Wonderful Life, Indeed

"The March of Progress," an image of evolution despised by the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

I enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould’s essays about biology and evolution immensely when my 6th grade science teacher read a few of them to us in class. Now, years later, I’m hoping to understand Gould and his ideas better. I borrowed Wonderful Life from my biology professor in August; I’ve only now gotten around to starting it. I’m hoping to finish it over Thanksgiving break. I imagine my professor is wondering where it is by now.

However, my old respect for Gould is giving way to a wariness of some of his motives and ideas. I’m only on page 44, and I’ve already found something that raised my hackles. After revealing “geology’s most frightening fact”—that Earth existed and life flourished for billions of years before humans—Gould uses his discussion of evolution  to begin a very philosophical one. It’s a very startling switch, and while one's view of evolution certainly has philosophical implications, it feels to me that he takes a step too far, the biology becoming almost an excuse for a soapbox speech. Consider the conclusion he makes from the modern view of an old earth and a young human species:

We cannot bear the central implication of this brave new world. If humanity arose just yesterday as a small twig on one branch of a flourishing tree, then life may not, in any genuine sense, exist, for us or because of us. Perhaps we are only an afterthought, a kind of cosmic accident, just one bauble on the Christmas tree of evolution.

What options are left in the face of geology’s most frightening fact? Only two, really. We may, as this book advocates, accept the implications and learn to seek the meaning of human life, including the source of morality, in other, more appropriate, domains—either stoically with a sense of loss, or with joy in the challenge if our temperament be optimistic. Or we may continue to seek cosmic comfort in nature by reading life’s history in a distorted light.

Sure, humans occupy only the tiniest slice in the history of life. Sure, we have arrogantly placed ourselves far above all else in the natural world, and are now dealing with the startling revelation that we are more similar than we wish to realize. But I believe Gould skips over important considerations due to his agenda. A strict materialist, he would not consider that humans are somehow different in a non-physical sense—in other words, I don’t think he would ever discuss the idea of a soul and that humans are the first to bear this development, even though many of his readers (say, me) subscribe to that idea. Simply ignoring it will not convince them, and if he’s willing to make this book philosophical, he can’t only go halfway—he can’t just end the philosophical discussion when it’s to his advantage. (Well, he can, but I think it's unbalanced.)

In addition, I hope he will eventually consider the idea that humans have an ability to choose and determine themselves that is somehow different from the rest of living things—an idea that fits in with a materialist mindset. Perhaps that’s what he means by “the meaning of human life, including the source of morality”. I’m looking forward to that next overtly philosophical section with interest.

“What this book advocates”—that phrase has the flavor of an ideological manifesto. Is the book really meant to be reduced to that? I feel that a scientist can have a worldview, but in a book nominally about biology, the worldview should come through by implication.  I have been very impressed with what Gould has done so far in this book—first of all, he demolished the idea of evolution as a continuous ladder of increasing excellence, which is extremely simplistic and traditionally has had racist implications. An excellent writer, he has drawn on examples from both science and popular culture to prove his point. But it bothers me that this whole discussion of evolution is being driven by his need to prove an utterly materialistic view of life. In a way, that pursuit is as simple-minded as the “March of Progress” depiction of evolution as a linear, ladder-like process that he hates so much (see above).

Is it unfair to expect a biologist to be interested in biology for biology’s sake? Ars gratia artis, scitum gratia scientiae? I’m going to finish the book before I decide one way or another.

Patria: A Few Fields in Greece, or Perhaps Kirksville

Going to college at Truman means living in rural Kirksville, Missouri. This was something that was always in the “con” column when I was deciding where to go last year. I had wanted to live for a while one of America’s big cities, to feed off the energy of a vibrant downtown area, like many of my friends from high school.

Kirksville’s downtown area is anything but vibrant. I explored it one day early in the semester, as the summer weather continued long past its due. A square surrounds the county courthouse, an impressive building that figured in a minor Civil War skirmish. There are a few restaurants, an independently-owned movie theater, a grocer, and a number of antique stores, the largest of which has three floors, with a small used bookshop on the top floor. The bookstore was a priority for me. A good, comfortable bookstore has always been something that I—well, I hesitate to say ‘need,’ but that’s my inclination. Being surrounded by books, most of which I have never read or seen before, in a quiet place with just a few other customers, is an environment I find rejuvenating for some reason.

I found a small classics section—a single bookshelf. The selection was thin but definitely interesting. The Beautiful and the Damned, Pilgrim’s Progress, Ulysses, and many other mysterious books I’ve never read. One in particular caught my eye—an old but mostly unworn copy of My Antonia. It snagged my attention first because it is one of my best friends’ favorite books, but also because I thought the cover was dully designed, overly pastoral, and sentimental. Which wasn’t too different from what I then thought of Kirksville. I bought the book in the hope that it would help me reconcile myself to where I was.

I ended up immensely enjoying the book—its slow storytelling place, the richly developed characters, its careful, loving attention to the red prairie grass and the way the Nebraska sunsets turned farming machinery into mysteriously portentous silhouettes. I even grew to love the cover, an old painting of a wheat harvest, pastel-hued and irretrievably dated, but beautiful all the same.

One of the most important parts of the book for me was Jim’s realization, while reading Virgil, of what was meant by the line “Primus ego in patriam mecum … deducam Musas” (“for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.”) I thought this line sounded very high-minded, but the Jim’s professor explained

“that ‘patria’ here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little ‘country’; to his father’s fields, ‘sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.’”

Jim goes on to speculate about his professor’s “country” as well.

“We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric [the professor] intimately enough to guess what that feeling was … I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric’s patria.”

I found the idea of the patria very interesting. For Jim, patria is his adopted home of the Nebraska fields. More importantly, patria is Antonia and the other “hired girls” he grew up with—the group of brawny, ambitious immigrant women that took up traditionally masculine jobs to secure the futures of their families and themselves. Though looked down upon by the prim townsfolk, they ultimately became the most successful of anyone from the town or surrounding farms.

For me, patria was the thick woods and streams around my house, our camping-themed family room, the cupboard-sized newspaper office in my high school, my friends’ houses. Patria was my family and the friends I made in high school. And it still is those things and those people. But for the next several years my country will also be this dusty old northern Missouri town and its college. What and who will I find in this place?

I Believe in Small-Scale Anarchy ... Hi, New Classmates!

For our orientation week at Truman University, we freshmen were asked to write "This I Believe" essays. I had never heard of this project before. I started reading and listening to some of the essays, both the recent ones and the ones broadcast on the radio in the 50's, and realized I could probably listen to them all day--it's a bit like "This American Life," fast-food style. Most of the essays are about 500 words and take only about three minutes to read or listen to, but the writers accomplish a lot in that brief time, telling beautiful, painful, or just amusing stories and synthesizing life lessons from them. It's also a bit like the format of my old column for my high school newspaper, which was around 600-700 words and had many of the same goals. I've posted my essay below; I read it to about 100 classmates in a lecture hall. About two dozen others chose to read their essays. It may have been a bit out there for my first essay at Truman, but that's the energy of starting so many things over in a new place, I guess.

I believe in anarchy. Let me explain.

This is not a plug for a stateless society. Maybe I should rephrase and call it small-scale anarchy, because that is all that is usually possible in this world. The kind of anarchy I am interested in occurs in the smallest imaginable moments, usually when we are most alone—when we encounter a panhandler on the street without a mother or father with us to brush him or her off, when we see a wrapper on the floor in a deserted hallway, when we are alone with another person on a date, when we find ourselves holding the answers to a quiz we have to take next period, when we are faced with a choice and have no one to stop us from making the wrong decision. Situations with no rules, with no authorities, when we are accountable no one and nothing but our own conscience—these are times when we are most free to choose, and therefore have the most potential to do good or evil, to do something truly horrible or beautiful.

Anarchy of this kind is not always small-scale. But it is the only scale I have experience with. And just because these moments seem small does not mean they are not important—extremely important, sometimes the best evidence as to what kind of person we are and often profoundly influential on other people.

I don’t believe in anarchy just because I believe in humanity and our ability to choose the right thing when given the chance. I believe the human spirit is fallen, and that people, including and especially me, face many barriers to choosing good when there is no authority to tell them to do so. Indeed, these moments of anarchy are also the times when the influence of God, and an omnipresent, interventionist God at that, is clearest—a God that somehow pulls humans over high mental barriers and deeply rutted prejudices in order to be able to be merely free to chose the right thing. But these moments are also when the human spirit is at its strongest, because we so often do choose to do good, against all odds.

I have only spent five days at college, but I have already noticed that there is a huge amount of anarchy here. The absence of parents, the ease of access to all sorts of things we know we shouldn’t want, and the sheer number of people and situations makes this a place where students are forced to make many more decisions on their own than they ever have before. My fifth-grade teacher once said that you really only find out what a person is like in college. I think I understand what he meant now. Only when we choose entirely for ourselves do we begin to determine what kind of person we are and will become.