Table Of ContentNature and Experience in the Culture of Delusion
Also by David W. Kidner
NATURE AND PSYCHE: RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE POLITICS
OF SUBJECTIVITY
Nature and Experience in
the Culture of Delusion
How Industrial Society Lost Touch
with Reality
David W. Kidner
Nottingham Trent University, UK
© David W. Kidner 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012
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First published 2012 by
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Contents
Preface vi
1 Symbolism Breaks Free 1
2 The Natural and the Industrial 37
3 Growing Out of the World 84
4 Lost in (Symbolic) Space 100
5 How the Mind Took Over the World 143
6 The Industrialised Individual 221
Notes 283
Bibliography 305
Index 323
v
Preface
Douglas Adams’ novel A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins with
the stealthy approach of huge i nter- stellar Vogon spaceships, unnoticed
by the world’s combined military defences – a source of obliteration
that emerges, as we say, ‘out of the blue’. This seems an apt parable for
current threats to human being, which also emerge from within sys-
tems we have not evolved to recognise. Unlike the Vogon spaceships,
however, the threats that face us are not simply external, since they
arise out of the same systems that we ourselves are intimately and often
unknowingly entangled with. For similar reasons, and despite their pas-
sion and often heroism, environmentalists have generally been no more
successful than Arthur Dent in stemming industrialism’s accelerating
destruction and commodification of the natural world. This is often
taken to indicate the failure of environmental activism; but it is more
realistically understood as a measure of the power of the forces ranged
against the natural order and our difficulties in identifying these forces.
What has befallen the world since the advent of industrialism is a
catastrophe. Despite the torrent of denials, evasions, excuses, compart-
mentalisations, talks about ‘changing cultures’, ‘contested natures’, and
‘discursive mediation’, I know of no other intellectually honest read-
ing of the history of the colonisation and destruction of bioregional
ecosystems, cultures, and languages. When academic writing ignores,
conceals, intellectualises, justifies, or celebrates this history, it simply
reveals its infection by the forces of colonisation.
This book is the story of a conquest – one that is changing the lives
of every creature on earth, while saving its most drastic consequences
for future generations. Despite its momentous character, the process of
conquest is barely reported; indeed it has become a taken-f or- granted
aspect of living, corroding the health of cultures and individuals from
within as it simultaneously restructures both the natural world and our
experience of that world to fit the emerging industrial order. Indeed,
it is highly significant that ‘reality’ has become a dirty word in many
quarters today, especially but not exclusively within academia. In a
reaction to scientism that is as simplistic as the understanding it tries to
replace, some writers tell us that ‘reality’ is simply a product of culture
and language. If this is the case, then the decline of the natural world
becomes merely another cultural ‘myth’, with no more significance
vi
Preface vii
or emotional import than tales of dragons or fairies. For example,
one academic writer tells us that she is “interested in” the “tale” of
disenchantment that “defines a particular range of ethical problems
calling for worry and redress”.1 Another asks: “Why not accept what
may have been wrongly regarded as abnormal and t error- filled – the
Enlightenment nightmares of machinic dehumanisation – as what is
actually the normal, ordinary, or everyday?”2
The ‘real world’ consists not only of sensorily apparent physical proper-
ties but also of emergent ecological and subjective properties, particularly
the tendency to s elf- organise, which is the basis of the whole of life. This
is a world that contains structure, and also tendencies towards structure –
a process dimension. It is itself a troubling sign that this book needs to
begin by affirming that humans, like other animals, have evolved within
a natural world, and that our physical and psychological characteristics
reflect our evolutionary dependence on a world that is both symbolic and
material. Social reductionism is as prevalent as biological reductionism;
and what James Hillman has referred to as social scientists’ “paralysing …
obsession with language and communication”3 is as much a symptom
of the deeper problem this book addresses – namely, the dissociation
between physical being and symbolic form – as others’ more scientistic
preoccupations. Both these aspects of being are essential parts of the real
world; and the dead end of idealist influence over many disciplines has
to be challenged in all its forms. As Roy Bhaskar and others have shown
very clearly, this has nothing to do with ‘naïve realism’.
It is the glory and the bane of human being that our cognitive powers
allow us to envision situations and creations that do not at the moment
exist. This capability can be the means of creativity and invention; or
it can be the road to delusion and insanity. My focus here concerns
the process whereby whole civilisations – as I argue – can lose touch
with reality and become effectively insane. When an individual loses
touch with reality, we call it ‘psychosis’. When a civilisation loses touch
with reality, we call it ‘normality’.
Academic etiquette dictates that I should not merely review the evi-
dence and offer an analysis of it but also complete the book by offering
solutions to the problems I have outlined, thereby bringing a comfort-
able sense of closure to my argument. This is the academic equivalent
of the Hollywood ‘happy ending’. Most of the ‘solutions’ currently on
offer, however, will have the effect of enabling industrialism, rather
than the natural order, to survive a little longer. Not only is the story
I have to tell unfinished but the ending is one that is largely beyond
the power of human consciousness to foretell. While solutions have
viii Preface
become more urgently required over the past h alf- century, our ability to
provide them has faded as industrialism has tightened its grip. My aim is
more modest than making predictions or offering solutions, although it
is a necessary precursor to both: to provide what is so far largely – and
in certain disciplines completely – absent: namely a reasonably realistic
assessment of our situation. Solutions, if they exist, will emerge out of a
more complete awareness of our situation rather than from a continu-
ing effort by consciousness to retain its delusory grip on our fate.
One of the most prominent of our problematic assumptions is that
knowledge is best arranged into more or less separate d isciplines,
ensuring that a systemic understanding of industrial society as a whole –
always an ambitious aim – has remained elusive. Most s cience – even
recent science – has understandably recoiled from the systemic com-
plexity of industrial society, preferring to focus on more detailed and
fragmentary types of knowledge. There are exceptions: the work of
Robert Ulanowicz and Stuart Kauffman in the natural sciences; the
emergence of biosemiotics, catalysed by Gregory Bateson’s pioneering
writings, and greatly extended by Jesper Hoffmeyer and John Deely;
the emergence of complexity theory and its application to ecosystems.
Nevertheless, mainstream science, while brilliantly effective in specific
domains, has failed to throw much light on the social, economic, and
technological systems within which we live – and especially on their
integration to generate the phenomenon I refer to as ‘industrialism’.
The consequence is that while we know a great deal about specific pro-
cesses, we have almost no conception about where all this is leading
or about the larger frameworks that provide the backdrop to our daily
lives. Industrialism therefore involves a multiplicity of connections
that are normally overlooked because of the splintering of knowledge
into disciplines and specialities. Much the same could be said of the
system it opposes and consumes – the natural order. There are peculiar
difficulties, then, in describing these systems or the conflict between
them in the linear stream of language that normally constitutes a book.
The approach I have taken here is therefore more akin to a painting
(or an ecosystem), each fragment or section contributing a piece of the
whole, and relating to many other fragments.
Another tenet of academic etiquette – one that I also ignore – demands
that I define my terms clearly before beginning my argument. This particu-
larly applies to the term ‘industrialism’, as some of my critics have noted.
But clear definition assumes that the important players in the drama
have already been identified, and their shape and constitution agreed
upon; so like chess pieces, it is merely their interaction that d etermines
Preface ix
outcomes. Systemic interactions, however, are based not only on such
‘bottom up’ determinations but also on redefinition and transformation of
component entities according to their interactions. Furthermore, ‘clear
definition’ assumes that entities and ideas can be precisely translated into
language. None of this is the case in our present situation: our character
and boundaries, which were debatable even prior to the industrial era,
are being transformed as we are uprooted from our natural context and
transplanted into a quite different order, and our thought and language
are themselves extensively colonised by industrialism. What is needed is
that we sensitively and reflexively feel our way towards identifying the
shape and dynamics of the industrial system, using a somewhat broader
range of faculties than is generally considered proper.
Despite these misgivings, it is useful to have an approximate starting
point for understanding; and in this provisional spirit I will characterise
industrialism as that colonising system which is r e- ordering the world
and its constituents to fit the emerging imperatives towards commodi-
tisation and capital accumulation, consuming ecological relationship as
it does so. But this is already inadequate – not least because it implies
that industrialism, like the Vogon spaceships, is external to human sub-
jectivity; whereas it might be better regarded as an outgrowth of the
historically emerging confluence of technological vision and economic
dominance, exploiting vulnerabilities that open up only after a certain
complexity of symbolic organisation has been reached.
One commentator on an early draft of this book suggested that I should
use the term ‘capitalism’ to refer to this colonising system. While I would
agree that capitalism is at the heart of the industrial system, the term carries
baggage that I prefer to do without. For example, capitalism implies private
ownership of the means of production; but as Vaclav Havel pointed out,
the socialist republics of the Cold War era shared many essential character-
istics with the capitalist world. Industrialism is broader and more pervasive
than even Marx’s pioneering insights recognised, and can be visualised as
a sort of ‘gravity well’ into which everything tends to roll, resulting in a
general distortion of the landscape of value, meaning, and relation.
I would like to thank my colleagues Matt Connell, Neil Turnbull, and
Nigel Edley for covering some of my teaching while I worked on this
book; and to Eugene Hargrove for permission to include brief extracts
from my various papers in Environmental Ethics. Thanks also to Andy
Fisher, Joel Kovel, Jack Manno, Hal Mansfield, Ugur Parlar, Eileen Patzig,
and Gill Wyatt for their diverse criticisms and suggestions over the
years; and particularly to C, for her less easily definable but nevertheless
essential contribution.
