if you are “sacred” then… (pt.1)
We’ve been told again and again that to get us, the USA, out of the troubles were in we’re going to have to change our ways.
But, as you’ve surely noticed, there has been very little changing of our ways.
In fact, you watched the BP spill and probably expected it would lead us to take some bold steps to change our ways. It didn’t happen, though. The only thing Obama’s Dept. of the Interior rushed to do was to announce that the spill had no impact upon the flavor of shrimp.
You know, natural selection dictates that a species that does not adapt to the conditions of its environment expires. What we are participating in, whether we like it or not, is our species’ refusal to adapt to its environmental conditions. More narrowly viewed, the USA long ago exceeded the carrying capacity of its own environment—the Great Depression signaled that moment—and ever since has relied on oil: not to solve the problem of an unsustainable way of life but to instead to delay its consequences. We are experiencing its consequences now. Example #1: our military, the biggest employer in our nation, is engaged in the Oil Crusade, attempting to secure cheap fossil fuels so that we can live like our parents did. So much for change!
Since our government is devoted to defending a way of life that is unsustainable, we can’t expect it to lead the way to preparing us for the future. We must prepare ourselves.
The key to adapting to the next era is our attitude, the way we view and value ourselves.
We have been raised to believe that nature is property, and that the environment is not really connected to us; it’s a background, like a stage set, upon which our play occurs.
We have been raised with this vision about how we fit into the cosmos because our culture, from the Pilgrims onward, was and is a frontier culture. Our ancestors entered biomes, consumed their vitality, and then moved onto new biomes to do the same, again and again, always leaving big messes behind for future generations to deal with. Since, for about a century, this slash-and-burn economy yielded the “highest standard of living ever known,” there was very little interest in trying to stop it. In fact, because it’s married to the Pilgrims’ belief that North America was the proverbial “city on the hill,” our “highest standard of living” became proof that our economy was the realization of eons of theistic prophecy. It’s perhaps too obvious to point out that our currency exactly expresses this theology.
Now, standing in the way of this highest standard of living were the Native Americans, who—to put it simply—view(ed) nature as their body and spirit. This attitude was of course rejected by the frontierists who invaded Native America, because—coming from a feudal Europe—they wanted property and the freedom that seemed to attend it. So, for economic and theological reasons, the animism of Native American culture was attacked as demonic, and despite some hints of it here and there in American literature, it did not influence modern American culture enough to create a widespread awareness that nature is sacred.
We know it is a sin to defile or destroy what is sacred. That is why, in our industrial capitalist culture, nature has to be considered profane; if it is considered sacred our frontierist history has to be understood as an enormity, equivalent to the murdering of God. This is why, in our culture, nature is seldom valued as sacred.
This is very unfortunate, because if we considered nature sacred we would have a morality that would prevent , or at the very least inhibit, us from behaving in ways that destroy nature, and are economically- & environmentally- unsustainable. (Of course, if that morality was in place, I wouldn’t be writing this.)
We—the ancestors of immigrants—cannot go back in history and retrieve and resuscitate the religions of Native Americans, mainly because they were so thoroughly erased by our frontierist ancestors, but also because they were site-specific, creative-expression-manifestations of the vital symbioses that human communities had with biomes that sustained them. If we cannot resusciate these indigenous religions, we can of course respect and learn from them.
As a result of our inherited frontierist attitude, we have very little awareness of where we are. The McDonaldsization of our landscape, where every strip mall district looks the same, prevents us from concentrating on, and developing heightened awareness of, the biocultural singularity of the places we inhabit. And of course, we don’t have, in an official commonly-accepted sense, any sacred mountains or rivers or plains; at the moment, every centimeter of the USA is property, either publicly or privately owned.
We do consider our lives to be sacred, however. And we rebel at the thought that we are property. Accepting these truths, we can arrive at the conclusion that nature is sacred without having to look backwards in history; and with this awareness comes the impetus for the cultural transformation that we cannot expect our Oil Crusading government to lead. Tomorrow I’ll explain—
Related posts:
