Indigenous American philosopher John Lame Deer, a medicine man of the Lakota Sioux, shares insights with some of the other critics of modernity, such as Tolstoy and Nietzsche.
Modern Western culture draws a clear line between the biological world of plants and animals and the nonbiological world of minerals. But for Lame Deer, this line is dangerous because the biological world depends on the nonbiological one. To call rocks and minerals "dead" gives a kind of implicit permission to commodify that world and despoil it. Further, domestication has changed animals from creatures with beauty and integrity to artificial things that can live only on feed lots or in cages-things that are symbolic of exactly what might be uncomfortable for us. Ultimately, we no longer even think of ourselves as biological animals who live in an ecosystem but in terms of our functions in an economic order. We thus imprison ourselves and are complicit in our own imprisonment.
The end of this path of rejecting the symbolic and the natural, of fetishizing commodities, and of denying that we are biological animals is a completely ersatz life, a life that's a stand-in for a real life. For Lame Deer, the nature of modernity is to turn us into spectators, not even of our own lives but of other people's lives. We become prisoners looking at televisions that give us views into other people's cells.
The symbol of the Native American is the circle, which not only resembles and describes the character of nature but is also a representational symbol. In the repetition of circles in the universe-the planets, the stars, the rainbow- Lame Deer sees "symbols and reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature." But we end up living in a world that's square, not a world that's circular; a world that's a prison, not a world that's organic. That's not a world that any of us would choose to live in, despite the fact that every day, in every action, we make choices that entail the necessity of just such a world.
In contrast, the symbol of non-Native Americans is the square, seen in houses, office buildings, and walls. Our world, too, is full of symbols, but they are the wrong symbols-symbols of separation. The truly meaningful life is the organic life, the life that is in unity with nature and represented by the circle. What's wrong with modernity is not that it fails to be meaningful but that it means the wrong things.
-Source Credit: Professor Jay L. Garfield, Smith College
Modern Western culture draws a clear line between the biological world of plants and animals and the nonbiological world of minerals. But for Lame Deer, this line is dangerous because the biological world depends on the nonbiological one. To call rocks and minerals "dead" gives a kind of implicit permission to commodify that world and despoil it. Further, domestication has changed animals from creatures with beauty and integrity to artificial things that can live only on feed lots or in cages-things that are symbolic of exactly what might be uncomfortable for us. Ultimately, we no longer even think of ourselves as biological animals who live in an ecosystem but in terms of our functions in an economic order. We thus imprison ourselves and are complicit in our own imprisonment.
The end of this path of rejecting the symbolic and the natural, of fetishizing commodities, and of denying that we are biological animals is a completely ersatz life, a life that's a stand-in for a real life. For Lame Deer, the nature of modernity is to turn us into spectators, not even of our own lives but of other people's lives. We become prisoners looking at televisions that give us views into other people's cells.
The symbol of the Native American is the circle, which not only resembles and describes the character of nature but is also a representational symbol. In the repetition of circles in the universe-the planets, the stars, the rainbow- Lame Deer sees "symbols and reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature." But we end up living in a world that's square, not a world that's circular; a world that's a prison, not a world that's organic. That's not a world that any of us would choose to live in, despite the fact that every day, in every action, we make choices that entail the necessity of just such a world.
In contrast, the symbol of non-Native Americans is the square, seen in houses, office buildings, and walls. Our world, too, is full of symbols, but they are the wrong symbols-symbols of separation. The truly meaningful life is the organic life, the life that is in unity with nature and represented by the circle. What's wrong with modernity is not that it fails to be meaningful but that it means the wrong things.
-Source Credit: Professor Jay L. Garfield, Smith College
