The Trouble With Humans

At some point I'll be able to write something upbeat here - but not today! A few months ago I put together a short pamphlet on the relationship of the Church to the climate emergency and the theological issues it raised, mainly because nothing I heard tackled it the way that concerned me. In it, I thought about the danger the politics of climate change seemed to pose of anti-humanism, of falling into a misanthropic rhetoric which viewed human beings as a polluting presence, a disease that nature would be justified in wiping out.  That wasn't very present just a short time back, but it seems to be now. My LiberFaciorum feed is full of it: often brutal and violent, accusatory, angry not with categories of human being (like the Brexit debate), but with humans as such. The Earth would be fine if they weren't around. It's hard to read, and often comes from people I care about and who are even, in at least one case, engaged in work which concerns saving people's lives. 

One of my favourite little stories involves Metropolitan Anthony of Sourezh who, on his first trip back to the Soviet Union from which his family had fled during the Revolution, was welcomed at the airport by a commissar from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. 'Do you believe in God, my child?' asked the archbishop. 'Certainly not,' replied the official firmly, 'As a member of the Communist Party I believe in human beings.' 'Good!', said Anthony, shaking his hand, 'So does God!'

There is a misanthropic strain in Christian spirituality, with disgust at the depth of human sin as its justification, but it's marginal. Rather, we are used to the tension between the fact that human life cannot be radically bad if the eternal Son came to share it and we are to carry on his work, and on the other hand the inescapable truth that humans' response to the arrival of absolute goodness was to turn on it and attempt to destroy it. The liturgy consistently rehearses both. I don't know whether the atheistic sort of misanthropy, released by the climate crisis, has long roots in people's thinking - was it always there - or whether it results from being surprised at how humans have failed? Christians have always known we are Fallen; perhaps non-believers are only now really finding out.

There's a more philosophical question below this, which is how far we should think of humans as part of the natural order, and how far we are separate from it. This is a complex matter for both Christians and non-believers. Traditionally Christians could maintain that humans were set radically apart from the beasts, but accepting evolution muddies those waters: we become both, part of a natural continuum but also endowed with something else, something which makes us capable of great good and also great evil. Our animal nature can be bent in either direction. However, if you're an atheist, everything we have is part of our genetic inheritance, and the way we behave must also derive from it. Whatever selfishness and short-sightedness we display must come from there. If we act badly, it can't be because we are too distinct from nature, but precisely because we are part of it: not because we are insufficiently like your pet cat, but because we're like it too much. If that's true, there's no great sense in castigating humans for being what they can't help. 

The conclusion a Christian must draw is that, if our imagination, the aspects of us that are 'the image of God', can be used positively or negatively; though it be ever so hard, we can choose to exercise the better side of what we are. And we must, for disaster lies otherwise. And without us, Creation returns not to a state of goodness and grace, but to chaos, to inarticulacy, to nothingness; beauty, perhaps, but with nothing capable of discerning, describing or enjoying beauty. Try Romans 8.19-22, which our holy mother the Church made us read last Sunday, if you don't believe me. Blessed Paul, of course, got there ahead of us.