December 8 2013
THE AGE OF DENIAL
Just after I had decided to write a series on “How then shall we live?” trying to combine the Creation Word with the Written Word I went to the local library where a book sale was going on. There I bought for $5.00 three books, one by Robertson Davies, a children book to read to our 5 and 7 year old grandchildren when they are here at Christmas, and a book by a number of authors, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, with the intriguing title of Covenant for a New Creation.
I very much believe in divine guidance, and I saw this as an affirmation that in the coming year I must pursue this difficult, self-imposed assignment to struggle with the question “How then shall we live?” in these last days.
Some of you may recognize the topic: it is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), who with his wife ran L’Abri, a retreat in Switzerland some 50 years ago. I will write more about this book and this couple in my first blog in January.
Yes, I very much believe that we are living in the last of days. All signs point to that. Jesus, in that revealing 24th chapter of Matthew, with the heading Signs of the End of the Age, gives some indication in verse 32. He points to a tree – Jesus often takes examples from creation – a fig tree in this case. Here is that passage: “Now then learn this lesson from the fig tree: as soon as the twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know it is near, right at the door.”
What things are so plain to see for those who have eyes to see? The most glaring sign is “the great abomination” mentioned in that chapter, referring to the world-wide pollution of which Climate Change is the most pronounced feature, which also indicates that we live in The Age of Denial, especially relating to these final matters.
Denial persists
Last week I read an article in the December 2 New Yorker: Letter from Handan with the title In the Air, and subtitled: Discontent grows in China’s most polluted cities. Here is an excerpt: “There’s a joke that a Handan person went to Switzerland and the air was so good that he began to feel sick from all the oxygen. So they quickly hooked a tube to a car’s exhaust pipe and he sucked on that for a while until he felt better.” Denial anyone?
The truth is that China’s pollution- this great abomination, which is getting worse – is influenced by the same religious misconception as most Christian thinking. Back to the article: “For much of the past two millennia, Taoism (which places a high value on closeness with nature) was politically eclipsed by Confucianism, with its more worldly concern for family and society. Mark Elvin, a professor emeritus of Chinese history has argued persuasively that China’s disregard for the environment has roots in this heritage. The ideal Confucian ruler saw the mastery of nature as part of humanity’s triumph over barbarism.”
Is it any different in the Western World? The observation Lynn White, a professor of church history, made in 1967 is still very relevant today. He wrote a scathing essay in the most prestigious scientific journal in the USA, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His article entitled The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis was widely read and reprinted in thousands of environmental studies published in the decades following its appearance in Science.
Dr. White focused on the environmental attitudes and values set out in Genesis and how they might have fostered ill-treatment of nature in Christendom throughout the ages. He argued, in effect, that since it is written in the first few chapters of the Bible that human beings alone among all creatures were created in the image of God and given dominion over nature and charged to subdue it, the Jews and Christians, taking this message to heart, attempted to live by its light. They regarded themselves as beings apart from the rest of nature, licensed by God to rule over it and bend it to their purposes. After two thousand years of putting this vision of the human-nature relationship into practice with increasing success, the 20th century’s technological wonders and the 20th century’s environmental crisis are the end result.
In my next year’s series on How then shall we live? I will explore and critique this further. Suffice it to say that by and large the church still adheres to a dualistic view, and thus most certainly is part of The Age of Denial.
During 2013 I have written my weekly blog of some 2000 words and have been encouraged by the increasing number of visitors from all over the world. It looks that my blog will have close to 70,000 visitors in 2013, well over double the number in 2012. Only the Lord knows whether I have changed anybody’s mind, given that we live in The Age of Denial.
Why this denial?
People in general, continue to avoid serious thought about human population growth, the predictable effects of global warming, the degradation of the oceans, and even the depletion of top soil in the Midwest. Believe it or not, but Peak Oil is still an issue today, and will be increasingly so in the years to come even though there now is a temporary new supply, which will actually speed up The Coming of the Lord because fracking releases a lot of extra methane and other pollutants. Don’t get fooled by this fracking frenzy, which is proclaimed as the new Saviour of the United States.
My regular readers may remember that I have written extensively about the issue of Peak Oil. Basically, it is the observation that there is only so much easily obtainable oil. Let me use a graphic example. Imagine an erect penis. Place this full-blooded male member on the centre of a timeline of 10,000 years. For the first 5000 years the line is flat. Then suddenly there is this Eiffel Tower structure, depicting the sudden onset of oil, its peak and its demise, spanning no more than 200 years. For the next 5000 years the line again shows nothing. That illustrates our oil usage: no more than 200 years of a-historic extravagance. Right now we are at the pinnacle, around the point when we have used half of what was originally there. The second half, however, lacks the easy extraction of the first, because fields become depleted, new fields are smaller, are harder to find and take much more energy to develop.
The United States hit its peak oil production around 1970, and it has been in decline ever since. It’s true that with improved technology, we can squeeze a few more drops out by drilling deep offshore, slant drilling, and steam cleaning the tar sands, but these are expensive and highly polluting methods. We have probably been at or around the point of peak oil for most of this decade.
The economic effects of peak oil are as obvious as they are frightening. The most immediate result is an increase in oil prices, something which will slow down economic activity. For the sudden entente with oil-rich Iran look no further than Peak Oil. There was a period in which Saudi Arabia could influence the world’s rate of oil production by turning up the flow, but even that is a thing of the past. Fact is that we will be spending the rest of our lives, and our children their own lives, dealing with the consequences.
On a personal note.
This past week we had our TV re-connected after doing without it for 2 years. Now that we again have an opportunity to visualize what’s going on the world out there, our television set just sits there, not used for days on end. I simply don’t feel inclined to waste my precious time. I am already sorry that there was a special deal from Bell TV. Oh well, the Olympics coming up and the World Soccer tournament, so OK, one can’t be ‘culturally deprived’ forever. The greatest danger of TV is that we won’t deal with reality and remain in denial. Peak oil is just one of the big denials we persist in holding onto. Global warming is obviously the other, as our political discourse shows only too well with conservative Christians voicing the most vocal opposition to this issue. It is severely sickening how people who regularly go to church have no clue how deeply they offend God by this denial which turns off potential Christ believers. TV is controlled by Capitalism which has a vested interest in the status quo and is financing propaganda campaigns solely to squash the communication of scientific reality. When you hear a United States Senator call global warming a hoax, you know we have a big problem. When it’s the Republican Party policy, it’s an even bigger problem. To my shame, “Conservative’ Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, is also a Global Warming denier.
Yes, population growth. When I was born in 1928 there were some 2 billion people, mostly well fed, but very few obese. Today there are more than 7 billion and obesity has become a global plague. Even though projections are that the human population of the world would be in excess of 12 billion people by the end of this century, this will never happen. When we consider global warming, declining supplies of petroleum, the expanding population, and depletion of soil quality, we are looking at the perfect storm for humanity.
So what are the remedies? That’s why I am starting that new series, not that I expect that the world will change direction. That just won’t happen. That also is not my motivation. My sole aim is to prepare people for the New Creation to come, something we have to practise now if we want to be ready for Christ’s return.
There are signs of hope.
One of them is the new pope by the name of Francis, who chose this name to show his affinity to Francis of Assisi, who wrote
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
The sign of hope is that, in his address to the world-wide Roman Catholic Church, he condemned the capitalistic system. No other pope before him has ever done so in such clear language. Pope Francis said: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”
Thanks to Capitalism a large segment of America’s workforce is under employed. Millions in North America don’t make enough money, working for Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, to feed themselves properly. They require food stamps, a feature that, thanks to the Republican Party, has been cut back. They are the victims of what the Pope refers to as “trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”
The pontiff also wrote: “While the earnings of a tiny minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. … A new tyranny is thus born. … The thirst for power and possessions know no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. Behind this attitude,” Francis wrote, “lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God.” That is because ethics inevitably represents a judgment that “makes money and power relative.”
Will it make a difference? That is not the issue. Jesus proclaimed the same message and even now, after Two Thousand Years his words too are not being heeded. Yet, in the end, when he returns, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord. We all have to be Anthropoi Teleioi, people that keep the End – the telos – in mind.