Worldview Literacy at Your Fingertips

Earth Day for Earthlings

Western philosophy has misdirected our attention from its beginning, infusing western scholarship and culture with its one-eyedness, fearful of what its postconquest consciousness could not perceive or understand:

“It must be that Nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.” (Aristotle)

“The world is made for man, not man for the world.” (Francis Bacon)

“Men are the lords and possessors of Nature.” (Rene Descartes)

“The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against Nature.” (Sigmund Freud)

Western culture, fearful of Nature, became a warrior against it, ignorant of “the things that matter in the long run—life-supporting systems and the very cycles that produce and facilitated people, culture, living things, and the future” (Safina, 2011, p. 36). Safina notes that most of western philosophy has not had the world in mind at all. For ethics—how we share life’s benefits and burdens through our decisions and actions—warring against Nature is a critical problem.

One-eyed seeing emerges from early life undercare, the missing evolved nest, the underdevelopment of right hemisphere capacities, and the terror that comes about from coercive community treatment in babyhood and childhood.

In a 2020 published paper, I described original virtue, an ethic of wholeness characteristic of preconquest consciousness:

“Nest-supported human nature displays Darwin’s moral sense whereas unnested individuals show dysregulation and a degraded moral sense—a species-atypical human nature. Original virtue is about flourishing—of self, human community and the more than human community—within all circles of life, based in a deep awareness of humanity’s dependence on the rest of nature to survive. The pillars of original virtue include relational attunement (engagement ethic), communal imagination, and respectful partnership with the natural world. All are apparent in human societies that provide the nest to their young, fostering connectedness throughout life. They maintain communal imagination through cultural practices that enhance ecological attachment and receptive intelligence to the natural world.”

Striking moments in life can reorganize one’s worldview. Aldo Leopold, whose ethics changed from wolf-killer when he watched the dying of the light from a wolf’s eyes whom he had just shot, became an advocate for Earth, proposing that humanity adopt a land ethic. “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” And a land ethic includes in those parts wildlife, soil, water and ecological systems that support Life.

Today is a good day to check out the differences in worldview manifestations between the dominant and the Earth-centric, Kinship or Indigenous worldview at WorldviewLiteracy.org. Assess where your ethics land.

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

References

Leopold, A. (2016). A Sand County almanac. Oxford University Press.

Narvaez, D. (2020). Ecocentrism: Resetting baselines for virtue development. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23, 391–406. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10091-2

Safina, C. (2011). The view from Lazy Point: A natural year in an unnatural world. Picador.

Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness. In H. Wautischer (Ed.), Tribal epistemologies (pp. 79-115). Ashgate.