The Russian Orthodox Church used to spread a superstition among the peasants. They would say -
Never dig down into the earth. The more you dig the closer you are to hell!
It was probably just a superstition. By making them afraid of the ground underneath them, the church reinforced peasant's sense of the cosmic order. God in the heavens, the devil below.
But a subtler thinker might realise that this injunction is anti-technological. The majority of materials of cities and modern living are made from materials extracted from under the earth's surface. If we had never been a digging species, there would have been no bronze age, no iron age, no industrialisation; no concrete, oil, plastic or computer chips.
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Like a modern pilgrim I had an interesting conversation on the road to Jerusalem. My mind was already impressed by the sun's heat which beamed with the intensity that another age or person might consider divine; I was also impressed with the modern Hebrew in the airport, finally seeing the language of my religious upbringing come to life.
But this Englishman sitting next to me on the bus impressed me in a different way. He was an engineer who had come to analyse the ancient water systems under the Old City and elsewhere in Israel. He and his team believed they could be study the ancient technology and develop applications for modern supply. After all, water security is still an issue even in England (hose pipe bans, etc).
My researches reveal that these ancient tunnels are approximately three thousand years old. Back then another culture dug down and tapped a key source of life - water.
In a mutable universe, a reflexive, self-aware species would look to secure control over all the resources upon which its survival depends. Even less intelligent species, such as the beaver, control their environment to increase security. The beaver builds its dams; this creates a water barrier about their home and wetlands for a new ecology; the barrier prevents predators and thus secures the beavers. Yet whereas the beaver builds the dam instinctively, man digs with a purpose.
The earth promises water. With purposeful work, the earth yields water.
Our species takes dominion over all the things of the earth. This extends God's promise in the first chapter of the Torah "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth."
Whether one believes in gods/God or not, one must acknowledge that gods'/God's presence reassures believers about the promise of things (and this could also be said of non-monotheistic religions); it reminds us that our attitudes towards materials is deeply infused with a sense of purpose. I believe that none of us can entirely get behind or beyond this underlying power to attribute our purposes to outside matter. Without it, we would not be able to survive in the way we do.
(We have stories about this. Moses in the desert striking the rock with
anger and it yields water. And God is angry with his anger, at Moses's skepticism towards God's instructions and never
allows Moses to enter Israel the promised land.)
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Anthropologically, our digging is also significant. I learnt in Israel that studying burial rituals - are the bones carefully placed? - tells us a lot about the symbolic value attributed to death by cultures. In fact it is an early marker of culture.
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Nowadays our digging is much more complex. Water is relatively cheap; we devote our most highly engineered digging for more expensive substances, such as oil.
I remember at one law firm an Australian associate showing this picture of a massive oil rig (a comparable image would be http://bit.ly/12hfuSC) and saying "Isn't that a thing of beauty?" And my initial reaction was, well, not my idea of beauty - kind of monstrous gargantuan construction. But then I thought about it some more - the amount of effort and ingenuity that went it that. The sheer human willpower and work and careful execution and planning; the astute advice necessary to put together such an intricate vast construction. What an impressive mass of material! How daring - to venture into the ocean and build this extracting machine upon which man can live. It was one of those duck/rabbit moments.
