The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [498]
Another respect in which the headlong rush of technological advance was now inspiring a reaction - although again its origins first appeared in the 1960s - lay in the growing sense that it represented a collective hubris which was threatening to destroy all life on earth. Increasingly prominent in the 1970s was the worldwide environmental movement, which had developed its own `narrative' centred on what it saw as man's reckless over-exploitation of the earth's natural resources and the ever-increasing pollution of land, sea and air caused by the waste products of his material self-indulgence. As the world's forests were laid waste, as human activity led each year to the extinction of thousands of other species, as the earth's atmosphere (according to the narrative) became subject to potentially disastrous chemical changes, humanity's defiance of nature for its own egocentric advantage was casting Homo sapiens as a cosmic `cuckoo in the nest': the ultimate `monster'. And nowhere was the ambivalence of `the spirit of Loki' more obvious than in the way dramatic advances in medical knowledge and agricultural technology were helping to promote an explosion in the world's human population. Whenever in nature such an exponential rise was observed in the numbers of any other species, this was invariably the prelude to a devastating population collapse.
No single image did more to bring all this home than than `Earthrise, the picture taken by the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 by the first men to orbit the moon, showing the Earth rising above the lifeless lunar landscape. There floating, unimaginably beautiful, in the blackness of space was the soft blue image of the world they had left: the place which was home to themselves and to every known form of life; the only true source of their identity; the living centre of all meaning and existence. In that unforgettable image Earth became a symbol of the Self. Yet now, through that same hyper-developed consciousness which had enabled Homo sapiens for the first time to step outside the confines of the Earth where nature had placed him, an ever-lengthening shadow was stretching across all those fragile ecosystems and natural balances which allowed life on that planet to survive. The Earth itself had become a symbol of that wholeness against which the collective ego of mankind was now in potentially catastrophic rebellion.
The response to this awakening perception was, on the one hand, an apocalyptic sense that, unless the human race took the most drastic steps to mend its ways and curb its material appetites, life on Earth must be doomed to destruction. On the other, there was no sign that the measures humanity was prepared to take to reduce its despoliation of the natural world were anything more than sentimental gestures. `Environmentalism' thus became another expression of `ego-Self confusion'. A vocal minority worked up a tremendous sense of self-righteousness about the need to `save the planet'; while mankind as a whole (including most of the would-be planet-savers themselves) carried on consuming and destroying its natural resources at a greater rate than ever.
The `age of Mother'
The two decades which followed the late 1950s had seen a shift in the ruling consciousness of the Western world which was without precedent. We can catch a little glimpse of this change in comparing two British films made twenty years apart but each based on the same event, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
A Night to Remember (1958), recreated this familiar tragic story according to the values dominant during the Second World War and the decade which followed. The film showed the liner's passengers as a microcosm of pre-First World War society, divided between an `upper world' of aristocrats and millionaires travelling in firstclass