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| Back to our journey through this important work. |
First, let's catch up with Pope Francis from his encyclical Laudato Si about climate change, environmental degradation, and justice:
We are free to apply our intelligence towards things evolving positively, or towards adding new ills, new causes of suffering and real setbacks. This is what makes for the excitement and drama of human history, in which freedom, growth, salvation and love can blossom, or lead towards decadence and mutual destruction. The work of the Church seeks not only to remind everyone of the duty to care for nature, but at the same time “she must above all protect mankind from self-destruction.”
(Location 818)81. Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution, also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology.
82. Yet it would also be mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination. When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society.
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Personality is an entirely different matter. It is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon—which has nothing demonic about it—this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas.
The originality of totalitarianism is horrible, not because some new “idea” came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment.
If there is one message this book seeks to impart, that is it. Individuals talking to each other, no matter how big the network, are just people gabbing. Even truth-seeking individuals who cherish rigor and accuracy are likely to go unheard amid the din. The reality-based network’s institutional nodes—its filtering and pumping stations—are what give the system its positive epistemic valence.
To [Joan] Robinson the point of The General Theory had been to restore human agency to economic theory. Keynes, she argued, forced economists to grapple with “life lived in time.” Systems didn’t immediately snap to equilibrium. People made choices based on expectations about an uncertain future. Decisions like whether to save or spend, or whether to buy new factory equipment or lay off workers, were never obviously rational or irrational in the moment, because long-term consequences could not be predicted.
The United States was “a distinct moral, social and political entity,” [Hans] Morgenthau declared in the introduction of The Purpose of American Politics. All other countries defined themselves by their “ethnic affinities and historic traditions,” but the United States defined itself by an idea, with “a particular purpose in mind.” That idea, that purpose, was what Morgenthau called “equality in freedom.” Admittedly, this was a vague concept, even contradictory, or in Morgenthau’s words “intangible, shapeless and procedural,” as the principles of equality and freedom often came into conflict with each other. Pursued for its own sake, freedom became libertarianism, which necessarily undermined equality because, as Morgenthau said, there was a “natural inequality of man.” And equality by itself led to a repressive “equalitarianism,” or the denial of individual freedom. The two principles had to be forcibly yoked together to avoid extremes and the destruction of the American purpose.
There’s a big difference between soil and dirt. Soil has carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria. Dirt, on the other hand, is just dirt. It’s dead. There’s only so much carbon, nitrogen, and bacteria in the ground, and we have to replenish it or we get dirt. More people means more extrication of those elements.
