A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence.  A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed.  But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat.  His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

…I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well insulated roof.  Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?  The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

–Aldo Leopold, “March,” from A Sand County Almanac.

…there are two kinds of disturbances of the eyes, stemming from two sources—when they have been transferred from light to darkness and when they have been transferred from darkness to light. —518a, Book VII, Plato’s Republic, translated by Bloom

The following scene from the The Shawshank Redemption in which a prisoner plays Mozart at a random moment to the entire prison, strikes deeps chords in the human soul. Beauty, unexpected, draws a captive crowd up through music towards something beyond themselves and their surroundings. The scene acts on the level of a parable, or in that same genre of philosophic vignettes of which Plato’s cave stands as the ultimate example.

In this viral video, a flash mob executes a meticulously planned moment of random beauty for an unsuspecting crowd, again through music, in the food court of a mall. It is a sort of gonzo, rogue evangelism of beauty.  The opposite of terrorism. It is very much like the fictional scene above writ large in real life, lived out in some cosmic sense:

The inverse of the Hallelujah Chorus at the food court can be seen in the recent experiment in which virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell played near a Washington, D.C. Metro entrance like a common panhandler and was mostly ignored in the morning rush.  Children, however, were the one demographic consistently drawn to Bell’s music according to the fascinating article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post.  Again, the raw video stands as some sort parable.

“Wisdom cries without; she utters her voice in the streets…”

There is much in these last two so-called “reality” videos, both of which are products of human artifice in many ways nonetheless, that is well worth pondering both as regards their substance and their production.

The flock emerges from the low clouds, a tattered banner of birds, dipping and rising, blown up and blown down, blown together and blown apart, but advancing, the wind wrestling lovingly with each winnowing wing. When the flock is a blur in the far sky I hear the last honk, sounding taps for summer.
***
It is warm behind the driftwood now, for the wind has gone with the geese. So would I–if I were the wind.

-Aldo Leopold, “November,” from A Sand County Almanac.

All prosy dull society sinners,
Who chatter and bleat and bore,
Are sent to hear sermons
From mystical Germans
Who preach from ten till four.

I always figured this was a reference to German Romanticism, to which the English spirit seems stereotypically opposed.  A reference to what that part of the human soul that judges and universalizes cultures might think is a thread that links Meister Eckhart to E.T.A. Hoffman.  Or, perhaps, for the obscure few who’ve been there, what one might think in friendly jest at certain points whilst sitting through the Voegelin Society panels at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting.

According to the almighty googles this is partially right, but reality takes a surprising turn.  This site, for instance, says: “Martyn Green glosses this line as ‘[a]n allusion to a number of German Lutheran evangelists who were visiting England’ (Green 434 n. 78).” Another site explains, again, that the phrase is “an obscure reference to Lutheran Germans who had been on a lecture tour of England at the time of the premiere of The Mikado, and who were considered long and somewhat abstruse speakers.”

Anyone out there know more about this?  Mystical Lutheran evangelists?  Really?

“A more human Mikado” starts about three minutes and 20 seconds into the following video (or just listen to this more common, audio-only version):

There were horses in a moonlit pasture in western New York the night before I left, stomping purposefully upon farmed earth a few miles outside of small towns founded by wandering soldiers of the American revolution. There were tourists milling about Fisherman’s Wharf the next day, eating their chowder in the mists that gather above the churning seas at the outermost edge of what was once a vast frontier. Driving out of San Francisco greys, cold Pacific at our backs, it wasn’t long before we saw the sun’s summer handiwork reflected in the steep swells of foothill greens long since crisped into toasted browns and golds.

The first impression on the senses is the abundance of light. Light shines and flows and pools up everywhere, an immense ocean pouring down into its diurnal shore. Its powerful rhythms slowly, inexorably, continually washing the concretes and asphalts, warming miles and miles of interlocking clay tiles in unison, fading the fast food colors of roofs standing like islands amidst the reflected heat of sun-worn strip mall parking lots.  It reveals every nuance in shape, texture and sheen.  It exposes the banality of artifice, of flaw and dross, drawing visual attention instead to physical purities and proportionate perfections of material forms.  Yet it overpowers even these, indifferently washing out everything below as if it was purposely sacrificing the properly adjusted luster and tint of the beautiful for the sake of total and complete clarity of vision.

This clarity presents the colossus of space between place to eye and mind.  It emphasizes the enormity of everything. The Great Plains and their fickle skies are swept up into the continental crescendo of the Rockies and then the land unfolds roughly down and gently up again to the sea, the air above dried and purified.  Upon entering this guarded space we become impostors, uninvited visitors crawling around the gigantic geographic features of a rough-hewn, earth-bound waiting room for gods en route to some far-flung, full-blown intergalactic Eden.  A land for giants.  Canaan on the edge of a continent.

The word itself seems outdated, as if it could only comfortably belong within a Hollywood film’s stereotypical portrayal of nineteen fifties culture.  It reminds us of a time we’ve never experienced ourselves: an era when few women went to college and the idea that a woman could join the infantry or become a lawyer was laughable.  It’s a word that has lost its sting outside of the crumbling worldview of a band of older feminists and other formerly potent remnants of the transitional period between our world and that of Mad Men.  A word that perhaps some ever-dwindling numbers of humorless humanities students hang onto here and there, but insofar as it has any real energy left usually refers to stale arguments having something to do with unequal pay.  The naiveté of our time, especially insofar as we naively think, like a teenager or bitter old fool, that we aren’t naïve, would be touching if it wasn’t so damn destructive.

We are blind to modern misogyny.  Consider the fact that 40% of children are born out of wedlock, and vast numbers of those kids end up being raised by their mothers without much assistance from their fathers.  Does this have nothing to do with male attitudes towards women? Nothing whatsoever? A friend was recently at a T.G.I. Fridays after work for dinner, and the bartender was casually telling a few guys at the bar about [insert name of sex act degradingly described in regards to women with a four letter word here] dot com, and how he was unable to [interact with the site sexually] because he found it rip-roaringly hilarious.  The argument that women choose to be filmed for such websites, and women choose to have children out of wedlock, and therefore the mere suggestion that either of these two disturbing trends are a problem is itself misogynistic rings hollow in the face of common experience.  (Yet this is a standard academic response, serving to cut off such uncomfortable discussions before they begin).  Of course, noting that these are new problems in need of solutions is not to suggest that we go back to the fifties, even if it were possible.  The fact that we feel the need for the sort of disclaiming sentences such as the previous one before having these discussions is a sign we are crossing some sort of border into the forbidden zone.

Misogyny is not the circumstantial product of the wrong mixture of religion and claustrophobic culture, or an impure thought crime that can be eradicated with the right antidote of therapy, sensitivity training and “girl power” Disney cartoons at a formative age.  You can’t get rid of it by promoting G.I. Jane and the WNBA.  All this sort of thing misunderstands the underlying problem: despite the wide variety of causes that might trigger misogyny, the state of mind is an ever present temptation of human nature.

At the heart of the thought that drives the behavior of many a misogynist there is often a peculiar contradiction: the misogynist simultaneously understands women to be grossly inferior or defective while understanding himself to be in some way powerless or beholden to women.

One can find an implicit critique of misogyny as far back as the book of Genesis, in spite of the fact that the ancient Hebrew account is routinely condemned these days for being misogynistic itself. Infamously, when Adam is asked by God if he has eaten the forbidden fruit, he doesn’t respond to the yes-or-no question by saying “Yes.” Adam says: “The woman, whom you gave me to be my companion, gave me of the tree, and I ate.”

Note two potentially implicit claims in Adam’s response. First, the woman succumbed to temptation and ate the fruit, and thus she is weak and defective. (And since God made her, Adam implies that God is ultimately responsible.) Second, she then gave the fruit to Adam to eat, and apparently he was powerless or beholden to her. Adam seems to say that she is at fault and an inferior creation—but also to blame for his actions.

Yet according to the simple facts of the story as presented by the author of Genesis, Eve falls to temptation only after a concerted effort on the part of a being that is understood by religious traditions to be the devil.  The devil is held by those same traditions to have been the most powerful, intelligent and beautiful of God’s creatures before he chose to make God his enemy.  Nonetheless, Eve initially resists the serpent, referred to in that same chapter as the most crafty or clever of animals.  Adam, on the other hand, merely takes what “the weaker sex” gives him, with no recorded resistance.  It is not even clear she spoke to him at all: the author of Genesis says only that she offered, and he took.  As soon as he is called to account for his actions, however, he immediately points the finger at her.  Thus it was, is, and shall be: the same man who decries women as inferior or defective or evil inevitably contradicts himself when he simultaneously blames women for his own base actions.  “She deserved it.” “She asked for it.”  “She wanted it.”  The hidden premise is that when she offers, I can’t help but take.  If you can’t help but take, however, aren’t you weaker than she is?  If you are her superior, how can you blame her for your fall?

This is a general mental ruse that all human beings employ individually in order to avoid blame for their own actions, regardless of the gender of the parties involved.  It also crops up whenever we feel the need to scapegoat some group of human beings.  For instance, the Nazi holds that Jews are simultaneously responsible for a masterful conspiracy causing all the world’s problems and an inferior race.  And so forth and so on.  Nonetheless, one of the most enduring, glaring examples is always in the realm of sexual activity between men and women.  The guys who loudly assert that women are weaker or in some way inferior to men are inevitably the same guys who blame women whenever anything goes wrong.  One wonders if they can really believe their own bravado, since if their own words were true they would have no one to blame but their superior, and therefore responsible, selves.

Examples flow through our culture every day. When a famous actor (Mel Gibson) who has seemingly attempted to follow traditional ethical teachings on these matters leaves his wife and kids of many years for the sake of another woman, it isn’t all that surprising when the bottom inevitably falls out of the new relationship.  Although it raises eyebrows, it shouldn’t be surprising when he is then recorded repeatedly hurling various accusations against the new woman, all of which hang on the notion that she is an ostentatious flirt, sexually promiscuous, a whore who will be inevitably raped on account of her immodesty, etc.  The common theme throughout the recordings is that she is guilty of assorted offenses, and that she should or will be justly punished for them in some way.  Of course, neither her disregard for monogamy nor her style of dress was hidden from him when they began their relationship. It became a fault only after their relationship began to falter, apparently.

Yet even if every one of his accusations are merited, don’t they condemn his own relationship with her?  Whether or not he is a misogynist generally speaking, consider the hidden premises of his tirades in regards to this particular woman.  What is left unsaid in his accusations?  She’s just a dumb whore, and she deserves what she gets, or whatever I deign to give her.  Especially after all she’s done to me.  All the trouble she’s put me though.  She tricked me. How was I supposed to help myself? Even if he is consciously aware of these internal contradictions, the recordings of him screaming at her provide a rather stark example of the tortured conscience of all human beings when they seek to transfer the crushing weight of guilt to another.  The recordings reveal a soul writhing under the increasingly bright light of outside reality while it tries in vain to shut that light out, clinging desperately to a self-drawn veil that is slowly being lifted without its consent. If she is as inferior (morally, intellectually, and otherwise) to him as he claims, how was she able to ensnare him? If she is as flawed a person as he claims, mustn’t he be even more flawed in order to fall prey to her wiles?

More extreme examples of full blown modern misogynists can be found writ large at nearly every cultural turn these days for those with eyes to read.  For those who aren’t squeamish and have become as culturally callous as I have, try one of my favorite profiles of an individual written in the last few years: the alarming, explicit, and chilling portrait of “Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis entitled “Baby, Give Me A Kiss” by Claire Hoffman for the Los Angeles Times.  Plutarch would recommend it, I think, if he knew the world in which we live today.  See also the similarly explicit “‘The New Dating Game: Back to the New Paleolithic Age” by Charlotte Allen in the Weekly Standard. Or any number of articles by Kay S. Hymowitz writing for City Journal that can be found by scrolling through this list.

There are at least four ways one could shrug off such comments without giving them their due.

1) One might say his comments are simply not applicable to nature in that they are, oddly enough given his reputation as a film maker who stares at length into the abyss, profoundly moral complaints. Although Herzog doesn’t strike me as a full blown nihilist, it is interesting to note as an aside that those who tend that way–even old Fred Nietzsche himself–often exhibit a marked tendency to make profound moral judgments about nature itself, generally without any sort of extended argument actually examining the nature of nature in any great detail. One might want to cut any conclusion arising from this sort of rant off at the pass: why anthropomorphize nature in this way?  Even if one agrees with Herzog’s understanding of good and evil, one might disagree that this understanding can be applied to anything other than human beings.

There are deep waters we must swim over here at present, but we can safely leave this objection alone for now since his central complaint seems to be a severe lack of order and harmony amongst natural things in the rain forest, and in light of this one could take his moral references as metaphors for disorder rather than supposing him to be accusing nature of actual sins.  Few devout religious people throughout the ages have actually condemned nature for immorality, after all, so taking Herzog of all people literally is a tad ridiculous.  Besides, as we will discuss later, all human beings think and talk in a similar anthropomorphic vein about nature to some extent or another whether they want to or no, so we ought not immediately dismiss his comments on account of his phrasing.

2) One might say his comments are seemingly driven by too much time in the Amazonian rain forest in grueling conditions, and thus he is simply expressing anger with a frustrating circumstance of his own making.  If one watches the entire documentary, it is clear that Herzog went through hell on jungle earth in order to get the movie made.  Anyone who’d been through such excruciating experiences would likely want to vent a little.

No doubt this judgment is partly true, but his comments are extreme enough to question his sanity if he is simply angry at plants and animals for making him uncomfortable.  After all, he’s made countless other, similar public remarks even when nature has not been standing so obviously in the way of the production of his art.  More significantly, his films are often vehicles for specific understandings and explorations of the natural world.  It’s not as if he hasn’t spent years of his life experiencing and considering the nature of nature.

For instance, watch this haunting short clip and listen to his fascination with the deranged penguins marching off to oblivion in Encounters at the End of the World:

Or consider his commentary in Grizzly Man: “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears…I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy, I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me there’s not such a thing as the secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”

3) One also wonders, especially given such similar comments he’s made elsewhere, the extent to which Herzog might be finding what he wanted to find in the Amazon; he may have brought a specific natural philosophy of sorts with him.  What if he was already convinced of the truth of this bleak view and simply foisted it on the rain forest once he got there?  Even if true, one must examine the possible reasons for which he might say what he does before rejecting his conclusions.

4) For most of us, our initial reaction to such comments consists in either laughter or distaste, largely for the same underlying reason.  Most people that I have shown the video I opened with to or that I read about coming into contact with these remarks on the internet have initially found it humorous.  Why?

First, let’s put aside the fact that part of our amusement is likely that his strong German accent and intonation sound like some sort of nihilist parody to the American ear.  Humor necessarily follows upon reason, and analyzing the reasons for which humor arises is something like the intellectual equivalent of a doctor analyzing a patient’s knee jerk reaction.  Humor often arises from a recognition of what is disproportionate, often of what is grossly out of proportion, and Herzog says things that are in direct and extreme opposition to much that the western world today regards as the canonical understanding of nature.  This disjunction is made extreme in part by the fact that the Amazonian rain forest in particular is considered a sort of sacred ground by most people living in western, “developed” countries, a frequently used example of the truth of conclusions about nature that are seemingly diametrically opposed to everything Herzog says.  Yet if it was simply the case that our understanding of the rain forest today was a self-evident truth, and that Herzog was therefore stating a self-evident lie, one wonders if we would still laugh or muster enough passion to be upset at what he says  A lack of proportion makes human beings laugh: mere contradiction and opposition is often comes off as simply stupid.

Not long ago, and perhaps still today, western young people were bombarded with exaggerations and hastily constructed myths mixed up with varying truths and half truths concerning the rain forest.  “Hastily constructed myths” is a polite way of phrasing it, because productions such as Captain Planet and the Planeteers are impossible to receive as organically grown, honest to goodness myths, however well intentioned they might have been.  At worst, such pieces of entertainment were were insipid bits of odd propaganda; at most, they were an attempt to create a sort of mythology ex nihilo.

In Herzog’s jungle, “the trees…are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain.”  Fern Gully, however, is “a magical place…where everyone sound is a song, every tree a home.”

One needn’t turn to cartoons, however, to grasp the fact that the Amazonian rain forest is routinely held forth by experts as well as everybody else as a wondrous example of natural harmony, bursting with an overwhelming and vibrant abundance of life.  In fact, many of us see the Amazonian rain forest as a living monument to the harmony of nature: a spectacular, complex “ecosystem” that acts as the “lungs” of the planet but whose very existence, along with its potentially miraculous curative powers, is in grave danger because of man.  And so forth and so on.  So when we hear Herzog’s rant, it is very difficult for us to take it seriously.  It seems so extreme as to be humorous.  Yet we realize there is something wrong, or at least not true to life, about the other extreme: for instance, the rain forest as commonly portrayed in children’s entertainment affected by the “environmania” that flared up in America during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Herzog told an interviewer recently that although he borrowed his favored phrase “ecstatic truth” from medieval theology to explain the goal of his art, when explaining what he means by the phrase he wants “to get away from the religious, from the mystical, because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm. And this is something you see in a film like Avatar by the way… What annoys me is the way the film romanticises and idolises nature. It’s celebrating a new form of paganism and it gives me knots in my intestines just thinking about it.”  It is precisely this reining, romanticized view of nature that Herzog’s films often either explicitly deconstruct or implicitly question simply by telling their story.

Can we learn anything  from Herzog’s critiques and our reaction, be it laughter or distaste, to his conclusions?

I say yes. 

Philosophy, or loving the truth to enough to pursue it, begins in wonder.  Wonder refers to knowing and not-knowing: delighting in the partial or isolated bits one knows but realizing that one is mostly or partially ignorant of the whole picture.  Wonder thus spurs one on to pursue the truth.  A certain combination of a kind of knowledge and a kind of ignorance, then, engenders wonder.  When one is unaware of what one doesn’t know, and when what one thinks one knows is actually shallow and platitudinous, held by one’s mind in a reflexive and rote fashion only, wonder vanishes.  In the case of the natural world and our relation to it today, wonder must be awoken by digging until we reveal our own deep rooted ignorance.  Wonder must be conjured up by uncovering what we do already know of nature and polishing these fragmented reflections of reality in such a way as to make them shine truly.  The task at hand is to reveal our ignorance while also revealing the partial truths we don’t even yet know that we already know.  We must seek to understand formerly unconsidered truths such that we see them as the tantalizing shards that they truly are.  Awareness of our own ignorance will be the light by which we pick up these pieces.  This is the normal course of things.  These are always the vital courses of action necessary if we are to wonder and thus seek the truth of reality.

Philosophy, then, can sometimes be said to begin in nervous laughter, or even deepening annoyance, and a number of other states of mind before it begins in wonder.

Herzog presents, in extreme form, the sorts of objection we must directly confront and answer if we are to break out of the rut of our current unconsidered, untethered and often contradictory assumptions.  Our minds are clouded on these matters.  We need to wake up from our stupor, and Herzog provides the needed philosophical smelling salts.  His comments serve as an opening question to which modern society assumes the answer.  Upon reflection, however, we will find hidden contradiction and muddled confusion at every turn as we unpack that answer.  And this is exactly why we are in desperate need of taking just this sort of radical objection to modern presuppositions seriously if we are to begin to jump start real dialectic about the universe and and our relation to it (i.e., philosophy properly understood).  We need to be shown our desperate need by having someone peal back the layers of accepted ideas and question the unquestioned cultural assumptions about nature to which we have grown accustomed.

I’m not kidding, either.  This is a great example in the sense that it is both timeless and universal.  Young people are attracted to dramatic examples, but philosophy must be derived from common experience or not at all.

-Sheriff Bell, No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy