We must deal with Earth on Earth's terms.
C E N T E R FOR R E F L E C T I O N ON T H E S E C O N D L A W
Affiliated with The Riverdale Center for Religious Research
James F. Berry
American Teilhard Assoc.
June 20, 1995
Circular No. 168
THE GREAT WORK
This issue is dedicated to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen the grand
economist whose work The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
provided a flood of light to the cloudy world of economics.
Our friend and advisor died recently, at the age of 90, in
Nashville, where he taught at Vanderbilt. He was friend and
advisor. We treasure his memory.
I think work is unique to humans. Some writers say that
nature works: rivers, glaciers, mountains, etc. But in the
truest sense of the word, it seems to me that work is an
attribute, a capability belonging only to humans. Work
involves the interaction between humans and the context of
human life, Earth. Some human-Earth relationships do not
involve work, but what we are talking about here has to do
with humans changing Earth or earthstuff into another
condition for purposes of survival, knowledge, fun, or
profit. Work is for all these things and also and
especially for fulfilling the purpose of being human. The
human purpose is to observe, partake in, cooperate with,
celebrate, enjoy and advance ongoing creation. That's
cosmogenesis, cosmology evolving according to its own
necessity, what we understand to be the Great Work, the
ongoing work of creation.
This understanding sets the framework for the definition of
right and wrong: A thing is right if it supports the
complexity, integrity, stability, and beauty of the
community of life, and otherwise it's wrong. Note the
addition of "complexity," a term justified for cosmological
reasons.
Realization of humanness is made possible by the capacity to
work; fulfillment is achieved by doing it. Humans have to
work; without work, life lacks meaning and joy; without
meaning and joy, life is senseless. One has no identity
unless one works. Work has cosmic dimensions as well. We are
not accustomed to a lot of philosophizing about work, which
is a pity since the subject is so central to everything. But
we are beginning to think about the broader and deeper
implications. And as this process develops, some profound
revelations appear.
--------------------------------------------------------Humankind with its intelligence, its
independence, and its freedom is obliged to
dedicate its work to right causes and to
deny it to wrong causes.
----------------------------------------------------------Humans have a capacity for and an obligation to work. It is
a possession, a gift, a defining characteristic, a deep
psychological urgency. The question we have to deal with is:
how should our work be directed so that it provides for our
needs and advances the Great Work? The proper beneficiaries
of work are the community of the living and all Earth's
processes. Greed offends against this principle.
We have, in the human population, an enormous potential for
work. In large part, that potential is disposed of in a
system of employers and employees where employers hold the
greater power and are unmotivated by any desire to see the
life system succeed, where employers are governed by the
harsh rules of the "free market," driven by a relentless
requirement to minimize costs and maximize sales and a spirit
of something for nothing in dealing with employees and the
natural world. The Great Work gets no notice and has no
constituency. Work is organized and directed to the success
of the corporation and not concerned with the success of the
entire community.
These matters get to the heart of what it means to be human.
The intelligent application of work to solving the problems
of living is vital to the success of the human endeavor. But
society has relinquished control over work to corporations
that are unconcerned with outcomes hostile to life itself.
This is an arena where religion has, or ought to have, a
paramount interest: the success of humanity in finding
fulfillment through work. Fulfillment cannot be found in work
that results in the ruin of Earth.
When religion is unconcerned with cosmology and ongoing
creation, it loses its relevance to our situation. When I
was a child, we had answers to our questions. Religion gave
me my origin story and my destination story. I knew what I
was about, or thought I did, and for a long time I never
asked any questions because they had been answered and it
would have been a daring thing to bring it up as needing more
discussion. It didn't... Until Thomas, and others, started
examining cosmology and evolution and space and time along
with the ruin being visited on air and water and trees and
animals and wilderness and everything that industry-controlled
work touches. Thomas saw the necessity to reinvent the
human. He wrote about it in The Universe Story. Matt Fox
found it necessary to change the way we understand work. And
so he wrote The Reinvention of Work.
The elaboration of the universe story made possible deeper
thought into the role of the human as it can be discerned in
the sweep of cosmological events. These tell us a lot about
ourselves and about how the Creator thinks. God said,
"Creation is good." That it's good and that it has taken
billions and billions of years through a series of
transformations staggering to comprehend, on the way to its
present condition, must at the least, say to us that it is not
our purpose to wreck the Great Work, but it is our purpose to
affirm and enhance complexity, integrity, stability and
beauty. That can be said in a thousand different ways and
ought to be. Religion must take on as its duty to point out to
the faithful how utterly awesome is the universe, how finely
tuned and balanced it is, how beautiful in its universal and
stunning impact, how its complexity reaches degrees of
interaction the human mind and all the computers in the world
cannot begin to replicate.
Sometimes environmentalists bemoan the fact that humans tend
to mess up this lovely planet, as if humans are a plague on
nature. Which, I suppose they are, in their unreinvented stage.
But it is beginning to appear that humans have an essential
role to play in the story of the universe. In the first place,
there wouldn't be humans unless the universe needed them.
That, in itself, is a lesson to be told and elaborated in
great detail. How can I persuade somebody to believe that?
Well, there has to be an intelligent observer for the world
to exist, or so we are told by the quantum world of Max Planck
and Erwin Schrodinger and their followers. John Wheeler, for
example, says: "Observers are necessary to bring the universe
into being." (There are good books suitable for a general
audience on this subject, notably those of John Gribbin ["the
best things in life are both beautiful and simple"] who wrote
several of them.)
Theologians, too, are talking about the necessity for the
presence of humans in a universe that seems to have anticipated
them during all its evolution (the anthropic principle). That
necessity arises out of the need for observers. In "Creation,
Cosmology, and the Cosmic Christ," Teilhard Study #31, author
Russell B. Norris, Jr., of Lutheran Theological Southern
Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, discusses the subject of
observership and the teleological implications of the
anthropic cosmological principle. (Order a copy from the
American Teilhard Association, c/o Prof. John Grim, Dept of
Religion, Bucknell U., Lewisburg, PA 17837).
This awareness of a need for observership is fairly new in
both physics and in theology, but there must be an abundance
of commentary and analysis that says the same thing in the
works of poets and other wise people of the past. Just the
omnipresence of beauty may make the case. Beauty requires
display, which requires observers, which requires an emotional
response, which makes humans essential participants in
creation. While it is apparent that beauty must be appreciated
and responded to, complexity, integrity and stability must
also be comprehended. You just cannot imagine the world
without intelligent observers being stimulated in all kinds
of ways. Just looking fills a need. Is the appreciation of
creation, by means of observation and the registering of
delight or awe or some other emotion, work? I think it is.
We could not know when to be awestruck if scientists had not
helped prepare us for it with their analyses or if teachers
had not perceived the need for a wide audience.
When we evaluate what our work accomplished in the past and is
now accomplishing, we are struck with dismay. It is,
magnified a million times, the sort of thing a wastrel looks
on in the cold morning light after a colossal binge. We have
trashed something precious.
Maybe it was inevitable that it come about this way. Humans
had concluded that Earth was a place of misery and
disappointment. Joy is to be found only in the afterlife.
"Weeping and mourning in this valley of tears" was the human
condition our prayers pleaded every Sunday to be delivered
from. Earth was a place we were not at home in. We belonged
somewhere else. It was OK to trash the place.
But that was wrong and we are now engaged in redefining
ourselves as participating members of the community of life
out of which we emerged and to which we belong and owe loyalty
and love. Humankind with its intelligence, its independence,
and its freedom is obliged to dedicate its work to right
causes and to deny it to wrong causes. As we repeat over and
over, it is right to support the complexity, integrity,
stability, and beauty of the life community, of Earth, and the
Universe; it's wrong to support their degradation.
---------------------Advisors
Acasia, Stephanie Bass, Peter Berg, Anne Berry, Margaret
Berry, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Hal Crowther, Michael
Dowd, David Haenke, Hazel Henderson, Bill Holman, Evelyn
Mattern, Charles Mulholland, John Papworth, Zach Ralston,
Sallie Ricks, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jane Sharp, Charlene Spretnak,
Clay Stalnaker, Brian Swimme.