f o u r
How did we get here? By here, I mean a world of oceans of plastic and mountains of waste, a world of clear cuts, strip malls, strip mines. A world in which our bottomless appetite for fossil fuel threatens to break the earth’s thermostat and send us careening into a period of mass extinctions, only the sixth in our planet’s four and a half billion year tenure.
There is no simple answer to this question, of course. We could approach the inquiry through a multiplicity of lenses: historical, technological, sociological, geopolitical, economic, ecological. And yet all of our activities, all of our world-shaping ideas, philosophies, technologies, policies, our art and our poetry emerge out of psyche.
Jung’s conception of the psyche, which evolved throughout his long career, comprised all psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious, what he described as “a boiling cauldron of contradictory impulses, inhibitions, and affects… Psyche is the starting point of all human experience, and all the knowledge we have gained eventually leads back to it.”
Speaking after witnessing the effects of two world wars and amidst the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War, Jung made a statement that feels even more urgent today. “The world hangs by a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man… We are the great danger, psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche?”
Clearly something has gone wrong with the human psyche, and perhaps one way of answering our question of “how did we get here” is that for millennia humanity has, sometimes knowingly but usually not, drained the world in which we live of psyche and made it the exclusive domain of homo sapiens.
Psyche derives from an ancient Greek word meaning both soul and breath and is somewhat analogous to the Latin word anima. For most of our perhaps 200,000 years, humans lived on an animate earth. Deer and buffalo had anima, as did rivers and mountains and trees. Humans were one ensouled living creature among the entire host of other ensouled living creatures. Our ancestors were subjects among innumerable subjects. In our modern jargon, we could say humans experienced the world ecologically, hitched to everything else in the universe, to paraphrase John Muir.
I raise this not to romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that most of our ancestors lived by, but to make the point that our de-animated, de-souled world is something quite new under the sun, and it has massively impacted how we see ourselves, how we see the environment around us, and ultimately how we behave.
