Carolyn Merchants The Death of Nature

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Carolyn MerchantsThe Death of Nature

• Larkin Romaneski

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Introduction

• How the Scientific Revolution sanctioned the
  exploitation of nature, commercial expansion, and
  the subjugation of women.
• The Organistic vs. the Mechanistic world view.

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Nature as a Female

• Sun as productive male, earth as receptive
  female.
• Mother and female imagery as ethical control.
• The living earth ought not to be pillaged or
  raped.
• Dominion of nature as metaphor for dominion of
  women.

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• This subjugation of nature to market forces also
  caused a psychological shift in the population as
  they
• began to experience nature as altered and
  manipulated by machine technology. A slow but
  unidirectional alienation from the immediate
  daily organic relationship that had formed the
  basis of human experience from the earliest times
  was occurring. Accompanying these changes were
  alterations in both the theories and experiential
  bases of social organization which had formed an
  integral part of the organic cosmos. (Merchant
  68)

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Organic Society and Utopia

• Utopia as a possible model for ecologically
  integrated society.
• Kinds of Utopia
• Hierarchical the body writ large (70)
• Communal it takes a village (76)
• Revolutionary Millenarianism and Christian
  Theocracy
• Holistic organic unity of agriculture, the
  community, and the human body (84)
• Echo in modern ecology (95)

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• In these utopias, all parts of the natural and
  social community were interrelated in an organic
  unity in which both human and natural components
  were of equal value in the functioning of the
  whole. (Merchant 95)

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The World as Organism

• Dialogue on the nature of matter.
• Ancient Organicism When one part suffers, the
  rest also suffer with it. (104)
• Neoplatonic Magic a hierarchical universe in
  which matter was inactive but the world soul
  was immanent within nature, vivifying it like a
  cosmic animal. (106-7)
• Naturalism contraries are the agents of material
  change. (112)
• Vitalism matter and spirit are unified into a
  single, active vital substance. (117)

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• From the spectrum of Renaissance organicist
  philosophies the mechanists would appropriate
  and transform presuppositions at the conservative
  or hierarchical end while denouncing those
  associated with the more radical religious and
  political perspectives. The rejection and removal
  of organic and animistic features and the
  substitution of mechanically describable
  components would become the most significant and
  far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution.
  (125)

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Nature, Women, and Witchcraft

• Women as allegory for nature
• Nurturing, nourishing, and yet chaotic,
  uncontrolled, and vengeful.
• Proscription for both nature and women is the
  same dominion.
• Witches as the embodiment of the undesirable,
  uncontrolled traits in nature.
• Prosecution of witches a mechanism for
  anti-feminist persecution and scapegoating of the
  socially undesirable.
• The Malleus Maleficarum.

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And Devil Worship?

• European witchcraft is best viewed as a
  religious cult of the Devil, built on the
  foundations of low magic and folk traditions, but
  formed and defined by the Christian society
  within which it operated (Russel 17).

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The Problem of Order

• The fundamental social and intellectual problem
  of the seventeenth century was the problem of
  order. The perception of disorder was crucial
  to the rise of mechanism as a rational antidote
  to the disintegration of the organic cosmos.
  (Merchant 192)

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Order

• New view of the cosmos as an ordered machine
  instead of an uncontrolled organism.
• Translation of ecological metanarrative into
  social, racial, and economic metanarrative.
• The mechanical framework with its associated
  values of power and control sanctioned the
  management of both nature and society (Merchant
  234).

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A bright side? The Managerial Dominion

• Managerial Ecology a fusion of Organicist and
  Mechanist philosophies.
• During the Restoration the Cambridge Platonists
  helped to advance the managerial approach
  by adapting the older organic philosophy to the
  new social and commercial demands of
  pre-industrial capitalism (242).
• The natural world as a finite resource.
• Biblical antecedents managerial interpretation
  of the doctrine of dominion.
• Luke 162 Give an account of thy stewardship,
  for thou mayest be no longer a steward.

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Conclusion

• Thoughtful and creative analysis, though it
  suffers from an ambiguity of purpose.
• Are we meant to read some call to action from
  this book?
• An unpleasant choice sexist modernity or
  superstitious pre-modern?

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Works Cited

• Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature Women,
  Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San
  Francisco Harper Row, 1989
• Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Witchcraft in the Middle
  Ages. London Cornell University Press, 1972