When I read these two articles about how we are emptying our oceans  and exterminating sharks not even on purpose, but as thoughtless “bycatch” while we exterminate other things,  I was led into musing about the kind of world we live in.  (Thanks to the Schwarz Report)  Not at the political level, but far more deeply.  More and more I am coming to the realization that we Pagans are pointing to a radical rethinking of humanity’s place in the world – if our society does not crash the ecosystem first.  

All of modernity, and a great deal of Christianity, is based on the idea that nature is a fund of resources valuable mostly because we can turn them into something else: trees to paper, mountaintops to electricity and landfill, rivers into storage pools, animals into meat, oceans into fish farms, and so on.  Nothing on this earth is valuable for what it is.

Corporations include human beings in this category of things valuable for other than what they are, and some moderns object.   Economists, many of them, legitimize this attitude by claiming we don;t ‘owe’ the future anything.  What, they ask, did the future ever do for us? 

But this view is implicit in the modern world view that denies the intrinsic value of anything.  From this perspective what is intrinsically valuable is subjective, like our preference for kinds of ice cream.  What is ‘real’ is ‘objective,’ and does not include our mere ‘preferences.’  That our country could seriously debate whether torture is acceptable is a sign of just how deeply this pathology of the soul and rot of the spirit  has infected our society.

Most Pagans realize this belief is false, and not just false.  It is deeply destructive of any possibility of a right relationship between us two-leggeds and the rest of the world.  As a society, we relate to the other-than-human the way sociopaths relate to the human.  Small wonder that in time the sociopathic mentality begins to seep into how men and women of power see the rest of us.

When we experience the sacredness of the cycles of nature, see and feel the fields of life in which we are immersed, and discover that sometime even ‘inert’ nature responds to us in our rituals we know the more than human encompasses us.

Leaving our sacred spaces for the broader society more and more feels to me like leaving sanity and entering an asylum.