"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

79
This new idea-system… I shall simply call Humanism, because it can only be
based on our understanding of man and his relations with the rest of the
environment. It must be focused on man as an organism, though one with unique
properties. It must be organized round the facts and ideas of evolution, taking
account of the discovery that man is part of a comprehensive evolutionary
process, and cannot avoid playing a decisive role in it.
Such an Evolutionary Humanism is necessarily unitary instead of dualistic,
affirming the unity of mind and body; universal instead of particularist, affirming
the continuity of man with the rest of life, and of life with the rest of the universe;
naturalistic instead of supernaturalist, affirming the unity of the spiritual and
material; and global instead of divisive, affirming the unity of all mankind. (73)
Livingstone demonstrates through his poetry that anthropocentrism is not
sustainable in ecological terms. He articulates a reverence for nature, but portrays
Darwinism not as the survival of the fittest with man at the top of the food chain, but
from the perspective of a common ancestor. He prods his readers into contemplating the
fact that humanity originated, along with other organisms, as a microbe in the primeval
soup, and so puts us in our place.
Williams claims that “nothing much can be done until we are able to see the
causes of this alienation of nature” (1990: 82). This is also Livingstone’s preoccupation.
It is, perhaps, an irresolvable problem and it frequently leads Livingstone into a position
of ecological despair. He repeatedly examines the problem of humankind’s alienation
from and of nature. Williams points out that there is no going back. While “many writers
have created an idea of a rural past” (82), this use of pastoralism seriously underestimates
the problem. Livingstone uses the pastoral mode in only a few poems and then often
ironically. In the poems which do portray man and nature as united the tone is almost
always one of yearning. This yearning for a lost synthesis or state of innocence
paradoxically both serves to compound the despair and to offer hope. This is an example
of the tension between reason and imagination where a reasoned view of the present state
of the world points to a position of despair while an imagined view of a pastoral ideal
reawakens hope in the human heart. Livingstone uses both reason and imagination. His
reason is philosophically and scientifically informed, but he often urges his readers to
imagine the microbial activities which support our physical world, thereby taking science
(which contributed, especially during the Enlightenment, to humanity’s separation from
nature) and using it as an imaginative tool for a synthesis between man and nature. Both
evolution and microbial activity inform his poetry. Livingstone thus uses what Williams