"The End of Living and the Beginning of Survival" (click for video)
I was texting Pablo about Joseph Campbell during a discussion of myth. I wanted to send him a link to some video of Campbell, so I looked up The Power of Myth. I found the link above. In it, a very intriguing phrase occurred in Chief Seattle's reply to the governor of Washington who had made an offer to buy their land. He asks what the future will be of the white buyers of the land. When their civilization overruns the land, it will be "the end of living and the beginning of survival."
This is an intriguing contrast. Of course, one has to survive in order to live. "To live" suggests a quality of life that makes survival worthwhile. But I think it suggests more. Somehow in Seattle's discussion, we see that it is the Indian way of survival that is living. In our culture, if we achieve a quality of life, it is something we enjoy after we have done our work to survive. The cleavage that we know, even when we have things wired, seems to be absent.
I don't think the Native Americans are the only civilization to have achieved a unity of survival and life. In his book Aristotle, John Hermann Randall, Jr. writes of "a life of nous, of thëoria, of intelligence, burning, immoderate, without bounds or limits" (Randall, Aristotle, p. 1). I don't sense a cleavage there, either, even if Aristotle doesn't want to be entangled in mundane concerns.
I feel a tragedy in our history at the same time that I feel a thankfulness. Our history in this country is better at many points than we should have been able to insist upon, yet still deeply disappionting at other points. What might our world have been had other courses been taken? If Chief Seattle's warning had been taken to heart in a culture that was burning with Aristotelean nous? The wilderness would have been made friendly to man through thëoria rather than asphalt.
To those who imagine I'm being ridiculously theoretical, I am not. Our earlier polity was much more libertarian, and the complaint in the freest states was that no decent road could be built. How much would the members of the Green party give to live in that world? Individual solutions to problems of space use and transportation would have been developed rather than our mechanized one-size-fits-all auto-centered planning. Ayn Rand argues that "Aristotle (via John Locke) was the philosophical father of the Constitution of the United States" (Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason, ed. by Leonard Piekoff, p. 12). Had his vision been allowed to rule more thoroughly, I think we might have had a wondrous culture of greater harmony with the wilderness and greater harmony among the inhabitants. Perhaps a world where there were fewer roads, but we had gotten further in space travel. I like to picture that world, anyway.
It is when we are entangled in mere survival, and in the pursuit of survival we feel no harmony between our faculties and our world, that we feel the curse.
posted by solarblogger @ 12/27/2006 03:10:00 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I agree with your belief that had a more thorough Jeffersonian/Lockean view man's role in nature won the day that this world would be a better place today. Unfortunately, Hamilton's industrialized cosmopolitanism won the war. I'm not convinced that we have to continue on this course, however, as more and more people are coming to a better understanding of the importance of the preservation of nature. Hobbiton is not yet lost, my brother.
I thought of the same thing. I started to say it, but it brought up a discussion of degree of loss that I didn't want to go into in the main text. I will go into it a little here, though.
Part of what I miss is the idea that we can go native. Whatever we can recapture in terms of ecological balance, and I think that is possible, and even perhaps not unlikely, the other is not going to happen. The Native American cultures are in large part lost. Many tribes are extinct. What glories of insight could their languages have provided to humanity, had these people not been oppressed? It's just tragic.
Hobbiton may not be lost, but it isn't the same without the "Bagginses and Boffins, the Tooks and Brandybucks, and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and ... ProudFEET."
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That's true, but the whole idea of Tolkien's works was to give England a mythological history. Maybe we have some of that already. It is now time to build upon what we remember. Yet, at the same time, we must remember that much of our history is not and could never be lost. It is rooted in us. We are trees that grow, and weather storms, and are climbed on, and provide light and heat. We can't kill what we are. The future is bright and green.
[W]e must remember that much of our history is not and could never be lost.
Hmmm. There's gospel in there, and I think a lot of truth. But I think it's meant in a different sense. I'm not suggesting giving into despair. But Bly would say that we have a lot of grieving we haven't done.
There are lost worlds to be recovered. This is like surviving a shipwreck. Many were lost and died and we won't see them again till the Resurrection. But it might be worth combing through the wreckage more carefully to salvage what we can. Some of what the lost worlds carried was a more robust sense of what we are. Granted, that history may be carried in each of us. But it may also be carried in a lost, detached sort of way that only someone from a lost world could help us to find.
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