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
