Into the Wild and Worthwhile Risk

The Story of Chris McCandless(Into the Wild) , on which I've posted a number of times, continues to fascinate me. I think what holds me is the search for what was missing in his story. McCandless was a young man of obvious virtue and passion, yet his life ended in seemingly pointless tragedy in an abandoned bus in the wilderness of Alaska. How did he end up there?

I found a clue tonight reading an old copy of Peter Benchley's The Deep. (I've always liked the film version and decided to read the book, which is a quick read and turned out to be better than I expected. One of the better adventure stories I've read in some time, in fact.) At one point, the salty old diver Treece (played by Robert Shaw in the film) offers some advice to the younger David Sanders, who killed a shark with a knife underwater after he thought the shark was about to attack his wife. It turns out that this was a foolish move, because the shark was not really a threat and Sander's attack only attracted many more sharks, forcing the divers to surface. Treece engages in some perceptive analysis:

"It's natural enough, Treece said. "A lot people want to prove something to themselves, and when they do something they think's impressive, then they're impressed themselves. The mistake is, what you do isn't the same as what you are. You like to do things just to see if you can. Right?"
Though there was no reproach in Treece's voice Sanders was embarrassed. "Sometimes, I guess..."
"What I'm getting at..." Treece paused. "The feeling's a lot richer when you do something right, when you know something has to be done and you know what you're doing, and then you do something hairy. Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else." Treece took a drink. "In the next few days, you'll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It's learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn't know goose shit from tapioca... That's the only hitch in learning: it's humbling... Anyway, that's a long way around saying that it's crazy to do things just to prove you can do 'em. The more you learn, the more you'll find yourself doing things you never thought you could do in a million years."

Treece is teaching nothing other than Aristotle's distinction between the truly courageous and the merely reckless. The difference is that courage is conditioned by the virtue of prudence, whereas the reckless are dangerous actions not ordered to right reason. Treece puts it succinctly: True courage is only displayed in actions that are dangerous but must be done and, further, done in the knowledge that you know what you are doing.

But to know something must be done implicitly implies a knowledge of the good, i.e. an end that is desirable in itself. The man who displays virtue in the pursuit of the good has acted nobly. But the noble is just one of those ancient concepts that modern thought has "debunked", only to discover that, debunked or not, it is necessary. It is necessary to order passionate souls like Chris McCandless into constructive paths. This is where the contemporary university failed Chris McCandless so comprehensively. His university education should have educated his soul into a true appreciation of the good and the noble; instead, it "educated" him into the modern conceit that there isn't any true good or nobility that can we really can know. In effect, he was educated into anti-prudence. Yet the passion in his soul didn't go away merely because its object was denied; it was only given a prophylactic. So the rest of his tragic life was spent in the pursuit of extreme adventures that would, somehow, allow him to "break through" to the other side, whatever that might be. But when the denial of prudence itself becomes mistaken for a virtue, then the pursuit of pointless dangers becomes a substitute for the noble.

This accounts for the curious combination of thorough technical preparation in the service of foolish ends that characterized McCandless's adventures. He didn't die in the bus from lack of preparation; he extensively researched Alaskan flora and fauna, knew what he could eat and couldn't eat (almost - it appears he died from eating the wrong seeds), and survived for some time on his own. In fact, he would have succeeded (at what? - that's the problem) but for one slip up. But his prudence was truncated; it extended to the preparation and conduct of his adventures, but had nothing to say about their ends. This is the difference between a life that might have ended nobly and heroically, but instead ended foolishly and tragically. I see Chris's tragic end as a consequence of the peculiarly modern suffocation of the soul.

Into the Wild, Kierkegaard, and the Herd

The aesthetic life in its radical form (e.g. Chris McCandless) seems to be unconsciously based on the following syllogism:

1. Most men lead meaningless, desperate lives.

2. Most men lead a life that conforms to cultural and societal norms: Getting a job, buying a house, raising a family, etc.

3. Therefore, conformity to cultural norms leads to meaninglessness and despair.

4. Furthermore, the discovery of meaning and truth can be done only in opposition to or at least outside cultural norms.

Now as a matter of logic, 3 and 4 obviously do not follow from 1 and 2. I am sure there is a Latin phrase that captures the fallacy, but I don’t know what it is. In any case, the syllogism leads to a concern in the aesthetic man to separate himself from the “herd” of humanity. Since the circumstances of most men lead to meaninglessness and despair, rejection of those circumstances through a radical lifestyle seems to offer the chance of discovering meaning and truth. This adds a further qualification to the external circumstances for which the aesthetic man seeks: They must not only be radical and dangerous but novel. To the extent that they have been experienced before by someone else, they “lose” their power to confer transcendence. Thus the author of Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer, relates his own dangerous adventures in mountain climbing, where it is clear that a key component of his adventures was the novelty of the mountain-climbing routes he attempted. Similarly, the wine-taster or opera-lover will not be satisfied with a product that the mass of humanity might enjoy; critical to the experience of transcendence is the exclusivity of it.

Consider Chris McCandless and his bus in the following thought experiment. Suppose he made it out of his Alaskan adventure alive, then discovered from the locals that his adventure was nothing new and that young men had been periodically living “in the wild” in the bus for years. Would the “transcendence” of this experience suddenly evaporate? Would he feel the need to seek out some yet more obscure and dangerous adventure? I suspect so, and this reveals the fallacy behind the radical-lifestyle aesthete’s claim to being unique and unconditioned by society. The difference between the radical-lifestyle aesthete and the boring bourgeoisie is that the latter defines himself through a positive relationship to society, while the former defines himself through a negative relationship to it. But both nonetheless take their cue from society, just in different directions.

Kierkegaard teaches us that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. The man who is truly independent of society neither loves it nor hates it; he is indifferent to it. It doesn’t matter to him whether the lives of none, some or all of the rest of humanity are indistinguishable from his own in external circumstances. He knows that what counts is the inward aspect of his experience, not the outward, empirically visible aspect. This is Kierkegaard’s man in the ethical stage of existence…

Into the Wild, Wisdom and Virtue

Perhaps the most significant philosophical casualty of the modern era is the disappearance of the concept of wisdom. The modern world began with doubt about the metaphysical basis of traditional wisdom, progressed to doubt about the very possibility of wisdom, and has now reached the point where it has even forgotten that there is a concept of wisdom. This is one of the more depressing aspects of the case of Chris McCandless from Into the Wild. Here was a highly intelligent, talented, passionate young man who graduated from Emory University with outstanding marks in a liberal arts curriculum, yet who apparently grew very little in wisdom through the process.

I am not talking about his penchant for radical living and taking chances. A radical lifestyle that calls into question “normal” and “safe” ways of living may be an expression of deep wisdom. Socrates, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas and Kierkegaard all lived more or less radical lives. But they understood that such a lifestyle is truly “radical” only to the extent that one has understood and mastered oneself. Most people, in thrall to various passions and vices, need the restrictions and pressures of society to keep the bad side of their natures in check. Absent such pressures, such people become “free” only in the sense that their vices are given head. In places where the civic structure has broken down, it isn’t peace and universal brotherhood that breaks out but riots, looting and arson. Only the man who has attained a high degree of virtue is capable of stepping outside the structure of society without such a move turning self-indulgent.

All this was once part of the essence of wisdom, the wisdom taught at Plato’s Academy and the medieval universities. Students then were far more truly radical than they are now (living as beggars, for instance, just to be able to hear lectures at the University of Paris). But they were not subject to the superficial understanding now current that becoming radical is a simple matter of dropping out of society and going “on the road” as a vagrant. When a young man born into nobility in the Middle Ages decided to renounce his privileged life and live as a beggar, a man such as Thomas Aquinas, he didn’t merely give up his trust fund and hit the open road in an illusory “pure freedom.” Instead he took a vow of poverty in an order of mendicant friars, an order that would allow him to live as radically as he liked, but would also discipline him in his vices such that his freedom matured into true freedom.

This is particularly the case with the vice of pride, to which men of great passion and talent, like Chris McCandless, are particularly vulnerable. Seeing the lust, gluttony and envy that are common vices in mankind but seem to have been largely absent from himself, it was almost inevitable that McCandless would become subject to the vice of pride over the fact. He might have understood this about himself if he had attended the University of Paris in 1288 instead of Emory University in 1988. But the modern university is not about Socratic self-examination and growth in wisdom, but about instilling a self-righteous pride as a substitute for wisdom. I’m just fine, it’s the rest of the world that needs fixing.

McCandless finished college only out of duty to his family and couldn’t wait to hit the road on graduation. The result was entirely predictable. He renounced his old self by giving all his money away and severing completely his ties with his family, and began the search for transcendent truth as a “supertramp.” Of course, money or no money, he was still the same man with the same virtues and vices; his considerable virtues carried him for awhile but, unfortunately, the vice of pride eventually caught up to him in the Alaskan wilderness.

Into the Wild and Individualism

A Quiz: Which of the following is significantly different from the others?

Chris McCandless
Gene Rossellini
John Waterman
Carl McCunn
Everett Ruess
5th Century Irish Monks (papar)

All of these are mentioned by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. The book is, of course, about Chris McCandless. All the others are people who attempted more or less similar adventures to McCandless, striking out into the wilderness in search of transcendence through a primitive life in nature. Krakauer tries to understand McCandless through the example of the others.

Now what strikes me is that the last item on the list differs from the others in two significant ways. The first is that it is the only pre-modern entry; the second is that it is the only example that is a group of people rather than an individual. I think these two facts are related.

Krakauer provides the following summary of the monks from Fridtjof Nansen: "these remarkable voyages were... undertaken chiefly from the wish to find lonely places, where these anchorites might dwell in peace, undisturbed by the turmoil and temptations of the world." This interpretation confuses the means with the end. The end of the monk's life is service to God through prayer and contemplation; the simple and secluded life is a means to that end. The monks were under no illusion that primitive living was in itself a state of bliss; it may lead to bliss to the extent that the monk opens himself to the grace of God through it. Ultimately, however, whether the monk experiences grace is a matter of the will of God, not his own will.

It is in the modern, death-of-God world that the "state of nature" has been taken from a means to an end to an end in itself. In effect, the original theocentric orientation of the monastic life was turned egocentric. Now the individual, instead of experiencing transcendence through the grace of God, experiences it (or attempts to experience it) through the determination of his own will. The individual is assumed to be competent in his own nature to experience transcendent truth; it is only society and its inhibiting conventions that prevent him from finding that truth. So the individual, in a supreme act of willful self-denial, sheds all the burdens placed on him by society. Superficially he may look like the medieval monk in his self-denial, but really he is the polar opposite of the monk. His quest is in every way an individual quest, which is why all the modern examples cited by Krakauer are individual men. The medieval monk's vocation, even that of the hermit, is at heart a social vocation, for he seeks communion with a personal God in the context of the authority of the Body of Christ as manifested in the Roman Catholic Church. Thus the monks, even when seeking more isolated lands, seek as a community in boats rather than in their private canoes (as Chris McCandless did in Mexico at one point.)

Into the Wild and G.K. Chesterton II

Here I brought up the remarkable story of Chris McCandless, the young man who tramped off into the Alaskan wilderness and eventually died of starvation.

A response to that post might be that the modern "free spirit" can't submit to authority like St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis was, this thinking might go, tamed by the Catholic Church and thereby betrayed the truly radical nature of the quest for freedom. Submission to any authority is to submit to limits, and true freedom is not constrained by limits, particularly those set by others. St. Francis was radical for his time, but the modern quest for freedom has moved beyond him.

We can find an answer to this point, again from Chesterton, in Ch. 6 of Orthodoxy. The peculiar genius of Christianity (in its unified form prior to the Reformation) is that it did not settle for what Chesterton called pagan or natural compromises; in other words, the virtuous mean of Aristotle. The problem with Aristotle's mean is that it ultimately does not do justice to either of its extremes. Chesterton considers as an example the case of charity:

Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things - pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but is is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable.

Now what Christianity manages to do is to balance the extremes without compromising either. Both are kept in their full force, but in a way that neither destroys the other. Chesterton puts it this way:

Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from anaother. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

"Good things running wild" is just the sort of thing that seems to describe Chris McCandless. He had the uncompromising moral sense of the radical, and sensed that the bourgeois life he saw around him as he grew up was a series of pagan compromises, which he found intolerable. He refused to have his burning passion for transcendence tamed (that is, killed) by society. All this is good. His answer was the only answer available to the natural mind; a complete repudiation of society and its compromises and the embrace of a radical lifestyle that pushed things to extremes. Alas, Aristotle cannot be refuted simply by ignoring him and attempting to reconcile extremes through the sheer force of personality, even a personality as powerful and talented as Chris McCandless's. The extremes do destroy each other as surely as do fire and ice.

The solution of Christianity, and in particular the Catholic Church, was to reconcile the extremes not in the individual personality, but in the corporate body of the Church. The aim of such reconciliation was not to tame the passionate personality, but to point his passions in the right direction such that they could run free yet not be in danger of destroying each other. Contrary to the modern impression, this does not limit the extreme personality, but allows him to travel to places he could not possibly find on his own. St. Francis was every bit as radical as Chris McCandless in his pursuit of living on as little as possible; the difference is that Chris did it for two years and St. Francis did it for thirty. Again, Chesteron puts it better than I can:

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pssimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless. So tis was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Chruch not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de theatre of morality - things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirit of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantangenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal.

Into the Wild and G.K. Chesterton

I just finished reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, a book that was recently made into a film (I haven't seen the film). For those who don't know, the book is about the life and death of Chris McCandless, a young man who set out to live on his own in the Alaskan wilderness and, after a few months, starved to death.

There is a lot in the book that stimulates philosophical reflection, for McCandless was not your typical foolish youth attempting a misguided communion with nature. He was highly intelligent, talented, well-educated (he graduated from Emory University), and would likely have survived his time in the Alaskan wilderness but for a couple of unfortunate circumstances. In fact, rather than a nutcase, the figure he brings to mind is St. Francis of Assisi.

In this post, I would like to consider Chris McCandless in the light of G.K. Chesterton. Specifically, the following passage from Ch. 3 of Orthodoxy:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices, are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone man. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

The phrases "wasted virtues" and "virtues gone mad" seem apt with respect to Chris McCandless. This was a kid of extraordinary courage, resourcefulness, self-discipline, intelligence and passion. He was a physical stud, musically talented, and generally charmed whomever he met. A lot like St. Francis. The crucial difference between St. Francis and Chris McCandless, however, was that St. Francis's extraordinary life was theocentric rather than egocentric. By that I mean that the radical lifestyle of St. Francis had its origin in the imitation of Christ, rather than in a self-conceived program of spiritual transcendence. The difference this makes is all the difference in the world, for it is the difference between humility and pride.

Because St. Francis was imitating Christ, and Christ is one who submits to authority, St. Francis himself submitted to the authority of the Church. This had the effect of giving a structural foundation to Francis's life, a structure that prevented his passionate virtues from turning in on themselves and destroying him. The Church has also always made clear that a life of self-denial, no matter how radical, is never an end in itself. Nor is it really even a means by itself. The point of self-denial is to remove those things that stand between us and God. Now, even if we are successful at removing them, we have no guarantee that communion with God will follow. That is up to the will of God, and so patience is a virtue counseled by the Church even to natures as wild and impulsive as St. Francis.

Chris McCandless had no such direction or foundation, and so his considerable virtues eventually pulled him in directions that destroyed him. Since he did not understand the true point of radical self-denial, McCandless made the natural mistake of thinking that such measures, by themselves, could lead to transcendence. But such measures are ultimately empty without the grace of God. The consequence is that the seeker is led to ever more radical and dangerous modes of self-denial, with the thought that just a little bit more is all that is needed for the breakthrough. Eventually, either the seeker realizes it won't work or he is tempted to potentially fatal excesses. The latter seems to have happened when McCandless tramped off into the Alaskan outback without a decent map, compass, radio and only a ten-pound bag of rice to eat.