One of my friends shared an article last week that gives me a good opportunity to talk about something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's a 2015 piece by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Yes! Magazine, and like all of Kimmerer's work I've read so far (only a couple of articles), it's something I would have loved as an undergrad. Unfortunately, I never came across her work when I would have been most receptive to it, and reading it now, I find it a bit frustrating.
The main argument of the piece is that our language determines the way we treat nature, so replacing objectifying pronouns like "it" with personifying ones would help us respect other species and nature as a whole. Kimmerer specifically proposes using "ki/kin" instead of "it/that/those." That these specific pronouns were doomed to fail from the start is sort of beside the point. If we're mindful of the way we speak, we can interrogate unquestioned assumptions and address our insults and omissions. To the extent that Kimmerer is simply inviting us to make a statement of intent about our attitudes to the natural communities we live, I'm still more or less on board.
The problem only arises when Kimmerer starts making implications about historical causality. She tells us that the objectification of nature as "it" released people from the moral inhibition that kept them from harming their ecosystems. "Using “it” absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation." More importantly, this amorality was then violently imposed on indigenous cultures that otherwise rejected it.
"Among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object. We can see the consequences all around us as we enter an age of extinction precipitated by how we think and how we live."
I don't mean to single Kimmerer out here--her version is just the most concise and convenient at hand. The implicit narrative here is a very familiar one in the corner of the environmental Left focused most on indigenous cultures and colonialism. Kimmerer most closely echoes David Abram, who wrote two books (which were at the time some of my favorites) arguing that the invention of writing severed humanity from the animal experience of nature and thus numbed us to the pain we inflict on ourselves by destroying it. Derrick Jensen takes this line of thinking to its most explicit, flawed, and polemic extreme, stating unambiguously that the emergence of agricultural civilization was the root of all evil in society and nature, from mine waste to child abuse. I suppose I'm mostly writing this in continued rejection of Jensen's ideas, since they held me deepest and longest, and commit the most egregious overreaches. In my mind, the other arguments I'm referencing are watered down versions of the same story, carefully crafted to invite the same feeling without saying anything too historically reckless. Maybe it's unfair of me to accuse them of deliberately making implications, and really I'm just aggressively filling in the blanks that aren't actually there, but I'll leave you to decide that for yourselves.
It was transphobia that turned me off of Derrick Jensen in the first place, but cliodynamics (the scientific study of human history) and cultural evolution are the things that have changed the way I understand this narrative in general. The thing that got me thinking about this question again was reading the new Barry Lopez book, Horizon. In my review of that book I noted that learning about cultural evolution had made some of the claims of his I used to take for granted seem completely unfounded. I thought I should back that up with a bit more detail. So what I want to do here is to use the tools of cliodynamics and cultural evolution, in broad terms at least, to evaluate the implicit claims Kimmerer and Lopez are making. Both are offering the same combination of historical explanation and exhortation to the future.
Indigenous cultures are by very fact of their persistence in particular places, ways of perceiving and influencing the world that center community well-being and the sustainable use of natural resources. As they have been violently suppressed and replaced by a culture that centers short-term self-interest and entertainment apparently severed from nature, the power to make decisions that influence the fate of most people and species on the plant has gone to individuals driven by greed and ignorance rather than inherited wisdom. And the solution to all the pressing problems of the world—climate change, biodiversity loss, racism, etc—is to embrace indigenous wisdom.
We’ll start with the historical claim.
The idea that a single, essentially random or perhaps locally adaptive cultural change, whether it was writing or agriculture or the linguistic shift from personifying to objectifying nature, had important long-term implications, is not inconceivable. It's the sort of thing that drives certain species to ecological success all the time. The hypothesis does raise a lot of questions, though. Why did it occur when and where it did, and apparently only a few times in human history? Were there reasons it spread among certain societies and not others?
There are potential answers to these questions, different for each mechanism, and looking into the empirical evidence for any of them quickly explodes the notion of any single cause for "civilization disease." More importantly, though, pulling on any of these threads just raises more fundamental questions. If you find that heirarchial states emerged in places where climates favored the growth of plants with dry, storeable seeds, for instance, what does that mean for a story about the healing wisdom of plants? If writing, agriculture, hierarchy, and certain linguistic shifts that accompanied them were all solutions to problems that arose during a collective ecological shift not reducible to any one cause, does it make sense to single any of them out for blame?
Trying to apply scientific or historical thinking to any of these hypotheses quickly reveals the category error. None of these authors--and it pains me to say this about Barry Lopez--are genuinely interested in these questions. Their purpose is, unsurprisingly, moral and political, not causal. The clearest illustration of this I've seen came not from a professional writer but from an indigenous communist acquaintance on Facebook. They shared a pop science summary of a study which claimed that the evolution of the lactase persistence gene contributed to the fact that Europeans colonized the rest of the world. She didn't like that suggestion, because it seemed to somehow absolve settlers of their true sin. Colonialism wasn't something that happened to Europeans; it was a moral choice they made. More specifically, colonialism wasn't something Europeans were uniquely able to do because of some special genetic endowment. It was a crime any culture in the world could have done, but which only Europeans were vile enough to actually commit.
The lactase persistence story lacks the key element the stories told by Kimmerer, Jensen, and Lopez all have in common: nobody does something they know is wrong. Nobody rewrites a grammar so it’s okay for them to cut down sacred trees, or violates the universal norm of egalitarianism, or indulges in greed and short-term gratification while their elders scowl at their lack of foresight. They just drink milk and have marginally more surviving children. (I’m not saying lactase was the single cause of anything in human history. It’s just a good illustration of the difference between the two modes of thinking.)
For these writers, the most influential moments in human history were shaped by moral vices. They’re all retellings of Adam and Eve, focused on the fateful choice to disobey God, which led to all the manifold suffering of the modern world. Even Abrams, who never frames his story as a violation of a moral norm, still talks about the dulling of our animal senses by written knowledge in a way that echoes the loss of Edenic innocence. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of two timeless forces defined by their moral essence, battling for the fate of human society. Any story that echoes it commits the same historical error, conceiving of evil as a proactive, causal force.
Cliodynamics acknowledges that moral norms, as they vary by culture, can be causal factors in history. But it also sees them as part of a complex web of causes and effects, and over the long term, more effect than cause. Morality is a perceptual system that helps us weigh our options in complex social situations and, more importantly, makes it feel good to make the decisions that tend to lead to good evolutionary outcomes. It’s shaped entirely by the competing needs of lineages and societies. So any gloss of history that hinges on the assumption that one ethnic group or social class ended up where it did because of an innate tendency, over decades or generations, to align with some timeless virtue or vice, should raise some serious red flags. And obviously when I put it like that, it sounds easy. But I made this exact mistake myself for many years, and kept making it even after it was pointed out to me. As Kimmerer reminds us, our habits of thought and language can conceal implications we might not like if we considered them more carefully.
The version of this story that Lopez presents in Horizon is, uncharacteristically, a fascinating train wreck of intellectual overreach. It almost seems to be an attempt to combine genetic and moral stories of human history, to predictably messy results. The passage comes up in a chapter about research on human origins, and opens with a gloss of the extinction of Homo neandertalensis at the hands of Homo sapiens. He places heavy emphasis here on early H. sapiens' capacity for social cooperation.
"what set behaviorally modern man apart so dramatically from other populations of H. sapiens, and from Neanderthals, was his ability to recognize and manage various forms of complexity, including social complexity. A widely held view about the enlargement of the frontal lobes in Homo is that they enabled Homo to far surpass earlier hominins in developing and maintaining extensive social relationships."
The most important element of this capacity, for Lopez, is empathy. "If the creation and maintenance of effective social networks, a particularly striking human attribute, is necessary to protect individuals against threats to this species’ health, then the ability to listen carefully to one another becomes critical." So far, this is all reasonable enough, and broadly accords with what I know of the literature. It's only when he turns to the present and future that things get weird.
"To what degree do man’s built environment and his cultural environment exercise a selective pressure on, for example, temporal and spatial “disorders” such as manic depression and agoraphobia; on such mental conditions as autism, narcissistic personality disorder, and psychopathy, all characterized by a lack of empathy; and on the continued existence of such characteristically human behaviors as altruism and aggression?"
His speculation is that the modern cultural environment, which rewards short-term, selfish thinking, exerts a selective pressure that favors individuals with less empathy. Thus, rather than improving humanity for a better future, the modern world is eroding the capacities that made us human in the first place. He even goes so far as to imply that we are losing the capacity for cooperation entirely.
"It could be that [...] H. sapiens “lost” on his way to modernity, [its] willingness to cooperate closely with others on a daily basis . . . ."
Ironically, elsewhere in the book Lopez makes the point that evolution is misunderstood as progress, that we should instead place adaptation to current circumstance on that pedestal. And yet here, he frames potential adaptations to modernity as an explicit step back, a tragic loss of the thing we had previously attained as a prize of forward progress.
The passage concludes by shifting focus from natural selection to leadership. The key expression of human empathy for Lopez is not a sentimental moment of compassion. Rather, it is the institution of the "elder," a set of individuals who embody the best aspects of empathetic thinking and can be relied on to guide communities through hardship.
"Elders take life more seriously. Their feelings toward all life around them are more tender, their capacity for empathy greater. They’re more accessible than other adults, able to engage in a conversation with a child that does not patronize or infantilize the child, but instead confirms the child in his or her sense of wonder. Finally, the elder is willing to disappear into the fabric of ordinary life. Elders are looking neither for an audience nor for confirmation. They know who they are, and the people around them know who they are. They do not need to tell you who they are."
And here we come to Lopez's version of the original sin of modern civilization:
"Living in one of the most highly advanced of human cultures, I often wonder, What have modern cultures done with these people [elders]? In our search for heroes to admire, did we just run them over? Were we suspicious about the humility, the absence of self-promotion, the lack of impressive material wealth and other signs of conventional success? Or were we afraid they would tell us a story we didn’t want to hear? That they would suggest things we didn’t want to do?"
The elders advised a prudent, compassionate course that would yield sustainability and justice. Instead, we chose petty self-glorification and instant gratification, at the cost of immense cruelty and the death of much that was good about our world and society. All of the dangers we face now, from climate change and biodiversity loss and on and on, could only be addressed by ceding decision making power back to a council of indigenous elders.
Once again, it's fairly obvious that this story isn't a satisfying explanation of human history. The kinds of moral character implicitly at work here are simply too flexible, too contingent on culture and context, to be the driving force of such large and persistent trends. This hypothesis could be framed and evaluated in the terms of academic history and cultural evolution, focusing on the intergenerational transmission of norms, on the power of particular institutions during changing material circumstances, and excluding out the notion that modern people or their ancestors were genetically predisposed to greed, but that seems like an empty exercise at this point.
Similarly, the way Lopez talks about selection is transparently misinformed. He implies that the only things that could prevent the capitalist dystopia from removing our genetic capacity for empathy and foresight would be catastrophes like a plague or nuclear war. The contemporary evolution of our species is fascinating precisely because it works through slow, consistent subtleties rather than obvious catastrophe. A nuclear war would likely have a less noticeable impact on human genetics than C-sections, for instance.
Agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization have all changed humans genetically and culturally in profound ways, but none of them have made us into the sort of people willing to cheat our friends, harm outsiders, ignore the wisdom of our elders, transgress moral norms, or destroy the parts of the environment that might otherwise have supported our grandchildren. All of that is the default inheritance of all animals produced by evolution. To the extent that we and a few other animals have, in some instances, developed the ability to escape it, we can be grateful--though of course the fact that we would feel pleased about that capacity is inextricable from the fact that we have it.
Because the thing is – and if this rambling post is leading up to any insight, it's this – the cultural norms and social structures of indigenous societies were not shaped toward virtues like compassion and equality. They weren't even designed to achieve outcomes like environmental harmony. They were shaped, like colonial societies and modern industrial ones, by the same ecological and evolutionary forces that shape all life on earth, forces largely unperceived by the individuals embodying them. Indigenous cultures are egalitarian because that arrangement on average benefits each hunter more than relying only on their own hunting skills, not because they're innately generous. If indigenous societies today look more sustainable than others, relative to the scope of their land use and population, that's less because they've restrained their impulse to overconsume than because they've in their homelands long enough that the consequences of their unsustainability have been forgotten.
The point of all that is not to take indigenous people down a peg on the moral scoreboard. The point is that making moral judgments of the scale of societies never made any sense in the first place. On some level, writers like Kimmerer, Abram, and certainly Lopez (though maybe not Jensen?) certainly know that stories they are telling are metaphors, that they didn't literally happen. If for some reason, that doesn't stop them from telling them. Are they really such useful metaphors, despite their inherent falsehood? Maybe, though I don't see how.
What seems more likely, at least based on my own experience, is that these authors simply pass on this story because the underlying core of it feels true to them, while the flaws and mistruths feel ephemeral, something that can be swept under the rug with a choice caveat. In other words, this narrative is their core worldview, and the purpose of each article or book they write is to reinforce it in their audience. To speak for myself, that was certainly my main draw in reading them. I'm not being snide here, either--this is of course how human thinking works about pretty much anything we care about, no matter what "side" you're on or what kinds of narratives you prefer.
The problem I’m trying to point out isn’t the use of the metaphor as such. Rather, it’s the unexamined meaning of the metaphor itself. One of the main implications of the Original Sin story, no matter how you tell it, is that humans somehow set ourselves apart from nature. We stopped playing by the same rules as every other animal. That seems antithetical to the whole spirit of what these writers are doing. Kimmerer wants us to see the other parts of the natural world as family. Lopez prizes scientific and indigenous frameworks that respect the agency and perspectives of other animals on par with our own. David Abram’s book is even titled “Becoming Animal.” If you asked any of them to explicitly endorse the idea that humans were exempt from ecological forces because we are uniquely capable of moral choices, I think they would all reject it.
So I think there’s a fundamental contradiction here that’s worth addressing. In my experience, the only way to overcome it is to study the rules that govern all animals, all life, including us. To approach our history through the lenses of niches and foraging theory and population dynamics, and to study culture with the tools of evolutionary science. To immerse ourselves in the interplay of ecological forces and the drift of cultural traits until they form a coherent alternative story about what humans are and where our problems come from.