715
billion residents, as documented in China’s Green Book of Population and Labor.
4
The trend, so well documented both by Edmund Burke, writing of the French
Revolution, and then by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, constitutes the most pervasive,
unwavering orientation in human kind. If our alleged dominion’s collective nature
(Jung’s “primordial images”) devised and ruthlessly enforced were not so consciously and deliberately cruel, it would forge a mere monument to stupidity, overcome with reason and patience, on a par with, though far in numeric excess of, that
grisly toll of predation meted out by the world’s feral cats. Others can be cruel,
clearly, Japanese wasps, for example, but not as a full substitute for some version of
predictable restraint or charity.
5
And it would also contradict the brilliant and loving history of ecological aesthetics within humankind, so reverentially characteristic, for example, of one of
Darwin’s great contemporary American painters, Jasper Francis Cropsey
(1823–1900), a leading member of the Hudson River School, who never ceased to
portray a resplendent Western Europe and Eastern Seaboard.
6
This is the great paradox, of course: the beauty we have both espied and eschewed.
79.2 Paradigmatic Shifts out of the Wasteland
Darwin was no stranger to this paradox, repeatedly remarking upon the cruelty
of nature with an addled humility. Where do all the birds and their eggs end up?
Quietly lost, by little fanfare, a soft, but no less brutal (in the end) sacrifice area
for wildlife deaths which humans rarely come upon. Darwin’s reading of William
Paley’s book, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity published in 1802, 7 years before Darwin was born, underscored the critical
watershed that gave to Darwin his stunning courage in demarcating the intelligent
and Claire Fu, The New York Times, January 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/china-population-crisis.html, Accessed January 17, 2020.
4 No. 19, As reported by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences http://ex.cssn.cn/zx/bwyc/201901/
t20190104_4806519_1.shtml?COLLCC=4186522808&, January 2020.
5 See, for example, “Australian feral cats wreak the most damage,” by Signe Cane, February 3,
2015, Australian Geographica, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2015/02/australian-feral-cats-wreak-the-most-damage-to-species/. Accessed January 17, 2020. Neither dissection
or diagnosis is relevant to the wearying multiplicity of fall-out. Studies of trees and shrubs in
Yasuní; of midges in the Scottish highlands; or sandflies along New Zealand’s Doubtful Sound,
yield ratios and divisible quanta that defy calm analysis in that the numbers and their underlying
identities are simply outside our ken. Similarly, most vireos and song thrushes – musical virtuosos
all – are acoustically immune to human calculation as are flowers in Spring. We know nothing. Vast
amalgams of Plato and Chaucer; of Averroes, Shakespeare, Newton and Humboldt. They leave
us – no matter our cues and prompts and many-hued involvements – dry upon dried riverbeds. This
is capacity, our destiny, the story we inevitably will leave inextricably behind, namely, that we
cannot rightly assess compare other species with ourselves.
6 See Andrew Speiser’s two-volume Catalogue Raisonné, Newington-Cropsey Foundation,
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 2013.
79.2 Paradigmatic Shifts out of the Wasteland
billion residents, as documented in China’s Green Book of Population and Labor.
4
The trend, so well documented both by Edmund Burke, writing of the French
Revolution, and then by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, constitutes the most pervasive,
unwavering orientation in human kind. If our alleged dominion’s collective nature
(Jung’s “primordial images”) devised and ruthlessly enforced were not so consciously and deliberately cruel, it would forge a mere monument to stupidity, overcome with reason and patience, on a par with, though far in numeric excess of, that
grisly toll of predation meted out by the world’s feral cats. Others can be cruel,
clearly, Japanese wasps, for example, but not as a full substitute for some version of
predictable restraint or charity.
5
And it would also contradict the brilliant and loving history of ecological aesthetics within humankind, so reverentially characteristic, for example, of one of
Darwin’s great contemporary American painters, Jasper Francis Cropsey
(1823–1900), a leading member of the Hudson River School, who never ceased to
portray a resplendent Western Europe and Eastern Seaboard.
6
This is the great paradox, of course: the beauty we have both espied and eschewed.
79.2 Paradigmatic Shifts out of the Wasteland
Darwin was no stranger to this paradox, repeatedly remarking upon the cruelty
of nature with an addled humility. Where do all the birds and their eggs end up?
Quietly lost, by little fanfare, a soft, but no less brutal (in the end) sacrifice area
for wildlife deaths which humans rarely come upon. Darwin’s reading of William
Paley’s book, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity published in 1802, 7 years before Darwin was born, underscored the critical
watershed that gave to Darwin his stunning courage in demarcating the intelligent
and Claire Fu, The New York Times, January 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/china-population-crisis.html, Accessed January 17, 2020.
4 No. 19, As reported by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences http://ex.cssn.cn/zx/bwyc/201901/
t20190104_4806519_1.shtml?COLLCC=4186522808&, January 2020.
5 See, for example, “Australian feral cats wreak the most damage,” by Signe Cane, February 3,
2015, Australian Geographica, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2015/02/australian-feral-cats-wreak-the-most-damage-to-species/. Accessed January 17, 2020. Neither dissection
or diagnosis is relevant to the wearying multiplicity of fall-out. Studies of trees and shrubs in
Yasuní; of midges in the Scottish highlands; or sandflies along New Zealand’s Doubtful Sound,
yield ratios and divisible quanta that defy calm analysis in that the numbers and their underlying
identities are simply outside our ken. Similarly, most vireos and song thrushes – musical virtuosos
all – are acoustically immune to human calculation as are flowers in Spring. We know nothing. Vast
amalgams of Plato and Chaucer; of Averroes, Shakespeare, Newton and Humboldt. They leave
us – no matter our cues and prompts and many-hued involvements – dry upon dried riverbeds. This
is capacity, our destiny, the story we inevitably will leave inextricably behind, namely, that we
cannot rightly assess compare other species with ourselves.
6 See Andrew Speiser’s two-volume Catalogue Raisonné, Newington-Cropsey Foundation,
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 2013.
79.2 Paradigmatic Shifts out of the Wasteland