Yes. An important position; the inner world, mostly unseen in our very materialistic time, may well offer the hope of renewal. This is a dimension that’s often dismissed as silly or trivial in ecological discourse. See Douglas Rushkoff on the deadly billionaire mindset in Survival of the Richest.
The corollary to Avatar is the absurd notion that colonizing Mars would guarantee the survival of our species, as if duplicating in a wasteland the very life-sustaining environment we trashed is remotely realistic. As if even if we could duplicate such an environment, we wouldn’t trash it again. Our survival hinges on a change of consciousness, not Buck Rogers nonsense.
Yes, an astute commentary and I look forward to viewing Avatar 2. I wrote this about Avatar 1: From Earth Emotions (2019): "The film can easily be read as an allegory on the plight of the contemporary Earth. In their rapacious and murderous quest for "unobtanium", the humans who invade Pandora care nothing for the distinctive humanoid and other forms of life. They have no real understanding of how the Na'vi and other life forms on Pandora are interconnected. They engage in a great military drive for the extinction of any and everything that gets in their way. They are willing to use powerful technologies to blow up and burn 'the tree of life', the soul tree, in order to get more material wealth and power. Humans, for the most part, are portrayed as a species with no empathy with the greater forces that hold life together, and put on full display, their willingness to commit war and ecocide to achieve their aims. A very bleak view of human nature was contrasted to the alien, animistic, pantheistic and ecologically "spiritual" humanoids. It was a battle between terraphthora and terranascia.
Yet, it was observed at the time when the film ended in cinemas, that many people in the audience wanted to go back and recapture the intense life and love experience of the Na'vi for each other and their Gaian 'living moon', Pandora. Many reported experiencing 'the blues' or what I interpret as powerful, negative psychoterratic emotions in the form of both intense nostalgia, the desire to return 'home' and what I have called a type of virtual solastalgia, or deep existential distress about the environmental desolation that had happened on Pandora at the hands of the human invaders. People were emotionally desolated on 'coming back to Earth' at the film's conclusion, despite the fact that Pandora only existed in the cinema as an enhanced 3-D glasses experience. One viewer succinctly described these emotions:
'One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality.'
I wrote about the psychoterratic dimensions of Avatar on my Blog, Healthearth, not long after viewing the film in 2010:
'As the real world is being desolated (climate change, ecosystem distress etc etc), real people experience solastalgia. When, in Avatar, they can 'see' an alternative world, which is beautiful, diverse and complex, one that meets their aesthetic, spiritual and ethical needs, they want to live within it. During the three dimensional movie, they experience a virtual solastalgia as they become virtual participants in the attempted destruction and desolation of the Na'vi and other life forms in this pristine environment … all for the sake of a meaningless materialism. The movie becomes, for such people, an existential experience of negative environmental change (defined as solastalgia). At the conclusion of the movie when they must accept that such a world is virtual only, they experience a virtual nostalgia for it and become depressed. The irony of humans finally seeing the value of life, different ways of being 'human' plus the intrinsically valuable complexity of non-human beings and their living systems via a movie about a virtual world and its destruction is not lost on me.'
What the Avatar virtual solastalgia experience suggested to me was that, deep inside many people, was the empathy needed to commune with the coherent and complex world that planet Earth once represented for all humans and all life. Not necessarily a perfectly peaceful and harmonious place, but one that sufficiently favored the forces of creation over the forces of destruction, to allow life and the positive emotions to be nurtured and perpetuated. Pandora was a fantasy of a place, which allowed expression of psychoterratic emotions such as solastalgia, nostalgia, soliphilia and eutierria. In addition, mutualism via symbiotic 'unity-in-diversity' enabled the forces of life to finally overcome the forces of death and destruction. I am not the first to notice the connections between Earth emotions and Pandora emotions, and the psychoterratic distress felt by people as a result of their engagement with the movie."
Brilliant!! You've written a thesis that should be mandatory analysis from grade 1 through to PhD. To dissect everything you've brought to light as a community of humans through each grade until they reform processes and adopt new/old practices (better invite the Elders of the the First Nations who still have those elements alive at their core) and see how the younger generations evolve and grow in such an environment. Yes it's a dream - but it has to start somewhere. Thanks for your passionate and beautifully expressed thoughts and comments.
An excellent article but I fear there will be no grand awakening. The blind cannot lead the blind anywhere but into the pit. The premise on which western imperialism is based (A very British system deliberately passed on to the US as the 'exhausted Titan' of the British empire neared its end, in the words of J.Chamberlain) is fatally flawed. It is a poor foundation which can only initiate the building's inevitable collapse.
Just as Hippocrates sincere belief in the bodies four humors dominated human medical thinking for centuries, although being entirely wrong, so too is our belief in the magical thinking of evolutionary science and its consequent existentialist philosophy that produces our present world (of self-destructive economy/materialism, politics/power/ambition, religion/phony spirituality etc.) is entirely unfit to provide the solution.
If you do not have knowledge of germs you cannot hope to combat them. If you believe in non-random natural selection, the solution it offers is human extinction, which is no solution at all.
Sorry there is no good news, we humans are on a relentless downward spiral to extinction taking all other life forms with us. There will be no sudden Worldwide awakening that would reverse the damage because it is in our nature to be selfish and damn the consequences.
Wordsworth was a ransacking shameless Girondist. His self-exculpation culminating in the 1850 Prelude, which was a hoax. As he condemned Robespierre he Duncan-transferred his head to hand Macbethean axe to Burke. The scholarship is there for this. It this if anything which has made progress in the nature nurture killing mitigation - all attempts that includes Cameron’s hopeless before they started. It’s ingrained and hard to locate now. But it’s there.
Interesting article Jonathon. Thanks. I am currently working on essay on the first generation of British Romantic poets, and I have arrived at a similar conclusion, derived from a slightly different motive:
"By 1797 the Pitt Alarm had been normalized across Britain. Wordsworth’s cry of “Was it for this?” and the disappearance of the poet into the choral chants at the conclusion of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan…” were expressions of their anxieties over lingering suspicions that they continued to hold pro-revolutionary sympathizes. As with many of their peers, the poets felt the need to suppress the political radicalism of their earlier writings and focus instead on the psycho-spiritual aspects of their investigations. Although, they continued to advocate for empathy towards those who suffered from the effects of systemic injustices, they moved to emphasize a conciliatory approach towards the broader society and culture, proscribing organized resistance that threatened the rule of law. Through the scholastic elaboration of this paradoxical praxis, Romanticism would become one of the central ideologies of the British professional class, allowing them to counter criticism of the social instability that resulted from the progress of historical forces intrinsic to national interests." ***
*** See also: "Coleridge and Wordsworth, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory" by Paul Hamilton, Seamus Perry (LRB, Vol. 25 No. 23 · December 4, 2003): “So Romanticism is a kind of evasion, an ‘aesthetics of distraction’: it operates as a brake on historical progress and is all the more deplorable because it simultaneously tantalises us with figurative glimpses of the happier world that we might otherwise be progressing towards.”
Dec 31, 2022·edited Dec 31, 2022Liked by Jonathan Cook
Another highly interesting thought-provoking piece of writing, thank you.
But I don't see any positive hopeful counterbalance to the accurate criticisms you make of Avatar and the modern adrift mindset you describe. The last sentence, say, offers only a slammed door in our faces.
Are you so completely lacking in hope? If so, fine, that's your position; but one could ask why bother writing at all? There's an element of scribbling while the Titanic sinks - another Cameron metaphor of man-made global ecocide, incidentally - instead of helping the lifeboats.
Given the insane whirligig we inhabit, like a dismantling merry-go-round, that you describe so well, green shoots of realistic hope are thin on the ground.
But applying your well-made, if solely pessimistic, points, surely there is hope: the sense of Oneness, Unity is real! Though buried under 'establishment news' and 'smart' phones and other nonsense like eg nationalism and 'growing the economy' - we all have an accessible sense of Unity to one another, our planet and universe!
As a highly accomplished writer and analyst of our world, will you please dedicate your next piece(s) to bringing this out.
Whether ancient / nearly extinct native cultures, those with a strong spiritual tie to nature, or the experience of trips to the countryside - or even to movies like Avatar! - this innate link is an essential part of us. It's there, it's real, it lives in us.
Then there's science that is even more emphatically 'We are One' than the biggest hippies in eg my local Totnes High Street.
That We are One is undeniable on so many levels.
But of course, too, that sense of Oneness with one another and with Nature has lost meaning in our consumer, plastic-wrapped chicken from Tesco's, position in corporate culture.
There's a very good reason for that.
Being One, being United, Caring for one another across classes, nations, religions, skin colours etc and caring for our Earthly Home: this is inimical to the power structures we are corralled into.
It's the precise opposite of Divide and Rule, and centralised power.
Superficially imposed from above: difference, competition, selfishness, blame and hate - these make us feel "adrift" as you righly describe.
And that deep alienation and loss, sometimes described in religions like Christianity, allows us to be so easily and passively led into being robbed and exploited from above, while apathetically looking on as our Earthly Home is also destroyed.
Mass media, as you're well aware, is the enchanting glue in the modern world, owned and appointed by the few at the top, that binds us to the insane corrupt system and keeps us blind to the worst of reality, or injects hopeless passivity.
Given all this, please Jonathan, as the excellent writer and analyst you are, can you focus your journalistic powers on benefitting the chances of solutions:
- Uniting people. Prejudices only work at long-distance. They can be worn down as they were built up.
- Awakening people to the need for a Media Revolution. The Overton window will never include toppling the corrupt self-serving establishment that frames our 'news'. We need a transparent, new paradigm of a grassroots people and planet serving media - a sensory and communication system to replace the status quo serving 'magic mirror' that keeps us in line, doffing caps.
- Pushing for a radical global Green Revolution. We all know it's desperately necessary; it's the 0.00001% clinging to their profiteering and insane wealth from self-destructive systems that are blocking progress.
Written in a bit of haste, but I hope you get my point.
"It is not just the military – represented by the crew-cut, machine-like Col Miles Quaritch – that kills everything it touches on Pandora. It is business leaders, bureaucrats and scientists."
From a few years ago, Joel Kovel's masterpiece "The Enemy of Nature" should convince you that at root of all the blame is...CAPITALISM. See
Yes. An important position; the inner world, mostly unseen in our very materialistic time, may well offer the hope of renewal. This is a dimension that’s often dismissed as silly or trivial in ecological discourse. See Douglas Rushkoff on the deadly billionaire mindset in Survival of the Richest.
The corollary to Avatar is the absurd notion that colonizing Mars would guarantee the survival of our species, as if duplicating in a wasteland the very life-sustaining environment we trashed is remotely realistic. As if even if we could duplicate such an environment, we wouldn’t trash it again. Our survival hinges on a change of consciousness, not Buck Rogers nonsense.
Yes, an astute commentary and I look forward to viewing Avatar 2. I wrote this about Avatar 1: From Earth Emotions (2019): "The film can easily be read as an allegory on the plight of the contemporary Earth. In their rapacious and murderous quest for "unobtanium", the humans who invade Pandora care nothing for the distinctive humanoid and other forms of life. They have no real understanding of how the Na'vi and other life forms on Pandora are interconnected. They engage in a great military drive for the extinction of any and everything that gets in their way. They are willing to use powerful technologies to blow up and burn 'the tree of life', the soul tree, in order to get more material wealth and power. Humans, for the most part, are portrayed as a species with no empathy with the greater forces that hold life together, and put on full display, their willingness to commit war and ecocide to achieve their aims. A very bleak view of human nature was contrasted to the alien, animistic, pantheistic and ecologically "spiritual" humanoids. It was a battle between terraphthora and terranascia.
Yet, it was observed at the time when the film ended in cinemas, that many people in the audience wanted to go back and recapture the intense life and love experience of the Na'vi for each other and their Gaian 'living moon', Pandora. Many reported experiencing 'the blues' or what I interpret as powerful, negative psychoterratic emotions in the form of both intense nostalgia, the desire to return 'home' and what I have called a type of virtual solastalgia, or deep existential distress about the environmental desolation that had happened on Pandora at the hands of the human invaders. People were emotionally desolated on 'coming back to Earth' at the film's conclusion, despite the fact that Pandora only existed in the cinema as an enhanced 3-D glasses experience. One viewer succinctly described these emotions:
'One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality.'
I wrote about the psychoterratic dimensions of Avatar on my Blog, Healthearth, not long after viewing the film in 2010:
'As the real world is being desolated (climate change, ecosystem distress etc etc), real people experience solastalgia. When, in Avatar, they can 'see' an alternative world, which is beautiful, diverse and complex, one that meets their aesthetic, spiritual and ethical needs, they want to live within it. During the three dimensional movie, they experience a virtual solastalgia as they become virtual participants in the attempted destruction and desolation of the Na'vi and other life forms in this pristine environment … all for the sake of a meaningless materialism. The movie becomes, for such people, an existential experience of negative environmental change (defined as solastalgia). At the conclusion of the movie when they must accept that such a world is virtual only, they experience a virtual nostalgia for it and become depressed. The irony of humans finally seeing the value of life, different ways of being 'human' plus the intrinsically valuable complexity of non-human beings and their living systems via a movie about a virtual world and its destruction is not lost on me.'
What the Avatar virtual solastalgia experience suggested to me was that, deep inside many people, was the empathy needed to commune with the coherent and complex world that planet Earth once represented for all humans and all life. Not necessarily a perfectly peaceful and harmonious place, but one that sufficiently favored the forces of creation over the forces of destruction, to allow life and the positive emotions to be nurtured and perpetuated. Pandora was a fantasy of a place, which allowed expression of psychoterratic emotions such as solastalgia, nostalgia, soliphilia and eutierria. In addition, mutualism via symbiotic 'unity-in-diversity' enabled the forces of life to finally overcome the forces of death and destruction. I am not the first to notice the connections between Earth emotions and Pandora emotions, and the psychoterratic distress felt by people as a result of their engagement with the movie."
Brilliant!! You've written a thesis that should be mandatory analysis from grade 1 through to PhD. To dissect everything you've brought to light as a community of humans through each grade until they reform processes and adopt new/old practices (better invite the Elders of the the First Nations who still have those elements alive at their core) and see how the younger generations evolve and grow in such an environment. Yes it's a dream - but it has to start somewhere. Thanks for your passionate and beautifully expressed thoughts and comments.
An excellent article but I fear there will be no grand awakening. The blind cannot lead the blind anywhere but into the pit. The premise on which western imperialism is based (A very British system deliberately passed on to the US as the 'exhausted Titan' of the British empire neared its end, in the words of J.Chamberlain) is fatally flawed. It is a poor foundation which can only initiate the building's inevitable collapse.
Just as Hippocrates sincere belief in the bodies four humors dominated human medical thinking for centuries, although being entirely wrong, so too is our belief in the magical thinking of evolutionary science and its consequent existentialist philosophy that produces our present world (of self-destructive economy/materialism, politics/power/ambition, religion/phony spirituality etc.) is entirely unfit to provide the solution.
If you do not have knowledge of germs you cannot hope to combat them. If you believe in non-random natural selection, the solution it offers is human extinction, which is no solution at all.
And the good news is......
Sorry there is no good news, we humans are on a relentless downward spiral to extinction taking all other life forms with us. There will be no sudden Worldwide awakening that would reverse the damage because it is in our nature to be selfish and damn the consequences.
But just knowing, the curse of such knowledge,
That Wordsworth was a ransacking shameless Girondist
Whose self-exculpating culminating
In the 1850 Prelude
Condemning Robespierre as he Duncan-transfers
The same treatment to Burke
With his Macbethean head-to-hand training
A thousand heliotroped Duncan duplicates.
O believe me it’s truer than the moon.
It was the first inversion of human solidarity
Seen in its infancy at Shakespeare’s Globe
When Bard defied King and patronage but not
Country and people –
Into the creation of new and future groups
That The Polish Dock Worker’s Union
Had to and was prepared to overcome:
The tyranny every-day recognisable for them
To be hoodwinked, unlike us.
Wordsworth was a ransacking shameless Girondist. His self-exculpation culminating in the 1850 Prelude, which was a hoax. As he condemned Robespierre he Duncan-transferred his head to hand Macbethean axe to Burke. The scholarship is there for this. It this if anything which has made progress in the nature nurture killing mitigation - all attempts that includes Cameron’s hopeless before they started. It’s ingrained and hard to locate now. But it’s there.
Interesting article Jonathon. Thanks. I am currently working on essay on the first generation of British Romantic poets, and I have arrived at a similar conclusion, derived from a slightly different motive:
"By 1797 the Pitt Alarm had been normalized across Britain. Wordsworth’s cry of “Was it for this?” and the disappearance of the poet into the choral chants at the conclusion of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan…” were expressions of their anxieties over lingering suspicions that they continued to hold pro-revolutionary sympathizes. As with many of their peers, the poets felt the need to suppress the political radicalism of their earlier writings and focus instead on the psycho-spiritual aspects of their investigations. Although, they continued to advocate for empathy towards those who suffered from the effects of systemic injustices, they moved to emphasize a conciliatory approach towards the broader society and culture, proscribing organized resistance that threatened the rule of law. Through the scholastic elaboration of this paradoxical praxis, Romanticism would become one of the central ideologies of the British professional class, allowing them to counter criticism of the social instability that resulted from the progress of historical forces intrinsic to national interests." ***
*** See also: "Coleridge and Wordsworth, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory" by Paul Hamilton, Seamus Perry (LRB, Vol. 25 No. 23 · December 4, 2003): “So Romanticism is a kind of evasion, an ‘aesthetics of distraction’: it operates as a brake on historical progress and is all the more deplorable because it simultaneously tantalises us with figurative glimpses of the happier world that we might otherwise be progressing towards.”
Best for 2023,
Sincerely,
Alan
Another highly interesting thought-provoking piece of writing, thank you.
But I don't see any positive hopeful counterbalance to the accurate criticisms you make of Avatar and the modern adrift mindset you describe. The last sentence, say, offers only a slammed door in our faces.
Are you so completely lacking in hope? If so, fine, that's your position; but one could ask why bother writing at all? There's an element of scribbling while the Titanic sinks - another Cameron metaphor of man-made global ecocide, incidentally - instead of helping the lifeboats.
Given the insane whirligig we inhabit, like a dismantling merry-go-round, that you describe so well, green shoots of realistic hope are thin on the ground.
But applying your well-made, if solely pessimistic, points, surely there is hope: the sense of Oneness, Unity is real! Though buried under 'establishment news' and 'smart' phones and other nonsense like eg nationalism and 'growing the economy' - we all have an accessible sense of Unity to one another, our planet and universe!
As a highly accomplished writer and analyst of our world, will you please dedicate your next piece(s) to bringing this out.
Whether ancient / nearly extinct native cultures, those with a strong spiritual tie to nature, or the experience of trips to the countryside - or even to movies like Avatar! - this innate link is an essential part of us. It's there, it's real, it lives in us.
Then there's science that is even more emphatically 'We are One' than the biggest hippies in eg my local Totnes High Street.
That We are One is undeniable on so many levels.
But of course, too, that sense of Oneness with one another and with Nature has lost meaning in our consumer, plastic-wrapped chicken from Tesco's, position in corporate culture.
There's a very good reason for that.
Being One, being United, Caring for one another across classes, nations, religions, skin colours etc and caring for our Earthly Home: this is inimical to the power structures we are corralled into.
It's the precise opposite of Divide and Rule, and centralised power.
Superficially imposed from above: difference, competition, selfishness, blame and hate - these make us feel "adrift" as you righly describe.
And that deep alienation and loss, sometimes described in religions like Christianity, allows us to be so easily and passively led into being robbed and exploited from above, while apathetically looking on as our Earthly Home is also destroyed.
Mass media, as you're well aware, is the enchanting glue in the modern world, owned and appointed by the few at the top, that binds us to the insane corrupt system and keeps us blind to the worst of reality, or injects hopeless passivity.
Given all this, please Jonathan, as the excellent writer and analyst you are, can you focus your journalistic powers on benefitting the chances of solutions:
- Uniting people. Prejudices only work at long-distance. They can be worn down as they were built up.
- Awakening people to the need for a Media Revolution. The Overton window will never include toppling the corrupt self-serving establishment that frames our 'news'. We need a transparent, new paradigm of a grassroots people and planet serving media - a sensory and communication system to replace the status quo serving 'magic mirror' that keeps us in line, doffing caps.
- Pushing for a radical global Green Revolution. We all know it's desperately necessary; it's the 0.00001% clinging to their profiteering and insane wealth from self-destructive systems that are blocking progress.
Written in a bit of haste, but I hope you get my point.
Yes We Can if We Push Together!
Here's my contribution!
https://www.instagram.com/p/CmZlJ_6LblS/
It is a one minute video with soundtrack & also a philosophical description I wrote to accompany it, enjoy.
Best wishes for the new year Jonathan, muchos Gracias!
Thank you!
Another well written piece 
Just so ... (as Rudyard Kipling would say).
"It is not just the military – represented by the crew-cut, machine-like Col Miles Quaritch – that kills everything it touches on Pandora. It is business leaders, bureaucrats and scientists."
From a few years ago, Joel Kovel's masterpiece "The Enemy of Nature" should convince you that at root of all the blame is...CAPITALISM. See
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/the-enemy-of-nature
The way out?
Maybe "Challenges 1-2-3 at my substack. Connection to Nature essential, and a way outlined.
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/challenges?s=w
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/challenges-part-2?s=w
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/challenges-part-3?s=w