More on Human Evolution

 The Guardian has published of a book I'd like to check out at some point.  Basing his theories of human evolution on the influence technologies such as cooking and baby slings have upon physical structure (and therefore on the potential for larger brain capacity), British archaeologist Timothy Taylor offers some interesting hypotheses:

After the switch to an upright posture, probably the biggest single anatomical change on the journey from apes to humans was the weakening of the jaw. In apes, the jaw is large and protrudes way beyond the nose. It is attached by muscle to a bony ridge on the top of the skull and has a force many times that of a human jaw. Recent genomics research has shown that a large mutation about 2.4m years ago disabled the key muscle protein in human jaws. We still have the disabled protein today, and that weakened jaw enabled a raft of innovations. The ape brain could not grow because of the huge muscle load anchored to the skull's crest, and apes cannot articulate speech-like sounds because of the clumsy force of their jaws. This mutation allowed the increase in human brain size and the acquisition of language.

But why did it happen? Wrangham maintains that it was cooking that led to the change. Cooked food does not need strong jaws. In genetics a function that becomes redundant always leads to the gene being disabled by mutations. Around 2.4m years ago an ape switched to mostly cooked food. In the fossil record, a new proto-human appeared 1.8-1.9m years ago: Homo erectus had a much larger brain and no crest on the skull, indicating that the weakened jaw muscle was now standard.

Read the rest over at the Guardian.  I don't agree with all the author's conclusions, but I do find it of interest that many, many theories of human evolution are constantly being advanced.  Recent genetic research seems to be offering new avenues for helpful guesses at the prehistory of homo sapiens, and it is fun to stay in the discussion on terms other than one's own.  Thinking about things in a way different from my own certainly does assist in the ongoing task of broadening the mind.

h/t AL Daily

In other news, I've settled on the blog header that does the job right, and I'm sticking with it.  Possibly for months.

Echoooooo

To continue with some thoughts from an earlier post on technology, a recent review appearing in the City Journal is worth some of your time.  It takes up the thesis of a "digital technology philosopher," a discipline in which I consider myself an amateur (in the etymological sense of the word--a lover).  The man in question, William Powers, has released a number of articles on the subject, including a paper on the effect the Internet is having on print journalism ... supposedly excellent.  I suggest you read the whole review yourself, and then follow up with some of the comments on First Thoughts, where I first came across the review.  Some excerpts:

In my experience, judging from e-mail conversations I have, when you learned to write affects how you use the technology. The people who learned to write and discuss things before the invention of e-mail find it a great tool, because it creates a new mixture of conversation and letter-writing, with something of the speed of the first and the distance and reflection of the second. You can respond fairly quickly, but with time to measure what you say, check your facts, dig up good quotes, etc.  But people who didn’t learn to write and discuss things then . . . tend to use it and similar technologies in the way it seems to encourage: to send short, pointed, undeveloped, often emotive and sometimes pointless, thoughts. The exchanges make a personal connection, which is probably all to the good, and communicate judgments and emotions, but not thoughts of any complexity.

A respondent brings up the very point that goes unasked with every new development: what do we bargain away in exchange for the gains we make?

Every breakthrough in communications technology involves the loss of some existing skill set, almost as compensation for whatever benefits accrue from the new technology.  Writing tended to undermine our ability to memorize long stories, lists, poems, etc. Printing undermined calligraphy (and typing destroyed handwriting); television undermined the listening skills and imagination required for radio (or reading aloud). It’s a constant process of trading off one thing for another, and each generation has to judge whether the game is worth the candle.

Scarier than all these developments is the fact that there aren't too many of us even asking the question. At what point do we sell our birthright for a mess of pottage?

For further reading, you can pick up my somewhat lengthy comments on the issue of what effects technology has on our lives here.

Happy Birthday to Me

"Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for ever species of sh*t that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great sh*thouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday." 

Walker Percy

The Moviegoer

Ever since I read this several years ago, it seemed like it was destined to commemorate in some form my own thirtieth birthday.  It doesn't necessarily represent my own subjective state of mind, but I present it nonetheless.  Thanks for the birthday wishes from those who sent them along.

totus  +  amdg  +  tuus

 

Various and Sundry Engagements With Matters of Enlightenment

A few hours of desultory reading on the web can either be fuel for contemplation or a complete waste of time that calls into question one's character and sanity. Happily, this morning can be declared the former.

First Things has been on a roll with the daily article of late. R.R. Reno discusses some thoughts on how scientific discoveries are received by ordinary people, and sheds a tear of compassion for the well-funded, highly educated army of researchers whose labors do little to influence public opinion on matters that touch on basic human experience. The matter in question? Brain science, and the conviction among researchers that impending discoveries will put the last nail in the coffin of freedom (and hence moral responsibility). A recent study from the University of Utah suggests that regardless of the scientific consensus, certain basic convictions just won't be eradicated. Reno does a fine job of reining in our view that science has the last word on the humanum.

When a scientist reports that action x can occur if and only if there is an antecedent brain state y, which in turn requires brain state z, then he is identifying y and z as necessary condition for and not the causes of x. We all know that what counts as a free choice is not a mental moment suspended in ether, unconnected and uninfluenced by emotions, habits, and intuitions. The ability of science to explain and illuminate the webs of interconnection does not dislodge our deeper intuition that our deeply embedded, highly influenced, and profoundly physical mental lives are somehow genuinely our own—and somehow our responsibility to discipline and cultivate.

Reno's appraisal of the general reluctance to swallow massively counterintuitive scientific claims sits well with the perspectives of another FT contributor (and a favorite author of mine) Stephen Barr. I plowed through his Modern Physics and Ancient Faith on the exercise bike this summer, which I highly recommend to enthusiasts in the field of the philosophy of science. Dabblers might be more suited to print out an article that presents the thesis of the book in summary form, entitled "Retelling the Story of Science", and park themselves in an easy chair on a winter morning with a cup of hot coffee and a pencil. In it, Barr nails down five areas of scientific progress that have actually undermined the Enlightenment aspirations to eradicate religious perspectives on the world. The fourth and fifth these areas of discovery touch on the issues outlined by Reno above, but in a very different light. Barr takes up the favorite activity of ideological materialism, "debunking myths," and turns it back on its practitioners:

Here the scientist debunks himself. Here all the grand intellectual adventure of science ends with the statement that there is no intellectual adventure. For the mind of man has looked into itself and seen nothing there except complex chemistry, nerve impulses, and synapses firing. That, at least, is what the materialist tells us that science has seen. However, the story is really not so simple. Here again the plot has twisted. Two of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century cast considerable doubt upon, and some would say refute, the contention that the mind of man can be explained as a mere biochemical machine.

What might those discoveries be? Read the article and find out.

On a note related to some thoughts on relativism earlier, I came across this interesting video of Penn Gillette's reaction to the gift of a Bible from one of his fans after a show (link via Creative Minority Report). A short encounter with a genuinely good Christian man had an obviously powerful effect upon him.

What is most interesting is the way he countextualized the simple gift of a small Gideon Bible. "How much do you have to hate someone to believe everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that?" Contra the popular conception of evangelism as judgment and condemnation, this self-proclaimed atheist accepted what this man was offering: the gift of God's love, despite the personal discomfort making such an offer would probably bring him. That offer worked on a level more profoundly than the merely intellectual:

I know there's no God, and one polite person living his life well doesn't change that. But I'll tell you, he was a very, very, very good man.

We have here something akin to what made Christianity such a popular religion in the first place. Benedict has said that

the conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the life of Christians and of the community of the Church … The Church’s community of life invited people to share in this life in which was revealed the truth from which this kind of life arose. On the other hand the apostasy of the modern age rests on the disappearance of the verification of faith in the life of Christians. In this is to be seen the great responsibility of Christians today. They should be reference points of faith as people who know about God, should in their lives demonstrate faith as truth, and should thus become signposts for others.

We have, in this short, unpolished video, an account of just what effect a life lived in fidelity to truth can have on unbelievers.

Perhaps it also gives the lie to a common saying that, in my opinion, is much abused: preach the Gospel always; when necessary, use words. A true statement in itself, but perhaps it's necessary more often than we've led ourselves to believe.

In Case You Thought That's All There Is To Say

The way multicultural-speak has completely saturated reflection on globalization, you'd think the only path to maturity as a human person within the body of Christ was coming to grips with the encounter of world cultures. And you'd be right, as long as you were aware it was a necessary but insufficient dimension of the process of purification that constitutes this life.

What I mean is that there is another equally important discipline to be held in tension with stretching oneself to swallow the broadness of the world. There is more to life in cultivating a vastness to the point of containing contradictory multitudes, as Whitman did. We must never lose sight of the wonder of living, in all its humbleness and unremarkability. The great "apostle" of this way of life is none other than the great Chesterton, who in his reverence for "beef, noise, the Church, vulgarity, and beer" offers an "alternative lifestyle" to the continent-hoppers.

I was reminded of this by a few casual remarks made during our multicultural presentation (referenced in the previous post) with regard to Rudyard Kipling, that author of such wide and varied influence absorbed by way of British colonization. Chesterton points this out in his introduction to a series of essays known as Tremendous Trifles, and in prophetic counterpoint to the globalization that we now experience, set up a sign of contradiction: a portly, golden-mouthed Renaissance man who saw no reason to set out beyond the confines of his own particularity. That is, he saw the antithesis to Kipling in no one other than himself.

Apart from pointing out the great value of paying attention to literature and the mutual influence it exerts and receives from culture, Chesterton points out to us from a vantage point nearly a century away certain broad features of our own time we fail to discern for our proximity to them.

I give you the pleasure of reading the (short) essay for yourself.

Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly in the front garden, because their villa was a model one. The front garden was about the same size as the dinner table; it consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some mysterious pieces of cork standing up in the middle and one flower bed with a row of red daisies. One morning while they were at play in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman, leaned over the railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation. The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply interested in his remarks. For the milkman (who was, I need say, a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering them in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for. And Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness, explaining that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride across continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas in an afternoon dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner; and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas.
But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep. Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment with an axe in one hand and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the other. The man looked at the book and then at the giant, and then at the book again. And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe." So the backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and, working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off; and there was an end of him.

Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long wished to be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he immediately became one. When the transformation was over he found himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with a tall green jungle and above which, at intervals, rose strange trees each with a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of such stony height and dominance, that it looked like some incident of the end of the world. And far away on the faint horizon he could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more mystical, of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever. He set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not come to the end of it yet.

Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced it is not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction. It is in fact the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating the pages that follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls call telling a story.

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a pigmy like Peter to discover that.

I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large; it is from the level that things look high; I am a child of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide. I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help; but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind; and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude. I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

A Carapace Dissolved

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God," a poet once prayed,

For you

as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me; and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I couldn't help but remember the opening lines to Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV as I wrapped up Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych for a class on death and grieving here at the seminary. Back in college, we had an all-school seminar on this work of short fiction, and though I enjoyed it then, the intervening years have only enriched my experience of it. It is the ultimate drama: the inner dialogue of a dying man confronted with the possibility that his entire life was lived in the pursuit of vanity, and nothing less than eternity is at stake. Every other story derives its dramatic power from this possibility of salvation (or its loss). One moment stands out. Ivan lies in pain, waiting for death, yet unable to let go of life; as the truth of his situation slowly dawns upon him, all those who peopled his life and participated in the game of bourgeois society along with him are stripped of their charm. Only the duplicity and superficiality remain, and they are loathsome to him.

He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which choked and stifled him. And he hated them on that account.

Consider the agony of this moment: the possibility that what by all accounts was a decorous, gentlemanly, and entirely correct life might have been spent "plowing the sand and sowing the ocean" is real; I have reason to believe that my life has been spent this way, and every relationship I examine in the light of this possibility, even the most intimate, reinforces my conclusion that it is so. Now, at the end, I am forced to discard all my labors and sacrifices as so much smoke and wind. Had this knowledge come when I was in a position to do something about it, it might have served some purpose. All that is left to me now is to die in despair, rueing the day I ever asked the question "what was it all for?"

Anger is understandable in this situation. Augustine remarked in passing about this in his Confessions:

Why is it that 'truth engenders hatred'? Why does your man who preaches what is true become to them an enemy (Gal 4.16) when they love the happy life, which is simply joy grounded on truth? The answer must be this: their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken. And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong. Because they do not wish to be deceived but wish to deceive, they love truth when it shows itself to them but hate it when its evidence goes against them.

Yes: it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For we provoke Him to wrath with our misdeeds; yet His wrath is nothing more than His steadfast resistance to the encroachment of the forces of sin and death upon His creatures. God's wrath is good news, as it's been said. It is the wrath of a protective Father. The discovery of an awful truth about oneself is a gift, never to be refused in order to return to manufactured illusions. In His mercy, a moment of clarity is offered. For those with eyes to see, it is presented through the ordinary things of life, standing behind them, knocking, breathing, shining, healing. Yet for those whose sight fails them, who render themselves incapable of apprehending reality as it is, other more forceful means are available to the physician. And it is here that we find ourselves confronting the reality of suffering.

What strikes me as wholly inadequate in most attempts at theodicy (the justification of God's ways to humanity, the presence of evil and suffering in the world, etc.) is that they are always directed outward. They are meant to explain the suffering of another to the audience that observes it, and one that observes it from a distance, no matter how compassionately. Ivan Karamazov is not plagued with his own suffering, but that of the innocent five-year-old girl pounding her chest with her little fist and crying out to "dear God" to protect her from her cruel and hateful parents, or the infants skewered on the bayonets of pillaging soldiers. Yet it is precisely the meaning of her suffering that is inaccessible to him. What would lead us to believe that we have access to what transpires in the hidden and silent recesses of the person when the full weight of pain is laid upon him? It is incommunicable, for it is inexhaustible, unable to be labeled with neat classifications and placed in a scheme that somehow takes Everything into account. It is always more.

What these fail to take into account is the meaning of suffering for the one who suffers. This is not to glibly dismiss it in the way the genuinely compassionate find so repulsive; it is to ground it in the infinite dignity of each person in the sight of God.

Our own pain speaks plain words, though we may not have ears to hear them. What it has to say, it says to us and to us alone. To me. I alone am responsible for discerning its truth and learning its lessons. I cannot interpret the suffering of another, and so I cannot justify it or explain it away. Only I can discover the secret resistance to the love that draws me to itself, and so the messenger of that love—be it ever so kind or savage—is meant to overcome that resistance without force or compulsion.

If we truly understood what was at stake, the poet's prayer would ever be on our lips. The possibility of refusal is very real. We must cultivate a readiness to be o'erthrown:

That we might rise and stand.

Myopic Natural History

A Short History of Nearly Everything, a recent release by the prolific travel writer Bill Bryson, is the fruit of three years of research into the cumulative discoveries of the scientific world, with the hope of re-presenting them in layman's terms to the general public. It began, as he tells in the introduction, during a flight over the Pacific, in which he was staring out the window of the jet down at that vast ocean and realized he knew nothing about it. At that point, he resolved to do something about it, and I rather enjoyed his efforts to remedy his ignorance.

Coming from the pen of a man accustomed to pleasing his readers, the book manages to hold one's attention throughout long periods of academic history in which aristocratic gentlemen in powdery wigs debate with great vigor the suitability of certain botanical categories or the possibility that our noses evolved downward-pointing nostrils to ward off the hordes of contagion that dropped onto our planet from outer space. Scientific history is one long list of characters, some immediately recognizable, and many others whose names were forgotten as I turned the page; some were noble, others shady; some were possessed of a broad mastery of numerous disciplines, and others were content to whittle away at some miniscule corner of the scientific edifice with no apparent concern for what was transpiring around them. All seem driven by some desire for recognition; few seem to have received what they deserve. Each of them stands out in a remarkable way as beloved forebears of a rich and massive heritage.

While the certainties of yesterday are almost always laughable, Bryson manages for the most part not to condescend when surveying the progress of human knowledge--a progress that has been slow and painful since the dawn of the modern scientific method. Consequently, the most consistent reaction this book produced in me was surprise. Of course, the "incomprehensibles" such as astronomical distances, the subatomic particles, the probabilities of life, and the age of the earth and of the universe never fail to impress; yet more than once I found myself swimming in a morass of incoherent hypotheses and data, only to be told by the author that my confusion was not unusual, as the experts themselves really had no idea, either. Apparently, the only thing more astounding than what we know about the universe is what we do not know, and how likely it is that some discovery will come along that will up-end whatever certainties the establishment operates upon. Bryson makes much of the conclusion of the scientific world at the turn of the twentieth century that very little additional investigation was necessary before a complete, airtight account of the universe would be well within its grasp.

It becomes abundantly clear that the history of science is one long story of "back to the drawing board." Theories about cataclysmic impacts from a prehistoric comet driving the dinosaurs to extinction circulate among incredulous geologists, full of disdain for such preposterous conjecture; it's a small but gratifying delight to look back with a knowing smile and think, "Just you wait." Being myself a student of Scripture, which in certain forms is to the neophyte the very province of uncertainty and hypothesis, it was a small consolation to discover that I have some unlikely comrades who share my pain.

Indeed, it is striking to note how the human mind is driven to reduce complex systems to simple ones and summarize them in an elegant whole. Human discovery has been almost exclusively powered by the conviction that given enough time, we will be able to sort the world out neatly and publish our findings in a sort of almanac. Experts almost to a man regarded theories that did not have concise and simple expressions as less compelling than those that did, and new theories were required when data arose that did not fit with existing formulae, thus rendering them incomplete. As I read and reflected on this point, there appeared a subtle correspondence with medieval thinkers on the beauty of truth. These thinkers saw a deep identity between what are called the “transcendentals”: the forms of truth, goodness, unity, and beauty, which are beyond any particular category of being, and for that reason can refer equally to all subjects in which they are found. This is to say, the truth is good, beautiful, and one; so also, the beautiful is one, good, and true. Beauty itself is the presence of integrity, harmony, and clarity within a creature; and, it might be said, any scientific theory that lacked these would have been dismissed out of hand as, in all probability, untrue.

Thankfully, Bryson waits to hammer home the obligatory moral until the last few pages of the book; it was brief enough that wasn't clear to me whether he thought it through or if it was tacked on to make sure it had a chance to get on the bestseller list. Human beings, he opines, are in a unique position to "make a considered difference" given our rapid rise to the top of the list of complex beings. This injunction makes its way onto the page after a long catalog of the species that scientists conjecture we may (or may not) have driven to extinction along the way. There seems to be an implicit appeal to a sort of "species-pride" that seeks to evoke vague sentiments of compassion for all the helpless animals that may (or may not) be crushed beneath the juggernaut of human success. Yet everything that precedes this appeal militates against it. Repeatedly, Bryson marvels at the precarious path life had to travel in order to arrive at its present state of rich variety, noting how tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of species have come and gone without our ever knowing it. If the planet is bountiful in its opportunities for life, it seems equally willing to rub out life forms with the impunity of a bored child. The forms now present happen to be well-suited to their environment and to their fellow creatures, and as the history of the earth has demonstrated, it is entirely possible that changes in climate, geography, the ocean temperatures or even the magnetic fields generated by the molten metal core may be disastrous to life as it exists now, just as such changes were disastrous to life as it has existed in the past.

My reaction to these conclusions is, so what? If man is nothing more than the latest, most successful instantiation of protein conglomeration, what justification is there to minimize our ecological footprint? If (as the argument goes) our presence on the planet has resulted in a significant loss in biodiversity, what ethics pronounces judgment upon it? What tribunal will decide our innocence or guilt, if not the Court of the Fittest? What, other than a howl of victory, could be its verdict upon the proliferation of the human species to the detriment of all others? What, other than a resigned shrug, could be its verdict upon the self-destruction that follows? Is there any warrant for the demand that the long history of life’s self-preservation should cease and desist?

This is why the sentimentalism of the environmentalist cause rings so hollow. It parades the long, loveless history of the universe before us, ever to remind us that we are dust, to dust we shall return, being no more than a blip on the cosmic radar. Yet when a nameless beetle may (or may not) have disappeared without ever having been known to science, there is an equally earnest appeal made to the "responsibility" humans have to care for this planet and the potential for its rapid and disastrous deterioration, an appeal that parades an equally long and much more lovely history (quite in contradiction to the first) in the hope that this panoply of variety and marvelous complexity in harmony with itself could provoke a middle-class American to “think globally, act locally”—or at least act in his own self-interest.

The question then arises of whether it is even possible to rise above an enlightened self-interest, given the parameters of the issue. It's not clear that these apocalyptic prophecies will come true in our own lifetime, or in the lifetime of the youngest of our children. Is it for the good of the human species, as such, that sacrifice is necessary? Or is it for some unknown future generation that may (or may not) benefit? Entreaties in behalf of abstractions or faceless non-beings are hardly the most compelling imaginable. In fact, they are nonsensical, as Henri de Lubac lays out in a pointed refutation of humanitarian optimism:

... it is not really for humanity [itself] that sacrifice is made; it is still, despite assertion to the contrary, for other individuals, who in their transitory outward form contain nothing that is absolute and do not stand for any essentially higher value than those who are sacrificed to them; in the last resort, it is all for one generation of humanity—the last—which is yet no greater than the others, and which will pass away like the others.*

Erazim Kohak skewers this perspective even more pithily, saying, “Only in a most myopic perspective does life become meaningful by virtue of being used as a means to something whose value is in turn solely instrumental.”** Sustained reflection gives the lie to environmentalist importunities. Yet they are, I believe, indications of a deep-seated disorder awaiting diagnosis.

Before delving into what that diagnosis might be, it is necessary to clarify that we have long ago left behind Mr. Bryson in his own right; his well-researched, thoughtful, and informative book have served as a springboard for further reflection. My comments are not directed at him, nor do I wish to burn him in effigy. Furthermore, I should mention that in no way do I mean to be dismissive of the importance of ecological responsibility. Humankind has certainly been a destructive influence upon the integrity of this planet. That something must be done is clear; what we are not agreed upon is why it must be done, and my hope is to shed a little light upon that chain of reasoning.

What, then, permits the environmentalist movement to make such groundless and self-contradictory demands, and what conclusions can we draw regarding them? I suggest that it is fundamentally a profound discomfort with the truth of who man is and his flight from God. These two are tightly interwoven. As a professor of mine puts it, to turn one’s back on God is to assume God’s stance towards reality. Thus, any rejection of one’s own identity demands a turning of one’s back upon the ground of all identity, and to turn away from that ground is to reject one’s own identity and deepest source of meaning. In place of them, a surrogate destiny must be found, one that reaches into the depths of one’s being and makes the sort of practical demands on one’s life that the innate desire for the infinite requires. In a series of retreats he gave before being elevated to the papacy, a certain German theologian captured the essence of this attitude as it is exemplified in the ecological movements:

Man sees himself as the enemy of life and of the balance of creation, as the great disturber of the peace of nature (which would be better off if he did not exist), as the creature that went wrong. His salvation and the salvation of the world would, on this view, consist of disappearing, of his life and soul being taken back from him, of what is specifically human vanishing so that nature could return to its unconscious perfection, in its own rhythm and with its own wisdom of dying and coming into being.***

Trace the contemporary green movements to their roots, and this is what you will find. There once was a time when it was believed that we could harmonize our presence in nature; one is hard-pressed to find such hopes among the die-hard today. Eradication of the human footprint is the only way we know how to convey respect.

Ratzinger goes on to uncover the foundations of this desire to disappear, and discovers there a circular paradox not unrelated to the discomfort with man’s identity described above. Originating in the desire “to be like God” and become his own creator, man refuses to acknowledge his dependence on God and asserts his freedom from him; man claims to rule in God’s place. Yet this is a rejection not of God’s dominion, but of his life, and soon the fascination with death supplants the fresh acquaintance with liberty. Soon, this liberty is consumed with the“flight from God, the wish to be alone with oneself and one’s finiteness and not to be disturbed by the presence of God.” **** What an accurate description of the clamor of secularism, anxious above all to be rid of this inescapable presence.

What is the antidote to this malady? At the risk of being facile, it must be an acceptance of true identity. With respect to the created world, this identity has long been spoken of as ‘the recipient of a gift’. By gratuitously bringing into existence all that is in a free act of good will, the Creator gives to each creature the gift of itself, a gift that is constrained by no one and surpassed by no one. Humanity, moreover, is the recipient of all else that is, and is situated within an ordered cosmos. Man has power and authority over this cosmos, given by the one who is its maker. A gift given so freely and with such perfect and unselfish correspondence to our good can only be called ‘love,’ and the only proper response to love is love itself. Neither paralyzed by sentimentality nor greedy with the possibilities for exploitation, as stewards we must step boldly forward into our position of responsibility. With love comes vulnerability, and in our stewardship we will find it necessary to execute the bitter works love at times requires.

Perhaps we will also ask ourselves if we have not settled for too simple a solution; yet, perhaps it also takes courage not to dismiss what satisfies that desire for the integrity, harmony, and clarity of the beautiful--ultimately, for the truth.

* Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, p. 353
** The Embers and The Stars, p. 101
*** The Yes of Jesus Christ, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, p. 74
**** Ibid., p. 75