The best part of this book was the Preface & Introduction. After that, it went downhill and so did my interest. Had to fight to stay awake from sentence to sentence.


Review: 2000-07-26

Flat treatment of important topic
This is a book on the important topic of ecofeminism. The author wants to show how the modern destruction of nature and our environment ties in with the subjugation of women during the same period. However, to understand how these assaults occurred, we have to first examine the history of ideas. As Merchant shows, these destructive attitudes toward women and nature reflect changing ideas of how we think about people and our place in the world. What characterizes this new way of thinking which began about 500 years ago is the idea that trees, colors, ideas, people, in short, the entire cosmos, are really just the mechanical actions of matter in motion, no matter how much things may seem otherwise. From this modern perspective, the natural world and everything in it really amounts to a gigantic machine in motion, thereby debasing our ordinary experience of that world. Nonetheless, this reduction of things to numbers greatly helps the rise of modern science, especially technology, by showing how mathematics can be applied concretely and experimentally to just about everything there is. Moreover, during this period, how people think about society also changes. Society too is conceived as a colossal machine, a human one, possessing definite structures, with components conceived as self-contained and independent little atoms, who associate with one another not because of inner need but because of external advantage. Thus, moral philosophy too, follows modern thinking by becoming a credo of "it's okay for the selfish man to get ahead in life", while economic science becomes a means of determining how we can all get ahead without destroying the social fabric. Or, put another way, we're really only interested in ourselves, but cooperate with others as a means of gaining our own ends and avoiding a consuming war of all against all. It's not too hard to see the seeds of destructive assault in such thinking.

Nature thus undergoes a profound change from the traditional conception of nurturing mother to one of dead machine, that is, from an object of affection to an object of subjugation and exploitation. Correspondingly, the traditionally moral way of looking at our natural surroundings changes to a non-moral, strictly neutral, it-is-there-to-be-used point of view. Moreover, these new aggressive attitudes are associated with how men should act, are supposed to act; while women,on the other hand, are thought of (like nature) as passive, there-to-be-used objects of exploitation. Such thinking thus enables industry and technology to historically combine in an ongoing assault upon the environment, on one hand, and women, on the other. What is needed, of course, is a new way of thinking that will end these horrific abuses - What has changed, can be changed. Unfortunately, Merchant treats this fascinating subject in a lifeless manner. She walks through the historical precedents in dry, uninspired, and thoroughly descriptive fashion, leaving the impression of an embroidered postgraduate dissertation. Her thesis cries out for greater color, synthesis and argumentation. As a student of the humanist philosopher Theodore Roszak, she could use more of his chutzpah.

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