Tag Archives: Self-Preservation

On Vanity

On Vanity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

Today, in Rome the College of Cardinals will convene for the new conclave to elect our next Pope. By the time you read this we may have already seen white smoke rise from the chimney and met our new pontiff by his papal name on the balcony of St. Peter’s. Or more likely when you read this the cardinals will be amid one volley or another of voting rounds and deliberating their right course of action. Since the death of Pope Francis, I’ve felt rebuffed by the electoral speculation over who will be the next pope; by and large I’ve avoided reading any of these articles or watching any of these analyses. On the one hand, in my lifetime these lists of papabili have often been wrong. Francis was an unexpected choice. Yet on the other hand I see a sense of vanity in all this speculation which seeks the political power of the Papacy while ignoring its pastoral nature. I’ve long heard that the eventual choice of Pope is supposed to be directed by the Holy Spirit, whispering perhaps into the ears of the men in red like God did to Elijah in the cave. In my own experience, I’ve seen this most in the realization that the best path for me to take often is the strangest or most winding in character.

It takes a great deal of humility to take that particularly uncertain way in life, to not know where you’re going to end up. You have to learn to trust in yourself and in the people around you to make that path work. I’ve learned to expect things to break, and nothing that I try to work, and to figure out how to move forward in spite of what I’d dreamed and hoped for. I try to learn from my experience even when it is painful or heart wrenching to see dreams vanish and new realities, perhaps less glowing than what I hoped for, take their place. Still, the best way in my experience is to be patient and let things grow naturally around you and within you. The initial instinct isn’t always accurate, yet it should not be discounted either. There are days when the useless is best just to let your mind rest and decide where to go next. The late Renaissance French humanist essayist Michel de Montaigne (he actually wrote “I am no philosopher”) wrote in his essay “Of Vanity” of the men of his own time when France was wracked by forty years of civil war, “a time when it is so common to do evil, it is practically praiseworthy to do what is merely useless.”[1] I am often focused on resolving questions by finding immediate solutions, even if they are smaller steps leading to a greater whole. Yet in recent weeks I’ve found those solutions aren’t always needed or warranted, for they can sift the complexities of a problem so far down that the problem itself slips through the strainer and remains unresolved.

I recognize a degree of vanity here; I figure I have a strong mind and being reasonably well educated that I can attend to any problem and find a logical solution. Yet logic cannot account for humanity in all our chaos and charm. The character and nature of humanity is to spy ourselves in the glass and be marveled by it. We can be so caught in imagining our own glories and our own defeats that we miss the lived moments in between when we are surviving the daily fare and writing even the smallest of verses which will contribute to the song of our lives. I’ve learned to accept that my wishes for things are not always going to happen, and that as much as I warm my soul with dreams of wonders to come those dreams will only be realized by living with the people around me, learning about them, trying to understand them, supporting them, and appreciating them for who they are. Why enforce my own persuasions on you when I could appreciate you, dear Reader, for your own self and your cosmovision? This is a word I only recently learned, I saw it first in Surekha Davies’s new book Humans: A Monstrous History. It seems to originate in Spanish as a way of expressing the way in which reality is subjectively understood through our sensory perceptions. Descartes’s famous maxim for knowledge, “I think, therefore I am” means in this sense that we know what we know because we can perceive it. The cosmos in all its wonder is familiar to us through our sight, hearing, smell, and touch. I would much rather wait to hear your song and listen to it harmonize with mine than pull your voice into my own melody against its own nature.

Montaigne admired those in his generation who kept up the good nature of humanity, its customs, laws, and mores in spite of the world around them losing so much of that common purpose. In quoting Cicero, “not by the calculation of your income, but by your manner of living and your culture, is your wealth really to be reckoned,” the essayist speaks the greater value of a good life enriched by a passion for community and a charitable outlook on our pursuits.[2] While I’m a practicing Catholic, ever striving to be more faithful in my life, I firmly believe with my whole being that the state should be secular, the better to reflect the totality of the people from whom government derives its power. I would be vain to demand that the state reflect my Catholicism at the detriment of all my neighbors, even my fellow Catholics, whose faith is personal and distinct from my own. A good person recognizes this and seeks communion through mutual respect and appreciation. The most central tenant of my faith is that God is love, άγάπη, φιλία, and ἕρως alike in the original Greek, and the greatest expression of this love is in our liberty to make our own lives, our free will. If we are meant to live in this image then surely we ought to lower our pride and our vanity and hail the liberty of those around us to live their own lives and make their own choices?

For much of my life I’ve had a hard time taking criticism. I’m better at it today, yet it still is a something I know I will always need to work on. I’m no longer in a state of mind where I feel that I need to justify my actions or choices to everyone. On the inverse side, several years ago I finally caught myself trying to deflect praise with a witty quip that deflated some of the experience. This is something that I’d been doing for a long time perhaps to not inflate my ego too far. I went through my phase of wanting to be important, wanting to be a leader, and to be at the front of things and today when I am in that position in so many organizations, I’ve found that it’s much more fun to be a part of a team working together to achieve our common ends. Together these twin forces pull me toward a humility that I hope keeps me grounded, in which I’ve allowed myself to experience my successes while embracing the troubles that occurred in the course of those victories.

In my academic career I’ve published to date one public-facing article about my historical zoology research into the three-toed sloth and an encyclopedia entry titled “Amerindians in Brazil” for the volume South America: From European Contact to Independence which was published earlier this year. In both instances, I’ve since found things that I got wrong. It was a bit of a shock at first to realize this. In the case of the encyclopedia entry, I made a rather large error in misgendering a god, the Tupi deity Maire-Monan who I interpreted as feminine following the lead of the sixteenth-century Portuguese authorities, only to realize while I was writing a book chapter last summer about magic in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest the error I’d made. As such, the correction to the encyclopedia entry appears in the footnotes of that forthcoming chapter. Likewise, in the editing stage of a forthcoming article of mine, my first peer-reviewed article to be published, I was presented with conclusive evidence that my prior conclusions that the three-toed sloth found in my sources cannot be definitively identified as a southern maned sloth (Bradypus crinitus) as I’d written in that article “The ‘Sufficiently Strange’ Sloth” for EPOCH Magazine’s June 2024 issue but is in fact more likely either a northern maned sloth (B. torquatus) or a brown-throated sloth (B. variegatus). That prior assertion in favor of the southern maned sloth stands corrected now not only in my forthcoming article “A Sloth in the First French Colony in the Americas” but also in the latest draft of Chapter 3 of my dissertation.

A few years ago, I would have still had significant trouble accepting these critiques out of a strong sense of embarrassment at making such a mistake. In the case of the sloth’s historical zoology, I thought I read all there was to read about the different three-toed sloth species which live in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, yet I was proven wrong by a generous reviewer who even offered a bibliography of where I could look to find more reliable information. Were, I always fixated on the looking glass of my successes I would surely miss the flaws that pronounce my humanity and not see the ample room for growth. I know that I’m not perfect, in fact I revel in the fact. And while my faith exists, I challenge anyone who claims to know definitive things about matters of belief whether they can really know the mind of God, a concept which as I wrote previously in my blog post from 12 March titled “The Divine Essence,” that divinity extends in scale far beyond human comprehension.

These last few years I’ve long felt a sense of disconnect between the two poles of my life. On the one hand in Binghamton, I felt a sense of professional accomplishment, I was at a good university conducting research and teaching, and a part of an academic community, however disparate that community was in practice. Yet I missed my family, I missed the Midwest, my home cities of Chicago and Kansas City became longed for isles of the blessed far to the west on the flatlands beyond the Appalachians. I longed to be active in my parish and to offer my talents to my brother Hibernians in elected office. I missed the regularity of the live music in Kansas City, the greater presence of the Kansas City Symphony in this city than anything I could find in Binghamton. Yet when I left Binghamton at a moment when I know I needed to leave, I found that I gave up more than I necessarily wanted. I lost that sense of professional accomplishment and surrounded myself by friends from beyond the academy who appreciate what I do but don’t necessarily understand the nuances of it. In the last few months, I’ve found something of that professional community through the learned societies that I’m a part of and at academic conferences where once again those two poles seem linked by a common axis. That axis is essential to a good life because it provides the balance which allows the individual to truly live to their fullest potential as a part of a wider community. I’ve known true solitude, a mantra of mine in recent weeks has been the simple Irish phrase, “Is mé i m’aonar,” or “I am alone.” It’s a plaintive call of sorts, yet it’s also a moment to learn from, that as much as I’m used to this existence that I want to grow out of it. Montaigne wrote in “Of Vanity” that “it is pitiful to be in a place where everything you see involves and concerns you.”[3] This is the solitary life, a life where about you all things revolve, and what’s worst about it is that it can be lived in community. Alone together was a phrase I read time and again during the recent pandemic. Yet even then with our need to stay apart we found ways to be together. I spent much of the pandemic years here in Kansas City rather than in Binghamton and still felt far more closely attuned to my professional community and the friends who populate it. 

In these past few weeks, I’ve been happiest when I’ve had that connection with my family and friends, when I’m with other people and experiencing their lives, their passions, their perceptions of our shared world. I put faith in the currency of human connection and community because that is the most valuable coinage I’ve yet seen. All the gold and silver that humanity has ever mined cannot compare with the value of community and the humility it brings out in all of us. I have many highly accomplished, brilliant friends, and I’m delighted to count myself among them. There is some vanity in these friendships, after all we approach each other with our own experiences and stories to share, highlighting the things we’ve done, yet in a good relationship we do so to elevate our friends and encourage them to seek greater things for themselves. I feel fortunate to have met these friends, and to be able to put my talents to use serving our common cause.This week then as the cardinals vote in Rome, I hope they will look not just to their own personal interests, theological bent, or political persuasion. I pray they will listen for that suggestion that seems just strange enough that it could be right, and that they chose a Pope to lead our Church who will continue to build bridges that may close the divides erected for millennia between ourselves and so many of our fellows. I hope for a pope who will be a friend to all, a good diplomat who can unite disparate peoples together into one common cause. May his humility guide him to be the pope we need now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and when he is elected may we rise to the occasion to better ourselves.

[1] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 3.9., p. 722.

[2] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., p. 724.

[3] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., pp. 725–26.

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Dominion or Cultivation of Nature?

Dominion or Cultivation of Nature? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkanePhoto by Hariprasad Ashwene, 2024.
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This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

A line in the Book of Genesis that comes into play in my dissertation is in the very first chapter of that first book of the Bible in the first Creation story in which God made humanity “after our likeness” and gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.” In the context of my research this divine proclamation of human dominion over the rest of Nature in Verse 26 was used to justify the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans beginning in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Here these newcomers from across the sea found worlds that to them seemed less touched by human hands. Brazil in particular stood out for André Thevet, the man at the heart of my dissertation, because its great forests seemed unaltered by its human inhabitants. The Tupinambá had in fact been living and using the great Atlantic Forest for generations, yet to Thevet coming from a France covered by cities, towns, villages, and a countryside that’d been farmed and ploughed for thousands of years he beheld something that to him seemed primeval in this world on the far side of the Atlantic.

I grew up hearing the adage that before settlement of the Midwestern states in the Early Republic and Antebellum decades that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River leaping from tree to tree without ever setting foot on the ground, and that these great forests were ancient and unspoiled by human hands. I now know that while there once were great forests in the old Northwest Territory, the Great Lakes states where I was born, those forests seemed far deeper and darker to the European explorers and colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries because the diseases which their predecessors introduced on North America’s coasts in the 16th century. Those pandemics killed vast potions of this continent’s indigenous populations such that by the Revolution the old indigenous forestry efforts of controlled burns were fewer and farther between.

I was born in the western suburbs of Chicago, a city which is famous for its engineering triumphs that shaped the natural world on which it was built. Chicago stands on the borderland between the Eastern Woodlands and the Prairies. Generations of engineers and innovators created an environment suitable for the building of one of the greatest metropolises in all of human history. I remember as a child listening with a sense of awe and pride to my Dad’s retelling of the story of how engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River at the turn of the last century to keep Lake Michigan, the city’s drinking water source, clean from all the pollution in the river. The western suburbs where I grew up were largely built as bedroom communities for downtown commuters. Our home was 26 miles west of the Loop, which in a preindustrial context would’ve take a pedestrian nearly 9 hours to travel. Wheaton, my hometown, became accessible from the city thanks to the railroad, in this case the Union Pacific which as of time of writing continues to operate trains for Metra through Wheaton’s two commuter stations into the Ogilvie Transportation Center, or Northwestern Station as I knew it. On the Metra you can today get from Wheaton to the Loop in 45 to 50 minutes, making it a viable commute for many. This sprawl is possible because of industry and the ways in which we’ve grown in our civilization with this mentality that we have dominion over nature and ought to use it and change it to our needs.

An even more radical transformation of nature can be found in my adopted home city of Kansas City, a metropolis of 2.2 million built around the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers about 400 miles southwest of Chicago as the crow flies. The land here is a mix of old glacial hills and prairie, yet unlike in Chicago where the city and suburbs were built from the old forests which survive as preserves in various pockets, in this drier region trees normally only grow in those few places where rivers, creeks, and streams flow. Kansas City is on the easternmost edge of the arid western half of North America, and so this region’s original state could not support the same kind of verdant canopy nor the large population which it does today. Brookside is a beautiful place; I love my neighborhood in particular for all the old trees which line our streets. The oldest of those trees were planted by developers working for J.C. Nichols between 1906 and 1950 when he built the Country Club District, of which Brookside is one part. The Kansas City Public Library’s history collections contain photographs of my neighborhood when it was just being built in the 1920s and while I recognize the contours of the hills, I find the lack of tree canopy to be somewhat alien to my recollection.

In developing neighborhoods like Brookside, our ancestors sought to create lived realities which fit what they knew in the Northeast, where too as William Cronon so expertly wrote in Changes in the Land, the landscape there was transformed by the first generations of colonists to resemble something of England, the Netherlands, and France depending on whether the colonists were in New England, the Hudson Valley, or along the St. Lawrence River. I find something reassuring and communal in seeing similar neighborhoods to my own in cities across this continent, from Atlantic to Pacific; this tells me that there are others whose lives might be something like mine, and that I’m not as alone as I often feel. It’s the same reason in fact why I like watching Jeopardy! or the national evening news broadcasts, because I know millions of others are also watching these programs, and maybe even a few people I know & love are among them.

What I hope I’m getting at here is a sense that I have that we’ve built up our world and transformed the nature of the worlds ours replaced in order to better fit some sense of normalcy which has been brought further and further toward the fringe of our world from some idealized source. I for one am drawn to the sense that this source is English, owing to the prevalence of English names in so many of these neighborhoods whether drawn in the Midwestern case from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, or the Old South, or in each of those cases from England itself. Yet with that embrace of a nostalgia for an idyll that may never have fully existed, of the idealized American town whose cultural roots fall in the idealized English market town, do we also carry on the sense of ownership over nature? This dominion after all caused English forests to be so depleted in the early modern period that wood began to be imported from New England and Canada for the building of ships for commerce and war alike.

I’ve grown used to expecting a less than favorable reception from other people. I’m ready to flinch and to put up my defenses whenever necessary. I suppose this is a learned hesitation; I’ve met a lot of people throughout the years who were interested in me only for their own benefit. Recently I loaned out a pen to a friend and immediately reawakened a 20 year old memory of doing the same thing in middle school only for the classmate to declare that pen was theirs now and not mine, leaving me to write the rest of the day with an old stubby pencil that was barely longer than my thumb and forefinger are wide. Last week, I wrote about how traffic even in Kansas City seems to have gotten worse, and the behavior of drivers across the board more aggressive since the recent pandemic. Unlike my Dad who learned to drive in Chicago, I never use my car’s horn out of a general knowledge that in this country other drivers are likely to have guns, and I’d rather my frustration at their conduct remain unannounced to them in the name of self-preservation.

The great trial of the present moment seems to me to be one of ordinary people like you or me just trying to survive amid a deluge of unnecessary troubles brought on by the greed of a few. I believe that before profits or efficiency that empathy must always come first in all our deliberations. I hope for the best intentions in all people whom I meet, and in many cases I see the good in their eyes and posture and in the way they interact with our world. Do we allow for the flood to persist because we are so jaded to the naïve hope that love could actually be the most powerful emotion? I know that love is more potent than greed, and that in the end it’s flame will always burn brighter than one fueled by fear. Yet love requires patience, as St. Paul wrote, and patience is not something which industry can well afford to have.Should we then look for other ways of living? If we are to begin anywhere, it’s to remember that we are natural beings ourselves, yes made in God’s image, yet evolved out of the same natural materials that begat all other life on Earth. I don’t know where the Divine comes into play in any of this, you can read my recent blog post on that topic for more. In fact, I see myself as much a hopeful skeptic as a believer. What I do know is what I’ve experienced, and that is that there is no more powerful emotion than love which burns so bright as to blind the mind and senses to any other voice. I for one love the aspiration and mission of studying how the innate and fundamental in nature was understood in our historic past, and I hope to continue learning more about this. Yet I feel the weight of our world on my shoulders, and like many others who feel isolated from the higher pursuit of wisdom in all its philosophical pulcherity, today I’m just trying to keep that love which I feel burning bright while I also do what I can to survive in this world we’ve built. It is our dominion, which is a triumph to our humanity, yet its roots are still in nature and nature will outlive anything we build.

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