Creation Care - “Creation, Creatures, and Creativity” with Norman Wirzba
Shownotes:
God’s creation is a direct reflection of God’s glory, and Christians are called to be faithful stewards of the earth. While global issues of climate and environment can seem out of reach, our local communities give us space to learn and take action in small and large ways. How can we partner with our creator to build a better, more sustainable living environment? What simple, practical changes can we make to responsibly care for our local communities and our world?
Chris and Eddie are joined by Dr. Norman Wirzba, the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute of Ethics at Duke University. Wirzba’s upcoming book, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World explores three central questions at the intersection of theology and ecology: Who are we? Where are we? What should we do? Wirzba acknowledges that the doctrine of creation is not simply the teaching about how the world began, and he views creation care as an act of honor to God. This episode discusses the realities of climate change as both an ideological and financial issue, the importance of God’s covenant relationship with all of creation, and the limits of the natural world.
Series Info:
God’s creation is a direct reflection of God’s glory, and Christians are called to be faithful stewards of the earth. While global issues of climate and environment can seem out of reach, our local communities give us space to learn and take action in small and large ways. How can we partner with our creator to build a better, more sustainable living environment? What simple, practical changes can we make to responsibly care for our local communities and our world?
In this series, we will discuss the relationship between humanity and creation with leaders in agriculture, government, and the church. These guests equip us with the knowledge we need to honor God through creation care. Join us as we seek to make environmental issues less intimidating and more inviting, rooted in love for God’s very good creation and honor for the image of God woven throughout it all.
Resources:
Follow Dr. Norman Wirzba on the web:
Preorder This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World here
Follow Dr. Norman Wirzba on social media:
Full Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 0:01
And I'm Eddie Rester. Welcome to The Weight We're being more peppy because Cody tells us we should be happier.
Chris McAlilly 0:07
You got to put some pep in your step.
Eddie Rester 0:09
Gotta put pep in the step. That's right. Today, we get to talk with Dr. Norman Wirzba. He's at Duke University. He is professor of ethics and theology there. And today, he talks with us about really his passion and what he writes about, which is creation and an understanding of the care of creation and creativity and how we live as creatures within this creation.
Chris McAlilly 0:35
He's directing a multi-year project called Facing the Anthropocene, which we're going to find out what that word means in the podcast today. I did not have an awareness of what that meant.
Eddie Rester 0:48
You know, you gotta read more, Chris.
Chris McAlilly 0:51
I know you got enlighten me, brother. Dr. Wirzba has a book coming out in October. He'll talk all about that in the podcast. But if you're interested in a conversation about climate change from the perspective of a person of faith, if you're interested in trying to kind of come to terms with the power that humanity has to reshape the world, either on the molecular or the cell level, or in the big and kind of macro climate scene, this is a conversation that I think you're gonna find really, really interesting. And it really helped me to kind of come to terms with parts of that conversation that I had not thought about before.
Eddie Rester 1:34
And one of the things that I really liked that I didn't know about him until he talked about it is that he comes from a farming family. So this isn't just something he's picked up on the fly because it's interesting to him. This goes back to his roots, not just his parents, but it sounds like deep into history, his relationship to the land and understanding what that work meant to him and his family and how it's changed over time.
Chris McAlilly 2:01
Yeah, he's wanting to push us to ask large questions about what it means to be human. What is our place in the world? What is it all for? And to allow those those larger why questions to frame all the things that we do all of the creativity and the biomedical engineering and all of the other important work that has to be done on the political or policy level, etc., he wants all of that to be framed within the context of the resources of religious traditions, specifically, his religious tradition of Christianity. He thinks that there's something to offer. And by the end, Eddie, I have to say, I agree.
Eddie Rester 2:45
It's, I think you're going to enjoy this episode. It's a part of our longer conversation about the care of creation. So share it with a friend, like it, give us a review. Let us hear from you.
Chris McAlilly 2:56
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 3:03
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 3:07
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:14
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:26
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand. You're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:42
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:44
We're here today with Dr. Norman Wirzba. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.
Eddie Rester 3:50
Yeah, it's great to be with you. It's always good to have someone from up the Durham, North Carolina way, the Duke way.
Norman Wirzba 3:57
Yeah, it's good to be with you. I've not been to Mississippi, so someday, I'll get down there.
Chris McAlilly 4:02
Well, today it's pretty wet. We've had some fairly significant raining happening over the course the last few days, and kind of a good time to talk about assessing our situation as it relates to climate. You have a new book that's coming out in October, that's kind of, it seems to me, as a kind of--taking a look at at the manuscript--it seems like the culmination of a lot of themes in your work. I wonder if you could just go back for folks who are not familiar with the trajectory of your research and talk a little bit about some of the some of the work that you've done.
Norman Wirzba 4:40
Sure. Yeah. So I think the way to frame it is to say that I'm a bit unusual in academic circles, because I've, you know, over a rather circuitous route, come to see how agriculture and ecological realities had really been absent in so much philosophical and theological teaching and writing. And so I wanted to draw on the experience that I had as a farmer in southern Alberta. But then also through some of the education I received from agrarians like Wendell Berry and Vandana Shiva and West Jackson, to see what kind of difference does it make when we start to think about human embodiment and that embodiment entangling us with what I call now the flesh of creation, which includes, you know, plants and animals, but also all kinds of ecological and biophysical processes that are absolutely crucial for human flourishing.
Norman Wirzba 5:37
And the fact that so much that was being done by philosophers and theologians assume that the only world that really needed attention and exploration was the human world, that seemed to me to be a big mistake. And so I started first of all thinking about land, and then more specifically, I wrote a book about food, because eating is one of those very visceral, embodied actions, that, better than most other things that we experience, really connect us to land, plants, animal, weather systems, you know, processes like photosynthesis, and try to help people understand that who they are as creatures, involves them in a creaturely world and creaturely realities that we need to understand. And we need to not just understand but learn to abide by. Because if we don't, we're gonna do a lot of damage to our places and our communities, and in doing that, bring a lot of suffering that's needless upon ourselves.
Eddie Rester 6:43
I want to dig into a couple of the things you brought up in just a second, but I want to back up to what kind of farming did you do in Alberta, Canada?
Norman Wirzba 6:52
Sure, yeah. We were a pretty typical family farm operation. We had, you know, irrigated land that raised grain barley, wheat, and we had alfalfa. We had a small cattle operation where we fed about 2000 head at a time. We had chickens and pigs and dogs and rabbits. And it was it was a pretty wide-ranging operation, which I absolutely, I love the work. I loved being with animals. I love the physical work of, you know, building the kinds of farm equipment that you need, and it was a tremendous education.
Norman Wirzba 7:27
And my family, their background was really formed in Europe, when as peasant farmers, they figured that the honoring of the land is one of the primary ways that we learned to honor God. And so that ethos was just something that was was built into me as a young person. And, of course, I saw that change pretty dramatically as I was coming into adulthood in the 80s, where our family farm faced tremendous pressure, right, to industrialize. And so what I later encountered in the writing of Wendell Berry I first experienced. So if you know his book, "The Unsettling of America," he talks about the transformation in agriculture. And so when I read that book, it was telling me my own story. And that's one of the reasons there was so much resonance with his work is that he reflected a world in which people thought being on the land, serving the land, serving a community of people who live from the land, is one of the noblest things that people can do. And so that's been really decisive for me in the way that I think about so much else.
Chris McAlilly 8:38
In the most recent book that will be published later in the year, you kind of, you know, it seems to me, are pushing back a bit from the table or from the conversation closer to the ground to give a wider theoretical view and in the place that you begin is assessing our situation. And that begins with a conversation about Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist who announced that the planet Earth had entered into a new geological epoch and he did this in around 2000. Could you talk a little bit about the Anthropocene and what it means to face that? The whole conversation if folks are, are a bit unfamiliar with that topic, I wonder if you could start there?
Norman Wirzba 9:26
Yeah, sure. I'm happy to do that. So, you know, geologists have divided up the history of planet Earth in very large ranging epochs. And we had been in what's called the Holocene for roughly the last 12,000 years or so. And that period is really important because that's the period in which what we consider to be the great human civilizations emerge. It's the period in which we have relative climate stability. It's where we have a wide-ranging planet of ecosystems that are still fairly unspoiled if you want to use that term. And so human invention and human power could be exercised on a scale that was just like an open canvas, as the way some of the people who described what they were doing put it.
Norman Wirzba 10:13
And of course, what that did is it created major cities. It created major transformation of the planet, beginning thousands of years ago in the way fire was used to create certain kinds of species. This is when agriculture develops. It's a very complex, interesting story. But it's also where urbanization develops, new kinds of technology emerge. But in the course of this Holocene period, this roughly 12,000 year period, that power that human beings or some human beings, at least, could develop and exercise became so great that human beings are now one of the primary agents, one of the primary forms of power that really determine the future of this planet.
Norman Wirzba 11:02
And we're not just talking about the future of particular life forms. We're talking about affecting all of the very geophysical, biochemical processes that have made this planet habitable for us, but also for the millions of species that we share the planet with. And so some of the key indicators that we have entered into this new epoch, one of the big ones, is climate change, right? That scholars now know that we have been warming the planet, most primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, but through other means, as well. And this new climate regime is affecting all sorts of realities. It's affecting the acidity in our oceans. It's contributing to the melt of glaciers. It's contributing to new disease vectors, new fire patterns. I mean, all sorts of realities that human beings simply took for granted as being stable, these are now all up in the air.
Norman Wirzba 11:02
So that if you're a farmer, for instance, you're very concerned, because you don't know what frost cycles are going to be like. You don't know if there will be enough snow melt for you to be able to irrigate your land. And I think as urbanites, we've been pretty good at shielding ourselves from those kinds of realities. But people who draw their living from the land--farmers, foresters, fisher-people--these are all folks who are having a front seat to how industrial development has really changed the way this planet functions, the way it works. And in that new regime that we call the Anthropocene, we're seeing that there is tremendous loss to species, but also tremendous disruption. And because obviously, Earth systems are so complicated, we can't predict exactly what are the outcomes are going to be. But most every Earth system scientists that you read will tell you that the future is looking pretty tough.
Eddie Rester 13:09
You know, one of the things I read about this new epoch a while back, and the way that it was put in the article I was reading was that for millennia, the world shaped humanity. So we chose to live by the water, or we chose to live on a river, so the world really shaped how we lived and what we ate and how we farmed. But now humanity has the power to do just the opposite, to shape the world. And one of the ways it's impacting the Mississippi Delta is that the water tables have fallen so dramatically, because farmers are using that water for irrigation that now it's causing problems in Mississippi Delta because the earth is shifting in ways.
Eddie Rester 13:58
And I think when we talk about it, people assume that this is just the way it's always been. We assume that humanity as we see it now, is the way that it just has been, that humans have always had this power. But we really, really haven't. Was there a moment, as we think about this, was there a moment or an invention or just a season over the last several hundred years that really, kind of, we turn the corner on that?
Norman Wirzba 14:29
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And there are lots of ways to answer it. But I think one of the go-to ways of answering is to say that you really need to look at the birth of industrialism in the mid-19th century in particular. But also I think, more generally, you could put it in terms of a shift from biophysical, sunshine power to what we call mechanical machine power. Because when you go from using muscle mass, whether that be horses or oxen or humans beings, you clearly understand that there are limits to what you can do, right. A body gets tired, and only has a certain length of life.
Norman Wirzba 15:08
And what happens when you go to machines, and then you increase the power of these machines, the limits that nature, you might say, would have put in front of you saying, "you can only do this much," those limits start to evaporate. And so we're now in a situation where not only do we have the machine power to just level a mountain, right--this would have been unimaginable to people several hundred years ago. But we do this regularly now in Appalachia, where we blow up mountains to expose coal seams, so that we can more efficiently and profitably extract their coal.
Norman Wirzba 15:10
Or the idea that we could change through the kinds of economic practices we've been doing something like the Gulf current that goes up the eastern seaboard in the Atlantic, right. These kinds of possibilities, they could not have been imagined, because nature's power was understood and respected as an overwhelming power that we have to learn to fit within. Machines changed all of that. And of course, when we move into something like nuclear power, where the potential is not just to radically transform landscapes, but that we can even destroy the planet, this is quite a development in the history of humanity.
Norman Wirzba 16:32
And so one of the things that is so important to help people understand, because we have such short timeframes, that we sort of think in terms of, that human beings have become a different kind of being in the last 200 years, because we now have power at our disposal that previous generations of people simply didn't have. They had power, but not in the way that we have it today. And so to think that we could design new species that we could alter at the very basic genetic level and designed synthetic, with which we call them cyborgs. I mean, there's different words that people use, that really puts people in a new place in the history of the world.
Chris McAlilly 17:19
Yeah, I do think, you know, I want to keep pushing and pressing in this direction. But I also just want to acknowledge that I mean, public opinion around climate change continues to grow in terms of, you know, its awareness, but they are still climate deniers, even the US Congress. I wonder how you think about that. I mean, I think one of the things that's shifted in the last couple of years, has been the awareness on the local level of at least something is changing in the climate, whether it's catastrophic climate events, or, you know, there are, you know, fires or droughts or floods or, you know, changing events on the ground. But how do you think about that realitynin the broader kind of public opinion?
Norman Wirzba 18:05
Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. It's, it's not a simple question, I don't think because you have to parse out what happens in a very public sort of ideological realm where people will say, in public, we are not sure that human, right, anthropogenic causes are making our climate warm, that are then creating problems like coastal sea level rise, things of that sort. But then on the ground when they're not in public, they are clearly working very hard to address this. So for instance, if you're an elected official from Florida, you understand very well, because if you talk to your constituents living in Miami, that you're dealing with regular flooding events. Or if you're in New York City, and you're talking with engineers who are designing new buildings or figuring out how do you fit buildings, retrofit them, so that they will withstand the next Hurricane Sandy, whenever that comes. These are people who do not deny at all, that these realities are coming upon us, have already been among us.
Norman Wirzba 19:15
I think also, if you talk to business people, right Wall Street Journal, they're not denying climate change, because insurance agencies are recognizing that they're looking at losing tremendous amounts of money on their insurance of coastal properties. If you talk to the Department of Energy, they're having to rethink where they're going to put their bases because of flooding events. If you talk to farmers, you can't use the word climate change, but if you talk about weather, boy, they're all over it, because they're noticing that things are changing, right? The snow packs aren't as large as they were or the freezes that were so important at managing pests. Right? They're not deep and hard.
Norman Wirzba 19:54
If you're collecting maple sugar, so you can have maple syrup. They're saying what happened to those deep freezes in the winter? We don't have them anymore, right. So people who are actually close to the ground, you're not finding those people deny it, because the folks who work with the world, with places and communities that live on the land or from the land or have to deal with the land, these folks understand that this is not just an ideological issue. It's a financial issue. It's a livelihood issue. So there's not much denial happening there. But what you see amongst politicians or talking heads on radio, who have zero stake in any kind of making sure that they can feed their families or, ave an income from farming or forestry. Those folks have the sort of luxury of talking at an ideological level that doesn't really bear up with reality.
Chris McAlilly 19:59
One of the things that I found really interesting about the way that you narrate the story is that you kind of push the conversation beyond just the Anthropocene, just the idea that human beings have more power over the natural world and ecological processes, to the question of, you know, maybe it's not all humanity, but you know, a particular subset of, few privileged white folks from Western Europe and the colonial American kind of etiology or kind of the logic of the way in which a capitalist economy and a particular approach to technological advancement would lead to the exploitation not only of the land but of individuals.
Chris McAlilly 21:40
I've heard that story before. One of the things, or that part of the narration of the story, I think, is fairly widely known. I think, what I found interesting is that a footnote where you're talking about Gary Snyder, who was exploring in his education--a poet of the natural world, who explored Asian literary and philosophical traditions, and drew on Chinese poetry and religion, especially Taoism and Buddhism--and you use Gary's work to talk about how, you know, this is a reality that extends beyond the Western world, the way in which humanity across the board does, in fact, exploit people and the land. I wonder if you could just flesh that out a little bit for our listeners.
Norman Wirzba 22:27
This is a great question. And I'm happy to do that. I think that the idea of the Anthropocene, of course, is a highly contested term. And we could spend a lot of time talking about the ins and outs of it. But, you know, some people argued that we should call it the Capitalocene, because it's really market capitalism as it develops not just in the 19th century, but much earlier in this mercantile phase already in the 16th century, that we really need to point to, because what that shows to us is that the way financial people, financial leaders, business leaders, were thinking about land and labor was radically transformed so that you had to use violent methods to conscript land and conscript human beings.
Norman Wirzba 23:04
And so one of the earliest manifestations of this mercantile, or what some historians call military capitalism, what they needed to do is they had to develop the plantation and slaves and of course, the violence that went with that whole system of production. And so you're absolutely right to say, it's not all of human beings that are somehow implicated in the development of what we call war or military capitalism, because it took a few very wealthy people, and then the power that came with their connections to political military leaders to enforce this new way of appropriating land and subjugating labor. This is a new thing in Western culture.
Norman Wirzba 24:03
Now, what I wanted to do in the book is say, but hold on a sec, maybe even that Capitalocene framing doesn't really get to it far enough, because when we look at other cultures, Western, but also Eastern, there have been elites, who, from the beginning, have used coercive, violent force to subjugate peoples to extract whatever wealth they can from the land. And so this is where you're looking at the origins of agriculture as much as 10,000 years ago, is fascinating, because what you discover is that agriculture develops in all sorts of interesting ways. It's not just a clear shift from hunting-gathering, to agriculture. Instead, people, communities, societies are doing a little bit of both. But when elites emerge, right, the birth of cities comes to be, the elites need to find some way to keep the wealth in their hands. And so you find them conscripting labor, but you also find them conscripting the land to grow the kinds of crops like grains that can be stored, right. You can't store potatoes very well. So, potatoes don't show up in tax records, it's always grains, because those can be stored for a long period of time. And they can be used as a kind of currency because they can be measured and quantified in ways that are, of course, really lovely for people who have a bureaucratic mindset.
Norman Wirzba 25:30
So what you're seeing is already in these very, very early, you know, millennia, descriptions of societies in which people with power use coercion and violence to compel workers, to enslave workers, but also to conscript land. And so I wanted to say that we shouldn't just talk about the kind of dynamics at work in the Anthropocene as starting in the 19th century or earlier in the 16th century. We really need to go back to the earliest part of the Holocene to see that we've got already there evidence of this pattern within communities or societies in which power is exercised over people who don't have power to bring about a financial objective.
Eddie Rester 26:17
So all of this has brought us to 2021. What, in your mind, is a healthy way to approach our relationship to nature? What does scripture compel us? What does our faith compel us to understand about how we might live in a more holistic way?
Norman Wirzba 26:39
Yeah. Well, a tremendous amount is the first part of the answer. And I think what I would start is, first of all, help people see that the doctrine of creation is not simply a teaching about how the world began a long, long time ago, because God brought it about. What we need to understand is that God's love is not just for people. It's for the whole world. And the reason is for the whole world is because the whole world is the material manifestation of the love of God that desires for creatures to exist at all. Right?
Norman Wirzba 27:18
When Christian theologians have talked about the doctrine of creation, they have said that God creates not because God is compelled to, or because there's some sort of deficiency or lack within God's being. No, God creates because God loves for something other than God to exist. And so when you try to understand the existence of bees, and earthworms and sunshine and plants and human beings and giraffes, you have to only say that they exist because God loves them as they are. Now, if that's the case, then the teaching about creation isn't primarily about the origin of the world, as if we could come to some sort of chronological first time. No, the doctrine of creation is about the meaning and purpose of all life. And we know that God is deeply invested in that purpose, because God is in covenant relationship, not just with people, but with the land, with all creatures and people together, right.
Norman Wirzba 28:21
And this is one of the things that my colleague Ellen Davis has been so good at doing is helping us see that from the earliest periods in the scriptures of ancient Israel. They never restricted the covenant between God and humans, but drew in the land. And it's not just because they're agrarian people, and they care about the land. It's part of the logic of creation. And so what we see instead of honoring the land, we find these terrible theologies emerge that propose that God somehow delights in the destruction of the world, and the escape of a few human beings in disembodied form to be somewhere else. It's a terribly confused and destructive logic, because it takes delight in destroying what God loves.
Norman Wirzba 29:09
And so what I would want Christians to do is go back and read your scriptures and see how the covenant with God is not just with people, but with all creatures. And then when you go to the New Testament, of course, people will say, well, that's all Old Testament stuff. Again, the answer would be, that's not true. Because if you just turn to Colossians 1 or John 1 or Hebrews, I mean, there are multiple places we could go, that are very clear that these early Christian communities understood Jesus not just as the creator, but also the Savior, and the end, the purpose, behind all of created life.
Norman Wirzba 29:49
And so in the Christ hymn in Colossians 1, we're told that all things exist through him and for him and in him, and that through Christ's self-offering cruciform life, God is reconciling the whole world, all things in heaven and on earth, to himself. Right. This is an indication, again, of how early Christians understood that God loves the whole world. And the question now is, what are Christians going to do to suggest that they believe that if God loves every creature, if God loves every place, how do Christians need to think differently about their own lives? How they need to think about human economies, political systems, institutions, that might reflect that love that God has for creatures?
Chris McAlilly 30:34
What strikes me in what you're saying, are kind of two things. One is kind of depressing, because I do think that the resources have been there, within particular religious traditions, the Christian tradition and otherwise, to resist or to push back. And it seems as if resources have been a bit impotent to make much of a difference. I guess what... you have a lot of, clearly, optimism, about a turn back to the resources of the Christian tradition to offer, almost like to fund, a cultural solution or to find our moral imagination for the way in which we might re engage in practices. Talk a little bit about that, both why you think it is that the resources of the Christian tradition and other religious traditions have not been able to do the work, and then also, why are you doubling down?
Norman Wirzba 31:39
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I don't know if I would say that I'm optimistic, because I never discount human belligerence. But I think one thing that is particular about this time that we're in right now, and we're seeing it, especially in younger people, is they sense that we are at a major crossroads. People know that, even if they don't want to speak clearly or openly about it, they know we're in deep trouble. Because the planet is dying. And it's dying because of what human beings are doing. And young people are saying, what you all have given us, it ain't working. And we need to be thinking about something very, very different. We need to go back to fundamental themes, fundamental questions, things that are unavoidable, right.
Norman Wirzba 32:32
Like, people need to eat. They need to drink clean water. They need to have fresh air rather than putrid air. Right, we're going back to basic questions. And these basic questions invariably bring you back to religions, because religious traditions have been the places we might say, where these fundamental questions are regularly engaged. They've not always been engaged very well; there's no doubt about that. But we always have to go back to whatever sources we have.
Norman Wirzba 33:05
And you know, for me, that means do we go back and we read Christian scripture again? Well, I think we have to, but we don't just read Christian scripture naively as if we already know what's going to be there. We're constantly doing that, by being in conversation with current realities, by being in conversation with people from other traditions, who are similarly engaged in some very deep thinking about what kind of future do we imagine. Because for a lot of people, the future looks pretty bleak. It looks like there there's been a real diminishment of our dreams, a diminishment of our prospects. And so there's a kind of openness to asking questions about what's it all for? Why are we here? Is it just so that, you know, some people can be obscenely wealthy, and the rest of us just sort of struggle along? That doesn't seem to be the best course. And it certainly doesn't reflect well on human beings if we can't think about ways to live in this world in peaceable, harmonious, or even beautiful ways.
Eddie Rester 34:15
A few years ago, I got a book and I read about half of it and just I'm gonna be honest, it kind of got boring, but, "The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles Mann.
Norman Wirzba 34:26
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 34:27
And he, you know, there's this fight between the two primary people. So it's a book written about two men who lived in the world dealing with the environment. And one believed that we could we should conserve, we should hold back the other. The other just kind of said, we'll figure it out. Technology's gonna figure it out.
Norman Wirzba 34:48
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 34:48
And so how do we figure it out? I mean, that, you know, we're not going to go, Oh, I don't see us going backwards. But how do we lead the conversation going forward? You know, my daughter's a biomedical engineering major. And that means she's, you know, she and her kind of will have the ability to make body parts. You know, at Duke, we were there looking at a 21-year-old who's making a functioning heart muscle a few years ago. So, what's the role of faithful people in these conversations? Because I think maybe part of the problem is these conversations just haven't happened. We just kind of pressed on ahead. It's been fun. We've gained power. We could do all that stuff. But where do we enter the conversation? What do we do?
Norman Wirzba 35:41
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think, a starting point is to ask the people who are doing this work not lose sight of larger questions. Right. And this is a problem, because I'll tell you, I know a number of people who are in the worlds of engineering, artificial intelligence, and, you know, maybe they're influenced by people like Steven Pinker, or Ray Kurzweil, who want to say, don't put up any barriers, we don't have to ask any questions. And of course, that's just delusional, but it's also highly dangerous. Because what you do when you simply say, "if we can do it, we should do it," is all sorts of moral questions that ought to be in play when we do the possibility of a, say, engineered body part or an engineered organism, what are the ethical, spiritual questions that ought to be in play?
Norman Wirzba 36:36
So just to give you an example, in agriculture, where biotech is huge, right. There's all sorts of concern about whether or not the biotech that has been fed to farmers over the last couple decades has been worth it, because the promise was that we're going to use a lot less herbicides. Well, we've used less of some, but we've used more of others. And in fact, we haven't seen the dramatic decrease that was projected, because what has happened is, is that the pests have modified to withstand the application of, say, Roundup. And so farmers didn't just lose the ability to save seeds, they've now had to pay licensing fees every year to have genetically modified seed that is resistant to the roundup herbicide so that they can grow their crops. So in the course of this development, we've seen continuing degradation of soils and water systems. We've seen further impoverishment of farmers. And we've seen greater wealth consolidation in the hands of these large agricultural companies.
Norman Wirzba 37:42
Now, why would we say this is a good idea? We're seeing that the yield associated with this are not keeping pace with the demand that we're going to have. And we're trying to increase yields in the context of soil erosion, soil degradation, and water depletion. That's not a winning formula. So what we need to do is when we go to engineers--and I'm not opposed to genetic engineering, that's not my point here--we have to think about what kinds of genetic engineering are going to make it possible for farmers to thrive, for farming communities to succeed, for soil fertility to increase, water quality to be better, for water availability to be better, right? These are the kinds of things that need to be asked. And unfortunately, in a lot of context, they're not being asked, right.
Norman Wirzba 38:34
I remember, speaking of Duke, you know, the head of our School of Engineering made a remarkable statement in a meeting where he said, look, we engineers, we can do pretty much anything you want us to do. The trouble is, we're not very good at answering whether we should do all the things we could possibly do. And for that, we need the help of people who are asking moral, spiritual questions. So if we've got an engineer who is the Dean of the School of Engineering, who is so smart as to understand that there are dangers in technologies that we need to be thinking about, that there are large justice questions, health questions in play, is a hopeful sign that we're not just going to go full steam ahead doing things just because we can do them. Because you're right to say, the world is changing very, very quickly. Artificial Intelligence, big data collection, it's changing dramatically what the world is potentially going to look like even in 50 years.
Eddie Rester 39:34
You mentioned the dean of engineering saying we need help with your questions. I remember reading an article really early on after Jennifer Doudna had figured out how to do some of the amazing genetic engineering and splicing. She said, we really need a pause on this until we've had the bigger conversations. And of course, nobody paused it. So.
Chris McAlilly 39:58
Yeah, I had one of my inmates when I was in Nashville, before I went to seminary was in a lab at Vanderbilt doing research on malaria-bearing mosquitoes. And he went on to be, you know, do a lot of research in genomics and studying human development and disease. We had this conversation around, I mean, he was at that time, I assume he still is, agnostic to atheist on kind of the spectrum of religious belief. But I remember several years later, we kind of hashed it out on my way to seminary and on his way to, you know, a PhD program out of Stanford, and we corresponded just a few years back and he's well into his career at this point. And he basically said, look, I'm just in a different place right now. I'm thinking about these questions in a much different way. And I, you know, I need to take a deeper dive in the in larger questions around morality and philosophy and religion, asking questions on who we are, what does it mean to be human if you have the capacity to potentially augment human humanity? It kind of takes you back to the sources.
Chris McAlilly 41:15
I see you doing that in this book. I think the question that I find fascinating is that you do have this role for creativity. And it's not just kind of going back to a nostalgic past. You are interested in creative and policy solutions moving forward. You end the book with two characters that I wanted to ask you about. One is Mako Fujimura, who is somebody interviewed on the podcast. His work is amazing. And then also Etty Hillesum, I wonder if you could just maybe tell the listeners a little bit about why you draw from them as you as you make an account for creativity at the end?
Norman Wirzba 41:15
Yeah, no, that's really great. Yeah, I think, you know, as a way of framing why it's important to think about people like this is a question that brings us back to what we were just talking about, is one that we rarely take much time with is, what's it for? What's the point? And if you talk to people in, you know, engineering, biotech fields, they're not very good at giving you explanations about what's it all for. And I think when you're involved in making things as artists are, or if you're engaged in, you know, a major crisis as Etty was, right, the Holocaust, the question of what's it all for, right, comes clearly interview.
Norman Wirzba 42:40
And this is something that, I think when we think about creativity, is so important to have in view. When you make something, whether it's a house, or whether it's an implement, or a piece of clothing, or whatever, and you're doing it, you're actually making it, you've got all kinds of questions that you have to be thinking about, that you don't, if you're simply a purchaser of something. Because you have to be thinking about the materials, right? You have to be thinking about the quality of the materials. Will those materials be around for a very long time? And you have to think, why am I making it this way rather than some other way? Am I making it so that it's beautiful? am I making it so that it will serve some communal or personal purpose? What would that purpose be? How does that purpose line up with the purposes that other people or other creatures might have?
Norman Wirzba 43:29
Right, and in the case of Mako, one of the things that he says is that when you're making things, you're being brought into very close proximity with the functioning of this world, because, again, thinking about what we were saying earlier about what it means to say that the world is created by God, it means that God is in covenant relationship with everything and present to everything. And Mako has this amazing line in his book, where he says, if theologians really want to get people thinking about God, don't write books. Get them involved in making things, because that's where you're going to encounter God. And I think he's absolutely right on that score. This is something that artists and farmers crafts people, they've long understood, not because all of them are, are Christian, necessarily.
Norman Wirzba 44:20
And I think with Etty, we're dealing with something also very similar. She's looking at herself, her community, her Jewish brothers and sisters, and she sees a systematic effort to not just kill Jews, but to turn the whole world into a concentration camp that will dramatically alter what life is for, what life is about. And if it doesn't serve the Third Reich, it doesn't matter. And so she was helping us see that we need to understand something about the sanctity of life, that we need to understand that apart from understanding things in terms of God as the one who loves them into being, we're going to continue to do tremendous damage.
Norman Wirzba 45:07
And so I think both Mako and Etty, what they do for us, is to get us to step back and ask what's the larger framework in which we do any of our political or social action, but also any of that sort of what we might call infrastructure, or home making kinds of work? Because these are fundamental things that we always have to attend to. What sort of society do we want to be? What kind of built environment do we want to create together? Because in our built environments, in our social organizations, we communicate what we value and what we think life is for.
Chris McAlilly 45:47
This is just hopefully, a just teasing this book that's coming out that you've written, that'll be out in October. Tell folks the name of the book and just exactly when it's going to be coming out.
Norman Wirzba 46:03
Sure. Yeah, the book is called "This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World." It's coming out with Cambridge University Press this October. And the book is fundamentally about how we need to recover a sense for the sanctity of our places, the sanctity of human and also non-human life. But then also the sanctity of human work as a way of recovering humanity's place as not just a sort of extracting, exploiting type of presence, but as one that contributes to the healing, but also the beautification of this world.
Norman Wirzba 46:37
And really, what motivated me in the book is to try to answer three really big questions together. And those questions are, where are we? Who are we? And what should we do? Right. Those are the big questions that people have asked for a very long time. And I want to argue that if we answer them in a theological way, so that where we are is God's creation, who we are is God's creatures, and what we're supposed to do is participate in God's own creativity and sustaining of this world, that that might give us a way of recovering something about the sanctity of this world and its life. And that that might be a way to get folks to rethink about what are the assumptions that are going on around us, and how destructive they are. And then also how we might imagine a different way of being in the world if we took the sacred character of life seriously.
Chris McAlilly 47:32
Well, thanks for helping us ask these big questions today. We really appreciate your time.
Eddie Rester 47:36
It's been a great conversation, Dr. Wirzba, thank you.
Norman Wirzba 47:39
Yeah, well, it's so good to be with you. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Eddie Rester 47:42
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 47:47
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Eddie Rester 47:59
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com [END OUTRO]