Behold! Life!

Is life a miracle to behold or a problem to be solved and something to be explained?

I have enjoyed reading Wendell Berry's book, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. It is a passionate critique and response to E.O. Wilson's book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

[A brief and helpful summary is in Kirkus Reviews].

Berry is a poet, farmer, and former professor. He takes umbrage at Wilson's scientism and reductionism, which Berry considers to present an impoverished view of life, nature, and the university.

Berry has lived and worked on a farm for decades while writing. I cannot imagine doing this, as I am impractical. The passages below [page 45] gave me insight into what he is trying to achieve.

"In all of the thirty-seven years I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being as I am. My success, as I well know, has been poor enough, and yet I am glad of the effort, for it has helped me to make, and to remember always, the distinction between reduction and the thing reduced..."

“But, when I try to make my language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.”

Berry taught at a university for many years but eventually became disillusioned for reasons discussed in his essay, The Loss of the University.

My sense of awe and wonder at nature

 On most mornings I go for a walk with my dog, Priya in the parkland near my house. Originally this daily ritual had pragmatic motivations: exercising both me and the dog, clearing my head for the day ahead, and promoting good mental health. Over time this activity has been enriched by my observation and contemplation of the natural world. I see flowers, trees, a creek, birds, and water dragons. Two beautiful rainbow lorikeets emerge from their nest inside the trunk of a gum tree and fly off chirping. A large water dragon looks like a miniature dinosaur as it lumbers out of my path and plunges into the safety of the creek. Priya and I clamber down the banks of the creek and hop over it where it narrows and make our way through a grove of majestic bamboo trees that creak in the wind. I notice how the different trees near the creek produce an impressionist image of a range of shades of green. I am delighted to see how some of these trees have produced beautiful yellow flowers. I catch a glimpse of a kookaburra standing still contemplating its environment before it sleekly flies off in a straight line with a slightly undulating height, so unlike the random flight path of swallows.

And then there is Priya. Sometimes she walks faithfully by my side. Other times she passionately sprints in random directions, just for the sheer pleasure of it. She smells practically everything. She experiences a whole reality that I am oblivious to. These walks can be a source of joy, awe, and wonder. Nature is amazing.

If you did not grow up in Australia, you may think that some of our wildlife is weird, cute, and fascinating: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, echidnas, wombats, and platypi. Even though they are very familiar to me, seeing a kangaroo hop along is still a delight. Until this year I had never seen a platypus in the wild. When I finally saw one from a viewing platform in a National Park I stood mesmerised as I watched this cute little creature swim and dive, while searching for food on the bottom of the creek. My heart sang. But, why?

While at university I began taking bushwalking trips in wilderness areas with friends. The trips lasted for three to fourteen days, camping and carrying all our supplies.  Within a few hours' drive of Canberra, there is a multitude of national parks, each with distinct landscapes and ecosystems. They range from stone-covered river beds at the bottom of deep canyons to alpine areas covered in fields of wildflowers. Why did I find it so enthralling? I encountered beauty. I had a sense of wonder how there was something here that stood outside the rapidly changing world of the city. Human history and personal achievements really did not matter in the wilderness. Looking over a grand vista there was a sense of our own smallness and insignificance. I had an insatiable desire for more and developed a mentality that bushwalking was my default method of relaxing and the only way I could recover from mental and emotional exhaustion.

What is it about our experiences of nature that are so special and significant? What is the origin of the awe and wonder? What produces feelings of resonance, joy, and delight? There is mystery. 

To me, speaking somewhat scientifically, the sound of a bubbling brook is "white noise" and not that different from the sound produced by a highway full of cars. But, the effect on me of the creek and the highway is very different. Walking beside a bubbling brook is delightful, calming, energising, and peaceful. Walking beside the road is stressful, tiring, and just plain yucky. Why the difference?

The mystery in my encounters with nature hints at something greater than me, something that may complete me, and something that might place my life in a grander story.

There are two things to make sense of here, nature and my response to it. How do we describe and interpret nature? How do we interpret our experience of it? There are a range of perspectives we can bring to bear. On nature, there are the perspectives of biology and ecology, ranging from genetics to how climate change affects individual species. At what scale we look at the phenomena is a matter of what questions we are asking. Our personal response to nature can be viewed through a kaleidoscope of perspectives: biological, psychological, sociological, experiential, aesthetic, and religious. The representation and communication of our experiences can be expressed in art, music, poetry, and literature. All of these may provide a window into the reality of the natural world and our relation to it.

Here, I want to explore hints of transcendence. There is something going on that is beyond DNA, physical appearances, ecology, biological evolution, and the social conditioning of aesthetics. 

Through the ages, human encounters with nature have produced rich and diverse perspectives. In reaction to the rise of scientific descriptions of natural phenomena: from Newtonian mechanics to Darwinian evolution, the eighteenth century, saw the rise of romanticism, which valued the intense emotional experience of individuals' encounters with nature.

Negative sentiments concerning natural philosophy (science) is captured in the poem, Lamia written by John Keats in 1819. 

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

This negative sentiment about science is countered by Richard Dawkins in his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. He contends that science reveals rather than conceals the true beauty of the natural world. A softer perspective is that of Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, and an advocate of religious naturalism.

For me, my experience of awe and wonder hints at transcendence. But this is not my only feeling. There is also a sense of violation and lament as I see natural beauty being defiled and destroyed. Last week, the creek I walk by each day was flooded by sewage and became black. It was so polluted that dead fish appeared on the banks. The creek smelled so bad I changed my walking route for a few days to avoid the stench. There are countless other violations that grieve me: ancient forests being felled, wilderness areas flooded, wildlife losing their home, and fields of alpine wildflowers killed by late snow dumps resulting from climate change. To me, this sense of violation has a transcendent dimension. It hints that there is intrinsic value in nature and that there is a morality associated with how humans interact with it.

What is awe and wonder?

 At times when I contemplate nature, science, humanity, and Biblical texts I have a sense of awe and wonder. What do I mean by that? I know it when I feel it but it is hard to describe in words.

Members of my family have been reading Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder, and things that sustain you when the world goes dark, by Julia Baird. In this memoir, she intersperses descriptions of her own experiences of awe and wonder, her struggle with cancer, scientific studies on the value of encounters with nature, her struggles with churches, her own faith, and what all this may mean for a fulfilling life. She includes quotations from famous people that I found helpful in considering how might define and characterise awe and wonder. 

Awe makes us stop and stare. Awe humbles us, gives us perspective, and makes us aware that the world is unfathomably larger than ourselves.

Wonder makes us stop and ask questions about the world.

Here are quotes from Einstein, Adam Smith, and Rachel Carson.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

Adam Smith was a moral philosopher and the founder of modern economics. He said that wonder occurs

“when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance.”

This wonder can be felt physically, characterised by

‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’.

Adam Smith, A History of Astronomy

“Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties or mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life… Their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” 

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

To me this is a hint of transcendence. There is something going on and behind this which goes beyond material reality and what we can quantify, control, and describe.