One of the major reasons for the destruction we humans are doing to our planet is the psychic separation we in Western culture tend to experience between ourselves and other people, animals, plants, and everything else “outside” of us. It is referred to as the subject/object split and is exemplified in the rigid skin boundary we experience, even linguistically, between ourselves and everything else. The very way we speak and think shows this and, since this usage starts when we first learn to use language, it is very much a part of how we learn to experience reality.
Dorothy Lee, an anthropologist who studied the languages of other cultures, points out in her book, Freedom and Culture, (p. 132) that over the centuries one finds in English “. . .a conception of an increasingly assertive, active and even aggressive self, as well as of an increasingly delimited self.” In Chaucer, for example, who was writing in the 15th Century, events were more often seen as happening to the self instead of the self acting on the events. Chaucer might have someone say “melikes,” or “dreamed, me,; now we say “I like” and “I dreamed.” When I say, for example, “I am taking my dog for a walk,” I am making it clear that I am a separate being from my dog. I might love my dog, see her as part of my family, but I don’t see her as part of me or that I am part of her. I am even separating myself in my sentence from the act of walking.
Seeing everything as not ourselves makes it relatively easy to act unfeelingly, even destructively, toward other people whom we see as not only “other,” and subhuman. But we also experience animals, birds the oceans, trees, plants and insects as not us. (I will talk about how seeing other people as “other” makes it possible to act destructively towards them, but in this article I’m concerned with the effect on our planet of this way of experiencing reality.)
Even those religious people who decry planet destruction because they see humans as guardians of the environment are still seeing the environment as an object separate from themselves.
We don’t have to view Nature in this way. There have been many other cultures that didn’t make this subject/object split For example, Lee, studied numerous indigenous cultures in North America and the South Pacific and described a tribe of Native Americans, the Wintus, who lived in Northern California. These people had a sense of self that was permeable rather than rigidly separate from them. They didn’t have a psychological experience of ownership of their children, but would refer to a child as “the {name} I live with.” They felt intimately connected to the natural part of their environment and would not consider cutting down a tree to create a house because the tree was regarded as having an existence that was just as privileged as their own.. They felt they were a part of the tree and the tree was part of them. Lee gives an example of the way the Wintus oriented themselves to the environment instead of our way, which is to orient the environment to us. For Wintus the universe came first and humans emerged from the universe, not vice versa. If a Wintu man was walking East to West and a mosquito bit him on what we would say his left arm, and he turned around and came back in the same direction, he would describe himself as scratching his East arm, not his left arm.
These people would only use dead wood for their fires and small rocks because they saw the tree and rocks as having just as much a right to live as they did. When they killed an animal, they would only do it for food and they ate it all, including the hooves. Lee quotes an aged Wintu woman as saying “. . .The White people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes.. . .We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead word. But the White people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blasted out trees and stir it to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them.” And so on. If I can be excused from being somewhat animistic, I can see this woman as prescient in seeing the spirit of the land hating us humans and threatening to make us much of the rest of life extinct.
While we can’t undo Western culture, we can begin to experience ourselves as part of what a gestalt psychologist, Kurt Lewin, called the psychological field in his concept of field theory. In this view, we humans are never outside the field but are part of it. We influence every other part of our psychological field and every other part impacts us. When we experience our reality in this way, it’s impossible to see the external environment as completely separate from us. And we are much more careful to treat the rest of the field-environment respectfully and lovingly, because it is us and we are it.
We obviously can’t live like the Wintu Indians lived. But we can begin to allow ourselves to feel more connected to nature, including other humans . And animals. I think of the horrible way we treat them in the factory farms from which most of us get our meat, poultry and pork. We know from observation and research that they experience fear and pain at being treated so brutally. And the people who raise and slaughter them must be affected emotionally very negatively by having to shut off any empathic response to their immense suffering.
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David Manfield 2 years ago · 0 Likes
I can't help but feel a bit beaten down by these concepts, as they are so profoundly remote to the 99.99% who are not Wintu. I would like to be inspired by these perspectives, but I can't. It is not how I live and think. It's one more thing to feel bad about.