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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Hubris of technology’s dominance of, and humanity’s split from, nature — prescient novel
The following is from the introduction by Gerald Martin, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh
“Men of Maize (Hombres de Mais) — by Miguel Àngel Asturias — is the most ambitious novel ever written about the mysterious, fascinating, and tragic country known as Guatemala. One might say that the world needs this book more than ever, because we have ignored or denied the lessons that it might have taught us — the struggles between men and women, the relationship of all humans to the natural world, the oceans, its climate, and the earth itself.
“Men of Maize may one day be considered the most important book written in Central America since the so-called ‘Maya Bible’, the Popol Vuh. The true meaning of Popol Vuh is ‘book of the community’. The Popol Vuh relates that the gods created animals before human beings, and that they tried to create men out of earth, then wood, and succeeded only when they made them out of maize.
“Maize is the cereal generally believed to have been discovered and developed in the Maya territories of central and southern Mexico and most of Central America. Men of Maize symbolically recuperated aspects of the Indigenous past, before specific reforms by revolutionary president, Jacobo Arbenz were even proclaimed. The Revolution was ended in 1954 by a coup organized by the United States on behalf of the United Fruit Company [banana plantations].
“Asturias spent ten years in Paris studying ethnology at the Sorbonne, avoiding the dangers of living in Guatemala. He completed the first great Latin American novel about dictatorship, Mr. President, in 1933, just before he wrenched himself away from the French capital, and returned, reluctantly, to Guatemala.
“He learned, all over again, about his country, its towns and villages, its obscene injustices, its incomparable beauty, and endless cruelty. He was researching another novel every bit as extraordinary as Mr. President. Men of Maize has two great themes, the first being political tyranny. The second was the fate of the Indigenous people, the now subjugated descendants of the great Maya civilization of astronomers, mathematicians, architects, painters, and sculptors.
“The novel’s end is enigmatic, at once mythological and profoundly psychological. In each of three phases — tribal, feudal-colonial, and capitalist-neocolonial — an Indian protagonist is defeated, loses his woman, and is cut off from the earth and the maizefields — aligned to the three-part Mayan cosmic design of underworld, earth, and sky (past, present, and future). That is effectively the trajectory of Gucumatz, who the Aztecs called Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent and creator god.
“Claude Lévi-Strauss showed, as Asturias’ novel brilliantly demonstrates (and did so before the great French anthropologist), that Western culture has aggressively employed binary oppositions to create differences rather than fusions — mind versus matter, culture versus nature, civilization versus barbarism, men versus women.
“Asturias holds that the ‘animal’ side of humanity which we have chosen to sacrifice with each historical step forward, is what may one day save us from the barbarism of a mechanistic scientific culture.
“Behind the novel’s themes lie two enduring perceptions. The first is that, in the long term, a civilization based on exchange values, individualism, and a predatory attitude toward the natural world may prosper scientifically, technologically, and economically, and thus dominate nature. But [such a civilization] may eventually be left with no spiritual or collective values whatever, and will then seek mere distractions to pass the time on earth.
“The second perception is even more concrete and indeed more terrifyingly immediate — that technology itself will eventually lead us beyond mere meaninglessness and distraction to catastrophe.
“Perhaps Western Civilization’s original sin lies at the very beginning of what we might impertinently call the ‘Christian Popol Vuh‘. It lies in Genesis itself, where God makes man ‘in his likeness’, gives him
‘dominion’ over all animals and plants, and instructs him to ‘subdue’ the earth.
“Then centuries later, Descartes would confirm that mind is separate from matter, that animals are mere machines, and that man is separate from nature.
“Our apparently unstoppable technological developments have produced a process that, in just a few decades from now, could make life on Earth uninhabitable for human beings. Asturias was concerned with the very nature of human beings, that we presume we are the only creatures who know ‘consciously’ that we will die. We are tragic creatures if we live a life of individualist self-indulgence, and if we ruin a planet on which we were destined to live.
“I have been looking for another novel embodying this astonishing historical and existential project for more than fifty years, and have not yet found one.”
Technofixes won’t cure eco-damage from capitalism
“It’s an often-heard argument: that capitalist economies are going to prevent climate catastrophe because ‘green’ technologies are becoming cheaper thanks to innovation. But all this innovation has only one goal, and that’s to generate profits. Capitalist economies are even better at producing new energy-consuming technologies — and those are getting cheaper, too.
“People running businesses of all sizes seek to maximize profits not because they are misguided, but because that’s their job in a capitalist economy. The common goal of both the private and public sectors is rapid, sustained GDP growth, so the only climate actions that companies or governments are willing to take are those that will not risk slowing wealth accumulation.
“Dieter Helm, chair of the U.K. Natural Capital Committee, said ‘the environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed’. Here we come to a myth that lies at the core of this essay: the notion of ‘natural capital’.
“The great ecological economist Herman Daly has debunked that myth, saying ‘If the Chairman of the U.K. Natural Capital Committee gets it exactly backwards, then probably others do too. It is the economy that needs to be properly integrated into the ecosphere’.
“India and China, already plagued by chronic power outages, are aiming to satisfy rapidly growing energy demand. All of that new renewable energy capacity being built in the two nations will supplement, not replace, fossil and nuclear capacity. Emissions will continue.
“There will have to be an immediate, declining cap on the quantities of fossil fuels years before we have enough renewable energy capacity. That will mean a steep decline in society’s overall energy consumption and goods and services, because a significant share of the fossil fuels still being burned will have to go to building renewable energy capacity.
“Naomi Klein argued succinctly in her 2014 book, This Changes Everything, ‘It’s not about carbon — it’s about capitalism’.”
The mind as map to the world, can be (mis)taken to be the world
“For some, a focus on the division between humans and animals is the crux of dualism. But the more fundamental divide as articulated by DayKart (my gesture of disrespect) is between mind and body (matter). As long as we hold minds to be transcendent phenomena apart from matter, we risk savaging of mother Earth as a collection of commodified resources.
“Unfortunately, the cultural prevalence of dualism is older than the languages in common use today, and is thus deeply integrated into language (itself a mental model). Dualism underwrites sentence structure (subject/object); first/third person (pervasive focus on ‘I’, ‘me’, etc.). It is a difficult undertaking to argue against dualism using a language that is deeply dualist in construction. Yet ‘I’ will try.
“Let’s dig a bit deeper into the three serious choices between mind and matter:
- Both exist, as different ‘substances’ or on separate/parallel planes (whatever that means);
- Everything is mind: matter is a figment/product of imagination;
- Everything is matter: mind is generated by normal matter interacting via physics.
“DUALISM – Dualism still bugs enough people in its clumsy embrace of two separate — or even inseparably parallel phenomena: how would ontologically distinct ‘substances’ interact? The ground on which dualism stands is also constantly eroded by experiments. Abandoning dualism leads toward monism: only one ‘substance’ is real. These come in two flavors: idealism and materialism.
“IDEALISM – The notion that consciousness (mind) is the one true ‘substance’ of reality, and that matter is generated notionally in minds, is called idealism.
“While I can respect the embrace of idealism as a laudable escape from dualism, I can’t personally resonate with a solipsistic worldview lacking actual matter. It seems like the most supremacist possible stance: only I matter; I define the universe; I think, therefore I am (DayKart’s mind-substance speaking for itself). It’s hard to get past the self-centered nature of idealism.
“If minds are all unique and private and un-sharable — each generating an illusory material ‘reality’ — why do all physics experiments around the world agree on the same set of particles and interactions? Where did the idealistic freedom go to assert material realities as unique as the minds generating them?
“MATERIALIST MONISM – Materialism (sometimes physicalism) says that only matter is real — and all its interactions are described by physics. It may seem little wonder that I, as a physicist, find myself in this camp. Yet having worked for decades among physicists, I would venture that a healthy fraction (a majority?) are the usual products of our culture, and are actually dualists like most people.
“If both dualism and idealism are evidentially problematic, materialism becomes my default home — even though some aspects of it are unsettling to me (yet, my affinities are irrelevant to the universe). Relinquishing the demand for full understanding, the position becomes that no elements beyond matter and its governing physics need be involved. And the universe has impressively found a way to generate all that we experience using this basic set of matter and interactions.
“I can’t stress the interaction aspect enough. And arrangement matters a lot, so that molecules can be highly selective in how they behave in various contexts. Mental models just can’t do it justice. The microscopic world of ‘inert’ matter is anything but “dead.” It’s buzzing with unstoppable frenetic activity all the time. It’s incessantly animated—by physics! We’re lucky to be able to perceive the merest hints!”
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