One of the key ideas involved in considering plants as persons is a concept of the social that includes not only nonhuman beings but also inanimate entities. As for the first group, nonhuman beings, the idea is really not that strange if one thinks of how thoroughly integrated pets, especially cats and dogs, are integrated into family life. So many mundane signs, from the postcard from the vet addressed to the dog of the family, complete with first name (Rusty in my case) and last name, reminding him of his upcoming appointment, to those little stickers on the rear windows of automobiles depicting each family member in white silhouette, pet included, normalizes the idea that our pets are part of our social network, along with our parents and children, often in a more intimate sense, especially if one considers the attenuating significance of aunts, uncles and cousins in modern social life. In contrast, the importance of animals seems to be on the rise, especially with regard to people who are otherwise single and/or childless. A particularly mean-spirited and obnoxious version of this attitude appears on bumper stickers that are all too common in the San Francisco Bay Area, which read something along the lines of 'My Dog is Smarter than Your Honors Student'. It may be meant in humor, and as a poke at the overly achievement oriented culture of high octane places such as Silicon Valley, but I am not sure the medium conveys it effectively.
But enough about animals. What about plants? And speaking of humor, one of the best representations of the 'plants as social actors' discourse, to convey the idea rather stiffly, came to me in a presentation on Guarani society society. A research self-deprecatingly related a dressing down that he received at the hands of two women who said something like: 'Oh no, brother, trees are people, don't you forget it. We may not know what's going on with them most of the time, but they are people just like you and I are'. I loved the lack of pretentiousness and preciousness in this exchange. Who knows what those trees are thinking! But we respect them just the same.
So here is a great example of what Michel Serres calls the 'natural contract', a version of Jean Jacques Rousseau's social contract, except that it is made between humans and nature rather than solely among humans ourselves. Serres' point is that the social contract is tacit, and as such it really does not depend upon a sophisticated line of communication among all signatories to it. In fact, there are no signatories because there really is no contract as such, merely a highly abstracted idea that there is or should be a bond among people, read homo sapiens, that conditions daily life. Well, Serres suggests that the same bonds once existed between human beings and nature, but that through industrialization and modernization, those bonds have been broken and need to be reformed, lest disaster ensues. And so we must return to the Amazon, or in Serres' illustration, ancient Egypt, specifically the Nile Delta, and figure out once again how to give nature, including its inanimate features, the respect it deserves.
What would such a model of society look like? How would our culture accommodate it? I will attempt to answer these questions in future posts.
But enough about animals. What about plants? And speaking of humor, one of the best representations of the 'plants as social actors' discourse, to convey the idea rather stiffly, came to me in a presentation on Guarani society society. A research self-deprecatingly related a dressing down that he received at the hands of two women who said something like: 'Oh no, brother, trees are people, don't you forget it. We may not know what's going on with them most of the time, but they are people just like you and I are'. I loved the lack of pretentiousness and preciousness in this exchange. Who knows what those trees are thinking! But we respect them just the same.
So here is a great example of what Michel Serres calls the 'natural contract', a version of Jean Jacques Rousseau's social contract, except that it is made between humans and nature rather than solely among humans ourselves. Serres' point is that the social contract is tacit, and as such it really does not depend upon a sophisticated line of communication among all signatories to it. In fact, there are no signatories because there really is no contract as such, merely a highly abstracted idea that there is or should be a bond among people, read homo sapiens, that conditions daily life. Well, Serres suggests that the same bonds once existed between human beings and nature, but that through industrialization and modernization, those bonds have been broken and need to be reformed, lest disaster ensues. And so we must return to the Amazon, or in Serres' illustration, ancient Egypt, specifically the Nile Delta, and figure out once again how to give nature, including its inanimate features, the respect it deserves.
What would such a model of society look like? How would our culture accommodate it? I will attempt to answer these questions in future posts.
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