Abstract
This article claims that the Anthropocene Age reveals the tragic insanity that lies at the core of religious experiences informed by Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In brief, I claim that Western Christianity and its apparatuses produce beliefs, which are an integral part of persons’ religious experiences, that give rise to an ontological rift between human beings and other species. This rift and its attendant beliefs are evident in how religious individuals and communities have (1) overlooked or disavowed the singularities and sufferings of other species, (2) used attendant instrumental epistemologies to justify the exploitation of Othered species (and Othered human beings) and the Earth, and (3) sought to force nature to adapt to human needs and desires. The article addresses the psychological dynamics and consequences of the ontological rift, which further exposes the madness that attends religious experiences that rely on apparatuses of the ontological rift. The article ends with a brief discussion of an antidote, namely, inoperativity.
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Notes
Moore (2016) prefers the term Capitalocene Era because, he argues, capitalism is the primary culprit in global warming. While there is much to be said for this term, I will use the more common Anthropocene Age, in part because it is more inclusive of the many human factors causing climate change and species extinctions. I recognize that this term carries its own controversies, especially considering that not all human beings are implicated in the rise of the climate emergency. Nevertheless, human activity is the source of the current rise in global warming.
Historian Chakrabarty (2009) notes that climate change has brought to the foreground the geological agency of human beings. Individually and collectively, human beings have acted in ways that have led to climate change, which results in his thesis that there is no longer a distinction between natural history and human history. Climate change has radically altered how Chakrabarty understands history.
It is important to stress that not all human beings are complicit in climate change. Largely, those living in the global north and in nations with colonial pasts are the major contributors to climate change and the current climate emergency.
The scientific data regarding global warming is mountainous and easily attainable, which is why I have decided not to take it up here. I am presuming that readers are already acquainted with some of the research since it is part of the news nearly every day. However, for those who may be interested in some of the recent research, I suggest the following: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (htpps://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/); NASA’s Global Climate Change website (https://climate.nasa.gov).
For Agamben (2009), the term apparatus refers to “a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in a way that purports to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings” (p. 13). Referencing Foucault, Agamben writes that “in a disciplinary society, apparatuses aim to create—through a series of practices, discourses, and bodies of knowledge—docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their ‘freedom’ as subjects” (p. 19). The apparatuses associated with Christianity include attendant theologies, narratives, and rituals.
There is, in this definition, already a hint of the ontological rift in the sense that human beings can transcend their biological nature, suggesting other “lower” species are determined by their biology.
It is important to note that other scholars have, in varying ways, identified and criticized the artifice of the ontological rift (e.g., Jeremy Bentham, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur Schopenhauer). More recently, Singer (1975), Latour (2004), Derrida (2008), and Deleuze and Guattari (2003) made similar comments about the rift between human beings and other species. For instance, philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (2003) agree with Agamben’s claim, arguing that “we make no distinction between man and nature... man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other... rather they are one and the same essential reality” (pp. 4–5).
This ontological rift also applies to those human beings who are constructed as absolutely Other and inferior, which we observe in varied forms of racism (and other types of oppression and marginalization such as sexism and classism) and attendant traumas (Mills, 1997, 2017; Patterson, 1982). My focus in this paper is, however, the source of the exploitation of and traumas to other species.
It is important to make clear that differentiating between human animals and other species does not necessarily result in an ontological rift. One can differentiate between species without creating separation or hierarchy. More positively, differentiation can lead to connection or I–Thou experiences (see Buber, 1958; Kovel, 1988).
All quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version.
While it makes sense that human beings are the center of the cosmic story, it does not necessarily follow that other species are subordinate, inferior, and, therefore, to be excluded. However, when anthropocentrism is coupled with ontological hierarchy, then other species (and Othered human beings) are constructed as inferior and subordinate.
Whitman, who James indicates was at times considered a pagan, appeared to be a person who rendered inoperative the ontological rift. Quoting the work of another author, Whitman is depicted as having never spoken “deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history, or against any trades or occupations—not even against animals, insects or inanimate things” (James, 1958, p. 81). Perhaps the appellation of pagan reveals the gap between religions that see human beings and other species as co-participants in creation and religions that produce and embrace the ontological rift.
It is not possible to juxtapose these religious experiences of Christian individuals with those of other religions, especially native peoples, which James entirely ignores. This said, let me mention Plenty Coups (Lear, 2006), Black Elk (Neihardt, 2014), and Chief Seattle. These men had religious experiences or visions that were populated by animals that spoke, possessed wisdom, and were central to the story. They obviously made distinctions (differentiation) between human animals and other animals, but these distinctions did not accompany separation. In short, no ontological rift was present.
There is also the mystical remedy of overcoming alienation if that mystical experience is a sense of oneness with nature and God. Since mystical experience is a less common religious experience, I am going to stay with scripture. I would add that mystical experiences also do not seem to address the ontological rift in any critical way.
A wonderful and ironic illustration of this is seen in rituals associated with sacrifice and scapegoats. People experience alienation in relation to God, thus the “need” to keep in God’s good graces through appeasing God or apologizing for wrongdoing through a ritual that entails killing or freeing an animal—a goat who bears the sins of the people. It is ironic because hidden within this ritual is the instrumental use of other-than-human animals, which confirms human superiority and significance while denying ontological significance to the one sacrificed—preserving and revealing the ontological rift.
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LaMothe, R. The Anthropocene Age Reveals the Insanity at the Heart of Western Christian Religious Experience. Pastoral Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-024-01126-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-024-01126-x