An excerpt of the essay that begins below appears in the August-September 2022 issue of The Catholic Worker. A longer version, titled “The Wild Places,” was first published in that publication’s June 1968 edition. The author, described by Wikipedia as “an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion,” died later that year. A second segment will be reprinted here at a later date. — MCM
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Our frontier mythology
Man is a creature of ambiguity. His salvation and his sanity depend on his ability to harmonize the deep conflicts in his thought, his emotions, his personal mythology. Honesty and authenticity do not depend on complete freedom from contradictions — such freedom is impossible — but on recognizing our self-contradictions, and not masking them with bad faith. The conflicts in individuals are not entirely of their own making. On the contrary, many of them are imposed, ready made, by an ambivalent culture.
This poses a very special problem, because he who accepts the ambiguities of his culture without protest and without criticism is rewarded with a sense of security and moral justification. A certain kind of unanimity satisfies our emotions, and easily substitutes for truth. We are content to think like the others, and in order to protect our common psychic security, we readily become blind to the contradictions — or even the lies — that we have all decided to accept as plain truth.
Our frontier mythology has grown in power even as we have ceased to be a frontier or even a rural people. The pioneer, the frontier culture hero, is a product of the wilderness. But at the same time he is a destroyer of the wilderness. His success as pioneer depends on his ability to fight the wilderness and win. Victory consists in reducing the wilderness to something else, a farm, a village, a road, a canal, a railway, a mine, a factory, a city – and finally an urban nation.
We all proclaim our love and respect for wild nature, and in the same breath we confess our firm attachment to values which inexorably demand the destruction of the last remnant of wilderness. But when people like Rachel Carson try to suggest that our capacity to poison the nature around us is some indication of a sickness in ourselves, we dismiss them as fanatics.
Now one of the interesting things about this ambivalence toward nature is that it is rooted in our Biblical tradition. There is a certain popular, superficial and one-sided Christian worldliness that is, in its hidden implications, profoundly destructive of nature and of God’s creation, even while it claims to love and extol them. The elementary Christian duty of the Puritan settler was to attack the forest with an axe and to keep a gun handy in order to exterminate Indians and wild beasts, should they put in an appearance. The work of combating, reducing, destroying and transforming the wilderness was purely and simply God’s work.
The Puritan, and after him the pioneer, had an opportunity to prove his worth — or indeed his salvation and election — by the single-minded zeal with which he carried on this obsessive crusade against wilderness. His reward was prosperity, real estate, money and ultimately the peaceful “order” of civil and urban life.
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TO BE CONTINUED