What can philosophy say about ecological crises?

"The environmental dangers that now face [hu]mankind put the reflexive non-scientist in an awkward situation. He must acknowledge that he can have precisely nothing interesting to say on the two most important questions in the air, namely, 'What is going to happen to us?' and 'What should we do?' It is not from a philosopher that you stand to be enlightened.

"Which is not to invalidate the attempt to contemplate, rather than simply find a way out of, our ecological dilemmas. It remains valid to try to fathom what the idea of planetary abuse has done to our minds. We may ask what the awareness of the crisis has done to our inner landscape, how it has altered the human psyche.

"One should begin by observing that there is nothing new for mankind about confronting the possibility of its own destruction. The feeling that the present order – the neat fields, the ordered laundry cupboards, the full granaries – might soon disappear, would have been intensely familiar to any inhabitant of medieval Europe. One need only study the carvings on the sides of the cathedrals to see that our imaginations have for centuries been haunted by visions of Armageddon.

"However, we have grown used to conceiving of our present environmental situation as unparalleled, perhaps because we have learnt of it through the media and because for the daily paper, everything must, from an a priori position, be novel. There never was a Lisbon earthquake or a sack of Rome. No one has ever murdered their children or wasted their fortune. This isn’t to deny some intensely novel features behind our anxieties, just to insist that we must carefully separate out the familiar, long-standing morbidity of homo sapiens from the particular features of the current predicament."

- Alain de Botton, "Ecology" in the UN Chronicle.

Populist philosopher Alain de Botton can be somewhat hit and miss, but I think this piece is well worth reading in full (see right hand column).

Fears about our present situation are neither entirely novel nor merely a repetition of ancient patterns. Indeed, part of what I will be arguing in my project is that in certain important respects, we do face genuinely new challenges and fears in the various ecological and resource crises of our time. More on that in future posts, but if you want to get a gist of where I'm headed (at least insofar as the diagnosis of an historically novel issue), read the article.
H/T Stuart.

Acting in the dark: climate change and the paralysis of novelty

"[B]eing compelled to make decisions in a situation which remains opaque is our basic condition. [...] We find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge."

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tregedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 63.

We nearly always act in situations on incomplete or insecure knowledge. We have to do things before we truly know what they mean. Sometimes, this feeling is more acute than others. How is it possible to get married when one has never experienced making such a promise before? How can one have a child while ignorant of how it will affect your life? How can we baptise those who don't yet really know what the way of the cross entails?

The novelty of these situations is personal rather than social. We marry without personal knowledge of what exclusive lifelong commitment means. Yet we do so on trust since we have witnessed others (perhaps our own parents, perhaps some other role model) who live out the blessings and struggles of this reality before us. We may not have firsthand knowledge of the delights and despair associated with raising a child, but perhaps we are already an uncle, or a cousin, or a godfather or in some way know a little of what this has meant for others.

But what about social actions that are historically novel? How is it possible to will a new social situation that has never before been experienced, not just by me, but by anyone? And how is it possible to make political and social decisions in a situation of incomplete and contested knowledge?

That is exactly where we find ourselves today with climate change. Whether we choose to do nothing (or the equivalent of doing nothing through greenwash and weak agreements) and so continue the novelty of our present carbon experiment, or whether we choose to make widespread and untested changes to our global economy, we cannot but choose historical novelty. Our knowledge, based in the science and our estimations of what is thinkable economically and politically, is far from complete. Scientific models can give some sense of likely climate outcomes, or at least a current best estimation of various risks (which should not be sneezed at). Economic models represent some of our best guesses about the costs of action (and inaction!). Political discussion seeks to find the best solutions that it is possible to implement (though it is important not to shut down the possibility of new possibilities opening up due to radical political action: the abolition of slavery or universal suffrage would have been unthinkable economically and politically without decades of more and less radical protest). But we are still left with educated guesses taken on trust in the individuals and institutions offering them.

This could be paralysing. But it need not be. The stakes are high; the debate is heated and complex. But how is possible to seek the best options without sticking our head in the sand or waiting until our knowledge is complete? What beliefs and practices keep open such a space for careful deliberation under high pressure?

New every morning: novelty, imperialism and cataclysm

Continuous Cities • 1
The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-wrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.

Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crests of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tyre, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, cancelling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114-16.

Jesus and climate change XII

Jesus’ resurrection: Renovation
But that’s not all, because Jesus didn’t stay dead. The heart of the good news on which Christians base their lives is that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. As crazy as it sounds, that is what the Bible clearly says, it’s what Christians really believe.

Imagine: what if it were true? Although it would be an amazing biological miracle, there are more important consequences. Yes, it would mean that the guilty verdict passed by Pilate has been overturned by God. Yes, it would mean that the disciples who abandoned Jesus in his hour of need could have a second chance, a fresh start. Yes, it would mean that Jesus’ amazing claims to represent God to us in word and deed have been vindicated. Yes, it would mean that God has publicly appointed him as his special king. But it would mean something even more exciting. If Jesus is not only God’s representative to us but also our representative to God then if God raised Jesus from the dead, that is a picture, a promise, a precedent of what God intends to do with his whole creation. God's plans for the creation have been revealed in what he did to Jesus.

God hasn’t given up on us or on his world, despite all our problems. We don’t need to be afraid. He is not the kind of builder who walks into a house, notices the shaky foundations, peeling paint, broken windows, leaking pipes and says "tear it down, let’s start again." God is not a demolishing developer. He is into transformative renovation. To renovate something is to make it new and amongst the last words spoken by God in the Bible is the wonderful promise: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21.5). If God raised Jesus from the dead, he has started to keep this promise.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.

What is new about Jesus?

In response to my previous post, Geoff asked an excellent question: can we still say it's 'new' leadership?

I assume that by asking if we can 'still' call it new, Geoff was referring to the enormous gap of around 1977 (or maybe 1974) years since Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. Is this still something 'new' after the fall of Rome, after the black death, after the invasion of the Americas, after the Renaissance, Reformation and countless revolutions, after industrialisation, after the European colonisation and destruction of Africa, after the war to end all wars, after Auschwitz, after the bomb, after globalisation, after a Ruddslide?

What does it mean to say that Jesus is 'new'?

On the one hand, it is an acknowledgement that, despite all these momentous changes (and more - after all, my summary was very eurocentric), the most important and decisive turning point in history was the life, death and resurrection of this somewhat obscure Jewish peasant on the outskirts of an ancient empire. This is still news, good news, in the face of twenty centuries of disaster of death. Indeed, those twenty centuries are counted (in many parts of the world) from Jesus' birth (or as close to it as some medieval monks could calculate). Not only so, but his advent divides history in two, throwing all previous events in a new light and rendering them "B.C.".

But there is more. Jesus' victory, like the mercy of the Father, is new every morning (Lamentations 3.22-23). This is not to say that he is forever changing his mind, eternally indecisive, but that his good gifts never become stale, his rule never runs out (Luke 1.33). Ironically, the ever-new is an image of stability.

Furthermore, God's redemption is also always to do a 'new' thing, as promised in Isaiah 43.18-19. Our hope is for God's surprising act of refreshing, of renovation. But this isn't because God is like the market, shallowly obsessed with novelty, or like the SMS-generation, unable to make a commitment, always needing to keep bridges unburnt. No, God's renewal takes the form of life from the dead (both literally and metaphorically) and so is both restoration (continuity with the old) and novel transformation (discontinuity: new!). He is the one who renews, who gives a fresh start (in fact many fresh starts): in every deadly end, Christ brings a new beginning. And so the message of Jesus is good news - it breaks through the dreary depressing sameness of sin with the promise of a new day. Every morning is a reminder of that coming new day, which is already dawning (Romans 13.12).

A whole new world

[Photo by Adrian Smith]
What will be new about the new heavens and earth? Where is the discontinuity? What will not last?

The short answer is: death. The long answer is death and mourning and crying and pain, the bonds of futility: in sum, the old order of things. It will be a new world order for a renewed world. No longer will God be absent, no longer will mortality loom and pronounce doom. What is hidden will be revealed. Injustice and half justice will be banished; things will be right.

But of course, all I am doing here is quoting the Bible. What does it mean?

Theologically, the problem with this world is neither physicality nor transience, nor temporality, nor humanity per se. It is evil, and its partner, death: the chaotic destruction and convoluting of life, of God's good world. Where did it come from? See my coming post on the origin of evil (and here). What is it like? See my coming post on the nature of evil. What is God doing about it? The gospel: the life, death and resurrection of his Son. Why is it still around? Because the gospel continues: the cross and resurrection were promise as well as achievement; there is a chapter yet to come in which the resurrection is applied to the entire world. What is its destiny? Exclusion from the new world. Whatever we make of the images of eternal destruction, they are complemented by images of exclusion: there is no symmetry between the new creation and what is not in it.

However, this raises the question of whether good things will be excluded. I have often stressed the continuity between creation and its redemption through the language of release (as in Rom 8) or of renewal. But is it true that no good thing will be lost? That not a hair of creation's head will perish?

Now, of course, one piece of scriptural witness I haven't yet mentioned is marriage. Specifically, 'in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.' (Matt 22.30) Is this a good part of this creation that misses out on renewal? No: though like everything else, it must 'die' in order to be raised/transformed. Marriage will remain: the new Jerusalem is 'prepared as a bride adorned for her husband'. The wedding feast of the Lamb and his Church affirms, liberates and restores marriage. What does this mean for those presently married? I am not entirely sure; but the good gift of marriage is not excluded.

Have I here undermined all my previous confidence in continuity? If marriage can be so transformed as to possibly mean the end of all present human marriages (remember, our vows are until parted by death), is anything really 'safe'? Of course not, if by safe we want to retain them as they are. But absolutely, they are secure in the transformative power of God to become truly themselves. The risen Jesus was not at first recognised by even his closest followers. But it was truly him.

Towards the end of The Great Divorce (and despite other problems I have with this text), Lewis captures this dynamic with a beautiful image. One man's lust, a sneering whispering slimy lizard on his shoulder, is killed so that he can 'go on to the Mountains' (an image of new life). As it dies, it becomes an enormous stallion that then carries him on his journey. The narrator reflects upon this with his guide (the Teacher, who is meant to have a Scottish accent. Don't ask):

‘Do ye understand all this, my Son?’ said the Teacher.
I don’t know about all, Sir,’ said I. ‘Am I right in thinking the Lizard really turned into the Horse?’
‘Aye. But it was killed first. Ye’ll not forget that part of the story?’
‘I’ll try not to, Sir. But does it mean that everything – everything – that is in us can go on to the Mountains?’
‘Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.’

- C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 95.