Connexion
The explanations must be out there, even if we cannot find them.
There have been fewer golden orioles in my garden in France this year: or perhaps, more accurately, I should say that I have heard fewer of them. Their single, slightly melancholy or plaintive whistling cry (one could hardly call it a song) has been much less evident than last year above the chirping chorus of the cicadas. It is difficult to see golden orioles, despite the brilliant yellow plumage of the males, for they are shy birds, and are much more manifest by sound than by sight. It is possible that it had been too hot for them this year to expend their energy on making a noise, though whether orioles are affected in this way by unusual excessive heat I do not know.
The golden oriole is very rare in the British Isles, where it used to breed; but Britain has become one of the most impoverished countries in the world from the point of view of wildlife (except of the human variety). It is curious in a way: Deindustrialization has not been accompanied by the extension of natural habitat, the population having grown and requiring ever more shopping centres, distribution warehouses, car parks, airports and amusement theme-parks, to say nothing of windfarms and solar panelling.
Elsewhere in Europe, there is no shortage of orioles, though in France it is forbidden even to possess a dead one. In what used to be called the Levant, the oriole is regarded as something of a pest, being so numerous as to imperil fruit crops—though the depredations of orioles probably do not rate at present rate very highly on that region’s litany of woes.
The life cycle of the oriole is extraordinary. In the northern spring, it migrates from southern sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and Eurasia; in autumn, it makes the return journey. This return journey is always via the Eastern Mediterranean. It spends between two and three months a year in its migrations, thus rather more time in the air than the average long-haul airline pilot. Of course, they are not subject to quite the same administrative oversight, though organizations dedicated to the welfare of animals no doubt would like to limit the hours that they were permitted to fly, if they could.
What I puzzle over is how such a pattern of behaviour could have evolved. I am afraid my concept of evolution is very crude, deriving as it does from school biology about 60 years ago.
For example, there was the moth in the North of England that lived on the bark of trees, which started out light-coloured but became darker and darker as the industrial revolution covered the locality, including the trunks of trees, with soot. This made perfect evolutionary sense, or perfect enough that I could grasp it. It is obvious that a lighter-colored moth on a soot-covered tree trunk would be more visible to a predator than a darker-colored one; a chance mutation could thus easily result in darker-coloured offspring who would be at survival advantage by comparison with their lighter coloured brethren. Before long, all the moths of that species would be darker.
But this facile and easily comprehensible story seems not to cover the case of the golden oriole. The idea of a gradual change in conduct of the ancestors of the present generation of orioles is not quite as plausible (even supposing that the complex conduct of a species were genetically as easily changeable as the colour of a moth’s wing).
The explanation of the oriole’s migration is that climate change in some sense encouraged behavioural experimentation in an overcrowded field, where every species, or every member of every species, or every gene of every member of every species, struggled for survival, or immortality. When Europe became more habitable after the end of the Ice Age, certain creatures, among them Oriolus oriolus, discovered that there were now rich pickings to be had in the newly-fertile Europe between the months of May and August, and therefore that it made sense to make the journey.
Of course, evolutionists don’t like expressions as “discovered,” “struggled,” or “made sense,” for they impose upon the process of evolution a vocabulary of direction or guiding intelligence, though in fact what they are describing is a purely mechanical process.
The problem is this: If the proto-oriole went only a little bit north, rather than the whole hog, he or she would find him- or herself in very inhospitable regions indeed, the Sahel and the Sahara. If it were argued that in those days, the Sahel and the Sahara were not so inhospitable to orioles as they are now, the question then becomes why they should have continued northwards. Bear in mind that the migratory conduct of orioles (and not only orioles, of course), is not a matter of conscious or rational reflection, but of hardwiring into their nervous systems. No oriole ever said to itself, “The Sahara’s a bit arid, let’s try it a little further north”—as sub-Saharan Africans do nowadays.
This is not a diatribe against evolutionary theory. I have nothing better to offer to explain why the golden oriole flies back and forth between Africa and Europe; and all theories that propose an overall purpose, a design, to this extraordinary phenomenon, even if the role of the oriole in it that overall purpose is only very minor, a fly-on part in the drama as it were, seem to me open to at least equal objection.
But where explanation is concerned, Man dislikes a vacuum; he is an explanation-seeking animal. Where one is not immediately available, he invents one. That is one of the reasons that conspiracy theories are so popular and comforting: They give the illusion of understanding. Where there is understanding, there is also the possibility of mastery and control, especially by being nasty to someone, which for a good proportion of people is a pleasure, even a duty or a necessity. The situation is complicated by the fact that conspiracies do exist, and it is a moot question whether it is more dangerous to see them where they don’t exist, or not to see them where they do.
At any rate, I have no explanation of why there are fewer orioles this year, or why they come in the first place. On the other hand, it might be that the smaller number of orioles explains the larger, indeed very much larger, number of swallow-tailed butterflies this year, more of their caterpillars (a favorite food of orioles) having survived into the chrysalis and imago stages. There is, no doubt, an explanation of everything, but I do not have it.
The post The Golden Oriole Rule appeared first on The American Conservative.
The eminent historian died last week.
The preeminent historian of the American Founding, Gordon Wood, died last week as the result of a traffic accident. Wood, a long-time professor at Brown University, had a profound and prolific effect upon the historiography of the American Revolution and the Founding in an academic career spanning six decades. Significantly, he was the first leading historian to emphasize the importance of republican thought and principles, both classical and modern, to 18th-century America, a tradition that later gave way to the totalizing force of equality and democratization.
Creation of the American Republic (1969), fashioned from Wood’s dissertation under the equally notable scholar Bernard Bailyn, looked to show the deep and radical transformation that occurred between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, a period in which the revolutionary idealism of 1776 came up against the considerations of practical politics. The result was a system of government which reflected a new philosophy and new definitions of democracy and republicanism. Republicanism itself was a utopian ideal, strikingly anticapitalistic in Wood’s vision, for early revolutionaries, according to which society and not just government would be reformed and made pure, with citizens working for the good of all and hierarchy and distinctions drawn away.
That idealistic spirit led to the crafting of state governments which, as Wood shows, were almost universally distinguished by weak executives and strong legislatures. The result was that the early revolutionaries, perhaps naive in political matters, quickly learned that the people’s representatives could be as despotic as the executive. The Constitution reflected these lessons, creating a separation of powers and checks and balances.
In the minds of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, among others, the social, political, and economic turmoil that resulted from the excessively democratic experiments at the state level showed that peace with England and at home could only be achieved with a restructured and empowered national government. The Imperial Crisis forced American leaders to formulate, out of their own experience but informed by English history and philosophy, a “Whig Science of Politics” to justify the revolution and the republican society it engendered. That project, Creation reminds us, was full of ambiguity and premised on the view that “the people” were a collection of interest groups with competing ambitions and motives.
Conservatives have broadly and understandably celebrated the life of a distinguished scholar who was personally courteous, gentlemanly, and gregarious. Yet, conservatives should also consider the myriad ways in which Wood rejected their vision of the American tradition. In the 1991 book Radicalism and the American Revolution, Wood painted a picture of an American Revolution that was not conservative, but radical. Even in Creation and its follow up, The Rising Glory of America (1971), Wood sees the American revolutionary leaders—he did not refer to them as “Founding Fathers” at this time—as cosmopolitan utopian reformers driven by the ideals of the Enlightenment. Winning the Revolution, in Wood’s telling, meant that the revolutionaries could purify their society of Britain’s conspiracy against liberty, and also redeem America against emergent social tensions driven by class division and growing individualism. In this period of Wood’s scholarship, the challenge to existing authority by equality everywhere, from religion to science to business and citizenship, was a disturbing and destructive force. By 1820, Wood writes,
America had become a sprawling, materialistic, and licentious popular democracy unlike anything that had ever existed before…This vast transformation, this move from classical republicanism to romantic democracy in a matter of decades, was the real American revolution, creating for many Americans a cultural crisis as severe as any in American history.
That is, Wood showed how the 18th-century world, built upon social distinction and the values of classical republicanism and its emphasis upon public virtue, had been lost within a generation. What it gave way to was a world built upon materialism and egalitarianism. The price of democracy, he admitted, was America’s “vulgarity, its materialism, its rootlessness, its anti-intellectualism.”
In his later works, Wood wrote more positively about the rise of liberalism and democratization throughout the 19th century. In Radicalism, Wood wrote, “The revolution did more than legally create the United States; it transformed society,” because Americans had “become, almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.” Not only did the “ligaments of patronage and kinship that had held the old monarchical society together” atrophy, but they had to be replaced with a fully democratized culture based on merit and talent—common people with a common interest in making money. In Wood’s telling, the revolutionary generation was extraordinarily modern, optimistic, and forward-looking, and the revolutionaries were convinced they had the ability to shape society “as they saw fit.”
Ultimately, Wood’s bold and consistent emphasis was on the revolutionary nature of not just the American Revolution, but America itself. That is, as he put it in The Idea of America, Americans were an ideological people who had an “obsessive concern with our own morality and our messianic sense of purpose in the world.” The sense of nationhood and national purpose, in Wood’s rendering, came from the Revolution itself and the idea that we were a “special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.”
Thus, Wood reads the Cold War period as an oxymoronic one in which the United States stood against revolutionary movements, even as the only adequate explanation for America’s tragic involvement in Vietnam, for example, was its own revolutionary and messianic tradition. Seeing things in this light, conservatives are compelled to try to understand how an American tradition as radical as the Jacobinite French Revolution can be conserved.
Just this year in National Review, looking to the 250th, Wood wrote as much, saying of the phrase “all men are created equal” that even the “French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, with its statement that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights,’ does not have the same power and significance.’” No words, he thought, were “more radical, more momentous.” Indeed, they helped form the basis of “all modern thinking.”
Such an argument should, by its very nature, be jarring for conservatives. If Wood is right, then the meaning of conservatism in America is inherently paradoxical—it stands revealed as a movement dedicated to preserving a radical and universal revolution that destroyed all existing hierarchy, tradition, and status. Intentionally or not, Wood’s work gives credence to the neoconservative persuasion against the old conservative view of the Revolution as a conservative restoration of traditional rights and self-government.
Still, Wood’s own conservative disposition was of a different bent. He once quipped that “nothing really ever works out the way the perpetrators intend. I can’t think of any major event in the history of the world that ever turned out the way the participants who launched it expected.” Conservatives share this tragic view of history, given their understanding of human nature as fixed, and tend to sense that history should, if nothing else, humble us. We should follow Wood’s desire to take the people of the past on their own terms and worldview, including by reckoning with the complexities of the men who founded our nation.
The post Gordon Wood, the Bard of the American Revolution appeared first on The American Conservative.
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