Nature and Madness

Rating:
Summary: Society is Immature
Review: For those interested in studies of western culture's destructive relationship with nature, this treatise from Paul Shepard is certainly a rewarding read, though I recommend it with some reservations. Shepard starts with the Mother Earth concept and takes it to great psychological lengths, then applies this psychology to all of mankind. It's certainly a radical thesis, but it's worth thinking about. In what he calls variously ontogenetic regression, unaltered immaturity, and other labels, Shepard makes the case that humans have been torn from their true mother, the Earth, as the unfortunate outcome of modern civilization and social constructs. Thus, society behaves in pathological ways similar to what can be seen from children who are torn away from their mothers before the onset of maturity. Therefore, our society's attitude toward nature is perpetually immature, underdeveloped, and undernourished, with all the destructiveness and disrespect that results from such a dysfunctional childhood.

While this thesis has its various strengths and weaknesses that can be discovered by the reader, there's not enough meat to it to round out an entire book, even a very short one like this. Shepard's most glaring weakness is in psychology, as he offers little more than extremely basic Freud (with the associated sexism and dubious ideas on infancy and childhood), and then makes unconvincing attempts to extend this psychology to society as a whole. Meanwhile, Shepard's writing gets buried in academic dogma that is a real slog for non-professors who don't speak in non-stop technical jargon all day. Watch for arcane terms like methectic, kerygmatic, neoteny, or autochthonous; along with brain-drain sentences like "...amputate and cauterize pubertal epigenesis because they would further transform the relationship of the infant to its mother." Add all this to Shepard's rather self-righteous speculations and you are in for an exasperating read, although the basic thesis of this book definitely offers food for thought.

Rating:
Summary: Not his best
Review: I am a big Paul Shepard fan but this book was a disappointment. The book starts off well investigating the thesis that natural selection has left the human mind with a set series of developmental events that must take place between childhood and adulthood by which the child comes to understand its place in both the human community and the natural world. This sequence was built into human psychology during hundred of thousands of years of living as hunter-gatherers. When we adopted large-scale agriculture a mere 10.000 years ago this sequence was radically disrupted as the sphere of the childs interaction with both the naturl world around it and it human community was contracted drastically. Many of the ills of modern life stem from this disruption.
Shepard presentation of his basic thesis is compelling. But he then goes on to psycho-historical explorations of how this disruption takes different shapes in different historical epochs. This constitutes the bulk of the book. The psycho-history pieces I found unsatisfying, full of very broad generalizations about the psychological effect of various cultural trends. There is no way to tell what is just psychobabble and what is not. If you are new to Shepard I would recommend the Tender Carnivore instead, or for a nice summary of his whole line of thought Coming Home to the Pleistocene.

Rating:
Summary: The disjunction from our past and our modern dilemma
Review: Paul Shepard is the seminal thinker/writer in the field of human ecology. His works have been widely influential and caused some distress amongst environmental groups. This work was originally published by Sierra Club books, but withdrawn in two years because of the controversial ideas.

In this, the final volume of a trilogy (The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game and Thinking Animals being the first two) he furthers his thesis that seperation from our pleistocene past has caused a modern disjunction with nature and may be the most important cause of modern problems.

His indictment of history; "(history) is itself a Western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to location.... It seeks causality in the conscious, spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them in writing" (page 47), is one aspect of Shepard's view that modern human culture is pathological.

Paul Shepard is not easy to read. His ideas are unsettling and his writing style is dense at times. However, it seems that he is a philosopher who will influence thinking not only about nature and human relationships with nature, but about society and "progress."

"Nature and Madness" will upset your view of the world you live in, which is probably the main reason for reading it.

Rating:
Summary: extending the legacy of Paul Shepard
Review: This is a really impressive, powerful and inspiring book, which investigates neurotic behavior of the individual and collective societies as a result of alienation and separation fom our natural impulses, nature itself and our "co inhabitants" of the planet earth.Those interested in further investigating these themes are advised to check out John Zerzan's excellent "Against Civilization"(surely a pun on Huysmans classic portrayal of dissatisfied and empty urban neurosis, "Against Nature"), a collection of essays devoted to the "wrong thnking" and negative effects of civilization and the disastrous implications of man's separation from nature. In a similar vein, his "Elements of Refusal" should find a sympahetic readership amongst those impressed by Shepard's work. Gregdada from Korea.