Naturalistic Paganism
The goddess Kali and Religious Naturalism, by Colin Robinson
“[There are] things about the universe which can seem terrifying when we first learn of them, and yet can be accepted as profound and sacred.”
What can India’s goddess Kali mean to Religious Naturalists?
Like her male counterpart, Lord Shiva, Kali is often pictured dancing. In fact, she is often pictured using Shiva himself as her dance floor. Dance is about energy, self-expression, self-sufficiency. It is also about balance.
The image of Shiva as lord of the dance is a classic vision, which been appreciated by twentieth century scientists outside India, such as Carl Sagan (1985, page 214) and Fritjof Capra (1975, page 11). And yet, this is something about Shiva’s image which may need further balancing. It is rather top heavy. Dancing Kali brings Lord Shiva down to earth.
As the feminist theologian, Rita Gross (1986, page 223), has remarked, when considering images of Kali: “… balance is crucial. It must not be overlooked.” Whether Kali is pictured dancing, or consuming demons, or having sex, or sitting in the relaxed teaching position, she represents a unity of opposite qualities: death and life, energy and composure.
On another page of this website, Ursula Goodenough has written about terror and mystery. Goodenough mentions things about the universe which can seem terrifying when we first learn of them, and yet can be accepted as profound and sacred. Similarly Kali and Shiva: their images can appear terrifying at first sight, but as you learn to accept them, you begin to experience them in a very different way.
A path or a forest?
I’ve said a little about the ways Kali is pictured. Kali, however, is not only pictured, but also worshipped.
Historically, images were not made to go into art galleries, they were made to go into temples and shrines where people would contemplate them, prostrate before them, sing to them, burn incense, garland them with flowers, and offer plates of food.
Some background about the worship of Kali as it has been practised in and around India, and today is spreading around the world:
- It is not monolithic, but very diverse. There are numerous large and small temples and shrines of the goddess, each with its own customs and traditions. Images of the goddess are also kept and worshipped in households. There is no list of doctrines which every worshipper has to accept.
- There is an extensive written literature about Kali, in Sanskrit, Bengali, and other languages as well. The literature includes sacred narratives or myths, found in texts called Puranas, as well as ritual and meditative practices, described in writings called Tantras. Also lyrical statements of personal devotion, such as the bhakti songs of Ramprasad.
- The relationship between deities is described differently in different texts. There is not necessarily a simple, “right” answer to questions such as whether Kali and Parvati are the same goddess, or whether Mahakala and Shiva are the same god. It depends which chapter and which verse of which book you are considering…
How old the worship is, is a matter of historical debate. It may or may not have developed out of bronze age or stone age goddess religion. In any case, we are not talking about something invented last year on the west coast of the USA.
Some forms of Kali worship can be wild and sensational, other forms are more reflective.
The cultural richness of Kali worship is a both a blessing and a challenge. To describe it as a path is not quite right. It is more like a forest — not a pathless forest, but a forest in which many paths can be traced though not all are immediately visible… A forest quite big enough for a naturalist to get lost in.
But here are a couple of flowers from the forest…
In all beings
There is an old and well-known Sanskrit salutation to the gentle and terrible Goddess, in which she is hailed as present “in all beings”, in the form of different faculties and attributes such as intelligence, sleep, hunger, compassion, contentment… even as the tendency to error. (Jagadiswarananda, 1953, chapter 5 verses 8 – 82)
If you understand the Goddess in this way, then worshipping her (affirming her worth) means affirming your own worth, and the worth of all other beings as well.
This salutation is part of a book known as the Devi Mahatmya or the Chandi, a fairly short but intricate work. The Devi Mahatmya contains myths where one goddess turns into many goddesses, and then turns back into one goddess again, as she fights battles against armies of demons. In this book, the name Kali is used in more than one way: there is a Kali who is one goddess among many, but Mahakali (Great Kali) is also a name of the Great Goddess, the Mahadevi. (Jagadiswarananda, 1953, chapter 12 verse 38)
The Devi Mahatmya also declares that the Great Goddess is Prakriti, a Sanskrit word which can be translated as “nature” (Coburn, 1984, page 180), or as “primordial cause”. (Jagadiswarananda, 1953, chapter 1 verse 78)
This Sanskrit text was written around 1500 years, according to mainstream academic historians. (Coburn, 1984, page 1)
The world as her dance
Shiva Chandra Vidyarnava was a nineteenth century tantric scholar and devotee of Kali. His book, the Tantra-tattva, which he wrote in the Bengali language, was published in English by Sir John Woodroffe as Principles of Tantra.
Vidyarnava affirmed the positive value of the natural (material) world, and contested the teachings of Hindus of other schools who dismissed the material world as unreal.
He wrote:
“In whatever direction I turn my eyes I see nothing, nothing but the Mother. In water, on land, and in space the Mother dances before the eyes of the Sadhaka, to whom the world thus appears true. When the world becomes full of the Mother, then all the gunas [qualities] cease to be enemies. Nothing is then a stain. It is no longer necessary to regard the world as stained, and to look upon another as stainless.” (Woodroffe, 1986, part 1, page 178)
This statement out of nineteenth century India is surely relevant to the world today, and specifically to Religious Naturalists.
A note of caution
Can the tantric scholasticism of someone like Vidyarnava be equated with modern empirical science? Not quite. There are interesting points in common, but also differences, for instance..
- Shiva Chandra Vidyarnava often uses the term shakti (energy), but he does not quantify shakti in kilojoules, in fact he does not quantify shakti at all.
- Shiva Chandra Vidyarnava is an empiricist, in the sense that he says the truth of tantric teaching is demonstrated by the results of tantric sadhana (meditations, rituals and yogic practices as prescribed in the tantras)… He also mentions that the same is true of two other fields of learning: medicine and astrology. (Woodroffe, 1986, part 1, page 112)
I expect many Religious Naturalists today will disagree about astrology. And this is only one example of how traditional teachings (Eastern or Western) are not necessarily in keeping with the findings of modern science.
What meaning emerges?
What meaning of Kali emerges from the images and texts we’ve discussed?
She is a dancing goddess, who dances within us and all around us. She is Nature, terrifying and beautiful, and the rich culture of worship that surrounds her is a culture that has kept in touch with nature.
Not everything in that culture is necessarily easy for the modern scientific mind to swallow. Yet is it, nonetheless, worth serious consideration?
Well, I’ve found it so. Your mileage may vary…
Sources
Capra, Fritjof. (1975) The Tao of Physics. Boulder: Shambhala.
Coburn, Thomas B. (1984) Devi Mahatmya; the Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Gross, Rita. “Hindu Female Deities as a Resource for the Contemporary Rediscovery of the Goddess”. in Olson, Carl. (1986) The Book of the Goddess. New York: Crossroad Publishing.
Jagadiswarananda, Swami, trans. (1953) Devi Mahatmyam. Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math.
Sagan, Carl. (1985) Cosmos. New York: Ballantine.
Woodroffe, Sir John (ed). (1986) Principles of Tantra [English translation of Shiva Chandra Vidyarnava. Tantra-tattva]. Madras: Ganesh and Company.
The author
Colin Robinson has been studying and writing about the vision of Kali since late 1984. He lives in Sydney, Australia, and has visited India to worship at temples in and around Calcutta. He is the creator of the web-site Dancing World-Soul Kali, where you can find reviews of modern books about Kali and Tantra, studies of Sanskrit sources, accounts of personal experiences of Kali’s presence, and articles relating the vision of Kali to current world concerns.
Upcoming work
This Sunday
Looking outside our typical Euro-Mediterranean focus, can we gain any insight from India’s Kali tradition?
The goddess Kali and Religious Naturalism, by Colin Robinson
Appearing Sunday, June 24th, 2012
Next Sunday
What can Big History tell us about who we are and how we ought to live?
Big History: A core narrative for HP?, by B. T. Newberg
Appearing Sunday, July 1st, 2012
Recent Work
Sustainable communities: An interview with Alison Leigh Lilly
What are our root metaphors?, by B. T. Newberg
Etiquette for interfaith discussions, by Thalassa
Get our ebooks
Sustainable Pagan communities: An interview with Alison Leigh Lilly
“Instead of drawing lines in the sand, we draw lines of connection and communication.”
This week we interview Alison Leigh Lilly, who has just launched a new podcast along with Jeff Lilly called Faith, Fern, and Compass.
B. T. Newberg: Working for the Pagan Newswire Collective, editing No Unsacred Place, and now podcasting, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the Contemporary Pagan community. If you had to name one single issue (as absurd as that sounds) most pressing to the Pagan community today, what would it be?
Alison Leigh Lilly: Sustainability, hands down. Pagans these days face the challenge of crafting sustainable models of engagement and effective communication not just with each other, but also with the rest of society.
You can see this struggle playing out in everything from Pagan-focused media like the PNC, to controversies in the community about leadership and service, financial funding, exclusive versus inclusive ritual, and perennial debates about what words like “Pagan,” “Druid,” and “Witch” (among so many others!) even mean and who uses them.
Right now, there are many folks out there experimenting with different solutions — some borrowed from more mainstream religious traditions, some set up as alternatives to redress problems of the mainstream. Solutions that work will have to be sustainable, supportive and vibrant in the long-term, not just passing trends.
I also mean sustainability in the sense of ecological sustainability. It’s impossible for any spiritual community today, regardless of tradition, to avoid the pressing question of how humans relate to the planet and its ecosystems. Ecology has a direct impact on how we create and maintain our communities. “Green” is a part of the religious vocabulary now, for Christians, Muslims, Hindus and modern Pagans alike, “nature-centered” or not.
BTN: Many have observed a shift in recent years away from archetypal views of deity and toward hard polytheism. By that I mean a shift toward views of deity as external, independently willing, real-existing causal agents, more or less as depicted in myth. Would you agree, and if so what do you make of that shift?
ALL: I do agree that there seems to be a shift in that direction. My initial impulse is to look at the sociological pressures at work. I think the shift towards a hard polytheism reflects a desire among Pagans for legitimacy in the mainstream, drawing on authentic ancient sources and anchoring their interpretation of those sources in the authority of modern scholarship — distancing themselves from what they might see as silly claims made by some Pagans in the past.
You also have the polarization in mainstream society between hard-core atheists and literalist fundamentalists, with more nuanced views of deity getting sidelined in the media ruckus. Pagans looking for legitimacy or authority in the debate might (knowingly or not) lean towards a more literal view of deity to avoid being marginalized as just another wishy-washy New Age trend. On top of that, a desire to respect the cultural integrity of ancient societies and modern ones can lead to a backlash against paths that seem too eclectic or syncretic, erring instead on the side of overly simplistic interpretations of cultural boundaries, drawing hard and fast lines between theologies that are actually much more fluid in their original contexts. So there are a lot of factors that might be at play, many of them stemming from noble intentions.
I’ve found this shift to be somewhat of a stumbling block for me in my personal spiritual practice. Debates about “hard” v. “soft” polytheism often feel to me like they’re unnecessarily dualistic. It’s only recently I’ve been able to set the whole theological question aside and cease to view it as the defining aspect of my Pagan identity. My interfaith work has played a big part in that.
BTN: A desire for legitimacy – good point. I think that underlines the same sense of urgency felt by many naturalistic types. By seeking spirituality within the bounds of current scientific understandings, naturalists seek a path that may appear plausible and legitimate in modern society.
It also comes back to sustainability, too – crafting a path that is sustainable within a larger context of Western scientific discourse. Hard polytheists go for a different solution, but the issue seems similar.
One thing for which I have to commend hard polytheists is their motivation and seriousness – I think a lot of the most rigorous research as well as dedicated ritual practice is coming out of such groups today. Frolicking in the woods is definitely valuable, but so is making a deep commitment to one’s path. Hard polytheism seems particularly conducive to the latter. Or am I off base here?
ALL: There is some fantastic work coming from the reconstructionists and hard polytheists among us. Erynn Rowan Laurie and Seren are two in the CR community who’ve had a big influence on my own work.
And it’s exciting to see Pagan naturalists engaging modern science with the same rigor and enthusiasm as reconstructionists bring to their study of history and archeology! In both cases, people are grappling with methods of structured discourse that offer valuable insights – whether into history or ecology – and they’re looking for ways to integrate those insights into a meaningful, authentic spiritual life. It’s not a one-way conversation.
The mistake we make is in thinking that frolicking in the woods and deep commitment are at odds with each other, or that dedicated ritual practice must be based in one particular theology.
I know many Pagans who not only host regular rites and perform daily devotions, but show up to their UU service or Quaker meeting every Sunday. Their serious, life-long commitment and the service they give back to the community are in no way diminished by the fact that they hold a somewhat looser view of deity than hard polytheists.
BTN: In this context of struggles for legitimacy and efforts toward sustainability, how does your new podcast fit into the picture?
ALL: Since I’m a tree-hugging dirt-worshipper with an analytical streak myself, I like to think that Faith, Fern & Compass gives listeners a legitimate, scientifically-based excuse to spend more time hugging trees, talking to animals, lighting candles, sitting in meditation and generally frolicking about in the woods!
In all seriousness, though, what a desire for legitimacy really boils down to, I think, is a desire for deep-rooted authenticity and mutual respect. These are important drives behind why we form religious communities in the first place, but they also set a challenge before us: to find ways of living that don’t compromise our rational minds or ask us to ignore what we know about the world.
The pressing issue of ecological sustainability is an inescapable reality today, and it’s one that many religious traditions are struggling with, not just Pagans. Religions that ignore this reality risk losing credibility and sometimes resort to fear-mongering, exclusion and even violence to bolster their legitimacy.
FF&C podcast strives to move in the opposite direction: towards inclusivity and interfaith outreach as a way of confronting head-on the challenges of living with/in an ecologically and socially complex world. Instead of drawing lines in the sand, we draw lines of connection and communication.
We believe the natural world can be an authentic source of spiritual guidance if we craft communities that know how to listen – the way a human tool like a compass helps us see the planet’s magnetic fields and orient ourselves when we are lost.
About the interviewee
Alison Leigh Lilly is the producer and co-host of Faith, Fern & Compass, and the editor of No Unsacred Place, a project of the Pagan Newswire Collective. Nurturing the nature-centered, mist-and-mystic spiritual heritage of her Celtic ancestors, she explores themes of peace, poesis and wilderness through essays, articles, poetry and podcasting. Her work has appeared in numerous publications both in print and online, including Aontacht Magazine, Sky Earth Sea, and The Wild Hunt. You can learn more about her work on her website: alisonleighlilly.com
Faith, Fern & Compass is currently running a promotional campaign where anyone who recommends FF&C to a friend via the recommendation form on our website will get a free phonosemantic name analysis from Jeff (and whoever recommends the most new listeners wins a free album of guided meditations).
Upcoming work
This Sunday
Alison Leigh Lilly, of No Unsacred Place and the new podcast Faith, Fern & Compass, illucidates issues facing the Contemporary Pagan community.
Sustainable Pagan communities: An interview with Alison Leigh Lilly
Appearing Sunday, June 17, 2012
Next Sunday
Looking outside our typical Euro-Mediterranean focus, can we gain any insight from India’s Kali tradition?
The goddess Kali and Religious Naturalism, by Colin Robinson
Appearing Sunday, June 24th, 2012
Recent Work
What are our root metaphors?, by B. T. Newberg
Etiquette for interfaith discussions, by Thalassa
Why do people want supernatural gods?, by M. J. Lee
Seton Setting: Something special may happen, by Thomas Schenk
Get our ebooks
What are our root metaphors?
– by B. T. Newberg
I need your help folks. At the core of every religious tradition is a root metaphor which fuses ideas of how things are and how we ought to live. So what root metaphor(s) operate among naturalistic traditions such as those of HP? What metaphor(s) should we develop?
Below I make an argument that the root metaphor of all forms of naturalism is nature in some form, but that alone is not enough. How are we to understand nature, and how will it help us understand how to live? We need to get more specific.
Please take part in this poll. Vote for up to three. You don’t need to be a regular HP reader to vote. And after voting, you’re invited to explain your choices in the comments section.
This post is part 2 of a series examining HP through the lens of the work of Loyal Rue. Part 1 is here, and an overview of Rue’s basic concepts is here.
Each candidate is explained below, after a brief exploration of root metaphors in general and nature as the specific metaphor of naturalism.
What is a root metaphor?
In the last post in this series, it was proposed that HP’s basic job is managing human nature, in order to motivate behavior such that we may achieve both personal wholeness and social coherence, as well as ecological integrity. How is this accomplished?
It takes a central idea capable of fusing facts and values, so that how we ought to live feels as real and compelling as reality itself. The central idea that does this called a root metaphor.
“The root metaphor renders the real sacred, and the sacred real.” (Rue, 2005)
A root metaphor, according to Loyal Rue, is what lies at the core of a religious tradition, informing its deepest concepts. Crucially, it integrates into one single idea how things are (cosmology) and how we ought live (morality). Abrahamic religions traditionally use the root metaphor of God-as-person, ancient Greek tradition used logos, Hinduism and Buddhism dharma, Chinese religion Tao, and so on.
“When the root metaphor of a mythic tradition is ingested, one apprehends that ultimate facts and values have the same source. In mythic insight, the ultimate explanation is also the ultimate validation.” (Rue, 2005)
For example, in the Judeo-Christo-Islamic myths, which use the root metaphor of God-as-person, all ideas about how the world came to be and how we ought to live are grounded in the creative will of God. This produces a strong motivation to behave as God wills (i.e. as the religion says to behave).
Nature the explainer
The role God plays in the above formulation is explanandus, or explainer (Rue, 1989). The metaphor of God-as-person succinctly explains how things are (God willed them so) and how we ought to live (according to God’s will).
For naturalists, such a metaphor is no longer credible. Instead, we have come to a point where God is the explanandum, or what needs to be explained.
The ancient Greeks made a similar shift starting around the 6th-century B.C.E. (Burkert, 1985), when they began to critique their gods and deduce how they must be from rational principles. Since gods are perfectly good, they reasoned, they cannot exhibit moral failings, therefore the myths of Zeus’ adulterous affairs must be false. By what were the Greeks able to make such a judgment? They appealed to what they took to be higher than the gods: reason. The gods were explainable by rational deduction. Thus, the role of explanandus passed from gods-as-persons to logos, or reason.
The opposite formulation, where God is still the explainer, can be seen in many forms of Judeo-Christian theodicy, where the existence of evil is explained by placing God beyond human judgment: “God works in mysterious ways.” In this view, there is no rational order explaining how God must be; rather, God is the be-all and end-all of explanation.
Naturalists today do not explain nature by reference to gods; they explain gods by reference to nature. The divine is variously interpreted as process, creativity, ultimate concern, the ground of being, the encoded memory of past events or people, allegorical reference, a quirk of human biology, a tool of social domination, a development of culture, or a function of human evolution – all these are natural phenomena. God is the explained, and nature is the explainer. Thus, the root metaphor of naturalism would seem to be nature.
But that doesn’t tell us all that much – not yet. What is nature exactly? And how can it suggest how we ought to live? To address these questions, our metaphor needs be more specific. So let’s investigate a few of our alternatives.
Nature-as-machine
The predominant paradigm bequeathed to us by scientific materialism is nature-as-machine. We have grown used to thinking of matter as inert, dead, stupid stuff that gets knocked around by other matter, like balls on a billiard table.
One problem with this metaphor is that machines are tools for our whims. They do not transcend us, we transcend them.
Another problem is that traditionally matter was complemented by the intelligence of soul as well as by its designer, God. If you no longer believe in soul or God, then there is nothing but stupid, meaningless stuff all around. This lays the foundation for the famous quote by physicist Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless” (Weinberg, 1993).
The metaphor of machine cannot help us understand who we are or how we ought to live. At most, it says it is up to us to answer these questions for ourselves. While that may be true, I think we can do better.
Nature-as-person(s)
Another metaphor in play today is nature-as-person(s). This is like the God-as-person metaphor of traditional theism, but swap nature for God. Nature acquires some or all of the human-like traits of God, such as will, intention, personality, wrath, compassion, and so on. This metaphor shows up in some forms of animism and some Gaian paths (note that the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis does not use this metaphor, but posits the planet earth is a self-regulating organism; Lovelock, 1995).
It’s certainly a powerful metaphor, allowing for a high degree of what Robert McCauley calls inferential potential: the capacity to permit one to “utilize a huge range of default inferences that accompany our maturationally natural ontological knowledge” (McCauley, 2011; italics his). In plain language, he means it let’s us quickly draw a number of conclusions with little but the brain’s natural intuition. Specifically, it draws on our species’ highly developed social intelligence.
An example will make that a little less arcane-sounding. The God-as-person metaphor allows one to take an event such as a failure of crops and activate the brain’s module for dealing with persons, leading to a whole suite of new inferences: If all happens by divine will, then a god willed the crops to fail, and it must be because he is angry, so we should offer a gift to appease that anger, and hereafter live in ways conducive to a better relationship with the god. In this train of thought, the idea of how things happen (cosmology) leads directly to what to do (morality).
The nature-as-person(s) metaphor would seem to allow similar inferences (though without necessarily reaching the same conclusions). However, the main problem with this metaphor is the same as that of God-as-person: credibility. It just doesn’t seem plausible for many naturalists today (with the possible exception of certain proposed solutions to the hard problem of consciousness). Anthropomorphism is not necessarily a bad thing if used consciously and for specific purposes (see my defense of it here). However, used as a root metaphor, which usually operates unconsciously and at the highest level of generality, it seems inappropriate for naturalists.
Nature-as-Creativity
A third metaphor is nature-as-Creativity. Representatives in this line of thought include Stuart Kauffman, Gordon D. Kaufman, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Michael Dowd, Connie Barlow, and PaGaian’s Glenys Livingstone. It may also hark back to Spinoza’s natura naturans.
The idea is that nature is inherently creative, producing marvelous patterns and complexity out of its own self-organizing propensities. It is not inert stuff, nor is it the tool of some other thing that transcends it. This grants nature inherent value. It also gives nature and humans something in common, namely creativity, without going so far as to turn nature into a personality. Finally, it tells us who we are: part of the great story of unfolding cosmic creativity.
“Creativity” is quite abstract, though, and it’s not very clear how we ought to live as part of this Creativity. It seems short on inferential potential. If a crop failure happens due to natural Creativity, then it must have a meaningful place in some emerging pattern. There is something inspiring in that idea, but it doesn’t seem to suggest much of a role for us in the matter other than perhaps to marvel in tragic awe at the new pattern (or am I missing something?).
Nature-as-Big Self
Here’s the idea: Nature is so much greater than us, yet we are an integral part of it. Our tiny conscious ego (small self) is dwarfed by, yet interdependent with, the greater world of being (Big Self).
Alan Watts eloquently expresses the notion:
We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. (Watts, 1989)
As does Albert Einstein:
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
There is inferential potential here: If I am an integral part of nature, however small, then how I live must have an effect. Since we are nature, we ought to value it as we value ourselves, treat it with care and respect, and live in ever more sustainable ways. The crop failure would be met by questioning how our own actions have contributed to this (trans)personal crisis, what we might do to heal the wound, and how we might live healthier in the future.
One problem with this metaphor is that it seems to obscure the radical otherness of nature. But I don’t think it’s a big problem, because contemplation of it leads right into the experience of otherness. Confronted by the proposition that nature is us, we immediately ask “How can this be? I’m nothing before the vast depths of nature.” Nature appears as an Immensity (to use Brendan Myers‘ term). This plunges us into what Rudolf Otto (1958) calls “creature feeling”: the emotion of being overwhelmed with awe before what transcends our own smallness. Finally, integration comes when we realize it is not the tiny ego but rather its participation in the greater whole which is meaningful.
An alternative version of this metaphor might be nature-as-body. If “self” is too psychological of a term, “body” might achieve the same extension of personal identity without suggesting any kind of cosmic consciousness or intelligence. Those living with the nature-as-body metaphor may see trees as their lungs, and rivers as their blood.
Nature-as-kin
Last but not least, the metaphor of nature-as-kin may have something to say today. By this metaphor, Earth becomes our mother, sky our father, and all creatures our brothers and sisters.
This metaphor has recurred again and again across history in many times and places. It’s probably not by accident, either: sociobiology suggests we are genetically predisposed to aid our close kin first, since they likely carry identical copies of our genes (this is called inclusive fitness or kin selection; Dawkins, 1989). If this is so, then viewing nature as kin may activate deep-rooted motivations to treat nature with respect, care, and devotion.
This reverses the original function of the predisposition (widening rather than narrowing the field of aid), but that doesn’t matter – evolution re-purposes things all the time if it makes for greater fitness. In our age of ecological crisis, whatever best motivates eco-centric behavior will exhibit the greatest fitness.
Another advantage of this metaphor is that it has the virtue of being modestly counterintuitive. Pascal Boyer (2001) counts as counterintuitive something that violates our most basic, inborn intuitions about classes of objects. Children know from a very early age that an owl can’t give birth to a lizard (McCauley, 2011). So, saying that the earth is our mother is counterintuitive. This makes it an interesting meme, and therefore more likely to be passed on. Yet it is not radically counterintuitive – it doesn’t take years of training to grasp, as do science and theology. Boyer finds the best balance or cognitive optimum is a modestly counterintuitive idea with just one or two violations. In other words, nature-as-kin is a highly fit meme in the game of cultural selection.
A difficulty, though, might be that it seems all too ready to merge with the nature-as-person metaphor. Since our kin are normally human, calling the Earth “mother” seems to invite anthropomorphism. The metaphor would then suffer from the same credibility problem that plagues nature-as-person.
Other metaphors
There are, of course, many other possible nature metaphors. Michael Cavanaugh suggests Big History as a possible metaphor (Cavanaugh, personal communication). I’m sure you’ll come up with plenty as well (feel free to share in the comments).
Can we really choose our metaphor?
Ultimately we may not be able to choose our root metaphor; we may just find ourselves using it. But however we identify it, it will determine how we think, act, and forge symbols as we embark on our naturalistic paths.
References
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained. New York: Basic Books.
Burkert, W. (1989). Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lovelock, J. (1995). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press.
McCauley, R. (2011). Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. New York: Oxford University Press.
Myers, B. (2008). The Other Side of Virtue. Hants, UK: O Books.
Otto, R. (1958). The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rue, L. (1989). Amythia. Tuscaloosa,AL: University of Alabama Press.
Rue, L. (2005). Religion Is Not About God. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Watts, A. (1989). The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Vintage Books Edition). New York: Random House.
Weinberg, S. (1993). The First Three Minutes. New York: Basic Books.
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