Superstition and Religion

Earlier this week, I finished reading "Another Turn of the Crank" (1995), a collection of essays by the Mad Farmer, Wendell Berry. My favorite essay was "The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity," about the increasing pressure we are under to choose caring over not caring.

We know that caring will involve us in great effort and discomfort, and we dread to choose it, but we know too that the toils and miseries of nor caring are becoming greater by the day. Someday, presumably, it will become easier and less miserable to care than not to care - if by then we still remember how to care, and if the choice is still possible.

I am going to write more in the next couple days about this essay and a novel by Wallace Stegner, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." For now, I'd like to share this passage from "The Conservation of Nature":

We are by nature creatures of faith, as perhaps all creatures are; we all live by counting on things that cannot be proved. As creatures of faith, we must choose either to be religious or to be superstitious, to believe in things that cannot be proved or to believe in things that can be disproved. The present age is an age of superstition, and some of our shallowest superstitions have the authorization of our hardest-headed rationalists and realists. The modern ambition to control nature, for instance, is an ambition based foursquare on a superstition: the idea that what we take nature to be is what nature is, or that nature is that to which it can be reduced. If nature is to be controlled, then it has to be reduced to that which is theoretically controllable.  It must be understood as a machine or as the sum of its known, separable, and decipherable parts.

Care, on the contrary, rests upon genuine religion. Care allows creatures to escape our explanations into their actual presence and their essential mystery. In taking care of fellow creatures, we acknowledge that they are not ours; we acknowledge that they belong to an order and a harmony of which we ourselves are parts. To answer to the perpetual crisis of our presence in this abounding and dangerous world, we have only the perpetual obligation of care.

Berry says that Modernism takes nature as that to which it can be reduced. This reminds me of something I read several years ago in a book by Max Oelschlaeger called "The Idea of Wilderness." Oelschlaeger explains that, for Moderns, "wilderness" represents a former, repugnant condition "in which human beings lived mean and savage lives"; it has no essential value in a society that prizes culture and civilization. However, Moderns believe that the "naturally given" wilderness might be valuable as throughput - the streams and forests, the plants and animals, the land itself are "transformed into material resource" through Adam Smith's production-consumption cycle. Oelschlaeger calls this "economic alchemy."

The "Wealth of Nations" represents the realization of Merlin's dream: the base and valueless could now, with the facility of natural science and industrial technology, be transformed into a Heaven on earth. Consumption, and its never-ending growth, is the summum bonum of the "Wealth of Nations," an ideal yet living today in the relentless pursuit of economic development. Through legerdemain, Smith transformed the first world from which humankind came into a standing reserve - a nature of significance only within a human matrix of judgment, devoid of intrinsic value.

We now understand how this was done, for we see nature only through the eyes of Homo oeconomicus...Primary attributes of nature alone remained - those capable of quantification through monetary value. Even to entertain such a question as "How much is wild nature worth?" implies a radical reorientation of perspective. For Smith, and all indutrialized democracies since, this question has been answered through the market mechanism, sometimes supplemented by cost-benefit analysis (an enormously questionable and politically oriented practice itself rooted in Modernism). With the publication of Smith's "Wealth of Nations," the line between civilization and the wilderness was clearly drawn.