Review: Michael Robbins on Wild Souls
“At the commune, I fed pigs and herded oxen. Had there not been anyone around to manage them, those two animals would have known exactly how to live.” I read these sentences by the late Wang Xiaobo in a recent issue of Harper’s. They’re reminiscent of an observation in Heidegger’s Being and Time: “even when [animals] have been raised [by humans] these beings produce themselves in a certain sense.” Humans are the only animal that wonders how it should live or asks what life is for or writes Beyond Good and Evil. The other animals “look out into the Open,” as Rilke puts it (in a passage Heidegger took issue with). This is all somewhat obvious. But the only animal that doesn’t know how to live has created a very fucked-up situation for all the other animals. And in a real sense we’ve messed the world up because we don’t know how to live.
There is a book by James Clear called Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones that I keep seeing on the front tables of various Hudson Booksellers in various train stations, as well as on the meticulously curated Instagram accounts of various attractive influencers. I registered it with mild annoyance until, stuck in Penn Station one afternoon because New Jersey Transit sucks, I picked it up and paged through it. It is, as I suspected, bad in a boring and obvious way. There’s a graph on page 16 that demonstrates that if “you can get just 1 percent better each day,” after a year you’ll be a whole lot better! Amazing stuff. But this insipid book has sold, like, 10 million copies
I kept thinking of Clear’s book as I read Emma Marris’s Wild Souls: What We Owe Animals in a Changing World (the subtitle of the paperback was curiously changed from the hardcover’s Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World). This is unfair to Marris, whose book is a worthwhile collection of essays that probe “our ethical obligations to our nonhuman kin.” She considers various ways humans interfere, deliberately or accidentally, with the lives of nonhuman animals, for better or worse or TBD—including the exotic pet trade, different types of hunting, the management of condor populations, the concept of “invasive species,” the evils of zoos.
Nonetheless, Marris’s book—which addresses a number of subjects that John Berger, who is not cited, has written on better than anyone else—is let down by a timid bibliography, mostly confined to scientific studies and science journalism. Marris writes the sort of deluxe journalistic prose familiar to readers of respectable journals like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, in which “experts” are consulted, anecdotes related, studies cited, costs tallied, and obvious conclusions reached. “We must also meaningfully tackle climate change,” Marris writes in the final chapter, before offering “the most straightforward piece of advice I can give you: Make room for other species and fight for climate justice.” On the one hand: sure, absolutely. On the other: if you can make just 1 percent more room for other species each day …
I suppose I have grown impatient with books about our crises, our chaos, our crash, with calm appraisals, dire warnings, exemplary accounts, with litanies of catastrophe, of lifeworlds at the brink of extinction, that conclude with liberal bromides. At the end of the book, Marris actually provides a checklist for determining “what you think is really valuable” in the “tough cases” involving the flourishing of nonhuman animals. This checklist includes: “list out all the options for solving your current dilemma”; “choose the least morally wrong option”; “own your choice”; “if necessary, grieve.” This is deeply unserious.
People should read Wild Souls anyway, if only to understand how impossible we have made it for nonhuman animals to live as they know how to, and how twisted the conversations around ethology have become. At one point, Marris considers whether we should intervene to prevent cruelty among animals, such as the humiliation baboon “bullies” inflict on weaker baboons. Importing human values into the nonhuman world—what could go wrong?
We can’t live like other animals. Increasingly, it seems we can’t live with them, either. Auden concludes “The Fall of Rome” with one of my favorite quatrains:
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
The point is that nonhuman life goes about its business, taking no notice of our seemingly momentous upheavals, our dumb travails. But it’s harder for reindeer to do that these days.
Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. He has written for Book Post on Rilke, The Grateful Dead and Proust, Paul Muldoon, and Alan Ginsberg.
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Love “deluxe journalistic prose,” as well as the sentiment expressed here.
a lovely piece