Vespers' Lament: Essays of Culture Critique, Future Suffering, and Christian Salvation

By Brian Howard Luce

There is much to be sad about at the dusk of America-as-we-knew-it. Composed during the years when Americans looked on in horror as many middle Americans took the mark of the Beast upon their hats and work-trucks, this book explores the theory that this political misstep was just the last in a long line of mistakes that America and other nations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781639883530

Book preview

VESPERS’

LAMENT 

Essays of Culture Critique, Future

Suffering, and Christian Salvation

BRIAN HOWARD LUCE

atmosphere press

Copyright © 2021 Brian Howard Luce

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Josep Lledó

No part of this book may be reproduced

except in brief quotations and in reviews

without permission from the author.

Vespers’ Lament

2021, Brian Howard Luce

atmospherepress.com

Introduction

There are many problems with our society; many people are making doomsday predictions. Let us look at the issue from a good range of perspectives. If you do not respectfully use the light of your friends and resources, you will lose them. Let us think about the issue from out of the flashing passes of God’s Wisdom in us. Only if we stop clinging to frameworks of thinking and praxis—can we clear the way for God’s far-extending Wisdom. As I commentate on different books and documentaries, I will responsibly alternate between using a scientific lens and using a theological lens. This, I believe, is what we must do to be good stewards. May each of us face the theories courageously: this would prepare us for the movement to come. Lament that the earth is sick. Lament that modern society may be doomed. Repent that so many of us are guilty of being sick or blind. Turn to the God of simple gatherings; He is the hope of your soul surviving the flood times to come. And if you see an opportunity to leave modern society now, before it collapses, seeing in the distance a monastery, a commune, or a cabin on Walden Pond, if you hear the call to depart for it, may it be your ark.

The word Repent! is here intended to mean this: expressing regret, then trying to turn from wicked ways by fasting, almsgiving, finding time for a prayer life, and focusing on being humble, …that is, down-to-earth, to study the small-voiced nature of the will of God (Romans 12) (1 Kings 19:12).

Contents

I. The Heavens are Falling

II. A Crude Awakening

III. Gasland

IV. Our Other Fatal Addiction: Rare Earth Metals

V. An Inconvenient Truth

VI. Will the Epoch End in Fire or Ice?

VII. Concealed Rage

VIII. Sins of Racism

IX. The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

X. Anticipating Disagreements: The Ever-Optimistic

vs. The Doomsday Brigade

XI. "Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying

Our Democracy"

XII. The Creepy Technician Epidemic

XIII. The McDonaldization of Society

XIV. The Novel 1984 Shows This: Where Nietzschean

Worship of Power Spreads, So Does Insanity

XV. Dark Market

XVI. The Four Heresies of Our Time

XVII. We Tortured Little Lambs

Discussion

Works Cited

The Heavens are Falling

Climate change, world change, threatens to destabilize the epoch. Shall we continue to build Towers of Babel? Is it not foolish to build an extravagant building in any coastal region when many scientists predict the oceans will rise because of global warming and hurricanes will henceforward be more powerful and destructive? Miami has never before seen flooding problems like the flooding it has been struggling with the last few years due to rising sea levels (Gillis). May the top dogs of Miami accept that the party is over. May they face the music, humble themselves, deconstruct the extravagance, and minimize their losses. Likewise, is it not foolish to build an extravagant building in California where earthquakes are expected? Or, to build an extravagant building anywhere in the U.S., where the economy may pop like a bubble at any moment because of the debt? (Karplus 235). And Have you ever realized how sophisticated a nuclear reactor is? (Areva) Is it not foolish to build nuclear reactors when they are so dangerous and we will run out of the rare earth metals needed for them in 100 years or so anyway? …specifically, the metals needed for a reactor’s instrumentation and control system, which involves thousands of sensors (Areva). Yet we are building them—because men gloat that Control of nuclear power plants has come a long way since the Chernobyl days (SaveOnEnergy.com). I gloat in the West no more: I touch a red button.

On another note, is it not foolish to use up resources to construct an extravagant building when the world has seven billion people on it, and feeding and sheltering these seven billion people requires frugality, generosity, time, and uncanny logistics? Finally, is it not foolish to build an extravagant building anywhere on this planet, where dust and mold, human fickleness, and the winds of change will dispose the owners and inhabitants to lose interest in the building in short time? Yes, it is foolish. Renounce the extravagance. That is my response to the convincing book by Walter Karplus, entitled The Heavens are Falling: The Scientific Prediction of Catastrophes of Our Time. Karplus analyzes the evidence with scientific discipline and levelheadedness:

This book is about scientific predictions, the use of computer models and simulations, high tech. It is addressed primarily to readers who have been weaned on the scientific method and who look to scientists for advice and counsel: readers who consult meteorologists for weather forecasts, not the Farmer’s Almanac; who go to physicians when they are ill, not to faith healers; who have trust in seismologists when it comes to earthquakes, rather than in astrologers; in short, readers who, while aware of the many limitations of modern science, nonetheless respect the scientific way of thinking rather than the alternative. (Karplus 27)

Karplus is a trustworthy scientist who has gathered and summarized the scientific theories for why scientists are predicting eight different catastrophes: ozone layer depletion,¹ climate change, nuclear radiation, acid rain, the AIDS epidemic, overpopulation, economic collapse, and earthquakes. This book awoke in me a new sense of the vanity of most human projects, including a sense of the vanity of my own plans to build up things in my life.

Repent. See the foolishness of building Towers of Babel on such a wild planet—that belongs to such a jealous God. Cross over to the other mindset: the way of minimalism, that is, to be minimally concerned with improving your material situation and not to begin a grand project when a small project would suffice, thus actually finding time for prayer. The less you have, the more natural it is, and the less you idolize it, the more lightheartedly meaningful it tends to become. To be sure, we should work together to build shelters and grow food so that we do not devolve into cavemen. In cavemen, the Divine Wisdom was almost always repressed. However, we should not risk losing our souls enslaving others or being enslaved in order to build grand cities showcasing man-made treasures. As Jesus said, You cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24).

Do not store up your treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy them, and where burglars dig through and steal them; but store up your treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys them, and where burglars do not dig through or steal; for where your treasure is, there also will be your heart (Matthew 6:19-21).

The disappearance of modern diversions is coming. It is time to get your heart in the right place: not in your big plans for your modern career and fun-filled lifestyle: they will probably be canceled. Rather, labor for holy houses. And lay down your heart in the spirit of simple gatherings. Alas, we are unholy and bothersome to each other. Yet the rapport will return. The spirit of the simple gatherings of the awake and sober could suddenly become the Holy Spirit that helps you all resist the Antichrists of the falling modern world.

A Crude Awakening

Because so many geological scientists, oil consultants, and academics say that the modern dependence on coal and oil spells DOOM for modern living, it is difficult to believe it is fake news. The most edifying presentation of this theory is the documentary A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash: We’re Running Out and We Don’t Have a Plan. Here the voices of many professionals blend together into one voice that says: we need to realize modern society uses oil for everything. For, we use plastic everywhere and fuel all day long. In other words, there are now billions of humans—from Canada to Singapore—who use rock oil products and rock oil power all day long. It is the prime mover of modern civilization, the secret to its success

(A Crude Awakening). It is one of the main reasons the population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion in 2012. It is one of the main reasons that many people have become sick with affluenza and mother earth has become sick with pollution.

An unforgettable moment in the film is when Matthew Savinar declares, Oil is our God. I don’t care if someone says they worship Jesus, Buddha, Allah, whoever. They actually worship petroleum (A Crude Awakening, ch. 2). In other words, we have become idol-worshippers. The second commandment tells us not to worship false idols, but we break this commandment on a daily basis. How so? Let us approach an answer in steps. There is plenty of evidence that in the early 1900s people worshipped their radios: a radio was as big as a blue mailbox, or R2-D2, the Star Wars robot; it was the centerpiece of the room. In the 1950s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger made this observation about his countrymen: The only thing they hear is the noise of the apparatus, which they almost take for the voice of God (The Pathway). A family’s radio was the favorite family friend and the family’s guardian angel: by listening to one radio program after another they would fend off feelings of coldness. Then came the television: initially intoxicating, but, if clung to for long hours, it offered only comfortably numb hypnosis and pseudo-EMDR healing. Many made it the center of their homelife anyway. Likewise, there is plenty of evidence that many people in the twenty-first century worship their smartphones: it is their personal assistant and guardian angel that helps one fend off feelings of powerlessness. Sometimes, when we are adoring our radio, TV, or smartphone for how much it does for us, we let our imagination wander and sing praise to the whole system that makes the apparatus possible: praise to the power grid and the signal processing networks. It is only a small step from there to worshipping the fuel that keeps all this active: coal and oil. Between 1900 and 1988, before people learned to associate coal and oil with global warming, many people blatantly worshipped the gushing oil well. Now oil worship is less common, but, nonetheless, we adore it whenever business as usual is occurring at our gas stations. We adore the symbols of modern advancement: the train, the skyscraper, the fighter aircraft. Or, the symbol of the Apple Store. Secretly we adore the uncanny substance that makes it all possible.

We break the second commandment whenever we entertain reveries about how much better it is to live in a highly mobilized world than a horse and buggy world—and do not think any deeper about what truly makes us alive. Old spiritual practices have been replaced by new ones: if one needs some alone time, one does not go to a quiet room or to a chapel to find God; one probably goes cruising, because, as one modern youngster has admitted: her car is her church (Morris). Our decision is always to Drill, baby, drill and to welcome so many worldly comforts from oil. This has turned us into outrageous sinners. We believe we cannot be happy without a continual supply of plastic products and oil power. We believe this to such an extent that we will support unholy persons and practices if they promise to secure the influx of oil into our cities. So Matthew Savinar speaks the truth in the quote above: not only is our huge usage of oil outrageous from a scientific perspective, it is also outrageous from a theological perspective.

Let’s slow down and get clear about the basics. What is oil? It is a non-renewable substance we pump out of the earth, transport in metal barrels, then process into transportation fuel, plastic, and petrochemical fertilizers:

Oil is not like wheat; we are not growing it every year. Oil is an outcome of many millions of years of geological history. The great bulk of the world's oil was formed at just two very brief moments of extreme global warming, 90 and 150 million years ago. Animals and plants that died in the ocean were compressed by more deposits of sand, and over the years these deposits squished and compacted more and more, and then, over time, they were cooked, which was what we call the kitchen. And when the organic material was buried to a depth of about 2000 meters, chemical reactions converted it into oil. This was formed once, briefly, over geological time. And so, we are using this stuff up over one or two centuries.

(A Crude Awakening, ch. 1)

Mankind discovered lots of this stuff in the U.S., in Venezuela, in Baku, and then, in the late 1960s, lots more was discovered in Siberia and under the North Sea. But we have already used up most of those reserves. Now, 2/3 of the oil reserves are in the Middle East, which means basically the Persian Gulf, and that's 10 times as much as any other source. Right now, the only region of the world that hasn't peaked is the Middle East (Dr. David Goodstein and then Matthew Savinar qtd. in A Crude Awakening). Representatives of Saudi Arabia reassure the world that Arabian oil will keep flowing strongly for another 50, 75 or even a hundred years (Matthew Simmons qtd. in A Crude Awakening, ch. 6). That sounds promising. Yet, listening to the statements of Matthew Simmons² in the documentary, if we read between the lines, we are led to the following conclusion: if Saudi Arabia will run out of oil in 50, 75, or 100 years, the world will run out of oil in 50, 75 or 100 years! This will be such a shock to our economic system³ that there will be societal chaos and strange gusts of collective action.

There will be no gasoline for our cars. Most of our grand technologies, the idols of the cult of oil, will cease churning and will be as lifeless as toppled statues. The planet will be covered with dead technology.

How long have we known our addiction to this non-renewable resource spells DOOM? Dr. M. King Hubbert was one of the first individuals to speak up about oil depletion. In 1970, it had become clear to him that mankind’s use of oil is a huge problem (A Crude Awakening, ch. 6). He created the chart above to express how dramatic the change was when mankind discovered oil and how dramatic it will be when mankind runs out. The y-axis in Figure 1 is the measurement of how much fossil fuel the human race used in past years or the prediction of how much it will use in future years. When Dr. Hubbert presented Figure 1 on public television, he added this commentary:

I've taken this timespan here from 5000 years ago to 5000 years in the future. What we call recorded history began about 5000 years ago. So, what this shows is that this spike here is the episode of the fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, and every other kind of fossil fuel in human history. It's the most disturbing thing that's ever happened to the human species. It's responsible for our technological society and in terms of human history is a very brief epoch. (A Crude Awakening, ch. 13)

Hubbert’s point is that life changed so much when we discovered how to use