Nature's Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture
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Book Review
Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. Brian Goodwin, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 2007 It was on reading a couple of draft chapters of Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture, at Schumacher College in February 2005, that the expression ‘a wise elder of an alternative West’ first came to mind to describe the 1book’s author, Brian Goodwin. My impression that Goodwin is such a‘wise elder’ became amply corroborated after a first reading of the entire work, just published last month (I should add that ‘elder’does not have to do strictly with age, although it often goes along with a lifetime work of reflection and engagement). I decided to write these notes in the belief that there is something of great insight in what some of these biologists ^ themselves, dissenting imaginations within their own fields ^ are telling us that I do not find in the best works of contemporary critical theory in the humanities and the social sciences. This is not to suggest that the latter are less important, but to encourage us all to read the work of some of these ‘wise elders of an alternative West’, who, coming from the science worlds, aim at reconciling social action with the dynamics of life itself. The two projects ^ critical theory in the humanities and the social
sciences, on the one hand, and alternative science theory, on the other ^ are complementary and it is important to build bridges between them. Some intellectuals coming from the sciences have started the process in earnest, such as Goodwin himself (there are many others, of course, Vandana Shiva being among the most well known ones). Let me mention, to start on a more intuitive vein, some of the claims to be found in Goodwin’s book: Meaning, language, feelings and experience are not the prerogative of humans but are found in all living beings. Feelings are a property of many biological systems; organisms should be understood ‘as sentient beings that create and know their worlds by exercise of intention and skill in which feelings are genuinely aspects of nature’. All organisms make sense of their genetic text and engage in purposive activity within their own context in order to create themselves and satisfy their needs. There is thus a meaning-based natural intelligence in all organisms. Creativity and adaptability are inherent aspects to all forms of life. There are lessons to be learned from how creativity works in the natural world for designing social worlds. Contemporary biology (e.g.,
complexity theory) can be one of our guides in this regard, Every organism is a member of a community (a species) with a shared language and a culture that makes meaning of its history (reads the inherited text) by creating forms that are appropriate to their context. As nature itself, humans are thrown into lives of meaning through relationships, that is, the process of finding meaning, coherence and wholeness through relational views and practices. Let me now try to spell out some of these notions. Since the 1970s at least, some life scientists have be
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