Summary: Returning to Nature

In this essay, the author introduced four eras of human nature to readers. At the
beginning of the essay, through the framework and some ideas of Thomas Berry and
Marshall McLuhan, the author gives some opinions of four eras of communications and
some of his analyses.
This essay explores the long cultural journey of humanity from the primal culture up
to the postmodern culture. The first culture is the primal culture, which called The
Organic Root-Metaphor and Matrifocal Tribal Community. At the beginning of this era,
people live in a society without hierarchical. The structure of culture is a matriarchal
system period. People call this Earth-Mother Goddess. Gradually, with the ending of
matriarchy and the establishment of mans dominance in the society, womens role,
known as the second sex, changed from the rule of society into the subjugated of men.
The second culture is classical culture that called The Hierarchical Root-Metaphor,
Patriarchal-Aristocratic City-States, and Mercantile Empires. This is the second form of
culture in the human journey. In this era, the matriarchal society into a patriarchal society,
people built great agricultural empires through violent plunder. Aristotle, which was one
of the greatest philosophers coming in this period. Against this human background, both
the urban and rural setting, one of the historys most influential civilizations took shape,
leaving behind a cultural legacy that survives in part today.
Then is the Modern Culture, which called The Mechanistic Root-Metaphors, HyperMasculine Bourgeois Nation-States, and Industrial Empires. In this period, the western
capitalism was on the rise, in the emergence of this new bourgeois process, Western
culture went through a series of traumatic spiritual, philosophical, religious, scientific,

political and economic revolutions, all of which progressively ushered in the modern
Western industrial-colonial world in both capitalist and socialist forms.
The last one is the Postmodern Culture, which called The Root-Metaphor of
Creative-Communion, the New Global Civilization, and Sustainable Local Communities.
We are all living in postmodern times. This statement is an acknowledgement of
postmodernisms influence on contemporary culture. In this essay, the author told us this
is a global postmodern era, concern about the development of human settlements and
prospects for urban ecological sustainability is rising around the world.
As the author said, only a civilization that cares for Earth, that leans from it, and the
drinks of its spiritual nourishment will be a sustainable civilization for the future
(Holland, 2010, p10). Through the four eras of the human nature, the human civilization
involves. At the same time, with the development of human civilization, our
understanding of the era is not like what we saw, some problem are manifest, such as the
return of poor, unemployed. However, these are the process of human civilization, as war
is repugnant, peace is welcome. While peace is the ultimate goal of all our undertaking in
this world, war has been inevitable in the course of human civilization.