Where Are the Wild Things? A Cultural-Psychological Critique of a Political Theology of Climate Change Denial

• Authors: Irvine Andrew B.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

One aim of this essay is to understand why white evangelical Christians, more than any other religious adherents in the United States, are deeply invested in denying the emergency of anthropogenic climate change and in obstructing action to address anthropogenic climate change. Michael S. Hogue, in his recent book, American Immanence, blames a religious imaginary he names the “redeemer symbolic.” This symbolic complex inspires the devotion of the politically powerful white evangelical Christian and nationalist movement in the United States at the present time. A second aim of the essay is to analyze the redeemer symbolic. Through a reading of Maurice Sendak’s much-loved illustrated children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, the essay suggests that U.S. white evangelical devotees of the redeemer symbolic share a kind of inability to come to terms with a vital and ineliminable wildness in persons and cultures; further, that this inability correlates with a political-theological failure, even refusal, to grasp the emergency of anthropogenic climate change. The essay first explicates the redeemer symbolic, with a particular focus on its implication in the legitimation of climate skepticism. Then, with the aid of key concepts from the psychoanalytic theory of D.W. Winnicott, it interprets the story of Max, the protagonist in Where the Wild Things Are, as a fable of healthy development of what Winnicott calls “transitional space” and a related “capacity to be alone.” Unsuccessful development of those resources, it is suggested, contributes to an account of why adherents of the redeemer symbolic typically refuse wildness and thus may be prone to climate negligence. More importantly, though, recognizing the cultural-psychological importance of “wild things” (as by the “counter-fable” of Max) may help fire imaginative ways around the obstructiveness of the redeemer symbolic, to more effectively address climate change in particular, and human well-being in nature in general.

Keywords

EN

climate change; Michael S. Hogue; imagination; political theology; Maurice Sendak; wilderness; D.W. Winnicott; psychoanalysis

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Warszawski
• Journal: Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 88-101

Dates

published

2020-04-15

Contributors

author

Irvine Andrew B.

• Division of Humanities, Maryville College

References

• Aly, Waleed. “Thirty years after the Berlin Wall came down, new walls are rising up.” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 7, 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/thirty-years-after-the-berlin-wall-came-down-new-walls-are-rising-up-20191107-p538a1.html.
• Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
• Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociology of Religion. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
• De Certeau, Michel. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Edited with an introduction by Luce Giard. Translated with an afterword by Tom Conley. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• De Certeau, Michel. “The Revolution of the ‘Believable’.” In Culture in the Plural. Edited and with an introduction by Luce Giard, translated and with an afterword by Tom Conley, 3-15. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Jefferson Chase. “Far-right populists and climate policy: An attempt to move the goalposts.” Deutsche Welle, November 28, 2018. Accessed November 2, 2019. https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-and-climate-policy-an-attempt-to-move-the-goalposts/a-46487669.
• Gander, Kashmira, with Katherine Wilkinson and Robin Veldman. “What Do Evangelical Christians Really Think About Climate Change?” Newsweek, September 19, 2019. https://www.newsweek.com/what-evangelical-christians-think-climate-change-1459927.
• Hart, Ray L. Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968.
• Hayhoe, Doug, Mark A. Bloom, and Brian S. Webb. “Changing Evangelical Minds on Climate Change.” Environmental Research Letters 14, no. 2 (February 13, 2019). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf0ce. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf0ce.
• Hayhoe, Katherine. “Caring About Climate Change Is the Christian Thing to Do.” New York Times, October 31, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/opinion/climate-change-evangelical-christian.html.
• Hogue, Michael S. American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7312/hogu17232.
• Kirkos, Bill, dir. Trashed. 2007; U. S.: OXI Productions, 2007, DVD.
• Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (2nd ed.). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.
• Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind, with a foreword by Char Miller, (5th ed.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014.
• Nicholls, William Bradford. “What’s Really behind Evangelicals’ Climate Denial?” TheHumanist.com, April 23, 2019. https://thehumanist.com/magazine/may-june-2019/features/whats-really-behind-evangelicals-climate-denial.
• Ricoeur, Paul. “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Edited and translated by John B. Thompson, 131-144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316534984.
• Ronan, Marisa. “Religion and the Environment: Twenty-First Century American Evangelicalism and the Anthropocene.” Humanities 6, no. 4 (2017); https://doi.org/10.3390/h6040092.
• Saleha, Bernard Daley, and Andrew Szasz. “Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71, no. 5 (2015): 19-30. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0096340215599789. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096340215599789.
• Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Twenty-fifth anniversary edition. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991.
• Shafer, Jack, “Maurice Sendak’s Thin Skin.” Slate, October 15, 2009. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/10/where-the-wild-things-are-author-maurice-sendak-can-t-stoppositioning-himself-as-bruno-bettelheim-s-victim.html.
• Stover, Dawn. “Evangelicals for climate action.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75, no. 2 (2019): 66-72. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2019.1580878?scroll=top&needAccess=true. https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1580878.
• Winnicott, Donald Woods. “The Capacity to Be Alone.” In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Edited by M. Masud R. Kahn. New York: Routledge, 2018, 29-36. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429482410.
• Winnicott, Donald Woods. Playing and Reality. With a new preface by F. Robert Rodman. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Identifiers

DOI

10.14394/eidos.jpc.2020.0008