Adelphiasophism
Adelphiasophism Roots and Influences: Through War to Self-sufficiency—Lovelock, Schumacher, Roszak
Abstract
There are poor societies that have too little, but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough!”?E F Schumacher
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Tuesday, June 06, 2000
Vietnam War
Adelphiasophism goes back at least to the sixties of the twentieth century when the greatest nation ever known in the world took on one of the least in a disgraceful exhibition of inhumanity and disregard for Nature. While the peasants of Vietnam were subhumanized as “Gooks,” a famous governor of California displayed characteristic arrogance and disdain for Nature, saying: “When you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all!” Chop them all down. Just keep one in a museum. Kill “all” the commie Gooks. One in a museum is too many!
Robin Clarke, a British science journalist and author, catagorized the war as between the richest nation and the poorest, between the ultimate technology of B52 bombers and close to the simplest in the bicycle, between the multinational corporation and the peasant, and not least between humanity and Nature. Its importance was all these things and above all that people, particularly the young, noticed, despite the propaganda and initiatiated the biggest and most sustained political protest movement ever known. An even bigger one is needed today.
The American defeat was humiliating for a great power, though many Americans deserved massive credit for the stance they took against their own leadership, the real culprits, already called by the most famous US general of WWII, the “military-industrial complex.” A reckless class of people had commandeered the extent of human knowledge for their personal interests and benefit.
The great economist of liberal capitalism, Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) had explained with surprising frankness the morality of even liberal capitalism before WWII when he did his famous work:
We must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair—for foul is useful and fair is not.
The Vietnam War was the clearest exemplar of these unsavoury principles. The defeat of the aims of this class offered a prospect of a new world in which humanity was more important than machines and the deliberate destruction of Nature was a crime. The uses that ruthless people could find for technology were questioned, then the faceless rulers who urged its use against Nature were seen as the real threat to natural life.
They controlled university syllabuses, manufacturing production and marketing, and the output was coloured beads for the natives, flibberties and throw aways with temporary amusement or utility value to keep them entertained while the dominant class got money and power. A twentieth of the world population used half of the resources available in a profligate consumerism that has not altered since the protests ceased and the protesters were mollified and integrated with new varieties of beads. The business was left unfinished and we are now faced even more surely with the prospect of ecological collapse while the fiddlers fiddle us in Washington, the Pentagon and Alpen, Colorado.
The wiser critics of the Vietnam War and the social system it was fought for became proto-Adelphiasophists, still critical of the exploiters and their misuse of the world’s resources, whether geological, biological or human. They realised that the technologies of exploitation and destruction had to be replaced by technologies of restoration and diversity.
Another great economist of a different ilk, E F Schumacher (1911-1977), author of “Small is Beautiful” (1973) tells us:
The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy and these are the very causes of its success.
Such motives eventually blind people to reality. They stop being able to see that the course they have taken that has brought such success is now pointing them to the edge of a precipice. Selfishness and greed displace intelligence and intuitive caution. What was selfish is now self-destructive, but they cannot see it because they do not want to see it.
Sadly, it also blinded some critics to the real source of the problem and instead of attacking those controlling the military-industrial complex, they launched attacks upon the scientists that themselves were being misused by the same people. Like everything else, governments and corporations use science for their own ends.
James Lovelock
Dr James Lovetock FRS and Dr Sidney Epton on 6 February 1975 wrote in the “New Scientist” an article explaining the Gaia hypothesis that helped to formulate the scientific ideas of Adelphiasophism. They asked:
- Do the earth’s living matter, air, oceans and land surface form part of a giant system which could be seen as a single organism?
- Could man’s activities reduce such a system’s options so that it is no longer able to exert sufficient control to stay viable?
They suggested two possibilities for why we are here on earth:
- life exists because material conditions on earth happen by good fortune to be just right for its existence;
- life changes the material conditions needed for its survival to make sure they are suitable for life to continue.
The first of these is the conventional wisdom though it might be altered slightly by believers in God to suggest that God ensures the conditions are favourable for life. Scientifically, it implies that the environment for life is unstable. Effectively life has walked a tightrope over the chasm of death for over 3500 million years. If any of a number of variables like temperature, humidity or acidity had strayed outside a narrow range of values for any length of time, life would have been exterminated.
The second proposition is the Gaia hypothesis and formerly was the unconventional view. It implies that living matter is not passively subject to the vicissitudes of fortune in respect of its environment but actively conditions it to keep it just right. It has found means of forcing conditions to stay within the permissible range.
The sun has evolved as a typical or main sequence star. It means that during the earth’s existence the sun’s output of energy has increased substantially. The earth now has about three times more energy from the sun than it had 4000 million years ago. At that time, the atmosphere probably contained ammonia and other complex molecules which acted like the glass in a greenhouse, that is, by reducing the radiation of heat and long-wave infrared radiation from earth. Calculations show that in these conditions the surface temperature could have been suitable for life to start.
Once life began, it must have found a way of keeping the temperature of the earth’s surface within the critical range of 15-30 oC for hundreds of millions of years in spite of drastic changes of atmospheric composition and a large increase in the mean solar flux. Unless some means had existed for restoring to the air the heat-retaining gases such as ammonia now being consumed by the living organisms, or of altering the earth’s surface to make it more heat-retentive, the planet would have become ice-bound, because the rate of increase of solar energy was too small to compensate. The fossil record and the continuity of life shows this never happened. When only the feeble beginnings of a new life should have been possible, complex multi-celled organisms had already evolved. Life uses some mechanism to protect itself.
Extinction through glaciation was not the only danger. Overproduction of ammonia and other heat-retaining gases could have resulted in the opposite effect, known as the “runaway greenhouse,” that is to a rapidly increasing surface temperature that would have scorched the earth and left it permanently lifeless, like the planet Venus now.
Has life been able to control other conditions of existence besides the surface temperature of the earth? The composition of the earth’s atmosphere is critical but almost everything about it violates the laws of chemistry. It is unstable and, over time, the oxygen and most of the nitrogen in the atmosphere ought to have ended up in the sea combined as nitrate ions. The air we breathe must be being maintained in a steady state far from chemical equilibrium by biological processes.
Gaia
The earth’s biosphere is able to control at least the temperature of the earth’s surface and the composition of the atmosphere. The air looks to be put together cooperatively by all of life on earth to keep the variables needed for life at the right values. Living matter, the air, the oceans, the land surface are parts of a system to control temperature, the composition of the air and sea, the pH of the soil and so on, to be optimum for survival of the biosphere. The earth behaves like an organism—a living creature, responding to its conditions. William Golding, the novelist, suggested Gaia as the name of this living planet—the name given by the ancient Greeks to their earth goddess.
If Gaia is a living entity we can ask questions like “how does constituent X in the atmosphere help the Goddess keep equilibrium?” Thus the biosphere produces about 1000 miiion tons of ammonia a year. Why?
In early times, when the sun was cooler than it is now, ammonia served to keep the earth warm. At the present time, the need for ammonia is just as important—ammonia keeps the soil near to pH 8, the optimum value for living proceeses. Having nitrogen in the air in the presence of oxygen means they surely but surely and continuously combine to make a strong acid. Thunder storms make tons of nitric acid that is washed down as rain and would make the soil sour and hostile to life if there were no alkali such as ammonia to neutralise it.
One of the purposes of the small but definite amount of methane in the atmosphere is to maintain the oxygen level. Methane is a product of anaerobic fermentation in soil and sea. Some of the methane rises into the stratosphere where it oxidises to carbon dioxide and water, so being the principal source of water vapour in the upper air. The water rises further into the ionosphere and is photolysed to oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen descends and hydrogen escapes into space. Methane transports hydrogen from the earth’s surface to the stratosphere in sufficient quantity to maintain oxygen concentration in the lower atmosphere.
Unexpected trace gases in the atmosphere, such as dimethyl sulphide, methyl iodide and carbon tetrachloride are found in the air. The first two are biological ensissions that transport essential elements, sulphur and iodine in these cases, from the sea to the land. No biological source is known for carbon tetrachloride but its uniform distribution in the atmosphere, showing no difference between the northern and southern hemispheres, suggest that it is not a man-made pollutant.
For more than 3500 million years in the face of a big increase of solar output, the average temperature of the earth’s surface must have remained within the range of 15-30 oC. How did Gaia do this? At first the emission and absorption of ammonia by simple organisms might have been the control process. But the failure of only one year’s crop of ammonia would have led to a self-accelerating temperature decline and extinction of life. Other means must also have been present. Some algae could change colour from light to dark, altering the way the surface radiated and reflected heat.
Later, when photosynthesising and respiring organisms existed and oxygen became a major constituent of the air, the control of the concentration of carbon dioxide, which is also a heat absorbing and retaining gas, played the role of stabilising temperature.
Gaia and Man
Gaia is a hypothesis but, like all useful theories, it suggests new questions which may throw light on old ones. What bearing has she on pollution, population and man’s role in the living world?
Gaia has survived the most appalling of all atmospheric pollutants for early life—oxygen—which flooded the atmosphere about 2000 million years ago when the photosynthesisers had completed their task of oxidising the surface and the atmosphere. Whole ranges of species were killed off or driven into dark, oxygen free prisons from which they have never been released. The appearance of the whole planetary surface, and its chemistry were changed. Think of what would happen to us if a widespread marine organism began to photosynthesise chlorine and replace oxygen in the air with chlorine. Oxygen was as poisonous to the primitive ferments as chlorine is to us today.
Lovelock had a degree of the nineteenth century complacency that he complained about—or had reason to defend the polluters. He smugly assures us human activity as a polluter is trivial by comparison with what has happened naturally in the past. We cannot seriously change the present state of Gaia, let alone hazard her existence!
There is another disturbing aspect of human activity. A control engineer shown the graph of the earth’s mean temperature against time over the past million years, would note it had never gone out of control, though subject to potentially serious instabilities. A law of system control is that a system must possess adequate variety of response to maintain stability—at least as many ways of countering outside disturbances as there are outside disturbances to act on it. Humanity is reducing the variety of response open to Gaia.
The growing human population of the earth is leading us to use drastic measures to supply this population with resources, particularly food. The natural distribution of plants and animals is being changed, ecological systems destroyed and whole species altered or extinguished. Yet any of these species might contribute the response to an external threat that is needed to maintain the stability of the whole. Long before the world population has grown so large that we consume the entire output from photosynthesis, instabilities generated by lack of variety of response could put us out of our misery.
There is at least one sign that we might have triggered something off already—the climate. Unprecedented temperature changes have occurred, decreases in some places like Iceland, increases in many other places, along with changes in wind and rainfall. This climatic trend may be just another fluctuation of the kind which has occurred before and which will cure itself, but there is more agreement now that it is global warming that is changing our climate noticeably. Global warming is attributed to greenhouse gases, the most common of which is carbon dioxide, caused by burning fossil fuels and forests.
A Need to Survive
Humans have the ability possessed by no other species to collect, store and process information and use it to alter the environment to suit ourselves. When our forebears became farmers they set thenselves on a path that must have had an impact on the rest of Gaia almost as revolutionary as that of the evolution of photosynthetic organisms millennia before. The area of the world that we can regulate to our short-term advantage has grown from the immediate locality of a settlement to vast geographical regions. The area of manipulation could become the whole world. What happens then?
Maintaining system stability might cease to be natural. We would have to do it by technology and it would be dauntingly difficult. We must not immobilize the natural control systems that evolved to keep the conditions on our planet suitable for life and survival, lest the earth becomes a spaceship, with us the passengers and crew, and what remains of nature engineered as our life support system. Before we get that far, we shall have to make agonising social and moral decisions to avoid it, such as, how many people the earth can support without it becoming a spaceship earth, and how to decide or regulate who should stay on board. Our priority is to choose, from the feasible means of limiting our own population, those which are acceptable in social and moral terms.
We must reject the idea that human existence is a battle against nature. We must make peace with Gaia on her terms and return to peaceful co-existence with our fellow creatures. Thirty thousand years ago some of our ancestors did something like this. They abandoned primitive hunting and took up the transhumane way of life—they lived and migrated with the animal herds, defended them against other predators and systematically culled them for food. This ensured them a more plentiful and regular supply of animal products than the random hunting it superseded. Unfortunately, others killed herds in excessively wasteful ways by driving whole herds over cliffs, and left themselves nothing. So far we have been in the second camp. We must join the first.
Humans need Gaia but could Gaia do without humans? Plainly she has done and can again. But Gaia is evolving, in the appearance of intelligent creatures, the equivalent of hands, eyes and consciousness. Through humanity, she has a capacity to anticipate and guard against threats to her existence. Humans could ward off a collision with a planetoid, and might have evolved precisely to become the agent of Gaia’s survival. First, we have to make sure that we do not damage her so much that our own survival is in doubt.
Henryk Skolimowski
People who should know better, like Henryk Skolimowski, told us that science was a disgrace to human dignity because the executives of I G Farben in Hitler’s Germany produced gas to murder Jews, communists, Gypsies and homosexuals in the death camps. This is philosophy? The best excuse for statements like this is that science and the owners of its applications are confused in some people’s minds.
He also said that science was not concerned with eternal truths because scientific hypotheses are subject to revision and replacement. Philosophy? Again an excuse might be that some scientists have been cocksure enough to declare that the problems of understanding Nature had been solved, and they had had to recant. Inasmuch as science is concerned with discovering eternal truths, it only does so progressively, as most scientists will agree, and does not jump immediately to some eternal truth—just like that! Science requires hypotheses to be formulated about how some aspect of the world works, and then the hypothesis is subject to testing, revision—and replacement, if necessary. Because scientists are no more gods than any other human beings, they cannot fairly be blamed for not doing what only gods can do—revealing eternal truths—but at least science offers a way of approaching them, however slowly.
Philosophers, like theologians, free to speculate about any subject, real or imaginery, with no need to refer to the real world, can tell us they have discovered this eternal truth or that one, but scientists, unlike them, can be proved to be wrong. Truths can only be eternal because no one can prove them to be untruths. That is why philosophy and theology, for philosophers and theologians, are so superior to science. For scientists, whatever cannot be disproved is not scientific.
Philosophers, at one time, were punctilious about defining what they were philosophizing about but for Skolimowski, the body of scientific knowledge could not be disproved because he could not get a handle on it to shake it by. He found several definitions, mostly silly or irrelevant, but he could not find a way of disproving that science was a body of knowledge about Nature. He wanted a definition that would let him bite it, so he calls science a “social phenomenon.” If the institution of society uses science, then scientists could not abrogate their own responsibility for what they did. Anyone who had any qualms at all about the uses that society put to science, should resign as a scientist.
No scientist with a social conscience could be a chemist because of the use I G Farben put to chemistry in making gas for mass murder. Should this rule extend to philosophers too, since science is a branch of philosophy—natural philosophy? Perhaps it should, for the argument could be extended to everyone who has anything at all to do with weapons (soldiers, workers), propaganda (writers, film makers, philosophers), churches (”Gott Mit Uns”), and so on. The point is not that they should resign because none of these activities can be said to be utterly wicked in themselves. They are made wicked by misapplication.
Chemistry can be used to save lives but governments and transnational corporations are more interested in poisons and weaponry. The latter rightly get more attention from critics, but science is not the villain. Chemicals can be used as antiseptics, but it is not the scientist who determines what chemicals—explosives, poisons or antiseptics—should be manufactured and in what quantities or to what uses they should be put, if there is a choice.
These decisions are made at a higher level of decision-making in society than the scientist who only has control of a laboratory at the most, and then under license from a government or multinational. The fact that society is complex does not incriminate the scientist. Society can—and this is the real point—be forced to take different decisions about scientific usage. The duty of all of us—scientists especially but not exclusively—is to bring the change about.
The Culpability of Science
Scientists, if they wish to remain scientists, have little say in what they do. The reason is that someone has to fund them to do it—and only governments and large companies can afford to. Scientific projects that offer no potential for military advantage or profit will not get funds, except insofar as it suits multinational bosses to seem humane. So support for “academic” research, the dispassionate search for knowledge, or for research intended to benefit disadvantaged people, groups or localities, is funded only at the whim of the deciding class, and then usually with some ulterior or publicity motive.
Writing on the culpability of science as far back as 1939, the year that war was declared in Europe, Peter von Dresser in “Harper’s Magazine” pointed out these realities:
Technology, scientific or otherwise, is not a self-determining entity. It is a child of the wishes and intentions of the men who form it. And it was most certainly not the inventors and pure scientists who controlled the development of technics during the past century—it was the entrepreneurs, the rising industrialists, the empire builders… Small wonder that such men and their successors have left us with a heritage of mighty industrial baronies [that have]overcentralized our industries, overbuilt our cities, debased our farms and farmers with one-crop agriculture, replaced the American yoeman with a growing landless, rootless, proletariat, robbed our communities, villages, natural regions of all semblance of economic autonomy, driven our government (along with all those of other highly industrialized nations) each year deeper into a policy of oil imperialism, raw material imperialism, forign market imperialism, to supply fuel for a hypertrophied transportation system and justification for our great centralized mass production industries, drafted half our man power into parasitical occupations of salesmanship, packaging, servicing, left much of provincial America spiritually and culturally bankrupt, overstimulated a few centers to a point of intellectual hysteria. Simultaneously and quite automatically they have steam rollered democratic methods out of existence.
The Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnamese War followed in rapid succession, but despite them and another thirty years of cogitation, every word of von Dresser’s analysis remained true.
At the height of the Vietnam War, about 1968, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) held two symposia on “Leaf Abscission” and on “The Introduction of Foreign DNA.” The second one was on what we now call GM and the first would more honestly, at that time, have been called, “Defoliation.” Were American biologists in the middle of the Vietnam War spontaneously deciding to exchange their expertise on destroying Nature as we know it to win a war against a nation of impoverished communist peasants? Does this prove that scientists are in league with the Devil?
If so, the Devil they were in league with should be recognized. The conferences were sponsored by Fort Detrick. The military were coughing up money for research “they” wanted! Scientists could have chosen to have opted out and remained poor and starved of funds—even unemployed. Those that did, have never been heard of again, perhaps because they became schoolteachers or even house painters. Scientists are employees, not decision makers.
Some scientists are more openly culpable by sitting on the advisory committees set up by the military and corporate sponsors, but none have any power to change the directions plotted by sponsors. Senior scientists shrug and say: “The money is allocated. All we can do is submit proposals to get some of it.” Scientists would help the credibility of science by refusing to submit for funds for unethical or dubious research—indeed by exposing the demands put on them by the military-industrial complex. But why just scientists? We all should be objecting as loudly and vigorously as we can.
The Incomprehension of Science
Skolimowski puzzlingly agreed that “people do not control science because even scientists and the whole institution of science are manipulated by power structures in society,” destroying his own thesis. He seemed either to misunderstand science absolutely or was careless in how he expressed himself. Incomprehension of science is confirmed by his statement:
When an experiment does not come out right, we blame either the instruments or the scientist, but not science.
How does he judge when an experiment is right or wrong? The statement implies that the right answer is known independently of the experiment, so what purpose was the experiment serving? If he meant that the experiment was faulty so that it could not have yielded any results, then plainly it was the instruments or the operator that was at fault. If he meant that the results were contrary to all received scientific wisdom, yet the experimental set-up and operation were checked and were faultless, then a new scientific phenomenon has been discovered. In other words, science “was” to blame and the experiment will lead to a change in scientific understanding. When science is found to be to blame then science is advancing.
Science is based on being skeptical. The initial response of scientists doing the work will be to disbelieve it. They will check and double check the set up and the procedure. They will repeat the experiment until they are confident that they have found something new. They will surprise workers elsewhere by publishing their method and results in a journal, and the other scientists will be skeptical and will repeat the experiment. If they too confirm it, then the new phenomenon will enter the body of scientific data and will stimulate theoretical scientists to account for it by new hypotheses. This is the way science progresses. How can “science” be to blame when this process is its very impulse? The results of scientific experiments are only right or wrong in relation to Nature as it is theoretically understood so far, or is understood by direct observation.
The only sort of experiment that can come out “right” is the experiment that seeks to confirm or refute a published experimental finding. There might be an expectation that published work has been done carefully enough to be repeatable. Depending on the experimenter’s expectation in relation to the previous experiment, the result can be right or wrong. If the experiment turns out to be “wrong” because it fails to confirm the published one, but has been faultlessly performed, then it is the earlier experiment that was “wrong” and the “wrong” experiment was “right.”
Then there is scope for a scientific controversy with the original school trying to show they were correct and another school trying to prove they were incorrect. These controversies are resolved when the balance of experimental findings, backed up by suitable theories, favours one school or the other. This is why it is hard for scientists to cheat. If published results are wrong then they will be shown to be wrong by other scientists. Science cannot be blamed for a wrong experiment except in the process of making a scientific discovery. When an experiment shows science to be wrong, then science has made a new discovery.
The reader will note here two different meanings of science, one as a body of knowledge about Nature that can be shown by the other, the method by which knowledge of Nature is revealed, to be wrong. No method that gives such consistent agreement with the real world could be wrong but, if there is a better method that gives better agreement with the real world, then it is up to the critics of science to tell us what it is. Carping is not enough. Do better! They cannot. All they can do is tell us to believe in spirits and the soul, beliefs that kept us in squalor and ignorance for 1500 years.
The sight of appalling murderers holding their hands to their hearts and appealing to God had an influence on the beginning of Adelphiasophism. Nothing made the sheer hypocrisy of the patriarchal religions clearer than the way their bishops and prelates stood forth to support the military-industrial barons, and the way the politicians and barons found that a little religion helped their unpleasant medicine go down. Historical investigation showed it was always so, and that Christianity was utterly opposed to the world that we treasured. Critics of our society in the sixties inevitably could still finish their pieces or lectures by urging us to return to outmoded and exhausted religious motifs that the accepted religions of western society bandied about like confetti—soul, spirit, God. Something seemed amiss in their reasoning.
E F Schumacher
E F Schumacher was an important influence on the Adelphiasophists, having many important practical things to say about the state of the planet and how it might be saved. Universal prosperity cannot be fulfilled but, by adopting the principles that “small is beautiful” and “less is more,” we might survive as a species. The remarkable thing about Schumacher, as it is of Theodore Roszak and others, is his conclusions. After recommending that “an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory,” he gives us tons of sound practical advice, with feet firmly planted on the solid ground of the real world, only to conclude that we should believe in a concept so theoretical that it has never been met in practice in any confirmable way. He quotes:
There must be a recognition of the existence of the soul apart from the body, and of its permanent nature, and this recognition must amount to a living faith. In the last resort, non-violence does not avail those who do not possess a living faith in the God of love.Mahatma Gandhi
That Schumacher takes this as his conclusion is incredible, and bears no relatonship to the practical solutions he had previously offered. Concerned with the practicalities of survival in real life, these great men immediately propose the solution of reverting to the old, discredited, false concepts of the patriarchal religions—soul and God! Stuff it! If we are to preserve the world, it is the world we must revere—the actual world, not some imaginary world that never ends, and does not need preserving, that our never ending souls will supposedly live in infinitely longer than the time we spend here. Souls and gods are the cups and balls of the priestly conjurers throughout history, used to baffle and defraud the gullible. Only when we shout, “God is dead! Long live the Goddess!” shall we have hope.
Theodore Roszak
Perhaps one should be naturally wary of a man called Theodore. In “Where the Wasteland Ends” (1972), Roszak admits that the word “spirit” had no negotiable meaning in educated or, one might add, honest company. Though Roszak had many instructive things to say, he did not clarify these issues but continued to use these words with their supernatural connotations. Nevertheless, he urged us to feel “the life within us and the Nature about us as sacred,” and so was a founder of Adelphiasophism in practice.
There are no miracles in the plural because there was only ever a single miracle for each of us, the turn of the tide at its lowest ebb, the integration of experience, the recognition of true divinity, the apocatastasis of the Gnostics, the gestalt revelation of Nature in consciousness, the return to wisdom that makes sense out of chaos, the recognition of truth and distinguishing it from illusion.
Society teaches us to believe illusion and disparage reality. There can be no hope for our continued existence while this is true. Christianity will succeed in its goal of bringing about the eschaton—as far as humanity is concerned—unless we achieve apocatastasis, when the truth and beauty of the Goddess is seen to be the only real divine light. And this is precisely where Roszak gets it diametrically wrong.
Having made his profound observations, he gives us his conclusion—reality is illusion! Whatever can be weighed or timed does not matter—what matters is our souls! One might ask, why bother about the real world at all? Why bother about where the Wasteland ends? Why not make everything into wasteland? Why not blow up the world with some fusion bombs and return us to his understanding of pure “spirituality,” where we belong?
Dreaming about unmeasurable souls, spirits, gods and transcendence can have no positive influence on the natural world. We will only bring about positive changes in the world we live in when we accept the measurable, material world as the “only” divinity. If we treat it as less than divine, we shall destroy it, or rather the zoosphere of higher animals on the earth, and therefore ourselves.
Roszak goes on to denigrate reason as “insanity’s mask,” a manifestly stupid position to hold. We should then all be unreasonable—irrational? Adelphiasophists argue that the world Roszak described was unreasonable, still is, and will be saved by a return to reason—or a religious state based on reason coupled with intuitive caution.
One can accept that reason, through its application to the world through science, has enabled our rulers to destroy our world faster, but that is to misuse reason. It is our selfish rulers who should be replaced, not reason. Over 3000 years ago, when advisors to the rulers of the world used shamanic intuition, the Archons had already started their destructive trend. The “insanity” of mankind is its refusal to accept reality—Nature—as sacred. In the western world, Nature is profane, but imaginary concepts like gods and souls are divine. Roszak tells us the world is sacred, then urges us to bother only about our souls. He illustrates human “insanity” but perhaps he is merely following his prescription to reject reason.
He has a deep admiration for the “realities” of insanity and goes on to sing its the praises. His objective for so doing is to lure us into a “higher reality” in which the dualisms that have divided consciousness vanish. Gurus always want to invent something higher than or transcending what we already have. It is symptomatic of human insanity.
At present few people look upon Nature and see a goddess. If seeing her is a “higher reality,” we can accept Roszak’s metaphor as merely clumsy, but the truth is that seeing her is seeing reality. We have to urge people to appreciate what is plainly there as divine and treat it as such. Out of that will come transcendence—the realisation of our personal situation as human beings in the amazing kinunity of the Goddess. That is the true experience of the mystical—the awe of Nature—and once experienced no one would want to pluck a blade of grass without good cause.
Adelphiasophists do not deny that there are perceptions of reality that human beings do not, indeed often cannot, know but all of them are part of Nature and our inability to perceive them reflects the fact that we are not gods. Roszak is saying this—that the world is greater than we can perceive—but seems to think that we “are” gods, because with a bit of effort—or insanity—we can perceive it. Nor is it exceeded by some other entity outside of itself, so Roszak peddles amateur mysticism to fool people otherwise. To impress upon people the need to protect the world we know, it is foolish to pretend there is something bigger and better we do not know. Let us protect what we know we have. There is only one “Whole.” It is Nature.
Roszak was once described as “the sure voice of a new vision.” His voice might have been sure—voices of gurus usually are—but his vision turns out to be the same old supernatural concoction of souls, spirits and transcendence. The transcendecne we really need is to transcend all this imaginary nonsense that, despite Roszak’s wish to see the world as divine, always sees it as a cesspit, while the important world is somewhere else. There can be no hope until humanity sees the world as holy. If gurus say respect for reality is “reductionist,” then better be reductionist and respect Nature than embrace a bible of spiritual gobbledegook and reject it in favour of angels and fairies.
Blake said:
Man must and will have some religion. If he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan and will erect the synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of the World, God, and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the name of God.
Blake was, of course, of the religion of Jesus, and anyone like Roszak, who quotes this approvingly, also must be. What they never seem to stop to consider is whether Satan is ensconsed as the Prince of the World in the form of Jesus. Blake, and presumably Roszak, want to suggest that the destruction of the world happens because people do not worship the proper god—Jesus—yet the most powerful people in the western world say they do, and so do most ordinary people too. People have professed worship of this god for almost 2000 years, and they have been terrible years.
Worshipping Jesus, the western world has come to despise the material world of Nature in favour of a transcendent world that is called the true reality. Under this regime the Archons of the world do as they wish while assuring us they have God’s authority for it. True reality will follow when we die, so there is no need to worry about what happens while we live. The measure of progress for these Archons is their own accumulation of wealth and power over the lives of the rest. The world cannot tolerate unlimited growth—that is plain. Only the recognition of the blessedness of the world will save us from the Idol of Mammon, hanging on its cross!
Lynn White Jr
Scripture once told us, through the voice of authority that we should not suffer witches to live, that slaves are legitimately taken, that to be poor is to be virtuous, and by this dreadful twisting, was the instrument of oppression through much of our history in Europe and America.Jerome Y Lettvin
The clearest exposition of this view, in the formative years of Adelphiasophism, was an article by Lynn White Jr in “Science,” March 1967. White shows that Christianity is the most anthropocentric of all the patriarchal religions, indeed of all religions. The Judaeo-Christian myth gave man dominance over every herb, bird and animal on earth. In this scheme, God is the god of man but man is the god of the earth. God created Nature but only to remind man of his duties to God. The busy bee told him to be industrious and the rising of sweet smells to heaven told him to pray. Otherwise, he could swat the bee and create as evil a stench as he liked.
Because Nature was meant to be a lesson for man, in the Dark Ages monks took to studying it hoping to learn more about what God wanted of them. They thought it revealed God’s thoughts, but it was not God—it was not divine in itself. Western science was wrought out of this desire to see into God’s head, an apparently sacred pursuit, but not so when man is the god of the natural world. God’s creation it might be, but God has commanded man to be lord over it!
Despite the discovery of the insignificance of the earth in the universe and the evolution of humanity from earlier forms of life, the Judaeo-Christian cultural heritage still puts mankind at the centre of the cosmos and superior to Nature. This tells us that we shall have to learn true humility and cast aside the false doctrine of Christianity, if the biosphere is to survive, even roughly as it is now. We must stop being contemptuous of Nature and discard what is sacred in the Christian world.
What is sacred in the Christian world is never sacred in itself but only from actual or supposed associations with Christianity. The redwood is a tree. It is like any other tree to a Christian. It cannot therefore be sacred in itself. A grove of trees certainly cannot be sacred because groves were sacred to Pagans, and Christians, like Blake, tell us that what is not Christian is Satanic. Even all the trees in the world, or Nature herself, are not sacred to Christians.
The most sacred buildings of the Christian religion, its great churches and cathedrals, epitomize the Christian disdain for Nature. Take a look at their interiors. They represent a grove of giant trees with with high trunks and overhanging branches. Actual groves of trees were cut and burnt because they were idolatrous. Instead the Christians built artificial groves of stone. Cut down the natural and replace it with the man-made. Glory to God!
A noted anthropologist of the last century, Alfred Kroeber, sought to distinguish “lower” from “higher” cultures in this way:
Backward cultures… recognize as objectively effective certain phenomena that the advanced cultures regard as objectively unreal and as subjectively psychotic or deranged.
He could not see that his description of “certain” symptoms applied to the “advanced” cultures just as surely as to the “lower” ones. Our own religious beliefs in the objective existence of God, angels, demons, souls and spirits is no less subjectively “psychotic and deranged.” The poor man thinks only of his concept of the scientific method, forgetting that many people prefer to believe in the “truths” of the patriarchal religions rather than those of science, and many manage to believe both at the same time. Kroeber shows how utterly lacking in objectivity even supposed scientists are when they hang on to the idols in their heads.
The truth is that the reverence technologically primitive people have for Nature is infinitely wiser than the “superior” patriarchal religions of advanced societies where only poets are allowed to express their awareness of the kinunity of Nature—and that is minimised as poetic license. The people that revere Nature still—because the odious missionaries have not yet reached them—are treated as simple people, mentally retarded or, at least, mentally undeveloped. Yet we fall below them in failing to see Nature as the most important part of the objective world—the very basis of it.
We do not have to believe in the supernatural aspects of an ancient or unsophisticated view—unscientific ways of interpreting the world—but the central tenet of the view was more correct than our sophisticated one. They had no hang ups about seeing Nature as central to their existence and divine in its own right, because they had no need of supernatural saviours.
More Roszak
Ecology is a science that borders on mysticism.Theodore Roszak
Theodore Roszak reminded us that the magical vision of Nature was one of the oldest of human concepts, and the source of religious insight and artistic expression. Yet, magical is not necessarily supernatural. Human thought was diverted from the original age-old focus on Nature into the blind alley of invented and symbolic patriarchal religions that disparage Nature. Fundamental to Adelphiasophism is the fact that patriarchal religions are incompatible with reverence for Nature.
The problem Adelphiasophists face is to persuade people that the Goddess Nature is much more magical than any imaginary gods or spirits. Their magic, if they have any, is phony magic. They have no substance in fact and so they seem absolutely mysterious and therefore magical to someone convinced by priests and parents that they exist. It is simply the normal problem of proving a negative. Fairies, angels, gods do not exist but how can anyone prove that they do not? In some instances like the unicorn, we can trace the myth to early descriptions of the rhinoceros, and the collection of narwhal horn. It is a reasonable explanation but it is not proof, so even that myth persists. Myths with even less substance seem even more mysterious and therefore supernatural.
There is more magic in a storm and the rainbow that follows than in the parting of the Red Sea or the Resurrection of Christ. The latter are in the same category as the “Wizard of Oz” and “Peter Pan.” Anyone can invent, in fiction, the most astonishing magic, but the only real magic is natural. Our failing is that—despite the successes of science—we live too much in a mythological religious construct of paranormal demons, angels and acts of God, to appreciate the wonders about us. If we do not see the magic in Nature, then we do not see Nature at all, and cannot ever see it as divine. We shall therefore destroy it and ourselves.
Roszak told us that the magical view of Nature is scientifically heretical but, if he is right, it need not be—ought not to be! Science too ought to be magical and ought to help us see how wondrous Nature is. Claiming to see dryads in the woods and nymphs in the streams might persuade simple people that they lack some magical power that the guru has, but it does not help understanding and is plainly a way of conning the gullible. We should want the woodman to spare the tree for many reasons, including that it has the spirit of Nature in it, but those who claim to see it or converse with it are either overworking or trying to falsely impress us. Dryads, nymphs elves, whatever little people you associate with Nature, are themselves anthropomorphic representations of something more important—the sanctity of Nature’s chain of being.
Roszak was a pioneer, even while seeing nothing but monsters in science. For all that, he knew that science was merely a slave to its colonial masters in their multinational executive judgement seats, and their governmental posts. He looked forward to a science that was not simply to uphold power or reveal egotistical knowledge alienated from Nature because it is above her. Calls to preserve Nature’s mysteries are unnecessary because everything revealed reveals fresh wonders and mysteries. We could never find them all in eternity. Nevertheless, there is no sense in breaking up a unique watch to discover how it works, and Nature must be treated in the same way.
Destruction for knowledge’s sake is another mark of humanity’s insanity. When our mother feeds us at her breast, should we bite off the breast out of greed or curiosity? When we lie content in her bosom, should we tear her open to find the rhythmic beating heart that comforts us? When she croons a lullaby to us to rock us to sleep, should we hack out her tongue to find the source of the sweet song? None of these are good science or good sense. Nature is our mother and not merely metaphorically. We are a cuckoo child that could murder her with our precocious strength, but lack the maturity to survive without her.
One cannot divorce the deeds and policies of the Inquisition from the doctrines and propositions of the saints.Jerome Y Lettvin
What is needed is a new set of axioms to displace those of Christianity. Lettvin thinks science is the secular religion of modern times and declares it to be as bad as the old patriarchal religions. Despite this blunt assessment, he decides that science is not bad in itself but merely because of those who control and apply it. So, he makes an important distinction between the practice and the application of science, but then speaks of “science” when he means its application. He thus invites people to reject science, taking us back to superstition—the basis of the patriarchal religions he condemns. In the thirty years since his ideas were influential in helping to formulate Adelphiasophism, many people have failed to make the distinction he noticed, and have turned away from science to ineffective mysticism and obscurantism. Lettvin did not intend this and coined the word “Antaeism” to mean exactly this fatal abandonment of the phenomenological world as the source of knowledge.
The “kinunity” of Nature is not just a set of independent phenomena within Nature, though, admittedly, each must be studied independently before anything grander can be understood. Critics call this essential procedure “reductionism,” implying that they have the better process of being able to comprehend complexity before simplicity. All of these phenomena in Nature “do” coalesce into a complex whole which is plainly more than the sum of its parts. The kinunity of Nature is the weaving together of chains of being into a cosmic hologram that each of us sees as their aesthetic of existence. No man is an island.
Christians who find all of this difficult should read St Francis of Assisi (not Church summaries of his work) who tried unsuccessfully 800 years ago to point Christianity in the direction of reverence for Nature. Then, note that the ancient view, as Gary Snyder says, has been suppressed by Church and state, but today is essential to humanity:
- our mother is Nature, and should be tenderly respected,
- the divine is flesh and flesh is divine.
- humanity’s continued life and destiny is in freedom subject to self-discipline
Finally, break loose—revere Nature instead of the idol on the cross. As long as Nature is seen as man’s slave, the ecological crisis will worsen.
Scientians
A nomark called Malachi Martin launched an attack on scientists in “Harpers” in March 1972, in which he labelled them as “scientians.” Scientism originally meant the way in which scientists expressed themselves but was given a pejorative meaning by Bernard Shaw as an inclination among some scientists to give pseudo-scientific explanations for anything, even though inadequate scientific work had been done to justify it.
Martin categorizes the scientian as a scientist successful in his own field who has the temerity to use his “background to extrapolate the currently known data of his field—and if necessary the data of other branches of science—in order to discourse on the whole of man, including specifically ethics, morality, religious instinct and practice, humanism, and all the so-called values—the inner things of man.” Perhaps we should always be wary of men called Malachi as well as those called Theodore! You can almost hear Martin bristling with prophetic indignation, though he claims no expertise about anything at all, and so has as much competence to pronounce on these matters as any priest or theologian, and far more than he allows the scientian.
Why a human being should be excluded from discussing the nature of humanity or the state of Nature because they have proved themselves successful in examining some small part of Nature successfully is inexplicable, except the desire to keep the debate uninformed. When scientists depart from their own field of expertise, they raise themselves to the level of the prophet and the shaman. Yes, indeed, scientists are ordinary citizens as well as being scientists and, as such, are entitled to comment on society—as anyone is in a democracy—from their own viewpoint.
If Jacques Monod wants to speculate on whatever certain aspects of his experience might contribute to society at large, he is just as entitled to as the editor of “Harper’s Magazine,” though he will have less opportunity. We also have just as much right to reject his conjectures, or take them merely as talking points, because he has barely any more authority for pronouncing on them than anyone else. But editors know that readers like to have the views of clever people whether politicians, industrialists, hacks or even scientists, and therefore give them occasional column inches. Monod will be unlikely to claim his own untested thoughts are scientific, but he will doubtless hope that others might get some inspiration from them.
If Skinner and Lorenz extrapolated from animal behaviour to human behaviour without actually confirming their speculations by experiment, what is so wrong? Clergymen tell us what heaven and hell are like! Since human beings are acknowledged by most people today as being animals, how can anyone hold that animal behaviour is irrelevant to human behaviour? Cannot a scientist ask that it be considered that animal behaviour might cast some light on certain aspects of human behaviour? Even though humans being can arguably consciously decide how they might respond to a stimulus, why could there not be an underlying instinct common to higher animal life?
Scientists, just like hacks, have sometimes to take an extreme position to be noticed. Indeed scientists are in the normal distribution of human outlooks and some will take an extreme position on social issues anyway. The only exteme position that should not be allowed in a democracy is that which forbids extreme positions, for by forbidding extreme positions we converge to totalitarianism. Extreme positions are exposed by informed dialogue, and the dialogue will be informed ultimately by the application of science. But this, apparently, is the “scientian leap.” Scientists are not allowed to examine religious, ethical or humanistic questions unless they have the scientific tests to back them up. What tests do non-scientists use?
By “scientian,” despite the definition that he gives, Martin really means scientist. He is criticising science though scientism can sometimes be a legitimate target. Scientians are apparently crusading to free humanity from the toils of superstition, animism, clerical domination and primitive moralities and systems… This is meant to be a criticism! Scientists have the audacity to offer solutions to some of society’s problems, or, if not solutions, they issue warnings… This too—would you believe?—is a criticism! He carries on in similar vein:
The golden promise of scientism is the total obliteration of whatever evils bedevil the world in the form of ignorance, aggression, poverty, mental and physical disease…
Seriously this too is a criticism in Martin’s world. He wants to paint these scientists as dreamy idealists, out of touch with reality. True enough, scientists are just as likely as anyone else to be dreamers—perhaps more so—but in the world of Malachi Martin, where such dreams are risible, nightmares will prevail.
Martin tells us that science that produces results “conforming to objectively acquired data” is acceptable but that “scientians belie the very principle of scientific objectivity.” Well indeed they do, but then Martin and the theologians have no principle of objectivity at all. The real people he does not like are those whose “dream of the total integration with Nature would become an accomplished fact.” It begins to sound as though the “scientians” are really the Adelphiasophists, and “integration with Nature” sounds like the retutn to a symbiotic relationship with Nature rather than the parasitic relationship we now have.
Scientism arises, perhaps justifiably, when scientists, writing for the public, interpolate what seems reasonable into some lacunae in scientific knowledge. It is using a hypothesis as fact because the hypothesis has not been confirmed. Science, notably in its historical branches like evolution and archaeology, and its distant branches like cosmology, does have such lacunae that cannot instantly be filled scientifically. Filling such gaps with educated guesswork is no more than most people do daily, and Martin has no objection to that. We might not see the cat steal the fish, but we can make a good surmise based on the evidence before and after the act. In Martin’s world, scientists are not allowed to make any such guess unles they can test it, otherwise they are being scientian.
The mistake seems to be that scientists do not make their analogies and conjectures clear in their popular pieces. Yet a requirement to justify every statement would make a popular piece constrained by space, style and readability, impossible to write—it would become textbook or review material. Martin is consistently unfair on scientists, from whom he demands standards infinitely higher than those of the bishops, politicians and astrologers that he has no desire to attack. They can write just as they please layering conjecture on speculation and speculation on surmise, yet scientists who base their speculations on fact rather than previous speculation or unfounded axioms are criticized mercilessly. If scientists qualify what they say, he accuses them of fudging. They are not allowed to say, “If so-and-so, then such-and-such,” because it is fudging! They cannot warn the reader of a condition, without being bad mouthed.
Martin’s criticisms finish up sounding like jealousy that scientists like Monod, Morris and Lorenz can write popular books that grab people’s imagination. Most of their readers will recognize that some of the material they present is provocative but will forgive them for being interesting. Perhaps, Martin is boring.
Having gone through his diatribe, Martin selects a quotation from Loren Eiseley that is the epitome of speculative hypothesis turned into law that he says he despises in scientists. Eiseley apparently said that if humanity became nothing other than rational, it would expire in that instant. Nothing could be less scientific, being utterly impossible to falsify. After all his words about scientism, what could be more so, yet Martin quotes the scientian with approval.
Finally, he reveals himself fully when he speaks of “metaphysical knowledge,” a complete contradiction in just two words, which he then extends to “knowledge derived through religious experience.” He also talks of the “diktats of blind Nature” that will “close man’s mind to any possibility of ultimate mystery.” He reveals himself as a hater of Nature and a polemicist for the obscurantism of the religions of the past, and the confidence trickery of the priests and preachers of today. Malachi, indeed!
The real “scientians,” rightly criticized, are the “experts,” the professional scientific talking heads, wheeled out by governments, multinationals and social institutions to justify, through their scientific credentials, the directions of scientific exploration, or to calm our fears about this or that new revelation about the organized destruction of the planet. They tell us that science and technology will find answers to all the problems that their misdirection by the professional politicians, the generals and the profiteers, are causing. They do not say how desiccated skeletons will solve the ultimate crisis, if it were to strike too soon.
Science as scientific method is a neutral process but where it is used is selected by people with vested interests, and so the body of knowledge also called science is not neutral. Science is applied, as Marcuse said, in the interests of IBM and AEA—corporations and governments—it is not neutral. It is not then a question of whether the product of science is good or bad, it is a question of who determines the product and who owns or controls it. As long as only a few powerful individuals decide, science will mainly be bad science.
The implication is not that science is wrong or should be stopped but that our social organization is wrong, so that the wrong decisions about science are being made constantly. Yet, social organization cannot be changed without mass protest and pressure. There is no point in citing the benefits of our present laissez-faire technological society, because all of them will be negated by the environmental crisis when it comes.
We are in the age of “temporal imperialism”—exploiting future generations by robbing the earth of resources that will leave them at best destitute, and otherwise dead. Garrett Hardin once said: “A finite world can only support a finite population. Therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero!” If we do not achieve it, Nature will. We are experiencing the final tragedy, the essence of which is, as A N Whitehead said, “the solemnity of the remorseless working of things… the inevitability of destiny.” The Goddess Nature will wreak her vengeance. Our only chance is to belatedly return to her. If we do not, escape is futile.
Self-Sufficiency
We must learn to restore to Nature the wealth we take from it.Barry Commoner
Seek to reduce waste and pollution will be reduced. Seek to reduce waste by reducing production. Seek to reduce production by reducing consumption. Reduce consumption by being content with less. What is the point of clearing forests so that we can all enjoy beefsteaks when the outcome is that we all choke to death through lack of oxygen? Instead of eating beefsteaks grow spinach beet and Jerusalem artichokes in your garden. Even the worst gardeners can grow them with ease—but be sure to eat them instead of beefsteaks, and help to save the world through self-sufficency.
John Seymour was an early pioneer of self-sufficiency, taking to it from as early as the fifties. He knew that many Third World villages were effectively self-sufficient, and the people living in them were mainly happy and content though they were extremely poor by western standards. The individuals were not self-sufficient but the people in a village practised a variety of necessary skills, the products of which they bartered, and they were all happy to lend a hand to others in co-operative work that was beyond the capacity of any individual such as building a house.
Thus they all enjoyed a common economic level above the level of subsistence, and no one worked hard except at the times of the year when the fields were being prepared, sown and especially harvested. Were it not for the fact that a substantial part of their produce went to pay the rents of the owner of the village, they would have been reasonably well off, but the landowner took half of the communal product. That was what made life hard and insecure, not their level of technology!
Farming used to be an activity that was close to Nature. A farm was where some natural activities were localized for convenience of management. Plants were grown and animals reared for foodstuffs—natural processes but managed for human convenience. The nutrients lost from the soil by the growth and removal of food crops were replaced by recycling vegetable waste as compost and animal waste as manure, and by rotating crops to fix nutrients by periodically growing legumes. Such a farm, properly managed, can be productive for millennia with no loss of soil quality—the opposite, if anything. Today we call this organic farming and it is treated by hacks, multinational fertilizer corporations and conventional farmers as a joke.
We live in a world in which farming is industrialized for “efficiency” yet human beings in the developed countries have so much “leisure” time that they have to find novel ways of wasting it. Managers are well known for their love of golf because it gets them out of the office or factory and into the open air and gives them exercise. What is their objection to digging an allotment and growing vegetables? They might find that they did not need to work in the factory at all, and would be far healthier. Golf is a pure waste of time, as is squash, tennis and similar sporting activities. They are also a waste of human energy that could equally be spent in cultivation with a useful product at the end. Promote self-sufficiency as a positive creative force in people’s lives that will help them avoid displacement activities that, at best, are pointless and, at worst, destructive of social cohesion and Nature itself. Replace golf and sports with kitchen gardening and we would be heading for self-sufficiency.
A balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technolgy, and a decentralized society are not only desirable but necessary.Murray Bookchin
Any symbiotic technology would work with and within natural parameters, since otherwise it would be in some sense parasitic on Nature. We do not need “mechanical standardization” but organic diversity. The greater the diversity, the greater the stability of the ecosystem. By increasingly turning to monoculture we are destabilizing our food-producing environment. By focusing the monoculture on GM varieties we shall be causing even greater instability by removing useful genes and replacing them with ones that are useless in the natural world, or alternatively might be conducive to the emergence of an uncontrollable super-weed.
The use of GM varieties means the elimination of non-GM varieties and the reduction of genetic diversity with its potential for instability and disease. Thousands of varieties of local wheats, for example, have already been lost simply by displacement by higher-yielding hybrids. GM will accentuate this trend. Although gene banks have now been set up to preserve non-commercial varieties, the attack of a widely used GM variety by a mutated pathogen would cause worldwide starvation before enough natural resistance could be re-introduced from the gene banks. The potato blight that caused the Irish famine less than 200 years ago was caused by growing potatoes that were too inbred and had no natural resistance. Leaf rust attacks on Brazilian coffee plants were also severe because the plants had insufficient genetic diversity to resist.
Industrial farmers are grubbing out all peripheral lifeforms in the sterile prairies they now call fields. To make bigger fields, hedgerows and copses disappear. There are no complementary or alternative crops, no rotation, no insect life, bird life and small mammal life, no manuring, no composting—just wholesale attack via fertilizers and pesticides that distort and destroy the balance of life still more, and denude the soil of its quality. Pesticides and herbicides used with crops genetically modified to resist them also destroy soil species that help preserve the quality of the soil. When that happens, plants get more vulnerable to attack by pests, necessitating more frequent applications of pesticides and fertilizers while robust weeds invade more successfully, necessitating herbicide spraying more often… Everything is set up for disaster. Dustbowl insanity—the inability to learn from experience when greed is the motive.
Modern farmers treat Nature as a commodity not as a goddess. Adelphiasophism says direct science and technology towards the sustainable, the organic, the quiet, the harmless, the elegant and the beautiful, and eschew exploitation, the synthetic, the raucous, the dangerous the clumsy and the ugly. We must support a return to a form of farming that respects the land, promotes variety and embraces health—organic farming. It does not preclude science but demands that science serves it, rather than power and profit.
Scientific discoveries do not have to be used just because they are there. Their use might be too terrible. The ancients knew of steam power, and it was used in minor ways such as for pumping water to the top of the Pharos Lighthouse in Ptolemy’s Egypt, or for mysteriously opening temple doors as the worshipper approached. The fear was that such mechanical power extensively used would leave the world full of unemployed and rebellious slaves and would therefore destroy the basis of lawful society. The Romans also knew about water power but never used it even for grinding wheat out of the same fear.
Suetonius, in the Twelve Caesars reports that a man came to Tiberius with an astonshing glass ball that bounced. Tiberius enquired whether anyone else knew of the discovery, and when he received a negative reply had the man executed. He feared that such an amazing substance would become more valuable than gold and again would undermine the economy. Batteries were known in Mesopotamia before the Arab conquests but were never used because of concerns for traditional crafts. Similarly, in South America, the Incas knew about wheels because they made wheeled toys for their kids, but feared their military use and so forbade their use commercially.
Nature around us is a living presence that can be addressed.Theodore Roszak
Roszak expressed the view of the Native Americans. We address empty space in our churches, so what is wrong with addressing something teaming with life and senses. The central psychological element in any program to change attitudes is the cultivation of reverence for Nature in place of supernatural and unreal constructs.
Some practical elements have been mentioned but another is the adoption of crafts based on simple and accessible equipment that will allow people to produce hand-made goods—as a hobby or a business—useful and harmless to the environment, yet that will fulfil the human need for gainful activity and creativity, while cutting down the extent of damaging mass production. Startup costs for these hobby-businesses should be low so that there is a propspect of breaking even quickly. Natural science and technology will put:
- Nature before utility,
- people before machines,
- health before profit,
- crafts before mass production,
- organic before artificial,
- quality before quantity,
- symbiosis with Nature before dominance of it.
There should be no casual acceptance of any generalized “safe” levels of pollution, contamination, radiation, or any other dangerous application, that are meaningless in the particular instance, and often in general anyway, and can only too easily be bypassed by dilution, dispersion or by some “unfortunate accident.”
Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a co-operative part of the global whole.Barry Commoner
