Edward H. Huijbens, Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2021)

• Published in: Nordicum-Mediterraneum
• Main Author: Giorgio Baruchello
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Akureyri 2022
• Subjects: iceland; netherlands; philosophy; climate change; climate crisis; environment; geography; tourism; Social sciences (General); H1-99; Human ecology. Anthropogeography; GF1-900; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.33112/nm.17.1.8; https://doaj.org/article/90347a67fdd443109ffc1bc9eaa36791

Letting the proverbial genie out of the bottle is bad. Killing the genie after it has leaped out of the bottle is even worse. Now, and perhaps forever, the bottle is going to be empty. Our culture, to a significant extent, is a thoroughly disenchanted one. Apart from a passé and largely passing minority, notions of sacredness and divinity have mostly disappeared from the leading conceptual horizon. As Nietzsche famously asserted, God is dead—and it was us who killed Him. Academia, for one, cultivates a veritable graveyard of past ‘irrationalities’ and serves as an imposing bastion of practical atheism, especially in the Nordic countries, where the intellectuals’ secular outlook is part and parcel of the broader conventional wisdom. On Sundays, people no longer go to church. Instead, they go to the shopping mall.