“Goats to be gardeners” is a phrase that comes from James Lovelock. The full thing:

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.