He Was Wrong About The Moon

Present-day fringe theorists often cite the case of Galileo (1564-1642) as proof that they're right and the authorities are wrong. It's true that Galileo was constantly in conflict with the intellectual establishment of his time, and that history has proved him to be on the winning side on all the big issues. The Earth really does move around the Sun, and heavy objects really do fall at the same rate as light ones. But is Galileo really such a good role model? Unlike the armchair scientists and internet cranks of today, Galileo didn't always get it right.

To start with, it's worth dispelling a couple of tenacious myths about Galileo. The first myth is that he set out to disprove the Bible. In fact, it's clear from his Selected Writings" that he had no problems at all with the Bible: "Holy Scripture can never lie or be in error... nonetheless some of its interpreters or expositors can. All of Galileo's arguments are aimed not at the Bible but at the Greek philosopher Aristotle-who was held by the Church to be second only to the Bible in authority.

Galileo used the Biblical story of Joshua, where God caused the Sun to stand still in order to lengthen the day, as evidence that the Aristotelian earth-centred model is wrong, and the Copernican sun-centred model is correct: "This passage of scripture clearly demonstrates the impossibility of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world system, and on the contrary fits perfectly well with the system of Copernicus. Galileo argues (correctly) that making the Sun stand still in the Aristotelian view would actually shorten the day, not lengthen it (since the length of the day is set by the "Primum Mobile", and the Sun moves backwards relative to this). What you actually need to do is freeze up the whole Solar System. Galileo had observed the Sun to rotate on its own axis, and believed (wrongly) that this rotation was the source of all the motion in the Solar System-hence he argued it was this rotation that God halted in the story of Joshua.

Another myth-conception is that the Church prohibited Galileo from writing about the Sun-centred theory, and that his 'crime' was to defy this prohibition. Actually, the Church "encouraged "him to write about the theory... as long as he ended up debunking it, or at least showing that the truth couldn't be proved one way or the other. What he was prohibited from doing was offering any concrete proof that Copernicus was right and Aristotle was wrong. But that's what he did, and that's what got him into trouble.

The hilarious thing (and now I'm finally getting to the point of the article) is that Galileo's proof was rubbish. At the time, no-one knew what caused sea tides-Galileo's fellow Copernican Kepler believed they were due to the influence of the Moon, but Galileo dismissed this as mystical mumbo-jumbo ("Of all the great men who have speculated on this marvellous effect of nature, the one who most astonishes me is Kepler... he had grasped the motions attributed to the Earth, and yet he still listened and assented to the notion of the Moon's influence on the water, and occult properties, and similar childish ideas.") Galileo was convinced the tides were a direct result of the Earth's motion, in the same way water sloshes around in a vase when you move it. But Galileo was wrong about this... and he was wrong about the Moon having nothing to do with the tides!

You might think that, having upset the Irish nation last week by suggesting that St Patrick was British, I've now lurched on Boris Johnson style to insult the Italians-by pointing out the single occasion on which Galileo made a mistake. But it's worse than that... he made another mistake as well! Galileo believed that orbits had to be perfectly circular (again, this was a disagreement with Kepler). This created a problem in the case of comets, which are on manifestly non-circular orbits. Galileo's solution was to dismiss comets as not really existing at all-merely an illusion caused by the Sun reflecting off the upper layers of the atmosphere!

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Unitary Animist Worldviews

It is sometimes said that animist worldviews are unitary, totalized, and seamless. What does this mean? At a first approximation, it means that such worldviews are distinctly and adamantly non-dualist. Animist worldviews neither recognize nor use a series of dichotomies that we tend to take for granted and which are prevalent, if not dominant, in modernist worldviews. These dichotomies include (but are not limited to):

* Nature/Supernature
* Physical/Metaphysical
* Matter/Spirit
* Material/Ethereal

In the absence of these dichotomies, the world presents - or rather is constructed as - a seamless unity in which people, animals, landscapes, plants, things, ideas, and events are connected, even if the precise nature of those connections is unknown or mysterious. This seamless unity stands in stark contrast to the series of dualisms that dominate the kinds of politico-religious formations that are generally known as "modern" or "world" religions.

It is my contention that these conceptual dualisms arose in conjunction with and as a consequence of the Neolithic transition. The process, I surmise, began with the newly built environment featuring the settlement and house. From this materiality flows ideas about inner/outer and private/public. In these seemingly innocent dualisms we find conceptual seeds that will eventually sprout into ideas about property, ownership, wealth, and distinction. From the early Neolithic through the post-Neolithic present, we find a multiplying or cascading series of dualisms on which everything will come - or be made - to rest. It is this constant sundering and splintering of things that so bewilders animists who are exposed to (or resist) Neolithicization.

As I read and understand the animist ethnographic record, this is what separates animist worldviews from the many different kinds of sociocultural and ideological formations that arise in Neolithic and post-Neolithic societies. This also explains why animist worldviews cannot be made to lie down on the procrustean bed of "religion." It further explains why I contend that "religion" slowly originates out of the Neolithic transition and is particular to post-Neolithic societies. There is no such parceled and constructed thing as "religion" in animist worldviews. The only people who find "religion" in that worldview are those who conceive religion as a something like a natural, timeless, essential, and universal category.

There is today a growing and sophisticated body of research that is sometimes called the "new animism." Considered in all its variety and as a whole, this scholarship describes a fully integrated and comprehensive way of being in, knowing about, and relating to the world. Animist worldviews make no distinction between the symbolic world of the mind and the physical world in which minds are embedded. Animist worldviews seamlessly bridge or join those worlds and thus literally and figuratively "make sense." There is no "nature" that exists separate and apart from "supernature." There is simply one reality, one world, and one cosmos. Everything within this unified cosmos - perception, thought, action, experience, and event - is connected and hence "real." Animist worldviews are, in this sense, seamless, unitary, and totalizing.

While I would like to take credit for these ideas, I have done little more than piece them together from various sources. The intellectual godfather of this conception is Irving Hallowell, whose classic work (pdf) on Ojibway ontology paved the way toward this understanding of animist worldviews. His ideas were brilliantly extended by Nurit Bird-David and her understanding of these worldviews as a "relational epistemology" and "cosmic economy of sharing." Embedded within the latter is an "ethic," which is a category and construct that modernists (and philosophers) usually treat as something separate and apart. This separateness is of course a legacy of Cartesian dualism. Bruce Charlton, for his part, extended these ideas yet further by considering animist worldviews as a "relational ontology." This ontological treatment is perhaps most brilliantly expressed in the work of Tim Ingold, whose "rhizomatic" understanding of animist worldviews is profound.

For those who want an "operational" analysis of animist ontology, Ingold's analysis is the place to start. In a
Given the radical differences between animist worldviews and modernist worldviews, it can be difficult to wrap your mind around them. The best way to do this is, in my estimation, to read long and deep in the hunter-gatherer Record. This will, of course, always result only in partial understanding because animist worldviews are lived and experienced in ways that elude capture through written records. They are deeply embedded in particular lifeways and oral traditions, in addition to being deeply embodied within ancestral or non-agricultural environments.

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