AUGUST 10 2019
THE FIERY RED HORSE AND THE OMINOUS BLACK ONE.
About three times per week I bike 12 km back and forth to the village’s Value Mart to buy groceries. I always take along my own shopping bags, and always in the line-up I see people needing plastic bags, sometimes 4 or 5. A few weeks ago a high school teacher I know also came without. She is the typical “Akratic”, “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite”.
She is living proof that, in spite of multiple warnings, hotter and hotter days, Arctic and Antarctic melting with ominous consequences for the planet, in spite of ever more urgent reminders from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the general public remains willfully ignorant.
A world in decline is a world ignoring the obvious; instead its people perpetuate the myth that all is well. Nothing is well, again confirmed in two mass shootings in 24 hours: anger, unresolved mental disarray, simplistic solutions to problems that have festered for decades.
Everything is connected to everything else. Environmental neglect leads to psychological trauma. In the USA, denial of medical coverage, a basic human right, causes mental cruelty, resulting in mass shootings. The tested Latin saying, Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, also holds true for the opposite, Mens Insano in Corpore Insano, an insane mind the result of an unhealthy body.
All the News Is Bad
The United States has some 300 million guns and mass shooters every month. Americans – 5 % of the world’s population – own 40% of all guns in the world, more than all civilians combined in 25 other countries.
How come the USA is what it is?
I think it is a religious problem. It piously claims to be a Christian nation but, as Dr. Harold Bloom asserts in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION it has ceased to be Christian. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, upon leaving the US, after a brief stint at Columbia Theological Seminary, claimed that the USA has not seen a REFORMATION. The 1517 Reformation tied Christianity to all of life, while both the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist remained heaven oriented. The result is that in these denominations GNOSTICISM reigns, seeing the earth as evil, the globe as something to be abused.
When we exploit creation, we kill ourselves, and, since America still is the pace-setter in the world, it sets the tone for the world’s inhabitants, with its over-arching Information Technology industry, such as Google, Facebook and similar corporations. It now has become a culture where anything goes and nothing matters.
It’s not that there have been no warnings. Already in 1972 THE LIMITS OF GROWTH warned that we live in a finite earth where infinite growth is not possible.
In 1974 I bought, “An Inquiry into THE HUMAN PROSPECT”, by economist Robert L. Heilbroner, whose textbook I used when taking economics 101 at Queen’s University. He writes, “The industrial growth, so central to the economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism alike will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within a generation or two and will probably give way to decline thereafter………..Therefore the outlook involves what we may call “convulsive change” – change forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculations.”
Wise man he is, he assumes that there will not be a voluntary effort to reduce consumption, and so, more than 45 years ago, he predicted the current situation. Remember that then there was no talk about Climate Change as yet, now rapidly overwhelming us.
In 1995 he revisited this theme in his new book, “VISIONS OF THE FUTURE”. He did not change his mind: on the contrary. He prescribed in 1995 that, “We can content ourselves with three propositions, of which only the first is indisputable: humankind must achieve a secure terrestrial base for life. The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities…….Without such a stable foundation there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own.”
Well……… Yes, Heilbroner was dead on.
We have done exactly the opposite and now we are stuck: there is no way back. We have chosen the Road Most Traveled, and have learned nothing.
A look at today.
From the Tweed library I borrowed THE THIRD HORSEMAN, a book dealing with the 14th Century. That was when after 400 years of mild and favorable weather, the so-called Medieval Warming Period (MWP) suddenly in 1316 in Europe the weather turned nasty: unending rains for months, washing away the topsoil, making it impossible to plant and harvest crops, so that millions of people died. That extended favorable period generated a population explosion that suddenly reversed itself for lack of food.
This wet weather, lasting some 7 years, in which millions of people starved to death, was followed by the Black Plague, which found a ready feeding ground among a weakened population, killing as much as 30 percent of the then small number by our standards, perhaps 30 million out of an estimated world-wide 100 million.
There’s a lesson for us. THE THIRD HORSEMAN has as subtitle, “Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century”
William Rosen, the author, writes in conclusion, “The conditions that destroyed millions of lives during the seven years of the Great Famine appeared just after the four centuries of the Medieval Warming Period. (In Europe) from 900 to 1300 ten million grew to 30 million – and as the least productive acres were cultivated to feed them – the balance between producing food and consuming grew more fragile every year. By the time the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted, and the weather started to change, that balance could be destroyed by a strong wind.”
Dr. Heilbroner was so correct in his prophecy, when he wrote, “The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities…….Without such a stable foundation there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own.”
Today love for the Cosmos, so needed to maintain the earth, has vanished. I don’t want to recite what has happened in the last few decades: it is too well-known, although rarely admitted. We have become a people of the Lie. And the Liar-in-Chief is the President of the United States of America, who started his political career with a Lie, telling all that the then president, Obama, had not been born in the States but in Kenya. He then, as president, maintained that the crowd that greeted him was the greatest ever, in spite of graphic evidence to the contrary. Now his recorded lies run into the thousands. This and many other incidents portray his obvious moral vacuum, his profound spiritual black hole that lies beneath his persona and career.
It is that NIHILISM that now drives not only him but a good portion of the USA, supposedly a city on the hill, a shining light, now a light so dimmed that the wick has become wicked, throwing off poisonous fumes, becoming a growing threat to its 330 million of people. All this will get worse as the majority of its ruling politicians even deny the existence of Climate Change.
Our earlier circumstances closely resemble the MWP, the Medieval Warming Period, which preceded the 14th Century Famine. My lifetime coincides with the unprecedented growth in the world’s population, quadrupling since 1928, the year I was born, when OIL became food. It so happens that OIL is poisonous, poisons everything it touches, including our minds, including our religious consciousness: oil is king, oil is our idol, oil BURNS.
The RED HORSE
In many ways we already witness ongoing destruction everywhere. God has given our generation a power over creation that borders on the unbelievable, endangering the entire human race. Secrets that were hidden for centuries from the human eyes are one after the other in our time being revealed, even in the very heights of heaven. It is as if God has now removed the blindfolds that prevented us from discovering the secrets of the universe. But also this fabulous force now in the hands of us small humans is increasingly becoming a factor of horrific threat.
Isn’t that too a sign that God has released the brakes that now allow us to employ the unlimited evil that dwells in all of us?
However this all may be, there is one fact that is true beyond dispute and that is that the Bible bases the tremendous acceleration of planetary peril on theological grounds. It cannot be simply understood as based on human thinking but can only be explained when we grasp something of the riddle of the rider on the RED HORSE. The American general MacArthur has seen this correctly when, on the day the Japanese delegation signed the conditions of surrender, he spoke the remarkable words: “If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological.”
The RED HORSE signifies WAR. Of course. The most striking color of war is RED, as in ‘red hot’. Flames are red. War always involves FIRE. When our hometown was liberated from German occupation, the entire downtown area was ablaze.
Today the fires are different: they have come because we have changed the weather, making it so hot that we have fires everywhere, especially there where they never happened before, precisely where the methane is buried: the Arctic in Canada, Siberia and Greenland.
The fires occur because we are at war with creation. Every tree that burns has a double impact: one tree less to absorb CO2, while a tree aflame adds CO2. Trees, the lungs of the earth, are being decimated everywhere in the world: no country is excluded: a sure sign that we are engaged in a universal war.
Immediately after the RED HORSE, the BLACK HORSE arrives, its rider carrying in his hands a scale, and while he proceeds, there is a voice that says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.”
Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. Money loses its value and the costs of the normal daily needs become dearer by the day. A quart of wheat then was about what one person needed to stay alive, which meant that a laborer by working could only earn enough to keep himself from starving, but not his family. Were he to use barley, instead of wheat, the situation would be more manageable, but even then it would be impossible to maintain a family. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days.
In my life-time, thanks to natural-gas derived fertilizer and oil-based machinery, much of the workable growing soil has become nutrient deficient, while either drought – India, China, South America and Africa come to mind – or too much moisture – think about the USA Mid-West – has the potential of causing wide-spread crop failures.
How long do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad.
Once the methane in the Arctic erupts, we will have no more than a decade, and that decade will resemble the situation depicted in REVELATION: “Then I looked and saw a pale horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed close behind. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by sword, by famine, by plague, and by the beasts of the earth.”
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. No one knows about that day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24: 35-36).