Symbiotic Economics: Green Rednecks
31/October/2007 14:31 Filed in: Weekly Column
24-31 October 2007; Volume 9, Issue 36
PDF copy
I would suppose it would be interesting in an academic sense, if it were not so real. Virtually all my conversations since I have returned or moved to Northeast Washington State eventually have come around to money. Money in the sense that we have been discussing in this series, financial liquidity or the lack thereof.
Because this area does not fit within the economies of scale of modern global enterprise, there flat out is no liquidity to do the things that need to be done. The wishful thinking that a rising tide floats all ships only works, as we have pointed out, in the oceans of capital, it doesn’t work on rivers and streams. This is true, I’m sure, not only in this corner of Washington State, but around the world. Countries, localities, and other places, that are willing and able to give global capitalism what it wants, get to play in the monopoly game. An area that can’t afford free trade zones, or places where these enterprise behemoths must pay some of there burden upon society in the form of infrastructure, just don’t get to play.
As I have had the time to read more books that discuss the enterprise future, in the later chapters the authors look forward to some positive results. Their general consensus is that we need some sort of fair morality in which the whatever must function in order for whatever to be successful.
The fact of the matter however, is that the authors have limited or no basis within their worldview for that morality to exist, to be created, or to operate. Just to say the world needs moral ethics doesn’t make them happen, even if we count all the hopeful visions of everyone on earth. Truthfully, morality and ethics cannot evolve out of nothing. Evolution, as a religion, cannot answer where these primitive instincts came from, and definitely cannot provide a model to develop them either.
So where did or does morality or goodness come from? Of course, the opinion belief herein is that it comes from God alone, who created the universe and also prescribed the operating rules, absolutes if you will. Some of those rules, along with gravity are also natural law, but deal with interactions between the various entities and populations. The natural science is ecology. In the human being, created in God’s image, that philosophy is religion in the broadest sense.
Probably the one most difficult distinction to understand about human beings compared to the rest of the animals is that homo sapiens care. True mostly about themselves, but even the most vain among us, don’t think that the vanity song is about them. They care after all, if not about other people, they care about cats, dogs, nature, pollution, global warming, aids, the list is pretty much endless.
So for sake of this discussion let us define caring as the true natural religion of mankind. A religion based on natural law. Caring is the root of all formal religions, Christians, Jews, Moslems, Atheists, Evolutionists, Hindu’s, and so on. All care, and either actively, passively, or forcibly, seek to make converts to their faith.
This week we want to discuss the developing common natural religion of the Green Redneck. Anybody can be a Green Redneck, but some characteristics seem evident. The first is that you must care about people and you must care about nature or creation (as defined in your more formal religion).
If you care only about nature alone, then the world should be a park, and no one should do anything to it, not even manage it in any fashion, forest fires should burn themselves out. That is really not even something the urban green environmentalist thinks is prudent. The mantra of Greens is sustainability, that we can pass on to future generations.
Rednecks have a similar high regard for nature, except they would like to pass on the hunting, fishing, snowmobiles, ATVs and the like to there children. The hunting and the fishing are sustainable allocations and management of natural resources. The debate about snowmobiles, jet skis, white water rafting, ATVs, and other recreational activities are only relative within the current economic model and cheap energy. This will change as the economy changes and the price of energy becomes significant in regard to disposable income.
When you get right down to the substance of the issue. caring about the natural world, the differences between true greens, and true rednecks, is not the object of there caring, but where they live and the focus of their vocation.
Starting with vocation, rednecks build things, greens design things. In other words, rednecks will build it if they get paid to do it. They might offer some insight on the practical nature of the design if asked, but for the most part they enjoy putting things together in a tangible world. Greens however may design a 5000 square foot log estate, with 500 square feet of north facing windows, on 15 acres, with a horse barn, and another 5000 square feet of garage for motor toys, but understand this is not sustainable.
In similar fashion rednecks don’t live in these abominations, even if they build them. What they want is an affordable residence for them and their families. They may need the big shed, but for the most part it is to work on the equipment they need to build things. They would like an energy efficient sustainable house, but they just can barely afford what they are living in now, and really can’t afford to heat it in the winter.
What ties this green redneck dichotomy together is the concept of Wildness. “In Wildness is the preservation of the world,” is an oft used quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s short essay “Walking.” This essay has been published in the Wonder Springs Chronicle Resources section. Here is the oft quoted stanza, somewhat in it’s context as found on page 13:
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. . . .
At this point in last week’s writing, I came to the awareness that there was something much bigger here than what I was so easily spewing forth.
I began to search for what was so important about “Wildness” the concept, in opposition to “wilderness” a place. The difference is that Thoreau is writing about Wildness as transcendent. That should be obvious, because Thoreau, with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others were known as Transcendentalists.
These highly educated Northeasterners were turned off by both the Calvinist and Unitarian Christianity of their day. Simply because both streams had become so religious in nature and aggressive to the other, that both forms lacked any transcendence with the wild nature (and streams) that surrounded their New England homes. With access not only to creation, but to all the other resources of humanity and the Enlightenment, Transcendentalists carefully attempted to craft a religion to fill the emptiness that was not filled by any of the religious paradigms that were available.
What they came up with in theological terms is really an intellectual gnostic deism. So what! Well, if you dumb that Transcendental religion down over a hundred and fifty years of entropy, what you really end up with is the American (and the world’s) religion of the 21st century. That is: There is a God out there somewhere that helps me get what I want in this life, and if I make a reasonable effort to do some good things, when I die I will go to heaven.
What this modern religion lacks however, is the same power that created Transcendentalism in the first place. There is nothing in our world today that has any transcendence, or can touch the eternity in the heart of the human personality. The modern Church is patterned much on that same non transcendence religion. In church you get practical applications of Biblical verses to lift your mundane boring life up a notch or two, for an hour or two, and if it is really good, maybe a day or a week. Couple these with the society’s naturalism of evolution in which the transcendent by definition can not and does not exist, and you have a truthful representation of the sorry world in which we live.
The Bible says: He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastics 3:11)
That simply means that just as Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists knew, with only human nature as our power to create the transcendent, we will fail and fail miserably. What Thoreau found in the Wildness of nature, was just not natural nature, but the art of Wild, transcended nature into the eternal. The Bible speaks of Creation as the spoken word of God.
Greens and Rednecks all worship that transcendence of Wildness, even if they are incapable of discerning that there is a creator God behind it. In the light of that eternity of Wildness, they merge their beliefs into denominations of the same Wild transcendent eternity.
Except for the Green Rednecks however, we live in a Post Religion world. That is what I was discussing in the opening of this article. True morality is a transcendent reality. But without some understanding of the existence and the power of the transcendent, we are just stuck with what we can come up with on our own, and that today is really what we call political correctness. Political correctness simply being my own lusts being cast upon culture hoping vainly that someone else will agree with me and likewise offend as few as possible.
Next week we will look more in depth at our Post Religious (non-transcendent) world. But for now let us look briefly at the Wildness of nature within the context of real time.
In the beginning, as the Bible starts its revelation, God created the heavens and the earth. We can live with that. Then it gets transcendent in a hurry. It states in the ordinary reading of the text that this creation was basically instantaneous and ex nihilo (out of nothing). How can that logically happen? Then it goes on to say that God created light and darkness (again ex nihilo) without the existence of the sun and the stars (creation day four) and defined the light as day, the dark as night. That is way over the top for me to understand. Then it gets even more transcendent, it does not subtly imply, but categorically states (especially in the original language), that this light and darkness is mysteriously consistent with a 24 hour day, just like today, and tomorrow, and the next day.
God how can that be? Well, except for the Ecclesiastics quotation above, completely incomprehensible.
Excluding attempts of doubters to dismiss the claims of Jesus Christ, probably no other section of scripture has more determined efforts to alter the transcendent meaning than the Genesis creation account. This has been done not only outside the church, but probably more damaging within the church, with a mundane zeal to make the Bible more relevant (non-transcendent) to fallen sinful mankind (Genesis 3, and third on the accommodation list).
How is that relevance achieved? By time, or buy time, if we bye enough time, anything is possible. Millions and billions of years are needed, but so what, if we don’t mess with number 1 and number 3 on God’s transcendent list, the church, the church fathers, and any other religious bureaucracy will understand. Furthermore, it will sell, books, Cds, Dvds, if not in the church, our mundane culture will gobble them up, in a vain search for meaning without ever knowing or believing the transcendent exists. The perfect marketing Ponzi scheme, it works in time, all the time, and for all time.
One of the redeeming qualities of evolution is that it was designed by atheists as a godless natural explanation of how life came about. It takes about 15 billion years as an age for the universe, and about 5 billion years of planet earth, maybe some alien seeds thrown in for good measure, but it is pretty consistent in it’s application that no transcendence exists. Evolution has been so successful all we have now is a world in which materialism is our only God. The more material we are with our thneeds the happier we will be, is the politically correct talking point.
Last Sunday churches that hold to doctrines of the Protestant Reformation celebrated Reformation Sunday. Last evening, 490 years ago, Martin Luther posted 95 Theses on the bulletin board of the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. To the good Dr. Luther, this was the evening of All Saints Day, today we call it Halloween, and many churches hold “Harvest Parties.” Now that for sure really converts satanic transcendentalism into the benign. At least that is the story you will hear from the pulpit and the invitations churches hand out in the neighborhood..
“What part of no don’t you little monsters understand? As an outreach of the church to the community, I will not let you dress up like little monsters and feed your selfish wants and gluttony with candy.”
Halloween harvest parties aside, there is a need in the church to recover transcendency. In our world that is really their reason to exist. That Reformation transcendency of the five solas, Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, by scripture alone, for God’s glory alone, changed the world in short order. In our post religious world, virtually no one has a clue, at a transcendent level what the five solas I just wrote mean. That includes much of the evangelical church, that wants to convert the world, at least the United States, through the political action of correctness. If you have no basis to preach God’s grace, pound them with God’s law, and if God’s law doesn’t seem to fit, write new laws based on what you see as an appropriate moral society.
Green Rednecks understand Wildness, like few pastors, church leaders, and laity can or will fathom. These sinners have bypassed the established church much like Thoreau and Emerson did a hundred and fifty years ago. Could Wildness be the basis for a new transcendent Reformation?
When Jesus walked the earth as a man, his ministry bypassed the established religious leaders because essentially their self righteous religion had lost its transcendence with the normal people. The same was true in the Protestant Reformation against the church of Rome. The Bible and Creation are transcendently joined from the beginning of time. If God’s people understand Wildness, (which is really transcendent order) why not give it to them and catechize (a Reformation term) them into disciples of the Creator of all, the one and the same Jesus Christ, the eternal Word made flesh, and dwelt among us, died for our sins, and was raised from the dead for our justification.
Amen!
PDF copy
I would suppose it would be interesting in an academic sense, if it were not so real. Virtually all my conversations since I have returned or moved to Northeast Washington State eventually have come around to money. Money in the sense that we have been discussing in this series, financial liquidity or the lack thereof.
Because this area does not fit within the economies of scale of modern global enterprise, there flat out is no liquidity to do the things that need to be done. The wishful thinking that a rising tide floats all ships only works, as we have pointed out, in the oceans of capital, it doesn’t work on rivers and streams. This is true, I’m sure, not only in this corner of Washington State, but around the world. Countries, localities, and other places, that are willing and able to give global capitalism what it wants, get to play in the monopoly game. An area that can’t afford free trade zones, or places where these enterprise behemoths must pay some of there burden upon society in the form of infrastructure, just don’t get to play.
As I have had the time to read more books that discuss the enterprise future, in the later chapters the authors look forward to some positive results. Their general consensus is that we need some sort of fair morality in which the whatever must function in order for whatever to be successful.
The fact of the matter however, is that the authors have limited or no basis within their worldview for that morality to exist, to be created, or to operate. Just to say the world needs moral ethics doesn’t make them happen, even if we count all the hopeful visions of everyone on earth. Truthfully, morality and ethics cannot evolve out of nothing. Evolution, as a religion, cannot answer where these primitive instincts came from, and definitely cannot provide a model to develop them either.
So where did or does morality or goodness come from? Of course, the opinion belief herein is that it comes from God alone, who created the universe and also prescribed the operating rules, absolutes if you will. Some of those rules, along with gravity are also natural law, but deal with interactions between the various entities and populations. The natural science is ecology. In the human being, created in God’s image, that philosophy is religion in the broadest sense.
Probably the one most difficult distinction to understand about human beings compared to the rest of the animals is that homo sapiens care. True mostly about themselves, but even the most vain among us, don’t think that the vanity song is about them. They care after all, if not about other people, they care about cats, dogs, nature, pollution, global warming, aids, the list is pretty much endless.
So for sake of this discussion let us define caring as the true natural religion of mankind. A religion based on natural law. Caring is the root of all formal religions, Christians, Jews, Moslems, Atheists, Evolutionists, Hindu’s, and so on. All care, and either actively, passively, or forcibly, seek to make converts to their faith.
This week we want to discuss the developing common natural religion of the Green Redneck. Anybody can be a Green Redneck, but some characteristics seem evident. The first is that you must care about people and you must care about nature or creation (as defined in your more formal religion).
If you care only about nature alone, then the world should be a park, and no one should do anything to it, not even manage it in any fashion, forest fires should burn themselves out. That is really not even something the urban green environmentalist thinks is prudent. The mantra of Greens is sustainability, that we can pass on to future generations.
Rednecks have a similar high regard for nature, except they would like to pass on the hunting, fishing, snowmobiles, ATVs and the like to there children. The hunting and the fishing are sustainable allocations and management of natural resources. The debate about snowmobiles, jet skis, white water rafting, ATVs, and other recreational activities are only relative within the current economic model and cheap energy. This will change as the economy changes and the price of energy becomes significant in regard to disposable income.
When you get right down to the substance of the issue. caring about the natural world, the differences between true greens, and true rednecks, is not the object of there caring, but where they live and the focus of their vocation.
Starting with vocation, rednecks build things, greens design things. In other words, rednecks will build it if they get paid to do it. They might offer some insight on the practical nature of the design if asked, but for the most part they enjoy putting things together in a tangible world. Greens however may design a 5000 square foot log estate, with 500 square feet of north facing windows, on 15 acres, with a horse barn, and another 5000 square feet of garage for motor toys, but understand this is not sustainable.
In similar fashion rednecks don’t live in these abominations, even if they build them. What they want is an affordable residence for them and their families. They may need the big shed, but for the most part it is to work on the equipment they need to build things. They would like an energy efficient sustainable house, but they just can barely afford what they are living in now, and really can’t afford to heat it in the winter.
What ties this green redneck dichotomy together is the concept of Wildness. “In Wildness is the preservation of the world,” is an oft used quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s short essay “Walking.” This essay has been published in the Wonder Springs Chronicle Resources section. Here is the oft quoted stanza, somewhat in it’s context as found on page 13:
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. . . .
At this point in last week’s writing, I came to the awareness that there was something much bigger here than what I was so easily spewing forth.
I began to search for what was so important about “Wildness” the concept, in opposition to “wilderness” a place. The difference is that Thoreau is writing about Wildness as transcendent. That should be obvious, because Thoreau, with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others were known as Transcendentalists.
These highly educated Northeasterners were turned off by both the Calvinist and Unitarian Christianity of their day. Simply because both streams had become so religious in nature and aggressive to the other, that both forms lacked any transcendence with the wild nature (and streams) that surrounded their New England homes. With access not only to creation, but to all the other resources of humanity and the Enlightenment, Transcendentalists carefully attempted to craft a religion to fill the emptiness that was not filled by any of the religious paradigms that were available.
What they came up with in theological terms is really an intellectual gnostic deism. So what! Well, if you dumb that Transcendental religion down over a hundred and fifty years of entropy, what you really end up with is the American (and the world’s) religion of the 21st century. That is: There is a God out there somewhere that helps me get what I want in this life, and if I make a reasonable effort to do some good things, when I die I will go to heaven.
What this modern religion lacks however, is the same power that created Transcendentalism in the first place. There is nothing in our world today that has any transcendence, or can touch the eternity in the heart of the human personality. The modern Church is patterned much on that same non transcendence religion. In church you get practical applications of Biblical verses to lift your mundane boring life up a notch or two, for an hour or two, and if it is really good, maybe a day or a week. Couple these with the society’s naturalism of evolution in which the transcendent by definition can not and does not exist, and you have a truthful representation of the sorry world in which we live.
The Bible says: He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastics 3:11)
That simply means that just as Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists knew, with only human nature as our power to create the transcendent, we will fail and fail miserably. What Thoreau found in the Wildness of nature, was just not natural nature, but the art of Wild, transcended nature into the eternal. The Bible speaks of Creation as the spoken word of God.
Greens and Rednecks all worship that transcendence of Wildness, even if they are incapable of discerning that there is a creator God behind it. In the light of that eternity of Wildness, they merge their beliefs into denominations of the same Wild transcendent eternity.
Except for the Green Rednecks however, we live in a Post Religion world. That is what I was discussing in the opening of this article. True morality is a transcendent reality. But without some understanding of the existence and the power of the transcendent, we are just stuck with what we can come up with on our own, and that today is really what we call political correctness. Political correctness simply being my own lusts being cast upon culture hoping vainly that someone else will agree with me and likewise offend as few as possible.
Next week we will look more in depth at our Post Religious (non-transcendent) world. But for now let us look briefly at the Wildness of nature within the context of real time.
In the beginning, as the Bible starts its revelation, God created the heavens and the earth. We can live with that. Then it gets transcendent in a hurry. It states in the ordinary reading of the text that this creation was basically instantaneous and ex nihilo (out of nothing). How can that logically happen? Then it goes on to say that God created light and darkness (again ex nihilo) without the existence of the sun and the stars (creation day four) and defined the light as day, the dark as night. That is way over the top for me to understand. Then it gets even more transcendent, it does not subtly imply, but categorically states (especially in the original language), that this light and darkness is mysteriously consistent with a 24 hour day, just like today, and tomorrow, and the next day.
God how can that be? Well, except for the Ecclesiastics quotation above, completely incomprehensible.
Excluding attempts of doubters to dismiss the claims of Jesus Christ, probably no other section of scripture has more determined efforts to alter the transcendent meaning than the Genesis creation account. This has been done not only outside the church, but probably more damaging within the church, with a mundane zeal to make the Bible more relevant (non-transcendent) to fallen sinful mankind (Genesis 3, and third on the accommodation list).
How is that relevance achieved? By time, or buy time, if we bye enough time, anything is possible. Millions and billions of years are needed, but so what, if we don’t mess with number 1 and number 3 on God’s transcendent list, the church, the church fathers, and any other religious bureaucracy will understand. Furthermore, it will sell, books, Cds, Dvds, if not in the church, our mundane culture will gobble them up, in a vain search for meaning without ever knowing or believing the transcendent exists. The perfect marketing Ponzi scheme, it works in time, all the time, and for all time.
One of the redeeming qualities of evolution is that it was designed by atheists as a godless natural explanation of how life came about. It takes about 15 billion years as an age for the universe, and about 5 billion years of planet earth, maybe some alien seeds thrown in for good measure, but it is pretty consistent in it’s application that no transcendence exists. Evolution has been so successful all we have now is a world in which materialism is our only God. The more material we are with our thneeds the happier we will be, is the politically correct talking point.
Last Sunday churches that hold to doctrines of the Protestant Reformation celebrated Reformation Sunday. Last evening, 490 years ago, Martin Luther posted 95 Theses on the bulletin board of the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. To the good Dr. Luther, this was the evening of All Saints Day, today we call it Halloween, and many churches hold “Harvest Parties.” Now that for sure really converts satanic transcendentalism into the benign. At least that is the story you will hear from the pulpit and the invitations churches hand out in the neighborhood..
“What part of no don’t you little monsters understand? As an outreach of the church to the community, I will not let you dress up like little monsters and feed your selfish wants and gluttony with candy.”
Halloween harvest parties aside, there is a need in the church to recover transcendency. In our world that is really their reason to exist. That Reformation transcendency of the five solas, Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, by scripture alone, for God’s glory alone, changed the world in short order. In our post religious world, virtually no one has a clue, at a transcendent level what the five solas I just wrote mean. That includes much of the evangelical church, that wants to convert the world, at least the United States, through the political action of correctness. If you have no basis to preach God’s grace, pound them with God’s law, and if God’s law doesn’t seem to fit, write new laws based on what you see as an appropriate moral society.
Green Rednecks understand Wildness, like few pastors, church leaders, and laity can or will fathom. These sinners have bypassed the established church much like Thoreau and Emerson did a hundred and fifty years ago. Could Wildness be the basis for a new transcendent Reformation?
When Jesus walked the earth as a man, his ministry bypassed the established religious leaders because essentially their self righteous religion had lost its transcendence with the normal people. The same was true in the Protestant Reformation against the church of Rome. The Bible and Creation are transcendently joined from the beginning of time. If God’s people understand Wildness, (which is really transcendent order) why not give it to them and catechize (a Reformation term) them into disciples of the Creator of all, the one and the same Jesus Christ, the eternal Word made flesh, and dwelt among us, died for our sins, and was raised from the dead for our justification.
Amen!