The Profitable Practice Of Shifting The Blame For Environmental Destruction Is Widely Practiced

Like much of North America and some other places, my area of New England is in what could become a catastrophic drought, it has had a major impact on agriculture here, I've lost a couple of my most important crops.  Bela Bartok once said he was puzzled over an old Hungarian peasant curse, "May you buy your bread."  until he realized that a Hungarian peasant who had to buy their bread had had a catastrophic grain crop failure, well, I'm going to be buying beans and with the price of beans these days, it will have a real impact on me.  For some reason the bean beetles have had a very good year, up till the time they wiped out my stressed bean crops.  What is a financial setback for me, in other places must mean starvation, destruction of wildlife, endangered species, etc.

It became fashionable in the early 1970s, with the publication of the article by Lynn White mentioned below, to attribute the massive destruction of nature under the domination of Europeans to Christianity.  I think that to ignore that those involved in the destruction were aided, at every step, by the science and technology that arose in the late 16th and onward, blaming the very religion that is both accused of impeding that, through setting aside the actual historical record in favor of an explicitly anti-Christian mythological presentation as history, and which is presented as being destroyed and superseded by it is absurd.  In our world, since at least the 19th century, the most serious damage to the environment has happened with the participation of scientists, with the use of their technology and, often, with the false assurances of scientists that what will make them, their employees, their universities and their countries money, will have no serious effect worth delaying a product line, a technological innovation, a massive construction project or the deployment of policies and military resources while it is studied more.

Compared to the power of those secular, "Enlightenment" institutions, things such as science, technology, capitalism, modern systems of investment and return.... there are few weaker forces at work in the socieities and the world which is destroying our planet than religion, especially those religions which are the least to blame for it but which it is fashionable to indict in such a dishonest way.

Scholars, even some of them Christians, knew and know there would be no price to be paid and lots to be gained by blaming the activities of scientists, engineers, those who hired them, and a host of others on the authors of the Bible, long dead theologians or even living ones whose refutations would be ignored in the secularized academic and popular cultures.  

Here is the passage in the video I posted yesterday that started me thinking about this.  Note, I don't know and can't find a reference to the author of the book which Walter Brueggemann makes reference to, if anyone can tell me who and what book he's talking about,  I'll be grateful.  The passage begins at about 21:45 on the video.  I think I got it pretty close to what's said in my transcription.

Arni Zacharissen: A lot or a big part of the praise that is directed towards God in the Psalms concerns nature and creation.  And you could tie it back to the counter-world thing the picture of creation presented in the Psalms is very different from the scientific picture that we talk about in, you know, the modern west, you now dead matter and also scarcity. That has all sorts of implications.  Can you maybe talk about the contrast between those two.

Walter Brueggemann:   Well I think there's no doubt that the Bible is articulated in poetic and pre-scientific categories and I don't think we ought to use any of our energy pretending otherwise.  But what that pre-scientific stuff does is remind us that the creation is not simply a technical problem to be solved,  it is a mystery to be honored and that no matter how much scientific control you think we can manage in the end the world does not belong to us and we are not free to do with it what we want to do with it.  So I think that  Biblical faith has a strong ally in responsible science but I think it is also a great caution to Promethean science that thinks we can do anything we want to do.  I think the whole environmental crisis and global warming and all that is a reminder that the world does not belong to us and that there are non-transgressible limits to what we are able to do.  So, there is a good argument going back to Bacon and Descartes, at the beginning of the Enlightenment period that's the kind of destructive science that thought the world was autonomous and I think creation faith will of of its doxologies is a great protest against that kind of autonomy.  

Arni Zacharissen:  Sometimes Christian theology gets blamed for a lot of the problems that we are in, environmental problems would you you know ….

Walter Brueggemann:   Well I think that's right.  I can't think of the  the author who wrote that famous article that blamed everything….

Arni Zacharissen: Lynn White

Walter Brueggemann:  Yeah, that's correct.  I think that's clearly wrong.  There is a book written by a guy named Librow (?) that's not received much attention but he traces out Bacon and Descartes and the shifts that came in the 16th   and 17th  centuries that unleashed this kind of autonomous science and I think Lynn White has it exactly wrong about where the destructive permissions came from.  I think they did not come from the Bible,  Descartes and people like that may have found the Bible useful but that's not where they came from, they came form Enlightenment rationality and I think … I personally think that's beyond argument.

Q  Yeah,  It's the creation isn't….   is clearly not mechanistic when you read the Psalms

Walter Brueggemann:   That's exactly it, that's exactly right.