Religion, Science, and Capitalism Against Nature
The Last Judgement (1538-41) at the Vatican, by Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The Encomienda System. American Indian slaves in Peru silver mines.
Like its Classical and Hebrew predecessors, Christianity placed humans somewhere between nature and God. We were certainly not of nature. We were above it, made in God’s image. We had transcended nature. On the one hand this was a developmental step into comprehending the magnificence of the human potential. On the other hand, by desacralizing nature and placing ourselves outside and above it, we could blithely exploit nature without empathy or common sense. As Gregory Bateson reasoned, “If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit.”[i] Now when we stepped outside our towns and cities, we did so as if we might in traveling to another planet that was inhabited by aliens, to mine its minerals, eat its meat, and observe it from a distance in awed fascination.
The Great Chain of Being from the Rhetorica Christiana by Fray Diego de Valades (1579). Wikimedia Commons
We find a similar trend in all the world’s religions. The Great Chain of Being, with its evolution from matter to spirit, is a perennial notion. In Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Taosim, the aim is transcendence.[ii] Earth and nature are imperfect, less spiritually evolved way stations to nirvana, to heaven, to the transcendent. In fancying a godlier role for humans, we lost our sense of Earth as sacred and we sundered what had been—since the awakening of human consciousness—an ever deepening, integrated relationship.
Illustration from "One Thousand and One Nights" (http://commons.wikimedia.org) by by Sani ol-Molk (1814-1866), licensed as Public Domain.
Starting with the early agricultural, patriarchal empires, this new paradigm became dominant during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. It was then, roughly two to three thousand years ago, that the world’s great transcendent religions developed.[iii] They have since dominated the human narrative about our relationship with the universe, the Earth, human society, and our individual being. These religions still dominate the human narrative. Almost eight in ten people in the world identify with one of these religions, and most institutions are philosophically and historically rooted in the dominant religion of that region.[iv] Of these, the Christians perhaps went furthest in their separation from Nature, actually making Earth evil and a “carnal prison” to be exploited by humans as they saw fit.[v]
Relics from the Womb of Some Age by Arella Tomlinson
This master-slave relationship between humans and the rest of life was made explicit in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, both of which served to further legitimize the destruction of nature.[1] Rene Descartes (1592-1650) wrote that we could “render ourselves… masters and possessors of nature.”[vi] And Francis Bacon (1561-1626), often regarded as the “father of modern science,” believed that the scientific method would be a powerful new tool that would allow us to “conquer and subdue” nature and to “establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.”[vii] Nature must be “bound into service” and made a “slave,” put “in constraint” and “molded” by the mechanical arts.[viii] According to the philosopher Carol Merchant, “The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution. Because nature was now viewed as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external, rather than inherent forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature.”[ix] This was still a dominant viewpoint in 1929 when Freud noted, “… that countries have attained a high level of civilization if we find that in them everything which can assist in the exploitation of the earth by man and in his protection against the forces of nature…”[x] And to this day this utilitarian and estranged relationship to nature has remained as what has been referred to as the Dominant Social Paradigm.[xi]
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby.
This mechanistic ideology of science meshed nicely with the emergence of capitalism. Both were viewed as being objective and value-free; neutral instruments that we could employ to manipulate nature in the service of humanity. The notion of ourselves as transcendent, different from nature, and living in a linear progressive universe, served as the psycho-spiritual catalysts and the ultimate philosophical legitimacy for capitalism, technological innovation, and the whole evolutionary force of industrialization, colonialism, imperialism, globalism, and all their blowback of suffering.[xii]
It was the great Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who performed the philosophical justification for capitalism and its consequential rape of nature and grievous inequality among people.[xiii] Since nature has no worth in itself, he argued, value comes only from the productivity gained through human labor. And since God gifted nature to “the industrious and rational,” we are obligated to make the most of it, by cultivating the land and producing commodities.[xiv] To justify the owning of private property, he wrote, “Persons who worked on natural products in any way to alter them for use also gained possession of them through their industry.”[xv] In these ways, we turn a natural wasteland into a human cornucopia. And by hoarding the surplus of our efforts—capital—we produce inequality among people, sure, but we also create the excess wealth necessary to fund the ventures that create even more wealth.[xvi] And so capitalism, fueled by coal and oil and human cleverness, has produced unimagined wealth for the few, suffering for the many, and the biospheric crisis.
FOOTNOTE
[1] Paradox seems to exist at every level. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were also a punctuated leap in consciousness for the West, moving away from slavery, superstition, and obedience to authority, towards the values of reason, empiricism, and the inherent value of the individual.
ENDNOTES
[i] Bateson, G. (1972:468) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Random House, New York.
[ii] Parrinder (1971), Wilber (1981, 1995), Cope (2000), Murphy (1992:144-147), Shah-Kazemi (2006). Parrinder (1971) doesn’t use the word transcendence in describing the goals of the world’s religions, but terms such liberation, salvation and enlightenment serve the same purpose, namely of liberating one of her illusory material bonds in order to become fully aware of one’s true immaterial nature.
Parrinder, G. (1971) World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present. Facts on File Publications, New York.
Wilber, K. (1981) Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. Shambhala, Boulder, CO.
Wilber, K. (1995) Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala, Boston.
Cope, S. (2000) Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. Bantam Books, New York.
Murphy, M. (1992) The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York.
Shah-Kazemi, R. (2006) Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi & Meister Eckhart. World Wisdom, Inc., Bloomington, IN.
[iv] Pew Research Center (2012, December 18) The Global Religious Landscape. Accessed March 19, 2019 at http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec/.
[v] Bender, F.L. (2003:187-208) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.
[vi] Descartes, R. (1637/1998:32). A Discourse on Method, Translated by Donald A. Cress. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN.
[vii] Bacon cited by Rifin, J. (2009:154) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.
[viii] Taken from Merchant, C. (2001) The Death of Nature, pp. 273-286 in Michael E. Zimmerman et al. (editors) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 3rd edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
[ix] Merchant (2001).
[x] Freud, S. (1929/1961:145) Civilization and its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
[xi] McCright, A.M., and Dunlap, R.E. (2003) Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement’s Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy, Social Problems, v. 50(3), pp. 348-373.
[xii] Bender (2003).
[xiii] Bender (2003:221-228).
[xiv] Locke (1690/2010) Second Treatise, Chapter 5:34.
[xv] Locke (1690/2010).
[xvi] Locke (1690/2010).
