Global Requiem: The Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, and Art

Cross Currents, Fall, 2000 by Jack Miles

And yet the activism with which the late Cage flirted cannot substitute for religion either. What matters is not the merit or even the eloquence of an ecological poet's words but the likelihood that enough people will read them and take them to heart. When results are the criterion, as they are for activism, then the size of the audience is critical. If a grave warning from a majority of the world's Nobel scientists can go largely ignored, surely no body of poetry is likely to be heeded.

In what may be the last years of the human race, the role of the imagination, I am driven to conclude, lies not in supplanting religion but in imagining how existing organized religious traditions might adapt their old resources to meet this new challenge. Most artists and writers, called upon to imagine such a thing, would reply "That's not my job." So much the worse for human survival if a few cannot escape this suffocating secular orthodoxy.

Worldwide, the time when religious traditions of all kinds most often make an appearance is the time of death. When a memorial service is held for a man or woman who practiced no religion, the mourners -- in this country; typically, of widely varying beliefs -- have to organize themselves into a kind of ad hoc congregation. I recall, in my own recent experience, the memorial service for poet Joseph Brodsky at St. John the Divine in New York and a much humbler service for Benjamin Pinkel, a deceased RAND Corporation physicist in Santa Monica. On both occasions, traditional religious elements were combined with a set of secular readings that took on an inescapably religious coloration.

So we may find ourselves doing if we come to believe that we are in the last days of the human species. Whether or not we believe in the existence of any transcendent reality, we may find ourselves forming ad hoc congregations that combine secular and religious elements in a mood that, in such a somber moment, will surely seem more religious than secular. The religious traditions of the world do have major resources to draw on. All of them speak of death and of such violent actions as slaughter and war in two senses, one of which, as I might put it, corresponds to the early Cage and the other to the late Cage.

All of them prepare the individual man or woman to accept physical death as the human lot. If the death of the human species truly cannot be avoided, we can at least hope to dignify this passing with decent grief and try by our resignation to prevent the last years of the human species from being a battle of all against all. However, all of the major religious traditions of the world also celebrate sacrifice to the point of martyrdom and even (in the West, I maintain, as well as in the East) self-martyrdom. And all -- short of that extreme -- teach disciplines variously described as the slaying of desire, inner jihad, or self-mortification. If the death of the human species can be averted at all, it surely cannot be averted without enormous sacrifice. In Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1995), science journalist Mark Dowie speaks depressingly of the spread of the "Wise Use" movement, an ecological counter-movement that, as he sees it, refuses to accep t the possibility -- for Dowie it is a virtual certainty -- that profits must be sacrificed to save the human habitat. When profits go down for the rich, wages, contrary to the hopes of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, invariabty go down even faster for the poor. So long as it is possible to do well white doing good, so long as what is best for the bottom line can be sold as good enough for the environment, then no recourse to the ideologies of retigious self-sacrifice will be required. Enlightened self-interest will suffice.