Ending the War Between Humanity and Nature: Rethinking Everything 1527555453, 9781527555457

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Ending the War Between Humanity and Nature

Ending the War Between Humanity and Nature: Rethinking Everything By

Patrick C. Lee

Ending the War Between Humanity and Nature: Rethinking Everything By Patrick C. Lee This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Patrick C. Lee All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-5545-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-5545-7

This book is dedicated to my grandfather, Cornelius Hickey, who supported my childhood interest in nature. Although I grew up in New York City, he was the first to realize that I was not a city boy, but a country boy trapped inside the body of a city boy. He freed me from the trap. Thanks, Grandpa.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................... 1 Introduction: The Disconnect Part 1: Our Sacred Nature Story Preface to Part 1......................................................................................... 13 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................... 14 Genesis 1-3: Our First Nature Story Chapter 3 ................................................................................................... 25 Augustine’s Reading of Genesis 1-3 Chapter 4 ................................................................................................... 40 Is the Biblical Flood Story an Ecological Covenant? Chapter 5 ................................................................................................... 45 A New Sacred Nature Story Chapter 6 ................................................................................................... 74 Pantheism Part 2: Our Literary Nature Narrative Preface to Part 2......................................................................................... 95 Chapter 7 ................................................................................................... 97 Beauty and Beast as an Environmental Parable Chapter 8 ................................................................................................. 117 Outlying Beauties and Beasts

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Chapter 9 ................................................................................................. 139 Gender and Science at The Beauty-and-Beast Interface Chapter 10 ............................................................................................... 152 Interlude: Was There Always a Disconnect? Part 3: Science and Nature Preface to Part 3....................................................................................... 167 Chapter 11 ............................................................................................... 169 The Science Story: Nature as Machine Chapter 12 ............................................................................................... 187 What is a Scientific Model? Chapter 13 ............................................................................................... 196 Machine or Not Machine: The Newtonian Paradox Chapter 14 ............................................................................................... 211 The Machine Starts to Break Down Chapter 15 ............................................................................................... 224 The Machine Collapses, but Nature Keeps Working: Quantum Physics Chapter 16 ............................................................................................... 243 What’s Wrong with the Mechanical Model? Chapter 17 ............................................................................................... 252 Nature as Evolving Narrative Part 4: Economics and Nature Preface to Part 4....................................................................................... 273 Chapter 18 ............................................................................................... 274 Nature and Economics: From the Classical to the Ecological Model

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Chapter 19 ............................................................................................... 300 Ecological Economics Chapter 20 ............................................................................................... 327 Conclusion: Choosing Between Usable and Unusable Pasts References ............................................................................................... 344

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first acknowledgement goes to the scholars and commentators listed in the book’s reference section. Their scholarship and perspective sit at the infrastructure of the case made in this book. Moreover, it goes without saying that this book would not have been written without the generous support of my friends and colleagues. These include Vittorio Frigerio, John Broughton, Edward Malloy, Edmund O’Sullivan, Eimear O'Neill, Eric Koch, Abraham Nehmad, Robert Wozniak, Catherine Oliver, Thomas Bloom, Sheldon Zitner, Deborah Sommerer Jurdjevic, Anne Slater, Klaus and Ellen Bohr, Michael Sherman, and my sister Denise Gillen. I also want to thank Robert Stewart and James Perrone for their advice and encouragement. This book owes much of its merit, but none of its faults to these kind and generous advisors. I also offer major gratitude to Denese Coulbeck for her word processing, proofreading and administrative expertise. Finally, to my son, Daniel, for his generous assistance, and my wife, Yvonne, for her unlimited personal support over the several years it took to complete the book. It could not have been done without their dedication to this project.

PREFACE

Are humanity and nature at war? Of course they are…the evidence is all around us: climate change, catastrophic weather events, habitat destruction, extinction of species, crop failure, famine, deforestation, wildfires, drought, polar ice melting, rising sea levels flooding coastal communities and island nations, millions of environmental refugees, non-biodegradable plastic waste, toxic pollution of air, water, soil. The list goes on and on. What’s causing this war, and how can it be stopped? The conventional wisdom is that the war is an unintended consequence of economic and environmental imperatives pulling in opposite directions. And, of course, there is a partial truth to this claim. But this book takes the question—and its answer—to a deeper level. It argues that the root cause of our war on nature might be found in the time-honored, historically deep myths, narratives and stories we tell ourselves—and have been telling ourselves for centuries, even millennia— about humanity’s place in (or out of) the natural world. When we in the West view the world through the lens of our sacred biblical creation story, we understand nature as ours to subdue and we see ourselves as in God’s image, elevated above nature. When we approach the natural world in terms of science’s archetypal mechanical model, we see it as a vast assembly of interlocking mechanical systems. And since we humans are the only mechanics in town, nature is ours to work as we wish. Our ruling economic narrative, in turn, reduces nature to “natural capital” and treats nature as a cost-free, inexhaustible, and wholly owned subsidiary of the human condition. Each of these stories—whether religious, scientific, or economic—builds upon and reinforces the antinature bias of its companion stories. Although we often think of religion and science as mutually antagonistic worldviews, they are in remarkable agreement when it comes to their respective positions on nature-human relations. Whether sacred or profane, the overarching message is the same: humanity rules nature. Science has given us the cognitive and instrumental means to obey God’s mandate that we subdue the Earth. And economics translates the mandate into a profit generating enterprise. Our mainstream nature stories—whether we describe them as models, narratives, paradigms, or worldviews—have three main functions. Their first function is analogous to a blind man’s cane. His cane is at the leading edge of his encounter with the world, and he effectively “sees” and

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makes sense of the world through information transmitted to him by the physical structure of his cane. In almost exactly the same way, our collection of nature stories is at the leading edge of our encounter with nature, and the sense we make of nature is largely filtered through the narrative structure of our stories. Replace the blind person’s cane with a seeing-eye dog, and he experiences the world very differently. Analogously, if we were to adopt an alternative set of nature stories, we would make very different sense of our encounter with the natural world. Second, as sensemaking devices, our orthodox nature stories are the raw material at the infrastructure of environmental policy. Public policy, in turn, shapes collective action on environmental issues. Unfortunately, neither our policy nor our action is commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of our environmental problems. We suffer from a semi-paralysis on these matters. Why? To answer this question we have to reason backwards to the raw cognitive and attitudinal material feeding into and informing our environmental policy. The semi-paralysis begins at the level of nature story. Finally, our nature narratives set the terms we bring to our dialogue and interaction with nature; and nature is telling us in a thousand ways that the terms no longer work. The “dialogue” has become a quarrel and the interaction a war. Our nature stories, in other words, are much more than “onceupon-a-time” entertainments. They are fundamental vehicles for making sense, assigning value, and prescribing action in the real world. If we want peace and sanity at the nature-human interface, we have to embrace a different repertoire of nature narratives. The main polemic of this book follows two tracks: first, to examine and critique our mainstream, orthodox nature stories; and, second, to rehabilitate our recessive repertoire of dissenting but silenced nature stories. The latter have been pushed to the sidelines by history and we need to return them to center stage. We need to give them back their voice. And when we do, both we and nature will recognize their voice as one we share in common. These dissenting stories will completely change the terms of our dialogue with nature. In fact, they will put us and nature on the same side of the dialogue. The scope of the book’s argument is admittedly ambitious, covering religion, literature, science, and economics. Within each of these four traditions we examine the orthodox nature narrative and its heterodox alternative. This encompassing focus accounts for the book’s somewhat extravagant title: to achieve reconciliation between humanity and nature, we are going to have to “rethink everything.”

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE DISCONNECT

Here’s the problem: we’re all aware of environmental and climate disturbance—particularly the increasing incidence of extreme weather. How could we not be? But our difficulty is that the rabid weather makes no sense to us. This is not the way it is supposed to be. The evidence for climate turmoil is all around us—if not right in our face as in flooded and wildfire-ravaged communities, then certainly in the daily news coverage. But again, we fail to take the news at face value…and, again, it makes no sense. We are supposed to be in charge of nature, not the other way around. Our Western sacred tradition gives us dominion over the earth. Our market based economic system sees nature as a wholly owned subsidiary of the human condition. Our scientific tradition is grounded in the mechanical model. Since we are the only mechanics in town, nature is ours to operate as we wish. There is a disconnect between our worldview and the way the natural world is behaving. We are a sense-making species and if something makes no sense, it lacks full reality even while it hits us between the eyes. What’s going on here? At one level we know that nature is in trouble and that its trouble is our trouble—given the steady diet of news stories and TV images, how could we not? But at some deeper level we don’t seem to embrace the danger as real. Again, there is a disconnect between the two levels. It’s as if the daily news stories are being cancelled out by some other, deeper story. For most of us this pattern recurs over and over: we take the news story at face value, become vaguely alarmed, and then wait a few minutes for the alarm to dissipate. It’s not that we reject, rationalize, or deny the news so much as our not having well-formed mental categories for making personal sense of it. The experience is like catching a ball, but not knowing what to do with it because we don’t know what game we’re playing. I know the ball is here in my hand, but without the framework provided by a game, its meaning is elusive. I hear the news and even

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“understand” it in a literal sense, but without a relevant mental framework, my understanding is shallow and elusive. Again, it’s as if there were two stories occurring simultaneously and at cross purposes. My position in this book is that there are two stories, and they are at cross purposes. The surface story is immediate and full of threatening information about nature. The other story is old, deep, and reassuring. It reaches back into history, as far back as the sacred and secular origins of the Western worldview in ancient Israel and Greece. This other, more determining narrative operates like a deep mental template or mindset whose function is to give meaning to incoming information about nature. But it doesn’t seem to work the way it should. There is a disconnect: We and nature do not seem to be reading the same story. But why can’t we just make sense of current information on its own terms? The answer to this question lies in an understanding of how memory and history shape human consciousness. Our consciousness is not situated solely in the moment; nor is it merely a passive sponge that soaks up whatever is presented to it. Consciousness actively engages experience in terms of what it already knows. It is historically elongated, a creature of traditions, beliefs, and narratives that have been passed down for centuries, even millennia. It stretches backward into the past and forward into the present, such that a collectively remembered past is always at work in our understanding of the present. Our inherited memory of the past necessarily prejudges our experience of the here and now. These prejudgements draw the present into the flow of history and autobiography. They make for continuity of community, self, experience, and the world. Without prejudgements, without guiding stories, narratives, and myths, human experience would reduce to dots, jumps, and blips. We would live in discontinuous spurts of amnesiac surprise. This urge to coherence, more than nostalgia, is why we cling to narratives from the past. In principle, then, prejudgement is not only inescapable, but it is a highly adaptive function. However, the wrong prejudgements—the wrong seminal stories—don’t guide present experience into the emergent flow of history; they keep it out. They fracture human consciousness into two dysfunctional and mutually inaccessible parts, one in the past and one in the present. Again, the disconnect. 1 What are these seminal nature stories? And how powerful are they in shaping prejudgements? My argument is that they are enormously powerful and foundational. Take, as already noted above, the seminal nature narrative in the West’s sacred Judeo-Christian tradition. In the first chapter of the Bible’s Book of Genesis God creates us in his image and

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instructs us to “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” over all its creatures. On top of that, the founding fathers of our archetypal science story—Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Huygens, Newton, et al.—mapped nature on the “mechanical model.” Since we humans are the only mechanics around, it follows that we relate to nature as a mechanic does to a machine. And if running nature’s “machinery” translates biblical dominion-andsubdue doctrine into a doable program, it becomes both a practical and sacred imperative to do so. Piled on top of our seminal religion and science narratives, our ruling economic model views nature as a wholly owned subsidiary of the human condition, to be exploited entirely in the service of human appetites and ambitions. These several layers of cognitive and ethical material set the deep terms for whatever prejudgements we humans in the West bring to our encounter with nature. The purpose of this book is to unpack and take a hard look at these foundational nature stories, the ones that continuously and tacitly murmur in the background of the Western mind. They are our fundamental narratives for making sense of the natural world and our place in it. These stories don’t merely tell us about nature; rather they reveal nature to us, us to nature, and, in self-congratulatory spasms, us to ourselves. Like the beating of our hearts, they live at the edge of consciousness. Without the next heartbeat our bodies would die, and without stories our understanding would splinter into dots, jumps, blips, and pixels. But there the comparison ends, because our nature stories contain the wrong prejudgements. They overwhelmingly present nature as the “other,” as antagonistic, subordinate, or irrelevant to human destiny, as backdrop to the central cosmic drama between humanity and God, as having no moral standing in its own right, as a diminished form of reality, as subject to human control and ownership, as an inert collection of mindless mechanisms, as having no function other than serving humanity’s appetite for resources, services, and waste sinks. Our primary nature stories reveal a profoundly passive and disposable natural world, with no interests, integrity, or perspective of its own. These accounts, secular and sacred in origin, are the mental templates we reflexively invoke when trying to make sense of contemporary environmental issues. But to make adequate sense of our troubled relations with the natural world, we have to seriously entertain three hypotheses that find little, if any, support in our basic nature stories: that we are part of nature, that our destiny is yoked to nature’s destiny, that nature is reality itself. No wonder there is a disconnect. Our traditional nature stories deflect new and incompatible information about nature and prevent it from

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reaching deep levels of understanding and commitment. Our understanding remains shallow and our commitment confused. There are, of course, many pragmatic—if short-sighted—reasons for resisting the significance of bad news about nature. To respond constructively would involve great personal, societal, and economic sacrifice. It would require long-term, cross-generational planning; a revolution in what we mean by production and capital; reversing entrenched habits of consumption and waste disposal; reconciling competing interests of different sectors of the human community; and so on. In other words, even if the cautionary messages of environmentalism made perfect sense, we would still have to muster the will to actually implement the messages—the workload itself sits out there like a huge disincentive. But the case I make in this book is that present-day environmental messages do not make coherent sense to us. Rather, they unravel our sense of reality; they directly challenge our prejudgements about the way the world is supposed to be. How can we work to rehabilitate our relation with the Earth, when such a project makes little sense to us in the first place? The basic problem of environmentalism is that it questions habits of belief and thought that sit at the foundation of the Western worldview. Ultimately it requires that we in the West revisit and reconstruct what, for sake of a better phrase, might be called our “theory of everything”: God, creation, being, becoming, meaning, value, and human exceptionality. Not surprisingly, most of this theory shows up in our canon of nature stories. 2 The following chapters can be viewed as a series of archeological digs which attempt to unearth the West’s tacit, taken-for-granted nature stories. The stories come from four historically deep sources: the JudeoChristian sacred tradition, secular literature, the scientific revolution, and classical free-market economics. In each case, my objective is to articulate the tacit text, i.e., to make the implicit explicit. Much of the power of our traditional nature stories derives from their inherent poetry, craft, and boldness. But their power also rests on two other pillars: they remain partly hidden from view, where we imagine them to be wiser than they are. We mistake their sotto voce murmur for deep truth. And, because of their primacy and longevity, they have been granted a de facto immunity from prosecution. But when their immunity is waived, and the stories are put on the stand for detailed interrogation, their power over our collective imagination begins to crumble. Or at least that is my hope. Working against this hope are several interblended facts: these stories have long been viewed as our “friends” and counselors, they unashamedly puff up human vanity, and they shape the grammar and vocabulary we use when examining the world and our place in it. Our

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orthodox nature stories are not accustomed to answering challenging questions about nature—rather their custom is to dictate the terms of discourse: to raise their own questions and supply their own answers. Putting this kind of defendant under cross-examination often makes for awkward, testy, and surreal exchanges, interspersed with occasional moments of comic relief. I cannot promise the reader the process will go smoothly. Nor will I win every argument. The entering assumption of this book is that our canonical nature stories have had their own way too long. And the main polemic of the book is to bring their claims under sustained questioning not of their choice. Unless we do so, they will continue to block our efforts to accommodate the newly emergent facts of nature. To borrow a phrase from historian Henry Steele Commager, our mainstream, canonical nature stories no longer qualify as a usable past. 3 Which raises a final question: are any of our traditional nature stories usable? I think so. In a large and complex civilization, such as ours in the West, the past is a mosaic of orthodox and dissenting accounts. Positions which achieve orthodoxy usually begin as one of several competing stands on a particular issue. Orthodoxies, in fact, typically refine and define themselves in terms of how they differ from their preexisting and co-existing alternatives. But this does not mean that the alternatives simply disappear from history. They live in the interstices of memory, like tough weeds poking through cracks in the asphalt, waiting for their turn to come. Although the West’s canonical nature stories are largely useless, our rich repertoire of dissenting alternatives, taken together, may serve as a usable past. For starters, our orthodox god-story presents God as wholly outside and other than nature. But we also have a recessive supply of heterodox accounts in our sacred canon that bring God closer to nature. These alternatives effectively sacralize nature and naturalize God. Another example: Beauties and Beasts wander all over the landscape of secular literature—in the standard version the animalistic Beast converts to the human Beauty’s side; but it takes only a little imagination to tell the story the other way around—and some authors have begun to do so. Third, modern science, dating from the legacy of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, still officially clings to its archetypal 17th century mechanical model of nature. But science’s own 19th and 20th century investigations into evolution, quantum physics, Big-Bang cosmology, and living ecosystems have opened several completely different windows on the natural world. Finally, our classical, laissez-faire, growth model of economics posits nature as a cost-free, inexhaustible, and wholly owned subsidiary of

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the human species. But we also have a dissenting ecological model that turns this picture upside down: the human economy is subsumed under nature, and nature’s fixed supply of resources and services is not governed by human demand, but by the laws of physics and biology. 4 The canonical stories, of course, demand more of our attention simply because they are history’s winners. But in each of the four traditions tapped here—religion, literature, science, economics—I will examine alternative accounts that may yet become history’s ultimate winners. Indeed, they or something like them must replace our current canon of nature stories. Otherwise the disconnect in our conversation with nature will continue, and the final outcome will not be pretty.

In What Sense Is Our Nature Story “Ours”? The scope of this book is limited to the Western tradition, that is, to our defining mosaic of Judeo-Greco-Christian-Medieval-Renaissance-ScientificTechnological-Enlightenment-Industrial-Capitalist legacies. Some of these legacies are sacred, some secular, and all enjoy a strong degree of historical depth. Even science goes back at least 400 years to the time of Kepler and Galileo, and “classical” economics dates back two and a half centuries to Adam Smith. But why restrict myself to the Western heritage? Four reasons. First, as my home base, I think I have an intuitive feel for its texture as well as its formalisms. The same could not be said for my acquaintance with humanity’s other grand cultural traditions. Second, as an insider I have no compunction about being critical of my own legacy: this is an argument within the family. As an outsider to other cultural traditions, not knowing the terms, limits, and sensitivities of discourse, I could not approach their faults with the same legitimacy. Third, I don’t think there is any compelling reason to reach outside our own tradition for corrections or remedies to the failed interface between humanity and nature in the West. Cultural imports—no matter how well intentioned—often don’t graft well or quickly on the host body. Their voice is not our voice. And we’re running out of time. But, more importantly, we already have a home-based repertoire of dissenting and usable pasts. As noted earlier, most of them have been silenced and pushed to the sidelines by our more established, orthodox positions. But again, their voice is our voice. We do not so much discover them, as recognize them: they are part of us. Finally, to go beyond our own tradition would not only force me into terra incognita, which is daunting enough, but into an endlessly

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receding horizon. I would wish others to do for their own traditions what this book tries to do for our Western worldview. Difficulties at the naturehuman interface are not peculiar to the West.

What Do We Mean by the Term “Story”? The term “story” is used here in an encompassing, catch-all sense, referring to the entire spectrum of our collectively held accounts of nature. Thus, the term subsumes narratives, models, paradigms, myths, legends, worldviews, etc.—whether sacred, secular, or somewhere in between. There are only two constraints on the term. The first and most obvious is that the focus of the story must be on nature and/or the human-nature encounter. Some sections of the Bible, for example—Genesis 1-3, the Flood story, the Book of Job, Revelation—clearly qualify in full or part as nature stories, while other sections do not. The second constraint is that the story must be broadly and collectively held. Private, idiosyncratic, regional, obscure, or forgotten stories don’t make the cut. What all our nature stories—model, paradigm, account, narrative, etc.—have in common is that they are all sensemaking and/or epistemological devices. They are more than mere entertainments or “once-upon-a-time” diversions. That is, they dictate an understanding of what happens at the nature-human interface. When, for example, we bring the first chapter of the Book of Genesis to bear on our encounter with nature we understand it one way. If, in contrast, we view nature through the filter of the Song of Solomon or the Book of Job, we interpret the encounter in a very different way. The first story invokes dominion-subdue and image-of-God doctrines, fostering a disconnect between us and nature. The other two biblical stories emphasize the connection between humanity and nature. If Genesis and Job were computer programs, one would fail to compute the input that the other computes. If both were lenses one would blind us to what the other shows us. In this sense our nature stories are epistemological devices. They structure and inform our understanding of the natural world. Different structures yield different understandings. And different understandings treat the same world as if it were different worlds. I like to think of our nature stories as roughly analogous to a blind man’s cane. The cane is at the leading edge of the blind man’s encounter with the world. And just as the cane reveals the world’s configurations to him, our stories reveal the world to us. Without them, we blink at the world in incomprehension. With them, we “see” the natural world, but only on their terms. We walk into the world, as it were, guided by story, probing for the world-structures prefigured by the story. But if

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the blind man were to replace his cane with a seeing-eye dog, he would “see” the world differently. Analogously, if we switch to one of our dissenting nature stories, it guides our understanding into a quite different worldview. Again, our nature stories are sense making devices: they prefigure our knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Our orthodox stories predispose us toward one kind of world; our dissenting stories toward a very different kind. 5 One other point about our nature stories: They are the raw cognitive and attitudinal material at the infrastructure of environmental policy. Public policy, in turn, shapes collective action on environmental issues. Again, our nature stories are much more than “once-upon-a-time” entertainments. They are fundamental vehicles for making sense, assigning value, and prescribing action in the real world. Whether we like it or not, they have real world consequences—to get the world right, we have to get our nature narratives right.

Why Stories? Why the focus on stories/narratives? Two reasons. First, stories are user friendly, much more so than rational arguments. We enter a story and follow its path from beginning to end more or less effortlessly. This is much more friendly than running into a brick wall of rational argument or ideological persuasion. Stories are less threatening than argument…they tend to break down the barriers between people, to invite people into a shared reality. We walk together, as it were, through a shared story. In a sense, we become the story. Second, as easily shared realities, stories/narratives tend to bring people together into large communities. As social historian Y.N. Harari points out in his influential book Sapiens, without shared narratives/myths/stories, human society would be fragmented into family, clan, or tribe. Shared stories are fundamental to the expansion of relatively small human groupings into vast human communities—nations, empires, collectives—that go way beyond the constraints imposed by geography, language, religious and cultural differences, ethnic identity, etc. If I encounter a complete stranger on the other side of the world with whom I share a story—whether sacred or secular—we immediately recognize ourselves as like each other, as more alike than different, as participants in the same human community and worldview. 6 And why nature stories? Again, two reasons. First, this book is about the nature-human interface. Second, and more importantly, our nature stories are the cognitive and attitudinal infrastructure of the sense

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we make of our interface with nature. And, as already noted, the sense we make of nature is at the foundation of environmental policy and action.

A Few Notes on Method The method of inquiry used here is quite straightforward. We begin each section by closely reading one of our dominant nature stories. As we go through the story at hand—again, closely and point-by-point—the reader is repeatedly encouraged to consider a small set of questions: Do I think that this is, on balance, an account that promotes enmity or peace between humanity and nature? Does it reconcile us with nature or estrange us from nature? Does this story serve a hidden—or not so hidden—self congratulatory, anthropocentric agenda? Is this story at bottom a justification for exploiting or dominating nature, or for diminishing its importance? Do I really identify with this story? Am I comfortable with its message? Given my answers to the previous questions, do I want this to be my guiding nature story? And so on. The questions vary according to context, but they more or less follow this pattern. 7 A second point of method is that the questions are deliberately referenced to the type of nature story under consideration. There is no mixing of types. I do not, for example, confront our sacred, biblical nature story with scientific or economic questions. Rather, I approach it from the perspective of a participant in our Judeo-Christian religious tradition, not as a scientist, economist, or philosopher. I do not expect our biblical creation story (Genesis 1-3), for example, to answer for the findings of quantum physics, big-bang cosmology, or Darwinian evolution. Again, I approach it entirely as one steeped in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Do I as an observant Christian or Jew, or even as a secularized member of this tradition—do I want to believe this story? As a distinctively religious and/or moral statement, how does this story shape the moral dimension of my encounter with nature? Does it assign moral standing to nature? Does it permit nature to make moral claims on humanity? Do I think it does more harm than good to nature-human relations? Does my Judeo-Christian heritage have alternative stories which are simultaneously within the sacred canon, yet conducive to reconciliation with nature? And so on. The same domain-specific strategy applies to our examination of other nature stories. Regarding our scientific nature story, for example, I avoid religiously or economically motivated questions. The questions are strictly internal to science. Is the physics of science’s archetypal mechanical model, for example, supported by science’s own empirical findings? Are there contradictions between the mechanical model and

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other fruitful scientific models, such as those underlying relativity, quantum physics, Big-Bang cosmology, and biological evolution? Does the mechanical model’s “objectification” of the natural world drive an ontological wedge between the world and the knowing human subject? Does the mechanical model’s “mechanization” of nature promote the illusion that we humans—the paradigmatic mechanics—are in charge of the show? And so on. Finally, the same sorts of questions are posed while reading our dissenting, heterodox collection of nature stories. Again, each type of story is interrogated on its own terms. Alternative science stories—for example, cosmic and biological evolution—are asked the same kind of questions as those addressed to the dominant mechanical model. Do their claims have good fit with science’s empirical findings? Do they—either implicitly or explicitly—assign a privileged status to humanity in the natural world? Do they incorporate us into nature? Do they provide a basis for reconciliation between humanity and nature? In general and on almost every specific point, our dissenting nature stories yield more confident and conciliatory answers to these questions. There are two partial exceptions to this domain-specific approach. One is the book’s final section on economics, where the dissenting story borrows much of its framework and methodology from ecological science, thus interblending economics and science. There are at least three justifications for this hybrid. First, economics itself aspires to scientific standing. Second, ecology’s multivariate, systems approach keeps economics honest. The application of ecological method forces classical, market-based economics to internalize critical factors it routinely and conveniently ignores. And, third, over the last 30 years, a dissenting and growing school of economists has embraced ecological method in the service of what it calls “ecological economics.” The other exception to domain specificity is found in the “Interlude” chapter. Here I permit myself to freelance a bit, stacking various nature stories against each other or on top of each other, looking for patterns of discontinuity and continuity. The overarching purpose of this rather relentless interrogation strategy is to make the implicit explicit, to bring the tacit and taken-forgranted text into focal awareness, to lift the story out of the murmuring recesses of memory into the clear light of day. The advantage of this method is that it enables us to look at the sensemaking platform from which we usually look out; to look at the lens we usually look through; to dissect the filter that selectively lets some experience in while keeping other experience out. Unless we do this, we’ll be stuck with the same

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stories; with the same dysfunctional platform, lens, and filter—with the same computer program that fails to compute precisely the input most critical to bridging the disconnect. In the end, the method adopted here—if taken seriously—forces us to make a choice. Do we want war or peace with nature? And perhaps more to the point—since we are inextricably immersed in nature—do we want to wage war or peace on ourselves? Our orthodox nature stories encourage us to choose war. Our dissenting stories push us toward peace. My objective in this book, of course, is to encourage the peaceful choice. But either way, the method used here will force us to choose with our eyes wide open.

Endnotes 1

I borrow the notions of prejudgement and historically conditioned consciousness from the eminent twentieth century German philosopher, HansGeorg Gadamer (1900-2002). According to at least one scholar, Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) is “the most detailed and nuanced account of the event of understanding in the history of philosophy” (R. E. Palmer, 1996, p. 216). An English translation of Truth and Method appeared in 1975. 2 The expression, “theory of everything” is taken from the title of John Barrow’s (1991) book, Theories of everything: The quest for ultimate explanation. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. 3 Commager, H. S. (1967). The search for a usable past. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 4 The “wholly owned subsidiary” image is borrowed from a statement attributed to U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (cf. Gilding, 2011, p. 57). 5 The analogy of the blind man’s cane is borrowed from M. Polanyi (1958), Personal Knowledge, pp. 55-56, 59, 61. 6 Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. New York, NY: Harper. 7 The method used here is an adaptation of Michael Polanyi’s approach to modifying entrenched and tacit modes of knowledge and understanding. See M. Polanyi (1969), Knowing and Being, pp. 146-148.

PART 1 OUR SACRED NATURE STORY

Preface to Part 1 The seminal account of nature in any tradition is its creation story. Creation is where nature begins. Everything—all reality, value, and meaning—proceeds from the creation story. And nature gets its reality, value, and meaning from the same source. Our Judeo-Christian biblical heritage offers us two widely divergent accounts of the three-way relationship among God, humanity, and nature. The first—and by far the more orthodox—is found in the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. Here God creates a three-tiered reality with himself at the top, nature at the bottom, and humanity—in the image and likeness of God—hovering in between. Once nature falls as a result of Adam's sin, the Bible segues into a long redemptive narrative in which the all but exclusive focus is on the moral encounter between God and humanity. Nature fades into the background, only to be drawn out occasionally for the purpose of smiting wayward humanity. The Bible's second—and by far its less orthodox—nature story is found in the Book of Job and the Song of Solomon. Taken together, these two books narrate an alternative covenant that celebrates, first, God's overwhelmingly creationist presence in the cosmos, and, second, intimacy between humanity and nature. From nature's perspective, the Bible is a story of two covenants: one orthodox and redemptive, the other heterodox and creationist. The first forces humanity to choose between nature and God. The second brings nature and humanity together under an overarching and providential God. The time has come for our sacred heritage to prioritize its creationist covenant and to assign moral significance to nature.

CHAPTER 2 1 GENESIS 1-3: OUR FIRST NATURE STORY

All our other books, however different in manner or method, relate, be it indirectly, to this book of books … All other books … are like sparks, often, to be sure, distant, tossed by an incessant breath from a central fire. —George Steiner The seminal account of nature in any tradition is its creation story. Creation is where nature begins. Everything—all reality, value, and meaning—proceeds from the creation story; and nature gets its reality, value, and meaning from the same drama. The creation account raises and answers the most fundamental questions about nature: Is it real or illusory, alive or inert, sacred or profane? What moral, aesthetic, and ontological weight does the creator give it? Does the creator enter into it or remain aloof? And, perhaps most importantly, where does nature stand in relation to humanity? Are we part of nature or separate from it? Do we cherish nature as our mother or rule her as our servant? Does nature have a perspective and goodness of its own; or does it rise and fall on the roller coaster of human conduct? These questions are not hypothetical, at least not in our own creation account, where they are raised and answered immediately, so quickly in fact that the story seems to end almost before it begins. Our basic nature story—as told to Moses by the creator God—is in the first three chapters of Genesis, the biblical account of creation and fall. The Bible goes on for more than a thousand pages, but its primal event is over by the end of the third page.

1

While reading this chapter, it would be helpful to have the Bible at hand, open to the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Any of the standard translations will do.

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Even so, the brief opening chapters cover a lot of ground, beginning magnificently, rapidly shifting into an ambiguous voice, and ending catastrophically. Their thick, polysemous text can be mined for several stories, and my intent is to extract two of them, first on my own, and then with the assistance of a considerably more expert reader who got there before me: Saint Augustine. The result is a two-layered cake which one wouldn’t want to serve for dessert at a meeting of the Sierra Club. The first bite is sweet, but the last leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The Genesis creation story collapses the several previous questions into a basic two: What is the origin of the world? And how did evil and suffering get into the world? Unfortunately, the authors of Genesis did not keep the two questions apart, so nature gets tangled up in the answers to both. Genesis so thoroughly conflates the natural and moral dimensions of reality that nature, once created, becomes the setting for human sin; and sin, once committed, enters inextricably into nature. According to the “logic” of this conflation, God punishes not only the human perpetrators, but the natural setting as well. Adam and Eve disobey God, and, in truly stunning overreaction, he proceeds to curse them, nature, and human–nature relations. This is our first and foundational nature story, reputedly given to us by the revealed word of God. As George Steiner suggests, all our subsequent imaginings about nature are tossed like sparks from this central fire into the darkness that separates us from nature as paradise, as mystery, as nemesis.

A First Reading of Genesis 1-3 The opening chapters of Genesis play out like a three act tragedy. Act 1 answers the question about the origin of all things; Act 2 fleshes out the origins story and sets the stage for the second question about evil and suffering; and Act 3 answers the second question. 1 The drama is surprisingly brief. It begins with a glorious paean to God’s creative activity, quickly posits the test on which the entire action will rise or fall, fails the test, and ends on an all but stupefying note of malediction and vindictiveness. Our creation story is over almost before the audience is seated, but not before it has dictated a very difficult set of terms for the human–nature relationship.

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Act 1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This first verse of Genesis attests the Judeo-Christian God did not himself emerge out of the primal chaos or void. He exists apart from creation and is transcendent over it—he creates from the outside. This is an important consideration because it establishes right from the outset that the biblical God is not an immanent presence in the natural world. He is supernatural. He produces nature but he and nature are categorically different realities. His modus operandi is magisterial and omnipotent; like a sovereign magician-king, he calls creation into existence with a series of “Let there be ...” proclamations. There is a hymnal, incantatory quality to the language, each creative act following a three part formula: command, execution, appraisal—“Let there be … and it was so … God saw that it was good.” 2 In repeatedly judging the world to be good, God confers intrinsic value upon each creature as it appears: light, sky, water, earth, plants, sun, moon, animals. 3 The initial impression is of a transcendent, benevolent, and regal Divinity who creates a good and harmonious world. Suddenly, with the appearance of humans (Gen 1:26), the recurring formula is interrupted and a different note is struck: there is not to be a democracy of creatures. God creates humans in his own “image” and “likeness” and immediately charges them with “dominion” over all living creatures. These doctrines, imago Dei and dominion, dictate a creation that is hierarchically ordered, with a god-like humanity placed over all other creatures. Moreover, the doctrines do not appear to be an idle choice of words. God emphasizes his “likeness” and “dominion” imperatives by repeating them and by reiterating the word “over” eight times, lest there be any doubt: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing …” and so on. Then, as if to further underscore the point, God instructs us to “subdue” the earth (Gen 1:28), extending our rule to include non-living creatures. At this juncture, one might ask whether human rule is meant to be a hard or soft overlordship. The terms “dominion” and “subdue” are translations from the Hebrew râdâ and kâbas, respectively. The first term means to tread down or trample underfoot; the second term, kâbas, means to beat down, attack, assault, or bring into bondage. 4 It often refers to the military subjugation of conquered territory and, in another part of the Bible, to an assault on Queen Esther (Esther 7:8). Their etymology argues that “subdue” and “dominion” are not intended to convey a soft or pleasant relationship between humans and the rest of creation. 5

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Alongside the invocation to rule over nature, we are also set apart from nature. Although we are creatures, there is an unmistakable sense in which we are, to borrow George Orwell’s phrase, “more equal” than other creatures. First, as already mentioned, we are cast in God’s image, and nothing else is. Second, a close reading of Genesis 1 shows that all living creatures except humans emerge out of nature. God has “the earth bring forth” and “the waters bring forth” all plants and animals (1:11, 1:20, and 1:24), but there is no mention of nature “bringing forth” humans. We spring directly from God: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion …” (1:26). Nature is not invoked as humanity’s womb; God is our father, but nature is not our mother (at least not yet: the next act has a different version of human creation). Finally, although God judges nature to be “good” six times prior to his creation of humans, after our creation he sees his work as “very good.” This may seem a small point, but our appearance on the scene upgrades the overall quality of creation from an A to an A+. We are clearly singled out and set apart as God’s favorite. Even so, as Act 1 of the Creation drama draws to a close, God seems to want to smooth over the harshness of human dominion. He divides plants into food for people and animals, suggesting a fair distribution of sustenance and, at least for the moment, a vegetarian, non-predatory way of life. 6 Then God surveys creation, gives it his seal of approval, and rests from all the work he has done. The curtain falls. At the end of Act 1 (Gen 1 to 2:3), we have a firm, if somewhat schematic, answer to the question of origins. Everything in the universe was created at the command of a transcendent, magisterial, and omnipotent God, who seems to be very pleased with his work. There is a pervasive harmony in creation with human dominion as its guiding principle. Dominion doctrine is strongly worded, but seamlessly woven into the natural order of things. The natural order is hierarchical, and humanity is matter of factly the undisputed ruler of nature. The overarching structure of reality is three tiered, with God at the top, nature at the bottom, and humanity in the middle. As regards the human–nature relationship, two apprehensions seem to be warranted. First, it is a relationship, i.e., humanity is not subsumed by nature. A relationship, by definition, carries within itself the potential for estrangement. Second, humanity rules over nature, and rule contains the seeds of harshness from above and rebellion from below. The harmony of creation is in place, but, because of humanity’s separate and dominant status, it could be a precarious harmony. As it turns out, these apprehensions are well founded.

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Act 2 Act 2 narrates the well known story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first thing we notice in this act (Gen 2:4-25) is that God has changed. He has a different name. The “God” of Act 1 is now the “Lord God” (“Yahweh” in Jewish scripture). He also has a different location, persona, and working style. Act 1’s God had a lofty and regal manner, and he conducted his work through proclamation. In contrast, the Lord God sets up shop down on earth, and is a hands-on craftsman who molds his creatures out of the dust of the ground. Unlike God, who behaved like an exalted being, the Lord God behaves very much like a man, almost the flip-side of imago Dei. While He cannot be taken for an immanent God, he has few of the trappings of transcendence. He gets his hands dirty, wanders around the garden, keeps an eye on things, and loses his temper when crossed. 7 Reversing the sequence of creation in Act 1, the Lord God begins by making a man (Gen 2:7). The dust of the ground and his own divine breath are the ingredients for the human recipe. Humanity’s ambiguous status, already hinted at in Act 1, is made graphically explicit here: we are a blend of earthly dust and God’s breath, of the natural and supernatural. When Yahweh later makes the animals, he forms them out of only one element, the ground; his breath is conspicuous by its absence (Gen 2:19). There is nothing ambiguous about the animals’ standing—they are entirely natural—but we humans are unlike anything else in creation, a category unto ourselves. Right after the animals are created, Yahweh brings them to Adam to be named (Gen 2:19). This passage again denotes the central position of humanity in creation. God makes it and we name it. The extravagant imago Dei anthropocentrism of Act 1 is replayed here in a minor key. But, despite these assertions of human uniqueness and centrality, Act 2 reins in some of the inflated pronouncements and images of Act 1. For example, shortly after man is created, he is put in the garden of Eden “to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). There is a clear shift in tone from ruling and subduing the earth to tilling the garden. In the original Hebrew text the word for “tilling” is 'abad, meaning to work or cultivate the ground; and “keeping” translates from the Hebrew shâmar, which means to preserve or guard. The initial mandate to exercise a hard overlordship is here qualified by the notion of stewardship, much to the relief of eco-theologists who would like to find a basis for environmentalism in the Bible. 8 But the text gives no reason to assume that stewardship has cancelled dominion doctrine. Rather there seems to be a divine expectation that humanity shall be ambivalent toward nature, on the one hand to rule and beat it down, on

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the other to husband and domesticate it. The conceptual problem here is a matter of reconciling two different families of metaphors. Act 1 is full of royalist metaphors: God is kingly and humans take on his regal image and likeness. Act 2 is much more down to earth: it metaphorizes the Lord God as one who shapes creatures out of earth and plants a garden. Accordingly, its portrayal of humanity shifts toward metaphors of soil and cultivation. Taken together, the dominion and tilling passages suggest that we are to rule over the earth, but to exercise our rule as a benevolent hegemony. Nature is to be cared for as long as it yields to human authority. A spirit of hierarchical noblesse oblige is the key to harmony in creation. But just as things start to go smoothly, we are again jolted by a discordant note, this time the ominous threat of death. Yahweh instructs Adam that “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen 2:17). This constraint speaks directly to human–God relations and specifies the test on which the story’s dramatic tension hinges. But, in a more indirect sense, it also speaks to nature–human relations because, as it turns out, when Adam and Eve fail God, they bring his wrath down not only on themselves but on all of nature as well (this part of the story, The Fall, plays out in Act 3). For the moment, however, after realising that animals are not adequate partners for the man, Yahweh fashions Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. They then cleave to one another and go naked and unashamed in each other’s eyes. Act 2 ends on a note of paradisial harmony: the animals are named, the garden is tilled, and the first humans enjoy God’s esteem and each other in conjugal bliss. But the tree of knowledge and the threat of death loom disturbingly in the background. In this act the nature–human relationship has been functionally rebalanced to some degree, but remains structurally unchanged. Human rule over nature is now tempered by a mandate to rule with care, but we are still at the center of things, still God’s favorite creature, still inspired by his breath, and still in his image, unlike any other created thing. Despite this privileged status, the proscription on the tree of knowledge makes it clear that there is a limit we cannot cross. At this point the fundamental problem of the creation drama begins to come into focus: given our position at the center of things, the harmony of creation depends on whether or not we accept the limit imposed by God. If we fail God’s test, everything would be thrown out of balance.

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Act 3 Act 3 is a catastrophe. It begins with the abrupt appearance of the troublemaking serpent and ends with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It tells us that evil and suffering were brought into the world by human sin, letting God off the hook. The various negative potentials for the nature–human relationship—estrangement, rebellion, disharmony—are all realized by the end of this act. All, that is, except one: humans do not misuse their dominion. But does God misuse his? Everyone knows the story of the Fall, so we don’t have to go into the details. The serpent successfully tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, she passes it on to Adam, they are stricken with guilt and shame, and they try to hide from God. When God confronts them, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, and God proceeds to utter horrifying curses against the serpent, Eve, Adam, nature, and human–nature relations. He ends by expelling the first humans from their original Edenic home into an inhospitable natural world. Strictly speaking, Act 3 is not part of the creation story; it is a morality tale that expands out of the ominous interdiction placed on the tree of knowledge in Genesis 2:17. But because humanity is so central to creation, our moral conduct apparently has cosmic implications. As we rise and fall, so does all of nature. This is anthropocentrism with a vengeance. In fairness to the first humans, it has to be said that the Lord God changed the rules in midstream. He never warned Adam and Eve that, if they disobeyed him, he would curse all nature, and evil and suffering would come into the world. Adam was told he would die on the day he disobeyed, and this was also Eve’s understanding (Gen 3:3). The stewardship doctrine of “tilling and keeping” was presumably introduced to protect the earth from the potential for human abuse of dominion doctrine. Nowhere is it mentioned or even implied that humans had to behave well to protect the earth from God. A dispassionate reader—one not predisposed to automatically justify everything God does—would see God’s wrath as a clear case of divine overreaction, perhaps even a temper tantrum. Adam and Eve are freshly created and inexperienced, they’ve never done anything wrong before, and when they disobey they behave just like the children they are. First, they hide from their divine parent, and when he confronts them, each tries to pass the blame. But God’s response is inexplicably vindictive and uncompromising. No second chances. One gets the impression that this Lord God, despite the fine rhetoric of his maledictions (Gen 3:14-19), has some growing up to do. We have to keep in mind that he himself is a beginner in the creation and morality business. Like a novice craftsman,

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when his main project goes wrong, he petulantly smashes everything in sight. Parenthetically, a close reading of the text makes it far from obvious that Adam and Eve brought evil into an otherwise virtuous world. The serpent, one of God’s creations, clearly has a vile streak that antedates human sin. And, if by some convoluted logic, one were to argue that the serpent was in fact good, acting only as a partner to God’s test of Adam and Eve’s virtue, then God is guilty of entrapment. If one finds that inference unpalatable—would the Lord God conduct a sting operation?— then there seem to be only two other possible interpretations of the unsavory serpent. Either creation already contained evil and disharmony before Adam’s sin; or, according to popular Christian legend, the serpent was the devil in disguise. John Milton adopted this latter interpretation in his Paradise Lost. In either case, Adam and Eve did not introduce evil into the world. The point here is not that they did not sin. The point is that their sin was not original. There was at least one, and possibly two, moral agent(s) who sinned before them—the serpent and/or the devil—both of whom were created by God. By this alternative reading, orthodox Christian doctrine that Adam’s sin was the original evil is a curious blend of misanthropy and anthropocentrism. Moreover, orthodox original-sin doctrine raises some confusing questions about Satan doctrine. Does Satan exist? If so, when did he begin, before or after Adam? If he was a fallen angel, a standard feature of Satan doctrine, then he certainly predated Adam, his sin preceded Adam’s sin, and his fall preceded The Fall described at the end of Genesis 3. The orthodox Christian position that Adam committed the first sin and caused The Fall of creation stands on shaky ground. 9 Not only does this position dictate hostility between humanity and nature, but it is riddled with internal confusions. Nevertheless, it is the official position of the church and, since St. Augustine (354-430), has been the dominant interpretation of Genesis 2-3. So, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll proceed as if it were the only permissible interpretation of these passages. Whether one prefers to see God’s reaction as a temper tantrum or a sober judgment, it goes way beyond the death penalty he promised for disobedience. I hesitate to give the Bible a literal reading, but we are later told that Adam finally dies at the ripe old age of 930 (Gen 5:5). Shall we think of this as a deferred sentence? Instead of putting a single man to death, God penalizes the primordial harmony between humanity and nature, deranging the entire world for its entire history. As Act 3 rushes to its conclusion, God declares to Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you” (Gen 3:17) and “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen

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3:19). Thus, there is a sharp downward shift in the lower and middle tiers of reality. Humanity is still in God’s image, but it needs some dusting off; and still has dominion over nature, but it is no longer a harmonious dominion. We are banished from our Edenic home into a harsh, unyielding, and fallen nature where we are born in pain, live in toil, and die into the dust of the earth. This exile into a punishing nature is a recipe for human hostility toward nature. One never loves the instrument of one’s punishment. And nature, for its part, has even greater reason for resentment. Completely innocent of any offence against God, it has been dragged down by human sin. 10 It responds by rebelling against our dominion and resisting even our attempts to till it (Gen 3:17-19). There is division and enmity between humanity and nature, locked in an embrace of mutual resentment. And it doesn’t stop there. The human being is divided against itself. Made of dust and in God’s image, we are paradoxically of nature and beyond nature. The antagonism between human and nature is reproduced in miniature inside each human being. Other fissures are added by the command to rule over nature even while we endure its opposition and harassment. We are in, outside, above, and against nature. And nature is in, below, and against us. This collection of incompatible prepositions posits a relationship which is simultaneously bewildering and agonistic. It should come as no surprise that, exiled from our original home, we would feel estranged in this world and would yearn for redemption into another. *

*

*

In three brief chapters our sacred nature story begins in magnificence, proclaims human dominion and centrality, stumbles onto treacherous moral terrain, and ends in a spasm of nastiness. 11 At this point the Bible abruptly segues from its short creation story into a long providential/redemption story: banishment, exile, generations, promises, threats, punishments, covenants, rebukes, tests, trials, prophesies, wanderings, miracles, blessings, betrayals, and, through it all, a relentless yearning for deliverance into a promised land, into a new Jerusalem, and, with the late book of Daniel (c. 160 BC), for reunion with God at the end of time (Dan 11-12). The eventual appearance of Jesus as redeemer is a completely apt consequence of the botched creation story. Cast out of original paradise into a punishing natural world, we are redeemed by Jesus into another, heavenly world. The other-worldly bias of Christianity is a direct response to the fall of this world.

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At the close of the biblical creation story we are left with several “facts” of nature. First, God is transcendent. He has invested his creative talent in nature, but nothing of his being. God-nature relations are at arm’s length and, when he gets angry, punitive. Second, human–nature relations are a mess. Humans are driven out of their Edenic home into exile. Nature is our place of exile and the punishment for our sin. We are not at home is this world. Moreover, while we have been commanded by God to exercise a top-down dominion, he has also instigated a bottom-up rebellion by nature against our dominion. We are not on peaceful terms with nature. Third, human–God relations are terribly strained. Having lost God’s favor, we yearn for restoration to his good opinion. Since God transcends nature, our longing for him necessarily implies a turning away from nature. As a corollary to this point, because our own makeup combines nature with God’s image, turning toward God requires that we reject the natural aspect of ourselves, effectively tearing ourselves apart. Our relationship with God encourages alienation from this world and even from ourselves. The three-tiered cosmological structure of our sacred nature story puts human beings in the unenviable position of having to choose between God and nature. We can’t have it both ways. The moral structure of the story posits fallen nature as God’s punishment for human sin. Thus, unless we are prepared to identify with our punishment, we are forced to choose God and reject nature. Nature, for its part, blameless but cursed, simmers with hostility toward both God and humankind. God, humanity, and nature are simultaneously yoked to, and estranged from, each other. Any move toward closeness between any two parties involves betrayal of the third. Everything is tangled in a web of ambivalence and disharmony. Taken on its own terms, this text does not show much promise for a positive theology of nature-human relations. And after St. Augustine’s pivotal reading, it showed even less promise.

Endnotes The epigraph is from G. Steiner (1996). No passion spent (p. 40). London: Faber and Faber. 1 The biblical chapters do not correspond precisely to what I’m calling “Acts.” Act 1 is Gen 1 to Gen 2:3. Act 2 is the remainder of Gen 2. Act 3 is coextensive with Gen 3. 2 This is a simplification of G. Coats’ (1983) scheme in Genesis, p. 44. 3 Eco-theologists, e.g., J. Cobb, Jr. (1992), see these repeated assertions of goodness as the key to a creationist Christianity (as opposed to a redemptioncentered Christianity). 4 See E. C. Beisner (1997), Garden, p. 178.

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A further indication of the onerous implication of the term “dominion” is found in the story (Gen 37:3-8) of Joseph telling his brothers about his dream in which their sheaves of grain bow down to his sheaf. The brothers explode in anger. Already resentful about the obvious preference their father, Jacob, showed for Joseph. They said to him, “Shalt thou indeed reign over us? Or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us?” And they hated him yet the more for his dreams and for his words (Gen 37:8). “Dominion” is apparently an unpleasant concept when one is on the receiving end. There is no suggestion here that dominion meant Joseph would treat his brothers fraternally. They soon hatched a scheme to kill him, but settled for selling him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver. Even Jacob, when told of Joseph’s dream, felt constrained to rebuke his favorite son: “What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?” (Gen 37:10) 6 Of course, plants might find this arrangement objectionable. See L. Watson (1987), Dreams of Dragons, pp. 33-47, on the question of awareness in plants. Also, eight chapters further into Genesis, God repeals vegetarianism (Gen 9:3). 7 On these points, it is interesting to read the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which depicts the young child Jesus making living birds out of clay and losing his temper with other children. See W. Barnstone (1984), The Other Bible, pp. 398-403. 8 See, for example, Ruether (1992), Cobb (1992), Bratton (1986), Hall (1986). It’s also interesting to note how the New Oxford Annotated Bible changed one of its annotations between the 1977 and 1991 editions, a period during which environmental and feminist issues became increasingly problematic for Christianity. In the earlier edition, the footnote to Gen 1:28 confidently reads: “As God’s representatives, man is given dominion” (1977, p. 2, italics in original). In the later edition the same footnote waffles: “... God gives power to reproduce their kind and to exercise dominion over the earth. Together men and women, made in the image of God, share the task of being God’s stewards on earth …” (1991, p. 3, italics in original). The latter annotation adds the notion of stewardship to dominion. 9 I use the term “orthodox” (noncapitalized) to refer to standard or official Christian doctrine, not to the Eastern Orthodox (capitalized) branch of Christianity. 10 Even the stern John Calvin (1509-1564) saw “all created things in themselves blameless” (1948, p. 305). G. H. Kehm comments on Calvin: “the non-human parts of creation never rebelled against God although they were made to bear the sufferings that were consequent on (human) sin” (1992, p. 205). 11 Doing a simple page count of the Revised Standard Version I have on my desk, these 3 chapters make up only one quarter of one percent of the Bible. The pagination of my King James Version yields the same figure.

CHAPTER 3 AUGUSTINE’S READING OF GENESIS 1-3

To say, as is generally said, that St. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) is the greatest of the Latin Fathers is an understatement. He is probably the single most influential figure in the history of Christianity, arguably more important than the writers of the Gospels; indeed, his teachings influenced the eventual shape of Christian theology more than those of Jesus himself. Although Augustine was not baptized until 32 years of age, once he entered the church he made up for lost time, rising within nine years to become bishop of Hippo (in present day Tunisia) and leader of the tightly knit North African church. He threw his considerable weight into all the major doctrinal controversies of his time and left behind a vast corpus of writing, including, aptly enough, an autobiography, the Confessions. 1 I say “aptly enough” because Augustine was an extremely self-referenced man. His doctrinal convictions were deeply colored by his personal experience; and his theory of human nature was a direct and unapologetic extension of introspections on his own psychological makeup. Putting an egocentric turn on Augustine may seem a bit harsh, but at least one of his contemporaries, the British monk Pelagius, shared this view, and his melodramatic, confessional approach to doing moral theology clearly invites it, at least as an hypothesis. 2 He was almost morbidly preoccupied with his own sinfulness, particularly sins of the flesh, and did not hesitate to generalize his own guilt to all humanity. In fact he insisted on the representativeness of his personal experience and argued that those who experienced themselves otherwise, even the holiest of ascetic monks, were guilty of denial or arrogant pridefulness. 3 But what do these observations about Augustine’s personal peculiarities have to do with our sacred nature story? A lot, as it turns out, because Augustine seems to have built the foundations of his entire moral system on his reading of Genesis 1-3. And since his moral doctrine won out over all competitors during the formative period of Western Christianity, his interpretation of these three chapters was, for all practical purposes, definitive. That Genesis conflated human morality and nature presented no problem to Augustine: it perfectly fit his conviction that

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human sinfulness festered like a malignancy at the center of reality itself. This conflation is counterintuitive to the modern mind, which tends to separate morality and nature into distinct domains of reality. Most moderns (and even many ancients) would reject as superstitious the proposition that my telling a lie today would determine whether or not my cherry tree blossoms tomorrow. But for Augustine, nature had no existence independent of sin: lies wither cherry trees. While nature’s occasional beauties were evidence of God’s original creative act, its many disharmonies were the fallout of humanity’s profound moral pollution. In fact, Augustine held that natural disharmony was proof of fundamental disorder in the moral universe. This is not to be taken as an elaborate metaphor; Augustine literally means that nature, itself blameless, suffers the consequences of our sins against God. His view of the universe, in other words, was radically and structurally anthropocentric; and the prototypical man who stood at the center was so corrupt with sin that he radiated contamination out to the limits of creation. Reading Genesis 1-3 through Augustine’s eyes is to enter the world of the obsessive moralist who sees sin and its effects everywhere he looks. It’s not a pretty picture for humanity or nature. Of the two questions raised at the outset of the previous chapter—how everything began and why there is evil and suffering in the world—Augustine was much more inclined toward the second. But let’s start with his treatment of the first. 4

Genesis 1 Augustine’s approach to the creation story of Genesis 1 is allegorical and uncharacteristically obscure. Occasionally, for example, in his discussion of the nature of time, he scores strong philosophical points. But for the most part he offers highly symbolic and idiosyncratic interpretations of the sea, land, heavens, sky, fish, birds, etc., in God’s overall scheme. He sees Genesis’ internal inconsistencies as deliberately intended (how could God be unknowingly inconsistent?) and, for that reason, an open invitation to figurative interpretations. When he arrives at the verse about humans created in the image and likeness of God, he notes the creator did not say, “Let us make him according to his kind” (13, 22). * For Augustine, this omission was deliberate, and it means that God did not want humanity to take itself as a *

These citations refer to chapters and subunits in Confessions. For example, (13, 22) refers to Chapter 13, part 22. All except one of the quoted passages are from R. S. Pine-Coffin’s translation (Penguin Books, 1961).

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model. On the contrary, God wanted us to remake ourselves in his image, more specifically to align our will with his will. Image-of-God doctrine was less a statement of accomplished fact than a program for seeking closeness to God by a joining of wills. True to form, the moralistic Augustine did not see imago Dei as defining humanity’s ontological position in the cosmos. He saw it as a moral standard to guide the Christian toward God’s will and away from human wilfulness. Ontological standing is an outgrowth of moral standing. For Augustine the latter always takes priority. Augustine’s treatment of the dominion passages is even more elusive. We rule over all things because, unlike “the brute beasts,” we have the kind of intelligence that permits us to “take in the thoughts of God’s spirit” (13, 23). This neoplatonic notion of the compatibility of human and divine intelligence effectively collapses dominion into Imageof-God doctrine. As regards the “brutes” whom we rule, they are taken entirely in symbolic terms. For example, Augustine interprets the sea as the repository of the pagan multitudes and land as the domain of the faithful. The Christian “dominion over the fish of the sea” symbolizes the power to raise pagans, like fish, out of the sea to receive God’s grace on land. Our intelligence also gives us the power of language which enables the persuasion of pagans to the truth. Flying birds symbolize the words spoken by humanity under the influence of God’s holy book. Our dominion over birds, then, is a metaphor for our command of language. And so forth. The upshot of all this allegorizing is that Augustine simply sidesteps the ontological and moral implications of dominion doctrine for nature-human relations. As he reads on into the next two chapters of Genesis he approaches the relationship as an expression of the Fall, not of dominion doctrine. In the context of the creation account of Genesis 1, he neither derogates nor engages nature on its own terms. He simply dissolves it in symbol and metaphor. Primordial nature is, of course, “good” in Augustine’s view, but good for what? Good for supplying a vocabulary to describe the relationship between the two main players, God and humanity. There is no real bite to Augustine’s commentary on the creation, and one gets the impression he didn’t have his heart in it. It’s almost as if the many creatures enumerated in Genesis 1 lack full reality for him, and here his neoplatonic streak shows again for, according to neoplatonism, the material world is a kind of degraded reality, deprived of a full complement of being. But, more to the point, it may be that the creation story simply fails to pique his interest. His attempt to read a moral subtext

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into it feels forced. Augustine does not seem to be interested in the beginning of reality itself. It’s specifically the beginning of evil that rouses his imagination. So he doesn’t really hit stride until Genesis 3, when the sinning starts, and the creation account dissolves into a morality tale. But I get ahead of myself. Augustine’s reading of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis 2-3 is better appreciated when prefaced by a reading of his own story, as laid out in the autobiographical Confessions. Here we are struck by two overarching themes: a guilt-ridden obsession with sin, particularly sins of the flesh, and a professed helplessness to control his lustful urges. We also stumble upon a revealing vignette: like Adam, the young Augustine had an encounter with a fruit tree.

Confessions Augustine begins Confessions with a discussion of infancy. His own earliest days are lost to memory, but he compensates by making extensive observations of other babies. He is not impressed. In his view infants are demanding, jealous, selfish, and ill-tempered … anything but innocent. “If babies are innocent,” he notes caustically, “it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength” (1, 7). Their bad will only proves they are contaminated with sin from the outset: “I was born in sin and guilt was with me already when my mother conceived me” (1, 7). Things did not get any better in his boyhood where he sinned by neglecting his studies, disobeying his parents and teachers, and loving games too much (1, 9-10). The dispassionate reader may think these part of a normal childhood, but Augustine would fix him with the baleful observation that sin is so deeply ingrained in human nature, it is taken as normal. He had been, in a nice turn of phrase, “so small a boy and so great a sinner” (1, 12) and sums up his earliest years with a plea: “Can this be the innocence of childhood? Far from it, O Lord! But I beg you to forgive it” (1, 19). Adolescence, of course, only worsened matters, introducing him to sexuality: “I ran wild with lust that was manifold and rank” (2, 1). “I could not distinguish the clear light of love from the murk of lust. Love and lust together seethed within me. In my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body’s appetites and plunged me into the whirlpool of sin” (2, 2). Augustine’s overheated vocabulary obviously singles out this category of sin for special opprobrium. At seventeen years of age, he goes off to school in Carthage where no sooner does he get into town but, in his words, “I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust … so I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness

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and clouded its clear waters with hell’s black river of lust” (3, 1). He soon takes a mistress to whom, remarkably enough, he is faithful. But he does not take heart from that, choosing to insult their relationship as “a bargain struck for lust” (4, 2). When Augustine is eighteen, he and his mistress have a son, Adeodatus. Years later when the boy is fifteen and, by his father’s own admission, an excellent and gifted lad, Augustine nevertheless refers to him as “my natural son born of my sin … for there was nothing of mine in that boy except my sin” (9, 6). Even conceding the large cultural differences between the present time and late fourth century North Africa, one has to agree this is an odd way for a father to characterize what he has bequeathed to his son. But it doesn’t stop there. When Augustine’s beloved mother dies, at first he is unable to weep. A day or two later, his grief finally erupts in heartfelt tears. Immediately afterward he questions himself whether or not “I sinned by weeping for my mother, even if only for a fraction of an hour.” Augustine was unable to turn a stone without finding a sin, if not his own, then someone else’s. One might easily conclude from all this that Augustine was too hard on himself. 5 Perhaps so, but as he probed deeper and deeper into his troubled moral career, he became convinced that his will was irreparably damaged by something over which he had no control: a fundamental perversity and disorder inherent to human nature. There was a sense in which his sins were not his own. He spent years, he tells us, trying to reach out to God only to be dragged back into sins of lust each time he got close to a breakthrough. He found sexual libido to be particularly defeating: was this because, as the Manicheans taught, the body was inherently evil? Although Augustine had himself followed the Manichees for a period, he eventually abandoned the sect because he found this sort of thinking too crude. 6 Augustine concluded that the problem with sexuality was not that the body was too strong, but that the will was too weak. The sinner is failed by his will, not his body. Instead of exercising easy dominion over the body, the will was enslaved by it. In fact, Augustine claimed, despite all the trouble it had given him, lust was not the worst of sins. What made lust stand out from the pack was that it was the sin in which the lineaments of the enslaved will were most clearly displayed. In parsing out the complex workings of his own will, Augustine knew that he did not want to sin—quite the reverse, he wanted the opposite—and yet he sinned. But in sinning, he had to admit that he at least partly wanted to sin. His will, in other words, worked against itself, it was divided against itself, while his body mocked its efforts. 7 Not only that, but he also noted that there are times when the will directs the body to sin sexually but the body is impotent. Lust rebels

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not only against the will, but in a paradoxical sense even against itself. 8 The body was in open, contemptuous, and bewildering rebellion against the will which, in turn, was divided against itself. Human moral life is totally fragmented, each part in rebellion against itself and all other parts. This is the topography of sin. Augustine was convinced, based upon introspection into the thwarted workings of his own will, that this pattern was engraved on the human soul; in other words, that his experience was universal. He also concluded that, against such an opponent, the human being was helpless. Our unaided efforts, no matter how energetic and well intentioned, could never prevail. Only God’s free gift of grace could guide the will safely through the maze of sin. This is what Augustine meant when he claimed that God must love us before we can love him. 9 Taken on its face, this is simply a sugarcoated way of saying that human moral life is profoundly passive. It’s no wonder his contemporary, Pelagius, accused Augustine of preaching a doctrine of “moral torpor.” But, undeterred, Augustine pressed on, concluding that, just as we cannot achieve virtue on our own, we do not sin on our own. Sin is put into the soul at the moment of conception. Because of this the will cannot freely choose to sin or not sin. The will is not free at all. It is paralyzed. The reason Augustine could not stop sinning by his own efforts was that, at some fundamental level, he was not the sinner. He was being sinned through. By whom? By Adam. What was the sin? Original sin. And what was the consequence of this sin? The Fall from Edenic harmony into chaotic nature. By tracing this line of reasoning, one can see how Augustine found the answer to his personal moral paralysis in Adam’s sin. For Augustine, religious conversion was not simply a matter of shifting allegiance from one set of beliefs to another. It was a deeply psychological exercise, and indeed it should have been. But there is a point at which personal introspection degenerates into egocentrism. One wonders whether Augustine passed that point. Either his reading of the Bible is exceptionally self referenced or his “reading” of his own life is very Adam referenced. Or both. As my earlier comments indicate, I lean towards the first alternative, but whichever view one favors, Augustine’s Confessions reveal an extraordinary correspondence between the sense he makes of his own life and the sense he makes of Genesis 2-3. The correspondence only thickens with the vignette about the fruit tree. When he was sixteen, he writes, he ran with a bad crowd that liked to stay out late at night. One night they tore all the pears off a neighbor’s tree. It was not because they wanted to eat them. They had a rowdy good time just throwing the pears away. In reflecting back on this

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incident, Augustine asks himself: why did he steal the pears? “For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. If any part of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavour … What an abomination! What a parody of life! What abysmal death! Could I enjoy doing wrong for no other reason than that it was wrong?” (2, 6). This incident and his retrospective interpretation had a powerful impact on Augustine. His story of himself and the pear tree bears an obvious parallel to the Bible’s account of Adam, Eve, and the forbidden tree of knowledge. When Augustine raises the same question of Adam as he did of himself— why did Adam take the fruit?—he comes to the same answer: for the pure joy of rebellion against God, for the pure joy of sinning. This is the original sin. Augustine had this conclusion in the palm of his hand around the year 400. For the remaining thirty years of his life, caught up in one doctrinal controversy after another, his fingers gradually tightened around it until no force, no voice of reason or holy persuasion, could unlock his grip. This clenched fist pounded out the basic shape of Christian moral theology in the West for the next 1,500 years. Prior to Augustine’s birth (354), Christianity’s main themes were love, forgiveness, community, and freedom. After his death (430) its main themes were sin, guilt, and temptation. None of this is to say that before Augustine Christianity was friendly to nature. It was at best ambivalent. But after Augustine, it became a matter of dogma that nature had been pulled down by Adam’s sin and was in open rebellion against human dominion. Adam had dragged nature down, and nature in turn dragged the corrupted human will even further down. The human–nature relationship was a collaboration in sin and mutual contempt.

Genesis 2-3 Returning now to Augustine’s reading of Genesis 2-3, we find he moves immediately to the four passages of commandment, sin, shame, and fall. First, the commandment: And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Gen 2: 1617)

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Here God makes it perfectly clear that Adam (Eve does not exist yet) is free to eat whatever he wants, basically to do whatever he wants, except one thing: the tree of knowledge is off limits. But why did God command Adam not to eat of this tree? Why didn’t he just make the tree physically inaccessible? Moreover, why did God specify a consequence—”you shall die”—if his commands were disobeyed? Obviously God’s understanding was that Adam was free to disobey if he chose to take the consequences. The tree was a test of freedom. Is free will compatible with obedience to God, or does it by its very nature chafe against every constraint, even against the will of the God who created it? Is freedom a gift or a curse? In his early Christian writing Augustine saw free will as a gift. But as he got older, he came to see it as necessarily perverse: to have freedom is to use it, ultimately to “prove” it. Its definitive proof is unbridled self expression, to go against other wills on principle, even against God’s. Free will inevitably degenerates into wilfulness, into the “freedom to do wickedness.”10 For Augustine, God had drawn a very clear line. He told Adam he could cross all lines except this one. After this clear commandment, Augustine moves to its clear violation. One wonders if in his memory’s eye Augustine saw the pear tree of his youth. Just as he and his rowdy friends ran toward the pear tree years ago, he now runs ahead to Genesis 3:6-7 where his biography is all but rewritten in miniature. Adam and Eve are at the tree eating its fruit, relishing the “flavor of sin,” showing the pure perversity of free will. The immediate consequence is lust and shame. Augustine must have felt like he was looking in a mirror: … she (Eve) took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Gen 3:6-7)

They eat of the tree, they feel sexual shame, they cover their nakedness with leaves. Augustine was profoundly struck by this quick sequence of events, interpreting it as a tragic instance of the punishment fitting the crime: just as Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s will, their bodies now rebelled against their will. 11 Up to this point their wills had been in harmony with God’s and their bodies had been harmoniously at the bidding of their own wills. But no longer. Suddenly their bodies mocked them with feelings of lust and shame. For Augustine this was the first sign of the Fall: the human body in lustful rebellion against the human will. The rebellion of all nature against human dominion was soon to follow.

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An entire moral theology, full of ferocious symmetries and linkages, grew out of Augustine’s interpretation of these two verses. The first and most obvious linkage is that Augustine surely saw himself in the verses or, more to the point, saw the verses in himself. Augustine recognized in Adam’s sin exactly what he felt in himself: wilfulness, lust, guilt, and shame. This was not a mere resemblance. He concluded that Adam’s sin had literally been deposited in him; and, if in him, then in everyone. Just as we have all inherited Adam’s humanity, we have all inherited his sin. Adam was, in other words, a corporate personality and his original sin was a corporate sin. 12 Prior to his sin Adam was serene in his and Eve’s nudity: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Gen 2:25). After his sin he felt lust and shame. Without sin, there is no lust. The fact that we humans routinely feel lust is proof that Adam’s sin is in us. But Augustine didn’t stop there. The juxtaposition of original sin and lust in the text had further implications. Clearly, lust was not itself the original sin. That was disobedience. Lust was the immediate punishment for original sin. Again, most of us might think this an odd contention because we think of lust as a pleasure, not a punishment. But for Augustine lust was a humiliating rebuke to the will. Its significance, as described earlier, is that it captures so clearly the texture and feeling of sin: no sin taunts the helpless will as clearly as lust, turning the soul away from the sublime pleasure of knowing God and toward the corrupt pleasures of this world. Of course sex is pleasurable—Augustine knew that very well— but to prefer it to God and to actually feel oneself helplessly in the grip of this preference was for Augustine an unspeakable humiliation and punishment. The linking of these two verses (Gen 3:6-7) also gave Augustine the clue to how original sin is passed on. It is transmitted, aptly enough, by sex; that is, by endlessly repeated surrenderings of the will to—what else?—lust. Semen is the vector of original sin and it is deposited like a pathogen in the child at the moment of conception. For Augustine, original sin was a kind of venereal disease that infects, not the sexual partner, but the newly conceived child. No child is innocently conceived. Every child is conceived in the carnal heat of lust. Once Augustine’s airless system is entered, it takes on a logic of its own. One can almost see him gathering up all the loose ends. There are also two or three nicely drawn symmetries in Augustine’s account, which gives its repugnant content an intellectually pleasing shape. The first, mentioned above, is his notion of poena reciproca, God’s perfect fitting of the punishment to the crime. Adam’s crime of rebelling

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against God’s will is immediately punished by his body’s rebellion against his own will. This loss of primal harmony between divine and human will leads to analogous disharmonies between human will and sexual desire, between body and soul, between husband and wife, and, in a few more verses, between humanity and nature. Here we begin to get an inkling of Augustine’s natural theology, if such it can be called. The rebellion of the body—nature’s most intimate incursion into the human design—is only the first assault of many to come. Augustine also notes, remarkably enough, a symmetry between lust and death. In God’s prohibition on the tree of knowledge, he declared that death would be the consequence of eating its fruit, but, in Adam’s violation, lust was the immediate consequence. Augustine pulled the two together into a neat bracketing of human life: it begins in lust and ends in death, each a rebellion of the body against the will. The sexual act, in other words, is a prefiguration of death. 13 This position ran counter to almost all previous opinion in Christianity. All orthodox Christian teaching agreed with Augustine that extramarital sex was a sin and that it was bad form to overdo it even in marriage. But, until Augustine, no major figure advanced the notion that sex was a miniature instantiation of death. On the contrary, they were taken to be opposites. God had commanded that humankind “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …” (Gen 1:28). Sex was the key to the reproduction of life, not a foretaste of death. The great Eastern fathers Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom, for example, saw sex as “a merciful, if clumsy, remedy against death.” 14 This was only common sense. But Augustine pressed on. With advancing age he increasingly became a prisoner of his own contortions of common sense. Moving several verses ahead, we finally arrive at the Biblical basis for Augustine’s theory of fallen nature. After cursing the serpent and Eve, God turns to Adam: And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee … cursed is the ground for thy sake … thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee … In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Gen 3:17-19)

The man who in Genesis 1 was the image of God is now reduced to dust. He is fallen, and with him all humanity falls. But Augustine notes, quite accurately, that God also lashes out at nature, “cursed is the ground for thy sake,” transforming nature into a force that harasses, resists, and ultimately

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absorbs humanity. Adam’s sin brings down not only humanity; it brings down everything. Adam is more than a corporate personality; he is a cosmic personality. In Augustine’s view Adam’s sin restructured the entire cosmos, first shattering the moral center of creation and then, as a direct consequence, dragging down the natural universe. The Bible’s primordial three-tiered hierarchy had God at the top and nature at the bottom, with humanity in the middle, its body turned downward to nature, its soul upward to God. When Adam disobeyed God, he profoundly disturbed the moral fibre that held the whole system together, resulting in a seismic collapse of the middle and lower levels. Suddenly harmony drained out of the created universe. All of nature—including our own bodies—was in rebellion against human dominion. Each part of nature was in rebellion against all other parts, the great chain of being was fragmented, and evil and suffering entered the world. Since it would be inconceivable for God to have created evil and suffering, their ubiquitous presence—hunger, murder, slavery, lust, ignorance, sickness, toil, death—their presence is proof that Adam’s sin was a cosmic sin. Paradise was lost, and, in Augustine’s view, rightly so. God gave an explicit command and he specified a clear punishment. Adam clearly disobeyed God’s command and deserved the punishment. As noted earlier, one might object that God had promised only Adam’s death (Gen 2:17), nothing so extreme as the fall of creation, but Augustine was disinclined to quibble. Adam’s sin was a direct affront to divine sovereignty, and we were lucky to have been punished so lightly. We are wicked to the core, nature is deeply corrupted by our cosmic sin, and our efforts at self recovery are useless. Only God’s infinite love and mercy and the redemptive sacrifice of his son have given creation a second chance. The last few loose strings have been tied together. Or have they? Despite the apparently tight weave of Augustine’s system, it seems to incorporate at least one serious break. He was a fierce and uncompromising advocate of God’s sovereignty, and yet he seems to have assigned extraordinary power to Adam. Augustine could not entertain the notion that God, in his infinite mercy and goodness, would have created evil and suffering. 15 So these had to be a consequence of Adam’s sin. But suffering and evil are not minor adjustments to creation. For Augustine, the universe was wracked with disharmony from one end to the other, and the world was groaning under the weight of endless sin, evil, and misery. If Adam had been the cause of such radical restructuring of the entire moral and natural universe, then he was, in effect, its co-creator. This implication struck at the heart of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence.

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Had Augustine’s obsession with sin trapped him into an egregious error? Was his ostensible theocentrism in fact a covert anthropocentrism? I think this is an eminently plausible hypothesis, and it puts Augustine in a very embarrassing position. Let’s review the matter. As clearly shown in his Confessions, Augustine’s life was plagued by sin, particularly by sins of the flesh. Despite repeated efforts, he was unable to stop sinning. His will was so enslaved and so divided against itself that he was forced to conclude there was a deep corruption in his soul. Being an extravagantly self-referenced man, he decided that, if this were true of him, it was true of everybody. But where did this universal corruption come from? A careful reading of Genesis 1-3 gave Augustine the answer. The sin in each of us is Adam’s original sin. Adam was a corporate personality and his sin was a corporate sin. Moreover, since his sin immediately released feelings of lust, Augustine argued that lust was the mark of human corruption. The “proof” of all this was that Augustine was paralyzed by the lust he felt squirming in himself. This was not a modest line of reasoning, in either sense of the term. Augustine so closely identified with Adam and generalized so confidently from his own experience that one begins to wonder who, at bottom, was the corporate man: Adam or Augustine? Had Augustine seen Adam in himself, or had the author(s) of Genesis misspelled the main character’s name? Again, as noted above, there is the problem of Augustine’s cosmology, which holds that morality is central to, and inseparable from, the natural structure of the universe. When God created the world, according to Genesis 1, it was “very good.” But the world is now saturated with evil and suffering. How could it have gone from so good to so bad? It is inconceivable that God himself would have produced a less than completely good world, at least in Augustine’s view. Again, it follows that evil and suffering must have entered creation through Adam’s sin which, in cracking the moral center of things, radiated its cosmic damage throughout the universe. The difference between the good world originally created by God and the fallen world we now have is profound and structural. In other words, Adam, through his sin, re-created the world. This makes Adam a cosmic personality, and is a clear infringement on the exclusivity of God’s creative prerogative. Moreover, given Augustine’s close identification with Adam, we have to wonder who was the cosmic man. Again: Adam or Augustine? This line of analysis transforms the root metaphor of Augustine’s moral and natural theology from a tightly woven fabric into a set of Chinese boxes. Inside the theocentric box is an anthropocentric box; and

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inside that one is an egocentric box. Which box tells the truth about Augustine’s theology? The only way to restore God’s creative sovereignty would be to deny that Adam and Eve committed a sovereign, original sin. But such a sin was committed. If they didn’t commit the sin, who did? If they weren’t guilty, who was? This begins to get pretty sticky. To keep from assigning a piece of the creative action to Adam, one has to deny that Adam freely defied God’s will. This forces one to conclude that God willed that Adam defy his will. If so, then Adam was merely a puppet, and God committed original sin … and the whole system is a farce. Or is it? Augustine found a slippery way out of this dilemma in what is called “Fortunate Fall” doctrine. According to this doctrine Adam’s sin was not merely an evil, but an indispensable part of God’s overall redemptive plan and, therefore, a good. If Adam had not sinned, there would have been no Fall; without the Fall, there would have been no need for redemption; no redemption would have meant no redeemer, that is, no Christ; and, of course, without Christ there would never have been Christianity. According to this logic, Adam’s peccata originale was, in fact, a felix culpa, a happy failing, that led to a fortunate fall. It must have been very difficult for Augustine to swallow the possibility that a sin could be anything other than an evil, but here was his dilemma. Either Adam’s sin was so determining that he co-created the structure of the universe, an unthinkable encroachment on God’s sovereignty; or, to salvage God’s sovereignty, Adam’s sin had to be traced back to God’s will. But if God willed Adam’s sin, He willed evil, an equally unthinkable conclusion. The way out of this fix was to accept the contortion that some sins—including original sin—are good. The twin notions of felix culpa and Fortunate Fall got Augustine off the hook. They enabled him to assert God’s absolute sovereignty and goodness. Taken by itself, Augustine insisted, Adam’s sin was an evil. But as a causal factor in the unfolding of God’s cosmic plan, it was necessarily willed by God. Therefore, it was a preponderant good. This may qualify as the mother of all tendentious arguments, but there it is: Adam takes the blame for original sin; God takes credit for it. In any event, leaving aside the troublesome issues of sovereignty and egocentrism, what emerges from Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis? His reading yields a peculiarly hermetic and airless doctrine built on the pinhead of Adam’s sin, expanding outward, and pushing its guiltridden obsessions to the limits of the cosmos. Original sin is at the center of Adam, Adam is at the center of humanity, and humanity is at the center of all creation. Tracing this sequence of centrations backwards reveals

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Augustine’s natural theology for what it is: a sin-drenched anthropocentrism that indicts humanity and scapegoats nature. While Genesis 1-3 is, by any reading, a negative account of human–nature relations, Augustine managed to make it even worse. Despite its mistreatment of nature, the biblical account of creation and fall remains our seminal nature narrative. All our subsequent nature stories—to repeat George Steiner’s image—are tossed off like sparks from this central fire. Some few are refutations, others are confirmations, but whichever way the sparks fly, their trajectories trace back to the first three chapters of Genesis. 16 Those of a utilitarian persuasion might argue that our difficulty with nature is a practical matter, amenable to practical solutions. But a careful reading of our sacred creation story shows the estrangement between humans and nature to be deeply grounded in myth and religion. No technological fix can repair this condition. It requires a fundamental shift in the tacit assumptions that underlie the sense we make of everything. In fact, within a few pages, the Bible presents an opportunity for such a shift. In Genesis 6:5 to 9:17, the sacred text tells the story of Noah and the Flood, in many ways a second creation account. This was a chance for a fresh start on human–nature relations.

Endnotes 1

Augustine (1961). Confessions. Penguin Books. (Original Latin version c. 400

AD) 2

E. Pagels (1988), p. 117. E. Pagels (1988), pp. 106, 112-113, 140-141. 4 E. Pagels (1988, pp. 98-150) and P. Brown (1988, pp. 406-447) offer excellent and detailed discussions of the early controversies between Augustine and his adversaries and how these were grounded in disparate readings of Genesis 1-3. 5 For example, his translator, R. S. Pine-Coffin (1961), p. 12. 6 But Augustine’s adversary, Julian of Eclanum (386-454 AD) accused him of lingering Manichaeism (see P. Brown, 1988, pp. 414-415; E. Pagels, 1988, pp. xxvi, 136). E. Pagels (1988, p. 106) also implies Augustine never fully abandoned Manichaean thought; as do Gordon Leff (1958, p. 34) and Uta Ranke-Heinemann (1990, pp. 66-68). 7 See Confessions (8, 5): “So these two wills within me … were in conflict and between them they tore my soul apart.” 8 Augustine, City of God, 14, 16 (as quoted by Pagels, 1988). 3

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Gordon Leff (1958), p. 37. Augustine, City of God, 13, 13 (as quoted by Pagels, 1988, p. 107). 11 See P. Brown (1988), p. 416. 12 See E. Pagels (1988), pp. 108-109. 13 See P. Brown (1988), pp. 408, 414-417. 14 See P. Brown (1988), p. 408 (italics added). 15 Given his uncompromising position on this question, what sense did Augustine make of this passage from Isaiah, in which God declares that “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isa 45:7).? Here God includes evil in his creative sovereignty. And again, in Proverbs 16:4, “The Lord hath made all things for a purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil.” 16 George Steiner (1996), p. 40. 10

CHAPTER 4 IS THE BIBLICAL FLOOD STORY AN ECOLOGICAL COVENANT?

Some Christian eco-theologians, eager to make a biblical case for environmentalism, have advanced the Noah’s Ark story as the basis for an “ecological covenant.” At first glance, this assessment would appear to be a no-brainer. After all, Noah built the ark and rescued breeding pairs of all living animals under God’s explicit instructions to save them from the annihilating flood. And when the waters receded he released them to repopulate the Earth. Noah would seem to qualify not only as the second Adam but as the first St. Francis of Assisi. 1 But before conceding the point, two questions have to be asked. Upon close examination does the great Flood and its aftermath hold up as a uniformly positive ecological narrative, never mind something as ambitious as a new covenant? And if it does not, then why do most of us in the Judeo-Christian tradition think of it as such? To answer the first question, let’s get the Bible out and turn to chapters 6 through 9 of the Book of Genesis. Right up front we are told that God decides to destroy all life on Earth because of human wickedness (Gen 6:5, 7). But if God is specifically fed up with the human species, why does he impose his wrath on nature as a whole? How could such a punitive overreaction be the foundation of a covenant between God, humanity, and nature? This is not a promising start. In any event, Noah and his family rescue a small remnant of living creatures from the Flood, suggesting a camaraderie between humans and animals—we’re all in this together. For forty days and forty nights humans and animals cling to each other for mutual survival. Perhaps things are taking a turn for the better. But when the flood finally recedes, Noah immediately builds an altar, and apparently while they’re filing out of the ark, he “takes of every clean beast and every clean fowl” and sacrifices them as “burnt offerings.” God smells their roasting fragrance and is greatly pleased. Again, we’re

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pulled up short: a subsample of the animals was rescued only to be sacrificed on the altar. God then goes on to promise a new order in his attitude toward nature and animals—“neither will I again smite any more every thing living” (Gen 8:21)—even as he inhales the pleasing odors of their burning flesh. But why sacrifice the animals? Why not spare them in God’s honor? After all, he created them alive, not dead. Surely the divine nostrils would prefer their living fragrance. There is even a later story in the biblical Book of Leviticus where the “scapegoat” is ceremonially burdened with human sin, but then released into the wild. By this formula human wickedness does not have to be countered by punishing nature—sparing nature gets the job done. 2 Moving right along, God then blesses Noah and his sons, and declares that “the fear and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth…into your hand are they delivered”(Gen 9:2). So much for the appearance of camaraderie and/or reconciliation between humans and nature. “Fear-and-dread” doctrine is a particularly nasty amplification of the “dominion-and-subdue” doctrine God had declared in the first chapter of Genesis. Almost as an afterthought he then tells humanity that we can now eat animals as well as plants (Gen 9:3). We are no longer vegetarians. God then delivers his rhapsodic paean to the rainbow as a sign of his new covenant with the Earth. But a close reading strongly suggests that he articulates not one, but two covenants, one between himself and nature, the other between himself and humans. Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of reconciliation or harmony between humanity and nature. In fact, despite a final reference to our “evil hearts,” he gives humans license to do pretty much whatever we want with nature: terrify it, own it, eat it. In a footnote to these passages The New Jerusalem Bible comments that “in the beginning man was blessed and was consecrated lord of creation; he is now blessed and consecrated anew, but his rule is tranquil no longer. In this new age man will be at war with the beasts and his fellows…” On balance, the Flood story seems to send too many mixed messages to qualify as an ecological covenant. Which gets us to the next question— with all these mixed messages, why do so many of us—from theologians on down—consider the Flood story to be the Bible at its greenest? *

*

*

I have to confess that when I recently re-read the biblical account of Noah and the Flood there was much in it that took me by surprise. I easily recognized most of the dramatic and/or charming content—God’s

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entering displeasure, Noah and the ark, the pairs of animals, the rising deluge, the forty days and forty nights, the release of the dove three times, the beautiful rainbow; even little details like the olive leaf, the watertight pitch and the cubits. But I had completely forgotten most of the nasty business: animal sacrifice, human dominion, fear and dread, etc. I seemed to have remembered a benign, sanitized version of the story. Puzzled, I asked friends to tell me the story as they remembered it, and they also left out the unpleasant themes. I had begun to think that the biblical account was the beneficiary of a collective amnesia until I asked my ten-year-old son to tell me the story. His version was as benign as the adults’ except for one feature. With a clear note of annoyance in his voice he included the part about Noah’s sacrifice of the animals. Further questioning revealed that he had first read the story two or three years ago in what he called a “children’s bible” in his elementary school library, but that he had picked up the animal sacrifice theme from a more recent reading of the King James Version he found on my desk. Then it occurred to me that collective amnesia may not be the cause of our sugar coated retellings, but that we might have been told a different version of the story in the first place, most likely when we were children. Perhaps, it’s not so much a matter of “forgetting” the nasty parts as it is of remembering too well the benign version first presented to us. To test this hypothesis, I selected a non-random sample of “Noah’s ark” stories written specifically for children: the twenty-two (!) picture story books on the topic in the library of my son’s elementary school. The results of these twenty-two readings were startling. Almost half the books (45%) failed to mention that all animals who were not on the ark were killed by the flood. This, despite the fact that all but one of the books portrayed the pairs of animals as “saved” by the ark. Many children are left scratching their heads: Saved from what? From a long swim? They have to figure it out themselves because about half the books written for them are too squeamish to explicitly point out that God killed all living things, even though the Biblical version repeats this point eight times. 3 Moreover, about three quarters (77%) of the children’s books made no direct causal connection between human wickedness and the animals’ drowning. The point that God killed all but a small remnant of life because of human sin is largely deleted. One book, to its credit, asserts that animals were innocent of wrongdoing, but finesses the issue of their unjust punishment by failing to mention that they were punished at all: there was a flood, but nobody seems to have drowned. Interestingly, this book is told from the animal’s perspective: the narrator is a mare who tells

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the story to her colt. As an animal, she points out animal innocence, but as a mother, she protects her child from the brute fact of an unjust God. Or, alternatively, the mare may believe her own story. It may have been the version told to her by her own mother when she was a foal. 4 God’s decision to exempt nature from future blame for human sin was included in only one of the children’s stories. 5 Since nature’s punishment for our sins was underplayed in the first place, its exculpation was largely moot. None of the children’s stories mentioned the sacrifice of animals; none alluded to “fear and dread”; and none mentioned that God now gave humans permission to eat animals. Only one book referred to dominion doctrine, but in a mixed message of dominion commingled with stewardship. 6 Only one book included the “into your hand are they delivered” passage, and here it was in an epigraph, not in the story itself. Moreover, in this secular, explicitly environmentalist rewriting of the flood story—Noah, wearing bell-bottoms, saves the animals from human pollution, not from God’s flood—the passage is taken as an expression of human responsibility for the well being of animals, not of dominion over them: their survival or extinction is effectively “in our hands.” 7 Although the children’s stories ignore the negative material toward the end of the biblical version, this does not mean they end prematurely. The theme of covenant is brought in at the close of two-thirds (64%) of the stories, and the rainbow, a radiantly natural image, wraps up three-quarters (73%) of the books. Popular storytellers don’t skip the ending; they simply skip over the repugnant material clustered between the landing of the ark and God’s proclamation of his new covenant. That way, once they get past the entering problem of human sin, divine wrath, and natural catastrophe, they can pursue an uninterruptedly ecological story line. Since almost all of us, like my son and the mare’s colt, first hear the story in childhood, when we are most impressionable, this naturefriendly version has the enduring truth value of a primary encounter. All subsequent encounters with the story, even if they are “biblically correct,” are selectively filtered through this first impression, which takes on authority simply for having got there first. Because of children’s flood stories the biblical version no longer has incontestable authority. This raises an obvious question, one probably as unanswerable as it is intriguing. Which account of the Flood is our real story: the one in the Bible or the one we tell our children and, in the telling, ourselves? Since contemporary children’s stories are more recent and are usually the first version we hear, it could be validly argued that their authenticity now supercedes the Bible’s.

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Popular understanding of the Flood story seems to hold that amelioration of human-animal relations is the point of the story. Dissonant material, such as animal sacrifice, “fear and dread,” etc., simply robs the story of its thematic integrity. Why on earth, we seem to ask, would Noah, after rescuing the animals, want to sacrifice and terrify them? It makes no sense. Once a more sensible, thematically coherent version of the story is laid down in the consciousness of childhood, the official Biblical version gets recast as a grumpy, dissenting account. Just ask my ten-year-old son. If this argument is true or even partially true, then Genesis 6-9 may have spawned an “ecological story” despite itself, in which narrative offshoots take root around their rotting, parent trunk. While eco-theologians have been ransacking the Bible for ecological themes, many children’s storytellers have simply appropriated its more promising episodes, such as the Flood story, and rethought them for their own purposes. Perhaps, the theologians are looking in the wrong place; or, alternatively, looking too much and rethinking too little. 8

Endnotes 1

For a sampling of ecotheologians, see T. Berry (1988), D. J. Hall (1986), H. P. Santmire (1985, 1992), J. B. Cobb (1995), R. R. Ruether (1992). 2 For the scapegoat story, see Leviticus 16:7-10, 20-22, 26. 3 Genesis, chapter 6:7, 13, 17; Chapter 7:4, 21-24; Chapter 8:21; Chapter 9:11, 15. 4 Elborn (1984). 5 Singer (1974). 6 Stoddard (1983). 7 Haley (1971). 8 I borrow the term “ransacking” from Paul Santmire. See his chapter in D. T. Hessel (Ed.), (1992), p. 60.

CHAPTER 5 A NEW SACRED NATURE STORY

We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story. —Rev. Thomas Berry Shifting from one encompassing worldview to another is neither simple nor risk-free, especially when the one we have to abandon is so deeply entrenched as to seem self evident. In order to make the shift, two things are required. First, we must be transparently clear about what’s wrong with the old worldview lest we adopt a new story that repeats the same mistakes as the old one. And, second, for us to fully embrace a new sacred story it must be authentically our own, not an alien narrative imposed on us from the outside. The new story I propose here emerges out of our own sacred biblical canon. Its long silence is our silence, and—when we let it speak—it speaks with our voice. It watches us from the shadows, waiting for us to invite it home. It is a usable past. But this raises an empirical question: whether silent or vocal, does our sacred tradition actually offer a viable alternative to the Bible’s orthodox nature story—a counter text which brings God, nature, and humanity into closer communion? Yes, it does, and the two sources we’ll discuss here are the Book of Job and the Song of Solomon. The first source asks what is perhaps the most fundamental question about divine providence: Is God’s primary function to monitor morality, justice, and suffering in the human condition, or to be the father and overseer of the created universe? Job forces a choice between these alternative views of God. And the answer, according to God himself, is that he is the Creator, that we humans are one creature among many, and that his concern for us falls under the general rubric of his concern for creation. In Job the arena of divine action and revelation is not in salvation

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history, nor in a formulaic, point-for-point retributive moral order. It is in creation. The second book, Song, makes a very strong case for a close connection between humanity and nature. Song is basically a love story where the deepest intimacies and longings between a man and a woman are spelled out in the rhythms of nature—tenderly elevating human love into an ongoing act of intimate and sensual poetry. And, very strangely for a sacred text, it leaves God out of the picture entirely—as well as all pretensions to dominion/subdue/fear-and-dread doctrine. Song does not promote us to some self-congratulatory image-of-God status above nature, but immerses us in it. Nature becomes the vocabulary of our joy in each other, our yearning for each other, our consummations with each other. Job delivers its message like a thunderbolt, Song like a soft caress. Taken together, they radically redefine God–nature–human relations. Neither account repeats the mistakes of our orthodox narrative of dominion, human exceptionality, original sin, fall, exile, redemption, and salvation. Both dissent from our orthodox nature story, even while belonging to our own sacred canon. But before entering the new story, let’s briefly review the alienating themes of our old story. 1

What’s Wrong with our Orthodox Nature Story As discussed at some length in previous chapters, our orthodox nature story is organized around several themes which poison nature–human relations. First, and most directly, dominion/subdue/fear-and-dread doctrine forces a divinely sanctioned hierarchy onto humanity’s encounter with nature: we control, subdue, and trample nature underfoot. We are its overlord, and a careful reading of Genesis 1 and 9 suggests that God does not merely permit this nastiness, but offers it as a statement about the natural order of things. Second, and more insidiously, humanity’s image-of-God status dictates an ontological estrangement between us and the rest of nature. This doctrine is a clear statement of human exceptionality: in the likeness of a transcendent and super-natural God, we are not really of the natural world. We are creatures, but set apart from all other creatures, elevated to a separate plane of reality somewhere between God at the top and nature at the bottom. Third, a doctrine of human centrality follows from the stories of the Fall and the Flood in which the disobedience and wickedness of one small part of creation—humanity—triggers the collapse of all creation. This cause and effect sequence was later raised to the level of high dogma

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by Saint Augustine’s argument that the human moral project is at the throbbing center of the entire cosmos. When our morally charged covenant with God fails—as in “original sin”—all creation groans, cracks at the center, and plunges into catastrophic disharmony. By this account, the human moral project is not merely a part or subset of creation—it is the force that holds the entire cosmos together. Because of humanity’s inherent wickedness (Gen 6:5; 8:21), creation is no longer celebrated as the primal goodness. Rather it wallows in sin from which humanity—not innocent nature—must be rescued. After the Fall and the Flood, creationist theology—God as Creator—gives way to a redemptive, salvific theology in Christianity—God as savior, God as redeemer—and to a deliverance theology in Judaism. We might want to call this a “tail-wags-the-dog” cosmology: human immorality overrides and contaminates everything. * Finally, there is God’s absolute transcendence of nature. Despite the fact that our orthodox nature story dutifully recognizes God as its Creator, he has an awkward and structurally distant relationship to it. His super-natural standing seems to impose a deep incompatibility between him and his natural creation. Even in Jesus’ incarnation, church doctrine specifies that there is no commingling of natural and supernatural substance. Moreover, as discussed earlier, God is so narrowly preoccupied with one species—humanity—that he doesn’t seem to view the rest of his vast creation as an end in itself. Instead of inspiring harmony between humanity and the rest of nature, he uses nature as a means to keep us in line. It’s difficult to imagine that, if God were close to nature, either he or we would treat it as a mere instrument. A new sacred nature story needs a God who is less transcendent and more immanent in nature. These four doctrines—dominion, imago Dei, the cosmic centrality of human sin, and divine transcendence—are the heart, muscle, and bone of our orthodox sacred nature story. The task of a dissenting, heterodox story is twofold. It must re-establish balance and proportion by getting us into nature and out of the center of creation. It must portray humanity as a citizen of the natural world, at home with our fellow earthlings. And, second, it has to shift emphasis from the salvation of corrupt humanity to the glory and goodness of God’s creation. Those of us who are religious need a sacred nature story that praises, loves, and worships God for the

*

Note that, as used here, creationism is an alternative to redemptive theology. It is not used as an alternative to the science of cosmogenesis and biological evolution. Again, I do not use the term “creationism” to suggest, for example, that humans co-existed with dinosaurs, nor for any other conflation of religious belief with scientific theory or findings.

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gift of creation. We do not need the one we currently have, which begs him for deliverance and salvation from the life and home he gave us. 2

The Book of Job This book vividly portrays two contesting views of God: God as guarantor of justice versus God as father of creation. Is God, above all, the arbiter and guardian of justice and morality in the human condition? Or, conversely, is he the creator and ruler of the universe? Does God have a special covenant with humanity? Or is his covenant with all of creation? Job forces the question: one or the other, no in between. If God is the first, then the prevalence of injustice and undeserved suffering in the world compels us to define him as either weak or uncaring … or deeply mysterious in his ways, far beyond human understanding. But if he is the second—a Creator God—then his agenda is not narrowly focused on human affairs, but is as wide and deep as the cosmos, and his ways are anything but mysterious. They are transparently clear: put simply, he is the source and guardian of reality itself, he is the difference between everything and nothing. After belaboring the first interpretation of God’s providence for 37 chapters, the Book of Job turns to God himself to settle the question. And his response is unequivocal: I am the Creator God, the God of all creatures, the God at the origin of things, the God who makes it rain where no human lives. 3 But let’s start at the beginning. The book opens with a brief prologue about how Job, a scrupulously righteous man, has lost his large family, his vast estate, his good reputation, and his robust health, stripped down to a sore-infested wretch—all this as a result of a frivolous wager between God and a mischievous member of the heavenly court. This is not a very complimentary portrayal of God, but it draws a firm line for the great debate to follow: How could God be so shallow? Do cocktail parties at the heavenly court bring out the best in him? If not, then what does? What kind of God is God? Job, of course, laments his own undeserved fate, but still declares his faith in God. Even so, he wants an explanation. Job’s calamity sets the stage for the book’s action, which plays out in two acts. The first act (chapters 3 to 37) reconstructs in excruciating detail a prolonged series of arguments between Job and three friends. All four of them subscribe to the conventional wisdom that God is, first and foremost, the guardian of justice in the world. But beyond that their basic positions are polarized and intractable: the three friends insist that God would never

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have permitted such horrendous suffering to befall Job unless he had committed some terrible sin. Thus, he should beg God’s forgiveness. But the stubborn Job responds—in rising crescendos of deeply wounded rhetoric—that he has sinned against no one, that, on the contrary, he is the innocent victim of completely undeserved punishment. We the readers know that Job is telling the truth. He is in fact a righteous and God-fearing man. He wants an explanation from God, and so do we. Job is living, wretched testimony to the fact of unjust suffering in the world. We and Job want to know how a just God could permit such a thing to happen. As already noted, a God who would allow injustice must himself be weak, cruel, or both. But it is unthinkable to accuse God of such things, so we fall back on the old bromide that God’s ways are mysterious and beyond human understanding. This, in fact, is the traditional interpretation of the Book of Job. Even so, invoking God’s mysterious ways as an “explanation” for the problem of undeserved suffering begs the central question posed by the book: again, what kind of God is God? After Job’s three friends have their say, only to be fiercely rebutted by Job, another interlocutor, named Elihu, steps forward and introduces a line of argument that begins to change the terms of discourse. At first Elihu more or less adheres to the standard line about God’s concern for justice and moral order. But then he shifts to a portrayal of God as the majestic Lord and mover of creation: 31 of Elihu’s final 34 verses pursue this new theme. 4 And Job, completely out of character, has no response … Suddenly, God appears, speaking out of the whirlwind. God’s overpowering presence fills the stage and engages Job on terms and at a scale wholly beyond Job’s complaints. First, God asserts the ground rules: He will ask the questions and Job will answer, if he can. “Where were you when I laid the foundations … measurements … cornerstone” of the Earth? Where were you when I bound the “bursting sea … commanded the morning … caused the dawn”? (38:3-12). Have you “entered into the springs of the sea” or “seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?” (38:16-18). Rising to indignant sarcasm, God rebukes Job: “Surely you know” all these things, because you were there when I created the world, were you not? (38:21). In quick succession, the Whirlwind God tosses aside the doctrines of human centrality and dominion. He “causes it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness wherein there is no man” (38:26). So much for human centrality. The swift, wild ass runs free, “scorns the tumult of the city,” and ignores “the shouts of the driver”; the wild ox does not “serve you”; even the ostrich, too stupid to protect its own eggs,

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“laughs at the horse and its rider” (39:5-18). So much for dominion “over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen 1:28). God testifies to a providential concern for his many creatures: for the lion and raven trying to feed their young, the mountain goats and deer giving birth, and how their offspring grow up to be strong and strike out on their own. He notes that the young ravens cry out to him for their food, and he provides it. And, again, he asks Job: Do you know about all these things, how and when baby animals are born, how they grow and thrive out in the open? (38:39 to 39:4). Does Job permit the hawk to soar and command the eagle to make its nest on the rocky crag to care for its young? (39:26-30). One after another, God points out his creatures, from lions to birds to grass on the ground. He watches over them, sustains them—they are his wards and he is their devoted parent. Does Job find fault with such a God? (40:2). God pauses for an answer. Job lays his hand upon his mouth—he will not answer (40:4-5). Then the Whirlwind God presses on, further raising the stakes, inviting Job more deeply into creation, turning attention to his two most fearsome creatures, the mythical monsters Behemoth and Leviathan. Behemoth has the strength of cedar, bronze, and iron in its limbs and bones. It can drink up a river, and is so powerful that only its maker can approach it. God reminds Job that he made Behemoth “just as I made you” and that the monster is “the first of the great acts of God” (40:15, 19). Again, so much for human exceptionality. Leviathan, in turn, is even more to be feared than Behemoth. No man can hook it, or spear it, or even consider doing battle with it—even the “gods” are “overwhelmed at the sight of it” (41:2, 7-9). Yet it “speaks soft words” and “supplications” to its Creator God, who plays with it “as with a bird” (41:3-5). Although it is God’s “servant,” it “has no equal on earth, a creature without fear … king over all that are proud” (41:4, 3334). Clearly, Leviathan overturns dominion/subdue/fear-and-dread doctrine with a vengeance. And clearly, God treats the monster with a fatherly fondness, leads it on a leash, plays with it like a bird. Throughout his whole speech, God manifests a closeness and ease with nature—he shows no awkwardness or incompatibility—completely unlike the orthodox God of Exodus who causes the earth to quake and tremble every time he approaches it. Here God pauses again, and again offers Job a chance to respond. Job is stunned by all that the Whirlwind God has revealed to him. Who wouldn’t be? He says little, but what he says is more than enough: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you … and (I)

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repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6). What Job had heard through conventional wisdom is refuted by what God shows him firsthand. His eye sees that God is not narrowly focused on the human condition. He is the source and Lord of all creation. And Job repents—in the Old Testament the term “repent” often does not mean repent for sin. It means a change of mind. Job changes his mind—he has a new answer to the question: What kind of God is my God? After their transformative encounter, God abruptly restores Job to twice his lost fortune (42:10). What are we to make of this? Of course, it would seem to be the humane thing to do. After all, Job was unfairly punished, and God should set matters straight, should he not? But to do so puts the lie, first, to almost everything God revealed to Job in his speech from the Whirlwind; and, second, to Job’s insight into the true nature of God: “but now my eye sees you,” and “I repent.” Job’s restoration suggests that God is not the God of all creation that he claims to be, but one who narrowly serves the cause of human justice. Does the Book of Job contradict itself? Does God contradict himself? To answer these questions, we should go back to the Whirlwind God’s speech. One of its overarching themes is that nature proceeds in rhythms and cycles, constantly repeating and recreating itself. The seasons of the year flow through their sequence in snow, hail, wind, thunder, rain, dew, lightning; they travel the paths of light and darkness; they turn dusty clods of earth into newly grown grass. The animals build nests, give birth, feed their young—who, in turn, grow strong and go forth to repeat the cycle. Even the prefatory comments of Elihu emphasize God’s unfolding seasons of the year (36:27 to 37:22). In this cyclical framework, Job’s initial rise to prosperity, his fall into disgrace, and his rise again would seem to be subsumed under the great cycles of nature. He is a creature among creatures, subject to hunger and surfeit, agony and comfort, despair and joy, decline and restoration. Does God contradict himself? Narrowly conceived, perhaps yes. But conceived on a cosmic scale, no. Just as a great forest burns to the ground, only to regrow and flourish again with the passing of the seasons, so it goes with Job: when his time comes he flourishes again. Another maverick book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes, captures creation’s cycles beautifully: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Eccl 3:1). But does this notion of nature’s rhythms and cycles leave us with an amoral God? Is there a necessary disconnect between God as Creator and God as moral agent?

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Is the Creator God Amoral? This is not the kind of question that can be resolved to everyone’s— perhaps not to anyone’s—satisfaction. But let’s raise a few starting points for discussion. As mentioned above, the cycles of justice and injustice in the human condition may be subsumed under or mapped upon the cycles of nature. As such, they would fall under God’s creationist providence, not under a special moral covenant. Even so, a careful reading of the Whirlwind God’s speech reveals that, of its 129 verses, five clearly refer to human pride and wickedness. These five verses, few as they are, suggest that there is no categorical disconnect between God as Creator and God as moral agent—even the resolutely creationist Whirlwind God admits to a degree of wiggle room on this issue. 5 What form might the wiggle room take? In creating humans God seems to have deposited a strong moral impulse in the human design. But is an “impulse” a moral system? No, far from it. Let me suggest that God creates a moral inclination in humanity, and humanity’s job is to organize a workable moral system out of the inclination. If we can’t hold up our end, does that justify our offloading the human moral project onto God? And, beyond that, does it justify our redefining the Creator God as a morally preoccupied, redemptive God? This is essentially the question posed by the Book of Job, and the Whirlwind God’s response is unequivocal: Creationist theology, to put it crudely, wins by a score of 124 to five. To even the most muddled and/or sceptical auditor, the Whirlwind speech is an overwhelming affirmation of the primacy of God’s covenant with creation. But this just leads to another question: What if the human moral project fails? Would a creationist God just stand by and let it happen? Here we enter very fraught territory which, among other things, fundamentally challenges the moral integrity and efficacy of our orthodox redemptive theology. There seem to be three answers to the question, one unthinkable, one transformative, and the third self-defeating. The all-but-unthinkable answer is straightforward and unsentimental: If the human moral project fails, then there’s a reasonable probability that the human species itself will fail. Moreover, given our numbers, ambitions, and the force of our technologies, it’s not likely we’ll go into a quiet, self-effacing decline—we’ll take many species and ecosystems down with us. The Creator God has already witnessed several mass extinctions and catastrophes in the history of life on earth; and he may soon witness another, this one perpetrated by humanity’s assault on the planet’s natural support systems. We don’t even know if God considers

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these catastrophic events as failures or as opportunities for renewing the structure of creation. Speaking for myself, I suspect that God would be saddened by the loss of young ravens, fields of grass, unfolding seasons, and even us, the cantankerous descendants of Job. But creation itself would endure, and God would generate other creatures to cherish. The transformative answer is that a compassionate God would rescue us from moral failure by offering us an alternative covenant: the one he revealed to Job. The Whirlwind God’s dissenting nature story— once adopted—would become the basis for mounting a new moral system. How so? Shifting from a salvific to a Creator God would automatically sacralize and confer moral standing on all creation, not just its human component. The structure and scale of our moral project would become coextensive with the structure and scale of creation. This shift would provide a radically new foundation for our relationship with God and our behavior toward our fellow creatures. Moreover, it would signal to us that our real destiny is to be good citizens of the life and home God has already given us. Does this scenario rule out an afterlife? Not necessarily. But it does transform the idea of “afterlife” from a massive distraction into an intriguing bonus. The critical point here is that God’s Creationist covenant is at the leading edge. Everything, including morality, flows from it. Because God is sacred, his creation is sacred by definition. Because creation is sacred, it has moral standing. Because it has moral standing, it can make moral claims on those who abuse it, including us. The moral imperative doesn’t replace Creationism. Rather, it emerges—through God’s inherent sanctity— out of creation. The third and self-defeating answer to the question is the redemptive covenant we have subscribed to for three millennia. When viewed with a clear, unclouded eye, our orthodox salvation story—while presenting itself as a moral tour-de-force—shows itself to be an exercise in paradox and internal contradiction. God’s moralized covenant with sinful humanity has failed in large part because it is supposed to fail. A savior God needs a failed human moral project to justify his inordinate focus on human immorality. This paradox also plays out the other way around: if humanity were to succeed at its moral project, it would not need a redemptive God or a sacred redemptive narrative. As discussed in an earlier chapter, this internal contradiction reflects poorly on God’s integrity, thus inspiring the early Christian church to formulate the bizarre doctrine of “fortunate fall.” Put briefly, it goes like this: if humanity had not fallen into sin, there would be no need for salvation/redemption from sin. And if there were no

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need for salvation, there would be no need for Christ the savior. Finally, if there were no Christ, there would be no Christianity. By this logic, Adam’s original sin was “fortunate” because it was a pre-condition to the greater good of redemptive Christianity. In the big picture, sin is a goodness. This tendentious line of reasoning is hardly a satisfactory answer to the question: What if the human moral project fails? But again, once God commits to redemption as his primary function, the human moral project must falter and fail. If it succeeded, both God and his redemptive program would have to go out of business. Moral failure is a precondition to redemption. A clever way around this absurdity is to transform the program into a promise: the big redemptive payoff is delayed indefinitely into the distant future—2,000 years and counting since the Christian savior was born. At that unspecified time Christ’s salvific sacrifice will come to fruition—so we are taught to believe—when the saved, the repentant, the just, the elect (choose your term) will rise en masse to a heavenly realm, leaving our earthly home behind. This is the redemptive program/promise, and it succeeds as a doctrine only to the extent it fails as an ongoing process. Moreover, for our purposes it is anything but a prescription for reconciliation between nature and humanity. For that we need a Creator God whose covenant is with the facts on the ground in the here and now. Of the three options we’ve considered, the one that advertises itself as most committed to justice and morality—the orthodox, redemptive, salvific covenant with humanity—is the one that most lacks moral integrity. It’s entire raison d’etre is based on the premise that the quantum of human wickedness remain above a critical threshold. Again, a precondition to the continuing existence of a redemptive God is that the human moral project not succeed. None of this is to say that a creationist covenant would guarantee a successful moral project. But it would be a fresh start. After our long history of self-congratulatory navel gazing, it would give humanity a sacred incentive for looking out at—and joining—the rest of God’s creation.

Can the Creator God Be a Personal God? Is the Creator a personal or impersonal God? Is he approachable or beyond our reach? Can we pray to him, take him into our confidence, and feel his presence in our hearts? Let’s look at the scriptural evidence. According to the Book of Job, God clearly has a personal fondness for his creatures—as already noted, he cares for the young ravens, plays with Leviathan, keeps a

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vigilant eye on the young mountain goats and deer, is entertained by the ostrich’s wacky antics even while worrying about her unguarded eggs, and, finally, takes the time to clear up Job’s deeply personal confusions about the nature of God. If he is to be taken at his word, the Creator God’s vastness is perfectly compatible with personhood. In praying to a God whose first priority is creation we would not beg him to rescue us from temptation, sin, and injustice. Rather we would thank him for rescuing us from nothingness, for granting us the gifts of reality, life, sentience, consciousness. We would not plead for admission into a heavenly afterlife; on the contrary, we would thank him for the life and home he has already given us. And we would praise and worship him for the great works of creation: soil, rainfall, water to drink, air to breathe, food to eat, the Earth, sun, stars, space, time … the endless procession of reality itself. This short passage from Psalm 145:5 nicely captures the attitude of the creature toward the creator: On the glorious splendor of your majesty, And on your wondrous works, I will meditate.

Much of our current repertoire of prayers is grounded in the orthodox moralistic/ redemptive covenant. Think, for a moment of the dominant themes in the Lord’s Prayer: “who art in heaven … thy kingdom come … forgive us our trespasses … temptation … deliver us from evil.” It does strike one creationist note in “give us this day our daily bread,” but only if the term “us” refers to all living creatures. Otherwise, our most widely used prayer is completely focused on sin, forgiveness, and the afterlife; a marvellous condensation of our entire redemptive convenant into a thirty-second statement. We need a new collection of prayers for a creationist covenant. A good place to start would be Psalms 104:1-31 and 148:1-13. While the great majority of Psalms are consistent with the Bible’s orthodox nature story and anthropocentric bias, these two are overwhelmingly creationist in emphasis. Psalm 148, in particular, is noteworthy because it calls upon all creatures to join together in praising the Creator: the sun, moon, stars, sea monsters, mountains, fruit trees, wild animals, creeping things, flying birds, and humans—all praise God in a democracy of creatures. 6 Psalm 104 repeats many of the themes first raised by the Whirlwind God and even has the formidable Leviathan sharing the sea with humanity’s ships (v. 26). Literary critic George Steiner has rightly identified this psalm as a marvellous instance of “nature poetry” in the Bible. 7 Unfortunately, although the Psalms are a good place to start for nature friendly themes, they very quickly run dry. Of the 150 Psalms, only

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the two just mentioned assign nature a central role. Several others refer briefly to nature or use natural images for metaphoric purposes. 8 At least one (number 8) is just plain repugnant, explicitly and joyfully celebrating human dominion over nature. In any event, there is no necessary disjuncture between a Creator God and a personal God. We can speak to, pray to, and meditate upon such a God. And we would please him by caring for all his creatures, including ourselves; by recognizing that all creatures have moral standing in their own right; and that they belong to God, not to us.

What’s Right with our Creationist Nature Story A brief point-by-point overview of the two nature stories—one creationist, the other redemptive—quickly reveals their radical differences. As already noted, the Whirlwind God tosses aside dominion doctrine as if he had never even heard of it: Dominion doctrine? What’s that? The natural forces and living creatures in Job run wild and free, full of vigor, surge, and unimpeachable strength—subject only to the benevolent rule of God himself. As for human centrality and exceptionality, the whole point of Job is to show that God’s covenant is not narrowly focused on humanity, but extends to the far corners of creation. The man Job is merely one creature among a universe of creatures. To be sure, he eventually gains an audience with God, only to learn that God routinely interacts with Behemoth, Leviathan, the young ravens, and so on. If anything, these other encounters are more affectionate, caring, playful, and fatherly than is his confrontation with Job. To cap it off, the God who speaks from the whirlwind does not appear to fit the standard anthropomorphic image associated with the biblical God. Nor, reciprocally, is there even the slightest suggestion that humanity is in God’s image and likeness. Our hubris-driven claim to cosmic centrality is best refuted by God’s offhanded reminder that he makes it rain where no man lives, only to help the grass grow. How different this is from St. Augustine’s later teaching that the human moral project is the central binding force in all creation. 9 Finally, there is the question of divine transcendence. In the orthodox creation story of Genesis 1 God commands the universe into existence from afar: Let there be light, etc. His supernature is categorically distinct from nature; his own majestic reality transcends his creation’s reality. In the Book of Exodus God has an awkward and incompatible relation to nature, resulting in fearsome turbulence whenever he approaches the earth. From the perspective of nature–human relations, the

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orthodox God is neither close to, nor at ease with, the natural world. This puts us in a tough spot: the more closely we affiliate with this God, the greater our estrangement from nature; and vice versa. We cannot be close to both God and nature. 10 In sharp contrast, the Whirlwind God is quite at home in his creation. He courses through its calms and perturbations as one intimately involved: he “enters into the springs of the sea … walks in the recesses of the deep” (Job 38:16). Also, like a doting father, he visits his creatures, feeds them, plays with them. We can’t conclude from these behaviors that he is a fully immanent God, but his closeness to nature rules out full transcendence as well. He is not Spinoza’s pantheistic God, nor is he an unequivocally transcendent God. He strikes a balance between these two polar opposites. His covenant is with all creatures; he is close to nature; his closeness sacralizes nature; and, in this sense, he authors a sacred nature story for our time. Job’s Whirlwind God displays the power, immensity, vitality, and untamed beauty of nature. But charm, sensuality, and fragrance are also woven into nature’s fabric; for that we leave Job and turn to the Song of Solomon.

The Song of Solomon In the Book of Job the main tension is between dissenting Creationist and orthodox Redemptive accounts of God. It is a discourse on substantive theology which raises and answers questions such as: Who is God? What does he do? What are his priorities? What is his relation to the natural world? What kind of God is God? Song is a very different experience, bridging the gap not between God and Creation, but between nature and humanity. It is an extended and sensual love poem about the intimacies, yearnings, memories, dreams, and consummations of two humans, sung in the rhythms, melodies, and refrains of nature. Unlike Job, it is not an exercise in substantive theology—in fact Song never mentions God, not even once. Rather it is a lyrical expression of how humanity at its most loving, giving, and vulnerable is a humanity absorbed into nature. It achieves this union by exposing human love to an almost endless stream of natural metaphor, a simple but powerful technique that effectively “naturalizes” humanity and “humanizes” nature. Let’s pause for a moment to examine how metaphor works.

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How Metaphor Works How does metaphor—which most of us view as mere verbal ornamentation—achieve such a powerful conceptual outcome? Let’s look at a hypothetical example, one that could have been drawn from Song itself. If I say my beloved is the first flower of spring, I do not mean to suggest that she is literally a flower. Rather, I am using metaphor to transfer certain features of nature to her: freshness (first, spring), beauty (flower), fragrance (flower), fertility (spring), and so on. In doing so, I achieve an aesthetic effect—I spin a certain poetic magic—that goes way beyond calling her a beautiful woman who smells good on March 21st. But that’s not all. According to language philosopher Max Black, metaphor has an even more fundamental cognitive or semiotic effect that breaks down categorical distinctions—in this case between humanity and nature—by commingling features of one with features of the other. 11 According to Black, my example captures the first dynamic of metaphor: by transferring images and meanings from nature (a source domain) to humanity (a target domain) it effectively “naturalizes” humanity. But it doesn’t stop there. The second dynamic of metaphor is flowback from target to source. Once my beloved is poetically commingled with spring flowers, the meaning of spring flowers changes to incorporate features of my loved one: flowers now conjure up my beloved. This is the “humanization” of nature. The bi-directional commingling subtly erodes the cognitive barrier between nature and humanity and, when repeated over and over—as in Song—further undermines the distinction. Metaphor is much more than verbal decoration. It changes the meaning of things, forces us to rethink things, to understand and know them differently. 12 My argument here is that this is precisely what Song does; and, in so doing, it radically dissents from our orthodox sacred nature story.

Reading Song Perhaps we should let the text speak for itself. At the beginning of the second chapter, the woman says of herself: I am the rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.

And recalls the last rendezvous with her lover:

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As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, So is my beloved among young men. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

She anticipates their next coming together: The voice of my beloved! Behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.

Then the man says to her: Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, The rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; The time of the singing birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth her figs, and the grapevines are in blossom, they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

The woman reflects on their reunion: My beloved is mine and I am his: He feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, be thou like a gazelle or a young stag upon the cleft mountains. 13

The man is an apple tree whose fruit she sweetly tastes; the woman is a lily of the valley, and he, the gazelle, feeds among the lilies. The woman is a cleft mountain and he, the stag, mounts her. 14 Their reunion flows as winter into spring, celebrated by growing flowers, singing birds, and

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fragrant grapevines bursting into blossom. They and their love are immersed in nature—and the fig leaves reveal as much as they hide. In chapter 4, the man speaks: “Your eyes are doves behind your veil” … “your lips distill nectar, my bride, honey and milk are under your tongue.” She is a “garden locked, a fountain sealed” who suddenly opens into “a garden fountain, a well of living water.” And she replies: Awake, O north wind and come thou south. Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat its choicest fruits. 15

Again, the nature metaphors blow through the text like wind. Her locked, chaste fountain opens to her lover, and her garden (i.e., she herself) becomes his garden where he eats her choicest fruit. Two chapters later, the woman “looks forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun,” and her “belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” She is as “stately as a palm tree,” her breasts are “clusters of grapes.” And her lover will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its boughs.

while declaring to her that the scent of your breath (is) like apples, and your kisses like the best wine that goes down smoothly

Responding to his eager passion, the woman invites him to go out early to the vineyards and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened … There I will give you my love. 16

Again, the consummation of their love is embedded in nature. Human love and the scents, tastes, rhythms, and anatomy of nature are inextricably interwoven. Song is a radical departure from our orthodox account of the fundamental distinction, alienation, and enmity between humanity and

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nature. In Song we and nature live within each other, as breath to the scent of apples, as music to birdsong, as hope to tomorrow’s dawn.

Song’s Portrayal of Nature In the Book of Job, nature may have a rough charm, but the overall impression is of vibrant energy and untamed wildness. By any standard, the Whirlwind God’s nature comes across as unimpeachably real, despite its inclusion of mythical monsters such as Behemoth and Leviathan. In sharp contrast, Song portrays nature as friendly and harmonious, perhaps too good to be true. This gentle bias raises two questions. First, is Song an idealized, Edenic fantasy? Is it backward looking nostalgia for the Garden of Paradise? If so, it’s a dishonest treatment of nature–human relations: nature is not Edenic now, nor has it been since the Fall, as described in the third chapter of Genesis. 17 Second, is Song’s version of nature—its repeated allusions to vineyards, gardens, heaps of wheat—a bit too cultivated to truly represent nature’s wild side? Is it imbalanced toward domesticated nature—perhaps even an exemplification of stewardship doctrine? Let’s address each question in turn.

Is Song an Exercise in Edenic Nostalgia? A superficial reading of Song might suggest that it tries to recapitulate the Garden of Eden. But the Edenic hypothesis is easily refuted upon closer examination. Of course, the natural images in Song are appealing and benign; after all, they are selected for inclusion in love poetry, not for a screed on nature red in tooth and claw. But, benign as the images may be, they don’t come close to Isaiah’s Edenic fantasy about nature when the coming messianic king restores it to its “original” harmony (Isaiah 11:68): The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze … and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The Bible knows how to reconstruct Edenic imagery when it wants to, and Song isn’t it.

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There are numerous telling differences between the two stories, some major and some minor. In Song, for example, the woman has bad dreams (3:1-5, 5:2-8)—was Edenic sleep ever restless? In Eden, Adam and Eve go naked, unashamed, and cleave unto each other (Gen 2:24-25), but there is no explicit mention of passion, desire, or yearning between them. In fact, the first hint of such emotions comes after they eat the forbidden apple, and by then their passion is felt as shame. In Song, the vegetation includes thorns (2:2), while thorns and thistles are altogether absent from Edenic nature, appearing only after the Fall (Gen 3:18). On the flip side, Song’s world does not center on a sadistic booby trap like the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17). In fact, apples receive nothing but favorable mention in Song, full of refreshment and fragrant scent (2:3, 5 and 7:8). Finally, there is nothing distinctively Edenic about, for example, flocks of goats descending mountain slopes or winter giving way to spring (4:1, 2:11-12). These events occur regularly in postlapsarian nature. Song’s gentle imagery, in other words, is chosen not as a nostalgic return to Paradise, but because it intersects beautifully and sensually with human love, yearning, and eros. In retrospect, the Garden of Eden seems to have had nothing to do with nature as nature. Basically, it was a sugar coated setting for God’s test of human obedience. We failed God’s test, and Eden failed nature’s test. Song celebrates nature as it is. Eden celebrates nature as it is not.

Does Song Pass the Nature Test? The bi-directional flow of metaphor is a very powerful force in Song. As the poem progressively embeds the human lovers in nature, nature adjusts to include them in its bed—just as it does for its other creatures. Some of the nature metaphors in Song are clear evocations of wildness: gazelles and stags leaping on mountains, the rain soaked passage of winter into spring, the breaking dawn, the north wind blowing south, and so on. But some other metaphors evoke humanly cultivated sectors of nature: vineyards, gardens, clusters of grapes, heaps of wheat. The wild portrayals of nature feed forward and naturalize humanity, while the cultivated images testify to the flowback humanization of nature. The man, for example, bounds like a stag over the mountains, but he and his beloved meet in a vineyard. There is a fine balance struck here. A kind of benevolent cycle is set up in which wild nature naturalizes humanity, which, in turn, humanizes nature, until it becomes difficult to distinguish which is which.

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When natural metaphor is used this way, it goes beyond the nature–human encounter to define the encounter between human and human. In Song, we humans are so integrated into nature that our expressions of our own humanity serve simultaneously as expressions of nature. Or do they? Might it be the other way around? Might the circular flow of metaphor in Song transform nature into a humanized playground, rather than humanity into an expression of nature? This is a cautionary point. But the point should not make us question the validity of Song’s dissenting portrayal of nature. Rather, it should caution us against the knee-jerk attribution of two orthodox themes to the new nature story: (a) that nature and humanity are incompatible by divine edict, and (b) that, as a consequence, we humans are an inherent threat to the integrity of nature. Song offers itself as a new nature story not because it pretends there is no human footprint on the planet, but because our impact in Song is several orders of magnitude less than what we’re doing in today’s real world. It’s one thing for humanity to transform nature into a “Manufactured Landscape.” It’s quite another to cultivate a raw field of tangled vines into a vineyard. It’s the difference between heedless dominion and soft-touch stewardship. 18 The point of a new nature story—sacred or profane—is to teach us, first, that we are part of nature’s great variety. And, second, to teach us how to bring our distinctively human features to it without threatening it, just as herds of buffalo, photosynthesis, the hydrologic cycle, and earthworms have their distinctive impacts on nature without harming it. Nature, after all, is an integrated and evolving system of impacts. But is there a limit to how much impact nature can tolerate? Of course there is, and we humans are now in the process of testing that limit. For this reason we need a radically new nature story, one that teaches us how to be citizens, rather than conquerors, of nature.

Is Song a Sacred Story? As an alternative sacred nature story, Song presents two problems: its barely disguised carnality and the absence of any reference to God. One way of getting around these problems is to interpret Song as an allegory for the Lord’s love of Israel or, among later Christians, of Christ’s love for his Church: the man represents God, the woman stands for the chosen faithful. One of the great Church fathers, Origen (185-254), for example, embraced this approach. But the prevailing current interpretation of Song is quite straightforward: the poem is exactly what it appears to be, a

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celebration of human love. The allegorical option has proved a dead end, and the two problems remain. 19 Many will reject Song as a sacred nature story because it celebrates precisely what’s “wrong” with nature: the presumed dominance of bodily appetite over edifying spirit. The whole purpose of Christianity—for those who subscribe to this view—is to celebrate soul, spirit, and otherworldliness, rising above embodied nature. This bias is grounded in the extraordinarily influential and puritanical Pauline/Augustinian tradition in Christianity. And it is inextricably wedded to a doctrine of human exceptionality: what best defines us is that we are not part of nature (except in some partial and temporary sense). Created in God’s image—a key feature of our orthodox sacred nature story—we are by definition set apart from nature. To wallow in its metaphors, whatever poetic charm they may have, is to cast off God’s image. Going right for the jugular of this rigidly puritanical strain in Christianity, Song does not naturalize us in some casual or superficial sense. Rather, it naturalizes us deeply, focusing on our capacity for love, tenderness, heartfelt yearning—when we are at our most selfless and generous—when we are most fully alive. Natural metaphor insinuates itself into our intimate recesses, into the seams between loving bodies. If we are natural in these respects, then we are natural to the core. Without denying our spirit, Song rescues our bodies from sin and shame. Even those who accept Job as a dissenting nature story may not be able to accept what they perceive as Song’s inappropriate emphasis on the bodily dimension of romantic love. But others will surely find Song’s interplay between human intimacy and natural metaphor very liberating. If these metaphors blend so easily with human love, then we can choose to live and love in nature. We can choose to embrace the life and home God has given us in this world. The other problem—Song’s omission of God’s name—is awkward, but not intractable. Song is clearly a nature story, but, in the absence of any reference to God, can it claim to be a sacred story? There would seem to be at least two positive answers to the question: First, despite a fair amount of controversy and debate, it made its way into the sacred canon shortly after the destruction of the second Temple in 70 AD. One could argue that, if the book is in the sacred canon, then it is sacred by definition. It should also be noted that Song is a short book—only eight chapters long—that swims in a sea of Godly scripture. Is it necessary that every fish in the sea refer explicitly to God? Tucked between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah, Song would seem to be sacred by osmosis.

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The second answer to Song’s Godlessness—in my opinion the stronger of the two—is that Song and Job come as a package. Each makes up for the deficiencies of the other. Job is vociferously and explicitly God centered, arguably moreso than any other book in the Bible. It makes the strong case for God’s omnipotence, for God as overlord of creation, and for humanity’s standing as a creature among creatures. For its part, Song does a close-up examination and demonstration of humanity’s immersion in nature. Job asserts our creaturehood; Song spells it out in loving detail. Job brings God and raw power to our sacred nature story; Song brings intimacy and tenderness. If anything, the Book of Job is the stag leaping over the mountains, and Song is the meadow where it lingers to graze on fruit and flowers.

Two Caveats To this point we have discussed the competing covenants—one redemptive, the other creationist—as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives. But many of us may wonder about combining features of the two covenants into a synthesis that better serves our perceived self interest. After all, if both alternatives are included in our sacred, canonical tradition, why not do a bit of mix and match? For example, without full awareness of the probable consequences, the Judeo–Christian West seems to have lifted image-of-God doctrine from our redemptive tradition and combined it with a bastardized version of our Creation story. If God is above all a Creator God, then it follows that to be in his image is to be a creator. As environmentalist Bill McKibben argues, we are now in the process of re-creating God’s natural world to suit our own purposes: we have altered life forms (genetic engineering, recombinant DNA), changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere (greenhouse gases, ozone depletion), degraded water and soil (toxins, waste, pesticides, mining, chemical fertilizers), and driven thousands of species to or beyond the brink of extinction by habitat destruction and what’s euphemistically called “overharvesting.” We have literally transformed God’s Earth into humanity’s greenhouse. 20 In this scenario God’s first creation is being replaced by humanity’s second creation. This goes way beyond dominion/subdue doctrine to an amplified re-creation doctrine. It puts humanity at the center of the Earth process: so much so that the scientific geological profession is actively debating whether our planet has passed out of the Holocene Epoch into the Anthropocene. This is the first caveat: Creationism—if

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combined with image-of-God doctrine—could be taken as an invitation to recreate the Earth. 21 The second caveat comes into play when and if our incremental approach to redesigning the Earth backfires. What happens if our shortsighted efforts at re-creation cross over a critical threshold into decreation or un-creation? In a Creationist covenant this would be a direct repudiation of God. Two consequences are likely to follow. First, we would be guilty of the most profound sin imaginable in a Creationist covenant: usurping, defiling, and twisting God’s creative prerogative. And, second, we would risk damaging our God-given home to the point where it is no longer capable of supporting many life forms, including us. We would need a new home. What would happen then? No problem. Ever resourceful, we would simply repent and fall back on the orthodox redemptive covenant, which explicitly promises to forgive us our sins and deliver us into a heavenly kingdom. Redemption is our escape mechanism. This kind of “resourcefulness” reduces to opportunism, even hypocrisy. *

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The point of this brief digression into caveats is to show that a Creationist covenant with a Creator God will not work unless it is embraced in the heart. It is not just a cynical exercise in “enlightened” self interest. It is an honest contract between God and those of us who embrace God. It is a recognition and celebration of the irreducible and sacred fact of our creaturehood.

A Third Caveat: Advice From the Apocalypse Actually, there is precedent for un-creation and covenant blending in the Bible itself. The Bible’s more or less formulaic approach to mixing covenants is laid out in ten apocalyptic texts, which divide the end of days into two phases. The first is the period of wrath: a time of rampaging armies, diabolical visitations, rampant human wickedness, suffering of the faithful, and catastrophic deformations of natural creation. The great wrath ends with a stupendous victory of the heavenly hosts over the marshalled forces of human and satanic wickedness. This decisive triumph ushers in the second and final phase: the joyful, glorious, and majestic restoration of the Redemptive God to his throne. Each human is judged, the wicked are pitched into hellfire, and the elect rise—cleansed and purified—into the

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beatific radiance of God’s holy presence. All creation is transformed and subsumed into a new, heavenly, bejewelled Jerusalem. This is the apotheosis of God’s Redemptive covenant with humanity. 22 However—from a Creationist point of view—there are two structural problems with this apocalyptic narrative. The first is that the orthodox Redemptive covenant unilaterally subsumes its Creationist counterpart, only to betray it at the end. The second problem is that it strains credibility that the Creator God would have even the slightest interest in entering the redemptive story. Let’s take a brief look at each problem. Even the most casual reading of the apocalyptic books shows that—as nasty as nature-human relations may be—they don’t compare to how brutally the Redemptive God treats nature. During the time of wrath this morally preoccupied God pushes nature way beyond its standard repertoire of violent behaviors (e.g., earthquakes, plagues, floods, etc.) into grotesque deformations and falsifications of itself. The earth is “turned upside down … utterly broken … torn asunder” in Isaiah. Mountains are “thrown down” in Ezekiel. In Revelation “a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood.” Two hundred million horses with lions’ heads and serpentine tails breathe “fire, smoke, and sulphur” from their mouths, killing a third of humankind. An angel pours a vial of God’s wrath “into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in the sea died.” In another passage “the rivers and the springs of water … became blood.” This is followed by “every island fled away and no mountains were to be found; and huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, dropped from heaven on people.” None of this is nature as nature. These grotesque deformations falsify natural creation to suit the Redemptive God’s wrathful purposes. 23 What are those purposes? First, to punish wayward humanity. As always, natural creation is entirely in the service of the Redemptive God’s supervision of the human moral project. Nature has no integrity or moral standing in its own right. And, second, now that the end is near God clearly wants nature to extinguish itself in a paroxysm of self annihilation. According to the redemptive timetable, “old” creation—drenched in Adam’s sin—must die off to make room for a new, resplendent creation. Which brings us to the final phase of the orthodox redemptive story: the time of joyful restoration. Nature as we know it—and as the Whirlwind God knows it—meets one of two fates in the final phase. It either goes totally ignored, literally dropping out of the biblical text; or it is deformed into a hyper-Edenic, unrecognizable substitute for itself. The

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Bible’s most authoritative and elaborate apocalyptic books, Daniel and Revelation, each exemplify one of these two fates. In Daniel, nature is conspicuous by its absence from the final phase. At the end all reality shrinks to the size of the Redemptive covenant. Only God, humanity, and heavenly beings are invited to the party. Whatever else the Whirlwind Creator God may think of this ending, he would have to concede that Daniel at least shows a bizarre kind of intellectual integrity: the Redemptive covenant simply deletes its rival from the Book. The same is not true of Revelation, the Bible’s last book and by far its most resounding account of final redemption. After un-creating nature in the period of wrath, Revelation’s God establishes “a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” The point is repeated four verses later, “And the one who was seated on the throne (God) said: See, I am making all things new.” And to further drive the message home, God declares that “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Interesting: he “begins” and “ends,” effectively recusing himself of responsibility for everything that happened in between. This is a profound betrayal of creation. And, for precisely that reason, a profound betrayal of what it is to be God. 24 As noted earlier, the second structural problem with the apocalyptic redemptive narrative is that it would make no sense whatsoever to the Whirlwind Creator God. After all, he does not subscribe to any of its premises: Eden, image-of-God doctrine, dominion doctrine, original sin, the Fall, and human “exile” into nature. Nor does he see creation as a selfloathing instrument in service to the presumably central drama of human sin and salvation. If the Creator God does not share any of these premises, why would he have any interest in joining a Redemptive covenant? Redemption from what? On the contrary, his dissenting covenant is based on three counter-premises: First, that he created the cosmos as it is; second, that he loves and cares for it as it is; and, third, that it enjoys his sacred blessing, again, as it is. The Creator God is not Alpha and Omega. He’s the whole alphabet. Finally, we have to ask ourselves a question: what message does the orthodox redemptive covenant send to humanity? Feel free to despoil nature any way we want? After all, according to its narrative, the nature we have is headed for doom anyway. If the redemptive covenant must falsify nature to embrace it—or extinguish it altogether—then it does not tell a nature story for our time. Rather it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will continue to undermine reconciliation at the nature-human interface.

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Conclusion The basic argument in this chapter is that we must choose between two biblical accounts of God: one redemptive, the other creationist. The first account—by far the more orthodox of the two—presents God as having a special redemptive covenant with humanity; the second, more heterodox account is of a God whose covenant extends to all creation. Each of these covenants yields its own sacred nature story. The defining themes of the first story are human dominion over nature, humanity in God’s image, the cosmic centrality of the human moral order, and nature as a passive backdrop to the central drama between God and humanity. God’s human centered covenant dictates a three-tiered reality: God at the top, nature at the bottom, and a theomorphic, self-important humanity suspended somewhere in between. Since we are created in the image of God, and not in the image of nature, there is a clear bias toward identifying with God rather than with nature. Overall, and in almost every particular detail, this story fosters a quite profound alienation—if not outright enmity—between humanity and nature. This is obviously an unacceptable nature story, particularly at a time in history when humanity and nature are in greater need of reconciliation than ever before. We need a new starting point that generates a different architecture of God–nature–human relations, one that takes nature’s presence and priority as a given. The Creationist covenant—exemplified by the Job-Song package—seems to fit the need. Although neither book explicitly rejects redemption, dominion, or image-of-God doctrine, they behave as if these doctrines never existed in the first place. The one exception to this working formula is Job’s explicit erasure of human centrality doctrine. In addition, the Books reduce the old three-tiered system to two tiers: the Creator God at the top and creation at the level below him. In Job, God is the benevolent father and guardian of all his creatures, and humanity is one creature among many. In Song, the intimate commingling of humans, flowers, trees, gazelles, goats, mountains, seasons, sun, and dawn into a communion of creatures is spelled out in tender detail. Job operates at both tiers; Song fills in the blanks at the lower tier. 25 We should have no illusions about an easy acceptance of a new sacred nature story such as the one proposed here. Religious conviction runs deep, and the Redemptive covenant caters to three strongly felt human needs: pride of place among Earth’s creatures, special protection from the consequences of our sinfulness, and assurance of immortality. We want a lot, and our salvific tradition offers much of what we want. The

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Redemptive package is not an easy one to walk away from, even if we botch our relations with nature to the point where the planet devolves into a wasteland. In that event, we can always fall back on the afterlife provision built into our redemptive contract with God. When put this way, the Redemptive covenant is a hard act to follow. But it comes with a huge Achilles heel: it offers a diminished portrait of God. How so? The Redemptive God’s agenda is narrowly focused on the human condition and, within that, even more narrowly preoccupied with human sinfulness. Despite his professed commitment to justice, this God seems incapable of protecting the innocent from rampant, real-world injustice. Is he weak, cruel, indifferent, all of these—or, as we’re constantly reminded, “mysterious” in his ways? Also, in keeping with his focus on humanity, his makeup is predictably anthropomorphic: are we in his image or is he in ours? His interactions with natural creation are often awkward and tumultuous, suggesting that he is unable to reconcile his own super-nature with nature. And so on. Again, the only justification for a narrowly defined agenda is that God would get good results within its more manageable workload. But that does not seem to be the case. An overly specialized God is not God at his best or greatest. In contrast to the Redemptive God, the Creator God operates on a grander scale, wants to operate on a grander scale, and does so successfully. Shouldn’t God be the Lord of all creatures, all space, and all time? Shouldn’t his agenda be coextensive with reality itself? As noted a few paragraphs ago, we need a new starting point that takes nature’s presence and priority as a sacred imperative, i.e., that brings our dormant Creationist covenant out of the shadows into the foreground. One such starting point may be found in Pope Francis’ recent encyclical Laudato Si Mi Signore (Praise be to my Lord), released in June, 2015. In it Francis declares that humanity needs what he calls an “ecological conversion” that enables us “to hear the cry of the earth” before we transform it into “an immense pile of filth.” The pope is performing a balancing act here, using code words like “ecological conversion” as a step toward invoking a Creationist covenant and “cry of the earth” as an attribution of moral standing to nature. Turning the earth into a “pile of filth” becomes an act of de-creation (or even un-creation), a terrible affront to God as Creator … but not at all to God as redeemer. To the extent that we humans de-create the earth, we are not in the image of the Creator God. So much for image-of-God doctrine. Francis also undermines dominion/subdue doctrine by rebuking humanity’s “unrestrained delusions of grandeur” that lead to climate change, the death of coral reefs, rising sea level, deforestation, and extreme weather

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events—each of these ecological problems given specific mention in the encyclical. Finally, he makes the point that the negative consequences of environmental damage are disproportionately visited on the poor, even though the industrialized and wealthy sector of humanity is the primary cause. In this sense he links the “cry of the earth” with the cry of the poor. Two cautionary points should be made here. First, Pope Francis does not speak for all Christianity, never mind all of humanity. Moreover, his encyclical has triggered a mix of responses, some positive and some negative. Even so, in his relatively brief term as pope, he has achieved inter-denominational recognition as an advocate for progressive causes; and as a leader who deeply questions many of the calcified practices and priorities of traditional Catholicism. Second, his encyclical does not challenge established dogma per se, nor does it elevate his environmental concerns to the status of infallible pronouncement. Rather it advances new priorities and points of doctrinal emphasis. For our purposes, it’s a starting point for the step-by-step resuscitation of our Creationist covenant with God. And, God knows, it needs resuscitation. Just listen, as Francis does, to the cry of the earth. *

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In summary, our sacred tradition offers us a choice between two divine covenants, one redemptive, orthodox, and narrow, the other heterodox and broad as all creation. Each covenant comes with its own sacred nature story, one divisive and unequal to the task, the other more than equal to the task, but held in reserve ever since it was set aside in Genesis 1-3. Perhaps, as Pope Francis argues, the time has come for nature as nature to step out of the background and re-enter sacred history. Either choice is consistent with our sacred canon, but only one promises reconciliation with nature. It’s up to us. Choose.

Endnotes Epigraph: Thomas Berry (1988), p. 123. 1

It should be noted that both Job and Song stand outside the mainstream Old Testament narrative of Yahweh’s covenant with the chosen people. They don’t contest or confront the Yahwist narrative in any explicit manner—they just go their own way. Job is part of the Bible’s maverick “wisdom” tradition (which also includes Ecclesiastes and Proverbs). Song is in a category of its own. Its fabled

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association with Solomon, generally considered the greatest king of the ancient Israelites, may have given it entry into the sacred canon (Hastings, Mason & Pyper (2000, p. 681). Nor do the books belong to the Christian mainstream—both are implicitly in dissent from orthodoxy, following a heterodox, yet sacred and canonical path. For our purposes, they keep open the creationist option in the Bible. See J. L. Crenshaw (1992, 1993), Hastings et al. (2000, pp. 346-347). 2 I do not mean to suggest here that biblical stories have resonance only with those who are religious. All of us in the Western Judeo–Greco–Christian tradition, whether observant or not, are deeply influenced by culturally pervasive biblical messages. The biblical messages of dominion and human exceptionalism, for example, are in the air we breathe, and have to be explicitly countered by all of us, believers and non-believers alike. 3 Support for a creationist interpretation of Job, albeit often in tentative or fragmentary form, can be found in McKibben (1994), Hastings et al. (2000, pp. 346-347). 4 The three off-message verses are 36:33 and 37:23-24. 5 The five verses referring to justice and/or morality are 38:13, 15 and 40:11, 12, 13. 6 I have deliberately left out several verses of Psalms 104 and 148 because they refer to an anthropocentric covenant (148:14), sin (104:35), and God’s incompatibility with nature (104:32). As noted repeatedly, these are among the themes that harm the Bible’s nature story. 7 See George Steiner (1996), p. 73. 8 For example, Psalms 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 29, 50, 52, 84, 102, 145, 146, 147. 9 Regarding St. Augustine’s sin-drenched cosmology, see chapter 3. 10 Refer to Exodus 19-20 for a clear account of the Mosaic God’s incompatibility with nature. Also note that God’s incompatibility occurs in the context of his handing down the ten commandments, a fundamental expression of his moralized covenant. 11 M. Black (1962). Black’s account of metaphor has the merit of being clear, comprehensive, subtle, and conceptually powerful. 12 As a thought experiment on the cognitive function of metaphor, the reader might want to analyze other ways of metaphorizing a beloved. For example, my beloved is a work of art … is the light of my life … is a gift that keeps giving … is a moveable feast … etc. Unlike Song, none of these metaphors jump the barrier between humanity and nature. They jump other cognitive barriers. 13 Chapt. 2, verses 1, 3, 8, 9, 10-13, 16-17. 14 See The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Metzger & Murphy, 1994), p. 855, footnote: she “invites him to the mountains, i.e., herself.” 15 Chapt. 4, verses 1, 11, 12, 15, 16. 16 Chapt. 6, verse 10; Chapt. 7, verses 2, 7, 8-9, 12. The quoted passages are from two sources: the King James Version and The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 17 J. M. Reese alludes to the Edenic interpretation (1993, p. 709). 18 I borrow the term “Manufactured Landscape” from the movie of that title, released in 2006 by Zeitgeist Films.

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19 On this point of allegory versus human love poems, see J. M. Reese (1993), pp. 708-710; J. Miles (1996), pp. 335-337. 20 See Bill McKibben (1994), pp. 69-95. 21 See Jan Zalasiewicz et al. (2010); and Paul J. Crutzen (2002). 22 The description I’ve offered here is a compilation of themes and images taken from the apocalyptic books (and parts of books) found in the biblical canon. These include Zepaniah, Zechariah, Joel, Ezekiel (Chapts 38-39), Isaiah (Chapts. 24-27), Daniel (7-12), Mark (13), Matthew (24), Luke (12), and, most spectacularly, Revelation, the last book of the Bible. There are also a number of non-canonical apocalyptic books, but I have not included them. 23 The quoted passages are taken from Isaiah 24:1 and 24:19; Ezekiel 38:20; and Revelation 8:8-9; 9:16-18; 16:3, 4, 20-21. Translations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Metzger & Murphy, 1994). 24 For quoted passages, see Revelation 21:1, 5; 22:13. Translations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible (1994). 25 According to one analyst, there are 10 animal species and 25 plant species identified in Song, not to mention many abiotic features of nature, e.g., mountain, water, dawn, moon, etc. (J. M. Reese, 1993).

CHAPTER 6 PANTHEISM

What sort of God would it be, who only pushed from without? —J. W. Goethe As we saw in the previous chapter, the Whirlwind God of Job is much closer to nature than is his orthodox counterpart—and in this sense Job’s God offers a much stronger sacred nature story for our time. But what if we took the argument for God’s Creationist covenant into a qualitatively different dimension? What if God and nature were not merely close to each other, but inside each other? This is pantheism—and, by definition, it would yield the strongest conceivable sacred nature story. That’s the upside. But the downside is that pantheism is not merely a dissenting voice within the biblical canon. It is heresy. Even so, it is a recurring heresy, one that doesn’t seem to go away. According to pantheism, every time we see a bird or a mountain or falling rain, we witness God. God is in my mother’s milk, the air that I breathe, the sea shell in my hand . . . God is no further away than the rain drops on my face. Let’s take a look at this intriguing heresy. *

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The basic difference between theism and pantheism lies in the contrast between transcendence and immanence. In theism, as Goethe says, a transcendent God pushes against creation from the outside. In pantheism an immanent God acts from inside creation. The JudeoChristian God is dogmatically transcendent, and I have argued that this has had tragic consequences for nature and the nature-human relationship. So it makes sense to ask: What would happen if our God were immanent? From nature’s perspective two benefits would automatically follow. First, we would have a fully developed creation story. If God were immanent in nature, then his simple existence would be an ongoing act of creation.

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Second, theology would become a nature story. With God in nature or nature in God any story about God would necessarily be a story about nature. There would be no more dominion doctrine. Nature would be God’s home and would be under his protection. Nature would no more stand in “fear and dread” than God would. There would be no invidious and shallow image-of-God doctrine. All creatures, not only humans, would be of God’s substance, not just his image, deepening the God-creation relationship and softening the God-human-nature trichotomy to the point of insignificance. Creatures (human or otherwise) who wished for union with God would need no redemptive story. We would already be united with God here in this world and this life. Nature would not be a place of exile and trial for humans nor a low-status dumping ground for other creatures. Any creature who wished to worship God would in the same act worship nature. In pantheism every theocentric gesture—every point of doctrine, ritual, and sacred history—would simultaneously be an ecocentric gesture. Unfortunately, all standard forms of Christianity anathematize all forms of pantheism as heresy or serious error. This unanimous rejection of pantheism raises two questions: Leaving aside arguments about its merits and demerits, does pantheism have enough historical weight to qualify as a usable past? And is there some form of pantheism which could conceivably gain acceptance in our tradition? In other words, is there any point to considering pantheism except as an esoteric and feeble form of dissent? I would like to argue that pantheism, broadly understood, is one of our usable pasts precisely because Christian cosmology contains within itself a stubborn temptation to immanent accounts of God. Christianity stands on the Bible as its core of belief, but in the process of becoming a “universal” faith it incorporated all sorts of cultural material—myths, beliefs, customs, philosophies—which were alien to its Semitic origins. Once the early church committed itself to the evangelization of the Gentiles, assimilation became its central project. But converts, no matter how well intentioned, came to the new faith with lots of baggage. The assimilation process was inevitably bi-directional, and as the orthodox core of belief reached out to an expanding variety of people, it found itself in a more or less constant negotiation with local practice and habit. It reached across ethnic, cultural, linguistic, regional, economic, class, and educational lines, and every outreach necessarily involved mutual concessions. The first and most determining line the early Christian Semites crossed was into Greek culture.

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The Greek Influence During the Patristic period (c. 100-450 A.D.) Christian theology was developed out of a synthesis of biblical revelation with Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy. The Bible’s doctrine of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, was a strong pull toward a transcendent view of God; so was the received Platonic doctrine of ideal forms. But the Neo-platonic doctrine of creation via divine emanation was an intermittent pull toward pantheistic concepts of God. The version of Plato’s ideal forms adopted by the early patristic theologians had a transcendent bias, and in this sense Jerusalem and Athens were on the same page. But Platonism did not stand still. It evolved through various Neoplatonisms until it achieved mature form under Plotinus in the 200s. The Neoplatonic “God” (the “One”) was positioned as an “outsider,” perched at the top of creation, but his emanative flow was so open to interpretation that he could be either inside or outside nature depending on how one answered this question: precisely what emanates from God into creation? Emanation doctrine was the wild card. If God was understood to emanate light or grace or some such ethereal entity, he was a transcendent God. But if he emanated his own substance, he was an immanent God. Under these circumstances the line between immanence and transcendence was the locus of much theological probing during Christianity’s formative period. Although orthodoxy eventually positioned itself firmly and insistently on the transcendent side of the line, some of the Church’s finest minds drifted fully or partly over the line into pantheistic speculations, often without even realizing they were in error. If the Church leadership had listened with undivided attention to Tertullian’s warning—“What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?”—it might have nipped immanentist thinking in the bud. But it did not. Like most educated Roman citizens, the early Christian fathers were fascinated with the riches of the Greek philosophical legacy. The pure joy of speculation seized Justin Martyr (100-164 AD), Clement of Alexandria (150-219), Origen (185-254), Eusebius of Caesaria (265-340), Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), and others. Tertullian’s (160-220) anti-Greek stance was then a minority view. The majority adopted Platonic and Neoplatonic thought as the means to upgrade the emotional, miraculous, and historical Biblical narrative into an intellectually satisfying theology. There were a few centuries of fairly wide open dialectic until the austere and moralistic Augustine appeared on the scene (354-430). Under his influence things began to harden into uncompromising dogma. Parenthetically, Augustine was a westerner like

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Tertullian—more Latin than Greek—while the fathers mentioned above, from Justin to Gregory, were easterners—more Greek than Latin—and for this reason presumably more susceptible to the blandishments of Greek speculative thought. Clement and Gregory eventually waded ankle deep into different ponds of immanentist speculation, while Origen, utterly seduced by neoplatonism, dived in over his head. Among other heterodox opinions, he anticipated aspects of Erigena’s and Spinoza’s later pantheisms which were developed in the ninth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. One gets the clear and correct impression that the early accommodations between Greek and Biblical thought were mutual. It took great persistence for the Church to retain its Biblical bias toward a transcendent God who created the world out of nothing and whose revelations were found only in holy scripture. But the tendency toward pantheistic accounts of the God-nature relationship never went away. It remained a disturbing—to orthodoxy— presence in the background which occasionally broke into the foreground. It never became the standard, but it lingered as a recurring exception, against which the standard redemptive and transcendent account defended and defined itself. Given orthodoxy’s relentless opposition, why has pantheism never been stamped out? There are several reasons. The first and most obvious is the common human experience of awe before nature. Nature is so vast, fecund, vital, sustaining, and inescapable, it demands our attention. For by far the greater part of human history and prehistory, we have viewed nature as animated, enchanted, and a source of great fascination. Whatever else they may signify, the cave paintings at Lascaux and Peche Merle surely indicate that early Homo sapiens spent a great deal of time watching wild animals. And the same is true to this day. When we look, for example, at a landscape full of trees, meadows, water, alternating storm and sunlight, we don’t see it merely in practical terms, as a collection of resources to be exploited or dangers to be subdued. It moves us, draws us in, makes us feel more alive, gladdens the heart, inspires fear, traces our moods, provokes archetypal memories, stirs the imagination. This kaleidoscope of feelings and evocations may be the first step toward a sense of the sacred. For humans, nature evokes a commingling of practical and sacral attitudes. It provides and enchants. This does not necessarily force attributions of divinity, but it makes sense that it sometimes would. The idea of God effectively summarizes all the feelings aroused in our sense of awe before the universe.

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As a footnote it’s worth mentioning that, although ordinary people may have seen nature in these terms throughout the classical Greek and early Christian periods, at the level of “high” philosophy, theology, and science, the sense of enchantment was systematically deleted. The western, Latin church embraced much of classical Greek thought and assimilated it to its own theocentric and image-of-God doctrines. But after three centuries of Greek humanism and four centuries of Christian theism, something unexpected happened. The Roman Empire collapsed, the Latin West was overrun by pagan and barely Christianized German tribes, and the Roman church found itself surrounded by rulers, armies, and settlers whose worldview was closer to nature worship than to Christian theology. The Roman church was almost back to Square One. Nature had received a tremendous infusion of re-enchantment.

Sacramentalism Another factor that kept mild forms of pantheism alive, if not thriving, was Christianity’s partial evolution from an historical to a sacramental religion. In historical religions God reveals himself through certain unique events which are located at particular points in the past. Examples of such events in the Judeo-Christian tradition are Noah’s building the ark under God’s instructions, Moses’ receiving the tablets from God, Jesus’ incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection, St. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, and so on. The problem historical religions present to the faithful is that direct encounters with God always seem to be in the remote past. But believers want to experience God in their own lifetime. Christianity met this need by partly transforming itself into a sacramental religion in which God reveals himself in objects, rituals, and sacred places. As these proliferate into an almost endless array of relics, beads, crosses, icons, anointings, novenas, masses, processions, chapels, weeping portraits, holy places, holy days, holy water, retreats, and pilgrimages—not to mention official sacraments like baptism and the eucharist—as these proliferate, God becomes willy nilly more immanent in the world. If allowed to proceed to its logical extreme, sacramentalism would become pantheism. Many of the early medieval church leaders were alarmed by the multiplication of such objects and practices, concerned that Christianity was degenerating into a “magic” religion. But Pope Gregory the Great (papacy: 590-604), a man of unimpeachable moral authority, overruled their objections. He recognized that most of the Church’s old membership was ignorant peasantry and almost all of its new members were nominally

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Christianized tribes hardly a step removed from nature worship. In his view, the faithful needed the comfort of objects and rituals, and a sense of God’s presence in their everyday lives. They had very little access to the church’s historical record: Bibles were scarce, very few people could read anyway, and preachers circulated through to relate the Biblical stories and administer the sacraments only at great intervals. Pope Gregory may have made the right pastoral decision, but at some doctrinal risk. Taken in their totality, all the holy objects, rituals, and places made for an uneasy balance between theistic dogma and quasi-pantheistic practice. This is not to suggest that the educated church leadership was itself free of pantheistic deviations. The scholars were not so easily tripped up by relics and weeping icons, but they had a weakness for ideas. We’ve already noted the enormous influence of Plato and Neoplatonism on the early church fathers. As the Christian world passed from the classical Roman period into the Middle Ages, Plato’s influence gradually dissipated, but Neoplatonism continued to be a major force among intellectuals. The ninth century scholar, John Scotus Erigena (810-877) is a perfect example of how Neoplatonic, emanationist thinking can explode into a full blown pantheistic metaphysics. Erigena, as far as we know, was a committed Christian who simply made the “mistake” of taking emanationist doctrine in a very strong sense. But, given the Church’s deep grounding in neoplatonic philosophy, an Erigena or the later Nicholas Cusanus (14011464)—to mention only two of the more delightful pantheists—was completely predictable.

Creator-Creation Doctrine Another recurring theological problem was the opposition between Greek and Biblical accounts of creation. The standard interpretation of the Book of Genesis is that God created the universe out of nothing, an idea which is completely alien to classical Greek thought. Both Plato and Aristotle— whose philosophies were otherwise quite divergent—agreed that God created the world out of primitive substance. The Greek creator God does not pull a rabbit out of an empty hat, but he designs a rabbit out of formless substance. He is more a sculptor than a magician. For the Greeks, creation out-of-nothing was an impossibility. In their attempts to reconcile Biblical and Greek creation accounts, some Christian theologians would pursue a line of thought that probably went something like this: if the Greeks are right in holding that creation out of nothing is impossible, then creation must have been out of something. But since, as the Bible teaches, only God existed before creation, then the “something” must have been

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God himself. It follows that God created the universe out of himself, i.e., out of God-stuff. This is pantheism. Another intellectual problem that flared up in the Middle Ages grew out of the Church’s analysis of Creator-creation doctrine in causeeffect terms. God was construed as the “first cause” and all of nature was his effect. Two conclusions followed: God was external to nature as an efficient cause is external to its effect; but he was also present to nature in the logical sense that an effect necessarily implies a cause. This is how Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) resolved the transcendence-omnipresence conundrum. If God were omnipresent in the universe, how could he be transcendent? Aquinas answered that the transcendent creator God was substantively outside creation, but he was logically everywhere in creation, just as an efficient cause is logically present to its effects, long after the causal event itself. But cause-effect analysis cuts in more than one direction. Just as there can be no effect without a cause, there can be no cause without an effect. The same reciprocity holds for Creator and creature. A cause realizes itself as cause in its effect and only in its effect. Similarly, God-ascreator realizes himself only in his creation. It follows that God would be less real without his creation. If this is so, then for the Creator God to be fully real, creation must be at least a part of his reality. Again, pantheism. The categories “cause” and “effect” so absolutely imply each other that they can be construed as two aspects of one and the same process. The same can be said for the categories “creator” and “creature,” and this is precisely what Spinoza (1632-1677) argued in his later pantheism. In fact, nature-as-effect is the logical trump card of pantheism. The only counter-argument is that God’s “first” causality is unique and not governed by the same logical rules as “secondary” causality. But this argument is a metaphysical assertion and has no logical merit. Proceeding from logic to its presumptive opposite, the Church also has a long but reluctant tradition of mysticism. Unlike Zen Buddhism and philosophical Hinduism, Christianity is not a mystical religion per se. It tolerates but does not encourage mysticism in its ranks. There are a number of reasons for this cautious attitude, but the one most germane to our discussion is that mystics tend to drift toward pantheistic visions of the cosmos. Mystical experience—grounded in meditation, fasting, and deep spiritual exercises—typically dissolves all distinctions and oppositions into a vast, encompassing oneness. For the Christian mystic, this oneness is the God who contains all things, including, of course, nature. Mystical experience is ineffable, i.e., indescribable in ordinary human language, so its reports of pantheism may be distortions or inflations introduced by the

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inadequacies of language. But to the extent that words can even partly report the experience, they often lead to pantheistic formulations. In summary, despite its deviation from orthodoxy, pantheistic thinking and practice were kept simmering by several factors: neoplatonic emanationism, awe before nature, the influx of pagan German tribes, proliferating sacramentalism, digressions into mysticism, and logical speculation on the Creator-creature relationship. Perhaps, it would be helpful to take a brief look at one of our tradition’s most influential pantheists, Baruch Spinoza. His approach focused on the logical implications of the Creator God’s relationship to his creation.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) Spinoza’s working style was steady, calm, detached, and rigorously logical, almost geometric in its precision. He worked toward conclusions, not assertions or paradoxes. He did not ask: if x is true, what does this suggest? He asked: if x is true, what necessarily follows? For this reason, Spinoza went further than any of his predecessors to construct what Bertrand Russell calls “a complete and undiluted pantheism.” 1 Put simply, what Spinoza did was apply logical, deductive method to his conviction (one he shared with the mystical nature philosophers) that all reality has a basic unity. He began with a small number of uncontroversial premises and definitions: for example, God exists, he is one, he is infinite, and substance is self-caused being. The first three monotheistic premises were completely orthodox in Judeo-Christian terms, and the fourth point about substance was commonly held by Spinoza’s philosophical contemporaries. But he took these standard starting points in very unorthodox directions. We can demonstrate Spinoza’s logical method with either his assumption of God’s existence or his definition of substance. Both starting points lead to the same pantheistic conclusions. Starting with the assumption of God, the standard Judeo-Christian position is that God is one, infinite, and transcendent. But Spinoza found the transcendence and infinity claims to be incompatible. If God is transcendent, then he is external to creation. And if he is external to creation, then he is limited, i.e., limited to that which is external to creation. But if God is limited, he cannot be infinite. Thus, it is impossible for an infinite God to co-exist with an external creation. In other words, it is impossible for God to be both infinite and transcendent. For God to be infinite, he must be immanent in his creation.

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Spinoza made an analogous argument for God being selfdetermined. If nature exists outside God, then it necessarily encroaches on God’s freedom to act in the universe. Under such conditions God’s behavior would be co-determined by himself in interaction with an external nature. Thus, it is impossible for an absolutely self-determined God to co-exist with an external nature. Moreover, it is even impossible for a part of God to exist outside of nature, because nature would then encroach on part of God’s freedom to act. From these sorts of arguments, it follows that an infinite and selfdetermined God (the Judeo-Christian God) cannot be transcendent or external to, or even different from, nature in any way whatsoever. On the contrary, God and nature must be absolutely identical. As identical with God, nature must have all the qualities of God, e.g., nature must be infinite; and God must have all the qualities of nature, e.g., he must be present to human experience. God and nature, then, are simply different names for one and the same thing, that is, for everything. Starting with a careful analysis of the standard features of the Judeo-Christian God, Spinoza derived a radically different, pantheistic God whom he called Deus sive natura (God or nature). We could also begin with Spinoza’s definition that substance is self-caused. There was a consensual presumption among late and postRenaissance philosophers that there is a kind of being which depends on nothing else for its existence, i.e., an ultimate and irreducible being which is self-caused. This being was conventionally referred to as “substance.” Starting with this consensus definition, Spinoza argued that, if substance is self-caused, then substance must be God, since only God can be selfcaused. And if God is infinite, there can be no substance other than God. Finally, if God is one, there can be only one substance. God and nature, then, cannot be two different substances, but must be the same, single substance. It follows that whatever can be said of God—that he is selfcaused, necessary, and infinite, for example—also applies to nature; and vice versa. After a thorough exchange of defining characteristics between God and nature, they are rightly understood to be identical. Again, this is a logically derived pantheism. Whether we start with the God premise or the definition of substance, Spinoza’s tight, deductive method leads straight to pantheism. Once you enter Spinoza’s axiomatic system, you can’t get off until the last stop. Spinoza’s rationalism was, among other things, a reaction against certain errors in Descartes’ thinking. As is well known, Descartes (15961650) posited the existence of two irreducible substances: matter and mind. But this raised a serious problem: How do two categorically

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different substances interact? How can my mind, for example, get my body to obey its intentions if it cannot apply physical force to my body? Descartes hoped to solve the problem by specifying the pineal gland as the seat of mind-body interaction. This “solution” drew a lot of attention to the pineal, but did not help to solve the problem. Spinoza rejected Descartes’ two-substance theory as a logical absurdity. After demonstrating that there could be only one substance, he concluded that mind and matter were merely two of its “attributes.” At the level of substance, mind and matter were identical. This eliminated the problem of how they interact: the actions of mind and matter are substantively the same actions. Thus, there is no question of interaction, and the little pineal is relieved of its burden. But Spinoza’s monistic alternative to Cartesian dualism came with problems of its own. If mind and matter are the same substance, then whatever is true of mind must be matched by parallel truths in matter, and vice versa. For example, if the mind can reason logically about matter, then matter must be logically structured. Spinoza agreed, and he argued that causal sequences in material nature correspond precisely with logical sequences in mental nature. Moreover, since logic consists of necessary relations, then material relations must also be necessary. In other words, everything that happens in the natural world happens necessarily. Since God and nature are identical, this means that even God’s actions are necessary. Whatever God does do he must do. By this line of reasoning Spinoza’s pantheism becomes a thoroughgoing determinism which paints its author into an awkward corner. For example, what about free will? In an utterly determined universe, can humans make free choices? Spinoza got around this problem by redefining our commonsense notion of freedom. Humans are not free in the sense that they can choose to do this or that. We are free in the sense that we are capable of bringing our passions under rational scrutiny and control. Once freed of the confusions and fragmentation caused by the passions, we have a clear and distinct understanding of God’s will. True freedom is the calm, intellectual apprehension of the necessary unity between human will and God’s will. Since God is nature, this unity of wills also sets the human mind at one with the entire universe. The consequent sense of oneness is the highest and most serene form of happiness. And what about evil? A spin-off implication of humans’ having no free will is that evil could not have been brought into the world, as the Book of Genesis tells us, by human disobedience of God. Free will is a precondition of disobedience. Evil, then, must come from God himself. But how is it possible that God could create evil? The unperturbable

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Spinoza navigates his way around this problem by claiming evil does not really exist. To humans, evil may appear to exist, but this is because we have only a partial view of things. From God’s eternal perspective what we think of as evil is merely part of the overall, harmonious and logical design of nature. If we humans could see the “big picture” with the same large and clear vision as God, we would recognize that evil is not a fact of nature. Again, for Spinoza, the greatest happiness comes from the correspondence of human and divine perspectives. Such correspondence reveals a world devoid of evil. One thing that should be clear by now is that Spinoza’s system is not for everyone. Only saints and savants need apply. Spinoza himself recognized this, and it was on these grounds that he assented to the usefulness of the stories in the Bible. Biblical stories speak to the moral sensibility and limited perspective of ordinary people, and that’s why they have such widespread appeal. But it would be a grievous mistake to conclude from this that they are true or that they are the literal word of God. They are mere allegories full of drama, error, promise, threat, and moral proscription. This sort of Biblical criticism is commonplace now, but was very rare in Spinoza’s time. It got him into trouble with his own Jewish congregation which anathematized and excommunicated him in 1656. Twenty years later, the Christian church of Holland passed 37 edicts against his work. 2 Luckily for Spinoza, civil authority in Holland was extremely tolerant, so his physical freedom and safety were not threatened. Unlike Galileo, he was beyond the reach of the Catholic Inquisition. By profession, Spinoza was a lens grinder, a line of work which aggravated the lung condition that eventually undid him. During his brief life—he died in 1677 at 45 years of age—Spinoza maintained a network of contacts (e.g., with Gottfried Leibniz and Christiaan Huygens), and he was even offered the philosophy chair at Heidelberg in 1673. He declined the offer, preferring the tranquility and privacy of his life in Holland and the general broadmindedness of the Dutch civil authorities. As it turned out, his dissenting opinions required all the tolerance they could get. Perhaps the Heidelberg appointment would have prolonged his life a bit by taking him away from grinding lenses. But it also would have removed him from the tolerant environs of Holland. He was not particularly important in the century after his death, his reputation suffering from Pierre Bayle’s unflattering and influential account of his work. Bayle’s 1697 Dictionnaire philosophique essay portrayed Spinoza as a nice fellow who composed a “monstrous” philosophy. He was widely believed to have been an atheist, to have dealt badly with the problem of evil, to be ignorant of physical science, and

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overly given to geometric formulations. His reputation was rehabilitated in Germany after the “Pantheismusstreit” controversy of 1785. After that he was embraced as a pantheist by many leading German thinkers, including Goethe, Herder, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Hegel. 3 Goethe, in particular, was a great fan of Spinoza and sang his praises at every opportunity, although not always for the most accurate reasons. This was the heyday of German romantic idealism, and Spinoza’s calm and rational method was welcomed as a somewhat reassuring counterweight to the more restless and expressive tendencies of the time. At present Spinoza occupies a secure place in the history of ideas, but his rigorous and uncompromising monist pantheism never managed to find a form that would admit it into the popular, modern imagination. That role was taken by Descartes’ mind-matter dualism. There are three reasons why Descartes, rather than Spinoza, wrote the first chapter of the modern nature story. First, Descartes’ division of reality into mind stuff and matter stuff corresponds to modern common sense. Ordinary people may know nothing else about Descartes, but they “know” that the idea of an apple is not made of the same stuff as the apple itself. Spinoza failed the apple test. Second, and for precisely the same reason, Spinoza’s monism never caught on with science. Descartes’ division of the world into observable material events and unobservable mental events greatly simplified the scientific agenda. With the world so divided, science could focus its empirical efforts on fully observable substance, and leave unobservable substance to other disciplines. In contrast with Descartes, Spinoza’s monism requires that any substantive account of, let’s say, an atom would have to treat not only its tiny extension in space, but also its tiny bit of mentality. This would greatly complicate the scientific agenda. Moreover, Spinoza’s monism would disallow the reductionist tendencies so prevalent in much of 19th and 20th century physical science. For Spinoza, it would be nonsensical to reduce mind to matter because they are already the same substance. He would probably indulge a material account of the “attribute” matter as a clumsy, but more or less acceptable conceptual exercise. But an exclusively material account of nature itself would be a contradiction in terms. As attributes of one and the same substance, mind and matter are absolutely commingled. Wherever there is matter, there is mind, and vice versa. There is simply no avoiding it. In principle Descartes also disallows reductionism, but his two-substance doctrine does at least provide physical science with a mindless, so to speak, workspace. After enjoying much success on the material side of the Cartesian divide, science has, perhaps excusably, been tempted to treat the mental side as if it has no independent existence at all. This is reductionism.

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Spinoza’s substance monism cuts off such mischief right at the start: there is no exclusively material workspace, so bad habits never get started in the first place. And Spinoza doesn’t leave it at that. Because he recast Descartes’ two substances into two attributes of one substance, Spinoza’s system has generally been taken as a “double-aspect monism.” But in fact he defined God as infinite in all respects. As such, God has an infinite number of attributes, even though we humans know of only two: mind and matter. Since God is identical to nature, Spinoza’s system amplifies to an infiniteaspect monism. That is, it posits the existence of one substance— God/nature—with an infinite plenitude of “attributes.” This is a reductionist’s nightmare. There are, however, some ways in which Spinoza’s theory is oddly consistent with advances in 20th century physics. Spinoza’s idea that all things emerge out of a single, universal substance is suggestive of modern field theory. Unlike Newtonian mechanics, field theory assigns primary reality not to the object, but to the field, and posits objects as zones of intense field. With a little fine tuning this view would line up conceptually with Spinoza’s account of objects as finite expressions of an infinite substance. Even Spinoza’s notion of God as necessarily determined by his own nature foreshadowed Einstein’s often quoted assertion that “God does not play dice.” For both Einstein and Spinoza, nature and God are completely determined and lawful. * Finally, Spinoza’s claim that God/nature has infinite attributes anticipates some contemporary thinking in theoretical physics that the universe may have many more dimensions than the standard four of length, width, depth, and time. 4 These correspondences, of course, are merely suggestive, but it may yet turn out that when science bet on Cartesian dualism, it bet on the wrong horse. The third reason for Spinozism’s failure to become a popular nature story is the most obvious one: it is a pantheism. As such, it swims against three thousand years of Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, since it establishes a complete identity of God and nature, it sets aside no space exclusive to God himself. Because God and nature so completely dissolve into each other, some have been tempted to think that Spinoza used the term “God” merely as a colorful metaphor for nature. If so, his system would be a covert atheism. This interpretation shows how strongly our definition of God is driven by the notion of transcendence. If God merely equals reality, we wonder: how can he be God? In any event, as already * Contrary to Einstein and Spinoza, however, modern quantum physics has found nature to be radically indeterminant. At the sub-atomic level of reality, God does play dice.

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mentioned, the Germans rescued Spinoza from the charge of atheism almost by acclamation. It can safely be said of the German idealists that they knew a pantheist when they saw one. Moreover, everything that we know about Spinoza’s intellectual courage and integrity strongly suggests that he would not use the notion of God to sugarcoat a covert atheism. Bertrand Russell famously referred to him as “The noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.” 5 As it was, he took a major risk in refashioning the personal, transcendent JudeoChristian God into an impersonal, immanent God of nature. It’s difficult to imagine he thought this reconstructed God would make his nature philosophy more palatable to conventional opinion. Indeed, Spinoza seems to have truly been, in the words of Novalis, “a God-intoxicated man.”6 But his impersonal and immanent God was not a convivial drinking companion. Spinoza’s God was the wine itself.

After Spinoza Pantheism didn’t end with Spinoza. As already noted, about a hundred years after his death, there was an explosion of pantheistic enthusiasm among German Romantics and Idealists. Herder (1744-1803), Goethe (1749-1832), Fichte (1762-1814), Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Hegel (1770-1831), and Schelling (1775-1854) all caught one strain or another of the pantheist bug. Goethe is of particular interest because he was almost certainly the most celebrated man of ideas in the Europe of his time; and he was self-professedly an ardent follower of Spinoza. He adopted Spinoza’s Deus sive natura formula and inflated it with a romantic vocabulary of art, vitality, and upward striving. For Goethe, transcendent theism robbed nature of its immanent divinity, and Newtonian mechanism stripped it of its vitality. Nature’s seemingly infinite creativity was the proof and mark of its divinity, making pantheism its only adequate account. Referring back to the epigraph that begins this chapter, it’s interesting to note that Goethe’s God was not only immanent, but he pushed from within. For Goethe, both God and nature were in many ways mapped on the ideal romantic figure: restless, pushing, striving, reaching for perfection. It’s surprising that Goethe could have started with Spinoza’s logical God and ended with a romantic God—there must have been some creative misreading in between—but, if nothing else, it shows how much plasticity there is in the pantheistic framework. Pantheism probably reached its high water mark during Goethe’s time, the first half of the nineteenth century. Its decline after that is to some extent symptomatic of the progressive secularization of the West.

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Over the last 150 years, organized Christianity has lost not only much of its worldly power, but also some of its capacity to inspire belief, obedience, and moral anxiety. People who were dissatisfied with theism could now adopt atheism or agnosticism with impunity. This is not to say that what might loosely be called the “pantheistic attitude” has died off. The twentieth century inherited and produced a number of outstanding but somewhat qualified panen-theistic thinkers, including Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000). But it remains to be seen whether this panentheistic school of thinking will enter the mainstream of Western religious practice. Another probable cause of pantheism’s decline is that the Roman Catholic church, perhaps threatened by the immanent God’s resilience and popularity, issued a series of condemnations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1861, 1862, and 1864, Pope Pius IX repeatedly condemned pantheism. A formal anathema was issued by Vatican Council I (1869-70); and Popes Leo XIII (term: 1878-1903) and Pius X (term: 1903-1914) expressed follow-up disapproval. The Catholic Church has doctrinal, philosophical, moral, and what might be termed “religious” objections to pantheism. The doctrinal differences are definitional and, for that reason, inarguable. Orthodox Christianity posits divine transcendence, image-ofGod, dominion, the “Fall” of nature, and redemption as irreducible points of doctrine. In the Catholic Church’s view, to the extent that pantheism identifies God and nature, as was done by Spinoza, it reduces to idolatry and/or covert atheism. Pantheism, on the other hand, sees itself as unifying the divine and the natural into a sacred synthesis and rejects the transcendence–dominion–Fall–redemption package as a doctrine of alienation among God, humanity, and nature. The philosophical problems are not fully separable from the doctrinal issues, but, to the degree that they are, they seem to be grounded in the Catholic Church’s articulation of Creator-creature dogma in causeeffect terms. As pointed out earlier in this chapter, cause and effect are codependent concepts, suggesting by analogy that God and his creatures are interdependent. The implication that God is dependent on anything is, of course, totally unacceptable to the Church. The official line is that God’s unique “first” causality is absolutely distinct from the “secondary” causality we find in nature. As far as I can tell, this argument derives directly from the Church’s definition of God. If God is defined as absolutely transcendent, then his causality is outside nature and arguably unique. But if he is defined as even partly immanent in nature, the distinction between

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his “first” causality and nature’s “secondary” causality breaks down, leading to the conclusion that God and creation are co-dependent. This is completely incompatible with the orthodox definition of God. The moral question is: How does pantheism reward good people and punish evil people, if all participate equally in God’s being? This is a vexing question for pantheism because God’s ubiquitous embrace would envelop and, for this reason, “reward” all people, whether good or evil. Thus, rewarding the good is not an issue for pantheism. The problem is how to detect and punish evildoers. There would seem to be three approaches to this problem. One would be to tear a page out of Spinoza and deny the existence of evil. This solution may make for satisfying metaphysics, but it seems unworkable as a prescription for moral practice. A second approach would be to uncouple evil and punishment. In this scenario God’s response to sin would not be punishment, but forgiveness and reconciliation. In fact—leaving aside his assault on the money changers and merchants in the temple—this was Jesus’ approach. In the last moments of his life he even asked his Father to forgive his executioners. Tough-minded moralists, however, might find Jesus’ methods a bit too permissive. A third response to the moral question would come out of rephrasing and redirecting it to standard Judeo-Christian theism. This way one might get some idea of what would be considered an acceptable answer. How does theism reward good people and punish evil people? The Judeo-Christian answer is that God granted the gift of free will to human moral agents, and that some abuse the gift by sinning. Moreover, God made it perfectly clear in the third chapter of Genesis that he would punish those who sin. There are two features to this moral doctrine: free will and punishment for its misuse. Are these features compatible with pantheism? Spinoza would have difficulty with the first feature, free will, because for him God and nature were fully determined. But most pantheisms are not Spinozistic. There is nothing inherent to pantheism that requires its God to be determined or that rules out free will. If the immanent God is free to choose this or that course of action, then it follows that all agents who share in his being would be similarly free. The punishment feature is also manageable. Since the immanent God is in everything, a sin against anything would be a sin against God. And since the same God is in the evil-doer, sinning is ipso facto an abuse of one’s own self. Sinning becomes, by this formula, its own punishment. It’s a bit like punching a Bobo doll. Every time you punch it, it bounces up and hits you back. This, for example, is exactly what happens when people sin against nature, although the bounce-back is often delayed. Unfortunately,

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the “delay” may be so prolonged—lasting generations—that the sinner is effectively let off the hook. The delay factor would probably be pantheism’s most intractable moral issue. Even so, the advantage of a moral system grounded in pantheism is that it would make clear the otherwise non-apparent connection between acts against nature and self punishment. More importantly, it would invest this connection with moral significance. Judeo-Christian theism does neither. By this analysis the moral question is not merely about the punishability of sin, but also about what is sinful. Pantheism would automatically put sins against nature at the top of its list, since they would by definition be sins against God. In contrast, Judeo-Christian theism does not have an important doctrine of sins against nature. Why would it? Its God is not in nature and his overarching concern is with the redemption of humans. Nature’s value is secondary at best. Catholicism’s “religious” concerns during its period of heightened attack on pantheism are vigorously summarized in the 1911 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia: “In forming its conception of God, pantheism eliminates every characteristic that religion presupposes. An impersonal being, whatever attributes it may have, cannot be an object of worship. An infinite substance or a self-evolving energy may excite fear; but it repels faith and love.” This narrow and polemical treatment shows the raw nerve touched by pantheism. The points it makes about love, worship, fear, and impersonality are easily refuted. Even without God, many people love nature. Add God to nature and nature would presumably be loved even more. Such a God could easily be worshiped and personalized, as the original animistic pantheists did, and as some of the earlier Christian pantheists also did (e.g., Erigena and Cusanus). Moreover, to claim that an immanent God “excites fear” is simply ridiculous. None of the pantheists we’ve mentioned have pointed to “fear” as part of their religious experience. The same Encyclopedia article goes on to argue that, for pantheists, “religion is nothing more than existing or breathing,” suggesting an unwitting and ironic prescience on the author’s part. The day may come when simple breathing will have religious significance. 7 In any event, from an orthodox perspective, there are serious doctrinal, philosophical, moral, and religious differences between pantheism and Judeo-Christian theism. Most of the differences are directly traceable to their respective creation stories. The transcendent JudeoChristian God put his creative talent into the universe. Pantheism’s immanent God puts himself into the universe. These different creation stories make for very different nature stories.

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From Pan-Theism to Panen-Theism At the beginning of this chapter two questions were raised: Does pantheism have enough historical weight to qualify as a usable past? And is there any kind of pantheism that could conceivably enter the mainstream of contemporary belief and value? I have to admit that I’m surprised to hear myself answering the first question in a qualified affirmative. But the historical fact is that pantheism has been a tenacious and persistent set of beliefs in the West. It has survived almost two thousand years of unrelenting ridicule, rejection, anathema, and condemnation. Its books have been suppressed, and its advocates have been patronized, rebuked, silenced, excommunicated, imprisoned, and burnt at the stake. Despite all this, as recently as the mid-nineteenth century pantheism was so fashionable in central European intellectual, artistic, and literary circles as to be a cliché. Since then its importance has diminished, as much a victim of secularization as of orthodox religious disapproval. Given this drop-off, we might want to ask whether its historical weight translates into usability in the present. To the extent that the contemporary West is secularized, any theory of God, whether transcendent or immanent, is more or less beside the point. And to the extent that agnostic enterprises like science, technology, and economics drive our public discourse about nature, any theory about the God-nature relationship is equally beside the point. Even so, a majority of people in the West still believe in God and are still capable of being motivated by religious prescription. The problem for pantheism today is not so much that God is irrelevant, but that aside from a small core of eco-theologians, no clergy is systematically preaching the sanctity of nature to believers. On the contrary, contemporary Christianity— in both theology and pastoral practice—is still overwhelmingly preoccupied with Christocentric and redemptive themes. This gets to the second question: is pantheism at all viable today? When the question is put this bluntly, the answer is probably negative. Hard-core pantheism has few, if any, influential advocates. And relatively orthodox eco-theologians, by their own admission, have great difficulty getting even non-controversial environmental items onto the larger Christian agenda, never mind pantheism. 8 As noted earlier, pantheism is still under anathema in the billion-plus member Catholic church. It is a doctrine with no church and no clergy. Pantheism may be so much a creature of the past that, like alchemy and horse-drawn transport, it has no utility in the present. But there may be a subtler version of the second question. Just as alchemy has been replaced by chemistry and horse-drawn transport by

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machine-driven transport, is there some form of the “pantheistic attitude” that may be viable today? A few pages ago I alluded to panen-theism. It comes in several versions, but rather than digress into its varieties, I’ll try to sketch out a sort of consensus position. 9 For the panentheist, God and natural creation are in each other, but not identical to each other. When creation is subtracted from God’s being, something is left over, but not vice versa. In this sense God is both immanent and transcendent. Panentheism also seems to lean more toward a process than a critical-point doctrine of creation. God did not simply cause the world at some point in time, then supervise his work from the outside. Upon creation, he entered the process of natural evolution where he progressively realizes himself. Once he got nature started, his modus operandi has not been to coerce natural events, however benignly, from the outside; but to both embody and lovingly persuade the course of nature from within. Put differently, if God is in nature and if nature is evolving, then the immanent God is evolving; although his transcendent aspect may not be. This God stands both inside and outside time. He is both the Supreme Being and the Supreme Becoming, and his creation is both cosmos and cosmogenesis. Panentheism’s nature-story is found in cosmogenesis. Although panentheism may seem moderately incoherent in terms of strict Aristotelian logic, it has several offsetting merits. It halts the endless wrangling between transcendent and immanent God dogmas. God’s immensity simply overrides Aristotelian categories. In this view God’s being does not dissolve in nature, nor does it disappear into transcendent otherness. All creatures are guests in the house of God, where he also has “a room of his own”—a divine privacy, a place to “rest,” as the Bible says, from the demanding work of his creationist covenant (Genesis 2:2). Finally, by partially uncoupling God and nature, panentheism avoids the undesirable side effects of Spinoza’s complete determinism, which undermines the validity of cherished Western values such as free will, democratic choice, and self-determination. This is not to say that Spinoza was ultimately wrong (or right), only that his extreme position hurts his candidacy as a usable past. Within theological circles, panentheism today seems to occupy the dissenting chair once held by pantheism as an alternative to orthodox theism. It has great historical depth: Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, for example, were almost certainly panentheists, and John Scotus Erigena was probably one also. St. Francis of Assisi, on the other hand, does not qualify. He advanced a charming fellowship of creatures, but his

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God remained unambiguously transcendent. In the modern period panentheism is most closely associated with the figures mentioned earlier: Alexander, Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, and Hartshorne.

Afterword Perhaps, in today’s semi-secularized world, the basic question about panand panen-theism is: Why God at all? Why not just nature? Isn’t nature enough? God is not to everyone’s taste, and many people conduct moral lives without any reference to God. On the other hand, despite secularization, there are also many people who still believe in God and for whom God’s word is morally imperative. For these people the yoked issues of God’s location and commandments are absolutely critical. If he is in nature, then nature has an automatic moral claim on human action. If he is outside nature, there is no automatic claim, and everything depends on the content of his commandments. Unfortunately for nature, the transcendent Judeo-Christian God has not commanded his followers to respect nature. In fact—with the exception of books like Job and Song— his revealed word has largely encouraged the opposite. So again: Why God? Because he’s been around for a long time and is still assigned a major moral and ordering role in the human condition. He is both a usable past and a usable present. And why God in nature? Because, if he is in nature, then nature ipso facto becomes central to our collective doctrine of virtue and sin. Finally, an immanent God would tell an immanent nature story. Even those of us who don’t believe in God might prefer this to the prevailing sacred and secular stories we have now. On a personal note, I have no idea whether God exists. Nor, I would argue, does anyone else in our tradition, and this for a simple irreducible reason: despite the best efforts of ritual and sacramentalism, our transcendent God is elusive, elsewhere, away. He does not walk among us. The contributing grace of pantheism (or panentheism) is that it makes God present. His presence would save nature. And his presence in nature would have—for those interested—the additional benefit of rescuing God from his dissolve into absence.

Endnotes Epigraph: Goethe is quoted by Arnulf Zweig, “Goethe,” in P. Edwards (Ed.), (1967), Vol. 3, p. 364. 1 Russell, Bertrand. (1961). History of Western philosophy (2nd ed.), p. 560.

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Borkowski, S. D. (1911). “Spinoza.” The Catholic encyclopedia, Vol. 14, p. 218. 3 See Weinburg, Kurt. “Pantheismusstreit.” In P. Edwards (Ed.), (1967), Vol. 6, pp. 35-37. 4 See Greene, Brian. (1999). The elegant universe (pp. 184-209). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. “Superstring” theory mathematically requires that nature have at least six more dimensions than the four apparent to human awareness. 5 Russell, B. (1961). p. 552. 6 See Kenny, Anthony. (2006). Vol. 3, p. 69. Novalis was a German Romantic poet. 7 The two quotations are from Pace, E. A. (1911). “Pantheism,” The Catholic encyclopedia, Vol. 11, p. 449. 8 See Cobb, John B., Jr. (1992). pp. 82-85, 106-118; also see Gene McAfee’s and D. T. Hessel’s essays in D. T. Hessel (Ed.), (1992), pp. 31, 199-207. It should be noted that Pope Francis’ recent encyclical Laudato Si Mi Signore (June, 2015) may get environmentalism on Christianity’s 21st century agenda. 9 For a brief discussion of panen-theism by one of its foremost proponents, see Hartshorne, Charles. (1987). Encyclopedia of religion (Vol. 11, pp. 166-168). New York, NY: Macmillan.

PART 2 OUR LITERARY NATURE NARRATIVE

Preface Consider the analogy: Beauty is to Beast as human is to nature. It is far from airtight, but has enough intuitive merit, first, to kick off a discussion of our literary tradition’s treatment of nature–human relations; and, second, to reduce an otherwise voluminous body of work to manageable size. So I’ve appropriated the Beauty-and-Beast theme as a way of typifying, organizing, and drawing a boundary around our literary nature story. The appropriation is not without its faults, but my judgement is that, on balance, it gains more in focus and coherence than it loses in breadth. The Beauty-and-Beast theme works in two ways. First, and most obviously, it is a story in its own right, one that could easily be construed as an environmental parable about the encounter between humanity (Beauty) and nature (Beast). Does it qualify as a parable? Yes, as a deceptively simple story that conveys a larger message, it does exactly what parables are designed to do. And in what sense is it an environmental parable? If one accepts the foregoing analogy that Beauty is to Beast as human is to nature, its message speaks directly to the encounter between humanity and nature. Moreover, the theme is open to three rotations. In the standard version the encounter leads to the humanization of Beast. But there are also two dissenting rotations, one which transforms Beauty into an animal; and another in which each partner retains his or her own identity while cherishing the other as an other. Each rotation conveys a different message about nature–human relations. The second way the Beauty-and-Beast theme works is to insinuate itself as an organizing motif into much of our literary canon which is ostensibly addressed to other matters. Look, for example, at Victor Hugo’s (1833) Hunchback of Notre Dame (guess who is Beast), Mary Shelley’s (1818) Frankenstein (where Beauty and Beast are both male), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1886) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (where Beauty and Beast are locked in the same body). Each of these

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novels, considered classics in the Western canon, is given vocabulary, sinew, and emotional impact by incorporating the Beauty-and-Beast motif. In both instantiations of the Beauty-and-Beast tale, whether explicit or implicit, whether the thing itself or an outlier, the breathing space between the two protagonists is tight . . . too close for some of us, but just right for others. One way or another Beauty and/or Beast will cross over the line between nature and humanity. As readers, we can witness their encounter and learn from them how to do it well or poorly.

CHAPTER 7 BEAUTY AND BEAST AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL PARABLE

In the argument about the difference between humans and animals, there’s been a pronounced change of sympathy … and it’s the wild pole that has been radiating the greater magnetic attraction on human imagination and allegiance. —Marina Warner Consider the analogy: Beauty is to Beast as human is to nature. Fair enough, you may say, and more or less self-evident. But what’s the point? The point, I’d like to argue, is that the Beauty-and-Beast tale is a fruitful parable for understanding the complex and troubled interplay between humanity and nature. At one level we think we’re reading a formulaic fairy tale. But at another level we join the dance between nature and humanity. In this sense the Beauty-and-Beast narrative fits the definition of a parable: a deceptively simple story that conveys a larger message. Beauty represents the familiar, the known, and Beast the alien, the unknown, the other. Beauty is human, and Beast is a hulking animal, a creature of nature. The standard plot arranges for the human to journey to the animal’s home in the deep forest. The problem, as presented, is whether or not the human will be able to accept, love, and marry the beast as a beast. The solution to the problem implicitly instructs the reader about the terms and conditions of our encounter with nature. A review of the many variations on the Beauty-and-Beast parable yields three basic rotations on how the problem is solved. Beauty’s love may transform Beast into a handsome prince—this version prioritizes humanity over nature. Or, Beast’s love may seduce Beauty into purring animality—shifting the magnetic charge to the natural pole. Or, each may cherish the other as an other while retaining the self as a self. The first two rotations erase the entering reality of one of the partners, valorizing either humanity or nature, but not both. The third rotation preserves their

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respective identities while drawing them into an intimate embrace between nature and humanity. Each rotation on the Beauty-and-Beast parable offers its own solution to the problematic encounter between humanity and nature. Taken together, the three alternatives are an inventory of our understandings of the encounter—and any trend in their pattern charts a trajectory in our understanding. 1

Background Whatever its origins may have been—some scholars point to Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche (c. 150 AD)—the Beauty-and-Beast story thrived in oral, semi-pagan variants for centuries among the European peasantry. In the mid-1600s it was introduced to the urbane sub-culture of the French salon, passed up to this stratum of society by wet-nurses, nannies, farmhands, and household servants. By the late 1600s, elaborated, salon versions of the story were published in a new wave of “literary” fairy tales that were often as quirky and mischievous as their oral originals. Most of the authors were women and were subject to varying degrees of disapproval in aristocratic circles, in which, incidentally, they had uneasy membership. But, by the mid-1700s, the literary tales had become conventionalized; that is, despite retaining some of their bizarre themes, they no longer questioned societal conventions, but supported them, and were a widely used means of socializing children of the newly emergent middle class. The standard version of Beauty and the Beast, published by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, was addressed to a readership of young, bourgeois ladies to mollify their apprehensions about arranged marriages to strangers, thus upholding, not questioning, this practice. 2 But, despite conventionalization, the story never lost its contrarian potential and is often used subversively by more recent authors who write for an adult readership, reverting to the heterodox flavor of the original oral and literary versions. 3

The Standard Version Shortly after the annulment of her marriage to a dissolute libertine, de Beaumont (1711-1780) moved from France to England where she worked as a governess to privileged families and began a writing career. De Beaumont had a particular interest in the proper edification of young ladies and to this purpose wrote and adapted a large number of charming, didactic essays and stories, including what came to be recognized as the

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standard—and by now orthodox—version of Beauty and the Beast. Her Beauty has two envious sisters, three hearty brothers, and a merchant father. They live prosperously in town until the father’s business fails, forcing them to move to a humble home out in the country. There the father and brothers till the fields, Beauty rises early for household chores, and the idle sisters complain endlessly about their loss of social status. One day the father receives news that a vessel has returned safely to port and sets out to recoup his fortune. Before his departure, the two older daughters beg him to bring back expensive gifts, but Beauty requests only a rose. He arrives in the city, however, only to discover his goods are tied up in legal proceedings, and he turns back to the country empty handed. He is almost home when a great storm blows up in a large forest and he loses his way, surrounded by howling wolves and fearing for his life. Unexpectedly he comes upon a wonderful, illuminated palace where he finds warmth, food, drink, and bed, but no host. The next morning, just before leaving, he picks a rose for Beauty, and suddenly a roaring beast descends upon him—How dare you steal my rose, you shall die for this, he shouts—The poor man falls to his knees: My Lord, he pleads—Don’t flatter me with such titles, bellows the monster … My name is Beast! After brief and stressful negotiations, the merchant reluctantly agrees to offer one of his daughters as ransom for his life, but only, Beast stipulates, if she willingly agrees. There is much sorrow and recrimination when the father arrives home, but the plucky Beauty will have none of it. Since I was the one who requested the rose, she says, I will go to Beast’s palace to face death. It’s the least I can do for my father. So she and her father go to Beast’s castle in the deep forest, and, while dining there, Beauty thinks to herself that her host only wants to fatten her up before eating her that night. Then Beast bursts into the dining room and Beauty is “sadly terrified at his horrid form,” but screws up her courage for their first meeting. At this point her father departs, and three months of unexpectedly pleasant days follow. Each evening ends dining with Beast, and each dinner ends with a disconcerting proposal of marriage, which Beauty politely declines. She confesses to Beast that, yes, she does find him ugly, but his many virtues make her forget his deformity. He is, in fact, kind, considerate, respectful, and has “plain good common sense.” She is mistress of the palace, he declares, and her happiness is paramount. And, indeed, she is happy with Beast, esteems him greatly, but cannot “feel the tenderness of affection for him.” 4 Eventually, Beauty worries about her father’s health and requests leave, promising to return in a week. Beast grants her wish, but openly

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grieves at the prospect, lamenting he will wither and die without her. She returns home, where the father is overjoyed to see her, and the sisters, envious this time of her happiness with Beast, conspire to make her overstay the week. On the tenth night, however, she dreams that Beast is sick and dying and wakes up with a start, bursting into tears at his pain and her ingratitude.—She rebukes herself: How could I have refused to marry this kind and good monster?—Putting his magic ring on the bed table, she is transported to Beast’s palace, where she eagerly awaits his company at dinnertime. When he fails to appear, she frantically searches the castle and grounds till she finds him lying senseless in the garden. She throws herself upon his motionless body and hears a heartbeat. Quickly she fetches water from the canal and pours it over his head. He stirs and thanks her for one last sight of her before he dies. No, she cries out, do not die, I want you for my husband, I cannot live without you! Suddenly the palace explodes with light, music, and fireworks. Momentarily distracted by the dazzling tumult, she turns again to her “dear Beast,” but he is gone. A gorgeous prince lies at her feet. Despite his splendid figure, she looks about and asks, where is Beast? “You see him at your feet,” says the prince, “a wicked fairy had condemned me to remain under that shape till a beautiful virgin should consent to marry me.” Beauty’s love had broken the spell, and, “agreeably surprised,” she raises the prince up with her hand. A fairy appears and, with a wave of her wand, summons Beauty’s family, restores the prince to his domain and subjects, and holds a great wedding. She congratulates Beauty for preferring virtue over good looks and quick wit, then turns the two envious sisters into statues that must forever stand at the gate of Beauty’s palace to witness her joy. The emotional impact of de Beaumont’s version derives precisely from its grounding in a tacit set of assumptions about human–nature relations. The metaphors—Beauty and Beast—that carry the parable from beginning to end are like two red flags waving in the direction of the hidden assumptions. You want exogamy?—the metaphors shout—How about arranging for the pretty lady to marry an animal? Now that’s exogamy! Deeply ingrained taboos about bestiality give the tale its ominous and gripping undercurrent. Think of the alternative: given de Beaumont’s concern to prepare her adolescent charges for arranged marriages to older, unromantic strangers, why didn’t she write “Beauty and the Bald Banker” or “Beauty and the Bloated Bureaucrat”? The answer is obvious: Bald Bankers have no ominous undercurrent. As a metaphor, Beauty works only because it’s coupled with Beast. Without Beast, the girls would have yawned through the telling, and the story

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would have perished before being published. The reason the girls paid close attention, and the reason the parable has survived the centuries— before and after de Beaumont—is that it threatens intimacy across a very dangerous and enticing divide: between the familiar and the forbidden, restraint and appetite, human and animal. De Beaumont establishes the tension of contrast early in her story. Beauty is nubile, innocent, and vulnerable. Beast is loud, terrifying, and powerful. In Beauty’s company, however, he turns benign, generous, patient, watchful. He becomes a kind of presence, an environment, a recurring event, a witness to her unfolding—like nature. From town to country to forest, the story brings the human Beauty step-by-step right up to the threshold of deep nature: conjugal union with Beast. Her outer journey is mirrored by her inner movement from fear and revulsion to friendship, to love, to physical embrace. Finally, she accepts Beast as a beast, making the biocentric leap into nature. But suddenly the whole thrust of the story is stopped in its tracks. The instant she commits to Beast, he evaporates. A human prince appears in his place. The paradox is that her biocentric commitment is precisely the hinge that swings Beast, herself, and the whole story over to an anthropocentric resolution. At the end, it’s all one, big, exclusive crowd of humans. Beauty is momentarily puzzled—Where is my Beast?—but quickly adjusts to the human fact. What’s noteworthy is that in her heart Beauty goes over to Beast, but the story vetoes her choice and pulls her back from the brink. The underlying taboo against nature-human intimacy is bigger than Beauty’s good intentions. She simply has no say in the matter. After eliciting a great deal of sympathy, poor Beast is peremptorily zapped and replaced by a human imposter. The standard version of the parable resolves the human–nature polarity by humanizing the natural pole. Hold on, the reader might protest, he was “really” human all along. But that would have come as news to Beauty: as far as she knew, he was a Beast with a human add-on or two, not the Beast who was formerly known as Prince. Granted, fairy tales have always relished a generous dose of magic, but this tale is playing with some pretty volatile metaphors, and can’t expect to keep them on a leash forever. Metaphors, at least in part, have a life of their own. This Beast came very close to getting his Beauty. Will he go away as quietly the next time? There would seem to be three possible resolutions to the parable: Beast transforms into a human, Beauty metamorphoses into an animal, or untransformed, they meet halfway. Beauty opted for the third resolution, but de Beaumont (and most other authors) would not let Beauty have her

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way. Much to her readers’ delight, the author took them up to the brink, but, much to their relief, drew back to the first, anthropocentric resolution. At the surface level de Beaumont’s parable says: You see, young ladies, if you appreciate a homely husband for his virtues, he becomes handsome in your eyes. But at the level of subtext, she says: proceed carefully, or you will couple with an animal. The subtext is what gives the surface narrative its force as a parable. But because of the tension between subtext and surface the story suffers from a fundamental incoherence: Beauty’s ostensibly selfless and other-directed love ends up dissolving the other and affirming the self. It’s a kind of “loving to death.” When Beast loses his otherness into a sameness, the story effectively cancels itself out; its purported defense of marrying-out rests upon a preference for marrying-in. In this version the parable resolves the tension at the nature-human interface by “humanizing” nature. And this resolution nicely sums up the problem in nature-human relations: nature is disposable whenever its continued presence becomes inconvenient or abhorrent. When humanity’s presumably elevated standing is threatened, nature is simply pushed off the page. On both figurative and literal grounds, the standard Beauty-and-Beast formula is unhelpful as an account of nature-human relations. But it never loses its potential for subversive rotations.

The Orthodox Rotation The orthodox rotation is practically an industry of its own, churning out an endless stream of Beauties and Beasts. One example, however, stands out from the pack: one industry met another in the hugely popular 1991 Disney film (and book), Beauty and the Beast. 5 Disney’s Beauty, named “Belle,” is a spunky, budding feminist who’s tired of small-town life. She looks forward to bigger things than the happy but yokelish locals, and, much as she adores her lovable old father, he’s a bumbling, eccentric inventor who would pull his socks over his shoes if Belle didn’t keep an eye on him. Dad is not a big-time merchant, and her brothers and sisters never made it past the studio cutting room. So she’s essentially on her own, except for an arrogant, egotistical, handsome young man, Gaston, who trumpets about marrying her despite her obvious indifference. Gaston’s primary function is to serve as a shallow, conceited contrast to the deep, soulful Beast. One day the father sets out to enter his latest invention in a fair, but loses his way in the forest. He stumbles on a gloomy, run-down castle

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where a terrifying beast confronts him and throws him into a dungeon for “trespassing.” This Beast is the real thing: angry, huge, crudely cloaked, down on all fours, and no connoisseur of lovely flowers: there is no plucked rose. Beauty soon follows to find her father, and Beast receives her as nastily as he did the father, except she is not shown to a dungeon. There is no table set for her, no fancy dinner, no elegant manners to belie Beast’s fearsome appearance, no marriage proposal. His character seems well matched to his looks, as is his estate. Belle walks about the castle through large, gothic halls and rooms that have not been used for years, finding everything in decay, covered with dust and cobwebs. Not only Beast, but also his staff, castle, and domain have fallen under the witch’s curse. There is much to be redeemed here, and Belle hopes she is equal to the task. Beast, as seems to be his custom, goes roaring around the cavernous castle, ill tempered, menacing, and particularly unpleasant to Beauty. His staff, however, now reduced by the curse to animated teapots, candlesticks, and clocks, senses a rare opportunity. This pretty lady may be the one, they gingerly advise him, to break the spell. Be nice, they say.—But how? he growls—it’s been so long, he’s forgotten how. And, besides, he’s a monstrous Beast. But one thing leads to another, Beast gives it a try, and Belle has a real knack for bringing him along. She is a sprightly little redeemer, and we’re all rooting for her—teapots, brooms, candelabra, clocks, and every child in the movie theatre. Gradually, it dawns on us that we’re rooting for her because he’d be a good catch. As mythographer Marina Warner rightly points out, this Beast steals the show. He overpowers the screen, the animators unable to take their eyes off him. In Warner’s words he is “male desire incarnate. He embodies the Eros figure as phallic toy. The Beast swells, he towers, he inflates, he tumesces.” A combination of lion and American buffalo, he symbolizes nature in all its power, innocence, and vulnerability. In no time at all he responds to Belle’s sure and gentle touch: he spruces up, puts on stylish clothes, learns to dance, develops dimples, finds an endearing smile, introduces Belle to his vast library. He rediscovers charm and, indeed, charms us; but Belle’s sweet domestications go no further than to produce a sweet Beast. He is, dimples notwithstanding, still a Beast, still swelling and tumescing with raw animal vigor. He charms and arouses us—the audience feels it and even Belle seems to feel it. By now Madame de Beaumont must be spinning in her grave: right in the teeth of Belle’s best humanizing efforts, the magnetic charge is shifting toward nature. Is Belle going to take the biophiliac plunge? Will Beast finally get his Beauty?

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At this critical point, de Beaumont rises from the dead to call time-out. Beauty’s father conveniently falls prey to a plot hatched by the nasty Gaston, and she has to leave the castle to get him out of trouble. Then, as a further distraction, Gaston rallies a mob of villagers to attack the castle, which is stoutly defended by all the teapots and broomsticks. Gaston falls to his death during the assault, but not before he grievously wounds Beast. The magnificent creature lies dying, Belle gets there just in time to pledge her love, and he rises up … a prince. At the last instant the Disney version knee jerks to an anthropocentric conclusion. One can only guess at what de Beaumont threatened—or promised—during the time-out. Whatever it was, it was enough to preserve the orthodox resolution to the human–nature encounter. Marina Warner is flabbergasted: “No child in my experience preferred the sparkling candy-colored human who emerged from the enchanted monster; the Beast had won them.” Disney had crafted a pretransformed Beast into a superb husband for Beauty, but then transformed him anyway, an anticlimax that was bad for both human–nature relations and the dramatic integrity of the film. 6 To their credit, however, the Disney people strayed beyond the brink out into thin air. Like the cartoon character who suddenly realizes he’s wandered off the edge of the cliff, turns around, pumps his legs furiously, suspended in mid air … will he make it back to the cliff or fall through the bottom of the frame? Disney made it back to the cliff. But the award-winning British writer, Angela Carter (1940-1992), falls out of the frame. First, she takes a peek over the edge in her story, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon.” Then she takes the plunge in “The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Company of Wolves.” 7 “Mr. Lyon” is a small pearl of a story, which strips the standard prototype down to its essentials. There are only four characters: father, Beauty, Beast, and Beast’s pet dog, an alert spaniel. The spaniel, a domesticated animal, serves as an appropriately hybrid go-between for the humans and Beast, who is equally comfortable as predatory hunter or smoking-jacketed master of the estate. His bristling lion’s mane, retractable claws, and rumbling roar are real enough, and Beauty is shocked when, after their first evening together, her attentive and cultivated host drops down on all fours to spring from the room. But he is also well connected in London financial circles and has his lawyers reverse the future fatherin-law’s commercial misfortune. Beauty is a kind of hostage to Beast’s generosity toward her father. When she first arrives at his sumptuously appointed mansion, she notes how much more beautiful than a man a lion is, but that his beauty is

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of a “different order.” She is overwhelmed by his irreducible animal difference: “its presence choked her.” She feels herself to be a “tender herbivore,” a sacrificial lamb in his predatory company. But he is struck immediately by the sweet and grave look of her eyes and nurtures the hope that these eyes could see through appearances. Each night after dinner he falls to his knees and laps her hand with his rough tongue. It is his way of kissing her hand. He is shy but astute in conversation, his voice rolling like a great organ, his mane irradiated by the fireplace, his eyes green as agate. There is the impression of great power in repose. His eyes reflect her face back to her like two small buds in flower. The days pass, and she becomes more comfortable, even happy, at Beast’s home. She soon feels as if she has known him all her life, but still shivers at his strangeness, flinches at his touch. She cannot bring herself to touch him back. Her father calls, his fortunes restored. Of course, she is free to join him in London, but Beast confesses he will be lonely without her. She promises to return before spring. London is full of buzz and social whirl: shopping, restaurants, theatre, opera—an urbane, sophisticated romp through the human condition. Her father escorts his darling everywhere—there are oedipal hints, and Beast seems so far away. She feels free and excited, but also a “desolating emptiness.” One night after the theatre, she looks in the mirror and sees a “lacquered … pampered” face staring back at her, no longer the double bud in the agate eyes. Winter has passed and spring is here, but she wants to cry. Suddenly, the spaniel is at her door, desperate, filthy, emaciated. Come, Spaniel signals, come quickly. A night train, then a taxi to Beast’s mansion, now neglected, nature falling into decay, all the flowers dead, lights extinguished: Beauty and the spaniel rush to the attic where Beast lies sick on a narrow, iron bed. She rouses him, “I have come home.” But he whispers, “I’m dying, Beauty.” She throws herself upon him, weeping, kissing, imploring him not to die, to take her back. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an unkempt mane of hair and, how strange, a broken nose, such as the nose of retired boxers, that gave him a distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts.

Beast goes over to humanity, but retains vestiges of himself. Even in this homage to de Beaumont’s classic, Carter gets in her two cents. In her next story she breaks the bank.

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Alternative Rotations: Beautiful Beasts and Beastly Beauties In “Mr. Lyon,” when Beauty first meets Beast, she observes that “a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty.” His beauty attracts, but its strangeness suffocates her. Neither Angela Carter nor the future Mrs. Lyon takes this dilemma frivolously. It cannot simply be waved off as if it were a trivial matter. In erasing Beast’s strangeness at the end, this standard version of the story also expunges most of his beauty. The two are of a piece. Conversely, to embrace Beast’s beauty as it is would be to enter an aesthetic of the unknown, a place where taken-for-granted markers of attraction and identity dissolve in a stew of confused pheromones. It must be the same from the lion’s side. What sense does he find gazing into our round-pupiled eye, suspended in a field of white? Cats always look away from the human stare. The senselessness must be as unnerving as the attraction. The terms of two such sensibilities coming together, each an other to each, would have to be reinvented de novo; it’s not enough that their hearts be positively disposed. These sorts of issues can be examined only in an account where Beast’s identity is as stubborn as Beauty’s, where, in other words, the burden of change is not presumed to lie with nature. Carter’s next story may be the test case. In “The Tiger’s Bride,” both Beauty and Beast seem to be deeply embedded in their respective categories. The first words of the story—“My father lost me to the Beast at cards”—prefigure a different ending from the usual. Staying home with father versus being given away to a stranger is decided by turning over a card. Can a daughter so cynically transferred across species boundaries ever be sentimental about species membership? The lugubrious father is left crying in his grappa, but Beauty and Beast are left with the dilemma of mutual attraction confounded by mutual otherness: now what? Beauty and her father are wealthy Russians stopping over at an obscure and inclement backwater in northern Italy where “La Bestia,” as the locals call him, is a grand seigneur with a knack at cards. Any visitor of note is obliged to play a hand with him. After hours of more than a few hands, the father has gambled away crops, estates, serfs, forests, and, finally, his last chattel, Beauty. A carriage will be sent to pick her up the following morning. Waiting for dawn to arrive, the proud and offended Beauty is flooded with memories. The English nurse of her childhood outside Petersburg adored the headstrong, little charge, her Christmas rose, a “wild

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wee thing.” It took tales of a tiger-man to rein in the spirited girl, a tigerman from London who would ride the wind across the North Sea and gobble her up if she did not behave. This grown up Beauty carries a wild child inside. The carriage arrives at Beast’s palazzo, where she passes over the threshold into nature. Horses are stabled in the grand dining room, paintings face the cobwebbed walls, wind gusts through abandoned corridors. The palazzo is reverting to nature. The valet who leads her to Milord is bandy legged, chattering, simian. In the tiger’s dark shuttered room, he sits completely concealed by mask, wig, gown, and strong vapors of burning scent. The uneasy valet speaks for him, who, despite his skill at cards, has no speech. The master has only one wish, he stammers: to see you unclothed, and only once. Then everything, you included, will be returned, with additional gifts, to your father. Beauty responds with contempt. In part she mistakes his request to be a proposition in the crude sense, and in part she is insulted that he would ask for so little. She is worth more than a toss in the hay. She will raise her skirts, she replies, but will remain covered from the waist up and accept only the standard prostitute’s fee, nothing more. Through the mask a tear drops from Beast’s eye. The valet quickly hustles her out of the room. She takes Beast to be appropriately stricken with shame, but, as the story unfolds, we realize the cause of his sorrow lies elsewhere. He in fact only wants to see naked, human beauty, the one thing guarded humanity forbids to nature. From his side this is not to ask for too little, but, if anything, too much. The game of cards, his risking everything he owned, was for this one prize, an unobstructed gaze at this most beautiful specimen of humanity. Time passes. The simian valet again escorts Beauty to Beast’s chamber, where the same interview occurs, with the same result. The saddened Tiger drops his masked head to his arms and great paws extrude from the sleeves. She notices. That night Beauty hears Beast pacing outside her room. The next time, the valet says that master would like to go riding. They saddle up and trot out over the sepia landscape toward the river. Beauty feels herself passing into strangeness, reflecting on the supposition that, by the rational conceit of man, there was not a valid soul among the six of them, three riders and three mounts. Beasts and women alike are strangers to man. At the river’s bank, protected by a wall of reeds, the valet announces that, if she will not remove the barrier of her costume, the master will remove his. Suddenly she is on “the brink of panic … far from home.” She nods agreement and watches his disrobing. “Nothing about

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him reminded me of humanity.” Then, just as Tiger is about to cover, she disrobes, showing her white skin and red nipples to his eyes. The horses also lift their heads to gaze. The wind eddies through the open space between them, frozen in mutual exposure. Then Beast and his valet bound off, leaving Beauty to walk the riverbank. She now understood that Beast had not asked for too little, but for the “abominable,” for the one thing a human could not do before nature, to go naked as a familiar among animals. And she had been able to do it. She felt free for the first time in her life. Back at the palazzo the relieved valet tells her she may return to her former life, but she waves him off. Again she strips down to the skin, and goes to Beast’s room. The valet, now his naked monkey self, shows her in. Inside there is no longer pretense. Beast’s costume and incense are set aside. The room, stinking of fur and piss, is littered with bones. The great cat paces, then freezes at the sight of her. His fear is deeper than hers. She sits on the floor before him, an offering. Then, down on his belly he slides himself across the floor, purring vibrations that throb shingles off the roof, shutters open, walls to the ground; the force of nature comes closer and closer. His tongue is on her … And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

The dissolution of the human into the animal is a refreshing and unsettling corrective to the standard anthropocentric denouement, especially when accompanied by this kind of erotic frisson. The proud Tiger figured out how to be a fair match for the strong willed Beauty, so, for once, Beast carries the day. If anything, it would take a thousand more subversive stories like this to compensate for the herds of Beasts already sacrificed to anthropocentrism. There are at least two ways to read “Tiger’s Bride.” In one reading, Beast awakens in Beauty the force of nature, which has lain dormant since her childhood, restoring her to wholeness. Instead of the usual formula in which Beauty redeems a fallen Beast, Carter’s Beast redeems a fallen Beauty. On the other hand, “Tiger’s Bride” could also be taken for a story about annihilative love, in which the condition of love between “others” is that one becomes the other. In formal terms it makes little difference whether Beast absorbs into humanity—as usually happens—or Beauty

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absorbs into nature. In terms of history’s score card, it makes a great difference, but that’s a separate issue. When the consequence of “I love you” is “I am you,” then love does not so much reconcile as sacrifice one to the other. By this formula nature-human relations reduce to a zero-sum game. But reconciliation between humanity and nature—as metaphorized by the Beauty-and-Beast parable—would seem to be incompatible with the eradication of one or the other. On the contrary, it would seem to require the celebration of the other’s survival as a beloved other. No sooner is the problem raised, however, but Carter addresses it with her next story, “The Company of Wolves.” Strictly speaking, “Wolves” is based on the Little-Red-Riding-Hood tale, but since it has a Beauty, a Beast, and other similarities to the parable formula, it will do for our purposes. 8 Beauty lives in wolf country. When children go out to their chores, they carry a freshly sharpened knife, and always keep to the path. At night, especially winter nights, cottagers lock their doors against the hungry, howling carnivores, and those who must go out are watchful for gleaming, green eyes in the dark. It’s not just wolves, but there are rumors of wolf-men, shape shifters with slavering jaws, human from the waist up, wolf from the waist down, hair full of lice, huge genitals. Beauty sets out for grandma’s house on Christmas Eve. She packs the usual knife with her small cargo of cakes and cheese, but, a late born child, she has been so loved and indulged that she fears nothing. She has just stepped over the cusp into adolescence, with flaxen hair, newly swelling breasts, the first bleedings of womanhood. Scarlet cheeked and wrapped inside her red shawl, she has the confidence of fruit just before the picking, unblemished, full of sweet magic. She has not gone far before the country path crosses over into nature and “the forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws.” On the path she meets a handsome young hunter with flashing, white teeth. They laugh and joke, instantly attracted. He carries her basket, shows off his gun and compass. Bet I can get to your grandma’s house before you, he says—How? she wants to know.—Straight through the woods—What about the wolves?—He taps the stock of his gun—And if you win the bet?—You must give me a kiss. There is spittle on his gleaming teeth. Off he goes. She dallies a bit to ensure the kiss. By the time he raps on grandma’s door, the hunter’s knuckles are hairy. He enters and strips off his clothes. Grandma, very old and very pious, hurls her open Bible at the werewolf, but to no avail. He devours her quickly, dresses, and waits for Beauty, the second course on his menu.

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While waiting, he picks up grandma’s Bible, closes it, and lays it on the table. When Beauty arrives, she immediately senses something has gone awry. There is no grandma, and the Bible, always open, is now closed. The handsome hunter has strange eyes and a predatory manner. Her knife is out of reach. He is going to kill her. A blizzard swirls outside and wolves gather around the house. “Those are … my brothers, darling,” he says. She looks out the window and pities their frozen lot. There is no point to fear, she realizes, so she stops being afraid. Fearlessness comes easily to this Beauty. Then, unrequested, she removes her red shawl. What shall I do with this?, she asks—Into the fire, you won’t be needing it again, Beast replies. Then she boldly pulls off her blouse, small breasts white as snow. Again she asks, again he answers. The teasing ritual continues with each piece of clothing until, fully naked, she goes directly to Beast and delivers his kiss. What big teeth you have, she says—All the better to eat you with, he replies. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing …

They mate till granny’s bones clatter under the bed. Later, resting, she calms his fears, picks out his lice and eats them as she “would do in a savage marriage ceremony.” Then they fall asleep. See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

Lice may not be to everyone’s taste, especially for a wedding meal, but no one ever promised that reconciliation between nature and humanity would be easy for gourmets on either side. If she eats his lice tonight, then he, the carnivore, better be ready for her special dish of Limburg cheese tomorrow night. Aside from its questionable cuisine, two points are made by this story. First, there is the explicit, almost ritual closing of the Bible. Its closing shuts out the Judeo-Christian message of human dominion over nature and of humanity created in God’s image. With no Bible to get in the way, nature-human relations can rewrite themselves in fresh terms. Second, neither Beauty nor Beast dissolves into the other. The wolf-man does not swallow and digest Beauty into animality, nor does she rescue his human part from his wolf part. Instead

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they meet half way, she still a beautiful, young woman and he still a hairy werewolf, each embracing the other as an other. Carter’s three stories are like a triptych in a pagan temple, Beast kneeling before Beauty on one flanking panel, Beauty before Beast on the other, and the two standing together on the central panel—each panel illustrating a different rotation of the Beauty-and-Beast parable. *

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If one could imagine Angela Carter stepping out of magic realism into what might be called “elastic realism” one would have Marian Engel’s Bear. Engel’s award winning novel begins with a woman of unspecified demographics who barely has a name: Lou. She works in a basement office of the Historical Institute where she has become pale and desiccated as the crumbling, old documents she handles. She describes herself as mole-like, squints in the light, hates the feel of “cold air on her skin.” One day her boss informs her the Institute has inherited the estate of a nineteenth-century Colonel. The Cary property includes a great house, Pennarth, on its own island in northern Ontario. Lou is dispatched to inventory its contents. “The change will do you good,” the Director says. 9 Lou has not always been this way. On her drive north, she passes over a height of land, and suddenly feels “lightheaded” with memories of childhood summers in the north country: poison ivy as tall as she, a huge dragonfly “sucked dry” by a spider, a silver colored lake, a vague sense of loss. Then she appraises her current self: “Where have I been? she wondered. Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?” It was nothing in particular. Things in general had turned gray. This Beauty is severely de-natured. When she arrives at the Cary estate, she is startled by the main house, a magnificent Fowler’s octagon. The local caretaker nervously tells her the place comes with a bear. It’s around back. Hopes she won’t mind feeding and watering it. There’s a hundred pounds of dog chow in the shed. The next day she seeks out the bear in its shack behind the main house. As she approaches she gets “a large whiff of shit and musk. It was indubitably male, she saw, and its hindquarters were matted with dirt … it looked stupid and defeated.” The beast was chained to a post and “not at all menacing. Not a creature of the wild … time had ceased to exist (for it) and there was only waiting.” Her description of the bear echoes her earlier appraisal of herself. She has the thought of “restoring some gloss to it, taking it for walks.” Up to this point the novel’s action roughly

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corresponds to the opening of the standard Beauty-and-Beast tale. There is a Beauty, Lou, dispirited, but beginning to perk up. She’s been sent on a journey to a distant estate in the forest by a father surrogate, the Director. The bear may be pathetic, but it’s a real Beast. And there are the first stirrings of a redemptive motif: Lou would like to “restore some gloss” to the sad, mud-caked animal. In fact, both Beauty and Beast look like restoration projects. The next morning Lou wakes up shivering, and pees a yellow patch in the snow—it had been years. She walks around the island, everything is pulsing with life; she listens to the birds, branches rubbing on branches, the sound of her own shoelaces. The bear cautiously puts his muzzle in her hand; they are “beginning to be friends.” The changeability of his size excites her. An old Native lady, Lucy, tells her to “shit with the bear … you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell. He like you.” A day later she squats beside his cabin and shits, unhooks his chain from the post, takes him to the river. He strains against the chain: “to her this first small rebellion was a return of life, and she rejoiced in it.” She releases the chain, fetches a brush, and grooms him. Both Lou and the author take their cue from old Lucy: Bear’s pronoun shifts from “it” to “he.” By now it’s clear this is no fairy-tale bear: he is not a fallen human, but a fallen animal. He doesn’t talk, wear fancy clothes, play cards, or retain a lawyer; nor does he have any other hidden human agenda. Lou, on the other hand, may have a hidden animal agenda. She wants to redeem his animality; she wants him to be a river-diving, sleek coated, wild bear, and she intends to go there with him. As the weeks pass, she busily catalogues the great house’s library and artifacts, but spends more and more time with Bear. She starts out with a wary sense of pity, then becomes his companion and friend. One night he enters the house, climbs the stairs, and settles by the fireplace. She is simultaneously frightened and delighted by his nonchalant boldness. The next day she skinny-dips with him in the river, and he pushes her under the water. She panics and darts to the shore where he follows and licks the fresh river water off her naked body with his long, ridged tongue. Two nights later she lies in bed streaked with blood from a sudden explosion of black fly bites. Bear enters her room and sniffs at her smell of blood. She lies stiff with fear. Then he leaves. Lou is riding an escalating curve of fear and excitement, which rises in a series of spikes to a declaration of love. “I love you, bear,” she says, but he does not turn into a prince. He does, however, recapture degrees of animality: his thick coat is glossy, he eats pawsfull of grubs and berries in the woods, swims in the river, walks the

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land unchained. He takes long hikes with her, mirrors her moods. Their growing attachment is reciprocal. One night Lou begins to masturbate and Bear takes an interest. She coaxes him into cunnilingus. The next night Bear walks upstairs and goes directly to her, “his tongue bent vertically and he put it up her cunt.” A note falls out of a book about the offspring of a woman and a bear. According to old Finnish legend, it’s a hero. “She cried with joy.” Her love for Bear becomes voluptuous, passing over a threshold into obsession and danger. “Pull my head off,” she says, caressing his furry testicles as he licks her. “Eat me, Bear.” “Bear, make me comfortable in the world at last. Give me your skin.” She wants to merge with him, find her own reality in him. She lies naked on his furry belly, licks his gums with her tongue, her entire body reeks of bear and “this smell was very sweet to her.” But there are two discordant notes: although he obviously enjoys their physical closeness, he has a habit of stopping at inexplicable points and waddling off. He does not share her inexhaustible craving. Also, despite her best efforts, he has no erections. She responds with more insistent obsessiveness, asking him to tear her skin, claw out her heart like a grub. She lies around on the hot summer days—it is now August—panting through fantasies of impregnation and giving birth to heroic twins. For her, their lovemaking devolves into a quest for erection and penetration. She wants to mate with him, animal to animal. But to her shame and self-reproach, he seems uninterested or unready. He licks to his heart’s content, but goes no further. There is no passing of seed. Soon the days are cooling and summer is coming to an end. She and Bear are lounging naked, as usual, when she gets up to dress. Suddenly his penis rises into an erection. He looks confused. She drops down on all fours, raising her buttocks into the animal position. He reaches out a huge paw and rips her back from shoulder to hip. She leaps away, turns to face him. No more erection. She’s bleeding, shaking with fear, and chases him out of the house. So much for mating with bears. She tried to go too far, and Bear drew the line for both of them, right across her back, a mark she would carry for life. In the next few days they get back on gently affectionate terms, and she meditates on what he had given her: Certainly it was not the seed of heroes, or magic … for she continued to be herself. But for one strange, sharp moment … she knew what the world was for. She felt not that she was at last human, but that she was at last clean. Clean and simple and proud.

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The reader wonders if the taste of her would remain in Bear’s memory. We don’t know because real bears don’t talk, any more than they mate with humans. But if he could talk, perhaps he would paraphrase her: she had restored him to a clean and proud bear. When Lou and Bear—Beauty and Beast—first encounter each other the natural world is too little with them: she inkstained, pale, squinting, buried in the basement archives of the Historical Institute; he chained to a post, eating dog chow off a dish, caked with mud, malodorous with his own excrement. In this initial state both parties have lost their natural moorings; each suffers a “life out of balance,” to borrow the Hopi notion of Koyaanisqatsi. Step by step they return each other to balance. Lou unhooks Bear’s chain, and, in return, he permits her to unhook hers. That was redemption enough for each of them. They didn’t have to mate and propagate a race of heroes. Only mythical creatures do that. But real bears and humans can walk the same island, swim the same river, drop the same chain, inhabit the same world. 10 *

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The three heterodox rotations on the Beauty-and-Beast theme— “Tiger’s Bride,” “Company of Wolves,” “Bear”—clearly support Marina Warner’s observation that as we lose nature, in itself and in ourselves, value seems to have migrated from the human to the natural pole, from Beauty to Beast. 11 Most tellings of the Beauty-and-Beast parable— whether orthodox or heterodox—portray Beauty as awakening to a desire for Beast. Traditionally their union is realized by Beast’s coming over to the human side, accompanied by an almost audible sigh of relief. But that ending is no longer as satisfying as it used to be: it now evokes more letdown than relief. When Beast transmutes into a human, so that an entitled, handsome, “candy-colored” nobleman replaces the hulking, vulnerable, soulful beast, the effect is self-congratulatory and anticlimactic. But when Beauty goes over to Beast’s side, the effect is unnerving and atavistic—with Beauty we enter into the “other.” In formal terms, however, the two outcomes are identical: one pole collapses into the other. Either Beauty’s humanity or Beast’s animality is expunged. The recent turnabout may avenge nature some of its past indignities, but it doesn’t make for reconciliation. Despite the appeal of its purring climax, Angela Carter’s “Tiger’s Bride” suffers from this formal problem. Carter’s other heterodox story, “Company of Wolves,” yields a more balanced outcome, as does Marian Engel’s Bear. In Carter’s comic fairytale, neither Beauty nor Beast enters into otherness. Instead, they

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enter the same bed. Beauty happily relinquishes her virginity, but not her identity, and Beast discovers that he’s no less a werewolf for making love, not war. Their ability to push through formulaic fear and threat into mutual acceptance metaphorizes a reconciliation between humanity and nature that stands as an attractive alternative to transmutation. Marian Engel’s heavier treatment is simultaneously realistic and bizarre, but, for all its weirdness, it yields an unimpeachable sanity. Neither Lou nor Bear magically mutates into the other—it’s not a fairy tale—nor do they, despite lots of foreplay, copulate and propagate. The story’s elastic realism does not stretch that far. It’s not even clear that Engel’s characters are unambiguously polarized. One may be fully human, the other fully animal, but they share a common malady: alienation from nature. Their story lurches through spasms of shock therapy to a surprisingly low-voltage resolution. At the end we are left with two creatures who are merely sane, a major achievement against the background of their deranged biographies. They are more than simply reconciled to each other; as collaborators in each other’s sanity, they have raised the potential at the human–nature encounter to a new level of mutual redemption. Engel does not pose humans and animals as estranged categories, but as fellow victims of a world out of balance. In this sense her parable has its finger on the weakening pulse at both sides of the human–nature divide. When her two sides come together, enough energy is released to restore a small part of the world’s pulse to normal. And with each telling and retelling of this heterodox rotation of the parable, the more likely the Earth’s larger pulse will throb its way back to normal. The urgent task of reconciliation at the nature-human interface needs all the help it can get, but what it most needs is a new understanding of humanity’s place in nature. What it needs, in other words, is a transformation of the heterodox into the normative. That way lies sanity. And survival.

Endnotes Epigraph taken from M. Warner (1994b). Six myths of our time: Little angels, little monsters, beautiful beasts, and more (p. 63). New York, NY: Vintage. (Published version of her 1993 BBC Reith Lectures) 1

Much to my surprise, I have not found much published support for the notion that Beauty and the Beast is a commentary on human–nature relations. One exception is Marina Warner’s From the beast to the blonde (1994a), where she argues that historical changes in society’s portrayal of the Beast are correlated with

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changing societal attitudes towards animals. Hearne (1989) mentions that the story permits Beauty “to explore her animal nature” … “her rapport with nature,” and introduces her to “carnal knowledge” (p. 126). But neither Warner nor Hearne develop the point. 2 There seems to be a consensus among folk-tale specialists that de Beaumont’s version is the standard. . 3 See the introductory chapter in Zipes (1989) for a brief history of oral and literary fairy tales in France. 4 Quoted passages are taken from a 1783 English translation of de Beaumont’s 1756 French text. For a facsimile of the complete text, see Hearne, 1989, pp. 189 ff. (Appendix Two). 5 The book is Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1992). New York, NY: Disney Press. (Adapted by A. L. Singer from the film) 6 M. Warner (1994a), p. 315, p. 313. 7 All three stories are in A. Carter (1979). The bloody chamber and other stories. London, England: Penguin Books. Quoted passages are from pp. 45, 48, 49, 51, 45, 51, 63-64, 64, 66, 67, 141, 145, 147, 147. 8 “The Company of Wolves” was the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie of the same title. The movie, as is usually the case, altered some features of Carter’s story. 9 Engel, Marian. (1976). Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. The quoted passages are from pp. 11, 13, 19, 35-36, 46, 49, 51, 99, 115, 112, 120, 136-137. 10 Musical composition by Philip Glass (1983). Koyaanisqatsi. New York: Antilles Records. 11 M. Warner (1994b), pp. 63, 81.

CHAPTER 8 OUTLYING BEAUTIES AND BEASTS

I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both … —Henry Jekyll The orthodox and heterodox versions of the story we looked at in the previous chapter focus directly on Beauty and the Beast as a story in its own right. In contrast, outlying versions transfer the Beauty-and-Beast motif into another context entirely, where it provides a vocabulary for the host story’s primary message. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, for example, the beastly Quasimodo and the beautiful Esmeralda bring a particularly poignant edge to Victor Hugo’s critique of life-denying religiosity. Similarly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde borrow and adapt the theme to suit their critiques of scientific arrogance. Despite their many differences, the three novels—each a classic in the Western canon—share strong overlaps. Hugo and Stevenson both examine the relation of the natural to the human in “human nature.” Stevenson and Shelley address the role of science at the interface between humanity and nature. In a sense, all three authors take critical aim at the same target: the human urge to bend nature to its own narrow purpose, whether it be driven by proud science or arrogant religion.

Nature Versus Arrogant Religiosity Victor Hugo (1802-1885), the leading voice of French romanticism, wrote the remarkable Hunchback of Notre Dame at the precocious age of twentynine, and the extravagance of youthful authorship shows. The novel is so full of incident, event, and character, of everything at cross-purpose with

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everything else, it almost bursts at the seams. But the Beauty-and-Beast motif runs through it like sinew, holding all the parts together. In Hunchback the motif has its traditional triangular configuration with the father at one vertex, Beauty and Beast at the other two. However, Hugo significantly rotates the emotional and relational architecture of the basic triangle. Quasimodo, the hunchbacked Beast, loves Esmeralda, the street dancing Beauty. But, in a first departure from the original, she does not reciprocate his love; in fact, although they are strongly linked by fate and circumstance, their actual experience of each other is episodic, chaste, and asymmetrical. In a second departure, the father figure, Dom Claude Frollo, has a radically rescripted and amplified role. He is the father of Beast, not Beauty. And his feelings toward Beauty are not at all paternal: despite his priestly disavowal of the flesh, he is sexually obsessed with her. A further complication is that Quasimodo is deeply loyal to his adoptive father, pitting filial devotion against his love for Esmeralda. Finally, the main opposition is not between Beauty and Beast, but between them on one side and the father on the other, between Frollo’s urge to subdue and possess their vital force and their struggle to resist. They represent “natural man,” the spontaneous blending of nature and humanity in the human being. Frollo is de-natured man, one whose natural half is sheared off and alienated from its human half. Amazingly, the triangle manages to hold together for hundreds of pages until, with its rupture, the story ends. But first things first: does Quasimodo qualify for the part of Beast? He is early introduced as the “Pope of Fools” at a ribald public festival that runs through the streets of medieval Paris. Even by the freakish standards of this parade, he stands out as deformed and monstrous: His prodigious head was covered with red bristles; between his shoulders rose an enormous hump, which was counterbalanced by a protuberance in front … his feet were immense, his hands monstrous; but with all this deformity, there was a formidable air of strength, agility, and courage … 1

As the novel progresses he is variously described as a “monster … beast … brute … tiger … boar … animal … wolf … bear … ape … lion” in an almost endless litany of references to monstrosity and animality. The general physical impression is of a great, hulking, athletic ape, a sort of oversize orangutan. Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre Dame, had adopted him as a four-year-old foundling, named him “Quasimodo” (partly formed), and let him loose in the cathedral. The cavernous edifice became Quasimodo’s whole world; he knew every corner and crevice, climbed the towers fearlessly, scrambled along its precipices, went deaf leaping and

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swinging on his beloved bells. His irrepressible vitality made the cathedral into a living being; Hugo notes that after Quasimodo’s death the great body of the church was a “void,” a “skeleton,” a “skull” with eye sockets, but no eyes. Undeniably a force of nature, the hunchback is equally human: literate, reflective, courageous, capable of deep and generous love, a great, striving soul who typified much that was admired in the romantic age. Hugo set his story in the 1400s, but Quasimodo was very much a product of the romantic 1800s. His blend of animal and human features gives him the configuration of a classic Beast: brute on the outside, human on the inside. But unlike the classic, Quasimodo is not his own master. Claude Frollo has the kind of control over Quasimodo that recalls the dominion passages from the biblical Book of Genesis. 2 The priest, erect, irritated, threatening, imperious—Quasimodo at his feet, humble, submissive, suppliant. And yet it is certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with his thumb.

Here Hugo has the brute, kinetic power of nature bow down before the theologized gaze of humankind. Like most romantics, Hugo championed nature, but this did not translate into a friendly or optimistic account of nature–human relations. Although Esmeralda does not fit the classic Beauty profile, she is close enough. If anything, she is even more beautiful than her predecessors. In her first appearance, the sixteen-year-old dancing girl is introduced as “dazzling … radiant … golden.” In a later passage, her simple presence destroys the confidence of a group of young, aristocratic women: Her beauty was so surpassing that at the moment when she appeared at the entrance of the room, she seemed to shed over it a sort of light peculiar to herself … the young ladies were dazzled. Each felt wounded, as it were, in her beauty.

But she departs from the prototype in her closeness to nature, an elemental blending of fire and air: “eyes of flame” … “a sort of human bee … living in a perpetual whirl” … “a little bird” … endowed with “agility, dexterity, and lightness of foot.” Combining features of nature and humanity, she effortlessly dances back and forth between the two. Her beauty and movement are completely uncultivated, as pure and spontaneous as gifts of nature. She is “wild” and “chaste,” a “maniac” and a “queen”; her singing

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is “pure … ariel” and “harsh … hissing,” but all her parts are held together in “harmony.” Like Quasimodo, but differently configured, she is a romantic type: uncalculating, direct, and vital. In one of her early encounters with Quasimodo, she finds him whipped and strapped to the pillory, roaring like a “wild beast” for water, and she is instantly moved to sympathy. The surrounding crowd is mocking, cursing, and stoning him in a frenzy of fear and hatred. She clears a path through them and holds a gourd of water to his parched lips, a kindness he does not forget. The next time they meet, it’s his turn. She has been arrested and convicted, by prevailing evidentiary practice, of murder and witchcraft. Prior to the gibbet, she is forced to her knees to do penance before the great cathedral. Perched on a front gallery, Quasimodo watches and waits for his moment. Suddenly, he lowers himself by rope, throws her guards aside, lifts her to his massive shoulders and bounds into the cathedral crying, “Sanctuary, sanctuary!” As the gathered multitude takes up the chant, Quasimodo turns to face them, a triumphant beast: His huge head, with its profuse covering of hair, appeared to be thrust down into his shoulders, like that of the lion, which, too, has a copious mane and no neck … at this sight the women laughed and cried; the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. Yes, he was beautiful—he, that orphan, that foundling, that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked in the face that society from which he was banished … that human justice from which he had snatched its victim … which he, the meanest of the mean, had foiled with the force of God!

This epiphany fuses Quasimodo and Esmeralda into a momentary whole, he lending brute strength and courage when she most needs it, she conferring beauty on him for the first and only time of his life. Even the fickle Parisian crowd rises to the occasion. Then he takes her into his great palace, the Cathedral, and deposits her in her own quarters, the sanctuary cell. Here Hugo sets aside a quiet space at the heart of the novel that could have been lifted directly out of Madame de Beaumont. Esmeralda is frightened at his beastly appearance. He senses her fear and cautions her not to look at him. He gives her food, clothing, his own bed, calms her, then leaves her in the cell where she “ponders the words of this almost monstrous being … struck by the tone of his voice, at once so harsh and so gentle.” This is reminiscent of what had earlier been said about her voice, at once “harsh” and “pure.” The ear can hear resemblances that the eye cannot see.

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The next day begins with its own chapter, entitled “A Human Heart in a Form Scarcely Human.” Quasimodo’s gentle, self-effacing manner continues. Esmeralda invites him into her cell, but he declines, “No, no … the owl never enters the nest of the lark.” He contemplates her beauty, she his deformity. Breaking the silence, he refers to himself as an “unhappy monster … a beast … neither man nor brute” in contrast to her, “a sunbeam, a drop of dew, a bird’s song.” It’s revealing that Quasimodo chooses metaphors from nature, no less for her than for himself. Their definitions draw closer together. Then the poor fellow—hopelessly in love—tells her that when she wishes to be rid of him, he will oblige by hurling himself off the church tower. No pining away for this Beast. Finally, he gives her a special whistle, just as his predecessor gave Beauty a magic ring. When she whistles, he will hear it through his deafness and come to her. The direct line between them is drawn. One day, while watching her stroke her pet goat, he sidesteps metaphors for the literal truth: “My misfortune—said he—is that I am too much like a human creature. Would to God I had been a downright beast, like that goat!” But this is as far as Hugo takes the theme. Esmeralda continues to love a handsome and shallow cavalry Captain, and Quasimodo is never a consideration. In the meanwhile, the creepy father figure, Claude Frollo, is alternately central and peripheral to the action. Like Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll, he began as a decent young man with a promising future. He excelled at school, took holy orders, raised his orphaned younger brother, adopted and protected the foundling Quasimodo, and rose up through the ranks of the Cathedral hierarchy. Along the way, however, his character began to spoil, again like Frankenstein and Jekyll. He became pridefully religious, personally imperious, secretive, voyeuristic, and contemptuous of bodily appetites. He spent endless hours in his private study, combining sacred readings with hermetic and occult philosophies. Once he discovered Esmeralda dancing in the streets, he spent almost as many hours watching her from a distance, simultaneously abhorring her spontaneous animality and coveting it in welling spasms of lust, lashed with guilt and self-hatred, taking refuge in an escalating sense of his own religious superiority even as he felt its foundations erode. He was obsessed with her and repelled by her. Her simple existence was a rebuke, humiliation, and revelation to him. For her part, she had unmixed feelings. She was horrified by him and, compulsively honest, told him so whenever he gave her the opportunity.

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After the quiet Beauty-and-Beast interlude in the Cathedral tower, the story is again swept up in the tumult of Paris, careening to its tragic resolution. When a mob of vagabonds attacks the cathedral, Quasimodo, thinking they have come to abduct Esmeralda, rises up like Rousseau’s noble savage and holds them off single handedly. King Louis XI suddenly enters the picture, sending his troops to massacre what is left of the confused and wounded vagabond army. Esmeralda is spirited out of the besieged cathedral by Frollo, again rejects his pathetic advances, and is finally hunted down and hanged by the king’s executioners, as Quasimodo watches helplessly from the Cathedral’s tower. Within a day or two, it’s all over. Both Quasimodo and Esmeralda are dualities—equal parts natural and human—and, despite her beauty, she no more represents humanity than he does. Each is an outcast from human society; each is a monster, she monstrously innocent and beautiful—more than the human world could bear—and he monstrously ugly—equally unbearable. On balance, their similarities count for more than their differences. The radically romantic Hugo recrafted Beauty and Beast as a pair of noble savages; each was a “natural man,” the original synthesis of the natural and the human into a harmonious whole. Their plight was that they lived amid the corruptions of civilized human society rather than in the original state of nature. For Hugo, two other characters represent de-natured humanity. One is the Parisian mob: crazed, religious, superstitious, cruel, driven this way and that by forces it cannot understand, never knowing who or what it is. The second and more important is Dom Claude Frollo. He is the thoroughly self deceived and theologized man whose natural passions are so blocked they metastasize his own soul and the soul of any natural man or woman drawn into his orbit. Esmeralda cringes and recoils in his presence, Quasimodo grovels. At the end, in a spasmodic rebellion of natural against theologized humanity, she curses him and Quasimodo throws him off the Cathedral tower. But their victory is literally short lived. Esmeralda is only sixteen when she dies, Quasimodo twenty. If it is true that in nature, no animal dies of old age, for Hugo it is equally true that in human society, no natural human dies of old age. Two years later their skeletons are discovered in a bone vault north of Paris. On hers, the neck is broken; she had been hanged. On his, curled in an embrace around hers, the neck is not broken. He had followed her to the grave, shielding her in death as he had in life. Hugo’s Hunchback is not an account of human–nature relations per se, but of the opposition between the natural and the artificialized

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human. The former represents synthesis between humanity and nature, the latter their alienation. Urban, human society reduces to a frenzied, deracinated mob; and human learning—as represented by Dom Frollo— shears us off from our natural innocence and compassion. Dom Frollo’s toxic religiosity suggests that Hugo singles out religion as a prime cause of human rootlessness and alienation. By their simple existence the natural Beauty and the beautiful Beast both fascinate and rebuke de-natured humanity. They can be neither dismissed nor embraced. Together, they are a nagging reminder of how much has been lost for so little gained. In this permutation Beauty-and-Beast is worse than a zero sum game: nobody wins, everybody loses.

Nature Versus Proud Science In April of 1815, nature literally blew its top. Mount Tambora, a volcano in the Indonesian archipelago, erupted with such ferocity that 1,450 meters disappeared from the summit. On April 9th it was over 4,300 meters high. Two days later, it was reduced to 2,850 meters. An estimated 10,000 people were immediately killed by explosion and tidal waves, and another 80,000 perished from the aftereffects. A haze of dust particles rose into the atmosphere and slowly circled the globe, making 1816 Europe’s “year without a summer.” 3 This was the backdrop to a small gathering of English literary figures in Switzerland. Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, his friend Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician, John Polidori, assembled one June night at a lakeside villa where they hatched a ghost-story contest. Their gathering now has a firm place in the informal history of English literature because it produced the first images of Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s mind. Years later Mary recalled a “waking dream” she had in which a young scientist recoils in terror before a monster he had created. From her dream, she claims, came the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. A year after nature had asserted power over humanity, the dusty memory of its anger still floating overhead, the ambitious Victor Frankenstein set out to even the score. Of course, I’m indulging in a bit of my own mythmaking here. Mount Tambora was real, it really had erupted, and its haze really did hover over Lake Geneva. It only completes the picture to imagine this vestige of nature’s enormous force filtering into Mary Shelley’s “waking dream”; and from there into the mind of her character, Victor Frankenstein, who, intending to subdue nature, instead invented a living reincarnation of Mount Tambora. 4

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At the time Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was only eighteen years old, but far from typical for her age. She had eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was sixteen, gave birth to a child at seventeen only to have it die in two weeks, had a second child at eighteen, and finished Frankenstein at nineteen. She then had a third child before the book was published in 1818, when she was only twenty. The story became a classic, not so much for its literary value as for its mythic treatment of one of the great developments of the modern world: the mediation of human–nature relations by science. Although she lived and wrote prolifically for another 33 years, she never produced anything of equal merit. She peaked high and early. The story is organized like a three-layered onion, each layer containing its own version of the same events. The outer layer is told by Walton, an Arctic explorer, who begins and ends the novel as a witness to its main characters. In his eyes, Victor Frankenstein is an unmitigated Beauty, the most exemplary of men. The middle layer is Frankenstein’s own account of his early years, brilliant studies, scientific ambitions, creation and abandonment of a living being, and the grief and terror his act brought down on himself, family, and friends. Here we get an inside view of the man, one not nearly so flattering. He is a fatally compromised Beauty. The central layer belongs to Frankenstein’s Monster who has no name of his own. He relates the coming into consciousness of a freshly invented creature and, perhaps for the first time in the Beauty-and-Beast tradition, we hear the inner voice of Beast and see the world from his perspective. If nature had a voice, it would be his. 5 Immediately after his creation and abandonment, the Monster tells us, he flees into the Bavarian forest. There he gradually brings his nascent senses into focus, feeds on berries, drinks from streams, and sleeps on the dank earth like any other animal. Soon he discovers a deserted campfire and quickly figures out the relation of wood to fire, enjoys its heat, and learns how to cook his food. In terms first articulated by the eminent anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, these are his first small steps from the “raw” to the “cooked,” from nature to culture. 6 Shortly afterwards, he chances upon a hut and marvels at being sheltered from snow and rain; then, moving on, naively heedless of consequences, he wanders into a village. The villagers, of course, are terrified by his monstrous appearance and batter him with stones. He escapes into open country where he ducks into a low hovel to contemplate, however vaguely, his first painful lesson in the difference between beauties and beasts. By luck, the hovel adjoined a cottage where he could look through a chink in the wall to observe its human family. Mary Shelley’s

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invention of the hovel was a brilliant stroke. Crouching inside, the Monster had humanity just beyond the wall on one side, and nature through the door on the other. Again, in Lévi-Strauss’ scheme, he was betwixt and between, neither this nor that, partly formed (Quasimodo); he was suspended in what anthropologist Victor Turner would call a “liminal” state, at the margin between nature and humanity. 7 For the next year, the creature, wary of another impetuous rush into the uncertain embrace of humans, was perched on the hyphen between nature and humanity, living like a beast in his dirty hovel, but observing the family in the cottage, their “perfect forms … their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions.” Swallowing in rapid gulps the “Godlike science” of language, literacy, and the many exchanges of familial affection and loyalty, he wished in the innocence of his heart to be one of them. 8 By day, he watched and learned; by night, he took to the forest for food and exercise. He gathered firewood for the family and laid it at their door each morning as a gift, transforming wood from a natural to a cultural object, recapitulating every night the transformation he felt occurring in himself. One night he found several books someone had lost in the forest, and devoured their contents: Goethe’s Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The last was of special interest to him: Was he Adam or Satan? He constantly pondered the questions: Who am I? What am I? He also discovered Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory notes in the coat he wore and, sick at heart, read the hateful opinion his creator had of him, the creature. How could he possibly hope to realize his dreams when he was revolting even to his own father? He longed to introduce himself to the small family, but by now he knew of his hideous appearance and feared their rejection. As the months passed he gradually realized the elderly father, DeLacey, was blind. With a blind man the Monster could reach beyond the barrier of appearance and speak from the heart. Trembling at the thought, he decided at one year of age to pass over the threshold from nature to humanity. Not quite man, not quite animal, eight feet tall, bristling with monstrous vitality and strength, his legs buckled and he fell to the ground as he approached the blind DeLacey. Only the greatest exertion of will enabled him to knock at the cottage door. There he made his case, step by cautious step, to the kindly but puzzled elder. Suddenly, the other cottagers returned, and pandemonium broke loose. The women fainted and the young man beat him with a stick as the Monster clung to the knees of the old man, to his desperate chance at humanity. Full of pain and despair he ran from the cottage and retreated

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into his hovel, back over the threshold into animality, his fondest hopes shattered. That night, he tells us: I quitted my retreat and wandered in the wood; and now, no longer restrained by the fear of discovery, I gave vent to my anguish in fearful howlings. I was like a wild beast that had broken the toils. … There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness toward my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species.

The next day he notices the cottage is abandoned. On cue, winds howl out of the hills and hammer him into insanity. He sets fire to the cottage and dances in a frenzy around the conflagration. Here Beast burns his bridge to Beauty. Wittingly or not, the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley has exquisitely articulated the Beautyand-Beast theme from the perspective of Beast. In this view, we humans are “Godlike” at the summit of creation, the envy of all creatures who watch us from beyond the barrier that separates heath from hearth. We are, for all they know, their creators. We have language, fire, dwellings, “delicate complexions.” All that beastly nature wants from us is a fair recognition of its merits and acceptance into our company. Shelley raises the classical Beauty-and-Beast question: Can we see through the rough outer appearance of other creatures to the goodness within? Victor Frankenstein answers the question in the negative. He is an ambiguous Beauty, but after Madame de Beaumont’s 24-karat version, unalloyed virtue was no longer a necessary part of the job description (even being female was no longer required; more on this point in the next chapter). Frankenstein tells us that as a child he was the center of his aristocratic parents’ affection, and later greatly loved by his adoptive sister, Elizabeth, and his dear friend, Clerval. He was a promising and idealistic student, enrolled at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria where he studied chemistry so assiduously and creatively, he was envied by peers and admired by professors. Before leaving for Ingolstadt, he was engaged to marry Elizabeth, “the beautiful and adored companion of all (his) occupations and pleasures.” Every chance of professional success and domestic harmony seemed to lie before him. Leaving aside his being the wrong sex, de Beaumont would have been pleased by his background profile. How could she have known there was a worm in the apple? Even at the very end, long after de Beaumont would have closed the book, after a series of hysterical morbidities, melancholies, and derangements, after self-imposed isolation and an exhausting pursuit of

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the Monster over trackless polar wastes, Frankenstein’s new found soulmate, Walton, describes him as one who “must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable.” And elsewhere: “What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and Godlike in ruin!” And again: “… a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him …” Here the dotty Walton goes over the top, but even the Monster, in his final agony of remorse, declares his creator to be “the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men.” The Monster was not what he appeared to be, and in this sense he was a traditional Beast, where the guiding formula is: appearance may be the opposite of reality. Shelley’s innovation was to apply the same formula to Beauty. To every human in the book except himself Victor Frankenstein was an exceptional Beauty; but to Beast he was a lamentable fraud, a creator who was in all important respects inferior to his creature. 9 And, in another twist of the formula, Shelley’s modern Beauty never sees deeply enough into nature to discover the goodness behind its beastly façade. Rather it is Beast who sees through the “delicate complexion” of humanity to discover—all the time wishing otherwise—its inner ugliness. This is more than just an innovation for innovation’s sake, but an ironic reversal that leads directly to the next question. Assuming that Victor Frankenstein is Beauty, however rotated, and his Monster is Beast, what does their story tell us about human–nature relations? Shortly after his arrival at university, symptoms of egotism and hubris began to afflict the impatient Frankenstein. He had already abandoned his earlier interest in alchemy as an obsolete methodology, but held on to its mystique of “immortality and power.” His ambition was to adopt the methods of modern empirical science and push them further than anyone had done before, to unfold the hidden secrets and “deepest mysteries” of nature. He was much impressed by a Professor Waldman who heaped praise on modern scientists: “They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. … They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers.” It’s relevant at this point to recall that Shelley’s revered mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a foundational book on women’s rights. 10 The words Shelley put into Waldman’s mouth—penetrating into the hidden recesses of a female nature to gain power over “her hiding places,” a creepy blend of sexual and domination metaphors—were not an accidental choice. Here Shelley rolls out modern science, an overwhelmingly male enterprise, as the framework for her examination of human–nature (and male-female) relations. The young Victor Frankenstein, who had already felt “a fervent

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longing to penetrate the secrets of nature,” found vindication in Waldman’s choice of metaphors. After too many solitary and sleepless nights in the lab—some of which would have been better spent with the soothing Elizabeth—his headstrong passion for knowledge soon catalyzed into an unwholesome megalomania. 11 Driven by a sense of his own exceptionality, the fevered chemist in quick sequence discovered the formula of animation, assembled body parts and apparatus, and, in a ebullience of narcissism, decided to create “a being like myself.” When everything was ready, like the Creator God of Genesis, he “infused a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” and it stirred with life. 12 Imposing his will on nature, he had penetrated her hidden recesses and forced out the secret of life; and, not incidentally, a Monster with a will of its own. In a dark and stinking laboratory, they faced each other, creator to creature, father to son, fading Beauty to emergent Beast, each the other’s double turned inside out (“a being like myself”). The appalled Victor immediately regretted his creation, fled the lab, and abandoned the freshly born Monster. The scientist could “penetrate” the surface of nature, but could not see into what he had revealed. All he could see was the surface. After his year in the hovel and a second abandonment, this time by the DeLaceys, the Monster was on the verge of losing his inner decency to rage and vengeance. Trekking through the forests of Germany and Switzerland, he pursued his maker to the mountains above Chamonix. On the way he murdered Frankenstein’s little brother and maliciously planted evidence on a young woman who was then executed for the crime. With blood on his hands he was, bit by bit, severing all connections with humanity. But he found Frankenstein in the Alps and, amidst much recrimination, blaming, and fault finding, they negotiated a quid pro quo. The Monster, relating his short and blighted history with great eloquence, rebuked Frankenstein, his “creator … author … origin,” for failing in his duty to his “creature,” his “Adam.” And he persuaded the scientist to create a female monster so he could, like all other creatures, have a mate. In return, he swore to quit human company altogether and live in the wilds of South America; in other words, to abandon all claims to humanity and retreat to nature. Frankenstein agreed. But after much procrastination, he reneged. Halfway through the project in a remote laboratory on the Orkneys, Frankenstein reflected on his fear that if the Beast he had already created was so rebellious and out of control, what assurance did he have the next one would comply with the plan they had for her. On behalf of the “whole human race,” he could not let this happen. So he tore her partly made body to pieces. The Monster

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soon discovered the atrocity and, in revenge, he strangled Frankenstein’s good friend, Clerval, and on Frankenstein’s wedding night he murdered the beloved Elizabeth: a wife for a wife. At this point, his life in ruins, Frankenstein decides his one last duty to humanity is to kill the Monster. The pursuer becomes the pursued, an arrangement not altogether unappealing to the Monster who has also decided this shall be the last roundup. He sets out across the snow blasted steppes of Russia, making sure Frankenstein does not lose track of him. They reach the Arctic Sea, Frankenstein frozen and exhausted, the Monster thriving on the elemental forces of nature. They plunge forward into the stacked and heaving ice fields of the Arctic, the Monster mocking and challenging Frankenstein to keep up the chase. So personified, nature retreats ever more deeply into itself. And driven by a sense of entitlement, humanity recklessly pursues until it dies of exposure, ironically fulfilling the young Victor’s rash boast as a student: “I pursued nature into her hiding places.” At the end Beast has the last word: Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honor and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal.

He then disappears into the polar darkness where he pledges to end his life on a triumphant funeral pyre and have his “ashes swept into the sea by the winds.” In equal parts injured, murderous, and magnificent, Beast dies back into nature, and nature prevails. Her hiding places are ultimately beyond our prideful reach. 13 In the early 1800s, the world’s human population was creeping up to the one billion mark, and Robert Malthus’ warnings about unsustainable growth were already in circulation. Shelley still entertained a romantic belief that there were vast spaces on the earth—the Arctic and the wilds of South America—that were beyond human reach. When push came to shove, she seemed to conclude, megalomaniacal figures like Victor Frankenstein would be defeated by nature’s unlimited capacity for absorbing human assault. Today, six and a half billion people later, she might have had a different view of things. 14 By setting her tale in the scientific enterprise and by identifying science with the masculine will to dominate, Shelley produced a powerful and cautionary myth of nature–human relations. Persuaded by our scientific ambassadors, we think we can plunder nature’s secrets and reshape them to our image and purpose. Perhaps we can, Shelley suggests,

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but we cannot do it with impunity. Our “Godlike” dominion must be balanced by a sense of responsibility toward nature and an assent to its inner goodness. Failing that, the Beast erupts, like Mount Tambora, in monstrous rebellion and shouts at Beauty: acknowledge me or I will destroy you. Although her novel is ostensibly non-religious, its subtext is resonantly biblical. The authors of the first three chapters of Genesis wrote the Judeo-Christian nature story from the viewpoints of God and his preferred human creature. Shelley has turned the text upside down and rewritten the story from the perspective of unfairly cursed, fallen, and outraged nature. In giving the Monster his own voice, Shelley gives voice to nature. When humanity refuses to listen, the tragic outcome is unavoidable. Yoked in a pact of escalating abuse and incomprehension, arrogant humanity and rebellious nature are unreconciled. 15

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel is like a jack-in-the-box: the package is small, but it’s spring-loaded. Open it up, and all sorts of unexpectedly big themes leap out at you: the problem of evil, the relation of appearance to reality, the human and animal makeup of human nature, and, perhaps most centrally, science as a new way of knowing and engaging the world. It has elements of morality tale, detective mystery, gothic fantasy, and science fiction. Despite, or, more likely, because of all these ingredients, it is immediately accessible to the general reader. One does not have to be an intellectual to appreciate it and, in fact, for the greater part of the novel’s existence, it was mandatory among highbrows to disparage it. But that low opinion has changed; the critics and academics are now admitting that the public was right all along. While recreational readers enjoy, as they always have, whatever jumps out of the box, more analytical readers try to figure out how the spring works. The key to cracking Stevenson’s “Strange Case” is to discover what puts tension into the spring. 16 Any story about science is by definition about the human–nature relationship for the simple reason that science is a system for relating the human mind and senses to nature. The particular tension that Stevenson’s story brings to the relationship comes from its blending of gothic and scientific worldviews. In the gothic view the scientific act is not, as science would have it, cooly rational and instrumental. On the contrary, it is a hot gathering of enthrallments, ambiguities, ironies, and Faustian strivings. The gothicized scientist is the “mad scientist” who does not bring madness to his work so much as he is made mad by it. Snared by the bright promise of science, he finds that everything it delivers comes with

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an unanticipated underside. This was certainly true of Frankenstein and, if anything, is even truer of Jekyll and Hyde. The scientific ideas in circulation during Stevenson’s lifetime (1850-1894)—especially, but not restricted to, Darwinian evolution—were ripe for gothic treatment. 17 Perhaps, the best place to begin is with a quick summary of the story itself. Henry Jekyll, an estimable physician, but a maverick scientist, secretly invents a drug that transforms him into Edward Hyde, a ravenous, ape-like seeker of pleasure. The drug also works in reverse, affording him the best of both worlds: social respectability as Jekyll and guiltless hedonism as Hyde. The scientist simply switches his animal appetites on and off at will. This is the benign promise of science. But after a while, things start to go wrong. The drug proves less than reliable, Hyde grows progressively stronger, and his pleasures become increasingly sadistic and murderous. Alarmed by this underside, Jekyll abandons his experiments and for some months sticks to the straight and narrow. But one day, while having prideful thoughts about his superiority to other men, he spontaneously transmutes into Hyde. The chemistry of his own egotistic thoughts now duplicates the effects of the laboratory drug. But not in reverse. Hyde had become the dominant force in their shared personality, and Jekyll is hostage to his appearance at any time and place. This pushes Jekyll into a downward spiral of isolation, debility, and, finally, death. But without the respectable doctor to serve as his cover, Hyde also realizes the game is up and, investigators pounding on the laboratory door, he commits suicide. At the end Jekyll’s old friend and lawyer, Gabriel Utterson, is left with a written testimony, which pulls some but not all the pieces together. In his testimony Jekyll confesses that, once the scientific experiments had split his human nature into two separate components, as personified by the ambiguously beautiful Jekyll and the beastly Hyde, they could not be put back together. Rather, they came to hate each other and competed for the same self which was unviable as either one or the other, leading to mutual destruction. What had begun as a successful attempt to achieve scientific control over the primitive forces of human nature ended in disaster. That the story appropriates and distorts the Beauty-and-Beast motif for its own purposes is evident. Hyde is “the brute … the animal within” and is repeatedly described as “ape-like” and “deformed”. He hisses, snarls, gnashes his teeth, and pursues his nocturnal pleasures with “bestial avidity.” But, unlike the traditional Beast, he houses no inner decency. Henry Jekyll, for his part, is a problematic Beauty. He is a widely respected London gentleman: “the very pink of the proprieties … endowed with excellent parts,” and blessed with a slew of academic degrees after his name. Physically, he is “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty

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… a tall fine build of a man” with “a large handsome face.” But, he also leads a parallel life of “undignified” pleasures, which, given his middle age and social standing, has become a source of discomfort. The basic problem, as he sees it, is that his pleasure and propriety are locked into one being, the former embarrassing the latter, and the latter devitalizing the former. The only way to release his pleasures while securing his reputation was to precipitate the human compound into its two constituent parts so each could be experienced in pure form. He turns to science for a solution to his dilemma and succeeds—this is the gothic touch—beyond his expectations. Jekyll’s clandestine experiments give drug-assisted, parthenogenic birth to a pure Beast, hatched out of the compound matrix of his own ambiguous Beauty. Stevenson reversed the traditional formula in two ways: his Beast was beast through and through and his Beauty contained an inner malignancy. Once chemically separated, each was the other’s opposing double and alter ego; but, as sprung from the same living being, each was also the other’s necessary half. In this claustrophobic account, Beauty and Beast are wrapped up in the same creature. Stevenson examines the human–nature relationship as it exists in “human nature” itself: Jekyll playing the human component, Hyde the role of nature. 18 And appropriately so. The major popular concern at the time was not humanity’s relation to external nature, but our purported descent from apes. Darwin’s news was not that we live in a natural world, but that the natural world lives in us. This news triggered a chain reaction of nervous questions whose gothic rattle is heard throughout Stevenson’s sub-text: If, as Darwinians argue, there is a vestigial ape within the human, what would happen if the human lost control of the ape? What if the ape gets out? If directional evolution is a scientific fact, then might there be some biological process or scientific procedure which could reverse it, i.e., which could devolve the human into its ancestral ape? These questions are the stuff of gothic story telling, and they lead inevitably to others: Given the duality of human nature as both human and animal, how can we be accountable to an exclusively human morality? Might there be a more fundamental but repugnant natural morality, based on a code of “survival of the fittest?” Finally, if science raises questions so threatening to human morality, then is science itself an immoral enterprise? Is science, in other words, our friend or enemy? 19 On the surface it appears that Stevenson appropriated scientific technique and attitude as a vehicle for exploring questions of human duality and evil; but, turned over, the story could as easily be taken for a cautionary critique of science, and not a silly one. Stevenson’s gothic diction does not fantastically distort the scientific enterprise; rather it

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simply underscores some of the apparent absurdities—absurd, that is, to ordinary human perception and intuition—endorsed by science. For germane example, the theory of evolution itself could easily be treated as an instance of gothic science. It proposes that inert matter generates living matter, which, in turn, generates immaterial consciousness; then goes on to claim that human reason evolves out of simian irrationality. All this is the stuff of gothic fantasy; when, in a despairing moment, Henry Jekyll looked deeply into Hyde’s grotesque “energy of life,” he saw: … something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. 20

Here Jekyll only supplies a more florid vocabulary for what Darwin had already said: life emerges from “dead” dust and slime and from there it proceeds to gesture, language, and (im)morality. The subversive force of gothic fantasy is to blur precisely the same distinctions blurred by Darwin; that is, to move creatures over the barrier from non-life to life, to confound the psychic with the physical, and to unpack the enthrallments wrapped inside rationality. Put Darwinian theory into an old mansion, line up the test tubes and beakers, and you’ve got the makings of superb gothic science fiction: a celebration of science that mocks it at the same time. One of the insights of gothic science fiction is that nature itself mocks science. This was almost certainly Mary Shelley’s position. Victor Frankenstein was abashed by the results of his scientific experiments from the outset, and his final pursuit of the monster was a complete mockery. The Monster led and taunted him deep into the polar wastes where he was defeated by the limitless power of nature. Even the goofy Walton got the message: he caught the next warm breeze south. Shelley was struck by the puniness of scientific pretense in the face of a vast, implacable nature. Big Mother Nature makes sport of boy scientists who would penetrate into her secret places. Stevenson seems to have shared Shelley’s bias, but was struck by nature’s complexity and elusiveness. For Stevenson, nature was not so much big as tricky. In his final statement, Henry Jekyll offers a conclusion followed by a troubled speculation: … I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the

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Human duality is confusing enough, Jekyll confides, but we’ve only scratched the surface. Further research will precipitate the human compound into such numbers that identity and definition will drown in confusion. As if to underscore the point, Stevenson taunts Jekyll throughout the novel with a recurring sick joke. Jekyll scours all the chemists in London for a particular salt that is a necessary ingredient of his drug. His supply is running low. But none of the new samples works. They must be impure, he complains, and repeatedly he badgers the chemists for the pure stuff. Still no success; until at the end he concludes that the original sample—the one that worked—must have been impure. Nature is elusive and tricky. Even the makeup of laboratory chemicals is not what we think it is. Hyde doesn’t stay put, human identity shifts like sand, and we grow out of and back into apes by the application of chemical procedures whose ingredients we don’t even know. The deeper our scientific inquiries take us into nature, the more it mocks us with its complexity, elusiveness, and mutability. 22 Stevenson was born in 1850, a year before Shelley’s death. In effect, they split the nineteenth century between them, timing which worked to Shelley’s imaginative disadvantage in scientific terms. In her half of the century, popular science did not yet run counter to human intuition. Electricity had been discovered and its strange properties seem to have inspired some of her thinking about the vitalization of dead body parts. Early, pre-Darwinian versions of evolution were in the air. But the prevailing scientific account of nature was a Newtonian physics that corresponded more or less to human commonsense. It was a physics of low speeds, large objects, Euclidean space, and precise mathematics. It yielded a clear and timeless description of nature that was immensely satisfying. One could confidently, say, as Shelley did, that science went wrong only when it went too far, but that it bore no inherent faults as an epistemology. After 1850, however, science began to paint a quite counterintuitive picture of the world. Stevenson was most obviously heir to Darwinian biology, which at the time was unsettling enough; but there were other developments in physics which, while less immediately threatening to human definition, raised serious challenges to the steady Newtonian view of the physical world. For example, the implications of

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the second law of thermodynamics were worked out in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, promulgating into educated consciousness notions like entropy, the “heat death” of the universe, molecular disorder, and probabilistic states of nature. Science seemed to be eating its own tail: the harder it worked, the more it violated its own assumptions. Where it assumed order, it found disorder. In place of mathematically precise predictions, it offered probabilistic guesses. Determinacy had to make room for indeterminacy. Timeless laws of nature were giving way to time’s arrow: biological and geological structures transformed over vast stretches of time. After a period of Newtonian calm, nature had become problematic again. Dealing with the unpredictable Hyde, and tearing his hair out over chemical impurities, the visionary Doctor Jekyll could certainly vouch for this. 23 It’s not clear what game the two principals were playing, but whatever it was, the rules kept changing on poor Henry Jekyll. Science is supposed to be an orderly process and the scientific lab an orderly place. But once the scientist, in his obsession with analysis and control, starts to parse nature into pure distillations of its constituent parts, he releases energies that inherently threaten his control. When Jekyll set Hyde loose, he tampered with the checks and balances built into human nature. The whole point of Hyde was his unbridled self-interest. To suppose he would obediently jump in and out of a Victorian cage at Jekyll’s bidding was a contradiction in terms. Only Jekyll’s scientific hubris could have blinded him to this simple gothic logic. Hyde personified the unruly, indeterminate, unpredictable side of human nature which turns monstrous unless securely integrated into the side represented by Jekyll’s corrective conscience and rationality. Hyde began, harmlessly enough, by vicariously feeding Jekyll’s naughty appetites; then he rebelled against Jekyll’s control; finally he transformed into an embodiment of pure evil. Before turning the page on Jekyll and Hyde, the question of evil has to be addressed. I have accented Hyde’s animality over his evil because this emphasis better yields the novel’s nature story. But Stevenson clearly intends Hyde to symbolize both animality and evil, and the conflation of the two is basic to his parody of science as an overreaching and self-defeating enterprise. A precondition to the parody is what might be called the “animalization” of evil. Evolutionary theory—or so it was popularly understood in Stevenson’s time—tells us there is an “evil” ape lurking inside the human type; effectively transforming the problem of original sin into the problem of the original ape. So demystified, the problem’s solution reduces to a program of ape management: isolate the inner ape, harness its behavior, and evil is under control. Once evil is translated into scientific terms, its treatment is transferred from the cleric

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to the scientist. All it takes is a chemist of Jekyll’s daring and genius to get the job done. In fact, with sufficiently powerful and subtle controls we might even hope to fine-tune the harm out of evil while retaining its pleasures. Then we can enjoy ourselves on both sides of the human–nature interface: estimable Jekylls on this side, hedonic Hydes on that. Stevenson skewers this hubristic scenario by spelling out its unanticipated consequences. Blaming human sin on nature would make sin more manageable only if nature were manageable. But nature is full of mystery and—ask Victor Frankenstein—has a will of its own. In this view science does not shape nature to our purpose, but only leads us into a labyrinth of struggling wills. Locating the problem of evil on the natural side of the human–nature interface is a false start. The problem is on the human side, in our overweening pride. The Jekylls of the world would persuade us that the human condition is perfectible by, first, projecting our difficulties onto nature and, second, recruiting scientific technique to subdue them. This is the false promise of applied science. Science points the finger at the inner ape, but Stevenson knows better. He points one finger at human vanity and pride and another at science as the paradigmatic expression of these human failings. Writ small, Henry Jekyll’s ambition is the same as the overarching goal of applied science: to release nature’s benefits while subduing its unwanted turbulence. In an ironic turn of history, “godless” science has stepped forward as the means to implement the biblical God’s ancient command to dominate and subdue the earth. But Stevenson warns us that, if we go the way of science, an Edward Hyde will jump out from behind every bush. One doesn’t have to fully accept Stevenson’s scientific pessimism to appreciate its cautionary message. The contemporary landscape is, in fact, littered with Edward Hydes left behind by scientific intervention in the world: drug-resistant bacteria, holes in the ozone layer, pesticides in the water supply, acid in the rain, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, toxins in the food chain, and so forth. Wherever a Dr. Jekyll goes a Mr. Hyde follows close behind. The leading edge of evil is not Hyde’s animality, but Jekyll’s pride.

Endnotes The epigraph is taken from R. L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oxford University Press edition (1987, p. 61). 1

Page citations are from the original English translation (by F. Shoberl) of V. Hugo. (1833). The Hunchback of Notre Dame. London: Richard Bentley.

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Quotes are taken from pp. 43, 146, 62, 55, 203, 55, 216, 425, 65, 59, 192, 311, 326, 58-59, 329, 333. 2 Genesis 1:26, 28; 9:2. 3 In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley remembered the weather: “… it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” 4 The “waking dream” is recounted in the same 1831 Introduction. 5 Of course, there is a sense in which the Monster is distinctively un-natural, gestated by artificial means in a laboratory rather than by natural means in a womb. Even so, he is made out of natural, organic body parts, not out of synthetic materials. Moreover, when he is abandoned, as monstrous newborns often were in earlier times, he survives through sheer animal vigor in the Bavarian forest. By this calculation his ontological status is ambiguous, both human and animal, both artifactual and natural. This sort of ambiguity or duality is almost always a built-in feature of Beast. Marian Engel’s Bear and Angela Carter’s Tiger are exceptions to the rule, although, in my view, they are welcome exceptions. 6 Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The raw and the cooked: Vol. 1. Introduction to a science of mythology. New York, NY: Harper and Row. (Original French edition, 1964) 7 Turner, Victor. (1974). Dramas, fields, and metaphors (pp. 231 ff.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 8 Refer to the Oxford University Press edition of Frankenstein (Shelley, 1969). Quotations and specific descriptions are taken from pp. 112-128, 136, 35, 27, 210, 29, 222, 46, 48, 47-48, 39, 53, 57, 99-102, 166, 54, 221, 223. 9 The Monster felt both admiration and contempt for his creator. There is no need for the reader to puzzle over this ambivalence. At the beginning the Monster was a simple creature, but he experienced the world intensely, and soon developed a conflicted and complex sensibility. 10 Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1992). A vindication of the rights of woman with strictures on political and moral subjects. New York, NY: Penguin Classics (Original work published 1792) 11 See commentary by A. K. Mellor (1988, pp. 89, 111-112); B. Easlea (1981, pp. 82-86). Shelley artfully uses sexual metaphors to articulate the scientific account of human–nature relations, and scientific metaphors to capture male– female relations. Her novel is an indivisible critique of scientism and sexism. The topic of my book requires that I place more emphasis on the former. 12 See Genesis 2:7 where “The Lord God formed man of the dust of ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (The Holy Bible, King James Version). 13 I realize that the frozen north could be taken as a metaphor for death and/or entropy (cf., Huet, 1993, p. 143), that is, as the antithesis of nature. But I think it is more accurate to read it as a particularly severe and extreme expression of nature. There are at least three reasons for my view. Early in the book the polar explorer, Walton, rants and raves about achieving “dominion” over the “elemental foes of our race” by going to the north pole (Oxford edition, 1969, p. 28). He sees it as humanity’s triumph over nature, not over death or entropy. Second, the Monster,

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who by the end has thoroughly identified with the role of Beast, thrives on the polar environment as if it were his natural element, while the human Frankenstein fails. It is true that the Monster dies in the north, but only because he chooses to do so. Third, the theme of “penetrating” and “pursuing” nature makes much more sense, both narratively and morally, if Frankenstein’s final pursuit leads him into a nature so extreme and powerful that it mocks and “swallows up” his arrogance (Oxford edition, 1969, p. 172). 14 Malthus, Robert T. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. London. (2nd ed. published 1803) 15 I should note that, in my treatment of Frankenstein, I have not explicitly referred to its obvious gothic and science-fiction features. This is not because I think they are beside the point—Science Fiction claims Frankenstein as one of its seminal texts—but because I wanted to emphasize another point so well developed by Shelley: nature’s view of human–nature relations. I emphasize the gothic and science-fiction elements in the discussion of Jekyll and Hyde where, in my opinion, their role is less ambient and more structural. 16 For the detective story and gothic/science fiction readings, respectively, see the chapters by G. Hirsch and D. Lawler in Veeder and Hirsch (1988). For the academic rehabilitation of Jekyll and Hyde, see the introductory chapter in Veeder and Hirsch (1988, pp. 1-3). 17 Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871. Jekyll and Hyde appeared in 1886. 18 Verbatim descriptions of Hyde are taken from the Oxford University Press edition of Jekyll and Hyde (Stevenson, 1987, pp. 73, 71, 26, 74, 75, 76, 12, 19, 63, 18, 19, 72, 65). For descriptions of Jekyll, see pp. 11, 60, 22, 45, 23, 64. Interestingly, many of the subsequent film and stage productions of Jekyll and Hyde portray Henry Jekyll as a highly principled man. Stevenson’s original version of Jekyll was much more ambiguous. Regarding the fear among the Victorian gentry that their social respectability entailed a “loss of vitality,” see Tim Young’s comments in Liebregts and Tigges (1996, p. 162). 19 See D. S. Mack’s chapter in Liebregts and Tigges: “Hyde is the Darwinian ape within Jekyll, and within humanity” (1996, p. 152). For a discussion of contemporary concerns about devolution, see D. Lawler’s chapter in Veeder and Hirsch (1988). Also see Emma Letley’s Introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Jekyll and Hyde, (1987), pp. xi-xii. 20 Oxford University Press edition, (1987), p. 74. 21 Oxford University Press edition, (1987), p. 61. 22 There may have been personal, as well as philosophical reasons for Stevenson’s view. Frail as a child, he spent his entire life plagued by an elusive and incurable bronchial condition until he died of hemorrhage at the early age of forty-four. 23 I am indebted to Donald Lawler’s (1988) essay (in Veeder & Hirsch, 1988) for making the connection between thermodynamic physics and Stevenson’s view of the disorder discovered and released by scientific practice.

CHAPTER 9 GENDER AND SCIENCE AT THE BEAUTYAND-BEAST INTERFACE

Of the nine versions of Beauty-and-Beast we’ve examined, three of them—all outliers—result in the death of both Beauty and Beast. In Hunchback, the two main characters die, but not because of confrontation between them. Both monstrously innocent, they die caught up in the turmoil of ravenous and rampaging human society. Quasimodo and Esmeralda each represent “natural man,” the fusion of nature and humanity into an integrated whole. The Parisian mob and King Louis’ troops, in contrast, represent denatured humanity, simultaneously attracted, shamed, and revolted by the natural man and woman in their midst. Parisian society is Dom Claude Frollo writ large. Driven by a toxic mix of libido, frenzy, religiosity, and ignorance, it pursues Esmeralda and Quasimodo to the grave. But the dynamic at the center of the other two outliers, Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, is very different. First, the Beauty and Beast confrontation is a personal fight to the death. They basically kill each other off. No Parisian mob, no third party participates in their fatal struggle. Second, and unique to these two versions, both Beauties are male. And finally, the lethal confrontations between the two main characters—between nature and humanity—are mediated by scientific technique. These differences raise very intriguing questions about the dynamic at the nature–human interface. What happens if Beauty is male? And what happens if the Beauty and Beast encounter is driven by scientized hubris? Again, in both these outlying versions, the human Beauty is a male scientist. And in both cases, the antagonistic faceoff between Beauty and Beast leads directly to the horrific death of both. They are father and son, but there is no reconciliation between them. Let’s take a look at how these two factors—Beauty’s gender and scientific arrogance—shape the interaction between humanity and nature. First, Beauty’s gender …

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Beauty’s Gender The role of Beauty has been so consistently played by women that it’s more or less assumed it could not be otherwise. It’s only when we’re suddenly confronted with a male Beauty, that the question of gender is raised. Why is Beauty almost always female? And why do things tend to go badly when Beauty is male and turn out better when Beauty is female? We usually take Beauty to be the polar opposite of Beast, but folklorist Maria Tatar notes that there is also a sense in which the father is Beast’s opposite, while Beauty mediates between them: “To the confrontational policies of father and beast, which give rise to violence by affirming the law that might makes right, the daughters respond with a diplomacy of negotiation.” 1 On the one side, Beauty sympathizes with her father’s dilemma and, accepting the burden of his honor, goes uncomplainingly to Beast; on the other side, accepting the challenge of Beast’s ferocious pride, she does not try to defeat or conquer him, but to tame and soften him. Thinking of Beauty as mediator offers a solution to the sex-of-Beauty puzzle, but only if we can figure out why young women are more skilled than fathers, Beasts, male Beauties, and male scientists at Tatar’s “diplomacy of negotiation.” It would seem to have something to do with her gender, but precisely what? Beauty can be understood in two ways: she is a simple metaphor for humanity or a more complex metaphor for the interblending of human and natural features. Our matriarchal tradition leans toward the former metaphor, patriarchy toward the latter. Ostensibly matriarchal, Madame de Beaumont presents Beauty as a straightforward representative of humanity: aesthetic, unselfish, industrious, literate, embedded in a network of kin, devoted to her surviving parent, restrained in her appetites, a carrier of civilité. As a description of humanity, this is an historically situated ideal, but most of us would recognize the pattern. She summarizes the qualities many humans would invoke to distinguish us from animality or, more generally, from nature. It’s precisely this characterization that yields our entering analogy: Beauty is to Beast as human is to nature. But the analogy, as we’ve already noted, begins to break down when Beauty shows signs of mixed identity. As soon as the standard version of the story realizes she intends to go over to conjugal union with Beast, it sanitizes her tabooed intention with a redemptive outcome: the hairy monster becomes a prince. Yet she passes the story’s litmus test only by consenting to embrace Beast as a Beast. Only this way can she lift his spell. The logic of the story, in other words, seems fundamentally dishonest: it requires that Beauty in fact metaphorize humanity, but in

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intention metaphorize a synthesis of human and animal features, all the while believing her intentions to be factual. Apparently, the requirement is better met by a female than a male Beauty. Why so? Why is it that a female Beauty is more adept at combining the two metaphors? The answer to this question lies in a consideration of the two mythic traditions already alluded to. The Western patriarchal tradition constructs women as a hybrid combination of humanity and nature. In this view, women qualify as human, but not as distinctively human as the reputedly more rational male. Ovulating, gestating, lactating, and emotional, women are located somewhere between rational, principled man and rhythmic, savage nature. This would seem to make them excellent gobetweens. The matriarchal tradition, on the other hand, posits women as the humanizers of wild, forest-dwelling men. 2 In this view, women have the ability and inclination to reach out to feral male hominids and adapt them to human dwellings, clothing, and customs. Again, women are the gobetweens. The two traditions, in other words, diverge much more in their portrayal of men than of women. Both scenarios characterize women as effective ambassadors between nature and humanity. But patriarchy defines her duality less as an aptitude and more as a fact of the female constitution. The mixed logic of de Beaumont’s story suggests that even she did not believe Beauty was unequivocally human. When de Beaumont chose Beast over a bald banker as the object of Beauty’s affections, and then required that Beauty consent with all her heart to be Beast’s wife, she went a long way toward accepting Beauty’s ontological duality. Even though the story drew back at the last instant, its appeal and tension came from playing the duality card. The philosophical basis for thinking of women as something other than completely human was first systematized by Aristotle (384-322 BC). His nature philosophy included an elaborate theory of generation and embryology which posited the father as providing “form” and the mother “substance” to the embryo. Since the father gave human form to the baby, it followed from the principle of like-produces-like that only male babies were well formed. The newborn female is, by this account, a “deformed male,” a departure from the human norm, even, strictly speaking, a kind of monster, although a “useful monster” because of her grown-up, adult role in the continuation of the species. In Aristotle’s view—which, incidentally, carried great weight into the nineteenth century—the course of her prenatal development marked the human female as closer than the human male to animality. This, of course, better qualified her to go between humanity and nature: she was constitutionally in both camps. Mediation

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between humanity and nature would come as naturally to her as heat to fire, sweetness to honey. 3 For subscribers to the patriarchal tradition, the upside of Aristotle’s doctrine is its assignment of a superior form of humanity to men. Women, as departures from the human type, are ipso facto degraded in a system which subscribes to the formula that the closer to nature, the further from God. But there is also a downside for patriarchalists: as neither fully human nor animal, as betwixt and between, women are inherently unpredictable. When Beauty leaves the house of her father and enters the domain of Beast, which passport does she carry? Whom does she represent and to whom is she ambassador? When she passes over the threshold between humanity and nature, she is completely on her own and draws on her own stock of wit and value. She dearly loves her father and dearly loves her Beast. Each side keeps a watchful eye on this double agent, this central player in a shape-shifter’s game. Alone, vulnerable, yet with an emerging agenda of her own, she embodies the mutual attraction and tension between humanity and nature. As we have seen in the several stories of the previous chapters, she can affiliate one way or the other, or stand her ground halfway. Her plasticity makes her dangerous. For male chauvinists, Beauty’s qualified monstrosity would seem to imply a qualified loyalty to humanity, at least in its pure Aristotelian type. If she is a “useful” monster, might she have a hidden affinity to useless monsters? Empedocles, who predated Aristotle by a hundred years, certainly thought so. 4 He founded “imaginationism”, a doctrine of the formative power of the maternal imagination on the unborn fetus. According to Empedocles, if the mother were terrified at the sight of a monster during pregnancy or had passionate thoughts of copulating with a beast at the moment of conception (as well she might, being something of a beast herself), she could pass these images on to her embryo, resulting in a severely deformed or monstrous birth. The seminal Greek physician, Hippocrates (460-370 BC), also held that images have power over the maternal imagination, and her imagination has power over the fetus. Although Aristotle himself seems to have ignored the issue of maternal imagination, his doctrine of form and substance in embryonic development was easily appropriated by subsequent imaginationists. There are instances, so goes this alternative account, when the father’s formative function is over-ridden by the mother’s fevered and passionate vis imaginativa (power of imagination). Unlike male rationality, which is an active engine of abstract ideas, the female imagination is a passive organ easily overwhelmed by concrete images and impressions. When these images arouse great terror, desire, or passion in the pregnant mother, she

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imprints their form on her malleable fetus, erasing the father’s paternity and resulting in the birth of monstrous aberrations. 5 Quasimodo was such an aberration, and, sure enough, Hugo’s story makes at least two references to imaginationism. In his first appearance the hunchback is playing the “Pope of Fools” at a profane street festival where his monstrosity and deformity are described in graphic and lurid detail. Suddenly the “scholars” cry out, “Let breeding women take care of themselves!” and the women actually cover their eyes, lest his image invade their unborn fetuses. In a later passage, when Quasimodo is whipped and bound to a pillory, a man steps forward, hurls a broken jug at him, and shouts, “It was the sight of thy frightful figure that made my wife have a child with two heads.” 6 Although the modern reader might have to pause to figure out what these passages mean, Hugo’s nineteenth century readership immediately understood them. The female imagination, unchecked by male rationality, is overheated, and, unfortified by male assertiveness, is weak and passive, easily invaded by grotesque images such as the “frightful figure” of Quasimodo. Her imagination subverts the father’s form being passed to his offspring. How else account for monstrous births? Actually, there were other hypotheses. During medieval times, monstrosities were commonly thought to result from women having sexual intercourse with beasts and devils. But since the incidence of deformed births clearly outstripped any reasonable estimate of the number of crossspecies copulations, imaginationism was invoked as a somewhat subtler explanation: if not women’s sinful actions, then their sinful thoughts. With the rediscovery of Aristotle’s philosophy in the West in the 1200s and the translation of Plutarch’s account of Empedocles in the Renaissance, imaginationism received a major boost. A long line of influential figures, including Albertus Magnus (1200-1280), Paracelsus (1493-1541), and Malebranche (1638-1715) were open advocates of the doctrine, and it was hotly debated throughout the European Enlightenment of the 1700s. It even had a degree of scientific respectability as late as 1840 and a firm grip on general opinion well beyond that date (Hunchback was published in 1831). 7 The West, in brief, has a long and persistent tradition of prescribing affinities between women and nature. The Beauty-and-Beast tale is only one expression of the tradition. Until fairly recently, popular belief has held that women are monsters (however useful), that their imaginations are susceptible to beastly images, and that they are directly responsible for introducing monstrosity into the human type. In this view, they are eminently, if somewhat dangerously, qualified to serve as humanity’s

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ambassador to beastly nature and as nature’s envoy to beautiful humanity. Their physical and psychological makeup gives them entry to both camps. While most patriarchal chauvinists would be more or less content with this arrangement, a subset was not. At the beginning of the Romantic period (late 1700s), literary and artistic men caught a severe case of imagination-envy, lamenting their stereotyped affiliation with rationality, analysis, balance, and instrumental proficiency. As part of their revolt against the “mere” reason and sterile mechanism of the previous Enlightenment period, the romantics seized vis imaginativa from women and reassigned it to the male artist. But the newly masculinized imagination was reconstructed as active and creative, no longer a warehouse and transfer station for externally imposed images and impressions. The first item on the romantic artist’s agenda was the recreation of himself as a monster of imagination. From that would flow a river of bold and prodigious expressions: poetry, music, philosophy, art. But, before anything else, the artist would always be his own best creation. Mary Shelley’s husband once wrote that poetry itself is merely the “feeble shadow” of the poet’s original concept and inspiration. By this logic, the only expression commensurate with his genius would be the reproduction of himself. 8 Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde are gothic parodies of this romantic conceit. In each story the striving male Beauty usurps and transforms the maternal vis imaginativa; the Beast he parents is a creature of his own fevered imagination, not hers. Being actively male, his guiding images are not externally imposed; they are internally generated expressions of a scientifically fecundated fatherhood. 9 Alone and self-absorbed, his reproductive act is necessarily narcissistic. The procreated Beast is modeled on himself, a parthenogenic budding off in Jekyll’s case, and a stitching together of body parts into “a being like myself” in Frankenstein’s case. Just as the mother’s imagination once erased the father, the father’s scientifically enhanced imagination now erases the mother. The maternal role in procreation is simply set aside: there are no women in Jekyll and Hyde, and Shelley arranges for the women in Frankenstein to be killed off before they even have sex, never mind become pregnant. Finally, after usurping female imagination and procreation, the male Beauty goes on to appropriate her mediating function, falling back on his own “diplomacy of negotiation”, only to find he has none. With no women in sight, the Beauty-and-Beast interaction becomes a male-on-male confrontation that quickly escalates into an uncompromising struggle to the death. Mary Shelley’s book is pivotal in many ways. It marks the passage in English literature from the female to the male Beauty, from maternal to scientific imagination, from the female uterus to the male

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laboratory, from the indispensable participation of the female in human reproduction to exclusively male parthenogenesis, from Beauty and Beast as redemptive parable to failed experiment, from Beauty and Beast as reconcilable opposites to competitive antagonists. So, should Beauty be female? The body count at the end of our sample of nine stories strongly suggests she should be. Does this disqualify males as positive players in human–nature relations? Only if one insists on a crude equation between biologically determined sex and culturally dictated gender. The Beauty-and-Beast literature has advanced what, for sake of a better term, may be called a “female capability” that sets the register for constructive human–nature relations. Her biological sex is not so critical as is her “femaleness,” however one wants to take that notion. Femaleness can be taken psychologically, as a willingness to negotiate, compromise, and affiliate, rather than engage in willful, egodriven power struggles. Or it can be taken ontologically, as an expression of duality, of her including both natural and human features in her identity. Or it can be taken metaphorically, using gender as a shorthand for the configuration of attitudes and identifications that ameliorate human–nature encounters. My personal inclination is toward the last construal. The Beauty-and-Beast literature has kept the gender metaphor simple: Beauty is either a biological man or a woman. But, with apologies to Madame de Beaumont, the female Beauty works better not because she better represents humanity, but because she has a biocentric capability. She has the vis imaginativa to share home, bed, and being with Beastly nature. She has much to teach the male Beauty; in the end the only question is whether he can learn from one who, so long considered his inferior, is suddenly his superior. The survival of the planet turns on the answer to this question.

Beauty–Science–Beast Although all three outlying stories are critiques of our compulsion to control and exploit nature, Hugo’s account stands apart from the other two. Like Stevenson, he does a close examination of the tension between human and natural elements in human nature, but his interpretive template is romantic, natural-man ideology, while Stevenson’s is scientific Darwinian evolution. Stevenson poses the problem as the ape inside homo sapiens. For Hugo, the problem is the struggle between wholesome nature and decadent civilization for the human soul. His Beauty and Beast are two expressions of the natural human, each a monstrous embodiment of the primordial goodness that rebukes the conceits of de-natured humanity. Their tragedy—in Hugo’s youthful view, the tragedy of the human

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condition—is that such magnificent monsters have no place in our dominant systems of thought and social organization. Because of their uncompromised purity, figures like Quasimodo and Esmeralda set loose the full spectrum of de-natured humanity’s longings, anxieties, and hatreds, serving as simultaneous objects of desire and revulsion. Hugo is clearly prepared to shoot his arrows at any number of targets, but the one he seems to single out for special aim is arrogant, life-denying religiosity, as typified by Claude Frollo. Frollo’s theologized version of humanity both reviles and covets the spontaneous rhythms, muscular vitality, sensual contours, and original innocence of the human body. The stubborn survival of these natural features in our makeup is taken as proof of the vitality of sin and the sinfulness of vitality. When they occasionally appear in the pure form of a Quasimodo or an Esmeralda, they become intolerable reminders of what we’ve lost in fashioning ourselves into half-beings. In Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, the focus shifts to the struggle between scientized humanity and scientized nature. Victor Frankenstein’s ambition is to apply scientific technique to the creation of a new and super-human race that will forever thank him as its progenitor. But, instead, his fevered imagination hatches a monstrous being who is driven out of human society into union with nature. From his base in nature, the Monster rises up in murderous rebellion to overthrow the house of Frankenstein. This is what comes of bad science practiced by irresponsible scientists. Stevenson, in subtle contrast to Shelley, seems to give more attention to the epistemological consequences of science. Jekyll is not only physically defeated by Hyde, but bewildered by the whole Hyde-project. At the beginning, he smugly enjoys the best of both worlds, but soon he is fretting himself to death over impure chemicals, unreliable reactions, shifting dosages, and the unpredictable moods of Hyde, not to mention endless apprehension over what today would be called “the public’s right to know.” Stevenson’s gothic spin on materialistic Darwinism puts the human being only a chemical reaction away from its ancestral ape. But his scientist discovers that the precise workings of the chemicals are elusive, and scientific inquiry into how they connect the human to the ape yields more confusion than clarity. Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde present human–nature relations as a power struggle that scientized humanity is too weak and stupid to win, but too ambitious and vain to quit. Shelley’s message is equivocal: on the one hand, Walton, despite his admiration for Victor Frankenstein, decides not to follow his example. But the spooky Professor Waldman still has tenure at the University of Ingolstadt. Shelley’s account is inconclusive,

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suggesting that science is not inherently harmful to nature, but the ambitions it arouses may be. Stevenson is not so forgiving: others will take up Jekyll’s experiments and push them toward further disorder. For Stevenson, the issue is not good versus bad science. In and of itself science is a futile approach to nature. It requires us to break nature down into its constituent parts and then meddle with them as if we could disconnect and reconnect them at will. Nature’s response is to bewilder us with its unpredictability and elusiveness, to mock our feeble efforts at understanding and control. If we rely on science to articulate our relationship to nature, Stevenson argues, we become inarticulate. In fairness to science, two qualifications are in order. First, and obviously, strong arguments could be made against Stevenson’s case. But those arguments would have to pursue the case into some pretty obscure hiding places. Stevenson’s story has settled deeply into the mythic structure of Western consciousness—everybody “knows” the tale of Jekyll and Hyde, even if they haven’t read it—and it is inextricably part of our inventory of science stories. The same is true of Frankenstein. Whether Western science deserves it or not, it is stuck with Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll. Like gothic punks in an otherwise respectable family, they warn us that science does not bring a uniformly sweet vocabulary to the conversation between humanity and nature, but sours it with malediction and incoherence. 10 Second, a distinction has to be made, at least in principle, between pure and applied science. Both books are severe critiques of misapplied science; their position on pure science is less clear. Shelley seems to let it off the hook, but Stevenson seems to implicate it in his critique. The problem here is with the distinction itself: as Roger Shattuck puts it, “the frontier between pure and applied is a phantom that appears on many maps yet cannot be located easily on the terrain.” Shattuck likens the distinction to the Siren song episode from the Odyssey in which the wily Odysseus separates having knowledge from acting upon it. The goddess Circe instructs him to plug the ears of his crew with wax and have himself tightly lashed to the mast. That way he can know the Siren song without applying his knowledge. He hears it but cannot succumb to its bewitching call to action. Pure science, in other words, can be separated from applied science only by the most extraordinary, divinely inspired constraints. Neither Frankenstein nor Jekyll paused for wax or rope. They heard the Siren and in the same motion followed her to disaster. 11 A common error in reading both stories is to overemphasize the differences between the main characters. But the stories’ most provocative and disturbing point is that the main characters are simultaneously

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antagonists and doubles. The Monster is, in a sense, Frankenstein’s son (the movie-going public has even transferred Frankenstein’s name to the Monster). And Hyde is Jekyll’s alter ego. The term “alter ego” nicely captures the dimensions of otherness and sameness in both relationships: the other (alter) who is me (ego). Mediating the relationships with scientific technique is a brilliantly tragic device because the term “alter ego” is inadmissible to the scientific vocabulary. Science’s dogmatic commitment to objectivity requires a splitting of the term into its two parts: the human scientist is the “ego” who observes and acts upon the objectified “alter.” For standard science nature can never be an alter ego. If it were, objectivity would break down. Nature is always the other, the object out there. 12 The one thing Victor Frankenstein cannot seem to say is: this creature is the mirror reflection of my desire and genius; I acknowledge him to be my son. As for Jekyll, he realizes too late that he is no more Jekyll than Hyde. The tension and tragedy in both stories come from the progressive amplification of difference in the face of sameness. Beauty and Beast look at each other across the table, and Beauty denies the shock of recognition. Scientized humanity looks at nature and denies the family resemblance. Again, nature is the other, the thing out there. Yet both stories know otherwise. Jekyll’s attorney, Mr. Utterson, understood little about Beasts and even less about Beauties, but, lawyer to the bone, he had some familiarity with written documents. At one point he put samples of Jekyll’s and Hyde’s handwriting to his head clerk: ‘Well, sir,’ returned the clerk, ‘there’s a rather singular resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only differently sloped.’ 13

Secular Literature as a Usable Past As a prism for refracting the several colorations given to nature–human relations, the Beauty-and-Beast theme permits two conclusions. First, and not surprisingly, the prism refracts over time: the more classic and established the literature, the gloomier its coloration of human–nature relations. To find brighter colors we have to look to lesser known, more recent versions. Marina Warner’s observation about the historical shift in our attitude toward nature is well taken: there seems to have been a progressive valorization of nature which secular literature both reflects and promotes. 14 Warner’s time line, however, leaves out the second conclusion: Beauty-and-Beast has long refracted critical colorations in its outlying

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wavelengths. Hugo wrote an adversarial account of human–nature relations over a hundred and eighty years ago (1831), but he obviously felt it to be a great tragedy and folly. Thirteen years before Hugo’s Hunchback, Mary Shelley portrayed Victor Frankenstein as a lamentable example of human irresponsibility toward nature. Shelley never directly alluded to the Bible (Milton’s Paradise Lost was the closest she came), but her protagonist was as literal an exponent of the Bible’s dominion passages as Shelley was not. Essentially the same analogy can be made of Claude Frollo and Hugo. Both Shelley and Hugo show that, even in the early nineteenth century, secular literature was groping toward an alternative to our foundational sacred account of the interface between humanity and nature. In fact, first Shelley and, later in the century, Stevenson, were already mounting alternatives to the scientific nature story, which was itself an emergent rival to the sacred story. They refashioned the Beautyand-Beast theme into a microscope for cruel scrutiny of science, or at least of some ways of doing science. For both, science, like religion before it, bred a peculiar kind of hubris in its practitioners that released monstrous disorder into human–nature relations. Late twentieth-century writers like Angela Carter and Marian Engel do not simply reflect more tolerant contemporary attitudes toward nature; nor is it completely accurate to say they have recently pushed attitudes into newly imagined territory. Rather, they cultivate fields that were initially plowed by Shelley and Hugo almost two centuries ago. In this sense secular literature is both a usable past and a usable present. From the perspective of human–nature relations, it may be the best of both. 15

Endnotes 1

Tatar, M. (1992), p. 147. See Zipes (1983), pp. 33-34, for a brief summary of Heide GöttnerAbendroth’s study of this type of matriarchal folktale. I restrict myself here to the implications of matriarchy and patriarchy for human–nature relations, not addressing their implications for male–female relations in exclusively human social and political systems. 3 See J. Needham (1959), pp. 39-55; J. Oppenheimer (1967), pp. 118-122; M. H. Huet (1993), pp. 3-4. Also see Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (A. L. Peck, Trans.), (1963), II, iii, p. 175. According to Needham (1959, pp. 43-44) Aristotle’s misogyny actually conferred a greater physical role on the mother than she had had in earlier thinking. Before Aristotle, it was widely believed by Greeks and Egyptians that the mother was merely a “field” into which the father planted his seed. The mother, by this account, is not a parent of the child at all, but merely 2

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a close friend, bearing the same relationship to the child as soil does to seed. Only the father is the child’s parent. 4 Empedocles (c. 490-433 BC) is best known for his doctrine of the four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. 5 For a thorough treatment of “imaginationism,” see Marie-Helene Huet, (1993). Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 6 From F. Shoberl’s (1833) translation of Hugo’s Hunchback into English, pp. 44 and 193. 7 According to A. W. Meyer (1939, pp. 232-233), the role of maternal impressions in deformed births was still accepted in the articles on “Generation” and “Foetus” in the 1839 edition of R. B. Todd’s The Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology (London), although one of the authors warned against its “indiscriminate” acceptance. 8 P. B. Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” (1821), is a paean to the creative imagination in which he asserts, “Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent; as the body to the spirit; as the shadow to the substance” (Clark, 1954, p. 277). Later in the same essay, he refers to Locke, Hume, Gibbon, and Voltaire as “mere reasoners” (Clark, 1954, p. 292, n. 62). See D. L. Clark (Ed.). (1954). Shelley’s Prose. The “feeble shadow” quote is on p. 294. It is interesting to speculate about what sort of imagination Mary Shelley had. Sharing her parents’ Enlightenment commitment to the role of reason, principle, and education in the formation of a good society, she was no single-minded devoteé of the creative imagination (see B. T. Bennett, 1998, pp. 31-43). But she was also caught up in the romantic movement and traveled in some pretty impressive circles (Shelley, Byron, et al.) at a rather impressionable age. Was her imagination a passive sponge absorbing the ideas and images tossed around in their heady, midnight conversations? To some extent, yes: how could it not be? She describes herself as mostly silent in their company (see her Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein). But she also had a mind of her own and, without question, an imagination that could powerfully switch into the active mode. The surest proof is the Frankenstein story itself. To some extent she may have been the beneficiary of the male appropriation of imagination. Once the leading romantic figures embraced imagination, they legitimated what she already had in abundance. 9 Mary Shelley made her protagonist a scientist rather than a poet. The latter choice would have come too close to home; although it came close enough: Percy Shelley was a science buff and had dabbled in experiments during his school days (see A. K. Mellor, 1988, p. 103). By 1821, however, Percy Shelley’s scientific enthusiasms seem to have cooled (see his “Defence of Poetry” in D. L. Clark, 1954, p. 293). 10 Betty Bennett (1998) argues, based on an overall reading of Shelley’s work and letters, that she was friendly to the scientific enterprise. “For the Shelleys, therefore, scientific experimentation served as a paradigm for political experimentation: both offered the means to create a better world … far from condemning scientific exploration, Mary Shelley adopted this major enthusiasm in England at the time as a germane metaphor through which to examine age-old political inequities” (pp.

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37-38). Bennett is a Shelley scholar whose interpretation of Frankenstein is colored by her overall knowledge of Shelley’s life and context. But it’s hard to imagine how Frankenstein, taken on its own, could be construed as evidence of “major enthusiasm” for science. Its entire emphasis is on bad science practiced by a bad scientist. 11 Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, (1996), p. 181. 12 I use the terms “standard” and “dogmatic” because science in principle posits distance and dispassion between the knowing subject and the known object, that is, between ego and alter. Scientific practice, however, frequently violates the principle. The clearest example of this violation is found in quantum physics— arguably science’s greatest intellectual achievement—which openly assents to observer effects in microparticulate nature. These effects certainly blur the boundary between ego and alter. Nevertheless, science clings to its own “Nicene Creed” whose points of dogma include objectivity, dispassion, and epistemological distance. 13 Oxford University Press edition, (1987), pp. 33-34. 14 M. Warner, Six Myths of Our Time, (1994b), p. 63. 15 Contemporary reworkings of the Beauty-and-Beast theme don’t stop with Carter and Engel. For example, Tanith Lee’s (1983) science fiction adaptation, “Beauty,” poses Beast as an extraterrestrial alien and Beauty as a human who later discovers she is herself inwardly alien and, if anything, not as beautiful as Beast. Philip Dick’s (1968) science fiction novel was the basis for the popular movie, Blade Runner. The novel about human–robot relations is much more intriguing than the movie, and violates the analogy, Beauty: Beast = Human: Nature, in thought-provoking ways. Before Lee and Dick, Leonora Carrington gave the theme several surrealistic treatments. In one of her stories, “The Oval Lady,” an authoritarian father runs the show, and in another, “As They Rode Along the Edge,” Beauty loves Beast savagely and savagely avenges his murder (Carrington, 1989a, 1989b). A more recent rotation on the Beauty-and-Beast motif can be found in Helen Macdonald’s acclaimed H is for Hawk (2015). In this story Beauty (the author) does not save her father from Beast’s wrath, but Beast (the hawk) rescues Beauty from deep remorse and grief over her father’s death, returning her to the world of the living. There are also delightful reworkings by authors of children’s books. Lisa Ernst (1995), for example, does for children what Carter did for adults in the “Red Riding Hood” story. And Jon Scieszka (1991) turns the “Frog Prince” tale (a version of Beauty and Beast) upside down in a magically illustrated collaboration with Steve Johnson.

CHAPTER 10 INTERLUDE: WAS THERE ALWAYS A DISCONNECT?

One might argue, of course, that our mainstream nature story just plain gets it right—that there is something fundamental in human design and destiny that sets us apart from nature. Given the story’s power and durability over the centuries, this conclusion would seem to be the path of least resistance. But there are at least four evidence-based counterarguments. First, a systematic examination of the paleoanthropological record strongly argues that humanity’s connection with animals was at the core of the humanization process. Second, there is a small but accumulating body of evidence showing that exposure to nature contributes to our psychological well-being, reduces stress, and accelerates recovery from illness. Third, research on young human children—those least indoctrinated to our orthodox nature story—reveals that they have a spontaneous, precocious, and irrepressible orientation toward nature. Finally, there is a growing movement for animal welfare, liberation, rights, and legal personhood; and the extension of this movement beyond life forms to rivers and nature preserves. Let’s look at each in turn.

What Does the Prehistoric Record Tell Us? To answer this question, biological anthropologist Pat Shipman starts with the three adaptive strategies which, taken together, define the human species in distinction from all others: tool use, symbolic behavior, and domestication of animals. No other species combines these three features. Then she asks whether the three have something in common. Careful examination of the archeological record strongly suggests that our three defining features converge on our interaction with animals, a hypothesis she calls the “animal connection.” That is, our distinctive humanization as a species was not furthered by a radical disconnection from nature—as our orthodox narratives would suggest—but by a progressive connection with

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nature, most decisively with the animals in our natural surround. This is not to say that the nature connection we cultivated during our species’ formative period was cozy, Edenic, or unambiguously friendly. But it was focused, deliberate, engaged, and—perhaps most importantly—adaptive. It worked for us, and it was the opposite of the distancing narrative spun by our orthodox nature story. The humanization process seems to have followed two interwoven tracks of adaptation. One, of course, was the everyday project of physical survival in a natural world that was alternately challenging and providing. It’s easy to see, for example, how the combination of tools and animal domestication contributed to this process. Tools served many purposes, but one of their primary uses was for hunting and scavenging animals, thus introducing protein-rich meat into our diet. Domestication of selected animals—especially dogs—assisted us in hunting and self-protection. A spin-off consequence was that it brought us into closer association with companion animals—again, dogs—fostering interdependence between us and them. We lived together in the same encampments, developed resistance to each other’s diseases, and accommodated to each other’s behaviors and modes of communication in ways that were mutually beneficial. There was a reciprocal selection process: we humans are who we are in part because of dogs, and dogs are who they are in part because of us. Our canine connection, in other words, was their “human connection.” Moreover, it wasn’t just dogs. They shared membership in a large portfolio of animal companions which included cats, horses, cattle, camels, birds, goats, monkeys, and rabbits, to mention only the most obvious. Some of these animals—horses, camels, oxen, etc.—effectively became extensions of tool use—they served as both companions and what might be called “living tools.” Our second track of adaptation—inextricably linked to the first track—was the progressive development and amplification of an aptitude for symbolic behavior. We shaped our vocalizations into language; engaged in dance and ritual wearing animal skins, feathers, and masks; took our first excursions into music using flutes made of animal bones; painted pictures of animals with pigments, and made small carvings of animals out of bones, ivory, horns, and stone. Almost all of the surviving evidence about our symbolic behavior during this period (40,000 to 10,000 years ago) is restricted to our early carvings and paintings. Since they were overwhelmingly referenced to animals, it’s a reasonable—but not airtight—conjecture that our other forms of symbolic expression were also importantly focused on animals: our verbalizations, music, dance, and myths. To this day, for example, the myths of aboriginal peoples routinely

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address the connection between nature and human culture, and mythic heroes are often human–animal hybrids, equally at home in nature and human society. Even modern, urban human society has popular hybrid superheroes: witness, for example, Batman, Spiderman, Wolverine, Catwoman, and the Ninja Turtles. The specific formula varies from hero to hero, but what they share in common is some interblending of human and animal features. In our emergence as a species, the animal connection effectively combined our three defining adaptations into a coherent package. As living tools, animals’ size and strength amplified our leverage on the physical world; as artistic representations they linked our symbol generating aptitude to a strong focus on animals; and, of course, they were themselves the raw input and finished output of the domestication process—as were we. In other words, they were indispensable partners in our humanization project in two fundamental ways: first, they shaped and embodied each of our three defining adaptations; and, second, they pulled the three adaptations into an interblended gestalt. According to the animalconnection scenario, we are who we are because of our relentless fascination and interaction with animals. Given the strength of the evidence, Pat Shipman identifies our link with animals as our single most fundamental and defining adaptive strategy. To illustrate this point, it might be helpful to list several concrete examples of what the human condition would have been like without the animal connection. Our artistic expression would have been stunted and impoverished, as well as our dance, rituals, costumes, and myth. Without our connection to animals, there would never have been domesticated herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, ox-drawn carts, pets, zoos, dinosaur exhibits, chicken coops, bird baths, human lactose tolerance throughout adulthood, county fairs, seeing-eye dogs—the list goes on and on. The animal connection even insinuated itself into the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Otherwise, it never would have occurred to God to let Adam— the first human—name all the animals. St. Francis of Assisi would never have preached to the animals; Christmas nativity scenes would not include cows, lambs, and camels; Santa’s sleigh would not be pulled by eight reindeer; and, while we might have such a thing as Easter jelly beans, we would almost certainly not have Easter bunnies. And grab your seat for this one: our kids would have no interest in teddy bears. This last example—teddy bears—may seem kind of silly. But I’m only half joking: one of the things that makes us human is that we’re silly about stuff like stuffed animals for our kids. Put bluntly, without animals we would not be recognizably human. We would be something else. 1

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But on the way to becoming human, we began to weave increasingly elaborate and convoluted cosmologies which bifurcated into two divergent lines. One line continued to develop and rework the raw material of our original deep connection with nature. This line was eventually demoted to our heterodox, dissenting nature story. This story— the Bible’s Song of Solomon, for example, is nothing less than an ode to the nature–human connection—is still with us, but largely pushed to the sidelines. Our other track—by far the more dominant—went off in an entirely different direction, valorizing a disconnect, a rupture, a metaphysical break between humanity and nature. This anthropocentric track devalued and turned its back on our earlier attachment to nature and redefined nature in terms of its opposition, inferiority, and subservience to the human condition. In any event, this hypothetical historical scenario—or something like it—would seem to underlie the pattern of connections and disconnections in our posture toward nature. We clearly have two kinds of nature narrative, one dominant and celebrating a disjuncture between humanity and nature; the other marginalized—but persistent—and rooted in a deep connection between us and nature. Yet both stories, while at crosspurposes with each other, are recognizably our own. One of these narratives seems to be compatible with the raw material in our archeological heritage. The other, orthodox set of attitudes is discontinuous with the archeological record. At some point, or series of points, in the last three or four thousand years we in the West shifted from a preoccupation with nature to a navelgazing preoccupation with ourselves; from defining ourselves as nature’s attentive companion to nature’s categorical opposite and overlord. Which raises a big question: What happened? What went wrong?

What Went Wrong? To call this a “big” question is an understatement. Its answer sits at the foundation of what we in the West believe ourselves to be. But it’s also a very scary question because it forces us to take a hard look at the hubris and desperation that led us to turn away from our home planet. For a wellconsidered and provocative answer, let’s turn to religious historian Hans Jonas’ reconstruction of a pivotal era in our history, extending from about 1700 B.C. to 300 A.D. and set in the eastern Mediterranean cradle of Western civilization. 2

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At the risk of oversimplification, it helps to break Jonas’ timeframe into three periods, the first lasting about 1400 years, and the next two about 300 years each.

The First Period: 1700 B.C. to 335 B.C. During this period the eastern Mediterranean region—from the Nile River, through the Fertile Crescent, to Persia—was overrun by a series of waxing and waning empires: Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian. These conquering empires systematically and wantonly subjugated a great variety of local peoples, territories, and city states, herding them into imperial districts ruled from distant capitols with little attention to local customs, folkways, autonomy, and religions. Two of these empires— Babylonia and Assyria—also had a particularly nasty habit of uprooting and relocating regional populations, sometimes in their entirety, sometimes their leading classes. One well-known example of this was the Babylonian Captivity of thousands of Jews from 586 to 538 B.C. As the centuries passed, this pattern of conquest and foreign rule had the overall effect—according to Jonas—of breaking “the political backbone of the local populations,” forcing them to “passively accept each new master in the change of empires.” When transplanted to unfamiliar locations or scattered into diaspora, they lost their sense of place. Their local customs, traditions, and folk-religions were no longer grounded in native soil. When ruled by a succession of distant, faceless, centrally administered superstates, they lost their sense of agency, self direction, and sovereignty. And when swept into the ambit of one empire after another—each with its own unilaterally imposed priorities and worldview— their sense of history and communal continuity was broken. As traditional geographic, cultural, and political boundaries shifted and dissolved, there was an unavoidable intermingling of folk religions, gods, cults, and beliefs, alongside a self protective hardening of positions. 3 All this led to a sense of drift, atomization, rootlessness, and helplessness before incomprehensible, distant forces. Communal life often departed from human scale, fragmented and scattered at one extreme or absorbed into large cosmopolitan entities at the other. It would be intellectually satisfying if we could come up with a simple way of summarizing the outcome of over a thousand years of living in what was effectively a dehumanizing madhouse. But the outcome was more paradox than resolution. On one level there was widespread political apathy and cultural stagnation. How could it be otherwise? But juxtaposed with this passivity was what we moderns would call anomie—a loss of meaning, a

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restlessness, a creeping nihilism, a purposelessness seeking purpose. On a good day our cultural ancestors felt a collective world fatigue. But on a bad day they felt “cosmic pessimism” or even the first inklings of “cosmic paranoia.” At the time they had only the beginning of a vocabulary to articulate the paradox and how to solve it. But that would change over the next 300 years. 4

The Second Period: 334 B.C. to 0 A.D. Starting in 334 B.C., the young Macedonian King, Alexander the Great, methodically conquered the eastern Mediterranean and beyond: Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, as far as the northern border of India. As a military conquest, the Greco-Macedonian takeover was just more of the same. Once again the diverse local peoples were little more than the spoils of war. World fatigue and cosmic pessimism were still the order of the day. That was the downside. But there was a cultural upside that changed everything: the Hellenization of the East. Alexander’s conquest imported and imparted a revolutionary way of thinking: rationality, abstraction, systematic logic, a set of formal principles that were universally applicable to any and all content. Greek modes of thought—along with a widespread embrace of the Greek language—gave the conquered peoples a vocabulary for framing the strongly felt but largely inarticulate and fragmented paradox of their condition. There was an interblending of Greek rationality with what Hans Jonas calls the “oriental” worldview, rich in symbol, sensuous imagery, ritual, and cultic practice. This interblending became the mental toolkit for transforming local, overlapping, and scattered cults into coherent and transportable theological systems based on universally applicable principles and themes. The themes began as a hodgepodge of regional and tribal practices, superstitions, beliefs, and dispositions, but under the influence of the Greek sensibility, they gradually converged on a hard core of four interlocking principles: radical dualism, divine transcendence, divine revelation, and salvation. 5

The Third Period: 0 A.D. to 300 A.D. Alexander’s death in 323 B.C. was soon followed by the division of his territory into separate Hellenistic kingdoms—each of which ruled their inherited cacophonies of people—until they, in turn, were replaced by the newly expanding Roman Empire. Of course, the Roman superstate brought with it further conquest and foreign domination, exacerbating the

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pent-up frustration to the breaking point. For the masses in the Levant and beyond, the “Pax Romana” was not felt as such. It was a stifling imposition of order from a capitol more distant than ever. By the time of Christ the eastern provinces had become a seething hotbed of apocalyptic, salvific cults. After centuries of confusion, dislocation, and incubation, the East exploded out of its posture of world fatigue into a fully realized and theologized world rejection. The various cults may have disagreed on many things, but they all converged on one overarching conviction: that this painful and oppressive world was not our true home, that human destiny was with a God who existed beyond the confines of this world. The four interlocking principles became foundational. First, a radical dualism between God and the world, between soul and body, between spirit and matter, between light and darkness, between the human soul and this fallen natural world. Second, a doctrine of divine transcendence—again, God is categorically distinct from this world and humanity’s true destiny is reunion with God in the divine realm. Third, divine revelation: God reveals his plan for us, speaking to us through chosen prophets and apostles. God tells us what we must know and do to get from here to there. And finally, salvation. The ancient hero, exemplified by Gilgamesh, hurled himself against the constraints of death and this world, only to fail and ultimately affirm the given order of things. The new salvific hero, in contrast, is the escape artist; he knows where the exits are, the way out of this world’s prison—he knows the path to God. 6 Three centuries of military and cultural conquest from West (Macedonia, Rome) to East were reversed into a counter-cultural (not military) conquest from East to West. The Hellenization of the East was rolled back by a powerful “orientalization” of the West in the form of dogmatic, evangelistic religions. The three main faiths that emerged out of this new dynamic—Christianity, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism—became competitive versions of the core set of four themes. All three embraced a fiercely dogmatic disconnect between humanity and nature; all three were world-rejecting, salvific systems of belief. All that remained was for one to win the competition. As it turns out, we’re lucky that Christianity won, not because it better captured the truth—I’m not arguing the truth value of the three religions here. We’re lucky Christianity won because its doctrine contains more wiggle room. First, the Christian canon of revelation includes a small number of books—e.g., Job and Song of Solomon—that, if brought into the foreground of orthodoxy, would permit reconciliation between humanity and nature. And second, unlike Christianity, the other two faiths

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do not subscribe to a creator God. They categorically condemn creation as the work of demons and the “forces of darkness.” For them creation is not merely fallen (as in Christianity), but is the anti-God principle. Their God is not merely beyond this world, but is the antithesis of this world. Creation is the disease, salvation the cure. This is full blown cosmic paranoia. In these two respects Christianity contains the seeds of a creationist covenant. No such seeds can be found in the Gnostic and Manichaean alternatives.

Does World Rejection Solve the Problem of World Fatigue? Hans Jonas’ account of world fatigue, rejection, and transcendence ties so many loose ends together that it is almost satisfying. It has a great cast of characters, a magnificent stage, historical depth. It has ebb and flow, movement and counter-movement, and at the end the underdogs stand at the threshold of a heavenly realm more glorious than anything their oppressors ever dreamed of. The story, in other words, has a pleasing shape. All things considered, it even makes sense—perhaps not the kind of sense that Jonas or many other observers of history would wish for. But even so, it makes a certain kind of sense. Or does it? Only if we overlook one quite fundamental flaw in the way those ancient people diagnosed their situation. They rejected the natural world, but it was not nature that destroyed their dignity, sovereignty, selfdetermination, and way of life. It was not nature that drove them into paroxysms of estrangement, anomie, and nihilism. And, again, it was not nature that committed what today would be called crimes against humanity. It was fellow humans who committed these crimes. Humanity committed these crimes against itself. Yet the people who suffered blamed their plight on what they perceived as “the nature of things.” It was like eating food poisoned by the cook—a fellow human—but blaming the dining room. The setting was confounded with the perpetrator. The natural world became the scapegoat. And if the paleoanthropological record is to be believed, by de-naturalizing themselves, our ancestors effectively de-humanized themselves. We in the West have been living with that legacy ever since.

Are We Stuck with Permanent World Fatigue? Our convoluted legacy of animal connection versus world fatigue has riddled the nature–human encounter with ambivalence. At the level of

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what might be called “high” cultural heritage—assorted doctrines of human exceptionalism—we in the West ride with the four horsemen of the disconnect: dualism, transcendence, revelation, and salvation. But at the level of everyday experience—strolling in the park, enjoying an unexpected breeze on a hot day, feeding the squirrels and pigeons, witnessing a brilliant sunset, taking our children to the zoo (as 130 million Americans do each year)—at this level the four horsemen are kicked out of the saddle and the disconnect fades into the background. 7 Thus, the ambivalent mix of pleasure, tension, and estrangement at our interface with nature. Are we part of nature or apart from nature? Over two thousand years of world-fatigue doctrine inclines us toward the latter view. But, as promised at the beginning of this chapter, there is a fair amount of empirical evidence that supports the former view.

From Animal Connection to Nature Connection One intriguing line of research takes us beyond the animal connection in the narrow sense of the term. It investigates what might be called the “landscape connection,” i.e., how we respond to different kinds of ecosystem, vegetation, and topography. In general we experience positive aesthetic and emotional feelings—liking, relaxation, peacefulness—when exposed to open savanna or park-like meadows and to open, unturbulent bodies of water. Combinations of the two seem to be the most favored, particularly when the meadows are flecked with mature trees, and sight lines are deep. In contrast, negative emotions are triggered by exposure to thickly vegetated settings with poor sight lines; to arid, desert-like settings; and to landscapes or water degraded by pollution. We probably feel more comfortable with the open savanna-water combinations for basically pragmatic reasons: accessible water is one of life’s necessities, expansive terrain promises a more than adequate and varied supply of food, and the open sight lines enable us to see threat before it is upon us. Conversely, the other kind of densely forested environment may conceal predatory threats; does not display water; and triggers a calculation that the ratio between risk and benefit is unfavorable, i.e., the opposite of the ratio on the open savanna. These different response patterns are quite reliable across different studies, whether measured by verbal feedback or physiological reaction such as blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle tension. The responses are the same whether the informants view actual or depicted landscapes. And the findings are consistent across widely divergent ethnic/cultural groups from Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.

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Moreover, we consistently prefer natural scenes—even mediocre ones—over urban scenes. And when we are asked to choose between two kinds of urban settings, either those with no natural features or those which include flowers, trees, and bushes, we much prefer the latter. Finally, one study of urban public housing projects found that those surrounded by plant life have a significantly lower incidence of crime and violence than those with only concrete and asphalt. In summary, the landscape research supports five conclusions: we prefer open savanna to densely vegetated terrain; open bodies of water are highly valued; even mediocre natural settings are preferred to strictly urban scenes; urban scenes with natural features are favored over those without such features; and, finally, we may respond positively or negatively to different natural configurations, but we do not respond with indifference. None of these findings should come as a great surprise, but it’s still worth asking: why don’t they surprise us? Probably because this profile of preferences—particularly the first two—has a genetic basis. Open savanna type environments favor and have good fit with our bipedal, upright anatomical structure; our ambulatory, socially organized lifestyle; and our hunting, gathering, and agricultural modes of subsistence. In fact, the archeological and paleoanthropological record clearly shows that such landscapes were our original environment of adaptation as a species. Because they contributed so much to our fitness and well-being, a positive disposition toward them was very likely genetically tracked. This genetic feature is probably behind the pattern of findings described above. Even modern, urbanized humans still have an uncanny orientation toward open, park-like natural configurations and away from their opposites. Aside from our orthodox nature stories, there is little evidence for a structural or pervasive disconnect between us and nature. Quite the contrary: we are very attuned to nature, and our attunements are as varied as are the varieties of nature. The one thing that does not define us is indifference to nature. These landscape findings stand comfortably alongside Pat Shipman’s case for our “animal connection.” Taken together, they argue for a strong overall nature connection. Actually, the argument goes one step further. Several studies indicate that our positive emotional and aesthetic disposition toward nature translates into positive health outcomes. Patients in pre-surgical holding rooms and dental clinics, for example, experience measurable stress reduction when exposed to nature pictures on walls and ceilings. Dental surgery patients feel less anxiety and discomfort when there is a fish aquarium in the room. Hospitalized patients randomly assigned to rooms with windows that look out on a stand of trees have fewer post-surgical

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complications and shorter post-operative hospital stays than do those assigned to rooms with a view of a brick wall. Postoperative open-heart surgery patients have less anxiety when randomly assigned to a recovery room with a nature picture as opposed to rooms with abstract pictures or no pictures at all. Finally, prison inmates whose cells offer views of nearby farms and trees have fewer sick calls than do those whose cells look out on the prison yard. 8 There is also a fair amount of empirical evidence that the young human child manifests a strong nature orientation in several ways. For example, seven of the first fifty words typically spoken by toddlers are animal names (cow, duck, horse, etc.) and they use the terms “dog” and “cat” more than any other words except “mommy” and “daddy.” Children routinely turn to the family pet as a source of emotional security when their human caregivers are ineffective or absent. Observational field studies find that toddlers and pre-schoolers enjoy getting down and dirty in mud, sand, and water play in natural settings. Surprise! As early as nine months of age, children are more attracted to real animals than to cleverly designed imitation toy animals. And, by the time they are three years old, children have developed a sophisticated capacity for making distinctions between living and inanimate things. They understand, for example, that life is a precondition to self-generated and goal-directed movement. By age four they know that inert objects do not die, but that plants and animals do, and that once they die they “stay dead.” They also understand, by 4 ½ years of age, that animals and plants grow and that they heal when injured, while the opposite is true of artifacts. Furniture and cardboard boxes, for example, do not grow and, when scratched, do not self-heal. Speculatively, this ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate things would seem to be a precondition to making the animal connection: How can a growing human “connect” to animals unless she can tell the difference between animals and other objects like rocks, trees, and toys? The human child’s precocious ability to make such distinctions would seem to be further evidence for the validity and the genetic basis of Pat Shipman’s animal-connection hypothesis. Moreover, it is further evidence against there being a fundamental disconnect between nature and the human condition. 9

Social and Legal Activism Before closing this chapter, we should take note of two other articulations of humanity’s nature connection: social and legal activism. The first, while only partially successful, is by now an ongoing reality. Hardly a week

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passes without news coverage of organizations and movements like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Greenpeace, The David Suzuki Foundation (in Canada), the National Audubon Society, the ASPCA, the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on protecting the Earth, the Paris Climate Accord, UN/IPCC Conferences, the creation of national and international nature preserves, and efforts at protecting endangered species—to mention only a few. These are all designed to ensure the welfare, integrity, and survival of an increasingly threatened natural world. And beyond that, to link humanity’s well-being to the well-being of the natural world. The second major thrust—although quite preliminary at the time of writing—is to assign “legal personhood” to selected rivers, landscapes, and animal species. This would give them the same protection under law as currently enjoyed by human beings … thus, the term “personhood.” So far this legal standard has not been successfully extended to animals. Not even to those—e.g., chimpanzees, dolphins, orcas, elephants, magpies, cockatoos, orangutans, African gray parrots—who display human-like traits such as self awareness, vocal and non-vocal communication, a caring sense of community, an awareness of past and future, tool use, autonomy, mourning the dead, etc. On the other hand, in 2017 “personhood” was legally assigned to the Whanganui River and the Te Urewera Park in New Zealand and to the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India. Legal custodians have been appointed to oversee and protect the rivers from abuse and to sue on their behalf. Anyone who damages the rivers with waste or polluting materials would be as liable under law as if they had assaulted a human being. Again, at the time of writing the “legal personhood” movement is a work in progress, but it shows great promise as a mitigation of the problems at the interface between nature and humanity. Nature is not simply an accumulation of “things.” Much of it may enjoy personhood, translating the nature–human encounter into an interaction between persons, not between persons and things. 10

The Moment of Choice Is the foregoing merely a sugar-coated case for devolving our nature story to the worldview of our meso- and neo-lithic ancestors? No, not at all. In league with the children, dental patients, surgery patients, housing project tenants, prison inmates, and environmental activists, my case is for connection, not backward looking regression. In fact—as argued in the

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following chapters—our dissenting nature stories in science and economics have all appeared in the last two centuries: Big-Bang cosmology, biological evolution, and ecological economics. Our dissenting nature stories, in other words, are not regressions into a primitive past. Quite the contrary, they are continuous, evolving, and faithful expressions of our connection with nature—or, even more strongly, of our inclusion in nature. They remind us that our past, present, and future are inseparable from nature’s past, present, and future—that our fates are commingled characters in the same story. As it turns out, our orthodox and dissenting nature stories share a tense coexistence in the present. But—despite two millennia of relative silence—our dissenting stories enjoy a double advantage: both greater historical depth and greater contemporary relevance. It’s time to make a lateral move from one set of stories to the other, from a world-weary and unusable past to a world loving and usable past. But before we can make the move, we must make a choice. Imagine the prototypical human: she closes her eyes and dreams the world dream in all its wonder, vitality, danger, and fecundity. In her dream her eyes sweep through all time and space as she stands at the threshold of creation … until her gaze settles on two splendid gates. One is marked “Emergency Exit.” The other reads “Welcome Home.” This is the moment of choice. Our mother turns to look at us. Which gate shall we ask her to pass through?

Endnotes 1

For a concise account of the animal connection, see Pat Shipman, (2010), pp. 519-538. 2 See Hans Jonas, (1970), especially pp. 3-32, 42-47, 206-237, 241-265, 320-340. 3 For quoted passages, see H. Jonas, (1970), p. 13. 4 For “cosmic pessimism,” see H. Jonas, (1970), p. 250. For “cosmic paranoia,” see J. Z. Smith, (1970), p. 467. 5 H. Jonas specifies three of these principles. I’ve taken the liberty of adding a fourth—divine revelation—because it is a critical feature of each of the macroreligions he discusses. See H. Jonas, (1970), pp. 31-32, 42, 44-45. 6 For discussion of the two kinds of hero, see J. Z. Smith, (1970), pp. 461, 462, 467. 7 For figures on zoo attendance, see S. R. Kellert, (2005), p. 86. 8 For thorough and readable reviews of the research on human aesthetic, emotional and health responses to natural landscapes, see Roger S. Ulrich’s chapter in S. R. Kellert and E. O. Wilson (Eds.), (1993), especially pp. 87-108; and S. R. Kellert, (2005), pp. 9-22, 29-30.

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For a review of research on the human child’s nature orientation, see Patrick C. Lee (2012), pp. 193-198. For a very well written book-length treatment of the child’s animal connection, see Gail Melson (2001). 10 For a well-informed discussion of legal personhood and one of its leading advocates, Steven Wise, see Charles Siebert, (2014, April 27). “The rights of man … and beast.” New York Times Magazine, pp. 28-33, 49-50, 53. Also see Bryant Rousseau (2016, July 13). “In New Zealand, rivers and parks are people, too (legally, at least).” New York Times Magazine, p. A11.

PART 3 SCIENCE AND NATURE

Preface In the mid-1300s, mechanical clocks began to appear on town halls and church steeples all over Europe. As a way of telling accurate time, the new invention was a great technical improvement over its precursors. But the new clock did more than keep time: at a much deeper level it foreshadowed and incubated a profound change in how Europeans would eventually view the world, preparing them for the scientific revolution of the 1600s. If time were a part of nature, and if the mechanical clock so precisely and reliably captured how time worked, then what about the rest of nature? Might the other parts of nature work with the same mathematical and mechanical order as the clock? This line of questioning led to the mechanical clockwork model of nature. And under the mathematically astute gaze of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, the mechanical model quickly morphed into science’s ruling account of nature. Soon enough, however, two problems emerged. The first had to do with human hubris. If, according to the new science, nature were nothing more than a network of interlocking mechanisms—gears, levers, pulleys, cogwheels, pistons, valves, etc.—and if we were the only mechanics in town, then we could run the whole show. Could we not? Unfortunately for human pride, the answer to this question came burdened with the second problem. As science progressed through the 1800s and 1900s it began to encounter dimensions of nature that burst the mechanical model at the seams: electromagnetics, relativity, quantum physics, thermodynamics, biological and cosmic evolution, the ecology of living systems. These were all major violations of the mechanist worldview—a worldview which could not account for space-time warps, quantum uncertainty, random genetic mutation, complex ecological feedback and feedforward dynamics, and the contingencies of big bang cosmogenesis. Science needed a new nature narrative. Yet it continues to cling— inexplicably—to its archetypal mechanical model. Hubris dies hard.

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Apparently we liked it better when we could delude ourselves into thinking we had the same control over nature that a mechanic has over a machine. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning and take it one step at a time. It’s 1350 in central Europe and the town clock begins to chime the time of day …

CHAPTER 11 THE SCIENCE STORY: NATURE AS MACHINE

In the mid-1300s, mechanical clocks began to appear on town halls and church steeples all over Europe. As a way of telling time, the new invention was a great practical improvement over its precursors: the water clock often froze on cold winter nights and the sundial was useless on cloudy days. But the new clock did more than keep time: on a much deeper level it foreshadowed and incubated a profound change in how Europeans would eventually view the world, preparing them for the scientific revolution of the 1600s. Chiming and clanking with implacable regularity through day and night, heat and cold, work and play—at the center and high point of every city, town, and village—the ubiquitous mechanical clock tick-tocked the germ of a new idea into the Western mind: the idea of a clockwork world. 1

From Mechanical Clock to Mechanized Nature This may seem an excessive claim, but let’s pursue the point for a few minutes. The new clock did not alter time itself, but it profoundly changed our experience of time—a part of nature—in ways that bore an uncanny resemblance to how science later altered our understanding of nature as a whole. The clock objectified, abstracted, ordered, quantified, and mechanized time, and in these several ways it anticipated almost exactly how science would approach nature. The mechanical clock gave classical science the first draft of its archetypal model of the world. 2 The connection was disarmingly simple: if a part of nature can function like clockwork, then why not all of nature? And since the clock works according to mechanical principles, might not nature as a whole work according to the same principles? What began as an implicit analogy gradually hardened into an explicit model of the natural world. The

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fourteenth century mechanical clock was a cosmic metaphor waiting to happen. It did not have to wait long. The late medieval physicist, Nicholas Oresme (1323-1382), saw the connection almost immediately. Intrigued by the new clock’s autonomous and orderly function, he began to play with the notion that God may have created a “clockwork universe” and left it to run by itself. This insight reconciled two contending forces in Western thought: on one side was emergent secular scholarship seeking naturalistic explanations of natural phenomena; on the other was the traditional biblical account of nature as God’s creation. If the world were the product of a supernatural cause—and scripture could not be clearer on this point—if every grain of sand and mote of dust were created by God, then nature would be open to only supernatural explanation, right down to the finest detail. This was the dilemma faced by late medieval scientists, most of whom genuinely wished to reconcile their devout Christian faith with naturalistic explanation. 3 Oresme seized on the mechanical clock as a way through the dilemma: if we think of God as a divine clockmaker, creation would work according to his perfect clockwork design. In this view, science is in the business of contemplating the lawful order and design God deposited in his clockwork universe. Science would no longer be a secular rival to theology and faith. Nature and scripture were both gifts of God: one contains the truth of his works, the other the truth of his words. Science becomes a form of worship and the scientist a natural theologian. 4 The key image behind the reconciliation is the mechanical clock. Oresme’s insight was a premonition of the mechanical worldview the new science would embrace two centuries later. But his personal intuition was one thing; the general conversion of the European mind to this view took much longer. To get a better idea of the revolutionary influence of the mechanical clock, we should take a quick look at how Europeans experienced time before the clock. In some ways they felt the passage of time just as we do today: they knew, for example, that time’s forward movement was more or less independent of human needs and wishes. Daytime lasts for a while, and then it is followed by nighttime which, in turn, is followed by the next day, and so on. But, unlike us, they did not think of time as if it were made of abstract, countable, objectively measurable units which apply equally to any and all events. For them time was not dictated by an impartial piece of machinery, as it is for us moderns every time we glance at a watch. Interestingly, and revealingly, by the mid-1700s the English language had adopted the generic term “timepiece,” connoting that watches and clocks are “pieces” of time, that time is in

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some sense made up of watches and clocks. This distinctively modern implication would have been totally incomprehensible to the pre-clock medieval mind. Even we moderns have difficulty with the image when it’s spelled out so explicitly. But this was precisely the world-image adopted by most figures in the scientific revolution: that the whole natural universe is made of interlocking mechanical systems. And what has come to be called the “mechanical model” continues to be the preferred world-image of contemporary mainstream science, even as it proves more and more untenable. The pre-clock feeling for time was more subjective, organic, elastic, concrete, and embedded than it is for us. The time between morning and midday meals, for example, was not measured out in hours and minutes. How could it be? No one had a watch, and there was no clock chiming out the hours in the nearby village. Medievals experienced the gap between meals organically, as a kind of “getting-hungrier-andhungrier,” and checked the state of their stomachs against the position of the sun in the sky. Their sense of time was also concretely embedded in context and content. It had not yet been abstracted from the extravagant clutter of life’s occasions, rhythms, and rituals into a formal, isolable variable, as it is in the clock (and in science). Just like the famous passage in the book of Ecclesiastes, before the clock there were qualitatively different types of time: To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance … (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)

If one happened to spend five hours dancing and five hours mourning, the two experiences were not for that reason chronological equivalents. They were different kinds of time. They could no more equal each other than an apple could equal an orange. In this view, time’s duration and texture were creatures of human purpose and occasion, not of how many jumps the hour hand takes over the calibrated surface of a mechanical clock. Prior to the clock, time was less quantitative; it was qualitatively built into the cycles of nature and culture, marking the trajectory of birth, growth, decline, and death. It was ingredient in these events, absorbed in them—not a detached, impartial measure of them. Its pace was elastic, varying between youth and old age, waking and sleep, leisure and work. The mechanical clock imposed clock

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time on these various types and elasticities, homogenizing them into a uniform system. *

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Parenthetically, one should be cautious not to overstate the influence of the clock. A moment’s reflection indicates these changes in our experience of time have not been absolute: we moderns are more or less “bi-temporal.” We easily recognize and often participate in organic, embedded, and elastic expressions of time. But the pull of clock time is everywhere and, when the two senses of time compete—as they often do—the tension between them is palpable. They seldom pull in the same direction. The same holds for our experience of nature: non-mechanistic and mechanistic interpretations of nature co-exist in modern, Westernized consciousness, building tensions and contradictions into how we define our place in (or outside) the natural world. The main line of argument I will pursue in the next few chapters is that a similar tension exists even in science itself: for the last 400 years mainstream science has stubbornly clung to mechanistic dogma even while its most spectacular findings refute it. The mechanical model has effectively alienated science from itself. *

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Looking back on the pre-clock period from the perspective of a seventeenth century European scientist, e.g., a Kepler or Galileo, it could be said that the mechanical clock’s principal contribution was to impose order and precision on time’s idiosyncrasies. After the clock became commonplace, time was laid out in exact, predictable coordinates, as so clearly reflected on its calibrated face. Again, as part to whole, this anticipated science’s larger agenda: to find the order behind nature’s tangled abundance, to articulate it in mathematically precise terms, and to figure out nature’s underlying “machinery”—to discover, in other words, what made nature tick. Clockwork mechanism was an apt guiding model and it was explicitly adopted by Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes—they repeatedly used the clockwork image in their own notebooks and publications. 5 In fact, for Descartes (1596-1650) mechanism was more than a convenient model or figure of speech. His natural world was literally a vast mechanical system. This was not a trivial claim: Descartes’ philosophy

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was widely accepted as the manifesto of modernity. When he said the world was a machine, all Europe paid attention. 6

The Mechanical Clock and Control Before switching on Descartes’ big machine, there is one other feature of clock time we should consider: control. The clock is a mechanical instrument, and mechanisms are designed to give us power and control over their assigned sectors of nature. Jet engines, for example, give us a degree of control over distance, pneumatic drills over hard rock surfaces, pumps over gravity, washing machines over dirt, fans over air movement, and so on. But does the mechanical clock give us control over time? The question is simple, the answer ambiguous. By reducing time to a denominated currency of hours, minutes, and seconds, the clock enables us to “save time” … “waste time” … “spend time” … “lose or gain time” … and, if we can “find” the time, “make up for lost time.” The ubiquitous clock is always there to give us a precise accounting. The clock also makes it possible to gain or lose an hour of daylight by moving the hour hand a notch forward or backward. By attaching a wake-alarm to the clock we finally got rid of that noisy rooster whose crowing fit his schedule better than ours. Before we could get the trains to run on time, we had to get time to run on time. The clock makes time run on time. As cultural historian Lewis Mumford puts it, the clock is “a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” 7 If the clock “produces” segments of time, and if we humans make and own the clocks, then we control time. Or do we? Let’s conduct a thought experiment. If time were to accelerate, would the clock speed up? Of course it would. In fact, everything would speed up. If time stopped, would the clock stop? Yes, it would, and so would everything else. Conversely, if the clock stopped, would time stop? No, it would not. It would be time to fix the clock. Einstein did a similar thought experiment in the early 1900s and subsequent empirical research has supported his conclusion. Time accelerates and decelerates under different gravitational conditions, and the clock tags along. Again, the question: does the clock really give us control over time? Or does it merely give us the illusion of control? It may be that the mechanical clock has tricked us into underestimating time’s real complexity and power. In fact, a psychological case could be made for the clock giving us less control over time. As noted a few paragraphs ago, the clock has made us bi-temporal. Put simply, our inner, organic sense of time may or may not synchronize with our outer dependence on clock time. When the

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correspondence breaks down, then we feel bullied by the clock and not at all in control of time. We feel like time is in control of us. There is a cautionary parable in here for science. If the clock does not give us psychological or physical control of time, then why would science expect that imposing a clockwork model on all nature would bring the whole show under human control? Mechanism does a good job of promoting the illusion of control, but in fact it can deliver only a portion of what it promises. And there is good reason for this gap between promise and performance: with each major advance in scientific knowledge there has been a commensurate loss of fit between the mechanical model and the physics of the natural world. By adopting and retaining a mechanistic worldview science has deluded itself and humanity into believing it can impose the same kind of control over nature that a mechanic has over his machine. To an increasing degree, modern science achieves cognitive control of nature by sidestepping its preferred model. As regards physical control, the issue is complicated by the ubiquitous fact of unintended consequences. 8 No sooner does applied science get a grip on X, as intended, but Y and Z spin out of control in ways neither anticipated nor intended. The ideology of dominion and physical control—which goes back to the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis—is bigger than mechanism. But the mechanical model was science’s entry into dominion ideology: if the natural world is a machine, then we are the mechanics, and we’ll get nature to work to suit our purposes. On the other hand, if the world is not a machine—and scientific findings increasingly tell us it is not—then we have to negotiate a new arrangement with nature. Whether that would entail or even wish for the same degree of control is an open question. Of course, we can’t hold the mechanical clock itself responsible for all this confusion. The clock would have been a remarkable invention no matter when or where it first appeared. But in fourteenth to seventeenth century Europe, it just happened to be the right (or wrong) instrument at the right time. It responded to a deeply felt need for order and control in the world of ideas and in everyday life.

The Urge to Order When a piece of technology becomes more than itself; when it spreads out beyond its practical utility into a sea of metaphoric value, we have to ask ourselves if it addresses some more basic human need. The mechanical clock was a useful technology for telling time; but much more fundamentally,

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it imposed order on time, and in doing so it spoke to a deep need in European society. It became an expression of the urge to order and, by extension, control. During the period 1300 to 1650 Europe was plagued by disorder in both its state of mind and its everyday life. Leading up to the Renaissance, European thought was a thick stew of scholasticism, Arislotelianism, superstition, metaphysics, and occultism. The boundary between philosophy and theology was permeable; spiritual and animistic forces were routinely invoked to explain physical processes, such as the movement of objects and forces across open space; alchemy, a widely adopted and semi-respectable practice, was a bizarre mix of magic, incantation, ritual, secret codes, and genuine chemical knowledge. An outside observer could be forgiven for having the general impression of clutter, hair-splitting, confusion and intellectual disarray. It was not so much that the European mind lacked inventiveness and imagination; on the contrary, it had so much of both it teetered on the brink of chaos. At least this was the view of scholars like William of Occam, Jean Buridan, and Nicholas Oresme, who as early as the 1300s were prescribing a remedial program that favored parsimonious over complex explanation, rational analysis over intuitive insight and, above all, discipline over “anything goes” in the life of the mind. From the perspective of seventeenth century rationalism, even the Renaissance was derelict. Its explosion into humanism, worldliness, tolerance, creativity, artistic expression, and skepticism toward orthodoxy was not an adequate response to medievalism. Renaissance pluralism and open-endedness came dangerously close to a kind of promiscuity of the mind. It was typified by figures like Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, and Giordano Bruno who, when they erred, always erred in the direction of excess, never toward restraint. When in doubt, Shakespeare would add an extra scene or character, Michaelangelo one more cherub, Bruno another universe or two. The Renaissance was too fascinated with antiquity to be truly modern; it was not a solution to medievalism, but part of the problem. This may seem preposterous to those of us who see the Renaissance as Europe’s first burst into modernity, but the new science argued otherwise. It claimed authorship of what it supposed were the markers of modern thought: intellectual severity, parsimony, rationality, certainty, clarity, materialism, and mechanism. In this view, the onset of modernity had to wait until the Renaissance had burnt itself out. 9 Disorder also had a real-world backdrop. When Nicholas Oresme first thought of an orderly clockwork universe in the mid-1300s, he may have had one eye on the clock, but with the other he watched his Europe

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digging out of years of bubonic plague. The black death wiped out at least a third of the population from Iceland to Constantinople and beyond. God’s creation had become an anti-miracle, and there was a desperate, collective wish for order and sanity in the world. The wish gradually tipped Christianity away from the idea of a miraculous God to a rational God, the creator of Oresme’s clockwork universe. A revealing footnote to the history of science is that three centuries after Oresme the 23-year-old Isaac Newton fled to his family’s country home when Cambridge University was attacked by plague in 1665. His later notebooks suggest that most of his major ideas were hatched during this year of forced sabbatical. 10 Was Newton’s mathematically ordered universe a reaction to the disorder of plague? The real-world context of the scientific revolution itself was the Thirty Years War. From 1618 to 1648—the period of Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes—marauding armies criss-crossed central and northern Europe in an orgy of killing, pillage, and destruction. There is general consensus among historians that this period was one of Europe’s most painful and chaotic. The founders of the scientific revolution could not have been immune to the physical and social catastrophe all around them. At the time, Descartes’ vision of a rationally ordered, mathematically certain, and mechanically determined universe may have been just the medicine Europe needed. Unfortunately, we have been living with the iatrogenic consequences ever since. 11

Galileo and Bacon: Mechanics and Dominion Around the year 1600 European science had reached an impasse. Until then it had followed a well traveled Aristotelian path, although with escalating restlessness. In the early 1600s the Italian physicist, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) stood for one way out of the impasse, and the English statesman and philosopher, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), actively proselytized another way. For a while, science seemed undecided about which course to take, but, ever resourceful, it eventually took both, one for “insiders”—the purist, cutting-edge, mechanistic thinkers—and the other for “outsiders”—those who emphasized science’s applied benefits. The insiders, led by Galileo, sought cognitive control of nature and set the tone for how science would select, address, and solve its problems. They effectively defined the new science. But the outsiders, rallied by Bacon, also played an indispensable role: for them the new science’s greatest benefit would be the physical control it gave humanity over nature.

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What eventually made science an all but unassailable enterprise in the following centuries was the combination of these two kinds of success: discovering nature’s laws and putting them to work for humanity. Its “almost miraculous series of triumphs,” in the words of Alfred North Whitehead, has allowed science to stonewall external criticism with impunity. The only critique it respects comes from within its own ranks. 12 For this reason I won’t waste the reader’s time with anti-mechanistic arguments offered by the arts or humanities. Science just shrugs them off. Instead, I will focus exclusively on science’s own refutation of its mechanistic worldview. One other important historical point bears mentioning. Many of the Baconian outsiders weren’t applied scientists at all; they were pure scientists who just weren’t up to speed, especially in areas like biology, physiology, geology, and chemistry. When they caught up—almost always by bending their intuitions and methods to suit the dominant mechanical model of physics and astronomy—they gradually worked their way inside. 13 This unequal maturity among the several specializations may well be the most decisive factor in the history of science—it pointed science’s future course in a mechanistic rather than an alternative direction. In 1600 the four laggards just mentioned – biology, geology, etc. – were still unsystematically empirical and often operated on a trial-and-error, field study basis. In contrast, most of the preliminary empirical work in physical mechanics had already been done. Engineers, instrument and tool makers, architects, metallurgists, etc., had compiled an enormous body of practical knowledge in handling refractory matter. By the time Galileo came along, the field was ripe for the kind of systematic treatment that would start to pull these pieces of knowledge together into general principles. 14 Similarly, but in a more programmatic way, most of the prerequisite work in astronomy had already been done by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). While biologists were still doing “natural history,” Galileo was discovering mathematical regularities in the area of physical mechanics; and both he and his contemporary, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), were making and publishing major breakthroughs in mathematical and empirical astronomy. Galileo and Kepler had three strong tools on their side: mathematics, the clockwork mechanical model, and two overarching theoretical frameworks in Archimedes’ mechanics and Copernicus’ heliocentrism. With these advantages, they got their agenda on the table first and set the “gold standard” for modern scientific practice. Biology very quickly realized that, to escape the stigma of medievalism, it would have to

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reconceptualize living organisms as elaborate mechanical systems. In fact, within a few years Descartes (1596-1650) had made this ideological contortion a requirement for entry into the new club (more on Descartes in a later chapter). Again, this point is so critically decisive that it bears repeating. An accident of scientific history is that physics and astronomy were the first specializations to reach methodological and theoretical maturity. Both strongly embraced mathematics, systematic theory, hypothetico-deductive method, and a mechanistic, clockwork worldview; and, in doing so, they set the tone and standard for the new science. All the other sciences had to adapt to their model or fall even further behind. For this reason, the major emphases in this and the next few chapters are, first, the development of the dominant mathematical-mechanistic approach to science, and, second, the intractable problems it created, even for physics and astronomy. 15 *

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Because Francis Bacon was neither mathematician nor mechanist— at least not in any explicit sense—he did not play an insider’s role in the new science. But before he gets lost in the shuffle, three things have to be said about his importance. First, he was a very persuasive public relations man for the new science. His writing was accessible to a broad, nonspecialized audience and was also full of fruitful ideas, trenchant insights, and catchy turns of phrase. Second, he openly and cheerfully promoted the view that humanity’s mandate was to conquer nature and that science was to be our main weapon. If he were alive today he would enthusiastically subscribe to the cliché that knowledge is power; and had he lived in biblical times, he would have trumpeted dominion doctrine. Finally, although he was not a self identified mechanist, none of his main positions were inconsistent with mechanism. One could move seamlessly back and forth between mechanism and his program of subduing and controlling nature: science would teach us how to build the machines to harness nature’s machinery. The overall Baconian program, in other words, was flagrantly anthropocentric and chillingly prophetic. 16

Motion and the Mechanical Model Galileo was among the first to put on the modern straightjacket of believing that we can know all we need to know about nature by counting all its countables, measuring all its measurables, and finding mathematical regularities in the resulting numbers. One of his most frequently paraphrased

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opinions is “Il libro della natura è scritto in lingua matematica”—The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. He (and Kepler) had a severe case of what science historian Nicholas Rescher calls “number idolatry.” 17 To capture the way Galileo did science, let’s look at how he addressed the “problem” of motion. One of the burning questions in late medieval and Renaissance science (approximately 1350-1600) was the nature of motion. How you answered the question—even how you asked it—decided whether you were among science’s tired old men or its bright new boys. 18 Galileo’s approach relied on not bogging down in concrete details. Like a latter-day Plato, he engaged motion by stepping back from its manifest reality. From this detached posture he would abstract the essence of motion from its messy, multivariate context by way of a thought experiment. He imagined an ideal, geometric object—not a real physical object—moving through empty space and concluded that it would continue to move in a straight line at exactly the same velocity forever. Here he discovered an early version of the principle of inertia. Moreover, for him “straight line … same velocity … forever” were strict mathematical and/or geometric concepts. They were not merely convenient ways of communicating. Lurking in the background of this way of framing the problem was the clockwork model: just as the clock abstracts and mathematizes time, Galileo abstracted and mathematized motion. 19 After mentally capturing the pure, solitary behavior of the moving, geometric object, the Galilean approach then goes on to consider the several other factors that, if admitted into the idealized scenario, would perturb the object’s motion: gravity, atmospheric resistance, the shape of the object, surface tension, collision with other objects, and so on. Each factor is isolated and investigated on its own, while associated variables are neutralized either in thought or through experimental controls. This was the beginning of science’s step-by-step, univariate approach to research. The whole exercise is based on imagining motion to behave as if it were a mechanical system. Just as an individual part of a clock, e.g., a cog-wheel, can be physically removed, measured, manipulated, and put to the side, a selected “part” of the motion-system, e.g., air resistance, can be mentally abstracted from the whole, studied, and set aside. It can be manipulated in mind, or in small-scale, physical experiments, or both. Then, just as the cogwheel can be examined for how it interacts with adjacent parts of the clock, the interaction between air resistance and inertial motion can be investigated. Next, the scientist repeats this procedure with another part of the system, e.g., collisions, and then

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another, and yet another, until all the relevant parts have been examined. Finally, the scientist reassembles the system—whether clock or motion— and he knows how the system operates. In any event, this is the ideal. Galileo studied motion just as he would have studied a clock: take it apart, figure out how the various pieces work, put it back together. 20 According to Galileo’s writings, a surprising amount of his research took the form of thought experiments. 21 But at some point he had to leave the domain of ideal geometry and “re-physicalize” motion. Otherwise he would have been all mathematician and no physicist. Again, the mechanical clockwork model came in handy: one can think of the clock as a “physicalization” or “materialization” of mathematics. Just as everything logically follows in a mathematical proof, everything physically follows in a well-designed machine. It has to—otherwise neither the proof nor machine would work. In fact, three features converge in clockwork mechanism that are immediately transferable to Galileo’s physics of motion: materiality, quantification, and contact action. By defining an object’s motion in absolutely material terms, the problematic role of immaterial agents— spirits, souls, animisms, emanations, etc.—is nullified. There are no ghosts in a mechanical clock. By quantifying motion to the fullest extent possible, the role of qualities is minimized. This provides further insurance against spirits and souls—“occult qualities,” as the new scientists scornfully labeled them. Finally, and most critically, every causal event in a mechanical clock is by direct physical contact: one cogwheel moves another cogwheel which, in turn, rotates a connected shaft, and so forth, in an interlocking system of contact causality. Analogously, in a motion system, direct physical contact with atmospheric resistance slows a moving object down, physical collision with another object knocks it off course, and so on. Without physical contact there can be no change in the object’s velocity or direction. All cause-effect interactions are by direct contact—there is no such thing as distant, gap-jumping causality in a mechanical system. If there were, the system’s physics would be non-mechanical by definition. Since this stricture is true of a clock, then by the ana-logic of modeling, it must also be true of all motion systems. 22 But is it? What about the influence of gravity on an airborne object? When I throw a ball in the air, does gravity pull it down by physical contact? Or does gravity’s influence jump the empty gap between the ball and the earth’s surface? In fact, gravity’s pull works most efficiently in an empty vacuum, that is, when physical contact with any atmospheric medium is reduced to a minimum. Release a feather in the air,

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for example, and atmospheric resistance causes it to waft down gradually. Release the same feather in a vacuum and it drops like a rock. This strongly suggests that gravity’s causal influence on motion acts at a distance, leaping across empty space. If so, gravity is a categorical violation of mechanistic physics. This is a serious problem because it means that any motion system which includes gravity cannot be mechanical. If this is true, then Galileo’s contact-action account of motion may be good mathematics, but it fails as a physics. I understand this is a harsh charge, but distant causality— generally referred to as “action at a distance”—soon became a crippling problem for science, one that would eventually erode the mechanistic worldview at its foundation. A few pages ago I referred to an intractable difficulty built into science’s commitment to the mechanical model without mentioning what it was. Well, this is it: causal action at a distance. And, as we’ll see, gravity isn’t the only form it takes. For the moment, however, let’s sidestep the problem of distant causality. We’ll get back to it soon enough. I don’t want to give the impression that Galileo single-handedly laid down all the rules for scientific practice; he had lots of help. Nor should we think of him or his ingenious contemporaries as unambiguously modern, even by their own standards: they were children of their time and constantly struggled to articulate a new approach to intellectual order. 23 But it would also be a great mistake to underestimate Galileo’s importance. He typified the new scientific mentality by framing it along Platonic lines. Galilean science does not investigate the rough and tumble of nature, but idealized, mechanically modeled nature scenarios. In this view, nature presents only its shallow reality to the senses, but its deep reality to the mathematical structures of the human mind. The criterion of truth is mathematical order and intelligibility; just as it was for Plato. Intelligibility dictates reality; not the other way around. By the end of his long career, Galileo had assembled much of modern science’s conceptual toolkit, and he did so mostly by following one intuition after another. He was not an explicit or systematic philosopher of science; that role would fall to Descartes.

The Theology and Politics of Mechanism It’s pretty clear that science’s adoption of the mechanical model was not required by any built-in scientific imperative. On the contrary, its appeal grew out of the way it simultaneously met a number of needs, some of them internal to scientific practice, others having to do with social

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disorder, war, wretched public health, theology, and the political power of the church. The model, in other words, was overdetermined and in no sense uniquely necessary to scientific thought or practice. On the theological and political front, the mechanical model kept the inquisitorial power of the church at arm’s length, as long as science did not get too rambunctious in its claims. When it did, as in the famous case of Galileo, the ecclesiastical authorities came down hard, but not nearly as hard as they could have. In 1633 they humiliated and house-arrested Galileo for his outspoken heliocentrism. But only three decades earlier they had burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake for his magical theory of nature. Galileo’s mechanism was preferable to Bruno’s magic because— leaving aside the specific issue of heliocentrism—Galileo’s general neoplatonic take on nature was more or less compatible with the church’s positions on divine transcendence, creation doctrine, human exceptionalism, God’s rationality, and the principle of absolute truth. If nature is a machine, then—like any machine—it is not selfcreating, but constructed from the outside. This corresponded nicely with Christian creation doctrine: God was the only creative force in existence and, as a transcendently super-natural being, he created the natural universe from the outside by definition. Moreover, we humans, made by God in his image, were also outside nature, not quite supernatural, but extra-natural, set apart from nature just as a machinist stands apart from his machine. Humanity, in other words, has strong theological standing; nature considerably less so. God and human souls are the proper province of religion; nature belongs to science. Also, if the universe operates according to a mathematically precise mechanical design, it follows that its divine creator has an orderly, rational, mathematical mind. 24 This new view of God was a welcome relief from his medieval image as mysterium tremendum, beyond knowledge, beyond ordinary human understanding, accessible only through mystical experience—the discredited God of the 13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart. Finally, a mechanized nature also corresponded to Christianity’s investment in the principle of certain truth. The post-Reformation church was not fond of relativism in any form. Christianity’s earlier view of theology as an ongoing discourse had been replaced by a theology of manual and catechism, by an excessive emphasis on the church as guardian of absolute value and revealed truth. Analogously, machine behavior is not at all relativistic: it operates in one and only one way, as dictated by its maker’s design. Even miracle doctrine was supported by mechanism. Miracles wouldn’t be truly miraculous unless they occurred as

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exceptions to the backdrop of an absolutely lawful and predictable nature. The mechanical model delivered the backdrop. Mechanism turned out to be good theology. Compare this picture with Giordano Bruno’s relativistic, magical, self creating, pantheistic, living universe and we can begin to understand why the church was more comfortable with a mechanistic account of the cosmos. As long as science kept its hands off the realm of spirit, the church was appeased and gave science a green light—well, perhaps, a yellow light—to proceed with its inquiries. Reciprocally, science was perfectly happy to exclude spirit and other “occult” entities from nature. This was no price to pay for relative freedom of inquiry. Mechanism was good politics. We have already briefly looked at how plague, war, social disorder, medievalism, and Renaissance open-endedness motivated the rise of the mechanical worldview. When we add to this list the church’s political power—particularly in Catholic Europe—and its activist, inquisitorial theology, it’s safe to conclude that seventeenth century mechanism was overdetermined. Again, mechanism was not necessary on distinctively scientific grounds; but it so concretely expressed society’s urge to order and so effectively neutralized ecclesiastical interference that it got a much stronger hold on science than it merited in strictly scientific terms. It informed, protected, constricted, and historically situated the scientific approach to knowledge. The mechanical model became an albatross that science couldn’t live with or without. 25 *

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The major theme weaving through our historical account so far has been the mechanical clockwork model. At this point it might be helpful to interrupt the narrative to address several questions: What is a model? Why does science use models? And how can they be misused? After that, we’ll resume the science story with two contrasting figures: Descartes, the high priest of orthodox mechanism, and Newton, arguably the greatest scientist who ever lived, and a loose cannon in the mechanist camp.

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Endnotes 1

For the material in this and the next two chapters I have relied on the excellent historical treatments of the period by Whitehead (1925), Hull (1959), Dijksterhuis (1961), Butterfield (1962), Hall (1983), Holton (1988), and Toulmin (1990). Dijksterhuis’ The Mechanism of the World Picture is as authoritative and scholarly as anyone could want. Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science is well written, well informed, and accessible to the lay reader. If one were limited to one book on the period, his would be it. Mumford (1963, pp. 9-22) offers an insightful account of the role of the mechanical clock in depositing the idea of order in the European mind. On this point, also see Lundmark (1993, pp. 45-65). Butterfield seems to share Mumford’s view of the clock’s importance, but notes the connection is impossible to prove (1962, p. 119). However, given the repeated and explicit resort to clockwork imagery among seventeenth century scientists, the connection is also impossible to overlook. 2 Historians of science generally use the term “classical” in reference to the scientific revolution of the 1600s and 1700s (Kepler, Galileo, Newton, etc.). The terms “ancient” or “Greek” refer to the science of antiquity (Aristotle, Archimedes, etc.). I’ll use “medieval” to designate the several centuries prior to 1600 (Oresme, Buridan, Occam, etc.), and “modern” to cover the 1800s (Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, etc.) and 1900s (Einstein, quantum physics, “big bang” cosmology, etc.). 3 For Oresme’s insight, see Butterfield, (1962), pp. 8, 93. Oresme’s rather severe Deism was later viewed by the Church as a threat to God’s providential action in the cosmos: if the clockwork world operated “on its own,” God would become a passive irrelevance. Later versions of the clockwork model were careful to bring God back into the picture. See, for example, how the chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) revised mechanism to make it more palatable to the Church (Dijksterhuis, 1961, pp. 441-443). For further discussion of how the clockwork model reconciled religious and scientific viewpoints, see Butterfield (1962), pp. 118-120; and Abram (1996), pp. 235-238. 4 Perhaps the clearest example of this conflation of science and religion was the work of astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). He conceptualized the cosmos as a simultaneous expression of clockwork order and Christian trinity doctrine. See Dijksterhuis (1961), pp. 305-306, 310, 322. 5 For Descartes, see the Cambridge University Press edition of his Philosophical Writings (1984-91), Vol. 1, p. 288; Vol. 2, p. 58; Vol. 3, p. 304; also see his Philosophical Essays (R. Ariew, Ed.), (2000), p. 69. For Kepler, see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 310; Hall (1983), p. 141; Holton (1988), p. 56. 6 For a sustained and persuasive argument to this effect, see Turbayne (1970), pp. 3-27, 34-40, 65-69. 7 L. Mumford (1963), p. 15. 8 I have borrowed the distinction between cognitive and physical control from Rescher (1999), pp. 175, 245. 9 See Toulmin (1990), pp. 5-44.

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10 See A. R. Hall (1983), p. 307, for quoted passages from Newton’s notebooks. Also see Butterfield (1962), p. 152. F. E. Manuel (1968) offers an alternative hypothesis. In his psychohistory of Newton he argues that Newton’s drive for order and clarity was motivated by the guilts and anxieties of his troubled childhood. In any event, I offer the plague-hypothesis as a thinking point: personal anxiety does not rule out plague anxiety. It might even potentiate it. 11 See Toulmin (1990), pp. 16-17, 53-80, for evidence that Descartes was personally aware of the disorder of his time. A. R. Hall’s opinion is that Kepler’s mature years were “made wretched by the Thirty Years War” (1983, p. 133); also see Holton (1988), p. 70. 12 For Whitehead’s discussion of this point, see his Science in the Modern World (1925), pp. 24-26, 88, 97, 147. The quoted passage is from p. 88. 13 Whitehead notes that in the 1600s, science was “dominated by physics,” whose root concepts were “very unsuited to biology” (1925, pp. 60, 150). Also see A. R. Hall (1983), p. 16; Butterfield (1962), pp. 122-123; and Mumford (1962), pp. 45-51. 14 See Dijsterhuis (1961), p. 243. 15 Butterfield (1962, p. 122) comments on the downside of this trade-off: the "mechanistic point of view" eventually became an “embarrassment” to biology and “ultimately operated rather as a check upon the progress of (its) knowledge and understanding.” Whitehead also remarks on the “insoluble problem” physics’ domination presented to biology (1925, pp. 59-60). Even in the early 20th century, “ … biology apes the manners of physics. It is orthodox to hold that there is nothing for biology but what is physical mechanism under somewhat complex circumstances” (1925, p. 150). 16 On Bacon’s enthusiastic embrace of dominion doctrine, see J. Spedding et al., The Works of Francis Bacon (1860), Vol. 3, p. 156; Vol. 4, pp. 47, 247-248, 372373. Also, B. Farrington (1966), The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, pp. 62, 92-93, 130; M. Hesse (1954), p. 36; B. Easlea (1981), pp. 82-86. Here are a few typical Baconian comments: science would enable humanity “to bind her (nature) to your service and make her your slave,” and science has “the power to conquer and subdue her (nature), to shake her to her foundations … ” (Farrington, pp. 62, 93); and humanity should devote its “united forces against the Nature of Things, to storm and occupy her castles and strongholds” (Spedding, Vol. 4, p. 373). 17 For “Il libro della natura … ,” see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 499. For “number idolatry,” see Rescher (1999), p. 234. 18 Butterfield (1962), pp. 3ff. 19 Actually, for Galileo, the inertial line followed by the moving geometric object was not perfectly straight, but perfectly curved. He believed that the universe was a sphere: thus, all unobstructed motion pursued a circular trajectory. Among other things, this view enabled him to avoid the problems of extraterrestrial gravity and distant action. His planets were not held in their circular orbits by gravity, but by the tendency of all moving objects to follow a circular path. As regards terrestrial motion, however, his circular line approximated a straight line, just as the unaided human eye sees the horizon as a “straight”

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approximation of its curved reality. For discussion of how seventeenth century science overcame Galileo’s error, see Butterfield (1962), pp. 85-86. 20 Butterfield has a humorous way of capturing the variable-by-variable approach: “things like air-resistance, which had been read out of the diagram at the first stage of the argument, could now be brought back into the picture, but brought back in a different way—no longer as despots but as subjugated servants. These things themselves were now caught into the mathematical method and turned into problems of geometry … ” (1962, pp. 87-88). In Dijksterhuis’ more sober terms, the “disturbing factors” were separated from the “essential ones” (1961, p. 268); “Radically idealizing the phenomena by the elimination of all disturbing influences and schematizing everything with equal thoroughness by means of simplifying abstractions … mechanics developed into an autonomous science, quite remote from physical reality” (p. 346). 21 For Galileo’s generous use of “thought experiments,” see Butterfield (1962), pp. 83-84; and Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 345. His overreliance on them may have trapped him in the occasional contradiction (Dijksterhuis, p. 353). 22 See Dijksterhuis (1961), bottom of p. 497. 23 This struggle was particularly evident with Kepler. His notebooks reveal how difficult it was to shift from the pre-mechanistic to the mechanistic sense of reality. See Dijksterhuis (1961), pp. 305-313; Holton (1988), pp. 53-56. 24 On God’s mathematical mind, see Dijksterhuis (1961), pp. 500-501. 25 See Whitehead (1925), p. 74.

CHAPTER 12 WHAT IS A SCIENTIFIC MODEL?

The previous chapter may have left the reader suspended between two questions: Is my critique directed at the mechanical model? Or am I using mechanism to make a broad case against science as a whole? The answers are yes to the first question, no to the second. Put briefly, my position is that science, whatever its faults may be, is bigger, smarter, and more adventurous than its preferred model. There is no logically necessary connection between science and mechanism—the link is largely an accident of history; and, perhaps more to the point, most of science’s major findings have repudiated the physics of mechanism. Even so, for reasons that are only partly explicable, mainstream science retains an atavistic attachment to the imagery and vocabulary of its orthodox model. The oddest aspect of this attachment is that it puts science at cross purposes with itself and its own best interests. In addition to being inadequate to the physics and biology of the natural world, mechanism severely constricts the scientific imagination and distorts the enterprise into an instrument of dominion ideology and unchecked anthropocentrism. The model is bad all around. Bad for science because the mechanist view of nature is biased, narrow, and in many respects just plain false. And bad for human–nature relations because it encourages humanity to embrace the analogy that we are to nature as a mechanic is to his machine. On moral, aesthetic, cognitive, and practical grounds, this analogy is impoverished, delusional, and potentially dangerous. In contrast, much can be said in favor of science as a whole. Its devotion to a package of disciplinary constraints—replication, falsification, reliability, logic, peer review, methodological rigor—is nicely set off by a track record of resourcefulness, a spirit of opportunism, and a taste for intellectual adventure. As science historian Thomas Kuhn has persuasively argued, science periodically mounts revolutions against itself without losing its core identity. 1 In the next chapter we’ll see how Isaac Newton anticipated Kuhn by overturning the mechanistic physics (not the mathematics) of his seventeenth century predecessors. If his forerunners deserve credit for starting the scientific revolution in the early to mid-

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1600s, Newton takes credit for completing it at the end of the century. But to complete it he had to repudiate the mechanist physics which began it. Before resuming the historical narrative, however, let’s pause to consider three questions: What is a model? Why does science use models? And how can they be misused? Since these questions get to the heart of science’s nature story, they have to be answered directly.

What is a Model? According to language philosopher Max Black, a scientific model is a “sustained and systematic metaphor.” It does on an elaborate and extended scale what metaphor does in a more modest way. 2 So what is a metaphor? As we saw in the earlier chapter on The Song of Solomon, a metaphor mentally transfers ideas or images from one domain of reality to another. For Black, it is more a cognitive strategy than a literary embellishment. If I say, for example, that “nature is a machine,” it is not just a facile turn of phrase, but a way of tapping into my familiarity with machinery to enhance my understanding of nature. Depending on context, I may mean that nature’s apparently unfathomable behavior is nothing more than what we’re accustomed to in machines: automatic, determinate and predictable. Or, rather more concretely, I may mean that nature’s moving parts work like everyday mechanical devices, such as hinges, levers, pistons, gears, cog-wheels, etc.; or, more dramatically, that nature is as unforgiving and unemotional as a machine. The one thing I would not mean is that nature is literally a machine. My metaphor is neither an identity assertion nor a dictionary definition. It is an “as if” statement, a kind of verbal “make believe” whose purpose is to achieve some insight into some aspects of nature. Alternatively, I might say, “nature is an organism.” This metaphor would try to portray inanimate natural phenomena as if they were instances of perception, symbiosis, memory, relationship, selfmovement, communication, etc. Gravity, for example, might be described in communication terms: the sun “communicates” its great mass to the less massive Saturn, holding it in orbit; the earth “communicates” a gravitational “message” to the ball I throw in the air, “telling” it to return to earth. 3 Another example: the earth’s atmosphere may be seen as having a “symbiotic relationship” with its plant life, as they reciprocally exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen. And so on. 4 Again, the whole exercise is a kind of make-believe. “Nature-isan-organism” is neither an identity assertion nor a truth claim. But, if not used judiciously, it might have the side effect of biologizing one’s general

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understanding of nature, just as the machine metaphor would tend to mechanize nature’s overall meaning. My intention may be to mentally transfer only one or two selected features across domains, but unintended features sometimes piggyback on the transfer. These side effects are one of the cognitive risks of using metaphors and models; we’ll return to them below. If a model is an extended metaphor, at what point does the metaphor become a model? In Black’s view, metaphors are “relatively brief statements,” while a model is more like an “allegory or fable,” i.e., a kind of story. We can jump in and out of individual metaphors, using them for quick insights and to make particular points. In contrast, a model is a stable gathering place for a family of related metaphors, deciding which get in and which stay out. It becomes the organizing theme of the fable or story, generating vocabulary, imagery, and, most importantly, a central message. If a nature story were organized by the mechanical model, the central message would be that nature behaves “as if” it were a machine. Alternatively, an organically anchored story would leave us with the message that nature resembles a living system. And so on. But a model’s stability should not be mistaken for truth. As a collection of “as-if” metaphors, the model is merely an amplified as-if statement, not a metaphysics or belief system. Its value is completely heuristic, only as good as the images, vocabulary, and ideas it produces about the world. It hints at possible connections, suggests analogies, focuses attention, and generates hypotheses. But it is never a literal account of the world itself. 5

Why Does Science Have Models? Why would a tough-minded profession like science resort to modeling or, in Black’s terms, allegories and fables? To some extent this is a misguided question because it overlooks the strong cognitive value of a well-chosen model: its cognitive power lies in an ability to convert the unknown into familiar images and relationships. Let’s look at two illustrations of how it provides this help. A model’s most fruitful function is to generate predictions and hypotheses about nature. Assume, for the sake of demonstration, that a particular model has two related components, X and Y. If empirical research discovers the existence of X in nature, then the model would predict that Y should also be there. This would point subsequent research toward testing the “Y hypothesis” rather than alternatives. A classic, if subsequently thwarted case of this scenario was played out in nineteenth

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century physics. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a pivotal experiment in England showed that light behaved just like a wave. This finding soon led to the more or less universal interpretation of light in terms of the “wave model”—the same model that describes the behavior of ocean and sound waves. Since both ocean and sound waves undulate through a medium (water and air, respectively), the model predicted that light waves would also have a medium. This was the “Y hypothesis.” The yet to be discovered medium was even given a name—“luminiferous ether”—and, because the model was so easy to believe, ether was prematurely taken for a fact of nature even though it was merely a hypothesis. This was a bad omen. Sure enough, toward the end of the 1800s, an even more important experiment tested the hypothesis and, much to everyone’s surprise, was unable to find any trace of luminiferous ether. It did not seem to exist. Although light had wave-like features, it differed from other waves by having no identifiable medium. The point of this example is that without the wave model, the luminiferous ether hypothesis may never have been generated, tested, and, in this case, disconfirmed. As we’ll see in a subsequent chapter, ether’s failure cast a pall over physics at the end of the nineteenth century. It took a new generation of scientists, led by Albert Einstein, to move physics into the post-ether era. The beauty of a failed hypothesis—to put the best face on it—especially one as fundamental as ether, is that it clears the decks for a whole new way of thinking about nature. The downside, of course, is all the time, effort, and resources science wasted believing what turned out to be a false hypothesis. Not incidentally, it’s worth noting that the wave model is a happy face subset of the mechanical model. In any event, although a failed hypothesis may help to advance science, it discredits the model which produces it. The first requirement of a scientific model is goodness of fit between its physics and nature’s physics. When a model generates bad hypotheses, it usually suffers from bad fit. The best this kind of model can do is show science where not to go. But that’s not good enough; science needs models that guide it into positive lines of inquiry, that tell science where it should go. Another function of models is to provide “pictures” of nature. Scientific theory relies so heavily on mathematical notation, formalism, and abstraction that it often behaves as if it has no interest in what nature actually looks like. Take, for example, Newton’s inverse squares equation for gravity:

F = C x m1 2m2 r

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The equation nicely captures the mathematical regularities of gravity, but even if we know what the various symbols (m1 … m2 … r2 … etc.) refer to, we still don’t know what gravity looks like. Of course, it doesn’t help that gravity is invisible, but a good model could portray gravity as if it were visible. In fact, when Einstein developed his geometric account of gravity (as opposed to Newton’s force account), one of the fringe benefits was how it “visualized” gravity. For Einstein, gravity is a curvature in the geometry of space-time. To get the picture, imagine two people, one on each side, stretching a cotton sheet between them. Then we put a soccer ball on the sheet, causing it to sag or curve downward in the middle. Next, we place a golf ball at the edge of the sheet, and it rolls “downhill” to the soccer ball. If the soccer ball represents the sun, and the golf ball a planet, then what “attracts” the planet to the sun is the sheet’s curvature. In this model gravity is—or more properly, is like—the sag in the sheet. This is what gravity might look like if it were visible. Newton’s equation abstractly summarizes the law of gravity, but the sheet-and-ball model provides a concrete mental image of the physical reality behind the mathematical notation. 6 This example shows how a model helps to keep mathematized science grounded in physical reality. Bertrand Russell once described pure mathematics as the one subject where we don’t know what we’re talking about or whether what we say about it is true. 7 Even if one doesn’t agree with Russell, his point about excessive abstraction is well taken. The great electromagnetic field theorists, William Kelvin and James Maxwell, almost always visualized their mathematics in terms of the mechanical model—this was what kept them from falling into the trap described by Russell (although it did not save them from other problems). If Kelvin and Maxwell had not used mechanist imagery, they probably would have adopted some other family of images to ground their mathematics. But in the heyday of nineteenth century electromagnetics, the mechanical model was science’s orthodox source of mental pictures. 8 Had the scientific revolution begun at a different time and been driven by different circumstances and priorities, its dominant model and story would very likely be different. Let’s pursue this point with a brief digression into “what-if” history. What if science had begun with the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species? The organizing theme of its nature story would probably be based on some time-plotted model, e.g., nature-as-history or nature-as-evolving narrative. In fact, this is not a fanciful example, because since Darwin all of science, even physics and astronomy, has edged toward an evolutionary perspective. Without this

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perspective theories of climate change, continental drift/plate tectonics, and “big bang” cosmogenesis would be inconceivable. In its classical period science asked: What is nature? And concluded it is a machine. The present tense of the question sidestepped time-referenced answers. But modern science increasingly asks: What was nature? How did it get from what it was to what it is? And what will it become? These questions presume a view of nature as an unfolding series of becomings rather than a fixed state of being, and the machine is no longer an adequate answer to them. The modern recognition that nature moves through time and that time implies change has underscored the inadequacy of the mechanical model. Even so, we should never underestimate the durability of a deeply entrenched fable. The point of this digression is that the mechanical model is a creature of history and, as already noted, has no logically necessary relation to science. Science is itself a historically situated enterprise, and like many other sustained human endeavors, remains stubbornly devoted to its founding myths and fables, even while disregarding them on an almost daily basis. This is obviously a complex issue and will come up for discussion more than once in the following chapters.

The Misuse of Models As already noted, when properly used, modeling can be a fruitful source of images, vocabulary, and hypotheses about nature. Models—mechanical or otherwise—are not logically necessary to science, but because they help to keep it grounded in the contours and possibilities of physical reality, they may be necessary in a practical sense. In any event, science does not seem to be able to get along without them. Unfortunately, when misused, models also have a serious downside, leading to two general kinds of error: overextension and reification. Overextension refers to what I called “side effects” a few pages ago. It follows the formula that if something walks like a duck, then it probably talks like a duck. In science this would read: if it walks like a machine, then it probably talks, balks, squawks, and gawks like one too. The model, in other words, may so colonize scientific understanding of nature that it inhibits awareness or discovery of nature’s non-mechanical qualities. Non-mechanical ways of “walking” or “talking” are overlooked, ignored, or not even noticed; or when noticed, model-saving criteria are invented to explain them away. Once science fell in love with the mechanical model it saw machinery wherever it looked; and it indiscriminately adopted the vocabulary of mechanism. 9

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We looked at an example of this type of error in our earlier discussion of Galileo’s account of motion. According to the mechanical model all motion is caused by direct physical contact. For example, a billiard ball moves only when it is hit by a cuestick or another ball. Similarly, a cog-wheel turns only through direct physical contact with an adjacent cog-wheel; a sailboat moves only when wind applies air pressure to the sail. So far, so good. But the model only partly fits the physics of the ball I threw in the air a few pages ago. It accounts nicely for the ball’s upward motion because direct physical contact with the muscular action of my arm propels it into the air. But now we run into trouble: my arm doesn’t make the ball come back down. Gravity does. And since gravitational pull operates at a distance, contact action cannot explain the ball’s return to earth. There is poor fit between the physics of the falling ball and the mechanical model. Falling objects need a distant-action model to account for their motion. Nevertheless, when Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton were actively grappling with the role of gravity in nature—from about 1600 to 1720—there was a growing consensus that its force had to operate through direct physical contact. Contact causality was bedrock to Descartes: his physics got rid of the “problem” of distant causality by ruling out the possibility of empty space. If there is no empty space between objects, then by definition everything is in direct contact with everything else. Late seventeenth century neocartesians like Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz were furious with Newton for suggesting, however reluctantly, that gravity might operate across open spaces. But the dispute was not honestly resolved—after Leibniz died in 1716 it was conveniently swept under the rug. Rather than go through the trouble of modifying its mechanical model, science continued to pretend that gravity walked and talked like a machine. It was the tidier solution. The other misuse of modeling, reification, goes beyond overextension: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Note the qualifier “like” is dropped from the second clause: to reify a model is to declare it a concrete fact in the world or, even worse, a selfevident or necessary truth needing no confirmation. But a model is no more factual than a metaphor; it is a heuristic “as if” or “make-believe” statement, not a literal truth claim. When I say, “nature is a machine,” this is shorthand for “let’s pretend that nature behaves like a machine because it might alert us to hypotheses, explanations, or features of nature that we would otherwise overlook.” But when my model shifts from as if to it is or it must be, from make-believe to belief, I’m no longer in the modeling

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game; I have shifted into metaphysics. The difference between as if and it is makes all the difference. 10 Max Black rightly notes that when a model becomes a metaphysics, “its consequences will be permanently insulated from empirical disproof,” that the more persuasive the model, “the greater the danger of its becoming a self-certifying myth,” and that in the absence of independent tests, “what is to be meant by the reality of the model becomes mysterious.” When a model reaches this state it is neither falsifiable nor intelligible. It becomes an instance of precisely the kind of metaphysical swamp science set out to drain in the first place. To the extent it reifies the mechanical model, science is at war with its own raison d’être. 11 Aside from these conceptual difficulties, the practical consequence of reification is to drive a wedge between science and nature. The intention behind modeling is to make nature more accessible, but when the model claims to be nature, it substitutes itself for nature and estranges us—scientists and laypersons alike—from nature’s own reality. Under the influence of reification, science is reduced to the contemplation of the mythic structure of its model rather than the actual structure of nature. It makes nature less accessible. 12 Another practical consequence of reification, particularly of the mechanical model, is to split science’s worldview from its most spectacular findings. Mechanism estranges science from nature and even from science itself. This incoherence started when science turned a blind eye to the physical implications of Newton’s theory and continues right up to contemporary quantum physics, as we’ll see in the following chapters. A reified mechanical model does not simply put non-mechanical features of nature off limits—it asserts that, unless they can be reduced to mechanical terms, they don’t even exist. What are these features? Distant causality, indeterminacy, instantaneity, life, and consciousness, to mention only the short list. In fact, the mechanical model has long been an impediment to knowledge: the natural features we have most difficulty understanding are those the mechanical model regards as impossible. But the only thing impossible about them is that they cannot possibly be explained—or even described—by mechanism. Once reified, mechanism is reduced to chasing its own tail, partly because its tail is the only thing it can swallow, but mostly because—from its perspective—there is nothing else to swallow.

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Endnotes 1

For “opportunism” in science, see N. Rescher (1999), pp. 104-106. For scientific “revolutions,” see T. Kuhn (1970). Although Kuhn’s account has attracted both praise and criticism, he seems to have fathered a general consensus that science goes through periods of self-correction and that some of these are revolutionary in character. 2 M. Black (1962), p. 236. Black’s account of metaphor and models is widely referenced, and for good reason: it is clear, comprehensive, subtle, and conceptually powerful. 3 The example of the earth “communicating” with a falling object is borrowed from B. Greene (2004), p. 255. 4 The chemical exchange between earth’s atmosphere and plant life is central to James Lovelock’s controversial Gaia hypothesis. For Lovelock, however, the relation seems to be factual rather than metaphorical. See J. Lovelock (1988). 5 For a rather technical treatment of scientific models, see M. Hesse (1965), chapt. 1; and M. Hesse (1966). For model as “allegory or fable,” see Black (1962), p. 238. For model as theme, see G. Holton (1998), p. 230. 6 For good pictures of the “sheet-and-ball model” (my term), see Greene (1999), pp. 67-83. 7 For this attribution to Russell, see M. Hesse (1954), p. 82. 8 For the mental imagery provided by the mechanical model, see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 497. Also see Hesse (1966), pp. 1-56 for a summary of the arguments for and against modeling in science. The case against modeling is that it is distracting and, in twentieth century physics, increasingly irrelevant and unintelligible. According to French physicist Pierre Duhem, geometry and/or mathematics is the sole route to scientific intelligibility. Models, especially the mechanical model, bring incoherence into scientific theory. On the other side, the case for models is that they extend the explanatory purview and predictive power of scientific theory. This latter argument is valid, however, only if the model’s physics fits the real-world physics it purports to explain and predict. If it does not, as was the case with the nineteenth century wave model, then its predictions are distracting and theoretically incoherent. 9 On this point see Hesse (1954), p. 140: “There is always the temptation to explain awkward facts away in order to save the basic analogies of a science, and this has happened in the history of science more than once, most notably with the analogy of mechanism.” By the “analogy of mechanism” Hesse means the mechanical model. 10 For a pungent, ethnographic account of the prevalence of reification in physics, see Krieger (1992), especially pp. x-xvi, 28, 54, 100, 105-107. 11 For quoted passages, see M. Black (1962), pp. 230, 242. 12 On this point see C. M. Turbayne (1970), p. 3: “There is a difference … between using a model and mistaking it for the thing modeled. … The one is to use a disguise or mask for illustrative or explanatory purposes; the other is to mistake the mask for the face.”

CHAPTER 13 MACHINE OR NOT MACHINE: THE NEWTONIAN PARADOX

What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics? —Alfred North Whitehead  After covering science’s use and misuse of models, it’s time to return to our historical overview, focusing mainly on Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the high and low points, respectively, of mechanist physics in the 1600s. Alfred North Whitehead, despite reservations, admiringly refers to this period as the “century of genius.” But by the end of the century, its genius had developed a severely split personality. 1

Descartes the Systematizer There are many paths into Descartes’ philosophy, but let’s confine ourselves to two: the first follows his argument that mathematical intelligibility is the litmus test of reality, and the second tracks his case for nature as a vast mechanical system. Actually, both paths lead to the same end point since, for Descartes, mechanism is simply the materialization of mathematics. The first path starts with his famous cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. He came to this conclusion after systematically doubting the existence of everything until he could go no further: the one reality he could not doubt was that he doubted. After cleansing his thought of all prior knowledge, what remained was raw thought itself. Having arrived at this point zero, he then reversed direction and, relying on presumably pure reason, deduced a whole new reality out of the entering premise that thought exists. As part of its existence thought

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includes knowledge of material things—much of this knowledge is vague, imprecise, and dismissible, but some of it is “clear and distinct,” as Descartes put it. In fact, some features of material things—for example, their length and width—are so clear and distinct they can be described in mathematically precise terms. And since God is no deceiver, he would not permit us to perceive these things so clearly unless they really existed. Note that Descartes substitutes theo-logic for logic at this critical juncture. Without invoking God’s good will, his case for the existence of material reality would collapse. 2 In any event, Descartes confidently concluded that there is a physical world out there and that its reality is proved by its mathematical properties: “my physics are nothing but geometry.” For him, math decided between true and false knowledge. Kepler and Galileo had already adopted this position, but Descartes, through sheer deductive bravura—and a generous dose of theology—“proved” their position to be universally correct. 3 And he went even further: for Descartes, math was not only the key to what was knowable, but, beyond that, it had become the arbiter of what was real. If a thing is knowable in clear, distinct, mathematical terms, its reality is incontestable. Again, God is no deceiver. But this leads to a further question: what concrete, physical form would a mathematically driven reality take? Here we switch to the second path. Descartes divided the real world into two substantive categories: material things, which he defined as anything that has extension in space (Descartes’ term: res extensa) and immaterial things, which are made of thought-like substance (res cogitans). By equating matter with extension in space, he offered a clear and precise standard for differentiating matter from mind: the former takes up space and the latter does not. A natural object, for example, the spruce tree in my yard, occupies 400 cubic feet of physical space, while my thoughts about the tree, weighty as they might be, occupy no space at all. Because nature takes up physical space, it is completely material; and because human thought takes up no space, it is immaterial, i.e., inadmissible to nature. There is no place for mind, soul, or consciousness in the natural world. Cartesian dualism forbids it. This uncompromising dualism served Descartes’ modernist agenda of banishing “occult qualities” from nature: material objects like spruce trees, rocks, animals, and planets did not contain occult entities like soul and volition. But what about the empty spaces between objects? Couldn’t occult forces lurk in the gaps and seams? No problem: Descartes argued that since space takes up space, it must be made of matter, and anything made of matter by definition excludes occult entities. What

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appears to be empty space—let’s say the vast open area between the planets and the sun—is really an enormously extended object made of invisible “ether.” The only difference between Cartesian “space” and the planets is that planets are made of grosser matter. Ether conveniently eliminates empty gaps in the universe and, by extension, the possibility that occult forces might transmit influences across them. In this kind of system all causation occurs only by direct physical contact between contiguous objects. For object A to influence object B, they must be in direct physical contact, and for B to influence object C, they must also be in direct contact, and so on, in a chain sequence of mechanical events—just as in clockwork, there can be no gaps in the chain. The Cartesian sun, for example, does not hold a planet in orbit through a gravitational force that leaps across the space between them. Rather the sun (object A) physically pushes against the ether (object B) which, in turn, pushes the planet (object C) into orbital motion—again, just as in clockwork. The key to Descartes’ clockwork universe is the “materialization” of space into ether. His postulation of ether was not based on empirical evidence; in fact, ether has never been observed, before, during, or since Descartes. It was simply conjured into existence by waving a magic wand. It “exists” only because it has to exist to save the mechanical model. 4 Here the two paths meet: just as there are no logical gaps in a geometric proof, there are no physical gaps in a clockwork mechanism. For Descartes, mechanism is the physicalization of geometry, and geometry is the mentalization of mechanics. The two are completely symmetrical. Because mathematics dictates the incontestably real, it follows that the physics of the real world must be mechanistic. Descartes’ conclusion: the natural world is a machine. Did Descartes commit the cardinal error of reification? Is Cartesian nature literally a machine or merely very much like a machine? A superficial reading of his work suggests he vacillated between as if and it is interpretations of the mechanical model. 5 On the one hand, we know he was painfully aware of Galileo’s mistreatment by the Inquisition and had no stomach for similar difficulties. So, unlike his feisty contemporary, he often disguised assertions as hypotheses and would every now and then pause to remind his readers that, however powerful the results of pure reason may be, they were always subject to correction by faith. On the other hand, the whole point of Descartes’ project was to arrive at certain truth, and he never hesitated to invoke God’s goodness as a guarantee. Although he didn’t share Galileo’s combative temperament, he was at least as hard headed. Hypothetical hedging was part of his

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expository style, but we should not infer from this that his course of thought ever vacillated. 6 For Descartes, reality is dictated by deductive reasoning; and his reasoning forced him to conclude that nature really is a machine. The clincher is his ruthlessly argued position on animal pain. According to Descartes, when humans feel pain, their souls feel it, not their bodies. In and of itself, the human body is merely a complex machine and, as such, incapable of pain. Animals, however, have no souls: unlike humans, they are nothing but body-machines, so they feel pain no more than any machine would. That they appear to feel pain is not to be mistaken for the real thing: cringing, crying, groaning, and screaming are merely signs that the mechanical system is under stress. Throw a wrench into a machine, and it will groan, squeak, and screech, just like an animal. Does this mean the machine is a sentient form of life? No, it only means it is breaking down. This unshakable line of argument is pure reification: the logic of the mechanical model dictates the facts of nature. Descartes’ counterintuitive but logically consistent stand on the animal-as-machine soon became the litmus test for those who had the “pure milk of Cartesian orthodoxy” in them. 7 Although the extremity of his position on animals aroused controversy at the time, it clearly signalled the hard line he drew for the mechanical worldview. Small deviations from this line suggested backsliding. Large deviations were bald concessions to occultism. After Descartes, mechanism was more metaphysical manifesto than heuristic model, and well on its way to becoming science’s orthodox worldview.

Descartes’ Legacy The fallout from Descartes is scattered all over the landscape of Western thought, but let’s focus on four particular themes which are germane to our purpose. The first, of course, is his uncompromising reification of the mechanical model, as discussed in the previous section. Ever since Descartes, science has been in the schizoid position of believing nature is a mechanical system while discovering it is not. His second legacy is the necessary connection between math and mechanics. By the late 1600s, it had already become axiomatic to assume that if a natural phenomenon was quantifiable, its physics had to be mechanical, if not in demonstrated fact, then at least in presumption. Wherever math went, mechanics tagged along; under these circumstances math is effectively held hostage to mechanics. Two prime examples of this confusion are found in so-called Newtonian and quantum “mechanics.”

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Each is mathematically sound, but each fundamentally violates mechanist physics. Even so, each is widely believed to be an instance of “mechanics.” In fact, Newton’s theory is routinely rolled out as the exemplar case, almost entirely because of its mathematical elegance. It’s the kind of absurdity that provokes Whitehead to wonder whether we even know what we mean by mechanics. 8 Third, Descartes’ mind-matter dualism set the table for science’s later reduction of all reality to materialist monism. All science had to do was reframe the existence of God as an irrelevant hypothesis: setting aside the supernatural narrows reality down to the natural. And since, as Descartes had so persuasively argued, nature is entirely material, all reality is then equated with matter. But what about human consciousness? Its existence argues that reality must include immaterial entities. Science trumps this complication by reducing consciousness to neuro-chemical events in the brain. I’m not suggesting that Descartes intended this outcome; only that his dualism invited it. Nor am I suggesting that science is necessarily atheistic; only that atheism simplifies its agenda. If nothing but inert matter exists in nature, there’s nothing else to explain. The “problem” of consciousness—and along with it, the corollary “problem” of life—is simply defined out of existence. Once God is set aside as its guarantor, mind-matter dualism easily dissolves into monist materialism. When this happens human consciousness is banished from natural reality, along with all other “occult” entities. Which leads to the fourth legacy: Descartes, in fact, had beaten reductive science to the punch. He had already banned consciousness from nature. According to his categorical dualism nature is necessarily material and mechanical, while souls, minds, and consciousness are not. By rescuing (as he saw it) our souls and minds from mechanism, Descartes estranged us from nature. Herbert Butterfield captures the eerie texture of human–nature alienation in the Cartesian world: “ … the human soul … escaped imprisonment in the process of mechanization … flitting vaporously amongst the cog-wheels, the pulleys, the steel castings of a relentless world-machine.” The only way out of this estrangement is to lose our “vaporous” minds (or souls) and become our bodies—become, in other words, “cog-wheels, pulleys, and steel castings” ourselves. This is Descartes’ contribution to the history of human–nature relations. 9

The Newtonian Paradox Isaac Newton’s great contribution to science was to develop a universal physics based on the dynamics of force rather than the mechanics of

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contact action. The foremost neo-Cartesians of his time, Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz, immediately saw that Newton’s distantaction gravity struck at the heart of the mechanical model and protested vigorously. In the words of science historians Stephen Toulmin, A. R. Hall, and E. J. Dijksterhuis, Newtonian gravity “scandalized” and “menaced” and committed “treason” against the mechanist worldview. 10 Yet, by the time he died in 1727, a bizarre consensus had emerged that Newton’s anti-mechanics was in fact the paradigm case of mechanics. This is the Newtonian paradox: by defeating the mechanical model, he enshrined it. 11 The key to solving the paradox—if it can be solved at all— probably lies in the competition among the several accounts of celestial gravity Newton inherited from his predecessors, most notably Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler. Let’s look briefly at each, proceeding backwards from Newton’s time (the late 1600s) to the mid and early 1600s. According to Descartes, gravity was caused by swirling vortices of ether—the same ether discussed in the previous section. Each planet was enclosed in, and rotated by, its own local vortex. The several planetary vortices, in turn, were carried around the sun by the sun’s megavortex. Because each vortex was made of material ether, gravity operated by contact action. As we saw earlier, Cartesian nature was literally an assembly of interlocking mechanical systems. For Galileo (1564-1642), gravity applied only to earthly objects falling to earth, e.g., apples and cannon balls. His planetary system, in contrast, was gravity-free: what kept planets in orbit was not gravity, but inertia. At the time of creation, God had assigned each planet its own circular orbit and inertial motion, and there each obediently stayed, true to the Creator’s design. Galileo also held that the idea of force was inherently incompatible with celestial harmony. For a system to be harmonious—as God’s cosmos manifestly was—it had to be free of any kind of pushing or tugging, gravitational or otherwise. For these reasons, the issue of contact versus distant action was irrelevant to Galilean cosmology. In his system, planetary motion was a creature of preformed harmony. Motion on our home planet, however, operated strictly according to contact-action mechanics. For Galileo and Descartes, clockwork mechanism was a statement about nature’s physics. In contrast, Kepler (1571-1630) seems to have interpreted it as a model of nature’s orderliness, not of its physical machinery. As long as planetary motion was mathematically describable, Kepler was satisfied it met the criterion of clockwork order; the internal physical mechanics of the clock were beside the point. He dealt with the

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question of gravity’s physics by proposing a two-factor theory of distant action: magnetism and “solar motive force.” Borrowing the notion of magnetism from his predecessor, William Gilbert (1540-1603), Kepler saw it as governing earth-moon interaction. The earth and moon were mutually attracted by long-range magnetic force because, like lodestones, they were made of kindred substance. In contrast, the sun moved the planets by “force rays” that were analogous to its light rays. As the sun rotated, its light rays illuminated the planets and its force rays pulled them through their orbits. This “solar motive force” did not magnetically attract the planets, but simply moved them. If so, what kept them in orbit? Why didn’t they just go off on a tangent if the sun didn’t attract or hold them? This was a difficult question for Kepler; because he could not bring himself to think of the glorious, God-like sun as made of kindred substance to mere planets, mutual magnetic attraction between them was implausible. On the other hand, how could the sun ensure the planets would stay in orbit, if not by some magnetic force? Kepler does not seem to have settled this question one way or the other. 12 What’s important for our purposes is that both his forces acted at a distance. He was not a reified contact-action mechanist like Descartes, nor, like Galileo, did he finesse the issue of celestial force. For Kepler the cosmos was not itself a machine, but its behavior was as orderly as a machine’s. In this sense, his general approach to celestial motion and the mechanical model crudely prefigured Newton’s thinking. Right at the outset of modern astronomy, Kepler found a big crack in the mechanical model’s physics. Galileo’s evasive response was “Crack? What crack?” Descartes jumped on the crack, filled it in with ether, and painted it over with metaphysics. But the version that showed up on Newton’s doorstep in Cambridge still had the crack. Conventional wisdom is that Newton synthesized Galileo’s terrestrial mechanics and Kepler’s celestial gravity into an overarching, universal account of nature. This is true as far as it goes, but it was a bit more complicated than that: Kepler and Galileo had a fundamentally different feel for the texture of reality, and Newton had to choose between them. Is nature an arena for the interplay of forces or a workshop full of “cog-wheels, pulleys, and steel castings?”

The Mathematics and Physics of Gravity Newton’s Principia (1687) offers a stunning demonstration of math-driven knowledge about nature. After establishing that all planetary and lunar

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motion follows gravity’s least squares law, he decided to go a major step further. Based on measurements of the moon’s orbit and earth’s radius, he was able to calculate what the moon’s acceleration would be if it were to fall out of orbit into the earth. It would land on earth at exactly the same rate of acceleration as an apple falling from a tree (but not, of course, with the same impact). Newton concluded that if the mathematics of the two motions are identical, their physics must be identical. By mathematically discounting the moon’s centrifugal movement, he was able to show the moon responded to earth’s gravity just like a terrestrial object. Here mathematics unpacks a universal physical law, unifying celestial and terrestrial gravity. 13 Let’s turn the thought experiment around and look at it from the apple’s perspective. If mathematics can treat the moon like a falling apple, can it make the apple perform like an orbiting moon? Yes, it can. If I threw an apple so hard that its inertial force were equal and opposite to the earth’s gravitational force, the apple would orbit earth like a small moon— and in a little while hit me in the back of the head. If I were to throw the apple even harder, it would escape the earth’s gravitational field and fly out of orbit into outer space—just as the moon would if its velocity increased. Prior to Newton’s mathematics of inverse squares, these thought experiments would have been pure fantasy. 14 But Newton’s intellectual tour de force left one very big question unanswered. His math could generalize laws from one natural phenomenon to another and confer order and intelligibility on their physics. But the one thing it could not do is reveal the physics of the physics. Math, in other words, shows us that something—let’s call it “gravity”—causes a lawful, universal attraction between objects, but it does not tell us what causes gravity. In Newton’s words, gravitational attraction is a “manifest quality,” but its cause remains “occult,” that is, hidden. What causes gravity is a question for empirical investigation: math can help us to identify and articulate this question, but it cannot answer it. 15 Newton knew this perfectly well. The mathematician in him preached caution about the physical nature of gravity. His way of putting it was: “Hypotheses non fingo”—“I don’t make up hypotheses.” Or more freely translated, “I don’t speculate about the physical causes of gravity.” But his makeup also contained an irrepressible physicist who enjoyed generating speculative hypotheses. Everyone—even his adversaries— admired his math; but many were less than enthusiastic about his physics. The problem that engaged and frustrated natural philosophers over the next fifty years, from 1687 to the mid 1730s, was: What is gravity’s physics? This question opened up the fault line running down the middle

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of the mechanical model. On one side were the “math-ists” who felt that if the equations were balanced, the physics would eventually fall into place; the doctrinaire mechanists on the other side insisted that the math was only as good as the physics, and the physics had to be mechanical. Newton quickly put his Neocartesian adversaries on the defensive by attacking their godfather’s vortex theory. He argued, for example, that if a planetary orbit were vortical, it had to be circular; but Kepler’s careful measurements revealed orbits to be elliptical. And comets created even greater problems; as Newton put it, they “are carried with very eccentric motions through all parts of the heavens indifferently, with a freedom that is incompatible with the notion of a vortex.” Actually, even some of Descartes’ loyalists, most notably Huygens (but not Leibniz), were willing to see the vortex hypothesis go down the drain—it was regarded as one of the weaker points of Cartesian physics. 16 Ether, however, was another matter: it had become the guarantor of mechanical contact action in the cosmos. But Newton pointed out that, if space were filled with a pervasive substance, no matter how subtle, it would exert a drag on the planets and steadily slow them down. Yet there was no observational evidence, historical or contemporary, that planets were decelerating. He also did a calculation showing that the atmosphere 200 miles above the earth’s surface was so thin that if the planet Jupiter passed through it for a million years, its velocity would be reduced by only one-millionth. This was not a strong argument for the existence of ether. 17 With ether and vortex theory called into doubt, the physical claims of the mechanical model were in serious trouble: distant-action force and contact-action mechanics were now on an almost level playing field. In the eyes of the Neocartesians, the old “occult qualities” were lurking like ghouls on the sidelines, eager to get back into the game. Even Newton seems to have had second thoughts, followed by third thoughts. In his correspondence with Cambridge philosopher Richard Bentley in 1692 he confessed that it was an “absurdity” to suppose that one object could influence another across empty space: there had to be some sort of intervening medium or agent “acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.” 18 Surely Newton must have known what he was saying. For the opposing camp, it was precisely the “immaterial” connotation of distantaction gravity that made it a regressive “absurdity.” But for Newton, it seemed that any kind of “agent” would do—even an immaterial one—as long as it “acted constantly” according to mathematically “certain laws.” Even while expressing reservations about action at a distance, he was

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effectively endorsing it. As far as he was concerned, subtle ethereal matter was a defeated hypothesis. But wouldn’t any material medium suffer from the same criticisms directed against ether? Newton was steadily moving into uncharted territory, from a physics of mechanically interacting material objects to a physics of distant, “immaterial” forces.

Toward a General Force Theory Newton didn’t stop at gravity. Just as a large force like gravity attracts large objects to each other over large distances, he wondered whether micro-forces might attract tiny particles to each other over very small distances … small distances, for sure, but distant nevertheless. If so, this would explain how a thing’s atoms cohere into a stable object. By the time he published the Optiks in 1704, he was openly using distant force gravity (not mechanics) as a model to depict the behavior of atomic particles, clearly attempting to unify celestial, terrestrial, and atomic physics into a general distant-force theory. Moreover, if the cohesion of atoms in a solid object could be explained by micro-attractive forces, the opposite behavior of a gassy “object” might be due to repulsive forces between its atoms. When released from a container, gas dissipates rather quickly at first and then more slowly, suggesting its atoms (i.e., molecules) are driven by a repulsive force and that the force gets weaker with distance—just like gravity’s attractive force gets weaker with distance. The more Newton worked on the problem, the more the pieces fell into place. In these speculations—which, not incidentally, he supported with cogent examples and observations—Newton was working toward a general force theory of attraction and repulsion, whose overarching unifying concept was distant action across empty space. Again, in his own words: Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces by which they act at a distance … upon one another for producing a great Part of the Phenomena of Nature? For if Nature be simple and pretty comfortable to herself, causes will operate in the same kind of way in all phenomena, so that the motion of smaller bodies may depend upon certain smaller forces just as the motions of larger bodies are ruled by the greater force of gravity. For if all natural motions can be explained through such forces, nothing more will remain than

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Newton would look at a stone, a gas, or a planetary system, and see them not as material objects, but as organized collections of motion. In this view, force began to replace matter as the primary component of nature. This was an idea with a future.

Newton, Clarke, Leibniz, and Voltaire In 1716, the last year of his life, Leibniz exchanged a series of letters with Samuel Clarke, a cleric and disciple of Newton. By then Newton’s general force theory was in wide circulation, and Leibniz saw it as an extravagant, almost perverse exercise in occultism. Without going into details, two themes emerged from the correspondence, the first a rehashing of entrenched scientific positions, and the second a surprising digression into theology. Leibniz launched an uncompromising defense of contact-action physics as the key to modern science. To invoke any kind of distant-action explanation was to backslide into medieval occultism: case closed and reclosed with each successive letter. For his part, Clarke conceded that although distant-action gravity was a “contradiction: for ‘tis supposing something to act where it is not,” its mathematics renders it intelligible, therefore not occult by definition. The cause of gravity was the real issue between them, and if Leibniz could produce a credibly mechanist account of that, he would “have the abundant thanks of the learned world.” The second theme was an extended discussion of what might be called, for sake of a better term, the “theology” of gravity. Uncomfortable with the then fashionable deism that had relegated God to the role of retired mechanic, Newton—through his clerical mouthpiece—proposed that gravity may be an expression of God’s ongoing providential care for creation. It was God’s way of keeping the planets well behaved, making sure “eccentric” comets don’t throw the system out of harmony, and calming other potential perturbations. This was a pretty feeble fallback position, but it had the merit of consistency with his earlier conjecture that gravity may be an “immaterial” force. Also, since it assumed God’s operational immanence in nature, it had vaguely pantheistic implications. Leibniz impatiently attacked the God-gravity hypothesis as libelling the perfection of God’s creation and the transcendence of his being. 20 The upshot of the correspondence was an impasse. Leibniz’ aggressive defense of orthodox mechanics gave him an ostensibly modernist

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edge in the debate. But the Clarke-Newton side showed a more subtle feel for the empirical, mathematical, and provisional nature of scientific truth, pointing beyond the doctrinal demands of hard-core mechanics. Contactaction physics may have been a useful tool for bashing medieval occultism, but by the early 1700s it stood in the way of further progress, becoming a latter-day occultism in its own right. Or at least that was Voltaire’s view. Seventeen years after the stalemated Leibniz-Clarke exchange, he argued that to dogmatically fill gaps with undemonstrable entities, as Descartes did with ether and vortices, was to lapse into fatuous metaphysics. In contrast, Newton’s agnosticism—“I don’t make up hypotheses”—was the modern way. As Voltaire put it, “Vortices may be called an occult quality, because their existence was never proved. Attraction, on the contrary, is a real thing, because its effects are demonstrated, and the proportions of it are calculated. The cause of this cause is among the Arcana of the Almighty.” Because he was a very influential figure in continental intellectual circles, Voltaire helped to turn the tide of opinion in Newton’s favor. 21

The Mechanical Model at the Crossroads Starting in childhood, we humans very quickly become spontaneous contact-action physicists. To get my wagon moving, I have to pull it. If I just talked to it or waved at it from a distance, it would not move. To get a ball from here to there, I have to throw it. To control my dog’s motion, I hold the leash. To drive a nail into wood, I hit it with a hammer. To lift a load, I use a lever or pulley. Push, pull, throw, hit, lift—these are all familiar causes of motion, and what they have in common is contact action. The physics of the mechanical model is nothing more than an amplified summary of all these contact actions; and its metaphoric thrust is to transfer them from the familiar, everyday world of human limb, tool, and instrument use to the unfamiliar world of nature. In this story of push and pull, nature becomes familiar and intelligible, no longer incomprehensible, no longer a repository of hidden secrets and occult causes. But after Newton, what was left of the push-pull story? In his hands familiarity was no longer the key to intelligibility. He showed that abstract, mathematical laws were indifferent to familiar push-pull physics. As even he admitted, distant force was “absurd” and “contradictory” —it made as much sense as a child trying to talk her wagon across the street. But because its behavior was mathematically lawful, it was intelligible. Newton effectively drove a wedge between familiarity and intelligibility, and in this sense he narrowed the mechanical model down to its mathematical

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dimension. The Newtonian world was less a machine than a vast mathematical proposition. 22 Of course, the hard-core mechanists were unhappy with this development, and why shouldn’t they be? After all, they were in the physics business, and what’s the point of a guiding scientific model unless it takes an unequivocal position on nature’s physics? But they were caught in a bind: while they rightly insisted on a physical account of nature, their preferred mechanical clockwork model did not appear to fit nature’s physics. There are two separate but linked problems here: first, at what point does a make-believe model become a belief system? The risk of going beyond this point is always inherent to the ana-logic of modeling, and the orthodox mechanists seem to have gone beyond it. And, second, the consequence of becoming a believer is particularly problematic when you’re working with the wrong model. Newton’s message to the orthodox mechanists was: you’ve made the egregious error of believing in the wrong physical model. It’s no wonder they were annoyed with him. Mechanism was at a crossroads. For Newton, it was a model of order in nature; he was, of course, interested in nature’s underlying physics, but did not automatically assume it would behave like the internal workings of a clock. If anything, he leaned the other way: distant action over large and small spaces seemed to be commonplace in nature. But as long as Newton and his followers remained within the ostensible ambit of the mechanical model, they were always an eyeblink away from clockwork physics. They should have dropped mechanism and moved on to another worldview when they had the chance. But they didn’t. Sure enough, as we’ll see at the beginning of the next chapter, science eventually blinked, and full-blown mechanism came roaring back, with Cartesian ether at the leading edge. But that was still eighty years in the future. For the rest of the 1700s, despite the fact that so-called “Newtonian mechanics” offered an unfamiliar picture of nature, and orthodox mechanics an incorrect picture, science’s archetypal model kept soldiering on in a state that can only be described as self-confident incoherence. We’ll leave the next to last word to science historian E. J. Dijksterhuis: … when Newton’s concept of force, which had been rejected as essentially unmechanistic by physicists like Huygens and Leibniz … came to be regarded as precisely the most characteristic feature of a mechanistic conception of nature, nothing was really left of the original meaning of mechane (the Greek term for machine). Even the most skilful mechanic is

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unable to construct apparatuses in which material objects move in consequence of their mutual gravitation; yet people quietly continued to designate the gravitational explanation of planetary motion as mechanistic. 23

Finally, Alfred North Whitehead’s epigraph to this chapter can also serve as a concluding epitaph: “What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?”

Endnotes Epigraph: 1

A. N. Whitehead (1925), p. 24

For “century of genius,” see Whitehead (1925), p. 57. See Butterfield (1962), p. 113: for Descartes “everything hung on this existence of a perfect and righteous God.” Also Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 418: “The whole theory is based on the metaphysical foundation of the existence of a good God, who will not mislead men if they use their reason.” 3 See Dijksterhuis (1961), pp. 408-409, for a brief discussion of how Descartes’ universalist approach went beyond Galileo’s “fragmentary way” of doing physics. 4 On this point see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 409: “The identity of matter and space … forms the metaphysical foundation of the Cartesian system … a vacuum, i.e., a space not containing any matter, is a contradiction and consequently impossible.” 5 See R. Descartes, Philosophical Writings of Descartes (1984-1991); Philosophical Essays and Correspondence (2000). 6 On Descartes’ non-vacillation, see Dijksterhuis (1961), pp. 417-418. For extensive discussion of Descartes’ reification of the mechanical model, see Turbayne (1970), pp. 3-27, 34-40. 7 For “pure milk,” see Butterfield (1962), p. 124. 8 A. N. Whitehead (1925), p. 24. 9 For “flitting vaporously,” see Butterfield (1962), p. 124. 10 For “scandal,” see Toulmin (1993), p. 142; for “destructive menace,” see Hall (1983), p. 321; for “treason,” see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 479. 11 Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 490: “It is interesting to see how soon notions, which at one time had been rejected by the greatest physicists as essentially unmechanistic, came to be seen as essential elements of mechanistic science … from the moment Newton’s way of thinking began to set its mark on physics, no concept had become more indissolubly bound up with the mechanistic view of nature than that of the force acting at a distance and causing motion … it is Newton above all who has to be regarded as the founder of the mechanistic worldpicture of classical physics.” 2

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12 Kepler assigned religious significance to the sun, identifying it with God the Father. 13 See M. Hesse (1965), pp. 145-146. The moon’s impact, of course, would be far greater than an apple’s because of its greater size and velocity. Newton’s calculation was addressed to the two objects’ rate of acceleration. 14 See Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 478. 15 For Newton’s description of “manifest” and “occult” qualities in the Optiks, see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 489. 16 See Hall (1983), p. 321, who quotes the “eccentric motions … ” passage from the 1713 edition of Newton’s Principia. 17 See Hall (1983), p. 322. 18 See Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 488, quoting from Newton’s letter to Bentley. 19 The first quotation is from Newton’s Optiks; second quotation from his De Gravitatione. See Hall (1983), pp. 293, 327. 20 For a summary of the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence, and for quotations from their letters, see M. Hesse (1965), pp. 160-163. Also see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 491, on the God-gravity hypothesis. 21 See L. Hull (1959), p. 216, for this quotation from Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation, written in 1733. 22 On this point, see M. Hesse (1965), p. 156: “The theory of central forces … was the first mathematical model, intelligible because it was a coherent logical system, and not because it was a familiar process or event. Mechanical models also continued to make good analogues, but in the subsequent history of physics this ceased to be primarily because they are objects of a familiar sort that could be imagined or built; it was rather because their structure and functioning was (sic) easily susceptible of mathematical expression.” 23 Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 497. Parenthetical comment added.

CHAPTER 14 THE MACHINE STARTS TO BREAK DOWN

Once the contentious exchange between Samuel Clarke and Gottfried Leibniz faded, European science had to come to terms with a fundamental contradiction in its mechanistic worldview. After Leibniz’ death in 1716 Newtonian theory gradually gained all but universal acceptance despite its embarrassing flirtation with action at a distance. Mechanism’s precise mathematics had swept its contentious physics under the carpet. Influenced by Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation in 1733, even continental opinion began to shift from Descartes to Newton in the “clarity and distinction” game, and, despite lingering reservations, French scientists became as Newtonian as their English counterparts. But the physics of action at a distance remained a great puzzle throughout the 18th century: nobody knew how it worked, and it was extremely difficult to come up with a mechanistic explanation without reaching back to some sort of Cartesian “ether.” Old habits die hard. Even the 19th century, for all its spectacular advances in the physics of energy, was surprisingly regressive in how it modeled the natural world. Perhaps the mechanical model had to be fully played out. The harder science worked at preserving contact-causality doctrine, the further it traveled down a cul-de-sac of inconsistencies, contradictions, and complications. Intending otherwise, the best scientific minds of the period—Faraday, Kelvin, and Maxwell—pushed the overburdened doctrine to its own absurd conclusion, setting the stage for the twentieth century’s two great breakouts: relativity and quantum physics. Nature turned out to be neither a vast mechanical system, nor even remotely like one. Under the pressure of relativity and quantum physics, the world machine broke down. But, to everyone’s surprise—or, perhaps, to no one’s surprise—Nature kept working. The reader will have to forgive me—or, perhaps, thank me—for passing over the complexities of 19th century electromagnetic field theory. The big three just mentioned—especially Maxwell—were extremely important figures in the history of science, but our main focus here is on the fate of the mechanical model. For that we should go directly to three

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critical empirical studies, one at the beginning of the 19th century (1801), the second toward the end of the century (1887), and the third at the start of the 20th century (1905). Then we’ll move on to Relativity and Quantum physics, the one-two punch that finally knocked the mechanical model out of the ring.

The Three Decisive Studies In 1801 the English physicist, Thomas Young, apparently settled a long disputed question: is light “corpuscular” or wavy? That is, does it travel as a series of microscopic particles—as Newton argued—or does it undulate through space like a wave? According to Young’s pivotal research, light behaves like a wave, and subsequent studies supported his findings. But this raised another question: if light is a wave, then it must propagate through a medium of some sort. Sound waves, for example, use air as their medium, and for this reason they cannot pass through a vacuum. But light does travel through a vacuum, suggesting that there must be some very rarefied medium that fills the ostensibly empty vacuum. Otherwise, “waves” of light could not pass through it. This medium was dubbed “lumeniferous aether” (light-bearing ether), and was nothing more than an updated version of Descartes’ earlier concept of ether: an exceedingly subtle matter that pervades every nook and cranny of the universe. Wherever light goes, ether is already there. Or is it? Beware the temptation to reify. For science to claim that something is real, it has to observe it. Otherwise the “something” is merely hypothetical. In 1887 a cutting edge team of American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, devised a test of the ether hypothesis. * If I roll down the window of my moving car, I can feel the motion of air blowing in the opposite direction of the car’s motion. Analogously, just as my car generates “air wind” as it goes forward, the planet Earth must generate “ether wind” as it rotates through space. And just as air wind blows across the surface of my moving car, “ether wind” must blow across the moving surface of the rotating Earth. Finally, since light waves are presumed to propagate through ether, the “ether wind” should influence the speed of the light waves that move through it. Light waves that go against the ether wind should move more slowly than those that flow with the wind. That’s just the simple physics of wind resistance. This hypothesis can be tested by projecting two beams of light waves from the same point on the Earth’s surface, one “with the wind” and *

Michelson was the first American to win a Nobel prize in physics (1907).

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the other “against the wind.” If there is an ether wind, the first set of light waves should move measurably faster than the second set. But Michelson and Morley found that both light beams moved at exactly the same speed—186,000 miles per second—indicating that there is no ether wind. Indicating, in other words, that ether has no physical reality. Light waves move from one place to another through empty space. They act at a distance, completely violating the contact-action physics of the mechanical model. Michelson and Morley’s results were subsequently replicated several times, indicating their finding was no fluke. The ether hypothesis was falsified and, with it, the contact-action clause of the mechanical model. But this raises another question: is light really a wave? Since it had been shown to move in waves many times, perhaps the question should be rephrased: is light a wave and nothing but a wave? Newton, for example, suggested that light moves like a series of particles and that particles move easily through empty space. As particles—or what Newton called “corpuscles”—the projection of light from one place to another would be a paradigm case of action-at-a-distance, i.e., a radical refutation of the mechanical model. Put simply, if I switch on a light over here and it lights up that area over there with no ether in between, then light acts at a distance. Within a few years, Einstein showed that Newton’s corpuscular model of light had serious merit. In his 1905 study of the photo-electric effect, Einstein discovered that light can move through space in discrete packets of energy called “quanta” or “photons.” Not only does light not need an ethereal medium, but it does not even consistently behave like a wave. This finding then raised yet another question: if light—long thought to be a wave and nothing but a wave—can behave like both a wave and a particle, then might an entity long thought to be a particle— e.g., the electron—also be a wave? Subsequent research answered this question in the affirmative: electrons also had a dual identity. In the world of sub-atomic physics there was a very real sense in which a thing was not identical to itself. Photons and electrons seemed to have split personalities. This line of research did serious damage to the mechanical model: it overturned ether doctrine, demonstrated action-at-a-distance, and showed that at the sub-atomic level clockwork mechanism is routinely violated. When sub-atomic “cogwheels” and “gears” are sometimes one thing and sometimes another, the pieces don’t fit together into a working system and the clock breaks down. But much to the chagrin of ether’s advocates, nature keeps on working. By the end of the 1800s William Kelvin lamented ether’s absence as a “dark cloud” hanging over science.

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And even after Einstein dismissed ether as irrelevant in 1905, J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, declared it a “duty” of physics to track down ether and find it. But with the subsequent emergence of Relativity and Quantum physics, science sidestepped its outdated “duty” and ushered in even more “dark clouds.” Relativity discovered “dark clouds” at the macro-physical level of nature and Quantum physics found them at nature’s micro-physical level. 1 Let’s close this chapter with a brief overview of Relativity and then look at Quantum physics in the next.

Relativity Rather than plunging into all the intricacies of Einstein’s relativity, let’s focus on three central features of his system which address the validity of the mechanical model: lightspeed, space–time warps, and geometricgravity. This may sound like a handful, and it is, but it all falls together into a coherent, if somewhat counterintuitive, portrait of the cosmos. Einstein’s theory raises serious questions about both the physics and the mathematics of the mechanical model and strongly points toward a more dynamic and elastic account of nature. Since the absolute speed of light is the linchpin of the theory, that’s a good place to begin. 2 During his work on electromagnetism James Clerk Maxwell came to several tentative conclusions about the nature of light. Light is the fastest entity in the universe, and it seems to move at the same speed relative to an observer regardless of the observer’s speed. You can never catch up to a retreating beam of light, grab it, and put a lump of it in your pocket, not even theoretically. 3 Moreover, Maxwell’s equations predicted that time does not move at an invariant pace; as it approaches lightspeed, time slows down. It’s not just that time slows down in some abstract sense; but every concrete event that occurs in time takes longer to happen. If I were to accelerate toward lightspeed, my heart beats and the minute hand on my watch would slow down. 4 My aging would slow down, and it would take much longer for me to write this sentence. Maxwell’s strange prediction about the pace of time directly contradicted Newton’s position that time (like space) is absolute and invariant, and it presented classical physics with an indigestible paradox. In an uncanny echo of 1642 when Galileo died and Newton was born, Einstein was born the same year Maxwell died (1879); and, just like Newton, he expanded the partial insights of his predecessor into a theory of the entire universe. The mathematics of mechanics corresponds to human intuition: its geometry is Euclidean, and its numbers add and subtract just like they

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do in elementary school. In mechanics, if a person runs forward at 15 miles per hour on a ship cruising at 20 miles per hour, the person’s total speed is exactly 35 mph. It’s the same in Newtonian physics, and this is one of the reasons his theory is (misleadingly) referred to as “Newtonian mechanics.” Let’s take another example, this one involving light. Imagine two cars, one moving forward at 100 mph, and the other parked; each has its headlights on. Newton’s theory would predict that the light from the moving car would go 100 mph faster than the stationary car’s light beam. Einstein’s theory predicts both light beams would move at the same speed, and empirical tests confirm Einstein’s position, even though Newton’s makes more sense. Newtonian physics and human intuition have the same problem: both are restricted to slow moving objects in an absolute space–time framework. At low speeds, velocities add up to sums which, for all practical purposes, are accurate enough. But at extremely high speeds they don’t add up. Einstein’s counter-intuitive theory covers all speeds, fast and slow, in a relative space–time framework. In relativity, space–time is not the static context in which forces and objects cavort. Space–time cavorts just like everything else … through a dance which is choreographed by the one absolute: lightspeed. Since lightspeed is absolute, the motion of a light beam’s source (e.g., a moving car) can neither add nor subtract velocity to or from the beam’s speed. Although Einstein honors the general scientific bias that nature be mathematically describable, this simple example shows that his theory violates the mathematics of mechanics itself, putting a dent in one of the mechanical model’s strongest features. It is only the first of several violations. The speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second), is not only very fast, but it also plays a very strange, complex, and central role in cosmic physics. According to Einstein the total velocity of every object through the four dimensions of space–time is equal to the speed of light. Since the great majority of objects expend much of their speed in the time dimension, their motion through the three spatial dimensions is much slower than lightspeed. Light is the exception: it moves only through space and not at all through time. An upshot of this is that light never ages: every photon in the universe is as young as it was the instant it was born. 5 Another implication is that when an entity goes as fast as light, its time stops. Since light’s motion is totally dedicated to space, it has no motion left over for time. Thus, at lightspeed reality is threedimensional: there is no time. And, as an entity approaches pure

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lightspeed, it diverts more and more speed to space, slowing time down to a crawl. This radical deceleration of time is called “warping,” and what it means for mechanics is that the chronicity of very fast objects warps relative to slower moving objects in the vicinity. Since a machine requires that its parts move at coordinated tempos, it would break down when even one of the parts accelerated into a time warp. If, for example, one piston in my car radically changed its pace relative to the other pistons, the engine would break down. A universe that includes time warps, yet continues to work, is incompatible with the physics of the mechanical model. Descartes, the patron saint of mechanism, insisted that the entire universe worked like one big clock, everything mechanically synchronized with everything else. Relativity, however, portrays the universe as a vast collection of local clocks, all ticking away independently of each other, depending on their relative velocities and accelerations. Of course the next question is whether time warps actually occur in nature or exist only in Einstein’s equations. We’ll get to that question shortly. But, first, if very high speed warps time, shouldn’t it have the same effect on time’s yoked partner, space? Yes, it should and, according to Einstein, it does. Einsteinian warps occur both in the space near rapidly accelerating objects and also, since material objects take up space, in the objects themselves. As something accelerates toward lightspeed, it shortens relative to the length of a matched thing moving at slower speed. Its mass also increases exponentially as it accelerates, and it would take all the energy in the universe to push its potentially unlimited mass all the way up to lightspeed. For this reason it is physically impossible for anything with mass to travel at lightspeed. Since photons—particles of light—have no mass, they are free to travel at their own velocity without draining the resources of the universe. Although a massy object can never actually attain lightspeed, as it accelerates toward that velocity, its spatial properties warp relative to slower moving objects in its vicinity. This would create severe problems for the physics of a mechanically organized universe. Since a machine requires that its several parts retain their spatial configurations throughout its operation, the warping of even one part would throw the whole operation off. To return to the example of my car, if one of the pistons radically changed length and mass during operation it would no longer interface with its cylinder: the engine would malfunction. And if a piston’s timing and space warped relative to the space–time of other mechanical parts, my car would never get out of the showroom. A universe with

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space–time warps is not a mechanical system, nor is it even like one. If Einstein is right, the physical universe construed by Descartes, Galileo, and Leibniz would never get out of the showroom. But is Einstein right? Are space–time warps merely creatures of mathematical equations or do they actually exist in nature? Do they merely disrupt mechanics’ math or do they pose more fundamental physical problems for mechanism? Between 1905 and 1915 Einstein devoted most of his attention to one problem: how to reconcile his ideas about lightspeed with Newton’s account of gravity. The big breakthrough came when he realized that accelerating motion and gravity are physically equivalent. His thinking went something like this: When you suddenly speed up your car the pressure you feel on your back is caused by acceleration. Now stop the car, stay in your seat, and tip the seat over so its back is on the floor: the pressure you now feel on your back is caused by gravity; but it is the same kind of pressure you felt when the seat was upright and the car was accelerating. Thus, gravity and acceleration are equivalent forces. Einstein called this the “equivalence principle.” 6 Recall that the more an object accelerates—up to but not including lightspeed—the more it warps space–time. But, if acceleration is equivalent to gravity, gravity must have the same effects. It follows that the greater an object’s gravity—that is, the greater and denser its mass— the more it warps itself and its surrounding space–time. According to the equivalence principle a large, massive object like the sun would produce large warps or curves in space–time. This encouraged Einstein to predict that if a beam of light passed in the vicinity of the sun, its path would bend around the curved space caused by the sun’s gravitational mass. This was an extremely counterintuitive notion because, as everyone “knows,” light beams are perfectly straight; and, if you think about it for a moment, they are straight because Newtonian space is “straight.” For Einstein, however, space is straight or level only if it is utterly remote from objects. In the vicinity of gravitating objects space is curved. But how could we know which view is correct? How could we put it to an empirical test? In May of 1919 a solar eclipse offered the opportunity to test Einstein against Newton. If we could “see” a star that was actually just behind the rim of the blocked out sun, it would only be because its light followed the curved space around the sun’s surface. A particular star was identified that met the right conditions; two expert teams of astronomers looked for it during the eclipse and, sure enough, they saw it. Newton was wrong, Einstein was right: space is warped in the vicinity of massive gravitating bodies.

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But what about time? Does gravity also warp time? Based on the equivalence principle Einstein predicted that time would go slower the closer it was to the massive source of a gravitational field. Newton predicted that time was a universal constant: it would always and everywhere go at the same pace. Most of us would intuitively agree with Newton. But subsequent experiments have shown that clocks closer to gravitating masses tick slower than twin clocks further away. Einstein was right again: time is warped by gravity. These empirical tests clearly show that warping is not merely a creature of mathematical equations; it is part of the physics of the universe. Moreover, modern astronomy tells us that massive stars are constantly moving, being born, collapsing into “black holes,” and dying away, producing stupendous shifts in the warping patterns of space–time. Again, a universe with parts warping in and out relative to other parts cannot be a machine: it violates the clockwork physics of the mechanical model. But none of these tests addresses the basic conundrum of gravity. The question of what gravity is and how it works has bedeviled physics at least since Newton’s Principia (1687). Newton figured out gravity’s math, and he decided it was a force of some kind, but he was at a loss as to what the force was made of or what caused it. At one point he seriously entertained the idea that gravity was just a secular term for God’s providence in the universe. If planetary movement were left solely to inertia, the various parts of the solar system would fly out to interstellar space. God kept this from happening by ongoing divine intervention. The intervention was gravity. Einstein was also a god-referenced man. But, unlike Newton, he wasn’t prepared to turn gravity over to divine intervention. Once he made the connection between gravity and space–time warps, he concluded warps are the key to how gravity works and what it is. Recall that there is a direct correlation between an object’s gravitational mass and the amount of space–time warping in its vicinity. We know that the sun and the earth exert a mutual gravitational attraction on each other, but we also know that the sun’s attraction is many times greater than the earth’s. Why is this? Einstein’s answer is remarkably simple. The sun’s huge mass induces a big curve in its nearby space; while the earth’s smaller mass makes for a smaller curve. Since the sun’s space curvature is larger and more steeply sloped than the earth’s, there is a tendency for the earth to “roll downhill” toward the sun. For exactly parallel reasons there is a tendency for the moon to “roll downhill” toward the earth. If we were to take a moving snapshot of the moon–earth–sun dance, we would see the moon sliding

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down the earth’s small space curve, while their pas de deux slides down the sun’s huge space curve. Of course, this picture is much simpler than the reality, for at least two reasons. First, the dance happens in a four-dimensional space– time volume, not in the more or less two-dimensional snapshot just described. The vocabulary of “steep slopes” and “rolling downhill” is completely metaphoric. Its value is that it gives us a visual idea of how Einsteinian gravity works. For Einstein, gravity is not a force; it is the curving geometric structure of space. The little earth is not attracted to the big sun by some mysterious force; its little warp is a dent in the sun’s huge warp of solar-system geometry. The earth’s path of least resistance is to “roll downslope” to the sun. 7 The second oversimplification in the picture is that the earth does not in fact roll “downslope” into the sun, but both the earth and its little space warp roll “around the slope” of the sun’s large space warp. The main reason for this is that the earth has an inertial motion to precisely counterbalance its downhill motion toward the sun. Without inertia the earth would head directly for the sun, disappear into its larger mass, and we’d all fry. On the other hand, without the sun’s gravity the earth’s inertia would take it out of the solar system into outer space, and we’d all freeze to death. The combination of inertia and gravity determines the earth’s orbital path. Another reason the earth does not crash into the sun is that its movement encounters no resistance in empty space. Even the slightest, most ethereal resistance would eventually slow down the earth’s motion and cause it to slide out of orbit into the sun. Newton saw this problem back in the late 1600s and was inclined to conclude, despite vigorous neocartesian objections, that there is no such thing as ether. Without ether, there is no material connection between the sun and its planets; without a material connection, gravity must act at a distance; finally, if it acts at a distance, it violates the most fundamental law of mechanical physics: contact causality. Einstein’s system also debunks contact-causality doctrine. For Einstein, empty space is shaped by a curving geometry which offers no resistance to moving bodies like the earth. If it did, the earth’s motion would slow down, and for each decrement in our planet’s speed, there would have to be a compensating decrement in the sun’s gravity, that is, in its mass. Otherwise earth would fall out of its orbit. Since the space curves are completely unresisting, they cannot be material, not even in the most attenuated sense of the term. This means they provide no physical link between the sun and the planets. Just like force-gravity, geometric-gravity acts at a distance, again violating the most fundamental physical principle

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of the mechanical model. Whether forceful or geometric, Newtonian or Einsteinian, gravity discredits the mechanistic view of nature. Parenthetically, one of the oddities of the scientific literature is that, while it routinely (and misleadingly) refers to “Newtonian mechanics” and “quantum mechanics,” one rarely encounters the phrase “relativity mechanics.” This reluctance to associate Einstein with the mechanical model may trace back to his 1905 study of the photoelectric effect, where he effectively drove the last nail in ether’s coffin. Without ether, gravity cannot act through physical contact; without physical contact, gravity defies mechanistic explanation. 8

Models and Metaphors Suggested by Relativity If, as I have argued, Einstein’s cosmology disputes mechanics, which alternative model (or models) of nature does it suggest? This is a big question, and I can’t pretend to have an adequate answer. But let’s play around with the question for a moment, and to make it more manageable, let’s restrict our play to space–time warps. Assume mechanics as a starting point: this means that all parts of nature have external, physical contact with the parts they influence. But suddenly one part of the system warps relative to other parts. Two possible consequences would follow: lost contact or mismatched contact between the warped and unwarped parts. The warped part would either jam or detach from its adjacent parts, passing the malfunction down from part to part until the whole machine is affected. In the event of lost contact between parts, a mechanical system would simply stop working. But in reality the warping universe continues to work: some sort of action-at-a-distance must jump the gap between detached parts. What kind of system would permit this to happen? Perhaps the distant action is mediated by some form of “memory.” That is, the unwarped parts of the system might “remember” what the now disconnected part used to do, and compensate for its loss. This would suggest that the disconnected part had previously acted on the internal structure of the other parts. Its behavioral routine, in other words, would have been internalized into the “memory” or “program” of the other parts, violating the mechanistic principle that all working parts act externally on each other. The second possible consequence of warping would be physical mismatch between working parts. They would remain in contact but no longer interface in a coordinated manner: when, for example, two adjacent cog wheels no longer mesh together, they jam and grind to a halt. But

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again, let’s suppose, contrary to purely mechanistic expectations, that the system continues to work, as indeed it does in the real natural world. For the system to continue working, its parts would have to be “perceptive” enough to assess changes in other parts and “elastic” enough to modify their physical dimensions accordingly. Again, this violates the mechanistic principle of external action. None of this is to argue that divergently warped chunks of space, time, or matter literally have memory and perception. It’s only to fish around for metaphors and analogies that, first, might assist our understanding of otherwise incomprehensible phenomena—incomprehensible, that is, in terms of mechanical metaphors; and, second, may suggest hypotheses or lines of investigation that would yield further insight. These, after all, are two of the primary functions of a scientific model. Alfred North Whitehead astutely observes that something like perception and memory really occurs in the ostensibly inanimate sectors of nature. There’s no point in denying the existence of perception-like and memory-like processes on ideological grounds; the point is to figure out what they are. 9 Since the universe continues to work despite disrupted and mismatched contact between parts, the mechanical model is out of the question. Einstein’s warping cosmos could be more accurately represented by an organismic model of nature, one that permits perception, memory, functional compensation, morphic plasticity, and information exchange in and among its various parts. Again, this is not to say Einstein’s cosmos is literally a living organism. It’s only to suggest that some of its distinctive features may resemble those of living organisms more than those of insentient machinery. The point here is not to replace a mechanistic with an organismic belief system—to jump from one metaphysical commitment to another; but, much more modestly, to find a more suitable set of metaphors. These, in turn, would help to get science’s nature story out of its confining, mechanistic straightjacket.

Relativity: Push–Pull at the Human–Nature Interface For Newton, space–time was absolute. To take a concrete example, the Newtonian minute had exactly the same duration everywhere and everywhen, and it was our minute. Since our familiar space–time framework was presumed to be universal, our intuition had a privileged status in the cosmos. Newtonian physics, in other words, was resolutely, if unintentionally, anthropocentric—or at least earth-centered. But about 230 years after Newton’s Principia, Einstein discovered something his predecessor hadn’t: there is a functional connection between

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the shape of space–time and the strength of gravity. For the law (not the strength) of gravity to be universal, the shape of space–time could not be universal; its shape had to adjust to local gravitational conditions. Each gravitational magnitude shapes its own space–time framework, and because the strength of our gravity is dictated by the specific mass of our planet, our space–time framework is only one of many. Going back to the above example, on earth a minute always lasts an “earth-minute.” In other gravitational frameworks, it does not: the stronger the gravity, the slower the minute. The same rule applies to spatial measures: the stronger the gravity, the shorter the inch. Human intuition, in other words, is not universal. It is distinctive to the conditions on the surface of our home planet. In this way Einstein demoted humanity’s emplacement in the cosmos. Our intuition about the shape of space–time is no more or less valid than any other. While Newton’s absolute space–time framework implicitly conferred special privilege on human commonsense, Einstein’s variable-framework cosmos explicitly requires that we adopt variable concepts of space–time. We can do it, but only by going against commonsense. The Einsteinian human may be at home on his own planet both physically and cognitively, but in the larger cosmic picture, he is a bit more estranged from nature than the Newtonian human was. I say a “bit more” because Einstein also showed that the human mind can formulate mathematical equations that correspond precisely to the physical structures of relativized nature. Relativity may “push” our familiar Euclidean intuitions away from a good match with nature, but there are alternative geometries which “pull” us back in. In fact, for those of us not mathematically inclined, the new equations and geometries can be roughly translated into verbal terms. This chapter’s discussion of relativity is a concrete example of translation. While reading this chapter, your mind is Einsteinian and, if Einstein’s theory is correct, your mind corresponds more closely to nature than the Newtonian mind did. Contrary to Newton, the universe does not play a tune composed by his local Cambridge chamber ensemble. Our Earth-bound melodies make up only a few notes of universal music, but if we listen closely, Einstein helps us to appreciate much more of the whole cosmic symphony.

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Endnotes 1

For Kelvin’s “dark clouds,” see R. H. Schlagel (1996), Vol. 2, pp. 426, 434. For J. J. Thomson’s “duty,” see G. Holton (1998), p. 79. 2 Of the many treatments of relativity, which vary from reader-friendly to incomprehensible, the three I would most strongly recommend are R. Feynman (1998), chapt. 5; R. Feynman (1997), chapt. 6; and B. Greene (1999), chapts. 2 and 3. 3 This image is borrowed from Greene (1999), p. 24. 4 R. Feynman (1997), pp. 77-79, 128; B. Greene (1999), pp. 40-43. 5 B. Greene (1999), p. 51. 6 Feynman (1997), pp. 129-133; Greene (1999), pp. 56-62. 7 For lucid discussion and illustrations of earth-sun interactions in space curvature, see Greene (1999), pp. 67-73, 78-83. 8 For a rare exception to this convention, see Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 500, where he refers to “relativity mechanics.” For Einstein’s own doubts about the adequacy of the mechanische Weltbild (mechanical world–picture), see Holton (1988), pp. 216-217, 241, 325; Holton (1998), pp. 84, 89. 9 A. N. Whitehead (1925), pp. 61, 106-107.

CHAPTER 15 THE MACHINE COLLAPSES, BUT NATURE KEEPS WORKING: QUANTUM PHYSICS

In proper quantum processes, we meet regularities which are completely foreign to the mechanical conception of nature. —Niels Bohr In the interest of full disclosure, the reader should be advised ahead of time that quantum physics can be viewed as either a theme park full of entertaining oddities or a labyrinth riddled with mind-numbing conundrums. Or as a combination of both: just when you think you’re getting it, it seems to slip away. As we’ll see in a few pages, even quantum physicists shake their heads at the weirdness of the micro-particulate world. So a word of caution before you go any further. The whole point of our exploring quantum physics is to show how thoroughly it discredits the mechanical model of nature. But there is such a thing as overkill. If you find the quantum material too tedious or counter-intuitive to be worth the effort, just shed a tear and jump to the next chapter. The microparticulate world is not for everyone.

Five Experiments (1801-1927) Imagine yourself dropping a stone into a small pond. It creates wavelets which ripple out until they hit a barrier with two holes in it. If you look closely, you’ll see the ripples re-forming beyond the holes in two expanding semi-circles. When they meet, the semi-circles jostle and interfere with each other, making what physicists call an “interference pattern.” In physics this pattern is the criterion test of a wave. If a phenomenon shows the interference pattern, it is assumed to be either a wave or like a wave.

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This mental image of jostling wavelets seems harmless enough, but it soon leads into the murky waters of quantum physics. Relativity is difficult to understand at first, but once you get the drift, it begins to make sense. Quantum physics is also difficult, but once you get the drift, it makes even less sense. In fact it eventually challenges almost every intuition we have about the fundamental nature of physical reality and our place in it. 1 Let’s return to Thomas Young’s pivotal 1801 experiment. As noted earlier, the 1700s had two incompatible theories of light. On one side were the Newtonians who argued that light was made up of microscopic “corpuscles” or particles. On the other side, was the “wave” model, which saw light as undulating through space the way waves move through water. Young tested the two models against each other by devising an experiment analogous to our imaginary pond, but substituting light for water. He projected a light beam toward a barrier with two tiny slits. On the far side of the barrier was a screen that picked up the pattern caused by the small amount of light which passed through the two slits. It was a perfect interference pattern, and he concluded that light behaves like a wave, not like a series of little particles. Much to every Englishman’s surprise, Newton was wrong. Shortly after Young’s experiment, light was universally taken to be a wave, and mainstream physics sailed through the 1800s on one version or another of the wave model. 2 But as soon as the century was over, the wave—a happy-face version of mechanism—began to run into problems. In 1900 Max Planck discovered that heat radiation did not flow through space in continuous waves, but stepped through space in discontinuous lumps. Then Einstein’s 1905 study of the photoelectric effect clearly showed that light also behaved like discrete packets of energy, what soon came to be called “quanta” or “photons.” Newton’s corpuscular theory of light was suddenly making a comeback, but Young’s wave theory—which had been experimentally confirmed many times—could not simply be dismissed. Light had become mysterious: sometimes it behaved like a continuous wave, other times like discrete particles. It had a dual identity. As if to add to the confusion, about twenty years later the French physicist Louis de Broglie asked himself: if light, usually thought to be a wave, could behave like a particle, then might the electron, generally regarded as a particle, behave like a wave? Soon afterwards, research showed that it could: electrons also had a dual identity. In the world of sub-atomic physics there was a very real sense in which a thing was not identical to itself. Photons and electrons seemed to have split personalities. This began to pose serious questions for the classical mechanical model of nature, which

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assumes that every object has a distinct identity amenable to one true description. The discovery of wave–particle duality confronted established physics with several puzzling questions: what triggers one identity or the other? When light (or an electron) behaves like a wave, where is its particle? And when it morphs into a particle, what happens to its wave? We’ll get back to these questions—and their disconcerting answers—in a while. But, first, let’s return again to the early 1800s. Flush with what appeared to be the complete triumph of neoNewtonian determinism, in 1814 the French mathematical astronomer, Pierre Simon Laplace, declared that if we could identify the position and momentum of every particle in the universe at one instant in time, we could precisely predict the universe’s entire future and retrace its entire past down to the tiniest detail. This was a bold hypothesis, but within physics, it was not terribly controversial. It posed logistical problems— how would we gather and process the data on every particle in the universe?—yet to a committed material determinist Laplace’s claim held in principle. 3 But 113 years later the German quantum physicist, Werner Heisenberg, discovered that we could not know the simultaneous position and momentum of even one particle, never mind all of them. Heisenberg conclusively demonstrated that his famous “uncertainty principle” was not a creature of clumsy measurement procedures, but was inherent to the physics of the subatomic world. An electron, for example, exists in an illdefined flux between position and momentum, and the closer we come to measuring its precise position, the less certain we are of its momentum, and vice versa. In fact, the degree of uncertainty is precisely calculable and corresponds to a number discovered by Max Planck in his 1900 study of heat radiation. This number, called “Planck’s constant,” is extremely small by everyday standards, but at the subatomic level it is a hefty value. To get some idea of what quantum uncertainty would be like if it worked on an everyday scale, imagine yourself looking out a window at a car driving down the street. The window gives you a very precise view of the car’s momentum (speed plus direction), but, oddly enough, you can’t see where the car is. Then you look out another window, and can see exactly where the car is, but this time you can’t tell which way or how fast it’s going. Finally, you turn away from the windows so you can’t see out at all, and the car’s location, direction, and speed all dissolve into an indeterminate blur. There is a car out there, but it has undefined location, speed, and direction. By choosing which window to look out, you define either the car’s location or its momentum. On its own the car is in the

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strange position of having both, but neither. This is how the macro-scopic world would operate if electrons were the size of cars and Planck’s constant were commensurate with our everyday scale. Obviously, everyday reality does not behave this way; but what’s interesting and puzzling is that our familiar world of cars, ponds, windowpanes, and mechanical clocks is made of stuff that does behave this way. For the mechanical model to hold at nature’s foundation, the quantum world would somehow have to be the little machine inside the big worldmachine. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is not a promising start. Since Heisenberg’s discovery of uncertainty in 1927 the principle has become so surrounded by myth and metaphysical speculation that most of us have forgotten it began as a mathematically precise physical construct. At bottom, uncertainty is simply a hard fact of atomic physics which, among other things, shatters Laplace’s confident picture of a clockwork universe. For our purposes, the uncertainty principle counts as another refutation by science of its own archetypal mechanical model. And it is only one of several discovered by twentieth century atomic physics. We’ve already mentioned wave–particle duality, and true to the bizarre nature of subatomic reality, we could continue bouncing from one quantum oddity to another. There’s always the temptation to do the “geewhiz” tour of the quantum theme park, and I’m afraid we’re already through the front gate. So let me suggest an alternative strategy. Instead of bouncing superficially among the various forms of quantum weirdness, let’s pause for a more thoughtful appreciation of two lines of inquiry: the first into the fascinating “one-versus-two-slit” problem. And the second into the equally puzzling “particle-entanglement” problem which upset not only mechanistic physics but Einsteinian relativity as well. After that we’ll try to find our way out of the quantum theme park, if indeed there is an exit. The great majority of particle physicists practice their craft according to well-established rules of procedure, not bogging down in what the profession calls “interpretations.” But the few who have taken the trouble to interpret the two-slit and entanglement findings typically describe them as “unreasonable … spooky … meaningless … crazy … mysterious … ghostly … absurd … shocking”—adjectives that are seldom addressed to any major physical theory, at least not by scientists. 4 Yet there is a strong consensus that quantum physics is probably the most spectacularly successful branch of pure and applied science ever developed. 5 If so, why is it so “absurd”? Let’s have a look at the two bodies of research and see what sort of nature story they tell.

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The One-Versus- Two-Slit Experiments This line of research actually began with Thomas Young’s original experiment of 1801. As already noted, his apparatus was quite simple: a light beam was projected at a barrier with two vertical slits, one to the right and the other to the left of the barrier’s center. A little distance beyond the barrier was a screen sensitive to light patterns. That was all it took to demonstrate, contrary to Newton, that light makes an interference pattern and must be a wave. But suppose Newton’s corpuscular model of light had been right: what pattern would Young have found on his screen? If light had been a series of tiny particles (as Einstein later discovered), it would have streamed through the slits in two straight lines and made two bright vertical stripes on the screen. But it didn’t. Instead, it made a complex zebra-pattern of alternating dark and bright stripes, exactly what one would expect from wave interference. But why would nature behave in a complicated way when a simple alternative is available? Ever since Occam’s Razor (named after William of Occam, 1285-1349) the scientific mentality has preferred parsimonious over complex accounts of nature. The former—so goes this view—have the virtue of clarity, while the latter are messy and obscure. For decades atomic physicists have been scraping their razors against this puzzle, looking at almost every conceivable variation on Young’s two-slit experiment. Let’s take it step by step. First, modify Young’s apparatus so it has only one slit on the left side of the barrier. Shine the light, and only one bright stripe appears on the left side of the photosensitive screen. Mark exactly where it is located. Now adjust the barrier so the only open slit is on its right side. As expected, one bright stripe shows up on the right side of the photo screen. Record exactly where this one is. Now open up both slits—here we’re back to the original twoslit condition—and we get two bright stripes on the screen, right? Wrong: contrary to Occam, Newton, and Einstein, we get Young’s zebra-striped interference pattern. Not only that, but the two carefully recorded bright stripes of the one-slit conditions are now dark stripes. What’s going on here? No classical physical explanation will do. Since the mid-1920s the quantum community has shifted almost exclusively to “quantum explanation,” and the starting point for this is usually Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. He discovered that what you get to know about an electron (or any other particle) depends on how you observe it. Observe it one way and you know its momentum; observe it another way, and you find its position. This is what has come to be known as the “observer effect.” But how does the observer effect apply to the two-slit experiments?

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Think of the one- and two-slit procedures as alternative ways of looking at light. Observe it one way, and you know its particulate features; observe it another way, and you discover its wavy features. But just as you cannot know the electron’s momentum and position simultaneously, you also cannot know light’s two identities simultaneously. When you know where the light is going—in the one-slit procedure it has only one possible way to go—it behaves like a particle. When you don’t know which way it goes—in the two-slit procedure any given photon could go either way— light travels like a wave, yielding an interference pattern. But that seems too facile. The classical mindset doesn’t give up so easily. Even when we don’t know which slit the photons go through, it has to be one or the other and, if so, they would have to brighten up the photo plate at two spots just beyond the slits. It’s ridiculous that they would splay out into a zebra-stripe interference pattern where the two “bright spots” turn out to be dark spots. Ridiculous: I’ve just added another adjective to the earlier list. One way to examine the ridiculous two-slit results more closely is to dim the light source so that only one photon at a time is released, with several seconds elapsed between each release. Even though we still don’t know which slit a particular photon goes through (photons are too small to see), this should permit a much more finely tuned analysis than when bright light sends out millions of photons per second. Now look at the photo-sensitive plate. A photon plinks against it and leaves a tiny bright spot. Wait several seconds. Another photon hits the plate, another tiny spot. And so it goes, for days. Each photon obviously arrives at the plate as a particle. Now things are starting to make sense; except that, as the days go by, it becomes clear the photons are plinking out a perfect interference pattern. Each photon is acting at a space–time distance from every other photon, yet it plays its exact role in forming the zebra-stripe pattern. But this is crazy. How can the 1,000th photon, which wasn’t even born when the previous 999 were plinking the screen, know where it is supposed to go? And how did the previous 999, each one acting in total space–time isolation, know where to go? Who or what is choreographing this subatomic dance? And according to what plan? Before trying to answer these questions, there’s the problem of the “observer effect”—which will lead us right back to the same questions. In classical physics the scientist is assumed to be a dispassionate observer who has no “effect” on what he observes. If he did have an effect, his findings would not be objective. But from what we’ve seen so far, in quantum physics the observing scientist seems to have an unavoidable effect. When he knows which path the photon takes (in the one-slit

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procedure), it is a particle. When he does not know its path (in the two-slit setup), it is a wave. This is a very serious—even stupefying—observer effect: what the observer knows about light’s path determines what light is. This runs so counter to science’s belief system, that the great majority of physicists choose not even to think about it. But there are others who can’t stop thinking about it, and they’ve come up with another twist on the two-slit procedure. Suppose we put a minute light detector at each slit, so we know which slit each photon goes through. Although we can’t see the microscopic photon, the detector can “see” it for us. That way we effectively observe its path: in this deceptive two-slit design, the photon still has two available paths, but now we know which it actually takes. The result: no interference pattern. The light behaves like two streams of particles making two bright stripes on the photo plate. We can’t fool the photons into “thinking” this is a standard two-slit procedure. Here’s another twist: put a detector at only the right slit while leaving the other unobserved. The result? Again, no interference pattern. But how can this be? Why don’t the photons going through the undetected left slit behave like waves while the righties behave like particles? Remember, each photon is separated in space–time from all other photons. How does each isolated left-going photon even know we’ve observed the righties. And beyond that, how can the lefties know that, if we observe the path of righties, we can infer which path the unobserved lefties have taken? How do they know we’ve “observed” them when they have not encountered a detector? Are they logicians? Here’s another even more cunning twist. Suppose we put the light detectors beyond the slits (not at the slits). Then, for sure, light will behave like a wave, because it will have already committed to a two-slit procedure—it’ll be long through the slits and on its way to the photo plate before any observation occurs. The observer “effect,” in other words, is delayed beyond the point where it can have an effect. How about cunning beyond cunning? Suppose we put a delayed detector beyond only one of the two open slits. What sort of photon can figure out that trick? But light is not fooled by either of these deceptions. There is no interference pattern on the screen. It’s as if light can observe us observing it. The whole one-versustwo-slit scenario plays out like a chess game in which no matter how many steps we think forward, light “thinks” one extra step. And no matter what complications we build into the game, light can “see” the whole chessboard. Somehow light seems to “know” the whole space–time organization of the experimental apparatus and procedure. But how is this possible, even

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metaphorically? (At this point we’re deep into metaphors of “thinking … seeing … knowing.”) It strains credibility that individual photons, each a solitary, newborn particle, could know the whole space–time. This leaves us with the alternative of light-as-a-wave. For light to behave so consistently through all the variations on the two-slit theme, it must have spread-out wave features that pervade the entire experimental procedure. Light’s pervasive “wave function” (as physicists call it) must choreograph both the behavior and the being of its photons. According to this interpretation light leaves the lamp, meets the detector, and arrives at the screen as a particle: in each case we know its location. But it travels as a wave; in the space– time gaps between the lamp, the light detector, and the screen we literally have no idea where the microscopic photon is. It seems to be everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere all at the same time. When we know its location in space–time, it seems to be a particle; when we don’t know, it seems to be a wave. Again, which incarnation it has seems to depend on what we know, and what we know depends on what we can observe. 6 But which is it really? Is light really a particle or a wave? This question is based on the classical assumption that a real thing must be identical to itself, or at least consistent with itself. Niels Bohr’s answer is that light is really both particle and wave: these incarnations are not inconsistent, but “complementary” (his term). 7 With only one or the other, we’d have an incomplete picture of light; with both, we have a fuller account of light’s reality. Light just happens to be a complex entity, and that’s the way it goes in the quantum world. This world is not at all like the macro-world of classical physics where a rose is a rose is a rose whether you run it through one or two slits. Nonsensical as it seems, we have to take quantum reality on its own terms. (For simplicity’s sake I have so far restricted the discussion to photons, but electrons, neutrons, and even whole atoms behave just like photons when they take their turn in the one-versus-two-slit experiments.) 8 So what is it about light’s complicated photon-wave-observer (PWO) mix that causes it to behave the way it does? One way of answering this question is to see the wave as “something like” a choreographer, the photon as “something like” a dancer, and the observing scientist as “something like” the audience at a dance concert. Admittedly this metaphor limps even while it dances, but it brings the “PWO mix” a bit closer to human intuition. The light’s choreographic wave function tells its photon when and where it might possibly go, and the audience’s observation—its applause—tells the swirling photon when and where it can take its bow as a visible piece of light.

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In technical terms the photon’s probable locations are encoded in the wave. The wave does not guide a given photon through the two-slit apparatus to a predetermined spot on the screen. It’s more accurate to say the wave guides the photon’s possible locations through the system. Standard quantum physics describes the wave as a “superposition of probabilities.” The photon’s reality and location are suspended until some triggering event “collapses” the superposed state: at that instant one of the wave’s probable locations—which particular location is entirely indeterminate and unpredictable—becomes the photon’s actual location. What makes the superposition collapse? Or, in other words, what gets many probable outcomes to commit to one actual outcome? As already noted, in the one-and-two-slit experiments there are three places where light has an actual, measurable location: at the source, the detector, and the photo screen. What these three places have in common is their observability. Between these locations light is an unobservable probability wave. So what collapses the wave into a well-defined actuality? Observation. But why doesn’t observation just show us the probability wave? Good question, if for no other reason than to distinguish between classical and quantum observation. A classical observational process would show us what it observes (or so we hope and trust). But in quantum physics observation produces an observer effect. It does not simply witness an event; it effects the event. It does not witness the wave. It collapses the wave into an actuality. To more precisely visualize this process, imagine an elaborate house of cards set up on a table. The house is a delicately balanced superposition of cards. The face of each card is turned inward so an observer can’t see it, and on each face is information about a photon’s probable location. You, the observer, walk around the table wanting to know the photon’s actual location. Suddenly, on impulse, you reach out and pluck one card. The card house, of course, collapses at precisely the instant you have the photon’s actual location in hand. Quantum reality is no longer the superposed house of cards—it is now the card you hold in your hand. This card-house metaphor demonstrates four core features of quantum physics. First, to know this reality, you necessarily alter it. Second, since you had no basis for picking one card over any other, the quantum reality you now hold in your hand is a creature of chance. Third, since the house of cards and the plucked card cannot co-exist, quantum reality is either a wave or a particle, but cannot be both at the same time. Fourth, just like the house of cards, the quantum wave is a hybrid combination, delicately balanced between the physics of the house and the information on the cards.

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There are many other questions spun off by quantum physics, but for our purposes they would be digressive. Nevertheless, here are short answers to two that may have already come to mind. Is observation the only thing that collapses probability states into actualities? There does not seem to be consensus on this point, but there is some evidence that other influences can tip suspended probabilities into one actuality. Some quantum physicists use the term “decoherence” to describe this class of events. Think of the house of cards: it stands in a quite fragile state of coherence, and when you select a single card it tumbles into decoherence. The same would happen if a breeze blew by or the table trembled: these and other perturbations would bring the card house down, and—to push the metaphor a bit—the one card that ends up on the top of the pile becomes the actuality. 9 Which raises another question: what happens to all the other cards scattered on the table or, in other words, what happens to all the unexpressed probabilities when only one is actualized? Most quantum specialists don’t deal with this problem, assuming that unexpressed probabilities simply fade into background noise. But there are a few theorists who think that each probability actualizes in a different universe—this is called the “many worlds” interpretation. Its mathematics is fine, but its physics is top heavy with metaphysics. 10 To start hiking through these various universes would be a digression of no return; instead, let’s take a brief look at what the two-slit experiments imply for one of science’s most cherished doctrines: objectivity.

Objectivity Perhaps science’s proudest claim is that it is able to deliver accounts of nature based on objective findings, as opposed to subjective opinion. But if the observational process alters the reality of the thing observed, what is left of objectivity? This is a problem even if—as seems to be the case in the one-versus-two-slit experiments—science can precisely predict which kind of reality will be induced by which kind of observation. Under these circumstances science cannot produce knowledge of reality itself, but only knowledge of reality as it is effected by the act of knowing. Thus, if you ask a quantum physicist what light is, strictly speaking she has to ask whether you’re referring to one-slit light or two-slit light. In her capacity as a physicist, light itself does not exist; only light-as-it-is-observed exists. She would respond the same way if you were to ask her what an electron, neutron, or proton is. The process of knowing becomes an irreducible and unavoidable aspect of nature’s reality. As Heisenberg once put it, “ … the

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object of research is no longer nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man’s questioning, and to this extent man here also meets himself.” 11 To get some idea of how revolutionary this kind of science is, think of Galileo back in 1610 looking at the moon through his newly invented telescope. For him the telescope was merely a means of improving science’s knowledge about the moon itself. Galileo assumed without question that the “moon-as-telescoped” was exactly the same object as the “moon-as-seen-by-the-naked-eye” which, in turn, was exactly the same object as the moon when we’re not even looking at it. Therefore Galileo presented his findings as facts about the “moon-as-it-exists.” In the quantum world, however, science cannot operate this way. If the moon were a quantum entity and I asked a scientist what the moon is, she would want to know whether I meant the “telescoped-moon,” the “naked-eyemoon,” or the “Apollo-landed-moon.” In quantum physics, the scientist and object overlap in the observational process, breaking down the classical distinction between the knowing subject (the scientist) and the known object (the electron, photon, proton, etc.). Without this distinction, objectivity is in trouble. But does this objectivity problem mean that the quantum world may not have its own independent reality … that it is entirely a creature of observation? No. While observed quantum reality is not equivalent to its un-observed reality, it does not follow that the latter is “unreal.” It only means that we do not know the subatomic world “objectively.” The standard Copenhagen approach to quantum physics—as articulated by Niels Bohr—is not an anti-realism; it is an anti-objectivism. It strikes at the heart of science’s claim to objective knowledge, not at science’s belief in a real world.

Non-Locality and Entanglement In fact the seemingly bizarre coordination between human observation and the decoherence of a wave into an actual particle appears to go even further. An atom is made of several particles, i.e., electrons and protons. When they are parts of the same atom, these particles are considered “entangled.” That is, they bear a special relation to each other that they do not have to particles from other atoms. This raises a few questions. When, for example, two electrons from the same atom are separated, what happens to electron B when electron A is observed? Does each electron have its own independent location or does their entanglement override location in space-time such that observation of one effectively becomes observation of both? In other

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words, when electron A decoheres through observation from its wave into its particle state, does the unobserved electron B also decohere or does it remain in its wave state? And if it does transform into a particle, how long does it take to do so? Does the observer effect travel between the entangled electrons at the speed of light—as Einstein predicted—or does it happen simultaneously? In 1982 a French team of quantum scientists, led by Alain Aspect, ran a crucial experiment and they found that the remote but entangled particle responded instantaneously to the observation of its related particle as if they were located in exactly the same place and time. If so, location would seem to be irrelevant to their reality … thus the term “non-locality.” This is action-at-a-distance on steroids. Alain Aspect’s finding (later replicated and supported by independent studies) not only refuted mechanistic contact-action doctrine, but it also questioned Einstein’s contention that nothing in nature—no object, event, signal, or message—could travel faster than light speed. But in the micro physical world entangled particles communicate instantaneously even if they are on opposite sides of the universe. Instantaneity is qualitatively different from any form of speed. Put simply, it is the abolition of speed and location. As Niels Bohr said, just when you think quantum reality is crazy your interpretation is not crazy enough. But does quantum entanglement in fact refute Einstein’s position on lightspeed? Maybe yes, maybe no. Einstein’s theory held that if an object or message exceeded the speed of light, it would have to move backward in time. That is, it would have to move from the present into the past. Since the past cannot co-exist with the present, such movement would seem to be a physical impossibility. Causes, for example, must precede effects in their timing. “Retrocausality”—i.e., backward causality— may make mathematical sense, but it makes no physical sense.12 Recently, however, some theoretical physicists have developed the notion of a “block universe,” i.e., a universe in which passing time does not actually fade into the past—i.e., disappear—but forms a “single, ever-existing block.” Time doesn’t go away, but—just like space— expands into an ever increasing “block” of reality. If this is true, then instantaneity would be a case of backward moving time, and Einstein’s theory would not be violated by non-local entanglement. In other words, the messages between entangled particles would move both forward and backward in time at speeds that effectively cancel each other out into a temporal instantaneity. If Niels Bohr were still with us, he might comment that block-time is even crazier than crazy enough.13

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In any event, just as Einstein’s relativity theory refuted the mechanical model’s account of macro-physical reality (see previous chapter), quantum physics seems to have done the same for the microphysical world. The macro and micro zones of nature seem to operate according to different physical laws, but neither set of laws is even remotely mechanical.

Quantum Physics and Mechanism Science’s archetypal mechanical model has real trouble getting through the one-versus-two-slit and non-locality-entanglement experiments. As already discussed, mechanistic physics hinges on two fundamental factors: contact causality and object externality. Mechanical systems work by each part making external physical contact with adjacent parts. One cog wheel, for example, causes another to turn by contacting it and imposing force on it from the outside. One billiard ball moves another by physical impact from the outside. The two great enemies of mechanism are distant action and object internality. Let’s first look at what quantum physics tells us about contact versus distant action. In the one-versus-two-slit experiments coordinated action at a space–time distance is routine between atomic particles. And the non-locality research goes a step further, showing that entangled particles influence each other instantaneously over vast distances. These particles are the “billiard balls” of the quantum world, yet they seem to influence each other’s motion and location without physical contact. I say “seem to” because one may argue that, since their wave functions are spread out in space–time, particles do have physical contact through wave overlaps. But to make this argument, the waves must be composed of some kind of physical stuff. Whatever that “stuff” is, in the early 1900s quantum physicist Max Born calculated that the wave would have to be able to contract to the size of an electron and expand to the size of the solar system over a long weekend—a stretch in both senses of the term. Moreover, if waves are mathematical artifacts, that is, probability statements, they would seem to be made of “information,” not of physical stuff. In what conceivable sense could overlapping information qualify as a case of mechanical contact action? But even if the two-slit results are ambiguous on this point, the non-locality findings are quite clear. The majority of quantum physicists agree these findings are pure instances of action at a distance. As regards object externality, the non-locality-entanglement research shows that quantum particles may have an uncanny internality

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with respect to each other. If two separated photons were once entangled, they share an internalized “memory” of each other which excludes every other photon in the universe. Their probabilities are so closely coordinated, they behave as if they were the same entity. Yet the physical basis of their internality is completely mysterious since electrons and photons don’t seem to have any inside structure where coordinated “memories” could be stored. This lack of storage structure suggests “memory” may not be the apt metaphor, but that their coordination may be based on something like “communication” and “recognition.” At the instant photon A’s wave is collapsed it sends a signal to its entangled photon B. This means that of the trillions of trillions of trillions of photons in the universe, photon A’s signal has to reach and “recognize” photon B as its recipient, so that B’s wave collapses at precisely the same instant and in precisely the same way as A’s wave. At a different instant photon A might send a different signal—e.g., decohere to the right, not to the left—but to precisely the same recipient photon. If A and B “remember” anything of each other, it’s the fairly abstract information that they are correlated entities; it is not the concrete fact that they are “left handed” or “right handed.” No wonder Einstein referred to this scenario as “spooky action at a distance.” It is very spooky, and it puts the lie to any conceivable world machine. Another indigestible feature is quantum indeterminacy and/or probability. In a mechanical system, one part’s action causes an adjacent part’s action: this is straight cause-and-effect determinism. But when all events are creatures of chance, they are neither “effects” of causes nor “causes” of effects. No clockwork mechanical system can work this way, and, if it were required to, it would be radically dysfunctional. Yet quantum reality, the foundation of physical nature, functions quite well this way. Finally, quantum physics raises embarrassing questions about mechanism’s materialist worldview. One of the main motivations behind classical science’s choice of a materialist metaphysics was that it greatly simplified the natural world, and, as a consequence, science’s job of explaining the world. At the time of Descartes and Galileo (c. 1600-1650), this seemed a defensible strategy because it purged nature of souls, emanations, animisms, and all sorts of ghostly mischief. Unlike these, matter was nature’s solid citizen: observable, describable, quantifiable, manageable, and predictable. The “materialization” of nature seemed to render it less mysterious. So classical science equated nature with matter and, to make doubly sure no unanticipated complications would arise, it defined matter

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as passive and inert. The living physis of ancient Greek natural philosophy became the dead physics of classical science. Now fast forward to the twentieth century: the more deeply modern quantum physics probes into the foundation of matter, the more mysterious matter becomes. It lacks self-identity; in the natural state its features dissolve into an ill-defined blur, but become relatively well defined when observed; it seems to move from place to place without passing through the space in between; its behavior is inherently indeterminate; it acts instantaneously over vast distances; it interacts in very strange ways with observers, apparently “thinking” one move ahead, as if involved in a game of chess. Finally, because of its confused relations with “information,” matter is not even unambiguously material. Science’s materialist agenda was supposed to keep nature simple, passive, and compliant to human investigation. But matter itself turned out to be complex, active, and counterintuitive. In one of history’s delicious paradoxes, the mysteries which classical science banished from nature seem to have been invited back in by modern science. 14 In summary, quantum physics’ repudiation of the mechanical model is devastating. As Niels Bohr puts it, “In proper quantum processes, we meet regularities which are completely foreign to the mechanical conception of nature” (see epigraph to this chapter). At the quantum level of reality, the machine collapses, but nature keeps working.

The Quantum Story and Nature–Human Relations Quantum physics, even more than relativity, is a “push–pull” account of nature–human relations: the notorious observer effect “pulls” us into a deep ontological involvement with subatomic nature, while quantum strangeness “pushes” our understanding away. First, the pull. Heisenberg sums up the observer effect this way: “… what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning … in our scientific relation to nature our own activity becomes very important when we have to deal with parts of nature into which we can penetrate only by using the most elaborate tools.” 15 By “method of questioning … scientific relation … our own activity … elaborate tools,” Heisenberg refers to the whole complex of quantum inquiry: apparatus, procedure, laboratory set up, guiding theory, measurement, and, most controversially, the researcher’s consciousness. This complex of elements, when arranged one way, produces one quantum reality; when organized another way, it produces quite a different picture of quantum

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reality. The answers nature offers are physical outcomes of the questions we ask and the way we ask them. Given the critical role of human observation, has quantum research let anthropocentrism sneak in through science’s back door? Not exactly. According to the Copenhagen School, the observer effect blurs the classical boundary between the human investigator and the natural object. This is far from putting us at the center of creation; the observer effect is not a scientized retelling of the first chapter of Genesis. But it does identify us as one of the major players in the dynamics of micro-nature: human observation belongs to a small set of decoherence events that transform nature’s fundamental probabilities into actualities. According to the two-slit, entanglement, and uncertainty research, we are not detached witnesses of nature: to witness is to participate. But does our participation go beyond physical involvement with nature? Upon close examination, the observational process seems to have several discriminable parts ranging from the physical to the cognitive; and there is no consensus within the quantum community about which part (or parts) makes for the observer effect. 16 Which feature, for example, of the one-and-two-slit research collapses the probability wave? The concrete, physical encounter with the detector or photosensitive plate? Or, somewhat more generally, the act of being measured? Or the cognitive encounter with the researcher’s consciousness? Or some combination of these? The most controversial feature, of course, is human consciousness: how can conscious awareness—an immaterial event—alter nature’s physical (or quasi-physical) structure? If it could, science’s classical commitment to strict materialism would be called into question. Science has got itself into a real jam here: there seem to be three possible resolutions, none of them entirely satisfactory. One resolution would be to accept the causal efficacy of consciousness as consciousness. In this scenario science would effectively ratify a hybrid domain of reality in violation of its materialist metaphysics: one where subject, object, mind, and matter commingle. A second resolution would get rid of consciousness as consciousness by reducing it to neurological events in the brain. This would rescue materialism, but would also raise the perplexing question of how subatomic events in the physicist’s neurons influence quantum events in the laboratory apparatus. The third resolution would be to live with the irresolution of the status quo. Most quantum physicists hold their noses and hope the “consciousness problem” will just go away. But again, however malodorous it may be, this problem was not imposed on science from the outside. Its significance arose from within the ranks of hard physics, and it has been

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hanging around for almost a century, showing no signs of going away. If the observer effect and its corollary of consciousness are disruptive to some of science’s most bedrock convictions, science has brought the disruption on itself. And in the process, it has pulled humanity into its nature story as both author and actor. On an epistemological level, however, quantum strangeness seems to push us back out, at least at first glance. Developments in mathematics and theory have provided a formal and abstract “understanding” of sorts— we can predict experimental outcomes with amazing accuracy. But for a concrete understanding of quantum reality’s physics, we have to fall back on counterintuitive interpretations. One merit of the Copenhagen approach is that it tries not to embellish the findings with too much fluff, but the findings themselves strain intuition. Even so, as we’ve already seen, the quantum enterprise is not at a loss for metaphors or models: dice game, chess game, house of cards, and so on. Unlike arbitrary mathematical symbols, each of these offers a visual representation of how quantum reality works. To take a simple example, the mathematical symbol for fiveness refers with equal accuracy to 5 apples, 5 electrons, or 5 universes. This is its strength. But its weakness is that it resembles none of them. It tells us almost nothing about the physics of apples, electrons, or universes. In contrast, Einstein’s dice game metaphor paints a concrete image of quantum indeterminacy. The physics of indeterminacy resembles rolling dice. Similarly, the house-of-cards metaphor helps us to mentally visualize “superposition” and “decoherence.” If anything, the strange quantum world has attracted a crowd of metaphors, each trying to elbow its way to the head of the line. This is not to say we “truly” understand quantum reality. A good model is never a truth statement. It points us in the direction of the truth; its goodness comes from its being something like the truth. On the flip side, quantum physics not only attracts metaphors, but has generated a few of its own. One immediately thinks, for example, of “quantum leap” or “quantum jump” as metaphors for sudden increase, advance, or change. Even though this image is technically incorrect, it still highlights a feature of non-quantum reality in a vivid and forceful manner. The transfer of meaning works; and if it works, quantum physics cannot be meaningless. It must have pockets of semiotic value. Another quantum metaphor that has fared less well, at least in my experience, is derived from the uncertainty principle. There does seem to be an irreducible uncertainty in human affairs, and Heisenberg’s principle is occasionally— and awkwardly—invoked to account for it. I always take a quantum leap into a heightened state of alertness when I hear the phrase, “According to

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Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle … .” It often announces the arrival of a woolly thought. So, does quantum reality stump model/metaphor? Not at all. Despite its persisting weirdness, it has evolved into a two-way street: several metaphors and models drive in and a few even drive out. But all the metaphoric traffic at the macro–micro boundary has not produced a complete or even adequate picture of micro-physics. It’s a work in progress. On balance, it’s fair to say the quantum nature story has at least as much pull as push. We still don’t understand most of what’s going on, but, as participant observers, we’re right in the thick of it. To paraphrase Heisenberg, when we look at quantum nature, we see ourselves looking back, albeit with a furrowed brow. 17

Endnotes The epigraph is taken from N. Bohr (1958), p. 166. 1

For reasonably clear treatments of quantum physics, see R. Feynman (1998), pp. 115-138; J. Gribben (1984, 1995); D. Lindley (1996); B. Greene (1999), chapt. 4; P. Davies and J. Brown (1986). Davies and Brown include transcribed interviews with major quantum physicists such as A. Aspect, J. Bell, D. Bohm, and J. Wheeler. For an article length treatment, see J. Horgan (1992). These various sources often don’t agree with each other’s interpretation, but in quantum physics, some disagreement comes with the turf. 2 J. Bernstein (1991), p. 25. 3 By the end of the 1800s, however, Laplace’s hypothesis had become problematic. In 1889 mathematician Henri Poincaré pointed out serious limitations on predictability due to what was called the “n-body problem.” Newtonian mathematics was good at predicting the precise course of interactions between two bodies, e.g., the earth and the sun, but it became incrementally less reliable with 3, 4, 5 … n bodies. Indeterminacy, in other words, had begun to creep into physics a generation before Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The n-body problem is probably the main reason that science prefers to study nature one variable at a time, while “controlling” for other variables. Analysis which takes nature as a whole, i.e., in its full multivariability, quickly approaches unmanageable degrees of complexity and uncertainty. See Toulmin (1993), pp. 150-152; also Funtowicz and Ravetz (1991). 4 For “mysterious,” see R. Feynman (1998), p. 117; for “unreasonable” and “spooky” (Einstein) see Horgan (1992), pp. 96, 99; for “meaningless” (John Bell), see Horgan (1992), p. 101; for “shocking” (Niels Bohr) and “ghostly” (Paul Davies), see Davies and Brown (1986), pp. vii, 21-22, 30; for “absurd” (Richard Feynman and Werner Heisenberg) see Bernstein (1991), p. 4, and Greene (1999), p. 111. Brian Greene, a leading super-string theorist, describes quantum reality as

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“crazy” (1999, p. 102) and “altogether bizarre or even ludicrous” (p. 88). Niels Bohr once remarked that “if you do not get dizzy sometimes when you think about these things then you have not really understood it.” See Bernstein (1991), p. 20; Greene (1999), p. 88. 5 See, for example, Davies and Brown (1986), pp. 1, 4, 84; Greene (1999), pp. 87-88. 6 Most quantum physicists subscribe to particle–wave duality. But Richard Feynman developed an alternative theory which bypasses waves. For him subatomic entities like electrons and photons are always particles, and according to his “sum-over-paths” equations they are literally “everywhere and anywhere” (my words) at the same time. See Feynman (1998). 7 For a discussion of Bohr’s complementarity principle, see G. Holton (1988), pp. 99-105; Davies and Brown (1986), pp. 11-12. 8 Gertrude Stein’s famous tautology dates from 1913, the same year Bohr proposed his quantum model of the atom. 9 Decoherence is clearly and sympathetically discussed in D. Lindley (1996), pp. 193-222. 10 For a discussion of the “many–worlds” interpretation, see Davies and Brown (1986), pp. 34-38, 83-105; also see D. Lindley (1996), pp. 107-111. 11 See W. Heisenberg’s article in Daedalus (1958b), p. 105. 12 For “spooky action at a distance,” see Bernstein (1991), p. 45; Horgan (1992), p. 99; Gribbin (1995), p. 24. Backward moving time violates the physics, but not the mathematics of special relativity. Einstein’s equations treat lightspeed symetrically. At lightspeed, time stops. On either side of lightspeed, time diverges into forward and backward directions, respectively. The farther from lightspeed, the faster each time goes in its own direction. At lightspeed each time stops, unable to cross the lightspeed barrier. But for Einstein only the “forward” side of the mathematical symmetry applies to the physics of the universe. The forward side is the side we live on. 13 For a discussion of block-time, see Adam Becker (2018, Feb.), New Scientist, 237(3165), pp. 28-31. 14 As science historian, Mary Hesse, puts it, “The notion that matter has intrinsic powers … was never entirely absent from Greek thought, and although apparently banished in seventeenth-century science, it may be said to have returned, heavily disguised, in contemporary physics” (1965, p. 38). 15 W. Heisenberg (1958a). Physics and Philosophy, p. 58 (italics added). 16 For a sample of arguments about the observer effect, see the several interview chapters in Davies and Brown (1986); particularly the interviews with Bell, Peierls, Deutsch, and Taylor. Also see the editors’ Introduction, pp. 31-34. 17 See endnote 11 above.

CHAPTER 16 WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE MECHANICAL MODEL?

A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress. —Alfred North Whitehead The mechanical model poses two major problems, one for the internal coherence of science; and the other for sanity and moderation at the nature–human interface. Let’s look briefly at each in turn.

The Internal Coherence of Science A recurring theme of the last few chapters has been the bad fit between the mechanical model’s physics and nature’s physics according to science’s own findings. Mechanism lacks the one indispensable requirement of any physical model, metaphor, or analogue: good fit. Its two bedrock physical commitments—contact action and external causality—have been repeatedly and remorselessly embarrassed by developments in Newtonian gravity, Einstein’s relativity, and quantum physics. Ever since Descartes (c. 1650) science has been in the schizoid position of believing nature is a mechanical system while discovering it is not. The paradox here is that science is right only if its archetypal worldview is wrong. But, despite what would seem to be a fatal flaw, the mechanical model has proved to be extraordinarily resilient. Under science’s vigilant, if puzzling, protection it has managed to hang around for hundreds of years, long enough to generate a series of spinoff difficulties, most notably, the “problems” of life, distant action, and consciousness. Prior to the spread of mechanist thinking in the West, none of these were considered particularly problematic. That’s not to say humanity understood them; we did not. But we were more or less comfortable with

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their obvious reality and felt no need to deny their existence or explain them away. However, for mechanized science all three are physical impossibilities. Because living creatures are self-propelling, they violate the physical principle of external causality. A rabbit is not a billiard ball; it appears to hop around under its own internal volition. Descartes solved this “problem” by declaring the rabbit to be an inanimate, mechanical automaton which moves only in response to external stimulation, just like a billiard ball. Similarly, distant causality over empty space (e.g., gravity, magnetism) violates contact-action doctrine. So “ether” was invoked— again by Descartes—to eliminate the existence of space; if there’s no empty space between objects, they are in physical contact by definition. Consciousness, in turn, contradicts the physics and metaphysics of dogmatic materialism, so it also had to go. Since Cartesian animals were simply robotic automatons, it followed they were devoid of consciousness. As for humans, we were permitted a special dispensation by excluding our immaterial minds from material nature—triggering the mind–body problem. After a decent interval had passed, mechanized science got rid of Descartes’ non-parsimonious dichotomy by reducing mind/consciousness to neuro-chemical events in the brain, restoring the hegemony of dogmatic materialism. Once the “ghost in the bodily machine” was exorcised, science settled into what it expected would be the comfortable study of ostensibly simple and observable matter. However, as described in the earlier chapter on quantum physics, even matter eventually became problematic: it proved to be elusive, counterintuitive, and mysterious—anything but simple and mechanical. Of course, none of these eliminative strategies really worked. Mechanism did not so much explain the inconvenient trinity, as explain them away. As it turns out, many of the most intriguing and puzzling features of nature—let’s add indeterminacy, contingency, instantaneity, uncertainty, and space-time warping to consciousness, life, and gapjumping causality—are deep mysteries in the mechanist framework. The mechanical clockwork model was originally adopted to “demystify” nature, and to some extent it met this goal by discovering that nature contained some mathematical regularities. But in the process it invented its own occult qualities (ether is the most conspicuous example) and developed the arrogant habit of simply denying the reality of whatever it could not explain. For Kepler and Newton, mechanism was still an “as if” clockwork model, but in the hands of Descartes, Galileo, Huygens, and Leibniz, it hardened into a reified metaphysics. They lost sight of the basic principle that models have to pass the reality test. Reality does not have to

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pass the model test. When it is required to do so, the model itself becomes a source of mystification. Unfortunately, mechanism’s overdetermined appeal—as manifesto, program, and preamble to a new way of knowing; and as theological and political cover for science—kept it going long enough to introduce a more or less permanent residue of muddle into scientific discourse. According to philosophers and historians of science such as Dijksterhuis and Whitehead, it’s not at all clear that after Newton’s Principia (1687) anyone really knew what mechanism meant anymore. 1 Over the intervening centuries it has devolved into an exercise in semantic sleight of hand; or, to put it more crudely, a grab bag of ready-to-wear vocabulary, images, and posturings. Examples of grab-bag mechanism show up even where we might least expect to find them. In his classic, Science and the Modern World, Whitehead argues strenuously for the superiority of evolutionary organism over mechanism as a model of nature. But even Whitehead falls back on mechanist vocabulary and imagery. Right in the thick of his case against mechanism, he begins four consecutive paragraphs with “Finding exactly the mechanism” … “the evolutionary mechanism” … “the machinery involved in the development of nature” … “the evolutionary machinery.” A somewhat less extreme example is found in an essay by Niels Bohr where he unequivocally declares that “quantum processes … are completely foreign to the mechanical conception of nature,” only to refer twice in the next four pages to “quantum mechanics”—without noting why he retains the vocabulary of mechanism while rejecting its physics. 2 A more recent example can be found in Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin’s case for an emergent (as opposed to reductionist) interpretation of life. He repeatedly refers to “the cell’s basic regulatory machinery” … “the machinery of life” … “the control machinery for converting genes to life.” He labels the ribosome a “little machine” and ATP synthase as a “little electric motor.” Unlike Whitehead and Bohr, however, Laughlin gives the impression of winking at the reader—and expecting the reader to wink back—especially when he closes his argument by observing that he “happens to like machines” and would rather “be classified with them than with a lot of people I know.” In any event, it’s clear which grab bag of images he prefers. 3 Three and a half centuries after Descartes reduced life to robotics, and ninety years after Whitehead lamented that the mechanist legacy left biology with “an insoluble problem of … life and organism,” little clockwork machines still peer out at us from living cells. Science can’t shake the habit. 4

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I’ll resist the temptation to grope around in the grab bag for semantic twists on the themes of consciousness and distant causality, except to remark on one trend. Although the term “ether” has been more or less officially taboo in physics for about a century, it now seems to be returning in a different guise. Space may no longer be filled with ether, but recent studies of gravitational “ripples” and energetic events inside vacuums are beginning to persuade some scientists that space-time is made out of some sort of ethereal “fabric.” 5 The new term is right on schedule: in the early 1700s Newton pushed ether to the sidelines; Thomas Young’s 1801 demonstration that light propagates in waves brought it back to stage center; in the early 1900s it was again sent out of the room, this time by Einstein; but the early 2000s may see another comeback, if not by ether, then by a close cousin. The history of science suggests that the idea of ether follows one hundred year cycles. Stay tuned: nature is no longer a machine, but science seems to have liked it better when it was.

The Psychology of Mechanism Machines and mechanical systems, of course, have no psychological makeup in their own right. So when I use the term “psychology” in this context, I mean the emotions, thoughts, and attitudes we humans bring to our encounter with a mechanized nature. Science has given us unprecedented cognitive and physical control over the natural world, but— because of a persistent mechanist undercurrent—this control has come at two great costs: first, an increasingly dysfunctional estrangement from nature and, I would argue, even from ourselves; and, second, a tendency to mistake “unprecedented” control for unlimited control. One path into the tangled psychology of mechanism is marked by the ideological face-off between reductive materialism and mind-matter dualism. This conflict forces humanity into a no-win situation: either we collaborate in our own reduction to mechanized matter in order to gain full entry into mechanized nature; or we split ourselves into admissible bodies and inadmissible minds, half in and half out of nature. The cost of the reductionist option is to disavow the authentic, undiluted reality of our most defining feature: human consciousness. We experience our own mental life as immaterial, internally caused, and more or less voluntary. Sometimes the course of thought is lucid and decisive, other times wandering, ambivalent, or whimsical. Often one’s own mind engages other minds in shared experience: conversation, argument, collaboration, playing games—and these other minds have no physical link to one’s own. Sometimes these other minds belong to people who

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aren’t even alive anymore, as when we attend a play by Shakespeare, or read a novel by Tolstoy (or even a treatise by Descartes). However you add it up, this mix of mental functions bears no resemblance to clockwork mechanism. Put succinctly, our minds as experienced are alien to our minds as reduced. The upshot is that in a thoroughly mechanized world, human beings are deeply estranged from themselves. 6 It should come as no surprise that most of us reach back to Descartes for a compromise choice: our mechanized bodies are in nature, but our minds are not. Unfortunately, the Cartesian compromise leads to what might be called “nature-as-object” doctrine: nature is that world of material objects over there, while we hybrid humans have some sort of extra-natural status over here. Nature is the “Other.” We are surrounded by it, even embodied by it, but it is not us. Descartes’ schizoid solution is a prescription for estrangement from nature. A second path into mechanist psychology raises the deceptively simple question: if nature is a mechanical system, and we are outside the system, then what are we? One can almost hear Francis Bacon shouting out the answer from the background: we are the ones who run the machinery. When classical science reconstructed nature into a vast assembly of interlocking gears, cogwheels, rods, pistons, and pumps, it effectively transformed dominion doctrine from a biblical injunction into a doable program. If the world is a mechanical workshop and we are the only mechanics in town, then it is ours to operate as we see fit. Although at first glance, dominion ideology and estrangement may seem an odd couple, they nicely merge into a continuous loop of feedforward and feedback effects. Because of our estrangement from nature—having no constraining sense of fellow feeling or intimacy with it—we have little hesitation about objectifying, controlling, and subduing it. Reciprocally, treating nature in this callous manner feeds back upon and amplifies attitudes of estrangement. Once the self affirming cycle gets rolling—as it did in the industrial revolution—it would feel increasingly “natural” to work nature the way a mechanic works his machine, limited only by the size of our ambition and the state of our technology, and not at all by psychological or moral compunction. This self sustaining negative cycle has enabled us to virtually reshape the world in our own image. Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen—the scientist who deciphered the chemical basis of stratospheric ozone holes— speculates that the planet is now shifting from the Holocene to the “Anthropocene” epoch, that is, to the “geology of mankind.” But, while probably true, this kind of conjecture only raises a further question: are we in control of the consequences of our humanized geology? The feedback

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we get from Nature is increasingly negative. Forces we have set in motion—climate change, habitat and species loss, contamination of air, water, and soil—are at or already beyond the threshold of spinning out of control. Our posture of grand mechanic is quickly dissolving into a grand illusion. 7 Another psychological consequence of mechanism takes us beyond human–nature relations into what Whitehead calls the “enfeeblement” of the Western mind. Mechanist determinism reduces reality to a series of inviolable laws—the laws of physics are to us moderns what the decrees of fate were to the ancient Greeks. 8 Yet, over against the inescapable necessity dictated by physical “law” is our countervailing tradition of human free will and personal responsibility. The dilemma is that our instrumental power in a mechanized world is predicated on a doctrine of absolute determinism; while our moral power is predicated on choice, purpose, and free will—that is, on indeterminism. This polarization has built a deep incoherence into Western humanity’s posture in the world. Our twin urges to power and goodness pull us in opposite directions. The dysfunctional psychology of mechanism—its mix of estrangement, enfeeblement, and delusional megalomania—keeps circling back on three principal themes of the mechanical model: determinism, external causality, and dogmatic materialism. This, despite the fact that physics has already falsified or deeply modified two of the three problematic themes: determinism has yielded to probabilism, and matter’s internal energetics have literally exploded externality doctrine from the inside out. The one holdout is dogmatic materialism. But the history of science strongly suggests that the bias toward material explanation began as a self imposed methodological discipline—it was a prophylactic against resorting to facile and/or “occult” (read immaterial) explanations of nature’s behavior. But in the course of time materialism hardened into an ontological principle. This is not the place for a full discussion of the merits and demerits of ontological materialism, but one or two points are in order. First, matter itself is no longer an island of clarity or guarantor of parsimonious explanation. Quantum uncertainty, wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, and discontinuous motion are the antithesis of clarity—if materialism has banished the “ghost” from the world machine, how is it that sub-atomic matter is so “spooky,” to borrow one of Einstein’s favorite adjectives for it? Second, at this point in its history, physical science should have the maturity to outgrow its matter fetish and accept the challenge of

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consciousness on its own terms, not as something that has to be explained away. Or, failing this, so called “hard” science should recuse itself on questions of immaterial reality. The “soft” social and behavioral sciences—psychology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology—are better equipped to meet the challenge posed by consciousness, meaning, and/or mind. Unfortunately, because even these soft disciplines aspire to full scientific legitimacy, they sometimes subscribe to a covert—or even overt—reductive materialist program. Again, we keep circling back on the same historical problem: mechanist science got its agenda on the table first, setting the gold standard for those disciplines which followed. The world-as-machine continues to hang on as science’s orthodox nature story. *

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What science needs is a new model that, first, has good fit with nature’s reality and, second, promotes harmonious fit between humanity and nature. The problem is not that good “double-fit” models don’t exist or that they are voiceless. It’s more a matter of deeply ingrained conservatism and hierarchy in the professional structure of science. But, given the emergent crisis in nature–human relations, it’s time for less estranging and deluded models to push their way to the front of the line. Let’s take a look at two alternatives, one focused on nature’s history, the other on nature’s ecology. These alternatives have merit partly because they repair the legacy of problems passed down by mechanism. But their primary value is that they stand at right angles to the old model, directing science’s attention to radically different features of nature. The historical model presents a dynamic image of nature as flowing through time, having a past, present, and future. The ecological model portrays nature as a complex, multivariate assembly of interrelated systems. Although these two models differ from each other in several ways, taken together—as the evolution of ecosystems through time—they offer a much more encompassing and relevant perspective than mechanism’s static focus on timeless and universal abstractions. They attempt to explain—not explain away—the teeming, varied, restless, and dynamic face nature presents to the observing eye. They attempt, in other words, to pass the reality test, rather than force nature to pass the model test. *

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The next chapter discusses three examples of the historical approach to nature: biological evolution, thermodynamic devolution, and Big-Bang cosmogenesis. What these three have in common is a revolutionary focus on the role played by time’s arrow in the natural world. As we have seen, relativity and quantum physics effectively refute the mechanistic worldview. But the three time-plotted sciences have value not so much in countering mechanism (although they do), as in alerting science to entirely different dimensions of nature. By embracing time’s arrow they tell a radically different nature story. The ecological model of nature, in turn, is covered in the last section of the book: Nature and Economics. While the ecological perspective—like quantum physics, evolution, and relativity—rejects the mechanistic worldview, for our purposes its major value is as an antidote to the orthodox “free-market,” growth model of economics. Our conventional economic model treats nature as if it were a wholly owned subsidiary of the human economy. The dissenting ecological model turns that view upside down: the human economy is a sub-system embedded within the Earth’s global ecosystem. When and if the economy violates the physical limits or ecological organization of the Earth system, it fails. And both we and the Earth suffer the consequences.

Endnotes Epigraph: A. N. Whitehead (1925), p. 86. 1

See E. J. Dijksterhuis (1961), p. 497; A. N. Whitehead (1925), p. 24. See A. N. Whitehead (1925), pp. 162-163; N. Bohr (1958), pp. 166-170 (italics added). 3 R. B. Laughlin (2005), pp. 159, 162, 165, 166, 170, 174, 175. 4 A. N. Whitehead (1925), p. 60. 5 See, for example, the title of string theorist Brian Greene’s best selling book, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004); also, Robert Laughlin devotes a chapter to “The Fabric of Space-Time” in his book, A Different Universe (2005), pp. 117-126, especially pp. 120-123. 6 This is not to say that our experience is proof of the mind’s immateriality. It’s only to say that the reductive formulation—mind is matter—is alien to our introspective and interpersonal experience of mind. Whether or not the mind actually reduces to matter is a separate and open question. That the question remains open, however, is largely traceable to the way we experience our own minds. If mechanized science had its way, the question would be closed. 2

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See P. Crutzen (2002), p. 23. Also, see J. Rockström et al. (2009), for the relationship between human activity and the thresholds of seven natural Earth processes. Three of the thresholds have already been crossed. 8 See A. N. Whitehead (1925), pp. 16, 110, 114.

CHAPTER 17 NATURE AS EVOLVING NARRATIVE

In its classical period science asked: what is nature?—and concluded it is a machine. The present tense of the question discouraged time-referenced answers. But modern science increasingly recognizes that, if we want to know what nature is, we have to figure out what it was, and how it got from then to now. This orientation offers a view of nature as an evolving narrative—an unfolding series of becomings rather than a fixed state of being. The modern consensus that nature moves through time and that time implies change has demonstrated, perhaps more than any other factor, the sterility of the mechanical model. Starting around 1800 the earth and life sciences—geology, paleontology, biology—began to raise serious questions about the age of the planet. Contrary to popular biblical interpretations, careful analysis of geological formations and fossil deposits suggested the Earth’s history reached back into a very remote past. For our purposes the most important consequence of these nineteenth century findings was to force a temporal dimension into respectable—although not yet mainstream—scientific discourse. If the natural world had a long history, as geological and paleontological research indicated, several spinoff questions quickly followed. How long? Millions of years? Billions? Is geological time static, cyclical, or does it have an arrow? And if planetary history is anything like human history—we can’t refight the Battle of Waterloo—wouldn’t it have fundamental and irreversible consequences for the emergent structure of the natural world? Finally, the sacrosanct question of strict determinism was reopened: if time permits change to happen, what causes change to happen? Is all change determinate and predictable, or do chance and probability play a major role? 1 All four questions—about time’s length, its arrow, qualitative change, the possible role of chance—tumbled over each other in a series of controversies involving many of the foremost scientific minds of the period. Once it got rolling, the idea of time posed a serious challenge to the shape and content of scientific law. Let’s take a brief look, first, at how

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science engaged the challenge; and, second, at two case studies of the historical model’s impact on modern cosmology and particle physics. Incidentally, the irony that science had to embrace time to escape the straightjacket of clockwork mechanism has not escaped me. But we don’t have to pursue that conundrum any further. The clock kept ticking away, but its time had run out. It was time for science to choose a new model of nature.

The Idea of Time Before the 1800s, most of mainstream science’s physical laws were time reversible. Newton’s iconic laws of motion, for example, took no position on time. They were indifferent to whether an object moved ahead into the future or back into the past. Outside physical law, of course, time had great significance: We all (Newton included) understood that the Roman Empire had existed many centuries in the past, that Alexander the Great was active even before that, and so on. But in science’s nature story, time played a relatively inconsequential role. That omission was gradually revised as geologists and geophysicists lowered science’s gaze from outer space to our home planet. Until about 1830 the influential “uniformitarian” school of geology supported two basic positions on Earth’s history: first, that it was enormously deep, extending over several hundreds of millions of years— way beyond any time span imagined in biblical exegesis. 2 And, second, that all this time moved in no particular direction: geological history was essentially cyclical, consisting of alternating periods of erosion, massive upthrust, more erosion, more upthrust, and so on. Before long, both claims come under attack, primarily from early researchers in what eventually came to be known as “thermodynamics.” The French mathematician Jean Fournier (1768-1830), for example, developed a theory of heat conduction in which temperature flows in only one direction over time: always from hot to cold, never the reverse. Unlike Newton’s laws of motion, Fournier’s law of heat conduction was time irreversible; and because it was based on empirical research and elegant mathematics, it conferred scientific respectability on time’s arrow. 3 The British geophysicist, William Hopkins (1793-1866), agreed with Fournier’s laws, but added a special wrinkle: although the larger trend of Earth’s history is toward gradual cooling, abundant geological evidence shows the big picture is marked by alternating ice ages and warm interglacial periods. Here we have an early hint of probabilism in the flow of time. Fournier’s law of heat conduction—at least on a planetary scale—

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is a probability statement. It does not permit us to predict that between any two points in time the Earth’s temperature will invariably move from hot to cold. It may or it may not. In other words, over long periods of time in complex systems, the rhythm of change is indeterminate—a serious blow to the mechanical model’s dogmatic determinism. Around 1860 uniformitarianism’s other position, regarding the great length of terrestrial history, was challenged by the eminent electromagnetic theorist, Lord Kelvin. Based on certain assumptions about the Earth’s progressive cooling process (which later turned out to be wrong), he calculated the planet’s age at between twenty million and two hundred million years. Although this estimate was long by biblical standards, it was much shorter than the uniformitarian schedule. What time was gaining in direction it seemed to be losing in length. But, countering Kelvin, Darwin’s Origin of Species (published in 1859) was sympathetic to the uniformitarian position on time’s great length. Darwin estimated that evolution by natural selection would require about 300 million years, leading to a faceoff between evolutionary biologists on one side and a bizarre coalition of physicists and biblical creationists on the other. Anti-evolution advocates, whose primary motivation was religious conviction, were only too happy to embrace Kelvin’s calculations as “scientific” support for their case. 4 Meanwhile, the Darwinians persevered, and eventually their position on Earth’s long history was vindicated by Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radioactivity in 1902. Among other things, radioactivity meant that the planet was not limited to the original supply of heat it captured when first formed (one of Kelvin’s erroneous assumptions). Throughout its history, Earth had been drawing upon additional sources of heat generated by its own radioactivity. This discovery completely changed the planet’s thermodynamic time frame, extending it to an estimated three billion years (and later, in 1953, to a recalculated figure of 4.5 billion years). Darwinian natural selection now had all the time it needed, alongside a growing body of supporting evidence from both the fossil record and Gregor Mendel’s rediscovered research on genetic transmission. By the turn of the century the historical model of nature was clearly in ascendancy while the mechanical model, already wounded by the failure to find ether, was about to meet its denouement—as described in our earlier discussions of ether and quantum physics. Although the two driving forces behind science’s adoption of irreversible time were thermodynamics and biological evolution, they present a paradox—they seem to pull nature’s history toward opposite

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conclusions. Let’s look briefly at each in turn and then try to resolve their differences.

Biological Evolution My purpose here is not to tell the evolutionary story according to the standard script (the branching tree of life, progressively upright apes, etc.), but to focus on how it applies the idea of time to biology. The first result of the new temporal framework was to pose life forms—that is, qualitatively different species—as emerging and receding historical events, not timeless, fixed essences. Reframing biology in temporal terms gave the field an internal dynamic it had not previously enjoyed. Species were no longer pigeonholed in rigid taxonomic systems, but distributed along time’s arrow as successive stages of emergent organization. For Darwin, the answers to the first three questions about time were clear: it is long, directional, and irreversible. Once biology was recast as a form of history, the overarching concern became: how does life get from its past to its present? What, in other words, drives the history of life? Darwin offered a three-factor answer: environment, spontaneous variation, and natural selection. Put simply, the natural environment surveys anatomical and behavioral variations in a given species and selects some as having more survival value than others. Those variations favorably selected—i.e., better suited to meet environmental demands—are more strongly represented in successive generations, becoming more typical of the species. Or, as the positively selected variations add up, they may force the emergence of a new species. Darwin had no empirical or theoretical difficulty with his environmental and natural selection factors: geology, geography, and climate obviously made for different environments which, in turn, imposed different selective pressures on their resident forms of plant and animal life. But his third factor—spontaneous biological variation—was problematic. He always suspected there might be some organic process underlying variation, but since the field of genetics was essentially unknown at the time, he had no clear idea of what the process might be. When Gregor Mendel’s elegant research on pea plants resurfaced after decades of neglect (and after Darwin’s death), the third factor fell into place: variation within and between species is caused by random recombination and mutation in genetic material, later identified as DNA. Because it occurs randomly, spontaneous variation is an indeterminate factor.

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DNA turns out to be an apt chemical for a historical account of nature. Today’s DNA is a “memory” of information stored in prior generations of DNA. In this sense it preserves the historical record. But when a segment of DNA spontaneously mutates, it “forgets” ancestral information, breaking a tiny historical link with the past. Many breaks can add up to a new species. In other words, genes have two functions: to replicate and mutate, to remember and forget. The first function makes for historical stability in life forms, the second lays the basis for change and, eventually, divergent evolution within and between life forms. Although genetic mutation is a fairly frequent occurrence, most of the time it is maladaptive and selected against—that’s one of the reasons why evolution generally proceeds at a slow pace; and why extinction of old species and evolution of new ones tend to speed up in the presence of severe environmental destabilizations, such as rapid climate change or catastrophic asteroid hits. A radically altered environment is more likely to favorably select otherwise dysfunctional mutations—precisely those that would be suppressed by a stable environment. In this sense the randomness and frequency of genetic mutation are biological assets. This brief discussion of the interplay among environment, natural selection, and genetic variation brings us to the fourth question raised by temporal accounts of nature: is change determinate or indeterminate? For Darwinian evolution, it’s a bit of both. The structure of the selecting environment is indeterminate. The simplest example would be the massive asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago—this was a radically contingent and unpredictable environmental event. Another somewhat subtler example is “co-evolution.” Some species—e.g., leafy green plants, coral, beavers, humans, grazing animals—radically reconstruct their physical and organic environment to the point where they begin to serve as selective forces in their own right, favoring themselves, coevolving species, and compatible features of their ecosystem. The point here is that environments themselves evolve alongside and under the influence of their resident species. This reciprocal co-evolution of species and environments is a process of trial and error and, for that reason, essentially indeterminate. Natural selection, in contrast, appears to be a determinate force. It bridges the gap between the two indeterminate factors—environmental and genetic variation—linking them into a lawful evolutionary process. The environment sets the adaptive terms for species’ survival, and natural selection enforces the terms, by favoring some genes over others. This three-way interaction portrays nature as an ongoing collaboration between

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determinate and indeterminate forces—again, very different from the lockstep cause-and-effect chains of classical mechanism.

Thermodynamic Devolution 5 As noted a few pages ago, biology and thermodynamics were partners in applying the idea of history to nature, but they pursued quite different paths. Jean Fournier’s early work on heat conduction was expanded by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888), and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) into the notorious Second Law of Thermodynamics. The “second law,” as it’s usually called, is a probability statement about the relationship among time, energy, heat, and physical order in nature. When applied on a cosmic scale it takes two strong positions: First, that as the universe ages, it tends to become more disorganized—that is, less structured and differentiated. And, second, that over time the universe cools down to a uniform temperature. Once all thermal energy converges on the same temperature, the universe will be reduced to a vast, unstructured, disordered sameness. Nature will be “condemned to a state of eternal rest,” in Helmholtz’ words. 6 But there’s a snag: empirical observation of cosmic evolution appears to confirm one position while disputing the other. Since the Big Bang the universe’s mean temperature has cooled down considerably from billions of billions of billions of degrees to about three degrees above absolute zero. But it has simultaneously become much more structured, differentiated, and organized. Starting from the essential simplicity of the Big Bang, the cosmos has differentiated into hundreds of billions of well structured, complex, and highly organized galaxies. In other words, on a cosmic scale structural evolution co-exists with thermal devolution. Is the second law at odds with itself? There seem to be three ways out of this dilemma. The second law may not apply to mega-scale, expanding systems like the universe—it may be restricted to isolated systems like the distribution of gas molecules in a sealed container. In this case, nature’s history would seem to be evolutionary. Another way out of the dilemma is to remind ourselves that the second law is a probability statement. Strictly speaking, it has to be right only over the long haul. In this scenario, evolution and devolution can coexist without violating the second law, provided devolution wins out in the end. The third resolution is to see the cosmic structuring process as a superficial mask for a more fundamental deconstructive process. In this

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view the evolution of structure consumes both more and higher quality energy than it generates. Thus, on balance, structural evolution is itself a force for disorder: the more it flourishes, the more energy it consumes. Eventually, when it runs out of external supplies of energy, it will have to devour itself as an energy source, leading ineluctably to Helmholtz’ “state of eternal rest.” Whichever scenario—evolution or devolution—turns out to be dominant in the end, both scenarios agree that the history of nature is long, directional, changing, and surprisingly (although not fully) indeterminate. In these several respects, the historical model opens science’s eyes and imagination to a world utterly foreign to the mechanical model. *

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None of this is to say that the mechanical model has been put out to pasture. Its emphasis on materialism, determinism, and contact action (however laboriously redefined) still sits at the center of scientific orthodoxy. Even biology assigns value to mechanically flavored explanations, ever vigilant about any reversion to “vitalism” or other heresies of its past. For science in general, natural processes that underlie cause-and-effect sequences are still routinely understood as “mechanisms.” For example, I earlier described genetic recombination and mutation as “organic processes”—which is exactly what they are. But science—stuck in an outdated lexical groove—reflexively refers to them as evolutionary “mechanisms.” Words matter: they shape the way we see and understand the world. Nevertheless, the emergent relationship between physics and biology—at least in modeling terms—is now a two-way street. The historical model of nature has insinuated itself into the mainstream in two ways: it provides an alternative big picture of nature, and offers a fresh approach to research and inquiry. Let’s look briefly at examples of each, one in Big Bang cosmology, the other in the particle physics of force. In both cases, physics—like biology—understands nature in terms of its past, not its “machinery.”

Big Bang Cosmology As we’ve already seen, the theme of change over time was an integral part of thermodynamic physics as early as the mid 1800s; but astronomy and physical cosmology continued to treat the universe as if it were in a permanently fixed and steady state. Something had to give, and eventually

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it did. In the early 1920s a Russian meteorologist, Alexander Friedmann, pointed out to Einstein that his general relativity equations suggested the universe was changing in size. Einstein responded by inserting a “cosmological constant” into the equations, ostensibly removing the problem. After all, everyone “knew” the cosmos was eternal, fixed, and constant. But in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble made a startling discovery that supported Friedmann: the light emitted by distant galaxies had a reddish hue—the Doppler effect—indicating they were not standing still, but moving away from Hubble’s telescope. The universe, in other words, was expanding in size. 7 When faced with this empirical evidence, Einstein returned to his original equations, calling the cosmological constant the greatest mistake of his life: he should have trusted the math. Friedmann, who did trust the math, had derived the first draft of Big Bang cosmology. The universe was no longer a vast collection of objects rotating endlessly through their preassigned locations in space. It had suddenly been rediscovered as an expanding and evolving narrative unfolding along time’s arrow. Cosmology had transformed into cosmogenesis. The empirical evidence for the big bang story starts with Hubble’s observations of the Doppler red shift, revealing a universe expanding outward in all directions. But expanding from what beginning? And through what intermediate stages, if any? Is the cosmos merely getting bigger or is it qualitatively evolving? To answer the question about beginnings, big bang theory mentally turns time’s arrow around, tracing it all the way back to its starting point. The conclusion: the universe must have begun as an infinitesimally small and densely packed “point” of simple “stuff” which exploded outward into the creation of reality itself. On the face of it, this claim would seem to be preposterous. But let’s suspend disbelief: if the primal bang is taken at face value, two empirical hypotheses follow. The first is that there would be a uniform cosmic background of microwave radiation left over from the original explosion. In the 1960s the microwave background was discovered—in fact, 15 billion years after the bang it still accounts for some of the snow we see on the screen of non-cable TV sets. It’s a dim echo of the original cosmic explosion. For big bang theory, it’s the lingering birth cry of reality. The second empirical hypothesis has two parts: (a) given the essential simplicity of the primordial stuff released by the big bang, there would be a preponderance of simple, light elements in the early structure of the universe. And (b) something had to happen between the bang and the present to account for the emergence of heavy elements which are,

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among other things, prerequisite to carbon-based life forms such as potatoes and humans. Both sides of this hypothesis have been supported by astronomical observation and analysis. First, about 98 percent of the atoms in the very early universe were of the light elements, hydrogen and helium. And, second, about three billion years after the bang, gassy clouds of these light atoms were clumped by gravity into stellar galaxies. The cores of the stars, in turn, were further compressed by gravity into extremely hot furnaces which cooked and fused the light elements into their heavier counterparts. In fact, stars still do this. 8 The evidence that stars bridge the gap between light and heavy elements also argues strongly for qualitative evolution. Without intervening stages of star-and-galaxy formation the cosmos would not have got from what it was to what it is. It is not merely a bigger version of its original simplicity: it is both bigger and more complex. It has expanded and evolved. As a further bonus, the available data strongly suggest that bigpicture cosmic evolution is consistent with small-picture evolution here on Earth. In this sense the historical model links cosmic and terrestrial nature into one continuous nature story, where the cosmos sets the stage and terms for chemical, geological, and biological evolution on our home planet. Earth is not a little cog in the big machine; it’s a small chapter in the big narrative. *

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The value of alternative scientific models is the attention they draw to natural phenomena that might otherwise go unnoticed. When viewed through the historical model, nature takes on a different shape, texture, and feel from what it has in the mechanist worldview. History opens the scientific imagination to new questions and, equally important, to fresh ways of asking old questions. Even particle physics has gotten on board.

The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Force Ever since James Clerk Maxwell mathematically unified magnetism and electricity into one electromagnetic force, physics has been intrigued by the prospect of theoretically unifying all natural forces into one. But the quest has been hindered by several obstacles. First, after Maxwell’s synthesis in 1865, there were only two known forces: electromagnetism and gravity. But twentieth century

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quantum physics soon uncovered another pair, the weak and strong nuclear forces. And more recently, physical cosmology may have identified a fifth force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. Theoretical unification seems to be playing catchup with the empirical multiplication of forces. A second problem is that the four well known forces (leaving aside the most recent discovery) have extremely different strengths. The strong nuclear force has 100 times the power of electromagnetism; which, in turn, is 1000 times stronger than the weak nuclear force; which itself is a staggering hundred million billion billion billion times stronger than gravity. 9 Further complicating the unification agenda, the several forces have qualitatively different functions. The strong and electromagnetic forces, for example, work opposite to each other. Electromagnetism repels objects that have the same electrical charge. That’s why the positive poles of two magnets push away from each other. In contrast, the positively charged protons making up the atomic nucleus do not repel each other because they are held together by the strong force. Without the strong force, atomic nuclei would fly apart, and the fundamental physical structure of nature would be radically different from what it is. If left to their own devices, electromagnetism and the strong force would dictate very different nature stories: how can particle physics hope to combine them into a unified account of force? Another complication is the disjuncture between a force’s strength and the distance over which it operates. Paradoxically, the strongest force works over the shortest distance: the extremely small space between protons packed into an atomic nucleus. Yet gravity, by far the weakest force, works over the greatest distances, holding together galaxies that are millions of light years in diameter. As it turns out, the distance variable may be the key to unification. One of the features of an expanding universe is that the older and bigger it gets, the greater the range of distances it incorporates: from the infinitesimally small gaps between nuclear protons to the vast spaces between galaxies. But, if we were to trace the history of the cosmos backward in time, it would get younger and smaller, and its distances would progressively (or retrogressively) converge on one “original length.” Would the several known forces similarly converge to one “original force” as the cosmos contracts to its original size? This is a historical question—and it now guides particle physics’ search for a grand unified theory (GUT) of force. The historical model has penetrated into particle physics—science’s sanctum sanctorum, its holy of holies.

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In the mid-1970s a group of American physicists theoretically (not empirically) united the three non-gravitational forces into one. They calculated that over extremely small distances (a hundredth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter) the forces seem to have the same strength. Their great differences in actually measured strength seem to be an artifact of using larger distance scales of measurement, such as those prevailing in nature today. The not so subtle implication of these calculations is that the physical answer to the unification question cannot be found in nature’s present, but only in its remote past, when distances were very, very tiny. Again, it’s a historical question. 10 The small distance scales which theoretically unify the nongravitational forces into one strength occurred around the time the universe was a thousandth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, or in standard mathematical terminology, 10-39 of a second old. At that time the temperature was about ten billion billion billion (1028 Kelvin) degrees above absolute zero. As the universe expanded, it cooled down dramatically. Between 1028 and 1015 degrees Kelvin, the strong nuclear force split off from the other two in strength and behavior. Below 1015 degrees Kelvin, the weak nuclear and electromagnetic forces diverged, yielding three non-gravitational forces whose strength and function differed markedly. It’s interesting to note that in this account, differences in strength—a quantitative measure—automatically translate into functional differences—a qualitative assessment. For science, changes in magnitude often lead to changes in kind. In any event, all of this happened before the cosmos was a hundredth of a second old. 11 A hundredth of a second old? Is it legitimate to link the notion of “history” to such a brief time frame? I suppose it depends on how much— or how little—time it takes for a great deal to happen. In the first few instants after the big bang, the universe effectively passed through at least three epochs. Changes on a scale that might take a billion years today, took only a fraction of a second to happen when the universe was exploding, expanding, cooling, and differentiating through the first nanoseconds of its existence. An enormous amount of consequential history was compressed into each of these fractional seconds. The safest answer to the historical question would seem to be that time, whether brief or long, has a presumptive claim on history. Without time there would be no such thing as history. The reader may also be wondering about gravity’s absence from the foregoing chronology. As usual, gravity is the odd man out. But, assisted by some geometric fine tunings, string theory claims to have nudged gravity into the theoretical unity of forces that may have existed at

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1028 degrees Kelvin. Unfortunately, empirically testing the four-as-one theory would require reconstructing the extreme thermal and energy conditions which existed immediately after the big bang; in its present state, technology does not (and may never) permit such experiments. Until and if it does, we have to rely on the historical model as our only access into the original unity and symmetry among forces. If capable technology were ever developed, it would be a “time machine”—not the kind that literally transports particle physicists back into the past, but one that recreates past conditions in the present. For the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of force our four questions about time do not yield uniformly simple answers. Does time have an arrow? Yes, it clearly does. But how long does the arrow fly? The answer to this question is not so clear. According to GUT the splitting of the one original force into four took only a hundredth of a second—a huge amount of change was packed into a very short time period. But the recent finding, admittedly preliminary, that there may be an emergent fifth force which accelerates cosmic expansion puts another twist on the question: when did this so called “dark force” split out of the original unity? Was it ever part of the original unity, or does its more recent arrival signal a new epoch in the cosmic history of force? The fifth force may stretch the arrow’s flight plan out to 15 billion years. The question about qualitative change has a pretty straightforward answer. When nature’s four well-known forces had one strength— assuming GUT to be correct—the force system looked the same from every viewpoint. You could rotate the system in mind or in observation, and it invariably had the same strength and function. In this sense, the system had what physics calls “symmetry.” But as the original force’s strength split into quantitatively different values because of quantitative changes in cosmic temperature and size, its original symmetry was “broken” and the divergent forces began to perform qualitatively different functions. The system no longer looked the same from every perspective. Each break in symmetry produced a new epoch in cosmic evolution. This is a textbook example of how differences in amount, if large enough, yield differences in kind. The final question about time is its likely relation to indeterminacy. It would take an all but religious commitment to determinist doctrine to believe that over 15 billion years of history, nothing accidental happened. To the extent that cosmogenesis is the envelope for a GUT of force, particle physics brushes uncomfortably close to indeterminacy. One of its leading practitioners, Howard Georgi, admits as much: “I think you have to regard cosmology as a historical science, like evolutionary biology …

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you’re trying to look at the present-day universe and extrapolate back, which is an interesting but dangerous thing to do, because there may have been accidents that had big effects.”12 Alongside the indeterminacies already charted in the quantum micro-world (see earlier chapter), a historically grounded GUT incorporates the additional uncertainties of cosmogenesis. The natural reality described by particle physics effectively becomes doubly indeterminate, leaving the determinist metaphysics of mechanism doubly refuted.

The Historical Model Unlike its mechanical counterpart, the historical model imposes relatively few restrictions on nature’s physical possibilities. All it requires is that nature be plotted along time’s arrow. In addition—based on the heuristic principle that “more is different”—the model anticipates (but does not require) that change will be qualitative. In this sense it is friendly to evolutionary accounts of nature like Darwinian biology and Big Bang cosmology. Finally, the model takes the entirely reasonable position that the longer time lasts, the greater the likelihood unexpected things will happen. Thus, it is fully open to the idea that over the course of fifteen billion years lots of accidents, contingencies, and/or surprises will have happened, some of them deeply consequential. In other words, the historical model easily incorporates indeterminacy as playing a decisive role in the formation of nature. Because it is considerably less constraining than the mechanist worldview, the historical model opens science’s eyes and imagination to a much richer and more varied nature story—a nature story that, to paraphrase Copernicus, is more “pleasing to the open mind” than is the mechanized version. 13 But this does not mean the model is inclusive to the point of shapelessness. It seems to draw the line at two places: against time-reversible laws, such as Newton’s laws of motion; and, more or less by default, in favor of science’s bedrock commitment to materialist physics and metaphysics. Let’s take a brief look at each constraint. As we noted earlier, Newton’s laws of motion are indifferent to time’s direction: it does not matter to them whether time moves forward or backward. But, while this may be true of the laws’ mathematics, it may not be true—even for Newton—of their real world physics. If there is no such thing as backward moving time in the real world, then for all practical purposes Newton’s laws are compatible with the historical model despite their theoretical commitment to time reversibility.

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On the other hand, if time reversibility were a real world possibility, then the historical model would have poor fit with Newton’s laws. This is more than an idle cautionary note. For example, in an earlier chapter we saw that Einstein’s relativity equations show that time stops at light speed. But mathematical symmetry would require that beyond light speed, time would start up again, except that it would be moving backward. In other words, at greater than light speed time’s arrow would point in the opposite direction from history’s arrow. Einstein got around the problem by insisting that nothing in real nature goes faster than light speed. For this reason, although time may be mathematically reversible, it would be physically irreversible. Yet, as we saw in the chapter on quantum physics, subatomic particles from the same source are capable of instantaneous behavioral coordination even though they may be on opposite sides of the universe. Science doesn’t know how this entangled behavior happens, but whatever it is, it happens a lot faster than light speed. In any event, the question of time’s direction remains open. The answer may be as simple as the distinction between mathematics and physics. Or it may not be, especially in the micro-world of quantum physics.

The Question of Immateriality The relationship between the historical model and materialism is also open to discussion. Unlike mechanism, the historical model does not have an inprinciple commitment to materialism—after all, machines are literally made of matter, but it’s not at all clear what time and history are made of. Yet in practice, the model seems to have made a knee-jerk accommodation to science’s traditional materialist bias. It’s important to recall that for political, theological, and epistemological reasons science long ago restricted itself to materialist explanations of the natural world. Since then, science’s great success has transformed what began as a self-imposed discipline into a kind of intellectual imperialism: hard science now defines everything as material. Going along with the materialist bias has become both a mark of scientific credibility and the path of least resistance, as much for the historical model as for any other aspect of scientific thought and practice. To be fair, it should be said that the historical model has its own reason for leaning toward a materialist worldview: for the greater part of nature’s 15 billion year history there was no such thing as consciousness, mind, or intelligence (leaving religious claims aside). Big history is overwhelmingly an account of matter’s history. But in the last few

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hundred million years, something fundamentally new seems to have emerged in nature: immaterial consciousness. And in the last million years or so on planet Earth (and perhaps elsewhere) consciousness has evolved into some form of intelligence. The question confronting science is as simple as it is difficult: how can big history, which is largely a history of matter, jump the qualitative gap between ancestral matter and its apparently immaterial progeny? It’s something like asking a color-blind profession to account for the emergence of color. Short of an enormous paradigm shift—which, incidentally, is not out of the question—science is probably not qualified for the job; but to its credit, it has at least recognized the problem and made a less-than-heroic attempt to solve it. Science’s half-hearted answer to the problem of consciousness goes something like this. As the organization of organic matter becomes increasingly complex, it seems to generate qualitatively new functions. Again, at some point the more-is-different principle switches on. Thus, highly complex assemblies of neural tissue—in this case the brain—have evolved to the point where they can generate or “secrete” consciousness. But since the brain is a material precondition to consciousness, science likes to argue that consciousness is “reducible” to brain, and thus itself nothing more than an exotic symptom of matter. Consciousness, in other words, has no independent reality in its own right. In the process of explaining consciousness (or mind) science explains it away. Strictly speaking, the historical model does not prescribe the reductive solution; it merely acquiesces in it. Most Darwinians (including Darwin, despite some hesitation) are reluctant to break mechanism’s taboo against immateriality, partly through conviction, partly through unwillingness to rock the boat. However, taken on its own terms, the historical model is neither for nor against the taboo. 14 But let’s not leave it at that. In the spirit of constructive speculation, I’d like to suggest two ways the historical model might circumvent the taboo. The first line of speculation begins with the uncontroversial observation that mental activity—whatever it may be—is a relatively recent evolutionary development. As already noted, there was a time when mental activity simply did not exist—just as there was a time when, for example, reptiles did not exist. But now reptiles exist. And so does mental activity. The only question is whether, like reptiles, the mind has its own independent reality. Since neurological complexity evolved prior to the immaterial mind, they would seem to have an ancestor-descendant relationship; again, just as amphibians are ancestral to descendant reptiles. But these time-

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plotted connections introduce a snag. To reductively argue that the descendant—consciousness—is “nothing more” than the ancestor—the material brain—would require that a more recent historical event be backwardly absorbed into a prior historical event. In a time-plotted system “something after” can never be “nothing more.” If so, it would be a clear violation of the exclusively forward motion of time’s arrow. “Something after” is necessarily “something else.” Recall that the one indispensable feature of a historical model is that time moves only and always forward. Another way of making the same point would be to step out of the evolutionary framework for a moment to examine an isolated instance of brain-mind coordination. For a brain to secrete or generate mental activity, there would have to be a temporal sequence, however brief: first, the brain acts, then the mind acts. If so, reduction would not occur simultaneously, but backward in time—again, incompatible with a timeirreversible model. These speculations about the bad fit between reduction doctrine and directional time are not intended to support or refute the historical model—like any model, it is only an “as if” statement about nature. But to the extent cosmic and biological evolution assume that time has one and only one direction, they trap reductionist explanations in an inconsistency. Science can’t have both evolution and reduction. The way out of the trap is to accept mind/consciousness as having its own incontestable reality, and get on with the task of explaining it rather than explaining it away. But it’s one thing to insist that science produce a positive explanation of consciousness as consciousness, and quite another to figure out how science as science might get the job done. Is there any scientifically respectable precedent to draw upon? Pursuing a second line of adventuresome speculation, I’d like to suggest there is such a precedent in the idea of symmetry and symmetry breaking. Recall our earlier discussion of the Grand Unified Theory of force. According to recent thinking in particle physics, force once existed in a state of perfect symmetry—that is, it had one unified strength and function. From whatever angle one approached it, whether observationally or mathematically, it was homogeneous. Then, very early in cosmic history a series of “symmetry breakings” occurred which yielded four (and possibly five) forces, each with its own separate strength and function: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, gravity, etc. This account of the emergence of several qualitatively distinct forces out of an original force symmetry might serve as a model for the emergence of immaterial out of material substance. Materialist doctrine is basically a statement about substance symmetry: however one observes,

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approaches, or thinks about nature—from whatever angle, perspective, or starting point—it has substance symmetry. Everything is made of matter or its energetic equivalent (according to Einstein’s equation E = mc2). Note that the overarching idea of matter as matter overrides second-order distinctions between, for example, protons and planets. Protons and planets, whatever their specific differences may be, participate indistinguishably in matter’s substance symmetry, as do all material things, however various and multiple they may be. At the fundamental level of substance every material thing is homogeneous. Modern science’s position on the universality of matter is its answer to the ancient Greek problem of the One and the Many. For modern science matter is the One, while protons, planets, polar bears, and so on, are the Many. The question then becomes: has matter ever had its substance symmetry broken? Or to refine the question somewhat: if force as force can break its symmetry into qualitatively different forces, can substance as substance break its symmetry into qualitatively different substances? Just as the several forces have common ancestry in one symmetrical force, might different substances have common ancestry in one symmetrical substance? If so, the co-existence of matter and mind in nature would not be a metaphysical or physical absurdity, no more so than the co-existence of gravity and electromagnetism. Mind and matter would just be two outcomes of broken substance symmetry. The next question asks: what might have caused the original substance symmetry to break? By way of answer, let’s circle back on the earlier point about matter increasing in complexity over the course of cosmic evolution. Let me present a hypothetical scenario consisting of three phases of decreasing substance symmetry: simple matter, informationalized matter, and dematerialized information. During the first phase—which begins with the big bang—aboriginal matter differentiates, assembles, and reassembles into increasingly complex structural and functional configurations. Eventually, some configurations acquire so advanced a level of complexity that they effectively “informationalize” themselves through the emergence (or generation) of DNA. At this critical juncture—which probably occurs about 11.5 billion years after the Big Bang—nature’s substance breaks symmetry into two kinds of matter: one inanimate and relatively simple, the other animate and informationalized. The co-existence of animate and inanimate matter would be the second phase in our hypothetical account of substance evolution. During this second phase, DNA-informed matter continues to evolve through a series of increasingly complex organic configurations— prokaryotes, eukaryotes, multicellular invertebrates, vertebrates, and so

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on—according to Darwin’s principle of natural selection. With the passage of time, another complexity threshold is approached as higher life forms evolve increasingly complex and adaptive central nervous systems. These prototype brains begin to generate rudimentary consciousness. The emergence of consciousness forces a second symmetry break where informationalized substance splits into two qualitatively different forms: one materialized—i.e., DNA—and the other dematerialized into pure consciousness. The dematerialization of information drives nature into the third phase of substance asymmetry, the phase we are in now. This scenario—admittedly hypothetical and speculative— approximates a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) of substance roughly modeled on particle physics’ Grand Unified Theory of force (without, of course, the mathematics). The GUT of force accounts for the emergence of various qualitatively distinct forces out of an original symmetry. Analogously, the hypothetical GUT of substance accounts for the breaking of nature’s original substance symmetry into its present variations: simple matter, informationalized matter (i.e., life), and dematerialized information (i.e., consciousness). In this scenario the three expressions of substance are not timelessly and categorically distinct essences in the Cartesian sense. Rather, the second and third types are each derived from their predecessors over the course of cosmic history. As such, the three presently co-existing forms of substance are both related and distinct: related because descended from a common ancestral symmetry, yet as distinct from each other as gravity is from electromagnetism. The only way original substance symmetry could be restored would be if cosmic history reversed itself and receded 3.5 billion years backward in time. For ease of presentation the timetable I’ve used here is biased toward the emergence of life and consciousness on Earth. But we have to stay open to the possibility that other forms of informationalized matter and dematerialized information may have emerged at different times and locations in cosmic history. If this were the case, it would not discredit the above scenario, but only multiply its dates and locations. In fact, the multiple appearance of life and consciousness in the cosmos would likely strengthen the case for substance symmetry breaking. Rather than being a one-time and local occurrence, it would have manifestations throughout the universe. If life and consciousness were to occur only once, they might be dismissed as some sort of anomaly, not quite a fundamental break in nature’s substance symmetry. But if they emerged in several—or even many—places, their role in cosmic evolution would be much more significant.

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In any event, the historical model seems to have at least three strong advantages over its mechanical counterpart. First, it introduces the idea of directional time into the scientific worldview, seeing nature as a dynamic and unfolding narrative. In this sense the model has good fit with all the empirical findings of geology, Big Bang cosmology, and biological evolution. Second, if applied boldly and imaginatively, it has potential for breaking science out of its materialist straightjacket. The model can assimilate consciousness into nature without reductively explaining it away, without invoking occult explanations, and without threatening the integrity of science as science. And, third, it has the merit of promoting sanity at the human–nature interface. Let’s turn to this third point now.

Human–Nature Relations and the Historical Model There are three intertwining threads that make the historical model friendly to human–nature relations. The first is the big bang account of cosmic history; the second is Darwin’s story of human evolution; and the third is the model’s adoption of the life cycle as its root metaphor. Darwin incorporates humanity into the evolutionary story as a late arriving but principal actor; and the trajectory of both cosmic and biological evolution is mapped on the familiar curve of a human life: birth, growth, decline, death. In this sense nature’s story is our story writ large. Nature is not that set of mechanical objects over there. On the contrary, it is this set of “biographies” right here: the biography of a human life, a species, a planet, the entire universe. The evolution story does not so much put us in nature as it puts nature in us. Nature is not the distant other, but the intimate, inner companion to our humanity, the stuff we’re made of. The carbon molecules generated by the core furnaces of stars are literally in us, as is the DNA of our primate ancestors. In the historical model nature’s face is only as far away as the nearest mirror. Darwin’s relocation of nature from the outside to the inside was nothing less than a tectonic shift in the landscape of discourse about human–nature relations. Prior to Darwin the question was: are we in nature? He turned it around to ask: is nature in us? His scrupulously collected data, when combined with subsequent research in genetics and paleontology, invites an affirmative answer to the revised question. Again, if the “other” is woven into our own chemical and biological makeup, how can it be considered an other? Depending on one’s commitment to human exceptionality, the Darwinian story could be taken as charming or repugnant, but it could hardly be read as an arm’s length account of nature.

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If anything, its message is to recognize the face in the mirror as the one we share with nature. There is also another way the historical model might restore a degree of sanity to the Western worldview. Recall our earlier discussion of what Whitehead calls the “enfeeblement” of the Western mind. He argues, rather persuasively, that our instrumental power in the world derives from science’s mechanically determinist view of nature, while our moral posture is grounded in a doctrine of free will, personal choice, and personal responsibility. The contest between these two incompatible claims enfeebles us: the implacable laws of physics refute the possibility of free moral choice, and vice versa. 15 But the historical model has generated evidence for the coexistence of two kinds of behavior in nature—one determinate and the other indeterminate—demonstrating that they are not mutually prohibitive alternatives. Science’s job is not to prefer one kind over the other, but to figure out which behaviors subscribe to which rules. Events like personal choice, random genetic combination, quantum uncertainty, etc., would seem to be governed by rules of indeterminacy; while mechanical causeand-effect sequences would follow determinate rules. In this two-factor system, personal choice would not be a deluded exception to a pervasively determinate nature, but an expression of natural indeterminacy—rescuing the Western mind, at least in part, from its “enfeeblement.” *

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As noted at the end of the previous chapter, science’s ecological model of nature is introduced and discussed in the following section of the book: Nature and Economics.

Endnotes 1

I use the year 1800 as an approximate turn-around point. In fact, the 1700s had already seen a fair amount of speculation about the role of time in nature, but the issue became a central scientific controversy in the 1800s. 2 After exegesis of relevant biblical passages, one prominent Anglican Archbishop concluded that creation occurred in 4004 B.C. See Toulmin (1990), p. 145. 3 For brief and readable treatments of this period, see H. Butterfield (1962), pp. 219-233; Holton and Brush (2001), chapts. 18, 22 (sections 22.9 and 22.10), 31 (section 31.1). On nature-as-history, also see Toulmin (1990), pp. 145-152. 4 See Holton and Brush (2001), pp. 258, 488.

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I borrow the term “devolution” from biology: as referring to retrograde evolution from complex to simple forms of organization. 6 Helmholtz is quoted by Holton and Brush (2001), p. 259. 7 For brief, readable treatments of this period in the history of scientific cosmology, see Greene (1999), pp. 81-82, 346-349; Holton and Brush (2001), pp. 495-496, 510-513. 8 For a brief overview of big bang cosmology, see Greene (1999), pp. 346-356. 9 For these figures, see Greene (1999), p. 175. 10 The American particle physicists are Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, Stephen Weinberg, and Sheldon Glashow. The facts and figures in this section are taken from B. Greene (1999), pp. 175-178, 352, 363-364. Greene’s (1999) book is well worth reading. 11 On the relation between magnitude and kind, see P. W. Anderson’s (1972) influential article, “More is Different,” pp. 393-396. 12 Georgi’s comment is taken from a 1993 interview with science writer John Horgan. See Horgan (1996), p. 104. 13 Copernicus’ actual phrase was “pleasing to the mind.” See S. Toulmin (1974), p. 525. 14 For Darwin’s hesitations on the issue of consciousness, see H. Gruber (1974), pp. 14, 41, 209, 214-217, 229-236. 15 See Whitehead (1925), pp. 16, 110, 114.

PART 4 ECONOMICS AND NATURE

Preface Our classical free-market, growth model of economics treats nature, first, as if it were a wholly owned subsidiary of the human economy; and, second, as if it were a cost-free and inexhaustible reserve of raw materials, services, and waste sinks. Classical economics reduces nature, in other words, to something it likes to call “natural capital.” The dissenting ecological model of economics turns this view upside down: the human economy is a subset of the human condition which, in turn, is a subset of the Earth process. In this view nature is not a part of the economy—it’s the other way around. The choice posed by the two models is pretty straightforward: nature as natural capital versus nature as reality itself. To get the choice right, homo economicus has to learn how to think the way nature thinks. Otherwise the whole system goes down. This is not an idle threat: the early—and not so early—signs of economic overshoot are all around us.

CHAPTER 18 NATURE AND ECONOMICS: FROM THE CLASSICAL TO THE ECOLOGICAL MODEL

It is trivial to ask what is the value of the atmosphere to humankind, or what is the value of rocks and soil infrastructure as support systems. Their value is infinite in total. —Robert Costanza Just as physical science uses models to guide its inquiry into nature, economics uses them to organize its understanding of human economic activity. For our purposes, two economic models are of particular interest: the orthodox, time-honored, “neoclassical” approach and the newly emergent, dissenting, “ecological” account. 1 The first model traces its origins and legitimacy to the classical economics of Adam Smith (1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823), and perceives the human economy as an autonomous and self-sustaining growth machine. In contemporary economic practice this overarching “growth model” (as it is sometimes called) is dominant, orthodox, and, for all practical purposes, reified. Its emphasis on continuous material growth as the key to human welfare is fundamental to almost all modern economic systems, from market based capitalism to centralized command-andcontrol communism. In contrast, the heterodox, ecological model does not see the human economy as autonomous, but as a subsystem nested in nature’s larger ecosystem. In this view, growth ideology was harmless enough in earlier historical periods when the earth’s natural services and resources were superabundant relative to the scale of human economic activity. But with the onset of industrialization—beginning in the 1800s and exploding into the present—the scales have shifted. Two centuries of exponential growth in human population, per capita consumption, industrial productivity, and technological prowess are now pushing the earth’s

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natural support systems over their functional thresholds. If the economy were to continue growing without limit, it would soon overwhelm and destroy its nest, and of course, itself. It would ultimately act against human welfare. There are many points of contention between the two models, but to get the argument started, let’s focus on three key notions: growth, limits, and nestedness. One way to portray these differences is to visualize two concentric circles. Let the outer circle represent the physical carrying capacity of the planet Earth. This circle cannot expand because it has a fixed and limited supply of physical resources, services, and waste sinks. Even renewable goods and services—e.g., regrowth of clear-cut forests—are restricted to the pace at which nature can regenerate them. The smaller, inner circle represents the human economy. It is nested inside the outer planetary circle for two simple reasons: the human species lives on Earth and nowhere else; and our material economy is necessarily grounded in physical nature. But as the economy grows, the smaller circle increases in size until its circumference threatens to cross over the fixed outer circle. When and if the crossover happens, a creeping catastrophe is set in motion: at this critical point the human economy begins to overshoot the Earth’s capacity to supply resources and absorb wastes. Of course, such a consequence would be unintended, but that would not make it less real or more palatable. As the Earth’s capacities are used up, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to shocks it may have absorbed in the past. This interaction between the two circles nicely portrays the ecological model, showing how it passes the test of common sense in at least three ways: first, as already noted, it assumes that a material economy must be grounded in physical reality. Second, it avoids digressions into science fiction scenarios such as human colonization of other planets. By any reasonable reckoning, our species and its economy are restricted to planet Earth for the foreseeable future. And third, it accounts for the accumulating evidence of depletion and degradation of our planet’s natural resources and services: water and air pollution, deforestation, stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, and so forth. Since the planet contains the economy, when the economy grows it cannot help but have an impact on the planet. And the bigger it grows, the bigger the impact. In contrast, the conventional orthodox model likes to argue that the human economy is an autonomous system; it is not nested. Since the outer circle—the planet—places limits on growth, and since continuous growth is presumed to be indispensable to human welfare, orthodox

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economics is forced to ignore the planet’s finite reality on both economic and humanitarian grounds. In this view, there is only one circle—the human economy—unencumbered by the inconvenience of physical limits. Its material resource input apparently comes from “nowhere,” its productivity and wealth circulate within its ever growing circle, and its waste by-products are dumped into some other “nowhere.” While this may sound like a caricature of neoclassical growth economics—and to some extent it is—it nevertheless captures its essential tenets: no limits, no nestedness, all growth. In their better moments, conventional economists assent to the obvious fact of the earth’s physical existence, but they dilute—and, paradoxically, inflate—its significance by tacitly assuming the planet to be an on-call, more or less inexhaustible inventory of resources and waste sinks. The economy, in other words, is not viewed as a subset of nature, but the other way around. Nature—in the form of “natural capital”—is subsumed by the economy. If nature were to be assigned a circle, it would be inside the economic circle. The tail wags the dog. Whenever the inexhaustible-supply assumption fails, it is backed up by another: that human ingenuity, technology and inventiveness have no limits—“human capital” can and does compensate for any lapses or limits in natural capital. In economics, this latter assumption is called the “substitutability” principle. The tail substitutes for the dog. Herman Daly, one of the founders of ecological economics, has rightly observed that the incompatibility between the two models “could not be more fundamental, more elementary, or more irreconcilable.” 2 *

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Before going any further, several frameworking points should be made. First, neither the foregoing nor the following is a general critique of mainstream economics. We will not get into issues like currency management, socialism vs. free-market capitalism, maldistribution of wealth, self-eliminating competition, the fetish of self interest, etc. The focus here is restricted to the impact of human economic activity on nature. Market function will come into the picture, but only as it distorts the economic value of nature’s goods and services. Second, as already evident, my approach to the economics of nature fits the format used throughout the book. The West’s orthodox economic model is juxtaposed with a heterodox counter-model drawn from our own tradition. Mainstream growth economics plays the first role, dissenting ecological economics the second. Without question, the

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mainstream model does exactly what it purports to do: it is enormously productive of growth. But the overarching concern here is growth at what cost, not only to nature, but because we are part of nature, ultimately to humanity. Which leads to the third point: both economic models are frankly anthropocentric in the sense that each construes nature as having instrumental rather than intrinsic value. From an economic perspective, nature’s worth derives entirely from its service to humanity, not to whales, coral reefs, or spotted owls. Even so, anthropocentrism comes in different colorations, which are perhaps best captured in biblical terms. Conventional economics subscribes to dominion doctrine: Nature’s purpose is to serve us, period. Ecological economics is a clear statement of stewardship doctrine: Nature’s purpose is to serve us, and it does this best when we use it wisely. If a functional connection were discovered between the health of coral reefs and human economic welfare, then by all means save the reefs. If not, the reefs have no distinctively economic validity. In this view, biocentric or ecocentric strategies—for example, conservation programs, pollution controls, setting aside nature preserves—are merely means to anthropocentric ends. But, to its credit, ecological economics spontaneously incorporates these “mere” means into the heart of its otherwise anthropocentric worldview. As we will see shortly, conventional economics does not, unless it is forced to. Fourth, an economic approach to nature–human relations requires clarity in what we mean by nature. Human economics is confined to the planet Earth, and the distinctively defining feature of terrestrial nature is life. Our interaction with nature on our home planet is unavoidably with our fellow life forms: animals, plants, insects, microbes, their chemical output, and the habitats, ecological systems, and physical infrastructure we share with them. Thus, any discussion of nature–human relations on earth requires much more emphasis on the viability of things and systems of things than on their simple physical existence. Fifth, the whole point of the dissenting ecological model is to shift the balance of discourse from business as usual to business as part of nature. Economics, in other words, is in the nature business. Thus, much of the argument (but certainly not all of it) is based on evidence generated by scientific research at the economy–nature interface. Finally, as in previous chapters, I feel no need to give the orthodox view an equal hearing. Its case is made and over-made by every mainstream economic institution in the developed world. In contrast, the heterodox ecological position, while not silent, needs and deserves all the voice it can get.

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Capital, Substitutability, and Externalities Prior to having the two models over for dinner, we should fill out the menu. So far it includes three items: limits, growth, and nestedness. But a few more would help to get the conversation underway. Let’s start with capital.

Capital For a modern economy to function, it needs three kinds of capital: human, manufactured, and natural. 3 Human capital is what people bring to the table: labor, knowledge, experience, ingenuity, and so forth. Manufactured capital, as the term suggests, covers things like factories, railroads, ships, communication systems, oil rigs, and computers. Sometimes, for the sake of simplicity, these two categories are subsumed under “human capital.” After all, factories and technology are creatures of human know-how, ingenuity, and labor. “Natural capital” is economic jargon for what the layperson would call nature. It includes three basic elements which, from a distinctively economic perspective, are arranged in a hierarchy of declining importance. At the top of the scale is nature’s stock of raw materials, such as timber, coal, oil, iron ore, fish, water, chemicals, etc. These are the parts of nature that serve as “input” into the economy. Somewhat lower on the scale are nature’s waste sinks: for example, landfills, toxic dumps, bodies of water, the stratosphere (for chlorofluorocarbons), and the troposphere (for greenhouse gases). These are where the economy “throws away” obsolete products (used rubber tires, last year’s computers, etc.) and waste byproducts (toxins, slag, emissions, effluents, plastics, etc.). Note that water—among other parts of nature—functions as both input resource and output waste sink. This dual function allows water and industrial pollutants to have regular reunions in wells, irrigation systems, filet of tuna, and kitchen faucets. Waste absorption, of course, is one of nature’s most indispensable services. But at the bottom of the natural capital scale is another cluster of equally important services that are, for all practical purposes, off the economy’s radar screen. These include photosynthesis, pollination, flood and erosion control, soil formation, climate regulation, and the great nutrient, hydrological, and carbon cycles of nature. For conventional economics, these services are simply assumed to be hovering somewhere in the background, hopefully in good working order. They don’t have any upfront status or value as natural capital: both they and their malfunctions

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are considered economic “externalities” (more on this below). Yet even from a narrowly focused economic perspective, this posture is incomprehensible. Imagine, for example, how the agricultural industry would feed humanity in the absence of photosynthesis, pollination, climate regulation, soil formation, and the hydrological cycle. Simple common sense would argue that any major economic model—or even a minor one—would show explicit concern for the proper function of these natural services. In any event, conventional economics treats natural capital in three ways: it systematically and tirelessly targets natural resources; waste sinks are sometimes deliberately set aside for the purpose of dumping waste, but often are targets of opportunity; and most of nature’s other macro-services are external to the system. Human–nature relations reduce to the interaction between “human capital” and a truncated version of “natural capital.” As we’ll see below, ecological economics presents a very different profile.

Substitutability vs. Complementarity One of the peculiarities of conventional economics is its position that human/manufactured capital can “substitute” for natural capital when necessary or desirable. Substitution within natural capital is unproblematic. For example, if wood isn’t available, a house can be built of brick. And if brick isn’t available, the builder can use adobe or corrugated metal or cement or thatch—these are substitutions of one form of natural capital for another. But any systematic attempt to substitute between the two types of capital runs into problems. As ecological economist Herman Daly reminds us, “One cannot build the same wooden house with half the timber no matter how many saws and carpenters one tries to substitute.” 4 Even if we could substitute saws for wood, the saws themselves are made of natural capital. In fact and in principle, natural and human/manufactured capital are complementary rather than substitutable. Human know-how and technology are what the economy imposes on natural capital to transform it into marketable products. Then why does conventional economics make substitutability claims? There seem to be three reasons. First, the notion is a clumsy way of capturing the efficiencies associated with some new technologies. For example, if a newly designed car can go twice the distance on half the gasoline, then its design effectively “substitutes” for 75% of the original amount of fuel. But it still needs the remaining 25%—or some other source of energy—to run. The car’s manufactured design can save or

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squander energy, but it cannot become energy. Thus, technical design and natural capital are complementary, not substitutable. A second reason is that, without the substitutability principle, conventional economics would be faced with the prospect of limits to growth. For example, suppose nature’s waste sinks were overloaded by unrelenting industrial expansion, forcing a slowdown or reversal of growth. Mainstream economics is all but compelled to believe that human ingenuity would contrive some substitute process for managing waste. Once the new technology is in place—for example, seeding the Earth with genetically engineered, toxin-eating bacteria—nature’s sputtering waste absorption system could be bypassed and economic growth could proceed. The same act of faith would apply to declining reserves of oil, tropical deforestation, climate change, and so on. Wherever natural capital fails, human capital stands ready to fill the growth gap. Nevertheless, even while genuflecting to human genius, we should remind ourselves that genes and bacteria are forms of natural capital. A third reason, and here I sense the same bias that infects almost all our orthodox nature narratives—religious, scientific, etc.—is that conventional economics asserts humanity’s fundamental independence of nature. Through his good works homo economicus (a.k.a. human capital) will one day transcend natural capital. For those too caught up in this fantasy, the so-called “information economy” is seen as a major step toward decoupling economics from reliance on the material world. Again, Herman Daly brings the Silicon Valley crowd down to earth: “We can surely eat lower on the food chain, but we cannot eat recipes!” 5

Externalities A few paragraphs ago, I used the term “externality” to describe conventional economics’ view of nature’s services. Like any discipline or profession, economics tries to draw a boundary around its purview: no profession can deal with everything. In fact, the major point of the earlier two-concentric-circles diagram was to show what and how much the conventional economic model excludes from its agenda. A concrete, small-scale example of an externality is the air pollution generated by a smoke-stack factory. The people who live in the surrounding community incur higher medical costs and health insurance premiums because of a greater incidence of respiratory illness. The foul air and accumulated soot also lower their property values relative to similar housing stock elsewhere. In this scenario, a third party—the local

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community—is penalized without compensation by the primary economic actors: the factory and those who consume its products. The economic rationale behind this unfair but commonplace arrangement is to keep environmentally driven health and property costs “external” to the cost of operating the factory. If they were “internalized” into the company’s balance sheet, they would threaten profit margins and force higher prices on consumers. The air pollution, in other words, has no distinctively economic reality. If you were to look at the world through a strictly economic lens, air pollution (among other unpleasant externalities) would not be part of the view. Of course, conventional economics is not so obtuse as to think air pollution really doesn’t exist—it simply unloads the problem into the political arena. For government—especially if it is accountable to the local electorate—public health is not an externality. So it may impose pollution taxes on the offending company, require the installation of scrubber technology on its smoke stacks, and so forth. Once this happens, conventional economics quickly gets back into the picture: it then preaches the merits of cost effective technology and proposes that tax liabilities be diluted by passing them on to consumers. Its calculations also send a message back to government: higher prices make the company less competitive in the marketplace, leading to loss of jobs or, in the worst case scenario, factory closure—all of which are politically undesirable consequences. And so it goes in a complicated spiral of regulatory and market interactions called the “mixed” economy.6 The basic problem here is the entering assumption that nature’s costs and services are external to economic activity. Conventional economics long ago bought into the myth that these services are essentially “free.” Since they cost nothing, there is no reason to factor them into the costs of production. This enables markets to set artificially low prices which, in turn, encourage consumption which, in its turn, promotes growth. Of course, on the underside of economic growth, nature’s stock of goods and services becomes scarcer, driving nature’s real but hidden costs ever higher until they burst through the surface of wishful thinking. The conventional economy stands firmly on a hallow foundation of its own making. All this could have been prevented by adopting nature as an internality in the first place. But early in its lineage, mainstream economics faced a natural world whose proportions were superabundant relative to the small human economy. So it felt no pressing reason to internalize nature’s costs at the time. Now, however, the reasons for internalization are as abundant as nature once was.

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The factory example above is an instance of “microeconomics.” As the term suggests, microeconomics deals with relatively small, discrete entities such as a particular industry, factory, or even household. The complex process of externalizing versus internalizing environmentally driven costs—such as those imposed by local air pollution—is an ongoing area of research and practice in microeconomics. Driven by evolving political and social awareness, environmental costs are sporadically internalized; in the absence of such awareness, however, they are presumed to be external. There is no in principle commitment to internalization. Even so, microeconomics seems to have made a partial and pragmatic adjustment to the real world on this issue. In contrast, economic practice on a national or trans-national scale—so called “macroeconomics”—still strongly subscribes to externality doctrine. But there seems to be a modest degree of fresh thinking even on this front. A recent example is found in the influential Stern Review, released in late 2006. Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of its analysis is the claim that climate change is so pervasive, long term, and potentially irreversible that it, first, demands internalization and, second, can be adequately internalized only on a macroeconomic scale. In Nicholas Stern’s view, the international economy externalizes the mounting cost of global warming at its own peril. Immediate corrective action will likely cost one percent of global GDP annually. * In contrast, inaction will reduce global GDP by no less than 5% each year, “now and forever.” Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, puts it this way: “Economists describe human-induced climate change as an ‘externality’ and the climate as a ‘public good.’ Those who create greenhouse gas emissions … do not have to pay for the costs of climate change that results from their contribution to the accumulation of those gases in the atmosphere. But climate change has a number of features that together distinguish it from other externalities. It is global in its causes and consequences; the impacts of climate change are persistent and develop over the long run; there are uncertainties that prevent precise quantification of the economic impacts; and there is a serious risk of major, irreversible change with non-marginal economic effects.” 7

*

GDP (gross domestic product) is the dollar value of all goods and services produced by a nation in a year. Global GDP is the same calculation applied to the world’s economy.

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Of course, we shouldn’t take the Stern Review, or other similar documents, for more than they are. 8 At the time of writing, they are merely carefully reasoned, evidence-based proposals for action. They have no legal force. But they do have the authority of progressive economic thinking. Moreover, their emphasis on internalization of environmental costs is a step in the direction of ecological economics. If the orthodox model were to internalize the full range of natural externalities, it would effectively dissolve into a version of ecological economics; although it would do so the long way around. In contrast to the tedious contortions of orthodox economics, the position of ecological economics on these matters is straightforward and can be summarized rather briefly: x x x

x

x

Natural capital consists of the full range of nature’s services and resources. It is not restricted to raw material input and waste sink output. Nature’s services have distinctively economic standing and value: they are not externalities, nor are they free. Natural ecosystems are networks of interconnection and interaction. The rule of thumb is that every action or event in nature ripples out into a web of secondary and tertiary outcomes. No interventions are isolable, and unanticipated consequences are commonplace. Human economics is no exception to the previous point: it is fully integrated into nature’s network of ecosystems. Although economics is—perhaps necessarily—anthropocentric, it does not follow that we humans transcend nature’s limits or that we can “substitute” for natural capital. In fact, a strong case could be made for the hypothesis that, since we are part of nature, “human capital” is merely a marvellous and powerful subset of “natural capital.” Since human welfare is intertwined with nature’s welfare, self-interest dictates that we think out the consequences—both intended and unintended—of every economic intervention into nature. And since we can’t anticipate every possible outcome of our economic behavior, we should leave adequate margin for error.

Admittedly, this is no more than a list of general principles: the devil is in the details. Let’s get busy chasing the devil.

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The Prima Facie Validity of Ecological Economics One of the strongest arguments for the ecological model is its prima facie validity. For example, more than half the world’s workers depend directly on nature for their livelihoods: farmers, loggers, herders, fishermen, and those who work directly with forest products, leather goods, cotton processing, food processing, and so on. These carriers of water and hewers of wood are far from the leading edge in modern industrial and information economies, so they are easily overlooked. But their numbers are a reminder that for most of humanity, economic well-being is immediately, necessarily, and physically grounded in the state of nature. For them, there is no economics other than ecological economics. Moreover, what croplands, forests, rangelands, fisheries, etc., have in common is that they are all intrinsically biological systems: that is, they are alive. If they get sick or die, so do the human economies they support. 9 A second example of prima facie validity is the world’s growing reliance on what economists call “virtual water.” Because it takes about a thousand tons of water to produce one ton of wheat, it makes sense for water-poor countries to import wheat. This virtual water (i.e., wheat) is poured into a grain “pipeline” to move from one part of the world to another. It’s an efficient way of using someone else’s water to save one’s own. The economics of such trade arrangements assume geographic discrepancies in availability of natural resources, in this case water— clearly illustrating how economics is grounded in nature. A general but often violated rule of thumb in the modern world is that about 70% of water is devoted to agriculture, 20% to industry, and 10% to household use. Importing grain releases a substantial fraction of the 70% for the other two uses, which can be very demanding in countries, like China, that are rapidly industrializing and urbanizing. 10 But the dual practice of importing grain and diverting water from farmland does great damage to a nation’s agricultural self-sufficiency: it is no longer capable of feeding its own population. While the trade-off makes economic sense according to the conventional model, it may be unsustainable on other grounds. As noted by environmental economist Lester Brown, the flip side of the virtual water scenario is that grain-rich countries (like the United States) are overpumping their aquifers, rivers, and lakes for export purposes in the same time frame as water-poor nations are overpumping to meet domestic industrial and household demand. 11 In this scenario the resulting impact of water scarcity may not be gradually spread out over time and geography, but for all practical purposes may be sudden and global. The nonrenewable aquifers in the

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United States and China, for example, are running down at the same time. 12 Less water means less food; and less water globally means less food almost everywhere, with only a few breadbasket regions struggling to take up the slack as the cost of food gets out of reach. With population growth—and it is increasing most in the world’s most water problematic regions—the outcome of this crunch could be catastrophic. And none of this factors in the unpredictable patterns of drought being ushered in by climate change, nor the conversion of huge tracts of arable land from food to biofuel production. China is not the only problematic area. Arid zones like North Africa and the Middle East would suffer widespread hunger if they did not import enormous amounts of grain, i.e., virtual water. As Brown puts it, the farm products imported into this part of the world in 2005 “equalled the annual flow of the Nile River at Aswan. In effect, the region’s water deficit can be thought of as another Nile flowing into the region in the form of imported grain.” 13 Water, of course, is only one part of the food equation. Another main factor is arable land, and, as noted a moment ago, land availability is facing its own crisis. The demonstrated connection between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, as well as the political instability of many oil producing regions, has triggered a run on biofuel (e.g., ethanol) as an alternative, renewable, and accessible form of energy. But biofuels—in addition to the excessive emissions released in growing and refining them—place an additional, if unintended, burden on land use. Arable land is under worldwide pressure to produce the four Fs: human food, livestock and fish farm feed, textile fibre, and now, bio-fuel. With all four competing for a limited supply of global farmland, at least two problems follow: More forest will be cut down and cleared for agricultural purposes, resulting in the usual consequences: flooding, soil erosion, species loss, reduced nutrient cycling, and decreasing storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). This is already happening in Brazil, a major producer and consumer of ethanol. A second and perhaps more immediately desperate problem is that the profitability of biofuel crops almost certainly will drive up the cost of food. What incentive would agribusiness have to grow food when biofuel beckons? The raw economics of supply and demand require that for our cars to run on full, many stomachs will have to run on empty. The only way around this dilemma is to develop other sources of clean and abundant energy or double the size of the planet. As we’ll see below, this latter suggestion is only partly facetious.

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The Burden of Proof Illustrations such as the foregoing could be multiplied, and as a whole they would seem to demonstrate that the dominant growth model lacks the face validity and explanatory power of its ecological alternative. 14 Over historical time, the human footprint has grown exponentially from less to more occupation, domestication, control, exploitation, and pollution of the natural world. But there’s a catch: because this track record of almost uninterrupted growth is so long term, well established, and ostensibly successful, it’s natural to believe it embodies a deep wisdom; and that it can, should, and will continue indefinitely, even perpetually. The burden of proof in this historical scenario would seem to be on those who now argue for necessary limits to the human footprint. The conventional growth model offers its two basic assumptions as an unbeatable team: first, that nature has an inexhaustible capacity for absorbing wastes and supplying resources as needed—it always has and always will. And, second, that human ingenuity and technology will substitute for any future deficits in natural capital, just as they have in the past. When gathering wild berries and hunting deer proved insufficient, we invented horticulture and small-scale herding. And when that strategy fell short, we expanded to large-scale agriculture and animal domestication. And when the sun’s daily supply of solar radiation proved irrelevant to the needs of industrialization, we dug stored sources of energy out of the earth to run our newly invented machines and factories. There’s a kind of manifest destiny to the human footprint. We believe ourselves to be created in the image of God, and we’ve lived up to that image. Why stop now? To counter this line of argument, the new ecological economics has to present an evidence based case for four claims: first, that the human economy is overshooting the planet’s fundamental regenerative and absorptive capacities. Second, that human or manufactured capital cannot adequately substitute for the loss or degradation of nature’s presumably “free” services without incurring prohibitive costs. Third, that nature’s services have demonstrable economic value. Contrary to the claims of mainstream economists, nature’s services are neither free nor external to economic activity. And fourth, that the growth model’s apparent success at generating wealth is illusory to the extent its true costs are not transparently reflected in market prices. Let’s look at each claim in turn. *

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Although the ecological model has been around since the first human being dug a tasty tuber out of the soil, it is a relative newcomer in at least two respects: it became a professionally organized and selfidentified branch of economics only as recently as the mid-1980s; and its research base is only now coming into its own. Note, for example, that the empirical studies cited below date entirely from the 1990s and 2000s. But this shouldn’t be taken as a mark of professional immaturity: ecological economic research has already produced some stunning and persuasive findings. Even so, it’s a work in progress; and were this overview to be rewritten twenty years from now, it would very likely draw upon a more evolved research base. In the meantime, my apologies to the reader if some of the discussion suffers from a hot-off-the-press tone. Let’s devote the rest of this chapter to the first claim; then make the case for the other three claims in the next chapter.

The First Claim: Human Economic Overshoot As a public policy issue, economic overshoot is complex and controversial; but as an ecological concept, it’s quite straightforward. If, for example, nature replenishes farmland in half the time it takes humans to complete an annual crop cycle, then we are farming well within nature’s carrying capacity. If, in contrast, nature requires 13 months to replenish the land, we have overshot nature’s limits by a month. In this scenario, with each passing year nature falls another month behind, the land is progressively degraded, and the economic value of the crop declines. Farmers have always known this: it’s why they use fertilizer and periodically let land lie fallow. These practices give nature a chance to catch up. Another example: logging a forest at half its regeneration rate does not overtax the services provided by the forest. These services include, among others, soil formation, watershed protection, biodiversity habitat, carbon absorption, oxygen release, and nutrient cycling. In this undershoot scenario, we would be treating the forest as if it were only half a forest, leaving lots of margin for error. But if the logging rate were accelerated to the point where it exactly matched the regeneration rate, we would be at the threshold of overuse. Strictly speaking this pattern would be sustainable, but there would be no margin for error. In this threshold scenario we would be treating the one forest as if it were one forest, no more, no less. A third scenario gets us into overshoot. Suppose we accelerate the pace of logging by, let’s say, another 50%, effectively treating the one forest as if it were one and a half forests. In this case, there would be

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negative margin for error; that is, error would be built right into the system. The result would be sharply degraded forest services: soil erosion, diminished flood control, drop-off in carbon sequestration, disrupted nutrient cycling, and, not incidentally, no more wood and no more profits. Note that the emphasis in the three forest scenarios is on regenerative capacity, not timber stock. There are two reasons for this focus. First, in strictly economic terms, the forest is worth more as an ongoing provider of wood and services than as a one-time clearcut. Once clearcut, the forest yields no income for decades. Second, the focus on nature’s regenerative timetable discloses a basic weakness in the conventional wisdom about renewable vs. nonrenewable resources. Take coal, for example. It is nonrenewable, thus scarce in principle; yet so abundant in fact that humanity probably will have as much coal as it wants for several centuries to come. But the large scale burning of a carbonintense fuel like coal for even one more century will severely degrade and deplete the Earth’s capacity for providing renewable services and resources. In other words, we are in no immediate danger of overshooting the Earth’s fixed supply of coal—the real danger to humanity will come when and if coal use overshoots the planet’s ability to renew its biosystem services. Paradoxically, of the two types of natural capital, renewables may be degraded at a more rapid rate than nonrenewables are depleted. Let’s push the logging illustration a step further, and suppose the forest to be a stand-in for the entire Earth: which of the economic scenarios—undershoot, threshold, or overshoot—best describes our planet-wide impact on nature’s regenerative capacity? Several years ago an international team of economists and scientists tried to answer this question by surveying 40 years of economic data in six major categories of human–nature interaction: growing crops, grazing animals, harvesting timber, fishing, burning fossil fuels, and converting raw land to housing, transport, and industry. Taken together, the six categories approximate human economic intervention on a global scale. 15 Deliberately adopting conservative assumptions about how the data should be analyzed, the researchers determined that in 1961, human demand was at about 70% of nature’s regenerative capacity. But by the early 1980s, it was at 100%, that is, in the threshold zone. By 1999, human consumption had grown to 120% of the planet’s biospheric capacity. This was a clear case of overshoot: in the authors’ words, “ … it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to regenerate what humanity used in 1999.” In 2002, when the study was published, the lead author estimated the overshoot had risen another 5 percentage points to 125%. These findings indicate that, by the onset of the 21st century, it took the planet

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about 15 months to regenerate the services humanity consumes in 12 months. Nature, in other words, is playing a losing game of catch-up, falling another 5 to 6 days behind with each passing year and piling up a growing debt against the future. This is the downside of the “growth” model. The study also found great variation in the size of national footprints, which, for illustrative purposes, were converted to hectares. The average American’s footprint, for example, covered 9.7 hectares (24 acres). The figures for Germany and Great Britain were 4.7 and 5.4 hectares, respectively, while the global average was 2.3 hectares per person. If the average human being were to consume, let’s say, at the German level, it would double the size of the overall human footprint on earth. Even the more modest levels of consumption in the developed world, such as Germany’s, set an unsustainable standard if generalized to the rest of humanity. By way of follow-up, the World Wildlife Fund estimates that in 2005, humanity consumed the equivalent of 1.3 earths; and predicted that, if we continued to conduct business as usual, the figure would rise to two earths by the mid-2030s. Also, the average human footprint in 2005 had risen to about 2.6 hectares, indicating it took only 3 years to produce a 13% increase (over 2002) in per capita global consumption. 16 More recently, another investigation of the overshoot problem took a somewhat different tack, but yielded equally disturbing results. 17 Johan Rockström and a team of environmental scientists divided nature into seven measurable Earth-system processes, such as the nitrogen cycle, climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc. They then calculated thresholds for each process, which if crossed by humanity, would seriously threaten the earth’s capacity for supporting human society. The thresholds, in other words, define the boundaries of what the authors call a “safe operating space” for human economic activity. Unfortunately, the findings show that we have already crossed three limiting boundaries: climate change by 11%, removing nitrogen from the atmosphere by 246%, and biodiversity loss by 900%. Yes, nine hundred percent, and that’s a conservative estimate. In contrast, we are still on the safe side of the other four processes, but inching toward some thresholds. For example, we are only 5% away from overshooting the oceanic threshold for acidification; but a somewhat safer 35% short of overconsuming Earth’s fresh water supply. The study also warns us that these Earth processes are interdependent. So, for example, to the extent that climate change destabilizes ecosystems, it contributes to biodiversity loss. Biodiversity, in

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turn, is one of nature’s most important guarantors of ecosystem resilience. Thus, its loss leads to ecosystem loss, and vice versa. The three-way relationship among climate change, biodiversity, and ecosystem integrity shows how interlocking nature’s various processes are. Trouble in one process can spill over, often quite abruptly, into other processes. At some future point in the century our children and grandchildren will look back on this sorry record and ask: what were we thinking? There are probably two answers to this question. First, we were not thinking. Much of our economic behavior at the nature–human interface is an unreflective playing out of the orthodox nature stories we’ve inherited from 3,000 years of Judeo-Greco-Christian-EuropeanScientific tradition. The Earth is given to us to use as we wish; we have dominion over it; created in God’s image, we are exempt from its natural cycles and rhythms; it is not our true home; it’s a vast collection of isolable mechanisms and inert objects; it is the “other.” And so on. These tacitly held convictions are a substitute for thinking. The second answer is that we were thinking, but in terms of the conventional economic model. We were not thinking in ecological terms, where a basic rule of thumb is that it’s impossible to do one and only one thing in our encounters with nature. We may intend to do only one thing, but the multivariate, interlocking structure of nature forbids it: everything is entangled with everything else. The consequences of our economic behavior, in other words, routinely overshoot our intentions. The cure for this kind of overshoot is to always think several consequences ahead, i.e., to think ecologically. In the first overshoot study reviewed above, one of the categories—fishing—nicely exemplifies how ecological ignorance can transform short-sighted business as usual into consequences way beyond anything we may have intended. Let’s look at three empirical studies that trace a full circle from one species of shellfish to another (oysters to scallops) with lots of unintended damage along the way. Dennis King’s study of Chesapeake Bay oysters is a textbook case of overshoot driven by ecological ignorance. 18 Considered in conventional economic terms, the value of these shellfish in 1992 dollars was $2.5 million right off the boat and $7.5 million at the retail level. But left out of the calculation is that Chesapeake Bay oysters are what ecologists call a “keystone species”: their water filtration service ripples out into the entire ecosystem. Before their population was exposed to large-scale commercial harvesting, they filtered the whole bay—the world’s third largest estuary—every 3 or 4 days, cleansing it of excess nutrients from agricultural runoff, playing an indispensable role in

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maintaining the bay’s biological diversity and ecological integrity. In other words, they were both a natural resource and the keystone of the bay’s regenerative capacity. But by 1992, overharvesting had pushed the oysters down to about one percent of their pre-commercial population. At this level it took them 300 to 400 days to filter the bay, which was soon overwhelmed by nutrient runoff from the surrounding farms. The breakdown of their free filtration service led to water turbidity, algae blooms, huge fishkills, multimillion dollar government rehabilitation programs, the closure of two fisheries, and damage to local real estate development, agriculture, fishing, and outdoor recreation. The oysters turned out to be an economic as well as ecological keystone. The commercial oyster outfits did not intend to kill off their stock: it was their livelihood. Under the spell of the conventional growth model, they simply assumed an inexhaustible supply of oysters; this despite ongoing evidence of population decline. After all, they could see with their own eyes that they weren’t catching as many oysters as they had in the past. The fishers aimed at one target: oysters. But in natural ecosystems, targets are not isolable. To hit one is to hit many, especially if the selected target is a keystone. Nor, incidentally, did the local farmers intend to pollute the bay with agricultural runoff. True to the orthodox growth model, they assumed nature had a bottomless capacity for assimilating waste. They aimed at only one target: crops. But because they subscribed to the wrong model, they participated in economic and ecological overshoot—just like their colleagues in the oyster fleet. Recently, however, there has been some hopeful news about the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. A number of protected sanctuary reefs (made of huge piles of oyster shells) have been installed in the bay and seeded with juvenile oysters. As of 2009 the protected oyster population had grown to 185 million, raising hopes that the keystone species might recover. But the new population, despite its encouraging size, is nowhere near the billions that once lived in the bay. Even so, this experiment in ecosystem restoration is worth watching. It speaks to the issue of whether or not economic overshoot can be reversed. 19 Incidentally, it should be noted that this partial recovery is not an example of substituting human for natural capital. Rather it’s a demonstration of how humans, if they put their minds to it, can, first, protect an ecosystem from abuse by human capital, and, second, “think” like an ecosystem—letting natural capital restore itself according to its own principles of growth and recovery.

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The next two empirical reports show how overfishing large predatory species yields systematic ecological consequences known to marine biologists as “compensation” and “cascade effects.” In the first study, marine biologist Ransom Meyers found that, once industrialized fishing targeted a particular predatory species, its worldwide population declined by about 80% within 15 years. Given the advanced technology of many commercial fishing fleets, this should come as no surprise. But the underlying ecological implications of industrialized fishing showed up in the pattern of species depletion. Early in the period 1950-2000, the fleets targeted blue marlin, a large predatory billfish. By 1960 to 1965 the marlin was in such severe decline that its oceanic econiche was temporarily taken over by a closely related species, sailfish, which “compensated” for the loss of marlin. The sailfish, in turn, were replaced in the 1980s by swordfish and, again, the pattern repeated itself. By the year 2000 all three species, especially the first two, had been harvested to the point of population collapse. Ecological theory also holds that apex predators—such as sharks and swordfish—exercise a top-down control function that radiates through all levels of an established food web. In other words, they are something like a keystone species. When apex predators are overfished, their prey species will be destabilized into a population explosion. In turn, the erstwhile prey—now too populous for the ecosystem—will overconsume their prey; and so on throughout the web, in a pattern of cascading effects. Since 1972, the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science has conducted annual surveys of shark populations along the eastern U.S. seaboard. By the year 2005, several species of great sharks had undergone spectacular declines: for example, tiger sharks were down by 97%, scalloped hammerheads by 98%, and smooth hammerhead, bull, and dusky sharks by 99%. Moreover, their average body length had decreased by 17 to 47%, suggesting that fewer of the survivors grew to full maturity. These declines are almost entirely due to increased human demand for shark meat and especially for their dorsal fins, which are a highly desirable delicacy in some parts of the world. 20 What were the cascade effects? During the 30-year period of shark decline, each of five prey species has enjoyed a tenfold increase in population. One in particular, the cownose ray, has been closely followed because of its well-known appetite for commercially valuable shellfish, such as scallops and oysters. Predictably, cownose predation soon destroyed a century-old scallop fishery along the North Carolina coast. Moreover, they appear to be uprooting the seagrass in their feeding areas, disrupting nursery habitat necessary to the survival of many marine and

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estuary species. This is a textbook cascade pattern that was triggered by the economically driven depletion of a whole class of top predators. These studies show that overshoot is a routine occurrence in nature–human economic relations and that it tracks ecologically predictable sequences. In marine ecosystems overshoot leads to compensation followed by cascade: first the sharks go, then the shellfish, and finally the nurseries of many other species. And once their food supply disappears, the newly abundant cownose rays are next. In the meantime, anybody for a nice bowl of cownose chowder? The conventional growth model is at a complete loss to account for these research findings. It fails on at least two grounds: first, the supposedly “renewable” stocks of teeming aquatic populations are not inexhaustible. Nature has limits. And, second, the conventional model has no understanding of compensatory and cascade sequences in living ecosystems. To target one species switches on one or both sequences, following the broad outline of a predictable pattern: target ĺ GHFOLQH ĺ FRPSHQVDWLRQĺUHWDUJHWĺUHGHFOLQHĺUHFRPSHQVDWLRQĺFDVFDGH7KH ecological economic model, in contrast, accounts only too well for the interconnectedness inherent to natural ecosystems.

Climate Change and Overshoot Perhaps the most pervasive example of economic overshoot is humanity’s release of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere. These gases— which are mainly produced by the combustion of fossil fuels in transport, industry, and power generation—permit sunlight to reach the Earth’s surface, but prevent heat from radiating back out into space, just as if the entire planet were encased in a huge glass-paned greenhouse. The trapped heat directly and indirectly causes what is variously called “the greenhouse effect … global warming … climate change.” 21 We are not accustomed to think of anthropogenic climate change as an example of overshoot, but that’s exactly what it is. Human economic activity is overshooting the atmosphere’s capacity for stabilizing climate by forcing it to absorb greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, among others. All the empirical evidence, both prehistoric and contemporary, shows that the moderate presence of these gases in the atmosphere is perfectly normal. In fact, without them Earth would probably be covered by a permanent and planet-wide ice sheet. The same evidence also shows that there is a normal range of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration, but that since the onset of industrialization,

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and particularly since the mid-1900s, levels have overshot the norm to a degree unprecedented in at least the last 650,000 years. Without going too far into the devil’s details, let’s take a brief look at the evidence, starting with prehistory and moving to the present. The prehistoric data come from drilling ice cores as deep as three kilometers (1.8 miles) into the Antarctic ice sheet. Once extracted, the cores provide a stratigraphy of climate history going back hundreds of thousands of years. Each year in the core is represented by a compressed cross-section of ice (much like tree rings); and each cross section contains isotropic evidence about temperature, as well as tiny air bubbles which can be analyzed for carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations. One core, called “Vostok” after its location in Antarctica, goes back 420,000 years and yields two basic findings: a very close coupling between temperature and CO2 level; and clear evidence that normal CO2 concentrations range between 190 and 290 parts per million in the atmosphere. The lower concentrations occur during ice ages, and the higher figures correspond to interglacial periods such as the one we live in now. This is exactly what climate science would predict: temperature levels co-vary with levels of carbon dioxide. 22 Another, more recent ice core was drilled at “Dome C,” about 560 kilometers (347 miles) from Vostok, also on the Antarctic ice sheet. This one probed 740,000 years into the past, of which the most recent 650,000 years had been analyzed at the time of writing. Despite their distance from each other, the Dome C findings closely matched the Vostok results: temperature co-varied with CO2 concentrations in the air bubbles, and CO2 levels ranged between 190 and 290 parts per million (ppm) during the last 420,000 years. For the 230,000 years before that, CO2 spanned a somewhat cooler range, from 180 to 260 ppm; again, the lower figures corresponding to ice ages, the higher to warmer interglacial periods. Finally, as a check on the representativeness of the Antarctic samples, their temperature records have been plotted alongside core results drawn from sediment layers at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The two records match beautifully. 23 For our purposes, the most important of the ancient findings is that during the last 10,000 to 11,000 years—the Holocene period in which human civilization rose—carbon dioxide concentrations hovered in the 270 to 280 ppm range. It’s fair to conclude that, for all practical purposes, this is the distinctively human norm: the world in which we, our agriculture, inventions, traditions, languages, religions, and philosophies flourished was a 280 parts per million world. Any substantial deviation from this figure would take us into uncharted territory. 24

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Now let’s fast forward to the modern period of large-scale industrialization beginning around the year 1800. 25 Just before the onset of smokestack industry, atmospheric CO2 concentration was around 280 ppm, right at the human norm. By 1940 it had crept up to 310 ppm. In 1959 the chemist Charles Keeling began to take systematic annual measures of CO2 levels at a fixed site on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. From 1959 to 2005, Keeling’s recordings—called the “Keeling Curve”—rose steadily to 378 ppm, an increase of 35% above the human standard, and rising by about 2 ppm a year. In 2013 the figure had risen to 400 ppm. According to this measure we are now treating our one atmosphere as if it were over one and a third atmospheres, clearly overshooting the upper level of its historic and prehistoric capacity for carrying carbon dioxide. During the latter part of Keeling’s time frame, from 1980 to 2006, the planet has registered the 22 warmest years on record. More recently, from 2014 to 2016, the global temperature has heated up to its 3 highest levels, each successive year setting a new record. 26 This interlocking pattern of surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 in the late 1900s and early 2000s extends the ancient ice-core correlations into the here and now. Except for one thing: the current measures of carbon dioxide are way beyond the standard range of the last 650,000 years and, more to the point, beyond the distinctively human norm of the last 11,000 years. A broader measure of greenhouse gas concentration is calculated by chemically translating several other warming gases (e.g., methane, nitrous oxide) into CO2 equivalents. This approach indicates that combined greenhouse gas levels have risen from 290 to 430 ppm since the start of industrialization, a surge of 48%. According to this more inclusive yardstick, we are now using our one atmosphere as if it were one and a half atmospheres, an even stronger sign of overshoot. And the CO2 equivalent measure continues to add about 2.3 ppm per year. 27 When looked at this way, we can think of climate change as the atmosphere’s way of telling us we’ve overshot its absorptive capacity. Again, it’s important to note that these overshoot estimates are explicitly referenced to the human condition: our species has assumed planetary dominance in a 280 ppm world. To push the totals up to 400 or 500 ppm and beyond is, as eminent British economist Nicholas Stern puts it, to go “far outside the experience of human civilization.” 28 Nature will make the required adjustments. But will we? When we overshoot nature’s capacities, it doesn’t suffer quietly: it downloads the harm onto us. We are not disturbing nature in some abstract, arms-length sense—we are fouling our own nest. 29

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As we saw in the earlier discussion of oceanic compensation and cascade effects, ecological systems do not operate in terms of isolable, one-step cause and effect sequences. Rather, everything behaves as if it were connected to almost everything else in a spreading web of unanticipated consequences. Climate change follows the same pattern. High concentrations of CO2 cause atmospheric warming which, in turn, causes land and water warming, which through a series of positive feedback loops, contribute even more to the general quantum of warming. The effects of warming, in other words, become down-the-line causes of further warming. An example of one such effect is the melting of ice sheets and glaciers—already happening with surprising rapidity in Greenland, Antarctica, and the Arctic Ocean. With the loss of vast expanses of ice and snow as reflectors of sunlight, the Earth’s newly exposed dark surfaces absorb and retain heat rather than reflecting it back into the atmosphere, causing even more warming. As northern land masses heat up, permafrost and frozen peat bogs thaw, releasing enormous amounts of stored carbon dioxide and methane which further warm the atmosphere. Again, these thaws are already occurring in the Arctic land masses of Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia. The now doubly heated atmosphere, in the meantime, continues to transfer heat to the oceans. When oceans are warmer, they evaporate more, and because the atmosphere is also warmer, it spontaneously takes up greater amounts of water vapor. As it turns out, water vapor is itself a particularly strong greenhouse gas. And so it goes, one thing leading to another, and then another, in a spreading web of feedback loops. All this is a perfect—and lamentable—example of a positive, amplifying feedback system. As the Arctic gets warmer, it releases feedback signals that tell it to get yet warmer. It’s the opposite of a negative, thermostatic feedback system. When you key a house’s thermostat to a certain temperature setting, the furnace will heat the house until it reaches that setting, at which point it shuts off. That is, the warmed-up house sends a negative message to the furnace: stop what you’re doing. But in a positive feedback system, when the house heats up to the thermostat setting, it sends a positive message to the furnace: do more of the same. Only a broken thermostat would behave this way—the planet is operating, in other words, with a broken thermostat. And our fossil fuel based economy is the force that broke it. It should be noted that the feedback system just described focuses on only one theme of climate change: how heat begets further heat. It does not even begin to incorporate other themes, such as rising sea levels;

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alteration of major ocean currents (thermohaline circulation); acidification of the oceans; coral reef bleaching; overtaxing both land and sea’s carbon sequestration function; increasing frequency of extreme weather events (storms, hurricanes); changing patterns of rainfall—pause to catch one’s breath—unprecedented spread of drought leading to crop failure and forest, brush, and grassland fire; proliferating migration of invasive species, particularly insects and disease-bearing microbes, into new habitats; displacement of tens of millions of human beings, creating a whole new category of refugees—those fleeing climate change. And so on, one thing leading to another in an ecosystemic web of interlocking uncertainties, compensations, cascades, keystone effects, positive feedback loops, covariations, thresholds, and discontinuities. In any event, whether one takes an optimistic, pessimistic, or fence-sitting view of how humanity (and nature) might cope with these challenges, there is abundant empirical evidence of both local and global overshoot. This is particularly the case when we adopt nature’s regenerative capacity as the criterion of impact. The conventional growth model’s assumption of nature’s inexhaustibility has become a historical curiosity. This assumption may have been generally—although certainly not universally—valid during the preindustrial era, but it is increasingly refuted by the sheer scale and appetite of modern economic practice. Economic overshoot is real and its consequences are all around us.

Endnotes Epigraph: R. Costanza, d’Arge, et al. (1997), p. 255. 1

For general readings on ecological economics, see Costanza (1991); Costanza and Daly (1992); Costanza, Cumberland et al. (1997); Jansson et al. (1994); Daly (1996); Prugh et al. (1999); Brown (2006). For the conventional model—and how it has developed over the years—see the many editions (from 1948 to 2005) of the standard text by Paul Samuelson (more recent editions are by Samuelson and Nordhaus). 2 The visual image of concentric circles is an adaptation of Herman Daly’s discussion and illustrations in Daly (1996), pp. 5-11, 46-49. The term “nowhere” and the phrase “could not be more fundamental … ” are also from Daly (1996), p. 7. 3 Capital can be categorized in several ways. The three-part breakdown adopted here is in common use. 4 Daly (1996), p. 76. 5 Daly (1996), p. 28.

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For “mixed” economy, see Samuelson and Nordhaus (2005), pp. 8, 40. For GDP estimates and quoted material, see N. Stern (2007), pp. xiv-xv. 8 Another significant report was released in late 2006 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also, see Jane Lubchenco’s 1997 Presidential Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998, pp. 491-497); and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s (2010) essay. 9 See L. Brown (2006), p. 142; J. Lash (2001), p. 1789; also see N. Stern (2007), p. 315, where he notes that “Over 90% of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty depend on forests for some part of their livelihoods.” 10 The figures on water use are from L. Brown (2006), p. 42. 11 See L. Brown (2006), pp. 42-48, especially p. 48. 12 Nonrenewable aquifers are underground deposits of “fossil” water which are not replenished by rainfall. Examples are the North China deep aquifer and the Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. 13 L. Brown (2006), p. 56. 14 For more examples and illustrations than the human mind can process at one time, see L. Brown (2006). 15 See M. Wackernagel et al. (2002). Quoted passage is on p. 9268. 16 World Wildlife Fund (2008), pp. 1-3, 14. 17 J. Rockström et al. (2009). See also the editorial in the same issue of Nature, pp. 447-448. 18 See D. King’s chapter in Jansson et al. (1994), especially pp. 329-331. 19 See D. M. Schulte et al. (2009). 20 See R. Myers et al. (2007). 21 For a brief overview of scientific findings on climate change, see Naomi Oreskes (2004), p. 1686. She examined 928 scientific reports published in refereed journals between 1993 and 2003. Not a single report disagreed with the scientific consensus that human activity is a major cause of climate change, and 75% explicitly agreed with the consensus. 22 For technical reports, see Petit et al. (1999); McManus, 2004; EPICA community members (2004); Siegenthaler et al., 2005. For general discussions of these findings, see the references in note 29 below. 23 For Atlantic Ocean sedimentary records, see J. F. McManus (2004), Figure 1, p. 611. 24 Note that the CO2 figure 280 ppm refers to the human preindustrial Holocene standard. The study referred to in note 17 above uses a CO2 figure of 350 ppm. Rockström et al. recognize that 280 is the human norm, but use 350 ppm as the safety limit we should not cross. 25 Experts use various starting dates of large-scale industrialization, ranging from 1750 to 1850. I’ve decided to split the difference with the year 1800. 26 Figures on surface temperature from 1980 to 2006 are from Brown (2006), p. 61. Temperatures for the 2014-2016 period were recently released by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Temperature records have been kept since 1880. For a picture of the Keeling Curve, see Flannery (2005), p. 25. 7

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For trends of CO2 equivalents, see N. Stern (2007), pp. 4-5, 10-11. See Stern (2007), p. 15. 29 For readable treatments of CO2 concentrations and climate change, see E. Kolbert (2006), pp. 37-44, 105-107, 127-128; T. Flannery (2005), pp. 22-35, 153-165; N. Stern (2007), pp. 3-21. For a summary of the effects of CO2 increases, see L. Brown (2006), pp. 59-78. 28

CHAPTER 19 ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

In the previous chapter I argued that the ecological economic model could push its way into the mainstream only if it made an evidence-based case for four claims. First, that economic overshoot is a real and growing threat to the planet; second, for the complementarity (as opposed to substitutability) of human and natural capital; third, that nature’s so-called “free” services in fact have huge economic value; and, fourth, that unless markets fully internalize nature’s monetary value, they are not the efficient system conventional economists believe them to be. In fact, neither free nor informed in their present incarnation, markets grotesquely distort the economic truth. The case for the first claim—economic overshoot—was laid out in the previous chapter. Here we discuss the second, third, and fourth claims.

The Second Claim: Substitutability vs. Complementarity Substitutability is intimately linked with technology: human ingenuity invents the material technology which presumably “substitutes” for dysfunctional, depleted, or refractory natural capital. Thus, any discussion of substitution ultimately turns to a consideration of our various technologies. At the risk of oversimplification, let me suggest that there are three kinds of economically relevant technology: efficiency enhancers, growth amplifiers, and domestication. Although the three frequently overlap to yield hybrids, they are sufficiently different to be recognizable types.

Efficiency Enhancement The first type may be the one most often touted as a substitute for natural capital. A good example is the fuel-efficient car mentioned in the previous chapter. Because it consumes 75% less gasoline, its design effectively “substitutes” for the unused fuel. But this is true only in a figurative

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sense—in physical engineering terms, efficient car design does not substitute for the fuel it doesn’t use, but squeezes more performance out of the fuel it does use. As such, it saves fuel; it does not become fuel. This is obviously a great improvement over the gas-guzzling alternative, but, if anything, it clearly demonstrates efficient complementarity between human and natural capital, between auto design and petroleum. When we put our minds to it, we can collaborate rather well with nature. Another example of efficiency technology is the screw-in fluorescent light bulb. Relative to its incandescent predecessor, it produces more light per unit of electricity. But, again, its innovative design only makes it a more efficient complement to its energy source, not a substitute. Without a natural source of energy (oil, atomic, hydro, solar, etc.), there is no electricity; and without electricity, the bulb will not light up, no matter how ingenious its design. This is more than mere quibbling over one’s choice of words. Pursued to its logical endpoint, the substitutability principle holds that natural capital is fully replaceable by human capital. But even in those many cases where this appears to be true—artificial hip joints, cardiac pacemakers, the whole range of robotics—the replacement is itself made of natural capital. Substitutability is a partially valid rule of thumb, and, as such, could play a useful role in ecological economics. But as an economic principle, it is ultimately incoherent.

Growth Amplification The second type of economic technology consists of “input” and “throughput” amplifiers, such as massive mechanized pit-mine shovels and huge factory complexes. The former increase the flow of raw material into the economy, and the latter magnify the scale of industrial production. They are specifically designed to move greater volumes of natural capital into and through the economy. As such they are growth amplifiers par excellence and have little to do with substitutability. They are physical expressions of conventional economics’ inexhaustibility assumption. But there is also a hybrid technology that harnesses efficiency to amplification. As noted above, pure efficiency technologies like fuelefficient cars and fluorescent light bulbs squeeze more utility out of a given unit of energy—they presume scarcity of natural capital. In contrast, the hybrid type processes greater volumes of natural capital per unit of work and/or time—it presumes scarcity of human capital. In this hybrid scenario, if efficiency were to reduce energy consumption by 50 percent, the scale of input and throughput would not be comparably reduced.

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Rather, the remaining 50 percent of energy is typically used to double the volume of production. That is, it doubles the consumption of natural capital and, along with it, the polluting byproducts of industry. Moreover, if the energy efficiencies are used to triple or quadruple production volume, “efficiency” becomes a euphemism for raw growth. Needless to say, the hybrid type is a recipe for overshoot, particularly when it consumes so-called “renewable” natural capital more rapidly than nature can regenerate it. The fishing industry is a sad example of this. Modern fishing fleets have been developed to such a high level of proficiency and efficiency—sonar, drag nets, refrigerator and factory ships—that they deplete fish stock faster than nature can replace it. They don’t “substitute” for natural capital, not even partially—we can’t eat the fleet. Rather, they target successive populations of sea life, replacing each with the next until the fleet is reduced to mining the seabed for whatever it can haul to the surface. In this boomerang scenario the hybrid technology effectively and efficiently destroys the resource it was designed to harvest. The boomerang effect, in turn, sets the stage for the emergence of a new industry: fish farming. Aquaculture is a step in the direction of domestication, that is, the progressive replacement of wild forms of nature with humanized reconstructions.

Domestication Most of us don’t think of domestication as a form of technology. But, like any technology, domestication is the application of human ingenuity to nature to serve perceived human interest. What gives it a distinctive flavor is that it doesn’t so much exploit nature as “humanize” it. Dogs, dairy cows, and cereal crops are humanized versions of their wild ancestors. They sit at the hyphen in human–nature relations, neither one nor the other. We have figuratively, sometimes even literally, invited them into our “household” (the root meaning of the Latin domesticus or domus). Without question, civilization would not be what it is if we had never invented domestication. Even so, the invention comes with at least four caveats. First, it has radically altered the natural world—much more than most of us realize. Second, it seldom begins intentionally, but usually quasi-intentionally or even accidentally. Third, it does not always serve our best interests. Finally, like any other human intervention into nature, it triggers complex ecosystem responses, many of them unanticipated. Wheat, barley, and peas are good examples of how domestication has radically altered nature’s original wild stock. These plants had their natural adaptations reversed by 180 degrees when they were first cultivated

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in southwest Asia’s fertile crescent. In the wild, wheat and barley had evolved shattering stalks to disperse their seeds to the ground where they could germinate and reproduce the next generation. But the occasional mutant stalk did not shatter, and the seed clung to the top of the plant, failing to germinate. These maladaptive mutants were preferred by the early human domesticators because their ripened seeds remained available for harvesting, rather than dispersed over the soil. 1 Natural selection also favored wild peas whose pods exploded, casting seeds over wide areas. But, again, some plants lacked the gene that instructs the pod to explode. Human selection favored the mutant gene because the intact pods were easily harvested by picking. We did not have to scratch around in the soil—like a bird or mouse—to find tiny, scattered peas. In a natural environment the mutant plants would not reproduce; but in a humanized environment, this naturally lethal quality was precisely what enabled them to flourish. At first willy-nilly, but gradually by design, humans planted the peas they didn’t eat to produce the next generation of people-friendly plants. As the well-fed human population grew, it invented large-scale agriculture, and the wild versions of wheat, barley, and peas were increasingly marginalized. In effect, natural selection says to the plant: if you have feature X, nature will favor you. Human selection says: if you have feature Y, humanity will favor and protect you. This formula may suggest that the early human agronomists “substituted” human selection for natural selection, but the underlying principle is exactly the same. They simply adopted and adapted the rules of natural selection to serve human purpose—most likely with very little awareness, at least at first, that this was what they were doing. Agriculture is a massive example of how human capital (opportunism, trial-and-error experimentation, persistence) complements natural capital (Darwinian natural selection). For early Holocene human populations to grow, and for their emergent agricultural economy to grow, they had to redesign nature to be different from what it was and, in the case of staple grain and legume crops, to be the opposite of what nature favored. It’s tempting to speculate that the early domestication of plants and animals may have given premature birth to two ideas: first, that economic growth is the key to human welfare and, second, that it can be achieved by imposing our will on nature. If so, growth was a tacit economic model waiting to happen. With the onset of industrialization about 200 years ago, its time had come.

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Domesticating the Planet Generally we think of domestication as restricted to animals and plants, but in fact it has been applied much more broadly than that almost from the outset. When we first cultivated a field of non-shattering wheat, we domesticated not only the wheat, but the field. And when we established a settlement beside the wheat field, we humanized the small patch of settled land; that is, we transformed it into a home—a domesticus—by taming and/or eliminating many of its wild natural features. We reconstructed the whole complex—crop, field, settlement—into a distinctively human habitat. And so it proceeded: converting prairies and forests into farmland, expanding settlements into towns and towns into cities. We domesticated great swaths of the Earth into human habitats—including the water, soil, air, and species they contained. When we adopted industrialization we progressively “humanized”—sometimes intentionally, often inadvertently— entire spheres of natural function, most recently and alarmingly the waste absorption and climate regulating services of the Earth’s atmosphere. As already noted in the previous chapter, ice core samples have revealed the prehistory and history of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations: for hundreds of thousands of years CO2 content hovered at about 280 ppm during the warm interglacial periods such as the one we live in now. But over the last two centuries industrial growth has incrementally amplified CO2 levels by 43% to 400 ppm (and rising by 2 ppm each year), triggering a series of climate warming feedbacks and forcing the global human habitat into uncharted and threatening territory. There is by now overwhelming scientific consensus that heightened CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations are anthropogenic—that is, caused by humanity. It’s almost certain that none of this damage was intentional: if smokestack industry was intended to do anything, it was to increase prosperity and, by extension, human welfare. But with a collective attitude vacillating among the three poles of ignorance, willful blindness, and soft-core denial, we have managed to turn our time-honored domestication strategy on its head. The Earth’s atmosphere is now so thoroughly “humanized” that it threatens the civilization it once fostered. It’s as if—on a vastly grander scale—we had bred a cow to produce more meat, only to discover that it also yields 43% more milk. The milk, however, is poisonous. There are three basic strategies for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions: mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering. The first attacks the underlying cause, attempting to cut down on the use of fossil fuels at the source. An example of mitigation strategy is the important Paris Accord of

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2015, which requires that participating nations meet emissions reduction targets spread out over time. Unfortunately, some of the world’s most flagrant greenhouse gas emitters—e.g., the U.S.A.—have what appears to be an ambivalent commitment to the treaty…and that’s on a good day. But, effective or not, this strategy’s objective is to restore the Earth’s atmosphere to its original chemical composition—in belated recognition that nature’s wild atmosphere was friendlier to human interests than the humanized one we substituted for it. Mitigation is a massive dedomestication project. A major problem with the cause-oriented mitigation approach is that many of the consequences of climate change are already here: global warming, extreme weather, ecosystem destabilization, etc. This is where the adaptation strategy comes in—unlike mitigation, it addresses the effects of climate change. Its approach is based on the premise that, if we’ve missed the opportunity to stop climate change, then let’s figure out how to live with it. Let’s, for several examples, build barriers to protect vulnerable coastlines from rising sea levels and storm surges; develop population relocation plans for people who live on low-lying islands, such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives; develop genetically modified heatand-drought resistant crops; set up water desalination stations and devise superior irrigation systems to counter unreliable and contaminated supplies of fresh water; prepare for the migration and destabilization of entire ecosystems, such as expanding deserts and northward traveling vegetation zones, along with their human, animal, insect, and microbial inhabitants; invent new medicines and vaccines to blunt the threat posed by new geographic distributions of disease; prepare contingency plans, on both security and humanitarian grounds, for the potentially overwhelming problem of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of climate change refugees; and so on. Of course, the flip side of adaptation is to prepare for new economic “opportunities” opened by climate change, such as ice-free access to Arctic Ocean oil deposits, recapitulating the economically driven cycle of oil production, oil use, and CO2 emissions. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at such a prospect. Which brings us to the third strategy for dealing with climate change: geoengineering. Unlike the mitigation objective of de-domesticating the atmosphere, geoengineering proposes to further domesticate it. And, unlike the adaptation strategy of identifying multiple greenhouse gas effects and attacking each one on its own terms, geoengineering hopes to bundle all the separate problems into one grand problem to be neutralized by one global solution. The most highly regarded geoengineering approach

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(at the time of writing) would be like injecting the ill-bred cow mentioned earlier with a second poison to neutralize the first. In the meantime we would continue to drink the two presumably offsetting toxins while trying to figure out how to fix the cow. A little background is needed to appreciate this proposal. The combustion of fossil fuels produces both aerosols (not to be confused with aerosol sprays) and greenhouse gases. Paradoxically, they have opposite thermal effects on the atmosphere. Aerosols, such as sulphur dioxide (SO2), are made of minute particles which reflect sunlight back into space, thus having a cooling effect. Their increasing atmospheric presence in the 1940s to the early 1970s actually lowered global temperatures despite burgeoning CO2 emissions during the same period. But when scrubbers were installed on North American and European coal burning plants to solve the problem of acid rain, the cooling aerosols were significantly cut back, and temperatures began to rise again in the mid1970s. 2 The temperature turn-around was fairly sudden because aerosols tend to degrade very quickly. In contrast, CO2 degrades very slowly, taking 50 to 100 years to dissipate. So if global emissions of both gases were stopped today, the longevity of the CO2 already in the atmosphere would physically commit us to further global warming because of the greatly different degradation rates of the two molecules, SO2 and CO2. In the meantime, increased coal use in developing countries, like China, keeps spewing aerosols into the atmosphere, partly offsetting CO2 warming effects—and masking them. The aerosols—which are themselves a serious form of air pollution—sit like a dirty band-aid on the CO2 emissions, partly hiding the growing sore underneath. An interesting natural test of the aerosol effect occurred in 1991 with the eruption of the Philippine volcano, Mount Pinatubo. This eruption suddenly released 10 to 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and the global temperature predictably dropped by 3/10 of a degree Celsius (1/2 degree Fahrenheit), interrupting the overall warming trend, but only briefly. By now the reader has probably guessed where all this is leading: if nature can geoengineer a Pinatubo to stop global warming in its tracks, why can’t humanity? If we forced the equivalent of a Pinatubo eruption into the stratosphere every two years or so, we could hold off global warming until we figure out what to do about it. Unfortunately, while the aerosols would slow down warming, they would not halt the ongoing accumulation of CO2; rather they would simply block its warming effect by forming a layer of light-reflecting debris between the sun and the CO2-drenched troposphere. 3 They would treat the symptoms,

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not the problem. “Global dimming,” in other words, would mask, but not reduce, the causes of global warming. Clearly, the geoengineering solution would be workable only if combined with mitigation. 4 But taken on its own terms, the aerosol geoengineering alternative is fraught with potential problems. It would replace a CO2-dominant atmosphere with one rich in both CO2 and SO2. If for some unforeseen reason, we had to abort the aerosol fix, it would dissipate rather quickly, and the suddenly unmasked CO2 would force a thermal surge. It would not be gradual, nor short term. Given the discrepancy in CO2 and SO2 degradation rates, once we commit to aerosols, we may not be able to abandon them for the 50 to 100 years it takes for even greater concentrations of CO2 to degrade. That’s a lot of air pollution and global dimming. Another potential problem stems from the chemical complexity and physical dynamics of the atmosphere. Many of the interaction patterns of the atmospheric ecosystem are not well understood, leaving lots of room for unanticipated consequences of humanity’s engineering inputs: the Frankenstein effect. Even if the aerosol intervention were to work, it would stop only the thermal effects of greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 acidification of the oceans would continue, resulting in at least two undesirable outcomes. It would leach calcium from every shellfish species in the food web, endangering them, the web, and the viability of the whole oceanic ecosystem. Moreover, it would inhibit coral organisms from secreting their hard skeletons, weakening the skeletal structure of coral reefs. Since about one quarter of ocean species spend at least part of their life in coral reefs, any problem with the reefs would produce ripple effects whose extent is not well known. 5 Finally, should the aerosol strategy prove operationally and financially feasible—two big ifs—and relatively free of side effects—a third big if—it would reduce the socio-political will to mitigate CO2 emissions, the cause of the problem in the first place. Given the already clearly demonstrated ambivalence of our political leadership to engage the problem of global warming, there would be a strong temptation to use the aerosol band-aid as an excuse for inaction or delay. In this scenario humanity would transform the Earth’s atmosphere into a self-defeating race between air pollution and pent-up global warming. However well intentioned the geoengineering approach may be, its underlying ideology reduces to a naïve faith in the benefits of domestication: even when the humanization of the Earth backfires, the knee-jerk response is further humanization. Put a bit differently, more

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aggressive technology is invoked as the best fix for failed technology. The mitigation approach, in contrast, asks for less aggressive, alternative energy technologies. 6 The geoengineering mentality poses the question this way: Have we degraded natural capital—in this case the Earth’s atmosphere? Let’s fix it by “substituting” even stronger doses of human/manufactured capital. This blind commitment to expansion of the human habitat betrays a quite profound alienation from nature, even those dimensions—such as air, atmosphere, and sunlight—which have served us well. Deliberately seeding the stratosphere with pollutants in order to buy time and “save jobs” (as the current rhetoric goes) would be bad economics. And, beyond that, it would cross a real and symbolic threshold, opening a new chapter in the history of human–nature relations. Chemist Paul Crutzen—a Nobel laureate for discovering the chemical basis of stratospheric ozone depletion—sees the progressive humanization of the Earth as ushering in a new geological epoch. In his opinion, the onset of industrialization marked the end of the Holocene epoch and the transition to what he calls the “Anthropocene,” or the “geology of mankind.” From a very different starting point, ecotheologian and Catholic priest Thomas Berry arrives at essentially the same conclusion. He sees the Earth as shifting into the “ecozoic” era or, in his less optimistic moments, the “technozoic,” noting that the planet is now so humanized we have power even over its chemical composition and topography. In the view of these two observers—and they are not alone— human domestication is now the primary driving force in the planet’s geological evolution. And none of this has been thought through: it’s just one unanticipated consequence after another. Of course, Crutzen’s and Berry’s positions are debatable. But while the debate unfolds, one thing is certain: we may not know where we’re going, but we’re sure on our way. 7

The Third Claim: Nature’s “Free” Services Have Economic Value The fact that nature’s services contribute to human material welfare would seem to put them right at the center of economic discourse. But there is a major technical obstacle: according to our orthodox economic model nature’s services are sometimes seen as “free,” other times as impossible to evaluate. Either view lets economics off the hook, because values that have no price tag have no distinctively economic reality. Unless a monetary value can be assigned to them, nature’s services float out there with truth, beauty, and wisdom—wonderful things, of course, but

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fundamentally beyond the purview of economic practice. A Rembrandt painting, for example, may have great aesthetic value, but it takes on economic value—overwhelmingly so—only when it goes to auction. One of the things that unnerves conventional economics is that, like the Rembrandt painting, nature may also turn out to have overwhelming monetary value and, for that reason, overwhelming economic significance. As long as its services are assumed to be cost-free, nature can be treated as an inconsequential “externality.” But once this assumption breaks down, nature’s costs have to be entered into economic calculations, and the conventional growth model inevitably dissolves into the ecological model. Cost implies scarcity (either in fact or potential), and scarcity rules out unlimited growth. This would be a major blow to orthodox neoclassical economics. Unfortunately, it may take a breakdown in one or more of nature’s vital functions (e.g., atmospheric climate regulation) to invalidate the “free service” assumption. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves: Does nature actually have economic value and, if so, how great is it? In 1997, Robert Costanza and a team of economists, geographers, and environmental scientists calculated the cost of 17 ecosystem services on a global scale. 8 Again, as is typical of this kind of exploratory research, the investigators adopted conservative analytic criteria so as not to overstate and thus discredit their conclusions. Their overall finding was that, when the value of the 17 services are added together, they are worth almost double the annual global GDP. Ecosystems provide at least $33 trillion of services annually, as contrasted with annual global GDP of $18 trillion (Costanza’s figures are in 1994 U.S. dollars). * Some of nature’s specific habitats yield very interesting patterns of results. Wetlands, for example, generate $4.9 trillion of services a year (all figures are in outdated 1994 dollars), contributing to atmospheric regulation, disturbance regulation (e.g., storm protection, flood control, etc.), water supply, waste treatment, and so on. Made up of tidal marshes, mangrove forests, flood plains, swamps, etc., wetlands are simultaneously vulnerable and pivotal because, while they occupy only 2.2% of the *

In 2015, global GDP had reached a value of $74.5 trillion (U.S.) according to the World Bank. No comparable year 2015 figure is available for the monetary value of nature’s services, but since they are scarcer now than they were in 1994, while human demand for them is greater, their dollar value has probably increased even more rapidly than global GDP, to about $135 trillion (U.S.) annually. Similar calculations could be made for specific habitats by multiplying Costanza’s 1994 dollar figures by four. Wetland services, for example, would be worth approximately 4 x $4.9 trillion = $20 trillion in 2015 dollars.

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earth’s land area, they account for 40% of nature’s land-based services. A major reason for their vulnerability is their frequent location on prime waterfront property. Mangrove forests, for example, get cut down, filled in, and built over by oceanfront real estate developments. When this happens they are no longer available to absorb the energy of storm surges, and events like 2005’s Hurricane Katrina are much more destructive than they would otherwise be. Ask any insurance company whether this has economic relevance. Estuaries are the marine equivalent of wetlands: occupying only one half of one percent of the Earth’s marine area, they yield $4.1 trillion (1994 dollars) of “free” services annually, making disproportionate contributions to nutrient cycling, disturbance regulation, food production, and recreation. Together, wetlands and estuaries, which sit at the boundary between land and water, take up only one percent of the Earth’s overall surface, but account for 27% of nature’s functional value. A more balanced ratio of space to service value is yielded by inland forests. Covering 32% of land surface, they generate 38% of land services, worth $4.7 trillion a year. Surprisingly, raw materials like lumber account for only 14% of forest benefits, by far the greater value coming from relatively invisible functions like climate regulation, nutrient cycling, and erosion control. When rank ordered, nature’s most costly services are nutrient cycling ($17.1 trillion annually), waste treatment ($2.3 trillion), disturbance regulation ($1.8 trillion), and water supply ($1.7 trillion). Even pollination—the everyday work done by bees and other insects—has an annual value of $117 billion. Without these bugs, most flowering plants, shrubs, and trees would neither bear fruit nor reproduce. We would have to do our own pollinating, and it would cost us $117 billion (1994 dollars) a year to get the job done. And, speaking of bugs, another team of economists recently estimated (in 2016) that the insect-eating bat population of the state of Texas saves the local agricultural industry more than one billion dollars annually on pesticides. These bats provide two benefits: first, they contribute a billion dollars annually to the agricultural sector for free; and, second, they reduce the volume of pesticide chemicals that would otherwise enter the local food chain. On this second point, the bats make Rachel Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring a billion dollars noisier than it would otherwise be … and this is just in Texas. Even so, according to the standard economic model, the value of their contribution is not explicitly entered into the cost-benefit analysis of the agricultural market. This is simply ridiculous. Take away the bats and the Texas economy would have

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to come up with another billion dollars annually. You don’t have to be a Nobel prize-winning economist to figure that one out. Getting back to the Costanza team of researchers, they conclude that “if one were to try to replace the services of ecosystems at the current margin, one would need to increase global GDP by at least $33 trillion (1994 dollars) … this impossible task would lead to no increase in (human) welfare because we would only be replacing existing services, and it ignores the fact that many ecosystem services are literally irreplaceable.” 9 Although, as already noted, this study was deliberately biased toward conservative monetary estimates, it nevertheless came up with a hefty list of costs. So, let’s suppose, in the spirit of bending over backwards, that the figures are off by 50 percent. Even in this weak case scenario, where one concedes half the evidence, the cost of nature’s services would approximate the entire global GDP—that is, unless underwritten by nature, the global GDP would be about zero. Wetlands, estuaries, bees, and forests massively subsidize our economy by trillions of dollars annually. And, if they did not, the costs would have to be passed on to us. To compound the picture, the earlier evidence on overshoot indicates that nature is now in the process of losing its capacity to absorb the impact—that is, the cost—of our growing economy. As nature’s supporting infrastructure deteriorates, the economy we bequeath to our children will groan under the weight of the costs nature can no longer pay. One weakness of the Costanza study is that its value estimates are restricted to undisturbed natural ecosystems. But, of course, when ecosystems are converted to human use—for farming, plantations, real estate development, etc.—they also have value. Otherwise, why convert them? So another approach to the question at hand would be to estimate the difference in value between intact and converted versions of the same ecosystems. To do this, a group of scholars led by Cambridge’s Andrew Balmford surveyed over 300 case studies in the research literature. Unfortunately, they were able to identify only five that fit their stringent criteria. But these few cases permitted comparisons within four types of closely matched biomes: tropical forest, mangrove, wetlands, and coral reef. In each matched pair, the economic value of the relatively intact habitat was found to be greater than the one converted to human use for logging, aquaculture, farming, or blast fishing. The relatively undisturbed habitats yielded an average of 55% greater economic benefit than their exploited counterparts; and this figure does not include the value of

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nutrient cycling and waste management, which the Costanza study found to be the two most valuable services offered by natural ecosystems. 10 But why do humans convert habitats to the point where they lose money? Basically because we don’t know any better: knowledge of the specifically economic benefits of intact ecosystem services is generally undeveloped and unavailable. Why so? There are probably three reasons for our ignorance on this front. First, there is inadequate demand for this kind of information. Many entrepreneurs wouldn’t use it even if it were available. They have less interest in cautionary advice than in immediate, private, short-term profit. Chop down the forest and move on; dynamite the coral reef, grab as many fish as you can, and move on. The thinking behind this kind of exploitation—if there’s any thinking at all—is that nature has an infinite capacity for healing the wounds we inflict on it. Second, ecosystem services are generally external to market assessments of value. They are like the Rembrandt painting that does not go to auction. The price of a barrel of oil, for example, is decided with deceptive ease by the scrum of buyers and sellers in the marketplace. But does the market factor in the environmental cost of burning the oil? No, and as presently constituted, it cannot. For this reason it systematically underestimates the real cost of oil. Setting up a market for trading carbon credits might be a partial step toward correcting this problem; if nothing else, it would have the effect of economically “normalizing”—even if underestimating—the otherwise elusive cost of carbon overload in the atmosphere. Finally, markets further miss the real cost of natural capital because of distortions introduced by government subsidies and tax benefits. Again, the market price of oil does not reflect the subsidization of the oil industry by governments. We’ll deal with marketing issues in somewhat more detail below. In the meantime, the short answer to the “why so” question is that ignorance, greed, subsidies, and market failings prevent the creation and widespread availability of accurate information about the economic value of nature’s services. One point of entry into this logjam would be to rethink the subsidization policies followed by most governments. At present, subsidy programs serve objectives like protecting jobs (fishermen vote, fish don’t), supporting “vital” industries (e.g., oil), catering to special interests (e.g., shielding corn-based ethanol from competition), and the like. An enormous subtotal of these expenditures—somewhere between $950 billion and $1,950 billion each year—are “both economically and ecologically perverse.” 11 That is, they waste money on programs that systematically deplete the very resources and services the programs need to succeed. A

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classic example of this sort of misbegotten policy was the heavy subsidization of the Grand Banks cod fishery: by encouraging overfishing— rather than the politically unsavory alternative of conservation—it led to the collapse of the cod stock and the consequent loss of the tens of thousands of jobs the subsidies were designed to protect in the first place. 12 Balmford and his colleagues offer an illustration of the kind of rethinking necessary to break the logjam. They note that at present only eight percent of our planet’s land and less than one percent of water surface are protected in reserves. In year 2000 dollars, the world spends $6.5 billion annually to manage this collection of small and dispersed programs. But suppose reserve sizes were increased to 15% of land and 30 % of ocean surface. Maintenance costs, of course, would also increase, to an estimated $45 billion a year. At first glance this figure may seem exorbitant, but it would amount to only 5% of the low estimate of current perverse government payouts ($950 billion), thus could be offset by subsidies already in place: there would be no new expenditures. The expanded global reserves, in turn, would yield ecosystem goods and services worth at least $4.4 trillion annually. The benefit-cost ratio of the proposed reserve system would be about 100 to 1. In other words, every dollar spent would yield approximately $100 of benefit to humanity. Again, even if the analysis grossly overestimates the benefits by double and underestimates the costs by half, the program would still yield $25 for every dollar invested. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of reserve maintenance jobs would be created. And a final benefit would be to wean governments from the current counterproductive subsidization model. 13 Of course, it’s one thing to propose innovative approaches, but another to successfully implement them. One major problem of such an ambitious reserve program would be its susceptibility to what ecologist Garrett Hardin calls “the tragedy of the commons.” 14 For example, world fishing fleets would be very tempted to sit on the marine reserve boundaries or even devise ways of “accidentally” floating into the reserves themselves. If one cheat gets away with it, others will soon follow. But, even without cheating, fishing the edges would effectively negate a major spillover benefit by reducing outmigration of fish stock to adjacent and even remote ocean areas. A program like this would work only if the international community signed on to ironclad agreements, backed up by protective patrols (which would mean more jobs). Not only would this sort of program circumvent the current counterproductive subsidy paradigm, but the “distortions” it would introduce into the marketplace would for

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once be ecologically ameliorative; and for this reason beneficial to human welfare rather than the opposite. As should be evident by now, ecological economics is not a feelgood model. In fact, most of its messages about limits, overshoot, and the like have a regrettably apocalyptic tone—these two chapters, for example, often read like a litany of forebodings and complaints. But the model has more than a warning function—it can also generate innovative policy and programs, such as the reserve strategy just described. These fresh ideas and proposals are exactly what the world economy needs now. The mainstream, orthodox model—with its outdated and counterfactual assumptions about growth, the supply of natural capital, externality, and substitutability—is simply incapable of thinking its way out of the logjam. It does not even assent to the existence of the logjam. From the ecological perspective, it is the logjam.

The Fourth Claim: Natural Capital and the Market This section should be prefaced with a caveat. Although it says a number of unpleasant things about market function, it should not be taken as an argument for centralized command-and-control planning, nor for excessive external regulation. On the contrary, my basic argument is that a fully informed market may be the best friend ecological economics could want. The problem with contemporary market function is that externality doctrine and government subsidies block it from access to full information. One thing the market does very well is translating supply and demand ratios into monetary values. When, for example, a shipment of timber arrives at the market’s doorstep, buyers and sellers efficiently negotiate a mutually acceptable price for the wood. Moreover, everyone agrees to agree that the negotiated price truly reflects the current value of the wood. When it comes to estimating economic value, the assumption is that the market usually gets it right. But for this assumption to be valid, the market must have perfect knowledge of what we might call the “economics of wood.” If it does not, its evaluations are based on inadequate information and they necessarily distort the economic truth. Unfortunately, the economics of wood is less determined by the real world value of trees, forests, biodiversity, flood control, carbon sequestration, etc., than by the economic model the market follows. The conventional growth model sees a forest as a huge pile of wood; and so does the market. In contrast, the ecological model sees the forest as a complex resource and service delivery system; and the market does not. The two models are completely different information systems, and for that

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reason lead to grossly different estimates of wood’s monetary value. Because of its externalization bias, the conventional model spontaneously withholds information from the market. The effect is to systematically underestimate the true value of natural capital—wood, fish, oil, water, etc.—which has the further effect of disguising ecological costs as economic profits. This is a harsh change, so let’s parse it out a bit. From the perspective of conventional growth economics, the problem with internalizing “unnecessary” information into prices is that it would drive prices up, thereby reducing consumption—this, in turn would slow down growth. In contrast, artificially low prices pump up consumption, which in turn pumps up GDP, creating the impression of expanding wealth. But the weakness of the model is that externalized costs don’t just go away—they have to be parked somewhere. So the model simply downloads them onto nature. Nature absorbs the costs as long as it can, but when it can no longer, it uploads them back onto humanity. This is not a real wealth scenario. Built on the foundation of bankrupting the global ecosystem, it is the illusion of wealth—it is impoverishment disguised as wealth. The two main culprits in the conventional market are subsidies and externality doctrine. We’ve already brushed up against them, but let’s look at two more examples. The problem of externalities is nicely exemplified by a case study from Peru. In 1989, a one-time sell-off of Peruvian tropical forest hardwood yielded $422 per hectare (2 1/2 acres). Assuming the logging did not irreversibly degrade the fragile tropical topsoil and that the land was not converted to subsistence farming (both optimistic assumptions), it would take many years for the hardwood forest to replace itself for another commercially feasible logging. In the meantime, a relatively intact forest could have contributed at least $500 of services and resources per hectare year after year. The choice between the two land uses would seem to be economically unproblematic. But here’s the catch: There is no market for the ecological services of an intact forest—these are “externalities”—so sustainable use of the forest yields less in-hand monetary payoff; and, not incidentally, contributes less to Peruvian GDP, according to standard accounting procedures. Burdened by externality doctrine, the conventional model is forced to conclude that a one-time payout of $422 is worth more than repeated $500 payouts! By this reasoning, it makes sense to take the short-term $422 profit and forego the more valuable, long-term ecological benefits. But in ecological economics the opposite course makes greater sense. 15

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A second example combines the effects of externalities and subsidies. 16 In mid 2005, gasoline sold at the pump for about $2 per gallon in the United States. But this price reflected only the costs of extracting, refining, delivery to gas stations, and retail markups. It excluded—that is, externalized—government subsidies to the oil industry, military costs of ensuring secure access to oil supplies, respiratory illness costs, and climate change costs: these add up to about $9 per gallon. If the marketplace told the truth about gasoline, it would sell for $11 at the retailer, not $2 (year 2005 dollars). Given the enormous reliance of the U.S. economy and lifestyle on gasoline, the pump price, false by a factor of five, introduces commensurately enormous distortions into the economy. In fact, U.S. citizens, either now or later, pay the full cost of these distortions through taxes, health insurance premiums, and lost environmental services, but the market hides that fact from them. Because these costs are distributed throughout society, even Americans who do not own or use cars pay for the gasoline of those who do. Imagine yourself to be a non-car owner. One day you’re out taking a walk. You pause at the neighborhood gas station and watch someone pump 10 gallons of gas into his car. He pays the whole retail price of $20 (2005 dollars), but he shares the $90 hidden cost with you. You actually pay for a portion of every gallon he uses. And it doesn’t end there: the money that now subsidizes the oil industry could be transferred to research and development of alternative energy sources and technologies without passing new costs onto the taxpayer. The taxpayer is already paying for most of these subsidies. Government could raise the same revenues by shifting some tax burden from “goods” (e.g., family income) to “bads” (e.g., producers and users of fossil fuels). 17 We are constantly and falsely reminded by pundits and markets that, although new energy technologies (wind, solar, etc.) may be clean, they are uneconomical. But this is no longer true … wind and solar energy are on the threshold of being less expensive than fossil fuel sources. Moreover, if the true social, health, security, and environmental costs of fossil fuels were actually built into their market prices, the alternative technologies would likely be even more desirable in economic terms. So why aren’t the subsidies transferred to new technologies? A principal reason for business as usual is the oil industry’s highly successful lobbying program. During the period 1992-2002, government subsidies to the U.S. oil and gas industry were $2.6 billion annually. During approximately the same time frame (1990-2004), the industry spent an average of $13 million a year on lobbying and campaign contributions. These figures

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indicate that for every thousand dollars the industry invested in lobby efforts, it received about $200,000 in government subsidies, quite a nice return. 18 It should be noted that this return is completely separate from the industry’s business profits, which are by now the stuff of legend. Without realizing it, the U.S. taxpayer rewards an already spectacularly profitable industry for depleting non-renewable resources and, in the process, contributing to environmental degradation and climate change. Incidentally, all things considered, the U.S. is a relatively small player in the fossil-fuel subsidy game. Internationally, the oil, gas, and coal industries received $151 billion dollars in government subsidies in 1998. By 2005, the oil industry alone enjoyed an approximately $90 billion worldwide subsidy, up 73% from its $52 billion windfall in 1998. 19 Although there is something unconscionably perverse about these kinds of subsidies, the far greater distortion is to exclude so-called “external” environmental costs from the market process. This practice is particularly reprehensible when applied to a very large-scale “externality” like climate change. The underlying formula is a recipe for economic failure: the greater the environmental cost, the greater the temptation to keep it external to markets, and the greater the damage done to human welfare by its externalization. Here is economist Nicholas Stern’s refreshingly candid view on the matter: “Those who produce greenhouse gas emissions are bringing about climate change, thereby imposing costs on the world and on future generations, but they do not face directly, neither via markets nor in other ways, the full consequences of the costs of their actions. … Thus, climate change is an example of market failure involving externalities and public goods. … All in all, it must be regarded as market failure on the greatest scale the world has seen.” 20 Similarly concerned by market dysfunction, Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute, generalizes Stern’s observation to the entire spectrum of environmental externalities: “The central challenge, the key to building the new economy, is getting the market to tell the ecological truth. The dysfunctional global economy of today has been shaped by distorted market prices that do not incorporate environmental costs. Many of our environmental travails are the result of severe market distortions.” 21 Before closing this section let’s look at one more example of market externalization. Almost everyone would agree that water is an indispensable key to life on planet Earth. Put simply, without water all forms of life would expire, from plants to people. Given this reality, one would expect water to have overwhelming economic significance. But in fact its value is absurdly externalized from market function. In Canada’s

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province of Ontario, for example—sit down and grab your seat for this one—water bottling companies paid only $3.71 for every million litres of groundwater they extracted from nature’s supply in 2017. That amounts to 2,700 litres per penny. For all practical purposes this means fresh water is free of cost in Ontario, an example of market externalization that boggles the mind. Not incidentally, the bottled water industry goes on to generate 180 times more greenhouse gas emissions than does tap water due to the production of plastic bottles. The plastic bottles, in turn, end up in the environment as a form of toxic waste. Market externalization triggers cascade effects that are extremely damaging to humanity’s interaction with nature. If the true cost of natural capital were fully reflected in the market, consumption patterns would change, reducing pressure on ecosystem services, and ultimately benefiting humanity. Prices are kept artificially low by the false economic consensus that nature’s services are “free.” Again, low prices pump up rates of consumption which, in turn, inflate GDP figures, the whole process giving the cosmetic (and anesthetic) impression of expanding wealth. In this system, nature’s costs are disguised as the economy’s profits. It all works well until nature begins to pass its costs back onto humanity, ultimately showing conventional economics to be an exercise in illusion. *

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By any reasonable evidentiary standard the ecological economic model meets the burden of proof regarding its four claims. We are clearly at or over the threshold of nature’s carrying capacity, substitutability is a partial truth at best, nature’s services do have distinctively economic value, and systematic externalization of nature’s costs has severely distorted market function. The conventional model’s case for economic autonomy and unlimited growth is not grounded in deep wisdom. Rather, it’s an accident of supply–demand ratios which have faded into history. The ideology of growth and autonomy survives its illusions and appetites only when the supply of natural capital is superabundant relative to human demand. But after two hundred years of increasing industrialization, population, and per capita consumption, the ratio is now tipping in the other direction, in some cases dangerously so.

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Economics and Morality Among other things, economics addresses some of the great humanitarian issues of our time: underdevelopment, hunger, and poverty. In this sense it has an underlying moral agenda whose claim to virtue, I would argue, hinges on the distinction between intention and consequence. Both models have nothing but the best intentions regarding human welfare, so on this point they converge. But they differ on means and probable consequences. The conventional model embraces economic growth as the primary means to upgrade humanity’s material welfare: increase the overall volume of wealth on Earth, and all ships, great and small, will rise with the tide. Has this approach worked? As regards gross accumulation of wealth: Yes, if one is willing to count environmental costs as income. Regarding equitable distribution of wealth: maybe yes, maybe no—it depends on whether one looks down on the income mean from the upper one percent, or up at it from the lower fifty percent. Regarding unanticipated (but probable) consequences: No—the evidence for unintended anthropogenic damage to the planet is all around us. In contrast, ecological economics argues that the surest means to human well-being—in the present and across generations—is to maintain the integrity of the natural infrastructure in which our welfare is nested. If the planet’s natural support system is forced into dysfunction, “all the money in the world,” as the saying goes, will not save us. Referring back to the previous chapter’s two-concentric-circles diagram, when and if the economic circle outgrows the world circle, a moral Rubicon is crossed and human welfare becomes progressively less sustainable. There are a number of well-documented cases from history to support this position. The evolutionary geographer Jared Diamond has traced the fall of human societies in Mayan Yucatan, Norse Greenland, and Polynesian Easter Island. Each case followed the same sequence: deforestation, soil loss, agricultural failure, societal collapse. In each situation, social and economic decline was driven primarily by environmental degradation, and only secondarily by war, disease, or demographics. 22 These historical tragedies were small scale and isolated, so were relatively inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. But the parallel problems humanity faces today are large scale, global, and inherently consequential. The Greenland Norse could have saved themselves by going back to Scandinavia. But today there is nowhere else to go. In any event, the moral record of mainstream economics should not be measured by its good intentions. Its program basically reduces to a high stakes race between two consequences. Which will happen first: a

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developed-world standard of living for all humanity or irreversible damage to the natural world? Which, in other words, is the more probable consequence? Orthodox growth economics is betting on the first, mostly because it won’t even face the possibility of the second. But, as we’ve already seen, the emerging bodies of evidence on economic overshoot, climate change, and humanity’s ecological footprint do not encourage confidence in the growth model’s chances. Sadly, the more likely outcome—if we keep to business as usual—is further growth, leading to pathological overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity and declining human welfare: painful in the developed world and catastrophic for the most vulnerable sectors of humanity. This probable outcome does not speak well for the moral legitimacy of growth economics. Under present circumstances, the morality of one model or the other can no longer be justified by good intentions—human well-being depends on respect for the evidence and clear thinking about probable consequences. Again, ecological economics enjoys an advantage here because it systematically embraces the mixed consequentiality of any particular economic action. Since no intervention in nature is isolable, every intervention is expected to produce a branching and feedback looping network of intended and unintended consequences. Because of this bias the model is prepared to stand the test of moral consequence rather than hide behind good intentions. Of course, ecological economics also has benign intentions. It would like to see humanity’s underdeveloped sectors raised to a better standard of living. But the bulk of evidence argues against the feasibility or even the desirability of universalizing a developed world standard. A more modest and sustainable level would be better all around, even for the developed world, which seems to have confused GDP with quality of life. On this point, it’s interesting to note that there are rather severe discrepancies between the growth rates of GDP and measures of human economic well-being. Although the correlations between the two vary according to the factors built into well-being measures, the general finding is that it takes a lot of GDP growth to produce even small increments in the economic quality of life. In fact, in some periods, for example between 1970 and 1985 in the U.S., GDP enjoyed spectacular growth while at least one major measure of economic welfare was flat. The obvious conclusion is that, although GDP may be a workable measure of raw economic productivity, it is a misleading and extraordinarily wasteful index of quality of life. 23 It’s like using a sledgehammer to pound tacks into a wall. The tacks go in, but the wall is starting to crumble.

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The most probable consequence of sledgehammer growth is severe degradation of the planet’s life support systems. This outcome would be neither morally nor economically defensible, no matter how beneficent the intentions of growth ideology may be. At this point in history the cause of human welfare demands a new approach: in determining the humanitarian impact of economic practice, probable consequence must override good intention.

A Framework for Policy and Action The ecological economic model has two overarching functions: the first is to diagnose what’s gone wrong in our economic encounters with the natural world. In this role it gives us a vocabulary for describing and explaining the inner logic and damaging consequences of two centuries of unrestrained industrial growth. Unfortunately, the truth it uncovers is more than merely “inconvenient.” In fact, it is so disturbing, it could easily evoke collective denial, paralysis, or hands-in-the-air resignation—a cluster of responses which are the exact opposite of what’s needed. 24 Which brings us to the model’s second and more important function: to provide a new framework for sustainable economic practice and thinking. Let me close the chapter by proposing four shifts from conventional to new forms of economic behavior. These suggestions are admittedly germinal in their present form—a great deal of work would be needed to flesh them out—but they have the merit of getting right to the point without bogging down in qualifications.

The Tax Shift We need to follow Nicholas Stern’s advice to shift taxation targets from “goods” to “bads.” For example, at present a sizeable amount of government revenue comes from levies on the wages of low and middle income workers. This is actually a tax on human labor, but labor is something most of us consider an economic “good.” Why should the tax code include disincentives to work? 25 An alternative would be to replace the labor levy with Robert Costanza and Herman Daly’s proposed natural capital depletion tax. This would shift a major part of the tax burden onto industrial practices and consumption patterns which are “bad” for human welfare. 26 Obviously, this kind of shift would encounter gargantuan opposition from strong and entrenched special interests, but, if implemented, it would yield a number of benefits. Government revenue would remain

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more or less constant; polluting industries would either change their ways or become uncompetitive; low and middle wage earners would have more take home pay; consumption patterns would shift in environmentally friendly directions; health costs would decrease; and mass transit would benefit. Taxing “bads” would stimulate development of economic “goods,” such as innovative, efficient, and alternative technologies—these, in turn, would evolve into major job-creating industries; factoring the full cost of natural capital into taxes would encourage market internalization; and so on. This sort of tax shift would not be a panacea, but would certainly slow down our rush to the precipice of economic overshoot. It would be one solid block in the foundation of a new economic paradigm.

The Subsidy Shift Second, we need to shift subsidy policy and practice from perverse to constructive programs. At present global subsidy practices—in agriculture, fishing, energy, etc.—are primarily designed to protect special interests rather than the public good; and are often destructive of the natural capital base of the very industries they are supposed to support. For the most part, they act as disincentives to conserving natural capital, encouraging, for example, further exploration, production, and consumption of carbon intense fossil fuels over switching to less harmful alternative sources of energy. They also introduce severe distortions into market function, reducing some markets to travesties of the truth—again, particularly in the pricing of fossil fuels. If the health, security, social, clean-up, and greenhouse costs of gasoline in the U.S. amount to nine dollars per gallon, then that figure should be reflected in the pump price. It’s hard to imagine a better incentive to developing cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient forms of energy. Should subsidies be eliminated entirely? No, not at all: as a form of reverse taxation, they should be shifted from “bads” to “goods.” Subsidies which have the effect of conserving ecosystem services and resources—such as the proposed marine reserves discussed earlier—would also distort market function, but for once in ways conducive to human welfare.

The Market Shift Third, and perhaps most imperatively, markets must shift from externalized to fully internalized information systems. Unless they do,

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they will continue to underestimate the true costs of natural capital. To enable the shift, markets need to abandon two economically destructive and outdated myths: first, that natural capital reduces to raw materials and, by default, waste dumps. And, second, that nature’s other services—from nutrient cycling to climate regulation—are inexhaustible, cost-free, economically meaningless, and thus dismissible without penalty. In fact, if lost or severely degraded, their annual and unavoidable replacement cost would come to at least the annual global GDP, assuming they could be replaced at all. These two myths—each taken for granted by the conventional orthodox model—build massive distortions into market function. None of this should be taken as an argument for “deep ecology,” but only for the more modest and completely anthropocentric objective of enhancing human welfare. Unless the market meets this objective, it is dysfunctional by definition: the entire raison d’être of economics is to serve the material well-being of humanity. And since our well-being is nested in the full and finite range of the planet’s natural services, the market had better pay very close attention to the viability of those services. Realistically, if left to its own inertia, the conventional market would not willingly internalize the full cost of natural capital. Adequate and timely internalization would require a steady dose of government intervention. But most modern economies are already a mix of market initiative and government regulation (antitrust laws, money supply management, etc.). In an ecological economic system, the specific tax, subsidy, and regulatory mix would change, but the underlying principle of economic and governmental synergy would not. If anything, the ecological model may have more faith than its conventional counterpart in Adam Smith’s legendary “invisible hand”—it only asks that the hand be permitted to play all the keys on the piano rather than a preselected few. 27 One major caveat: given the trans-nationalization of commerce and the current relaxation of trade barriers, it would be inadvisable for one nation, even an economic powerhouse like the U.S., to make the three shifts on its own. If a given nation were to unilaterally impose a full or even partial internalization policy on its domestic markets—thus driving up the prices of its products—it would become uncompetitive in the international trade arena over the short to medium term. The market shift in particular would be workable only in the context of ironclad multilateral or, preferably, worldwide treaties. Even a small number of cheats willing to sell raw materials or finished goods at externalized prices would undermine the whole effort. This is a big caveat: The assault on our natural support system is ultimately a global problem requiring global solutions. If

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given all the keys—especially if given all the keys—Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” must play to a full house. Finally, government would have to exercise very astute timing in phasing out “bads” and phasing in “goods.” If, for example, government plans to impose a carbon tax on Tuesday, it had better shift subsidies to alternative energy industries no later than Monday. Otherwise we would wake up to severe energy shortages on Wednesday. The careful sequencing and coordination of tax and subsidy shifts should have three benign effects: they would automatically stimulate market internalization, buffer the inevitable perturbations caused by market shifts, and kick start a whole new category of natural-capital conserving industries.

The Thinking Shift Once the ecological perspective is fully internalized into economic discourse and practice, everything changes: entering assumptions about economic reality, what sort of content is admissible into economic thinking, and the shape of the thinking itself. As already noted, humanity’s current impasse at the interface between economics and nature is primarily a creature of unintended consequences. For all its subtlety, orthodox economics lacks the time frame and broad vision necessary for thinking through the most probable long-term consequences of two of its most cherished doctrines: growth and externalization. Unchecked growth inevitably causes economic overshoot, and externalization doctrine encourages us to deny the reality or even the possibility of overshoot until it hits us between the eyes. The growth model has failed miserably at anticipating the negative consequences of its prescriptions and blind spots—again, the evidence of failure is all around us. In contrast, as an old professor of mine used to say, applied ecology is the science of anticipating and managing unintended consequences. The ecological model is nothing if not an ongoing surveillance of ripple effects, feedbacks, interactions, and margins of error. Every time a human intention is dropped into nature, its subsequent biography is uncertain: even if it has the effect we want, it also has side effects which cumulatively may override the intended effect. If only the last two centuries of industrial growth had been guided by this cautionary principle. Put simply, the human economy has to accept the brute fact of its nestedness in nature’s dynamics and capacities—it has to think the way nature thinks. This would not signal a regressive shift toward primitivism

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or romanticism. On the contrary, under present circumstances, it would be motivated by hardheaded pragmatism and realism.

Endnotes 1

For discussion of early plant domestication, see J. Diamond (1997), pp. 120,

130. 2

Regarding aerosols, see Flannery (2005), pp. 158-160; Kolbert (2006), p. 103; Stern (2007), pp. 15, 229; Kerr (2006), pp. 401-403. 3 CO2 tends to accumulate in the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to Earth’s surface. SO2 settles in the stratosphere, the next layer out. 4 On “global dimming,” see T. Flannery (2005), pp. 126, 162. For a technical discussion of geoengineered aerosols, see T. Wigley (2006), pp. 452-454. For discussion of international governance of solar radiation management (SRM) and the advisability of field testing, see D. W. Keith et al. (2010). 5 For coral reefs, see T. Flannery (2005), pp. 104-113. For danger to shellfish populations, see pp. 186, 251-252. 6 See, for example, John Turner’s essay supporting the feasibility and adequacy of clean, alternative energy technologies (1999, pp. 687-689). 7 P. Crutzen (2002), p. 23; T. Berry (1991), pp. 98, 103; (1988), p. 42; J. Zalasiewicz et al. (2010). 8 R. Costanza, R. d’Arge et al. (1997). 9 R. Costanza, R. d’Arge et al. (1997), p. 259. Parentheses and italics added. 10 A. Balmford et al. (2002). 11 See A. Balmford et al. (2002), p. 952. 12 A. Balmford et al. (2004), p. 9697. 13 A. Balmford et al. (2002). 14 See G. Hardin (1968). For more recent thinking about “commons” reserves, see E. Ostrom et al. (1999); T. Dietz et al. (2003); Raj Patel (2009), pp. 92-99. 15 See Rudolf de Groot’s chapter in Jansson et al. (1994), especially pp. 159160. 16 The second example is taken from L. Brown (2006), pp. 15-16, 77-78, 231234, 259, 265. 17 See N. Stern (2007), pp. 362-364 on taxing “bads” vs. “goods.” Also see H. Daly (1996), p. 15; and Costanza and Daly (1992), p. 45. 18 U.S. lobby and subsidy figures are taken from L. Brown (2006), pp. 77-78, 234. 19 See N. Stern (2007), pp. 312-313, 403-404. Also, note Stern’s comments on the damaging effects of subsidies: they cause excessive consumption, stimulate waste and inefficiency, discourage innovative research and development, etc. 20 N. Stern (2007), p. 27 (italics added). 21 L. Brown (2006), pp. 15-16.

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22 See J. Diamond (2005), chapts. 2, 5, 7, 8. Taking his lead from Diamond, L. Brown (2006) puts it this way: “First the trees go, then the soil, and finally the society itself” (p. 82). 23 For detailed discussion of GDP and measures of well being, see Daly and Cobb (1994), pp. 76-84; and Costanza, Cumberland et al. (1997), pp. 111-119, 127-140. Also see Costanza and Daly (1992), p. 40. 24 With apologies to Al Gore’s (2006) cautiously titled, but otherwise very helpful book, An Inconvenient Truth. 25 Note that my suggestion is specific to low and middle wage-generated income, that is, to labor. The taxation of property-generated income is another matter, as is the tax code’s treatment of high-income earners. I am not suggesting that we abandon progressive taxation policy; in fact, I’m suggesting that we strengthen it. 26 For “goods” and “bads,” see Stern (2007), pp. 362-364; for natural capital depletion tax, see Costanza and Daly, 1992, p. 45. 27 For Smith (1723-1790), the free market is guided by an “invisible hand” which presumably combines many expressions of individual self interest into what’s best for society as a whole (1937, p. 423).

CHAPTER 20 CONCLUSION: CHOOSING BETWEEN USABLE AND UNUSABLE PASTS

It’s not so much our technology, but what we believe, that will determine our fate. —Tim Flannery Between 980 and 1450 A.D. a natural experiment took place on the southwestern coast of Greenland. Settlements were established there by two distinctly different ethnic and cultural groups, the Norse from Scandinavia and the Inuit from Canada. They co-existed in what eventually became a struggle for survival during the deep freeze of the “Little Ice Age” of the 1300s and 1400s—not a struggle with each other, but between both colonies and the challenging forces of nature. The Norse—despite having the advantage of 200 more years to adjust their way of life to their new homeland (they arrived in 980, the Inuit in 1200)—failed the experiment. Their colony eventually collapsed, most of them dying and some migrating back to Iceland and Scandinavia. The Inuit, in contrast, survived the Little Ice Age, and today make up 90% of the population of Greenland. Historical geographer, Jared Diamond, after reviewing the archeological and written records of the two settlements, asks a simple question: why did one group fail and the other succeed? One answer, of course, is that the Inuit—while lacking the metal, stone, wool, lumber, and livestock-based technology and lifestyle of the Norse—had dwellings, hides, tools, weapons, and kayaks better adapted to making a living in the Arctic. Fair enough. But this answer is complicated by the considerable evidence that the two groups had contact and interacted with each other. They co-existed on the west coast of Greenland for over 200 years (12001450 A.D.). Yet the Norse failed to embrace the more adaptive practices and technology of the Inuit. This failure encourages Diamond to ask a

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deeper and more focused question: Why did the Norse not learn from their neighbors? They had every practical incentive to learn—including, most fundamentally, physical survival. Moreover, examination of the skeletal remains in the Norse colony indicates there was no interbreeding between the two peoples. So this possible route to exchange of technique and custom was effectively shut off. Again, it’s as if the group that had the most to gain by collaboration had no interest in this option. And again, the same nagging question: why not? Before venturing an answer, we need a little more background on the Norse people. When they arrived in Greenland in 980, they imported their dairy farming lifestyle from Scandinavia, even though the soil and vegetation of their new landscape was incompatible with it. They cut down the sparse supply of trees and removed native brush to plant hay and grassy pasture for their dairy cows, sheep, and goats. They used wood and turf for building homes, barns, and churches, as well as for heating and cooking. The resulting deforestation led to erosion and loss of topsoil (trees and brush have deeper roots than grass does), and this, in turn, degraded their crop and hay production. Their existence and selfsufficiency were marginalized by the mismatch between their traditional livestock-based economy and the fragile Greenland environment. Put bluntly, by being good Scandinavians, they were bad Greenlanders. Even so, for about 300 years, this strategy more or less worked, however precariously and intermittently. But with the onset of the Little Ice Age in the 1300s, the summer growing season, short at best, became even shorter. This put further stress on an already overtaxed use of the land, reducing the food supply for both people and livestock. The margin for error, already strained, became even less forgiving. The human–nature encounter in the Norse colony degenerated into a war of attrition. There’s a reason—however ironic—that we call ourselves homo sapiens and not homo economicus. At bottom, when push comes to shove, we seem to be ultimately more invested in the various “wisdoms” (sapiens) that define our lives than in the pragmatics that enable us to make a living (economicus). Jared Diamond’s answer to his own question was that the Norse failed because in order to succeed they would have had to identify with the Inuit, to effectively become Inuit. But they held the Inuit in contempt, routinely referring to them as “wretches” (from the Old Norse Skraelings). In contrast with the pagan, hunting, non-Western Inuit, the Norse defined themselves as livestock farmers and Christians. The Norse could not abandon the markers of their own identity: the foundational “wisdoms”—narratives, beliefs, values, models, and divine revelations—by which they defined themselves. To do so would have been

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to lose all sense of who they were, to cross the line between self recognition and self alienation, between familiar and “wretched” versions of humanity. Their past had become unusable, but they chose to draw upon it until they drew their last breath. Jared Diamond sums up their problem this way: “In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit; they lost that gamble.” And then he draws a more general conclusion which applies as much to us today, as it does to the medieval Norse Greenlanders: “Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to replace with new values, when times change” 1

Usable versus Unusable Core Values But what precisely were the core values that undid the Norse Greenlanders? To answer this question, let’s start with the two markers of identity they embraced—a farming way of life and a Christian belief system—and parse out each one for its contained set of core values. The fact that they were dairy farmers—that they identified with this way of making a living—dictated a posture toward their new landscape that was ultimately self defeating. Owning cows, barns, and hayfields was considered a mark of prestige in Norse society. They also hunted for seal meat, and during their 450 years of tenure in Greenland, they increasingly relied on this source of nourishment—but they did not make this dietary adjustment gladly. There was something “wretched” about it. Instead of eagerly bending their livelihood toward the abundant— as opposed to scarce—resources of their natural surround, they did so reluctantly. And the higher a given family’s social status, the greater the reluctance. The honorable strategy was to stubbornly bend the environment to fit their livestock farming heritage. They bent the wrong way. But why were they so rigid? Why couldn’t they adjust to the climate and landscape realities of their new world? Why couldn’t they, like the Inuit, establish good fit and fluent relations with their natural surround? Again, why did they bend the wrong way? To get any kind of even halfsatisfactory answer to these questions, we have to turn to the core values embedded in their Christian identity. As argued in the first section of this book, our Judeo-Christian religious heritage is primarily centered on the relationship between God and humanity. But it also includes a nature story whose core themes and values have profoundly shaped our relations with the natural world. The

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building blocks of our sacred nature story reduce to four basic points of doctrine: dominion doctrine, image-of-God doctrine, the “Fall” of nature, and heaven doctrine. Since the primary existential issue for the Greenland Norse was their problematic ability to adjust to the realities of their natural world, the most determining feature of their Christian identity was its nature story. Unfortunately, the core values of that story persuaded them to make—however well intentioned—all the wrong choices in their encounter with nature. The first three points of doctrine are taken from the first three chapters of the Bible. There God creates humanity in his own divine “image” and grants us “dominion” over the Earth. Because we are exceptions to the natural order of things, he does not counsel us to accommodate to the realities of our world. On the contrary, he tells us in no uncertain terms to “subdue” it. Unfortunately, Adam and Eve’s subsequent “original sin” forces their banishment from Eden into a “fallen” natural world where God declares the ground to be “cursed because of you” and “brings forth thorns and thistles to you.” By the end of the third chapter of the revealed word of God, nature’s bottom-up resistance clashes with humanity’s top-down dominion to transform the interface between us and nature into a war of attrition. As a kind of corrective to this nasty nature story, Christianity introduces heaven doctrine. Put briefly, this doctrine teaches that the Earth is not our real home, but that our true destiny is elsewhere, and that this elsewhere is a super-natural realm. Heaven doctrine replaces our nasty sacred nature story with a sugar coated super-nature story. Nature becomes an irrelevance. These were the core values the Greenland Norse brought to their encounter with nature. All things considered, it’s amazing they lasted as long as they did. But the pagan Inuit, who did not share these Christian values, managed to survive and ultimately thrive in Greenland. The Norse may (or may not) have gone to heaven, but the Inuit inherited their own piece of the Earth. The difference between the old Norse and contemporary humanity is that they had a third option: they could have gone back to Scandinavia. And, apparently, some of them did. We, however, have nowhere else to go. Our footprint covers the entire Earth. We have only two options: embracing an alternative set of core values or suffering a very painful future. As argued throughout this book, we already have an alternative nature narrative – a usable past – locked away in the basement. All we have to do is set it free.

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From Homo Sapiens to Homo Invasiens to Anthropocene Epoch In another ironic turn on our preferred designation as homo sapiens, when our ancestors left Africa, we transformed into homo invasiens, the consummate invasive species, upsetting ecosystem balance wherever we planted our footprint. This invasion has been so complete and impactful that evolutionary geologists now see the planet as shifting out of the Holocene into a new “Anthropocene” epoch in Earth history. We humans are becoming the primary force in the design, structure, and function of terrestrial nature. Dominion doctrine has turned out to be a full-blown biblical prophesy. 2 This new consensus in geological thinking, however, is not advanced as an improvement or a goodness in the Earth process. If anything, it is approached in a spirit of apprehension: we are forcing the Earth into a new epoch, but it will not be as welcoming as the epoch—the Holocene—in which homo invasiens multiplied, thrived, and expanded its habitat. The early evidence strongly suggests that the larger the human footprint grows, the more problematic it becomes—not just for water, weather, whales, and waste sinks—but for the human species itself. The irony is that the geological epoch to which we give our name—the Anthropocene—may witness our heedless decline. Clinging to our orthodox collection of nature narratives will only exacerbate the process. As Jared Diamond, Thomas Berry, Isaiah Berlin, Tim Flannery, and Alfred North Whitehead remind us—each using his own vocabulary—we need a different story. Diamond observes that “when times change,” we need new “core values.” Berry counsels us to get a “new story.” The “old story … is no longer effective.” Flannery claims that “what we believe … will determine our fate.” Berlin argues that “the first step to the understanding of men is the bringing to consciousness of the model or models that dominate and penetrate their thought and action.” Whitehead puts it this way: “A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility.” 3 The critical insight shared by these astute observers of the human condition is that the way we attribute value and meaning to the natural world will decide the outcome of the Anthropocene Epoch. The shift out of the Holocene into the Anthropocene means that our old nature story has successfully done its work. But its “success” raises a cautionary question: will its success as a guiding narrative translate into our success or failure

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as a species? A growing body of evidence points toward failure. It’s time to activate our repertoire of dissenting nature stories. It’s time to become homo sapiens in the true sense of the term. Just as the blind man “sees” and makes sense of the world through his cane, we “see” and make sense of the world through our stories. I use the term “story” in an inclusive sense, as a kind of cornucopia that carpets the path before us with narratives, paradigms, prejudgements, models, values, beliefs, and—to paraphrase Whitehead—sterilizing abstractions. A football coach would call it a “game plan.” Because of our guiding nature story, we behave as if we already know what awaits us beyond the next horizon of our invasive trajectory. We invade with a game plan, with a set of cognitive and ethical templates that prejudge our experience of the new worlds we occupy. We have a mental map of their contours before we even get there. It’s just a matter of laying the map—whether it fits or not—over the new territory. Just as the invasive Norse did over the fjords and hillsides of coastal Greenland. Their mental map showed churches, livestock, and hayfields. The landscape was bent to fit the map. As noted in this book’s first chapter, if the blind man shifts from a cane to a guide-dog, he sees the world differently. It is no longer a “cane-able” world, but becomes a “canine-able” world. Analogously, if we change our nature story as we invade the twenty-first century and beyond, we reshape the configuration of the century before we even get there. When the Norse arrived in Greenland, they saw it through the eyes of Christian farmers. The Inuit saw it through the eyes of pagan hunters. Each group imposed its own prejudgements, stories, values, and game plan on the landscape, turning one and the same physical setting into two completely different experienced settings. What favored the Inuit was that the shape of their nature narrative better fit the shape of their new home in Greenland. Twenty-first century humanity needs to have its thought and action “penetrated”—as Berlin puts it—by stories, core values, and models that have a better fit with the realities of the new century.

Nature Story as the Infrastructure of Environmental Policy It’s one thing to argue that our mainstream nature stories hinder the average person’s ability to make coherent sense of environmental problems. But can the same be said of government leaders who are responsible for the creation and execution of environmental policy? After

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all, they are supposed to be the experts. But if they are so expert, why is environmental policy—with the occasional exception—in such a shambles? The usual roster of answers to this question is so profuse it tumbles all over itself. The experts, for example, are blocked by powerful vested interests opposed to environmentalism on economic, political, or ideological grounds. These special interests, in turn, are supported by a small but influential coterie of scientists who caution against overstating the magnitude of environmental problems, particularly climate change. Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway indict the latter as “Merchants of Doubt.” 4 Government leaders are also preoccupied with many other ostensibly more pressing issues, such as terrorism, regional wars, nuclear proliferation, porous national borders, drug trafficking, corruption, crime, re-election, rogue states, sphere-of-influence rivalries, economic recession, unemployment—the list goes on and on. There is also the hard-wired human tendency to give more immediate problems higher priority than long-range problems. And this tendency is compounded by denial, wishful thinking, escapism, and/or resentment when we are faced with the unintended negative consequences of our presumably wellintentioned behavior. This book is not about environmental policy per se. Rather, it’s about the basic stories that shape our understanding of nature and humanity’s place in—or out of—nature. But do these stories also shape environmental policy? I would argue that they do—that, in fact, they influence it more deeply than any of the factors listed in the previous paragraph. Perhaps the best way of making this argument is to do a little “reverse engineering.” If you really want to figure out why a house, for example, is designed the way it is or what makes it work as a house, you “reverse engineer” the process that built it. That is, you take the final product apart piece by piece, step by step—either conceptually or physically—until you get to the starting point. At this point you’re down to the construction materials—brick, mortar, wood, metal, glass, shingles, etc.—that fundamentally constrain the house’s design options. Take away the metal and glass, for example, and you cannot “forward engineer” to the same house. Replace roof shingles with thatch, and you’ll end up with a very different roof. The house you end up with, in other words, is very much a creature of the raw construction materials you start with. The house can never become anything other than what its raw materials permit. You can’t, as the proverb says, make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear—nor, vice versa.

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The same goes for environmental policy. If you want to find out why it works—or more to the point, why it doesn’t work—you expose it to something like a reverse engineering process. You dig underneath the policy to unpack the infrastructure of core values, narratives, assumptions, and biases that shaped it in the first place. If you want to change the policy, you’ve got to change the raw cognitive and ethical material it’s made of. If you want “silk purse” policy, you have to start with silk worms, not with pig ears. Unfortunately—with all due respect to our porcine friends— there’s more ravenous pig than beautiful silk in our orthodox nature stories. As argued throughout the book, our mainstream nature stories promote attitudes of hostility, superiority, estrangement, control, and exploitation toward nature. Again, these attitudes are the raw material at the infrastructure of environmental policy. It’s a stretch to expect humanity to forward engineer from this set of attitudes to a reconciliatory environmental policy. The raw material is bent the wrong way. In our foundational sacred nature story, for example, God tells us to “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” over all its creatures. The founding fathers of our archetypal science story mapped nature on the mechanical model. Since we humans are the only mechanics in town, it follows that nature is ours to operate as we wish. If running nature’s “machinery” translates biblical dominion-and-subdue doctrine into a doable program, it becomes both a practical and sacred imperative to do so. Piled on top of religion and science, our ruling economic model views nature as a wholly owned subsidiary of the human condition to be exploited entirely in the service of human appetites and ambitions. These layers of raw cognitive and ethical material effectively set the terms for whatever environmental policy we might wish to build. How can humanity expect to achieve harmony with nature when it has to plow through so much inharmonious muck to get there? Just as a house cannot transcend its physical construction materials, neither can environmental policy magically levitate above the cultural, conceptual, and attitudinal material at its foundation. The way out of this fix is to shift to a new set of dissenting nature stories—both sacred and secular—which are recognizably our own. In the biblical Book of Job, for example, humanity is a creature embedded in the full spectrum of God’s creatures. There are no divinely sanctioned aspirations to dominion or exceptionalism, as the human Job rises and falls and rises again—just like other creatures—according to the rhythms and cycles of nature. The Song of Solomon wraps human love and intimacy in a flowing, silken robe of natural metaphor, blending nature and humanity

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into a poetic whole. How different this is from our orthodox sacred nature story. Our dissenting versions of the Beauty-and-Beast legend do not have the human Beauty redeem Beast from his presumably degraded animality. Rather, Beast rescues Beauty from her sterile entrapment in human identity. Or, better yet, they meet halfway, each a self that loves the other without surrendering the self. Our alternative science story sees humanity as a rather recent arrival in nature’s vast procession through cosmic time—and it backs up this account with sound empirical findings. Unlike the mechanical worldview, the physics and biology of science’s alternative story has good fit with the physics and biology of nature itself. The ecological model of economics embeds the human economy in nature (rather than the reverse), assigns monetary value to nature’s resources and services, and internalizes those values into market function. In doing so it sets new terms for rethinking taxes, subsidies, and the unanticipated consequences of economic activity. These new terms make for a more harmonious, more sustainable, and less deluded encounter between the human marketplace and nature’s fixed and precious supply of resources and services. To paraphrase a piece of late twentieth-century wisdom, the problem is not the economy, stupid—it’s the ruling economic model. The following chart outlines a simple four-phase sequence between our collectively held nature stories and solving and/or preventing environmental problems. Going from top to bottom is “reverse engineering.” Going from bottom to top is “forward engineering.” Outcome:

Failure or Success at Solving/Preventing Environmental Problems

Action:

Collective Action on Environmental Problems

Policy:

Environmental Policy Choices

Infrastructure:

The Raw Cognitive, Ethical, and Attitudinal Material Contained in Our Traditional Nature Narratives

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My basic argument is that success or failure at the top of the chart is largely—although certainly not fully—determined by the raw material at the bottom of the chart. If we start with silk worms we are more likely to arrive at “silk purse” outcomes, i.e., success in solving environmental problems. If, in contrast, we start with pig ears, environmental policy is more likely to be bent toward “pig ear” outcomes, i.e., failure. What I’ve outlined here is a four-step process. The first step— analysis, critique, and rethinking of infrastructural stories, biases, and values—is the focus of this book. The second step—policy formulation— is the job of government agencies, environmental lobbies, think tanks, international organizations (e.g., the UN), and treaties such as the recent Paris Climate Accord. The third step—collective, policy-driven action— would require initiative, funding, and collaboration among the executive branches of government, industry, and environmental consortiums. The fourth step—success or failure—would be a creature of the first three steps. My argument is that we have to get the first step right to set the whole process in the direction of success. Of course, at any point from infrastructure to outcome, things may take an unexpected turn. Sound policy, for example, may transmute into ineffective or counterproductive action. But I would argue that this sort of disconnect between policy and action is much less likely to happen if the infrastructural stories portray humanity and nature as harmoniously related. Sound and positive infrastructure triggers strong and positive momentum from the bottom up. The opposite is likely to happen when the raw material at the level of infrastructure bends the wrong way. When this happens, the momentum it triggers usually leads to negative—or, at best, ambivalent—outcomes. Look at what happened to the Greenland Norse. They had what might be considered two “policy” options: one consistent with their core identity as Christian farmers, the other shaped by an Inuit worldview. My argument is that they embraced the wrong policy because their basic nature story bent the wrong way. Much the same could be said for twenty-first century Western civilization. Despite the overwhelming evidence that cries out for effective environmental policy and action, we wallow in confusion, hesitation, and ambivalence. And that’s on a good day. On a bad day we simply deny the problem. This alternating pattern of ambivalence and denial—this hesitant nibbling away at the edges rather than striking at the heart of the problem—is probably driven by the underlying conflict between our coexisting orthodox and dissenting nature stories. The former speak to us in a loud and authoritative voice; the latter in a soft and tentative voice. We need to shift the volume from one to the other. We need to radically

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change the raw cognitive and attitudinal material at the level of infrastructure. Otherwise, we’ll go the way of the Greenland Norse.

Merchants of Doubt or Merchants of Faith? A few pages ago I briefly alluded to a critique advanced by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. 5 They argue that, despite overwhelming empirical evidence on issues like climate change, a hard core of influential, dissenting scientists—whom they call “merchants of doubt”—receive an inexplicably balanced treatment in the media and in the court of public opinion. In fact, not only do they get more favorable coverage than their views deserve, but their campaign of doubt is quite successful. Very little actually gets done. But why is their message so successful? My argument in this book is that while their message is clearly counter-evidentiary, it is not counter-intuitive. The reason for their success is that they speak out of Western civilization’s dominant, orthodox position on human–nature relations. Every time they publicly express a “doubt,” they tap into a deep reservoir of belief that resonates with their message—our orthodox body of nature stories. The merchants of doubt, in other words, are more fundamentally merchants of faith. In the context of recent scientific inquiry, they merchandize doubt; but in the larger context of Western cultural history, they merchandize faith. By rejecting the findings of science the merchants effectively reaffirm faith and belief. And as scientists in their own right, they presumably speak from a position of authority. They don’t so much promote doubt as reduce it wherever it may pop up. Their basic message is keep the faith—don’t be alarmed by questionable data—everything is OK. Listen to the nature stories circulating through your head. Their wisdom is timeless. When looked at this way, these ostensibly dissenting critics are not dissenters—they represent orthodoxy. In the big picture of Western civilization, it’s the cutting-edge climate and atmospheric scientists who speak in a dissenting voice. They are routinely dismissed as alarmists, as sanctimonious left-wingers and socialists, as driven by a bizarre political and economic agenda that runs counter to what we all—in our hearts— “know” and believe to be true: that nature is a wholly owned—if somewhat prickly—subsidiary of the human condition; and, moreover, that it is right, just, and according to the word of God that this be so. Not to mention the words of St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Adam Smith. The so-called merchants of doubt find themselves in

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pretty heavy company. They’ve got the whole weight of our mainstream nature narrative backing them up—and reassurance is the order of the day. So where does this leave us? The emergent scientific consensus is struggling to become the standard story on human-caused climate change. Considered in a deep historical context, however, it speaks from a dissenting, not from an authoritative, position. Given this disadvantage, it has two tasks: (a) to continue to produce and transmit high quality knowledge, and (b) to incrementally transform itself into our orthodox voice and story about humanity’s encounter with climate change. The second objective is at least as important as the first, and would require that scientists themselves actively get out the message. It would require that they not hide behind the usual mask of professional dispassion and objectivity, but that they proselytize their findings in the domain of public opinion. It means that they would have to become “merchants” as well as producers of empirically verified fact. In doing so they would wrap the valid findings of climate science in an aura of familiarity and believability. And they would effectively counter the obsolete orthodoxy of the merchants of doubt. What’s critical in this face-off is that the old anthropocentric orthodoxy be replaced by a new story. Once the new story takes hold of the popular imagination, the merchants of doubt-you-can-believe-in will no longer speak with a powerful voice. Their voice will be recognized for what it is: an expression of cranky, backward looking, and wishful thinking. 6

What Do We Mean by “Nature”? What men see in nature is a result of what they have been taught to see— lessons in school, doctrines they have heard in church, books they have read. They are conditioned most of all by what they mean by Nature, a word that has gathered around itself paradox and ambiguity since the fifth century B.C. —Marjorie Hope Nicolson 7 The term “nature” may have more meanings and connotations than any other word in the Western lexicon. Cultural historian Arthur O. Lovejoy, for example, has listed 38 meanings in one of his examinations of the idea of nature, and 66 in another. 8 Even a casual reading of such an extensive catalogue of definitions forces two conclusions: first, we humans can’t

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seem to stop thinking about nature—we are all but obsessed with it. And, second, our way of dealing with this preoccupation, our way to avoid being overwhelmed by nature, is usually (but not always) to devalue it, objectify it, keep it at a distance, rise above it, or wishfully think it into submission. Sadly, these conceptual maneuvers, taken together, dictate the shape of our dominant, orthodox nature story. Sometimes our stories approach nature in terms of what it is: Nature is X, Y, and Z. Nature, for example, is water, soil, air, and life. Or, more broadly, nature is space, time, cosmos, and consciousness. But our dominant, orthodox stories tend to place greater emphasis on what nature is not or what it contrasts with: Nature is what remains after we subtract A, B, and C. The most common and recognizable of these understandingsby-subtraction can be summed up in seven or eight polar oppositions. 9 x

x

x

x

Nature versus Supernature: In our Judeo-Christian religious tradition, God is transcendently super-natural, i.e., above, beyond, and outside nature; and his miracles are exceptions to nature’s standard repertoire of behaviors. Thus, the first thing we subtract from our idea of nature is our idea of the sacred and divine. To include God in nature would be to slide into pantheism, which our religious tradition categorically rejects as heresy and idolatry. Nature versus Paradise: Nature is the harsh reality we humans inherited after the Fall and exile from our first home in the Garden of Eden. Nature is the punishment for original sin, and the ongoing occasion for further sin. For these reasons humanity yearns for redemption from it. Nature versus Human: This opposition takes four forms: religious, cultural, metaphysical, and economic. According to standard JudeoChristian religious cosmology, nature is understood to occupy the bottom rank in a three-tiered hierarchy, with God at the top and humanity suspended somewhere in the middle, created in the image and likeness of God. As God’s favored creature, we have also been granted dominion over all other earthly creatures. Taken together, Image-of-God and Dominion doctrines are the sacred basis for Western humanity’s claim to superiority over nature. Nature versus Culture: In this opposition, nature is understood to be elemental, raw, primitive reality—earth, air, water, animality, etc.—in contrast with humanity’s culturally invented reality: agriculture, story, ritual, symbol, literacy, artifact, art, technology, science, commerce, manners, civilization, and so on. We humans transform nature’s crudities into cultural configurations which nature, for all its raw

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energy and variety, could never achieve—all in the service of creating a distinctively human and reputedly superior form of reality. Nature versus Spirit: According to this metaphysical dualism, nature is restricted to matter and body. The essence of humanity, in contrast, takes an immaterial and more edified form: soul, mind, consciousness, abstract thought, an awareness of death. Nature versus the Human Economy: Wherever humanity goes—we are the ultimate invasive species—our economic footprint follows. As our footprint expands, virginal nature is progressively colonized and transformed into what our ruling economic model calls “natural capital.” According to this model the Earth’s forests are little more than economically useful stacks of lumber; the oceans reduce to a vast fish farm; the atmosphere serves as a convenient waste sink for our industrial gases; and so on. Nature-as-wild-nature, in other words, is understood in terms of its potential for (or against) humanity’s overarching domestication project. In this opposition, nature is not simply defined in contrast with what it is not, but much of it progressively becomes what it is not. Nature versus the Ideal: Nature’s turbulence and disorder oppose it to the ideal Platonic form of our classical Greek philosophical heritage. There are, for example, no perfectly parallel lines in nature, no perfectly rounded spheres, no well-shaped Beethoven symphonies. Yet nature hints at the ideal: the two banks of a river are approximately parallel; pumpkins and planets are approximately spherical, etc. Only the human mind—serene, logical, mathematical— can go beyond the “hint” to achieve truly ideal form. Interestingly, Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony was composed after he had become totally deaf—it was a product of his mind, unencumbered by his ear. Nature versus Reality: At this point our orthodox nature story begins to tie itself into a knot. How can nature be the opposite of both the real and the ideal? According to our foundational Platonic philosophical tradition, the answer is that nature, despite appearances, is at best a shadow or reflection of true reality. “True reality,” in contrast, is found only in the realm of ideal Platonic form. Western religion adopts this bias in a strong sense, reaching toward a “higher reality” in heaven and soul doctrines. For Western science the bias also operates, but in a more qualified sense. When wearing its empirical hat, science takes nature to be reality itself. But in its search for the “laws” of nature, it probes beneath nature’s surface disorder for a “deeper” mathematical reality: for example, Einstein’s famous

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equation, E = mc2, which describes the relation between energy and mass. Consequently, nature as we encounter it in our everyday lives falls short of both religion’s and science’s target “realities.” In this sense everyday nature is a kind of degraded leftover that falls through the cracks between the real and the ideal. In various combinations these several oppositions are invented, embraced, amplified, and propagandized by our orthodox collection of nature stories. Deeply influenced by these stories, we define nature primarily in terms of its opposition to what we most value; as the lesser reality left over after God, spirit, perfection, and human culture are subtracted; as the backdrop to the larger cosmic drama between humanity and God; as the stage on which humanity plays out its urge to power, exceptionality, and superiority. Over against this orthodox bias, we have an alternative, but much less assertive lexicon of nature’s meanings which differ from the foregoing in at least three fundamental ways. First, they tend to define nature positively, in terms of what it is. Second, they blur the boundary between the natural and the human, often commingling the two. And, third, they usually turn our orthodox meanings upside down by assigning a more encompassing and determining reality to nature than to the human condition. These alternative definitions of nature can be seen as the message spun out by a quite different set of nature narratives. In our dissenting stories we humans define our God as close to nature. We find an invigorating blend of frisson, fear, and comfort in nature’s thorns, animals, tempests, seasons, birdsong, and sunsets. We see in nature an inner and outer companion, a teeming assembly of fellow Earthlings, a home in which we make our home. And, finally, we see ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. We are not merely “in relation” to nature, or “close” to nature, or “reconciled” to nature. Nature’s existence is a precondition to our own existence. It is our home, yes, but it is more than that. Put simply, if there were no nature, there would be no humanity. We may in some ways be a marvelous expression of nature’s fecundity, but we are not exceptions to the natural order of things. We are like the biblical Job—rising, falling, and rising again according to nature’s rhythms and cycles. When we violate those rhythms—as we often do—we violate our own rhythms. If we continue to abuse those cycles—as we enter the Anthropocene epoch— we wound both nature and our own tenure on the Earth. But nature will heal itself and, however sadly, move on without us.

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A New Covenant with the Earth We humans need a new covenant with the Earth, one that redirects our worldview from a doctrine of human exceptionalism—the “emergency exit” view—to an embrace of the Earth as our true home—the “welcome home” story. The old covenant suffers from a severe mismatch with the new reality of the 21st century—a reality which was itself created in no small part by the misguided themes and values of the old covenant. A society which clings to old models, values, beliefs, and narratives is doomed to stagnation and failure, particularly when the old worldview is itself at the foundation of the problem. The old worldview is an unusable past. To think otherwise, to continue to use the unusable is the definition of insanity and a roadmap to collective tragedy. And by tragedy, I mean it in the ancient Greek sense, as a fatal hubris, as the pride that goes before the fall. We are who we are, we shout at the Earth, and we’ll be damned if we change. And the Earth shouts back: You’ll be damned if you don’t change. Again, our original mother turns toward us. Which gate shall we ask her to pass through: the one marked “Emergency Exit” or the one marked “Welcome Home”? All our children and grandchildren are gathered behind her, all the creatures of the Earth. Which gate shall we ask them to pass through? The choice is ours to make. Choose.

Endnotes Epigraph: Tim Flannery (2011), p. xviii (italics added) 1

For a readable and quite detailed treatment of the Norse Greenland settlement and disaster, see Jared Diamond’s (2005) Collapse (pp. 178-276). The two quoted passages are from pp. 433, 434. For more recent archeological reports on the Norse settlement, see the several articles published by the Greenland Isotope Project in Journal of the North Atlantic, Vol. 3, 2012. 2 See Paul Crutzen (2002); J. Zalasiewicz et al. (2010); Johan Rockström et al. (2009). 3 For quoted passages see Tim Flannery (2011), p. xviii; Thomas Berry (1988), p. 123; Jared Diamond (2005), p. 434; Isaiah Berlin (1979), p. 159; A. N. Whitehead (1925), p. 86 (all italics added). 4 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (2010), Merchants of Doubt. 5 For Oreskes and Conway’s argument, see endnote #4 above. 6 One example of a prominent scientist assigning top priority to activism and public education is climate physicist James Hansen of Columbia University and head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He has been involved in

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several acts of environmental civil disobedience. (See New York Times article by Justin Gillis, “Climate change seen posing risk to food supplies,” November 2, 2013.) 7 Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1959). Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. (italics added). 8 See A. O. Lovejoy (1955), pp. 69-75; A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas (1965), pp. 447-456. 9 For analysing nature in terms of what it contrasts with, see, for example, R. W. Hepburn (1967).

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Easterly, R. L. (1974). Illustrated great Bible stories for children. Nashville, TN: Royal. Elborn, A. (1984). Noah and the ark and the animals. Natick, MA: Picture Book Studio USA. Geisert, A. (1988). The ark. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Hewitt, K. (1984). Two by two: The untold story. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lathrop, D. P., & Fish, H. D. (1937). Animals of the Bible: A picture book. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott. Lewis, S. (1986). One-minute Bible stories: Old Testament. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Lorimer, L. T. (1978). The story of Noah’s ark. New York, NY: Random House. Mathias, R., & Downer, M. (1992). The story of Noah and the ark. New York, NY: Derrydale Books. Singer, I. B. (1974). Why Noah chose the dove. (E. Shub, Trans.). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spier, P. (1977). Noah’s ark. New York, NY: Doubleday. Stoddard, S. (1983). Doubleday illustrated children’s Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Todd, R. B. (1839). The cyclopaedia of anatomy and physiology. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts. Tresselt, A. (1971). Stories from the Bible (L. Ward, Lithographer). New York, NY: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. Wildsmith, B. (1994). Noah’s ark. The pop-up book. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. WilkoĔ3 :LONRĔ- Noah’s ark. New York, NY: North-South Books. *

*

*

Secular Farber, N., & PqҒ ne du Bois, W. (1974). Where’s Gomer? New York, NY: Dutton. Goffstein, M. B. (1978). My Noah’s ark. New York, NY: Harper and Row. Haley, G. E. (1971). Noah’s ark. New York, NY: Atheneum. Rounds, G. (1985). Washday on Noah’s ark: A story of Noah’s ark. New York, NY: Holiday House. Wildsmith, B. (1980). Professor Noah’s spaceship. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.