Unexpected Animists
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same...
I’ve been reading about Native American conceptions of “nature” and “wilderness” a lot over the past year, as I slowly wrap up work on my book project. One of the aspects that’s often emphasized is the “animism” of indigenous cultures, although that term means different things when used by different people. As a consequence, it can end up being applied to cultures and belief systems that are, in certain respects, quite different.
The earliest occurrence of “animism” was in an 1832 article in The Edinburgh Review, where it was used to describe a belief in the universal animation of nature, from the Latin anima—life, breath, or soul. Straightforward enough. However, it was often used, explicitly or implicitly, in a way that suggested animism is a primitive form of belief when compared to, say, Christian theology or to humanist science. Something a more advanced culture will grow out of.
The Anthropocene, however, is changing things. Climate change, mass extinction, microplastic pollution, and the like have people asking if there might be problems associated with the “more advanced” views of modern science, which since Francis Bacon has understood the non-human world to be a well of inert and meaningless resources for human use. As we suffer from heat exhaustion, dig our homes out from under mudslides, wonder where we are going to get our food, and fret about the next zoonotic spillover, animism is starting to look less like a primitive belief cultures are destined to outgrow and more like wisdom rooted in respect and gratitude for the more-than-human world.
However, in addition to engaging and learning from indigenous cultures, this new interest in animism should prompt those of us who come from supposedly “non-animist” cultures to reevaluate our own intellectual history.
The disenchantment of the world did not happen when humans crossed a geographic line—the Bosporus, the Danube—and entered “the West.” It happened, rather, when we crossed a temporal line somewhere between 1600 and 1800. In those two centuries, Descartes insisted non-human nature was mechanical, Bacon gave us a “new method” of thinking to extend our “dominion over the universe,” Locke argued we could possess land by mixing our labor with it, and Kant told us that only humans (covered by the fig-leaf description of “rational beings”) have intrinsic worth.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the Enlightenment was definitely a good thing; but it is built on foundations that are not all equally sound, and which have consequences that are not universally to be praised. Reason? Good. Scientific inquiry? Good. Less poverty? Antibiotics and anesthesia? Human rights? Good, good, and good again. But the disenchantment of the world, the depersonalization of the world, and the desacralization of the world (which are probably three ways of saying the same thing)? Not so much.
Prior to that modern turn, we can find animist intuitions or inclinations in various places in “the West”—whatever that means, it’s another sloppy category. Pagan folk traditions. Neoplatonism. Various Christian sources and practices. All kinds of unexpected places.
One of my favorite examples, because I’m a fan of poetry, is Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Hopkins grew up in a large family with an artistic bent, with lots of poetry, literature, art, and music in the house. While at Oxford, he began to wrestle with two callings that would define the rest of his life: poetry and God. The life of a poet seemed rooted in attachments to this world, the life of faith fixed on another. Poetry seemed to encourage, perhaps require, some measure of self-regard—publication, seeking attention, receiving recognition from other poets—while the life of faith seemed to demand effacing the self to focus on love of God and one’s neighbor, a life committed to prayer and service.
For Hopkins, the tension was never resolved; but it received relief when, in 1875, one of his superiors suggested he write a poem to commemorate the lives lost when the SS Deutschland foundered on a shoal and sank, killing over a hundred people. That suggestion gave Hopkins the license he was looking for. Although The Wreck of the Deutschland was not published until twenty-nine years after Hopkins’s death, writing it marked the resumption and affirmation of his poetic vocation.
Over the next decade, he produced dozens of astonishingly original poems using “sprung rhythm.” Thematically, many of them lie at the intersection of faith and the natural world. And what’s really interesting is the way that Hopkins begins to speak about natural phenomena.
During his Jesuit training he had been exposed to the Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus, who argued that individual beings are distinguished by haecceitas, a distinctive thisness that makes them indivisible into constituent parts without destruction. The notion of haecceitas fell on fertile ground in Hopkins’s mind.
In 1879, Hopkins was serving as a priest at St. Aloysius’s, back in Oxford. While he was there, a long line of poplar trees was felled on the other side of Port Meadow. Hopkins had been fond of the trees—not just some trees, but these particular trees, in the individuality of their haecceitas, which Hopkins called inscape. Feeling the loss, he wrote “Binsey Poplars.”
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Stokes of Havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene
Unselve? That’s an extraordinary turn of phrase coming from a Jesuit priest writing about trees. So extraordinary in fact that the OED entry for the verbal use of “selve” describes it as “rare” before clarifying “only G.M. Hopkins.” Rare indeed.
To Hopkins, those poplars were not objects to be understood in terms of board-feet of lumber of kilojoules of fuel. They were not habitat for biodiversity, or ecosystem services stabilizing the bank of the Thames. They were not even objects of beauty for our contemplation. They were selves. Not just living or animate. Beings with their own intrinsic worth and dignity, beings pursuing their own distinctive goods and aims, beings testifying in their own unique ways to the goodness of being itself. Unique. Irreplaceable. He even uses a diacritical mark to clarify—in keeping with sprung rhythm—where to stress the word: un-selve. The felling is like a murder.
In the early 1880s, Hopkins pens his most definitive poetic statement of this view:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator argues that animism is characterized by a more expansive sense of life and more inclusive understanding of community. By the recognition that each being has its own purpose, and that each commands a degree of our respect. By a sense of shared responsibility for the world. That seems good to me, both as a definition and as a goal. But if that’s a working definition of animism, then Gerard Manley Hopkins is, perhaps surprisingly, an animist.
None of this exonerates “Western” thinking, which I think is really “modern Western thinking” and which is fast becoming “modern global thinking.” But it does complicate a view of “the West” as monolithically and unrepentantly anthropocentric.
As we correct for the wrong moves, excesses, and unintended consequences of the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, and Industrial Revolution—which, again, also brought us enormous goods—we should definitely be thinking with indigenous traditions that were not, or have not yet, been seduced by the Baconian dream of casual dominion. However, we should also look out for forgotten voices in unexpected places, which show us there are diverse ways to be “animist.” Those options are important, because there is no going back. Barring apocalypse, we won’t be living in a world with just 500 million humans and huge tracts of wild nature. We won’t willingly return to a pre-scientific, pre-industrial economy and culture. We can and should learn from the animisms of the past; but we need to sort out how to be animists in the 21st century.