A Splendid Nowness
Mary Midgley on the importance of habit, and the culture that emerges from it
“Continuity, and habit as a means of preserving it, is an essential aspect of all life right through the animal kingdom.” - Mary Midgley
In her 1978 philosophical debut, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, Mary Midgley utterly upended the prevailing views on animal and human life. Much of what was revolutionary to say then became commonplace soon after, but not all the seeds of her arguments have germinated. So it is with her remarks on habit and culture, which run against a prevailing rhetoric that deems our existing culture as a prison from which we should seek escape. But how can you flee the framework of your very existence...?
Pondering the importance of habit, Midgley observed that it was not that long ago that it was presumed that wild animals roamed without pattern all over the planet, and fixed routines were supposedly a mere artificial structure imposed by society. But this was not at all what studies of territorial behaviour in animals revealed - even setting aside migration, regular movement is a nearly universal feature of the animal kingdom. As Midgley remarked, far from our orderly lives being unnatural, “happiness centres upon habit”.
Understanding this involves more than a simple acceptance of the connection between regular routines and our mental well-being, for the regularities that support our lives are entwined in the great web of habit that we call culture. As Midgley observed, our cultures are to our minds what the skeleton is to the body. “We do not carry it as a dead weight. It carries us.” Any aspiration to heroically free ourselves from culture is akin to striving to be nowhere.
The need for a culture is more than just a background to our lives, it is an essential necessity for a great many animal species. To draw upon one of my favoured references, the genetic differences between ground squirrels and tree squirrels are miniscule, comparable to the variation in different domesticated dog breeds - yet they live entirely different lives. One has a culture built around forests and the other has a culture conditioned by burrows, leading to a greater emphasis on social behaviour. This kind of contrast cannot adequately be explained by those desperate to reduce behaviour to genetics, it requires us to recognise minds, and the cultures that follow from them.
Whether squirrel or human, we need a common culture to allow any possibility of living together. Because we are communicative animals, Midgley stresses, we require a solid background of shared presuppositions, without which disputes are impossible to resolve and effective communication becomes entirely inconceivable. What’s more, because our cultural baggage has long been more than any one individual can carry, we have to choose how we live, and in some respects it is this more than anything that creates a distinction between us and our animal relatives.
That the possibilities for human living vastly exceed what any one person can fit into their lifetime creates the circumstances where it makes sense to speak of free will. Yet Midgley is keen to stress that many of the choices we make are communal rather than individual. The tradition of Romantic individualism, and the existentialist tradition that follows it, thus risk losing sight of the necessity of intelligent alternatives for making choices.
Our framework of choices for life is possible solely through culture, which is to say, “an unseen host of collaborators”. This means that habit, as the foundation of culture, is also paradoxically the requirement for freedom. As Midgley eloquently expresses this issue: “All elsewheres are potential, which is a miserable shadowy thing to be compared with the splendid nowness of being actually here.” This is not just an exultation of the joy of existence, but a warning of the risks of straying too far from the network of paths we are born onto.
Precisely the reason that our culture feels on the brink of unravelling is that the existentialist project of perpetual reinvention has upped the ante in terms of transforming tenuous spectres of potentiality into new ways of life. While I welcome all peaceful forms of being, we simply cannot afford to deny the necessity of maintaining our shared patterns of life together.
We are each born into a splendid nowness that is ours to shape and channel through our choices, and this is both our heritage and our duty. But if we cannot maintain any common culture together, we shatter this gift into fragments, and with it dies any hope of protecting our civilisation from the ever-present risk of fracture.
Right on! I would add that built into most civilizations are the seeds of its own destruction, either from within or without. Our species has staggered from one pinnacle of human creativity to another. We have now arrived at a place where we have the wherewithal to, if not to end the game altogether, at least set it back several millennia.
The only way out is to recognize the corner we’ve painted ourselves into, and to implement basic cultural habits that can take us to a place where we won’t be in immediate danger of imploding. Can we do it? A bedrock condition is that this must be done in a multi-cultural civilization. What are the habits that it is now imperative that we incorporate into daily life? Can we make a list? I don’t think the sine qua non essentials are that many. Here’s a few starters:
TOLERANCE
Tolerance all around: for ethnicity, for religions, for worldviews, for individual differences and preferences, not begrudgingly, but heartfelt. Reaching this place will require adjustments that some will find hard to swallow, but not, it seems to me, impossible.
EMPATHY
A general level of tolerance is necessary but not sufficient. There must also be empathy at all levels, from the individual to the state.
EQUALITY
A state of mind that honors the birth of every human child and supports the life path of every person.
I assume that if we don’t slip into darkness, our civilization will continue to be multicultural, and that the realization of the necessary fundamental principles will take place in different ways in autonomous countries. In such a civilization there can only be a few firmly held common beliefs. At present it’s all up for grabs. Has nature and our history endowed us with minds that that can truly grasp that unless we dispel the mushroom cloud, the continuation of an Earth-based human civilization is problematic?
"we require a solid background of shared presuppositions, without which disputes are impossible to resolve and effective communication becomes entirely inconceivable." No doubt this is the case; but I'm not sure there's a way to hold onto any "shared presuppositions" any longer. So far as I can tell, our education systems simply quit teaching these things and started promulgating the tantalising notion of social construction without noting that notions of murder and rape for instance are also social constructs. We're not the fist civilisation to fall apart. And as I keep pointing out, it seems to be a natural cycle. This fragmentation may even be a good thing, though it is difficult to navigate. While our civilisation is on the decline, it may be interesting to note that the other half of the world is prospering. There's something ecological to it, something even poetic. And yes, also tragic. The image of trying to stitch fallen leaves back to trees comes to mind. On that note, I'll leave you with this poem... which I wrote a few years back:
Fall Awakening
What wedding? What armistice? What coterie
has brightened the woods with such vital confetti?
The canopy alight with gold and glowing eerily
illumines path and grove with chill festivity.
Must have been the wicked winds and slanting rains
that laboured under darkened skies
and all their crafty hands that took the pains
to bring this musky, fecund fall alive.
Yet, I dread the arid grid of days that plots
the month, the bony fingers that tap the clock.
If I could, I’d reattach the flowers to their stalks,
return each leaf to linger at its knot.
I awaken from the drag of the metro train,
from the turnstiles, tunnels, revolving doors,
awaken from the tedium of passageways,
quicken in the midst of this elemental roar.
Here I am at last, I think; hold tight
and do not sink away again in watery might’ves;
do not fly off again in a hot air flight
toward that horizon and its widening bite.
Linger here as the last colours flutter,
as the maple keys twirl and putter;
celebrate with the victors the end of a war you’ve lost,
the resignation of all colour marrying the frost.