Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

Reform-minded Americans still depend on the idea that other countries are in advance of us, and scold and shame us all with scathing comparison. Of course they have no tolerance for information that makes such comparison problematic. The strategy, however generous in impulse, accounts in part for the perdurable indifference of Americans to actual conditions in countries they choose to admire, and often claim to love.

I have begun to consider Edgar Allan Poe the great interpreter of Genesis, or perhaps of Romans. The whole human disaster resides in the fact that, as individuals, families, cities, nations, as a tribe of ingratiating, brilliant, momentarily numerous animals, we are perverse, divided against ourselves, deceiving and defeating ourselves. How many countries in this world have bombed or poisoned their own terrain in the name of protecting it from its enemies? How many more would do so if they could find the means? Do we know that this phenomenon is really different in kind from the Civil War, or from the bloodbaths by which certain regimes have been able to legitimate their power? For a long time we have used dichotomies, good people/bad people, good institutions/bad institutions, capitalist/communist. But the universality of self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior is what must impress us finally.

Those who are concerned about the world environment are, in my view, the abolitionists of this era, struggling to make an enlightened public aware that environmental depredation is an axe at the root of every culture, every freedom, every value. There is no group in history I admire more than the abolitionists, but from their example I conclude that there are two questions we must always ask ourselves — what do we choose not to know, and what do we fail to anticipate? The ultimate success of the abolitionists so very much resembled failure that it requires charity, even more than discernment, to discover the difference. We must do better. Much more is at stake.

I have heard well-meaning people advocate an environmental policing system, presided over by the member governments of the United Nations Security Council. I think we should pause to consider the environmental practices and histories of those same governments. Perhaps under the aegis of the United Nations they do ascend to a higher plane of selflessness and rationality and, in this instance, the cowl will make the monk. Then again, maybe it will not. Rich countries that dominate global media look very fine and civilized, but, after all, they have fairly ransacked the world for these ornaments and privileges and we all know it. This is not to say that they are worse than other nations, merely that they are more successful, for the moment, in sustaining wealth and prestige. This does not mean they are well suited for the role of missionary or schoolmaster. When we imagine they are, we put out of mind their own very grave problems — abandoning their populations, and the biosphere, in the very great degree it is damaged by them, to secure moral leverage against whomever they choose to designate an evildoer. I would myself be willing to give up the hope of minor local benefits in order to be spared the cant and hypocrisy, since I have no hope that the world will survive in any case if the countries represented on the Security Council do not reform their own governments and industries very rigorously, and very soon.

I think it is an indulgence to emphasize to the extent we do the environmental issues that photograph well. I think the peril of the whole world is very extreme, and that the dolphins and koalas are finally threatened by the same potentialities that threaten every thing that creeps on the face of the earth. At this time, we are seeing, in many, many places, a decline in the wealth, morale, and ethos whose persistence was assumed when certain features of modern society were put in place, for example, nuclear reactors and chemical plants. If these things are not maintained, or if they are put to cynical uses by their operators or by terrorists, we can look forward to disaster after disaster. The collapse of national communities and economies very much enhances the likelihood that such things will happen.

We have, increasingly, the unsystematic use of medicine in the face of growing populations of those who are malnourished and unsheltered and grossly vulnerable to disease. Consider the spread of tuberculosis in New York City. Under less than ideal circumstances, modern medicine will have produced an array of intractable illnesses. In the absence of stability and wealth, not to mention a modicum of social justice, medicine is liable to prove a curse and an affliction. There are those who think it might be a good thing if we let ourselves slip into extinction and left the world to less destructive species. Into any imaginable future, there must be people to maintain what we have made, for example, nuclear waste storage sites, and there must be human civilizations rich and sophisticated enough to know how this is done and to have the means to do it. Every day this seems less likely.

And only consider how weapons and weapons materials have spread under cover of this new desperation, and how probable truly nihilistic warfare now appears. These are environmental problems, fully as much as any other kind.

Unless we can reestablish peace and order as values, and learn to see our own well-being in our neighbor’s prosperity, we can do nothing at all for the rain forests and the koala bears. To pretend we can is only to turn our backs on more painful and more essential problems. It is deception and self-deception. It stirs a sad suspicion in me that we are of the Devil’s party, without knowing it.

I think we are desperately in need of a new, chastened, self-distrusting vision of the world, an austere vision that can postpone the outdoor pleasures of cherishing exotica, and the first-world pleasures of assuming we exist to teach reasonableness to the less fortunate, and the debilitating pleasures of imagining that our own impulses are reliably good. I am bold enough to suggest this because, to this point, environmental successes quite exactly resemble failure. What have we done for the whale, if we lose the sea? If we lose the sea, how do we mend the atmosphere? What can we rescue out of this accelerating desperation to sell — forests and weapons, even children — and the profound deterioration of community all this indicates? Every environmental problem is a human problem. Civilization is the ecology being lost. We can do nothing that matters if we cannot encourage its rehabilitation. Wilderness has for a long time figured as an escape from civilization, and a judgment upon it. I think we must surrender the idea of wilderness, accept the fact that the consequences of human presence in the world are universal and ineluctable, and invest our care and hope in civilization, since to do otherwise risks repeating the terrible pattern of enmity against ourselves, which is truly the epitome and paradigm of all the living world’s most grievous sorrows.

COURAGE SEEMS TO ME to be dependent on cultural definition. By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true. I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it. Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself. Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave. It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission. We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves — prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one. This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression. But it is.