Just as the universe is said to be still expanding from that first Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, life is expanding and ramifying from that first spark in that first cell ten billion years later, unceasingly exploring new forms of being. We are all heading down new roads, and it makes no more sense to claim that our human route is existentially superior to another creature’s than for a driver heading east on the M62 to think he was thereby ‘superior’ to one heading south on the A470. In nature’s eyes, we are all equal. [Footnote: evolution very clearly demolishes any notion of human exceptionalism. The only possible justification for such a belief would be a spiritual one – that the divine creator gave to all humans a special dispensation which distinguishes us qualitatively from all other creatures. As St Paul neatly puts it, ‘There is no brotherhood of man without the fatherhood of God.’ This is not something I personally believe. I doubt whether most of those who accept the seemingly unarguable truth of evolution accept it either. But without it, the sense of human specialness and solidarity we all entertain is groundless. It is not God who is dethroned by Darwin but ‘Humankind’.]
Our innate equality is re-iterated by Daniel Davis in The Compatibility Gene, a study of the genes which vary most between individuals and which, as part of our immune systems, ‘help your body distinguish self from non-self’. He writes, ‘Our diversity in these genes weaves a system for immune defence that works in each of us and across all of us … our uniqueness and our togetherness. … Overall, nobody has a better or worse set of compatibility genes: there’s no hierarchy in the system. The fact that we differ is what’s important; the way our species has evolved to survive disease requires us to be different.’
The deep scientific and spiritual truth is that we are all one equal creation. However, the social and cultural lie we generally prefer is that we humans are top-dogs (or top-cats) and that other creatures exist for our use, convenience and entertainment, whether that be the destruction of a rain-forest so that we can raise cattle before destroying them in turn and rendering them into hamburgers or, at the other extreme, less damagingly but equally anthropocentrically, the veneration of particular creatures – tigers, oak trees, pandas – because they suit our made-up notions of beauty or nobility or cuddliness. We should no more privilege animals for their looks than we would our children. [Footnote: and our veneration can be equally catastrophic. It is because we think tigers beautiful that we hunt them to extinction, because we think warthogs ugly that they are safe. For millions of years unknown to mankind rhinoceroses did whatever rhinoceroses do undisturbed in the jungles of Vietnam. They even survived the war unnoticed. We discovered them in 1988, told ourselves lies that their horns might cure cancer and destroyed every last one in only twenty-two years.] It is their haecceity rather than our taste which defines them. We pay some people to protect kites and dormice, and others to kill pigeons and moles. We have an Instrumental rather than a Sacral view of the world, trying to wring it into our ideal shape (even though our ideals keep changing) rather than seeking to find our place in it.
It is one of the sad ironies of the Scientific Revolution that the move from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the Solar System should somehow have been accompanied by this perversely increasing highly unscientific anthropocentricity. The Instrumental view insists on the centrality of our own, human perspective. All the rest of creation demurs. In spite of the high rhetoric about the impartiality of scientific discipline, mostly we use science to gain power and increase our control of nature. [Footnote: which, after all, is why governments and private companies, none of which is remotely interested in high-minded impartiality, continue to fund its expensive researches.] ‘Knowledge is power,’ we say in self-justification. ‘Power tends to corrupt,’ we add only when someone else is wielding it. Wonderful as humans are, human exceptionalism is a lie, and our solidarity, though a truly noble aspiration, is no more natural a condition than rat solidarity, or solidarity between the robins who were fighting outside the kitchen this morning.
A DIGRESSION ON THE INSTRUMENTAL & THE SACRAL
I perhaps ought to explain a little more about these terms, to which I was introduced by Malcolm Guite’s fascinating book on Coleridge, Mariner.
Obviously, all our actions have 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 ‘Instrumentality’ is the supposition that we can justifiably treat other beings as means to our non-essential ends without much regard for their own requirements; that we have some kind of existential superiority (being somehow ‘above’ or ‘outside’ the natural world) which gives even our whims the force of imperatives and permits us any means required to indulge them, because nature has been provided for us as an instrument to further whatever our purposes may be. Nature is our tool-kit and toy-box.
Look here upon this picture, and on this: Bosschaert’s Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase and Cotan’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber. 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 only a few years apart. 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.
Bosschaert, Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase (National Gallery)
Cotan, Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (San Diego Museum of Art)
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, [Footnote: like some teenagers, historians often try to assert their identity by contradicting the previous generation.] 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 quaintness of the produce competition at a village show. 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.
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. In Shakespeare’s plays, his main characters generally meet the fates they deserve.
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. If, in a drama, the protagonist doesn’t behave ‘in character’ or his fate is determined by pure chance, we feel short-changed. We may no longer be constrained by Aristotle’s dramatic unities, but we have invented almost equally rigid, if unspoken, conventions of our own, one of which is that the 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 mechanical and 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 the unpredictability of the world. 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. [Footnote: interestingly, in Sophocles’s play, it is the problem-solver, the clever man who unravelled the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus, who is himself the problem.] 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 [Footnote: 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 think us a bit hubristic. They believed in Fate which was inherently unknowable; we believe in the actions of bodies and particles which are, in theory, predictable – if, at least, the world is complicated like a machine, rather than complex like a brain. 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 in order to make 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, of course, the world is more complex than we reckon: the invasion ends in civil war, a million dead and chaos, the microbeads poison the oceans. Instrumentality is a dangerous and unpredictable attitude, always arrogant and too often ignorant. It starts from the premise that reality is wrong and needs changing. The Sacral approach humbly wonders if reality may be right.
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