INTERPRETING YOUTUBE

YouTube is full of mini-documentaries on how other animals express love for one another, and remember the kindness paid to them by human beings after years of living in the wild. Apes run to their rescuers, wolves approach timidly the man or woman who released them from traps and fences; whales roll over and signal their recognition of the sailor who cut them free of nets and tackle. These eye-witness accounts of meeting up with human friends is very moving. You might even be persuaded that this is a return to how the past regarded animals as able to think and communicate with what was usually feared as their worst enemies. Just today I saw a clip that showed a cow moaning and writhing until a man decided to follow it back to a patch of high grass near a marsh and to attend to a calf in trouble. The cow stood by as the man worked his miraculous fingers into the calf's body and pulled it to safety.

            Hardly anyone is aware that a profound but unarticulated subtext is also being established in these short features. That we may be witnessing the rough attempt to weaken the humanism first established in northern Italy in the 14th century that then spread throughout Europe and England in the ensuing centuries. The rise of humanism simultaneously justified the de-sanctification of nature and the vestiges of a much older and deeply rooted paganism that was the enemy of the Christian religion, especial Catholicism. Hence, the assault upon nature worship, witch craft, totemism, and the shift from the Greek spiritual notion of the daemon as the voice of nature in our dreams and visions to the notion of demons, the multiple forms of the devil in the lingering fringes of mysticism and pantheism.

            This shift in belief and the rise of science accompanies the earliest signs of a startling new vision of the world, a mechanical universe that had no soul or transcendent dimension, and thus, no other purpose than to serve the needs and desires of mankind. Slavery was the first manifestation of how dark the new vision would be -- with the capture and cruel exploitation of the remaining nature worshippers of Africa. Romanticism was the last dying throes of the ancient world, a period of wild guesswork of where the spirits of nature were hidden and the poets and visionaries who were gifted with the third eye to contact them and to glimpse their secret doctrines. Phrenology, table-knocking, tarot reading, fortune telling were all the relics and ruins of the dead spirituality lying in heaps throughout the 19th century. Blake's "dark Satanic mills" replaced the old religions with something sinister and menacing in the new world. Blake prided himself on his singular ability to imagine the hidden world of divine nature. Wordsworth simplified Blake and smoothed out the arcane corners of his vision and came up with a child's version of god-inhabited natural events. He did so until the visionary gleam faded for him and his collaborator, Coleridge, in their later poetry. "Gone is the visionary gleam," wrote Coleridge in "Frost at Midnight." Thereafter the two men became reverends and served the Christian faith in their later poetry and essays. Something similar occurred to T.S. Eliot in the 1920s when he renounced Modernism as a form of materialistic negation of faith and the rise of a new poetry that was beginning to unravel the forms and rituals of older verse. Eliot said he chose his residences in London by their proximity to the churches where he prayed and meditated. He tried to revive Christianity in the face of a gritty, atheistic London gripped in the sooty wastelands of industrialization. The only sign of a sense of guilt might have been the building of insane asylums and zoos in the city, where one could observe the pathetic remains of a vast metaphysical realm. Both institutions resembled prisons and were closely related to the repressive purposes of such punitive dungeons.

            Now comes the images of docile nature begging human beings for their help; the implicit message here is that such troubled animals recognized the superior intellect and ability of these rational creatures born of centuries of mechanical scientific laws. Somehow the idea that God might be the framer of the universe devolved into the cliche that "God was in the details." Thor Heyerdahl was an eye-witness to the destruction of the oceans, and shortly after, NASA rockets were recording the extent to which the ozone layer protecting us from ultraviolet rays was being perforated by atomizers and dispensers and thus allowing in deadly radiation to the human life below. An overwhelming sense of how the earth was being polluted and slowly destroyed filtered into the scientific literature, though it was considered hypothetical writing that exaggerated the power of human beings to be so irrational and reckless with human existence. But anyone listening carefully to the rhetoric of these revisionists and fatalists would have recognized the stirring of an argument dismissing the promise that humanism was virtuous and progressive. The atom bomb did not help the apologists of the new science to explain how virtue had any role to play in the philosophy of the modern age. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring didn't help much either.

            Bauhaus architecture with its monotonous symmetry and walls of glass removed the final remnants of the temple from human shelter. Instead, we were going to live in vast corridors of cement and steel devoid of any possibility of transcendence. Henry Adams was aware of this when he observed that in the Middle Ages all roads led to the Virgin Mary, while modern roads flung humanity outward from any center (save the banks) like a dynamo. The death of God was very much on Nietzsche's mind as he tried to steer humanism toward some heroic end, perhaps as Hegel intended in his view of the Spirit of History. Wagner took up the theme of some heroic rebirth of a dying world, which Hitler crushed with the rise of Nazism and his boasts of a long-lasting Third Reich full of the religion of the State. All these bromides and remedies failed and disappeared from consciousness only to be replaced by the new imperial regimes of mega-corporations and the unlimited power of the military industrial complex.

            So now we have lion cubs suckling at the teats of a German shepherd, and crows learning to play games with lonely widows at their window sills. Nature is viewed as rubbing its eyes and looking about at a new dawn full of hope and charity. The octopus is the new guru of nature, as smart or smarter than the fallible human. The Taman Nagara, the great rain forest of Malaysia, was said to have moved itself bodily from the highlands down to more moderate latitudes during the Ice Age, thus showing a soul and a conscience that was denied for the last five or six centuries. Witches are back, and spiritual groups of all stripes are thriving in their communes. YouTube will bring you the latest news in their short features as you hold your remote at the ready should anything become too outrageous about the forgotten natural world.