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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
Douglas—My husband and I watched the HBO documentary about the Scientologists that Brian Watt et al have been discussing. The disaffected former Scientologists seem like such nice, rational, intelligent people for the most part, and yet were sucked into something so obviously exploitative and crazy. When the show was over, I turned to my husband and asked “do you think you could ever have gotten pulled into Scientology?”
His response was simply that people get caught when they are vulnerable—at low moments in his own life, he longed acutely for comfort, meaning, explanations and hope, and was so quickly moved by music or a good sermon at church. In that state…who knows? As soon as he said it, I recalled bereavements, and the way the grieving mind seeks something (anything?) that seems to transcend and order the present chaos.
The brilliance of L. Ron Hubbard was how closely he was able to tailor his program to the anxieties of a specific group of people… In this, he was Hitlerish, a mini-monster, the dictator of his own, creepy little world.
Studying the Holocaust, as I’ve been doing fairly intensively for the past year or so, I focus on the perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders. It is their behavior that seems most curious— and most ominous. Hitler’s target audience was prepped for him by centuries of anti-Semitism easily brought to bloom in the aftermath of WW1, economic and social upheaval and disorder, inflation, unemployment and general chaos. But then there are the resisters and rescuers —where did they find their moral courage? What did they have that their neighbors didn’t, and how can I make sure I’ve got it, and my children too?
This hits the bullseye. With or without humans, equilibrium in nature is transitory. When a coyote goes hunting for rodents (or a roadrunner!) he’s not questioning whether he is taking too many and upsetting the balance.
You’re assuming it’s conscious and sentient. Gaia could well be meta-life to us, just as we are meta-life to a single-celled organism, and yet not be sentient. Just a giant, planet-wide jellyfish.
This has pretty much been true at every single point in human evolution, hasn’t it?
I’m at a bit of a loss as to why you find this significant. Are you a fan of the Singularity? I hadn’t the impression that you were a fan of the inevitable Progress school of thought.
I have, quite literally, had a Bible Study where this verse came up as we were paraphrasing verses. The end result was “Be hot or be hocked”
Couple of thoughts as I read through this totally interesting thread:
1. I am reminded of what Fermi said about extraterrestrial life – “Where are they?” In other words, if they exist and they can travel to Earth, they’d have done it by now. As to us destroying the planet, the planet has been subjected to abuse in its history that is orders of magnitude greater than anything humans have done, yet it still is as it is.
It is in a kind of huge balance, rolling along through its ice ages and warming periods, wobbling slightly on its axis, circling the sun over and over, indifferent to the tiny happenings on its surface. Sometimes big things happen, like meteor strikes or the Yellowstone explosion, and small things happen, like Mt. Pinatubo, or tiny things, like this little species that emerged a few seconds ago and invented things called Chevys. In every case the planet adjusts, releases some more of this, shuts off the supply of that, some things go dormant for a while, other things wake up, and it all stabilizes again. It doesn’t take a mind to manage it, it’s inherent in the system, each thing reacts and responds to its local condition, and the whole thing just keeps rolling along.
If something happens to increase the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, an opportunity for something new opens up for a while and the opportunity for some current things shuts down. The new arrangement burbles along for a while and everything adjusts to the new situation. Sooner or later something else happens and it all swings back – balance. The system doesn’t know or care if the CO2 came from a volcano of from a Chevy, the same thing happens. (This is the central problem with computer models – they assume that present trends will continue. Present trends don’t continue in a dynamic, adaptive system.)
We came along in the middle of all this. Some of us see a minute change in something and imagine that we caused it, and that we are so mighty that we can throw the whole planet out of balance. I say then there’s a good thing we have roosters, otherwise the sun would never rise.
2. One of my favorite shows was on a while back, “Life After People”. Each week it would look at some part of our world and imagine how it would change if people suddenly disappeared; what would happen in a day, what would happen in a month, a year, 100 years. It demonstrated just how intense are the forces that want to undo all the works of Man, how quickly things revert to their “natural” state once left unattended, how much more of our lives are spent constantly maintaining what we’ve built. It was shocking.
It wasn’t just Ozimandias, it’s all of us.
It wasn’t just Ozimandias, it’s all of us.
Bruce—I think that show might have been inspired by? based on? a book called The World Without Us. Fascinating read, for all the reasons you suggest—the description of the river that wants to run through Manhattan Island finally asserting itself is worth the price by itself. Oddly, the author (can’t remember his name now) is inclined to lament the end of the pleistocene megafauna whose disappearance from the American continent is suspiciously concurrent with the arrival of human beings across the Bering Strait… and to sympathize with efforts now (apparently) underway to recreate these animals and reintroduce them.
As in—sloths the size of volkswagons, woolly mammoths, sabertooth cats…
Have you seen the environmentalist cult film Koianusquasti? It’s visually beautiful, with a powerful score (Philip Glass–not my favorite, but I’m a musical philistine) and really, really glum. Human beings are just…awful. There are hordes of us in the movie, far too many, teeming in our unsustainable millions up and down escalators and in and out of office buildings, serving obsequiously in the disgusting mechanical world of the hot dog factory. The human world is contrasted with the natural world— gorgeous shots of landscapes, seascapes, the dance of clouds in a wide sky.
I noticed two things about the film, however. The first is that the human activity is always of the least attractive variety—why not show a ballet, a Shakespeare play, or a crayon factory, the Uffizi or Notre Dame?
The other, and stranger aspect is that the “natural world” is shown devoid not just of human life but of animal life as well, with the exception of a single shot, at a distance, of bats circling the mouth of a cave, anonymous as smoke. Maybe if the film-makers showed the activities of termites chewing a log apart, or migrating wildebeest churning grassland to dust, they would look mindless and mechanical, too. Perhaps if you include animals, you’d have to notice that we are animals?
Yes I saw Koyaanisqatsi, years ago and several times. It’s funny you should bring it up, because I was thinking about it as I was reading your piece. I thought of all those lovely scenes he showed of natural beauty, and I realized that they are only beautiful to a human observer, or as you said, a witness.
There’s “a majestic primeval forest” that, absent a human observer (and lighting and composition and camera angle), is just some vegetation. There’s “a heart-stoppingly beautiful waterfall”, which is just gravity and water and some rocks, unless I am there to regard it and deem it heart-stoppingly beautiful.
Neither the forest nor the waterfall are inherently wonderous, they’re only noble – or what that movie tried to claim is life in balance – if there is an appreciator there to regard them and declare them so.
It’s funny, I remember watching it and getting what he was trying to show. But he failed, because by so artfully filming the first part, the man-made stuff, he made that equally beautiful to me. It seemed to me that all of that industrial stuff was as powerful and awe-inspiring and sublime and striking as the natural scenes that came later. The first was intentional in its creativity and its creative destruction, the the second was mindless in its equally violent creativity and destruction. I like dwatching it, I found it striking and beautiful. I am not persuaded by his assertion that one part shows life out of balance; the balance is there in every scene.
Oh and yes, that scene you mentioned about the river trying to reassert itself and once again flow down Water Street – ehem – down in the south end of Manhattan was definitely in one of the episodes, one of the most memorable as I recall. It was a book?
Yup—The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.
Did Koi—any—whatsis (sorry, very not PC, but I can’t keep track of the spelling!) have those scenes of controlled demolition of buildings? I remember scandalizing my seminary classmates by saying I’d always thought those were cool (at least, prior to 9/11, when they became, in the parlance “triggers). And I really liked it when they reverse the film and make the buildings stand back up again.
But it was one of those movies you weren’t really allowed to criticize. You were supposed to Feel Bad.
The religious —or is it just Christians? Protestants?— are, I think, too trained toward feeling-on-demand—faith, belief, the holy spirit. When we decide that something is “spiritual” it means “immune from reasoned inquiry or critique.”
Have you read Matthew Fox? He is recommended to me all the time, as in “Oh, you’ll LOVE Matthew Fox!” because I work outdoors with outdoorsmen.) He was a former Dominican turned “Creation Spirituality” guru. A lot of my seminary colleagues (not Unitarian Universalists, either, but Lutherans, Methodists and especially Episcopalians) were very enthusiastic about him. I’ve read a few of his books, in part to try to please my mother-in-law, who considers herself very spiritual and adores him. The “creation” he talks about is very much the creation of Koyaanisqatsi—and thus not really recognizable as the creation I walk around in, the actual woods, riverbanks, rocks, lakes, ocean all teeming with animals doing their best to eat one another and avoid being eaten.
The guys I work with will often say (slightly shamefacedly, as if this was somehow inadequate) that their spiritual lives happen out in the woods, but it’s the REAL woods, the messy, suffering, cruel, fascinating, gorgeous, grubby, endlessly inventive natural world they love, not the sanitized virgin woods of an artist’s imagination.