When You Wish upon a Star: On the Evolution of Spiritual and Moral Thought

r o b e r t f i n c h nonfiction On the Evolution of Spiritual and Moral Thought 323 When I was a boy, I read a lot of science fiction. It seemed to me the most exciting and imaginative literature of the day—and to a boy of twelve, it probably was. I have forgotten most of what I read, but there is one story, Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” that made a deep impression on me. Asimov imagines a human society living on a planet in a solar system that has—I think—six suns. As a result, night comes to this planet just once every thousand years. The story begins on the eve of one of these millennial nightfalls and is told from the viewpoint of an astronomer who, like everyone else, anticipates this miraculous event with great expectation. But he is also concerned, a little worried, because the history of this society goes back only a thousand years, to the time of the previous nightfall. Before that, there is no record of human memory, though obviously the society has existed for a much longer time. Eventually the long-awaited night arrives, the stars, never before seen by anyone alive, come out in all their inconceivable splendor, and everyone goes mad. This story unnerved me for a long time, and other people I have met who also read the story when they were young had a similar experience . For a long time I didn’t know why I had been so affected by it, but now I think that reading the story provided my first inkling that our lives, our deepest selves, our collective psychological identity might be shaped and controlled by stars and other manifestations of the physical universe in ways we did not understand, or even suspect—and that this had nothing to do with astrology. I have been a writer for most of my life, and like almost all writers, I use natural metaphors. Since in my writing my primary subject has been nature, I tend to use more than most, I suppose, but nature as metaphor is our stock-in-trade, not just as writers, but as human beings. We can’t help it—it seems hardwired into our DNA to compare aspects of human nature to their counterparts in external nature. We do it largely to explain ourselves to ourselves, to get a clearer or more vivid understanding of who we are as human beings. One of the oldest examples of this in our culture is Aesop’s Fables, a series of popular allegorical narratives, supposedly written by a slave in ancient Greece, in which animals speak and behave like human beings in order to convey moral lessons. One of the best known of these is the fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” which tells of a spendthrift grasshopper that fiddles away the summer, making fun of an industrious ant that works hard to hoard food for the coming winter. The grasshopper, of course, represents 324 Ecotone: reimagining place improvident, hedonistic behavior compared to the sober, diligent, gratification -delaying ant. It is a lesson deeply ingrained in the work ethic of capitalism. Religious instruction, too, has always borrowed images or symbols from the natural world to illustrate points. Christ said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” This verse from Matthew seems to suggest a lesson opposite to that of the Aesop fable; at least you’re not likely to see it posted on many corporate Web sites. The trouble with learning something about natural history, which I’ve had to do in my writing, is that it tends to undermine the moral meaning of many of these natural metaphors. One comes to understand that, after all, both grasshoppers and ants are marvelously adapted to their different environments, social structures, and life cycles, and after all, both ants and grasshoppers do survive—they just have different strategies. Also, those wonderful lilies eventually shrivel up and die each fall. Moreover, we know that they do toil and spin...