The Myth of Primal Ecological Wisdom

Wilber's View

A recurring move in Eco-Romantic thought is to hold up tribal or foraging societies as custodians of a lost "ecological wisdom" — a reverence for nature that modernity severed and that we now need to recover. Wilber thinks this rests on a category error, and it's the ecological instance of his more general pre-trans-fallacy (and of the differentiation-vs-dissociation distinction that runs through the book). Magic-era consciousness had not yet clearly differentiated the biosphere from the noosphere — mind, body, and nature were run together in what cognitive anthropologists call "indissociation" or "global syncretism." That undifferentiated condition can look, from the outside, like a seamless integration of humanity and nature. But integration is something you achieve after differentiation, by taking up and coordinating parts that have first come apart. You cannot integrate what was never distinguished. So the Romantic, Wilber argues, mistakes indissociation (a pre-differentiated state) for integration (a trans-differentiated one), and mistakes a move backward for a move forward.

The second half of the argument is empirical, and Wilber leans on writers who are themselves sympathetic to tribal wisdom — Theodore Roszak, Riane Eisler, René Dubos, Gerhard Lenski. Their own evidence, he says, shows that pre-modern peoples also overgrazed, deforested, eroded, and hunted out their habitats; the damage was real but local, limited by the scale of the means available, not by any special restraint. "Close to nature" in the sense of indissociated does not translate into "ecologically sound." The correct conclusion, on Wilber's reading, is that the difference between tribal and industrial eco-devastation is a difference of power, not of wisdom: the same ecological ignorance, now armed with far more dangerous means. His constructive point is that the cure is therefore neither to strip away modern means nor to romanticize primal ignorance, but to develop into a genuinely worldcentric, integrative mode of awareness that can hold biosphere and noosphere together for the first time.

Two things are worth flagging as contestable. First, the "same ignorance, bigger means" formula is asserted more than demonstrated — it does real work in the argument but rests largely on a handful of secondary sources and a few striking examples (Mediterranean erosion, tribes depleting a site and moving on) rather than a systematic survey. Second, the argument is aimed squarely at a strong, sweeping claim ("tribal societies possessed ecological wisdom as such"); it lands less cleanly against the weaker and more common claim that particular practices, norms, or scales of living in particular societies were in fact more ecologically sustainable, which Wilber grants in passing but does not really engage.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

It is that indissociation that is so often eulogized by Romantics, because, I believe, they mistake indissociation for integration. The magical-animistic structure, as lovely as it might appear to us jaded moderns, was not an integration of the biosphere and the noosphere, because these had not yet been differentiated in the first place.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"

Lack of capacity to devastate the environment on a large scale does not automatically mean presence of wisdom, let alone reverence for the environment. And, in fact, many tribes, as Lenski points out, simply remained at one location until they had ecologically depleted the area, and then were forced to move on.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"

Wilber's key witnesses are writers otherwise committed to "primal/tribal wisdom." Roszak concedes that

tribal societies have abused and even ruined their habitat. In prehistoric times, the tribal and nomadic people of the Mediterranean basin overcut and overgrazed the land so severely that the scars of the resulting erosion can still be seen. Their sacramental sense of nature did not offset their ignorance of the long-range damage they were doing to their habitat.

— Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"

The correct conclusion, in other words, is that the primal/tribal structure in itself did not necessarily possess ecological wisdom, it simply lacked the means to inflict its ignorance on larger portions of the global commons.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"

The main difference between tribal and modern eco-devastation is not presence or lack of wisdom, but presence of more dangerous means, where the same ignorance can now be played out on a devastating scale.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"

Returning to Roszak at length in Book Two, Wilber reads the whole Eco-Romantic project as caught in a self-contradiction — it needs the primal state to be both parochial and universally wise at once:

…he senses (and states) that the primal state was thoroughly parochial (egocentric/ethnocentric to the core), yet on the other hand it must be the repository of universal ecological wisdom, so he must figure out a way to eulogize the primal undifferentiated state and distance himself from it at the same time.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13, "The Dominance of the Descenders"

But since the primal structure (phylo and onto) contained neither inherent ecological wisdom (as he clearly demonstrates) nor a worldcentric/global orientation (as he also demonstrates), what exactly is it that we are supposed to recapture? The special form of primal ignorance?

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13, "The Dominance of the Descenders"

See Also

• pre-trans-fallacy — the general error this page is the ecological special case of
• flatland — the differentiation-vs-dissociation distinction the argument turns on
• environmental-ethics — Wilber's constructive alternative to flatland ecophilosophy
• ego-camp-and-eco-camp — the "Eco camp" whose romanticism this critique targets
• dominator-vs-growth-hierarchy — the same "don't confuse the pre- with the post-" move, applied to hierarchy rather than to nature
• involution-and-evolution — why, for Wilber, the developmental arrow runs forward through differentiation, not back toward an Eden
• dialectic-of-progress — the companion anti-retro-Romantic argument: every stage brings new burdens as well as new achievements, so comparing eras one-sidedly is rigged