Restoring the Natural Balance
By Colman McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 17, 1996
In some of the confessional moments in this often moving narrative, Tom Hayden recalls the early 1960s, when he took up with the civil rights and anti-war movements. His father disapproved and "refused to speak to me for many years. I became an outsider as a way of life."
It wasn't to last all that long. A decade later Hayden diverted into electoral politics, where he has remained ever since as a California state senator representing voters in Santa Monica. "This life," he writes of his toil in the legislature and chairing the Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee, "is the mirror opposite of outside alienation of the 1960s."
Except for U.S. representatives John Lewis of Georgia and Bobby Rush of Illinois and a few others, not that many law-defiers turned lawmakers are on the current scene with Hayden. He has seen enough of both the outside and inside to draw on the best of each. I'm not as familiar as perhaps as I should be with Hayden's legislative wins and losses -- keeping score on the 535 members of Congress is task enough -- but however well or poorly he's been doing in Sacramento, his writing reflects a solid spiritual and philosophical grounding in ideas that matter well beyond this or that fleeting roll call vote.
The gospel that's been lost, according to Hayden's definition, is "the ancient one of our sacred environment" which "existed among indigenous people long before the rise of monotheism . . . In seeking to preserve these ancient insights, I am not calling for withdrawal from the sensibility or achievements of the whole modern world. But in repressing the past as primitive, the modern world has ushered in a reckless emptiness. We have modernized everything in our path at great moral and ecological expense. The time has come to retrieve the gospel of the earth."
As a matter of record, the time came generations ago. Henry David Thoreau, followed by John Muir and Aldo Leopold, warned of the despoiling of nature. Lacking a familiarity with those minds, a reader is likely to dismiss Hayden's calls for renewal as mere pieties. This is much the current response from politicians, anti-environmental corporations and the conservative press. The Wall Street Journal has editorialized against "a pagan fanaticism that now worships such gods and Nature and Gender with a reverence formerly accorded real religion." Patrick Buchanan, the cafeteria Catholic who selects Church teachings he likes and skips the rest, has a standard jibe about environmentalists: "They turned Easter into Earth Day and worship dirt."
Hayden ably returns the fire, and then some, but the strength of his thinking is in the intellectual effort to persuade his constituency, the environmental community, to go beyond a science-based reform movement: "Science cannot answer every mystery of nature, and it lacks the motivating force to nourish vital qualities like courage and compassion. We are deficient today not so much in our scientific capacity but our spiritual and ethical resources for approaching the environmental crisis. I have noticed a broad pattern of defensiveness about spirituality, a tendency to hide our spiritual motives behind a facade of being practical and hard-headed. Many environmentalists seem to fear they will be scorned or laughed at if they reveal their genuine feelings. But it is unhealthy and self-defeating in politics as well as life to closet one's feelings."
To his credit, and by way of offering an example, Hayden opens up a bit. He tells of his years of violence against nature, when "I killed hundreds of fish for sport, for challenge, and conquest, without remorse. . . . When I brought them to the boat, I killed them with a sharp blow to the head, often with a club."
Then came a conversion, and the killing stopped: "I had looked into the eyes of too many fish and experienced feelings there -- fear, bravery, and the pathos of mothers laden with eggs."
Is Tom Hayden a more moral person and a more open-minded politician because he no longer destroys aquatic life? The better question is, is he a renewed person, both in his inner and outer self? His writing here suggests -- no, affirms -- that he is.
That means he's in for rough days ahead: more ridicule from political opponents, more scorn from old allies who say that he's gone mystical and probably a fair number of temptations to think that he is producing nothing more than words on paper. If any of what Hayden hopes for happens, Hayden can really begin living a life of faith.
Colman McCarthy is a columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group and director of the Center for Teaching Peace.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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