What!?
Say it ain't so, Joe...
Brad DeLong
Cf. The interviews in the Verso book, "From Red To Green, " "Socialism and Survival, " AVOIDING Social & Ecological Disaster (Book)
Source: Third World Quarterly, Mar96, Vol. 17 Issue 1, p170, 2p
Author(s): Dien, Mawil Izzi
Abstract: Reviews the book `Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster:
the politics of world transformation,' by Rudolf Bahro.
Title: Theology Not Ecology.
Subject(s): BAHRO, Rudolf -- Interviews; GREEN Party (Germany);
ENVIRONMENTAL degradation -- Religious aspects
Source: New Perspectives Quarterly, 1999, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p52, 3p,
1bw
Author(s): BAHRO, RUDOLF
Abstract: Interviews Rudolf Bahro, writer and founding theorist of the
Green Party in Germany. Views on the environmental crisis; Theology as
an alternative to ecology; Comments on eco-dictatorship.
AN: 1732716
ISSN: 0893-7850
THEOLOGY NOT ECOLOGY
NPQ
Awareness of a warming atmosphere, ozone depletion, Brazilian
deforestation and the dying German woods has generated a sense of
environmental crisis. In Germany, the Greens have now formed governing
coalitions with the Social Democrats.
Yet, you have turned away from active concern with Green politics to
questions of the religious imagination.
Why?
RUDOLF BAHRO
Because the crisis is not in the trees, it is in us. The sense of
environmental crisis merely reflects the inner-world crisis of man.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger says we are alienated from the
cosmos because "we have forgotten Being."
In Faust, Goethe wrote "you understand the spirit to which you are
equal." In our age, we understand concrete but not how the forest
grows; we know the combustion engine but not the pattern which
connects us to the primrose.
NPQ
But doesn't ecology aim at healing that alienation?
BAHRO
Ecology challenges the human spirit to rediscover Being, but it is not
the answer to man's spiritual crisis. In fact, ecology is
anthropocentric; it is man's projection of inner crisis onto the outer
world; it locates the problem not in man, but in the environment.
An ecological definition of "crisis" will inevitably lead to
ecological modernization--the final imperialism of man over nature.
Technological amelioration of crisis may win time against depletion of
the ozone layer, but will only perpetuate the "evil" inertia of the
megamachine. Persisting in the normal life of industrial culture is
enough to destroy the biosphere.
But, ecological modernization, the stage I believe we are now
entering, is a necessary and unavoidable step in the process toward a
break with destructive inertia. In ten years or so, I am convinced, we
will see that the technological answer does not work.
The ozone problem alone implies the need for industrial disarmament on
the order of ten to one. Already, the proposed solutions to this and
other environmental problems are no longer a matter of saving a few
watts, using less plastic or getting the lead out of gasoline; they
are tantamount to a call for freezing the infrastructure. For example,
leaders in the West are telling China and India that they can't have
more refrigerators and officials in Los Angeles are telling commuters
that each family can have only one car.
The fact that we have already arrived at the stage of deep
restrictions means the whole shape of our industrialized lifestyle is
obsolete. Inevitably, an ecological response to the crisis of
industrial culture threatens to transform the West into a gigantic
Rumania, where home heating can't rise above 50 degrees and
electricity is only available two hours a day.
This is the Dark Age promised by an environmental awareness without a
cultural revolution that breaks with the logic of the entire
industrial system.
NPQ
The alternative?
BAHRO
The alternative is theology, not ecology--the birth of a new Golden
Age which cultivates what the Russian novelist Chingiz Aitmatov calls
the "divine spark" of nobility in man instead of the spark plugs in
his beloved German BMW. In effect, the alternative is a spiritual
conversion which abandons the mentality of domination by men over
nature; a submission of the city of man to St. Augustine's "City of
God" where we once again realize that, to cite Augustine, "the frail
and mortal objects of earth here below, the blossoms and the leaves,
could not be endowed with a beauty so immaculate and so exquisitely
wrought did they not issue from the Divinity which endlessly pervades
with its invisible and unchanging beauty of all things."
Such a conversion is not a matter of living in poverty, though it
means answering Tolstoy's question, "how much land does a man need?"
Surely, the whole planet cannot live at the level of the American
middle-class; we must turn, instead, from extensive development to
quality of life.
However, I do not advocate a rejection of technology. The issue is not
man's tools, but man's spirit. "Who is this man that uses tools?" That
is the real question. The spiritual conversion I call for withdraws
commitment from a system built on the fears of technologically
powerful man who, because he has forgotten the Being at his center,
uses science as insurance against nature instead of reconstructing
God, as Einstein wanted. Einstein thought the ultimate task of science
was to establish a trust in the order of the cosmos so that man would
lose his destructive fear.
NPQ
This comment reminds me of something the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton
once wrote: "... without a center, men become little helpless gods,
imprisoned within the four walls of their weakness and fear. They are
so conscious of their weakness that they think they have nothing to
give to another, and that they can only subsist by snatching from
others the little that they have, a little love, a little knowledge, a
little power."
BAHRO
It is precisely the projection of that insecurity onto the natural
world and other men that is so destructive. That is why regaining a
spiritual center is the key question for industrial man. If the planet
is going to survive, humanity has to get off its ego trip and
rediscover Being. He must become "Man in Cosmos," as Teilhard de
Chardin put it.
Meister Eckhart, the Christian philosopher who lived in the now
despoiled Rhine River valley during the 13th century, celebrated the
Logos, or Word of God, as applying to all creatures: "All creatures
are words of God. My mouth expresses God but the existence of a stone
does the same. ... God enjoys all creatures, not as creatures, but
creatures as God." Similarly, Mechtild of Magdeburg, also a Christian
thinker of the 13th century, speaks of each creature--human, plant and
animal--as "a flash of grace." The eternal light of God, she wrote, is
not restricted to humans alone, but is "scattered on leaves throughout
the world."
The recentering of man through the reconstruction of Logos, the
remembrance of Being, is the spiritual conversion I am talking about.
This should not be confused with the normal error of New Age people
who say "I am God," thereby individualizing spirituality. Trees are
God too and maybe more important than I am. Rather, the center of
Being is everywhere. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson was fond of
saying, God is Logos--"the pattern which connects" the cosmos.
NPQ
Absent this spiritual conversion, ecological modernization proceeds,
driven to deep restrictions if not authoritarianism by the fear of
environmental destruction.
Do you expect eco-dictatorship?
BAHRO
Empty men full of fear, as we Germans know, are the raw material of
authoritarianism. That's why I put so much emphasis on conscious
cultural revolution and the spiritual recentering of man.
Especially in Germany, there is a great readiness for change. Every
German taxi driver will tell you the forests are dying and no one
seems capable of doing anything about it. If someone comes to the
German people and says, "I am the man who will make the pine needles
green again," he will be given a chance.
In the deep crises of humanity, charisma always plays a role. The
deeper the crisis, the darker the charismatic figure who will emerge.
But a charismatic leader is not inevitably a criminal and a charlatan.
Whether or not we will have a green Adolf depends, in my view, on how
far cultural change advances before the next Chernobyl.
~~~~~~~~
By RUDOLF BAHRO
RUDOLF BAHRO ONCE A LOYAL SUPPORTER OF THE EAST GERMAN COMMUNIST
PARTY, RUDOLF BAHRO WAS ARRESTED IN 1977 AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF HIS
BOOK, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, IN WHICH HE CALLED FOR A
GORBACHEVSTYLE PERESTROIKA A DECADE TOO EARLY. RELEASED FROM PRISON IN
1979 AS A RESULT OF PUBLIC-OPINION PRESSURE N THE WEST, BAHRO
EMIGRATED TO WEST GERMANY WHERE HE BECAME A FOUNDING THEORIST OF THE
GREEN PARTY. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK IS ENTITLED The Logic of Salvation.
NPQ EDITOR NATHAN GARDELS SPOKE WITH BAHRO IN THE EIFEL MOUNTAIN
HAMLET OF NIEDERSTADTFELDT WHERE HE MADE HIS HOME UNTIL HE DIED IN
1997.
_________________
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Source: New Perspectives Quarterly, 1999, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p52, 3p,
Cut and paster, Michael Pugliese