Kimberly Steele (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kimberlysteele) wrote2021-05-12 11:30 am
kimberlysteele) wrote2021-05-12 11:30 am
Entry tags:
Why Atheists Don't Allow Themselves To Love Nature
For many, nature has become Star Trek’s holodeck. Nature is an experience in a buffet placed before the modernite: just one more item in the array of choices in the “you only live once” mindset. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s sci fi novel Aurora, the denizens of a spaceship bound for a distant planet only enjoy their home planet via a holodeck simulation: there is something infinitely sad about contemplating their fate, and I pity those who would try to replicate it in my lifetime by marooning themselves on Mars. The attitude of a person who does not understand what they are missing by becoming a space colonist is one that I recognize from my own childhood. When I was growing up and throughout most of my adult life, I didn’t talk to any of the entities in my house, the tree spirits outside, or my car on purpose. Instead, it would accidentally happen in the form of talking to myself, which when stressed I did compulsively.
For my atheist contemporaries (this includes the Faithful-In-Name-Only Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews), the wealthier they are, the more they tend to go the way of full-throttle materialism. When they are not inside their coastal, urban, climate-controlled townhomes or houses, they are in a fully-insured, dealership-detailed car on their way to another luxe, indoor space where they can consume to their heart’s content. Many of them have an intellectual admiration of the homespun arts but if they engage in anything so base, it is to showcase on a blog or on social media. Sustainability is a gesture and a virtue signal: it is done for show, not because one worries about a present or a future where there isn’t enough money. My atheist contemporaries hire it done. Lawn mowing, repairs, plumbing, and oftentimes, cooking is avoided in favor of hiring a team of professionals.
To the materialist atheist, wild spaces are museums to be preserved as a bulwark against human stupidity. When the materialist atheist has a tiny, momentary connection with wildness, it immediately churns the mud of cognitive dissonance. If they tune into the wild “frequency”, the resulting resonance ignites the outrage they have been trained all their lives to feel about wildness being destroyed by stupid humans. Anyone who has ever watched reruns of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is familiar with the plaintive mantra: “But time is running out for the poor black-footed ferret. His habitat is encroached upon by greedy poachers and water pollution…” As with any nag, the sensible child learns to tune out the whining, hypocritical, chastising parent. The fleeting moment of connection with nature becomes unpleasant because as modern materialists, we cannot live up to the ideal of leaving the Wild Kingdom untouched and pristine. As the atheist ages, the painful connections to Nature (which is doomed) become suppressed and buried. They become crystallized under layers that form a great ball of hate. This hatred cannot be rationally dealt with in the conscious mind. The black pearl rooted in the gut is utterly occulted. For a special subset of materialists — the childfree, vegan atheists — its dispatches bubble to the surface as a passionate hatred of all those who ruin “Nature”. There is an undeniable reality that nothing creates more pollution or displaces more wildlife than the creation of more human children, especially if those children are upper middle class First Worlders.
The atheist has a hard time touching the emotion of a sunset or the joy of emerging chartreuse leaves in springtime because contact threatens to release the anger underneath the fear it is all going away. There are several bandaids that get slapped over the teeming cauldron and misunderstanding of the glacial cycles in which we are mere participants: one is Progress, the idea that there are new unspoiled wildernesses waiting to be spoiled in deep space. Another is the rallying cry of “Somebody’s got to do something!” This bleating is most popular among the Extinction Rebellion crowd, who buy into the popular delusion that civilization is going to end within the next decade. Childfree vegan atheists conveniently blame the entire species extinction predicament on the unexamined choices of “breeders” and throw up their hands because there is no stopping them. They do have a point: medical techno-triumphalism is responsible for extending human life far beyond its past due date, and it is easy to make a moral lesson out of the hideous depravity of keeping a severely deformed baby alive into young childhood “because we love her”.
It hurts to connect with the fleeting beauty you are certain is going to be Apocalypsed in a few short years. Duncan Creary, who produced James Howard Kunstler’s podcast for a time, spoke eloquently about the anxiety he felt whenever he saw a small patch of wild space in the suburbs where he grew up. Like me, he knew it and all its fauna would soon be razed for the next phase of “development”.
Of course atheists are still drawn to wild spaces, where they plan picnics, outdoor weddings, or hiking. The upper middle class version of a hike involves jet travel to international locales such as Macchu Picchu or the Tibetan Plateau, because that enables them to indulge their exotic fetishism while showing off how much money they have. What they don’t do is talk to the trees, the buildings, the furniture, or the vehicles they travel in because that would mean they are crazy. When they force themselves into the wilderness museum in the form of a nature preserve, they take every measure to shut down their senses lest their connection with those spaces tear at their heartstrings. To blunt their antennae, they try not to go into the forest preserve alone (wouldn’t want to allow the trees or the wind to get an uninterrupted message in there!), they wear sunglasses, listen to music through headphones, whiz through quickly on their bikes, or drink heavily/get stoned.
I remember what this condition was like. There is no one remedy for it, though discursive meditation would be a hell of a good start; discursive meditation and being willing to talk to your toaster oven, who after all does work very hard on your behalf.
For my atheist contemporaries (this includes the Faithful-In-Name-Only Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews), the wealthier they are, the more they tend to go the way of full-throttle materialism. When they are not inside their coastal, urban, climate-controlled townhomes or houses, they are in a fully-insured, dealership-detailed car on their way to another luxe, indoor space where they can consume to their heart’s content. Many of them have an intellectual admiration of the homespun arts but if they engage in anything so base, it is to showcase on a blog or on social media. Sustainability is a gesture and a virtue signal: it is done for show, not because one worries about a present or a future where there isn’t enough money. My atheist contemporaries hire it done. Lawn mowing, repairs, plumbing, and oftentimes, cooking is avoided in favor of hiring a team of professionals.
To the materialist atheist, wild spaces are museums to be preserved as a bulwark against human stupidity. When the materialist atheist has a tiny, momentary connection with wildness, it immediately churns the mud of cognitive dissonance. If they tune into the wild “frequency”, the resulting resonance ignites the outrage they have been trained all their lives to feel about wildness being destroyed by stupid humans. Anyone who has ever watched reruns of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is familiar with the plaintive mantra: “But time is running out for the poor black-footed ferret. His habitat is encroached upon by greedy poachers and water pollution…” As with any nag, the sensible child learns to tune out the whining, hypocritical, chastising parent. The fleeting moment of connection with nature becomes unpleasant because as modern materialists, we cannot live up to the ideal of leaving the Wild Kingdom untouched and pristine. As the atheist ages, the painful connections to Nature (which is doomed) become suppressed and buried. They become crystallized under layers that form a great ball of hate. This hatred cannot be rationally dealt with in the conscious mind. The black pearl rooted in the gut is utterly occulted. For a special subset of materialists — the childfree, vegan atheists — its dispatches bubble to the surface as a passionate hatred of all those who ruin “Nature”. There is an undeniable reality that nothing creates more pollution or displaces more wildlife than the creation of more human children, especially if those children are upper middle class First Worlders.
The atheist has a hard time touching the emotion of a sunset or the joy of emerging chartreuse leaves in springtime because contact threatens to release the anger underneath the fear it is all going away. There are several bandaids that get slapped over the teeming cauldron and misunderstanding of the glacial cycles in which we are mere participants: one is Progress, the idea that there are new unspoiled wildernesses waiting to be spoiled in deep space. Another is the rallying cry of “Somebody’s got to do something!” This bleating is most popular among the Extinction Rebellion crowd, who buy into the popular delusion that civilization is going to end within the next decade. Childfree vegan atheists conveniently blame the entire species extinction predicament on the unexamined choices of “breeders” and throw up their hands because there is no stopping them. They do have a point: medical techno-triumphalism is responsible for extending human life far beyond its past due date, and it is easy to make a moral lesson out of the hideous depravity of keeping a severely deformed baby alive into young childhood “because we love her”.
It hurts to connect with the fleeting beauty you are certain is going to be Apocalypsed in a few short years. Duncan Creary, who produced James Howard Kunstler’s podcast for a time, spoke eloquently about the anxiety he felt whenever he saw a small patch of wild space in the suburbs where he grew up. Like me, he knew it and all its fauna would soon be razed for the next phase of “development”.
Of course atheists are still drawn to wild spaces, where they plan picnics, outdoor weddings, or hiking. The upper middle class version of a hike involves jet travel to international locales such as Macchu Picchu or the Tibetan Plateau, because that enables them to indulge their exotic fetishism while showing off how much money they have. What they don’t do is talk to the trees, the buildings, the furniture, or the vehicles they travel in because that would mean they are crazy. When they force themselves into the wilderness museum in the form of a nature preserve, they take every measure to shut down their senses lest their connection with those spaces tear at their heartstrings. To blunt their antennae, they try not to go into the forest preserve alone (wouldn’t want to allow the trees or the wind to get an uninterrupted message in there!), they wear sunglasses, listen to music through headphones, whiz through quickly on their bikes, or drink heavily/get stoned.
I remember what this condition was like. There is no one remedy for it, though discursive meditation would be a hell of a good start; discursive meditation and being willing to talk to your toaster oven, who after all does work very hard on your behalf.
Re: Reply to materialist atheist
I agree with a lot of what you have said but I want to counter you on two points.
Stack 'em and pack 'em apartments: if by that you mean regular apartments, and not vacation flats for the rich that sit empty, then you should be in favor of this. With a high human population, high-density living is the only ethical way to live on the land unless you're a farmer. If you farm, it makes sense for you to have land. If you don't, it doesn't make sense to chop down wild lands and pave prairies so highways and suburbs can sprawl.
By this I don't mean American industrial agriculture, Monsanto, etc. I mean actual small-scale farmers who enrich the land they work with. It makes sense for the Amish to have land. It doesn't make sense for *me* to have land.
Suburbs: you might like looking at your yard, but something got bulldozed so you could have it. The birds are nesting on power poles because their prior nesting is gone. (Btw I've seen the sandhill migrations in Nebraska. That was one of the coolest things I've ever experienced.)
Someone living in an apartment and busing or walking to work destroys the environment way less than a suburbanite, even if they don't care two hoots about the environment in terms of their personal politics. That's one of the big things that Americans need to wrestle with. The American Dream and the American way of life are quite frankly crazy town in the eyes of most of the rest of the world.
One final note: apartments are very shoddily made in the US. The walls are thin and the ceilings are only nine feet. You can't escape your neighbors. It's pretty miserable. Contrast that to my flat that has four-meter ceilings and thick enough walls I never hear my neighbors unless the kids full-on scream. There is a reasonable way to live high-density that allows for human dignity, and that can readily be found in the world, just not in America.
Re: Reply to materialist atheist
Re: Reply to materialist atheist
Re: Reply to materialist atheist
Concerning the stack-ems and pack-ems, they ARE cheaply built and seem to get larger, higher and uglier as time goes on. The “vacation flats” are called condominiums here, huge multi-storied concrete monstrosities that can take years to build, usually on valuable shoreline. Both are popping up everywhere.
Quality build does not always guarantee quality neighbors. It’s not this high rise sustainable Utopia that you might want it to be. So wonderful to be surrounded by stupid shouting people. Banging on the walls, thumping the ceiling overhead, yay! That’s just what I want to deal with after a day at work!
And your “high density living” sounds a lot to me like Agenda 21/2030. Are they pushing that heavily in Europe? (I ask because you sound a little European. We don’t call them flats over here.) Where you will own nothing and better be happy about it? Or else?
At least in our little suburban worlds, we could chose to have a garden as space would allow. More so than on a 6x10’ patio that you might get over there if you’re lucky. We could try to mitigate the destruction that has been done, such as re-planting native vegetation in our yards, not using toxic fertilizers that cause run-off in to the Indian River Lagoon, etc. A nearby neighbor has been growing a food producing garden in his front and back yards for months now. And by the way the concept of the ridiculously perfect green expanse of lawn wasn’t born in America. It was brought over by the English.
Things are a little more spread out over here, as well. Even in the vicinity of the crappy apartment complexes. One could live in an apartment and still have to travel 30 miles to their jobs. We make do with the system we are born in to and any number of rantings from little Greta Thundberg, entitled little creature that she is, is not going to change that.
“The American Dream and the American way of life are quite frankly crazy town in the eyes of most of the rest of the world.”
This comment is interesting. We’re not all crazy over here. I don’t know how much television or mainstream media that you are exposing yourself to, but it might be a little too much. Over here, for a long time the big invisible boogieman was the Muslims. They were all made out to be crazy, too. And maybe some of them are, just like some of us are, like some of the boogieman Russians are and on and on it goes. Lots of us here (but not nearly enough) are aware that the media has created a laughingstock of our country and are embarrassed and sickened by it. Not all of us worship celebrities and sports figures or have fainting spells over Donald Trump.
Like anyone, we want beauty in our worlds. Our souls are wired to appreciate art and beauty and for many of us, it’s a mainstay of our lives. Whatever we chose to believe in.
Nature is not a random and soulless machine. You just haven’t been paying attention.
Colleen
PS: This is my favorite poem.
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale
Re: Reply to materialist atheist
America's suburbs and many of its cities are badly built. But we aren't nearly as nuts as the Germans or the British, who have gone batcrap crazy with lockdowns and vaccines. Look at our northern neighbor, Canada. In every province, they are shuttering businesses, arresting the healthy, and interning people in Covid hotels as their economy collapses. Even in psycho Illinois, we have maintained some semblance of free commerce and you can get your hair cut without yourself and the stylist being arrested. Not so much in Ontario. If it weren't for free states like South Dakota and Florida setting an example for freedom, I suspect that all of Europe would be following in lockstep with Canada's lunatic COVID rules. I think the US deserves some credit for its "American" response to COVID. The buzzword in my nearly 3000 member-and-rapidly-growing Facebook group Speakeasy Illinois is "patriot". The group promotes businesses and establishments that respect people's freedom. I don't see Europeans or Canadians starting social media movements designed to go around the stupid and the fearful. The American dream is deeply flawed, but I think we deserve some credit for being willing to go against the globalist-controlled sheeple, at least this time around.