Sunflowers and Silos: Reconciling with the Natural World

I highly recommend Sir Roger Scruton's How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.

From The European Conservative

By Veronica Lademan

The environmentalist’s claim that man is nature’s enemy undermines any reason to steward it in the first place. To care for something, one must love it; one must feel that it belongs to them and them to it.

Activists claim that we are in the midst of a climate crisis. It is difficult to parse out exactly what this means, but it has nonetheless laid claim to the imaginations of countless young people on the Left, many of whom have thrown themselves into the climate cause with religious fervor. The world is ending, they say, and it is because of human filth and vice that our doom is all but sealed. It is something akin to the doctrine of original sin. But what is perhaps most striking about this movement to save nature from the greedy hand of the rapacious capitalists is that the advocates themselves inculcate a sense of alienation and otherness from the natural world. They claim that man does not belong here and sets him up as an enemy of the natural world, placing him outside the ebb and flow of creation. Yet this stance affirms the very reasoning that justifies their opponents indifference to creation and the rejection of the responsibility to steward it.

The bizarre forms of activist rebellion that have increasingly made themselves felt in our cities and communities reveal this odd sentiment. Recently, young activists targeted Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, splashing a large can of tomato soup before gluing their hands to the wall in protest. In the midst of their defiant gesture, one of the young activists asked, “What is worth more, art or life?” It is not clear how these are diametrically opposed to one another. In fact, it seems that quite the opposite may be true. Art is an expression of man’s belonging in the created world, of his unique role of seeing and understanding nature around him, an outpouring of human creativity that is meant to convey some unspeakable truth about the world around us. 

One would think that a devotee to nature would recognize the vital role that art, in any form, plays in the quest to preserve a sense of reverence for the created world. Art, in the simple act of rendering beauty in all its glorious ‘uselessness,’ as Oscar Wilde might have put it, challenges the dominant utilitarian notions that motivate the categorization of nature as purely a resource to satisfy human demands. Van Gogh’s painting was not just some stale copy of an object, but an imaginative transfiguration through which he entered into relation with the sunflowers. They were not simply things in reality, but in his human eyes, were seen and understood as something beyond mere material that could be manipulated by his will. He acted out the human peculiarity in nature of being the knower of the known and seeing it as beautiful. As Sir Roger Scruton notes, “to look on a thing as beautiful is to value it for what it is, not for what it does or the purposes it serves.”

Homeless in the World

Valuing a thing for what it is outside of its utility is often a foreign concept to modern man. In claiming ownership over reality, subjected to the limitless and infallible powers of reason, man set himself apart from creation. He became what Charles Taylor calls ‘the buffered self.’ Things outside himself no longer affected him. He withdrew into his mind and away from the created world. This laid out the pathway that in our times has led to man’s transformation from a creature who belongs in creation to a thing amongst things. 

This disintegration between man and creation challenges the sense of awe and wonder that renders natural beauty meaningful. Nature becomes merely an object of use, and man is granted the freedom and the ability to extract whatever is useful for his technological advancement. In The End of the Modern World, Romano Guardini reflects on the modern self-consciousness of unbridled will that rendered man master and nature slave: 

The technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts … as raw material to be hammered into useful shape … Technological man will remold the world; he sees his task as Promethean.

This self-perception has led to an alienation from nature. As we are its masters, we no longer can claim belonging in it. We are trapped in transcendent silos, overseeing the goings on of a world that exists for our bidding and benefit. This justifies the sense that nature can be consumed with no concern for its dignity. As creation is defined merely by the dictates of reason, man has the last say. 

The technological man is necessarily devoid of a sense of love and responsibility towards nature. He does not belong in it. The environmentalist agrees with this assessment and has set up his mission upon that premise. However, this is a counterproductive approach. In Green Philosophy, Scruton points out that the element of home and belonging is missing from the environmentalists’ message. They insist that man is vile, that his craftsmanship in creation is nothing more than a desecration. Those treasures of art which are meant to ground us as belonging in creation are mere delusions. Better to splatter them with soup and condemn the whole human project in the process. Their message appeals “to those for whom humanity is little better than a disease on the face of the earth.” 

To set up man as the enemy of all that is worth saving is to undermine any reason to save it in the first place. To care for something, one must love it; one must feel that it belongs to them and them to it. Home, writes Scruton again, “is the place that contains the one you love and need; it is the place you share, the place you defend … Oikophilia [love of home] is the source of our most generous and self-sacrificing gestures.” In other words, if they truly wish for man to reclaim his rightful place as steward, not master, of the earth, the environmentalists would do well to reawaken the sense that we are a part of nature. They ought to reignite the flame of love that would draw technological man from his alienation to re-enter into the world as a participant.

Why, then, does the modern activist insist on cultivating a spirit of oikophobia? They have framed their “goals and ideals against some cherished form of membership–against the home, the family, and the nation.” In other words, the activist is motivated by resentment and by the repudiation of the tradition that he deems responsible for the degradation of nature. It is not merely capitalistic greed or indulgent consumerism that fills the environmentalist with ire; it is the entire Western project, for which they blame all evils. In so doing, they join the ranks of the Left generally, declaring themselves freed from the arbitrary shackles of Western mores and oppressive expectations. 

This precludes the environmentalist from any sense of belonging. He must reject his heritage and everything it has given him, including, ironically enough, the recognition of nature itself. To cultivate a sense of belonging in the natural world, the human person has to admit that he does belong there.He must acknowledge the reality of his human nature that ties him to the created world. To do this would be to affirm the very heritage that environmentalist activists are so eager to tear down and reject. It would require that they submit themselves to the demands of reason, which according to their analysis is a mere imposition of Western tyranny. They would have to recognize, say, that one can only be a man or a woman and that we cannot choose which of these we are based on our whims.

Homeless within Ourselves

This paradox puts many environmentalists in an untenable position. Provided they also support the latest shibboleths on self-determined identities, as seems probable in our confused ‘intersectional’ culture which sees the struggle for ‘climate justice’ as identical to the struggle against ‘patriarchy’ and the gender binary, they are forced to maintain that all nature is sacred except human nature. That, as we know, must be considered infinitely malleable, as fluid as the will itself, at times even worthy of mutilation. This kind of environmentalist—and there is no shortage of them—inhabits the other side of the Promethean coin: he is the technological man who sees human nature as the thing to be exploited. He has alienated man from himself. This makes it impossible for him to reintegrate into the natural world. He is siloed twice over; from both exterior and interior nature. His oikophobia extends beyond the nation and his heritage; its tentacles have reached into his very center.  

In his encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis notes that the prevailing war against human nature precludes reconciliation with the natural world. “Thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.” It is necessary to accept and reacquaint ourselves with the laws of our own nature so as to be able to stand as members of nature ourselves. Without the recognition that our bodies are not slaves to our wills, it is incoherent for the environmentalist to demand that we treat nature with respect and reverence. There is no argument that can sustain the claim that while nature must be preserved and pristine, the human body can be abused and used to conform to raw will. If one is permissible, there is no limiting principle to prevent the other from falling into the category of permissible as well.

In waging warfare against human nature, the activist has cut himself off establishing any meaningful way of acting out his aims. As Scruton was fond of reminding us, man is motivated to make sacrifices for his place of belonging, where he is received as a cherished and valuable member. The activist who rejects the current culture, the heritage that gave it shape, and, even more drastically, his own nature as mere oppressive constructs leaves man homeless and isolated.

Nature and the Fulfillment of Man

It is ironic that the very Western tradition at whose doorstep the activists place the blame for our current environmental concerns is deeply grounded in the sense that man belongs in nature and plays a vital role in it. He is the sole creature who can be in the world and understand it; his intellect gives him the capacity to recognize order, and so elevate the natural world from a mere set of disparate things to a known and cohesive reality. Man can see and know that nature is beautiful and worth preserving. No other creature is capable of this.

But this discovery did not end in the mere appreciation of nature for its own sake. In the Christian West, nature was understood as God’s first book, which man could read to understand its creator. This draws him into what is called natural contemplation. Immersion in the created world reveals more deeply what is meaningful as such. As Jason Baxter notes, when man inhabits this role “the delight in the logos of things in the world through natural contemplation, the mind moves from a kind of admiration of things to gratitude directed towards the source of being.” Since the Christian conception placed knowledge of God as man’s highest aim, the natural world was made a necessary and integral part of the true fulfillment of man’s nature. 

In their revolutionary fervor, the environmentalists have cut themselves off from the very foundations that would give their mission meaning. In denying that man can participate in nature through his own nature, they have deprived him of the love that would move him to reclaim his place in the world and reestablish reverence for his environment. Western tradition, through both its implicit and explicit Christian principles, has long understood that man belongs in nature and nature belongs in man. It was this that Van Gogh conveyed in his simple painting of the sunflowers. Through his human faculties, he saw those flowers as beautiful. His acknowledgement reaffirmed that nature should be treasured because it is the place where we belong.