How to Fix the Oil Spill

I don't know how to fix an oil spill. At least, not the technological ins and outs of the business.

But I know enough about spills in general to know the following:

1. You turn off the taps.
2. You minimize the damage.
3. You clean up as soon as possible.


Turning off the taps

They say that only BP (and similar deep sea operators) has the expertise to shut down the well. I have no reason to disbelieve this - they are the only ones with the incentive to create the technology to get down there in the first place.

Back in early May BP began drilling relief wells to shut the well down far below sea bottom. Apparently this process, if successful, will take until August. In the meantime, they have held the world breathless as they have attempted to shut the well off where pipe ends and sea begins, to little avail.

I can't say I can fault the approach here.


Minimizing the damage

Here is where my big question mark comes in.

Are buoys, booms, and skimmers so effective? Why is BP conducting a massive chemical experiment [dispersants] in mid-ocean? Why isn't BP trying alternative methods for taking the oil out of the water? And what on earth happened to using microbes to eat the oil?

This last question really bothers me. I see a proven technique which is not being used, for no apparent reason. Toxic dispersants are being used... Nuclear bombing has been suggested... Why not use microbes?

And why is it that the same ineffective tools and strategies used 30 years ago are still used today? No, actually, I think I know this one. $$ There is no money to be had in researching clean-up.


Cleaning up as soon as possible

Again, I can't fault anyone here. As soon as tar made landfall, dedicated workers and volunteers began picking up tar balls and washing off birds. But their work is a hopeless work of Sisyphus unless the oil stops flowing... unless methods are found to collect (or devour) the oil mid-ocean.

- V.

2010, and the Oil Spill

It is hard to believe that 6 months have past since I last set digital foot in the blogosphere.

Will this be a reinvestment of self into the site, or another flash in the pan (some noise, some light, but nothing of duration)? Time will tell, I suppose.

But between you and me, I am avoiding commitment.


The Wound caused by British Petroleum

The tragic. horrific. sickening. grievous. grief-causing arterial bleed in the Caribbean is big news, and doubtless has been covered and re-covered ad nauseum. What can a voice in the wilderness say?

My voice (in case this is your first time here, or in case you forgot) is that of a person who loves God's Creation, who loves the "environment" that uneasily embraces our urban sarcophagi. Don't expect pro-industry blathering here. However... and this is the however I haven't heard many say... However, only some of the fault lies with BP/Haliburton/Transocean. BP and the companies that worked with it and for it are only servants. Shoddy service, no doubt. However, their service, however poorly executed, was done to please and placate their master. Us.

We, and by "we" I mean industrialized society, need oil. We need it badly, that red crude the lifeblood of our luxury. But the easy wells are drained... and now we have only the tricky spots left. Alaska. The deep sea. Canadian tar sands. Middle Eastern war zones.

And so BP and its like go into these places for us, pushing technology to its limits, pushing people to their limits, and sometimes things don't go well. Sometimes there is war, and people die. Sometimes the technology is not enough, and the plundering of the depths becomes rapine.

In our just anger with BP, let us not forget that until this event, BP was a good servant. It provided us what we wanted at a price we could afford. There should be consequences to BP's recklessness, yes, but because BP was our servant, doing what we asked of it, we share in both responsibility and blame.

- V.

Hell & Subhumanity in Art

Two experiences stand out in my mind. I was once asked to accompany a friend to an exhibition on Picasso (I went). And once I ingested (over the course of a morning) a massive tome on Salvadore Dali.

Both were slow descents into Hell.

Kinds of Art

I find that there are four types of art for me.

1. There is the art that is so beautiful that it is a physical pain. I have only felt this with something I have seen in person, never yet in a book or on a screen. In these cases the only thing to do is to walk away, sit down, and then come back. ... I sometimes imagine that the holiness of God is akin to this painful beauty that can only be appropriated in small doses.

2. There is the art that is good and wholesome, that grows on me and becomes increasingly dear, valuable. Like a friend, a fine wine, a well-brewed beer, a Cuban cigar, or a much-read book, I need to adjust to the flavour - roll it on my tongue - before it is revealed. The flavour gives it the depth and richness that makes it worth coming back to.

3. There is the art that is the equivalent of musack - it is a background noise that becomes annoying when it is the focus of attention. When I saw Renoir in person, I was surprised to find that his paintings were to me bland, without sustenance. I moved on.

4. And then there is the art that is wrong. It can be sensed immediately as wrong or even evil (as in the case of Bacon's Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X). In others there may be an initial piquance or cachet (like college dorm Dali prints) that masks the perversion beneath. In my journeys through the massive output of both Dali and Picasso, the flavour soured and the spell quickly lost its charm as their art spoke their hells for them.

Fr. Seraphim

Fr. Seraphim Rose spoke of art like this last category, art that came out of Nihilism, art that came out of the lower depths, art that taught a subhumanity.

And in fact such an image has quite recently been portrayed; it is the image of contemporary painting and sculpture, that which has arisen, for the most part, since the end of the Second World War, as if to give form to the reality produced by the most concentrated era of Nihilism in human history.

The human form, it would seem, has been rediscovered in this art; out of the chaos of total abstraction, identifiable shapes emerge. The result, supposedly, is a new humanism, a return to man that is all the more significant in that - unlike so many of the artistic schools of the 20th century - it is not an artificial contrivance whose substance is hidden behind a cloud of irrationalist jargon, but a spontaneous growth that would seem to have deep roots in the soul of contemporary man. In the work, for example, of Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Jose Luis Cuevas - to take an international sampling - there seems to be a genuinely contemporary art that, without abandoning the disorder and freedom of abstraction, turns its attention away from mere escape toward a serious human commitment.

But what kind of man is it to which this art has returned? It is certainly not Christian man, man in the image of God, for no modern man can believe in him; nor is it the somewhat diluted man of the old humanism, whom all advanced thinkers regard as discredited and outmoded. It is not even the man disfigured and denatured in the earlier Cubist and Expressionist art of this century; rather, it begins where that art leaves off, and attempts to enter a new realm, to depict a new man.

To the Orthodox Christian observer, concerned not with what the avant-garde finds fashionable or sophisticated, but with truth, little reflection should be required to penetrate to the secret of this art: there is no question of man in it at all; it is an art at once subhuman and demonic. It is not man who is the subject of this art, but some lower creature who has emerged (arrived is Giacometti's word for it) from unknown depths.

The bodies this creature assumes (and in all its metamorphoses it is always the same creature) are not necessarily distorted violently; twisted and dismembered as they are, they are often more realistic than the figures of man in earlier modern art. This creature, it is clear, is not the victim of some violent attack; rather, he was born deformed, he is a genuine mutation. One cannot but notice the likeness between some of these figures and photographs of the deformed children born recently to thousands of women who had taken the drug Thalidomide during pregnancy; and we have doubtless not seen the last of such monstrous coincidences.

Even more revealing than the bodies of these creatures are the faces. It would be too much to say that these faces express hopelessness; that would be to ascribe to them some trace of humanity which they most emphatically lack. They are the faces, rather, of creatures more or less adjusted to the world they know, a world not hostile but entirely alien, not inhuman but a-human. The anguish and rage and despair of earlier Expressionists is here frozen, as it were, and cut off from a world to which they had at least the relation of denial, so as to make a world of their own.

Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul, but the very idea and nature of man. No, all this has passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity.

- Fr. Seraphim Rose.

From here, recently shared in the blogosphere by Daniel Matsui here.

The "Artists" in Question

Alberto Giacometti













Jean Dubuffet













Francis Bacon













Leon Golub













Jose Luis Cuevas













- V.

Your Creepy Thought of the Day

... brought to you by the letter Y.

As in why, oh why did I have to read this gem?

We face a choice. We could allow this crisis to start a retreat from globalisation.

As some want, we could close our markets - for capital, financial services, trade and for labour - and reduce the risks of globalisation, but that would reduce global growth, deny us the benefits of global trade, and confine millions to global poverty.

Or we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth pangs of a new global order, and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global economy, not muddling through as pessimists but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting new rules for this new global order. (Found in various places - here is one source.)
- British PM Gordon Brown.

I like the phrases "a new global order" and "a new internationalism" best.

Somewhere out there, there is a man, a woman, a family packing up the house to move permanently to the cottage, the mountains, the bomb shelter. I almost wish I were moving with them.

- V.

Disaster Strikes Ottawa

I have friends in Ottawa, the (currently) frigid capital of Canada, and I thought I would take a moment to share their pain with you.

It doesn't appear that their situation is getting much play outside of Ottawa itself - at least, my search for news articles found nothing from outside the city - but the people of Ottawa are experiencing an unnatural disaster. Namely, a bus strike, now in its 46th day.

This is a grim kind of ascesis, an ascesis made abuse because it isn't voluntary.

It seems that bus drivers want more money, or to keep their current scheduling. It seems that the city wants to save money, or to bully the drivers into worse hours. It depends on who is doing the talking. But I don't think many people in Ottawa care anymore what either the bus drivers' union or the city says - they just want their city back.

Let me put this into perspective. Ottawa has frequently been called the coldest capital of the world. I don't know enough to dispute it, but we'll take it as assumed that it is cold. I do know that there was a nasty cold snap a couple weeks ago where the mercury dipped below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And then there were a couple snowstorms where a foot of snow fell.

Meanwhile, the poor and the destitute have to walk, or stay at home.

Meet Anna Kraisingerova. She is 59, and she walks 6 hours to and from work, 18 km (11 miles). Happily, her story is now known, and there has been an outpouring of kindness.

But there are those whose stories do not yet have a happy ending.

Meet businessmen who are losing a third of their business.
Meet store owners who have no business.
Meet Burmese Christians who have no Church.

This bus strike is inhumane.

- V.

Put Not Your Trust in Obama

As I look to the American scene, I see hope bordering on hysteria.

After the darkness of the past eight years, the wars* (and rumours of wars**), the panic-inducing state of endless emergency, the anthrax terrorism, 911's scar upon the American psyche, the ubiquity of evil titans like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ... after the unending trauma that was Katrina ... after the constant embarrassment of a president who wavered between puppet and buffoon (albeit with a down-home charm) ... and after the recent series of economic body blows pointing to an almost unprecedented economic disaster ... America wants a saviour to rescue her.

But Barack Obama is a man. Despite the resonant timbre to his voice or the polished orations, he is only a man who cannot possibly begin to achieve all that is hoped of him.

The danger lies in our giving a man too much power, whether in our hearts or in reality: investing in him the ability to correct our world's ills, or handing him the power to do as he sees fit to attempt the same. As Whippleshire points out, today is not the inauguration of a president, but the annointing of a god-king, a Caesar.

We need to remember the words of the Psalmist:

Put not your trust in princes,
In sons of man,
In whom there is no salvation.

America does not need a mellifluous orator, breathing words of hope. She needs a bracing slap - a dash of cold water. She doesn't need ear-ticklers, but prophets.

She needs secular prophets like Wendell Berry or Ron Paul.

But she needs Christian prophets most of all:
She needs another St. Elias, prophet to Jezebel, prophet to the Baal-worshippers.
She needs John Prodromos, out in the desert

calling for repentance.

- V.

* Afghanistan, Iraq
** Venezuela, North Korea, Iran

Edit: A similar post [What's Worse than a US President "Everyone" Hates?] can be found at Sentire cum Ecclesia (and duplicated at Orrologion).

When War is Profitable

Last lines from a recent movie:

While private gunrunners continue to thrive, the world's biggest arms suppliers are the U.S., U.K., Russia, France and China.*

They are also the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

What happens when the brokers of peace are those who quietly profit from war?

Who will be the peacemaker then? And what then is the U.N.?

When Christ said "blessed are the peacemakers" it was not because they would be ideally positioned to fuel war.

...

This one shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.

- V.

* According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2000 the biggest arms exporters were the U.S., Russia, Germany, U.K., and France (source). In 2007, SIPRI records that the biggest arms exporters were the U.S., Russia, Germany, Netherlands, and Ukraine.

Not an Obamaphile

I cannot guarantee how long or how faithfully I will be able to sample the blogosphere, but in this latest bout of web surfing I found a bleak analysis of the American election over at Whippleshire.

He is not an Obamaphile, clearly. For that matter, neither am I.

Throughout the latter part of this election I have felt the enervation that comes from true pointlessness. What is the point in cheering for a McCain over an Obama? Or vice versa? Neither would have been good for America, and now we will find out exactly how bad it can be with the guy that won.

America's greatness lay in being a republic, not a democracy, not an empire. The republic died years ago, perhaps before the Second World War? Her greatness lay in her constitution, a constitution which has been completely abrogated, dismissed, and otherwise sloughed off. In watching Election 2008 I met and was smitten by the figure of Ron Paul. A Republican, but not a Republican like the imperialists Reagan, Bush, Bush, and McCain. A constitutionalist, and that is something that reaches beyond partisan lines. A man who desired a return to the republic.

But there is little point in crying for what-might-have-been. Instead we need to live with what is and what will be. ... What will be?

From Whippleshire:

It has also been said that peoples go from slavery to great faith, from great faith to freedom, from freedom to prosperity, from prosperity to apathy, from apathy to chaos, from chaos to tyranny, and back to slavery once more. America right now is on the fast track from apathy to chaos and into tyranny.

Let us hope he is wrong.

- V.

Two Moments

A Moment in a Cemetery

Some time ago, not too long after Pascha, I and several others were working together to give our parish cemetery its annual spring cleaning when an older parishioner remarked in scandalized tones that another Orthodox cemetery in town had just interred the cremated remains of someone ... and with the approval of the bishop no less! When I made note that cremation was just as scandalous and unOrthodox as embalming, another practice that crops up in Orthodox circles, I was gently rebuked. Embalming, I was told, is okay ... it is only cremation which is not.

What?

When I had gone apart with a friend, I began a mini-rant on the heterodoxy of embalming. Until I noticed that he wasn't with me, wasn't in agreement. He showed only the mild patience of an older dog for the excitable yipping of a puppy as he discovers his own tail.

Which was discomfiting. I care about things and that strongly. I care about clean water and clean food, I care about traditional social mores, I care about children and family. And I care about Orthodoxy.

It is bewildering to call a brother or a sister "brother" and "sister" in confidence that they hold to the same beliefs, only to discover that the same brother and sister are not aggressively guarding these self-same beliefs from the predations of the Enemy. In fact, they do not care, and from the vantage-point of their apathy find articulated belief alarming.

A Moment in a Mass Grave

Just in time for the 141st anniversary of the formation of the Dominion of Canada, the news media has informed us that Henry Morgentaler is being awarded the Order of Canada. And I have to say that I am just sick over it. No doubt this event is being widely panned throughout the blogosphere and my small contribution therefore redundant in the extreme, but I cannot be silent.

For those not in the know, Dr. Morgentaler was a G.P. who gave up his practice to set up and run Canada's first abortion clinic. Who, when he was arrested, took the case through the courts and through appeals until it reached the Supreme Court and the prohibition against abortion in Canada was struck down. Who, to this day operates an abortion clinic within a block of Parliament Hill and remains the Canadian abortion activist and so an icon of death, a Canadian Kevorkian for the unborn.

Morgentaler, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Canada after the end of World War II, is a man who survived one holocaust at the hands of the Nazis only to import another holocaust into this country. Although a victim of prejudice-spawned mass murder of a minority group, Morgentaler has seen fit to champion a feminist-spawned mass murder of our minors in utero.

Something terrible has happened to this nation that not only is abortion allowed, but its apostle honoured.

They say that fully a third of my generation was aborted. I don't know how true the numbers are, but I do know that Canada is a wasteland - a mass grave - inhabited by the dead whose blood calls out to heaven. Against this society, against their infanticidal mothers, against the "doctors", against Morgentaler.

Lord have mercy.

- V.

The Vox Clamanti Manifesto

I have heard it said that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and as a general principle, I would have to agree. However, at certain times and in certain places a prophetic voice is needed, a voice crying out in the desert, a chiding one that calls a people to change. Sometimes it is needful to curse the darkness.

To put it another way, Solomon wrote that every purpose under Heaven had its proper season. Sometimes one builds, sometimes one tears down. Our purpose and aim is to do both.

A Time to Build

For the sake of our own sanity, we cannot always be railing against the dying of the light. We need, and those who read this blog, need to hear and see beauty. We need to be secondary creators in emulation of our first Creator.

So expect from time to time descriptions of our parish, the natural world around us, and the joys of friendship, parenthood, and marriage. Perhaps also some art works, some art discussion ... perhaps some poetry.

And, where possible, where appropriate, and where we see them, we will offer our solutions to the various issues raised.

A Time to Tear Down

There are, regrettably, many thing that need changing in this world of ours. It is a deeply flawed and hurting world that we have inherited, a world under bombardment not only by our sins, but by our man-made toxins and our mountains of forever garbage. And it is a world where there is little to no repentance for our demon-like hatred of God’s Creation, man and world both, because we have constructed around our misdeeds horrible ideologies to defend them. … Here follow the issues that we have identified (and this section will undoubtedly evolve over time).

A. Environmental Concerns

These issues form an assault on the Creation that God called good. It is a failure to recognize that when the Holy Spirit was poured out on all the cosmos at Pentecost, He began to restore, through and by the prayers of the faithful, all Creation to its Edenic state. It is a failure to realize that all of nature has the potential to become sacrament, to become grace-bestowing, and it is a wanton violation of our role as stewards of a world that is not ours but God’s, lent us for a while. In many cases, our profligacy holds dire consequences to our health and well-being, and the health and well-being of our descendants.

I. Toxins: I have broken these down into four categories, from what I consider the most immediately damaging and dangerous to the least.

• Injected toxins – These would include street drugs, some pharmaceuticals, and vaccinations. These are easiest to avoid, most immediately damaging, and affect humans (and sometimes their progeny) alone.
• Ingested toxins – These would include unbound chemicals in our plastics, pesticides and heavy metals in our foods, and fluoride, chlorine, and various medications in our water. Where these toxins are carried in our groundwater and our waterways, the responsibility for them is shared, and the consequences involve more than our species alone.
• Breathed toxins – These would include cigarette smoke, smog, airborne pesticides, and vapours from household cleaning supplies. These are harder to avoid, and involve, again, a shared responsibility and collective harm.
• Absorbed toxins – These would include the plastics, pesticides, and bleaches found in our clothes, as well as skin contact with certain cleaners and varnishes.

II. Genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) are aberrant creations formed in Frankensteinian laboratories in a world-wide experiment to see what happens when the unnatural is tossed into nature. All too frequently these are self-replicating monstrosities.

Completely aside from whether or not these are a mockery and a blasphemy against God’s Creation, we eat many of the products made from these GMO’s, and we do not know what the long term effects will be.

III. Nuclear waste and depleted uranium are persistent and invisible mutagenic pollutants that will remain with us for millennia.

IV. Hormones in our meat, milk, and water have already been shown to have an effect on the hormones of those who consume them. This is another global experiment gone awry.

V. Garbage – our plastics and the throwaway culture that gave them birth – must be combated, reduced, and ultimately eliminated. There is no “away” to “throwaway”. Non -biodegradable garbage stays here in this world, our home, and as such is a present to our descendants that will keep on giving.

VI. Animal torture and the wanton cruelty towards animals, whether as manifestation of sociopathy, as the result of the industrialization of animal husbandry, or as a result of reckless and irreverent experimentation, constitutes a kind of savagery unknown even to the barbarians of yore.

VII. Clear-cut logging, unlike a more selective logging, is a habitat eliminator and the forefather to desertification. I recognize the need for wood for many uses and purposes, but our harvesting of this resource must allow renewal, rebirth, and the harvesting by future generations.

VIII. Power lines I include tentatively, largely because while we know that all electrical systems throw off magnetic fields, we do not know the long-term effects of constant habitation in a powerful magnetic field such as is given off by high-voltage power lines.

B. Social Concerns

These issues invariably are an affront to the human person, a degradation of the image of God, and a complete and utter failure to see God in others. Sadly, many of us participate in them through our self-indulgence and our pride.

I. Abortion: We need to take a tougher stand against this holocaust, this incessant feticide and its byproduct industries. Any vaccination that uses cell-lines derived from human fetuses (read: babies) must be avoided as we would avoid the taint of Nazi gold pulled from Jewish teeth. Likewise fetal stem cell research and any medical “advance” derived from fetal stem cells must be banned, boycotted, and shunned. Lastly, in vitro fertilization must be rethought where human embryos are formed in large number but not implanted in the mother’s womb. Throwing these out, as is customary in most cases, is another form of feticide, and as such constitutes murder.

II. Human trafficking: We as a society agree that human trafficking (the buying and selling of humans for the purposes of slavery) is wrong. However, we lack the moral courage to create an outright ban on prostitution and pornography so as to crush sexual slavery and the traffic in woman and children for sexual purposes. We lack the moral courage to outlaw and criminalize all companies that use forced labour, slavery, and sweatshop labour. We lack the moral courage to place adoption and organ transplants under the microscope to ensure that human exploitation was not involved, and we lack the will to vigorously punish those who engage or who knowingly benefit in such practices.

III. Usury, or interest, is a form of slavery in that it creates bondage through debt. The receivers of interest (the ever-wealthier) effectively enslave, through the medium of the banks, the ever-poorer. Banned by Mosaic Law and the Church, it has enjoyed not a resurrection but a revivification in more recent times.

IV. War, torture, and the use of weapons of mass destruction are similarly great evils. While I might argue that a defensive war is a necessary evil to preserve a nation in the face of military aggression, I fear that we have lost the ability to discern what a defensive war is. It is not a preemptive war, and it is not an offensive invasion of [another] belligerent country.

C. Cultural Concerns

These issues are those that, while not an affront to Creation or the human person, are distractions that interfere with our ability to stop, think, meditate, pray, and simply be, in silence and before God. Monastics would recognize these, I think, as tools of the Enemy to keep us from the knowledge and pursuit of God.

I. Speed: We live in a society that exists at only one speed, and that is breakneck. We need to slow down, we need to stop. We need to escape the tyranny of the ticking clock and the fear of “wasting” time as if it were something wastable. Just as God created us in matter so that we could learn to receive His grace through matter, He created us in time to experience Him in time.

There are many things – all the important things, in fact – which cannot be obtained quickly, or by any measure of time, but only by the measure of living, suffering, praying, loving, and growing. Building a marriage, raising a child, achieving maturity, gaining wisdom, and finding salvation itself are the products of a life, and cannot be measured by time or gained by the “spending” of time. We examine and speak of time as if it were quantitative, when any child could tell you it is qualitative.

II. Silence: St. Gregory Palamas was identified as a saint in part through his defense of hesychasm (silence) as a means to finding and experiencing God. Centuries before him, St. Elias discovered that God was not to be found in the crashing thunder but in the still small voice. And before him the Psalmist wrote of the need to be silent on our beds.

Silence is a precondition for meditation and prayer, and has become an ever-rarer commodity in the face of modern noise. Music pumped over the radio, through headphones, and in the supermarkets, engines roaring throughout the world, there are few places where one can entirely escape the sounds of busy, worldly Man.

III. Advertisement: Our senses and our peace are under constant assault by the omnipresence of signs and their ubiquitous siren call to buy, buy, buy. We are urged to satisfy our inner emptiness through endless consumption. We are titillated and amused, seduced into greed. We are not given the chance to rest, but are barraged and bombarded until we accept the hidden premise that we are consumers, not citizens of a nation nor the distinct people of God.

D. Ideological Concerns

These issues can be divided into two categories: heresies and philosophical ideas. Both, however, derive from the imagination of Man independent of Christ and His Church.

Thoughts may and should be free, but the implementation of these ideas – these pernicious and dangerous follies – have cost us a great deal, and will continue to cost us, unless we replace them with real wisdom and real knowledge.

I. The cult of youth: In the West we worship youth and beauty, and so we do everything in our technological power to promote youth, beauty, and “sexiness”, and to hide what is old and ugly. Our seniors are locked away into old folks’ homes. Our disfigured are urged to undergo plastic surgery. Our young starve themselves into looking more “beautiful”. Wrinkles are botoxed away and faces are lifted, grey hairs dyed, and beards shaved.

There are two even uglier consequences to the cult of youth. First, we hide our dead behind makeup and we attempt to preserve the illusion of life – eternal youth – through embalming, a profound abuse of the body, and a manifest disbelief in the reality of the resurrection of the dead. Second, the logical extension of the worship of youth results in the perversion of baby beauty competitions and prepubescent whore chic (where we display our young as sex objects), and pedophilia (where our young are perceived and treated as sex objects).

II. Modernism teaches, in essence, that things will keep on getting better. Evolutionary theory is a rationalization as to how this reversal of entropy works. What makes modernism so dangerous is that it has given us countless technologies without reckoning their cost. Vinyl must be a good, because it is a new technology – but the production of vinyl involves the incredibly toxic dioxin. Atomic energy must be a good, because it is a new technology – but in the 63 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ushering in of the atomic age, we have yet to find a safe way to handle the waste. Genetic manipulation must be a good, because it is a new technology – but we have produced alien species unknown to this planet with consequences unforeseen and unlooked-for.

It is the recklessness of modernistic technophilic zeal that has given us the heavily polluted world we know today.

III. Calvinism: This is the Christian heresy wherein free will is removed from Man’s finding of salvation. Grace (a pale, limited grace) is bestowed upon the elect, will he nill he, resulting in the saving of just these elect. Calvinism’s bastard child is the Enlightenment, and its grandchild atheism. Where God has been made odious and onerous, there people will flee Him. Doubtless some hardy Germanic types have found Calvinism the intoxicating and heady brew necessary to stir them to great and glorious achievements for the Kingdom of Heaven. However, for many (most?) others, Calvinism does not solve the age-old problem of theodicy but enshrines it. We depart from the question as to why does God allow evil and we conclude with the statement that God wills evil.

IV. Globalization, aside from its resultant dependence on slavery and forced labour, and apart from its systemic replacement of the person of the local merchant and artisan for the faceless and soulless body of the international and unaccountable corporation, is a modernistic movement that is causing massive pollution of the environment through the endless crisscrossing of oceans and continents by exhaust-emitting mega-vehicles. The only solution to globalization is a restoration of the merchant, artisan, and craftsman, the re-empowerment of the small farmer, and the replacement of the ideal of globalization with the ideal of locavore.

V. The Armageddon Complex: In the world at large disregard for the environment seems to stem from selfishness and greed. In the Christian community, however, this disregard originates from what I call the Armageddon Complex. This is the belief that the end of the world is at hand, with its implicit destruction by hail and fire, etc; in the face of this destruction there is no point to cleaning up the world (or to keeping it clean).

We do not know the day nor the hour of Christ’s return. We may suspect He is coming soon, but to fail to care for our home would be a dooming and a damning of our children to live in a toxic cesspool should He not come. In point of fact, ours is the first civilization to fail to provide for, think of, or work towards the betterment of the next generation.

VI. Compulsory public age-graded education: One of the worst (again modernistic) ideas of the 19^th century was the one that remade the education of our young. It concluded that all children learned alike, at the same age and in the same manner, cloistered away from real life and real-world experience. It concluded that apprenticeships were bankrupt, despite being the primary method of disseminating knowledge for millennia. It concluded that all children would do best divorced from the God-created whole spectrum of ages that is the family at the microcosmic level and society at the macrocosmic. And it concluded that the government and its emissaries the education theorists, pedagogues, and teachers would know better how to raise and educate a child than the parents who knew it best.

VII. Right to Paradise: We appear to believe that we have the right to a disease-free paradise where there is peace and plenty for all, along with all the paradisiacal technological gizmos and devices that are the hallmark of the wealthy. Ours is a jubilant and narcissistic expectation that we are owed everything we desire. We have seemingly fallen heir to the world, and we consume and consume its resources without any sense of the other three-quarters (or more) of the world that has none of the advantages we have. We are astonished and indignant when these rights are encroached, when disease makes a comeback, when oil prices rise, when our peace or our prosperity is in any way lessened. We cannot fathom that bacteria and viruses mutate, that peak oil exists, or that there is sin in the world.

Ours are the “rights” of the delusional maniac, unaware of a fallen world. Ours are the “rights” of the locust, devouring everything in its path. We have no right to Paradise, no right to any Utopia. We can only be given Eden through the sacramental life of the Church, the healing of the Holy Spirit, and the prayers of the saints. And we will only fully enter the garden when God makes it anew.

In the meantime, our avaricious society is a blight upon the earth and a gross inequality that time and the wrath of other nations will iron out. We should accustom ourselves to a simple life before it is made simple for us.

- V.,
Writing for V. & E.

A Failure of Good Stewardship

When future generations look upon ours - if future generations there are - they will marvel at our stupidity. Not short-sighted zeal or misplaced optimism, but downright old-fashioned asinine stupidity.

For only in the past hundred or so years has mankind produced waste that could not be thrown out. [Away, yes. Into our own backyards, or into the backyards of others.] Only in the past few generations have we had, and used, the capability to leave an ecological footprint. And what a footprint we have left, one where time to clean up the mess is measured not in months or years, but in millenia and thousands of millenia.

Consider the following two examples:

1. Nuclear waste. We cannot clean this stuff up. Billed as a "clean" energy source, in that it does not use hydrocarbons like gas, coal or oil, nuclear power plants produce electricity and radioactive waste, waste that will remain radioactive, and dangerous, long after our grandchildren's grandchildren have grown old. And our best solution? Bury it in a mountain.

Completely aside from the dangers inherent in nuclear waste management, the fact is that this waste will persist for generations. Depleted uranium, one of the less radioactive byproducts, has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. Cesium-137, one of the more radioactive byproducts, has a half-life of approximately 30 years. This sounds good, but it still takes 150 years to stabilize 97% of the stuff.

We have created a technological marvel, but have completely failed to create the technology to clean it up. And yet we use it regardless. This, by any definition, is stupidity.

2. Plastics. Long-term readers of this blog know already of my deep antipathy for plastic bags. And so I was quite pleased to read a recent article which called for an end to them. But the problem is not just bags. They are just the most obvious and most unsightly leaving of the plastic industry: bag-festooned trees are, as an urban phenomena, an unfortunate commonplace.

The problem is plastic in general. Again, we have created a technology without creating the means to clean up afterwards. The net result is a global experiment to see how nature copes with something it cannot biodegrade. Incidentally, it is this biodegradability that ensured the economic "success" of plastics, and their ubiquity in modern life - we wanted, and now rely on, something that will not rust, corrode, or rot. In short, we wanted something completely alien to nature.

And we got it. Here is what this alien monstrosity has brought us: the plastic ocean, a soup of ever-crumbling plastic floating in the heart of the Pacific, a soup twice the size of the continental U.S. The cleanup? As possible as sifting the Sahara.

For those interested in more information on the garbage patches where ocean once stood, there is a video you can watch, a blog from a research vessel currently exploring this plastic ocean that you can read, or you can check out Wikipedia.

The problem doesn't end with the near indestructibility of plastic. Unfortunately, our global experiment includes the use of toxins. Recently, bisphenol A and phthalates have both made the news as toxins that exist in our plastics and which are not bound by them [they leach out]. Other known toxins are DEHA and styrene.

I think of the snobbery of the historian or scientist looking at the Roman's use of lead in their water pipes (as an interesting side-note, "plumbing" comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum). Are we any better? Many modern homes use piping made from PVC, an incredibly persistent plastic that releases dioxin both during manufacture and incineration, a plastic that contains the aforementioned phthalates.

What can we do, if we desire to effect some change? As far as I can see it, we must follow the three R's, whether we are making a personal move away from plastics, or the government wakes to the fact that we are bankrupting our future for present convenience and makes the decision for us. And the three R's are:

Reduce - First and foremost, we must reduce our plastic consumption. We must make it clear to the corporations that if they package something in plastic, we will not buy it. We must opt for products made of wood, metal, glass, etc. Only in the arena of medicine do I see a legitimate need for plastic ... in all other parts of our lives, I see enormous potential for improvement.
Reuse - Where plastic exists already, let us reuse it so as to maximize its lifespan. Eventually, plastic grows brittle and breaks into smaller [non-biodegradable] pieces, but until that happens, let us keep what we have out of the landfills and away from our seas for as long as we humanly can.
Recycle - In creating recycling programs we have bred a feeling of smug complacency about our plastic consumption. The truth is that out of the seven main groups of plastics, generally only two are recycled. And their recycling is just another form of reuse - the plastic doesn't go away, it doesn't biodegrade. It is a sop to our collective conscience and little more. However, where we can, and until that day when we have eliminated this unnatural abomination from our diets, recycling is a good way to reuse certain of our plastics.

The Travesty of the Religious Right

Sadly, there is not much concern for our environment in most conservative Christian circles today. In a baffling move, social conservatives (traditional Christianity is, by definition, socially conservative) have allied themselves with big business, big pharma, big oil, and big agribusiness, not to mention the military-industrial complex. And so they have distanced themselves from the environment, from the need to protect this planet from the worst of man's ravages, for it is axiomatic that the "needs" of large corporations are inimical to the needs of nature.

Somehow, we have left it to the democrats, the liberals, and the otherwise loony left to take up the torch that is ours by right and by religion. How many times have we heard it said that man is a steward of God's Creation? (I have heard it used as a defense for doing what we like with it - which makes as much sense as justifying defecating in the front parlour of our neighbours' home because they asked us to house-sit for them.) This stewardship is ours as heirs of Adam, a sacred charge not to be lightly dismissed. And as recipients of the faith, of true doctrine given us by our forefathers, the Fathers and Apostles, we should be leading the charge, eager to baptize all Creation, eager to restore the Cosmos to the conditions of paradise.

It grieves me that the Church isn't illumining the way for the world ... that it must be the largely non-Christian left that shows us how to care for His Creation (as they show us how to care for the poor, etc.). This was our task, our duty.

I am minded of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In a grim parallel, it wasn't the Pharisee or the scribe, keepers of the Law or of true doctrine, who rescued the injured man, but it was the Samaritan, the man whose religion was faulty, even heretical, who acted as a true servant of God.

Some may think that properly stewarding the environment is not the most important work asked us of our Lord. True, in comparison to saving a brother from the fires of hell, it doesn't seem terribly important. However, the truth is that most of us aren't busy saving our brothers from the fires of hell, so we really don't have a good excuse for our moral laziness and our callous disregard. Do I think that everyone should become an instant enviro-fanatic? I don't think it likely, even if I was arguing for it. A far more practical and beneficial thing would be if we opened our apathetic hearts to the need to do something, to heal our planet in even a small way. We need to be open to acting on behalf of God's Creation, and then perhaps we will see how.

- V.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, we learn that Daniel Matsui has just gotten engaged.

Congratulations, Daniel & Michelle, and may God grant you both many years together. Your joy is our joy.

Also, Maxim from Earl Donald the Bewildered recently commented on a post over at the Ochlophobist's. I can't help but feel that his thoughts on the difference between Republican and Democrat complement mine quite nicely. (Naturally, he is welcome to disagree with me.) Here is a quote:

Can anyone tell me the difference between a Republican moderate and a Democratic moderate? There isn't much, is there? Any differences which still exist between the Parties are now relegated to the fringe; Labor and the much-maligned "Religious Right" are what remains of the soul of the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively. Both of these groups give themselves, body and soul, to their respective Parties each election, and get nothing in return. In the middle, the real face of the single-party government which rules us emerges; I call it the "Secular Industrialist" Party. The so-called Democratic and Republican Parties are just the left and right legs of this Behemoth; the Democrats are charged with advancing the social interests of the Party, the Republicans, the economic interests. When the Democrats win, the Monster takes a step forward with its Left leg; when the Republicans win, it takes a step with the Right. Note that, no matter what happens, there is never any retrograde motion; no matter how fervent the rhetoric of each Party, when they actually come to power they never actually reverse the actions of their predecessors.

The image of the Behemoth, monstrous and all-powerful, echoes my intuition about the birth of despotism. I like it.

- V.

A Recipe for Despotism

If I had aspirations for dictatorship and possessed a few powerful friends, or if I wished to reduce the free peoples of the greatest nation on the planet to an abject serfdom, here is what I would do:

Taking as my raw medium two parties or philosophies that we will call, for the sake of argument, "liberal" and "conservative" or "asinine" and "elephantine", I would start by refocusing attention on the differences between the parties, highlighting them and making them larger than life. The important thing would be to draw attention away from the similarities between the parties, namely, 1) a singular inability on the part of either to accomplish anything significant for the family or the individual, 2) a singular ability to promote increasing regulation and to consolidate power, and 3) a common philosophy concerning global domination and empire-building. And lest any clear-thinking individual penetrate this obfuscation, I would encourage each party to create a climate of fear within the ranks of those who identify themselves with the distinctives of that party (remembering that there is little real difference between the parties). For the liberal, I would create the bogeyman of climate catastrophe, of an angered Gaia wreaking vengeance upon iniquitous man. And for conservative, I would invoke the spectres of the alien in our midst, whether it be the barbarian hordes creeping across the border or the omnipresent and civilization-destroying worshiper of a foreign deity. Clear thinking would be muddied by emotion and reason co-opted by the effort to convince the other half of the population of the need to fear.

When everyone was good and frightened, I (or someone equally unscrupulous) would step in with the antidote to fear: "protection" by a strong right arm.

Of course, if I had the luxury of time, I would first dull the wits of the masses with mind-numbing entertainments like television, and if possible I would ensure that education was everywhere bastardized (perhaps by focusing on teaching techniques instead of the resultant citizens). Naturally I would be opposed to academies, to home-schooling, and to rebellion against the black box in the corner, and I would try to discourage these by speaking of the need to "socialize" the child.

...

Of course, this was a poorly-disguised allegory for our time.

I don't know that there is an one person or any cabal out there that is using my recipe for despotism. I don't know that a conspiracy theory is necessary to explain the fact that we have been marching inexorably into serfdom, either. The fact remains that this recipe will work independent of active cooks.

In the crucible of civilizational collapse a tyrant will rise.

- V.