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Curing Gaia
Human beings find other human beings really depressing. Even when we are quite fond of the ones in our vicinity, we frequently despair of humanity as a whole. If you don’t believe me, go to church.
I drive around my state a lot, and one of my little enjoyments is to note the sentiments on church marquees. My favorite recent example is this one, from the Reformed Church of Something-or-Other:
Services 9 & 11
Sunday School 8-9
CASUAL, UNCOMMITTED CHRISTIANS MAKE JESUS VOMIT.
Dang!
It’s like some kind of surrealist poetry, isn’t it? I had to turn around and go back for another look, just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.
I think we can agree that this diagnosis of divine bulimia has more to do with the pastor’s tummy than with Christ’s, can’t we? But apart from its sheer weirdness, it serves as a nice example of a basic sociological principle.
As a species, we tend to take our own human problems and Writ Them Large upon the vault of heaven and make them into cosmic calamities.
“Human beings are the worst,” my friend Mike said the other day. “We are a disease. We are cancer.”
Mike is not a Reformed Something-or-Other. He’s not even a casual Christian. He is a nice, well-educated policeman who claims to have no religion at all. Still, he is an environmentalist. And at that moment, he was expressing his environmentalism in traditional, religious terms. He was speaking as an apocalyptic.
“The planet,” he concluded sepulchrally,” would be better off without us.”
“The planet would be better off without you? Without me?” I asked. “Without your kids?”
“Well…”
“Better off without my kids, then? Without Ellie? Peter? Zackie?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So maybe we should just knock off the Anti-Retroviral drug treatments and let AIDS take its course. Maybe world hunger is just the planet trying desperately to heal itself. Maybe we should hope that weapons of mass destruction go right ahead and proliferate, since they could be the planetary equivalent of radiation and chemotherapy?”
“That doesn’t follow at all…!” Mike was getting angry. (And he is armed.)
But just as a fundamentalist can’t assert, “Non-believers are going to Hell!” Without expecting to offend actual people, an environmentalist can’t describe humanity as a planetary virus akin to AIDS without suggesting that the planet would be better off without…well, you.
Genesis describes human beings as the most important, most God-like things in God’s creation.
In its religious form, environmentalism describes human beings as similarly God-like and important: no mere worms writhing blindly on the crust of an uncaring earth. We are the destroyers of worlds, we are legion, we are the living end! The story of the world, the story of the cosmos, the story of life itself ends up being our story.
Environmentalism carries the same risks as any other religion. It offers the false comforts of moral and intellectual superiority. Apocalyptic pronouncements from the true believer tend to discourage action. And because, like any religion, this religion likes to divide the sheep from the goats—the enlightened us from the dull, unknowing them—it does nothing to further the sorts of conversations we could be having if they gave up this attitude of noble sorrow and admitted that it is humanity, and not the planet, that is sick to its stomach and in need of saving.
Look, I’m an environmentalist. Okay, I’d like to make a few, small improvements to the environment. It’s okay by me, for example, if AIDS and smallpox go extinct. But for the most part, I think the environment is awesome. The aesthetics are agreeable, the amenities are good. I like a planet with a temperate northern hemisphere, a toasty equator and a couple of nice, clean polar ice caps. I like having a few snowy spots as well as tropical rain forests, and diverse ecosystems are entertaining even as they contribute to our material well-being. By now, we know how to take this planet’s offerings and turn them into poetry and crayons, Merlot and pastry, music, democracy and love.
“Don’t worry,” I told my friend Mike (lovingly). “We aren’t cancer. We’re more like a bad case of acne. And—there will be a cure.”
Mike didn’t seem comforted.
“And when we are gone,” I continued. “The sun will rise and set above the waters and the wind will whisper through the branches of the trees. The lion will feed upon the haunch of a still-living lamb. The baby cuckoo will casually kick its doomed nest mates over the lip of the nest it has usurped from them, the ichthumanid wasp will insert its egg into the soft and helpless body of a caterpillar, and a baboon who finds an infant antelope in the grass will scream in excitement and tear it to pieces. If there is life, there will be suffering and there will be death. But without us, there will be no witnesses.”
“That doesn’t cheer me up,” said Mike.
I know. But what can you do?
If nothing matters more than life… well, each life and all life ends. If nothing matters more than the earth, well, with or without us the sun shall cease to shine and the earth shall one day cease to be. If nothing matters more than love? Then we should try to survive as long as we can, because as far as we know, we are the only creatures who know how to love our neighbors as ourselves, even if we aren’t nearly as good at this as we would like to be.
We have spent so much time—human time, that is—creeping ever so slowly along the moral arc of the universe, willing it to bend toward justice. If we blow it now… if we cure the planet of ourselves as if we were a bad rash instead of an astonishing miracle…well. I’m telling you: Jesus will vomit.
Amen.
Published in General
First, stupid church sign.
Second, Mike is so wrong . . . if we humans have the power to do all these bad things to the planet, then he has to admit we have the power to do good things. We just disagree on what are the good things that to be done. Nonetheless, his attitude makes me want to ask him “Why don’t you just quit your job, then curl up in a little ball, and cry while the world is destroyed?”
Third: Environmentalist. I hate the term. I prefer to say I’m a conservationist. I love my environment – I don’t want dirty air, dirty water, etc., but I want to to take advantage of what God put here for us to use . . . but wisely! However, the term “environmentalist” has now taken on the meaning of “any human impact on the planet is evil and must be stopped, no matter what the cost.” Hey! Humans are part of the environment!
Loved your book (“Here If You Need Me”, recommend it to everyone), and another great post!
CASUAL, UNCOMMITTED CHRISTIANS MAKE JESUS VOMIT.
Revelations 3:14-16 (KJV)
Sounds about right. (This verse might also refer to coffee)
That’s so funny—I never associated that verse with vomiting! (Always pictured it as spitting…)
Thank you, Stad! (And— agree on 1, 2, 3)
Nice post. Oddly enough, most environmentalists spring from a profoundly conservative, nay, reactionary vision: they want to freeze time, or roll it back to a romantically-appealing point in the past.
Hey, it’s an attractive idea.
Sadly, biology only goes in one direction: forward. We must live with the world we inhabit, not the one we wish to inhabit.
The people who amuse me the most, and with whom I sympathize greatly, are those who want to halt the spread of “invasive species”.
Sadly, we’re the invasive species. We brought all the rest. And while I’m more partial to the indigenous Dogwood than almost anyone else, having grown up with a beautiful specimen (since cut down) outside my bedroom window, the sad truth is that invasive us brought a fungus along that’s wiping it out.
Bummer. There’s no turning back the clock in biology. And we’re along for the ride.
Kate:
Blessed Holy Week!
As Mr. Amy has shown, that sign is very Biblical, if perhaps, not very pastoral. As a Catholic, to me it means that the cafeteria is closed (i.e., you accept all of Church teaching or none – you can’t pick and choose).
What God created was good, and when He created man, it was very good. That makes us stewards of His creation.
Strap on your seatbelt – Pope Francis is rumored to be preparing an encyclical on the environment and human ecology – that should make for some interesting discussion here.
Thank goodness! I was worried if I ever went to Maine, I’d get busted crossing the border for insubordination to the Warden Service!
Really would love to get up there some day. Like I said earlier, Maine and Vermont were the two states I never made it to when I was stationed in Connecticut. I wanted to hit Killington in Vermont (used to ski), and Maine for, . . . . well . . . the seafood! Can’t do a whole lobster, but a monster-sized tail? Ummmmmmmmm
I see kind of a crossover between religion and hard-core environmentalism. Those of the Christian bent are taught that the world was perfect until Adam and Eve sinned by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (depending on exactly which bible you are reading). They gained knowledge but by taking that step, they made the world and their lives a more miserable experience.
The hard-core environmentalists seem to believe that humanity was OK prior to the stone age. But as the centuries rolled by and we became more knowledgeable and more adept at controlling our environment, the application of knowledge ruined everything and destroyed paradise. It’s like environmentism is a way for non-believers to get in on original sin.
Just wanted to say that I loved this and will be stealing it.
-E
Since he has not “self extinguished” then he must not be a truly faithful environmentalist.
Since he has not “self extinguished” then he must not be a truly faithful environmentalist.
Hypocrisy and inconsistency! More of the hallmarks of a genuine religion!
Every time someone tells me churches are full of hypocrites I reply, “Full? Heck no, there’s still plenty of room for you!” It’s not very effective as a witness, but it sure feels good.
I think Michael Crichton had the same insight years back where he likened environmentalism to a religion with its perfect Eden (pre-human), the Fall caused by man (the industrial revolution), and our collective salvation by returning back to nature.
The truth of course is that the least industrialized nations are the worst stewards of their environment. The countries where industry coexists with pristine environments is in First World countries. (*obligatory apology for this reactionary, imperialist term)
Oh that’s perfect—can I steal it?
Absolutely! I copyright none of my material. My genius is available to all. Well, to all who pony up for a Ricochet membership.
Kate – are you still claiming to be a Lib? If so, I’m worried – you appear to display an overabundance of logic to comfortably fit in that camp.
As a Christian, I long ago came to the realization that the behavior, speech and attitudes of other Christians will be a never ending source of embarrassment. Pretty sure I’ve made some comments somewhere along the line that embarrass others as well. That sign though… Yikes!
Kate – are you still claiming to be a Lib?
Not entirely sure anymore…
other Christians will be a never ending source of embarrassment.
it’s okay, Great Adventure. Try being a Unitarian-Universalist…
On the other hand, our marquis signs are usually…unprovocative.
You beat me. :)
I have always thought spewing was more like spitting.
That said, I am old enough to remember when there was litter everywhere. Along the road sides, in parking lots, and when you wanted to get rid of something while driving, you threw it out the window.
Then people got tired of looking at the litter, and we cleaned up our act.
I remember when air pollution made city air nearly unbreathable… then we got tired of that and we cleaned it up. I remember that when I get behind some polluting truck… it stinks, it’s awful, I’m thankful for the EPA or who ever fixed that…
When there is a real environmental problem, we know it and we fix it. And we don’t resent it. We like it.
Because we all live here. And we don’t like messes.
That is how you tell a fake problem from a real one. If it’s a real problem you don’t have to go to such lengths to convince people, they notice. WE notice. If it’s a fake problem… you might scare folks for a while, but then they catch on, and laugh at you.
We are not “other”. We are the earth. We like things pretty clean. And we will address real environmental issues.
Or…we won’t. You know? If it turns out that we’re making a bigger mess than we can fix, then the earth will fix it. The big mistake is assuming that we can “kill nature.” Nature can kill us.
My cousin once tragically, yet confidently wailed “human beings aren’t good for anything! Nothing even eats us!”
To which I said: oh dear no.
Things eat us.
I’ve seen bodies that have been left to nature for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, a few years…and trust me. We get et.
I find that strangely comforting, myself.
Shame – making me do research. According to The Internets, Spue can mean “to discharge the contents of the stomach through the mouth”
It can also mean ” expel or eject (saliva or phlegm or sputum) from the mouth”
So either can work. However, the new KJV Translation is “So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.”
So the sign could have said “The casual, uncommitted Christian will be hocked like a lukewarm loogie by the Lord?”
Love your post, Kate, but I cannot resist adding to MrAmy’s observation:
MrAmy
CASUAL, UNCOMMITTED CHRISTIANS MAKE JESUS VOMIT.
Revelations 3:14-16 (KJV)
And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God;
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.
Rev 3:16 Spue: Strong’s #1692, from the Greek emeo, meaning to vomit
Not unlike Jonah 2:10: “And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.”
Strong’s #6958, from the Hebrew qow, meaning to vomit:–spue (out)
The church marquee is a tasteless paraphrase, but pretty much spot-on accurate.
When the environmentalist complains that man is screwing up the planet, he actually means that he is making it less congenial for man himself.
Nature is, in my opinion, indifferent to man and his effects upon the world. If man makes the world so inhospitable that man dies off, nature won’t care. It will go about it’s business as if we were never here. That’s true even if we burn the place to a cinder. If there is any life left, it will regenerate in some fashion. And even if it doesn’t, who cares?
The extreme environmentalist who prefers a world without man on it must imagine some pristine world of nature as in a child’s story. But once man is gone, who will care about what remains?
I don’t find them depressing as much as I find them wanting. I’m developing a real Mencken-esque attitude about people. I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that more people than not are either sheep or are such pushovers to social and peer pressure that they’d cave on pretty much anything if the mob gets loud enough. Maybe most of us would make excellent slaves with just a little conditioning. Especially in the West, where the more affluent we get, the more ridiculous and feckless we seem to become. If a modern day Saladin suddenly moved on Europe, I wouldn’t give Europe great odds.
What’s stupid about the idea that humans are a parasite because we don’t fall into equilibrium with the surrounding ecosystem, is that no animal does. It just looks that way because of the market like nature of ecosystems, where competing animals in an evolutionary battle end up with the strongest at a stand still and the weakest extinct.
A friend on facebook linked to a video about how when we removed the wolves from Yellowstone, the deer cleared out all the vegetation, resulting in massive levels of environmental destruction.
So every animal destroys their surroundings, but were the only ones that feel bad about it.
“We have spent so much time—human time, that is—creeping ever so slowly along the moral arc of the universe, willing it to bend toward justice.”
Washington Post – Obama often talks about moments in which U.S. leadership can “bend the arc of human history.”
I believe he has it embroidered on his carpet in the Oval Office, which he occasionally visits, in between Gaia-burning Golf trips on Air Force One.
What a brilliant defense of the unique virtues of humanity!
Environmentalists tend to confuse their aesthetic preferences with nature as it actually is. There’s nothing wrong with loving a pristine forest or a beautiful sunset, but neither is more essentially natural than a strip mine. The latter is produced by the natural behavior of a naturally evolved creature. To strip away forests and topsoil, to hunt other creatures to extinction, and to slaughter millions in wars over territory, resources, and tribal dominance, these are all things humans do in their natural state. The damage we do to the world and to each other is as natural as that caused by a volcanic eruption, an asteroid strike, a tsunami, a plague.
Aside from humans, no product of nature has ever thought to call these things disasters, to form the thought that a forest knocked down when a mountain explodes is ugly, that the loss of a species is a tragedy. In Man, for the first time in billions of years nature becomes self-aware and develops preferences for more than simple survival. And rather than celebrating our ability to do so, environmentalists project their preferences and their neuroses onto a non-existent global consciousness that looks down from the heights and declares Man to be an abomination.
Nature is dumb process, and somehow that process has produced Mind. Mind has the potential for judgment, discernment, taste. It has the potential to impose new patterns on the natural world, some of which we may even find beautiful. In its inventiveness, Mind has learned to harness the surplus energy necessary to make the world more beautiful, to make both humans and non-humans more healthy, to find ways reduce their suffering. And yet the self-hating humans would hobble, impoverish, even extinguish nature’s most magnificent achievement: That creature who brings moral and aesthetic sense to a universe that previously had none at all.
(Yes, I know this argument is made in entirely naturalistic terms, without reference to God and the supernatural origin of Mind. But the “man is a disease” crowd is post-spiritual, and such a simpler argument is outside their frame of reference.)
Environmentalists tend to confuse their aesthetic preferences with nature as it actually is.
Wonderful response, Daniel—thank you!
And—ever practical—I’ve always thought the most sensible (and effective) conservationists made their appeals based in large part on what human beings like and need (or might need) rather than on some romantic fantasy of nature-sans-humanity.
I spend a good deal of time in the company of men (mostly men) who have arranged their lives so as to spend nearly all of it outside, in the woods. They hunt and fish, which is to say, they murder Bambi.
They don’t spend more time than any other human being “in the natural world,” because we’re all, always, in the natural world: we have no choice (city dwellers: cockroaches, pigeons, rats, spiders, fellow humans and germs count).
But they do spend a lot of time in a natural world that doesn’t arrange itself around human life in quite the same way. And so they love “nature” with the full understanding of its absolute indifference to us. Their love is not self-referential, it doesn’t demand reciprocity. They’ll knock themselves out to rescue a deer that has fallen through the ice without any expectation that the deer would do the same for them. Come deer season, they’ll kill and eat that deer. Splendid human beings!