return to nature

The return to nature. How can one return to nature and ignore the hunt. There are always current efforts to recover the desirable features of a past way of life, idealized into a mythic sense of equality, non-violence and leisure, where the manna of low hanging fruit was always like the old Coca Cola slogan, “within an arm’s reach of desire.” The fact that lives were short and brutish is subsumed by the sense that men lost important things in the process of becoming civilized that asserts that murder and warfare were rare and hunter’s generally had an easy life. An evolutionist’s utopia in which it was the Enlightenment which is responsible for creating the myth that primitive people were engaged in a bitter struggle for survival. In this scenario, the heroic bushman spent much of his time talking, playing games, and visiting friends and relatives and has never known comparable leisure since the end of his hunting days.

( see link at end) …Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl in search of food, but at night they all gather closely round the fire and build it up, for it is their protection against the wandering bear and such like beasts of prey. The Old Man is the only fully adult male in the little group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough to rouse the Old Man’s jealousy, he will fall foul of them and either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they may try to steal a mate. Then they would probably fall out among themselves. Some day, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead. There is prob ably short shrift for the old at the squatting-place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble and death Come upon them….

…What did they eat at the squatting-place?

“Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the eat hairy mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is the highest degree improbable that the human savage ever hunted animals much larger than the hare, the rabbit, and the rat. Man was probably the hunted rather than the hunter. Read More:http://www.oldandsold.com/articles32n/history-outline-25.shtml

The posited theory is that man’s innate goodness  has suffered dramatically from what Walter Benjamin called “the shock of the new”, and in turn the basic instinct of taking while the taking is good, of hunting and being hunted, has transformed him into a master exploiter. The relationship to the land and animals is still one of exploitation. Man continues to behave as though the world were still a place of savannas and virgin forests that covered continents. The social engineering issue becomes to design environments as appropriate for modern individuals as the wilderness was for the prehistoric while still enjoying emotional intensity and the excitement of the chase and the kill. Of course, the bio-engineering problem has never been solved to everyone’s satisfaction but nonetheless, the myth of an idyllic history replete with hunting ceremonies, dancing and rhythmical noisemaking around early hearths; the cackling of burning wood and moving shadows on cave wall, arousing the passions….

This “deep ecology”, back to the roots and source is partly rooted in an anti-enlightenment discourse that has had a seamy underside where we don’t simply walk on the earth, but have a blood and soil erotic relation to it. And one of the grandfathers of this movement is none other than Martin Heidegger:

( see link at end) … Existentialism is fertile ground from which to develop a deep ecological worldview. Existentialism often uses natural existence or ‘being’ to trump idealistic or religious thought that heightens itself above the natural world. Nature and its holistic interrelatedness is used to

ralize both philosophy and religious faith as incongruent to the existential realities of the real world. This also allegedly leads to a false, dominating view over nature, which has become especially superficial and unsustainable in the modern mechanized world. Truth is not a matter of abstract doctrinal statements that unnaturally detaches people from the real world, but is self-defined according to one’s own natural existence rooted in his particular environment.

For Heidegger, what needs to be done is to destroy western philosophy and its Judeo-Christian handmaid. Even after the war, Heidegger’s philosophy was aimed point blank at the overthrow of traditional western philosophy/religion in order to save the planet. With its transcendental emphasis upon mind, thinking and thought, both western philosophy and the Judeo-Christian worldview elevate ‘rootless’ rationalism and/or faith over the reality of natural existence. As far as Heidegger was concerned, this has led modern, western man into an inauthentic lifestyle contrary to the natural world grounded in what Heidegger calls ‘being.’…

… Technology based on the globalist forces of the Enlightenment is inauthentic and locally destructive to the native German peoples (das volk) since it has been uprooted by the ‘liberal’ Jewification of society. That modern environmentalism has swept in behind the collapse of classic western philosophy and the fading of the Judeo-Christian worldview is thus no accident. It is part and parcel of the whole post-modern outlook that denies any transcendental truth or God that exists independent and outside of the natural world. Without such transcendental truths, all that is left is an amoral nature and its factual existence, and Martin Heidegger has been leading this particular charge since his early days in the camp of National Socialism….Read More:http://gulagbound.com/17582/the-green-nazi-deep-ecology-of-martin-heidegger/#.T7vgLSqF9cc

aAlso:http://www.integralworld.net/zimmerman5.html

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Such arguments have a chilling currency within contemporary ecological discourse: the key to social-ecological harmony is ascertaining “the eternal laws of nature’s processes” (Hitler) and organizing society to correspond to them. …

In many varieties of the National Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea of rootedness in nature. …

Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” as the energy path of the future. … Read More:http://www.theatheistconservative.com/2010/01/22/green-roots-the-origin-of-ecology/