I fully agree that the crux of our problem is our increasingly mechanistic view - not just of humankind, but also (and perhaps more importantly) of the natural world. And I think that our cities are emblematic. In cities we literally pave over the natural world with asphalt and cement; bury the rivers and replace them with pipes; root out the trees and glades for balconies and potted plants; banish wildlife for zoos and compliant pets; eliminate gardens for grocery coolers; give up building a lifestyle to buy one off a shelf. No wonder we lack meaning and feel isolated even when (particularly when) surrounded by millions of anonymous faces. Urban settings are anti-human technocratic enclaves where even the dark of night is banished, the hours of the clock mean nothing, circadian rhythms are overpowered by power drinks, and temperature and humidity are regulated to personal preferences.
Now the technocratic gods want to make the sun stand still in its place. They want to banish time. They’ve already banished the night, why not the year? The cycle of life and death? The long rhythm of the earth heating and cooling in succession - the very respiration of the universe? (Or do you think that if we ever successfully froze carbon emissions at some determined level we would subsequently allow it to fluctuate, as it has for millennia before we burned oil - or trees? And if we did, would it not be according to our schedule, not nature’s?)
Too often, people who move to the country take the urban aesthetic with them. They hire someone else to tend the yard, install ac, put up flood lights to keep the dangerous dark away from the dooryard, draw curtains even when there’s no one to peer in, and stare at urban-oriented television programming rather than gaze outward and fall into the natural world.
We treat our bodies the same way. If I have this ailment, I take that synthetic compound to relieve it, just as I put nitrogen into nearly dead soil to stimulate a season’s vegetables. We do this rather than cultivate a healthy terrain, a naturally vital ecology both inside and outside our bodies. We go to the gym to systematically target muscle groups and specific health goals rather than get outside to till the soil, feed the animals, move the rocks and fell the trees to shape into lumber to construct the new building. We get on a treadmill and simulate hills and valleys while listening to the Top 40 through earbuds, privately, in isolation although lined up with twenty other people doing exactly the same lonely exercise rather than go for a long walk in the woods and up and down hillsides, ears wide open, listening to the small sounds of nature and falling into the rhythm of seasons; or sharing a hike or a farmstead chore with a neighbor, a spouse, or a child.
Of course we’re crazy. Of course we’re desperate for some sign that we belong, that we matter, that there’s a reality larger than ourselves that we can sink into through service. Service is meaning-generating effort. Most of us just don’t know where to look for it any longer. We’ve forgotten who we are, what we are.
I’m a theologian. I fought for a couple decades against the tendency even in formal theology to confuse the psyche with the soul, to conflate having a feeling with experiencing spiritual insight, to replace spiritual rectitude with political ideology. Our forebears knew the differences; lived them. We call them primitive, pre-scientific, and superstitious.
I think what is superstitious is the belief that we can make ourselves our own gods and fashion the world in our own image. That is anti-scientific and suicidal. Also, of course, finally homicidal - which, spiritually speaking is pretty much the same thing. The problem is as old as humankind, which means that our reversion to this ideology is the truly primitive view. Every major religion and spiritual path knows better. Our adherents to scientism don’t; they know worse. And they’re our vision-casters - at least for a while longer.
What we are participating in is the demise of this latest, greatest incarnation of the Great Lie encoded in every spiritual discipline. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it’s in Genesis:
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?' " And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said 'You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.' " And the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, [directly] knowing good and evil."That is the Lie: that we can know for ourselves what is good to do and what is evil. The Great Reset is nothing more than the Great Lie dressed up in a technocratic dream coat. And what God said is true: the day we eat of that fruit is the day we set about to kill ourselves. But we think we're smarter than that...
So the woman saw that the tree was good food, that it is desirable to make oneself wise. Therefore she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.Naked. Not a fig leaf's worth of rationalization to hide the truth about what they had done and who they had become. They were hiding from no one; not themselves and not God. Only the thin veneer of self-justifying lies obscured from their immediate consciousness the certain knowledge that they had blown it. At that point, and until today, only metanoia could reverse the disaster. Metanoia, the deep, foundational recognition of one's faulty path that results in repentance - which is stopping in one's tracks, turning about, and walking in the opposite direction. That is not the path humankind chose. Instead...
They sewed fig leaves to make themselves coverings. And when they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the breeze of the afternoon, Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God. (Gen. 3:1-8)As if. Yet, here we are. Pretending we killed God and established ourselves on his throne. Robey likes to say on this site that the Abrahamic faiths are about guilt and shame. Not so. They are about identifying the root of the problem, being honest with ourselves, and changing direction. Not moving on to new fig leaves and regurgitated threadbare self-rationalizations and fantasies, but giving up the enterprise of being our own little gods capable of getting it right this time, competent to rule over nature. We are about metanoia and repentance. That is, admitting the truth, stopping in our tracks, and turning around to walk back into the Light (of ancient wisdom) in order to become the "living spirits" who "tend and keep" creation (Gen 2:7, 15). Biblically, to tend and keep is to serve; that is, to nurture, care for, uplift, ennoble, give one's life to, or even husband according to the true meaning of that word. It does not mean abandoning technology, it means knowing the affirmative role of human ingenuity and exercising discipline over our appetites accordingly. To "tend and keep" is to embrace and live into our place in the natural order, rather than try to subject nature and the natural world to our self-referential notions of order; notions of order conceived in fevered brains that fantasize their godly status, but truly hardly know themselves.