NEW RELIGION

What is the "ur-story" that might be a "new religion"?  This guy named Loyal Rue is pretty sure it's not postmodernism, that fancy and inscrutable stuff from Derrida and Foucault, but he nominates Darwin.  Darwin??!!  He only knows the old-fashioned version.  But gets it wrong, that march towards progress of the white male. As usual, his "new" is just a reversal of the old.  The point of Derrida et al is total reframing as deep as one can go.

"In his book, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution, Loyal Rue, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Luther College, explains the challenge of multiculturalism: “A particular story may be mine, and it may be worthwhile, and I may be diminished without it, but it is not a story that speaks for everyone’s experience.

"Thus, Rue asks “Where do we go for a universal narrative account of how things are and which things matter?” His answer: The paradigm of Darwinian evolution. In contrast to the majority of cultural and religious narratives, which are anthropocentric, the paradigm of evolution is ecocentric and based on the fact that we originate from, live in, and depend on a physical world of interrelated systems, and that as the place where all stories happen, indeed, that makes all stories possible, we must care for the natural world above all else." 

I would narrow this down even more to the individual's experience of the particular space/time they inhabit.  In fact, the way I survived all those barmy theologians and philosophers in seminary was by looking up their life stories.  That was the lens by which they were intelligible.  Few of them were all that ecological:  they only considered living organisms, never geology or the origin of the solar system.  Climate has as much influence on us as our mothers and offers less opportunity to have a dialogue or influence.

. . . according to social psychologist Kenneth Gergen: “The emerging multiplicity in perspectives is undermining longstanding beliefs about truth and objectivity. Many now see science as a sea of social opinion, the tides of which are often governed by political and ideological forces. And as science becomes not a reflection of the world but a reflection of social process, attention is removed from the ‘world as it is’ and centers instead on representations of the world.”  But the equipment of a human being MUST be limited by sensory and processing capacity.  Science, even with ingenious instruments, cannot exceed itself.

"John Alcock, Emeritus Regents’ Professor of Biology at Arizona State University, deals with these relativist claims in his book The Triumph of Sociobiology. . . . Alcock also argues that “one cannot brush [sociobiology] to one side with social constructionist claims that scientists operate in a social context, which is somehow supposed to make it impossible to validate scientific findings. Scientific conclusions rest upon the impeccable logic of the procedures that are used to test all manner of potential explanations."   This is where he goes off the rails.  All manner of tests have shown that every human has prejudices and is lucky if they are conscious enough to recognize.  Excluding women, excluding emotion, excluding all those without degrees, are only the beginning of the blind spots that afflict so-called "reason."

"Admittedly, we will always privilege certain knowledge, but if humanity aims to transcend the limits of the status quo and thereby repair social and environmental ills, the knowledge we privilege must be based on what we verifiably know about biotic reality and interdependence. The ecocritic Glen Love makes this point in the Afterword of his book Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment, and his argument is my own: “My contention is that Darwinian evolutionary theory offers the truest basis with which to deal with the perils and opportunities of being human, as that awareness affects not only our work as teachers and scholars, but also our relationship with the nature which binds us to life on this decreasingly commodious sphere.”  This was written in the days before horizontal DNA swaps and so on, literature newly presented by David Quammen.

"Now is the time to tell the story of all time. To this end, postmodern theory has done all it can ever do, as have the majority of the manifold narratives it seeks to privilege. Social constructionists and environmental realists want the same thing: to find common ground. But let us do so in the most realistic, sustainable, and inclusive way possible: Let us begin by looking beneath our feet."

Good advice.  At this point I come back on board.  As far as I can see, the story must be a time-art, like a dance or music.  A performance. Though I'm not pleased with a focus on the writer instead of the examples of static books, paintings, buildings, there is a sense in which any creator's work forms into a separate art form, that of life itself.  "Works" represent points on a lifeline.  Some people who have not written blockbuster books or whatever have nevertheless made themselves into accumulative remarkable narratives.  But there is still a sense in which there must be some kind of guiding pattern even if it must adapt to change.  What about occasional conversions when people even reverse themselves, as though hit by a meteor?

A newly available dimension of this story-making is the nature of our "life-instrument", our bodies, part of which are brains operating on circuits built as we experience life from the earliest existence.  On the one hand, it is "plastic" and impressionable, ready to process to new information.  On the other hand, it is organic, existing, reluctant to physically change itself by either adding new systems or deleting old ones, and vulnerable to trauma or even something so simple as a shortage of needed materials from the environment.  It is largely "self-making" but also open to change initiated by others, much of that by attachment.  That is, attachment to others has the capacity to renew and enlarge us as it did in the womb.  But we are also able to shut out, shut down, refuse anything from outside our bodies and its already decided pathways of behavior.  Alongside "story" exists "no-story."