Animal Spirits

April 15, 2023
How ideas about the blending of spirit and materiality have influenced American thought and life. In his latest book, history professor Lears explores the American evolution of so-called animistic thinking, "a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience," or a somewhat more formalized "metaphysical worldview...known as vitalism." The author first covers some key British expressions of vitalism in such figures as John Donne, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne, who "epitomized the lingering and lurching of the patriarchal ethos in a world where male authority was becoming detached from its traditional sources in dogmatic religion and landed wealth." Then he moves on to a series of American exemplars, including both the well known (Timothy Dwight, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt) and the more obscure (Andrew Jackson Davis, Helen Wilmans). As Lears memorably demonstrates, the belief in the significance of pulsing flows of energy that move through minds and objects has played a profound, if not often well-acknowledged, role in American philosophy and lived experience. The author makes a convincing claim that vitalism remains relevant not just in popular, but also scientific discourse and has in fact "begun to acquire new legitimacy in our own time as scientists have rediscovered the uses of animist-derived ideas in physics, botany, geology, and epigenetics." Such recuperations will continue to be crucial, the author argues, in responding to the contemporary threat of ecological collapse. A notable strength of the book is the richness of the author's commentary on the context in which vitalist ideas emerged; he offers a strikingly detailed view of the lineage of specific articulations of a faith in "animal spirits." The only lacuna is a thorough accounting of how Indigenous worldviews have impacted Anglo-American thinking over several centuries; a little more close attention to those worldviews, which have undergone their own substantial transformations, would have been useful. A well-informed, engrossing consideration of the significance of vitalist ideas.

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April 17, 2023
Historian Lears (Rebirth of a Nation) attempts to explain in this sprawling study “how animistic thinking survived in the modern Anglo-American world.” Characterizing animal spirits as both “a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience and a metaphysical worldview,” Lears ranges from the emergence of credit-based capitalism in 18th-century England (he notes that Daniel Defoe thought “credit was to the body economic as animal spirits were to the individual body: a mysterious but essential vital force, an evanescent liquid evaporating into thin air”); to the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, where “enthusiasm for the sheer vitality—the animal spirits—unleashed by war won out over the fear of unreasoning animal instincts”; and the “varieties of black vitality” captured by the writers, musicians, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Lears draws captivating profiles of Americans who embodied “animistic thinking,” including mesmeric healer Andrew Jackson Davis, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and inventor Thomas Edison, and his extensive research touches on many fascinating historical eras. However, the concept of animal spirits remains amorphous (somehow, it’s everything from “vernacular dance crazes to theoretical innovations in physics and psychology”), making it difficult to draw any firm conclusions about what it means to American history. The result is an entertaining but exhausting survey.

June 1, 2023
Animals have been revered from the earliest recorded history, notes cultural historian Lears (Rebirth of a Nation, 2009) in this examination of how respect toward animals as sentient beings has waxed and waned. Indigenous customs honor animals and acknowledge that part of being human is a shared animal spirit. Industrialization, especially in Europe and America, has popularized the idea that life and power are best explained and controlled by concepts that are measurable. Deep dives into the theories of philosopher William James and economist John Maynard Keynes show how technology, especially as applied to war, has replaced respect for unmeasurables like animal vitality as the driver of political and economic thought. The ascendance of technocrats, meanwhile, especially after WWII, has had disastrous results. Lears points to late 1960s counterculture and the environmental movement of the early 1970s as the beginning of a pendulum swing back to the idea that humans should respect the nonhuman beings we share the world with. Readers can savor and puzzle over this profound, unique take on how humans view their place in the world.

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