merely another cultural myth, with no more significance vi

Preface vii or emotional import than tales of dragons or fairies. For example, one academic writer tells us that she is interested in the tale of disenchantment that defines a particular range of ethical problems calling for worry and redress. 1 Another asks: Why not accept what may have been wrongly regarded as abnormal and terror- filled the Enlightenment nightmares of machinic dehumanisation as what is actually the normal, ordinary, or everyday? 2 The real world consists not only of sensorily apparent physical properties but also of emergent ecological and subjective properties, particularly the tendency to self- organise, which is the basis of the whole of life. This is a world that contains structure, and also tendencies towards structure a process dimension. It is itself a troubling sign that this book needs to begin by affirming that humans, like other animals, have evolved within a natural world, and that our physical and psychological characteristics reflect our evolutionary dependence on a world that is both symbolic and material. Social reductionism is as prevalent as biological reductionism; and what James Hillman has referred to as social scientists paralysing obsession with language and communication 3 is as much a symptom of the deeper problem this book addresses namely, the dissociation between physical being and symbolic form as others more scientistic preoccupations. Both these aspects of being are essential parts of the real world; and the dead end of idealist influence over many disciplines has to be challenged in all its forms. As Roy Bhaskar and others have shown very clearly, this has nothing to do with naïve realism. It is the glory and the bane of human being that our cognitive powers allow us to envision situations and creations that do not at the moment exist. This capability can be the means of creativity and invention; or it can be the road to delusion and insanity. My focus here concerns the process whereby whole civilisations as I argue can lose touch with reality and become effectively insane. When an individual loses touch with reality, we call it psychosis. When a civilisation loses touch with reality, we call it normality. Academic etiquette dictates that I should not merely review the evidence and offer an analysis of it but also complete the book by offering solutions to the problems I have outlined, thereby bringing a comfortable sense of closure to my argument. This is the academic equivalent of the Hollywood happy ending. Most of the solutions currently on offer, however, will have the effect of enabling industrialism, rather than the natural order, to survive a little longer. Not only is the story I have to tell unfinished but the ending is one that is largely beyond the power of human consciousness to foretell. While solutions have

viii Preface become more urgently required over the past half- century, our ability to provide them has faded as industrialism has tightened its grip. My aim is more modest than making predictions or offering solutions, although it is a necessary precursor to both: to provide what is so far largely and in certain disciplines completely absent: namely a reasonably realistic assessment of our situation. Solutions, if they exist, will emerge out of a more complete awareness of our situation rather than from a continuing effort by consciousness to retain its delusory grip on our fate. One of the most prominent of our problematic assumptions is that knowledge is best arranged into more or less separate disciplines, ensuring that a systemic understanding of industrial society as a whole always an ambitious aim has remained elusive. Most science even recent science has understandably recoiled from the systemic complexity of industrial society, preferring to focus on more detailed and fragmentary types of knowledge. There are exceptions: the work of Robert Ulanowicz and Stuart Kauffman in the natural sciences; the emergence of biosemiotics, catalysed by Gregory Bateson s pioneering writings, and greatly extended by Jesper Hoffmeyer and John Deely; the emergence of complexity theory and its application to ecosystems. Nevertheless, mainstream science, while brilliantly effective in specific domains, has failed to throw much light on the social, economic, and technological systems within which we live and especially on their integration to generate the phenomenon I refer to as industrialism. The consequence is that while we know a great deal about specific processes, we have almost no conception about where all this is leading or about the larger frameworks that provide the backdrop to our daily lives. Industrialism therefore involves a multiplicity of connections that are normally overlooked because of the splintering of knowledge into disciplines and specialities. Much the same could be said of the system it opposes and consumes the natural order. There are peculiar difficulties, then, in describing these systems or the conflict between them in the linear stream of language that normally constitutes a book. The approach I have taken here is therefore more akin to a painting (or an ecosystem), each fragment or section contributing a piece of the whole, and relating to many other fragments. Another tenet of academic etiquette one that I also ignore demands that I define my terms clearly before beginning my argument. This particularly applies to the term industrialism, as some of my critics have noted. But clear definition assumes that the important players in the drama have already been identified, and their shape and constitution agreed upon; so like chess pieces, it is merely their interaction that determines

Preface ix outcomes. Systemic interactions, however, are based not only on such bottom up determinations but also on redefinition and transformation of component entities according to their interactions. Furthermore, clear definition assumes that entities and ideas can be precisely translated into language. None of this is the case in our present situation: our character and boundaries, which were debatable even prior to the industrial era, are being transformed as we are uprooted from our natural context and transplanted into a quite different order, and our thought and language are themselves extensively colonised by industrialism. What is needed is that we sensitively and reflexively feel our way towards identifying the shape and dynamics of the industrial system, using a somewhat broader range of faculties than is generally considered proper. Despite these misgivings, it is useful to have an approximate starting point for understanding; and in this provisional spirit I will characterise industrialism as that colonising system which is re- ordering the world and its constituents to fit the emerging imperatives towards commoditisation and capital accumulation, consuming ecological relationship as it does so. But this is already inadequate not least because it implies that industrialism, like the Vogon spaceships, is external to human subjectivity; whereas it might be better regarded as an outgrowth of the historically emerging confluence of technological vision and economic dominance, exploiting vulnerabilities that open up only after a certain complexity of symbolic organisation has been reached. One commentator on an early draft of this book suggested that I should use the term capitalism to refer to this colonising system. While I would agree that capitalism is at the heart of the industrial system, the term carries baggage that I prefer to do without. For example, capitalism implies private ownership of the means of production; but as Vaclav Havel pointed out, the socialist republics of the Cold War era shared many essential characteristics with the capitalist world. Industrialism is broader and more pervasive than even Marx s pioneering insights recognised, and can be visualised as a sort of gravity well into which everything tends to roll, resulting in a general distortion of the landscape of value, meaning, and relation. I would like to thank my colleagues Matt Connell, Neil Turnbull, and Nigel Edley for covering some of my teaching while I worked on this book; and to Eugene Hargrove for permission to include brief extracts from my various papers in Environmental Ethics. Thanks also to Andy Fisher, Joel Kovel, Jack Manno, Hal Mansfield, Ugur Parlar, Eileen Patzig, and Gill Wyatt for their diverse criticisms and suggestions over the years; and particularly to C, for her less easily definable but nevertheless essential contribution.