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Religion, Modern Secular
Culture, and Ecology
George Rupp
 S
AN OCCASIONAL PARTICIPANT in the meetings that led to this issue of Dædalus,
I have been invited to sketch the historical, religious, and academic context
that these deliberations on religion and ecology presuppose. I can summarize
that context in two countervailing points: virtually all of our religious and
cultural traditions have contributed to the gravity of the ecological threats
we face; at the same time, both our religious traditions and our universities
can marshal substantial resources for addressing those threats more effectively
than has been the case so far. The challenge is to move from point one to point
two.
Almost thirty-five years ago,
Lynn White wrote an arresting essay entitled “The Historic Roots of our
Ecologic Crisis,” an article that was published in Science and has
received widespread attention over the years from scientists as well as
humanists. It is worth returning to White’s article more than three decades
later because it continues to be instructive, not only through its telling
insights but also through its equally revealing omissions. White correctly
identifies the dominant strain or core structure of Western theism that
represents God as transcending the world and humanity as exercising dominion
over the natural order. Where White falls short is in failing to notice how
other elements in the structure of biblical religion in effect counterbalance
the invitation to exercise human sovereignty over nature. Two such elements are
crucial: the affirmation of creation as the handiwork of God and therefore as
good; and the record of humanity’s fall and consequent need for redemption.
That nature is God’s creation and
therefore good calls for respectful care and stewardship. White is aware of
what he terms “an alternative Christian view,” which he delineates almost
exclusively with reference to Saint Francis of Assisi. But he does not
interpret the theme of care and stewardship for the divine creation as a
central element in the structure of Jewish and Christian religion.
Similarly crucial for
counterbalancing the motif of human sovereignty over nature is the biblical
story of fall and redemption. The destiny of the faithful is, after all, not to
be realized in worldly rulership. Especially in much of Christian piety, the
human vocation is to be a pilgrim who is only passing through the fallen world
and therefore is to tread lightly over the earth on the way to redemption in
heaven.
This otherworldly orientation
can, of course, cut both ways. It may lead to a disengagement that is,
paradoxically, friendly to the environment from which it is estranged. But it
may also result in the exploitation of the fallen world precisely because it is
viewed as lacking intrinsic value. Thus, even very traditional Western
religious worldviews have a deeply equivocal relationship to our ecological
crisis.
What is noteworthy, though, is
that the force of the structural elements outlined by White become only more
pronounced as increasing numbers of people find the traditional narrative of
fall and redemption less and less compelling. If salvation in heaven is not the
central goal of human life, then the prospect of sovereignty over the natural
world takes on greater urgency. And if the evident evil in worldly affairs is
to be overcome apart from any redemptive divine action, then vigorous human
effort will be required.
Similarly, if God as creator is
believed to have established a general order to nature but is no longer thought
to intervene in particular events, then human will and intelligence can seek to
understand and in time even attempt to control the natural world. And if even
the limited role attributed to this remote deity is no longer attractive or
persuasive, then human effort is all the more crucial. Thus the rise of science
and a correlative retreat by traditional theism from at least the late
seventeenth century on accentuated precisely the anthropocentric elements that
White identifies as characteristic of Jewish and Christian religion.
To put the point bluntly, it is
only when the transcendent God of biblical religion is no longer thought to
intervene in the world either as creator or as redeemer that the full force of
claims for human dominion over nature becomes evident.
In the twentieth century this
unrestrained human self-assertion over nature reached what remains its starkest
expression in the literary and philosophical movement called existentialism.
Like most broad cultural trends, existentialism has many variants that
certainly do not agree in all their details. But the early thought of Martin
Heidegger exerted enormous influence on the movement as a whole and in many
respects illustrates its central tendencies. For Heidegger, the human self is,
to use his metaphor, “thrown” into an indifferent universe from which it must
seize and shape whatever meaning can be attained. There is no created order to
discover. Nor is there any redemptive community. Instead the self-reliant
individual must establish authentic existence in stark opposition both to
nature and to the mores of any and all forms of conventional social life—in
particular the mass culture of modern society.
Existentialism offers a
convenient illustration of both the glory and the travail of modern Western
individualism. Its summons one to authenticity, to self-actualization over
against a conformist society and an indifferent nature; it resonates with the
energy and initiative and independence of our most individualistic traditions.
But existentialism also exemplifies the willful self-assertion and arrogance
that all too frequently characterize Western attitudes both toward nature and
toward the cultures of others.
There are, of course, substantial
cultural resources for enriching this environmentally inhospitable and
religiously impoverished individualism. The essays on religion and ecology in
this issue collect and present impressive evidence of the vitality of those
resources. Especially noteworthy are the contributions from a remarkable range
of Asian traditions—from Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Shinto, and Confucian thought
and practice. Indeed, one of the most remarkable achievements of this
collection is the depth and variety of representation of those various
traditions. But that very achievement at the same time demonstrates how diverse
each community is, how disparate its historical impacts have been, and how
untenable it is to present any tradition in self-congratulatory terms as
consistently and effectively unified in its ecological orientation.
The result is that neither Asian
traditions nor the relatively fewer environmentally friendly themes of Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim action and reflection nor the orientations of indigenous
communities in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are by themselves adequate for
addressing the environmental challenges we face. We cannot select and emphasize
only environmentally friendly motifs from multiple traditions. Nor can we
simply embrace a unified position that affirms the whole of reality just as it
is. Instead we must grapple with the fact that modern Western individualism and
its institutional expressions in social, political, and economic life have
become major historical forces across cultures—forces that we cannot ignore or
wish away but rather must engage and incorporate into an ecologically
responsible stance appropriate to the centuries ahead.
One of the settings in which we
must grapple with this ecological crisis is our universities. It is scarcely
surprising, in view of the history of their development, that modern research
universities exemplify an advanced form of the very individualism that we must
overcome. This is so not only because individual members of at least Western
academic institutions are in their personal styles highly
individualistic—though that is certainly often true; more important, it is
because universities, in developing academic disciplines as central to the
organization of domains of knowledge, exhibit a pattern that parallels the role
of individualism in the broader society.
Disciplinary specialization is a
significant achievement of the research university. It has been remarkably
effective in generating understanding of both specific data and general
explanatory hypotheses. But this attainment of analytical rigor has as its
correlate a depth of specialization that renders connections with other
disciplinary approaches difficult at a time when we are becoming more and more
aware that many challenging intellectual problems, certainly including issues
at the heart of our ecological crisis, do not fall neatly within the domain of
a single discipline.
This state of affairs predictably
has led to calls for interdisciplinary investigation. While completely
understandable, such calls are problematic in ways that parallel the invocation
of one or another religious or cultural tradition as the answer to our
ecological crisis. Just as we cannot simply return to a state of innocence that
antedates the historical emergence of modern Western individualism, so we
cannot embrace a synthetic interdisciplinary approach that fails to incorporate
the analytic strengths and achievements of disciplinary specialization.
What is required is therefore not
interdisciplinary study but rather multidisciplinary investigation comparable
in rigor and depth to specialized research within single disciplines. Such
investigation offers the prospect of moving forward on two crucial fronts. The
first requires us to understand and then also to demonstrate in compelling ways
how current patterns of advanced industrial societies are not sustainable
indefinitely—or even for very long. The second calls for participation in
developing alternative technical approaches and economic incentives that allow
and encourage movement away from unsustainable current practices.
Progress on both fronts clearly
requires joint efforts on the part of scientists and engineers on the one hand
and policy professionals on the other. That such joint efforts are being
launched is promising. But the interests that favor continuation of current
patterns of consumption are extremely powerful. Consequently, any campaign to
conserve our environment must be solidly based on compelling scientific
evidence and cogently expressed in terms of economic incentives and policy
requirements.
Along with marshaling scientific,
technical, and policy capabilities for addressing ecological issues, we must
also enlist the full range of the world’s cultural resources. This process must
recognize the extent of pluralism not only among traditions but also within
each of them. Because there are multiple voices within each of a rich variety
of communities, effective collaboration across traditions entails greater
complexity than has often been supposed—but, paradoxically, may also be more
readily attained, at least in partial and stepwise fashion.
Pluralism within traditions
testifies to the capacity for change in what remains a continuous line of
development. Thus even the communities most inclined to invoke authoritative
figures or texts in fact regularly take into account new data and respond
creatively to the demands of novel situations. This capacity for change opens
up opportunities for collaboration across traditions, as minor or even
submerged motifs in one community gain a higher profile through interaction
with other communities in which those motifs are more prominent.
To take a critical instance, in
seeking to counter the Western tendency toward unrestrained individualism, a
major resource is the insistence of many religious and cultural traditions that
humans in the end are parts of a larger whole to which their personal interests
and ambitions are subordinate. In Western religious and cultural traditions,
this holistic affirmation has not been a dominant theme insofar as God has been
construed as outside the world, and it has been muted still more as the divine
has been relegated to the margins of natural life and human affairs. But even
in Western traditions, there is a persistent testimony that God is intimately
involved with the world and indeed incorporates the world into the divine life.
This testimony is not confined to
Francis of Assisi and a few other revolutionary figures, as Lynn White suggests
in referring to “an alternative Christian view.” Instead, it is a recurrent
even if not dominant motif in the Bible and in Western theology and philosophy.
In regard to this theme, Psalm 139 speaks for much Jewish and Christian piety:
Where can I go from your
spirit?
Or where can I flee from
your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you
are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol,
you are there.
If I take the wings of the
morning
and settle at the farthest
limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall
lead me,
and your right hand shall
hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the
darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me
become night,”
even the darkness is not
dark to you;
the night is as bright as
the day,
for darkness is as light to
you.
(Ps. 139:7–12)
And for Christian theology, the central teaching of the
incarnation affirms that the divine is integrally related to the human, that a
deity who is distant cannot be the God who loves and embraces the world in
Christ.
Modern secular appropriations of
Western religion illustrate the persistence of this holistic affirmation.
Spinoza and Hegel are probably the most influential examples of philosophers
who sought to restate the truths of Jewish and Christian religion in secular
terms after the erosion of belief in a God outside the world. But instead of
retreating to the remote God of Deism, Spinoza and Hegel insisted, each in his
own way, that any coherent conception of God must include all of reality in the
divine.
This holistic strain in Western
traditions may attract attention out of proportion to its historical prominence
in the context of interaction among religious traditions, especially once the
interaction has moved beyond self-congratulatory representation to a search for
common ground. This seeking common ground does not imply an attempt to find a
least common denominator to which the various religious traditions can be
reduced. Instead, the aim is to enrich and develop further the resources in
each community for resisting unrestrained individualism through the affirmation
of an inclusive reality into which personal interests and ambitions must be
integrated.
We in the West have much to learn
from religious and cultural traditions that locate the human within nature and
do not authorize the exploitation of nature to serve narrow human interests. At
the same time, all of us as humans now confront ecological challenges that
require vigorous effort to redirect the environmental impact of our species.
Consequently, the energy and imagination that have contributed to the threats
we face may also be a major resource for countering those threats.
In this respect, modern Western
individualism in both its secular and its religious expressions may play a
constructive role in ongoing deliberations on religion and ecology. While the
recognition that the human is integral to a larger whole is crucial for
cultivating an ecological ethos, this insight alone is not enough. In
particular, this holistic affirmation of all that is does not directly address
the crucial ethical question of how a more equitable sharing of limited
resources may be attained.
Here again, each tradition can
bring impressive resources to bear. But along with counterparts from other
traditions, Western religious and secular perspectives certainly can and should
play a role in the common cause of restoring ecological balance while at the
same time advancing toward a more equitable sharing of the earth’s scarce
resources. Only this joining of environmental concern with a commitment to
justice is worthy of the best in each of our diverse traditions.
To integrate an ethos of care for
the earth as our common home with an ethic that engages the issue of equity
would be an optimal outcome for a series of deliberations on ecology and
religion. This volume has certainly not yet achieved that integration. But in
marshaling resources both from the academy and from an impressive range of
religious traditions, it at least moves in the right direction.
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©
2001 by The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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