Franjo, care!

Holy Ignorance

Garry Wills

Jim Young/Reuters/Corbis Republican candidate Rick Santorum, a critic of Pope Francis’s climate encyclical, in Marshalltown, Iowa, May 17, 2015

When a Republican politician, asked about climate change, says, “I’m not a scientist,” most of us hear just a cowardly way of dodging the question; but the politician’s supporters hear a brave defiance of an alien force. When we hear only “science,” they hear “godless science,” the kind that wants to rob them of their belief in creation and force evolution into their minds. That science is marching in a battalion of forces—the media, the academy, the government—that has them besieged. “I’m not a scientist” does not mean, “I have not heard enough about the science, and need to hear more,” but “I know the evil intent or effect of science, and I will not let it affect me.” They summon a courage not to know.

Now Pope Francis, with his encyclical on climate change, has introduced a concern for the poor into the environmental discussion. But conservative Catholics (including five actual or potential candidates for president) forgive him, since he knows nothing about science—if he did, he would realize its anti-biblical animus. He does not know, as the conservatives do, that the masked godless thing must be met by a holy resistance. This is what the French anthropologist Olivier Roy calls “holy ignorance.” It is not a failure of intelligence, but a proud refusal to know things tainted by the arrogance of inevitability. He writes: “There is a close link between secularization and religious revivalism, which is not a reaction against secularization, but the product of it. Secularism engenders religion.” The defenders of the lost cause feel persecuted, and the more support there is for their opponents, the grander they are in their lonely war.

Roy’s apparent paradox is supported by the Fundamentalism Project, a six-year study completed in the 1990s by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with ample funding from the MacArthur Foundation. That report also concluded that fundamentalism is the unwanted child of secularism: “The defining and distinctive structural cause of fundamentalist movements is secularization.” This kind of principled ignorance will not be lessened, but exacerbated, by calling into court more and more scientists to refute it, since the witnesses enter the court already labeled as “godless,” to be resisted as belonging to the forces trying to destroy the real America. The court itself is not valid. On the contrary, the few scientists who deny man-made climate change are on the side of holiness, so one of them can outweigh hundreds of the godless.

Roy notes how the holy float free even from what seems to be their own base. About the Bible, he writes: “Evangelical Protestants follow it ‘to the letter,’ but a letter freed not only from the original language, but from language itself, in order to see no more than a simple message… It does not question the veracity of the letter of the scriptures, but nor is it interested in the actual language of the text, nor, incidentally, in any specific language.” An earlier dismantling of the Bible was called the Higher Criticism. This new approach might be called the Higher Holiness, claiming that the Bible is right, no matter what it actually says. This resembles the way American fundamentalists wave the Constitution as a talisman without reading it deeply or at all. They condemn in the same talismanic way the sharia law they have not read. Roy also says that some fundamentalists have detached themselves from the actual culture they are in, appealing to some fictional state they are trying to bring back—they want to “take the country back.”

So, if Catholic conservatives like Rick Santorum deny climate change in the name of holiness, can Pope Francis persuade them with his own appeal to holy values in creation? I doubt it. People who float above the Bible with their own message will find it easy to resist an encyclical. Other popes have denounced war, nuclear weapons, and the death penalty without budging the stony Catholic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Catholics like Michael Novak have taught Catholic businessmen that the free market is holy, and criticizing it is blasphemy. Besides, fundamentalists are quick to sniff out incipient godlessness even in their own ranks. They will think Pope Francis nice but naive, and suspect the Devil fooled him.

June 18, 2015, 9:29 a.m.

The Pope and the Planet

Bill McKibben

 August 13, 2015 Issue  
 

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home

an encyclical letter by Pope Francis

Vatican Press, 184 pp., available at w2.vatican.va

   Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis visiting typhoon survivors in Tacloban, the Philippines, January 2015  


On a sprawling, multicultural, fractious planet, no person can be heard by everyone. But Pope Francis comes closer than anyone else. He heads the world’s largest religious denomination and so has 1.2 billion people in his flock, but even (maybe especially) outside the precincts of Catholicism his talent for the telling gesture has earned him the respect and affection of huge numbers of people. From his seat in Rome he addresses the developed world, much of which descended from the Christendom he represents; but from his Argentine roots he speaks to the developing world, and with firsthand knowledge of the poverty that is the fate of most on our planet.
So no one could have considered more usefully the first truly planetary question we’ve ever faced: the rapid heating of the earth from the consumption of fossil fuels. Scientists have done a remarkable job of getting the climate message out, reaching a workable consensus on the problem in relatively short order. But national political leaders, beholden to the fossil fuel industry, have been timid at best—Barack Obama, for instance, barely mentioned the question during the 2012 election campaign. Since Francis first announced plans for an encyclical on climate change, many have eagerly awaited his words.
And on those narrow grounds, Laudato Si’ does not disappoint. It does indeed accomplish all the things that the extensive news coverage highlighted: insist that climate change is the fault of man; call for rapid conversion of our economies from coal, oil, and gas to renewable energy; and remind us that the first victims of the environmental crisis are the poor. (It also does Americans the service of putting climate-denier politicians—a fairly rare species in the rest of the world—in a difficult place. Jeb Bush, for example, was reduced to saying that in the case of climate the pope should butt out, leaving the issue to politicians. “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people,” he said, in words that may come back to haunt him.)
The pope’s contribution to the climate debate builds on the words of his predecessors—in the first few pages he quotes from John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI—but clearly for those prelates ecological questions were secondary. He also cites the pathbreaking work of Bartholomew, the Orthodox leader sometimes called the “green patriarch”; others, from the Dalai Lama to Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, have spoken eloquently on this issue as well. Still, Francis’s words fall as a rock in this pond, not a pebble; they help greatly to consolidate the current momentum toward some kind of agreement at the global climate conference in Paris in December. He has, in effect, said that all people of good conscience need to do as he has done and give the question the priority it requires. The power of celebrity is the power to set the agenda, and his timing has been impeccable. On those grounds alone, Laudato Si’ stands as one of the most influential documents of recent times.
It is, therefore, remarkable to actually read the whole document and realize that it is far more important even than that. In fact, it is entirely different from what the media reports might lead one to believe. Instead of a narrow and focused contribution to the climate debate, it turns out to be nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet—an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary. In scope and tone it reminded me instantly of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and of the essays of the great American writer Wendell Berry.¹ As with those writers, it’s no use trying to categorize the text as liberal or conservative; there’s some of each, but it goes far deeper than our political labels allow. It’s both caustic and tender, and it should unsettle every nonpoor reader who opens its pages.

It’s easier when history has worn away all but what was truly important about a man: Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. indulged any number of bad (and occasionally batty) political ideas, and each had substantial personal failings. We might say the same about Thomas Jefferson. But each of those men was right about one big thing that mattered, and we remember and admire them for that. Political perfection, to say nothing of personal perfection, is not a precondition for anything worth talking about.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424467/pope-francis-economics-public-policy-fallible

We conservatives want liberty, for ourselves and for the world. On that front, Pope Francis, unlike some of the great men who have walked before him in those fisherman’s shoes, does not appear to be a man who is going to be a great deal of help. But what do we want liberty for? For the things of this world alone, or for something more? That, despite his lamentable adventures in political economy, is more Pope Francis’s game.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424467/pope-francis-economics-public-policy-fallible

And if you mix your classical liberal values with the classically conservative predisposition to think that politics is at best futile, at bad perverse, at worst risks what is most fundamental, then you will always celebrate these gains when the fight is over: always at the after party, inconspicuous at the main event, and never on the planning committee.

In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”
And what method should be used to enforce the maintenance of “civilized standards”? According to Buckley, it should be a no-holds-barred defense, even including violence. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical [white] minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.”

In other words, it was up to the white community to decide when violence was appropriate. Through its White Citizens’ Councils, the resurgence of the Klan, and the general refusal to prosecute crimes committed against black Southerners, by the 1960s the white South had made its decision. And rather than condemn it, Buckley stayed the course. In 1958, National Review printed a cutting article on the black politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., entitled, “The Jig Is Up.” Buckley professed not to know the racial connotations of the word “jig.” In his 1959 book, Up From Liberalism, Buckley responded to an African nationalist, saying, “Your people, sir, are not ready to rule themselves. Democracy, to be successful, must be practiced by politically mature people among whom there is a consensus on the meaning of life within their society.” In his next breath, Buckley turned to American civil rights leaders, saying, “In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail politically because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white—as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status.”

In a 1961 article in the nationally prominent Saturday Review, Buckley answered the titular question of “Desegregation: Will It Work?” with his first, all-capitalized word: “NO.” His rationale? For it to do so would require the dramatic intervention of the federal government, and conservatives should always oppose such an occurrence. Meanwhile, things weren’t so bad in the South, he said. Martin Luther King, Jr., was simply “more sensitive, and so more bitter, than the average Southern Negro, and hence unqualified as a litmus of the Southern Negro’s discontent.” Meanwhile, Buckley allowed two open racists, sociologist Ernest van den Haag and editor James J. Kilpatrick, to write long pieces on civil rights for National Review (it was a piece by van den Haag called “Negroes, Intelligence & Prejudice” on which Buckley had asked Mailer to comment in 1964). Both van den Haag and Kilpatrick became the magazine’s authorities on the matter.