Man and Nature in God

Lloyd E. Sandelands

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765802620
• eBook ISBN: 9781351507578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

"Contemporary American life is tinged with dissatisfaction. Increased wealth and comfort and technological advances have not made individuals happier or society more companionable. Today Americans marry later or not at all, and they fail at marriage as often as they succeed. Man and Nature in God is a story of contemporary American decadence, a grim tale of our flagging relation to nature, a tale confirmed at the center of our sexual lives. Sandelands grounds his critique in a modern philosophical error. We have conflated a particular metaphysical outlook--the subjective standpoint of science--with our relationship, as humans, to nature. We fail to see that however much we may learn about nature by treating it as object to our subject, we cannot in this way learn what we most want and most need to know about nature and about ourselves. Answers to such questions as ""How are we related to nature?"" and ""How are we to think and act truly in nature"" continue to elude us.Cast as ideology by the ""isms"" of humanism, naturalism, and postmodernism, today's subjective standpoint has turned the question of truth into one question of politics. The unhappy result has been and continues to be a profound and deadly misunderstanding of nature as well as man, epitomized in contemporary American culture today. Taking this as his starting point, Sandelands suggests how we can save ourselves from our mortifying philosophical error, thereby claiming our true relation to nature, and reinvigorating our sexual lives. He identifies the need for a natural philosophy that takes God to be the starting point of self-understanding.Although the book is about philosophy, it is not only for the academic philosopher. Although it is about theology, it is not only for the theologian or student of religion. And although the book takes modern biological and social sciences to task, it is not only for biological and social scientists. Instead, Man and Nature in God is for everyone concerned about the disma"

Part 1

Disease

1

Morbidities

My local bookshop is not as much fun as it used to be. So many titles on display seem to be signs of times gone wrong, of an American culture in decline. So many titles betray nostalgia for happier days. I might dismiss my impressions as native glumness if the signs were not so many and did not point so resolutely in one direction. If nothing is wrong, why are so many thoughtful people saying the same thing in so many different ways?

I shall consider a few well-known titles:

The End of Nature

In his 1989 book, The End of Nature (updated and re-issued in 2002), naturalist Bill McKibben argues that modern man, without necessarily being aware of the fact, has, by his depredations upon the world around him, forever altered his relationship to nature. By “nature” McKibben means the human idea of a separate and wild province apart from man to which he adapts and under whose rules he is born and dies. This idea, argues McKibben, has slowly but surely gone extinct. It is not that man has ended the wind or rainfall or sunlight, but that the wind, rainfall, and sunlight he knows today is unalterably and irrevocably his own. “It is too early to tell,” McKibben writes, “how much harder the wind will blow, how much hotter the sun will shine. That is for the future. But the meaning of the wind, the sun, the rain—of nature—has already changed. Yes, the wind still blows—but no longer from some other sphere, some inhuman place” (p. 48). Nature has come to an end, there is only man’s world.

For McKibben, there is no denying the evidence for a world humanly transformed. It is in the sure global warming and deformation of weather wrought by additions of carbon dioxide and methane gases to the atmosphere. It is in the sure destruction of the ozone layer that shields us from ultraviolet radiation by supposedly “inert” man-made chloroflourocarbons and halons. It is in the sure disappearance of wilderness as there are few places left in which to find no evidence of human presence of light, sound, radiation, and chemical pollution. And these evidences will only grow and multiply as we’ve now crossed the threshold where we might have reversed the damage done.

Arresting as these evidences are, McKibben’s main point is more philosophical and existential. He worries about what it means today to be human. He finds that the loss in our too heavy footsteps is meaning. By taking from nature its independence, we have killed its meaning, and in killing its meaning we have murdered our own. Now that we have taken the forces and balances of nature into our hands we can no longer imagine ourselves part of something greater than ourselves.

If you travel by plane and dog team and snowshoe to the farthest corner of the Arctic and it is a mild summer day, you will not know whether the temperature is what it is “supposed” to be, or whether, thanks to the extra carbon dioxide, you are standing in the equivalent of a heated room. If it is twenty below and the wind is howling—perhaps absent man it would be forty below. Since most of us get to the North Pole only in our minds, the real situation is more like this: if in July there’s a heat wave in London, it won’t be a natural phenomenon. It will be a man-made phenomenon—an amplification of what nature intended or a total invention. Or, at the very least, it might be a man-made phenomenon, which amounts to the same thing. The storm that might have snapped the hot spell may never form, or may veer off in some other direction, not by the laws of nature but by the laws of nature as they have been rewritten, blindly, crudely, but effectively, by man. If the sun is beating down on you, you will not have the comfort of saying, “Well, that’s nature.” Or if the sun feels sweet on the back of your neck, that’s fine, but it isn’t nature. A child born now will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter, or spring. Summer is going extinct, replaced by something else that will be called “summer.” This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics—it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and the time of year when crops grow—but it will not be summer, just as even the best prosthesis is not a leg. (p. 59).

For McKibben, our great and tragic loss is one of perspective and place. We used to know where we stood. We were obviously helpless creatures before a great and awesome nature. But while helpless before her great power, nature took care of us. She provided the warmth and rain and living bounty upon which we depended. And she remained balanced and predictable enough for us to accommodate her. When we sought to express our gratitude and eventually sought for her explanation we looked to higher powers—to St. Francis’ Christian God or Thoreau’s Benefactor and Intelligence—authorities we could bow before, authorities we could obey. But now having changed nature we have reduced her in our estimation. We are left with the sad loathsome fact of our own power and reverberating presence. Now having mastered our world, we stop looking to find someone beside or above us. We imagine ourselves all-powerful, and all alone. If there is to be a nature, and if we are to have a zest for life, we will have to manufacture it for ourselves.

© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Michael Crawford from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

The State of Our Unions

Every year the National Marriage Project, a nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and interdisciplinary initiative located at Rutgers University releases an annual research report on the state of marriage in the United States. Entitled The State of Our Unions, this report is an index of the health of marriage and marital relationships in America.¹

The 2002 report updates trends in social indictors of marital health and well-being that have been assessed for better than four decades. The report’s key findings are as follows:

• Marriage trends in the United States in recent decades indicate that Americans have become less likely to marry, and that fewer of those who do marry have marriages they consider to be “very happy.”

• The American divorce rate today is more than twice that of 1960, but has declined slightly since hitting the highest point in our history in the early 1980s. The number of divorces per 1,000 married women age 15 or older has more than doubled from 9.2 in 1960 to 18.9 in 2000. Although difficult to estimate with confidence, the chances remain high—around 50 percent—that a marriage started today will end in divorce. (p. 16)

• The number of unmarried couples has increased dramatically over the past four decades. Most younger Americans now spend some time living together outside of marriage. According to U.S. Bureau of Census figures, between 1960 and 2000, the number of unmarried couples in America increased by more than 1000 percent, from approximately 439,000 to approximately 4,736,000.

• The presence of children in America has declined significantly since 1960, as measured by fertility rates and the percentage of households with children. Other indicators suggest that this decline has reduced the child centeredness of our nation and contributed to the weakening of the institution of marriage. The authors estimate that in the middle of the 1800s more than 75 percent of all households contained children under the age of 18. In 1960 this number was less than 50 percent. In 2000 this number was less than 33 percent. The authors conclude that this “… obviously means that adults are less likely to be living with children, that neighborhoods are less likely to contain children, and that children are less likely to be a consideration in daily life. It suggests that the needs and concerns of children—especially young children—gradually may be receding from our consciousness.” (p.20)

• The percentage of children who grow up in fragile—typically fatherless—families has grown enormously over the past four decades. This is mainly due to increases in divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and unmarried cohabitation. According to the report, in 1960 only 9 percent of all children lived in single-parent families. By 2000 that figure had jumped to 27 percent. Over this same period the percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers jumped from 17 percent to 35 percent. And since 1960 the percentage of babies born to unwed mothers has increased more than 6 fold to nearly a third in 2000, the highest number yet recorded.

© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Barbara Smaller from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved

Bowling Alone

Robert Putnam wrote his 2000 sociological tract, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, to establish a dramatic fact of contemporary life; namely, that in numerous sectors of social life—including politics and public affairs, religion, clubs and community associations, unions, professional societies, informal associations, and patterns of trust and altruism—there has been a sharp decline in participation. Writes Putnam (p. 27):

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

The result of these changes, says Putnam, has been much more than a loss of “warm, cuddly feelings” or “frissons of community pride,” but a marked loss of social capital and a serious deterioration of the social fabric. This is suggested by failures of schools and neighborhoods, disruptions of economy, a faltering democracy, and flagging health and happiness. Putnam documents these changes in American society as well as their unhappy consequences with an impressively comprehensive array of sophisticated national statistical studies. The fact of a drop in social participation is convincing.

Less convincing because more speculative are Putnam’s explanations for this drop. After discounting effects of changes in family structure (away from marriage and family), changes in race relations, large-scale government programs, and global market capitalism, Putnam explains this drop by four concrete changes in contemporary social life. By his estimate, increased pressures of time and money (stemming in part from a rise in the number of two-career families) accounts for 10 percent of this drop. By his estimate, increased suburbanization, sprawl, and commuting time accounts for another 10 percent of this drop. A larger share of the drop, nearly 25 percent by his reckoning, is accounted by the rise to prominence during this period of electronic entertainment, especially television. Finally, by his estimate, a full 50 percent of the drop is due to what he terms “generational change,” which is the statistical fact that as the generation of civic-minded Americans born before World War II dies off, it is replaced by a generation of less civic-minded Americans born after World War II. Putnam is, however, unforthcoming about what explains the dramatic difference between these two generations. To be sure, these generations can be distinguished in many ways, not least by dramatically changed family circumstances, feminism and altered sex roles, effective chemical birth control, television, the shadow of the bomb, cheap and readily available air travel, economic globalization, among others. While Putnam’s impressive empirical case clearly suggests a generational story, we are left to wonder what the baby boomers and their children have done to change the social equation so dramatically.

© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Barbara Smaller from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved

The Closing of the American Mind

In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind exploded on the scene as a no.1 national bestseller. Bloom, a professor of the humanities at the University of Chicago, offered a cultural report from the frontline of teaching the best and brightest of the nation’s youth. His discouraging message is that the great Western tradition of liberal education, developed over millennia of considered thought and debate about man, nature, and society, is rapidly coming to an end. Once supple, incisive, curious, daring, critical, and passionate, the American mind, according to Bloom, has closed upon narrow and over-simple values of personal freedom and equality. These values are now pursued with such blind vigor that by negating one another they undermine a just and vital democratic society.² The result, as Bloom details, is a generation of narcissistic and nihilistic Americans—feeble of mind, at odds with nature, corrupted by rock music that panders to base instincts, superficial, passionless, sexually experienced but erotically challenged, morally bankrupt, and increasingly unable to make for themselves a responsible and meaningful life of family and culture.³ Bloom notes that while these best and brightest young do graduate to jobs as software engineers or investment bankers or corporate executives, they do not graduate to lives well and richly lived and they do not promise much for the children they expect to bring into this world. Ask a young person today what is the good life, expect to learn that it is about fortune and fame, or maybe that it is just about money and celebrity. Ask a young person today what he or she most wants from life, expect to hear that it is pleasure—health and happiness. Ask a young person today what is the relevance to their life of history, even of their own American history, or what is the relevance to their life of the reflections of Aristotle or Plato or Aquinas or Locke or Nietzsche, expect to be lectured on historicism and the march of time and culture that puts the present beyond the reach of the past. Ask a young person today what is the meaning of sex, expect a laugh, for sex itself means nothing. It is a “hook-up” for pleasure, to be engaged opportunistically. It is certainly not about a relationship or about commitment. And ask a young person today what is the meaning of marriage or family, or of community or nation, expect banal platitudes or, among the honest, an uncomprehending stare, edged perhaps with anxiety or regret.

Most tragic from Bloom’s vantage is that, when taken to irrational extremes, personal freedom and equality undermine the life of mind. Any open, honest, and clear play of ideas—discourse—requires limits be placed on both personal freedom (to listen and talk meaningfully to one another requires respectful cooperation and ground giving) and equality (truth is discerned among ideas in the light of experience and reason, and this means the certain ideas, principles, and values and persons holding these must be granted primacy before others). The human mind is a socially motivated and enabled faculty for distinguishing truth from falsehood and good ways of life from bad ways of life. “The real community of man,” writes Bloom (p. 381), “… is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know…. The other kinds of relatedness are only imperfect reflections of this one trying to be self-subsist-ing, gaining their only justification from their ultimate relation to this one.” This, alas, according to Bloom, is the ideal of liberal society that is being lost or forsaken throughout society and most discouragingly in the modem university where it is supposed to be protected and nurtured. Ideas today are excess baggage.

© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Edward Koren from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved

Sex in America

This book by Michael, Gagnon, Laumann, and Kolata, published in 1994, is a report on the National Health and Social Life Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Council (NORC) at the University of Chicago. It is a national survey of sexual history and practices based on a representative sample of 3,432 Americans conducted in 1992. Perhaps its most sensational finding is that, despite the much remarked upon and lamented coarsening of American culture, as for example indicated by the increased availability of sexually explicit ideas and images in the mass media, advertising, music, literature, and the Internet, “there is no support for the idea of a promiscuous society or of a dramatic sexual revolution reflected in huge numbers of people with multiple casual sex partners” (p. 105). Young peop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part 1: Disease
• Part 2: Sin
• Part 3: Redemption
• Part 4: Conclusion
• References
• Index