chapter2:Pantheism:Man Is No More Than the Grass
Why not try to find a solution to this in the direction of pantheism? Here we find a use of the concept of pantheism by a Western scientist, a sociologist, in his effort to solve modern man’s problem in relationship to the saving of nature—i.e., the ecological problem. This man seemed to be trying to use pantheism in a very specific way—not as a real, religious answer at all, but merely in a sociological or a scientific, pragmatic way.
Richard Means’s article was entitled “Why Worry About Nature?” Means begins the article by quoting Albert Schweitzer: “The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relation of man to man.” He thus quoted Schweitzer as saying ecology is a problem of ethics, but that man’s only concept of ethics has been “man to man.” Later Means said, “The notion that man’s relation to nature is a moral one finds very few articulate champions, even among contemporary religious writers.” He proceeded to refer to Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City. Cox, of course, is a very liberal theologian and at that time a proponent of the God-is-dead theology. Means said that even with Cox, “the city is taken for granted and the moral dimensions of Cox’s analysis are limited to man’s relations to man within this urban world, and not with the animals, the plants, the trees, and the air—that is, the natural habitat.” It should be remembered that much modern theology is in the direction of pantheism, and thus Means’ suggestion of a pragmatic pantheistic base for solving our ecological problems fits naturally into the climate which reaches all the way from the vague pantheism in much popular thinking today to the theological faculties.
Means went on to refer, interestingly enough, to Eric Hoffer, who was a popular American folk philosopher. He was a longshoreman who said many really profound things and had become very popular indeed with intellectuals. “Eric Hoffer, one of the few contemporary social critics who have met head-on the issue of man’s relationship to nature, has warned in these pages of the danger of romanticizing nature” (“A Strategy for the War with Nature” in Saturday Review, February 5, 1966). Romanticizing means that one looks at nature and projects into it man’s reaction. So one would look at a cat and think of it as though it were reacting as a man reacts. Hoffer very properly warned against this. However, his solution (according to Means) ends like this: “The great accomplishment of man is to transcend nature, to separate himself from the demands of instinct. Thus, according to Hoffer, a fundamental characteristic of man is to be found in his capacity to free himself from the restrictions of the physical and the biological.” In other words, Hoffer was really not proposing that we should come to terms with nature (not as far as Means understood him anyway). What Hoffer was saying is that man has to transcend nature.
It should be said that it is correct to reject the romanticizing of nature as an answer or a solution. First, nature, as it now is, is not always benevolent; and second, to project our feelings and thoughts into a tree would mean that we would have no base upon which to justify cutting down and using the tree as a shelter for man.
Those who are familiar with Koestler’s The Man and The Machine will recognize Hoffer’s ideas to be merely a more poetic form of his concept. Koestler, along with Adler (The Difference in Man and the Difference It Makes) and Michael Polanyi of Oxford, attacks the classical view of evolution, at least pragmatically; these men were united as far as saying that it is leading us in the wrong direction. But Koestler in The Man and The Machine came up with the final solution by pleading with science to make a pill to bring together the upper and the lower brain. For Koestler, the lower brain deals with the instincts and the emotions, and the upper brain deals with the intellect and reasoning. According to Koestler, the real problem lies in the separation of the two. The point to be made here is that Hoffer’s idea of man’s “getting on top of ” his nature in order to free himself from the restrictions of the physical and the biological is, interestingly enough, in the direction of Koestler’s concept.
Reverting to Means’ article, he went on to ask and answer an important question. Remembering that he was proposing the thesis that man’s relationship to nature is a moral and not just a scientific crisis, his question and his immediate answer provide a brilliant snapshot of modern man: “What, then, is the moral crisis? It is, I think, a pragmatic problem.”
Here was a remarkable combination of phrases; the moral dissolved into the pragmatic. He started off with a moral crisis, but suddenly all one is left with is a pragmatic problem. “It involves the actual social consequences of a myriad of unconnected acts. The crisis comes by combining the results of a mistreatment of our environment. It involves the negligence of a small businessman on the Kalamazoo River, the irresponsibility of a large corporation on Lake Erie, the impatient use of insecticides by a farmer in California, the stripping of land by Kentucky mine operators. Unfortunately there is a long history of unnecessary and tragic destruction of animal and natural resources on the face of this continent.” Of course the pressure becomes greater on a world scale, and he was certainly right in pointing out that there is a serious problem. But that does not change his problem of dealing with the problem! He wanted a moral base on which to deal with the ecological problem, but soon all he had is the word moral. And what he was left with was the pragmatic and technological.
As one faces the growth of population, the ecological problem becomes even greater. In Switzerland, an excellent example was beautiful Lake Geneva and the difference since we came to Switzerland thirty-two years ago—a major difference. Happily, the Swiss have, at great expense, begun to clear up Lake Geneva, but the growth of population on its shores required a major effort. Left to itself, the lake could not have cared for the population growth.
As the pressure gets greater worldwide, upon what basis, different from the one we have employed in the past, are we to treat the nature which is our environment and upon which our life in this world depends? As the Sierra Club calendar for 1970 put it, “The moon, Mars, Saturn . . . nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” Human life depends on the uniquely balanced environment of this world.
Means went on to talk about the passenger pigeons, of which there were once many in the United States; but they had become extinct. The same could be said about the seal industry. “The trouble is, however, we do not seem to learn very much from these sad happenings for (to the anguish of men who have thrilled to the images created by Herman Melville and the great white whale) such marine scientists as Scott McVay believe that commercial fishing is endangering the whale, the last abundant species in the world. For those more inclined towards the cash nexus, there goes a profitable industry.” He continued that it is not only an economic loss, but that “for those of us who have a respect for nature—in particular, for our mammalian kinsmen—the death of these great creatures will leave a void in God’s creation, and in the imagination of men for generations to come.” The use of Means’ phrase “in God’s creation,” which for many Christians would inspire hope as to the kind of answer he might give us, must not be misunderstood, as I will point out later.
Then Means touched on the other basic issues, referring to the mighty Hudson River and the Great Lakes and the state of the air we breathe. Because of these matters and hundreds like them we can see why men are wrestling, in a way that they have never wrestled before, with the problem of ecology. There is a true dilemma. Modern man has seen that we are upsetting the balance of nature and the problem is drastic and urgent. It is not just a matter of aesthetics, nor is the problem only future; the quality of life has already diminished for many modern men. For the future, many thinking men see the ecological threat as greater than that of nuclear warfare.
Means proceeded to offer his solutions to this dilemma. These were presented as first a negative, and then later a positive side. It is worth considering Means’s thinking in detail, because it is representative of what, with various modifications, we have heard from a multitude of sources—and will be hearing in the next years. Indeed, Aldous Huxley, in his last novel, Island, pictured a “utopian” future in which the first lessons given to schoolchildren will be in ecology. He then went on to observe: “Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism.”
There was a conference in Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, called “The Conference on Environment and Population.” There was a lightshow presenting the modern problems of ecology. Then the proposition was made that the answer must be in the direction of pantheism. We are going to hear more of this. Pantheism will be pressed as the only answer to ecological problems and will be one more influence in the West’s becoming increasingly Eastern in its thinking.
What is man’s relation to nature? Means asked, “Why is man’s relation to nature a moral crisis? It is a moral crisis because it is a historical one involving man’s history and culture, expressed at its roots by our religious and ethical view of nature—which have been relatively unquestioned in this context.” Up to this point one could agree with his diagnosis. But then he went on to make a negative statement: “The historian in medieval culture, Lynn White, Jr., brilliantly traced the origin and consequences of this expression in an insightful article in Science last March: ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.’ He argues that the Christian notion of a transcendent God, removed from nature and breaking into nature only through revelation, removed spirit from nature and allows, in an ideological sense, for an easy exploitation of nature.
“On the American scene the Calvinistic and the deistic concepts of God were peculiarly alike at this point. Both envisioned God as absolutely transcendent, apart from the world, isolated from nature and organic life. As to the contemporary implications of the dichotomy between spirit and nature Professor White says: ‘To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.’”
Means’s answer to his question (“What is man’s relation to nature?”) must be found in his proposition that our ecological problem exists because of Christianity. He laid the blame squarely on Christianity as such, which has, in its intrinsic nature (on his premise), created and sustained the ecological problem.
In contrast to this, we can agree with the first part of the next paragraph in Means’s article: “Perhaps, as Lynn White suggests, the persistence of this as a moral problem is illustrated in the protest of the contemporary generation of beats and hippies.”
Our agreement with Means at this point centers on the fact that the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too, a long, long time ago, before the counterculture ever came onto the scene. More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture—modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle-class—is poor in its sensitivity to nature. This is totally right. As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man’s concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side. At that point, I would side with the counterculture.
However, Means went on to suggest that the
hippies had what was perhaps a good solution.
We may differ with him here, but undoubtedly he
did understand what the counterculture’s solution
was. He says, “There may be a ‘sound instinct’
involved in the fact that some of these so-called
beats have turned to Zen Buddhism. It may
represent an overdue perception of the fact that
we need to appreciate more fully the religious
and moral dimensions of the relation between
nature and the human spirit.” This showed a
quite proper discernment of the counterculture
direction, which was, and is, toward pantheism.
He would not need to limit it to Zen because it
is pantheism in general. Thus, after having given
a negative statement, saying we must get rid of
Christianity, we have a suggested solution which
is in the direction of the drift of our culture. For,
as I have said, almost all the new theologians are
drifting toward pantheism in company with the
often present vague pantheism which comes in
many forms today.
Much of the surrounding culture undoubtedly is moving in the direction of the West’s
becoming the East. And Means offered this solution with regard to the problem of ecology. This
is undoubtedly why he quoted Schweitzer in the
first sentence of his article. At the end of his life
Schweitzer was a pantheist, laying great emphasis on “reverence for life,” by which he meant:
all that is is of one essence. Means started with
Schweitzer as a man well-known in the West, but
who was a pantheist.
This is why I questioned Means’s statement about “God’s creation.” He is really using a Western term for a completely different concept. The term “God’s creation” has no real place in pantheistic thinking. One simply does not have a creation, but only an extension of God’s essence. In pantheistic thinking any such term as “God’s creation”—as though He were a personal God who created, whose creation was external to Himself (all of which is wrapped up in our Western phrase “God’s creation”)—has no place.
It is clear that Means was talking about a real pantheism when he went on: “On the other hand, the refusal to connect the human spirit to nature may reflect the traditional thought patterns of Western society wherein nature is conceived to be a separate substance—a material—mechanical, and, in a metaphysical sense, irrelevant to man.” What he was trying to do was link up the fact that all that is, is the same substance with nature. In this way he hoped to get a reverence for nature that would cause us to treat nature more gently.
He said toward the end of the article: “Such a view should help destroy egoistic, status politics, for it helps unmask the fact that other men’s activities are not just private, inconsequential, and limited in themselves; their acts, mediated through changes in nature, affect my life, my children, and the generations to come.”
What is interesting here is to see, as noted earlier, that his use of the word moral leaves us with only the pragmatic. The only reason we are called upon to treat nature well is because of its effects on man and our children and the generations to come. So in reality, in spite of all Means’s words, man is left with a completely egoistic position in regard to nature. No reason is given—moral or logical—for regarding nature as something in itself. We are left with a purely pragmatic issue.
Means ended his article: “. . . Our contemporary moral crisis, then, goes much deeper than questions of political power and law, of urban riots and slums. It may, at least in part, reflect American society’s almost utter disregard for the value of nature.” Here we must agree with him. We have mistreated nature—not just the Americans, but other people throughout the world.
But notice—he gave no answer; and the “no-answer” falls into three different levels. First of all, the moral only equals the pragmatic, and this, of course, is related to the fact that a modern man in this position has no basis for morals because he has no absolutes to which to appeal. One can have a basis for something else—a social contract, a hedonism—but one can never have real morals without absolutes. We may call them morals, but it always ends up as “I like,” or social contract, neither of which are morals. The latter is a majority vote, or the arbitrary absolutes of an elite in society, by which one can decide anything. And having no absolutes, modern man has no categories. One cannot have real answers without categories, and these men can have no categories beyond pragmatic, technological ones.
This can be seen in Means’s article when he talks about cutting down the sacred groves. He has no categories whereby he could cut down a sacred grove when it is an idol and yet not be against trees as trees. As far as he is concerned, these categories do not exist. For him, the fact that a Christian would cut down a sacred grove when it has become an idol proves that Christians are against trees. It is rather like arguing concerning the Bible and art. The Bible is not “against” art. But supposing somebody argues that the Jews broke the brazen serpent which Moses had made (2 Kings 18:4). Here one has a serpent made of brass which the godly king broke; therefore, God is “against” art. Of course, from the Biblical viewpoint, it is not a statement against art at all. They were against the brazen serpent, which God had originally commanded to be made, only when it became an idol. God commanded this work of art to be made, but when it became an idol it was to be destroyed. This means that one has categories.
In contrast, modern man has no categories. This brings us back to the first point. The moral equals the pragmatic on a very crude level, in spite of all this nice terminology. So we must not think that Means (and other people like him) is a man giving a moral answer, a higher answer; he is not. It is a very low answer indeed.
The second thing is that Means uses these religious words (moral for pragmatic) over and over again as religious connotation words for the purpose of motivation. He is also using the word pantheism as a motivation word. This is something we must always be careful of. Words have two meanings, the definition and the connotation. The connotation goes on no matter what you do with the definition. Modern man destroys the definition of religious words, but nevertheless likes to cash in on their connotation/motivation force. This is precisely what Means was doing. By using these words, he hoped (even though he has indicated in his definition that moral equals pragmatic) that people would treat nature a little better because of the religious connotations of the words. It is one more illustration of a type of manipulation that is all about us.
The third thing to notice is that what one had was sociological religion and sociological science. It is important to note that Means was a sociologist. One does not have religion as religion; nor does one have science as science. What one has is both religion and science being used and manipulated for sociological purposes.
Edmund Leach, the Cambridge anthropologist, in an article in the New York Review of Books (February 1966), chose a certain scientific solution, not because it had anything to do with objective science, but very clearly because it led to the sociological answer that he wanted. Edmund Leach was at this point the very opposite of a scientist. Here was a scientist using science for sociological manipulation. With this, then, a parallel can be found between Edmund Leach in his article and Richard Means in his. The latter was also using science and religion for purely sociological ends. With it, science dies, religion dies, and all you have left is sociological manipulation.
Remember what I have emphasized before— it is worth considering this article by Richard Means in detail because the thoughts presented in this article are representative of those which will be sounded by many voices, with a multitude of variations and subtleties. This is true about the theoretical and practical discussions in general, and the ecological discussion of the relationship of man to nature in particular. And the same basic factors are involved, whether the unity of everything that is is expressed with some form of the religious connotation word pantheism, or with purely secular terms, in reducing everything to energy particles.
Let us examine the reasons why pantheism in any form does not give a sufficient answer. Pantheism eventually gives no meaning to any particulars. In true pantheism unity has meaning, but the particulars have no meaning, including the particular of man. Also, if the particulars have no meaning, then nature has no meaning, including the particular of man. A meaning to particulars does not exist philosophically in any pantheistic system, whether it is the pantheism of the East or the “paneverything-ism” in the West, beginning everything only with the energy particles. In both cases, eventually the particulars have no meaning. Pantheism gives you an answer for unity, but it gives no meaning to the diversity. Pantheism is not an answer.
This is not just a theoretical dilemma—that the particulars have no meaning in pantheism. It is not just a vague philosophical objection. It leads to important conclusions. First, any “results” one does get from pantheism are obtained only by projecting man’s feelings into nature. And that is simply the romanticism concerning which Hoffer warned, an endowing of the lower creation with a human reaction. So when we see a chicken, we endow its love-life with human qualities. But that is to evade the reality of the chicken. This kind of an answer can get results from these motivation words only by projecting human feelings into nature, and Hoffer was right to reject this.
What I am saying is that a pantheistic answer is not just a theoretically weak answer, but it is also a weak answer in practice. A man who begins to take a pantheistic view of nature has no answer for the fact that nature has two faces: it has a benevolent face, but it may also be an enemy. The pantheist views nature as normal. In this view, there is no place for abnormality in nature.
This was a very practical problem in Camus’s The Plague where Camus comments on the dilemma facing Orion the recatcher: “Well, if he joins with the doctors and fights the plague, he is fighting against God, or if he joins with the priest and does not fight God by not fighting the plague, he is not being humanitarian.” Camus never resolved this problem. If we accept this romantic and non-Christian mysticism, the difficulty is that we have no solution for the fact that nature is often not benevolent. If everything is one, and a part of one essence with no basic distinction, how does one explain nature when it is destructive? What is the theoretical answer? And as Camus understood, it isn’t just a theoretical problem. Rather, how do I fight the plague?
The Christian can fight it. When Christ stood in front of the tomb of Lazarus (John 11), He was claiming to be divine and yet He was furious. The Greek makes it plain that He was furious. He could be furious with the plague
without being angry with Himself . This turns upon the historic, space-time Fall. Consequently, the Christian does not have Camus’s difficulty. But if one is putting forth a pantheistic, mystical answer, there is no solution to the fact that nature is not always benevolent. One has no way to understand the origin of this double fact of nature; one has no real way to “fight the plague.” There may be much high-sounding talk, but eventually this is true of all pantheism, either Eastern or modern Western—either any of the vague forms of pantheism which are all about us or the modern theologian.
Again, a pantheistic stand always brings man to an impersonal and low place rather than elevating him. This is an absolute rule. Whether the pantheistic answer is the modern scientism which relates everything back to the energy particle, or whether it is Eastern, eventually nature does not become high, but man becomes low. This can be seen over and over again. Schweitzer spoke much of reverence for life, but a doctor who worked with him said that he wished Schweitzer had had less reverence for life and more love for it and for people. At the end of his life Schweitzer’s pantheism, instead of going toward a higher view of those among whom he worked, went toward a lower view.
The Eastern pantheism leads to this same thing. In the Eastern countries there is no real base for the dignity of man. Thus, it must be pointed out that idealistic Marxism could only have come as a Christian heresy; it could never have originated in the East, because there is no place for a genuine dignity of man in the pantheistic East. Idealistic Marxism is a Judeo-Christian heresy.
The same is true even in the realm of economics. The economic dilemma of India is complicated by their pantheistic system in which the rats and cows are allowed to eat up food that the people need. Instead of man being raised, in reality he is lowered. The rats and cows are finally given preference to man himself, and man begins to disappear into the woodwork in economics as well as in the area of personality and love.
Those who propose the pantheistic answer ignore this fact—that far from raising nature to man’s height, pantheism must push both man and nature down into a bog. Without categories, there is eventually no reason to distinguish bad nature from good nature. Pantheism leaves us with the Marquis de Sade’s dictum, “What is, is right” in morals, and man becomes no more than the grass.