Ecological Intelligence Read online

  To be aware of the evolutionary roots of human psychology is to deepen one’s understanding of what is loosely referred to as human nature. Without this understanding, an ecological intelligence is impossible. Unwilling to look at ourselves, we have become masters in the art of finger-pointing and self-deception and until we understand the origins and the dynamics of why we do it, any attempt to reconcile the Human-Nature split is going to be futile. It is essential, therefore, that we develop a greater awareness of the structure and functioning of the human psyche, particularly the workings of the human ego—what we refer to as “me,” what it is, how it has evolved, how it defends itself, how blind it can be, and yet how essential it is for our survival. Yes, the human animal is a deeply biological being, but we are psychological beings also, creatures that reflect, fantasize, hope, intuit, pray, bless, blame, care, cheat, love, and who look for the meanings in things.

  To me, psychology begins to make more sense when seen through an evolutionary eye. It comes into its own when we become aware of the universality of the various strategies of survival—the way all animals consciously and unconsciously encounter the world. Say what you wish, we are survivors—the living evidence of more than two million years of hominid existence and with it a consciousness that has become not only self-aware, but aware of the awareness of others.

  Derived from the Greek word psyche, which means “soul,” “breath,” or “life,” human psychology is the science that studies the conscious and unconscious workings of the human psyche, especially our behavioral and mental processes. It includes the study of thoughts, emotions, feelings, memory, personality, and relationships—not only the way we relate to people, places, and events, but to the way we relate to ourselves. It is the study of human nature. It is not an exact science and probably never will be, which is why for many scientists it is regarded as being too abstract or too theoretical to be relevant to empirical science. It is essential that this attitude be changed, for not only are we all naturalists of sorts, all of us scientifically curious, we are also philosophers and psychologists, if only in a small way. And what is more, we can’t help it! It is in our nature to be objective, to explore, to measure, and to define our outer world, but this is only a part of our nature. Human nature is powerfully subjective too; it is both abstract and abstracting, never entirely satisfied with what can be measured, which is why, for everything wonderful about science, somehow it seldom answers the deep, existential questions in our lives.

  How, for example, can one possibly discredit those great poetic dimensions of human society—spirit and soul? We readily speak of the spirit of adventure and the spirit of science, of soul mates, soul places, and the dark night of the soul. The words are at the tips of our tongues. They are intrinsic to our descriptions of kinship, belonging, connection, and continuity. And we know what they mean, even if we cannot fully explain them. They may well be linked to neurocircuits, neurotransmitters, and circulating hormones, as I am sure they are, but how they are linked and to which combinations of circuits or neurochemicals, we’ll probably never know. It would seem they can’t be measured, or better still, they refuse to be measured. Does that make them any less real or, indeed, irrelevant? I think not. Instead, because they are dimensions that are experienced and that add to our sense of meaning, they need to be understood as psychologically significant and therefore valid.

  And then there is language. If we are serious about rediscovering ourselves in Nature, we are going to need a language that speaks for science and soul, that narrows the gap between subject and object, that slips between yes and no. We will need a language that continually reminds us of where we have come from and of what we have to do if we are to become ecologically intelligent. For the time being, the only language I know that can begin to do this is poetry. It may be an extravagant claim, but there is a history to it…

  At the end of 1997, after eight years of working with troubled adolescents and mentally handicapped children, I resigned from my post as the head of the Child, Family, and Adolescent Unit at the Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in Cape Town. My wife and I headed off to the Linyanti wilderness of northern Botswana where, working as a guide and comanager of a small tented lodge, I was overwhelmed by a sense that I had come home. I tried to keep a diary, but every time I tried to write down my experiences with animals, it came out in stanza form.Prose somehow escaped me. Instead, what I was writing was verse—“pure nonsense…pure wisdom” as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda said of his first written lines. Where did it come from? I don’t know.Gripped by them, it was as if the poems were writing me. I tried to ignore them, but it didn’t work. Some of them came quickly, decisively.Some of them refused to be rushed, waiting instead until I was ready for them. Others wrestled with me, sometimes deep into the night. I came to see them as wild gifts.

  To begin

  to know wilderness,

  something in me had to die—

  the pregnant parts,

  the motherly expectations

  and the test tube notions

  of a safe delivery.

  In the wild

  dead fetuses are for real,

  vultures are the midwives of new life

  And to be abandoned is to grow.

  To begin

  to know wilderness,

  something in me had to come alive—

  my wild side,

  the part that knows

  that it is impossible to sleep with the dead

  without being awakened by them.

  In the wild

  the animal spirits are for real

  they are the shadows in our bones

  and they come to us

  as wild gifts.

  To rediscover ourselves in Nature does not mean turning one’s back on technology as is often advocated. Technology is part of our nature. It is part of the evolution of a problem-solving, tool-making species. The harnessing of the molecular formulas of genes, medicinal plants, hormones, and tissue extracts to enhance the quality of life of countless human and nonhuman beings has to be understood as being just as significant as the harnessing of fire by our ancestors Homo erectus less than a million years ago. Without technology we could not speak about DNA, there would be no photographs of Earth from space, no understanding of the AIDS virus and no long-distance calls from a daughter on her travels in a foreign land. Without technology, the monitoring and protection of many of the world’s endangered species would be impossible. Celebrate it. Learn how to say yes and no to it.

  Throughout this book I have used the paired words yes and no for two very specific reasons. The first is to encourage the reader to become a little more comfortable with paradox—discovering the sometimes irrational yet meaningful truths that are hidden in statements that are seemingly contradictory or absurd. Science has long been familiar with paradox, for example chaos theory and with it the recognition that there are patterns of order in what we all too readily interpret as chaotic. And then there is the paradox of the dual perception of light—that it can be perceived as being either waves or particles. The paired words, then, are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they convey a simple wisdom: everything is in process…every idea, every interpretation, and every strategy has at least two sides. The second reason is to remind the reader that yes and no are the two most powerful words in the vocabulary of a species that has become capable of deciding what to do about its future.

  PART ONE

  REMEMBERING WHEREWE HAVE COME FROM

  Hinged to far beginnings

  pulled by a distant sun

  we are linked to the scars

  on the moon.

  Astonishing! Everything is intelligent!

  Pythagoras

  1

  THE RESHAPING OF

  MYTH AND LANGUAGE

  THERE IS NOT A CULTURE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE MYTHS, legends, or fairytales—explanations, no matter how fantastic, of the origins of the world and of life, of heroes and villains, of how we ought
to behave and how not to. While many of them are based on elements of fact, they nevertheless acquire a peculiar potency. Embellished by the human imagination, they often represent a highly invested truth for a group or an individual. This means that they must never be negated as being mere figments of the imagination.

  Any story that begins “Once upon a time…” is magnetically charged with this potency. It draws us into the narrative that follows and the reason for this is that we inevitably discover within them our own life narratives. The hero and the heroine is in all of us. So is the victim, and, believe it or not, the villain too. Myths and legends are the carriers of meaning and the quest for meaning is one of the most defining characteristics of the human animal. Myths have a profound psychological significance. We are shaped and guided by them. However, we sculpt them also. We give them new clothes and new voices. We not only derive meaning from myths, but we add meaning to them too. As hard as we try to dismiss them, they refuse to go away. “They are insidious,” says Canadian psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, “great secret dragons which may appear to be slain and discredited, but which mysteriously reappear as powerful as ever to press their perennial claim to a territory of belief and understanding.”

  Nearly all of our scientific theories have a subjective core, and they almost all originate from intuition and myth, said the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl Popper. For example, the bushmen hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari knew nothing of the shared genes between humans and animals, but their thirty-thousand-year mythology tells us that all living things are connected. They have been proven right. And what about Empedocles, whose intuition thousands of years before Darwin was one of evolution by trial and error? Imagine how much more there is that remains unproven but nevertheless valid and vital to our sense of meaning. The poetry, the myths, and the legends of our past not only stir our imagination but it would also appear that we cannot live without them.

  To rediscover ourselves in Nature, we are going to need a new myth, or perhaps the redressing of an old one to help us. We need to reshape the way we think and speak about ourselves, about our history, and about our relationship with the Earth. But where to look? I would like to recommend that we look in two directions, one to Africa itself and to the image and legend of one of her great trees, the Ziziphus mucronata, and the other to ancient Greece and to the great mythological oracle at Delphi—Apollo. Choose which one you prefer. I will show that they share the same message, that they are urgent, and that their admonitions are the script for an intelligence that is ecological.

  Central to the folklore of the Nguni people of southern Africa is the Ziziphus mucronata. They call it the tree of life. At any time in the year you will find on this tree a combination of green, yellow, and brown leaves—the phases of youth, adulthood, and old age. It is a hardy tree.In times of drought, when grazing and browsing is scarce, the leaves on this tree remain resiliently intact. Its nutritionally rich foliage becomes the emergency food for antelopes and elephants, as well as for humans, who mix the leaf pulp with water as a thirst quencher. In hard times, even lions have been seen browsing upon its leaves.

  A striking feature of the ziziphus is its thorns. Appearing as a double row, they are spaced along the length of every branch in pairs, each thorn directly opposite the other. But it is the shape of the paired thorns that is intriguing. One of the pair points robustly outward and forward while the other curves back and inward in the opposite direction. The Nguni legend says the thorns tell us something about ourselves—that we must look ahead, to the future…but we must never forget where we have come from.

  In the image of the backward-hooking thorn of the ziziphus is the explanation of the Human-Nature split—we have forgotten our animal past. It is therefore the direction of our healing. By all means look ahead, keep moving, follow your dreams, but never forget your roots. Together the thorns say yes and no. They are poetic. One row points toward the future and to what we might become, the other toward the Earth and our origins. They represent the push of the human spirit on the one hand, the pull of soul on the other; the wings of psychology in one direction, the roots of our biology in the other. They are complementary opposites. They hold the tension between science and non-science, between subject and object, and it is crucial that we hold that tension, for within it is the definition of an ecological intelligence.

  And then there is Apollo, the great mythological oracle of ancient Greece. Apollo was the Homeric god of prophecy, medicine, and culture—the embodiment of the poet, the naturalist, and the scientist in all of us. His twin sister was the fabulous goddess of the wild, Artemis. Separate, yet inseparable, they anticipated each other. Apollo proposed three fundamental requirements for rediscovering our place in Nature:

  Know thyself.

  Do no thing in excess.

  Honor the gods.

  “Remember where you have come from,” says the Nguni legend; “Know thyself,” said Apollo.

  “The thorns are paired…keep the balance,” says the African legend; “Do no thing in excess,” said Apollo.

  “Honor the ancestors,” say the Nguni; “Honor the gods,” said Apollo.

  When examined carefully, it will become evident that these admonitions are not as easy to follow as they might look. For a start, there is a definite order to them. To know thyself comes first. It anticipates the other two. It is a prerequisite for a greater awareness of the dynamics of balance and excess and of the nature of the “gods” within oneself.

  The first admonition, to know thyself, is the big one. It is to remember where we have come from. It is to deepen our awareness of human origins, of species interdependence, and of the transient nature of all things. To live this admonition is not going to be easy, and the reason for this is that we will have to confront our own nature first. “To confront human nature is to confront the absurd,” says French writer and philosopher Albert Camus. “It is to confirm that there is no sun without shadow, and that it is essential to know the night.” In other words, to know ourselves will include owning up to the dark side of our nature—our mostly unexplored, mostly undesirable qualities of personal greed, jealousy, aggression, our propensity to kill, and our power play.

  To know thyself is an ongoing task. Like the curved thorn of the ziziphus it continually turns us around, bringing us face-to-face with ourselves in the world. To know thyself is to understand our wild nature. The psychological instincts of the predator, the parasite, and the scavenger are in our history and in our blood. They will not go away, which means there is no point in turning a blind eye to them.To know thyself implies a willingness to review our prejudices and our sometimes inappropriate belief systems. It is to discover that one’s identity is not restricted to a personal ego but includes a sense of self that is both ancient and evolutionary. But first, we must understand what we mean by the ego. We must understand its strengths and its limitations.

  Adapted by Sigmund Freud to describe that part of our personality that corresponds most nearly to the perceived self, ego is another name for one’s autobiographical self—our conscious sense of “me.” The big problem with the ego, because it is our most relied upon model of the self, is that it is heavily biased in favor of seeing ourselves as separate and distinct from the rest of the world. In other words, the rest of the world is “out there,” or, as the theologian Alan Watts puts it in his critique of the “skin-encapsulated ego,” what is in here is “me” and what is out there is “not me.” This of course has led to the widespread belief that our ego reality is the only one there is. As we shall find in what follows, this is not the case at all.

  It is important, however, that we do not underestimate the significance of the human ego. It is mostly portrayed in a negative light, but without it we cannot make sense of our world. Like the conductor of an orchestra, it has an orientating function, coordinating skills such as memory, perception, and intellect, as well as acting as a point of reference to who we are and what we might become. Not as strong
and as encompassing of the world as we sometimes like to think it is, it is just as well that it has its denial-oriented defenses, which we will consider later. The ego, then, is a fairly recently evolved and tenuous attribute of the human mind and to witness its disintegration—as I have done as a psychiatrist—is to witness the frightening process of psychosis, a condition in which the boundaries between thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and intuitions begin to blur until they become indistinguishable from each other.

  Without an ego, without that sense of “me,” we lose our gifts of insight and reflection. This is why analytical psychotherapy can be so meaningful. Ultimately, it is geared to strengthening the ego, not by bolstering its defenses but by making it less defensive. It is about helping the patient to become less resistant to self-examination. To know thyself, then, is a lifelong process of learning to see ourselves in the other, of seeing the world as a mirror, and of being accountable for our personal contributions toward our own suffering.

  The second admonition, to do no thing in excess…to keep the balance, is not merely a caution against addictions to foods, beverages, and drugs. It is a caution against being obsessive about any one thing—a dream, a memory, a doctrine, or a cause. It is to remember the other row of thorns on the branch of the ziziphus. Keep the focus but learn to scan as well. Importantly, this does not imply that sometimes boring notion of doing everything in moderation. Apollo did not say “Do nothing in excess.” The first admonition will already have alerted us to the fact that we are naturally immoderate, self-concerned, and, given half a chance, pleasure seeking. We want it all and we want it now. Have your excesses, Apollo implied, but do not find yourself addicted or obsessed by them. In other words, we must learn how and when to say yes and no to our preoccupations and to our extremes.