On Metaphors and Nature

Darwin wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends. Nature, selection, good, tending: all are metaphors. Nature is evolution personified. She selects and tends. Her work is good.

A hundred years earlier, the great naturalist Comte de Buffon had written that Nature is “attentive … to the preservation of each species.” The metaphors are the same.

Darwin also associated the metaphor “survival of the fittest” with the workings of evolution. It is a metaphor for indifference, one Darwin learned from Herbert Spencer. Nature is not present, or at least, away at a great distance, in this metaphor – the beings struggle to survive on their own, they are not tended by Nature.

It is the metaphor of indifference, survival of the fittest, that one most often hears associated with Darwin, and yet, in Chapter 4 of Origin of the Species, Darwin also associated natural selection with another metaphor – one he called the “preservation principle.” In this other metaphor, Nature tends for the good of each being. This metaphor is the one that Buffon used.

I think it is Darwin’s preservation metaphor that Aldo Leopold appropriated in his land ethic. Darwin contrasted Nature, who selects for the good of each being that she tends, with humanity, who selects for the good of humanity. Leopold tried to change human selection to follow the way of Nature rather than the way of survival of the fittest. It is a religious effort – to try to live by the ways of gods, of Nature.

The cosmos, the order of life and the universe, is a great paradox.  It appears both terrifyingly indifferent to life and yet benevolently attentive to life. It is susceptible to investigation by naturalists, and yet it is ultimately knowable only in metaphors.

Phenomenology

On most days in southern California, light from the sun washes away the color of the land. On this day, an afternoon wind from the ocean carried clouds from the coast into the mountains, thick clouds that darkened the light of the sun. Only a little light remained and it was no brighter than the light that remains for a few minutes in the evening when the sun passes beyond the horizon. In this unnatural darkness with its little light, the color of the land became intense and the light itself seemed to emanate from the trees and rocks and ferns.

On most days in southern California, rays of heat from the sun warm my skin even while a cool breeze chills my bones. On this day, in the unexpected dark light of the afternoon, the coldness that I usually feel only in my bones spread to my muscles and skin, even while my jacket kept the wind outside.

On most days light and darkness, and warmth and coldness, seem to have a normal order about them that went away on this day when the clouds covered the sun and filled the mountains. In the alternative order of this day, light and darkness are not controlled by the relative position of light and dark spheres, but light is something that emanates from rocks and trees and ferns. Warmth is unknown and coldness radiates from bones.

In the normal order, the sun heats the air over the ocean to make the wind, but in the alternative order, the wind is inexplicable because warmth is unknown.

So much depends on what we know and what we don’t – the motion of the spheres, the light within and without, the coldness of bones, the color of things, and the meaning of wind.

Serendipity

Last week on the ridge above a deep canyon, before descending into the canyon with my wife and friends, I miscalculated our location and the distance around the base of a mountain peak that is part of the ridge.

The canyon is steep and rocky and forested.  Some of the rocks are large boulders.  The thorns of the ceanothus that grows there hurt to touch.  In some places the thick duff is topped with slippery pine needles.  Fallen trees add to the ruggedness of the land.  Although my GPS guided us to the destination, our journey was much longer and harder than we expected when we left the ridge.  The thorns scratched us and we all fell more than once when the pine needles slid beneath our feet.  Climbing through and over boulders tired our legs and arms.  It all stressed our patience and confidence.

Deep in the canyon are ruins of a historical log cabin, so deep that hiking there from any point in or above the canyon is strenuous, difficult, slow and tiring.  On the day last week when I was lost, by being lost I unexpectedly found a new route to the cabin – something I had previously sought but been unable to find.

Two days later I returned with my wife and friends to explore the new route.  It was more difficult than the others we had used, but more dramatic, more remote, more isolated, and unused except by deer and other wild creatures.  I often hike in lands designated “wilderness” by Congress, but walking this steep forested canyon slope was really the first time I had been in a place that was plausibly unvisited by humanity before me.  It was a place like Thoreau described in Chesuncook:  “There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot.”  There were no signs that other hikers had been here seeking solitude before us.  This was wilderness.

Places like this – so beautiful, so remote, so inhospitable, so wild – seem to affirm Darwin’s suspicion: the land was not made for us.  Wild land confounds agrarian theology.  Chance and necessity seem to have found expression in error and travail.  In wilderness life came unexpectedly and it still does.

Night at The Outermost House

“Learn to reverence the night,” Henry Beston counseled in The Outermost House. Gazing at the night sky we are touched by an “awareness of the mystery of being,” he wrote.

William Blake had warned, “We are led to believe a lie when we see not through the eye that was born in a night to perish in a night.”

To both men something religious was at stake. To Beston, it was “a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.” In Blake’s poem, when the eye was born in the night “the soul slept in beams of light.” And now it doesn’t.

We have banished the night. That was Beston’s lament. And waves in a storm, washed The Outermost House into the sea.

What I think both men saw in the night is that, in spite of the great enlightenment, a certain darkness still covers the face of the deep.

Walking to Stills Landing with Thoreau, Darwin and Nietzsche

The walk to Stills Landing and back was twelve miles in the wilderness, in a place a friend of mine calls “tall and uncut.” His expression is an allusion to Thoreau’s use of those words to describe the forests were he liked to walk – a places not transformed by humanity.

Stills Landing is named for someone who attempted to settle there in the 1940’s. The homestead failed.

The beauty and benevolence of wilderness is deceptive. The harmony is illusion. The river runs cold through Whitewater Canyon, bears hunt the deer, and my survival, as well as that of bears and deer, depends on me leaving this tall and uncut place before night.

I want to be deceived – I love the illusion. And yet, my disbelief in the terror of existence, my disbelief that nature is sublime, is hard to suspend.

Thoreau, Darwin and Nietzsche, each in his own way, confirmed the terror. I think Thoreau hoped for transcendence and feared the nihilistic boredom of civilization more than he feared places tall and uncut. Darwin faced the terror stoically – accepting it as it is and admiring the grandeur of the terror and the deception. Nietzsche faced it heroically – acknowledging the power such terror has over us, but resisting, not with suspension of disbelief, but with a raised fist. It is as if Thoreau said, “Let it not be so;” Darwin said, “so be it;” and Nietzsche said, “Nevertheless, thou must reckon with me.” Nietzsche was like Job.

As for me, I guess I am much like Thoreau – I walk in the wilderness and return to the city with hope renewed. I admire Nietzsche, and yet I love the wilderness too much to raise my fist. Let it be – tall and uncut, and terrifying.

Whitewater Canyon

We crossed the river about a dozen times, hopping from rock to rock above the rapids, but at one place, at the base of Paw Hill, the only way to cross was to wade. That will be the only crossing that I will remember, the only one that will matter.

Cool water matters on a warm day. Bare feet on cold rocks in rushing water matter.

I remember wading across a river in the desert mountains a few years ago – the cold water, the soft sand.

Rock hopping above the rapids is good, but not enough. It is wading that matters. One must step into the river to live, step into the river to remember.

Mount San Jacinto

The land is so simple in the snow – no chinquapin, manzanita, fallen tree trunks or boulders to hike around or through.  The snow makes the rough textured land smooth.

In the photo, my wife is approaching the summit of Mount San Jacinto.

Something important is only visible on mountain tops covered in snow – the high limit of being alive – and something frightening – the thinness of it, the fine layer of life.

The Origin of Species as Myth

The Origin of the Species is “myth,” in the way Mircea Eliade uses the word myth – a story that tells how “a reality came into existence.”

Eliade wrote: “To tell how things came into existence is to explain them and at the same time indirectly to answer another question: Why did they come into existence? Eliade explains: “The why is always implied in the how — for the simple reason that to tell how a thing was born is to reveal an irruption of the sacred into the world, and the sacred is the ultimate cause of all real existence.”

The Origin of the Species is, in this sense, a religious story. Although Darwin’s intention was to tell a story that did not involve God, it makes us think of God, not just because it reminds us of Genesis, but because its genre is myth.

In the story told in The Origin of the Species, the species have emerged through a long struggle for survival. The struggle theme is also found in the ancient near eastern myths in which the cosmos emerged from a struggle between a god and a great sea monster, the god representing order and the sea monster representing chaos. Through the course of history, that myth became part of the western mosaic of myths and became a paradigm that has guided our attitudes and actions, which is what Eliade said myths do. The Origin of the Species is the latest retelling of that myth, but in the retelling the paradigm has changed.

In the new myth, order is not imposed on chaos by a god, but by the organisms of life themselves. The organisms have fought the battle themselves. This is the paradigm that guides our attitudes and actions in modernity.

The ancient myth explained the existence of an agrarian world ruled by kings and queens and emperors. The myth retold in The Origin of the Species explains an industrial world ruled by democracies and free markets. In the retold myth, we do not fight sea monsters, but each other and the world is not one given to us by a god, but one we have won or made for ourselves.

Beauty and Necessity

Does beauty reduce to necessity? The Darwinian answer is “yes.”

Donald Culross Peattie wrote, “You may pretend so if you like, but it is not demonstrable.”

He wrote those words in An Almanac for Moderns in 1935. A nature writer could write such things in 1935, but today I think it is harder for one to say this.

The possibility that the struggle for existence is not sufficient to explain beauty worried Darwin. He worried that it is not demonstrable.

It is a pity that the view of evolution named Darwinian today does not reflect the full careful thought and wisdom of the man whose name it bears.

I think Peattie is right – we pretend that we believe beauty reduces to necessity. I wonder why we pretend so? It may be that through science we have learned to overcome the great power of chance and necessity, but if beauty is something else, something free, then its power must be awfully great, just as poets say. It may never yield its secret, its freedom, to us.

Liberty Hyde Bailey on Evolution

In “The Holy Earth” (1915) Bailey wrote about evolution: “This is the philosophy of the oneness in nature and unity in living things.”

About the morality or immorality of the struggle for existence that is the instrument of natural selection, Bailey wrote: “If one looks for a moral significance in the struggle for existence, one finds it in the fact that it is a process of adjustment rather than a contest in ambition.”

It is, in Bailey’s estimation, morally significant that natural selection is not driven by ambition or purpose. By the expression “process of adjustment” I doubt that Bailey meant to offer an alternative teleology for the struggle. I think he understood that evolution, as understood in science, has no purpose, no meaning in a teleological way. If one removes the idea that life has purpose, then the character of morality must change, if it is to remain significant at all.

For Bailey, I think his expression “The Brotherhood Relation” defines morality, if the word morality even applies. I think the word eschatology applies here more than the word morality. The Brotherhood Relation is something that comes after the era of natural selection, after the era in which survival, the adjustment process, is tied to the instinct to kill. He wrote: “It is exactly among the naturists that the old instinct to kill begins to lose its force and that an instinct of helpfulness and real brotherhood soon takes its place.” That is an eschatological belief, rather than a moral belief. It is a vision of a new era. It is eschatological in the way Isaiah wrote – the wolf shall dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6-9.) It is a vision of Zion, of God’s holy hill, of “The Holy Earth.”

Eschatology and evolution merge to form ecology in the writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey.  In ecology, evolution sings the song of Zion.