Saturday November 15, 2003 at 12:34 AM
Can't We Just Talk About It?
Appearing in American Culture
It was about this time last week that I found myself enjoying a rather lengthy conversation with two dear friends of mine. To some of you that may sound like a normal passing of a Friday evening but for a man with two pre-schoolers, it was indeed a rare event.
After the conversation wound it’s way through the typical topics of work, family, and general life events, it landed on the two subjects to which I find myself incessantly drawn: politics and religion. Now I am of course aware that the discussion of said subjects is universally regarded as poor manners, at least here in the United States, but in the course of current events it is increasingly difficult to find anything else ultimately worthy of discourse. More to the point, maintaining a division between the two has become an exceedingly operose exercise.
Although I have often been perplexed by the interconnection between the two, taken in a certain context their interdependence is apparent. At the most fundamental level all religions express a philosophy of how we should live while politics provides the mechanism for determining which philosophy will ultimately be concretized as practice. Therefore when we speak of political matters it is invariably a proxy for a more elemental conversation which is rarely explicit or public.
One of the most obvious examples is in the struggle between environmental conservation and environmental exploitation. Although both sides are operating from a philosophical position that can be described in relation to Darwinism, one argument flows from the conclusion that humans are but one leaf in the larger tree of life while the other concludes that humans are the product of divine creation and therefore possessors of a unique status in the natural world.
If you adhere to the first interpretation, you are likely to conclude that humans have no particular right to destroy other forms of life and perhaps even possess an obligation to protect them. By contrast, if you adhere to the second position you may well see the environment as little more than an economic resource to be exploited and managed to whatever end our species deems advantageous.
Unfortunately, the fundamental philosophical question of the relationship between our species and the larger natural world is rarely or ever discussed outside the confines of a philosophy course. Without such direct discourse however, it is difficult to imagine how this or any of the critical issues of our time will ever be resolved.
Comments
Food for thought...
Being married to a Native American has changed my previously rather short-sighted views on this subject. It also gives me further insight into just how interconnected politics and religion have always been.
Had the North American Indian tribes not been essentially wiped out, our race might not be so divided by the question of conservation vs. exploitation. Those tribes had a unique respect for the natural world. They used what they needed, but nurtured the rest. That's a concept that modern Western man would find as foreign as walking on four legs.
Ironically, or typically, depending on your point of view, the wholesale slaugher of Native Americans started when they would not convert to Christianity. It was then accelerated by greed for land and for supremacy. The truly sad thing is that there are almost no Indians left who remember the old ways and the old religions. Their tribes have been so marginalized and Christianized that they've lost not only their land, but their entire heritage in most cases.
Had the push to Christianize the Native Americans instead been a fusion of their culture into ours, I think the balance between exploitation and conservation might have been something we'd have accomplished by now with relative ease...
Just my two cents. I really don't have an agenda, I promise!
Posted by: J. Ned on Sat Nov 15, 03