THE WISDOM OF TREES
Alienation: Technology & the Soul, Part II
Like the God of the Bible, who repented that he had made man, we repent that we have made our technologies.
“Even when we have corrected an illusion, it by no means follows that the psychic agency which produces illusions, and actually needs them, has been abolished.”
-C.G. Jung
One hot midsummer day, while in the throes of a profound existential crisis, I found myself talking to a tree in my front yard. I should clarify that this is not part of my normal routine. Up to this point, my (somewhat) scientific, 21st-century mind and (extremely) traditional Catholic upbringing had entirely precluded me from talking to plants (though I admit I had, on other occasions, been tempted). In fact, I felt quite self-conscious and silly doing it; I looked around beforehand to make sure none of my neighbors were watching. But the desire came up out of me instinctively, and, after some hesitation, I surrendered to it.
But, while it was the first time I’d acted on the impulse to talk to trees, it wasn’t the first time I’d felt a connection with them. I used to drive every evening by a large one that stood alone in a field — a solitary and magnificent figure silhouetted against the bright blue sky — and think, “That means something. I don’t know what it means, but it means something to me personally.” It was as if it reminded me of some long-forgotten truth I once knew. And in this summer of soul-searching, I found myself once again captivated by these “princes of immobility.” But the experience wasn’t simply — or even primarily — an intellectual one; it wasn’t as if the trees were merely symbols to decode. It was an embodied experience. I felt the trees calling to me. They were not words on a page, but living creatures inviting me to a dialogue; when I looked at them, they looked back at me. And when I walked up to this very ordinary tree in this mundane, middle-American suburb, I felt that I was in the presence of a benevolent, paternal being who wished to bestow some wisdom on me. So I put my hands around its trunk and said, “Tell me what I need to know.”
The tree, of course, was mute. No sound emanated from it save the gentle rustle of its leaves in the soft summer wind. And yet I felt that it had answered me, and was seized by a classic religious impulse: the desire to give thanks.
Of course, trees do not — and cannot — speak, or think, or have emotions, as far as we know. Perhaps one day we will discover some hitherto unknown form of tree consciousness and a corresponding arboreal capacity for telepathy, but absent any such evidence, we can conclude that the tree I spoke to was hardly aware of me at all, except in a very rudimentary sense. So, as a scientific, modern person, how am I to make sense of the fact that I had such a very ancient religious experience — the experience of a living spirit in a feature of the natural world?
Clearly, it was a case of projection. The, feeling that I was “called”, the impression of a paternal presence, the sense that I was the recipient of a meaningful gift — all of this took place entirely in my own mind. I simply threw my inner, subjective mental content onto the external object of the tree.
But to conclude that the experience was not meaningful would be a mistake. The experience did not mean that the tree was literally speaking to me, but an experience of such emotional power — without question — meant something important about the contents of my own mind. By paying attention to the mental responses evoked by the tree, I eventually learned a critical lesson about myself. In other words, the tree was a kind of interface between my conscious and subconscious mind, a way of bringing subconscious material into conscious awareness. The image of the tree was somehow associated with long-dormant mental content, and — at the right moment — awakened it. The “prayer” to the tree was a therapeutic self-dialogue. The benevolent, paternal presence was my own self-compassionate soul.
But projection is not a unique phenomenon of my own mind; it is a phenomenon common to all human minds. How exactly does this phenomenon, projection, occur? In my view, it is the result of five factors: the autonomous nature of man’s psyche, man’s lack of psychological self-awareness, the natural process of association in which the mind engages, and symbolic thinking.
While we have the power to consciously direct our minds — focus our attention on some things to the exclusion of others, think chosen thoughts, even generate specific emotions if we choose — the conscious mind is built on a biological substrate that functions automatically. This substrate is comprised of the basic functions of our nervous system, which processes sensory data and creates the basic experiences of pleasure or pain (and the more complex experiences of positive or negative emotion) in order to keep us alive. When we are infants and children, we experience sensations of pain or pleasure that give rise to value judgments, i.e. “This is good; this is bad.” Of course, these value judgments are not conceptual yet; they are remembered, automatic physical-emotional responses to stimuli. When we see something that previously evoked pain, we experience fear. When we see something that previously evoked pleasure, we experience desire, and, if we can’t get the object of our desire, we experience anger. Thus, as self-consciousness develops, there is an existing substrate of judgments about the world and emotional complexes that developed when we were infants and toddlers. We are hardly aware of these underlying factors when we are children, as our capacity for self-awareness is still developing, but they powerfully influence the direction in which our conscious thoughts and emotional life grow.
Of course, this automatic substrate continues to function after we have developed self-consciousness. While we become (to our varying individual degrees) conscious of it, and we can influence and change it over time through conscious action and direction of focus, we do not have perfect, immediate control over it.
Thus to a large extent (and for some more than others), ideas and emotions spring automatically into consciousness; they happen to us. They have the subjective quality of autonomous entities that act on us without — or even against — our conscious desires. Our own mental content can seem as if it comes from somewhere else — as if it is not part of us at all.
Another aspect of our mental functioning noted implicitly but not explicitly in the process described above is association. We connect the aspects of our experience on the basis of simultaneity. Donald Hebb, the famous neuroscientist, described this phenomenon with the phrase, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” For an example of the former, imagine that one of your parents wore a certain scent while you were growing up. Years later, you may find that a sudden encounter with that scent awakens images and feelings from your childhood. In this case, an automatic association formed as a result of simultaneous experience. This, of course, is just one example. We have a vast and complex web of associations that has developed over the course of our lives, and every moment activates an incalculable number of nodes in our associative networks.
In addition to the unconscious psychic structures and content that formed when we were developing children, we also possess subconscious content as a result of deliberate suppression. When something unpleasant comes into the field of our awareness, we move the spotlight of our attention to something else. Since we can only hold so much information in awareness at one time, redirecting our attention can be effective, particularly over time, as it becomes an ingrained, automatic habit. But this is a process of evasion, not erasure. If the emotion or thought we suppress has deep causal roots in our psyche — our conscious or subconscious value judgments, our early formative experiences, our deeply-held ideas about the nature of reality, or the immutable demands of human biology — it cannot simply be erased by selective attention. It remains in the part of the psyche outside consciousness (the subconscious), and it can (and will) be “triggered” (brought back into consciousness) by an event, person, or object to which it is connected in our vast and complex web of mental association.
Projection is this process: concrete objects activating subconscious content due to subconscious mental associations, but without a complete differentiation of the inner content from the outer object. In projection, we locate the subjective experience in the object that triggered it.
I can perform this analysis because I am a modern person with a scientific outlook that is the product of centuries of cultural conditioning. But the rational, scientific mind is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the Enlightenment, well-developed and consistent rationality was an extreme rarity, possessed by a scant number of individuals and almost never by an entire culture. It was only after Thomas Aquinas revived Aristotle in the West that an entire civilization took up reason as an epistemological absolute, which led to the Renaissance and, ultimately, the birth of modern science.
Prior to these developments, the vast majority of men did not take reason as an epistemological absolute; they did not even have a complete or fully conscious understanding of it. Most applied it only implicitly and inconsistently, and they frequently took their experiences at face value rather than analyzing them logically. Premodern man was less rational and therefore less conscious — less aware of his mental processes and less aware of reality as a whole. He had far less ability to step outside the stream of his mental content and observe its inner workings objectively, just as he had far less ability to understand and control nature. He was more immersed in — and at the mercy of — both nature and the automatic forces of his own psyche.
As a consequence, he did not have the capacity to recognize the process of psychological projection. When he perceived a spirit in a tree, he did not make the distinction between his subjective feeling and the objective facts. As a result, his psyche was unconsciously entangled with the world around him. He conceived of his own emotions and thoughts as living entities that spoke to him, guided him, commanded him, punished him, rewarded him, played tricks upon him, loved him, hated him, acted upon him. He sensed them as disembodied presences in the dead of night, saw them in hallucinatory visions, heard them in the rush of wind and the roar of thunder. Nature was the abode of gods, devils, angels, fairies, nymphs.
Nature then, acted as an interface for man’s psyche; through his contemplation of it and his interactions with it, he practiced a primitive, unconscious psychotherapy. In nature, he encountered not only the objective, outer world, but also the subjective, inner world of his own consciousness — the spiritual world. It is in this sense that Proteus and Triton are real — as projections, mythical concretizations of psychic realities. And it is with these psychic realities that we lose touch as we turn from the slow rhythms of nature to the frenetic beat of industrial capitalism.
So it seems we are back to the same problem. If science and technology produce a rupture in man’s psychology, is the cure a Retvrn to some former state of development? Is psychic wholeness only achievable by a conscious return to the unconscious state of the primitive?
To answer the question of whether such a return would be the right course of action, let’s first ask: is such a thing even possible? And the answer is no, because to do so would require a deliberate destruction of the mind qua mind. Man uses his reason, he invents technologies, produces and trades, all by his very nature. His development — from agrarian to industrial, mystical to rational, subsistence to abundance — is a product of human nature, not a deviation from it. What advocates of Retvrn unwittingly advocate then is the salvation of man through the destruction of man.
The things we create, whether novels or paintings, corporations or smartphones, are not distinct from us — they are expressions of us. And in the case of techno-capitalism, we are not dealing with only an expression, like a painting or a novel. We are dealing with an amplifier of man’s being. Capitalism and technology multiply our natural capacities. The effects that they have upon us and our world are simply human effects, magnified hundreds or millions or trillions of times. When the world’s fastest computer does 1.1 quintillion operations per second, it is doing something fundamentally human in a superhuman way. To hate technology then, is to hate mankind. And this is ultimately where Ludditism leads. Like the God of the Bible, who repented that he had made man, we repent that we have made our technologies.
And this brings us to the crux of the matter. It illuminates the whole problem.
What we encounter in modern civilization are our own capacities and tendencies in more powerful form. Good as well as evil. Helpful and unhelpful. Angelic and demonic. Our adversarial relationship with our creations exposes not a conflict between humanity and “inhuman” industrialism, but a fracture in our own psyches. The split we discover between ourselves and our technologies, is — like Proteus and Triton, like the tree spirit of my summer encounter — a projection. It does not exist without, but within.
And the path forward, to the healing of the rupture, consists not of less consciousness, but of more; not of going back, but of going even further — further than we have ever gone before.
To be continued in Part III.
If you missed it, read Part I here.
