THE FAMILY OF MAN—YES! PROPAGANDA!

In 1955 Edward Steichen, a photographer and curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, launched his photographic essay, The Family of Man, accompanied by a book with the same title, iconic cover art by Leo Lionni. The introduction to the exhibit and its accompanying commentary were provided by Carl Sandburg, Steichen's brother-in-law. The exhibit in different versions toured around the world and the book has never been out of print.

I can't remember when I first saw the book, the most popular version of it being a soft cover edition, an early paperback book. I suppose it might have been in the early 60s because it accompanied me to medical school in 1967 and has been in our library ever since. When I think about all of my travels and the moves we have made in our lives, it is amazing to me that some of these early books have survived all the commotion. The exhibit appeared in the first few years after WWII and at the time was considered to be an ambitious attempt at American propaganda to link with the Marshall Plan reconstruction of societies in Europe. In our present contentious times it seems a minor criticism to have directed at the incredible attempt to celebrate human activities and the life cycle. As time passed, there were more criticisms of the exhibit for slighting marginalized populations and indigenous cultures. The exhibit culled from some 10,000 photographic negatives the 500-plus photographs finally included. So, the exhibit was the result of an extensive effort to represent as many different populations as possible, with an eye to the beauty of the photographs themselves. As I think about how the original exhibit was viewed differently in different eras, it seems to me the critiques tell us more about the times in which they were made than the actual exhibit. If one were truly sensitive to our times in this aspect then we might suggest that the exhibit be called “The Family of Humankind” the reference to “man” now clouds feminist perspectives on culture. I do think there is value in preserving Steichen's effort as it was originally constructed, if only as a bookmark to the inclusiveness and goodwill of those times just after a world war that witnessed the suffering and losses of many millions of people. There is also value in looking at the exhibit through the lenses of our own times now. The exhibit can be a teaching for us in how to see and think about one another, even though we all differ in so many respects. The teaching would include attention to our diverse populations as well as our universal heritage as human beings. I don't believe the intention of the exhibit was to covertly or overtly manipulate viewers into what they should think.

All of the photographs were black and white and as I page through them now I am reminded of why the book appealed to me in the first instance. Steichen, himself, considered the exhibit to be the culmination of the work of a lifetime in photography. Each of the photographs communicates a different level of intimacy that only photography can capture in the faces, gestures, and interactions of the subjects. If one can separate the “common” from the “special” among us, then the exhibit weighed heavily on subjects whose names were probably not known at the time they were photographed in unposed situations and interactions. There are the few celebrities among them; the photos of J. Robert Oppenheimer teaching a class, Toscanini, and Judge Learned Hand leaning over a legal text. But for the most part all the subjects are human beings captured in the courses of their rich lives. The photos were grouped to correspond to the cycle of life from birth to death. No one seems to have noticed the photographer with camera held to the eye. All are engaged and grounded.

Much attention was given to the actual details of the installation as it was constructed. Some of the photos were mural sized, some closer to postcard size. Some were mounted close to the floor, others mounted on the ceiling. The viewer was invited to stand up close for some and far back for others as a way of seeing the world of human activity in its panoramic dimensions. I had only the book as a reference and so it was not possible for me to experience the grand scope of the actual exhibit, but the book has served me well. Over time, as I have read magazines and newspapers, I have clipped photos from those sources and in retirement began a pasting project on poster board, making collages of the images in a mostly random fashion. Now, as I look back on some of them, I see that the seed for this project was planted many years ago with The Family of Man. There are an infinite number of images that one could gather from the billions of people now wandering the face of the earth. Each of us could be a study subject for such an exhibit.

When we look at the photos in the book, we are looking at ourselves in a mirror as well as others in very different settings. We are struck by the commonality of the human experience, no matter where on earth people wander. When I think about how different this type of exhibit might be today, I have only to look at my own collection of photos to see people in refugee camps, families at borders of countries attempting to cross into a new life, and children in detention who have been stripped from their immigrant parents. I see children still starving, women giving birth in difficult circumstances, patients in hospice care with devoted companions. I also see images of distant nebulae in galaxies never before imagined, creatures from the depths of the ocean never before captured. There are dictators and Nobel Prize winners, geniuses of technology, and images of poets who have died. Some of the photos are posed but most are moments of time in which a person is caught off guard, moments of self-absorption, confrontation, or meditation. There is no limit to how we can experience and process life that unfolds for us.

When I think about the initial criticisms of the exhibit and the implications that this exhibit was an America trying to propagate some specific doctrine in order to sway opinion, I pull back. If it was, indeed, propaganda, then it was an effort to show how much all of us share even at the end of a devastating war that engulfed millions of people and caused immeasurable suffering. One of the more controversial images was of the atomic bomb mushroom cloud from one of the test sites on Enewetak Atoll. It was a reminder of how possible it was to bring further destruction to the earth and its inhabitants. It was sober propaganda to draw all of us to the reality of what powerful forces man had created. For me, living now in a decidedly permeated nuclear age, I see the black and white photographs of human beings living their lives in stark relief against the potential destruction of those human lives and contamination of the earth for millennia. To what better uses could The Family of Man propaganda be directed? In the grand scheme of the life cycle all of us share, how do all the superficial differences and partisan battles add up in significance? It seems to me that we need books and exhibits like these to remind us of the joys and sorrows in our lives and how we can comfort one another despite our cultural and ethnic differences. Should we not devote more to the welfare of our neighbors, be they around the corner from us or across trackless oceans? Should we not show compassion that is essentially the message embedded in the black and white photographs so tenderly recorded and displayed and published? Can one look at any one of the photographs and not see compassion behind its selection? Even the Civil War soldier lying dead in the trench with a gun across his body must elicit in us compassion for him and for the loved ones never to hold him again or perhaps to even honor him in death by being able to bury him instead of knowing that he was interred in an unmarked grave with other fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict. And the faces of distressed women with children captured by Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn worrying in the poverty of the moment and looking into the unknown future. These, too, with the beggars and grief stricken, the jubilant grandmothers, the storytellers and the students—all draw from us the compassion we have for them and the compassion we hope for ourselves. This, then, is useful propaganda even today and perhaps especially today when compassion is now considered a “radical” response to all that seems to have gone wrong with the body politic and our common relationships.

The Family of Man would propagandize the message of love and compassion for the plight of all of us in our profoundly rich and perilous lives. It would remind us how fragile life can be, yet how resilient we are in the face of all its exigencies and vicissitudes, its diseases and destructions. And death. Yes, the propaganda message of joy and sorrow is accompanied by the reality of death. In this, then, life and its various parts and experiences is brought back to us in a way that allows for common cause on a tilting planet that succors us with the tender loving care only mystery knows. Are we able to return the tender care to one another as well as the earth, our home?

I invite you to explore more deeply The Family of Man in all its dimensions. Let this idea of common family life touch you as it has me. May it spread as only good propaganda can.

HANNAH ARENDT—THINKING ABOUT THINKING

We are living in a time of intense scientific scrutiny of the brain, mind, and their neuroscientific correlates. We wonder about the nature of mindfulness, about meditation, and all the neurotransmitters that are involved in the generation of emotions and, ultimately, human behavior. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Life of the Mind: Thinking, looks at the brain's most potent process through the lens of philosophy. Her book was published in 1971, years before the explosion in neuroscientific explorations. In thinking about thinking we have an inherent tendency to choose the results of scientific investigation and research over what a philosopher might say about the same process, a tendency, that is, to establish a duality of thought about the mind. But my own orientation is to see that both science and philosophy have something to offer in our understanding of how we think. In fact, the disciplines are complementary and support each other because both sides of the duality have as their mission to reach a deeper understanding of human behavior with the intention of making greater progress in how we understand ourselves and all other things and beings.

This mission of comprehensiveness and elucidation is a weighty one. The weight of understanding is greater for the philosopher because she must take into account many vectors and influences and tie them into a whole picture, whereas the scientist is focused on single particles of that same picture, not such a heavy task. I don't claim to see clearly what Arendt sees in her treatise on thinking. I am not well versed in the language of philosophy and its nuances. What I read from her book at the outset is an attempt to construct a platform upon which the elements of thinking can be separated and examined. She knows that these are the concerns of the “thinking ego,” referring to that part of all of us involved in the process of thinking, and that part that holds sway over how we think and, thus, what we think. She reserves for human thought the essential ability to choose what we think. So, my interpretation of her work may miss some very important philosophical points but there are some important ideas in it that inform my continuing understanding of the wonder of the human brain and thought.

Early on in her book Arendt stresses how thinking is different from the world of “appearances,” the activities of daily toil. It is this world that is dependent on what we perceive through our senses that feeds our intellect and through which we come to some understanding of a truth of the world around us (not the truth, a distinction she makes later on). Thinking, on the other hand, is generated by a process that is non-appearing, a process that involves a withdrawal from the world of activity and involves, too, a suspension of our perception of space/time, as well as a sense of our own corporality. This represents a detachment from the senses and sense-objects. This is the realm of philosophy. This realm of mind is invisible and controlled at will. It is active within the chamber in which a soundless dialogue (self-talk) between I and itself is ongoing in a continuous pattern. The thinking ego (in its withdrawn role as one who is being vs. doing) is the observer of sense objects and of the participants who are subject to the sense-objects of the world and the images they form (as in the realm of imagination). These are the distinctions she makes between the various layers of the amalgam of thinking and doing, the differences between vita contemplativa and vita activa, an ancient distinction.

One of her important points is to consider what she believes to be the ultimate aim of thinking and that is to make meaning. It is not, she says, to find the truth; an elusive, slippery, and inchoate property of thought. She implies that truth is contingent and not defined as a single universally accepted property. We are storytellers and meaning-makers and it is in this that we engage our thought processes. The way in which thinking joins doing is through the use of properties of the imagination. Here is how Arendt words this:

“Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience.”

“If the language of thinking is essentially metaphorical, it follows that the world of appearances inserts intself into thought quite apart from the needs of our body and the claims of our fellow-men, which will draw us back into it in any case.”

“... truth, in the metaphysical tradition understood in terms of the sight metaphor, is ineffable by definition. We know from the Hebrew tradition what happens to truth if the guiding metaphor is not vision but hearing (in many respects more akin than sight to thinking because of its ability to follow sequences). The Hebrew God can be heard but not seen, and truth therefore becomes invisible....”

“The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive.”

In another interesting section of the book she explores a concept of the soul.

“The soul, where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, is a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer.... Its invisibility resembles that of our inner bodily organs of whose functioning or non-functioning we are also aware without being able to control them. The life of the mind, on the contrary, is sheer activity, and this activity, like other activities can be started and stopped at will.”

Once again she emphasizes how active choice in thinking is a property of our brains. While thinking, we are detached from the “real world” so long as we continue to think. We tend to trade perceptions of the world around us for the invisible properties of thought. I think this is a very interesting distinction she makes. It inserts a strong element of personal agency and choice into a process that we take for granted as an independently organizing and guiding ability.

It is this ability to dissociate thinking from the doing of the “chaotic welter” of everyday life that surrounds us that resonated with me as I reflect on my own experiences with daily events, especially now in times of what seem like political entropy. Arendt writes that one of philosophy's uses is to “teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking.”The idea here is that we can choose thinking as an antidote to the chaos of human behavior expressed through “appearances” and “sense-objects.”

“Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.”

The chaos and visible deficiencies of politics and other human pursuits raises the question, for me, of the nature of evil. I see much of what passes as acceptable behavior as arising from the seed from which evil blossoms. Arendt writes about this as well. Her position is that thought's quest is for meaning as a “kind of desirous love” and so the objects of thought can “only be lovable things—beauty, wisdom, justice, and so on. Ugliness and evil are almost by definition excluded from the thinking concern.” This seems like a controversial position to take, given that we often see evil as an active participant in our thoughts and behavior. Arendt continues that evil for her is an absence, something missing altogether from the thinking process. In this way, evil is equivalent to thoughtlessness. Not converting evil to speech or action eliminates it from thinking. So thinking (and thus philosophy) represents a refuge from the dark and dirty force of evil. In 1961, Arendt covered the trial of Adolph Eichmann for The New Yorker. Eichmann was an official in the Nazi regime and Arendt, a Jew, was interested in the trial as an extension of her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Her coverage of the trial resulted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It was her position on evil and evil intent that was reflected in the phrase she coined to describe Eichmann as a bland functionary, “the banality of evil.” It was a philosophical position that emerged from her considerations of evil and explored in Thinking. She was criticized and even vilified for reducing someone, like Eichmann, to the size of a common criminal and not for depicting the oversized and ugly monster the Israelis presented to the world. She did not excuse the crimes of the Nazi regime as much as treat the evils done as results of thoughtlessness. Whether one agrees, or not, this concept of evil as absent from thought might help explain how people educated and sophisticated in so many ways can support demagoguery and the tyrannies of a despot. I am not sure that Arendt's arguments make me more comfortable with evil pursuits, but the idea that evil is absent from thought and the process of thinking is as good an explanation as any other of how evil takes hold among us. A continuing dilemma I face is how to explain how good people can support evil intentions and actions. Perhaps I will always have this dilemma. In any case, if evil is absent from the ambitions of thinking, then what are we to do with those who perpetrate evil acts? Evil is part of our chaotic and noisy everyday life and so, in that way, can be segregated from the invisibility of thought. People aren't prosecuted for evil thoughts, just for how those thoughts translate into the behavior that describes our relationships with one another.

Evil is just one of Arendt's concerns in her book, but a concern that emerges from all that we see around us and absorb through our senses. Evil is a force that requires attention and tending in our relationships with one another. Some of us (and me, when I was younger) would like to believe in and depend upon the best in people and relegate evil to some category of theoretical possibility. But we must contend with what evil actions produce and know it for what it is in our wobbly world. Can we keep evil out of our “lovable” thoughts? Is evil, as with Arendt's conception of truth, contingent and relative in ways that allow it to prosper? If we believe in individual choice, then perhaps we can choose to reserve thinking for just those thoughts that move us toward greater understanding, clarity, and love and live in a world that is anything but thoughtless.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Primary sources refers to written documents that originate within history that bring to light new ideas or perspectives that are then used in commentaries and analyses. Primary sources are the seeds of thought that then sprout extensions. The Constitution of the United States is one of these primary sources, as are the The Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers was a series of publications written in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to support the ratification of the United States Constitution. Three of the Founding Fathers of America built a case for ratification but also, in the process, outlined in broad strokes the philosophy and structures upon which the new republic was based.

Primary sources are important for many reasons, not the least of which is to explore ideas that have proved generative over time. Every discipline one can name has its primary sources. Every scientific experiment, for instance, can be considered a primary source for what comes after it. It is important to trace back to the origins of ideas in order to understand how they have come into being and to then develop some perspective on our contemporary thinking. In this way we gain some deeper understanding of the original context for certain ideas and to see how they have evolved. I think asking the question about how true we are to the original is always a good one. What wisdom can we gain from examining the primary sources? Is it useful to know how our own ideas have been changed over time from the original forms? It is part of accepted wisdom in some cultures and traditions to think of the commentaries on primary sources as elevated and original in their own rights, even though their foundations can be traced back in time to a more durable document or narrative. It is also important to think of primary sources as beginnings and not ends. They serve us as points of departure in further explorations of thought extensions. They themselves may be extensions of previous seeds but they need to be organic and elastic sources for future ideas.

Politics is the ocean in which all of us swim and it has been so since time immemorial, since humans began to congregate and codify their beliefs. In its broadest meaning, politics constitutes the agreements factions of people have about how to manage their collective affairs. I suppose even primeval communities had their own methods of governance that allowed for the tribe to survive in a world hostile to their own interests. I think “factions” is a good way to look at politics, as most collective efforts at governance are composed of a set of minorities within a cohesive group. What was true for hunter/gatherers is true for us today. When the colonists decided to separate themselves from what they considered an oppressive monarchy, they were defining their set of beliefs against the backdrop of another set composed of its own factions. Factional prerogatives are not new to contemporary governments. Returning to primary sources challenges us to reexamine our own assumptions about what we think we know or what seems to us to be inherited wisdom. We are challenged to observe the contexts of our own lives as evolutionary steps in a changing landscape of human behavior.

What has grown more prominent in present times about factional governance are the great divides among the factions and the growing tendency to inhabit the factional preferences and not work toward integrating them into a larger fabric of cooperative cohesiveness. James Madison (1751-1836) wrote Federalist No. 10 in 1787 and it stands out from the rest as a statement of philosophy for the remainder. It is a primary source for understanding the perspective of one founding father and to see how it has contributed to our present day politics, if at all. He has written about how a “well constructed union” must deal with the “violence of faction.”

“The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have in truth been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

“To secure the public good, and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our enquiries are directed.”

In effect, Madison concluded that the common good is supported by having enough representatives to dilute the “cabals of a few; and that however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude.” He acknowledged that any system designed to protect the rights of all would inevitably produce “inconveniences” for all factions. He is writing here about the elements of a system of governance that contribute to the maintenance of its parts and to the health of the whole. His summary takes into account the natural tendency for humans to have opinions that aggregate in factions. He is perspicacious about human behavior to include safeguards against the tyrannies of both majorities and minorities. To this end, he supports the structures established in the Constitution that both energize and limit equal and fair treatment of all citizens. It should be noted that Madison also swam in the ocean of the politics of his time and held slaves all his life. The slave trade was permitted under the constitution and he was the one who proposed that apportionment of the United States Senate be based on each state's free population and slave population that led to the Three-Fifths Compromise (1787-1868) that assigned to slaves a three-fifths fraction of a whole human being for determining representation and taxation in the states. Even in the times in which human equality and rights were being debated, the assumptions made about what constituted a human being were being drawn up along lines of race and a defined minority. Our assumptions today about the individuals we consider to be enlightened intellects were also human beings with clay feet and we can learn a great deal about the threads of history that persist today in our own society. Good ideas and bad ideas are part of the mix of politics. Madison recognized that and proposed mechanisms for limiting those ideas that allowed for factions to triumph over the common good.

In times in which the structures of stable government (for good or ill) are being questioned and, it could be asserted, marginalized or ignored altogether, it is important to be clear about the truth of the changes and their rationale. Where the changes seem to be random and at the whim of egoic passion, it is even more important to be awake to the extent to which they represent a danger to the pursuit of freedom and attempts at equality and justice. I think any time judgments are presented as simple and intuitive all of us must be alert to their validity and applicability. Returning to primary sources can be a method by which we can evaluate the validity of moves by one faction to favor their own causes, thus causing disruption to the fabric of governance that covers all citizens. We are left at the mercy of demagogues and tyrants if we do not excavate the legitimacy of history and what lessons it can teach us. Primary sources are a priceless reservoir of wisdom and balance that are accessible to us in our quest for understanding our 21^st century American character. They are equally important for those values of enduring worth and to see the values once considered true that no longer serve our ongoing struggles to attain the lofty ideals of the founding fathers, those inalienable rights encoded in our national psyche.

Concepts of governance and what we are now experiencing change all the time but depend on structures established centuries ago. We jettison those structures at our national peril, just as we entertain chaos and despotism when any structures of self-governance (families qualify here, as well) begin to break down. One of our hopes for stabilization is what Madison presented as a bulwark against such chaos and that is to dilute the power of factions by a sufficient number of agreeable representatives (families don't work under this proviso most of the time). Tensions and pressures of individual and group prejudices will always be present in how we govern ourselves. This contributes to the strength of the republic if kept in balance and also contributes to opportunities for change as we examine the fundamental properties of the system.

It is worthwhile to point out that politics might be the ocean in which we swim every day, but consulting and studying primary sources applies to any discipline or corner of our lives that we might otherwise take for granted. We must be ever alert to the tendency to freeze ideas and treat them as inflexible dogma. The power of curiosity and the practice of inquiry are instrumental in our attempts to dig as deeply as we can into the hierarchies of power and influence that affect our lives. In this sense, there is a reason to question what is presented as “common sense” or as common knowledge. Knowledge can become diluted and subject to the contexts of different oceans (like those of the sciences, the arts, economics, education, etc.) in which all of us swim from time to time. We need to remain wakeful and alert to what we hold as prejudices and acknowledge partial truths, our partial understandings, and how everything changes over time. If we cannot know the future (and we can't), then often the best we can do is to question what we do know and that often relies on history and its primary sources. We would be wise to consult them and wiser still if we can learn from them. When we can understand their teachings, then we are better able to make the changes that will benefit more of us citizens in our collective efforts to make better lives for all. Let us never assume we know all the answers to problems and so let us always keep a healthy practice of inquiry. What is it? Is it true? Do we believe what we do because we need to believe we are right? What assumptions are we making today about our lives that we might change by referring to primary sources? What seeds are we cultivating?

Since I crafted the ideas above, the House of Representatives has begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. I reread my comments with this pivotal event in mind and I think what I have written stands the test of relevance. I didn't change any of it, knowing what I do about the present events. I believe that our democracy is strong enough in the institutions encoded in our constitution to withstand the insults of a demagogue and the processes by which he can be removed from the seat of power. We are returning to primary sources for the support and strength we need in these times.

EXQUISITE PRESCIENT AESTHETICS

The beginning of science is art.

The beginning of art is seeing.

The beginning of seeing is looking.

When we look, what do we really see? This is the question that emerges out of my study of the life and work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), a Spanish neural investigator and pathologist who focused his attention on the histology of the central nervous system. Learning about him raised many questions about the possibilities of a life's work and, especially about Cajal's life and the distinction made between art and science. I think what I discovered is that, for him and maybe for all of us, we need to particularize before we unify our thinking about anything. We seem to need details in order to see the whole. We can't deduce or synthesize or conclude without knowing the particulars. Ironically, the whole can't be seen until all the pieces (or as many as possible) can be brought into the picture. When we do that we can be surprised by what coalesces. Because most investigations are vast in their scope, our impression of the whole is ultimately only partial and temporary until more information is obtained or more experiments are performed. This is as true in science as in art.

What did Cajal notice? Cajal's father was a professor of anatomy and Santiago followed in his footsteps through medical school and into a professorship of anatomy, even though his early interests were in art and photography. In science his interests were focused on the study of histology (study of cells in tissues) of inflammation and basic cellular structures. He was aided in his studies by the available technology of the light microscope and a technique for staining cells in microscopic slide preparations, a method developed by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. These technologies allowed him to explore the histology of the central nervous system, a lifetime study that earned him and Golgi a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. It is important to Cajal's life story to outline the way in which he devoted his time and energy but, of course, that is only the beginning of what his life's work signifies. There are many threads and themes in his life that one could pull on to see the whole of it better. It is his studies of neuroanatomy that are of primary interest, even though one could also write about his family life or his own writings (his autobiography, Recollections of a Life, is considered to be one of the finest scientific autobiographies), among many other threads in a life of multiple interests and accomplishments.

What is striking to me about his work in histology is the beauty of the drawings he did of the cells he studied under the microscope. It is interesting to me that he was also interested in the early techniques of photography (he wrote a book on the technology and art of color photography and many of the portraits of him are self-portraits, the very first “selfies,” I suppose) and one can see in his drawings some of the stop-action motion that characterized the early experiments in photography. This reminds me of how Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), too, was fascinated with photography and especially the work of Edweard Muybridge and his photographic motion studies. The lives of Cajal and Eakins overlapped in time and in other ways, too. Eakins was devoted to the idea that the study of gross anatomy enabled the artist to shape the surface anatomy of the human body in ways that conformed to the truth of its functions. Cajal also discovered much about the functioning of the human brain from its anatomical structures, only from the microscopic perspective. Each was an artist in his own right and each began with the particularities of anatomy. The beginning of science is art. The beginning of art is science. When we make too many categories and distinctions, we lose sight of the fact that the goal is to understand the entirety as a marvelous construction. Science and art are wedded in reality and we lose much if we feel a need to pick one or the other when we want to know about the structures of body, brain, and mind.

The drawings Cajal made of the human central nervous system are intimate observations of structures that often show all the marks of progressive understanding. There are in some of his drawings the preliminary pencil lines that resemble ancient palimpsests. There are heavy lines and darker colors to designate primary foci of investigation. There are ghostly structures to indicate the tangle of background fibers and tracts. We are asked to notice his lettering and numbers that put some order into the layers of brain tissue to show locations and proximities. He has also highlighted specific areas by painting in contrasting white washes around structures and these are an artist's working marks. Some cells are exaggerated in size to call attention to their importance in the drawing. His working methods often meant that he would spend mornings peering into his microscope and then drawing from memory in the afternoons. He estimated that he had done 20,000 drawings but only about 2,500 survive. One can only imagine how prodigious his work methods were to produce so many individual studies.

His drawings were more than descriptive and artfully beautiful. They were also maps of brain function. We don't stop to think how important the little arrows are in understanding a map. They designate location as well as direction. One can see their importance to Cajal's thinking and his formulations of brain function by noticing how he used them. They relate to his ability to bring motion, the motion of photography perhaps, into a two-dimensional rendering of brain cellular structure, an otherwise static image. The deductions he made of nerve function were prescient and many were corroborated and supported only decades later when more sophisticated technologies for studying cellular structures were developed. The beginning of science is art. Cajal's autobiography is divided into two sections, one focused on his science and the other on his art. Yet, his life was an example of how it is possible to unite the two divisions. We take things apart in order to put them back together into some cohesive and comprehensive whole. When we do gather the pieces we often find new combinations and new meanings. When taken as a whole, what we observe is something with artful properties. It isn't until we begin to dissect the parts, either with microscopes or unaided eyes, that we discover the miraculous interweavings and interdependence. Cajal's drawings were ideas about central nervous system function, a very complex aspect of human anatomy and as yet unyielding in the secrets of how brain becomes mind.

Cajal developed an approach to the study of neural function he called the Neuron Theory. This was a description of neuroanatomy in which nerve cells were contiguous and not continuous in structure (the Reticular Theory), as championed by Camillo Golgi. Additionally, the Neuron Theory contained Cajal's Theory of Dynamic Polarization where chemical signals (now referred to as system information) flowed in only one direction along the nerve fibers, the directions designated by the arrows drawn on the maps of anatomical structures. The interruptions in nerve structure allowed for transmission of nerve signals by way of chemicals that crossed the small spaces between nerve bodies. This was not confirmed until the 1950s with electron microscopy. Many other theories proposed by Cajal were also confirmed many decades after his work was first published, all based on what his eye could see through his microscope. He was looking and also seeing, a prerequisite for discovery.

Prescience is far removed from guesswork. Cajal's foresight was based on endless hours hovering over a microscope and drawing what he could see. He brought to his scientific work an artist's eye and sensibility. What he recorded demonstrated that what he saw was structure and pattern and he translated these into elements of form, specificity, interdependence, complexity yielding to simplification, and information transmission—all precursors to intelligence and the evolution of mind. We are still far removed from the correlations that link our brains to our minds even in the most simplistic ways. Modern neuroscience has made strides in making connections between brain function and thought and behavior patterns but there is still no accounting for what makes me different in my thoughts from you. We know that all we are, how we act and interact, is confined to the processing in our brains but we don't have many clues as to how identities are formed and shaped in that marvelous machine, a machine that never sleeps the way we think sleep occurs. We don't know all the details about brain function in its normal state and less about abnormal brain function, about how it heals and about synaptic plasticity. Does the brain create the mind? Is learning a function of brain or mind? Where in the brain do we harbor our spiritual selves? How do we get the sense that our ideas are evolving and that we are growing in awareness and wisdom?

Today's Connectome Project is designed to map all of the brain's neuronal connections. Will that help us understand the answers to some of the questions asked above? If the neurons aren't connected in an interwoven reticular pattern and brain function is dependent on chemical transmission in one direction only along individual cells and if normal function recruits neurons from all over the brain, then do we think we will be able to know how the brain generates and supports the mind? In thinking even this, how will we track all the millions of connections and sparkings that help us think it?

I find it interesting that Cajal and Golgi championed diametrically opposite theories of nerve structure and function but shared a Nobel Prize for their work. We don't see this same open-ended acceptance of the idea that even in science (maybe especially in science) there are partial truths to be discovered and that science is more like art in being malleable, improvised, and creative in format but never fabricated. And it is also true that science is as often wrong as confirmatory in its results. But don't we learn as much and perhaps more by what science can't confirm as by how the results confirm the hypotheses? Don't we approach art in the same way? Isn't every piece of art an experiment? Don't both scientists and artists use the same neural structures in the brain, perhaps borrowing fibers and bundles from one another and recruiting for different purposes?

Cajal was honored in his own lifetime and not only by being awarded a Nobel Prize. One of the cells he first described and drew was named the “interstitial cell of Cajal.” It is a specific neuron within the smooth muscle of the gut that is a generator and pacemaker for the slow waves of gut contraction that mediates between motor neurons and the smooth muscle cells, allowing for the all-important movement of waste along the GI tract. In a gesture that honors Cajal's devotion to life viewed through the microscope and into the cosmos, Asteroid 117413 was named Ramonycajal in his honor. So, in the gut of us human animals or in the heart of the cosmos, Santiago Ramon y Cajal is truly honored as a man for all times. His life and work were art forms in the service of science and a greater understanding of the brain and mind.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND PRISONS

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a visitor from France to American soil in 1831, along with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. His stated mission was to observe and document the state of American prisons and penitentiaries. It was an odd subject and quite circumscribed in nature. What resulted from his visit was a book titled Democracy in America, published in 1835. This work was a wide ranging set of observations about a nation that had been populated and settled over a relatively short period of time compared to the country from which he hailed. Tocqueville was attuned to the issues of social consequence in his country and abroad. He was involved in the turmoil that rattled French society in the mid-eighteen hundreds and held posts in government at high levels. He seemed to be attuned to the effects of governmental transitions, violent or otherwise. It was this interest as well as an interest in the freedoms government promoted or curtailed that occupied him and to which he turned his prescient critical eye. What he was able to describe about the American character has been passed down to us even today as a legacy of his keen observations. I am not certain that his book on democracy influenced Frederick Jackson Turner in his descriptions of the passing of the frontier in American settlement, but I see it as the nucleus of Turner's portrait of the American character and “rugged individualism.” Both historians drew some conclusions about American society based on the characteristics of its citizens and these, in turn, were further elucidated and updated by Robert Bellah, et. al., in 1985 in their book, Habits of the Heart, a reference to Tocqueville's observations about American mores. That is still quite a long time ago as our history has unfolded. In many ways we are still a “new” country and always will be when compared with other nations and cultures. We seem to be in a continual state of growing pains, experiments, and restructuring. We resemble all other nations and cultures, however, in that we are always in the process of redefining our hopes and our progress, or lack of it. I believe that a way out of the confusion I experience when I examine current events is provided by a look back at sources like the works of Tocqueville, Turner, and Bellah which paint a broad picture of a nation always in flux. The seeds of American culture and character are still present in the soil of our lives together. Some of the seeds become weeds and some become more useful plants that sustain us. It isn't always easy to discern which is which. I believe that the agricultural/botanical/biological metaphor is useful because it can be used to better understand our complicated and often contradictory lives as a national community. The biological reference also allows us to borrow the idea of ecosystem as a way of teasing out what we can observe and understand from what we can't explain but which is part of the overall structure of autopoiesis (a word meaning self-regulating), and homeostasis (biological balance).

I have often thought of American culture (which includes our history) as a collage but I now see that as insufficient to understand the deeper levels of commitment and engagement that characterize us now in the early years of the 21^st century. A collage is a superficial arrangement pasted together and it is easy to portray American life that way, to paste together headlines and short stories about what we do and how we think. But our collective lives are much, much deeper and more profound than that and it takes some hard work to make it more of a sculpture or a defined entity. It takes intention and attention to carve away from the raw block of material what our character is not and to get to the three-dimensional form inside. Our lives are complicated and it isn't always possible to fit all the pieces together to see how it holds together. The idea of an ecosystem suggests that we have a system that does hold together in ways we can observe and in other ways we can't understand, but which are still within the system. As we mature as a nation, we are learning more about who we are and what our character looks like—and what we envision becoming over time.

I think it is as true for a nation as it is for an individual that we can create open spaces as well as prisons for ourselves. Tocqueville came to America with the intention of investigating prison systems but eventually defined aspects of national character (some universal and some particular to the United States) that translated as imprisoning forces for its government as well as for its individual citizens. For instance, he noticed that individualism and pragmatism were part of our character. Among our cultural traditions he also wrote about public-private tensions, the importance of personal success, the insistence on freedom and justice. But he also noted, as with all things, that there were some darker aspects to the loftier attributes of national character. Freedom granted to all was sometimes curtailed in the interests of some individuals whose freedom was borrowed from others. Economic acquisitiveness (greed), freedom from governmental interference, freedom to govern one's own course, and freedom from conforming values and from the past didn't necessarily translate into ideas about cooperation and community. Tocqueville noticed that for all the emphasis on this radical individualism there was an attendant isolationism for individuals who segregated themselves from others in their attempts to express their own freedoms. This tendency often led to a dispersion of effective communal action when it became important to resist authoritarian, administrative despotism or the call for greater social cohesion to protect against the threats of natural disaster or security threats. Individualism, in other words, opened up a vacuum into which more aggressive individuals with personal agendas were able to move and consolidate authority. I think we can see versions of this on the national and international political stages even today.

Similar tensions evolved in public vs. private life, in economics, in the spiritual life of individuals vs. communities of faith, in marriage and family life, in work vs. leisure, in the abandonment of rural life and the move to cities, in the “trigger” issues of personal choice, race (the persistence of slavery's legacies, for instance), gender, and moral values that have come down to us even today as important cultural and societal aspects of the American ecosystem. A biological ecosystem conforms to certain characteristics: dynamic interactions among elements, interactions that are non-linear (small changes can create large effects), modulation of local interactions within the system, feedback of interactive elements, unpredictable behavior of the whole system when compared to the behavior of individual elements, hard to define system boundaries, activation far from equilibrium (implying energy needs to sustain the system as a functioning whole), operating in the present as a result of adaptation to an evolving history, and various elements operating under the influence of local stimuli rather than from the system as a whole. When examined with a culture or society in mind, these same characteristics might also describe social vectors and influences which to my mind are very complex and difficult to understand and difficult, too, to put into a cohesive picture.

The fact that a complex system exists means that we might not understand all its necessary requirements but we can rely on its adaptive vigor for self-maintenance. Systems that don't maintain themselves in ways described above will not persist. And so when I think about how dysfunctional our form of democracy seems at times, I think that it is an ecosystem following an evolution of autopoiesis that can sustain its life. It doesn't mean that its elements won't change, that they will be predictable, and that all the elements will be discernible. It is a source of some psychological discomfort to accept levels of uncertainty in a system that we think should be more transparent and understandable, but we are living now in a time of great uncertainty and we are aware of structures of governance evolving (is dissolving too strong a word?). Our knowledge of change is based on a history of what seemed predictable and at a slower pace of change than what we are now experiencing. But our challenge is to define the changes in terms of a complex adaptive system and rest in the fact that if the changes cannot maintain the health of the entire system with all its different parameters, then the system will no longer exist and another complex system will appear with its own vectors and forces.

I am not sure that thinking about complex adaptive systems in reference to governance will bring any comfort of mind. But this is a different way to see the world as it changes and it allows for hope and possibility of new structures that may, in the process, be more useful and of greater service to the commonweal. I find that thinking in this way also applies to so many other sticky issues that confound us as a society, issues that have existed in one form or another for all of our history and as issues particular to us as human beings. I see challenges in the realms of interpersonal relationships, of status and privilege, of economic imbalances, political partisanship, of gender rights, of race, of social isolation, and the role of women in society, to name just a few. I see each of them as a complex adaptive system interacting with American society as a whole. Each is not isolated from the rest and all are somehow interwoven in the human psyche. They persist in our lives because they have autopoietic mechanisms and forces that give them life. They are continuing to evolve and sometimes at a pace that makes them seem exaggerated and overwhelming. But that is the nature of systems within systems that are given the nutrients they need to survive. Are we able to investigate and explore them deeply enough to understand them better? Do we have the perspective to allow this to happen? To whom do we turn to guide us in this search? Do we do this as a community? Is it even possible for one person (the rugged individualist?) to manage this exploration alone? What elements of the system aid us in our inquiry?

I began this entry with the idea that we often find ourselves imprisoned by boundaries we impose on our lives in one way or another. We would not need prisons if there were a different set of assumptions about what constitutes right and wrong behavior. A different set of “habits of the heart” would lead to different possibilities. I think we can see ourselves in a limited and imprisoning way or we can see how complex our lives are and seek new and different ways of understanding them. Tocqueville and his heirs (and maybe their predecessors at the founding of the republic) make a good case for individual freedom and also for communal engagement, all of which free us from a variety of prisons. No one gets everything and that is a good thing. We are complex beings living in ever more complicated times and knowing more about our capacities for adaptation makes us more resilient and healthier. But, like all healthy complex adaptive systems, this requires energy and the work of self-regulation.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER AND THE FRONTIER MINDSET

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), then a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, published an essay in the American Historical Association's Annual Report for 1893, titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The essay made a splash at the time and was much discussed within the world of historical scholars. Jackson went on the teach and publish articles on his ideas about the frontier and the evolution of sections (the idea that defined cultural groups had distinct settlement patterns) in American history. Even though his scholarly output was not considered large, his few essays on the topics of frontier and section made an impact on how historians of American history viewed its development. It is my opinion that the 1893 essay has implications for our times far beyond what even Turner might have imagined.

I first was introduced to this essay as a junior in high school in a course that combined American history (using Morison and Commager's The Growth of the American Republic as a textbook) and American literature (here it was Bradley, Beatty, and Long's American Tradition in Literature). This was a year-long course that more resembled a college course than one for high school. Yet, it gave us an opportunity to survey the grand scope of American history and to weave into its crevices the literature that emerged from the relatively short span of time from our founding to its maturity back in 1963. Of course, we have come a long way in time since then, but there are some aspects of our history that still stream in the consciousness of the 21^st century. I don't think we can make coherent sense of who we are as a people and how our society is evolving without the perspective that our collective history offers us. I believe that a close look at Turner's essay of 1893 provides that perspective and raises more questions about our collective civic life today than it answers. But it is within those questions that we are able to gather together the threads of what the frontier mindset meant in 1893 and what it means for us today. I have pondered just why this particular point in our history has stayed with me all these years, why it made such an impression on me. I think it has something to do with the discovery in that history/literature course that history is an ongoing story, but that we are heirs to how it has unfolded. When it is said that we don't “learn” from history and so are destined to repeat it, it seems to me that we are always repeating aspects of history because it is a documentation of human behavior and that will always be repeated. I was struck by how Turner was able to use a data point of information and weave the information into the grand saga of a nation growing and pushing against its boundaries. The fact that what he was documenting had already passed was also of interest to me because he was able to pull us into the history that was then unfolding as he wrote. I was learning about how to view history and to see it as a narrative of human behavior in the particular context of the settlement of America, a bold experiment in all aspects. It was an exciting discovery at that stage of my life and remains so today to imagine the frontiers that we now believe we are conquering.

Frontier exploration and settlement lasted quite a short period of time in our history and Turner begins his essay noting that the 1890 bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census stated that “up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” And so the idea of “frontier” was no longer included in the periodic census. Turner's short essay didn't document the incredibly rich and complex movement that became the push towards western settlement. It was a short essay that sketched the outlines of that surge as a series of waves and it is this metaphor of fluidity and streaming that describes the settlement of the West and supports the frontier mindset that persists to this day. The coursing of that stream was a continuation of the character that had landed small loads of ship passengers on our shores at the beginning of our history as a nation. Massively underexplored, it beckoned those frontiersmen out beyond the small settlements they inhabited. Just imagine the risk and attendant excitement with which they set out into lands for which they had no maps and little foreknowledge. Surely, they were a proud bunch, self-assertive and self-reliant, mobile, egalitarian, sometimes coarse, inquisitive, inventive, restless, dominant individuals, buoyant with the freedom of open vistas, acquisitive in their desire to own land and to obtain the greater material comforts that independent investment promised.

But what of the “frontier”? What was this space, this “wilderness”? I think the unknown of the frontier and its conquest probably exaggerated the character traits of those men and women who took the risks of its exploration and settlement. They survived and so reinforced those tendencies survival required to make a life in a clear-cut forest, far away from neighbors, dependent on the land and what skills they had to make a living. It wasn't until later that any notion of community became an option and so inventiveness and self-defense were the only ways to survive in the wilderness, at the frontier line. With time, the waves of settlement consolidated into what Turner called “sections,” collections and communities often based on shared ethnocultural traditions. But it seems to me that what had made survival possible for individuals and families was easily transferred to their larger communities of shared interests and commercial activities. The character traits of the frontiersmen and women had by then become deeply embedded in the American character. I think it is some of those traits that we see now among our fellow citizens in a time when nationalism and a turn to the protections of tribalism are resurgent.

Today, of course, we have no more “frontier” to settle. In fact, the opposite is the case: there are population expansions in cities that put pressure on goods and services and, in rural areas, a consolidation of agricultural land in a few hands that monopolize production and distribution of food crops. Today, our frontier consists of a mindset that challenges exploration and discovery in realms very different from those of our early history. While there may still be some appetite for conquering lands and peoples (and even extending to the colonization of distant planets and moons), those lands and peoples are far removed from our national borders and do not represent the same peaceable intentions frontier settlers had. Fear today causes us to mount fearful defenses against mostly manufactured threats. Fear of others different from ourselves now motivates people of power and influence but this is far from how Turner characterized the sentiments and attitudes of democracy as egalitarianism, individualism, and idealism. He saw democracy more as a world view than as forms of institutions. In this regard, he was characterizing the frontier as a mindset and not as land to be settled or conquered. He was describing the American people as inventive and resilient.

Turner's ideas about the development of sections also implied what those villages and cities were to become; often breeding grounds of social stratification, income disparities, enclave isolation, and patterns of political power and influence. There was often an absence of mutuality or of common and collective effort. Individualism as a trait supported private action as a premium and painted governmental action as “interference.” Individualism was often associated with a high tolerance for deviance, eccentricity, nonconformity, privacy, and dissent at many levels of the civic collective. It is some of these qualities that I think we see exaggerated now on our national stage and on the stages of other national governments. We have celebrated those qualities of individuals that make them attractive to the common imagination. We see a conformity of thought and action that seems to be the opposite of what we consider to be the traits that created the great western expansion. There is a sense that our notion of frontier has created a culture of conformity, complacency, and intolerance. Those who identify with the dark shadow side of “frontier” foster a speculative spirit, the exploitation and waste of precious resources for commercial gain, the desecration of natural beauty, the stratification of classes, petty capitalism, and tolerance of violence and ruthlessness. This, for some, is what it means to be a “rugged individualist” and to answer the call to full citizenship.

But we no longer live in a frontier society as defined by those individualists. Our frontiers lie before us at the horizons of philosophy, mathematics, the arts, education, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, space exploration (to name just a few of the long list of disciplines and realms of thought), and the interweaving of multiple disciplines that challenge contemporary thinking about what is possible for humans to achieve. I suggest that these frontiers require the same traits and characteristics that motivated the earliest settlers on the land. They require that we not allow those traits of achievement to lapse over into the shadow areas that all good virtues possess. We must climb to the high places where our efforts can support all people in their hopes and dreams for a better life, the frontier mindset that brings all people along in the stream of progress.

Enmeshed in our history and national character are traits that favor the shadow side of the human condition we share with all people over the millennia of existence: slavery, racial injustice, economic and ethnic oppression, warmongering, fear of the “other.” The side of the human condition exposed to the light favors the traits that the frontiers fostered: individual initiative, egalitarianism, the ideal of a land where all people have access to opportunities. Turner described the physical expansion of America as waves and it is in this spirit that we can now see that we are able to participate in such a streaming by choice. We can choose to favor the light or the dark side of our character and we can do this because we live in a democracy that shapes its people and is, in turn, shaped by them. Citizens have the opportunity to use the forms and institutions of government to support their choices. We no longer have new lands to settle, but we do have the frontier mindset to carry us into new realms of discovery. We have to confront our frustrated individualism as a myth of the 21^st century, just as frontier individualism became a myth after such a short period of our history. It is equally important, I think, to consider to what extent we continue to support the idea of sectionalism which becomes isolationism. Sectionalism tears at the fabric of democracy as surely as a mythical and exaggerated individualism does. Sectionalism is the new tribalism, nationalism, and white supremacy. But sectionalism can unite groups of people in communities of social change and cooperation. We have choices we can make and the strongest statements of national sentiment are made at the ballot box. Hopefully, all citizens will have the opportunity to have their say and the fabrications of gerrymandering in the body politic and minds of the politicians elected to serve will not prevail.

I suppose what I have said is that we are a nation of diverse opinion and as a nation we must confront and acknowledge our darkest shadows. We must work to mend the fabric of democracy and once again support the deepest and broadest virtues that continue to shape American society. Perhaps we can return to the virtues of kindness and fairness and service for all. Frederick Jackson Turner opened our eyes to what the “frontier” offered and we can choose the best parts of that tradition to continue to shape our republic for all citizens. We are still a stream of transitioning forces. Where are we headed? Where will the stream carry us?

JOHN MUIR, CANNY CONSERVATIONIST

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Wendell Berry, Given

There are many lenses through which we can view the life and work of John Muir. And there are many lenses through which he viewed his own life. Of course, all of the lenses view the parts of a whole life and are interdependent, as are the various lenses of our own lives. By knowing some of the lenses of his life, we are able to observe how we think about them and, thus, to make a determination about what to think. This has been the point of most of the little meditations for our classes and in seeing how we think we are exercising and training our attention through the practice of meditation. Every person's life we engage deeply enough can be seen through a number of such lenses. Our own lives are equally interesting and an amalgam of images through different lenses.

I have chosen John Muir (1838-1914) for this piece because a long-term interest in his life, but also because I think his life illustrates concern for issues that are immediately present for us in the 21^st century. I am not certain that these issues could be considered “fault lines,” as that seems to refer to semi-permanent, if not permanent, gaps in society inhabited on either side by entrenched interests. But there are some recurrent themes in the history of modern times that emerge, then settle back, then reemerge. One of these themes is the fate of our planet. It is no small matter that we are beginning to pay more attention to climate change and the ways in which human activity and behavior are altering how the earth and its life-sustaining encircling envelope of forces is responding to us. John Muir devoted his adult life to comforting and protecting Mother Nature in ways that were new to the public at the time but which today would be considered part of the package of the environmental resistance movement, so used are we now to the civil resistance actions of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-war Movement during the Vietnam War, the #MeToo Movement of recent years, sit-ins, protests, demonstrations, and even immolations. But in Muir's time, there were only a few tactics that could be used to get the public's attention and those included back room arm-twisting in governmental suites. To a certain extent, then and now, the success of a movement depended on media coverage and the voice of a charismatic personality. John Muir, with the help of his friend Robert Underwood Johnson of The Century Magazine, became the voice of environmental consciousness.

Muir didn't begin his work as a fully formed activist. His background was Calvinist with a transition to the ideas of the Transcendentalists (Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Walter Rollins Brooks) who believed that matter and spirit were in harmony and never more so than in nature. He explored woods, meadows, and bogs wherever he traveled. But it was an accidental eye injury in 1867 that nearly blinded him that brought him to a new purpose of spending his life studying plants. From then on, he traveled and wrote about his experiences in nature. When he settled in San Francisco he explored the Yosemite Valley, climbing its peaks and being ecstatically thrilled by all its beauty. He traveled to Alaska, British Columbia, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, and Panama. Everywhere he went he was embedded in nature. His writings detailing his travels and experiences have the feel of an evangelist and that is what he was to become. He was a popularizer of nature's beauty and expansiveness before he became an advocate for her vulnerable resources. The writings documenting his travels were from the perspective of the micro- and the macro-, detailing both the diversity of flora and the immense spans of her valleys and mountains, as well as the mercurial nature of her weather moods.

Would it be too much of a stretch or too much hyperbole to say that Muir's own coming of age was an evolving experience from rapture to rupture? I ask the question that way to emphasize how I see the maturation of the human experience from the pure innocence of childhood to the realities of life's vicissitudes and exigencies. It is acceptable even in our times to refer to the “innocence” of childhood and its loss as we grow older and get roughened around the edges by our frictions and contacts with other people and events. Environmentalists are prone to lamenting such losses as if they were, indeed, a subtraction from our lives. I happen to see this as a normal progression through life, with each of us growing into some version of adulthood that accommodates the inevitable changes we all experience. Instead of seeing this as a loss, I see it as a gain in perspective and a normal and healthy way to grow older. Here is Muir in the glory of his childhood (from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 1913):

“This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature's warm heart—how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were in school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature's pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!”

John Muir was as innocent as any one of us in childhood and maintained some of that guileless charm as he matured and became a spokesperson for the integrity of the earth. In fact, my reading of his life's story leads me to suspect that his quirkiness also included a conscious effort to be the showman and publicizer of the natural phenomena he was attempting to save. In this way, he was demonstrating a willingness to compromise his own jubilant acceptance of truth and beauty in service of conserving and preserving what he could of Nature's body, a body increasingly vulnerable to the economic interests of shortsighted politicians and aggressive and acquisitive developers.

There is no question that there were tensions in Muir's life and that compromises might have come with some difficulty, as they seem to do for someone whose causes are supported by passion and scope. Muir's religious background in Calvinism and its severities transitioned to the more open and welcoming philosophy of the Transcendentalists and he found within that system of thought a comfortable combination of focus on matter and spirit. He learned to work within the real world of politics by cultivating relationships with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and the people in positions of legislative influence and power. He wasn't always successful in overcoming the waves of zeal and energy that exploitation of the “frontier” of America brought to the lives of its citizens. To some extent, Americans in the early years of the 20^th century were enamored of the myth of the frontier (based almost solely on an essay by Frederick Jackson Turner) and the can-do spirit of the people who explored it and conquered it. There are vestiges of this mythical mindset even today in the minds of those who believe that any country can live and thrive without cooperating and compromising on issues of national importance. There was, and is, a blindness to the reality of our interdependence among nations and peoples. Muir was cognizant of the interdependence that he witnessed in nature and acknowledged it in his efforts to preserve Nature's health and integrity. He was no stranger to compromise when he took up the cause of the Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite National Park.

Developers were eager to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley and the Tuolumne River, especially after the devastating earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906, when the water needs of the city of San Francisco proved their reservoirs to be woefully inadequate. Yosemite National Park had been established by then (1890), as had the Sierra Club (1892) with Muir as its president (and Muir to serve for several decades). Muir led the opposition to such engineering and had both presidents Roosevelt and Taft on his side but the lobbyists for the project overcame the opposition and convinced President Woodrow Wilson to authorize the dam into law in 1913. John Muir was to live only one more year but it must have been a heartbreaking event for him. It was one more demonstration that compromises and the events they lead to are not always of one's liking and may, indeed, result in harmful consequences and destruction. With increasingly dwindling natural resources and a large world population, we are facing many of the same compromises Muir faced with perhaps greater consequences for greater numbers of people. Yet, who could argue against a water supply for thousands then and now millions? The decisions are not always easy but often necessary. But my view is that full maturity means that we acknowledge that sometimes good ends are accomplished by less-than-pure means and, in reverse, that bad ends are sometimes preceded by pure and golden intentions.

“It appears, therefore, that Hetch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have not seen it seem to suppose, is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples.” (From Hetch Hetchy Valley, 1912)

So it is with losses and gains. What we see as a loss on one day might result in a gain on another day. It isn't that we “lose” innocence as much as we grow and gain a new perspective. It seems to me that we layer on over our childhood innocence and open minds the experiences with and in the world that shape us. We don't so much lose the joyous capacities of youth, as much as we harden our outlooks and add prejudices to opinions. Competing interests will always compete and more so with contracting resources. But perhaps with a perspective that accommodates multiple uses of natural resources along with a mindset that honors nature's grand sanctity, the means to thoughtful ends might be achievable. Is it possible that what now seems to be an expression of “frontier” exploitation might be viewed as restorative or sustainable? The idea of ecology was not known as a set-aside discipline in Muir's time, as it is now. However, Muir often used the word “home” as a metaphor for nature and man's place in it. The root meaning of eco- is house or home. Ecology is the study of nature as a home. It is the home we know as the earth, sailing along in the cosmos, the only true home for all of us.

“The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” (From The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West, 1901)

I am trying to make the case for opening our minds to the endless possibilities they contain. All of us don't have access to all capabilities, but we do have access to the possibilities that our minds can imagine. I believe one place where we can safely and comfortably imagine them is in the spaces we set aside for meditation. We can open them up and work with the creativity we are gifted in order to support how we think, how we train our attention, and then what we do. If we practice thinking in this way, then we are not as apt to be swayed by what someone else tells us we should think or do. Our minds are as sacred as the places Wendell Berry refers to above. There are no unsacred minds, only sacred minds and desecrated minds. How we think determines what we think. What we think, in turn, helps us decide what we can and should do. If Woodrow Wilson had thought that all places were sacred, then would the dam across the Tuolumne River have been built? On the other hand, if Hetch Hetchy hadn't evolved the way it did, would we now celebrate the likes of John Muir who became a conscience for the future development and exploitation of the great earth? There is no doubt that our childhood innocence plays into this drama as well as greater recognition of the needs of our fellow human beings. How we strike the balance is, in part, dependent on how we see and describe the world and what metaphors we use in how we think. How do you think?