THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TOM HAYDEN

...For openers, “the Ten Commandments prohibit adultery but not pollution, demand that we honor our parents but not the earth...

...There are the same disdain for mainstream liberalism (even Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt come under mild fi re for failing to uphold an “absolute standard” for the rights of nature), contempt for his suburban American roots, demonizing of political opponents (who are now described as sinners), and comprehensive rejection of his culture...

...For a quarter century or more, Indians have been Hayden’s favorite people—equaled in his affections for only a few years by the Communist Vietnamese...

...today his knees go weak at the mere mention of any people that supposedly worships trees...

...Indeed, Hayden has been trashing Christianity and linking it to a predatory capitalism for decades...

...Yet Hayden apparently learned nothing from this rare moment of self-awareness...

...He notes approvingly, for example, that Thoreau’s last words are said to have been “moose” and “Indians...

...Hayden clears the ground for his new identity with a necessary stipulation: “The search for the lost gospel,” he announces, involves “a deeper exploration of our common identity in a native past...

...Yet in The Lost Gospel, he quotes Chief Seattle’s environmental manifesto even though he knows, and admits, that “the technical accuracy of Seattle’s speech has been rightly challenged...

...But whereas Communist imperfections belatedly caught Hayden’s eye, long after the last blood of American troops had stained Indochinese soil, the romance of Indians still retains its hold on the California state senator, delegate to last week’s Democratic convention, and onetime leader of the New Left...

...He repeatedly mocks the idea that humans merit special consideration compared with other creatures...

...The stream ran through me...

...The Judeo-Christian tradition, in particular, has a lot of explaining to do...

...For another, not only had these Irish once “communicated with spirits in the land and sea,” but they would later develop “the ‘greenest’ church in Europe...

...Best of all, Hayden is now one of them...

...What enthusiasm will have Vincent Carroll last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the Worldwatch Institute...

...By way of answering he notes that in 1973, he and Jane Fonda named their son Garity, his mother’s maiden name, as “a step in the recovery of memory and healing of loss...

...As recently as 1991, he recounts, a Gallup poll found that nearly half of all Americans adhere to the view that man was created “pretty much in his present form at one time in the last 10,000 years...

...Yet Hayden has no illusions about the resilience of the biblical tradition, and a fundamentalist interpretation at that...

...Such dreadful sanctimony and self-absorption have been the hallmarks of Hayden’s long public career, along with an unchecked sentimentality...

...No one is purely settler, or purely native...

...What he really wants is what he has always wanted: to assert moral superiority over the rest of us...

...So, is fi shing wrong...

...For one thing, the Irish once lived in “kinship-based clans similar to tribes in America...

...The manifesto was written in 1970 by a screenwriter named Ted Perry...

...Much of this has been said before, of course, most notably by Lynn White, who in a 1967 article for Science magazine blamed “our ecological crisis” on “the victory of Christianity over paganism...

...He does describe how he gave up fi shing because he “had looked into the eyes of too many fi sh and experienced feelings there...

...But rest assured, he is not through...

...If The Lost Gospel adds anything new to the Hayden oeuvre, it would seem to be a large dose of weirdness...

...It is his single, lifelong compulsion, and he does it today through the same rhetorical tricks he employed a full generation ago...

...Hayden never really bothers to explain...

...We are all indigenous somewhere...

...STRIP CHRISTIANITY OF MONOTHEISM, HIERARCHY, AND THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL, AND WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT DOESN’T REMOTELY RESEMBLE CHRISTIANITY...

...Hayden fi rst tried to enter Ireland in the late 60s, but his reputation preceded him and he was summarily expelled...

...Although born and raised mainly in Michigan, Hayden seems to believe he is “indigenous” to Ireland and that his Irish ancestors “could be called the Indians of Europe...

...To wit: He “turned the Vietnamese into caricatures of revolutionaries,” all kind, selfl ess, and wise...

...Once upon a time, it was American imperialism that threatened human existence...

...Today his hyperbole, equally puerile, is offered on behalf of the environment...

...Yet the endeavor is hopeless, and one senses the author knows it as well as anyone...

...Although Hayden no longer calls for the abolition of private property, the right to own land still leaves him uneasy...

...And was there ever a more disturbing call to human dominion over nature (“a license to plunder the natural world”) than the traditional interpretation of Genesis...

...Hayden must feel like an Indian because Indians, above all others, embody for him the lost nature mysticism that he believes is necessary to save the world...

...It also was then,” he now reveals, “that I began to understand how an Indian in America must feel...

...All these disorders...

...At 56, it seems, Hayden has come a long long way from his lessons at the Shrine of the Little Flower School...

...Now the danger is every major organized religion on earth...

...Reading The Lost Gospel, one continuously marvels that a man of Hayden’s superfi ciality has played such a prominent role in left-wing political thought for more than 30 years...

...A score of questions spring to mind, all unanswered...

...Here is Hayden describing a transcendental moment he experienced while wading in a stream: “One day I even felt the water inside me while being in the water outside me...

...Strip Christianity of monotheism, hierarchy, and the immortality of the individual human soul, put human beings on the same moral plane as a grasshopper or a porcupine, and what you have left may be agreeable to a nature mystic, but it doesn’t remotely resemble Christianity...

...His would be a village culture sustained, however, by only the vaguest sort of private property rights...

...During it, the animal “delivered a message, all witnesses later agreed,” based upon the creature’s “3 million years’ experience...

...All these disorders of the modern world arise from our striving against nature...

...They all, every one, fail to put nature on the pedestal it deserves...

...He was once absolutely convinced that the trial of the Chicago Seven marked “the beginning of full scale political repression” and the waning days of the American “empire...

...Presumably not, one supposes, yet isn’t a moral hierarchy implicit in that distinction...

...He exulted in Trial, a 1970 tract, that “private property and puritan morality, while still endorsed by dinosaurs like the Nixon family,” would soon be obsolete...

...If all nature is equally sacred, as he repeatedly maintains, need we lament the death of a trout as much as that of a child...

...Is eating fish wrong...

...In his 1972 book The Love of Possessions Is a Disease With Them (it’s a quotation from Sitting Bull, marking the author’s early fixation on native genius), Hayden sneers at Vietnamese Catholics as “traitors to their people” who richly deserved their often brutal fate...

...For that matter, under what circumstances are we permitted to cut down one of those trees that we are all expected to revere...

...Challenged is one way to put it...

...I was buoyed by water within my body that swelled to join the river through the porous boundary of myself...

...He writes in all seriousness, for example, that “fi fty thousand Americans die in car accidents every year, and many thousands more from the tobacco, alcohol, and drugs that we take to steady our nerves...

...Hayden is mainly posturing, of course...

...If Genesis cannot be cast aside, Hayden reasons, it must “be reinterpreted in a greener way,” along with the whole of JudeoChristian theology—which task, in a nutshell, Hayden sets out to do, while helpfully throwing in a chapter on how to improve Buddhism, too...

...His descriptions of Indian virtue and wisdom in The Lost Gospel are no less monochromatic than his most gullible exhortations on behalf of the Viet Cong—if anything, they are more so...

...What will Hayden’s be, one wonders...

...Otherwise, the excesses of The Lost Gospel parallel the excesses of his earlier work almost stride for stride...

...He rails against technology and what technology has wrought, and seems disturbed by the culture of scientifi c inquiry itself (“Where nature becomes an object of intellectual conquest, physical conquest is not far behind...

...He relates an equally bizarre encounter with a musk ox in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge...

...Thirty years ago Hayden fell head over heels for a Third World police state...

...If “nature mysticism is the de facto religion of native people everywhere,” as Hayden argues, what would distinguish its Christian variant, other than a few apparently expendable biblical stories...

...His transformation is recounted in his new book, The Lost Gospel of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 267 pages, $22), a work of environmental theology that will solidify Hayden’s reputation as his generation’s most nimble spokesman for whatever leftist enthusiasm dominates the day...

...Or perhaps Hayden disagrees...

...The apocalyptic tone that affl icts The Lost Gospel has been a longtime staple of Hayden’s, too...

...Presumably Hayden never put fi ctional statements in the mouth of a Vietnamese...

...Even Hayden has admitted, in his 1988 memoir Reunion, that he was “very wrong in certain of my judgments” regarding the Vietnamese...

...Will none of us die in car accidents when paganism reigns supreme...

...Just as he did 30 years ago, Hayden yearns incoherently for a decentralized village culture “connected to the land...

...Yet he also blandly insists he is not “advocating the wholesale rejection of science...

...how can any piece of this planet belong to us, after all, when we are merely “sojourners upon God’s good earth...

...Yet he never bothers to explore how such a view would translate into practical behavior...

...he even praises children because they do not “distinguish a moral hierarchy between trees, fl owers, animals, and human beings” (a dubious notion, but never mind...

...Indeed, Hayden fails to grapple seriously with any of the premises he lays down...

...I wonder today,” he muses, “if the experience of expulsion from our own ethnic gardens doesn’t reverberate as an unhealed pain in our own memories...

...All this bucolic hokum from a man who resides in Santa Monica...