Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

In ‘Forests: the shadow of Civilization’, Robert Pogne Harrison discusses the three universal institutions: religion, marriage and burial of the dead and their relation to the forests, which he finally suggests are the origins of our human civilizations. Harrison’s work leaves me as a reader questioning myself two main things. Firstly, why does civilization finally go back to their origins or feel the need to do so, and where do we, humans, stand – What is human?

Throughout the whole text it is implied that forests are an abomination to human civilizations. Although they are discussed to be the antecedent to human, forests represent the archaic world, a world of gloom, mistery and fantasy, where giants, creatures that appeared after Noah’s flood, lived with what Giambattista Vico described in ‘New Science’, as “Bestial Freedom” – a freedom from terror and authority. However, Harrison arrives to the conclusion mentioned previously: forests are the origin of civilizations, further suggesting that the order of human institutions is: “first the forests, after the huts, then the villages, next the cities and then the academies”.

According to Harrison and Vico, human civilizations and their ‘universal institutions’ are based on the forests of prehistory, and with the burial of the dead, men or so called ‘sons of the earth’ are able to return to its origins. Nevertheless, and one of the ideas that most caught my attention from this reading, is that humankind has found religion and divinity in the sky, and most civilizations from then have been ‘sky-worshipers, children of a celestial father’. Why then if we are so called ‘sky-worshipers’ do we have to find eternal rest in the ground? One of the ideas we came up as a group in our discussion was the adoration towards the sky is only because of pure curiosity, fear and perhaps even ambition. The sky represents to humans the unconquered and unknown world; a world that goes beyond what we know down here, and its inmensity overwhelms us. This might even explain the construction of the ‘Integral’ in “We”, the dystopian novel we read for the course, since the Numbers in the One State are building it in order to go to space and conquer new worlds. Another way to see human adoration to the sky is that it might represent the future, whereas burials denote the past and the ancestry.

Why then, do we feel the need to go back to our origins? (represented by the burial of the dead, one of the universal institutions of humankind). One of the conclusions one can arrive to is that life is cyclical, thus must and will go back to what it started. In his work, Harrison supported by Vico’s ‘New Science’, explains how it has always been like that, and how from animal or forests we develop into civilizations, but always will return to our origins. The idea of the forests and beast suggests the scary and unknown, what is out of our control, whereas civilization seems almost as a machine, no soul, emotions or interactions. What might differenciate us, humans, from these extremes, is that we have been able to form institutions and find something to which hold on to, our religion, matrimony and our ancestry.

Throughout the entire text, one comes up with the idea that mankind is always trying to crush nature in order to build its civilizations, and is according to Harrison the way it is, has always been and will continue to be. Not only it applies to Rome, “Rome can become Rome only by overcoming, or effacing, the forests of its origins”, but I think it applies to the One State in “We”, because as a nation they have grown overcoming nature, leaving it exclusively behind the “Green Wall”, where beasts and animals roam around like the numbers in the One State.

One of the conclusions I have arrived from this reading, is that ‘nature’s battle against humans’ and civilization’s need to go back to its origins, thus creating a ‘cyclical life’, are closely related to Zamyatin’s idea of infinite revolutions, since nothing is finite.