Discuss: The Barbaric Heart

Is our underlying problem really a barbaric heart or, instead, a heartless prejudice against nature in people, places and things?

Due to racial prejudice, it has taken 200 years to reduce our irresponsible exploitation of people of color.

Due to sexist prejudice, it has taken 200 years to reduce our irresponsible exploitation of women.

However, today, around and within us, we continue to irresponsibly deteriorate the natural world.  Due to the frightening depth of our prejudice against nature, we have neither addressed nor significantly reduced our unreasonable exploitation of nature, in and about us.

To our loss, we excessively suffer many disorders because most of us have learned to identify our conquest of the natural world as “progress,” “economic growth” and “the advance of civilization,” not as a runaway prejudice against nature and the natural. 

Most of us don’t recognize our degradation of nature as a form of discrimination or as the heart of our unsolvable problems.  This is critical. Without identifying it as a profound prejudice, we neither know how to address nor remedy our destructive relationship with natural systems in the environment and each other.

Today, May 5, 2009, search engine findings for “prejudice against nature” link almost exclusively to my twenty-seven year old book Prejudice Against Nature (1982), and to my articles on this subject.  Seldom is our detrimental prejudice against nature identified or taken seriously.  It is as if I have simply imagined it all these years, that I am mistaken, that our biased degradation of the natural does not really exist. 

We are part of nature and its perfection. Its renewing way flows through us. What we do to it, we do to ourselves. 

What does our dim-witted destruction of nature’s life say about us other than we suffer because our prejudice against nature won’t give nature a right to its life or treat it fairly.

The moral and ethical values of Industrial Society are disgraced by the damaging effects of our unholy prejudice against other forms of life. Out of our shame and its pain, we are unable to admit to the insanity of us knowingly injuring the balance and beauty of the natural world and the flow of its grace in us. 

Nature’s life is a nurturing and healing essence of our life. It is a form of madness to destroy our own life support system. 

We are at risk because our arrogance has convinced us that we are advanced thinkers. Our ego won’t admit to its prejudice, to doing something as stupid as knowledgeably letting us shoot ourselves in the foot by injuring natural systems.

Nature is self-correcting, purifying and restorative as it flows.  Being blind to our prejudice against nature, we delude ourselves. We can’t see that our prejudice against nature and its support of well-being, underlies most of our personal, social and environmental problems. Our anti-nature bigotry has short circuited our thinking.

Fortunately, an antidote has appeared. Today, many nature lovers have discovered that a new, nature-enhancing process, Educating Counseling and Healing with Nature (ECHN), gives us the remedy we need for our anti-nature lunacy. 

The remedy works because it genuinely plugs our thinking and feeling into the regenerative and renewing powers of nature, backyard or backcountry.  It makes nature’s wisdom our ally, not an enemy to conquer or exploit.  

Similar to a lasting walk in the park, ECHN helps us continually clear our mind. It increases our critical thinking as it encourages the flow of natural systems to recycle the garbage or pollution that Industrial Society has dumped in our psyche.

Individuals who are lovers of nature are the hope of the world. They are usually thoughtful, dedicated and sensitive souls who appreciate the empowering art and science of ECHN and its unique contribution to well-being. 

ECHN provides us with a potent preventative for what ails us.  Our saving grace may be that those who recognize that life is sacred can to learn to use and teach ECHN. It enables them to apply their respect for nature’s ways to simultaneously strengthen our lives and all of life.

Those of us who care about the peace of life-in-balance can learn and teach the online sensory science of Educating Counseling and Healing with Nature. We can take advantage of subsidized nature-connected degrees, courses and career opportunities that enable young or old to increase the health of the web-of-life, including humanity.

Love this article. Just absolutely fantastic. I loved the treatment of the capitalist drive: “there is something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism has made.”

I’ll have to read this three more times before I can really say anything of substance, unfortunately.

Thanks for this.

Curtis White uses his knowledge of history and philosophy to dance around the age-old concept modern thinkers love to avoid. It’s called sin. Sin is a fact in the lives of humankind. We all have murder hidden in our hearts, and alone without faith, hope, and; most of all, love; some aspect of that murderous violence will find its way to the surface of our lives. The seven deadly sins of pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth are alive and well.
Most environmental/nature-focused writing seems to abhor any positive reference to Judeo-Christian tradition in favor of the ying and yang, and maybe for good reason looking at the type of Christianity dominant in world. Of course some try to blame environmental degradation on the “dominion” directive in Genesis 1:28, in which case they need to continue reading through Genesis 2:15 and beyond.
Those of us in the so-called ‘creation care’ community, have always acknowledged that the ‘environmental crisis’ is a moral crisis. It’s a reflection of sin in our lives individually and collectively as a society and civilization. We lust after selfish desires, self-fulfillment, self aggrandizement, comfort, etc. at the expense of the rest of God’s good creation including our fellow human beings with whom we share the planet.
In our human pursuit of happiness rather than the beauty of true joy, we follow the path warned against in Proverbs 16:25, “There is way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.”
There is beauty throughout all of creation including within each of us. The early Christian concept of nature’s beauty was not just aesthetic beauty but it represented a grace and energy, which sustains the universe – a reflection of God’s beauty.
Just as the teachings of Jesus stood the concepts of Jewish legalism and of a violent messianic redemption on their heads in his day, so, today, a true following of Jesus (difficult to find!) turns individualism, materialism, commercialism, and militarism on their heads. It’s a stand against sin.
Yes, we need beauty to overcome the barbaric sinful heart. We need to “array ourselves with glory and beauty” (Job 40:10), and praise the Lord with all of creation (Psalm 148).
I’m not sure where Curtis White thinks he (and we) will find the strength to “make our own world, demanding the impossible and calling it Beautiful”. Apparently, he believes we can somehow humanly will it to be even when we see that it’s the weakness of the human-centered will that has led to our degraded planet earth. I would posit the need for a ‘higher power’, which I call Jesus to overcome my self.
As Dostoyevsky said, “Beauty will save the earth”, but good luck with Dionysus Mr. White.

As a follow-up, I’m glad a few folks liked some of the notes in the essay: I called them “decent,” but gave them a grade of C. Maybe a higher grade is deserved. Yet all undone by the fantastical transcendental mysticism of the last paragraph. What does the good reverent professor mean by the witless folderol?
Similarly, the comments are mostly further tripe. Jerry Lang seems to abhor his self, finding it murderous and lustful and whatever. He posits this Christian concept of “sin,” saying it underlies all problems he finds. I, on the other hand, am not a war with my self, and find that Christianity is a scourge against a proper enjoyment of sex,passion,doubt, and happiness. We as humans act in general accordance with our social conditions, yet the religious charlatans of the world transfer their own self-disgust into a ruling slavery of victims who are taught to blame themselves for their predicaments, instead of their elite masters.
As for the fetishization of “nature,” we fool ourselves if we think we can undo the continual and growing terrors inflicted by the Industrial Revolution upon the water, the land, and our fellow animals. Thinking good thoughts and playing with leaves does not bring forth environmental justice, social justice, or food on the table of the starving. If all environmentalism means is wooly-headed reverie while the mass of humanity is ground down by the human-controlled social order, then it is immoral. If you think Curtis White provided you an answer for the damage that we as humans have done, through our social, economic, and religious orders, then you’re a better diviner than I am.

...and here I go.

(I should be posting this on Orion, but shoot, this place needs posts more.)

Haha!  This guy goes on and on and on about The Barbaric Heart.  But he doesn’t come close to the true issue until he writes this:  “We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings.”

And then he loses the thread.  [sigh]

You can get so wrapped up in celebrating the Beautiful that you forget:  we are animals; and nature is not, most emphatically NOT, about Beauty.  Nature is messy, and so are we.  We have gotten, however, this most peculiar genetic mutation, that like any genetic mutation, hangs around as long as it helps us reproduce.  And it is, well, it’s what makes us, among other things, write articles like this.  It’s Intellect, whatever that is:  that thing that allows us to create, and build on that creation, and build on those creations, generation upon generation, exponent upon exponent as our population expands and expands, and erases more and more of the creatures in its way, under the protective umbrella of what we create.

WE CAN’T STOP THAT.  We can’t stop it, any more than Smilodon fatalis could stop plunging those fangs; any more than the Irish elk could stop using – or growing – those fantastical antlers; any more than bacteria or viruses can stop colonizing the thing that keeps them alive until it dies, and they do too; having first taken the trouble to attach the hope of the race to another host.

This weird genetic mutation of ours – successful, oh let me be clear on that, as almost none other has been, given how Ma Nature measures success (simply:  more and more and more of us) –  does something, maybe the one thing, that is truly what sets Homo sapiens apart from everything else:  the illusion that what has happened to the rest of Earth’s species won’t happen to us; that we are clever enough to avoid the fate of all life; that Beauty will save us, because how could Nature not want that?  How could nature not want us, producing and yearning and hoping for Beauty above all?

You’ve said it before, Wade.  It’s Nature’s view of us that counts.

And that view?

Antlers tusks fangs wings hooves armies brains intellect Beauty.

Seen it all.

NEXT…!

Pardon the “I should be posting this on Orion.”  It went on another blog first, and then I went, well, I SHOULD.  lol

Great article. To me the crux is this: when we mastered fire, and formed agricultural society, we needed to take over from natural selection and makes ourselves adapt.

To my mind, that means adapting to being self-governing, and inherently conscious not only of ourselves (and, as socially inculcated, others) but of all things around us and the long-term effects of all of our actions.

We haven’t yet taken this next step in evolution, or at least not enough of us have, so we are sliding backward into a hybrid right/left philosophy where freedom, consumerism, justice, individuality, and morality all mean the same thing: each person can live, breed and exist in their personal world without someone reminding them that their actions are selfish.

Well, I tend to agree with the comments that slapping upper case letters on a euphemism for greed and selfishness ain’t exactly a watershed moment for the species.  Still, it was eloquent and made me look at the old, old story in a slightly different light.

But, let’s get on down to the lick log here…..what is likely to change? Is Western (and let’s not shun our fellow Asiatic travelers towards extinction)capitalistic enterprise suddenly going to evaporate, or is it even likely to wither in our grandchildren’s lifetimes? Even gradually? Me thinks not. At least not in the sense understood by social evolutionists….inexorable adaptation driven by ever more exigent circumstances. All this stuff we’ve assembled will take a boat load of entropy to undo all of this anytime soon. I await the ultimate trash disposal unit that will evaporate it all into an ether of anti-matter….not THAT would be progress.  What MIGHT happen is something more along the lines of a big ol’ cosmic kick in the arse, more punctuated evolution than incremental adaptation. That time is short for us is hardly a mind-blowing revelation at this stage, most would agree. What form that coup will take is up for grabs, but we all know the contenders for the title.

The irony of our little temper tantrum that is the American Republic on this continent is that we rubbed out in Act I the many cultures that might could have spared us a lot of pain…if we had only been open to listen. Does that message still have legs, or are we doomed to retrench into our Randian fantasies and diddle ourselves with ever more evaporative pleasures?

Before that question gets answered, I’m wagering that history and nature will draw a bead on our little drama…no refunds, no rain checks. As Donn puts it: “NEXT!!!”