You’re being asked for on all the other posts and essays . . . your vociferous presence is requested . . .

a)The fundamental cry here, as I read it, is against contemporary environmentalism. I read in The New Yorker years ago some phrase along the lines of, “We show our love for the country by not moving there.” This is a great evil. It melds nature as consumable commodity with a misanthropy so deep that it can see nature as good so long as there isn’t a person in the picture. Early landscape painting is, I think, arguably better than the later forms (those painted after landscape became the genre of choice for Romantic and post-Romantic painters) precisely because the artist always inserts a person in there. Even the diminutive girl reading a book in the middle of a vast field teaches us more about our world than the most forbidding and sublime mountainscape lacking a person. If we wish to protect the nature of which we are a part, we ought to think about it only as something, well, of which we are apart. The best place to do that is on the front porch of Old Slabsides, etc. Anything else amounts to a modern secular contemptus mundi, a hopeless gnosticism, as Peters rightly would call it.

b)Your division of science and faith seems more proper to the age of Burroughs than to our own. That said, most people who see “science and religion” at odds strike me as also belonging to the creaky mechanical nineteenth century. I suppose this divide will linger with us since America is the home of Evangelicalism and “Second Great Awakening” sects, but I wonder if this dualistic way of thinking isn’t best dealt with by ignoring it. The sooner we ignore it, the sooner those who live in contempt of “religion” will discover what religion actually is — and, perhaps, a few Evangelicals will as well.

c) To some extent, science is the answer for more science (I didn’t read all the comment thread on this point, by the way, so forgive me). As I’ll argue in a post soon, it is not the threat of knowledge that generally endangers us, it is rather the maniacal application of that knowledge to liberate man from his condition, to free him from necessity. Such liberation would not necessarily be bad, but it in fact is bad, indeed evil, precisely because it is only under a very limited kind of condition that the human person can live a full and happy life. The effect of most technological liberation has been to relieve men not only of the necessities that troubled them, but also of the virtues that made for their happiness. To be crude, if a new technology makes it more likely that one will become fat, it is probably bad technology; this cosmetic test could be, pardon this, fleshed out into a more profound generalization; I ask your patience as I work it out in private before posting in the weeks ahead.

I wish there were more posts on FPR drawing our attention to the words of American transcendentalists. Limited folks, they were, but not without their graces. Thanks to you for this, as to Bill Kauffman for coughing up such examples.

You are correct in your assertion that bureaucratic regulations function as a kind of “get-out-of-morality-free” card and as someone who admits of a knee-jerk hostility to government…at least as now practiced…, I would surmise that they are far less effective than a moral code. Frequently, the regulations become idols themselves.

The ugliness of industrialization will never be overcome by science alone. This is Burrough’s premise that I believe it is as relevant now as it was when he wrote “The Summit of the Years” in 1913. We require science and the human spiritual tradition of the arts and religion to find not glasnost or perestroika, or detente…in other words, a simple reform of existing modes but true rapprochement …one in which both poles of thought are actually strengthened…and pushed….. by the contrary and sympathetic participation of the antipode.

Right now, we have an Iron Curtain of the Mind that has descended between Science/ Modern Technology on the one hand and artistic sensibilities / religious spirituality on the other. This is just one of the many sets of antagonists that decorate our House of Irony. It is, perhaps, a kind of spawn of the Cold War that is still with us…though it seems to predate that long conflict. Funny enough but maybe Marx was true by half when he asserted that “Religion is the Opiate of the Masses”. He saw technology as the great liberator when in fact, Technology too is the Opiate of the masses. Mass movements of any sort will tend to have a narcotic effect on their participants and what has resulted in our country is a kind of drug-induced treaty that sanctions a right to agree not to disagree…or encourage one to exist beyond the ameliorative effects of the other . This suspends reality and entrenches mythologies that are, at heart oppositional rather than productive. Industrial blight , to be put behind us will require the agencies of both science and the spirit. There may be regulations in this effort…they seem the only way to codify mass behavior in complex society but with the spiritual-artistic component, Industry and science will not be so devoid of moral compass, nor dismissive of moral checks and balances. As a result, religion will not then be so chary of science and technology. Admittedly, this is a complex and potentially noisome marriage but I can tell you from experience with over 32 years with The Concept: difficult and contentious marriages are full of both love and respect and in the end, some estimable and worthwhile progeny result.

Cheeks, I’ll leave it to more disciplined and capable minds than mine to assert how to “restore the right order of the spiritual being”. As a member of the permanent opposition, religious tomes have bounced off my thick skull like encyclopedias off a doublewide. I’m on a ship of the damned through habit…perhaps even a ship of damned fools and am happy that an occasional hospitable harbor such as this one presents itself so I can take on board a little refreshment. But then, I jess gots to hoist the skull and crossbones and catch the wind so as not to make too many commitments… libertarian malcontent that I pose to be.

That said, one could argue that in some quarters, organized religion is “numerous” and “widespread” as in the explosion of evangelical arena religion. This phenomenon is quite pronounced in both what Mencken referred to as the “Bible Belt” as well as, interestingly enough, the former Catholic strongholds of Latin America. Watching the Catholic cable channel as a roomful of nuns somberly recite, almost like an automaton, their devotions under a beautiful altar and then switching to the other Evangelical cable channels with their excited throngs, Hollywood lighting , exhortation and healings, I can see why. I used to like to mildly entertain myself by inducing cultural vaporlock through turning the channels (which just so happened to be adjacent) on my telly from the dour Catholic “Hail Mary’s” then to the Evangelical “Frenzied Stompings” and then to some bit of organized debauchery of Legendary Louche on MTV. It is like the T.V Age Trinity and it never failed to induce in me some kind of Swiftian feelings of abandonment amongst the Yahoos or Houyhnhnm. I make it a point to avoid insulting all religions equally while insulting them equally and so do not wish to diminish the value of anyone’s religion …or lack thereof and how they wish to practice it. But here again, I hold to my use of the word “common” because in so many of the expressions of our new generation of the American Burnt Over District Revivalism, the congregation seems to embrace the consumer culture of spectacle and want and an ethic of “you can have it all” if only you raise your hands and stomp your feet and beseech. There is no Michelangelo or Dante here, there is just a rock band and the fever of mass healings before the pastor is off in his Gulfstream to add to the head-count or be caught with their pants down. Though I have no doubt it exists, this is not a religion of quiet contemplation nor inner exploration…at least as it is displayed in public…. and one finds it most recently marshaled to the Rove-Bush Cultural Conservative Bait and Switch where the faithful are lured into staunch support only to have policies enacted in direct opposition to their interests. Still, these so-called “conservative” forces engage the prideful Hitchens and Bill Maher in a foolish grabass of name calling and righteous invective meets weary ennui. More box checking and Professional Wrestling. More balkanization….more whistling in the wind…or peeing into it while we stray further from the meshing of spirit and science which has eluded us to such a large degree.

This, is what I meant by “common”.

… We have become, as the landscape architect Ian McHarg or anarch red rock sachem Ed Abbey asserted, a kind of petulant cancer upon the body of the Earth. These contemporary men are due their rage at the machinery of this guillotine we … ……