January 3, 2025
“First, do no harm.” It is a Latin phrase: Primum non nocere. No one knows exactly where it came from. In the East, there is the principle of ahimsa, often translated “nonviolence” but actually a much more expansive counsel to do no injury to any living thing, a tenet common to Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism.
But it is impossible to do no harm. All life preys on other life. We live by killing. Some things won’t bear thinking about, and this is one of them. Most of us have a habitual detachment about what we are eating. It would not do to think very much about the fact that, if we are carnivores, we are eating something that was once alive, sentient, and able to feel pain. If we are urbanites, our meat arrives pre-packaged and not resembling an animal. But of course rural folk raise animals for food and even do their own butchering. To be able to do that, you have to stop feeling empathy with another living creature, to the point of denying that the animal is really much more than an organic automaton. This desensitization is by no means crudeness: the most famous person to say that animals really are automatons and do not have emotions or feel pain was Descartes. This last summer I watched a coyote—a rare visitor—carry off one of our groundhogs. Well, the coyote has to eat too, of course, and so does the hawk who leaves a mess of feathers after getting one of the pigeons. But those who sagely intone that we have to accept the cycle of life and death in nature are not thinking of it—are very studiously not thinking of it—from the point of view of the groundhog or the pigeon. What do the last moments of that groundhog feel like?
At this point, all I can do is protest I am not one of those self-righteous vegetarians who like to make everyone else feel guilty. I have never met such a vegetarian and doubt that they exist, but that does not prevent them from being the object of furious defensive attacks on discussion boards at the mere mention of vegetarianism. However, I confess I am a vegetarian, though I occasionally I go off the wagon, and I am a vegetarian precisely because I don’t like the idea of killing animals. But the last thing that motivates me is some kind of philosophical or political theory. What motivates me is a developed imagination that can’t keep from imagining what a death by violence feels like.
I am admittedly a strange bird, to use the appropriate metaphor, but I am not alone in feeling regret and guilt over the question of predators and prey. In the West, the Biblical myth makes not just Adam and Eve but all the animals of the Garden of Eden into vegetarians:
And God said, Behold I have given you every herb, bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. | And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. (Genesis 1:29-30, King James Version)
And the peaceable kingdom shall return with the coming of the Messiah, according to Isaiah:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together: and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6)
Interestingly, “The lion shall lie down with the lamb” is nowhere in the Bible. It is an example of the Mandela effect, which produces those things that everybody knows but which happen not to be true. But at any rate, it became traditional to assume that when the human race fell, it dragged nature along with it, even though that is also not said explicitly in the Bible. In Paradise Lost, Milton briefly shows the advent not only of predation but also of harsh climate, as a result of angels changing the position of the heavenly bodies that control the weather. Darwinian nature is fallen nature, odd as it is to think of lions and wolves in Paradise living on plants.
In the East, the principle of ahimsa, of not harming any living thing, is linked to the doctrine of karma. Of the four karmic religions, Jainism espouses ahimsa in its most absolute form. It not only prescribes vegetarianism but forbids any unnecessary harm to plants and even to insects. Joseph Campbell says of it:
Among the Greeks, it is true, there was an ascetic strain also, in the line of the Orphics, Pythagoras, Eleatics, and Plato. But there is nothing anywhere in Greek philosophy, or indeed anywhere in the known history of our subject, to match the absolute No! of the religion of the Jains. The peculiar melancholy of their alienation from this life-in-death that will never end goes infinitely farther than the Greek—as does their vision of the reach of time and space, and therewith of cosmic misery. (Oriental Mythology, 232-33)
Campbell was not an Indologist, but he spent almost a decade editing for publication in multiple volumes the papers of the major Indologist Heinrich Zimmer after Zimmer’s untimely death. In one of the volumes, The Philosophies of India, Zimmer describes the goal of Jainism as escape by the complete repudiation of life:
The Jaina monk does not permit himself to respond in any manner whatsoever to the events that afflict his person or take place within his ken. He subjects his physique and psyche to a terrific training in ascetic aloofness, and actually becomes unassailably indifferent to pleasure and pain, and to all objects, whether desirable, repugnant, or even dangerous….Thus the life-monad gradually clears, and attains its intrinsic crystal clarity, while the actor obdurately refuses to participate any longer in the play on the stage of life….The busy host of players who fill the universe, still enchanted by their roles and eager to go on contending with each other for the limelight, changing masks and lines from life to life, enacting all the sufferings, achievements, and surprises of their biographies, simply turn from him and let him go. He has escaped. So far as the world is concerned, he is a useless fool. (256-57)
This attitude of negation, not just of meat-eating but of life itself, seems to have appeared in both East and West around the same time. Campbell does not quite make the relationship explicit, but it appears to me that this coincides in his historical scheme to a fourth paradigm, replacing the three earlier mythological paradigms, the Way of the Animal Powers, the Way of the Seeded Earth, and the Way of Celestial Lights, as he calls them in his Historical Atlas of World Mythology. The fourth paideumatic model, to use his term, is the Way of Man, and began roughly around 500 BCE. Among other things, this new era is marked by the emergence of individualism and a faith in human creative power that was once projected upon the gods. But this awakening to the value of the individual may have been accompanied by an awakening alienation, as consciousness becomes aware that it is, as a late poem of Yeats puts it, “fastened to a dying animal.” In an essay called “Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art,” Campbell says,
[O]ne day, the crisis occurs that has separated mankind from the beasts: the realization of the monstrous nature of this terrible game that is life, and our consciousness recoils. In mythological terms, we have tasted the fruit of the wonder-tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and have lost our animal innocence. Schopenhauer’s scorching phrase represents the motto of this fallen state: “Life is something that should not have been!” Hamlet’s state of indecision is the melancholy consequence: “To be, or not to be!” And, in fact, in the long and varied course of the evolution of the mythologies of mankind, there have been many addressed to the aims of an absolute negation of the world, a condemnation of life, and a backing out. These I have termed the mythologies of “The Great Reversal.” (181)
Whatever the truth of this historical speculation, the reference to Hamlet is right on target. Hamlet says to Claudius, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” When the king asks what he means by this, Hamlet replies, “Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3. 27-32, Bevington edition). He recurs to this sentiment in the graveyard in Act 5, contemplating the skull of Yorick: “Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till it find it stopping a bunghole?” (5.1.203-04). The attraction of shuffling off this mortal coil through suicide in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy” has as its immediate motive his family’s dysfunctional soap opera, but in the background lurks a much larger source of disgust and repudiation of life.
Whatever sensitive souls may feel, others are made of sterner stuff. The ideology known as Social Darwinism claims that life is a ruthless competition, and that it is necessary to be ruthless to survive. The mythologies of the Great Reversal have rejected life and are seeking to escape it into some transcendent state, but if you’re going to stick around, you had better learn to be toughminded. Humanity emerged in Africa, in other words in the tropical climes of the seeded earth, and we may have been originally adapted to plant-gathering. After all, we are not naturally evolved to be hunters: we lack the claws and sharp teeth, the strength, the lightning speed of true predators. We have compensate for our shortcomings by ingenuity, inventing weapons and traps. According to some theorists, this may have been enforced on us by the migration northward, out of Africa and into Europe and, especially, beyond Europe into the far north in both North America and Siberia. These are the lands where hunting cultures flourished, the idea being that we had to learn to get our protein from animals in areas where there were few or no plants.
The toughness of the Great White Hunter is, if you think about it, mostly a posture. Tarzan notwithstanding, human beings do not go up against the real predators in a fair contest. We fight dirty, with long-distance weapons, and when we do fight lions and jaguars it is for self-proving: we do not eat their meat. It’s just a contest for trophies proving some kind of superiority. The animals we hunt for food cannot really fight back: huge as they are, all buffalo and mastodon could do was trample people. Although there have been female hunters, hunting is usually a typically male activity. Its counterpart, also a masculine hobby, is war. We cannot say that human beings were naturally peaceful until they tempted themselves into these aggressive activities, for we know that our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, fight wars. The motive for war is originally territorial, although again it turns into an opportunity for masculine self-proving. And what is the motive for territoriality? Sometimes perhaps the securing of food-gathering areas. But mostly territoriality is an expression of a paranoia, a fear of the other that derives from the alienated nature of human ego consciousness.
Which brings us to the article that sparked the present newsletter, a New York Times piece by Kurt Gray on December 22, 2024 called “We’ve Misunderstood Human Nature for 100 Years.” The meaning of that title is that human beings were always “more prey than predators.” The implications Gray, a social psychologist, draws from that insight are startling:
Finding that hominids were hunted also implies that humans evolved with a prey mind-set, living in fear and constantly seeking protection. Anthropologists now believe that early humans spent many days worrying about predators — and most nights, too. Big cats, like leopards, hunt primates at night. Their eyes can see in darkness, while our eyes, evolved for detecting ripe fruit in daylight, cannot.
This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished. We fear that “child predators” will abduct our kids even when they are safer than ever.
Modern humans, ensconced in towns and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened. Whether we’re scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate, we all still carry the legacy of our ancestors, who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.
This seems to me an important insight, out of which unfold multiple corollaries. One is that human violence is in fact largely compensatory, a form of “masculine protest” even when women indulge in it too. Everyone knows that small animals, when cornered, can turn nasty: the stereotypical example is rats. Years ago, a baby raccoon managed to get its paw stuck in a gap between the front railing and the house. When I approached to free it, it snarled at me with truly impressive ferocity, even though the babies are normally fearful and do not venture far from their mother. They snarl at each other the same way: squabbling baby raccons sound as if they are going to rip out each other’s throats, but they never really harm each other. It’s all bluff. The whole manosphere these days is nothing but this kind of posturing designed to allay male insecurities. Back in the day, the poet Robert Bly, first known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, somehow became convinced that men had become demoralized by the demands on them by feminists for sensitivity, and needed to recover their supposed native fierceness. He wrote a best-selling book expounding this theme through the use of a fairy tale, Iron John (1990). This led to men’s groups going out into the woods and drumming and howling. His successor these days, for those who read books at any rate, is Jordan Peterson, who likewise makes lots of money assuring young men that it’s good to be manly. He does attempt to distinguish between true and toxic masculinity, which is more than the social media influencers do.
To say that most human violence, especially male violence, is the display of the secretly fearful does not mean it is harmless. One of the things that has most troubled intellectuals is the human will to power. Here, the analogy to the animal kingdom breaks down. Competition in the animal world is regulated, and always maintains a balance. In the human world, competition destroys the balance. Animals do not desire more and more and more. They stop with what they need. What is the reason for our infinite greed—for money, possessions, mansions, military might, for the desire to become as gods? The very word “totalitarian” indicates the unbounded nature of the will to power. What has gone wrong, what has become unnatural about the human race, even in the face of the obvious fact that such limitless desire is basically a form of nihilism? Is there something just innately evil about human nature, and, if so, why? But Gray’s theory may provide an answer. Coleridge spoke of Iago’s “motiveless malignity,” but Iago’s soliloquies make clear that his maliciousness derives from a hatred of human nature—a human nature that he endlessly characterizes in terms of ugly animal imagery. And hatred is invariably on some level provoked by fear, which defensively turns to rage. We do not see that level of fear in Iago’s case, and in the case of so many other sociopaths who in fact strike us as coldly, inhumanly lacking in emotion. But it makes more sense to wonder whether a basic fearfulness is not being deeply repressed and hidden—more sense than to assume that people are simply irrational.
Where “I am a big bad predator” posturing ceases to be harmless fantasy role playing is politics and economics. In politics, an innate paranoia fuels a “get them before they can get you mentality.” If such a paranoia acquires an army, it becomes fascism or some other form of authoritarianism. Vladimir Putin is a deeply paranoid man, who trusts no one—he is a former head of the KGB secret police. Why obsess about restoring the Soviet Empire, which was always more façade than reality anyway? Paranoid fear, the obsession about safe borders that led the the Soviet Union into its fiasco in Afghanistan and is now bogging it down in Ukraine. Putin thinks he is a cornered rat. In economics, laissez-faire capitalism is the peacetime form of Social Darwinism. In the form of libertarianism of the Ayn Rand variety, the strong man is the willful individualist who owes nothing to no one. “We’re all in this together” is a lie designed by weak and inferior parasites to manipulate the strong. This form of elitism believes in oligarchy, not democracy, and the form of that elitism has an increasing tendency to become more technological than materialist. Rand’s famous “hero” is an architect, but instead of merely monopolizing oil or coal, like the old robber barons, the new ones monopolize electronic networks. Who are the new techbros? Masters of the Internet. Zuckerberg has Facebook; Bezos has Amazon, a mail order company dependent on electronic ordering; Musk started with Paypal, moved to electronically self-driving cars, but then bought Twitter/X and used it to make himself the de facto ruler of the United States. Then of course there is Trump himself—whose vehicle was reality TV, which he translated into politics. Just as empires never have enough territory and always feel defensively unsafe, the capitalist oligarchs never have enough wealth, even though to acquire more they are nihilistically weakening to the point of collapse the social system on which their wealth depends.
Sometimes people are driven to conspicuous display of wealth because they grew up dirt poor and still secretly fear poverty, but that is not true of this crowd, who are the children of privilege. Of what can they possibly be afraid? The answer, I suspect, lies in the elite’s uneasy awareness that their wealth and power depend on the masses who both work for them and are their consumers. And the masses are many, while they are few. It is slaveowners’ psychology. The masters must always fear an uprising, which is why the masses must be kept in such insecurity that they dare not think of demanding anything, why any attempt at unionization is met with a perfectly stupid degree of resistance. It was illegal to teach enslaved people to read, lest from their reading they derive ideas beyond their proper subservient station. The form this takes these days is social media, which keeps the commoners in a reality bubble, safe from any hint of who their real enemies are.
The elite live in gated communities, and have bunkers in secluded parts of the world in which to hide if their shit ever hits the fan, for all the world like the old fallout shelters of the Cold War. Musk wants to leave altogether and live on Mars. They know they are gutting the planet, and fear that it can’t last.
Gray began by trying to understand the political polarization in the United States. His article is unfortunately weakened by both-sideism, for although the left has its paranoid fears, of which everything that is genuinely bad about “woke” is an expression, there is no comparison to the complete denial of reality on the right.
The philosopher of unapologetic elitism is Nietzsche, and it is Nietzsche who first cast light on the dynamic that is playing itself out within the Republican Party right now, for the entertainment of liberals and progressives. As you doubtless know, Elon Musk has taken control from Trump, and is in favor of bringing more technical workers from other countries so he can have cheap labor under his control, since he can always cancel their visas. This has outraged the xenophobic MAGA faithful, who want no visas and no foreigners at all. Both Musk and his cohort Ramaswamy have let loose with blistering invective against the MAGA mob, characterizing them as ignorant and lazy fools who mask their own failure and inferiority by anger against scapegoats, in this case immigrants.
They are basically accusing the MAGA people of what Nietzsche called ressentiment, the resentment of underlings against their betters. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche described this kind of conflict using the imagery of predators and prey. He himself was totally on the side of the predators, which to him were all the aristocracy of the heroic ages that swept back and forth through history raping, pillaging, plundering, enriching themselves, and enslaving people to do their bidding. These are the “great men.” What Nietzsche despises is the counter-movement that he called slave morality, which, beginning with Judaism and Christianity, deems aristocratic greatness and power evil and champions the cause of the masses as good. To Nietzsche, this was the onset of cultural decadence and decline—the taming of what he called the “blond beast,” a phrase that now has chilling associations since the Nazis understood very well what he was saying. Nietzsche speaks contemptuously (Nietzsche almost always speaks contemptuously—it is his default setting) of “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal” (42). He has a little parable about the way the inferiors define the “good”:
That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution as an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don’t dislike them at all these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.” (44-45)
And who was this philosopher of the strong-willed and powerful? A reclusive neurasthenic with bad vision and constant headaches who could not even hold down a job as a professor. And who did he influence? Among English-language poets, Yeats, a timid young man who actually tried to turn himself into a strong-willed aristocratic type after his girl friend dumped him for a soldier. Among political leaders, a runt of a housepainter who invented Trump’s trick of working the masses up into lynch-mob hysterical ressentiment by screaming at them. In other words, all overcompensating frauds.
But there is a third group, those of us who identify neither with the elites nor with the mob. In “The Gold Wheel,” the opening essay in The Night Country, Loren Eiseley calls himself a “fugitive,” saying, “Nevertheless I know that there are men born to hunt and some few born to flee, whether physically or mentally makes no difference” (4). His defense has been protective coloration, “the ruse of the fox.” He speaks of an episode in childhood in which a pack of boys are peer-bonding by stoning to death a turtle—and who then turn on Eiseley and stone him too. He speaks of somehow having gotten trapped in a truck from which a man with a rifle is trying to demonstrate his manliness by shooting an antelope, which is saved by the fact that the truck goes into a ditch. I don’t know about “fugitive,” but I am a loner who likes animals more than I like most of the human race. I have always identified with, not to mention befriended, the prey animals rather than the predators. Outside, it is the raccoons and groundhogs. Inside, my pets have been hamsters and guinea pigs, which is more than enough to disqualify me from any kind of manliness. My favorite political writer, Amanda Marcotte of Salon, informs us in a current essay that the manly males now compile lists of things it is not masculine to do or like, a variant of the old “Real men don’t eat quiche” schtick. Real men don’t eat ice cream cones or soup; real men don’t wish each other happy birthday. Nope, too effeminate. You can imagine what they think of hamsters and guinea pigs.
What does all this imply concerning our plans for utopia, particularly we utopians who remember dreaming of “getting back to the Garden”? Well, it’s surprisingly hopeful, actually. You can certainly argue that the will to power (and it was Nietzsche who gave us that phrase) is innate and genetic. Chimps fight wars and male animals exhibit dominance behavior. Insofar as the “social construction” movement denies any biological influence on human behavior whatsoever, it is in the camp of “woke” reactive hysteria. But admitting biological influence is not a slippery slope leading to biological determinism. We may indeed be hard-wired for a vestigial amount of aggressive, competitive, and dominance behavior—but it is clear that we are not, like the animals, utterly subject to our genetic programming. We have a freedom they don’t—we have reason, and, with it, the ability to consider and choose. “My genes made me do it” is no excuse. Moreover, animal behavior does not run compulsively out of control like human aggression, competition, and dominance. On top of whatever biological influence there may be on human identity, something else is at work. And that something may be the fear of a consciously aware ego realizing it is surrounded by an environment, both natural and human, that is other, and therefore unknown and scary. At that point, our prey reflexes kick in.
But two compensating factors make utopia dreamable. The right way to regard the excess fear that people have is to make them feel safe, so their prey impulses are not triggered. For 40 years, the elite have deliberately been aiming at the opposite, because fearful people readily become collectivized and are therefore manipulable. Maslow’s rational and yet not naïve interpretation of human evil was to treat most of it as a deficiency disease. He spoke of “D-motivations,” deficiency motivations that could attenuate if the deficiency were corrected. The evil of human nature is like a Biblical curse, passed on from generation to generation from dysfunctional families, both rich and poor. This is not ivory-tower idealism. If evolutionary theory makes any sense, it is about behavior enhancing the prospects of survival. It is irrational to think we are genetically programmed for destruction. I suppose you could contend that we are a kind of cancer, the failure of self-regulating organs subverted into out-of-control chaotic growth. But where is the evidence for that? The orthodox Darwinists, sometimes called neo-Darwinists, have been accused of being in ideological thrall without realizing it to Social Darwinism, emphasizing only the part of natural selection that is the survival of the fittest in a world “red in tooth and claw.” Actually, cooperation and symbiosis are the equal opposite of competition. We are an interdependent species, much more so than other animals because human offspring take so long to grow to maturity. The rugged individualist is simply an ideological fabrication. And if aggressive competition is a vicious circle, always reinforcing itself and never satisfied, cooperation may also have its synergetic feedback loop. In other words, progress is realistically possible and not merely the pipe dream of intellectuals who don’t know the hard facts. Most of the hard facts are deliberately and politically generated, and could be deliberately and politically changed.
No, this does not entail pacificism, even if Gandhi, and thereby Martin Luther King, were influenced by the ideal of ahimsa. We do begin by assuming that others are not necessarily other and a threat. The death of Jimmy Carter has elicted comparisons between his genuine Christianity and that of the Christian nationalists of the present, and Joe Biden has always insisted on at least trying to be bipartisan and work across the aisles. But these are exactly the two presidents that the American people have contemptuously dismissed as failures. Those of you who are younger, don’t be fooled by the eulogies for Carter now. When he was president, he was widely despised—and the Iran hostage crisis cemented it. Because it made him look weak and unmanly, and dragged America into his own humiliation. As for Joe Biden, he is unpopular, despite impressive accomplishments for the betterment of common life, because he is old and shows it—and that means weakness to many fearful people who are desperate to cling to someone who is strong and who promises a strong, aggressive America. In fact,
it is presently unclear how much Biden has declined with age. He had one disastrous night on TV—but at other times functions energetically and effectively, continuing to accomplish things right up to the end. But the contrast in the debate was between Trump in his raging-bull mode with a weak old man who was steamrollered, and many people always take Trump’s hyperventilating as evidence that he is strong. His hatred is to them strong too. It appeals to those who have bumpers stickers saying, “My kid can beat up your honors student.”
So, no, I am not a pacifist. There may come a point where we must fight. In the East, the Bhagavad Gita came to agree. My dad fought in World War II, and I am proud of him for it. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is about a world in which it becomes clear that the good people must band together and fight, use power in a good cause. When Tolkien was writing, the war was still going on, the war in which the blond beast was defeated. There is also a use for individualism that is not just an excuse for selfishness. Sometimes a man, and also a woman, and also a trans or nonbinary human being, must stand alone. The primary case is in defense of one’s family, in a tradition that goes back to the Odyssey, in which Odysseus dispatches 108 suitors who have besieged his family, sexually harrassed his wife, tried to murder his son, and oppressed his people, in a grisly but unapologetic fashion. In 1968, Sam Peckinpah, maker of violent revisionist Westerns, showed a very young, willowy Dustin Hoffman in wire-frame glasses dispatching a band of psychotic thugs trying to take over his house and his wife in a style quite reminiscent of the Odyssey. To win against the odds, both men had to use the ruse of the fox, but not in Eiseley’s fashion. I remember that a trick involving a bear trap habitually got cheers from the audience. For some reason, there was a spate of such movies in those years, I think because the ideal of aggressive manhood was being questioned: Walking Tall, Billy Jack. I saw them all as a young man and was haunted by them.
And then there is my lifelong fascination with Clint Eastwood, who began of course in the genre of the Western, where, as I have said at other times, the good guys were not toxic males, not blond or any other complexion of beast. Those were the bad guys, who were either Yahoo bullies mistreating women and Indians or big-time ranchers and corrupt players. High Noon is the classic film about a man of the law who stands up to a whole gang of such people, with the very town he is defending too cowardly to stand with him. But he stands anyway, on principle. Eastwood circles again and again around the toll it takes on a man to stand alone that way. American Sniper was a contemporary version of it, but the great one is Unforgiven. The man of violence is both isolated and bent out of shape emotionally by the necessity of that violence, yet he assumes it as a sacrifice. More ambiguous are the films in which Eastwood’s heroes are vigilantes because they insist on justice within a corrupted justice system. We may call this Batman syndrome, and the Dark Knight has indeed paid a price for being what he is. There are also times, however, in which Eastwood questions such loner heroism, and indeed violence itself, such as Gran Torino, seeing that it leads to a vicious cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. It can also lead to the psychosis of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, who has been inspired to be a vigilante by John Wayne Westerns.
Men of violence in a good cause have to harden their hearts, and pay a terrible price for it. In World War I, it was called “shell shock.” Survivors of Vietnam and Iraq may suffer, like American sniper Chris Kyle, from PTSD. But there is another way, not an alternative but a complement, to cope with this world in which we have to kill to survive. It involves exactly the opposite: refusing to harden ourselves out of self-protection, opening ourselves to the terrifying risk of compassion, the risk of caring when it may do no good. In one of my favorite poems, “The Meadow Mouse,” Theodore Roethke tries valiantly to take in and nurture an orphaned baby mouse, only to find in the morning that he has gone—
To run under the hawk’s wing, Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree, To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat. I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass, The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway, The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising— All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.
Compassion is not manly to the toxic crowd. But it takes more courage to have one’s heart broken by the innocent suffering of the world than the master race will ever comprehend. Out of compassion, the Buddha refused nirvana and returned to this world of illusion, refusing to leave until all people achieve enlightenment. Jimmy Carter was a Bodhisattva, helping to eradicate infectious diseases, building habitats for humanity. Blake said that where man is not, nature is barren. He has been taken to task for that, but this is what he meant. We cannot live in nature like the animals, and must humanize it. I write these words on the evening of the last day of a bad year, on the threshold of one that promises to be far worse. We are part of nature, and therefore in mitigating nature’s ruthlessness, we are trying to improve ourselves. We are prey, but if we face our fear, we will be capable of love. Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimism and said that life must be affirmed. But he did not truly understand how. Shakespeare’s King Lear is full of the imagery of predatory animals, which the evil characters identify with, and Albany fears that humanity will prey upon itself like monsters of the deep. Humanity does, and not much is left of the cast at the end of the fifth act. Lear dies because his heart is broken by Cordelia’s death. But he dies redeemed of the will to power and heartless, selfish cruelty by which he has been possessed all his life. Sometimes that is what redemption means, and it is enough.
References
Campbell, Joseph. Oriental Mythology. Volume 3 of The Masks of God. Penguin, 1962.
Campbell, Joseph. “Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art.” In The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays, 1959-1977. Harper Collins, 1997. 180-203. Originally published in Myths, Dreams, and Religion.
Eiseley, Loren. “The Gold Wheel.” In The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971. 3-14.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufman. Vintage, 1967.
Zimmer, Heinrich. The Philosophies of India. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Bollingen, 1951.