7
Re-Enchanting Agriculture
value is utility’ (2019: 145) could well be describing a driver for industrial agriculture, where the
right hemisphere’s priorities, such as nature, culture, the body, the arts, spirituality and soul, have
been deconstructed and devitalised. McGilchrist concludes ‘I believe that reductionism has become
a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth, which is blighting our ability to understand what is happening and what we need to do about it’ (2019: xxv).
Whilst this theory may help us to understand the nature of the underlying disorder or mind-virus
that manifests through the industrial worldview, McGilchrist’s otherwise comprehensive work omits
discussion of gender and the feminine. This absence stands out not only because the worldviews of
many of the non-contemporary cultures that McGilchrist refers to were rooted in the feminine, but
also because of the clear parallels of his work with those of feminist scholars. One such is psychologist Anne Baring and her classic work The Dream of the Cosmos: a Quest for the Soul (2020). In
this, Baring attempts to address the roots of Western culture’s multifaceted crisis by exploring its
historical and psychological causes. Echoing McGilchrist’s perspective of the dominant left hemisphere’s inability to hold awareness beyond itself, she asks:
What happens to us if we exist without a relationship to anything beyond our own consciousness? We
are left bereft of relationship with the Cosmos. Psychic energy that has nowhere to go implodes on
itself… Recognising nothing beyond ourselves, we become both infated and diminished.
Baring (2020: xvii)
Baring similarly talks of a malignant pathology and the need for release from our current defective
worldview. Whereas McGilchrist identifes the historical decline of key civilisations (the Greeks,
Romans and post-Enlightenment West) as triggers for the increasing entrenchment of the left hemisphere, Baring points the fnger at two erroneously held beliefs of the three Abrahamic religious
cultures (Judaism, Christianity and Islam): the myth that a woman caused the expulsion of humans
from Eden, and the belief that humans are separate from both God and nature. Baring notes that,
prior to this, cultures dating to 40,000 BC emphasised the feminine (e.g., see Marshack, 1972), and
she explains that ‘the idea of the whole Cosmos as an entity with consciousness or soul in which all
life participates derives directly from the image of the Great Mother’ (2020: 30).
A shift from lunar to solar imagery, and from feminine to masculine deities, happened around
2000 BC, from which time imagery of the divine feminine was largely repressed or excluded, or
became ‘almost exclusively associated with nature as a chaotic force to be mastered, whereas the
God assumed the role of creating or ordering nature from a “place” that was outside or beyond it’
(Baring, 2020: 31). Arguably the most misogynistic manifestations of this belief, Baring points
out, were the witch trials, instigated in 1485 by Pope Innocent VIII and spanning the 15th to 18th
centuries. Many thousands of women, often herbalists, were tortured and killed (and in the UK,
it was only in 1944 that the last woman was convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 (Morton,
2014)). Ultimately, according to Baring, the loss of respect for nature and for woman, and the current
ecological crisis, can all be traced to this denigration of the feminine over the last four millennia.
McGilchrist and Baring agree on the problematic manifestation of a certain type of science, a
critical rationalism that focuses on the physical dimension and not simply ignores – but proactively
ridicules – anything outside of this perceived reality. 2 Baring states:
We no longer have access to other levels or modes of consciousness because our ‘rational’ mind has,
over the last four centuries, increasingly ridiculed, disparaged and repressed what it has been unable, so
far, to accept, prove or comprehend.
Baring (2020: 491)
2 In his essay on the work of Francis Bacon (1561−1626) who was the so-called founding father of the scientifc method,
Scalercio explains Bacon’s perspective, ‘The purpose of studying nature was to recover man’s original dominion over the
earth, bestowed upon Adam in Eden but lost in the Fall’ (2018: 1080). Other authors describe how Bacon used the way
women suspected of witchcraft were tortured by mechanical devices to extract confessions, as a metaphor to indicate the
methods of inquisition by which he thought nature’s secrets should be extracted (Conner, 2005; Merchant, 1990).
Re-Enchanting Agriculture
value is utility’ (2019: 145) could well be describing a driver for industrial agriculture, where the
right hemisphere’s priorities, such as nature, culture, the body, the arts, spirituality and soul, have
been deconstructed and devitalised. McGilchrist concludes ‘I believe that reductionism has become
a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth, which is blighting our ability to understand what is happening and what we need to do about it’ (2019: xxv).
Whilst this theory may help us to understand the nature of the underlying disorder or mind-virus
that manifests through the industrial worldview, McGilchrist’s otherwise comprehensive work omits
discussion of gender and the feminine. This absence stands out not only because the worldviews of
many of the non-contemporary cultures that McGilchrist refers to were rooted in the feminine, but
also because of the clear parallels of his work with those of feminist scholars. One such is psychologist Anne Baring and her classic work The Dream of the Cosmos: a Quest for the Soul (2020). In
this, Baring attempts to address the roots of Western culture’s multifaceted crisis by exploring its
historical and psychological causes. Echoing McGilchrist’s perspective of the dominant left hemisphere’s inability to hold awareness beyond itself, she asks:
What happens to us if we exist without a relationship to anything beyond our own consciousness? We
are left bereft of relationship with the Cosmos. Psychic energy that has nowhere to go implodes on
itself… Recognising nothing beyond ourselves, we become both infated and diminished.
Baring (2020: xvii)
Baring similarly talks of a malignant pathology and the need for release from our current defective
worldview. Whereas McGilchrist identifes the historical decline of key civilisations (the Greeks,
Romans and post-Enlightenment West) as triggers for the increasing entrenchment of the left hemisphere, Baring points the fnger at two erroneously held beliefs of the three Abrahamic religious
cultures (Judaism, Christianity and Islam): the myth that a woman caused the expulsion of humans
from Eden, and the belief that humans are separate from both God and nature. Baring notes that,
prior to this, cultures dating to 40,000 BC emphasised the feminine (e.g., see Marshack, 1972), and
she explains that ‘the idea of the whole Cosmos as an entity with consciousness or soul in which all
life participates derives directly from the image of the Great Mother’ (2020: 30).
A shift from lunar to solar imagery, and from feminine to masculine deities, happened around
2000 BC, from which time imagery of the divine feminine was largely repressed or excluded, or
became ‘almost exclusively associated with nature as a chaotic force to be mastered, whereas the
God assumed the role of creating or ordering nature from a “place” that was outside or beyond it’
(Baring, 2020: 31). Arguably the most misogynistic manifestations of this belief, Baring points
out, were the witch trials, instigated in 1485 by Pope Innocent VIII and spanning the 15th to 18th
centuries. Many thousands of women, often herbalists, were tortured and killed (and in the UK,
it was only in 1944 that the last woman was convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 (Morton,
2014)). Ultimately, according to Baring, the loss of respect for nature and for woman, and the current
ecological crisis, can all be traced to this denigration of the feminine over the last four millennia.
McGilchrist and Baring agree on the problematic manifestation of a certain type of science, a
critical rationalism that focuses on the physical dimension and not simply ignores – but proactively
ridicules – anything outside of this perceived reality. 2 Baring states:
We no longer have access to other levels or modes of consciousness because our ‘rational’ mind has,
over the last four centuries, increasingly ridiculed, disparaged and repressed what it has been unable, so
far, to accept, prove or comprehend.
Baring (2020: 491)
2 In his essay on the work of Francis Bacon (1561−1626) who was the so-called founding father of the scientifc method,
Scalercio explains Bacon’s perspective, ‘The purpose of studying nature was to recover man’s original dominion over the
earth, bestowed upon Adam in Eden but lost in the Fall’ (2018: 1080). Other authors describe how Bacon used the way
women suspected of witchcraft were tortured by mechanical devices to extract confessions, as a metaphor to indicate the
methods of inquisition by which he thought nature’s secrets should be extracted (Conner, 2005; Merchant, 1990).