This fragmented view of the world extends to the way people are expected to behave. I come across many instances when the absence of this understanding of how we really fit within the great scheme of things forces people to censor what their intuition might be telling them, to the point where I sometimes wonder if there are a considerable number of people living an almost schizophrenic-like existence. The pressure can be enormous on individuals to draw a very clear line between their private feelings and their public, professional occupation. I have lost count of the number of people I have spoken with who tell me quietly of how, even though privately they may feel deeply anxious inside themselves about the consequences of this whole mechanistic approach, when at work they are expected to lock those feelings away and follow the corporate diktat, which so often reflects the mechanistic mindset that can be so destructive of Nature and her systems.
If we continue to engineer the extinction
of the last remaining indigenous, traditional
societies, we eliminate one of the last remaining
sources of that wisdom.
This bizarre denial has far-reaching and serious consequences for the lives of millions of people, and all the more so if it manifests itself in those who effectively run the world. I intend to give graphic details of the ultimate price some of the poorest farmers in India have had to pay because of it. But it is not just the lives of those in developing countries. Many small-scale farmers in the US also find themselves up against the same might of a globalized system that allows only a few giant corporations to control more or less the whole food production and distribution system across an increasing proportion of the world.
I find it revealing that a substantial number of the people who work for such organizations can often feel instinctively anxious about what this current world view expects of them, but they dare not express their disquiet for fear of being considered old-fashioned, not ‘on message’ or anti-science. They can see quite clearly the long-term implications of what they are being asked to do in their professional lives, but even so, I suspect that if I asked them whether they have any sense of the inner value of things when it comes to the decisions they take, or whether they look beyond the mechanics of Nature to obtain a true sense of what life consists of, the chances are they would feel obliged to accuse me of relying on ‘superstition’. They would most certainly fight shy of agreeing that there may be such a thing as an invisible ‘pattern’ in which all manifestations of life take place. But if they were to realize how many people in the same situation felt the same way about the consequences of what they are doing, I wonder whether they would think again, or even have the confidence to stick their heads above the parapet. I would certainly welcome the company!
Even if words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘sacred’ are a step too far for some, anyone who stands back and considers what has been done to Nature by what is now the dominant approach could be forgiven for thinking that simple common sense has been abandoned. How else could we have embarked upon such a singular and self-destructive enterprise to prove beyond doubt that we can, indeed, do without the rest of the natural world? For that is what we are doing. We are testing the world to destruction and the tragedy – no, the stupidity – is that we will only discover the real truth when we have finally succeeded in completely denuding the world of its complex life-giving forces and eradicating traditional human wisdom.
If we continue to engineer the extinction of the last remaining indigenous, traditional societies, as is happening in so many countries today (where governments feel embarrassed because they make a country look less ‘modern’), we eliminate one of the last remaining sources of that wisdom. For just as natural species, once lost, cannot be re-created in test tubes, so traditional, socalled ‘perennial’ wisdom, once lost, cannot be reinvented. This is the real damage being done by our disconnection, which is fast becoming all but complete in the modern world, all the while proving that the great experiment to stand apart from the rest of creation has failed.
This is why I have argued for so long that we need to escape the straitjacket of the Modernist world view, so that we can reconnect our collective outlook to those universal principles that underpin the health of the natural world and keep life’s myriad diversity within the limits of Nature’s capacity. In other words, we have to discover once again that in order for humanity to endure alongside the natural world (and the vast, as yet unnumbered creatures with which we share this miraculous planet) on which it so intimately depends for its survival, it is essential to give something back to Nature in return for what we so persistently and all the more arrogantly take from Her. Our approach cannot all be based on ‘rights’. There have to be ‘responsibilities’ too. And my mentioning the word ‘Modernist’ brings me to one more term I need to define before we go any further.
Modernism
Every time I use this word it provokes a storm of protest. Perhaps it is because, for many, ‘Modernism’ conjures up a certain kind of popular ‘trophy architecture’ associated with, for instance, Le Corbusier, who famously described a house as ‘a machine for living in’. However, the Modernism I am referring to is a much more pervasive doctrine than the eye-catching and clever style of architecture created by a complex figure like Le Corbusier. He was a Modernist, of course. He certainly subscribed to the wider principles of that movement – its devotion to the machine, its love of speed, the rejection of beauty as being innate in things, and the denigration of traditional design and craftsmanship.
What we should remember is that what became an international movement and a far-reaching attitude began as a gross indulgence by the one-time avantgarde. You have only to take a look at Marinetti’s famous Futurist Manifesto, published in Paris in 1909, to see what I mean. Even he called it ‘demented writing’. His language, though, rings with a certain familiarity – for instance, when he calls for ‘the gates of life to be broken down to test the bolts and padlocks’ or when he urges humanity and technology to triumph over Nature. Marinetti did, at least, admit that he wanted to ‘feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd’. But that ambition seems to have been conveniently forgotten as the Modernist ideology tightened its grip.
Marinetti’s historic prospectus was one of the statements that induced the wave of Modernism that would sweep the industrialized world throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Later I will be more specific in my definition of Modernism because its impact on our general outlook has been so pervasive, but for now suffice it to say that this is the movement that still, to my mind, underpins what has become the Establishment view. Modernism deliberately abstracted Nature and glamorized convenience and this is why we have ended up seeing the natural world as some sort of gigantic production system seemingly capable of ever-increasing outputs for our benefit. Modernism compounded what had already become a general attitude in industrialized countries towards the natural world and, as that definition has become more predominant, so the view we have of our own role in Nature’s process has been reduced. We have become semi-detached bystanders, empirically correct spectators, rather than what the ancients understood us to be, which is participants in creation. This ideology was far from benign or just a matter of fashion. The Marxism of the Bolshevik regime totally absorbed, adopted and extended