Loren Eiseley: THE NIGHT COUNTRY

"To an anthropologist, the social reception of invention reminds one of the manner in which a strange young male is first repulsed, then tolerated, upon the fringes of a group of howler monkeys he wishes to join.  Finally, since the memories of the animals are short, he becomes familiar, is accepted, and fades into the mass.  In a similar way, discoveries made by Darwin and Wallace were at first castigated and then by degrees absorbed.  In the process both men experienced forms of loneliness and isolation, not simply as a necessity for discovery but as a penalty for having dared to redraw the map of our outer, rather than inner, cosmos."

-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country


Perhaps among the majority of scientists and perhaps the general population, this might be true, but there still are groups of howler monkeys out there who haven't accepted evolution, even after some 150+ years of evidence.  Other groups, and there is considerable overlap here, still deny the existence of global warming, again in spite of overwhelming evidence.  Other groups, again with considerable overlap, still believe the world is only 6000 years old, having been created in 4004 B. C. 

I wonder how many members of these groups also belong to the Flat Earth Society.   Yes, they still exist and here's their web site:  http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

Loren Eiseley: from THE NIGHT COUNTRY

"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.  If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which that scientist or artist presents us.  Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him.  Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker;  frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion  of himself.  He has voiced through the ages, in one form or another, this very loneliness and detachment which Dewey saw so clearly at the outcome of our extending knowledge.  The custom-bound, uneducated, intolerant man projects his fear and hatred upon the seer.  The artist is frequently a human mirror.  If what we see there displeases us, if we see all too clearly our own insignificance and vanity, we tend to revolt, not against ourselves, but in order to martyrize the unfortunate soul who forced us into self-examination.

In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.  If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed.  Carl Schneer recounts that Einstein made so little impression on his superiors, it was with difficulty that he obtained even a junior clerkship in the Swiss Patents office at Bern, after having failed of consideration as a scholar of promise.  Not surprisingly, theoretical physicists favored his views before the experimentalists capitulated.  As Schneer remarks: It was not easy to have a twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Swiss Patent office explain the meaning of experiments on which one had labored for years."  Implacable hatred, as well as praise, was to be Einstein's lot.

-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country


I have one small quibble here with what Eiseley is arguing--he says "uneducated" as a characteristic of those who fear the genius or one who goes beyond the accepted dogma.  I would remove "uneducated" because I see many "educated" people in the ranks of those terrified by the new or the original.

Just because it is new or original or unique does not make it bad or wrong or good or right.  It is hard to judge something that is novel objectively or fairly, for our biases and prejudices immediately come into play.  For this reason, we should always wait a while before passing judgement.

Too many times those first immediate snap judgements are proved wrong later.   Some are able to  reevaluate their position and admit they were wrong, facing unfortunately, derision and even isolation from those around them--wobbling is unacceptable to many.  Others unable to admit their errors then search out evidence that appears to support their position while ignoring, avoiding, or ridiculing contrary evidence.   Mocking or ridiculing those who disagree is also a common tactic employed to protect oneself from having to admit one made an error.

It is unfortunate for a country or other political entity when the leaders, elected or appointed, are among those who are shackled by the past and unable to consider new ways of doing things or new ways of thinking, simply because they are new.  We should wait before dismissing the new, for there just might be something there worth thinking about, something better than today's universal truths.

It's been said in many ways: Yesterday's heresies are today's revelations and tomorrow's dogmatic truths.

Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable, pt. 3

"A few years ago I chanced to write a book in which I had expressed some personal views and feelings upon birds, bones, spiders, and time,  all subjects with which I had some degree of acquaintance.  Scarcely had the work been published when I was sought out in my office by a serious young colleague.  With utter and devastating confidence he had paid me a call in order to correct my deviations and to lead me back to the proper road of scholarship. He pointed out to me the time I had wasted--time which could have been more properly expended upon my own field of scientific investigation.  The young man's view of science was a narrow one, but it illustrates a conviction all too common today:  namely, that the authority of science is absolute.

To those who have substituted authoritarian science for authoritarian religion, individual thought is worthless unless it is the symbol for a reality which can be seen, tasted, felt, or thought about by everyone else.  Such men adhere to a dogma as rigidly as men of fanatical religiosity.  They reject the world of the personal, the happy world of open, playful, or aspiring thought."


-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country


I am not launching an attack on science, nor is Loren Eiseley.  Science is one of several methods humans use to understand their environment and their place in the universe.  Science is not perfect nor are scientists superior thinkers.  They are expert in their field of research, but even there one finds disagreements among the researchers with considerable expertise and knowledge.  Science can tell us how things came about and how to do many interesting or curious things, but it can't tell us if we should and why we should do these things.  Science showed us how to build an atomic bomb or how to create chemical weapons, but science can't tell us if we should build that bomb or develop those weapons.

The answer to a "why" question  requires a different mind set, a different knowledge, a different perspective that can't be tested, tasted, felt, or measured.  It requires a way of thinking that combines a knowledge of the human past, present, and projections into the future.  Should we build an atomic bomb?  What are the consequences of creating such a weapon?  Once something is created, its very existence seems to promote its use.  That's the next question:  should we use it?  Why?  How? When? Science can not be expected to provide the answer to these all important questions.

Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable, pt. 2

This quotation follows directly after the quotation included in the earlier post titled "Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable."  I had planned on a series of sequential posts from this section of Eiseley's The Night Country, but it didn't work out that way.  Reality sometimes barges in and upsets "the best laid plans of mice and me."


"It is through the individual brain alone that there passes the momentary illumination in which a whole human countryside may be transmuted in an instant.  'A steep and unaccountable transition,' Thoreau has described it, 'from what it called a common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men can not describe them.'   Man's mind, like the expanding universe itself, is engaged in pouring over limitless horizons.  At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe.  The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.  One does not see, one does not hear, until he speaks to us out of that limitless creativity which is his gift."


I find this startling and illuminating.  I have heard many scientists defend what they do to be as beautiful and stirring as as any work of art--that science is not the enemy of the arts.  But now I read Eiseley's comment here:

"At its heights of genius it betrays all the miraculous unexpectedness which we try vainly to eliminate from the universe."

Isn't that the task of science--to remove the unexpectedness and unpredictability of the universe?  I am reminded of Poe's "Sonnet--to Science."


Science!  true daughter of Old Time thou art!
    Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
     Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee?  or how deem thee wise,
     Who wouldst  not leave him in his wandering
To seek for resurrect in the jewelled skies,
     Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
     And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
     Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?


I think Poe and Eiseley would agree here.  After all, what is science about--it is an attempt to explain all things and reduce it to predictability, to do away with surprises and the unexpected.  What happens when scientists stumble across something unexpected?  They greet it with joy and then go about trying to eliminate it.  Scientists, some day, may be able to tell us from what parts of the brain a poem or a symphony emerges, but they will never be able to predict the next poem or symphony that emerges.

The next paragraph in Eiseley's essay:

"The flash of lightning in a single brain also flickers along the horizon of our more ordinary brains.  Without that single lightning stroke in a solitary mind, however, the rest of us would never have known the fairyland of The Tempest, the midnight world of Dostoevsky, or the blackbirds on the yellow harvest fields of Van Gogh.  We would have seen blackbirds and endured the depravity of our own hearts, but it would not be the same landscape that the act of genius transformed.  The world without Shakespeare's insights is a lesser world, our griefs shut more inarticulately in upon themselves.  We grow mute at the thought--just as an element seems to disappear from sunlight without Van Gogh.  Yet these creations we might call particle episodes in the human universe--acts without precedent, a kind of disobedience of normality, unprophesiable by science, unduplicable by other individuals on demand.  They are part of that unpredictable newness which keeps the universe from being fully explored by man."

all quotations:
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country


This is probably one of the clearest and most succinct comments on the value and importance of the arts that I have ever read.  And, as I read it, what Eiseley says about the flash of genius that illuminates others, is equally true of what he writes here, for he has changed my thinking about the value of the arts and also about the value of science and their roles in human culture.  The arts can not  do nor should they be expected to do that which science can, but on the other hand, science can not do what the arts do for humanity--transport us out of mundane reality into a new unexpected and unpredictable world.  Science attempts to reduce all to a  mathematical formula--The Grand Theory of Everything--while the arts seek to maintain the sense of wonder, of surprise, of unpredictability that makes us human.

Loren Eiseley: the unpredictable

"Physicists, it now appears, are convinced that a principle of uncertainty exists in the submicroscopic realm of particles and that out of this queer domain of accident and impact has emerged, by some kind of mathematical magic, the sustaining world of natural law by which we make our way to the bank, the theater, to our homes, and finally to our graves.  Perhaps, after all, a world so created has something still wild and unpredictable lurking behind its more sober manifestations.  It is my contention that this is true, and that the rare freedom of the particle to do what most particles never do is duplicated in the solitary universe of the human mind.

The lightning flashes, the smashed circuits through which, on occasion, leaps the light of unverses beyond our ken, exist only in rare individuals.  But the flashes from such minds can fascinate and light up through the arts of communication the intellects of those not necessarily endowed with genius.  In a conformist age science must, for this reason, be wary of its own authority.  The individual must be re-created in the light of a revivified humanism which sets the value of man the unique against that vast and ominous shadow of man the composite, the predictable, which is the delight of the machine.  The polity we desire is that ever-creative polity which Robert Louis Stevenson had in mind when he spoke of each person as containing a group of incongruous and ofttimes conflicting citizenry. Bacon himself was seeking the road by which the human mind might be opened to the full image of the world, not reduced to the little compass of a state-manipulated machine."

-- Loren Eiseley --
 from The Night Country

Does this sound at all familiar?  Large corporations, as well as governments, are happiest with the composite person, predictable and manageable.  The art of communication can be used or misused to manipulate and indoctrinate citizen-consumers as well as illuminate and enlighten.  It's a race to see who wins.  I'm not optimistic for the forces of conformity have the financial and the political resources to silence the odd and irregular messages that come from those lacking the official stamp of approval.

Loren Eiseley: on stability

"Life is never fixed and stable.  It is always mercurial, rolling and splitting, disappearing and re-emerging in a most unpredictable fashion.  I never make a journey to a wood or a mountain without experiencing the temptation to explode a puffball in a new clearing or stopping to encourage some sleepy monster that is just cracking out of the earth mold.  This is, of course, an irresponsible attitude, since I cannot tell what will come of it, but if the world hangs on such matters it may be well to act boldly and realize all immanent possibilities at once.  Shake the seeds out of their pods, I say, launch the milkweed down, and set the lizards scuttling.  We are in a creative universe.  Let us then create.  After all, man himself is the unlikely consequence of such forces. In the spring when a breath of wind sets the propellers of the maple seeds to whirring, I always say to myself hopefully, "After us the dragons.

To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.  Otherwise everything becomes stale, commonplace, and observed.  I suspect that it is this unimaginative boredom that leads to the vulgar comment that evolution may be all very well as a theory but you can never really see anything in the process of change.  There is also the even more obtuse and less defensible attitude of those who speak of the world's creative energies as being exhausted, the animals small and showing no significant signs of advance.  'Everything is specialized in blind channels,' some observers contend.  'Life is now locked permanently in little roadside pools, or perching dolefully on television aerials.'

Such men never pause to think how they might have looked gasping fishily through mats of green  algae in the Devonian swamps, but that is where the homunculus who preceded them had his abode.  I have never lost a reverent and profound respect for swamps, even individually induced ones.  I remember too well what, on occasion, has come out of them.  Only a purblind concern with the present can so limit men's views, and it is my contention that sympathetic observer, even at this moment, can witness such marvels of transitional behavior, such hoverings between the then and the now, as to lay forever to rest the notion that evolution belongs somewhere the witch world of the past."

-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Night Country



Loren Eiseley is not the first to talk about unending change in the world: Taoists, Heraclitus, and Montaigne among many others had also noted this, but we forget and we need to be reminded of this regularly.  In textbooks that discuss evolution, how many end the exposition with the present day and never go on to talk about future evolutionary modifications.

The same is true of human affairs.  I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Iron Curtain came down in the early '90s.  The wise ones talked about peace, the end of the arms race, the reduction of military forces now that the Cold War had ended.  The money spent on weaponry could now be put to peaceful uses to benefit humanity.  And now.  .  .