Cultural acquiescence towards nature

[planetgeli]

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[RTWL]

I find the phrase 'noble savage' and the usage of it to diminish any credible lore or knowledge from indigenous people a bit imperialist, racist and arrogant.

 

[8ball]

I find the phrase 'noble savage' and the usage of it to diminish any credible lore or knowledge from indigenous people a bit imperialist, racist and arrogant.

Isn't it usually doing the opposite, just from a kind of clumsy ignorant position?

 

[RTWL]

Yes. No, I mean when somebody is talking up advantages within ancient culture, and then someone else chirps "lol that's just that Nobel Savage crap"

 

[8ball]

Yes. No, I mean when somebody is talking up advantages within ancient culture, and then someone else chirps "lol that's just that Nobel Savage crap"

Ah, gotcha.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Culturally most societies have paid serious respect to nature, no need to dress it up as some mystical process, it's just the respect that nature gets when you are heavily reliant on it year by year and your environment is more locally reliant on food than able to supply food from international sources. Much nature worship is just trying to persuade the deity of your choice not to let you and yours starve.

There's nuggets of sense and decent insight in much of the "native lore" but frankly much of its been buried by woo peddling loons and has been sold to those loons by whatever flavour of the month culture those guys are fetishizing now.

The challenge humanity has is realising there's to many of us now not to treat the entire planet as local, and to think seriously long term. Neither of which we are any fucking good at.

 

[freakydave]

I thought the whole romantic notion of gardens (and the picturesque view) was a fairly recent thing, a reaction to industrialisation.

Japanese and Chinese have amazing gardens based on Feng Shui around the 12th century. I think that the ancient world had great gardens as well.
From remembering this sort of thing, the idea of a garden is a very old one, what was novel about industrialisation was the fetishisation of nature and wilderness as freedom. Because with industrialisation we lost this sense of fear of weather and beasts, we began to fetishise wilderness

 

[RTWL]

Culturally most societies have paid serious respect to nature, no need to dress it up as some mystical process

Well firstly, nature is a mystical process. Science has scarce to no understanding about the simplest processes of nature. How and why a plant grows, how does light travel from the sun to the earth, what is gravity, what is consciousness, and so on. Most scientific theories populating the public mind are vastly extrapolated upon very little hard evidence and could be called a kind of mysticism in their own right.

, it's just the respect that nature gets when you are heavily reliant on it year by year and your environment is more locally reliant on food than able to supply food from international sources. Much nature worship is just trying to persuade the deity of your choice not to let you and yours starve.

A very causal disregard for nature you have there! You say it is just some old stuff , I would say that it created us, it is us, and everything that we do. It is probably the foundation of the spiritual aspect within our culture which extend a little further than appeasing the crop gods or whatever. In fact, they mainly celebrate our connection to the rest of nature and remain humble, taking the lead from nature.

There's nuggets of sense and decent insight in much of the "native lore" but frankly much of its been buried by woo peddling loons and has been sold to those loons by whatever flavour of the month culture those guys are fetishizing now.

The challenge humanity has is realising there's to many of us now not to treat the entire planet as local, and to think seriously long term. Neither of which we are any fucking good at.

I do not think the entire unarticulated lore of the human race has been buried by woo peddlers in the last decades. At least I hope not.
People still connected to their culture all around the planet are at the front line of environmental issues, consistently voicing the opinion we should respect our environment, and they do it better than anybody else because the notions are within their culture.

 

[RTWL]

I am not backing the 18th century romantic notion of the "nobel savage", I am saying it in itself is an imperialist philanthropic liberal fantasy and thusly could only form a straw man in an actual discussion about cultural importance.

 

[Cid]

Japanese and Chinese have amazing gardens based on Feng Shui around the 12th century. I think that the ancient world had great gardens as well.
From remembering this sort of thing, the idea of a garden is a very old one, what was novel about industrialisation was the fetishisation of nature and wilderness as freedom. Because with industrialisation we lost this sense of fear of weather and beasts, we began to fetishise wilderness

All those examples are urbanised societies though. Or at least partially urbanised. Also the preserve of elite classes... certainly with China or Japan, and e.g ancient Persia or Babylon. They represent abstracted, romanticised ideals of nature... which I think probably makes the impetus behind them not far off that behind the gardens created in response to industrialisation.

 

[Artaxerxes]

All those examples are urbanised societies though. Or at least partially urbanised. Also the preserve of elite classes... certainly with China or Japan, and e.g ancient Persia or Babylon. They represent abstracted, romanticised ideals of nature... which I think probably makes the impetus behind them not far off that behind the gardens created in response to industrialisation.

From what I’ve read on Persia and Babylon the gardens were very much a power statement and a display of mastery over nature and manpower. Look at what I can create, this ordered space of tame nature.

 

[RTWL]

On the matter of medicine, most of the people on the planet still use herbs as their primary source of medicine .

Many of the pharmaceuticals currently available to physicians have a long history of use as herbal remedies, including artemisinin,[15] opium, aspirin, digitalis, and quinine. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 25% of modern drugs used in the United States have been derived from plants.[13] At least 7,000 medical compounds in the modern pharmacopoeia are derived from plants.[16] Among the 120 active compounds currently isolated from the higher plants and widely used in modern medicine today, 80% show a positive correlation between their modern therapeutic use and the traditional use of the plants from which they are derived.[17]

 

[Cid]

From what I’ve read on Persia and Babylon the gardens were very much a power statement and a display of mastery over nature and manpower. Look at what I can create, this ordered space of tame nature.

True enough... And I mean we're talking about the span of 3000 odd years between them, within which there are probably different ideas for each generation with some overarching continuities between them. I kind of suspect a major aspect of it is just vulnerable elite classes wanting protected places where they can still do elite things like kill small creatures and eat/fuck/drink too much.

 

[Aquamarine]

I knew there would be some specialist knowledge on Urban, thank you everybody for your comments.
The implication of what I’d read originally is that Far Eastern cultural reverence for nature shaped economic activity. I’ve seen references to early Far Eastern societal moral codes and extrinsic social values having been informed by an ‘interwoven understanding of ecological and cosmological processes’.

 

[Cid]

I knew there would be some specialist knowledge on Urban, thank you everybody for your comments.
The implication of what I’d read originally is that Far Eastern cultural reverence for nature shaped economic activity. I’ve seen references to early Far Eastern societal moral codes and extrinsic social values having been informed by an ‘interwoven understanding of ecological and cosmological processes’.

I mean... Daoism and its antecedent school of the naturalists (yinyang). And yeah there are ideas... But I'm only writing this out of drunken confidence. Because frankly knowing how that relates to the other dominant schools of Confucianism and (for a long time) legalism is... high level. Even understanding what 'nature' means in context; natural law as interpreted by people at the time. As something different from what we mean by 'nature' now. I mean... This is a highly developed civilisation, the period I'm talking about is often referred to as 'the hundred schools'. Bit like trying to delve into the entirety of Greek philosophy, and probably how it was interpreted by both the Romans and later Christianity in er... the length of this post.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Interesting long read.

The Social Life of Forests (Published 2020)

Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?

www.nytimes.com