Thou Shalt Not Destroy
Creativity, not destructivity is what ought to characterise us
It is fun to destroy things. To wield a sledgehammer in order to demolish a wall — or an entire house, even — is a fantasy many young boys have long enacted in their vivid imaginations (and many adult men and women too for that matter). To smash, to crash, to utterly spifflicate:1 all this is a whole lot of immense and addictive fun as anyone who has been part of a house demolition can testify (or anyone who has played the classic fairground game of smash the crockery).
Not only are destruction, demolition, and desecration fun, but they are also among the easiest, most intuitive actions known to man. To tidy a room takes a reluctant child hours; to make an utter mess a matter of minutes. To make a bone China plate takes hours of skilful moulding, firing, and glazing; to smash the same plate takes less than the merest of seconds. To build a house takes months of sweaty manual work following precise measurements; to demolish a house takes a fun day with a wrecking ball. To nurture and cultivate a garden or forest takes years of training, generations worth of ecological wisdom, and cooperation with temperamental beasts and plants; to annihilate an ecosystem takes a day with a bulldozer fuelled by a destructive greed that gets what it wants no matter the cost.
To destroy is blissfully easy. To create, make, protect, and steward is painfully difficult.
Though the question of why we find destruction so easy and addictively fun is worthy of an essay, it is not my intention here — though I will pose a few threads of thought in suggesting that the ability to express raw power and the associated noise and spectacle may explain what lies at the core of our infatuation with destructivity. My purpose here is rather to argue that mankind’s bent towards destructiveness is a severe malady and the fact that we often find it so euphoric should ring red hot alarm bells in our ears.
We were not made to be destructive; we were made to be wonderfully and skilfully creative.
It is in the act of creativity that we as humans express our true genius and reflect the image of God most vividly — a God who is a God of creation. Along with worship, our truest and most proper work is to take the raw stuff of earth and grow life giving food; fashion ingenious and useful products; and create masterpieces of astounding art. This is our good and truest work. This is our high and proper calling. This is what we all have been created for.
The effects of the tragedy, the desolation — the Fall — have taken a hammer blow to this creative impulse and have made our creative work severely difficult. By the sweat of our brow do we labour in the fields and all creative acts are beset with frustrations. Not only that but the Laws of Thermodynamics dictate that the impulse of the energetic world is towards chaos and destruction — the undoing of our creativity and God’s created natural order. This law of entropy explains physically why we find destruction so easy and why it tends to occur seemingly naturally whether we like it or not. One could surmise, then, that like sin, entropy is at the heart of the curse.
But an entropic world of destruction and chaos is not how things ought to be, not how things were designed to be. This world was made to be a world of order, of beauty, of creativity. And we as humans made in the image of God were put on this earth to enhance its beauty, creativity, and order. The fall of mankind has not altered this command and intention, it has simply made the creative life painfully difficult.
We must remember this. We must remind ourselves daily of our high and noble calling: the calling to create, to build, to fashion, and to grow, and then to steward, preserve, maintain and protect what we have made. It will be helpful to remind ourselves when tempted by destructivity that destructiveness, though often the easy and pleasurable option, rarely, if ever, creates value — and almost never results in beauty. And an action without value and devoid of beauty is probably something we ought not to do.
Francis Schaeffer, that great sage has remarked wisely in this regard:
“Christians, of all people, should not be the destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect. We may cut down a tree to build a house, or make fire to keep the family warm. But we should not cut down the tree just to cut down the tree… To do so is not to treat the tree with integrity.”2
All this should put a hand break on our impulse to destroy, to demolish, and to neglect (which is a form of passive destructiveness). Instead, we should consider our actions and motives: rather than demolishing an old building, it likely better for society and our planet for us to renovate and repurpose. Rather than killing the trespassing little house mouse, it is more humane to trap and release, for the mouse is as much a living creature that God has made as we are. Rather than destroying a grove of somewhat inconveniently “placed” trees to make way for a development and to save a relatively small amount of money, we should consider adapting our designs to incorporate these precious organisms whose benefits to us all transcend well beyond the mere economic.3 And rather than damaging and neglecting his soil, the farmer should rather nurture and build it up as his most precious and life-giving resource. This is good work indeed.
Another motive to check our destructive habits is to appreciate that the effects of destruction can be, and often are, permanent. There is no room for regret, nor remediation or recovery once the gun has been fired. The wanton destruction of the passenger pigeon was a grave sin. Not only did the mass killing betray a vice-fuelled blood thirsty spirit, but it resulted in the irreversible extinction of one of God’s most sublime masterpieces.4 Mankind had no right to kill wantonly, let alone utterly annihilate a precious species God has made. That this act was performed by many folk who would later be found worshiping and singing praises to their Creator in church on Sunday betrays that this generation suffered from a deep, dark, and festering blind spot.5 They never appeared to question how their destructive impulse grieved and angered their Creator and how their actions were in utter dissonance with the intentions and heart of the One they professed to serve.
Such an example should be a stark warning to us all, for it is an act of hypocrisy that we still enact time and time again in this present generation. The testimony of decimated landscapes, high rates of extinction, and the persistence of blood sports stands against us as an ugly, putrid stain. And a dangerous one. When we destroy the natural world, we are destroying the handiwork of God. We are throwing His immensely valuable and incredibly designed gift back in His face. Such behaviour will, on one great day, be called to account. The rampagers, the pillagers, the destroyers will receive their deserved recompense.
That we all possess this immense and profound power — the power of to be destructive — and that this power can be kindled within an instant, impels us to pause, to temper ourselves, and realise just what it is that we are capable of. Wise is the man who humbly considers his power and conducts himself with restraint. He will be a blessing to this world, rather than a destructive curse.
Living in a fallen and imperfect world, however, means that sometimes destruction is necessary. To exterminate the persistent pest ravaging the crops, to demolish a dangerous building, to kill a suicide bomber, to squash the mosquito. Though necessary, none of these actions should be taken lightly nor be done liberally (though perhaps squishing the mosquito is the exception). We should beware when we find the act of destruction comes to us too easily and should be deeply afraid of what has become of us if we find the desire to be destructive dwelling within us. It is also true that the need to destroy is much rarer than we first think. It should never become our impulse. If our impulses gravitate towards destruction, then they are illuminating that something deep within us is out step with the way things ought to be and out of kilter with God Himself — which is a very precarious position to find ourselves in.
We were made to be creative, not destructive. Let us then go forth and create good things: things of beauty, things of worth, things that will stand the test of time. Creations that no one in their right mind would ever think of destroying.
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Further reading
Wasteful Efficiency
An old word I think we should popularise again which means “to violently destroy”.
Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man. p.75.
This example of the tree grove is one Schaeffer gives in Pollution and the Death of Man.
The loss of spectacle of immense flocks of passenger pigeon is one of the greatest losses of all time in the natural world.
To put it mildly.
Well said! Thank you.
From The Prelude,the long poem William Wordsworth wrote about his childhood find the passage where he describes himself a ten year old boy going nutting. In a grove of Hazel bushes in the woodland,the boy fills the basket with ripe hazelnuts then,boys will be boys,embarks on an orgy of destruction,his vigour freshly fueled by the success of the trampled branches everywhere from his wild assaults. The world was big enough and the population low enough (even then) to get away with that sort of thing. And him an icon of environmentalism too!