To understand the predicament of industrial civilization,
it’s not enough to grasp the outward shape of the crisis of our time: the
looting of a finite planet’s stock of resources, the destabilization of the
global climate, the breathtaking cluelessness with which politicians, pundits,
and ordinary citizens alike insist that the only way we can get out of this
mess involves doing even more of the same things that got us into it in the
first place, and the rest of it. Follow the roots of our predicament down into
the soil that feeds them, and you’ll find yourself in a murky realm of unspoken
narratives and unacknowledged desires—the “mind-forg’d manacles,” as Blake
called them, that keep most of us shackled in place as the great rumbling
vehicle of global industrial society accelerates down the slope of its decline
and fall.
Over the last seven months, I’ve tried to open up the
obscurities of that subterranean realm using the language of religion as a
tool. This is far
from the first time that I’ve discussed the religious dimension of
our blind faith in perpetual progress in these essays, but it’s the first time
I’ve done so at length, and the sheer intensity of the emotions roused on all
sides of the discussion is to my mind a sign of just how important that
dimension has become.
The distinction made in an earlier post between
religions and religious sensibilities is crucial to making sense of
all this. Most discussions of the interfaces between religion, ecology, and the
future have missed this distinction, and focused either on specific religious
traditions or on the vague abstraction of religion as a whole. The resulting debates were not especially
useful to anybody.
A classic example is the furore kickstarted by the 1967
publication of Lynn White’s famous essay “The Historical Roots of Our
Ecological Crisis.” White argued that the rise of Christianity to its dominant
position in the religious life of the western world was an essential
precondition for the environmental crisis of our time. The old polytheist
religions of the west, in his analysis, saw nature as sacred, the abode of a
galaxy of numinous powers that could not be ignored with impunity;
Christianity, by contrast, brought with it an image of the world as a lifeless
mass of matter, an artifact put there by God for the sole benefit of human beings
during the relatively brief period between the creation of the world and the
Second Coming, after which it would be replaced by a new and improved
model. By stripping nature of any
inherent claim to human reverence, he suggested, Christianity made it easier
for post-Christian western humanity to treat the earth as a lump of rock with
no value beyond its use as a source of raw materials or a dumping ground for
waste.
The debate that followed the appearance of White’s paper
followed a trajectory many of my readers will find familiar. Partisans of
White’s view defended it by digging up examples from history in which
Christianity had been used to justify the abuse of nature, and had no trouble
finding a bumper crop of instances. Opponents of White’s view attacked it by
showing that the abuse of nature was not actually justified within a Christian
worldview, and by and large they had no trouble finding a bumper crop of good
theological grounds for their case.
What’s more, both were right. On the one hand, there’s nothing in Christian
theology that requires the abuse of nature, and a very strong case can be made,
from within the context of Christian faith, for the preservation of the
environment as an imperative duty. On the other, over the course of the last
two thousand years, very few Christians anywhere have recognized that duty, and
a great many have used (and continue to use) excuses drawn from their faith to
justify their abuse of the environment.
Factor in the influence of religious sensibilities and the
paradox evaporates. A religious sensibility, again, is not a religion; it’s the
cultural substructure of perceptions, emotions and intuitions that shape the
way religious traditions are understood and practiced within a given culture or
a set of related cultures. The religious sensibility that shaped Christian
attitudes toward nature, and of course a great many other things besides,
wasn’t unique to Christianity in any sense; it had already emerged in the
Mediterranean world long before Jesus of Nazareth was born, and only the fact
that Christianity happened to come out on top in the bitter religious struggles
of the late classical world and suppressed nearly all its rivals gave White’s
condemnation as much plausibility as it had.
As I sit here at my desk, for instance, I’m looking at a
copy of On the Nature of the Universe by Ocellus Lucanus, a
philosophical treatise probably written in the second or third century before
the Common Era. Ocellus, like many of the cutting-edge thinkers of his age,
wanted to challenge the popular notion that the cosmos had a beginning and
might therefore have an end. That was
part of a broader agenda—one that’s left significant traces in many
contemporary currents of thought—that dismissed everything that came into being
and passed away again as illusion, and tried to find a reality outside of the
realm of time and change.
That commitment led to strange convictions. The fourth
chapter of Ocellus’ treatise, for example, is devoted to proving that human
beings ought to have sex. If, as Ocellus argues, the cosmos is eternal, it
needs to remain perpetually stocked with its full complement of living things,
and therefore human beings ought to keep on reproducing themselves—as long as
they don’t enjoy the process, that is. Back of this distinctly odd argument
lies the emergence, then under way, of that strain of thought we now call
puritanism: the conviction that biological pleasures are always suspect, and
can be permitted only when the actions that bring them also have some morally
justifiable purpose.
In the generations following Ocellus’ time, that sort of
thinking became standard in intellectual circles across the Mediterranean
world, in modes ranging from the reasonable to the arguably psychotic. For all
their subsequent reputation, the Stoics were on the mellow end; most Stoic
thinkers classed sex as “indifferent,” meaning that it had no moral character
of its own and could be right or wrong depending on the circumstances
surrounding it. (Stoics criticized adultery, not because it was sex, but
because it was breaking a promise, which they found utterly abhorrent.) The
spectrum ran all the way from there to religious cults that made castration a
sacrament or considered reproduction the most horrible sin of all because it
trapped more souls in the prison of the flesh.
That was the religious sensibility of cutting-edge thinkers
all through the world in which Christianity emerged, and since the new religion
inevitably drew most of its early converts from people who were unsatisfied by
the robust life-affirming traditional faiths the people of that time had
inherited from their far from puritanical ancestors, it’s hardly a surprise
that Christian teachings and institutions ended up absorbing a substantial
helping of the attitudes that arose out of the rising religious sensibility of
the time. Every human cultural phenomenon is complex, contested, and
polyvalent, and the religious landscape of the western world is no exception to
this rule; religious attitudes toward sex in that setting ranged all the way
from the Free Spirit movement in late medieval Europe, which indulged in orgies
as a sign that its members had returned to Eden, all the way to the Skoptsii of
early modern Russia, who castrated themselves as a shortcut to perfect purity.
Still, the average fell further toward the puritanical side of the scale than
even so ascetic a pagan movement as the Stoics found reasonable.
I’ve used sex as an example here, partly because people perk
up their ears whenever it’s mentioned and partly because it’s a good barometer
of attitudes toward the biological side of human existence, but the same point
can be traced much more broadly. White pointed to the sacred groves, outdoor
worship, and ecological taboos of classical Mediterranean pagan religion, and
contrasted this with the relative lack of veneration for natural ecosystems in
Christianity. It’s certainly possible to point to counterexamples, from St.
Francis of Assisi through the Anglican natural theology of the Bridgewater
Treatises to the impressive efforts currently being made by Patriarch
Bartholomew of Constantinople to establish
ecological consciousness throughout the Eastern Orthodox church; the
fact remains that so far these have been the exception rather than the rule.
Given the sensibility in which the Christian church came to maturity, it’s hard
to see how things could have gone any other way.
As the theist religions of the west gave way to civil
religions, in turn, the same patterns held. Once again, that wasn’t true in a
monolithic sense, and the first great wave of civil religion to hit the western
world—the nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries—went the other way,
embracing reverence for nature and the irrational dimensions of life as a
counterpoise to the cosmopolitan rationalism of the age. That’s why the first
verse of “America the Beautiful”—consider the title, to start with—is about the
American land, not its human history or political pretensions. Still, the ease
with which that thinking was dropped by the self-proclaimed patriots of today’s
American pseudoconservatism shows how shallow its roots were in the collective
consciousness of our civilization. Back in the Seventies, you would sometimes
hear that first verse sung in a rather more edgy form:
O ugly now for poisoned skies, for pesticided
grain,
For strip-mined mountains’ travesty above the asphalt plain,
America! America! Man shed his waste on thee,
And milled the pines for billboard signs from sea to oily
sea.
Back in the day, that stung.
Sing it now, when it’s even more true than it was then, and the most
common response you’ll get is blustering about jobs and the onward march of
progress. Other ages have seen the same process at work: it’s when the
balancing act among traditional narratives, mystical experience, and religious
sensibility finally fails, and the theist religions of a civilization’s
childhood and youth give way to the civil religions of its maturity and decay,
that the underlying logic of its religious sensibility gets pushed to the
logical extreme, and appears in its starkest form. In our case, that’s
biophobia: the pervasive fear and hatred of biological existence that forms the
usually unmentioned foundation for so much of contemporary culture.
Does that seem too strong a claim to you, dear reader? I
encourage you to consider your own attitudes toward your own biological life,
that normal and healthy process of ripening toward mortality in which you’re
engaged right now. Life in that sense is
not a nice clean abstract existence It’s
a wet and sloppy reality of blood, mucus, urine, feces, and other sticky
substances, proceeding all the way from the mess in which each of us is born to
the mess in which most of us will die. It’s about change, growth and decay, and
death—especially about death. Death isn’t the opposite of life, any more than
birth is; it’s the natural completion and fulfillment of the process of being
alive, and it’s something that people in a great many other cultures have been
able to meet calmly, even joyfully, as a matter of course. Our terror of death
is a good measure of our terror of life.
It’s an equally good measure of the complexity of religious
sensibilities that some of the most cogent critiques of modern biophobia come
from Christian writers. I’m thinking here especially of C.S. Lewis, who devoted
the best of his adult novels—the space trilogy that includes Out of
the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous
Strength—to tracing out the implications of the religion of progress
that was replacing Christianity in the Britain of his time. Into the mouths of
the staff of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, the villains
of the third book, Lewis put much of the twaddle about limitless progress being
retailed by the scientists of his time.
Why should we put up with having the earth infested with other living
things? Why not make it a nice, clean, sterile planetary machine devoted
entirely to the benefit of human beings—or, rather, that minority of human
beings who are capable of rational cooperation in the grand cause of Man? Once
we outgrow sentimental attachments to lower life forms, outdated quibbles about
the moral treatment of other human beings, and suchlike pointless barriers to
progress, nothing can stop our great leap outward to the stars!
You don’t hear the gospel of progress preached in quite so
unrelenting a form very often these days, but the implications are still there.
Consider the gospel of the Singularity currently being preached by Ray Kurzweil
and his followers. I’ve commented before that Kurzweil’s prophecy is the
fundamentalist Christian myth of the Rapture dolled up unconvincingly in
science fiction drag, but there’s one significant difference. According to
every version of Christian theology I know of, the god who will be directing
the final extravaganza is motivated by compassion and has detailed personal
experience of life in the wet and sticky sense discussed above, while the
hyperintelligent supercomputers that fill the same role in Kurzweil’s mythology
lack these job qualifications.
It’s thus not exactly encouraging that writers on the
Singularity seem remarkably comfortable with the thought that these same
supercomputers might decide to annihilate humanity instead of giving them the
glorified robot bodies of the cyber-blessed in which Kurzweil puts his hope of
salvation. It’s equally unencouraging when these same writers, or others of the
same stripe, say that they don’t care if our species goes extinct so long as
artificial intelligences of our making end up zooming across the cosmos. The same logic lies behind the insistence,
quite common these days in certain circles, that our species can’t possibly
remain “stuck on this rock”—the rock in question being the living Earth—and
that somehow we can only thrive out there in the black and silent void.
I’m pretty sure that this is why the recent film
Gravity has fielded such a flurry of nitpicking from science
writers. What believers in progress hate about Gravity, I
suggest, is not that it takes modest liberties with the details of space
science—show me a science fiction film that doesn’t do so—but that it doesn’t
romanticize space. It reminds its audiences that space isn’t the Atlantic
Ocean, the Wild West, or any of the other models of terrestrial discovery and
colonization that proponents of space travel have tried to map onto it. Space,
not death, is the antithesis of life:
empty, silent, cold, limitless, and as sterile as hard vacuum and hard
radiation can make it. Watching Sandra
Bullock struggling to get back to the only place in the cosmos where human
beings actually belong is a sharp reminder of exactly what lies behind all that
handwaving about “New Worlds for Man.”
Turn from the mythology of progress to the mythology of
apocalypse, the Tweedledoom to Kurzweil’s Tweedledee, and you’re at least as
likely to find biophobia, though these days it often takes an oddly sidelong
form. Consider the passionate insistence, heard with great regularity on one
end of the peak oil scene, that something or other is going to render life on
Earth extinct sometime very soon—the usual date these days, now that 2012 has
passed by without incident, is 2030. A while back, the favored cause of
imminent extinction was runaway climate change; nuclear waste became popular
after that, and most recently the death of the world’s oceans has become a
common justification for the belief. None of these claims are backed by more
than a tiny minority of scientific studies, but I can promise you that if you
point this out, you will face angry accusations of pedaling “hopium.”
The people who spread these claims very often make much of
their love for the Earth, but I have to say I find that insistence a bit
disingenuous. Imagine, dear reader, that one of your loved ones—let’s call her
Aunt Eartha, after one of my favorite jazz singers—has been told by a doctor
that she has inoperable terminal cancer. Being aware that misdiagnosis is
epidemic in today’s American medical industry, she seeks a second opinion, and
you go with her to the hospital. A few hours later, the doctor comes to meet
you in the waiting room, and tells you that he has good news: the first doctor
has made a mistake, and there’s every chance Aunt Eartha still has many healthy
years ahead of her.
Would you be likely to respond to this by becoming furious
with the doctor and insisting that he was peddling hopium? If the doctor
proceeded to show you the test results in detail and demonstrate why Aunt
Eartha was in better shape than you feared, would you then go on to insist that
if she wasn’t about to die of cancer, she was bound to die soon from diabetes,
and when the tests didn’t bear this out either, would you start insisting that
she must have severe heart disease? And if you did so, would the doctor perhaps
be justified in wondering just how deep your professed love for Aunt Eartha
actually went?
Mind you, those who talk about hopium have a point; the
popular faith-based response to the crisis of our time that relies on the
sacred words “I’m sure they’ll think of something” is a drug of sorts. Still,
it bears remembering that the opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad
idea, and hopium isn’t the only drug on the market just now; another is the
equally deliberate and equally faith-based cultivation of despair. By analogy,
we may as well call this “despairoin;” just as opium can be purified of the
natural phytochemicals that make it hallucinatory and refined into heroin,
hopium can be stripped of the hallucinatory fantasies of a bright new future,
refined into despairoin, and peddled to addicts on the mean streets of the
industrial world’s collective imagination.
I’ve suggested in the past that one of the things the paired
myths of inevitable progress and inevitable apocalypse have in common is that
both of them serve as excuses for inaction. Claim that progress is certain to
save us all, or claim that some catastrophe or other is certain to doom us all,
and either way you have a great justification for staying on the sofa and doing
nothing. I’ve come to think, though, that the two mythologies share more in
common than that. It’s true that both represent a refusal of what Joseph
Campbell called the “call to adventure,” the still small voice summoning each
of us to rise up in an age of crisis and decay to become the seedbearers of an
age not yet born, but both mythologies also pretend to offer an escape from
life, in the full, messy, intensely real sense I’ve suggested above.
