THE HOUSE YOU WILL BUILD
We return to prophecy. We return to Isaiah. The disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant symbolized the transcendence of Yahweh, God, who could not be represented by any human imagery, shape, or construction. Many saw its disappearance as symbolising God’s absence from the new Temple built in his glory. Isaiah spoke in anticipation of a new world, a new Jerusalem.
New Heavens and a New Earth
17Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. 18But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy.
19I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
20"Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach" a hundred will be considered accursed.
21They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the works of their hands.
23They will not toil in vain or bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the lord, they and their descendants with them.
24Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. 25The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent's food.
They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,"
says the lord.
(Isaiah 65:17-25)
Isaiah offers an exhilarating vision of social and ecological harmony, a new Jerusalem of justice and joy. Isaiah’s hopes have yet to be fulfilled. We have yet to build the Jerusalem in which God in his "glory" could take up residence. Instead, social injustice and environmental destruction show the extent to which we have failed to live up to the beauty of the Creation.
But we are still called upon to be builders. We are still called upon to build the household which is worthy of housing the glory of God.
Judgment and Hope
This is what the lord says:
"Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me?
Where will my resting place be?
2Has not my hand made all these things,
and so they came into being?"
declares the lord.
(Isaiah 66: 1-2)
That remains the question before us: where is the new Jerusalem? Where is the housing of the divine power? In answering this question we start to put the global economy and planetary ecology back together again, we start to live up to our part in and responsibility for the Creation. The word ‘household’ comes from the Greek oikos, a word which forms the stem of both words ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’. The word ‘ecology’ derives from the Greek words oikos, meaning 'house', and logos, meaning 'understanding'. But there is also a moral dimension to this home, this place to be, where we thrive in full cognisance of our environment. The new Jerusalem is a household worthy of God the Creator, we build in recognition of our part within the greater whole. We need to start showing humility and start building the household in accordance with the creative principles of social and environmental justice. And this is a very different notion to the machine world build in abstraction from nature. Enthroned in Heaven, God points to Earth as His footstool and asks ‘where is the house you will build for me?’ It is plain that building this house requires much more than the veneration of the technical powers at our disposal, an idolatry, but requires the ability to place means and ends in their true relation.
"This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.
3But whoever sacrifices a bull is like one who kills a man, and whoever offers a lamb, like one who breaks a dog's neck; whoever makes a grain offering is like one who presents pig's blood, and whoever burns memorial incense, like one who worships an idol.
They have chosen their own ways, and their souls delight in their abominations; 4so I also will choose harsh treatment for them and will bring upon them what they dread.
For when I called, no-one answered, when I spoke, no-one listened. They did evil in my sight and chose what displeases me."
Isaiah 66: 1-4
As the city moved further and further away from Isaiah’s prophecy of peace and harmony, there was a growing sense of sense of God's immense distance from the world. The idea that a transcendent Deity could dwell in such a house seemed more and more ridiculous. In the modern world, as the promises of industrial and technological progress backfire spectacularly in the form of looming ecological disaster, there is a growing sense of our immense distance from nature. That doesn’t render old Isaiah’s prophecy false. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the questions for us to answer remain:
what house could you build me?
what place could you make for my rest?
Yahweh’s questions from his throne in Heaven enjoin us to live up to our creative and moral powers and build the new Jerusalem. There is little point in hoping against hope that God is going to come down from Heaven and do the building for us.
Whilst God never returned to Zion in fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy, the dream of the day when there would be "a new heaven and a new earth" has never died. The old hope of salvation in a new Jerusalem lingers. Is it a symbol of an innate yearning? That’s not the role of the new Jerusalem in the Bible. It is clear that we are out of Eden and that there is no going back. What there is is a new Eden in the form of a new Jerusalem, a future we build that embodies harmony, intimacy with God, and which returns us to a paradisiacal condition, this time by our own efforts. The New Jerusalem would be a city of peace, of peace with each other and of peace with nature. Every person, indeed every creature, would be settled in place and would live long and healthy lives. Life would be established as it had always been meant to be.
The secular religion of progress has not delivered the new Jerusalem, and with good reason. The endless accumulation of material quantities may feed the physical self, but it does not nourish the soul. Max Weber characterised capitalist modernity as a disenchantment of the world. We are now increasingly disenchanted with the claims of secular progress. The social problems are mounting inside the city, and environmental problems closing in from outside the city. And the inhabitants are not secularised at all, they venerate the new gods of money and power.
In the secular myth of progress, the contemporary world’s dominant religion, salvation is made conditional upon a ceaseless economic growth. The capital system is an endless world which pursues wants to infinity. Fulfilment is only possible through the recognition of limits. The accumulative logic of capital can respect no limits. So we have a production for the sake of production and a consumption for the sake of consumption, a hollowness that can never be filled. It’s a nihilism, an endless accumulation of means for further accumulation.
There is no morality in such a world, only systemic imperatives.
In this world without ends, the question is begged: ‘Where will my resting place be?’ When will human beings come to cease deifying their technical means and instead start to live in accordance to moral ends? Where is the new Jerusalem? That’s a question that only we can answer.
The future is entrusted to us. It always was.
Adam and Eve 1913-14 Henrik Sorenson
We have come from Genesis to Revelation, from the Fall to the new Eden. It’s time to wake up and start living well. It’s time for a new beginning, the Age of Ecology as the Age of Being and Place. It’s time to enjoy the Earth. It always has been. Right from the very beginning.
Green economics is about sustainability. Such is the claim. I worry that the discussion of clean energy and energy infrastructures assumes the continuation of the expansionary, accumulative dynamic of the current economic system and, tragically, employs the global heating that is an inevitable consequence of that endless growth as an appeal to 'necessity' justifying the choice of contentious technologies, many of which are opposed by communities, but which will be imposed over their heads. A green movement which promised a democratic technics thus comes to be associated with an authoritarian technics. From nuclear to fracking, take your pick of energies, the principal agents in the current economic system - the ones whose central position within production relations gives them real power of choice and allocation - will take it all, demand more, and make the public pay one way or another, taxes, subsidies, prices, the lot.
There are a lot of false fixities in play in these debates, the biggest one of all being the capital system itself. Accept that as the only economic game in town, and the 'choices' follow. You can forget all about democratic choice. The massive investments that companies have made in these areas will not be written off as a result of public opposition. And you can forget about the common good too. The common interest or the common good used to mean something positive, the social and environmental justice generating and sustaining human and planetary flourishing. We flourish as parts of an integrated, interconnected whole. Now, a certain strand of environmentalism - detached from the practical movement for bringing about the ecological transformation of society from the roots up - is employing the common interest to justify the imposition of some very contentious forms of energy upon communities. That is 'common interest' defined in terms of human survival, rather than in the original, ancient sense of politics, as associating together to create the public life which embodies and articulates the human good. The things that ought to be a matter of public debate, deliberation and decision are being presented as technical necessities and inevitabilities if we are to address the problem of climate change. I am the last to deny that problem. The climate crisis is the biggest problem we face and should concentrate minds. And we need cool heads. We need to debate these various technologies and energy infrastructures. The situation is so serious that we need to think like foxes, keep our minds open to various possible solutions and work through them pragmatically.
I would just argue that without active consent connecting short and long term interest, individual and collective good, there will be a democratic deficit in those solutions generated in abstraction from the individuals composing the demos. They will be hollow. It will smack of a green authoritarianism, betraying the promise of a movement which originated in a grassroots effort to reclaim the global commons. But can resolving the environmental crisis await democratic growth? This is the political problem that seems hardest to crack. Governments are subject to such systemic and structural constraints with respect to 'the economy' that they lack political autonomy (and this is even before we mention corporate capture of public business). Electorates are made up of individual voters who necessarily vote out of self-interest, not collective solidarity, not the long term good for all. To argue for altruism over egoism in politics is to appeal to a social identity which does not exist in the prevailing social relationships. Aristotle argued that human beings are social beings, politikon zoons, but in a market 'society' we are atoms, each seeking self-interest, all becoming playthings of external forces (from business imperatives to climate change).
And all for what? What will an authoritarian technics achieve? Will it really address climate change? The idea that we can choose our energy infrastructure in the 'common interest' (defined negatively in terms of dealing with climate change by purely technical means) involves an inadvisable degree of faith in the power of contingent, incremental change within the larger system. The capital system is not a public domain subject to democratic deliberation and choice in this way, but a regime of private accumulation. At a time when serious social transformation needs to be on the global political agenda, we are debating energy infrastructures in abstraction from social relationships. These relationships - the relations we have to each other and to our environing society and nature - need to be addressed directly, challenged and transformed so that we live more harmoniously with each other and with the planet. Rather than transforming the way we organise our interchange with nature, we are in danger of making ourselves experts in how to fuel the very economic system that is eating up the planet.
And being fair to the environmentalists who are proposing technological solutions to climate crisis, it is the failure of government and politics that has brought us to this. And that, ultimately, is our failure. We may talk about 'choice' when it comes to the energy infrastructure and mix, but, in the absence of real social transformation, we seem to have no option but to seek a technical solution to the problem of global heating. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, has demanded accelerated research into geo-engineering and called for a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" in order to avoid runaway global heating. Those views are worth considering because, make no mistake, that is what we are facing - runaway global heating. And when the planet is on the move, politics will be no more than a rescue squad at best, reacting rather than adapting.
I'm not criticising the scientists or the technologists here at all. They are having to fill the void left by the collapse of a genuine politics, politics in its true sense. But technique is not politics, is not philosophy; it is a means being pressed into the gap where ends once were. And techno solutions are a gamble. Wadhams himself acknowledges that such technical solutions possess inherent dangers and offer no guarantees.
And being fair to Wadhams, he is correct to point out that time is running out.
"Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms. Having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme."
I can accept this reasoning, certainly in light of decades of political failure, of governments and political leaders but also of electorates, both too wedded to 'business as usual' to change in any substantial respect. For me, though, the question is not 'energy' as such but why energy demands are so large and continually increasing. We have used more energy this past hundred years than every civilisation in history put together. And that points to an unsustainable demand derived from an endlessly expanding economic system.
Why do we need so much energy in the first place? That is the real question. We are in danger of turning a socio-economic problem into a technical one, and that is a blatant moral and political evasion (born of political failure). Capital, subject to its endless, expansionary imperatives, will take all your energy forms and still want more. It's a time to recover a sense of political economy, to investigate issues of control and power in order to understand how our social relations are arranged and to what end.
I find the abandonment of the politics of social transformation in favour of technical solutions deeply depressing, an admission, indeed a confirmation of political failure. Of governments, yes, but also ourselves. We are selling ourselves short as citizens. We can employ technologies, certainly. But I set technology within a wider understanding of technics. Technics revolve around a special role for human creativity and require a new relationship of culture to the economy for their potentials to be realised. The new productive forces express and are grounded in a human culture that, as culture, is capable of being an end in itself. At the moment, these nps's are used merely as a means of accumulating capital, means for the accumulation of more means in an endless process. It's a nihilism. We need to restore the true relation between means and ends. And that means affirming creative human self-realisation - conscious choice on the part of the sovereign citizen body - against external imperatives and fixities imposed by 'the economy', that slippery euphemism for specific, historical and alterable social relationships. Realising the potentials of culture as a co-evolution with nature is precisely what ecological activism is about. You can cover the planet with wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear reactors, the lot. And I don't doubt that the capital system is in the process of doing precisely this, not by choice but by necessity. We could have a city planet, the planet as one vast factory, the green and pleasant lands of every nation and every people built over. Even if successful, this enterprise is self-defeating when considered in terms of the human ontology. We would survive on the outer landscape, but we would die on the inner landscape. I see little that is 'green' in any of this discussion, just what James Lovelock calls the green wing of the very techno-urban industrial system whose accumulative dynamic is generating the climate crisis in the first place. I find the groups working in the fields of restoration ecology, rewilding, reforestation, reclaiming the global commons and such like much more appealing. Against the accumulative dynamic of the endlessly expanding global economy, I don't think wind turbines and the like will make one iota of difference. We need to think in terms of technics, and not just technologies. The great flaw in engineering solutions is that, alone, they are unable to address the the social and political problems at the heart of the environmental crisis and, what is more, may even add fuel to the fire. The problem lies with human demands on the environment and the way we arrange our technics within specific social relations. Scientist Stephen Emmott is clear that all such engineering ‘solutions’ threaten to produce as many problems as they may solve. For Emmott, the only genuine solution is behavioural change. And that is a moral and political solution. Historically, the practice and study of politics first emerged amongst the ancient Greeks as a concern with the quest for the good life. The word politics derives from the Greek 'polites', meaning those concerned with public affairs. Human beings are social and political animals who need to associate with each other within a public life, politikon bion, in order to be themselves. This is politics as creative self-realisation. How to achieve this public life as the good life remains the key question of politics, not the bargaining and negotiation between and choosing of necessary evils. Choose a lesser evil and you will find that not only do you fail to address the real problem, but that that problem will soon become a bigger evil. The ancient Greek awareness - and I'm thinking Aristotle here - was that not only are human beings social animals, they are also rational beings. The growing consciousness of the difference between an existing reality and a future, potentially existent reality formed the essential, creative, democratic component of the quest for the good life. The idea that we have reached the limits of our political capabilities and creativity either expresses a confidence that we have achieved perfection already, or a despair that the good could ever be achieved. For my part, I argue for an engaged philosophy. I would argue that philosophy does its best work in that gap between the 'is' that we see all around us, and the 'ought-to-be', the morally desirable future, the good life as corresponding to and enhancing the human ontology. The use of certain technologies could buy us time to recover this politics of human self-realisation. We could survive and, maybe, at last learn to thrive. But it is not an either/or. I'm not arguing against green technologies at all, just against the tendency to evade moral and political questions and fall back upon technology alone. At best, that may buy us time as we organise more concerted action to deal with climate change. We need means and ends to work together in their proper relation. To dispense with the good life and our role as moral and political beings in constituting it would be to renounce a large part of what it is to be a human being.
Painting - Adam and Eve 1913-14 Henrik Sorenson