The Nature of Myth, the Myth of Nature
One of the clichéd ways we talk about human-inflicted damage to a landscape, especially damage to its fertile, creative powers, is with the metaphor of rape. Yet, the idea rankles: where does this association come from? Google Ngrams reveals that forms of phrases regarding rape or raping of the earth or land first came into more common use in published works in the 1930s. These phrases proliferated the most during the the mid-1960s to late 1990s, years during which second wave feminism’s anti-rape movement was beginning to push back against engrained patterns of violence against women. These are also the years when concepts of “the environment” as something that needs our awareness and protection rose to prominence.
At the same time, there are also many reasons why such language is unclear and problematic. First, “raped” is not an end state. What in nature even has an end state? Surely it is arrogant—hubristic even—for humans to believe they have caused or have the power to predict an end state for the planet they inhabit. Patriarchal ideologies that prize chastity in the “vessels” that grow a man’s progeny may promote this view, but outside of such frameworks, why would “raped” need to be a final status ascribed to a woman? Even if one’s body were somehow physically tainted by an assault, it changes all of its cells many times over a lifetime: the raped body gradually fades out of physical coherence. What happened in the past was done to another body, just as what has been done to a landscape in the past happened to a different ecosystem. In both cases, there is the possibility to re-tell the tale and bring about healing.
Also, a certain subtle grammatical issue in discussions of rape sets it apart from discussions of other crimes. Passive formulations that focus on the victim’s state do nothing to advance understanding of why the perpetrators acted this way. If the motivations are misunderstood or ignored, there is little reason to press for redress or corrective action to prevent more instances in the future. As Jackson Katz explained in an influential TED talk titled “Violence Against Women—It’s a Men’s Issue:”
We talk about how many women were raped last year, but not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenage girls in the state of Vermont got pregnant last year, rather than how many men and boys impregnated teenage girls … So you can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. [It] shifts the focus off of men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term “violence against women” is problematic. It’s a passive construction; there’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term “violence against women,” nobody is doing it to them. It just happens to them … Men aren’t even a part of it!
Our common language de-emphasizes and even erases the perpetrators of these crimes. One of the results of this focus on the victim’s state (which is perceived as shameful) is that, in criminal justice systems around the world, only a vanishingly small number of sexual assaults are successfully prosecuted. Cases are hushed up before being brought to trial, or at some point the prosecution simply halts before a verdict and sentence can be pronounced. The woman thus remains “raped,” living under stigma, and the man who perpetrated the crime moves on, either discreetly or perhaps swaggering among his peers.
Those who cause damage to the Earth are likewise usually not named or held to account in our culture. Some of them, such as corporate functionaries who approve the release of chemicals into rivers, remain forever anonymous, while others—a small handful of those who live in industrial countries and perpetrate the worst ecocidal crimes—dream of moving on to other celestial bodies. This is celebrated in some circles and decried in others, but nothing is done to make them more accountable to or for the planet that supplied them with all these resources. Then, there are generations upon generations of more ordinary people whose actions have cumulatively brought ecosystems to and over crucial tipping points. Thus, it is often unclear who should be held responsible and who should remedy the damage.
When humans assault each other, there are often reflexive assumptions that this is a “natural” aspect of behavior. This behaviour is then seen to appear only when certain inherently hypocritical and unstable civilized norms are not enforced vigorously enough. If the best we can hope for is to apply checks to a violent “natural instinct,” what sort of society could ever be built on this understanding? It’s a quick slip from there to where it seems “natural” for Homo economicus to maximize gain while offloading the damage and cost onto animals, plants, ecosystems, and others. I don’t see these worldviews as natural at all: I suggest they are the outcome of many ages of pernicious ideologies which poison our relationship with the world that sustains us. I will describe some of them in the following chapters.
Roland Barthes famously quipped in his Mythologies that “myth transforms history into nature.” This may seem counterintuitive; after all, many of us have heard that myths or fables mostly provide cultural explanations for natural phenomena such as seasons or weather. The more subtle view, however, is that the highly communicable narrative form of myth actually conceals political motives, ideology, values, and expectations, ensuring their circulation in public spheres and discourses. Let’s now look at what kinds of myths might drive some of our ideas about human and divine nature, and about rape and domination of the earth.
The Great Chain of Being
The motif of rape and social stigma was certainly present in the Classical world; however, these cultures were not connecting it with a concept of the Earth being composed of “resources” awaiting exploitation. This link was later forged with the introduction of the theological model of the Great Chain of Being. At the top of this chain is a transcendent deity who suffuses all of his “creation” while also standing apart from it. Humans are tasked with trying to understand his arrangements: just as God is set apart from his creation, human beings are set apart from the rest of nature, which they enjoy the prerogative of using as they will. There is a hierarchy that begins with God, who has supremacy over angels; then there are beings who want to teach and interact with humans; and beneath the supernatural beings are the celestial bodies of the stars and moon. In the human hierarchy, kings are placed over princes; princes stand over nobles; nobles over commoners; and men over women. All humans enjoy dominion over animals; wild animals over domesticated ones; animals over plants; and plants over the minerals and soil.
Why are they ranked in this order? It's connected to a conception in which spirit is considered superior to changeable and "corruptible" matter. God was said not to have been created by anything else, but he created all the rest. He and the angels exist wholly in spirit form and are eternal, and spirit is a higher emanation of divinity than matter; the earthly flesh of humans and animals is subject to disease and death; animals have motion and appetite; plants possess life; and minerals merely exist. We still retain the memory of this hierarchy when we use phrases such as “we’re not animals!” or even “he treated me like dirt!” when people are not granted fitting levels of dignity.
Nature as Resource, Nature as Machine
In his essay “The Rape of Mother Earth: The Rise and Fall of Western Dominance,” Pierre Madl draws the logical conclusion that this view of nature’s instrumental value has been cemented in certain strains of Christian theology by a teleology that represents nature as a “support system for rational human beings.” Unfortunately, coldly utilitarian (and, under the influence of scientific modernism, also mechanistic) views persisted in European thought through the Enlightenment, with or without explicit religious underpinnings.
Francis Bacon may not have actually said some of the very worst things attributed to him, such as Leibniz’s suggestion that Bacon advocated “torturing nature on the rack” to “reveal her secrets,” but he did organize his discussion of nature into three states that it might exist in: free, erring (creating “wonders” and “monsters”), and “constrained.” His explicitly stated aim—quite in keeping with the theology of his times—was “so that man can recover that right over nature that belongs to it by divine bequest” after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. As though that were not immodest enough, this should be pursued in order to “establish the power and dominion of the human race over the entire universe.”
In Bacon’s time, a great proliferation of proto-industrial activities—ranging from mining and refining ores, working with metals, constructing wind and water mills, and designing machines to do labor—was taking place all across Europe. The famous formulation “knowledge is power” (scienta potentia est) is correctly attributed to Thomas Hobbes, who had served as a secretary to Bacon when he was a young man, but the idea was incipient in Bacon’s work when he wrote “knowledge itself is power”(ipsa scientia potestas est). This view was inherent throughout this period’s research and manufacturing activities. The practical application of understanding of physical and chemical processes to inventions, mechanics, crafts, medicine and so on facilitated their further development. When nature was understood as a complex machine, it became possible to analyze its constituent parts, which could then be reassembled and set to tasks that would serve humankind.
The same coldly utilitarian logic was also applied to animals. René Descartes claimed that animals do not think or suffer because they lacked souls: essentially, he saw them as machines. Animals were still described mechanistically by philosophers well into the twentieth century: for example, when Martin Heidegger set man into the role of world-former and impoverished the animals by denying them this faculty. Like the medieval Scholastics, Heidegger proposed that (non-human) animals can only interact with what is immediately available to them, and that they suffer from a poverty of attunement to broader contexts. He said: “the stone is worldless; the animal is poor in world, man is world forming.” Pierre Madl argues that those who accept this logic are not constrained to treat the Earth or other creatures with consideration for their welfare. Wielding a theological or philosophical license that allows one to dump chemical, radioactive, or bio-hazardous pollution, or to harvest old-growth forest, or drive animal or plant species to extinction, is part of the “bulldozer mentality of developers.”
This kind of logic (or teleology) has sometimes been considered to be specifically “capitalist.” It would be more accurate to call it by other names, such as modernist or mechanistic, because a coldly anthropocentric logic also dominated communist thinking and planning. We see this in V.I. Lenin’s 1909 Materialism and Empirio-criticism, where humanity seems to have a stark choice between being enslaved by nature, or becoming its “master” by learning about the working of natural laws. In 1931, a brutal volume called New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan was published in English and circulated widely. In a section titled “We Will Force the Dead to Work” it declares: “the remains of the swamp grass, the ferns, the horsetails rotted under the layers of sand and clay, become black, and turned into coal. And to this cemetery we intend to go, drag the dead out of their tombs, and force them to work for us.” This language, Rebecca Solnit comments, “frames it as a zombie movie, a horror story, the dead come back to haunt us, in this case with their carbon.” In his article “On the Persistence of the Non-Modern” the contemporary philosopher of technology Yuk Hui shares the lyrics written by Hu Shi for the “Song of the Chinese Science Society”:
We do not worship nature. He is a [sic] tricky and weird;
We have to beat him, boil him, and tell him to listen
to our assignments.
We want him to push wagons; we want him to deliver
letters for us.
We need to expose his secrets so that he can serve us.
We sing that heavens act perpetually, and that we dare
knowing the truth.
We know that truth is infinite, still feel joyful when
moving every inch forward.
Hui comments: “What we can see in this lyric is the idea that meaning is no longer to be deducted from nature, as was central to ancient Confucian and Daoist thought, but rather that nature is something to be explored and exploited.”
De Te Fabula Narratur
Nonplussed by any civilization’s claims to master nature, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1927 that, while civilizations arose to defend us against nature, “the aim of achieving total control over either our inner nature or the outer world was a dangerous illusion, an illusion of control and mastery to protect us from feelings of helplessness and fear in the face of the awesome power of mother nature, our fear of acknowledging dependency on this largest of ‘holding environments,’ the ultimate ‘environment mother.’” Out of fear, people undertook to do unto Nature before nature did unto them—but, of course, Nature has the last say.
What do classical myths, medieval theology, and industrial worldviews have to do with us and the ever more ominous problems we face today? Taking a hint from Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology, as well as from Horace and Marx who remind us that the tale is about us, we are going to take a trip into some unfamiliar and uncanny territory, where we will discover wondrous and monstrous things.
Leigh Bardugo wrote in King of Scars: I am the monster, and the monster is me.” As in noir novels or films, or legends of mystical quests, the seeker believes she is examining a situation external to herself, but the further she progresses in her inquiries, the deeper her realization she is deeply implicated in it. Increasingly captive to morbid curiosity and also desire, the more she discovers that neutral standpoints, such as those proposed by many traditional Western forms of science and philosophy, are illusory.
We discover that we are both victims and perpetrators of crimes against our oikos (that is, our home), and our extended families. Yet, in this delve into a dark thicket, just like in all the oldest and best tales, and often in dreams and visions, we will meet with a guide: the white deer. It is a bright form shining in a darkness, as close to us as our own suppressed thoughts. That darkness has nothing to do with evil or depression, but is instead a place of potential, shimmering with hidden symbols, waiting to give birth to new associations. The hidden pleasures of the “dark sweet” can be tasted when we step aside from the glaring light of causal reasoning, let ourselves breathe deeply, perceive the land where we live more sensitively, and ask how we can be of service.