The Lynn White Thesis and American Christianity

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Lynn Townsend White, Jr’s essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” is the essay that launched a thousand ships in the study of religious environmentalism. That essay, originally delivered as a conference talk and popularized because of its publication in Science magazine, has been a touchstone of discussions of the connection between Christianity and environmentalism in in the more than fifty years since it has been published.

The problem with the essay is that it is largely wrong.

White’s basic argument is that Western Christianity devalues creation, promoting a dualistic framework that treats the physical world as merely existing for human benefit. White puts the blame on Christianity for de-paganizing the world because, he argues, Christian missionaries chopped down the sacred groves, taught the barbarians that there was one true God in spirit form, and that the Nyads and Dryads of their mythologies were false gods. The solution, according to White, is to adapt a more pagan conception of reality, viewing the world as sacred and adapting Christianity to a more nature-centric worship.

This thesis should have been debunked simply because it relies on a basic misunderstanding of Christianity. While theologians like Augustine do argue that there are differences between spiritual things and physical things, they do not indicate that on that basis physical things may be abused. There are certainly dualistic Christians who devalue creation and view it as solely existing for humanity’s benefit, however, their perspective in not consistent with Scripture. The solution is not to modify Christianity, but to present a robust theological orthodoxy that points dualistic Christians back to Scripture, back to the creeds, and back to the proper worship of the creator.

In the same year that White’s infamous essay was published, there was another volume that also should have undermined his thesis. Clarence Glacken published his seminal work, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, in 1967. In roughly 700 pages, he shows from ancient literature through roughly the present that the common human condition has been an anthropocentric view of nature. That is, the view that White ascribes to Christianity is prevalent throughout Western culture from the ancient philosophers through the current ones. While Glacken does not absolve Christianity from all guilt related to environmental abuse, he does demonstrate the White’s simply cause and solution are off base. Glacken’s main failure was publishing the anecdote to an essay in a tome. White’s thesis has more power because it is concise and blames the right out-group. Glacken’s work is devastating to that thesis, but is dense, carefully researched, and lengthy. Thus it is often footnoted, but much less likely to have been read and digested.

More recently, a more direct rebuttal of White’s thesis has been published. In 2016, historian Evan Berry’s book, Devoted to Nature, was released into the wild. He argues that, “American environmentalism is related to religion, not out of serendipitous resemblance but by way of historically demonstrable genealogical affinity with Christian theological tradition.” (2) Moreover, “Theologically rooted notions of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress provided a context for Americans enthusiastic about the outdoors and established the horizons of possibility for the national environmental imagination.” (5)

This, of course, does not take us directly to “orthodox Christianity is great for the environment” because a large piece of Berry’s account is how the bones of American environmentalism align to progressive ideas with a significantly middle-class flavor. Therefore, there is a Christian tinge to much of American environmentalism that is, to paraphrase Rauschenbusch, about as orthodox as the interests of the environmental movement will allow.

Still, Berry’s book is helpful in that it exposes the reality that Christian per se is not the problem with the environmental movement. While the versions of Christianity that have been most active in preserving the environment are not always particularly Christian, there is hope that with some focused attention and proper hermeneutics, we can see a robust pro-environment theology that is consistently orthodox. At least, as an orthodox Christian who believes caring for the environment is important, I hope that is true.

For those struggling with the Lynn White thesis, Evan Berry’s book, Devoted to Nature provides a strong anecdote. It is a helpful entry into the history of environmentalism in the US. It carefully debunks some of the strongest anti-Christian tropes of the environmental movement. It also points readers toward a hopeful engagement with Christianity that may lead to them finding the gospel. This isn’t a book for everyone, but it is a particularly important book for those doing scholarship on religion and the environmental.

Learning How to Learn - A Review

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Learning how to learn has always been a struggle, I think. Ancient philosophers invested significant time and energy into thinking about pedagogy. Though we have advanced in many ways, our struggle to learn has not changed that much, since we are still humans with the same basic traits as the ancients.

The difference in our age is that everyone promises easy ways to learn with half the effort. Usually, those new ways to learn are ineffective in the long run. Meanwhile, the sheer number of distractions and their addictiveness have increased. While there is nothing new under the sun, I think that Nicholas Carr is on to something with his book, The Shallows.

As an instructor, I am seeing a generation rise that tends to struggle with focus and learning in ways that are changing. This is not as much as “kids these days” comment as it is an awareness that the ubiquity of digital entertainment and information overload has made it more difficult for people to make connections between concepts, retain that information, and see the value in knowing anything that can be looked up. Since by federal law the end of the training course I supervise is a closed book exam, there is no escape from the informational demands, just a greater struggle to get to the finish line.

My wife found and enjoyed Barbara Oakley’s 2014 book, A Mind for Numbers, in which she talks about how she went from being a very verbal person to an engineering professor over a number of years. In 2018, along with Terrence Sejnowski and Alistair McConville, she published a volume for kids, Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School without Spending All Your Time Studying.

As the subtitle hints, the selling point on this is instrumental. Read this book and you’ll get smarter faster. However, given that a book advertising the benefits of learning for its own sake is less likely to sell, I can’t really fault the publisher for their choice in titles. In the end, the book is helpful whether you are learning how to learn to get ahead or simply for the value of learning on its own.

Summary

The book opens with an introduction to the main authors. More significantly, the book tells students that “follow your passion” is bad advice. It’s a good way to start. Their point is that just because something is hard or unpleasant does not mean that it is not a good thing that you come to enjoy. In Chapter Two, the authors shift to describing types of thinking, noting that we need to practice both focused thinking when we are zeroed in on solving a problem or getting information, but we also need to use diffuse thinking, where we allow ideas to bounce around in the back of our head. A lot of creative thought and connection of ideas comes during diffuse thinking. The issue is that its not enough to try to blast through studying in one chunk, there has to be time for multiple focused hits and diffuse mulling to get things embedded. So this is not a book that simply tells you to work harder, it is intended to help teach how to study smarter for better results.

The third chapter wrestles with focus and procrastination. The authors provide some hints to help overcome the hard start as well as to increase focus. One big tip they recommend is the Pomodoro method. Chapter Four drills into some neuroscience, describing how many scientists believe information is stored and provided some tips on how to strengthen neural pathways. The visual aids in this chapter help with understanding, and the understanding can be useful in providing motivation for study. The fifth chapter offers an exhortation to take up subjects that are new, even at the risk of being bad at it. Chapter Six emphasizes the need for proper sleep so that the brain can be restored. It also introduces the concept of “spaced retrieval” where a learner looks at material multiple times, preferably with sleep in between. This is the anti-cramming chapter.

Chapter Seven deals with the way our memories work and describes the processes for getting things from short term (working) memory to long-term memory. This is an encouraging chapter for those that struggle with focus, as the authors highlight the potential for people with weaker working memories often have higher capabilities in creativity. The eighth chapter provides to tips and tricks for improving one’s memory. There is nothing earth shattering, but the techniques have been validated, which is encouraging. Chapter Nine talks about building brain links, which elsewhere is called chunking. This is the process of connecting ideas together to strengthen their hold in our minds. The authors recommend focus, repetition, and understanding as key means of retaining knowledge and skills.

The tenth chapter recommends learning in groups, especially exploring more in-depth topics beyond the typical curriculum. Chapter Eleven commends the benefits of both exercise and good nutrition as part of improved learning. The twelfth chapter returns to the construction of brain links and encourages practice over an extended period. The authors commend both deliberate practice (focused study) and interleaving (doing something different between practice or study sessions). Both can be helpful means of solidifying knowledge in the brain.  Chapter Thirteen recommends being truthful about how distractions affect a student and then eliminating them. The fourteenth chapter notes that tests are actually some of the best ways to learn and thus commends quizzing and self-testing as a means to ingrain knowledge.  Chapter Fifteen provides some helpful tips on being better prepared for tests. And the book concludes in the sixteenth chapter tying many of the concepts together.

Analysis and Conclusion

Learning has not changed drastically over the course of documented human history. There are no real shortcuts to learning, but Learning How to Learn helps to identify roadblocks so they can be removed. In other words, there is not a lot of original content in this volume, but it has been structured and presented in a way that it is accessible to kids.

The target audience of this volume is tweens and teens. There are cartoons and diagrams throughout. The language is simple and plain. On of my children didn’t appreciate the zombie cartoons or analogies, but others might find this makes the book more interesting.

This is the sort of book that will help a motivated student get better. For the kid that is convinced that everything is going to pan out and that video games are enough of a career goal that real learning can be foregone, this book will probably not cross the threshold of engagement. Learning How to Learn isn’t a promise of an easy path to success. For students that want to learn more effectively, this can be an excellent resource. For parents of kids who have some desire to improve, but whose kids are resistant to their input, this book offers a sly way to get good advice into the hands that need it.

I commend this book as a helpful resource. As we try to prepare out children to learn on their own, this sort of book has the potential to assist them in the quest to be successful in their studies and become lifelong learners. It may also begin to form habits of persistence and perseverance that transcend academic success, often bleeding over into so many other venues.

 As a bonus, here is Barbara Oakley speaking at Google. This is based on her Mind for Numbers book, but it has basically the same content as the book translated for teens.

Ultralearning - A Review

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There is a temptation in our world to try to find a quicker, easier, and better way to do everything. How can I lose 20 pounds without actually dieting? How can I earn a huge income without working? How can I make everyone think I am more intelligent without actually studying? We are a culture of convenience that hasn’t eliminated our preference for appearance—we want microwave dinners that don’t really taste like it. It’s a form of dishonesty.

When I first picked up Scott Young’s book, Ultralearning, I expected to find a microwave dinner that advertised itself as fine cuisine. But what I actually found was a microwave dinner than that advertised accurately and notes the benefits and the drawbacks of what it is. The potatoes may be a little soggy and the meat a little tough, but it takes ok and is reasonably nutritious. A little candor is a good thing, because sometimes a microwave dinner is good enough.

Young’s book falls into the airport book genre, which I commented on in my review of Rolf Dobelli’s, The Art of Thinking Clearly. It is reasonably short, lucidly written, relies on the research of others, provides clear steps to success, and is the sort of self-improvement volume that can provide light conversation and make the reader sound intelligent.

That Young’s book is designed to sell well should not be considered a severe criticism, however, because he has put together some helpful advice in an easily absorbed presentation.

Young has done the round of podcasts and presented at a TEDx event and some other self-help, inspirational, big-idea sort of stages. His writing style, ideas, and approach fit well within that genre of thought.

The majority of what he advertises, though, is simply a way to become a better learner. The lack of originality is no sign of a lack of value. Every generation needs champions of ideas and contextualizers that can help translate older ideas for newer audiences. The weakness in Young’s approach is that he does not really recognize that what he is doing is translating older ideas, but presents much of what he offers as being derived from contemporary science, rather than simply repackaging older methologies.

Ultralearning is “a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.” It is, in essence, the process of becoming an efficient autodidact. It is an approach that Young has put to the test by working his way through MIT’s computer programming curriculum on his own and by learning four languages in a year. Ultralearning is about becoming competent quickly at a particular skill.

There are nine principles that Young recognizes for ultralearners:

  • Principle #1 – Metalaerning – Figuring out the way that the subject or skill should be learned.

  • Principle #2 – Focus – Zooming in on the subject to the neglect of many other things. Making a job of getting good at whatever the goal is.

  • Principle #3 – Directness – Seeking to gain the information or skill in as close to the setting as it can be applied.

  • Principle #4 – Drill – Figuring out where the choke points are in learning or proficiency, breaking those down, and practicing them until proficiency is achieved.

  • Principle #5 – Retrieval – Using testing (of various sorts) to embed information well so that skills and knowledge are retained and progress can be made.

  • Principle #6 – Feedback – Going through the discomfort of feedback so that problems can be corrected as quickly as possible.

  • Principle #7 – Retention – Creating a plan to maintain important proficiencies, depending on the nature of the skill.

  • Principle #8 – Intuition – Making the “why” connections on the topic to help make further learning on the subject easier.

  • Principle #9 – Experimentation – Changing methods when something isn’t working, even if it worked earlier on.

As I noted, there is nothing that is truly remarkable about any of these steps for those that been engaged in the study of pedagogy. But Young packages them in a way that prevents having to dig through the literature of the field. He also shows some ways that some of the “quick fix” learning methods that are advertised are doomed to failure.

Ultralearning is not a “quick and easy” approach to becoming an expert in something. Rather, it is “hard and fast” approach to becoming reasonably proficient at something. It does not advertise cheap, fast, gourmet food. It advertises reasonably healthy, reasonably tasty, microwave food. On that front it delivers.

I think there is value in the Ultralearning approach for those that are trying to gain knowledge in a new field. For the pastor seeking to learn New Testament Greek without going to seminary, something like an ultralearning approach would probably work well. If someone could carve out three hours a day for a few months to jam through a common Koine textbook, memorize the most common vocabulary, and develop a plan to use it daily, they will be more likely to be successful than by trying to do Greek drills 20 minutes a day for years. There is a realism to Young’s approach that I find attractive.

This, of course, does not mean that someone can become an expert in something nearly instantly. While the internet tends to make people feel they can be experts on constitutional law one day, international politics another, and health sciences on the next, the reality is that most of us have a limited bandwidth to develop competencies. The ultralearning approach intentionally neglects a lot of the background work that is typical of more conventional learning approaches.

If you want to be able to paint something you find attractive and don’t expect to become a stellar artist, then it can be helpful to learn to paint from Bob Ross. If you want to become more proficient at a skill or in a limited area of knowledge that can develop you personally or improve your career options, then Scott Young’s approach is beneficial. In neither case will you be the best at something or the expert in a field, but it can certainly add tools to a toolbox that can make a huge difference.

The Art of Thinking Clearly - A Review

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If there is one skill I would like to improve in time on this earth, it is thinking well. Our affections and our actions follow what we think. Additionally, in the information-saturated world in which we live, individuals and companies are spending billions of dollars every year to keep us from thinking well.

In this quest to think better, I picked up Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly. The title makes it sound like it has some methods to clearer cognition, but as Dobelli announces in the introduction, “This is not a how-to book.” Instead, it is an illuminated list of biases and fallacies that people commonly buy into.

This book falls into the category that I like to categorize as “airport books.” These are the trade books that you will see if you browse one of the bookstores or newsstands in any American airport. The writing is clear, with simple language and frequent illustrations, but usually very skimmable. The chapters tend to be short and well titled so that one can pop in and out easily or simply skip some chapters and still understand the main flow. The books are designed to be read in about the time it takes to wait for and endure a domestic flight. The content is usually something in the self-improvement vein (usually with a business bias), alternative view of history, or interesting but lesser-known aspect of humanity.

Authors of this genre of book include Malcolm Gladwell, James Clear, Bill Bryson, Nassim Taleb and others. They are usually popularizers whose gift is in researching a topic, synthesizing some of the ideas, and writing about in a captivating way. Some of the books are quite good, and some even include very helpful ideas, but they are always derivative, typically non-controversial, and intended to make the reader look and sound more well-informed than he or she really is.

As I’ve fallen into a well of these books while reading on various topics, I’ve also come to discover that there is a lot of self-reference within the genre. For example, Dobelli probably should have listed Taleb as a contributor to his volume, given how frequently he cites him. There are many instances of each of them citing each other—whether in print or a Ted Talk someone else gives. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, it’s simply something that is evident when you read a clump of the books published around the same time.

Dobelli’s book is helpful in many ways. Each of the ninety-nine chapters covers a distinct error in thinking or method of misrepresentation we ought to watch out for. He tells us to watch out for mistakes in true remembrances, the paralysis of excessive options, attempts to attribute attitudes to an author based on characters in their novel, the psychological effect of scarcity, and more. There really area lot of different ways that we can think incorrectly and there is value in understanding how we might get tricked, so we can watch out for it.

The book seems to take a humanitarian approach by offering for the cost of a restaurant meal tips that could change your life and improve society. But the nature of social improvement is not entirely altruistic. As Dobelli notes, “If we could learn to recognize and evade the biggest errors in thinking––in our private lives, at work, or in government––we might experience a leap in prosperity. We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity––all we need is less irrationality.”

Of course, what exactly constitutes irrationality in Dobelli’s mind? He does not state it, but it is clear from the text that he writes that irrationality is assumed to be any belief or idea that does not reduce all value to instrumentality and all reality to the material.

When considering causality, he dismisses the possibility of the supernatural. Those who believe in God’s intervention have simply been fooled by the randomness of the world and pieced together a fairy tale based on ignoring the details. At another point he dismisses as foolish someone holding onto a car he had refurbished when selling off possessions to pay a debt. There can be no value other than the dollar value in his mind.

None of these views are surprising. They are not atypical. However, they reflect the biases of his own thinking, which oddly enough he does not highlight as one of the fallacies. They are reflective of how people need to continually interrogate the baseline assumptions of authors as they read a book. Having assumptions does not invalidate the contents of a volume or its arguments, but it can inform us and help readers sift through the wheat and the chaff.

Overall, this was a useful book. It can serve as a reference when trying to label errors in thinking that we witness. It may also provide fodder for discussions of clear and critical thinking. Whether it will result in a jump in prosperity, as Dobelli hopes, is less clear. However, it will certainly provide an amusing way to spend a few hours, if one has the time.