Nathan Vonnahme

Regent College

13 September, 1999

          Theodore Roszak starts this book with a story that doesn't seem to fit, at first. He tells of a young Polish girl named Anna visiting the U.S. and standing, weeping, among the aisles of plenty in a Californian Safeway. He writes,

There is a kind of material hunger--not for the bare necessities--that transcends the needs of the body. In this sense, access to material goods, even of the most frivolous kind--junk food, blue jeans, transistor radios, T-shirts--can sometimes be an assertion of self-respect and independence. It is not just raw, self-indulgent consumption (22).

The story is a preamble, I think, to challenge the reader into thinking about the complexities of human motivation before Roszak starts piling on statistics about looming worldwide environmental crisis. He allows the customary environmental warnings to rise to a fever pitch, then piles on some stock guilt trips, culminating with this one:

. . . Earth Island Journal tells us it is not enough to find "fifty simple things you can do to save the Earth," as a best-selling environmental manual of the 1980s puts it. We need fifty difficult things. The list begins
          1. Dismantle your car.
          2. Become a total vegetarian.
          3. Grow your own vegetables.
          4. Have your power lines disconnected.
          5. Don't have children.
The intention is not entirely humorous (37).

The point, of course, is that these "scare tactics and guilt trips" traditionally used by the environmental movement serve not to motivate but to paralyze:

          In the face of jeremiads like these, the English science writer Jeremy Burgess, a stout ecological supporter, is understandably moved to ask, "Is it just me, or does everyone else feel guilty for being alive too? . . . Eventually, and probably soon, we shall all be reduced to creeping about in disgrace, nervous of our simplest pleasures" (37).

This leads Roszak to wonder,

Is there an alternative to scare tactics and guilt trips that will lend ecological necessity both intelligence and passion? There is. It is the concern that arises from shared identity: two lives that become one. Where that identity is experienced deeply, we call it love. More coolly and distantly felt, it is called compassion. This is the link we must find between ourselves and the planet that gives us life (39).

Finding that love for the planet is Roszak's endeavour for the rest of the book. He acknowledges that "The great changes our runaway industrial civilization must make if we are to keep the planet healthy will not come about by the force of reason alone or the influence of fact. Rather, they will come by way of psychological transformation (47).

          Roszak suggests that the current destruction of the earth by urban-industrial civilization is psychopathic, and in need of psychological therapy--"This is an essay in ecopsychology" (14). His first line of diagnosis is cosmological. He discusses how much of the modern cosmology has been shaped by a view of life as an accident in a mechanistic universe. Especially telling is how Freud, the father of modern psychology, saw the relationship between humanity and nature.

Nature, Freud was convinced, "is eternally remote. . . . She destroys us--coldly, cruelly, relentlessly." This tragic and inexorable truth is too fearful for most people to face. In its terrible presence, the vast majority of our fainthearted species can do nothing but turn to the illusions of religion or go crazy with terror and grief (57).

Because of the intense alienation between life and the non-living world that Freud felt, human-environment relations was mostly ignored by his psychological followers (especially in therapeutic practice) in favor of his intrapsychical insights, but that alienation is one of the pervasive obstacles to responsible use of the planet. Another telling example of the way modern cosmology has contributed to the alienation of humans from the earth is found in the words of Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of the universe in ruins--all these things, if not beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built (100).

This "firm foundation of unyielding despair," Roszak maintains, is at the root of industrial society's neurotic relationship with nature. To address the problem, he turns to some findings of recent science which challenge the prevailing cosmology.

          The first scientific theory Roszak discusses is the Anthropic Principle, which is the nagging suspicion that some scientists keep having that the universe seems perfectly designed for human life, and that if any of a vast number of variables were slightly different, life would be completely impossible. The probabilities of life existing at all are more than astronomical:

          Odds like these [a computed 1 in 1040,000 chance that a certain sequence of amino acids essential to life could arise spontaneously in a "primordial soup"] become even more telling when we introduce the factor of time. F. B. Salisbury has attempted to do just that. He undertook to calculate the probability for the haphazard assemblage of the thousand nucleotides necessary to synthesize even a small enzyme containing a mere three hundred amino acids. His conclusion was that there would be not even a fraction of the time needed in the entire history of the universe. This left Salisbury to observe that chance may be the factor that has to be eliminated if the evolutionary explanation of life is to retain its cogency. An ironic proposal. Chance, previously so powerful an explanatory device, now becomes the obstacle to coherent explanation (116).

The point here is that enormously unlikely coincidences don't happen outside of time, and that for some things the universe is too young to reasonably believe they could have happened.

          Another scientific theory that Roszak discusses is the Gaia hypothesis, which James Lovelock originated. It appeared to Lovelock that all the organisms on the planet play an active role in maintaining the atmosphere that makes life possible, and that somehow the whole system maintains and adjusts itself almost as if it were a living organism itself. Lovelock, a traditional scientist, "was at great pains to explain that Gaia is merely a metaphor--as if metaphor were not a powerful agency of the mind, one of our most precious ways of understanding the world, and therefore perhaps related to whatever we take the 'truth' to be" (146). All of language is rife with metaphors, and scientific language is hard-pressed to avoid them:

Even in an essay whose specific purpose is to refute the existence of designing intelligence in nature, one comes upon phrases like "evolution . . . is a tinkerer, banging into shape, with minimal change, anything that works." No doubt a scientist asked to explain this curiously anthropomorphic choice of words would pass it off as another "mere" metaphor. Very well, eliminate the metaphors. What other words will do the job? And how do scientists themselves, in the privacy of their own imagination, really make sense of what the enzyme is observed to be doing? (148)

Darwin was especially hard-pressed to find his way around personification when it came to what he called "organs of extreme perfection" like the eye. Here is the curious way he addressed the problem.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Still, he perseveres in the effort, suggesting that

we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers [of the primitive eye] and carefully preserving each which, in any way or degree, tends to produce a distincter image. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

          "A power . . . always intently watching. . . ." The anthropomorphic reference and the only partially rhetorical question at the end of the passage are clear signs that the theory is straining to find a suitably impersonal explanation for a central fact of nature: the seemingly designed character of organic forms (150).

The point Roszak is making is reluctantly but strongly teleological--it really appears as if some intelligence akin to ours has designed and tweaked life to meet certain goals.

          Roszak sums up his challenges to modern naturalistic cosmology with a discussion of deep systems theory:

          In every traditional use of the words, the Big Bang, that initial burst of raw, unformed energy, would be regarded as the near absence of "order." Mythologically speaking, this is the "chaos" that existed before the moment of divine creation when "the Earth was without form and void." As nothing but unrealized potentiality, it would have been regarded by most schools of metaphysics as "nonbeing." For that matter, even common sense, clinging to the ordinary meaning of words, would insist that there is more "order" in a universe of galactic systems and living beings than in a barren ball of fire. From a culturally literate point of view, there is more order in the robin's wing or in the simplest nursery rhyme taught by mother to child than one can imagine in the Big Bang when it was all there was. Deep systems theory builds upon both traditional thought and common sense in interpreting the cosmos as an evolution toward increasing levels of coherent organization (189).

So in contrast to the "unyielding despair" that Russell and Freud saw as the only option for chance creatures in a universe destined for entropic dissipation into chaos, these new scientific theories hint at an intentionality behind the cosmos, building increasing order out of chaos and providing a universe uniquely tailored for human life.

          Of course, this sort of thing sounds like anthropocentrism, the evil which so many environmentalists decry as the root of the problem. But Roszak sees it as necessary to a healed relationship with the natural world.

          There is no question but that anthropocentrism can lead to claims of human supremacy over nature that lie at the root of our ecological problems. To state the possibility is to issue the warning, and to invite a different reading. We should remember that the worst environmental depredation has taken place in the modern period within a rigorously nonanthropocentric cosmology, one that reduces human existence to an inconsequential cipher in the universe. The thesis of this book has been that such a sweepingly [sic] devaluation of human life may only serve to starve our need for meaning until it produces a pathological infatuation with power. If so, it is our despairing flight from nothingness more so than any sort of anthropocentric pretension that encourages the willful assertion of human dominance (201).

          The second tack that Roszak takes in diagnosing the earth-negating psychosis of industrial civilization is psychological rather than cosmological. He surveys ideologies such as deep ecology and ecofeminism that he considers important contributors to the healing of our urban psychological malaise, and discusses several elements of newer schools of psychology, but in the end he disappointingly maintains that "healthy narcissism" and introspection is the key to healing the psychological disorder. The basic drives that have been subverted to produce the current consumption-heavy industrial society must be refocused on sustainable goals.

          But now we arrive at a point in the life-story of the planet where [the shame-induced regimentation of human beings into types and stereotypes] needs to be broken; the great industrial armies, the technological systems must be hobbled in their runaway career. I think this is how it is done. At least in part, narcissistic fascination is the way we break the manacles. Whatever Gaia may be, impersonal system or immanent divinity, she speaks to that within each of us that wishes to be known peculiarly and personally, the self that fits no mold, the "me" that cannot be made interchangeable.
          This "song of myself" may be no more than a brief discordant tune. But sung by a sufficient number, it is enough to halt the rhythm of the great machine. In that moment we become what Charlie Chaplin's little victim-hero became in Modern Times when, falling out of synch on the assembly line, he wound up jamming the man-eating gears. In becoming even a small piece of ourselves, we become what the burdened planet needs: creatures with some more urgent calling, some greater joy than comes of waging war upon nature (278).

          Roszak concludes by describing what he calls ecopsychology, the treatment of the societal psychological disorders behind ecological destruction. It is the wedding of psychology and ecology in an organic way that connects the personal with the cosmic.

          Strict Freudians used to argue that any form of psychiatry that did less than engage the instincts is merely adjustive. It will end as an ego psychology that may reliever the immediate suffering, but leaves the core of the neurosis untouched: a wound still needing to be proved and cauterized. Might not the same be said of any psychiatry that limits itself to sex, parenting, family, social relations, but fails to engage the ecological level of the unconscious? It, too, is merely adjustive. It leaves the underlying neurosis--which is our estrangement from Gaia--untreated. Worse, by somewhat assuaging the anxiety (a result that is more and more achieved these days by medication) and assuring us that we have indeed been healed, it may return us to our bad old habits of urban-industrial life with the energies of annihilation renewed and ready to do more damage (304).
Both the therapists and the ecologists offer us a common political agenda for the good of the planet, for the good of the person. It is simply stated:
          Scale down.
          Slow down.
          Democratize.
          Decentralize.
          Ecological goals that can heal the psyche; psychological values that can heal the planet.
          This convergence of inner and outer needs cannot be purely coincidental. It is the Hermetic philosopher's old dictum--"As above, so below"--come back to us as the shared prescription of psychiatry and science (311).

          This book was difficult for me to read because it was so sprawling, and because I was frustrated with Roszak's exhaustive--and speculative--discussions of everything. The relationship of the naturalistic cosmology of despair to environmental damage was an important insight, and the value of a chastened anthropocentrism is important too. But the discussion of teleological findings in science sounded like the worst of Christian apologetics to me--the teleological argument reduces to, "It looks like someone made this watch I found laying on the beach."

          "No it doesn't--it's all chance."

          "It does so look like it was made."

          "No it doesn't." Etc., etc., ad nauseum. It seems to me like there are better ways of defending the existence of God, which is certainly what is needed. Perhaps the main problem of the modern world is its lack of any ground for morality, and our use of the environment is certainly a moral issue. No psychological approach will be successful without a cosmology that provides a reason for morality, because it is self-indulgent narcissism that is causing the problem in the first place, and it is accentuated by the feel-good moral relativism which enables most of modern civilization to comfortably ignore questions of environmental responsibility.