Positive Ecology?

One of my core intellectual projects is a to encounter modernity theologically. Specifically in a Christian theology, grounded radically in the resurrection of Jesus and his proclamation of the reign of God, for the practice of the Church.

This big project idea has led me to explore many things: theodicy, transcendance, technology, consumerism, justice, liberation and technology. I now turn to ecology, which I have yet to really think about. What I want to discuss now is positive versus negative approaches to the environment.

By negative approach I mean one that's creed is "we must not destroy the environment". This approach is reflects the ideologies of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism. Just as the individual has rights and must respect the rights of others, so the environment has rights that must be respected. Yet these rights are in the negative, there is no positive relationship to the environment just as there is no positive relationship with society.

By positive I mean an account that, just as communtarian accounts describes society, describes the relationship in terms of commitment and responsibility rather than rights.

When it comes to the bible, was is a good reading to determine between the two?

Food Freedom

I just added this blog to my RSS feed.

Check it out. The latest post on American agro-business in India is particularly enlightening.

re-thinking Christendom

A lot of the intellectual issues I try to deal with our fundamentally about the relationship between the Church, it's theologies and political practice. Recently I have decided to try and work through something that John Milbank poses in an interviewover at the The Other Journal:

"And that means of course, re-think Christendom. But now in more festive, pro-body, yet more interpersonal, less fearing terms and ones celebrating much more excellence and virtue in every realm including those of craft, farming and trade. And having a greater will to the democratization of excellence."

Considering the anti-Christendom strain in my thinking and the traditions I have been apart of (Anabaptist,evangelical,anarchist and missional) this quotation is directly challenging. The political thinking intrinsic to Milbank is that theology has a place in the economic, social and political world beyond the position of prophetic utterance or face-to-face relationship. Examining my thought it seems that the ecclesiology I pertain to puts a monopoly first on the personalist 'face-to-face' and the Anabaptist/liberationist 'prophetic utterance'. For me Milbank has effectively de-stabalized these two monopolies in my mind.

In Missional Church, a book I have mentioned before, Darrell Guder describes the relationship of the church, the people of God, to the reign of God as "the sign,foretaste,instrument and agent of God's rule in Christ" (pg 221). The church is not identical to the reign of God, but is certainly related and the relationship is not easily severed. I will call 'Christendom' a social arrangement which is not identical to the reign of God and neither identical to the Church.

Milbank seems to mention some of the harsher criticisms of the Christendom arrangement including the less festive,anti-body,impersonal,fear-mongering,lack of virtue and lack of respect for the common person as citizen and worker. He is open about the reality that historic Christendom has major flaws but does not abandon the project altogether after the failure of both socialism and liberalism in avoiding both wide-scale genocide,economic injustice and nihilism.

As a member of those various traditions above I would argue about, or more precisely add to, his constructive politics of a re-thought Christendom is a heavy suspicion of power, a rejection of violence, a need to reconcile localism with global technocracy and a recognition of cultural diversities. I would also caution that european imperialism has been an experienced reality of the last five centuries partially out of the failures of the old Christendom.

Re-thinking Chistendom means for me thinking through my cautions and additions to what Milbank is saying. Much of what seems to me to be 'post-Christendom' political theology seems to bubble out of a dialect between an ethical aim (to respond to the other, to have justice) with political suspicion (which comes out of a lived reality of imperialism - such as the Anabaptist persecutions by the state churches in Europe). Yet at the same time in quite clear terms Post-Christendom theology must come to the realization that it is not politically neutral and that even the concept of 'Christendom' is the recognition that our theology will inevitably, if taken to their the logical conclusions, will produce or support some sort of social arrangement which although neither the reign of God nor the Church is something related to the two.

First of all, following Macintyre and also Milbank and 'Theology and Social Theory', we must recover a robust understanding of virtue. But I would caution that this must be 'textured' by the Scriptures and should be more from the Spirit than Aristotle. This means both practice and understanding arising out of the New Testament, especially Paul's epistles. Perhaps love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control" can be the virtues of this new order.

Secondly the suspicion of power and rejection of violence must be taken into account, especially as informed by the New Testament. This means both the development of virtues and communities of nonviolence and a communal respect and distrust of power. There are practical ways of exploring this including favouring the local and de-centralized institutions, including economic and politics ones.

Thirdly - learn from De Certeau and Ellul about technology and it's use. Technology is not a bad thing intrinsically but has the potential, as is shown in actual history, to be very alienating. There are ways to use technology to build community, strengthen the local economy and build towards what Illich call 'conviviality'.

Two things in those whole Christendom discussion:

First - it is secondary or ever tertiary. Not in the sense that it does not matter but in the sense that ethics come before politics. What matters primarily is not the setting up of an order but the spiritual flourishing of individuals and the church in the willingness to suffer and love the last,the lost, the least,the widows, the orphans and the enemies.

Secondly we must head Illich's warning "Responsibility is the soft under-belly of power".

Personal Emerging Politics

I will spare the story but in the past two years I have become increasingly political. Four real reasons: international injustice (do you know how many children die each day from preventable causes??), peak oil (people are way to ignorant of this), unsustainable corporations (co-operatives are so much better) and the quenching of community through consumerism (this hurts). All these reasons come down to a desire to see good and be part of good in the world.

I realize that some of these are already implemented, some of them are idealistic and likely will not happen and others maybe slightly incoherent.

So here are a list of political positions that are developing but not quite there:
- credit unions should be established and should charge non-profit interest (against Usury)
- > including national credit unions
- worker's co-operatives should be everywhere
- > along with this one of the priorities of government spending should be setting these up
- non-profit social insurance co-ops are needed urgently (Canada is facing a major crisis in a few years with it's spending)
- > along with worker's co-operatives should be funded by the governments but this is higher priority at the moment
- solar and wind energy driven economies
- > we can not survive on oil - the technology exists to go solar/wind
- > to do this a system of carbon taxes, renewable tax credits and laws for certain key sectors that must go renewable
- the IMF needs to change
- > be managed by a board of more equitable representation globally
- > SAPS need to have reasonable interest rates
- > SAPS should encourage the above mentioned government projects and not the selling off of major public works
- > heavily indebted countries need to be forgiven their debts immediately
- the nation-state model needs to be replaced with a continental union model,
- > the African union, the Central American union and the South American union are essential to get off the ground now
- expropriate the patents and rights to their GMOs from Monsanto
- make it illegal to buy non-fair trade purchases (just as Asbestos was made illegal)
- truth-and-reconciliation commissions should be set-up
- > between former colonial powers and colonies
- > between ethnic conflicts the world over
- > in the Great Lakes region of Africa
- > between North and South American post-colonial states and their indigenous peoples
- > between the United States and the various countries it lead coups in during the Cold War
- high-speed trains
- > several long projects within the new continental unions and across borders to create a new internationalism

Things I think about but have reached no solid ideas about:
- the environment - there is danger but what happens when we switch our energy sources?
- education - Illich showed me the disturbing reality of schooling which added to my own suspicion of the institution - where do we go from here?

MY DEEPEST CONCERN:

Community and consumerism - the point isn't to arbitrarily create wealth, although I believe my suggestions will create wealth in the long run. I worry that wealth might lead to excess consumerism and more breakdown of community - more isolated individuals living somewhat meaningless lives moving from place to place with no real friendships, enduring connections or hope for an intentional life.

It will be hell - the damned fires of satiation and excess, greed and loneliness.

That's why I started this blog. It is not that I have confidence in the good human soul but I believe with the technologies that exists a better political order can be founded. This is not some idealism, I believe there is the agency to do so. But hidden within that agency is a dark spirit that will rage a deep spiritual violence on people who live in political peace and economic prosperity but who are not living 'the good life' nor being form into the 'Imago Christi' having forgotten the Imago Dei.

Altruistic-Profit-Organizations?

Now the title I chose for this post is quite fecisious. I apologize for that.

This idea came to me a few days ago: now we have Non-Profits Organizations and then businesses but not really anything in between. What if there was some sort of legal entity that could be created that could function as a business, by selling some goods and services, providing a small amount of surplus for increased wages and expansion but with the main purpose of giving (most of) the profit away to charities, hospitals, third-world projects and other community-building exercises?

Imagine this: an electric car co-operative in Ontario employing two thousand people. Now as a legal entity they are allowed to use surplus cash to increase workers wages and to expand by a certain percentage but beyond that they must give it away. The co-op chooses to build wells in Africa with it's profits.

Now how is that for some legislation that could be past?

Just a thought

Here's a thought: since the end of the climate change conference many have complained that it was a complete 'failure'. Although this is true it seems wrong to me that no one blames the average western consumer. It seems to me that their complacency (or OUR complacency?) in consuming way too much oil, producing way to much waste and generally living like we can have as much energy as we want (which we do not) since the end of World War II is the cause our current crisis.

Big business? PLEASE. The businesses only produce what we want them to produce because they can sell it to us.

Corrupt governments? Maybe. But an even worse self-deceiving,gluttonous and corrupt citizenry.

Co-operatives

I am always perpetually in thought about how to organize societies better. All I have really been able to come up with is oranizing the economy along the lines of worker's and consumer co-operatives.


These thoughts come from a reality I perceive: that the distinction between left and right economically and politically is false. Historically they both arise out of the enlightenment era and the french revolution. The right at that time did not want to seriously change societal structures (the monarchy) but agreed with the basic philosophies of the Enlightenment (first classical liberalism). The left tried to match philosophy with policy by having a revolutionary policy (but moved, unlike the right, to embrace the succesor of liberalism in the various forms of socialism).

Not much has changed.

The left was seriously set back by the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet and Maoist regimes, thankfully, as some have already said, the end of the cold war was a sort of victory for the left.

Unfortunately the left has been degraded in the generic keynesian strategies and has a lost what once their attempt at creative and revolutionary policy. Not to say the revolutionary policy is inherently good, it was this thrust of revolution that caused the Reign of Terror in post-revolutionary france and some of the dictatoral tyranny in marxist lands.

The left (and by that I mean a specific organizational politics, where philosophy meets policy) must rejuivante itself. The right has never really existed as distinct from the left, and as the left was co-opted by a beuarocratic keynesian ethos the right has been co-opted by the interests of a very specific group of businesses, specifically certain financial institutions, oil companies and large scale manufacturers.

So let us move in the direction of co-operatives. Where we own what we produce and consume, or at least have a say in how it is produced and consumed. This can severely break-down financial class positions and increase production and equity in our societies.