The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.
In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.
Perhaps the pope should update this in light of the most recent IPCC report. To wit, we can now gauge more accurately the ties between extreme and persistent weather events with human-caused climate change.
It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.
Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.
And now from some other voices:
"To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological. It is a verb with many adverbs, not just a matter of nouns chasing nouns."
The Matter with Things (to be published this fall in the UK)
Iain McGichrist
The beliefs in the unlimited substitutability of resources, in the primacy of economic institutions and policies, and in the exceptionalism of human beings and their modern markets often combine to produce what I can only call unbridled hubris.
Culture is an amorphous concept at best, but the scholars Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson provide the definition I’ve found most succinct and useful: according to them, culture is “information—skills, attitudes, beliefs, values—capable of affecting individuals’ behavior, which they acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning.”
Frederick Douglass, in his once-famous Fifth of July oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, could combine a militant rejection of slavery with a bow to the moral possibilities inherent in the Constitution to annihilate it—and this wasn’t just a rhetorical gambit designed to win support for his cause: “In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”
What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.
MODERNITY: Condition of society from late eighteenth ceTimntury, marked by rapid growth of population, spread of industrial and then finance capitalism, division of labor, literacy, and mobility. Intellectually, a climate of ideas marked by secularization and enlightened thought. Modernity cut loose natural science from the divine and the supernatural; philosophy from alone explaining the world; morality from the task of human redemption; law from the putative universal order of nature. Modernity entered political thought via Machiavelli and Hobbes, who lifted from rulers any duty beyond ensuring a safe, stable frame for people to flourish in and pursue worldly concerns. To liberals, modernity was a liberation, to conservatives a loss of anchorage and human shelter for which they blamed liberals, hence the term, “liberal modernity.” “Many old works become fragments. Many modern works start out as fragments” (Friedrich Schlegel).
Like cultural conservatives before him and after, [Carl] Schmitt was also disturbed by the apparent loss of compass and bleak purposelessness in liberal modernity. The oddity, for a conservative, was Schmitt’s looking to politics to fill the gap. A more natural filler—one sought by [John Henry] Newman, for example—was an authoritative religion. Schmitt’s correspondent and interlocutor, Leo Strauss, pointed that out to Schmitt, who acknowledged the religious element in his thinking.
The contradictory of ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’; and if the distinction between literal and metaphorical usages is a genuine distinction, which in one sense it is, both kinds of usage are equally proper. There is another sense in which all language is metaphorical; and in that sense the objection to certain linguistic usages on the ground that they are metaphorical is an objection to language as such, and proceeds from an aspiration towards what Charles Lamb called the uncommunicating muteness of fishes. But this topic belongs to the theory of language, that is, to the science of aesthetic, with which this essay is not concerned.
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