The Wounding of the Earth: The Presence of the Ontological Rift and Eco-Dissonant Spiritualities

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the climate crisis is a symptom of dissonant eco-subjects and relations that are, in part, produced by Abrahamic religious/spiritual traditions—traditions that function as apparatuses of the ontological rift between human and other-than-human animals. The argument begins by addressing the relation between Abrahamic traditions and apparatuses of the ontological rift. This sets the stage for explicating what is meant by spiritualities of eco-dissonant subjects. To further understand the features of eco-dissonant spiritualities, I turn to the philosophical notion of self-deception and the psychoanalytic notion of weak dissociation, which help explain our resistance to becoming aware of our contributions to the sufferings of other species and the wounding of the Earth, as well as our resistance to change.

1. Introduction

Years ago, while hiking in the Colorado mountains, my partner and I came across a sign explaining that a mining operation in the area had closed in the late 19th century. As far as the eye could see, the land was barren, covered in the detritus of that operation. Similar and more devastating examples from our own lifetime can be seen in mountaintop removal mining operations. Fracking has despoiled water sheds. Industrial farms and slaughter factories have killed billions of animals and polluted streams, rivers, and oceans. The tremendous increase in CO₂ and other gas emissions since World War II has escalated the warming of the planet, leading to desertification, increasingly destructive storms and flooding, rising seas, dying coral reefs, and the collapse of insect and fish populations. Biologist Wilson (2003) predicts that by the end of this century half of the known species will be extinct. Collectively, these examples represent the wounding of the Earth. A wounded Earth will neither be able to support human life, nor the lives of untold numbers of other species.

There is a cottage industry in trying to identify the culprits of the climate crisis and to coin an apt appellation for it. Crutzen et al. (2000), at the beginning of this century, called our current era the Anthropocene, arguing broadly that human beings are responsible for climate change. J. W. Moore (2016) believes that term is too far-reaching and fails to identify the major source of this crisis. He uses the term “Capitalocene,” because capitalism and attendant apparatuses1 of market societies fetishize profits, opportunistically expand markets, and relentlessly exploit human beings, other species, and the Earth. Runciman (2023) similarly believes the term “Anthropocene” is inadequate, largely because not all human beings and societies (e.g., Indigenous peoples) are not responsible for climate change. Like Moore, he notes that capitalism and its apparatuses are primarily liable for this crisis. However, we cannot understand the emergence of capitalism in the West without noting the rise and prevalence of nation-states, especially the Western colonizing leviathans that enslaved and exploited peoples around the world. “Leviathan” is a reference to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which argues that sovereignty and its attendant apparatuses are essential for ordering society and the exercise of individual freedom. It is the leviathan (the state and its apparatuses, which includes capitalism) that exercises the use or threat of political violence to enforce the social contract and maintain societal security and stability, all the while overlooking and denying our destructive relations with other species and the Earth. Runciman contends that the Western notions of sovereignty and nation-states, entwined with capitalism and imperialism, are to blame for the current climate crisis and wounding of the Earth.

I agree with Moore and Runciman, yet I think these analyses deflect attention from the handmaidens of capitalism, colonization, and imperialism, namely, Abrahamic religious traditions. These anthropocentric traditions can foster spiritualities of eco-dissonant subjects and relations. These spiritualities frequently entail neglecting, denying or rationalizing the sufferings and deaths of billions of species, as well as environmental degradation. More particularly, I argue that the climate crisis is a symptom of dissonant eco-subjects that are, in part, produced by Abrahamic religious/spiritual traditions—traditions that function as apparatuses of the ontological rift between human and other-than-human animals. I begin by addressing the relation between Abrahamic traditions and apparatuses of the ontological rift. This sets the stage for explicating what is meant by spiritualities of eco-dissonant subjects, but first, to understand dissonant subjects, I briefly depict the attributes of resonance and its attendant relations. To further understand the features of eco-dissonant spiritualities, I turn to a philosophical rendering of self-deception and the psychoanalytic notion of weak dissociation, which together help explain our resistance to becoming aware of our contributions to the sufferings of other species and the wounding of the Earth, as well as our resistance to change.

Before beginning, there are some clarifications to be made. First, over the years I have found that theologians interested in the climate crisis are quite adept at identifying its sources and yet tend to overlook how religions birthed in Western civilization have colluded with and contributed to these sources. Of course, there are exceptions (e.g., Keller 2018). However, in my view, we need to continue to examine the proverbial beam in our own eyes, which is a reason for the approach taken in this article. Second, I view the notions of “soul,” “spirituality,” and cognate terms as abstractions that refer to experiences and relations characterized by resonance (or the desire for resonance). Resonance, which I will say more about below, is always in relation to dissonance, which is an epiphenomenon of resonance. Abrahamic religious traditions and spiritual practices aspire primarily to facilitate resonant relations with God and people of the community of faith (temple, church, mosque) and secondarily with other human beings (and, occasionally, select other species). Third and relatedly, human beings are complex and contradictory animals who can establish resonant spiritualities vis-à-vis God and God’s people (whoever they are) while at the same time manifesting dissonant relations with othered human beings (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, etc.) and other species (e.g., speciesism). That is, human beings can exhibit soulfulness (life-affirming resonance) and soullessness (destructive dissonance) at the same time without any hint of contradiction or remorse or awareness. This is an important point to stress because Jews, Christians, and Muslims have for millennia developed spiritual practices that have contributed to loving and compassionate relations—resonant spiritualities. And yet, I will argue that people of these religious traditions have engaged in dissonant relations with other species and the Earth, which has become increasingly apparent in the advent of the climate crisis. We are indeed contradictory and tragic animals. Fourth, I recognize that persons can find scriptures that seemingly refute my claims, indicating that we are commanded by a sovereign God to care (resonantly) for other species and the Earth. This is fair enough; however, there is considerably more evidence in scripture, Western political theologies, and everyday practices of religious persons that manifest reifying, exploitative, or indifferent relations with other species and the Earth. Finally, the term “ecological” is derived from the Greek oikos, which means house or dwelling place, and logos, which means study. “Ecological” refers to how we dwell in the world and is not simply about the environment. All spiritualities, then, can be understood in terms of the “ecological” in that they manifest specific beliefs, narratives, and practices that entail dwelling in the world. It is altogether another question as to whether spiritualities are, in the main, ecologically life-affirming or life-denying.

2. Civilization, the Emergence of the Abrahamic Religions, and the Ontological Rift

Philosopher Agamben (1999) writes that a burning house reveals “the fundamental architectural problem [that] becomes visible for the first time” (p. 115). The climate crisis is the burning house, and the architectural problem is the “deep ontological rift … between animal and human” (Dickinson 2015, p. 173).2 That is, the rift entails “a radical and total discontinuity between human and nonhuman” (Kompridis 2020, p. 252), which is part of the assumptive world of most Western persons.3 Agamben (2004) writes:

It is as if determining the border between human and animal were not just one question among many discussed by philosophers and theologians, scientists and politicians, but rather a fundamental metaphysico-political operation in which alone something like “man” can be decided upon and produced. If animal life and human life could be superimposed perfectly, then neither man nor animal—and, perhaps, not even the divine—would any longer be thinkable.

(p. 92)

Latour (1993) similarly noted that there are, in the West,4 “entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhuman on the other” (pp. 10–11). Likewise, Derrida (2008) referred to this as an “abyssal rupture” (p. 30) between human beings and other species. Agamben, Latour, Derrida, and Stengers (2023) contend that Western philosophies, theologies, and sciences serve as apparatuses that produce and maintain this abyssal rupture between human animals, other species, and plant life (see Schlanger 2024). More particularly, as Derrida noted, the rift is inextricably part of the Abrahamic religious traditions, not simply Western philosophies and sciences. Derrida (2008) wrote, “I think that Cartesianism belongs, beneath its mechanistic indifference, to the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, a sacrificial war that is as old as Genesis” (p. 101). The mention of the term “sacrifice” clearly refers to the ancient tradition of sacrificing other-than-human beings to God or gods. Yet, Derrida may have also been thinking of the story of Noah in which God destroys not only most of humanity but other species as well. Or perhaps he was thinking of the Exodus story in which God slaughters/sacrifices thousands of other-than-human animals with the aim of freeing the Israelites.

Given this general overview, at least three questions arise. What gave rise to the rift? Is the rift an inevitable feature of being human? What are the attributes of this rupture? The source of the rift, Bookchin (2005) argued, was rooted in the “breakdown of early Neolithic village society” (p. 130) and the “emergence of towns, cities, and finally empires—a qualitatively new social arena in which the collective control of production was supplanted by elitist control, kinship relations by territorial and class relations, and popular assemblies or councils of [male] elders by state bureaucracies” (p. 130).5 In brief, the rise of Western civilization, Bookchin posited, entailed the construction of apparatuses that established hierarchies of domination within society, which followed hierarchies between human beings and other species or nature (pp. 12–13). Moreover, these epistemologies of ruling and apparatuses of hierarchy established zones of exclusion, such as those deemed to be outside of society (e.g., barbarians—less than fully human) and those within society (e.g., women deemed to be less than men). Boundaries were also drawn between civilized human beings and whatever fell under the abstraction “nature.” Bookchin argued that “from Aristotle’s time to Marx’s the split (between human beings and ‘nature’) is regarded as inevitable”, (p. 74) and, I would add, believed to be universal.

Before addressing further the rift’s attributes and dynamics, it is important to note briefly that the rift is neither inevitable nor universal. Numerous Indigenous religions/spiritualities organize society without a rift between humans and other species, nor do they construct abstract binaries such as culture and nature or civilization and the wild (Ingold 2013, 2022; Kohn 2013; Lloyd 2024; Stewart 2021; Turner 2006; Viveiros de Castro 2017). As Latour (2004) notes, “Non-Western cultures have never been interested in nature; they have never adopted it as a category; they have never found a use for it” (p. 41). There are also Western philosophers and religious figures, past and present, who rendered the apparatuses of the rift inoperative.6 I add that other scholars, scientists,7 activists, and religious leaders8 and organizations in the West have eschewed the attributes of the rift advocating for more caring compassionate relations (e.g., Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Kaur 2020; Morton 2017; Nussbaum 2023; Wallace 2019). In my own discipline, pastoral theologians such as Graham (1992), Clinebell (2013), and M. E. Moore (1998) decades ago addressed the issue of climate change. It was not until the late 2010s that pastoral theologians began to engage the challenges of the climate crisis directly.9 While not inevitable or universal, the apparatuses of the rift are nevertheless powerfully pervasive, as evidenced by Abrahamic religion’s general collusion with and indifference toward factory farms, industrial slaughterhouses, factory ships, and scientific experimentation on other-than-human species.

Above I noted that Bookchin (2005) identified one of the main attributes of the rift as ruling epistemologies, whether in relation to other human beings or other species. These epistemologies emerge in concert with the idea or belief that sovereignty is essential for establishing a secure and stable society over and against “nature.” Evidence of this abounds. Aristotle (1971) researched various Greek polities, never questioning the necessity of some kind of ruling class for a stable society. At the same time, Plato and Aristotle affirmed and built on the binary abstractions of civilization and nature. Millennia later, Bodin (2009) set out the main features of sovereignty and Thomas Hobbes (Ryan 2012, pp. 440–47) used the myth of the state of nature to secure his idea that sovereignty (the leviathan) was fundamentally necessary for the existence of a stable society. In other words, the absence of sovereignty and its ruling epistemologies, for Hobbes, led to a kind of life in “nature” that would be nasty, brutish, and short. This view is evident in Freud’s ([1927] 1961, p. 15) belief in the necessity for civilization to protect humans from the cruelties of “nature.” From the religious angle, the Abrahamic traditions have long asserted the sovereignty of God as an ontological fact of creation and maintained that God’s sovereignty is necessary for the well-being of religious communities/societies. Moreover, human sovereignty is derived from God’s sovereignty. In Jewish scriptures, it is God who gave permission for male Israelite elders to rule over Israel, which accompanied a number of predictable abuses of power (1 Samuel 8:5–17). I add that in the creation myth God also gave human beings dominion over other species and the Earth (Genesis 1:28). Bookchin (2005, pp. 168–72) argued that dominion over other human beings preceded ideas of dominion over “nature.” Human beings dominated other human beings prior to assuming this role over all that falls under the abstraction “nature.”

More needs to be said about ruling epistemologies to obtain a clearer picture regarding the rift. The abyss between human and other-than-human animals results not simply from ruling but from instrumental epistemologies that entail constructing other species as lacking some essential feature that defines the human person. Derrida (2008) wrote:

It is not just a matter of asking whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, crying, respect, etc.—the list is necessarily without limit and the most powerful philosophical tradition in which we have lived has refused the “animal” all of that). It also means asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution.

(p. 135, emphasis in original).

We can include in this list of “deficiencies” the notions of personhood and spirit or soul.10 Western theologies, by and large, deny that other species have souls or are persons—unique, valued, inviolable, agentic subjects. In other words, epistemologies of lack categorize other species such that they lack any singularity. Or as Derrida (2008) remarked “They have given themselves the word in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept” (p. 32), thus denying them singularity. Epistemologies of lack, then, are foundational to the notion of dominion and for the instrumental use of othered human beings and other species. In short, epistemologies of lack function to legitimate the domination and exploitation of other species (othered human beings) and the Earth.11

Abrahamic religious traditions possess apparatuses that include instrumental ruling epistemologies that construct other species in terms of deficiencies, and these epistemologies accompany beliefs in the existential or ontological superiority of human beings and the inferiority of other species. These beliefs, which I will say more about below, function to further legitimate the use and exploitation of other species—species constructed as mute and dumb (lacking reason) and the Earth as inert and lifeless. I add here that the belief in human superiority accompanies conscious or unconscious beliefs in the ontological significance of human beings and the insignificance of other species. Human beings, in other words, are deemed to be normative and the measure of all things (anthropocentrism, exceptionalism). As philosopher Gray (2013) writes, “The distance between human and animal silence is a consequence of the use of language. … But if animals lack this interior dialogue, it is not clear why this should put humans on a higher plane” (pp. 163–64; emphasis mine). Nevertheless, the apparatuses of the rift place human beings on this higher ontological plane.

Sovereignty or epistemologies of ruling and the beliefs in superiority and inferiority are central features of the rift between human beings and other species (and othered human beings). Together, they shape perceptions, dispositions, and behaviors toward other species. Let me identify briefly four consequences. I have already mentioned that the attributes of the rift legitimate the exploitation of other species. This means other species exist in the zone of non-justice. That is, the notions of justice or injustice simply do not apply when it comes to other species, as exemplified by Kant. For Derrida (2008), “What the nonrational animal is deprived of, along with subjecthood, is what Kant calls ‘dignity [Würde],’ that is to say, an internal and priceless value, the value of an end in itself” (p. 100). Derrida adds, “One has power and authority over these irrational animals because they are things. One can use them and lord over them as one pleases” (p. 93). The absence of singularity accompanies the absence of dignity, and both lead to a zone of non-justice. As Bennett (2010) contends “The ontological divide between persons and things must remain lest one have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentalization” (p. 12).

Another related consequence is that other-than-human species are excluded from the political realm since they “lack” personhood and agency.12 Of course, many species live with human beings. They exist in the polis, but they are used for human needs and pleasures, whether that is for consumption, labor, war, experimentation, etc. If other species are cared for in the polis, this care is instrumental. Absent this, other species exist in the zone of carelessness, which is a third consequence.

A reader may counter this by saying that many human beings (in the West) have pets and care deeply about them and for them. Fair enough, but consider Twine’s (2024) research indicating that over 73.1 billion farm animals were slaughtered in 2020 (p. 6). Singer (2023) cites a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization that “estimates that 77 billion birds and mammals are killed each year for human consumption” (p. 67). He goes on to point out that a “typical salmon fish farm churns through at least 1.5 kilos of wild fish for every kilo of salmon that it produces,” which means that “627 billion fish were killed so that 167 billion fish could be sold” (p. 68). These staggering numbers do not include experiments on other-than-human beings or the instrumental exploitation of other species (e.g., horse racing, dog racing, cock fighting, dog fighting). The statistic of billions of other-than-human animals killed reveals not only the perceived absence of existential significance and singularities, evidenced by their slaughter and the namelessness, but also the absence of any idea of justice and the complete lack of care.

The fourth related consequence is the absence of faith. Other species are believed to lack agency and reason. From this it logically follows that “faith” does not apply to them. To be sure, people of the Abrahamic traditions acknowledge that we are to be good stewards of the Earth and its inhabitants. That is, our faith, at best, entails an obligation toward these unintelligent other-than-human beings, yet it is inconceivable that other animals have faith because they are perceived to lack personhood, soul, reason, and agency. From this logic of deficiency, other-than-human animals are placed outside of politics, outside of justice, outside of care, outside of faith.

3. The Creation of Eco-Dissonant Spiritualities and the Wounding of the Earth

To understand what is meant by eco-dissonant spiritualities, I must first depict briefly what is meant by resonance, relying principally on the work of Rosa (2019, 2020). Let me stress again that human beings can engage in resonant and dissonant relations at the same time, lacking awareness that they are doing so. The implication here for Abrahamic religious believers is that they can engage in spiritual practices that foster resonant relations with each other and God while also participating in practices that create dissonant relations with othered human beings, other species, and the Earth. I call these “eco-dissonant spiritualities” precisely because they emerge in concert with religious apparatuses of the rift.

The idea of resonance, while not directly named, is evident in the philosophical and religious works of Alfred North Whitehead (Faber 2023; harmonic vibrations), Buber (1958; I-Thou relations), Teilhard de Chardin (1978; vitalization of matter and spirit of the Earth), and Merleau-Ponty (1964; syncretic sociability). More recently, Rosa (2019, 2020) has developed the term “resonance,” arguing that it “is constitutive not only of human psychology and sociality, but also of our very corporeality, of ways we interact with the world tactilely, metabolically, emotionally, and cognitively” (Rosa 2020, p. 31). Rosa (2019) stresses that “resonance is not an emotional state, but a mode of relation … a specific way of being-related-to-the-world” (pp. 168–69). Resonance, for Rosa, is “a basic human capacity and need” (p. 170).13 In other words, for Rosa, “The primal form of existence is a relationship not of alienation but of resonance” (p. 258). This “basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them” (Rosa 2020, p. 31).14 Rosa writes that “resonance in its full sense occurs only when … we feel connected to the world” (p. 33).

There are four attributes of resonance. The first is “being affected,” which “means being ‘inwardly’ reached, touched, or moved by” other persons, landscapes, ideas, art, etc. When it comes to human interrelations, to experience being “somehow ‘addressed’” means that one’s singularity is acknowledged and respected.15 In relation to objects or other living beings, this “being affected” and experience of being addressed are also applicable. One’s resonant experience of connection to a sunset or sunrise, to the waves crashing onto the beach, to the mists clinging to the mountain, entails a sense of being affected wherein we are addressed and we address the landscape. That is, we have a sense of connection to or belonging with a singular object or landscape. Indigenous beliefs in the sacredness of the land or the land as kin (Lloyd 2024) represent the acknowledgment of being mutually affected and addressed. In one sense, quantum physics indicates that the observer and the observed are mutually addressed and affected, which grounds resonance at the material level of existence—meaning and matter resonate (Barad 2007).

The second feature of resonance in relation to human beings is self-efficacy. To be affected, to be touched, or to be addressed is not passive. For a resonant relationship to be present, there must be “our own active response” (Rosa 2020, p. 32). Rosa writes that “we feel connected to the world because we ourselves are able to affect something in it (something that, in turn, also affects us)” (p. 33).16 The sense of resonance between a good-enough parent and infant means that the infant possesses some nascent agency in relation to the parent’s agency and the parent’s personalizing recognition of the infant’s singularities. It is a mutual interaction, though in an asymmetrical relationship.17

This may raise a question about experiences of resonance between oneself and an inanimate object(s). We can have a sense or experience of resonance with an object, whereby we possess agency and a sense of being affected by the object, but the material object, as far as we know, does not possess self-efficacy or “experience” resonance, at least not in the sense a living being does. Yet, because the inanimate object exists, it has singularity (being-in-itself), which means it resists non-existence, sameness, or identity. The object resists assimilation into sameness, and this resistance is a kind of “self-efficacy.” “A total loss of resistance,” Han (2018) writes, “would level the other to the same” (p. 45). Singularity by definition means sameness is impossible, but it also means that a singular object resists assimilation into sameness. This resistance can be understood as central to being in a resonant relationship with another object/person. I add here that feminist philosopher and physicist Barad (2007) uses the terms intra-agency and intra-action to indicate the mutual engagement of the observer and the inanimate observed. The notions of intra-agency and intra-action reveals the complicated quantum interaction between materiality and meaning—inter-affectivity.

A third attribute of resonance is adaptive transformation. Rosa (2020) argues that the experience of resonance “transforms us, and it is precisely this transformation that makes us feel alive” (p. 34). He states further that “resonant experiences also significantly change inanimate objects (if only for us). The mountain I have climbed is different (for me) from the one I only saw from a distance or on television” (p. 35). I would put it this way: the object is not necessarily changed, but my disposition toward it and its meaning for me change. If one experiences an I-Thou moment with a tree, one will see and relate to the tree in decidedly different ways than the individual who wishes to instrumentally appropriate the tree (an I-It experience and relation). By contrast, resonant transformation will transform my behavior toward the tree.

To address and be addressed, to engage in interactive self-efficacy, and to experience adaptive transformation occurs for human beings when we care for and respect the dignity [Würde] of the singular other. While Rosa (2019) links love to resonance, I think more broadly about caring relations. I cannot say I love the plants and trees in our yard, but I do care for them. I certainly do not love the spider in our bathroom, but I care for and respect this singular being by gently moving it outside. Non-instrumental caring relations, in my view, imply attending to and respecting the singularity of the other, which is necessary for the possibility of resonant relations.

The final and key feature of resonance is uncontrollability, which may seem odd after mentioning self-efficacy. Resonance, Rosa remarks, “cannot be manufactured or engineered. … [R]esonance cannot be made controllable through scientific knowledge, technical mastery, political management, economic efficiency, and so on” (pp. 36, 38–39). We lose our sense of resonance because “what appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful” (p. 6). In brief, we cannot force resonant experiences or predict their transformative effects. Uncontrollability also refers to the singular object or person. To recognize the singularity of the other, whether object or person, means accepting that this singular being or object cannot be controlled if one is to have a resonant relationship and experience. Objectification, indifference, and depersonalization are actions and dispositions that deny singularity while seeking to manipulate, control, subjugate, dominate, or annihilate the object or person. Positively stated, the possibility of resonant relations and experiences depends on our agency to surrender to being moved by the other’s singularity. To surrender to being moved means accepting the uncontrollability of the object/person and experience. This uncontrollability, which is not the absence of self-efficacy, creates a space for us to be addressed and adaptively transformed.

I suggest that religious spiritual practices ideally aim for resonant experiences and relations, whether that is in relation to God(s)/the transcendent, other human beings, or other species. Furthermore, religious spiritual practices also acknowledge and deal with the reality of dissonance in life. The Abrahamic traditions have rituals of repair (sacrifices, public confession/forgiveness), as well as social-religious institutions of justice (the prophets), etc. In my view, these practices can be seen to affirm that dissonance is an epiphenomenon of resonance. In other words, these institutions and practices aim to restore resonance. However, this is not the case when it comes to the ontological divide between human beings and other species. The ontological rift represents practices—in this case, Abrahamic traditions—that establish resonance as the epiphenomenon of dissonance. That is, dissonant subjects and relations are deemed to be existentially normative (the Fall) when it comes to other species and the Earth, while resonance is understood to be atypical, at least until the realization of the kingdom of God.

Let me explain with an eisegetical interpretation. The Abrahamic origin myth represents a place and time of resonant subjects and relations between human beings, God, and other species. Failing to obey God’s command results in being expelled from Eden. What exists now is separation from God, though God makes a covenant with the people of God—a covenant that makes possible partial resonant relations in the midst of dissonance. Put another way, outside of Eden human beings exist in antagonistic relations to “nature.” In Genesis 3:17–19, God “placed a curse on the ground. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. All your life you will sweat to produce food until your dying day.” This dissonance also included repeated occasions of disobeying a sovereign God; even though obedience and worship suggested a resonance with God, the land was still under God’s curse.

Since we (of the Abrahamic traditions) are all offspring of the original couple who did not obey, we believe that dissonance is the more likely state of affairs. Only God can cross this rift, and for Christians Jesus Christ is the paradigmatic example. Pannenberg’s (1969) notion of prolepsis points to how the kingdom of God is partially experienced in the here and now through God’s grace, which is an epiphenomenon of our separation from God—dissonance. Resonance in its fullness remains in the yet unrealized “kingdom” of God, which is an exclusionary kingdom (and hell is the ultimate symbol of dissonance). Generally speaking, religious people captive to the rift are focused on obtaining some measure of resonance with God and with God’s people in the present while awaiting its fullness in the future kingdom. They are less concerned, if concerned at all, with establishing resonant relations with other species and the Earth.18 As mentioned above, the stories of Noah in Genesis and of slaughtering animals in Exodus reveal indifference toward the sufferings of other species. Worse, other species are used to effect God’s goals. We can include Samson’s destructive use of foxes, Jesus sending demons into swine that kill themselves, and the prolific use of other-than-human animals in sacrifices—rituals aimed at restoring or maintaining resonance with a sovereign God.19

To establish some degree of resonance with God, then, our dissonant relations with other species and the Earth are ignored. We are, those of us of the rift, indifferent to this dissonance. Consider Twine’s and Singer’s reports above about the billions of animals “sacrificed” for human consumption. These reports do not include the loss of species’ habitats that result from mining, fracking, farming, etc., as well as from human-caused climate change. I am not suggesting that these statistics are simply and solely the result of Abrahamic traditions, because clearly global capitalism and other apparatuses of the rift are operating here. I am arguing that the Abrahamic traditions have contributed to and colluded to create these figures that represent profoundly dissonant subjects and relations with other species and the Earth. The tragedy is that devout religious persons can care about the looming realities of the climate crisis while, without giving it a thought, purchasing and eating meat from factory farms and industrial slaughter factories.

Dissonant spiritualities of the rift can operate in conjunction with spiritualities that seek resonant relations with God and others of the community of faith. As Rosa (2019) writes, “They experience self-efficacy not in the sense of resonance-sensitive attainment, but as reifying domination” (p. 428). Put another way, dissonant subjects of the rift are not moved or transformed by the sufferings of other species and the wounding of the Earth. We are in the main indifferent to and careless about the needs of other species, not simply because we do not recognize their singularities but also because of our conscious and unconscious pursuit of control, domination, and superiority (ontological significance). In being offspring of the rift, we have, in our relations to and practices toward the abstraction “nature,” made resonance an epiphenomenon of dissonance. These dispositions and practices fall under the heading of eco-dissonant spiritualities.

4. A Psychoanalytic View of the Dynamics and Resistance of Eco-Dissonant Spiritualities

There are questions that linger. What are some of the psychosocial reasons for the emergence of these eco-dissonant spiritualities? Why are so many of us resistant to facing and altering our dissonant relations to other species and the Earth? In the space I have remaining, a philosophical and psychoanalytic approach aids me in providing answers to these questions.

Psychoanalyst Donnel Stern was interested in the work of philosopher Fingarette ([1969] 2000) regarding the issue of self-deception. How is it that we can deceive ourselves? Fingarette wondered. “It is,” he wrote, “when we judge that there is a purposeful discrepancy between the way the individual really is engaged in the world and the story he tells himself that we have the complex but common form of self-deception in which we are interested” (p. 62). This self-deception results from not spelling out one’s engagement in the world or, better, from spelling out one’s engagement such that one does not avow one’s dispositions, actions, or the consequences of these actions. In terms of dissonance, a common example is going to the grocery store and buying meat. We deceive ourselves about the massive cruelties inflicted on other species to keep the deli section open so that we can eat various meats without remorse. In other words, people of the rift tell ourselves stories that spell out our ways of dwelling in the world such that the sufferings and deaths of other species are elided. Or the stories we have been told about ourselves and other species have been internalized to such a degree that it never crosses our mind that we are participating in cruel mechanisms of slaughter. As mentioned above, these animals exist outside the zones of politics, justice, care, and faith. Like Kant (1980), the categorical imperative does not apply and there is no conscious realization of our dissonant relations and their consequences. Similarly, the stories we have internalized inform us that the Earth is inert, not alive, and therefore is available for exploitation (mountaintop removal mining, fracking, etc.).

But I have not yet addressed why this is self-deception when it is likely that many people see this as the way of the world. Where is the purposeful discrepancy between the actions and what people say about these actions? From a purely practical point of view, the discrepancy is made evident given the realities of the climate crisis. Industrial farming, fishing, and slaughter factories, as well as mining, oil industries, etc., contribute to the degradation of the land, air, and ocean. This degradation is impacting and will impact the well-being of billions of other species and human beings. As noted above, “Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide” (in Wood 2019, p. 65). We deceive ourselves when we think we can continue these practices without accountability for the environmental destruction carried out on our behalf.

Stern (1997) adds to Fingarette’s analysis. Stern argued that some individual and collective forms of not spelling out are illustrations of weak dissociation. Weak dissociation, as a psychosocial defense mechanism, involves narrative rigidity, which is a complex form of organizing one’s experience such that one’s actions and consequences are narrowly spelled out. Inflexible narration, in other words, means that ideas, meanings, values, and affects that are unconsciously perceived to challenge the dominant story are excluded or remain unformulated. In weak dissociation, Stern argued, we spell out only what “we believe we can tolerate, or that furthers our purpose, or that promises a feeling of safety, satisfaction, and the good things in life; we dissociate the meanings that we believe we will not be able to tolerate, that frighten us and seem to threaten the fulfillment of our deepest intentions” (p. 128). As a result of “so insistently turning our attention elsewhere … we never even notice alternative understandings. Focal attention under these conditions is controlled by the intention to enforce narrative rigidity” (p. 132).20

Yet, what is it that those of us captive to the rift cannot tolerate? Murdoch (2001) wrote that every philosopher (and theologian) should be asked what their fears are. What do our elaborate theologies and philosophies of Western civilization fear, keeping this fear and attendant dissonant relations from coming to awareness by way of weak dissociation? An answer lies in the discussion above regarding the attributes of the ontological rift. Individuals and communities that rely on the stories and practices that produce the rift depend on these apparatuses to provide a sense of ontological, permanent significance while, at the same time, constructing other species as existentially insignificant. To be sure, some species may obtain mere instrumental significance, which depends on their fulfilling a role or purpose. When this has been achieved, they are discarded, disposed of, forgotten. Add to this the belief that because other species are deemed to “lack” language and agency, they are incapable of assigning significance, though, as Peirce (1991, 1998) and Kohn (2013) note, all living beings are semiotic creatures. This means they assign significance, which is impermanent. The eco-dissonant subjects of the rift are unconsciously terrified that their significance is not ontological and permanent. This fear is kept at bay by weak dissociation—by a rigid narrative spelling out our ontological, permanent significance—and projecting onto other species and the Earth existential insignificance or impermanent instrumental significance.

Self-deception and weak dissociation help explain why many Abrahamic religious people do not consciously experience eco-dissonance when acting out of the apparatuses of the rift. The abstractions kingdom of God, salvation, eternity, etc., are ensconced in narratives, hymns, and rituals that assure us of our permanent ontological significance and ultimately our resonant relations to and with God. We deceive ourselves of the reality of the precarity and impermanence of existential significance that all living beings share. Our weak dissociation blinds us to the singularities, precarities, and sufferings of other species—sufferings that we, in particular, cause, though we fail to acknowledge because other species are constructed as inferior. Self-deception and weak dissociation also help explain why there is little or no movement toward changing our alienated relations with, and behaviors toward, other species and the Earth. The unconscious fear that our existential significance, like that of all other species, is impermanent is a powerful force of resistance. As mentioned above, human beings are complex and contradictory creatures. The religious stories we tell and hold on to can undergird spiritual practices that give rise to resonant relations and experiences, while at the same time these stories can manifest an eco-dissonant spirituality that fosters dissonant relations with other species and the Earth. The psychosocial defenses of weak dissociation and projection help smooth out any contradictions embedded in our spiritual stories and apparatuses, heightening our resistance to facing dissonance and being open to change. For instance, I have never heard in church or in a sermon a concern or questions about the destruction of other species in the stories of Noah’s ark and in Exodus. We simply direct our attention to the power of the sovereign God and the new world and liberation of the Israelites, indifferent to the singularities and sufferings of those sentient beings. As a result, nothing changes, leaving eco-dissonant relations and our trajectory toward extinction (human and other-than-human) intact.

5. Conclusions

The scriptural passage regarding the beam and the speck manifests a seemingly universal truism which, in the context of the climate crisis, is tragic. To recognize the beam in our own eyes is not to be horrified like King Oedipus and blind ourselves or to nihilistically, like many present-day authoritarians and their followers, continue on our merry, violent way. To be sure, there are horrors past, present, and future, but there are also the pleasures and consolations of recognizing the singularities of other species, as well as learning about and from them and caring justly for them. Resonant subjects and relations are possible only if we face, acknowledge, and change the dissonance fostered by the apparatuses of the rift embedded in Abrahamic (and Western philosophical) traditions and practices. Resonant relations may not alter our trajectory toward climate disaster, but they nevertheless, in themselves, are existentially fitting and of value.