While Calvin and Hobbes no longer grace our comic page, fear not, Bill Watterson's wisdom will continue to be proclaimed from this pulpit. Calvin says to Hobbes, "Getting is better than having. When you get something, it's new and exciting. When you have something, you take it for granted and it’s boring."
Hobbes: "But everything you get turns into something you have."
Calvin: "That's why you always need to get new things."
Hobbes: "I feel like I'm in some stockholder's dream."
Calvin: "'Waste and want.' That's my motto."
It's Earth Day again - when we piously parade our Earth Day credentials - like the banner over Interstate 490 which urges us to "Save our forests; recycle your files." Good, but would that it were so simple. Earth Day has become a rather hum-drum affair in which we say, "I'm more environmental than thou," and go about our business as usual. Seldom do we ask the fundamental questions it poses.
For example, is it true that Nature and Civilization make the ultimate odd couple? It would seem so. That question reminded me of a poem by a minister friend, the late John Wood, "On Owning the Earth or Parts Thereof."
"Who can own a sunset or the view from the top of a hill?
Where is the deed to the wind, or the copyright on the song of a bird?
Ownership? It was all here - the sun, the song, the hills, the wind. We came!
And the marks of our coming are upon the land - giver, taker, intruder, helper, destroyer, appreciator, lover, pretender.
The wind chuckles among the hills at the pretense of our ownership."
I thought of these words during my Thursday morning power-walk past the George Eastman House on East Avenue. A large beech tree is being uprooted and transplanted to another site so the front lawn can be restored to its original look. But a funny thing happened - the tree's root system proved too much for the equipment, so the project has been postponed - an expensive, but intriguing, example of Nature talking back to Civilization.
Also last week I read a letter to the editor attacking an editorial on the preservation of green spaces in the suburbs. He argued that if the people would rather have shopping malls and office parks instead of farmland, they ought to have them. If the people want it that way, that's the way it should be. This is a democracy. We don't need tree-huggers who would violate the will of the people. Another case of Nature doing battle with Civilization - and losing.
These experiences set me thinking. Getting something - like a shopping mall or office park, which presumably produce jobs and tax dollars - as Calvin said, is better than having something already - like some green space which is not really pulling its own weight in the economy. And that is evidently the way we want it. And usually, though not always - progress wins. There are times I agree with Ogden Nash that "Progress was all right once, but it went on too long."
Poet Wendell Berry wrote that "our people are rushing from one expensive and dangerous fix to another, from drugs to war to useless merchandise to various commercial thrills...our corporate pushers are addicted to our addictions."
Addictions. One of our addictions is to bigness. President Clinton wants to "grow" the economy - an interesting use of the intransitive verb. Bob Dole said he wasn't "growing" it fast enough. Alan Greenspan thinks he's "growing" it a little too quickly. But no one disputes the need to "grow" it. After all, bigger is better, isn't it? And isn't faster finer? And isn't more merrier? Don't we all want to be able to build bigger and better widgets faster and more often?
That is the internal logic of our society. We are experiencing an acceleration of history and our foot is firmly on the gas peddle. It is exciting, but there's one problem - we don't know where we are going or why or what might happen along the way. We are caught up in a momentum from which it seems impossible to escape.
We are expending our lives in a remorseless ritual of getting and spending, wasting and wanting, growing and growing. Henry Ford II put it succinctly: "Minicars make miniprofits."
The economy is supposed to grow except, of course, the labor force. There, negative growth is good. CEO's to grow their earnings must grow the company in efficiency, productivity and profit - with fewer people. I find ingenious and ingenuous the argument that downsizing improves the company so it can grow and employ more people. And economic growth is also supposed to eliminate poverty, except that poverty is persistent - and when the welfare reform really kicks in - will go up. I must be missing something.
And world population grows relentlessly. Although the rate of growth has slowed down - we still add nearly 100 million people a year. Some economists like Julian Simon - the perennial optimist - believe the earth can handle still more people - despite the fact that one-fifth of the world's population lives in abject poverty, another fifth lives in affluence, and the gap between them is growing. His motto is grow along with me, the best is yet to be.
That view is echoed by my friend, George Will, who quoted the moderator of the 1992 United Nations population conference in Rio De Janeiro, arguing for more political influence in slowing population growth: "We have been the most successful species ever. We are now a species out of control."
Will wrote, "To which a healthy response is: Damn right, and we’re determined to stay that way....we are the most successful species because we resent control....The species is most successful - morally as well as materially - when resisting permeating of life by political regulation."
But this was the same George Will who not long ago said "the rights of man do not include a Buick," by which he defended the right of government to set mileage standards for cars - for our own good, since we do not act for our own good often enough. George cannot have it both ways. We do need to "interfere" in burgeoning population growth for our own good.
And the Pope continues to thwart, or try to thwart, international family planning efforts. The Roman Catholic Church finds artificial birth control a heavy-handed measure stifling growth - which is a human good. And the beloved Mother Theresa, who works with the wretched of the earth in the slums of Calcutta, still officially opposes birth control, including abortion. But the illegality of abortion, promoted both by Pope and the U.S. Congress, means that annually 10 to 12 million women worldwide will be condemned to unwanted child-bearing because they have no access to contraception and that some 200,000 women will die from septic abortions. What a tragedy that the Pope and Mother Theresa, championing the cause of the poor so effectively, promote practices that ultimately harm many of them. The growth mania is literally killing us
This bigger is better philosophy is hard on the earth. It denies that the earth has a limited carrying capacity. It assumes a technological fix for every problem. And it jeopardizes the earth's delicate capacity to sustain life.
If China were to be as wasteful and wanting as America, it would devastate the earth in terms of resource consumption and environmental pollution. And good planets are hard to find.
I find myself torn on the bigger is better issue. On the one hand I want the economy to grow so the stock market will boom so I can retire in relative comfort. I want a faster computer so these sermons will be cranked out with increasing speed, though I have not noticed that quality increases with speed, have you? And I want to live in a big house to accommodate all these things I have accumulated over the years. But is bigger really better in terms of the quality of our religious living? Or does it indeed impede that quality?
Henry David Thoreau asked the questions that still empty the room. "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? ....We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will lead through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
We need to change the metaphor, from bigger is better, to recognize that religiously we are part of an interdependent web of existence. That is the so-called Seventh Principle of our Unitarian Universalist Covenant. I think it is virtually unique in the religious world to celebrate our integral connection with an earth over which we are not lords, but in which we hold citizenship.
The web is, I think, a happy metaphor. It recognizes in the words of Sierra Club founder John Muir, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." The web is a thing of beauty, it recognizes that life is a delicate blessing - tough only in that we all contribute to its strength. The web sustains us and we help sustain the web - in the words of Chief Seattle, "What we do to the web we do to ourselves."
I know that what I have been saying is counter-intuitive - that is, it simply seems that every human enterprise should grow - bigger is better. I know the contradictions in my own life style - that I am imprisoned by things to a disturbing degree.
How may I escape the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth; how can I learn to treat earth as a replenishing garden and not as a mine from which to extract riches for my temporary enjoyment. How can I respond to the charge of biologist Rene Dubos? "We behave as if we were the last generation to inhabit the earth."
Here and now, I can only raise the questions: try to more fully align my life with the interdependent web; try to follow the teachings of Buddhist economics which urges us to "obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption."
Poet Wendell Berry warns us of our failure to heed this advice in his poem, "Let Us Pledge Allegiance."
"Let us pledge allegiance to the flag
and to the national sacrifice areas
for which it stands, garbage dumps
and empty holes, sold out for a higher
spire on the rich church, the safety
of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood
of the stock market. Let us feast
today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us
gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming
the earth for our greater joy in Heaven,
that fair Vacationland. Let us wander forever
in the labyrinths of our self-esteem.
Let us evolve forever toward the higher
consciousness of the machine.
The spool of our engine-driven fate
unwinds, our history now outspeeding
thought, and the heart is a beatable tool."
"The heart is a beatable tool." Our world is out of control in its fixation with quantity - bigger is better - whether it be the gross national product - or the population.
In our obeisance to size and speed, we forget what it is that makes for meaningful living - a sense of being part of the earth - an opportunity to live gently on its surface, to be frugal in our use of its resources, to be humble before the miracle of life itself - which we did not create.
Have our hearts so succumbed to the temptations of wanting and wasting that it has become merely a tool in the service of stockpiling things and people at the expense of our souls?
In the wise words of a Kenyan proverb, "Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was lent to you by your children."
Poet Denise Levertov says it well:
"But we have only begun to love the earth.
We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life
How could we tire of hope? -- So much is in bud.
How can desire fail? We have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.
Surely our river cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet -
There is too much broken that must be mended,
Too much hurt that we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture,
so much in bud."
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