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Bret L Bret L is offline
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Default Country Boys and Conservative Conservation

Country Boys and Conservative Conservation



"Edward O. Wilson’s new book, Anthill: A Novel, is, in many ways, a traditional first novel: it’s primarily a quasi-autobiographical fictional retelling of the author’s childhood and young manhood. Anthill is the tale of Wilson’s alter ego, a bug-loving Eagle Scout with the venerable Southern name of Raphael Semmes Cody, who grows up exploring nature in an old growth wilderness outside Mobile, Alabama.


On the other hand, most first-time novelists aren’t octogenarians. Nor
are they, typically, the world’s top expert on ants. They haven’t been
famous / notorious since the 1975 publication of their scientific
masterwork, Sociobiology, either. Nor are they the chief inventor of
the influential cause of preserving biodiversity.

And, generally speaking, autobiographical novels don’t include a 73-
page centerpiece narrating the genocidal wars between ant colonies
that young Raff tracks for his Insect Study merit badge. Or at least
they don’t recount them from the ants’ point of view, with dialogue
exchanged via chemical secretions: “The signals now proclaimed, Food,
food. I have found food, follow my trail!” (While “ant fiction” sounds
odd, to say the least, Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer winner, is a
crackerjack storyteller. His ant chapters are as dramatic as the
finest nature documentaries.)

And while many novelists are nostalgists, few are as thoroughly pro-
conservative as E. O. Wilson. When it comes to sympathetic portrayals
of white Republican Southerners, Wilson’s Anthill makes the recent
Sandra Bullock hit movie The Blind Side seem like a Paul Krugman op-
ed.

Particularly moving is the depiction in the first third of the book of
the often-tense marriage between Raff’s redneck father, who works to
instill in his son the best aspects of the good ole boy code of honor,
and his old money mother, who names him after the Confederate admiral
in her genteel family tree.

Here, Wilson is content to show—rather than tell—how an ordinary
American family follows the patterns he outlined in Sociobiology. In
the final third of the book (after the ant interlude), however, Wilson
displays a little too much of his Harvard professor’s didactic streak
as he insists on explaining the evolutionary basis for his human
characters’ actions.

Wilson was a nature-loving Gulf Coast boy back during the Depression,
a story he told wonderfully in his autobiography Naturalist: “Most
children have a bug period, and I never grew out of mine.”). In
Anthill, though, he has moved his protagonist’s birth up to the Jimmy
Carter era. This both makes the story more relevant and lets Wilson
avoid the usual ritual groveling over Jim Crow.

Tom Wolfe famously called Wilson “the new Darwin.” That’s a bit
overstated, but it reflects the affinity between the Virginian Wolfe
and the Alabaman Wilson as proud Sons of the South.
Wilson is heir to a long Anglo-American tradition of evolutionary
theory founded largely by other intellectual country boys, such as
Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Francis Galton. In contrast,
Wilson’s bitter enemies in the Harvard biology department were two
city boys: the Chicagoan James D. Watson and the New Yorker Stephen
Jay Gould. (The acerbic Watson and the gentlemanly Wilson have since
reconciled.)

In Britain, it has been common for conservative writers such as J.R.R.
Tolkien (Lord of the Rings) and Richard Adams (the great talking
rabbit novel Watership Down) to be skeptical of development out of
their Tory love for the countryside. In America, though, conservatism
is associated with boundless building. And the recent takeover by
neoconservatives hasn’t helped instill a regard for nature—neocon
godfather Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, for
instance, lived for decades in an apartment overlooking New York’s
lovely Central Park without ever setting foot in it.

In Anthill, Wilson offers an observation that would have appealed to
Edmund Burke: “Nature works, Raphael learned, because it has order,
and from order, it has beauty.”
The conclusion of Wilson’s plot is intended to deliver a political
message to conservatives, one that Wilson summed up in a 2001 lectu

“What is the heart of conservatism if it does not include leadership
in conservation? And why have conservative thinkers needlessly, and
against all logic and their own self-interest, surrendered the moral
high ground on this issue to the liberals?”

Hence, after Raff graduates from Harvard Law School and returns to
Mobile, he joins the National Rifle Association, becomes a
Scoutmaster, and works out a mutually profitable compromise between
environmentalists and the real estate developer planning to pave over
the beloved wilderness where he learned about biodiversity.

Fortunately, Raff persuades the real estate baron that the big money
these days is in upscale developments that set most of the land aside
in nature preserves as a perpetual amenity for the fortunate few. Raff
explains to the mogul that the higher price per lot in his plan is not
a bug, it’s a financial featu “Rich people can always buy houses,
but the middle class maybe not.”

So, perhaps Wilson hasn’t quite worked out all the bugs in his plan
for conservative conservation. Still, even if Anthill isn’t quite the
great American novel, it’s an impressive addition to one of the great
American careers."

http://www.takimag.com/article/count..._conservation/
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Default Country Boys and Conservative Conservation

On May 4, 10:30*pm, Bret L wrote:
Country Boys and Conservative Conservation


So in your lexicon "conservative" means "dumb hick".

Good to know.
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