A Folk Song Could Save The World
Starner, Fred

CLEARWATER NAVIGATOR (9-10/88), Pp. 5-8


Margaret Mead's Opinion On Music

[This comment was made to the author by Margaret Mead at a breakfast meeting during the 1972 Stockholm Conference On The Environment].

It's my opinion that Mead knows what she is talking about. Music can influence values. And since society's central problem in terms of environmental matters arises from values, music can have a profound influence...

This state of affairs has been terribly unsettling to the erstwhile leaders of our society. Pollution has shattered the long-established beliefs (or myths) about the benevolence of the market system. Mead's remark about music came at the end of the "breakfast seminar". What she meant was that a song, as it simplifies the complex environmental dilemma, can define different value perspectives. These new values can be translated into concrete public and private policies.

Values And The Environmental Movement

I realize it sounds glib to say "changing values lies at the heart of the environmental movement". So bear with me while I bring up several controversial topics right now&emdash;property and people's mystical appreciation of nature. How we understand property rights and respond emotionally to nature affects what we mean by "environmentalists". If you take property and nature into consideration, I think I can explain what Mead believed was the role of folk song in these areas. Let's take property up first.

Private Property

Barry Commoner has pointed out an important similarity between the 19th century movement against slavery and the 20th century concern about the environment. Both have to do with changing our ideas on the institution of property. In the last century we came to accept the notion that a person is not someone's private property. The world will survive if the "environmental movement" can weaken the view of private property as an unchallenged tenet of Western civilization.

Against the myth of "free enterprise-progress," we need countervailing myths about how landscapes, parks, wetlands, unpolluted rivers and streams and clean air sustain human existence. The cutting edge of the present destruction of the earth is honed by our unceasing praise of "technology" driven by enterprise.

True, we have benefited from technological change, but we tend to overlook the destructive spillovers from the "progress". The myth of "progress" needs to be displaced by more realistic myths about the deadly interaction of technology, people and the environment. A folk song represents one means of changing myths.

If a poetic image could link the collapse of the ozone layer over Antarctica with its cause&emdash;the narrow use of technology for short-run corporate profit&emdash;then the public mind-set might change. The new myth would take the general form of the "wounding of mother earth" by the "Mr. Greeds" of the world. We don't need to give up the idea of private property, but only to modify the absoluteness of property rights. Under the new system of property rights the notion that all people and corporation should act as sustainers and maintainers of the earth should dominate, rather than remain its liquidators, levelers, or exploiters.

Nature

Environmental organizations have a job on their hands. Moderating the claims of private property and value reconstruction are difficult enough. Complicating that task is the influence of the Judeo-Christian approach to how people relate to nature. The leading Western religions have, for all practical purposes, thrown animals and nature out of Paradise.

As they see it, animals do not have souls; trees, mountains and rivers are not given special religious meaning. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the practice of "worshiping nature" is synonymous with Paganism. Paganism, the competitor of the single God religions (or the "monotheist" religion of the Jews and Christians), is not given a forum by the established church.

St. Francis of Assisi held heretical views on nature. His talking to the birds, the "Canticle" of the Sun, and the Moon, rankled the Medieval church. His poetry, in tone at least, violated the doctrine of a single God. St. Francis' friendliness towards animals came pretty close to the pagan belief that nature, theologically speaking, has the same importance as people.

Despite the harshness of the church view, the love of nature&emdash;if not its worship&emdash;permeates the feelings of many people today. Are people who feel a mystical awe of nature disrespectful to their Judeo-Christian heritage? Not at all. They are simply responding to the pleasantness of Mother Nature's visage.

Many observers have noticed the "heresy" of fondness of nature as an ancient human yearning. The psychologist Jung coined the famous term for age-old understandings and feeling about creation, the earth, life in general. He called these universally sounding insights, the "collective unconscious".

Jung points out that since the collective unconsciousness begins with the dawn of evolutionary man, these dream-like ideas are implanted in our psyche. Thus, they predate by thousands of generations the "young religions" of Judaism and Christianity. For that reason, church theology has never been able to wipe out "mystical" feelings about our connections with the birds, animals, the forest, and nature in general. Despite the harshness of the church view, Jung reminds us that "merry paganism" was able to break through the stone facade of Judeo-Christian theology of inanimate nature.

It's no surprise that there is a reminder of Jung's collective unconscious, in the form of a love of nature in Clearwater circles. Most people have heard the parody of "Old-Time Religion". The adaptation of the Christian song reminds us that religion is as old as the hills. One verse recalls the mystical Druids and their pagan worship of the spirits of the forest.

Let us worship with the Druids, / Who drink fermented fluids,

Waltzing naked through the woods, / It's good enough for me.

 

It is clear that "simple" stories and myths guide public policy on many issues. President Reagan made skillful use of the "The Evil Empire" myth in speechmaking and managed to expand military spending significantly during his term in office. His characterization of the "bird watching eco-freak" citizen, and his theory of how Mother Nature and trees pollute

more than the industrial state, helped make it politically acceptable, to cut heavily into federal expenditures on environmental protection.

On the other hand, if the public mind perceives that Mother Nature has been raped, the political system can respond. With public concern, like-minded (or simply opportunistic) politicians can expect to get elected if they push for an environmental agenda: slow growth, stricter enforcement of air and water laws, a national energy policy, expenditures for mass transit, preservation of wetlands and shorelines, more parks, international treaties on acid rain, and ocean dumping, and so on....

A Folk Song Can Save The World?

To me, anyway, it's increasingly evident that Margaret Mead is correct. A song may jolt us. It can unlock our shared ancient yearning for peace, the mystical energy tapped as we view an unspoiled vista. The emotions released by a song (or speech, play, movie) can help validate the principle of environmental protection being more important than individual property rights. Since a nation is the sum of individual psyches, people will follow political leadership calling for environmental protection. Politicians, in other words, can get elected and reelected on ecological platforms. Environmental protection could be as popular as national defense.

It is unlikely, by the way, that the EXXON apologist reading the details of this environmental plot can benefit by hiring poets or songwriters to extol PROGRESS. Why? Well, because the myth/idea of TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE GOD DAMN IT! NO MATTER WHAT THE COST cannot be artistically, that is, sympathetically, successful. Such a theme, I doubt, can engage us in a play, opera, movie, or folk song form. The big practical problem is that technological change is dehumanizing (as well as polluting). Machines and techniques strip us of our creativity. Will the story of John Henry losing out to the machine ever be transformed into a song about a revered "track-laying device? . . .

Even the Star Wars series in movies celebrates more the human spirit, the clash of good against evil that the message, "HOW WONDERFUL IS TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS!" Pure technology as a theme would necessarily be without laughter and the sense of "merry paganism" that Jung thinks is bound to break in on us in our present evolutionary form.

Finally, we need to remind ourselves, the task of value creation, is a job that cannot be accomplished by the lawyers, or the scientist. We need these logical and scientific minds to design the institutional and political structures to manage the environment. But before the technicians can do their important work, the ecological values have to be refined and strengthened. Without the social demand for the maintenance of the earth's ecology, the technicians will have nothing to do. That is why art and music are so important. They can define, mystically, who we are. Without the dreamers, there is no hope society can save itself. Margaret Mead is correct. A folk song can save the world.

 

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