Some environmentalists criticize that our society is living "against" or "apart from" nature. A valid argument, but I would characterize it more as that we are dissociated from the rest of nature. By this I mean that although we are not physically separated from it (as Daniel Quinn says, you can't get "away" from nature any more than you can get "away" from the carbon cycle), rather, we're physically here, but mentally elsewhere (**see note at end of entry). If our society were a person, and I were a therapist charged with actually making a clinical diagnosis, I'd have to factor in antisocial and narcisstic personality traits, as well as significant delusional thinking, but the dissociative traits would be what most stood out to me. And how we interact with fellow human beings is, arguably, a microcosm of how we interact with the world around us.
The idea is propogated by many organized religions. There's a song by the Christian band FFH called "For Future Generations," where it plainly tells us in the very first verse that "saving" people (in a Messianic sense) is more important than saving the Earth (in an ecologic sense). I know that's probably not the song's sole intention, but that's still a big theme in the Bible, "be in this world but not be of it," "he who loves the world loves not the Father," et cetera ad nauseum. Other organized religions have similar notions: moksha, ascension, et cetera. That just seems to propogate the notion that "this world is an illusion, so what's the point of taking care of it?" Personally, I prefer Derrick Jensen's notion that just because our perceptions are imperfect doesn't mean that the physical world is an illusion; it just means that we don't always see it clearly. (For the record, I don't think Christanity is inherently evil; and certainly there are those who care about others and about the Earth and not simply obsessed with going to Heaven, just it would be nice if there were more of you like that.)
We also see it with those "reality" shows which are taking over the television these days. We can't deal with the real real stuff, but we still crave some sort of reality. So we turn to these artificial, contrived "realities" the network executives dish out. Easier to sit and watch a flickering screen than to actually go out and live a life, interacting with the people (and nonhuman beings) around you. I suppose you could also stretch that notion to include pornography and prostitution as poor substitutes for meaningful intimacy and lovemaking, which, at least in my view, is not the same as f-cking. (But being absurdedly sheltered and having never been exposed to porn, prostitutes, or for that matter actual lovemaking, perhaps it's not my place to make the comparison.)
So, I take back what I said before in an earlier entry about logic. Thought divorced from feeling isn't a flaw of our culture. Au contraire, it's a fundamental tenet of our culture. "Thousands died today..." but don't you worry about that. They're just Africans... or Iraqi's... or chickens... or trees. Don't picture one individual and multiply that horror times a thousand. Don't imagine the man dismembered by a car bomb, the woman being raped and tortured, the child slaving away in a sweat shop, the tortured pig in a factory farm, the redwood being cut down in the name of "progress." Stalin said it best, one death is a tragedy, many deaths is a statistic. Keep it as a number, a lump sum, a cold, hard figure, especially with people or things that don't actually "matter." (Your definition of what "matters" or not is, of course, completely arbitrary and thoroughly convenient.) Dissociate. Disconnect. Disengage. That's the way to do it. Heaven forbid you should actually understand the world around you. Then you might actually feel something.
It's easier to disengage and cut yourself off from feeling, from having to have true intimacy with the world around you. But easier doesn't mean it's necessarily healthy. It's like the Garth Brooks song: "Life is not tried, it is merely survived if you're standing outside the fire." How can you say you're really living if all you detach yourself from the world around you?
Let's go back to the psychological analogy. Dissociation is a defensive or coping mechanism. How do you go about changing a maladaptive defense mechanism? You can't just take it away and leave a vacuum. No, you teach the person more positive ways of dealing. Industrial society needs to be taught a better way to deal with problems than by rationallizing, denial, or this mental dissociation from reality.
It's not too late to reconnect with the world around us... ecologically and socially.
"What was it about that night? Connection in an isolating age. For once the shadows gave way to light. For once i didn't disengage." RENT, What You Own
(**In psychology, dissociation is "a psychological defense mechanism in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated from the rest of the psyche." Depersonalization, part of the dissociative spectrum, is "a state in which the normal sense of personal identity and reality is lost.")
