As I’ve mentioned, one of the great pleasures of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me. By grace of academic tradition, the College at Brockport, and the delete button on my email server, I now have more time for thinking. I can pick up an enticing novel or book of poems, get lost surfing the Web, or write long, rambling letters to friends. Conversely, a corresponding danger of my sabbatical is the opportunity to wander wherever my inclinations might lead me, because those mental peregrinations could lead into intellectual displacement activity. Without some discipline my sabbatical could become a dilettante’s playground—and although it’s great fun to swing on monkey bars and dig in a sandbox, at the end of the year all I might have to show for it might be skinned knees and sand in my shorts. I recently felt the seduction of the playground when my brother-in-law showed me a small book, Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow, by Clare Kripps. It’s a quintessentially British work, first published in 1954, which describes the quirky and intelligent behavior of a foundling House (or English) Sparrow. Reading Kripps’s little account makes it difficult to typecast House Sparrows as “pests,” even if they are an exotic species in North America. (Quickly now, the ecological sign of the cross. . .) But what really distracted me from entering salamander data into spreadsheets, editing manuscripts and Master’s theses, and writing grant proposals—what I “should” have been doing—was the epigraph to Clarence, from The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis: “Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything he does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right. The ‘tame’ animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only natural one. . . More animals than you might expect are ready to adore man if they are given reasonable opportunity; for man was made to be the priest and even, in one sense, the Christ of the animals—the mediator through whom they apprehend so much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows.” Well. The above passage led me straight toward the displacement rabbit-hole, and so I put aside my spreadsheets and tunneled into The Problem of Pain, Lewis’s attitudes about non-human animals, and theodicy—the effort to explain the existence of evil (such as pain and suffering) in a world created by an omnipotent, good, and just god. This is a central conundrum for Christianity, particularly in regards to non-human animals. One might explain the existence of human pain and suffering as an outcome of the “Fall,” but why should the poor eating habits of Adam and Eve result in an avalanche of collateral damage, the endless agonies that non-human animals endure each day, on this earth: a mired woods bison, alive and conscious, fed upon by wolves; a pregnant muskox, taking a week to die of a breech birth on some cold and lonely arctic hill; or a line of biting ants, marching toward a nest of three-day-old Australasian pipits. . . On and on. This was a vexing problem for Darwin, who wondered why a good and loving deity would create ichneumon wasps, which lay their eggs inside living caterpillars, leaving the wasp larvae to grow and slowly devour their hosts, ignoring the most vital parts until they are large enough to metamorphose. “There seems to me too much misery in the world,” Darwin wrote. The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s exploration of theodicy—mostly in regards to humans, but he devoted more than a chapter to pain in non-human animals. A detailed examination of Lewis’s views would require a book of my own, and a depth of knowledge that would take years to develop. That would be a very deep and winding rabbit-hole, and I will stay out of it. Still, the epigraph to Clarence led me to read much of The Problem of Pain, and sort out Lewis’s views on everything from evolution (rather ambivalent) to the difference between suffering and pain (pain is a simple neurological sensation, while suffering requires consciousness and according to Lewis probably does not occur in most animals). Interesting stuff, but before long I became aware of an uncomfortable sensation, part guilt and part anxiety: I am wasting my time. I should refocus on my sabbatical work, especially those salamanders. . . But not quite yet: Although I disagree with almost everything in the quotation from The Problem of Pain (okay, I am comfortable with the articles and conjunctions), two ideas most irritate me. The first is that notion that, “The ‘tame’ animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only natural one.” The second is the proposition that [man] is “the mediator through whom they [the animals] apprehend so much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows.” In Lewis’s supremely anthropocentric view, humans are the conduit through which animals realize their true nature, and Get Right with God; not only do we have “dominion over the beasts,” but we also provide the path to whatever degree of enlightenment they are capable of. Perhaps it’s a simplification, but Lewis seems to be saying that without humans, animals ultimately are lost in the spiritual (and natural) wild. Now C. S. Lewis was kindly and well-disposed toward animals; he believed that humans had a moral responsibility to treat them fairly, and wrote about them with great sympathy. His home was a refuge for cats and dogs, and he reportedly fed the resident house mice, rather than trap them. Yet his portrayal of the relationship between humans and animals seems so wrong-headed as to be ludicrous. Try applying his notions to the Inyo Mountain salamander, a species which has existed for over ten million years—at least one hundred times longer than Homo sapiens, and more than five thousand times longer than the Christian belief system that Lewis channeled in The Problem of Pain. What were those salamanders doing in the 9,998,000 years or so before Christianity came along? Or in the 9,999,950 years or more before 1973, when two biologists stumbled upon them? Will the salamanders forever remain a bit less than fully “natural,” because (let’s face it), they are not particularly well-suited to taming? And given my research focus on Inyo Mountains salamanders, am I somehow responsible for helping them apprehend as “much of the Divine splendor as their irrational nature allows”? That’s a pretty challenging responsibility, given that I do not speak salamander. . . I don’t get it. It’s difficult to consider the natural world as fully subservient to, and incomplete without, humans—discounting the 4.5 billion years of earth’s history prior to the moment when Homo sapiens arrived upon the Pleistocene scene, and ignoring the sheer, beautiful “otherness” of animals. It’s a dangerous and misguided philosophy (or theology).
Instead, I’ll opt for Henry Beston’s view of animals, described so beautifully in The Outermost House: “We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. . . We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. . . For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth.” And so it is Beston’s view of the natural world, rather than C. S. Lewis’s, that I carry with me into the Inyo Mountains. And each time that I flip a rock in some rough canyon and find a small creature coiled there, I sense that I have been offered a momentary and fortunate glimpse of another nation, of a “finished and complete” life, one that has little need of my kind. And yet the beauty of the Inyo Mountains salamander’s sheer otherness draws me into their world, into a visceral and intellectual joy. In thinking about these things, and of my coming field season—of being among the salamanders once again—I realize that reading Clarence: The Life of a Sparrow and The Problem of Pain were not really intellectual displacement activities at all. Sure—they offered up a bit of a detour, but it was one that helped me to more fully consider salamanders, their place in my world, and my place in theirs. Such are the rewards of reading widely, and the value of rabbit-holes.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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