John Gray reviews Richard Mabey’s latest book in the New Statesmen:
“For those who still subscribe to the orthodoxy of “two cultures” (and there are many), science and Romanticism are bound to be at odds. If you think there are two distinct ways of seeing the world – one scientific and detached in its outlook, the other humanistic and Romantic, asserting the importance of subjective experience – then Romanticism can never be more than an exercise in imagination, valuable for what it contributes to the emotions but intrinsically inward-looking. To such people, science is concerned with the nature of things while the humanities deal with human responses to the world, two vastly different things.
The assumption made by those who subscribe to this orthodoxy is that human beings are set apart from the world. Philosophers in the dominant western tradition have tended to think of consciousness as a defining human attribute, one that no other animal possesses. Even militant Darwinists, committed to the notion that we emerged by natural selection from other animal species, invariably claim that human beings alone have the capacity to frame an objective view of the world. The insistence that human beings are great exceptions among the animals owes much to Christianity, but the idea that humankind does not belong fully in the natural world has continued to wield influence even as religious belief has declined. In many ways, the old argument about two cultures turns on this sense of separation.”
John Gray says something very important here. Environmentalism is a post-Christian thinking and it inherited the patronizing approach to nature. The very idea that the nature needs to be “protected” presumes that the nature is small and helpless, unable to cope with the superior human species. And this very megalomania denies our humble oneness with the plants, the animals and the fury.
An example is the fanatical refusal by the environmentalists to admit that the Gulf of Mexico appears to heal itself after the BP oil spill. I recently heard on the NPR: “But you surely think that the oil is still somewhere there…” To admit otherwise would be to deny earth’s helplessness and more significantly to admit that the humans are not the superior species in charge of the weak planet but are one with it.