Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: COVER STORY Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 11:27:24 EST Message-ID: \SE COVER STORY \HD Albert Gore's Heaven on Earth \BY Philip Chalk \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: Al Gore's discussion of theology in his book on the environment hasn't gained the spotlight that his scientific and economic theories have, but he does attempt to use it as a linchpin. As could be expected when a politician discusses faith, however, a clear-cut theme is difficult to find. And it's not clear that Gore understands the stakes of trying to make environmental concerns a branch of theology. TEXT: Politics is expected to make for strange bedfellows, and Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore, in his best-selling environmental manifesto, Earth in the Balance, lives up to expectations. In the earnest company of the green movement, the two-term senator from Tennessee finds allied schools of thought in every direction - from biblical literalism and high church metaphysics to Bahai spiritualism and neopagan goddess worship. These nonscientific passages have attracted less attention than the book's discussion of science and economics. But they raise questions about whether Gore realizes what is at stake when doctrines clash at the boundary lines of religion and the environment. There has never been a clearly defined border between theology and environmentalism, and in recent years their intermingling has increased. Some environmentalists have always seen themselves as preachers of a creed. Others have turned to theology - to arguments about reverence for Earth and its creatures - when economic and scientific facts look too weak to provide a persuasive basis for the societal changes they want. From the other direction, theologians and clerics have taken an increasing interest in the environmental movement, sensing in its growth a spiritual reawakening deserving of their attention, a source of inspiration and perhaps even a force to be channeled into other forms of worship. The subject can hardly be ignored in any serious treatment of environmentalism, and Gore's book is nothing if not ambitious. He sets out to chronicle "the perspectives offered by the earth sciences, economics, sociology, history, information theory, psychology, philosophy and religion." Much of the material is familiar. Gore decries unreflective materialism and short-term thinking. Some passages on these themes are moving, as in his description of the boat-littered desert left behind when Moscow's central planners diverted entire rivers from the once vast Aral Sea. But his exposition of such controversial scientific hypotheses as global warming and ozone depletion has drawn criticism for overstatement, including a New Republic charge that "increasingly, [Gore's] environmental oratory is out of control." And other parts of the book look equally overstated. In the chapter "Climate and Civilization: A Short History," Gore offers a straightforward narrative of cultural expansion and calamity over thousands of years, with calamity always following neatly on the heels of climatic changes - so neatly that one is drawn to the footnotes for citations. In the notes, Gore explains his basis for believing that climate change explains the rise and fall of whole civilizations: "In my discussion of migrations and prehistoric climate change, I . . . constructed my own calendar on which I correlated the events, both climatic and sociopolitical, and couldn't resist coming to my own conclusions based on the concurrence of events that seemed to me to betray something other than simple coincidence." The work of six scholars is listed as source material for this exercise, but there is no mention of how much is from whom, how dates were assigned to prehistoric events, or why these specialists didn't draw such clear-cut correlations themselves. "What no study [before Earth in the Balance] has suggested," he writes, "is that a change in the global climate pattern may explain the Mayans' collapse." Citing "the historical climate record," he proposes that the warm weather around A.D. 950 that allowed Leif Eriksson to sail to Vinland was also the scourge of the Yucatan, and says "that may be at least a part of the solution to the mystery of the disappearing Mayans." Gore's do-it-yourself linkages leave much of his history looking shaky, like so many effects stuck loosely to a cause. "Sometime between 1150 and 1136 B.C.," he writes, "the Helka 3 volcano, in Iceland, blew millions of tons of dust and particulates into the atmosphere. Contemporaneously, according to a primitive Chinese script preserved on dry bamboo strips, 'it rained dust at Po.' " Elsewhere, he fits the Old Testament story of Joseph into his narrative of climate change. Joseph "interpreted the ecological meaning of Pharaoh's dream," allowing the pharaoh to "anticipate and prepare for climate fluctuations." This technique of skimming through different disciplines for material that can be condensed in original ways recurs throughout the book. In the chapter "Dysfunctional Civilization," Gore rejects one extreme "controlling metaphor" of humanity as a kind of destructive virus running amok in the planetary body and selects as his own controlling metaphor "dysfunction theory," borrowing from the expanding universe of psychotherapy. Western civilization, he argues, suffers from a Cartesian delusion. The belief in a "cleavage between mind and body, intellect and nature," inherited from the French philosopher Descartes, "has created a kind of psychic pain at the very root of the modern mind, making it harder for anyone who is suffering from other psychological wounds to be healed." Since "it can be argued that every addiction is caused by an intense and continuing need for distraction from psychic pain," Gore concludes that "our civilization is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself." Subordinating all values to our addiction, we are lost in denial; as evidence Gore cites Southern Californians who spray-paint their lawns green during drought. Switching from the vocabulary of addiction to that of dysfunction, Gore describes a therapeutic school of thought that looks for unwritten, abusive rules transmitted through the generations by dysfunctional families. The Cartesian cleavage is our dysfunctioning cultural inheritance, Gore says, and it follows that "recovery is possible" in the form of confronting and overcoming our "compulsive need to control the natural world." As with therapeutic professionals in general, Gore finds terms of illness easier to apply than a moral vocabulary that would require an explicit standard of right and wrong. In one passage, for example, he denounces Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, communist China and the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes as "especially malignant examples of dysfunctional civilizations." This might sound rather anemic compared with terms like evil, bad or even wrong. But when the starting point is calling Descartes's dualism a disease, dysfunctionality is the worst charge available. The choice of dysfunction theory as a "controlling metaphor" is curious, since its apparent purpose is to allow Gore to condemn consumerism ("shopping is now recognized as a recreational activity") while scrupulously avoiding moralism. But this avoidance is only temporary. In the very next chapter, which caps the analytical section of the book, he plunges headlong into the subject of religion. In his chapter "Environmentalism of the Spirit," Gore again takes up the notion of Cartesian dualism. Using a painting by the Renaissance artist Raphael, Gore describes the competing Western traditions of looking to experience as the source of knowledge (represented by Aristotle, who is shown pointing down toward the Earth) and reliance on abstract reflection and detached idealism (represented by an upward-pointing Plato). Lamenting the modern dominance of Platonic idealism as rendered by Descartes, Gore is drawn to religion by the feeling that the ecological crisis he cites masks "an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual. As a politician, I know full well the special hazards of using 'spiritual' to describe a problem like this one. . . . But what other word describes the collection of values and assumptions that determine our basic understanding of how we fit into the universe?" This wish to make environmental concerns a branch of theology is hardly shared by all environmentalists. Indeed, defenders of ecology as hard-nosed science spent years dodging the dismissive charge that their work was just so much disguised religion. At some point, however, the discipline of ecology was eclipsed by the movement of environmentalism, and now many consider the transformation to be not just reasonable but desirable. "There is a profound spirituality in environmental commitment, and much of the time that raw, intuitive spirituality is not affiliated with any particular church," says Paul Gorman, executive director of the ecumenical Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment. "The environment is intrinsically and inescapably a religious issue. What's at stake here is the relationship of the human species to the rest of the created order. It's hard to imagine a more fundamental challenge than that one." Stephen Toulmin, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Northwestern University, traces what he sees as a revival of "natural religion" to "the character and intensity of commitment that one finds in the adherents of these positions." Toulmin notes that while "some supporters of the ecology movement are prepared to rationalize their views in utilitarian terms . . . many environmentalists display a kind of piety toward nature which owes nothing to any utilitarian calculations. . . . The system of nature revealed by the science of ecology thus takes the same cosmological place in their minds and hearts that God's created system took in the minds and hearts of their ancestors in earlier centuries." For decades many observers - among them some of the 20th century's prominent minds, from the poet T. S. Eliot to Roman Catholic philosophers Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn - have lamented the same divorce of the material and the rational that Gore describes, along with the same practical division of science from considerations such as ethics. Toulmin, too, traces this habit of mind to Descartes and considers the spiritual component of ecology part of a welcome "reintegration of humanity into nature." Whether the established Western religions are suited for this reintegration is hotly disputed. Defenders of the monotheistic tradition largely shared by Judaism and Christianity insist that it has an environmental ethic - usually the premise is that nature reveals, in one fashion or another, the nature of God the Creator and therefore enjoys a high place in ethical considerations. Featuring prominently in this defense is the creation account in Genesis, in which, after reflecting upon the new world, God "saw that it was good," and then granted to Adam and Eve "dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Implicit in this dominion, says Jude Dougherty, chairman of the school of philosophy at Catholic University in Washington, is that "creatures are to be used by man, but rationally and in accord with his proper needs and in accord with their nature. . . . We have a human responsibility to respect the land, not to slaughter more animals than we need and so forth. But animals have no rights [in Roman Catholic doctrine]; rather, man has obligations to them, and obligations to behave in a rational fashion." Any talk of "dominion," however, makes some Christian environmentalists uneasy; they are quick to substitute the "stewardship" language more typical of the New Testament. Dominion doctrines have "contributed to a justification for the treating of animals, plant life and so on for our convenience," says the Rev. J. Robert Nelson, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Religion at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, "but this is a misreading. Instead this should be 'stewardship' of creation, not for our excessive despoliation but rather for our responsible use, so that what is done to nature is done in the sight of God, with responsibility to God." A robust environmental ethics is thus possible, says Nelson, one drawn from "the biblical injunction not to exploit the Earth, but to take care of it as our home, as the home of our future generations. . . . In fact the motto of the World Council of Churches lately has seemed to be justice, peace and the integrity of creation." More often than not, Al Gore remains within sight of this mainstream creation tradition, as when he writes that "in my own religious experience and training - I am a Baptist - the duty to care for the earth is rooted in the fundamental relationship between God, creation, and mankind. . . . 'Dominion' does not mean that the earth belongs to humankind; on the contrary, whatever is done to the earth must be done with an awareness that it belongs to God." But what sort of Baptist - and what manner of theologian - is Gore? His reliance on the Genesis passages and the Noah story - even his refashioning of God's commandment to collect two of each species as "thou shalt preserve biodiversity" - would still fall within the bounds of much Baptist interpretation. But his creation theology is all high-church, without a trace of those Baptist mainstays, man's fall from innocence in the Garden of Eden and an otherworldly salvation achieved through grace: "God is pleased with his creation," Gore writes in the mode of liberal Protestantism, and "the purpose of life is 'to glorify God.' " Elsewhere, however, he appears to line up with biblical fundamentalists: "For those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, it is hard to read about the predictions of hurricanes 50 percent stronger than the worst ones today, due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases that we have fostered, without recalling the prophesy of Hosea: 'They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.' " Gore then quickly distances himself from those Christians who would dismiss the welfare of the environment in anticipation of the Apocalypse and for good measure throws a passing punch at Reagan administration Secretary of the Interior James Watt for proposing this sort of "heretical" notion. It's hard to find much of a theme here, as one would expect of an elected official discussing matters of faith. But Gore clearly wishes to present an outline of the reunion of science and religion and to propose a credible theological foundation for environmentalism. His problem is that he appears not to know how. As though assembling a voting bloc rather than synthesizing viewpoints, Gore praises "a renewed investigation of the wisdom distilled by all faiths. This panreligious perspective may prove especially important where our global civilization's responsibility for the earth is concerned." There follows an appreciation of the faiths of the world, unmarred by the notion that many of them are in conflict and that many, perhaps most, of their followers take those differences very seriously. Native American prayers ("O Great Spirit") are reproduced along with Islamic teachings, Buddhist and Hindu texts revering water, Sikh natural taxonomy and Bahai ruminations. The pope makes an appearance, welcoming "a new ecological awareness [that] is beginning to emerge." Searching for additional distilled wisdom, Gore writes that "a growing number of anthropologists and archaeomythologists argue that the prevailing ideology of belief in prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and who radiated harmony among all living things. . . . [Apparently] a goddess religion was ubiquitous throughout much of the world until the antecedents of today's religions - most of which have a distinctly masculine orientation - swept out of India and the Near East, almost obliterating belief in the goddess. The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity as late as the fifteenth century in Lithuania." This near-lament for a single, pre-Christian "goddess religion" now lost to the ages is one of the passages in Earth in the Balance that confirms Gore is making his way down a topical checklist too enthusiastically to distinguish scholarship from advocacy. Goddess hypotheses, the product of an intellectual fringe of feminism, spring less from any "ubiquitous" archaeological presence left by the large number of greatly differing Indo-European cultures than from the tendency of a small core of such "archaeomythologists" to assign gender to entire doctrinal traditions by virtue of their supposedly aggressive (masculine) or passive, nurturing (feminine) character. Lamentations for the loss of goddess religions are becoming increasingly common, issuing both from Christian and Jewish feminists and from neopagans such as Otter (nee Tim) Zell. The founder (and now a priest) of the Church of All Worlds in Ukiah, Calif., a 30-year-old church that embraces pantheism and folk traditions such as goddess worship, Zell says a feminine deity "implies valuing the feminine aspect of things. Essentially the major focus of the monotheistic religions has been the war against women. Their gods have been masculine gods, like Yahweh and Allah, and there has been a war against women that has been a part of the whole thing." As Western civilization became progressively monotheistic, Zell says, "the goddess was denigrated at the same time. The Bible is full of instances such as when the indigenous goddess of the Canaanite people was suppressed. And you find this all throughout the tradition." Even today, says Zell, "a number of the churches have refused to ordain women, and those who have ordained women refuse to call them 'priestesses,' calling them 'priests' instead, as if they were somehow just men in drag. Only in pagan religions do priestesses exist." Goddess worship has established itself as a thriving creed among those attempting to synthesize religion and environmentalism. Lawrence Joseph, author of a survey of one New Age tradition that includes goddess worship, cites the establishment of a Gaian Island for retreats in the Pacific Northwest (Gaia was the Greek goddess of the Earth) and a 1989 Goddess Festival in New York. As for Christianity as an inherently masculine doctrine, Catholic University's Dougherty says this impression comes largely from terminology rather than the content of faith. Fathers were controlling figures in the ancient world and were likely candidates for a symbol of omnipotence, he says, so "the metaphor of a father was then considered more appropriate than a mother. Christ, also, was incarnated as a man and presented himself as the Son of the Father. But nobody should think that this in any way degrades women." Nelson of the Institute for Religion notes that "[Christian] feminists are very polarized over this, and I think this is a case of excess, of overplaying their patriarchy complaint." In the case of the historical record on goddess worship, Gore hedges, acknowledging "the elaborate and imaginative analysis used to interpret the artifacts" and that other than "a reverence for the sacredness of the earth" and a probable barbarism, not much can be said with certainty of the goddess. "Still," he writes, "the archaeological scholarship is impressive." Elsewhere he is less circumspect, writing that "it certainly seems as if the way our civilization as a whole relates to the environment . . . has emphasized a distinctly male way of relating to the world and has organized itself around philosophical structures that devalue the distinctly female approach to life." This is evident in emphasis on technology for war, Gore writes, which is "historically associated more with males than females," while a concern for infant mortality is one of the neglected "female ways of experiencing the world." Overlapping with advances in goddess archaeomythology is the Gaia hypothesis, which in its stripped-down form proposes that Earth's planetary ecosystem is alive, a single superorganism that regulates and adapts itself to change. Gore has kind words for Gaia theory for "evoking a spiritual response in many of those who hear it." That spiritual response has actually been explosive, producing a host of sometimes competing Gaian spiritualities. The goddess's contemporary reappearance dates to the early 1970s in St. Louis, says J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif., and editor of The New Age Encyclopedia. Gaia was conceived "as a building block of a new religion," Melton says, "but underpinned with scientific ideas." Zell of the Church of All Worlds, who calls himself "a priest of Gaia," takes credit for reintroducing Gaia as a foundation for renewal of pagan folk religions of the sort that predated monotheism. The old pagan religions "all say the same thing," says Zell. "They all revere Mother Earth, Mother Nature and the spirits of nature." Western monotheism, which Zell calls "an aberration on the whole stage of history," denies that "the universe itself is alive. A god presumed to exist outside of this and not of it cannot form the basis for any environmental ethic." In the mid-seventies, British scientist James Lovelock and others brought to the Gaia theory a wealth of scientific data, and the ecological proposition of the superorganism was advanced. In Gaia: The Growth of an Idea, Lawrence Joseph chronicles the proliferation of Gaian philosophy this set off, eventually to include Gaian economics, literature, theories of justice, rituals and, of course, ecology. Gaia, he writes, became "a wishful trivialization of the vast mechanical power of geological systems . . . a romantic metaphor for oneness, a unified symbol for pantheism." But the currency of Gaia may now be dwindling, according to Melton, the editor of The New Age Encyclopedia. "There was religion running through the idea all along," he says, "and I think that's why a lot of people won't touch it." Ironically, while Gore quotes Gaian scientist Lovelock to emphasize the fragility of life on Earth, Lovelock himself has largely been written off by environmentalist colleagues for having declared that because the Earth is a self-adjusting organism, human activity poses no threat to it. Many Christians would agree with Zell that there is no way to reconcile his brand of Earth worship with their theology and traditions. But Jim Conlon, director of the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, Calif., is not so sure. Conlon is one who finds the Gaia hypothesis useful for the recovery of a lost sense of the soulfulness of all nature. "Historically there was a kind of animism, in which everything had a soul," says Conlon. "Aristotle taught that. So what the Gaia hypothesis says is that things are conscious and alive, and that this extends beyond the human." Conlon insists that there is no incompatibility between animism and Christianity. "Animism was one of the principles Christianity was founded on, but it's been laundered and sanitized," he says. "Anything alive has a soul. The basic principle is that life is sacred, and that has been lost track of." Conlon, who considers Earth in the Balance "one of the most significant books by a politician in our time," calls his theology one of "panentheism," not pantheism. He describes this as the belief that "to see God in all things and all things in God does not equate the natural world with the divine, because there is still a God outside, which I would call the Godhead, and which we have traditionally understood as the transcendent being." The religiosity in the rebirth of interest in goddess worship, along with the profusion of New Age innovations under the umbrella of Gaia theories, is just what concerns Christian critics of this burgeoning spirituality. "It's paganism," says Notre Dame philosophy Professor Ralph McInerney. "It is a kind of Earth worship, with man as an evanescent manifestation of an eternal reality which is Earth, and is clearly a way to treat as divine what clearly does not have qualities of divinity. The Earth . . . is an inanimate object. [Pantheism and panentheism] are the equivalent of worshiping rocks." The Institute for Religion's Nelson agrees, saying that the "ancient doctrine of an Earth mother and Earth goddess is contrary, of course, to biblical faith both Jewish and Christian, in which you have the absolute distinction between Creator and creature. The Gaia thesis, then, is a form of pantheism. Panentheism is an effort to make a distinction between that and a view of divine transcendence" in which "God is distinct from creation" but still present "in creation and is in effect growing, developing and becoming along with creation." Nelson says that panentheism, as professed by Conlon, "has very clear reference to environmental and ecological concerns." It represents an effort to be able to say, without becoming a pagan, "that divine spirit and divine reality is actually found in all of creation. . . . In other words, there is a soul in matter." It's not clear that Gore understands the theological stakes in preserving distinctions between the traditional Jewish and Christian belief in one God, above nature as its Creator, and environmentally friendly alternatives such as pantheism, animism or paganism. At one point in Earth in the Balance, he regrets that "we are not used to seeing God in the world because we assume from the scientific and philosophical rules that govern us that the physical world is made up of inanimate matter whirling in accordance with mathematical laws and bearing no relation to life, much less ourselves. Why does it feel faintly heretical to a Christian to suppose that God is in us as human beings?" Because it can be heretical, says Nelson, with important consequences for believers' ethics. "One of my concerns is that some of those with a pantheistic or panentheistic notion seem to regard the human race as a curse on the Earth, because we're the ones doing the spoiling. They're elevating the Earth to a position higher than that of the human race," he says. "Can we then say of what we call nature or creation that it is undifferentiated in terms of its value? If it is, then the environmentalist can say that it is just as bad to cut down a tree as it is to cut up a human being; the animal rights people can say that the life of a frog or spotted owl has also to be respected in the same way human life is respected," as in fact some do say. Gorman of the Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment says, "There is something at stake in clarifying that the covenant is with the Creator, not with the creation." An admirer of Gore's, Gorman says that for a Christian, what matters is not "just our relationship to the environment. That is not an adequate response for the environment, and it certainly is not an adequate religious response. What we're trying to get straight here is the nature of our relationship to God and God's creation." (MORE) Making that distinction can have immediate implications for moral life, says Gorman. "One of the serious shortcomings of religious environmentalism outside the Judeo-Christian tradition is that it has seriously ignored its responsibilities to traditional concerns for social justice. In its zeal to overcome anthropocentrism" - which places humanity at the center of creation - "it's forgotten about the human person altogether. . . . That's what's happening when a lot of well-meaning Northern environmentalists go to Rio and get an earful for having forgotten about poor people on the planet." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM