Responding to a recent article in Nature on the psychology of climate change, The Guardian‘s Andrew Brown argues that combatting global warming will require something beyond carbon taxes, recycling programs, and technological innovation:
There may be ways of fixing [the current confusion] and averting catastrophic global warming that don’t make use of religious resources, but I can’t think of any.
It’s important to this argument to understand that religious resources need not be theistic. All they need do is make manifest a higher rationality than self-interest. This isn’t an argument about whether God exists, but about how human beings make up their minds and form their characters. Atheist states based around myth and ritual are not hard to find. . . .
What religious thought — and ritual — can supply is the two things absent from normative consumer liberalism. The first is a belief that the choice between ends is not arbitrary or wholly personal: that there are moral facts of the matter; that saving as much of humanity as possible is an obligation on all of us, and that this is actually true, and not just a matter of preference.
The second is the kind of conformism, reinforced by all kinds of social ritual, large and small, which will enforce the social discipline needed to carry societies through some pretty ghastly changes. Let’s face it, any adjustment to an ecologically sustainable standard of living is going to be a lot nastier than anything Greece is going through now. It will need considerable determination and solidarity.
Even if climate change never becomes a crisis, the resources Brown mentions could be vital if the recent economic stagnation worsens in coming decades. But the idea of a non-theistic religion supplying them seems far-fetched in light of the mockery that greeted Alain de Botton’s proposed religion for atheists.
August 22nd, 2012 | 4:02 pm
I think the mockery leaned more on the content and implementation than the concept as such.
August 22nd, 2012 | 8:44 pm
I fear that any “rationality higher than self-interest” that is not theistic will inevitably be the state in itself.
August 23rd, 2012 | 8:32 am
G K Chesterton observed that when good religion is abandoned it will be supplanted by bad religion. We see it in the religion of environmental extremism, such as the piece quoted here. People are willing to put humanity through “ghastly” deprivations for the sake of a theory of warming which is far from proved, and appears less persuasive as time passes and more data accumulate.
The bad religion of environmentalism is radically anti-human. But of course, the popular press supports this religion, while condemning Christianity, which recognizes the worth of the human person and of human society.
August 23rd, 2012 | 9:51 am
“I fear that any ‘rationality higher than self-interest’ that is not theistic will inevitably be the state in itself.”
Well said. Doubly so when one reflects on the overt Paganism of many of the more committed environmentalists, going back to the so-called Gaia Hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis. Paganism can best be understood as what travel writers going back to Pausanias have described as “Spirit of Place.” In the Archaic Era, meaning a very, very long time ago, simply no distinction was made between Spirit and State because States were small, tribal affairs attached to a specific geography, a geography having its own Spirit.
The Spirit of the City–State of Athens, for example, was Athena, who represents the end “State” of a very long development, stretching far into pre-history, from Spirit to Deity, during the course of which absolutely everything, including what we should think of as inanimate objects like rivers, hills, and clouds, were alive: they embodied, or were endowed with, Spirit, a Spirit that was, moreover, the essence of the thing and its sole reason fro existing. The Iliad is rather old as poetry goes. We see a vestige of archaic Animism in Hector’s soliloquy on the approach of Achilles in the hour of his (Hector’s) death: “Arisest thou from rock or oak?” To extend the notion of Sprit of Place to the globe altogether, as Lovelock did, was therefore neither surprising nor even very interesting as a matter of anthropology.
Where does religion enter, one inevitably wonders. Observing modern-day Animists, of which there are several-hundred-million practitioners on earth still, it is apparent that their Spirit lore is much motivated by the need to CONTROL Spirit, which is deemed to have dominion, literal power, over matter and which can be manipulated to one’s ends through a variety of magical techniques. Animism is in that sense, proto-science. One must be careful, of course, when extrapolating from the practices of modern Animists to archaic Animism, yet it seems to me to be at least plausible that similar, utilitarian attitudes toward Spirit flourished 10,000 years ago. Obviously such attitudes cannot be described as reverent, even casually, but seem to have far more in common with fear or awe than worship.
Yet at some point, over the course of some indefinable epoch, on the path from manipulating the Spirit of rocky, sun-drenched, violet-crowned–as Pindar say–for a magical purpose to the erection of the Parthenon of Athena as a place of worship, SOMETHING ELSE must have entered into the affections of the faithful, which by insensible stages converted them from manipulators of Sprit into Its worshippers, in effect, into adherents of a RELIGION.
So the chief distinction to be made here is that after the arrival of religion a Spirit that theretofore was regarded, not without suspicion, as either helpful or unhelpful in gaining material power, has transmogrified into something benign or baleful; and that which humans perceive as benign, humans must eventually come to love.
Thus, and summing up, while the Spirituality of environmentalists can coexist comfortably with Animism, such people can never be described as religious absent love of Spirit, worship of Spirit, and adoration of Spirit. Animistic atheism is quite possible. Religious atheism, therefore, is not.
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