“Happy people die whole,” Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962) wrote in one of his poems. “Integrity is wholeness,” he wrote in another. For Jeffers, whose verses became revered hymns of the environmental movement as Rachel Carson was making ecology a household word, this meant wholeness not only within oneself but also wholeness with the rest of the natural world, with the integrity of the universe itself — an ethos consonant with his contemporary John Muir’s insistence that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Jeffers coined the term inhumanism to describe the perilous counterpoint to this awareness. Humanity, he worried, had become too solipsistic, too divorced from the rest of nature, too blind to the “astonishing beauty of things” — beauty the protection of and participation in which is both our natural inheritance and our civilizational responsibility.

Although Jeffers’s ideas moved and influenced generations of readers, writers, artists, activists, and even policymakers — from Ansel Adams and Edward Weston to Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams — he never formally articulated his spiritual credo outside of verse. Never, except once.

Robinson Jeffers by Edward Weston

In the autumn of 1934, Jeffers received a letter from Sister Mary James Power — a principal and teacher at a girls’ Catholic high school in Massachusetts. A lifelong lover of poetry, Power had endeavored to edit an anthology of prominent poets’ reflections on the spiritual dimensions of their art and their creative motive force. She invited Jeffers to contribute, asking about his “religious attitudes.” His response, originally published in Powers’s 1938 book Poets at Prayer and later included in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (public library), is one of the most beautiful and succinct articulations of a holistic, humanistic moral philosophy ever committed to words — some of the wisest words to live and think and feel by.

Jeffers writes:

It is a sort of tradition in this country not to talk about religion for fear of offending — I am still a little subject to the tradition, and rather dislike stating my “attitudes” except in the course of a poem. However, they are simple. I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.)

Illustration by Oliver Jeffers from Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth

Writing in the same era in which Carson revolutionized our understanding of the natural world and our place in it with her lyrical writings about the sea, observing that “against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change,” Jeffers adds:

The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation.

But this “salvation,” Jeffers observes in a sensitive caveat, is not something that happens to us, passively — it is something that happens in us, through our active participation in life, through the choices we make during the brief interlude of our existence as animate beings in an animate universe. Wholeness itself is a participatory act — both a faculty of being and a function of becoming, to be mastered and refined in the course of living. (I too have wondered how, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, we attain completeness of being.) Jeffers writes:

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.

Complement this fragment of the wholly ravishing Wild God of the World with poet and philosopher Parker Palmer, a modern-day Jeffers of a kind, on the elusive art of inner wholeness, neurologist Oliver Sacks on beauty as a lens on the interconnectedness of the universe, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis on the spirituality of science and the interconnectedness of life.

Decades before Simone de Beauvoir contemplated how chance and choice converge to make us who we are from the fortunate platform of old age, the eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath — who never reached that fortunate platform, her life felled by the same conspiracy of chance and choice — contemplated these indelible forces in the guise of free will, writing in her journal that “there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention.”

Two generations later, Maria Konnikova entered this eternal conundrum via an improbable path half chosen and half chanced into, emerging with insights into the paradoxes of chance and control, which neither strand alone could have afforded.

Having devoted five years of doctoral work, with the creator of the famous Marshmallow Experiment as her advisor, to designing and performing psychology experiments probing how people’s perception of control in situations dictated by pure chance shapes decision-making and outcomes, she was suddenly life-thrust into a much more intimate empiricism. A period of successive losses rendered her the sole bread-winner of a family as a mysterious malady savaged her body without warning, gnawing at the fundaments of consciousness.

In the midst of this maelstrom, she became interested in the world of poker. She entered it as a psychologist on a philosophical inquiry — how often are we actually in control when we think we are, how do we navigate uncertain situations with incomplete information, and how can we ever separate the product of our own efforts from the strokes of randomness governing the universe? She emerged an unexpected master of the game, master of her own mind in an entirely new way.

The record of that experience became The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (public library) — an inspired investigation of “the struggle for balance on the spectrum of luck and control in the lives we lead, and the decisions we make,” partway between memoir, primer on the psychology of decision-making, and playbook for life.

One of Salvador Dalí’s forgotten folios for a rare edition Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Having previously written about the psychology of confidence through the lens of con artists and the psychology of creativity through the lens of Sherlock Holmes, she takes the same singular approach of erudition and perspicacity to the improbable test-bed of poker, lacing her elegant primers on probability and game theory with perfectly illustrative invocations of Dostoyevsky, Epictetus, Dawkins, Ephron, Kant.

More than half a century after W. I. B. Beveridge observed in the undervalued treasure The Art of Scientific Investigation that “although we cannot deliberately evoke that will-o’-the-wisp, chance, we can be on the alert for it, prepare ourselves to recognize it and profit by it when it comes,” she writes:

That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. You can’t calculate for dumb bad luck… My reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strongly-worded lesson if ever there were: you can’t bluff chance.

[…]

Real life is not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions. It’s about discerning the hidden, the uniquely human. It’s about realizing that no amount of formal modeling will ever be able to capture the vagaries and surprises of human nature.

Art by Moomins creator Tove Jansson from her 1966 edition of Alice in Wonderland

Drawing on the decision-making experiments she had conducted for her graduate work, she offers an empirical echo of neuroscientist Sam Harris’s insistence that our free-will experience of choice is only the illusion of choice, recounting her utterly unexpected finding in these experimental investment scenarios:

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented real control over the game from emerging — and before long, the quality of people’s decisions deteriorated. They did what worked in the past, or what they had decided would work — and failed to grasp that the circumstances had shifted so that a previously successful strategy was no longer so. People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did — well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

This cognitive glitch, she reasons, is not a personal failing of the individual but a fossil of the evolutionary history of our species — a species that survived by dealing with the immediate threats of particular environments, mistaking those isolated incidents for statistically representative distributions of common experience, mistaking in turn anecdote for data — a misapprehension that scars us modern humans with everything from the mental machinery of stereotypes to the crooked inner calculus of gambling. She writes:

The equation of luck and skill is, at its heart, probabilistic. And a basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty. There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment — just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare in this part of the country, and you have a 2 percent chance of encountering one, and an even lower chance of being attacked; we learned instead to deal with brute emotions such as last night there was a tiger here and it looked pretty damn scary.

Millennia of evolution have hardly allayed our preference for anecdote over probability — a failure to internalize mathematical rules known in psychology as the description‐experience gap, leading to what the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has memorably described as our tendency to draw our confidence in our beliefs not from the quality of the evidence but from the coherence of the story we have constructed. Numberless studies have demonstrated that the human distaste for numbers leads people to make decisions based not on the data they are shown but on the pattern-recognition of non-representative past experience we call intuition, gut feeling, hunch.

Art by Maurice Sendak for The Big Green Book by Robert Graves

A central paradox magnifying our ineptitude at parsing probabilities is that, in everyday life, we only tend to notice chance when the dice roll counter to our expectations — we are congenitally blind to the silent tilling work of randomness for as long as it smooths reality in our favor. But the moment life grows rough and the topography of reality becomes unfamiliar, we begin coloring chance with emotional interpretation:

Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet — chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It was always meant to be, and any sense of control or free will we may think we have is pure illusion.

One of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for his revolutionary 1907 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Poker presented a perfect ready-made laboratory for distilling this theoretical insight into a practical toolkit for making sounder choices. Picking up the gauntlet the titanic mathematician and computing pioneer John von Neumann threw down nearly a century ago with his revolutionary illumination of behavioral economics through game theory, she writes:

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions: it’s a statistical undertaking, and one we are not normally equipped to deal with. Which brings me to poker: Used in the right way, experience can be a powerful ally in helping to understand probabilistic scenarios… The correct systematic learning process can help you unravel chance from everything else in a way that no amount of cramming numbers or studying theory ever will.

[…]

Poker, unlike quite any other game, mirrors life. It isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Like the world we inhabit, it consists of an inextricable joining of the two. Poker stands at the fulcrum that balances two oppositional forces in our lives — chance and control. Anyone can get lucky — or unlucky — at a single hand, a single game, a single tournament. One turn and you’re on top of the world — another, you are cast out, no matter your skill, training, preparation, aptitude. In the end, though, luck is a short‐term friend or foe. Skill shines through over the longer time horizon.

The intricacies of the relationship between chance and skill, and how it shapes our experience of the world, is what The Biggest Bluff goes on to examine through the curious universe of poker: how mathematics can depersonalize chance and furnish the emotional forbearance necessary not to let small fluctuations of fortune derail us; how the fascinating psychology of locus of control (whether we attribute our life-outcomes to external factors of chance or internal endowments of skill) affects those outcomes; how to wrest from our lack of agency a rational toolkit for not just surviving but thriving in uncertainty; how to live with the awful, humbling fact that however great our skill and however much it can mitigate the work of chance, it can never be enough to entirely undo it — and how to make of that fact not a sinkhole of helplessness but a portal of possibility.

The polymathic British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (January 8, 1823‐November 7, 1913) is best known as the man evolution left behind. While Wallace arrived independently at the theory of natural selection and while the paper about it he jointly published with Darwin in 1858 fomented the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was Darwin — who had kept his controversial ideas under wraps for years, until Wallace gave him the courage to go public — that took the laurels of evolutionary theory. But Wallace holds a different, long overlooked distinction, the cultural impact of which might well shape the evolution of this planet’s living future more profoundly than the evolutionary history of its past.

Darwin became the face of evolutionary theory because, with his intensely focused autism-spectrum mind and its acute attention to this particular branch of knowledge, his science was just stronger. Russell, unlike Darwin, had a mind too fractal with ideas to stay within the bounds of any one discipline and a humanistic spirit too concerned with the social side of life to remain confined purely to science. And so he became one of the first scientists to seriously consider the ecological footprint of our species and caution against the environmental assault of human industry.

Alfred Russel Wallace circa 1895

Writing not long after Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology in an obscure German scientific book and long before Rachel Carson made it a household word with the unexpected bestseller that awoke the modern ecological conscience, Wallace drew an unambiguous causal link between the economic and political decisions by which our society governs itself and the ecological consequences for our species, for all species, and for the planet itself — and then he considered what it would take for us to divert the catastrophic path we had just set out on then, and on which we still remain.

In the final years of the nineteenth century, with Darwin long dead and the Earth newly laced with train tracks and telephone cables, fogged with factory fumes, and cratered with oil wells, Wallace published an extraordinary 426-page reflection on the promise and peril of what we so blindly call progress, titled The Wonderful Century (public domain | public library) — a far-seeing cautionary yet ultimately optimistic vision for how to course-correct our civilization, so that the rise of capitalism as a global economic system based on exploitation and extraction would not corral our species into its own misery and threaten the survival of all species on an irreplaceable planet that is a miracle and not a resource.

Art from the 19th-century French science textbook Les phénomènes de la physique. Wellcome Collection. Available as a print and as a face mask benefiting The Nature Conservancy.

Wallace, having lived far past his era’s life expectancy and watched generations claw at the rungs of so-called progress, writes:

One of the most prominent features of our century has been the enormous and continuous growth of wealth, without any corresponding increase in the well-being of the whole people; while there is ample evidence to show that the number of the very poor — of those existing with a minimum of the bare necessaries of life — has enormously increased, and many indications that they constitute a larger proportion of the whole population than… in any earlier period of our history.

Born in an era when there were only a handful of millionaires in the world, he adds:

This increase of individual wealth is most clearly shown by the rise and continuous increase of millionaires, who, by various modes, have succeeded in possessing themselves of vast amounts of riches created by others, thus necessarily impoverishing those who did create it.

[…]

The development of steam navigation, of railroads and telegraphs, of mechanical and chemical science, and the growth of the population, while enormously increasing productive power and the amount of material products — that is, of real wealth — at least ten times faster than the growth of the population, has given that enormous increase almost wholly to one class, comprising the landlords and capitalists, leaving the actual producers of it — the industrial workers and inventors — little, if any, better off than before.

Wallace observes that of the thousands of millionaires already in existence, most are in America — “a country having a much larger amount of natural wealth and of human labor to draw upon.” (For a sobering calibration of how this asymmetry has swelled, a century after Wallace’s death there were already tens of millions of millionaires in the world, so many of them in the United States as to dwarf the rest into a statistical irrelevance.) He observes, too, that this leap in income inequality has been paralleled by a doubling of mental illness and suicide in the same time frame — an increase in “the total mass of misery and want” that has far outpaced population growth.

Art by Sir Quentin Blake from Michael Rosen’s Sad Book

More than half a century before Rachel Carson admonished that those atop the capitalist pyramid of extraction and exploitation maintained their position of power by feeding the rest of us “little tranquilizing pills of half truth” to conceal the fundamental malady ailing our civilization, Wallace writes:

This is exactly what we have been doing during the whole century, — applying small plasters to each social ulcer as it became revealed to us — petty palliatives for chronic evils. But ever as one symptom has been got rid of new diseases have appeared, or the old have burst out elsewhere with increased virulence; and
it will certainly be considered one of the most terrible and inexplicable failures of the nineteenth century that, up to its very close, neither legislators nor politicians of either of the great parties that alternately ruled the nation would acknowledge that there could be anything really wrong while wealth increased as it was increasing.

Epochs before humanity became ready to take the reins of its own catastrophic extractionism with actionable ecological resolutions like the Paris Agreement and the Green New Deal, Wallace weighs “the injury done to posterity” — that is, to us — and portends the inevitable end of the greedy industrialism just beginning, in the kiln of which our own modern lives were set into shape:

The struggle for wealth, and its deplorable results [in the human sphere] have been accompanied by a reckless destruction of the stored-up products of nature, which is even more deplorable because more irretrievable. Not only have forest-growths of many hundreds of years been cleared away, often with disastrous consequences, but the whole of the mineral treasures of the earth’s surface, the slow products of long-past eons of time and geological change, have been and are still being exhausted, to an extent never before approached, and probably not equalled in amount during the whole preceding period of human history.

Art by Oliver Jeffers from The Fate of Fausto — a lovely painted fable about the absurdity of greed

At the dawn of the petroleum craze that would soon give rise to Big Oil and the world’s first corporate monopolies, whose magnates would swell the score of millionaires and swell our species’ carbon footprint to a size capable of stomping out all of life on this rocky world, Wallace adds:

In America, and some other countries, an equally wasteful and needless expenditure of petroleum oils and natural gas is going on, resulting in great accumulations of private wealth, but not sensibly ameliorating the condition of the people at large.

[…]

This rush for wealth has led to deterioration of land and of natural beauty, by covering up the surface with refuse heaps, by flooding rich lowlands with the barren mud produced by hydraulic mining; and by the great demand for animal food by the mining populations leading to the destruction of natural pastures.

In a passage that stuns with its tragic timelessness, bellowing down the hallway of time an indictment not only of his century but of every century that has followed it, Wallace writes:

The final and absolute test of good government is the well-being and contentment of the people — not the extent of empire or the abundance of the revenue and the trade.

Wallace questions why, in an era marked by “altogether unprecedented progress in knowledge of the universe and of its complex forces,” marked also by “the application of that knowledge to an infinite variety of purposes,” our knowledge alone has not improved our social harmony and individual wellbeing at a commensurate rate. (A generation before Bertrand Russell — easily the most lucid and luminous mind of his time — located the source of this disconnect in the astute distinction between “power-knowledge” and “love-knowledge,” Wallace writes:

The bounds of human knowledge have been so far extended that new vistas have opened to us in directions where it had been thought that we could never penetrate, and the more we learn the more we seem capable of learning in the ever-widening expanse of the universe… But the more we realize the vast possibilities of human welfare which science has given us, the more we must recognize our total failure to make any adequate use of them. With ample power to supply to the fullest extent necessaries, comforts, and even luxuries for all, and at the same time allow ample leisure for intellectual pleasures and aesthetic enjoyments, we have yet so sinfully mismanaged our social economy as to give unprecedented and injurious luxury to the few, while millions are compelled to suffer a lifelong deficiency of the barest necessaries for a healthy existence. Instead of devoting the highest powers of our greatest men to remedy these evils, we see the governments of the most advanced nations arming their people to the teeth, and expending much of their wealth and all the resources of their science, in preparation for the destruction of life, of property, and of happiness.

And then this stunning prophecy, vindicated by his future that is our history, haunting the unchanged reality of our own present:

When the brightness of future ages shall have dimmed the glamour of our material progress, the judgment of history will surely be that the ethical standard of our rulers was a deplorably low one, and that we were unworthy to possess the great and beneficent powers that science had placed in our hands.

Illustration from Le monde physique. Wellcome Collection. Available as a print and as a face mask benefiting The Nature Conservancy.

And yet Wallace — a man who devoted his long life to science precisely because he believed in its humanistic potential — ends on a note of lucid optimism, to which we are yet to live up:

Although this century has given us so many-examples of failure, it has also given us hope for the future. True humanity, the determination that the crying social evils of our time shall not continue; the certainty that they can be abolished; an unwavering faith in human nature, have never been so strong, so vigorous, so rapidly growing… The people are being educated to understand the real causes of the social evils that now injure all classes alike, and render many of the advances of science curses instead of blessings. An equal rate of such educational progress for another quarter of a century will give them at once the power and the knowledge required to initiate the needed reforms.

The flowing tide is with us. We have great poets, great writers, great thinkers, to cheer and guide us… And as this century has witnessed a material and intellectual advance wholly unprecedented in the history of human progress, so the coming century will reap the full fruition of that advance, in a moral and social upheaval of an equally new and unprecedented kind, and equally great in amount.

While the vector of Wallace’s prophecy was correct, the predicted velocity of progress falls tragically short of reality — instead, the century that followed brought the world’s first two global wars, which hijacked hard-earned scientific knowledge for inhumane ends. It now seems touching, laughable with a bittersweet laugh, that Wallace estimated it would only take another quarter century of intellectual illumination to bend the arc of progress toward universal human flourishing. But wrong as he was about the timeframe, he was unassailably right about the mechanics of change: New world orders only ever come by once new knowledge exposes the corruptions of the existing order, then moral guidance from our poets — in the largest Baldwinian sense of the word — transmutes that knowledge into the wisdom necessary for navigating the inevitable upheavals of change toward new vistas of possibility.

Art by Ryoji Arai from Every Color of Light by Hiroshi Osada — a lyrical Japanese illustrated meditation on change, landscape, and resilience

It might just be that the impossible always takes a little while longer than we wish to give it — and yet give we must, for as Albert Camus so astutely observed in considering what it really means to be a rebel and in solidarity with justice, “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

Vintage Science Face Masks Benefiting the Nature Conservancy