More from Pope Francis via Naomi Oreskes:
[Naomi Oreskes] So perhaps this is the pope’s most important message: that we must move past the ideology of no ideology, the morality of amorality.
The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm … is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same … Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished. [Laudato Si]
Many people will of course misread this message. Already, conservatives are condemning the Encyclical for its failure to celebrate the rewards of capitalism and extol the virtues of carbon markets. Others have misread the letter depriving “people of the [technological] tools humanity will need to prevent climatic upheaval.”These reactions demonstrate why this Encyclical is so important. The pope is not asking us to reject markets or technology. He is asking us to reject the (il)logic that insists that only markets can decide our future and that technology is politically and morally neutral. He is asking us to reject the creed of market fundamentalism, and to recognize that the system has levers. Individuals, institutions, and governments are all making choices, and we have the capacity to make different ones.
End of the Introduction by Naomi Oreskes. Now into text of Laudato Si directly:
“LAUDATO SI,’ mi’ Signore”—“Praise be to you, my Lord.” In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.”
2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
[3.] . . . . In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home.
Now, a few words to ponder from some other sources:
Language did not appear at some point in a world already given; language and ‘the world’ that we know emerged simultaneously as two separate phenomena as a result of the loss of original participation, that is of a prior unity encompassing both. And that loss of original participation itself resulted in the polarity of inner and outer worlds that we experience today. Consciousness, from being spread out and interfused – as Wordsworth would say – with its world began to contract, to become more definite by becoming more limited, finding its home more and more within the confines of our skulls.
But since it had become evident by 1968 that the war could not be won, the only question that remained was how to get out. “The real issue in South Vietnam is, who shall govern, the Communists or their opponents,” and since Kissinger/Rockefeller continued to support the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, they were trapped in the same dilemma that had swallowed up the Johnson administration, trying to uphold an ally that had neither genuine legitimacy nor the will to fight for itself, and one that the Communist enemy was determined to overthrow.
Does this ring a bell? Applicable to current events?
But if an epistemic community follows the fallibilist and empirical rules, what it is doing will look like liberal science. And that is because what its members are doing will look like organized social persuasion.
One can but reiterate the point that the mystic is negating only concepts and idols of God, and in this way cleansing the doors of perception in the faith that, if God is real, he need not be sought in any particular direction or conceived in any special way. To see the light, it is only necessary to stop dreaming and open the eyes.
Historically, this kind of withdrawal from doing is the oldest condition posited for the life of the mind. In its early, original form it rests on the discovery that only the spectator, never the actor, can know and understand whatever offers itself as a spectacle.
Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.
Inequality may be inevitable. But in the most fundamental, moral sense, all human beings are equal.
Like any persuasive gospel, no element is without some small truth. Taken as a whole, the radical gospel sets itself as at war with a conservatism of prudence and moderation.
