The Way – a synthesis

The philosophy underlying this interpretation of disease and the means of curing it is even more explicit in the case of the Qollahuaya diviners of the community of Kaata in the Bolivian Andes. They see their community as an integral part of an ayllu – conceptualizing their mountainous territory as a human body, with communities living on the high ground, the central areas and in the lowlands. According to Joseph W. Bastien, the head of the ayllu is the “moist puna area . . . where herders graze alpacas, llamas, sheep and pigs; the grasses that grow there are its hair; its eyes are the lakes of Apacheta. Its trunk is formed by the sloping terraced fields of potatoes, oca and barley”.

The Kaata also has a heart, and a liver, which produce blood and fat and are the “principles of life and power”. They are circulated by the diviners throughout the community and in particular into the “earth shrines” by means of rituals and ceremonies in which the sick people “eat with the mountain”. For the people of Kaata, human health is thereby identified with the integrity of their ayllu: it follows that when people, their society and its environment “work together to form one body, the bodies of sick individuals become whole” and the sick are restored to health.

The body metaphor provides in this way “a systemic model in which there is an analogy between the human body and the environmental and social bodies”. Diseases are diagnosed as “signs of disorders between man and his land, or between his vertical ayllu and Ayllu Kaata”. The disease is then combated “not by isolating the individual in a hospital away from his land” but instead by “gathering the members of his social group in ritual and together feeding all the parts of Ayllu Kaata”.(88)

Bastien sees this as being very much the approach to disease of the people of the Andes in general. For them disease

“is an organic, cultural, environmental and social phenomenon . . .By means of the body metaphor, diviners not only examine, but also interrelate the complex networks of environmental factors and social structure with physical distress. This often prevents subsequent illness because action is taken to change social and environmental causes of the sickness.” [89]

In this manner, vernacular man correctly diagnoses heterotelic diseases as the symptoms of social and ecological maladjustments brought about by diverging from the Way, and thereby violating the laws of the cosmos and disrupting its critical order. What is more he fully realizes that maladjustments can only be eliminated by correcting such a divergence and returning to the Way.

Modern man, on the other hand, interprets problems in terms of cause and effect relationships on the basis of which a disease is attributed to a discreet event such as the action of a bacterium, virus or other pathogen – which must be eliminated, usually by waging chemical warfare against it.

The same is true of all the other ever more daunting problems that confront our society today, such as crime, delinquency, drug addiction, poverty, unemployment, etc. All are interpreted in such a way as to make them appear soluble by the expedients that science, technology and industry can provide and whose application is rationalized and hence legitimized in terms of the world view of modernism. Needless to say, everywhere the incidence of all these problems is escalating.

That is the essence of the Great Misinterpretation – the ultimate manifestation of modern man’s cognitive maladjustment to the industrial world that he has created. It draws us into a chain-reaction leading to ever greater social and environmental destruction, from which we must waste no time in extracting ourselves if we are to have any future on this planet.

The Great Re-interpretation

No amount of empirical or theoretical evidence is likely to persuade mainstream scientists or other protagonists of the world view of modernism to accept any of the principles of the world view of ecology. What is more, if they are eventually accepted, it will not be because they will have been ‘proved’ to be true in the scientific sense of the term, but because the ‘reigning paradigm’ or ‘canonical knowledge’ will have changed to such an extent that they will have become consistent with it.

Similarly, no amount of empirical or theoretical ‘evidence’ as to the untenability of the basic ideas of today can lead scientists to abandon them if they are part of ‘current wisdom’, the ‘reigning paradigm’, or ‘canonical knowledge’.

Clearly then, so long as we argue from within the accepted ‘conceptual framework’, or the reigning paradigm, or the canonical knowledge of the day, we can never dissuade people either to accept new ideas or to abandon old ones. “Demonstration”, Polanyi insists, “must be supplemented . . . by forms of persuasion which can induce a conversion”. [90] Such a conversion, or generalized paradigm shift, involves a profound rearrangement or recombination of the knowledge that makes up our world view. It must affect its very metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic foundations.

In the same way the members of a society are converted to a new religion or world view when that with which they are imbued proves to be unadaptive to the new conditions – in particular the social and ecological chaos caused by colonialism and economic development. The new religio-political movements to which they are converted is generally referred to as ‘millenarian’.

They proliferated in Europe during the 10th century, a period of socio-economic change that caused very serious social stress. Many of the movements which sought to establish new cultural patterns during those troubled times were convinced that the year 1000 presaged the end of the world and they called upon their adepts to prepare themselves spiritually for this momentous event.

Such movements are also referred to as ‘messianic’ in that they are often led by a prophet who sees himself as divinely inspired-as a re-incarnation of a previous great religious figure, or in the case of movements of this sort occurring among the Jews, as the Messiah himself. These movements have proliferated throughout the Third World, during the colonial period in particular. In Lagos, there has been such a proliferation of messianic cults that their leaders went so far as to set up the world’s first trade union of messiahs. Anthony Wallace refers to such cults as “revitalist”. [91]

The increasing failure of all policies based on the world view of modernism and its derivative paradigms – those of science and modern economics in particular – to satisfy our most fundamental psychic needs or indeed solve any of the worsening problems that threaten our very survival on this planet gives rise to psychic conditions increasingly propitious to the emergence of revitalist movements.

The chances are that such movements will be affected, among other things, by ecological ideas that are increasingly in the air and whose relevance is becoming ever more apparent to even the blindest among us. There are signs too, that such movements are likely to preach a return to the vernacular way of life.

Thus while the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Moslem world and of Hindu fundamentalism in India can be seen as an unpleasant trend towards chauvinism, bigotry and intolerance, these movements are clearly also a reaction against Western economic imperialism and the disruption of the cultures and traditions of Moslems and Hindus by Western science, technology and industrial development.

Significantly, too, a considerable proportion of the revitalist movements that have so far sprung up in the Third World have been ‘nativistic’ – which is to say that they correctly attributed the ills against which they were reacting to the way of life imposed upon their members by their colonial masters, and preached a return to the Way of their ancestors.

Many such movements have been violent and unpleasant, of that there is no doubt. Usually too, they have been put down with equal violence and unpleasantness as their ideas were rightly seen as a threat to the established order. However, there is reason to hope that the ecology-based revitalist movements of the future will seek to achieve their ends in the true Gandhian tradition. It could be that Deep Ecology, with its ethical and metaphysical preoccupations, might well develop into such a movement. So could the Earth First movement in the U.S.A., whose religious and metaphysical basis has recently been described by Bron Taylor. [92]

We cannot afford to wait and see whether such movements will develop into revitalist cults that are powerful enough to transform our society. Instead, we should work towards their development by helping to create the conditions in which they are likely to emerge. Let us remember that the world view of ecology is very much that of a vernacular community-based society, whereas the world view of modernism is that of an industrial society.

We must thereby set out to combat and systematically weaken the main institutions of the industrial system – the state, the corporations – and the science and technology which they use to transform society and the natural world. At the same time, we must do everything to help recreate the family and the community, and above all a localized and diversified economy based on them, reducing in this way our increasingly universal dependence on a destructive economic system that, in any case, is in decline and may well be close to collapse.

As we multiply our efforts in these directions, so we must create the terrain in which ecological ideas can take root and flourish. May they inspire those who will lead us back to the Way, and thereby restore and preserve what still remains of the beautiful world we have been so privileged to inherit.

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References

1.	The term ‘ecosphere’ was coined by the American ecologist Lamont Cole. I shall take the ‘biosphere’ to be the organization of living things, and the ‘ecosphere’ to be the biosphere together with its geological substrate and its atmospheric environment. This is how James Lovelock uses the term biosphere, as opposed to Vernadsky and others. The word ecosphere corresponds to Lovelock’s Gaia and the two will be used interchangeably.
2.	Gaia, or the ecosphere, is seen to constitute a hierarchy of natural systems. Each natural system is part of a series of larger systems and is itself made up of smaller systems. Thus, a human being is part of a family, a community, an ecosystem and Gaia herself, and is in turn made up of tissues and organs, cells, molecules, etc. The hierarchical nature of the living world is stressed by the ecologist Eugene Odum, especially in his latest textbook Basic Ecology. For him ecology is largely concerned with the study of the upper end of the hierarchy, i.e. from the ecosystems upwards. He also defines it as “the study of the structure and function of nature” or of Gaia. If the latter is hierarchically organized, then the subject matter of ecology can only be the Gaian hierarchy as a whole. Ecology then becomes a super-science – as it was seen in the early decades of this century by the leading ecologists of the time.
3.	see Eliade, Mircea, 1971, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, pp. 55-56. Oxford University Press.
4.	see Rupert Riedl’s book Order in Living Organisms, p. 1. John Wiley, New York, 1978.
5.	Homeotelic behaviour. From the Greek homeo (same) and telos (goal). A term coined by the author. The behaviour of natural systems is seen to be homeotelic if its goal is to maintain the critical order and hence the stability of the larger system, and indeed of the Gaian hierarchy. It is the basic thesis of The Way that such behaviour has prevailed at all levels of organization until recently. Homeotelic behaviour is also that which best serves the real interests of all natural systems, which can only be secured by maintaining the critical order of the whole of which they are but the differentiated parts, and which provide them with the environment to which they have been adapted by their evolution.. This view is the very opposite of that entertained by neo-Darwinians and socio-biologists. For them, there is no ‘selective advantage’ in displaying any concern for the stability or integrity of the larger whole.
6.	Riedl, Rupert, 1978 Order in Living Organisms, p. 1. John Wiley, New York.
7.	von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, was co-founder of the General Systems Theory, which is unfortunately no longer very much in fashion, though its main journal The General Systems Yearbook is still published today. It seems to me that it is only in the light of this theory that one can develop a coherent organization of knowledge in terms of which one can understand the workings of the ecosphere as a whole-in other words, a true ecology.
8.	Pittendrigh, Colin, 1958, “Adaptation, Natural Selection and Behaviour,” in Roe, Anne, and Simpson, George Gaylord, Eds, Evolution and Behaviour, p. 394. Yale University Press, New Haven.
9.	Douglas, Mary, 1966. “Purity and Danger. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Quoted by Hildyard, Nicholas, 1978, “There is more to Food than Eating”, The New Ecologist No. 5, September/October, pp. 166-168.
10.	Metuh, Emefie Ikenga, 1981, God and Man in African Religion, p. 57. Geoffrey Chapman, London.
11.	Passmore, John, 1978, Science and its Critics, pp. 108-109. Duckworth, London.
12.	I deal with the nature of early academic ecology, in The Way in particular in chapters 1 and 4.
13.	Forbes, S. A., 1880, “On Some Interactions of Organisms,” Bulletin of the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History, I. pp. 11-18.
14.	Allee, W. C., Emerson, W. S. W. A., Park, O., Park, T., Schmidt, K. P., 1949, Principles of Animal Ecology, pp. 7-8. Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders.
15.	Thorpe, W. H., in Koestler, Arthur and Smythies, J. R., eds., 1972, Beyond Reductionism, p. 393. Hutchinson, London.
16.	Weiss, Paul, in Koestler and Smythies, ibid, p. 46.
17.	Ibid, p. 46.
18.	Stanner, W. E. H., in Hammond, Peter Boyd, ed., 1971, An Introduction to Cultural and Social Anthropology, pp. 289-290. Macmillan and Collier Macmillan, London.
19.	Cannon, Walter, 1932, The Wisdom of the Body. Norton, New York, p. 22.
20.	Cannon, Walter, ibid, p. 25.
21.	Odum, Eugene P., 1983, Basic Ecology. Saunders College Publishing, Philadelphia, p. 46.
22.	Rappaport, Roy A., 1967, Pigs for the Ancestors. Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 4.
23.	Harding, Thomas G., 1960, “Adaptation and Stability” in Sahlins and Elman, eds., Evolution and Culture, p. 54.
24.	Sagan, Dorion, and Margulis, Lynn, 1983, “The Gaian perspective of ecology”, The Ecologist Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 160-167.
25.	This statement will sound very odd to those who are accustomed to thinking of evolution as a process that affects the individual organism, (or – in statistical terms – a large number of individual organisms), and that changes to the natural world as a whole can be understood in terms of the changes occurring to these individual organisms. Needless to say, this thesis is untenable if the natural world is an organized whole of which the individual organisms are but the differentiated parts. In other words, if the Gaian thesis is correct, the unit of evolution cannot be the individual but Gaia herself. Since Gaia is a spatio-temporal entity, Gaia, in a sense, is evolution. However, I prefer to see evolution (less accurately) as the ‘Gaian process’. This issue is dealt with in The Way chapter 21.
26.	I use the term homearchy (from the Greek homeo (same) and archos (to rule)) to refer to the control of differentiated natural systems by the hierarchy of larger systems of which they are part. for instance, the control (much of which is likely to be internalized) of people by their families, communities and ecosystems. I also use the term heterarchy (from the Greek hetero, different and archos to rule) to refer to the control of natural systems by agents that are external to the Gaian hierarchy, such as corporations and state institutions, since the later have a totally different agenda, this can only give rise to behaviour that is heterotelic to Gaia.
27.	Waddington, C. H., 1975, The Evolution of an Evolutionist. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 221-223.
28.	Orians, G. H., 1975, “Diversity, stability and maturity in natural ecosystems”, in van Dobben, W. H., and Lowe-McConnell, R., eds., Unifying Concepts in Ecology, pp. 139-150. Funk, The Hague.
29.	von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 1962, Modern Theories of Development: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology. Translation by Woodger, J. H. Harper Torchbook, New York, p. 123.
30.	Ungerer, E., 1930, “Der Aufbau des naturwissens”, Pedagogische Hochschule ii, quoted by von Bertalanffy, 1962, Modern Theories of Development, p. 12.
31.	Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1965, Structure and Function in Primitive Society p. 181. Cohen and West, London. A general discussion of this issue will be found on pp. 178-187.
32.	Ibid, p. 186.
33.	Odum, Eugene P., 1983, Basic Ecology, p. 5. Saunders College Publishing, Philadelphia.
34.	Stephen Boyden is a biologist at the Australian National University. He deals with this thesis in an article published in The Ecologist 1973, Vol. 3, No. 8, entitled “Evolution and Health”. I have devoted a number of chapters in The Way to it and to its various ramifications. See chapters 46, 47, 48 and 49.
35.	Coleman, J. S., 1968, The Adolescent Society. The Free Press of Glencoe, New York, p. 103.
36.	Rappaport, Amos, 1978, “Culture and environment,” Ecologist Quarterly No. 4, Winter, p. 270.
37.	Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1983, Symbolism in Indian Architecture. The Historical Research Documentation Centre, Jaipur, p. 8.
38.	This whole issue is described in great detail by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971.
39.	Eiseman, Fred, 1989, Bali: Sekala and Niskala, Vol. 1, ed. David Pickell, p. 5. Pickell-Periplus, Berkeley.
40.	Gerard, Ralph, in Whyte, Lancelot Law, Wilson, Albert G., Wilson, Donna eds., 1969, “Hierarchical Structures” (Proceedings of the symposium held Nov. 18-19, 1968 at Douglas Advanced Research Laboratories, Huntington Beach, Calif.). American Elsevier, New York, p. 224.
41.	Sahlins, Marshall, “Tribal economics” in Dalton, George, ed. 1971, Economic Development and Social Change, The Modernization of Village Communities, pp. 43-61. The Natural History Press, New York.
42.	Park, Mungo, 1984 (original edition 1799), Travels in the Interior of Africa, p. 154. Folio Society, London.
43.	Personal communication to the author.
44.	Sahlins, Marshall, op. cit. pp. 43-61.
45.	Polanyi, Karl, 1957, (original edition 1944), The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, Boston, p. 46.
46.	Malinowski, Bronislaw, 1937, “Anthropology as the basis of social science,” in Cattel, Cohen and Travers, eds., Human Affairs: Essavs on the Application of Science to the Study of Society, p. 232. Macmillan, London.
47.	Cornford, F. M., 1957, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 167. Harper Brothers, New York.
48.	Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, 1977, “Cosmology as ecological analysis: a view from the rainforest”, The Ecologist Vol. 7 No. 1, January/February 1977, pp. 4-11.
49.	Ibid, pp. 4-11.
50.	Fernea, Robert A., 1970, Shayk and Effendi: Changing Patterns of Authority Among the El Shabana of Southern Iraq, p. 315. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass.
51.	Harrison, Jane, 1927, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, p. 517. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
52.	Ibid p. 517.
53.	Anaximander. Quoted by Cornford, F. M., 1957, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 8. Harper Brothers, New York.
54.	Cornford, Ibid, p. 12.
55.	Herodotus. Quoted by Cornford, Ibid, p. 12.
56.	Iamblichus; “Life of Pythagoras”. Quoted by Cornford, Ibid p. 54.
57.	Homer, The Odyssey, 1854 translation by Alexander Pope, Cooke, London. Quoted by Harrison, Ibid, p. 532.
58.	de Groot, Jan Jacob Maria, 1910, The Religion of the Chinese. Macmillan, New York. Quoted by Cornford, op. cit. , p. 45.
59.	Ibid, p. 174.
60.	Feng, Yu-Lan, 1984, ” A Short History of Chinese Philosophy,” trans. Derek Boddler. Macmillan, New York, “quoted by Peerenboom, R. P., “Beyond naturalism: a reconstruction of Taoist environmental ethics”, Environmental Ethics Vol. XIII, spring 1991, p. 4.
61.	Wing-Tsit Chan, ed. 1963, “A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy”. quoted by Peerenboom, R. P., ibid, p. 9.
62.	Bloomfield, Maurice, 1908, “The Religion of the Veda, the Ancient Religion of India from Rig-Veda to Upanishads,” quoted by Cornford, op. cit., p. 175.
63.	Chaitanya, Krishna, 1983, “A Profounder ecology: the Hindu view of man and nature”, The Ecologist Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 127-128.
64.	Hocart, A. M., 1970, Kings and Councillors, p. 112. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
65.	Eiseman, Fred, 1989, ibid, p. 12.
66.	de Groot, Jan Jacob Maria, ibid, 1910, page 166, quoted by Cornford, op. cit., p. 176.
67.	Harrison, Jane, 1927, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, p. 526. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
68.	Chaitanya, Krishna, 1983, ibid, pp. 127-135.
69.	Ibid, pp. 121-135.
70.	Cornford, F. M., 1957, ibid, p. 32.
71.	Durkheim, Emile, 1964, (original edition 1915), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 199. George Allen and Unwin, London.
72.	Lods, Adolphe, 1932, Israel: From its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century, trans. S. H. Hooke, p. 250. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
73.	Tempels, Placide, 1984, La Philosophie Bantoue, p. 69. Presence Africaine, Paris.
76.	Ibid, p. 33.
74.	Ibid, p33.
75.	Schebesta, Paul, 1940, Les Pygmees, p. 62. Gallimard, Paris.
76.	Caillois, Roger, 1988, L’Homme et le Sacré, p. 24. Gallimard, Paris.
77.	Harrison, Jane, op. cit., p. 447.
78.	R. R. Marett’s The Threshold of Religion was published in 1909 (Methuen and Company Ltd, London). It was very much an answer to Tylor’s thesis that man’s original religion was animism (see his classic Primitive Culture, 1903, John Murray, London.) Marett saw the belief in an “indwelling psychic power”, referred to as mana by the Melanesians and Polynesians, as predating animism. He referred to it as “the pre-animistic religion”. Though this idea aroused a lot of interest at the time, mainstream anthropologists now seem to have lost interest in it and on the whole the idea has been discredited in anthropological circles.
79.	The term ‘in illo tempore’ is a term much used by Mircea Eliade. It refers to the mythical period in which the heroes lived and the laws enacted. Radcliffe-Brown refers to it as “the dawn period”, as it is known among certain Australian tribes.
80.	Hearn, Lafcadio, 1904, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 37. Macmillan, New York.
81.	Jomo Kenyatta, 1979, Facing Mount Kenya, p. 232. Seeker and Warburg, London.
82.	Driver, E. 1961, Indians of North America, p. 428. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
83.	Kuper, Hilda, 1963, The Swazi. A South African Kingdom, p. 58. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.
84.	Parsons, Robert T.,1964, Religion in an African Society, p. 176. E. J. Brill, Leiden.
85.	Hughes, J. Donald, 1983, ibid, pp. 54-60.
86.	Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo, 1977, ibid, pp. 4-11.
87.	Ibid, pp. 4-11.
88.	Bastien, Joseph W., 1981, “Metaphorical relations between sickness, society and land in Qollahuaya ritual”, American Anthropological Association Bulletin No. 12, 1981, pp. 19-37.
89.	Ibid, p. 488.
90.	Polanyi, p. 151.
91.	Wallace, A. F. C., op. cit., pp. 264-281.
92.	Taylor, Bron, “The religion and politics of Earth First”, The Ecologist Vol. 21 No. 6, November/December 1991, pp. 258-266.

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