MS
Above is my photo of an endangered whooping crane. According to our guide today at the International Crane Foundation (ICS), who seemed to have the latest figures for these things, the total number of whooping cranes in the world is about 550. That’s pretty amazing since the number was once as low as 15! Through careful management and protection the flock has grown.. and those working with the birds now face the question of how to get young whopping cranes to migrate when there are no adults who can teach them. The answer? An ultralight airplame piloted by a person dressed up as a whooping crane. It’s awesomely ingenious:
The perseverance and creativity of the people working with cranes is incredible.. and with clear interest from my daughter, I am thinking about eventually contributing some money to the ICS and making this an issue we follow. But it’s sad that America has depleted its native animals like this. At the ICS habitat for the whooping crane there was this beautiful re-creation of what this Wisconsin landscape might have looked like long ago.. before Europeans arrived:
photo MS
This painting (the guide mentioned the name of the artist, but I didn’t have any way to write it down) portrays passenger pigeons sitting in the trees on the left, and of course those are bison down in the valley. The passenger pigeons are extinct and the bison no longer in Wisconsin.. nor anywhere in great numbers. A male and female whooping crane stand in the wetlands to the right. The lush landscape itself has been totally transformed in our own time.. and is, in effect, another extinction. Animals that survive in our world have to be able to make do with agricultural fields or land manipulated in other ways by humans. Contrasted with this view of America as it once was is this photo of the same area:
photo MS
The image looks much more sterile, and clearly the key element in this photo is the large farm complex in the background. Wetlands have been removed and the animal life is hardly a fraction of what it once was. I don’t want to give the impression that I blame “Europeans” for this, rather it’s a result of the industrialized capacity that produced the tools that quickly led to the domination of the landscape. Every human society had the roots of unsustainability within it.
This area of Wisconsin that is home to the ICS is also home to the Aldo Leopold foundation. It has deep environmental roots, yet close by.. uncomfortably close.. are parts of the crab-grass like vacationland that is the Wisconsin Dells. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered such a pure abundance of water parks. One of them—Noah’s Ark—claims to be the largest water park in America. I have no way to judge that claim, but obviously it’s big. With my daughter I took a “Duck” tour of the area.. and she loved it, so no regrets. But once again, a stunning section of our shared landscape has been privatized and made into a place dedicated to amusement. One park was even themed to classical Greek architecture, so imitation Greek temples lined the road. Somehow it fills me with disgust, but maybe I had the whooping cranes too much in mind.
MS
One characteristic of children’s literature is the overt use of parallelism. Think of a classic story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We see a pattern emerge as Goldilocks tries the three porridges, sits in the three chairs, and sleeps in the three beds. Then when the bears return they have to go through the three items one by one again. An adult book would skip this A-B-C parallelism, but it seems like there’s something necessary about that parallelism for a child. My guess is that all narrative is built out of these parallel blocks, but as we get better at narrative our mind is able to abridge the parallels. Adult literature delivers the abridged version of the narrative, meeting our adult ability to auto-fill the empty spaces in the narrrative. An adult version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears would resort to something like: “and then she did the same thing with the beds, settling comfortably into the last one..”
One book I love for its sense of parallelism is Blueberries for Sal.. a genuinely beautiful book. The development of the narratives with the mother/child and mother bear/cub are exactly parallel. Each narrative advances along the same lines, then the child and the cub get mixed up and follow the wrong mom. This adds the necessary conflict to get these two narrative paths to form a plot. Of course in the end the child and cub are reunited with their rightful moms. Children early in their development appear to need this kind of laying out of the parallels.. and in the best children’s literature I almost always see this methodical development.
I’ve designed a layout for the plot of Blueberries for Sal. An adult version would be the same story, but the parallels would be muted.
photo by Flickr user Chris & Angela Pye, used by Creative Commons License
Jonathan Franzen’s essay in this week’s New Yorker is worthwhile for the information it contains about birds, but further as an illustration of a common ethical issue in modernity. First for the birds, though. Franzen gives us a look at an impending silent spring in the Mediterranean as hunters in small countries like Cyprus and Malta, as well as in larger countries like Italy, bag millions of song birds every year while they make their migrations. Songbirds seem like an odd quarry for hunters, but these tiny birds are delicacies. As Franzen shows, they are served surreptitiously at restaurants. (The essay itself is behind paywall, but you can listen to this audio interview on topic.)
It does look like a dire situation for song birds, since the disunity of Europe, especially in its southern reaches, makes it difficult to police the wholesale killing of these birds. Franzen heads into his conclusion with a sobering reflection on the Mediterranean:
The Blue of the Mediterranean isn’t pretty to me anymore. The clarity of its water, prized by vacationers, is the clarity of a sterile swimming pool. There are few smells on its beaches, and few birds, and its depths are on their way to being empty; much of the fish now consumed in Europe comes illegally, no questions asked, from the ocean west of Africa. I look at the blue and see not a sea but a postcard, paper thin.
That kind of reflection goes along with my own thoughts about the way the modern world has fundamentally changed the landscapes we visit. I often think the only real cross-cultural experience open to us.. where we can begin to breath and imagine a different world.. is in the careful reading of old books. Everything else is just a postcard we are being sold.
But the quandary Franzen is getting at is evident in all areas of life. He visits Cyprus, Malta, and Italy and learns how ensconced hunting is in these cultures. It’s undoubtedly true that song birds were a traditional delicacy. Although in the pre-modern world, in the midst of spectacular plenty, it was possible to harvest songbirds without thinking about consequences, we now live in a time where the shear numbers of hunters and the modern methods (guns, recorded bird sounds) threatens to destroy the bird populations. So the underlying conflict is between industrial methods and pre-modern cultural habits. Past practices simply cross a threshold into unsustainability, and there is sometimes not enough time for cultural norms to catch up.
Something like this is happening in America when it comes to sexual ethics of all kinds. Ethics follow social possibilities and enforce sustainable cultural patterns. But when life possibilities get untethered from the past due to technological/social changes (such as the birth control pill or medical treatments), then cultural norms have to with difficulty creak forward to arrive at some kind of settlement with new lifestyles. So a hallmark of modernity is the displacement of past traditional norms as technological/social changes make them unworkable. That creates a high level of cultural tension, and so we are plagued by culture wars.
One way that culture “catches up” is by shifting practices into another domain. The essay by Franzen has a beautiful example of this as a hunter reminds an activist of what she had predicted long ago:
‘You said the day would come when I would love the birds instead of killing them. I just came here to tell you you were right. I used to say to my son, when we were going out, Have you got the gun? Now I say, Have you got the binoculars?’
That is the path that traditional practices need to tread. Instead of a wall built against what is felt to be natural, it’s a transposition.
I traveled tonight to Milwaukee to see the opening reception for a show of portraits by my colleagues John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. The gallery featured two rooms of their work. One room featured life-size portraits taken in their studio. Though crisp photographs, these portraits stood out like oil paintings in the depth of color and the captured interest of the faces. John and Julie have done many portraits (see varieties at website here), but these stand out for sheer beauty. The second room was filled with postcard-size prints of people who had visited their studio (there’s even a photograph of me in the bunch). These smaller photos are directly related to the large full color prints, as everyone is shown standing upon the same T in the artists’ studio. But the small size and the sheer number of these postcard images shifts our attention from the depth of the single image to the volume of people faces and looks. You wouldn’t call it a diverse crowd of faces in the sense that it represents the many colors of an ethnically crowded place like Los Angeles.. but in terms of ages and eccentricities it is a wildly curious crowd that shows up in these rows. One last technique that should be mentioned is the juxtaposition of a modern postcard portrait with one from the past. These were most effective when they not only captured an external parallel (style of clothes), but also signaled a shift in culture.. such as the image below in which the young man is shown opposite a dressed up woman.
One aspect of Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Émile Durkheim that students seem to dislike is his willingness to dismiss what actual practitioners of religion reported about themselves. It’s not that people have nothing interesting to say, but they rarely—in Durkheim’s view—are enlightened in respect to the causes or motivations of their behavior. In his book On Suicide he displays a similar tendency to not take seriously the reasons that people themselves give for their acts. Durkheim addresses this issue several times in the course of his book, and comes up with a particularly vivid metaphor for making clear his view.
The fact is that the reasons given for suicide or those that the suicide himself apparently gives to explain his action are, most often, only the apparent causes. Not only are they merely the individual repercussions of a general state, but they express it very inaccurately, since they remain the same while it changes. One might say that they indicate the individual’s weak points, those through which the current, which comes from outside inviting him to destroy himself, can most easily enter. But they are not part of the current themselves, and, consequently, cannot help us to understand it. [154-5]
So, say we find a suicide note, and it goes on about some local situation (job loss). How should we treat that information? It was no doubt important in the mind of the person about to commit suicide, but for Durkheim it has no interpretive significance. The more important point is that within every society there is a dark current that flows around and among us. The local problems a person may encounter can be thought of as the “weak points” through which this current enters an individual and does its work, but it’s the dark current that kills. It happens that the dark current can be represented by a rather exact number: the “social rate of suicide.” It is a remarkably steady number which responds to macro-level social changes (rates of divorce, religious commitment, educational attainment). These macro-level changes set the strength of the current, and then every year a certain number of people find themselves drawn into the darkness.
Durkheim takes up the same point somewhat later with regards to the different viewpoints of the sociologist and the psychologist in the matter of suicide. Yes, a large number of suicides can be classified as “neurasthenics” (sufferers from a neurosis, using 19th century language), and it is true that if we look for a reason why this person committed suicide while a neighbor did not, then this has to come into play, but that hardly gives us the larger truth about the cause of suicide:
It will be objected that if there were not a sufficient number of neurasthenics, the social causes could not produce their effects, but there is no society in which the different forms of nervous degeneracy do not supply suicide with more candidates that it needs. Few are chosen, if we may say so. It is those who through circumstances found themselves closer to the currents of pessimism and consequently were more completely affected by them. [360]
Again note that language of a dark “current” that represents the deeper social pull of suicide. There is a kind of poetry in that image of the current. Since it is largely unrecognized by the people who succumb, it takes on a dark cast in the imagination. It’s a level of pessimism that runs around us at all times.
In the final chapter Durkeim addresses the question of whether a society should take action to suppress suicides. The first answer is that the suicide rate stems from the positive values of a society and so cannot be simply stopped. It is exactly the forces of “progress” which educate individuals and allow them to break free of traditional social bonds that are a marker for higher rates of suicide. So to the extent that “progress” is accepted as a good thing, a society is locked into a higher rate of suicide. But it is also the case that societies can enter periods of time when they get out of whack.. and the pressures on individuals grow too strong. That current becomes a raging torrent.
It’s here that Durkheim comes close to sounding like Marx in his condemnation of a modern world that eats the past:
…what we see in the rising tide of involuntary deaths is not the growing brilliance of our civilization, but a state of crisis and upheaval which cannot continue without danger. [412]
There Marx would see a sign of a capitalist system eating itself and ripe for revolution, while Durkheim is more a prophet of social exhaustion. The signs of this dark current are to be found in the data on suicide, but them he looks to the intellectual ferment associated with the growing current. Durkheim lists Schopenhauer and all the various late 19th century movements that flourished, such as anarchists, aesthetes, mystics, and revolutionary socialists. I found this a fascinating hint toward a sociology of knowledge. The model is not: great thinkers lead to daring ideas that inspire/infect a generation. Rather the model should be: social current of pessimism brings about rise in suicides and turns powerful minds to darker subjects. Philosophy itself is thus an outgrowth of that same dark current that controls the data on suicide.
It’s here that the difference between sociology and philosophy becomes clear. The philosopher is, ultimately, a part of the social stream, responding intellectually, but still unconsciously, to the deep current of pessimism. The sociologist, on the other hand, can analyze the social current and with his tools suggest ways to modify or re-direct that current. The conclusion of On Suicide contains a recommendation to strengthen a particular type of social organization. It’s a weak suggestion, in hindsight, but it also shows clearly Durkheim’s view of the possibilities of sociology. The last sentence of the book is a great statement of the result of this knowledge: “It is to set oneself resolutely to work.”
