Eco-Nalogies: An Introduction
In Albert Camus’ existentialist masterpiece, The Stranger, there lurks a curmudgeonly old man, Salamano, who is seen constantly beating and cursing at his dog. Salamano’s neighbor, the protagonist Meursault, reflects upon how strange is Salamano’s abuse, and how rapidly it shifts to a nostalgic love once Salamano’s dog passes away. Both the master and his pet looked much alike: Old, disease-ridden, trampled inside and out, tired. But the dog dies, and Salamano does not know how to live without him.
Personally, I did not find The Stranger to be especially enlightening when compared to other works of its stature. But that tragic figure of Salamano sticks out in my mind even now, like a pesky burr caught inside the lip of your boot. Why did he abuse the dog so greatly when it was alive? Why did it take the dog’s death for him to realize how much he needed him all along?
To me, Salamano and his dog functions as a metaphor for human beings and the complex biological framework through which we (often recklessly) struggle to emerge. In the midst of this struggle, we kick our nature, curse its inexorable stubbornness, but when that nature has been silenced and overcome, we do not know what else to do with ourselves. We are as a prisoner murdering their jailer, then curling up and lying still, unwilling to leave our unlocked cell.
I once knew a laboratory scientist who expressed to me her wish that she didn’t have to worry about meeting her own biological needs. No eating (unless for pleasure), sleeping, urinating, exercising, yawning, etc. (I did get her to concede that sneezing could stay.) When I probed her about each of these functions individually, I got the sense from her that it wasn’t the qualities of each one that bothered her, but rather the idea that we are beholden to them sans consent. That she had to sleep, even when staying awake would be so much more productive. That she had to die, and so much of the knowledge she had gained would die with her. She enjoyed recreational sex, but resented any suggestion that her particular appetites were in any way tied to her biological substrate.
In many ways, I believe that many of us have grown to become like that scientist. We might accept the need for sleep, but curse the existence of interpersonal prejudice. We might accept the need for breathing, but hate the words that come out of others’ mouths when they do. Like Salamano, we angrily beat and abuse our own mangy, disobedient dog, and we won’t comprehend how deeply we miss him until he is dead.
I used to wrestle in high school. I was quite talented at it from the start, but my real breakthrough came about only once I began training in judo as well. Another wrestler might be able to foresee and thwart my grappling-based attacks, but would be nearly defenseless against my more judo-informed throws and footwork. Similarly, in the few times I competed in judo tournaments, my greatest successes came from wrestling my opponent, by putting them on unstable ground on which I had practiced, and they had not. What I learned from all this is that while specialization has its strong points, so too does it sometimes limit our perspective, restrains our possibilities into a tiny box and thus suffocates them.
As a novelist with a background in ecology, I have tried to keep this perspective always in mind. Though a product of such seemingly-unrelated fields, my writing is strongest when tethered to my ecological know-how, and my understanding of the natural world is most precise when tied to the exploration of humanness that I find in books. I may not be the most accomplished writer—And certainly not the most accomplished ecologist!—but when I hold these strengths in tension with one another, I know that I am a force to be reckoned with.
Hegel once wrote that, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history,” and I fear that he is right. But, in comparing our past to where we are now, I cannot help but wonder if we really have not improved; if not through learning, then at least by trial and error. We take ninety-nine steps back, but only after we have taken a hundred forward. We must have learned something, haven’t we?
When you examine this question from the lens of statistics, it seems irrefutable that what is ‘good’ in humanity has multiplied, and what is most ‘evil’ or at least unfortunate in us has faded to the background; not gone, but certainly unable to widely proliferate. Starvation goes down, poverty goes down, violence goes down… Why, then, must I retain this gnawing feeling that for all of these improvements, we ourselves have not grown more enlightened; that, for all our progress, we ourselves are as lost as ever, if not more so. When a man two thousand years ago spoke out against slavery, we view him as a hero (and rightly so), but who among us nowadays does not already know that slavery is evil? When an idea becomes commonplace, it no longer grants moral authority to those who hold it. It is not so much that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, as trembling upon them, pissing mildly into the wind. The more refined our collective moral substrate has become, the less chance we have to grasp fresh morality for ourselves.
As a scientist, my brain wrestles less with why, than with how this change has come about. The answer to why is always the same: Because those who didn’t, died before passing on their genes. Or, more exactly, that those societies who held up the better angels of our nature have succeeded over those who fed only our darkness. Even if we permit the notion that we have indeed become more moral individually over time, can it really be argued that this moral growth has kept pace with that of our societies? Even Socrates believed in certain forms of slavery, but condemning slavery today does not a Socrates make.
The best hypothesis that I can arrive at is that our search for justice succeeds more on a population-level than it does for individuals. Or, rather, that evolution itself caters to the progress of many, over the progress of one. But if the many is merely a collection of lots of little ‘ones,’ then wouldn’t these trends prove identical? The only possible conclusion is that society is not just a haphazard collection of each individual, but is imbued with certain emergent characteristics that disappear when you look too close. The concept of death itself supports this hypothesis, for one can scarcely call death ‘good’ for the individual, but nevertheless must acknowledge its necessity in furthering our collective progress. Evolution, it seems, presupposes this emergent hierarchy. But how exactly does it do so?
In my life experiences traveling to many parts of the globe and meeting people from all strata of society, I have learned that nearly everyone values the same terminal goals: Family, peace, love, acceptance, etc. Where we differ, is the aims we take to reach them. Some of these particular aims might objectively be labeled ‘better’ than others, either by measure of their success, or by the ethical standards of the means used to achieve it, but what if the full algorithm does not neatly spit out some optimal answer (Forty-two!) that lies at the heart of each goal-seeking endeavor? What if the answer is more akin to a tension between each instrumental value, where minus-one and one do not make zero, but i, a value that exists not at all on an individual basis, but only through its constituent parts? What if the answer is not freedom or security, progressivism or conservatism, but rather that the tension between them is itself the answer?
If your goal in reading these essays is to be reassured of your own moral rightness, then I suggest you stop reading now. Through these Eco-Nalogies, my aim is not to declare a winner and a loser of some personal morality contest, but rather to elucidate how there are no winners and losers, only the act of wrestling. Unlike poor Salamano, I want us to awaken and realize our folly before we have beaten the dog to death, where we may still nurse it back to health and learn why it so misbehaves and insists on aggravating us. We are about to enter a portal where minus-one and one cease to exist, and the imaginary and complex is all that matters.
Welcome.