Our new established religion.(Essay)

MANY REASONS have been put forward for John Howard's failure to win the 2007 election--negative reaction to Work-Choices, his refusal to abdicate in favour of Peter Costello, even a sense that he had just been in power too long--but there was another issue which suffused the Opposition campaign and which played a major part in persuading voters: climate change, in particular the recent drought. John Howard may be the first leader in the modern world to be voted out of office partly because he failed to make it rain.

Howard, however, may not be the last leader to be deposed over this issue, for the last few years have seen the surprise reappearance of a belief which was thought to have been extinct for centuries: the belief that human beings can control the weather.

To our hunter-gatherer and planter-herder ancestors the notion that humans could influence the elements seemed reasonable. To them it was clear that the wind, the rain, the phases of the moon, the movement of herds and the rebirth of the world in spring were controlled by otherworldly spirits. Placating these entities was the job of the tribal witch doctor or shaman, who knew how to appease them with prayer, dance, song and sacrifice. As humans became more dependent on agriculture, dependence on water increased correspondingly: failure of the spring rains to fall or the sacred river to flood was attributed to the displeasure of the governing deity, and appeasements had to be offered, sometimes in the form of human sacrifice. If the shaman failed to mollify the recalcitrant god, that sacrifice might well be him.

As magic evolved into religion and shamans into priests, natural catastrophes were linked less to the capriciousness of the gods and more to the observance, or lack thereof, of divine commandments. Droughts, hurricanes and floods were characterised as punishments for human immorality. According to the central narrative of Judaic faith, the Old Testament, the history of the human race was a series of reprisals for transgressions against God's law. Central to that narrative is the story of Creation, in which God brings forth the world as a perfect work: complete, unified and unchanging. As custodians of this untainted paradise he introduces two humans who forfeit their state of bliss by eating the fruit of the Forbidden Tree (variously interpreted as a symbol of knowledge, sex or self-determination) and are cast out of Eden to toil by the sweat of their brows. Despite this, humans continue to sin and are punished again with a great flood and occasional surgical strikes of fire and brimstone.

The notion that natural calamities were punishment for collective human sin was to last for the next 2000 years. The Black Death, which killed around a third of Europe, was blamed on a range of causes including the machinations of Jews and witches, but was principally seen as a punishment for the general sinfulness of the times. The idea of an irredeemably corrupted world was even borne out by non-biblical sources. To medieval scholars, the ancient Greeks seemed to have dwelt in a golden age which decayed into a silver age and then an iron age: contemporary humans were but a degenerate vestige of the physical and intellectual giants who once strode the earth. The inevitable conclusion of this decline would be the Apocalypse--Judgment Day, when history would end and God would make his final disposition of all people who had ever lived.

Then, almost overnight, the belief that natural phenomena were the result of sorcery or divine punishment crumbled with the advent of the scientific revolution. In little more than 400 years--an extraordinarily brief time in the total span of civilisation--the old beliefs in spirits, possessions, spells, curses, hexes, charms and God's wrath, were replaced by medicine, chemistry, mathematics, biology, geology and physics. Finally, the notion of decline itself was reversed by Darwin, whose Origin of Species recast humans, not as degraded leftovers, but the heroic species that had dragged itself out of the primeval sludge, up through the stages of fish, reptile and mammal to become Nature's masterpiece.

But the old narratives were only biding their time, waiting for their moment to re-emerge, patiently weaving the new threads of science into their tapestry.