‘Care for Our Common Home’: Taking Up the Moral Challenge of Pope Francis

Scott Stephens

Yesterday, Pope Francis released his encyclical letter on the “care for our common home” – entitled Laudato Si’. Not since John Paul II’s seismic 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae has a papal document been so eagerly anticipated, and so widely discussed.

Though Francis does not once cite John Paul’s most famous work, there is a deep and common conviction that unites these two encyclicals across the twenty years that separates their publications.

This shared conviction is nowhere more apparent than in a passage near the end of Laudato Si’, in the chapter devoted to civic and political love, which will almost certainly be among the least cited within the explosion of commentary that is already well underway. Francis writes:

“We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it. We have had enough of immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty. It is time to acknowledge that light-hearted superficiality has done us no good. When the foundations of social life are corroded, what ensues are battles over conflicting interests, new forms of violence and brutality, and obstacles to the growth of a genuine culture of care for the environment.”
What the pope is here suggesting is that the environmental crisis, at its core, is a crisis of liberalism itself.

The normalisation of liberal individualism and the unsustainable form of prosperity on which the West has so long relied are, of course, the crowning achievements of what Luigino Bruni calls the “grand ‘immunizing’ project of modernity.” But this project did not simply clear away the tyranny of inherited privilege, thereby returning individuals to themselves and their own acquisitive desires. Instead, this immunity from our obligations to others – what John Rawls more prosaically called the “mutual disinterest” constitutive of the social contract – involved the radical renunciation of the munus: that obliging gift which forms the basis of the social bond that is at the heart of communitas.

In Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II captured the essence of this gift in a simple, wondrous sentence: “God entrusts us to one another.” Once this munus is renounced, what follows is a hollowed out form of social life, a debased, erstaz community in which, “Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail.”

(It is worth pointing out in passing that Pope Francis and John Paul II find an unlikely ally in Julian Savulescu, who shares their critique of the failure of liberalism to produce the kind of citizens that are willing make decisions for the good of others, especially when doing so would run counter to self-interest and immediate benefit: “This restraint of self-interest is the very opposite of the unrestrained satisfaction of it made possible by industrialization and its profusion of material goods, which brought liberal democracy into existence. Liberal democracy has so far been a politics of prosperity, and this induces doubt whether it could turn into a politics of parsimony, voluntary restraint, and decreasing welfare.” As a result, Savulescu warns, “contemporary liberal democracies are in the danger of being too liberal to last.”)

The great achievement of Pope Francis’s encyclical is the way it explicitly deepens and extends the scope of that which has been entrusted to us: our shared environment; the wellbeing of those near and far; the wellbeing of future generations. The language of gift and of what is in common pervades the encyclical, and at once condemns the interpersonal and political indifference that has held sway over the “climate change debate” and exposes the inadequacy of purely technocratic solutions to the problem of environmental degradation.

Implicated in the pope’s critique of both interpersonal indifference and a kind of technophilic solutionism is the way that social media cultivates a feeling of concern and even ethical responsibility, all the while shielding us from any real commitment to others. In another passage unlikely to be quoted widely, Francis warns:

“Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences.”

For Francis, there is simply no substitute for the recovery of a sense of deep moral obligation – of what he calls at the end of the encyclical “generous commitment” – through which we will then joyfully constrain our behaviour and redefine those benefits to which we feel we are entitled. This is particularly clear when Francis addresses the debilitating political problem of how to galvanise public support for an intergenerational problem like climate change. As Stephen Gardiner has examined at considerable length, the problem is not only that the benefits of carbon pollution are enjoyed by the present generation while the deleterious effects (or “costs”) are deferred to some future generation; the iterative nature of the problem ensures that “each new generation will face the same incentive structure as soon as it gains the power to decide whether or not to act.”

This, it would seem, is the brute reality behind the myth of progress, and a powerful illustration of C.S. Lewis’s extraordinarily prescient claim in his 1943 book The Abolition of Man (which is a favourite of Benedict XVI, interestingly enough). Lewis was, of course, fiercely critical of that heroic liberal narrative of the ” progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power.” This emancipation from tradition, Lewis insists, does not make successive generations more free, but rather more subject to the conceits and impairments of their predecessors:

“In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors; and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors … There is therefore no question of a power vested in a race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.”

This is deeply consonant with Francis’s own warning about the illegitimate and destructive exercise of our present power, just to the extent that the attenuation of our bonds of obligation to the environment, to one another and to future generations are all interrelated (as Francis puts it, “human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together”). For Francis, the only way of interrupting this decline into a state of mutually assured impotence is to recover an intergenerational solidarity (par. 159), which is itself of a piece with ecological protection and interpersonal care:

“The notion of the common good also extends to future generations. The global economic crises have made painfully obvious the detrimental effects of disregarding our common destiny, which cannot exclude those who come after us. We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity. Once we start to think about the kind of world we are leaving to future generations, we look at things differently; we realize that the world is a gift which we have freely received and must share with others. Since the world has been given to us, we can no longer view reality in a purely utilitarian way, in which efficiency and productivity are entirely geared to our individual benefit. Intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but rather a basic question of justice, since the world we have received also belongs to those who will follow us.”

Pope Francis’s challenge to re-forge a spirit of “generous commitment” – a form of love for “our common home” which cannot help but flow from the proper ordering of our loves, for God, for those near and far, and for those not yet born – is more thoroughgoing than the fads and fashions of public debate will permit. But hopefully these brief observations, along with the stunningly perceptive reflections of the following theologians, philosophers and ethicists that I’ve invited to assess Laudato Si’, will at least keep the possibility of a different kind of conversation open a little while longer.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/06/19/4258547.htm