Dead Deer

 

My daily walk, which actually does happen on some days, has a variable route along a wooded lakeside and old tow paths along the Princeton stretch of the Delaware and Raritan Canal.   It generally begins and ends by going through the woods, field, and lakeside path between my back yard and the northern abutments of the bridge that carries County Route 629 (Harrison Street) over Lake Carnegie.  Once across, there are inviting walking paths going in both directions and on both sides of the canal, which at this point runs parallel to the lake.  The very beginning of the walk (or the very end, if on the return)—that is, the four hundred yards or so between my yard and the lake—offers two possibilities.  There is an “official” path used by most strollers and wide enough for the groundsmen to use now and again when  bringing in their large mowers to trim the fields.  Fifty yards or so to the west and more or less parallel to the official path is a long, thin glade where the trees are sparse enough that one can easily make one’s way around and through them on the grass.  These are alternative pleasant routes to the lakeside, and the only motive to choose one over the other is a desire for variety.

 

            About a week ago, having exited by the glade, I elected to return by the “official” path.  This was after about three miles in hot and humid weather.  That is a little beyond the comfort zone of my enfeebled condition.  I was perspiring copiously and looking forward to a sit-down followed by a shower.  Three hundred yards short of my house I came upon a downed animal flailing in the middle of the path.  It was a pretty large doe, probably near her full growth.  There was no blood, and I could see no evidence of a wound or a broken limb.  It apparently had been on the ground for some time, and in its thrashings it had scraped away patches of hair right down to the raw skin.  Though obviously in bad shape, it was still vigorously kicking its legs, its sharp hooves clattering.  I was not going to mess with this beast.  Years ago back on the farm I had seen large downed animals, domestic as well as wild, recoup their strength, rise, and totter on.  I convinced myself that this was at least a theoretical possibility in this instance; so I simply kept my distance from the flailing flesh and continued the short distance home.  The experience was of course disconcerting, a discordant end to a wholesome walk, undertaken in the pursuit of good health, through rain-fresh woods.  However, I was able to put it mostly out of mind.

 

            I did not return to that spot until two days later.  It was under the same circumstances of returning from a walk, and by the same route.  This route was downwind from the spot at which I had encountered the stricken deer, and the sickly odor of death reached me well before I could see the remains in the path.   Anyone who has done much hiking in real woods knows the unwelcome smell of decomposing animal flesh.  Even small critters, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, can cast off quite a stench.  When I got in sight of these large remains, the color of the russet-brown beast seemed to have been transformed into something paler, a kind of light beige.  It appeared as though someone had placed a tight-fitting cloth over the carcass.  The garment was knitted or woven.  You could see the individuated short segments of knitting stiches.  Except that the segments were undulating, many of them rolling down the curvatures of the beast’s back and belly.  What I was actually seeing was a seething mass of fat, moist,  maggots feasting on a rapidly diminishing deer cadaver.   The realization struck me suddenly with equal forces of shock and disgust—and disgust in its fullest old Latin sense, which goes beyond the mere recognition of a repellent yuckiness to suspect a kind of cosmic faux pas.

            There is a large deer population in our part of the state, as there is through much of East Coast suburbia.   It is in fact an over-population, encouraged by an abundance of food and a protection from certain difficulties and dangers of true wilderness.  The animals’ greatest enemy here is not the gun but the motor vehicle.  It is very common to see dead animals on the roads and highways.  The phenomenon is national, and the danger does not reside with the deer alone.  About two hundred people die each year in this country in accidents involving them.  Municipalities have to contract with animal control experts, or at least with some strong guy with a full-bed pickup truck, to remove the roadkill.  An infrequently used footpath through semi-private woods is not the same thing as a state highway.  So I was surprised a few days later, when I next passed, expecting to see a pile of polished bones, to find only tiny trace elements remaining.  There had been a clean-up.  I presume a neighbor living much closer to the scene had called the municipality.  But removing some animal remains could not resolve the disquiet which the episode had left me.

 

            The problem of reconciling belief in a just God (or even the operations of a godless but benign material universe) with the fortuities of observation and lived experience has a fancy name: theodicy.  Its classical literary expression in our western literature is the Book of Job, which, though a beautiful poem, is for most modern readers even less consoling than the Consolation of Philosophy.  Whether you regard the problem as philosophical or theological, it’s a big one that has disquieted thinking people for eons.  Goethe was only six years old when reports of the Lisbon earthquake upended his infant confidence in a providential universe.  That even now in legal language “natural disasters” are often called “acts of God”—events in which individual human agency plays no role, at least so far as the insurance company is concerned—is possibly disquieting.  From the point of view of the dead deer, was not its grotesque fate as much a natural disaster, and therefore “act of God,” as a great wind or a floodtide?  The subject of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” is the premature death of promising youth, one of the classic topics in discussions of theodicy.  “Are God and Nature then at strife?”—asks the poet, before anticipating in the poem’s most famous phrase the grim doctrine so many would find in Darwin’s yet unpublished theory of natural selection: Nature red in tooth and claw.

 

            I recognize that I am saddled with various old-fashioned ideas that strike most of my younger contemporaries as quaint at best or at worst, worse; but I hoped that I had progressed beyond the early Victorian period.  I walk for healthy recreation, and because I enjoy the freshness of nature even in its carefully contrived suburban preserves.  Must I adjudicate the ghastly maggot feast on which I stumbled in terms of a problem in nineteenth-century moral philosophy?  Are my interpretive options limited to “Nature red in tooth and claw” and a striking demonstration of providential order through the food chain and a recycling program vastly superior to anything on offer from the Waste Management Corporation?

From Port-au-Prince to Lisbon

It is difficult for me to believe that there is an intelligent person alive who has not posed the “God question”—that is, “Does God exist?” One of the conveniences of answering that question in the negative is to avoid a second and harder question: How can the God in whose existence I find myself compelled to believe allow the horrors and evils I see about me on every side? Whether you ponder this on the local level (the homeless mothers, the crack babies, the suicidal schizophrenics, the hopeless alcoholics, you name it) or on the cosmic (the Ukrainian famines, the Auschwitzes, the Rwandas and Darfurs, the killing fields of Cambodia, you name it) God would seem to have a good deal of explaining to do.

Leibniz coined a fancy word to denote the attempt to reconcile a good God with the moral and material evil in the world: theodicy. Most of the examples I adduced allow one small loophole, since they are related to human agency and therefore perhaps to human motive. This could conceivably justify removing the responsibility from divinity to humanity. Stalin was a bad guy. Hitler was a bad guy. Pol Pot was a bad guy. Those guys in Rwanda—they were bad guys. But this evasion, even if partially plausible, cannot apply to natural disasters like floods and earthquakes and tidal waves. There is a specific legal term for such catastrophes, chosen precisely to show their independence of human agency, and therefore human indemnity. They are called “acts of God”. This is a phrase that frequently makes an appearance in the small print of insurance policies, usually to the detriment of the policy holder.

I was overwhelmed by “theodicy anxiety” the moment I first heard about the Haitian earthquake. You may have been, too; but in this instance the circumstances in which I first learned of it were also decisive. I was sitting with my son Luke in a very agreeable bar in Lisbon. It was my first visit to that charming city. I was sipping a delicious latte thing and eating one of those scrumptious miniature custard pies, the name of which I never learned, which are a Portuguese specialty. Across the screen of a television set in the corner flashed half-decipherable images of horror. The half-decipherable voice of a Portuguese announcer spoke in a garble of plural sibilants of the mounting toll of the dead—was it a thousand, or thousands, or a hundred thousand?

If there is such a thing as “intellectual” or “historical” déjà vu, that is what I experienced at the moment of learning the news from Haiti as I sat in Lisbon. For in the mid-morning of November 1, 1755 a terrible earthquake struck Lisbon and numerous other places in Iberia and north Africa. That was a major Roman Catholic feast day—All Saints’ Day, the day for which Hallowe’en (All Hallows’ Eve) is the preparation. It was a so-called day of religious obligation, meaning that the faithful were morally obligated to attend Mass. Hence the huge, heavy baroque churches were, many of them, full to capacity when the quake struck. The loss of life within these temples was stupendous, but hardly more so than in the residential quarters. Fire rapidly spread among the ruins, immolating a large if unknown number of those trapped in the debris. Large numbers desperately sought safety in the open squares at the dock-front, or even in the large number of ships always to be found in the busy docks of this great commercial city. Thousands of them were snuffed out in an instant by the tidal wave that followed the quake.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 may be said to have effected a decisive shift in European intellectual history. Many preachers, then as now, seemed willing to justify God by ascribing to him a fit of choleric vengeance that would have embarrassed a self-respecting devil. Almost all religious commentators ascribed the event to God’s displeasure at sinners, though the identity of the specific sinner varied according to the preacher’s inclinations. Some even managed to turn the disaster to the purpose of sectarian polemic. “It is remarkable,” said one English clergyman, “that some of the Priests of Portugal have (as we are informed) taken the Advantage of the Superstition of the People to insinuate, that this dreadful Calamity was a Judgement of Heaven upon them for the great Lenity that had been exercise towards the Protestants since his present Majesty came to the Throne.”

The ruins of the Opera House by Jacques Philippe Le Bas

Such foolishness could not satisfy the philosophers, who could find in the event nothing to encourage or even allow philosophical optimism. Voltaire famously wrote a poem about the earthquake in which he asked the obvious question. If Lisbon had been destroyed for her wickedness, why were people still dancing in the streets of Paris and gambling in the casinos of London? Voltaire was not an atheist. There were very few atheists in the Enlightenment. But the earthquake seemed to confirm that the watchmaker God, having created the intricate mechanism of the universe, had retired from its daily supervision.

Presume not then the Deity to scan [wrote Pope]
The proper study of mankind is man.

In a famous page of his autobiography Goethe (born in 1749) tells us of the disturbing impact that the news of the Lisbon earthquake had on his childish faith. He was hardly alone.

A painted "Allegory of the Earthquake" by João Glama Stoberle (xviii century)

Religious belief, like the thoughtful rejection of religious belief, is mainly a private matter requiring in a modern, pluralistic world, a good deal of tolerance and civility. Ordinarily I abstain from comment on other people’s religious beliefs. But recent remarks of the “evangelist” Pat Robertson to the effect that the Haitian earthquake is but the latest of many unhappy results of a pact made between the Haitian nation and the Devil are so outrageous, ignorant, and in the most literal sense insane as to require comment. Pat Robertson is a senile blowhard whose self-appointed “ministry” is an embarrassment to every thinking Christian of my acquaintance. His remarks would have doubtless remained in the dark void into which they were uttered had they not been discovered by some incredulous Internet detective and rendered viral. Thus in some mischievous way they have been valorized by a medium that loves its religious freaks no less than freaks of any other genre.

The danger now is that somebody might confuse Pat Robertson’s lunacy with an actual “Christian” response to the Haitian earthquake. That response, imperfect though it may be, is visible not merely in the faith of many Haitians but in the vast fund-raising effort and practical relief efforts undertaken by the churches throughout the world. I may have mentioned a brilliant refrigerator-magnet prayer my daughter found somewhere: “Lord, save me from your followers!” It was designed precisely for the likes of Pat Robertson who, alas, are rather numerous in the United States. Thoughtful religious skeptics can hardly take comfort in this reality. If you have any doubt that Christianity is a divine institution the mere fact that it continues to exist despite the best efforts of some of its prominent “leaders” should dissolve them.

There is a famous half-line in Virgil that succinctly expresses a fundamental truth about our human condition: sunt lacrimæ rerum. There are indeed tear-drops in things. It is not the only truth; for things have their smiles and even their belly-laughs too. Often enough there are tears and smiles. But the devastation in Port-au-Prince, like than in Lisbon more than two hundred and fifty years ago, is an event so tear-stained as to challenge any comfortable metaphysical certainties. And the instant communications of our world hardly allow, at least at this moment, the kind of philosophical leisure accorded to a Voltaire. The only possibly adequate existential response is a thoughtful investment of human empathy and generous material contributions in aid of whatever inadequate means of remediation are available. If you want to see the evidence of divine love in the world, you may have to perform some of it yourself.

My inevitably rather blurry photographs come from the remarkable book of essays put together by Helena Carvalhão and Gonçalo Cordeiro: O Grande Terramoto de Lisboa: Ficar Diferente (Lisbon, 2005).