If we keep thinking this “no center or edge” aspect of the mesh, we discover that there is no definite “within” or “outside” of beings. Everything is adapted to everything else.61 This includes organs and the cells that constitute them. The mesh extends inside beings as well as among them. An organ that may have performed one function in one life form might now perform a different function in another one, or none at all. Then there is symbiosis. Margulis asserts that symbiosis is the fundamental driving force of evolution.62 This also affects the rhetoric of cuteness. What is cute and cuddly about symbiosis? Even worse, what about endosymbiosis—the fact that our cells contain anaerobic bacteria, for example? It sounds more like monstrosity. Cuteness requires a minimum of integration.
Although there is no absolute, definite “inside” or “outside” of beings, we cannot get along without these concepts either. The mesh is highly paradoxical. Endosymbiosis abolishes inside–outside distinctions. A life form must have a boundary for filtering nutrients and poisons. Yet these boundaries are not perfectly defined. An oyster makes a pearl by secreting fluids around a piece of grit it has accidentally absorbed. Surgeons can transplant organs. The same thing occurs at larger scales. You only have to think of a coral reef to realize how life has influenced Earth; in fact, you only have to breathe, as oxygen is a by-product of the first Archæan beings (from 2.5 billion years ago back to an undefined limit after the origin of Earth 4.5 billion years ago). The hills are teeming with the skeletal silence of dead life forms.
The ecological thought permits no distance. Thinking interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between “over here” and “over there,” and more fundamentally, the metaphysical illusion of rigid, narrow boundaries between inside and outside.63 Thinking interdependence involves thinking difference. This means confronting the fact that all beings are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge. In a language, a word means what it means because of its difference with other words. There is nothing intrinsic to the word that makes it mean what it means. The same goes for how it sounds.64 The mesh is also made of negative difference, which means it doesn’t contain positive, really existing (independent, solid) things. This should be an utterly mind-blowing idea, so don’t worry if you’re having trouble imagining it. Consider Indra’s net, used in Buddhist scripture to describe interdependence: “At every connection in this infinite net hangs a magnificently polished and infinitely faceted jewel, which reflects in each of its facets all the facets of every other jewel in the net. Since the net itself, the number of jewels, and the facets of every jewel are infinite, the number of reflections is infinite as well.”65
What we’re examining here is that scary thing, “totality.” Recent thinkers have been shy of totality.66 They fear that totality means totalitarianism. Totality may be difficult and frightening. But the current global crisis requires that we wake up and smell the total coffee. It’s strictly impossible to equate this total interconnectedness, Indra’s net, with something beyond us or larger than us. Total interconnectedness isn’t holistic. We’re definitely not talking about totalitarianism, and we’re not talking about large things as opposed to small ones. Indra’s net implies that large and small things, near and far things, are all “near.” “Totality” doesn’t mean something closed, single, and independent, nor does it mean something predetermined and fixed; it has no goal.
Very large finitude is harder to deal with than an abstract, ideal infinity. 67 As I noted in the Introduction, it might be harder to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It might be harder to imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. Actuality presents us with disturbingly large finitudes. Quantity humiliates.68 The other appears in this world, not beyond it.69 Face it we must. Perhaps “untotality” would express it better, but we don’t need to invent clever ways of saying the same thing. Think big, then bigger still—beyond containment, beyond the panoramic spectacle that dissolves everything within itself.70
The mesh is vast yet intimate: there is no here or there, so everything is brought within our awareness. The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become. We can’t really know who is at the junctions of the mesh before we meet them. Even when we meet them, they are liable to change before our eyes, and our view of them is also labile. These beings are the strange stranger. You won’t see references to animals in this book except in quotation marks. You will see absolutely no references to “the animal” or, even worse, to “the animal question,” as some contemporary philosophers put it (have they forgotten the resonance of “the Jewish question”?). Might this “question” be a product of a capitalist age, in which, as Marx comments, money is removed from other commodities and made to stand for commodity-ness as such, as if “there existed the Animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom”?71 Could treating people like “animals” result from this alienating abstraction?
Saying “Humans are animals” could get you in trouble. So could saying “Humans are not animals,” for different reasons. The word “animal” shows how humans develop intolerances to strangeness and to the stranger. According to prevailing ideologies, we must become, or be thought of as, like “animals” (biocentrism), or they should become, or be thought of as, like us (anthropocentrism). Neither choice is satisfactory. There is no way to maintain the strangeness of things. Equating humans with “animals” seems right. But “animals” are often shorthand for tools or objects of instrumental reason—the equation doesn’t sound so clever when you put it that way. Humans are like “animals,” but “animals” are not “animals,” as we are beginning to see.
We should instead explore the paradoxes and fissures of identity within “human” and “animal.” Instead of “animal,” I use strange stranger. This stranger isn’t just strange. She, or he, or it—can we tell? how?—is strangely strange. Their strangeness itself is strange.72 We can never absolutely figure them out. If we could, then all we would have is a ready-made box to put them in, and we would just be looking at the box, not at the strange strangers. They are intrinsically strange. Do we know for sure whether they are sentient or not? Do we know whether they are alive or not? Their strangeness is part of who they are.73 After all, they might be us. And what could be stranger than what is familiar? As anyone who has a long-term partner can attest, the strangest person is the one you wake up with every morning. Far from gradually erasing strangeness, intimacy heightens it. The more we know them, the stranger they become. Intimacy itself is strange. As the passenger side-view mirror on your car reads, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” We ignore the mesh because we’re so familiar with it.74 Our familiarity forms the basis of the threatening intimacy that we too often push to the backs of our minds.
Imagine living in a world of triangular creatures. A triangular scientist discovers creatures without angles. These “smooth strangers” would be “strange” only insofar as we don’t usually encounter them in our world. But we can imagine such a creature. And if one ever showed up, it would be a “familiar stranger”—we would have anticipated its existence. We would need some time, of course, to get to know its smoothness. But this process would be finite. The strange stranger, conversely, is something or someone whose existence we cannot anticipate. Even when strange strangers showed up, even if they lived with us for a thousand years, we might never know them fully—and we would never know whether we had exhausted our getting-to-know process. We wouldn’t know what we did not know about them—these aspects would be unknown unknowns, in the inimitable phrasing of the U.S. secretary of defense who in 2003 promoted a disastrous war.75 They might be living with us right now. They might, indeed, be us. That is what is so strange about them. We can never tell.
Most philosophers (excepting Peter Singer and other utilitarians) opt out of including animals on “this” side of things. Sensing the danger of excluding them from ethics, Emmanuel Levinas, fearless thinker of our infinite obliga
tions to others, grudgingly includes some “animals” within his idea of the “face,” his term for the thisness and presence of the actual other person—“the infinite which blinks.”76 The closer you look, the weirder strange strangers become. Let’s examine them in detail, starting with a consideration of time—evolution. There are two main levels: the growth and death of life forms, and the history of evolution as such. We shall travel through a discussion of time, take a detour through Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then return.
Ecology isn’t only about vast space but also about vast time. Ecological time and geological time are difficult to grasp intuitively. Vast time opened up in the Romantic period, when people such as Mary Anning discovered the first dinosaur fossils, and the geologist Charles Lyell began to establish just how ancient Earth really is.77 Life on Earth wasn’t just thousands but millions of years old, and Earth itself was therefore even older. The concept of “prehistory” vanishes as we think the ecological thought. The whole thing is history.78 What we call Nature is really just solidified history that we aren’t studying closely enough. But it’s arduous to think of time on Earth as historical all the way back. The time of evolution is almost inconceivably slow. Think of those wonderfully displacing 1970s television documentaries such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which depict humans arriving on the scene at a minute to midnight, or a second to midnight, in a metaphor that depicts the time of Earth or the universe as a single day, a month, or a year. But even the time of living and dying takes a stretch of the imagination. There must be some way of helping us to visualize it.
Think of a time-lapse movie: the camera records a flower growing from a bud, opening, aging, withering, and finally shedding its petals. We have only to speed up our sense of time to see how strange life forms are. They arise, flicker, and vanish. Plants and fungi do move, like animals in slow motion (think of a sunflower). If you read Darwin, the strongest thing you take away is a feeling of time-lapse. Each species is like a river; rivers join and part without much regard for boundaries. Rivers flow, so we can never talk about the “same” river, only river stages.79 A species is like that. Evolution is like that. Species and individual members of a species are like the flowing flames of flowers discovered in time-lapse animation. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was right to assert that panta rhei, “Everything flows.”
By speeding up the world, time-lapse photography makes things that seem natural reveal something monstrous or artificial, an uncanny, morphing flow. This flow has been ongoing since DNA started its random mutations. Evolution is mutagenic. It isn’t linear or progressive. If you threw up a “handful of feathers ... all must fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is this problem compared to the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins [in the southern United States]!”80 These interactions have produced, and are producing, all the life forms we see today.81
If we sped up evolution like a time-lapse movie, we would notice many strange things. The eye has evolved no less than forty separate times.82 DNA code contains thousands of repeated or possibly redundant strings of information. You can inject fresh pieces of gene in a modified virus directly into the cells at the back of the eye to improve eyesight.83 DNA isn’t a blueprint—it’s more like a recipe, and recipes can produce very different results.84 Thankfully, living organisms are not designed, and there is no “intelligence” behind the mutation—unless by “design” we mean the processes of evolution: adaptation, selection, and variation, carrying on through hundreds of millions of years in a highly distributed fashion. No one special being is uniquely responsible for the existence of future beings.85
Time-lapse makes things appear unnatural: even flowers take on a weird, monstrous quality. This unnaturalness speaks a truth of evolution itself. Life forms didn’t evolve holistically, and they didn’t evolve with a “point” (telos): there is nothing inevitable in evolution. If you could see evolution happening rapidly, you wouldn’t be tempted to say something like, “Look at those wings: how perfectly developed for flying through the sky.” Not all water birds have webbed feet. Like a horror movie, evolution is as much about disintegration as it is about things coming together. Naturalness is a temporal illusion: like seasons, things seem static because we don’t notice them changing, and when they do change, there is a rough predictability to the way they do so. Horror and disgust arise whenever that neat aesthetic frame breaks. In this ecological age, we must take stock of these unaesthetic reactions—acknowledging, for example, the rapid mutagenic effects of radiation.
Many parts of life forms serve no function whatsoever. They just evolved. Darwin discusses vestigial and rudimentary organs in The Descent of Man. Your ears do not have to be the shape they are: think of a cell phone microphone (just a pinprick hole). Ears are shaped in that spiraling, shell-like way because they are made of cartilage stiff enough to enable you to prick up your ears properly, which you don’t, of course, because you’re human—unless you do (some people can and do prick up their ears, as Darwin notes).86 See the problem? That little bump on the inside upper flap of your ear is a vestige of pointed ears turned inward.87 Our cranial nerves are derived from the gill arches of fish.88 A life form flows around within its unstable liquid environment in a highly metamorphic way. If you trace the history of evolution backward, you will see no rhyme or reason to it—well, you will see a great deal of incredible rhyme and intricate reason but no progress (no teleology) and no climax. Humans are not some mysterious “Omega point,” as one Christian evolutionist claimed.89 Humans are not the culmination of anything; they aren’t even a culmination of anything. All that we call Nature is mutation and often pointless—thinking otherwise is called “adaptationism.”90 Evolution shares pointlessness with art, which at bottom is vague and purposeless.91 There is no really good reason for it. In fact, some organisms, from butterflies to apes, capitalize on pointless mutations in the process of sexual selection. This was one reason why Marx thought that Darwin was very helpful to materialism. If you could get past the stuffy Anglo-empiricism, you would find a convincing refutation of the notion of teleology, the idea that things have a point: “Not only is a death blow dealt here for the first time to ‘Teleology’ in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is empirically explained.”92
How pointless is evolution? DNA mutates randomly. Mutations are random with respect to current need, a conclusion Darwin drew himself. If you drop a mouse into a colder climate than she is used to, her descendants won’t necessarily grow warmer coats in order to “adapt.” What does this mean? It means, profoundly, that there is no environment as such. Mice don’t evolve warm coats “in order to” accommodate themselves to an environment. It may just so happen that mice with warmer coats survive. But it would be a mistake—the mistake called adaptationism—to think that this means that they evolved “in order to” adapt to their environment.
A time-lapse film of a flower growing and dying shows not only its fragility and unique beauty but also its linkage with everything else. When the flower becomes like a flame that spurts, flickers, and dies in a few seconds, we see it less as a solid single lasting thing. The time-lapse view is what makes Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner such a powerful ecological statement. Unlike Wordsworth’s poems in the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s poem is deliberately, relentlessly supernatural and uncanny. This could be better for the ecological thought than “realistic” writing. For Coleridge, “supernatural” meant super natural, like those tubes of toothpaste that say “30 percent extra”; extra Nature, more than you bargained for:The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the light-house top.
The sun now rose upon the left
Out of the sea came he
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
(1.21–28)93
In just eight lines, the ship disappears over the horizon, and the sailors can no longer see their homeland—they have left their world. The sun rises and sets—a day passes in twenty-six words. Events rush like a waterfall. We put our habitual way of being in time in a box and call it natural. Coleridge shows Nature leaking out of the box. What a great poem to read in a time of ecological emergency.
Don’t shoot albatrosses! Is this really the moral of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Senseless violence against animals is wrong—so perhaps sensible violence against them is justifiable? When the Mariner enjoins us to love “All things both great and small” (7.615), he leaves the Wedding Guest mind-blown, as if the bottom has dropped out of his world (7.622–625). Is that really the reaction we would expect from such a trite sentiment? Even by the late eighteenth century, it was trite.
Coleridge’s critique of sensibility is directed toward creating the potential for a radical democracy that transcends the politics of pity. The moral of The Ancient Mariner can’t possibly be not to shoot albatrosses. The moral is about the traumatic encounter between strange strangers. One of these, without a doubt, is the albatross itself; another is the Mariner, the zombie-like walking, talking poem; another, the Wedding Guest; the Nightmare Life-in-Death; and several million water snakes, lowly worms indeed. Coleridge brilliantly imagines the proximity the strange stranger, who emerges from, and is, and constitutes, the environment. The background becomes the foreground. It’s the sheer “thereness,” the frightening presence of the Mariner himself, and the snakes that surround the dead ship at the dead center of the poem.94 It’s the holy otherness of the albatross, not the fact that it is a cute creature, great or small, which disturbs. The sailors can’t fit it into their horizon of meaning, can’t figure out whether to blame it for the “fog and mist” (2.102).
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