Pantheism in the Garden of Eden

January 10th, 2010

“Nature cannot satisfy the desires that she arouses,” as C.S. Lewis has pointed out, but on planet of Pandora – the setting of Avatar, James Cameron’s latest film – it certainly seems as if she can.

The worship of nature isn’t a particularly original movie idea, but Avatar goes beyond something like the normal fare of Star Wars to which most theatergoers are accustomed.  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all the main characters believe in the force (if not take it for granted) and the presence of pantheism is primarily a plot device, or an excuse for interesting special effects.  The storyline in Avatar, on the other hand, draws most of its conflict from whether or not the pantheism of the Na’vi is true.  The climactic battle is about more than just which characters will triumph – it’s also a question of which theological system will be vindicated.  Because of this, Cameron’s portrayal of pantheism has a more evangelistic fervor than it would be if it just happened to be set in a world where – like Star Wars – practically all the characters take it to be true.

Avatar makes for powerful storytelling, and its apologetic for pantheism is a powerful one for multiple reasons.  For anyone that’s even remotely concerned about the environment, for anyone that has a tendency to root for the individual over a large corporation, or for anyone that has a gut reaction to see even an economic empire as being intrinsically evil, will easily find themselves hoping that the Na’vi will triumph even before we’re introduced to any of them.  Cameron introduces us to ideals that many of us share with the Na’vi before a discussion of their pantheism ever enters the scene, so by the time we hear discussions referencing Eywa – the mother goddess of the Na’vi – it seems like a harmless belief of a backward culture.

By the time we realize – through the discussions of the human scientists – that the Na’vi have a factual basis for their belief in Eywa, we’ve come to be emotionally invested enough in their point of view that most of us in the audience were probably hoping that they were right, anyway.

Quite a bit of the appeal of the Na’vi is the degree to which their life is seen as being beautiful and peaceful.  Not only is the natural state of Pandora beautiful, but it’s the only thing there that is – by contrast, all the human “civilization” that we’re shown there is nothing but ugliness and destruction.  Overall, the natural state of Pandora bears little resemblance to Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw.”  The death of even the animals (at least by the hands of the Na’vi) is largely avoidable, although this takes Jake Sully some time to learn. The Na’vi kill only what they need, and their lives in the state of nature are anything but – as Hobbes famously put it – “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Even death, to an extent, is held at bay:  when one of the Na’vi die, their soul is absorbed back into Eywa in a way that suggests that even if their lives cannot continue, their consciousness still does.

This view of nature, alas, doesn’t bear much resemblance to what any of us who have spent any time camping, for example, know to be true.  In our society, it’s those that have the closest connection to nature, perhaps, that are the least anxious to reunite with it.  The reason for this, I suspect, is that the degree of harmony with nature that the Na’vi have attained, on some level, doesn’t resemble nature as we know it now nearly as much as it resembles nature as it must have appeared in the Garden of Eden.  At the very least, this helps to explain some of the appeal:  if being in Eden without God isn’t enough to make someone a pantheist, probably nothing is.

Another reason for the appeal of the pantheism of the Na’vi is that it’s a belief system that’s constructed to appeal to those of us that are watching the movie:  there are no creeds; there is no liturgy, and the actions that Eywa would have her adherents take look suspiciously like what they would probably want to do anyway.  In addition, it’s a it’s a belief system that can be empirically verified, and Eywa is, under the right circumstances, willing to intervene on behalf of her followers.

It’s not like pantheism is a tough sell in modern American culture, anyway:  judging from movies like Star Wars and Dances with Wolves, to the writings of Deepak Chopra, to the “Love Your Mother” and “May the Forest Be With You” bumper stickers, it’s a belief that’s quite a few filmgoers, apparently, are comfortable with already.

Still, to dismiss the pantheism of Avatar as wholly without merit, or as being a symptom of what’s wrong with the theological beliefs of the average filmgoer, is something of an exercise in missing the point.  C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography, describes how his eventual conversion to Christianity came was more complex than just a conversion from atheism to Christianity – it involved several belief systems that he later realized were steps on the way.  In The Four Loves, he explains how pantheism was – for him – a necessary step:

“There is an easy transition from Theism to Pantheism; but there is also a blessed transition in the other direction.  For some souls I believe, for my own I remember, Wordsworthian contemplation can be the first and lowest form of recognition that there is something outside ourselves which demands reverence.  To return to Pantheistic errors about the nature of this something would, for a Christian, be very bad.  But once again, for “the main coming up from below” the Wordsworthian experience is an advance.  Even if he goes no further he has escaped the worst arrogance of materialism:  if he goes on he will be converted.”

It may be that most productive part of the portrayal of religion in Avatar is that those who had no interest in any sort of religion previously may now be open to discussing it.  Indeed, even for those for whom pantheism may not have been a necessary step, the religious overtones of Avatar have a potential to draw them into discussions about religion that they may not be comfortable with otherwise.

Pantheism, as Cameron presents it here, may ultimately not be that satisfactory in the long run:  those of us that do not have avatars of our own, it seems, will have to look salvation somewhere else.

National Security and Renewable Energy

January 3rd, 2010

Or, a more specific way to describe where we’re going with this: this is how our energy policy in the immediate future can impact our national security in the distant future: i.e., environmentalism may be more important we typically think it is, but for reasons that we don’t typically associate with it.

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Hiking in the Grand Canyon

October 15th, 2009

Here’s the second installment in the series of travel stories – if this topic doesn’t ring a bell, go back and read the beginning of this post here so you’ll understand where I’m going with this.

This story, as it were, is about hiking in the Grand Canyon, and, if you’re interested in any sort of chronological order, actually takes place before the previously described adventures on Mt. Olympus. Without any further ado, here we go:

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Three Ecology Books

September 11th, 2009

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan contains, among its other observations, an fascinating illustration about how possessing more data without having the capability to understand it can cause us to make what are poorer decisions than what we would have made if we didn’t have the data in the first place. The context in which Taleb works (and, consequently, the example that he gives in his book) is within the context of the stock market, and here is how it works:

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Reflections of a Nostalgic Baseball Fan

July 30th, 2009

Well, we’re into the second half of the baseball season, now, and from the perspective of most of the folks in my immediate family, we’re still having a pretty good baseball summer around here. At least, it’s a good baseball summer in the sense that the teams that we like still seem to be doing okay; not in the sense that any of us have made it to many games. The Detroit Tigers are still in first, although after watching them play, it’s not entirely clear how that’s happened. They’ve got to get their offense together before anyone considers them to be a pretty good ball club, really. Over in the senior circuit, the Giants – my dad’s team – were second in their division up until just a few days ago. Although I don’t think anyone expects that they’ll be able to catch the Dodgers, they’ve got a pretty good shot at winning the wild card. We’ll see.

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