Tag Archives: animism

relating to the ancient mindset of spirits pervading the world, blurring what we call animate and inanimate

Ditching Dualism #3: The Divorce

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Dualists have a foot in each camp, precariously.

Having prefaced this series on dualism with a clarifying exaltation and a grounding in animism, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and trace the origins of dualism.

Animist tendencies have to be stamped out of children in our culture, who display a natural proclivity to treat the entire world around them as alive and full of potential friends. They soon learn from acculturated adults the sin of anthropomorphism. “Stop talking to that stool and inviting it for tea! Don’t dare project human greatness onto mere ‘things’—or even animals. No, not even Boots, the family pet. Yes, technically humans are animals, but that’s just a quirky fact, not how we should act.” Indeed, we do a number on our kids, molding them into fine little human supremacists.

Viewing rocks and weather and rivers as part of a single, unified co-dependent Web of Life, animists are somewhat allergic to both supremacy and hierarchy. Humility is the watchword. We don’t and can’t understand enough to call ourselves superior, voiding any case for ranking. Many cultures recognized humans’ newbie status and explicitly looked for wisdom in our elder relatives: the plants and animals, who knew how to live in “right relationship” with each other and with the planet—tested over eons.

This aversion to hierarchy went hand-in-hand with “fiercely egalitarian” social practices—wherein everyone had essentially equal access to food and its means of procurement. Various “leveling mechanisms” were employed deliberately and explicitly to prevent the emergence of instability resulting from power concentration. Demand-sharing and jocular meat-shaming were common practices in this vein, all the way to banishment or death for dangerous aggrandizers (see also earlier, related work from Hayden). As Christopher Ryan phrases it in Civilized to Death, “There’s plenty of ferocity in the ‘fierce egalitarianism’ of foragers.”

So, what happened to upset this long-standing social order?

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Ditching Dualism #2: Animism

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Tell this rock it’s not alive! From Wikimedia Commons.

In this second part of our journey to dump dualism, we peek at the ancient worldview of animism. Why this additional detour before getting to dualism itself? Two answers come to mind. First, it’s valuable to know what pervaded long before dualism swept in. Second, some aspects of animism might provide an appealing alternative—and in so doing might stave off the sense of nihilism and lack of meaning that can accompany the contemplated abandonment of an entrenched worldview. In other words, it’s nice to have another lifeboat at the ready—especially one as time-tested as animism—before asking someone to step off their current, familiar platform.

Rather than being a religion, animism is a mindset that had common purchase around the globe prior to modern times. Not only is it important to appreciate how we used to be when the planet’s ecological relationships were more “normal,” but it offers a worthy alternative to dualism that has much overlap with an astrophysical perspective.

Animism is contrasted with the prevalent scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, as fabricated by Greek philosophers during modernity’s early adolescence. This ladder-ranking schema places humans awkwardly straddling the domain of superior angels/gods and that of “lower” animals and plants. Note that this is an implicitly dualist framing, separating the heavenly from the earthly—humans of course having access to both at once: a foot in both camps.

A persuasive argument has it that this perceived separation from the earthly domain took root in agricultural practices, whereby cultures began to aggressively manipulate and control “lower” life, as its domesticating masters. Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions explicitly grant dominion of Earth and its lesser inhabitants to a culture of ordained human supremacists.

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Animistic Physics

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Murmuration by Mostafameraji (Wikinedia Commons).

It might seem that animistic beliefs—which prevailed prior to agriculture—would be about as far away from modern physics as possible. Yet, I find them to be rather compatible in a number of foundational ways. Allow me to elaborate. And don’t worry: it’s not about quantum mumbo-jumbo.

What is animism? While not a formal belief system, animists tend to view nearly everything in the world as being animated by spirits or forces beyond our capacity to fully comprehend. We can call these animating agents spirits or “the gods.” Animists live in the hands of the gods along with all other Life: not particularly special. These spirits not only move animals and plants, but also weather, landscapes, oceans, rivers, mountains, rocks, and soil.

Modern languages (reflecting a non-animistic worldview) objectify the world by being noun-dominated—which deeply affects how we think about the world. Animist languages, by contrast, are often verb-dominated (verbal people!), so that verbs are used to connote mountains, rivers, bays, trees, etc.—reflecting the sense that such beings are always in a state of motion and change. What we call a sand bar is “verbalized” as “to be a sand bar”—it is acting as a living, changing, life-interacting entity, or being. Note that the noun “being” itself carries an echo of animism, embodying this state of verbiness, as a variant of “be.” It’s a nounified verb.

An important tip-off as to how animism relates to physics is provided by Daniel Quinn in The Story of B, on page 136.

Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness.

Below, I outline five (connected) ways that animism meshes well with physics, mirroring a conversation I had with Derrick Jensen that you can listen to here. While very few scientists would volunteer that they have animistic leanings, these connections might make it easier to identify as such.

As an aside, I “privilege” physics here not only because that’s my own background, but because all other sciences appear to rest on (abide by) a physics foundation, often characterized by complexity that eludes first-principles formulations in the style of physics. One might say that chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry, etc. The word “science” may easily be substituted for “physics” in what follows.

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The Story of B

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Ammonite fossil, by Liez (H Zell), from Wikimedia Commons.

Oh No. Is Do the Math about to get hijacked for another long series about a Daniel Quinn book, like it was for Ishmael?

How about just a really long post?

The Story of B is the second in a series of three books associated with the wise gorilla, Ishmael, and his teachings. Some report “B” as a more powerful book than the first (Ishmael). For me, they sort-of run together, and I have trouble remembering which book focused on which point. That’s part of why I started the project of capturing the Ishmael content, and here do something similar for The Story of B. I figure if it helps me keep the books straight, it will help others, too.

In this post, I sketch the content of the book. I am not tracing much in the way of story elements. I’m not even fully fleshing out the key arguments, but making more of a map so that I or others can more quickly revisit key parts, or get a quick refresher on the entire book’s flow and content. For those who have not read the book, I hope it serves as encouragement to do so.

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MM #17: Being Human

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This is the seventeenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Here, I attempt to paint a picture of how we might think of ourselves as humans on this planet, as integral members of the community of life. If we’re good, evolution might keep us for a while—along with lots of friends currently in deep trouble.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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A Religion of Life

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Image by Karen .t from Pixabay

The following discussion about belief systems may seem out of place coming from a recovering astrophysicist, and perhaps I am as surprised as you are. But my path has taken me to an unexpected place, so that I now think we would be wise to make a radical course change at the deepest level of what we believe.

Why should we consider a major change?

  • Because we don’t know everything, and never can.
  • Because what we do know tells us we’re on the wrong track, initiating a sixth mass extinction—not just from CO2, but from modernity itself.
  • Because we now (collectively) believe in the wrong things, like human supremacy and economics (gross).
  • These beliefs are actively hurting the living creatures of the planet, including us.

Science has revealed so much about the origins and rules of the universe, and how life came to be so exquisitely diverse. Let’s tap into what this tells us. Let’s also acknowledge that mysteries will always remain. Rather than continue to be paralyzed in this urgent time by what we don’t yet know, let’s fill in the gaps with belief—or even faith—rooted in the science we already do know. Let’s move beyond the current stories we tell ourselves in modernity, and fashion new ones that move us in a better direction—to the enduring benefit of all life on Earth.

I’m not sure I know how to tell this story, so please bear with me and accept my apologies for a long-ish read. For those who saw last week’s post, this one contains familiar echoes, but represents a fresh approach intended for a more general audience.

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