DECEMBER 21 2019
THE STATE OF THE WORLD, 2020 (1)
I used to subscribe to the World Watch Institute publications some 30 years ago, buying its annual world survey, “The State of the World 1990” etc. but stopped after a few years. I had the sense that the World Watch organization was there to prolong its own existence by seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, with an eye to its corporate donors.
Well, I might as well say it outright and explain later: “The State of the World, 2020” is that God has abandoned us: we are on our own. For our own good, I might add.
I base this partly on Geert Mak, a well-known Dutch author, who wrote a book entitled: “How God disappeared from Jorwerd”. (I translated the Dutch title, of course.) Bonhoeffer too has influenced my thinking.
Jorwerd was –is- a village in the heart of Friesland’s farming country, a province in the north of the Netherlands, a region with its own language.
Some of my ancestors stem from this neck of the woods (no woods there, though, mostly meadows and lakes), as my surname suggests. The book traces the advent of the car-culture, and the effect of agricultural mechanization on rural towns such as Jorwerd in Friesland. Of course the carbonization of society has affected similar rural areas all over the western world, including Tweed in Ontario where I have lived since 1975. Our mechanical slaves have taken the heart out of all small municipalities everywhere and forced cities to mushroom.
How, you might ask. The car brought exurban development, with city people buying second residences, with farm hands becoming superfluous and drifting to the larger centres, and especially, with long commutes from country-side or suburbia, to employment opportunities far away. All this is now ingrained everywhere across the globe. This development has disrupted faith communities, killed off the local shops, created box stores, with enormous parking areas, severed ties with families and friends, and has brought us Trump, who promised to bring back the past.
The point Geert Mak – himself a lapsed church goer (his father was a minister in the Reformed church) – really made was that “God disappeared from Society”. And with God abandoned, our future too has disappeared.
We have no future in the sense that my grandparents had a future: a future dependent on carbon use, however refined and technically clever, is no future, as we now are discovering.
Yes, we are a society without a future. The State of the World 2020 is one of death: no future, no life. We have no future because we have never dealt with the problems that arose: we always pushed them off to tomorrow, which now has come, and we are stuck: no way forward, no way back.
It reminds me of Barbara W. Tuchman’s book, A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century.
In its introduction she writes, “ (The 14th Century’s) disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoof prints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven – plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and the schism in the Church. All but the plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over.”
Now in Century 21 and the year 2020, the curse of the Seven Horsemen of Judgement also applies to today. Already evident are similar fault lines, such as famine (Southern, Eastern Africa), soil erosion (China, Iowa), forest fires (Australia, California), floods (everywhere), but also identical problems: war, bad government, schism in the church, as well as increasing incidents of earthquakes, hurricanes, and related natural disasters.
What struck me on page 96 of Tuchman’s book were two items I have mentioned before: “As if the world was indeed (1) in the grip of The Evil One, its first (black death) appearance on the European mainland in January 1348 coincided with (2) a fearsome earthquake that carved a path of wreckage from Naples up to Venice,….. and the destruction reached as far as Germany and Greece….The chronicler wrote, ‘And in these days was burying without sorrowe and weddings without friendschippe.’”
The second quote is to me an eerie reminder of the prediction made in Revelation 16: 18 of an enormous earthquake and related disasters.
Fact is that we have no future and that’s why Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro are seen as redeemers: they promise a fictive future, to gullible followers.
The only possible future is the past. It has been exactly the elimination of human labor that has created the current chaos in the world, brought on by our carbon-crazy society. This has necessitated COP 25 – which stands for “Conference of the Parties”, UN sponsored, a fruitless effort to stem and reverse the carbon age.
For the last 25 years this world body has met, and, with the last one just completed, has been unable to deal with our carbon addiction age and the resulting climate crisis.
In the Western world the three hold-outs are Australia, Brazil and the USA, three countries where ‘Evangelical’ Christians head the government. It is quite understandable that China and India, with some 40 percent of the world population, have not budged: they still want to match the Western world in prosperity and life style. Good luck!
Tragically, thanks to the “Christians” we are doomed. Take Brazil: its new motto is the 3Bs: Bible, Beef and Bullets.
Bible.
Bolsonaro sees the Bible as providing a mandate to dominate creation, influenced by the real American Religion, Gnosticism, which sees matter as evil. The same is true for Australia, also led by a “Christian” Prime Minister, and the USA, with ‘born-again’ Pence and Pompeo in charge.
Beef.
Brazil loves Beef: it is seen as more important than trees, so destroy the Amazon.
Bullets.
Bullets are useful to exterminate the native population: they are godless heathens after all.
In other words: just as the church in Jesus’ days crucified him, so today’s ‘evangelicals’ crucify creation and so kill God by expanding carbon use and accelerating the race toward oblivion. The largest polluters, the USA and China, even refuse to hold the line, let alone reduce carbon emission, and so the future has disappeared and God help us, which he won’t do, because we are on our own.
Bonhoeffer.
In his Christmas 1942 letter to his fellow anti-Nazi conspirators, Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, ‘Are we (Christians) still of any use?’ He wondered, “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; … experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.”
I should add that the German Lutheran Church fully sided with Hitler and the Nazi regime, which explains Bonhoeffer’s question, just as American ‘evangelicals’ worship Trump. Do you know of any church that has taken an effective and confessional stand against Carbon and its war on God’s Holy Creation?
Later Bonhoeffer wrote: “Humanity has come of age”, and suggested that God will leave us, because God wants to see us grow up and observe how we will end up.
It’s all in the Bible, of course!
Deuteronomy 32: 17-20 has a line referring to this, “And my anger will burn at them in that day, and I shall leave them, and I shall hide my face from them….and shall see what their end will be.”
The word ‘end’ here does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future, a future that has arrived, a future that is NOW, a society without God. And, indeed, the End is here.
All this is pedagogically correct.
We humans need a period of divine hiddenness, must leave the manifest presence of God, so that we can become all that we can be.
I myself had to go through this phase: I had to emigrate, to be away from my conventional parents and family, my oh-so orthodox church and develop my own religious way in life. Once I have become what I am, I shall be able to meet God in Jesus.
Fortunately there are some stirrings. The world is waking up. Wise people see the writing on the wall. Look at the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Last week it had an interesting article.
Here is its caption:
The climate crisis is like a world war. So let’s talk about rationing.
“It’s time for mandatory cutbacks on the kinds of consumption that threaten all of us,” writes Eleanor Boyle, a Vancouver-based writer, and author of High Steaks: “Why and How to Eat Less Meat, and her forthcoming book Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today.
She starts: “It’s too bad meat is so tasty, driving so convenient and airline travel so desirable. Because those all create large amounts of greenhouse gases and worsen the climate crisis. We know it, and some of us feel guilty getting on a plane, hopping in the car or eating burgers. But how are we to cut back when we’re not sure what level of a high-emission behaviour is sustainable – and when everyone else is doing it? Some environmental activists and leaders suggest we should practise moderation, take the bus, eat veggie burgers. But voluntary measures just can’t deliver when the problem is this big and time is so short. That’s why it may be time for mandatory cutbacks on the kinds of consumption that threaten all of us. It may be time for rationing.”
Let me stop her there. The article goes into details of rationing in the past and how populations – especially in Great Britain – complied.
I know all about rationing. I was 12 in 1940 when Germany invaded the Netherlands, and right away rationing was introduced, because the occupiers took the locally produced food and brought it to feed their own population, causing shortages at home. The first items to go were tropical fruits, as imports were impossible. Soon after that coffee, tea and, horror of horrors, tobacco disappeared. In some ways, cigarettes became the new currency. I remember sailing in 1947 from England, where cigarettes were in abundant supply, en route to Sweden, via Germany – for 6 weeks I was a paying guest on a 600 ton coastal vessel. In Kiel, Germany, I bought a glass of tepid beer for ONE cigarette.
Rationing remained in force in defeated Germany for years after the war ended, and also in Great Britain. It took years before it disappeared.
I believe the Globe article is timely. Wartime conditions will create the worst of all worlds: fearful food inflation, frightful asset deflation, and stagnant wages. The portents are everywhere. Our economy was based on the ‘free’ use of air, water and soil: the bills are due in real money, because the banks have created free money out of nothing: “nothing comes free!!” is one of the laws of Ecology.
How are we going to cope with the looming shortages? Will rationing be the solution? I vividly remember the coupons for candy, for clothing, for sugar, for tobacco. How about access to electricity and natural gas? What about fuel for cars for the millions that live too far from stores?
If all carbon-based products are banned, because they are the root cause of the crisis, what about exurban and suburban housing, now totally dependent on automobiles, especially in the winter with snow and ice?
The questions multiply, and my next blog will deal with that. It also concludes 20 years of weekly blogs: an even 1000.
Postscript.
I will take off for a while, certainly one month. It is my intention to write a series of skits or short plays based on Bible stories for performance in our church: that’s how centuries ago the gospel was conveyed to illiterate masses. The old is new again, this time with the help of CDs and power point.