I’ve been working on this one book for eleven years, a book that attempts to wed the various dominant worldviews into a biospheric and sustainable paradigm. And just as I finished it and picked up my head to scan the world around me after more than a decade of intensive focus on the environment, consciousness, and civilization, I find that I’ve been scooped. Not by the innumerable scientists, economists, and other analysts and pundits who have raised similar concerns, no not by them. Although we share common themes and worldviews, none of them, no matter how brilliant, perceptive, and compassionate, have offered a vision that greatly overlaps mine. Except, as it turns out, for Pope Francis. Yes, he’s come closest in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ “On Care for Our Common Home.”
Pope Francis has articulated a worldview that is far from the geocentric dogmatism of the 16th century. His is a call for the integration of diverse perspectives, where, for example, “science and religion, with their distinctive approaches to understanding reality, can enter into an intense dialogue fruitful for both.” He maintains that, “The gravity of the ecological crisis demands that we all look to the common good , embarking on a path of dialogue which requires patience, self-discipline and generosity…”
In some most fundamental and profound ways, the pope’s message is permeated by an enlightened and integral worldview that has not been as elegantly annunciated by a Roman Catholic since perhaps Thomas Berry. And we dearly need the Roman Catholics. They make up some 1.2 billion of our human family, and they inhabit both the richest and poorest strata of society. We need all the world’s religions to step up and be similarly perceptive about the human relationship between humans and the environment. We “need an ecological conversion,” as Pope Francis phrased it, “… so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor… to create an integral ecology.”
He correctly criticized the absurd inequality of Civilization’s wealth and power, of the First World’s “obsession with a consumerist lifestyle,” and its faith in global economics and technology to solve the world’s problems. We have need for material comfort, of course, and for functional economic systems and for wise application of technology. And, of course, these are not what we have. We don’t have them in great part because the gods of science and materialism have brought us far more comfort and excitement than did the gods of the world’s transcendent religious. They also brought us greater alienation from the rest of nature, and even greater overpopulation and overconsumption. In abandoning the dogmatism of religion, we have also abandoned our psycho-spiritual depths. The pope’s message is a call to unite this dualist split of mind and matter and to reimage Civilization.
However, Pope Francis is not the center to which the rest of the world must flock. He too will need to evolve. In his encyclical he is uncharacteristically brief and vague on the issue of overpopulation, preferring instead to critique overconsumption. The problems, however, are not of either/or. They are twinned problems that we must resolve. We are overpopulated and we over consume. Fertility rates are particularly high in poor countries, and consumption is absurdly high in rich countries. The pope also finds, “human beings possessing a particular dignity above other creatures.” However, dignified and remarkable our species may be, anything that places us “above” continues the fatal separation between us and the rest of nature. Surely, these are not irresolvable shortcomings. Earnest dialogue with the world’s many perspectives and the exigencies of the ecologic crisis may well bring even the Catholic Church into an appreciation for the perils of large families and towards a paradigm that no longer views humans as demigods. We are animals, simultaneously gifted and burdened with reason and intuition, empathy and greed, awareness and ignorance, humility and arrogance.