Modern Civilization and its People without Spirit

Victor M Toledo (ex Secretary of Natural Resources in Mexico)

Translated from the Mexican daily, La Jornada

“The world is living the most dangerous moment in its history”, the United States’ principle intellectual, Noam Chomsky, has said, and his assertion couldn’t be more terrifying. Today, to the climate crisis we have to add the danger of nuclear war, the invalidation of democratic mechanisms ( the United States and Brazil, inhabited by over 500 million citizens are governed by two lunatics elected by their own people) and Covid19. The pandemic has not only turned the world upside down, it has also brought the entire humanity to its knees. The human species has knelt down in the face of an unstoppable phenomenon with almost a million victims which as we have maintained, and which has been demonstrated, has been a reaction of the natural world against a series of irrationalities imposed by industrial systems of food production, which are the ultimate source of zoonosis. (viruses that pass from animals to humans). At least until the vaccine appears, we human beings will have to face the fear of the unknown as did our ancestors in the face of lightning, volcanic eruptions, or earthquakes.  All of the hyper-technological apparatus of the modern world has been outdone by an invisible being. The machines have once again been beaten by an organism. Is there a lesson to be learned here? There are many; but one central one… the mother of all lessons.

The civilization (industrial, technocratic, capitalist, and patriarchal) that today dominates a good part of the planet has been built upon a mistaken foundation. If there is one attribute that marks human evolution it is communality, collective organization based on mutual aid…on solidarity. This trait not only made possible the survival of the human species for 296 thousand years, but it also should be considered a logical consequence of the evolutionary path traced by the species of social animals, a theme that has been carefully analyzed by sociobiology. Communality, defined by P. Kropotkin (1907) as institutions of mutual aid, was present throughout tribal organization, in village communities and trade unions, in the medieval city, and today continues to provide a center of resistance in indigenous communities and in rural, urban, and industrial cooperatives. Modern civilization, on the contrary, operates upon a rationality that is the extreme opposite of this. It considers the competition among individuals to be its central dogma, a fallacy constructed upon an erroneous interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution which has permitted the justification of the dominance of private property, the concentration of wealth, and of capitalism.

These two radically opposed interpretations of the significance of social organization are, in turn, related to two radically opposed conceptions of the natural world. The communal vision rests on the idea of the sacredness of nature as a living being, as the source of life, and the receptor of the dead…as the Mother Earth. The modern world overthrew this image and with its vision of science constructed a conception of the natural world as an inanimate mechanical system; a machine to be scrutinized, controlled, dominated, and, finally, exploited. “Both animist thought and mechanistic thought are metaphorical,” R. Sheldrake points out in his famous book The Rebirth of Natured. “But while mythic and animist thought is based on metaphors taken from life processes, mechanistic thought appeals to those   taken from machines fabricated by man.” The idea of the conquest of nature is inseparable from sexual imagery, as feminist studies have shown, but also leads to behaviors totally opposed to those of the animist/mythic metaphor.

While human beings still accepted with humility the existence of a superior being, product of a collective intuition and fruit of a direct connection with life itself, they facilitated dialogue, reciprocity, compassion, and consequently, the brother/sisterhood that allows community. That is to say, spirituality (not necessarily religiosity) and communality are inseparable. Under the pretense of the conquest of nature, on the other hand, the human turned proud, and in its current version (as in The Wolf of Wall Street) individualist, arrogant, materialist and hedonistic… human beings transformed into beings made to compete and win at all cost, beyond all laws, rules, principles, and scruples.  They became masters of the arts of simulation and lies. If the world of today is turned upside down and on the verge of chaos, this is due to the domination of spiritless beings applying themselves every day in all the fields of human endeavor:  the economy, politics, diplomacy, the army, science, religion and intellectual creativity. Only beings with conscience will save the species. They are already beginning to do so.