“How, indeed, is a mind to become conscious of its own bias when that bias springs from a communal flight from understanding and is supported by the whole texture of a civilization?. . . No problem is at once more delicate and more profound, more practical and perhaps more pressing.”
Bernard Lonergan[1]
The quest is for moral vision potent for forging societies in which the economic well-being of some is not bought by the blood of others, and in which humankind is not toxic to its planetary home. By what paths may we learn to see how our patterns of consumption, production, and investment—and the public policies that govern them—are linked to others’ poverty and to ecological devastation? What would kindle and sustain our capacity to recognize systemic evil, and to live toward the greater good, even when so doing may be costly?
The challenge is not merely unmasking systemic injustice, but doing so in ways that evoke moral action. Moral vision without action is not moral vision. What conditions of seeing will lead from awareness of exploitation to actions that dismantle it?
Enabling moral vision in this sense is the focus of this chapter. It proceeds in three parts. The first introduces “critical mystical vision.” The next dwells on one dimension of critical mystical vision, perception of “what could be.” The chapter’s third section argues that critical mystical vision entails a tectonic shift in the moral consciousness undergirding economic life as we know it.
Recognizing causal links between our wealth on the one hand and Earth’s demise and profound human suffering on the other, can be devastating and hence dangerous unless simultaneously we see something else. Seeing “what is,” when the view is of systemic evil, is morally empowering if accompanied by a second and a third form of vision.
The second kind of vision is seeing “what could be”—that is, more just and ecologically sound alternatives. “People can be morally and emotionally disgusted with what the system is doing but still cooperate because they see no alternative.”[2] Seeing alternative modes of economic life and movements that are living into them is vital to critical vision. A Chinese proverb cautions, “Unless we change direction, we will get where we are going.” Changing direction begs first recognizing, even dimly, alternative viable destinations. These two together—vision of “what is” and of “what could be”—I call critical seeing.
The third mode of vision, I refer to as “mystical vision.” By this I mean acknowledgment of sacred powers at work in the cosmos enabling life and love ultimately to reign over death and destruction. Mystical vision confirms what eco-theologian Sallie McFague refers to as “our hope against hope that our efforts on behalf of our planet are not ours alone but that the source and power of life in the universe is working in and through us for the well-being of all creation, including our tiny part in it.”[3]
“Critical mystical vision,” then, is a phrase to signify the union of vision in these three forms:
Christian ethics, the art-science of Christian morality, has at its heart the crucial task of holding these three in one lens. Vision of this sort is subversive because “it keeps the present provisional and refuses to absolutize it.”[4] Critical mystical vision reveals a future in the making and breeds hope for moving into it.
Why “critical”? “Critical” in this volume does not refer to its common meanings. Rather, it refers to a stream of social theorizing that may be seen as stemming from the Frankfurt school of social theory. The Frankfurt school emerged in Germany in part to counter the rise of fascism. “Critical” connotes an approach to understanding social reality that exposes and demystifies oppression and the power alignments and truth claims that rationalize it, rather than presupposing and thus reinscribing them. A critical approach exposes social structures as historically contingent and thus, at least theoretically, subject to human agency, rather than being natural and inevitable and thereby nontranscendable. Critical theory seeks to empower people for structural social change. In short, a critical approach seeks to reveal that “the way things are” is not “the way things must be.”
We cannot go where we cannot envision. Recognizing “what could be” comes from unearthing a phenomenon barely recognized in the dominant public discourse. It is the visionary and practical organizing of little-known groups throughout the world aimed at surviving, resisting, and transforming neoliberal global economic arrangements and the social and ecological destruction wrought by them. These people are constructing viable and vibrant alternatives.
Nothing imperils a more just future more than our tacit and often unacknowledged belief that such a future is not possible. “What are you writing?” queried a woman who saw me writing this manuscript in a coffee shop. I explained that I was trying to understand why we agree to live in ways that damage so many people worldwide through the injustice embedded in the global economy and through environmental destruction. Thinking she would not “get it,” I was humbled by her instant response: “I think,” she said, “people don’t want to see those things, because we don’t know any way out.”
However, as we will see here and in subsequent chapters, vast numbers of people and groups around the world are creating ways of life that earth can sustain and that do not impoverish some to the benefit of others. They are forging lives, institutions, and bodies politic in which huge transnational unaccountable corporations do not determine the distribution of water, seeds, and jobs. They are reshaping households, businesses, schools, and cities to live in harmony with Earth’s economy of life. They are building communities in which the well-being of humankind and otherkind trumps wealth accumulation. Public policies, practices of daily life, and re-constituted principles of economic life are the building blocks of this movement.
Paul Hawken and the Wise Earth Network that he founded conclude that “over one—and maybe even two—million organizations currently are working toward ecological sustainability and social justice.” “I believe this movement will prevail,” he writes. “It will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior.”[5] Peasants and other farmers, scientists, economists, factory workers, educators, elected officials, students, heathcare professionals, homemakers, educators, journalists, and more comprise this social force. Some are from communities of oppressed people. Others emerge from communities of conscience among highly privileged people. Profoundly needed is knowledge that they exist and recognition of the connections between them.
The following story illustrates a few small pieces of this pan-human movement. The remaining chapters and the vignettes spread throughout dig further. These stories are merely droplets in this fertile and growing river. They reveal the interplay of principles, policies, and practices. Note them at play in household life, institutional life, corporate and other business life, and government. Note too the rich variety in forms of action toward justice and sustainability.
If the public was aware, on a regular basis, of these movements and the rapidly growing number of people they represent, we would be far more likely to believe that alternatives are possible and are worth joining. That knowledge whittles away at the doors of denial and allows recognizing the economic and ecological violence embedded in our lives. Seeing “what could be” opens windows to seeing “what is.” Moreover, seeing “what could be” breeds the joy and freedom of moving in that direction. Indeed, seeing alternative paths is a crucial ingredient of moral power.
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The story of Free Trade and Sweatshops, begun in chapter 3, closed with Colleen pleased with her “good buy” on tank tops made in Mexico, and Maria Chantico in a sweatshop on Mexico’s northern border having been driven north by the impact of NAFTA.
Imagine that Colleen, the contented new owner of a sky-blue racerback tank top from an Old Navy store in New Hampshire, learns about the backstory to her purchase. She learns about Maria Chantico and her family, the reality of maquiladora life, and the consequences of NAFTA’s “free trade” doctrine. Once knowing, what can she do about the connection that she now knows exists between her and people like Maria Chantico and her family? How will her behaviors change?
Perhaps Colleen starts with some basic changes. She starts frequenting used clothing stores, and tries to curb her impetuous consumption of goods. But Colleen also knows that lifestyle changes are only one tool for dismantling immoral trade regimes and worker exploitation. In itself, it will not stop corporate abuses. She wants to act on another level and acquire more powerful tools. Colleen might learn from countless individuals, households, and communities that are taking concrete steps of resistance and rebuilding.
Some people put their economic weight into ending sweatshops and unfair trade through boycotts and investments in socially responsible companies and mutual funds, as well as selective buying. These people make a habit of knowing about supply chains and refusing to purchase items that are produced under oppressive conditions. In this they are aided by sources like Green America’s Guide to Ending Sweatshop Labor and The Better World Shopping Guide.[6] In stores, they fill out customer comment cards asking the company to work with its suppliers to make sure that workers are treated fairly. They buy coffee, tea, chocolate, produce, and crafts from companies that belong to the Fair Trade Federation. They ask questions before buying a product and let company management know that they’re asking. If they own stock, they vote by proxy to support shareholder resolutions that require improved labor policies. They ask companies to provide annual reports that account for a “triple bottom line”: not only financial, but also social and ecological. “We will only do business,” they are saying in myriad ways, “with companies that pay a living wage, provide safe working conditions, allow union organizing, and eliminate environmental degradation including waste for export.” By making these actions into regular “habits,” and teaching them to their children, they are creating a culture that expects just and sustainable business.
Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision to overturn limits on corporate spending, the movement to rein in corporate power at its roots is rapidly growing. More and more people are calling for a constitutional amendment that rescinds the rights of personhood granted to corporations by another Supreme Court decision in 1886. Colleen might join a national group—such as the Network of Spiritual Progressives or Move to Amend—that is organizing for such an amendment.
The student organization United Students against Sweatshops (USAS) formed in 1997 when college students, skeptical of NAFTA and free trade regimes, decided to act in solidarity with the struggles of working people around the world. These young people recognized that colleges and universities were licensing their logos and names to clothing companies such as Nike and Champion, and could therefore demand that these companies produce college apparel in factories that pay workers a living wage and respect workers’ rights to unionize. A procurement standard emerged called the “Designated Suppliers Program.” It is enforced by an independent monitoring agency called the Worker Rights Consortium, which assesses worker conditions and reports back to universities.
With chapters in 250 schools, the USAS is now the largest anti-sweatshop community in America. It did not come about easily. Early on, students from the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Georgetown, and Duke occupied presidents’ offices to draw attention to the issue, and students at Purdue completed an eleven-day hunger strike in order to persuade their school’s administration to adopt the Designated Suppliers Program. In March 2011, USAS launched a cross-country “Truth Tour” with U.S. students and workers from the Dominican Republic to highlight labor abuses by Sodexo, a global outsourcing giant.
Some actions are emerging at the town and city level. Norman, Oklahoma is situated on the edge of America’s prairielands. The town responded to a campaign by Green America, an organization that harnesses the economic power of consumers, investors, businesses, and the marketplace to promote a sustainable and just society. One way that Green America does this is by urging towns to join the international Fair Trade Town community. Norman was intrigued. An action group formed called Norman Fair Trade, which collaborated with local businesses, farmers, city council members, student organizations, faith-based organizations, and environmental groups to increase the availability and demand for Fair Trade products. Ajit Bhand, organizer with Norman Fair Trade, commented on the town’s motives for taking on this project: “Not only does it help local and small businesses, it also positively affects the lives of thousands of farmers and workers in other parts of the world.” [7]
In Florida, Claremont’s Community of Faith United Methodist Church has, like many churches in America, switched to Fair Trade coffee at their Sunday-morning fellowship hour. Fair trade coffee, chocolate, tea, rice, sugar, honey, wine, fresh fruit, and olive oil are increasingly accessible in stores throughout the U.S., as more shoppers keep asking for it. Efforts at responsible buying are complemented by larger initiatives such as Oxfam’s “Make Trade Fair” campaign.
With participation and donations from thousands of supporters, Oxfam influences corporate practices. Regarding coffee, for example, Oxfam urged large coffee companies to introduce a portion of Fair Trade Certified coffee to their product lines, which resulted in twice the annual U.S. Fair Trade coffee imports. Oxfam would not be able to exert leverage if it were not for supporters from around the world who back their actions. Twenty million people signed Oxfam’s international petition urging Congress to make trade fair.
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“Seeing” undertakings such as these and stepping into their current throws a bucket of cold water on the face of moral oblivion. It counters many of the factors identified in the previous chapter.
Recognizing systemic violence and the possibilities for a more equitable and Earth-honoring future is impeded by the privatized, victor-oriented, and anthropocentric moral consciousness that shapes the Western world. Developing “critical mystical vision” calls for profound shifts in moral consciousness. To that challenge we now turn.
Contradictions often illumine a way through murky problems. Here, the contradiction between the public or collective moral impact of our lives on the one hand, and pervasive perceptions of the moral life as a private matter on the other, is revealing. Collective human activity is shaping the material and cultural conditions of life. Yet, moral consciousness enacted in our society is, generally speaking, increasingly privatized. We practice the privatization of morality and deny our moral responsibility for collective morality, even while that collective activity has enormous moral consequences.[8]
For instance, the culture of the automobile—generated through many forms of corporate persuasion including legislative lobbies, campaign financing, and consumer persuasion—is a central feature of public life in the United States. The ecological consequences of the automobile obsession are infinitely public and costly. Yet we hold the absurd assumption that driving a large vehicle that produces enormous quantities of greenhouse gases is a matter of individual freedom, and that the move not to do so must depend upon individual conscience rather than on a move of public policy aimed at limiting global warming. Moral consciousness must confront the contradiction between the collective shaping of public life on the one hand, and our privatized sense of moral response on the other.
Here, we call for and sketch a shift to moral consciousness that: (1) perceives the world as interconnected; (2) seeks persistently and humbly to perceive reality through the narratives and experiences of subjugated people and peoples; and (3) locates human life and morality within Earth’s matrix of life, rather than outside of it.
While others have called for similar shifts in worldview, I relate these shifts specifically to moral consciousness. And I aver that they are required if we are to see more clearly the roots and consequences of ecological and economic violence. Moreover, I insist that such shifts have vast implications for the meaning of neighbor-love.
This contradiction between privatized moral consciousness and the inherently public moral impact of our lives presents a clue to morally responsible vision. It prescribes a shift in moral consciousness that would be an antidote to many ingredients of moral oblivion identified in the previous chapter. We consider three facets of that shift and then suggest a way of putting them into practice.
In the first place, the shift is away from the privatized sense of morality created by modernity’s “turn to the individual” as the primary unit of existence and neoliberalism’s fetishizing of it. The modern individualized moral consciousness allows us to assume that because I am not individually culpable in another’s suffering, I am innocent. An interconnected sense of morality, in contrast, recognizes that while I am I, I am not only I, but also am “we” and “us.” What I do as part of a larger body of people has moral consequences for which I am, to some extent, accountable. What I eat, how I heat my home, what I purchase, where I vacation, how I speak as part of a society in which these ways are common practice has moral impact even if my individual piece, isolated, does not. By “interconnected,” therefore, I mean not only awareness of the structural connections between me and others the world over, but also awareness of the moral weight of those connections.
A privatized moral consciousness has another related consequence. It is the subtle but engulfing persuasion to serve the well-being of self, family, and “tribe,” to the extent that the well-being of distant “others” becomes functionally irrelevant. This is nothing new. However, it is far more dangerous than ever before in human history because of the vastly expanded freedom and power of the world’s ultra rich to do just that.
The recent global financial meltdown demonstrates this expanded danger of freedom to pursue self-interest regardless of the cost to others or the Earth. That financial disaster was rooted in a global financial architecture (neoliberalism) structured to prioritize wealth accumulation by the ultra-wealthy above all else. And its taproot was a privatized moral consciousness that affirms “freedom” to accumulate personal wealth with little regard for the costs to others and to the Earth. Millions of people worldwide suffered and many died as a result.
Another crucial transformation in how we, the world’s over consumers, perceive morality is the ongoing attempt to recognize “the eyes through which we see” and to glimpse the world as it is known by people who are denied life’s basic necessities by the systems that deliver our material wealth. Societies paint reality from perspectives of those with power, the victors. Critical vision to meet the ecological-economic crisis of our day will open the doors of perception to reality as experienced by those whom we plunder or even destroy (within this society and beyond it), and to their authority in describing “what is going on.”
Feminist, womanist, and postcolonial social theorists have paved the way. They insist that social analysis produced by people in positions of privilege is limited by their failure to recognize that their ideas are shaped by those positions of privilege. A responsible moral consciousness must seek to stand “outside dominant thought patterns and to know something we could not have known without the tools of the outsider’s point of view.”[9] That is, we are to learn about what is and what could be from people whose lives are damaged or threatened by ours, and who are proposing alternatives. There is revealed the deeply disturbing truth from which we run. “If the perpetrators of injustice want to step into the truth of their lives,” writes Jürgen Moltmann, “they must learn to see themselves through the eyes of their victims.”[10] Perhaps the most unsavory revelation of a structural view of the world informed by voices from the underside of history is awareness that “privilege and oppression do not simply coexist side by side. Rather, the suffering and unearned disadvantage of subordinate groups are the foundation for the privileges of the dominant group.”[11]
In short, humanity and the planet now need wisdom born on the underbelly of power and privilege. Moral wisdom for a humane future will be learned by listening to people and places who suffer from the ecological and social exploitation of our day, and by putting their wisdom into conversation with other moral sources.
This valid and vital claim also is complex and messy. Feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway says it well. “To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic.”[12] The problems are countless. Who has the right to determine what is “below” or what are the “margins”? How are we to locate and see from social sites that we never have imagined and that we may not even know exist? One cannot “be” a colonized indigenous person, a poisoned river, a displaced campesino if one is not. Furthermore, the standpoints of the subjugated are infinitely multiform and conflicting, and they are not “innocent positions.”[13]
The intention to see and learn from standpoints on the underside of one’s own privilege, though crucial, is also audacious and presumptuous unless accompanied by admitting the inherent dangers. How am I to “learn from” without repeating colonializing assumptions of my right to possess what “they” have, in this case knowledge or wisdom? And what of the dangers of patronizing and silencing when I try to communicate another’s story? The effort to see from the margins demands accountability.
Yet another problem lies in the tendency to learn “about” rather than “from.” The difference is the difference between the verbs saber and conocer in the Spanish language. The former means to “know about.” The latter is to “know” as being in relationship. The former is safer, less risky, less demanding than the latter. And often to know about a people or situation is far easier than actually to “know” that people or situation. The former is passed through a third party—be the medium a person, website, or book. It then bears the inherent danger of intending to represent the other while unknowingly misrepresenting. All in all, “from below” or “from the margins” is not an uncomplicated visual lens.
Nevertheless, it is imperative because the magnitude of evil is known most fully by those who experience it, and by their stories that reveal my participation in it. Beyond this, a surefire antidote to hopelessness is to encounter and act with people who are indeed impoverished or otherwise hurt by our economic or ecological violence and who are going forward in hope to resist it and build alternatives. Becoming an “ally” ignites hope and with it, moral agency.[14]
Finally, the requisite shift in moral consciousness includes moving from our anthropocentric to an emerging ecocentric perception of the world and of morality. By ecocentric I do not mean necessarily prioritizing the well-being of Earth over that of humans. Such prioritizing by a person of the Global North is morally questionable, given that so many of Earth’s human beings still are denied the basic necessities for human life. The shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric consciousness does not refer to a shift in what gets priority. It means a shift in how we fundamentally see the human in relationship to the rest of creation. It is a move from assuming that all of life centers around the human, to recognizing that this is biologically not true. And it is a move to expand the moral universe beyond the human.
Moving from anthropocentric to ecocentric perceptions of reality is not, in itself, adequate. Alone, it would not address the power asymmetries within and between human societies. Indian Christian ethicist George Zachariah says it well: “Environmental ethics that locates the earth crisis in anthropocentrism that can be rectified by interconnectedness, relationships, community and the like” is sorely mistaken. The crisis of earth is also a “crisis of prevailing social relations,” by which he means in particular relations of domination.[15]
Ecocentric moral consciousness will perceive the “exquisite interconnectivity of all life” and its implications for morality.[16] That interconnectedness renders humankind first and foremost a part of nature and its economy, rather than apart from these. Moral obligation and even moral agency extend beyond the human to the greater community of life. The purpose of economic life is not only production and distribution, but also the well-being of Earth’s ecosystems.[17]
Such a sense of morality recognizes that “I” and “we” do not act apart from our literally countless relationships with other species and elements. They enable every breath we take. Not even a twitch of my muscle is possible without the aid of other creatures and the elements that give them life. And all that I do has impact on the other-than-human conglomerates of organic and inorganic molecules making home on this planet. D. John Chelladurai, Director of the India Peace Center in Nagpur, expresses eloquently this ecocentric dimension of the shift in moral consciousness. He writes:
The five elements . . . make us shareholders of the same body. The oxygen we consumed ten minutes before is now part of our body. We can no more distinguish it as oxygen. It has gone into the remotest interior of our body and merged with it to become an integral part of the body. . . . The oxygen we consumed just now was released a while before by a plant close to us. Before it was released, that oxygen was part of the plant’s body. That which was the body of a plant is now the body of me.
Blood is our lifeline, an integral part of our being. The blood cells in our body have a life span of forty to one hundred and twenty days. Then they are eliminated from our body through excretion and urination. The epithelial cells constantly are eroded and washed out of our body. Every day when we bathe, we remove a thin layer of our body that is flushed out down the gutter. The cell that was ‘I’ travels through the gutter and reaches a canal or a pond in the outskirts, settles in the tank bed, disintegrates into amino acids and sucrose, glucose etc. Now ‘I’ am absorbed by the grass that grows on the banks, and the grass is now eaten by a cow, now the milk of that cow is sold in our neighbourhood, the man across the road consumes that milk. . . . This way there is a definite passage of our individual body into different bodies around us. . . . Don’t we hold common body? What is true is we do not know how much of our body parts are exchanged with our neighbor with whom we are ill at ease.[18]
Wherein lies the necessity of this shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric moral consciousness? In the most pragmatic terms, self-interest as a species warrants the change. We, the human ones, are dependent, in every moment on millions of other species without which we would die. Our lives depend on thousands of unseen organisms living on and in our bodies, thousands more in a foot of soil, the trees of the Amazon rainforest. Yet our numbers, consumption levels, and disregard for the other-than-human are destroying species and life-support systems crucial to human health and survival. To continue in this disregard may be to write our death sentence as a species.
Not only self-interest but also social justice, and hence morality itself, demand the move to reinstate the human world into Earth’s world (in particular, to resituate human economies into Earth’s economy). As we have seen, social degradation and ecological degradation are inextricably linked. Ecological degradation produces social inequity in the forms of climate injustice and environmental racism. If, therefore, an expanded sense of morality is requisite for arresting the Earth crisis, then justice itself demands that expansion.
Theological integrity too prompts this move to a non-anthropocentric moral framework. In the creation stories in Genesis, God declares that creation is “good” long before human creatures appear in the story. And an ancient Christian eschatological assumption claims that the “already and not yet” reign of God includes the other-than-human parts of creation.
The shift to an ecocentric understanding of reality goes further. The lifeweb of which we are a part is not merely a system of connectedness and interdependence, but also, in a sense, a system of ontological sameness. We, as every other thing, living and nonliving, are offspring of the same parent that flared forth some 13.7 billion years ago in the cosmic event known as the “big bang.” We are “distant cousins” to the stars and “close relatives” of myriad species extant, extinct, and yet to come.[19]
This would be startling enough were it to stop here, with humans sharing molecular composition, interdependence, intrinsic worth, and ultimate salvation with the other-than-human, while retaining sole status as the species with political agency. Yet the ecoshift in morality extends even further. Eco-theology and ecological ethics are uncovering or recovering the agency of the other-than-human.[20] The Hebrew scriptures indicate the powerful agency of the wind, mountains, water, and more. They too are called upon by God to undertake the crucial task of witnessing to the power and presence of God.
Moral consciousness expanded to include the other-than-human is fraught with complexity. To illustrate: How are we to understand moral subjectivity in the other-than-human? On what grounds do specific moral values and obligations apply differently to humans than to other-than-humans? What moral constraints ought be placed on human beings in light of our sameness with and dependence upon otherkind? These and related conundrums illustrate crucial work to be done in Christian ethics and other fields if we are to develop a sense of morality that extends beyond the human.
The call for privileging perspectives from the margins of power discussed in the previous section alters dramatically from an ecocentric moral perspective. The Earth crisis has moved the “margins” and the “underside.” If moral wisdom is to be found on the underside of dominant power structures, then the other-than-human has wisdom to communicate. (I am not suggesting that nature is a model of morality. Such a claim would have to ignore many processes that are natural but certainly not normative for human morality—predation, unchecked disease, and so on.)
How will we hear, from voices not human, wisdom for living in sync with Earth’s needs? How can we conceptualize perceiving and learning from other-than-human perspectives? Conversion to Earth-honoring lifeways beckons the church to explore more fully and bring to public use the biblical testimony that God calls upon the creatures and elements of Earth to “testify,” “witness,” “minister” (Ps. 104:4); convey God’s message (Ps. 104:4); and praise God (Ps. 148).
Critical vision for a just and sustainable future will venture into this uncharted terrain of asking how human creatures may hear moral wisdom spoken in “languages” of otherkind. Practices and theory shaped by this principle are foreign beyond imagining for people who have assumed that the knowledge of dominant sectors mediated by rational discourse is the most valid knowledge. The path toward just and sustainable living will make provocative leaps in ways of knowing. The foremost may be to recognize the profound “otherness” of moral knowing marked by the contours of the Earth rather than of the human. Learning to negotiate this terrain in an Earth community is a fascinating and formidable challenge for the “uncreators.”
This move in moral consciousness is a requisite for seeing more clearly the roots and consequences of the economic and ecological violence that binds our lives. Equally important, are the implications of this move for neighbor-love. Such a shift in moral consciousness calls for rethinking neighbor-love, to be explored in the final four chapters.
Such a way of seeing the world has precedents in valiant historical efforts against oppressive social arrangements. The shift in moral consciousness that I suggest has its early stages in the second half of the twentieth century, if not before. The 1950s found German social theorist Erich Fromm seeking to unearth the roots of widespread complicity with the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. His findings attribute that acquiescence in part to an “individualized view” of life, an inability to perceive the broader societal dimensions of personal life. He called for “a structuralized picture of the world” as a necessary ingredient in action for social change toward “a social order governed by the principles of equality, justice and love.”[21] A structuralized view of the world “interprets individual experience in terms of broader social and economic forces,” analyzing “private problems and personal dilemmas as structurally produced.”[22] Fromm held that the lack of “structuralized picture of the world . . . [paralyzes] the ability to think critically.”
In 1959 the American sociologist C. Wright Mills coined the term “sociological imagination” for the capacity to connect the experiences of individual life with broader social and historical forces. He recognized the trauma of ordinary people attributing their difficulties to personal circumstances while, in fact, their lives were tossed about by circumstances of social history such as wars, industrialization, and macroeconomic developments. By recognizing that seemingly private troubles are manifestations of larger societal circumstances, people would see that change in personal life required political action and could seek to become politically engaged.
Subsequently, political theologies arising in Germany and liberation theologies beginning in Latin America insisted that work for justice requires social analysis, analysis of the historical and structural roots of poverty and oppression. The early decades of liberation theologies paid special attention to uncovering the players and power arrangements that enabled wealthy and powerful—yet relatively small—social sectors to accumulate enormous wealth by exploiting and subduing the majority of people who were forced into abject poverty.
Liberation theologians were not the first theologians to insist that Christian moral responsibility demands close and critical attention to the structural dynamics that determine the distribution of economic resources. “The lack of thinking in economic terms is fatal to a sense of reality, and every Christian is under orders to learn how to think in these terms.” The voice is Vida Scudder, a late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century Episcopalian churchwoman and professor of literature at Wellesley College. Scudder was an economically privileged United States citizen. Having spent much time in the burgeoning Settlement House movement, seeking to help people in poverty, Scudder decried Christians’ tendency to see poverty as a malady affecting individuals that could be addressed primarily through helping those individuals. Christian faith, she insisted, calls people to see the social structural roots of poverty, and to engage actively in advocacy for systemic change. Scudder insisted on action for structural change as a necessary and integral dimension of Christian faith.
Fromm’s “structuralized picture of the world,” Mills’s “sociological imagination,” liberation theology’s “social analysis,” and Scudder’s insistence on “thinking in economic terms” all demystify social systems that accumulate wealth for some at the expense of poverty and oppression for others. These movements have been invaluable. Efforts to dismantle social justice in its many insidious forms are indebted to them.
These early- and mid-century admonitions to a structural sense of morality, important as they are, bear two lethal flaws. First, they prescribed and described a structural worldview that was not a view of the world, but rather a view of the human world. The rest of creation was a kind of stage on which the “real” drama, the story of humankind, unfolded. Clearer perception of the economic and ecological violence infecting our lives requires a view of reality that encompasses the earth as well as its human societies.
The other faultline is epistemological and stems from socio-ecological location.[23] With the exception of many liberation theologians, the aforementioned theorists occupied the world of privileged European-Americans and Europeans. They assumed a worldview constructed by the experience of people at the centers of power or privilege. Perspectives from the underside of history went unacknowledged.
The contradiction between collective moral impact and individualized moral consciousness suggests a key to seeing the connections between “those who have too much” and “those who have not enough.” The key is a move to picturing life and morality through a lens that situates human social systems within Earth’s larger systems, recognizes the impact of our collective actions, and favors perspectives from the margins of power. This moral consciousness transgresses how we have been trained to understand the world: with human beings as the centerpiece of life and with history’s winners as the determiners of what is normal, socially respectable, good, and true.
Enough of abstractions. What does such a moral consciousness imply in practical terms? Here we illustrate with the practice of “ecological-economic justice literacy.”
People in American society tend to hold in mind a fundamental economic query that in varied articulations pervades virtually all aspects of life: “Am I getting a good buy on this purchase? Can I get a ‘better deal’ elsewhere?” These questions influence what we buy and what we do.
“Ecological-economic justice literacy” means that another set of questions will play an equally determinative role: “What is the ecological impact of this article of clothing, hotel, or food? And to what extent and how does its production, transport, use, or consumption exploit marginalized people who have little power to counter that oppressive impact?”[24] In simple terms, what does this “cost,” including the cost of greenhouse gas production, other ecological costs, and the costs to people exploited to keep the monetary price low? Such questions enable recognizing what is masked by structural evil—ways in which our collective lives unwittingly bring death and destruction to others, and ways in which our lives could bring well-being to ourselves, the earth, and others.
Someone once asked the Dalai Lama, “What is the most important meditation for us now?” He replied, “critical thinking followed by action.”[25] “Ecological-economic justice literacy” is a mighty form of critical thinking. It means gaining the tools to find out whether or not specific aspects and activities of our lives indirectly exploit or oppress other people, or damage Earth’s regenerative capacities, and how. Moreover, given the magnified collective impact that we have, it means learning to recognize that collective impact. That is, the question broadens from, “Does my eating this hamburger damage other people’s life chances?” to “Does our societal practice of regularly eating beef damage other people’s life chances?”
This step into “ecological-economic justice literacy” produces jolting results.
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Beef production plays a significant role in the emission of three of the four global warming gases: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. [26] From “field to fork,” the long production chain of beef releases greenhouse gases through the burning of forests for cattle pasture, the incineration of agricultural waste from feed crops, the mechanized agricultural production and petrochemical-based fertilization of feed crops for cattle, and the significant methane release from fermenting manure, flatulence, and belching of approximately two billion cows across the surface of the earth. [27] Methane and nitrous oxide trap more solar heat than carbon dioxide; the former has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of carbon dioxide and the latter has 296 times the GWP of CO2. [28] A single dairy cow produces about 75 kilograms of methane per year—the equivalent of about 1.5 metric tons of CO2. [29] The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported that livestock is responsible for 18 percent of global warming emissions. [30] Furthermore, a great deal of protein goes into producing beef. According to a Cornell report, every year “an estimated 41 million tons of plant protein is fed to U.S. livestock to produce an estimated 7 million tons of animal protein for human consumption.” [31]
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Making ecological-economic justice literacy integral to daily life seems at first glance overwhelming. Indeed it would be if undertaken alone. However, uncovering the ecological and social justice consequences of our lifeways and building that knowledge into common consciousness is not the work of individuals alone. It is collective work, people collaboratively generating the wisdom they need to live responsibly. This means incorporating such inquiry into church life, healthcare, childrearing, educational systems, and dinner conversations. It means weaving these questions into the body of “tips for living” that we commonly pass from friend to friend. “Ecological-economic justice literacy” implies making questions about the consequences of our individual and collective economic practices and policies a fundamental frame of reference while treading the hallways of everyday life.
Ecological-economic justice literacy calls for shifting the information-gathering habits of daily life—frequenting websites and journals that provide information about the justice implications of products and activities. And it implies a shift in public discourse on individual and institutional levels and in the discourse of faith. In teaching this shift to my students, I have instituted a set of “reality-revealing questions” for them to weave into daily life. The first is this: Who benefits and who loses from “the way things are”? “The way things are” could refer to a purchase, a public policy, a power structure, or more.
The economic side of “ecological-economic justice literacy” is arguably integral to Christian faith; it is a tool for responding to God’s love and God’s call to “love neighbor.” This tool enables unmasking structural evil; it enables discerning where our lives serve to “love neighbor” and where they do quite the opposite. For this reason, economic justice literacy ought to be integral to Christian education. In Vida Scudder’s words, “[T]he lack of thinking in economic terms is fatal to a sense of reality, and every Christian is under orders to learn how to think in these terms.”
“Ecological literacy,” the ability to “read” the language and realities of Earth’s life-systems and how they interact with human factors, is equally key to the life of faith. If God loves this world, found it essentially good, and calls upon it to witness, testify, and praise God’s self, then how wildly absurd that many of us have assumed no need to understand how it works (with the exception of the scientists among us), or to interpret its languages.
Until my recent incipient efforts to the contrary, I have journeyed through life ecologically illiterate and have perpetrated that illiteracy in my students. I have not known that my body is nearly 60 percent water and that the salt content of my blood mirrors that of Earth’s seas. I did not realize that a single gram of forest soil contains about ten billion individual organisms—and only four thousand or so are known to scientists. Never did I imagine that the cells in my body contain atoms that were once part of stars.
More elusive than learning about the Earth and its life-systems is the question of learning from them. What—in practical terms—does it mean to “learn” moral wisdom, and how to live from voices that are not human? Of this, modern humans know very little. We will forge new (or reclaim ancient) epistemological pathways. This will mean learning and teaching our children (or learning from them) to decipher Earth’s other-than-human languages no less than we teach them to understand the humanly created languages of ATM machines, computers, and college entrance exams. As we will see in the following chapter, hope and moral wisdom lie not only in the human but also in the other-than-human parts of creation. How great, then, will be our gain in learning to access that hope and wisdom.
The move to ecological literacy is underway. Ethicist Dan Spencer initiated ecological autobiography exercises for his students, and he identifies “ecological location” along with social location. Elementary school children in Seattle work with salmon and their life-cycles vis-à-vis the city’s waterways. The Earth Bible series explores scripture from perspectives of the Earth. “Green Sisters” (Catholic sisters dedicated to hearing the cry of the earth, healing the earth, and developing religious culture that enables both) offer “earth-literacy training.”[32]
Biomimicry, the art and science of imitating nature’s designs for human use, has gained traction in recent years. Airplane designers are inspired by the tiny bumps on the edge of a whale fin called tubicles, which could increase airplane efficiency by 32 percent and save significant fossil fuels. Peacocks emit color in their feathers not with pigment, but through carefully designed shapes that emit a certain hue when light passes through—potentially reducing our use of harmful dyes.
In short, if our economic policies and practices mean life and death for people thousands of miles across the globe, and threaten Earth’s life-systems, then we must develop tools to understand the impact of what we are doing and the possibility of alternatives. From a theological perspective, if repentance calls for seeing structural sin that is craftily hidden, then repentance also calls for literacy in the fields of that sin, including ecological and economic violence. Literacy of this kind is a way to practice a transformed moral consciousness.
The individualized, anthropocentric, and victor-oriented moral consciousness shaping the modern world obscures critical vision—our sense of “what is” and “what could be.”
A transformation in moral consciousness is called for. It will be less privatized and anthropocentric, and will seek persistently to know reality as it is experienced on the losing side of power and privilege. Such a consciousness will acknowledge the moral consequences of collective human actions as well as individual actions.
If critical mystical vision entails three forms of seeing—“what is,” “what could be,” and “the sacred powers of life at work in the world to bring wholeness for all”—then it remains to consider the third of these, what I call the “mystical vision” dimension of critical mystical vision. Like seeing “what could be,” seeing sacred healing power at play is an antidote to the denial, hopelessness, and the powerlessness that may ensue with daring to see “what is.” “Mystical vision” and the hope it brings claim our attention in the next chapter. Before going there, we return to a life story begun in chapter 3. In hearing it, be alert for the shifts in moral consciousness traced in the current chapter.
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This story in chapter 3 revealed Freddie’s “petroleum addiction” and her unawareness of it. It revealed also the impact of the oil industry on people of low-lying coastal lands, Mississippi’s Cancer Ally, and the Niger Delta, and those impacted by U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf.
The bicycle—that 150-year-old, human-powered, pollution-free, efficient mode of transport—is rising as a worthy and increasingly popular antidote to our societal obsession with automobiles and our petroleum addiction. Cyclists and bike commuters are challenging the idea that cars are necessary, that they are a human right, and that they control the streets of our cities and towns. They challenge the idea that there is “no other way” to get around.
The Pedal People Cooperative in Northampton, Massachusetts is a human-powered hauling and delivery service. This small business hauls up to three hundred pounds of residential and municipal trash, recycling, and compost on trailers hitched to the back of bicycles, and also runs a grocery and diaper delivery service. The business is growing, and many customers prefer the bike-trash haulers to the loud, polluting garbage trucks. Watching people pedal away with huge trailers full of trash has also served as a deterrent to producing large amounts of waste. “We try to help people reduce the amount of trash they make,” explains one Pedal People employee. “[We] encourage reusing and reducing what people think they need to live on.” [33]
Individual lifestyle choices alone cannot bring about communities that consume far less oil. For that to happen, public policy is needed. The movement to reduce automobile use through biking is a good example. One gray morning as I biked from home to work, a white van backing out of a driveway collided with my bike, sending me sprawling onto the road. Fortunately I was fine, and my bike was undamaged, but the collision stunned me. I spent the rest of the day thinking about how much worse it could have been, and how the accident might have been different. We could live in a city with no bike lanes, no helmet laws, and no driver (and biker) education around sharing the roads. The driver of the van could have argued that I was at fault, that bikes shouldn’t be on the roads, and the law might have been on her side. But instead, our city values bike commuters and creates public policies that encourage them. We have bike lanes, road signs, rails-to-trails programs, driver education, bike-sharing programs, bike rack installations by the city, bike racks on public buses, and bicycle advocacy organizations. As a result, we increasingly see parents with young children in buggies or bike seats, kids biking alongside their parents, and panniers full of groceries as a shopper returns home via bicycle. Without public policies in place, biking would be much riskier—so risky that most citizens might decide it’s not worth it, and stick to their cars.
Bicycles are only one manner in which communities are addressing our oil addiction, and contributing to a shifting moral consciousness. Alternative energy movements are gaining traction in cities and countries across the world. NativeSUN is a solar project of the Hopi Foundation, an organization by and for Hopi people.[34]The Foundation makes photovoltaic cell panels affordable to the low-income reservation community through a revolving loan fund. Over three hundred homes now have solar panels on the roof. The project reflected the assessment of the Hopi community regarding its needs. Author and activist Winona LaDuke summarized the guiding mentality as: “Use less, produce what you can on your own, and be cognizant of the implications of each decision on others.”[35]In these few words, LaDuke eloquently voices the call to ecological-economic justice literacy.
And what of the places far from home where oil is extracted and refined? How can we practice a collective moral consciousness that attunes itself to the lives of the workers and residents in the Niger River Delta? Rehabilitating our oil addiction in our own homes is certainly necessary. There are also ways to influence the inhumane living and working conditions for communities in Nigeria, the Mississippi River Delta, and other places on earth where oil is extracted or refined.
Amnesty International, for example, runs a campaign that would force the Nigerian government to hold oil companies accountable for the oil spills and gas flares that kill the fish, pollute the water and air, and endanger the people of the Niger River Delta. [36] According to Amnesty International, multinational oil companies such as Shell, Total, and Chevron, as well as the Nigerian government are jointly responsible for gas flaring, but no one is held accountable. Amnesty International teams have now collected over ten years’ worth of satellite imaging, and mapping data revealing the close proximity of gas flares to waters where people drink, bathe, fish, and wash their clothes. When representatives meet with government officials and oil company officials to urge an end to gas flaring, they do so armed not only with collected data but the names of thousands of citizens in the U.S. and across the world who have signed a petition indicating that they know and care about what is happening there. Without that participation of individual citizens, these initiatives would not work.
Some people choose to organize around public policy change and corporate change. 350.org is a global, decentralized, volunteer-led, grassroots movement of campaigns, organizing, and mass public actions to solve the climate crisis. The movement is active in 188 countries and at one point initiated a campaign to address the problem with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is notoriously supportive of a gas-guzzling America. It fought to weaken clean air standards, [37] lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, and opposed a hazardous waste dumping ban. The Chamber petitioned the EPA to do nothing about climate change, arguing that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” [38]
Recognizing that the Chamber of Commerce no longer represents many businesses in America, especially small businesses, 350.org is committed to organizing small businesses to weaken the Chamber’s grip on political life. “Maybe,” the organizers write, “we can finally get rid of the huge subsidies to our fossil fuel industries. Maybe we can finally get a law passed to start dealing with the worst crisis our planet has ever faced.”
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