Nature's Web

Rethinking Our Place on Earth

Peter Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781563248641
• eBook ISBN: 9781317463962
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This powerful book provides the first comprehensive overview of the intellectual roots of the worldwide environmental movement - from ancient religions and philosophies to modern science and ethics - and synthesizes them into a new philosophy of nature in which to ground our moral values and social action. It traces the origins and evolution of the dominant worldview that has built our industrial, technocratic, man-centered civilization, and brought us to the current ecological crisis. At the same time, it uncovers an alternative cultural tradition in the world's different religions and philosophies and describes how these ideas are now surfacing and coalescing to form an ecological sensibility and a new vision of nature which recognizes the inter-relatedness of all living things. Finally, this book integrates these varied traditions with modern physics and the science of ecology into a larger philosophical whole that provides the environmental movement with a comprehensive vision of an organic and sustainable society in harmony with nature. As ecological disasters continue to threaten our planet, becoming worse with every passing moment of indifference, it has become clear that we must take action. We must change our relationship with nature, and return to the days when our lives were intimately connected to and dependent upon the natural world. Nature's Web lays the foundations for that change by explaining where our complex ideas about nature come from, why they are wrong, and what we can do to change them.

Part I

ANCIENT ROOTS

1

TAOISM

The Way of Nature

Horses live on dry land, eat grass and drink water. When pleased, they rub necks together. When angry, they turn round and kick up their heels at each other. Thus far only do their natural dispositions carry them. But bridled and bitted, with a plate of metal on their foreheads, they learn to cast vicious looks, to turn the head to bite, to resist, to get the bit out of the mouth or the bridle into it. And their natures become depraved.

Chuang Tzu

The first clear expression of ecological thinking appears in ancient China from about the sixth century BC. Chinese society at the time was passing through a feudal and bureaucratic phase and the empire was divided into warring states. Law was becoming codified and the followers of Confucius were calling for a rigid hierarchy in which every citizen knew his or her place. The Taoists, on the other hand, resented their meddling and believed all could live in spontaneous harmony with nature. They offered the most profound and eloquent philosophy of nature ever elaborated and the first stirrings of an ecological sensibility.

Both Taoists and Confucians believe that human nature is fundamentally good: human beings have an innate predisposition to goodness which is revealed in the instinctive reaction of anyone who sees a child fall into a well. Both claim to defend the Tao, or the Way, of the ancients. But whereas the Taoists are principally interested in nature, the Confucians are more worldly-minded and concerned with society. The Confucians celebrate traditionally ‘male’ virtues like duty, discipline and obedience, while the Taoists promote the ‘female’ values of receptivity and passivity. The former wish to dominate and regulate nature; the latter to follow and harmonize with it. The struggle between the two world-views, one authoritarian and the other libertarian, is still with us.

The only reliable source of the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BC) is the Lun-yü (Analects), a collection of brief dialogues and sayings recorded by his disciples, mostly young gentlemen preparing for government office. Confucius’ Tao is the proper way of life for humanity. It presupposes that the hierarchical structure of the old society corresponds to a natural world order. Each person has a moral obligation by virtue of his position, whether father or son, ruler or ruled. The cardinal virtue is jen, usually translated as ‘benevolence’, although in Chinese it is a homophone for ‘humanity’. It embraces the moral qualities of loyalty, reciprocity and dutifulness and celebrates the ideal of the chün-tzu (gentleman) who is sincere, polite, righteous and generous. Confucianism has often been called a system of morality without religion, and the master formulated the golden rule: ‘What you do not wish to be done to yourself, do not do to others.’

In social terms, Confucius was a utilitarian. He wanted to promote the general good, which he thought would be best achieved by a paternalistic government. He therefore urged rulers to bring about social justice by becoming moral themselves. A virtuous ruler would encourage the virtue of the ruled. Confucius felt that he failed in his aim to influence rulers but his disciple Mencius (371–289 BC), whose conversations were recorded in Meng-tzu, carried his message to the rulers of the warring states with some degree of success.

Although Buddhism held sway in Chinese society from the fifth century, there was a deliberate effort to revive Confucianism in the Sung period from the eleventh century onwards and it became a kind of state cult, the orthodoxy of a feudal and bureaucratic order. Its influence can still be seen at work in the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party.

Taoism, by contrast, never became an official cult, although it has helped shape Chinese thought as much as Buddhism and Confucianism. It had its roots in popular culture far back in Chinese history, possibly in an earlier matriarchal society, although it emerged as a remarkable combination of philosophy, religion, proto-science and magic at the beginning of the sixth century BC.

Its first principal exponent, Lao Tzu (‘Old Philosopher’), is shrouded in mystery. Tradition has it that he was born c. 604 BC of a noble family in Ch’u (in modern Honan, or Henan, province). He rejected his hereditary position as a noble and became a curator of the imperial archives at Loh.

All his life he followed the path of silence – ‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,’ he taught. But according to legend, when he was riding off into the desert to die in the west, he was persuaded by a gatekeeper in northwestern China to write down his teaching for posterity.

The exact date of the work attributed to Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (The Way and its Virtue), remains in dispute. Before the Second World War, scholars dated it about the fourth or even the third century BC, although since then there has been a tendency to revert to tradition and place it in the sixth century BC.¹ The Tao Te Ching remains the sole record of Lao Tzu’s teaching and it stands as an unrivalled literary and philosophical masterpiece. The Chinese scholar Joseph Needham, the author of the monumental Science and Civilization in China, has called it ‘without exception the most profound and beautiful work in the Chinese language’.² The text consists of eighty-one short chapters (5,250 words in Chinese). It is a combination of poetry and philosophical reflection. While it is sometimes obscure and paradoxical, a haunting beauty resonates throughout.

The other great Taoist text is written by Chuang Tzu (399–295 BC) and goes by the same name. More mystical than Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu relates nevertheless many entertaining anecdotes and parables. The work still follows the light of reason and has a sensuous naturalism, but it develops more clearly the concept of te as Tao individualized in the nature of things. The idea of self-transformation is more central, as is the the need to adapt closely to the environment.

The influence of Taoism on Buddhism was great, especially in the development of Zen. It has also greatly inspired Chinese poetry and landscape painting. In the West, the Taoist view of reality as dynamic and ever-changing and the principle of unity in diversity find echoes in the philosophies of Heraclitus and Hegel. Taoism offers a path to mystical experience and philosophical enlightenment as well as a guide to right living. It provides the most fertile soil for the growth of a genuinely ecological sensibility.

Philosophy of nature

The Taoist conception of nature is based on the ancient Chinese principles of yin and yang, two opposite but complementary forces in the cosmos. Together they constitute ch’i (matter-energy) of which all beings and phenomena are formed. Yin is the supreme feminine power, characterized by darkness, coldness and passivity and associated with the moon. Yang is the masculine counterpart of brightness, warmth and activity, identified with the sun. Both forces are at work within men and women as in all things, responsible for diversity within the overall unity.

Know the strength of man,

But keep a woman’s care!³

In the famous Taoist symbol of a circled S, the objective (white) emanates from the subjective (black); equally the subjective results from the objective. Both are for ever interrelated and flow into each other: black contains white and vice versa. The contraries of subject and object, good and bad, beauty and ugliness, dark and light, spring from subjective individuality; from the perspective of the whole, all distinctions merge. Yin and yang originally referred to the sunless and sunny sides of a mountain.

The Tao itself cannot be defined; it is nameless and formless. Lao Tzu likens it to an empty vessel, a river flowing home to the sea, or an uncarved block. The Tao follows what is natural. It is the way in which the universe works, the order of nature which gives all things their being and sustains them:

The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and the right.

The ten thousand things depend on it; it holds nothing back.

It fulfills its purpose silently and makes no claim.

It nourishes the ten thousand things,

And yet is not their lord.⁴

The Tao is in all beings and things, yet it is not identical with them, neither differentiated nor limited. All proceeds from it and is under its influence.

Needham describes the Tao as a ‘kind of natural curvature in time and space’. In one sense, there can be no wrong attitude to the Tao since there is no point outside it to take such an attitude.⁵ The Tao, however, is not fixed; it is a flowing and creative process. The universe in a state of flux; everything changes, nothing is constant. Energy flows continually between the negative pole of yin and the positive pole of yang. Both being and nonbeing are aspects of Tao: The ten thousand things are born of being. / Being is born of not being.’⁶ To be at one with the Tao is not therefore a static condition, a motionless identification. It is a process of creative self-realization, a process of becoming in which both being and nonbeing are two enduring presences.⁷

Taoists take a holistic view of the universe, recognizing the ecological principle of unity in diversity. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, in nature as well as in society: ‘A mountain is high because of its individual particles. A river is large because of its individual drops. And he is a just man who regards all parts from the point of view of the whole.’⁸

The Taoists speak of creation as the ‘ten thousand things’ merely as a way of expressing a large number since the outward shape of the universe is vast. The Tao folds them all into its embrace. Unity underlies all particular manifestations. The fulfilment of a part can only take place within the larger whole. ‘All things spring from germs. Under many diverse forms these things are ever being reproduced. Round and round, like a wheel, no part of which is more the starting-point than any other. This is called the equilibrium of God.’⁹ The Tao is thus an interrelated process which results in natural order. Taoists refer back to a golden age which preceded hierarchy and domination, state and patriarchy, when all formed an integrated community. But they also look forward to a restored organic society.

The Chinese phrase usually translated as ‘nature’ is tzu-jan, which means literally ‘of itself so’. The concept stresses the creative spontaneity of nature; indeed, tzu-jan may best be translated as spontaneity.¹⁰ Nature is self-sufficient and uncreated; there is no need to postulate a creator. All parts of the single organism regulate themselves spontaneously.

But the universe is not random, for its has its own organic pattern (li). Li, a concept also found in Buddhism, may best be translated as ‘principle’. But li, the principle of principles, cannot be stated in terms of law (tse). The difference is beautifully expressed in the root meanings of the words; li referred to the markings in jade, the grain in wood or the fibre in muscle; tse, to the writing of the imperial laws upon sacrificial cauldrons. The laws cannot be changed; they are fixed and static. But the markings in jade are ‘formless’ in the sense that they create a flowing, complex pattern. Thus Huai Nan Tzu (died 122 BC) declares: The Tao of Heaven operates mysteriously and secretly; it has no fixed shape; it follows no definite laws [tse]; it is great that you can never fathom it.’¹¹

Being in the world

The artist creates beauty by understanding the nature of his material, the grain in wood or stone, the notes of a musical instrument, the colours of the palette. The nature of the material is li, which is discovered not by logical analysis but by kuan, a kind of quiet contemplation, an open awareness without conscious concentration. The Taoist will contemplate in silence, without words. Language does not structure the world, as Wittgenstein arg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• The Birthday
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Ancient Roots
• Part II Seeds Beneath the Snow
• Part III Green Visions
• Part IV The Joining of the Ways
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index