Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[T]he revival of the religious left is a new fact of American politics, with the implication that a connection between liberalism and religion must be surprising or novel. The prominence of conservative Christians in recent decades may make it surprising. But it is not novel at all.
It so happens that one of the most compelling causes of moral concern for the whole world is an issue that the political right has decided to ignore, or worse. The issue is climate change, which poses fundamental moral questions: What is our responsibility to our fellow humans? What is our responsibility to the globe — to creation? These questions have become central to our politics and to politics around the world.
In light of these questions, it’s worth remembering the powerful influence that religion has always had on the politics of the left. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke with a prophetic voice, grounded in Scripture, about the demands of political and economic justice. The leader today who has picked up King’s mantle most effectively is the Rev. Dr. William Barber II of North Carolina, where he leads the movement called Repairers of the Breach. “We must claim the moral center,” Barber said in a recent sermon, and he described five “interlocking injustices”: racial injustice, poverty, ecological destruction, militarism and religious nationalism.
Ecological destruction is much on the mind of John Elder, professor emeritus of English at Middlebury College and author of books exploring the nexus of nature and spirituality. In a new, still unpublished essay exploring the myth of Persephone, he described the importance of “filial gratitude” toward the earth. His own spiritual history has acquainted him with several traditions. He grew up as a Southern Baptist, later attended Quaker meetings, then became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. His wife remains a Roman Catholic, and he has learned to revere Catholic teachings, notably the encyclical written by Pope Francis on climate change and the environment.
Confronting the challenge of climate change is difficult in part because the problem is so enormous. “Emotionally what motivates us to act is love,” he said in a recent conversation. “Our families, our towns — we’ll make sacrifices for these things.” It has been harder for the world to direct the necessary “focused attention” on the global challenge of climate change.
In his essay on Persephone he cited two important leaders of the last century, King and Rachel Carson. “At the core of [King’s] vision, as of Carson’s approach in ‘Silent Spring,’ was the motivating power of love,” he wrote. “In his 1956 speech celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision desegregating seats on the public buses of Montgomery, King asserted that ‘the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community.’”
To focus on the beloved community is a deeply religious impulse that ought not to be diverted by what Barber called the “puny politics of left vs. right.” Rachel Carson, in awakening the nation to the damage done by industrial chemicals, was summoning us to consider what might be called the beloved planet. The reality of climate change challenges us to consider whether our values encompass the beloved community and planet, or whether our values define community so narrowly it’s reduced to one nation at the expense of all others, one party, or oneself.
Bill McKibben’s new book, “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?,” contains a searching exploration of the strains of selfishness that have gained a hold on American culture, including the prominent role of Ayn Rand, the literary apostle of selfishness, within Republican and business circles. In Rand’s view, anything that gets in the way of the individual’s pursuit of wealth and power is akin to totalitarianism. Altruism and a sense of responsibility to others are anathema. Society benefits when each individual has the freedom to pursue his or her aims. For government to step in to curb the emissions caused by fossil fuels is to subjugate the rights of the individual to government control, in the view of Rand’s adherents.
McKibben, the author and activist who lives in Ripton, is unsparing in his depiction of the present damage and future dangers of climate change. There are extreme possibilities: He cites one study suggesting that if the oceans keep warming until 2100, the process of photosynthesis by phytoplankton could be disturbed so that the production of oxygen ceases. Two-thirds of the earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton so mass mortality of animals and humans would be the likely result.
Short of the mass extinction of humanity, there are other dangers, including the disruption of agriculture, mass migrations caused by hunger and by the flooding of coastal areas, the spread of new diseases and the political upheavals that would be the consequence of these changes. Future migrations would dwarf the recent influx of Syrians to Europe and Central Americans to the United States, and yet even these relatively small migrations have touched off fierce surges of political nationalism and authoritarianism.
The last time democratic values faced an existential threat came in the mid-20th century with the rise of Nazism and communism. It wasn’t easy for the democracies to summon the will to fight German fascism; they kept finding excuses to look away from Hitler’s crimes and the danger he represented. New upheavals could pose similar or greater threats to democratic values.
McKibben’s book describes the infatuation with gene editing, designer babies and the prospect of immortality among Silicon Valley billionaires. Their thinking is profoundly selfish, misanthropic, and arrogant. The hubris underlying their interest in gene editing can be likened to the hubris of the eugenics movement in America, from which Hitler gleaned his racist theories.
John Nassivera, an author and retired professor of the humanities who lives in Dorset, has written that Western Europe and the United States have undertaken a dangerous experiment. Seldom in human history have societies sought to carry on without the guidance of religion. Thus, the secularism of the West is unique in history. Two attempts to carry out a program free from the humbling and humanizing influences of religion were the regimes of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The incipient fascism of populist movements today, and the new eugenics of hubristic billionaires, ought to give us pause and cause us to look with new respect at the moral concerns of those thinking about climate change.
Bill McKibben closes his book with words summoning a sense of morality that looks beyond our narrow, selfish interests. “Another name for human solidarity is love, and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me. The human love that works to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the love that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice and of all else around us that is good. The love that lets each of us see we’re not the most important thing on earth, and makes us okay with that. The love that welcomes us, imperfect, into the world and surrounds us when we die.”
John Elder’s evocation of the myth of Persephone reminds us that the darkness of winter descends each year when Persephone descends into the underworld. But she always returns. He sees difficult years ahead for humans — “major collapses, major emergencies” — and the “urgent necessity of a profound cultural and spiritual shift.”
But maybe through it all, “it will makes us a little kinder,” he said.
Kindness, solidarity and love are what exist at the moral center.
