Shepherds, disputations and trickster gods

I currently feel a bit like Harold Macmillan, who when asked what it was that knocked governments off course replied: “Events, dear boy, events.” Indeed, I was going to write a blog about my latest book William Blake, the Single Vision and Newton's Sleep, and to try and start to unpack some of the ideas therein. However, the events in the Middle East have eclipsed everything.  Just as war was brought back onto European soil last year, and the situation in Ukraine was the first item of every news bulletin, today, war again has become the first news item when anyone switches on the radio or television. But this time, it’s not Ukraine hogging the headlines, but the horror which is being unleased in Israel and their global vibrations that are occupying the media’s attention. I don’t want to downplay the significance of what is happening in either the Ukraine or Israel, but I would like to ask a simple question. Are these conflicts fundamentally resource driven?

Israel-Palastine Conflict Gaza: BBC News item

Trying to return to my original intention, and as a biologist having studied ecology, you might think I have a vested interest in pedalling this scenario, and you may well be right, but please let’s explore this a bit further. At one point in my book, I discuss Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons which has a history that starts with Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798) and which basically makes the point that human population increase is geometric, while food supply increase is arithmetic.  Consequently, food supply quickly becomes limiting, and this leads to nutritional poverty. Hardin applies this principle to animal husbandry, suggesting that in a stable village where villagers hold pasture in common and each villager has an equal number of sheep that can be stably maintained, all is well. However, if one villager were to be predatory and add an extra sheep to their advantage, it would also be to all villagers’ advantage to do similar. However, the increased sheep population due to the action of each villager adding a sheep would lead to a failure of the pasture. The result, tragedy for all! But have I not just resorted to biological determinism? Are not these disputatious wars and conflicts ideological and religious?

Well, I believe the answer is both yes and no. What do I mean? In my book I make a case that human imagination, that fundamental human characteristic that was so important to William Blake, unites three realms, the mental realm (Res cogitans), the material world (Res extensa) and the public realm (Res publica). Religion, the word comes from the Latin religare to bind, is to my mind inescapable, because it can be equated with the human imagination, and it is involved in binding together these three realms. Now let’s undertake a thought experiment using our sustainable village of pastoralists that husband sheep, let’s imagine in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. Each member of the village from birth to death would be exposed to a constant Cotswold environment and their method of husbandry would be optimised to the climate and growth conditions that would best fit to their Cotswold surroundings. There would be a congruent relationship between each person’s mental realm and the external world. And because each person’s experience of the external world would be similar, the public realm would also be congruent. The collective imaginations of everyone would also be congruent. The result, a harmonious world view.

Wenn diagram of the three realms (Res-cogitans, Res-extensa and Res-publica) united by imagination Chapter 11

Now, let’s compare this Cotswold village of shepherds to a similar village in the Lake District. Broadly speaking their collective imaginations that bind their tripartite realms (Res cogitans, Res extensa and Res publica) together would be very similar. Both village communities sustain themselves by rearing sheep that they raise on pasture. Both village communities live in stone-built houses. Both communities live on the Western side of the British Isles, but their environments are subtly different. The average temperatures in the Cotswolds, being slightly further South, will be slightly warmer than those of the Lake District. The summer day length in the Lake District will be slightly longer than in the Cotswolds and slightly shorter in the winter, and so on and so forth. These ecological abiotic factors will influence the pastures and the species composition of the grass swards, and in turn this will affect the nutrition of the sheep that they support. But if you brought these two groups of villagers together there would be interesting discussions to be had around the subtle differences in their shepherding. In other words, the two villages’ collective imaginations about sheep husbandry would be subtly different, as would their views about building and masonry, as Cotswold stone (a type of limestone) is very different from the granite of the Lake District.

Edshu: West African trickster god (Wikipedia)

I lived in Africa many years ago and became acquainted with Edshu the trickster god of Western Africa. It was only on my return to the UK that I read Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces and this is what he says:

      The difficult point is made vivid in an anecdote from Yorubaland (West Africa), which is told of the trickster-divinity Edshu. One day, this odd god came walking along a path between two fields. "He beheld in either field a farmer at work and proposed to play the two a turn. He donned a hat that was on one side red but on the other white, green before and black behind (these being the colors of the four World Directions: i.e., Edshu was a personification of the Center, the axis mundi, or the World Navel); so that when the two friendly farmers had gone home to their village and the one had said to the other, 'Did you see that old fellow go by today in the white hat?' the other replied, 'Why, the hat was red.' To which the first retorted, 'It was not; it was white.' 'But it was red,' insisted the friend, 'I saw it with my own eyes.' 'Well, you must be blind,' declared the first. 'You must be drunk,' rejoined the other. And so the argument developed and the two came to blows. When they began to knife each other, they were brought by neighbours before the headman for judgement. Edshu was among the crowd at the trial, and when the headman sat at a loss to know where justice lay, the old trickster revealed himself, made known his prank, and showed the hat. 'The two could not help but quarrel,' he said. 'I wanted it that way. Spreading strife is my greatest joy.'

Is this not the sought of strife one could imagining developing between the shepherds from the Cotswolds and the Lake District if their discussions became entangled with the egos of their communities. And is this not what we see happening in the war in Israel that arguably can be traced back to the type of dispute we were taught about in Sunday school and the arguement between Cain and Abel. Cambell goes on:

Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgment shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless -- suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time.

It is my contention that by understanding the role of imagination in the tripartite nature of knowledge we may gain some perspective on our self-centered battling egos. Surely, if we cannot get beyond the disputes that were articulated in Genesis that marked a demographic transition from a pastoralist to an agrarian way of life, what chance have we of addressing the demographic problems of the 21st Century and the transition from an agrarian way of life to an urban one?