CHANGE AND DECAY in all around we see. The End of the World is Nigh. “I didna’ ken,” protests the Scotsman to a thunder-faced St Peter. “Well, y’ken noo,” replies Heaven’s gatekeeper. How we relish those gleeful lines in John Newton’s hymn: “Fading is the worldling’s pleasure/ All his boasted pomp and show.” Says the Book of Revelation: “Look! He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him; and all the peoples of the Earth will mourn because of Him.”
Running like a silver thread through the history of the world’s religions you will find the same refrain. Apocalypse. We have erred and strayed like lost sheep. We have been worshipping false gods. We shall be punished for it. We are doomed.
We are doomed because we are living not as we should, but too much in the material world. Jesus kicks over the tables of the money-changers. Moses reproaches the Israelites as they feast before a golden calf. The Buddha counsels us to transcend the material world. And time and again the people of the Book are enjoined to turn our eyes from lives of pleasure and ease, and in our spirits head toward the desert.
The desert. Ah, that other Eden for Jews, Christians and Muslims. Here is the closest geographical metaphor human poetry and divine prophecy can find for the healing power of austerity. Here, wand’ring in the wild, sunbeams scorching all the day, chilly dewdrops nightly shed, prowling beasts about our way, stones our pillow, earth our bed, we shall be tempted — and yet undefiled.
In every text the lesson is clear. Our age is not living as it should. The pursuit of riches has distracted us. Lives have been corrupted by lust, vanity, wastefulness and greed. We have become lazy and selfish. Our spirits are sick. And — count upon it — we shall be punished. One way or another we shall have to pay.
Well maybe. I cannot speak for God. Perhaps His prophets are right. These judgments are founded upon theology, and if you accept the theology then other claims will follow. I cite them neither to defend nor to deny them, but to remind you how deep they run in the history of belief.
Religion in this case is probably only the messenger. So rooted and insistent is the nagging fear (and secret pleasure) we take in seeing signs in the stars, the weather and the natural world, that sinful man is heading for apocalypse, that I suspect there is something buried in the collective unconscious of every age, feeding the glee and the gloom. Perhaps the world’s religions tap into this, using it as a recruiting sergeant.
In the still of the night everyone knows what it is to fear that we are heading for some half-sensed and ill-defined disaster. In the still of the night everyone knows the vague guilt that comes with a recognition that we are selfish. In the still of the night we know the gnawing resentment that there are others more selfish than we — yet who do not seem to be punished.
Guilt, resentment and apocalypse. Prophets have since the dawn of history recognised the power they can unleash by linking these three. Elijah told of earthquake, wind and fire; Jeremiah of disasters unnumbered. Ignatius Loyola, Luther, Calvin, the Wesleys, Moses, Mohammad . . . and countless other seers, ayatollahs and divines, have called upon us to bail out of whatever version of Sodom and Gomorrah it has pleased them to paint, before those cities burn.
The prophets of climate change are their inheritors, reclothing new belief in the metaphor of the old, reconnecting it to those ancient drives. The Archbishop of Canterbury has sensed as much. Dr Rowan Williams told politicians this week that they would face “a heavy responsibility before God” if they failed to act to control climate change. He described the lifestyle of those who contribute most to global warming as “profoundly immoral”. Asked how God would judge our age if we fail to act, Dr Williams said: “If you look at the language of the Bible on this, you very often come across situations where people are judged for not responding to warnings.”
So there you have it. The Friends of the Earth are Elijah’s latest recruits. Eco-apocalypticism is the new religion.At once I hear you protest: “But climate change is true.” And it may be. So may the Book of Revelation. Accept, please, that I am not urging upon you the truth or otherwise of any of these claims, religious or scientific. I am simply pointing out that as a belief system — scientific or otherwise — eco-apocalypticism runs powerfully with the grain of the collective human unconscious. It has its sheet-anchor down into a powerful current in the history of belief.
Between science, religion and fashion there exist no impermeable divides — and for two reasons. First, scientists are human beings: they share the drives, hunches and unconscious preconceptions of the rest of us. True, they have learnt not to fabricate or falsify, but they are not immune from the human tendency to screen in what tends to support a favoured line of reasoning, and screen out such doubts and uncertainties as might weaken it.
Secondly, research will follow funding. It is the familiar refrain of the green movement that “climate-change denial” finds funding from the pockets of carbon-producing or carbon-hungry big business, especially in America. That is a fair point, and a reason for scepticism, but it is sauce for both goose and gander. Eco-alarmism has a ready market of its own among politicians, journalists and moralists. They have deep pockets too.
Groupthink is everywhere, even in science. Some data is beyond refutation: sea levels are surely rising; carbon dioxide levels are up; and the climate is changing. There are likely to be linkages of some sort. Around these rocks of hard fact, however, swirls a sea of guesswork and speculation. It is here where — as we observe philosophical currents at work that are not so much scientific as driven by guilts, envies and yearnings — we need to observe particular caution.
I’ll tell you how we can know this. Buttonhole a passionate eco-apocalypticist and tell him a way has been found for us to cut carbon emissions perfectly painlessly, and carry on living as we do. Observe the involuntary anger cross his face. Or tell him it’s anyway too late and we’ll never stop China polluting. Observe that his objections remain: to how his own countrymen live. He may talk science but his underlying motives are of a different kind.
Near what is today the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca, a pre-Inca civilisation once dwelt among temples whose ruins are now called Tiahuanaco. They held that the wellspring of their divinity was located on an offshsore island later named the Isla del Sol. When the Incas overthrew them and wanted to win local loyalty they had the good sense to discover that in fact their god, the Sun King, had come to Earth on the Isla del Sol. When the Catholic Conquistadores overthrew the Incas — behold! A new miracle occurred. The Virgin Mary appeared by the lake, at a place called Copacabana.
A magnificent church has been built there. Truckers come from afar to wash their lorries in the holy waters, affording them protection from road accidents. The Virgin of Copacabana is the patron saint of Bolivia.
The gauleiters of today’s green consciousness would be well advised to visit Lake Titicaca and, with the ruins of the Temple of Tiahuanaco across the plain behind them, the Church of the Virgin of Copacabana at their back and the sacred Isla del Sol at their feet, await the arrival at this holy place of some new and terrifying intimation that we are all doomed. Then there could be founded on the shores of the lake a new institute for the study of climate change.
