https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=65QSXuz69tY
One of the things that has been interesting to me watching the environmental question has been how the discourse has often been radicalized in the sense that I always have this sense that the modern world is really a de-incarnation, you know, that Christianity, it’s as if Christianity had a kind of synthetic worldview, let’s say, that became quite strong in the Middle Ages. And then in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, things started to split. And we didn’t see the fruits of that at first, but now we’re really seeing the fruits. And, you know, Ian, I’ve always actually had a tenuous relationship with the environmental kind of activism because what I saw in it was something of an extreme kind of coming out. And this, the idea, even the idea of like nature as a value in itself, like the idea of nature, the idea of the wild, you could say. Because there’s something of the place that you talk about, which brings human consciousness to the fore, right? The idea of a place in the sense that we recognize this as a, having respect or reverence for a place means that it’s like the garden is the best image of that, where there is a human element in the sense of a human recognition of a boundary. And then this like natural interaction within the space, whereas what I’ve noticed in a lot of the environmental rhetoric is this kind of fetishization of the wild, let’s say, and a hatred almost of almost an anti-human quality in it. I don’t think it’s there everywhere. Maybe it’s there mostly in those that make the most noise, and so we kind of hear it more. And so because of that, I’ve been, I’ve always been tenuous about it. I appreciate the desire because I see the insanity of Western culture. Like I can notice the insanity of consumerism and this complete treating the world like Heidegger talked about, right? The idea of the world as a standing reserve is just this stuff that we can use to further our own agenda. And so I’m curious about your vision of that because I haven’t seen, at least me, I haven’t seen a lot of people that are able to kind of find that balance in a cosmological sense, almost like in a symbolic sense. Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, look, I wrote a manifesto called Uncivilization, right? So I’ve been quite deep in that. But look, I mean, people are in the radical green movement, especially people are desperate to protect the wild because we’re destroying it so fast. So if you look at it in terms of balance, there’s always a balance between the wild world, which is the world that basically isn’t under the control or domination of humans, mainly modern humans and human civilization. Now, I tend to think that in a traditional society and a pre-modern society, in other words, there’s a reasonable balance between the human and the non-human world. And you don’t have a kind of environmental conversation because you don’t need one because you’re not destroying everything. You’re in some reasonable balance with it. You know, you don’t have to romanticize nature, but you can’t demonize it either. And you don’t just treat it as a resource. I mean, I live in rural Ireland. There’s a great long tradition of folk culture here, just as there is in England, where I come from, which has a wary respect for nature and which treats it well. And you have to do that because it’s a living web. What we’ve done, and I don’t think this is a problem of Western culture so much as it’s about modernity, because it started here, but it’s global now, where we have basically desold everything that isn’t human, right? And increasingly desold other humans as well. But we treat the world as a resource because we treat the whole of life as a machine. And we treat most of non-human life and indeed much human life as a kind of resource to be fed into that machine and turned into profit at the other side. So that’s a question of that. As I say, this is a spiritual matter because it’s a question of respect for creation, which includes humans. And if you don’t respect that, if you create a giant machine that eats everything effectively and destroys everything and tries to turn it into plastic junk that we don’t even need, then you’re going to get a huge reaction in terms of people who want to defend the wild from humans. And what happens a lot is that people get human civilization, the worst aspects of modernity, confused with human beings. And they say humans are the problem. Humans aren’t the problem. But the way that modern humans are living is the problem. And that’s a problem in any number of ways, not just in terms of, I mean, I see the destruction of the natural world, the wild world as a symptom of the bigger crisis and the sort of disintegration of aspects of our culture at the moment is a symptom of the same crisis, I think. I mean, you mentioned the garden. I think it’s very interesting that I think a lot about the notion of Eden and the fall. You know, the sort of primal story of Christianity is that we begin in communion in a garden with everything else that’s alive and with God who’s so close to us that we can see him walking around. Okay, and there we are. Everything is there. All life is there. And we chose to leave that because we chose power and knowledge and desire, if you like, individual self will over communion. And then we spent the whole of history trying to get back again, you know, or attempting to rebuild our own garden here on Earth, which is effectively the point we’re coming to now after so many centuries of trying to build our own godless world with us at the center of it. This is what we’ve come to and the destruction of the fact that you can change the climate of the whole planet by playing God. That’s a spiritual matter, you know, so the question is then not, you know, what technology should we use instead of this one? The question is, what happened? That’s the result of eating the apple, if you like. So what do we do now? What do we do now? That’s a spiritual matter. That’s got to have a spiritual answer to it. There’s an interesting image, because you can see if you look at the story of the fall, you can notice how technology is an answer to the fall and it comes from Cain’s lineage. So Cain is the first one to build a city. And then you can see this kind of pendulum swing between what you could call the wild and civilization. The biggest example is, of course, the flood, which is which is, let’s say, this coming in of the wild to take revenge, let’s say, on on on excess of order. And then right away after the flood, what is the first thing they want to do is they want to build a tower. They build a tower. So it’s like if they ever a flood comes again, you know, we’ll be safe. So you see this kind of pendulum moving back and forth between these two extremes. And the powerful imagery of the New Jerusalem is actually a balance that people wouldn’t think that that’s how the balance should be. But it’s a it’s a powerful balance because in the center of the city is the tree and the water of life. And then on the margin is the wall of the city. And so we tend to think the opposite. We tend to think that it’s like the city in the center and then the trees in the wild on the outside. But the image that is brought about in the New Jerusalem is rather of this is kind of pristine reality in the center. And then the wall is there to kind of protect almost protect that that pristine reality rather than rather than the opposite, let’s say. And but it’s it’s pristine, but it’s also more of a garden than it is just of the the tale of the wild, the way that we understand it. Because in the in the last image, it also says that the that there’s no ocean, which is actually a crazy image that that image is hard to totally understand when it says in Revelation that there’s no ocean left. You’re thinking there’s no ocean, no chaos at all. Like, I don’t totally get it. But that’s the final images of this. Let’s say there’s flowing water, but not not this kind of chaotic water, let’s say.