Monastic
Wilderness and Civilized Complacency
Affirming wilderness
to not to deny sustainable development. Callicott alleges,
"Implicit in the most passionate pleas for wilderness preservation is a complacency
about what passes for civilization." Not so. I cannot name a single wilderness
advocate who cherishes wilderness "as an alibi for the lack of private reform," any
who "salve their consciences" by pointing to "the few odds and ends" of wilderness
and thus avoid facing up to the fact that the ways and means of industrial civilization
lie at the root of the current global environmental crisis. The charge is flamboyant; the
content runs hollow. Wilderness advocates want wilderness and they also want,
passionately, to "re-envision civilization" so that it is in harmony with the nature that
humans do modify and inhabit. There is no tension between these ideas in Leopold,
nor in any of the other passionate advocates of wilderness that Callicott cites, nor in
any with whom I am familiar.
The contrast of monastic
sanctuaries with the wicked everyday world risks a flawed
analogy. Unless we are careful, we will make a category mistake, because both
monastery and lay world are in the domain of culture, while wilderness is a radically
different domain. Monastery sets an ideal unattainable in the real civil world (if we
must think of it that way), but both worlds are human, both moral. We are judging
human behavior in both places, concerned with how far it can be godly. By contrast,
the wilderness world is neither moral nor human; the values protected there are of a
different order. We are judging evolutionary achievements and ecological stability,
integrity, beauty–not censuring or praising human behavior.
Confusion about nature
and culture is getting us into trouble again. We are only going
to get confused if we think that the issue of whether there should be monasteries is
conceptually parallel to the issue of whether there should be wilderness. The
conservation of value in the one is by the cultural transmission of a social heritage,
including a moral and religious heritage, to which the monastery was devoted. The
conservation of value in the other is genetic, in genes subject to natural selection for
survival value and adapted fit. There is something godly in the wilderness too, or at
least a creativity that is religiously valuable, but the contrast between the righteous
and the wicked is not helpful here. The sanctuary we want is a world untrammelled
by man, a world left to its own autonomous creativity, not an island of saintliness in
the midst of sinners.
We do not want the
whole Earth without civilization, for we believe that humans
belong on Earth; Earth is not whole without humans and their civilization, without the
political animal building hispolis (Socrates), without peoples inheriting their promised
lands (as the Hebrews envisioned). Civilization is a broken affair, and in the long
struggle to make and keep life human, moral, even godly, perhaps there should be
islands, sanctuaries, of moral goodness within a civilization often sordid enough. But
that is a different issue from whether, when we build our civilizations for better or
worse, we also want to protect where and as we can those nonhuman values in wild
nature that preceded and yet surround us. An Earth civilized on every acre would not
be whole either, for a whole domain of value– wild spontaneous nature–would have
vanished from this majestic home planet.
Holmes Rolston III; (1991) The Wilderness Idea Reaffirmed
