Nature and Madness by Paul Shepard (review)

170 Western American Literature Dippie’s contribution may best be seen as a cultural history, and in this sense he has sampled a significant segment of American opinion in tracing the white view of the vanishing American. JOHN W. BAILEY, Carthage College Nature and Madness. By Paul Shepard. (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1982. 178 pages, $15.95.) After publishing three more or less traditionally framed (though certainly original and provocative) studies on the humanity-nature relationship, Paul Shepard apparently felt the need to start fresh and go as deep as possible. Man in the Landscape (1967) dealt with a range of philosophical and aesthe­ tic responses to the environment; The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973), with the meanings of hunting in human history; Thinking Animals (1977), with the importance of other life forms to human development. These books, and a number of essays on place and on the implications of ecology, put him in the front rank of contemporary philosophers on man and nature. No one has argued more persuasively, or from broader research, that fulfill­ ment of the ecological vision (that is, the perceptual approach associated with systems science) would involve major transformations in our style of civili­ zation. Nature and Madness takes the study inside, into developmental psychol­ ogy and its relation to history. Yet this isalso Shepard’sbroadest work. He has provided an inner analysis, but its nature necessarily ties it to every human activity. Briefly, his thesis is that from the Neolithic revolution onward, those cultures we call Western have engaged in systematic characterological stunt­ ing. The typical ontogeny of a Western person, particularly in the critical years from about age three through adolescence, is narrowed and arrested, in favor of complicity in the historical, progressive project. In natureembedded or mythic societies, by contrast, development isguided by a various, implicitly democratic experience of interaction with the environment. The sense of identity of a hunter-gatherer is formed by metaphors of interpenetra­ tion with an enormously complex, plural world. The result is a mentality and a personality marked by stability — the analog, perhaps, of the biotic commu­ nity in which, as ecology teaches, health is a function of internal diversity. Shepard’s analysis of “primitive” psychological development gives a clue to the remarkable dignity and maturity of Ishi — to take just one example — though he does not cite Ishi’scase. In our historical and progressive world, the metaphors that guide develop­ ment tend to be dualistic and hierarchic. With a logic that seems to have terrifying inevitability, the result of simplified ontogeny is that the “adult” has little sense of the environment as a living, worthy world. He islikely to simplify Reviews 171 it, thus carrying the downward spiral further. The generations inhabit increas­ ingly pauperized environments. These are powerful ideas, and in hands less careful than Shepard’s might be only passionate assertions. But he has built his argument on extraordinarily wide reading, taking no single source for granted, and on what seem to be fair-minded assessments of what he sees around him. The book is not a purely intellectual history of ideas: “. . . it is not philosophy as such that counts. It is how our daily lives are lived.” In Shepard’s view, pavement matters deeply, in ways we may not have guessed. It is intuitively obvious, perhaps, that the modern nation states, brandishing their weapons, consumed with missile envy, utterly unconscious of the richness and meaning of the natural world, repre­ sent a juvenile — possibly even infantile — stage of human development. Shepard, has, among other things, put a very interesting footing under this intuition. Nature and Madness is a book whose ground-breaking importance willbe widely recognized. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Death, Too, For The-Heavy-Runner. ByBen Bennett. (Missoula, M T: Moun­ tain Press, 1980. 192 pages, $7.95.) As we generate a balanced historical viewpoint of the last century’s encounters between the tribal cultures of the West and the Anglo-European culture which dominated them and assumed control of the land, a number of disturbing ironies become evident. Dee Brown and other writers have given us a version of the frontier in which our pioneers are seen...