Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Gaia, Taoism and Chinese Landscape Painting


I originally intended this piece to be part of the anti-science week, but the week has passed, and so I suppose I should extend the theme to the entire month, or simply until I am exhausted.

Somewhere in the comments section of one of my previous anti-science posts, I remarked that, as a writer, it is usually my job to step back and try to see the bigger picture - the God's-eye-view panorama that you will find in most novels. I also remarked that that was precisely what I was not doing in my criticisms of science. However, this time I certainly would like to look at the bigger picture - a bigger picture, in fact, than that usually descried through the microscope of science.

I am in the bad habit of reading too many books at once, perhaps another sign of my reprehensible generalism, and one of these at present is James Lovelock's Gaia.

In his preface to this work, Lovelock writes:

"When I started to write in 1974 in the unspoilt landscape of Western Ireland, it was like living in a house run by Gaia, someone who tried hard to make all her guests comfortable. I began more and more to see things through her eyes and slowly dropped off, like an old coat, my loyalty to the humanist Christian belief in the good of mankind as the only thing that mattered. I began to see us all, as part of the community of living things that unconsciously keep the Earth a comfortable home, and that we humans have no special rights only obligations to the community of Gaia."

I was particularly struck, in reading this, by the phrase "humanist Christian belief". I do not know whether Lovelock ever considered himself, in adult years, a practising Christian, but my guess is that, like the majority of British scientists, he did not. What I took his phrase to imply was as follows. Christian belief has in many cases been superseded by atheistic humanism. Atheistic humanism, however, is really only an extension of Christianity in that it places human beings at the centre of creation.

If this interpretation is correct, and I believe it is, then this is quite an interesting statement for a scientist to make. In fact, it resembles confession or repentance. This impression is strengthened by Lovelock's talk in the next paragraph of a possible future science that "transcend[s] its own limits" and "find[s] itself on the border with myth".

Lovelock remains loyal to science, but his preface deals largely with the difficulties he has encountered in having Gaia theory accepted by the scientific community. Tellingly, much of this difficulty seems to centre around language. He relates that, "[n]ow most scientists appear to accept Gaia theory and apply it to their research, but they reject the name Gaia and prefer to talk of Earth System Science, or Geophysiology, instead... the new science of Gaia, Geophysiology, must be purged of all reference to mystical notions of Gaia the Earth Mother."

Lovelock, being among the ranks and used to such institutional discipline, submits to its concomitant absurdities. I must admit, as an outsider, I am not so forgiving. I am reminded of the story in The Little Prince, of the Turkish astronomer whom Western scientists did not take seriously because at first he wore traditional Turkish costume instead of a suit and tie. It seems to me that one of the fundamental tyrannies of science is linguistic. One must speak the language of science in order to engage in conversation with scientists, and in so doing one finds it is impossible to disagree with the scientist, since the language is already steeped in the assumptions of his philosophy.

However, although Lovelock does not exactly break ranks with the institution of science, considering it more important to have the power of science behind Gaia - even if he must change its name to something more serious-sounding like 'Geophysiology' - he does give us a glimpse of the possibility that there may indeed be something outside of science, and hints that his alliance with it is at least partly one of expedience:

"The community of environmentalists include many who claim an ownership of Gaian ideas and they have a case. Jonathan Porritt put it well: Gaia is too important as a focus for Green thought and action to be conscripted by science. Some accused me of betraying Gaia. Fred Pearce, in an entertaining article in the New Scientist of May 1994, captured the spirit of that Oxford meeting when he asked for Gaia to be acknowledged by science and the humanities both."

Quite an idea that - that something might be "too important" for science, or, to put it another way, more important than science.

Why does science demand such absolute authority that it can decide that we should take the word 'Geophysiology' seriously, but not the word 'Gaia'? Is it not, by insisting on such authority, placing itself at the centre of all things, declaring itself universal, and, yes, omniscient?

Herein we may discover the underlying hypocrisy of science.



Ancient peoples believed that the Sun and all the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. In this, the Ptolemaic model of the universe, the physical centrality of the Earth also placed mankind at the symbolic centre of creation. This anthropocentric view was to prove one of the supporting pillars of the Christian church. It is a view implicit in the creation myth of Genesis, and in many artistic depictions of the Garden of Eden over the centuries. Typical of such depictions, for instance, is a certain Florentine miniature, in which the foreground is occupied by the figures of Adam and Eve, standing either side of the Tree of Life, and bound by a circle that is the world.



We are often led to believe that it was the discovery of Copernicus, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that was pivotal, so to speak, in bringing about the Scientific Revolution and the rational, materialist doctrine that was its concomitant. In other words, the foundation of scientific thought should be that, unlike the universe depicted in Genesis, we occupy a universe in which mankind has no central place. Lovelock's mention of "humanist Christian belief" contains within it the implication that this notion is a fallacy, and looking over the development of science, we may readily see this is so. All the early architects of science were Christian, and they chiselled the blocks which are its foundation with tools of Christian philosophy. Since the existence of God was not to be proved logically, God must be removed to a safe distance. Ockham's razor of reductionism severed God from the world, and also mankind from the world. We were left with a machine, and God was outside of the machine - deus ex machina. The machine itself was one of subject and object. The subject could not truly know the object, since there was now no God connecting them. Knowledge could only be attained by experiment upon the object - a method pioneered by the likes of Descartes, Bacon and Newton. To experiment upon the object - the basis of 'objectivity' - was entirely permissible, since, after all, the object, now devoid of God, was inanimate, dead. In fact, soon enough, within this model, god itself became superfluous, and deus ex machina became simply 'machine'. Even the subject now was no better off than the object, since both were only mechanical. However, the subject did possess one advantage in being able to dominate the object through means of experimentation.

"... and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heavens, and over every animal that moveth upon the earth."

Genesis 1:28

A single thread leads all the way from the arrogant anthropocentrism of Genesis to the forceful domination of nature by science that is the greatest determining factor of life on Earth today. Science, I would therefore suggest, is actually Christian. It is specifically Christian, too, in the dichotomy it creates between body and soul - similar to the dichotomy between God and devil - except that, where Christian religion simply divides the two, science in its contemporary form takes this division futher by declaring one real and the other unreal.

If we are to judge by the disapproval a term such as 'Gaia' garners for its 'overtones' of mysticism, there can be little doubt of the scorn in which science must hold any philosophy that is mystical through and through. And yet it is to just such a philosophy that I turn now to provide us with an example of the kind of model of the universe that science supposedly (though not actually) gives - a model in which humankind does not take centre stage. The philosophy in question is Taoism. In terms of written texts, the first source of Taosim of which we have knowledge is the Tao Te Ching (pronounced 'Dow Der Jing'), supposedly written the Chinese sage Lao Tzu. We only have to consult the Tao Te Ching to see the extent to which Taoist philosophy differs to that of ostensibly objective science:

"Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.

"The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it."

However, more than Taoist writing, it is the painting that I now wish to consult to highlight the difference between scientific philosophy and Taoist. Traditional Chinese landscape painting is, indeed, infused with Taoism. Chinese painters believed that the 'qi' energy of the Tao was communicated from them to the painting via the brush. Moreover, the very landscape they painted was a natural expression of the Tao. Here we see the connections severed in Western philosophy still intact. The subject is indeed one with the object, whether that object be brush, painting or landscape, and the landscape itself is alive with Tao, not the dead machine of science and Christianity.



One feature of such Taoist painting is the way in which human figures very rarely take up the foreground. They might occupy a hut in the corner of a scroll, or be shown as a dot on a mountain trail. The explanation for this is that, in Taoism, the human being was not seen as central and dominating, but simply another tiny part of vast nature, such as the bee that pollenates the flowers. Here disanthropocentrism is acheived much more elegantly - and humanely - than it ever was by science, if science acheived it at all.

I do not think it is any co-incidence that such a humane disanthropocentric view is acheived through the panorama of landscape - of Gaia, if you will - rather than by the microscopic investigations of science. This is, indeed, a bigger picture. It is the generalism that science scorns.

As Lovelock notes in his preface, "[t]he French Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod, in his book Chance and Necessity castigated holistic thinkers like me as 'very stupid people'".

This is the attitude that modern science must take, since it is a technocracy whose jealously guarded power is built upon esoteric specialisation.