Lesley Hazelton has another excellent post on what will turn out to be the greatest environmental disaster in history:
Yes, I am aware that ‘evil’ is a religious term. How can a proud agnostic use such a word? I trust my guts. As I look at this, I am sickened. The feeling starts in my throat, travels down to the pit of my stomach, then makes its way up again into my throat, leaving me with such a deep disgust that I feel dirty, degraded.
I think this visceral reaction is simply a human response to evil.
I want to take this idea or thought a step further: The theological implications of this disaster are becoming more and more apparent. Now, let me take two steps back: Two weeks ago, I argued that the disaster would not only bring death to offshore drilling but shake the foundations of American oil culture. Now, let me take three steps forward: My present belief is that American oil culture is finished (it will not survive this mess) and what is next to be shaken and possibly destroyed is the foundation of something even larger: American Christianity.
From NYT:
Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.
This “great belief in technology” is not secular but closely linked with a great belief in American awesomeness. And American awesomeness has always been sustained by the foundations of American Christianity, a form of religion that is humble not toward nature but toward a God who has power over everything and punishes His enemies and rewards His followers. With American Christianity, prosperity is a God-given right, and this frame of thinking has established and reinforced a relationship with nature that is essentially identical with the one that exists between a master and slave.
It is precisely this kind of thinking that in Europe began to crumble in the period that followed the scientific revolution. In Origin of Species (1859), for example, Darwin essentially dethrones humans and pleads, again and again, that this dethronement, this diminishing, decentering is not the end of the world—humans can happily (if not proudly) live as animals among other animals.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
The end of the 19th century was not only the end of British awesomeness but also the emergence of a scientific sense of human littleness and limitations. It is a mistake to read the late-19th century books of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and many others without this understanding. What Darwin saw as a grand “view of life,” many saw as either “The horror! The horror!” (be it in the direction of the deep past—Heart of Darkness) or “A horror of this great darkness” (be it in the direction of the deep future—The Time Machine). Near the end of The Time Machine:
A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.
True, we find dethroned humans in so many American novels (Earth Abides, for example) and movies (The War of the Worlds), but, culturally speaking, this sense of dethronement is far from universal. The certainty of American awesomeness that led to the war in Iraq or to the current destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, has been rooted in one, politically powerful branch of American Christianity. And what has feed much of this overrepresented group’s tireless (and often comical) resistance to the hard facts of, say, Darwinism, has been the belief that American greatness cannot be separated from divine providence, from supernatural agency. What they do best (or famously) is to refuse to register American military power and technological mastery as anything but direct gifts from (and reflecting the power of—and also obedience to) the creator of the universe.
What the spill has made clear is that American awesomeness (technology) has a sure limit. It can only go so far and do so much. Operation “top kill” could not overwhelm that thing that God (technology) is imagined to completely master—nature. But if American awesomeness has a limit, then the God who supports and reinforces it (technology) is also limited. And if God is limited, then He is not a He but only a he, a man, a mere human being (technology).
Not all American Christians have the kind of relationship with nature that has placed this country in such deep waters. And the more the oil spill poisons the gulf, we can expect to see, on the one hand, the steady belittling of the believers of American awesomeness, and, on the other hand, a corresponding increase in the number of Americans whose view of things is much more down to earth.
For the 80th time, this isn’t a spill. It didn’t “happen”, it’s happening every minute, it’s continuing to gush. What the situation was yesterday or the day before is not what the situation is today or will be tomorrow.
This won’t affect Christianity’s view of the natural world or humans or its particular God. Christianity doesn’t focus on the world; it focuses on being saved from what humans choose to do so they can enter the next world shorn of sin. Environmental disasters don’t figure into that, except for being one more sin to expect Jesus to expiate.
dear rhodie, we are manikas. if you knew the politics of the country, you would know it is deeply tribal. mugabe and manikas are hardly friendly. just look at morgan and robert and you get some of the picture. my father worked for the zim gov until 1988. what is curious about that year? zim become a one-party state. my father is capitalist; im the socialist. my father moved to botswana in 1988 to work for the pro-democracy and capitalist botswana government. my father studied economics at american university. he is actually a highly trained economist.
“. my father worked for the zim gov until 1988”
Take the money and run.
Charles, I think I disagree with you, but I don’t know, because your predictions as stated are fairly vacuous. Christianity is already trending slightly downward in the U.S. (and in the world, in terms of percentage of the world’s population); and of course America’s oil industry will *eventually* be replaced by something else. The only interesting questions are when and by how much.
To link the BP incident in some meaningful and causal way, you would need to put a little more meat on your prediction bones. What kind of timeframe and quantity of change would tend to confirm your prediction? Will less than 50% of Americans claim to be Christian by 2030? Will less than 50% of American energy come from oil in 2025? Will a majority of historians recognize the oil leak’s role, or will this link be detectable only by socialist columnists for local arts weeklies?
Observations about the future seem fairly feckless if there’s no way anyone could ever assess whether they were correct or not; so I’d be interested to see your thoughts on this translated into something more substantial, which could eventually be confirmed or disconfirmed.
@35, @42 The problem, as I understand it from Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) is that the wellhead pressure is something like 6800 psi at the sea floor, over and above the approximately 2500 psi pressure of all the water sitting over it. This is not something you can just dump stuff on top of to snuff out. It’s going to keep squirting through. Unless you can mechanically stop the flow long enough for cement to set, it’s a toughy to cap.
Even if they managed to fit a shutoff valve over the broken section of pipe, are there even valves that will close with 6800 psi pressure behind them? That’s a lot of pressure, much more than industry has to deal with usually, and up in the range where most normal materials will fail. A gate valve would be more likely to deform and jam than to close. Even if they cap it, it might be high enough pressure to break off the end of the well casing and cough out everything on top of it.
This thing is a monster. These folks caught a dragon by the tail and they don’t know what to do next.
@52
It’s interesting to me that Charles only responds to racist trolls. I noticed that in the conversation about his daughter’s hair, as well.
I don’t know as much as Brooklyn Reader but I have an old house with springs under it and until I installed a sump pump, there was no way to stop the water from pushing through the cement basement. That sump pump has broken down several times and until it’s restarted, the water just comes up through the hole the pump sits in and floods the basement. Which the oil will continue doing until the oil deposit is at a lower level than the well, which will be a long time.
this is my favorite thing Charles Mudede has ever written 🙂
Unfortunately, religious fanatics looking to place blame for god’s wrath will probably blame “teh gays” and “teh liberruls” and not American materialism and wastefulness.
@59: Religious fanatics are expert rationalizers. Whenever what they predict doesn’t happen they just chalk it up to “minions of Satan” or “God works in mysterious ways”.
I assume by American Christianity you are speaking of Fundamentalist and Conservative Christians. Because the rest of us see our faith as a call to social change, respect for the natural world and progress toward peace. Also, I’m not sure that I’m understanding the reverence for Almighty technology connected to reverence for an Almighty God? Actually, I find those who do not have a spiritual faith, put their faith in technology and scientific innovation. I’m by no means against scientific innovation but lets not forget that it has brought us the oil drill, the atom bomb and the complete reliance on fossil fuels. Religion is always the scapegoat but the reality is its truly about money and capitalism. Profit rules this country and until it costs corporations more money to harm the environment than to protect it, nothing will change. Not even this disaster will change it.
@Fnarf:
I haven’t forgotten Katrina. Neither have the families and friends of the 1,836 people who perished, or the 705 people still officially missing after the storm and the flood. Neither have the countless thousands of misplaced citizens from those areas still struggling with that relocation today. Nor has any of the current population of the 7 US States affected by the hurricane, the flood, or the government’s failure to react.
In fact, I’m pretty sure the only people who’ve forgotten Katrina are the folks who never truly gave a shit in the first place. Which might be the bigger problem, with this disaster as well.
And since I don’t have the bullshit swab of religion with which to paint myself a rosier future, I’m going to hang onto Charles Mudede’s fantasy of a golden world in which Christianity, rendered useless, simply expires and we move on to a better way of life.
” fantasy of a golden world in which Christianity, rendered useless, simply expires and we move on to a better way of life.”
Islam!
@63
Are you suggesting that Americans are going to drift away from the powerful brain shield of Christianity…and slip into Islam? Are those our only options? I don’t think so. Large numbers of Europeans just dropped religion.
Hey, maybe that was a joke, but unregistered comments always read as foolish empty hate. Sarcasm doesn’t come out in anonymous single-word comments. There’s always someone real who’s as stupid as you.
My hair…it is naked.