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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Subjugate the Earth traces the biography of a strange idea: the idea that human beings can subdue nature and rule over it. Born in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilization, the idea of subjugating the Earth was included in the Bible, reached Europe through Christianity, and spread to the entire world through colonialism. The Enlightenment gave a scientific appearance to the ambition of controlling nature but did not change the ambition itself. Yet every birth presages a death. Only with the climate crisis has it become apparent that the subjugation of nature must be a self-defeating ambition, because it alters and deregulates natural systems which humans depend on for their survival, precisely because they are part of nature and not separate from it. Subjugating the Earth is an idea that is dying around us.
The polycrisis threatening to engulf humanity is inextricably linked to how humans see themselves and their relationship with nature. Based on developments in the natural sciences, a new understanding of this relationship looks not at individual phenomena but at systems, connections and entanglements between humans and other manifestations of nature. Is it possible to build a new understanding of humanity in nature by turning the traditional vision of free, rational individuals on its head and seeing humans as fascinating, irrational and system-dependent beings within the vast system of nature?
Interlacing historical episodes, individual life stories, works of art and scientific discoveries, Subjugate the Earth tells the story of the rise and fall of an idea that has shaped our world, and weaves a rich tapestry that is as surprising as it is enriching.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Up into the Air
Prologue: Buy Me a Cloud
Notes
I MYTH
The World on a Vase
Gilgamesh the Hero
Notes
The View from the Parapet
Landscape and Memory
Notes
The Free Market of Offerings
Notes
Before the Flood
In Search of Lost Matriarchy
Notes
In Search of Presumed Religion
The Dancing God
King of the World, King of Assyria
Notes
… and Subdue It
Notes
Lost in Translation?
Notes
Look on My Works!
Notes
The Triumph of Light over Darkness
Notes
The Map of Misreadings
Notes
II LOGOS
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Notes
Why Europe?
Notes
Technology and the Burden of Empire
The Justification Industry
The Age of Iron
Notes
Monsieur Grat and His Master
Notes
‘If Only I Could Paint His Spirit!’
Notes
The Canon and the Antichrist
Notes
An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump
The Theology of Fish
Notes
Lisbon
Notes
A Work of Nature
Notes
Virtuous Terror
Notes
Carte Blanche
Notes
Stuffed and Exhibited
Notes
The Silent Death of Saartjie Baartman
Notes
Hare Hunting
Notes
Modern Times
III COSMOS
Agony
Notes
The One-Armed Lumberjack
Notes
Liberal Lifelong Lies
The World as Clockwork
Notes
Admiration for Cannibals
Notes
Entangled Life
Notes
A Handful of Earth
Notes
Risky Thinking
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1 Jacob von Ruisdael,
Wheat Field
,
c
.1670, oil on canvas, 100 ×...
2 Noa Jansma’s project Buycloud. Source: https://noajansma.com/buycloud
Chapter 1
3 Stone vase with relief, Mesopotamia, Uruk period,
c
.3200–2900 bce...
Chapter 6
4 Venus of Willendorf (Wachau),
c
.20,000 bce, oolitic limestone tinted with...
Chapter 10
5 The Dying Lioness, fresco from the palace of King Ashurbanipal (669–631 ...
Chapter 3
6 Christ as
cosmocrator
, ‘ruler of the world’, enthroned agai...
Chapter 16
7 Pieter Bruegel the Elder,
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
,
c.
155...
Chapter 19
8 Unknown artist, ‘Augusta Angustiata, a Deo per Deum liberata’. Sti...
Chapter 23
9 Adam Perelle,
The Fountain of Apollo
(Versailles), copperplate engraving,...
Chapter 24
10 Joseph Wright of Derby,
An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump
, 1768, oil...
Chapter 28
11 Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, drawing by Willey Reveley (1791)
Chapter 29
12 Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, main entrance; postcard, 1919
Chapter 30
13
Angelo Soliman
(1721–96), tutor at the court of the Prince of Liec...
Chapter 32
14 William Blake,
Newton
, 1795. Colour monotype, watercolour, 46 × 60...
15 William Turner,
Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway
,...
Chapter 34
16 Atmospheric CO
2
level over the last 800,000 years until today. Graph ...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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SUBJUGATE THE EARTH
The Beginning and End of Human Domination of Nature
Philipp Blom
Translated by Wieland Hoban
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Die Unterwerfung: Anfang und Ende der menschlichen Herrschaft über die Natur © Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich, 2022
This English edition © Polity Press, 2025
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6132-2 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024935053
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Researching and writing this book was an adventure, an incredible challenge and a fascinating journey. Some of my fellow travellers were especially supportive, and I thank the following people for good conversations, for listening patiently during long excursions, posing astute questions, making suggestions and answering sometimes naive questions: Thomas Angerer, Gertraud Auer-d’Olmo, Tina Breckwoldt, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Michael Ignatieff, Ivan Krastev, Geert Mak, Brian Van Norden, Hannes Benedetto Pircher, Shalini Randeria, Alexa Sekyra, Richard Sennett and Heike Silbermann.
Tobias Heyl accompanied this book from the very first idea, helped shape it and edited it wisely; Sebastian Ritscher moved it along with great enthusiasm and infinite patience. Marie Klinger helped with quotations, sources and important questions.
Amid the silence of the pandemic, more than ever, my wife Veronica was my daily, most important conversational partner.
Thanks to all of you, my fluttering ideas were able to reach the ground and assume a form.
Vienna, June 2022
Illustrations
1 Jacob von Ruisdael, Wheat Field, c.1670, oil on canvas, 100 × 130.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, estate of Benjamin Altman, 1913. Accession number: 14.40623
2 Noa Jansma’s project Buycloud. Source: https://noajansma.com/buycloud
3 Stone vase with relief, Mesopotamia, Uruk period, c.3200–2900 bce. Iraq Museum, Baghdad
4 Venus of Willendorf (Wachau), c.20,000 bce, oolitic limestone tinted with red ochre; height: 10.5 cm. Vienna Natural History Museum
5 The Dying Lioness, fresco from the palace of King Ashurbanipal (669–631 bce), Nineveh, Mesopotamia. Alabaster, height 160 cm. British Museum, London, Joseph Martin Collection. © The Trustees of the British Museum
6 Christ as cosmocrator, ‘ruler of the world’, enthroned against a golden background and surrounded by his court. Christ hands San Vitale the martyr’s crown; an angel gives Bishop Ecclesius a model of the church. Mosaic in the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, consecrated in 547 ce.
7 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555–68, oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 74 × 112 cm. Royal Museums of the Fine Arts, Brussels
8 Unknown artist, ‘Augusta Angustiata, a Deo per Deum liberata’. Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ident. no. 14136034. Photo: Art Library, Berlin State Museums
9 Adam Perelle, The Fountain of Apollo (Versailles), copperplate engraving, 1661
10 Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768, oil on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. National Gallery, London
11Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, drawing by Willey Reveley (1791)
12 Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, main entrance; postcard, 1919
13Angelo Soliman (1721–96), tutor at the court of the Prince of Liechtenstein in Vienna from 1734. Portrait, mezzotint, 1796. Austrian National Library, Vienna
14 William Blake, Newton, 1795. Colour monotype, watercolour, 46 x 60 cm. Tate Britain, London
15 William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 91 × 121.8 cm. National Gallery, London
16 Atmospheric CO2 level over the last 800,000 years until today. Graph by NASA. Source: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide
Up into the Air
A moment of greatest heroism in the face of death, of blind faith, when he runs towards the cliff and leaps into the air, trusting in wings that feel so alien and rigid, until the wind seizes them, bearing them aloft all at once like mere feathers. Then he flies, he rises, racing with flapping wings into the summer air above the island. He sees the houses below, the trees and even the mountains growing ever smaller, the glittering sea extends to the horizon, to the white everywhere. He feels his strength, lifting himself higher with every stroke of his wings and ever farther. He sees his father flying beneath him, who would never have the courage to raise himself so far into the heavens like a god, the ruler of the islands and the sea. But Icarus hears the pulsing blood pounding in his ears and coursing through his bulging veins, he feels every tensing of his muscles, he feels the warm air rushing around him like a flowing embrace, the breath of an unknown goddess. Icarus swings farther aloft, farther than the seagulls and geese, higher than the boldest eagles fly. He has done it. He has escaped from the world down below. Its tyrannical laws. From now on, he will write his own laws. From now on, he will live like a king: sublime, free and ready for any challenge. He will rule over all of this, these little patches of land that look from up here as if a bird had dropped them in flight, as if the gods had rolled dice with the islands to win a prize. In a moment he will reach the clouds, which fly freely and untameably through the sky; in a moment he will be able to touch them and wrest their secret from them.
Only a few more beats of his wings, then he will be there.
PrologueBuy Me a Cloud
Look at the sky, at its infinity, and before that, at the high-domed tumult of the clouds. Whatever lies on the strip of land below – an alpine panorama, the daily traffic jam on Sunset Boulevard, an industrial ruin, storm-lashed oceans, cornfields or glittering skyscrapers – up there the wind blows freely, and thoughts must be equally free in ever new forms. It must be the last bastion of wildness.
Painters have always been infatuated with clouds, with their stormy metamorphoses, with the sensuality of their forms, the play of light and shade and the dramatic shifts of mood that take over when the sun suddenly disappears, or when it breaks through the looming leaden masses like a revelation.
The greatest cloud virtuosos were the Dutchmen around the middle of the seventeenth century who began to see their own moods echoed in the fragmentation and poetry of celestial landscapes, if only because the terrestrial one had little to offer them: barely a hill, let alone dramatic peaks or canyons, majestic rivers or panoramas. Here everything was damp and small, a brownish hue with some grey, with little that stood out – no ancient ruins or other sources of sublime frisson. The people there were farmers or herring fishers. The land was a line on the horizon, interrupted only by a few trees or a row of windmills. Large parts of this landscape were created by human hands: not only the fields, whose edges were drawn with a ruler, but also the canals and towns, the very land itself, which engineers, dike wardens and the hard work of anonymous arms had wrested from the North Sea. ‘God created the Earth’, an old saying goes, ‘and the Dutch created their own country.’ They were not lacking in self-confidence.
But the painters were looking for more than delineated production units for market gardens and dairy pastures. Their patrons, the patricians of Amsterdam and other trade centres, demanded visual representations of their approach to life and their ideas. They were strict Protestants who believed that they were directly accountable to God. Without confession or absolution, they were thrown back entirely on their conscience. The artists of the time projected this drama onto nature. Canvases showing a farmhouse or a little wood provide the stage for psychological dramas in which the cloud masses represent the storm of emotions and the inner struggles.
1 Jacob von Ruisdael, Wheat Field, c.1670, oil on canvas, 100 × 130.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, estate of Benjamin Altman, 1913. Accession number: 14.40623
In the sky, Rembrandt, Ruisdael and their colleagues recognized the last wilderness of a world that had been heaped up, delineated and cut into strips. The sea, that eternal provider and eternal foe of all coastal peoples, represented a nature that could not be subdued and whose force one had to respect if one valued one’s life. But the sea was always also a source of fish and merchandise, of work and careers. However much they respected it, people had a pragmatic relationship with the North Sea. The sky was the last space in which the storms of the soul could be depicted.
*
1 July 2021: the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China. A guard of honour marches in front of 70,000 invited guests in uniform and 56 loaded pieces of artillery across Tiananmen Square, and through an enormous gate crowned with the dates 1921 and 2021 as well as a hammer and sickle in gold. The soldiers move with the discipline of a single body; every corner is as straight as a ruler, the metal of their guns sparkles in the sun and their eyes stare rigidly ahead, into a glorious future. While the national flag is hoisted, the cannons fire a 100-gun salute. The Communist Youth and the Young Pioneers enthusiastically pay tribute to the party in front of a gigantic portrait of Mao Zedong. The youngsters have little earphones in their left ears so that they can chant the choruses and party anthems in perfect synchronicity; nothing is left to chance. Helicopters fly above the square in formation, presenting the number 100.
Some distance away from this ceremony and the omnipresent posters, banners and neon signs for the party jubilee, the city’s normal, chaotic life continues. The oppressive smog that usually makes it hard to breathe has cleared somewhat. It is a welcome side effect of the festivities for many people in Beijing: the sky is a radiant blue, and although photographs from this day will show a yellowish-grey vapour above the houses, the visibility and air quality are substantially better than on other days, because factories in the vicinity of Beijing with particularly dirty emissions had to halt production a few days before the ceremony.
International scientists found another reason for the fine weather on that festive day, however. The government had employed a technology in which they had invested huge amounts of money in the last few years: cloud seeding. Here silver iodide or other chemicals are sprayed on clouds by aeroplanes in order to stimulate the production of droplets, and thus provoke the shedding of moisture by the clouds in a desired location. Thanks to the artificial rain on the previous day, the air was clean and the sky above Tiananmen Square was almost blue. Cloud seeding had also ensured attractive television footage of the 2008 Olympic Games.
According to official Chinese figures, more than 200 billion cubic metres of rainfall had been artificially stimulated between 2012 and 2017 alone, and artillery shells filled with iodine had prevented massive damage from hailstones in 2019. The aim is to expand changes of weather through cloud seeding until one can cover a surface one and a half times the size of India, in order to secure agricultural production quotas and propaganda events.1
*
‘I, Noa Jansma, sell clouds’, a young Dutch artist announces on her website. She explains her project in business language:
Prospecting: clouds become my property. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of occupation, I take control of it by drawing a boundary around it before someone else. I have trained Artificial Intelligence to do it for me.
UR (Unique Registration): according to John Locke’s theory of labour, people must interact with the clouds to make them their property. I have built an installation in which people can lie on the grass and gaze at projections of clouds that drift past. The clouds are priced (in €) according to their attributes and are given a QR code. When viewers scan this QR code with their telephones, they enter the world of virtual speculation. As part of their interaction, they share their data (a selfie and their name) with the cloud and receive a certificate.
The US (Universal System): after payment, the owners receive a certificate that is also archived in an online land registry. The purchased clouds float in virtual space with the purchase prices. Inspired by capitalist market forces, larger clouds in the registry can eat up smaller ones and grow at their expense.
2
The pandemic forced Jansma’s project to mutate into an online event. Nonetheless, she believes that Buycloud clearly has great potential in the face of disaster: ‘New studies predict that with rising emissions, there will soon be no more cumulus clouds. This will cause a rise in temperature by 8° Celsius – catastrophic for the planet, but excellent for the cloud market. The purchase of a cloud becomes a poetic, but stable investment.’
The laughter occasionally sticks in the investors’ throats, but the artist plans to take her ideas a step further. Her inspiration came from the history of European conquests of other continents, she explains: ‘When in the 15th century the Western “explorers” went to what-we-now-call-America, they told the native people they wanted to buy their land. The natives were confused; “Their land?” “To buy it?” Their vocabulary did not have a word or understanding of ownership over natural phenomena.’3 As the last remaining not-yet-colonized phenomenon, the clouds are waiting to finally be marketed globally.
2 Noa Jansma’s project Buycloud. Source: https://noajansma.com/buycloud
*
Clouds – the last untamed part of nature? They are indeed, these ever-changing formations – but only in our imagination. Their growth has long been accelerated by global heating; they are observed, classified, tracked, analysed, chemically manipulated and, in more than one art project, awarded prizes and turned into objects of speculation: future options on the crop yields of individual agricultural commodities, and thus bets on the weather over the harvest period, have long since become normal. One can make a great deal of money from clouds.
Anyone who spends enough time gazing at a landscape – or, rather, a skyscape or cloudscape – of cumulus clouds, a field of finest cirrus in the light of the setting sun or a leaden impending storm front cannot help being hypnotically sucked in by their inexhaustibly inventive variations on a theme. Faces and figures appear, dragons fight with other wonderful creatures, menacing rock faces tower up, sunbeams cut through dark walls or illuminate a scene like something from a Baroque opera. No landscape can be more grandiose than the mountains and canyons of these looming chimeras. As when one looks at flowing water, at breaking waves or a fire, one’s consciousness can be completely swept away by the current and even dissolve in it.
The anarchic, intangible, ever-changing nature of clouds has enabled them to elude human control for so long. They have always belonged to the gods, who could crumple them or banish them from the sky at will, or use them to conceal themselves and hurl their thunderbolts.
But now, in a time when smart entrepreneurs and self-appointed visionaries have long been planning simply to abandon our planet, where humanity has behaved in recent times much as a rock band behaves in a hotel suite, and to bring their destructive instincts and ownership claims to other parts of the galaxy with a cosmic Noah’s Ark, the space of clouds has long been colonized too. Only in those corners of the imagination not yet usurped or numbed by commercial interests can the clouds still paint their swelling and fading sorceries into the sky – a reminder that everything which is part of nature is in a state of constant flux, impossible to pin down.
The tamed land beneath the clouds and the lust for ever new conquests in the stratosphere are expressions of a collective delusion, the completely unfettered idea that man (the masculine form is intentional here) is outside and above nature and can – indeed must – subjugate it. This conception of humans deems them superior to animals and other living beings, and sees nature as the backdrop to its own ambitions and a warehouse for natural resources. From this privileged position, it sets about subjugating the world entirely to its will.
This ambition is accompanied by the fluttering of a Faustian madness. At the same time, however, this delusion of controlling nature is so ubiquitous and all-pervasive that it is difficult to gain the necessary distance to see it with all its grotesque and fascinating faces, masks and grimaces – which, after all, are also invisible in clouds until one steps out of them and views them from afar.
The subjugation of nature has long since become a global practice. In societies that like to think of themselves as enlightened, and often look back on a Christian tradition, this delusion has especially deep roots in the understanding of nature and conception of humans. It is passed on in families and schools, appears as a pattern in stories, films and video games, as well as laws, remarks and even jokes, whereby the social world presents itself to individuals as holding the same points of reference.
This subjugation shapes the approach to the world and the self-image of many societies that invoke a shared legacy. From their perspective, history appears as the expansion of civilization and the development of progress, which finds its highest expression – whether by coincidence or providence – in their own way of life, or a very similar one. The rise from nomadism to agriculture, urban cultures, text and money, the wheel and railways, human rights, liberal democracies and global markets seems to be advancing with unstoppable momentum.
That, at least, is how observers in the so-called West have described it since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but history has taken several other turns simultaneously. The eschatology of liberal democracies and liberal markets has been replaced on the one hand by the techno-future of Silicon Valley, which clothes the same old longing in new images and enacts it as transhumanism, colonization of distant planets or the reign of Artificial Intelligence.
In other fields, this narrative has been thwarted by reality, from the climate catastrophe to the violent opening of post-imperial wounds and humiliations from the Middle East to Ukraine. Beyond these obvious conflicts, the disregard for natural systems and the resulting collapse of biodiversity is causing a race towards predictable disaster. Instead of a heavenly Jerusalem, what looms in the middle distance is Sodom and Gomorrah.
The tamed and dominated land, the subjugated planet, is proving to be overtaxed by so much wilful and sudden manipulation. Organic connections that developed over millions of years and were stored in the Earth’s memory were blown back into the atmosphere within a few decades: their energy fuelled the rapid rise of a species to unimagined power.
From the perspective of ecological systems, however, this rise has a price: finely attuned life cycles are collapsing, the chemical composition and temperatures of oceans and the atmosphere are changing, ocean currents and jet streams are shifting direction, the polar ice is melting, rainforests are disappearing, sea levels are rising and biodiversity is collapsing. The heavenly Jerusalem is still uninhabited, yet already resembles a damp cellar.
These natural processes are taking place as predicted by scientists, except considerably more quickly than in many models. We must therefore be prepared for the next stages of global heating to follow much as calculated, but the potential for repression, denial and political instrumentalization is so enormous that this understandable and observable truth cannot prevail by itself.
And so the disaster is unfolding before everyone’s eyes. But Homo sapiens is not an especially important organism, and will only have a temporary effect on the fate of its home planet; microbes reigned before humans and will do so after them, and mammals are little more than carrier organisms for them. Homo sapiens, of course – and this thought is not without a certain comedy on the evolutionary stage – sees itself as the centre, the measure of all things, the ruler of nature. It actually believes that all living creatures fall into the dust before its incomparable majesty.
In the cold light of day, however, one recognizes Homo sapiens as a primate that hopelessly overestimates itself, an inessential part in a system of systems known in Western tradition as ‘nature’, a biological newcomer that currently seems to be going through the cycle of all innovative species: maximum expansion, degrading of resources and finally collapse. The Roman Empire followed the same path.
The subjugation of nature plays a key part in this unfolding drama, albeit perhaps not the expected one. It has long become part of the fabric in which our societies think and act. It is taken for granted as part of human life, yet its success was never certain; its career has taken a more adventurous course than those of many fictional heroes. The idea of subjugation established itself over centuries in a very restricted geographical and cultural environment before embarking on a new, infinitely more powerful life. It was brought into the world with the ships, the books and the cannons of Europeans; the Enlightenment thinkers declared absolute control over nature to be humanity’s noblest task; scientists and engineers seemingly took giant steps towards a glorious future; capitalists and communists alike elevated it to their raison d’état and literally declared war on nature.
In this book I will attempt to trace the astonishing history of this delusional idea, from its birth in the dawn of documented civilization to its death in the course of the climate catastrophe.
*
Outside of the ‘Western’ tradition, the picture is an entirely different one. Scarcely any other society whose myths and stories have been handed down and explored to this day views humans as rulers over nature, superior to the vermin at their feet, destined to subjugate it and complete history.
In Chinese intellectual traditions, for example, the way, Tao, dictates how and where nature flows, and that humans must learn to recognize this way and respect balance (as we will see later, however, this does not occur as idyllically as it initially seems). The Aztecs saw themselves as slaves of tyrannical and incompetent gods that they encountered in all natural phenomena, and which could only be placated with exaggeratedly bloodthirsty human sacrifices.
Aboriginal Australians understand themselves as wanderers along the dream paths of their ancestors, which connect them intimately to their land and form a spiritual geography. The Jívaro people in Ecuador know that they are a people of raiders who live at war with nature and take, either by force or by cunning, whatever they can capture from their omnipresent foe. For the Māori of New Zealand and their Polynesian ancestors, the natural world is full of things and places that are tāpuu – taboo – for everyone or only for certain people, meaning that they must not be touched, eaten or entered.
In the Japanese Shinto tradition, the highest aesthetic perfection and the greatest wisdom lie in a meditative identification with natural and transient forms and processes. Members of the San people in Botswana and Namibia know that they are related to animals and trees, and that their ancestors may live in stones or even the wind. It is easy to deride such conceptions as poetic naivety, but cultures like the San have managed over several millennia to live in a comparatively stable relationship with their natural surroundings. The Western model has reached its limits within a few centuries, if not decades.
These conceptions of the world (which are merely a few arbitrarily chosen examples) differ greatly from one another and convey very different ideas of humans and patterns of action. They came about in cultures with widely varying degrees of technological development and social complexity, under very different climatic conditions and in reaction to challenges of different kinds. What they have in common, however, is that they perceive humans as part of a closed system.
Many traditions grant humans a special status of sorts, as described by Dipesh Chakrabarty,4 but none of these many conceptions of the world involves the insane and breathtakingly narcissistic idea that humans stand above nature and can force not simply other humans and territories, but even nature itself, to submit to them, whether through prayers or through technological arsenals and scientific penetration of the last secrets of the cosmos.
For a long time, this idea was but one of many, and the delusion of subjugating nature was limited to the ambitious fantasies of various monks and scholars in Europe, a part of the world that had descended into anarchy after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Other cultures with other ideas about the world – and no doubt also other collective delusions – developed on other continents. Some societies and their stories existed largely isolated from one another, while others were in constant exchange through migration, trade and war. None of these cultural approaches to the world, however, succeeded in establishing itself on a global scale.
The fifteenth century saw the emergence of a rapid historical dynamic that destroyed this equilibrium. Within a few generations, the narrative of the control and subjugation of nature was globalized, introduced and spread by colonial powers, adapted and often intensified by rebels and freedom fighters, and furthered, praised and executed by churches, communists and capitalists. In the process, other approaches to the world were branded backward and fought, while the gospel of the scientific control of nature in the service of humans, business and progress was hammered into many millions of heads and enforced with armoured brigades if necessary.
Today, this delusion is so endemic and deeply rooted, having reached the furthest corners of our consciousness and our conception of humans, that it is literally impossible for many people to imagine the world from a different perspective. The history of this unique delusion offers one way to gain a critical distance from the idea, which in many ways forms the matrix of the Western approach to nature.
It therefore seems wisest not to treat the idea of subjugating nature as an entomologist would, impaling and classifying it, but rather to describe the entire process of its genesis and observe how it develops, infects new minds and collectives, fights for survival, changes and triumphs – from its beginnings in Mesopotamia to global dominance and gradual death. This collapse gives rise to a philosophical revolution greater than the Copernican one: the radical rediscovery of humans as part of nature. That intellectual adventure will return in part III of this history.
Humans as part of nature come into being when the history of the domination of nature is turned on its head (or, as Marx would say, from its head to its feet). Rather than viewing Homo sapiens as the master of creation, it is also possible to understand it as an animal entangled in all sorts of contexts, a nodal point in an infinitely complex tapestry of changing states, a being with less power and freedom of will than it flatteringly ascribes to itself.
From this perspective, then, who is really acting? How important a part of this complex picture are the stories that societies send onto the stage of their collective and individual inner theatres, and which are meant to guide their actions? Can collective ideas and stories play an active part in history, or are they merely passive figments of the imagination? In other words, do humans act more as free individuals or more as part of a collective attunement, a common cultural horizon, driven by the drama of their inner theatre?
Perhaps it is interesting to see the delusion of the domination of nature too, and with it every collective delusion, every story a community tells itself, as an actor – not a biological one, but lifelike nonetheless – that carves out a path for itself with a certain intentionality and creativity, adapting and changing and finding strategies to expand further and infect more minds like a virus, and hence like evolution itself. Subjugation thus emerges as an evolutionary dynamic that uses humans, just as fungi and countless microbes do in the great dance of entanglements and dependencies that we call ‘life’. Delusion as an actor: it is this quasi-evolutionary perspective that creates the necessary analytical distance to tell the story of that delusion in the first place.
*
In all these reflections on the relationship between humans and nature, it is the latter that plays the passive part, and I will still refer to it by that name, even though these two concepts will dissolve in the course of my deliberations. The difficulty of reflection already lies in this one word, ‘nature’, whose meaning one would imagine to be immediately clear – yet doubts arise as soon as one begins to interrogate it, and no one knows what the person they are speaking to actually means by it.
To open up the semantic horizon a little and allow the complexity of this word to appear in a momentary flash, let us remember that the word ‘nature’ has always transported a difference. Nature is opposed to culture; the one defines the opposite of the other, yet they simultaneously depend on each other. Bruno Latour compares them to ‘Siamese twins who continue to hug or hit each other without ceasing to belong to the same body.’5
The hierarchy between culture and nature is viewed in different ways depending on the ideological disposition. Nature is untouched and emerges of its own accord (or through divine intervention), while culture is made by humans and constitutes their true destiny. Humans stand between nature and culture. Their historical mission lies in the emancipation from nature and the creation of a higher culture, the foundation of their freedom and their deliverance from earthly shackles.
This somewhat exaggerated narrative is mirrored in an artistic genre that came to life in a period when the relationship between humans and nature changed radically: the still life, which became especially popular in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century. A classical still life – a painting with a bouquet of flowers or a plate of fruit, or cooking ingredients including game and fish – is never the representation of a naturally occurring found scene, but rather a careful arrangement of various elements based on a moral order. And a still life is never alive. The French term for it is nature morte, ‘dead nature’.
A still life not only ordered nature; it lent it moral content, transforming natural objects such as flowers or fruits into mere ciphers of a divine order. Every bouquet consisted of cut flowers whose death was inscribed in their beauty, of a fruit at the height of its ripeness and about to become rotten, with the first flies already circling it. A candle would soon burn down; a blossom quickly dries; a glass soon empties; a flute is only brought to brief, melodic life by a transient breath – and the frequent skulls, account books (the Dutch were a nation of merchants) or religious treatises require no interpretation. Nature became a moral spectacle, a space in which to stage human mortality and a longing for transcendence.
This thought movement, Latour states, leads to a structural schizophrenia: ‘It is nevertheless this unwarranted generalization that gave rise to the strange opinion that has made it possible to deanimate one sector of the world, and to overanimate another sector, deemed to be subjective, conscious and free.’6 The experiential continuum of nature/culture in which human consciousness exists is split into an individual, subjective, ‘overanimated’ culture and its shadow, a lifeless, objectified nature. Each conditions the other.
On the one hand, distant ‘nature’ becomes a mute resource and economic externality; on the other hand, it becomes a still life, a landscape, touristic décor, kitsch. The rest is the historical revenge of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: in a society that has emancipated itself from all natural rhythms, foodstuffs and charms, and increasingly shifts its experiences into a sphere of digital simulacra, authentic and untouched nature once and for all becomes a site of longing, even though such a nature has not existed on this planet at least since the proclamation of the Anthropocene.
At least since Rousseau, the cultural backlash against the artificiality of culture has consisted in a withdrawal to paradise, to childlike innocence and harmony with nature, to an idyll. This is at best dangerous anarchic romanticism, but usually mere conceptual kitsch. There is no return or stasis in nature or in history – no still, neutral place of contemplation from which the world can be described objectively. The mere fact that all thinking occurs in and through ageing, desirous, sick, fearful, ever-changing bodies and experiential horizons renders such a historical abstraction impossible.
Western history offers an entire panoply of tensions and positions between hyperanimated culture and passive nature, between extreme separation from nature and the longing to return to its bosom. At the same time, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola argues, the way in which the modern occident presents nature is ‘by no means widely shared’.7 In many regions on the planet, humans and non-humans are not viewed as fundamentally separate, he explains. They inhabit the same ‘ontological niche’, have the same needs, are related to one another, are interconnected by the same histories and are fully fledged individuals with their own forms of reason, morality and society.
This separation of ontological niches into Western people and their culture, on the one hand, and what they call ‘nature’, on the other, is never complete – indeed, one part of this book is devoted to the archaeology of intellectual resistance to it – but it made the culture of subjugation possible, and shaped it, by turning the organisms with which humans share this planet into a nature morte.
Wherever the various voices and positions are located in the continuum between ecstatic dissolution and total objectification, they all share the complicated, contradictory history of the concept from which they proceed. In the following, it is important to take the difficult biography of this concept into account while reading and thinking whenever the word ‘nature’ appears, seemingly innocently, in various contexts and meanings, repeatedly eluding any clear definition.
In one meaning, however, nature has now returned on a massive scale to the lives of many millions of people. The coronavirus pandemic made it drastically clear how arbitrary and costly this separation has become, how vulnerable humans are, how directly they are part of nature, interconnected and entangled in biological, economic, political and social contexts beyond their control, even beyond their knowledge. It is a pandemic that was probably caused by human interventions in nature, and will probably be ended by the inventive spirit of humans.
Yet, even now, the virus has changed our perceptions and instincts, modified how we feel about our bodies and altered our working practices, family dynamics and social rituals. It has increased social differences and exposed governments; it has reinforced people’s trust in science in some countries and further eroded it in others; it has divided societies, burdened countless people mentally and financially; it has led to new medical breakthroughs and unprecedented interventions of the state; and it has supplied a new vocabulary for old debates. However long the global emergency caused by it lasts, we will return to a different world.
If a biological pandemic can have such a profound effect on the thinking and behaviour of millions of people within a few months, regardless of whether they were physically infected or not, what about a delusional idea whose infectious power has been afflicting societies time and again for millennia? And what will come after the pandemic? Something always comes afterwards.
Notes
1
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/06/china-modified-the-weather-to-create-clear-skies-for-political-celebration-study
.
2
www.noajansma.com/buycloud
.
3
Ibid.
4
Dipesh Chakrabarty,
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021), p. 68 and
passim
.
5
Bruno Latour,
Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 15.
6
Ibid., p. 85.
7
Philippe Descola,
Beyond Nature and Culture
, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2013), p. 30.
IMYTH
The World on a Vase
3 Stone vase with relief, Mesopotamia, Uruk period, c.3200–2900 bce. Iraq Museum, Baghdad
This is the world and its order. A mighty cylinder of pale, yellowish-grey alabaster the size of a ten-year-old child, with horizontal bands of figures winding around the vessel (figure 3).
At the bottom, directly above the foot, one sees rippling waves, the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which turn the arid plains into fertile fields; the waters on the coast, where the freshwater and saltwater of a god and a goddess had mingled in an act of cosmic conception to create the known world; the sparkling canals running between the fields and gardens in a dense web. Everything is based on water, which, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, creates, nourishes and surrounds the world.
The next band shows ears of corn and reeds, cultivated and wild plants of this coastal landscape, and directly above them is a band with sheep and proudly horned rams following one another in a seemingly endless procession.
On the next level, a long row of men are carrying jugs of oil or beer and bowls full of fruit to offer up their harvest at the temple. They are all frozen in the same gesture, in profile with almond-shaped eyes, striking noses and bald heads; their angled arms hold their burdens in front of them, their bodies are soft and strongly built, as if to show that their master is rich and they have enough to eat; their legs are opened, the genitals clearly visible.
A wide band separates these inexhaustible carriers from the uppermost depiction, which is almost at eye level for the observer. A naked man, praying, offers the goddess a basket of fruit. The two reed bundles, whose tips are rolled up in the shape of a ring, identify her as a powerful deity.
This field depicts a very special ritual: sacrifice and sacred wedding. The ruler marries Inanna, patron goddess of the city and mistress of heaven, goddess of fleshly love and war, of justice and power. We cannot be certain how this ritual was performed. Perhaps the king consummated marriage with the high priestess as a proxy, but just as the priestess is no longer an earthly woman during this coitus, so too the king is at once the body and proxy of Dumuzi, the divine consort of Inanna. Thus, the rulers performed an annual ritual to ensure the fertility of the land.
Nature – inanimate, vegetal and animal – occupies the lowest levels of the pyramid, whose highest point is the sacrifice at the temple, the mystical wedding, as later Christian authors would call that moment in which worldly life joins with otherworldly life to guarantee the order of the world.
Above the levels of the natural world are the slaves and low-ranking humans (although those depicted here seem to be symbolically undressed priests). Only on the highest level are most figures (except the priest) wearing ritual clothing. The king is taken as the groom to his bride, led by a broad sash (unfortunately, this fragment has been lost). The priest hands over a bridal offering. The bride stands before the entrance to her temple and storehouse, part of the temple complex, just as the priests and administrators belong to the same literate, mathematically educated class. The storage of the grain for meagre years, taxation of fields and fixing of prices formed the basis for the temple elite’s power.
In the temple, there are two statues of gods, several offerings – and a pair of vases that look astonishingly similarly to the Uruk vase. Archaeologists assume that this masterpiece from the temple of Inanna had a similar partner piece and both stood in the temple, so the two vessels in this depiction become part of the story they tell: an infinite self-referential mirroring.
This play of references is no coincidence, for the object itself becomes a game. The ritual of marriage between the ruler/Dumuzi and the goddess (represented by a priestess or temple courtesan) was celebrated annually. The sacred wedding also recalled the fate of the god Dumuzi, who had to spend half the year in the underworld and be reborn every year, just like the plants. It guaranteed the continuity of this cycle and simultaneously explains the simple, conical form of the vessel, since the vase can also be thought of as a gigantic cylinder seal which, rolled out into infinity, symbolizes an ever-returning cycle of marriage and harvest, supported by the eternal hierarchy of the divine order.
The Uruk vase is not only for viewing, but also holds its message in its form and the way in which it makes itself part of its own story. It portrays a world in which humans have subjugated the earth and are themselves subjects of the gods – a world in which everything follows a divine order. This order, however, contains an ambivalent element: humans are the only creatures that appear on the vase on two different levels; half animal and half divine, they inhabit an intermediate realm.
Clearly, this dual nature created a tension that was already difficult for the Mesopotamians to bear. People told each other stories about this, as they do about all great tensions, ruptures and fears. One of these stories, about a great king who was two-thirds divine and one-third human, and who set out to subjugate nature and death itself, became one of the central narratives of Uruk. It was recorded on twelve clay tablets at the start of the second millennium bce by a scribe and priest named Sîn-lēqi-unninni, based on ancient tradition, in a system of signs developed some 1,800 years previously to facilitate stock-keeping: writing.
Gilgamesh the Hero
He who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,
[who knew the proper ways,] was wise in all matters!
[Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,
[who] knew the [proper ways, was] wise in all matters!
[…]
He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden,
he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.1
These are the opening words of the oldest known story in writing, whose basic characteristics, according to archaeological evidence, extend back to the sixth millennium bce. And this story provides the first document of the idea of subjugating nature. We must therefore recount it here in a certain amount of detail. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in Mesopotamia, wishes to make a name for himself with heroic deeds and ultimately fails in his attempt to attain eternal life. Despite his wisdom and strength, he finds himself shipwrecked. This hero is wise and yet foolish, an outstanding ruler and yet a tyrant, cruel and yet sometimes gentle: a contradictory and ambivalent protagonist, like all the great figures of world literature.
In the epic’s prologue, Gilgamesh appears as a city-builder who has surrounded Uruk with a great wall that rises imposingly from the plain, an edifice such as the world has never seen before – ‘Look at it still today: the outer wall where the cornice runs, it shines with the brilliance of copper; and the inner wall, it has no equal.’2
But not everything here is as beautiful as the splendid walls. The king oppresses his people. He forces the young men to be ready day and night to amuse him, and claims the right of the first night (the right to sleep with his female subjects on their wedding night) for all virgins in the city. No one can stop him, and so his desperate subjects turn to the gods that they might tame his excessive appetite and free them from the burden of his tyranny.
The gods hear this complaint and decide to distract the overly powerful king. They create Enkidu, a young man who is Gilgamesh’s equal in strength and physique, a hairy individual who lives in the wilderness, far from the walled city, grazing with the gazelles. When the citizens hear of this strange creature, they send the harlot Shamhat to trick him. She meets him at a water-hole he shares with other animals and takes action: ‘Shamhat unfastened the cloth of her loins […] For six days and seven nights Enkidu was erect, as he coupled with Shamhat.’3
When Enkidu is finally sated, he finds that the animals he lived among now flee from him. His once-innocent body has been ‘defiled’ by his new knowledge, by his contact with culture, but his nights with Shamhat have increased his understanding, and he stays with her. Through her, he becomes an inhabitant of the city and grows remote from the wilderness. In the town square of Uruk he encounters Gilgamesh, who is just about to deflower another young woman. Enkidu blocks his path and the two fight until the walls shake, yet neither is able to defeat the other. Thus the opponents become friends.
Gilgamesh’s longing for affirmation and fame has not remotely been quenched by his new friendship and his newfound popularity among his subjects and the gods. He decides to head to the Forest of Cedar with Enkidu to kill the forest spirit Humbaba, guardian of the cedars. The advisers of the king and Enkidu try to dissuade him, for Humbaba is protected by the god Enlil and is a fearsome monster. But Gilgamesh rejects their attempts, and Enkidu ultimately agrees to accompany him. After heavy fighting, the two heroes succeed in killing the terrible forest spirit. Gilgamesh fells the enormous cedars and fashions gates for the temple in Nippur out of their wood. They also take Humbaba’s severed head with them.
The courage and strength of the two friends even impress the gods. The powerful goddess Ishtar has decided to marry the handsome king. Ishtar is none other than Inanna, the ‘mistress of heaven’ and goddess of love and war. It is said that she deals cruelly with her lovers when she tires of them. Gilgamesh knows this, and snubs his divine admirer. Enraged and deeply humiliated, the goddess arranges for the Bull of Heaven to be unleashed in order to destroy Gilgamesh and Enkidu. But the two heroes can deal with this challenge too, and kill the bull.
Gilgamesh holds an extravagant celebration in Uruk, but the gods are outraged by his blasphemy and arrogance. They resolve that one of the two friends must die and send a fever to Enkidu. Gilgamesh is beside himself with pain and sorrow for his close companion, his second self. He refuses to accept Enkidu’s death, and remains with him until a maggot falls from the corpse’s nose. Only then is he struck by a sudden realization: ‘I shall die, and shall I not then be as Enkidu? Sorrow has entered my heart! I am afraid of death, so I wander the wild.’4
The loss of his friend makes the great king aware of his own mortality, and he decides to go and find Uta-napishti, the old man whom the gods have granted immortality. Perhaps he can help Gilgamesh to become immortal? After a long and perilous journey, he reaches a seaside inn at the edge of the world: the first Last Chance Saloon in world literature.
He recounts his heroic deeds to the inn-keeper, but she is unimpressed. When he tells of his fear of death and his sorrow, she gives him some advice that remains as wise now as it was millennia ago:
‘Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find the life for which you are looking. When the Gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.’5
But the wandering hero is determined to cross the water and find Uta-napishti, and he disregards the wise advice. He finds the ferryman, fells seventy trees to use as bargepoles for the crossing and finally finds the old man.
The immortal Uta-napishti likewise tries to dissuade Gilgamesh from pursuing eternal life. Like a mayfly, man is surrounded for a short while by the riches of the world, only to disappear suddenly: ‘Man is snapped off like a reed in a canebrake! The comely young man, the pretty young woman, all [too soon in] their [prime] Death abducts them!’6
The old man tells him his own story. Long ago, the gods decided to wipe out the town of Shuruppak and all its inhabitants with a flood. Only the god Ea refused to participate. He gave Uta-napishti the task of building a boat and loading all the animals onto it so that they would survive the flood. So the old man built the boat and loaded it up with his family, all the animals he could find, purveyors of all the arts, all his possessions and ‘the seed of anything that breathes’. Then the gods began their awesome work of destruction: ‘For a day the gale winds flattened the country, quickly they blew, and then came the Deluge. Like a battle the cataclysm passed over the people.’7 Even the gods were seized with fear when they saw their work. They cried out, lamented loudly and regretted their cruelty, for only now did they comprehend that there would be no one to sacrifice to them any more.
The deluge lasted six days and seven nights, then the water withdrew and the boat came to rest on a mountaintop, from where Uta-napishti sent out a dove, a swallow and a raven to search for land. Finally, he made an offering ‘on the peak of the mountain’, and the gods ‘did smell the savour sweet, the gods gathered like flies’ to still their hunger.
After telling this story, Uta-napishti decides with his wife to put their implacable visitor to a test. If Gilgamesh can stay awake for seven days and nights, the old man will convene the council of gods to decide whether to grant him immortality. The hero agrees, but is so tired that he falls asleep immediately. Although he has not passed the test, Uta-napishti’s wife takes pity and tells him about a plant that bestows eternal youth. Gilgamesh finds the plant through an adventurous dive to the bottom of the sea.
While the hero bathes in a cool pond on the journey back to civilization, a snake eats the plant and sheds its skin, for it has gained a new life. Gilgamesh risked everything and lost everything, and now he must return to Uruk empty-handed. His last words repeat the opening of the epic: they praise the beauty of the city and its wall, a marvel without parallel.
It is remarkable that the first hero in literary history was already an imperfect man, a seeker who – though two-thirds divine – makes one mistake after another and must suffer for it because he is too arrogant, unheedful of good advice, too proud and too ignorant, because he does not know his place in the world.
