Loren Eiseley's "The Invisible Pyramid"

   

When he died at the age of 69 in 1970, anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer Loren Eiseley had already become respected as a twentieth century version of Henry David Thoreau.  Toward the end of his career, he focused increasingly on the impact of human civilization on the world around us—the living nature in which human civilization developed. 

            In 1970, a volume of Eiseley’s essays, The Invisible Pyramid, was published.  One of the essays, “The Time Effacers,” examines Eiseley’s view of the rise of modern science, which he describes as “. . . an increasingly time-conscious, future-oriented society of great technical skill, which has fallen out of balance with the natural world around it.” (p. 70)   He defines the rise of a scientific society as “a society of constant expectations directed toward the upcoming future.  What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is ‘progress.’  What we seek, in the end, is Utopia.” (ibid.)

            As I write this, Eiseley’s work is more than a half-century in the past.  In many ways, the issues he raised in 1970 are still with us, and the impact of our Industrial Revolution—from polluted rivers and air to global climate change—is becoming clearer as its products become intertwined with those of the Technological Revolution that has been underway since before his death.   “In the extravagant pursuit of a future projected by science,” he wrote, “we have left the present to shift for itself.” (p. 71).  Science, “as it leads men further and further from the first world they inhabited, the world we call natural, is beguiling them into a new and unguessed domain.” (ibid.)

He concludes, “When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond.  She has dealt with the locust swarm and she has led the lemmings down to the sea.  Even the world eaters will not be beyond her capacities.  Sila, as the Eskimo call nature, remains apart from mankind “just as long as men do not abuse life.” (p. 80)

Note:  My quotations from The Invisible Pyramid are taken from Volume Two of the Library of America’s Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos.