Why Have You Abandoned Me

As we think our way through the difficulties of this late twentieth century we find ourselves pondering the human meaning of the future. Sometimes the future appears as a yawning abyss about to swallow us up as our present energy sources begin to fail, as pollution darkens the skies and poisons the seas, as tensions between nations and within nations intensify, as military methods grow more destructive, as the multitudes of humans double in numbers and swarm toward the great urban centers. There crime and violence increase constantly; arsonists begin setting our cities to the torch. These urban centers and their corresponding difficulties will multiply. In the year 2000 there will be some 300 cities in the world of over a million people. Earlier in this century there were only a dozen such cities on the planet. So we could continue on with this description of our world in endless detail until we were all driven into a state of paralyzing depression. While such is not my intention, it is my intention to fix our minds on the realities before us with some sense of the magnitude of the human task we face.

This human task concerns every member of the human community in whatever occupation, on whatever continent, of whatever ethnic group, at whatever age. It is a task from which no one is absolved and in which no one is ultimately more concerned than anyone else. Here we meet as absolute equals to face our ultimate tasks as human beings with a human order. We have a question of life and death before us, the question, however, not merely of physical survival, but of survival in a human mode of being, of survival and development into the true splendor of intelligent, affectionate, imaginative persons living in ecstatic enjoyment of the universe about us, in profound interior communion with each other, and with significant capacities to express ourselves in our arts and sciences, in our music and dance. It is a question of interior richness within our own personalities, of shared understanding and sympathy in our homes and in our families. Beyond this is our extended security and inter-communion with others in an embrace of mind and heart that reaches out to the local community, to the nation, to the larger world of humanity, to an affectionate concern for all living and non-living beings of earth, and on out to the most distant stars in the heavens. A break, a single destructive antagonism anywhere in the fabric of being is a tear in the heart of every being.

The Technological Trance

This description of human grandeur may seem a slight exaggeration, a romantic view of human possibilities. To this I answer that this is the basis on which the human venture has been sustained from its earliest beginning until the present. Our difficulty is that we are just emerging from the technical trance into which the human mind has been placed by the scientific technological modes of thinking that have dominated human existence for the past two centuries. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a vision of the universe, or one's place and functioning within the universe, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human that far exceed the parameters of the human within the manipulative world of 'technological man', as known in recent centuries.

It is not surprising, then, that when a more expansive vision of the human breaks upon us at this time it should come as a shock, as something unreal, insubstantial, and unattainable. Yet this is precisely what is happening through the instrumentality of science itself. The exclusively analytical manipulative phase of science is over. A counter movement toward comprehensive integration and interior subjective process is taking place within a new humanistic vision' of the entire universe. Humans with all their imaginative and emotional capacities are now seen not as Olympian Observers, extrinsic to an objective world, but as functional expressions of that very world itself. A man or woman is that being in whom the earth becomes conscious of itself. The deeper subject is the world, the earth, or the earth process. In one's own deepest subjectivity, be or she is the earth, as the earth in its consciousness phase is humanity.

A Transforming Vision

So the most intensive experience of the scientist, the experience that has fascinated the scientist in the deepest realms of his or her unconscious being, is a mythic, mystical, magical vision that is only now coming to conscious awareness in the mind of the scientist personally. It can hardly be repeated often enough that the dynamics of the technological endeavor is non-technological. In both instances there is a far reaching transforming vision that is sought that is not far from the spiritual vision sought by the ancient tribal cultures as well as by the great traditional civilizations of the past. Only such a visionary quest could possibly have sustained the efforts made these past two centuries in both science and technology. Nor could anything less than such a trance state have so blinded scientist and technologists to the devastating impasse into which they have been leading the human venture. Not until Rachael Carson in the early 1960's shocked the world with her presentation of the disasters impending in the immediate future was there any thorough alarm at the situation facing us. Ever since then we have been asking each other what has happened? Where are we? What can be done? When in 1972 the Club of Rome came out with its Limits of Growth a new anxiety gripped us. Since then scientists and technologists have set themselves to the task of devising neo-scientific ways of understanding the universe, and neo-technologies for dealing with the needs of humans in the future.

That much has been done by scientists and technologists is clear. Their work is indispensable. Yet the very condition of their ultimate success depends on their understanding of the world into which they would lead us. Scientists and technologists, as well as economists, may simply be extending the trivialization of human life in the recent past on into the future. If this is done we can expect continued diminishing of the taste for life, a dying down of the energies needed for the stupendous task of building the global community of the future, and a turn toward what Sigmund Freud designated as a "will to death". The scientific process has however, recently begun to penetrate more deeply into those primordial energies of which the galactic systems, the earth, and the life forms of earth have emerged and upon which the future ultimately depends. These energies, which are the primary subject of study in all the sciences, have from the beginning a twofold aspect, a physical and a psychic aspect. The supreme achievement of science has been to establish a complete narrative of the innumerable physical transformations through which these primordial energies have passed to arrive at the human mode. Less attention has been given to the numinous psychic transformations which are even more significant than the physical transformations. This sequence of change, especially since the shaping of the earth began, has been marked by ever increasing psychic intensity, a deepening subjectivity, which has never faltered over any great period of time.

In the early tribal period, men and women lived in a world dominated by psychic power symbols whereby they guided their lives toward communion with this total human and trans-human environment. They felt themselves sustained by a total cosmic presence that went beyond the surface reality of the surrounding natural world. Their sense of an all pervasive, numinous, or sacred power gave to their lives a deep security and enabled them over a long period of time to establish themselves within a consciousness realm of high spiritual, human, social and artistic development. This was the period when the gods were born in human consciousness as expressions of those profound spiritual orientations that emerged from the earth process into human unconscious depths, then as symbols into the conscious mind, and finally into visible expression. All that humans have done since then has taken this same course. The gods have been changed, the visible expression has been altered, but the ultimate source of power still remains hidden in the dynamics of the earth and in the obscure archetypal determinations of the unconscious depths of people.

These primordial determinations were further developed in the second age of the human race: the age of the great traditional civilizations. The great volume of the civilizational accomplishments came in this period, especially in development of the spiritual discipline whereby human life was shaped in the image of the divine.

But then in the western world a third great age of human development began. A new sense of human capacity for understanding and controlling the dynamics of the earth came into being. While the efforts of all former civilizations had been to enable people to find their exalted place within the seasonal sequence of the earth's natural rhythms and to establish a spacial center where an intersecting Of the divine, the natural, and the human planes of reality could take place, the new effort beginning in the 16th & 17th century work of Francis Bacon, Galileo, Galilee, and Isaac Newton sought to understand the physical forces at work in the universe and the manner in which people could avail themselves of these energies to serve their own well-being. By the mid 18th century the invention of new technologies had begun whereby people could manipulate their environment to their own advantage. At this time also an ‘objective world' was born, clearly distinct from humans and available to them not as a means of divine communion, but as a vast realm of natural resources for human exploitation and consumption. These scientific attitudes and technological inventions became the modern substitutes for the mystical vision of divine truth and the sympathetic evocation of natural and spiritual forces by ritual and prayerful invocation. Yet, though differing in its method, the historical drive of western society toward a millennium of earthly beatitude remained the same. The Day of the Lord of the earlier biblical books and the later apocalyptic vision of a coming earthly paradise remained the same. But the means had changed.

Yet, though differing in its method, the historical drive of western society toward a millennium of earthly beatitude remained the same. But the means had changed. No longer divine grace but human effort was the instrument of this paradisal realization. The scientists and inventors, the bankers and commercial magnates were now the saints who would reign. This, then, was the drive in the third great age of humankind, the technological age, which succeeded the tribal age and the age of the traditional civilizations. It was an energy revolution not only in terms of the physical energies now available to people, but in terms of psychic energies which came to new modes of expression. Never before had anyone experienced such a turbulent age of change, such a variety of activity, such a movement to alter the world to introduce men and women in an earthly redeemed state, and finally, to give them power formerly attributed only to the natural or the divine.

Social Change

This achievement was associated with a sense of political and social transformation that would release people from age-old tyrannies. The very structure of existence was being altered. In the mood, America was founded, achieved independence, and then advanced throughout the 19th century to a position of world dominance in the early 20th century. America took seriously the words of Thomas Payne written in 1775 in his pamphlet Common Sense. There he says: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present, hath not appeared since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand...."

Earlier the Pilgrims had seen this country as the new City on a Hill to which all people could look for guidance into a glorious future. Throughout the founding years, even until the 20th century, peoples crossed the Atlantic with a vivid sense that they were crossing the Red Sea from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom and abundance of the Promised Land.

Such expectation of a political and social transformation went with the new exhilaration in the new powers for technological dominance and industrial exploitation of the earth. This led to a savage assault upon earth such as was inconceivable in prior times. The experience of sacred communion with the earth had disappeared. Such intimacy was considered a poetic conceit by a people who prided themselves on their absolute realism, their aversion to all forms of myth, magic, mysticism; and superstition. Little did these know that they themselves had a mythic, magical, mystical and superstitious attitude toward the earth. Their very realism was pure a superstition as was ever professed by anyone, their devotion to science was a new mysticism, their technology was a magic way to paradise, and their entire life attitude was as unreal a mythic vision as was ever known.

So we must pass on to the next age that is dawning before us, The Ecological Age. I use the term 'Ecological' in its primary meaning as the relation of an organism to its environment but also in its metaphorical sense as the inter-communion of all living and non-living systems of the universe. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of that it is to be human. It is to transcend national limitations to achieve a sense of the human community. A new sense of the directions that human existence should take is involved.

What is happening has been unthinkable in ages gone by. People are in control of forces that once controlled them, or more precisely, the earth process that formerly administered the earth and guided its affairs directly is now accomplishing this task in and through men and women as its conscious agent. Once creatures of earthly providence, they are now the expression of this earthly providence. They have the power of life and death not only over human life but over the earth itself in its higher forms of life, humanly as well as physically we are now in a world order that can be dealt with only by a transformed mode of consciousness.

Editor's Note:

This article is excerpted from a monograph "The Ecological Age", by Rev. Thomas Berry, C.P., Ph.D., a renowned historian, anthropologist, and a 'geologian', as he calls himself. He is the Director of The Riverdale Center of Religious Research, 5801 Palisade Ave., Riverdale, N.Y. 10471. His Scholarly Papers and Books are available at that address. His latest book to be published is "The Dream of the Earth".