"oh God of progress have you degraded or forgot us?"

"And yet none of these patterns matter to human history until we ask how the people whose lives they touched understood their significance. By using landscape, giving names to it, and calling it home, people selected the features that mattered most to them, and drew their mental maps accordingly" (Cronon 25).

The passage above from William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis elicited irritation. I grew agitated over the words, my immediate state of mind was to deconstruct the narrative of human hubris. Nature does not become meaningful when hashed apart by the pen of categorization. I even brought up this quote in class with, probably, a scoffing indignation. While also wiping away of Native American history and presence, that is not the only thing that disgusted me about the sentiment. It was that humans subordinate the life of the physical world to their experience of it. Though Cronon spends time before this passage creating for us a history of the landscape from the Ice Age to its place before the expansion of Chicago, this passage seems to cover this earlier passage and make it invisible. That is a distant and meaningless aspect of the past, it seems to say, now here let us begin to pave the stones of history.

Yet, at the end of a weekend filled with conversation about the task of making meaning, I am feeling a little less angry with Cronon. History is an act of making meaning that resonates with a group of people. (Other animals also construct meaning, but this is not a class on animal behavior, so I will try to narrow my scope here.) History draws one from their present position and exposes to them the layers of experience. It also adds or supports a current symbolic order. The reason why the danger of the history written by the victor exists is because it creates a world where the symbology of the defeated is either appropriated by the victor or flattened (eliminated?). This may be a dual process.

My anger with Cronon was that his framing of history does subordinated/eliminate the importance of the natural world to that of human manipulation. Humans necessarily divine meaning through the act of experience and interplay between the internal and external world, true. Humans manipulate the external world to serve their needs and allow them to survive, also true. Yet. Here again, I am struggling with Cronon's worldview. The framing of this transition between the natural world and the Western manipulation of that world does not give equal meaning to both sides. Cronon's wording shoves the world pre-1833 into the realm of the unimportant, or the meaningless, as it only becomes meaningful when occupied by people (and people who matter, i.e. the United Statesians, to borrow a term.) Cronon supports a narrative (note to self: thinker further on this) of human (Western?) "progress" (Manifest Destiny?) through framing the discussion of the natural world as a stepping stone into futurity and the human "progress" that will overlay it. 

While perhaps more innocuous than my frustrations illustrate, Cronon's phrasing tripped me up. I cannot truly encompass the entirety of Cronon's thought here, nor the extent of it, but this particular quote made me think. It helped me, too, frame a way to understand my own worldview. Cronon's task was the advancement of the United States and how Chicago stood at the center of that, so his viewpoint was clear from that start. But, the above is always a fun exercise.

As Ian asked me to expand upon in my below post, this exercise is also a fundamental aspect of beginning to understand my task. The appropriation of meaning/the creation of meaning is a question close to any scholar. Fingers crossed that in my next post--well, the one after the analysis of the picture--I will have gotten a little more actual research done!

Subject line credit: Sufjan Steven's "Come On, Feel The Illinoise!"