3 The Natural Conscience

maybe it’s because I’m a part-time musician. For me, a sound speaks the characteristics of a place. Its reverberations give the dimensions. Its timbre gives the materials. Its timing gives the rhythms of the society and the ecology of the locale.

I’m remembering a sound as I write. Nothing remarkable—just a knock, somewhat thudding and indistinct, on the front door of the farm cottage I was living in at the time in the English countryside. There was no bell on the door. The place was too small to have need of that. Nor did the cottage have central heating. The place was too humble to have benefit of that. So, in the damp of that bleak morning, I was huddled around the “electric fire,” as the British call what Americans know as “space heaters.” I had come to this village— Childerley, we’ll call it—to study the meaning of nature in people’s lives.¹ This old farm cottage was the only place available for me and my wife to stay in. We worshipped the electric fire those first few frigid months.

I opened the door, and there stood Nigel, a young man of about eighteen, son of the couple who owned the farm. Nigel’s family lived a hundred yards away in the main farmhouse. The next closest house lay a quarter-mile away, up a twisty, single-track lane, walled by hedges into a sort of green tunnel. Nigel’s family weren’t farmers. Like most other residents of Childerley, his parents worked in the city and had bought their place because they wanted to live in the country. The family rented the fields out to a neighboring farmer.

We hadn’t arranged an interview. In fact, at that point in my research, hardly anyone had yet agreed to an interview. I was starting to worry that my research wouldn’t pan out (a common feeling at the beginning of ethnographic field­work).

And talk we did. Nigel had finished his secondary schooling, and was taking a year to decide where to take his life, now that he was an adult. He needed a sounding board. We talked about Nigel's love of nature and country life. We talked about how he used to be a hunter, and would take his gun out and wander the fields and woodlands, “potting at anything that moved.” We talked about his guilty feelings about his indiscriminant shooting, and how he had lately become an avid supporter of the environmental movement. Nigel had been mostly raised in the city; the family had bought their farm only a few years previous. But Nigel now intended to dedicate himself to the defense of nature. I listened in wonder and appreciation, as he had given little hint of this (or much else) in our previous conversations.

Somehow, the conversation moved from there to politics. “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland boiled with gruesome intensity at the time, and Nigel felt torn about what to think of the situation. The Protestants were regularly shoot­ing the Catholics, and the Catholics were regularly shooting the Protestants. Both sides were taking down British security forces in the crossfire, and the security forces were doing quite a bit of shooting of their own. Children knew no other life. Both the Protestants and the Catholics had a lot to answer for, Nigel reckoned, as did the British government. Plenty of fault lay on all sides. I agreed, and told him so.

The conversation, which had been rattling on for an hour, paused. I think we sat there for over a minute, each silent in his own thoughts.

Then Nigel said, barely louder than a whisper, “That's why I think I'm inter­ested in the environment. You know what's right. It's clear where one should be standing. It's never that way with politics.”²

The contention that nature is a moral good, a matter of conscience, is very old—nearly as old as the very idea of nature.

The Greek word for nature isphysis (pronounced PHU-sis). The English word for nature derives from the Latin natura, which we also find in words like “natural,” “naturalistic,” and “naturalized,” as well as “unnatural” and “dena­tured.” But we also use versions of the Greek word in English, as in “physics,” “physical,” “physique,” “physician,” and “metaphysical.” It soon became a pow­erful word for the ancients, and a root for other powerful words. It remains so for us.

The earliest use of physis in Greek that scholars have turned up is in Homer.⁴ In Book 10 of The Odyssey, the god Hermes shows up to warn Odysseus about the enchantress Circe. Hermes tells him that Circe will put a potion into the food of Odysseus’s crew, turning them into swine. However, says Hermes, there is a plant that protects against the potion, a flower called moly. Odysseus later explains that Hermes “gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its nature. At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk.”⁵ The herb works, and Odysseus is able to free his crew.

This passage dates physis to the seventh or eighth century BCE, when most scholars think Homer lived. Here, Homer uses physis not as a moral good, but to refer to the essential, in-born, permanent qualities by which one can be sure to know what something really is—in this case, black at the root with a milk­white flower.

The etymological origin ofphysis reflects this first use. Physis derives from phyein, which in (even more) ancient Greek meant “to give birth,” and itself derives from phy, meaning “to be.”⁶ Physis, then, was the way something first came into the world, its material origin, unadulterated by later layers and designs: the way it truly was. When Roman philosophers subsequently trans­lated physis, they were good scholars and followed a similar etymology in Latin. They derived natura from nat-, the Latin past participle stem of nasci, which meant “to be born,” and which also survives in English in words like “natal,” “native,” and “nativity” They combined nat- with - ure, a suffix mean­ing “the result of,” yielding “the result of having been born.”⁷ Rather clever, actually.

In the two centuries following Homer, physis took a huge conceptual step. First nature quickly gained the possibility of a second major use, what I like to call second nature: nature as a moral good. By the fifth century BCE, Greek authors had taken to contrastingphysis, the way things truly were, with nomos, the ancient Greek for “convention,” “custom,” “culture,” and “law.”⁸ Nomos itself derived from nim, a very ancient word that goes back to the Proto-Indo- Europeans. For the PIE people, nim meant to “deal,” “distribute,” “hold,” or “manage.”⁹ In other words, nomos meant that which people had manipulated for their own reasons. It is also easy to hear in nomos a suspicion that maybe the outcome of our dealing, distributing, holding, and managing—our con­ventions, customs, cultures, and laws—gave advantage to some over others. Physis seemed right and just, and nomos did not. The unmanipulated firstness of physis had taken on a second basic meaning.

This second nature turned out to be extremely useful, and has become central to our understanding of a vast expanse of endeavor. As the sociologist Raymond Williams once noted, “ ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language,” and presumably so for many other languages as well.¹⁰ Conceiving nature as unmanipulated and thus good raises some huge issues with the idea, powerful as it is, and has led to much of this complexity, as we shall see. But let us first look at the circumstances of Greek life in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, circumstances that led philosophers to craft this most wild and civilized of ideas.

It’s 388 BCE, the final day of Dionysia, the annual drama competition in honor of the god Dionysus. You and your husband are racing around your oikos, your house, getting ready to go to the competition’s last play. In keeping with tradi­tion, the last play is going to be a comedy and staged at the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus, set into the hillside on the south slope of Athens’s Acropolis. The previous four comedies in the competition—Admetus by Aristomenes, Adonis by Nicophon, Pasiphae by Alcaeus, and The Laconians by Nicochares—had all been good, and a welcome point of emotional balance with the tragedies. But there was no tragedy on the schedule for today—just the final comedy, plus the end of the dithyramb competition.

Funny word, dithyramb. And such a weird dramatic form: Big teams of men or boys, singing and doing wild dances to honor Dionysus. It’s exciting, but why do we have to turn all drama into competitions? That’s Athens, you sigh. A team from each of Athens’s ten tribes will sing and dance a dithyramb today, accompanied by aulos, the double-reeded pipe that sounds so uplifting.

Unfortunately, rumors murmur that your tribe’s team isn’t very good this year. So you are skipping the dithyramb competition, and hoping to time things right to arrive at the theater for the start of the final comedy.n This year’s final comedy was written by the most famous playwright alive, Aristophanes, sixty years old and still going strong.

“Eirene,” you call from the ramshackle balcony overlooking the tiny court­yard of your oikos, “where are you?” Eirene is the new slave. With her easy laugh, saucy tongue, gentle looks, and aristocratic upbringing, she has quickly become your favorite of the household's three. True, her work ethic isn't the best, but she is still recovering from the shock of losing her family and being taken as a slave during an Athenian naval expedition earlier that year.

“Here, madam,” calls Eirene from behind you, coming out of the gynaikon, the special room for women on the second floor, common even in modest homes like yours. “I found the right color thread.” The left shoulder tape on your best peplos, the green one with the embroidered flowers, had pulled loose when you stepped on the bottom hem going upstairs. Fortunately, the fabric hadn't ripped—just the shoulder tape. It should be an easy fix. It had better be. There aren't many drachmas left in your money pouch, and now there's another mouth to feed. Slaves are cheap to buy but expensive to maintain.

“Excellent, Eirene. Thanks. You're such a dear. Do you know if my husband is ready?”

“The gray goat?” (There's Eirene's cheeky confidence that you like so much.) “Yes, he's in the andron,” the room for men and their affairs on the first floor. “I think he's talking to Thraix,” the male slave in charge of the family's twelve-acre farm a short distance out of Athens.

“The goat talking to the goatherd,” you say, and you both laugh.

You and your husband arrive at the theater in good time. It was only a fifteen-minute walk through the maze of streets from Melite, your neighbor­hood, to the theater district, lying on the far side of the Acropolis. “What a wonder and a comfort,” you think, to be able to walk so far and still be safe within Athens's sturdy walls. The wars with Sparta have gone on for as long as you can remember.¹² But the average free person must bear the burden of paying for all the military construction projects, and for the upkeep of the soldiers.1³ It seems like the tax collectors come by every month, nowadays. As well, prices are horribly high. The military's appetite for food and goods competes with the needs of everyone else in the city. Plus the weather has been so terribly dry, lowering yields. That's the farmer's perpetual problem: When prices are good, it seems like you never have a lot to sell. And when you've got lots to sell, prices immediately start dropping. Either way, you don't make much money.1⁴

Anyway, this is not a time to worry about walls and wars and taxes and the struggle to make a decent living. This is a time to laugh. The ten thousand or so others in the theater, ranged out on the rows of wooden benches layer­ing up from the orchestra at the bottom, clearly agree. They are already in a grand mood as they watch the last of the dithyramb performances—nearly fifty dancers in a great circle, singing, stamping, and acrobatically hurtling into and off of each other. It must be the dithyramb team from one of the wealthier tribes, the Aegeis from the look of their costumes.

The audience is almost all men, and you get a chorus of hoots and catcalls as you and your husband make your way toward empty seats. Unpleasant and unwanted, but not unexpected. You love drama and are determined to attend anyway.

“Do they think that women actually like this? The pigs!” you say with exas­peration to your husband.

“They hoot to please themselves, not you,” replies your husband, a man of few but trenchant words. You have always loved that in him.

You take seats along the edge about halfway up the rows. The first rows are reserved for the judges, the priests, and the leading aristocratic families, sitting on cushions in special stone seats shaped like thrones. A few empty seats beckon from closer to the middle, but much higher up and further away from the orchestra. You'd rather hear better and see the actors' masks better than take in the full sweep of the action. Aristophanes's recent plays have been more about words than action, anyway.

You remember his last one, A Parliament of Women, in which women take over the government and ban private property. It had that new, more intimate style, a kind of comedy of manners and less about slapstick (although there was still plenty of that). Some found it dull. Others it irritated, particularly men, whom the play lampooned. That meant the play put off pretty much the entire audience. It didn't win the comedy competition. But you quite liked it, both the content and the subtler approach.

“I just love how Aristophanes points out the absurdity of all our conven­tions,” you remember telling Eirene this morning. “Why shouldn't women be in government? And why shouldn't we all just share things?”

“It's just politics, madam, men's politics,” she had replied. “The agora is really just a big andron.”

You'd laughed loud and long at that. Eirene was so right. In fact, that's why you love your garden at the farm, you found yourself thinking—a chance to escape the wearisome politics of the agora and the andron. Yes, the work is hard sometimes. But out there, among the plants and the soil, the sun and the wind, away from the city, you feel free. You feel like yourself. There is no arguing with the sun and the wind. There is no arguing with plants and the soil. They just are. And so are you, immersed in—what is it that the philosophers have started calling it? That's right, physis, another funny-sounding word.

And it's also because of politics that Aristophanes almost never wins com­petitions, despite his thirty-seven previous plays. His work is usually too shocking for the generally conservative, male judges. He has no fear about toying with the raw nerves of Athenian society. No strata are safe from his barbs, bottom to top. His savaging of Cleon, the Athenian politician and gen­eral who ran a network of informants throughout the city, led to Aristophanes being put on trial for slander, you remember. The city council let him off, fortunately. This new play, titled simply Wealth, also seems likely to spawn consternation.

The last dithyramb ends, with much applause. People stir in the seats, get up for stretches and trips to the latrine and to haggle with the food ven­dors making their way through the crowd. Meanwhile, stagehands roll out a painted scene of a street on the edge of Athens, with a farmhouse in the background, and hang it from the skene, the stone fagade behind the orchestra. Aristophanes himself comes out, cracks a few jokes, and announces the start of Wealth. People settle back into their seats.

An old man in rags, apparently blind, enters the stage, groping his way across. Is this the start of the play, you wonder? Yes, it seems to be. An elderly Athe­nian citizen follows—the character Chremylus, it turns out, who owns the farmhouse in the painted scene. He is accompanied by his slave, Cario, who wails, “Zeus and all you gods, what a ghastly thing it is to be the slave of a master who is out of his mind!”

The crowd guffaws. After a few more disses of his master, Cario turns to Chremylus and says, “Now then, there is no way I'm going to keep quiet if you don't tell me, master, why on earth we're following after this man,” indicating the ragged, blind figure on the far side of the stage.

In the story that unfolds, it emerges that Chremylus has just returned from the Oracle of Delphi, where he went for advice about his son. Chremylus is a humble farmer—you like that!—and has struggled to make a living all his life. So Chremylus wanted to know from the Oracle whether to advise his son to be virtuous or a villain, for it seems plain that villains are the ones who usually do well in life. “I've been a pious and honest man,” Chremylus says, “and I've done badly in life and been poor... while other people were rich—crooked politicians, informers and all sorts of villains.”

The Oracle does not answer Chremylus directly. Rather, the Oracle tells him to follow the first person he meets—who turns out to be the poor old blind man they are tailing. But it doesn't make sense. Chremylus and Cario decide they had better ask the blind man who he is, in order to figure out the Oracle's meaning. At first the blind man refuses to tell them, but then he con­fesses “what I had intended to keep a secret. I am Plutus.”

The crowd roars at this ridiculous pronouncement because Plutus is the Greek god of wealth. He shouldn't be in rags, let alone blind. It's another of Aristophanes's characteristic power reversals. You start to shush the two drunken men next to you, but your husband catches your hand. You stop, but not without a glare because you can barely hear what Chremylus says in response: “You, Plutus, and in this piteous guise! Oh, Phoebus Apollo! Oh, ye gods of heaven and hell! Oh, Zeus! Is it really and truly as you say?”

Apparently it is. Plutus's divine responsibility is supposed to be to reward the good and virtuous with wealth. But Plutus explains that Zeus, in one of the fits of perverse pique for which he is infamous, made him blind. So Plutus can't tell who is deserving of wealth and who is not. As a result, Greece soci­ety shows no relationship between whether someone is wealthy and whether someone is good.

Chremylus sees an opportunity, and he comes up with a plan to get Plutus his sight back. That way he can reward the virtuous instead, including Chre­mylus. The plan is very simple: to take Plutus to the sanctuary of the god of health, Asclepius, and ask for a cure.

But Plutus is afraid to offend Zeus. Chremylus and Cario try to convince Plutus not to worry about retribution from Zeus. Since every want and need depends upon having money, Plutus is actually the most powerful of all the gods, they tell him. Even Zeus is subordinate to Plutus. If there were no wealth, Zeus would get no sacrifices from people and would soon become poor himself.

You love this scene, with its fast and witty dialogue.

plutus: So it's because of me that sacrifices are offered to [Zeus]? chremylus : Most assuredly. Whatever is dazzling, beautiful, or charming in the eyes of mankind, comes from you. Does not everything depend on wealth?

cario: I myself was bought for a few coins. If I'm a slave, it's only because I was not rich [and could not pay my debts].

chremylus: And what of the Corinthian whores? If a poor man offers them proposals, they do not listen. But if it be a rich one, instantly they turn their arses to him.

cario: It's the same with the lads [the male whores]. They care not for love, to them money means everything....

chremylus: It is in you that every art, all human inventions, have had their origin. It is through you that one man sits cutting leather in his shop.

cario: That another fashions iron or wood.

chremylus: That yet another chases the gold he has received from you. cario: That one is a [cloth maker].

chremylus: That the other washes wool.

cario: That this one is a tanner.

chremylus: And that other sells onions.

cario: And if the adulterer, caught red-handed, [gets a shaved head instead of paying a fine], it's on account of you.

plutus: Oh! great gods! I knew naught of all this!...

cario: It is not because of you that Agyrrhius [the new general of Athens] farts so loudly [demonstrating his pride and power]?

chremylus: [... And] that troops are sent to [save] the Egyptians?... In short, Plutus, it is through you that everything is done. You must realize that you are the sole cause both of good and evil.

cario: In war, it's the flag under which you serve that victory favors. plutus: What! I can do so many things by myself and unaided? chremylus: And many others besides. Wherefore men are never tired of your gifts. They get weary of all else. Of love...

cario: Bread.

chremylus: Music.

cario: Sweetmeats.

chremylus: Honors.

cario: Cakes.

chremylus: Battles.

CARIO: Figs.

chremylus: Ambition.

CARIO: Gruel.

chremylus: Military advancement.

cario: Lentil soup.

chremylus: But of you they never tire.

Before Chremylus and Cario can take Plutus to the Sanctuary of Asclepius to get cured, however, an ugly, withered old woman appears. She turns out to be Penia, the goddess of poverty. Penia tries to convince Chremylus that, if she is banished, society would soon be a shambles. No one would be willing to work, and so no work would get done. Nothing would get cleaned. Nothing would get cooked. Nothing would get made. There would be no beds, blan­kets, clothes, fancy oils, perfumes.

“And really,” Penia argues, “what's the good of being rich when you're lack­ing all these things? From me, on the other hand, all these things that you want are available in ample supply, because I sit over the craftsman as a mistress sits over her slaves, compelling him through need and penury to seek a means of getting a livelihood.”

Chremylus dismisses Penia's arguments. “The way life is arranged at pres­ent for us humans, who would not regard it as sheer insanity and, even more, sheer wretchedness?” he asks. “Many men are wealthy who are wicked, having amassed it by crime. And many who are very virtuous are in a bad way.”

Chremylus sends Penia away. He and Cario take Plutus to Asclepius, who does indeed cure Plutus's blindness. The effect on the world is immediate and transformative. The virtuous become wealthy, beginning with Chremylus and his fellow farmers. Those who are not virtuous discover that they need to change if they are to be wealthy too. The rich and powerful discover they can no longer hold others in thrall—although they need a bit of time to figure that out, as a series of walk-on characters show. An informer becomes suddenly poor, while an honest man becomes suddenly wealthy. A wealthy old woman who had romanced a young man with gifts discovers her strategy no longer works because the young man already has enough money.

Aristophanes isn't done. The god Hermes shows up, followed by a priest of Zeus. They both complain that sacrifices have stopped. People are doing so well, they don't need to ask for favors from the gods. So the gods have become poor, hungry, and powerless.

“Since Plutus began to be able to see once again,” Hermes complains, “no one sacrifices any more to us gods—no incense, no laurel, no ground-cakes, no animals, no nothing!... I'm completely ruined and done for!... Now I just rest with my feet up and starve.”

The play ends with Hermes becoming a servant of Chremylus, and the whole company taking Plutus to the Parthenon to install him as the new chief god.

The cheering is thunderous. Many in the audience stand on the wooden benches and throw money toward the stage, pelting the actors (who quickly run for cover). Having exhausted their coins (or not having any to begin with), some men start tearing the benches apart and throwing chunks of wood. Left­over food flies through the air, too. It's supposed to be in good fun, but it's chaos, and you and your husband quickly leave, thankful that you chose seats close to the side.

“A marvelous vision,” you say to your husband when you get to the street, thinking of your own family's struggles to maintain a decent life in the city, based on the meager profits from the farm.

“Too bad this could never happen,” he replies.

“Yes, and too bad that Aristophanes, once again, won't win the comedy competition,” you answer, a touch exasperated.

You look at each other and nod. Wealth is a fantasy that is all too true.¹⁵

A major change was under way in Athenian society and Aristophanes had his finger on the pulse of it: a sharp increase in both vertical and horizontal inequalities, in social class and in rural-urban differences. It would be sim­plistic to read Wealth as a plea for equality. The play is full of ambivalence, questioning the structure of society, not resolving its problems. Ambivalence is Aristophanes's most consistent strength as an author (and is the strength of comedy more generally). Was Aristophanes telling his audience to deal with each other more virtuously, so that a good life would be possible for everyone? Or was he suggesting that equality itself is a fantasy because not everyone is in fact virtuous, and the fortunes of wealth indeed are blind to who is virtuous and who is not? Was Aristophanes anticipating Karl Marx's line about the opiate of the masses and arguing that a just society would have no need for religion? Or was he saying that money is the real basis of the divine for us? Was, perhaps, Aristophanes anticipating Thomas Jefferson and suggesting that struggling farmers like Chremylus are the true source of virtue in Greek soci­ety, as they live more in tune with nature and its goodness? Or was he saying that the city will corrupt even them, and that humble folk advocate for equality only because it is their best argument for getting ahead themselves?

With any of these readings, though, Wealth is plain in pointing out the rising inequality at the heart of the Athenian social order, even if Aristophanes does not suggest a clear guide to possible alternatives.

Aristophanes also brings out Athenian society's utter dependence on slav­ery. He portrays Cario as quick-witted and capable, not a lower order of person, therefore somehow deserving of being a slave. We learn in the middle of the play that Cario is a slave only because he couldn't pay his debts (or so Aristophanes implies). But having pointed out this injustice, Aristophanes goes on to suggest that Athenians would never willingly give up their slaves anyway. Here is the exchange between Penia, goddess of poverty, and Chre- mylus, after she ticks off her list of the unpleasant work that wouldn't be done if Plutus were able to see again:

chremylus: All those laborious jobs you just listed, the slaves will do them for us.

penia: So where are you going to get slaves from?

chremylus: We'll buy them with money, of course!

penia: But who's there going to be to sell them in the first place, when he's got money too?

chremylus: Oh, some trader wanting to make a profit, coming from Thessaly where all the kidnappers are.

penia:... Who, if he's rich, will want to risk his own life doing that?

Chremylus's only response is to curse Penia.

chremylus: May those words be on your head!

Although we often regard Athenian society as one of democracy's birth­places, somewhere around a quarter to a third of the population of the Athe­nian city-state were slaves—roughly the same proportion of slaves as in the southern states of the United States in the years just before the US Civil War.¹⁶ Almost all households headed by free people owned slaves, even an ordinary farming family like the one I have described. Probably most of the farm labor was done by slaves. Some were captured in war, some were kidnapped by slave traders, and some fell into slavery when they couldn't pay off their debts. Apparently, slaves were so cheap to buy that few families raised new slaves from the children of their current ones. It made more economic sense to buy slaves who were already old enough to work?⁷

Athens was also sharply divided between citizens and metics—free men born of Athenian citizens versus free men born of non-Athenian citizens, many of them non-Greek. Citizens could vote and citizens could own land; metics could do neither. About a third of free men were metics?⁸ Many had come to Athens for its economic opportunities, both from other Greek city­states and from other lands entirely. Some metics, however, were former slaves who had been freed by their masters or had bought their own freedom. Slaves sometimes received wages, giving them the chance to save. (Paying slaves may seem an economically unnecessary arrangement, but it meant that owners did not have to spend for the upkeep of their slaves, who would then live in separate households on their earnings, making do as best they could on their meager wages.) Slaves could also borrow money. Either through saving or borrowing, slaves sometimes could amass enough money to convince their masters to let them go. But they could not become citizens.

Wealth inequality among the free was also on the rise. Compared with the Roman Empire, the distribution ofwealth in Athens was relatively flat. An aris­tocrat like Alcibiades, an Athenian statesman and general in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, owned only about seventy acres of farmland, still the main source of income in classical times.¹⁹ Most landowners had less than fifteen acres, though, and a fifth to a quarter of Athenian citizens owned no land at all.²⁰ But some were starting to amass quite significant holdings. For example, when he died in 330 BCE, we know that a wealthy man named Phainippos owned about 850 acres.21

The growth of Athens led to a great profusion of new economic oppor­tunities, from small-scale artisans to large-scale operations, making a wide variety of goods for sale. Some families farmed along with running small home workshops, especially peasant farmers. And some of the wealthy—many of whom were metics, not citizens—had operations large enough that we almost could call them factories. A metic named Lysias ran a shield workshop that seems to have been big enough for that word. He owned 120 slaves, most of whom probably worked in the shield-making operation, and he kept an inven­tory of seven hundred shields on hand.22 (As Aristophanes observed with his crack about why soldiers were being sent to Egypt, war could be a great way to make money.) Demosthenes, a famous Athenian politician, reports that his father ran a couch-making workshop with twenty employees and had a knife-making facility with over thirty employees, most ofwhom were probably slaves. Another Athenian politician, Nikias, had a thousand slaves working the Athenian silver mines, which he leased from the state?³ Plainly, a few men were becoming very rich, while most men were struggling hard.

And I do mean men. Athenian society was strongly patriarchal, as I tried to bring out in my story of the woman attending the first performance of Wealth.²⁴ Women had few rights. Women could own, inherit, and pass on property, and they continued to own their dowry when they married. But husbands con­trolled the property of wives, although they did not own it. Women's freedom of movement in public life was also highly curtailed. It’s actually not certain that they could attend the drama festivals, even in the company of a male rel­ative, such as my little story describes—although scholars are divided on this point.²⁵ And they could not vote.²⁶ Aristophanes pointed out these injustices too (in his characteristically ambivalent way) in A Parliament of Women and, most famously, in Lysistrata, a play written at the height of the Peloponnesian War in which Athenian women get men to give up their war-making by refus­ing them sex. We cannot doubt that women's lack of social and political status was closely connected with the restraints on their economic status.

In short, as Aristophanes pointed out in Wealth, Athens had become a world of money. Older forms of social connection and stratification were fading. Hereditary ties still existed—your clan and tribe still mattered, and so did aristocratic birth—but were far less important. As Chremylus says to Plutus, “Does not everything depend on wealth?”

But as well, Athens had become a world of voting rights and equality under the law, what ancient Greeks called isonomia. Around 507 BCE, a remarkable politician named Cleisthenes had reorganized Athens’s political order, based on some earlier reforms by the equally remarkable Solon around 590 BCE. Solon had abolished political privilege based on birth, and replaced it with privileges based on four classes of wealth. The poorest class, the thetes, could vote but they couldn’t hold office. It was a compromise. The aristocrats still had privilege because of their preexisting wealth, but now had to share some control. The poor got a bit of power, but they didn’t get the land redistribution they had called for. It turned out to be an awkward compromise. Much turmoil followed, in large part because of continued clan and tribe conflict.

So Cleisthenes came up with a radical and unprecedented move. He abol­ished the traditional Athenian tribes and replaced them with ten new ones, based on locality instead of heredity. Each of these non-heritage-based tribes chose fifty citizens by lottery to represent them for a year on the “Council of Five Hundred,” the main legislative body of Athens. And to prevent the gerrymandering of interests and the emergence of local patronage systems, Cleisthenes divided the region around Athens into 139 neighborhoods called demoi—“demes” in English—with about a third each demes from the city, the coast, and the hinterland. Each individual tribe in turn was composed of roughly a third demes from each kind of region, carefully selected to balance interests.2⁷ In the singular, demos, the word came to mean the people common to an area. They called this form of government by a new word, demokratia, rule by the people—the people being itself composed of many peoples, many demes, carefully balanced to ensure that minority voices could still be heard. It was raucous. It was problematic. It was full of tensions. And it largely worked, then as now.

In other words, democracy developed as a response to wealth inequal­ity. But people had noticed (again, then as now) that despite these efforts at isonomia, the wealthy had a lot more political power than the poor, and often used that power to increase their wealth even further. So they laughed at Wealth. It turned out to be Aristophanes’s most popular play—so popu­lar that we have over 150 surviving manuscripts of it.²⁸ Apparently, even the judges laughed at Wealth. Scholars think it actually did win the comedy prize in 388 BCE.2⁹

Although they laughed at Wealth, people had doubts about this churning up of the old that was taking place in the polis, the Greek word for a city-state like Athens.³⁰ They had doubts about living what I will refer to as bourgeois lives: that is, living not in a kinship-based society, but in a society dominated by the social relations of class. The word “bourgeois” comes to English via French, which got it from the Latin bourg, meaning a town big enough to rate a defensive wall. So it is apt to call this class society a bourgeois manner of living, for it arises with the growth of cities and their need for division of labor, record keeping, and an increased centralization of authority and the means of violence, all of which enable differential accumulation of wealth and protect it behind walls of many kinds.

It is also apt to call these class-based ways bourgeois because they are closely associated with another characteristic of city life: politics, a word whose very origin is the wordpolis. Contending with interests and their many conflicts— politics—was by no means new to human affairs?¹ But in a social context in which a person’s life chances and social relations were so much more fluid, the significance of politics in the gaining of those chances and relations grew mightily. For the principles of legitimate contention (grounded, as they are, in the social) seemed equally fluid. And we must note too that the bourgeois life turned out to be markedly less fluid than it appeared to promise. The settling out of distinct layers in the liquid of social opportunity is, after all, what we mean by class. Politics can shake some turbidity into these layers, but it is also the main source of their viscosity.

Political economists have long used a similar term, the bourgeoisie, and I’m aware that my usage might be confusing. By the bourgeoisie, political econ­omists usually mean to refer to the rich, the owners, those who control the means of production. These writers often use a separate term for the poor, the owers, those who actually do the producing: the proletariat. Here I use the term “bourgeois” for both rich and poor, owner and ower, as well as for all the other motivations of social class that came along with city life. I don't mean to deny the conventional usage. Rather, I mean to point out that there has long been another basic economic inequality in social life, indeed one that is in some ways prior to that between the urban rich and the urban poor, for it provided the initial accumulation of riches behind the walls of the bourg: the inequality of city and countryside, what I am calling bourgeois and pagan. Both axes of inequality—the vertical inequality of bourgeoisie and proletariat, and the horizontal inequality of bourgeois and pagan—interact, each feeding the other: a double conflict.

Although they originate with the expansion of cities about this time, these inequalities and the cultural orientations associated with them are no longer so spatially confined, as I will be emphasizing later in the book. But they are still with us. As well, both axes continue to present deep political questions of legitimation and justice.

An immensely powerful means for trying to settle either kind of question— questions of legitimating these inequalities or of challenging their justice— turned out to be the idea of nature. For nature provided a different manner of conscience, of moral thinking, that many came to feel lay beyond accusation, beyond the interests of politics.

The poet Theocritus was one who felt the attraction of this new manner of conscience. He liked nothing better than to wander in the back country, far from the city, among the pastures, glades, leys, grottos, and tumbling fountains of clear-flowing streams that he found there, overflowing in abundance, at least in his imagination. Sometime in the middle of the third century BCE, Theocritus and two friends headed out for a ramble on Kos, a small island that lies just off the Asia Minor mainland. As was his custom, he later set down a few reflections in a form of poem he called an eidullion—a term that meant “little picture,” and which led in time to the English word “idyll.” Scholars call this particular eidullion his “Seventh Idyll,” and sometimes add a more colorful descriptor like “Harvest Home” or “Thanksgiving Festival.” (Theocritus him­self didn't bother with titles.)

“Once on a time,” writes Theocritus in the Seventh Idyll, “Eucritus and I (with us Amyntas)” did “steal from the City” in order to attend a festival in honor of Demeter, goddess of the harvest.³² On the way, they encounter a boukolos—a herder—named Lycidas. Theocritus challenges Lycidas to a sing­ing match. Each acquits himself well in the competition, with a long song apiece about the captivating glories of food, love, wildlife, and the scenery of the countryside. Lycidas gives Theocritus his crook as a present and de­parts, and Theocritus and his friends continue on to the harvest festival. They find a nice spot to lie down, soaking up the gaiety and the charms of country life:

... there we lay

Half-buried in a couch of fragrant reed

And fresh-cut vineleaves, who so glad as we?

A wealth of elm and poplar shook o'erhead;

Hard by, a sacred spring flowed gurgling on

From the Nymphs' grot, and in the sombre boughs

The sweet cicada chirped laboriously.

Hid in the thick thorn-bushes far away

The treefrog's note was heard; the crested lark

Sang with the goldfinch; turtles made their moan,

And o'er the fountain hung the gilded bee.

All of rich summer smacked, of autumn all:

Pears at our feet, and apples at our side

Rolled in luxuriance; branches on the ground

Sprawled, overweighed with damsons; while we brushed

From the cask's head the crust of four long years.

Four-year-old wine. Damson plum trees overweighed with fruit. Pears and apples rolling at their feet. Larks, goldfinches, and turtles (that would be turtle doves, not amphibian turtles) singing and moaning, and cicadas and tree frogs too. A gurgling spring. Fresh-cut vine leaves. Fragrant leaves. The shade of the elm and the poplar. Glorious.

If you can tolerate the gooey sentimentality, that is—especially as passed through the pen of this high-Victorian translation by C. S. Calverley, from 1869. I confess I do like it, even though it is (or maybe because it is) so plainly over the top. The modern reader may laugh a bit at lines like “turtles made their moan,” but we readily see the attraction of the world Theocritus portrays in his “little pictures.” Here is nature, painted in unflaggingly positive, natu­ralistic, and innocent terms, implicitly contrasted with the city. Theocritus's countryside suffers no conflict—other than a gentle contest over who is the best singer. And Lycidas is unperturbed by the lack of an obvious victor. He even gives Theocritus a gift, so much does he admire his opponent's music. Nor does anyone seem to have to work. Nature yields sustenance without the force of labor. No money changes hands. The wealthy and powerful do not receive fealty. Rather, honor lies with the boukolos, and especially one who is also a good musician.

The central moral is that the idyllic world of the Seventh Idyll, immersed in nature and a giving agriculture, has no politics. There is no conflict, no conten­tion, no wrestling for hierarchical advantage in the pursuit of interests. And it is therefore good. That is what is idyllic about the idyllic. It is a place of imagined remove from the polluted bourgeois norms of the polis.

Theocritus launched an enduring genre. We call it bucolic writing, after Theocritus’s favorite stock character, the boukolos. But for all its rural inno­cence, politics persist in the bucolic vision. Its very nonpolitical stance has meaning for us precisely because we bourgeois souls know the reality of pol­itics in our lives.

As well, bucolic innocence can usefully cloak a secret political motive. In the case of the Seventh Idyll, scholars are pretty well convinced that the people in the poem are real, albeit disguised with pseudonyms. Scholars have won­dered about one reference in particular: the appeal to a mythical goat-herd and poet, Cometas, that Theocritus puts into Lycidas’s song.

Happy Cometas, this sweet lot was thine!

Thee the chest prisoned, for thee the honey-bees

Toiled, as thou slavedst out the mellowing year...

In the normal telling of this ancient myth, Cometas’s master gets mad at him and locks him in a cedar chest for three months to see if the Muses will save him because of his poetry. They don’t. In Theocritus’s telling, though, the Muses come through, sending honey bees to feed Cometas until his master releases him.

... the round-faced bees,

Lured from their meadow by the cedar-smell,

Fed him with daintiest flowers, because the Muse

Had made his throat a well-spring of sweet song.

Some scholars suspect that Theocritus included the reference to this myth to mourn the murder of his friend, the poet Sotades, who had written a sala­cious poem to protest the emperor Ptolemy’s incestuous marriage to his sister.³³ (It was a rather ripe topic, and the poem did not hold back.)³⁴ Ptolemy had him imprisoned, but Sotades escaped. Unfortunately, he was recaptured, locked in a lead chest, and thrown into the sea to drown. By telling the story of Cometas being locked in a chest, but with a happier ending, saved by the Muses, Theocritus seems to be saying that Sotades would not be forgotten— all the while protecting himself from the wrath of Ptolemy through the bucolic innocence of a world with no politics. Only music, leisure, and vine leaves.

And love. Theocritus, like all the bucolic poets, loved love. He has Lycidas sing to his love, Mitylene, hoping that “from Love's furnace she will rescue me, for Lycidas is parched with hot desire.” Theocritus's own song in response tells of the woes of his friend Aratus, who “pines for one who loves him not.” He calls on the gods to shoot love arrows “and strike that fair one... strike the ill-starred damsel who disdains my friend.”

Theocritus had a broader understanding of love than some in our own day, we should note. The C. S. Calverley translation that I have been quoting actively suppresses the homoerotic in the Seventh Idyll. In a later translation by J. M. Edmonds, Theocritus writes that although he himself “loves a lass,” his “dear'st Aratus sighs for a lad”—not merely “one who loves him not,” as the Calverley translation has it. Theocritus does not disapprove of his friend's homosexuality. Rather, in the Edmonds translation (and similarly in all sub­sequent translations), Theocritus asks the gods to use their love arrows and “come shoot the fair Philinus, shoot me the silly boy [not a ‘damsel'] that flouts my friend!” All our loves are equally innocent for Theocritus, here in the countryside, far from the city.

But Theocritus is a transitional figure. His idylls remain partially nature before nature, not yet fully second nature, nor even first nature. We see throughout his writings references to what we today easily put in the category nature: the sights and sounds and foods of the wild and gently cultivated. He also references gods and demigods that fit what we now call nature and the rural. Pan, the god of shepherds and wild things. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. Apollo, the god of the sun. The centaur Chiron, a great healer and hunter. And the Nymphs, beautiful female spirits of waters, hills, trees, and woodlands. But the word physis does not appear in Theocritus's work.³⁵ There is no nature here. Not yet. We know philosophers had taken up the word a century before, making the firstness of things into a secondness, a moral good. That was in Athens, though—not remote Kos. Evidently, the term had not then become popular in Kos, even among the educated like Theocritus. Yet the need for nature's potential moral help he plainly felt.

So he paints his little pictures with the moral resources he did have: those of nature before nature. We discover in Theocritus an exuberant pluralism of the divine. We see interactiveness between humans and the divine. We hear a blending of the natural and the supernatural. We find a frank and diverse accounting of the sexual. And it is all told through a deep immanence in spe­cific places that touch us through sight, sound, texture, taste, smell, and spirit. But unlike the nature before nature of Gilgamesh, African ancestor veneration, the Popol Vuh, and the Greek gods as Homer understood them, this nature before nature is purely good. It is a refuge from the political, not a product of it.

This distinctive formulation of the early bucolic writers—perhaps we could call it second nature before second nature—soon moved on. (In fact, given what we know about the talk among the philosophers in Athens a century before, it had already begun to move on.) From Theocritus, it was a short step, and a giant leap, to link such a picture of rural innocence to nature and the conscience it can provide.

Pan the camera now to Rome a couple of centuries later, where the old gods seemed to have had less and less relevance for an increasingly urban people, at least among the elites. The inequality already evident in ancient Greek society widened greatly with the coming of the Roman Empire. Roman mil­itarism, slavery, and market development, assisted by improved technology, led to extremes of wealth and poverty not unlike our own today. The houses of the Roman middle and upper classes were large and well fitted with the conveniences of the day. Better lamps brought good lighting in the evening. Aqueducts brought water for fountains, showers, and flushing toilets. Drains took rainwater and wastewater away. You could relax and clean yourself in vast, heated bath-house complexes. The wealthiest even had a form of central heating, plus private baths. Food and imported luxuries regularly came in from thousands of miles away. Life was less and less local, less and less tribal, less and less uncomfortable, and less and less rural and agricultural—at least for the better-off classes of people within the growing cities.

And these are precisely the people who had the time and schooling to write their thoughts and arts down. One among them was the Roman poet Horace, scratching out his verses on a waxed tablet while luxuriating in his rural villa in the Sabine Hills above Rome. By that time, the late first century BCE, the old gods have pretty much disappeared for a well-off intellectual like him. Instead, Horace is all about natura. In his Tenth Epistle, he tells his friend Fuscus back in Rome that “life in harmony with Nature is a primal law.”³⁶ He warns Fuscus that if we try to “Push out Nature with a pitchfork, she’ll always come back, and our stupid contempt somehow falls on its face before her.” In place of the “city pleasures” Fuscus enjoys, Horace enthuses about his home in the “blissful country” with its breezes, fragrant grass, and “lovely rural rivers, and trees, and moss-grown rocks.” The gods are reduced to a mention of a “crumbling shrine” to a disappearing cult, which Horace only includes as a landmark.

And he has a new concern that rarely made it into the old tales of the gods, goddesses, and demigods: concern about greed, wealth, and ambition. Horace is deeply disturbed by the dangers of “piled up gold” and the way it can dis­tort one's priorities. Theocritus definitely had this worry as well, but not so explicitly as in a line like this from Horace to Fuscus: “Never let me be busy gathering in more than I need, restlessly, endlessly.”

Because, Horace says, you are only setting yourself up for disappointment. Free yourself from money, he advises his urban friend, Fuscus:

If Fortune's been kind-

Too kind!—loss will seem more than loss, will seem

Catastrophe. Whatever you like is the hardest of all

To lose. Try for nothing grand: kings and the friends of kings

Can be excelled, even under a humble roof.

Horace also worries about the kind of issues we would today call “pollu­tion”: the ill effects of pursuing our ambitions with little regard for our health and the health of the environment. “Is your water as clear and sweet, there in its leaden pipes,” he asks Fuscus, “as here, tumbling, singing along hilly slopes?” Horace could not have been referring to the effects of lead poisoning, which were not understood at the time. But we can well imagine how fetid and stale that water must have been after miles of lead-lined Roman aqueducts, and the final stretch of lead piping to bring it to a Roman home.

After it left Roman homes, the water was ranker yet. Rome had grown to a vast scale, likely approaching (and perhaps exceeding) a million inhabi­tants. No city would again reach that size until London in 1800. A million people means a lot of effluent, so, following the old out-of-sight-is-out-of- mind school of environmental relations, the Romans built a Roman-scale system of drains to carry it all away. The largest such drain, the cloaca maxima, still runs under Rome today, helping drain the Forum. But all that waste water had to go someplace, and the pollution in the River Tiber was prob­ably also unequalled until nineteenth-century London and the poor River Thames.

Thus, Horace favors the simple country life, close to Nature's primal law— but also as a refuge from pollution of a moral kind. “Where can we sleep safer from biting envy?” he asks. This is why Horace says, “I run looking for good plain bread, just crusty bread, no honeyed confections, dripping sweet,” like one gets in town. He likens civilization and its ambitions to a bridled horse, racing against the stag of nature.

There was a stag, once, who could always defeat a stallion

And drive him out of their pasture, until, tired of losing,

The horse begged help of man, and got a bridle in return.

He beat the stag, all right, and he laughed—but then the rider

Stayed on his back, and the bit stayed in his mouth.

So refuse the bit of civilization with all its class competitiveness, Horace advises Fuscus. It's slavery for all who take it up. Don't.

Give up your freedom, more worried about poverty than something

Greater than any sum of gold, and become a slave and stay

A slave forever, unable to live on only enough.

Seek instead a different conscience and basis for motivation: the conscience provided by harmony with Nature's primal law.

Half a world away, in the area we now call China, a calm, peaceful man was having similar thoughts. His given name was Li Ehr, but hardly anyone recalls that now. He served as government historian for the state of Zhao, one of the main powers struggling to rule China during the Warring States period. The Zhao nearly won. But in 221 BCE, after a roughly 250-year-long struggle, the state of Qin wound up on top—which is why today we call China China, after the Qin (which is more or less pronounced “chin”). Otherwise, we might well call that most populous of countries Zhao.

Li Ehr lived during the early part of the war, probably in the late 400s BCE, about the same time that the ancient Greeks were extending first nature into second nature, making nature a form of the good. He became a teacher of moral value, in addition to holding his position as court historian. He hated all the fighting—as well as all the infighting among local elites, trying to use the war to promote their own ambitions. Li Ehr taught a different way of being, a way that he simply called the Way, the dao. Some listened avidly to Li Ehr, and grew to calling him Laozi, meaning “Old Master”—the name by which he is most remembered today in English (or by the variants Lao Tzu and Lao- Tze). But still the war went on. Disgusted, he put a pack on his back with a few possessions and took the road over a mountain pass out of Zhao. A Chinese historian from the first century BCE tells the story like this:

When he reached the Pass, the Keeper there was pleased and said to him, “As you are about to leave the world behind, could you write a book for my sake?” As a result, Lao Tzu wrote a work in two books, setting out the meaning of the way and virtue in some five thousand characters, and then departed. None knew where he went in the end.³⁷

Two very short books. Five thousand Chinese characters works out to roughly three thousand words in English, or about twelve pages of doubled- spaced text. The first book was the Daojing, which focuses on the character of dao, the Way. The second book was the Dejing, which focuses on the mean­ing of a Chinese term that has long confounded translators: de, which means something like virtue or integrity, but is really much more than that?⁸ Today we call those two books together the Dao De Jing, meaning, roughly, “the clas­sic work on the Way and on integrity.” Surely, no work of a mere three thou­sand words has influenced so many for so long.

In the words of the twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Fung Yu-Lan, Laozi saw dao as “the all-embracing first principle of things... the unitary first ‘that’ from which all things in the universe come to be.”3⁹ Dao, then, is very much a first nature kind of idea. But Dao also extends first nature to second nature. Laozi makes plain his sense that the dao is not just a firstness but it is also morally good—albeit with a note of caution. Laozi harbors a constant wariness of distinctions, especially ones that might tempt us into exalting our­selves for being better than others:

Everybody knowing

that goodness is good

makes wickedness.⁴⁰

So the Dao De Jinggenerally doesn’t use terms that easily translate into the English word good. But Laozi plainly thinks that following the dao leads us to what is right for ourselves and for others. We get no sense in the Dao De Jing of a nature-before-nature political struggle in the deeper powers of existence. Rather, the dao is free from the desire, manipulation, ambition, and inequality Laozi saw all around in Zhou society.

The Way of heaven

is like a bow bent to shoot:

its top end brought down,

its lower end raised up.

It brings the high down

lifts the low,

takes from those who have,

gives to those who have not...

Not so the human way:

it takes from those who have not

to fill up those who have.⁴¹

Laozi connects the ambitions of inequality to the human habit of giving things names. The dao does not name or categorize. Names and categories stem from human intentions and therefore, ultimately, the conflicts of human politics. The true dao is peaceful, nameless, and simple, says Laozi, like an uncarved block of wood:

The nameless uncarved block

Is but freedom from desire,

And if I cease to desire and remain still,

The empire will be at peace of its own accord/²

In short, the dao is beyond politics. And the way to follow it is to learn to act without intention, and thus without politics. Laozi termed this way of acting wu wei, which literally means “without action.” He contrasted it with acting deliberately, what he termedyu wei, or, literally, “with action.” He advised us to wei wu wei, to act without action, as in this passage.

Do without doing

Act without action.

... the wise soul

by never dealing with great things,

gets great things done.

Now, since taking things too lightly makes them worthless

and taking things too easy makes them hard

the wise soul,

by treating the easy as hard,

doesn't find anything hard.

Act without acting? Treat the easy as hard? Do great things by not doing great things? Laozi loved to teach through paradox, I think to try to shock us out of our conventionalized lives. In the second book of the Dao De Jing, the Dejing, from which the quotation above comes (the others were from the first book, the Daojing), he tries to help us find our elusive de. Everything has a de, its individual essential quality, integral to someone or something. To follow one's de is to experience a very encompassing form of integrity, the virtue of being what and who one ought to be. A de comes from the dao. Acting in accordance with our de is how we manifest the dao in our own lives, and expe­rience the rightness of our existence. We do so through acting wu wei, without intention, without effort, without doing.

In the pursuit of learning, one knows more every day;

in the pursuit of the Way one does less every day.

One does less and less until one does nothing at all, and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone.⁴³

Or as another Daoist master, Zhuangzi, put it sometime during the final decades of the Warring States period,

Fishes are born in water

A person is born in Dao.

If fishes, born in water,

Seek the deep shadow

Of pond and pool,

All their needs

Are satisfied.

If a person, born in Dao,

Sinks into the deep shadow

Of non-action

To forget aggression and concern,

Nothing lacks

And life is secure.

Moral: “all the fish needs

Is to get lost in water.

All a person needs is to get lost

InDao.”44

Not every Greek and Roman saw things as Horace did, nor all Chinese from the Warring States period as Laozi and Zhuangzi did. Nor every intellectual— probably not even most of them, or Horace and the Daoists would not have felt need to make their arguments. Horace's contemporary Virgil certainly did not see things Horace's way (even though Virgil and Horace were reputed to have been friends and colleagues). The Eclogues, which Virgil modeled closely on Theocritus’s Idylls, do not mention natura a single time. His other works only occasionally mention natura, and only in a first nature sense—not nature as a moral good beyond politics.⁴⁵ The other of the three greats of Roman poetry, Ovid, reads like a splitting of the philosophical difference. His vast Metamorphoses traces the history of the world, from its creation to the murder ofJulius Caesar. Metamorphoses is our main source on Roman myths about the gods, but the word natura also appears thirty-four times?⁶ For Ovid, nature precedes the gods, intertwines with them, and is “more powerful than them all.”4⁷ But Ovid isn’t clear about whether nature is good or not.

Horace is plenty clear. For him, not only is nature a moral good, a second nature, we are good to the extent that we follow nature. Plus Horace seeks not only second nature but a different kind of self that comes from living in tune with nature’s rhythms—a self that is free of envy, greed, ambition, and the inevitable disappointments of desire for more and more and more, desires that he associates with urban life. Laozi frames the matter a bit differently, but he looks for and finds much the same resolution to the grievances of bourgeois living. Thoreau in his shack by the shores of Walden Pond would have under­stood immediately. So would my young friend Nigel. Thoreau quite possibly had even read Horace, given the importance of the classics in nineteenth cen­tury education, and maybe even Laozi?⁸ I’m pretty sure Nigel hadn’t read either. But we don’t have to have read Horace or Laozi or Zhuangzi to get the point, weary and wary as we are of the striving ways of our fellow bour­geois humans. We get it because we have sensed these striving ways in our own selves.

As have many before us. Ever since urbanism and the expansion of the economies of empire and capital accumulation that fed urban growth, these themes have run through our literatures, from the Daoists to the Buddhists, from the middle East to the middle West, from Horace to Thoreau, from then until now. I call it the discovery of a natural conscience, a basis for moral think­ing we believe to be free of society and all its politics and constant play of interests and ambitions. I use this phrase in part to compare it with what the sociologist Emile Durkheim described as the collective conscience that comes from social life?⁹ The natural conscience comes from social life too, although we do not experience it as doing so. And we use the natural conscience as a direct response to social life and its troubles.

I find it helpful to think of the natural conscience as emerging from the interaction of a sense of natural other and a sense of natural me that the natural other sees and condones. We imagine a natural other as lying beyond the reach of human politics and its manipulations. It is other, separate and pure, real and true. We imagine a natural me as that the self that comes from the nonpolitical other—that it creates, sees, and potentially guides. Thus, we feel the natu­ral me as a more authentic and valid self than what society creates, sees, and guides. The natural me, then, we imagine as a nonpolitical self, as opposed to the self that emerges from society's constant tussle and scuffle of interests and ambitions. It is a second self that comes from second nature.

By using the terms “natural other” and “natural me,” I am trying to draw another comparison with another famous theory. The great social psychologist George Herbert Mead used to say that our sense of me comes about through learning to imagine how others see us. He called it “taking the role” of others. Mead argued that, in time, we generalize our imagination of specific others like our mother, father, brother, sister, friend, or other associates. We come to an overall sense of “them” he called the generalized other. The me imagines the generalized other's response to us, which simultaneously shapes what our sense of me is to begin with.

Think of Mead's dynamic of generalized other and me as a kind of mental personification of what Durkheim described: the collective conscience as built from the interaction of the generalized other and me. Think of what I'm talking about as a kind of parallel moral structure: the natural conscience, with its dynamic of natural other and natural me.⁵⁰ But this parallel moral structure we see as coming from beyond the social and its politics—even though it does not—and as being a more sure basis for the moral for precisely that reason.

Mead and Durkheim didn't discuss the existence of this parallel conscience. They saw the development of a collective conscience as pretty much trouble­free. We just take it in, without much fuss or gripe, they felt. They presumed that sociality is so fundamental to our being that we readily embrace its ways. I agree that sociality is fundamental. But in certain times and situations, we find ourselves disputing our sociality and the forms of self it encourages. We doubt the motives of the generalized other, and we even doubt the me that it calls forth from us. We doubt “the human way” that “takes from those who have not to fill up those who have,” as Laozi put it. We worry that we are being led astray by the bit of civilization, busy gathering in more than we need, “rest­lessly, endlessly,” as Horace described it. We come to sense that the generalized other is full of manipulation and ambition, and that the me it tries to create in us serves society's dominant interests and purposes, not ours.

This is a very troubling realization to come to. For if our interests and pur­poses really come from society with all of its politics, and if these politics serve certain others and not us, then what should our own interests and purposes be? What is moral? What is right to do? Is there a truer source upon which to base the self?

Horace said, yes, there is a truer source: the nature he found in the country­side. Thoreau also said, yes, there is: the nature he found in the “subtile mag­netism” of the wild. Laozi and Zhuangzi said as well, yes, there is: the nature to be found from following the Way without effort, abandoning ambition and desire, for these are merely social. As the chapters to come will describe, the divine can equally yield this sense of a truer source, free of the “lust of domi­nation” that comes from “liv[ing] by man's standards,” in the words of Augus­tine—a divine natural other, emancipated from the manipulative powers of human politics.

From these natural others, each felt one could gain a more authentic self, a natural me whose morals and motives lie beyond the corrupting influence of the political. Horace felt it in his sense that country life, closer to nature, allowed him to refuse the bit of civilization and how it turns us into slaves of money and status. Thoreau felt it his sense that living in tune with nature's rhythms granted him “absolute Freedom” from “man and his affairs... even politics, the most alarming of them all,” whereby he might learn his true “savage name.”⁵¹ Laozi and Zhaungzi felt it in their sense that we all have a de that we can manifest by allowing ourselves to “get lost in dao,” like a fish in water. Augustine felt it in the words of Paul and his advice to “put on the armor of light” that comes from embracing the Lord Jesus Christ. They each discovered thereby a rock of self in a roiling sea of turmoil, a source of mor­ally secure motivation in a storm of self-serving desires, clashing and dashing against each other, like waves from a hundred hurricanes.

Many others have found this second self in many other ways, both in nature and in the divine. But the natural conscience is not a nonsocial conscience. These are very human concerns. They are concerns of humans about humans. These sages were not escaping the city. They were rebuilding it.

I'm remembering another sound. We call it “chuckling”—the sound of the waves rippling up the lapstrake sides of a Saint Lawrence skiff. A lapstrake boat like a skiff has a wooden hull set with overlapping planks, making for a kind of cedar washboard for the flow of the water. The wind has to be just right, not too strong and not too calm. The angle of the boat has to be right too, roughly forty-five degrees off the wind. And you need to be rowing at a fair clip. A motor won't do. You wouldn't hear the chuckling reverberating through the cedar.

It's a musical and calming sound, an arpeggio of water chimes. We love it. We even put it into a song that we sing every summer when we return to the Thousand Islands section of the Saint Lawrence River for family vacation.⁵²

The oars rise up, the oars dip down

And I hear a chuck-a-ling sound

As I row this golden river skiff

Up to Rockport town

A branch of my mother's family were among the first European settlers of these islands. First Nations folk already lived here, and the story of how the settlers pushed them out isn't pretty. But that was a long time ago, and we don't often remember it. Rather, we remember our family's two-hundred-year history in the area, some of which is now a Canadian national park. We and various families of our cousins still own cottages on the islands. Hardly any­one lives on the islands year-round now, but we reconstitute the old commu­nity every summer.

To have a summer place is, I recognize, rather bourgeois. I confess one must possess considerable class privilege for even a jointly owned family vacation cottage on an island. But that's not the story we tell ourselves, just as we don't often speak of the long-ago theft from the First Nations. Instead, we think of the Thousand Islands as a place of release from these and other politics. This is no place of urban wiles (or at least not so much, for we do bring our laptops). Nor is it nature before nature, full of pagan contest and ambivalence (or at least not so much, for we do still tell some of the old stories). For us (at least in the main) this is a place of nature, of conscience, of the good and true, of the solid and conflict-free, undefiled by hierarchical ambition.

“Going up to the islands again this summer to escape the real world?” friends sometimes say, inquiring about my summer plans.

“No,” I like to reply. “That is the real world.”

Sometimes I find myself in a daoist mood—without trying, of course. I take the skiff out into the main channel. I ship the oars, and just let the boat drift. Sometimes I even lay on the bottom, looking up at the sky, the sides of the boat obscuring my view of where we're headed, the skiff and I. No needs. No intentions. No politics. Pure wu wei. Complete peace with my savage name. We like to sing another song about that.⁵³

Put me in a boat in the water

Let the current take me where it will

As I drift through the tree-green islands I love

I will know I am near to my home

I cannot be a sociologist only. Even though I can be quite analytical about this kind of experience (if nothing else, this book should show that) I still feel these matters deeply. For me, as for so many others of similar times and places, second nature has become second nature.