Moby-Dick is arguably the great American novel because in its closely observed soundings of Ahab’s archetypal wounds; in the overt symbolism of the ship as hunting party, abattoir and roving industrial juggernaut; in the polyglot confederation of its crew and in its absence of women, we encounter a faceted critique of America as we moved rapidly from an agrarian, mercantile republic to a globe girdling industrial empire. Closely observed process often serves as metaphor or prophecy. While Melville’s masterwork was not well received in his lifetime, later generations of readers and critics have rightly ascribed to it a prescience as the nation has lurched from one willfully self-inflicted crisis to another.

Harvesting blubber for lamp oil and lubricant, a quintessential early to mid 19th century enterprise, brought whales to the brink of extinction, just as other forms of industrialized acquisition and harvest doomed myriad other species and peoples.  Melville’s modeling of the rapidly expanding domains and purposes of the American experiment illustrated the cost of our “red in tooth and claw” natures and the dangers of belief systems and egoism due to their disconnection from both reality and empathy.

The expansion phases of large scale human endeavor typically come at such a gruesome price that the costs are at once denied and lionized as virtue: having been in the ascendant, and believing God has chosen us as exceptional, many Americans enjoy a comforting romantic self-regard. Polemicists and apologists treat early phases of empire or nation building as heroic.  Conservatives, mistakenly thinking that history repeats itself (when, as has been said, it merely rhymes) hark back to the formative days and prescribe its simplicity, generative beliefs, ambitions and organized criminality as formulas for regeneration. Liberals, with their tendency to compromise, would encourage the substitution of benign ambition for blind.  Starbuck attempted consensus building to change to a sustainable course, but Ahab’s grievance-fueled theatrics and fire-eating woo woo won the crew.

We Americans have always had a penchant for projecting grievances, real and imagined, onto the victims of our aggression. We’ve bred generations of nationalist, racist and nativist elixir salesmen.  Genocidal celebrity G.A. Custer might even have become president if his cartoonish vanity had not brought him up against injured forces of nature who, like the white whale or the Lakota Sioux, weren’t having it –at least not on that day.  Americans, most of whom supported the genocide, would have eventually rewarded Custer’s narcissistic swagger had he only listened to his scouts’ intelligence, and saved himself for even greater glory. Pragmatism is not our strong suit. Likewise the Pequod’s crew would have lived to reunite with their families if Ahab had listened to the pragmatic Starbuck, or perhaps more to the point, had Starbuck succeeded in convincing them to overthrow Ahab. It’s not so easy to overthrow the nation building habit of bloody-mindedness.

Moby-Dick is a cautionary tale about America. The self-interested Ahabs of the present scoff at sustainability, liberty, justice and tolerance, react against understanding the systems that sustain us, and promulgate permanent war. Clearly it would be an acquired taste, but we need to awaken an appetite for pragmatism that calculates the interrelationships we depend upon in our brutalized global village.  Now that crowdsourcing capabilities and research allow for unprecedented insights and effectiveness, our societal capacity for sustainable solutions, too often swamped in a self-protective reactionary undertow, seem to be evading us at a particularly crucial moment.

While Nature herself often seems to generate chaos and wretched excess in the short run, in the larger view she has systems management to attend to.  And so do we.  If we don’t chart a more sustainable course, in the future it will not be written that we had a knack for survival.

Just ask Ishmael.