Ecological Restoration as a Restorying
The case for an Existential Literary Ecology
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 1.
‘The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there: shoreless seas and stars uncounted; Beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril. Both joy and sorrow as sharp as words.’
Tolkien
‘Folk tales emerge in times of upheaval, and from societies’ grimmest moments. They enable us to process and assimilate extreme experience, and deal with our fears. They also, typically, communicate powerful and uncompromising moral narratives. It’s not hard to draw a map of current major global problems with reference to them.’
In these perilous times, progressives must create narratives that shine a light on crises such as climate change.
I agree very much with what Andrew Simms writes in this article. He bemoans the extent to which an emphasis on facts and policies has replaced the art of storytelling. Human beings are story-telling beings; it is in stories that ‘objective’ facts and realities become humanly significant. I would be cautious of affirming mythologies that are ‘impervious to fact and rational argument,’ as Simms puts it, but would instead try to bring Logos and Mythos back together. ‘If you want change to happen, you have to change deeply embedded cultural narratives,’ writes Simms. If you want real and enduring change, you need to set facts and realities within a frame of existential meaning. ‘Progressive politics needs better stories as much as it needs facts and policies. Without them it will flail and flounder.’ Communicating environmental concerns has to be about more than informing heads – it has to go deep into the motivational economy of human beings. ‘Most tales, at some level, present a rite of passage through difficulty to maturity, awareness or resolution. Now, more than ever, it feels like we need new tales to lead us through our troubling times,’ Simms concludes. That’s putting it mildly.
‘Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.
Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough…
Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.’
Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
A lovely image indeed, free and wild, an anarchic excess that opens up and flies away. A world in bloom. That ‘excess’ is the potential for blossoming that exists in all things
Stories are a way of telling us about what it takes to enable the flower to bloom.
In spite of all that may trouble us in life, we are all capable of blossoming. And I am concerned with the blossom.
It is good that the voice of the indigent,
Too long stifled, should manage
To make itself heard.
But I cannot consent to listen
To nothing but that voice.
Man does not cease to interest me
When he ceases to be miserable.
Quite the contrary!
That it is important to aid him
In the beginning goes without saying,
Like a plant it is essential
To water at first;
But this is on order to get it to flower
And I am concerned with the blossom.
Hugh MacDiarmid
I am concerned with the conditions of enabling the flower to bloom. Human beings are story-telling, meaning seeking beings. We are symbol-making creatures as well as tool-makers. Earlier this year I completed a book on this very theme, Tolkien and the Fellowship of All Things, referring to ‘Fairy stories and story-telling,’ ‘the power of story,’ ‘the relation of self to setting,’ ‘Mythopoeia,’ ‘the truth of story-telling,’ ‘Keeping transcendent hope and vision alive under rationalisation,’ ‘Local scale, proximity, the social commons and community resilience.’
Tolkien’s words on ‘fighting the long defeat’ are wonderful and endlessly inspiring – he gives us a ‘hope without guarantees.’ And a long defeat that, in acts of love and kindness and solidarity, gives ‘glimpses of final victory’ and possibilities of a long joy. There’s a lot of discussion on what it takes to motivate people to act at the moment. Tolkien’s environmental concern came years before environmentalism as a movement, and is really a Christian stewardship. Many would consider him nostalgic, reactionary even, anti-technological – but he saw the impacts of industrialisation and urbanisation and didn’t like them; he thought the machine and the process of mechanization a tyrannizing coercion reshaping the world and drawing us away from the right way of relating to each other and to the world. That's what the Ring was all about, that power to corrupt, change, compel, dominate, to possess its possessor, a power that could not be diverted to good ends but which needed to be renounced, fought, destroyed. The tyranny of abstraction that Tolkien feared has brought us to a situation in which global problems require global solutions, and I argue strongly for concerted and effective action in that respect. I'm less than sure that Tolkien would have agreed. He feared the use of power and technology that was righteous and filled with good intentions. Gandalf would have been worse than Sauron in this regard. The problem is that I just don't see how, given the mess we've gotten ourselves into, we can avert catastrophe without ambitious large-scale projects. The key is the kind of humility and renunciation of power that Tolkien argued for, and understanding the religious roots of his wisdom here. I deal with this in the book, giving it a full chapter. I shall keep on arguing that large scale ambitious projects need to be grounded in down-to-earth, pragmatic reasoning, communities of practice and love of place – a hobbit like existence in which the ordinary actions of the little people knit communities together and create the warm and affective bonds between us, making us prepared to act to defend the places and persons we love and value. That’s where motivation and will to act in common cause comes from. And it is where the source of active hope is ever renewed. I develop these themes at length in my Tolkien piece. It’s a personal statement on my part, urban Hobbit as I am, someone who argues for material sufficiency and virtuous action within right relationships, pottering away in my little community, engaging in solidary exchange, creating bonds and links between 'ordinary' folk. We need the facts and figures and the right policies and policy framework; great problems require substantial action. My deep concern in taking these actions is to avoid opening a democratic deficit that leaves plans and projects all complicated form with little existential content. We need an environmentalism that gives the ‘little folk’ a material and moral stake. If we are hobbits at heart, and if we come to cultivate hobbit habits of the heart, then we will come to have the motivation to act and therefore won’t require too much by way of facts and research in order to be persuaded to do the right thing.
In this book, I show how the protagonists in the Lord of the Rings put everything on the line and throw their whole heart and soul into the struggle. They do this because everything they hold dear is at stake, the people and places they love, their past, their future, their folk memories, everything they hold true and know to be right. They long to preserve these things and are prepared to sacrifice themselves for their protection. That’s some love.
I develop Tolkien's natural anarchy and pacifism. Tolkien was accused of escapism, and he accepted the charge; he is escapist in the truest sense, he said, in the sense of a man escaping prison. Weber's "iron cage" of a rationalized, routinised, bureaucratised, mechanized world that proceeds "without regard for persons" springs to mind in this respect. We are all in prison in the world of capitalist modernity, confined within a world of anonymous collective force imposed externally to such an extent we lose the personal touch. This "iron cage" captures our very subjectivities so that we don't even see the bars on the cage. We live in a psychic prison. We need to escape mentally and psychically as well as physically. We need to nurture the imagination and feed the soul. We need to call back the soul.
‘My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) … the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity… The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari [I do not want to be bishop] as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to his son Christopher, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter
Here's to world without bosses and without bossing!
I’m quite proud of this little book I wrote on Tolkien. I think the case that it makes for literary ecology is clear and cogent. Reading Andrew Simms has confirmed me in that view. Literary ecology takes the physical world and sets us off on a voyage of discovery that looks further than the objective facts to comprehend their existential meaning with respect to human life. Such a world is 'humanly objective,' to use a phrase I remember from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Artistic visions, poetic revelation, musical inspiration, ideas form an imaginal space that expands the physical world into an imaginal landscape that is continually unfolding through the ongoing exploration of human-Earth interconnection. The approach I take highlights the important mediating role that the imagination plays in human-Earth interconnection and interaction. The natural sciences are important in delivering facts and yielding knowledge about the physical environment, the best check our reason has against the natural world. But human life is about the psychic environment too, and that points to living as a quest to satisfy meaning. An ecology conceived in such a way integrates the scientific study of biology, climatology, ecosystems within an existential and experiential domain constituted by relationship and interconnection.
The critique of modern rationalization in the book is emphatic, possibly giving the impression of a cultural pessimism, and maybe of a reactionary and nostalgic yearning for simpler times. I know those times never were, and I believe that whilst the problems we face in the modern world are great, so too are the tools at our disposal for their solution. The old overarching moral framework cannot be reconstituted along the old lines. The problem is not a merely moral or intellectual one, it is social – we need to reconstitute for the form and forms of the common life, create new social relations, identities and solidarities, so that the character formation that is key to virtue ethics proceeds hand in hand with social formation. The solution to our problems lies not in nostalgic revaluation of past social forms and moral modes but in lines of development which are immanent but repressed within modern social forms.
Developing that argument is work for another day. If my critique of rationalization has been so relentless and repetitive as to give the impression that I think modernity to be an utterly hopeless terrain with no redeeming features, then I say look closer - I identify lines of development and potentialities which are immanent but repressed within current society. I had a particular theme with regard to this particular piece, and stuck to it throughout – the Ring as the one rule, linked to the tyranny of abstraction through the modern process of rationalization. I think it has emptied the world of meaning, value and purpose and turned human relations into instrumental and calculating affairs centred on self-interest. The modern world is constituted by a particular social identity, one that renders the connection between individual self-interest and social interest, short- and long-term indirect and obscure, at best. And that is why we struggle to make common cause as individuals when faced with constant calls to act for the common good. The problem is that the common good we need is unavailable to us in anything but abstract forms. It is against those forces of abstraction and atomization that I have affirmed a politics of proximity and fellowship based on solidary ties and affective bonds. And based upon reconnection with the sources of life and meaning. And I affirm, against disenchanted man and his disinheriting, disconnecting mind, that the world is objectively valuable. This Tolkien book is part of my wider attempts to delineate the institutional, social, psychological and ethical conditions for bringing human beings back to their (common) senses.
I will stand very much with what I have written on hope. I know it's right. Simple as that. I don’t need to debate it with people who load the terms and definitions, and thereby misidentify the very thing they are criticizing. Much of what those who reject ‘hope’ are criticizing is not hope at all, but despair. Passively waiting upon false promises made by any number of modern idols and external saviours is not hope at all, it is the very definition of despair. I know what hope is. It isn’t naïve and deluded at all. It requires guts, faith and courage. And it demands dedicated action and a devotion to true ends, often against what objective trends and tendencies tell us about where we are going. Any such trends and tendencies are, as that phrase I used earlier says, 'humanly objective.' I affirm the radical indeterminacy of the future, based on the capacity of creative human agency to intervene into 'objective' trends and tendencies and turn them in favourable directions. The facts frequently tell us we are beaten. Reason and realism frequently tell us to give in; hope - and a commitment to values and ends transcending given circumstances - tells us to carry on. I've seen hope work in situations that seemed objectively hopeless. I’ve been a part of campaigns for justice that had the entire establishment ranged against a small group of people. And I've seen those campaigns win. I’ll stand on hope. And I'll stand on justice too. And the ‘little people’, the ‘ordinary’ people who, with the root of the matter in them, will reach within themselves and find the extraordinary capacities that take hopeless causes and turn them into final victories. The 'little hands that turn the world,' as Tolkien puts it.
I'll stand, too, on the demand to make objective reality and the facts about it meaningful in a subjective or personal sense by developing an existential focus via art, aesthetics and ethics. Let’s call it an imaginal moral ecology. My concern is to give the material facts of the environmental crisis an existential focus within a humanly meaningful frame of reference and action. So I affirm the power of literary ecology, too, in fostering the ecological vision and imagination. I'll certainly stand on the power of words, as in Bachelard’s confession to be a dreamer of written words. I draw on Bachelard to a great extent in this book. Bachelard loved writing, and loved seeing how his words would come to life and create worlds of their own, enriching the world we live in. I come from a family of builders. I build with words. And I am happy to stand on Heidegger's linking of thinking and building in dwelling. I loved the time I spent in the Black Forest, and can see why so many fairy-stories originated from there. I can see Heidegger living there, too, engaging in a little Elvic enchantment. I’ll stand by Heidegger's 'dwelling in the fourfold,' and by the call for a new spirituality. Only a god can still save us …. Only we can save ourselves by resisting the dis-godding of the world and coming finally to answer the question as to where value lies. Man may be the measurer of all things, but he is not the measure of all things. I'll go with Heidegger's connection of building, dwelling and thinking.
And I'll stand on the prophetic voice, too - there's a reason I repeat myself endlessly in a time when people are deaf not only to fact but also to value. Climate denial comes in many forms ... I'm prepared to strike out alone if need be. How real do people want it? I'm a curious mix of ingredients. I like what Becca Segall Tarnas writes on the trickster, and have quoted her work extensively throughout.
I've added a photograph of me in The Dragon Snug at Cae Mabon, Snowdonia. There's a point to it. It's there in the Earth Rites passage. ‘Fairy tales do not tell the children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.’ (G.K. Chesterton). Well, I have soft spot for dragons and, with Montaigne, will continue to light a candle for both St Michael and his dragon. But, point taken, fairy tales are true in the deepest psychic and moral sense, telling us not merely that the demons that plague us exist, but that we have the resources within us to beat them.
The key questions are these: is the world objectively valueless? What are the forces of disenchantment that say it is? Where does value lie? Is there such a thing as inherent worth? What is worth, with respect to 'woethership'? What gods or idols do we worship? To empty the world of value, meaning, purpose and goodness and then think that there are technical and engineering workarounds that allow us evade these questions is the plainest delusion. That expresses the disenchanted mindset that has brought us to this, in the name of ‘human progress.’
As the title of Keith Breen's excellent book puts it, we live "under Weber's shadow." So I engage with Weber tirelessly. He warned of a humanity confined within the "iron cage" of a rationalized modernity until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. He warned of a capitalist economy that determines our lives with "irresistible force." He warned of a world which proceeds "without regard for persons." And he warned: "Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness." An objectively valueless, disenchanted world, with a human world built in its meaningless image, systemic and institutional imperatives overriding the moral law within, planetary boundaries without, a world without soul, without romance, without imagination, ‘without regard for persons.’ This captures the pathos of means and ends that characterizes the modern world, with the enlargement of means to become ends in themselves serving to bring about the diminution of meaning. The 'disenchantment of the world' indeed, and I have sought to expand the meaning-space throughout this book, as a condition of ever coming to respond to what the facts of our climate crisis are trying to tell us (clue, the science needs some psychic and moral help.)
The term Weber employed came from Friedrich Schiller and what he called "die Entgotterung der Nature" - the de-divinization or dis-godding of nature. It is thoroughly dispiriting and I don't care for it at all. It is a disenchantment that denied Nature its inherent value, meaning and goodness, and made it available to humans to employ their technology to selfish ends with complete indifference to the natural environment and the beings and bodies that populate it. I'm for re-enchantment and re-godding. I have no faith in 'men as gods.' It is thoroughly dehumanizing. From Dante to Blake to Nietzsche to Heidegger, the mechanizing process is utterly infernal. Tolkien loathed it too.
"Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
Gandalf in The Return of the King, The Last Debate
In a lecture on William Blake, Iain McGilchrist compares Blake to Nietzsche in their complexity and in the fact that 'both were rightly of the view that machines were and are infernal. Blake was appalled by the treatment of man as a machine.' Rightly indeed. 'A machine is not a man, or a work of art', Blake wrote, 'it is destructive of humanity and art.' As Erich Fromm writes in The Sane Society:
‘Furthermore, ethics, whether it is that of monotheistic religion or that of secular humanism, is based on the principle that no institution and no thing is higher than any human individual; that the aim of life is to unfold man's love and reason and that every other human activity has to be subordinated to this aim. How then can ethics be a significant part of a life in which the individual becomes an automaton, in which he serves the big It? Furthermore, how can conscience develop when the principle of life is conformity?’
Fromm, The Sane Society 1990 ch 5
We may live under the shadow of an alien rationalization – but there is a Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and carries us. And it is that Love that can still save us, if we can start to see from behind the physical eyes and engage in the work of re-connection, re-enchantment and ‘recovery’ – and thereby come to regain what Tolkien calls the ‘clear view.’
'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.'
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
‘Myth and fairy story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary “real” world.’
― Tolkien.
Human beings as story-telling beings engaged in life’s journey as a quest … The word ‘quest’ is appropriate here, with its connotations of myths and legends, the stories which human beings in their various groups and communities tell themselves, making sense of their lives and thereby developing a symbolic consciousness in their search for truth, meaning and justice. The object of the search in such quests is typically elusive, and ultimately its supreme importance comes to be apprehended and even transcended by the lessons that are learned in overcoming the challenges on the way. The journey is at least as important as journey’s end, in that it is in finding the object ‘out there’ that we come to find ourselves.
Alasdair MacIntyre is an important figure in the recovery of narrative in the modern world, along with Charles Taylor. ‘The unity of an individual life’, he writes, ‘is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask “What is the good for me?” is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. . . .’ MacIntyre continues:
‘The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest. A quest for what? Two key features of the medieval conception of a quest need to be recalled.The first is that without some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos there could not be any beginning to a quest. Some conception of the good for man is required. Whence is such a conception to be drawn? Precisely from those questions which led us to attempt to transcend that limited conception of the virtues which is available in and through practices. It is in looking for a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods, for a conception of the good which will enable us to extend our understanding of the purpose and content of the virtues, for a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life, that we initially define the kind of life which is a quest for the good. But secondly it is clear the medieval conception of a quest is not at all that of a search for something already adequately characterized, as miners search for gold or geologists for oil. It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which provide any quest with its episodes and incidents that the goal of the quest is finally to be understood. A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge. The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good. The catalogue of the virtues will therefore include the virtues required to sustain the kind of households and the kind of political communities in which men and women can seek for the good together and the virtues necessary for philosophical enquiry about the character of the good, We have then arrived at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.’
MacIntyre, After Virtue
This completes the first and second stage in MacIntyre’s account of the virtues, situating them not only in relation to practices but in relation to the good life for human beings. He now goes on to the third stage. ‘For I am never able to seek the good or exercise the virtues qua individual.’ What it is to live the good life concretely varies according to different circumstances, even when we are dealing with the one and the same conception of the good life and one and the same set of virtues embodied in a human life. Further, we all approach our particular circumstances as bearers of particular social identities. ‘What is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity. This thought is likely to appear alien and even surprising from the standpoint of modern individualism. From the standpoint of individualism, I am what I choose to be …
Such individualism is a contradiction of the social nature of human beings – individuality and sociability are two aspects of the same human nature. The loss or distortion of the one is the loss or distortion of the other, through skewing the integral relationship that exists between both in a truly human life. The quest for the good life thus return us to nature and human nature, to universal standards which transcend their particular incarnation in time and place. The truth of story-telling is rooted in something outside of the social group, identity and community, however those things come to be defined in history.
‘While it is true that man can adapt himself to almost any conditions, he js not a blank sheet of paper on which culture writes its text. Needs like the striving for happiness, harmony, love and freedom are inherent in his nature. They are also dynamic factors in the historical process which, if frustrated, tend to arouse psychic reactions, ultimately creating the very conditions suited to the original strivings. As long as the objective conditions of the society and the culture remain stable, the social character has a predominantly stabilizing function. If the external conditions change in such a way that they do not fit any more with the traditional social character, a lag arises which often changes the function of character into an element of disintegration instead of stabilization, into dynamite instead of a social mortar, as it were.’
Fromm, The Sane Society 1990 ch 5
The quest, ultimately, is a work of self-knowledge ending in the truly human society of truly human beings.
‘Undoubtedly, lack of concern for one's own country is an expression of a lack of social responsibility and of human solidarity, as are the other acts mentioned here, but the reaction to the violation of the flag is fundamentally different from the reaction to the denial of social responsibility in all other aspects. The one object is "sacred," a symbol of clan worship; the others are not. After the great European Revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries failed to transform "freedom from" into "freedom to," nationalism and state worship became the symptoms of a regression to incestuous fixation. Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have found a new, human form of rootedness, will he have transformed his world into a truly human home.’
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society 1990: 60
Reason and love working together in harmony, solidarity and justice in a fellowship grounded in place and relations to others, a rootedness against abstraction, a genuine community as against ersatz, surrogate collectivities, a love of the particularities of place and warm, affective ties, bonds and loyalties as against empty universals … Tolkien gives us all of these things. He sees human life as a quest for meaning, and a search for love, truth and belonging. And he roots this quest in the realities of nature and goodness and experience. These are the themes I develop at length in Tolkien and the Fellowship of All Living Things.
As for the road that goes ever on and on, the 'eager feet' we start off with will grow 'weary' in the pursuit, but we carry on. That’s the journey from the first to the second version of the song, The Road goes ever on and on, in The Lord of the Rings. (Book I, Chapter 1, Book 1, Chapter 3). The third and final version of the song appears in The Return of the King, Book VI, Chapter 6, murmured by Bilbo, who is now a sleepy old hobbit
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
Earlier, when leaving the Shire, Frodo tells the other hobbits Bilbo's thoughts on 'The Road': "He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step onto the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'" But they go out all the same. That's the point, as I make clear in my Tolkien book.
What makes a good story is a purpose and a point, an end. The peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri knew more than anyone the power of story to instruct, inspire, motivate, and direct people. As Barbara Reynolds writes:
"A compelling feature of the Commedia is the force of the narrative. But it is not one single narrative: it is studded with minor stories, even stories within stories, in dialogue or told in the first person, some by mythological figures but the majority by the souls of people recently dead and well known."
Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man 2006
There are none better than Dante in this regard. Dante understood human beings to be story-telling animals impelled by their highest desire to the good. In his Comedy, Dante expressed his unwavering belief in ultimate good. Dante compares the soul on its way back to God to a traveler:
“who takes a road along which he has never gone before and thinks that every house he sees in the distance is an inn and, finding he is mistaken, fixes his eyes trustfully on another and so on from house to house until he arrives at the inn he is seeking.”
We travel through life in pursuit of the higher or greater desire, but may be led astray because 'the path is lost in error like the roads on earth' (questo cammino siperdeper errore come le strade della terra):
“[I]n human life there are diverse paths, one of which above all is the right road, and another the wrong, and certain other paths which are more or less wrong or right.”
Dante, Il Convivio, Section IV, Chapter 12.
The image of the right path that we lose, but may yet return to, goes back to the Bible, of course, and is employed to great effect by Boethius. Dante uses the image most memorably in the first canto of Inferno:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of our path in life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood
for the way which leads us straight was lost to sight?
In Il Convivio, Dante describes the soul as entering upon new, untrodden terrain in life’s journey (nel nuovo e mat nonfatto cammino di questa vita). He speaks, too, of the young man 'who enters into the wrong forest of this life and cannot keep to the right path unless it is pointed out to him by his elders.’ (Il Convivio, Section IV, Chapter 24.) There is, then, a right path, and the power and efficacy of story-telling lies in its moral and instructive purpose, educating desire and guiding it to its true end. In separating the Mythos and the Logos, discarding the former in thinking the latter alone is sufficient, we have lost the psychic and emotional apparatus by which we could comprehend and regulate the life forces that shape humanity within. We have lost the capacity to inspire and motivate at the level of the psyche. If we inform heads but starve the heart, we lose our way.
"Because the right way was lost." That those words are not merely expressions of Dante’s personal crisis but apply to all of us is made clear by Dante’s use of the collective plural.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vital
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscuraj
Che la diritta via era smarrita
Midway along the journey of our life
I found myself within a gloomy wood
For the right pathway had been lost to view.
Note well the shift in pronouns, the combination of the plural possessive – our life – and the first person singular - I found myself. Dante’s predicament is ours too. We are in life’s journey together. We share a common story with Dante, and Dante is sharing his experience with us. Not Dante alone, but all of us together. Human beings are social beings. That simple but profound truth from Aristotle cannot be repeated too often (and Dante was a good Aristotelian). We need a public life and a social infrastructure in order to individuate ourselves. We suffer as distinct individuals but we suffer collectively, too, as a society, as a result of departing from the right road:
se'l mondo presente disvia in voi e la cagione;
"If the present world goes off the road — in you (you all) is the cause" (Purg. xvi, 82-83).
As I say above, the demons to be beaten arise from within ourselves, and within our societies, from our failure to order love and direct desire to the proper object. It's the failure to put love, knowledge and reason together. The world is good. We need to enjoy it, not consume it out of desire for fame, fortune and mere transitory pleasures.
As Rousseau cautioned in his Social Contract:
“The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It has to be to made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear to it, to show it the good road it is looking for and to protect it from the seduction of particular wills.”
Rousseau understood well the complications of this question, producing the seemingly paradoxical formulation of ‘the general will’ as a resolution. The pedants of philosophy will point out that will is particular, and ask how it could be general? Rousseau was as analytical and logical as any philosopher, and had a lot more besides. Kant called him ‘the Newton of the moral world’ for a very good reason indeed. Rousseau understood that the true and the good cannot just be given, they have to be willed if they are to be acted upon and realized, which is surely the point of story-telling as moral, educative, directive … That’s what stories are about in Dante and in Tolkien, the apprehension of moral and psychic truth, and the affirmation that such things are truly real, and not merely ‘made-up.’
Rousseau intended this as an invitation to an education in civic virtue and fraternal love among citizens. So, too, did Dante for that matter.
When nature finds herself in ill accord
With fortune, her effects are always ill —
Like any other seed sown out of place.
And if the world down there would but take heed
Of the foundation nature has prepared
And follow that it would have goodly folk.
But you will turn to the religious life
One born to bear a sword, and make a king
Of one more fitted to write homilies,
So that your track strays from the proper road.
(Par VIII, 139-148)
I am currently putting the finishing touches to my book on Dante and The Sweet Symphony of Paradise, a book which shows Dante’s relevance in an age of environmental catastrophe and moral confusion (and relevance in every age, frankly). Read closely, Dante's conservative case for right ordering modeled on nature and human nature is remarkably subversive, not only of the medieval institutions of Church and Empire, but of the capitalist order. If Dante denied that virtue and nobility was heredity, he also denied that such things were dependent on wealth. That's work to come. I will be writing on Rousseau, too, in the coming year or so. In the meantime, I offer my book on Tolkien and the power of story-telling. It all fits together … get on the good road!