Help! Atheists Ate My Planet

One of the interesting things about having an eclectic book habit is that sometimes you read two very different books one after another and find they share some unexpected common thread. The two books in question are China Road (ISBN 978-0-8129-7524-6), in which Rob Gifford makes one last road trip through China, debating with himself whether China is about to take over the world or collapse into chaos, and Mythic Ireland (ISBN 0-500-27872-5), in which Michael Dames takes a scholarly look at the levels of Irish mythmaking.

What on earth can these two books have to do with one another?

The blog title gives it away: both lament the state of the environment and blame atheism for the carnage. This is a bit rich coming from a couple of apparent Christians, whose own holy book contains the exhortations to run roughshod over the planet. Christianity sets up an intrinsic animosity between people and the planet, but only the End-Timer extremists are up-front about it. Still, the fact that the most insistent anti-environmentalists, in the United States at least, are also the most dogmatic Christians can hardly be taken as an accident. The Christian/anti-environmental link is old ground, and well plowed elsewhere.

Dames makes the interesting observation that Ireland has present and active in its culture several distinct overlays arriving in successive waves of migration: Mesolithic (hunter-gatherer) and Neolithic (farmer) goddess worship, Bronze and Iron Age Indo-European sky gods, and Christianity. The Irish tendency to repurpose ancient deities as saints (e.g. Brigit, goddess of the flame) is well known: the bulk of the book is an extended and detailed observation that this repurposing has been going on for a very long time, and that some of the very old (7000-2000 BC) traditions still peek through. All well and good, but then Dames tries to make the claim that "Scientific Rationalism" is just another mythic overlay.

The recent appreciation by Popper and others that 'scientific discovery is akin to explanatory story-telling, to myth-making, and to the poetic imagination' places science in the broad mythic field where, in any case, it was born and nurtured.

Hmm...Right there on page 10, you start wondering just how much nonsense you're going to have to put up with. Well, quite a bit, it turns out, although mainly in small enough doses to keep you going. (Dames has a penchant for listing out every possible ancilliary meaning of a word root to prove mythic points.) Where he really jumps the shark, however, is in trying to make the case that it is the atheistic view of scientific rationalism that is degrading the environment. Dames undermines his own case (in typically overblown BS-laden terms):

Since in all mythologies (including the Christian) the individual is a cosmos-in-miniature, a person divided in two implies an equivalent an equivalent split in the macrocosm. Thus the spirit or soul which previously had been united with the body of the world was driven out, leaving behind a soulless mass of gross matter. Animals, plants, rocks, rivers, clouds, stars, sun and moon, were all now denied their share of the divine vitality. No longer were they regarded as living manifestations of the gods, but as a barrier blocking the view of the abstract and immaterial Godhead. This newly despicable world was repeatedly put to the torch at Lough Derg, and is incinerated again at Hiroshima, and in human-induced global warming. The pilgrimage to Ferry House is an Irish version of the Platonic European walk, where the world, as soulless Thing, is treated with contempt.

This may read like an indictment of Christian ethics and a pining for Neolithic morality, but no, this is not Dames' point at all. He pins dualism on the Greeks and the "mythology" of scientific rationalism. "In time, Christianity incorporated this teaching," he acknowledges (as he must since it is undeniable), but fails to clearly see that separating the divine from nature is a Christian idea, not a Greek one. The distiction between mind and body, spirit and flesh, is a part of the older traditions too. It is Christianity that brought contempt for the non-human parts of creation, not Plato, and not the scientific rationalism. Let's just set aside completely the non-sequitur of equating science with atheism, atheism with amorality, and amorality with immorality.

In the other corner, Rob Gifford observes the staggering environmental cost of China's development, and again, tries to pin it all on those darned atheists. It is a mess of faulty correlations and (again, sigh I do so get tired of this) the equation of atheism with amorality and immorality, as if they were all the same thing. He finds the blossoming of Christianity and other faiths in China a hopeful sign, but if we want to go for faulty correlations, how about this one: the acceleration of environmental degradation in China correlates with the positive uptake of Christianity. If Chinese are lost for ethical underpinnings, is it because they were raised to praise atheism, or because the Chinese government has made a systematic program of tearing down ethical frameworks one after another over the past fifty years, so that the only sane response is skepticism to any ethical pronouncement from authorities? Gifford runs through the program in detail, and then concludes that Chinese no longer believe anything and therefore (hoo, that's quite a therefore!) their atheism provides their justification for doing anything -- lousy health and safety rules, lousy environmental protection, lousy consumer protections, you name it.

None of it follows, of course.

Why do you have to believe in sky fairies to want to have a clean place for your grandchildren to live? Why does the fundamentally rational position that you can't outstrip your natural resources indefinitely need a supernatural justification for action?

Short answer: you don't.

Recent Reading

Charles de Lint, Moonlight and Vines
ISBN: 978-0765309174

I admire Charles de Lint's writing immensely. As a prose stylist, you could do worse. Far worse. He has a wonderful eye for detail in drawing his settings and people, and a deft touch in drawing together the natural, the urban, and the supernatural. His characters are interesting, the kind of people you wished you were sitting down in a coffee shop with. Still, there was something dissatisfying about this collection of interlinked short stories. It is like listening to some of Glenn Gould's records: after the zillionth etude your mind rebels and craves either something really different or some larger overarching structure. Something with the size of a symphony shouldn't should like the same little thing over and over. This book strikes me the same way. Each story was fine by itself, and many were very fine indeed, but the interlinked characters leads you into wanting something more akin to the structure of a novel, and it just isn't there. De Lint attempts to draw the book together by making the last story circle back to the first, but it is very unconvincing. The last story isn't, fundamentally, a story. It reads like a 2am confessional from the author. The characters in it bear little relation to the ones introduced in the first story. Still, worth reading. Just read it in pieces.

Barbara Robinette Moss, Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter, A Memoir
ISBN: 978-0743202190

This is eight tenths of a fantastic book. Moss recalls her appallingly poor childhood as one of seven children of an alcoholic and violent father. What makes it only a partial success is that Moss writes towards an ending where she gets her terrible teeth fixed and emerges swam-like into her new beautiful reality. But the suffering because of her teeth isn't the central thrust of the narrative, we don't get any of the payoff of the emergence, and honestly, the most interesting thread of this story is her mother. Here is a woman who has records with her own voice recording on, who has a love of learning and reading and poetry which she somehow manages to pass on to her children under the most appalling circumstances, who holds the kids together as best she can, and sticks with an terrible husband through thin and thinner, but who finally, finally breaks free. And we get that story only in glimpes. The moment when Moss' father, now remarried in a more stable (emotionally and financially) environment refuses to help with her educational fees is set up as some kind of key emotional moment, but it looks whiny. What did you expect? The moment that we didn't get a good view in was when Moss' mother finally leaves the bum. One of the most heart-rending moments for me, in part because it is told with such flat affect, was when the children destroy the mother's records by tossing them around the yard like frisbees when they are to be left behind in yet another forced-out-again move. What must she have been feeling at that moment? How does hope die? How, after all that, do you finally decide enough is enough? Why? All unanswered, alas. Still, a good and moving read.