What Alone Teaches Us About Living in Accord with Nature

It is a peculiar feature of reality television that it is premised on unreality. The Bachelor, one of the longest-running and highest-rated reality TV shows, is illustrative. Season 1 proclaimed the supposed telos of the show: “One lucky man and 25 women are given a rare opportunity to find true love.” Viewers are asked to believe that a woman could build the sort of intimacy and trust with a man that would lead to marriage, while knowing that he is simultaneously dating several other beautiful women. Of course, such a thing is impossible in the real world, as any guy who has mentioned on a first date that he is also dating twenty-four other beautiful women could attest. Unsurprisingly, a dismal 20 percent of couples have stayed together. After factoring in each contestant’s one in twenty-five chance to “win,” the probability of any particular contestant finding true love is infinitesimal. Contestants are much more likely to be mere pawns in a quasi-scripted drama “produced” by the showrunners, spectacularly spoofed in the dramedy Unreal.

In short, The Bachelor exemplifies a truth about much of reality TV: it is a spectacle precisely because the contestants labor so mightily against the grain of reality.

And so it was with more than a bit of skepticism about “reality TV” that my children and I started watching The History Channel’s reality show Alone, which recently aired its eleventh season finale. To my surprise, I found that it is a very interesting study of the real. Or, to put it another way, a study of what it means to live “in accord with nature.”

Whether it is the “progressive” who decries the capitalistic destruction of the planet, the “conservative” who decries the transhumanist destruction of man, or the “moderate” who merely wants a label telling him where and how his food was grown, there seems to be a broad feeling that late modern human beings are somehow living “unnaturally.” What does it mean to live “in accord with” nature? The uncertainty as to the answer lies at the heart of the predicament of late modern man and the show Alone, which tests contestants’ survival skills. Before elaborating on the premise of Alone and reflecting upon it, it is worth recounting some of the philosophical roots of the late modern predicament.

Liberal modernity can be traced to the fractured synthesis between nature and grace. Whereas the scholastics believed in a teleological account of nature that included a “natural” striving of man for flourishing and ultimate beatitude that virtue and grace directed and perfected, the seeds of modernity were sown by voluntaristic theologians who emphasized the alienness of grace to depraved nature. What had been an expression of God’s love, wisdom, and goodness to restore an essentially good (but broken) creature with an inner integrity of its own – by virtue of its substantial form, which specifies its kind or “nature” – now increasingly became an inscrutable act of God’s radically omnipotent will to make or unmake as he saw fit.

By the time voluntarist Thomas Hobbes was arguing that the ungraced natural condition was one of horrifying violence – “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – Europe had been torn asunder by a crisis of faith in the capacity of grace to heal nature and the Church to unite civil society. While Hobbes arguably retained a role for grace, it became subordinate to the artifices of society and government and the will of the sovereign, which were necessary to tame the human beast. For Hobbes, reason practically was identified with artifice, with the constructive capacities of the mind and will instrumentalized toward the end of “comfortable self-preservation.”

Meanwhile, Hobbes’s contemporary Francis Bacon had expanded the devaluation of “untouched” nature to science. The scientist replaced the priest and promised not the joys of the next life but the comforts of this one, the “relief of man’s estate.” Such a power lay not in consecrating and conferring sacraments, but in discovering and applying the hidden scientific laws of nature, which could only be revealed by the force of empirical experimentation, “as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.”

This sort of thinking informed a technocratic conception of man’s relationship to nature. To live in accord with nature was to be its conqueror, torturer, and manipulator. Only then would the inherently worthless, material stuff of nature acquire value in light of man’s goal of comfortable self-preservation. Thus, John Locke suggested that land in the state of nature was considered waste until the technological prowess of modern man was brought to bear upon it.

But this adversarial conception of man and nature generated a romantic backlash from thinkers like Rousseau and the American transcendentalists.

Rousseau romanticized about prehistoric man as a blissful brute living a mostly solitary life and enjoying the abundant fruits of nature. For Rousseau it was the introduction of artifices like property and its attendant social structures that led to the technological fall of man and the resulting evils of inequality. Meanwhile, since grace had long since been jettisoned as the restorative principle of man, Rousseau looked elsewhere. Since man was a product of history, Rousseau doubted that he could turn back the clock to pure nature. Among the possibilities he posited, the closest to the truth was the family, hearth, and home, which he praised as a refuge from the storms of “impetuous passions” that fuel a society driven by amour-propre, the form of self-love intrinsically tied to the desire for others’ approval.

In a more individualistic and hopeful Rousseauian vein, Henry David Thoreau argued that alienated modern man could find healing in untamed nature, alone in the woods. Thoreau’s Walden is a paean to the intrinsic value of nature to restore man to well-being by becoming its pupil. Accordingly, Thoreau explicitly rejected the idea that a transcendent God was man’s end. Rather, he affirmed a kind of pantheism. In his words, his goal was “to be always on the alert to find God in nature.”

One can thus trace a story of the displaced God whose creation was inherently “good” but in need of redemptive grace, to displaced nature, which was inherently bad but redeemed by a divinized creator-man whose will and artifice were good, to displaced artifice, which corrupted and alienated man, who could only be redeemed by divinized nature.

Another way to put the predicament of late modern man: shall God, man, artifice (technology), or nature be our god?

The premise of Alone is simple: ten contestants are dropped off in a remote wild location near fresh water and natural resources of flora and fauna. Typically, they begin at the end of autumn in a location with harsh winters, such as near the Arctic Circle. In addition to a set of cameras, a couple of sets of clothes, and bear horn/spray, they are permitted to bring ten of forty permitted survival items. Commonly chosen items include a ferro rod, multitool, hatchet, bow and arrow, paracord, and fishing hooks. Each person has a geo-locator button he or she can press at any time to “tap out,” and call for evacuation. The last person standing takes home half a million dollars.

Each episode of Alone opens with a quote from a more-or-less famous author. The showrunners draw from a smorgasbord of writers, but there are several quotes from luminaries of Western literature, philosophy, and statesmanship, including Virgil, Lincoln, Nietzsche, Winston Churchill, and Flannery O’Connor. The opening quote of the Alone series seems to throw its lot in with Thoreau’s prescription for late modern man: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . . and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”

But, as many contestants come to find out, nature’s lessons point us back to what the older Christian natural law tradition regarded as essential or natural human inclinations toward, family, friendship, and God, as well as that older conception’s view of nature as good but broken, and in need of God’s grace.

Of course, various unrealities of the show’s premise are apparent. Participants are cut off from all technology – except that which is necessary to document their adventures and call for help. And contestants are cut off from all human contact, except for periodic checks by a medical team, who can force a medical tap out if their body weight drops too low.

Still, the purpose of the setup is to largely remove the artifices late modern man has placed between himself and the real – namely, nature, God, and the voice of conscience. From the inception of the show, the contestants themselves have attested to this fact. As one season 1 contestant put it, when you go into the woods and strip everything away, “That’s where we get in touch with creation, Creator, self . . . it gets pretty real.”

Contestants battle a range of material foes: hunger, the elements, threatening and thieving critters. But humans are more than merely material beings. We are spiritual animals, and the most profound afflictions contestants experience are psychological and spiritual: the sorrow of loneliness, the pain of guilt and shame for past mistakes, the temptation to despair.

As Robert Cardinal Sarah has argued, modern technology-saturated life is loud. The power of silence consists in part in listening to what God has to say, interiorly. One contestant in season 11 articulates the power of silence this way: “Thoughts out here will tear up your mind ‘cause it’s so quiet out here. And so I’m wrestling with those. And I’m trying to put those thoughts in the background. But at the end of the day, that’s tough. No one around to hear me . . . except God and the wilderness.”

The winner of season 1 poignantly illustrated the spiritual battle that comes with solitude and silence:

Like every other person out there that’s honest with themselves, I have my regrets. I’ve made my mistakes, and some of them are very painful, very hard to look at, very hard to relive. But when you’ve come out here in the wild, you have no choice. . . . They will come bubbling up to the surface. There’s no suppressing them. They will come to the fore, and you have to meet them. You have to own them. My relationship with my son is one of my things I wish I could better, and time’s not over with. God’s still merciful.

Very often contestants find the strength to endure in dutiful love of family and love of God. Facing temptation to tap out, the second season champion reflected how, due to financial hardship, he always had to say no to his children when they asked for things. For their sake, “whatever it is, I have to figure it out . . . I have to finish this. . . . Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”

Not all contestants think this way. Some contestants opt for a sort of pantheism, a belief that nature is God. Language about “the land providing” if you “listen” to it – as if nature itself were a personal entity who can bestow blessings – and locutions like “thank you for your life, fish,” (instead of “thank you, God, for this fish”), can be seen as the neo-pagan refrains of the neo-Thoreauian. One contestant even proudly hails from a pagan rock band. But, these contestants’ experiences betray unexpected truths. Often, they tap out precisely because the solitude of nature is unbearable. Has nature turned out to be a cruel god, as all false idols must? Is it that, sans communion with the one true God, solitude to them is even more acutely unbearable than contestants who have some refuge in their relationship with the Lord?

Even those most hardened by the bush express the deeply human longing for friendship and family. In the most recent season, one contestant proudly channels the Thoreauian virtues of solitude for much of the season. He is an excellent fisherman, and outlasts most other contestants. But as the days wear on, he reflects: “I’m slowly, I guess, realizing that nothing means anything when it’s all by yourself. It only means anything worthwhile when you’re experiencing it with another person. . . . And you know what would feel frickin’ good right now? Is to have a half million bucks and to go home and have a wife and start a family.”

So Alone’s premise of solo primitive survival turns out to require its contestants to labor against reality, the reality that we are deeply social creatures. And yet this very exercise somehow reattunes the contestants to that reality – including the reality that marriage and family are intrinsic goods to which material wealth is merely an instrumental good. And sometimes, by laboring unnaturally alone in nature, contestants are reattuned to the very ground of reality: Being itself. When another season 11 contestant was facing extreme sorrow, he prayed:

When I struggle, I really need to feed the soul with Psalm 27. ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked and my enemies and my foes come upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear. Though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident. One thing have I desired from the Lord, that will I seek after.’

While Alone unveils ethical and theological truths, I would be remiss if I didn’t share another way it has enriched my family. We have learned how much wisdom premodern peoples possessed, and how fun and rewarding it can be to learn about and even recover primitive skills. My kids have loved learning about bow hunting, various fishing methods, field dressing, and building fires. But the skill of primitive shelter construction stands out. In season 8, one of our favorite contestants, an academic archaeologist, built an ancient pit house – a shelter made by digging into the ground – which can keep a constant heat in frigid environments. My daughters were so inspired by her feat that they dug out and built their own pit house in the forest behind our home that they use as a fort.

Each season finale features one of the very best scenes you’ll find in all television history. The winner believes he is undergoing a routine health check when a loved one (often his spouse) sneaks up and surprises him from behind. One cannot script the unfailingly rapturous reunion with one’s beloved and the tears of joy that are shared by the audience.

At its best, Alone teaches us that, while modern artifice and techne have often disrupted an integral relationship between man and nature, man and man, and man and God, it is natural to live in community with other human beings and, indeed, with the kingdom of heaven. To live “in accord with nature,” doesn’t mean we all need to go live alone in the woods, even if that could be something healthy and invigorating for a short period of time. The need is to recover friendship, family, and community in a way that is simpler, more attentive to ancient wisdom, less technologically obsessed and driven, with more time spent outdoors, in better harmony with our natural environment, and in a way which is open to nature being perfected by grace, the gift by which we achieve that which is most radically natural to man: friendship with God.