"The real littleness of ourselves"

It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.

-- from The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (1759) quoted by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Dancing atomic angel

The DIXIE showgirl, 1953:

Guardian angel

...It turns out that after 4 billion years DNA can do a pretty good job of repairing itself. There's one gene in particular called the P53 gene, sometimes called the guardian of the genome, which looks for DNA damage wherever it can...

It's like a guardian angel embedded in our genes...and there are a lot of different ways DNA can get messed up...[and] when one of the two strands of DNA gets damaged this P53 gene it whistles over certain handyman proteins which come over cut the strand out... and pop in a new one because you know if you've got A and C on one side you need T and G on the other.

...other times both strands [of DNA] get snapped and that is an emergency for your body. When that happens this little guardian gene will force the cell to commit suicide because that cell will turn cancerous.

-- from Double Blasted at WNYC Radiolab, which tells the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, fathered two children and lived to the age of 95.

The Open

The enigmatic 'angel' of Rilke's [Duino] elegies is not a Christian spirit, a harbinger of heaven. The angel is a creature in which the transformation of the visible into the invisible, of earth into consciousness, is already complete. Potentially, the poet – or perhaps the poem itself – is the angel. The mode of being to which Rilke aspired in poetry was that which he called the 'open' (one of the terms borrowed from Heidegger)...Like the Romantics, Rilke was in search of a way of thinking and living which reconciles instrumental rationality with openness to the 'the open'. This involves him in the acceptance of finitude and of mortality, but also in a letting-go akin to the experience he underwent in the garden of Schloss Duino in 1912 when, reclining against a tree, he felt himself entered by 'the open'. He seemed to become nature itself, to share his being with tree and singing bird as inner and outer were gathered together into a single 'uninterrupted space.'

-- from The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate

(Image: NIH-3T3 connective tissue cells co-transduced with 5 fluorescent proteins. Dr. Daniela Malide/National Institutes of Health/Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Via boston.com)

Angelic corporate beings

Legally, [the European and US] notion of a corporation is very much the product of the European high middle ages. The legal idea of the corporation as fictive person...a person who, as Maitland the great British legal historian put it, 'is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for the natural persons of who is composed' was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries as also universities, churches, municipalities and guilds. The idea of a corporation as an angelic being is not mine, incidentally. I borrowed it from the great medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz who pointed out all that this was happening right around the time that Thomas Aquinas was pointing out that angels were really just the personification of Platonic ideas. According to the teaching of Aquinas, he notes, every angel represented a species. Little wonder then that finally the personified collectives of the jurists, which were juristically immortal species, displayed all the features attributed to angels.

The jurists themselves recognized that there was some similarity between their abstractions and the angelic beings. In this respect it may be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later middle ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bodies, large and small. They were invisible, ageless, sempiternal, immortal and sometimes even ubiquitous, and they were endowed with a corpus intellectualae or mysticum -- an intellectual or mystical body -- which could withstand any comparison with the spiritual bodies of the celestial beings. All this is worth emphasizing because while we are use to assuming that there is something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations in historic terms they are actually strange exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it.

-- from Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

See also Griffin.

P.S. an online seminar on Graeber here

Creatures of two worlds

Robert Macfarlane's celebration The Wild Places of Essex includes at least two animals from in-between places:

The Common seal displays incredible colours: russets, coppers, burnished browns. The result of the mud on which they haul out. London clay naturally rich in iron oxide: Rust, basically. Wild creatures stained the colour of iron and industry.

The Knot which in great flocks is "more extraordinary" even than a giant flock of starlings. It has to do, says Macfarlane, with their winter colours: "They're silver and white. The effect of this is that as the light hits them they 'ping' brightly like little flecks of snow or ice. Then they turn as a group and they vanish. It's almost as if they've slipped out of our dimension into another and then they turn again and they're into our world, visible again. It's absolutely mesmerizing to watch.

This otherwordlyness, this feeling of other creatures moving in and out of our dimension and our perception is part of what fascinates me about Essex; these portal moments when you glimpse into another world running beside ours in parallel with it.

Macfarlane continues:

My grandfather was very involved in the development of Radar during the Second World War, and he told me once about what the Radar scientists called 'angels'. By this they meant flocks of birds which came in off the coast or up river estuaries. The radar detected these palping strange shapes and the scientists called them angels.

Jesse Smith has argued that nature films today are "often beautiful, usually interesting, and rarely important":

for the vast majority of viewers, the time spent before the movie or TV screen is time lost from actual encounters with nature, which, when ultimately made, can be fraught with disappointment.

But The Wild Places of Essex, available on iPlayer in the UK until 10 March, is a must see.

P.S. my review of the book on which it's based is here.