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Pope Francis Endorses Climate Science, Trashes Modernity
As promised, the pope’s encyclical came out today, so I spent most of my morning reading and processing so I could say something useful about it. (Amusingly, I was recently pre-interviewed for an NPR panel on the topic, but they got spooked when they discovered that I’m a climate skeptic. Such disreputable views are obviously not suitable for NPR. So I had to wait and read the encyclical today, with the rest of the plebs.)
So here’s something you already knew: Pope Francis believes in climate change. Here’s something else you knew: he’s wary of free markets. Despite that, I found it a very enjoyable read. Neither climate change nor free markets were the central focus. It’s more of a meditation on the dehumanizing, technocratic tendencies of modernity. It occurred to me as I was reading that Pope Francis believes in climate change mainly for the same sorts of reasons that conservatives are prone to doom-and-gloom future projections: the progressive disregard for nature has advanced so far that it seems credible to him that the earth is on the brink of disaster.
So, that’s some interesting food for thought. I’ll pull out a few passages that I liked, and invite others to leave whatever reactions they want to share.
Lamenting the fact that the poor are regularly overlooked and underserved, Francis opines that,
(49) This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric.
He goes on to lambast population control advocates (which was a great pleasure for some of us, who did not enjoy watching figures like Jeff Sachs get a platform at a Vatican-sponsored event):
50. Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health.” Yet “while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”.[28] To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.
In general, what Francis calls “human ecology” is a major point of emphasis. Multiple times he returns to theme of the hypocrisy of those who claim to champion the environment while ignoring the applications of natural law to human beings, who are even more precious.
91. A sense of deep communion with the rest of nature cannot be real if our hearts lack tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings. It is clearly inconsistent to combat trafficking in endangered species while remaining completely indifferent to human trafficking, unconcerned about the poor, or undertaking to destroy another human being deemed unwanted. This compromises the very meaning of our struggle for the sake of the environment. It is no coincidence that, in the canticle in which Saint Francis praises God for his creatures, he goes on to say: “Praised be you my Lord, through those who give pardon for your love”. Everything is connected. Concern for the environment thus needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society.
There is also, of course, some specific environmental advice that most conservatives will find distasteful. On the whole though, it seemed to me like a lot of trepidation leading up to a document in which conservatives can find quite a lot to admire.
Published in Economics, General, Science & Technology
The Pope has a right to his opinion, and to matters of theology and the Church he has an obligation to speak on God’s behalf. He should speak truth to power, and by his words, show the path to correcting the wrongs and injustices that pervade the earth.
Nevertheless, his 82 page tome on matters of human science and technology has waded well beyond the teachings of Christ, and the evils of man. Has man, corporatism, industrialization been guilty of incredible wrongs? Undoubtedly. Has the Church fallen prey to the evils of sin (e.g., the recent scandals of priests, the Inquisition, Papal scandals of centuries past)? Most certainly.
But to paint his J’accuse on the back of modernity is simply too great of a simplification. Blaming the very real suffering of the poor, most particularly in the developing world, to failure to take action against fossil fuels is idiotic and simplistic in the extreme.
Government corruption by despotic leaders in third world nations who allow (and even encourage) despoilment of the environment and callous treatment of their people deserve most of the blame. One does not have to be a Catholic, a Christian, a Jew, or even an atheist, to rail against immoral state and private sector actions against people who have no recourse.
By the same token, organizations like the UN, Western corporations, and Western governments should all take responsibility to bring about change in living conditions of people who live in squalor, ignorance, and terror. The developed world can bring about beneficial changes to these people by sharing the technologies that have brought about our own prosperity, and not depriving them of same. Criticizing the West’s use of fossil fuels, blaming them for food waste and a failure to recycle, and perhaps turning away from God, will not change poverty, disease, and education in grief ravaged nations. Climate change is a poor vehicle to induce beneficial outcomes, and will only further hinder technological advances that will ameliorate world hunger and disease.
The real battle must be a sustained commitment by the Western world to improve the living conditions of all peoples — through modernity, and to fight against political leaders who suppress their people for their own benefits and power. Having lived under a dictatorship himself, surely the Pope should understand that.
More nothing-to-see-here nonsense from his holiness.
The error Pope Francis and all the anti-capitalists seem to repeat is the notion that free markets and capitalist economies are somehow controlled (“planned”) by some nefarious cabal of Scrooge McDucks tobogganing down their mountainous stash of gold coins. Central planning is for nefarious socialists tobogganing down their mountainous stash of gold coins.
I wish we had some way to make the anti-capitalists see how free markets are “organically grown” out of the millions of actions and decisions of free people. Further, that the virtue of a given market is very much dependent on the virtue of the participants in it. And corruption (sin) of individuals affects the entire body. That would seem something very much up a religious leader’s alley.
This is a really great point, and a great description.
It may be that as the head honcho of an international top-down organization he’s going to have a difficult time imagining that the market is the sum of millions of freely-made decisions by people.
That is dead on Catholic teaching.
That is an interesting observation.
It was Richard F. Nation’s book, At Home in the Hoosier Hills
Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870 that helped me to understand the divide in our country between the millenialist progressives who wanted to make the world a better place, and those (such as Catholics in southern Indiana) whose religion emphasized the depravity of man and who did not get caught up in the utopian schemes of the progressives. This divide is to some extent the same divide that separates Hamiltonians from Jeffersonians.
So after Nation helped me see the Catholics as resisting Utopianism, you point out the modern Utopian tendencies in the head office.
Maybe my categories need a little more tuning.
Is that true even in context, such that “planning a sustainable and diversified agriculture” would be done at a global level? I’d thought that Catholics believed in subsidiarity for that kind of stuff. Water usage is another example given where most of the world treats it as a municipal issue and Francis apparently wants it to be organized by… the UN? The Vatican? Some other organization that’s likely to be better than the market at coordinating global farming?
I don’t think it’s fair to say that modern market liberalism deifies markets, certainly not now. If it did, we would never discuss market failures. Most of the economic profession works very hard to make the free market system better both because it is enamored with the ideal and because it is painfully aware of where that ideal falls short in reality.
I had the occasion to read the document in its entirety yesterday, and waited to make up my mind on it until I had the chance to process the entire thing. I could write more extensively about this, but I’ll limit myself now to a couple of comments.
Broadly speaking, I think R. R. Reno captures the underlying intellectual movement of the Encyclical fairly well.
To the extent that the Encyclical is rebuking radical modernity and progressive-technocratic scientism (as distinguished from science full stop), I think Francis is quite right and share at least the spirit of his critique. To the extent he reminds us that technology itself can separate us from one another, from God, from Nature, and can lead to us viewing Creation and other people as simply material means, I think he is spot on and speaking within his brief as a teacher of morals. His call for an inter-generational view of problems in particular is a useful counter-poison to an ever more distracted popular culture.
However, to the extent that the Encyclical calls for a global political plan to redress inequality and environmental problems, and to the extent that the Encyclical relies on the same science it critiques as having come unmoored from considerations of the ends of man in order to build its case that the Earth is in crisis, I think the document is by turns naive, somewhat self-contradicatory, and sure to be sourced as ammunition for international-minded technocratic Leftists (i.e. the most virulent incarnation of the priesthood of modern scientism) to further their agenda–an agenda, as Bjorn Lomborg argues, which is not improving conditions in the very same impoverished areas that Francis deeply worries about.
Rachel notes that the Magisterium (after all, Francis didn’t write this Encyclical alone in his study) can tend toward utopianism in some of its teaching documents. In Laudato, this utopianism takes the twin form of hyper-criticism of the status quo without a clear proposed alternative, and what borders on a kind of romanticism about social conditions in poor communities prior to the arrival of technology.
Additionally, there’s an unintentionally comical moment in section 141 of the Encyclical. There, the Encyclical exhorts us:
..If only we had a name for this field of human endeavor, one that integrates and orders the realms of economics, ethics, public administration, law, and how individuals and communities relate to one another in an architectonic way…
One can scarcely imagine a more concise summation of what Aristotle means by politics.
And this leads me to another criticism, not only of Laudato but of much contemporary Catholic thought, and it is one that I have voiced before. It neglects the political and fails to give it its due. Despite its fondness for Aristotle and its recognition of man’s sociability in community, the teaching bodies of the Church do not entirely grasp Aristotle’s teaching in The Politics. They fail to understand in full why man, as a political animal, lives a human life that is closer to perfection (and therefore goodness), closer to the full dignity of the class human being, when he lives as the citizen of a polity and not as a subject.
In a de facto way, arguments for global solutions are arguments for the abolition of the political through international bureaucratic rule. The same lackadaisical attention to the political is present in calls for de facto unlimited immigration on the basis of compassion.
If anyone is interested, Christopher Lydon had a historian and scientist on who showed up at the Vatican last year to inform the Papacy about global warming and the environment. The Pope didn’t write this encyclical without research.
Lydon points out that the Pope will continue the theme of the encyclical this year with other speeches.
Great analysis, Crow’s Nest. (As usual.) Thanks!
I wouldn’t say it all, though, in my “public analysis” (aka what I wrote for the Federalist, though I don’t think they’ve run it yet), because my main objective there is to communicate that there’s no call for panic. I’m sure there will be other occasions for discussing the Vatican’s weird world-government utopian tendencies, when Democratic strategists aren’t already hovering and looking for any excuse to announce that Republicans have declared war on the Vatican. But your suggestion about Aristotle’s politics is very astute. Now I want to go re-read the Politics and see if I can flesh out that insight.
But how necessary is it to grasp Aristotle’s teachings in The Politics? Was Aristotle even right enough to give his Politics the worship it gets from some Classics-oriented conservatives?
Or is worshiping The Politics quite frankly a kind of idolatry? In short, what does Aristotle teaching us about living well together that Jesus and the saints who came after cannot improve upon?
I’ll be honest: worshiping politics strikes me, at least, as a kind of heathenism.
I don’t think it’s an issue of worship so much as having a realistic appreciation of the goods of political community. The problem with so many contemporary Vatican documents is that they reject a radical individualism but don’t replace it with anything *realistic*; after rightly observing the need for ordered human community they spiral into utopian world-government talk. But there are resources in the Western tradition for assessing the health of the body politic, without going all the way to, say, Rand. The Utopianism is unrealistic but also kind of lazy… we should be able to offer something better.
Good questions. Answers:
I do not think that Aristotle can improve on the theological virtues articulated by Jesus and the Saints. As Christians, we regard the teaching of the Beatitudes as perfect. I do think, though, that since Christianity does not put forward a political/legal paradigm, it is up to us to sort out, using the reason granted to us by Nature and Nature’s God, our political arrangements.
For my part, I am neither advocating Politics worship, nor the worship of politics.
With regard to the latter, I do not believe that politics is the highest field of human endeavor, nor do I confuse the good man and the good citizen. The highest endeavors of human life are pursuits in private life. However, I do not disregard the tremendous importance of politics for facilitating those private pursuits, and I do regard the political itself as an indispensable realm of human activity: there shall never be a withering away of politics except with it too the withering away of genuine humanity. A humanism dedicated to the abolition of politics is no humanism I recognize because it aims at a being that is less than fully human.
With regard to the former, I chose Aristotle because he is the Church’s favorite Philosopher, not necessarily conservatives. Even while recommending him, I don’t think Aristotle’s Politics is directly applicable to our situation today (meaning by that both the 21st century and modernity in general)–it requires interpretation in order to be applied because our politics is grounded differently than what Aristotle’s argues for (though, in books 3 and 4, he shows he is aware of the possibility of modern politics). The Politics is an imperfect guide to modern politics, but because it is grounded in different ideas, it also helps us see ourselves in modernity more clearly in contrast to the way Aristotle thinks about things.
More still, I think someone like Tocqueville is a good modern stand-in for the kind of regime analysis Aristotle undertakes. Were there more men in the Vatican with as careful an eye as Tocqueville for seeing political things, we’d have fewer pronouncements of the type I’ve been critical of. I therefore have urged them to undertake a more careful study of a book by an author they already have fondness for–not in the hope that they will come to worship Aristotle, but because I think as friends of the truth it will improve their understanding.
This is a common complaint about the social encyclicals, for instance past popes have criticized the excesses of both capitalism and socialism without proposing some other economic system to replace them.
While I understand the sentiment I think this is by design, and is a strength rather than a weakness. After all, if a pope put forward a specific, detailed political program or economic system in an authoritative teaching document there would be a danger that many would interpret it as the Catholic system and any Catholic who supports anything else would be accused of going against Church teaching.
It’s perfectly fair to ask a politician running for office for a detailed proposal, but Pope Francis is not a candidate (he’s already Head of State for life, he doesn’t need your vote). He’s a moral teacher who sees his role as trying to point out the blind spots and moral failings of all sides on the issues of the day, then exhorting everyone to compromise and work together to solve those issues.