Instructions for Backgammon
So is it Darwin's fault? This idea that we humans with our self consciousness, our aggression, our misplaced sense of superiority are somehow the goal of evolution. You know the sort of diagram:
We are the right hand end of a series of images implying not only direction but progress. Even subversive or humorous images use the same trope:
You've seen this sort of thing haven't you? All pervasive isn't it? T-shirts, adverts, cartoons, probably not stained glass though... I would argue that this seemingly innocuous image is violently dangerous, almost as dangerous as the Old Testament God's order to Adam and Eve to have dominion over the earth and subdue it.
Let's get a bit of background:
The Judaeo Christian myth of creation is a rather beautiful positioning of Humanity, God and the Universe. It plays on that deep human sense of importance, because we are made in the image of God, and that this God (the only God) tells us that the bounty of the earth is ours for the taking. Up until the later 19th century this was the world view of all the Christian world, the world of the imperial powers. Just ponder that for a while..... We have permission to treat the world as we like, in fact it's our Christian duty. And one of the reasons we have for this is that we are qualitatively different, higher if you like, from all the other animals on the planet. We know this because it's the word of God written in the Bible. (How we treated other peoples we may meet is another issue for another post!)
The Enlightenment, a bit like the Renaissance, is a blanket term for many diffuse activities that were never considered a "movement" at all. It's a hindsight thing I think. In England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and to a certain extent Italy in the late 16th and 17th century there was a fashion for analytical thought and the beginnings of what we call Science, they called it Natural Philosophy. Mathematicians like Isaac Newton and Willhelm Leibniz argued about who invented calculus while developing the tools we still use to describe and predict the movement of the planets and comets. From 17th century onwards many were beginning to question the truth of the creation story and ever so gradually the time scale of the universe was growing. Geological processes that were discovered by James Hutton in the 18th century needed a lot longer than the 6000 years or so that was calculated from the bible by Bishop James Ussher in 1650. As these discoveries and explanations extended and expanded our view of the Universe, there were two religious responses: liberal creative acceptance or fundamentalist rejection and retrenchment. Newton himself was firmly Christian and saw his work as the affirmation of God's ordering of His creation.
William Blake, however, saw Newton in a very different light. (And no, it wasn't rainbow coloured!) To Blake, a visionary artist and poet, Newton was taking the wonder from the world and reducing it to an almost solipsistic mentation. This is such a key image and in it lies the danger of much of the thinking of recent times.
Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, all pioneers of scientific thought, started the vision of a universe that wasn't centred on humanity. From a medieval world view of a world-centred small(ish) series of nesting spheres described by the Greeks and set up by a Christian God, the Universe suddenly expanded and decentralised and became full of stars and planets all having their own orbits. And that was, pardon the pun, revolutionary. The world we lived on became a tiny part of a very big picture. You see, I think it's very seductive to think of the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific rationality as a value free way of seeing the Universe but it isn't at all. It's simply yet another incidence of anthropocentrism. We think Mathematics has given us access to God's tool box and His measures, in fact Newton saw his work as unlocking God's handicraft. Here's another Blake: look at God's instrument of creation.
Familiar? I don't think it's a coincidence: Blake is issuing a warning we have chosen to ignore. We think we're just discovering and describing the Universe, merely collecting and cataloguing creation almost passively, but our scientific endeavours are an ordering of things as a precursor of controlling and directing the world. And it's OUR order. This is I think what Blake is showing in his pictures. We are getting God like powers by our scientific endeavours.
Another visual representation of how science works:
This a very interesting image, especially as was first seen in 1888. It's often taken for a medieval woodcut but it has been engraved by a technique not developed until the late 18th century. The traveller (look at his staff) has broken out of the limiting geocentric universe but he's seeing the wonders beyond in terms of machines, diagrams and graphs. His view, although he thinks it beyond the mundane, is governed and trammelled by his "scientific" notions. The image of the machine is particularly interesting. For Lewis Mumford, a 20th century American thinker, Science and it's partner, Technics (Mumford's word), were responsible for much of humanity's misery. They were not sui generis bad but had got out of control. For Mumford the machine pervaded Western society, indeed factories used humans as part of the machine. We had become alienated from nature and we needed to get back. He was a staunch fan of Garden Cities and fought for what we'd call a greening of the world.
I suppose here we'd better get back to Darwin!
Just as the work of Natural Philosophers and later Scientists widened our notion of space and lengthened our concept of time and diminished our cosmic significance, so Charles Darwin tried to put the human animal in its rightful position as just another life form that populated a niche by dint of natural selection. What he absolutely did not do was to say that human beings were the present end of a natural progression towards anything. Humanity is not, repeat NOT the summit of a pyramid but the end of a tiny twig off a small branch of the tree of all living things. The wilful or ignorant misreading of the Origin of Species to put humanity as the end of a progression is, I think an attempt to claw back some lost ground in humanity's decentralisation. It may also be a sop to those of a religious persuasion who see humankind as somehow specially singled out and are liberal enough not to ditch evolution completely. What started out as a sort of clever shorthand for thinking about how animals can change over deep time becomes a dangerously misleading notion of how evolution works. It's not goal driven and we are not the goal. We are, in fact the problem in the changes we are seeing. No matter how many idiots deny that climate change is driven by our selfish and careless notions of dominion and human centrality, they will not bring back the species and the habitats we are destroying. Good grief, we've known long enough!
What movements such a Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and more recently and urgently Extinction Rebellion are telling us is that our relationship with the Earth is not one of subjugation, dominion nor control, but one of responsibility and compassionate care. It's the only home we have you know. It may be too late to undo all the damage but we must make a concerted effort to start.
Oh, and while we're at it, perhaps we could treat each other like that too. Just saying...
Notes:
The image of the Earth from Apollo 8 is the first photograph of Eathrise. It's taken with a Hasselblad with monochrome film and I think has a better composition than the slightly later colour images. It also hasn't been rotated; it's as Bill Anders saw it.
Booklist:
In Search of Deep Time: Henry Gee (A thoroughly good chap and a personal friend)
Technics and Civilisation: Lewis Mumford
Evolution The Great Debate: Vernon Blackmore and Andrew Page
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Stephen Jay Gould
Essays Concerning Human Understanding: David Hume
