In more concrete terms, what tantalizing issues does social ecology raise for our time and our future? In establishing a more advanced interface with nature, will it be possible to achieve a new balance between humanity and nature by sensitively tailoring our agricultural practices, urban areas, and technologies to the natural requirements of a region and its ecosystems? onlinedatingcritic Can we hope to “manage” the natural environment by a drastic decentralization of agriculture, which will make it possible to cultivate land as though it were a garden balanced by diversified fauna and flora? Will these changes require the decentralization of our cities into moderate-sized communities, creating a new balance between town and country?

To have so able and absorbing a biologist at hand is more than a privilege; it is an intellectual delicacy. I wish to thank Linda Goodman, an excellent artist, for bringing her talents as art director to the designing of this book and for rendering it aesthetically attractive. I have had the benefit of highly sympathetic copy editors, particularly Naomi Steinfeld, who exhibited a remarkable understanding of my ideas and intentions. Mandel had a cameo appearance as himself on the NBC show My Name is Earl in the episode where Earl’s roommates robbed an Indian casino at which Mandel was performing. In the episode, Mandel performed his old routine of inflating a rubber glove over his head with his nostrils. Mandel is known for his frequent appearances as a comedian and for his hidden camera segments on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Science, seen in terms of a history that wantonly discarded its past by a radical succession of “paradigms,” stands alone in the world because it has marched through this succession apart from nature. Having divested itself of antecedents that once addressed themselves to the different emerging levels of natural history, science now lacks the continuity that relates these levels intelligibly. The former is an intellectual enterprise between scientific contestants and collaborators, not an enterprise that authentically involves the natural world. Every serious critique of reason has focused on its historic instrumentalization into technics — its deployment as a tool or formal device for classification, analysis, and manipulation.

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A carefully tended network of trenches, canals, and pools had appeared in arid areas long before the “high civilizations” of antiquity surfaced. That the “hydraulic” communities of the predynastic world were sorely afflicted by conflicts over water and land rights was clearly a serious problem, but centralization often served merely to escalate the level of conflict to an even more destructive one between kingdoms and empires. Humanity’s habitat is thus latent with phenomena that “are,” others that are “becoming,” and still others that “will be.” Our imagery of technics cannot evade the highly fluid nature of the world in which we live and the highly fluid nature of humanity itself. The design imagination of our times must be capable of encompassing this flow, this dialectic (to use a grossly abused term), not to cut across it with wanton arrogance and dogmatic self-confidence. To subserve our already fragile environment only to what humanity alone “can be” — and definitely still is not!

A liberatory technology presupposes liberatory institutions; a liberatory sensibility requires a liberatory society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to conceive without an artistically crafted society, and the “inversion of tools” is impossible without a radical inversion of all social and productive relationships. Moreover, human subjectivity itself can be defined as the very history of natural subjectivity, not merely as its product — in much the same sense that Hegel defined philosophy as its own history.

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But it is not the complexity of machinery that inhibits our ability to deal with these imperatives; it is the new rules of the game we call an “industrial society” that, by restructuring our very lives, has interposed itself between the powers of human rationality and those of nature’s fecundity. Most westerners ordinarily cannot plant and harvest a garden, fell a tree and shape it to meet their needs for shelter, reduce ores and cast metals, kill and dress animals for food and hides or preserve food and other perishables. These elementary vulnerabilities result not from any intrinsic complexity that must exist to provide us with the means of life; but from an ignorance of the means of sustaining life-an ignorance that has been deliberately fostered by a system of industrial clientage. It is not the interplay between abstract intellectual categories to which we must turn in order to validate the assumptions behind all our views. It is to experience itself-to natural and social history-that we must turn to test these assumptions.

By the 1950s, the factory system and market had begun to invade the last bastions of private life and had colonized personality itself. Reinforced by rationality as a mode of instrumentalism and science as a value-free discipline, the Lowells of our own era have ceased to be an extrinsic feature of social mechanization. They arose immanently from the factory system as a way of life and the marketplace as the mode of human consociation. Technics no longer had to pretend that it had an ethical context; it had become the “vital spark” of society itself. In the face of this massive development, no private refuge was available, no town or frontier to which one could flee, no cottage to which one could retreat. Ironically, republican virtue was not completely discarded; it was simply transmuted from an ideal into a technique.

Leaving this muddled logic aside, there is no “cruelty” in nature, only the predation (and mutualism) around which natural history has evolved its structures for sustaining life and ecological balance. There is no “suffering” in nature, only the unavoidable physical pain that comes with injury. There is no “scarcity” and “want” in nature, only needs that must be satisfied if life itself is to be maintained. Indeed, the material fecundity of nature, prior to history’s “negation of Nature” (to use Marcuse’s language again), might have completely stunned its earliest hominid offspring, had they even been mindful of “scarcity” as a social category. I cannot emphasize too strongly that nature itself is not an ethics; it is the matrix for an ethics, the source of ethical meaning that can be rooted in objective reality. Hence nature, even as the matrix and source of ethical meaning, does not have to assume such delightfully human attributes as kindness, virtue, goodness and gentleness; nature need merely be fecund and creative — a source rather than a “paradigm.”

The brutalities of the new industrial society, which Fourier recounted with the most powerful prose at his command, are essentially the expression of “civilization’s” highly repressive psychic apparatus. Harmony, the culminating stage of society’s development, will be marked by the predominance of entirely new social institutions-notably, the phalanstery-that will not only dismantle “civilization’s” repressive apparatus but finally provide individuals with the full release of their passions and the full satisfaction of their desires. More so than most utopian writers, Fourier left behind pages upon pages of elaborate descriptions of his new Harmonian society, including the most mundane details of everyday life in a phalanstery. His critique of “civilization,” notably of capitalism, was utterly devastating; indeed, it is largely for his critical writings that he earned the greatest amount of praise from later socialist writers. He was above all the advocate of l’ecart absolu, the complete rejection of the conventions of his time. L’ecart absolu could easily provide a substitute for Maurice Blanchot’s plea for an “absolute refusal,” an expression that was to acquire special applicability to the social protest voiced by the 1960s.

Such ideas or intuitions were not to die easily; they spoke too deeply to the inner, libidinal recesses of human desire. Hence the Free Spirit, or its doctrines, remained a persistent “heresy” for centuries — one that has recurred right up to the present day as independent rediscoveries by the Symbolists in the late nineteenth century, the Surrealists in the 1920s, and in the counterculture of the 1960s. It constituted an indispensable dimension of freedom as a release from the internal regimentation of feeling and bodily movements — the subjective aspect of the existentially liberated individual. Without this aspect the notion of freedom remains an externalized social abstraction that has no space for its “heretics,” its creative artists, and its intellectual innovators.

Presumably, it is by virtue of our rationality that we are unique in the “mute” world around us and can achieve our “mastery” over it. The Enlightenment’s generous commitment to reason — its vast faith in the human enterprise as the outcome of thought and education — has never been lost even on its most severe critics, nearly all of whom have deployed reason in the very act of denigrating it. William Blake’s assault on the “meddling intellect” is a brilliantly conceived intellectual tour de force, as was Rousseau’s a generation or so earlier. Its role also depends on what, in our sensitivity to the world that surrounds and infuses us, reason is permitted to displace. In some cases, as we now know, even large political empires like the Hittite Empire were based overwhelmingly on small farms. Typically, these were worked by five or six people, using perhaps two oxen, and the cultivable land was divided into mixed croplands, vineyards, orchards, and pastures that rarely supported more than small flocks of goats and sheep.