I finished Taylor‘s book several days ago now, but I haven’t been able to let it go. I liked the book, but…

The next “goat” posts are the but.

In my thinking about Dark Green Religion (dgr), there seem to be some aspects of Taylor’s theory which I can’t reconcile with the intent of the book. As I read it, the author is compelled by the idea that dgr could be an even greater social force for adjusting our wants to a more sustainable level than it is now and thereby helping balance our species’ impact on planetary resources and health with the planet’s ability to keep producing said resources, remaining healthy while it does so.

A laudable goal and a question I would like answered as well, hence my fascination with the book. The thing is that there are a few places in the framework Taylor sets up that seem to me to work against answering such a question with any real explanatory power.

First I should say that I think he is quite right that one can read the all the recent emphasis on “our Mother Earth” as religious, and certainly these trends are experienced by many as at least parareligious. I don’t think there’s really any question that anything that evokes such awe, loyalty, reverence and a sense of kinship can be the seed of a human religion. It is quite clear that the Earth can and does evoke such; Taylor demonstrates just how widespread such feelings have become. The question is really will such feelings become normative. That possibility, Taylor seems to think, might give humanity a more sustainable attitude and might help ensure our survival. So a second question: is that link—between a sense of  the earth as “Mother” and sustainable behaviours—true?

Understand that I’m still thinking this through, and this writing is part of the process of doing so, but there seems to me to be at least two problematic areas. The first is the conceptual/ethical frame Taylor sets up doesn’t seem to me to go deep enough and the second is his apparent bias toward the answer he clearly wants to be the case, that should such feelings become normative this will cause a correlative shift in behaviours. This second is exemplified in the book by Taylor’s problems with Richard Dawkins and D’s brand of atheism. This post is about the first. The second will be in “goats” part 3.

The ethical/conceptual framework

Taylor lays out the ethical frame for dark green religion (dgr) early in the book. In the same section he also lays out the conceptual or metaphysical frame which allows for his four different (overlapping) kinds of dgr. While I agree that there do seem to be four kinds of approaches to the “religious” phenomena he is discussing, what underlies the reason for those four approaches (or cognitive expressions) seems to me important to acknowledge. In other words, a mere description of the phenomena he has observed is not enough. What is needed is an analysis that goes deeper into the workings of the human mind.

It is only by understanding what it is about us that makes us think the way we do that we can begin to answer the question of  change. If a new kind of thinking/understanding can become normative and whether such a change in attitude will make our behaviours more sustainable (goats part 3) is a question only understandable through a historical evaluation of a similarly rooted processes. An exploration of the basic frame that underlies our current dgr expressions can be useful here, and through historical analysis, understanding similar expressions of such cognitive and ethical change.

Taylor’s ethical frame:

This value system is generally (1) based on a felt kinship with the rest of life, often derived from a common ancestor and are therefore related; (2) accompanied by feelings of humility and a corresponding critique of human moral superiority, often inspired or reinforced by a science-based cosmology that reveals how tiny human beings are in the universe; and (3) reinforced by metaphysics of interconnection and the idea of interdependence (mutual influence and reciprocal dependence) found in the sciences, especially in ecology and physics.

I  have no problem with this, nor with the conceptual frame that follows below. Part of my problem is the presumed connection between the two. It’s as if he is saying I’ve noticed this new ethic. And I’ve noticed this new metaphysical sense and I’ve noticed this four-fold way of expressing parareligious feeling about the earth and then leaves it up to the reader to connect them—and of course these trends do seem to be connected since they are part of the same section of text, and part of the definition of his book’s intent and scope. What happens is that the reader is lead to make a presumed causal connection: the ethical frame leads to this four-fold distinction. But I rather think it doesn’t necessarily; that it might be more a correlation than a causal chain. And if that’s the case, then the deeper motive Taylor seems to have for the book—to make clear the dynamics of dgr to foster human respect for environment—may need rethinking.

The conceptual frame:

Taylor considers dgr to fall into four types: “Spiritual Animism,” “Naturalistic Animism, “Gaian Spirituality” and “Gaian Naturalism.” These types represent the breadth of the conceptual frame in which the ethical frame (above) can be enacted in daily life. He tabulates it with the categories “Animism,” “Gaian Earth Religion,” “Supernaturalism” and “Naturalism.” (See table below.) He then gives exemplars of each type, showing the resultant category’s inherent mutability. He uses well known cases, for example, Jane Goodall and Gary Snyder; it makes it easier for the reader to connect with the sometimes subtle differences between the four types. The green text blocks in the diagram below represent Taylor’s categories. The rest is a recasting of Taylor’s observations on a set of known cognitive properties extant in the human mind, the purpose being to show the deeper relationship between the changes Taylor has noticed and the long-term tendencies expressed by the cognitive structures of the human mind.

The vertical axis:

What I am calling figure-ground in the diagram below represents a key cognitive choice humans make when seeing things. We are structured so that we can perceive either figure or ground, and can rapidly switch between them, but we cannot perceive both at the same time. This innate capacity allows for but also constrains our perceptions of the world around us. The capacity for figure-ground observations is projected (so to speak) onto our environments and translates into our perception of objects and relationships between objects. In fact, almost certainly, our evolved figure-ground perceptual mode came to be as it is because as a species we need to be able to concentrate on both objects and the relationship between them, but still have the ability to intensely focus on one or the other.

We all live in world that requires us to distinguish between bounded objects and the space between, but we also live in a culture that tends to focus on one more than the other. In cultures that have a noun-centered language (such as English) you also have a culture that is “object” oriented. Not that language precedes or is the cause of the cultural bias. In fact it’s probably the other way around. Focus on objects more than relationships between objects and all the cultural communication and symbolic systems will all participate in this bias. This includes religion. Animism is an example, but so are the three Middle Eastern/Western monotheisms.

It’s important to remember that when a culture or person focuses on objects, it’s not that they are unaware of the relationship between things, but that the conceptual systems and ethics they develop as a society tend to preference objects. So you get noun-centered languages, cultures that prize individual rights over individual responsibilities and the like. But history shows that this emphasis, while normally quite sturdy, can change. Social transformation has happened, and will happen again.

Animism…commonly refers to perceptions that natural entities, forces, and nonhuman life forms have one or more of the following: a soul or vital lifeforce or spirit, personhood (an affective life and personal intentions), and consciousness, often but not always including special spiritual intelligence or powers.

If the cultural focus is on relationship you get verb-centered languages and societies that prize the group, the family, or the nation. Salish is one such language group, a Native American language and culture belonging to what in the U.S. is called the Pacific Northwest. Again, open to change under the right conditions. Here one would see Taylor’s Gaian, organicist forms.

Gaian Earth Religion, in my lexicon, stands firmly in the organicist tradition. It understands the biosphere (universe or cosmos) to be alive or conscious, or at least by metaphor and analogy to resemble organisms with the many interdependent parts. Moreover, this energetic, interdependent, living system is understood to be the fundamental thing to understand and venerate.

One fundamental point is that our current reading of our world as either filled with “natural entities” or as an “organism” is part of the fabric of our mind and has nothing really to do with a new trend in human beings, or even a return to a pattern of earthly reverence. Animism/Gaian perceptions represent an expression of the normal human mind that is as much cultural fad as it is new insight. Could it become culturally revolutionary as perspective did in the Renaissance? Sure. Will it? That probably depends on how useful this new form of figure-ground expression is to us in understanding ourselves.

Another fundamental point, such a cognitive “axis” is really only useful if understood in context with those other cognitive abilities that constrain or develop its potential expressions. An example: the horizontal axis.

The horizontal axis:

What I am calling the “metaphysical stance” in the chart above covers the cognitive spectrum between non-material (e.g. idealism, dualism or pluralism) and material-only ideas about the nature of the “real” world. I want to be clear here about what I mean by materialism, because Taylor seems to hold it in disrepute, which, I think is rather unfair—even silly—given the book is about a religion revering the material earth.

Materialism is just the idea that all that exists is matter. This means that all phenomena are a function of the material universe. Consciousness, mind, awe, love, hate, energy, heat, pain, all of these things are functions of the operation and organization of matter. Sure we don’t yet understand just what matter might “really” be, nevertheless, materialism would seem to me to be a sensible understanding of the world for someone who is (justifiably) in awe of the earth and its processes—and of someone not looking to unconsciously (or not) impose human phenomenology on non-human entities.

The horizontal axis on the chart below represents the human range of assessing “reality” as either in the physical world (Taylor’s naturalism) or in some postulated non-physical realm that, in some way, lies parallel to the physical (Taylor’s supernaturalism). Why do we assess “reality” this way and is it necessary?

Whilst the vertical axis fundamentally grounds itself in a hard-wired cognitive ability developed through eons of evolutionary necessity, the horizontal axis is a bit different. Not that it didn’t evolve, but rather it is different because it appears to be a “secondary” ability.

What I mean by this is that the fundamental ability that underlies the range of ideal to material, is the human ability to project our phenomenological sense of what it is like to be us onto the world outside us. We move about our days, from infancy on, learning to control ourselves, to make distinctions between needs and desires. An instance: we feel a wave of hunger but social or cultural conditions make that physically available food not socially or morally available. We must wait to eat.

Both the hunger and the need to recognize conditions where that hunger should not be immediately obeyed are quintessentially human. What it feels like internally, phenomenologically, is something like my body wants to eat but I know I must wait. The initial and primary phenomenological experience of being human posits two entities, my body and my mind. Of course the fact that this is what it feels like, does not make it so, but it does make it the simplest way to construe our reality. Dualism is just such a construal. Idealism is that same kind of thinking—the postulation of a universal “I” of the sort that we feel internally.

So where does materialism come from? Because we can extend our bodily metaphors, we can reason with them, and since we have many of them, we can try out different phenomenological logics (e.g. I feel like there are two of me, body and mind, so I’m going to think about the world that way and see how that works out) on our environment. We also have singular bodily metaphors, experiences of unification, very, very often stimulated, as Taylor points out, by some aspect of our natural environment.  Imagine you are Wordsworth on Mount Snowdon and that sense of unity he expresses in his poetry overwhelms you. From that it is easy to move to a monistic metaphysical stance, whether Idealism or Materialism. Which expression one takes up depends greatly on one’s cultural milieu and probably on one’s practical experience with the things of the earth.

The advent and roaring success of science in the last few hundred years has made us much more alert to the things and processes of the earth. We also know a great deal more about the earth than we did, and can no longer function as a society without the resultant technologies. That combination would motivate continued change in the same direction. This correlative (not causal) linkage between the growth and science and our dependency upon its products  is almost certainly what has moved us toward the materialist end of the axis, or to Taylor’s naturalism.

The Four Types of Dark Green Religion and what underlies them

Taylor categorizes his concepts with this chart.

	Animism	Gaian Earth Religion
Supernaturalism	Spiritual Animism	Gaian Spirituality
Naturalism	Naturalistic Animism	Gaian Naturalism

So Spiritual Animism is that conceptual framework that tends to notice “objects” and to explain them using a bifurcated universe, one where there is a material universe as well as a non-material one. Gaian Naturalism is a conceptual framework that notices the relationships between things, the “family” rather than the “individual”, whilst maintaining that all effects can be attributed to the material world.

What I would suggest is that his system is more understandable, and has better explanatory power if seen against the constituent cognitive abilities which ultimately enable the four kinds of dgr that Taylor has identified.

Here “Spiritual Animism” locates its “heart” in the center of the upper-left quadrant. “Gaian Naturalism” is located in the lower-right sector. For one thing, this kind of diagrammatic understanding helps explain the mutability of individual expressions of the types of dgr. Since a person is cognitively constituted to flip when necessary between figure and ground, the diagram would suggest that under the right circumstances (such as a change in cultural conditions), an individual can shift focus, thereby moving along the vertical axis and (presumably) exhibiting a different perception of what is perceptually important.

It seems to me that even Taylor’s own evidence, and his repeated examination of the mutability of individual’s expression of dgr sentiments, support this reading of the deeper cognitive structures that underlie the four types of dgr he has examined.

There’s more here to be examined. For example, is it cognitively possible for a human being to be in the center of this chart, and if not does that imply a kind of blind spot in our perceptual system? Another interesting way of examining this would be to place long-gone cultures on the axis and read them forward through massive social change.  For example, Classical Greece and its Platonic and Aristotelian battle over the Ideal-Material axis and how that worked out given they were a culture that resided far into the ground/relationship/Gaian portion of the chart. Their overwhelming focus on philosophical issues and their nearly absent sense of material, physical, evidence-based experimentation drove their culture to great heights, just as our overwhelming focus on experimentation has driven ours. So does what happened to them presage what will happen to us? Does the millenia-long influence Greek ideas have had on us (I mean we are still arguing with Plato and Aristotle about what is “really” real!) mean that our materialism will be just as influential?

Anyway, questions for another time, but ones I think explorable by moving Taylor’s analysis of what we are doing now in our dgr expressions onto a deeper cognitive framework for analysis.

Coming in goats part 3, Richard Dawkins’ “militant” atheism and the question of a link between attitude and sustainable behaviours.