Michel de Montaigne and Thomas Hobbes make a superficially unlikely pairing. Montaigne, a minor French nobleman and literary immortal, invented the essay in its modern form and is a hero of the skeptical, sensual, anti-systematic humanism that takes the essay as its model for living: a series of reflective experiments, sallies into circumstance, that weigh opinion against experience on the imperfect scale of human judgment. Montaigne boasted, or confessed – that it was hard to say which was part of his art – that he took himself as his topic, and turned to old books for exercise, not knowledge. He wrote candidly about his sexual appetites, his pleasures and the waning of his powers; about his agonizing kidney stones, the habits of his bowels, and his soft-hearted hatred of cruelty. Although he took as his motto a skeptic’s question – What do I know? – and wrote with a self-irony that kept that motto always in view, he left us a devastating attack on European atrocities in the Americas, and a finely sympathetic portrait of indigenous American societies. His essays inspired such anti-systematic writers as Emerson, Thoreau, and Nietzsche, and a recent book on his thought is titled, quite appropriately, How to Live – for Montaigne, the necessary question, but one with no single answer.
Hobbes was born in 1588, four years before Montaigne’s death, and famously joked that, as a child of the year the Spanish Armada menaced England, he was born a twin of Fear. If the joke seems as grandiose as it is grimly elegant, that is Hobbes. He was among the very first systematic political philosophers in a line stretching to the present: deriving a theory of politics from an account of knowledge and human interests, he made arguments about language, law, and the nature of obligation that remain vital in professional philosophy. Because he attributed nearly absolute power to government, and made arguments that seemed to invite atheism (even as they stopped short of embracing that stance), he was long the dark shadow of modern thought, a haunting nemesis whom his successors could not escape. It seems certain that no study of Hobbes’s thought will be called How to Live.
Yet the two, taken together, show the coherence of an early-modern project that they shared: the emancipation from fear, which was also emancipation from a certain way of experiencing nature. This may seem wrong: Hobbes, as his quip acknowledges, was a philosopher of fear, revivalist of the pessimistic motto that “man is a wolf to man” and author of a political theory motivated by escape from a natural life both unpleasant and brief. Hobbes, though, was an educator of fear, concerned above all to distinguish those unpleasant things that humans had reason to avoid from those terrors and panics that were only projections of human feeling onto the mutable canvas of the natural world. He and Montaigne shared the view that people were, mainly, victims of their own minds, of the persistent and predictable misfires of intelligence. Motivated to preserve ourselves and satisfy our own desires, struggling to understand, predict, and control the natural forces that bore down on us from all sides, and always alert to threats from one another, people created fantasy worlds, systems of authority and meaning, realms of good and evil, which had no basis in reality, and which they nonetheless tried, tragically, to inhabit. These mistakes were the great source of dissatisfaction and self-hatred in personal life – a great concern for Montaigne – and of sectarian violence in politics, which motivated both men’s thought.
Between Montaigne’s birth, in 1533, and Hobbes’s death, in 1679, the two saw much of the European wars of religion, the battles between Catholics and Protestants, and among Protestant sects, in which Europeans turned Western Christendom from a kind of coherent civilization into a slaughterhouse and, frequently, recast politics into a kind of demonology, trading bloody-minded speculation about who in power might be Beelzebub or the Whore of Babylon. These wars had the same force for thinking about social, political, and religious order as the World Wars and genocides of the twentieth century had for thought about peace and progress. Familiar certainties came to seem like dangerous complacency, and new ideas, or at least serious reconstruction, now seemed necessary. Both men felt the wars of their times personally. Montaigne served as a diplomat, apparently trusted by Catholic and Protestant alike, and once saw his house and family seat invaded in the chaos and opportunism of war. Horror at the savagery of religious violence was a compass-point of his writings, which are a kind of therapeutic search for the origin of this violence and a technique to drain its power. Hobbes went into exile in France with the court of the crypto-Catholic Charles II after Parliamentary forces, with the strong support of Protestant radicals, executed Charles I and established a republic. The royalists’ violent reaction to the secular tendencies of Leviathan, today his best-known work in the English-speaking world, sent him back to England in 1651, and for the rest of his long life he was actually or prospectively harried by a mixture of religious and political persecution. His joke about fear was bleakly self-ironic: circumstance pressed a frightened life on him.
Both thinkers took aim at the sources of gratuitous, avoidable fear, the ways that people became dangerous to themselves and one another. This meant, in a curious way, that both men were enemies of imagination, the mind’s inventive habit of ascribing meaning to nature’s patterns, and the creative capacity to rework experience into speculative myths or theological inquiry. Although such speculation was an utterly predictable, perhaps nearly unavoidable expression of human intelligence, if taken seriously it led always to trouble, and too often to violence.
Both Hobbes and Montaigne offered to renovate the human predicament by understanding it in a new way. Both cleared the ground for their work by comprehensively dismantling the conceits of human knowledge. Skeptical arguments, to the effect that people could know very little, and that most putative knowledge was delusion, were well established in elite humanist circles, and both thinkers put them to extensive use. Montaigne asked how people could claim to know the meaning of such terms as honor, or beauty, when history and modern cultural diversity showed the many inconsistent meanings those ideas had borne, or to know anything about the nature of the universe, when philosophers and theologians had rehearsed the same arguments for millennia without settling much of anything. Hobbes devastatingly defined religion as “fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed,” and superstition as the same fear, only “imagined from tales” that were publicly disapproved (L 42). Our religious theories, and theories of the universe, came first from “anxiety,” our restless questing in the dark to understand a daunting world, and, second, from our habit of speculating outward from what we could know to what we could not – a God behind the world, to whom we then assigned a hodge-podge of qualities (L 75-76). Montaigne judged that “we have strangely overpaid” for our “fine reason” (358). Our capacity for reflection made us “slaves of hope … for shadows and vain images that fancy dangles before them – which hasten and prolong their flight the more they are pursued,” and made us miserable, for “He who fears he will suffer, already suffers from his fear” (840). In their demolitions of epistemic conceit, Montaigne described experience as perched on the dung-heap where reason voided its waste, and Hobbes sketched the most unsentimental and pessimistic portrait ever of the natural human condition.
For all their attacks on the paradoxes of hubristic speculation, both were interested in applying reason to a most radical project: the divinization of human beings. Hobbes opened Leviathan by comparing the voluntary creation of a commonwealth, “an artificial man … of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended,” with “that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.” The point was not lost on Hobbes’s bitter enemies, such as the naturalist and theologian John Ray, who argued that “whatever agent can introduce a form into indisposed matter … must be superior to any natural one, not to say omnipotent.” Montaigne ended his Essays with an approving quote from Plutarch, with which, he claimed, the Athenians had welcome Pompey into their city: “You are as much a god as you will own/That you are nothing but a man alone,” and with this gloss: “It is an absolute perfection, and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.” For Hobbes, because religious doctrines and ideas of legitimacy and justice had no basis in knowable fact, and so were unavoidably human creations, people had to create and consent to an arbiter of such disputes, the artificial man whose artificial principles brought order as surely as God’s principles ordered the natural world. Skepticism’s lessons in what we could not know – the mind of God, as it were, or the moral order of nature – showed us what we must instead deliberately construct, and so by taking responsibility for our ignorance, we could overcome and create a political order to preserve us from fearsome conflict over irresolvable disputes. Montaigne’s conclusions had a different flavor, for they really were about “how to live,” not how to approach government, but he, too, argued that a clear understanding of the human situation helped us organize our lives to reduce the unnecessary suffering we caused ourselves and one another. Divinization is a metaphor – perhaps a hubristic one – for a better understanding of human limits and powers: the gods that either formula helps us to be are only the least frightened, least self-deceived, and most aware humans that we can become.
To achieve this newly calibrated relation between the human and the divine, and to bridge the present human reality and the ideal human potential, both Montaigne and Hobbes believed it necessary to drain the natural world of a rich reserve of imagination that people had imparted to it. Theirs was in many respects what we would call a magical universe, one deeply imbued with meanings that bore, morally and practically, on human life. This idea found expression in philosophical and theological arguments that divine design was manifest in the creation, and that nature, properly interpreted, contained instructions for political and social life: for instance, the alleged hierarchy among species corresponded to the hierarchy among men, with kings divinely appointed to rule their realms as lions ruled the savannah and eagles the sky. More colloquially, subjects might ascribe a drought or crop failure to the misbehavior or infertility of a ruler, or expect to see discord at court reflected in unharmonious cosmic events, such as a comet’s disruption of the usual night sky. An entire folk culture of magic underlay and interacted with all of this: peasants and tradesmen planted and harvested by the phases of the moon, sought to avoid evil omens, suspected ill-favored neighbors of withcraft, and propitiated fairies and other not-quite-empirical beings. Two premises united these various strata of magical civilization. First, epistemically, there was a constant mutual intelligence between human beings and the natural world. Its events were significant for us: thunder might be a judgment from an angry God, the distribution of species a lesson for political order. Conversely, our feelings and actions could affect nature, not directly, as with the axe and plough, but because hatred could blight a planting or sick a cow. Second, aesthetically, nature’s patterns, apparent to the eye, meant something: what struck us as order or disorder, nobility (eagle) or baseness (toad) was a moral fact. All these phenomena were involved in a web of nerves, one might say, that connected human and non-human in a single, terrifically complex, and always meaningful logic.
Both thinkers laid into this worldview, Montaigne with characteristic skeptical irony, Hobbes with a logician’s vigor and the acid of a man who hated tyranny over the mind. Hobbes insisted on a sharp division, not a continuity, between the human mind and the rest of the world: empirical events affected the mind through sensory data, but we had to work with the mental impressions that data gave us, without direct knowledge of the world, and certainly without moral or aesthetic meaning. The world was matter in motion and nothing more, and it had its effect by bumping up against the mind, which must also be a material phenomenon, and which lent events an interpretation. Hobbes roundly mocked the Aristotelian idea that objects in the world communicated with the mind through “intelligible species,” signals establishing an apprehending link between the two, rather than by “fancy, cause … by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of external things on upon our eyes, ears, and other organs.” For Hobbes, witches, spirits, and fairies were archetypes of mere fancy, nonsensical images confected of stray sense-data and projected back onto the world, then animated by anxiety, speculation, and the vain attempt to control the world by understanding it. Attempts to anoint political authority with theology were nothing but exploitation of these fears, most notably in the abhorred Catholic Church. (Hobbes had his sympathies in the religious wars; so did Montaigne, who tended to identify fanaticism with Protestants.) In his little-read but essential fourth book of Leviathan, on “The Kingdom of Darkness,” Hobbes spends some pages detailing the parallels between the storied kingdom of the fairies and the earthly magisterium of the Roman Church. Both, for example, enchant young children and steal them from their parents, rob the cream of the land in offerings from frightened peasants, and – here is the point – are fundamentally the fictional projections of frightened minds, as they take their authority entirely from “fancy.” Priests exist, of course, and fairies do not, but neither would exercise any power over the unfrightened mind. In a world washed with clear light, fairies would prove to be swamp gas and illusions, priests exploitative or deluded men, and, in a sense, both would cease to exist. Rulers would still govern, but their legitimate power would rest on the rational consent of the ruled, not any claim to divine or magical support.
Montaigne’s longest essay, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” was a subtle, complex, and finally devastating engagement with the kind of natural theology that often justified political rule in the sixteenth century. Sebond was a Spaniard who sought to combat the threat of skepticism by arguing that God’s plan for moral and political order could be inferred from the order of nature. Montaigne, the skeptic, could hardly have been a less obvious candidate to vindicate Sebond’s project. Montaigne, though, was also a loyal son, and his father asked him to translate and [give an account of] Sebond’s arguments. That account, the “Apology,” gently lays waste to Sebond’s arguments while, in fine skeptical style, also demonstrating that human reason is so impotent that Sebond’s opponents have no stronger claim on the conscientious mind than their target has. As Montaigne left it, systematic reflection on the natural world could provide no instruction on how people should live or whom they should obey. Indeed, such presumptuous speculation was preposterous, the “natural and original malady” of a creature lacking even self-knowledge and self-control, which nonetheless “in his imagination … goes planting himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the sky down beneath his feet. It is by the vanity of the same imagination that he … picks himself out and separates himself from the horde of other creatures, carves out their shares to his fellows and companions the animals, and distributes among them such portions of faculties and powers as he sees fit.” Natural theology was, for Montaigne as for Hobbes, a fruitless and ridiculous game of the imagination. This was the lesson of the skepticism that the two shared.
Montaigne, though, reserved a different place for relations to nature than Hobbes, who wanted simply to see nature’s claims neutralized so that relations among humans could proceed without interference from an anthropomorphic and myth-making imagination. To him, nature seemed part of the therapy that philosophy could offer to the presumptuous and speculative mind. Montaigne’s skepticism, like Hobbes’s, was ethical at the root, epistemic in the branch: where Hobbes attacked spurious claims to authority, Montaigne hated cruelty above all. He identified the roots of cruelty in blindness to the humanity of others. This was the vice, for instance, of Spanish conquerors in the Americas, who persuaded themselves that those they harmed were mere “barbarians,” unintelligible and not part of the same moral world as European Christians. In fact, Montaigne insisted, it was precisely the conquerors’ willful blindness to the morally intelligible experience and suffering of these fellow humans that was barbaric. Barbarian was a key term for Montaigne’s moral analysis because it originated in the ancient Greeks’ term for those whose language they could not understand, which they transliterated as it struck their ear – the rude and repetitive nonsense syllables bar, bar. The failure was, of course, the Greeks’ to realize that they had not understood, rather than the “barbarians”’ to make themselves understood in Greek. Thus the moral failing, the barbaric act, was to believe in barbarians at all, for that meant shutting others out of the scope of your moral sympathy and effort to understand, while pretending they were just beyond understanding.
Thus the phrasing was significant when Montaigne wrote, in his great final essay, Experience, “The most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.” Part of the source of cruelty lay in denying aspects of one’s own natural humanity, which produced, or at least encouraged, violence toward the same qualities in others. Those who “want to get out of themselves and escape from the man” are caught in “madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts.” Some, he observed, were “disgusted” with bodily pleasures, but this was “savage stupidity.” Montaigne’s pairings of terms are revealing: those who reject the human, the sensual and emotional aspects of bodily being do not ascend to a higher plane: instead, they are thrown down to the lower rung of madness, savagery, and bestiality. The idea of disgust is important here: revulsion from part of one’s self, whether in one’s own person or shown back to one in a “barbarian,” can inspire a reaction of cruelty, a wish to rub it out, which ironically makes the would-be angel a savage beast.
It might seem that Montaigne praised embracing animal nature, and certainly he did urge affectionate cultivation of the bodily nature that we share, as the story goes, with beasts but not with angels. He insisted, though, in a formula taken from Lucretius, that “We are neither above nor below the rest” of the world’s creatures. To say that we are not above the rest is to say that we cannot have the purely rational or purely virtuous spirits of disembodied beings – nor even know what that would be, except through the paradoxically debasing rejection of what we are, since “man can[not] raise himself above himself and humanity; for he can see only with his own eyes, and seize only with his own grasp.” To say that we are not below the rest is to avoid an equal and opposite reaction, disgust at our rational nature, or, as Montaigne and Hobbes might put it, at our incorrigible imagination. Just as fantasies of angelic nature cannot show bodily creatures how to live, so there is no escaping the peculiar troubles and pleasures of self-conscious, speculative, language-using creatures by finding a model in the rest of nature. Imagination must be a source of pleasure alongside the body, wrote Montaigne, who described himself as “meditat[ing] on any satisfaction,” not letting his “senses pilfer it,” but “bring[ing] my soul into it … not to lose herself but to find herself.” The great use of consciousness was to bring it more fully and attentively into those things that were closest to one’s self, to fill in the moment with distinctly human awareness: “When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents … I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.”
The close connection between Montaigne’s great themes, cruelty and humanity’s place in the world, finds expression in his essay on “Cruelty.” There he reports that the religious wars have given him “incredible examples” of cruel conduct, “souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the mere pleasure of it; hack and cut off other men’s limbs; sharpen their wits to invest unaccustomed torments and new forms of death.” He concludes that meditation, though, with a reflection on the relations between human and animals, arguing that there is a single thread of cruelty, linking cruel treatment of animals to that of other human beings. There was kinship, he argued, between our attitudes to animals and our attitudes to other persons, and in approaching animals, we should take a middle way. We should not, on the one hand, make gods of them. On the other hand, we should “resign that imaginary kingship that people give us over the other creatures.” Neither placing ourselves below an idealized nature nor elevating ourselves presumptuously over an abject creation, we should seek to show “a certain respect” and follow “a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants…. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation.” If a part of the antidote to cruelty was not to despise our own being, that involved acknowledging our involvement with other living things, embracing that but not seeking to dissolve into it. It was just the kind of irony Montaigne wished his readers to own and live out that the claim of kinship with the animals came in that uniquely human production, a book of reflection upon one’s self. When he wrote, “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books,” on p. 850 of the monumental Essays, he did not mean to imply that, as a man, he should have found a shorter or less articulate way to that conclusion. A humane approach to our place in nature, connected with a humane attitude to other people, could only arise by human means, including the same passions and imagination that so often led is to cruelty, self-deceit, and myth-making.
The Epicurean Background and the Reaction [Hobbes’s Centaur]
In describing how the mind assembles images of non-existent things, Hobbes gave the example of a centaur, an imaginary beast created by joining sense-impressions of men (from the waist up) and horses (backward from the base of the neck. The example comes from Epicurus, the Athenian philosopher who whom Hobbes agreed that the world is matter in motion, nothing more. Montaigne, whose first language was Latin, peppered his essays with Roman epigrams, many from Lucretius, to the effect that the world is ever-changing, and the mind forever caught in fear of imagined death and suffering, fear that obscures the present reality. Lucretius, a Roman of the first century C.E., wrote his didactic poem, On the Nature of Things, all that survives from him, as a restatement of Epicurus’ philosophy. It was long the major point of European access to Epicurus, whose work was not available in Latin until [ ]. Both could be dangerous allies. Church leaders accused them of subversive atheism, and St. Jerome concocted a slanderous biography in which Lucretius, driven mad by a love potion, composed his poem in rare episodes of lucidity. Hobbes’s enemies in seventeenth-century England habitually linked him with Epicurus and the two with atheism.
Epicurus and Lucretius, his Roman acolyte, were speculative physicists, theorists of the stuff and structure of the universe. The passion they excited among both admirers and enemies, though, lay in their real significance: as theorists and practitioners of human freedom. Their physics implied a purely material world with no room for either a soul that survived death or gods that concerned themselves with human affairs. This life was the only life, and all things in it, we included, were of the same material nature. Because people failed to see this, they were cruelly hounded by phantasms of their own creation, and lived in unnecessary fear. Thunder, a favorite example for Lucretius, seemed to the frightened mind to be the voice of an angry god, threatening to avenge some human sin. The days and nights of this short life were shadowed and haunted by fear of suffering in an afterlife that would never come. Lucretius used religio for the false beliefs he combated, translated as religion, but also having the specific Latin sense of that which ties down, or oppresses. Even the double sense of religio fits Hobbes, in particular, who described false and oppressive interpretation, in “The Kingdom of Darkness,” as a net that the mind from ideas, which had to be carefully and systematically untangled by philosophy.
Epicurus and Lucretius took aim at unnecessary self-oppression and sought ways that a clear view of nature, knowledge, and the mind could help self-emancipation. They believed that, once the mind had let loose of its tormenting phantasms and faced the world as it was, men could concentrate on the real satisfactions of finite life: for them these were friendship and reflection above all, but the general idea is that the goods of this life must be the highest human goods, for they are the only ones – the focus on present pleasures that remains associated with the term “Epicurean.” Understanding our situation accurately, we could live undividedly on what Lucretius called “these shores of light,” his word for the only life we have.
Hobbes and Montaigne took up these themes and drew from them a set of implications. First, much suffering, that of the unquiet mind but also the violence of religious and civil wars and imperial conquest, had roots in a confused relation to our place in the world: loyalty, even subservience, to vague or empty ideas that we invented in the first place, and contempt for our own finite, imperfect, and concrete existence. Second, although the roots of these self-imposed disabilities lay deep in our nature as thinking, language-using beings, we could overcome them to some degree, which meant there was vastly more scope for human freedom and satisfaction than the present moment showed. Although human powers could be self-ensnaring, they could also be self-freeing. The bases for pessimism and for radical optimism were laced together in the same human qualities. Third, untangling our mental bonds required an unillusioned view of the physical world, which meant driving out of it all intelligible essences, metaphysical purposes, divine prescription, omens, spirits, and immortal souls – the inheritance of metaphysics, religion, and popular magic. They labored to clear the vantage of the mind, which, without impingement from these meaning-laden forces, could reflect clearly on its own processes and stance to a disenchanted natural world.
Of course, there is a lot of difference between Hobbes and Montaigne. The Englishman was a systematic political philosopher with a theory of individual rights and sovereign legitimacy. The mayor of Bordeaux, who lived a lifetime earlier, was an episodic explorer of the texture of experience, who mistrusted all systems, quite unlike Hobbes, who sought to replace flawed systems with perfected alternatives. Montaigne’s work aimed at clarifying the self-understanding of individuals, Hobbes’s at recasting political authority to purge it of spurious claims based in the abused and frightened imagination. Their difference, though, highlights their deep commonality: both were participants in the rediscovery and renewal of a project of self-emancipation from self-imposed mental bonds.
In the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, a reaction against this project arose from several directions. Its loyalists consolidated an anti-Epicurean front that they also styled anti-atheist and anti-Hobbes. Some were philosophers, some natural scientists, and many took an intense interest in “natural theology,” what we today would call the argument of intelligent design. At least one, besides writing the typically titled Rational Discourse on the True Religion, was a man of letters, botanist, and student of English forestry. This was John Evelyn, best remembered for Sylva, a study of his island’s trees and their care and abuse, whose blend of practical science and vitalism led Thoreau to quote him in the famous passage of Walden describing the Concord hermit’s bean-field: “the earth, especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it ether) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to contain us.” The spirit of that passage, which attracted Thoreau, is typical of the intellectual mood that Evelyn shared with a movement in his time: a revival of the idea that nature contained forces and meanings, which humans interacted with and which bespoke divine design and contained lessons for our lives.
A distinct note of political and philosophical reaction animated this philosophical change. Although Hobbes wrote Leviathan as a supporter of the exiled Charles II and attacked the appeals that the King’s enemies made to divine authority, his “atheistical” doctrine came to be associated generally with hubristic disruption of settled order. The unifying commitment of his work was that humanity must escape its self-imposed immaturity and grow up into responsibility for its own choices and creations – whether systems of ideas or systems of political authority. Thus Hobbes’s atomism came to mean atheism, and atheism the disruption of all settled authority. When John Evelyn sat down to author A Rational Account of the True Religion, following the restoration of Charles II to the throne, he began his preface with a description of the age that made the book necessary: authority had collapsed. A king had been executed by process of law (“murdered” as Evelyn put it), bishops and priests denounced, and a proliferation of sects, each claiming a version of truth, displaced “the old Christian [religion], which taught men obedience to princes, reverence to antiquity, order and discipline in the Church.” In this time, “[f]undamental laws and establishments [were] subverted” and, with human judgment unleashed from authority, “’there was no king in Israel, but every one did what was right in his own eyes.’” The result had been a “rebellious and disobedient people” who behaved “maliciously and wantonly” in deposing their king and setting themselves up as rulers. These events, Evelyn suggested, at once made atheism more plausible and were themselves inspired by the doctrines of Hobbes and his philosophical fellow-travelers, such as Baruch Spinoza, who all aimed at “making religion a mere figment and … discarding all natural justice, goodness, and charity, and resolve it into brutish force.”
Evelyn claimed that these world-disrupting atheists had deified nature by making it (stripped of traditional divinity) the only source of moral guidance. They would have replied that they revealed the need for people to make their own free judgments, without super-human guidance. That Evelyn took their arguments as he did suggests that it was impossible for him seriously to imagine moral guidance apart from God. He therefore proposed a different sort of deification from what he thought the “atheists” had achieved: to show divine intelligence at every point in the natural order. We might not understand every aspect of providence, but
Though the pregnant clouds dissolve in the most seemingly unnecessary places, they may be the … originals of those rivers … which flow from those eminences to refresh the valleys, and give drink … both to man and beast. In a word, there is not silliest fly, or worm that crawls, not any grain of seed which falls, and becomes lost and scattered on the ground, but is for the food or help of some creature, at some time or other necessary for us; so as there is nothing made for nothing … but such ungrateful creatures, who blaspheme upon these accounts, and from their shallow reasonings.
The most abject, vile, and trivial things in nature are admirable, and those creatures which we reckon most defective, the most curious, and completely accommodated to their several functions. Indeed, some are noxious poisons, yet become antidotes; one fierce animal devours another, lest the wild beasts should increase upon us.
Evelyn’s account of the world’s complex and paradoxical design suggests that all things in nature are admirable, not straightforwardly, but because “the beauty of the world consists not in its separated parts, (which seem imperfect) but united, its order, economy, and concurrence to the end; which shows it to be the work of a wise and voluntary Agent.” “The world,” wrote Evelyn, “is a poem – the most perfect and consummate piece that ever was made.” To consider nature, then, was to be brought into communion with divine intelligence, which was manifest in the subtle weave of the world’s disparate and not always pleasing phenomena. It was in this light that Evelyn made himself a student of England’s forests, the uses of the trees, and the need to husband them properly, which he believed the Parliament and Protectorate had badly failed to do.
Simon Schama has observed that Evelyn saw the destruction of royal forests following the King’s execution and establishment of a republic as a symptom of anarchy, a world turned upside-down. Indeed, Evelyn’s lamenting the recent disorder seems to have been not mere rhetoric to gin up interest in his attack on atheism, but a candid report of his experience. His diaries, which span the years of civil war and restoration, are full of violent reactions to the killing of the king, the presumptuous rhetoric of the rebels, and, in particular, the loss of elite and traditional control over religious interpretation. He reported, in a telling entry from the early winter of 1653, “Going this day to our church, I was surprizd to see a mechanic step up. I was resolv’d yet to stay and see what he would make of it.” A commoner’s preaching in [a previously Anglican] service was already a kind of insurrection, typical of an egalitarian era when prophecies abounded. Worse was what followed: “His text was from 2 Sam. Ch. 23, v. 20: And Benaiah went downe also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow. The purport was that no danger was to be thought when God call’d for shedding of blood, inferring that now they were called to destroy temporal governments … so dangerous a crisis were things grown to.” The same anarchic religious interpretation that brought calls for continued rebellion into Evelyn’s home church showed up in the ungoverned ranting of Quakers (“a new sect of dangerous principles who show no respect to any magistrate or other and seem a melancholy proud sort”), a general invasion of the churches by “sectaries of all sorts, blasphemous and ignorant mechanics usurping the pulpits,” Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s “riding in triumph thro the City,” on Ash Wednesday “in contradiction to all custom and decency,” and “how the women began to paint themselves, formerly a most ignominious thing and us’d only by prostitutes.” There was much order to be restored, much divine instruction for the order of nature to convey.
Evelyn’s keenly appreciative sketchings of nature, so different in tone from his denunciations of religious, political, and social unrest, were not just the pastoral musings of a disaffected conservative. He cited among his influences the philosopher Ralph Cudworth, and Cudworth, along with his Cambridge colleague and contemporary, Henry More, labored mightily to refute Hobbes’s revival of classical atheism and provide a new, or revived, picture of God’s role in nature, a picture that filled and comforted Evelyn’s mind and those of many more after him. Cudworth’s sweepingly titled True Intellectual System of the Universe suffered a Casaubon problem: like George Eliot’s ever-blocked scholar, whose projected Key to All Mythologies exhausted itself in a delta of notes, he wanted to account for everything – in his case, to show by exhaustive scholarship and argument both that true atheism was conceptually impossible and that the impossible ambition to be an atheist was very rare, at least before his own metaphysically besieged time. In the one volume he produced of an anticipated three, Cudworth devoted a tract’s worth of pages to a careful restatement of the positions of Hobbes, Epicurus, and Lucretius, ranged under the heading “atomic atheism.” If his characterization was sometimes polemical, it was also remarkable in a certain gift for sympathetic restatement. For instance,
[T]hey, who first introduced the belief of a Deity and religion … deserved very ill of all mankind, because they did thereby infinitely debase and depress men’s spirits under a servile fear… There can be no comfortable and happy living, without banishing from our mind the belief of these two things, of a Deity, and soul’s immortality…. It was therefore a noble and heroical exploit of Democritus and Epicurus … who, seeing the world thus oppressed under the grievous yoke of religion, the fear of a Deity, and punishment after death … did manfully encounter that affrightful spectre … of a providential deity; and by clear philosophical reasons, chase it away, and banish it quite out of the world….
Cudworth’s talent for sympathetic reconstruction spurred suspicion that he had pressed too far into atheist arguments and gone over to the other side. Besides his Casaubon problem, the disheartening effect of these rumors discouraged him from continuing his great work. The rumors also suggest the light in which contemporaries viewed the alleged atheism of Hobbes: as anathema, but also enormously seductive to anyone who breathed too deeply of it. Why else would the man who, as much as anyone, devoted his life to answering Hobbes have been suspected of secretly joining “the monster of Malmsbury”?
Cudworth’s lasting influence lies in the formula he developed to account for God’s place in nature – not a new idea in the world, but influential at a pivotal time, so that it became a widely shared sense for more than a century. This was the idea that nature’s “economy,” which John Evelyn so admiringly described, was moved from within by a living energy which expressed divine intelligence, what Cudworth called a “plastic force.” Cudworth’s own language suggested the aptness of Evelyn’s comparing the world to a poem, except that the poem’s author should not be imagined as inscribing it from outside. Instead, “Nature is art as it were incorporated and embodied in matter, which doth not act upon it from without mechanically, but from within vitally and magically.” Only this force gave Hobbes’s “matter in motion” its form or, for that matter, its motion. As Cudworth wrote, using the Greek, “if there be physis, then there must be nous: where the world follow a pattern, a mind must lie behind and infuse it.
Cudworth’s colleague, Henry More (whose thinking aligned so closely with the other man’s that Cudworth feared More’s proposed work would make his own superfluous), showed in his Platonick Song of the Soul how the resistance to political disorder and wish to elevate the human estate joined in this project. In this allegorical work, More described the political significance of a purely materialist view of humanity, which put the species on the same plain as other animals, with no admixture of spirit. In his imagined “Beirah,” city of beasts, there was “no truth of justice,” but only “false polity that into tyranny would quickly wend” if it were not restrained by “stern fear.” There, More wrote,
Democracy/Is not but a large hungry tyrant-train:/Oppression from the poor is an all-sweeping rain./A sweeping torrent that beats down the corn,/And wastes the oxen’s labor, head-long throws/The tallest trees up by the root torn,/Its raging force in all the land it shows…. Such is the out-rage of Democracy,/When fearless it doth rule in Beirah.
Democracy was, for More, the political principle of brute appetite, coupled with the animal equality of creatures whose relations were not shaped by divine principle. His reference to “stern fear” as the only principle of order for such creatures seems to be a swipe at Hobbes, and does he implication that the State of Nature persists in Beirah: “There’s no society in Beirah/But beastlike grazing in one pasture ground./No love but of the animated clay…” – that is, love only for one another as the animate matter we are (and all we are) in the materialist view. After the violence, experiments, and radical doubts of the English Civil War, political order seemed to need firmer shape than this – ideally, a frame made in a divinely informed human nature, not the free choices of a humanity freed from divine oversight, such as Epicurus and his revivalists might have produced.
These thinkers had some impulse to restore every haunted and enchanted place that their atheist opponents would have cleansed. John Evelyn reversed the Epicurean formula, claiming in a kind of philosophical taunt that even atheists must sometimes fear thunder. Henry More, to the embarrassment of some of his admirers, wrote on the reality of witches and ghosts, which he sometimes seemed to see as standing or falling with the immortal soul. The main direction, though, was the one Cudworth laid out, and which Evelyn already followed in his theological writing. As we have already seen, this was to see divinity in the whole design of nature, particularly its service to human well-being, and in the vital, or “plastic” principle that gave the spark of life to matter.
John Ray, a founding English naturalist and fellow of the Royal Society, exemplified this approach. Ray was at Cambridge with More and Cudworth, and he cited the latter as having refuted Epicurus’ atheism. His approach to nature, though, was more experimental and empirical, a systematic version of the rambling, cataloguing research that John Evelyn conducted. He worked on scientific taxonomy, particularly that of plants, and studied the motion of sap within trees. He was a founder of the tradition of lay naturalists that carried forward to Charles Darwin, and he had in common with Darwin and many others between them an intense curiosity about humanity’s place within nature, and the meaning of that place.
For Ray, the workings of nature were a grand apologia, proof of God’s existence and justification of his ways to man. Divinity suffused nature through the “subordinate ministry” of the “plastic principle,” the vital force that gave matter its order and motion, carrying out God’s design. The cycle of water, the distribution of minerals in the earth, the blend of hills and plains in the world’s landscapes, and the shape of the human body all bespoke God’s design for human convenience: to know nature was to appreciate our place within it, its solicitude for us, and to be weaned away from the atheistic conceits of Epicurus and Hobbes.
The lesson was one of appreciation, but not complacency. As Locke has urged that God intended the world for the useful and rational, Ray discerned an activist agenda for humanity. The presence of metal ores in the earth showed that we were meant to transform nature with technology and work. Otherwise, Ray wrote (again in line with Locke), we would be left to a “barbarous and sordid life [of which] the Indians in the Northern part of America are a clear demonstration.” Gold and silver, so physically convenient for coin-making, were evidence that God intended us to use money, so that the rewards of wealth would inspire us to life ourselves above “brutal Nature” and “rend[er] all and every one mutually useful and serviceable.” So it was only by labor and innovation that human beings achieved what the rest of the Creation enjoyed naturally: “mutual subserviency to each other, and unanimous conspiring to promote and carry on the public good.” Other living things, even those as humble and, in some cases, superficially pernicious as insects, carried out a twofold role just by being. On the one hand, they fulfilled a place in divine design. On the other hand, their existence enabled them “to partake themselves of his overflowing goodness, and to enjoy their own beings.”
For humans, by contrast, their “brutal Nature” was a threat to joining properly in divine design. They participated in the Creation by transforming it. This transformation was a kind of perfection, an improvement marked by its contrast with the “barbarous and sordid” lives of those peoples who had not overcome “brutal Nature.” But this mastery over nature, even the antagonistic relation in which “brutal Nature” posed a constant threat, was not the negation of nature that Locke ironically called the key to perfect freedom. Nature taught “mutual subserviency” and ultimate subservience to God. It dealt harshly with rebels, as Ray pointedly observed in his justification of noxious insects: they were God’s shock troops, like those of a ruler, pernicious in themselves but “necessary, either to suppress rebellions, or punish rebels, or other disorderly and vicious persons, and keep the world in quiet.” Those who deserved and should expect the greatest punishment, now or in the afterlife, were those
rebels … who have made it their business to banish Him out of the world, who is the great creator and governor of it; to undermine his being, and eradicate all notions of him out of their own and other men’s minds; to provoke his creatures and vassals to a contempt of him, a flighting of his fear and worship, as being such imaginary chimeras as are fit only to keep fools in awe. Certainly all this is the highest provocation that any man can be capable of, so it shall be punished with the surest vengeance.
The great and terrible rebels, therefore, were those who misused their distinctively human powers of voice, reason, and technical mastery, not to complete creation by participating lawfully within it, but to clear the world of God and, implicitly, assume his place as lawgiver and meaning-maker. These were the “atheists” that Ray wrote against, and whose arguments be believed nature itself refuted, if only we saw nature in the light of right reason. The trick, though, was to avoid, simultaneously, symmetrical dangers: falling into “brutal Nature,” the instinct that honored God in animals but was sin and debasement in humans; or rising hubristically above it on the wings of reason, as the rebel atheists had done.
With Ray, we have come to a world resembling that of Tocqueville’s Lockean settlers. Nature is at once a hostile force and a harmonious design that is theirs to complete. Nature’s God – a term that would appear in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence – was a subtle gardener, a craftsman who put natural forces and, above all, living things into a complex relation of interdependence. The human role in this order was also a gardener’s: to put the creation on a path of improvement. Although each thing was perfect in itself, it was naturally imperfect, even threatening, in relation to human needs. Meeting those needs was a part of the divine design, but a part that would not be consummated without intelligent human labor – the special quality of the industrious and rational. So, to be in harmony with the design revealed by creation, humans must struggle against it, in external nature and in themselves. Their reward would be a higher fruitfulness than unaided nature could have yielded – materially and spiritually alike. The cost would be a kind of constant warfare to maintain both material and spiritual mastery – and, at the same time, to deny the purer form of mastery that Epicurean atheism promised. Nature was a Restorationist commonwealth, harmonious on the surface, but subtly exacting in the sacrifices it demanded, both in labor expended and in ambition forgone.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Tocqueville's Barbarians, Locke's Gardeners
It was about three in the afternoon and high summer, the end of July in 1831, when Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, reached Detroit via Lake Erie on a steamboat called Ohio. Detroit, Tocqueville reported, was “a little town of two or three thousand souls,” founded by French Jesuits and still full of French families. Earlier in the day, the French-built Catholic church in British Fort Malden, now in Windsor, Ontario, had reminded him of a village near Caen or Evreux, with a rooster-shaped weathervane atop its bell-tower. A Parisian whose aristocratic family was rooted in Normandy, where Tocqueville lies about equidistant between Evreux and Caen, the young traveler sought restlessly for such points of contact between the old world and the new: they were essential helps in making sense of the Americans for his European audience.
Such comparisons failed him. In what Norman village would the bell-tower cock look down on a British soldier of the Highland regiments, fully uniformed in kilt, red tunic, and ostrich-feather cap, and set on guard at the border of the empire; then spin in an east wind to regard “two stark naked Indians, their bodies streaked with dyes, rings in their noses … in a little bark canoe”? The frontier of European settlement was also the border country of empires, where civilizations crossed like the merchants of many languages and religions who streamed through the ancient port cities of the Mediterranean. Unsettlement, movement, the mutual jostling of people displaced by choice or force, was what Tocqueville found in the Northwest Territories. The emblems of European nations that he met on the frontier were fragmented images on the vast canvas of the new continent.
In the American pioneers, the forest-clearing, town-building leading edge of settlement, Tocqueville found a people entirely without terroir. They had, he reported, none of the flavor of a place and its soil, no regional idiosyncrasy or rough peasant culture. The man one met in New York upon disembarking from a trans-Atlantic voyage was the same man one met at the doorway of a log cabin northwest of Pontiac, on the very edge of settlement. Unlike the laborers and aristocrats of France – at least as Tocqueville imagined them – these Americans did not spring from the land and carry its mark in rooted, place-based cultures. Instead, they aimed their vagrant, conquering strength at a continent they were determined to master, indifferent to its detail and variation except where these promised wealth. The European travelers’ wish to see trackless wilderness for its own sake made no sense to their American hosts. As Tocqueville reported – playing up the scene for effect – he and Beaumont had to pose as speculators, then manoeuvre into a faux-casual question about where the least desirable land lay, to get directions to the wilderness.
These directions led them to a woods northwest of Pontiac, in what is now Michigan, which became a set-piece in Tocqueville’s portrait of the new American nation. The setting was of devastation. The first sign of settlement was burnt-over ground, scorched limbs, and trees dead but standing, having been strangled by girdling, stripping a ring of bark to stop sap from circulating. Here, “all the trees seem to have been struck by sudden death,” and “[i]n full summer their withered branches seem the image of winter.” In this deathly forest, a proliferation of weeds and wheat, corn and oak shoots, grew on ground newly opened to the sun. At the center of this crude clearing, dead trees gave way to stumps of trees cut but not yet grubbed up, and amid the stumps stood a log cabin.
In this crude building, with a window hacked out of the log walls and furniture assembled from untrimmed tree limbs still sprouting leaves, a few details pointed to the meaning behind the rough labor of frontier survival. A muslin curtain and cracked teapot promised a gracious domestic life in decades ahead. A bible, a prayerbook, and “sometimes, a poem of Milton or a tragedy of Shakespeare” the cabin’s ties to the past, while a few newspapers maintained a desultory but persistent tie to present events. Other than a deerskin or eagle feathers, Tocqueville mentioned only one pure decoration, one piece of visual display: a map of the United States, stretched to the right of the fireplace, lifting and fluttering in the breezes that passes through cracks in the cabin wall.
The map was an appropriate symbol. If the American pioneers lacked all terroir and pleasure in the details of unsettled land, if the terrain they shaped was haphazardly ugly, they were nonetheless in the grip of a continental vision. Tocqueville, who reveled in paradox, saw in the Americans a heroic spirit deployed for utilitarian ends, the vitality of savage warfare joined with the cool calculation of self-interest. He called the settlers “a race to whom the future of the New World belongs, a restless, calculating, adventurous race which sets coldly about deeds that can only be explained by the fire of passion … that submits to living the life of a savage without ever letting itself be carried away by its charms, that only cherishes those parts of civilization and enlightenment which are useful for well-being.” The American nation, he judged, “like all great peoples, has but one thought, and presses forward to the acquisition of riches, the single end of its labors, with a perseverance and a scorn of life which one could call heroic, if that word were properly used of anything but the strivings of virtue.” Here was something new in the world: heroic effort for everyday purposes, self-sacrificing devotion without self-immolating passion, were the qualities of a people who could achieve the focused violence of conquest and sustain the orderly power of rule. Thus Tocqueville called the Americans “[a] nation of conquerors … whom rivers and lakes cannot hold back, before whom forests fall and prairies are covered in shade; and who, when they have reached the Pacific Ocean, will come back on its tracks to trouble and destroy the societies which it will have formed behind it.”
What such a nation meant for the continent was palpable: clearing, settlement, cultivation and also a kind of devastation. What did it mean, how did it feel, to be such a person, one of these new Americans? It seemed to Tocqueville that these calculating conquerors became emotionally flat, almost two-dimensional, and lost the savor of living for its own sake, without some instrumental reward. He described the pioneers as cold-blooded, stiff, austere, and so emotionally isolated that they hardly took pleasure in ordinary sociability. Indeed, he saw them as consumed by their nation-building vision an hardly able to acknowledge the reality of fellow human beings: “Even [the pioneer’s] feelings for his family have become merged in a vast egotism, and one cannot be sure whether he regards his wife and children as anything more than a detached part of himself.” This was, for him, part of the paradox of a “great” people, a nation that would turn the wheel of history, that spent its energy in chilly, deliberate fashion, turning a continent to production and profit, from wilderness to property.
The image of the pioneer as what we might today call a narcissist – self-aggrandizing, emotionally truncated, isolated from others to the point of doubting their reality except as projected aspects of one’s self – was one that would later form a central and enduring image of the second volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. There he portrayed, not just frontier settlers, but Americans in general and, by extension, the democratic personality of the future, as emotionally insensate, among others yet unable to feel them, with each man shut up alone in himself. It is striking to find an origin for this idea in Tocqueville’s observation of Americans’ relation to land and the natural world. Although what struck Tocqueville was the lack of terroir in Americans, that did not mean Americans were not defined by a relation to the land. Instead, they were defined by an abstract and general relation to nature, as a field of economic value which they extracted and exploited wherever they found it, building a nation as they went. This relation to nature was well captured in the abstract image of the nation that Tocqueville saw on the cabin walls of the frontier: the map of the United States spreading across a continent, subsuming rivers and mountains, swamps and deserts, forests and plains within its borders. It seemed to him that its consequences were also palpable in the casual destruction that had turned a Midwestern summer to winter and left trees to decay and collapse as weeds and new crops grew up together under their dead limbs. Although Tocqueville did not trace the emotional economy that tied this chilly isolation to certain kind of world-historical mission on the continent, his intuition was that Americans’ isolation from one another, their evasion of their own warm and passionate energies, and their relentless, muscular, but cold-blooded struggle with nature were parts of a coherent outlook.
Alexis de Tocqueville was an opinionated observer of the American scene, and his judgments were motivated by an intense concern with Europe’s future, which he supposed was presaged in the democratic United States. Even saying this understates the matter: reading Tocqueville, one learns as much about him as about the people he observed. He often seemed to imagine that only refined characters like him were capable of genuine reflection, while others were swept along by the currents of opinion and history, their words and ideas symptoms of the great trends that Tocqueville traced. His writing is thus marked by reluctance to reflect on his own preoccupations and a sharp limit on his considerable gift for imagining his way into others’ experience. He approached the world somewhat as a tremendously bright student of literature might approach a novel that he had been assured was structured by a few major themes, which it was his assignment to discern. For all the acuity of his particular observations, then, his real talent lay in the sharp yet sweeping general claim about such things as “American character” or “democratic experience,” which might or might not exist, and might or might be as they seemed to one uncommonly articulate French aristocrat on a short visit.
For all these reasons, it has been unfashionable to begin a study of American experience with Tocqueville, or, for that matter, to follow him in making American experience a topic at all. Yet there are also reasons to do both things. Tocqueville’s arresting frontier vignettes are a window into a quiet moment within an extraordinary chapter of American social, economic, and ecological history: a settler people’s violent sweep across North America. As Tocqueville recorded in miniature, pioneers burnt hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, strangled and eventually leveled and grubbed up much of the rest, cut the deep and tangled roots of prairie sod with the plow, and drained wetlands and redirected rivers. The scope and vigor of the transformation suggested a military campaign. So did the one-sided warfare that Americans waged on predators. Wolves, for instance, were the targets of more than a century of something like total warfare, including massive poisonings, great bounties, and vaunted expeditions against the strongest and most elusive individuals. This was not the first time human beings had transformed a landscape, and some of the difference from earlier episodes was a matter of more powerful technology, but it was an extraordinary remaking of a continent.
As Tocqueville suggested, the settlers carried, and were carried by, an idea of what their work meant. Indeed, even more than he seems to have realized, the American project of clearing and settling the continent was involved with an interpretation of nature. [It all depended on…] [I think the strongest statements of the providential republic view, at least rhetorically, need to go in here. That way, it’s evident early that this is not just Great Books.]
[All the world was America]
John Locke’s claim that, “In the beginning, all the world was America,” is perhaps the most pregnant passage in his thought. It crystallizes the speculative history that underlay Locke’s political thought. Humanity began, on this account, in a world not yet owned, where no property lines marked mine from yours, and anyone could exercise his natural right to use whatever resources he needed for his survival or convenience. Those who wandered this world were in what Locke called the state of nature, where all were equally free to act as they wished, so long as they did not harm one another. There were no slaves and no masters, no rulers or ruled. Although it was a world not yet owned, it was not immune to ownership: one who used something, whether by clearing a field or gathering apples, acquired a property right in it, which others had to respect. The only limit on this right to acquire property was that the natural men must leave enough for others to satisfy their own needs. History began in a world of extensive liberty and radical equality, organized by a modest dose of natural law, a world without government but infused with without order and principle.
Locke’s state of nature contained the seeds of a much more extensive system of law, the explicit, usually written law of a formal political system. That was not accidental: the point of his imagined “America” was to provide an account of how organized government could come into being as an extension of natural freedom and equality. Government, in Locke’s telling, arose when men in the state of nature voluntarily surrendered some of their extensive freedom in exchange for the security that government provided. The advantage of this theory was that it explained why legitimate government must have limited powers: it was bound by the same natural law that pertained in the state of nature, including respect for property rights, and could exercise only the powers that natural men would have granted it to protect their lawful interests. Natural freedom and equality were speculative postulates, not direct limits on real-world governments, but as the cardinal points of Locke’s political theory they drew a line between those acts of government that subjects must obey, because they were compatible with the consent of free and equal natural men, and those commands that subjects could resist, because natural men would not have consented to them.
This image of a primordial, unclaimed land, where freedom and equality could unfold themselves, had great meaning for the continent Locke used to imagine the beginnings of history: North America. This continent became a present instance of a world before government, a landscape under natural law. This meant that settlers had a chance to replay Lockean history, divide the continent among themselves and make, by common consent, a constitutional government to rule them all. They could take freedom and equality as the premises of a practical enterprise, building an “empire of liberty” westward from the Atlantic. What had been theoretical postulates in Locke’s thought now became cornerstones of a vast undertaking.
It is widely recognized, of course, that discovering an open continent changed the course of European, and world, history. Max Weber, the great German social thinker, reflected that human freedom owed an incalculable debt to a “wind from the west,” the ferment of experiment, new wealth, and open borders that rebels and dissidents could flee across, and it seemed to Weber that such a wind might never blow again. Early Americans, too, endlessly claimed that open land and rational experiments in government made them the pivotal nation in human history, the ones whose success could revive Roman freedom, show the proper form of Christian government, or establish once and for all that a people could govern itself by choice and reason, not chance and inheritance. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Northern ideal of American democracy, as a republic of smallholders, was firmly established, and it was commonplace that a republic of free men, each dignified by making his living through free labor, depended on the availability of free land on the frontier.
What is easier to miss is that early Americans’ ideas were not simply about history, politics, and freedom. They were also about nature: what the natural world was, where its value lay, and how human beings should use it. To see this in some detail, let’s stay a little longer with Locke, where the logic is especially clear. Locke argued, against earlier theorists of natural law such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, that although the world originally belonged to all in common, an individual could turn it into his own property by appropriating or improving so much of it as he could use. This act, creating a legal right of ownership, did not depend on either the consent of the rest of humanity (which was, after all, losing its claim), which Grotius had argued, or the act of a sovereign government to declare “mine and thine,” as Hobbes believed. Instead, property could arise before government, was among the interests that natural men sought to secure by creating government, and thus was one of the limits on what legitimate government could do?
And how could we know this, according to Locke? “God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labor, and the penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of life….” Locke continued, “God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it;)….” There were two sources, then, for Locke’s view of natural property, both deeply involved in the human relation to nature. First was the curse of Adam, the command to labor that accompanied expulsion from Eden. This, however, is not purely a curse in Locke’s hands: rather, those who obey the command are a morally favored group, the “industrious and rational,” and it is to them that the world really belongs. The second source of Locke’s view was an interpretation of the human predicament in the natural world. People were needy, vulnerable, and poorly provided for by “un-assisted nature,” but the world’s stinginess, and humanity’s “penury,” need not be permanent. Instead, when men mixed their labor with the world, it bloomed, producing a hundred times or more the wealth it yielded when “un-assisted.” Property, which guaranteed to owners the fruits of their work, was the rational response to human needs in a world that met those needs abundantly when fertilized with labor, scarcely at all when left fallow. Locke persistently referred to land that had not been turned to property as “waste,” a word with a double sense: of resources squandered or not used, an affront to the “industrious and rational,” and also emptiness, a sense rooted in its origins in the Latin vastus, a desolate space. The natural world, so far as it had not come under the fruitful power of labor, was empty, incomplete.
For Locke, contemplating the natural world and the human place in it revealed principles that were binding on social and political life. This was true because humans were part of nature, and nature, in turn, pervasively exhibited divine purpose in the harmonies of its design. So far as human purposes were legible from nature’s design, they were natural law, part of the world’s fabric. Thus, though natural men were free and equal with regard to one another, they were subordinate to God, the divine legislator, and not at liberty to defy the design that nature expressed. As Locke memorably put it, “nature must be altogether negated before one can claim for oneself absolute liberty” – a course of action that he was not recommending. Instruction in divine design came from rationally contemplating nature, a task that required discipline and effort, since, like precious metals buried underground, the principles of divine law “do not present themselves to idle and listless people.” Therefore, as making nature fruitful required forging a virtue out of Adam’s curse of labor, so learning the duties of natural law itself required people to join the industrious and rational, for whom the world was made. The world taught humanity that they should subdue it with labor to make it bloom, that it belonged to the industrious and rational; but this truth was clear only to those who had labored to discern it.
[The material on exclusion of Native Americans and on settler colonies.]
The settlers of the United States followed Locke in how they described their right to the continent and their duty to develop it. This meant that they gave their continental project a distinctly environmental justification. Other imperial claims to land and jurisdiction relied on Christian conversion and the theory of just war (Spain in Latin America), utilitarian accounts of progress for backward civilizations (the British in India), and the need for humanitarian intervention in violent, rights-abusing societies (the Belgians and others in central Africa). The American claim rested distinctively on an interpretation of the human place in nature, which made clearing and settlement both a right and a duty. Using the continent productively was the basis of the nation’s claim to it in the first place, what legitimated pushing aside its original inhabitants, and the national task Americans had adopted.
This does not exactly mean that Locke’s writings on legitimate government, the origins of property, and natural law should have rested alongside Milton on the rough-hewn mantel of Tocqueville’s archetypal settler. It is true that early Americans were broadly literate, often with a rudimentary sense of law, and frontier settlers, as much as the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, did make Lockean claims to the land. The point, though, is that regardless of whether they read Locke or the many jurists who followed him on these points, Americans developed a public language, a proto-democratic way of talking about the national identity and project, the proper uses of government and duties of citizens, a whole civic vocabulary of praise, exhortation, and reprimand, that rested on the same view of nature that founded Locke’s philosophy. In doing so, they were of course engaged in the practical business of politics: finding phrases and arguments to motivate fellow citizens, align interests conveniently with principles, and deal with the immense, grittily practical, and often bloody work of nation-building. They were also, however, making a philosophical choice. They were aligning the country with a view of nature, and the human place in it, that was one point in a controversial set of debates. Like the broadly Lockean view that entered the public language of the United States, the alternative positions also tied ideas of nature to theories of political and personal freedom. The American engagement with nature grew out of a broader debate on the same themes, one closely connected with some of the most essential issues in politics, value, and knowledge.
A public language will not serve its purpose in a democracy unless it resonates with the experience and identity of everyday people. If they cannot recognize themselves in its phrases, it will have only the abstract clink of official ideology. For this reason, public language about nature interacts with environmental imagination, the ways that citizens perceive and encounter the natural world as they work and play, and how nature fits in their religious, civic, and intimate lives. The choice of public language acknowledged that environmental imagination already fit a broadly Lockean image. It was also, however, a choice to honor and propagate the sort of environmental imagination that fit this image, and to honor less the other ways a person might encounter the living world. Much of the rest of this book is devoted to understanding what these choices entailed, where they placed Americans within the spectrum of environmental imagination available in their time, and what Americans have done since with this legacy of public language and environmental imagination.
Such comparisons failed him. In what Norman village would the bell-tower cock look down on a British soldier of the Highland regiments, fully uniformed in kilt, red tunic, and ostrich-feather cap, and set on guard at the border of the empire; then spin in an east wind to regard “two stark naked Indians, their bodies streaked with dyes, rings in their noses … in a little bark canoe”? The frontier of European settlement was also the border country of empires, where civilizations crossed like the merchants of many languages and religions who streamed through the ancient port cities of the Mediterranean. Unsettlement, movement, the mutual jostling of people displaced by choice or force, was what Tocqueville found in the Northwest Territories. The emblems of European nations that he met on the frontier were fragmented images on the vast canvas of the new continent.
In the American pioneers, the forest-clearing, town-building leading edge of settlement, Tocqueville found a people entirely without terroir. They had, he reported, none of the flavor of a place and its soil, no regional idiosyncrasy or rough peasant culture. The man one met in New York upon disembarking from a trans-Atlantic voyage was the same man one met at the doorway of a log cabin northwest of Pontiac, on the very edge of settlement. Unlike the laborers and aristocrats of France – at least as Tocqueville imagined them – these Americans did not spring from the land and carry its mark in rooted, place-based cultures. Instead, they aimed their vagrant, conquering strength at a continent they were determined to master, indifferent to its detail and variation except where these promised wealth. The European travelers’ wish to see trackless wilderness for its own sake made no sense to their American hosts. As Tocqueville reported – playing up the scene for effect – he and Beaumont had to pose as speculators, then manoeuvre into a faux-casual question about where the least desirable land lay, to get directions to the wilderness.
These directions led them to a woods northwest of Pontiac, in what is now Michigan, which became a set-piece in Tocqueville’s portrait of the new American nation. The setting was of devastation. The first sign of settlement was burnt-over ground, scorched limbs, and trees dead but standing, having been strangled by girdling, stripping a ring of bark to stop sap from circulating. Here, “all the trees seem to have been struck by sudden death,” and “[i]n full summer their withered branches seem the image of winter.” In this deathly forest, a proliferation of weeds and wheat, corn and oak shoots, grew on ground newly opened to the sun. At the center of this crude clearing, dead trees gave way to stumps of trees cut but not yet grubbed up, and amid the stumps stood a log cabin.
In this crude building, with a window hacked out of the log walls and furniture assembled from untrimmed tree limbs still sprouting leaves, a few details pointed to the meaning behind the rough labor of frontier survival. A muslin curtain and cracked teapot promised a gracious domestic life in decades ahead. A bible, a prayerbook, and “sometimes, a poem of Milton or a tragedy of Shakespeare” the cabin’s ties to the past, while a few newspapers maintained a desultory but persistent tie to present events. Other than a deerskin or eagle feathers, Tocqueville mentioned only one pure decoration, one piece of visual display: a map of the United States, stretched to the right of the fireplace, lifting and fluttering in the breezes that passes through cracks in the cabin wall.
The map was an appropriate symbol. If the American pioneers lacked all terroir and pleasure in the details of unsettled land, if the terrain they shaped was haphazardly ugly, they were nonetheless in the grip of a continental vision. Tocqueville, who reveled in paradox, saw in the Americans a heroic spirit deployed for utilitarian ends, the vitality of savage warfare joined with the cool calculation of self-interest. He called the settlers “a race to whom the future of the New World belongs, a restless, calculating, adventurous race which sets coldly about deeds that can only be explained by the fire of passion … that submits to living the life of a savage without ever letting itself be carried away by its charms, that only cherishes those parts of civilization and enlightenment which are useful for well-being.” The American nation, he judged, “like all great peoples, has but one thought, and presses forward to the acquisition of riches, the single end of its labors, with a perseverance and a scorn of life which one could call heroic, if that word were properly used of anything but the strivings of virtue.” Here was something new in the world: heroic effort for everyday purposes, self-sacrificing devotion without self-immolating passion, were the qualities of a people who could achieve the focused violence of conquest and sustain the orderly power of rule. Thus Tocqueville called the Americans “[a] nation of conquerors … whom rivers and lakes cannot hold back, before whom forests fall and prairies are covered in shade; and who, when they have reached the Pacific Ocean, will come back on its tracks to trouble and destroy the societies which it will have formed behind it.”
What such a nation meant for the continent was palpable: clearing, settlement, cultivation and also a kind of devastation. What did it mean, how did it feel, to be such a person, one of these new Americans? It seemed to Tocqueville that these calculating conquerors became emotionally flat, almost two-dimensional, and lost the savor of living for its own sake, without some instrumental reward. He described the pioneers as cold-blooded, stiff, austere, and so emotionally isolated that they hardly took pleasure in ordinary sociability. Indeed, he saw them as consumed by their nation-building vision an hardly able to acknowledge the reality of fellow human beings: “Even [the pioneer’s] feelings for his family have become merged in a vast egotism, and one cannot be sure whether he regards his wife and children as anything more than a detached part of himself.” This was, for him, part of the paradox of a “great” people, a nation that would turn the wheel of history, that spent its energy in chilly, deliberate fashion, turning a continent to production and profit, from wilderness to property.
The image of the pioneer as what we might today call a narcissist – self-aggrandizing, emotionally truncated, isolated from others to the point of doubting their reality except as projected aspects of one’s self – was one that would later form a central and enduring image of the second volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. There he portrayed, not just frontier settlers, but Americans in general and, by extension, the democratic personality of the future, as emotionally insensate, among others yet unable to feel them, with each man shut up alone in himself. It is striking to find an origin for this idea in Tocqueville’s observation of Americans’ relation to land and the natural world. Although what struck Tocqueville was the lack of terroir in Americans, that did not mean Americans were not defined by a relation to the land. Instead, they were defined by an abstract and general relation to nature, as a field of economic value which they extracted and exploited wherever they found it, building a nation as they went. This relation to nature was well captured in the abstract image of the nation that Tocqueville saw on the cabin walls of the frontier: the map of the United States spreading across a continent, subsuming rivers and mountains, swamps and deserts, forests and plains within its borders. It seemed to him that its consequences were also palpable in the casual destruction that had turned a Midwestern summer to winter and left trees to decay and collapse as weeds and new crops grew up together under their dead limbs. Although Tocqueville did not trace the emotional economy that tied this chilly isolation to certain kind of world-historical mission on the continent, his intuition was that Americans’ isolation from one another, their evasion of their own warm and passionate energies, and their relentless, muscular, but cold-blooded struggle with nature were parts of a coherent outlook.
Alexis de Tocqueville was an opinionated observer of the American scene, and his judgments were motivated by an intense concern with Europe’s future, which he supposed was presaged in the democratic United States. Even saying this understates the matter: reading Tocqueville, one learns as much about him as about the people he observed. He often seemed to imagine that only refined characters like him were capable of genuine reflection, while others were swept along by the currents of opinion and history, their words and ideas symptoms of the great trends that Tocqueville traced. His writing is thus marked by reluctance to reflect on his own preoccupations and a sharp limit on his considerable gift for imagining his way into others’ experience. He approached the world somewhat as a tremendously bright student of literature might approach a novel that he had been assured was structured by a few major themes, which it was his assignment to discern. For all the acuity of his particular observations, then, his real talent lay in the sharp yet sweeping general claim about such things as “American character” or “democratic experience,” which might or might not exist, and might or might be as they seemed to one uncommonly articulate French aristocrat on a short visit.
For all these reasons, it has been unfashionable to begin a study of American experience with Tocqueville, or, for that matter, to follow him in making American experience a topic at all. Yet there are also reasons to do both things. Tocqueville’s arresting frontier vignettes are a window into a quiet moment within an extraordinary chapter of American social, economic, and ecological history: a settler people’s violent sweep across North America. As Tocqueville recorded in miniature, pioneers burnt hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, strangled and eventually leveled and grubbed up much of the rest, cut the deep and tangled roots of prairie sod with the plow, and drained wetlands and redirected rivers. The scope and vigor of the transformation suggested a military campaign. So did the one-sided warfare that Americans waged on predators. Wolves, for instance, were the targets of more than a century of something like total warfare, including massive poisonings, great bounties, and vaunted expeditions against the strongest and most elusive individuals. This was not the first time human beings had transformed a landscape, and some of the difference from earlier episodes was a matter of more powerful technology, but it was an extraordinary remaking of a continent.
As Tocqueville suggested, the settlers carried, and were carried by, an idea of what their work meant. Indeed, even more than he seems to have realized, the American project of clearing and settling the continent was involved with an interpretation of nature. [It all depended on…] [I think the strongest statements of the providential republic view, at least rhetorically, need to go in here. That way, it’s evident early that this is not just Great Books.]
[All the world was America]
John Locke’s claim that, “In the beginning, all the world was America,” is perhaps the most pregnant passage in his thought. It crystallizes the speculative history that underlay Locke’s political thought. Humanity began, on this account, in a world not yet owned, where no property lines marked mine from yours, and anyone could exercise his natural right to use whatever resources he needed for his survival or convenience. Those who wandered this world were in what Locke called the state of nature, where all were equally free to act as they wished, so long as they did not harm one another. There were no slaves and no masters, no rulers or ruled. Although it was a world not yet owned, it was not immune to ownership: one who used something, whether by clearing a field or gathering apples, acquired a property right in it, which others had to respect. The only limit on this right to acquire property was that the natural men must leave enough for others to satisfy their own needs. History began in a world of extensive liberty and radical equality, organized by a modest dose of natural law, a world without government but infused with without order and principle.
Locke’s state of nature contained the seeds of a much more extensive system of law, the explicit, usually written law of a formal political system. That was not accidental: the point of his imagined “America” was to provide an account of how organized government could come into being as an extension of natural freedom and equality. Government, in Locke’s telling, arose when men in the state of nature voluntarily surrendered some of their extensive freedom in exchange for the security that government provided. The advantage of this theory was that it explained why legitimate government must have limited powers: it was bound by the same natural law that pertained in the state of nature, including respect for property rights, and could exercise only the powers that natural men would have granted it to protect their lawful interests. Natural freedom and equality were speculative postulates, not direct limits on real-world governments, but as the cardinal points of Locke’s political theory they drew a line between those acts of government that subjects must obey, because they were compatible with the consent of free and equal natural men, and those commands that subjects could resist, because natural men would not have consented to them.
This image of a primordial, unclaimed land, where freedom and equality could unfold themselves, had great meaning for the continent Locke used to imagine the beginnings of history: North America. This continent became a present instance of a world before government, a landscape under natural law. This meant that settlers had a chance to replay Lockean history, divide the continent among themselves and make, by common consent, a constitutional government to rule them all. They could take freedom and equality as the premises of a practical enterprise, building an “empire of liberty” westward from the Atlantic. What had been theoretical postulates in Locke’s thought now became cornerstones of a vast undertaking.
It is widely recognized, of course, that discovering an open continent changed the course of European, and world, history. Max Weber, the great German social thinker, reflected that human freedom owed an incalculable debt to a “wind from the west,” the ferment of experiment, new wealth, and open borders that rebels and dissidents could flee across, and it seemed to Weber that such a wind might never blow again. Early Americans, too, endlessly claimed that open land and rational experiments in government made them the pivotal nation in human history, the ones whose success could revive Roman freedom, show the proper form of Christian government, or establish once and for all that a people could govern itself by choice and reason, not chance and inheritance. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Northern ideal of American democracy, as a republic of smallholders, was firmly established, and it was commonplace that a republic of free men, each dignified by making his living through free labor, depended on the availability of free land on the frontier.
What is easier to miss is that early Americans’ ideas were not simply about history, politics, and freedom. They were also about nature: what the natural world was, where its value lay, and how human beings should use it. To see this in some detail, let’s stay a little longer with Locke, where the logic is especially clear. Locke argued, against earlier theorists of natural law such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, that although the world originally belonged to all in common, an individual could turn it into his own property by appropriating or improving so much of it as he could use. This act, creating a legal right of ownership, did not depend on either the consent of the rest of humanity (which was, after all, losing its claim), which Grotius had argued, or the act of a sovereign government to declare “mine and thine,” as Hobbes believed. Instead, property could arise before government, was among the interests that natural men sought to secure by creating government, and thus was one of the limits on what legitimate government could do?
And how could we know this, according to Locke? “God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labor, and the penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of life….” Locke continued, “God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniencies of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it;)….” There were two sources, then, for Locke’s view of natural property, both deeply involved in the human relation to nature. First was the curse of Adam, the command to labor that accompanied expulsion from Eden. This, however, is not purely a curse in Locke’s hands: rather, those who obey the command are a morally favored group, the “industrious and rational,” and it is to them that the world really belongs. The second source of Locke’s view was an interpretation of the human predicament in the natural world. People were needy, vulnerable, and poorly provided for by “un-assisted nature,” but the world’s stinginess, and humanity’s “penury,” need not be permanent. Instead, when men mixed their labor with the world, it bloomed, producing a hundred times or more the wealth it yielded when “un-assisted.” Property, which guaranteed to owners the fruits of their work, was the rational response to human needs in a world that met those needs abundantly when fertilized with labor, scarcely at all when left fallow. Locke persistently referred to land that had not been turned to property as “waste,” a word with a double sense: of resources squandered or not used, an affront to the “industrious and rational,” and also emptiness, a sense rooted in its origins in the Latin vastus, a desolate space. The natural world, so far as it had not come under the fruitful power of labor, was empty, incomplete.
For Locke, contemplating the natural world and the human place in it revealed principles that were binding on social and political life. This was true because humans were part of nature, and nature, in turn, pervasively exhibited divine purpose in the harmonies of its design. So far as human purposes were legible from nature’s design, they were natural law, part of the world’s fabric. Thus, though natural men were free and equal with regard to one another, they were subordinate to God, the divine legislator, and not at liberty to defy the design that nature expressed. As Locke memorably put it, “nature must be altogether negated before one can claim for oneself absolute liberty” – a course of action that he was not recommending. Instruction in divine design came from rationally contemplating nature, a task that required discipline and effort, since, like precious metals buried underground, the principles of divine law “do not present themselves to idle and listless people.” Therefore, as making nature fruitful required forging a virtue out of Adam’s curse of labor, so learning the duties of natural law itself required people to join the industrious and rational, for whom the world was made. The world taught humanity that they should subdue it with labor to make it bloom, that it belonged to the industrious and rational; but this truth was clear only to those who had labored to discern it.
[The material on exclusion of Native Americans and on settler colonies.]
The settlers of the United States followed Locke in how they described their right to the continent and their duty to develop it. This meant that they gave their continental project a distinctly environmental justification. Other imperial claims to land and jurisdiction relied on Christian conversion and the theory of just war (Spain in Latin America), utilitarian accounts of progress for backward civilizations (the British in India), and the need for humanitarian intervention in violent, rights-abusing societies (the Belgians and others in central Africa). The American claim rested distinctively on an interpretation of the human place in nature, which made clearing and settlement both a right and a duty. Using the continent productively was the basis of the nation’s claim to it in the first place, what legitimated pushing aside its original inhabitants, and the national task Americans had adopted.
This does not exactly mean that Locke’s writings on legitimate government, the origins of property, and natural law should have rested alongside Milton on the rough-hewn mantel of Tocqueville’s archetypal settler. It is true that early Americans were broadly literate, often with a rudimentary sense of law, and frontier settlers, as much as the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, did make Lockean claims to the land. The point, though, is that regardless of whether they read Locke or the many jurists who followed him on these points, Americans developed a public language, a proto-democratic way of talking about the national identity and project, the proper uses of government and duties of citizens, a whole civic vocabulary of praise, exhortation, and reprimand, that rested on the same view of nature that founded Locke’s philosophy. In doing so, they were of course engaged in the practical business of politics: finding phrases and arguments to motivate fellow citizens, align interests conveniently with principles, and deal with the immense, grittily practical, and often bloody work of nation-building. They were also, however, making a philosophical choice. They were aligning the country with a view of nature, and the human place in it, that was one point in a controversial set of debates. Like the broadly Lockean view that entered the public language of the United States, the alternative positions also tied ideas of nature to theories of political and personal freedom. The American engagement with nature grew out of a broader debate on the same themes, one closely connected with some of the most essential issues in politics, value, and knowledge.
A public language will not serve its purpose in a democracy unless it resonates with the experience and identity of everyday people. If they cannot recognize themselves in its phrases, it will have only the abstract clink of official ideology. For this reason, public language about nature interacts with environmental imagination, the ways that citizens perceive and encounter the natural world as they work and play, and how nature fits in their religious, civic, and intimate lives. The choice of public language acknowledged that environmental imagination already fit a broadly Lockean image. It was also, however, a choice to honor and propagate the sort of environmental imagination that fit this image, and to honor less the other ways a person might encounter the living world. Much of the rest of this book is devoted to understanding what these choices entailed, where they placed Americans within the spectrum of environmental imagination available in their time, and what Americans have done since with this legacy of public language and environmental imagination.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The Ethics of Enchantment, II: The Trouble with Enchantment
The last post has drawn some skeptical reactions (some essentially friendly, others cooler), so here I want to clear some ground by considering the core reasons to deny that enchantment – that deliberately controversial word – might contribute something important to our environmental conversation.
First is disregard for science. Enchantment can mean license to indulge in interpretations of nature that fit one’s moral, political, and even aesthetic likes despite – or more likely because of – contradicting science. The hugely obvious example right now is skepticism about climate change on the American right, which also happens to be a politically congenial example for me: of course I think it’s irrational! But there are plenty of examples among greens and others more like me. Fantastical medical theories and rejection of vaccines don’t have the constituency of climate denial, and their effect on public policy is likely to be less serious, but such attitudes have plenty of potential to make us collectively less able to secure our health and safety. That can mean willing submission to the same kinds of blind and cruel physical necessity that the emancipation from enchantment was aimed at overcoming.
Second, there’s a pair of what I think of as more purely ethical problems. Both come from finding too much comfort in a congenial view of nature. The first is mainly a matter of intellectual honesty, of good faith. If you live within the modern project of trying to come to grips with the world as it is, then an enchanted nature can be an appealing but counterproductive way out. Consider John Muir’s portraiture of the American West, for instance. Muir’s nature is all harmony: as he once put it, “no struggle for existence” intruded into his high Sierra. The place was an aesthetic and spiritual pleasuring-ground, where all species were brethren. It is difficult to take this as a serious attitude toward nature, or toward life, though the all-embracing optimism Muir expounded was supposed to reveal the real character of nature and also much about the human place in the world.
This problem sheds some light on the wistful refrain of the early Sierra Club: that sojourns in the high country had to end in return to the disenchanted lowlands, geographic and spiritual, of everyday life. The Club had little to say about what a Sierra epiphany might mean for the rest of life, social or personal. Maybe this is partly because the terrain the Club’s expeditions ascended into was not just literally rarefied: it was also a landscape of enchantment in the sense that the Club’s way of describing and seeing it glossed over the jagged and bloody parts, and also the flat, disappointing, meaningless ones. (Admittedly, in the Sierra summer, there often seems to be little of the latter: from individual flowers to peaks and valley vistas, the region can seem made to delight at every scale and angle of vision.)
The other ethical problem can be a lot worse, because it breaks faith with other people, not just with one’s self. Often when I mention that I’m interested in the relationships among Romanticism, conceptions of nature, and politics, thoughtful people go straight to the appropriate historical challenge: what about Germany? To put it cursorily, skating over the horror, adoration of the German landscape and joyous expeditions into nature were ubiquitous in the politics of left (at least as far as the social democrats) and right from the later nineteenth century on forward. As Luc Ferry argued in his tendentious but hard-to-ignore New Ecological Order, Nazism, which incorporated and carried on the right-most of these movements, was both “ecological” in some of its substantive concerns (including organic agriculture and, in some infamous characters, vegetarianism and concern for animal rights) and “enchanted” in its romantic praise of “blood and soil.”
The general danger here is that enchanted views of nature almost automatically foster the belief that some people are closer to nature’s purposes, more aligned with its right order, than others. This needn’t lead to exclusionary nationalism, but it has that affinity, since it is a convenient way of explaining one group’s “superior” claim to a land: their organic connection to it, its entwinement with their innate identity. But even without that – and American nature romanticism has had only a weak association with nationalism, tending instead to universal spiritual claims – it certainly asserts that my nature is the right nature, and that, because I understand it, I am its inevitable spokesperson, the best judge of how to use and inhabit it. When there was a brief argument in the 1970s about giving legal standing to natural phenomena, through representatives such as the Sierra Club, the real substance of the cultural conflict was whether such groups, with their highly particular (and, from some perspectives, conceited) takes on nature, should have a special claim to understand and represent it. Of course, this would have meant, in practice, having a special claim to define the public interest in nature, and that, in turn, would have been a pre-emption of ordinary political debate. Elite aesthetes belong to nature, and it to them; developers, mine bosses, and the like, do not, nor it to them. You can very well prefer the agenda of the aesthetes and, nonetheless, believe this is an illegitimate kind of argument.
It’s pretty hard to resist this point, at least on some level. Pre-empting the usual means of making social decisions by asserting that the land is mine on aesthetic or spiritual grounds does seem wrong. Certainly no one likes it when the other side does this – for instance, when Tea Partiers appear to be saying that, because of the kind of relationship humans have with God, we can know that the minerals lodged in American soil are there for our use and benefit. And the reason is that this kind of argument – if argument is even the word: appeal seems better – is so hard to engage responsively. There’s a kind of modesty and reciprocal respect in the disenchanted way of arguing about such decisions: expressing our various “preferences” and coming to more-or-less majoritarian decisions that don’t try to leap out of the field of human interests and values.
I think these three kinds of difficulties, particularly the last, account for a lot of the hostile response that many thoughtful people have to any dalliance with the language of enchantment. To ask what kind of approach we should take to enchanted attitudes, and whether there is a constructive approach, can seem to lead ineluctably to indulging irrationality, including the arrogant and exclusionary irrationality that tries to defect from our settled ways of making collective choices. We don’t even have to invoke actual political violence or bloody-minded (and soil-minded) nationalism to get at what’s wrong with it.
If this is what enchantment means, then the only ethics of enchantment is to get away from enchantment: we should be unreservedly loyal to the emancipating program of disenchantment that I sketched in the last post. At a time when some enchantment-mongers are helping to scuttle climate action, which must rank among the most important political failures of our time, this seems a particularly natural move. As Bill Ragette politely implied in his comment on an earlier post, it looks like science still needs to be a fighting creed.
If there’s more to say, it has to take these problems fully on board and not dodge them. It seems to me that the question is whether there is work of moral imagination, in the register I’ve been calling enchantment, that contributes importantly to our ability to appreciate and engage nature as a moral, political, and cultural problem. And the argument cannot just be that, as a matter of history, we owe some of our legal and political commitments to Romantic and other pro-enchantment developments that we might be skeptical toward if they arose today. That kind of poignant historical irony wouldn’t necessarily show anything about the attitude we should take going forward. Although those examples might be informative, the question is whether the mode of experience or imagination that I’ve been calling enchantment can enter into a productive relationship with such indispensable commitments as rationality and equality among citizens, which both drove disenchantment and continue to ground powerful considerations against enchantment.
First is disregard for science. Enchantment can mean license to indulge in interpretations of nature that fit one’s moral, political, and even aesthetic likes despite – or more likely because of – contradicting science. The hugely obvious example right now is skepticism about climate change on the American right, which also happens to be a politically congenial example for me: of course I think it’s irrational! But there are plenty of examples among greens and others more like me. Fantastical medical theories and rejection of vaccines don’t have the constituency of climate denial, and their effect on public policy is likely to be less serious, but such attitudes have plenty of potential to make us collectively less able to secure our health and safety. That can mean willing submission to the same kinds of blind and cruel physical necessity that the emancipation from enchantment was aimed at overcoming.
Second, there’s a pair of what I think of as more purely ethical problems. Both come from finding too much comfort in a congenial view of nature. The first is mainly a matter of intellectual honesty, of good faith. If you live within the modern project of trying to come to grips with the world as it is, then an enchanted nature can be an appealing but counterproductive way out. Consider John Muir’s portraiture of the American West, for instance. Muir’s nature is all harmony: as he once put it, “no struggle for existence” intruded into his high Sierra. The place was an aesthetic and spiritual pleasuring-ground, where all species were brethren. It is difficult to take this as a serious attitude toward nature, or toward life, though the all-embracing optimism Muir expounded was supposed to reveal the real character of nature and also much about the human place in the world.
This problem sheds some light on the wistful refrain of the early Sierra Club: that sojourns in the high country had to end in return to the disenchanted lowlands, geographic and spiritual, of everyday life. The Club had little to say about what a Sierra epiphany might mean for the rest of life, social or personal. Maybe this is partly because the terrain the Club’s expeditions ascended into was not just literally rarefied: it was also a landscape of enchantment in the sense that the Club’s way of describing and seeing it glossed over the jagged and bloody parts, and also the flat, disappointing, meaningless ones. (Admittedly, in the Sierra summer, there often seems to be little of the latter: from individual flowers to peaks and valley vistas, the region can seem made to delight at every scale and angle of vision.)
The other ethical problem can be a lot worse, because it breaks faith with other people, not just with one’s self. Often when I mention that I’m interested in the relationships among Romanticism, conceptions of nature, and politics, thoughtful people go straight to the appropriate historical challenge: what about Germany? To put it cursorily, skating over the horror, adoration of the German landscape and joyous expeditions into nature were ubiquitous in the politics of left (at least as far as the social democrats) and right from the later nineteenth century on forward. As Luc Ferry argued in his tendentious but hard-to-ignore New Ecological Order, Nazism, which incorporated and carried on the right-most of these movements, was both “ecological” in some of its substantive concerns (including organic agriculture and, in some infamous characters, vegetarianism and concern for animal rights) and “enchanted” in its romantic praise of “blood and soil.”
The general danger here is that enchanted views of nature almost automatically foster the belief that some people are closer to nature’s purposes, more aligned with its right order, than others. This needn’t lead to exclusionary nationalism, but it has that affinity, since it is a convenient way of explaining one group’s “superior” claim to a land: their organic connection to it, its entwinement with their innate identity. But even without that – and American nature romanticism has had only a weak association with nationalism, tending instead to universal spiritual claims – it certainly asserts that my nature is the right nature, and that, because I understand it, I am its inevitable spokesperson, the best judge of how to use and inhabit it. When there was a brief argument in the 1970s about giving legal standing to natural phenomena, through representatives such as the Sierra Club, the real substance of the cultural conflict was whether such groups, with their highly particular (and, from some perspectives, conceited) takes on nature, should have a special claim to understand and represent it. Of course, this would have meant, in practice, having a special claim to define the public interest in nature, and that, in turn, would have been a pre-emption of ordinary political debate. Elite aesthetes belong to nature, and it to them; developers, mine bosses, and the like, do not, nor it to them. You can very well prefer the agenda of the aesthetes and, nonetheless, believe this is an illegitimate kind of argument.
It’s pretty hard to resist this point, at least on some level. Pre-empting the usual means of making social decisions by asserting that the land is mine on aesthetic or spiritual grounds does seem wrong. Certainly no one likes it when the other side does this – for instance, when Tea Partiers appear to be saying that, because of the kind of relationship humans have with God, we can know that the minerals lodged in American soil are there for our use and benefit. And the reason is that this kind of argument – if argument is even the word: appeal seems better – is so hard to engage responsively. There’s a kind of modesty and reciprocal respect in the disenchanted way of arguing about such decisions: expressing our various “preferences” and coming to more-or-less majoritarian decisions that don’t try to leap out of the field of human interests and values.
I think these three kinds of difficulties, particularly the last, account for a lot of the hostile response that many thoughtful people have to any dalliance with the language of enchantment. To ask what kind of approach we should take to enchanted attitudes, and whether there is a constructive approach, can seem to lead ineluctably to indulging irrationality, including the arrogant and exclusionary irrationality that tries to defect from our settled ways of making collective choices. We don’t even have to invoke actual political violence or bloody-minded (and soil-minded) nationalism to get at what’s wrong with it.
If this is what enchantment means, then the only ethics of enchantment is to get away from enchantment: we should be unreservedly loyal to the emancipating program of disenchantment that I sketched in the last post. At a time when some enchantment-mongers are helping to scuttle climate action, which must rank among the most important political failures of our time, this seems a particularly natural move. As Bill Ragette politely implied in his comment on an earlier post, it looks like science still needs to be a fighting creed.
If there’s more to say, it has to take these problems fully on board and not dodge them. It seems to me that the question is whether there is work of moral imagination, in the register I’ve been calling enchantment, that contributes importantly to our ability to appreciate and engage nature as a moral, political, and cultural problem. And the argument cannot just be that, as a matter of history, we owe some of our legal and political commitments to Romantic and other pro-enchantment developments that we might be skeptical toward if they arose today. That kind of poignant historical irony wouldn’t necessarily show anything about the attitude we should take going forward. Although those examples might be informative, the question is whether the mode of experience or imagination that I’ve been calling enchantment can enter into a productive relationship with such indispensable commitments as rationality and equality among citizens, which both drove disenchantment and continue to ground powerful considerations against enchantment.
Friday, November 19, 2010
The Ethics of Enchantment, I: Must We Be Disenchanted?
Do we need to be disenchanted? Is there an honorable place for magic in environmental thought? I obviously use the word magic to unsettle serious people: I don’t mean to ask whether we should protect unicorns under the Endangered Species Act. But I mean to ask a serious question about how much freedom we have to reimagine our relationship to nature, to our landscapes, in the time we inhabit.
I’ve been thinking all day about enchantment. It has been that kind of day, even simply as a matter of the fall light, but I mean the word as the counter to disenchantment. Disenchantment is closely associated with Max Weber’s canonical account of modernity. Weber believed that reason was a force in history – a thin but relentless rationality, which pushed human thought and undertakings toward consistency and systematic expression. This had different effects on different areas of life. As for nature, rationalization brought it thoroughly under the sway of modern science: consistent, systematic accounts of cause-and-effect relationships, with no idea that it all had any “purpose” or “meant” anything. Weber called this approach to nature (and other things) instrumental reason: learning how to master the world to achieve our goals, without gaining any insight on what our goals might be (let alone the idea that the world itself might have goals). He was contemptuous of romantics who imagined that by going into the forests and mountains, they learned something about how they should live or the meaning of their lives. Purposes, values, were human things, and pretending to find them outside our own choices was giving ourselves a comfort no one deserved.
Disenchanted nature was nature without meaning, nature that could teach us nothing except how to manipulate it. Humanity in a disenchanted world should understand this and not indulge fantasies to the contrary. The ethics of disenchantment, then, was an ethics of maturity: humanity freeing itself from self-imposed intellectual infancy. It had charisma in the hands of expositors like Weber: charisma based in the courage to face things as they were, not as one might like them to be.
Modern law, and, by and large, ethics and political theory, are disenchanted in this way – and, in the way I just sketched, the disenchantment is a source of pride: these are (on their own self-conception) disciplines for grown-ups The first modern Anglo-American legal theorist, Jeremy Bentham, spent his inferno of a lifetime stripping English law of moss, Latin epigraphs, and icons. The dominant way of assessing law in American scholarship and regulation, cost-benefit analysis, is a low-built version of Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, intended to replace arbitrary values with the facts of human pleasures and pains (or, in this case, with the wealth to spend on pleasures).
Our other major normative approach, built on various versions of equal human rights, is the other major ethic of disenchantment: people matter equally, because of some basic property we have in common – we can all make choices, we all value things and have life-plans, at the minimum, we all value our own lives immeasurably; and from this, it follows that we should all be equally respected. (In this commitment to equality, the equal-rights approach rejoins Bentham’s utilitarianism, which was very basically about the idea that everyone’s pleasures and pains should count equally, whether they were bishops or peasants.
My puzzlement around this starts with the fact that ideas about nature, and, just as much, the ways people experience nature have persistently resisted disenchantment. For many, they have remained resolutely magical. And these experiences of enchantment have contributed very importantly to the environmental politics, law, and culture that we in fact have. So it isn’t just sentiment that is senchanted around nature: it seems to be the legal and institutional structure, and the set of beliefs and social movements that helped produce it and now maintain it.
What might this tell us about the opening question – whether disenchantment is intellectually mandatory, the only respectable attitude?
ASPECTS OF MAGIC
I need to start this discussion by doing something that I learned in college never to do, but that seems increasingly unavoidable as I get older: generalize about cultures, at least in a rough-cut way. Studies of pre-modern “magical” culture in Europe and extant “animist” groups elsewhere seem to converge on some ways that people experience nature in those times and places. They make for a pretty good starting sketch of what an enchanted experience of nature looks like.
First is the idea that mind and world are connected, and so are speech and world. Words and thoughts are invisible threads reaching to the secret heart of things. Bad thoughts, blasphemy, disrespect for the spirit of a place, can cause trouble: a plague, failed crops or a bad hunt, a “monstrous” birth. (That word is telling: it meant “misshapen,” but it is also related to the Latin for show, as in demonstrate, and it was thought that a misshapen calf, let alone an infant, displayed God’s reproach.) Mastered, these relationships could be magic in the usual technical sense of the word: manipulating physical phenomena for good or bad ends, outside the schemes of science). This is why Weber though “primitive” religion was a failed form of instrumental reason, basically a skein of charms and propitiations to stave off infertility and starvation.
But – and here is the second thing about an enchanted nature – these accounts often suggest an ethical relationship to natural phenomena. In propitiating a spirit – of, say, a place or a species – you might be hoping for a good hunt the next year, but you would also be trying to show it respect because showing respect is the right way to behave. It’s a lot like life among other people: there’s advantage to staying on their good side, but we also try to do right for them because that is how people decently relate to one another.
The ethical dimension of relating to nature could mean that nature stood in judgment on us, or, more usually, expressed divine judgment over us. (This is the significance of the monstrous birth, remember.) There is a very long and hydra-headed tradition of calling on the spontaneous human fear of thunder as a true perception that the Gods, or God, are angry, and that we had better get on our knees as fast as we can. If you’re ever in the mood for good science fiction but feeling antiquarian, read a Puritan sermon on earthquakes as expressions of divine wrath, and how they remind to be always – always – prepared for smiting. So, contrary to the sense that the word may give, enchantment didn’t mean fitting snugly into a world of friendly dryads and other place-spirits: it mean the awesomeness (in the strict sense of the word) of nature was out to get you. Or at least it could mean that.
Another aspect of the enchanted world was a belief that the patterns we saw in nature – how things resembled one another, for instance – revealed something about the meaning of things. So, for instance, the perception that every realm of animal life seemed to have a ruler – the eagle among birds, the lion among animals – showed that nature was hierarchically arranged, and this, in turn, had political meaning: the king was ruler by the same hierarchical principle that ordered the other species’ affairs. The idea that aesthetics is a quality of the perceiving mind, rather than a correspondence between perception and the meaning of the world, is partly a product of a disenchanted view of nature.
EMANCIPATION FROM ENCHANTMENT
By now it should be somewhat clear why disenchantment was not just a process of growing rationality, but a mission connected with an insurgent idea of human freedom. For people to take command of their own fates, driving back the horizons of vulnerability and need, they had to be able to do certain things. One was to fact nature without fear: to start down the thunderstorm, look without flinching at the “monstrous” birth. Otherwise, they could never expect to be constant in their own purposes, authors, within whatever constraints, of their own lives (as some neo-Stoic humanists imagined it in early-modern Europe), or their own salvation (as many Protestant divines demanded). Nature had to be disenchanted to drive out the demons and divine judgments and free the human mind from fear. The aim to do this was as old as Epicurus and Lucretius, and was revived by humanists like Montaigne. It could be an atheistic program, and Epicureans were often thought to be atheists; but, whether or not it left room for God at the apex of the cosmos, it needed nature itself to be a purely natural, de-moralized phenomenon, for the sake of the vulnerable people who had to live in it.
By the way, I have been reading Puritan governor John Winthrop’s journals, and the everyday vulnerability to nature is astonishing. Calves and pigs are always getting eaten by wolves. People are always dying in the cold, or crushed beneath trees they are cutting for wood in the heart of the Massachusetts winter. People die suddenly of known diseases, or unknown ones. Where the victims are blasphemers, or lewd, or defiant servants, the judgment of God is invoked. Otherwise, Winthrop praises the survivors for their prayer and fortitude.
The Puritan experience speaks to the other emancipation: to make themselves less physically vulnerable to an often violent nature, people had to master it: Weber’s “instrumental rationality” really had to get going. It’s now often pointed out that, early on, magic and science were closely related: if you were a physicist, well, you might well be an alchemist. What was a chemist (other than an herbalist) but an alchemist? But, increasingly, the views of people like Francis Bacon came to the fore, and understanding nature as a neutral set of processes subject to our manipulation became prominent, dominant, the only serious alternative.
This last point is seriously overdrawn, as I am going to argue. In practice, many people continued to have both Christian and, if you will, pagan experiences of an enchanted nature. But the agenda of disenchantment, the emancipation from fear and need, powerfully affected all parts of common life. Most of all, it shaped the highest, or haughtiest, echelons: the elite arbiters of what could count as a serious approach to the world. It was the generalization of that agenda that produced the disenchanted approaches to law, politics, and ethics that I sketched earlier – and on much the same humanistic and progressive motives that I have been sketching.
But. The ways of experience nature that I described as enchanted have proved very persistent. It may be more accurate to say that the ways of experiencing one’s life, in landscapes and among other living things, have proved persistent. And, as I said at the beginning, the seemingly perennial hunger for them, and the ways they have been adapted to a changed – industrial, democratic – world, have done a great deal to form our environmental law and politics. And they have shaped the modes and maps of experience that we carry and live, the meanings nature has for us.
What to make of this? In my next post, I plan to sketch how the appetite for enchantment helped form today’s many relations to nature, and to begin asking whether the only serious attitude is a disenchanted one. And, if not, what are the uses we can make of it? Is there an ethics of enchantment?
I’ve been thinking all day about enchantment. It has been that kind of day, even simply as a matter of the fall light, but I mean the word as the counter to disenchantment. Disenchantment is closely associated with Max Weber’s canonical account of modernity. Weber believed that reason was a force in history – a thin but relentless rationality, which pushed human thought and undertakings toward consistency and systematic expression. This had different effects on different areas of life. As for nature, rationalization brought it thoroughly under the sway of modern science: consistent, systematic accounts of cause-and-effect relationships, with no idea that it all had any “purpose” or “meant” anything. Weber called this approach to nature (and other things) instrumental reason: learning how to master the world to achieve our goals, without gaining any insight on what our goals might be (let alone the idea that the world itself might have goals). He was contemptuous of romantics who imagined that by going into the forests and mountains, they learned something about how they should live or the meaning of their lives. Purposes, values, were human things, and pretending to find them outside our own choices was giving ourselves a comfort no one deserved.
Disenchanted nature was nature without meaning, nature that could teach us nothing except how to manipulate it. Humanity in a disenchanted world should understand this and not indulge fantasies to the contrary. The ethics of disenchantment, then, was an ethics of maturity: humanity freeing itself from self-imposed intellectual infancy. It had charisma in the hands of expositors like Weber: charisma based in the courage to face things as they were, not as one might like them to be.
Modern law, and, by and large, ethics and political theory, are disenchanted in this way – and, in the way I just sketched, the disenchantment is a source of pride: these are (on their own self-conception) disciplines for grown-ups The first modern Anglo-American legal theorist, Jeremy Bentham, spent his inferno of a lifetime stripping English law of moss, Latin epigraphs, and icons. The dominant way of assessing law in American scholarship and regulation, cost-benefit analysis, is a low-built version of Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, intended to replace arbitrary values with the facts of human pleasures and pains (or, in this case, with the wealth to spend on pleasures).
Our other major normative approach, built on various versions of equal human rights, is the other major ethic of disenchantment: people matter equally, because of some basic property we have in common – we can all make choices, we all value things and have life-plans, at the minimum, we all value our own lives immeasurably; and from this, it follows that we should all be equally respected. (In this commitment to equality, the equal-rights approach rejoins Bentham’s utilitarianism, which was very basically about the idea that everyone’s pleasures and pains should count equally, whether they were bishops or peasants.
My puzzlement around this starts with the fact that ideas about nature, and, just as much, the ways people experience nature have persistently resisted disenchantment. For many, they have remained resolutely magical. And these experiences of enchantment have contributed very importantly to the environmental politics, law, and culture that we in fact have. So it isn’t just sentiment that is senchanted around nature: it seems to be the legal and institutional structure, and the set of beliefs and social movements that helped produce it and now maintain it.
What might this tell us about the opening question – whether disenchantment is intellectually mandatory, the only respectable attitude?
ASPECTS OF MAGIC
I need to start this discussion by doing something that I learned in college never to do, but that seems increasingly unavoidable as I get older: generalize about cultures, at least in a rough-cut way. Studies of pre-modern “magical” culture in Europe and extant “animist” groups elsewhere seem to converge on some ways that people experience nature in those times and places. They make for a pretty good starting sketch of what an enchanted experience of nature looks like.
First is the idea that mind and world are connected, and so are speech and world. Words and thoughts are invisible threads reaching to the secret heart of things. Bad thoughts, blasphemy, disrespect for the spirit of a place, can cause trouble: a plague, failed crops or a bad hunt, a “monstrous” birth. (That word is telling: it meant “misshapen,” but it is also related to the Latin for show, as in demonstrate, and it was thought that a misshapen calf, let alone an infant, displayed God’s reproach.) Mastered, these relationships could be magic in the usual technical sense of the word: manipulating physical phenomena for good or bad ends, outside the schemes of science). This is why Weber though “primitive” religion was a failed form of instrumental reason, basically a skein of charms and propitiations to stave off infertility and starvation.
But – and here is the second thing about an enchanted nature – these accounts often suggest an ethical relationship to natural phenomena. In propitiating a spirit – of, say, a place or a species – you might be hoping for a good hunt the next year, but you would also be trying to show it respect because showing respect is the right way to behave. It’s a lot like life among other people: there’s advantage to staying on their good side, but we also try to do right for them because that is how people decently relate to one another.
The ethical dimension of relating to nature could mean that nature stood in judgment on us, or, more usually, expressed divine judgment over us. (This is the significance of the monstrous birth, remember.) There is a very long and hydra-headed tradition of calling on the spontaneous human fear of thunder as a true perception that the Gods, or God, are angry, and that we had better get on our knees as fast as we can. If you’re ever in the mood for good science fiction but feeling antiquarian, read a Puritan sermon on earthquakes as expressions of divine wrath, and how they remind to be always – always – prepared for smiting. So, contrary to the sense that the word may give, enchantment didn’t mean fitting snugly into a world of friendly dryads and other place-spirits: it mean the awesomeness (in the strict sense of the word) of nature was out to get you. Or at least it could mean that.
Another aspect of the enchanted world was a belief that the patterns we saw in nature – how things resembled one another, for instance – revealed something about the meaning of things. So, for instance, the perception that every realm of animal life seemed to have a ruler – the eagle among birds, the lion among animals – showed that nature was hierarchically arranged, and this, in turn, had political meaning: the king was ruler by the same hierarchical principle that ordered the other species’ affairs. The idea that aesthetics is a quality of the perceiving mind, rather than a correspondence between perception and the meaning of the world, is partly a product of a disenchanted view of nature.
EMANCIPATION FROM ENCHANTMENT
By now it should be somewhat clear why disenchantment was not just a process of growing rationality, but a mission connected with an insurgent idea of human freedom. For people to take command of their own fates, driving back the horizons of vulnerability and need, they had to be able to do certain things. One was to fact nature without fear: to start down the thunderstorm, look without flinching at the “monstrous” birth. Otherwise, they could never expect to be constant in their own purposes, authors, within whatever constraints, of their own lives (as some neo-Stoic humanists imagined it in early-modern Europe), or their own salvation (as many Protestant divines demanded). Nature had to be disenchanted to drive out the demons and divine judgments and free the human mind from fear. The aim to do this was as old as Epicurus and Lucretius, and was revived by humanists like Montaigne. It could be an atheistic program, and Epicureans were often thought to be atheists; but, whether or not it left room for God at the apex of the cosmos, it needed nature itself to be a purely natural, de-moralized phenomenon, for the sake of the vulnerable people who had to live in it.
By the way, I have been reading Puritan governor John Winthrop’s journals, and the everyday vulnerability to nature is astonishing. Calves and pigs are always getting eaten by wolves. People are always dying in the cold, or crushed beneath trees they are cutting for wood in the heart of the Massachusetts winter. People die suddenly of known diseases, or unknown ones. Where the victims are blasphemers, or lewd, or defiant servants, the judgment of God is invoked. Otherwise, Winthrop praises the survivors for their prayer and fortitude.
The Puritan experience speaks to the other emancipation: to make themselves less physically vulnerable to an often violent nature, people had to master it: Weber’s “instrumental rationality” really had to get going. It’s now often pointed out that, early on, magic and science were closely related: if you were a physicist, well, you might well be an alchemist. What was a chemist (other than an herbalist) but an alchemist? But, increasingly, the views of people like Francis Bacon came to the fore, and understanding nature as a neutral set of processes subject to our manipulation became prominent, dominant, the only serious alternative.
This last point is seriously overdrawn, as I am going to argue. In practice, many people continued to have both Christian and, if you will, pagan experiences of an enchanted nature. But the agenda of disenchantment, the emancipation from fear and need, powerfully affected all parts of common life. Most of all, it shaped the highest, or haughtiest, echelons: the elite arbiters of what could count as a serious approach to the world. It was the generalization of that agenda that produced the disenchanted approaches to law, politics, and ethics that I sketched earlier – and on much the same humanistic and progressive motives that I have been sketching.
But. The ways of experience nature that I described as enchanted have proved very persistent. It may be more accurate to say that the ways of experiencing one’s life, in landscapes and among other living things, have proved persistent. And, as I said at the beginning, the seemingly perennial hunger for them, and the ways they have been adapted to a changed – industrial, democratic – world, have done a great deal to form our environmental law and politics. And they have shaped the modes and maps of experience that we carry and live, the meanings nature has for us.
What to make of this? In my next post, I plan to sketch how the appetite for enchantment helped form today’s many relations to nature, and to begin asking whether the only serious attitude is a disenchanted one. And, if not, what are the uses we can make of it? Is there an ethics of enchantment?
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
God, Politics, and Climate Change
Some Americans say they don’t believe in climate change because they believe in God – or, more exactly, because of what they believe about God. A few weeks ago, the New York Times quoted some Indiana Tea Party activists who explained that, because the world was created for human use and benefit, using its mineral wealth couldn’t possibly be harmful. Then a Republican would-be Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee turned out to believe that Noah’s Covenant – God’s promise not to destroy the world again before the end of time – rules out climate change. We don’t know many people believe some version of this story, but it is clearly part of the skein of money and conviction that have helped to make denial of climate change nearly a tenet of the Republican Party.
This looks like a big failure for the strategy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC tried mightily to establish an untouchable consensus on the science of climate, which would serve as the basis of a reasoned political debate on the topic. In the US, at least, politics – and religion – turned around and ate the science.
What’s going on here? Some accounts focus on money: lots of it goes into cultivating climate skepticism. Some draw on social psychology. Yale’s Dan Kahan and his collaborators have done some invaluable studies, and inspired others, that show views on climate tracking broader political and cultural identity. People who dislike regulation, mistrust “big government,” and get their sense of worth from traditional hierarchies tend to doubt climate change is real – though they sometimes feel differently when they’re told that it could be fought with macho technologies like nuclear power and geo-engineering. Those who believe in regulation, mistrust markets and individualism, and would like to make social life more egalitarian tend to believe climate change is real and human-caused – though they are more likely to doubt it if they think it requires macho technologies rather than virtuous emissions control. It’s fair to say that none of this bears on the merits of the science. Some of it has to do with what kinds of governance respondents feel comfortable or uncomfortable with: they resist believing in problems that seem to require regulation or other interventions (such as geo-engineering) that they dislike. These, in turn, seem connected with status: a certain version of the problem and its solutions makes me right, people like you, wrong.
I think there’s another way of getting at the issue. The belief that climate change can’t be real because God made the earth for us to use is just one instance of a deep and old American practice of enlisting nature to uphold our cultural and political identities – to prove that the world is made for people like us. Competing ideas about how nature works, why it matters, and what our place is in it have been on the scene for centuries, and they have always shaped our law-making around nature. Greens have been as much a part of this as today’s climate skeptics. In some ways, even technocrats are part of this story, rather than standing outside as some like to imagine they can. Attractive as the IPCC’s science-first strategy was, the right starting place in American politics is not to end-run this messiness, but to find ways to engage it.
The place to begin is with a rough historical map of what I call American environmental imagination. There are, very roughly, four takes on nature that have shaped politics and lawmaking in this country. The Indianan Tea Partiers and their friends in Congress are invoking the oldest of these, an idea that goes back to the European conquest and settlement of the continent. On this take, the world is made for us to use, but we have to complete the design by working to make it productive. Idle land, minerals left in the ground, wilderness areas locked out of mining and timbering for backpackers’ enjoyment, are all affronts. Using nature in this muscular, productive way is connected with the spirit of egalitarian democracy: farmers, loggers, miners, small businessmen, all the toilers, get special credit for honor, integrity, and down-home insight – in contrast to the lawyers and professors who never get calluses on their hands. Very frequently, this take is connected with religious belief in providential design: the world was engineered to answer our labor with fruitfulness. The fact that we get richer as we work is proof that we are working with divine design.
This theory helped to justify taking the continent from Native Americans (who seemed not to be doing much to make it bloom) and was the ideology of westward settlement. It formed the identities of generations of Americans, particularly those who labored to extract natural wealth. For the last century, its public assertions have often been defensive: the spirit of the honest settler has been invoked against the creation of national forests, wilderness areas, and national monuments – anything that moves land from use to preservation. When Utah county officials pilot a flag-draped bulldozer into a national monument or wilderness study area on the Fourth of July, they are calling in progress, labor, and liberty against effete preservation. When an early Tea-Party road show included testimonials on how the Endangered Species Act was parching farmers in the Central Valley (by requiring that water be kept in-stream), the point was the same. When macho Democratic Senate candidate Joe Manchin, in coal-mining West Virginia, wanted to show which side of this cultural divide he was on, he ran an ad showing himself pumping a bullet into the Waxman-Markey climate legislation.
I like to call this strand of environmental imagination providential, because of its emphasis on the world’s being made for use, and the conviction that, if we work it properly, we will be rewarded. If you believe this at the level of identity – it is part of who you are, why it makes sense for you to do the work you do, live where you live, drive what you drive, and trust as you do in the afterlife, then climate change might be a pretty serious affront. After all, it amounts to saying that how we have lived on the continent is self-undermining, even self-immolating. The providential God doesn’t do this kind of grim historical irony.
The IPCC strategy, and much of the elite climate conversation, has belonged to another strand of environmental imagination: that of the engineers and managers. This is at least part of the reason that the two sides are so mutually baffled and contemptuous of each other. Our elite climate conversation is mainly the province of progressive managers, specialists in using government to design better systems to benefit the whole society. In the US, this approach to governance arose in the Progressive Era and triumphed, at least for a while, in the New Deal. Particularly in its Progressive origins, it was essentially connected with fights about nature. The paradigms of progressive reform were new approaches to continental development: soil conservation, national forests, irrigation systems, and wildlife preserves. Progressives justified them by painting the providential model of westward expansion as a disaster – which it often enough was: a tableau of blown-out farms, eroded slopes, silt-choked streams, and exhausted forests stripped for their best wood and then burnt or left in rotting chaos.
On the progressive take, nature didn’t call out for settlement, at least not in the providential style. Instead, it called out for management. Expert administrators and designers could provide that, and so, on this take, they become the heroes of continental development. The individual settler went from being God’s soldier to looking hapless and inadvertently destructive. In some ways, this same fight is playing out again. Scientists and policy engineers say we have to re-engineer our whole economy to avoid undermining the planetary system it depends on. Others hear this as meaning that their efforts to live the American dream, under increasingly straitened circumstances, have made them participants in a huge and unfolding environmental injury. This alleged injury was and remains invisible to them, but the experts claim they can diagnose and cure it.
The third take on nature has been tremendously important for about a century of environmental lawmaking, but so far is less central to climate politics. This is the romantic view of nature. It can be summarized in a place-name: Yosemite Valley. Beginning in the middle and later nineteenth century, growing numbers of Americans found that, in the most spectacular places, facing sheer cliffs and mountain vistas, they felt elevated, clarified, restored. American scenery became a kind of secular religion, the national parks and wilderness areas its temples and churches. Besides contributing a lot to the politics of parks and wilderness, this take has been the touchstone of many of the most committed environmental advocates, particularly in groups like the Sierra Club – founded around the personality of arch-Romantic John Muir, and built on the strength of Ansel Adams’s visual paeans to American sublimity. I’ve wondered elsewhere whether the romantic spirit has something to contribute to the politics of climate change; but, so far, it has been largely absent from the field.
The fourth take is the newest addition to the American environmental imagination. It’s also the broadest and most diffuse. My hunch is that the politics of climate change will define the form that this take develops over the next few decades. This is the ecological take, founded on the discovery that everything is connected, that our actions – particularly in an industrial society – have consequences that are often remote, long-distance, unintended, even unforeseeable. In its first generation, in the 1960s and 1970s, ecology founded the perception that pollution was causing a massive public-health crisis, perhaps threatening life itself. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was just one part of a massive alarm about air and water pollution that helped to power the environmental statutes of the 1970s. The basic solutions – imposing appropriate technology and other controls, industry by industry and medium (meaning, say, air or water) by medium mitigated the problem; but they also turned out to be too simply, too blocky, not nearly “ecological” enough. It came to seem that not just our problems, but our solutions, had to involve complex and elusive systems of interdependence, ways of responding to unforeseen consequences, effects cross-cutting different statutes and jurisdictions, and so forth.
Since then, ecology has increasingly become a master-metaphor for social life itself. At a palpable scale, the enthusiasm for local food whose sources one can see is a way of trying to weave the web of interdependence more closely, to turn those invisible and long-distance harms into a set of visible and approachable mutual benefits. At the largest, most abstract scale, visions of comprehensive carbon-pricing – building a disincentive to emit greenhouse gases into every economic decision, from whether to drive or walk to what car to buy to how much capital is invested in alternative-energy research – are attempts to redesign a vastly complex system so that its many interrelations become mutually supportive rather than undermining.
Climate change is the ultimate story of interdependence and unforeseen consequences. To those who adopted the ecological take on nature in the 1960s and 1970s and thereafter, it seems to follow from the same logic: our traditional efforts at mastering the world for our convenience, and getting ever richer as we do so, need to give way to a more subtle and humble approach – not voluntary global poverty, but a recognition that the world does not exist for our benefit, that it imposes its own limits, and that our mastery of it is fragile and incomplete. This is why the ecologically minded often see geo-engineering schemes as accelerating the same mistakes that brought us here, while technophile progressive engineers embrace them, and traditional providentialists deny the problem in the first place.
All of this requires a lot more than I can say here, but I’ll to offer a few take-away points. First, this cultural story is not an alternative to the focus on money and power, or the social-science story: it’s a complement, that tries to get at the relationship between nature and identity because that relationship is part of the stories the other approaches pursue. It’s why money can mobilize some attitudes much more easily than others, and why some takes on nature reinforce people’s ideological commitments, while others offend them. Second, it’s not a counsel of despair for the ambitions to build climate politics on science and design a smart climate regime. Rather, it’s a counsel of reality: those ambitions have to run through politics, not around it, and expect to be having the messy kinds of conflicts that are springing up around climate. It might be helpful to remember that the policy engineer’s perspective isn’t just the “right” one: it’s also one part of a history of political and cultural conflict. The clash between it and a providential take, or the ecological perception that it’s hubristic, won’t just go away before the force of reason.
The four environmental attitudes I’ve sketched came into being at different times, but they co-exist now, often even within individuals. Speaking for myself, I feel them all. As a farm boy (providential laborer), high-country devotee (Romantic), law professor (progressive technocrat), and student of environmental problems (you’d better have an ecological take, if you care about these), I sometimes resonate spontaneously to each. That’s probably not so very unusual. Moreover, all four are constantly changing, and being fought over. Some evangelicals, and plenty of mainline Christians, continue to argue that “earth care” is the best understanding of the biblical call for “dominion,” meaning something like “skilled and respectful mastery,” and that humility before a complex, often unknowable world is part of the spirit of their tradition.
We’d better look forward to a lot more arguments about the meaning of all these traditions. We can just hope to make them something more than shouting, bafflement, and contempt.
This looks like a big failure for the strategy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC tried mightily to establish an untouchable consensus on the science of climate, which would serve as the basis of a reasoned political debate on the topic. In the US, at least, politics – and religion – turned around and ate the science.
What’s going on here? Some accounts focus on money: lots of it goes into cultivating climate skepticism. Some draw on social psychology. Yale’s Dan Kahan and his collaborators have done some invaluable studies, and inspired others, that show views on climate tracking broader political and cultural identity. People who dislike regulation, mistrust “big government,” and get their sense of worth from traditional hierarchies tend to doubt climate change is real – though they sometimes feel differently when they’re told that it could be fought with macho technologies like nuclear power and geo-engineering. Those who believe in regulation, mistrust markets and individualism, and would like to make social life more egalitarian tend to believe climate change is real and human-caused – though they are more likely to doubt it if they think it requires macho technologies rather than virtuous emissions control. It’s fair to say that none of this bears on the merits of the science. Some of it has to do with what kinds of governance respondents feel comfortable or uncomfortable with: they resist believing in problems that seem to require regulation or other interventions (such as geo-engineering) that they dislike. These, in turn, seem connected with status: a certain version of the problem and its solutions makes me right, people like you, wrong.
I think there’s another way of getting at the issue. The belief that climate change can’t be real because God made the earth for us to use is just one instance of a deep and old American practice of enlisting nature to uphold our cultural and political identities – to prove that the world is made for people like us. Competing ideas about how nature works, why it matters, and what our place is in it have been on the scene for centuries, and they have always shaped our law-making around nature. Greens have been as much a part of this as today’s climate skeptics. In some ways, even technocrats are part of this story, rather than standing outside as some like to imagine they can. Attractive as the IPCC’s science-first strategy was, the right starting place in American politics is not to end-run this messiness, but to find ways to engage it.
The place to begin is with a rough historical map of what I call American environmental imagination. There are, very roughly, four takes on nature that have shaped politics and lawmaking in this country. The Indianan Tea Partiers and their friends in Congress are invoking the oldest of these, an idea that goes back to the European conquest and settlement of the continent. On this take, the world is made for us to use, but we have to complete the design by working to make it productive. Idle land, minerals left in the ground, wilderness areas locked out of mining and timbering for backpackers’ enjoyment, are all affronts. Using nature in this muscular, productive way is connected with the spirit of egalitarian democracy: farmers, loggers, miners, small businessmen, all the toilers, get special credit for honor, integrity, and down-home insight – in contrast to the lawyers and professors who never get calluses on their hands. Very frequently, this take is connected with religious belief in providential design: the world was engineered to answer our labor with fruitfulness. The fact that we get richer as we work is proof that we are working with divine design.
This theory helped to justify taking the continent from Native Americans (who seemed not to be doing much to make it bloom) and was the ideology of westward settlement. It formed the identities of generations of Americans, particularly those who labored to extract natural wealth. For the last century, its public assertions have often been defensive: the spirit of the honest settler has been invoked against the creation of national forests, wilderness areas, and national monuments – anything that moves land from use to preservation. When Utah county officials pilot a flag-draped bulldozer into a national monument or wilderness study area on the Fourth of July, they are calling in progress, labor, and liberty against effete preservation. When an early Tea-Party road show included testimonials on how the Endangered Species Act was parching farmers in the Central Valley (by requiring that water be kept in-stream), the point was the same. When macho Democratic Senate candidate Joe Manchin, in coal-mining West Virginia, wanted to show which side of this cultural divide he was on, he ran an ad showing himself pumping a bullet into the Waxman-Markey climate legislation.
I like to call this strand of environmental imagination providential, because of its emphasis on the world’s being made for use, and the conviction that, if we work it properly, we will be rewarded. If you believe this at the level of identity – it is part of who you are, why it makes sense for you to do the work you do, live where you live, drive what you drive, and trust as you do in the afterlife, then climate change might be a pretty serious affront. After all, it amounts to saying that how we have lived on the continent is self-undermining, even self-immolating. The providential God doesn’t do this kind of grim historical irony.
The IPCC strategy, and much of the elite climate conversation, has belonged to another strand of environmental imagination: that of the engineers and managers. This is at least part of the reason that the two sides are so mutually baffled and contemptuous of each other. Our elite climate conversation is mainly the province of progressive managers, specialists in using government to design better systems to benefit the whole society. In the US, this approach to governance arose in the Progressive Era and triumphed, at least for a while, in the New Deal. Particularly in its Progressive origins, it was essentially connected with fights about nature. The paradigms of progressive reform were new approaches to continental development: soil conservation, national forests, irrigation systems, and wildlife preserves. Progressives justified them by painting the providential model of westward expansion as a disaster – which it often enough was: a tableau of blown-out farms, eroded slopes, silt-choked streams, and exhausted forests stripped for their best wood and then burnt or left in rotting chaos.
On the progressive take, nature didn’t call out for settlement, at least not in the providential style. Instead, it called out for management. Expert administrators and designers could provide that, and so, on this take, they become the heroes of continental development. The individual settler went from being God’s soldier to looking hapless and inadvertently destructive. In some ways, this same fight is playing out again. Scientists and policy engineers say we have to re-engineer our whole economy to avoid undermining the planetary system it depends on. Others hear this as meaning that their efforts to live the American dream, under increasingly straitened circumstances, have made them participants in a huge and unfolding environmental injury. This alleged injury was and remains invisible to them, but the experts claim they can diagnose and cure it.
The third take on nature has been tremendously important for about a century of environmental lawmaking, but so far is less central to climate politics. This is the romantic view of nature. It can be summarized in a place-name: Yosemite Valley. Beginning in the middle and later nineteenth century, growing numbers of Americans found that, in the most spectacular places, facing sheer cliffs and mountain vistas, they felt elevated, clarified, restored. American scenery became a kind of secular religion, the national parks and wilderness areas its temples and churches. Besides contributing a lot to the politics of parks and wilderness, this take has been the touchstone of many of the most committed environmental advocates, particularly in groups like the Sierra Club – founded around the personality of arch-Romantic John Muir, and built on the strength of Ansel Adams’s visual paeans to American sublimity. I’ve wondered elsewhere whether the romantic spirit has something to contribute to the politics of climate change; but, so far, it has been largely absent from the field.
The fourth take is the newest addition to the American environmental imagination. It’s also the broadest and most diffuse. My hunch is that the politics of climate change will define the form that this take develops over the next few decades. This is the ecological take, founded on the discovery that everything is connected, that our actions – particularly in an industrial society – have consequences that are often remote, long-distance, unintended, even unforeseeable. In its first generation, in the 1960s and 1970s, ecology founded the perception that pollution was causing a massive public-health crisis, perhaps threatening life itself. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was just one part of a massive alarm about air and water pollution that helped to power the environmental statutes of the 1970s. The basic solutions – imposing appropriate technology and other controls, industry by industry and medium (meaning, say, air or water) by medium mitigated the problem; but they also turned out to be too simply, too blocky, not nearly “ecological” enough. It came to seem that not just our problems, but our solutions, had to involve complex and elusive systems of interdependence, ways of responding to unforeseen consequences, effects cross-cutting different statutes and jurisdictions, and so forth.
Since then, ecology has increasingly become a master-metaphor for social life itself. At a palpable scale, the enthusiasm for local food whose sources one can see is a way of trying to weave the web of interdependence more closely, to turn those invisible and long-distance harms into a set of visible and approachable mutual benefits. At the largest, most abstract scale, visions of comprehensive carbon-pricing – building a disincentive to emit greenhouse gases into every economic decision, from whether to drive or walk to what car to buy to how much capital is invested in alternative-energy research – are attempts to redesign a vastly complex system so that its many interrelations become mutually supportive rather than undermining.
Climate change is the ultimate story of interdependence and unforeseen consequences. To those who adopted the ecological take on nature in the 1960s and 1970s and thereafter, it seems to follow from the same logic: our traditional efforts at mastering the world for our convenience, and getting ever richer as we do so, need to give way to a more subtle and humble approach – not voluntary global poverty, but a recognition that the world does not exist for our benefit, that it imposes its own limits, and that our mastery of it is fragile and incomplete. This is why the ecologically minded often see geo-engineering schemes as accelerating the same mistakes that brought us here, while technophile progressive engineers embrace them, and traditional providentialists deny the problem in the first place.
All of this requires a lot more than I can say here, but I’ll to offer a few take-away points. First, this cultural story is not an alternative to the focus on money and power, or the social-science story: it’s a complement, that tries to get at the relationship between nature and identity because that relationship is part of the stories the other approaches pursue. It’s why money can mobilize some attitudes much more easily than others, and why some takes on nature reinforce people’s ideological commitments, while others offend them. Second, it’s not a counsel of despair for the ambitions to build climate politics on science and design a smart climate regime. Rather, it’s a counsel of reality: those ambitions have to run through politics, not around it, and expect to be having the messy kinds of conflicts that are springing up around climate. It might be helpful to remember that the policy engineer’s perspective isn’t just the “right” one: it’s also one part of a history of political and cultural conflict. The clash between it and a providential take, or the ecological perception that it’s hubristic, won’t just go away before the force of reason.
The four environmental attitudes I’ve sketched came into being at different times, but they co-exist now, often even within individuals. Speaking for myself, I feel them all. As a farm boy (providential laborer), high-country devotee (Romantic), law professor (progressive technocrat), and student of environmental problems (you’d better have an ecological take, if you care about these), I sometimes resonate spontaneously to each. That’s probably not so very unusual. Moreover, all four are constantly changing, and being fought over. Some evangelicals, and plenty of mainline Christians, continue to argue that “earth care” is the best understanding of the biblical call for “dominion,” meaning something like “skilled and respectful mastery,” and that humility before a complex, often unknowable world is part of the spirit of their tradition.
We’d better look forward to a lot more arguments about the meaning of all these traditions. We can just hope to make them something more than shouting, bafflement, and contempt.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Sacrifice Zones and Mountaintop Removal
The American relationship with nature is fragmented and divided against itself, and this division has shaped the land. Americans invented the ideal of wilderness, land forever protected against roads, buildings, and engines. Our laws consecrate more than a hundred million acres to that ideal, most of it in the West, where you can wander for days without seeing a sign of “development.” Our national parks mark the first time a democracy chose to set aside revered landscapes in the name of all the people – and for their use and pleasure. President Theodore Roosevelt, a macho bully, imperialist, and champion of executive power, created vast acres of wildlife preserves, quite possibly in violation of the Constitution, because he loved birds.
But joy in nature, and reverence toward it, are half the story at most. The United States was founded on the belief that the natural world exists for human use, and the noblest activity is to make nature economically productive – to turn it to human needs and human wealth. This idea has always implied a certain mercilessness toward other views of the non-human world. Early Americans justified taking the continent from the Indians on the theory that tribes that did not settle and clear the land could not own it, because ownership had to be earned by development. The American Revolution, too, was justified partly by the British government’s forbidding the colonials to settle beyond the Allegheny Mountains – denying them, in other words, the human right and duty of development. This view of nature has often been at war with the first: in loggers fighting environmentalists, cattlemen who resisted the parks and wilderness system, and Westerners today who want to kick the federal government out of the national lands in their backyard. Those who work the land for wealth have often felt that preserving it from use is not just inconvenient to them: it is an insult to their way of life.
Then there is a third ideal, which really came into its own in the suburbs and culture of consumption after World War Two. This is the clean landscape: unpolluted, free of rank smells and waste, safe for children to run. The wish for the clean landscape helped to inspire the great anti-pollution laws of the 1970s, including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which did indeed make life safer and healthier in much of the country. But this was also a segregating ideal. It drove working nature out of sight and out of mind, excluding farming, making things, and burning things for energy from the places where people lived.
The logic of all this is to create sacrifice zones – the places where we produce food and energy, with little regard for the health or beauty of the land, to maintain our clean and convenient lives. American farmland has become more and more like an industrial waste system over the last fifty years, and its fertilizer, pesticide, manure, and soil erosion account for much of the country’s failure to meet its announced standards for clean air and water.
Since the mid-1990s, central Appalachia has become the country’s purest sacrifice zone. Energy from coal runs laptops, iPhones, and super-green electric cars, plus high-efficiency air-conditioning – all the conveniences of the clean world. At the same time, it comes from a use of the land that treats it as disposable. In the Appalachian coalfields, Americans do not treat the land as a people would who expected to live in a place for generations, or for more than a few years. When dynamite blasts apart a hilltop and draglines heap dirt in the surrounding hollows, the land is being classified as a place that we ruin forever, in return for a few years of convenience.
The movement against mountaintop removal has failed again and again in court, though at the time of writing it may be starting to see some success in politics. Its clearer success, though perhaps a Pyrrhic one, has been to raise Americans’ awareness of the sacrifices their energy economy entails. This comes at the same time that the industrial food system is increasingly visible, so that plastic-wrapped hamburger and pork chops have indelible associations with pools of liquid manure, industrial-scale antibiotics that produce drug-resistant bacteria, and confinement that denies animals the basic pleasures of movement and fresh air, and seems to drive them mad. These changes in awareness are beginning to show those who pay attention that there is no such thing as a clean world. Instead, we face a choice between acknowledging our waste and destruction, and trying to deal with them as responsibly as we can, or ignoring them and deepening the logic of the sacrifice zone.
What does all of this have to do with justice? A standard definition of environmental justice is that less powerful individuals and communities should not bear a disproportionate share of environmental harms, from pollution to the destruction of mining. This is an idea based in a certain version of fairness: treating people alike, although they may be different in wealth, region, race, or other ways. It is very clear that mountaintop removal, waste dumps in Appalachia, and the rest of the region’s environmental experience are instances of environmental injustice in this sense.
It is important, though, to be clear about how little power this idea of justice has in American law or American life more generally. We allocate most of the benefits of social life according to wealth: buying land in a clean and safe neighborhood, paying for a good education (at a private school, or by buying a house in a good school district), being able to purchase good medical care (or, for the moment, any medical care at all). Even outside of economic life, the burden of our criminal justice system falls heavily on the poor and racial minorities, who fill prisons, and whose crimes are punished much more harshly than those of the comfortable and privileged. We don’t exactly let people starve, and in person we Americans are often compassionate and charitable; but our way of sharing out the world speeds many lives on a road to ruin.
We treat landscapes the same way, along with the people who live on them. There is no equality among American landscapes: some are sacred, some protected against harm, and some sacrificed. As a result, there is no equality among Americans to the degree that they care about their landscapes, identify with them, and wish to imagine that their children and grandchildren might live there as they have. If you live in a wooded suburb of Boston and treasure the preserved lands next door, if you live in the dense neighborhoods of Boulder, Colorado, and like to duck into the Rocky Mountain National Park for your summer hikes, your relation to the land is secure, a privilege enshrined in law. But if you love the hills of southern West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky, if they form your idea of beauty and rest, your native or chosen image of home, then your love has prepared your heart for breaking.
Today, climate change seems to ensure that no one can be sure of growing old, or even growing up, in the landscape they were born into. Change, uncertainty, all parts of modern life, are now acute features of the global environment, with results that we have not really begun to understand. This is not just a physical, practical vulnerability. It is also a vulnerability in memory and hope, in ways of seeing the land, anticipating the seasons, knowing what will grow and what lives there with you, knowing whether it will be habitable at all. Wherever they live, Americans might consider that this is a vulnerability our laws have long imposed on those who live in, and love, the country’s sacrifice zones.
But joy in nature, and reverence toward it, are half the story at most. The United States was founded on the belief that the natural world exists for human use, and the noblest activity is to make nature economically productive – to turn it to human needs and human wealth. This idea has always implied a certain mercilessness toward other views of the non-human world. Early Americans justified taking the continent from the Indians on the theory that tribes that did not settle and clear the land could not own it, because ownership had to be earned by development. The American Revolution, too, was justified partly by the British government’s forbidding the colonials to settle beyond the Allegheny Mountains – denying them, in other words, the human right and duty of development. This view of nature has often been at war with the first: in loggers fighting environmentalists, cattlemen who resisted the parks and wilderness system, and Westerners today who want to kick the federal government out of the national lands in their backyard. Those who work the land for wealth have often felt that preserving it from use is not just inconvenient to them: it is an insult to their way of life.
Then there is a third ideal, which really came into its own in the suburbs and culture of consumption after World War Two. This is the clean landscape: unpolluted, free of rank smells and waste, safe for children to run. The wish for the clean landscape helped to inspire the great anti-pollution laws of the 1970s, including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which did indeed make life safer and healthier in much of the country. But this was also a segregating ideal. It drove working nature out of sight and out of mind, excluding farming, making things, and burning things for energy from the places where people lived.
The logic of all this is to create sacrifice zones – the places where we produce food and energy, with little regard for the health or beauty of the land, to maintain our clean and convenient lives. American farmland has become more and more like an industrial waste system over the last fifty years, and its fertilizer, pesticide, manure, and soil erosion account for much of the country’s failure to meet its announced standards for clean air and water.
Since the mid-1990s, central Appalachia has become the country’s purest sacrifice zone. Energy from coal runs laptops, iPhones, and super-green electric cars, plus high-efficiency air-conditioning – all the conveniences of the clean world. At the same time, it comes from a use of the land that treats it as disposable. In the Appalachian coalfields, Americans do not treat the land as a people would who expected to live in a place for generations, or for more than a few years. When dynamite blasts apart a hilltop and draglines heap dirt in the surrounding hollows, the land is being classified as a place that we ruin forever, in return for a few years of convenience.
The movement against mountaintop removal has failed again and again in court, though at the time of writing it may be starting to see some success in politics. Its clearer success, though perhaps a Pyrrhic one, has been to raise Americans’ awareness of the sacrifices their energy economy entails. This comes at the same time that the industrial food system is increasingly visible, so that plastic-wrapped hamburger and pork chops have indelible associations with pools of liquid manure, industrial-scale antibiotics that produce drug-resistant bacteria, and confinement that denies animals the basic pleasures of movement and fresh air, and seems to drive them mad. These changes in awareness are beginning to show those who pay attention that there is no such thing as a clean world. Instead, we face a choice between acknowledging our waste and destruction, and trying to deal with them as responsibly as we can, or ignoring them and deepening the logic of the sacrifice zone.
What does all of this have to do with justice? A standard definition of environmental justice is that less powerful individuals and communities should not bear a disproportionate share of environmental harms, from pollution to the destruction of mining. This is an idea based in a certain version of fairness: treating people alike, although they may be different in wealth, region, race, or other ways. It is very clear that mountaintop removal, waste dumps in Appalachia, and the rest of the region’s environmental experience are instances of environmental injustice in this sense.
It is important, though, to be clear about how little power this idea of justice has in American law or American life more generally. We allocate most of the benefits of social life according to wealth: buying land in a clean and safe neighborhood, paying for a good education (at a private school, or by buying a house in a good school district), being able to purchase good medical care (or, for the moment, any medical care at all). Even outside of economic life, the burden of our criminal justice system falls heavily on the poor and racial minorities, who fill prisons, and whose crimes are punished much more harshly than those of the comfortable and privileged. We don’t exactly let people starve, and in person we Americans are often compassionate and charitable; but our way of sharing out the world speeds many lives on a road to ruin.
We treat landscapes the same way, along with the people who live on them. There is no equality among American landscapes: some are sacred, some protected against harm, and some sacrificed. As a result, there is no equality among Americans to the degree that they care about their landscapes, identify with them, and wish to imagine that their children and grandchildren might live there as they have. If you live in a wooded suburb of Boston and treasure the preserved lands next door, if you live in the dense neighborhoods of Boulder, Colorado, and like to duck into the Rocky Mountain National Park for your summer hikes, your relation to the land is secure, a privilege enshrined in law. But if you love the hills of southern West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky, if they form your idea of beauty and rest, your native or chosen image of home, then your love has prepared your heart for breaking.
Today, climate change seems to ensure that no one can be sure of growing old, or even growing up, in the landscape they were born into. Change, uncertainty, all parts of modern life, are now acute features of the global environment, with results that we have not really begun to understand. This is not just a physical, practical vulnerability. It is also a vulnerability in memory and hope, in ways of seeing the land, anticipating the seasons, knowing what will grow and what lives there with you, knowing whether it will be habitable at all. Wherever they live, Americans might consider that this is a vulnerability our laws have long imposed on those who live in, and love, the country’s sacrifice zones.
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