Me First!

"For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within"
(Alfred Lord Tennyson).



A new field of psychology, called ecopsychology, addresses anxiety and other mental maladies that are directly related to the rather common loss of our innate ecological instincts and consequently to our dysfunctional relationship with nature. Because humans for so long have believed in the dualism of mind and body, which presumably allows us to destroy nature without harming our mind, we live according to the premise "what interests me is me" and proportionally have disconnected ourselves from others and the world around us.

“You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

This basic error indeed propagates itself and grows like weed in our daily lives and in our language. As Jean Twenge in her book Generation Me points out, books and TV shows that revolve around the self have been blanketing the nation for many years. As a consequence, self-reference words (I, me, mine, myself) have proliferated, however at the cost of collective words (humanity, country, community etc). Twenge quotes Britney Spears saying in 2004 that her priorities are “Myself, my husband, and starting a family.” Not only does none of the three listed items in any way refer to anything outside Spears’ own individual life, she also begins her list with herself before she remembers her partner and her hypothetical future children. Until not too long ago, it was considered very impolite to mention oneself first. It was proper to say that “Michael and I are going out tonight.” Today, it is more likely to hear that “I and Michael are going out.” As Twenge reminds us, such manifestation of a change in mores should not come as a surprise after years of schools concentrating on students’ self-esteem and their self-esteem only. After all, there is no need to improve when one has “worthy and good inner essence… [that deserves] recognition and attention from others;” and there is no need to heed others when the “individual needs should be considered first and foremost” (65).
"A single word often betrays a great design," Jean Baptiste Racine believed. Thus, language is nothing more and nothing less than an expression of the way we think. Putting ourselves first and ignoring our ecological and social instincts ad perpetuum will destroy the planet because it will have destroyed our mind. Many already may feel solastalgia, a pain over the realization that what we call home (and this includes environment and language) is seriously endangered. Will we understand that without changing our attitude towards the outside (and the way we express this attitude) we will not feel much better inside?