Survival Of The Fakest

AFTER IT WAS PUBLISHED IN 2000, MY BOOK ICONS OF EVOLUTION got rave reviews—filled, not with lavish praise, but with furious denunciations.¹'²

Several critics wrote that I was stupidly trying to discredit evolution just because of a few textbook mistakes. According to evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, “Wells’s book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: hence, textbooks illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction.”³

Biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci wrote, “Because there are omissions, simplifications, and inaccuracies in some general biology textbooks, obviously the modern theory of evolution must be wrong. This is the astounding line of reasoning that is the backbone of Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution.”⁴

Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick of the militantly pro-evolution National Center for Science Education made the same point, heavily seasoned with scorn: “The Whine Expert: Wells reminds us of those kids who used to write to the letters page of Super-man comics many years ago. ‘Dear Editor,’ they would write, ‘you made a boo-boo! On page 6 you colored Superman’s cape green, but it should be red!’ Okay, kid, mistakes happen, but did it really affect the story? Wells cannot hurt the story of evolution; like a petulant child, he can only throw tantrums.”⁵

But if the icons of evolution were really just a few textbook “booboos,” biologists would have quickly corrected them. This point can be illustrated with an actual example from a physics textbook. The 1997 edition of Prentice-Hall’sExploring Physical Science contained a photograph of singer Linda Ronstadt holding a microphone, and the caption identified her as a silicon crystal doped with arsenic. The following page had a drawing of a silicon crystal doped with arsenic, accompanied by a caption about the usefulness of solid-state microphones. Obviously, the captions had been inadvertently switched. John L. Hubisz pointed this out in a Packard Foundation report on mistakes in physical science textbooks.⁶

Of course, the publisher corrected the mistake in subsequent editions. Imagine, though, the following scenario: The identification of Ronstadt as a silicon crystal appears year after year in almost all science textbooks. The caption is consistent with other materials in the textbooks promoting the theory that human life is based on silicon rather than carbon. And the theory is vigorously defended by establishment science, even to the point of vilifying its critics. Obviously, we would no longer be dealing with a mistake, but with a deliberate campaign to convince people that life is silicon-based.

If the icons of evolution were just innocent mistakes, as Coyne, Pigliucci, Padian, and Gishlick claimed, then the icons would have been corrected in subsequent textbooks, just as the Ronstadt-as-a-silicon-crystal error was quickly corrected in the physical sciences textbook. Let’s see what actually happened.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

AFTER THE first edition of The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Darwin concluded later editions with the statement that life had been “originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.” A few years later, Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker, “I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion” by using the biblical term, when what he really meant was “appeared by some wholly unknown process.”⁷

In 1871, Darwin wrote to Hooker again and outlined his true thinking about the origin of life: “If (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”⁸

Maybe the first cells actually did live in a warm little pond, but Darwin clearly believed that they were not created there. Instead, he believed they formed by some material process involving the spontaneous self-assembly of various chemicals.

In the 1920s, Russian scientist A. I. Oparin and British scientist J. B. S. Haldane suggested that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere consisted mainly of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor.⁹,¹⁰

The first three are what chemists call “reducing” gases, as opposed to neutral gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen, or oxidizing gases such as oxygen. In a reducing atmosphere, according to Oparin and Haldane, natural energy sources such as lightning could have produced the chemical building blocks of life, which could have then dissolved in the ocean to form a primordial “soup” from which the first living cells emerged.

An interesting idea, but could it be tested?

In 1953, University of Chicago graduate student Stanley Miller announced that he had shown experimentally (in the laboratory of his Ph.D. adviser, Harold Urey) that lightning in the Earth’s primitive atmosphere could have produced amino acids, the chemical building blocks of proteins.¹¹ Miller used a closed glass apparatus in which he boiled water, circulated the steam with a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen past a spark discharge, and then collected the products in a container at the bottom. After a week he analyzed the result (a brown tarry mixture) and detected some of the amino acids that occur in living cells. The experiment was widely advertised as evidence that scientists had demonstrated the first step in the origin of life.

By 1980, however, most geochemists had concluded that the Earth’s early atmosphere probably wasn’t a reducing atmosphere, as Oparin and Haldane had supposed, and as Miller had assumed when constructing his experiment. Instead, the early atmosphere likely consisted of neutral gases like those emitted from modern volcanoes—mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen (though some carbon monoxide, a reducing gas, is also emitted). Since hydrogen is the lightest element, if there had been any in the early atmosphere it would probably have escaped into space.

In 1983, Miller reported that he and a colleague had sparked an atmosphere containing carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide instead of methane and ammonia, and they were able to produce a small amount of the simplest amino acid—butonly if the atmosphere contained more hydrogen than carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. In order to produce other amino acids they needed not only an excess of free hydrogen but also methane.¹² Harvard geochemist Heinrich Holland came to a similar conclusion.¹³

So the Miller-Urey experiment could not produce amino acids from a realistic mixture of gases. Furthermore, the brown tarry mixture that it produced contained not only amino acids, but also substances that would have interfered with the origin of life. For example, the mixture contained cyanide and formaldehyde, which a skilled chemist can use to synthesize biologically useful molecules, but which by themselves are extremely toxic to living cells. In 2015, an international team of scientists reported that bacteria could survive in the residue from a Miller-Urey experiment, but only after the residue had first been purified to remove these toxic substances.¹⁴ In other words, an intelligent agent had to orchestrate matters to make the residue hospitable to life.

The Textbooks Respond

SO HOW did the biology textbooks respond to these discoveries showing that Stanley Miller’s experiment missed the mark? Many of them in 2000 persisted in using images of the Miller-Urey apparatus to convince students that scientists had demonstrated the first step in the origin of life. And many biology textbooks are still doing this. For example, Kenneth Mason, Jonathan Losos and Susan Singer’s 2014 edition of Raven and Johnson’s widely used Biology acknowledges that there is a controversy over the composition of the Earth’s early atmosphere, but it proceeds to tell the standard story anyway. It concludes that Stanley

Miller demonstrated that “the key molecules of life could have formed in the reducing atmosphere of the early Earth.”¹⁵ Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine’s 2014 Biology includes a drawing of the Miller-Urey apparatus with the following caption: “Miller and Urey produced amino acids, which are needed to make proteins, by passing sparks through a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor. Evidence now suggests that the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere was different from their 1953 experiment. However, more recent experiments with different mixtures of gases have produced similar results.”¹⁶

This last statement is profoundly misleading, if not downright false. As we saw above, Stanley Miller himself showed that his experiment needed excess hydrogen to produce even the simplest amino acid, and methane was necessary to produce more complex amino acids. So the “different mixtures of gases” that Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine claim “produced similar results” must have been very different from the probable atmosphere of the early Earth.

According to the 2014 edition ofCampbell Biologyand the 2014 edition of Scott Freeman’s Biological Science (both of which feature drawings of Miller’s apparatus), Miller-Urey-type experiments using realistic mixtures of volcanic gases have produced organic molecules such as formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.¹⁸,¹⁹

Yes, but as we saw above, these chemicals are very toxic to living cells. Life could not have emerged spontaneously from a primordial soup containing significant amounts of them.

(...)

The Grand Materialistic Story

DARWIN’S THEORY of evolution by natural selection is a materialistic story about how life diversified after it originated, but Darwin realized that his evolutionary story is incomplete without a materialistic explanation for the origin of life. He hoped that such an origin could be shown to have been possible in some “warm little pond” on the ancient Earth, but what if the origin of life cannot be explained materialistically? What if it required the origin of new information, which is immaterial? And what if that information required an intelligence?

In his 2009 book Signature in the Cell, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer argues that the complex information in biological molecules cannot result from unguided natural processes such as the spontaneous aggregation of chemicals. The only known source of large amounts of complex information is intelligence. Therefore, Meyer concludes, the origin of life required intelligent design.²⁶

But Science Says No, life must have originated materialistically.

So origin-of-life researchers rely more on a grand materialistic story than they do on evidence. Biologist Jack Szostak tells the story this way: “Simple chemistry in diverse environments on the early Earth led to the emergence of ever more complex chemistry and ultimately to the synthesis of the critical biological building blocks. At some point, the assembly of these materials into primitive cells enabled the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary behavior, followed by the gradual evolution of more complex life forms leading to modern life.”²⁷

But this story consists entirely of assumptions.If(“& oh what a big if”) simple chemistry led to the synthesis of biological building blocks, andifthese building blocks assembled themselves into primitive cells, etc., etc. None of these steps have been empirically demonstrated. In fact, origin-of-life research has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The Miller-Urey experiment is just one of its many dead ends.

Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour points out that the prebiotic (i.e., prior to life) synthesis of complex organic molecules remains a mystery. A chemist who wants to synthesize such molecules from scratch must start with targets in mind, then think of possible routes to reach them. “Further refinement of various routes leads to a set of desired paths; these are the routes that can be attempted in the laboratory,” Tour wrote in 2016. But “finding a direct path to a target is far too complicated. Dead ends are everywhere”—even for a skilled chemist with a target in mind. But, Tour continued, “There are no targets in evolution.”²⁸

“Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed,” Tour concluded. “Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding.”²⁹

And prebiotic synthesis would be just the first step. Even if we could explain how life’s chemical building blocks formed on the early Earth, we would still be a very long way from explaining how they assembled themselves into a living cell.

But the grand materialistic story lumbers on.

Haeckel’s Embryos

DARWIN THOUGHT that embryology provided “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of his theory.³⁰ In 1859 he wrote that we see “a close similarity in the embryos of widely different animals in the same class,” and that this similarity “reveals community of descent.”³¹ Ten years later he wrote that “it is highly probable that with many animals the embryonic or larval stages show us, more or less completely, the state of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult condition.”³² To support his point, Darwin cited some drawings of vertebrate embryos made by German biologist Ernst Haeckel33(See Figure 3-1).

Haeckel’s contemporaries accused him of faking his drawings to make the embryos appear more alike than they really were. Nevertheless, the drawings continued to be widely used in textbooks as evidence of common descent.

FIGURE3-1. HAECKEL’S EMBRYOS: The top row was portrayed by Haeckel as the earliest stage in the development of these eight embryos. The embryos are (left to right): fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, hog, calf, rabbit, human. Note that the four animals on the right are all mammals. To represent amphibians, Haeckel chose a salamander instead of a frog, which looks quite different. (See Figure 3-2.) From Darwinism Illustrated, George J. Romanes (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1892).³⁴

Recently, the credibility of the drawings took another hit. In 1997, British embryologist Michael Richardson and an international team of biologists compared Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of actual vertebrate embryos and found many discrepancies.³⁵ In an interview for the journalScience, Richardson said, “It looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.”³⁶ But the icon was just too good to abandon without a fight. Never mind the evidence. In 2008, University of Chicago historian Robert Richards published a book defending Haeckel against charges of fraud. According to Richards, Haeckel’s drawings were no less accurate than those of his contemporaries, including the people who criticized him.³⁷ Cambridge historian Nick Hopwood also defended Haeckel against the fraud charge in a 2015 book that included several pages criticizing Icons of Evolution as a creationist “primer for textbook activism.”³⁸

The real issue, however, is not whether Haeckel deliberately committed fraud. The real issue is that Haeckel’s drawings omitted half of the evidence—the half that doesn’t fit Darwin’s claim that embryos are most similar in their early stages. By the logic of Darwin’s argument, the earliest stages should be the most similar, but vertebrate embryos actually start out looking very different from each other, then they converge somewhat in appearance midway through development (Haeckel’s “first” stage) before diverging to their adult forms.³⁹ Biologist Rudolf Raff has called this pattern the “developmental hourglass”⁴⁰ (See Figure 3-2). Haeckel helped Darwin by simply omitting the top half of the hourglass.

FIGURE3-2: THE DEVELOPMENTAL HOURGLASS:At the top are the earliest stages of five classes of vertebrates (clockwise starting at the left: fish, bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian). Their patterns are noticeably different. Midway through development the embryos converge somewhat in appearance, though not nearly as much as Haeckel portrayed. In the circle on the right the embryos are (clockwise starting at the left): zebrafish, chicken, human, turtle, frog. This is the stage Darwin and Haeckel represented as the first. As the embryos continue to develop they become very different again (bottom). Copyright 2000 by Jody F. Sjogren; used by permission.

When Jerry Coyne reviewedIcons of Evolutionin 2001, he criticized the book for failing to recognize that “embryos of different vertebrates tend to resemble one another in early stages, but diverge as development proceeds, with more closely related species diverging less widely,” thus providing “copious evidence for evolution.” Yet Coyne knew that vertebrate embryos arenotmost similar in their early stages. Indeed, in the same review he acknowledged that “the earliest vertebrate embryos (mere balls of cells) are often less similar to one another than they are at subsequent stages.” But he brushed this aside. For Coyne, evolutionmustbe true, whether early embryos are similar or not.⁴¹

Coyne followed this with a 2009 book titledWhy Evolution Is True, which contained the following: “Each vertebrate undergoes development in a series of stages, and the sequence of those stages happens to follow the evolutionary sequence of its ancestors.” Thus “all vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor.”⁴²
So much for the evidence.

Textbooks Still Haunted By Haeckel’s Embryos

HAECKEL’S DRAWINGS had been discredited before I ever wrote about them, and yet the drawings (or re-drawn versions of them) continued to find their way into many biology textbooks as evidence for evolution. In 2000, Stephen Jay Gould wrote that we should all be “astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks.”⁴³ Haeckel’s embryos, it seemed, were not just dead; they deserved to be buried face down.

Yet many textbooks published after 2000 continue to use versions of Haeckel’s drawings as evidence for evolution. Donald Prothero’s 2013 textbook Bringing Fossils to Lifeactually features Haeckel’s original drawings, with the caption: “Embryos of different vertebrates at comparable stages of development (top row) are strikingly similar in every group.”⁴⁴ Mader and Windelspecht’s 2016 Biologyuses a re-drawn version of Haeckel’s embryos, accompanied by the statement, “All vertebrates inherit the same developmental pattern from their common ancestor, but each vertebrate group now has a specific set of modifications to this original ancestral pattern.”⁴⁵

Some recent textbooks don’t use drawings but make essentially the same claim. The 2014 edition of Raven and Johnson’s Biologytells students, “Some of the strongest anatomical evidence supporting evolution comes from comparisons of how organisms develop. Embryos of different types of vertebrates, for example, often are similar early on, but become more different as they develop.”⁴⁶ Miller and Levine’s 2014 Biology informs its readers that “the early developmental stages of many animals with backbones (called vertebrates) look very similar,” and these similarities provide “evidence that organisms have descended from a common ancestor.”⁴⁷

So despite the evidence, Haeckel’s embryos continue to stalk the halls of science education. When materials containing Haeckel-like illustrations were submitted in 2011 to the Texas State Board of Education for adoption into the science curriculum, Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin wrote, “Like a zombie that just won’t die, these bogus drawings keep coming back.”⁴⁸

Flock of Dodos

IN 2007, biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson released a film titled Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus. The film included an interview with John Calvert, director of the Kansas-based Intelligent Design Network and a critic of evolution, who asked Olson whether he had read Icons of Evolution. Olson said he had, and he acknowledged that Haeckel’s embryo drawings misrepresented the truth. “Haeckel did commit scientific fraud,” he said. But he insisted that Haeckel is no longer relevant to what’s being taught today, and the embryo drawings are no longer used in textbooks. “There’s no trace of them,” Olson claimed.⁴⁹ He concluded that Icons of Evolution was no more reliable than a supermarket tabloid.

But Olson already knew of textbooks published after 2000 that contained such drawings.⁵⁰ In 2007 he came to Seattle for a screening of his film and (to his credit) stopped by the office of the Discovery Institute, where Casey Luskin and I showed him a stack of recent textbooks that used versions of Haeckel’s embryos to teach evolution. Olson’s response, in essence, was that the story he told in his film was just too good to give up. At that point, the Discovery Institute established a website to document Olson’s misrepresentations.⁵¹

Nevertheless, the misrepresentations did not stop. On April 12, 2012,Flock of Dodoswas shown at Villanova University, followed by a panel discussion that included Olson and Lehigh biochemist (and intelligent design advocate) Michael Behe. Behe presented photocopies of Haeckel-style embryo drawings from some recent textbooks, but Olson defended the film anyway.⁵²,⁵³

In 2015 Olson published a book titled Houston, We Have a Narrative, in which he wrote, “Scientists must realize that science is a narrative process, that narrative is story, therefore science needs story.”⁵⁴

Even if the story’s untrue.

1.Jonathan Wells, “Survival of the fakest,” The American Spectator (December 2000 / January 2001): 19–27. http://www.discovery.org/a/1209. The title of this article was suggested byThe American Spectator’seditor at the time, Josh Gilder.

2.Jonathan Wells, “Critics rave overIcons of Evolution: A response to published reviews,” Discovery Institute XI:2 (2002). http://www.discovery.org/a/1180.

3.Jerry A. Coyne, “Creationism by stealth,”Nature410 (2001): 745–746. doi:10.1038/35071144.

4.Massimo Pigliucci, “Intelligent design theory,”BioScience51 (2001): 411–414. doi 10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0411:IDT]2.0.CO;2.

5.Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick, “The talented Mr. Wells,” Quarterly Review of Biology77 (2002): 33–37. doi:10.1086/339201.

6.The misidentified Ronstadt photo was in the second edition of Prentice Hall’s Exploring Physical Science(1997). See John L. Hubisz,Review of Middle School Physical Science Texts(Physical Sciences Resource Center, 2002), 55. http://www.compadre.org/psrc/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=1289&DocID=142#Doc142.

7.Charles R. Darwin, Letter to J. D. Hooker, March 29, 1863, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), III:18. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=30&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=side.

8.Charles R. Darwin, Letter to J. D. Hooker, February 1, 1871. http://evolutionatbyu.com/20130104Darwin-and-spontaneous-generationV03.pdf.

9.Alexander I. Oparin,The Origin of Life(Moscow: Moscow Worker, 1924).

10.J. B. S. Haldane, “The origin of life,”Rationalist Annual148 (1928): 3–10.

11.Stanley L. Miller, “A production of amino acids under possible primitive Earth conditions,” Science117 (1953): 528–529. doi:10.1126/science.117.3046.528. PMID:13056598.

12.Gordon Schlesinger and Stanley L. Miller, “Prebiotic synthesis in atmospheres containing CH4, CO, and CO2. I. Amino acids,”Journal of Molecular Evolution19 (1983): 376–382. doi:10.1007/BF02101642. PMID:6417344.

13.Heinrich D. Holland,The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 99–100.

14.Xueshu Xie, Daniel Backman, Albert T. Lebedev, Viatcheslav B. Artaev, Liying Jiang, Leopold L. Ilag, and Roman A. Zubarev, “Primordial soup was edible: Abiotically produced Miller-Urey mixture supports bacterial growth,”Scientific Reports5 (2015): 14338. doi:10.1038/srep14338. PMID:26412575.

15.Kenneth A. Mason, Jonathan B. Losos, and Susan R. Singer, Raven and Johnson’sBiology, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014), 511–512.

16.Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph S. Levine,Biology(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2014), 554.

17.Jane B. Reece, Lisa A. Urry, Michael L. Cain, Steven A. Wasserman, Peter V. Minorsky, and Robert B. Jackson,Campbell Biology, 10th ed. (San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2014), 57.

18.Scott Freeman, Lizabeth Allison, Michael Black, Greg Podgorski, Kim Quillin, Jon Monroe, and Emily Taylor,Biological Science, 5th ed. (San Francisco: Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2014), 33–34.

19.Sylvia Mader and Michael Windelspecht, Biology, 12th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2016), 319.

26.Stephen C. Meyer,Signature in the Cell(New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

27.Jack W. Szostak, “Attempts to define life do not help to understand the origin of life,”Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics29 (2012): 599–600. doi:10.1080/073911012010524998. PMID:22208251.

28.James Tour, “Animadversions of a synthetic chemist,”Inference2:2 (May 19, 2016). http://inference-review.com/article/animadversions-of-a-synthetic-chemist.

29.Ibid.

30.Charles R. Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray, September 10, 1860, inThe Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), II:338. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=354&itemID=F1452.2&viewtype=side.

31.Charles R. Darwin,On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st ed. (London: John Murray, 1859), 442, 449.

32.Charles R. Darwin,On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1869), 533.

33.Ibid., 515.

34.This widely used version of Haeckel’s embryo drawings is from Figures 57 and 58 in George J. Romanes, Darwinism Illustrated (Chicago: Open Court, 1892), 42–43.

35.Michael K. Richardson, James Hanken, Mayoni L. Gooneratne, Claude Pieau, Albert Raynaud, Lynne Selwood, and Glenda M. Wright, “There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: Implications for current theories of evolution and development,”Anatomy and Embryology196 (1997): 91–106. doi:10.1007/ s004290050082. PMID:9278154.

36.Quoted in Elizabeth Pennisi, “Haeckel’s embryos: Fraud rediscovered,”Science277 (1997): 1435. doi:10.1126/science.277.5331.1435a.

37.Robert J. Richards,The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

38.Nick Hopwood,Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

39.Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), 94–101.

40.Rudolf A. Raff,The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197.

41.Coyne, “Creationism by stealth,” 745.

42.Jerry A. Coyne,Why Evolution Is True(New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), 77–79.

43.Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!),”Natural History(March, 2000): 42–49.

44.Donald R. Prothero,Bringing Fossils to Life, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 29.

45.Mader and Windelspecht,Biology, 274.

46.Mason, Losos and Singer, Raven and Johnson’sBiology, 428.

47.Miller and Levine,Biology, 469.

48.Casey Luskin, “Haeckel’s embryo drawings make cameos in proposed Texas instructional materials,”Evolution News & Views(June 17, 2011). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/haeckels_embryos_make_multiple047321.html.

49.Randy Olson,Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus(New York: New Video Group, 2007).

50.Jonathan Wells, “Flock of dodos, or pack of lies?”Evolution News & Views(February 9, 2007). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/02/flock_of_dodos_or_pack_of_fals_4003165.html.

51.John G. West and Casey Luskin, “Hoax of dodos, part 1,”Evolution News & Views(February 7, 2007). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/02/hoax_of_dodos_pt_1_flock_of_do003132.html.
52.Debate at Villanova University (April 12, 2012), starting at 4:10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vDzcJNt1MM.

53.Casey Luskin, “Dodos keep on hoaxing,”Evolution News & Views(April 13, 2012). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/04/thursday_night058531.html.

54.Randy Olson,Houston, We Have a Narrative(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), vii.

Zombie Science
More Icons of Evolution

Jonathan Wells

A Puzzling Situation or The Story of a Young Man

 

In recent years I have been experiencing something I had often heard about from others but somehow never expected might happen to me: I have found myself getting old. So far it does not seem quite as bad as I have heard it described, but at sixty-one years of age I am, so to speak, still a youngster at being old. We’ll just have to see.

I am still somewhat partial to young people, however, possibly because I was one myself for a time. I have plenty of young friends trying to make their way in a challenging and confusing world, and find myself wanting to help them out in any way I can. But they often appear less anxious to hear my hard-bought wisdom than I think they ought to be. I keep feeling reminded of an old definition of “expert”—someone who has already made every mistake it is possible to make within some limited domain. To myself I seem a highly qualified expert in any number of domains by this standard, and I would be more than happy to share the story of my mistakes with the younger people I observe repeating them. Perhaps it is my unprepossessing exterior, or perhaps it just isn’t the fashion today for the young to seek out advice from their elders.

An exception occurred recently, however, and that is why I am setting pen to paper. A young man of my acquaintance approached me with the most intractable and confounded difficulties of which I have ever heard. He is really a good kid, about nineteen or twenty I would reckon, well brought-up and now gainfully employed. But he finds himself in a perplexing situation. It turns out that if a dilemma appears sufficiently difficult to resolve, a few young people are still willing to learn from their elders. This gives me hope for the future.

His difficulty concerns a young lady of his acquaintance. I don’t know her well, but have every reason to believe she is a respectable girl of good family and sound principles. He has known her for some time: in fact, he occasionally crossed paths with her when they were children, what with their both living in the same town and all. For this reason, he was taken by surprise recently at what happened when he ran into her again after about a year and a half. I will try to recount his story the way he told it to me, but must ask the reader’s indulgence due to the extraordinary nature of my young friend’s experience. It was not always easy for him to find the words to put it across to me.

Viewed from the outside, not all that much happened. He went to one of those small-town family-type get togethers. Folks were barbecuing and talking, kids running around playing ball, men were arguing over politics while women compared notes on family matters—you get the picture. Well, there stood this young lady, and she must not have been too upset to see my friend again, because when he appeared, she smiled. And although it probably wasn’t the first time he had seen her smile, something different happened on this occasion: as near as he could describe it to me, his whole being suddenly seemed flooded with a sensation of extreme happiness. He wondered what was going on, because he could see neither why such a thing should happen at all, nor why it should have happened today, nor why with this particular girl. He has been puzzling over these mysteries ever since.

Despite the unexpectedness and intensity of his feelings, his interaction with the young lady was rather limited. They exchanged some conventional greetings and conversed briefly about a few matters of hardly any importance at all. Then she had to leave to look after her little brother. She’s very good with children, you see, and hopes to have her own someday.

One reason my friend did not speak longer with her, he tells me, is that he seemed to be overcome by shyness. He hadn’t expected that either: they were, as I mentioned, acquainted from childhood, and he is not usually a shy young man. But he suddenly found himself fumbling to produce even the most commonplaces remarks in the lady’s presence. He has only seen her a few times since that day, but each time he finds the same thing happening.

So he came to me for advice. Perhaps he was relying on my reputation as the author of Sexual Utopia in Power. I actually do know quite a lot about sexual matters, as it happens. I am familiar with the gay liberation movement, have followed the recent kerfuffles over transsexualism and men competing in women’s sports, and once even reviewed Jim Goad’s account of the artificial vaginas transsexuals can now pay to have drilled into their bodies, along with the debate over how their odor compares to that of the natural prototype. But I’m not sure whether even a complete study of Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis would suffice to equip me to deal with my young friend’s situation, and I am ashamed to admit that I did not know quite what to tell him.

There are other matters to be considered. Although young, my friend is already aware that this world can be a dangerous place. It has seen wars and revolutions, fires, floods, and famines; criminals lurk in dark corners. This gives him cause for concern, because the young lady of whom he is so fond scarcely weighs a hundred thirty pounds and is not nearly as robust as he is. For the moment, he admits, no one appears to be coming after her with gun or knife. But he still finds himself worried about her well-being. He can’t even quite explain the nature of his concern, but it just plain seems to him that there ought to be someone capable of coming to this young woman’s assistance should such need arise.

My friend really does have a good heart, and I found his solicitude admirable, but when it came to practical advice, I did not find the case an easy one. I do, however, know someone who works in security, so I took the problem to that fellow. He has provided armed guards for businesses, banks, and meetings of right-wing extremists, but says he has never heard of a security detail being assigned to a young lady. Well, maybe the President’s daughter—but certainly not an ordinary girl in a small town like the one where these two live. Perhaps the market just is not there.

And now my young friend is facing even greater difficulties. I asked him how he imagines the future of himself and this girl he cares so much about, and he isn’t too sure of the matter. Being so young, I suppose he just is not used to thinking seriously about the future. All he could tell me is that every time he thinks about her—and he thinks about her quite a bit—it seems to him that the supreme happiness of which a human might be capable would somehow involves clasping this girl in one’s arms.

The reader will surely understand my alarm. I asked my friend if he did not realize that this was precisely where the very greatest danger of all for young ladies was to be found. To my relief, he assured me that he did. He is a serious young man who does a bit of reading, and the family leans Republican. Well, according to what is said in many highly-respected conservative publications, horrifying things can happen to innocent young women on American college campuses these days. The young men are quite simply predators, without honor or conscience. My friend is beside himself with anxiety because he understands the girl’s parents are seriously contemplating letting her matriculate at the local university. He is going to ask her father to reconsider the whole thing. If anything should happen to this young lady, he does not know what he would do.

I asked him to describe to me the dangers that face young women on college campuses. He reports that they are rarely described in detail because conservative authors are rather decorous and old-fashioned in their use of language and dislike being overly explicit. But according to what he can understand—and this is precisely the most confusing and disturbing aspect of the entire situation—the campus predators clasp girls in their

arms.

In other words, it appears from what these writers are saying that my young friend may himself be a predator. I’m sure the reader will appreciate his agony at the thought that his cherished dream of happiness might turn out to be a source of the greatest possible danger to the girl he loves: the very thought is almost too much for the poor fellow to bear.

I am not the first person he went to for advice about his situation, as it happens. Despite his generally conservative leanings, my friend has gotten wind of possible objections to his association with this young woman from a different quarter. How many obstacles there are to happiness on this earth! It turns out that young women have a right to bodily autonomy. Their bodies belong to them, obviously, so who should have any rights over them if not the women themselves? In fact, my friend enthusiastically agrees with this point of view.

Now, it appears that women are sometimes subjected against their will to inappropriate touching, but this young man is vehemently opposed to any such thing. In fact, he says that if anyone should come along and touch this particular young lady inappropriately, he would scarcely be able to contain his rage. He might not even be able to answer for his behavior! I was amazed to hear him speak like this because it was so out of character. He was never a violent kid.

Well, braving all the predators, he went down to our local university to seek the advice of Dr. Naomi Rosenberg, Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Rosenberg is the author of the well-received monograph Transgressive Biker Sluts Going for Broke, and is married to Alejandra García-Martínez, a Guatemalan labor activist and woman of color. A ten-year resident of our local community, Dr. Rosenberg is also an internationally renowned authority on the theory of inappropriate touching.

The young man explained his concerns. One point on which he was particularly keen to be instructed was that the very term would seem to imply the existence—at least as a logical possibility—of another kind of touching that was appropriate. But academic specialization has now gone so far that even Dr. Rosenberg’s extensive expertise on inappropriate touching did not translate into any ability to provide a young man with guidance as to the appropriate variety. Dr. Rosenberg did, however, express the hope that the young lady might enroll in one of her classes. No aspect of her work gives her greater satisfaction, she says, than the extremely personal interest it allows her to take in the development of young women.

The girl herself appears to like this young man, and she shares his perplexity. They hope they might eventually discover some sort of reliable, mutually beneficial arrangement to solve their difficulties. If such a thing were to emerge, my friend says he would not hesitate to “proposition” the young lady with it, if the reader will pardon the expression.

In my younger days I earned a PhD in philosophy and devoted many hours to some fairly abstruse issues: free will vs. determinism, idealism vs. materialism, realism vs. nominalism, you name it. But the novelty of my young friend’s situation is such that I can find no solution at all. So I have decided to resort to what is nowadays called “crowdsourcing.” Counter-Currents has some very intelligent readers, and I am hoping one of them may be able to suggest a way forward for this deserving young man and his lady friend. Commentators are urged not to shy away from even the most far-fetched suggestions, for nothing is so exotic that it might not provide a clue to the solution of a difficulty that has so far eluded the young man, myself, and even the learned Dr. Rosenberg.

F. Roger Devlin →

From comments

Laughing my [censored for the prudes] head off. OK Roger let’s just admit what you’re doing. Some of us can tell, especially if we’ve read your previous work.

By the way, you were wrong in your prior article about what “the immaculate conception” is. It’s not Mary conceiving Jesus without sex, it’s Mary herself having been conceived (born) without sin. An all-too-common mistake made by people without a Catholic background.

Sounds like an immaculate misconception then.

Paleontology

 

An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me into the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit, and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology.

Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed upon its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves. The flesh appears as an imposture, a fraud, a disguise which masks nothing. Was this all it was? And if it is worth no more, how does it manage to inspire me with repulsion or with terror? I have always felt a predilection for those who were obsessed by its nullity, those who made a great case for its insignificance: Baudelaire, Swift, Buddha. . . . The flesh, so obvious, is yet an anomaly. The more we consider it, the more aghast we turn away, and, by dint of such weighing, we tend toward the mineral—we grow petrified. In order to endure the sight or the idea, we require much more than courage: we require cynicism. We are deceived as to its nature if we call it, with one Church Father, “nocturnal.” That would be paying it too much honor. The flesh is neither strange nor shadowy, but perishable to the point of indecency, to the point of madness. It is not only the seat of disease, it is itself a disease, incurable nothingness, a fiction which has degenerated into a calamity. The vision I have of it is the vision of a gravedigger infected with metaphysics. Doubtless I am wrong to keep thinking about it; one cannot live and lay much stress on it: A colossus would perish in the attempt. I feel it as it is not permitted to feel it; it takes advantage of the fact, it obliges me to confer upon it a disproportionate status and monopolizes me to such an extent that my mind is no more than viscera. Next to the solidity, the seriousness, of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life.

At the entrance, man standing. All the other animals slumped over, borne down, sagging, even the giraffe, despite its neck, even the iguanodon, grotesque in its effort to pull itself upright. Closer to us, that orangutan, that gorilla, that chimpanzee—easy to see that they have struggled in vain to be erect. Their efforts having failed, they stay where they are, unhappy, arrested halfway, thwarted in their pursuit of verticality. Hunchbacks, in short. We should be like them still, no doubt about it, without the luck we had to take one decisive step forward. Ever since, we labor tooth and nail to eliminate every trace of our low extraction; whence that provocative expression so peculiar to man. Beside him, his posture, and the airs he assumes, even the dinosaurs seem timid. Since his real reverses are only beginning, he will have time to settle down. Everything suggests that, returning to his initial phase, he will rejoin this chimpanzee, this gorilla, this orangutan, that he will resemble them once again, and that it will be increasingly uncomfortable for him to fidget in his vertical posture. Perhaps, indeed, yielding to fatigue, he will be even more bowed than his former companions. Having reached the threshold of senility, he will “re-ape” himself, for one fails to see what would be better for him to do.

.   .   .

Much more than the skeleton, it is the flesh, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturbs and alarms us—and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhist monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation, in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous then, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid; it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to “nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the danse macabre.

“Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him,” we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flesh which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard—if only for a moment—that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once the exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable.

In order to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver, to renunciation. In the sermon on futility which both of them preach to us, happiness is identified with the destruction of our bonds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra!

Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word “depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gainsay the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a “parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet it was a rare consolation to think that thousands and thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajñāparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more than ever, we should build monasteries . . . for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exists a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

.   .   .

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

One sign of enlightenment is to have the obsession of the aggregate, the ever-increasing feeling of being just the place where certain elements come together, welded for the moment. Conceived as a substantial and irreducible datum, the “self” dumbfounds more than its reassures: How to admit that anything that seemed to hold so fast should let go, should stop? How to be parted from what subsists “by itself,” from what is? We can discard an illusion, no matter how inveterate; but what to do when we are faced with the consistent, with the durable? If there is only what exists, if being spreads everywhere, how do we break away from it without falling to pieces? Let us postulate a universal fallacy out of precaution or therapeutic concern. The fear there is nothing is followed by the fear there is something. We are far more comfortable bidding farewell to nonbeing than to being. Not that this world doesn’t exist, but its reality is no such thing. Everything seems to exist and nothing exists.

Every concerted pursuit, even that of nirvana, if we are not free to abandon it, is a shackle as much as any other. The knowledge we convert into an idol is corrupted into an unknowing, as the Vedic wisdom already preached: “They are in the depths of darkness, those who give themselves up to ignorance; those who delight in knowledge are in a darkness deeper still.” To think without being any the wiser, or rather not to think at all but to remain there and to devour the silence—that is where perspicacity should lead. No pleasure is comparable to that of knowing we don’t think. It will be objected, Isn’t knowing we don’t think still thinking? No doubt, but the wretchedness of thought is surmounted for the time that, instead of leaping from idea to idea, we remain deliberately within just one, one which rejects all the rest and which dissolves itself as soon as it takes for its content its own absence. This interference with the normal mechanism of the mind is fruitful only if we can renew it at will. It must cure us of the subjection to knowledge, of the superstition of system. The deliverance which seduces, which beclouds us is not deliverance. We must act so that nothing is ours, beginning with desire, that generator of dread. When everything makes us tremble, the one recourse is to realize that if fear—being a sensation, the sensation par excellence—is real, the world which causes it is reduced to a transitory assemblage of unreal elements. In short, our fear is intense in proportion as we give credence to the self and to the world, and that our fear must inevitably diminish when we discover the imposture of the former and of the latter. Only our triumph over things is real, only our realization of unreality, which our acumen constructs every day, every hour. To be delivered is to rejoice in this unreality, to seek it out each moment.

.   .   .

Seen from outside, each being is an accident, a lie (except in love, but love is located outside of knowledge, outside the truth). Perhaps we should regard ourselves from outside, somewhat as we regard other people, and try to have nothing further in common with ourselves: If, toward myself, I were to behave as a stranger, I should see myself die with utter unconcern; my death would be “mine” no more than my life. One and the other, insofar as they belong to me and I assume them, represent ordeals beyond my powers. When, on the contrary, I convince myself that they lack intrinsic existence and that they are of no concern to me—what a relief! Why then, knowing that in the last resort everything is unreal, still be carried away for such trifles? I am carried away, granted, but I am not involved, which is to say that I take no real interest. This disinterest I cultivate I achieve only when I trade in my old self for a new one, the self of a disabused vision which triumphs here, amid these ghosts, where everything enfeebles me, where the one I was seems to me so remote, so incomprehensible. The evidence on which I used to turn my back now is discernible in all its clarity. The advantage I derive from this is that I no longer feel any obligation with regard to my flesh, to any flesh. A far better context in which to savor the eighteen varieties of void set forth in the Mahayanist texts, so scrupulous in cataloguing the several types of deficiency! For here, instantly, I am in an acute state of unreality.

.   .   .

It is scarcely credible to what degree fear adheres to the flesh; it is glued to it, inseparable, almost indistinct from it. These skeletons—happy skeletons!—feel no such thing. Fear is the one fraternal link which joins us to the animals, though they know it only in its natural—its healthy—form, so to speak. They know nothing of that other fear, the one which arises without motive, which we can reduce, depending on our whim, either to a metaphysical process or to a lunatic chemistry and which, daily, at an unpredictable moment, attacks us, overwhelms us. In order to hold it in check, we would require the cooperation of all the erstwhile gods. It reveals itself at the nadir of our daily failure, at the very moment when we would be quite ready to disappear if a mere nothing did not keep us from it; this nothing is the secret of our verticality. To remain erect, standing, implies a dignity, a discipline that has been laboriously inculcated in us and that still saves us at the last minute, in that spasm when we grasp what may be abnormal in the career of the flesh, threatened, boycotted by the sum of elements which define it. The flesh has betrayed matter; the discomfort it feels, it endures, is its punishment. In a general way, the animate appears quite guilty with regard to the inert; life is a state of guilt, a state all the more serious in that no one is really conscious of it. But a crime coextensive with the individual, which weighs upon him without his knowledge, which is the price he must pay for his promotion to a separate existence, for the infraction committed against the undivided creation. This crime is no less real for being unconscious and is crucial to the prostration of every creature.

As I circulate among the carcasses, I try to conceive of the burden of fear they must have borne, and when I stop in front of the three apes I cannot fail to attribute the evolutionary hitch they have suffered to an analogous burden which, weighing upon them, has given them that obsequious and flustered expression. And even these reptiles—isn’t it under a like load that they have had to grovel so shamefully and to concoct their venom in the dust of the earth, if only to be revenged for their ignominy? Whatever is alive, the most repellent animal or insect, shudders with fear—does nothing but. Whatever is alive, by the simple fact of living, deserves commiseration. And I think of all those I have known, all those who are no more, long since sprawling in their coffins, forever exempt from flesh—and from fear. And I feel relieved of the weight of their death.

Anxiety is consciousness of fear, a fear to the second degree, a fear reflecting upon itself. It consists of the impossibility of communing with the all, of assimilating ourselves with it, of losing ourselves in it. It breaks the current which passes from the world to us, from us to the world, and favors our reflections only to frustrate their growth, ceaselessly disintoxicating the mind. Now there is no speculation of any scope which does not proceed from rapture, from a loss of control, from a faculty to lose and hence to renew the self. Inspiration in reverse, anxiety calls us to heel at the slightest impulse, the slightest divagation. This surveillance is deadly to thought, suddenly paralyzed, trapped in a calamitous circle, doomed never to escape itself except by fits and starts, by stealth. Hence it is true that if our apprehensions make us seek deliverance, yet it is they which keep us from achieving it. Though he dreads the future to the point of making it the sole object of his preoccupations, the anxious man is a prisoner of the past; he is, in fact, the only man who really has a past. His tribulations, of which he is the slave, move him forward only to yank him back. He comes thereby to regret the raw, anonymous fear from which everything starts, the fear that is beginning, origin, principle of everything alive. Terrible as it is, such fear is nonetheless endurable, since whatever lives resigns itself to it. It lacerates and ravages the living—it does not annihilate them. Such is not the case with this refined fear, this “recent” fear posterior to the appearance of the self, in which the diffuse, omnipresent danger is never materialized, a reflexive fear which, for lack of other nourishment, devours itself.

.   .   .

If I have not returned to the museum, I have been there in spirit almost every day, thereby deriving considerable advantage: what could be more settling than to brood over this ultimate simplification of beings? A moment comes when the imagination clears and you see yourself as you will be: a sermon—no, a seizure of modesty. On the proper use of the skeleton. . . . We should help ourselves to it in difficult moments, especially since we have it right under our hand.

I have no need of Holbein nor of Baldung Grien; with respect to the macabre, I rely on my own resources. If I see the necessity for it, or if I am overcome by a craving, there is no one I cannot strip of his carnal envelope. Why envy or fear those bones which bear such and such a name, that skull which has no love for me? Why, too, love someone or love myself, why suffer in any case, when I know the image I must invoke in order to alleviate these miseries? The sharpened consciousness of what lies in wait for the flesh ought to destroy both love and hate. Actually it manages only to attenuate and, in rare moments, to subdue them. Otherwise it would be only too easy: represent death and be happy . . . , and the macabre, gratifying our most secret desires, would be all profit.I suspect that I would never have returned—in flesh or in spirit—so often to those premises if, evidently, they hadn’t flattered my incapacity for illusion. Here, where man is nothing, you realize how unsuited the doctrines of deliverance are to understand him, to interpret his past and to decipher his future. This is because deliverance has a content only for each of us, individually, and not for the mob, which is unable to grasp the relation between the idea of emptiness and the sensation of freedom. It is hard to see how humanity might be saved en bloc; engulfed in the false, committed to an inferior truth, it will always confuse substance with semblance. Granting, against all appearances, that it is following an ascending path, humanity cannot acquire, at its zenith, the level of insight of even the most obtuse Hindu sanyāsi. In everyday existence, it is impossible to say if this world is real or unreal. What we can do, what we do do, is to keep shifting from one thesis to the other, all too happy to evade a choice which would settle none of our immediate difficulties.

Awakening is independent of intellectual capacities: a genius can be a dunce, spiritually speaking. Moreover, knowledge as such gets one no further. An illiterate can possess “the eye of understanding” and thereby find himself above and beyond any scholar. To discern that what you are is not you, that what you have is not yours, to be no longer the accomplice of anything, even of your own life—that is to see clearly, that is to get down to the zero root of everything. The wider you open yourself to vacuity, the more deeply you steep yourself in it, the further you remove yourself from the fatality of being—yourself, of being man, of being alive. If everything is null and void, this triple fatality will be so too. Thereby, the magic of the tragic is exorcised. Is the failing hero worth as little as the hero who finally triumphs? Nothing more glamorous than a splendid ending, if this world is real; if it is not, it is pure foolishness to go into ecstasies over any denouement whatever. To deign to have a “destiny,” to be blinded or only tempted by “the extraordinary,” proves that we remain opaque to any higher truth, that we are far from possessing “the eye” in question. To situate someone is to determine his degree of awakening, the progress he has made in the perception of the false and the illusory in others, in himself. No communion is conceivable with the man who deceives himself as to what he is. As the interval separating us from our actions widens, we see the subjects of dialogue and the number of our kind diminish. Such solitude does not engender bitterness, for it does not derive from our talents, but from our renunciations. Yet it must be added that it does not in the least exclude the danger of spiritual pride, which certainly exists as long as we nurse the sacrifices we have consented to and the illusions we have rejected. How vanquish ourselves unbeknownst, when detachment demands an insistent sounding of consciousness? Thus, what makes it possible threatens it at the same time. In the order of internal values, any superiority which does not become impersonal turns to perdition. If only one could wrest oneself from the world without realizing the fact! One should be able to forget that detachment is a virtue: otherwise, instead of delivering, it envenoms. To attribute to God our successes of any sort, to believe that nothing emanates from ourselves, that everything is given—that, according to Ignatius Loyola, is the one effective means of struggling with pride. The recommendation is valid for the thunderbolt states in which the intervention of grace seems de rigueur, but not for detachment, an undermining labor, long and painful, of which the self is the victim: how fail to pride yourself on that?

Our spiritual level may be raised, yet we do not thereby change qualitatively; we remain prisoners of our limits: the impossibility of uprooting spiritual pride is one consequence of it—the most unfortunate one. “No creature,” Saint Thomas observes, “can attain a higher degree of nature without ceasing to exist.” Yet if man interests us, it is precisely for having sought to surmount his nature. He has not managed to do so, and his inordinate efforts were not to fail in adulterating, in denaturing him. This is why we do not question ourselves in his regard without torment, without passion. No doubt it is also more decent to commiserate with him than with oneself (as Pascal so well understood). In the long run, this passion becomes so tiring that we think of nothing but means of escaping it. Neither the fatality of being oneself nor that of being alive can be compared with that of being man; once that fatality spurs me on, I reconstruct—in order to escape it—my promenade among those bones which, these days, have so often been helpful to me; I recognize them, I cling to them: confirming me in my belief in vacuity, they grant me a glimpse of the day when I shall no longer have to endure the obsession of the human, of all shackles the most terrible. From that we must free ourselves at all costs, if we would be free at all; but to be really free, one more step must be taken: to be free of liberty itself, to reduce it to the level of a prejudice or a pretext in order not to have to idolize it any longer. . . . Only then will we begin to learn how to act without desire. For this the meditation on the horrible prepares us: to circle around the flesh and its decrepitude is to be initiated into the art of dissociating desire and act—an operation fatal to enterprising minds, indispensable to contemplative ones. So long as we desire, we live in subjection, we are given over to the world; once we cease to desire, we accumulate the privileges of an object and of a god: we no longer depend on anyone. That desire cannot be extirpated is all too true; yet what peace, merely to imagine being exempt from it! A peace so unwonted that a perverse pleasure creeps into it: would not so suspect a sensation come down to nature’s revenge upon the man who has made himself guilty of aspiring to a state so unnatural?

Outside of nirvana in life—a rare exploit, a virtually inaccessible extremity—the suppression of desire is a chimera; we do not suppress desire, we suspend it, and this suspension, very strangely, is accompanied by a sense of power, by a new, an unknown, certainty. The vogue of monasticism in past centuries is doubtless explained by this dilation succeeding the ebb of appetites. It takes strength to struggle against desire; this strength increases when desire withdraws; desire halted, fear halts as well. For anxiety, on its part, to conclude any such truce, we must go further; we must confront a much more rarefied space, we must approach an abstract joy, an exaltation granted alike to being and to the absence of being.

It is said in the Katha Upanishad apropos of Atman that it is “joyous and without joy.” That is a state to which we accede as well by the affirmation as by the negation of a supreme principle, as much by the detour of Vedanta as by that of Mahayana. Different as they may be, the two paths meet in the final experience, in the glide outside appearances. What is essential is less to know in whose name one seeks liberation than how far one can advance on the path to it. Whether one is dissolved into the absolute or into the void, in either case it is a neutral joy one achieves: a joy without any determination, as denuded as the anxiety of which it seeks to be the remedy, and of which it is merely the outcome, the positive conclusion. Between them, the symmetry is patent; they may each be said to be “constructed” on the same model; they dispense with any external stimulant, they are self-sufficient, they correspond and communicate in depth. For just as concrete joy is only a vanquished fear, neutral joy is only a transfigured anxiety. And it is from their affinities, from their permeability, that the possibility derives of mounting from one to the other, and the danger of falling back, of a regression to an earlier state supposedly transcended. Which suggests to what degree all spiritual progress is threatened at its base. For the unfulfilled seeker after deliverance, for the beginner in nirvana, nothing is easier, nothing more frequent than to retreat toward his old terrors. But when, at long intervals, he manages to hold fast, he makes his own the exhortation of the Dhammapada, “Shine for yourself, as your own light,” and, during the time he adopts and follows it, he understands, from within, those who conform to it always.

The New Gods by E. M. Cioran; 

translated from the French by Richard Howard.

Hitler As Victim - On Wyndham Lewis

 

HE SLAPDASH SERIES OF NEWSPAPER articles in which Lewis conveyed his impressions of Berlin immediately after the first great Nazi victories in the Reichstag in September 1930, and which were published as Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), are as notorious as they are unread: the following brief account of this work, whatever its general usefulness, will indeed lead us to some unexpected conclusions.

With his satirist’s feeling about cities, Lewis could hardly omit an initial tableau of Berlin (“Chicago, only more so if anything, but minus Bootleg, and with that great difference—that politics account for much of the street violence” [18]). The political point made here is that Nazi street violence is essentially a reaction to Communist violence and provocation; yet the inevitable narrative point is rather different: “But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive [the tourist], with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home…. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees) after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. …” (24). With this characteristic and obsessive motif out of the way, we come to the political analysis proper, which I will resume as a series of theses:

1. “Adolf Hitler is just a very typical german ‘man of the people’. … As even his very appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces, his typicalness. So you get in him, cut out in the massive and simple lines of a peasant art, the core of the teutonic character. And his ‘doctrine’ is essentially just a set of rather primitive laws, promulgated in the interest of that particular stock or type, in order to satisfy its especial requirements and ambitions, and to ensure its vigorous survival, intact and true to its racial traditions” (31-32). This is very different from the hero-worshipping tones with which Pound salutes Mussolini’s “genius”; it also conveys the stance of Lewis’ articles. He means to convey the spirit, to the British public, of a phenomenon culturally alien to it; he intends to translate and to explain the Nazi movement as a matter of some historical significance, but not necessarily to endorse it. “It is as an exponent—not as critic nor yet as advocate—of German National-socialism or Hitlerism, that I come forward” (4). It seems to me that this didactic stance is essential in grasping the symbolic value Hitler (and Germany) had for Lewis: not only are they doubly oppressed—by Marxist provocation and by the Versailles Treaty—but this oppression is formally inscribed within his text as the misunderstanding and miscomprehension of the British reader, against which Lewis must write.

2. The Nazi conception of race is a welcome antidote to the Marxian conception of class: “The Class-doctrine—as opposed to the Race-doctrine—demands a clean slate. Everything must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless, automaton—temporally two-dimensional—is what is required by the really fanatical Marxist autocrat. Nothing but a mind without backgrounds, without any spiritual depth, a flat mirror for propaganda, a parrot-soul to give back the catchwords, an ego without reflection, in a word a sort of Peter Pan Machine—the adult Child—will be tolerated” (84).

3. Hitler’s program is exemplary as a defense of Europe, at a time when Europe’s intellectuals are at work undermining its legitimacy through their “exotic sense” (a “sentimentalizing with regard to the Non-White World” [121]). In effect, the Hitlerist has this message for the ruling classes of other European countries: “When, respected sir, and gracious lady, are you going—oh short-sighted, much indulging, sentimentally-renegade person that you are!—when may we hope that you will turn for a change to more practical interests? How about giving your White Consciousness a try for a little—it is really not so dull as you may suppose! A ‘White Australia’—that may be impracticable. But at least there is nothing impracticable about a ‘White Europe’. And today Europe is not so big as it was. It is ‘a little peninsula at the Western extremity of Asia’. It is quite small. Why not all of us draw together, and put out White Civilization in a state of defense? And let us start by mutually cancelling all these monstrous debts that are crushing the life out of us economically” (121).

4. The Nazi program recapitulates many of Lewis’ most deeply felt polemic themes: “A ‘Sex-war’, an ‘Age-war’, a ‘Colour-line-war’, are all equally promoted by Big Business to cheapen labour and to enslave men more and more. I do not like the present Capitalist system” (97). Hitlerism not only repudiates the call to hatred and division of Marxian class war, and the pernicious “trahison des clercs” of the “exotic sense,” it also gives the welcome example of a transformation of Western “youth cults” into a genuine political movement (97).

5. “Race” essentially stands for the affirmation of the specificity of the national situation: this is the sense in which Lewis deals with Nazi antisemitism. The latter is, according to him, a German national characteristic, however unlovely, and must be understood as such. But here Lewis has a counter-sermon for the Germans themselves, as they try to explain themselves to other nations: “The Hitlerite must understand that, when he is talking to an Englishman or an American about the ‘Jew’ (as he is prone to do), he is apt to be talking about that gentleman’s wife! Or anyhow Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying. So if the Hitlerite desires to win the ear of England he must lower his voice and coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke! if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion. Therefore—a pinch of malice certainly, but no ‘antisemitism’ for the love of Mike!” (42).

6. Hitlerian economics are those of the German peasant, essentially an anticapitalist attack on banks, loan-capital, and the War Debt. Hitler is a “Credit Crank.” The Nazi opposition to Communism (“which has taken the mechanical ways of Megalopolis into the villages”) “attacks the substitution, by the Communist, of the notion of quantity for that of quality…. Upon some points, of course, the Communist and the Nationalsocialist are in considerable agreement. Ultimately, the reason why their two doctrines could never fuse is this: the Marxist, or Communist, is a fanatically dehumanizing doctrine. Its injunctions are very rigidly erected against the continuance of ‘the person’. In the place of ‘the person’ the Communist would put the thing—quantity in place of quality, as it is stated above. … So, even if Hitlerism, in its pure ‘germanism’, might retain too much personality, of a second-rate order, nevertheless Hitlerism seems preferable to Communism, which would have none at all, if it had its way. Personality is the only thing that matters in the world” (182-183). Thus, “the Weltanschauung of the Hitlerist or his near-relation (the egregious ‘Credit-Crank’) is laughing and gay compared to that of his opponent, the Communist. … On principle—for his is a deliberately ‘catastrophic’ philosophy (the word is Marx’s)—the Communist views everything in the darkest colours…. The Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity—leisure and abundance. It is, with them, Misery-spot against Golden Age!” (183-184).

Most discussions of this book (which is generally passed over in embarrassed silence) have centered on the false problem of whether, on the strength of this “misguided” assessment of Hitler before he came to power, Lewis is to be thought of as a fascist or fascist sympathizer. The reader is generally reminded that Lewis changed his mind, and on the eve of World War II wrote an anti-Nazi counter-blast, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (1939). But Lewis’ opinion of Hitler is by no means the most significant feature of the earlier work.

What is essential from our point of view is that Hitler is informed by all the ideological positions which will remain constant to the very end of Lewis’ life: those fundamental themes do not change, even if his view of Hitler did. Among them, and far more central than his attitude towards Hitler as a historical figure, is his attitude towards fascism as a historical force. Here, but to the end of his career, fascism remains for Lewis the great political expression of revolutionary opposition to the status quo. This fundamentally historical vision of fascism—this structural place of “fascism” in Lewis’ libidinal apparatus—is not altered by his later (and impeccable) anti-Nazi convictions, and is in fact recapitulated in Monstre gai, published only two years before Lewis’ death in 1957:

Hyperides represented the most recent political phenomenon—hated or disliked by everybody. Here was the Fascist, the arch-critic of contemporary society. On earth this newcomer proposed to supplant the enfeebled Tradition, of whatever variety, no longer able to defend itself. So this enfeebled Power of Tradition, and its deadly enemy, the Marxist Power, joined forces to destroy this violent Middleman (a borrower from both the new and the old).

(MG, 220)

Coming in the midst of the Cold War, and after the utter annihilation of Nazism as a presence on the world political scene, this retrospective evaluation of World War II may seem anachronistic, and the reader may be tempted to see it as a tired survival of thoughts that were alive for Lewis in the 20’s and 30’s. Yet the fact that fascism continued to stand as the political (and libidinal) embodiment of Lewis’ chronic negativity, his oppositionalism, his stance as the Enemy, long after the defeat of institutional fascism itself, may, I think, be better grasped from a somewhat different perspective. The figural value of fascism as a reaction is determined by the more central position of Communism, against which the anticapitalist posture of protofascism (of which Lewis approved) must always be understood. We have touched on a number of reasons why Communism could not, for Lewis, be a satisfactory solution. The ultimate one now proves to be his feeling—paradoxical after all that has been said—that Communism was a historical inevitability, and thus, in a sense, the final and most irrevocable form of the Zeitgeist, that against which the oppositional mind must somehow always take a stand.

In this sense, and in the spirit of the present study, which has been an immanent analysis of Lewis’ works, disengaging the self-critique always structurally implicit in them, we may allow his own truth-in-jest to have the final word:

I know that at some future date I shall have my niche in the Bolshevist Pantheon, as a great enemy of the Middle-class Idea … I say: “I shall be among the bolshie prophets!” My “bourgeois-bohemians” in Tarr—and oh, my Apes of God!—will provide ‘selected passages’ for the schoolchildren of the future communist state,—of that I am convinced—to show how repulsive unbridled individualism can be.

Fables Ofaggression ...

Frideric Jameson 

Contemporary Men Hermits Around The World

 

Historical hermits have often reflected a religious motive, as have modern counterparts. Here are six religious men hermits, followed by non-religious.

Benedictine monk and hermit Dunstan Morrissey (1923–2009) founded Sky Farm Hermitage in 1977, in Sonoma, California. Sky Farm served as his dwelling, adding several cottages for retreatants over the years. After his death, two hermits have managed Sky Farm and continue to offer retreats.

Richard Withers (b. 1955) is a canonical hermit living modestly in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood. He adheres to a religious schedule but also engages in social and charitable work in his neighborhood.

Priest and hermit Charles Brandt (1923–2020) resided within old–growth forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada. Once an ornithologist, Trappist monk, and active book conservator, Brandt remained an avid photographer and naturalist, offering meditation retreats at his cabin. He is author of Meditations From The Wilderness: A Collection of Profound Writing on Nature as the Source of Inspiration (1997).

Daniel Bourguet (b. 1946) is a French Protestant hermit of the Reform sect, a former pastor and university professor, author of over two dozen books on Christian topics, none particular to eremitism. When studying as a youth, Bourguet felt a desire for solitude, discovering that his superiors approved of his aspiration. He spent time at a Trappist monastery and Dominican community before undertaking solitude at his own hermitage in a wooded area of Cevennes, southern France.

Bourguet lives in a single–room log cabin completely off grid, including the absence of media, yet like a starets, visitors seeking his counsel are numerous and regular. Bourguet has served as prior of the Order of Watchers, a virtual network of spiritually–minded hermits.

Maxime Qavtaradze (b. 1954) can be counted a modern stylite. The Georgian Orthodox priest lived alone atop Katskhi pillar, in a cottage adjacent to a chapel, 130 feet high (forty meters), from 1993 to 2015. Maxime would lift by pulley supplies prepared by fellow monks, though he descended the pillar twice a week. The pillar and chapel date from the tenth century; accessing the top of the pillar was forbidden by Patriarch Ilia II to preserve the site.

Norman Davies is a Jewish contemplative living in Malaga (Spain) as a hermit. He describes his daily life as “the practice of a dedicated and intentional prayerful lifestyle akin to solitary monasticism or eremitism. This is decided rarety in Jewish history and in twenty–first century Jewish practice it is virtually non–existent.” Davies, a former music teacher in the UK, cites Philo of Alexandria and the Essenes as ancient models, acknowledging the influence of his pre–conversion life as a Carmelite monk.

Motives among solitaries may converge around creativity, as Anthony Storr noted in his book Solitude: A Return to the Self. Two examples of creative hermits are Valerio Ricetti (1898–1952) and Manfred Gnädinger (1936-2002).

Ricetti, an Italian immigrant to Australia, arrived as an adolescent. He found work on steamboats. One day chancing upon a series of caves he decided to dwell in one. Over time he enhanced the caves via galleries into adjoining rock to create finished masonry passages and rooms, adding a water well, ample gardens, and wall iconography. Ricetti lived like a hermit. Injured one day, he was discovered by a passer–by, taken to hospital, and his dwelling–place revealed. Visitors praised his creation and he discovered the Italian community around Griffith, New South Wales, where he lived. Ricetti was interned with other Italians during World War II, put on road maintenance crews, where he shared his building skills, and returned to dwell in his cave after the war. In 1952, beset by mental illness, Ricetti returned to Italy, where he died shortly afterwards. The cave is today called “Hermit’s Cave,” maintained on the provincial registry for historic architecture.

Born in Germany, Manfred Gnädinger settled in Camelle on the coast of Galicia (Spain) in his twenties. He took up residence in a seaside hut, sculpting rock and driftwood in Gaudi–like configurations, dubbing the coast that displayed his works his museum. Man, as he was called, tall, long-bearded, and gaunt, lived a simple hermit life, with a small garden and neither electricity nor running water. He sculpted scores of figures and filled hundreds of notebooks with thousands of artistic sketches. Thirty years later, a horrific oil spill from the off–shore British tanker ship Prestige destroyed all of his work, bringing down all the sculptures and coating the beach and shoreline past his hut in thick black oil. Man was distraught. He died a month later. His “museum” has since been partially recovered by the village and preserved in commemoration of the hermit–artist.

If not creativity or overt belief, other contemporary hermit men are motivated by a personal response to the world.

Scottish–born Jake Williams has been a sailor, musician, handyman, and hermit. Williams lives in the Scottish Highlands, in the middle of a forest, where he contrives everything from tools to gardens using found objects recovered during expeditions to distant urban areas. He is the subject of the 2011 documentary film Two Years at Sea and continued media attention.

Sometimes the lure of escape overcomes the potential hermit, as in the example of Masafumi Nagasaki (b. 1936), who once worked in a factory in Osaka, Japan, dreaming of living on a deserted island. One day in 1989 he left civilization behind to live alone on the deserted Japanese island of Sotobanari (Okinawa Prefecture). He lived without electricity, water (except rainfall), animal food—or clothing, given that no one ever visited the deserted island.

Nagasaki is the subject of several news reports and films, wherein he would insist he wanted to live out his life on the island. But in 2018, a passing boater noticed him and notified authorities. Nagasaki was involuntarily removed from the island, placed in public housing, and refused permission to return to the island.

Italian–born Pietro Lentini sought to escape years of dissipation, becom-ing a hermit in the Umbrian region of the Apennines, on Mt. Aspra, in Valnerina. He found a ruined dwelling, furbished it—acquaintances later helping in the task— and lives there in silence and solitude, lacking running water and electricity, now with a solar-charged mobile phone gifted to him for emergencies. Occasionally Lentini descends to the town for provisions. He pursues a makeshift Christianity of his own crafting and frequently plays a worn flute. Lentini is seventy years old.

Since 1965, Chilean–born Faustino Barrientos lives alone on the shores of Lake O’Higgins in Patagonia, southernmost Chile. His dwelling is the remnant of a boat cabin. He lives from herds, livestock, and supplies from a boat that passes every ten days. He has no electricity, but uses battery–powered short wave and ham radios. Barrientos visits the nearest town every few years, riding by horse the twenty–five miles over mountains to exchange his animals for food and batteries. The inhabitants think he is crazy. He expresses no spiritual or other motive for his hermit lifestyle.

In 2001, Canadian researcher Robert Kull journeyed to a tiny deserted island in southern Chile to begin a year–long experiment in solitude wilderness. Kull had recently earned degrees in biology and psychology, and was scheduled to pursue a fellowship in behavioral studies in British Columbia, specifically interested in the effects of deep wilderness solitude. He convinced his doctoral faculty to accept his project, assembled food, clothes, supplies, and tools, and embarked. While pursuing observations and notes, Kull developed a routine of meditation; in his last months on the island, he quit reading and writing to concentrate on meditation, listening, stillness, and observation. Kull attributes the gradual realization that the self and all of nature is sufficient and sacred to the simplification undergone by the self–sufficiency and solitude he was able to experience. Kull recounts his year in his book Solitude: Seeking Wisdom In Extremes (2008).

Neil Ansell lived alone in Penlan Cottage in the rural isolation of Wales for five years, without car, phone, clock, or fossil fuel. In 2011, Ansell published a book on his solitude years, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills, imminently observant while self–effacing about his routines and the wild creatures that shared his forest. Ansell observed birds, grew food, and foraged. The silence outside reflected a growing silence within. Interior monologue quieted to a whisper, then fading away entirely. While he had not practiced meditation beforehand, Ansell notes that he came to under-stand the Buddhist concept of no–mind. The self becomes as much a part of the landscape as a stone. Ansell’s five years were cut short by a virus he contracted, perhaps carried by bats or mice.

David Glasheen (b. 1943) enjoyed an elite and privileged life as a mil-lionaire stock broker in Australia until the 1987 stock market crash wiped out his wealth. Glasheen decided to quit society, eventually moving to deserted Restoration Island, where he learned to fish, cook, and survive with a poor solar–powered internet connection and an annual boat trip to buy supplies. He was frequently visited by journalists and old acquaintances; his wife divorced him as soon as he fell into poverty. Seventy–seven year old Glasheen has published a memoir titled Millionaire Castaway celebrating over twenty years of solitary life.

Since 1989, Mauro Morandi (b. 1939) has lived alone on the Italian island of Budelli, near Sardinia, a national park. Morandi has assembled solar panels, collects rainwater, makes furniture out of driftwood, and takes photographs of the island, enough to fill a book. Morandi gives occasional interviews, displaying a confident and relaxed perspective on solitude and self–sufficiency. A gentle skeptic, he nevertheless keeps up with family, acquaintances, and the world via mobile phone and social media. Pressured by national park authorities, Morandi quit the island April 2021.

Many other men have pursued a hermit life, in a variety of places around the world: British–born Brendon Grimshaw (1925–2012) moved to an island of Seychelles, East Africa. Pedro Luca (b. 1937) has lived in a cave in Argentina for the last forty years. New Zealander Tom Neale (1902–1977) spent sixteen years alone on a South Pacific island, more a survivalist than hermit. “Pete” has lived in a cave off the Kaikoura coast of New Zealand for over thirty years.

Russia counts many hermits beside the media–famous Agafia Lykova. For reasons suggesting a criminal past, “Viktor” moved to Siberia sixteen years ago to live in solitude, while Nikolai Gromov (b. 1947) presents the strange case of having left to the Siberian taiga in fear and remorse that he had slain his wife in a pique of drunkenness. Twenty–four years later, Gromov returned to his old dwelling. His wife had not been killed after all, but had died in an accident during Gromov’s self–exile. Gromov remains alone with the burden of his history.

Some apparent or aspiring hermits reveal pathological motives. Carlos Sanchez Ortiz, a young medical doctor, disappeared from his home in Spain, to be found twenty years later in a Tuscany forest in Italy. Mushroom pickers who crossed his path passed information on to a European missing persons organization. His family was contacted, describing then twenty–six year old Carlos as severely depressed. They prepared to visit him, if only for a short meeting, but the forest hermit had disappeared again.

A similar motive may have impelled Filipino Mang Emigdio. He took off suddenly, abandoning wife and children, when a typhoon destroyed their home in 1987. Emigdio was found living in a mountain cave, refusing to leave, his pitying family and villagers helping him eke out a solitary life with regular visits.

Wilderness solitude is not equated to survivalism by hermits. The case of Chris McCandless (1968–1992) remains perplexing and elusive. McCandless may have grown up suffering childhood trauma, but its effect was, typically, unnoticeable to others. He expressed an enthusiasm for nature, outdoors, and wilderness when young, also demonstrating a strong empathy for homeless people with whom he sometimes mingled in Washington, D.C., offering them food, clothing, and comfort, in the shadow of the comfort-able suburban home where he grew up with his parents. Over the years, his favorite reading was Tolstoy and Thoreau.

Upon college graduation, McCandless announced to family and friends a planned road trip. He had just given away his savings of $24,000 to charity, and disappeared, traversing the United States to end up in Alaskan wilderness. McCandless was intent upon plunging into wilderness survival, though he carried no food or gear, nor had acquired survival skills, only an expanded idealism. At first he attended to an evocative journal paralleling Thoreau’s, but the late entries change tone. His successes had waned in just four months. He foresaw a fast–approaching fate.

As McCandless biographer Jon Krakauer notes, McCandless had a copy of Louis L’Amour’s memoir Education of a Wandering Man, a page quoting from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief farewell: “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!” McCandless died from starvation or food poisoning, at the age of twenty–four.

The case of Christopher Knight (b. 1965) is described in Michael Finkel’s 2017 book The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. Knight spent twenty–seven years in a wooded camp in Maine close to tourist and visitor cabins, from which Knight stole food and provisions with great deftness. The biographer’s dogged interviews and identification of details reveal Knight to be a classic recluse (versus hermit). Knight was eventually caught, publicly rued his thievery, and has slipped into obscurity.

The Book of hermits: the history of hermits from antiquity to the present / Robert Rodriguez

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger History of a Love

 Introduction

AT THE END of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes about the internal devastation wrought by the power of totalitarianism, “the iron band of terror” that succeeds in creating an atmosphere of desolation around and within each person. One might have the impression, she writes, “as though a means had been found in which the desert had set itself in motion, setting loose a sandstorm that blew over all the inhabited areas of the earth.”1

My book is about this sandstorm, and its effect on people who, with élan and self-awareness, wished to renew the world.

In the fall of 1924, Hannah Arendt, a young woman from Königsberg, came to Marburg on the Lahn with a group of like-minded friends. She was following a rumor that one could learn to think with a young philosopher at the university there. She was a student hungry for knowledge; he was a rebel among philosophers. She was eighteen years old and a free spirit; he was thirty-five and married. What connected them was the passion of love and the fascination for philosophical thought.

Both entered into a precarious love that was at the same time the beginning of an adventurous path of thought that would push them apart and bring them together time and again. With the publication of Being and Time in 1927 Heidegger rose to world fame. He owed this flight of thinking in part to her love. At the same time Arendt turned to Zionism, wanting to fight against murderous anti-Semitism. The seizing of power by the National Socialists ripped both from their paths. She and her friends were forced to flee. He awaited a national awakening and a leading role as educator for himself in National Socialism. Heidegger’s “mission” destroyed their love as well as the friendship of many of his teachers, colleagues, and students.

The lovers became enemies. Still, meeting seventeen years later, the old feelings of connectedness surfaced. A friendship of twenty years began, a friendship broken time and again by crises.

Those who came after have had their problems with this history. Not a few contemporaries considered it a scandal. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger! How could a Jewish woman find herself with a Nazi in spe? With the abyss that lay between them, how could she seek this connection again after the war, as was clearly the case?

Those who remain as voyeurs cannot understand that in this relationship two themes intersect constantly: love and thought. Along all the meanderings of the story and its characters, the theme that appears is love in all its shadings: eros and agape, faithfulness and betrayal, passion and banality, reconciliation, forgetting, remembering. Amor Mundi, “Love of the World,” also appears, clearly not a sentimental issue. From Arendt comes the question of how a new beginning may be made after the self-destruction of Europe through war and genocide. With this, however, the question of thinking itself becomes a theme. At the beginning of their relationship stood the following questions: What is the purpose of philosophical thought? Can a well-understood existential philosophy be transferred to the world of human action?

Heidegger failed in his aspiration to be the educator of the nation. When this failure became clear to him, he withdrew deep into philosophy.

Hannah Arendt, violently pushed by her enemies in 1933 into the same question, had a radically different response: thinking must reach into the world and engage human beings and their experiences, ruptures, and catastrophes more profoundly.

Above all, Arendt and Heidegger were painfully aware that they were witnesses to a break with tradition that could not be healed. In their different ways, they were both on the path to a new beginning, a “thinking without banisters,” without support in the tradition. One of the richest philosophical discourses of the twentieth century emerged from this political antagonism, a discourse between a thinking of the political world (Arendt) and a philosophical discourse on Gelassenheit or letting-be (Heidegger). It is a confrontation that defined the last century and continues today in its endless variations.

The double relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, as lovers and thinkers, will be told against the backdrop of the last century, its fissures, catastrophes, and personal dramas. The more entwined the history of the century becomes with Arendt and Heidegger, the more characters enter the stage. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger: a young doctor and psychiatrist from the northern German provinces and a young philosopher from the southern Bavarian province link up to radically remake philosophy and with it their universities. Their friendship began as they both followed the same thought: philosophy was no longer adequate to the existential questions of the present. They rebelled against the inherited structures of university philosophy. They would be the emissaries of a new way of thinking, existential philosophy. Their friendship collapsed in1933 as Jaspers condemned the new leaders and antisemitism. He was driven from the university by these events. Toward the end of the war, he was afraid for his life and that of his wife’s. After the war he emerged as a harsh critic of Heidegger—at the same time he appealed to their old connection. Friendship, however, was not possible.

For Hannah Arendt, her doctoral supervisor, Karl Jaspers, was the trusted person she could turn to after 1945 as she encountered a Germany she barely recognized. Jaspers was ever present as the third party to her new relationship to Heidegger. Heidegger suffered under the loss of friendship with Jaspers. Arendt was never able to effect a reconciliation between the two.

Heinrich Blücher, Arendt’s second husband, appears; his encouragement of her work was invaluable. Jasper’s wife, Gertrud, also emerges. This is the woman who Jaspers thanks for his “humanity” and whose contribution to their discussions in the Jaspers’ house can only be surmised. Finally, Elfride Heidegger enters, a woman who embarked on her marriage full of hope as an emancipated woman; she was fascinated with National Socialism early and never escaped from this legacy. Throughout her life she fought against Heidegger’s connection to his Jewish students; his insistence on a life with eros made her bitter.

The students appear: Karl Löwith, the talented early critic of his teacher Heidegger; Elisabeth Blochmann, the excellent student with a calling in pedagogy; Hans Jonas, who as Zionist and Jewish scholar studied with Heidegger; Herbert Marcuse, who was fascinated by Heidegger before turning to another fascination, Marxism; the highly intelligent Günther Anders, Arendt’s first husband.

What seems to those who come after to have been a clearly delineated world (the teacher as perpetrator, colleagues and students as victims) was at the time a shared world in which the traditions of communists and messianics, Jews and Christians, Zionists, nationalists and racists all interacted with, clashed against, and influenced one another simultaneously. Between the lines we also find the discussion of just how violent the separation of “German” from “Jewish” thinking in the intellectual history of Germany was.

And as though that were not enough for our protagonists, they also lived on two different continents for forty years. Hannah Arendt found a new circle of thinking in the United States, and, with her friends, she made a new home for herself there. She involved herself in the debates surrounding the founding of the state of Israel and worked on establishing a new foundation for political thought. Her friends Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Waldemar Gurian, Hermann Bloch, Dwight MacDonald, and many others, brought the American world closer to her and debated with her the future of Europe.

Martin Heidegger saw in America the embodiment of the age of doomed technology. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, wanted to bring the “American perspective” into European thought. Her lifelong disputes also stemmed from this, namely, how the political will of a people could find expression in a form other than that of the European nation-state. In this respect one can rightly speak of a “transatlantic relationship.”

Where do the protagonists stand at the end? Unmasked, damaged, rehabilitated? If the book has been successful at counteracting these images, then it has accomplished its goal.

Note

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1951), 478.

(...)

Heidegger now wanted to practically implement what he and Jaspers had been discussing, namely, the transformation of the university into an institution that produces intellectual leadership. Plato’s idea of the academy resonated in the background. Hannah Arendt would take up this idea in her plan for a book on politics. Of course, such an elite concept required the right students. They should be highly intelligent, but not studying out of purely theoretical interest. Heidegger and others accused the Jewish intelligentsia of just this, being too one-sided, living only in their heads, neglecting the other side of life: embodiment, work. Against this, the new students were to be exhorted to lead an authentic life, to engage in physical as well as intellectual exercise. Heidegger had already diagnosed the alienation between the two poles of human existence as a sign of self-alienation in the age of the masses. Already in the 1920s, there were reports of the campfire romanticism at the Todtnauberg cabin where visitors told ancient myths, sang songs, and played sports.

Academic teaching was to be completely transformed. Many complaints about the faculty in the 1920s—especially in letters between friends—often culminated in the derisive cry that the majority of colleagues did not belong in a university deserving of its name. Competitive thoughts and feelings of social inferiority may well have been at play here, but so was the conviction that too many compromises had been made in academic teaching. True thinking, however, as Heidegger had learned under difficult and trying circumstances, did not admit compromises. Those born after the Second World War were the first to understand that while lack of compromise can be fruitful and inclusive, under different circumstances, it can also be devastating and destructive. However, in the time after the First World War, another idea held sway, namely, that the renunciation of radicalness leads to mediocrity. It remains a mystery as to why so many people of that time consciously accepted the view that uncompromising thinking, in circumstances where it seeks to make an impact, may become violent, indeed, must become violent. Was it the First World War that made the dimension of violence in thinking so acceptable? An entire generation in different camps (socialism, communism, messianism, Zionism, national ideology) enthusiastically welcomed radical thinking. They believed that only those who pushed thought to its most extreme consequences could accomplish something in this world of decay. The danger of this uncompromising thinking escaped Heidegger, as well. He was certainly not alone in this.

But what astonishes us even more, from today’s point of view, is that the philosopher Heidegger must have really believed that he could leap from thinking to action, without first crossing over the transitional space where the two seemed to directly oppose each other.

In Being and Time, Heidegger foreclosed the possibility of thinking this transitional space; there he thoroughly demonstrated that authentic Dasein exists in the rejection of everything having to do with the “they,” of everything having to do with the evental-historical with-world (Mit-Welt), with the public domain, culture, and technology. From the background of this exclusion of the everyday world, a world defined as distracting, emerges this naïveté—a naïveté that seems so monstrous to us today—out of which Heidegger saw the euphoria of National Socialism materialize as a convincing concept. Hannah Arendt would later write a parable about this: Heidegger, the fox, fell into the trap that he himself set.

Heidegger hoped that the new way of thinking that he was working on would lead to a new kind of academy, a new form of thinking, teaching, and educating at the University of Freiburg. He believed that the opportunity to accomplish his project would present itself in one way or another. Did he hope that the National Socialists would come into power? He certainly did not wish for the banal orgies of violence that began after 1933. However, early on he saw in the “movement,” and apparently also in its militarization, the auspicious alternative to the everydayness of the 1920s, to the boring monotony of democratic procedures and practices. He saw a possibility, a forum, for the renewal of the nation’s spiritual potential. He must have believed that there was a task left unaccomplished by the ancients, a task that was now possible to fulfill with National Socialism. Not that he thought the task would be fulfilled by the National Socialist movement itself. In his view, the latter needed to be educated. The task was up to him; he had taken it upon himself long ago. He wanted only to be called.6Heidegger shared the epochal illusion of the emergence of National Socialism with many others, from Gottfried Benn to Carl Schmitt to Arnolt Bronnen, and others. National Socialism became the bearer of hope; many people saw in it an alternative to the chaos of the mass age, to being at the mercy of technology, to the self-forgetting loss of German culture, and the decline of the national state. The return to the “German essence” was the promise that hid the violence and terror, the modern means of technological domination and the formation of the totalitarian system.

Antonia Grunenberg

The Poundian Gists' and Maxims

Into what he variously described as 'gists', maxims, axioms and aphorisms, Pound encapsulated the essence of his critical thought or intuition, commonsense or wisdom in a memorably epigrammatic way. The Dantesque clarity, concision and concreteness he aspired to-and often succeeded in achieving- in his poetry, he also succeeds in achieving in his pithy comments and conclusions which are comparable with the best of their kind by Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Eliot and Leavis. Unbounded confidence in him-self, in his judgement and perception, and in his 'high and final EZthority', enabled him to pinpoint, with extraordinary incisiveness and simplicity, the various facets of the art of poetry - especially of modem poetry - as well as of the practice and profession of literary criticism. These dicta bring out, no less than does his most 'personal' poetry, the way Pound's mind and intelligence, and his critical perception and intuition work, enabling him to see 'fitfully and by starts' what other critics have to toil, dissect and analyse long to explore.

Apart from those we have already come across in the course of this book. here are some salient examples of the Poundian dicta on poetry, criticism, culture, art, religion:

1. Without constant experiment literature dies.
2. There is gongorism in critical writings as well as in bad poetry.
3. Parody is the best criticism - it sifts the durable from the apparent.
4. Lope de Vega is not a man, he is a literature.
5. Aristotle was so good at his job that he anchored human thought for 2000 years.
6. You could call Orage a damn fool and respect him.
7. Virgil is a second-rate, Tennysonianized version of Homer.
8. No one will ever gauge or measure English poetry until they knew how much of it, how full a gamut of its qualities, is already THERE ON THE PAGE OF CHAUCER.
9. Try to find a poem of Byron or Poe without seven serious defects.
10. It is hard to drop an enthusiasm.
11. Glory is a damned inedible substance.
12. Dogma is bluff based on ignorance.
13. Belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions.
14. The essence of religion is the present tense.
15. The syllogism, time and again, loses grip on reality.
16. By genius I mean an inevitable swiftness and right-mindedness in a given field.
17. There is no democracy in the arts.
18. [To his mother] No periodical is ever much good. I hope you don't think I read the periodicals I appear in.
19. The quintessence of style is that it should be swift and mordant.
20. Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism.
21. No one knows enough, soon enough.
22. A writer dies when he ceases to have, and exercise, omnivorous curiosity.
23. The trained never think.
24. It is very often easy to do for another what one couldn't possibly do for one's self.
25. The UNprintable part of my writing is what deals with ANYthing of importance.
26. One's preparation for a real job is possibly never what one does when one thinks one is preparing.
27. Tenny rate, stagnation comes from inside; and not from the circumst.
28. Ownership is often a damned nuisance, and anchor.
29. Xtianity is a poor substitute for truth.
30. One definition of beauty: aptness to purpose.
31. He [Christ] is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted upon him. As well blame me for all the bunk in vers libre.
32. Je revere plutot le bon sens que l'originalite.
33. Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives.
34. NO GOOD WORK EVER KNOCKED OUT ANY 0THER GOOD WORK.
35. Truth is not untrue'd by reason of our failing to fix it on paper.
36. The miracle of Homer is that great poesie is everywhere latent and that literary finish is up to Henry James.
37. A narrative is all right so long as the narrator sticks to words as simple as dog, horse, and sunset.
38. Music is excellent discipline for the writer of the prose.
39. Knowledge is to know man. Mr Alexander Pope rubs it a bit too smooth. If you translate him, the proper study for man is anthropology, you get nearer the source of error.
40. Only in basicly pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance.
41. A REAL book is one whose words grow ever more luminous as one's experience increases or as one is led or edged over into considering them with greater attention.
42. The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is the sun, air and the sea and the rain and the lake bathing. The cult of ugliness, Villon, Baudelaire, Corbiere, Beardsley are diagnosis. Flaubert is diagnosis. Satire is surgery, insertions, amputations.
43. 'Good writing' is perfect control.
44. All criticism should be professedly personal criticism.
45. Poetry, the lordliest of arts.
46. The function of criticism is to efface itself when it has established its dissociations. Let it stand that from 1912 onward for a decade and more I was instrumental in forcing into print, and secondarily in commenting on, certain work now recognized as valid by all competent readers.
47. The sonnet was not a great poetic invention. The sonnet occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His 'genius' consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter.
48. For most translation one would merely say, take it away and start again.
49. All criticism is an attempt to define the classic.
50. A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented.
51. When a civilization is vivid it preserves and fosters all sorts of artists - painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, architects.
When a civilization is dull and anemic it preserves a rabble of priests, sterile instructors, and repeaters of things second-hand.
52. Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliche and another.
53. An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
54. Civilisation is individual.
55. It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
56. The infinite gulf between what you read and enjoy and what you set up as a model.
57. Italian concept of poetry: something oppressive and to be revered.
58. The more a man goes over a real writer the more he knows that no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.
59. The Bible should be read after the reader is literate.
60. The basis of a state is its economic justice.

From Ezra Pound as Critic G. Singh