The recent government shutdown apparently surprised a lot of federal workers, at least those who agreed to appear as victims on national television. It seemed to reinforce the negative stereotype of bureaucratic flunkies who live from hand to mouth, unable to resist frivolous expenses to help set aside anything for known-in-advance periods of layoff. Are these really the people who end up in the national workforce? Will those who stayed home or called in sick still be allowed to collect back pay?
Looking back, there were two monumental periods when hardship and adversity, not welfare and victimhood, brought giant strides forward in shaping human identity and character: the Pleistocene Ice Ages and the American Frontier. The books of anthropologist Loren Eiseley and historian Frederick Jackson Turner return again and again to this theme.
For Eiseley, the Ice Ages forged modern man’s survivalist emphasis on developing the intellect. Other human-like prototypes simply became extinct. It was the way God set up the world, if you will. In “The Winter of Man” chapter (1972) in The Star Thrower, Eiseley states that “ice has established conditions in which man has had to exert all his ingenuity in order to survive. By contrast, there have been other times when the ice has withdrawn farther than today and then, like a kind of sleepy dragon, has crept forth to harry man once more. For something like a million years this strange and alternating contest has continued between man and the ice.”
Human history began when the Ice Ages ended. The survivors virtually brought about human history. Eiseley reports that “When the dragon withdrew again some fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, man was on the verge of literacy. He already possessed great art, as the paintings in the Lascaux cavern reveal. It was an art devoted to the unseen, to the powers that control the movement of game and the magic that drives the hunter’s shaft to its target. Without such magic man felt weak and helpless against the vagaries of nature. It was his first attempt at technology, at control of nature by dominating the luck element, the principle of uncertainty in the universe.”
Today’s politicization of global warming comes from scientists who hope to receive research stipends. There are some who even suggest that global warming is actually keeping us out of recurring ice ages. Eiseley, of course, reminds us that ice ages are a natural but “unseen balance” that will someday “swing in the opposite direction”: “So complex is the problem of the glacial rhythms that no living scientist can say with surety the ice will not return. If it does the swarming millions who now populate the planet may mostly perish in misery and darkness, inexorably pushed from their own lands to be rejected in desperation by their neighbors.”
Eiseley was once an endowed Frederick Jackson Turner professor at the University of Wisconsin, named after the historian whose “Frontier Thesis” in The Frontier in American History (1920) argued that America’s true character was defined during the westward movement, the frontier ending, he said, in 1890. Self-reliance and hardship cause people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. They learn how to endure and get ahead, and reject welfare and charity. Bloated federal governments shrink. Poor people are back in control of their own destiny. They even discover that many of the best things in life are free—rather than a part of our self-defeating consumer society.
Eiseley felt that both the Ice Ages and the Frontier were in his blood and bones. He was born and bred on the prairies of Nebraska, and his books share his solitary naturalist wanderings over landscapes “flat and grass-covered and smiling so serenely up at the sun that they seemed forever youthful, untouched by mind or time—a sunlit, timeless prairie over which nothing passed but antelope or wandering bird.”
One of the epitaph dedications of his books calls attention to the pioneering stock he descends from: “In memory of my grandmother, Malvina McKee Corey, 1850-1936, who sleeps as all my people sleep, by the ways of the westward crossing.” Another to his father: “Dedicated to the memory of Clyde Edwin Eiseley, who lies in the grass of the prairie frontier, but is not forgotten by his son.” Still another to his dog Wolf who had at one time growled at him after he’d picked up an ancient bone that Eiseley was preparing: “To Wolf, who sleeps forever with an ice age bone across his heart, the last gift of one who loved him.”