human and Hedgehog

A pretty significant turn in my thinking came when, around a decade ago, I discovered the anthropologist Susan Harding’s concept of the Repugnant Cultural Other. That concept ended up playing a big role in How to Think — and in a different way in Breaking Bread with the Dead, because there I argue that encountering the otherness of the past is a kind of training in figuring out how to deal with the otherness we face in the here-and-now.

Another idea that became important to me at around the same time – and this plays a role in The Year of Our Lord 1943 – is Simone Weil’s emphasis, not on human rights, an understandably appealing imperative at the time, but rather on our obligations to one another. (We of course have obligations also to the non-human world, but I believe that we have distinctive and identifiable responsibilities to our fellow humans.)

The two concepts go together, in that one of our obligations to our fellow human beings is not to treat them as our RCO. We owe them something better than that. As a Christian I would say that we owe them charity, which takes me all the way back to my 2001 Theology of Reading. But I think there are ways to articulate our obligations that don’t demand a prior commitment to the Twofold Commandment of Jesus (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself”). I’d like everyone to get there eventually, but we don’t have to start there.

So where do we start? Or, to put the question more specifically, Where should a genuine humanism begin? That’s what my essay in the new issue of The Hedgehog Review is about.

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My other essay in this issue is my plea to writers to stop trying to save the Earth. It’s a meditation on the loss we’ve suffered as traditional forms of nature writing — which are often intimate accounts of particular places — have been abandoned in favor of books about The Earth and The Planet. I would love to see a renewal of the great American tradition of writing that emerges from the love of some dear place: John Muir’s Sierras, Rachel Carson’s Atlantic shore, Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County. We need more people who stay in one place long enough to come to love it, and love it enough to observe it, and observe it closely enough to be able to write about it beautifully and vividly. You could say that this is a very different topic than my essay on humanism, but it’s not: instead of writing about human obligations to human beings, I am writing here about human obligations to the nonhuman world, and how those are best cultivated and encouraged by writing at a human scale.