An Eco-Confucian Instruction Manual for Good Behaviour
Professor Scott Slovic
(University of Idaho, USA)
When I attempted to characterize the essential rhetorical elements of “nature writing” in a 1996 essay titled “Epistemology and Politics in American Nature Writing”, I found myself dwelling on the vacillating proportions of “rhapsody” (celebratory language) and “jeremiad” (warning language) in literary prose concerned with the relationship between humans and the planet. Many writers I traced in my article, from Rachel Carson to Ann Zwinger, demonstrated variable mixtures of these modes of discourse. What I failed to discern in their writings, though, was the element of specific guidance or instruction, even though literary prose in Western culture, certainly in the American tradition, derives much of its heritage from the genre of the religious sermon, and sermons are inherently instructive. The sermonizer interprets a religious text and then uses this reading as the basis for guiding listeners toward right behaviour.
Henry David Thoreau came close to sermonizing in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden(1954), warning readers of the mind-numbing dangers of certain foods and drinks and advocating an ascetic diet he thought would support a “habit of attention”, an awakened state of mind. Yet it is difficult to take anything at face value in Walden, as Thoreau’s literary strategy was one of earnestly playful paradox and self-contradiction, one moment calling for the reading of ancient Greek and Latin texts as a way to keep one’s mind alert, the next suggesting that the most noble thing to do is to hoe beans in the garden plot, and a few pages later expressing an animalistic yearning to devour a woodchuck raw. Just as it is difficult to decipher the moral prescriptions in Walden, I find it challenging to discern sermonic instructions in more recent environmental writing. Rachel Carson said we should beware of the dangers of agricultural pesticides in Silent Spring(1962), and Bill McKibben raised the clarion cry about global warming in The End of Nature(1989). Warnings—“Jeremiads”! Others, from Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) to Rick Bass in Wild to the Heart(1987), celebrate the wildness of the human mind and the world beyond our control—— “Rapsody”! But both the jeremiadic and rhapsodic texts offer essentially the same broad instructions: “pay attention”.
That’s why it is somewhat startling, and curiously refreshing, for a Western reader to encounter Dizigui, this catalog of seven basic instructions, or “standards” of behaviour, regarding filial duties, brotherly behaviour, caution, honesty, love, goodness, and beauty. In his introduction to this volume, Peter Jingcheng Xu points to the Anthropocenic urgencyof bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, particularly from the sciences and the humanities, for “conversation about the endangered Earth in this bio-geological epoch of uncertainty”. The sense of intensified urgency suggested here is also inspiring more and more trans-national collaborations and exchanges of cultural perspectives. This translation of Diziguiinto English and its presentation together with multiple commentaries or artistic responses by the Chinese translator and various Western scholars exemplifies the spirit of international cooperation that characterizes what Xu calls “trans-cultural Anthropocenic ecopoetics”. But there is a stark difference between the explicit didacticism in this book and what one typically finds in contemporary environmental humanities scholarship.
Recent scholarship excels at exploding our preconceptions about human relationships with the more-than-human and at revealing anthropogenic destruction of the planet and vulnerable human and non-human communities. Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor(2011) castigates neoliberal economic policy from an environmental justice and postcolonial ecocritical perspective, while Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016) presents the ongoing disappearance of species as not only an ecological crisis but as a failure of the human imagination to appreciate (and react to) the magnitude of the crisis. A rising chorus of environmental scholars has reshaped our understanding of the human bond with physical nature: such publications as Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self(2010) and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s collection Material Ecocriticism(2014) highlights the constant flow “transcorporeal” of matter between human bodies and the body of the world and the inherent “story” within all physical phenomena. Sarah Nolan’s Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry(2017) operates with a broad and flexible view of “environment”, including constructed spaces and even textual spaces within the rubric of ecopoetics, not only primal, organic territories and forces. In Nature Writing of the Anthropocene(2017), Christian Hummelsund Voie argues that Anthropocenic writing about the natural world must be fully attuned to the destructive impact of human action upon the planet’s life-support systems and must therefore be almost exclusively jeremiadic in its condemnation of how our species behaves, how we misbehave. This is all important, consciousness-raising work, but it leaves readers without a blueprint for action.
Although the specific instructions available in Diziguiare mostly absent from Western environmental humanities scholarship, in a study titled Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative(2017), Alexa Weik von Mossner cites Elaine Scarry’s and Marco Caracciolo’s theoretical work that compares literary narratives to “instruction manuals”. Weik von Mossner takes the example of John Muir’s classic text of American nature writing, The Mountains of California(1894), as a work that brings the reader through vivid narrative into the mountains and offers “instructions” through stories about how to properly experience the landscape and cherish the world. I would suggest that Xu’s translation of Diziguigoes several steps further than Muir in offering specific instructions for proper, mindful behaviour. This eco-Confucian tonic is desperately needed at a time in history, the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, when we worry not only about the chronic problems of human overpopulation, resource exploitation, and habitat despoilation, but the rogueish behaviour of regimes full of climate-change deniars, fossil-fuel executives, hyper-nationalists, and xenophobes.
Moscow, Idaho
16/01/2018
