Dog Days

I like old dogs—they are so honest and stoic in their aging. They don't understand, it seems, but they accept. Our first dog was really neurotic, but we got along. Toward the end of her life, after I got home from work and finished dinner, I'd lie on the couch beside her, head to head. Two old ladies spacing out, I'd say to her! Not that I was old yet, but I was about twenty years over the median age in this country and teaching students who never got older—and beginning to realize I was on the down slope of the circle of life. That dog is dead now, but I adopted another one when she was about eight (the keepers did not know her age), and she's now about thirteen and chugging along beside me, though slowing down—as, indeed, I am as well, just a bit!

One of the things that worries me as I see more and more time pass is how we as a species are becoming increasingly more detached from nature, year by year, day by day. Incredibly, more than 80% of us Americans live in urban or suburban areas, leaving (as Wikipedia puts it) “vast expanses of the country nearly uninhabited.”¹ This growing estrangement from our original ground, from that within which we have evolved has, obviously, very great implications for how we see our world—and how we think metaphorically, even if we can think metaphorically. Several recent news article have touched on this issue.

The most scary article was, to me, an essay by Justin Cronin titled “Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner.”² Mr. Cronin, a well-regarded novelist and professor, relates that he keeps “half a dozen pistols in my safe” at home, and he's “currently shopping for a shotgun.” He lives in the Houston metropolitan area and thus has little likelihood of defending himself from wild animals. In his essay, he is quite open about the fact that what he feels he needs to defend himself and his family against is society, other people. He recounts that in advance of Hurricane Rita, which hit Texas soon after Hurricane Katrina, he and his family tried to drive inland, only to confront this situation:

By 2 in the morning, after six hours on the road, we had made it all of 50 miles. The scene was

like a snapshot from the Apocalypse: crowds milling restlessly, gas stations and mini-marts

picked clean and heaped with trash, families sleeping by the side of the road. The situation had

the hopped-up feel of barely bottled chaos. After Katrina, nobody had any illusions that help

was on its way. It also occurred to me that there were probably a lot of guns out there — this

was Texas, after all. Here I was with two tiny children, a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a

late-model S.U.V. with half a tank of gas and not so much as a heavy book to throw.

Cronin concluded from this experience: “Like most citizens of our modern, technological world, I am wholly reliant upon a fragile web of services to meet my most basic needs. What would happen if those services collapsed? Chaos, that’s what.” One thing I find disturbing here is the conclusion that it will have to be us or them, not that we will all be in this bad situation together. But even more clearly, this intelligent man feels acutely how precarious we all are, how dependent upon our social web which is maintained by our rather vulnerable technology—and at a level that most of us by far cannot understand or affect.

Not only that, but we have drastically minimized how often we come into contact with the basic facts of biological life—even of human biological life. In his recent essay, “You Are Going to Die,”³ Tim Kreider (writer and artist) worries about this estrangement, after accompanying his mother to her new elder-care home.

Segregating the old and the sick enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism’s

endless expansion, of youth and health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an

inexplicably bad lifestyle choice, like eating junk food or buying a minivan, that you can avoid

if you’re well-educated or hip enough. So that when through absolutely no fault of your own

your eyesight begins to blur and you can no longer eat whatever you want without consequence

and the hangovers start lasting for days, you feel somehow ripped off, lied to. Aging feels

grotesquely unfair. As if there ought to be someone to sue. 

 

There is humor here, but it is a grim humor—for people do sue other people for not controlling nature, as surely we should be able to do by now! A tree limb falls in Central Park on a pedestrian below, and it's no longer an accident of nature (to be dealt with with your own insurance); now it is a breach of social trust and the city can be held responsible for the bad behavior of its trees and sued for millions of dollars.

What I'm trying to get at here is that our baseline for understanding reality is increasingly social these days, no longer natural. People who live on a beach and lose their house during a storm, which is a predictable and inevitable event, given enough time, now are often fully compensated by the government for their loss. In effect, we deny nature; we deny the insecurity that nature can provoke; we prefer to believe that we should be able to control nature, even if we often can't—and that someone should be held responsible when we don't. To me this is ludicrous—a real slip away from reality, even pathological.

My husband and I took a trip to the still-wild Amazon River region when we were young, decades ago. We bought heavy hiking boots and heavy wools socks for the trip, but there were women on the excursion who brought only indoor shoes and stockings—and we were staying alternately on mountains or in jungles in decidedly primitive conditions! How many of us have come to the reassuring but deluded conclusion that the life we live in a comfortable city or suburb, with sidewalks and very little in the way of wildlife, is the norm—and that when we stray from that norm unprepared, someone should be blamed for not maintaining the norm. This kind of insular blindness leads to a false basis of reality. Metaphor doesn't work very well in this artificial world, because so much of the artificial world is abstract, as opposed to the real concrete existence of nature. In society we often start with abstract ideals, such as that no one should ever have to die from a falling tree limb, and then we create laws and lawsuits to try to secure that abstract reality as the world we actually live in. In nature, however, you always have to start with the real things around you; if you don't know how to interact with them properly, you will eventually get hurt or die.

Some people, aware that technology will probably not always serve us successfully, have begun to study means by which we can survive the effects of our own technologies. Huw Price (Cambridge philosopher) has created a think tank at Cambridge University to study what might happen to us biological beings if our technologies get too successful and escape our control.

I do think that there are strong reasons to think that we humans are nearing one of the most

significant moments in our entire history: the point at which intelligence escapes the

constraints of biology. And I see no compelling grounds for confidence that if that does

happen, we will survive the transition in reasonable shape. . . . our own intelligence is an

evolved biological solution to a kind of optimization problem. . . . . The hardware needs to fit

through a mammalian birth canal, to be reasonably protected for a mobile life in a hazardous

environment, [etc.] . . . the distinctive thing about our peak in the present biological landscape

is that we tend to be much better at controlling our environment than any other species. . . . the

question is then whether machines might at some point do an even better job (perhaps a vastly

better job). . . . Indeed, it's not really clear who 'we' would be in those circumstances.”⁴

Throughout his essay Price uses the metaphor of a large volcano—Mt. Fuji, to be precise. We socialized humans are that big volcano; we dominate our environment. But if a larger volcano emerges (the regrowth of Krakatoa, perhaps, which is actually occurring), where does that leave us? Instead of spewing our own make up over our surroundings, something more powerful than us will be spewing its make up on us and our environment. That is essentially our choice—that we remain the big shot in our natural world or that we risk becoming subordinates in a technological world. Nature is the environment we evolved within; it is what we have learned to succeed in. Technology is abstract—we make it out of our thoughts; it has evolved from us. It is an entirely different world, one in which we may not succeed because of how we have evolved.

Ironically, technology may do to us someday what we have done to nature—ignore our reality, try to control us. The more we measure ourselves against the social world instead of against the natural world in our thoughts and thus our metaphors, the more we prepare ourselves to accept that eventuality. In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell laments that many metaphors have become so common that we no longer respond to them as metaphors; they have become cliches.⁵ He uses as an example of a metaphor long past functioning as a fresh image the phrase “iron resolution.” But why do we need to give up on such common metaphors, surrender them to the realm of clichés? What if we were more alert to, even educated to watch for images that anchor ideas in our speech and writing—and even try to use more of them? What if we actually paused to imagine something like an iron railing, perhaps running along a cliff or perhaps separating a private beach from a public beach, when we use the term “iron resolution.” Sometimes we are very grateful for the unyielding nature of that iron, sometimes not. And we know that iron will, eventually, rust—even when nicely painted. Abstract ideas are often like iron railings. They have a purpose, but they can also be prohibitive and punitive—and they will eventually decay, hopefully unlike our (so far) renewable natural world.

1See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

2http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/opinion/confessions-of-a-liberal-gun-owner.html?emc=eta1

3http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/you-are-going-to-die/?emc=eta1

4http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/cambridge-cabs-and-copenhagen-my-route-to-existential-risk/?emc=eta1 . I have moved the final sentence in the quote above to that point from earlier in the article in order to clarify the meaning of Price's argument in this extract, as I see it.

5Please see my previous blog post, “Stupid Guns,” which discusses this essay at some length.