The Metaphysics of Modernity as Cultural godlessness

Or, how atheist zealots and religious fundamentalists contribute to the ecological destruction of the planet

Last time, I outlined my theories for why the zealous New Atheism movement arose and declined as it did, and I gave my assessment on whether we are now in a new moment of religious resurgence. What I didn't do was tie all of that into sustainable agriculture, which I am now going to attempt. As I have hinted in my title, my claim here is that both atheist zealots and religious fundamentalists share something crucial in common, a feature of modern culture, and my term for this is 'godlessness'. Once I have clarified what I mean by 'godlessness', it should be apparent that our agricultural unsustainability is just one offshoot of this broader modern metaphysical conceit.

Blake's mythological 'Urizen, the Ancient of Days', a deity who manifests the projected ideals of modern humans

Briefly, let me start by commenting on my approach to metaphysics, because the very word can conjure up notions of alchemy and astrology. In my usage, metaphysics is just the branch of philosophical inquiry that asks about first principles (being, causation, the soul, its immortality, its alleged free will, God). Metaphysics sits alongside epistemology, ethics (of which epistemology is just one perhaps overly-hyped sub-topic), and logic as the main disciplines for philosophy proper.

In what has become something of a forgotten metaphor, some have likened metaphysics to 'groundwork', both because it is preparatory to other fruitful work in philosophy and because its subject matter is supposed to be the root of all other things. In the modern period, I think this metaphor has a further extension, because the particular error of our day leads us to neglect, even destroy, the very sources of human existence. Bad metaphysics is robbing us of the very ground beneath our feet.

Sustainable practices would renew soils during the cycle of planting and harvesting, not deplete it; once lost, soil won't rebuild itself on human time scales

How so? What is our modern error? I call it godlessness, for various reasons. It used to be called the vice of impiety, but this term gives off a sanctimonious air that I'm trying to avoid. The ancient connotation of this vice was only applied to the cult of a god after the fact. Originally, what people considered the virtue of piety involved giving proper honor to parents and patria, i.e., community and countryside. Even today, piety survives in hidden pockets of the world where finance has yet to conquer native values, that is, wherever people still practice a deep connection to the land and to mutual interdependence of neighbors in order to produce the basics of life. In such societies, it never fails: people have a sense of sanctity about the earth and about the ancient wisdom that preserves a lasting relationship with the sources of goodness, without which we will lose our means of existing.

The dictates of a pious culture are the same, time and again, from place to place. Piety breeds humility, and humility both self-limits and respects naturally-existing limits. If you, like me, have been educated to be properly modern, that last pairing will chafe at your very sense of personhood. It's a commonplace to brush aside such humility as a product of 'primitive story-telling' and superstitious savagery. Myths of the gods and magical rights to appease them with sacrifices are merely empty, if all-too-relatable, expressions of human fear and powerlessness against an indifferent and often violent existence.

The extent Palace of Knossos, where nearby caves may have been the basis for a labyrinth myth

I remember when I first heard this modern story about ancient myth-making, from a high school teacher. In the moment, I couldn't work up a fitting retort, and he wasn't exactly open to hearing alternate views. But what I would want to say to such deconstruction of myths is: that's not why those stories are important, and it totally misses their wisdom. For one thing, many myths are not just purely made up. Babylon, Jericho, Troy, King David, King Nebudchadnezzar, perhaps even King Minos, these are all mythical cities or figures with solid evidence pointing to their real existence. Which brings me to my second response to the modern skeptic: When people related these stories, it isn't clear to what extent they believed every bit of them as facts, the way that we treat historical accounts. What mattered was that they really believed these stories were, in some sense, their own story. The 'belief' accorded to myths, even the 'myth' of scientific progress, is that this story is about us, and we make our own lives fit within the shape of whatever this narrative form delineates in terms of constraint.

Or, lack thereof. The lack of constraint on human activity, the belief in unfettered human freedom as well as the domination of a mechanistic and value-neutral material domain, these are all part and parcel to the modern metaphysics of physicalism regarding nature and self-actualization with respect to ethics.

Contrast this with pre-modern myths and their accompanying metaphysics, and what you find is that the foundational stories reinforced a widespread acknowledgment of the danger of hubris. In turn, this hubris could emerge by transgressing either the proper ambit of human activity (interpersonal morality) or by overreaching the order of nature (what we might call environmental ethics). Within these sorts of mythical and metaphysical frameworks, humans were neither gods nor grunts. They had to struggle to care for each other and the earth, lest they exceed proper bounds and incur wrath (which often manifests as climate-related disasters like drought, famine, floods, etc.). Crucially, within a community that practices piety toward one another and the land on which they depend, their duties to community and country are circumscribed with a recognition of sacredness, whether or not any god is brought into the picture (here I have Daoism in mind).

'Atlas shrugged', a notable example of the modern appeal to Reason without God or humility

If the sacred connotes the pre-modern attitude of humility and piety toward fellow humans and the natural world, then I think the modern rejection of this attitude can be called 'godlessness'. It's the foregone conclusion that nothing is sacred, nothing divine, that holiness is a farce. This attitude spread virulently as a response to the European Enlightenment, during which an irreligious notion of Reason became an ideal of intellectual refinement. Tellingly, the reaction to this abstracted Reason--a movement known as Romanticism--called for a return to Nature. Yet, this theme is revealing, because it still presumes that humans are possibly separate from the natural world, if we are to make an effort to return to it (this fallacy is still at work among some conservationists, who seem to think of the 'outdoors' as existing for its 'scenic' landscapes and 'picturesque' views: the stance of an observer, not of a participant.).

Here we see that the culture of modernity so successfully sullied our sense of sacred value that even its critics can no longer clothe themselves in the now-discarded raimants of native sacredness. Instead, those who cling to pre-modern pieties tend to be disparaged with such supposedly bad labels as 'luddite', 'savage', or close synonyms like 'backwards' or 'religious'. In what follows, I will forgo any attempt to rehabilitate the notion of piety in the eyes of those who embrace modern godlessness. My aim will be two-fold: 1) to tie godlessness to our current global catastrophe of unsustainable economies, agriculture, and energy use; 2) to implicate both atheists and fundamentalists in this godlessness.

Piety and Nonnegotiable Limits

So far I have presented my conception of a godless metaphysics (mechanistic objects, monetary values), but how pervasive is it, really? Can its impact really be measured? I mean, how influential is metaphysics anyway? My answers are: global, yes, and subtly but omnipresently.

Put simply, people today put their money where their metaphysic is. One test of an otherwise obscure sense of the sacred is to ask someone if they would be willing to do something or sacrifice something for any amount of money. If there is a finite dollar amount that a person or society will place on something, whether it be a human life, a landscape, a resource, or a course of action/inaction, then whatever that is isn't sacred to them. So, for instance, we currently allow industrial farms to lose topsoil to erosion every year. At current rates of loss, midwestern US farmers may have only 60 harvests left before there is no more arable soil in place. To take another example, companies have been synthesizing 'forever chemicals' for decades, molecules that have no natural function, no place in the web of life, and thus, only contribute unknown consequences and danger to our world. But we've let them accumulate unhindered and now we can't, e.g., find a single human without traces of these chemicals in their blood.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where commodities are traded, fortunes made, and soil health is ravaged

Culturally, we are accepting of collateral damage to our basis for agriculture, and to our health as a species as well as to countless other species. Why? Well, obviously, in the short term, many stand to profit from our industrial agriculture system (ag equipment businesses, processing plants, futures speculators, banks, et al.), and from our use of synthetic chemicals. But alongside this tolerance for greed, we also lack the social constraints to shame those who would profit by the destruction of necessary goods like soil, water, air, or our very bodily health. That is to say, we lack a sense that there is an inviolable limit to what we can (rightly) use for our financial gain. We lack even the barest remnant of piety, the sacred duty to neighbor and nature.

Two Faces of godlessness: Atheist and Fundamentalist

Two faces, one godless impiety (Ironically, this is the god Janus, who just happens to have two faces)

Who are "we," these godless, impious modern people? Somewhat counterintuitively, I contend that this people includes both the atheists who are openly and proudly 'godless' as well as the fundamentalists who espouse a certain modern strain of religion. It's obvious enough that, besides lacking a belief in God, zealous New Atheists disparage all forms of religion itself, and with it, any inborn sense of the sacred. I'm not saying that they are all necessarily a-moral, as this is a practical judgment. But a zealous atheist, as such, has no theoretical grounds for practical constraints that are so non-negotiable as to be sacred. (I'll leave off for now my argument that atheists could be capable of a robust moral theory without believing in God.)

What is less obvious, even paradoxical, is my claim that fundamentalist religion is also godless. Let me clarify that I'm only able to maintain this because fundamentalists characteristically adopt a two-tier metaphysic. On one level, they report a belief in God, a spiritual reality, an afterlife, and all of that. Importantly, however, they relate to this reality entirely through a text, or more accurately, a hermeneutic lens on a text. It is this artifact that they consider the epitome of sacred, and interestingly, the spirituality that this sacred object cultivates places God entirely beyond other people and this world, and the vision of spiritual culmination is likewise removed beyond this life. A classic manifestation of this two-tier metaphysic is the fundamentalist's fixation on saving 'souls', where the soul is supposed to be an immaterial or spiritual substance that drives the merely mechanical body, and it is this superadded spiritual thing that has ultimate value and will be saved for eternity.

Now, consider the effect of this other-worldly spiritual metaphysic on the metaphysics of the present. At the level of everyday life, fundamentalists think and behave no differently from other modern humans. Their spiritual practices--prayers, reading a sacred text--have no bearing on the world of practical outcomes. They still engage in business with, and even profit from, the destructive systems mentioned above. In an ironic twist, the part of morality that seems to most fascinate a fundamentalist mind is the one doing the least harm and producing nothing objectionable, viz., recreational/non-procreative sex. Effectively, if you imagine yourself as an omniscient alien observer, you could watch an atheist or a fundamentalist for a length of time, and you might conclude that the only difference between them was that the atheist knew how to enjoy sex, and that the fundamentalist took a few curious breaks from life to pause and talk to himself and to read a book of ancient near eastern literature. Strange hobbies, but not enough to found a new metaphysic or pull the culture back from its impending extinction.

That's probably an apt place to conclude. My overall claim here is that, for all its successes, our modern era definitively put to death the human sense of sacred piety. The ensuing godlessness of our culture--our economic and agricultural systems--is responsible for unleashing violence on the very basis of our existence. As bad as humans have been in previous eras, we've never waged a full-scale war on nature and been so close to winning that war, and killing our planet. Both irreligious atheists and religious fundamentalists are complicit in this modern system. Until we restore humility and a sacred sense of duty, to people and to our respective places, as pillars of our civilization, I expect we will continue down the path of least resistance, and certain destruction of our only home in the universe.