(All quotes from Laudate Deum unless otherwise noted; numbers in brackets refer to paragraph numbers.)
Laudate Deum, the Pope’s recent Apostolic Exhortation, conveys a sense of urgency. Humanity is on the wrong course, and time is running out. Pope Francis quotes Solovyov, who spoke of an “age which was so advanced as to be actually the last one”.[28] And while the destabilization of Earth’s climate puts us all at risk, the poor are likely to suffer the most from a problem that has been primarily caused by the wealthy, as noted by an included quote from the USCCB. [3]
Given how much is at stake, the Pope calls for drastic action. In particular, he expresses the hope that the participants at the next UN Climate Change Conference, COP 28 in Dubai, will seek for ways to serve the common good, rather than focusing on short-term financial interests. At the same time, he notes the irony of holding such a conference in a major oil-producing country, and catalogs the failures of many past conferences. While we can and should hope for a better outcome this time around, it is far from certain—perhaps even far from likely, because a true solution to the problem of climate change would involve great sacrifices on the part of wealthy individuals and wealthy nations.
Facing such a bleak prospect, it is easy to succumb to discouragement and despondency. Do our personal attempts to show respect for Creation really matter? Does forgoing that flight or that new gadget really make any difference? After all, the Pope himself correctly points out that “the most effective solutions will not come from individual efforts alone, but above all from major political decisions on the national and international level.”
While the current situation is certainly depressing, despondency is misplaced for at least two reasons. As the Pope reminds us, there can be no cultural change without personal change. Effective political change, if it ever comes, will grow out of personal conversion. Even more importantly, it is a mistake to judge our personal actions merely by their effects, as if their only value lay in a future outcome that may or may not come to pass. Such an outlook stems from a technocratic worldview—and that worldview is precisely what has caused the environmental crisis in the first place, as Pope Francis explains in the second section of the Exhortation.
The technocratic worldview sees things around us merely as means to an end, as raw material to be reshaped at our pleasure; the technocrat imagines that “reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such”. [20] It leads human beings to entertain fantasies of infinite and unlimited growth and to ignore the consequences of our actions. Above all, it portrays human beings as totally separate from the natural world.
In fact, the technocratic worldview is so prevalent that those who seek to challenge it often end up reinforcing it. Environmentalists who decry the damage we are doing often frame the issue as a technical problem to be solved with new and ingenious technologies. Or they portray human beings as “extraneous, a foreign element capable only of harming the environment”—and so propose to solve the problem by separating human activities from the natural world. Such an attitude, however, merely intensifies the sense of separation that is fundamental to the technocratic worldview. Both in his current Exhortation and elsewhere in his writings, most prominently in Laudato Si, Pope Francis emphasizes that everything is connected. We can’t hope to solve problems by considering them in isolation from the rest of reality.
What the technocratic worldview lacks is humility—the humility needed to see ourselves as part of Creation, rather than its master or its evil nemesis. There is a strange parallel here to the spiritual life, in which pride can take many different forms. The obvious form of pride is that which ignores personal faults and failings; a more subtle and insidious form manifests as a scrupulous obsession with personal failings. In either case, the emphasis is still on oneself as exceptional, whether as exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. The idea that we can remove ourselves from Creation is at least as arrogant as the idea that we can pillage it at will. Unless we accept our place as part of the natural world, we will be unable to treat it with the proper respect.
Happiness and reverence are closely connected; both are grounded in humility. Only the humble can give others their due, and only the humble can be happy. The prideful are trapped within the narrow limits of their self-referential worldview; inevitably, this isolation makes them unhappy and discontented. The humble can turn outward in awe and wonder at the beauty of things around them; by not focusing on their own desires and plans, they can see things as they really are, and this clarity of vision brings joy. God has given us a beautiful and wonderful world; but to accept the gift, we need to be humble enough to appreciate it.
Since the humble don’t take themselves seriously, they are also freed from the fear of failure which haunts the prideful. In the technocratic imagination, all actions are merely instrumental, and thus subject to the possibility of failure. All failure is forever, and so each moment carries an awful weight of significance; as environmentalists often point out, “extinction is forever”. But from a more deeply human and deeply Christian perspective, nothing is merely instrumental. Every moment carries cosmic significance, in and of itself. What matters is not what might flow from our actions at some point in the future, but rather the action itself. As Pope Francis mentions toward the end of his exhortation, even the smallest details of our world have been in a sense divinized, since God has entered into our world in the person of Jesus Christ. And so for the humble Christian, every moment is indeed significant—but with a significance of joy. For the Christian, failure is not a reality. God brings good out of every evil, and even death is not forever; we follow a God who returned from the dead. Nothing is ever truly lost; everything that has ever been exists forever in the mind of God, for whom everything is eternal.
It may well be that we will fail in the here and now; humanly speaking, the situation seems dire indeed. It is all too likely that human pride and greed will continue trampling on the world that God has made, in a desperate and futile attempt to “be like gods” rather than to “be like God”. Pope Francis concludes his exhortation with a striking warning; “When human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies.” [72]
In the face of such evil, our little actions certainly seem meaningless. What difference is made by our attempts to live lightly and respectfully on the earth? From a technocratic worldview, they make very little difference. But from the Christian point of view, such actions are of eternal significance; they are a way of returning to God a sacrifice of praise, and of doing good and sharing what we have been given (to paraphrase Hebrews 13:15-16). And it may be, as Pope Francis says, that our personal conversions will be the soil from which wider social change grows; but whether that occurs or not is for God to determine. Our part is to live out the Gospel—in this case, by respecting and caring for the world that God has entrusted to us. If we seek first the Kingdom of God, valuing it for itself rather than as an instrumental means to something else, all the rest will be given to us as well. (Matthew 6:33)
Laudate Deum! Praise God!
Image: Adobe Stock. By Tuấn.
Malcolm Schluenderfritz hosts Happy Are You Poor, a blog and podcast dedicated to discussing radical Christian community as a means of evangelization. He works as a graphic design assistant and a horticulturalist in Littleton, CO.
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