John D Rockefeller Saved The Whales

I watched Bp Barron's Sunday homily yesterday, in which, beyond discussing the reading from Johah himself, he urged listeners to go to Fr Mapples's sermon from the 1955 film of Moby Dick on YouTube. I've embedded it above. I would have embedded the whole film as well, but YouTube won't let me, as it's age-restricted. (There are gruesome scenes of actual whales being killed, which probably carry out Melville's purpose more than that of the Hollywood version.)

The actor portraying Fr Mapples is Orson Welles, by the way.

I had been thinking about Moby Dick anyhow. I think I've read it five times, once as an undergraduate, once in grad school, and three times since then. I'd set it aside for some time, as I'd begun to have my doubts about how serious Melville actually was as a writer. (Joseph Conrad annotated a copy of Moby Dick and thought little of it.) On the other hand, I've had almost ten years of Catholic Bible study, and this has made me conscious of how familiar Melville, along with many of his comtemporaries, was with scripture on even a casual basis, and this brought me back to reconsidering the novel once again.

Melvillle was a nominal Presbyterian, but I'm not sure if he was ever observant. Nevertheless, Moby Dick begins with a reference to the Abraham saga in Genesis, contains a sermon about Jonah quite early, and ends with a reference to Job's servants who survive calamities only to bring the news to Job. And all of Moby Dick is a reference to Job 40:25, "Can you lead Leviathan about with a hook, or tie down his tongue with a rope?"

The plot device, as well as the dominant metaphor of the book, though, is that the whales have begun to recognize that they're being hunted to extinction, and they've begun to change their behavior as a result. Not only are they resorting to large herds for mutual protection, but they're retreating to more distant oceans, and ultimately, like Moby Dick himself, they're turning on their tormentors. Melville suggests this is a human violation of both the natural and divine order.

The real-world twist here is that effectivly one man, John D Rockefellr, developed a system for refining and marketing kerosene, a product of mineral petroleum, that became cheap enough to replace whale oil for lighting in the post-Civil War period. For that matter, Standard Oil kerosene was cheap enough that it became the first stage of improved living conditions in the poorest parts of the world.

Not the narrative we want to hear.