The Human-Nature Dance

A summary of:
Malcolm Margolin (2004). The Human-Nature Dance: People as a Keystone Species. In Ausubel, K. & Harpignies, J.P., eds., Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco.

This chapter is incredibly eye-opening. Margolin describes a worldview that seems so foreign:

“For California natives, managing that land began with a deeply detailed knowledge of place – climate, seasons, soil, plants, and animals – around which their own lives were organized. Encoded in their intricate and eminently practical relationships with the land was a conscious ecological ethos, a living land ethic that recognized people as playing a central environmental and spiritual role in the web of life” (72).

My first reaction is that we are clearly getting dumber. For example, I have no real understanding of climate, seasons, soil, plants, and animals – and I certainly feel no relationship to them, except that they are external to my existence. And then I feel a great sadness for what we have all lost in severing these connections. This is precisely what Huston Smith (and many sociologists and psychologists) referred to as ‘alienation’, and it is no wonder this alienation creates a void in our lives. If we are not part of something greater than ourselves, what is the point of our individual existences?

Then consider: “Food was shared communally – a marvelous social device that prevents overconsumption and uses resources very efficiently. When people hunt and gather food individually, they have to stockpile because the next week they might be sick or have bad luck in their hunting. When it’s shared among people, there is less need to stockpile. Sharing becomes an amazingly efficient way of using resources” (74).

This, too, is incredibly foreign. (It also smacks of Communism, which people seem so afraid of.) Nevermind how we do this with environmental resources – that seems evident enough; instead, let’s think how we do this with information. When I spoke to people at a recent computing conference about Web 3.0 and I asked them why it was a good idea, one of the common replies was that we need it to be able to find as much information as we could, so that we could make sense of it all. (Notice this shatters the common fallacy that the Internet is a magnificent specimen of collective activity. It is, rather, an opportunity for all to realize their individuality.) But this was something that societies used to do collectively. This hoarding of information is highly inefficient, but worse, it is arguably less meaningful, in that it is stripped of its collective understanding and communal belonging. But the way we hoard is both symptomatic of, and contributing to, a lack of social cohesion that traditional forms of society offered. I’m reminded of Emile Durkheim, who argued that modern societies tend to be highly individualistic because they are so complex that they have to rely on divisions of labour which intensify differences between people, meanwhile dissolving all bonds between people except that they are all “individuals”. He writes, “Since human personality is the only thing that appeals unanimously to all hearts, since its enhancement is the only aim that can be collectively pursued, it inevitably acquires exceptional value in the eyes of all. It thus rises far above all human aims, assuming a religious nature” (REF: Suicide; in Lynch: 103-4). Durkheim believed that the “cult of the individual’” would eventually become the new secular religion – “‘a free, private, optional religion, fashioned according to one’s own needs and understanding” (in Heelas et al., 2005: 149) – and that all others that were “‘handed down by tradition’” (ibid) would slowly fade to extinction. But the lingering question is, Is this secular religion fulfilling in the way that participating in the “collective effervescence” would have been? Or even more importantly, Is this individuated living sustainable? I would argue it’s not.

I also really like this excerpt: “A beautiful example of conservation was a rock quarry near Oroville that was a source of chert, a hard rock used for making scrapers, arrowheads, and the like. This area doesn’t have a lot of obsidian or other minerals, so the chert was extremely valuable. The Indians had been quarrying this spot for who knows how long. In a sense it was owned in common. Any local male could (77) go into the quarry, which was dug into the hill like a cave, once each year and take out as much as he could get with the single blow of a hammer. He had to leave an offering of money beads on the way out. These laws were encoded in religion, and if a person broke them, there were grave repercussions. That the rules were strictly observed was a tribute to the power of this place, and in part clearly reflected a conservation ethic. Limiting access to the quarry and making certain that nobody took more than his share assured that the chert would last for several generations” (78).

I realized when reading this that there are no such taboos surrounding the use of Web resources. There are no rituals surrounding its appropriate use either (not like these offerings, anyway). What if such rituals and taboos were somehow introduced into and intertwined with our use of the Internet. Surely we would not see the levels of addiction-like behaviour we see today. Surely we would begin to treat it reverently, as the gift that it is. And surely it would last longer as a result. How can we possibly expect the Internet to be there forever if we expand and reap it mindlessly?

There is another issues being touched on in this chapter, about the silencing of voices that have some really excellent, wise things to say. Margolin writes, “To be a human being in this way, to learn such practices, required more than one generation. Among California’s Native Americans, this knowledge was learned and transmitted over many generations, and a lot of it is still around. Perhaps above all, it gives us a view of humanity as not living apart from nature and being destructive to the natural world. These traditions and peoples show us splendidly how, by our way of living, we can actually be a blessing to the world” (79). I suppose this poses an interesting inclusion problem for Web technologies. If what I’m suggesting is that a more holistic, nature-oriented worldview would be a beneficial contribution to the way we currently develop, what then? If we try to force this thinking – these cultures, these people, even – into cyberspace, surely this will forever change the nature of that worldview, thus exacerbating its extinction. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that we could certainly use the notion of ‘being a blessing to the world’ in the way we develop our Web technologies. I suppose it just means, like the previous post, asking ourselves honestly how we want to live.