A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic
by Peter Wadhams
by Peter Wadhams
Please use this thread to discuss Ch. 1: Introduction: a blue Arctic.
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Good comparison. If I recall, the mariner shot the albatross just to show he could. I find it ironic that the most common denialist response to the evidence of global warming is to declare confidently that there is no way humans could cause such a drastic change.Robert Tulip wrote: In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
Hi Harry, Your comment reminds me of my studies in existential morality, especially the existential themes of care, finitude and facticity. These are ideas brought into stark urgency by the collapse of the Arctic ice.Harry Marks wrote:Good comparison. If I recall, the mariner shot the albatross just to show he could. I find it ironic that the most common denialist response to the evidence of global warming is to declare confidently that there is no way humans could cause such a drastic change.Robert Tulip wrote: In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
I am reading A Farewell to Ice on Kindle for PC, which I find very convenient, much as I love the feel and smell and look and sound and material presence of paper.Harry Marks wrote:Any suggestions how to get hold of the book? Is it basically a choice between Amazon Kindle or getting a paper version?
You have given me quite a bit to think about here. But it is directly relevant to the on-going reassessment within Christianity. The whole idea of transcendence is having to be integrated with a more functional theology. It used to be a "direction" (up, by contrast with the horizontal relations between people, essentially) and this lent itself to, as you say, imagery of the infinite. One might say we are now having to think of relations more like spherical geometry, in which "wherever you go, there you are" (as a prominent explainer of Zen puts it). Or, perhaps, in whichRobert Tulip wrote:These existential themes mean that understanding the human situation requires that we ground our philosophy in concern for our relationships with finite facts. This differs from the old infinite imagination of religious myths of afterlife and a transcendent God, which generate an obsolete, dangerous and evil morality, giving false emotional comfort while distracting us from the impacts of our beliefs and actions.
One of the guideposts of the revised theology is wildness. The notions of God as "wholly other" may emerge more from wildness than from imagery of impenetrably prescient invisible control. Wildness is our origin and, in some sense, our destination. We are shaped by it, but also we are shaped for it. To be able to inhabit our cozy world of light-switch convenience with enough understanding to be subjects of wildness, i.e. agents of wildness, without being destructive agents as exploiters of wildness, that is a tall order but begins to be seen as a worthy objective.We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The moral ability to find myself in others, on which Christianity is based IMO, is grounded, as you say, in the ability to find a path for all of us in rational acceptance of our finitude. Religion has always understood the gift of mortality to be integral to the gift of meaning, but now we are meeting it in the everyday and the common life, not only in far-off time and sporadic convulsions of violence.Robert Tulip wrote:When climate deniers express their false confidence that our planet is too big for us to have any effect on it, they are rejecting human finitude as a moral principle, and in effect continuing the old false memes of transcendental religious fantasy and its corrupt schemes of social control. Their attitude is grounded in the emotional assumption that planetary resources are infinite. That false belief could partly be sustained before the modern industrial epoch, although even in the stone age human action already began to cause mass extinction of animal species.
Yes, I think this is correct, that the infinite has become an image for impunity, and I see no alternative to viewing this process as one of fantasy, in its essence. Where once we had stories of impunity due to power over other people, and I think of Camus' "Caligula" as an example, we now must tell stories of impunity as corrupt and destructive fantasy about the nature of human life together. Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" is a good start on how this looks in a world where honesty is easily sacrificed to immediate gain. There is no stronger touchstone than honesty for the emergence of a new relation to wildness.Robert Tulip wrote:Continuing this infinite mentality today with the accelerating power and reach of modern technology reflects the old flat earth fantasy of refusal to engage with the finite facts discovered by science. Coleridge’s parable of the albatross hung around the mariner’s neck points to this infinite attitude that feels it can transgress with impunity against unknown boundaries. Seeing the shooting of the sacred bird as a transgression presents a natural sense of the sacred, very distinct from how religions have tried to capture and control sanctity in church buildings and traditions. The transcendental does have a valid place in religion, but only when properly grounded in immanent temporal reality, as explained by natural science.
There are layers of irony in the term "priceless value". It comes from our inability to think about value except in terms of price, so that we turn to apophatic terminology, in essence. The same incongruity of "rational" thought with the true nature of things is found in the old saying that a cynic "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."Robert Tulip wrote:The moral turpitude of indifference to extinction is a key reason why I insist that evidence and logic must be the highest moral values in a coherent existential philosophy. The complexity of natural biodiversity is of priceless value. Species have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve, and their loss irretrievably degrades local ecosystems and our whole planetary community of the web of life, human and natural.
The strange slow pace and cumulative drama of the GHG threat is unlike anything recorded in our history or our mythology. We can only understand it using means that, to the average person, resemble mystical mumbo-jumbo. An "apocalypse" is an unveiling, and it calls us to examine ourselves and our self-understanding. Much of Western society is now convinced of our peril, but outside of scientifically oriented circles they do not see it with any clarity or take on board the implications for the commonality of our fate and the degree of mutual obligation at the heart of our relationship with the wild world we emerged from.Robert Tulip wrote: Allowing the Arctic to melt would cause irreversible global tipping points that will grossly amplify the moral tragedy of mass extinction, while also deeply imperilling human security.
I suppose we are all like the wedding guest accosted at the start of the poem by the mariner, who needs expiation through telling his tale. We want to get on with our business--go into the wedding celebration and not be bothered by troubles. But the mariner holds the wedding guest spellbound, and at the end the listener has become a "sadder and wiser man." Whether we'll undergo any lasting change is unknown.Robert Tulip wrote: In the poem, the heedless murder of the albatross plunges the ship into a magical disaster that the sailors cannot comprehend. Perhaps I am being too imaginative here, but this story seems to serve as a parable for all our foolish destruction of nature, and refusal to see the consequences of our actions.
There are probably several inputs toward GW denialism. I have not thought of religion as being at the top of the list, but have no facts to support a different cause. I am fairly sure that Donald Trump's dismissal of GW isn't based in his religion. On the other hand, in the few cases where people have held onto nature as the priority and not sacrificed it for material betterment, sacredness, rather than a rational appreciation of finiteness, might be the key element. Gods and spirits and what have you--maybe that's what works. It's a different result than emerged from Christian monotheism, although it also is true that the "ours to exploit" mentality that can be derived from Genesis has an antidote in the very same book--God saw his creation, and it was good. I note as well that Coleridge's tale of sin and expiation is set within a Christian framework.These existential themes mean that understanding the human situation requires that we ground our philosophy in concern for our relationships with finite facts. This differs from the old infinite imagination of religious myths of afterlife and a transcendent God, which generate an obsolete, dangerous and evil morality, giving false emotional comfort while distracting us from the impacts of our beliefs and actions.
When climate deniers express their false confidence that our planet is too big for us to have any effect on it, they are rejecting human finitude as a moral principle, and in effect continuing the old false memes of transcendental religious fantasy and its corrupt schemes of social control. Their attitude is grounded in the emotional assumption that planetary resources are infinite. That false belief could partly be sustained before the modern industrial epoch, although even in the stone age human action already began to cause mass extinction of animal species.
I agree with that, although I'm unsure about science being the ground. Coleridge and Wordsworth feared the cold rationality of science, while being very interested in what it was revealing. Thoreau is my best model for the balance of the transcendental--which I think of merely as the poetic--and the scientific. Even he, though, couldn't escape participating in the withering away of the natural landscape. He supported himself as a surveyor, work that is needed for what we call development today. Thoreau was a natural scientist and one of the earliest practitioners of ecology. Today, natural science/ecology and applied science are at loggerheads, with all of the money and influence being with the latter.Continuing this infinite mentality today with the accelerating power and reach of modern technology reflects the old flat earth fantasy of refusal to engage with the finite facts discovered by science. Coleridge’s parable of the albatross hung around the mariner’s neck points to this infinite attitude that feels it can transgress with impunity against unknown boundaries. Seeing the shooting of the sacred bird as a transgression presents a natural sense of the sacred, very distinct from how religions have tried to capture and control sanctity in church buildings and traditions. The transcendental does have a valid place in religion, but only when properly grounded in immanent temporal reality, as explained by natural science
Unfortunately, it is hard to be hopeful, i.e. full of hope. By any indication of past performance, only our own security matters, so any benefits to other species would be incidental. We have many ways of deluding ourselves that it is safe to proceed down the path that has already produced mass extinctions.The moral turpitude of indifference to extinction is a key reason why I insist that evidence and logic must be the highest moral values in a coherent existential philosophy. The complexity of natural biodiversity is of priceless value. Species have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve, and their loss irretrievably degrades local ecosystems and our whole planetary community of the web of life, human and natural. Allowing the Arctic to melt would cause irreversible global tipping points that will grossly amplify the moral tragedy of mass extinction, while also deeply imperilling human security.
Great! We have had some superb conversations over the years Harry. I think putting the facts of climate science into an existential philosophical worldview is essential to appreciate why only a finite factual framework can make our thinking systematic and rigorous.Harry Marks wrote:You have given me quite a bit to think about here.
Your phrase “functional theology” will seem out of place to many in a discussion of the melting Arctic. “Functional theology” is not only out of place at first sight, scientists would often see it as an oxymoron, self-contradictory, since theology is generally seen as lacking any practical function due to its pervasive fantasy assumptions. Yet perhaps these big mythological stories from religion can help us to step back from the immediacy of science and politics to place the urgent ethical issues of allowing our planet to collapse around our ears in some sort of strategic context.Harry Marks wrote:It is directly relevant to the on-going reassessment within Christianity. The whole idea of transcendence is having to be integrated with a more functional theology.