Volcanoes and Primitive Superstition

The Gods Are Not Crazy, But Angry

We recently watched the second UK "Leaders' Debate" on Fox. Two things (of not equal significance) were striking. The first was the relative politeness of political discourse on display. The moderator was not trying to make himself the "star" of the show and improve his next bonus by constantly interrupting like a childish jack-in-the-box. The three leaders, whilst disagreeing and debating, did so respectfully, with minimal interruption, cheap point scoring, crass one-up-man-ship, and megaphonic shouting down. We in New Zealand could learn a thing or two.

The second striking feature was, despite the superficial sophistication, the evident degraded state of the United Kingdom. All the candidates are so far into the mire of soft-despotic statism that the only differences were relatively minor. All candidates were scrupulous to do all they could not to offend anyone, particularly those identified as disadvantaged minorities. The UK is gone-burger--until its people come to their senses like the Prodigal at the swine trough--and repent. Let us, therefore, continue to pray for all those who have not yet bowed the knee to Baal in the UK, and who continue to believe, display, and proclaim the Gospel of the Lord Messiah. We do hear encouraging reports of the Spirit of God moving once again over that now formless and void nation.

The raw ignorance and wilful blindness of the UK has been on display again recently, with a cacophony of voices raised in praise and honour of the great gods of the Icelandic volcanoes, that shut down airports. (Well actually bureaucrats and soft-despots, using their "risk-prevention" mantras shut down the airports, but for the enlightened Druid set, that's mere hair-splitting.) What was so wonderful about the airport shutdown, we hear you asking? Well, it stopped all those dastardly CO2 spewing aircraft from flying of course. Nature was showing us how powerful she is. At one fell eruption, it displayed the man with all his oh-so-clever, devilish machines as puny. And that's a very good thing.

Brendan O’Neill, in a piece entitled, Bow Down Before the Mighty Volcano, reviews the celebration of primitivism disemboguing in the British media over recent days.

It took a few days, but after the initial shock of a volcanic eruption 900 miles away having such a dramatic impact in Britain and other parts of Western Europe, various observers started venturing the idea that maybe this was a Good Thing. ‘Even a modest rumbling in the underworld is enough to throw a gigantic spanner into the works of modern life’, said one overexcited commentator. For others the ash was a timely reminder of the awesomeness of nature in contrast to arrogant-but-actually-pathetic mankind. ‘Hate Iceland? No, their volcano reminds us that nature is the boss’, said one headline, above an article mocking the idea that mankind is ‘sophisticated and clever enough to master nature’.

An editorial in the Guardian cheered the fact that ‘the heavens were restored to a heavenly condition’ by the post-volcano grounding of flights – that is, there were no ‘wispy vapour trails’ in Britain’s skies. The editorial then said, with more than a hint of regret, that ‘for all the damage done to our climate [by manmade flight], there is no chance at all of mankind submitting to becoming a flightless animal once more. But how about for one day a week?’, it asked, arguing that the quieter, calmer, flight-free skies brought about by the volcanic spewing offered a glimpse of a greener, happier world. A world where BBC correspondent Fergus Walsh, who lives near the flight path to Heathrow, could finally hear ‘blackbirds, robins, wood pigeons, even song thrushes’. And what is mankind’s ability to take to the skies compared with a BBC journalist’s right to hear birds tweeting and squawking?

And then there is this pious, worshipful drivelling from the Observer:

The Observer was positively ecstatic about the impact of the volcanic ash on modern life, going into full sixth-form creative-writing mode to express its worship of the Icelandic volcano’s power. ‘For most of us’, it said (most of us – really?), ‘the plume of ash and smoke rising from beneath the Earth’s crust… is cause only for awe’. Sounding like members of some weird ancient nature cult, the Observer’s leader writers argued that ‘the eruption provides a reminder of our status in relation to our planet and over which we have arrogantly seized stewardship. We imagine ourselves its master and yet with one modest belch it hems us into our little island, sweeping instantly from the skies the aeroplane, which we consider to be an example of the irrepressible genius of our species.’

Animistic Druidism appears to be making a comeback in the broad temple of "scientific" rationalism in the UK and not surprisingly it is being granted a seat of honour. If you do not fear and worship the Living God, you end up worshipping some aspect of His Creation. And so the Green movement and its propaganda organs in the UK are lifting their hands in due reverence and obeisance to a volcano! As O'Neill argues:

And . . . the excitable idea that one volcanic belch has reminded us how small we are reveals what lies behind the contemporary green outlook: a misanthropic view of mankind as a cocky and destructive species which needs to be firmly put back in its place. It is striking that even a natural event which cannot in anyway be described as ‘manmade’ has unleashed so much nature-dominates-man commentary. This shows that, for all contemporary commentators’ claims that they are only interested in communicating the ‘scientific facts’ about what will happen if we continue distorting and warping the natural world with CO2, in fact they are instinctively drawn to any natural occurrence that can be held up as evidence of Mother Nature’s power over deluded mankind.

What we effectively have is a new, modern version of ancient man’s fear and humility before volcanoes. As one study of volcanology argues, in ancient times people thought ‘volcanic eruptions were the work of angry gods, determined to punish us for deeds that displeased them’. The birth of the science of volcanology, from the nineteenth century onwards, helped us to understand that volcanic eruptions were in fact natural phenomena with no moral meaning or sentience. Only now they are being given meaning once more, with some suggesting that maybe ‘Mother Earth is having her revenge on mankind for disrupting the balance of the world’. In short? The gods are displeased and they are punishing us.

Maybe the next step will be to call for a few choice sacrificial victims to be thrown into the angry maw of the beast, to propitiate its wrath. It's been done before in primitive societies, and the UK is now going back to the future at an ever increasing rate. Nothing would surprise us from here on out.