Some Simple Ranting on Global Warming (and a few other tenuously related topics)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday March 10th, 2002
READING: “We’re Number One” from Stupid White Men...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, by Michael Moore.
“...We had a chance to make to make the world safe for generations to come, but we were too greedy enjoying the orgy being thrown on Wall Street. That’s what happens in a nation of slackers and crooks....”
***
I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather again this past week, and particularly the possibility I’ve been hearing being floated around that, because of this amazingly mild winter we’ve been enjoying, we may very well be looking forward to drought and a serious shortage of groundwater here on the Island this summer. And I compare this weather to something I read in last Thursday’s Inky, that fifty years ago this week Nantucket was “almost completely paralyzed by one of the worst storms in its history:” 14-foot-snowdrifts blocking the roads to Sconset, Madaket and Surfside, telephone poles snapped and powerlines down, several days before the roads could finally be plowed and electricity restored to everyone on the Island. Quite a contrast, isn’t it? Meanwhile, many of these same experts I’ve been listening to are attributing our current weather conditions to the effects of Global Warming, suggesting that this is not just a temporary heat wave but a manifestation of permanent climatic change caused by Ozone depletion and the accumulation of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, both of which in turn are products of modern industrial civilization and the consumption of fossil fuels.
My grandfather sometimes used to say that the problem with the weather is that everyone seems to have an opinion, but nobody ever does anything about it. And the issue of Global warning is one of those problems that confirms the truth of these timeworn, old maxims of my grandfather’s generation: it’s a huge problem, which effects us all, but it’s so huge that at times it seems as though there is nothing that any of us can do, individually, to address and correct it. The temptation is simply to surrender to our sense of futility, rather than having the faith to trust (which is what the word “faith” really means) that by thinking globally, and acting locally, our small contribution can make a difference. Or maybe we just opt for outright denial, and stop worrying about whether we are part of the problem or part of the solution, but instead simply resolve to enjoy the good weather while we can, before the melting polar ice caps put us all underwater. And, of course, we always have the option of pointing the finger at someone else, someone who seems more culpable than we are: the neighbor who drives the bigger gas guzzler than we do, or a government that refuses to take the problem seriously, by declining to ratify or obey international global warming treaties.
But blame and denial and resignation aren’t going to solve our problems either, and whatever small solace or comfort they may give us personally in the short run is ultimately no more satisfying than the response of faith I described earlier: of trusting that our small contributions DO make a difference, and then living our lives as though the consequences of our individual actions truly matter. My friend Gary Kowalski once characterized this contrast as the difference between simplicity and simple-mindedness, or as I sometimes like to put it, between living a simple lifestyle and living a simplistic lifestyle. And the point is that voluntary simplicity is, in fact, a very complicated thing: it requires a lot of homework and attention to detail, as well as learning to see beneath the surface, rather than simply taking everything at face value.
There was another item in the news this past week that I wanted to mention in this connection. How many of you have heard about this 25-year-old woman from Fort Worth, Texas, who allegedly hit a homeless man with her automobile, breaking both of his legs, then drove away with his body still stuck headfirst through her smashed windshield, parked the car in her garage, and left him there, still alive, (possibly for as long as two or three days) until he finally bled to death, apparently even going out into the garage at some point to apologize to him, but ignoring his pleas for help?
This is a horrifying tale, even if it turns out only to be half true, but what’s amazing to me is the way that this story is being handled in the media, or maybe I should say: the way that the media is being handled both by the District Attorney’s office and this woman’s own attorney as her case is tried in “the court of public opinion.” This accident happened back in October, but the woman wasn’t actually arrested until last Wednesday. With the help of some friends, she had dumped the body in a public park, where the police had eventually discovered it, but were clueless about how it had come to be there until they were tipped off a few weeks ago by someone who claimed to have overheard the woman talking about the incident at a party. And there’s a terrific sound bite from the assistant prosecutor in charge of this case, which was naturally picked up by all the news services, who said (describing the woman’s behavior) “I’m going to have to come up with a new word. Indifferent isn’t enough. Cruel isn’t enough. Inhumane? Maybe we’ve just redefined inhumanity here.”
Of course the woman’s own attorney has a little different spin. He asserts that his client “is not the monster that police and prosecutors are making her out to be. She was simply a frightened, emotionally distraught young woman who had an accident, panicked and made a wrong choice.” He also claims that the victim was only alive for a few hours after the accident, and that the informant embellished their statement to the police out of personal animosity toward his client and in order to portray her in the worst possible light.
Eventually, of course, a jury is going to get to sort this all out, unless in the meantime the two attorneys can stop spinning long enough to get together and come to some sort of agreement about a reasonable plea bargain. But how does one judge a case like this? Is this woman simply a sociopath, a cold-blooded killer without an ounce of compassion or remorse? Does the fact that she had been drinking and using drugs the night of the accident, or that at least she felt guilty enough to apologize to her suffering victim, even though she still failed to help him and tried to avoid the consequences of her actions by hiding the body, make her seem more or less culpable in your eyes? Does it make any difference to you that she didn’t mean to kill anyone? How do you feel about the fact that her victim was homeless, someone with a history of mental illness, a “marginal” member of our society who was powerless to protect himself, and had no one else to look after him either? Would you feel any differently if the victim had been someone else? -- someone, maybe, like a former, high-level executive of the Enron corporation? Cruelty? Indifference? -- are these the qualities that make a person monstrous, and allow us the privilege of simply dismissing another human being as “inhumane?” And do we somehow become less human ourselves if we allow our sympathy for the victim to destroy our capacity to feel compassion, or even mercy, for the perpetrator -- if we simply give vent to our feelings of moral outrage and self-righteousness indignation by lashing out in vindictive, vengeful anger?
I don’t want you to think that I have all the right answers to these questions, because I don’t -- but I think it’s important to raise them, because it often seems to me that “cruel indifference” is a pretty accurate characterization of the way in which our privileged, “affluent,” first-world industrial civilization has tended to treat the rest of the people on this planet. In both a literal and a metaphorical sense, we recklessly drive our expensive, gas-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles wherever we please, as though we had some sort of God-given right to do whatever pleases US, regardless of the consequences, and God help those who get in our way. Does this make us monsters, or are we merely simple-minded -- a relatively young civilization that is basically just a major accident waiting to happen, often frightened and emotionally distraught, perhaps even on the verge of panic, astounding in our capacity to make the wrong choices, despite our best intentions?
Does anyone even know any more how many homeless people there are in Afghanistan right now? They seem to be dying off from exposure and starvation almost as quickly as we can create new ones through our bombing, and who but God could possibly keep track of them all? There was yet another item in last week’s news, which I saw on the front page of Friday’s New York Times, above the fold, sandwiched between reports about the increasing American military build-up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and the escalating violence on the West Bank in Israel, (which is just the kind of intractable situation I believe we can look forward to all over the world someday if we continue on our present course). It was a lengthy article about starving Afghan families who are essentially compelled to sell their children into slavery in exchange for food. This may sound monstrous to you (it certainly did to me), but when you stop to think about it, it is basically a win-win solution to what is otherwise an impossible situation: no home, no work, no food, then a simple market transaction and suddenly there’s all three (at least for the child being sold), and the rest of the family gets something to eat that night to boot. Short of waiting around for money to fall out of the sky (crisp one hundred dollar bills in clean white envelopes bearing the likeness of George “Dubya” Bush), it’s capitalism’s perfectly logical answer: a willing buyer paying a willing seller whatever the market will bear. Yet somehow I doubt that it would have been anyone’s first choice, had they the real freedom to choose otherwise.
I kind of feel like I’m ranting a little now, and I hope that’s OK, since one of the great frustrations of my line of work is that you can never really be certain that anything you say makes a difference, and occasionally you feel like you have to rant a little bit just to keep in touch with your own sanity. The original Ranters were radical, seventeenth-century English Puritans, the forebearers of the Quakers, and the things they were ranting about were the first manifestations of modern, industrial capitalism. Many of them were apparently itinerant journeymen craftsmen -- “masterless men” in the words of historian Christopher Hill -- who lacked the financial resources to set up shops of their own, and thus were forced to move from town to town looking for employment as wage-earning day laborers, or else evicted cottagers from the English countryside who had been pushed out of their homes by the enclosure of traditionally common lands, and who migrated into the cities in search of work -- in a word (well, three words) homeless, unemployed people -- and they tended to be extremely outspoken in their views, both theologically and politically (hence their name), and also extremely disrespectful of wealth and social privilege...or perhaps more accurately, of the wealthy and socially privileged, including the regularly settled clergy of the Church of England. Their opponents often accused them of licentiousness and moral laxity, since Ranters tended to place themselves outside of the traditional institutions of social control. They were often “unitarian” in their Christology, in that they tended to emphasize the simple poverty of the human Jesus over the glorified sovereignty of a supernatural Christ, and “universalist” in their doctrine of salvation, rejecting the notions of hell, eternal punishment, and an eventual Day of Judgment, but instead proclaiming the inherent divinity of every human being, and the ultimate spiritual freedom of all the children of God.
Not that they were all saints, by any means. My favorite Ranter was a fellow by the name of Thomas Webbe, who was in fact an ordained minister, but who publicly disparaged the value of preaching (especially his own), but instead proclaimed from his pulpit that he hoped to live long enough to see the day when there was “no such thing as a parsonage or a minister in England.” He also was reputed to have said (and this has nothing to do with my topic this morning -- it was just too good to leave out) that “there is no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage” -- an attitude which eventually caused him to be brought to trial in 1650 on charges of adultery (which, since it was a commandment, still carried the death penalty in those days), but he was eventually acquitted by a jury of his peers, much to the dismay of his more respectable colleagues. Most Ranters, however, wanted nothing to do with the church or organized religion whatsoever; instead, they tended to meet together in taverns and public houses, where they smoked tobacco (still a novelty in Europe in the seventeenth century), listened to music, and engaged in “mixed dancing.” And when they ranted, they attributed their ranting to the presence of the Holy Spirit, although it may well have been spirits of another sort that were, in fact, speaking through them.
For my own part, I prefer preaching of a more sober nature, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest, by describing the Ranters of the seventeenth century, that we should in some way try to imitate them today. But sometimes in a world where insane ideas try to disguise themselves as “reasonable” -- ideas like we can make ourselves more wealthy by being more wasteful, or make others our friends by killing them more efficiently, the voice of reason must at times sound a little crazy. Because simplicity in reality is a very complicated thing. And freedom, in fact, is simply voluntary slavery to the reality of the Truth.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday March 10th, 2002
READING: “We’re Number One” from Stupid White Men...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, by Michael Moore.
“...We had a chance to make to make the world safe for generations to come, but we were too greedy enjoying the orgy being thrown on Wall Street. That’s what happens in a nation of slackers and crooks....”
***
I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather again this past week, and particularly the possibility I’ve been hearing being floated around that, because of this amazingly mild winter we’ve been enjoying, we may very well be looking forward to drought and a serious shortage of groundwater here on the Island this summer. And I compare this weather to something I read in last Thursday’s Inky, that fifty years ago this week Nantucket was “almost completely paralyzed by one of the worst storms in its history:” 14-foot-snowdrifts blocking the roads to Sconset, Madaket and Surfside, telephone poles snapped and powerlines down, several days before the roads could finally be plowed and electricity restored to everyone on the Island. Quite a contrast, isn’t it? Meanwhile, many of these same experts I’ve been listening to are attributing our current weather conditions to the effects of Global Warming, suggesting that this is not just a temporary heat wave but a manifestation of permanent climatic change caused by Ozone depletion and the accumulation of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, both of which in turn are products of modern industrial civilization and the consumption of fossil fuels.
My grandfather sometimes used to say that the problem with the weather is that everyone seems to have an opinion, but nobody ever does anything about it. And the issue of Global warning is one of those problems that confirms the truth of these timeworn, old maxims of my grandfather’s generation: it’s a huge problem, which effects us all, but it’s so huge that at times it seems as though there is nothing that any of us can do, individually, to address and correct it. The temptation is simply to surrender to our sense of futility, rather than having the faith to trust (which is what the word “faith” really means) that by thinking globally, and acting locally, our small contribution can make a difference. Or maybe we just opt for outright denial, and stop worrying about whether we are part of the problem or part of the solution, but instead simply resolve to enjoy the good weather while we can, before the melting polar ice caps put us all underwater. And, of course, we always have the option of pointing the finger at someone else, someone who seems more culpable than we are: the neighbor who drives the bigger gas guzzler than we do, or a government that refuses to take the problem seriously, by declining to ratify or obey international global warming treaties.
But blame and denial and resignation aren’t going to solve our problems either, and whatever small solace or comfort they may give us personally in the short run is ultimately no more satisfying than the response of faith I described earlier: of trusting that our small contributions DO make a difference, and then living our lives as though the consequences of our individual actions truly matter. My friend Gary Kowalski once characterized this contrast as the difference between simplicity and simple-mindedness, or as I sometimes like to put it, between living a simple lifestyle and living a simplistic lifestyle. And the point is that voluntary simplicity is, in fact, a very complicated thing: it requires a lot of homework and attention to detail, as well as learning to see beneath the surface, rather than simply taking everything at face value.
There was another item in the news this past week that I wanted to mention in this connection. How many of you have heard about this 25-year-old woman from Fort Worth, Texas, who allegedly hit a homeless man with her automobile, breaking both of his legs, then drove away with his body still stuck headfirst through her smashed windshield, parked the car in her garage, and left him there, still alive, (possibly for as long as two or three days) until he finally bled to death, apparently even going out into the garage at some point to apologize to him, but ignoring his pleas for help?
This is a horrifying tale, even if it turns out only to be half true, but what’s amazing to me is the way that this story is being handled in the media, or maybe I should say: the way that the media is being handled both by the District Attorney’s office and this woman’s own attorney as her case is tried in “the court of public opinion.” This accident happened back in October, but the woman wasn’t actually arrested until last Wednesday. With the help of some friends, she had dumped the body in a public park, where the police had eventually discovered it, but were clueless about how it had come to be there until they were tipped off a few weeks ago by someone who claimed to have overheard the woman talking about the incident at a party. And there’s a terrific sound bite from the assistant prosecutor in charge of this case, which was naturally picked up by all the news services, who said (describing the woman’s behavior) “I’m going to have to come up with a new word. Indifferent isn’t enough. Cruel isn’t enough. Inhumane? Maybe we’ve just redefined inhumanity here.”
Of course the woman’s own attorney has a little different spin. He asserts that his client “is not the monster that police and prosecutors are making her out to be. She was simply a frightened, emotionally distraught young woman who had an accident, panicked and made a wrong choice.” He also claims that the victim was only alive for a few hours after the accident, and that the informant embellished their statement to the police out of personal animosity toward his client and in order to portray her in the worst possible light.
Eventually, of course, a jury is going to get to sort this all out, unless in the meantime the two attorneys can stop spinning long enough to get together and come to some sort of agreement about a reasonable plea bargain. But how does one judge a case like this? Is this woman simply a sociopath, a cold-blooded killer without an ounce of compassion or remorse? Does the fact that she had been drinking and using drugs the night of the accident, or that at least she felt guilty enough to apologize to her suffering victim, even though she still failed to help him and tried to avoid the consequences of her actions by hiding the body, make her seem more or less culpable in your eyes? Does it make any difference to you that she didn’t mean to kill anyone? How do you feel about the fact that her victim was homeless, someone with a history of mental illness, a “marginal” member of our society who was powerless to protect himself, and had no one else to look after him either? Would you feel any differently if the victim had been someone else? -- someone, maybe, like a former, high-level executive of the Enron corporation? Cruelty? Indifference? -- are these the qualities that make a person monstrous, and allow us the privilege of simply dismissing another human being as “inhumane?” And do we somehow become less human ourselves if we allow our sympathy for the victim to destroy our capacity to feel compassion, or even mercy, for the perpetrator -- if we simply give vent to our feelings of moral outrage and self-righteousness indignation by lashing out in vindictive, vengeful anger?
I don’t want you to think that I have all the right answers to these questions, because I don’t -- but I think it’s important to raise them, because it often seems to me that “cruel indifference” is a pretty accurate characterization of the way in which our privileged, “affluent,” first-world industrial civilization has tended to treat the rest of the people on this planet. In both a literal and a metaphorical sense, we recklessly drive our expensive, gas-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles wherever we please, as though we had some sort of God-given right to do whatever pleases US, regardless of the consequences, and God help those who get in our way. Does this make us monsters, or are we merely simple-minded -- a relatively young civilization that is basically just a major accident waiting to happen, often frightened and emotionally distraught, perhaps even on the verge of panic, astounding in our capacity to make the wrong choices, despite our best intentions?
Does anyone even know any more how many homeless people there are in Afghanistan right now? They seem to be dying off from exposure and starvation almost as quickly as we can create new ones through our bombing, and who but God could possibly keep track of them all? There was yet another item in last week’s news, which I saw on the front page of Friday’s New York Times, above the fold, sandwiched between reports about the increasing American military build-up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and the escalating violence on the West Bank in Israel, (which is just the kind of intractable situation I believe we can look forward to all over the world someday if we continue on our present course). It was a lengthy article about starving Afghan families who are essentially compelled to sell their children into slavery in exchange for food. This may sound monstrous to you (it certainly did to me), but when you stop to think about it, it is basically a win-win solution to what is otherwise an impossible situation: no home, no work, no food, then a simple market transaction and suddenly there’s all three (at least for the child being sold), and the rest of the family gets something to eat that night to boot. Short of waiting around for money to fall out of the sky (crisp one hundred dollar bills in clean white envelopes bearing the likeness of George “Dubya” Bush), it’s capitalism’s perfectly logical answer: a willing buyer paying a willing seller whatever the market will bear. Yet somehow I doubt that it would have been anyone’s first choice, had they the real freedom to choose otherwise.
I kind of feel like I’m ranting a little now, and I hope that’s OK, since one of the great frustrations of my line of work is that you can never really be certain that anything you say makes a difference, and occasionally you feel like you have to rant a little bit just to keep in touch with your own sanity. The original Ranters were radical, seventeenth-century English Puritans, the forebearers of the Quakers, and the things they were ranting about were the first manifestations of modern, industrial capitalism. Many of them were apparently itinerant journeymen craftsmen -- “masterless men” in the words of historian Christopher Hill -- who lacked the financial resources to set up shops of their own, and thus were forced to move from town to town looking for employment as wage-earning day laborers, or else evicted cottagers from the English countryside who had been pushed out of their homes by the enclosure of traditionally common lands, and who migrated into the cities in search of work -- in a word (well, three words) homeless, unemployed people -- and they tended to be extremely outspoken in their views, both theologically and politically (hence their name), and also extremely disrespectful of wealth and social privilege...or perhaps more accurately, of the wealthy and socially privileged, including the regularly settled clergy of the Church of England. Their opponents often accused them of licentiousness and moral laxity, since Ranters tended to place themselves outside of the traditional institutions of social control. They were often “unitarian” in their Christology, in that they tended to emphasize the simple poverty of the human Jesus over the glorified sovereignty of a supernatural Christ, and “universalist” in their doctrine of salvation, rejecting the notions of hell, eternal punishment, and an eventual Day of Judgment, but instead proclaiming the inherent divinity of every human being, and the ultimate spiritual freedom of all the children of God.
Not that they were all saints, by any means. My favorite Ranter was a fellow by the name of Thomas Webbe, who was in fact an ordained minister, but who publicly disparaged the value of preaching (especially his own), but instead proclaimed from his pulpit that he hoped to live long enough to see the day when there was “no such thing as a parsonage or a minister in England.” He also was reputed to have said (and this has nothing to do with my topic this morning -- it was just too good to leave out) that “there is no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage” -- an attitude which eventually caused him to be brought to trial in 1650 on charges of adultery (which, since it was a commandment, still carried the death penalty in those days), but he was eventually acquitted by a jury of his peers, much to the dismay of his more respectable colleagues. Most Ranters, however, wanted nothing to do with the church or organized religion whatsoever; instead, they tended to meet together in taverns and public houses, where they smoked tobacco (still a novelty in Europe in the seventeenth century), listened to music, and engaged in “mixed dancing.” And when they ranted, they attributed their ranting to the presence of the Holy Spirit, although it may well have been spirits of another sort that were, in fact, speaking through them.
For my own part, I prefer preaching of a more sober nature, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest, by describing the Ranters of the seventeenth century, that we should in some way try to imitate them today. But sometimes in a world where insane ideas try to disguise themselves as “reasonable” -- ideas like we can make ourselves more wealthy by being more wasteful, or make others our friends by killing them more efficiently, the voice of reason must at times sound a little crazy. Because simplicity in reality is a very complicated thing. And freedom, in fact, is simply voluntary slavery to the reality of the Truth.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:35 PM
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