Peak Oil and Prayer
September 19, 2005

The first Philadelphia Peak Oil conference took place yesterday at Friends Center and Friends Select School on Logan Square. The PhillyBeyondOil conference was sponsored by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Catholic Peace Fellowship, the Henry George School, the Shalom Center, Pendle Hill Peace Center, and several other organizations. Hats off to Charles Lenchner, Philly Beyond Oil Coordinator, who made it possible.

The Sunday conference kicked off in the morning with a session on "Peak Oil and the Alternatives" with Jan Lundberg, Mike Ewall, Suzanne Leta and Dennis Winters. The basic message was that there is no easy or ready substitute for oil, nuclear energy is neither cheap nor clean, and that the best hope we have for dealing with the immediate future is to institute thoroughgoing conservation measures. There were several concurrent sessions on other topics, but I attended the session on the Climate Crisis with Charles Komanoff and Lorna Salzman, both New Yorkers. Dr. Komanoff argued for the imposition of a carbon (energy) tax, and Ms. Salzman, who ran on the Green Party, said that progressives in the U.S. need to overcome their myopic vision and reach out to conservative Christians.

The sessions were informative and relevant, and it was heartening to see that 160 or 200 people in Philadelphia had come to hear the message about Peak Oil. It was not until near the end of the luncheon session, a panel discussion, that I began to feel the old sense of déjà vu – that here we are once again in the 1960’s or 1970’s and nothing has changed. Only everything has changed, because the variety of liberal progressivism on display has only proved itself to be totally irrelevant. Besides, the Masters in Power in Washington have already exploited the multicultural dogma to maximum effect ( i.e. divide and conquer) and, as recent events in New Orleans show, they’ve moved on to a new program of ethnic and civic warfare through disaster management. So, the multiculturalism on display at Friends Center was a little like somebody waving the flag of the British Empire after India was lost.

The multicultural undercurrents were moving in that room before some woman got up to read a manifesto from some representative of "Indigenous Peoples." Plus, I got tired of the panel moderator only calling on "women or people of color" to speak. Somebody got up to say that New Orleans really ought to be rebuilt according to green and multicultural ideals. Really? Ever heard of Halliburton? The liberals and progressivists seem to me as self-indulgent as ever and utterly clueless about the real "Forces of Evil" today, and about who gets what done and how. The multi-cultural pseudo-religious prayers of some supposed Christian reverend who began the next session (he prayed from Buddhist, Islamic, Old Testament and Hindu scriptures – in fact, everything except Christian) didn’t help my mood, which was rapidly sinking due to overexposure to liberal cluelessness, righteousness, egotism, and adulterated religion.

It was with feelings of relief that I betook myself later to Logan Square, to stand with the Catholics who had come to celebrate the "Prayer in the Parkway" with Justin Cardinal Rigali and numerous priests and religious of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. If multiculturalism is what you want, join the Catholic Church. Prayers were said in English, Latin, Spanish, and (probably) some Korean and African languages, though I couldn’t be sure. There were maybe 20,000 people present, and Cardinal Rigali gave a substantial homily about the Eucharist and what it demands of us. People sang; many kneeled. I saw some familiar faces and met new friends. "Purity of heart is to will one thing," says the Gospel. Or from the Epistle of James: Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh from the Father of lights, in whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

You would think that the real message of Peak Oil – that there are limits to any human activity – would have acted as a brake to the multicultural enthusiasm, but alas, there is no such hope. For the liberals and progressives, Peak Oil is just another opportunity to indulge in the adulteration of religion and to put forth their hyper-utopian social agenda. Somehow being with people who are aware of Peak Oil was just not enough, and the "Prayer in the Parkway" helped me put the bad taste out of my mouth. Somehow, just to worship God and not Self seems to me to be the first, gigantic, step. Unless you can make that step you havn’t gotten anywhere.

Passing Over
September 12, 2005

On this day my younger son was born, sixteen years ago. This tall, slender lad with enormous feet and an awesome piano jazz style continues, with his older brother, to bring the blessings of motherhood into my life. The three of us live in cheerful disorder in an apartment in a town on the Main Line near Philadelphia. It’s called the Main Line because it’s a central commuting train line from the suburbs to the city. And are we grateful to live practically next door to the R-5 station. I am definitely not of the "soccer Mom" mentality and my message to my offspring is basically, I’ll take you there only if you can’t get there by foot or by train. Driving in the USA has become a form of paying daily tribute to Moloch, and that was even before the price of gas began escalating as it has in recent days. Our littered-up landscape is one result of this tribute to Moloch, and the thousands of people unable to leave New Orleans because they didn't own cars, is another. The face of the Empire is the grimace on the face of the Dead, and what has died is what used to be called the res publica, the public things – the commitment to the common good. Public transit is one of these features of the common good about which most Americans place little value and commitment, but it is only one of a long list. My sense of the future is that the bill for our American worship of selfish private gain is starting to become due, and that this will coincide with Peak Oil and the already devastated American economy to deliver a series of blows from which we will either be humbled and live, or remain in impenetrable arrogance and die.

This "passing over" from arrogance to a more modest profile of attentiveness to reality is commemorated in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which, according to the Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac, is the Pasch.. He writes in his chapter MYSTERIUM CRUCIS, from his book Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (1950) that

The evolution of "Pasch" from that of the Jewish Passover to the voluntary sacrifice of Christ is a tremendous transformation of thought. In a sense the "Pasch" is an inversion of the Passover idea. The Jewish festival commemorates the deliverance of the Israelites, when the Angel of Death (which slew the first-born of the Egyptians) passed over their houses and spared all who did as Moses commanded. But the "passing over" of the Christian pasch is hardly a call to be spared, but the act of consent not to be spared. The Christian pasch is the consent to God’s will, to the circumstances of destiny, to the suffering that is an inevitable accompaniment to human life. It is the opposite of the Jewish idea. In the Pasch one may discern the attitude of acceptance of the destiny of mankind, thus implicitly pointing to the notion of the common good. By contrast, in the Passover one cannot but catch the tones of refusal and exceptionalism. These are momentous differences, and in many ways America today is poised between these two alternatives.

G.K. Chesterton once termed America "a nation with the soul of a church," to which the writer who calls himself "Spengler" on Asia Times Online corrected (rightly, I think) to "a nation with the soul of an heretical church." America’s "heretical Christianity" consists in the fact that it has not really made a decision for Pasch. Thus we are left with the Passover. But he difference is, we have no Moses.

September 4, 2005
Response to "After the Crash" from Piotr Kopylowicz:  "After putting down your book, I have to say the greatest thing I got from reading it is a sense of hope. This is not a profound comment, but there it is. The future world which you describe is based on the ruins of the proceeding age, but it is also human, in contrast to our own. I can only define human by listing several things in the book that appealed to my heart (I cannot say that it created a sense of longing because I have never known this future world, so I will simply call it desire). One of the things has to be the return to something like craftsmanship and a humane economy, e.g., Pete and his creating soles for shoes, the paper business, etc. Another would be something like the growth of communities, e.g., the only thing that comes to mind is the use of the abandoned prisons. A third thing would the return of a type of order in the relations between people and especially the sexes. I was taken in by the way Sas and Pete related to one another and by last boating trip to Philadelphia. Most people in the book actually had a desire to communicate with one another.

"I could create a laundry list of the above, but I will spare you the burden of reading it. All of the characters in the book were believable (one could imagine them as real people), e.g., I imagined the security guard slapping his leg and laughing after having been tricked and thought that in my life I had seen a person like him react to a situation similarly, or Sarcent's comments about beetles ("The insides of bugs is they outsides," or "They outsides is yo' insides brother.") which got me thinking about beetles myself and trying to picture them the way Sarcent was imagining them.

"Those are all the comments I have for right now. Most of my responses to the book are still at the intuitive and emotional level, so I do not have any profound thoughts to offer. I would recommend the book to other students in my dorm, but unfortunately they seem more interested in reading the likes of John Grisham or entertaining themselves with movies or electronic gadgets or with things on the internet. But I have not gotten to know that many students so perhaps I will meet different people who would enjoy your book.

"By the way, I like the fact that you included Ortega's distinction between beliefs and ideas. I frequently ask myself what people believe today, but cannot come to any definite conclusion (and opinion poll would not help very much). What do you thinks the beliefs of our age are?"  Note: Piotr writes from Poland.--Editor.

Big Butter and Egg Man
September 3, 2005; additional note posted Sept. 4; see below.

I want
A butter and egg man,
From way out in the way.
I'm gettin tired of workin' all day
I want somebody who just wants me to play.
Many the days I'm lonesome and blue,
Just sittin' and waitin' for a big sweet papa like you.
I want
A butter and egg man,
What great big butter and egg man wants me?

The news from New Orleans is inexpressibly sad. Many years ago I attended college briefly at Sophie Newcomb, the women's division of Tulane. I used to take the St. Charles Avenue streetcar to the Quarter and spend the better part of Friday or Saturday night at Preservation Hall, where Sweet Emma (the Bell Gal) would be performing. I guess Sweet Emma had been pounding the piano so long her back was curved in a permanent hunch. She looked like a wizened old question mark. She could sing. And man, could she play.

Those days are gone forever. Some people have called New Orleans Bush's "Waterloo," but I think the better analogy is Bush's Rubicon. New Orleans marks the transition of the American Republic to the American Empire -- an unmasked transition, in contrast to 9/11, which was in disguise. The Empire of Entropy embodied by Bush and his henchmen combines elements of the Roman Caesars, the French monarchy before the Revolution, and Communist Party dictators with the American "personality style" of permanent narcissism and  moral infantilism. All I could feel, when watching Bush say that "this is a temporary interruption" or hear his wife a few days later smile to the camera and insist "how important it is to register your children for school," was total shock and disbelief. A normal human being's response to such oblivious insouciance is to destroy, to lash out in sheer violence and destruction. It's the impulse to obliterate what is foul and evil, to wipe clean something that has been utterly corrupted.  In this fashion this impulse to destruction can been seen, paradoxically enough, as an expression of moral intelligence and of an outraged sensibility.  Yet it is extremely dangerous to trifle with this impulse,  to tease it, because this is one of the most dangerous forces in the world and can itself rapidly degenerate, as the history of modern revolutions shows. In spiritual science and mythology this force of destruction is called 'Saturn,' the God Chronos who devours his own children. The Old Testament contains an echo of the violent destructiveness of Saturn in the story of the Flood - God himself set a limit to 'Saturn,'  and promised never again to destroy humanity in this way, despite humanity's repeated violations of the moral law.

In the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center, thousands of poor people were herded into a foul, airless space without food, water, or functioning toilets and not permitted to leave. Inside,  there was rape, murder, death, misery, thirst, hunger, damp - outside, the troops standing by with guns.When would the buses come? Where are my relatives? Is there any water? No answers for questions, no order, organization, plan.  Nobody seemed to know anything or to know what to do. Those supposedly in charge seemed to be running around -- is S.J. Perelman's lapidary phrase - like heads with their chickens cut off. I am told that one mother, in desperation, handed her baby to someone in one of the buses that was leaving. I wonder if the story is true - and if so, who that little one will be - snatched from the swamp of foul waters that has engulfed an entire city. For already his life has the sign of Moses.

Additional note, September 4th: The reader may wish to consult John Harris’s "Literate Values" blog (9/3/2005) for an excellent post, part of which I reproduce below:

See full post at: http://www.literatevalues.org/virtue.htm#BEST

August 29, 2005

The United States of Hysteria

An Internet friend wrote me last week that I should write more on my website.I appreciated the fact that (a) he reads my site; and (b) cares enough about it to want more of it; (c) has the self-possession and confidence to urge me to the task. In the world today to elicit this degree of time and interest is noteworthy in itself, for I think the chief characteristic of the contemporary "form of being" is a kind of hysterical narcissism, an impenetrable refusal of passion and suffering - an invincible ignorance which will not be humbled by anything. And this -- despite the growing pile of disasters - from Iraq, from Peak Oil, from the storm about to hit New Orleans, from climate change and the endless evidence of the degradation of the life-bearing capacities of the earth.  It is said that if the storm hits New Orleans in the way that people suspect that it might, it could turn that region into a toxic cesspool, thanks to its being a center of the petroleum and petrochemical industry. Not to mention the devastation and possibility of wiping out the French Quarter.

I should say a little about this younger friend, who has just recently moved to Poland, where he intends to pursue the profession of dentistry. He wrote that he had obtained a law degree in the USA but was unable to find employment here. Our correspondence was mainly about Catholicism --  he is a loyal Catholic - and he appreciated my growing appreciation of Catholicism.

 Indeed,  I am more and more convinced that  Protestantism ought to bear some of the blame for the disintegration of American Christianity into narcissism and totalitarianism. Why aren't there any Protestant preachers stepping up to  perform the necessary examination of conscience with regard to the history of their own religion? (Hint: Protestantism dispensed with the "examination of conscience.")Why aren't good Protestants stepping up to condemn the current exhibit of "humans" at the London Zoo? (Hint: The animalization of man is good for the economy, which means good news for Mammon, who is the real god of the Protestants.) Why is the Protestant bishop of England allowing Lincoln Cathedral to be the site for the filming of that vile anti-Christian propaganda, The Da Vinci Code?  (Note: It's a Catholic nun who protesting this.) Why aren't Protestants protesting Pat Robertson, the latest neocon jihadist in their midst and the man who has turned Christianity into a temple of lucre for himself? (Hint: See above. The Protestants believe that making money is a sign that you are in good graces with God.) And finally where are the Protestants on Iraq? (Note: Cindy Sheehan is a Catholic.Hillary Clinton is calling for more troops to be sent there.)

 I am not being very charitable, I suppose, in condemning the protestant cesspool of narcissistic America. But I cannot help but notice that,  while not all Catholics make sense, for the most part it seems to be true that the only people who make sense happen to be Catholic. I have started to notice. I hope my readers take my not-so-subtle hint.

August 31 Update: An interesting chart was published yesterday in USA Today showing religious affiliation in the US. The numbers:
Roman Catholic       67.3 million
Southern Baptist     16.4     "
United Methodist      8.3     "
Latter-Day Saints     5.5     "
Church of God          5.4     "
National Baptist        5       "
Lutheran                   5       "
These figures are fascinating, not only for what they say, but also because of what they leave out. For one thing, where are the Episcopalians and Presbyterians? And I was very suprised at how the Catholic numbers dwarf all the others. It would be interesting to supplement these numbers of Christian denominations with those of Jews and Muslims. Cited source: 2005 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

"After the Crash-An Essay-Novel of the Post-Hydrocarbon Age"   Now available for $8.18 plus postage through www.lulu.com – To order: http://www.lulu.com/content/151561

August 13, 2005 Today is the death-date of St. Maximos the Confessor, d. 662 A.D., after being flogged in Constantinople. His tongue was plucked out and his right hand cut off. One of the great Saints of the Church, St. Maximos is mainly known for his resolution of several Christological controversies raging in his time. These controversies dealt with the question of human and divine will in Jesus and how, as Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in his book on St. Maximos, Divine Liturgy, one is going to go about reconciling the [Asiatic] 'religion of nature' with the Christian 'religion of self-communication and of grace.'

Such a controversy is bound to strike us nowadays as ancient and removed from life. But ancient questions have a way of reappearing in new forms.  When St. Maximos writes, "Do not lightly discard spiritual love; for men there is no other road to salvation," he enunciates the principle of inner freedom, the voluntary co-operation of man with the Holy Spirit -- which used to be the real meaning of oikonomia, economy -- our experience of God in history.  It was out of this depth that St. Maximos understood the human will of Jesus was truly and authentically a human will, but one held in voluntary and unwavering obedience to the Divine Will.

How does this 'voluntary co-operation of human will with Divine Will' relate to the announcement, at the head of this posting, that my novel, "After the Crash," is now available through print-on-demand format? St. Maximos tells us that "the person who has come to know the weakness of human nature has gained an experience of divine power." The realities of Peak Oil are certainly a way for people to come into knowledge of human weakness. The question is how such knowledge is to be faced and accepted. There are all kinds of lies, evasions, distortions, deceptions, failures, and postponements flaming in our world today, most of them traceable, ultimately, to the fact that the energy budget of the modern Empire slides deeper and deeper into debt accounting. I doubt that we will do what is difficult, will acknowledge difficult truths or make difficult sacrifices, unless we have the inner conviction of God's presence and that somewhere, somehow, something is calling us to account. The depletion of the oil resource is only the most obvious and evident of this fact. Our whole modern life is thus a 'symbolic fact' of the chaos into which our moral life has fallen.

'After the Crash' deals with this moral accounting of the hydrocarbon, oil-energy era with a light and whimsical touch. Set in the Philadelphia area in the not-too-distant future of the 21st century, Pete and his girl friend Sas and their friends and acquaintances are living in a world with drastically reduced opportunities for 'getting and spending.' In some ways their world resembles the Old World without oil - but in actuality, theirs is a radically different world. For they have to cope with the legacy of radical selfishness which is our world, the world we live in today - which takes to excess and thinks to leave nothing for our descendants. After the Crash is future people looking back at us. No wonder I tried to frame this difficult and sobering message with a touching romance and a whimsical plot. To have tried it in any other way would be too awful and unbelievable.

Michael O’Brien’s Catholic Apocalypses
August 4, 2005

Reposted to Part III of essay, "The New World Order of Entropy."
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495qs/theswordinthemouth/id13.html -- Two sections added, Aug 4 and Aug 11.Third section added August 15, 2005.

The Climbing Price of Oil           
August 11, 2005

The world - reality - human experience - is in essence a moral fact. That we have to labor for our bread in the world of substantiality and physicality disguises it, But anyone who pulls off the disguise and sees the moral nature of the world begins to realize his own higher mind. And with that, like dogs howling in the distance, this awakening to the higher mind awakens, in others, the urge to misrepresent, to resent, ridicule, undercut, belittle - the impulse to Accuse.

Satan, in the Bible, is called the "Accuser of the Brethren." I had an experience yesterday in which I felt that I stood before an - not "the" -  Accuser. This came on the heels of an altogether different personal rejection which has been very hard for me to accept.In the meantime, in the world, the "outer world," the price of oil is steadily escalating, thus confirming the suppositions of those of us who have been following the Peak Oil movement. The oil that is driving this world to the edge of the abyss is a fitting spiritual and physical symbol for the sense of the moral that we have buried below ground. We utterly depend upon it and we are utterly exhausting it.