Tag Archives: dualism

the problematic and pervasive attitude that humans (and animals, variously) possess a transcendent quality (consciousness, mind, soul) separate from the correspondingly devalued material realm

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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Ditching Dualism #1: Exaltation

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Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

By elevating human experience above the remainder of the universe, dualist beliefs can impede efforts to move past modernity—which I believe must end whether we wish it or not. Therefore, it seems important enough to devote some time to the matter. The first question one might ask is: “Am I a dualist?” A crude test involves answering the following questions:

  1. Is matter real (not a creation of mind), obeying physics independent of consciousness?
  2. Is mind/consciousness its own phenomenon, not a product of known matter and physics?

Here’s how I would label the results: Y/N is materialist (like me: mind is matter); N/Y is idealist (mind is everything); Y/Y is dualist (mind and matter separately real), and N/N is too bizarre for me to confront. “Maybe” answers are okay, too, but perhaps this series will result in greater clarity.

The topic of dualism is too important and too stealthily integrated into modern worldviews to be handled in a post of ordinary length. Maybe a book would be better, but I’m going to be lazy and parcel it out as a series of posts. I recognize that what I am attempting is very tricky, and probably insufficient to persuade anybody—we do get set in our beliefs (although I was once a default dualist, and still squirm at some of the implications of abandoning this comfortable, safe, and culturally reinforced position). All the same, I will try to anticipate failure modes and navigate around them before they seize the reader.

The larger effort here benefits from first establishing a starting position before even getting to the main topic of dualism. I hope it helps build a coherent framework, perhaps establishing deep resonance, connection, and trust before trying to extract the toxins. Of course, I may lose some people even in trying to establish a foundation, but I find I’m most interested in building something among those who start off with admiration for the universe we are lucky enough to inhabit. The others may be beyond reach.

The motivation for starting with an exaltation to the living world is mainly that I will ultimately be making the case that we find ourselves in a material universe, and that the only non-dualistic way to take this seriously is to have microbes, fungi, plants, and animals (including humans, of course) be entirely material beings. For many, this elicits distaste over the notion that humans and animals are “just machines,” and thus don’t deserve any more regard than a calculator. This hasty conclusion misses something enormous, and I thought it important to begin by expressing complete admiration for Life (which I even tend to capitalize, mimicking the convention for God). If being “only” material would seem to make a living being worthless, I hope by the end of the series the reader will understand this to be a failure of scope and not at all a necessary conclusion.

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