Gaia; Headings of Concern

Mary Midgley    June 2003

The reason why Gaian thinking is urgently needed today is to restore realism about the continuity of our life with the whole of the living world around us. Our current world-view tends to fragment that continuity disastrously in the following ways -

1) Morally. Despite much talk about evolution, people today still see human interests as an independent realm, a citadel safely cut off from the rest of life and entitled to take precedence over it.
2) Politically and Economically. Because they see human life as secure in this way from outward threat, people attend chiefly to competition between various groups within it. They see little need to attempt co-operation.
3) Psychologically and Spiritually. At the personal level too, they see individual interests as essentially separate and naturally conflicting. Competition rather than co-operation between individuals seems the primary state.
4) Scientifically. Accustomed to specialization, people readily see the different sciences as treating quite separate subject-matters, rather than dealing co-operatively with a continuous whole. Not only do humanists and social scientists tend to discuss human life without reference to its wider physical context but - perhaps more surprisingly - even biologists too currently treat life itself in a similar vacuum.

This dangerous mass of interdependent fantasies can, of course, be attacked in various ways. Many traditional approaches can raise objections to the first three of them. But those objections are not at present getting properly heard.
The distinctive point about Gaian thinking is its emphasis on the fourth point -the continuity which binds all earthly living things - including ourselves - with the earth itself, and the corresponding need for continuity between the sciences studying them.
In the earth sciences themselves, this Gaian approach has already had some effect. Some recognition of life's role in the shaping and preserving of the planet is at last bridging the long-standing gap between geology and biology. Gaian suggestions are being accepted here. But - significantly - the name that indicates their source and their wider relevance is usually dropped.
It is that name - Gaia - that connects them with the first three areas of concern noted above, which is why the name causes trouble. This connection offends present-day thought, partly because of a general belief that science cannot be connected to general interests at all, but, more seriously because the ultra-individualist, Neo-Darwinist ideology which now pervades our thinking in these areas has already made such a connection. And it is a false one - one which Gaian thinking shows to be wholly untenable.
That neo-Darwinist world-view is simply not compatible with a realistic notion of ourselves and our relation to our planet. Though this ideology is deemed `scientific' because it arose from speculations about evolution, it is actually no more than biological Thatcherism. It is a cuckoo in the nest, preventing reasonable thought in all the areas mentioned above. We need to get it out of the way. And the right tool for doing this is the more realistic pattern suggested by Gaian thinking.