Gelassenheit.

The idea that the world and everyone/everything in it exists as mere inanimate objects for humans to exploit, consume, transform, or otherwise wield power over and mangle for our own self-serving, arbitrary purposes, strikes me as perhaps the central ideology of Modernity.

One of the worst characteristics of Modernity centers on its maniacal obsession about messing with stuff.  The 16th century Enlightenment pioneer, Francis Bacon, vividly and nauseatingly described the scientific quest as strapping nature on a table and torturing her secrets out of her.  (Bacon himself actually used such techniques against women as a professional hunter of witches, which tells us everything we need to know about his character and the character of the movement he helped promote.)  In his enthusiasm for the application of violence against a nature imagined in feminine terms, Bacon set in place one of the main pillars of Modernity.  He prefigures Doctors J. Marion Sims and Josef Mengele in epitomizing Modernity's advocacy of careless and cruel violence towards living bodies of any kind.  

Modernity inherently wants to deconstruct, demolish, analyze, reduce to component parts, and otherwise apply violence to things, ostensibly in the pursuit of progress, knowledge, and profit.  We readily destroy villages in order to "save" them, in the words of one American officer in Vietnam.  We think nothing of reducing a mountain to rubble in order to extract the coal from within it.  We will casually cut down 2500 year old trees to make picnic tables and toilet paper, and destroy natural habitats with complete unawareness of the damage we do to other life forms.  We have inflicted this kind of violence upon the entire planet: corrupting the whole atmosphere to enrich a few men beyond reason.  All of us who exist under this regime bear responsibility for it, especially those of us who benefit the most. 

This idea, that the world and everyone/everything in it exists as mere inanimate objects for humans to exploit, consume, transform, or otherwise wield power over and mangle for our own self-serving, arbitrary purposes, strikes me as perhaps the central ideology of Modernity. 

The 14th century mystic, Meister Eckhart suggests a different approach to the world, summed up in his use of the German word, Gelassenheit.  It literally means "letting be-ness."  In other words, in place of torture, domination, and violence as the governing methodology, he would have us alternatively embrace a different attitude, one of nonviolent wonder, awe, and gratitude before life and Being.  Gelassenheit accepts and celebrates things as we find them for their inherent goodness and the miracle of their very existence.  It leaves them unmolested and learns from them without deconstructing, dismantling, or dissecting them.  Gelassenheit realizes that we all live together as interdependent participants in a larger whole.  

Where Modernity made the radical move of placing humanity -- men, really -- in the role of the measurer and disposer of all things, Gelassenheit counters this by recognizing and giving thanks for beauty, meaning, and purpose in everything.  For me, this points to a loving Creator as the center and Source of being, whose Wisdom  and Spirit permeates creation, making each creature precious, miraculous, and good.

Jesus expresses this as well, appreciating lilies, foxes, sparrows, the weather, mountain, humans, and bread and wine as revealing the Creator's Presence among and within us.

Call it techism, instrumentalism, experimentalism, or some other word denoting arbitrary, cruel, exploitative, extractive manipulation, but it reveals a nihilistic impulse essentially in opposition to the Creator and creation.  Maybe we most accurately sum it up by recognizing it as a particularly virulent manifestation of Gnosticism, an ancient spiritual pathology expressing both an obsession with knowledge, and a perverse antipathy for the material world and its Maker.

Speaking practically, Gelassenheit, of course, does not mean never touching, doing, changing, fixing, or intervening with anything.  It offers the governing attitude of wonder, care, and gratitude in our approach to things.  We see for instance a nearly infinite difference between, say, killing an animal for food done with respect, thanks, humility, and consciousness of mutuality, and the unspeakable horror of wanton industrial slaughter of animals for meat.  Doing something for the profit and convenience of some humans differs widely from something approached with circumspection and awareness of the best interests of all.  The deep consciousness of our intimate connection with all other creatures under the eye of a beneficent Creator, makes an essential difference. 

Had we adopted this sense of the inherent holiness of creation as our primary consideration in our interactions with nature from the beginning of the Modern Age, had we followed Eckhart rather than mindlessly marching and flailing to the beat of morally bankrupt men like Bacon, I have no doubt that creation and humanity would enjoy far more security and happiness today. 

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