The return of the Age of Water

I am by now convinced that Charles Eisenstein is the metaphysician of the emerging peer to peer era.

Here’s the latest manifestation of his luminous writing, an excerpt from a longer piece.

Charles Eisenstein:

“For tens of thousands of years, fire has defined our civilization. It is fire that has allowed us to smelt metals, to purify chemicals, to power cars, trains and airplanes, to pave over the earth and travel to the moon. Without fire there would be no silicon chips, no pharmaceutical drugs, no plastic toys, no guns or bombs, no televisions or computers. Ours is surely an Age of Fire — an age which is rapidly drawing to a close.

The Age of Fire is an age of separation, during which humans have sought to dominate and control nature. From the very beginning, the circle of the campfire divided the world into two parts: the safe, domestic part, and the Wild. Here was the hearth, the center of the circle of domesticity. Here was warmth, keeping the cold world at a distance. Here was safety, keeping predators at bay. Here was light, defining a human realm but making the night beyond all the deeper, all the more alien. Outside the circle of firelight was the other, the wild, the unknown.

The Age of Fire is also an age of domination. The original technologies of fire mostly employed wood, thereby removing it from the normal biological cycle and preempting the natural flow of matter and energy. No longer did it nourish generations of insects, fungi, and soil. This arrogation of wood’s oxidative energy to human purposes defined very early on the dominating relationship that technology embodies; today, the same logic sees all the materials of the world as “resources,” classifying them according to their usefulness to man. Today we burn oil, not wood, but the mentality of burning is the same: the arrogation of stored energy to human purposes of control, accompanied by the degradation of other phases of the cycle in an unsustainable pretense of eternal linear growth.

The unsustainability of our present system derives from its linearity, its assumption of an infinite reservoir of inputs and limitless capacity for waste. Fire is a fitting metaphor for such a system, for it involves a one-way conversion of matter from one form to another, liberating energy-heat and light-in the process. Just as our economy is burning through all forms of stored cultural and natural wealth to liberate energy in the form of money, so also does our industry burn up stored fossil fuels to liberate the energy that powers our technology. Both generate heat for a while, but also increasing amounts of cold, dead, toxic ash and pollution, whether the ash-heap of wasted human lives or the strip-mine pits and toxic waste dumps of industry.

It is not that fire is unnatural. Fire, along with its biological counterpart of oxidation, is a stage of a natural cycle. Our folly is to act as if that stage could exist permanently and independently. Only someone who cannot see the whole of reality would say, “Of course we can keep the fire burning forever-when it burns low we’ll just add more fuel.” To believe that a larger and larger fire can be sustained forever is transparently absurd. While fuel is plentiful, perhaps, the delusion might be sustained. But today it is increasingly evident that we are running out of fuel-both social capital and natural “resources”-even as we suffocate in the ash.
The end of the Age of Fire promises a reversal of the course of separation and domination that fire has fueled. Immersed as we are in the ideology of separation, it is hard to conceive of a mode of technology that does not involve the objectification, domination, and control of nature. Yet such technologies exist, even if we hardly recognize them as such. They are based not on fire but on earth, water, light, sound, and the human body. Rooted in an ancient past, they nonetheless carry the promise of a “new age.” Who knows what unconscious wisdom has named it the “Age of Aquarius”? But I shall call it the Age of Water.

Water (to risk stating the obvious) carries metaphorical connotations very different from those of fire. Water denies linearity: cycling endlessly, it is also the agent of nature’s cycles, nourishing both growth and decay. Similarly it resists separation: named the “universal solvent,” it tends away from purity to partake of its environment. Water is also the nemesis of control. Seeking out the tiniest crack, nothing can hold it in. As waves in the ocean, it destroys any bulwark. Whereas fire burns clean and purifies what it touches, water makes a mess. Hence the key to preserving anything-houses, books, food, clothes, metal-is to keep it dry.
Water, with its cycles and flows, its unruliness and its ubiquity on earth, could be called the essence of nature. Our dependence on water — the fact that we are made mostly of water-denies the primary conceit of civilization, that we are separate from nature or even nature’s master. No more nature’s master are we, than we are the master of water!

Yet for centuries we have tried to persuade ourselves otherwise. In science our pretense of mastery manifests most fundamentally in the supposition that water is a structureless jumble of identical molecules, a generic medium, any two drops the same. To a standard substance we can apply universal equations. That each part of the universe is unique is profoundly troubling to any science based on the general application of standard techniques. The same is true of technology. Only a universe constructed of generic building blocks is amenable to control. Just as the architectural engineer assumes that two steel beams of identical composition will have identical properties, so does the chemist believe the same of two samples of pure H2O.

That any two samples of H2O, or graphite, or ethanol, or any other pure chemical are identical is a dogma with enormous ramifications. It implies that the complexity and uniqueness of objects of our senses is an illusion, that they are mere permutations of the same standard building blocks. Such a view naturally corresponds to the objectification of the world, which makes of it a collection of things, masses.

The opposite view sees every piece of the universe as unique. No two drops of water, no two rocks, no two electrons are identical, but each has a unique individuality. This is essentially the view of animism, which assigned to each animate and inanimate object a spirit. To a Stone Age person, the idea that water from any source had a unique character or spirit would have seemed obvious. Modern chemistry denies it and says any apparent differences are merely due to impurities — the underlying water is the same. Animism say no-to have a spirit is to be unique, irreducibly and intrinsically unique. To have a spirit is to be special.
With the dawning of the Age of Water, we return to our animistic roots and recognize the unique, enspirited nature of each drop of water and indeed every substance in the universe. Not even the field of chemistry is immune to this paradigm shift, as it becomes increasingly apparent that water does indeed exhibit structure on several levels. Even within the mainstream, chemists and materials scientists are now recognizing that structure maintained by hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces is responsible for many of water’s anomalous properties. Few, however, believe that this structure can convey information to biological systems. Yes, water has structure, they might admit, but there is no signal in the noise.”

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.