Yes, I’m well aware of Pogo and the enemy quote. And in fact that is just my point: we are the enemy.
You say capitalism has been wildly successful. Successful at what? Yes, at providing cellphones and computers and global communications and many other things besides, though I suppose much of this could have been developed by non-capitalist economies.
It has also been successful at driving population growth, which is threatening our survival; depletion of finite resources, which is threatening our survival; and climate change, which is threatening our survival. All the good stuff, the comforts, brought by capitalism, or perhaps I should say brought by the modernist perspective in general, come associated with sometimes steep costs and costs that may even prove to be ultimately fatal, perhaps to human civilization and perhaps to human life itself.
Yet the indigenous people of America had no such problems. No, they didn’t have high tech. They also never faced, for some 20,000 years, threats to their very existence until the guys with the gunpowder and the horses and the crosses sailed over from abroad. They lived sustainably, not exploitatively, and bequeathed the land, air and water unscathed to their descendants.
I was just struck by the irony of the title of your thread, that the people bathing in that river were guilty of “religious insanities.” Inanities, maybe, but insanities? As I contended, to me, the real insanity is to despoil a living river. I have subsequently read about that river. It is dead, just dead, and has been for years, according to those who have studied it.
To keep more or less on topic, in the late 90s Coney Island was in bad shape. The beach and the Pacific around it were heavily polluted to the point where it was considered unsafe to go on the beach or into the water. Somehow people managed to clean it up, temporarily reversing the broader trend of worldwide entropy toward environmental destruction.
A couple of summers ago I was there with friends and we witnessed people visiting from Africa in native and religious garb conducting a baptism ceremony. Perhaps it would have been insane, or at least inane, for them to do this if the beach and ocean were still in bad shape. But it was all incredibly moving and people applauded. One need not believe in a nonexistent sky daddy to appreciate human bonding rituals, which I think may be said to be sacred even in a secular sense.
But then a few months ago, reflecting on the revival of Coney Island, I happened across a news article about scientific studies forecasting our fate. The island’s revival, alas, is to be short lived, because it, and about half of Brooklyn (where Coney Island is) will be either partly or totally submerged because of climate change, possibly as early as the turn of the century or sooner. So Coney’s days are numbered.
As all of our days are numbered too, I fear. But at least we have cellphones and computers. As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, we can text while the world burns.
