Standing in My Emphases

                My two emphases are Environmental Studies, and English. Each of these disciplines is rich in occurrences of the standing metaphor. One of the most prominent features of each of these institutions are standards. In English the standards are grammatical standards, like the Oxford Comma, which is a manifestation of humans in an ivory tower dictating in a totalitarian way what the rest of the world is supposed to think. In Environmental Studies standards are set in place as a means from keeping rich, powerful humans from doing whatever they want. Both disciplines require great understanding as well. The mechanical rules of English dictate that we adhere to standards, and understand them if we are to succeed. I took a class this semester called “Imaginative Writing and the Creative Process.” For our final project we had to write a complete work, or a few complete works and send them along to publishers.  Being that the Beat Generation has come and gone, we are back to a period of time in American literature that requires a mastery of grammatical rules. Imagine if I had sent a ridiculously unorganized paper, with commas spread unevenly and nonsensically throughout. iT co,ulddd ge,t re!aallY aBSURd!

 And all of human life has benefitted greatly from environmental controls that have been obtained through hundreds of years of the scientific method. We’ve mastered many environmental problems which have led to the proliferation of our species. We obtained the understanding sometime in the past few hundred years, and the understanding has led to a practice of standardization which has served to benefit all of humankind. For example, there is a systems program called the ISO 14000, which is headquartered in Switzerland, and it standardizes all of the engineering regulations. What this means is that all the components of everyday life: toilets, electrical wires and switches, screws, light bulbs, wrenches , engineering controls for water systems, solar energy systems, nuclear energy systems, etc. are going through a continual improvement systems plan. What ultimately means is that we are trying to bring these components up to a global standard, so that a global manufacturing base can be implemented to create components for mass-production, and the service of more people, and the spreading of an increased quality of life. To standardize, according to our metaphor, means we will set in stone the specifications for parts. Therefore, the blueprints will be easy. The stage is set.

                A Buddhist economist named Ernst Schumacher wrote an article called “Small is Beautiful”, discussing the need to decrease the amount of resources we consume, all the meanwhile working to promote as much happiness and well-being as possible. He invokes the standing metaphor magnificently when he writes, “It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things, but the craving for them.” So there is something standing between us and liberation, obstructing us. When we view obstacles in our lives, it’s funny that we invoke the standing metaphor by saying, in essence, “The only thing standing between me and happiness is…” Why is an obstruction something that stands? Why not something “lying between me and happiness”? Or something “squatting between me and happiness”? I’ll tell you why: Because standing is POWERFUL! It’s a position of dominance, and when a big wall is standing between me and China, (I’m a hording Mongol,) and I can’t rape and pillage, I’m extremely disappointed. It’s easy to see how the metaphor can be used to express dissatisfaction and disappointment.

                Another powerful article concerning my Environmental Studies emphasis is “Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy” by Arne Naess. This is a really phenomenal work, and could by itself exhaust the requirements of this essay. For space purposes I will keep it relatively brief though. Naess discusses the universal right to self-unfolding and the correlative intrinsic value of every life form. This refers, of course, to all biota—so plants and animals fit within the sphere of protection Naess proposes. Naess writes, “To have a home, to belong, to live, and many other similar expressions suggest the fundamental milieu factors involved in the shaping of an individual’s sense of self and self-respect. The identity of the individual, ‘that I am something’, is developed through interaction with a broad manifold, organic and inorganic. There is no completely isolatable I, no isolatable social unit.”

                This paragraph from Naess describes to me one of the deepest elements of this semester in our class, Standing as a Metaphor. Man is a wandering primate—intelligent, to be sure, but also an animal. We’ve stood up, we’ve created myriad languages and technologies as a means of self-expression, but there is something about us which can never be independent. Our consciousness depends on the external world. There cannot be an observation without an observer, and vice-versa. This relates specifically to the formulation of metaphors generally, as well. Because we interact with an exteriorized environment  we construct linguistic methods of dealing with what we see, thus allowing ourselves to communicate. Naess writes, “To distance oneself from nature and the natural, is to distance oneself from a part of that which the I is built up of.” If anything can be said for man, it’s that we’ve dominated nature. But we are not outside of nature, and any time we do something to harm the environment, we are hurting ourselves by hurting our perception.

                Naess also said, “The emergence of human ecological consciousness is a philosophically important idea: a life-form has developed on earth which is capable of understanding and appreciating its relations with all other life forms and to the earth as a whole.”

                Language is a fascinating tool. We belong to the Phylum chordate, which means we share a recent (in geologic terms,) common ancestry with any animal that has a spinal chord. It’s impressive to think of how different we became when we became bipedal, language-using monkeys. Suddenly our world become an object of inquiry and fascination. I imagine that after we had named one thing we wanted to name them all.
                Here's where I jump the rails slightly, but it's still a valid scientific theory, and worth considering in this context. Terence McKenna is a thinker I'm particularly fond of. He has a theory about the evolution of language that I consider to be worth entertaining. McKenna talks about how we were once canopy-dwelling monkeys on the African savannah, staying in the trees for fear of predation. Along the way there were harsh dry seasons in Africa which caused a lapse in the fruiting of the trees. This led our monkey ancestors to leave the trees and go out in search of food. According to his theory, we came upon psilocybin magic mushrooms growing on the dung of ungulates, and we ate them. This led to a distortion of normal consciousness and the awakening of tonal perception. He theorized that when these apes got stoned they were then able to differentiate between different tonalities in their grunting. McKenna thought this was the origin of human language. I'd be interested in hearing a correlative theory of Standing, if one exists. Of course, it would contain different components, but something radical must have happened along the way.