The Firmament of Time By Loren Eiseley
Composed in 1960, Eiseley delivers an important message for the modern world
This post is brought to you by
, who recommended Loren Eiseley’s work to me on a journal entry I shared called What Is Nothing?Thank you, Paul, for introducing me to his work.
If you are like me and enjoy reading as one does a glass of wine, sipping slowly enough to engage other senses and ponder the moment, then Eiseley’s work is worth a closer look. This is why I generally gravitate towards philosophy. I can read a paragraph and sit content for an hour or so pondering the implications, dissecting the choice of words and what was conveyed, the structure and the syntax.
For most of my adult life, I have barely read any fiction, an odd behavior considering I write it.
I think what ultimately deterred me from fiction was reading so much of it at a young age. By the time I was a teenager, I discovered a formula and how everything was written for a market. I saw straight through the psychology, or the mind, of the author and unintentionally became disengaged with the words paragraph by paragraph from the lack of immersion. Now, I find wonder and fascination in what people write about concerning the real world and their journey through it.
Just from this one publication, Eiseley strikes me as the kind of person who is deeply impacted by his surroundings, which is exactly my kind of person. It’s reflected in his prose and the connections he makes from the depth of his perceptibility, in this case, presenting a comprehensive synthesis of our historical discoveries of human evolution, our relationship to time, and the moral implications of it all.
Loren Eiseley was a naturalist, philosopher, and anthropologist around the mid 1900s who taught at the University of Pennsylvania. The Firmament of Time is a collection of lectures he gave to instill a deeper understanding of the role of science. The humanities are highly undervalued and I wish this was a required reading for high school students learning about evolution, or any science for that matter.
Admittedly, the first part of this book is a little difficult to get through as it is predominantly a historical account and Eiseley’s angle of it. This might not be engaging to those of you who are not interested in history, or who already know about figures such as Darwin and Lamarck and the details of how we navigated their discoveries to get to get to where we are today (I fall into the latter). However, the second half of the book, particularly the last two parts, are worth it. It becomes apparent as to why Eiseley began with this analysis and what he had to identify in order to fully convey his observations and assertions.
It is perhaps not surprising, but at the very least disheartening, to see a respected scholar sounding the alarm to the nature of our moral bankruptcy, just to have the same dilemmas exist sixty years later. Things have indeed progressed, but in the same crooked trajectory that he has identified. I am very grateful to have discovered Eiseley’s work (Thank you Paul) and it’s quite appropriate that I began with this piece in particular, because much of what he articulates in his essays parallels my own deductions having a background in academia, the sciences, nature, and philosophy myself.
Here, I have gathered a list of key points I’ve drawn from Eiseley’s work:
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are”. -Anaïs Nin
Through Eiseley’s philosophical approach to scientific advancements within the theory of evolution, a large mirror is held up to human nature, with both scientists and creationists. We are reminded of our unwillingness to accept new discoveries:
Christians believe that God created man in his own image. When closely examining human nature as Eiseley has done, I could never shake off the feeling that man, instead, has created God in his image. This sneaking suspicion most likely comes from God appearing in most depictions as a white man, a supreme leader, directing which souls deserve to go to heaven and which to hell based on how obedient they are and generally how he feels that day. This sounds like an awful lot of historical and present day men that I know of…
I always thought that our collective hatred towards nature was a recent issue, but Eiseley reminded me of how men have perceived nature as a force to overcome, to conquer by any means necessary. This is indicative in western civilization’s prerogative to annihilate all earth religions on every continent, to enslave its people, to use the Earth as a means to an end and not as a life support.
One is lead to believe that science was our way out of the dogma of religion in this way, which brings me to the next point that Eiseley has illustrated.
Eiseley often describes the natural world as a machine through the eyes of scientists, a symptom of how humans tend to reduce things in order to understand them better, rather than expand our awareness to meet the universe accordingly.
Without realizing it, we have inadvertently othered ourselves from the world we are intrinsically apart of in the wake of scientific progress. We now see nature as something that’s outside of ourselves.
We have mistakenly tied our our advancements in technology to ethical advancements.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Progress doesn’t look like how many toys we have, but our willingness to create a world everyone can live in. Today, we have more toys and less humanity, and it appears nothing has changed since the dawn of science, and the industrial revolution.
The point of science is that it is meant to be re-written over and over again.
People always say “I believe in science”. Well, me too, but what science are we talking about? Is it the science someone has staked a claim in, either for money or for ego? Or is it the science that will unveil even more of what we don’t know, and force us to fundamentally change again?
Ultimately, nothing has changed:
A couple of months ago I was having a conversation with my brother where we were lamenting over current affairs and the country as we knew it. I expressed what I thought were the three essential pillars to a civilization that actually functioned. First, it is the environment, second is education, and third is healthcare, in that order. I can’t speak for Eiseley, but I feel that he would agree with my reasoning that until we heal our relationship to the planet that we rely on for survival, that we are inherently apart of, nothing else can be done. The education machine and the medical machine will carry on, but without an investment in that which feeds us, allows us to breath, clothes us, houses us, connects us, it will be hard if not entirely impossible to create an effective society. The air pollution in our lungs and glyphosate in our bloodstream is as much concern to the professor or the nurse as it is the naturalist. Once we heal and re-learn connection, the teacher can subsequently create the citizens of our future, and the doctor can address the root cause of illness. Everything else falls into place.
I would just like to say that there are so many ways to get to the same place on the landscape of Metanoia. It may be through a religion, the scientific method, or a walk through a maritime holly forest. In fact, it may be that the only thing leading us astray on this landscape is thinking there can be only one path, where the destination is singularly pedantic.