The grizzly truth about the West We have forgotten the basic principles of civilisation

Witnessing the ongoing collapse of the American polity, one tries to find words for what is happening. The catastrophic error of our time goes beyond nasty political partisanship, and is not confined to our shores. It is easily described, but almost impossible to fix. Put simply, we’ve forgotten what civilisation is, and who we are without its distinctions and proscriptions: wild and vicious animals.

Nothing captures our terrible obliviousness better than Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell, the film’s subject, spent 13 summers living among the bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Treadwell is a characteristically postmodern man. His is a story of self-promotion and heartfelt, boundless imitation; as one man tells Herzog: “He tried to be a bear” An actor who took to alcohol and drugs after he lost a leading role on the sitcom Cheers, Treadwell starred in his own production while in the wilderness. In almost 100 hours of footage, he presented himself as the heroic protector of his grizzly “friends” against the (mostly imagined) threat of poachers. His sincere and passionate devotion to the bears landed him on the Discovery Channel and the Late Show with David Letterman.

So compelling was Treadwell’s long-running drama that the ending wrote itself. One wind-whipped October night in 2003, battened down at their campsite against the storm, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by an ursine stranger, a hungry interloper from the park’s interior. That bear was later shot, and his corpse was eaten by other bears. (Cannibalism is a common practice among grizzlies, who will eat their cubs when other sources of food dry up.) Having failed at comedy and achieved modest success in action-adventure, Treadwell is remembered almost entirely for his role as the tragic protagonist of Herzog’s documentary.

Treadwell, Herzog says in the course of his film, died “fighting civilisation itself” — something many people are now doing in many different ways, all of which involve transgressing what used to be cultural red lines. Their error, like his, is one of egoistic projection, in which the laziness of beautiful, self-promoting wishes substitutes for concentrated thought about hard truths. Herzog observes that Treadwell believed he and the grizzlies, apex predators that bring down moose and elk, “would bond as children of the universe”. Mistaking the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness for a paradise of natural goodness and concord, he allowed a quasi-religious fantasy to obscure a harsh reality. “[He] reached out seeking a primordial encounter,” Herzog says, “but in doing so he crossed an invisible borderline.” Others in Grizzly Man echo this assessment. A helicopter pilot who helped to recover Treadwell’s remains thinks he acted “like he was working with people wearing bear costumes”, while a curator of the Alutiiq Museum remarks that he “crossed a boundary [between man and bear] that we [the Alutiiq] have lived with for 7,000 years”.

Herzog himself displays what it means to be civilised in filming Grizzly Man, discreetly suppressing an audio recording of the fatal attack and refusing to air Treadwell’s obscene rant against named employees of the Park Service — “a line… which we will not cross”. He blames Treadwell’s death on his “sentimentalised view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and in harmony”. In the blank eyes of a grizzly that Treadwell captured on video just days before his death — possibly the very one that killed him and his girlfriend — Herzog sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature”. What is more, he remarks, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder”. Herzog seems to be describing not just nature but human nature, whose ferocious depths are easily forgotten in times of prosperity and stability.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. In the foundational mythology of the Greek poet Hesiod, all things, starting with Earth and Heaven, emerged from Chaos. But while you can take human beings out of chaos, you can’t take chaos out of human beings. Greek tragedy was from the beginning obsessed with the problem of how to keep civilisation from collapsing into the primordial disorder from which it emerged. Everything turned on the maintenance of basic distinctions that opened the space of civilisation in which human life was possible. This space was defined by a matrix of oppositions: citizen vs. foreigner, adult vs. child, man vs. woman, Greek vs. barbarian, animal vs. human being vs. god. Greek tragedy and comedy dramatically displayed the breakdown of these distinctions, with results that were either horrific and pitiable or simply ludicrous.

The earliest tragedies, from the late 6th century BC, told the story of how the cult of Dionysus, a god closely associated with nature, came from Asia to conquer the Greek cities. Euripides’s Bacchae, one of the last great tragedies, covered the same ground. In the Bacchae, Dionysus avenges himself on the rulers of his native city of Thebes, who deny his divinity. In doing so, he lives up to his reputation of being the absolute Other, a paradoxical god who scrambles all that should be separated and defies the laws of logic. An immortal who appears in the disguise of a young man, Dionysus is, in effect, a grizzly bear in human costume. He is ambiguously masculine and effeminate, Theban and foreign, Greek and barbarian, tame and wild. Present everywhere yet nowhere, he is sober, cruel, and, like nature itself, “most terrible, yet most gentle, to mankind”. By the end of the play, the complete collapse of the civilisational matrix is visible onstage, where a palace lies in ruins and the mother of young King Pentheus cradles his decapitated head.

The Bacchae exposes the darkest depths of the human psyche, where tenderness is inseparable from viciousness. For it is the Theban women, led by Pentheus’s mother, who tear him limb from limb. They do this not as Bacchants, peaceful celebrants of Dionysus who had earlier “nestled gazelles and young wolves in their arms, / suckling them” on a wild mountainside, but as Maenads (from the Greek mania): furious destroyers of human worlds. And the play’s true horror derives from the women’s instantaneous transition between these two seemingly opposed modes of being, one Edenic and pastoral, the other homicidally insane.

Grizzly Man is in essential respects a postmodern reprise of the Bacchae. In one scene, a seaplane pilot remembers the horror that awaited him when he arrived to fly Treadwell and Huguenard out of the wilderness. As a thick swarm of flies and mosquitoes buzz around him, the pilot recalls finding “what was left of Tim’s body, his head, and a little bit of backbone attached, and we found a hand, arm, wristwatch still attached”. Treadwell’s grisly end makes his very name sound like a warning. One is reminded of Pentheus’s murder, when crazed females shout in triumph while he shrieks in terror. “One tore off an arm, / another a foot still warm in its shoe.” This, Euripides suggests, is what happens when fundamental differences are erased and clear thinking gives way to labile sentiment and emotion.

Dionysus is the god of wine and intoxication. A modern-dress production of the Bacchae might make him a grungy, long-haired, androgynous hippie from the Sixties, wearing bell-bottom jeans and an army jacket with a painted peace symbol, handing out psychedelic drugs that induce pleasant highs followed by nightmares. The era of communes and “make love, not war”, after all, was also a time of murder and mayhem. Who can forget the Manson Family cult or the wide-eyed lunacy of its leader? Freed from long-standing societal constraints, raw feeling reveals itself to be a heaving sea of chaos.

Yet we are busily wiping away all the boundaries and borders of civilised life in the suicidal pursuit of some ill-defined vision of justice and equity. Gangs of criminals loot stores in major cities with impunity. Illegal immigrants are treated like citizens, and private citizens are surveilled like malicious foreigners. We no longer care to observe the difference between males and females. The new libertinism of drugs, pornography, and electronic amusements frees adults to remain in perpetual childhood, while encouraging children prematurely to abandon their innocence. The family is collapsing because there are too few men willing to protect and nurture it as husbands and fathers, and too few women insisting that they do so. Animal liberation extremists, “furry communities”, trans-, post-, and anti-humanist philosophies, and the relentless advance of AI are progressively effacing the differences between human beings, animals, and machines. Even logic and analytical precision are now attacked as instruments of oppression.

Can we really be surprised that many Americans, frightened and confused by a world turned upside down, have gone mad and are ready to tear apart the body politic? Or that many Westerners, cut adrift from civilisational moorings, support Islamist jihadis who gang-raped Israeli women and played with a breast they’d severed from a victim?

There’s an old joke about a Greek tailor who tells a man trying on trousers, if “Euripides, you buy-a-dees”. This is a humorous way of expressing the tragic wisdom of pathei mathos, “learning by suffering”. Our civilisational clothes are torn, but we lack the knowledge and the energy to mend them. Nor do we have new garments to cover our nakedness. Little wonder that so many of us are reverting to the nasty and brutish condition of nature, and are behaving like wild beasts or psychopathic gods.