Forest Poetry

With the collapse of tradition, two different worldviews have taken its place: scientific materialism, and religious superstition. Both of these positions are equally modern, although it is the adherents of the former that explicitly claim to be so, while those of the latter claim to uphold traditional ideas, although their ideas lack proper metaphysical understanding.

A good example of these two worldviews can be found in the reaction to the earthquake in Haiti, particularly the controversy surrounding the claim made by some adherents of the superstitious worldview that the earthquake was divine retribution for sinful conduct (Pat Robertson has been the most prominent to make this claim). The adherents of scientific materialism naturally reject this idea, although their explanation of the phenomenon is also unsatisfactory.

The situation in Haiti is worth examining because throughout history natural disasters and other environmental factors have often played a significant role in human events. The materialists seize on this fact and claim that environmental determinism is the key factor in the rise and fall of civilizations (Jared Diamond is one of the more prominent proponents of this view). This is a standard anti-traditional approach, an approach that assumes that the greater comes from the lesser, in this case, that the material world is responsible for human civilization, rather than divine creation. Leaving aside the metaphysical difficulties of this materialist approach, we would like to offer a more sophisticated way of looking at natural disaster and its effect on civilizations.

The important point is that the result of a natural disaster is dependent on two things: the direct effects of the disaster (in the case of an earthquake, these would be the actual shaking of the earth and the following destruction of buildings, etc), and the level of the health of the individuals and civilization. In other words, disasters of the same magnitude will have different results for civilizations that are at different levels of internal health, depending on how well the individuals in those civilizations can deal with the difficulties. The earthquake in Haiti resulted in much more chaos than in would have in another country (for example, in western Europe), because the people in Haiti were already more chaotic in their psychic existence. The people who turned to savage violence following the disaster did so because they lack spiritual and mental order. The poor infrastructure of the country is also a result of a poor inner state. When the disaster struck, some of the external factors that held back this inner chaos were removed, and the latent chaos manifested itself. Everything in the material world has its source in the Divine, and earthquakes sometimes strike Haiti, and sometimes strike elsewhere. They can be a factor in the success or failure of a civilization, but not the only factor, barring a disaster of extreme proportions that physically destroys every member of a civilization.

Turning now to the problem with the superstitious account, while its proponents are correct to claim that this destructive phenomenon has a divine origin, they do not properly illustrate that punishment for wrongdoing begins long before external manifestations of retribution, and even seem to think that sinful acts are disadvantageous only after the punishment itself. If the Haitians were indeed turning away from the Divine, their punishment was found in the very act of turning away, just as order and wisdom are more fundamentally their own reward than any material benefit that might result from them. When turning away, one loses the ability to instill the world with order and becomes an inevitable vehicle for destruction. When natural disasters occur, the outer and inner destructiveness work as allies.

Up to this point we have looked at the situation from a very narrow perspective. In examining the question of how different societies react to natural disasters, we have judged the health or sickness of a society by the level of technical infrastructure and cooperation among the societies members. But we want to make it clear that in so doing we are not holding up modern, western societies as paragons, for these societies, while technically proficient, are equally lacking in spiritual values. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the spiritual life of western man is as destructive and chaotic as the current external situation in Haiti. Even if our technical infrastructure is perpetuated and perhaps improves, our inner life verges ever closer to annihilation, towards being enveloped in formlessness. Some westerners deride the Haitians for their inability to bring order to their external environment, but only because they see only outer appearances and are unaware of how they themselves have neglected the eternal part within us, the part that truly matters.