In 1848, Marx and Engels asserted: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers” (p.6). This is to say too much and not enough. Marx was right about the thrall in which each of these could be held by the bourgeois class, but those halos had already been given a hundred tilts and tarnishes, and had worn the patina of earlier revolutions, bitter experience, corruption, skepticism, cynicism, civil war, and failures long before Marx’s bourgeois materialist met his specter. Marx’s amnesia aside, his point about incorporation of the nominally sacred by the economically profane is solid enough not to melt into air. Indeed, it is borne out. Witness the ritual between president Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and a dozen indigenous leaders in December 2018 aimed at sanctifying the Mayan Train railway project. According to the Yucatan Times:
In an “original people ritual” AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) asked Mother Earth’s consent for the development of the train project in the Yucatan Peninsula. The ceremony took place on Sunday Dec. 16, it was presided by AMLO and representatives of 12 indigenous peoples of the state of Chiapas. It was held in the municipality of Palenque, site of one of the most important ancient Mayan cities, and it was simultaneously carried out at five other archaeological areas within the Yucatan Peninsula. It’s not the ritual that tests common sense, but the apparent premise that holding it makes it acceptable to plow through notable biodiversity hotspots, some already under growing pressure from development (italics mine).
Elsewhere, López Obrador is quoted, claiming “we won’t uproot a single tree.” For a railway project traversing five states of southern Mexico, comprising 15 stations and 1500 km of track, even with some of this track reclaimed, this is—generously—an absurd and naked falsehood. This grandiose example of ritual in which Mother Earth (sic) is asked to “consent” to assault in the name of bourgeois capitalism and prole tourism, already admits the fault in the act of (de)construction. How is the biosphere to consent? Who is to claim that he has heard the answer, and why should we take any such claim seriously? The forgone conclusion of the ritual question—of course Mother Earth (sic) approves of the government’s project—is emblematic of the self-serving nature of many rituals regardless of scale. Should any of the several dozen indigenous groups who oppose the Mayan Train claim that, “Well, that’s not what the land said to us,” what then? First, it would be absurd to pretend that this would make any difference; secondly, if ritual like this admitted a dialectic of ritual and counter-ritual today, it would descend into bizarre ontological claims and priestly, or shamanic bickering. History demonstrates this: halos make for weak currency. Further, this kind of ritual, in this context, is implicitly colonial: it stakes a claim of permission where none can be granted, and seeks to foreclose argument, or counter-ritual. Among those who oppose the Mayan Train are the Zapatistas. The corporate alliance with mysticism to deny the individual, to alienate, is of the essence of fascism. For this, and other reasons, the Zapatistas have my support as a writer and ecopsychologist, and I have supported them for a long time.
What I refer to (experimentally, at least) as conservative ecopsychology is an ecopsychology that makes no metaphysical claims in the conservation of ecologies and in the disclosure of what Theodore Roszak called the ecological unconscious. Ecopsychology is premised on the idea that innate affinities with the biosphere have been repressed into this ecological unconscious, and alienation from our relationship with(in) the other-than-human world, or Nature, represents a significant cause of pathology. Ecopsychology owes much to transpersonal psychology. The conservative ecopsychologist recognizes transpersonal phenomena in psychological terms only, making no claims for the supernatural, mysticism, gods, teleologies, or any form of disembodied consciousness. It resists personifications and anthropomorphisms including the teleological excesses of some Gaia theorists. Wilhelm Reich’s distinction is pertinent: “The difference between animism and mysticism is that the former projects natural, undistorted organ sensations, while the latter projects unnatural perverted ones” (1973, p. 88)[i]. The conservative ecopsychological view of López Obrador’s purchase of ritual-consent must be that this is a perverse mystification. This perspective invites appraisal of the mystifications in the field of transpersonal ecopsychology in general, which have, in our view, obscured more than they have disclosed. We, like López Obrador, should be shy of the mirror of the unverifiable and how it reflects us.
References:
Marx, K, and Engels, F. (2004). The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin.
Reich, W. (1973). Ether, God and Devil / The Cosmic Superimposition. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroix
Yucatan Times (Dec. 16, 2018). AMLO asks Mother Earth’s permission to build Maya Train project. https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2018/12/amlo-asks-mother-earths-permission-to-build-maya-train-project/
Support the Zapatistas:
James Reich is a volunteer with Schools for Chiapas.
Twitter: @ChiapasSchools
[i] Wilhelm Reich’s view of animism aligns with E. O. Wilson’s description of biophilia as our innate affinity for the natural world, for living things, where mysticism is a culturally mediated relation.
