In story, man goes into the wilderness, where his savage nature is given free rein. He eats his meat uncooked, drinks directly from streams, is by turns rapacious and murderous. He is isolated, removed from the civilizing influences of communal life. For the Puritans, the wilderness marked God's absence; it was the place of punishment, but also the place of purification. If it wasn't exactly an earthly hell, it was at least an earthly purgatory.
In his classic essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner compares the map of America to a “series of glaciations,” each age leaving behind its sedimentary traces—in this instance, one of regressive civilization. The frontier, he says, is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” which marked a “return to primitive conditions.” Shifting our eyes from west to east over the American continent, we saw the trace of civilization itself: from lawlessness, to the hunter, to the disintegration of savagery by the trader, to the untutored pastoral of the rancher, to the raising of unrotated crops, to the “denser culture of the farm settlement,” to the processors and the manufacturers of the Ohio valley, and finally into the cities of the east. The American frontier, he argued, traces in reverse the movement of humans into cities.
Our language reflects this movement. Civilization is derived from civitas, the city. The wilderness is the realm of the barbarian, red in tooth and claw, marked by savage cruelty. The city is the place where we become cultured, refined, and educated. The wilderness is the place of disorder and reinforces the sense of danger and terror that emanates from disordered souls. But the city is the realm of order. It is where human beings fashion, with intelligence and wit and mutual support, a public life that tames our animal natures. It transforms us from little more than beasts to creatures little lower than angels.
In the first chapter of The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk asserts the preeminence of the human need for order. On the edge of human affairs, on the margins of human striving, lies the “gaping void”—chaos—“that always threatens to swallow us whole.” Keeping ourselves away from it is life. Getting nearer to it is death. These forces of order and chaos are at war within and without ourselves, for “the want of order is the mother of confusion.” We can't avoid the pull of chaos alone. We need the strength of others to resist with us. The city encircles and protects us. Through mutual striving to stem off chaos, human beings create the conditions and the elements of good order.
It is upon the forces of chaos that the spirit of God moves in Genesis 1. The primeval emptiness, the tohu wabohu, is transformed by divine speech, and order emerges. The narrative arc of sacred writ connects human creativity to God's own. Placed in a garden, we end in a city. The wilderness is barren of life. The city is the place of order because it is the place where human beings become most godlike in their creative ventures, procreation foremost among them.
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