Those of us who try to remind people of the overwhelming consensus on climate science – and the probable effects – are often accused of being Cassandras.* But there’s another prophet to take into account, not least in the U.S.
The “Jeremiad” is a time-honored genre in American literature. It’s named after the prophet Jeremiah, who was known for weeping over the wicked ways of the children of Israel for forsaking the path of the Lord and calling upon them to return thereto. So, as you might imagine, it’s a denunciation of a community for abandoning their principles, combined with a call to return to them. As an example, Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?” comes to mind; so do most of Thoreau’s writings. Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again” could be seen as an ironic, or at least poignant, revision of the Jeremiad. “Make America Great Again” is perhaps the Jeremiad’s most recent, unironic, and unselfconscious manifestation. But the Puritans were the ones who got it going, in North America at least. John Winthrop compared the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony to “a city on a hill”: if they failed, everyone would see them fail, and laugh. Ronald Reagan put a more positive spin on the metaphor in his farewell address – which, notably, also emphasized America as the land that welcomed striving immigrants. When it comes to the American carbon economy & our wastrel ways, it’s hard to know what we’d be going back to. The Puritans started out with a reading of the Bible that definitively separated God from the physical world, emphasized original sin, and saw the Creation as only worthwhile when “improved” by humans (hence, they didn’t count the Indigenous North Americans within that category, since they were perceived – incorrectly – as purely nomadic and non-agricultural). By the time the United States came into being, the figure of the citizen as bodiless, abstract subject was firmly established. Homo economicus was the subject of industrial capitalism, which was growing apace. Coal fired the US economy throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, as immigration swelled the population. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that greenhouse emissions hit the handle of the hockey-stick graph, here as well as globally. In other words, it’s hard to articulate mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate catastrophe in terms of any established USAmerican narrative. We’re all about individuality, independence, freedom to do whatever the hell you want, if it’s your property you’re doing it with (that is, if you stole it fair and square). We’re this weird amalgam of desire for creature comforts and accumulation of wealth on the one hand; and intense moralistic religiosity on the other (cf. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II). The New Deal is the oldest historical touchstone US climate critics can manage (as in “Green New Deal”); or maybe the Marshall Plan. Because, in a very real sense, the United States may not have invented climate chaos, but we sure did popularize it. And it was in our cultural DNA all along. So, “reinventing the economy” in a very real sense means reinventing ourselves. It might mean looking to, say, Indigenous cultures for inspiration. Or the “rugged individualism,” minus the individualism (rugged communitarianism? or communalism?). Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God might not be a bad place to start. The heroine is a young Ojibwe woman, raised in a white household, who is pregnant. There is something going on. The permafrost is melting and . . . well, we’re never quite sure what’s might have bubbled forth and what it might have done. The biosphere seems to be . . . regressing, devolving . . . and maybe humans, too. And in the meantime, a theocratic authoritarianism has triumphed (in Minnesota, at least). She meets her birth mother and stepfather and spends time on the rez, and then . . . Well, let’s just say that, like some of Erdrich’s other work, it’s an interesting mix of Indigenous lifeways and serious Catholicism. No easy answers. But a good reminder that, since the apocalypse (or at least Armageddon) has already happened for native peoples, one might consider how they have coped. In our present fix, any Jeremiad leads straight downhill – fast forward from Lamentations to Revelations. A new narrative is needed, one that involves courage, cooperation, and a broader conception of justice. Such a narrative may not stave off devastation. But it may prepare us to live with it. So – get busy! ___________________ * Or that other literary character, Chicken Little, who was a prophet manqué.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |