THERE ARE TWO MAJOR sacred and
profane impetuses driving the popular sense of wildness as non-human:
faith-based beliefs and rational beliefs.
First, faith-based beliefs of literate societies generally argue that human life is
not really of the Earth. Kim
Stafford, in Having Everything Right,
writes that since the Middle Ages, “The Earth itself was corrupt, and
ultimately doomed, along with those too devoted to it. Home was in heaven, and Earth was only
a perilous stopover on the soul’s pilgrimage.”[i] Human beings are described as children
of God who were placed on Earth with an
everlasting afterlife beyond the Earth.
From this perspective, humans may inhabit biological bodies that even share
key aspects such as DNA with all flora and fauna, but true human essence is
described as spiritist. Wildness
is the stage-set for entry into a spiritual afterlife, a test ground of sorts,
rather than an aspect of human identity.
And wild behavior or a desire to affiliate with wildness can be a
measure of spiritual dysfunction.
When human life appears to be
outside nature, this perception reflects our limits rather than reality, or
anything that our scientific measures tell us. Gary Snyder suggests, “We need a religious view that
embraces nature and does not fear science…”.[ii] This is not unlike Benedictine monk and
Zen adept, Willigis Jager, who states “…the most sacred dogmas were formulated
when the earth was still considered to be flat and the stars were holes in the
firmament.” Jager goes on to
state,“…humanity is not the center of the universe. Our earth is a grain of dust in a relatively small galaxy
that itself is among nearly 125 billion other galaxies, at last count.”[iii] Beyond Jager, it is generally accepted
that ninety percent of the universe remains unknown as well as ninety percent
of the human genome remains unknown due to the “dark” quality of the infinities
of both largeness and smallness.
Jager suggests that our models
must aspire to portray reality rather than become “postulates that, over time,
are simply repeated without question.”
Jager continues, “scientific models change as life changes,” and that
“religions should have the courage to rearticulate religious experience and
create new models or interpret old ones in new ways.”[iv] Jager cites C.G Jung’s observation that
belief tends to trump knowledge in order to avert despair, which leads to a
tendency to sustain beliefs rather than challenge them. And yet, Jager suggests that people may
also “despair at not knowing who they are” if “the old paradigm no longer
supports reality,…”[v]
In contemporary life, the primary
impact of any belief or model upon our actions is not simply psychological
discomfort. If psychological
discomfort was the primary issue, the debate over tradition or change might go
on ad infinitum. The ongoing
re-articulation of all of our models is important because we apply these models
to our daily life and they affect us in a very real, concrete way. In Ritual and Religion in the Making
of Humanity,[vi]
anthropologist Roy Rappaport stresses the importance of reconciliation between
religion and science both because religion creates consensus, and because
religion sustains when it fits life.
He does not suggest the need for a new theology because it provokes
argument rather than consensus.
Rappaport encourages a focus on ritual because he feels that ritual
constructs the concepts that become our beliefs. Now, as we become residents of a peopled Earth, our rituals—our
routine actions—are gradually transforming.
Whether religious or
non-religious, we have beliefs about origins and destiny.
Our beliefs affect every action
and are not simply esoteric or aesthetic or theoretical or psychological or
philosophical inquiry. Whether our
models place human life outside the Earth or place it within the Earth
dramatically affects our environmental actions toward not only the nonhuman
landscape but also, first, the quality and, second, potentially the
sustainability of human life.
Beliefs about creation may have seemed secondary to everyday life when
we were pioneers in a vast uninhabited Earth that could sustain us regardless
of our actions. Now, in “peopled”
the Earth with no vast physical frontiers to absorb our billions of daily uses,
our beliefs affect every action that form everyday “rituals” and profoundly
impact not only the local place but also global process.
Continuing with Willigis Jager as
one representative example of self-critical theological inquiry with regard to
theology and nature, Jager suggests that in Aristotelian philosophy, “God is
the ruler above all things: the
pinnacle of creation but not in
creation. In other words, the
Aristotelian God is not an overflowing fullness revealing itself as creation.” Envisioning a transcendent and personal
God “can lead to a dualistic view of the world, resulting in a wider gap
between God and creation.”[vii]
In examining possible directives
for transforming faith-based beliefs, Jager suggests that if “the cosmos is the
meaningful manifestation of God,”[viii]
then we might encounter “the inherent religiosity in many of our everyday
activities.”[ix] Then “everyday life is prayer,”[x]
and “living our lives is the actual content of religiosity.”[xi] In this context, our identity becomes
transpersonal or extends beyond ego, and our mysticism becomes directly
experienced in the events of the world.
Then actions in behalf of self may extend into a longer reach of self
and these actions are supported by both science and religion.
Envisioning human life as wild and
as an expression of the Earth does not require either an abandonment of a
theologically based religion for either a pantheistic place-based spirituality
or a secular rejection of religion.
It simply recognizes human life as an expression of nature rather than
an exception to nature. It
recognizes human life as occurring within an evolutionary process. It does not deny a sense of divinity
and mystery and grace in human life but extends this into the world, and this
brings the world inside our identity.
We encounter mystery and vastness and complexity to a degree that
exceeds our knowledge in both the micro-ecology of a fish scale or a mosquito’s
ear and the astro-ecological interactions of stars. And this encounter admonishes our cultural traditions to do
as they always do, that is, to enhance our languages to meet the changing
conditions of existence rather than abandon the richness of the tradition.
The problem lies in the conflict
with our contemporary information, especially in describing human life as
separate from nature and center stage, and as an intrusion. The integration of the human into the
larger Earth simply fits observation.
And the perspective of the universe helps us overcome our limited view
and locate ourselves in space and time.
The new task is really not something radically new, but rather is the
enduring one found in all traditions of challenging the beliefs that tend to
lag but slowly modify as a form of cultural progress.
Second, and far more influential
than faith-based belief in post-industrial societies, material technologies
that developed into the Industrial Revolution and post-industrial culture
produced a broader popular rational, almost anti-spiritist, rational profane
orientation. In this profane orientation, contemporary human life is
sensed to have evolved to the point of being predominantly cultural rather than
creatural. Contemporary human life
is described as domesticated and incapable of returning to a stage of human
wildness that is defined as a trait of preliterate cultures.
In the predominant profane
beliefs, wildness is, at best, envisioned as an archaic human stage of development and not an ongoing post-industrial, human
action state. Further, contemporary human life increasingly occurs in a
built environment that is artificial in the sense of being synthetic and
cybernetic. The “house” of human
life is envisioned as culture, and culture is described as a qualitatively different
state of being from nature, and distanced from nature if not an opposite of
nature especially in post-industrial civilization. Even if human beings are biological creatures, they are
sensed to no longer demonstrate traits that one would associate with wildness,
except as remnant qualities. Further, there is no solution in an association with
wildness.
Solutions to “modern” dilemmas
tend to be viewed as only capable of being resolved by further refinement of
sophisticated material technologies.
With mechanization and industrialization, the universe, and especially
the built environment, was objectified and approached as a machine. Earth and cosmos were envisioned as
ordered. Science became a way of discovering
both grand and minute expressions of
order. Wildness became
perceived as archaic behavior that was no longer functional in literate
societies, and that remained present only to a minor extent as ignorance and
irrational superstition or even disorder.
With increasing centralization of
human life, cultural linkages to wildness were proscribed. “Freedom” and other characteristics
that may be attributed to wildness are, in fact, envisioned as being created by
cultural development. For example,
Paul Gruchow describes an industrial agricultural perspective that “Science had
brought farming…freedom from wildness.”[xii] Modern freedom is popularly
sensed to result from expanding technology to enhance material comfort and
dependability. Modern rational
freedom aspires to foster independence rather than dependency.
Whether sacred or profane, the popular
or public perception of wildness in modern
life is one of human life having clearly moved beyond wildness as a primary
dimension of contemporary human identity, and this transformation judged to be
a fair trade. While modern life
can seem domestic to the point of restricting freedom and create an isolating
anomie or “half-life,” it is sensed to offer the possibility of reliable
comfort and improved health and less dominion by superstition and a freedom of
alternatives. Human survival now
seems primarily cultural, requiring cultural skills to meet needs. And landscape exists as a material
resource, not realizing its potential, either as a resource to be activated or
as an active no cost “recycler.”
Throughout human development,
there has always been a secondary tradition that has envisioned human life as
inseparable from the broader landscape.
For example, in News of the Universe, Robert Bly offers an anthology of verse that challenges
the “smugness of reason.” [xiii] Coming to consciousness of human life
as an expression of the cosmos has been a quality associated at times with high
spiritual and psychological development.
But such an effort is popularly viewed as an aesthetic intellectual
pursuit rather than a fundamental human directive, and nearly proscribed as
something of primary value. This
secondary tradition that has intuitively viewed human life as inseparable from
the broader landscape is now being reinforced by ecology, which looks broadly
at ecosystems and monitors rates of energy exchange. Increasingly, it attends to human activity as an element in
ecosystems. Unlike the dominant
tradition that envisions human activity an intrusion, this secondary tradition
envisions human activity as a natural expression of the Earth.
Now, very contemporary scientific
efforts that look at the extreme infinities of largeness and smallness, such as
quantum mechanics and cosmology, challenge the fundamental concepts such as the
“order” of nature. At first, these
new perspectives that challenged a sense of objects in relationship to each
other and that described an inseparability between events were felt to be
limited to distant cosmic processes such as the interior of stars. Now, there is a sense of quantum
process occurring moment-by-moment in the most fundamental daily processes such
as photosynthesis. A strong part
of this unseeing of a different reality was due to pre-existing beliefs about
the nature of reality. Now,
uncertainty is a real, concrete everyday reality that has mathematical form in chaos
theory that describes the everyday landscape and that is observed in “chaotic
patterns, for example, in bird flight and weathers, in the flow of water, and
in erosion that make uncertainty into “order.” There is pattern, but there is also wildness as a
central dynamic of a vast nature in which human life is deeply immersed. And to a very real degree, there is
this uncertainty in the formation and ongoing development of human habitation
as it adapts to the changing conditions of existence in the very frail
“certainty” of post-industrial life.
[i] Kim
Stafford, Having Everything Right.
Confluence Press, 1986, p. 11 [Penguin edition].
[ii] Gary
Snyder, “Writers and the war against nature,” p. 9.
[iii] Willigis
Jager, in Christoph Quarch, Ed., [trans. Paul Shepard], Mysticism for Modern Times, Conversations with Willigis Jager. Liguori, Missouri: Liguori/Triumph, 2006, p. xiii.
[iv] Willigis
Jager, p. ix.
[v] Willigis
Jager, p. xiv.
[vi] Roy
Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of
Humanity. Cambridge University Press,
1999.
[vii] Willigis
Jager, p. xx.
[viii] Willigis
Jager, p. 56.
[ix] Willigis
Jager, p. xxix.
[x] Willigis
Jager, p. xxx.
[xi] Willigis
Jager, p. xxxi.
[xii] Paul
Gruchow, The Necessity of Empty Places.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981, p. 217.
[xiii] Robert
Bly, News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980. p.3
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