http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/roszak.htm
JM: Welcome again Ted.
TR: Good to be with you Jeff.
JM: In parts one and two of this series, we talked about the deficiencies of modern psychology and psychiatry in addressing ecological issues. And we looked at systems theory and cosmology, the Gaia hypothesis, and the anthropic principle as providing a scientific context for an eco-psychology. Let's begin to look at other cultural elements. I think one of those elements that impressed a great deal is the tradition of nature mysticism that you drew upon, which has actually been a very rich tradition in Western culture.
TR: You know there's a whole wing of the environmental movement called deep ecology. And deep ecology draws many of its insights from nature mysticism, which is incidentally one of the reasons why standard environmentalists view it with perhaps some suspicion. I don't. I tend to feel deep ecology draws upon a valid perception of nature as seen from an aesthetic and religious point of view. And that perception of nature is a real one. It's had tremendous cultural influence in order for it to be honored and integrated into an environmental framework. The deep ecologists are prepared to adopt the insights of great nature mystics, poets like Wordsworth, Saint Francis and the Asian traditions like Taoism, which are very close to the natural world. My feeling is that this is again one of those sources of inspiration that eco-psychology, when it is fully matured, will have to draw upon in addressing the natural world around us. That there's a wealth of insight about the human continuity with the natural world to be found there that can be translated into therapeutic terms and into ecological terms.
JM: What is nature mysticisms?
TR: Well, of course they're many varieties of nature mysticisms. In the Western-Judaeo-Christian tradition it has always been viewed with a certain alarm and suspicion because it seems to involve deifying, sacralizing the natural world in a way that has often seen to be flirting with heathenism or paganism. There are still certain parts of the Christian community, especially in the Christian community, some suspicion that people want to address the natural world as if it's alive, vital, and sacred. Generally speaking, I would say nature-mysticism is a sacramental view of the religion of nature. It's characteristic of most primary people, the religions we think of as traditional religions among primary people-- the people that used to be called primitives, almost always based upon the perception of nature as alive and intentional and in touch with us; a nature that must be treated with respect and with reciprocity. So generally speaking, those are the characteristics of nature-mysticisms. The way this is translated into modern ecological terms is along the lines of deep ecology or eco-feminism or feminist spirituality, which are wings of the environmental movement that are seeking to draw upon a deep experience of the life and the intentions of nature, not to simply see it as a realm of resources, but has to be managed for human benefit.
JM: In our previous program, you used the concept mind at large. And it strikes me that when we talk about
nature-mysticism, I think about what anthropologists have sometimes disparagingly called animism, the idea that every rock, every tree, every animal has a kind of a consciousness that can speak to us. Are you thinking along these lines?
TR: Yes indeed. Animism is deeply rooted in human culture and in most of the religions of the human past. Perhaps all of them, with the exception of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, have within them a strong representation of animism. Indeed, in terms of an eco-psychology, I think animism is the perception of nature that's reborn in every human being. Children are naturally animistic in their treatment of nature. It's reflected in their most spontaneous response to the natural world. They address it as if it had vitality and mentality. It's reflected in children's literature, fairy tales, folk lore. My sense of the matter is that children have to almost be forced to stop being animistic in order to be normal and sane in our society. But in other cultures people matured into adult forms of animism. I think for example the ancient Greeks were as civilized as any society we might want to mention. They produced great philosophy, great art, great literature. What do you make of the fact that they look at the world around them and saw gods and goddesses inherent within it? We don't know quite what they meant by that perhaps, but we know they saw the natural world as vital and inherently mindful and purposive. They sacrificed to it, they prayed to it, the addressed it, they wrote great poetry addressing themselves to the natural world. So it's quite possible for a high civilization to be deeply animistic. So animism comes in a variety of forms. The Gaia hypothesis which we discussed already is an inherently animistic perception of nature, though for scientific nature purposes it can be cleaned up and put in perhaps biochemical terms. But the eco-feminists have come to see it as, (and that's the women's wing primarily of the environmental movement) have the Gaia hypothesis is a kind of modern animism. Animism is irrepressible because it's a valid perception of the natural world as having dignity, vitality, and mentality.
JM: The animism of the Gaia hypothesis would be that the planet itself is alive as a living consciousness.
TR: That we can understand a great deal about the planet only by thinking of it as if it were a living organism. And the whole problem is in those words, "as if it were." Because if that turns to be the only way to understand what the planet is all about, then the perception is not merely metaphorical in a reductive sense of the term metaphor, but it's a valid perception of nature.
JM: So what you're suggesting is that a eco-psychology has to reach back historically to the Neolithic understanding that people had of their unity with nature, their intimate psychological unity with nature.
TR: It has to be opened to perhaps even more than that, not only Neolithic, but Paleolithic. In a sense that-- I want to make this clear-- that there are insights in human culture going all the way back that deserve to be honored. And we should seek to understand them with all the respect we would seek to understand other cultures and their perceptions of reality. I think eco-psychology is in that sense highly comprehensive. It can draw upon modern science, a number of scientific ideas, but it must also, I think, integrate perceptions of nature that may still survive I want to emphasize in children, as they are born into the world, that are certainly represented in the human tradition. So all of that I think is the reservoir of ideas, perceptions, sensitivities that have a place in eco-psychology. This is a profoundly comprehensive vision of human nature.
JM: You also draw upon the work of the psychologist Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, who instead of studying on healthy people, his studies were based on the healthiest human specimens he could find, and one of his findings was that these people often exhibited states that he called peak experiences which he described very much akin to the states that mystics throughout history have described.
TR: There's a lot to be salvaged out of Maslow's perception, and humanistic psychology is one of the major schools of psychiatric and psychological thought. I find a lot in Maslow. Maslow was however limited in one respect. That is, he thought that we had to find our salvation, our therapeutic breakthrough, our peak experiences, wholly within the human environment. This is something that happened only within the human mind. There's very little nature to be found in Maslow's writings. That is, he never managed to connect his therapeutic insights, his theoretical insights with the natural world around him. He more or less subscribed to the idea that I think goes back all the way to Freud, that there is a division in the world between those things that are human and social; and those things that belong to the strict natural sciences. I think eco-psychology would take issue with that bifurcation of reality, and see human culture, human nature, as part of a continuum that is deeply rooted in the whole history of time and the universe.
JM: Well, one of the figures that Maslow sighted is I recall expressing these peak experiences. One example would be someone like the great poet Walt Whitman, who wrote about a grain of sand, a leaf of grass as embodying the ultimate essence of the divinity.
TR: Yes, Walt Whitman is a good natured mystic and there's a lot to be drawn from him.
JM: What Maslow seems to be suggesting is that kind of insight is one of the most powerful, one of the highest insights that a human being can have.
TR: The great idea in Maslow-- and not only in Maslow, you can also find this in other people-- is his perception that the depths of our nature may yield reason of joy and pride and exaltation. The psychiatric tradition is by and large along Freudian lines and grounded in the idea that the unconscious is a chamber of horrors. It's filled with guilt and repressed criminality and repressed aggression, and repressed lust. That if you look deep within your self, what you find there is cause for shame and essentially what therapy involves is reconciling people to accepting that into their lives and coming to have a more mature understanding of these repressed contents. Maslow, along with Jung and others, was among those who believed that the deeper you look inside, the more reason you find for joy, for celebration; that the foundations for human nature are clean and good and innocent and creative. My feelings is that this is what I believe we would find in what I've called the ecological encounter unconscious. That is a bond with the natural world, which makes us at home in the universe and which gives reason for a positive view of life, very different from the more alienated view of life we associated with Freudian orthodoxy or existential therapy or even certain elements of Maslow's humanistic psychology, which is still alienated from the natural world in a way that makes it hard to connect.
JM: You've mentioned Jung a number of times. Jung developed the theory of the collective unconscious, and it seems to me that this may be about as close as we can find within psychology and psychiatry today for the idea that the human unconscious is somehow connected to this larger world of, well Jung referred to archetypes. But if we look earlier to the use of the word archetype, the German poet Goethe referred to the ur phenomenon that the essence of poetry is the same as the essence of nature itself.
TR: Jung was one of the major thinkers that I was able to find most promising as a resource of eco-psychology. And it is precisely his idea of the collective unconscious that I found myself able to draw upon. The only problem I have with Jung is that Jung at a certain point in his career, because he wanted to treat deeply suffering human beings, felt that if necessary he would violate the principles of science in order to treat their wishes and their needs as realities in their own right. And if necessary, if this would sacrifice has scientific respectability, so be it. My feeling is that it is not necessary to make that decision to break with science in the modern world, that there is a great deal in science, especially within the last few generations that can support human needs and aspirations and it's not necessary to do as Jung did-- to sacrifice your scientific respectability. The other aspect of Jung that was a little difficult for me to deal with is the fact that Jung's collective unconscious is an extremely ethereal, almost fleshless realm of psychological reality. It does not take on the reality of the natural world. Even though Jung himself, incidentally, in his personal life had a strong sense of nature-mysticism, of connection with the natural world, was most at home out of the city in the forest near the water, the running waters
JM: His therapy sessions were often held while walking in the woods.
TR: He had a strong sense of natural connection. That didn't always show up in his theories, which tend to be more abstract and disembodied. So my strategy in The Voice of the Earth was to interpret that voice in very physical flesh and blood terms, to integrate into Jung's collective unconscious, a sense of actual, physical nature, of anomaly and vegetation and to find that our connection with nature in its most physical and real form at the depths of our unconscious. And the ecological unconscious for me is not as an abstract idea as Jung's collective unconscious, it is much more related to our evolutionary background as children of the planet earth.
JM: Several times you've referred to eco-feminism and women's spirituality as being branches of ecology. Could you amplify on that-- the feminist perspective and what significance it has for your...
TR: It's a very deep significance. Among the issues that I think has to be seriously addressed by eco-psychology is the issue that has been raised by eco-feminism. And that has to do with the deep influence of sexual stereotypes-- gender stereotypes I should call them-- upon our culture. There is a sense in which the whole of civilized history, since the foundings of the whole river-valleys civilizations, has been strongly biased in the direction of patriarchal values, and aggressive values that treat the natural world with hostility and suspicion and significantly that natural world is usually spoken of in feminine terms-- mother earth, mother nature. Even more so in the modern Western world, modern science and technology seem to be shot through with a sense of aggressiveness, a spirit of domination, which eco-feminists has identified as a gender stereotype. That is, they're warping the foundations of our understanding of nature and of technological connection with the natural world. At some point I feel this would be a central issue in eco-psychology, to a deep analysis of the gender stereotypes that continue to operate in the world today. Take a specific issue-- the sense we have that the only way you can be secure in the world is to dominate the world, hence all the metaphors we have of conquest, conquering nature, conquering outer space. Images like that are deeply macho, their compulsively masculine. And they influence us to believe that the natural world is an enemy, that it is hostile to us and that we must take it over and manage it and subjugate it to our human needs. Hence, the intense artificiality of urban, industrial society. We live in these cities, in these structures which are man-made and man controlled and it's within that context that we seek to find a sense of security in the world. Now, from a psychological point of view what this betrays is a tremendous sense of insecurity in the natural world. And I think at some point you would have to address the fact that this has distorted our relations with nature. Is there some other way to find security in the world, other than domination. Here I'll give you an interesting parallel, which is a psychological parallel. Anyone dealing in family counseling, marriage counselling, will recognize that nothing destroys a relationship in a family or between a husband and wife man and woman more than the feeling that the only way they can relate is by dominance and submission. We readily recognize that is at the root of many broken families, broken marriages, broken relationships. What's the alternative? Well most therapists would say there has to be trust, there has to be mutual respect. Now in an eco-psychology you would take that same insight into human relationships and try to read it into our relationship with the natural world. Is there some other way to find security in our relations with nature than by way of dominance and submission? And I think the eco-feminist viewpoint, the insight is yes, by trusting. By trusting nature to be life enhancing and life supporting. You cannot at every point, in fact it's a feudal exercise to seek to dominant a force as large as the planet earth. That we would be much better advised to move within the grain of nature, sort of a Taoist insight into the nature of things. That I think would be a very deep issue in eco-psychology. A deep investigation of how we achieve security in the world-- through trust or through domination.
JM: One of the issues that you raise is very basic is calls us to question what is underlying our behavior when we engage in activities that are destructive to nature. Why do we do that, it's a lack of trust. But let me ask you this, I think I hear you saying that if we just develop a new, self-image, a new psychology, we can address that lack of trust.
TR: Well, yes, we're being very brief about this, but to spell it out fully, you know one of the deep teachings of modern environmental philosophy is really quite traditional. You cannot simply take and take and take from nature without giving. So the proper relationship between human beings and the natural world is one of reciprocity. Well, reciprocity lies at the root of all of the religious practices of primary people, of traditional societies, a sense that you cannot simply take without giving back. Now we speak of that reciprocity in terms of recycling things. Of using things with thrift of wasting very little. So we can reinterpret this in modern terms that sound abstractly economic. But underlying this is the sense that we must relate to planet as if it were an intentional personal presence with whom a relationship that involves an ethical obligation to reciprocate the generosity of the planet. And if we don't do that we distort that relationship and seek to make it one of exploitation and domination. This may very well lie at the very root of our ecological crisis in the modern world. And the solution to it is at least along that one level is a psychological of recognizing that we can gain greater security by way of trust and reciprocity than by domination and exploitation.
JM: It seems to me though that you have to go a lot further than simply saying we must trust. And I think of the next steps that you take is to rely on science and say let's look at natives peoples and let's look at species of animals that have lived for hundreds of thousands of years in harmony with the environment.
TR: Well, one of the insights of deep ecology, which is challenging and perhaps even disturbing is in fact that our culture, the culture of the modern world the urban industrial world is very recent and very young. It does not have much of a tract record.
JM: Five thousand years maybe.
TR: Well, and urban industrialism is only a few centuries old. On the other hand there are cultures that have survived for a very long period of time in conditions of trust and reciprocity with the natural environment. I don't want pretend for a moment that I'm not trying to idealize or romanticize those relations between primary societies and the natural world because there's often recognition that nature can be harsh and be severe. It can be punishing. The Gaia is an earth-mother, she can be a tough mother, a punishing mother if you want to speak in those terms. That there's a kind of mature recognition of the fact that those are the terms of life. And you don't break trust with the planet and seek to dominate it and exploit it for some short term advantage simply because the going is sometimes rough. I think many environmentalists in more scientific terms of coming to tell us that same thing, that we have to change our lifestyle and our habits of life on this planets in ways that at some points may involve sacrifice, but will nevertheless in the long term give us the capacity to survive with grace and with a adequate standard of living. So this is a very real choice that confronts us about the meaning of security-- long term security on the planet and maybe that we are presently trapped within a psychology of domination that has pretty much characterized our style of life-- the city with its heavy weight upon the planet exploiting the planet as much as possible to give us all the things we need to create a artificial environment within which we will feel a kind of perhaps false security that cannot outlive three or four or five generations. That may be the essence of our environmental problem that we are seeking security along the wrong root. But the solution is not simply an economic and social political one. It's also a personal and psychological one.
JM: I suppose the question comes down to where is your bottom line if you feel as Freudians and existentialists do that the bottom line of the human sole is alienation and a need for domination, then it's easy to justify continued ecological exploitation.
TR: Yes, and the interesting thing about all views of life that are based upon a sense of alienation, inherent and inescapable alienation from nature is that they are deeply tragic. They don't promise a nice finish. Now I don't want to suggest that what I am advocating here is the easy way to go or anything of that sort. But what I am saying is that I think there might be a deeper maturity in recognizing that after all we are living on a planet from which we evolved. We cannot therefore be so alienated from that planet that we no longer some participation in that genetic heritage, that evolutionary heritage and that ought to become part of our psychological theory.
JM: Well, it seems to me that the lesson of tragedy is that when we're faced with situations that seem unavoidably horrible, the best we can do is reach inside of us for that which is noblest and wisest and Theodore Roszak that what I hear you calling us to do. The project of eco-psychology may fail, but even if it were to fail, it could bring out the best in us.
TR: Well, I think it's a matter of asking us to respond to the ecological crisis with a sense of more than fear or dread, with a sense of acting nobly towards a planet that has nurtured us into existence and which offers us a possibility of great bounty.
JM: Theodore Roszak, thank you so much for being with me.
TR: It's good to be with you Jeff.
JM: And thank you for being with us for this third part of a third part series on eco-psychology.
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