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Nature and Madness
Through much of history our relationship with the earth has been plagued by ambivalence―we not only enjoy and appreciate the forces and manifestations of nature, we seek to plunder, alter, and control them. Here Paul Shepard uncovers the cultural roots of our ecological crisis and proposes ways to repair broken bonds with the earth, our past, and nature. Ultimately encouraging, he notes, "There is a secret person undamaged in every individual. We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse."
200 pages, Paperback
First published October 12, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 23, 2015
Paul Shepard wrote Nature and Madness to explore a perplexing question: “Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?” Shepard came to the conclusion that modern European-American culture was damaged by a long process of psychological deterioration.
Obviously, modern consumers live and think in a manner that is radically different from our wild ancestors who lived relatively sustainably. This change wasn’t the result of freaky genetic mutations or the normal process of evolution. We still have Pleistocene genes. Newborns are still wild animals who are ready and anxious to enjoy a good life among a clan of buffalo hunters.
It wasn’t genes that changed us, it was culture. Culture is a tribe’s software, and cultural evolution can happen a million times faster than genetic evolution — and that’s exactly what happened. Few, if any, newborns are now born into wild, free, salmon eating cultures. Alas, most are condemned to spend their days in the most destructive culture yet devised. Poor babies!
The process that leads to the development of healthy, happy, well-adjusted wild humans is a spiral stairway, based on a calendar. There are time windows in which certain steps in the process can be completed. If you’ve ever read the story of Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India, you know that they missed developmental windows for learning how to speak, and walk upright. Missed windows lead to incomplete development.
Shepard thought that modern consumers were the offspring of an incomplete developmental process. We were immature, infantile, psychologically crippled. By Paleolithic standards, we were childish adults, suffering from arrested development. He discussed our downward spiral by presenting us with four snapshots.
First, the domestication of plants and animals blindsided the human journey. We no longer lived in a wild land. We lived in farm country, an artificial human-controlled ecosystem. Regular contact with wild animals had been an essential part of our psychological development process. But farmers erased our wild teachers and replaced them with what Shepard referred to as a horde of goofies — passive, submissive, dim-witted domesticated animals. We ceased venerating the sacred totemic spirits of the land, and replaced them with a human-like Earth Mother, who sometimes fed us generously, and sometimes didn’t. We abandoned the leisurely lifestyle of nomadic foraging, and replaced it with miserable backbreaking toil that destroyed the health of both the farmer and the land.
Next came the desert fathers, patriarchal nomadic herders who pushed Earth Mother out of the temple, and replaced her with a powerful, aggressive, authoritarian Sky Father. He sired three monotheistic multinational religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Monotheism was a fountain of world-rejecting asceticism which “tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots,” according to Shepard. “The ‘cradle of civilization’ is also the cradle of fanatic ideology — witness the interminable desert wars…”
Next came the Reformation. The Protestant fathers were fascinated, obsessed, and disgusted by sex, filth, corruption, sensuality, the natural world — life itself. The puritan path led to estrangement from the body and the world. It increased the attention paid to sin and evil.
Finally, he discussed the mechanists of industrial society. They mostly spent their lives indoors in vast manmade urban environments that were densely populated by huge numbers of strangers. Cities were breeding grounds for myriads of psychological problems. The city was “the wilderness in disarray, a kind of pandemonium,” a realm of “menacing disintegration.”
Many of us are coming to comprehend that it is remarkably unclever to continue destroying our habitat. Shepard spent years constructing his controversial explanation. Whether or not you buy every argument, the primary thrust of the book is the rather obvious notion that our civilization has lost its marbles. This realization is a mandatory step for any pilgrimage in search of healing, happiness, and sustainability. We must abandon the belief that we are enjoying the zenith of the amazing human journey, because it locks us into a cage — there is no problem to fix, everything is always getting better.
Human beings thrived as salmon eaters and buffalo hunters. We were healthy, whole, and happy when we lived in wild tribes in wild ecosystems. Prince Charles wrote a line I will never forget: “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.” It’s heartbreaking to watch insane zoo lions endlessly pacing back and forth in their concrete prison. Long ago I read an article about condors. It said that a wild and free condor soaring above the mountains was sacred, majestic, perfect. But a condor held captive in a zoo was less — far less. The essay concluded that condor-ness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place.
After a thorough examination of the process of our decline, Shepard served us a solution that barely covers more than a page. In terms of our human-ness, we still have the 10% human component — our genes. What we’re missing is the 90% place. Therefore, Shepard says, the solution is to raise our children in a manner similar to Neolithic society, in a wild ecosystem, so that they can fully experience a complete, normal, and healthy development process. I was shocked when I first read this ridiculous and naïve idea. But later, I realized that he was exactly correct. It’s a perfect and brilliant solution, but it requires huge change, of course. Shepard pointed to the destination. It’s up to us to find the route.
Obviously, modern consumers live and think in a manner that is radically different from our wild ancestors who lived relatively sustainably. This change wasn’t the result of freaky genetic mutations or the normal process of evolution. We still have Pleistocene genes. Newborns are still wild animals who are ready and anxious to enjoy a good life among a clan of buffalo hunters.
It wasn’t genes that changed us, it was culture. Culture is a tribe’s software, and cultural evolution can happen a million times faster than genetic evolution — and that’s exactly what happened. Few, if any, newborns are now born into wild, free, salmon eating cultures. Alas, most are condemned to spend their days in the most destructive culture yet devised. Poor babies!
The process that leads to the development of healthy, happy, well-adjusted wild humans is a spiral stairway, based on a calendar. There are time windows in which certain steps in the process can be completed. If you’ve ever read the story of Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India, you know that they missed developmental windows for learning how to speak, and walk upright. Missed windows lead to incomplete development.
Shepard thought that modern consumers were the offspring of an incomplete developmental process. We were immature, infantile, psychologically crippled. By Paleolithic standards, we were childish adults, suffering from arrested development. He discussed our downward spiral by presenting us with four snapshots.
First, the domestication of plants and animals blindsided the human journey. We no longer lived in a wild land. We lived in farm country, an artificial human-controlled ecosystem. Regular contact with wild animals had been an essential part of our psychological development process. But farmers erased our wild teachers and replaced them with what Shepard referred to as a horde of goofies — passive, submissive, dim-witted domesticated animals. We ceased venerating the sacred totemic spirits of the land, and replaced them with a human-like Earth Mother, who sometimes fed us generously, and sometimes didn’t. We abandoned the leisurely lifestyle of nomadic foraging, and replaced it with miserable backbreaking toil that destroyed the health of both the farmer and the land.
Next came the desert fathers, patriarchal nomadic herders who pushed Earth Mother out of the temple, and replaced her with a powerful, aggressive, authoritarian Sky Father. He sired three monotheistic multinational religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Monotheism was a fountain of world-rejecting asceticism which “tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots,” according to Shepard. “The ‘cradle of civilization’ is also the cradle of fanatic ideology — witness the interminable desert wars…”
Next came the Reformation. The Protestant fathers were fascinated, obsessed, and disgusted by sex, filth, corruption, sensuality, the natural world — life itself. The puritan path led to estrangement from the body and the world. It increased the attention paid to sin and evil.
Finally, he discussed the mechanists of industrial society. They mostly spent their lives indoors in vast manmade urban environments that were densely populated by huge numbers of strangers. Cities were breeding grounds for myriads of psychological problems. The city was “the wilderness in disarray, a kind of pandemonium,” a realm of “menacing disintegration.”
Many of us are coming to comprehend that it is remarkably unclever to continue destroying our habitat. Shepard spent years constructing his controversial explanation. Whether or not you buy every argument, the primary thrust of the book is the rather obvious notion that our civilization has lost its marbles. This realization is a mandatory step for any pilgrimage in search of healing, happiness, and sustainability. We must abandon the belief that we are enjoying the zenith of the amazing human journey, because it locks us into a cage — there is no problem to fix, everything is always getting better.
Human beings thrived as salmon eaters and buffalo hunters. We were healthy, whole, and happy when we lived in wild tribes in wild ecosystems. Prince Charles wrote a line I will never forget: “In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat.” It’s heartbreaking to watch insane zoo lions endlessly pacing back and forth in their concrete prison. Long ago I read an article about condors. It said that a wild and free condor soaring above the mountains was sacred, majestic, perfect. But a condor held captive in a zoo was less — far less. The essay concluded that condor-ness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place.
After a thorough examination of the process of our decline, Shepard served us a solution that barely covers more than a page. In terms of our human-ness, we still have the 10% human component — our genes. What we’re missing is the 90% place. Therefore, Shepard says, the solution is to raise our children in a manner similar to Neolithic society, in a wild ecosystem, so that they can fully experience a complete, normal, and healthy development process. I was shocked when I first read this ridiculous and naïve idea. But later, I realized that he was exactly correct. It’s a perfect and brilliant solution, but it requires huge change, of course. Shepard pointed to the destination. It’s up to us to find the route.
July 27, 2022
La noia, versione ecologista, credo...
Allora... l'uomo libero e in equilibrio con la natura era una cosa buona, e quando se ne è distaccato ritrovandosi in villaggi sempre più grandi ha peggiorato, e di molto, la sua condizione anche morale. Il suo distacco e il suo rifiuto del mondo naturale, allevare poche specie di piante e animali, rendere tutto intorno a sé asettico e sotto controllo lo ha man mano allontanato dalla natura. Mentre prima egli, uomo, era parte del mondo, ora era contro di esso.
Questa la sintesi del pensiero di Shepard per come l'ho capita. Pensiero ampliato all'infinito nei campi più disparati, dalla religione alla psicologia del bambino, dalla filosofia alla scienza applicata. Parole, parole... parole difficili da cercare nel dizionario, concetti sviluppati senza limiti, riferimenti continui ad autori e teorie non note. Tutto al fine di supportare la tesi originale, che l'uomo sia ormai troppo autoreferenziale, che abbia bisogno di tornare alle origini.
Perché il suo cammino è sbagliato, perché le microcomunità delle origini erano in equilibrio col mondo, erano parte di esso. Interessante, seducente, irrealizzabile purtroppo se non dopo la distruzione di tutto. Ecologia primordiale, dunque, e anche pulsioni olistiche contrapposte al meccanicismo che domina le nostre culture odierne. E su questo, pagine e pagine su e giù per lo scibile umano. Fino alla noia, fino a leggere in apnea, fino alla fine. Bello, dunque, ma...
Ma la morale della storia è chiara: se una libraia sorridente ti ha consigliato male una prima volta, non darle una seconda chance. Lei non ha letto ciò che suggerisce, tu dovrai.
Allora... l'uomo libero e in equilibrio con la natura era una cosa buona, e quando se ne è distaccato ritrovandosi in villaggi sempre più grandi ha peggiorato, e di molto, la sua condizione anche morale. Il suo distacco e il suo rifiuto del mondo naturale, allevare poche specie di piante e animali, rendere tutto intorno a sé asettico e sotto controllo lo ha man mano allontanato dalla natura. Mentre prima egli, uomo, era parte del mondo, ora era contro di esso.
Questa la sintesi del pensiero di Shepard per come l'ho capita. Pensiero ampliato all'infinito nei campi più disparati, dalla religione alla psicologia del bambino, dalla filosofia alla scienza applicata. Parole, parole... parole difficili da cercare nel dizionario, concetti sviluppati senza limiti, riferimenti continui ad autori e teorie non note. Tutto al fine di supportare la tesi originale, che l'uomo sia ormai troppo autoreferenziale, che abbia bisogno di tornare alle origini.
Perché il suo cammino è sbagliato, perché le microcomunità delle origini erano in equilibrio col mondo, erano parte di esso. Interessante, seducente, irrealizzabile purtroppo se non dopo la distruzione di tutto. Ecologia primordiale, dunque, e anche pulsioni olistiche contrapposte al meccanicismo che domina le nostre culture odierne. E su questo, pagine e pagine su e giù per lo scibile umano. Fino alla noia, fino a leggere in apnea, fino alla fine. Bello, dunque, ma...
Ma la morale della storia è chiara: se una libraia sorridente ti ha consigliato male una prima volta, non darle una seconda chance. Lei non ha letto ciò che suggerisce, tu dovrai.
August 3, 2017
Are we relying on future generations to solve our environmental crises and/or our broken relationship with nature? ....while at the same time influencing those same generations to adopt cultural values and attitudes which work against this reliance? Paul Shepard addresses this and other things in his excellent book.
November 16, 2017
cool ideas but felt academic in the bad way
September 2, 2024
è talmente puzzolente di conservatorismo, paternalismo e nostalgica visione primitivista che ci si annoia dopo neanche 10 pagine
December 20, 2019
I honestly could not understand this book. I read quite a bit of academic work on the subject of ecology, but this book had me going "what just happened?" at the end of every paragraph. The author seems to be making some comparison between human developmental stages and the cultural evolution of western economies... I think?! Check out this book if you enjoy the experience of zoning out as someone pedantic mansplains at you at a party.
December 20, 2015
I skimmed. Kind of a lot. Call me unsophisticated, but at this stage in my reading life, I'll own it: I found the writing fairly cumbersome and distracting. I don't mind working through confusion, but when I find myself stopping and going back to count a string of prepositional phrases out of passive curiosity, I know that's not where I want my attention to be. Yes, there are important and powerful ideas here. And I felt like most of them weren't particularly new to me. The work is explicitly anti-patriarchal, and yet somewhat patriarchal in its presentation; perhaps I'm just not able to accept an Explanation of Everything that's under 200 pages, though...I still skimmed. Some female subjectivity would have been...nice. I found mention of colonialism only once (but, you know, skimming). If you liked this, or if you didn't, but felt compelled to pick it up, read Annette Kolodny.
Here's some quotes I found interesting:
"'Resolved, that none of us know, or care to know, anything about grasses, native or otherwise, outside the fact that for the present there are lots of them, the best on record, and we are after getting the most out of them while they last.' (West Texas cattlemen's meeting, 1898)
"But history itself, an idea accounting for a made world, was invested by villagers as a result of five thousand years of strife and struggle to hold environment and self together. As a simplistic, linear, literal account of events and powers as unpredictable as parental anger, history is a juvenile idea."
"What the desert means is preceded by preconscious selection of what is seen and how it is seen."
Here's some quotes I found interesting:
"'Resolved, that none of us know, or care to know, anything about grasses, native or otherwise, outside the fact that for the present there are lots of them, the best on record, and we are after getting the most out of them while they last.' (West Texas cattlemen's meeting, 1898)
"But history itself, an idea accounting for a made world, was invested by villagers as a result of five thousand years of strife and struggle to hold environment and self together. As a simplistic, linear, literal account of events and powers as unpredictable as parental anger, history is a juvenile idea."
"What the desert means is preceded by preconscious selection of what is seen and how it is seen."
September 23, 2011
Such an important book. Great. Love it.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews