They Fell Silent When We Stopped Listening: Apophatic Theology and 'Asking the Beasts'

Abstract

Fredric Jameson poignantly notes that for those of us formed by the cultures of the West, it is easier to imagine the destruction of the biosphere and the extinction of the majority of earth’s species than the end of global capitalism. Our collective moral imagination has atrophied within the enclosure of a political-economic system whose momentum seems unstoppable, yet whose operation is geared toward the short-term monetary benefit of a tiny minority. We can readily imagine mass extinctions and ecological deterioration because this is the direction that we are already going; we have trouble imagining the end of late capitalism because so many avenues for meaningful resistance have already been foreclosed or co-opted. Proponents of even the grittiest realism still negotiate daily complicity with the economic empires that pollute, despoil, and colonize the resilience of the land and its creatures. To use a threatened metaphor, this is a stream against which it is exceedingly difficult to swim. Going with the flow, though, charts a course toward “manmade omnicide.”