LONG REACH OF STAAL: June 2014

A forewarning: This is completely unrelated to hockey. There. You have been warned. I did say this could happen. Also as a warning, this is tooting my own horn a bit. I recently won first prize in my school's essay contest. I'm only a little proud. I didn't think I had a chance to win this, but I did! This came about as a sort of amalgamation of all the subjects I studied in the fall semester. So, without further ado...

The Role of Beauty:

Environmental Movements and Human Rights

Humans have long found beauty in their surrounding environment. The natural world has inspired poetry, art, music, fashion, scientific progress, and more. This idea of seeing beauty in nature and using it to create and invent is what keeps humans fully connected to the world they live in. We have an innate and deep-seated connection to the nature that surrounds us. Problems occur when we lose our understanding of this connection; so-called progress strips function and beauty from nature. Because human beings depend so much on nature, it follows that there is an apparent connection between human rights movements and environmental rights movements. This relationship between nature and humanity is a major focus of the Transcendentalist movement of the Nineteenth Century.

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, which delves in to the equivalence of the environmental movements and social justice movements of today’s global community, brings the Transcendentalist movement into alignment with the social movements of today’s world. In particular, Hawken emphasizes two Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who illustrate this dichotomy of the abstract and the concrete and the basis of a global social movement within the counterpoints of their works: Emerson’s “Nature” and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”

Both Emerson and Thoreau focused much of their work on nature and spirituality. At the time, to be educated was to be interested and knowledgeable about not just politics, but also philosophy, religion, art, poetry, and a vast array of culture. These topics all connected to each other. They were not exclusive, independent parts of culture. This interconnectedness is the key to understanding the viewpoint of the Transcendentalist. It was not a narrow, one-dimensional view. In addition, they each provided commentary on the social and moral issues faced by society.

Emerson and Thoreau did not, however, agree on everything. In 1836, Thoreau was a senior at Harvard University when he read Emerson’s “Nature” and from this found a mentor and a new way of thinking (Hawken, 2008, p. 74). Originally published anonymously, Emerson never expected it to resonate as well as it did. Emerson questions and analyzes that from which humanity derives. Any query as to what nature is or does is also a query concerning our own origins. Because of this, the question Emerson Asks, “To what end is nature?” becomes a question not only about nature but also about understanding our place in this world (1836/1983, p. 7). Emerson asserts, “Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result” and that the arts—those things changed and affected by humans—“are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man” (p. 12). In other words, those things that are distinctly “other,” that are not of nature, are just imitations by humans of nature. Human beings are merely creating an artificial nature to do what nature creates, but at our own whim and on our own schedule. Everything belongs to or imitates nature. This awareness of our connection to nature, that “we are nature, literally, in every molecule and neuron,” speaks not only of a connection of the physical to nature, but also to the spiritual and abstract (Hawken, p. 71).

Emerson’s and Thoreau’s different approaches to many of the same topics exhibit progress and creativity within the Transcendentalist movement. Progress with creativity was a key idea in the thinking of architect Alden B. Dow. On a recent trip to Midland, Michigan, I had the opportunity to visit his home and studio. In addition to his profession as an architect, Dow was also an amateur philosopher. Everything about his design takes into account both the functionality and beauty of the interior with the context of the exterior and surroundings. Dow believed that the buildings he created should inspire the same creativity present in his buildings within those who experienced it and that everyone is obligated “to make his surroundings more beautiful” (Maddex, 2007, p. 68). I find his concepts of interconnectedness and inspiration align closely with the ideas of the Transcendentalists. Dow had a variety of different precepts included in his philosophy, but most of them centered on the idea of his buildings being connected to the environment that they are in. The outside becomes part of the inside and the design does not end at the outer walls.

For his design, Dow sought and found much inspiration from the organic shapes around him. One of Dow’s favorite sayings was that “nature relieves architecture. Architecture relieves nature” (Maddex, 2007, p. 5). He saw nature as a continuance of the man-made structures—the architecture. He saw that same architecture as a continuance of nature. Nature and architecture have a complementary relationship.

In the same way, nature and civilization have a complementary relationship. As human beings, we have a symbiotic relationship with the nature that we live in. When we respect that idea, we are at harmony with the natural world. Emerson and Thoreau, among many other Transcendentalists, wrestled with this symbiosis and the effects new technology had on that relationship. In much of Emerson’s early writing, “he praised the progress that came from technological achievements” (Lumpkin, 2006). As time passed, he became “troubled by the role of technology, and its affects on man and nature, in promoting commerce [and] as a result, his attention turned to man’s responsibility in containing technology” (Lumpkin). Contrary to what might be assumed, Emerson had a similar idea about the role of nature and its effects. In Emerson’s view, “intellect was primary and nature was secondary,” and he saw human beings as separate as and more important than nature (Lumpkin). Nature was a tool to be used to further civilized life.

Emerson had an entirely idealistic view of technology and industrialization. He saw it as a way to enhance or use nature. He “felt the development and uses of technology represented the highest expression of man’s intellect” and, because intellect was primary to nature, to be opposed to technology “was unimaginable” (Lumpkin, 2006).

One of the largest positive outcomes of Transcendentalist thought came about by way of social reform. Intellect as a primary concern meant that education and original thought were important. As such, class division and racial segregation became targets for the Transcendentalist reformers. This was the single largest push for broad spectrum reform in American history. Reformers created “single-issue reform movements, pushing for temperance, prison reform, educational reform, changes in debtor laws, and the abolition of slavery” among many other issues (Newman, 2005, p. 41). Women’s rights, worker’s rights, African-American’s rights were all issues that were born into movements during this time. Indeed, the Transcendentalist movement itself was actually spurred into being because of the radical working-class movement in New England just prior to the Civil War.

Although Emerson was a proponent of these radical social changes, his approach to the culmination of these changes differed from that of his follower, Thoreau. Where Emerson saw the change coming from educated leadership and connecting with the “divinely ordained laws of nature,” Thoreau, though he does not depart from this idea, takes it to a more extreme level (Newman, 2005, p. 42). Thoreau called for civil disobedience as a responsibility, not just a right. A number of years after Thoreau first encountered Emerson’s work and Emerson himself, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax and spent a night in the Middlesex County Jail. Eighteen months after that night, Thoreau pontificated on “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the Government,” which would later be published as “Civil Disobedience” (Hawken, 2008, p. 74-76). Thoreau’s assertions of a wish for “every man [to] make known what kind of government would command his respect” and as a result they “[would] be one step toward obtaining it” (1849/1965, p. 636) shows not only his passion for supporting what he believes to be right and withholding support from what he believes to be wrong, but also his belief in “human interdependency, a belief that called out for a willingness to respond to moral imperatives, however distant” (Hawken, p. 76). Thoreau’s interpretations and ideas respond to what Emerson began in “Nature.” He saw “the connectedness Emerson experienced in the natural world” and “saw [it] in the human world” (Hawken, p. 76). Emerson was to Thoreau an inspiration and mentor and Thoreau treated their relationship as such. He internalized and immersed himself in Emerson’s philosophies and used them to further his own understanding of the world, thus allowing us to further our understanding of the world.

We use the past so-called radical movements as foundations for new understandings of the world. Bill McKibben, a contemporary activist who takes this connectedness and applies it to today’s world, has many times been called radical. He believes that there is “nothing radical at all” about the environmental movements he supports (lecture, October 10, 2013). He’s right. The ideas of conservation and moderation are very old and appear as broad ideas in the Transcendentalist movement and throughout history. Although we, as human beings, are facing a more and more extreme problem with climate change, environmental movements, and environmental and human interconnectedness are as old as human history.

This old connection can be seen in the way we have assimilated nature into culture. Culture tends to center around the arts—music, visual art, poetry, language. In all of these, nature is the dominant presence. Before we had the written word, we had art that depicted natural events and places. Many of the Transcendentalists saw themselves more as poets than as activists. Thoreau focused the “first decade of his life as a write” on poetry; he believed himself a poet before anything else (Newman, 2005, p. 84). Thoreau produced a multitude of poetry exclusively on nature or exclusively on social issues, but he kept nature as a visual for abstract ideas, a way to connect that which is hard to understand with something universal and concrete. In a poem about women, Thoreau’s language remains centered around nature:

Ive seen ye, sisters, on the mountain side

When your green mantles fluttered in the wind

Ive seen your foot-prints on the lake’s smooth shore

Lesser than man’s, a more ethereal trace,

Ive heard of ye as some far-famed race—

Daughters of god whom I should one day meet—

Or mothers I might say of all our race. (Newman, 2005, p. 93)

While beautiful, Thoreau’s way of personifying nature is not original to him. We have seen this personification of nature in the culture of all civilizations. The religions of the Greeks and Romans upheld the godlike power of nature. Most ancient cultures had a reverence for that which provided for them. They saw nature as a gift. This differs greatly from how Emerson wrote about nature and how we see nature today as a society. Emerson believed nature was a tool. We believe nature is an adversary.

Americans are used to an adversarial justice system, and I believe that this overflows into how we view the world around us. We have to fight against communism. We have to fight against climate change. We have to fight against socialism. There is always something we are fighting against. To look at the challenges we face today from a more Transcendentalist point of view, we would be fighting for something. Fight for civil rights of oppressed people. Fight for nature. Fight for individualism and the well-being of all people. How we understand where we connect to the world affects how much we consider when deciding on actions.

There are some cultures that have preserved the concept of a barrier-free relationship with nature, who have not allowed “evolution” and “progress” to compartmentalize that which is so fundamentally connected. These cultures, what Paul Hawken includes as the third portion of his social movement, are the indigenous cultures of the world. They marry nature, humanity, and the preservation of both into a single idea—a single, unified movement.

An avenue to return to this singular movement is through the appreciation of beauty. Like Alden Dow, we can learn to incorporate beauty that already exists into our lives. To see beauty in our differences can help to heal social rifts. Beauty, as seen by Emerson, “in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe” (1836/1983, p. 19). Internalizing and understanding beauty is a path to understanding the world and how we live in the world, not apart from it.

Whether the Transcendentalist movement marked a point in time where we understood and distinguished how the ecological woes of the world and the human woes are one and the same or if it marked a point in time where we became aware of a distancing of the two problems within the social consciousness, it shows us a way of thinking that we can build upon to better appreciate the beauty we live in. Emerson and Thoreau both had a primal understanding of nature and the way in which we are not just connected to it but are part of it.

References

Emerson, R. W. (1983). Nature. In R. W. Emerson (Author) & J. Porte (Ed.), Essays and lectures (pp. 5-49). New York: The Library of America. (Original work published 1836)

Hawken, P. (2008). Blessed unrest: How the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice, and beauty to the world. New York: Penguin.

Lumpkin, G.T. (2006). The promise of technology versus the pastoral ideal: Ralph waldow emerson’s conflict over the role of mankind in nature. International Journal of Humanities and Peace, 22(1), 45-46.

Maddex, D. (2007). Alden B. Dow: Midwestern modern. Midland, MI: Alden B. Dow Home and Studio.

McKibben, B. (Presenter). (2013, October 10). Notes from the Front Lines of the Climate Fight. Lecture presented at the Changing Climates Speaker Series, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI.

Newman, L. (2005). Our common dwelling: Henry Thoreau, transcendentalism, and the class politics of nature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Thoreau, H. D. (1965). Civil disobedience. In H. D. Thoreau (Author) & B. Atkinson (Ed.), Walden and other writings of henry david Thoreau (pp. 633-659). New York: The Modern Library. (Original work published 1849)

LONG REACH OF STAAL

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Predictions: Penguins 2014-15

Monday, June 23, 2014

The Role of Beauty: Environmental Movements and Human Rights