While LBO-ers worry about their next dose of diflucan

Mark Jones jones118 at lineone.net
Sat May 20 09:25:50 PDT 2000


or whether the next SUV is big enough to look round the traffic, the princes worry about nature:

from the Guardian:

Charles's adviser spells out the prince's philosophy and warns off the scientists

The future of the monarchy: special report

Jonathon Porritt

Saturday May 20, 2000

So what does the word "sacred" do for you? Does it induce a nice warm glow, or bring on an instant fit of apoplectic rage? To a man, it's the rage that seized the great and the good of the UK's scientific establishment when Prince Charles chose to organise his contribution to the Reith Lectures around the simple notion of rediscovering a "sense of the sacred".

Richard Dawkins dismissed this as "mumbo-jumbo". Lewis Wolpert saw it as nothing more than an outbreak of New Age superstition. Walter Bodmer likened Prince Charles to a Dalek: "This sort of comment reminds me of how the Daleks from Dr Who, when they were confronted with rationality, burned up".

Such personal insults and intellectually vapid outrage are nothing new. From its inception in the early 1970s, the modern environment movement has always had an influential spiritual dimension to it, which has been deeply suspect in the eyes of most scientists.

There have always been two parts to this. The first is deeply pragmatic. Given that we go on destroying the world even though we now know for a fact that we're destroying it, the politics of "enlightened self-interest" (ie protect the environment in order to protect ourselves) has clearly been found wanting. We must therefore dig deeper into the human psyche, tap into those value systems which tell us this is either an affront to our own humanity (for those who don't actually believe in God) or an affront to God (for those who do).

The second part is more a journey of interdenominational discovery. Every one of the world's major religions or faiths has within it what might be described as "an environmental ethic", based either on the notion of a creator God or the inherently sacred nature of all life on earth. Add to that a wide diversity of less formal spiritual sensibilities (on the part of those who are not adherents of any major religion, but who still seek a deeper meaning in life than that provided by scientific materialism), and you end up with a very rich tapestry indeed. That does not make environmentalism "a new religion"; it simply encourages us to re-examine our traditional belief systems to draw out that environmental ethic from each.

Yet far from seeing such concepts as a creator God, or our "sacred trust" in acting as stewards of creation, as relatively orthodox aspects of the core teaching of Christianity and other faiths, many leading scientists have branded Prince Charles's Reith Lecture as an expression of neo-paganism or "extreme mysticism". So when Pope John Paul II declared (as he did in 1990 in Peace With God The Creator, Peace With All Creation) that "Christians in particular realise that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith", did that reveal him as some tree-hugging spiritualist? When the eminent Islamic scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, reminds us that "it is not only human beings who sing the praise of God - everything has its own tongue with which it praises him, everything sings the praise of God by virtue of its very existence", does that brand him as a New Age mystic?

There is a world of difference between pantheism (in which the divine is seen to reside in nature itself, leading some people to "worship" nature in the form of forests or mountains) and panentheism in which it is God that is seen to reside in nature, to be revealed through every twist and turn of evolution. If Prince Charles was a pantheist (which he is not), then Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and other religious leaders would find it hard to leap to his defence as they have done.

But as John Durant (professor of public understanding of science at Imperial College) rightly points out, Prince Charles went further in implicitly arguing that a religious/spiritual approach to the natural world (based on "a greater respect for the genius of nature's designs, rigorously tested and refined over millions of years") must automatically entail a rejection of genetic engineering and other technologies which threaten to transform nature irreversibly. Many take issue with him on this point, arguing that we have always intervened in nature, often irreversibly, and that without those interventions (agricultural, medical, industrial), life would be a lot nastier than it is today.

If managed and regulated properly, they argue, there is no reason why GM crops should not bring as great a range of benefits to humankind as the selectively bred crop types on which all farmers (including organic farmers like Prince Charles!) currently depend. This is a debate which will run and run. But what is so disturbing is that so many of his scientific critics seem to challenge the very notion that there is an ethical/spiritual aspect to the debate at all.

As we march off boldly into a genetically engineered future, the moral and ethical issues will get more and more pressing. The "hard lines" between different organisms and species are beginning to melt away; we can now pick and choose individual genes from one organism to introduce into a totally different and unrelated organism, crossing all biological boundaries, in combinations that nature never could and never would bring together. As Jeremy Rifkin points out in The Biotech Century, "living things are no longer perceived as birds and bees, foxes and hens, but as bundles of genetic information. There is no longer any question of sacredness or specialness. How could there be, when there are no longer any recognisable boundaries to respect? How can any living thing be deemed sacred when it is just a pattern of information?"

That's what lies at the heart of Prince Charles's concerns about both genetic engineering and modern science in general. In his Reith Lecture he quotes from the philosopher Philip Sherrard, who argued that the crisis we face today is not in essence an ecological one, but a crisis in the way we think. We treat Planet Earth in this destructive, godforsaken way because we see things in a destructive, godforsaken way. And we see things that way because that's how scientists have taught us to see ourselves: as random, purposeless bipeds, with an inherently destructive nature arising from our genetic inheritance.

Having systematically "desacralised" ourselves (ie ceased to think of ourselves as sacred beings), we have had little difficulty desacralising the world around us, evolving a world view that strips the earth and its creatures of any sacred significance, reducing our natural inheritance to a bank of exploitable assets uniquely available to Homo rapiens.

Which must surely make for a worthy contribution to a series of lectures about sustainable development, as Prince Charles has just demonstrated. But how sad that all our scientific gurus can come up with is invective and arrogant scorn.

Jonathon Porritt is a programme director of Forum for the Future; his book Playing Safe: Science and the Environment, will be published on May 29 by Thames & Hudson (£6.95)

Guardian 20.05.00

Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList



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