Who or what is Gaia? Is our planet indeed something alive? Or is it spooky and unscientific to talk of a planet as having life, especially by giving it the name of a mythical earth-goddess?
Our current ideas of religion, of science and indeed of life have all become so strangely narrowed that we cannot easily get them into the same perspective. Many people now understand science to mean only something highly specialised, something very like theoretical physics. But there are many sciences and they all presuppose general, background ideas about our relation to the world. There is nothing spooky about attending to these architectural ideas. James Lovelock, who introduced the notion of Gaia, started from particular facts. As an atmospheric chemist, he began by simply noting how strikingly terrestrial organisms work together to control earth's temperature, climate and atmosphere, keeping the place astonishingly hospitable to life and quite unlike our lifeless fellow-planets. These points - which are obviously scientifically discussable - are being discussed and many parts of them are being accepted.
What frightens people, however, is not really the parts but the whole, the new image which calls for a new way of looking at the world. Lovelock is reversing the narrow program of reductivism. He is explaining the parts by their place in a vast whole as well as vice versa. And that could force us to think about our own place in creation.
Till lately, Western scientists used to take for granted a comprehensive world-vision to which they could relate particular truths - namely, a Christian vision or one visibly descended from it. Modern scientists, having abandoned this common heritage, have drifted into a nervous habit of unwillingness to talk about wholes at all. And in popular biology this vague suspiciousnessness has lately hardened into an explicit orthodoxy of compulsory reductivism expressed in a new and violent individualist myth. This myth, which is officially part of sociobiology, has been called social atomism, biological Thatcherism or `the selfish revolution'. Like Victorian Social Darwinism, it presents a dramatic world-picture modelled on free-enterprise capitalism, denying the possibility of natural co-operation. Centring on the idea of `selfish' genes, it explains all large-scale movements as resulting from unbridled competition, war-games of all against all between huge numbers of detached, independent,. self-interested, autonomous entities, whether genes or organisms. From this angle, Lovelock's idea of a whole preserved by harmonious, biosphere-wide co-operation is naturally intolerable. Much of the academic conflict is therefore a battle between one myth and another, not (it should be noted) between Lovelock's myth and other people's science.
Myths, the imaginative pictures that underly thought, are an essential part of our thinking. But they always need to be balanced, one against another. The individualistic myth rightly displays the role of competition in natural selection. It is also attractively simple. But that simplicity is delusive because co-operation is actually quite as important as competition at every level from gene-interactions upwards. Entities which war with their environment do not prosper and, without some co-operation, competition itself becomes impossible. (Try organising school sports where nobody co-operates.)
Lovelock has produced computer-simulations to show how organisms that improve their environment can quite well be favoured by natural selection. Debate must go on about this, but iniitially it looks plausible. And the starkly atomistic pattern of individualist thinking is certainly not a fixed requirement of reason. Indeed, in general it is somewhat out of tune with modern science. Physicists today no longer deal in hard. independent, eighteenth-century atoms but in particles that are actually patterns of connection. Thus, there really is nothing unscientific about shifting the perspective from parts to whole.
What, however, about that goddess? Lovelock has come under tremendous pressure to dismiss her, but he stands fast. `For me' (he writes) `Gaia is a religious as well as a scientific concept, and in both spheres it is manageable.... God and Gaia, theology and science, even physics and biology are not separate but a single way of thought'. Altogether, he thinks modern specialisation is an intellectual disaster, blinding us to all sorts of important connections and above all to our own dependence on the natural world. If we really recognise that dependence (he says) can we fail to be filled with awe?
There are indeed people who think that the Enlightenment has proved that we shouldn't ever venerate anything or anybody. Past misuses of religion make this detached, unresponsive attitude understandable. But that detachment has produced a bizarre, contemptuous disregard for nature which is now radically endangering our whole civilisation. Entities whose profound importance we recognise naturally appear to us as persons (as indeed the personification of the Selfish Gene illustrates). And our irreplaceable planetary home, with its self-regulating biosphere, is surely such an entity. It seems likely that we do indeed need Gaia, and the concept of Gaia, a great deal more than she needs us.