Our understanding of the world around us has been a constantly-shifting thing. We have always sought to explain natural phenomena we can’t understand and to use myth, ritual and religion to add structure and narrative to this most complex and puzzling place. More recently, as our scientific understanding of the world evolved and its tenets ever more culturally dominant, we fought to dismiss superstition and myth, confident in our new knowledges and delighted with our infinite ability to understand the ineffable.
And yet we also mourn, acknowledging the loss of the unknowable and what Berman refers to as the ‘archaic tradition’ (Berman 1981). He reminds us that earlier cultures understood ‘certain things about light and colour…electricity and gravity that modern science has left out’. As scientific and technocratic understandings became increasingly dominant, Gregory Bateson and others helped shift our thinking and allowed us to view the world once again in richer more inclusive spiritual and animist terms without necessarily embracing the notion of a supreme spiritual being.
It’s increasingly commonplace to hear about spirit of place, trees with souls, enchanted places, human-animal interaction, interspecies communication, and notions of language that stray far from simple interactions between our own species. Anthropocentrism has for centuries been based on the surety our superior intellect and language skills; we have claimed sole ownership of a level of sophistication that may (how can we know?) exist equally within other species. In our relentless quest to understand the infinitely small and the infinitely large, we have tended to forget the richness of the world in front of our noses. We have forgotten to listen. In adopting objective reasoning as the superior form of knowledge we have lost understandings that once were endemic and shared across cultures and continents.
More recently arrived digital worlds have demonstrably engendered a psychotic estrangement from the natural world: this is Louv’s Nature Deficit Disorder (Louv 2005). Perhaps it is time for a quieter, considered, more languorous carousal with the non-human world, revelling in our commonality rather than fretting about difference. We after all share large parts of our genome, common bacteria, molecules, proteins and cell structures. We (pretty much) all sexually reproduce; we all die. The alikeness is astonishing when superficially we seem so unalike.
Artists never entirely succumbed; some doubtless eschewed enchantment and sentiment –– deliberately ‘courting meaninglessness’ (Gablik 1991) and consciously devoid of soul; but art almost always works with visceral knowledge. The best, the most profound art and science help us touch, taste, feel and smell new understanding.
Ultimately however we rely on stories ever-told to provide a spiritual baseline. The enchanted world dismissed, eviscerated from the Modernist worldview is hungered after and sought out: in different ways, in different languages, in different understandings. Re-discovering ancient knowledges that are still within our bones can only lead to new empathies and translations of other tongues, reinvigorating our connection to the world and everything that lives here with us and alongside us.
