LETTERS BETWEEN RICHARD T. GIBSON AND ROBERT F. WILLIAMS

June 15, 1976, Brussels, Belgium

Dear Rob,

This is a hurried reply to your letter of May 17th, which just arrived today. Of course, I will look into financial problem in Luxembourg. It is ironic that you raise this problem because only a month ago, Lyle Stuart asked me if I would write a book for him on Luxembourg banks, (They have become the poor man's Switzerland, with nearly all the advantages of secrecy and without the negative interest now charged by the Swiss on most foreign deposits). Anyway, while I would hesitate to say that there is no dirty business afoot in your case, it seems to me at first glance like a typical capitalist trick. Luxembourg is three hours away by train or less. In addition, I have some friends there who may be able to provide me with information on this bankruptcy. At the moment, however, I am awaiting vistas from the Tanzanian Embassy in the Hague for a long planned and much delayed trip to Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia. I hope to get over there by the 1st of July at the latest, once I have my visa. The biggest problem is that none of the three countries has an embassy in Brussels: Tanzania's is in Holland and Kenya and Zambia are in Bonn (another three hours by train from here). Nevertheless, I will try to get the information you want as quickly as possible and will write to you before my departure for Africa. By the way, is there anyone in Tanzania you would like me to lookup? Or in Zambia? (our friend Babu is still in jail, held without trial for years because the Zanaibaris will never give a fair trial and Julius does not want to release him for fear of arousing the ire of the island government). My regards to your wife and family. Cordially as always, Richard.

June 28, 1976, Brussels, Belgium

Dear Rob,

I spoke today by phone with my friend Jean Heisbourg in Luxembourg. He has been investigating your problem there and he tells me that the firm in question is not yet in bankruptcy. It has been placed under the administration of the three people you mentioned in your letter. This means that there are assets and you have a chance of getting your money.

Perhaps this book or the course in which you are reading it is your first introduction to sociology. If so, this appendix is for you. It introduces sociology as a discipline, along with some of the most important insights sociologists have about how society works. Some language in the appendix assumes that you’ve already read the book.

What Is Sociology?

Sociology is the academic study of social patterns (and exceptions to them) at all levels and in all contexts through the use of empirical research. Sociology is also a perspective or way of seeing the world, about which I say more later. Sociology studies the following:

• • Ways in which we are free and ways in which we are not

• • How structure and culture enable and constrain us

• • How belonging to a social group shapes our beliefs

• • How our interactions with people change based on the context

• • How our actions differ depending on the setting

• • How social inequality works

• • How different organizations and institutions interact with one another

• • How our self-understanding is socially shaped

• • How social patterns continue over time and how they change

• • How individuals make sense of their lives

• • How people interact with each other

• • What people learn from culture

• • What people believe, value, and assume, and how those beliefs, values, and assumptions impact our actions

• • How organizations and large-scale institutions work separately and collectively

• • How these facets of life come together to make societies that keep going over time while changing constantly

Since everything we do in our lives involves our relationships with others and with society more broadly, nothing human is off limits to sociology and virtually everything human is of interest to at least a few sociologists.

Some sociologists focus on the smallest levels of human social life: perceptions, values, ideas, identity development, meaning-making, individual behavior, and interpersonal interactions. Some sociologists are more interested in how organizations work, how cultural norms and ideals are disseminated across a society, or how social change movements come into existence, have an effect (or don’t), and fall away again. Some sociologists study the largestscale institutions of a given society, how nations interact with each other, or globalization and other patterns that span multiple countries.

Tennessee governor Bill Lee, the first US governor to sign into law a bill prohibiting certain kinds of drag performances, had some personal experience with drag as it turned out. Lee appeared in his own high school yearbook in drag, wearing a miniskirt, pearls, and a wig. When this information came to light, the governor's spokesperson contrasted the bill's “protection of children” from “obscene, sexualized entertainment” with “lighthearted school traditions.”

The spokesperson made a good attempt at defining the situations differently, but from a sociological perspective, what some people might call hypocrisy on Lee's part was really an example of what sociologist Robert Merton defined as “moral alchemy.” Moral alchemy describes a situation in which a behavior that is viewed positively when a valued group engages in it is viewed negatively when a devalued group engages in it. As Merton put it, “the in-group readily transmutes its own virtues into others’ vices.” Moral alchemy comes down to the idea that members of valued groups can do no wrong and members of devalued groups can do no good—so when a member of a valued group does it, it's good, and when a member of a devalued group does it, it's wrong, as shown in Figure 3.

We find moral alchemy at work in gendered language and in sexual double standards, among other places. This chapter covers a few common examples and then considers the opposite of moral alchemy, false equivalencies.

Justice scholar Warren Blumenfeld and social psychologist Derald Wing Sue are among those who have written about what Blumenfeld called the “double-standard language of gender,” in which a man and a woman behaving the same are described differently. He's “assertive,” she's “bossy.” He's “passionate,” she's “emotional.” He's “firm” while she's “stubborn.” He's “good at details” but she's “picky.” Successful, confident women are also called “abrasive,” “strident,” “shrill,” “aggressive,” “controlling,” “pushy,” and “bitchy,” among other terms rarely used to describe successful, confident men. One trans man reflected on how the definition of his behavior changed after his transition: “I used to be considered aggressive [as a woman]. Now I’m considered ‘take charge.’ People say, ‘I love your take-charge attitude.’ ”

For much of its 150-year-old history, anthropology has been a discipline of the human sciences that has at least implicitly sought the definition of culture. The way we have traditionally set upon our search has been to gather materials from multiple places and times with the tacit presumption that lining them up, or looking at them in comparative relief, would give us a greater knowledge, and maybe even a definition, of culture in its many permutations. For it was culture – the material, embodied (as well as conceptual and verbal) lens through which life is perceived, experienced, and navigated – that we knew to be at the base of collective human existence. Our assumption was that, if we could collect as many examples of its operations on the ground as possible, we could better understand the whole, that great human phenomenon of culture.

And yet “culture” is a contested term if ever there was one. As our discipline has developed, and deepened, we have learned that culture is curiously resistant to definition, both in the singular – “culture” – and in the plural – “cultures.” Cultural meaning has the extraordinary capacity to mean many things to many people, and even to ourselves as individuals over the course of our lives; it is both necessarily fragmented and that which enables coherence. Poke and prod as we might, it seemed that we could not find a way to reconcile our search for the general in perennially expanding investigations of the particular. Everything humans think or do might be culture, or cultural, and yet the more we tried to pin down the concept of culture, the more it eluded our grasp.

This book emerged out of a set of four lectures that together took up the question of our disciplinary search for the meaning of culture through the lens of method. There are innumerable histories of anthropology, and this text is not intended as another: it is rather a reflection on the genealogies – the lineages – of the methods of anthropology, and an enquiry into the historical relation of our subject to the way we have studied it.

This book is addressed primarily to readers who are new to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. In particular, I hope it finds readers who are interested in recent debates about the status of “the human” and who might wish to learn something about what Jeffers can offer these ongoing conversations. I make the case in this book that Jeffers is an essential precursor for contemporary discussions about inhumanism and that his radical non-anthropocentrism remains deeply relevant for work being done in the environmental humanities, environmental philosophy, animal studies, and related fields.

Advanced scholars in Jeffers studies who find their way to this work will encounter much that is familiar but a few new themes and ideas as well. With my focus on inhumanism, I am not trying of course to break new ground. This is a central—perhaps the central—philosophical and spiritual concern of Jeffers's work, and many scholars before me have examined it. So, too, many of the poems I discuss in this book have been expertly analyzed by previous and present generations of literary critics, and I am much indebted to their scholarship. At the same time, the heavy emphasis I give to the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of Jeffers's work cuts against the grain of some of the existing scholarship, and specialists will readily note the ways in which I push back against certain established readings of Jeffers. Scholars will, I hope, also appreciate how my approach to understanding philosophy as a way of life (as opposed to, say, a mode of discourse focused primarily on making arguments and defending metaphysical and epistemological theses) allows the philosophical dimensions of Jeffers's work to be differently illuminated.

Given that this book is primarily intended for the former (general and non-specialist) audience rather than the latter (scholarly and specialist), I have avoided cluttering the main body of the work with discussions of the secondary scholarship. I have instead provided footnotes in various places pointing readers to secondary works that have proved useful for my own analyses. I have also included “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the end of the book for readers who wish to delve further into Jeffers's poetry and the substantial body of scholarship on his work.

The Tragedy of Humanism

In his poetry and letters, Jeffers both laments and appreciatively acknowledges the highly rigorous education he received under the direction of his father. As I noted in the Introduction, this intensive education began with Jeffers literally having Latin slapped into him by his father in early childhood and continued into his youth and teen years during which he attended a series of demanding European schools (where classes were taught in foreign languages that Jeffers had to learn on the fly). By the time Jeffers had completed his education, he had a solid command of Greek, Latin, French, and German and had read widely in classical literature. Despite the downsides of this demanding program (the most obvious being his abbreviated childhood [CL 2, 1018]), his thorough training in classical languages and literatures left Jeffers with a profound and lasting appreciation for classical Greek poetry and epic; and he regularly draws inspiration and plots for his own poetry from these ancient narrative wells. Greek tragedy plays an especially prominent role in his oeuvre, with plays from Euripides and Aeschylus providing the backbone for some of his longer narratives. Over the course of his career, Jeffers also composed several adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies. These reworkings are no mere translations or paraphrases on Jeffers's part, but are instead original retellings tailored to explore a theme central to his own poetry while also speaking to the perennial issues highlighted by the original text.

Although Jeffers's general relationship to ancient Greek poetry has been ably explored by scholars in both Jeffers studies and in classics, some of his reworkings of ancient Greek tragedies and themes have received less attention than others. One important piece by Jeffers that has received only minimal attention to date, “The Humanist's Tragedy,” and which was published in his collection Cawdor (1928), will form my focus in the initial portion of the present chapter. This narrative is a brief retelling of a few key episodes in Euripides's posthumously produced and historically influential tragedy Bacchae.

Euripides's original play opens with a monologue by Dionysus who explains that he is traveling to Thebes to announce his divinity, where his divine status has been flatly denied by King Pentheus and his mother Agave and Agave's sisters.

Jeffers's “Apology for Bad Dreams” (CP 1, 208–11; SP, 141–44), one of his most frequently cited and analyzed poems, opens with a forceful and memorable description of the beauty of the California coast.

What initially appears to be a straightforwardly loco-descriptive poem shifts dramatically in its sixth line to an account of a disturbing event unfolding on the clearing below: a woman is punishing and beating a horse.

Immediately after depicting this painful scene at a distance, the narrator returns to a description of the natural backdrop against which the horse beating unfolds:

In the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud offers what has become one of the most influential accounts of the origins of religion and religious-based civilizations. Pushing back against his friend and interlocutor Romain Rolland, who argues that religion arises in response to an “oceanic” feeling latent in all human beings, Freud insists that the phenomenon of religious belief (at least for the common person) is grounded in the much more basic fact of human vulnerability. “Life, as we find it,” Freud suggests, “is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks.” In response to the difficulties of existence, Freud believes we turn to religion (and here Freud has in mind primarily popular forms of the Christian religion) for salvation and consolation. Religion, he tells us, promises a comprehensive explanation of our condition and assures us that a providential father figure is watching over our lives and will ensure a good end for us. On Freud's analysis, religion thus serves as one of a host of “palliative measures” we use to deal with the hardships of daily life. Further, he believes that civilization itself emerges as one of the chief means whereby we seek to alleviate and prevent suffering. By living and working together in larger groups, conforming to social norms, and submitting to rulers, governments, police, and other state apparatuses, we seek to adjust our relations with nature and our fellow human beings such that our pain is minimized and daily existence is rendered as comfortable and pleasurable as possible.

That the establishment of civilization as a solution to the problem of existence creates a whole host of unintended discontents of its own is, of course, Freud's central cultural-psychoanalytic insight. Modern civilizations, especially the highly religious kind that dominate in Western culture, place excessive normative demands on individuals in regard to their sexual and social lives; the struggle to meet such demands, Freud argues, splinters the psyche and gives rise to the formation of a super-ego and to the persistent discontent of living under the surveillance of an internal watchman.

This is a book about what the poet Robinson Jeffers would have described as “rock-solid themes” (CP 3, 35; SP, 567). It is about who we are and how we fit into the big scheme of things. It is about living and dying well in an era of cultural decline and ecological degradation. It is about dealing with the difficulties of existence and determining which things should be of paramount value and importance in our lives. Both Jeffers's poetry and his life as a whole were centered around these rock-solid themes—issues and questions that are as ancient as our oldest extant literature yet as fresh and as pressing for us today as they have been for any previous age.

If, as Charles Baudelaire suggests, modernity is marked by a turn toward “the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent,” then the themes that form the focus of this book and Jeffers's poetic reflections on them must be understood as being distinctively and resolutely nonmodern in nature. Jeffers sought to admit into his poetry only material that spoke to (relatively) permanent realities (CP 4, 391; SP, 714), matters that would be of importance to people who might happen to read them one hundred and even a thousand years hence (CP 4, 422–27; SP, 723–28). It is perhaps this focus on perennial matters that has made his work (which entered its mature phase nearly a full century ago now) newly relevant for those of us who live in the so-called Anthropocene, an age in which planetary conditions have forced us to reckon anew with intellectual and existential battles we might have once thought we had been spared.

Although Jeffers engaged in a wide variety of pursuits and practices throughout his life, he was, perhaps above all else, a poet. Besides the prose contained in his letters, prefaces to various volumes, and occasional essays, his published writing is made up almost exclusively of poetic verse. His poems took several forms, from tightly written lyrics to full-length tragic dramas to sprawling, epic-style narratives that run well over one-hundred pages in length.

In October of 1947, at the age of 60, Jeffers submitted to Random House the manuscript for his penultimate and perhaps most notorious book of poetry, The Double Axe and Other Poems. Written in the midst and aftermath of World War II, the manuscript contained scathing criticisms of US foreign policy and its involvement in the war; it also included harshly negative remarks about President Roosevelt's political judgment and physical paralysis. Saxe Commins, his longtime editor at Random House, was so taken aback by the manuscript's content that he requested from Jeffers substantial edits to several poems and removal of several others. Even after Jeffers had complied with most of these requests, Random House decided to append a Publisher's Note to the beginning of The Double Axe voicing their “disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume” when it finally appeared in print in July of 1948.

Considerable scholarly attention has been focused on this dispute, with many of Jeffers's supporters viewing Random House's editorial interventions as a scandalous instance of suppressing free speech and artistic creativity. Jeffers himself, though, seems to have taken the matter largely in stride, complying with most of Commins's requests and offering mild pushback on others. Along with the retractions and revisions he made to the main body of the work, Jeffers also substantially revised his original Preface, making it considerably shorter and removing several important philosophical reflections. Fortunately, the original, unpublished Preface has been preserved and is readily accessible (CP 4, 418–21; SP 719–22). It includes a pellucid exposition of Jeffers's mature philosophy of inhumanism and also offers some of his clearest insights into how this way of thinking can address the challenges of finding meaning and beauty amid life's difficulties. In this concluding chapter, I want to examine both Prefaces in order to review some of the key themes of the previous chapters and to return to the issue of evil with which I began my reading of Jeffers.

In the shorter, published Preface to The Double Axe, Jeffers remarks that the book presents “a certain philosophical attitude” that he calls “Inhumanism” (CP 4, 428). This attitude, he tells us, is based on a shift in emphasis from “man to not-man,” a turning outward from the human world to the “transhuman” or more-than-human world.

The Nature of Things

“The poets lie too much”—except, perhaps, the ancient Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. Although he admits to rimming the cup of his lessons with honey to take some of the edge off his austere message, Lucretius sees it as his task in his six-book poem, De rerum natura, to provide readers with a forthright and truthful account of the cosmos and the place of human beings within it. As a disciple of the early Greek philosopher Epicurus, Lucretius maintains that our anxieties about life and fears surrounding death are due to patently false superstitions about vengeful gods intent on causing trouble for us in this life and in the afterlife. The aim of philosophy as Lucretius sees it is to dispel “our terrors and our darknesses of mind” by giving us “insight into nature” and a schema of “systematic contemplation” that can help us understand who we really are and how the world truly works.

On Lucretius's account, the universe is constituted only by material particles and the void of empty space. The individual things we see around us are comprised of such particles of varied sizes and sorts and are brought together by chance to form relatively stable (but not invariant) patterns of existence and relation. While the individuals, groups, and patterns that form in nature and the cosmos are subject to change and destruction, the particles themselves are indestructible. Human souls are also, according to Lucretius, built from these same particles and, hence, are subject to the same processes of constitution and destruction. Our souls do not survive us after death and thus cannot be subject to punishment by the gods for anything we do in this life. Furthermore, if there are any gods, they would, Lucretius believes, be utterly uninterested in human affairs. The gods control neither the constitution and destruction of assembled particles nor the vicissitudes of human affairs; both realms unfold according to largely deterministic forces as well as random swerves from that predictable order.

Obscure Human Fidelity

The reading of Jeffers developed thus far has left us with the following questions to consider in this final chapter: What sorts of values might emerge in adopting and practicing an inhumanist approach to life and death? Further, what sorts of changes does inhumanism entail at the level of the individual and at the level of the collective? I begin this chapter with an examination of two of Jeffers's early narratives, “Roan Stallion” and “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” in order to highlight the difficulties involved in adopting and sustaining an inhumanist perspective. I then turn to an examination of other writings by Jeffers that highlight the importance of ongoing practices of self-transformation and the role they play in transforming all-too-human subjectivities in a more inhumanist direction. Finally, I discuss how an inhumanist philosophy allows for a fresh reconsideration of the stakes of collective and political life.

Jeffers's early narrative poem “Roan Stallion” illustrates the risks and difficulties involved in contesting anthropocentric introversion. The action of the poem centers around California, a young woman of mixed race, who is married to an abusive and heavy-drinking immigrant from Holland named Johnny. Living on an isolated ranch, California does her best to care for her daughter, Christine, while Johnny is often gone from the ranch and off gambling. The titular animal of the piece refers to a horse that Johnny brings home one day as part of his winnings. The strong and beautiful horse represents for both California and Johnny something like a portal to a life outside their introverted existence on the ranch, but this “outside” is understood in different ways by the two characters. Johnny's goal is to use the stallion for breeding and to make money for personal economic gain and social standing, whereas California is drawn to the horse's overwhelming power, beauty, and independence, traits that allow her to glimpse a life beyond the restrictive limits of her relationship with Johnny.

Both characters exhibit quasi-zoophilic passions for the stallion, but again the form and end their respective affects take are starkly different. When Johnny arranges to have the stallion breed with a mare, he and the horsemen watch the mating, with Johnny afterward crudely joking with the mare's owner that “to-morrow evening / I show her how the red fellow act, the big fellow” (CP 1, 188; SP, 124).