“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
1 comment:
Hello Sir.
I´ve been reading your books with much pleasure and I find they are "my drug of choice" of recently, as a reviwer wrote.
In "Humankind" you call the ecological world the symbiotic real, what existied before the agricultural revolution, before human realities, before the Severing (I guess Gregory Bateson used Adam and Eve´s eviction from Paradise as a metaphor for the Severyng).
In the ercossystems organisms interact by very violent means (predation, parasitism, competition either inter- or intra-species), symbiosis being just a peacefull kind of cooperation amid a sea of violence. Natural ecossystems, taken as a whole, are well ballanced, resilient, even beautifull entities (systems); meanwhile their most visible parts, individual organisms, usualy have a short life that ends with a violent death along the food chain.
Why did you choose to call the ecological world the "symbiotic real", giving it an air of paradise lost from where humans were expelled, when it could as well be called "the "parasite real", or more suitably, the "overkill real"? I tend to agree with the buddhists that life is sufering...
Thank you very much
Jaime Oliveira Braz
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