21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

maintains the being of whatever is perceived.’

The beauty and wildness of nature are likewise seeking a response from us. We ignore this at our peril. Psychologist James Hillman tells us that the ecological crisis is essentially an aesthetic problem. Humans however have a deep-rooted anger against nature for not being compliant to our wishes. We aspire to power over nature, but nature will not comply. Instead, she seeks our awe and our gratitude — and our humility. Our resistance — our lack of reciprocity — is having its consequences. In taming the wildness of nature outside ourselves, we have also tamed the inner wildness of our own souls. Creativity is thereby frustrated and trivialised. Reciprocity then is not an optional extra — in fact reciprocity is the soul’s adventure in the world — or at least, the beginning of it.

Often, for those of us born into modern Western cultures, nature simply doesn’t speak. Only those steeped in her language from birth will learn to hear her voice. Instead we are steeped in our own language of purely human signs — our letters and words, phones and the internet. All that is left is a dull vacancy, a sense of profound unease and guilt when we do occasionally stop to listen. Hearing nature and seeing beauty is a lifetime’s work. This too takes grace and love.

Beauty then — the strong and often contradictory beauty we’ve been examining — is the original source of our values. Beauty is quality. The values we derive are tough values that must deal with human evil as well as with

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