Posted by
Sustainable Futures on Thursday, January 24, 2008 1:06:01 AM
Religion and Sustainable Futures
Many people
would agree in some way with the idea that religion matters. But how, exactly, should it matter?
And what, exactly, should we mean by 'religion'?
We should try to remember that the original Latin
word
Religio is thus bringing ourselves into a state of Person/Planet[i]
or Earth Community awareness, and even into cosmic
The interactions of matter and energy give us
Ligio is the striving of the effect
to rejoin and blend back into its cause.[vi], Whitehead’s prehension Religio is the rejoining, the re-looping[vii],
the reconnection of individuals back into the whole of which they are a part and on which they depend. At a very conscious level, it is the
striving to evolve. It is thus
essentially nurturative.[viii] So of course ligio and religio matter. They are bedrocks of our being and of our being civilized.
Reconnecting ourselves, in its mental and cultural
self-representations, takes different symbolic forms, some of which we call the
great “religions.”[ix]
But the dynamisms of
reconnection, the underlying types of effort made through these differing
instrumental forms – what
some call simply “The Work”8 – constitute a systemic, scientific unity
behind the forms.[xi] I will
speak more of this in a minute.
This work of
reconnection is also separate from belief in the existence of a theistic personal deity or of other
so-called supernatural beings. Whether
or not such beings exist,[xii]
the ontological process of reconnection must go on. So-called supernaturalism
is no essential part of religio. But it may also be no essential
barrier, depending on how it is defined.
If supernatural or at least cosmically superior beings exist, and wish
to help, their help should not be refused, and their information should,
be studied for whatever it can yield.[xiii]
Religio and Conservative
Religion
If religio
is reconnection, then we need to ask ourselves as religionists who wish to conserve and preserve Creation how well we are reconnecting, and with what and
with whom are we trying to reconnect, for there can be both beneficial and non-beneficial connections.
Indeed, the
crucial global public question for the 21st century is, “To what kind of
future are we trying to connect? With
what and with whom are we creating community?” Are we trying to reconnect with
a distant personal deity that hides itself away, whose son's return has been vainly
awaited for 2000 years, or that may not even exist? Therein lies the possibility of huge disappointment. Or are we focused on trying to reconnect to
each other and to the Earth that sustains us and whose capacity to sustain us
is now, as a result of our own excessive growth and misguided activity, in very
great danger? Therein lies the
potential for great hope.
The Flood and the Ark: A Story for the 21st Century
This sub-story is the ancient story of the Flood and
the Ark and of how we today must rebuild the Ark to avoid the Flood that we are
bringing down upon ourselves in the 21st century. I wish to write, therefore, about the Flood, about the ethics of making progress toward building the Ark,
and about what the Flood and the Ark imply for the future at the local,
national, and global levels.
The story of
a great Flood occurs in indigenous religious traditions all over the world and
in nearly every major
In any case,
in the Biblical story, a being with objective knowledge (God) forewarns a man
(Noah) to build an Ark, a vessel that saves life from the Flood.
Almost every child on Earth is acquainted to some degree with this story. It is a
myth that can inspire us in our current circumstances, a myth we need to adapt
and reinvest in.
We today in
the 21st century are faced with our own flood in more than one sense, and we have been well
forewarned. Global warming is
already causing a literal rise in sea levels that imperils the existence of
several low-lying island countries and the shape of coastlines all around the
world. If global warming is not halted,
many major coastal cities will go partly or largely underwater.[xvii] We are also inundated with a flood of
confusing and often untrustworthy political and
commercial information, and a flood of political, religious, social, economic,
linguistic, ethnic, and ecological “problems” as the various diversities
comprising humanity and the biosphere are brought mentally and socially together by the
forces of the Information Society, by economic growth and globalization, and by the
necessity of finding the parameters of collective survival and sustainability.[xviii]
What Story Will Future
Generations Tell of Our Times?
What story,
then, will future generations indeed tell about the 21st century? Will it be the Story of the Final Flood, of the Great Unraveling
of human civilization, of how 10 percent of humanity for a brief second of
world history “lived
high” and, in their blindness and self-absorption, caused all else to die?
Or will it be the story of how humans
built an Ark, powered it with solar energy,[xix] and used it to steer themselves
toward safety and a sustainable Earth Community, a story of how, led by
visionary science, we embraced the interconnected web of all existence of which
we are a part, turned crisis into cooperation, and forged self-renewing
partnerships with one another and with the Earth?
[This blog will continue soon with the posting of Part 2.]
[i] See, Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial
Society. (Garden City, N.Y. :
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978). (republished electronically by iUniverse, 2003).
"The needs of the planet are the needs of the person. The rights of the
person are the rights of the planet."
[ii] Paul Tillich, Systematic
Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951-63).
[iii] Matter, energy, and
information are three interconnected concepts fundamental for any general
theory of living systems, along with space, time, entropy, and levels of
organization. See, James Grier Miller, Living
Systems. (McGraw Hill Books
Company, 1978). Miller’s conceptual
framework sees living systems at 8 nested levels on earth, and at each level as
consisting of supersystems of either 19 or 20 subsystems processing matter,
energy, and information. (Taking
space-time as a whole gives 19. The 20th subsystem came about
conceptually after 1978 by taking chronological coordination as a separate
subsystem.) For Miller, living systems
were a subset of all systems. Given the detailed formality of Miller’s framework,
questions whether living systems include the biosphere as a whole (the Gaia
Hypothesis) or extend beyond the Earth (e.g., Lee Smolin, The Life of
the Cosmos) are scientifically explorable hypotheses. For applications of Living Systems Theory
(LST) to social phenomena, see Kenneth D. Bailey, article, “Living Systems
Theory and Social Entropy Theory,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 22,
pp. 291 - 300 and Kenneth D. Bailey, Sociology and the New Systems Theory:
Toward a Theoretical Synthesis.
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
An important group of researchers in LST and other systems theories is
centered at the International Society for the Systems Sciences, http://isss.org/world/index.php.
[iv] Alfred North Whitehead, Process
and Reality. (The Free Press, 1978).
See also, John W. Lango, Whitehead’s Ontology. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1972). Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of
Charles Hartshorne. Library of
Living Philosophers, Vol. XX.. (Open Court, 1991).
[v] See, e.g., G. I.
Gurdjieff’s neglected masterpiece of science fiction and cosmic ecopsychology,
All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An
Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man (New York, London:
Viking Arkana, revised translation,1992) particularly the chapter entitled “The
Holy Planet Purgatory.” Gurdjieff was
teaching seminal and detailed forms of what are now called ecopsychology and
theological naturalism in Russia prior to the Revolution. See, P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous:
Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1949).
[vi] For an exposition of this
notion and of the notion of reciprocal maintenance, see, Gurdjieff, supra,
Chapter 43, “Beelzebub’s survey of the periodic process of the reciprocal
destruction of men, or Beelzebub’s opinion of war.” In Gurdjieff’s view, war is often triggered by environmental and
even solar and planetary phenomena that affect the psyche, and one of the
points of the kinds of “work on oneself” that he taught is precisely to prepare
and educate the psyche to use these factors and “tensions” in a constructive,
rather than a destructive, way. The
same idea underlies this whole essay.
Climate change is a stimulus, and represents a hazard, but a stimulus and
a hazard that we must use to work constructively in order to build our own
psyches into an Ark for Earth Community.
[vii] For a sophisticated
exposition of the notion of “I” and “We” as self-perception loops and feedback
processes, see Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop. (New York: Basic
Books, 2007).
[viii] For the notion of
“religion” as nurturative of our biological nature, see Loyal D. Rue, Religion
Is Not About God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and
What to Expect When They Fail.
(Princeton, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
[ix] See, Ernst Cassirer, The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 Vols.
(Yale University Press, 1955).
[xi] For a systematic treatment
of the forms notions
of relatedness and dynamism, see, John Godolphin Bennett, The
Dramatic Universe. 4 Vols. (London: Stodder and Houghton, 1956 -
1966.) See also his introductory book, Elementary
Systematics. His introductory
article, “General Systematics,” was first published in the
journal Systematics, The Journal for the Comparative
Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, Vol. 1, # 1, June 1963. An edited format version is available from
this present author. Reprints of
Bennett’s books and other materials are available from www.bennettbooks.org. Discussion of Bennett’s ideas occurs at
Deeper Dialogue (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/deeper_d and
at Harmonious Developments, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HarmoniousDevelopments.
. See also the websites www.duversity.org
and www.systematics.org
. More than any other single author,
Bennett, carrying forward insights gained from Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, has
given us a systematic theory of relatedness and dynamism – Gurdjieff’s “Law of
Three.” Many thinkers (e.g., Hegel and subsequent related theories) use
the notion of relatedness or dialectic but fail to penetrate to the specific
mathematical and systematic level of this concept. See also the works of Frithjof Schuon, e.g., The
Transcendental Unity of Religions.
(Harper and Row, 1975).
[xii] See, Steven J. Brams, Superior
Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know? Game-Theoretic Implications of
Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, and Incomprehensibility. (Springer-Verlag, 1983). See also, Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier,
eds., The Impossibility of God.
(Prometheus Books, 2003).
[xiii] The Baha’i religion, whose
scriptures use theistic language but insist nonetheless on the harmony of
science and religion, teaches centrally the notion of periodic progressive
revelation and education from a supernatural source, and thus the need of humanity to study what this
source reveals
[xiv][xiv] See, e.g., Loyal D.
Rue, Amythia: Crisis in the Natural History of Western Culture.
(2004). The “demythologizing” movement
within Christianity is associated with Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Rahner and with
the ongoing “search for the historical Jesus.”
[xvii] See, e.g., Al Gore,
film and book, An Inconvenient
Truth.
[xviii] An overview of the human impact on the
biosphere can be gained through the United Nations Environment Programme (www.unep.org)
and its Man and the Biosphere project.
UNEP issues periodic global environmental assessments. The specific notion of sustainable
development is the province of the UN Secretariat’s Department of Economic and
Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development, http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/review.htm,
and the Commission on Sustainable Development.
The United Nations helped pioneer the concept of sustainable development
and to distinguish it from mere economic expansion and any kind of so-called
“sustainable growth,” which is a non-sequitur.
The concept of sustainability refers to the ability of a system to
regenerate itself into the ?future. We can perhaps get the most vivid grasp of sustainability by focusing first on what is not sustainable. What is unsustainable is well described by David W. Orr, “The Four Challenges of Sustainability,” available at http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/4CofS.html:
“The things that cannot be sustained are clear. The ongoing militarization of the planet along with the greed and hatred that feeds it are not sustainable. Sooner or later a roll of the dice will come up Armageddon whether in the Indian sub-continent, in the Middle East, or by an accidental launch, acts of a rogue state, or terrorists. A world with a large number of desperately poor cannot be sustained because they have power to disrupt lives of the comfortable in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate and [because their poverty] would not be worth sustaining anyway. The perpetual enlargement of the human estate cannot be sustained because it will eventually overwhelm the capacity and fecundity of natural systems and cycles. The unrestrained development of any and all technology cannot be sustained without courting risks and adversity that we often see only in hindsight. A world of ever increasing economic, financial, and technological complexity cannot be sustained because sooner or later it will overwhelm our capacity to manage. A world divided by narrow, exclusive, and intense allegiances to ideology or ethnicity cannot be sustained because its people will have too little humor, compassion, forgiveness, and wisdom to save themselves. Unrestrained auto-mobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world is not sustainable because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But [all these unsustainable things] are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors. Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.” [My emphases. JD.] The concept of sustainability is not without debate. See, e.g., Julianne Lutz Newton and
Eric T. Freyfogle, “Sustainability: A Dissent.” Conservation Biology 19/1 (February 2005), pp.
23-32. Among the criticisms of
sustainability mentioned are vagueness about what is being sustained, who or
what is doing the sustaining, and that it is so malleable a term that its
popularity “provides only a façade of consensus.” The authors recommend a narrower term such as ‘land health’. “Land health,” they write, “as an
independent understanding should set the essential terms of how we live and
enjoy the earth, providing the framework within which we pursue our many social
and economic aims.” I might tend to
agree for biological discussions, but I would also point out that
‘sustainability’, precisely because it is a broad term, can help the public think
in a more ecosocially holistic way about not just land but other factors such
as pointed out by Orr, supra, that affect land health. See, Christine Padoch and Robin R. Sears,
“Conserving Concepts: In Praise of
Sustainability.” Conservation
Biology 19/1 (February 2005), pp. 39-41.
See also, Robert Paehlke, “Sustainability as a Bridging Concept.” Conservation Biology 19/1 (February,
2003), pp. 36-38. Conservation
Biology has had many valuable debates and article in recent years on
sustainability and the principles of conservation biology. See, David Orr, “Orr’s Laws.” Conservation Biology 18/6 (December,
2004), pp. 1457 - 1460 and Education Committee of the Society for Conservation
Biology, “Principles of Conservation Biology:
Recommended Guidelines of Conservation Literacy.” Conservation Biology 18/5 (October,
2004), pp. 1180 - 1190. The connections
between sustainability and spirituality are also noted there. See, Ian Christie, “Sustainability and
Spiritual Renewal: the Challenge of
Creating a Politics of Reverence.” Conservation
Biology 16/6 (December 2002), pp. 1466 - 1468. The ambiguities of sustainability and the problems of fragmented
approaches are noted in terms of international environmental treaties in
Alexander Gillespie, The Illusion of Progress: Unsustainable Development in International Law and Policy. (London and Sterling, Virginia: Earthscan
Publications Ltd., 2001) and in terms of international organization in Lydia
Swart and Estelle Perry, eds., Global Environmental Governance: Perspectives
on the Current Debate. (New York:
Center for UN Reform Education, 2007).
[xix] For a plan to power the
United States on solar energy, ?see, Ken Zweibel, James Mason, and Vasilis Fthenakis, “A Solar Grand Plan.” Scientific American 298/1 (January 2008). The authors state: “The technology is ready. On the following pages we present a grand plan that could provide 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050. We project that this energy could be sold to consumers at rates
equivalent to today’s rates for conventional power sources, about five cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If wind, biomass and geothermal sources were also developed, renewable energy could provide 100 percent of the nation’s electricity and 90 percent of its energy by 2100.” The article can be downloaded from http://www.countercurrents.org/mason311207.htm.