The Age of Seperation

Today there is much talk about how human beings are becoming more and more connected to each other via jet travel, global trade, the Internet, social networking, and more. There is certainly a lot to support this claim. And, yet, simultaneously, it seems that we are also becoming more separate from ourselves and each other and planet Earth. 

The separation that I am referring to often begins at birth when the modem mother—conditioned by her culture to believe that she (unlike all mothers down through history) no longer knows how to give birth—separates from her innate biological intelligence, surrendering her autonomy to medical directives at the time of childbirth. Then, within a year of being born, the newborn is often sepa­rated from her family and placed in a day care facility. 

Next comes school, where children are separated by age and test scores, and often socioeco­nomic status, and taught that in order to learn it is necessary to observe at a distance—in short, to separate from the subject of interest.

Later, as adults, we are expected to exchange our life energy for an abstraction­money—and, in so doing, often engage in work that distances, or separates, us from our soul’s deepest yearnings. Later still, as we get up in years, it is increasingly likely that we will enter—or be placed in—a retirement home, separated from the rest of society. Finally, in our dying, we run the risk of being separated from our personal dignity, insofar as we give the medical system permission to enact our death for us.

In some measure, from birth to death, we all swim in these waters of separation, often without even knowing it. No surprise, then, that separation consciousness is woven into most, if not all, of our societal institutions. For example, religion (for all its merits) sometimes contributes to separation by dichotomizing the world—saved versus fallen, my religion versus your religion. Government institutions such as justice, welfare, and education—in subtle and not so subtle ways—separate us from our indi­vidual integrity by cultivating dependency, even helplessness. Modern technologies (in addition to their benefits) can create separation by luring us with comfort and efficiency, often at the expense of personal know-how and interdependence. Science, with its emphasis on abstract models and numbers, also creates separation (for better or worse) by objectifying all in its purview.

Don’t get me wrong. Every day we each have myriad opportunities to experience connection through our relationships with those in our families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, and workplaces. Yet, it bears noting that we live within a larger system of beliefs and institutions that often engender separation.

Separation is pervasive, in no small part, because those of us born in the West have inherited, at birth, a way of thinking called “dualism.” It was Aristotle who formally presented dualism as a worldview. Everything in the world, according to Aristotle, was either one way or the other: black or white, true or not true, superior or inferior. Aristotle called this the “Law of the Excluded Middle.” It could just as easily have been called the “Law of Separation.” 

Yes, it seems that we have been socialized, to varying degrees, to believe that humans are superior to nature, that rich is superior to poor, that reason is superior to intuition, and so on. Dualism is the seedbed of fundamentalism, that all-too-common thought meme that seduces us into believing that my gender, my school, my values, my religion, my opinions, my politics, my race, my nation is superior to yours.

Source: “Developing Ecological Consciousness,” from Christopher Uhl