certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
And so on. (If you haven't read it, it's a classic.)
While there's nothing new about this discussion, every time I drive out to the country I am reminded of what it is that causes these religious urges to spring forth in the minds of people who otherwise could care less about religion (or actively hate it). I think most of us who live in noisy urban and suburban environments tune out the cacophony of noise so that it becomes inaudible "white noise." This noise is still there, however, constantly bombarding us. Naturally (if I may use that word), when we take a long drive out to the countryside, take a long walk in the woods, we tend to experience surprise and relief when we notice the total absence of "white noise." Instead, there's an unbelievable silence. The slightest sound -- a bird chirping, an animal walking, a dog barking, will sound magically clear and unfiltered.
Yet there's nothing magic about it. Nor is it "better." It's just different, and we don't get it as often as our ancestors did. Those of us who live in spiritual voids might tend to sentimentalize these things, and that, in my view, is how the forces of environmentalism-as-religion get a toehold.
"Man is evil!"
"Look how he has despoiled the world!"
People are then ready to jump on bandwagons to "save" the things they've sentimentalized, and it doesn't take much of a spiritual leap to start seeing the felling of a tree not as merely a bad idea (or an inadvisable thing to do to this particular forest right now) but as a profoundly evil thing. This is a logical mistake, because it replaces a rational view of the world with the projection of one's emotional reactions, and feelings. Someone who spends 60 hours a week in an office, plus ten hours a week in traffic jams to get to and from the office, might very well be expected to have intense reactions on those few occasions he visits "nature" -- that it is virginal, it is superior, and above all, that it is threatened. Most likely, the "threats" take the form of an anonmymous "them," and he can fill in predictable blanks about who "they" are. Nameless corporate bosses loom large, of course. But anything urban or suburban can eventually become a convenient scapegoat for those forces that keep him toiling the 60 hours a week -- and stuck in horrible traffic to get there!
How nice it would be to see such people actually quit their urban jobs and move to rural locations! That way, the "magic" could wear off, the sun's rays, the mosquitoes, the wasps and the ticks could have a go at their skin, and they could see firsthand how much work it is to keep the pristine growth from swallowing up the roads they still need to have to get in and out with the food that has to be obtained somewhere (and brought in by evil truck from somewhere else). The magic might wear off, and they'd have a little perspective.
Instead, all too often, the emotions cause an unconscious, unacknowledged religion to find root in the frustrated, discontented areas of the brain.
Activists who specialize in cultivating and nurturing this emotional overgrowth dare not admit that what they are pushing is religion. A mistake frequently made by certain religious analysts who refer to environmentalism as "paganism" is that while there might be paganistic elements, environmentalism cannot be called true paganism because of the fact that it is not acknowledged as religion! Environmentalists dare not do so, for they tend to be atheists who indignantly deny any religious connection. This gives their quasi-religion far more power, making environmentalism the ideal religion for atheists, and in my experience there's no better way to infuriate an atheist than to accuse him of holding spiritual views.
What I think is going on is that the people who are vulnerable to this are so self absorbed (and so lacking in appropriate boundaries) that they cannot separate their own views of what is desirable from an absolutist belief that their own desires are grounded in the difference between right and wrong, and of course that they are right, and everyone else is wrong. (It helps to be told by some well-funded chorus of politically motivated "scientists" that their desires are based on "facts.")
It's a little like a vegan who has discovered the virtues of a meat and milk-free diet, and believes he is not only "healthier" but morally superior. It is not enough merely to practice these dietary habits; they must be imposed on other people -- by force if necessary.
I'd never restrict anyone's right to be a vegan, any more than I'd restrict the right of a woman to cover herself from head to toe with a veil. (I've heard these women make oddly similar claims about veiling too; safety against lechery means healthier, happier, better adjusted lives.) The problem is, there are certain types of people who do not see these things as "rights" but as duties to be imposed ultimately on others.
And what better way to do that than by invocation of superstition? ("Not only is the veil good for you, but God commands it!" "Scientists and leading astronauts have proven that we're running out of air!" "Because bicycles are healthier, we must get rid of cars!")
So, while there's nothing wrong with liking nature (or liking anything, or just thinking something is good for you) if you like -- or dislike -- anything too much it can lead to erroneous thinking.
None of this is to argue that religion is right or wrong, or that one form of religion is better than another. But I prefer freedom of choice in matters of religion, and there's nothing free about covert, unacknowledged spirituality. Whether this is "paganism" or not is a red herring; just as a good an argument can be made for environmentalism as Christian puritanism as for paganism. My complaint is with it's covert nature.
Religion in camouflage only looks natural.
posted by Eric on 08.07.05 at 09:18 AM
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Yet another excellent essay. You are absolutely right that environmentalism -- which originally started out as a conservative, "conservation", movement among traditional hunters, fishers, and farmers -- has become a religion of the Left, a religion of the irreligious. They sneer as "Christers" and "Jesusland", but they make a God out of "nature", which, as you point out, they rarely see in the concrete from their office and apartment windows.
We are inveterably religious creatures, as we are created in the image of the Divine. I have long noted the phenomenon of atheist religions. Buddhism was atheistic in its basic premises, denying all Gods and the soul ("anatta") -- and yet it became a religion, the worship of the Buddha and his multitudinous incarnations who will ultimately, through their benevolent teachings, redeem the world from its Fall (i.e., its Creation).
Communism is atheistic, and yet, as historians have noted, it took on nearly all the attributes of a religion, with Godlike founders (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.), sacred scriptures (the writings of these men), ritual processions (on May Day) a belief in an Eden (primitive communism), the Fall (class society), and an apocalyptic Reedemption (the Revolution and the ensuing Utopia). It was even Calvinistic in its division of mankind into those predestined to be saved (the oppressed classes or proletariat) and those predestined to be damned (the oppressors or capitalists).
With Marxism-Leninism on the wane, environmentalism has come to take its place. Instead of the workers, it is "nature" that is oppressed, and the damned oppressor is not one class but the whole of the human race. Ironically, this worship of "the natural" and hatred of "the artificial" started with Rousseau, who held that all men are naturally good but corrupted by civilization. Today's radical environmentalists hold, Calvinstically, that all men are by nature evil, as the creators of civilization -- that man is by nature unnatural.
A far nobler atheistic religion is, of course, Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which opposes both Marxism and environmentalism as anti-man and therefore evil. Ayn Rand's enemies have long noted religious elements in Objectivism, often smearing Objectivism as a "cult". Indeed, Rand is practically worshipped by many as the Goddess of Reason, her novels (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, etc.) and other writings are venerated as sacred scriptures, her characters (Roark, Francisco, Galt, etc.) are worshipped as Gods, and there is much talk of a Devil (Immanuel Kant) who brought about the Fall from the Enlightenment of Aristotelean rational egoism, and of the Redemption through the spread of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Ayn Rand herself, in her introduction to The Fountainhead, argued that religious concepts of "Reverence", "the Sacred", "Worship", "Exaltation", must be recaptured and transferred back to their rightful object, Man Himself. And she did mean Man in the strict sense. She proudly called herself a "man-worsipper", a "male chauvinist". While she herself was the most independent and strongest woman imaginable, she had nothing but contempt for "women's lib". A Transcendental Scientist! The style of that!
Yes, as I said, we men and women, created in the image of the Gods and the Goddesses (Elohim), are inherently religious. The need to worship is inherent in our being. We need a religion, i.e., an overarching view of the origin, meaning, and destiny of ourselves and of the universe we live in, an idea of the existence and essence of the highest type of being, and all that gives rise to in terms of myth, ritual, sacrament, etc.. Religion, not economics, is the most powerful force in history. Like fire, it can either light our way or burn us. It cannot be ignored.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
Yet another excellent essay. You are absolutely right that environmentalism -- which originally started out as a conservative, "conservation", movement among traditional hunters, fishers, and farmers -- has become a religion of the Left, a religion of the irreligious. They sneer as "Christers" and "Jesusland", but they make a God out of "nature", which, as you point out, they rarely see in the concrete from their office and apartment windows.
We are inveterably religious creatures, as we are created in the image of the Divine. I have long noted the phenomenon of atheist religions. Buddhism was atheistic in its basic premises, denying all Gods and the soul ("anatta") -- and yet it became a religion, the worship of the Buddha and his multitudinous incarnations who will ultimately, through their benevolent teachings, redeem the world from its Fall (i.e., its Creation).
Communism is atheistic, and yet, as historians have noted, it took on nearly all the attributes of a religion, with Godlike founders (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.), sacred scriptures (the writings of these men), ritual processions (on May Day) a belief in an Eden (primitive communism), the Fall (class society), and an apocalyptic Reedemption (the Revolution and the ensuing Utopia). It was even Calvinistic in its division of mankind into those predestined to be saved (the oppressed classes or proletariat) and those predestined to be damned (the oppressors or capitalists).
With Marxism-Leninism on the wane, environmentalism has come to take its place. Instead of the workers, it is "nature" that is oppressed, and the damned oppressor is not one class but the whole of the human race. Ironically, this worship of "the natural" and hatred of "the artificial" started with Rousseau, who held that all men are naturally good but corrupted by civilization. Today's radical environmentalists hold, Calvinstically, that all men are by nature evil, as the creators of civilization -- that man is by nature unnatural.
A far nobler atheistic religion is, of course, Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which opposes both Marxism and environmentalism as anti-man and therefore evil. Ayn Rand's enemies have long noted religious elements in Objectivism, often smearing Objectivism as a "cult". Indeed, Rand is practically worshipped by many as the Goddess of Reason, her novels (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, etc.) and other writings are venerated as sacred scriptures, her characters (Roark, Francisco, Galt, etc.) are worshipped as Gods, and there is much talk of a Devil (Immanuel Kant) who brought about the Fall from the Enlightenment of Aristotelean rational egoism, and of the Redemption through the spread of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Ayn Rand herself, in her introduction to The Fountainhead, argued that religious concepts of "Reverence", "the Sacred", "Worship", "Exaltation", must be recaptured and transferred back to their rightful object, Man Himself. And she did mean Man in the strict sense. She proudly called herself a "man-worsipper", a "male chauvinist". While she herself was the most independent and strongest woman imaginable, she had nothing but contempt for "women's lib". A Transcendental Scientist! The style of that!
Yes, as I said, we men and women, created in the image of the Gods and the Goddesses (Elohim), are inherently religious. The need to worship is inherent in our being. We need a religion, i.e., an overarching view of the origin, meaning, and destiny of ourselves and of the universe we live in, an idea of the existence and essence of the highest type of being, and all that gives rise to in terms of myth, ritual, sacrament, etc.. Religion, not economics, is the most powerful force in history. Like fire, it can either light our way or burn us. It cannot be ignored.