On Saturday afternoon, we went to the Church of the Ascension to see the NYC premiere of a documentary about late biologist Lynn Margulis. It was
in fact something of a coincidence that it was shown in a church but this didn't
stop folks from trying to make a connection. Well, I did.
What are the spiritual consequences of giving Margulis' view of nature the place currently occupied by what she called the Neo-Darwinian capitalistic Zeitgeist? The most obvious takeaway is that we misunderstand evolution and our place in it if we think the bottom line is always competition, the war of all against all, nature red in tooth and claw, winners and losers, survival of the fittest. Margulis is for symbiosis - though she use the term in a more narrow way than many ecologists.
Margulis would have us look at the history of life not as a long series of races within and among species, though that's still happening at the micro scale, but as shaped decisively by game-changing bridgings and melding of species. Natural selection favors not (or not only) the one who's best at the current game but rather the one who contributes to the emergence of new collaborations and coalitions. What with the fusion of different kinds of life and lateral DNA transfers, the family tree of life isn't a tree or even a bush but a network, a web. We're connected to all of life, but not only through lineage - and not only through sexual reproduction. The implications for our understanding of kinship could be considerable.
Anthropocentrism gets a satisfying series of wallops. The story of life is definitely not a sort of bracket, with us as the culmination of a line of winners going all the way back. Bacteria govern the planet. They worked out all the important tricks that make the newer chapters in the story like ourselves happen, starting with producing an oxygen-rich atmosphere. They are governing it still if the Gaia hypothesis is right. And they keep doing their thing, as they have been since long before eukaryotic life emerged, the building blocks of more complex lifeforms. We latecomers are coalitions of coalitions. 90% of our bodies has DNA that is not human. Perhaps kinmaking had better start with recognizing who we are. The film-maker quips, "we think therefore I am."
The image of the working of nature as collaborative and coordinated and composed of emergent coalitions composed in their turn of of emergent coalitions (and so on!), the components still chugging along doing what they've always done but networked, is indeed something to behold, and our carelessness of and cruelty toward it something of which to repent. But spiritual? The film-maker asks one of Margulis' friends something along these lines and she says that her friend had certainly had a sense of awe. (This was what put me in mind of Johnson on Darwin.) Can one go further?
The film informed us that Margulis' ideas had been criticized by Neo-Darwinists as giving comfort to creationists, especially in their challenge to the idea that randomness and selfishness are what it's all about. (They're still a big part of what it's all about.) I certainly feel a kind of comfort, like that I felt when reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's response to the unnecessary "species loneliness" of human beings who think we're the only people around. Humility before - and a sense of indebtedness to - the rest of life seem like good things, not just for our relationship to the planet but to ourselves too. The big story isn't crass casualty and constant competition, epic waste and ultimate extinction, but something more like being with - being by being with - others. Diversity wrapped into alliances which cross the greatest of differences and produce yet new possibilities for sympoeisis - creating together.
Is there anything for religion, for the religions, here? A first thought is that the Trinity is a kind of coalition. Not to say that Christian theology somehow anticipated the cosmology Margulis has helped bring into existence, though it may well have built on experiences of sympoiesis in human and more-than-human life which capitalism has taught us to unsee. The coalitional relationships of many indigenous peoples with the non human communities that sustain them and which they help sustain resonate, too. I sense affinities also in the combinatory cosmology of the Yijing, and the sense in many ancient traditions that what we do as humans, with other humans, isn't qualitatively different from what the world does as it worlds - though it'll take some work for me to reclaim a sense that we may have a special part to play in this ongoing worlding. (Perhaps surprisingly - I'm surprised - I'm not feeling it with Buddhism. There might be a resonance with the idea of metempsychosis figuring kinship across species but abhidharma exposes coalitions rather than building them, and Buddhist ideas of interdependence and emptiness seem too abstract. Wisdom and compassion as symbionts?)
Much to ponder.
Margulis would have us look at the history of life not as a long series of races within and among species, though that's still happening at the micro scale, but as shaped decisively by game-changing bridgings and melding of species. Natural selection favors not (or not only) the one who's best at the current game but rather the one who contributes to the emergence of new collaborations and coalitions. What with the fusion of different kinds of life and lateral DNA transfers, the family tree of life isn't a tree or even a bush but a network, a web. We're connected to all of life, but not only through lineage - and not only through sexual reproduction. The implications for our understanding of kinship could be considerable.
Anthropocentrism gets a satisfying series of wallops. The story of life is definitely not a sort of bracket, with us as the culmination of a line of winners going all the way back. Bacteria govern the planet. They worked out all the important tricks that make the newer chapters in the story like ourselves happen, starting with producing an oxygen-rich atmosphere. They are governing it still if the Gaia hypothesis is right. And they keep doing their thing, as they have been since long before eukaryotic life emerged, the building blocks of more complex lifeforms. We latecomers are coalitions of coalitions. 90% of our bodies has DNA that is not human. Perhaps kinmaking had better start with recognizing who we are. The film-maker quips, "we think therefore I am."
The image of the working of nature as collaborative and coordinated and composed of emergent coalitions composed in their turn of of emergent coalitions (and so on!), the components still chugging along doing what they've always done but networked, is indeed something to behold, and our carelessness of and cruelty toward it something of which to repent. But spiritual? The film-maker asks one of Margulis' friends something along these lines and she says that her friend had certainly had a sense of awe. (This was what put me in mind of Johnson on Darwin.) Can one go further?
The film informed us that Margulis' ideas had been criticized by Neo-Darwinists as giving comfort to creationists, especially in their challenge to the idea that randomness and selfishness are what it's all about. (They're still a big part of what it's all about.) I certainly feel a kind of comfort, like that I felt when reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's response to the unnecessary "species loneliness" of human beings who think we're the only people around. Humility before - and a sense of indebtedness to - the rest of life seem like good things, not just for our relationship to the planet but to ourselves too. The big story isn't crass casualty and constant competition, epic waste and ultimate extinction, but something more like being with - being by being with - others. Diversity wrapped into alliances which cross the greatest of differences and produce yet new possibilities for sympoeisis - creating together.
Is there anything for religion, for the religions, here? A first thought is that the Trinity is a kind of coalition. Not to say that Christian theology somehow anticipated the cosmology Margulis has helped bring into existence, though it may well have built on experiences of sympoiesis in human and more-than-human life which capitalism has taught us to unsee. The coalitional relationships of many indigenous peoples with the non human communities that sustain them and which they help sustain resonate, too. I sense affinities also in the combinatory cosmology of the Yijing, and the sense in many ancient traditions that what we do as humans, with other humans, isn't qualitatively different from what the world does as it worlds - though it'll take some work for me to reclaim a sense that we may have a special part to play in this ongoing worlding. (Perhaps surprisingly - I'm surprised - I'm not feeling it with Buddhism. There might be a resonance with the idea of metempsychosis figuring kinship across species but abhidharma exposes coalitions rather than building them, and Buddhist ideas of interdependence and emptiness seem too abstract. Wisdom and compassion as symbionts?)
Much to ponder.
