Ian McCallum worries about the human species. He worries broadly, deeply, poetically, mystically, entertainingly, passionately, and challengingly. We are deeply diseased, McCallum believes, and we are inflicting our plague on the earth we inherit as the evolutionarily privileged human animal. In Ecological Intelligence, McCallum tells us that healing—as opposed to quick-fix mending–will occur only as we remember where we have come from and then learn to look ahead with a new rationality, a new language, and a chastened connectedness to the environment we inherit. Indeed, the ten chapters of his beguiling book are divided into sections entitled ‘Remembering where we have come from’ and ‘Looking ahead’.
The journey through this physician and psychiatrist’s diagnosis and subsequent prescription led this reviewer from skepticism to appreciation without getting him to the persuasion point that would have ensued if McCallum possessed a meta-narrative large and strong enough to support the weight of observations he makes in these chapters. Yet I turn the last of 243 pages grateful that there are people who hope as McCallum hopes for a categorical shift in the way we humans understand ourselves in the cosmos that becomes a kind of legacy to creatures like us privileged with the consciousness to recognize it.
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PART ONE: Remembering Where We Have Come From
McCallum beings with an apology for what the casual observer must recognize as a fairly massive change (chapter one, ‘The Reshaping of Myth and Language’, pp. 23-34). The author believes we need a new myth and suggests to candidates: first, the legend of Africa’s Ziziphus murcronata and then the mythical Greek figure Apollo. The African tree’s bark and its thorns both speak of integrating all stages of development and even of looking forward and backwards at the same time. McCallum finds in the tree’s thorns a metaphor for the Human-Nature split or, perhaps better, of the path toward its healing. We are meant to remember our ‘animal past’ even as we ‘follow our dreams’. Apollo’s ‘three fundamental requirements’ are given to us here as:
-Know thyself.
-Do no thing in excess.
-Honour the gods.
Cullng out the elements of self-awareness and balance that are intrinsic both to the tree and to the god, the author urges us to recognize that we are gong to ‘require a peculiar intelligence and a peculiar language’ if we are to heed the message Apollo and the ziziphus. This language will be poetical, seemingly in order to harvest the elasticity of poetic language and its inherent capacity to embrace paradox. Paradox will become a recurring theme in McCallum’s presentation, for he does not want to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ more often or more exclusively than he must. Already, then, we come upon one of his arguments’ attractive qualities and begin to recognize the same feature as an inherent weakness. He confesses himself to be a ‘romantic’ and exegetes this in part as a bias for action over speech.
The book urges its reader to comprehend the deep commonality that we share with the animate and inanimate world that accompany us in our adventure of survival. To this end, McCallum treats us to an off-the-shelf but well-presented description of how the universe came to be as it is. Survival, McCallum argues, is a shared pursuit. He appears to want to awaken in his reader a deep sympathy for our fellow creatures. The description of events since the postulated ‘Big Bang’ and the evolution of animate life leaves this reviewer with a sense of awe. Clearly this is what McCallum desires. Yet even as he describes humanity’s commonality with other life forms, he singles out consciousness and self-awareness as a distinguishing feature. McCallum seems to believe that consciousness is a privilege and that it places upon the species that possesses it a moral responsibility to leverage it in favor of our fellow travelers.
It is precisely here that this reviewer finds the coherence of the author’s argument somewhat lacking. Both awe and sympathy are perfectly appropriate responses to the natural world on the part of a creature who discerns meaning in them. But how is raw evolution and its myriad processes supposed to create meaning? That is to say, I am sympathetic with McCallum’s ends. I simply do not see that those ends make sense outside a theistic world view that ascribes meaning ultimately to a personal Mind that stands behind the wonders–a loaded word, when you come to think about it–that McCallum so poignantly describes.
In his third chapter, McCallum tries his hand at the periodization of humankind’s ecological consciousness (‘The Wake-up Calls’, pp. 66–87). Alas, his treatment of hinge figures like Galileo and Copernicus is a bit too laden by conspiracy and narrow-minded churchmen for alignment with a historical process that was somewhat more complicated than all that. Newton and Darwin carry the process forward, each responsible for a landmark reconfiguration of reality that placed human beings in a less central place and made it possible, so it is argued, for us to develop the humility that is appropriate to our station. If the progress of science is to teach us humility, a second virtue of which it can serve as schoolmaster is uncertainty. Einstein’s relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty should have been enough to train us aright in these ways, if faulty information had been our problem. McCallum seems, rather optimistically, to think that this is our diagnosis. His implicit moral summons appears to be that we face the music of data that has come our way and humble ourselves by becoming a part of nature rather than its overlord.
‘McCallum produces one of his most disheartening moments in chapter four, where he explores the Jungian concept of the ‘shadow’ (‘Facing Our Shadow’, pp. 88-103). Understanding the shadow as including those elements of the natural world that we label ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ and thus reject from our self-identity, the author advocates that we take a page from paganism and pantheism’s embrace of those very aspects. Western civilization, fueled by a narrow-minded Christianity, takes the blame for this unfortunate turn of events. Rather than sweep ourselves and our environment free of the savage, ‘(o)ur task is to acknowledge the “beast”, at the same time learning how to harness its vitality, its emotion and its raw power with an intelligence that knows how to say yes and no to it.’ Alas, McCallum does not say how we are to acquire that intelligence nor does he sketch out the criteria by which we are to ‘say yes and no’ to the shadow’s power and qualities.
Although McCallum usually maintains an irenic tone, he suffers under the weight of a broad brush when he describes the monotheistic faiths and the Judeo-Christian legacy of which he is to some extent a product: ‘(W)e should not be surprised to discover that the shadow of our Judeo-Christian-Abrahamic teachings is both long and dark and that its negative impact on the natural world has been profound. For everything that is valuable about the teachings of these great religions, it is nevertheless essential that we do not shy away from examining that shadow. By facing up to it, we may discover that something in us is beginning to shed its skin.’ Alas, McCallum seems not to have toiled overmuch in ‘facing up to’ this particular shadow, for he dates the Nicene Creed to 869, a full five and a half centuries late, though his struggle with the calendar does not keep him from describing that Council (or perhaps some other, say, the Fourth Council of Constantinople?) in some detail as the moment when ‘the all-male Principals of the Holy Catholic Church finalised what we know today as the Nicene Creed–the formal and final statement of the chief tenets of Christian belief’. Such description attempts vainly to make up in passion what it lacks in factuality. It does the author’s credibility no good.
In the book’s fifth chapter, it is the ‘cost’—one might even say the loss—of civilization rather than its gifts that preoccupies McCallum (‘Remembering Our Wild Side’, pp. 104–122). His exaltation of wildness is aesthetically appealing. Still, one wonders whether he has loaded ‘wild’ with all the superlatives that please him and then added to the cargo already borne in a skeptical age by ‘civilization’ all the derrogatives that trouble him. Wildness is not to be mistaken for brutality, the author reassures us. But is that not special pleading, a peeling off of the undesired attributes that normally accrue to a word in the interest of salvaging it. One might even say, in the interest of ‘civilizing’ it.
McCallum’s instinct for fairness is laudable, even if he seems occasionally to fail in the practice of it:
Am I being too hard or too cynical about the human animal? Perhaps I am, but I don’t want to be too soft either. If it makes us feel a little better about ourselves, let’s try to understand deception as a strategy that is often no only individually and social expedient, but also necessary. On the other hand, let’s no confuse deception with a disregard for accountability. What is important is that we learn to become conscious of our survival strategies—why and when we are employing them. We have to put them to the test from time to time. Are they appropriate, are they acceptable, are they meaningful and, finally, are they flexibie?
This reviewer cannot escape the sense that McCallum wants to have it all. He wants nice people who do appropriate and flexible things. He wants people who are highly conscious of what they are doing and therefore (so it seems) justified in the doing of it. Gnosticism dies hard. What I cannot understand is the hortatory, even moral argument that McCallum makes, always urging us towards a certain identification with the wider created world. This makes sense if there is some kind of coherent matrix of meaning that makes this objective preferable to, say, bulldozing all the trees to make room for more parking lots. But McCallum seems long ago to have jettisoned the arbitrariness of what people used to call ‘absolute truth’. What have we got left that prods us in McCallum’s direction except aesthetic preference?
The author is quite effective at what we might call decriminalizing the animals, of understanding the reason and the rationality behind actions that might have seemed simply ‘savage’ to us. For that, he is to be thanked. If only—one virtually groans under the desire of it—his epistemology were robust enough to support his moving comprehension of creatures who rarely enjoy such sympathy.
McCallum posits the existence of a vast ‘mindfield’, a notion he defines as ‘an interplay of ideas, dreams, intentions and like-mindedness’, a ‘noosphere’, and a ‘field of thought’ (chapter six, ‘Living in a Mindfield’, pp. 124–153). He wants to include within this noosphere not only those hard-wired capacities of mind with which we are familiar, but also that interplay of assumptions and practices that others define with the less flamboyant term ‘culture’. He calls upon anecdotes involving human and animal (it becomes strange this far into a review of a book like McCallum’s to lean upon that distinction, as though it were an obvious and categorical one) who somehow ‘knew’ things they had no discernible capability to know and who acted upon that knowledge in a way that proved fortuitous.
As he says, ‘(i)f thoughts, secrets, intuitions and intent are indeed mobile, then synchronicity, the so –called meaningful coincidences in our lives, will begin to make sense. Synchronicity describes events that do not appear to have any causal link, but because of the so-called coincidences of these events, they are linked, instead, by meaning.’ If one wonders where McCallum is taking his argument with this thought-provoking chapter, he does not delay in declaring his intent:
In addition to living in a world of cause and effect, ours, by virtue of the importance of meaning, is also a world of correlation and affect. This is to say that the logical connections we make aboiut ouir world are often in complete until there has been an emotional connection as well. We are born pattern-makers, linking the whirling patterns of fingerprints to the spiraling shapes of galaxies, and we do it because it feels right … As irrational as it may seem, symbol formation and pattern making are part of our survival. We can’t help it.
Shortly McCallum’s language is to become even more hortatory:
Our task is to rediscover ourselves in Nature and the only clear way to do this, I believe, is to make the mindfield livable. Clearly, this is an individual choice. We either continue to believe that someone or something else will rescue us, show us the easy way, or even to take the hard path on our behalf, or we choose the opposite—we take it upon ourselves. We take the hard path, each one of us, in our own way and we take it gladly. And where or when does that path begin? It begins exactly where we are right now, when we look up to see the world as a mirror; when we discover that our sense of freedom and authenticity is linked to the well being and authenticity of others—and that includes the animals, the trees and the land. It begins when we are open to synchronicity without pretending to control it. This is what living in a mindfield is about.
Such language is both poetic and moving. It is one small step from postulating a Beautiful Mind that might have designed us to live this way or at least might assist us in doing so. McCallum briefly allows that ‘an ecological intelligence’ and ‘one’s personal notions of God’ are not mutually exclusive, but that is as far as he finds it possible to go. Neither, it appears, are such personal notions to be taken as binding upon and ultimately good for human beings in any way that might transgress the private psychology of ‘personal notions’. Indeed, McCallum closes this chapter as follows: ‘However, let us not be victims of wishful thinking. Whilst it is impossible to participate in our own fate without a deep sense of awe and gratitude for the forces of creation and evolution, it is important that we accept the great indifference of Nature. It does not exist to punish or to bless us; it is neither cruel nor loving, but we, the human animal, can choose not to be indifferent. We can choose to reach out, to take care and to love.’
Sadly, McCallum wants everything that is good and beautiful, things for which the great monotheistic religions give thanks to a beneficent Creator. Yet he will have none of the personality that would necessarily accrue to such a God. Ironically, McCallum has so much wanted to lower the status and hubris of humanity to an elevation from which we could begin to care for that nature in which we are too often abusive participants. Instead, he has elevated us to the status of gods who must somehow find it in us to nurture all that is around us, with love, care, and self-denial.
Yet we are to do this without recourse to any transcendent values or Being. What if all that McCallum wants is not, as I fear, in us at all? Then his objective becomes futile and even self-mocking.
Part II, ‘Looking Ahead’
What is one to do with this description of our circumstance? Though McCallum’s book does not bifurcate neatly into description and prescription, his second of two parts does shift the emphasis to the latter.
McCallum wants humanity to experience nothing less than an ecological leap forward with regard to humankind’s ability to discover and even to craft an ecological consciousness. In chapter seven (‘The Blind Spots’, pp.157-180), he anticipates objections from several quarters. Science as the great objectifier and religion as a capable obfuscator—my language, not McCallum’s—come in for attention. To his credit, McCallum is not dismissive of either of these two human habits or, better said, enterprises. Yet he assigns to them an instinct for resisting the kinds of conceptual transformation that he would prescribe. We will need to overcome rejectionist instincts and develop habits that are open to dreams, poetry, and other imaginative constructions of reality, for these are the tools by which we will achieve the ecological consciousness that will be our salvation.
When he speaks of the desired inter-species reconciliation, McCallum starts with the assumption of a deep level of ‘correspondence’ between humans and animals (chapter eight, ‘Reconciliation’, pp 182–198. Reconciliation for the alienating damage that has been done between them will require extraordinary acts of both sympathy and empathy from the human correspondents. Indeed, one must seek shaman-esque guidance into the space of the animal, to ask permission to enter his place, and to seek the interaction which our wired-in correspondence can in the best of circumstances make possible. In this same spirit of reconciliation, the author argues that there exists an ethical imperative in favor of the abolition of trophy hunting (chapter nine, ‘The Keeping of the Zoo’, pp. 200–219). To become the kind of hunter that kills an animal in the absence of any required skills or knowledge and while undergoing no personal risk requires a deplorable kind of ethical desensitization.
McCallum ends his work with a poetically compelling treatise that is something between a last warning and a sermon on hope (chapter ten, ‘Heading Out—Coming Home’, pp. 220–234). He does not believe in the recovery of a Golden Age of ecological consciousness. Rather, taking his cues from Darwin’s evolution and then extending it in textbook fashion to the evolution of human consciousness, he appears to consider that humanity stands at a kairos moment—perhaps even a last opportunity—to take a categorical evolutionary step towards a way of knowing ourselves that allows us to embrace our place in the cosmos without the arrogance, insecurity, and egocentrism that have made the 20th century an ecological disaster.
One wishes McCallum and his project great success. So much or our world’s future depends upon a positive outcome. Yet this reviewer cannot sign on to his beautifully articulated campaign for ecological consciousness, at least not for the reasons that McCallum would have us sign on the dotted line. A theory capable of moving self-interested human hearts to the kind of empathic solidarity that is necessary requires more. In this reviewer’s judgment, it appeals to recognition of a divine Artisan who is profoundly and comprehensively good and who desires for his created world a climactic moment when the hills dance and the trees clap their hands. The narrative of this Mind’s gorgeously featured creative labors is not far from McCallum’s desk, in fact from time to time his quoting eye falls upon it. In the light of such a creation meta-narrative and the world view that emerges not full-blown but by deliberative fits and starts from it, ecological destruction becomes yet one further sickening feature of humanity’s and this worlds epic Tragedy. Recognizing this, hearts turn, hands move, feet take first steps towards something that considerable currents of human thinkers have called ‘redemption’.
That, at least, is a story more true than its competitors and capable of moving this reader’s hard heart. McCallum deserves thanks for telling us what such a result might look like, down here, among our fellow travelers.
Ian base his work on evolution.
There are too many limiting factors that limit the age of the earth to a few thousand years. That is science.
He uses the words believe, and probably(theories, no prove).
Ian follow the religion of evolution (believe in the big bang and other impossibilities). Evolution have never been proved, in fact its been proven wrong in every aspect.
It’s not science, its a religion.
(Theunis)
Do yourself a favor and read the book “ecological intelligence”
he both embraces science and spirituality in a deep poetical manner, sure there may be talk of evolution but if you take the time to read the book before making judgement’s you will will find a deeper meaning within the words that goes beyond science ,
Hi – I’m looking for a copy of McCallum’s poem, Deliverance.
Can you help? Jenny
Dear Jenny,
Thank you for your post and your query. I’m afraid I don’t know where to find this poem. Perhaps a reader of canterbridge. can help.
All best,
David
Dear Thuenis
I attended a lecture of Prof Ian Mccallam and the question was raised of evolution theory etc and his answer was he see no reason why people cannot believe in either one or both it is not for to preach what you should believe. His lecture was based on us saving this planet by changing our behaviour.
He did not come accross pushing any religion or science position.
Ferdie Andrews