(NOTE: This 1999 speech provides one of the best summaries of my philosophical views about environmentalism. Readers of my essays on "narratives" (posted elsewhere on this site) will see direct implications of that subject here, too.)
GREEN CATHEDRALS:
MODERN SPIRITUAL POVERTY AND
THE RISE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
Robert Bidinotto
The
Objectivist Center Conference, “What Should We Worship?”
Marriott
Marquis Hotel, New York City
October 23, 1999
Every culture
and its institutions are the living embodiments of certain fundamental ideas
about man and his place in the universe.
For
individuals, these metaphysical premises posit answers to basic questions about
life and its meaning, helping them to integrate their understanding of the world.
They also offer a foundation for values, and thus for personal motivation. Such
metaphysical premises provide individuals with the intellectual and spiritual foundations for daily living.
And when widely shared, they create the intellectual and spiritual foundations
for a culture.
At its birth,
America’s basic premises were part and parcel of the glowing historical period
known as “the Enlightenment.” It was an era from whose core radiated an exalted
vision of human consciousness, and of man’s power to explore and shape his
environment.
The Triumph of the Enlightenment
Historian Henry
Steele Commager wonderfully captured the spiritual atmosphere of the
Enlightenment in his book, The Empire of
Reason. Men such as Franklin and
Jefferson, he wrote, had “a prodigality about them; they recognized no
bounds to their curiosity, no barriers to their thought, no limits to their
activities...” Commager cited “their confidence in Reason, their curiosity about the
secular world and – with most of them – their indifference to
any other, their addiction to Science – if useful – their habit of
experimentation, and their confidence in improvement...” Heroic achievers,
these men “exalted Reason and worshiped at the altar of Liberty.”
Exaltation,
worship…these aren’t words one expects to be used to describe men whose
concerns were so worldly. But motivating their practicality was a spiritual quest for human progress. “The pursuit of happiness,” to Jefferson and his contemporaries, was
not the chasing of idle pleasures, but a mission to make life better, through
the exercise of reason.
America was the
triumph of the Enlightenment. Once people were encouraged morally to
employ their minds in the pursuit of personal values, and once they were free politically
to do so, a torrent of human ingenuity and energy was unleashed, curing
hunger, disease, poverty, and ignorance on an unprecedented scale. Capitalism –
the social system based on the values of reason, individualism, and liberty –
produced the greatest material abundance the world had ever known. And not only
in America: every country and culture which adopted Enlightenment premises
progressed dramatically, while every society mired in the pre-Enlightenment
muck of mysticism and collectivism continued to stagnate and suffer.
It would seem
that this demonstration of the extraordinary practical benefits of reason,
individualism, liberty, and capitalism should have been enough to convince all
the world – and certainly its intellectuals and leaders – of their unarguable
merits. Yet today, Enlightenment ideas that have brought the world so much are
considered suspect, if not evil. And not just
the ideas themselves, but the agent whose rational faculty generated them.
Environmentalism vs. Enlightenment
Man
is no longer praised as a heroic conqueror of nature's obstacles, or even
accepted as just another part of the natural world. More and more, he’s seen as
an interloper, as an alien presence on the planet – even as the planet’s enemy.
His creative works no longer are regarded as triumphs of the human spirit, but
as acts of desecration that alienate him from the natural order. His cities are
viewed not as monuments to human progress, but as symbols of natural
destruction. His science is regarded not as a source of human hope, but as a
menace to all that exists.
“[H]ave our
eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't
see...the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?”1
The writer is
our [former] Vice President, Al Gore, and he continues in this vein throughout his
best-selling environmentalist manifesto, Earth
in the Balance. “...[W]e are threatening to push the earth out of
balance…,” he warns. “Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized,
is colliding violently with our planet's ecological system. The ferocity of its
assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are
occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them…and organize an
appropriate and timely response.”2
Within just a
few short decades, it seems, this malignant view of man and his works has supplanted
the optimistic outlook of our Enlightenment ancestors, and has come to dominate
modern American culture. Today, environmentalist premises are woven throughout
our fabric of regulatory law; environmentalist scare propaganda permeates
school curricula; environmental groups are courted by most political
candidates; and environmental themes permeate popular songs, TV shows, movies,
even children’s cartoons. Polls show that strong majorities of Americans agree
that “nature is sacred”; that “ecological sustainability” should be an
important social goal; and that “voluntary simplicity” ought to be a behavioral
model.3
It’s not my aim
here to revisit familiar arguments about what’s wrong with environmentalism. My
monograph The Green Machine3a catalogs philosophic, scientific, and economic fallacies at the heart of
environmentalism. It also directs readers to a small mountain of scholarship
that demolishes environmentalism’s central claims.
What I aim to
address instead is why environmentalism
is succeeding in the marketplace of ideas despite
all of the many things wrong with it.
Why have
Enlightenment premises failed to retain broad public allegiance, despite their
early influence on American culture, and their proven benefits to us all? Why
have the many fine books and studies refuting environmentalism failed to make a
noticeable dent on public opinion? Why, in short, is a worldview openly hostile
to human progress on earth winning converts away from a worldview that champions
human life, well-being, and happiness?
The answer
brings us directly to the subject of this conference. It’s that
environmentalism is successfully filling a void in modern life: not so much an
intellectual or material void, but a spiritual
void.
The Enlightenment Crackup
Powerful and
fruitful as it was, the American Enlightenment worldview was vulnerable to
attack and dismissal on several counts.
First, the
Enlightenment worldview lacked a systematic rational epistemology. The
philosophic grounding of the Enlightenment project was taken for granted by
most leaders of the period, who, as practical men, were eager to get on with
practical issues of daily living. But as a result, Enlightenment spokesmen
couldn’t answer important technical attacks on their epistemological foundations.
What they thought was a system rooted firmly in reason and natural law was
actually standing in quicksand.
Second, the
Enlightenment worldview lacked a rational egoist morality, an ethics consonant
with its individualist politics. As a result, Enlightenment spokesmen couldn’t
answer charges that their social system, based on private property and the
profit motive, encouraged and depended upon selfishness. This made their system
seem amoral at best, and not a cause to command the allegiance of many idealists.
These two
important weaknesses are familiar to many of you, and beyond the scope of
discussion here. But neither of those issues explains why the Enlightenment
outlook couldn’t win a direct popularity contest against the emerging
anti-Enlightenment worldview of environmentalism, which has even greater
weaknesses and contradictions.
What, then, is
so compelling about that outlook? What do environmentalists have going for them
that our Enlightenment ancestors apparently did not?
Mythology: From Greek to Green
Put succinctly,
environmentalism – unlike the Enlightenment view – has a clear-cut spiritual ideal, rooted deeply in Western cultural history.
Furthermore, it’s a spiritual ideal utterly contrary to the premises of the
Enlightenment.
The source of
that ideal can be inferred from a passage in a book about the environmentalist
movement, written by a former reporter for the New York Times, Philip
Shabecoff. He summed up the movement’s outlook this way:
“…[A]n
unspoiled land of great beauty and wonder began to change when Europeans came
here five hundred years ago…[I]ts resources were squandered…large areas were
sullied, disfigured, and degraded …[O]ur negligent use of the Promethean forces
of science and technology has brought us to the verge of disaster.”4
Note first the
moral language used to describe the New World. It’s “unspoiled,” a place of
“great beauty,” a source of “wonder.” Then note the description of human use of
that land. The words employed are “sullied, disfigured, degraded.” Shabecoff
describes the use of natural resources in terms that conjur images of the rape
of some innocent virgin.
But what allows
him to count automatically on the reader’s sympathy with his moral perspective?
Why does he assume that we’ll agree
that the opening of a continent constitutes a crime against nature? Here, the
allusion to Prometheus gives us a further clue.
Prometheus was
a Titan of Greek mythology endowed by the goddess Athena with great wisdom. But
Prometheus decided to share this godly knowledge with human beings. He taught
men language and arithmetic, how to walk upright, till the soil, sail the
oceans, domesticate animals. And he brought them the fire of the gods – a tool
by which men could transform Nature for their own benefit.
In giving to
men the knowledge of the gods, Prometheus enraged Zeus, who chained him to a
rock for a thousand years. And Zeus punished man by sending him the first
mortal woman, Pandora, bearing a box which he forbade her to open. But moved by
curiosity, she opened it anyway, and unleashed on man its contents: all the
evils of the world.
To the ancient
Greeks, the worst sin – the sin of Prometheus and Pandora – was hubris: unlimited desire, a refusal to
restrain oneself, the urge to arrogate oneself above others, to be godlike.
They especially feared man’s unlimited quest for knowledge, believing that it
brought nothing but trouble, upsetting the natural order.
What was the
source of this fear? We can speculate. For one thing, at the dawn of
civilization, cooperation was a necessity for human survival. Individuals who
went their own way, or who sought power over others, threatened to undermine
the social conditions that made life possible. For another thing, emotions are
mysterious and sometimes disruptive forces in human life. Curbing the desires
and ambitions of unruly individuals, then, seemed to be the only path to social
stability.
For the Greeks,
hubris had to be suppressed by
recognizing something greater than oneself, by acquiring a sense of humility
before the gods or some higher good. Man’s proper path lay in self-restraint,
in the practice of virtues centered around the idea of moderation, such as
prudence, wisdom, and temperance.
The importance
of humility and steering a moderate course is a repeated theme in classical
myth. Phaeton, who insists on driving his father’s chariot to bear the sun
across the sky, fails to stay on the middle course through the heavens. Out of
control, he sets the world on fire and perishes. Similarly, Icarus fails to
heed his father’s admonition not to fly too high. Trying to reach the heavens
on wax wings, the lad flies too close to the sun. The wings melt and he falls
into the sea.
The Eden Myth
The fear of
unrestrained human desires – especially the boundless thirst for knowledge – is
equally evident in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, the original sin of
man was his eating of the Tree of Knowledge in order to become like God. For
that, man is cast out of the paradise of Eden. Later, when men try to build a
tower that can reach heaven, God says, “now nothing will be restrained from
them, which they have imagined to do.” So to punish men for their unrestrained
imagination and ambition, he scatters them across the earth and confuses their
languages.
To this body of
premises the Judeo-Christian tradition added another: what might be called the pastoral ideal, symbolized by the Garden
of Eden. In the mythical Garden, Adam and Eve lived among the flora and fauna
in climate-controlled comfort, without fear or want. Having no needs, they had
no goals; and having no goals, not a single fugitive thought ever fled the
stagnant tranquillity of their empty skulls.
This, Genesis
tells us, was perfection.
By contrast,
the symbol of evil was the serpent, who told Eve, in effect, to get a life.
When the two witless, purposeless humans finally mustered enough courage and
ambition to seek knowledge, they were told that they had committed the Original
Sin: they had refused to accept arbitrary limits and remain in passivity and
ignorance. So as punishment, they were kicked out of the perfect garden and
consigned to a horrible fate: now they would explore the rest of the world,
define personal goals and work to achieve them, and populate the earth by
making love.
What’s
important here are the basic premises
about man and his world that these
ancient morality tales have transmitted across the centuries – premises
communicated in songs, images, icons, art, and eventually, scholarly works –
premises that have shaped the thinking and lives of billions of people. And
what precisely are the premises
embedded within these stories?
Everything in
nature exists in harmonious balance and perfect order. And man’s task is to find a humble niche
within this benign and bountiful paradise, where he can exist
simply and non-intrusively. However, human desire – especially the desire to
improve oneself by gaining knowledge – represents a constant peril to this
pastoral ideal. Man’s exercise of his intelligence and ambition disturb the
tranquility and destroy the harmony of the pristine natural order. To prevent
such chaos, man’s evil appetites and capacities must be suppressed. That’s the
task of morality. Moral virtues consist of constraints: humility, obedience,
self-suppression, moderation, sacrifice of self to a higher good. By limiting
man’s disruptive ambitions, morality will maintain the balance, harmony, and
order of nature.
All this became
an early and indelible part of the Western metaphysical heritage.
And that’s the heritage Philip Shabecoff
trusted that his readers would share, when he denounced the European conquest
of the New World.
That’s the heritage
Al Gore counted on his readers to share, when he denounced the “violent
collision between human civilization and the earth.”
In fact, that’s the spiritual foundation upon
which the entire environmentalist movement has been built.
A Conflict of Visions
It should be
clearer now why environmentalism had a competitive advantage over the
Enlightenment worldview in the marketplace of ideas. Environmentalism is
swimming with the tide of the Western moral tradition, while the Enlightenment
was swimming against it.
Nature abhors a
vacuum, and society abhors a spiritual vacuum. Environmentalism took root
during a time of modern spiritual poverty, a time at which both the
pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment worldviews were in deep trouble.
As Renaissance
men awoke to the modern scientific era, the moral claims of religion began to
lose their grip. For a time, the tide of influence began to turn toward reason.
The Enlightenment was the culmination of that great shift.
But with the
weakening of traditional morality, the quest for knowledge seemed less and less
constrained. As philosopher Alston Chase puts it, “The possibility of excess,
of hubris, loomed larger…The
Renaissance, in awakening the human mind and conceiving the possibility of
finding truth without God, had found Pandora’s box.”5
This prospect
terrified and angered many intellectuals, and led them to turn their sights
against the Enlightenment.
The image of
Faust, the alchemist who sold his soul for knowledge and power, “came to
symbolize this darker side of the Enlightenment,” as Chase notes. And Faust was
just an early marcher in the postmodern literary parade. For example, in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, a brilliant but
amoral scientist tries to imitate God and create life – but creates instead a
monster that eventually destroys him. Frankenstein’s monster was to become a
dark metaphor for the Enlightenment thirst for knowledge, launching a new
literary sub-genre that flourishes to this day: the tale of the mad scientist,
whose madness invariably consists of a proud curiosity unshackled by morality.
Other writers
attacked not only the Enlightenment, but human civilization as such. Novelist
D. H. Lawrence, an early convert to the theories of ecology, gave his novel The Rainbow this misanthropic ending:
She saw…the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley…a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat…And the rainbow stood upon the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the earth’s corruption were living still.6
Anti-Enlightenment
While novelists
dramatized the horrors or spiritual emptiness spawned by Enlightenment hubris, philosophers tried to stifle its
source. Immanuel Kant, for example, took on the mission of putting human reason
back in a moral straitjacket. In a preface to his Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote: “I have found it necessary to
deny knowledge in order to make room
for faith.”
By the
twentieth century, the Enlightenment legacy was battered and bleeding. Postmodern critics, such as the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, complained
that “technological domination spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly,
ruthlessly, and completely…The humanness of man and the thingness of things
dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which…spans the earth.”
Philosopher George Sessions, a leading “deep ecology” theorist, praised the
Nazi’s contributions to environmentalism’s critique of Western technological
society.6a
But the attack
on the Enlightenment was coupled with another goal: to restore the ancient
ideal of Eden, and to make it a living reality.
Some thinkers
lent the reputation of science to this crusade. In 1864 naturalist George
Perkins Marsh wrote Man and Nature,
widely viewed as the seminal work of modern environmentalism. Without human
influence, Marsh argued, nature is basically stable and in balance. “But man is
everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of
nature are turned to discord.”7
Few noticed or
cared that his thesis was little more than the myth of Eve and Pandora, dressed
in scientific fig leaves. But Marsh’s work left a huge impact. It deeply
affected Franklin Hough, who successfully lobbied Congress to establish the U.
S. Forest Service.8 It also
left its mark on Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service under Theodore
Roosevelt, who went on to vastly increase federal landholdings.
Building on the
ideas of Hegel, 19th century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel transformed the
classical idea of a natural order into a full-blown science. Haeckel saw the
world of nature as a kind of global organic whole, in which all species,
including man, were merely parts. In 1866, he coined the term “ecology” to
describe “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the
environment…”9
An early
proponent of the pastoral ideal was Rousseau. “The earth left to its own
natural fertility and covered with immense woods, that no hatchet ever
disfigured, offers at every step food and shelter to every species of animals,”
he wrote. With impressive consistency, this champion of the “noble savage” preached
the inherent goodness of untouched nature; the corrupting influence of reason,
culture, and civilization; the social ideal of egalitarianism; and the
political ideal of sacrificing the individual to the collective.
Pastoralism, Primitivism, Pantheism
Romantic poets
such as Wordsworth, and painters such as Thomas Cole of the Hudson River School
fashioned a new aesthetic glorifying the pastoral ideal. Transcendentalist
writers did their part, too.
Upon entering a
forest, Emerson was reduced to babbling worthy of Hegel. “I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing, I see all; the currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am a part or particle of God.”10
“The earth I
tread on,” echoed Thoreau, “is not a dead, inert mass; it is a body, has a
spirit, is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit.” From his own
private Eden, Walden Pond, he wrote, “In wilderness is the preservation of the
world…The most alive is the wildest.” Hostile to the growing industrialization
of the nation, he complained, “Thank God, men cannot yet fly and lay waste the
sky as well as the earth.”11
Then there was
their friend and student, John Muir, the mystical, misanthropic Scotsman and
founder of modern preservationism.12 The pivotal day in Muir’s life was when he
came across two wild orchids in a field. “I never before saw a plant so full of
life; so perfectly spiritual, it seemed pure enough for the throne of its
Creator. I felt as if I were in the presence of superior beings who loved me
and beckoned me to come. I sat down beside them and wept for joy.”13
It was a
mysticism shared by most of the others who helped him found the Sierra Club in
1892. For example, photographer Ansel Adams openly described his faith as “a
vast, impersonal pantheism.”14
During the
twentieth century, philosophers began to promote the spiritual ideal of Eden to
a degree that would have shocked any early conservationist, and horrified any
Enlightenment spokesman.
UCLA historian
Lynn White Jr. called for a “new religion” based upon “the spiritual autonomy
of all parts of nature” and “the equality of all creatures, including man.”15 Borrowing from both the new
pseudo-science of ecology, and the holism of the German idealists, Norwegian
philosopher Arne Naess took everything a step further. Individuals do not
exist, he said; we’re all only part of larger “ecosystems.” The “shallow
ecology” of mainstream conservation groups aimed only at improving the
environment for the benefit of humans. Naess instead advocated “deep ecology” –
a view that he described as “biospheric egalitarianism...the equal right to
live and blossom.”16
In short: all things are created equal; they should be
venerated as ends in themselves, as intrinsically
valuable apart from Man; and they have equal rights to their own kinds of “self-realization,”
without human interference or exploitation.
“We must learn
that nature includes an intrinsic value system,” wrote philosopher Ian McHarg.
And what would that be? Philosopher Thomas B. Colwell replied: “The balance of
nature provides an objective normative model which can be utilized as the
ground of human value. Other values must be consistent with it. The balance of
Nature is, in other words, a kind of ultimate value…The ends which we propose
must be such as to be compatible with the ecosystems of nature.”17
From Myth to Dogma
Let’s sum up
the brief survey we’ve just taken.
The pastoral
vision of classical and Judeo-Christian times idealized a perfectly balanced
natural order, in which human ambitions were held in check. It had been a
powerful ideal throughout Western history. But with the collapse of religious
explanations during the Renaissance, this ideal no longer had enough power to
curb men’s selfish appetites. The Enlightenment appeared to be the culmination
of human arrogance. So while postmodern thinkers labored to demolish the
Enlightenment, a coalition of pantheists and ecologists provided a new
theoretical grounding for the old pastoral ideal. With the collapse of the
Enlightenment, and a new rationale in place for the pastoral ideal, the
environmentalist movement emerged, filling the spiritual void.
With this, it
seems Western culture has come full circle in its spiritual quest. We are back
in the Garden with Adam and Eve, humbly minding our tiny place in the grand
design of nature. And nature has provided us with a new intrinsic value system,
which operates on the following simple moral principle: Everything else in
nature may behave exactly as it wants to or must; but man must not act in any
way so as to affect anything else in nature.
The
breathtaking irrationality of this position is a testament to man’s
overwhelming need to experience a sense of spiritual worth and meaning – and to
find some basis for his values – even at the cost of common sense and personal
interests. These spiritual requirements lie at the heart of human aspirations.
For many people, they exceed in importance even basic material needs, and there
are few extremes to which they won’t go in order to fulfill them.
Environmentalism is a measure of how far they will go.
This
irrationality also stands as a refutation to those who hope to fight the battle
against environmentalism on anything other than moral-philosophical grounds.
Weak Responses
During the past
decades, dozens of books, some quite brilliant, have dissected environmentalism
on scientific and economic grounds. Focusing on the “junk science” claims of
the movement, volumes have been written convincingly refuting eco-scares about
pesticides, ozone depletion, global warming, electro-magnetic fields, and other
nonsense. So-called “free market environmentalists” have taken a different
tack, exposing the Malthusian fallacies at the root of overpopulation
scare-mongering, and explaining how property rights and free markets can solve
problems such as pollution, the overuse of natural resources, the protection of
wild animals, and much more.
All these
efforts are to be commended. But – if you’ve grasped the central point of this
message – you’ll realize that none of them ultimately will make much difference
in the wider battle for human life and well-being on earth.
To illustrate
my point, let me cite an article in the Spring 1998 Dissent magazine, a radical left-wing publication. In it, law
professor Eric Freyfogle, an environmentalist, attacks and dismisses “free
market environmentalism” – not on economic or scientific grounds, but on moral grounds.
“Efficiency,
the market’s most exalted promise, is a desirable quality of the means we use
to achieve an end,” he writes. “But efficiency, standing alone or embedded in a
market, cannot tell us whether species are worth saving. That decision requires
a moral judgment… A related market message, equally troubling, is the
legitimacy that it grants to self-centered behavior. However effective economic
incentives might be, they do not push people to look beyond their own
self-interest, and land health will never come about so long as we each look
out only for ourselves.”
After calling
for more collectivist control of the marketplace, Freyfogle concludes:
“Progress on environmental issues, then, will depend on our continued use of
moral language…”18
Given such
premises, it’s useless to argue that capitalism improves human well-being, or
solves environmental problems more efficiently. To environmentalists such as
Freyfogle, that’s the essence of the market’s moral failure: it ignores
allegedly higher moral values while it encourages selfishness. In the great scheme of things, environmentalists
argue, morality trumps economics. And
the whole point of morality – the morality of antiquity, which
environmentalists share with conservatives – is not to improve human
well-being: the ultimate goal is to
constrain human activity and hubris.
Once this point
sinks in, it should be clear where we ought to be turning our efforts.
By and large,
people want and try to do the right thing. What they need to discover is what
the right thing really is.
A New, Heroic Spirituality
But defining a
new ideal is only part of the challenge. A corollary point to my message today
is that while a new ideal must be defined
and justified by philosophy, it cannot permeate the culture by philosophical argument
alone. If, in the court of public opinion, you pit an abstract
argument about an ideal against a
compelling vision of an ideal, the
vision will win hands down.
For proof,
consider the historical survey we’ve just taken. Throughout Western history, a vivid,
concretized image of a preposterous ideal has persisted in public
consciousness, winning out over every intellectual challenge, every contrary
argument, every economic counter-incentive, every shred of human common sense.
The reason? It
has never been challenged by the one possible thing that could supplant it in
people’s imaginations: an equally vivid counter-image of a new and better
ideal.
As John Muir’s
epiphany with the orchids suggests, environmentalist arguments about the
intrinsic rights of nature or the sanctity of forests are based as much on a
sense of aesthetics as on any theory of morality. In fact, for Muir, as it is
for millions, boundary lines between ethical arguments and aesthetic
preferences are hard to distinguish. Steeped in a timeless tradition that
upholds the Garden of Eden as a moral ideal, many people hold its image as
their standard of beauty as well. And by that standard, there’s no place for a
city skyline, or its occupants.
We need to
raise a new standard – not just an ethical standard, but an aesthetic standard.
Ayn Rand
understood this well. In her essay on “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” she
wrote of “the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical
discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel toward such
discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions,
offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their
souls in its image…Art is the
indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.”19
Her own work,
and its astonishing, persistent, and growing popularity, is proof of her own
thesis. Rand chose to communicate her vision of the moral ideal not only
conceptually, but through the imagery of art – more accurately,
through imagery that her words conjured in readers’ minds. I believe that the
persistence of Rand’s influence is a direct result of the persistence of her
imagery in those minds.
Thinking of
imagery, a metaphor used by John Muir strikes me as terribly relevant to this
message. On one occasion, he denounced the builders of dams as “temple
destroyers.” “As well dam…the people’s cathedrals and churches,” he raged, “for
no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”20
The metaphor of
forests as a temple or cathedral persists within the environmentalist movement
to this day. Philip Shabecoff refers to our national parks as “the great
cathedrals of our New World civilization,”21
while Alston Chase notes that since the 1960s, “forests would be seen by many
as cathedrals in which to worship a new god.”22
The metaphor
caused me to remember a song we sang as children in school, titled “Green
Cathedral.” It was an ode to the spiritual beauty the songwriter found in a
forest. And it seems to me the perfect metaphor for the environmentalist’s
spiritual search: a quest to find meaning on earth, not through his own
actions, but by passively contemplating nature.
Rand has
suggested many counter-metaphors. In The
Fountainhead, to take one, Howard Roark tears a branch from a tree and
bends it. He tells Gail Wynand:
“Look, Gail.
Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the
meaning of life.”
“Your
strength?” Wynand asks.
“Your work,”
Roark answers. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it.”23
That’s the
antithesis of the environmentalist view of the green cathedral.
But what about
beauty? Doesn’t the green cathedral embody beauty? Wouldn’t its destruction be
an aesthetic, if not moral, crime?
Consider what
Rand has to say about beauty. In Anthem,
her protagonist – who appropriately names himself Prometheus – stands on a
mountaintop and says:
“It is my eyes
which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and
the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world.”24
It’s a stunning
thought, again so unlike the environmentalist perspective. The environmentalist
finds the beauty residing within the external object; beauty is a quality
intrinsic to its nature. But to Rand, the beauty of the world is imparted by an
active consciousness. Without an active mind, there is sound, but no
song – color and form, but no green cathedral.
These are
lessons that we must teach the world, if human life on earth is to continue and
flourish – if we are to continue the journey bravely begun by our Enlightenment
pathfinders.
It is a new
form of spirituality, a new vision of man and his place on earth, a vision that
doesn’t demean his life or diminish
his world. And that vision must be communicated, yes, in words and in ideas, by
all means – but also in the imagery that can fuel men’s imaginations and let
their spirits take wing.
Where can we
find such a sense of spirituality, a sense appropriate to our own values and
ideals? If I may repeat words that I used a year ago:
“It is not to
be found, but to be created – by ourselves. It is the gift from our own eyes to
the world around us, a gift that bestows upon that world the blessing of our
own significance. It is a gift that is ours alone to give – the kiss of an idea
pressed upon the stone cold face of matter – the kiss which brings to life the
romance that is ours alone to feel.”
It is the
creative spirit of man – that irrepressible, inexhaustible spirit which fills
the earth with meaning. And for those of us who yearn for a spiritual ideal, that is what we should worship.
Thank you.
1
Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology
and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume edition/Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 1,
26-27.
2 Ibid., pp. 2, 269.
3 "The Emerging
Culture,” American Demographics, Feb.
1997, p. 31.
3a Robert James Bidinotto, The
Green Machine (Poughkeepsie, NY: Institute for Objectivist Studies, 1993).
4 Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American
Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. xiii.
5 Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1995), p. 56.
6Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History
(London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 113.
6a Chase, pp. 124, 129.
7 Shabecoff, pp. 56-57.
8 Chase, p. 28.
9 Ibid., pp. 96, 121-22.
10 Ibid., p. 44.
11 Shabecoff, pp. 51-56.
12 Ibid., p. 58.
13 Ibid., p. 70.
14 Chase, p. 43.
15 Lynn White Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic
Crisis," Science, Mar. 10, 1967;
reprinted in Garrett De Bell, ed., The
Environmental Handbook (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970).
16 Peter Borrelli, "The Ecophilosophers," The Amicus Journal, Spring 1988, pp. 32-3. Also: Alston Chase,
"The Great, Green Deep-Ecology Revolution," Rolling Stone, April 23, 1987, p. 64.
17 Chase, In a Dark Wood, p. 116.
18 Eric T. Freyfogle, “The Price of a Sustainable Environment,” Dissent, Spring 1998, pp. 37-43.
19 Ayn Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” The Romantic Manifesto
(New York: Signet, Second Revised Edition, 1975).
20 Chase, In a Dark Wood, p. 44.
21 Shabecoff, xii.
22 Chase, p. 74.
23 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York:
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943; Scribner edition, 1986), p. 577.
No comments:
Post a Comment