I wish I could reply to some of the other new messages in this thread, but
time is short for me today and Kat's message was striking, with its
connections between religion and what we're talking about. That's not
surprising in the sense that I have been considering these issues from an
explicitly Christian standpoint, but I was surprised by how I had failed to
see things quite as clearly as Kat stated them.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of K.Feete
[snip]
> One rather depressing one (from my point of view) is that the political
> pendulum will end up swinging towards the religious. I think it already
> would have done so if the dominant religion around wasn't so
> anti-environmentalist and the New Agers weren't so wimpy; but look
> closely, and you will see some major symptoms of religion amongst
> environmentalists, such as the dogmatic belief (even when unsupported by
> knowledge or facts), the distrust of and rejection of "factual"
> information as actually *damaging* to the cause, the sense of martyrdom.
> >From a practical point of view, religion has been the one
> surefire way of
> making people sacrifice something they *want* to an abstract concept- and
> not just a few fringe people, but entire masses of 'em.
I was about to write that I don't share your depression, but then I thought
about the Inquisition and such and decided that there certainly are
depressing aspects at hand. However, I find that stewardship of not only
the earth, but also human culture and the rest of creation, comes to mind
quickly as one looks at what I've been describing as the shortcomings of
feedback-based systems.
Forgive a momentary diversion, but I don't think I have clearly said that
I'm talking about authority and feedback as sources of order. The medieval
worldview was hierarchical -- the source of order was the "Great Chain of
Being," which allowed God direct supervision of everything. In the modern
worldview, while we have not rejected hierarchical authority, we have
balanced it, to a great extent, with the authority of feedback, which plays
a vital role in modern systems of government, economics, machinery and in
systems of thought, most notably the concept of evolution. (And I'm not
rejecting any of those things as false, I hasten to add, lest someone
confuse me with a Bible literalist.) Modernism can even be defined as
self-regulation and design emerging through the feedback loops of
competition and selection, I'll suggest.
To return to Kat's observation of the connection between the failings of
modern systems and the rise of religious thinking, I'd like to add that
there's no coincidence. When rational systems fails to produce the expected
result, people naturally choose to depend less on logic. And sometimes they
turn too far, becoming fundamentalist extremists in the religiosity of
Christianity, environmentalism or whatever. (And that stuff sells, so we
see it exaggerated in the media.)
Like it or not, modernism, particularly in economics and politics, owes a
great deal to Christianity and the Reformation, which I think should give us
hope that religion has some answers as we struggle with our need for reform,
particularly with regard to how information is distributed. The First
Amendment was inspired by Milton's "Areopagitica," a faith-based argument
that free speech would bring out the truth if it could compete on a level
playing field. Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, "government of the people,
for the people and by the people," originated with reformer John Wycliffe's
preface to a 14th century English Bible translation. The tyranny of
religion itself (the supposed divine rights of kings and popes) and the
inspiration of Scripture drove this kind of thinking, which I offer as
examples of a much greater movement that led to the systems under which we
live today. I am starting to think we need an American liberation theology.
So, while religious thinking may be scary when it rejects logic, I'll argue
that it can achieve wonderful things when it rebels against tyranny and
embraces the shortcomings of human logic, in faith that we can continue to
do better and better.
Nick
