Are utopianism or distopianism beliefs a reflection of nature or nurture? I think for many it is probably a little bit of both, as well as an impossible question. As for me, I tend to just accept the future as it is – without letting myself feel powerless – rather, I do not convince myself that there is only one endpoint. Instead there are so many possibilities of what could happen that for none of the possibilities could be the standard good or bad of the utopia-sphere. In addition to my charming personality, I was also raised in a household in which care for the environment was not connected with any of my actions. I didn’t turn lights off because it would save the planet from chaos, I did it because my dad was always trying to cut our electricity bill. Same for showers, heat, etc. I never thought about whether or not the planet was doomed, only whether our savings were.
When I did reach a time where I was becoming involved with environmentalism and all that meant as a high schooler, I was already in a position of power – organizing an environmental education festival for my school and community. Because of this, I was not at the subject of someone telling me how to perceive the world, other than from the speakers that I brought in to speak. I was, naturally, still moved by the classic environmentalism that was still so common for that time, a lot of which was influenced by the spirituality or new age religion that Catherine Albanese writes a history about.
Albanese breaks down the history of spirituality and it’s connection with the Protestant religion, in which “a kind of conspiracy of optimism may be one response to a deep cultural sense of guilt and sin, a concomitant need for visible perfection as assurance of regeneration and sanctification” (Albanese 1993). Within the spirituality movement, “A discourse about power – cast as the personal empowerment of those oppressed by society and its lingering beliefs about original sin and guilt – can function as a covert response to old cultural tales of confinement” (Albanese 1993). Although the idea is to distance oneself from institutional religion, there are affects from the history of those religions.
I recently went to a panel for the annual Gender Studies Symposium, in which one Willamette senior spoke on her senior thesis on the power dynamics in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. The speaker, Celine Pond, analyzed the use of violence by women in the series. Her argument was that women in the series, namely the main character, used violence not only in a way that directly reversed the power in the situation, but also used the violence to effectively stop the use of misogyny by these men. While a lot of her presentation was very interesting, the particular part that I wish to connect to Albanese is the way that women who use violence as such are shunned as using sin and guilt, where men are not. Not only are they shunned for using a strategy that is created for and by men, but sin and guilt are also used to blame women’s sexuality for attracting rape and such to them.
It is difficult to connect heavy topics of women in society to other things because it feels like there should be a hierarchy of what constitutes a social “problem”, but I also think it is really important, especially as a way to combat such hierarchies. While reflecting on the past week in class and the panel that I saw, I connected the strategy of blaming the victim for the fault of the perpetrator with TGAL and putting the “weight of the world” on the individual in a reaction to the way that entire systems and networks have affected this planet. Sin and guilt are definitely used in environmentalism as a motivating factor for changing your lifestyle in order to save the planet. This is potentially one reason, along with the constructions of nature and science, as to why spirituality is so connected with environmentalism.
To see another perspective on nurturing spirituality and environmentalism, check out Alex’s post titled, “Faith in Morality and the Power of the Aggregate.” Alex looks at another aspect of Albanese’s article, in which healing the inner can heal the outer.