PSYCHOSCAPES: A Modest Proposal to Save the World

The art that united early Patagonians^⁠¹

With our mild weather so far this year, NH has avoided calamitous climate change. Texas hasn’t been so lucky with its still-raging, million-acre Smokehouse Creek Fire. Neither is the rest of the world.

We are turning parts of our planet into uninhabitable deserts as rising waters from melting glaciers threaten coastal cities and freak storms erupt everywhere.^⁠ In the words of UN chief Antonio Guterres, we have ‘opened the gates of hell.’^⁠¹

Our polarized, growth-at-any-cost society has hit a potentially fatal roadblock that could be the beginning of the end. All because we think we know everything. If we don’t make drastic changes, we, along with most of our fellow sentient beings, will soon be pushing up daisies.

This need not have happened if we had taken a different path, one suggested in a recent article about early Patagonians in Argentina.^⁠⁠2 Around 8000 years ago, they were challenged by extreme climate change lasting 3000 years that would have spelled doom to our fickle, tech-consumed culture.

The secret of their survival is revealed in their cave art, which, over this enormous span of time, stayed true to a single motif, dedicated not to gods, great deeds, or military victories. Instead, their symbol simply consisted of wavy lines, looking much like an out-of-focus comb.

Anthropologists say this motif “represented a resilient response to ecological stress,”^2a acting to preserve cultural knowledge and maintain collective memories, critical to survival during thousands of years of extreme drought.^⁠^⁠³

While scientists understand the function of this symbol, they have no clue what it signifies. Solving this mystery would be a priceless achievement because it would likely equally apply to us today. If so, it might forestall our pending nose dive into oblivion.

I came across a theory that sheds light on this mystery in the work of Alan Watts, the writer and speaker who was instrumental in introducing Eastern philosophy to Western audiences – and a guru to the Sixties generation. Steeped in Eastern thought, he viewed the Tao as the source of all existence: Agency unseen but not transcendent, all-powerful yet humble, the root of all things.^⁠⁠4

Watts’s Taoist perspective can appear elusive or paradoxical: a good example is its slippery definition of ‘non-acting,’ which can mean not acting, not forcing, acting spontaneously, or flowing with the moment.^⁠^⁠⁵

Two elements of Watt’s philosophy stand out: humans, rather than being the dominant species, are but a tiny thread, which, when woven together with all other sentient life on earth, form an interdependent whole. And second, life is change or, in Watt’s words – wriggly.

In that regard, early Patagonians and Watts have much in common.

The Patagonian’s common motif was wavy lines, while, for Watts, it was wiggly lines: “Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles.^⁠^⁠⁶

Meanwhile, Westerners, as Watts points out, live by straight lines: “You know, wherever human beings have been around and done their thing, you find rectangles. We live in boxes.^⁠”^⁠⁷

Because we think in straight lines, it follows, according to Watts, that we spend our lives trying to control things by trying to straighten out the wriggly lines. Of course, that’s a fool’s errand because our very essence is wriggly.

Just before Watts died, James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis came out, lending credence to Watts’s theory by proposing that the whole earth was not only wriggly but a single living organism.

Watts expressed it this way: “Just as there is an interdependence of flowers and bees: where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism… I am, as it were, one of the cells in this tremendous brain.”^⁠^⁠⁸

Watts’s conclusion is “that our failure to feel at home in this astonishing brain in which we live is” due to our inflated view of ourselves, coupled with our mistaken attempts to improve our lot through technology. As a consequence, “we seem to be destroying the planet by our very efforts to control it and to improve it.”^⁠⁹

So, there it is in a nutshell: The ancient Patagonians believed they were essential components in a magical, wriggly world that gave their lives meaning, so much so that they painted that symbol on their cave walls as their anthem.

Our only hope for long-term survival is to adopt their way of being, replacing our nationalistic symbols – like taunts hanging from pretend fortresses by immature boys – with banners of wavy lines, peaceful and enduring like waves of amber grain.

xxx