To put it bluntly Edward O. Wilson is one of my heroes. To my mind he looks at the world with a clear eye, but never a jaundiced one. He loves our world and he calls us to look at how we relate to it. Also he’s a pretty good writer. One of his really important books, to my mind, is Biophilia. Near the end of it he writes:
(A) healthful environment, the warmth of kinship, right-sounding moral strictures, sure-bet economic gain, and a stirring of nostalgia and sentiment are the chief components of the surface ethic. Together they are enough to make a compelling case to most people most of the time for the preservation of organic diversity.
But this not nearly enough: every pause, every species allowed to go extinct, is a slide down the ratchet, and irreversible loss for all. It is time to invent moral reasoning of a new and more powerful kind, to look to the very roots of motivation and understand why, in what circumstances and on which occasions, we cherish and protect life.
The elements from which a deep conservation ethic might be constructed include the impulses and biased forms of learning loosely classified as biophilia. Ranging from awe of the serpent to the idealization of the savanna and the hunter’s mystique, and undoubtedly including others yet to be explored, they are the poles toward which the developing mind most comfortably moves. And as the mind moves, picking its way through the vast number of choices made during a lifetime, it grows into a form true to its long, unique evolutionary history.
Sets me to thinking. I feel deeply that any theological reflection today not oriented to the realities of the world within which we live, that is the natural world, the planet, is a foolish waste of air.
In this regard I’m constantly struck how the Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes, an attempt at describing what the larger majority of UUs find meaningful has a single metaphor. And that metaphor forced itself into the statement from the floor of a General Assembly. After various high minded assertions, the last, what could be seen as the anchor for them all, comes a call of “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
It’s been a while since those Principles were written, and unlike creeds, they need to be updated if they’re going to be descriptive rather than like a creed, proscriptive. Right now the Unitarian Universalist community is considering newer statements. I think this last line about the web reflects a visceral, an intuitive response to that observation made by Professor Wilson. It would be a tragedy if wording very similar is not contained in any new statement of Principles.
That image of a web that includes us all is the call from the depths of our hearts to a deepest conservation, it is the call of the world itself…
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In