Midwestern Sublime 2

The non-native criticizes the central Illinois landscape not on ethical grounds – “This land is bad” – nor pragmatic grounds – “This land is useless”; the critique is aesthetic: “This land is boring.” To understand how the land places the burden of boredom on the traveler it helps to place ourselves in the position of the traveler. The traveler has been shaped by other landscapes, and she has expectations when she arrives in Illinois. She has seen Ansel Adams photographs and Hudson Bay paintings – now those are landscapes! It would seem that Illinois has nothing comparable.

To what, then, shall we compare the land of central Illinois? Many years ago I went on my first extended backpacking trip in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The trip lasted three weeks. We never entered a building by day, and we slept under tarps at night. And this Illinois boy felt nearly claustrophobic. I found it confusing to feel so hemmed in on every side when we were out of doors. Then we reached the shores of Lake Superior. I could see the horizon, and I relaxed. Illinois is not like the Rocky Mountains or the Adirondacks. It is like the sea.

The picture posted is by Larry Kanfer and is entitled, appropriately, “Tall Ships.”

Midwestern Sublime

Those of us raised on the flat plains of Illinois have heard the story too many times. Travelers from other parts of the country have seen all they need to see of the state. They have seen it through the windows of their cars travelling at seventy miles an hour on our interstate system. Those flat plains bore those passing through; they provoke dread in those coming to stay. A landscape without hills is like a sky without stars, an endless nothingness as far as the eye can see. “The towns feel like they just dropped out of the sky; there is no reason why they should be one place rather than another.” “I couldn’t live here,” says the passers-through, head wagging. “We may have made a mistake” cough the second-guessing stayers.


I usually nod in agreement, taking a kind of pride in the personal virtues which my lamenting friend must attribute to me, virtues which give me an unimaginable strength to live in this nowhere land. But my nod is a lie. I disagree. My traveling friends are blind. They travel the country, and they hope along the way to see the beauty of the earth. They find it in New England and New Mexico, in Michigan and Missisippi, and they think they should find it in central Illinois. When they do not find it, their eyes fail them. So, for my traveling friends, I will offer a few meditations on how to see central Illinois.

Richard Nelson, Reflections I

Nelson, Richard. The Island Within. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Nelson, Richard. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Richard Nelson expresses in the form of a nature memoir the aesthetic sense of hunting. In the field of aesthetics, we call this “the sublime,” and it finds its classic definitions in Kant and Schopenhauer. Before the philosophers, though, let us allow this anthropologist-gone-native to speak.

In the first chapter of The Island Within, “The Face in a Raindrop,” Nelson has goes to the island to hunt, but he finds himself stranded by a storm. For three days, the merciless wind, the buckets of rain, the swelling sea, the enormous trees, the everyday exchange of life and death, and the intricate interconnections of all things on the island work on him. They dwarf him, they contain him, and they uphold him.

Here is the paragraph from which he draws the title of the chapter:

At this moment there must be more raindrops falling on the surface of the island that they are humans on earth, perhaps more than all the humans who ever lived. I’ve thought of raindrops as tiny and insignificant things, but against the scale of the earth itself, they’re scarcely smaller than I am. On what basis, then, can I consider myself more important? Koyukon elders say that each kind of weather, including rain, has its own spirit and consciousness. If this is true, there must be a spirit within every raindrop, as in all else that inhabits the earth. In this sense, we are two equal forms of being who stand in mutual regard. I bend down to look at a crystal droplet hanging from a hemlock needle and know my own image is trapped inside. It’s humbling to think of myself in this way. In the broader perspective of earth, I am nothing more than a face in a raindrop. p. 17

Ishmael, Book Review II

I will offer only a few observations on the book. First, a point of clarification: Ishmael paints a powerful and accessible picture, but, we ought not confuse this picture with others. Though Western, white, patriarchy provides a clear example of the taker mode of operation, takers are not identical with the West, with whites, with men, or any combination of those. Beijing, Robert Mugabe, and Margaret Thatcher do not offer an alternative to the taker mythology. Takers have made nearly the entire planet into a prison, and we humans are its occupants … all of us. Getting out of the prison is more important than redistributing privileges within the prison. The ecological revolution trumps all others.

Second, a call for elaboration: Quinn’s meditations on the first chapters of Genesis are provocative, and they could be usefully read alongside Hugh Brody’s considerations in The Other Side of Eden. Likewise, his alternative account of the history of the world contrasts nicely with the account in Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama, and Sayyid Qutb. It could be filled out by reading it alongside the works of Paul Shepherd. (I am planning to review some of Paul Shepherd’s books next.)

Third, a few critical comments: The “either / or” dichotomy (either takers or leavers) that forms the basis of the book supports its thesis as well as a bicycle at full stop supports its rider. Still, I can concede its usefulness for making the book accessible. However, our rider definitely falls over when Quinn provides only one of the two wheels; that is, he gives us the “either” without the “or.” Quinn develops the taker mythology but never gives as much attention to the leaver mythology. His leaver mythology doesn’t speak much about the gods and doesn’t really take the form of a story. This is a damning criticism in the terms the book set for itself. Instead, he frames leaver mythology in terms of biological and evolutionary laws. It is highly doubtful that this is the way leavers of various stripes would formulate their mythology.

Further, Quinn’s leaver mythology embraces the values of romanticism and democracy; species and forms of life are valued for their own sake, possess their own rights, and no group imposes its form of life on the others. This stands in tension with his evolutionary-based claim that the universe is moving toward intelligence and self-awareness, that such qualities are more complex and are presumably better or a genuine “advance.” Humans were the first to make this break-through, that other forms of life will follow and they will hail us for helping keep their futures open. Leaver mythology begins to look like a mishmash of ideas from the political left of the sixties, not from as yet unassimilated tribes in Brazil. Surely an intelligent, self-aware gorilla could offer a more significant paradigm shift than this.

Ishmael, Book Review I

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A Bantam / Turner Book, 1992. ISBN: 0553375407

Ishmael shares a genre with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; both alternate between 1) a symbolic narrative and 2) a series of straight-forward but allegedly mind-blowing lectures. I don’t know if this genre has a name.

The narrative: In Ishmael a teacher is looking for a student who wants to save the world. The narrator, Alan Lomax, is the student; the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who communicates telepathically. (Yes, you read that right.) Ishmael lives in an office building, where he also conducts his classes with Mr. Lomax. Four-fifths of the way through the book he is evicted from the office building and sold to a carnival.

The lectures: Ishmael helps his student unearth the mythology / worldview / ideology of the civilized world, those he designates “takers,” and of those civilizations that “history left behind,” whom he calls “leavers.” For the takers, the gods made the world for man to rule, but man first must conquer it. When he finally conquers and rules, the world will be paradise. However, man has a tragic flaw that keeps him from fulfilling this mission. For the leavers, on the other hand, man belongs to the world. The world tends toward complexity, self-awareness, and intelligence. Man is first to achieve self-awareness, and his job is to keep the future open for other species to also advance in complexity, intelligence, and self-awareness. (Remember, this is a gorilla talking.) All can now see that human culture will crash within a few generations. From the leaver view, this is not the result of a tragic human flaw; it follows from acting out the taker mythology. Takers have not really transcended nature, but they have acted as though nature’s laws no longer apply to them. The result is a reduction in complexity and diversity of species, but also of actual and potential intelligence and self-awareness. Natural law will bring the taker experiment to a close, not, however, before the takers themselves have nearly destroyed the planet.

Ishmael, the gorilla, having taught the human all he has to teach, offering to be now his friend rather than his teacher, dies due to lack of good care in the carnival.

Cartmill, Review IV

Cartmill’s final account of the immorality of hunting fails to convince. First, his claim to have found “consensus” among “the industrialized West” is as persuasive as asserting “we the people…” It leaves out not only non-Westerners, but also the non-industrialized in the West, particularly the rural poor, including those living on reservations. I suspect that the asserted consensus, even within the industrialized West, is a lie. Our way of life could not exist without considerable suffering from many animals. We need them to test medicines and medical procedures, and to provide foods of choice to people living in large cities. We are vaguely aware of their suffering, and most of us do not object.

Second, Cartmill himself notes that many contest the claim that a utilitarian ethic can and should be the fundamental principle by which we judge our treatment of animals. The objection is that utilitarians consider only pleasure and pain, and pleasure and pain can be felt only by individuals, not by species. By treating everything as an individual, the utilitarian cannot make important ethical distinctions; that is, utilitarian principle is blind to certain realities. For example, if an invasive species threatens to throw an entire ecosystem out of whack, and if biologists set out to eradicate the invasive species, utilitarians will protest on behalf of the individuals that will suffer under the eradication program. The utilitarian fails to recognize that individuals can exist only in certain ecosystems, alongside other specific species, and this is because an individual is not only an individual, but a member of a species. Cartmill notes that hunters share this view with environmentalists and biologists, but he makes no reply (236). (I will save other objections to utilitarian ethics for another day.)

Finally, Cartmill’s argument is that if we erase the distinction between humans and animals as morally irrelevant, then we can see that hunting is wrong. This conclusion follows only if we put on the utilitarian blinders. Attention to American Indians, such as the Lakota Sioux, would have shown the hidden assumptions. According to the Lakota, the bison is their brother. That is why they hunt the bison. To understand this view requires more than learning how to employ a single abstract principle (pain is bad) in a detailed, ledger-book calculation. It requires understanding an entire history of a people and a way of life carved out for centuries in symbiotic relationship with the bison.

Cartmill, Review III

To his credit, Cartmill does not limit his book to cultural histories of the morality of hunting and of the hunting hypothesis. In the final chapter, he weighs in on morality: “We need to ask whether hunting is wrong” (240). Cartmill lays out the variety of worldviews and motives the give sense to the actions of both anti-hunters and hunters. But finally, he too cuts to the chase and settles on utilitarian ethics, Peter Singer style. “There is a consensus today, at any rate in the industrialized West, that the suffering of sentient animals is something that is intrinsically undesirable….” (240). We can spot the conclusion from a single premise: hunting is wrong.

But it is not a single premise. The entire book has lead to this conclusion. The hunting hypothesis and the immorality hypothesis are themselves framed by the more general claim that hunting and morality conflict. By showing the associations of hunting with war and by arguing for hunting’s associations with rape, Cartmill underlines his point with a big, thick, red marker. Within this framework, the hunter can position himself only by brushing aside morality in the style of Nietzsche. Cartmill, however, tries to smoke him out of this amoral stance. If the hunter flees from morality, he cannot position himself in “nature” via the hunting hypothesis because science does not and cannot prove that hunting is “natural.”

What conclusion follows from this? Hunting is as human as morality; morality is as natural as hunting. The conflict between hunting and morality is not a conflict between the human and nature but between different ways of living life. What principles could we extract from the life lived best? Cartmill offers one: pain is undesirable. Since there is no qualitative difference between the pain of a non-human animal and a human animal, and since hunting causes “excruciating” pain, we cannot justify a way of life that includes hunting.