Dominic Fox, following up on a question Jodi Dean’s (“what if the world has already ended and we are persisting in its degrading memory?”), suggests that perhaps all the urgent calls for action, every ultimatum, is already too late. For example, “at least one plausible model of climate change asserts that all the emissions needed to change the climate irrevocably have already been emitted, and the effects of this change are even now ineluctibly unfolding: we pass from tipping-point to tipping-point.” More generally, the results of death and disease — which are always specific historical deaths from specific diseases — are irrevocable. He uses the example of HIV/AIDS, but one could also cite the deaths of entire species, which we manage to cause “by accident,” an unconscious supplement to the conscious and somehow never quite fully accomplished projects of genocide.
In conversation once with someone with deep ecofeminist sympathies, I suggested that the “deep ecology” dream of simply eliminating humanity from the picture would not achieve the desired results. Even if one could at some point posit humanity as an eliminable parasite, the effects of human action have reached a tipping point such that if the Rapture came and took every single human beings, species would continue to die off, climate change would continue its course — one could envision a humanless world full of nothing but cockroaches and bacteria, processing the seemingly infinite waste we’ve left behind. Paradoxically, the only solution I could envision was precisely a human solution — some previously unimagined technological intervention that could somehow set things right (even if it were only something like massive reforestation projects, etc.).
I tend to read Paul as thinking, as many present-day people do, that the world is heading toward destruction on its own inertia, but as a result of human actions. (This kind of attitude does not seem to have been unique to Paul at the time — although they did not have the same type of empirical data that we have collected, there was nonetheless a widely-shared sense that “this cannot go on forever.”) Paul also shares with many contemporary thinkers an acknowledgment that the fate of the entire created world is inextricably tied together with the fate of humanity:
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
The redemption of creation will have been a human redemption — and human redemption is also necessarily the redemption of all of creation. Also interesting is this idea of “the one who subjected it,” namely creation — was this God, or humanity? Certainly we can understand humanity to have subjected creation to futility, in the form of the meaningless capitalist accumulation followed by the senseless destruction represented by crisis — but is there a way any longer to think of the creation as having been subjected “in hope,” in hope of a greater abundance, of a flourishing of life? Or has the window closed on that as well (perhaps, as Dominic’s commenter Owen suggests and I have also hinted at elsewhere, in 1914)?
It somehow seems more intuitively plausible that the possibility of redemption could open up at a discrete historical moment than that the possibility could be decisively lost at a discrete historical moment — very “American” of me, I’m sure. We always get a second chance, right? But as we all know, in the one life that we each have, that is not always the case — in our one life, it is possible to screw things up irrevocably. I can see no reason that such an irrevocable mistake could not, mutatis mutandis, occur in humanity’s shared history as well.
Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Interesting post. When you say that the only solution you can imagine is a human solution I have to protest. Not that I think we should wait for Martians to come save us or Jesus to rapture everyone, but just that technology itself has to be rethought. The human itself has to be rethought. Ironically the deep ecology people also want a human solution, one where we just leave everything alone (if we all die the better for the planet), and the human solution most people have is just the reverse (let’s figure out how to keep up consumption without the bad shit – no sacrifice). Both seem to think of humanity as an imperium within an imperium.
We likely have gone past the point of no return and we may very well see in our own lifetime the unravelling of the present global order. I don’t think, contrary to some of the more extreme predictions, this is going to present us with the death of humanity. To me it presents us with an opportunity to reclaim the commons. Local practices are going to matter more than they used to and that could be a good thing. This may be a good thing for life itself. But I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something.
Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 9:39 pm
This IS an interesting post. I would say that Paul thinks that the possibility for human redemption is perpetually possible; it is always open. Pauline redemption (exagoradzo in the Gr. is it?) has unfortunately been dangerously spiritualized, especially in theological circles and perhaps this is one area where a strictly literal interpretive move is/was absolutely necessary. It is tragic that the Christian imagination could not envision the literal “buying back” or “ransoming” of creation; a never ending cycle of the re-creation of creation.
I would add that Pauline redemption has also been strangely misunderstood, being prophetically realized and best understood only recently as a “living through” of the sin itself. Perhaps this is the lot that both man and the world share. That is, the world must live through this coming global catastrophe (assume the wrongs done it by man and live them through) to achieve its redemption.
Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 10:06 pm
It is tragic that the Christian imagination could not envision the literal “buying back” or “ransoming” of creation; a never ending cycle of the re-creation of creation.
That’s a nice way to express your point. In harmony with this, my contention has long been that the tragedy is that the Christian imagination has failed in being an artistic or aesthetic imagination — in this, one might say it’s lacked, or at some point lost, all sense of imagination at all. (This reminds me of one of my favorite chapter titles ever, “The Christian Art of Missing the Joke”). A truly aesthetic imagination, in the vein, say, that Tracy talks about so often without every really expressing aesthetically, probably because he is still so damn Christian, would seem to most fully embody (versus simply expressing as a symptom or a characteristic) this “never ending cycle of the re-recreation of creation.”
But this, admittedly, is far afield of the actual post. But damn it feels good to write something of substance in a blog comment field. It’s been a while.
Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 11:00 pm
The christian imagination has failed name-wise, but not properly so in its redemptive role; i.e., it is still exhibited aesthetically and artisticly in an actual manner and strangely enough my experience is that it is regarded as bad art, and as antithetical to the Beautiful.
For example, over the holidays I asked an aunt if I could take a page from a magazine on which was pictured a 16 story hotel in Sweden constructed from old boxcars. It was magnificent. “This is truly Christian redemption!” I thought. Needless to say failed recognitions were not in short supply.
Or, incidentally, I just saw “Lemony Snickets Unfortunate Series of Events” which demonstrates, through the eldest daughter, Pauline redemption: in every unfortunate event the daughter, through the use of any material resource previously thought unusable or “boring and dead,” finds safety/salvation. She keeps repeating, “There’s always something.”
I suppose my point is that even though such demonstrations of redemption do not fly under the name of Christian they are, in essence, properly Christian, and that the Christian imagination, in a strange paradox still exists, but outside of the Christian community.
Monday, January 8, 2007 at 7:17 am
Yes, absolutely. The question then becomes, if we were to follow this paradox through, is the Christian imagination possible only outside the Christian community, as you describe here — or, more precisely, beyond that which the Christian community can identify for and as its own?
Wednesday, January 10, 2007 at 10:59 am
In personal life, and I guess particularly in relationships, the irrevocable can sometimes be recontextualised in a redemptive way. People fall out and make up all the time; sometimes the falling-out conditions the making-up, such that the latter does not in any sense revoke the former, but prevents it at least from being the last word.
Then again, people die or just disappear, and whatever the last words spoken were, they’re what you’re left with. I’m fascinated by the way people renegotiate their relationships with the dead, particularly people they’re bitterly angry with (suicides for example). Marcello Carlin’s Church of Me blog is a particularly striking and powerful example of this.
Poetix is at least in part an attempt at one-sided conversation with some absent (probably not dead) persons – what psychoanalysis calls “introjects”. I doubt that aspect of it is particularly apparent though.