Uselessness as Radical Disruption: Spiritual Resources for Eco-Crisis

Our ongoing ecological crisis is rooted in global economic arrangements that use quantitative measures of value as the sole determinants of a good life. Paradoxically, these measures are both anthropocentric and, in their carelessness of our animal happiness, antithetical to the flourishing of human beings. Modern Christianity’s familiar dualism of soul and body, spirit and matter, inhibit its power to disrupt this engine of alienation from our creatureliness. In this paper I argue that where this conceptuality fails, Christian spiritual disciplines can nonetheless succeed in offering radical forms of resistance. I draw from Br. Paul Quenon’s memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, to explore the material consequences of joyful liberation from reductive measures of utility. To reject utility is to discover the harmony between our animal happiness and our participation in “the cosmic dance,” while exposing and deactivating the ecocidal lie of “a good life” under contemporary economism.