WHAT DO WE THINK WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE WORLD?
The last issue touched on the Scientific Revolution’s eagerness to use new discoveries to transform our lives. (‘Knowledge is power’) The writer Malcolm Guite describes this way of thinking as ‘Instrumental’ and contrasts it with a ‘Sacral’ attitude. They’re useful words to help us address the question posed above.
A shorter version of this essay was originally published in STA, now free to read at sta-serial.com
EVERYTHING HAS CONSEQUENCES. In pursuing our own existence we cannot fail to affect others, often rather deleteriously if, for example, we need to eat them to survive, but the ‘Instrumental’ view supposes that we can treat other beings as means to our non-essential ends without much regard for their own requirements; that we have an existential superiority (being somehow ‘above’ or ‘outside’ the natural world) which allows us anything to indulge our desires. Animals, plants, mountains and oceans are ‘resources’ for us to utilise. STA, looking squarely at the world and remembering what evolution tells us – that all creatures are related, that humans are not separate in any way – can see no justification for this idea; it takes a more ‘Sacral’ view.
STA et considera miracula – Stand still and consider the wondrous things
The Instrumental or Sacral dilemma runs deep, colouring our vision. Look, now, upon this picture, and on this: Cotan’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber and Bosschaert’s Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase. They are ‘counterfeit presentments’ (as Hamlet would call them) of natural things – plants, in fact – brought into a domestic setting. The artists (and, for that matter, Shakespeare) were contemporaries, the works completed within a decade. Both are beautifully painted with studied fidelity; both carefully composed and lit. I wouldn’t attempt to claim that one was a ‘better’ painting than the other.
At first sight, Cotan’s looks the more bizarrely unreal, Bosschaert’s a more conventional arrangement. But, in fact, the reverse is true. Cotan’s vegetables are in the larder, hung up on strings to preserve them from mice and rot – this is good housekeeping not proto-Surrealism. Bosschaert’s flowers, however, are a fantastic impossibility. They could never have been in bloom together, and no-one in seventeenth-century Holland would have cut them all to stick in a vase: they were much too precious. It is a fancy (and none the worse for that – so are most of the greatest works of art from the ‘Venus’ of Willendorf to Guernica), painted to appeal to the Instrumental minds of the newly-prosperous Dutch middle-classes. The blooms are kept separate so that the botanists and collectors can identify and admire them. Flowers are becoming assets, prized for rarity and freakishness. Even if sober-sided economic historians now claim that the famous ‘tulip mania’ of the 1630s is exaggerated, bulbs were certainly traded for huge sums. The flowers were not primarily valued for their aesthetic beauty or naturalness – they were commodities, like the expensive Chinese porcelain vase in which they are displayed. This is a picture about opulence, exoticism, virtuosity and possession. Nature is commandeered to show what a lot of money we’ve got.
Cotan has a different approach. Bosschaert’s clients did not want cabbage pictures – only poor people look at cabbages. Or, perhaps, those with a Sacral attitude. Cotan’s veg are not painted with Instrumental intent. This is neither food photography – it never occurs to us to wonder what they’d taste like – nor the endearing quaintness of the produce competition at a village show (‘Look at the size of my cucumber!’). Instead, he paints the innate integrity of these pieces of nature (or blessings of God, as he would more likely describe them). They are themselves, the humblest of things portrayed with a clear-eyed intensity that makes them the equals of kings. Sta et considera miracula Dei, as Cotan himself (he became a monk) doubtless often said.
The vegetables grown in a Spanish garden and the exotic flowers brought to the Netherlands are equally part of nature (both perhaps ‘improved’ by careful seed selection) but the attitudes of the artists painting them are poles apart.
The Instrumental view grows out of self-assurance. Over many centuries, even millennia, our increased scientific and technical knowledge has implied – often rightly, sometimes wrongly – that we can predict the consequences of our actions, that the mechanisms of cause and effect are as clear as the workings of a skeleton clock. The Scientific Revolution could not have taken place if this attitude were not already well-developed. In Shakespeare’s plays, for example, his main characters generally meet the fates they deserve.
So, oft it chances in particular men, That for some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty (Since nature cannot choose his origin), … that these men, Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star, His virtues else be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo, Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault:
However unlucky the protagonists may be to have ‘some vicious mole of nature in them’, once they have it, they are doomed. Effect follows cause. The Macbeths’ ambition, Coriolanus’s pride, Othello’s jealousy, Hamlet’s Hamletness summon the inexorable mole-catcher. ‘The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’ (And what quite a lot of Religion means too.) And we won’t have it otherwise. We may no longer be constrained by Aristotle’s dramatic unities, but we have invented almost equally rigid conventions of our own, one of which is that characters’ fates should not be completely arbitrary and that ‘means’ and ‘ends’ are intelligible (however little relation this bears to our everyday experience). This is linked to our modern belief in the logical structure of a universe which can be understood by our reasoning minds, and reinforced by our increasingly technological lifestyles. Office and factory jobs breed an expectation of predictability that an agrarian society, alert to weather, pests and diseases, never knows.
The ancient Greeks saw things differently, with a rather more alarmed sense of randomness. Oedipus had no vicious mole. It all went to bits for him, not because of any ‘particular fault’, but because there was no mechanism of just rewards in Bronze Age Thebes. Or in nearby Corinth, where the Chorus in Euripides’s Medea concludes:
Many are the Fates which Zeus in Olympus dispenses; Many matters the gods bring to surprising ends. The things we thought would happen do not happen; The unexpected God makes possible; And such is the conclusion of this story.
Of course, the ancient Greeks were not paralysed into inaction by uncertainty, and we moderns (cyber-children in a hundred years’ time, forced to download this now classic text into their brain-software, will giggle metallically at this point) still acknowledge that a car crash, a lottery win, a chance encounter can alter our lives, but our emphasis is different from theirs. We think them a bit ignorant; they would call us hubristic. They believed in Fate which was inherently unknowable; we believe in the actions of bodies and particles which are, in theory, predictable. And so, we act with more confidence. We accept the regrettable ‘means’ of invasion and slaughter, because we are sure of the welcome ‘ends’ – the overthrow of tyranny and the birth of liberal democracy; we put plastic microbeads in toothpastes and face-creams for the worthy cause of making ourselves prettier. We think we know the ends of our actions, and that we can justifiably use the rest of creation to achieve them, but the world is more complex than we reckon: the invasion ends in civil war, a million dead and chaos, the microbeads poison the oceans.
Knowledge is power, we are told. But ‘power’ is a slippery word. Does it mean the ability to do things? If so, the maxim is certainly true – we know how to fly to Mars, obliterate the Earth, get up to all sorts of stuff. But if it means the ability to control things, I’m not sure we can be so complacent. If we were really in charge, would the world be like this? Wouldn’t the news be just a bit more jolly?
A COMICALLY INEPT DIAGRAM TO SHOW DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE PROGRESS OF LEARNING IN THE LAST 400 YEARS
Yes, I know, I really cannot draw, but I hope you get the idea....
Which metaphor do we believe? Is it the traditional view where growing knowledge fills the glass until there is no more ignorance? Or does knowledge burgeon, glorious as a sycamore but stretching out a longer, deeper shadow beyond? Dark matter, the mystery of consciousness, the randomness of the quantum world, of the political world for that matter. What are you thinking? What’s round the corner? For all our equations, laws and hypotheses there still seems to be plenty we don’t know.
We think, because we possess more facts than our ancestors, that we are less ignorant but, ironically, each new discovery opens fresh vistas of unimagined ignorance rather as, here in Wales, you climb a hill always expecting to reach the summit, but find, as you ascend, no cartoon pointy peak where you might stick a flag or take a selfie, but ridge after ridge after ridge after ridge rippling away as far as you can see, gently deprecating grandiose claims of conquest and ambition.
STA opposes the Instrumental with a Sacral view. The word may irritate atheists, but we need not start guessing about gods and creeds. ‘Everything that lives is holy,’ proclaims Blake, sacrally. I (and I don’t think there can be much doubt about this) am pretty remarkable - the sensations I feel, the wild associations my imagination makes when I free it, the sheer unlikeliness of my intricate physical processes honed by four billion years of trial and error – yes, despite my annoyingness and frequent stupidity, I am quite remarkable. But so is this woodlouse approaching my desk. Everything that lives is holy. In what rests my supposed superiority? That I am cleverer? IQ is no cosmic metric. That I earn more money? I admire its ability to do without. That I could stamp my foot and put an end to its existence? Is that it – cheap glee at my killing potential, like a swaggering young hoodlum with a knife in his pocket? My enjoyment of novels, films and paintings is a privilege I cherish and an essential quality of my life, but it doesn’t make me superior to anyone else. We read and paint and think, not to be better than others, but to be better than we are ourselves. The woodlouse has very useful attributes I lack – it can walk up walls and find food without the palaver of fertilisers, road haulage, supermarkets, barcodes, credit cards and gas cookers required to fill my plate. But it’s not a competition – Man vs. Arthropod. Nature eternally makes new unique creatures; it does not make value judgements. (The next issue of The Familiar will see if we can find moral guidance in the very amorality of nature.)
‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the Gentleman?’ chanted revolutionary medieval peasants. Accepting evolution has the same levelling logic. Just as the Garden of Eden had no social elites, nature spawns no hierarchies, every creature being born unique (though many animals, like humans, have developed their own social conventions with leaders and pecking orders). Indeed, you could read the Biblical story of The Fall as our lapse from the Sacral to the Instrumental, God booting us out of paradise when we stopped gawping awed before the grandeur of creation and started sorting wonders into generalised categories to see what use we could make of them.
The Sacral view accepts the equal validity of all living things. Here we all are – equal presences doing our stuff, performing our us-ness according to the biology and environment we find ourselves in. There are trillions of Blake’s holy purposes to be seen through this window – trees, daffodils, jackdaws, that squirrel and the insects, moss and microbes I can’t make out – what an odd idea that they should all be subordinate to me! No plant or animal was created for my use – the universe didn’t know I was coming. Those daffodils may have been planted by my neighbours eager for a spot of spring brightness, but they follow their own agenda and flower for their own daffodilish purposes; our joy is just a by-blow of their effort to survive. Pure functionality creating pure beauty. (Just imagine if our purely functional inventions – motorways, sewage plants, housing estates, tax forms – aroused in us all such delight!)
What do we think we see when we look at the world? A stage for us to perform on (leading role and director, naturally) with a vast store of props and expendable cast of extras? Or an eternal parade of unimaginable variety that we, through no merit of our own, have been invited to join?
If I were to call STA innocent, Edenic or childlike, you might think it nostalgic and infantile. So instead, I call it a rational animism or, less formally, an openness to every living thing. STA et considera miracula – Stand still and consider the wondrous things. ‘The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us,’ wrote the philosopher, Mary Midgley. ‘That there are such worlds around us is an essential feature of this world.’ I cannot enter into the umwelt, the life-experience, of a kestrel or a caterpillar, but it doesn’t take much imagination to know that such perspectives exist, and the barest sense of fairness to respect them. To pursue our self-interest far, far beyond our need, we must wilfully deny what we know to be real.
STA’s aim is to strip away, as best we can, our cultural preconceptions, to clear away categories, names, tropes and habits and leave us staring, with all the innocence we can salvage, at the thing itself in front of us – like this particular gobbet of creation we inadequately label ‘flower’. (And, of course, ‘primrose’ or ‘Primula vulgaris’ would be equally inadequate.) Once we realise that our social and cultural assumptions are euphemisms for that much more troubling word ‘prejudices’ – that they quite literally ‘pre-judge’ – it may seem the best beginning for a fresh new look at the world.
STA’s SEVEN STARTING-POINTS
So far as I can see, if we accept that evolution is true (and that the world is real rather than an illusion) and we ‘stand still and consider the wondrous things’ around us – the things themselves, not our words and ideas about them – then we logically end up with the starting-points I summarise briefly here (all worked out and explained in much greater detail at sta-serial.com):
1. Nature is real and the basis of our lives.
2. We are wholly involved in it and not separate in any way.
3. We generally ignore this affinity with nature, focussing on our own inventions (e.g., shopping, politics, football, TV etc) but …
4. ... a rewarding sense of belonging is available to us if we accept it.
5. Nature unceasingly creates new, unique individuals.
6. Nature is perfect, by definition; its only purpose being to do what it does (though this, of course, may not suit our personal interests).
7. As each thing is unique, all things must be equal; individuality-with-interdependence is the basis of relationships in nature.