Preface Introduction The Domesticators The Desert Fathers The Puritans The Mechanists The Dance of Neoteny and Ontogeny   Notes Index

It is hard to be content with the theory that people are bad and will always do the worst. [2]

Deforestation continues today in the Amazon basin, Malaysia, and the Himalayan frontier. "Much of the soil of interior China and the uplands of the Ganges, Euphrates, and Misissippi rivers has been swept into their deltas." Descartes: animals feel no pain since they have no souls. The change began 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. [3]

"Likely [the change] was irrational (though not unlogical) and unconscious, a kind of failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence, an irrationality beyond mistakenness, a kind of madness." A sick society. Freud wondered if all of mankind had become neurotic. In the last two centuries, it is estimated that 160 million have died at war. [4] George Steiner refers to "collective personality disintegration." [5]

Abos live as guests, rather than as masters. They are the normal standard from which we have deviated. This normality is present within us. [6] In normal times, we grew up surrounded by living plants, birds, real sunshine and rain, animal calls, human voices, etc.

Hunter gatherers didn't need a house to symbolize social status. Individual rocks and trees known to parents and grandparents were important throughout life. There is no wildness or tameness. Human power over nature is centered on handcrafts. [8] The abo child will not graduate from the natural world, but into its significance. The end of childhood is the beginning of lifelong study.

There is no end to what can be learned. Moderns have external models of order & not the community of life, but books, ranks and professions, machines. [12] John Collier: saw the goodness of creation, and had a sense of being at home in the world.

Our capacity for elderhood and judgment is restricted. [16] The only society more dangerous than one run by children (Lord of the Flies) is one run by childish adults.

Chapter 2: The Domesicators

First crops planted 5,000 years before cities. Hunter-gatherers for 3 million years, to the beginning of the Pleistocene. First farmers and domesticators east of the Mediterranean. They "exceeded their hunter forebears in possessions, and altered their surroundings & and were the creators and victims of new attitudes, expectations, and mythology." [19] The farmer and herder kept hunting. The dog-man collaboration is very old. Changes of thought and perception between Pleistocene and Mesopotamia. "These shifts have to do with the quality of attention rather than ideas; with the significance of place rather than the identity of nations; with the theme of duality; with the subtle effects of food and trophic patterns on thought and expression; with the accumulation of made things and possessions that was part of village life; and, finally, with some of the subtler influences of domestication on the ways people saw themselves on the land, as well as their plants and animals." [20-21]

A: Quality of Attention. Differences in daily hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching the surroundings. All sound is a voice. Sounds could tell the hunter, herder, or farmer of events out of sight. Noise of cities deaden the ear. [22] The hunter cannot expect anything, therefore he must pay wide and intense attention. Wild plants and animals have predictable habitats, and paying attention to habitat patterns can lead to unseen food. With farmers, keenness of attention was replaced with focus on generation. Paid attention to weather and calendar. Planting annual crops year after year burned a pattern into the mindscape. [focussed attention, goals. Wandering dog tracks vs. deep ruts of corporate droid daily routine & dog chasing its tail, stationary gyroscope. Clocks, checklist of tasks. Trend from flexibility to rigid inflexiblity.]

B: Significance of Place. [23] Village is a center, fuel is one place, water another. [24] Land is dotted with landmarks, places of mythological and spiritual importance, deep time as well as present, rich. "The hunter seemed to inhabit the land body like a blood corpuscle, while the farmer was centered in it and could scan it as a whole." Became embedded, defensive. [25] "It became far more feasible for 500 men to exclude outsiders from fifteen square miles than it had been for ten to bar interlopers from 1,500 square miles. Hunters had a jealous sense of occupancy, but borders were negotiable. Farmers marked turf with stones identified with protective spirits. [Abo territory w/15 mile radius, droid territory w/20-50 foot radius.] The land's "contours, springs, caves, vegetation, and landforms are the surface of a giant, like a sheltering and nourishing mother." thus sedentary people created Mother Earth. Few mother artifacts from the Stone Age.

Farmers were nourished and protected by the land, mothered. Plants and animals were subordinated as the gods became more human. The hunter survived by gifts, the farmer earned survival through labor. For farmers, big difference between ease of childhood [heaven] and the hard labor of maturity [hell]. The adult senses the loss of a perfect world & Garden of Eden story, [Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Gilgamesh]. Soils were gradually ruined. Wild foods gradually diminished. Many problems. Drought, parasites. Bad years. Farmers dreamed of a perfect world. [26]

Diminishing returns caused by man, guilt, sin. Farmers resented easy life of nomads. Mother Earth, sometimes withholding, came under suspicion. [27] "What are the results of a lifelong subordination to mother? Among them are resentment and masked retaliations, displaced acts of violence, and the consequent guilt." [28]

C: Duality Something was either in the village, or out of it. Helped crops or destroyed. Wild or tame. Weeds or crops. Simplified ecosystem of the farm led to certainty of judgements. [29] Fetus: paradise of I-am-everything. Infant: I + mom. Adult: diversity and complexity [integration with All]. Getting stuck in me/mom is devastating in a universe of oppositions and conflicts. [Big Daddy is regression to fetal stage. Nomads accepted complexity.] Resolution of contradictions is mature state. [Now, we feed at the nipple of Mother Inc. Have job or don't have job. Marketing leads to perpetual hunger, consumer is never satisfied and at peace. Constant anxiety and panic. In corporation, always suckling, never independent and mature.]

At death of childhood, kid moves from flesh mother to Mother Earth, a life-long uterine relationship. In patriarchy, moves instead to masculinist world. Life cycle and crop cycle is regressive, not growth. Society is constantly pre-adolescent, endless courtship of Mother. [30] Farmers focussed on seed germination and livestock estrus. Nomads had more alternatives than farmers. With farmers, it was either boom or bust, despite all human efforts. [One Mother, then family with Big Dad (an integrating trend of growth?), then Big Dad only. To nomad, all is god, to farmer, god is human mother. This is a narrowing and distancing from the All, a regression. Earth is sacred to matriarchy, power is sacred to patriarchy (right of dominant male to fuck).] A mother who is deficient or absent can be traumatizing. [Perhaps this led to pantheon, where other deities could be invoked, driven by continuous loss of productivity of soil and forest.]

D: Trophic Pattern: meaning food, to feed, nutrition. Nomads casual and carefree, flexible and adaptable. Farmer is constantly apprehensive, for 10,000 years. Nomads were not fixated on mother, and were thus seen by farmers as unfeeling and brutish, and this was projected upon animals as well. [31] To farmers, wild life is not part of their poetic mystery. On farm, fewer than 20 types of plants and animals were used. "Civilization increased the separation between the individual and the natural world as it did the child from the mother." Farmers bore responsibility for certain failure from year to year & responsible for success that is beyond their control. "The judgement is guilt, for which the penality is scarcity." A full belly is never enough, abundance only sets the mark by which scarcity is measured. [The world is not a Good place, it is a realm of evil, which is sometimes good. Nomads spent 1/3 of time on survival. Farmers much more. Droids 60 to 80 hrs in artificial system with no safety nets.]

Nutrition. Domesticated foods less nutritious, and preservation methods further reduce nutrition. "It is widely observed that domesticated varieties of fruits and vegetables differ from their wild ancestors in carbohydrate/protein/fat ratios as well as vitamin and mineral content." Wild food supply diminishes with time. Chronic preoccupation with food. Fixates person on infantile oral-anal romance, a regression. [Current growth in US obesity?] Nomads ate huge variety of fresh foods, including invertabrates. Moderns are extremely fussy eaters. [32] Society made shift from totemic to caste/class & wild animals seen less as metaphors central to personal identity. [Vertical to horizonal heirarchy.]

E: Possessions [33] number of possessions is biggest difference between farmers and nomads. [34] Belongings came to be associated with personal identity. The richness of the nomadic life was replaced with the boredom of a static existence in a primarily man-made world. Belongings were a pain killer & needed more and more. A hunter is a Me in a non-me world. His goal is to establish lines of connectedness or relationship to the other and outer. There is no vague "identity with nature." Relationships with the Other form a secondary level of personal identity. [35] For farmers, the Other has disappeared. Man-made reality & extension of tamed inner self. Wild things are enemies. "Impulses, fears, and dreams &Ęthe realm of the unconscious & no longer are represented by the community of wild things with which I can work out a meaningful relationship." Self is now defined by trade and political subordination. Unified cosmos of nomads is replaced by wild/human split. Identity is stunted.

Tools are part of late-juvenile and early-adolescent development. Farmers saw land itself as a tool, and as a definer of the the self. With shift from subsistance to monoculture, non-farming specialists appear in the village. [36] New reality is like the pot to the potter:

1/ wild world is chaos.

2/ like his pot, he and the world are made objects.

3/ central core of non-livingness in himself

4/ ultimate outputs of self are acts of will or creativity

5/ daily labor is at the heart of his being

5/ daily labor is at the heart of his being

6/ relationship to others is exchange of things and personal achievement is measured in accumulation

7/ non-human world is a resource to be shaped by man. First synonym for wilderness in Roget's Thesaurus is "disorder."

As chiefdoms grew, farmers or slaves became possessions and commodities. [37] Gradually, the planet shifted to thing from thou. to product, from organism, something to be possessed, rather than encountered. With the comoditization of humanity, the cosmos became ambiguous. Itness replaced numen, in landscape and inner self, religions have tried to resolve this conflict.

F: Domestication. Humans observed animals for a long time. Domesticated animals change their essence. [38] Plumper, docile, submissive, reduced mobility, simplification of complex behaviors (such as courtship), "the broadening or generalizing of signals to which social responses are given (such as following behavior), reduced hardiness, less specialized environmental and nutritional requirements. Sum: Infantilization. Life is limited. Human relations took domesticated forms: slave, sex partner, companion, caretaker, family member. Distinctions between human and animal breached. Pet-keeping uses animals for psychological needs. "Before civilization, animals were seen as belonging to their own nation and to be the bearers of messages and gifts of meat from a sacred domain. In the village they became possessions." [39] Fat, deformed drudges became a part of the child's sense of self. The developmental process was prohibited from proceeding to completion.

Husbandry destroys a climax community, replaces it with a simpler and earlier developmental stage. (analagous to human development) [from simple to complex, from separate to integrated, from weak to strong, from incoherent to coherent. City state has no natural equivalent, infancy is farm state. Modern Gaia is climax state of evolution] Early eco phases are simpler, less efficient, and less stable. See Eugene Odum, Science 164 (1969) p. 262-70. If left alone, goes through phases of replacement, until climax or virgin condition. [Civilization is reverse development, Greek decline.] Husband pulls weeds and cuts brush. [40] Grazing stabilizes youthful state, plateau of immaturity, a disclimax. Disclimax harmonious with human psycho disclimax. Only hunting land is authentic and true. "Agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured in the human existence.

Farmers became limited in space, afraid of wandering too far, impeded separation from the womb. [41] Hunters proved maturity by going alone into wild country and solitude. Farmers dreamed of a better world, a lost unity. The villager's "identity was spread around among things, insufficiently internalized and consolidated." [42] Totemic identity was changed to identity with made things. The man was made, and so was the world. His environment was fabricated. Made things were not indistinct from himself. Important issues beyond the low development of the farmer were repressed.

Infants are ruled by their stomach, but growth moves them beyond this. Farmers and artisans were ruled by the collective stomach, very absorbed in food production. Hunters ruled by relationships, kinships, complexity. For the farmer and child, food is central, while in true maturity, it is only the beginning of thought. [43] Farming fixed the daily routine and increased the amount of work. Drudgery became normal, and savages would be scorned. Routine like autistic child or demented captive animal. Daphne Prior: Farming is a state of surrender, and the farmer is a defeated captive. [141 Scheduled work routines conceal psychosis, which erupts on vacations or quitting.] [RR: Industrial worker even more removed from food making, and more captive.] "Like a prisoner of war, he would survive if he could psychologically adapt."

Monotony is cherished & clothing, routines, friends. [44] Like 2 year old's clutching, fear of trips, strangers, and new tastes. This is useful among young, but is outgrown with maturity. Clinging conformity prohibits maturity. Chief Seattle saw whites as wrong but human. [45] His perspective of self and Other was broader, more generous. Villagers were hoarders, and loyalty and conformity were crucial. [esp. Japanese society] Nomad: "loving acceptance of the strangeness of life, the wit to become fully oneself and yet not estranged from the infinite diversity of the Other, the leisured, free openness to self-unfolding..." Farmers could do this to some degree, if inspired. "The final phases of maturity, in which the seasoned individual becomes capable of mentorship and spiritual guidance, are in some degree within reach of all in such places. (subsistance farms)"

"The difference between the psychological world of the adult and the child in the villages was not as great as that between adults and children among the ancestral hunters." [46]

Chapter 3: The Desert Fathers [47] The desert edge is the home of Western thought. It is where farming began. Aridity of culture. Desert is silent and empty. Too little life, too much heat, too little water, too much sky. History is primarily biography and nations. [48] Broad spaces dwarf and emphasize human figure. Civilization began on narrow edges of desert. [after moving north from the lushness of central Africa] [49] Strip of fertile land ends abruptly at desert, with an isolating effect. Civ was 70 centuries of chaos and building. Expansion and collapse. Today, tiny villages on the ruins of massive cities. Success brought environmental decline.

The cycle began with concentration of authority and organization, war-like expansion, creating irrigation systems. More water increased the amount of productive land. As population grew, people emigrated upstream, following timber cutters. [50] Livestock denuded the slopes. Faster runoff, flooding, etc. Pushed to the limits, farming was intensified, begging outbreaks of plant diseases and pests. Pests no longer had wild food.

As civ grew, diseases were brought in by raiders and traders. Four horsemen of the apocalypse: conscription, enslavement, famine, and disease. Floods brought cataclysm, as mud filled irrigation systems that took centuries to build. [51] Cycle of catastrophe and renewal & invisible to human lifetime. Hebrews were nomads, outisders, scornful of cities (mixed with yearning). They made a virtue of their homelessness. "In a Semitic storm god they found a traveling deity who was everyplace and therefore not bound by location." Farmers were allied with the cities, and the pastoralists were not. Cain and Abel. [Desert couldn't support sedentary herding.] Hunters were male, and gatherers were female. [52] Farmers worshipped the great mother (pantheons of goddesses). Herders were patriarchal [desert wasn't generous mother]. Wandering peoples of the desert were enemies to the city folk. Farmers: "cosmic cycle of life, the sacredness of soil and water, the spirituality of particular places, and reverence for seasonal rhythms and harmonies of growth and decay, birth and death." Herders hated shoveling manure and hard work. Hated city's pursuit of vanity and money. 53 Cities would inevitably fail, because God was just & flood, famine, plague, or invasion. "The Hebraic ideal was an extraordinary ambition: self-styled exiles, fugitives, wanderers, a community of alienated souls who disavowed both the substance and form of the bonding ties by which men had acknowledged kinship with earth and tribe from the dawn of consciousness and which they had given form in the exemplary and metaphorical model of myth." Adopted patriarchal authoritarianism.

Hebrew myth denied interconnectedness, estrangement was the condition of all men. "The new antimythological myth was history." Their myth explained creation, but it was linear, not cyclic. It was psychologically disfunctional with regard to sustaining the ideal of estrangement. Its truths were not linked to earthy phenomenon, body, or family. Truths came from prophets in written form. [54] Older myths were man-culture-nature-divine. Hebrew myth "extolled the mystery of God's purpose and the discontinuity of events." Its history was a broken point to point sequence, full of random turns. No universal harmony. Its skepticism was previously unknown. It pressed self-scrutiny, not merging with the world. Life was a sensuous snare. Hebrew attention to the sky. The "hidden, invisible, unknowable power that seems more akin to the wind than concrete things. Waiting, silence, emptiness, and nothingness led to truth, self, and ultimate states. "In general, none of the great world religions is life affirming." [55]

Aldous Huxley: emptiness is conducive to concentration, hallucination, sensory deprivation, spiritual exaltation, madness, and death. [57] Herbert Schneidau on historical view: Linear time. World is random in its patterns. Nature and culture are opposed. God is apart from the world, art, and culture. God is not localized, and his actions are intrusive, unexpected interruptions. God gives messages to selected spokesmen, and they are not repeated. Meaning comes from prophesy. Personal effects are skepticism, alienation, and self-analysis. [58] For the Hebrew fathers, there was no afterlife, no access to God beyond prayer, and no intrinsic order on earth. This system eventually penetrated into cities, and transcendence conquered the natural. Hebrews did not value desert. The main thrust of history was estrangement and abstraction. Monotheism "tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots." Judaic perfection was nearly impossible.

Polytheism is more appropriate to the multiple aspects of the human psyche. [59] It provides diversity. Thinking is polytheistic, because opposites always change and mix together. "The monotheistic search for a single sense of identity makes us feel guilty for not getting it all together, which is impossible in a plural universe." There is no center in a diverse world. "Belief divorced form tangible support is tiring, dull, out of touch." Monotheism socially becomes fascism, imperialism, or capitalism. Psychologically, it is rigid, fixed, and linear.

Ideology is us against them. [60] It is an irrational dualism. The desert is a land of opposites. "The "cradle of civilization" is also the cradle of fanatic ideology & witness the interminable desert wars. 61 The desert represented sin. Demons and devils vs. saints and angels. As the scriptures moved to Europe, so did the desert. It took the sacredness from the land, and the myths from the pagans. [62] The desert fathers scourged adolescence. [63] Patriarchy denies the woman and child any weight, autonomy, and reality. Adult males are the serious world. Protestants made much of the idea of paradise. Adam's pursuit of sensual pleasure led to the Fall, hence a swing to repression. [65] The adolescent becomes psychologically infantlike on his own in order to be reborn culturally as an adult. [66] Hebrews did not transfer mother connection to the earth. The loss of mother plunges the individual forever into infantile dualism. Less capacity to establish a mature relationship with the other sex or with any Other.

The goal was separation of the sexes, not integration. [68] Internal disharmony. Ideologist mentors perpetuate their own adolescent obsessions and thwarted rites of passage. [70] Americans have inherited Hebrew themes of alienation, disengagement, and unrelatedness & hence chaos. Puberts are amputed from nature, not allowed to become happily at home in the world, causing grievous dislocation, he will look for an ultimate answer. The desert answer is that his painful incompleteness is the true mature experience, and that the meaninglessness of the natural world is its meaning. Acted upon, we wound the planet. Central dogma of west separates spirit from nature. Each generation is impaired.

Normally, the young shift from the body of the mother to the body of the landscape. [72] Womb -> body/face -> natural world. In the west, nature is a limbo, or an evil snare. The normal sequence of mental growth is broken. Damaged adolescents make bad mommies and daddies. People with a damaged inner world will see the outer world as damaged, and rear their children with this outlook.[71]

Chapter 4: The Puritan. [76] In the desert, there is no balance between relatedness and uniqueness, only definition by isolation. Universe was binary. [77] Herdsmen vs. farmers. Nomads from the north invaded farmers, conquered them, became farmers, and were themselves conquered by nomads. [78] Greeks separated mind from matter, subject from object, form from substance. This had the effect of losing the understanding what it is to be a part of the world, and not be an enemy of it. [79] A normal child assumes that all things that move, such as clouds, are alive. Hellenists destroyed myth with the best of intentions, but this was accompanied by disillusion and anxiety, like today. The solution was a rational understanding of the world & no purpose, spiritual activity, ceremonial celebrations. It was not an alternative to the mythic, ritual foundation for passage-making in the life stages of an individual. [80] In 3rd century BC, Greek rationalism met the Hebrew scriptures. Shared goals of spiritual and intellectual abstraction and asceticism. Third and fourth century Christians were fanatically otherworldly, psychologically and ecologically destructive. "The New Testament became one of the world's most antiorganic and antisensuous masterpieces of abstract ideology, flecked with raw, ragtag bits of obscure patriarchal genealogy and fixation on vengeance and tribal war." European Christianity did soften, to allow old remants of pagan traditions. Myth, in Christian clothes, seeped into the church, a drift towards sanity, climaxing in the 12th and 13th C's.

St Francis of Assissi loved the natural world. Courtly love and the feminine were recovered. Natural images appeared in manuscript illustrations. Living forms sculpted on cathedrals. 82 Every falling leaf or calling bird was a message to man. This connectedness was symbolized as intercourse. Medieval Christianity had at-homeness in the world. The dualism of the desert does not translate well to a land with soil rain, trees, plants, abundance, much like the Garden of Eden. [81] Most fertile soils were often those most in need of drainage. [83] Reclamation of wetlands played a big role in civilized history and psychohistory. These muck lands were the landscape of human origin. Puritanical reformers protested the Church's tolerance of worldly numina, a terrestrial expression of that which they had always feared most: their own bodies. Puritans in 16th C. The city was like the desert of the Hebrews, and Christian puritans of Roman times. Nature was everywhere in Europe, except in the city. [85] The Protestants emphasized not only disgust and horror and fascination with bowels and genitals, but with death and the curse on the whole realm of the organic & on life itself. Being out of touch with the body is the basic schizoid position. It is transferred to the outer world. It is very aware of pollution, of what is clean and unclean.

Healthy people made the move from the mother relationship to the earth relationship. [86] Puritans were estranged from their bodies, mothers, and the landscape of childhood. [87] This leads to abuse of the body, and abuse of the natural world. The body is the lower self. Desert is most antiseptic and sanitary place. "Introspection turned the wetland of the natural self into a dry rectitude. Protestants took the harsher aspects of both testaments, and added a stronger sense of evil, and putting individual choice in place of the chosen people. [88] At adolescence, the body is made diabolical, and nature can be grasped as flawed. [89] Protestants saw America as paradise, and were romantic about it for a while, and then tried to sterilize it. [92] Fundamentalists are moving back to Calvin and the desert prophets.

Chapter 5: The Mechanists. [93] The city is a sink of psychological problems. In the individual, these problems are partly caused by the city, but from a long view, the problems cause the city. The problem is a disease of attention & how sensory input is processed and perceived. [94] Animal behavior changes when population exceeds the norm. Rats and rabbits congregate in dense immobile clusters. Horses and mice abort. Fish show increased homosexuality. All show physioligical abnormalities and impaired reproductive lives. In primates, the group degenerates into chaos, with killing, maiming, tyranny, attacks on females and young, and heavy stress on the whole group. In humans, groups don't recognize environmental damage soon enough, or may be too rigid to made adjustments.

Modern psychology and anthropology have yet to discover the inherent harms in overcrowding. [95] Urban stress and anxiety are associated with manifold symptoms, including virtually every physical complaint and emotional twitch, sexual deviation, and chaotic child rearing. Tendency to paranoia, pervasive fear. Children raised in cities are doomed. [96] In embroyology, the earlier a defect occurs, the more general and irreparable its effect. The psyche is more vulnerable in the early months of life. There is a timetable & if muscles aren't used by a certain age, they wither. If senses and perceptions aren't used, this has lasting effects. The town-bred child, removed from nature, is pathetic, having only bookish knowledge.

Human nature is limited in its capacity to respond hospitably to strangers and has an inbuilt, predictable shutting-down response to high human density. [98] The growing child needs to see the diversity of nonhuman life, to encourage its inner diversity. In the city, adequate otherness is seldom encountered. Humans normally grow up in a world of the Other. By 12, a child usually develops an association with an animal [thus totem clans.] [99] Helplessness. Infant can do nothing for itself, thus its power fantasies. Progress is this fantasy, increasing control, and domination of nature. The quest for power is the trait of our time. The dream of omnipotence is an infantile dream that should diminish, rather than grow, with personal maturity. Unchecked, it becomes an obsession. Leads to polarization: us against them.

Among plants and animals, the child sees thousands of metaphors of parts of himself. In each episode, the rest are the Other. In nature, the eater is also eaten, there is no helplessness. 100 The blue jay eaten today is replaced by another blue jay tomorrow. The city woman is afraid of nature, and feels helpless living in mass society, grieves for something lost. Security is a lifelong struggle against others for status and domination. Nature loses its ability to hold the universe together. Failing this purpose, it can become an enemy.

Artificial reality. Is the world grown or made? There is a phase in development where things are grouped or categorized (of earth or of water, etc.). It is important to distinguish cultural from natural. [101] Man has made God in his own image. The Creator is seen as a Maker, not a grower. Hunters lived in a world where everything glimmered with life. Townfolk live in a world of dead things with no inner fire. Untouched orphans have retarded development, or die. [102] The child leaves the mother at 3 and goes out into the world. He has nine years to integrate with the nonhuman Other, and find his totem identity, which is needed for adolescence. A city kid feels that nonlivingness is the normal state. There is no unfolding, no unique inner life. After adolescence, he will either believe that all life, including people, is machines, or, the only true living things are people. He becomes either a spectator or an exploiter. The world does not think or feel or communicate, it does not have special messages for him, it does not have independent purposes of its own. He is damaged by living in an unfeeling world, like the orphan.

God the Maker works from the outside. [103] The model of the human body as a machine. Reality is whatever you make it. If living things are chemical-physical compounds, then you are only an accumulation of compounds & behave accordingly. Chaos. The task of youth is to discover the structure of the world: constancy, patterns, rhythm, systems, stable relations. A coherent world provides stability and safety (a hand rail) while the child grows. Civilization is order, geometry, and symmetry, but not really. [104] City does not provide natural order, but repetition. Inhuman scale does not provide nonhuman Other. It is unnaturally centralized and mechanized. It does not provide the food that the child's development needs.

Reading is listening to a preacher or a prophet, the way of the Hebrews, in opposition to the myths. [Natural development is learning from the living world.] Do not grieve for a lost paradise, because it never existed. Denies what we yearn for: place, nature, continuity with earth, significance of seasons. [Mall as paradise. Shopping as path to divine.]. Educated know that lost paradise is an infantile dream. The illiterate continue to grieve the loss. Normally, the child is 3 years with mom, 9 years with nature, and then to mastery of social relations. In the city, the second step is gone. [105] During this time his frustration and desire will be anesthetized by portrayals of the nonhuman as entertainment & Disney, toys, pictures, decorations. The child of 13, without nature, has keen interest in machines. Man-portrayed nature is incoherent.

The years 9 to 12 also involve socialization, but Otherness catalyzes this. City child realizes deeply that the state of man is without pattern or purpose, men have an unlimited capacity to make things. Nonhuman elements of the self must be treated with suspicion. One must take control of the inner and outer world either as a tyrant or as God's steward. 106 Chaos drives a rage for order. Making a new order destroys the existing order. There is the 9 to 12 spectrum of years in which natural order can be internalized. If chaos is internalized, then crippled and angry.

From the air, a city looks more organized than wilderness. Loss of orientation to sky, stars, plants, makes schizoid confusion. Location by grid coordinates & like the desert, where all is the same, and one's place is a matter of tribal affiliation and ideology. [Most nomads stay in a region, but desert nomads must cover wide areas.] Each of the episodes in the book leads to dislocation. [107] The city is wilderness in disarray, a pandemonium. Nature is a guide to thought, as a metaphor of social concerns, as poetic significance. Menacing disintegration leads to neurotic quest for control. Self-abnegation, fanatic cleanliness, power over nature. [108] Landscape made with Mastery defines by subordination, not analogy (myth). The archtypal role of nature is the development of the human personality, for it embodies the poetic expression of ways of being and relating to others. Moderns, who miss integration with nature phase, have no grounding in nature. Grief and sense of loss. Modern social relationships are brittle, because people grow up in a vaccuum. Nature is a training ground for equilibrium within complex otherness, liveliness, and affirmation of ambiguities, not fear of them.

Chapter 6: "The Dance of Neotony and Ontogeny". [109] Neotony is juvenile characteristics in an adult, or the development of adult features in a juvenile. Ontogeny is the development of the individual. Modern is self-made person, chooses what to be: body + career. Ontogeny: the person emerges in a genetic calendar by stages, with time-critical constraints and needs, so that instinct and experience act in concert. Maturity is reached by spiral, not straight line. Each new cycle enlarges the previous one. Ontogeny is human and primate, based on an extended life: extended youth + extended longevity. The cycles and stages of retarded growth are neotony. [110] Neotony extends, specializes, and orders experiences essential to the emergence of consciousness and the psyche. See Joseph Pearce, Magical Child. Emerging sense of self and separateness, the growth of a confident, centered being who reaches out to new experience, perceiving a universe in a plural reality. Human is programmed to expect certain responses at certain times.

The child has a hunger to fill archetypal forms with specific meaning. Identity and meaning are built via oscillation between autonomy and unity, separateness and relatedness. It takes 30% of a human life span. It is a pulse, presenting the mind with wider wholes, from womb to mother and body, to earth, to cosmos. The goal is to identify the self, leading to a mature sense of relatedness. [112] The first 20 years is timed events occurring in an extraordinary interplay of the person with other people and the numinosity of the nonhuman. The success of this sequence depends on good nurturing. Evolution of infantile stages is accompanied by the emergence of parental and social capacity. Neotony is the plunge into immaturity. This journey is directed by the ontogeny of the adults. Human development is complex, and the scope for error is broad. Some repair processes are built in. Psychotherapy exists in all cultures & reexperience trouble spots. Nurturers provide mental catalysts of required experiences. [113] Corrective efforts can be screwed up. A city child will have a hard time achieving mature relationship with cosmos.

In first four chapters, each epoch has damaged human ontogeny, but agriculture was the most decisive. Ag favored large groups of people. Decisions not made by whole, but by subset. Success rewarded with power, not prestige. Authoritarian leadership was seized, not granted. Ag required people with the acumen of children. Infantilized animals and people through domestication. Important components amputated or changed. [114] Obedience required by organization was juvenile and submissive, proud loyalty, blood-brother same-sex bonding, tight conformity, willingness to suffer and endure based on pride. Totems of nature replaced with domesticated animal model. Nature was a competitor. Other human groups are regarded as other species, so the displacement, enslavement, and killing of others is logical. Severed from ancient natural and cosmic traditions, the lack of normal development led to Great Mother, which invited the takeover by an even greater father.

To correct our modern problems, we do not need to go back to a mother fixation, with its amibivalence of hating and adoring, fearing separation and yet resenting maternal power. [115] With village life, number of children rose from 4 or 5 to as many as 16 (50% survival in each case). Less attention and less milk for each child. Not being nomad, the child was carried less. Surrogate caretakers were used. The failure of maternal bonding is the fearful, tentative, slow-thinking, psychologically crippled personality. At adulthood, they become poor mothers. Their kids do not achieve separation from her in a healthy way, which affects their relationship to the nonhuman. [116] The fantasies, anxieties, and hostilities of unresolved immaturity are acted on or repressed and redirected in many ways. There is an enduring grief, a tentative feeling for the universe, and a thin love of nature over deep fears. Ag culture controlled people by manipulating these stresses, perpetuating their timorous search for protection, their dependence, their impulses of omnipotence and helplessness, irrational surges of adulation and hate, submission to authority, and fear of the strange. This created a psychology appropriate to a man made world. Ontogeny is bent to suit new ideologies. Desert fathers reacted against momism with patriarchy. Wrathfully demythologizing, deritualizing, and desacralizing the earth, fostering mobility and the iconography of the Word, the Hebrew prophets, Christian purists, and Hellenic Greeks sought to wrench the human personality into a more grown-up style. Individual responsibility, i mportant to them, resembled the juvenile superego.

Repudiating myth in content and ritual act, western man broke bonds with the earth, soil, and nature, to return power to the father, and dissociated the human spirit from seasons and celestial rounds. [117] To do so, they awakened fear of the body and world, to make man alien, to glorify separation anxiety. There was a terrible loss of relatedness. These desert patriarchs exploited the adolescent capacity for abstraction & and made it terminal & by despising all such [natural or mythic] sources except the Bible and its exegesis. [118] Initiation rites complete a crucial phase of the life cycle by using the realm of nature as the language of religious thought. The natural world can become an object of veneration if it is first an object of thought, as the prototype of coherence, in combination with healthy maternal care. The West of the Protestant era coupled desert thought with scientific mechanism and literary secular humanism in an assault on the basis of place attachment in every individual. Contempt for the body, and revulsion against the pullulations of life and the horror of slime, decay, excretion, birth, and death. Lacking the perception and affirmation of plurality and diversity, the self decays into duality.

Tribes recognize pollution, and include taboos in cultural practices. [119] Aversion has a limited but positive function. Puritans saw contamination everywhere, the result of the Fall, and the metaphor became destructive. The psychotic tries to change the world to meet his needs, by performing his impulses, instead of symbolizing them. Mania: progress or fall backward. [not achieve stability, wholeness, and wisdom]. An adolescent fear of regression. Environmentalists do the same changing the world, "particularly in animal protectionism, wild-area (as opposed to the rest of the planet) preservation, escapist naturism, and beautification & all of which maintains two worlds, hating compromise, and confusing the issues with good or evil in people. The difficulty of our time is that no cultus exists, with its benign cadre of elders, to guide and administer the transition from the juvenile stage to adult life.

Today, we inherit the past. We are separated by many generations from a whole way of life. We don't know how to make decisions by a council of the whole, we don't know how to live nomadically with few possessions, we don't have highly developed initiation ceremonies, natural history as everyman's vocation, a total surround of wild otherness with spiritual significance, or the natural way of the mother and infant. Yet the competence for these things is potentially in each of us. [121] What all cultures seek is to clarify and confirm the belongingness of their members, even at the expense of perpetuating infantile fears, of depriving the members of the object of their quest for adaptedness and making their only common ground their nonrootedness. [122] The "adaptability" society celebrates childhood and youth, and despises age. Its members cling to childhood, for their own did not serve its purpose. Wide-eyed wonder, nonjudgmental response, and the immediate joy of being are beautiful to see; I hope some kernel of them remains in the heart of every adult. The ecstasy of the child has special purposes, when there is a good mother bond. The poorly bonded child looks for a new maternal reality in nature, which may be helpful.

Children in fascination with nature must grow beyong the fascination. An adult chosing between owls and progress will usually pick the latter. Given our modern upbringing, we cannot choose the forest and the owl. [123] There is not a choice between an owl and an oil well at all. In our society, those who choose the owl are not more mature. In an ancient hunter society, the need to choose would never arise. [124] All Westerners are heir not only to the nightmare, but to the legacy of the whole. We now have the world's flimsiest identity structures. By Paleolithic standards, we are childish adults, arrested development. Our society works because it requires dependence. The private cost is therapy, escapism, drugs, fits of rage and destruction, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies, and, perhaps worst, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive has having failed us. Today's world is the home of omnipotence and immediate satisfaction. There is no mother of limited resources or disciplining father, only a self in a fluid system. High percentage of neuroses in West.

Ecological destruction is not a lifestyle problem, but one of an epidemic of the psychopathic mutilation of ontogeny. [125] The fetus is suspended in water, tuned to the mother's chemistry and the biological rhythms that are keyed to the day and seasonal cycles. The respirational interface between the newborn and the air imprints a connection between consciousness (or wisdom) and breath. Gravity sets the tone of all muscle and becomes a major counterplayer in all movement. Identity formation grows from the subjective separation of self from not-self, living from nonliving, human from nonhuman, and proceeds in speech to employ plant and animal taxonomy as a means of conceptual thought and as a model of relatedness. Games and stories involving animals serve as projections for the discovery of the plurality of the self. [126] The environment of play, the juvenile home range, is the gestalt and creative focus of the face or matrix of nature. Ordeals in wilderness solitude and the ecological patterns underlying the protophilosophical narration of myth are instruments in the maturing of the whole person.

Only in the success of this extraordinary calendar does the adult come to love the world as the ground of his being. Culture rewards omissions and impairments, and produces them by interceding in the nurturing process, and so put a hold on development. Juvenile fantasies are articulated by both the land scalper and philosophical argument. The West is a vast testimony to botched childhood, to serve its own needs. History authorizes men of action and men of thought to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity. [127] The tapestry of the industrial present is chronic madness, countered by dreams of absolute control and infinite possession. Development is hampered by successive amputations. Self-actualization, personal therapy, and so on, are helpful to the individual, but antagonistic to the modern state, which needs fearful followers and slogan-shouting idealists. An ecologically harmonious sense of self and world is the inherent possession of everyone. Perhaps we do not need new religious, economic, technological, ideological, esthetic, or philosophical revolutions. We may not need to start at the top and uproot political systems, turn life-ways on their heads, emulate hunters and gatherers or naturalists, or try to live lives of austere privation or tribal organization. [129] The civilized ways inconsistent with human maturity will themselves wither in a world where children move normally through their ontogeny.

A normal process can be created for kids. Life in a small group in a spacious world can be provided at the proper period of passage. Adults will not be the best mentors. The problem may be more difficult to understand than solve. Beneath the veneer of civilization lies the human in us who knows the rightness of birthin gentle surroundings, the necessity of a rich nonhuman environment, play at being animals, the discipline of natural history, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberatin of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a very secret person undamaged in each individual. [130] We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of a reconciliation wit the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing metaphysics.

End notes: [132] Place to an Australian abo is continuous with the identity structure of the adult, not detachable or abstract. [135] Paradise is associated with the breast, and stories of it contain many mammary allusions. In Christianity, the notion of decline in history is in the story of the Fall & leaving the garden. Christian-era folks could readily see the deterioration of the Med. region. [136] The Anatolian Plateau and Iran are the worst examples. Rain was heavy from 5,000 to 2,000 BC, then dropped off (from deforestation?) for 2,000 years. [138] Because of the disorder in their lives, the agricultural pueblo people of SW US have perodic festivals in which all rules are broken and norms of behavior violated. Chaos provides rejuvenation and a fresh start. [like Carnival, Mardi Gras, May Day, Midsummer.] With farming, larger numbers became advantageous. Births each year, instead of 3 - 4 year spreads. In village, caretakers and wet nurses were available. 16 kids common.

Music, with its biological rhythms, allows us to re-experience unity of experience. It reduces inner tensions by resolving them and unifying them. [140] The more complex the music, the more fragmented the patient, the more fundamental the problem. Music holds things together. [recording of African women singing together in jungle w/ insects.] [145] Hebrews lived on marginal land. They associated morality and climate, and failure and punishment. Moses spent 40 years in wilderness, Jesus did 40 days. Moses didn't bond to Promised Land. To the prophets, internal backsliding and weakness were as bad as enemy nations.

"Persons with a negative identity resort to a rigid ideology to achieve totality at the expense of wholeness." says Jay Y. Gonen. [151] Traditional societies tempered idealism in young adults, outer world was poetic metaphor. Moderns deny metaphors, so young are literal, and the impulse of idealism gets political, radical, etc. The need for rebirth is projected upon the world, so that it, rather than one's own childish self, is to be destroyed. Herbert Schneidau: "Western thinking is strange, aberrant, and requires arduous training." Our mode of thinking is not "normal." [160] Teenagers very ideal, dreaming of a perfect world, while creating a new identity for their adult journey. Creates a target for their own improvement. Since modern teens personality is dissolved, idealism can be expressed as ideology.

Last: The deer sees my cherry seedlings as immediate food, does not recognize that letting them grow will lead to more food. Farmers can't see the destruction of land that takes longer than a lifetime. The importance of abo stories is to record a pattern that has led to survival, and to provide valuable instructions to the living. Today, kids are not taught patterns that have worked for millenia. They are taught patterns that have already failed.

- Richard Reese

Brief biography of Shepard:

Shepard has been an ardent voice crying out for the wilderness, as well as for its non-human inhabitants. We need them, he believes, not to subjugate to human use and productivity, but as elemental teachers who show us the wisdom of the natural world and our appropriate relationship to it. Many of Shepard's conclusions on the ills of society were reached by observing how far we have come from a pre-agrarian time when we participated in the natural order without subverting it to our desires.

The writings of Paul Shepard are a fascinating journey along the route back to a healthy future.

Paul Shepard was Avery Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate School. He is the author of Thinking Animals, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Man in the Landscape, and Nature and Madness, among others.