EARTHWALK
240 Pages
Doubleday Publishing
Published 1974
SYNOPSIS
Once there was a man who lost his legs and was blinded in an accident. To compensate for his losses he developed great strength and agility in his hands and arms, and great acuity in hearing. He composed magnificent music and performed amazing feats. Others were so impressed with his achievements they had themselves blinded and their legs amputated.
With this parable Philip Slater begins one of the most insightful analysis of Western culture ever written. In The Pursuit of Loneliness Slater discussed our inability to live as social beings; in Earthwalk he goes to the very roots of the ideas most basic to Western culture: the idea of progress, the supremacy of scientific rationalism, the goal; of self-sufficiency, the postponement of gratification. He sees Western culture as founded on schizoid detachment.
But Earthwalk is not an attack or a prophecy of doom. It shows how humanity’s futile and self-destructive efforts to “rise above” its own ecological system (such as the people in the above parable) have been co-opted by nature to heal herself. Earthwalk shows how systems and societies change—how they destroy and reconstitute themselves, how conflict is mobilized to produce balance.
REVIEWS
"Probably around a dozen of my stories and novels have had takeoff points somewhere in Earthwalk.”
John Barnes
“[Slater] also has a sharp eye for both social irrationalities and the images and contexts to express them, so he offers lively reading.”
Sarah Sanborn, New York Times
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EXCERPTS
“In relation to women, men have taken the stance assumed by the warrior-aristocrat toward the peasant: ‘If you will feed me, I will protect you.’ Before long, of course, every protection contract becomes a protection racket: ‘Give me what I want and I will protect you against me.’”
“Despair ... is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it's a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.”
"The kind of growth Western culture has experienced over the past three hundred years would be considered a sign of gross malfunction in any other context. Healthy growth is paced differently - it does not absorb or destroy everything living around it. It is cancerous cells that grow and reproduce rapidly in total disregard of their connection with surrounding cells. From this viewpoint technology would have to be regarded as a cancer on human culture, Western culture as a cancer on the human species, and the human species as a cancer on terrestrial life - a cancer that may in the end be treated by radiation and radical surgery at the same time."