Hubris and the Green Wall
Adapted from the forthcoming Book, The White Deer, by Melinda Redinger
Hubris is a term familiar to many from ancient Greek literature, but the concept is recognizable in stories from many times and places. The Collins Dictionary defines hubris as 1. pride or arrogance; and 2. (in Greek tragedy) an excess of ambition, pride, etc., ultimately causing the transgressor’s ruin. Merriam-Webster adds “overconfidence” to the nuances of the word, and explains that the ancient Greeks “considered hubris a dangerous character flaw capable of provoking the wrath of the gods. In classical Greek tragedy, hubris was often a fatal shortcoming that brought about the fall of the tragic hero. Typically, overconfidence led the hero to attempt to overstep the boundaries of human limitations and assume a godlike status, and the gods inevitably humbled the offender with a sharp reminder of their mortality.”
Early usage of the word hubris in a Greek context referred to wanton violence, insolence or outrage. Specifically, in ancient Athens, it referred to the intentional use of violence for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the target, typically for pleasure or gratification. In modern terms, the crimes covered by this category include assault and battery, sexual assault, or the theft of public property or the property of religious institutions. However, over time, a semantic shift took place and hubris acquired the definition of “overweening presumption that leads a person to disregard the divinely fixed limits on human action in an ordered cosmos.” The consequences for acts of hubris were social disgrace for both the victim and the perpetrator and even the risk of a kind of curse: violating the limits given by the natural order dissolves one’s identity, and even sometimes “exposes one to monstrousness.” Briana Saussy’s story of Gawain and Ragnelle provides a perfect illustration of all of these themes, as we see that the maiden fled into the forest and became monstrous after the knight raped her. He was executed, thus perpetuating the violence, and the land became hostile and stingy and incapable of supporting human life as a consequence.
There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.
Our ancestors were adaptable and inventive, and they did everything possible to ensure that they would be provided for. They expanded their range out of the original African homeland into just about every part of Earth except for Antarctica (until recently) and the depths of the sea (for now). In general, the only real check to expansion has been other human societies capable of repelling an invasion of territory they considered their own. Part of what facilitated humans’ remarkable expansion and adaptations has been the degree and variety of cooperative behavior. As research by Botero et al. and other zoologists indicates, cooperation allows various species of fauna to push themselves into regions that otherwise couldn’t support them as solitary organisms. As this became a kind of “second nature” for our hominin ancestors, rules and norms came to replace previous limits imposed by natural conditions, which were increasingly treated with suspicion and hostility, and rejected on principle. The routinization of these habits then made people overconfident in their powers.
Eventually, some who lived in the harshest landscapes developed doctrines about transcendent deities who are harsh and moralizing and concerned with minutiae of our manners and behavior, but which grant us superiority and mastery over nature. When we are given (have taken) this right to dominion, nature is then externalized and alienated. On our side remained a form of spirit that was posited to be transcendent and eternal, and this in its turn was later replaced in the dyad with a more secular notion of mind. Part of the process of both religious and secular education was training minds to identify with the eternal spirit/mind and treating matter, nature, or any beings lower on the Great Chain (even human beings) as resources to be exploited for the glory of oneself, one’s king, or the God who sanctioned all of this. Meaning and justification for actions always came from a higher source, not from a lower “resource.”
After the adoption of Bronze Age solar gods and apace with the spread of social hierarchy as a norm in many parts of Eurasia, more and more peoples began to prioritize violent conquest and exploitation of others. Raising themselves up above their peers with palaces and ostentatious displays, and supporting standing armies led to ever-increasing and ever more unsustainable demands on the land. They asked solar and heaven-dwelling deities to aid and glorify their rule, and they imposed strict and moralizing religions on the people to ensure their cooperation. In a sense, the general rule that allowing greater levels of consumption than it is possible to sustainably supply often leads to an economic, social, or military conflict is still true today, though often the conflicts are out of sight and therefore out of mind.
Dualism intensified again during the West’s Enlightenment in philosophical and theological trends that shifted one half of the dyad from the theological conception of spirit to mind, which was opposed to the body or the material world. For instance, René Descartes’ dualism of mind and body proposed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible … the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” This was revolutionary because it undermined truth claims put forth by secular and religious authorities in the Age of Absolutism when he lived. Then in the centuries to follow, despite Descartes’ devout intention to naturalize a belief in God, immortal souls, and an afterlife in which souls are punished and rewarded, the notion of disembodied, transcendent reason discarded theology in favor of mechanistic political and economic theories that drank from the same well. Thus, even parts of the world – such as the communist states in Asia – that didn’t experience Christian hegemony or the Enlightenment (but are suffering from blights and extinctions) are affected by this dualism.
We have conceived of “nature” as something separate from ourselves, and then—in the belief that only what’s in our brains or perhaps the biological organisms of our bodies is real—we mistrust our experiences of it, fear it, and develop a preference for mediating our experiences of the living world through technology. What’s left over is just “imagination” or, if one has health insurance, perhaps it is characterized as symptoms of mental illness. It is of no value, and should be ignored or eliminated.
At its extreme, the dualistic antipathy toward life itself can verge into what the psychologist and social philosopher Erich Fromm described as “necrophilia.” He was not referring to a sexual fetish for dead bodies, but a love of “all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things…Memory, rather than experience—having, rather than being—is what counts. The necrophilous person…loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.” For Fromm, deadening one’s perception and pain were also necrophilic behaviors. However, “transhumanist” fantasies, which dream of using technology to free individuals not only from injury and death, but also from old age and the constraints of a physical body as such, are surely one of the most necrophilic phenomena ever to appear. This worldview looks at computers and robots not as tools to accomplish tasks, but as ideals that human beings fall short of and ought to strive to resemble. Here is a characterization of this way of thinking:
“…the entirety of our personalities, thoughts, feelings, and memories [are] merely a result of an operating system and various programs running in our skull. Many people ponder if a personality could be downloaded as data to a computer, or if a computer could, given the right sequence of 1’s and 0’s gain conscious self-awareness, or even a soul. Transhumanists can hardly wait for a new bodiless age where personalities live in a digital cloud and can be downloaded in to a variety of human or robot bodies. The implications of this are highly dualistic, a kind of sci-fi Gnosticism. The body is thought to be something that restricts. An imperfection that prevents us from reaching the potential of pure mind or spirit.”
NBICs (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, information technology and cognitive sciences) promise men and women the opportunity to defy death’s promise of oblivion. Not surprisingly, enterprises selling the idea that technology can provide physical perfection and mental immortality to those who can pay, or offering to rescue a few elites from a dying planet, enjoy considerable patronage from Big Tech corporations. But this is more than just paid flattery for tech-bro oligarchs: to the extent that people believe that these technologies are extensions of themselves, they are creating (or perhaps simply refashioning) cosmologies. And these necrophilic cosmologies have not only grown out of older ones that contributed to killing the animals, plants, and ecosystems that keep us alive, but they even rob death of its juicy, fertile power of recycling nutrients to provide the conditions for new life to emerge.
Alongside this, at the general societal level there is a kind of mental derangement instilled by politicians, economists and journalists who promote “a vicious ideology of extreme competition that pits us against each other, encourages us to fear and mistrust each other and weakens the social bonds that make our lives worth living. The story of our competitive, self-maximizing nature has been told so often and with such persuasive power that we have accepted it as an account of who we really are. It has changed our perception of ourselves. Our perceptions, in turn, change the way we behave.” Mistrustful, but with their appetites awakened, people find that they are continually ungrateful and discontented: most of those who live in consumer capitalist societies are dissatisfied with their present material conditions.
After a certain point, countries with rising standards of living do not always enjoy rising standards of happiness (the controversial Easterlin paradox), and when people in “developed” countries are asked how much income a person needs to be rich, the answer is usually about twice the amount that they are currently earning. Everyone compares themselves to others (this is explicitly encouraged) and measures themself against media presentations of a good, desirable lifestyle. Nearly everyone feels that they are coming up short, and many feel ashamed, as though they had failed. The idea that enough “growth” can or should accommodate everyone’s access to ever-expanding excess is underwritten by an impossible assumption of infinitely expanding finite material means. And it seems to dangle the impossible carrot of “someday, we’ll all get there” ahead of individuals and collectives, which mindlessly race after it.
The cultures of industrial societies tend to focus on material culture alien to the local environment: having enough, which means having more than most other people, means having something that costs more (to someone, somewhere) than what is easily provided for locally. While people in some countries are eating 24-karat gold-dusted piece of fried chicken while hoping it doesn’t dislodge the diamonds from their teeth before they take a selfie with the bones on their plate, the poorest are so desperate to get their next meal that they destroy their local ecosystems and poach the last endangered animals so their parts can be used for trinkets and potions, and this—as I discussed in previous chapters—has various catastrophic effects up to and including the release of zoonotic plagues that might eventually come knocking at everyone else’s doors.
It's a long walk down the road from earlier conditions that favored connection to the perverse and pathological mental states many live in now. Glenn Albrecht proposes four stages that human experiencing of nature and life moves through, ranging from a primal connection to complete detachment. “First nature” is where there is “a complete merging of self and the body with the greater forces of the Earth.” Anthropologist Veronica Strang provides an example of this in Australian Aboriginal culture:
Social and environmental sustainability are so closely integrated that they cannot be imagined independently. The close identification between clan groups and their local environments frames each part of Nature as an aspect of the self, incorporating and embodying Nature within human “being” in a seamless relationship between spiritual, social and physical existence. The intimacy of sensory experience in hunting and gathering, and the close-grained knowledge that supports it, reaffirm the projection of the self into the local environment as internalised aspects of social identity. In effect, the material world is not alienated and objectified, but is bound into a subjective co-identification. Nature is not merely “near” … it is integral to the self.
Then, there is “‘second nature,’ where humans are still partially connected to first nature but forge their own technologically mediated Earth.” Nature is framed as “other” to oneself, and it becomes expendable in relation to other needs and desires. As this continues, the Earth is increasingly unable to supply what they demand and people become frustrated and angry and they eventually withdraw from engagement with it to whatever extent they are able. During the second stage, human cultures and languages undergo “extinction events” as words and concepts fall out of use, and then become alien. For example, there has been a gradual removal of “nature words” such as acorn, newt, fern, bluebell, blackberry, and kingfisher from children’s dictionaries in England, in favor of terms like bullet-point, chatroom, and broadband.
Third nature is where, “whatever nature is, it is no longer normally part of a totally technologically mediated human experience. There is a story of engagement, alienation, and then separation of humans from nature taking place here.” (These include Elon Musk, transhumanists who dream of eternal AI afterlives, “long-termers” who are willing to sacrifice people alive now for the “vast and glorious” potential of humanity’s future, and all those who have gone numb or who are trying to anesthetize themselves into an unfeeling stupor with drugs.) Where are all the other species in AI? The otters and kingfishers and blackberries. Are they going to be present as flat simulations, or did the architects of the future worlds decide we no longer need them?
The loss is far more than just aesthetic: our human minds have been shaped in relation to countless other-than-human intelligences that we have shared our habitat with, in processes that are as old as life itself. Losing them, cashing them in, sacrificing them, means losing ourselves. As Robin Artisson wrote:
“Long before we became so entangled with our human social world and so mentally separated from the other-than-human world, human and animal co-created and co-shaped one another. Humans and the land co-created and co-shaped one another. We are foolish if we imagine that our dream of separation from Nature has caused these older bonds to cease functioning. They are still here, aching inside of us like a dream devalued and ignored. Every being, every phenomenon in our world of experience represents a pre-existing relationship, or a potential for new relationship, an opportunity for change, transformation, and co-creation. Thus, every time a being vanishes from our world, every time a family of animals goes extinct, or a family of plants vanishes, the range of transformative and insightful creative potential that our entities might express is forever lessened. We are forever diminished, whether or not we consciously realize this. The more of the world we destroy, the more of ourselves we destroy and degrade.
“Third nature” is a painful form of slow dismemberment that can be numbed with drugs and ideologies, but cannot be healed using its own logic and means—much like the Fisher King whose generative powers have been destroyed, and he languishes with a painful wound that he cannot die from. Finally, “fourth nature” is where a reintegration takes place. As Strang writes, “genuine sustainability relies upon beliefs, systems, and practices in which Nature is accepted as ‘self’ rather than repudiated as ‘other’.”
One of the dysfunctional behaviors we have been burdened with as we move from Albrecht’s second to third stages is the literal backgrounding of the living world as an environment. The word ‘environment’ makes us think of a stable and reliable backdrop as in the theater, in front of which ‘real’ human life and history takes place.” However, the neat distinction between foreground and background is illusory, and the illusion is founded in hubristic habits of mind.
The ethnobotanist and herbalist Hayden Stebbins uses the term “green wall” to refer to a habit of perception in which people see plants, and even the entire natural world as only a background to the real experience of the world they live in. This is a symptom of what Glenn Albrecht would classify as the third stage of separation. However, it is possible to reverse this kind of green-blindness and begin to really see plants, and then the other non-human beings also start coming into focus. In an interview, Stebbins recommended walking through any local green space that’s available and finding a place where you can slow down and take a few moments to closely observe something growing there: perhaps a tree, a flower, a mushroom. But whatever it is, keep coming back to see it. The interviewer followed up with: “It’s an interesting concept, to come back to the same plant or a mushroom or a tree instead of, say, taking a long wander through nature. What’s the psychology behind that?” And Stebbins replied: “You start to see that plant over time. And when you do that, you see how it changes through the seasons. And I think that’s one of the best ways to stop seeing plants as background — to see that they are individual organisms, and to see that they change. Just like visiting a friend. If you see a friend and you’re just walking by and you say, ‘Hi,’ every morning, that’s different than actually stopping and having a conversation with them.” Give it a try, and you may be amazed.
We cannot solve the problems caused by hubris by engaging in more of it. As paradoxical as it seems, sometimes the concept of “the environment” is one that separates us from the forces of life. No one lives in “the environment” or experiences a particular location as “the environment”. And yet, we ask it to supply us with resources, and even “environmental services”—such as cleaning the air—without limitations. Applying an insight similar to the Freudian critique of relating to the Earth as Mother, Brendan Myers writes: “As a civilization we have assumed that the Earth can always bear the loss of what we take from it, and always carry the load of what we return to it. This assumption, which I shall call the illusion of infinite carrying capacity, was not seriously examined or doubted in the whole history of civilization until the rise of mathematical ecology in the mid nineteenth century. Plenty of people today, perhaps yourself among them, understand that this assumption is false. But plenty more people still behave as if they believe it’s true.” Like the tales of heroes who discovered the answer to the riddle of what women want most, just having a theoretical answer is not enough. There has to be a thoroughgoing change in perception and actions that match.