'I no longer wish that individual things were better' - St. Augustine

The American idea of progress is that we are getting better at understanding everything.

However, reading the classics, I wonder if when trying to comprehend nature, we are actually getting worse.

Since at least the beginning of the Industrial Age people have been "improving" nature, which often means exploiting it -- clear cutting forests and strip mining come to mind.

Water is taken from Colorado to turn the desert around Los Angeles into suburbs with green lawns that try to make the Mojave look like New England.

Viewing almost everything as an us-versus-them struggle for dominance, we have also been at war with nature. Creatures that got in our way, most notably the buffalo, are virtually eradicated.

We fight floods and resist hurricanes that inconveniently interrupt our pursuit of the good life.

However, reading St. Augustine's Confessions in a new translation by Garry Wills the reader finds a classic viewpoint that is in sharp contrast with our modern perspective.

If St. Augustine were today "alive as you or me," it seems likely that both our political institutions and media would shun if not condemn his point of view. He accepts what we condemn and praises what we often disdain.

As Augustine tells the classic story of his progress from pagan to Catholic bishop, one of the things he gains is an acceptance and reverence for what he quaintly sees as God's creation. And the old bishop isn't just praising the Lord for a sunny day at the beach, he also accepts all the yucky nature that we are working so hard to fix up, change and correct.

"I am far from saying that anything that exists should not do so," Augustine writes, although he acknowledges this is a new and hard won point of view that comes as he moves away from materialism toward God.

In his ongoing conversation with God, Augustine writes: "'There is no soundness' in the person who disapproves of anything you made -- as I once disapproved of many of them."

Then Augustine goes off the charts: "Taken individually, I might prefer something different about them. But in the present argument I acknowledge the duty to praise each item individually. On earth everything shows that you should be praised -- even 'monsters and abysses, as well as fire, hail, snow, sleet, hurricane. All act on your command, as do mountains and every hill, trees with their fruit, every cedar, wild animals, and all cattle, serpents, and flying things.'"

He praises everything, even hurricanes and monsters?

You can almost hear the TV talking head: "This religious nut, this so-called St. Augustine, is praising monsters. How crazy is that?"

Augustine might get some support from one of those shaved head Zen monks who might support his "radical acceptance" of the world as it is rather than as he wants it to be.

But how many Zen monks get on TV?

So what would happen to the hapless Augustine when he tells a cable interviewer: "When I look on all things taken together, I no longer wish that individual things were better."

First, they would cut to a commercial where a coal mining company would extol the virtues of strip mining America's biggest source of clean energy. That would be followed with ads for cosmetics to help you be a better younger-looking you. And if that doesn't work, there's always beer, wine, whiskey and a new truck with a Hemi engine that sucks gas the way Dracula sucksblood.

This being the era of reality TV, when we get back from the commercial break, we would see security guards leading the old bishop off the set where a team of psychiatrists wait to take him in hand.

Electroshock will eventually get him to see things right.

If that doesn't work there's always pills and injections.

One way or another they'll teach him to wish that things were better.