Our World is Burning

We need to reconsider what is important.

Parts of California are burning down again. This is nothing new, and, as a certain group of people is interested to point out, would happen to some extent regardless of whether we’d been pumping exponentially greater quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for the last few centuries. But there is no serious argument to be made that the severity and frequency of disasters like wildfires and hurricanes is not made worse by climate change, and that we can barely imagine how bad things will eventually become. It’s heartening to see that the media seems no longer capable of discussing natural disasters outside the essential context of climate change, but they and everyone else in public service desperately need to take the next step: to implicate capitalism as the ultimate cause of these disasters and indeed virtually all the other ills of this planet.

These disasters will grow ever more frequent and severe until this ultimate cause is recognized and eliminated. Even the more proximate solution to the specific problem of climate change—the rapid replacement of our fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable alternatives—is itself made impossible by the acquisitiveness inherent to capitalism, the inability of companies to surrender their profitability even for the sake of their own long-term interests. Because, ultimately, these disasters are caused by a confusion about what’s important. We are all sleepwalking into an absolutely nightmarish future because we believe there is no alternative to our current way of life and the values of individual power and wealth around which it is organized. We can watch movies and read books about people who aspire to other things—freedom, honor, truth, love—but we are taught that those values are “unrealistic,” unsuitable to our benighted world in which we have no choice (we are told) but to fight in a war of all against all for the highest prize of our own survival. We are somehow taught this in the same breath, at least in the United States, as we’re taught to worship Jesus Christ, which is ironic given that he famously said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, that we ought to sell all our possessions and follow him, and that we needn’t worry about ourselves because God, who knows even all the hairs on our head, will not let us come to harm. Nearly no one, not even those who call themselves Christians, can imagine how these teachings could be anything other than hyperbole, how they could be actual advice about how to live. We can’t even imagine it, because it is fundamentally incompatible with what we have been taught is valuable, namely our exclusively individual well being.

But these are indeed some of the truths we need to realize, and I hope it’s clear that nothing I’m talking about is specific to Christianity. All of it flows from the deeper truth that is expressed in the mystical tradition of every major religion, that divinity and creation are one, that each of us is the manifestation of God. We already have, already are, everything we need. And what would be the alternative anyway? A ceaseless, anxious accumulation, and then death. Money, possessions, power, even our individual lives—none of this matters in and of itself. The value of the finite is to be the manifestation of the infinite; divorced from the infinite, the finite is ephemeral and weightless. We must learn to base our values on a fuller understanding of what we really are, and what our universe really is. So long as we continue to believe that we are separate beings, afloat in a universe of separate beings, we will believe that value is ultimately to be found in self-preservation and empowerment, we will continue to accumulate limitlessly, and we will eventually be consumed by disasters of our own making. Ironically, then, even our own instinct for self-empowerment must point beyond this limited understanding of ourselves to the real source of value in our existence: the realization of our own shared divinity, and that of the entire world. Until we come to this realization, our world will continue to burn.