Pope Francis, climate change, Marx, and morality.

Vatican spells out vision for zero-carbon world.

I’ll start with a quote from Chris Mooney:

‘This week — and it still feels strange to write this — the major climate change news story came out of the Vatican.

There, at the center of global Catholicism, church leaders joined with politicians, scientists and economists to draft a statement declaring not only that climate change is a “scientific reality” but also that there’s a moral and religious responsibility to do something about it. And an even more powerful statement is expected soon from Pope Francis himself, who is slated to release a major papal encyclical on the environment this summer.

All of this is enough to make environmentalists, members of a traditionally secular movement, nearly rhapsodic. After a history of being rather too technocratic and wonky, there seems to be a growing realization in green circles about the importance of an alliance with the world of faith.’

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/04/30/pope-francis-has-given-the-climate-movement-just-what-it-needed-faith/

Is that what the climate movement wants? I say it certainly needs to step up in the field of practical reason, the world of politics and ethics. If we are serious about changing the world, and for the better, we need numbers, we need a participatory revolution, we need democratic involvement and legitimacy.

In what I do, I try to combine and recognise the legitimate claims of ethics and politics, fact and value, religion and science ... and am well aware that many see religion - and maybe even morality - lacking any such legitimate claims.

Well, I adopt an integral approach, and it can lead to some difficult situations. Especially when it comes to emphasising morality. By morality I do not mean cheap moralism, I do not mean general references to 'greed' in abstraction from social relations, systems and identities. And I do not mean abstract appeals to 'the common good', appeals which lack social relevance and are doomed to failure. But I do think morality matters, that there is such a thing as moral praxis, and that the values we have serve to inspire, motivate and obligate us all in joining together to change the world for the better.

“The Vatican has gathered religious leaders, scientists, politicians and businessmen under one roof to agree that acting on climate change is a "moral and religious imperative for humanity".

“The report is entitled "Climate change and the common good: a statement of the problem and the demand for transformative solutions". It was prepared by a selection of high-profile scientists and economists, including Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute.”

We are taken through zero emissions, renewable energy, economics and then we come to morality.

‘It is not just in the realms of finance that the Catholic Church can apply its influence. More than institutional reforms, policy changes and innovation in renewable technology, what tackling climate change needs is a "moral revolution", say the academies.’

"Achievement of this goal would require nothing short of widespread moral reform in which we might collectively give up the greedy behavior that was so necessary for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive and instead become truly social beings, living together in comfort and sustainably."

I’m a little non-plussed as to why this ‘greedy behaviour’ is located in our ancient past when we should be examining the specific social relations and institutions of capitalist modernity which have been instrumental in alienating us from our powers and from our social selves. But we are getting somewhere. The demand for a form or forms of common life in which we can become truly social beings is a radical demand. And free beings, I would add.

"Roberts notes that there has been a long history on the left of failing to adequately moralize the climate issue ..."

I've been doing my best for years to emphasise moral praxis as playing a part in social transformation for more years than I care to remember. People may say it's all about power, as though that has nothing to do with morality. If it's all about 'power', then there's no problem. The state and capital reveal our own social power in alien form, it's our power, we are powerful. Or at least we could be.

Here's Shelley in The Masque of Anarchy:

"Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!"

That's as true now as it was in 1819, condemning unjust authority and urging a radically new form of social action: "Let a great assembly be, of the fearless, of the free". That's the kind of meshing of ethics and politics I support.

Politics and morality are intertwined and we need to effect changes through the field of practical reason. I've written extensively on Marx over the years, trying to highlight the implicit moral dimension of his work, emphasising that class struggle for Marx is more than just a power struggle, and that the victory of 'the proletariat' as 'the universal class' concerns human emancipation in general. We need to widen these notions. There's a case for saying that, in line with Locke and his labour theory of value, Marx saw nature as passive, with humans as the active, value creating agency. I agree with Marx's case for social use as against exchange value, but I'd look to rework the whole notion of use value to recognise the claims of nature. A partnership ethic. It can be done. An ecological marxism is possible, and I have argued for it in The Ecological Concept of the City vol 7 ch 5

https://www.academia.edu/…/THE_CITY_OF_REASON_vol_7_The_Eco…

There is plenty of textual evidence to support an ecological reading of Marx. Throughout his writings, Marx exposes the ‘ecological contradictions of capitalism’ (Quaini 1982) in showing how the capitalist system continuously eats away at the resource base which sustains it. ‘Capitalist production .. develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker’ (Marx C1 1976:638). Marx’s point is that the same class system which exploits labour is also responsible for the exploitation and destruction of nature. The socialist and ecological movements possess a common enemy.

Marx has no difficulty associating human beings and nature, the worker and the soil. By pointing to the ecological contradiction at the heart of capital – the fact that the expansionary dynamics of capital accumulation undermine the sources of wealth – Marx is questioning the rationality of capitalist agriculture as well as capitalist production in general. This systemic compulsion behind capital means that it leaves ‘deserts’ and a thoroughly degraded natural environment behind as it endlessly pursues exchange value: ‘all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility’ (Marx C1 1976:638). Marx establishes a direct connection between the destruction of the lasting fertility of the soil and the destruction of the physical health of the worker. Marx therefore charges capitalism with disturbing ‘the metabolic interaction between man and the earth’ (Marx C1 1976:637). Locating human beings within nature as a part of nature, ecologism is integral to the Marxism of Marx.

So, with a little reworking, I argue for an ecological marxism. I argue for Marx's praxis as a moral praxis. I argue for a moral ecology. I argue that we need to moralise both the social and the climate crisis.

The mere mention of the word 'morality' has some reaching for the revolver. Often for good reasons. I am sure that Marx rejected moralism and abstract moral appeals that lacked social relevance. He sought a social identity which went beyond the dualism of egoism and altruism. Morality here is embedded and embodied and practised in social relationships, forged in the affective ties and bonds of an associative public life.

My criticism is that the way he framed his argument, Marx minimises the creative role of moral praxis. It's clearly implicit in his work, but Marx was rightly scornful of abstract moral appeals that he buried his morality. The crisis and collapse of capitalism is the product of non-moral factors, collective self-interest in reaction to the crisis and dehumanisation of capitalist production. My view is that Marx has here revealed the necessary but not sufficient condition of revolutionary transformation. Morality has a creative role to play. There is such a thing as creative moral praxis, however much it works in line with immanent lines of development. Without a moral ideal inspiring effort and commitment and obligating actors, those lines of development remain passive potential. Marx ended the Manifesto of the Communist Party by urging ‘working men of all countries, unite!’ This is a moral injunction. If class, sectional or materialist interest and power alone were enough, then the working class would not need the moral appeal at the end of the Manifesto.

Buchanan establishes this point by showing that 'even if revolution is in the best interest of the proletariat and even if every member of the proletariat realizes that this is so, so far as its members act rationally, this class will not achieve concerted revolutionary action' (1982:88). Undermining proletarian revolution is the free-rider problem. Even collective self-interest does not necessarily bind together those who put self-interest first. Something more than self-interest – individual or sectional - is required to bind individuals together. This is morality. The motivation and obligation of individuals by a vision of a moral ideal produces activity and cooperation in conditions where individual self-interest would prevail. The point is that to initiate and sustain praxis requires moral vision - an ideal. Marx has this, he just concealed it. My point is that we need to make it explicit, and moralizing these issues is not a cheap, abstract, impotent moralism.

I agree with Terry Eagleton in After Theory, ch 6 2003: "Marx, however, made the mistake of defining morality as moralism, and so quite understandably rejected it. He did not seem to realize that he was the Aristotle of the modern age. The paradigm of classical morality in our own time has been feminism, which insists in its own way on the interwovenness of the moral and political, power and the personal. It is in this tradition above all that the precious heritage of Aristotle and Marx has been deepened and renewed."

I'll put this reference to Zizek in here, just to make the point that whilst I most certainly do reject a cheap moralism that neglects social relations and class interests, referring generally to 'greed' and calling for self-restraint whilst paying no attention to the iniquitous, exploitative social system that locks individuals into destructive and dehumanising patterns of behaviour, I do think there is a danger of denying ourselves a moral language, something which leads us into political cul-de-sacs. Just take on board what Max Weber said about modernity being 'disenchanted' and proceeding 'without regard for persons' before being so certain about discarding morality. We remain within the disenchanted terrain we are attempting to escape, that iron cage embracing our subjectivities that Weber spoke of. The big problem, as I see it, is the split between fact and value, fact alone does not motivate and value has been fractured into irreducible subjective opinion and preference, likes and dislikes.

http://www.lacan.com/zizliberal2.htm

That's my view from Marx and the left. I have been attempting to 'moralise' the social struggle for a just and equal society for as long as I have been writing. And I shall carry on making that moral argument, in the hope that one day we will recover morality as a praxis and an ethos and give our social struggles real, effective and affective moral power.

Anyway, back to the Pope and the view from ... where, left, right or neither but beyond?

The article cited above asks:

"The question remains, however, why this has been so long in coming. Why have environmentalists (and their scientific allies) been so focused on talking about policies like cap-and-trade, on tracking emissions targets and parts per million, rather than moralizing the issue?

Here, I think we need to turn to the research of social scientist Jonathan Haidt of New York University, famed for his insights about the different moral triggers and motivations of liberals and conservatives. One of the messages of Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind is that the left and the right tend to have different moral “foundations,” by which he means that they get emotional and intense about different kinds of moral situations."

We'd better get past this.

"The Vatican, if the signs are to be believed, may blast this emotional channel wide open." I hope so. I'm hearing the Pope being denounced as a communist and a socialist. In the light of financial and economic collapse, these are not the terms of abuse they once were. I'm reading that he has been listening to the likes of Jeffery Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros. Good. That's what we should all be doing. And reading a few more critics of the capital system besides. The bare faced arrogance of these apostles of the free market is breath taking. They still bleat on about the failures of government and the virtues of private property and free trade, as though the global financial and economic crash never happened. The very people and institutions responsible for the regulatory and legal framework that allowed the activities which led to global recession are not qualified to give lessons here, not on economics, and certainly not on climate science, ethics and spirituality. I can quote Joseph Schumpeter here saying that it is because the car has brakes that it can go so fast. The people who took the brakes off are not the ones who should be given the task of salvaging something from the wreckage. As Nassim Taleb argues: "People who were driving a school bus (blindfolded) and crashed it should never be given a new bus." (Taleb 2009.) Yet here they are giving lectures on material and spiritual affairs. I don't what the appropriately papal language should be here, but it should be some version of "take a hike, how daft do you think we are?!"

The problem is that the structural dependence of the state upon the process of private capital accumulation means that governments are going to be more responsive to the bus drivers – business and financial elites – rather than the bus passengers.

Seriously, if we cannot devise a politics in which we make common cause on these issues and see off the free riders, I think we should take a long, hard and honest look at ourselves - have we got what it takes to stand together, put aside the lesser things that divide us, and associate on the core things that unite us.

I can go back to Pope John Paul II and his Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All of Creation in 1990. I remember his call for an ecological conversion. It was the time I first really started to get involved with The Greens. He emphasized our relationship, as God’s creatures, with the universe all around us. “In our day”, he wrote, “there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened … also by a lack of due respect for nature”. He added that “ecological awareness, rather than being downplayed, needs to be helped to develop and mature, and find fitting expression in concrete programmes and initiatives”.

But was it so new? Previous Popes had spoken of the relationship between human beings and the environment. In 1971, for example, on the eightieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum, Paul VI pointed out that “by an ill-considered exploitation of nature (man) risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation”. He added that “not only is the material environment becoming a permanent menace – pollution and refuse, new illnesses and absolute destructive capacity – but the human framework is no longer under man’s control, thus creating an environment for tomorrow which may well be intolerable. This is a wide-ranging social problem which concerns the entire human family”.

http://w2.vatican.va/…/hf_jp-ii_mes_19891208_xxiii-world-da…

http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091208_xliii-world-day-peace.html

I'll keep making the case for morality, it seems like ploughing a lonely furrow at times, but there are signs of real growth. Katharine Hayhoe is having a real impact (though my views on politics and economics are different). And I shall continue to connect morality to social struggle, politics, human self-realisation, power, flourishing, growth. Morality, I can't be any clearer, is not moralism and is not some abstract, impotent appeal to ideals and values detached from their means of realisation, not in the way I define it.

We can, and many will, dismiss the intervention of the Pope on the climate issue, many will prefer to continue to keep the issue a matter of science and policy, and will object to the Pope having a voice and role to play. He should remain safely tucked away in the attic of spiritual questions, and we can all, left and right, safely ignore him. But be careful, if the material world is objectively valueless, the expropriators, enclosers and exploiters will waste no time in attaching a monetary value to it. Is that all that politics can be about, arguing over the terms of possession and exploitation? Where does value arise? Is it inherent, created, made up, decided by power, what? These are key questions.

But look at how conservative forces are panicking and just ask yourself why they are so frightened.

http://www.nytimes.com/…/pope-francis-steps-up-campaign-on-…

“The Holy Father is being misled by ‘experts’ at the United Nations who have proven unworthy of his trust,” Joseph Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, said in a statement. “Though Pope Francis’ heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate.”

Rubbish, pure, unmitigated, politically self-serving rubbish. I am one of the 'flock' and have brought the climate message to the Church in my local community. And it is a message firmly grounded in good sound science. The Pope is giving a lead here in putting his moral authority behind our collective attempts to deal with the crisis in the climate system. He would be doing his 'flock' a grave disservice should he throw his hand in with money and political power and look the other way.

The Pope cannot speak on scientific matters, Heartland claim, only spiritual matters, a spurious distinction, frankly, as anyone with a vague understanding of incarnation knows. Come on! Let's firm up on this. A spirituality that is both transcendent and immanent cannot see the material world as valueless and meaningless, and it cannot suffer from climate fatigue either, for that matter, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son' (John 3:16). We should be looking to become whole people in a whole world, achieving an incarnate spirituality that is very worldly. We need fact and value together if we are to become integral personalities in an integral world.

For the Pope ‘being misled by experts’ read ‘being informed by scientists’.

But if it's scientists that the likes of Heartland want to speak to about climate change, there is no shortage of them.

FACT: The Science Of Climate Change Is Settled

Study: 97 Percent Of Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature Acknowledges Manmade Climate Change. A peer-reviewed paper published at Environmental Research Letters found that the vast majority of the scientific literature that stated a position on climate change acknowledged that human activity is driving it:

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. [Environmental Research Letters, 5/15/13]

Nearly 200 Scientific Organizations Acknowledge Human-Caused Warming. NASA states that "most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing" the position that recent global warming is very likely due to human activity, including "nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations." [National Aeronautics and Space Administration, accessed 4/29/15]

Scientists As Certain That Human Activities Are Driving Global Warming As They Are That Cigarettes Can Kill. The Associated Press reported that the "president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, and more than a dozen other scientists contacted by the AP" agreed that the degree of certainty seen in the IPCC report "is most similar to the confidence scientists have in the decades' worth of evidence that cigarettes are deadly." [Associated Press, 9/24/13]

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/05/01/oil-industry-allies-paint-pope-as-bad-catholic/203499#science

The truth is that the apostles of free trade and free markets don't respect the scientists either. They have been active in misrepresenting, abusing and marginalising the scientists from the first.

Try this one:

"Global Warming? The Pope is Wrong" by Alan Caruba.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/71481

'I frankly do not know what is meant by “the moral dimensions of climate change,”' says Caruba. He is indeed morally clueless (deliberately so, of course, since he sees the dangerous implications of morality here). He has no idea about the science either.

"I have devoted the better part of more than two and a half decades speaking out against the charlatans that have created and maintained the greatest hoax ever imposed on modern man." "There is no science to support the global warming hoax."

Seriously, try not to fall off your chair when you read that sentence again: "there is no science to support the global warming hoax." Well, it depends on what that hoax is.

I read climate change denier Ian Plimer's "Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science" when it came out in 2009. Let's rename it The Missing Science of Ian Plimer, geologist with mining interests. It doesn't take too many brain cells to work out what is going on in all of this.

I've waded through way too much of this kind stuff. It should come with a health warning. It's simple, those who have enclosed the global commons and who make their money exploiting people and planet don't want to give up the free-ride and will organise and act and argue any way they can to block change. We need to organise and act and engage in a commoning that gives us back our power and our world. Know your enemy, and engage them effectively. I'm reading no more of this kind of rubbish, it's a waste of time.

"Sooner than lose the things he owns he will destroy the world."

Christopher Logue, Know Thy Enemy

http://www.wussu.com/poems/clkte.htm

Either we get our own politics in order, and devise the strategies and begin the transitions that draw increasing numbers into a social transformation from below, as well as supporting and buttressing concerted government action above, on an international scale, or this handful of exploiters and polluters will continue to run rings round us.

I think the net is closing, and given enough time we would be well on the way to the cooperative commonwealth. But that's the problem, we are desperately short of time.

What isn't a waste of time is that we keep up the solid scientific front and keep getting this message about the way we are doing business on the planet as causing global warming. Imagine the position we would be in now had scientists given up and stopped raising the alarm. Free riders want a free hand, and the scientific evidence is denying them that, and they are organising against them. The science and the scientists have my firm support on this. It's crucial. But not enough. We need to look at ethics, politics, practical reason, transitions, patterns of behaviour, psychology, the way that real human beings think and act.

And now the Pope. ... this is most interesting.

The most controversial statements in the document effectively say “ditch capitalism:”

“Market forces alone, bereft of ethical values, cannot solve the intertwined crises of poverty, exclusion, and the environment,” the document adds. “The move to a sustainable world will not be cost-free for all: the options we face are not ‘win-win.’”

“We should be prepared to accept a reallocation of the benefits and burdens that accompany humanity’s activities both within nations and between nations,”

My word, am I reading this right? The science, the politics, the ethics, the everything of climate change is calling our blessed markets and the capital system into question!

For what it's worth, I think we can decouple 'the economy' from the capital system, could have markets set in a social and institutional matrix, and organise our material life processes in the service of social use. And I think we would spend our time wisely getting this social economy underway, giving it our time, effort and talent and establishing linkages that draw increasing numbers in.

And now the Pope has added his voice. This is dangerous stuff indeed.

Some will welcome the intervention, others - seeing religion and organised religion in particular - as something of a blight, will not.

For what it's worth, I am a Catholic, and turn up for training as often as I can, and have been active in delivering the climate message in my local church and community. And will continue to do so.

At the same time, I share John Dewey’s reluctance to engage religious questions in any explicit way:

“I have not been able to attach much importance to religion as a philosophic problem; for the effect of that attachment seems to be in the end a subornation of candid philosophic thinking to the alleged but factitious needs of some special set of convictions. I have enough faith in the depth of the religious tendencies of men to believe that they will adapt themselves to any required intellectual change, and that it is futile (and likely to be dishonest) to forecast prematurely just what forms the religious interest will take as a final consequence of the great intellectual transformation that is going on. As I have been frequently criticized for undue reticence about the problems of religion, I insert this explanation: it seems to me that the great solicitude of many persons, professing belief in the universality of the need for religion, about the present and future of religion proves that in fact they are moved more by partisan interest in a particular religion than by interest in religious experience.” ("From Absolutism to Experimentalism," 1930, 153-154)

What worries Dewey is the tendency for the discussion of religious problems to become ideological due to the influence of a priori doctrinal commitments shielded from intelligent public inquiry. Dewey is against special truths and particular avenues of access to such truths. And this explains my caution on the issue. At the same time, Dewey’s pragmatism is infused by a natural piety, and that is certainly a religious experience. It shows us ways of valuing our world and ourselves that is quite distinct from monetary and instrumental valuations. We can common with each other and the world rather than commodify and commercialise.

Dewey is open to engaging religious questions via the medium of human experience, not constrained by doctrine or sectioned off from the rest of cultural experience due to their alleged special nature. And that’s the approach I take here in supporting the Pope on the climate issue.

And that support is firm.

My background and upbringing is Catholic and I cannot stay passive and silent when I read the apologists and lickspittles of vested economic interests portraying the Pope as a ‘bad Catholic’ for promoting the central principles of social and environmental justice.

Vatican Held Climate Change Summit In Advance Of Papal Encyclical.

On April 28, the Vatican held a climate summit between religious authorities and climate and policy experts that aimed to produce a "joint statement on the moral and religious imperative of dealing with climate change in the context of sustainable development, highlighting the intrinsic connection between respect for the environment and respect for people - especially the poor, the excluded, victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, children, and future generations." The summit is a precursor to Pope Francis' forthcoming encyclical -- an authoritative papal teaching -- on climate change, which is expected to make similar connections between climate action and helping the poor. [Climate summit program, accessed 4/28/15; The Guardian, 4/28/15]

The result?

Oil Industry Allies Paint Pope As Bad Catholic For Acting On Climate Change.

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/05/01/oil-industry-allies-paint-pope-as-bad-catholic/203499#science

How predictable and so wrong. Scientists can challenge these people on the science. I will openly rebut their charges with respect to Catholic principles, and with a force and vigour that is unequivocal. Social and environmental justice go hand in hand.

I don't take lectures on science, ethics and politics from those who equate freedom with the global anarchy of the rich and powerful. I don't make a big issue of it, not the religious aspects, because I see the politics and ethics of climate change as firmly grounded in good sound science. And I am sure we don't need to frame the climate issue in terms of claims and counter-claims concerning biblical texts and religious authority. This issue can be fought and won on other grounds. But we do need to bring fact and value together and we do need to effect the transition from scientific reason to practical reason.

And we need to know the forces ranged against us.

Climate Change-Denying Groups Attempted To Counter The Climate Summit. In response to the Vatican's climate summit, the Heartland Institute sent their own delegation to Rome to "inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science: There is no global warming crisis!" The Heartland Institute, joined by members of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the Cornwall Alliance, attempted to dissuade the Pope from lending his moral authority to the climate change crisis. Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast said in a press release:

“Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God's Green Earth - in fact, they are fulfilling their Biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity. Though Pope Francis's heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations' unscientific agenda on the climate.” [Heartland.org, 4/24/15; The New American, 4/25/15]

The Heartland Institute And CFACT Have Received Funding From Major Oil Companies.

“The Vatican’s climate change statement peddles eco-liberation theology based on the tedious demonization of markets and capitalism” thunders Peter Foster. Tedious? Foster has probably read it all before. Perhaps we should liven things up for him by actually acting on these critiques of the capital system

‘It calls, again, not for a New Socialist Man but a New Vatican Man whose attitude towards Nature has been “reoriented” in a more collectivist direction. Faith, hope and charity are transformed into ideology, sustainability and forced redistribution. Godliness is now to be replaced by “deep de-carbonization.”’

Heavens! You mean principles are no longer abstractly asserted but are to have some real social and political purchase! On Earth as it is in Heaven!

http://www.thegwpf.com/peter-foster-the-greening-of-the-va…/

This condemnation of the Greening of the Vatican here spells out the need to develop and start to implement constructive models of the alternative economy, we need to specify alternate economic institutions and start to draw more and more people into their operation. Otherwise, no matter how much we continue to criticise the capital system, it’s defenders will continue to gain strength from it being the only economic game in town.

Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/27/pope-francis-edict-climate-change-us-rightwing

Frankly, so what?! Of course it will. If it didn’t, I would be sure that the Pope really is betraying his flock. It’s like saying social and environmental justice will anger free-riders, exploiters and expropriators.

In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

‘However, Francis’s environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate.’

"Catholic lore has made winning over such Money Men the mark of the true church leader ..."

And now this.

Who’s Afraid of Pope Francis?

That question can be quickly answered:

"Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears. They must not only discredit the pope’s words (whatever they turn out to be), they must block them, ridicule them, destroy them."

"But this is beside the point. The real issue here is not science vs. ignorance, or the UN vs. xenophobia, or my 97 percent of experts against your 3 percent. It is a case of the immensely rich few against the many deprived poor. The few are getting much of their wealth from interlocking interests that despoil the earth. The fact that the poor get poorer in this process is easily dismissed, denied, or derided. The poor have no voice. Till now. If the pope were not a plausible voice for the poor, his opponents would not be running so scared. Their fear is a testimony to him."

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/30/whos-afraid-pope-francis/

An authentic pope should be a scary one. Jesus scared the dickens out of people (it cost him his life).

"Now, however, something is looming that has billionaires shaking in their boots, and when Catholic billionaires shake, Catholic bishops get sympathetic shudders."

"Now, as the pope prepares a major encyclical on climate change, to be released this summer, the billionaires are spending a great deal of their money in a direct assault on him. They are calling in their chits, their kept scientists, their rigged conferences, their sycophantic beneficiaries, their bought publicists to discredit words of the pope that have not even been issued."

I do hope 'the flock' will be with the Pope on this and that a significant percentage of the world's one billion Catholics will practice what they preach. Idolatry comes in many forms. There is such a thing as idolatry of words. If, in your religion, in your churches, you preach social and environmental justice, should go home and practice it. Way too many go back into the economy that practises a systematic injustice.

Such Catholic billionaires care more for mammon than they do for God. Ye cannot serve two masters… These billionaires pay lip-service to one, but are lickspittles of the other. In the UK we have Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, if you please. Climate change denier and prominent Roman Catholic. In 1988, Eddy Shah: Today and the Newspaper Revolution described Monckton as "a fervent, forthright and opinionated Roman Catholic Tory" who has been closely associated with the "New Right" faction of the Conservative Party.

I like what Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain writes with respect to Positivist philosopher Auguste Comte and his attempt to found an atheistic Catholicism.

For Comte, Reason, and not money, would take the place of God, but the secularised Catholicism can be compared to the Catholicism of the billionaires.

"We must completely secularize Catholicism -- eliminate from it God, Christ and the Gospel; reject its faith and doctrine, but restore its morals thoroughly purged from any supernatural beliefs; re-establish its institutions and authoritative structure on a wider and stronger basis furnished to us by positive philosophy."

Money, not Comte's positive philosophy, is what motivates the Catholic billionaires. It is the reign of mammon, not reason, that is the ideal of the people now mobilising against the Pope, in the same way that they have mobilised against working people and trade unions, politicians and governments, science, scientists and scientifc bodies.

Here is Maritain again:

"Thomas Huxley said that positivism is "Catholicism without Christianity". It is a fact that at Comte's time a noticeable part of the French bourgeoisie had already inaugurated this kind of Catholicism. If Comte could dream of founding an atheistic Catholicism, it was because the class in question had among its most solid members a number of practical atheists, more or less brought up by Voltaire and Béranger. They called themselves Catholic, though in all their principles of conduct they denied God, Christ and the Gospel, and upheld religion for merely temporal and political reasons -- preserving social order and prosperity in business, consolidating their economic power, and keeping the lower classes in obedience by means of a virtuous rigor sanctioned from on high."

And there it is, an atheistic, hypocritical, idolatrous Catholicism that keeps the poor imprisoned by obedience, soothed by sentimental phrases concerning the brotherhood of man, whilst allowing the rich and powerful to entrench and extend the iniquitous, exploitative economic power that brings poverty, division, disharmony.

They call themselves Catholic, though in all their principles of conduct they deny God, Christ and the Gospel, upholding religion for merely temporal and political reasons ...

The Pope versus the billionaires is a battle for the heart and soul of Catholicism. That battle has been too long coming. Climate change is forcing us to confront some uncomfortable realities about ourselves, our values and our institutions.

And Marx on alienation and exploitation springs to mind. For it was Marx who demonstrated such an acute awareness of the extent to which our social forces, our species essence, had assumed alien form, coming to control and enslave us as external force.

And I think Marx, with a keen sense of social justice, and a revolutionary concern to end injustice, struck hard at Christianity and religion here. Marx reproached Christianity for its failure to "establish its kingdom here below", Brought up on the God of the philosophers, with Reason in the place of God, the realisation of the kingdom of God for Marx could only take the form of the realisation of the kingdom of Man - human self-realisation. The God of the philosophers is the real anthropocentrism. If Kierkegaard's revolt against Hegel's God was a revolt of faith against Reason, Marx's revolt was a revolt of atheism for Man. But it was also revolt against Hegel's false God, against the necessity of Reason and History and the Emperor of this world, not the Christian God. Marx's rebellion was the protest of human dignity against notions of historical necessity and immanence leading a false order of might and right by which oppression and slavery are maintained within a rational state which is designated as 'the march of God on Earth'. Marx's rebellion against Hegelian rationalism could have been a Christian one -- and more than a few have suggested that Marxism is a Judaeo-Christian heresy, displaying all the passion for social justice contained in the Bible, but Marx was as wrapped up in immanence as all the philosophers of Reason who went before him. Marx's revolt against Hegel's God of Reason was powered by an instinct derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Yet, lacking a sense of transcendence, Marx mistook the God of Hegel for the true God, didn't see that Hegel's God was a self-contained, enclosing Reason, rejecting God but demanding the fulfilment of Hegel's rationalism. The very rationalism that Marx criticised and rejected. And so, for Marx as for Hegel, philosophical reason remains a Reason which has occupied the terrain of revelation and theology, and which has to bear the burden of God's will on Earth. So Marx's rebellion was atheistic, stressed positively as a human self-realisation. And so, Marx condemned Christianity as being no more than an impotent ought-to-be which has not been able to actualise its core principles of social justice, existing instead as a compensatory superstructure.

Hence the harsh words that Marx directed against Christianity and the Christian love of one's neighbor. ". . . When experience teaches that in 1800 years this love has not worked, that it was not able to transform social conditions, to establish its own kingdom, then surely it clearly follows that this love which could not conquer hate does not offer the vigorous energy necessary for social reforms. This love wastes itself in sentimental phrases which cannot do away with any real, factual conditions; it lulls men to sleep by feeding them lukewarm sentimental pap."

Who can say that Marx is wrong? Marx demanded justice. And so do I. And when Marx raised his voice against the inhuman material conditions of the capital system, where was Christianity? No amount of holy water, sentimentality and charity can take the place of social transformation. But it can give us a church and a religion and a God that those who profit from such conditions can accept. Marx exposes such hypocrisry as idolatry. But Marx did more than this. His rebellion may have been an atheistic one, but it challenged Christianity to get back onto nodding terms with its roots. Marx was right about the "the lukewarm sentimental pap" into which the religious message could and had degenerated, and he was right to see how religion could serve as an ideal compensation for the absence of justice in the real. All of this justifies the secular onslought against religion. But there is a danger of conflating the God of the philosophers, self-contained, self-legislating, all-encompassing Reason, and the true God; and there is a danger that the rejection of God as such loses the sense of transcendence crucial to justice, leaving us with an immance that identifies might and right within the unfolding necessity of History. The result of such rebellion is an attempt to bring to completion the Rational project of a throroughly domesticated religion enclosed within the implacable authorrity of the state - Hegel's God. Marx missed the fact that love is the only force active enough not to allow what it brings into existence to be corrupted. He seemed unaware that his protest was aroused by a desire for justice, and he did not see the dangers of incarnating this desire in pursuit of a false God, that Reason of the philosophers which is its own justification. Without transcendence, the highest of ideals are swallowed by immanence.

My point? Marx's rebellion was motivated by a passion for justice and a concern that the principles the great religions have preached should be practised in such a way as to be bring about the just social order. And, as such, his protest exposed the inadequacies of religion when it came to the effective application of core principles. Now the interesting and problematic bit. Much that Marx writes is more of a repudiation of Reason and totalising philosophical abstraction than of religion. Or, more accurately, Marx draws the analogy between Hegel, Reason and his conceptual appropriation of the world and religious mystification.

"The truth is that Hegel has done no more than dissolve the 'political constitution' into the general, abstract idea of the 'organism'. In appearance and in his own opinion, however, he has derived the particular from the 'universal Idea'. He has con­verted into a product, a predicate of the Idea, what was properly its subject. He does not develop his thought from the object, but instead the object is constructed according to a system of thought perfected in the abstract sphere of logic. His task is not to elaborate the definite idea of the political constitution, but to provide the political constitution with a relationship to the abstract Idea and to establish it as a link in the life-history of the Idea - an obvious mystification.

Another claim is that the 'various powers of the state' are 'fixed by the nature of the concept' and that therefore by means of them the universal 'engenders itself in a necessary way'. Thus the various powers are not determined by 'their own nature' but by something alien to them. Similarly, their necessity is not to be found in their own essence, much less has it been critically established.

Rather, their fate is predestined by the 'nature of the concept', it lies sealed in the holy archives of the Santa Casa (of the Logic). (Marx EW CHDS 1975).

Marx thus compares Hegel's Logic to the prison of the Inquisition in Madrid. That's the God of philosophy I was writing about, Reason, incarnated in the State. And Marx rejected it. Except, he conflated this God with the Christian God, so that his rebellion took atheistic rather than Judeao-Christian form, even though Marx's passion for justice came from those roots. In consequence, Marx lost the sense of transcendence, remained with a philosophical immanence which equated God, Nature and Reason, and thus his rebellion in the cause of justice set about realising the very all-encompassing state, the God of Reason, his critique had dismantled.

Marx's words are actually quite sympathetic to religion. Note, in this passage, how Marx recognises that religion, if it is a drug, it is a self-administered drug, not merely an illusion made up by the ruling class to dupe and stupefy the masses, but something the masses themselves resort to in compensation for the denial of real human needs. Marx's protest is less a protest against religious illusions than against iniquitous social conditions that require and generate illusions.

"The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-conscious­ness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn comple­ment and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is there­fore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is therefore the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the im­mediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics." (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction 245).

But note the continuities with the false God of the philosophers, not the commitment to the Reason/Nature that modern philosophers had put in the place of the genuine God, the God of a genuinely religious experience. What Marx proposes here is a full-blown anthropocentrism - human beings as gods revolving around themselves in a self-made human world. It is, what's the word, liberating. But it loses much. It loses transcendence, it makes justice purely immanent and historicist and, as a result, risks equating right with might, identifying the "ought-to-be" with whatever "is". "To what avail lamentation in face of historical necessity", Marx wrote. I like a little sentimentalism, I like a power tempered by emotion, and I like a justice that is infused by the intrinsic forces of the spiritual.

"The obligation to be in connivance with history is just as strong, as total, as fundamental for Marx as for Hegel. It is difficult for the observer who is determined to maintain the freedom of the critical mind not to conclude from this that in the last analysis Marx was vanquished by the false God of Hegel, of whom it must be asked that his will be done on earth not as it is done in heaven but as the earth exhibits it, and asked while bowing the knee to history." (Jacques Maritain, Moral Philosophy). In truth, the 'hidden God' that some detected in Marx is not so hidden at all; it is the God of the philosophers, Reason put in the place of God, and its forms doing the job of relligion, a politically domesticated religion which makes the faithful the slaves of the Emperor and his state. Marx "never glimpsed that which constitutes the mainspring of human history, that struggle between God and evil of which we have spoken above, and in which man's freedom either co-acts with God, being activated by Him, or, through its lapses, condemns history to have the tares grow along with the wheat up to the end of time." (Jacques Maritain).

And so, Maritain writes that "the atheism of historical materialism condemned to failure its own original rebellion against the Emperor of this world." What is the "actual end-all of the philosophy of absolute Immanence which is all one with absolute atheism? Everything which was formerly considered superior to time and participating in some transcendent quality -- either ideal value or spiritual reality -- is now absorbed in the movement of temporal existence and the all-engulfing ocean of Becoming and of History. Truth and justice, good and evil, faithfulness, all the standards of conscience, henceforth perfectly relativized, become radically contingent: they are but changing shapes of the process of History, just as for Descartes they were but contingent creations of divine Freedom. The truth, at any given moment, is that which conforms with the requirements of History's begettings. As a result truth changes as time goes on. An act of mine which was meritorious to-day will be criminal tomorrow. And that is the way my conscience will pass judgment on it. The human intellect and moral conscience have to become heroically tractable."

Thus the rupture with God, which "began as a claim to total independence and emancipation, as a proud revolutionary break with everything that submits man to alienation and heteronomy", "ends up in obeisance and prostrate submission to the all-powerful movement of History, in a kind of sacred surrender of the human soul to the blind god of History". Instead of hurling against the Emperor of this world "the strength of the true God, and of giving himself to the work of the true God, as the saint does, the atheist, because he rejects the true God, can only struggle against the Jupiter of this world by calling on the strength of the immanent god of History, and by dedicating himself to the work of that immanent god. It is indeed because he believes in the revolutionary disruptive power of the impetus of History, and because he expects from it the final emancipation of man, that the atheist delivers over his own soul to the blind god of History. Yet he is caught in a trap. Wait a while, and the blind god of History will appear just as he is -- yes, the very same Jupiter of this world, the great god of the idolaters and the powerful on their thrones and the rich in their earthly glory, and of success which knows no law, and of mere fact set up as law. He will reveal himself as this same false god in a new disguise and crowned by new idolaters, and meting out a new brand of power and success. And it is too late for the atheist. . . . He is possessed by this god. He is on his knees before History. With respect to a god who is not God, he is the most tractable and obedient of the devotees."

So let me take my bearings here. Marx is a Judeao-Christian heretic who calls the faithful back to their mission, he humbled the God of the philosophers, that abstract, totalising Reason, yet rejected the God of the theologians, to leave us where? With our praxis in a self-made social world. Actually, in seeing the world as our own creation, Marx was nearly their. It's a co-creation. But who or what is our partner? Nature? Then we are back with the God of the philosophers and scientists in a world of materialist immanence. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote a book entitled The Great Partnership, emphasising the responsibility that human beings have for working with God to realise the purposes of Creation. Biologist Stuart Kauffman presents an entirely naturalist argument for human beings as co-creators in an endlessly creative universe (Reinventing the Sacred). And now, apparently, the Pope is a Marxist!

‘Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, said Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be “un-biblical” and a false religion.

More false gods and false religions. This will take some unravelling. The truth is that Marx is nearly a Judeao-Christian rebel and the Pope is nowhere near being a Marxist rebel. Not even close. He rejects a self-enclosing materialism and remains committed to transcendence. But an incarnate spirituality does combine metaphysical and moral moives - and in an age of rapacious, unjust, exploitative capitalism in which a few gross materialists acquire and accumulate wealth from the efforts of others - that's dangerous. The capitalist class is now so rogue that even a notoriously conservative institution such as the Catholic Church is perceived as a revolutionary threat. And maybe the real point is that, that the capital system is now so rotten, so iniquitous, so exploitative, so socially and ecologically destructive that we are all Marxists now. All who remain passionate about justice, that is.

“The pope should back off,” he said. “The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science. It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect. Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US.”’

In the UK, we have had conservative forces, such as UKIP’s Roger Helmer, referring to the ‘new religion of climate alarmism’. It’s rot. So let’s dispense with this, easily, clearly and forthrightly.

FACT: Environmental Stewardship Is An Important Catholic Value

Pope Francis: Acting On Climate Change Is A "Serious Ethical And Moral Responsibility." Pope Francis spoke to negotiators at a climate summit in Lima, Peru last December, and said their decisions will "affect all of humanity, especially the poorest and future generations." He added that "it represents a serious ethical and moral responsibility." [Catholic News Service, 12/11/14]

Pope Francis Promoted Environmental Stewardship: "If We Destroy Creation, Creation Will Destroy Us!" In an address to an audience in Rome last year, Pope Francis said:

“Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude.”

“Custody of Creation is custody of God's gift to us and it is also a way of saying thank you to God. I am the master of Creation but to carry it forward I will never destroy your gift. And this should be our attitude towards Creation. Safeguard Creation. Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!” [Vatican Radio, 5/21/14]

I get angry too. I get .... annoyed as hell when I see the well-organised, well-funded free riding expropriators and enclosers playing hardball politics on this and attempting to throw their weight around by lying, misleading, deceiving and bullying.

I read James Delingpole, for crying out loud, expressing support for those who argue that "the very last thing [Pope Francis] should be doing if he means to help the world's poor is to join the vainglorious mission to 'combat climate change.'" [Breitbart, 4/27/15]

Climate science deniers are now giving lessons on Catholicism and religion, and as usual the conservative media are running with their myths. These characters are giving us rotten politics, rotten science and rotten religion and they can clear off. You can waste your time debating with them. They already have what they want and will be happy to keep you occupied exchanging claim and counter-claim, fact and fiction, till the world goes up in smoke. That is precisely what they have been doing for decades now. By arguing that climate action violates Catholic principles by harming the poor, they really are giving us the inverted truths of an inverted world. We have to find the collective nous and nerve to stand firm and see them off. I'm all in favour of vexing the mighty and raising the humble, and that won't be done through free markets and class exploitation, these are the very things that entrench and extend such asymmetries of power. It can only be done through an end of relations of superordination and subordination. It can only be achieved through political struggle and social transformation, and through the practical restitution of social power, ecological health and common resources. And that is something I am most certainly in favour of. And it entails a moral praxis - patience, effort, determination, sacrifice day in day out, conviction and a commitment to a cause.

A third of Catholics would go green if Pope Francis makes statement on climate change.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/a-third-of-catholics-would-go-green-if-pope-francis-makes-statement-on-climate-change-10222800.html

“A third of Catholics say they will make their lifestyle greener if Pope Francis makes an official statement on climate change, ahead of a significant publication from the Vatican on the environment.

A poll of 1,049 Catholics in England and Wales found more than seven out 10 (72 per cent) were concerned that the world’s poorest people were being hit by climate change and more than three-quarters (76 per cent) said they felt a moral obligation to help them.

Four-fifths (80 per cent) of those quizzed in the YouGov survey for aid agency Cafod said that as Catholics they felt a duty to care for God’s creation, the Earth.”

What do we make of this? We can regret the fact that so many people are still so inclined to follow authority rather than, as Kant’s motto of Enlightenment would have it, having the courage to use their own reason. But the Enlightenment is an incomplete project, and maybe, in its own terms, cannot be completed. I’d like to decide these issues by reason, evidence and logic, seeing political society as some kind of communicative cooperative community in which the only force that prevails is the force of the better argument. But that’s not how politics proceeds. At risk of compromising the purity of principle for political power, the numbers quoted above are the kind that turn heads. I have a book by Tony Brenton called The Greening of Machiavelli (1994). It’s heady stuff, politics, in trying to change the world we may end up merely changing ourselves. We get the political power we wanted, at the expense of losing the ecological soul we had. But I don’t see any alternative to political engagement. The price of preserving our political innocence is political irrelevance and a complicity, however passive, in the continued destruction of the Earth. If we continue to report back, we are doing little more than write our own obituaries, endlessly rehearsing the inevitable defeats and failures to come.

But, beyond the numbers, there is a solid foundation of principle, and we should be clear about that. Somehow, in some way, we are looking at a very worldly institution that has succeeded in mobilising people, getting people practising on the ground, and embodying principle.

This is from the Catholic Climate Covenant, Care for Creation, Care for the Poor.

‘The effective struggle against global warming will only be possible with a responsible collective answer, that goes beyond particular interests and behavior and is developed free of political and economic pressures … On climate change, there is a clear, definitive and ineluctable ethical imperative to act … The establishment of an international climate change treaty is a grave ethical and moral responsibility.’

Pope’s Message to UN Convention on Climate Change

December 11, 2014

‘Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude.’

Pope Francis’ Audience

May 21, 2014

Call it Creation, call it Earth. Either way, it is not a property. We need to get beyond arguing over the terms of possession, use and exploitation and start live by a partnership ethic. We should be looking to make common cause by constituting the common good on the common ground we share. We will do that by practising commoning. This entails reclaiming our moral commons as well as our physical commons.

And I prefer this term Climate Covenant to notions of a contract, it implies a genuine mutuality and solidarity whereas contract indicates a peace agreement between self-interested individuals, a temporary truce as we continue to predate on each other and on the planet.

Some great quotes here.

http://catholicclimatecovenant.org/catholic-teachings/pope-francis/

Pope Francis Calls on Christians to Fight Climate Change.

Following a Vatican-sponsored Sustainability Summit, the Pope reminded Christians of their duty to protect God's creation, and warned of the dire consequences of avoiding this responsibility.

"Let us be 'protectors' of creation, protectors of God's plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment." -Pope Francis

Well, good on him, I say.

“Safeguard creation,” the Pope admonished, “because if we destroy creation, creation will destroy us. Never forget this!” Pope Francis addressed his comments to a massive crowd in Rome, arguing that the “beauty of nature and the grandeur of the cosmos” should be valued by Christians and that failure to do so can lead to disastrous consequences.

‘Legal scholars, microbiologists, philosophers, economists and other experts convened at the summit, “Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature, Our Responsibility” to explore how the Catholic Church can address a range of issues caused by climate change. Not surprising given a Pope who has particularly focused his efforts on helping the poor, the conference echoed the pontiff’s beliefs that environmental justice and economic justice go hand in hand.’

http://www.goodspeaks.org/event/pope-francis-calls-on-christians-to-fight-climate-change

They do.

Vatican Held Climate Change Summit In Advance Of Papal Encyclical. ‘On April 28, the Vatican held a climate summit between religious authorities and climate and policy experts that aimed to produce a "joint statement on the moral and religious imperative of dealing with climate change in the context of sustainable development, highlighting the intrinsic connection between respect for the environment and respect for people - especially the poor, the excluded, victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, children, and future generations." The summit is a precursor to Pope Francis' forthcoming encyclical -- an authoritative papal teaching -- on climate change, which is expected to make similar connections between climate action and helping the poor.’ [Climate summit program, accessed 4/28/15; The Guardian, 4/28/15]

Blessed Are the Climate Advocates

The Vatican and United Nations present the beatitudes of a new movement.

by Michael Shank.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/05/pope_francis_ban_ki_moon_climate_change_talks_renewed_faith_from_vatican.html

"It wasn’t my faith in God that was renewed at the Vatican but rather a faith in our ability to get something done on climate change.

This Vatican moment was a game-changer. Science and religion were forcefully and unwaveringly aligning. Tuesday’s high-level session brought together multiple presidents, CEOs, academics, scientists, and all the major religions, and ended with this final, forceful statement.

These declarations were not soft, feel-good, and vague speeches by politicos keen to be perceived as leading on the most urgent issue facing humanity. These were unequivocal, unwavering statements: “Decision mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity” and the “summit in Paris may be the last effective opportunity” to keep the planet safe."

"This was no typical conference. This was a Sermon on the Mount moment, wherein the beatitudes of a new era were laid down. And we left as disciples, renewed in our faith that we must and will act in time to save humanity from itself—an agenda that would be a worthy legacy of the Pope’s Jesus."

[Addition from 25 May 2015. It seems that the organised assault on the Pope from contrarians and climate change deniers has provoked the appropriate response - moral courage and real leadership. It seems that Pope Francis is going to come out fighting in the Encyclical in June. "Respect for creation is a requirement of our faith and the garden in which we live is not entrusted to us to be exploited but instead to be cultivated and tended with respect. Fight with determination against sin, waging a determined campaign against corruption that grows increasingly in the world day by day."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qFjYnVmWn0

We could, if our efforts succeed, be entering into the age of ecology. If we want to survive, let alone thrive, we need our efforts to succeed. The environmentalism I support and promote offers a feasible, desirable alternative way of living, in so far as it succeeds in breaking free of all theoretico-elitist models of politics. What I mean by this is that there are certain groups, educated, active, informed, who see the world as some objective datum, as some kind of machine, comprising natural laws which only they can fully know. The social world is all structures and institutions which this elite organise to control and monopolise, engineering change through a top-down approach. This is not an alternative way of living, merely a continuation of the denial of popular autonomy and subjectivity. I am interested in the human roots that feed politics. The charge comes back that without top-level transformation through concerted government action, the roots will atrophy and die. The case for coordinated government action is that the crisis in the climate system is a global crisis requiring global action. This is indeed something I agree with, for all that my principal spur in politics comes from a commitment to social self-organisation, self-activity and self-government. But, without the development from below of appropriate forms of the common life, our climate politics of the common good risks being no more than a hollow shell, just elites of one kind of another arguing over the ways and means by which the world is to be engineering – and the people managed and manipulated. I adhere to an environmentalism that remains in touch with its original concern with the quality of life, even as it addresses the key global concerns of politics. For all of my commitment to an ecological self-socialisation and social self-mediation as against government by external media, effective, comprehensive environmental protection requires the skilful deployment of the institutional apparatus of government. I hesitate to say ‘the state’ here, because I do think we can reclaim ‘the political’ by distinguishing ‘government’ - the concentration of our sovereign power - from the abstraction of the modern state, shedding all the superogatory functions associated with this institution as it arose in symbiotic relation with the capital system. You will see, I am interested in alternatives to our present social system, setting political action above in the context of a social transformation below. I am as concerned with elitist, top-down, bureaucratic political organisation as any anarchist, but recognise the need for collective action. I see both the state and capital as our own collective powers taking alien form in specific social relations, powers which we need to reclaim and organise as social powers. If people reject my emphasis on morality as an impotent moralism, saying instead that it’s all about power, I would first make sure that we are not merely conflating might and right, and are saying something more substantial than justice is the interests of the strongest. That argument is a diversion. If we have a ruling class, then they are the strongest, they have succeeded in institutionalising their power and interest, and any argument is redundant. That just leads us into a political and moral wasteland, a world where there is no reason, justice, logic, just a naked contest between power elites, those who are kings and those who would be kings. I’m not interested in philosopher-kings period, and caution against environmental philosopher-kings. Goethe saw through all such Faustian bargains that have pervaded modernity from the first, and repudiated them clearly. In Faust, he has the ‘citizen’ speak:

“He suits me not at all, our new-made Burgomaster!

Since he's installed, his arrogance grows faster.

How has he helped the town, I say?

Things worsen,—what improvement names he?

Obedience, more than ever, claims he,

And more than ever we must pay!”

And there lies our predicament, we have created a world of quantity and complexity and are being called upon to assume responsibility for our collective forces and for the collective system-wide consequences of our actions. And that requires government. And this will always contain a danger of action that is independent of and proceeds over the heads of real individuals and communities. We need to organise and act in such a way as to avoid democratic deficits. Without popular participation, no solution will be effective or enduring. The more environmentalism involves itself with political and economic power – and this is what it needs to do to be effective - the more we need to be vigilant within our social movements and organs of popular self-expression to ensure that environmentalism is more than a political eco-bluff, reinforcing the very social and political system that is exploiting both people and planet. Should this become the case, the Green movement will appear as little more than a hygiene movement, like the nineteenth century social reformers, cleaning up the capital system to ensure a prolonged bout of social and environmental exploitation. We should know that throughout history, particular interests have enriched and empowered themselves under the cloak of the general interest. The state does not necessarily embody and articulate the common good, although there has never been any shortage of claims made to that effect. My point is that the state apparatus by no means ensures an integral approach to environmental issues. Claiming to act to ensure public welfare, the state can be full of particular groups extending their own interests, so that instead of a democratisation, we get a bureaucratisation in which powers are spread around, insulated from democratic check and control.

I’m sailing in dangerous waters here. A strong claim made by deniers of anthropogenic global warming has been that the climate movement is politically motivated and unscientific and is really concerned with establishing some kind of eco-socialist regime which puts an end to free markets, free trade, private property, competition and all those things associated with a capital system that has generated wealth, brought democracy and ensured that there has never been a better time to be alive. People are healthier, wealthier, better educated, longer lived than at any time in history, and in greater numbers. Part of the appeal of climate change deniers lies in this – they see eco-scare stories and alarms as attempts to justify an environmental regulation as a collectivism that proceeds over the heads of people.

18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year.

http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocalyptic-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/

No matter the wealth of scientific research firming up the case for anthropogenic global warming, it is dismissed as a religion of climate alarmism and compared to the ‘spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions’ made in the past. And the conclusion is drawn that environmentalism is just a political racket, an eco-bluff, an attempt to smuggle in socialism by the back door.

I disagree. But I think we should be more explicit in practising politics and ethics, and cease expecting science to do the job for us. Science is being pressed to do a job it cannot do, so long as fact and value are held in separation, and environmentalism is stalling as a result. Many quote John Reisman, “Science is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. It is evidence that does the dictating.” Science is the best reality check we have, I agree. But there is more to the world than science. ‘Science proposes, society disposes’ Stewart Brand asserts in Whole Earth Discipline (Brand ch 7 2009). That is a technocracy, not a democracy. Scientists propose, subjects dispose. And in no time at all, Goethe’s citizen is complaining about the new burgomaster. The principle of self-assumed obligation holds that citizens obey only those laws they have had a hand in making. There is no such obligation in a technocracy. This is a recipe for tyranny or anarchy, the anarchy of the rich and the powerful as a tyranny over the people. I want a society of volunteers, not conscripts.

My argument is that not only is science our best and most reliable guide to knowledge of the real world, its findings can inform the world of politics and ethics. Our scientific understanding of the world can be integrated with the way we choose to live in the world. Which is to say that fact and value can be integrated rather than, as at present, separated, to the detriment of both.

I work with Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, often translated as ‘happiness’ but better understood as ‘flourishing’, ‘fulfilment’ or ‘well-being’. It’s an ancient tradition, but the likes of William Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have been influential in demonstrating its continued relevance. For both, morality is a matter of skill and practical knowledge. The point is that living a good life, which I take to be a life in an ecological society, is a matter of integrating knowing how, knowing that and knowing why. There is such a thing as moral truth, and “knowing that” is important in mooring our thoughts, actions, decisions and beliefs in truth claims concerning right or wrong, good and bad. Such things are not relative nor conditional upon assertions of power or what ‘works’. Still, ethics is a matter of practical reason, and practical reasoning is involved in enabling us to determine the shape and character of the good life.

Philosopher and neuro-biologist Owen Flanagan and his work on human flourishing and “neuro-eudaimonics” is well worth checking out. His views in The Really Hard Problem and The Problem of the Soul are close to mine (insofar as they can be expressed within the confines of reason, science and philosophy) Stuart Kauffman in Rediscovering the Sacred is similar in taking a naturalistic approach. Flanagan doesn’t believe in Plato’s heaven of ideal forms, but he does think that eudaimonia is to be sought in the intersection of the true, the good and the beautiful. He isn’t impressed by what people in divinity schools says about truth. Fine. But what matters is how we can make truth claims appetitive and affective, and this involves more than delusions. Science is talking the language of ethics and the good life. How far are we from Kant’s necessary presuppositions of the moral life? What’s the good life? Let’s translate it not as happiness but as flourishing or fulfilment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BahZpFDVbz4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faSYGVmQceM

http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/Ch23Neuro-Eudaimonics.pdf

Casebeer, W. D. (2003). Natural ethical facts: Evolution, connectionism, and moral cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Flanagan, O. J. (2002). The problem of the soul: Two visions of mind and how to reconcile them. New York: Basic Books.

Flanagan, O. J. (2007). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The effectiveness and enduring success of environmentalism depends on the extent to which it effects a series of regulations that is within the control and comprehension of any rational person, and is able to motivate, involve and obligate individuals as eco-citizens from below, in a way that a platform of environmental directives from above does not.

Climate campaigning, action and policy punches way below its weight if it remains only at the level of climate change. We have to fight this at all levels, global and local, by building upon the vital needs and forms of organisation and expression of the people. It can be done. And it is being done. There has never been a time in history when people have been more active in a range of social and environmental issues, the eco-public is out there. And actions yielding tangible benefits are possible. A substantial number of environmental problems are solved by ensuring the human right to clean water and air, nutritious food, good housing, properly valued work. We know this, we’ve been trying to get this for the best part of the century. It’s socialism, comes the cry of the critics. Whatever you want to call it, it recognises the simple social truth that the human relationship with nature can be made equitable, just and harmonious only if it corresponds with and enhances human nature rather than contradicts and inhibits it.

The bourgeois critic of Marx, Max Weber identifies two moral imperatives which are specific to capitalism. In the first place there is ‘the duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed - as an end in itself’ and, in the second place, there is ‘the conception of labour as an end in itself, as a calling’ (Weber 1974:51, 63). Neither of these imperatives are natural, Weber argues.

“In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and entirely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.” (Weber 1974:53).

Weber thus stresses the peculiar character of the ‘spirit of capitalism’.

Marx also noted the 'ascetic' spirit of capitalism as a reversal of natural categories. This character was peculiar to capitalism. Marx thus criticises the mean, life denying morality of capitalism.

“Its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings bank... Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the capitalist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.” (Marx EW EPM 1975:361/2.)

These references to the unnatural spirit of capitalism point to something that goes beyond formal or instrumental rationality to locate human life and the way that human beings express their needs in terms of a substantive rationality. There is a philosophical anthropology at work here which demonstrates a moral concern with the appropriate regimen for human self- realisation. And it is that moral concern that I am highlighting here. Without it, what is environmentalism? Stuck in the instrumental world of means, unable or unwilling to speak the language of ends. The facts can dictate all they like, but society is a world of murk and bias, prejudice and appetite, want and need, meaning, understanding, identity, interest. It’s a democracy of desire and opinion, for good or ill. The future lies in educating desire from within, not dictating from without. There are no guarantees here, but environmentalism has a firmer foundation the more it succeeds in addressing the instinct for self-actualisation and bringing life's necessities in harmony with that end, at the same time that it addresses the great eco-issues of climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, water stress, etc. It is all too easier for critics and opponents to strike here, claiming that environmentalism entails an altruistic appeal to people to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of generations who do not exist and an ill-defined future that does not exist. And then comes the claim that it’s all about particular groups in the here and now seeking power under the cloak of a general ecological good. That claim is bogus but will succeed to the extent that environmentalism speaks an elitist language and seeks actions and policies that are detached from the people.

And here is my point. The great lesson that Max Weber delivered in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is this, the strongest driver of change in history has been the synergy of metaphysical and material motives. We dismiss ‘spirit’ and diminish morality at our peril.

And religion? Reading again Max Weber’s analysis of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, I agree with Joachim Radkau that ‘It would be rash to ban religion from environmental history.’ And that’s putting it very modestly. Radkau points out that ‘there are many indications that forms of natural religion — some of which do not even appear as religions — are on the rise as modernity unfolds.’ Me, I start with John Dewey’s natural piety and take things from there. But I make this point about religion, beyond the trappings and the doctrines, there is a religious experience. Religion is a way of life, it’s about what we do. What matters is not so much, so precisely, so doctrinally, what you believe in, but what you do and how you behave. Religion in this sense is about acting in ways that change you at a profound level. And environmentalism, more than anything, needs its doers.

So here is to a society doers, a society of volunteers, a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to directives. I’m not interested in despotisms and dictatorships, however enlightened and benevolent. They tend to stick around and corrupt from within, in their detachment from the base. Environmentalism requires more than the intelligent egotism of elites, it has to become inclusive. So, without apologies, I argue for the synergy of material and spiritual motivations, seeing real, profound and enduring transformation as the result of the combined interaction of the many aspects of human needs, our individuality and sociality, egoism and altruism, our reason, emotion and intuition, our interests within the material life process, our quest for meaning.

Viktor Frankl was a neurologist of some distinction and renown. He was also a Jew who spent three years in concentration camps, a prisoner of the Nazis. Knowing that it is meaning that makes life worth living, Frankl held onto his sanity by observing his fellow prisoners, as though he and they were part of an experiment.

Frankl observed first the shock and disillusionment as the Nazis dehumanised their prisoners, stripping them of every vestige of humanity: clothes, shoes, hair, names, everything but their bodies. Here is the dehumanised reality of human beings shorn of culture and reduced to their biology. The Nazis also seized Frankl's most precious possession, a manuscript containing his life's work as a scientist.

The next stage was characterised by apathy, a complete dulling of the emotions. The prisoners no longer lived, they merely survived from day to day; they had become automata. The eighteenth century materialist La Mettrie wrote of ‘man the machine’. Here were men and women reduced to machines, to their mere physical operation. It was at this point that Frankl asked the fateful question that all biological determinists and reductionists should be made to answer – what freedom is left to a person who has been robbed of everything: dignity, possessions, even the power of decision itself? The Jews had been persecuted throughout history but where formerly there had been a choice either to convert or die now, during the Holocaust, even that had been removed - there was no choice. Is there anything left to a person once everything there was to lose is about to be taken away? Frankl came to the understanding that there was one freedom that could never be taken away:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” (Frankl 1986: 86).

This is Socrates’ case for the moral dignity of human beings, that moral capacity above both mind and body. Even in the most adverse of circumstances, human beings retained freedom in the form of the decision how to respond. Frankl found his meaning in these most dehumanised of environments by observing others and by helping them to find a reason to continue living. Bertrand Russell justifies an heroic despair in face of the meaninglessness of the universe. It takes greater heroism and courage to continue to hope in the face of the adversity of the concentration camps. And that is what Viktor Frankl teaches. The complete absence of hope created a condition which Frankl called ‘futurelessness’, a deadening experience that denies life all meaning and all hope. Frankl recalls, 'A prisoner marching in a long column to a new camp remarked that he felt as if he were walking in a funeral procession behind his own dead body.' Human beings need meaning, a hope, a sense of direction towards something bigger and better, a feeling of being part of something greater than the individual ego and its concerns.

After the war Frankl wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning.

Above and beyond biology, beyond genes and neurons, homo sapiens is the rational species that seeks meaning. The human being is the meaning-seeking animal. However, to preserve meaning in dire circumstances, human beings must be able to do three things.

• Human beings must refuse to believe that they are victims of fate. Within limits, human beings are free, authors of their own lives.

• Human beings must understand that there is more than one way of interpreting what happens to them. There is more than one way of telling the story of life.

• Human beings must realise that meaning lies outside them as a call from somewhere else.

The metaphysical and the material reinforce each other, bringing ethics and economics back to their origins in oikos, the household, our planetary home. The loss of one is the loss of the other; if we lose access to one we skew relation to the other. Without balance and harmony between reason, culture and nature, all our material power will continue to misfire. Neither the material nor the moral or metaphysical alone suffices to make for a deep and lasting transformation: what matters is the creative interaction of moral, metaphysical and material motivations. Many people were inspired by E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, and responded to its demand for an economics as if people mattered. What tended to be neglected was Schumacher’s call in that book for metaphysical reconstruction. In defending this call, Schumacher quotes Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson: 'Such a development was by no means inevitable, but the progressive growth of natural science had made it more and more probable. The growing interest taken by men in the practical results of science was in itself both natural and legitimate, but it helped them to forget that science is knowledge, and practical results but its by-products .... Before their unexpected success in finding conclusive explanations of the material world, men had begun either to despise all disciplines in which such demonstrations could not be found, or to rebuild those disciplines after the pattern of the physical sciences. As a consequence, metaphysics and ethics had to be either ignored or, at least, replaced by new positive sciences; in either case, they would be eliminated. A very dangerous move indeed, which accounts for the perilous position in which western culture has now found itself.'

As Schumacher comments, it is not even true that metaphysics and ethics have been eliminated. Instead, ‘all we got was bad metaphysics and appalling ethics.’ It has to change. We are fighting a war in a state of political and moral disarmament. Metaphysical errors lead to death. Here is the philosopher of ideas R.G. Collingwood: 'The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease.... It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world. The cause was a metaphysical cause. The "pagan" world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patristic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were. If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.'

‘This passage can be applied, without change, to present-day life, economics, politics, education, and so forth - well, I am at a loss how to finish the sentence. There would be no more human relations but only mechanical reactions; life would be a living death. Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain himself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.’ (E.F. Schumacher).

The message is simple. Let’s start punching our full human weight, calling on our many diverse attributes and getting them to work in unison. In doing this, the spiritual motivation ‘works’ less through its theological content and certainty (or lack of) than through the meaningful way of life it helps to establish.

If it is to build a new civilisation, the environmental movement has to be more than an applied science or applied ecology. There are many contradictions and convergences in the relations between ecology, economics and ethics, and it is the creative synergy of material and spiritual motivations that will lead us out of the current impasse. The crisis in the climate system is a crisis with transformatory potential. We can realise that potential only if we proceed from the solid foundation of material interests in pursuit of an ecological vision that transcends the immediate and the tangible, a vision that combines reason and emotion and thus motivates, inspires and obligates increasing numbers of people. The most powerful change-making forces in history combine egoism and altruism, the particular and the general. To dismiss spiritual elements in the environmental movement as unscientific will leave us ill-equipped to address the political, social and moral challenges of building an alternative eco-civilisation.

The religious experience has often been in conflict with, even suppressed by, the orthodoxy that is grounded in doctrine and dogma. The religion I adhere to is based on love rather than fear. And that is my general point, living by our real natures, we respond to opportunities to express creativity, spontaneity, joy and freedom, not to directives and orders handed down from above. Environmentalism needs to be a new kind of ethics and politics if we are ever to be able to turn our knowledge into positive, creative effect. We need to join the ‘knowing how’, the ‘knowing that’ and the ‘knowing why’ together.

Some marvellous words on this kind of knowing in this interview with the Pope.

The Pope: how the Church will change

http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2013/10/01/news/pope_s_conversation_with_scalfari_english-67643118/?fb_action_ids=10153324495930074&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_ref=s%3DshowShareBarUI%3Ap%3Dfacebook-like

"The most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old. The old need care and companionship; the young need work and hope but have neither one nor the other, and the problem is they don't even look for them any more. They have been crushed by the present. You tell me: can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing."

"Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes."

"It is love of others. It is not proselytizing, it is love. Love for one's neighbour, that leavening that serves the common good."

"I believe I have already said that our goal is not to proselytize but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair, hope. We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace."

"Personally I think so-called unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded. We need great freedom, no discrimination, no demagoguery and a lot of love. We need rules of conduct and also, if necessary, direct intervention from the state to correct the more intolerable inequalities."

But what about this quote from Pope Francis:

"A religion without mystics is a philosophy".

Here, I return to the revolt against Reason, self-justifying, all-enclosing, totalising Reason - what I have called the God of the philosophers. The God of Hegel. All the ambiguities within Marx are revealed here. Marx revolted against the God of Hegel, Hegel's Emperor, Hegel's statist Logic. But he nevertheless remained under Hegel's spell and buried his morality behind the reason of scientific socialism, casting ethics in the language of economics, writing his morality into the necessity of History. And in doing so, in rejecting the sentimental, hypocritical, ineffective, compensatory, illusory Christianity of his day, Marx betrayed his true principles to a false god. Frankly, Marx's strength is his combination of metaphysical and material motives. His weakness is that he buried his metaphysics and was embarrassed to speak the language of morals. Maritain writes of Marx's metaphysical and even mystical values, and I agree with him. There is a transcendental element in Marx, and that is the strength of his work. Marx saw it as a weakness. And that is the irony that has betrayed us all to the worldy empire of a capitalist world totally rationalised.

I agree with Maritain that Marx's rejection of metaphysics "applies to a certain metaphysics, a certain ideology: bourgeois ideology. When the bourgeois invokes metaphysical values, this is nothing but a vain superstructure. But Marxist metaphysics, for its part, is not a momentary superstructure, because it is to be found incarnated, in an immanent and lived manner, in the proletariat and its movement. And it is thus that after the great day of the universal revolution we shall see metaphysical and 'mystical' values, such as those expressed by the words 'justice' and 'freedom', reappear with an infinite plenitude of reality and legitimacy, because then they will not be signified in philosophical systems or opinions but lived in a complete, integral immanence, through and in humanity, in the very practice of humanity delivered by the proletariat."