FOR PASSION 

by 

ERIC LAIRD BRATTAIN 

A THESIS 

Presented to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program: Environmental Studies 
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 
for the degree of 

Master of Science 

June 1994 



11 

"For Passion," a thesis prepared by Eric Laird Brattain in partial fulfillment of 

the requirements for the Master of Science degree in the Interdisciplinary 

Studies Program: Environmental Studies. This thesis has been approved and 

accepted by: 

Glen A. Love, Co-chair of the Examining Committee 

C. A. Bowers, Co-chair of the Examining Committee 

Date 

Committee in charge: Glen A. Love 
C. A. Bowers 
Richard Chaney 

Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School 



111 

Eric Laird Brattain 

An Abstract of the Thesis of 

for the degree of Master of Science 

in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program: Environmental Studies 

to be taken 

Approved: 
Glen A. Love, Co-chair 

C. A. Bowers, Co-chair 

June 1994 

In recent years, a great deal of attention has been focused on the quality 

of public education in the United States. Teachers, parents, students, and the 

public in general are growing increasingly frustrated and cynical: teachers are 

weary of students who don't seem to care about their education and parents 

who don't seem to care about their children; students are tired of feeling like 

nobody cares about them and the world they are inheritirlg; parents and the 

public are alarmed by the results of public education and the atmosphere of 

our schools, and their dissatisfaction is demonstrated by increasing reluctance 

to finance education. 

This paper explores the relationship between education and the 

ecological crisis, and how this crisis, which is primarily one of culture and its 

unexamined beliefs, can be utilized to revitalize students· passion and engage 

them in the learning process by addressing the imperatives of our time. 



CURRICULUM VITA 

NAME OF AUTHOR: Eric Laird Brattain 

. PLACE OF BIRTH: Eglin Air Force Base, Florida 

DATE OF BIRTH: March 30, 1961 

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: 

University of Oregon 
Menlo College, California 

DEGREES AWARDED: 

Master of Science, in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program: 
Environmental Studies, 1994, University of Oregon 

iv 

Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education, 1990, University of Oregon 
Bachelor of Science in Journalism, 1983, University of Oregon 

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: 

Environmental Education in the Language Arts Classroom 

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 

Substitute Teacher, Forest Grove and Banks, Oregon, 1993-94 

Teacher, American Literature, Sheldon High School, Eugene, Oregon, 
Spring 1993 

Substitute Teacher, Eugene, Oregon, 1991-93 



V 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

The author gratefully recognizes the influence of Professors Glen Love, 

Chet Bowers, David Flinders, and Richard Chaney upon his thinking and 

writing. Moreover, he wishes to express his sincere appreciation for their 

work and roles in their respective fields of endeavor. They are important and 

inspirational. 



vi 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. PLACE . . . . . .. . . .. ... . . .. . .. . . .. ....... . . .... .. .... . ... . .. 1 

II. POLITTCS ............................................... 27 

Notes .. . ............. . ... .. .... . . . . .. ... . . ... . .... . ... 43 

ill. PEOPLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 

IV. PERSPECTIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 

Notes .................... . .... . ...... .. . . .... . . . .. ..... 85 

V. PASSION ............ . .............................. . ... 86 

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 
Notes . . .. . . ..... . ... . . .. .... . .... ... . .. . . .. . .. . . . .... 153 

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 



1 

CHAPTER! 

PLACE 

Monkey Face Ranch borders the rimrock that marks the former level of 

the Crooked River. The ranch house was built right there, on the edge of the 

rimrock, where its inhabitants can see far down into the gorge of this Central 

Oregon river--upstream, downstream, and across--to a mind-boggling 

assortment of rock formations that draw climbers from around the world. 

Smith Rocks they are called, though I can't see why they should be named 

after anyone called Smith. The Smith of legend certainly didn't discover 

them, much less have anything to do with their creation. No, the rocks, if 

they are to have a name, should probably bear the name of their creators, in 

which case they would be called "Wind and Rain and River Rocks," or 

perhaps, "Crooked River Weather Rocks." The Crooked River, after all, is 

very crooked. It would not surprise me a bit if it was called Crooked River by 

the animals who frequent it--deer, bear, cougar; pigeon, heron, and crow; 

crawdads, salamanders, and salmon; a billion bugs; and more. At the very 

least, that is, if the rocks must bear the proper name of some human being or 

beings, then that honor should go to the one, or to the group, who first 

happened upon their extraordinary form. Whoever those people were, I 

doubt very much that any of them were called Smith. 

Monkey Face Ranch gets its name from one of the "Smith" rocks. 

There is a rock, a massive, dome-shaped rock bigger than the biggest capitol 



2 

building domes, that, when viewed from the ranch or most anywhere else on 

the southeast side of the rocks, looks very much like the profile of a monkey's 

head. I have tried, on occasion, to imagine how deep into the earth this rock 

would have to extend in order to match that head with a body of proper 

proportion. The first thing I notice in doing so is that my imagination is not 

that vast, or it is vastly out of practice. 

Mostly, I think, it is the latter. Along with most everyone else, save 

children, my imagination is out of practice, and perhaps too, a bit 

underdeveloped in the first place. I'll be damned if I haven't been stifled. 

Somewhere along the way I learned that certain things are just this way and 

it's not your job to do anything about them even if you could, which you 

can't, so don't waste your time thinking about it. That is, imagination and 

creativity are not what get you ahead in this world. They might help you get 

a job, a promotion, or a contract, but they are not what life is about. 

Who taught me that?! 

Back at the ranch, I'm on edge, literally and figuratively. Sitting on the 

big back deck, a long wooden structure that actually surrounds the house, I 

nearly overhang the rimrock. The tips of tall pines reach just over the edge 

from the small riverside meadow two hundred feet below. With a long pair 

of pruning shears I could probably top one some winter day and have a 

perfect Christmas tree. But would the tree prefer I took one of its saplings 

rather than its own fragile crown? Is that an important question? I roll along 

the smooth deck in my wheelchair, one end to the other and back, ears and 

eyes alert to sound and movement all around. A hawk appears just above 

the bunkhouse and begins an upward spiral: smooth, spread-winged, 



3 

carefully tottering on rising currents. Soon it is high overhead, and with a 

single half-flap sends itself across the canyon, over jutting Smith Rocks, and 

out of sight. On the floor of the gorge a Great Blue Heron powers low over 

the water and lands gently, gracefully, in the rippling shallows. Then, with 

the awkward dignity of a one-~egged war hero on parade, it stalks the 

shoreline, peering intently into its rustling flow. Over the meadow a flock of 

pigeons weaves its way, up and down, inside and out, in a spiraling game of 

follow the leader. From time to time they fly in to the cliff and land near a 

small waterfall that streams down the rimrock. Abruptly, they begin their 

game again; a single all-white bird is in their midst. Splashing sounds come 

from the sparkling river as several ducks take off for a short flight upstream 

where they play and poke around. And beneath my chair, a baby lizard 

scampers across the wood, stops dead, then squeezes between two planks and 

is gone. Other lizards bask on the sun-warmed rocks below, doing "push­

ups," and spinning dreams. 

But as close as I am to the beauty of this river, its canyon, and the 

creatures who live to play and dream here, I am also nearly as close to the 

sounds, sights, and smells of civilization. Along with the deer who step 

cautiously across the golf course-green lawn, there occasionally appear cows 

that have escaped their nearby pastures. They show only mild interest when I 

open the door and "moo." They are used to me, or people like me; and like 

me, they are accustomed as well to the rising and falling drone of the big-rigs 

forever passing their fields, day and night, on nearby Highway 97. The cows 

remind me of what is on the other side of the house, only a few miles away. 

And that puts me on edge too. 



4 

Sometimes I think it's going to put me over the edge--that world out 

there, where I spend most of my time. I only get to Monkey Face Ranch once 

or twice a year now, for a weekend or so. I used to come here more often, 

when I lived nearby. Under big open skies and through air fresh off the 

Cascades_ I thought it worth the 19 country miles from Prineville. I'd saddle 

up my Chevy, point it to the west, and glide over here without reason. 

Besides being an exceptional setting for croquet, gin and tonics, and sleeping 

outdoors, it is a great place just to be, to just be. It is also a great place to climb 

to high places, like right to the top of the monkey's head. From there or from 

anywhere else near the top of Smith rocks the house is almost hard to see, 

tucked in as it is to the junipers and sage, and itself the color of wood. 

Besides, it's a long ways down, and across. I don't get to that side of the river 

any more though, which makes me sad, nor do I come here often enough. 

My Central Oregon days ended almost eight years ago when I moved 

back to my roots, the Willamette Valley, where I was in a little deeper. I was 

back in Eugene, between jobs, and not really looking forward to the one 

toward which I was headed, when I broke my neck horsing around in my 

backyard. I was wrestling with a friend, playing like the kid I had learned to 

be--but I was no longer a kid. At the age of 27, I had been up all night, dancing 

and drinking, "playing" in the playground of adults--a bar. The games had 

spilled over into the daylight, and then into the backyard. Concerned about 

his exuberant spirit, I cautioned my friend before we began to grapple: "Let's 

be a little careful. I wouldn't want to chip a tooth." But we had long since 

moved beyond being a little careful that night, as I had used little caution in 

my life or with my time throughout my adult years. My teeth, it is now very 



clear, should have been amongst the least of my worries, that morning, or in 

general. 

5 

That was six years ago. I think I had been gunning for a wake-up call, 

something to help me focus on what I did want to do, but that, perhaps, was a 

little more than I expected. I spent the next three and a half months in the 

hospital while my body healed and strengthened and my mind, my heart, and 

my soul began the adjustment to living with new limits. By the time I was 

discharged I could walk short distances, but the struggle would leave me 

shaking, exhausted, and unable to walk a step further. My life, physically, was 

forever changed. Now when I come here I don't get to cross the river and 

climb, or even play croquet on what must be one of the greenest lawns east of 

the Cascades. But my life--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually--has 

changed forever too. I'm in a place inside that I'd rather be, which is not to 

say it feels entirely peaceful. But I am at peace with myself, or more so, 

anyway, than I was seven or eight or ten years ago. What I am not at peace 

with is this world, this world that's driving all creatures to the edge, this 

world of human beings. 

Nor do I think I should be. Actually, I haven't been at peace with the 

world since I was a kid. I was mad enough when my father's plane was 

destroyed in Vietnam, but as I grew up (I was six when he died) and learned 

more about that war than the body counts and "official" reports I used to read 

in the newspaper, I began building some rage. The thing was, I didn't even 

know it at the time. I was hurt and angry and frustrated but I didn't know 

where to direct it, so it settled in me and settled me in to a state of general 

disillusionment instead. Worse yet, I didn't really even recognize that. I was 



disillusioned and didn't know it, in junior high and jaded. I had taken 

legitimate anger and appropriate frustration with a screwed up world and let 

it mess with me instead of me messing with it. Like everyone else I knew-­

my mother, my relatives and my teachers, not to mention the media, the 

politicians and the preachers--! was trying to "accept" what had happened: 

6 

my loss, our loss. Somewhere in all of this there was a message of 

inevitability. It wasn't as if anyone was saying it was okay; some people, in 

fact, were raising hell and saying I told you so. But generally there was a 

feeling that it probably couldn't be helped; or what were we supposed to do; or 

it's over now so let's not dwell on it, let's get past it, let's accept it, let's heal 

the wounds. Maybe it hurt too much. Maybe it was too complicated. Maybe 

we had better things (easier things) to do. All I know for sure is that I didn't 

do anything with my anger. I just accepted that lousy things happen--people 

are corrupt, governments do the wrong things for even worse reasons, that 

"the system" is far from perfect. And that little was being done about it. It 

certainly didn't seem to be much of an issue at school, where I was supposed 

to be learning. To do what? Make a difference? Make sure we didn't make 

the same mistakes again, or even worse mistakes? 

More like get by, is the way I remember it. Thinking back to high 

school, that time when minds are eager but easily scattered, I recall not one 

instance of a teacher relating what was being taught to something of 

importance in the outside world, not one single attempt to apply the 

experience of learning to the world at large or to an issue that called for 

action. What does remain boldly in my memory is from a section in a 

psychology class. We read from the book Creative Dreaming, not only 



7 

because the teacher wanted us to learn to interpret our dreams, but because he 

wanted us to be able to control them, to dream lucidly, to deal unconsciously 

with our fears, our demons. He wanted us to be healthier as individuals. He 

wanted to help us get by. This is not a criticism of the man or his intention, 

for there is little we can do on the outside if_ we are not at peace on the inside. 

But as the strongest memory I have of learning, it says much about our 

priorities at the time. 

Well I got by all right. Very well, in fact. I excelled at school-­

academically, socially, athletically. My high school teachers thought I was 

"very well adjusted," meaning that like most of the other kids I played the 

game, didn't rock the boat, accepted things as they were. Accepted things as 

they were! And why not? My teachers did. The principal did. We were 

wallowing--yes, even then in the late 70's--in a world deep in economic and 

social injustices, environmental disregard, nuclear proliferation, and more. 

But that was not exactly the concern of the people who were (or were 

supposed to be) the most profound influence on my "formative" years. 

And while I let go of the past, that is, became adjusted--"well adjusted," 

I couldn't shake it clean free. I began eventually and gradually to notice that I 

was disillusioned, that while I could often enjoy happiness, I was as 

frequently, if not concurrently, aware of a deep dissatisfaction with the way 

the people in my world--my Western world of politicians, preachers, teachers, 

parents, and leaders of all sorts--were able to pay only lip service to, if not 

ignore altogether, the many issues and problems that seemed to me more 

important than the things with which they genuinely concerned themselves. 

Perhaps, despite all that those around me unwittingly did to distract me from 



8 

it, my disillusionment was rising to the surface where it was uttered in words 

and acts of discontent. I became a little more critical of what I read' and heard 

than most of my friends, a little more cynical, and a little more outspoken. I 

realized at last that I had once been very angry and for good reason, but had 

relegated that anger to_a sort of benign disregard, something that I could live 

with, if a little unhappily, but for reasons unknown. It was an escape, a 

retreat down a path beaten clear by so many before me, others, who like me 

did not know where to go with their anger but away, backwards, or at the very 

least, nowhere. 

Well I'm coming back now. The 1970's were a long time ago, and it's 

taken me this long, but I'm through with accepting. I'm still disillusioned, as 

there is much that disenchants, but not at the expense of my anger. That I 

hold on to: my anger and my determination not to be subdued, stifled, or 

silenced. That path is old, hardened, and fruitless; it is time, I think, to wear 

some new paths. Paths that don't back down or go around but which 

approach head-on, or from the side, the top, the bottom--from any and every 

angle; paths that encircle, that wind and twist and double back on themselves; 

such creative approaches to the things there before us that they can worm 

their way through the hardest soil and leave it open and accessible and ready 

for good weather. 

I didn't really start coming back until after my spinal cord injury. I 

wanted to start up a new path, or at least find one headed in the right 

direction, for quite a while beforehand, but I wasn't looking in the right 

places. I think I knew where to look, but I might have been a little afraid to 

look hard and long enough, afraid of the challenge, the responsibility. I 



9 

realized consciously just weeks before my injury something I had sensed 

even as a student: that the path for me to take was in the direction of 

education, of teaching. After all, it was education and educators, I was 

beginning to realize, that had failed a generation by separating learning from 

living and people from planet. When the closest your education ever comes 

to steering you toward the problems of the real world is showing you how to 

balance a checkbook in the mandatory course "Marriage and the Family," you 

know it is drastically out of touch with its purpose, regardless of its 

underlying philosophy. If we were ever going to make this world a better 

place, I thought, we would have to start with its kids, which is why I was so 

nonplussed by what otherwise would have looked like a great job 

opportunity in advertising. Instead it depressed me. "What good is that 

going to do anybody?" I asked myself. I tried to think of it as a stepping stone 

to something useful, and it might have been, but the odds were against that 

and I knew it. So when I broke my neck and the Department of Vocational 

Rehabilitation offered to "retrain" me, I jumped at the chance to get into 

education. Here was one of the paths that needed some widening, that other 

paths might emerge within it and diverge from it toward the challenges that 

abound around us. Here was where imagination needed to build a nest, that 

it might hatch a world of ideas in a species that more than anything else 

needs some new, and perhaps as much, some old beginnings. 

The course work is done now: classes in educational theory, teaching 

strategies, classroom management, assessing reading skills, teaching writing 

and many more. I took them all, was certified to teach "language arts" to fifth 

through twelfth graders, and moved on to an advanced degree. Now, while I 



finish my masters program, I substitute teach for the experience, and of 

course, the income. I'm in the classroom still, but now I'm the teacher, not 

the student. 

Or am I? 

10 

There's certainly a lot to learn here, not just about teaching, but about 

the young human beings who treat this place like anything but opportunity. 

They do not share, it seems to me, the sense of what it means to be alive-­

neither the exigency nor the peace--that I notice among the creatures around 

Monkey Face. In fact, they remind me of myself when I was their age. 

Back at Monkey Face I sit on the weathering wooden deck and ponder 

the lack of purpose I feel in the lives and attitudes of the kids I teach. It is not 

just one group, for I teach different kids almost every time I'm called to 

substitute. Nor are they miserable or unenthused, one and all. But they sure 

don't take to their lives with urgency, and this confounds me a bit. Don't 

they know? 

Sitting here in this deepening violet evening I am reminded of a time, 

long ago, when I stood with a friend behind a sheet of rain water that spilled 

from clogged gutters overhead. Huge drops pounded the roof and poured 

over the side, while behind it we shared an odd sensation. It must have been 

the motion, the steady stream of water before us that formed a screen on 

which our dim reflections danced in jerky, uneven movements. For together 

we agreed at that moment that our lives--life itself--seemed like a movie, 

revealing itself scene by scene, the frames themselves passing too quickly to 

hold or freeze or really know, but affecting us nonetheless with an eerie sense 

of being actors in our own lives. It was a brief glimpse, a brief shared glimpse 



11 

into a way of knowing that changed me. Not all at once, but the sense of that 

moment has never let me forget that I am the actor of my life, that in this 

movie, I am the lead. 

So like the other creatures who rely on this place to sustain them, I take 

my role seriously. I realize now under this deep bruis_ed sky that my 

recollection of the movie screen of water began taking shape with this 

morning's unusual sunrise. Day dawns suddenly here, for the rocks they call 

Smith loom large to the east and prohibit any sun from striking the ranch till, 

at once, it is not only morning, but day. Meanwhile, in the meadow below 

the rimrock, morning remains. The broad rocky shadow that only moments 

before gave way to the rising sun where I sit is just now beginning its descent 

to the riverbed, where it will lie cool and tranquil beneath the flow till 

evening conjures it again. It draws an uneven line across the east-facing cliff 

on which I am perched--the outline of one cliff projected onto the face of 

another. The shadow drops lower and lower until soon there appear patches 

of sunshine on the dewy morning meadow far below, while silhouettes of the 

larger peaks keep much of the meadow in relative darkness. Another day is 

unfolding on a land that never slept. Before long the sun will bear directly on 

the river which hugs the far cliffs, the last place every morning to receive its 

silent golden issue. 

As the earth continues its spin, the sun moves farther overhead, and 

the increments we call hours pass lazily for me. I am engaged, but by my 

surroundings, not by the fast-action, time-accelerating things I am accustomed 

to at home, so the day moves slowly, the way days actually move. Eventually, 

though, the inexorable revolution of the earth leaves the sun at my back and 



12 

places me and my side of the river in its shadow. And now, instead of 

disappearing before me as it did this morning, the shadow spreads· away from 

me, as if to return to some secret cave in the rocks, where, until morning, it 

will gather in the darkness it holds against the sun's return. There are no 

obstructions, however, on this side of the river, no massive, jutting rocks, so 

the broad shadow spreads in an even line, down the rimrock, across the 

cooling meadow and through the rippling river, and then gradually begins 

edging up the cliffs and filling the crannies of the Smith Rocks themselves. 

With the sky above still bright, the river basin below seems almost under 

darkness of night, so marked is the contrast. The climbing shadow seems to 

stall in its ascent of the opposing cliff for a while, and with the sun so low on 

the western horizon, the trees lining my side of the rimrock appear in its 

upper fringe. I can even pick out individual pines and junipers and 

distinguish their silhouettes on the cliffs more than two hundred yards away. 

If I had really big hands, I think whimsically, I could put on one of those 

projector shows. But the show, I soon realize, is already in progress, and 

today's performance is building to its climax even as the shadow closes on the 

stage. 

The shadow has stalled. The rimrock on my side of the gorge is clearly 

outlined, trees and all, midway up the far cliffs. The sun has set below this 

immediate horizon, shading the meadow and the river below. But higher up 

on the cliffs, on the monkey's face itself and on the faces of the other high 

peaks, the sun still shines brightly. The rimrock may have shaded the gorge, 

but the higher peaks will see the sun until the Cascades far to the west spin 

round to block their view. The sun's angle is very low now though, and the 



13 

detail in the cliffs disappears in the glare. Where they are sheer, they appear 

almost white, while the other rocks appear flat, tawny, and unspectacular. 

This impression is only momentary though, as short-lived as the position of 

the earth in relation to the sun. Soon the glare is gone, but the rocks do not 

return to their previous, earthy daytime colors. Instead, they seem to be 

heating up. They begin to glow and take on an orange hue that highlights 

every detail, every shade, every shadow one rock casts upon another. Each 

pinnacle, each towering spire takes on a life its own, stands out over the 

gorge, and grows. Details continue to emerge even as darkness approaches 

until, suddenly, the stone faces blush. Like a sailor in a sunset, the faces of 

these awesome and massive volcanic remnants blush and blush until their 

ruddy complexion turns to fire as the last bending rays of sunlight meet their 

cheeks. They shimmer in their glow and look as if they'll lose form 

altogether, returning to the molten state that brought them here so many 

million years ago. 

But it's over in a minute. Color drains from the face, the imperfections 

fade, and the shadow line is subsumed by a lighter shade that swallows all the 

land. That is the way it happens, on every clear day. Just before sunset, when 

the rocks turn red. 

Of that phenomenon I had been forewarned by my host, who insisted, 

unnecessarily, that I stay until I saw the rocks turn red. What I was not 

prepared for was the spectacle that occurred after dark. With all color gone 

from earth below and sky above, the first twinkling stars of evening are 

joined by thousands more that are visible to the naked eye in this lightly 

populated area. The air cools quickly, and despite the occasional and 



14 

inexplicable pocket of warmth that brushes by, I'm forced to put up the hood 

of my heavy cotton sweatshirt. I'm still fascinated by the colors I saw such a 

short time ago, and am left trying to decide where they really were. Were 

those the colors of the sun or of the rocks? What was energizing what up 

there? I try to recall my physics and remember that the colo_r of a thing has to 

do with the frequencies of visible light that it absorbs and those that it reflects, 

which in turn depend on its composition. I remember too that the colors of a 

sunset are explained by roughly the same principles; that is, certain 

frequencies--red, orange, yellow--the lower ones, are scattered least by 

molecules in the atmosphere, so when the sun is low and the atmosphere its 

light passes through is thick, we see more and more orange, and eventually, 

red. 

But what, if anything, does all this add up to I wonder? The rocks had 

the capacity all along to reflect light of the frequency we call red; the fact that 

they turned red at sunset means only that there was less of the other 

frequencies to reflect to my eyes. Scattering the high frequency light in the 

atmosphere is just like color mixing: subtract the high-frequency blue from 

"white" or visible light and the complementary color that is left is yellow; 

subtract the violet and the complementary color is orange; when green is 

subtracted, we're left with magenta, all of which explains the brilliant salmon 

and crimson radiance of sunset. 

So what color does this mean the rocks are? Are they simply the color 

they reflect as all this physics would suggest? By day they have available to 

them all the colors of the spectrum, yet they appear in full light to be a rather 

pale, bleached tan. This is confounding. In reality, the color of the rocks is 



15 

neither in the rocks themselves nor in the light they reflect. Color is a 

physiological experience that occurs in the head when electromagnetic 

vibrations interact with structures in the retina called cones. Some animals, 

including humans with missing cones or "defective color vision," see no red 

at all. Color, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder! 

What, then, of the transforming beauty I witnessed earlier? No, not 

witnessed, but experienced. Where was the locus of the elevation of those 

rocks from the merely majestic or beautiful, to the sublime, as indeed they 

were in their fiery cloak? Was it in the rocks themselves, since by their 

composition they are able, under certain circumstances, to reflect frequencies 

of visible light that make them appear to be extraordinary? Was it in the 

light, because it did not present the rocks with those frequencies which, when 

reflected along with the red, would have made them appear less remarkable? 

Was it in the atmosphere, without which the full spectrum of light would 

have presented itself anyway? Was it in the earth itself, which, were it not 

revolving, would never have placed the sun at an angle so low that a portion 

of its light would be scattered in the first place? Or, since it was incumbent 

upon my eyes to perceive the colors, was the sublimity of those glowing red 

rocks resident only in me, in my mind? 

That, according to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 

Hegel, is the only place where the truly sublime exists. To Hegel, whose life 

spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nature is mere material for 

the mind. Spirit emerges through the act of the mind, and therefore exists 

only in the mind, not in nature. Nature is that which needs to be transmuted 

into art, which is an expression of the spirit, and it is through this process of 



16 

transmutation that spirit recuperates itself by creating that which is sublime. 

Nature has not been processed by the mind, so therefore is neither art, nor 

sublime. 

But Hegel's philosophy of the sublime raises some ques tions he could 

not have anticipated given his understanding of the relationship between the 

eyes and the mind. We know now, for example, that the cones in the retina 

are not connected directly to the optic nerve (and thus to the brain), but are 

connected to many other cells that are connected to each other. Yet while 

these cells are interconnected, only a few actually carry information to the 

optic nerve. A certain amount of information is therefore "digested" in the 

retina. Some of what we think of as brain function (or Hegel's "act of the 

mind"), actually occurs in the eye itself. The eye does some of our "thinking." 

This thinking is evidenced in one way by the iris, the colored part of 

the eye, which regulates the amount of light the pupil admits by expanding or 

contracting, depending on the intensity of the light. Interestingly enough, the 

relative size of the expansion or contraction is also related to our emotions. If 

we hear, taste, smell, feel, or see something that is pleasing to us, our pupils 

automatically increase in size, and the reverse is also true. Our bodies, it 

seems, react to what is already out there, prior to any "act of the mind." My 

irises, I am certain, expanded as I reveled in the rocks ablaze beyond the river. 

They were, to me, sublime, their transmutation performed not by my mind 

but by the sun, the atmosphere, the earth. 

Night is fully upon the land now, and if any pockets of warm mystery 

remain, they have chosen other haunts. Probably they have dissipated, 

spreading thin their abstruse energy, loading all the night with a hint of their 



17 

intrigue. Overhead and all around, reaching to every horizon, stars fill the 

void. They glow so low in the sky that the night is clearly round, not flat as it 

seems from my porch in the city. It's like being in a full-scale planetarium, 

without the mood music. An arid chill has settled on the desert and despite 

the silent beauty in every direction, I'm considering ending my experience of 

this day's spectacle. I take one last look across the gorge, as if to bid goodnight 

to the ponderous peaks, the fractured cliffs, the jumbled stones, and then turn 

away only to catch myself, as something in that dim obscured landscape has 

caught me too. I wheel around expecting something, but with vague 

foreboding, for the night has touched me and I don't know what could be 

there. At first I see nothing, except the dusky outline of the ridge. But then, 

where the ridge drops low to Asterisk Pass, I spot the gleam that must have 

fired in my visual periphery. And as I peer through the night, questioning its 

source, it grows and glows and grows again. From &ehind the saddle that is 

Asterisk Pass shines a light so bright it can only be the moon. It shines 

brighter as it climbs higher till the first gilded edge peeks over the ridge-line 

and reveals its celestial body. It inches its way forth and soon it is clear by its 

lines that this moon is not shaded by my earthen sphere. But as its first 

quarter clears the ridge it becomes clear that it is obscured by something. A 

little higher though, and the tables turn. The moon is not so much obscured; 

rather, it illuminates that which is in its foreground: the Asterisk itself, a 

gigantic boulder, a misshapen cube, its north side deformed, but balancing 

nonetheless on one precarious edge. It is the asterisk of Asterisk Pass, the 

boulder that marks the spot, and on this night it too is punctuated by the full 

moon rising directly behind it. 



18 

For the red rocks of evening I was prepared, even primed. For this I 

had no preparation, no expectation. But none could have readied me for the 

rare and dramatic image the moon presented that night. As it rose farther 

from the desert floor it engulfed the Asterisk, enveloping its form, outlining 

its shape. It revealed the delicate balance of sculpture on pedestal, of creation 

on place. It looked vulnerable, perilous, unstable. And it made me anxious. 

I watched until the moon cleared the huge rock--a matter of minutes-­

and then left the night behind. It had given me, already, much for my 

dreams to consume. Inside I wondered just how wobbly the Asterisk really is, 

for that, to be sure, is the way it looked in the full illumination of the moon. 

Could it be tipped, I asked reluctantly, by a few pranksters with a mind for 

mischief and a rudimentary knowledge of engineering? My fears were 

unfounded, I assured myself, partly because it had not already happened, and 

partly because to do it seemed so unconscionable that my fears must be 

preposterous. Yet I knew that vandals had already tipped over several of the 

volcanic capstones at a site on the nearby Metolius River. I knew that my 

downstream neighbor was fighting to develop his property into a resort that 

would sterilize this land in many ways. And I had seen all too many times in 

all too many places the maleficence of human presence on natural 

surroundings. The Asterisk may be secure, I decided, but it was no wonder I 

was anxious. 

I wake the next morning to knocking, and though I can't remember my 

dreams right off, I have the feeling that someone's been knocking in them as 

well. I can't imagine who it could be and yell "Who is it?" as I climb from 

bed. There is no answer. "Who is it?" I yell again, just as the sharp knocking 



19 

resumes. I roll to the window and pull back the curtains to see who's being so 

impolite, but there's no one there, which is all I need to know now that my 

head is starting to clear. My visitor is not human but animal. Flicker, I 

believe, is its name. A bundle of bird with wings that do not match its ample 

body. They're powerful enough I suppose--each "flick" lifts the bird a few feet 

higher in the air. But they're certainly not meant for soaring--between 

strokes Flicker loses what it gains. Flicker, it seems, is best suited for knocking 

on wood, and with my concern for the Asterisk still fresh in my mind, I 

thank it for doing so. 

On the other side of the room I open more curtains to the shaded 

morning faces of the Smith Rocks. The Asterisk is still there, in its more­

precarious-looking-than-it-really-is balance, and after all my second guessing 

last night I wonder if I shouldn't knock on wood myself. It's a different day 

today, a different kind of day altogether from yesterday. Clouds have moved 

in, and surprisingly, it looks like rain. I welcome the change and hurry 

through my morning routine so that I may watch the weather unfurl on the 

land. 

West of here some 30 miles the old volcanoes of the Cascade Range 

form a barrier upon which the storms that move in from the Pacific drop the 

lion's share of their moisture. The clouds pack tight against the mountains-­

Jefferson, Washington, Three-fingered Jack, the Three Sisters, Broken Top, 

Bachelor Butte, four of which rise over 10,000 feet above sea level--lighten 

their load, and then spread across the Central Oregon high country where a 

sparse and drier landscape welcomes both showers and shade. Little rain 

usually falls here--less than an inch in most months, eight inches or so in a 



20 

good year--but it's been a wet spring and from the looks of things it's not over 

yet. 

After breakfast, I grab my rain gear and roll down the short ramp to the 

big back deck. The weather is coming from the west though, so I spin to the 

south side of the house where I can see it all: the ripe gray clouds slipping 

over the range to my right, the checkerboard of irrigated pastures in front of 

me, the cliffs and clefts of Smith Rocks to my left, and above, the cirrus, the 

leaders of the storm, a filmy-looking layer of whitish clouds high enough that 

the Himalayas, let alone the Cascades, pose no impediment to their 

procession. They've spread far to the east already, probably as far as the 

Ochocos. There will be no shadows on the land this day. 

The rain clouds are still many miles away, and while I await their 

arrival my mind wanders back to the events of yesterday. "The events of 

yesterday .. .. " Yes, so true. They were the events of the day and of the night 

and of the day turning into night. They were not my events, for surely they 

would have occurred with or without me, their splendor undiminished. Yet 

they were just as surely sublime, as I have never seen anything more 

beautiful in art or in nature than the gilded moon rising slow behind the 

Asterisk, nor could I imagine anything more sublime than the light of the 

sun firing earth's cold and barren satellite, setting it aglow, and blessing it 

with the light that graced my eyes from behind the Asterisk last night. No, I 

cannot agree with Hegel, who because he believes it lacks spirit, concludes 

that nature itself is not sublime. Nor can I agree with Immanuel Kant, 

Hegel's contemporary, who philosophized that the excitation of the mind 

which is caused by nature creates the sublimity of the mind that is greater 



21 

than nature. Kant, at least, credits nature with a major role in the invocation 

of the sublime, suggesting that it is through the contemplation of the 

beautiful in nature that we may apprehend the sublime. But after the 

experience of yesterday, my feeling right now is that the sublime exists both 

within and without, that its locus is not solely in one place or the other, nor 

dependent in any way on "the mind" for its existence. 

The dull gray clouds glide across the land now, over juniper, sage and 

pine, heavy-looking, as if they were pushed from behind, up and over, before 

they could rain their customary measure on the spongy lands west of the 

Cascades. They pass through low, and I can see the rain coming in sprays that 

tail off behind the darkest clouds. As the first sprinkles reach my location I 

move under the eaves of the long wooden house and turn away from the 

rain to face the rocks. It is rain like this, and the wind which now comes in 

gusts, that is largely responsible for the beauty of this place. The rocks 

themselves are products of the earth, volcanic tuff that originated in a series 

of explosive eruptions between 18 and 10 million years ago near the site of the 

rocks themselves. But it was the presence of water, and the passage of time, 

that transformed the glassy volcanic ash into the earthy clay minerals we see 

today. For eons, eternity by any human standard, the rains have pelted these 

rocks, delivering minerals, eroding the knobs, spires and cliffs, grain by tiny 

grain, and expressing themselves in designs that reflect the differing 

compositions of distinct volcanic episodes as well. More recently, only 1.2 

million years ago, the Newberry volcano 30 miles to the south sent a flow of 

highly-fluid lava down the valley of the ancient Crooked River, filling the 

existing canyon deep with basalt. Here too the rains were instrumental, 



22 

feeding the Crooked River at its source in the Ochoco Mountains, helping it 

to carve from the basalt the present-day gorge. 

I spend most of the day outside, watching the rain pass through in 

gusting sheets that trail low, dark, fast-moving clouds. These miniature 

squalls seem to approach with regularity, as if to pace themselves as they eat 

away at the ancient tuff across the river. Much of the rock is very soft--"junk" 

in the language of the rock climbers who favor this place more for the 

diversity of its climbs than the composition of its rock. I pick a spot amongst 

the spires and crags, the face of a cliff with wide cracks and several outcrops, 

each of which has some smaller fissures of its own, and try to imagine how 

that face appeared before the rain acted on it for the past 10 million years. But 

it's no good. I try a million years, one hundred thousand, a thousand, and 

now I'm within the realm of my imagination. I can think in thousands of 

years. I have landmarks. I can place a thousand years, even ten thousand 

years, in the context of human history, and that seems to facilitate my 

imagination. More than that though, and I'm lost, blocked from the past, 

unable to go any deeper. Again, I wonder why this is so, why my imagination 

is so restricted to what I know, to the familiar. 

I try to imagine this place as it was 5,000 years ago, long before any 

Europeans had marked this land, but still within the frame of what I know of 

as "my" history, Western history. Now I'm in business. In the river below, 

unperturbed by the wind and the rain, a lone stilted heron stands 

impassively. It surveys the nearby waters with enviable patience, a quality 

inherited from countless generations of this ancient and widespread wader. I 

close my eyes and as I do I notice that I roll them back, as if to draw my 



23 

concentration from the older part of my brain. I see the river now, the brushy 

shore, and the stony walls above, and all is the same except there is no well­

worn trail along the water's edge. The heron is there, stolid as before. But 

now it begins to walk slowly, broadening its potential source of prey. It 

displays other strategies as well: hovering above the water and stabbing with 

its long neck at minnows below the surface, plunging head-first to snare 

crayfish, jumping undetected from nearby branches, probing the river's 

substrate for underwater insects, flicking its wings to disturb prey and make it 

easier to spot, snatching flies and other insects from the air about it, even 

baiting prey by putting in the water material that will attract it. I see it 

dancing too, doing the "wing preen," the "circle flight," and the "twig shake" 

in an effort to attract a mate. These behaviors I know by reading about the 

herons from a book in the house, but now they've come alive as I imagine 

the primeval bird making this place its home, adapting to its offerings, 

performing for its very life and for the life of its progeny. 

I can imagine too the humans who hunted this area, explored these 

rocks, and perhaps sought visions high amongst the crags, where there was 

much to see, where perspective would be challenged and the sense of self 

made slight. The Tenino Indians of the Columbia Gorge are known to have 

lived in the valleys of the Deschutes River to the west and the John Day to 

the east, so these rocks could not have been unknown to them. And the 

Northern Paiute, whose territory was primarily to the southeast of here, are 

also known to have ventured into this land at various times. Lithic scatters, 

debris from the manufacture of stone tools, are not uncommon amongst the 

rocks, and two depressions in the area are thought to be the remnants of 



24 

house pits. An area excavated a mile to the north during the 1920's and 30's 

revealed artifacts dating back six to eight thousand years. 

I wonder about these people, and about the herons as well, because they 

were successful inhabitants of this land. The herons lived successfully, here 

. and around the world, by adapting to their surroundings, experimentally, and 

indeed, creatively. There are 60 distinct species around the globe, and 

numerous subspecies. The people who lived in the river valleys of this 

region and along the Columbia to the north were great experimenters, great 

adapters, superb performers in the game of life too. They fished by a variety 

of means, including weirs, dams, funnel and hoop traps, open-top baskets, 

nets with wooden floats and stone sinkers, hooks, harpoons, and poison. 

They hunted deer, bear, elk and other game, dug camas and kouse roots 

during the spring and gathered berries and nuts into the fall. And despite the 

notion now in vogue to dismiss the idea that American Indians lived in 

balance or harmony with their environment, to suggest instead that they 

were responsible for significant transformations of the land, the fact remains 

that the Tenino and other Columbia River tribes thrived for thousands of 

years, physically, culturally and spiritually, and that the rivers were still full 

of salmon, the forests still rich with game, when the first white settlers 

arrived. 

It's evening now, though the sky is lighter than it's been all day. Either 

the storm has moved through, or we're just having a break. It's hard to tell 

from here sometimes. It's bright to the west, where the sun has nearly set, 

but who knows what's building up behind those mountains? Tomorrow, 

tomorrow knows I suppose. I'm not feeling like I know too much at all. I 



25 

don't know what the weather holds, where the storms lie, what's behind the 

mountains. I just know the storms are there, and that they're building. 

Like the sensation I gained years ago standing behind the screen of 

water streaming off my roof, these past two days have changed me. I've seen 

in their unfolding a performance of interconnected things: the flash of 

sudden sunrise in whose silence I found peace; the light of sunset draw fire 

from rock; the fire of sun give light to the night; the rains of spring bring life 

to the land. 

So much beauty, so much spirit, I've not at once seen before. Neither 

though, have my eyes before been open so wide. What opened them so I 

cannot be sure. Plotinus, the third century philosopher and author of the 

Enneads, said we cannot see beauty in nature until we see it in ourselves, but 

I don't think I could have mistaken this recent beauty during even my 

darkest days, though perhaps, in some gloomy bar, I would have missed it 

altogether. But Plotinus, unlike Hegel or even Kant, not only posits wisdom 

and truth in nature, but gives to it the spirit or "Soul" which Hegel denies: 

"it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself .. . and, achieving 

thus a resplendent and delicious spectacle, has no further aim." 

Has nature indeed no further aim? Animals learn, species evolve, but 

does this constitute aim or intent, or is this simply the result of life living? 

My sense is that it is the latter, that Plotinus had great insight. Yet this should 

not detract in any way from the delightful mystery of living, or the spiritual 

yearnings of our souls. It suggests only that the future is as open as we are to 

its possibilities. In either case, my wish is to see life go on living, for it is 



26 

indeed a delicious spectacle. For that to occur, however, human beings must 

find their place amidst the sublime, and the sublime within their midst. 

I think back to the sunset, and it is clear to me now that the sublime is 

in all things, for all are dependent upon and connected to one another. Life 

here, and the sublime here, is in the performance. Like the action of 

atmosphere on the light of the sun and light on the color of the rocks, like the 

dance of the heron and the ingenuity of the native people, it is in the acts we 

perform that the future is held. The question is not one of where the sublime 

exists--in nature, in the mind of "man," or in the excitation of the one by the 

other, but in what one does with the experience of the sublime. Longinus 

said in the first century that the sublime is that which exceeds, that it is 

potential, and that it appears where the passion inspired by nature meets the 

language of consciousness. Sublimity, he said, is the echo of a noble mind. 

Therein, perhaps, lies a future: in nature, in passion, and in thought. My 

home in the valley beckons, and children still asleep too. I will bring them 

nature, as I can, and passion, and will ask for passion and thought in return. 



27 

CHAPTER II 

POLITTCS 

Home again, the struggle for perspective is on. The fast-moving, busy 

and noisy world I left behind during my stay at Monkey Face surrounds me 

once again. I feel bombarded: not only are there the common things that 

must be done--work, for example--but there are things that, while they are not 

absolutely necessary, I feel I must do anyway. How can I be a responsible 

schoolteacher and not stay in touch with current events? This takes time and 

energy, most of it emotional. Reading the newspaper can be so demoralizing 

that I know people who abstain specifically because of the effect it has on their 

psyche. Likewise, I am learning to ration my time and energy. If the story 

looks like something the television "news" programs--Hard Copy and the 

like--would pick up on, I avoid it. I don't need another version of an illicit 

affair turned sour, and of course violent, camped in my memory. Still, 

scouring the newspapers is a time-consuming endeavor that confuses and 

dismays as much as it informs. It also makes obvious the causes of such 

things as voter apathy, distrust of government, and the general sense of 

pointlessness that pervades our culture. But "staying informed" does one 

other thing for me as well: it rekindles the rage I repressed as a child and 

misdirected as a young adult. Maybe that's why I do it, and why I teach. 

Maybe I need to stay informed to stoke the fire that makes me teach. 



28 

The news really is bad. As the sky cleared over my last evening at 

Monkey Face I wondered if it was just a temporary respite, or if there was 

more weather on the way. I decided at the time that in fact I could be sUie 

there were more storms behind the mountains, and that they were building. 

Now, faced with a stack of newspapers which grew daunting while I was 

gone, as well as an assortment of articles I collected before I left, I can virtually 

feel the storms brewing. 

I work my way through the divulging pile and sort the clippings into 

several categories, but the divisions are not clean since the pieces often 

overlap: cartoons that read like sermons, sermons that make me laugh. 

There are some wrathful people out there writing some fire and brimstone 

letters to the editor; I wish they could see me grinning at their self­

righteousness. Unfortunately, I won't be doing much grinning during this 

review of events, except at the irony these clippings preserve. The process is 

sometimes amusing, more often saddening. Mostly, I find myself shaking my 

head. 

That, exactly, is my reaction to one of the first things that ignites me. 

The headline: "For most, basic rights are denied." It's a recent article, 

published April 18, 1993, my mother's birthday. Reading it I wonder how she 

would feel if she knew that "at least half the world's population is deprived 

of basic human rights and subject to violations ranging from tortUie and 

executions to slavery and starvation."1 The article is by the Associated Press 

and is based on a report by the United Nations Human Rights Center. These 

"violations," it says, are politically motivated human rights abuses and 

include 5000 cases of "disappearances" reported by the end of March. But the 



29 

fate of those 5000, while disturbing, pales in comparison to what follows. "Up 

to 1.4 billion people worldwide lived in absolute poverty and 1 billion more 

teetered on the brink, deprived of all economic rights," the report stated. The 

article goes on to mention plans for a world conference of government 

leaders on issues of human rights scheduled for Vienna in June, and notes 

that U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has described it as a 

"milestone on the road to a better world society." It is the first such gathering 

in 25 years, the last line of the article concludes matter-of-factly, as if that fact 

was barely worth mentioning. I catch myself, chin in palm, shaking my head: 

amazed, perplexed, dismayed. Perhaps if such meetings were held a bit more 

frequently they wouldn't be called "milestones," but policy assessments 

instead. I wonder again what the hell my dad was fighting for 25 years ago, 

when, with genuine belief in his government, he bombarded the 

infrastructure of North Vietnam. Democracy, supposedly, a chance for a 

better life for just the sort of people to whom this article refers. His life seems 

more wasted than ever. 

Same day, same paper: "Holocaust: Some doubt it happened," reads 

the headline. The first paragraph: "A third of Americans are open to the 

possibility that the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million 

Jews, never happened."2 The survey, conducted by the Roper Organization, 

found that 22 percent of the respondents said it seems possible that the 

Holocaust never happened and 12 percent said they did not know if that was 

possible or impossible. Added up, it's a frighteningly large percentage of 

people living in a free country who are not enjoying the benefit of learning 

from history. Incidentally, education, so far as this study revealed, has little to 



30 

do with learning--"21 percent of college graduates said it seems possible the 

Holocaust never happened, compared to 20 percent of non-high school 

graduates." Add to this alarming mixture of information an editorial cartoon 

a page over, and the picture I'm assembling continues to form its unnerving 

shape: Over a crudely drawn ~ap of the Northern hemisphere the 

cartoonist's bubble cries "Help!" with a long tail that places the plea in Bosnia, 

while across the Atlantic pointed eastward from the United States stand a 

dozen or more missiles with the bubble reading, "Um ... That's not really 

what we're set up for .... " And at the bottom of the frame, at the cartoonist's 

drawing board, are the words" . .. nor for the 21st century in general."3 

Another "ethnic cleansing" is underway, and all the A-bombs in the world 

stand as powerless as a single atom to stop it. 

That's just one day's news, but as sobering as it is, even more 

depressing is the fact that it is no fluke, no particularly down-sided edition of 

the local daily. Flipping through clips from papers before and after I find 

plenty more of the same. The Associated Press, citing information from a 

September 22, 1993 report by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) 

titled (presumably without intended irony) "The Progress of Nations," notes 

that "one-fifth of American children live below the poverty line--four times 

the rate of most industrialized countries, and twice that of the next worse 

performer, Britain."4 Just two weeks later, reporting news from the U.S. 

Census Bureau, the Associated Press says the number of poor Americans of 

all ages grew by 1.2 million in 1992, bringing the total to 36.9 million or 14.5 

percent of the country's population. Like Unicef Executive Director James P. 

Grant, who blamed "cutbacks in government services for the decline in the 



United States" in the Unicef report, analysts blamed "declining social 

services" for the increasing poverty in the report by the Census Bureau.5 

31 

Are these statistical summaries painful or unpleasant? Do they make 

for dry and difficult reading? 

Here are some more: 

By October of 1993, more children had been shot and killed in the 

Chicago area than all the people of all ages killed by gunfire in England 

during 1991.6 That fact, which Joan Beck says in her column for the Chicago 

Tribune "should prompt persistent outrage," comes on the heels of the death 

by gunfire of the 51st child under the age of 15 in the Chicago area, as reported 

by the Tribune in late September. 

"What kind of people are we?" she asks. 

Beck goes on to point out that among the industrialized countries we 

are alone, substantiating the article's incisive subtitle, "Guns, violence 

separate U.S. from civilized world." She cites information from Handgun 

Control Inc. which says that in 1990, handguns killed 22 people in Great 

Britain, 87 in Japan, 10 in Australia, 68 in Canada, 13 in Sweden--and 10,567 in 

the United States! Beck also cites a report issued by Unicef saying that 90 

percent of all murderers of young people ages 15 to 24 in the industrialized 

world live in the United States. And, to refute the National Rifle 

Association's imminent dismissal of this information, as if degrees of 

difference would make these deaths acceptable, she provides per capita 

comparisons as well. There are 15.3 homicides per 100,000 young people 

annually in this age group in the U.S., compared with 0.4 in Japan, 0.7 in 

France, 0.9 in Britain, 1.9 in Italy, and, in our nearest neighbor, 3.1 in Canada. 



• 

• 

.. 

.. 

.. 

• 

.. 

32 

Homicide is the 10th leading killer of all Americans, and the second leading 

cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds. Even here at home, at the mouth of 

the Willamette River Valley, in the relatively tranquil city of Portland, 38 

people were murdered in the first eight months of 1993 according to 

Oregonian columnist Steve Duin.7 The "City of Roses," it would seem, needs 

all the flowers it can get. 

"So what can we do," asks Beck, "besides letting our eyes glaze over at 

the daily news reports of more killings?" Several things, she says, are 

obvious: "Because violence in this country is inseparable from guns, we will 

have to start disarming ourselves," she says, adding that industrialized 

countries that have strict gun laws don't have homicide rates like ours. 

"That means voters will have to convince legislators they may have more to 

fear at the polls from outraged and frightened citizens than from well-paid 

and well-connected gun lobbyists." 

Beck's point sounds strikingly similar to that made by Oregon's 

Clackamas County Circuit Judge Patrick Gilroy when he ruled against a 

lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking an injunction to 

stop votes on anti-gay rights ordinances in several small Oregon 

communities. Acknowledging the ACLU's contention that his ruling in 

effect stifled legislation designed to end bitter debate on the issue by pre­

empting elections and their ongoing divisiveness, Gilroy announced that 

"the remedy for a pointless use of the initiative process is an informed 

electorate." 

An informed electorate? Is that all we need? Thanks for the tip "Judge 

Sidestep." 



33 

A survey released October 19, 1992 by FAIR, the media watch group, 

reveals stunning ignorance among voters on basic subjects, even though the 

poll of 600 likely voters found them to be inundated by the media. As 

reported by media critics Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, the majority said 

they watch a television news program virtually every day and most said they 

regularly read a newspaper. Yet when asked, for example, whether more 

money goes to "foreign aid" or "the military" or "welfare," 42 percent selected 

foreign aid, which accounts for only one percent of spending. Oops. Almost a 

third chose welfare, which is just five percent of the federal budget. The 

correct answer, the military, was chosen by only one-fifth of those responding, 

despite the fact that it is more than four times larger than federal welfare 

spending. As Cohen and Solomon conclude, "Whatever the particular 

explanations for the various incorrect answers, the survey as a whole 

indicates that the problem is more serious than simple ignorance."8 

Still, in theory at least, Judge Gilroy may be correct. Perhaps an 

informed and activated electorate is the answer to such things as the 

frequently distorted, unrepresentative and unconstructive (if not destructive) 

outcomes of the initiative process, as well as the undue influence of self­

interested lobbies. But the obvious question persists: How do we gain an 

informed electorate, one that will, for example, "convince legislators they 

may have more to fear at the polls from outraged and frightened citizens than 

from well-paid and well-connected gun lobbyists." Considering the tendency 

of the nation's media to impart what is sensational or emotional rather than 

what is substantial or broadly indispensable; or, for example, its taste for 

campaign rhetoric over readily obtainable facts; in addition to the complexity 



34 

and enormity of those issues that are well-covered in the media; coupled with 

the general public's overall preoccupation with passive entertainment, 

disinclination toward reading, and its consequent (in)ability to understand 

complex issues--the question of how we can gain an informed electorate is a 

good though discouraging one indeed. 

Yet even if we make the great leap forward and assume that we can 

gain an informed and active electorate, there are still many reasons to 

question its potential effectiveness, and finding them is as simple as turning 

the pages of my compiled newspapers. 

David Broder, a political reporter for The Washington Post, provides a 

telling example in a column about the United States Senate. How is it, Broder 

asks, "that a man who is unknown to most Americans, one of 100 senators 

and a freshman at that, can dictate energy policy and much of fiscal policy as 

well to an entire nation?"9 Broder explains that when Wisconsin Senator 

Herb Kohl announced he would accept no gas tax higher than 4.3 cents a 

gallon, President Clinton, in desperate need of Kohl's vote for his budget 

plan, was forced to comply. "It didn't matter what Clinton or the rest of 

Congress thought," states Broder. "That was it. Thus, an ambitious plan to 

reduce dependency on foreign oil, improve the efficiency of energy use and 

help clean up the environment went down the drain--and a $49 billion hole 

was ripped in Clinton's budget, forcing higher taxes on a few and deeper 

program cuts for many." Whether or not one agrees with Kohl's position, 

the point is clear: the leverage that Kohl was not alone in using to impose his 

personal policy and political agenda on the nation has made the United States 



35 

Senate, in Broder's words, "a body that defies contemporary understanding of 

democracy." But this is not half the story of our Senate "representatives." 

Because of the "Connecticut Compromise," the plan proposed by Roger 

Sherman, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, membership 

in the House of Representatives is proportional to each state's population, 

though each state, regardless of size, has two senators. This principle of 

federalism has served the country well for more than two centuries. But, as 

Broder points out, "With very little notice, the Senate has become 

increasingly unrepresentative of the United States. As population has 

concentrated in 100 or so major metropolitan areas and a dozen megastates, 

the disparity between the House and Senate has grown. In this Congress, a 

majority of senators--actually 54 of 100--come from states that collectively 

elect only 87 representatives, one-fifth of the members of the House. That is 

the major reason why measures like the energy tax can command majorities 

in the house but be killed in the Senate [emphasis added]." 

Clearly, this allows the smaller states to retain considerable influence 

in the Senate at least, and, as Broder says, "All this may simply reflect the 

modern application of Sherman's famous compromise. But there are other 

changes inside the Senate that were not contemplated by the Founders-­

changes that make it even less representative than it otherwise might be." It 

is here that this brief homily on history and power gets most disturbing. The 

Senate, says Broder, "has become a haven for the wealthy. No fewer than 27 

of the 100 senators, including Kohl, are millionaires. Only seven of the 100 

are women. Only one is black. Latinos are totally absent. EconomicalJy and 



36 

sociologically, this is an elite grouP==whose members can easily afford to defy 

presidents, parties or even public opinion [emphasis added]." 

Equally unsettling and paramount to the way senators can "afford to 

defy" most anything they choose is the way today's senators gain office. 

Originally, senators were elected by state legislatures, meaning their political 

life depended in part on representing the legislators who gave it to them in 

the first place. Now, however, since popular election of senators began 80 

years ago, a multi-millionaire like Kohl can literally buy a seat in the Senate. 

Kohl spent $7.5 million of his own money, wiping out his opponents in the 

most expensive election Wisconsin has ever seen. Still, notes Broder 

sardonically, "his Senate seat cost him substantially less than the $18.5 

million he spent on his basketball team, the Milwaukee Bucks." Senators 

today, says Broder, "essentially operate as individual political entrepreneurs," 

and one indication of this trend is the fact that "one-fifth of today's senators 

held no elective office of any kind before coming to the Senate." 

'This is not a plea," Broder maintains, "for abolishing the Senate. It 

remains a great theater for politics, comedy and occasional drama. But when 

a single senator, operating solely by his personal compass, can set policy for 

the whole country, the great design of the Constitution has gone awry." Gone 

too, in the minds of those who live under the guise--the outward aspect of 

the Constitution--is the sense that they have anything to do with politics or 

the course of the future. Present ins tead are cities that, in the words of 

newspaper columnist Carl Rowan, are "social powder kegs." 

Rowan draws this likeness in yet another article on the senatorial 

abuse, or at the very least, misuse of power. In it he suggests that we are 



37 

wrong if we assume our cities are safer now that a jury has convicted Los 

Angeles police officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell of violating Rodney 

King's civil rights. This verdict, sent down only after the fateful rioting that 

followed their earlier acquittals on charges of beating black motorist King, was 

regarded by some, says Rowan, as a message to racist policemen everywhere, 

and, therefore, as a signal of peaceful times to come in America's inner cities. 

Rowan, however, warns that "the feelings of economic neglect and 

discrimination, of virtual hopelessness, in our cities are more explosive than 

the passions over one episode of blatant police abuse. "10 Recognizing this, 

Rowan berates Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and Senator Phil 

Gramm of Texas for "fanning the flames of violence . .. blocking even tiny 

gestures of economic justice" by leading a Republican filibuster preventing 

the Senate from voting on a small economic stimulus program (the so-called 

"Jobs Bill") that is "really more important to urban tranquillity than the Los 

Angeles trial." Here again, as with Senator Kohl and his position on the gas 

tax, the point isn't whether or not one agrees with what Dole and Gramm 

were doing in the spring of 1993, but why they were doing it. That, according 

to Rowan, "has almost nothing to do with money but everything to do with 

politically humiliating and punishing President Clinton," a premise few 

would dispute. In the process, Dole and Gramm not only denied summer 

jobs to millions of needy youths and blocked extended unemployment 

compensation to millions of desperate families, they held up $300 million 

needed for immunization of poor children and $200 million for treatment of 

AIDS victims. Dole and Gramm, as Rowan says, "are beyond shame for 

ridiculing such programs as 'pork,"' while Gramm "wallows in the gravy" of 



multibillion-dollar federal outlays for a super collider and a space station at 

the same time he is asking Clinton to cut the "fat" out of a $700 million 

38 

college scholarship program or a $1 billion program to help small businesses, 

either of which will have more long-lasting positive impact on the economic 

health and overall well-being of the country. Dole, Rowan says, once laughed 

gustily when Ronald Reagan explained his lack of concern about the budget 

deficit by saying, "'I figure the deficit is big enough to look out for itself.' Now 

he pretends that adding $15.4 billion to a $4 trillion debt will wreck the 

country." When, asks Rowan, "will these senators show the guts and 

integrity that the jury displayed in convicting Koon and Powell?" When will 

they allow the Senate to "work its will and approve programs that represent 

[ emphasis added] opportunity and hope for the most deprived people in the 

land?" 

"Represent" indeed. "Represent" is the key word in Rowan's 

concluding sentence, and perhaps as well to his entire argument, for while 

the general public may be ill-informed about specific issues, it is well-tuned to 

the symbols and sound bites that emerge from our capitol. Both the anger it 

expresses on the streets and the apathy it reveals at the polls suggest a public 

that is at once issue-unsophisticated yet message-sensitive--in a word-­

disillusioned. That is why Rowan is not only affronted by Dole's sudden and 

purely political penny pinching, but also so concerned about the message, 

about the "flames that it fans." And indeed it did anger many, as Republican 

leaders are well aware. But what was their greatest concern? It was not that 

they were obstructing something that may have been worthwhile; rather, in 

their unanimous opposition, it was that they might be perceived as 



39 

obstructionists. Even in Oregon, which had less to gain or to lose than many 

parts of the country, the issue caused considerable fomentation. Letters to the 

editor were highly critical of the Republican hamstringing, wishing upon the 

Republican party a "Pyrrhic" victory, one that, in the end, costs more than it 

gains. Other letters, of course, supported Gramm and Dole, buying the "pork" 

argument. And there is little doubt that the "jobs bill" was, as claimed by 

Republicans, part pay back by Clinton for the support of many big-city mayors, 

though that doesn't mean it was a bad idea. In any case, amidst all the 

rhetoric a message was sent, a perception perpetuated: politics, not 

pragmatism, guide policy, and politicians care more about power than people. 

The consequence? So long as gridlock persists in the capitol it will dwell too 

in the people, in what they believe is possible, in their hopes and dreams and 

actions. 

None of this, of course, is intended to suggest that there are easy 

answers, or that politicians and leaders in government never work hard 

toward admirable ends, or that the give and take that oils the wheels of our 

form of government is necessarily evil or at all dispensable. There are many 

difficult choices to make, and, it would seem, there simply isn't enough to go 

around--at least, that is, without taking it from something or someone else. 

The fundamentals upon which this country was founded guarantee 

particular rights, but not included in those rights is a guarantee of personal 

prosperity for all. I acknowledge that. But it isn't really the statistics that 

move me, this information I process and pass on through the written word. 

Rather, these things only support what many of us, myself included, shut out 

to some extent--the images: The image of a downtrodden yet dignified 



40 

homeless couple, their child's eyes wide--too wide--and perplexed; images of 

gray, broken cities where sidewalks are beds and street corners are· "schools"; 

of shriveled, misshapen children, flies on their lips, in Africa, Brazil, Mexico; 

and of excess--luxuriant, nonchalant excess that by itself bears no blame--but 

which is not by itself. The other images are by its side. And they are 

connected. So my moral compass goes into a spin when I consider the 

disparity between rich and poor, powerful and powerless in this country and 

in this world, when I think of how things came to be this way, why they 

remain this way, and whether an honest person could truly say there is 

anything right about it or that there is nothing that can be done about it. 

In an speech in Boston in 1850, at the New England Anti-Slavery 

Convention, Theodore Parker articulated the ideal which Broder suggests we 

are today losing to big-money, special-interest politics: "A democracy," said 

Parker, "is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the 

people."11 That, admittedly, is a standard toward which we can only expect to 

strive, for democracy, as Plato wrote in The Republic, "is a charming form of 

government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a form of equality to 

equals and unequals alike."12 Plato, in this honest yet transparently facetious 

observation, describes in a nutshell both what is good and what is bad about 

democracy. He implies too why Parker's statement is indeed an ideal, why in 

fact the words "some" or "sometimes" must be inserted into his lines, 

depending on the context, in order to ground them in the reality of governing 

a massive nation constantly in flux, comprised of disparate views, and driven 

to compete both within and without. 



41 

This is the reality of our time just as it was in Plato's. Even within the 

framework of the well-intentioned and honorably-crafted form of · 

government we call American democracy there are glaring omissions of 

constraint and opportunities for abuse. Plato, perhaps, would say especially 

under a system such as ours shall we find such weaknesses. But does this 

mean we should idly accept the things I'm reminded of virtually every time I 

pick up a newspaper: the violence and the poverty, the exploitation and the 

grand excess--the pseudo-democracy; the power games instead of people 

games, the dysfunctional democracy--the mockery; and the accompanying 

disempowerment of the public, both sensed and real? Does this mean we 

should simply accept as our fate another of Plato's assessments of democracy, 

that "democracy passes into despotism?"13 I review what I've written about 

my reading experiences and find that, as indirectly connected as they are on 

the surface, they are but aspects of a common palsy. And, of course, they are 

precisely the kinds of things that cause potentially acute and active voters to 

throw up their hands, to disinvest their hearts and time and energy from the 

process of which they were designed to be a part--of which they must be a part 

if it is to have any chance at all to serve them with integrity--and to draw or 

be pushed into comers where they mutter bitterly of futility and spawn new 

generations of the disenfranchised. 

So, what kind of people are we? Is that the proper question, or should 

we be asking "What kind of system are we in?" "What kind of product of 

person and process, of nature and nurture are we?" People made the system, 

but systems are known to run away. Can a runaway system dictate or at least 

influence the kind of people we are? 



42 

That, to be certain, is the position of many people currently addressing 

the various interconnected crises in American culture, whether those of 

poverty, drug abuse, gang violence, mental health, or education. The systems 

that few people seem to address when discussing cultural crises, however, are 

natural systems--the systems that provide us with the air we breathe, the 

water we drink, the food we eat, and the connections we need to live on this 

planet. Here too we are in the midst of a crisis, a climacteric in the minds of 

many, and it is as much a crisis of culture as any of those mentioned above. It 

is as interconnected with culture as natural systems are interconnected with 

one another. In scope and immediacy it subsumes other crises. It is the 

ecological crisis, and in the challenge it represents others pale and blend into 

its potent mix of both danger and opportunity. While politicians thwart one 

another over power at the expense of the people they are sworn to serve, they 

are also failing to adequately address ecological concerns of global proportions 

and consequences. It is within the framework of what he sees as our most 

indispensable yet rapidly failing systems--natural systems--that Chet Bowers, 

in his book Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological Crisis: Toward 

Deep Changes, approaches the underlying problems of our culture, their effect 

on the future of the planet, and the potential of education, in its broadest 

sense, to guide us toward a sustainable, if not perfect future. That inquiry, its 

implications and its offerings, we will take up shortly. But first, in order to 

provide us with a framework in which to consider that inquiry, let us 

attempt, at least, to answer the elusive but recurring question, "What kind of 

people are we?" 



Notes 

1 Eugene (Ore.) Register Guard, 18 April 1993, sec. A. 

2Eugene (Ore.) Register Guard, 18 April 1993, sec. A. 

3Toles, Buffalo (N.Y.) News, April 1993. Further documentation 
unavailable at this time. 

4Portland Oregonian, 23 September 1993, sec. A, p. 4. 

5Portland Oregonian, 5 October 1993, sec. B, p. 5. 

6portland Oregonian, 3 October 1993, sec. B, p. 3. 

7Portland Oregonian, 14 October 1993. 

8£ugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, 18 October 1992, sec. B, p. 4. 

9washington Post, 3 August 1993, sec. A, p. 17. 

10£ugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, 1993. Further documentation 
unavailable at this time. 

43 

11'The American Idea," 29 May 1850, quoted in John Bartlett, Bartlett's 
Familiar Quotations, 16th ed., (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 
461. 

12Plato, The Republic, bk. I., 329, quoted in John Bartlett, Bartlett's 
Familiar Quotations, 16th ed., (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 75. 

13Bartlett, 75. 



44 

CHAPTER ID 

PEOPLE 

Thumbing through the newspaper recently, casually, not at all in the 

"search and collect" mode I was in a few months back, I came across a story 

titled "Fossils point to wide range for earliest known human ancestors."1 The 

gist of the article centered around the fact that some newly discovered 

Ethiopian fossils were determined to be related to the famous skeleton 

"Lucy," despite their strikingly different sizes. This evidence in turn 

supported the categorization of other fossils found great distances away from 

Lucy as having been of the same species, Australopithecus aferensis, despite 

their various sizes. The point, then, was that this discovery could settle the 

lingering debate over whether these 3.4-million-year-old hominids were 

correctly categorized as a single species or instead represented two species of 

different sizes, ranges, and behavior. 

But that was not the point to me. 

I was struck instead by what was already known, simply that Lucy and 

her fellow Australopithecus aferensis lived and breathed and roamed the 

earth 3.4 million years ago, that these hominids--primates that diverged from 

the ape lineage--are the common ancestor not only of other more "recent" 

australopithecines, all of which became extinct a million years ago, but of the 

Homo line as well--the line leading directly to modern humans. None of this 

was entirely new to me, but it's not something I often think about either. 



45 

Being reminded of it caused me to put down the paper for a few minutes 

while my mind tried to apprehend the lonely expanse of time that humans 

and pre-humans have walked this planet. It is not, I discovered, an easy thing 

to embrace, nor is doing so particularly comforting. We have been here for a 

very, very long time, in relentlessly advancing degrees of similarity to our 

present form. For some reason I found that a bit disturbing. 

To the sociobiologist, my reaction would come as little surprise. We 

humans tend to think of ourselves as being very unlike anything else on 

earth, either past and present. We believe without ever stopping to think 

about it that we are who we are because that is who we wish to be. We may 

acknowledge the effects of certain experiences--childhood traumas for 

example--on our self-esteem or our psyche in general, but all in all, we think 

we control who we are and how we behave. Our genes, we believe, may have 

dictated our physical form and even our mental capacity to some extent--we 

see the similarity between ourselves and our parents, for example, and 

acknowledge it with grace if not gratitude--but the rest of who we are is of our 

own making. Lucy, her relatives and her ancestors, we long ago left in the 

dust. 

Edward 0. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning sociobiologist, takes aim 

at this conception of autonomy, this sense of detachment from our biological 

origins and the processes of evolution in his book On Human Nature. 

Human nature, he argues, is hardly a thing of the present or of our own 

making; rather, its d eep structure is essentially a biological phenomenon and 

very much a thing from the past. Says Wilson of the sociobiological view of 

human nature: ''The most diagnostic features of human behavior evolved by 



natural selection and are today constrained throughout the species by 

particular sets of genes. "2 

46 

This is a strong statement and deserves elaboration, beginning with a 

definition of sociobiology itself. As Wilson explains it, sociobiology is a 

"hybrid discipline that incorporates knowledge of ethology (the naturalistic 

study of whole patterns of behavior), ecology (the study of the relationships of 

organisms to their environment), and genetics in order to derive general 

principles concerning the biological properties of entire societies."(H.N. 16) 

Sociobiology is genuinely new, adds Wilson, because it extracts the most 

important facts about social organization from ethology and psychology, 

reassembles them on a foundation of ecology and genetics--themselves fields 

of recently increasing sophistication--and studies this matrix at the 

population level "in order to show how social groups adapt to the 

environment by evolution."(H.N. 17) Sociobiology is based on comparisons 

of social species, each of which "can be viewed as an evolutionary 

experiment, a product of millions of years of interaction between genes and 

environment."(H.N. 17) Because sociobiologists have carefully examined 

such experiments, Wilson suggests, "it is now within our reach to apply this 

broad knowledge to the study of human beings."(H.N. 17) And, adds Wilson, 

sociobiologists agree with Rousseau that "One needs to look near at hand in 

order to study men, but to study man one must look from afar."(H.N. 17) So 

Wilson uses the analogy of looking through the front end of a telescope to 

describe the way sociobiologists view humans. In this way, sociobiologists 

"place humankind in its proper place in a catalog of the social species on 

earth,"(H.N. 17) and from this macroscopic perspective they avoid as well the 



crippling intellectual vice of the social sciences--"defiantly self-indulgent 

anthropocentrism."(H.N. 17) 

It is based on this unpresumptuous approach to the application of 

evolutionary biology to humankind that Wilson makes the sta tement that 

human behavior, like the behavior of other social species, is today 

47 

constrained throughout the species by particular sets of genes. "Evolution has 

not made culture all-powerful,"(H .N. 18) he says, adding that "the question 

of interest is no longer whether human social behavior is genetically 

determined; it is to what extent."(H.N. 19) It is a misconception among many 

traditional Marxists, some learning theorists, and, says Wilson, "a still 

surprising proportion of anthropologists and sociologists that social behavior 

can be shaped into virtually any form."(H.N. 18) The formula "culture makes 

man makes culture makes man," he proclaims, is only a half truth. Instead, 

proposes Wilson, "Each person is molded by an interaction of his 

environment, especially his cultural environment, with the genes that affect 

social behavior."(H.N. 18) 

If this sounds like Wilson is espousing genetic determinism, that is 

because he is; if it also sounds like Wilson is suggesting an absence of free will 

among human beings, rest assured he is not. Rather, the point Wilson feels 

compelled to make, in light of what he sees as the misconstructions of 

theorists in many fields and an abundance of evidence to the contrary, is that 

the assumption which has steered the social sciences for decades--that 

humanity has outgrown its own genes to the extent of being singularly 

culture-bound--is not only wrong but limiting because it ignores information 

about our species that is potentially useful in many ways. 'The proper study 



• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

48 

of man is, for reasons that now transcend anthropocentrism, man,"(H.N. 13) 

he declares, suggesting that while the study of "man" was once fashionable 

because humans considered themselves to be at the center or apex of the 

universe--exceedingly worthy of effusive study due to some divine mandate-­

that same study is now advisable if only to protect life in general, as well as 

human beings from themselves. Understanding ourselves not only as 

cultural beings, Wilson implies, but also as biological beings with still­

apparent genetically-determined tendencies can only enhance our ability to 

make choices about our future, about what will or will not fit into the 

framework of the kind of beings we already are, and about where we want our 

culture to go from here. Wilson cites Freud, who said that God has been 

guilty of a shoddy and uneven piece of work, but says that is true to an even 

greater degree than Freud intended. "Human nature," says Wilson in a point 

that suggests both the deterministic yet unintentional character of natural 

selection and genetics, "is just one hodgepodge out of many 

conceivable."(H.N. 23) 

How, one might ask, can Wilson describe human nature as a 

"hodgepodge," as only one particular consequence of many possible 

outcomes? On what does he base this sociobiological view of genetic 

determinism and its logical extensions, applications, and dispositions of 

notions to the contrary? 

First, as Wilson points out, the natural selection pressures of hunter­

gatherer existence have persisted for over 99 percent of human genetic 

evolution. Bones and tools retrieved from ancient campsites in Africa, 

Europe, and Asia leave little doubt that this way of life prevailed for over a 



49 

million years and was abandoned in most societies only during the last few 

thousand years.(H.N. 84) It is from this form of existence that our genetic 

history d~rives, and little can have changed in the relatively few generations 

since. This plain observation in itself says much as a matter of common 

sense--it is basic Darwinism. Wilson calls Darwin "the great expansionist 

[who] shocked the world by arguing convincingly that life is the creation of an 

autonomous process so simple that it can be understood with just a moment 

of reflection. No equations, photons, or computer read-outs required. It can 

all be summarized in a couple of lines: new variations in the genetic material 

arise continuously, some survive and reproduce better than others, and as a 

result organic evolution occurs.''3 Or even more simply: "natural selection 

acting on mutations produces evolution."(B. 46) Even insects, Wilson points 

out, which are separated from human beings by more than 600 million years 

of evolution, share with us a common multicellular ancestor. The most 

complicated organisms, even the human brain--the most sophisticated entity 

in the known universe--is a product of natural selection. And since the mind 

or consciousness is a creation of the brain, then, like Darwin, who wrote in 

his 1838 M Notebook, "Origin of man now proved.--Metaphysics must 

flourish.--He who understand[s] baboons would do more toward metaphysics 

than Locke,"(B. 47) we can only wonder what a better understanding of the 

brain can reveal about the mind. Simple evolutionary theory, more recent 

refinements included, speaks volumes for the continuing effects of genes on 

human nature and behavior, for the theory of the genetic evolution of 

human nature, and for the potential of sociobiology--the study of that 

influence on the social face of humanity--to enlighten us. 



50 

But while a simple understanding of evolutionary processes offers 

much to support both the credibility and the value of a sociobiological 

perspective of human nature, Wilson adds a deep and ranging supply of 

information as evidence for his assertions about the influence of behavioral 

genes on such things as "the form and intensity of emotional responses, the 

thresholds of arousals, the readiness to learn certain stimuli as opposed to 

others, and the pattern of sensitivity to environmental factors that point 

cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another."(H.N. 47) As 

threatening as it may be to our sense of control and autonomy, it is only the 

tendency of environmental factors "to point cultural evolution in one 

direction as opposed to another," that Wilson insists we recognize in order to 

more perceptively know ourselves as a social species and as cultural ecologies. 

Our history as biological beings with a shared evolutionary history should 

not, Wilson argues, diminish our self-conception, nor should comparing 

ourselves to other creatures for the purpose of better understanding 

ourselves. Says Wilson: "Humanity is exalted not because we are so far 

above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the 

very concept of life. "(B. 22) 

A case in point is Wilson's consideration of the chimpanzee. "If the 

development of human social behavior retains even a small degree of genetic 

constraint," says Wilson, then "the status of the chimpanzee deserves 

especially close attention [because] our growing knowledge of these most 

intelligent apes has come to erode to a large extent the venerable dogma of 

the uniqueness of man."(H.N. 25) Wilson's discussion of the chimpanzee 

begins with what is obvious yet significant and expands from there. "The 



51 

grimace of fear, the smile, and even laughter have parallels in the facial 

expressions of chimpanzees," and they are of course "remarkably similar to 

human beings in anatomical and physiological details."(H.N. 25) More 

importantly, perhaps, chimpanzees and humans are very dose at a molecular 

level. Genetic studies show "the summed differences between the two species 

to be equivalent to the genetic distance separating nearly indistinguishable 

species of fruit flies, and only twenty-five to sixty times greater than that 

between Caucasian, Black African, and Japanese populations."(H.N. 25) 

"About 99 percent of our genes are identical to the corresponding set in 

chimpanzees, so that the remaining one percent accounts for all the 

differences between us. The chromosomes, the rodlike structures that carry 

the genes, are so close that only high resolution photography and expert 

knowledge can tell many of them apart."(B. 130) It is a demonstrable fact, 

Wilson says, that the human species descended from Old World primate 

ancestors, a point of little dispute in the scientific community. "We are 

literally kin to other organisms,"(B. 130) he says, adding that the pygmy 

chimpanzee in particular is so close in skeletal structure to "Lucy," one of the 

probable direct precursors of modern humans, that many biologists believe 

that "the evolutionary lines leading to human beings and chimpanzees split 

from a common stock in Africa as recently as five million years ago," a 

relatively short span in evolutionary time.(B. 128) But Wilson's point is not 

to equate chimpanzees with humans. "By strictly human criteria," he notes, 

"chimpanzees are mentally retarded to an intermediate degree. Their brains 

are only one-third as large as our own .. . [and they] do not remotely approach 



52 

the human child in the inventiveness and drive of their language."(H.N. 25-

26) 

Nonetheless, "the capacity to communicate by symbols and syntax does 

lie within the ape's grasp."(H.N. 26) Wilson provides evidence of this ability 

and observes that many zoologists now doubt the existence of an 

unbridgeable linguistic chasm between animals and humans. He adds that "It 

is no longer possible to say, as the leading anthropologist Leslie White did in 

1949, that human behavior is symbolic behavior and symbolic behavior is 

human behavior."(H.N. 26) Symbolic thinking, in other words, is not unique 

to humanity, nor, apparently, is self-awareness. Chimpanzees allowed to 

peer into mirrors for two or three days exhibit increasingly self-aware 

behavior--they closely scrutinize their bodies--as they change from treating 

their reflection as a stranger to recognizing it as themselves.(H.N. 26-27) 

"If consciousness of the self and the ability to communicate ideas with 

other intelligent beings exist, can other qualities of the human mind be far 

away?"(H.N. 27) Wilson asks regarding the chimpanzee. To answer that 

question Wilson examines the social existence of chimpanzees, which, 

though it is "far less elaborately organized than even the hunter-gatherers, 

who have the simplest economic arrangements of all human beings," 

nonetheless shares "striking basic similarities" with hunter-gatherer social 

existence.(H.N. 27) 

The apes live in troops of up to fifty individuals, within which smaller, 
more casual groups break off and reunite in shifting combinations of 
individuals over periods as brief as a few days. Males are somewhat larger 
than females, to about the same degree as in human beings, and they 
occupy the top of well-marked dominance hierarchies. Children are 
closely associated with their mothers over a period of years, sometimes 
even into maturity. The young chimpanzees themselves remain allied 



for long periods of time; individuals on occasion even adopt younger 
brothers or sisters when the mother dies. 

Each troop occupies a home range of about twenty square miles. 
Meetings between neighboring troops are infrequent and usually tense. 

53 

On these occasions nubile females and young mothers sometimes migrate 
between the groups. But on other occasions chimpanzees can become 
territorial and murderous. Like primitive human beings, chimpanzees 
gather fruit and other vegetable foods primarily and hunt only 
secondarily. Perhaps the most remarkable form of man-like behavior 
among chimpanzees is the use of intelligent, cooperative maneuvers 
during the hunt. Normally only adult males attempt to pursue animals-­
another humanoid trait. The distribution of meat is also cooperative. On 
a few occasions males go so far as to tear off pieces of meat and hand them 
over to supplicants. This is a small gesture by the standards of human 
altruism but it is a very rare act among animals--a giant step, one might 
say, for apekind.(H.N. 27-29) 

Also significant, Wilson points out, is the fact that chimpanzees have a 

rudimentary culture. Zoologists "have discovered a remarkable repertory of 

tool use in the ordinary life of apes"(H.N. 29) that includes using sticks and 

saplings to defend against leopards; hurling sticks and stones during attacks 

on baboons, humans, and other chimpanzees; digging with sticks to open 

termite mounds and "fishing" for termites with modified plant stems; prying 

open boxes with sticks; and removing water from tree holes in "sponges" 

constructed of chewed leaves.(H.N. 29-30) The use of sticks to pry open boxes, 

in particular, demonstrates the chimpanzees' ability to invent techniques and 

transmit them to others. This method was invented by one or a few 

individuals at the Gombe Stream Reserve and then spread through the troop 

by imitation. Each tool-using behavior recorded in Afri