Living With a Wild God

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  My activism required me to be tolerant, to incline my head a little when others bowed theirs, but all too often I was more challenging on the issue than courtesy allowed, once even picking a fight with a local liberal minister. He was trying to reassure me that his vague denomination had no active involvement with God himself and remained fairly open on the question. That wasn’t good enough for me, though. I insisted that the appropriate stance toward an omnipotent God, even the possibility of an omnipotent God, should be hatred and opposition for all the misery he allowed or instigated. Another time, I disrupted the happy revivalist vibe at a conference held in a black church because I was tired of hearing the clergymen who were my copanelists exult in the unifying power of Jesus. I pointed out the number of women in the audience wearing head scarves, guessed at the number of Jews in attendance, and announced that I, an invited panelist, was an atheist by family tradition. Somehow I even managed to profess my atheism to an audience of striking janitors in Miami, all Hispanic and presumably Catholic or Pentecostal, to the irritation of the union officials who had invited me.

  It wasn’t just family loyalty that held me back from potentially heretical speculations. The whole project of science, as I had first understood it way back in high school, is to crush any notion of powerful nonhuman Others, to establish that there are no conscious, subjective beings other than ourselves—no spirits, demons, or gods. An individual scientist may practice her ancestral religion with an apparently clear conscience, but once at work, her job is to track down and strangle any notion of nonhuman or superhuman “agents”—that being the general term for beings that can move or initiate action on their own. Thus, for example, the oscillations at the silicon electrode could not be the work of some malign creature lurking unseen in my lab: That was exactly the possibility that had to be eliminated, if only I could have found a way to do so.

  The same impulse drives me today. If you hypothesize that certain strange noises in the house are produced by ghosts or poltergeists, I will tear the walls down, if necessary, to prove you wrong. Human freedom, knowledge, and—let’s be honest, mastery—all depend on shooing out the ghosts and spirits. The central habitat of spirits in our culture is religion, with the excess population flowing over into New Age spirituality, and nothing has ever happened in my adult life to incline me more approvingly to either.

  At some point, close to what seemed to be the nadir of depression, I began to dig myself out, using tools that, I now realize, had always been at hand. I was by this time not only a journalist churning out weekly eight-hundred- to thousand-word columns and essays on topical matters, but an amateur historian. The short pieces entertained (and financially supported) me, while the longer historical excursions fed my mind, or rather the insatiable little creature within it that was always demanding fresh questions and fresh clues. Lab work had starved my intellect, but the form of science I turned to now, “social science,” which requires no glassware or equipment, opened up a feeding frenzy. At first I wrote books on relatively manageable issues related to class and gender in American society, and then, realizing I had nothing to lose, turned to much larger issues—too large, in fact, for any legitimate social scientist—like religion and war.

  I had no reason to think that my new research interests had anything to do with the old metaphysical quest. Anything I dignified in my mind as “work” was about “politics,” in the broadest sense, and social responsibility—good, rational, mature concerns that could be justified by my activist involvements and concern for my children’s future. But my intellectual agenda was hardly just a matter of rational, liberal decision-making. I had not come out of solipsism into a world of gemütlichkeit and good cheer. To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort.

  Metaphorically, you could describe the situation this way: I am adrift at sea for years clinging to a piece of flotsam or wreckage, alone and prepared to die. Then I get rescued by a passing lifeboat, packed with people who pull me in and give me food and water. But just as I am rejoicing in the human company, I begin to notice that there is something not quite right about my new community. I detect uneasiness and evasion in their daily interactions. There are screams and groans at night. Sometimes in the morning I notice that our numbers have shrunk, though no one comments on the missing. I have to know what is going on, if only for my own survival. Hence the frantic turn to history: If these are my people and this is my community, I need to know what evil is tearing away at it, where the cruelty is coming from.

  I started my study of war and human violence with what I took to be a manageable hypothesis, based on many months of reading, but since I was untrained in any formal or official way, my research method was sheer mania: no stone unturned, no clue left hanging, no disciplinary barrier unbreached. I went from history to literature and classics, I immersed myself in ancient epics, and when anthropology seemed more relevant, I went there, and on to paleontology, archeology, psychology, whatever beckoned. Ah, the joy of libraries after so many years of laboratories! I cannot say that this new phase of research cured my depression, but I learned I could keep it at bay by clinging to the mystery I was trying to solve as if it were an amulet: Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate.

  I tested the limits of interlibrary loans from the local public library, and sometimes the patience of the librarians. I got access to a few major university libraries, where I could wander in the stacks, following whatever bat-crazy line of thought turned up. I was in the NYU library, on some kind of paleontological trail that afternoon, when I came across the book that launched a decade of obsession. It was not the book I was looking for, just shelved near it, but the title, The Hunters or the Hunted?, lured me in, never mind the esoteric subtitle, An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy, by the South African paleontologist C. K. Brain. The import of the book, which I absorbed in a single sitting, was that you could not understand anything about human violence—war, for example—without understanding that before they were warriors, or even hunters, our ancestors were the prey of more skillful and far better armed nonhuman predators.

  Taphonomy is the study of fossilization, and the remains in question were the skulls of early humans, or hominids, found in an African cave. Puncture marks in the skulls had suggested to evolutionary biologists that the hominids had died violently at the hands of their fellow protohumans—an early case of murder, if not actual war. But then Brain came along and determined that the distance between the puncture marks precisely fit the gap between the lower canines, or stabbing teeth, of ancient leopards. I could see no daylight from my desk there in the stacks, no human faces, only the nightmare past recalled, through some inexplicable Jungian mechanism, in my childhood fear of lions. Humans had not written their own history and prehistory, with of course the collaboration of climate and terrain. Our evolution, and even to an extent our history, were also shaped by encounters with dangerous nonhuman animals, especially the larger carnivores, to whom our ancestors were little more than meat. The conventional narrative of unbroken human dominion over the earth and its creatures had managed to leave out some of the central players.

  It took a while for me to grasp the metaphysical import of the animals that began to populate my imagination, my notebooks, and eventually my book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. Here were the Others, or some of them anyway, whose existence science had tried so hard to deny: conscious, autonomous beings, or “agents” in the largest sense, very different from ourselves and, no doubt, from one another. They were all around us and they always had been. The scientific notion that humans are the only conscious beings on the planet had been an error all along, an error rooted in arrogance and provincialism. Maybe other creatures are prone to simila
r fallacies: ants, for example, who get so caught up in the politics of ant warfare that they ignore the occasional reports of giant, colony-crushing bipeds.

  Since childhood, I had never spent much time thinking of animals in any context, whether as pets or as objects of pity. Modern urban and suburban people live for the most part in an environment devoid of wild fauna larger than squirrels, where you might even forget about their existence except for their curious prominence in children’s books and as “stuffed animal” toys. By the 1980s, science was beginning to move toward an acknowledgment of animal subjectivity and emotions, but for the most part educated humans were stuck with the Cartesian view of animals as automatons, driven entirely by instinct and reflex, which is a way of saying that they are in fact, for all practical purposes, already dead—just mechanisms responding to instinct and external stimuli. If I had thought anything else, how could I have cold-bloodedly vivisected so many mice in order to “harvest” their cells for my experiments?

  But as I got into my late forties and fifties, improving finances made it possible to go on vacations in rural and, incidentally, fauna-rich locations. We started going to the Florida Keys, in the summer when rentals were cheap, and I was struck there by the density of large and even dangerous creatures—snakes and stingrays and especially barracuda and sharks. None of these deterred me from going in the water; in fact, I was drawn by the frisson of being a soft, edible creature among so many experienced carnivores. When I got to know a diver—not a vacationer but a man who dove professionally for a treasure-salving operation—I pestered him for predator-related lore, learning, among other things, that it’s unwise to bleed in the water, wear sparkly earrings, or “act like a sick fish.” I taught myself how to kayak, just barely, and spent hours out in the Gulf of Mexico, finding hot, still spots on the leeward side of mangrove islands, watching out for dorsal fins, and then following—or, as I liked to put it, “hunting”—sharks. No danger in this except for one occasion, when a larger-than-usual shark whirled around at me in annoyance and made as if to ram my kayak.

  My next set of vacation destinations, in the Rocky Mountains, brought me within range of more traditional terrestrial predators, chiefly bears. Bears had been a hazard to Paleolithic Europeans, as well as a source of bearskins and, some archeologists assert, iconic images featured in what may have been religious cults. I made myself into a minor expert on bear attacks, reading all the books available in tourist stores and once following up with an interview of the author by phone. The most important thing I learned, from a theoretical point of view, is that bears are not entirely predictable. One bit of lore, for example, is that grizzlies are unlikely to attack a person who is playing dead. But no one should rely on this trick, because sometimes they are attracted to what appears to be carrion. Similarly, you cannot exactly predict where a shark will show up, which could be in a mere foot or two of water where you might have thought you were safe. If animals are reflex-driven automatons, they should obey certain statistical rules, as, for example, mosquitos appear to do when they travel around in a cloud, like molecules of a poisonous gas, but what I learned through observation as well as reading is that large animals are individuals, making minute-by-minute decisions of their own.

  Science has been moving in the same direction, and not only because of pressure from the animal rights movement. When observed through a lens cleaned of human vanity, more and more types of animals, many birds included, are found to reason, to exhibit emotions, cooperate, use tools, and plan ahead. I had my comeuppance in the Florida Keys, where I became fascinated by the group behavior of ibises. As the sun sets, they flock to a nearby mangrove island to roost for the night; at sunrise or thereabouts they take off again for their feeding grounds, and I would try to kayak out to watch both events. But the morning liftoff can occur before or at sunrise, and it can be either messy and anarchic or a single, coordinated action involving up to a hundred birds at a time. What, I wanted to know, determined the timing and nature of the liftoff? For surely, I thought, the ibises must be responding to some factor like sunlight or temperature that signaled them when to wake up and fly. Or maybe they were awakened by the sound of fish waking up and jumping. There had to be something—right?—that was controlling their behavior.

  But when I put this question to an old college friend and animal behaviorist, Jack Bradbury of Cornell University, he told me essentially that there were probably some leaders and trendsetters among the ibises, but there was also a lot of early morning jostling and nudging. In other words, within certain parameters like hunger and the need to stick together, they do pretty much what they damn well please.

  Dolphins are the free-will stars of the seas. You never know when or where you’ll run into them, in what season or depth of water, and whether it will be a single one or a pod. I was out on my kayak one day when I noticed some furious splashing off to the north. Paddling to the action as fast I could, I saw it was two dolphins playing some rough, elegant game involving alternating leaps out of the water, and when they saw me, they decided to include me in it. They’d swim alongside the kayak, then vanish under it and pop up dramatically on opposite sides with those wide dolphin grins on their faces. It would have been easy enough for them to flip the kayak over and, if they were so minded, to push me underwater until I drowned, but that was not the game they were playing that day. They fooled with me like this for about half an hour, and then zipped off to find a better player.

  I described these encounters to a friend as “religious experiences,” and the deeper my studies ranged, the more apt this description seemed. If you go back far enough in history and prehistory, you find humans investing animals, especially large and sometimes dangerous animals, with a charismatic quality, a connection to the divine or at least the occult. Ancient, premonotheistic cultures worshipped animals, animal-human hybrids like Sekhmet, the lion-bodied goddess of predynastic Egypt, or human-shaped deities with animal familiars, like the Hindu goddess Durga, who rides a tiger. Almost every large and potent animal species—bears, bulls, lions, sharks, snakes—has been an object of human cultic veneration. Before the Christian missionaries arrived, my Celtic ancestors worshipped the goddess Epona, who often took the form of a horse. The Makah people of Washington State worship “Whale,” who provides them with both physical and spiritual sustenance. If modern people can still get a thrill, as I do, from an encounter with a large and preferably wild animal, it is because such animals once were gods—beneficiaries of sacrifice and the centerpieces of ecstatic ritual.

  This posed a fresh challenge to my atheism. What does it mean to be an “atheist” if the gods could be, and once were, so numerous and diverse? I had nothing against Epona or even the death-dealing Hindu goddess Kali, and certainly no way of refuting anyone’s claim to have made contact with the Vodoun loa or Yoruba orisha in a state of trance. I realized that the theism I rejected was actually only monotheism, or the particular version of it represented by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in which the “one God” or “one true God” is not only singular but perfect—both omnipotent and perfectly good and loving. In the Freudian framework, the God of monotheism is a projection based on the child’s perception of reliably nurturing and powerful parents. I had no such template to build on, which may account for the scorn, expressed early in my journal, for a “parental God.”

  But amoral gods, polytheistic gods, animal gods—these were all fine with me, if only because they seemed to make no promises and demand no belief. You want to know Kali or Epona? No “faith” is required, because there are, or were at one time anyway, rituals to put you directly in touch with her. Most of these rituals have been abandoned, repressed, and forgotten, but images of the old gods linger on to amaze us. I was suffering through an episode of deep depression when I got to see the giant chalk horse representing Epona carved into an English hillside. She did not cure me, of course, but I was briefly cheered to think that my ancestors had created an image so expressive of freedom and motion�
��assuming that all the lifting and climbing hadn’t been accomplished by slaves. A few years later I had a chance to visit the great temple of Kali in Kolkata and went down the flights of stairs to the terrifying image of a three-eyed Kali with a long, protruding tongue. She is painted in broad, bold strokes, nothing like the complex curviness I expected from Indian sacred art. She clutches a severed head. Is she good or evil? Does the question even make any sense? I respectfully left her an offering of flowers, as recommended by my Hindu companion.

  To propagandists for the one true God, the rise of monotheism represents an unquestionable advance in human civilization. But it can also be seen as a process of deicide, a relentless culling of the gods and spirits until almost no one is left. First there was (and in some places, still is) animism, which anthropologists found almost universally among indigenous tribal peoples, although “religion” is a Western notion ill-suited to a worldview in which divine life pervades every single object, animal, breeze, and ray of light. Next, in more complex and hierarchical societies, the divine life that once animated everything gets aggregated into particular “spirits,” and eventually into a number of recognized, “legitimate” polytheistic deities. Monotheism is the final abstraction, leaving humankind alone in the universe with the remote and perfect “one true God.” Nonhuman animals came to be seen as “dumb” or even evil beasts, best worked to death or consumed as meat. Thus did monotheism pave the way for Descartes and the dead world of Newton’s physics.