CLIMATE CRISIS AS THE OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME HUMAN
Back in the early 1970s, the environmentalist Robert Waller wrote the book Be Human or Die. Those remain the alternatives in front of us. In a lecture sponsored by the Christian environmental group Operation Noah, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, argued that the climate crisis offers an opportunity for individuals to reject the addictive and self-destructive behaviour that has damaged their souls and become human again.
Well, Marx’s alienation thesis always condemned the way that human creations escaped human control, acquiring an existential significance as human beings were reduced to mere appendages of things. Dr Williams, a fine Hegelian man, will be well aware of this dialectic of objectification, alienation and redemption, of dehumanisation and rehumanisation. ‘That’s a little Biblical’, my old Director of Studies objected when I wrote with respect to Marx’s socialism of self-emancipation that ‘redemption comes from below’. Well, the alienation thesis of Marx has religious roots. And Dr Williams seems to be tapping into this thesis. Both the economic and the climate crisis offer the opportunity of rehumanisation, to rediscover the purpose and joy of living.
Addressing an audience at Southwark Cathedral, Dr Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion, declared that people had allowed themselves to become "addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost". It’s idolatry, the veneration of things over and at the expense of people. Money, capital, possessions are the new idols. Marx wrote of the fetishism of commodities. Economic growth is a new cargo cult.
Williams continued, telling the audience that such a lifestyle meant that the human soul was "one of the foremost casualties of environmental degradation". Alienation is indeed a dehumanisation. What a surprise to find the Judaeo-Christian message broadly similar to that of atheistic marxism. Maybe marxism was a concealed religion all along.
Dr Williams is not proposing revolutionary transformation, mind. Arguing that we cannot expect the state to provide all the solutions, Dr Williams proposes a lot of small changes, like the setting up of carbon reduction action groups, so as to help individuals reconnect with the world outside of the ego. This would replenish the soul at the same time as repairing the damage that has been done to the planet.
"Many of the things which have moved us towards ecological disaster have been distortions of who and what we are and their overall effect has been to isolate us from the reality we're part of. Our response to this crisis needs to be, in the most basic sense, a reality check.”
And there is a necessary role for government in this. Climate change is a global crisis requiring global solutions that only government – the concerted effort of individuals – can provide. Williams argues that "We need to keep up pressure on national governments; there are questions only they can answer about the investment of national resources. We need equally to keep up pressure on ourselves and to learn how to work better as civic agents." In learning and acting and organising as citizens, we become capable of reconstituting government as a genuine public purpose.
Dr Williams outlined the contours of a Christian response to the climate crisis.
"When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the sure foundations for change at the national and international level.
"If I ask what's the point of my undertaking a modest amount of recycling my rubbish or scaling down my air travel, the answer is not that this will unquestionably save the world within six months, but in the first place it's a step towards liberation from a cycle of behaviour that is keeping me, indeed most of us, in a dangerous state - dangerous, that is, to our human dignity and self-respect."
Sending a message to the heads of state attending the Copenhagen summit, Williams urged leaders to create a "suitably serious plan" for the speedy implementation of protocols on carbon reduction.
"We have had unexpected signs that the east Asian countries are readier than we might have imagined to put pressure on the economies of the US and Europe. The idea that fast-developing economies are totally wedded to environmental indifference because of the urgency of bringing their populations out of poverty no longer seems quite an obvious truth."
Climate cynics and deniers frequently emphasise the pointlessness of domestic climate action by making lazy references to India and China and the rest of the developing world. Well, the Asian economies are not just growing, they are getting into renewable energy and green infrastructures big time.
I have long conceived God as a partner in the co-evolution of all life forms on Earth (indeed, in the universe as a whole). The idea of God as an external, objective, all-powerful being standing outside the unfolding of purposes within the Creation makes little sense, although it is an easy target for atheistic denunciation. The notion of partnership and co-evolution comes with a moral imperative that each finds the moral law within and identifies it with the moral law without. One sees God in the face of the other. This idea comes with a moral responsibility.
Earlier in the year Dr Williams declared that God was not a "safety net" guaranteeing a happy ending. I agree. If people want a happy ending to their lives within evolution then they need to act to create the conditions for the flourishing of life forms. God is not on the outside ensuring that the right directions are taken – that is our responsibility, informed and strengthened by the moral law within.
For Williams, the planet is facing a "whole range of doomsday prospects" that exceed the effects of global warming as a result of the human pillaging of the world's resources. That despoliation of nature without is also the destruction of the moral law within. As external nature is damaged and destroyed, so too does the human soul wither and die.
The problem with such destruction is that it becomes self-perpetuating, a cycle that feeds on itself as it spirals downwards. A diminishing human soul can see less and less of spiritual value in the outer world. Humanity faces being "choked, drowned or starved" as a result of its own stupidity, Williams argues. Williams compared those who denied the reality of climate change to the courtiers who flattered King Canute with regards to his powers to command nature. The King had to go to the seashore to prove that he could not command the waves to go back. It’s a simple lesson that we learn easily enough at school. Clever men in the world of business and technology think they know better – or think they can fool the rest of us with illusion. "Rhetoric, as King Canute demonstrated, does not turn back rising waters," Williams said in a lecture in March. But now we have environmentalists of a certain kind arguing that geoengineering can indeed command the planet and thereby enable human beings to avoid facing the consequences of their actions. It’s an illusion.
picture - Antony Gormley, EVENING