Santorum grew impassioned while discussing his opposition to gay marriage, saying that it was harmful to families because it could mean that children grow up without both a mother and a father.

“You’re robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to!” Santorum said after the first question. “They have a right to know and be loved by their dad and their mom. And that’s what marriage is about. It’s not about two people loving each other. There’s lots of people who love each other that we don’t give a privilege to and call it marriage.”

“Not that those relationships aren’t important — of course they’re important,” he added. “We honor them and we respect them, but we don’t give them this unique privilege.”

He also suggested that those who disagree aren’t being honest with themselves.

“You may convince yourself that it’s not — you may rationalize that that isn’t true,” he said. “But in your own life and in your own heart you know it’s true.”

There is, of course, the issue of who gets to define the reach and distribution of “privileges”, which, as far as I know, Santorum has not made clear. I suspect that such power of definition is to be led by his thinking organ – the heart.

There might be a problem with that, as any student of anthropology, psychology — any of the “ologies” really — would be able to discern.

Here’s an example with the idea that children deserve a two-parent family, and making constitutional amendments to enforce such a “heart” decision.

So, a woman (or man) dies in the war leaving behind a spouse and children. The remaining family is now a single-parent family. Under a law defining family as one with a man and a woman married, then this is no longer a family and should not receive benefits designed for families.

Outrageous, but if follows on Santorum’s “heart” knowledge.

(Note: this is why it is probably best if the head also takes a role in decision making.)

What a dweeb that man is. I know he has a couple of degrees but — what? — he slept through his critical thinking class?

For example, Aiolornis incredibilis is a bird that lived up to the end of the Pleistocene. It had a wingspan of 5.0-5.5 m (and it was not the biggest of the Teratorns). It weighed something around 23kg and was a predator. Holy frakking shit man. That would have been like a SUV with wings and nasty-assed beak flying over head.

These guys live in the Americas and there were people there at the time. It’s no wonder we have stories of thunderbirds.

One of the places where fossil remains of this bird have been found is in California (the Anza-Borrego Desert). If you hunt around on the net you’ll find lots of regional sites with pictures of remaining pictographs and petroglyphs. Of course most of these far post-date the end of the Pleistocene.

During the late Pleistocene the Anza-Borrego Desert was probably very different than it is today from the point of view of the kinds of plants and animals you find there.

From: Isotopic Records From Herbivore Teeth

To compare, the mean annual precipitation in Barstow today is about 111 mm, but the place was covered in grass lands. The mean annual temperature today is 18.7 °C.  Horses, camels, mammoths, lynx, bison, antelope, deer, Capromeryx, Platygonus, Nothrotheriops, Paramylodon, Smildon, oh and so many more. And were today you’ll find desert scrub, you’d find then pinyon-juniper woodlands, and where there are woodlands today, you’d find mixed-conifer and boreal communities of plants. I mean there were evergreen oaks (Quercus spp.) growing in what today is the Chihuahuan Desert. But the big plant deal, according to Connin, were the C4 plants.

A C₄ plant is better adapted than a C₃ plant in an environment with high daytime temperatures, intense sunlight, drought, or nitrogen or CO₂ limitation. Most C₄ plants have a special leaf anatomy (called Kranz anatomy) in which the vascular bundles are surrounded by bundle sheath cells. Upon fixation of CO₂into a 4-carbon compound in the mesophyll cells, this compound is transported to the bundle sheath cells in which it is decarboxylated and the CO₂is re-fixed via the C₃ pathway. The enzyme involved in this process is PEP carboxylase. In this mechanism, the tendency of rubisco (the first enzyme in the Calvin cycle) to photorespire, or waste energy by using oxygen to break down carbon compounds to CO₂, is minimized.

Examples of C₄ plants include sugarcane, maize, sorghum, amaranth, etc.

It’s these plants that supported the large numbers of animal species that lived in the south west then.

The thing is that because of the placement of the ice sheet, jet streams and high and low pressure zones would have changed as well. You change one element, the others adjust. It’s one big system and what may seem like a little change to us can have big consequences. So in the south west they would have probably had more winter rain than today, more seasonal differences than today, i.e. cooler summers. One of the things this could have meant is that there was more effective moisture than today, even though there was not much difference in the amount of rain that fell over the whole year. There were, for example, great pluvial lakes throughout the Great Basin and the desert areas of the south west.

And there were huge flying predatory birds, camels, mammoths, sabre toothed cats and people. On what today is a desert. Awesome.

In this case I was prompted by a news story from Science sent to me. It talked about pre-Clovis mastodon hunters.

Most significantly, the findings constitute more evidence that Paleo-Indians settled the americas before 13,000 B.P.E., the earliest date that has traditionally been assigned to the emergence of the “Clovis” cultural horizon. The “Clovis” culture is originally derived from archaeological discoveries in the late 1930′s at a site near Clovis, New Mexico, where a distinct bifacial, fluted stone projectile point artifact type (pictured left) was found and which became a common find among numerous archaeological sites throughout the American continent. Clovis marked the first presence of humans in North America and was considered ancestral to all Native Americans. Additionally, it has been suggested by some scientists that the hunting practices of the Clovis people may have played a salient role in the extinction of the mastodon, along with other large mammals that roamed North America.

But that theory, popularly known in the scientific world as “Clovis First”, has been challenged in recent years by new finds. Among the new discoveries were those of Eske Willerslev, a key lead researcher with Waters on the Manis mastodon study. He conducted Carbon-14 dating and DNA analysis on human remains found in caves in the state of Oregon and concluded that these traces of humans in North America were approximately 14,340 years old. Maintains Willerslev, “our research now shows that other hunters were present at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis culture. Therefore, it was not a sudden war or a quick slaughtering of the mastodons by the Clovis culture, which made the species disappear. We can now conclude that the hunt for the animals stretched out over a much longer period of time. At this time, however, we do not know if it was the man-made hunt for the mastodons, mammoths and other large animals from the so-called mega-fauna, which caused them to become extinct and disappear. Maybe the reason was something complete different, for instance the climate.”

That last sentence, it had me smiling. Oh the world of in-fighting to which that alludes!

Science October 2011 issue has a number of interesting articles and reports.

Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunting 13,800 Years Ago at the Manis Site, Washington. Michael R. Waters, et al. Science 334, 351 (2011)

Abstract: The tip of a projectile point made of mastodon bone is embedded in a rib of a single disarticulated mastodon at the Manis site in the state of Washington. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the rib is associated with the other remains and dates to 13,800 years ago. Thus, osseous projectile points, common to the Beringian Upper Paleolithic and Clovis, were made and used during pre-Clovis times in North America. The Manis site, combined with evidence of mammoth hunting at sites in Wisconsin, provides evidence that people were hunting proboscideans at least two millennia before Clovis.

There’s a huge argument about when the ancestors of Native American people arrived on the North American continent. Here’s a nice summary of what was known as of 2008.

The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas. Ted Goebel, et al. Science 319, 1497 (2008)

When did humans colonize the Americas? From where did they come and what routes did they take? These questions have gripped scientists for decades, but until recently answers have proven difficult to find. Current genetic evidence implies dispersal from a single Siberian population toward the Bering Land Bridge no earlier than about 30,000 years ago (and possibly after 22,000 years ago), then migration from Beringia to the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago. The archaeological records of Siberia and Beringia generally support these findings, as do archaeological sites in North and South America dating to as early as 15,000 years ago. If this is the time of colonization, geological data from western Canada suggest that humans dispersed along the recently deglaciated Pacific coastline.

And my favourite (so far), a study presenting data acquired from fossilized human shit.

DNA from Pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America. M. Thomas P. Gilbert, et al. Science 320, 786 (2008)

The timing of the first human migration into the Americas and its relation to the appearance of the Clovis technological complex in North America at about 11,000 to 10,800 radiocarbon years before the present (14C years B.P.) remains contentious. We establish that humans were present at Paisley 5 Mile Point Caves, in south-central Oregon, by 12,300 14C years B.P., through the recovery of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from coprolites, directly dated by accelerator mass spectrometry. The mtDNA corresponds to Native American founding haplogroups A2 and B2. The dates of the coprolites are >1000 14C years earlier than currently accepted dates for the Clovis complex.

“The ultimate goal,” Friedman says, “is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government.” This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

There I am, sitting in a cafe, reading, listening to the sounds of other people singing, moving around, walking, driving all inside the lawful and occasionally law abiding city of Vancouver and I read this: and think “I wonder what will happen when the first child with cerebral palsy is born”.

The quote is from an article called The Billionaire King of Techtopia by Jonathan Miles.

Peter Thiel rose to fame by launching PayPal and funding a little upstart called Facebook. You’ll find his fingerprints on—and his seed money in—everything from DNA manipulation to Hollywood movies along with any silicon valley enterprise worth knowing about. Now the 43-year-old gay libertarian is embarking on his most ambitious venture: a start-up country on the open ocean that will be governed by his Ayn Rand—inspired ideology. Will it be Thiel’s crowing achievement or the biggest bust since Waterworld?

Whether it is a terrible example of urban-planning or not…I don’t care really. I do want to know about that first child with cerebral palsy. No welfare, OK. I presume, since he is an Ayn Rand inspired Libertarian, he does not feel obligated to the yet-to-be-born child? The family will have to cope? And if they can’t? What about the kid? Flipped overboard? The community will step in and help? Isn’t that what welfare is? It’s OK if it is voluntary? And if it isn’t? The kid goes swimming?

I really would like a few answers to my questions.

What would such tolerated abuse create? It reminds me of Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People. The degradation is extreme. Forced into radical individualism through starvation, violence and the resultant loss of empathy, the Ik were dying, messily, horribly. Baby have a bit of food, some water? I want it. Take it. Let it die.

The thing is that by the time a society – or a person – gets to that state, such gross lack of sympathy, the complete inability to think socially, is just what is. To take an infant’s food in the face of your own desire must – by that time – feel like common sense, like one’s right, even duty. In a state like the Ik experienced, most capacity to think, to feel human responsibility, has been eroded. Now this might be kind of extreme, but I was brought to think of this by Dinesh D’Souza. Did you know he has been made the head of an institution of advanced learning?

“I want to talk a little bit about what I call the unique villainy of Barack Obama,” D’Souza, 50, says with a grin. “In my view, it’s the villainy of nondisclosure.” Obama campaigned as a standard liberal, D’Souza says, but actually is a vehement anti-colonialist. “For Obama, the radical Muslims are on the right side of history—that’s why he is so unnaturally solicitous toward them.”

This theory, D’Souza’s idiosyncratic twist on birtherism, forms the core of his 2010 book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which was, like many of D’Souza’s books, both a New York Times best seller and a piñata for critics of all political stripes. Even the conservative Weekly Standard lamented the book’s “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.”

The institutions that enable the human capacity for accuracy-based reason, that specialize in providing a communal knowledge base for our youth, to enable rational decision making in the larger social context…this institution that has the purpose of helping us see that starving the infant is not the way to run a society…this institution is run by a man who cares so little for knowledge that he makes “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation”?

“We are living, for perhaps the first time in history, in a society whose basic assumptions are secular,” D’Souza told the 36 ­members of the King’s class of 2011. “Some Christians hope to change this through bottom-up, grassroots techniques. But I’m skeptical about that approach. Consider minority groups like Jews and gays, groups whose influence far outweighs their relatively small numbers. How do they do it? By focusing on strategic institutions—finance, media, law. At the King’s College, our mission is to prepare you to go into that world. It’s, frankly, an elitist mission, which says that culture is formed from the top down. I can only hope we have given you the tools to complete that mission, the tools to be dangerous Christians.”

I suppose D’Souza believes in the authenticity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other silly conspiracy shit like it. I mean how else to explain his comment about Jews and gays. And even worse than the irrationality of believing in things like The Protocols and other similar hate literature based conspiracies, D’Souza doesn’t want to dismantle such atrocities, he wants to emulate the elitist, manipulative, socially destructive groups he believes to exist, and to now be run by Jews and gays. He just blithely speaks about creating “dangerous Christians” to replace these other master manipulators?

And we are OK with this? Do we really have to wait for our own Norway?

Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.

Taylor quotes the passage in an early section called “living examples of dark green religion.” I love the phrase “goats to be gardeners”. It so simply portrays a situation where our natural inclination, our very talents and physicality, makes it all but impossible for us to do certain things. Goats have the talent of surviving nearly anywhere and they do that by getting every ounce of flora that is to be had in an area. Of course that means they denude a landscape. Very much like us. I’ve always thought the Jesus metaphor should have portrayed him as the shepherd who walked along behind his goats. It would have been so much more metaphorically accurate.

Anyway, whatever you belief about the existence of Gaia, Lovelock’s analogy is apt. We are very goat-like with respect to our talents for environmental transformation. Now you may say that we are much more aware than goats—the existence of National Parks is evidence that we can control ourselves.

I’d say that is both true and trivial.

The areas where we cannot control ourselves seem to me to be far more ultimately destructive and one of those is our need to reason from what it is like to be human to what it must be like to be non-human. It’s a bit like the is→ought fallacy: I feel I have a “self” therefore there must be a “self” as part of any complex, or living, organism. Bullshit, of course.

What I’m talking about here is the process of embodied cognition and its rational consequences. The fact that reasoning for human beings is something we cannot help but do, just as goats cannot stop before they uproot the plant and destroy its ability to return, makes the process of reasoning something critical to understand if we are to figure out when it misleads us and when it doesn’t.

We are such spectacular successes as technological animals that it seems impossible to argue that our brand of reasoning doesn’t work. We were, after all, evolved inside the environment in which our embodied reasoning takes place, so of course it fits. When we reason about distance and the control of objects based on our bodily experience of extending our arms and legs and picking up things from the ground, such extensions work so well they are essentially invisible. It just seems obvious, all of a piece, natural. We don’t think about it at all. To reach for things, is to grasp them, to understand. It seems so very clear that this is the way to handle the world. It works. We reach out with our minds and grasp a situation. We must, therefore, have it in hand. It’s such a horrible surprise to find that what we thought we had grasped, what we are so very sure we had understood, turns out to vanish while we watch. A phantasm.

And how we experience things is vitally important and horrifically strong. We have built-in images of which we are profoundly sure. It is most disconcerting to have these disconfirmed. Like an apotemnophiliac or a somatoparaphreniac we can sometimes refuse the evidence of our eyes and hands and insist that the evidence of error is not there, or insist that it be removed at once so that our inner sense of what is true remains unchallenged.

Some bits of our embodied reasoning are less sure than our assumptions about understanding and directly grasping the world or the ones that work like body image and body integrity. Like why is “up” associated with “good,” why “black” with “evil”, these kinds of metaphorical reasoning have long bothered. Religious and moral reasoning is of this sort. Still, like the concept of “grasping” as “understanding”, moral thinking is also a metaphorical extension of our bodily experience. We are deeply (largely, but not completely, unconsciously) aware of the dangers of being “down” and “in the dark.” Another example: that there must be a being to which we turn is a natural extension for a species that is fundamentally dependent on other existent, and more powerful, members of the same species to enable individual existence. Nothing in our evolution or our individual development leads us to bodily experience radical individualism. We are all dependent on the existence of others.

We can do nothing about this capacity to think through bodily metaphor except pay attention to our doing of it. We think through our body’s experience of life. Yet by paying attention to a limitation we can become conscious of doing it and try to circumvent the worst of its effects. I doubt we’ll ever be able to forgo the feeling that there must be a “self” like ours out there but we can recognize that it is an illusion of the sort that confuses us—as do all those wonderful optical illusions. Like the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are built to work with a specific kind of environment, to enable us to survive its demands. We are not built to perceive accurately; we are built to perceive effectively.

The concept of “self” is something that corresponds to the “error” in our reading the length of the arrows in the Müller-Lyer illusion through our bodily knowledge of depth perception. The “self” provides a perceptual tool akin to reading a 3D world. A “self” is something that is meant to interpret a social situation that has immense importance to human survival. Just as we see those line segments as being of different lengths because normally in a 3D world they would be, so reading the “self” onto others works for us because in the case of human society the other will have an experience of self like our own.The problem is that we don’t stop at other humans. We read everything that way, especially anything that triggers “other” like a feeling of awe, or the appearance of a big head and big eyes. Of course outside human society such a reading is almost certainly not true.

So? Well let me give you an example of how this kind of misapplied thinking can create more problems than it solves. For a long time women were thought to be misproportioned men, missing a vital bit of anatomy. Need I say more?

I think saving the earth is rather important; our lives probably depend upon it. And while it is true that the feelings of awe, reverence, wonder and the like that Taylor construes as Dark Green Religion can be seen as a new religion, is this the most useful way of doing so? Will it accomplish what Taylor wants—the change of our behaviour to reduce our goat-like destructiveness? Probably not if we keep using the same kind of logical patterns that created much of the problem in the first place. The thing is that those nasties seem to be tied up with the inherent bodily logic of the human religious impulse, tied as it is to seeing echoes of ourselves in the world around us. What I think we need to do is see that this is an illusion, and not despise it, but just recognize that it is not a true representation of the non-human other.

If we can do that, then maybe we can get down to the business of finding a more accurate metaphor for what is in fact the case in all things non-human, i.e. that they are not human. That they are something quite else.

Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

Here’s how Taylor brings this into his discussion in Dark Green Religion:

Dawkins contended that it is “destructively misleading” when scientists label as religious their aesthetic and affective experiences when contemplating nature because “for the vast majority of people, ‘religious’ implies “supernatural.’ ” Dawkins even declared that it is “intellectual high treason” when atheists and others who do not really believe in the “interventionist, miracle wreaking…prayer answering God” confuse people with pantheistic or other religious language.

Do you see the twist? It made me mad, I must admit. But then I thought, what is this evidence of?

I mean, does Taylor think it’s OK to confuse readers with terminology? Of course not. Taylor is a scholar so terminology is important to him. I mean what is scholarship except the careful increase of epistemological clarity? That’s why Taylor spent so much time defining “religion.” He’s trying to be clear about why it is OK to call “religious” those persons who don’t believe in anything apart from the material world. Of course Dawkins’ argument is that this isn’t good enough. His reason? That to mix terms that sound alike / religion and religion or god and god / but mean radically different things is guaranteed to confuse the issue.

Revisit Wittgenstein’s language games and my earlier post on the term “evidence.” Why do that? What is it about religious terminology that Taylor really needs for his project? What about it makes it worth the confusion such religious terminology brings with it?

That’s a question I wish he would answer for me, because I don’t think it is necessary. That’s why I posted the underlying framework that gets beyond religious terminology.

Finally, what Dawkins said in that quote above is that the pantheistic god of the scientists does not equate with the personal god of most Western religious practitioners and that he is not criticizing the pantheistic god of the scientists with the same criteria as he does the idea and consequence of a belief in a personal god. Taylor seems to misread the passage as Dawkins inveighing against pantheism as he does against those religions with a personal god. Based on the quote above, this is simply not true. Bad, Taylor, bad.

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.

It’s a good question, because it suggests answers that get to the root of intellectual bias. I suspect part of the answer lies in the fact that contemporary paranormal claims are often so outrageous, so non-sensical that it makes a mockery of religion in toto. And academics often have very little sense of humor about their topical areas.

Is that what taboo is then? A way of protecting an untenable, but dearly held, belief from examination? An interesting thought when one considers taboo subjects like incest. When I was an undergraduate anthropologist I remember thinking about the universal incest taboo and realizing that meant that it was also universal behaviour. The question is do we make it taboo to stop it or to hide it?

Thanks to Letter from Hardscrabble Creek for including the link to Eideard.

So far I like the book, appreciate its scholarship and its purpose—the subtitle of the book, Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future should make that last one clear. The book seems to intend to work toward a rubric by which methods of bringing more people into contact with the ethical frame of mind that will allow us to avert ecological disaster and our own subsequent demise can become clear and practicable. In other words, figuring out how to foster an appreciation of that which allows our existence by figuring out what is actually taking place in what Taylor calls dark green religion. This I applaud but I do think basic conceptual frameworks need to be very clear if such an intent is to be workable.

One of the things he does to facilitate this is define terms right at the beginning. He makes it clear that he is defining terms for the purpose of setting up this study, so problematic terms like “religion” and “spirituality” can take on meaning, can also be mutable, and still be useful terms. What I find odd is that he left out the term “sacred.” This is especially so since much depends upon it. Dark green religion (dgr) as opposed to green religion is defined by the fact that nature is held as sacred.  He does have a parenthetical remark: “in which nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.” I think this is meant as the definition of “sacred.” Really what this definition amounts to is the normal use of the term stripped of it’s “god’ component.

My question, and it is in fact a question, can such a definition be enough?

One of the reasons it is called into question for me is the same reason Taylor defines all the other terms. Our society is built on a conceptual system that fosters a disconnect from material nature in order to “point” us toward some other reality usually constructed as to be external to nature. This other is normally the divine.

So I suspect a rethinking of what “sacred” actually means about human experience, human mind, human body would be an important part of the bones of what this book is trying to accomplish. Where such a thing might come from is most likely embodied cognition since it is grounded in nature and an understanding of the world that has “green” at its bottom.

That’s it for part 1. Part 2 is going to be a look at the (absent) link between Taylor’s account of dgr’s ethical and metaphysical stances.