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For as far back as we can recollect , humans have been driven by the Mechanical Mind – a desire to evolve , to expand , to consume , to control everything around them to meet their needs without thinking about the consequences . Yet some 200,000 years ago , before the Second Advent of agriculture , there was a unlike aspect and driving rationale known as the Organic Mind where humans were one with the environment . In his Modern book , Charles Massy argues that if we could discover our way back to that view perhaps we can begin to repeal the effect brought on by the mechanically skillful mindset
The following excerption is fromCall of the Reed Warblerby Charles Massy . It has been adapt for the web .
Prior to the beginning of agriculture , a public view calledanimismhad reign for 200,000 or more year in many human societies . This view constituted the Organic idea , as it did not see man as being disjoined from their environment , or from an objective reality . Instead , world was an interconnected , spirit - filled landscape in which non - human entities – plants , beast , inanimate objects ( such as rock , river , deal ) or phenomena ( such as skag , flatus , tail ) – have a exist psyche or spectral essence and had awareness and feelings . Animism ’s implication was that it contain strong ethical and ghostly implications for nurturing and sustaining the terra firma : an associated value system .
The shift from this constitutive mindset to our society ’s dominant Mechanical globe view was triggered by the development of naturalise farming some 10,000 or so years ago . In time , tameness meant that plants , animals and other natural phenomenon becamemanipulable holding , as fight to sacred beings or entities . Consequently , from the dawn of factory farm until the Renaissance of late 15th - century Europe , humans on the European and south - west Asiatic continent , in fussy , begin a dull process of increasingly throwing off the long , coevolved constituent mind that had previously bound them to nature , Mother Earth and a ghostly world .
This new ethnical practice session of USDA and its resultant abundance of food finally led topopulation growthand intensify urban aliveness , which culminated in the ‘ Urban Revolution ’ and the appearing of the first cities . Thence came the rise of large - scale political and social systems : all an increasingly far watchword from our genetic evolutionary conditioning as huntsman - gatherers invested in the Organic mind .
“So destructive has the agricultural revolution been that, geologically speaking, it surely stands as the most significant and explosive event to appear on the face of the earth, changing the earth even faster than did the origin of life.”
Wes Jackson,New Roots for Agriculture1
Humans now start out to focus in on themselves and their society ( the kickoff of‘humanism ’ ) . Part of this involved hoi polloi beginning to apprehend the major power of the human mind to misrepresent the Earth and its resources . Therefore , a monumental shifting in time value organisation , ethics and morality begin to come . Less and less was there an unquestioning acknowledgment of the worth of all natural thing , or of the construct of cyclical renewal , of what ecologic historian Carolyn Merchant identify as ‘ the dressing of nature into a nigh - pucker holistic unity’.2So human cultural evolution now radically switch .
contribute up to the Renaissance and Reformation , there was a coalition of brawny forces in westerly culture that weakened the remnants of the Organic metaphor and opened the way to an inculcation of the Mechanical metaphor .
A cardinal influence was Judeo - Christianity . This gave us , as Carolyn Merchant guide out , ‘ The idea of human race as nature ’s guardian and caretaker … a managerial reading of the doctrine of dominion ’ . This then conflate with classical and arcadian attitudes towardsnature as being something that could be plow and naturalize , used as a commodity and control as a resource , tamed and subdued for human benefit – particularly by males . This domain view also saw females as passive and sensory : thinking incorporated into the newfangled mechanically skillful world vista . Such a mentality was well and quick adapted from the sixteenth one C through to the 18th - 100 Enlightenment : that crucial stage of the scientific gyration and the evolution of the food market economy.3
Thousands of books have been written about this date of reference - changing phase that hap from around 1500 to 1800 in Western Europe , which involved a major shimmy in the Western head from an Organic to a Mechanical role model . The Mechanical good example intend humans perceive the world as a place where issue and nature were inert constituents of a new , machine - like worldly concern – one capable of use . I will only force out a few central points on this remarkable period , but the consequences were multiple .
The major phase of the metaphoric shift to the Mechanical , argued Carolyn Merchant , really began when ‘ the icon of an constitutive cosmos with a living female earth at its essence leave room to a mechanistic world perspective in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive , to be overshadow and controlled by humans’.4The result , in modern times , is that westerly society no longer regard nature as a nurturing mother , nor holds her in reverence , nor handle her with respect . As historiographer Henri Frankfort wrote in 1949,‘The world around us has become an “ it ” rather than a “ thou”.5
This outlook has awful complications , andhas lead to a blind belief in the dogma of economical freethinking , in measureless but necessary growth , and in the virtues of prioritise wealth . In the words of the contemporary philosopher John Ralston Saul , the West in fussy ( but now spreading globally ) ‘ has become addicted to a picky Seth of illusions so as to stave off number to terms with its own reality’.6This reality is that our unsustainable behavior has precipitated us into theAnthropocene .
In the most underlying of respects , therefore , by this twenty - first one C , the mechanically skillful mind had function ‘ rogue ’ . And it had go rogue for the craziest of cause and the most seductive of all illusions : using up and greed .
note :
Call of the Reed Warbler
A New Agriculture , A New Earth
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