June 01, 2002
Human beings are by nature restless, and that being so, it is hardly something that can be held against a person. Yet that is just what is happening on an increasing scale today. And the aggression provoked by this existential wanderlust is rapidly gaining ground. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan traces the roots of this migratory tendency which is developing into one of the key problems of globalization.
‘Escapism’ has a somewhat negative meaning in our society and perhaps in all societies. It suggests an inability to face facts – the real world. We speak of escapist literature, for instance, and we tend to judge as escapist places such as mega-shopping malls, fancy resorts, theme parks, or even picture-perfect suburbs. They all lack – in a single word – weight.1
Suspicion of escapism has many causes. The most obvious is that no animal can survive unless it perceives its environment as it really is. Daydreaming or wishful thinking would not answer. The hard facts cannot be made to go away by shutting one’s eyes. But so far as we know, only humans may withdraw, eyes shut, to ponder the nature of a threat rather than confront it directly, muscles tense, eyes open; only they daydream and engage in wishful thinking. Significantly, only humans have culture. By culture I mean not just certain acquired habits, the manufacture and use of certain tools, but a whole world of thought and belief, habits and customs, skills and artifacts. Culture is more closely linked to the human tendency not to face facts, our ability to escape by one means or another, than we are accustomed to believe. Indeed, I should like to add another definition of what it is to be human to the many that already exist: A human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is. Humans not only submit and adapt, as all animals do; they transform in accordance with a preconceived plan. That is, before transforming, they do something extraordinary, namely, ‘see’ what is not there. Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture.
What do the words ‘reality’ and ‘real’ mean? Although philosophers do not find it easy to agree on an answer, ordinary thinking people have little difficulty using these words in everyday talk, often in conjunction with their opposites, ‘fantasy’ and ‘unreal’. Such talk, when looked at closely, shows how the meaning of ‘real’ shifts, even radically, as the context changes. A common meaning draws on the model of animal life. The idea is that animals live in the real world, respond as best they can to outside forces and their own nature, free of unsettling images and aspirations. Humans can approach that state of existence by also living close to nature, curbing the imagination and jettisoning excess cultural baggage. Nature itself is real. It is indubitably real to humans when they feel it as a blast of cold wind, a sudden shower, or the skin rash caused by contact with poison ivy. So another meaning of ‘real’ emerges: the real as impact. It is not just nature; it is whatever in nature or in society imposes itself on a human being or group, doing so either suddenly or as a consistently felt pressure. ‘Reality’ in this sense is intractable, and it is indifferent to the needs and desires of particular individuals and groups. Facing reality, then, implies accepting one’s essential powerlessness, yielding or adjusting to circumambient forces, taking solace in some local pattern or order that one has created and to which one has become habituated. This ‘local pattern or order’ points to another sense of the real: a small and thoroughly humanized world. Far from being shock or impact, the real is the familiar, the predictable, the nurturing and all-enveloping. Home is the prime example. Home is a place to which one is attached by myriad habits of thought and behavior – culturally acquired, of course, yet in time they become so intimately woven into everyday existence that they seem primordial and the essence of one’s being. Moving out of home and the familiar, even when this is voluntary and of short duration, can feel like escapism, sojourn in a fantasy world, less real because less dense and all-encompassing.
Does this conclude the list of commonly accepted meanings of ‘real’? No. For completion, at least one more sense of the word demands to be added. Disconcertingly, it is the opposite of the one I have just given. In this usage, it is daily life, with its messy details and frustrating lack of definition and completion – its many inconclusive moves and projects twisting and turning as in a fitful dream – that is unreal. Real, by contrast, is the well-told story, the clear image, the well-defined architectural space, the sacred ritual, all of which give a heightened sense of self – a feeling of aliveness.
The earth is our home. Trips to the moon, another planet, a distant star, have haunted the human imagination and may even become a commonplace reality one day. But they nevertheless have an aura of fantasy about them. Real life is life on earth; it is here that we have our roots and our being. Geographers study the earth as human habitat or home. Interestingly, they discover that the earth is never quite the home humans want it to be; hence the dreams of flying and of a paradise located elsewhere that are common to many cultures. Most people, when they think of the earth, think not of the entire planet but of a part of it – the part they live in. Wherever they happen to be, provided they have been settled there for some time, they consider home. Yet this is not quite the case either, if only because if it were, there would be no story, no human story, to tell; people, like other animals, will be ‘immersed in nature’, as G. W. F. Hegel put it. It is the restless activity that produces the story line. Human beings have been and continue to be profoundly restless. For one reason or another, they are not content with being where they are. They move, or if they stay in place, they seek to rearrange that place. Migration and the in situ transformation of the environment are two major themes – the two major themes – in human geography. They both reveal a discontent with the status quo, a desire to escape. Geographers have written voluminously on these themes without using ‘escape’ or ‘escapism’ as a guiding concept. What is to be gained by using it now? The gain is that it forces us to reconsider nature and culture, and thereby who we are and what we aspire to, in productive tandem with ‘real and imagined’, ‘reality and fantasy’ – ideas that traditionally are at the core of humanist scholarship and thinking.
Migration is clearly a type of escape. Animals move out when their home ground starts to deteriorate. Humans have done so since the earliest times. To overcome great distance, our remote ancestors must have had not only organizational ability, enormously enhanced by language, but also new technical means at their disposal – seaworthy craft, for example. Such people must have been of lively mind and were, I will assume, quite capable of envisaging ‘greener pastures’ elsewhere and making plans as to how best to reach their destination.2 By the end of the Ice Age, some twelve thousand years ago, human beings had spread into every kind of natural environment, from the Tropics to the Arctic, the major exceptions being ice sheets and the highest mountains.
Much of the human story can be told as one of migration. People move a short distance to a better hunting ground, richer soil, better economic opportunity, greater cultural stimulus. Short-distance movements are likely to be periodic, their paths winding back on themselves with changing circumstance. Over the years such movements become habit, their circuits habitat. Long-distance migrations, by contrast, are likely to be in one direction and permanent. A certain epic grandeur attaches to them, for migrants must be willing to take steps that make life even more difficult than it already is in the hope of future felicity. Before people make a risky move, they must have information about their destination point. What kinds of information are available? To what extent does the need to believe in a better world at the horizon overrule or distort the ‘hard facts’ that people know? Is reality so constraining and unbearable at home that it becomes the seedbed for wild longings and images? And do these images, by virtue of their simplicity and vividness, seem not a dream but more ‘real’ than the familiar world? A great modern epic of migration is the spread of Europeans to the New World. The United States of America proclaims itself a land of immigrants. It would not want to be known as a ‘land of escapists’, yet many did just that: escape from the intolerable conditions of the Old World for the promises of the New.3
Human restlessness finds release in geographical mobility. It also finds release (and relief) in bringing about local change. The circumstance one wishes to change – to escape from – can be social, political, or economic; it can be a run-down urban neighborhood or a ravaged countryside. And it can be nature. In telling a human story, we may start at any point in time, but if we go back far enough we necessarily have nature, untouched nature, as stage: first the swamp, forest, bush, or desert, then . . . then what? Then humans enter, and our story begins.
In the long run, humans everywhere experience, if not forthrightly recognize, nature as home and tomb, Eden and jungle, mother and ogre, a responsive ‘thou’ and an indifferent ‘it’. Our attitude to nature was and is understandably ambivalent. Culture reflects this ambivalence; it compensates for nature’s defects yet fears the consequences of overcompensation. A major defect is nature’s undependability and violence. The familiar story of people altering nature can thus be understood as their effort to distance themselves from it by establishing a mediating, more constant world of their own making. The story has many versions. Almost all are anguish-ridden, especially early on, when pioneers had to battle nature for a precarious toehold.4
A natural environment can itself seem both nourishing and stable to its human habitants. A tropical forest, for example, provides for the modest needs of hunter-gatherers throughout the year, year after year. However, once a people start to change the forest, even if it is only the making of a modest clearing for crops and a village, the forest can seem to turn into a malevolent force that relentlessly threatens to move in and take over the cleared space.5 Some such experience of harassment is known to villagers all over the world, though perhaps not to the same degree as in the humid Tropics. Villagers are therefore inclined to see nature in a suspicious light. Of course they know that it provides for their needs and are grateful – a gratitude expressed by gestures and stories of respect. But they also know from hard experience that nature provides grudgingly, and that from time to time it acts with the utmost indifference to human works and lives.
Escape from nature’s vagaries and violence – except during a blizzard or hurricane – may seem a strange idea to modern Westerners, for whom society rather than nature is unpredictable and violent. How short is their memory! Any full account of life and livelihood in the West from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century must give a prominent role to weather – that is, if we are more interested in ordinary people than in potentates and their political high jinks. So much misery had its immediate cause in meteorological freakishness. Too much rain or too little, prolonged cold or withering heat, led to crop failure and, all too often – at least locally – to famine and starvation.
I have given a brief and sweeping account of ‘escape from nature’, which has taken us from uncertain yields in village clearings to supermarket cornucopia. The escape is made possible by different kinds of power: the power of humans working cooperatively and deliberatively together, the power of technology, and, underlying them, the power of images and ideas. The realities thus created do not, however, necessarily produce contentment. They may, on the contrary, generate frustration and restlessness. Again people seek to escape – this time ‘back to nature’. Escaping or returning to nature is a well-worn theme. I mention it to provide a counterpoint to the story of escaping from nature, but also to draw attention to certain facets of the ‘back to nature’ sentiment that have not yet entered the common lore. One is the antiquity of this sentiment. A yearning for the natural and the wild goes back almost to the beginning of city building in ancient Sumer. A hint of it can already be found in the epic of Gilgamesh, which tells of the natural man Enkidu, who was seduced by gradual steps to embrace the refinements of civilization, only to regret on his deathbed what he had left behind: a free life cavorting with gazelles.6
The second point I wish to underline is this: Although a warm sentiment for nature is common among urban sophisticates, as we know from well-documented European and East Asian history, it is not confined to them. The extreme artificiality of a built environment is not itself an essential cause or inducement. Consider the Lele of Kasai in tropical Africa. They do not have cities, yet they know what it is like to yearn for nature. What they wish to escape from is the modestly humanized landscape they have made from the savanna next to the Kasai River, for to keep everything there in good order – from social relations to huts and groundnut plots – they must be constantly vigilant, and that proves burdensome. To find relief, the Lele men periodically leave behind the glare and heat of the savanna, with its interminable chores and obligations, to plunge into the dark, cool, and nurturing rain forest on the other side of the river, which to them is the source of all good things, a gift of God.7
The third point is that ‘back to nature’ varies enormously in scale. At one end of the scale are such familiar and minor undertakings as the weekend camping trip to the forest and, more permanently, the return to a rural commune way of life. At the other end of the scale is the European settlement of North America itself. It too might be considered a type of ‘escape to nature’. Old Europe was the city; the New World was nature. True, many settlers came from Europe’s rural towns and villages rather than from its large cities. Nevertheless, they were escaping from a reality that seemed too firmly set and densely packed to the spaces and simpler ways of life in the New World.8 My final point is this: Back-to-nature movements at all scales, including the epic scale of transatlantic migration, have seldom resulted in the abandonment, or even serious depletion, of populations in the home bases – the major cities and metropolitan fields, which over time have continued to gain inhabitants and to further distance themselves from nature.
This last point serves to remind us that ‘escape to nature’ is dependent on ‘escape from nature’. The latter is primary and inexorable. It is so because pressures of population and social constraint must build up first before the desire to escape from them can arise; and I have already urged that these pressures are themselves a consequence of culture – of our desire and ability to escape from nature. ‘Escape from nature’ is primary for another reason, namely, that the nature one escapes to, because it is the target of desire rather than a vague ‘out there’ to which one is unhappily thrust, must have been culturally delineated and endowed with value. What we wish to escape to is not ‘nature’ but an alluring conception of it, and this conception is necessarily a product of a people’s experience and history – their culture. Paradoxical as it may sound, ‘escape to nature’ is a cultural undertaking, a covered-up attempt to ‘escape from nature’.
I began by noting that escapism has a somewhat negative meaning because of the common notion that what one escapes from is reality and what one escapes to is fantasy. People say, ‘I am fed up with snow and slush and the hassles of my job, so I am going to Hawaii’. Hawaii here stands for paradise and hence the unreal. In place of Hawaii, one can substitute any number of other things: from a good book and the movies to a tastefully decorated shopping mall and Disneyland, from a spell in the suburbs or the countryside to a weekend at a first-rate hotel in Manhattan or Paris. In other societies and times, the escape might be to a storyteller’s world, a communal feast, a village fair, a ritual.9 What one escapes to is culture – not culture that has become daily life, not culture as a dense and inchoate environment and way of coping, but culture that exhibits lucidity, a quality that often comes out of a process of simplification. Lucidity, I maintain, is almost always desirable. About simplification, however, one can feel ambivalent. If, for example, a people’s experience of a place or event is one of simplification, they may soon feel bored and dismiss it – in retrospect, if not at that time – as a thinly constructed fantasy of no lasting significance. Escape into it from time to time, though understandable, is suspect. If, however, their experience has more the feel of clarity than of simplification, they may well regard it as an encounter with the real. Escape into a good book is escape into the real, as the late French president François Mitterrand insisted. Participation in a ritual is participation in something serious and real; it is escape from the banality and opaqueness of life into an event that clarifies life and yet preserves a sense of mystery.10
Between the big artificial city at one extreme and wild nature at the other, humans have created ‘middle landscapes’ that, at various times and in different parts of the world, have been acclaimed the model human habitat. They are, of course, all works of culture, but not conspicuously or arrogantly so. They show how humans can escape nature’s rawness without moving so far from it as to appear to deny roots in the organic world.11 The middle landscape also earns laurels because it can seem more real – more what life is or ought to be like – compared with the extremes of nature and city. Historically, however, the middle landscape has its problems serving as ideal habitat. One problem is that it is not one, but many. Many kinds of landscape qualify as ‘middle’ – for example, farmland, suburbia, garden city and garden, model town, and theme parks that emphasize the good life. They all distance themselves from wild nature and the big city but otherwise have different values. The second problem is that the middle landscape, whatever the kind, proves unstable. It reverts to nature, or, more often, it moves step by step toward the artifices of the city even as it strives to maintain its position in the middle. Of the different kinds of middle landscape, the most important by far, economically, is the land given over to agriculture. People who live on and off the land are rooted in place. Peasant farmers all over the world – the mass of human population until well into the twentieth century – live, work and die in the confines of their village and its adjoining fields. So the label ‘escapist’ has the least application to them. Indeed, they and their way of life can so blend into nature that to visitors from the city they are nature – elements of a natural scene. That merging into nature is enhanced by another common perception of peasant life: its quality of ‘timelessness’. Culture there is visibly a conservative force. To locals and outsiders alike, its past as a succession of goals, repeatedly met or – for lack of power – renounced, is lost to consciousness. Yet farmers, like everybody else, make improvements whenever they can and with whatever means they have. Their culture has taken cumulative steps forward, though these are normally too gradual to be noticed. Of course, one can find exceptions in the better endowed and politically more sophisticated parts of the world – Western Europe in the eighteenth century, for example. There, science in the broad sense of the systematic application of useful knowledge enabled agriculture to move from triumph to triumph in the next two hundred years, with far-ranging consequences, including one of psychological unease. An ‘unbearable lightness of being’ was eventually to insinuate itself into the one area of human activity where people have felt – and many still feel – that they ought to be more bound than free. Nostalgia for traditional ways of making a living on the family farm is at least in part a wish to regain a sense of weight and necessity, of being subjected to demands of nature that allow little or no room for fanciful choice.
The garden is another middle landscape between wild nature and the city. Although the word evokes the natural, the garden itself is manifestly an artifact. In China one speaks of ‘building’ a garden, whereas in Europe one may speak of ‘planting’ a garden. The difference suggests that the Chinese, unlike Europeans, are more ready to admit the garden’s artifactual character. Because artifice connotes civilization to the Chinese elite, it doesn’t have quite the negative meaning it has for Europeans brought up on stories of prelapsarian Eden and on Romantic conceptions of nature. European gardens were originally planted to meet certain basic needs around the house: food, medicinal herbs, and suchlike. In early medieval times they were an indiscriminate mixture of the useful and the beautiful, as much horticulture as art. Progressively, however, the gardens of the potentates moved in the direction of aesthetics and architecture. From the sixteenth century onward, first in Renaissance Italy, then in Baroque France, gardens were proudly built to project an air of power and artifice.
A striking example of the pleasure garden in our century is the Disney theme park – a unique American creation that, thanks to modern technology, is able to produce wonder and illusion far beyond that which could be achieved in earlier times. Unique too is the theme park’s erasure of the present in favor of not only a mythic past but also a starry future – in favor, moreover, of a frankly designed Fantasyland peopled by characters from fairy tales and from Disney’s own fertile imagination. What is more escapist than that? In the spectrum of middle landscapes, a countryside of villages and fields stands at the opposite pole to a Disney park. The one lies closest to nature; the other is as far removed from it as possible without becoming ‘city’.12 Disney’s carefully designed and controlled world has often been criticized for encouraging a childish and irresponsible frame of mind. But again my question is, What if culture is, in a fundamental sense, a mechanism of escape? To see culture as escape or escapism is to share a disposition common to all who have had some experience in exercising power – a disposition that is unwilling to accept ‘what is the case’ (reality) when it seems to them unjust or too severely constraining. Of course, their efforts at escaping, whether purely in imagination or by taking tangible steps, may fail – may end in disaster for themselves, for other people, for nature. The human species uniquely confronts the dilemma of a powerful imagination that, while it makes escape to a better life possible, also makes possible lies and deception, solipsistic fantasy, madness, unspeakable cruelty, violence, and destructiveness – evil.
Yi-Fu Tuan is an emeritus professor of geography. His last academic post before retiring in 1998 was professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
1. This text was adapted for Archis from: Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism, Baltimore/London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1998.
2. Christopher Stinger, Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals: Solving the Puzzle of Human Origins, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1993.
3. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1970.
4. ‘Every beginning is difficult’, says Goethe. An Australian historian applies this dictum to his own country: ‘In Australia, every beginning has not only been difficult, but scarred with human agony and squalor.’ In: C.M.H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, 1851-1900, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, p. 94. for a grim account of frontier life in the United States, see Everett Dick, The Lure of the Land: A Social History of the Public Lands from the Articles of Confederation to the New Deal, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1970.
5. Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants, London, Eyre and Spottiswode, 1965, pp. 20-21.
6. N.K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Harmondsworth (Middlesex), Penguin, 1964 pp. 30-31.
7. Mary Douglas, ‘The Lele of Kansai’, in: Daryll Forde (ed.), African Worlds, London, Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 1-26.
8. Robert C. Ostergren, A Community Transplanted. The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
9. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1969.
22. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion, New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1961.
10. ‘Middle landscape’ is an eighteenth-century idea that became a powerful tool for understanding the people–environment relationship in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to Leo Marx. See his The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 100-103.
11. Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Gardens of Power and Caprice’. in: Dominance and Affection. The Making of Pets, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984, pp. 18-36.
12. John M. Findlay, ‘Disneyland: The Happiest Place on Earth’, in: Magic Lands. Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 56-116.