Theology as the Queen of Sciences: Can we Stop the Collapse of Truth?

 

Years ago, I was walking along a narrow path along a steep mountain slope. Suddenly the rocks under my feet started slipping down. For a moment I had a horrible feeling that the whole mountain was sliding down and that it was taking me with it, all the way down to the bottom of the valley. Maybe some God, somewhere, was rolling dice for me and the bad number didn't come up. But if I rethink of that moment, I can still feel the impression of everything collapsing around me. The same sensation I have nowadays, not about a rock-slide, but about truth sliding down and being lost forever. 

 

First of all, a disclaimer: I am trained in physics and I know that the worst sin that you can make as a scientist is that of mixing data with opinions. In other words, you don't do science by analogies. That's not just a sin, it is treason. If you do that, you are three times a traitor: to yourself, to your teachers, to science. 

And yet, I recognize that something is rotten in the citadel of science. Maybe we scientists are still able to do good science, but what we are doing is becoming more and more irrelevant. We painstakingly find data, evaluate them, compare them, before arriving to a conclusion. But data are becoming irrelevant in the discussion.

An example: A few days ago, I found the results of a poll on how people perceive the damage made by the Covid epidemic. Impressive: in a group of Western countries, people estimated that the fraction of people killed by the virus was way higher than the real data. For instance, people in the US estimated that the Americans killed by the virus were 9% of the total. Now, do you realize that it would mean 30 million victims? Compare that with reality: the count of covid deaths now stands at 173,000 and the real mortality in the US so far is about 0.05%. The average estimate is off of more than a factor of 200.

And think that the "9%" is an average of the answers given. Some people must have known the real number and that means a lot of people must be thinking that the number of victims must have been well over 10%, maybe 15% or 20%, Think about that: if you believe that your chance to die of covid is around 15%, then it is the same as that of rolling a "6" on a die. Imagine that: you roll your die, you get a "six" and -- bang --  you are dead. 

And that's the reason of the tsunami of pure terror that has invaded people's lives. I know people who are still in voluntary lockdown in Italy, even though the compulsory lockdown has been over for three months. And they are living a miserable life, not wanting to see anybody, go anywhere, meet anyone. When they must go out -- because they must -- they do that wearing their face masks tight and looking at the people they happen to cross in the street as if they were lepers or worse.

This wave of madness explains some of the reactions I had to my comments on that poll. Some people seemed to be truly offended by the numbers I presented and they responded in kind (you are a denier, a spreader of fake news, a conspiracy theorist, etc.). Others seemed to be genuinely unable to understand the point I was making. The reaction was something like, "But, Ugo, don't you understand that we had 35,000 deaths of coronavirus in Italy? You think that's not enough? How can you be so callous in saying that these deaths do not count? You want to do nothing to stop the coronavirus to spread and cause more victims? Are you evil, heartless, or just someone who doesn't live in the real world?"

We can say many things about this story. That school has not made its job of teaching even a little mathematics to people, that the government propaganda turns out to be very effective, that we need to explain things better if we want people to understand reality, that Internet tribalization is causing all sorts of troubles. All that is correct, but my impression is that there is more here, there is much more. 

I have been thinking a lot about truth. And I still believe that science, the way we understand it today, is a step toward truth. But it is not enough, and a lot of what we are doing is counterproductive. What's truth, really? How can it be that truth is so difficult to recognize? How can it be that we keep fighting so hard against truth? How can it be that truth is so fragile that the lowliest internet troll can destroy it? How is it that people trust so evidently unreliable sources of information and become angry at the mere thought that they might be lied to?

Maybe we need something bigger, higher, deeper than just listing "the data" and hope that people will find truth in them. What could that be, I don't know, but I know that the problem is not new. Aldeady during the 3rd century AD, a man named Augustine was asking himself this question and he would find truth in the divine revelation. Today, Michael Dowd has put together a view that I see as the next step after Augustine: the truth is not in the words that the prophets related to us, although in part it may well be. The truth is in everything that surrounds us, the word of God is not in a book, it is in the creation itself. And the virtue we need to recognize truth is humility in front of the greatness of the creation. 

So, maybe theology really is the queen of the sciences and we badly need it to give a sense to our poor "science," so proud of itself and so lost in a universe too big for it to understand. This post by Dominey Jenner is a good example of a different view. I won't say that I agree on every single point she makes, but it reads like a breath of fresh air after having come out of a smoke-filled crypt.

Dominey Jenner: Restoring the Queen of the Sciences

https://hectordrummond.com/2020/08/17/dominey-jenner-restoring-the-queen-of-the-sciences/

 

Posted Monday 17th August 2020 Hector Drummond 

 

This is an article by Dominey Jenner.

We have all heard rather a lot about ‘the science’ these last few months. Its elevation has been clear through its impact on government policy, with the ever present SAGE and influential scientists such as Neil Ferguson. The consequence has been catastrophic both socially and economically. It would seem that, in fact, science does not have all the answers.

Perhaps it is time to return to a broader understanding of the sciences. Theology was once considered ‘the queen of the sciences’ – the study of God presumed to be the most fundamental way to understand the world that He has made. I would suggest that only through this lens can we really understand why lockdown and its associated policies were always going to be bad for the human experience.

Social Distancing

In C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Great Divorce’, Hell is depicted as a socially distanced realm. Its inhabitants move further and further away from each other as time goes on; “they’ve been moving on and on… getting further apart…every now and then they move further still”. Isolation pains us because we are instrinsically relational beings. The Bible holds that we are made in the image of God – a God who by nature is relational. Whilst the Trinity is perhaps one of the most headache-inducing doctrines, it is not hard to understand that One God made of Three Persons is going to involve relationship. Throughout the Bible we see Father, Son and Holy Spirit in perfect and constant relationship with each other. As God’s image-bearers, relationship is what we’re about too.

If being prohibited from seeing your family, your friends and your work colleagues was hard to bear, that is because it went against your human nature. If being required to stand two metres apart from your fellow citizens feels alien, that’s because it is. If you missed just bumping into people at Tesco’s, on the train, or in the park, that’s because we are relational beings. A people required to socially distance are a people required to work against their own nature.

Fear

It was early into lockdown that I saw her. An elderly woman, hunched up, face mask pulled up, eyes darting around, aghast at the sight of fellow human being, nothing but fear in her eyes. I wanted to cry.

The fear induced by our government and the media is perhaps one of the most lamentable aspects of this whole Covid episode. The warning given, early on, to the government by a SAGE sub-group that, “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased…using hard-hitting emotional messaging” did not go unheeded with government messages such as “if you go out, you can spread it, people will die”, plastered everywhere.

Even now, four months on, YouGov’s fear tracker (yes, it’s a thing) has only fallen by 11 percentage points since its peak, the day after lockdown began. 49% of those most recently surveyed still feel, “very or somewhat scared” of catching the virus. Covid has virtually left these shores and yet the fear remains. The terrorisation of our general population has been wholesale.

“Do not be afraid” is one of the most oft-repeated encouragements in the Bible, expressed over a hundred times. What a sweet counter those words are. They are based on the idea that, whilst not promising an easy life, God is ultimately in control and can be trusted to do the right thing by those who put their trust in Him. With our lives in His hands and Death conquered, we have nothing, ultimately, to fear. Biblically, the opposite of fear is not courage, but rather faith.

Fear is the devil’s currency. He seeks to sow it in human hearts for it is one of the best ways to undermine faith. It is hardly surprising then, that a nation saturated with fear is a nation approximating Hell.

Face masks

Human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creation. Made on the sixth day, just before God rested, we are created in His image and entrusted with the stewardship of the Earth: “Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1: 28). Human beings are sacrosanct.

Just let that sink in for a moment, because it runs against the grain of so much of current popular thinking. The neo-Malthusian revival, perhaps most apparent in the climate change movement, would have us believe that, in fact, humans are the scourge of the Earth. Consider David Attenborough’s view that, ‘we are a plague on the Earth’. His solution, of course, is population control. I can’t think of anything more contrary to God’s command to Adam and Eve to “fill the Earth and subdue it”.

But what has this to do with face masks? There seems to me to be something fundamentally sacrilegious in the blotting out of half a human being’s face. The face is more than just its physical features – it is part of the essence of a man. Animals have faces but we know it’s not the same.

Whilst I’ll admit to not having a fully developed theology of ‘the face’, I do believe the Bible has something to say about its significance. When Moses asks to see God’s glory, He agrees but says, “you cannot see my face, for no-one may see me and live” (Exodus 33: 20). God’s face is inextricably linked with his Person. So Moses has to settle for God’s back: “I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen”. Clearly, the face is more than just its constituent parts. When believers are encouraged by the Lord to “seek my face” we know it’s not his literal face but all that the face stands for. The face is symbolic, it expresses the Person. To cover it is, I believe, to dehumanise.

Singing

“Ah yes, singing – of course singing will be banned”. This was my first thought when I heard of a church choir in America, that became infected with Covid, following a single rehearsal. It was at this point that my suspicions were confirmed – there was something uniquely wicked about this virus and the way it would be responded to.

Singing is part of what we are made for. Many will be familiar with the opening statement of The Westminster Shorter Catechism; “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Singing is one of the ways by which we are enjoined to do this. “Sing to the Lord” is a regular refrain: “Sing to the Lord, all the earth; proclaim his salvation day after day” (1 Chronicles 16:23).

It is no coincidence that the Bible has a whole songbook, the Psalms, incorporated into it. The apostle Paul encourages believers to “sing and make music from your heart to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:19). Proclamation through the sung word was held dear by the likes of Martin Luther. It is reported that, “many of Luther’s enemies feared his hymns more than the man himself”. We are created to worship and the prohibition of congregational singing denies us this fundamental means of grace.

Furthermore, as if to add insult to injury, there is talk of humming being considered as a substitute for singing. This is like some cruel joke. It is to entirely miss the point of singing. Nothing can be proclaimed with lips firmly closed. I would rather be silent than hum. Imagine John’s revelation of heaven with humming in the place of singing: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth, and all that is in them, humming…” And of course they can’t go on to express what they would have otherwise sung: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honour and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Rev. 5:13). No, we are diminished without the opportunity to sing together.

Children

It has been difficult not to detect a certain malevolence towards children through many aspects of lockdown. Who can forgot the chalked playground squares that French nursery children were confined to? Or pictures of teachers, covered head to toe in PPE, welcoming littles ones back to school by pointing a temperature gun at their heads. Or, more recently, the perverse suggestion from a trusted CBeebies doctor, that children might like to cover their little faces with an old sock. There is so much in the way children have been treated during lockdown that I have found, frankly, dark and sinister.

In the Bible, children are considered to be a gift from God: “Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him” (Psalm 127:3). The way we treat children matters. Those who felt license to express their otherwise latent contempt for children, during the censorious atmosphere of lockdown, should have thought twice. Perhaps they were not familiar with Jesus’ strong warning, “if anyone causes one of these little ones those who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea”.

Conclusion

There is so much more that could be said on this subject: the treatment of our elderly; the decent into madness; our government’s attempt to play God; the idolisation of the NHS; the crippling fear of death. Suffice to say that, from a Christian perspective, these too are great evils.

An elderly preacher who I love and respect once said that the thing that convinced him that Christianity was true was the sense it made of the human condition. You may disagree but it’s at least worth considering. Thanks to our weak national church and the abdication of responsibility by its leaders (with a few notable exceptions), to teach anything approaching biblical Christianity, the majority of people will have no idea why their natural instincts may in fact be correct. It would seem that the queen of sciences has been in exile for far too long.

Gaia, the Return of the Earth Goddess

Temple worship in Ur, from Sumerian times. Note in the lower panel people are bringing all sort of goods to the temple represented as the abstract structure on the right. 

House founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring! A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)

Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian. For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation, religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, opium of the people, a mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing about how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.

It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.

And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras" -- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?

I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain

What is this thing called "religion," anyway?

Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say "Bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".

A constant of all ancient religions is that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to having kings -- it was taught them by some God who took the trouble to land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss) to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the ancient Sumerians called "me,"  a bewildering variety of concepts, from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in a more recent lore, how Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and gave it to humankind. This story has a twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a gift from the gods.

Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.

The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing. Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me: can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course. Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish spoils easily and those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live of fish alone, it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.

Sharing is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when bread was baked for the first time in the ovens,"  This is where religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.

Let's make a practical example: suppose you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer. Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it, and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi (which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for it. Money hadn't been invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.

We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of the priestess Enheduanna, among other things the first named author in history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries, manufacturing center, and offered all sorts of services, including that of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in whicb temples have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times

So, you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess. We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs and your means. It could be a goat that we know it was roughly proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule. But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could have limited your offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be pleased and as a reward the alewives of the temple would give you all the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).

Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice. The term  comes from "sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes an offer to the God or to the community -- most often the same thing. The offerings to the temple could be something very simple: as you see in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the formal procedure of killing a live animal. People were just bringing the goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice called korban olah in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with God alone -- but it was more of an exception than the rule.

In any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice was appreciated -- actually not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people might try to trick by offering low quality goods, but God is not easy to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed goods.

This method of commerce is not very different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient Sumerian were communists, it is just that the lack of method of quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway that could allow to the needy access to the surplus available, when it was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of how the holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important, indeed.

But there is more. In the case of a burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite" -- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.

And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)

The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human civilizations in the Near East was in some  ways alien to ours, and in others perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were soon to face a competition in a new method of attributing value to goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai -- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time. 

So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated, but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.

The Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services. Temples couldn't be anymore commercial centers, so they reinvented themselves as lofty place for the celebration of the greatness of the Roman empires. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant." 

 

Paganism would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times peasant rites were seen with great suspicion. The Romans burned witches, oh, yes, they loved to burn witches -- they burned many more than would ever be burned in medieval times. And the victims were most likely countryside enchanters and enchantresses. They were considered dangerous because the real deity that the Romans worshiped was money. An evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans, but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.

The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. It is a long story that would need a lot of space to be written. Let's just say that the Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses, manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role, although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for instance, ancient relics were authentic. In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods. The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started. It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.

So, where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and that's it.

The Problem With Money

Our society is perhaps the most monetized of history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans it is a shock to discover that many American families pay their children for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God. 

 

So, everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces, operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes, "the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the search for maximizing his/her utility function.

Maybe. But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made of in ancient times?

Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words, evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a price to everything.

Instead, God is good because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.

And here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because "capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use -- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital doesn't, either.

Call it capital or call it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and never shrinks. Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods (at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything. Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing part of the entity we call market. If destroying that thing can raise that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree: for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere. Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could be a good idea, but it is still based on money, so it may be the wrong tool to use even though for a good purpose..

The accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created something enormously different than something that was once supposed to help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.

Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)

There have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from "local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed to simply get rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the disaster that the evil deity calling money is bring to us simply by putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we call "Hell" -- maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know. For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere.

What does it mean a limit to money? It means that some things must be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want to use a metaphor based on economics, some goods must be declared to have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not billionaires, not even trillionaires or any even more obscene levels of monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess and even thinking of touching them is evil. 

 

Once something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared "whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human presence and a moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, the we are back to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.

Do we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely, we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for. Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech. Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions, everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it. You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).

Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?

Possibly yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn, and other similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.

Supposing we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction wrecked by the money based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures large and small. We could see this a as a new alliance between humans and Gaia: All the Earth is sacred to Gaia, and some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and must be respected. 

 

All that is not just a question of "saving the Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher power of God.  

Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it

In the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do: sometimes we call it with the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes we use the more sophisticated term of "empathy," but when we really understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the world "love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess, we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there are things that mere words cannot express.

 

The Word for World is Forest

Every book by Ursula Le Guin is by definition the best book by Ursula Le Guin. And there is no book by Ursula Le Guin that's not the best book by Ursula Le Guin. But this one, "The Word for World is Forest" may be even better than that!

I read "The Word for World is Forest" maybe 30 years ago, but when I took it up again, every word in it was familiar to me, as I had dropped it in a drawer just one week before. Each word of it carried the rumble of thunder and the force of a hurricane, the same effect on me of a presentation by Anastassia Makarieva on the same subject, the forest.

Anastassia Makarieva is a scientist, Ursula Le Guin was a novelist. It doesn't matter. There is a thread, there is a narration, there is a story that pervades humankind's consciousness. I can't remember who said that trees are the pillars that hold the sky, but I am discovering it is true. Not single trees, the forest, it is the biotic pump, an incredible machine that works pumping water from the air above the oceans and distributes it for free to every living creature. The ultimate gift of life.

I can't understand how Ursula Le Guin could grasp these concepts by pure intuition nearly 50 years ago, but she did. Reread many years later, this book is a pure hit to the stomach. It leaves you breathless, but in a state of mind as if you wanted to be punched again and again, for the pure pleasure of the action, the movement, the sensation.

In 1972, something about this subject was already known and the destruction of the Vietnamese forests using the infamous "agent orange" reverberates all over the book. The basis of the story is the Vietnam war, retold in a science fiction setting, with the Aliens in the role of the Vietnamese and the Terrans of the Americans. The Terrans want to destroy the forest to turn it into plantations, the Aliens want to save it. In fact, it is the same story as that  of the "Avatar" movie, it is just that Cameron's debt to Ursula Le Guin is not acknowledged.

But the book is not just a political statement, it is much more than that. Read this passage ("Selver" is the alien leader of the story):

"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is.

The meaning of this passage may be evident to you, or you may need to mull it over for a while in your mind. But it is one of the deepest statements I've ever read on the predicament we find ourselves in. The beauty of it is that so much hope is embedded in these words: the world changes, ideas evolve, sometimes taking the form of Gods or god-like entities. It is in this way that the world is changed: when dreams become reality. And some dreams are truly beautiful and full of hope, like this one by Anastassia Makarieva

You see, there is a succession process for forest recovery. We first have shrub grasses after some disturbance like fire, then it takes time for that to be replaced by trees. So if we are lucky our grand grandchildren will be walking in such forest, so this dimension should also be stressed. We are working for the future we are not just securing for ourselves some two dozens years of better comfort. Rather, we send a message through centuries such that people will remember us and walking into this forest along the brookes and rivers they will remember us with gratitude for our consciousness and dedication. (Anastassia Makarieva  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ1UtHRBcG4 - min 30:05))