Island News & Views
World Food Traditions · 23rd September 2007
Ray Grigg
Sometimes we don’t have an English word that captures the essence of a thought or feeling. The German word, “schadenfreude”, for example, conveys that unusual combination of maliciousness and joy that comes when we greet someone else’s misfortune with a delicious sense of satisfaction. Another German word, “weltschmerz” is now appearing in occasional English usage, probably because nothing else in our language quite conveys its meaning.
Weltschmerz (literally world + pain ) was first coined in 1810 by Jean Paul Richter, a German Romantic. It conveyed the profound and overpowering sadness that infused the Romantic Movement when their hopeful expectations failed. This nature based movement, which had been building in intensity for about 100 years, culminated in an explosion of ideas and energy that intended to reshape European philosophy, religion, politics, art and literature. By 1810, however, a pessimism was beginning to pervade the movement, a reluctant realization that nature was not a high moral teacher and that human failings were incapable of reaching the lofty hopes for a world community of loving equals living together in peace and simplicity.
Much of the energy and optimism of the Romantic Movement was based on the expectation that nature would be a guide and a regenerative force to reshape the decadence of the old societies and their corrupt political structures — those that were supposed to have been purged by the French Revolution. But human character did not rise to comply with this ideal, and the ethics revealed by a more realistic appraisal of nature proved to be more complicated than the benign morality envisioned by the Romantic philosophers. By about 1830, the Romantic Movement had mostly collapsed in disarray and disillusionment. Weltschmerz conveyed the painful experience.
Today, the importance of nature has surfaced again, not as an ideal to be emulated but as an environmental imperative with which we must comply if we are to have a sustainable future on our planet. Much has changed in the intervening years since the Romantics. The stake for us is not naturalistic idealism or moral guidance but our physical existence. The old Romantic sentimentalities are gone, cleansed by the austere notions of evolutionary biology, survival of the fittest and raw scientific data. We now respect nature for its incredible complexity, ingenuity, variation and resilience.
But we also recognize nature for its vulnerability. It is an astoundingly responsive yet precarious system, especially under the onslaught of an exploding human population with an industrial technology that is unprecedented in its global scope and impact. Millions of years have passed since nature last encountered anything quite as disruptive as our chemistry and our machinery.
The Romantic’s veneration of nature occurred with little biological history of the planet, before anyone knew of dinosaurs, geology, plate tectonics, or the vast ages of life we now call the Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous. Recent knowledge tells us that whole systems of life on the planet have come and gone, with some catastrophes obliterating up to 90 percent of the Earth’s flora and fauna. We know, too, from this history that our human impact is presently causing the sixth such major extinction event. We can observe the habitat degradation, note the ecological disturbances, measure the rate of climate change, calculate the magnitude of our impact, then count and extrapolate the species loss. We know the stresses to which we are subjecting nature and we can be fairly certain of the devastating consequences if we do not alter our behaviour.
Weltschmerz, that feeling of world-pain, now has a new poignancy. It’s not the bygone loss of Romantic’s ideals but a profound and visceral sadness that comes from witnessing and knowingly collaborating in the dismantling of a biological system that both contains and sustains us. The source of this pain is our willful and calculated diminishment of ourselves and nature, the conscious and purposeful participation in our own possible demise. The feeling is akin to grief, a mourning for ourselves, for our threatened civilization, and for the ecosystems and species that give vitality, variety and energy to our living planet.
Sometimes these losses just seem senseless, such as the recent killing of four rare mountain gorillas in Congo’s Virunga National Park. (The park rangers, who knew these animals, wept with grief. “Not even a beast would do this,” lamented one of them.) Sometimes these losses come just from the mindless momentum of our civilization’s imperative to extend itself with continuous growth and consumption. We must cut more trees, drill more holes, build more cities, construct more dams, mine more mountains, clear more land, burn more oil. We always have our excuses. The imperatives always provide extenuating circumstances.
Yet each of these acts — for those who are attentive — is beginning to feel profoundly painful. WestPac must build a liquid natural gas terminal on Texada Island. Hillsborough Resources must drill for coalbed methane. Quinsam Coal must expand its mining. Choose your trespass of nature. They are coming from all directions. A barge dumps 10,000 litres of diesel oil amid the dozens of orcas in Robson Bight. Biologists try to save spotted owls while BC’s government continues to allow logging in their required old-growth habitat.
Yes, caring people are helping a million toadlets migrate safely across the Inland Island Highway, and heroic efforts may save the Vancouver Island marmot from extinction. But the tiger, clouded leopard, pygmy hippo, polar bear, basking shark and leatherback turtle are probably bound for oblivion, like the black rhino and 844 species during the last 500 years. The inexorable trend for species is downward as the list of those endangered and threatened continues to increase. In 8 years, the official number of endangered species has risen from 1,327 to 2,887, and 7,775 are now listed as threatened. By 2050, we can expect that climate change will render 24 percent of all plants and animals extinct.
Weltschmerz may not enter popular usage because it’s not a pretty word. But neither is the pain it describes.
Weltschmerz (literally world + pain ) was first coined in 1810 by Jean Paul Richter, a German Romantic. It conveyed the profound and overpowering sadness that infused the Romantic Movement when their hopeful expectations failed. This nature based movement, which had been building in intensity for about 100 years, culminated in an explosion of ideas and energy that intended to reshape European philosophy, religion, politics, art and literature. By 1810, however, a pessimism was beginning to pervade the movement, a reluctant realization that nature was not a high moral teacher and that human failings were incapable of reaching the lofty hopes for a world community of loving equals living together in peace and simplicity.
Much of the energy and optimism of the Romantic Movement was based on the expectation that nature would be a guide and a regenerative force to reshape the decadence of the old societies and their corrupt political structures — those that were supposed to have been purged by the French Revolution. But human character did not rise to comply with this ideal, and the ethics revealed by a more realistic appraisal of nature proved to be more complicated than the benign morality envisioned by the Romantic philosophers. By about 1830, the Romantic Movement had mostly collapsed in disarray and disillusionment. Weltschmerz conveyed the painful experience.
Today, the importance of nature has surfaced again, not as an ideal to be emulated but as an environmental imperative with which we must comply if we are to have a sustainable future on our planet. Much has changed in the intervening years since the Romantics. The stake for us is not naturalistic idealism or moral guidance but our physical existence. The old Romantic sentimentalities are gone, cleansed by the austere notions of evolutionary biology, survival of the fittest and raw scientific data. We now respect nature for its incredible complexity, ingenuity, variation and resilience.
But we also recognize nature for its vulnerability. It is an astoundingly responsive yet precarious system, especially under the onslaught of an exploding human population with an industrial technology that is unprecedented in its global scope and impact. Millions of years have passed since nature last encountered anything quite as disruptive as our chemistry and our machinery.
The Romantic’s veneration of nature occurred with little biological history of the planet, before anyone knew of dinosaurs, geology, plate tectonics, or the vast ages of life we now call the Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous. Recent knowledge tells us that whole systems of life on the planet have come and gone, with some catastrophes obliterating up to 90 percent of the Earth’s flora and fauna. We know, too, from this history that our human impact is presently causing the sixth such major extinction event. We can observe the habitat degradation, note the ecological disturbances, measure the rate of climate change, calculate the magnitude of our impact, then count and extrapolate the species loss. We know the stresses to which we are subjecting nature and we can be fairly certain of the devastating consequences if we do not alter our behaviour.
Weltschmerz, that feeling of world-pain, now has a new poignancy. It’s not the bygone loss of Romantic’s ideals but a profound and visceral sadness that comes from witnessing and knowingly collaborating in the dismantling of a biological system that both contains and sustains us. The source of this pain is our willful and calculated diminishment of ourselves and nature, the conscious and purposeful participation in our own possible demise. The feeling is akin to grief, a mourning for ourselves, for our threatened civilization, and for the ecosystems and species that give vitality, variety and energy to our living planet.
Sometimes these losses just seem senseless, such as the recent killing of four rare mountain gorillas in Congo’s Virunga National Park. (The park rangers, who knew these animals, wept with grief. “Not even a beast would do this,” lamented one of them.) Sometimes these losses come just from the mindless momentum of our civilization’s imperative to extend itself with continuous growth and consumption. We must cut more trees, drill more holes, build more cities, construct more dams, mine more mountains, clear more land, burn more oil. We always have our excuses. The imperatives always provide extenuating circumstances.
Yet each of these acts — for those who are attentive — is beginning to feel profoundly painful. WestPac must build a liquid natural gas terminal on Texada Island. Hillsborough Resources must drill for coalbed methane. Quinsam Coal must expand its mining. Choose your trespass of nature. They are coming from all directions. A barge dumps 10,000 litres of diesel oil amid the dozens of orcas in Robson Bight. Biologists try to save spotted owls while BC’s government continues to allow logging in their required old-growth habitat.
Yes, caring people are helping a million toadlets migrate safely across the Inland Island Highway, and heroic efforts may save the Vancouver Island marmot from extinction. But the tiger, clouded leopard, pygmy hippo, polar bear, basking shark and leatherback turtle are probably bound for oblivion, like the black rhino and 844 species during the last 500 years. The inexorable trend for species is downward as the list of those endangered and threatened continues to increase. In 8 years, the official number of endangered species has risen from 1,327 to 2,887, and 7,775 are now listed as threatened. By 2050, we can expect that climate change will render 24 percent of all plants and animals extinct.
Weltschmerz may not enter popular usage because it’s not a pretty word. But neither is the pain it describes.