170 - The Promise of Technology versus God's Promise in Job

The Promise of Technology versus God's Promise in Job
By David Strong

 

“In our age, nearly everything we confront on a daily basis is either already under control or it is viewed as something to bring under control and to be made use of. In direct opposition to this way of seeing, interpreting, and taking up with things are the creation stories of the Bible and the vision of wild creation in Job. Wild things in these passages do not need to be rearranged, 'developed,' or made use of before they reach the fullness of their being. Wild things in these passages are already as good as they can be, on their own. Recognizing them in their own right, pausing and lingering unselfconsciously before them, makes one receptive to afresh and refreshing vision of our existence. “

It is easy to blame the way we dominate nature in our age on our Greek and Judaeo-Christian roots. Yet no one in these earlier traditions would have predicted that we would interpret the texts of these traditions the way we do, since there are so many other possible interpretations of them. For instance, none of the Hebrews would have guessed that the “message” of the creation story in Genesis 1 would have been heard by the movers and stompers of our age as: “In the beginning God formed a big ball of raw material. On the sixth day He put humans on the Earth and said, 'I didn't quite finish the job. Have at it! I hate to see it go to waste. Build! Reshape it. Develop it into something.' “ Why, then, do we read this kind of interpretation back into the tradition?

Thoughtfully reconsidered, our Greek and Judaeo-Christian traditions, even our American pioneering tradition, may teach us a great deal about meeting the deeper issues of our age more resourcefully. We can learn in them of a more respectful way of being with nature and natural beings than we commonly display today. For example, The Odyssey, as full of conquest and an adversarial relation to nature as it is, can, nonetheless, teach us much about the shortcomings of mistaking power as residing in our own right arm. The Bible,

David Strong is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. He recently earned his Ph.D. from Stony Brook. He has essays forthcoming in the journal Research in Philosophy and Technology and in the volume Falling in Love With Wisdom.

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especially, has the power to offer alternatives to the currently reigning views of nature.

A fundamental issue of our age is whether or not we will come to terms with technology and its promise to provide a good life. Technology promises to make life good through the consumption of commodities, but this commodity-fueled happiness, although glamorously attractive, is flawed at its core. If we have an alternative understanding of what is good in life and of what makes us whole, we can willingly relinquish consumerism and may adopt ways of life more in harmony with the earth. The Bible, generally, and the Book of Job in particular, through poetic illumination of the goodness of creation and the possibility of wholeness, help us to envision this alternative way, thus enabling us to meet this issue of technology and to come to inhabit the earth in ways that make sense spiritually and ecologically.

I

Nowhere does the Bible teach what Albert Borgmann, in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, calls the promise of technology:

Technology promises to bring the forces of nature and culture under control, to liberate us from misery and toil, and to enrich our lives…. [More accurately], implied in the technological mode of taking up with the world there is a promise that this approach to reality will, by way of the domination of nature, yield liberation and enrichment.¹

If Borgmann's language of the “promise” of technology is correct, we can see that our culture has made an implicit covenant with technology. Cast into Bible-like terms, the covenant might read something like this: “If you dominate nature, you will live a free and prosperous life.” How? By becoming liberated from suffering and toil and by being provided with all the fruits of the earth. One need only consider the technological achievements of the last century or glance at a few advertisements to realize how plausible and attractive this promise seems. However, many people have serious reservations about this technologically-fueled view of freedom and happiness, and those reservations often arise because of the teachings of the Bible. There we are not told to consume in order to be happy, but we are admonished that we cannot serve both God and mammon.

Following the promise of technology, we seek the blessed life through items that are possessed and under our control. We have them at will. Yet the items most traditional religions point to are usually beyond the will, and much religious language focuses on the renunciation of control and on an openness to events that are beyond our control, that are more and other than we expected. Hence, religious language is the language of inspiration, insight, healing of spirit, gift,

¹ Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 36.

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creation, blessing, miracle, and grace. In contrast, the language of commodities is that of bargain, possession, and fingertip control. The only trait that the promise and goods of technology shares with the promise and blessings of the Bible is people's devotion to them as ways of life.

Still, one may wonder if the Judaeo-Christian tradition is too other-worldly to provide a coherent view of our relation to the earth. Taken literally, nothing seems more unnatural, more earth-denying, than miracles or God's intervention in history. It may seem that the Judaeo-Christian tradition, trying to avoid idolatry, deliberately downplays the importance of “things.” To the contrary, the Book of Job gives us an opportunity to see how important things (and in Job it is “wild things”) are in at least one strand of the biblical tradition.

II

The Book of Job is better thought of as a meditation on the character of divine power rather than as a meditation on divine justice or as an attempt to justify God. Divine power is assumed to be manifested as the exercise of coercive power, meaning the ability to manipulate, control and, generally, overpower nature and natural beings. God seems to be able to coerce anything at will, when, as it turns out, power experienced as genuinely divine is found from an entirely unsuspected direction.

In the prologue and epilogue of the Book of Job, written in a mythological style, God's power is made out to be the exercise of this coercive power overpowering creation. God grants permission to Satan to bring on calamity and to touch the body of Job; God restores Job's body, brings him new children, and doubles his wealth. Both Job and his friends assume God exercises this kind of power over creation. Because God is in control, both the good and the evil, the rewards and the punishments, that come to humans are justly deserved by them. The righteous and good prosper, while the wicked are punished and perish. Were not such the order of the creation, something would be wrong with God in terms either of goodness or of the power to control.

Job's friends read Job's condition through their theory of God and the universe. Since Job is being punished and is perishing, great wickedness must have occurred before. More deeply, the Book of Job shows the friends to be worried about themselves. Job's affliction presents them with a possibility of human existence to which they are vulnerable, one they wish to avoid, and they do so by setting Job apart. There must be something wrong with him.²

At first, Job, too, tries to avoid any new way of being by rationalizing the first calamity that befalls him. But the second calamity will not

² For my reading of the Book of Job, I'm indebted to Henry Bugbee and John Lawry, my teachers at the University of Montana. I am also indebted to Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” Waiting for God (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), pp. 117-136.

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allow him to stand at a safe distance, as his friends do. Suffering now touches his body inescapably as affliction, rendering this possibility of being undeniable for him. Job, who maintains and defends his integrity, cannot deny this possibility of a way of being that should be impossible within the framework of a good God exerting overpowering control of creation. The greatness of Job is his unwillingness to accept a false answer. Yet, even in these impossible conditions, he still believes that an answer is possible, and it is only this possibility that keeps him alive.

Somehow, the revelation of the voice out of the whirlwind makes all the difference to Job. The character of this difference needs careful analysis. First, according to the text, Job repents of having “uttered what I did not understand” (Job 42:3). The text, thus, implies he understood something through direct acquaintance, rather than understanding merely in conformity with the wisdom of the tradition. Secondly, Job has been healed, although the meaning of that healing remains a question. Merely having his sores removed and recovering his wealth would not fully heal Job, a man whose integrity has been challenged. To the contrary, these restorations are in fact unnecessary for a true healing of Job's deepest condition. So, thirdly, if a true healing takes place, it does so because Job is somehow answered. His friends recognize his having been healed and having been answered. Finally, whatever answer Job finds in the revelation, it is certainly not from an expected direction, not from a God exerting absolute control, explaining (and justifying) to Job why he suffers.

If this is good drama, that is, if a warrant for Job's affirmation and healing is generated in what comes to pass in the Book of Job, then there must be something that occurs in the revelation that answers a person of Job's integrity in his condition. It seems unintelligible that such a person could be healed through an overwhelming display of coercive power. Humiliation is not what heals Job; that would only compound his affliction. We need, then, to attend closely to the address to Job out of the whirlwind. This speech begins by invoking creation, and it remains throughout a kind of creation story. We notice, surprisingly, that the view of creation expressed in this revelatory speech is not anthropocentric:

Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the Thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life… ? (Job 38:25-26).

Neither is sentient life the center of creation. “Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?” (Job 38:41). In fact, this is not even a biocentric creation. “Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?” (Job 38:37-38). It would be more accurate to say that this is a world without center, where things are as they are without reason.

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The ostrich's wings flap wildly, though its pinions lack plumage. For it leaves its eggs to the earth, and lets them be warmed on the ground, forgetting that a foot may crush them, and that a wild animal may trample them. It deals cruelly with its young, as if it were not its own; though its labor should be in vain, yet it has no fear … (Job 39:13-16).

If this is a creation where intention is absent, it could not be, then, an order that aims at touching Job with affliction. The coercive, heedless force of nature is indeed heedless. Fine, one may rejoin. The world may be this way, but only at the price of its divine or religious character. The problem of evil is resolved through a dissolution of its premises. Indeed, we may expect Job to take just such a position. But such resignation on the part of Job would preclude the possibility of remaining open to what can speak to his condition. At the same moment that these negating steps are carried out in the revelation, something unexpected is coming to be. We see in fact that the rain, which falls on the desolate ground, also makes “the bud of the tender herb to spring forth” (Job 38:27-KJV). Here we are not presented with a biocentric universe, but with poetry. The effect of this line is not unlike that of a passage near the ending of James Welch's novel Winter in the Blood, in which, after a long, dry summer in the enormous distances of the Montana plains, a miserable, estranged, and resigned Indian finds a healing touch in a rainstorm, and, thereby, a determination to live:

Some people, I thought, will never know how pleasant it is to be distant in a clean rain, the driving rain of a summer storm. It's not like you'd expect, nothing like you'd expect.³

Similarly, we are not simply left with the characterization of the ostrich suggesting the nonsense of creation. “When it spreads its plumes aloft, it laughs at the horse and the rider” (Job 39:18). Things have a dignity that calls on us to behold them: “Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3).

The vision of Job is essentially a vision of wilderness and wild things: “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?” (Job 39:26-27). Wild country and wild things are what they are, quite apart from human assistance. In a culture where things are viewed as needing to be reshaped, such character is seen either as so much raw material or worthless. “What good is it?” “I hate to see it go to waste.” And yet the fresh vision of things in their created wildness, in their being what they are, quite apart from both being for us or being assisted by us, is what, I take it, heals Job. What is this fresh vision of things stripped of their everydayness?

Allowing creatures to be, not being over them, is the distance from which creatures appear and are acknowledged in their own right in Job's vision. Yet to say this is not yet to enact it. The insights Job comes

³ James Welch, Winter in the Blood (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 172.

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to are known neither by theoretical speculation nor by observation and the method of induction. These are insights that Job comes to; he could not have grasped them at first because he lacks both the preparation that readies him and the experience that funds these insights. Accordingly, Job's friends may not have heard the voice from the whirlwind at all, though they may well have registered its significance in the eyes and face of Job. It follows that the reader is in this position as well. We may not be ready for or have had the kind of experience that would yield the disclosures presented to Job by the voice from the whirlwind. Certainly, the answer is not arrived at by either a careful analysis of the text alone or by following some proper procedure. Rather, the revelation and its healing effect on Job are set forth as something to be realized in experience through living the questions themselves. For instance, what about Leviathan and Behemoth, those strange monsters? Why are they included in the whirlwind's revelation? What effect do they have on the healing of Job?

Once, on a hike, I startled a massive bull moose in a small meadow. After the initial jump, which alerted me to his presence, his head swung around, with what I imagined was anger and possibly contempt, to eye this undersized creature who had surprised him. “Behemoth” leaped to my mind. I was ready to drop my pack and run for safety, yet I found myself overtaken with awe and fascination. Not the fearful, but the beautiful, held me there. Delicate yellow pollen dusted lightly the gleaming black hair of his powerful shoulders and back.

Such an experience may transport us to a different place and let us know all is well. Job is healed, I believe, because he is restored to the goodness of creation, a sense of goodness resonant with the Genesis 1 creation story. He is restored to this sense of creation through a vision of wild things in their own right. Divine power here is not the exercise of coercive power over creation. The mightiness of divine power is seen by what it can do in a spiritual way: healing this person who is suffering affliction. This power is known not by theoretical belief, but by direct acquaintance.

The sense of being found in Job is a staying with creation and creatures. In fact, it is the renewing and restoration of the with-relation, where divine power is most manifest. Wild things in Job have re-creating powers. Stripped of their everydayness, they stand out in their createdness, their re-created goodness. They are discovered in their own right as independent, wild, wondrous, and, as wild, not susceptible to possession. In their re-created presence, they reach Job in a way he can acknowledge as good, in a way that recreates him, too. Through his response to the re-creating powers of wild things, Job finds himself created again and made whole. It is through the re-creating address of wild things that Job finds his way into being again, or, perhaps, for the first time. The sense of being here is a sense of restored creation, restored for both creatures and self.

It is important to see that the re-creating powers of things do not play the only role in Job's enlightenment. Adversity plays an essential

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role, too. Affliction makes him confront in an undeniable way possibilities of being with which he would otherwise be too patient, as he was in the prologue. In this way, affliction forces the assumptions of his thinking to come forward and be; challenged. Ultimately, it empties and opens him to creation. Affliction readies him to hear the re-creating address of wild things.

III

How can this sense of restored wholeness and restored creation, this healing, inform our existence in today's world? Before headway can be made here, we must be sure that we have come to terms with another, earlier way that the wild land and wild things appealed to many of our ancestors. The wild country of the American West confronted the pioneers as an adversary to be struggled with and overcome. Usually, we view the pioneers' relationship to the land as consistent with the domination of nature in our time. Indeed, theirs was a time when the wild land was brought under control and tamed. So, just as it is easy to blame our attitudes toward nature on the Bible, so, too, it is easy to blame them on the pioneers. However, the conquest of nature at this early time is very different than the domination of nature in the twentieth century.⁴ As we will see later, this difference is most tellingly true with regard to the loss in our century of an awareness of the divine, recreating powers of things. Wild things and the wild land still had these re-creating powers for the pioneers, even when they did not formally understand this to be the character of divine power. They, nonetheless, discovered the goodness of creation, a renewal that kept pioneering alive and defined, as genuine pioneers, those who were capable of participating in it.

The novelist-historian Marie Sandoz's account of her pioneering father in Old Jules exemplifies the most profound attraction of the wild country. What we find in her narrative account is not merely a record of actions, but a portrayal of a man whose ambivalence, impetuousness, and violence might have time and again carried him away back to Zurich, or on to Canada, Mexico, or South America had not the land itself (he had no religious convictions) claimed him, and renewed and deepened its claim upon him after each estrangement:

But the land straight ahead, The Flats, as the Hunter cook called it, was absolutely bare, without a house, even a tree-a faint yellow-green that broke here and there into shifting aspects of small shimmering lakes, rudimentary mirages. There, close enough to the river for game and wood, on the hard land that must be black and fertile, where corn and fruit trees would surely grow, Jules saw his house and around him a community of countrymen and other home seekers, refugees from oppression and poverty, intermingled in peace and contentment. There would grow up a place of orderliness, with sturdy women and strong children to swing the hayfork and the hoe.⁵

⁴ Borgmann, pp. 182-185.
⁵ Marie Sandoz, Old Jules (New York: Hastings House, 1955), p. 19.

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Yet even within a few days he gets discouraged:

Suddenly he flung the dark liquid and cup from him, and piled his plough, his axe, and his spade into the wagon. In the morning he would go back, not to Estelle and Knox county, to Neuchatel and to Zurich… .⁶

Still renewal occurs that very night. A wagon with a husband and a pregnant wife emerges from the shadows. Jules, who was trained as a doctor in Switzerland, is called upon by the circumstances to deliver the baby. In a later incident, Jules himself, like Job, suffers calamity. As his two friends pull him to the top of a sixty foot well, which he just finished digging, the rope breaks and his foot is crushed in the fall. Eighteen days later, as the young Dr. Walter Reed prepared to amputate the foot, the nearly unconscious Jules came alive:

His gaunt cheeks flushed a violent red under his beard, his bloodshot eyes glittering. “You cut off my foot, doctor, and I shoot you so dead you stink before you hit the ground.”⁷

Against his better medical judgment, Reed did not amputate. Five months later, returning to the site of his homestead, Jules thought of himself as a “miserable cripple.” His spirit broken for pioneering, he was unwilling even to go back to Europe:

Even an animal hid from its kind when injured…. He did not see the brilliant web of prairie sun, the tinge of green spreading over the buffalo-grassed hills, the antelope bounding away from the trail, to stop curiously on a knoll when there was no pursuit…. There was nothing but his clumpy foot…. Suddenly a little valley opened before them, with a long, thin strip of sod stretching over the prairie; a bug-like speck that was a team with a ploughman creeping along the edge. Jules saw that and sat up.⁸

Here we see the land bringing Jules back to life. A few pages later, relating a reunion with his brother, Sandoz writes, “And the world became a good place once more, even for a man with a bad ankle.”⁹ This good world and his affirmation of it echoes the Genesis 1 creation story. So, here we see the kinship of Jules with Job, both of whom suffer and yet regain a sense of the goodness of things. Though he had periods of estrangement, Jules never lost this faith in land to the very end. As a lifelong acquaintance said of him:

There was something of the prophet in him, a prophet who remains to make his words deed. He is rooted in a reality that will stand when the war and its hysteria are gone, a sort of Moses working the soil of his promised land.¹⁰

However, this does not mean he was always respectful of others or other things. Often he could be quarrelsome and ruthless with others,

⁶ Ibid., p. 22.
⁷ Ibid., p. 43.
⁸ Ibid., p. 57.
⁹ Ibid., p. 61.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 406.

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especially women, and cruel to his family. His egotism was unsurpassable. Yet, in old age, even his family members do win acknowledgment in small but telling ways:

He dropped his hand on Mary's rounded shoulder, stooping under the weight of hoe and fork. “The trees look fine, plums ripening on rows a quarter mile long. A couple of years and we'll have one of the finest plum and cherry orchards in the state,” Jules predicted. And now, at last he said we.¹¹

What has been won through here is a kind of American Odyssey. Through an encounter with adversity and adversarial nature a selftranscendence and redefinition of things takes place. The land, other things, and other people are met in ways that steadily deepen the relationships. They change from adversaries to partners, to beings with dignity and worth welcoming in their own right.

Yet this redefinition and self-transcendence does not come easily. It comes about with struggle and hardship, and through conditions of necessity that exact from one what one would not give them otherwise. The land leaves its hard mark upon them. As another character in Old Jules says:

One can go into the wild country and make it tame, but, like a coat and a cap he can never take off, he must always carry the look of the land as it was. He can drive the plough through the nigger wool, make fields and roads go every way, build him a fine house and wear the stiff collar, and yet he will always look like the grass where the buffalo have eaten and smell of the new ground his feet have walked on.¹²

One must not read these lines romantically but closer to what war means for Heraclitus. Some died. Some went insane. Others left embittered and with animosity toward old friends. Some became heroes.

IV

In today's world, unlike that of Job's, we have medical, fire, and earthquake insurance. If our skin breaks out with sores, we expect a physician to help. Expecting a further answer from God seems similar to expecting an answer from astrology. A foot and ankle injury may call for an ambulance, but possibly not much of the virtue of endurance. We have, indeed, at least for the present time, been relieved by science and technology of many of the harsh conditions of life, and I, for one, am thankful for this change in the human condition. However, without the struggle with these threatening conditions of human existence, without the desolate, looming, wild land, for instance, we seem to have lost touch with the possibility of healing and renewal in a profound spiritual sense. Misery and toil were good for the full maturing of human beings in past ages. In this age, what seems to have disappeared

¹¹ Ibid., p. 388.
¹² Ibid., p. 375.

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is the reliance on any powers other than human ones in order to be healed. Should we seek out and live with these conditions in the present so that divine power can again flourish? Even if such a return were possible, it would not be intelligible or desirable.

In the prevailing technological culture, what we do not seem to have discovered in a consequential way is the manifestation of divine power in any alternative mode. Most people look forward to-not many turn down-a high and rising standard of living. More money means more commodities. The acquisition of more commodities means we will fill our time, fill our human condition, with objects that are designed just for us and that are completely under our control. So, neither in coming to terms with frustrating, harsh conditions nor in seeking to live a good life does the divine power disclosed in the Book of Job play an important role in consumer life.

That is not to suggest that this state of affairs is as it ought to be. For all its thrills, frills, and glamour, consumption as a way of life seems to evoke only the more superficial qualities of our humanity and leave us with voracious, restless, insatiable appetites. Such a life is bound, now and then, to lose its shiny appeal and show its emptiness. Dread in the face of this nothingness calls for a different way to be with our technology. We stand in need of a different re-creation, healing, and renewal than the one we receive from modern medicine. In spite of all our excitement we have become disengaged. We have become disengaged from things, isolated from others, and lead unexamined lives. Healing this with-relation is where Job and other works in the tradition have much to offer us.

V

How can this healing take place in our time and in a way appropriate to the benign changes in the human condition? Where can we know of the re-creating powers of things by direct acquaintance and not just what we have overheard from the tradition? Job is healed of his affliction by a vision of wild things and a wild creation. On this side of the Enlightenment, we seem to need a spiritual healing without having to pass through the fires of affliction and genuine suffering.

In our age, nearly everything we confront on a daily basis is either already under control or it is viewed as something to bring under control and to be made use of. In direct opposition to this way of seeing, interpreting, and taking up with things are the creation stories of the Bible and the vision of wild creation in Job. Wild things in these passages do not need to be rearranged, “developed,” or made use of before they reach the fullness of their being. Wild things in these passages are already as good as they can be, on their own. Recognizing them in their own right, pausing and lingering unsetfconsciously before them, makes one receptive to a fresh and refreshing vision of our existence.

Such a transcendent (but not nonmaterial) encounter with wilder-

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ness and wild things can happen in our time, too, because we have voluntarily not brought everything under control, having for some time now protected from this unsettling, rearranging process, wild places in the form of legal wilderness areas, wildlife reserves, and national parks. The experience of the profound goodness of these things and places is found in the inspired and enthusiastic accounts of many people. Thoreau, for instance, speaks of such consummatory encounters with wild things as the tonic of wildness. We see such encounters as Thoreau greets sunrise, sunset, the first signs of spring, a balmy spring day or a delicious evening. It is manifest in wild things: midwinter pickerel, geese, owls, nighthawks, and even, paradoxically, the rooster's crow.

Yet there are other kinds of encounters with this tonic of wildness, this healing, restoring, refreshing, and invigorating quality of wild things. Often one cannot say exactly where one has become reacquainted with animating nature or the tonic of wildness in a consummatory way. Hikers sometimes carry it out of the wild like the yellow pollen fallen on the back of the moose. Colin Fletcher tells of arriving at the end of a road and feeling he had gone as far as someone could go:

So I stood there looking out beyond the edge of the world. Except for a thick wall, I am no longer sure what I saw, but I know it was wild, wild impossible country…. All at once, without warning, two men emerged from that impossible country. They carried packs on their backs, and they were weatherbeaten and distilled to bone and muscle. But what I remember best of all is that they were happy and whole. Whole and secure and content… . I talked to them briefly in considerable awe…. Then they walked away and I was left, still awestruck, looking out once more in the huge black mysterious wilderness. The awe I felt that day still hangs in memory. But my present self dismisses it. I know better. Many times in recent years I have emerged from wild country, happy and whole and secure and content, and I have found myself face to face with astonished people who obviously felt they were at the edge of the world.¹³

What do we make of such experiences? Thoreau sees that such encounters and an openness to such encounters are missing in those around him who are so busy building America, building the technological society. This is why much of his writing in Walden is criticism directed against this endless, pointless building. Such pointlessness, he thinks, makes life vacuous and restless. On the other hand, his walks to the “holy land” are the awakening keynotes in his life, which harmonize everything for him. They are momentous events, which enable him to affirm his life in a way that would conform to Nietzsche's standard of the eternal return of the same. After speaking of such an encounter mythologically as visiting a noble family, Thoreau writes, “If it were not for families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.”¹⁴

¹³ Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 5.
¹⁴ Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bede (New York: Penguin, 1975), p. 323.

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The tonic of wildness keeps him where he is in Concord, in life. Without it, the passage suggests, he would report the “meanness of life to the world”¹⁵ and move out of it. Just as significant, it keeps him from leaving this local, particular place with a proper name.

The tonic of wildness serves both as foundation and as keystone for the building of the life Thoreau sees himself constructing. Unlike the building of his neighbors (who are not willing a world worth living in), this building has in view dwelling, living well in the here and now, inhabiting earth. What difference does it make? The appetite driven rationality of the technological existence keeps us on the go without ever getting anywhere. Wildness can bring us to a pause. It can enable us to affirm life. As a consequence, it teaches us to affirm life in the here and now, to make room for, and to be on the alert for, the experience of this tonic.

Through an understanding of what is good in life, what is worth living for, and what won't play us false, we are enabled willingly to give over consumerism as a way of life, and we are persuaded to adopt gentler and more compassionate attitudes and ways toward the Earth and all its inhabitants. Since commodity production is no longer held as ultimate, the quality of our lives and the quality of the environment will not be seen in conflict with one another as they are now. The dissolution of this conflict will make the most significant gains for coming to inhabit the earth in a way that is at peace with it. Moreover, having a more compassionate attitude and simpler ways will help the cause of an altruistic regard for nature and natural beings where such altruism is called for, that is, when there is genuine conflict between natural beings and our own well being.

Wilderness areas, wild places, and wild things seem to me to be rich metaphors for what we need in our time, a time which, in its systematic effort to get everything under control, threatens to exclude them altogether. We need things to counter our pointless, always overtaking, rushing about. We need a cynosure around which even the heavens turn. We need room in our lives for sacred places where and sacred times when we learn to be receptive of that which overtakes from behind, healing, enlivening, harmonizing, and enlightening us. “That man that does not believe each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.”¹⁶ Not the Bible alone, but the Bible surely does, through its poetic illumination of goodness, the goodness of creation, and the possibility of a good world, yield insight into the wildness that preserves the world.

¹⁵ “Walden,” The Portable Thoreau, p. 344.
¹⁶ “Walden,” The Portable Thoreau, p. 343.