ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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socio-erotic provides a metaphor that better resonates with the shift from a
spirituality-based essentialism to a historically situated relationality.
By appreciating the meaning of the socio-erotic, the dimensions of social
desire, we valorize the immense beauty, power, and intelligence that marks our
most sensual, empathetic, and developmental ways of relating. Far from being
reductive, we may elaborate an appreciation for the stunning potential of
humanity to express its relationality in sensual, creative, and dynamic ways.
Thus, if the socio-erotic is the oppisite of anything, it is not spirituality or the
sacred, but to capitalist rationalization, and an anti-humanism that reduces
humanity to a cold and controlling anti-sodal species; a portrayal that dismisses
and trivializes the potential of humanity for engendering institutions that
nurture the most empathetic and sensual expression of social and ecological
relationships.
By viewing meaningful experiences through the lens of the sodo-erotic
we regain a poetic appredation of the diverse expressions of human sodality.
We root our goodness not in spirituality or in romantic purity, but in our
humanness, a humanness that is derived from and constituted by, natural
history itself. It is deeply radical to assert what is potentially good in humanity
during cruel and truly anti-human times such as these. In a neo-liberal era in
which the majority of humanity is exploited, despised, and tyrannized, it is an
act of the greatest empathy to recognize within those who are not free, the
potential for beauty, intelligence, cooperation, and freedom.
In an era dominated by Christianity and neo-liberal capitalism, it is
tempting to yield to portrayals of a humanity that is inevitably flawed, selfish,
and ecologically destructive, a spedes inherently opposed to an innocent and
pristine natural world. The anti-humanism that peivades the radical ecology
movement, an anti-humanism that encodes ‘knowledge’ and ‘rationality’ as
sinful or regressive, perpetuates the religious myth of a world that ‘fell’ because
of humanity’s quest for knowledge and pleasure. In turn, the romantic idealism
that marks ecological discussions encourages us to idealize ‘nature’ (while
hating our ‘flawed’ selves) rather than resist sodal institutions that allow the
anti-sodal few to degrade the rest of humanity and the natural world.
Ecological romantidsm allows us to keep sodal hierarchies intact, constructing
idealized ‘nature preserves’ or ‘natural products’ for the pleasure and guilt
reduction of the privileged few.
The sodo-erotic represents the attempt to further differentiate the idea of
sodal desire, differentiating in turn, the cooperative impulse itself: elaborating
the desire for mutualism and an ethical and oppositional progression toward a
utopian horizon. Our vocabulary for describing moments of desire has been
impoverished for centuries; indeed, it has been limited to the language of
energistic, individualistic, and romantic drives for material acquisition, status,