The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

distanced themselves from the rest of nature. Behind fenced pastures, village walls, and, later, gated condominiums,” Nash writes, “it was hard to imagine other living things as brothers or nature as sacred. The remaining hunters and gatherers become ‘savages.’”¹⁶ Europeans were tamed by the social hierarchies of tradition, class, and family. To them, wilderness was something ugly. Americans, by contrast, had a wildness associated with them that came by way of the untamed land.

      The history of the concept of wilderness is one primarily of opposition. The wilderness was considered a place both physically and morally perilous. The opposite of “wilderness” is “paradise,” which is Persian for “luxurious garden” (nature tamed). The Bible is full of references to the wilderness as an accursed place. Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden into a desolate wilderness. Jesus experiences his trials with Satan in the wilderness. This was the attitude of the American pioneers as well. As Nash says, “The pioneers’ situation and attitude prompted them to use military metaphors to discuss the coming of civilization. Countless diaries, addresses, and memorials of the frontier period represented wilderness as an ‘enemy’ which had to be ‘conquered,’ ‘subdued’ and ‘vanquished’ by a ‘pioneer army.’”¹⁷ The commitment of the American pioneers was to convert wilderness into civilization, a paradise.

      Where there are gains, there are also losses. This is part of the wisdom of Nietzsche, that the suppression of some part of our nature can have dire consequences for our natures as a whole. The central trope of American wildness is the wild West. Early on Thoreau recognized the dangers of suppressing our own wildness and of the loss of wilderness. In his essay “Walking,” he writes, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”¹⁸