Cultural Autism

In relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries.

Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault; that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence; that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe…

None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted.

Thomas Berry
Cited in Christian Mystics

Matthew Fox offers us some brief comments on Berry’s point of view…

“Berry names our inability to listen to the earth as our collective “autism.” We have only begun to listen to how we have harmed her. And the only way out of the dead end we find ourselves in is to listen to earth’s pain and to call On our “prerational, our instinctive, resources. We have to move beyond culture as we know it, civilization as we know it”

While Berry’s classification of our being captured by a “cultural autism” is compelling and eye-opening, I am wondering if it is that organic an issue; where the perception is not there or could not yet be found because some quality of perception has not yet been discovered?

Or is it closer and more accurately described as a case of a craven greed or an induced myopia that is the true and lasting culprit in the despoiling of the earth?

Berry described himself as a “geologian” as his concern was less on a god or a divinity, and more on the inherent sacredness of life on earth… His warnings in his books stand true today as they did 30 years ago…

I place my hope on the upcoming generation(s) to reverse this capacious and irreverent way of living on earth, as my peers who woke up in the 1970s, have not been able to significantly transform the ways of agriculture, business, and energy production to truly allow the earth to heal and restore herself.

What gives me hope is what Berry’s cosmic invitation points to in our sense of rediscovered worship, awe, and wonder… when “we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe…”

An ecological religious orientation is essential, even mandatory, while a Creation story widely taught, and sincerely held to be a guiding and inspirational truth.