Global Warming as Crucifixion?
Prelude: Writing is a fragile activity. I overslept, made my coffee, and sat down to write. Two major distractions later, and the wholeness of the idea that I had on waking up is gone. It’s nice when writing flows, not nice when it doesn’t. And finding/creating conditions for that flow is an eternal challenge. Anyway, I’m wiping out what I started with and trying to wrestle the idea back…
Yesterday, the Washington Post had an article on the environmental impacts of AI. As Artificial Intelligence depends entirely on large computers, and the computers need lots and lots of energy to work, Artificial Intelligence is undoing any progress we made toward weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels. Today, I open my inbox to an article on how algorithms contribute to runaway rent inflation in The American Prospect. Overall, the environmental impacts are more significant, although I acutely feel the effects of rent inflation as I still can’t afford to move out of my mother’s house. Together, these articles remind me that there’s a kind of combination of finance and technology that ends up distorting our capacities to live together well, and ultimately our capacity to live at all.
This week, I also felt a need to revisit H. Richard Niebuhr’s reflections on World War Two.1 His reflections on war are a stark contrast to where Quakers end up. In part, this is because Niebuhr starts with parts of the Christian tradition - especially Calvin - that Quakers unequivocally rejected. But since reading The Meaning of Revelation in college, Niebuhr’s been one of my primary spiritual companions. What Niebuhr offers better than most is an ability to hold different perspectives together, to see distinctions as real - one thing I found this week is that Niebuhr described himself as a nominalist - but also to hold out hope for a kind of unity beyond those differences, a unity that doesn’t efface differences, but unites them. Niebuhr doesn’t really venture out beyond the differences within the Protestant Christian tradition, but his keen sense that differences can’t be papered over gets him to a point that he anticipated many things about postmodern thought - for example, he anticipated the feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding’s notion of standpoint epistemology. He’s able to synthesize what look like incompatible strands of thought. First, he’s solidly rooted in a strand of thought that goes from Augustine through Calvin and Jonathan Edwards that emphasizes that God provides a radically other horizon of action, that it is this transcendent horizon of action that judges all finite goals. But he’s equally rooted in two different strands of liberalism: The Social Gospel liberalism that aims for a just and equal society and the modernist liberalism that impels Niebuhr to insist that as far as possible every theological statement must be framed in naturalist, rather than supernaturalist terms. He doesn’t talk much about the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, but it’s clear that he’s read him and that the influence goes deep. It’s one of the influences that enables Niebuhr to easily dispense with supernaturalism as he uses the most traditional of premodern theological concepts.
A central theological conviction that Niebuhr does not let go of is that God is active in history. How this works is a task of discernment - difficult work. And Niebuhr’s rootedness in an Augustinian/Calvinist understanding of God means that that he will look for God at work in every aspect of history, including the most unpleasant. So, during World War Two, Niebuhr asked himself questions about how the war revealed God’s action. I’m not convinced I share Niebuhr’s answer - Niebuhr relies on an understanding of the crucifixion as salvific that my teacher Joanne Carlson Brown made it difficult for me to retain - but there’s a fundamental sense in which I look at the dire consequences of technological “progress” in visible ecocide and probable civilizational collapse and have to ask myself, “what kind of God does this historical process reveal?”
What Niebuhr saw in World War Two was the inevitable result of confusing the limited value of nationalism with the ultimate horizon of God. For Niebuhr, World War Two revealed that nationalism had become a kind of idol that set our moral compass too narrowly. He saw the war as a judgement on that process, a judgement that he saw in terms of crucifixion because in war it is the innocent - ordinary civilians who do not plan wars - who pay the price for the guilty. Here, I believe Niebuhr and Quakers part ways. H. Richard Niebuhr had a higher estimation of Quakers than did his brother Reinhold Niebuhr, who judged us as offensively naive, but H. Richard saw the contribution of Quakers as one important voice relativized by other voices. In the reading I did this week, I came across the following statement: “The coercionism of a highwayman differs as radically from that of a soldier as the non-resistance of a coward differs from that of a Quaker.”2 Quakers wouldn’t see the difference between a highwayman and a soldier as absolute as Niebuhr did, but the quote points toward Niebuhr’s insistence that context and meaning are more important ethical considerations than individual acts, and the way that Niebuhr tried to hold together the insights of those Christians who followed a just war tradition and those that held to pacifism as both revealing important partial truths that were grappling toward a larger truth.
I felt a need to revisit Niebuhr because I had an inkling that he could help me make sense of the way technology today is doing what nationalism did in the twentieth century. It’s putting us on a visible path of destruction - neither Greenpeace nor Greta Thunberg seem able to shout loud enough to get humanity to make a course correction - and somehow I have to make sense of this sense of futility. The realization that as a society we’ve essentially made technology an idol is clear enough. Niebuhr’s insistence that the biblical prophets were right about idols always failing - that also tracks. But the fact that his understanding of maintaining hope in a meaningful God in light of the cruelty of history depends on a pure acceptance of sacrifice as part of what guarantees that meaning means that I think I’ll have to keep looking for now.
Recently, I discussed the most popular, but perhaps least interesting of his books, Christ and Culture.
Jon Diefenthaler, ed. The Paradox of Church and World: Selected Writings of H. Richard Niebuhr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 333.