Nature Ramble

Discomedusae, by Ernst Haeckel

A Visit to Ceylon

by Ernst Haeckel
translated by Clara Bell

This is a delightful account of a visit to my native country by one of the greatest naturalists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, who was a fine writer and a brilliant artist to boot. His book concentrates mostly on the geography and natural history of the country, though he makes some observations about the people, too. Although his outlook and his ideas inevitably reflect his time, he brings a devotedly empirical attitude, as well as a refreshingly modern scepticism, to his observations. Haeckel was, of course, a great supporter of evolutionary theory and the man chiefly responsible for introducing Darwin’s work to the German-speaking world. Less admirably, he was also a proponent of racist and eugenicist views – which are, fortunately, present only in germinal form here.

I’d known about this book for many years and even repeated one oft-quoted passage from it in my own writings, but somehow never got round to reading the whole thing until a few weeks ago. What a treat it turned out to be. Haeckel’s breezy, confident, yet somehow unassuming style is a delight, and his descriptions of sights and scenes in Ceylon are lapidary. He gives us an island full of laughter, light and air, a far cry from the stygian forests, brooding ruins and shiftless devil-worshipping natives portrayed by Christian missionaries, who were embittered by their largely fruitless struggles to convert the Ceylonese from their native superstitions to those of Europe. Even these disappointed souls, however, never failed to testify to the natural beauty of the country – at which Haeckel never ceases, in his book, to marvel.

Ceylon: Jungle River by Ernst Haeckel. Lithograph by W. Koehler

His principal object in coming to Ceylon was to study and describe the marine life of the seas surrounding the island, as he had earlier done with that of the northern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Having been disappointed in his hopes of visiting the natural treasure-house of Trincomalee on the east coast, he had to content himself with studies in Galle Harbour and Weligama Bay. In Weligama he lived for three weeks entirely surrounded by the local people, exploring the bay and the nearby lagoons and wetlands and making no contact with any white person. Most of his descriptions of the Sinhalese people and of village life in Ceylon are drawn from this experience. He also visited Kandy, where he was overwhelmed by the riches of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, and made a tour of the up-country plantation districts (he was impressed by the British planters’ work ethic, but laughed at their insistence on dressing for dinner every night though living in the back of beyond). In the company of an ancestor of mine, Henry Trimen, he then made an expedition to World’s End, where the southern extremity of the central hill massif terminates in an abyss. From here, he and Trimen descended by the precipitous Nagrak trail to Nonpareil Estate, 4,000 feet below, and thence to Ratnapura, where they boarded a local riverboat that carried them down the Kalu Ganga to the coast. From here Haeckel returned to Colombo by rail and caught a steamer home to Europe, breaking journey in Egypt along the way.

His account of his excursions in Ceylon made me want to travel back in time and see my native land as it used to be before modernity, money and a growing population took their inevitable toll. The land he describes is Edenic, with only the faintest marks of human habitation and industry to mar it – except in the hill country, where he laments the loss of hundreds of thousands of acres of primaeval forest to the colonial plantation enterprise. Ceylon was then in truth the paradise of nature clumsily and mendaciously evoked in present-day tourist advertising. Accessible fragments of paradise still remained when I was a young man, but they are nearly all gone now. Books like these, old sketches, paintings and photographs are all that remain. Ceylon no longer exists; we are all Sri Lankans now, to our great loss.

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel

Jumping the God Shark

Fields of Blood

Religion & the History of Violence

by Karen Armstrong

A REVIEW OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS BOOK

Theology is, of course, mostly concerned with the distortion and obfuscation of truth. The simple ‘truths’ of religion cannot bear dispassionate scrutiny, so they have to be cloaked in layers of sophisticated misdirection to protect them from the light. Such is the purpose of theology.

But I read and write history, and it is hard to do this without encountering some theology along the way. When I was younger, I found these excursions enjoyable. Over time, though, my critical faculties grew keener and I became less willing to waste good reading and thinking time on nonsense.

Such is the perspective from which I read the introduction to Karen Armstrong’s book about religion and violence, Fields of Blood. I had meant to read the whole book, but found this impossible.

Armstrong, commendably, wastes no time introducing her thesis: it is presented in the very first paragraph of the introduction, in the shape of another writer’s observation that religion has been made a scapegoat for the human predisposition to violence.

Ah, so. A history book with a theological proposition – which is to say, an attempt to hide the hairy, smelly truths of human motive and action under petticoats of elaborate fabrication. Having stated her thesis, Armstrong next constructs a straw-man definition of religion ‘as seen in the West’ that no person of faith could possibly accept for an instant. This definition deserves to be quoted in full.

A coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centring on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities.

What rubbish. That's a description of the trees, not the wood, and a pretty bad one at that. But Armstrong tells us this is what ‘we in the West’ (I’m not from the West) think religion is, and then proceeds to tell us why we’re wrong.

Other cultures, she tells us, have different, more expansive definitions. As an example she gives us Debuisson’s description of the Sanskrit term dharma,: ‘a “total” concept, untranslatable, that covers law, justice, morals and social life.’

Oh what precious twaddle. Dharma is very easily translated as ‘applied moral philosophy’. But yes, of course, religion is Protean. It’s like money – one of those consensual illusions on which human society and culture are founded, but which elude definition. So? All this palaver with definitions is clearly a setup for sleights of hand to come, allowing the author to include and exclude facts and points of view as suits her case without alerting the reader. It was at this point that I realized there was no value in continuing with this book.

I thought I would at least finish the introduction, but three pages on I came to a digression on the chemistry of the brain in which Ms Armstrong makes a complete fool of herself, getting serotonin all wrong. I could see no reason to read further.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the thesis that religion is not to blame for the violence perpetrated in its name. No more is money the root of all evil. These things are conduits for the potential to do evil that exists, pent up, in all of us, but if we didn’t have them, we would simply find other ways to express it. It is ourselves, not our institutions, that are to blame.

But Armstrong’s approach to the proposition is simply untenable. It is not the study of history but the study of evolutionary psychology that will, perhaps, one day exonerate religion – as the common man understands it – from blame for all the atrocities perpetrated in its name.

I have enjoyed and been enlightened by Karen Armstrong’s work in the past, when she was in a more sceptical mode and had interesting things to say about, for instance, fundamentalism. That era is now long gone. She has become a book factory, reliably churning out another god-bothering tome every year, to the undoubted delight of her fans, her publishers and her bank manager, but with nothing of substance left to say. A sad if somewhat unusual case of the commercialization of religion.