Joe Holland, Art for Regeneration and the Power of the Female Imagination

Maddie: Let's talk about the issues we're facing as a world, politically, ecologically, and economically, and why the intersection of spirituality and sustainability is so important. 

Joe: I believe that ecological spirituality and ecological philosophy together form the foundationally intellectual pathway out of the global climate crisis. 

Something went wrong with the classical and modern spiritual-philosophical roots of Western Civilization. That is why modern Western technoscience, now globalized, is devastating our garden-planet Earth's beauteous but fragile community of life.

I wrote my 2017 book Postmodern Ecological Spirituality to address the spiritual side of this great problem. Now I am writing another book to address the philosophical side. It will be titled Ecological Failure of Modern Philosophy in the Anthropocene. 

Our eco-spiritual and eco-philosophical roots are deep, but today they are too often forgotten. To tap those roots, ecological visionaries across our garden-planet Earth are creating a global intellectual renaissance networking spiritual, philosophical, theological, literary, and artistic ideas for global ecological regeneration. 

This renaissance is already birthing powerful eco-spiritual and eco-philosophical energy. It will provide the visionary pathway that is essential for our global human family to journey toward a new and ecologically postmodern global civilization. 

M: It's almost a whole reimagination, which is why it makes sense to have artists and intellectuals and those kinds of people involved. 

J: We certainly need philosophical clarification. Again, that is what I'm now working on. But the deepest and most energizing level is the artistic one. Art comes first, followed by spirituality, and then intellectual areas like philosophy build on that deep artistic and spiritual ground. 

Philosophy works like an x-ray machine, allowing us to see the structural logic. But philosophy doesn't give life. Art, including images, poetry, and music, does give life. Again, art comes first. Therefore, ecological art is the foundational ground first of ecological spirituality and then of ecological philosophy. 

M: I think art gets to the heart of people, too, the heart of everyone. Obviously, the intellectual movement is important, but not everyone is going to connect to that. Not everyone is going to connect to philosophy. 

J: We need to realize that the heart is cognitive and that our whole body is cognitive. For example, cognitive scientists now tell us that the second most intelligent organ in our body, after our brain, is our intestines. 

Classical European philosophers traditionally associated our emotions with organs of the abdominal cavity and the heart. But, those classical European philosophers, most famously the Stoics, wrongly thought that emotions impeded the mind. They thought we had to repress the emotions to clear the mind.

Also, in an unfortunately related manner, classical European philosophers wrongly portrayed women as over-emotional and as not rational, indeed as not fully human.

But we now know that emotions are highly intelligent. There is even sometimes more truth in emotional intelligence than in mental intelligence. Our rational mind can lie to us, but our intelligent emotions more often tell the truth.

Further, our emotions tap into the deep intellectual power that I call mythic-symbolic. The mental-rational dimension is only an abstraction, albeit a valuable one, of the deep mythic-symbolic ground, which is profoundly emotive. 

M: In the four webinars that you gave for the United States Association of Catholic Priests, you spoke about the hyper-masculine society and its dangers. Can you speak more to that, I hadn't heard anyone explain it that way before. 

J: Expanding on the thought of Thomas Berry, I have been investigating four great eras in our journey of human evolution. I call them the Primal, Classical, Modern, and now Postmodern Eras. But I use the word "postmodern" in an ecological sense and not in its typically academic sense of philosophical Nihilism. 

Further, I don't see these four great eras in a modern way as linear stages but instead as concentric circles like the rings of a tree. The old eras never go away but always stay with us, like the DNA in our biology. 

When we all lived in tribes (the Primal Era), women's intelligence primarily created the human journey beyond the primates. Women provided the creative artistic-intellectual foundation for human development and human civilization. Women shaped the foundations of the human journey in powerful ways. 

Remember that, from its Greek roots, the word "philosophy" (philia-sophia) means "the love of wisdom," and that Athena was a Greek goddess of wisdom. (Plato tells us that she was earlier an African-Egyptian goddess, called Neith whose temple lay in the Egyptian city of Sais.) 

Women are still publicly powerful for indigenous peoples, who have never lost our human family's primal spiritual-philosophical foundations. 

For example, within the ancient and democratic Native-American Haudenosaunee Confederation (Iroquois League), founded by Hiawatha more than one thousand five hundred years ago, only women could traditionally vote to elect chiefs. 

The founders of the United States of America learned about democracy's separation of powers from leaders of the Haudenosaunee Confederation. That Confederation has for all its years been based on three separate branches of government: judicial, executive, and legislative. 

At the time of the United States' founding, the separation of powers did not exist anywhere in Europe. It was still ruled by kings and queens. The concept came from the Haudenosaunee tribes in the northeast of the North American continent. 

Also, the Haudenosaunee have always had a fourth branch of government. It is called the Council of Grandmothers. This Council can accept or veto any decision of its Confederacy by using a single criterion: "How will it affect the children seven generations from now." 

Along with the separation of powers, this long-term "seven-generations" thinking has been central to the Haudenosaunee government. (You may have seen the line of ecological paper products with the label "Seventh Generation." That's what the label refers to.) 

For indigenous people, human spirituality is rooted in Nature, of which we humans always remain a part. In this ancient but still relevant ecological spirituality, the plants and animals are our sisters and brothers. 

Classical European civilization looked down on our primal and still foundational eco-spirituality. But they did not eliminate it. Rather, they patriarchally subordinated it. 

The higher 'masculine' spirituality of the classical West's elite-male aristocratic class claimed to "transcend" (rise above) Nature. But that elite-male aristocracy could not prevent the primal "immanent" and 'feminine" Nature-based spirituality from continuing among women and the rural peasantry, over whom they ruled.

However, when we come to the Modern Era, we have something worse than classical patriarchy.  We have modern bourgeois hyper-masculinity. 

Following that spiritual-philosophical paradigm, modern bourgeois elite-males designed modern industrial-colonial civilization to technoscientifically conquer and plunder "Mother Nature." They set out to "penetrate" her interior in order to extract her "natural resources" for human "utility." (Fossil fuels soon became Modernity's primary "resource.")

That was indeed something new! 

At the deep mythic-symbolic level, bourgeois Modernity has held up the hyper-masculine symbol of a deformed male warrior conquering and plundering 'feminine' Nature's community of ecological life. (By contrast, the traditional noble warrior was to defend and protect the community of life). 

Thus, in bourgeois Modernity, technoscience gets designed exclusively out of a one-sided and imbalanced elite-male imagination. That is why it's so difficult for women to make advances in "hard" scientific fields like physics and engineering. 

Before bourgeois Modernity, however, women's imagination had always remained central to shaping society, even when subordinated in the classical period. 

By contrast, in bourgeois Modernity, women's imagination was no longer allowed to influence technoscientific design. Only the hyper-masculine imagination was allowed at the 'higher' elite-male technoscientific levels. (It was quite late in the Modern Era that women were finally admitted to the 'higher" educational level of the university.)

The founding 'visionary' of the modern hyper-masculine mandate for technoscience to conquer and plunder Nature was Sir Francis Bacon, an English lawyer, philosopher, and chancellor of England around the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Bacon is considered by many to be the founding visionary of modern technoscience.

The distinguished eco-feminist historian Carolyn Merchant has documented Bacon's foundational but negative contribution to modern technoscience. She did that in her magisterial 1983 book The Death of Nature; Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 

Bacon wrote a famous essay called The Masculine Birth of Time. In it, he defined Nature as "feminine" and technoscience as "masculine," and he directed modern 'masculine' technoscience to conquer and plunder 'feminine' Nature.

Bacon's mandate for modern technoscience was to force Nature (in effect, torturing her) to reveal her divinely embedded secrets of how she operates. Then, according to Bacon, modern technoscience could use Nature's divine secrets to extract her hidden "resources" for human "utility" and for building a new "modern" world. 

Influenced by his mother's intense Puritan Calvinism, Bacon apparently also thought that the modern technoscientific conquest of Nature would restore the great knowledge supposedly lost by Adam in the "Fall" and bring about the Eschaton preached by Jesus. 

But the long-term result has been the technoscientific construction of modern hyper-masculine industrial-colonial civilization, which we now know is ecologically unsustainable and which before long will collapse. 

I describe Bacon's cruel 'vision' in Asian yin-yang terms as repressing yin (the Asian feminine symbol) and promoting only yang (the Asian masculine symbol). Modern industrial-colonial civilization has indeed been yang-warrior civilization. 

Carolyn Merchant explicitly described it as waging an anti-ecological "war against Nature." It is also warring against rurally rooted peoples across the planet and against the urban poor and peoples of color. 

Most fundamentally, it is trying to force women into the hyper-masculine mold. 

Doing all that produces a hyper-masculine technoscientific society that is not cyclical or regenerative, but instead linear and degenerative. For example, steel and plastic cannot reproduce. They only wear out. 

Again, modern technoscientific production is linear and degenerative, whereas Nature's economy is cyclical and regenerative. For that reason, the bourgeois economy of modern technoscience has become ecologically unsustainable, will certainly collapse, and perhaps do so in the near future.

Thus, late-modern industrial-colonial civilization, both in liberal-capitalist form and in scientific-socialist form, is hyper-masculine, linear, and degenerative. Its bourgeois paradigm of technoscientific production is devastating our garden-planet Earth's symbolically 'feminine,' cyclical, and regenerative community of ecological life. 

In deep mythic-symbolic spiritual terms, modern bourgeois industrial-colonial civilization has lost consciousness of the ancient primal symbol of the divine feminine, which was often called the Mother Goddess. 

Classical Catholic Christianity had kept that feminine symbol partly alive with its veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus. That happened especially through the artistic image of the female Madonna and her male child (Jesus) – a divine mother-son symbol which we now know is thousands of years old and originally African.

Now, for contemporary global Christianity, the Holy Spirit is re-emerging as the divine-feminine symbol. In that regard, we also now know that the ancient Syriac Christian Church called the Holy Spirit "God the Mother." 

By the way, Antioch in Syria was the place to which the original Jewish followers of Jesus first fled when they were persecuted in Jerusalem, and where they were first called "Christians." They also spoke Aramaic, which was the primary language that Jesus spoke. So their naming of the Holy Spirit as "God the Mother" is foundationally important.

M: There is something I thought of when you were speaking about that, which also relates to the "seven generations", and it's the idea of sabbath, having the natural rhythms of renewal and rest baked in right from the beginning. I wonder if the idea of seven relates to the moon cycle, a woman's cycle, both twenty-eight-day feminine cycles. 

J: Maybe that was it, the twenty-eight-day feminine cycle broken down into four weeks. It would be interesting to discover whether that cycle of seven came from women's exchange of information across ancient cultures. 

Once again, our human family's ancient mythic-symbolic heritage of eco-spirituality and eco-philosophy, like the ancient cycle of seven with its sabbath, remains foundational for postmodern global ecological sustainability. 

Trying to overcome the climate crisis by political legislation is good and important. But unless we dive down to the deep and ancient mythic-symbolic ground of eco-spirituality and eco-philosophy, I fear that our legislative-political efforts alone will ultimately prove shallow and therefore will fail.