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The Animal Spirits
Let me start things off by saying that Average Joe: Hawaii is awesome.
OK, so I've picked up David McCullough's John Adams. This is actually the third time I've started the book, but I'm really feeling it this time and I think I'm finally going to get into it. As I make my way through the first pages of the book for the third time, I really feel like I've come to know Adams as McCullough introduces him. So far, the first striking detail of McCullough's history is his account of Adams' fondness long walks and time alone on horseback in warm seasons as they, in Adams' words, roused "the animal spirits" and "dispersed melancholy."
I'm intrigued by Adams' verbiage. First of all, I get a kick out of wondering if Adams would ever imagine that anyone would ever study the journal from which McCullough culled these phrases, let alone that someone (myself) would be intrigued by them. So what are these "animal spirits?" and why should they be aroused?
The adolescent in me giggles at the mention of "animal spirits," but, obvious innuendo aside, this is a sentiment that I share with the founding father. Radiohead's OK Computer, Mike Judge's Office Space, Thoreau's Walden, Huxely's Brave New World, and Orwell's 1984 are just a few of many poignant artistic statements that lament the loss of humanity's primal nature. With the exception of Office Space and perhaps Walden, the stark visions of a mechanized humanity presented in these works have burnt themselves in my mind as horrifying depictions of hell. There are few things that frighten me more than thoughts of a world of automatons, a society completely detached from nature. I believe that there are dimensions of joy and fulfillment accessible nowhere other than the out-of-doors, experienced through nothing other than physical activity. I think Adams said it perfectly. They are our animal spirits, those impulses that summon our adrenaline and sharpen our senses, the impulses without which the wild could never survive.
Adams devoted his life to the study of politics, of society, of governance. In a way, he devoted himself to the establishment of a system by which humanity's unruliness might be contained. It seems to me that well-roused "animal spirits" might have been a great obstacle to his choice of work. Nonetheless, he relished in them, as they "dispersed melancholy." All of the works I mentioned above deal in depression, dejection, an uncertainty of purpose. The stability afforded us by our laws requires us to suppress a number of our primal drives. I think it's a reasonable price to pay, but I'll argue that a little cost-benefit analysis is necessary to keep us afloat. The stability is nice, but I'm not willing to relinquish my happiness for it. As I discussed last week, there's no question that human values change as human necessities move from the bare necessities to whatever comes next. But there's the rub, what comes next?
Perhaps the melancholy that follows our departing animal spirits is simply the lack of purpose that we, as a species, haven't learned to recoup. What are humans supposed to do once they don't have to worry about not being eaten by lions, or starving to death? What is our purpose? Well, I figure that just about all of recorded human history deals with the millions of answers to this question, but in case you don't care to delve into it, just take a walk outside, if you breathe deep enough you'll forget all about it.