Merchant and Anthropocentrism

Our view of what is “nature” is very different from the view of our medieval ancestors. Today, we have a more anthropocentric view of the world instead of an ecocentric one as did our ancestors. For them, “mother” earth was considered to be a beneficent, receptive, and nurturing female. The ancients understood that while they needed to utilize her, they still needed to maintain this level of “violation”. Before “violating the sacredness” of Mother Nature, miners performed sacrifices, practiced sexual abstinence, and even fasted (Merchant 41.). This just shows how guilty they felt about exploiting nature for personal gain. The conceptualization of nature as alive and sensitive was a good defense against the destruction of it. However, people these days do not share the same idea. Capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism, was an important cause of this. The dreams of economic growth and profit from capitalism led humans to change their perception of nature. Demanded resources changed from renewable to nonrenewable, even though it hurt the earth, because they were more profitable. Realizing this, people like Francis Bacon advocated the domination of nature for human benefit and helped shift the conception of nature from an organism to a machine. And so this idea of the “mechanization of nature” began to be spread and accepted. Philosophers knew that machines gave man power over nature, and therefore most philosophers realized this mechanization would be the “death of nature.”(Merchant 65.)

Thoughts like these changed the metaphors that people lived by. Ideas like Social Darwinism helped change this paradigm by telling people how to respond to nature. Nature is something so abstract that, we as humans rely on other people(the media) to tell us what it is because we can’t explain it ourselves. It created this dualism with nature as a nurturing mother to nature as an obstacle. Soon, the “American” idea of “conquering anything” became popular as ever. Capitalism was regarded as the most “natural” way to do economics, advocating ideas like “survival of the fittest.” Calling it natural made it sound justifiable. This set a whole new standard on how to regard nature. The video I embedded really shows you just how much your perception has changed by the way they made it. The first clip is just a bulldozer digging up land, which seems "normal", and then it blends with the clip of a bird in the grass. The two frames combined show you how the two videos are connected. We didn't think of it in that way because of this changed metaphor of how we see things. Another thing I thought about when viewing this video was how construction vehicles and tools are often toys for young children. As a child, I played with dumptrucks and bulldozers in the sandbox but never really thought about what I was doing. It seems like America is trying to start them young so they don't see a problem when they see bulldozers destroying forests because it seems normal to them. Capitalism has given us the incentive to get out there and make money, and money makes us forget about the actual problem.

However, along with capitalism, the scientific revolution played a major role in the changing of this perception. Newtonian science especially changed the way people saw nature. The idea that matter was composed of individual components made people look at the nature the same way. What was once valued as a single living and breathing organism was now thought to be made up of billions of different parts, so destroying part of it didn’t affect nature as a whole. I believe the ancients thought of the earth the way they did because they knew nothing else. Humans generally need a set of rules or truths to live by, and so we create them, which is why “truths” are constantly changing between generations. What is considered to be “true” today may not be true in 100 years, and so forth. This and the facts from the scientific revolution changed humans conception of reality forever, with most people feeling disenchanted from their former beliefs.

This paradigm shift from an Organic Worldview to a Mechanistic one was due partly to people like Francis Bacon convincing the population that humans have the “might and right” to do anything they see fit. Destroying nature became justified because it was merely where “human knowledge and human power intersected.”(Francis Bacon, Merchant). This view is questionable to me because I’ve always been taught that knowledge is power. If we have knowledge, then don’t we have power? Why would this justify the destruction of “nature”, or the world? It doesn’t, but the idea of profits will outweigh the idea of conservation any day.

This quote by Francis Bacon particularly clicked with my media piece. The bulldozer represents human power, and the man driving it represents human knowledge. I find it funny that the title begins with “progress” because I wonder “progress for whom?” Construction is something we as Americans see every day because our civilization is “advancing.” Progress and advancement are two words with a similar connotation, but what exactly should that connotation be? Progress should mean that everyone is moving forward, but who actually progresses, or should I say profits, from this construction of civilization and destruction of nature? The builders of this house are a good example of egoism in today’s society. They assume that they are only doing good because they are building a home for someone, but what they don’t realize is that they are also destroying a home, or multiple. Therefore, this egocentric view that what is good for the individual is also good for society is wrong most of the time. Man will learn that sooner or later if this mechanistic worldview doesn’t change back to an organic one. Man must change how he defines “progress”, as “man’s rise is almost certainly man’s demise.”