14. Meanwhile
10/15/07:
Meanwhile, of course, life continues, whether or not I grasp the implications of Maturana and Varela’s logical accounting. Summer hangs on past its expiration date, the Red Sox win the American League East, I get to go to a playoff game against the Angels thanks to my friend Stewart. Walking to the game, I take a little detour to the bank of the Charles on the downstream side of the B.U. Bridge, which is home to a colony of white geese. Their ancestors were brought there in the first place, about 25 years ago, as guard animals for a pumping station on the upriver side of the bridge, and since then they’ve decided it is their home. There have been various efforts on the part of the city of Cambridge and the Department of Conservation and Recreation to get them to go away, vociferously opposed by local residents who want them to stay. They’re clearly an emblem of nature for many people – on the website of the Friends of the White Geese, their habitat (maybe a mile of the riverbank) is referred to as an “urban wild” – and then there are others who think of them as pests. I of course am charmed by them, since I’m the sort of person who would keep hens in his back yard, but even if they are said to live in an “urban wild,” the white geese definitely are not. They are a mix of breeds (mostly Embden?) as domesticated as a Rhode Island Red and were brought there by a person for human purposes. There’s a distinct difference between them and the Canada geese that are everywhere in Boston, and one difference is that the white geese don’t seem willing to move away from the spot where they live, no matter how the city makes life difficult for them. In recent years, they’ve been prevented from feeding on part of the short stretch of riverbank they inhabit. But what’s preventing them from expanding the boundaries of their world in other directions? They’re geese! The river is open to them. And there’s a lot of other goose habitat around; why don’t they take advantage of it?
I show up around dusk, as the white geese, some Canada geese, and quite a few ducks are starting to settle down for the night on land. The scene is both startling and funny in its incongruity: here on the ground, dozens of large birds congregating to go to sleep, and right above them, a world of rush hour traffic. To complete the picture with one more disparate element, a crew team rows by. The white geese put up with my presence and my photographing; when I get too close for comfort they stick their beaks in the air, eye me sideways and edge away. But as I leave they set up a concerted honking as if they are reproaching me: “You shouldn’t have bothered us! Don’t you know that?”
I wonder what would happen if someone planted a plastic fox there. But I’m not going to try it and become a big-time persona non grata to the Friends of the White Geese.
At the game, I almost catch a foul ball which instead is caught by a teenage kid who then gets interviewed by three or four news outlets; I decide I’m glad I didn’t make the grab. In the bottom of the ninth, Manny wins the game with a home run.
(The kid gets to throw out the first ball at a subsequent game; I change my mind.)
A few days later, Stewart sends me a clipping from the B.U. magazine about the white geese. It turns out that two residents of Cambridge feed them twice a day. Aha – no wonder they aren’t going anywhere. In the article is this quotation from Allison Blyler, one of those who feed the geese: “They are complex beings deserving of respect and care.” What does this sound like? Donald Worster talking about a river. “Their presence provides a bridge to the natural world that many city dwellers would otherwise never cross.” One of them eats out of her hand. When she leaves, she says to him, “I’ll see you in the morning.” As far as I’m concerned, the “natural world” that the white geese represent is not so different from the anomalous salmon run in Seattle. Less spectacular, but appealing in the same kind of way. The argument of The Organic Machine has sunk in. People may have had a lot to do with the present form of the living things around us, a fact that is visible in the white geese, but this people-modified “impure” nature isn’t going to go away.
Now I see why the white geese honked in protest when I left, not when I came: “How can you leave without feeding us?”
I reinforce the chicken coop, trying to benefit from nasty experience; a raccoon killed our last two hens. Vaughn and I drive out to Brookside Farm, in central Massachusetts near the New Hampshire border, and buy three new ones: a Rhode Island Red, a Black Beauty, and a Barred Rock. They are four months old and have just started to lay. We carry them in cardboard boxes from the car, let them out inside the coop, clip their wings so they won’t fly over the fence once they’re outside, and voilà – the chicken coop is in use again. Rural nostalgia rules! These hens have lived their life till now within the walls of a henhouse, so when only chicken wire separates them from the outdoors, it seems to unnerve them. For a few days they show no sign of wanting to be let out of the coop, but as soon as I let them explore, they get the picture. The Barred Rock is the boldest; she exits first, then the Black Beauty, then the Red. After a couple of days they’re devouring the vegetation in their part of the yard, enthusiastically scratching and pecking in the dirt just like chickens always do. Instinctive behavior has always been a puzzle to me. It works, but how does it work?
10/16/07:
Instead of chasing the answer to that, I try to figure out how Maturana and Varela would comment on the question of whether the hens and the white geese are nature. It’s still hard to get my head around their way of thinking. Through “natural drift” human beings have gotten to the point where we create culture through language; using these immensely powerful tools, we bring forth a world which becomes the reality we are facing. Among other results of culture would be the selective breeding of domestic animals, but to call these creatures “unnatural” seems silly once you can demonstrate, as M&V have done to their satisfaction, that a natural process has led to the point where humans are capable of this. Basically, in human beings “natural drift” gave rise to the capability of intervening in “natural drift.” A completely different way of saying there is no drawing a line between us and nature, but in the end, it seems to be a similar idea.
Simply put, we have agency. M&V never use the phrase “free will,” but they do say that “the human social system amplifies the individual creativity of its components” – those “components” being people – and as far as I’m concerned, you can’t talk about individual creativity without meaning that the creator has free will. So far as we can tell, amoebas, fungi, frogs, bees and trees cannot make plans and decisions about what they’re going to do next. (This might not be so clear about chimpanzees, gorillas, or whales, but that’s neither here nor there.) But we can, and for better and worse, we do. This factor cannot be subtracted from the natural world now that it has emerged. Or at least that’s what I would argue. I’m aware that other people wouldn’t; for example, there’s the notion that what’s really going on here is “selfish genes” (Richard Dawkins, 1976) trying to perpetuate themselves, so that genes are the real actors and human behavior is a mere side effect. An ingenious argument, but one that other biologists didn’t necessarily buy. People in my own field of English have made something like the “selfish gene” argument, only for them it’s language that really runs the show, or social forces like ideology. Again the individual’s sense of agency gets marginalized as an illusion; greater cultural forces are running us, far more than we realize. I always want to ask how the theorist achieved a point of view from which to make this analysis. What made the theorist different? If language or culture is so all-powerful, how did she make her escape? And if the theorist truly believed it, why write the argument down? I can’t get past this. Isn’t it a case of “Look how brilliant I am to have created this argument that people lack real agency”? And isn’t that self-contradictory?
In the absence of a satisfactory answer to that (though one may exist somewhere in my long list of not-yet-read books), I start asking myself what could be the motive for arguing away human agency. Why would I want to say that I have no real power to do anything new, anything on my own initiative? What could I get out of that, what makes it anything other than just depressing?
Would it be a way to escape guilt for my actions? To cover up their self-serving nature?
Is this position itself explainable as a product of cultural forces, e.g., the professionalization of “English”? And if so, does it matter at all?
Or is this position perhaps a sincere expression of despair?
As usual, no answers. But there’s definitely an argument going on within our culture about whether human beings are capable of origination. Whether we can begin something ourselves, or are just being used by some other more powerful agent. I come down squarely on the side of Hannah Arendt, who said in The Human Condition that “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.” (9) Not pulling any punches, she calls this a miracle. “The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new . . . an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.” (246)
I’ve experienced enough vacillation between hope and despair in my life to know it isn’t just a simple question of choice. But throwing in my allegiance with one idea or another is a choice I can make, and hope seems unequivocally to associate with Arendt’s point of view. To think that a human being cannot begin anything new feels like utter futility. And there’s enough futility already, without trying to prove that it is the ground rule of life. We’re not so overly endowed with hope that we need to have some of it chipped away.
The “selfish gene” argument, and sociobiology, and behaviorism for that matter, are all efforts to prove that humans have only the illusion of agency, but looked at from a slightly different angle they’re commentaries on man’s relationship with nature. By these descriptions, we are definitely a part of nature, and we’re a whole lot less distinctive than we imagine. Nature is certain regular mechanisms; we are products of those mechanisms; thus our behavior can be demystified. The truth to be revealed is that there’s a lot less to us than we think. Our grandiose conception of ourselves as exceptional (or even as conscious beings) needs to be taken down a peg; we are mere nature.
This just goes to show how the same premises can lead to opposite conclusions. Maturana and Varela also argue that nature is certain regular mechanisms, from which we are derived; but they conclude that the operation of these mechanisms (“natural drift”) has given rise to individual creativity and constant transformation, and has made it our mode of being to “bring forth a world.” Not to mention an ethical implication that we must love or accept others – which is hardly the ethical dimension of the “selfish gene.”
From my point of view, the ideas of Maturana and Varela totally confirm the notion that we can only project our human constructs onto nature. In their view, nature – biological reality – has its own structure, and we have ours. We are congruent but separate. Nature independently exists and is other than man, but it’s far more separate and other than the Sierra Club, let’s say, would have it be. We have no direct knowledge of it. The separateness is so fundamental that it forces us to rethink our own knowing. Any way that we make sense of the world around us (this includes M&V’s ideas, and all the rest of our science) is our own construction. Our moment-by-moment perception of it is not a representation of external reality. We are always making the reality we’re facing.
So, I think, let’s stop asking ourselves whether nature is separate from us. That question is answered, in two ways. From an organismal point of view, physical reality is indeed separate from us, due to our autonomy as organisms having our own structure. The idea of nature, any idea of it, is our creation. “Nature” is always a fiction, because the outside world is always a fiction. The notion of nature is nested within the larger collective fiction of our culture, upon which we depend for our survival. We can’t easily step outside of it, even into another culture, and as for stepping outside of culture altogether, as far as I can see, that’s impossible. We need to be in consensus with some other people, or we’re unable to function. There isn’t some absolute, extra-cultural, objective and complete knowledge of the natural world available to us. It appears that since the Enlightenment, we in the West have operated on the fiction that there was such knowledge available, that we had it (or close enough to make incredibly bold decisions), and that it gave us mastery and control. People with enormous power continue to operate on this fiction, but the consensus on it seems to be breaking down. There is serious feedback from the environment telling us that our knowledge is incomplete, our actions can have unforeseeable consequences, and not every problem has a technical fix. An alternative picture seems to be in the process of emerging; a high-stakes contest of fictions is going on, in science, in history, in politics, in policy, everywhere. This writing is my small contribution to that ongoing cultural work.
There’s really a lot in this installment. I have some responses, which might end up reading like me dipping my toe in at various points, but not quite getting the whole.
I like how the white geese group calls itself “friends” of the geese. It recognizes separation and connection in one noun. Also, the quote from Allison Blyler put me in mind, instantly, of the encampment of humans you came across on the bank of the… Little River, was it?
Your and Vaughn’s relationship to your chickens is akin to the relationship of the people who originally brought the white geese to Cambridge and now the Friends of the White Geese who sustain them.
I’m struck by Arendt’s use of the word “anew,” and your (intentionally or un-) later changing it to new, in her remark that the “newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew.” To me, anew is closer to renewal than it is to original, as if the newcomer enters into some cycle set in motion before him, which he then alters (according to will) and makes his own, while still keeping some version of the material that came before him.
In a book I’m reading, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books 2007), Hofstadter reframes “free will” as, basically, our wants and desires, and says, yeah, we have wants, they make us do things, but we’re not free. We are not only dictated by our wants, but also by “available paths… dictated by the rest of the world” or “this crazy hedge maze called ‘life'” (339).
A recent article in the Atlantic sums up the research, by evolutionary biologists, on the “selfless gene,” which accounts for social kindnesses, generosity, and heroism, not only in humans, but in our relatives, other mammals.
Your reflections continue to remind your readers of how we have constructed our view of the world, and our sense of ourselves in it, using binaries: Man and Nature, hope and despair, agency and biological destiny. You seem to be looking not to choose one over the other, but to find some place where those poles encounter each other. A middle space. That’s hard, because in our media-fed culture we’re so accustomed to considering everything reductively (hey, look at any major election). In a way, readers need to have some guidance in a new way to think, that looks at where these forces meet and mingle.
Hey Lowry– Your blog came up in class the other day, as we were talking about Leslie Marmon Silko’s strange little book, Sacred Water. She self- published it, so it is hard to find, but if you are interested ask me about it– I wasn’t the one who brought up your project by the way– the grad students were whispering about you… (in a good way).
Anyway, you’d be interested in silko because she is thinking about water and about humans and “nature” and also because she concludes with a brief essay on publishing and not pubishing and self publishing… which also connects to what you are doing here…
hate to add to the books you haven’t read, but this one is very very short (maybe 40 photos and 40 paragraphs)…
The college’s tame/feral geese play a comic role in Straight Man, too…
Your latest installment made me aware of the goose explosion along the Charles–I run there on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, on a route that I first ran in 1982 or thereabouts. In 25 years, the banks have “greened” considerably– but one of the strange side effects of this greening is the green goose poop everywhere… Sometimes I see geese (Canadian, which is to say non-white), but invariably, I see goose droppings…
Anyway, the main point of this comment is: people are thinking about your project in my classes, and I am thinking about it on my not-so-early morning runs…
i’m interested in this connection you see between creativity and freedom of the will. have you ever read any susan blackmore? she edits a number of the anthologies out of oxford on consciousness, and, while she’s an oddball and sometimes imprecise, she has some cool ideas agency that come from colliding interests in consciousness and eastern religious practices. here’s a little taste (from ‘what we believe but cannot prove: today’s leading thinkers on science in the age of certainty):
‘it is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. as samuel johnson said, ‘all theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.’ with recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time. so i long ago set about systematically changing the experience. i now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.
but what happens? people say i’m lying! they say that it’s impossible and so i must be deluding myself in order to preserve my theory. and what can i do or say to challenge them? i have no idea- other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is.
when the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises- will the decisions be morally acceptable? here i have made a great leap of faith (or, more accurately, this body and it’s genes and memes and the whole universe it lives in have done so). it seems that when people discard the illusion of an inner self who merely acts, as many mystics and buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. so perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds- but this too i cannot prove.
as for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether- this is very much harder. i just keep on seeming to exist. but though i cannot prove it, i think it is true that i don’t.’
so, is it possible to live CREATIVELY without having the experience of choosing freely? i imagine that susan blackmore would answer with an emphatic ‘yes’. or, at least we could say, people would probably still be motivated to put pens to paper (blackmore, at least, is prolific), and the decisions made in the process would still be more or less innovative, more or less satisfying to both producers and consumers.
Laura G! How lovely to see you’re reading this. I have not read any Susan Blackmore. I have not read 97% of the philosophy you’ve read, probably. (All right, 93.) But anyway, this is fascinating. I’ve studied enough Buddhism and done enough meditation to know that giving up the illusion, or whatever it is, of self is a real possibility. I recognize the feeling that it could be dangerous, which I have personally had. It doesn’t seem to be a place where I want to go, although even on this I’m conflicted. I must acknowledge (and maybe this belongs in the text somewhere) that in my creative life as a novelist, I subscribe entirely to what Joan Didion once said: “N.B.: You don’t tell it. It tells you.” The way it works (at the best times) is, I don’t write; it writes. What is “it”? Unidentified. My job is to get out of the way, listen to what the little voice says, and write it down. But I don’t know that this even comes close to giving up the notion of an inner self; after all, you notice that I still said “my job is.” There is an inner I doing something in order to let “it” write through me.
That’s how first draft of a piece of fiction happens for me. On the other hand, revision involves a great deal of the “I” deliberately choosing.
I think “decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them” is, in a word, happiness. I am by no means unreceptive to this idea. To me, the loss of the “I” in being at one with whatever is happening is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Is this a welter of contradictions? It probably is. So be it.
What do you think of Maturana and Varela’s argument about the self (or my effort to paraphrase it)? To me, the statement “I believe that I don’t exist” is totally compatible with what I think they’re saying. Fine, believe that — it becomes a part of the world you bring forth — but notice the word “I.”
It’s interesting that this quotation comes from something about “science in the age of certainty.” I am just about to post two more sections of Pro. Pei that are about science in the age of indeterminacy. I’ll be interested to know what you think about them. No doubt they will be full of holes, philosophically, but you know, we can’t all be philosophers.
P.S. Here is a statement I like very much about this topic: “Ego is seeming solid.”
i, less than a philosophy minnow.
found this writing very interesting and will have to read it over even more to perhaps better understand and synthesize. However I don’t see myself reading over those thinkers you allude to so please excuse my laziness and clumsiness.
the stuff about Arendt’s thoughts re: ‘anew’ness, or newness, or renewal, or birth, or rebirth, etc… are so intriguing and pertinent to your discussion; at least as i see it.
in viewing a receding life as only thru the prism of approaching death (without renewal) one slides towards many avenues of despair, and cynicism. The use of the word “I” getting so in the way of the active “I” whereby we have no doubt of our living renewed selves. Our insecurities loudly speak volumes in “I”.
This “I” as written is so ego inflating, so in the way of authentic perception; so too in the way of an unjaundiced view of ourselves, let alone “man”, let alone “nature”.
the notion of ‘man versus nature’, or even ‘man and nature’, or even ‘man in nature’, as acceptable constructs of perception have perhaps reinforced ill effects of facts that these fictions could not have caused without the delusion of man’s ego and ‘I’ness. Too frequently this all may just go back to a real dearth of cultural renewal (perhaps so relentlessly expressed in post modern dominance of various
forms of expression.) An avalanche of loud receding ‘I’ absolutely afraid of renewal.
the ethereal moving line as implied in ‘natural drift’ indicates
a responsibility that there are not always simple moral guidepost along the way…. perhaps prodding us to call on our own evaluations and encouraging us ‘anew’.
I am actually one of the feeders of the geese you were referring to and I greatly appreciate your thoughts on the issue as my mate Allison (the other feeder and wife of I [ha ha]) are revisiting this stuff it seems almost daily in our quests to help fortify those we appreciate and love.
The geese themselves have been a constant source of renewal for me and this is best expressed in the notion that I was afraid of them and was not really very sensitive to issues of wildlife, or “wild”, or I guess, life. The necessity of dogs getting older; they need to learn new tricks.
the culture and community and family and association we have viewed and experienced with the geese has been always illuminating and surprising, complex and enthralling. sometimes we think we speak their language and we draw a rule by which to better understand the whole better; only to be introduced to another exception…. further allowing rethought, humbleness and renewal.
i get the sense of your understanding of our doings and i think, appreciation…. either way i appreciate your thoughts and hope to read your stuff more thoroughly and look forward to your book and future renewals. Best of luck with your friends of all animals (especially the ones that prompt your thoughtful articulate wheels)
Bill (of Bill and Allison of the geese)