Sometimes cartoons draw from an existential depth almost too profound and uncomfortable to explore. Consider a Dilbert strip (Globe & Mail, June 19/07). Dogbert, the green consultant, is offering advice to the company CEO. "Stop eating, breathing, driving, defecating and procreating," he recommends. "Sit in the dark and decompose on some garden seeds. Or do you admit you hate Earth?" After an apparent moment of honest soul searching, the CEO replies, "A little."
If we search deeply enough through the inner recesses of our thoughts and feelings, "a little" may be an understatement. And our own honest soul searching might uncover insights of significance.
Dogbert has forced the CEO to admit to being an environmental sinner. The very basic things he does, from eating to procreating, are environmentally damaging. Indeed, the only atonement available for the most fundamental of these sins is to die, decompose and thereby feed the seeds of regenerating life. Like the CEO, our very existence commits us all to the same judgment and penalty. Since death is the final absolution that resolves this existential dilemma, the resentment for this discomfort gets transferred to Earth itself.
The psychology is as old as humanity. This is why we kill the messenger for bringing information we don't want to receive; why we invent scapegoats to avoid the necessity of confronting our own shortcomings; why we doubt the gift of life when it is punctuated by the inevitability of death. Our own self-awareness and the nearly universal impulse to avoid life's stark and certain sufferings creates in us a secret ambivalence about being alive. Our attempts to resolve this ambivalence express themselves in the convolutions of thoughts and feelings we call our philosophies and religions.
Regardless of philosophies or religions, however, the biological imperatives of our existence require that we sustain the ecosystems that sustain us. This obligation is causing us much difficulty. During the process of living, we mostly take from nature. How will Earth supply our needs? What does it have to give to us? What bounties can we extract from it? Until recently, we have offered little thought to our reciprocal obligation. And it's this confrontation with our half of life's bargain that has caused so much resistance to environmental issues. They remind us what we owe. And our duty requires a paradigm shift in our self-centred and narcissistic value system. In a global world of looming limits, we are coming to the end of our option for obsessive taking. As the call for giving becomes increasingly shrill, it elicits in us feelings of resentment and anger. Our initial response is to resist like a two-year-old in the throws of a temper tantrum, for we are being asked to accept that the needs of Earth may be more important than our own ‹ the path to our individual and collective maturity has never been easy.
But the meaning in Dilbert's cartoon reverberates more deeply than this.
"When you think about life," said theologian and poet, Ron Atkinson, "there's nothing quite like it." True. But, when you think about death, there's nothing quite like it, either. And the single goal of almost all our philosophies and religions has been to address these twin mysteries.
The result is our convoluted and complex systems of beliefs and dogmas that try to explain the mysteries, resolve their inherent paradoxes, and provide an ending with some semblance happiness and justice for humans. Buddhists envision the answer as detachment; Hindus as selflessness; Christians and Moslems as a promised heavenly hereafter. In purely empirical terms, however, we are still left with Dogbert's version of "decomposing on some garden seeds".
From this collision of belief and evidence, we inherit the unresolved conflict between religion and science. We also inherit a profound ambivalence for Earth itself, the place where this monumental conundrum is initiated and enacted. "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust" is one of theology's derisive responses to Earth's great recycling program. Those with a Western religious disposition are inclined to regard this program as relative rather than absolute, to denigrate Earth and our lives on it as a mere prelude to the important event that follows. However sacred Earth may be, it is temporal and imperfect compared to the ideal place that comes next. During the Christian Middle Ages, for example, when this view was clearly lived, the purpose of life was to get through the imperfections to reach the perfection beyond. Residency on Earth was to be tolerated rather than treasured, its joys treated as transient and superficial. For all its pleasures, Earth was a place to be endured and resented, a shadowed world removed from the light of Heaven.
Modern history confronts us with a more moderate version of the same dilemma. Science keeps challenging belief, urging us to attend to where we are and what we have, rather than attending to where we might go and what we might get. Fundamentalists in absolutist religions such as Christianity and Islam are particularly vexed by science because it challenges them to become unequivocally connected to a place for which they express only a passing commitment. Using the threat of impending ecological chaos, science asks such believers to protect and save what they regard as transient and imperfect.
The rise of environmental consciousness and the body of science supporting it presents an irresolvable conflict for those who are either religiously disconnected from Earth or for those who are in the habit of only taking from it. Dogbert's disquieting advice exposes their hidden conflicts. Without both a spiritual and secular love for the planet itself, we have little chance of responding to its needs.