The conciliar process for ‘Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation’ was set on foot at the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver in 1983.[1] What is at stake in the ‘preservation of creation’? The ecological theme was not new in the ecumenical movement. As early as 1961 the American Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler demanded a new ‘Christology of nature’ for the redemption of creation, on the basis of Colossians 1.20. In early Christianity the salient point of concern was Christ and the powers of nature, to which human beings felt they were delivered up. Today it is Christ and the human beings to whom nature is delivered up. In the ecumenical community, Orthodox theologians have always maintained a sacramental view of nature, because they hope for the eschatological deification of the cosmos. At the General Assembly of the WCC in Nairobi in 1975, in which I participated, the close connection between the social exploitation of human labour and the exploitation of the resources of nature was recognized and criticized. Because social and ecological justice correspond, ‘a just, participatory and sustainable society’ was formulated as a model for an ecumenical ethics.
Some people criticized the concept of ‘the preservation of creation’ because only God can preserve his creation; others rejected it because ‘preservation’ has a very conservative flavour and fails to indicate innovative connotations. The original English phrase was ‘the integrity of creation’; but this is equally open to misunderstanding, because creation in its present condition is not ‘integer’ or untouched. It is not complete and intact. It is imperfect, in need of redemption, and open to the future. According to Gen. 3.17, a curse lies over the earth. So the earth together with human beings waits for its redeeming integrity.
If we take as a formula ‘the preservation of creation’, and if we look at it more closely, this can mean only the part of creation at the disposal of the human being, not the universe and not heaven. The earth is to be preserved from depredations by human beings. Is that ‘conservative’? No, if progress leads to the annihilation of life on this earth, hope for the future of life lies in the preservation of the earth’s sustainability. But this preservation has its own progress into the future of life, for it will further the earth’s sustainability in order to anticipate the future of ‘the new earth on which righteousness dwells’. In this sense ‘the preservation of creation’ must be called innovative through and through.
Economic growth and industrial development are thought of in terms of the linear temporal scheme of progress. There, past and future are in imbalance. But continuance can only be acquired if more and more equilibriums and cycles are introduced into the growth and development, in order to give them stability. It is only that which can be ‘recycled’ which does not disappear, and serves ‘the preservation’ of the earth’s organism, the structure of which is itself cyclic and rhythmical. In order to further the earth’s sustainability, we must first accept the divine promises which indwell in the earth. The consequence is acceptance of the life-furthering patience of the earth, with which down to the present day it endures the human race and its civilizations—and this acceptance must precede definition of the role of human beings as protectors and stewards of the earth. Not least, it means acting in harmony with the spirit of the earth, so that ‘the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field’ (Isa. 32.15-16).
I would formulate the motto for ecumenical ethics as follows: ‘For freedom and justice; for freedom and the future of the earth’.
For our sake? For its own sake? For God’s sake? Today many people are aware of nature only as the human ‘environment’, as if it were there solely for the sake of human beings. The egoism latent in the widely used term ‘environment’ already eliminates nature as a value of its own, even when the word is used in combination with the word ‘protection’, as in ‘environmental protection’. The United Nations Earth Charter says: ‘[A]ll beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings’.
Consequently, the following declaration should be incorporated into the constitution of democratic states, as a national goal: ‘The natural world stands under the protection of government. It must be protected for its own sake from exploitation and destruction by human beings’. Major industrial and economic projects must be compatible with nature; it is only then that they will be ‘environmentally compatible’ for human beings too.
Theological declarations about nature must go further than this. Nature must not just be respected and protected for its own sake. If God is believed in as its creator, it will then also be recognized as his possession (Psalm 24), and it is then as God’s possession that nature must be respected. It follows from this that human beings together with other living things have a right of use over nature, but not the right of ownership. Whoever claims the right of use over nature (and that is just what we do as long as we live) must respect the owner’s rights. He is not permitted to damage or destroy the owner’s property. So if the creator is God, it is for God’s sake that nature must be respected, cultivated and furthered.
This has direct relevance where the modern land seizure is concerned. Because in the future food is going to be scarce and therefore more expensive, what Der Spiegel described[2] as the great race for land has begun. Wealthy nations and societies buy up arable land and pastures in poor countries in order to secure future profits for themselves. To take an example: the Sudan has leased out 3.5 million acres of prime farmland to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for ninety-nine years, and is nevertheless at the same time the greatest recipient of international aid: millions of people are dependent on the provision of food from abroad, This modern land sale will lead to famines in the future. But the people’s right to food sovereignty is a human right. No government has the right to sell or lease out the land of its people in order to enrich itself. Foreign investors are only interested in quick profits; once the soil has been exhausted they move on like locusts. Anyone who participates in predatory raids of this kind is guilty of a crime against humanity and against nature. The use of the land belongs to the person who looks after it, cultivates it and protects it.
In its preamble, the German Animal Protection Act of 1986 calls animals the human being’s ‘fellow creatures’. This definition does not apply only to animals, but also to the living space the fruitful earth provides for its living things. The earth is also a ‘fellow creature’, since it is the world created beforehand for the living, and it must be respected and protected like a mother. The person who protects the earth for God’s sake protects it for its own sake too and, finally, for the sake of human beings. He is protecting the creature human being from self-destruction.
The worldwide acceptance of human rights has led to the international warrant for arrest and to international tribunals for the prosecution of crimes against humanity, such as genocide and war crimes. Crimes against nature will one day have to be similarly prosecuted. Crimes against humanity and crimes against nature are often connected—after all, war is the worst pollution of nature. But for this the rights of nature must be assigned the same rank as human rights. The catastrophes of the two world wars in the twentieth century were followed in 1948 by the recognition of universal human rights. So in the coming ecological catastrophes in nature there will have to be an obligatory declaration of the universal rights of nature. The right of nature to live must be put beside the political goals of political freedom and social justice. An ecological democracy will try to balance out these three objectives.
A deeper intention is inherent in God’s covenant with his people, humanity, with all living things and the earth: God makes the covenant with his people ‘in order to dwell among the people of Israel’ (Ex. 29.45; Jer. 7.2; Ezek. 37.27; 2 Cor. 6.16): God will in the end ‘dwell among his peoples’ (Rev. 21.3). He lives ‘among those who are of a contrite and humble spirit’ (Isa. 57.15). So he lives ‘in the sanctuary’, in the temple in Jerusalem (1 Chron. 24.25; Ps. 9.14; 74.2; Joel 3.21), and in an extended sense in the whole creation: ‘Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool’ (Acts 7.48–50). In concrete terms this means ‘You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell ‘ (Num. 35.34). Summing up, we can say that God’s purpose in the creation of the world and in the covenant with Israel and the peoples is to make a cosmic temple in which he himself can live and come to rest. The ‘Indwelling’, the Shekinah, is the goal of all the creating, preserving, liberating and redeeming in history.
This is also the all-pervading motif in the way Christ and the Holy Spirit are presented in the New Testament: the Spirit descends on Jesus and ‘dwells’ in him (John 1.32); the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us (John 1.14); in the humiliated and exalted Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2.9); the Holy Spirit dwells in the community of Christ’s people (1 Cor. 6.19); that is his dwelling-place.
So if the goal of creation, the covenant, and the kingdom of God is his indwelling, this must also be the goal of the way his world is treated and ruled by his image, the human being. The purpose of the charge to ‘subdue the earth’ is that human beings may live and remain on this earth, and that all created things on earth should be cared for and allowed to grow. The deeper meaning of the scientific investigation of the world is not its domination, subjugation and exploitation, but the community between human beings and nature. Cognition means recognition—to know means to recognize, to accept. That is true for nature too. We only know in so far as we love, said Augustine. We do not know by way of subjugation and exploitation, for that is war with nature. We know through affection not through acquisition. Knowledge may be power, as Francis Bacon proclaimed so as to restore the god-like position of human beings in the world. But human beings will only arrive at wisdom when they come to rest, and let nature grow—if they live on the earth and want to remain there. The interest that is the driving power behind knowledge is then no longer to use and exploit the forces of nature. The driving concern will be to live together with nature—that is to say, peace with the earth.
This paradigm change in the interests motivating knowledge has far-reaching consequences for the hermeneutics of nature, for the meaning we give to the sciences and technologies, as well as for the civilizations and cultures of the nations and the economy of the earth.
The ecological crisis is not just a catastrophe in nature; it is also a catastrophe of present-day human civilization, whether that civilization is organized socialistically or capitalistically. It does not have merely global consequences but personal ones too. ‘Think globally—act locally!’ Personal lifestyle has global consequences, and global changes reach into personal life. An ‘earth ethics’ therefore includes the way the earth’s inhabitants shape their lives. By a lifestyle we mean the façon de vivre, the form which life acquires through the way it is led. This form is shaped by social demands as well as by personal decisions. In a lifestyle the ethos of a given society and the personal ethos of individuals overlap. If people adapt to the ethos of their society, there are no changes; if they withdraw into themselves the result is solitariness. In both cases we have to do with losses of freedom. A responsible lifestyle always develops out of debates with expectations from the side of society, and the expectations of a society are dependent on responses by the persons concerned. Adaptation and resistance peg out the debates individuals have to stand up to. The form a life takes will acquire its character in a field of relationships: the person and his or her bodiliness; the person and the community; older and younger generations.
If we ask about a new ecological lifestyle in the framework of an earth ethics, we come up against the need for an alternative lifestyle3, for life as it has been practised up to now in the capitalist industrial societies is one of the main reasons for the ecological catastrophes threatening our world. If we don’t succeed in finding an alternative lifestyle, then we shall not succeed in rebuilding industry and the economy ecologically, and we shall not be able to check or avert the climate catastrophe. Everyone living in the modern industrial societies is experiencing the ecological crises at first hand.
A new culture of moderation demands honest householding. If we live beyond our means, future generations, the so-called developing countries and nature will have the job of paying off our debts. Anyone who lives at the expense of others in this way is living unfairly. If the major nations are doing so because of their immense national debts, they have to be viewed as dictators. Economic growth, which the modern growth fetishists worship, has long ceased to be an indicator for the well-being of the people.
The suggestions I make here for a simple lifestyle belong to the context of my own world, and this has been moulded by the modern industrial society of the German Federal Republic, the European community and the Western world. They are not meant for the poor in countries of the Third World. In countries existing under the shadow of the industrial nations, an alternative lifestyle must be created in a different way. The criteria for humanity and the good life are not riches, success and private prosperity. But these are the unworthy dreams spread by the media through the agency of globally operating advertising. We have all heard the story about women in Kenya who walk for miles to sell their oranges to that they can drink Coca Cola. Christian congregations and communities are in a position to confront this with alternative pictures of good and just lives, because they have different standards. Part of this is the development of a culture of solidarity, which in Africa is called ‘Ubuntu’.
We shall look at some of these personal distortions before turning to an alternative culture of solidarity.
A society which takes the growth of its production of goods and services as the yardstick of its health is forced to increase consumption. In order to stimulate consumption, advertising must sell not only commodities but dreams as well—dreams of power and recognition. The market of unlimited possibilities elicits the feeling: ‘I can afford everything’ and ‘I can have everything’. If I can afford something, I shall win recognition; if I can’t afford it I feel excluded. So what develop on the one hand are fears of a decline in the social scale, and on the other hand greed for more and more. Why do well-paid managers demand millions in bonus payments? The answer is simple: self-esteem and the admiration of one’s own class increase together with income. Nothing motivates like recognition; nothing is so humiliating as disregard.[3] If that is the driving force behind progress, then behind the greed for life we can detect the shadow of the fear of death, and behind the life of luxury, nihilism.
The alternative facing us here is really the old alternative between justification through works and justification through faith. What was called ‘justification’ in theological tradition corresponds very well to recognition, acceptance, esteem—in short, the love which people despairingly seek. If people find this recognition through faith in God, they have no need to look for it in what other people see as their achievements or their luxury. For Christian faith, a person’s value lies in that person himself, and his transcendent relationship to God is therefore more than the image which other people have of him or which he has of himself. For Christian faith a person’s value lies in the nobility of that person’s divine birth. So works do not make the person, nor do they give the person self-esteem. It is the sovereign person who makes the works. The human being as person is more than his achievement, more than his poverty, more than his own opinion of himself. A human being is more than his success in business and something other than his business failure. People who perceive this can cope unperturbed with successes and failures. Human relationships are more important for them than possessions and property. They will live more simply and confine themselves to what is necessary for life, and what furthers life. They are not interested in increasing what they can get, because their concern is not an increase in their consumption. I believe that alternatives in peoples’ view of themselves provide the strongest incentives for an alternative lifestyle.
The relationship of human beings to their own bodies ‘within’ always corresponds to their attitude to nature ‘without’, for human beings are part of nature. A man has learnt to control the drives and needs of his own body, and in the same way he tries he tries to control nature outside himself. Women are careful with their own bodies, and they act similarly toward nature outside. As we saw in part 2, the detachment of the human mind and spirit from the body developed in the course of the history of Western culture. The subjectification of the mind and spirit and the objectification of the body are cleaving ever more widely apart. The controlled body has been reduced to dumbness. Today the mind is detached from the limitations of its own body through the internet and is brought to an almost planetary omnipresence. In cyber space every one can be in several places at the same time, but in a bodiless and ‘desensorized’ form.[4]
An alternative lifestyle begins with the rediscovery of the body[5] and identification with one’s own body, that is to say it begins with the overcoming of that laboriously learnt detachment through new spontaneity. A help here is the psychosomatic insight into the totality of the human being and into the unity of body and soul. This psychosomatic insight into the differentiated unity of body and soul, detachment and spontaneity, corresponds to the ecological insight into the differentiated unity of human beings and the earth. If we want to do justice to both nature and ourselves, the one-sided humanization of nature must be followed by the realistic counter-movement of the naturalization of human beings.
The demands of the modern world lead to the ‘de-sensorizing’ of the people living in it. Of our five senses, we call touch, taste and smell the local ones, hearing and seeing the remote ones.[6] In the traffic and communications of modern mass cities, the remote senses are pressed into service to an undue extent while the local senses are neglected. Radio and television, telephone, fax and internet allow us to communicate globally, but only by way of the remote senses. The local senses are not merely neglected in the modern urbanized world; they are actually tormented: smell by exhaust fumes, taste by fast food, touch by synthetics. Even school children can hardly distinguish things through touch, smell and taste. Young people can play computer games all day long and live from pizza and popcorn. A return to a body-friendly lifestyle close to nature comes about through the return of the senses and the deliberate development of the neglected senses of touch, smell and taste. A new sensitivity in dealings with other people, with other living things and with the countryside reawakens the senses and diminishes the brutalities hurried people commit. For a new culture of the senses we must take time and allow ourselves time.
Lewis Mumford called the clock ‘the key machine of the industrial age’,[7] and he was right, for through the clock, time as we experience it turns into rationally measured time. When I was young, one was given a watch at one’s confirmation, and that meant that life was beginning in earnest. Through the clock, one is made to conform to the course of things as this is laid down. The clock regulates the planned day; one clocks into work and clocks out again, and one’s wage is measured accordingly. The motto ‘time is money’ stimulates business. Punctuality is made the cardinal virtue. A waste of time is declared to be a sin. The clock dictates the time. In nature and our own bodies, time is certainly experienced, but in cycles and rhythms; but with the relentless ongoing clock, we conform to the linear sense of time which rules progress. Since time always ‘moves on’, as we say, we become short of time, and continually find that in fact we ‘have no time’. If we get the impression that ‘the march of time’ is quickening, we become accelerated people. We feel that ‘time is slipping by’, and want to experience as much as we can. Why? Life is short.
Time measured by the clock is mechanically measured time. For this clock-time it is a matter of indifference whether the time is empty or full, whether we have been bored stiff or whether ‘it has passed in a flash’—after sixty minutes the hour is at an end, and everything we experienced in it is past and gone, although we know in our heart of hearts that nothing which we have really experienced and nothing we have suffered is past. Mechanical time takes no account of experienced time; on the contrary, it makes all times the same. Measured time quantifies life, but experienced time is quality of life. When we are happy we have no sense of time. So it is important at times when we experience life intensely to lay our watch aside. Life comes alive when we break through the dictation of the clock. ‘You have the clock’, said a wise Indian as he took leave of an acquaintance who was interviewing him, ‘but we have time’. An alternative lifestyle only becomes visible when we acquire a new relationship to time. Everything has its proper time. Life according to the clock ‘has its time’, experienced time ‘has its time’. We shall learn how to distinguish and to limit ourselves.
In economic life and technology, competition is leading to an ever-increasing acceleration of the processes. Innovations demand it. In human development the accelerations do not further the maturing process; they actually hamper it. The pressures of high school or secondary education allow pupils no free time to develop their qualities outside the learning process. The bachelor’s degree allows students no time to reflect, to discuss, and to get to know other subjects. Human development needs time.
In order to understand what one learns and to develop a reliable capacity for judgment one must be given time. And because we learn from mistakes and misjudgments, these must not be excluded by way of prefabricated learning material. In the sectors bearing on human development and education, we need a deceleration of the processes and more trust in the freedom of the people concerned. In industry and technology, the acceleration leads to an ever-shorter ‘shelf life’ of the products. That increases consumption and also the production of waste. Long-life products can be expected to be more reliable, more user-friendly, and kinder to nature. Why don’t we allow ourselves more time?
The necessary ecological restructuring of industry and the market today demands a new, ecological lifestyle. In negative terms, this can be described as an avoidance of extravagance, a restriction in the expenditure of energy, and reduction of the production of waste. Then the old ideal, ‘produce more—consume more’, will give way to the alternative ideal of ‘the simple life’ which the novelist Ernst Wiechert already invoked in Germany after the First World War. If people in the First World lived more simply, people in the Third World could simply survive: this was already said in ecumenical circles forty years ago. But a this-worldly asceticism does not appeal to everyone. And yet the renunciation of unhealthy profits always also embodies an increase in the wholesome quality of life. This must be kept in mind. The use of energy makes it clear. For a long time the expenditure of energy has counted as an indicator of the violence we inflict on nature. The reduction in its use, through saving and effective application, is at all events salutary both for tormented nature and for our own economic expenditure. But there is also the intelligent transition to renewable energy, such as solar, water and wind power. Once this transition has been made, we shall not absolutely need to restrict ourselves. Asceticism, fasting and ‘doing without’ are necessary when we are considering the violence done to nature, but they are only the preconditions for a richer life in ecological harmony with nature and its forces, and in harmony with our own selves. The natural life we look for when we put aside the lifestyle of the consumer age will be a healthier one. The happiness of a successful life depends on social relationships and the relationship to oneself, not on superfluity in material possessions.
Changes in our eating habits also belong to an alternative lifestyle. In Germany we don’t have to eat strawberries from Israel at Christmas time or fly in tulips from Kenya and cherries from Australia. When cheap apple-extract from China is on offer during the apple harvest in Germany, this competition ruins the regional fruit farming. The immense transport distances pollute the atmosphere and ruin the taste of what has been transported. Is it worth this, in order to feel ‘globally’ provided for, like a king? No, it makes more sense to eat local products, and to eat and drink in harmony with the seasons. This is part of the food sovereignty of the peoples of the world, and the sovereignty of one’s own people as well.
The ‘slow food’ movement is a healthy reaction to the unhealthy fast-food chains and canteen food. Organic farming produces healthy foodstuffs and must be protected today against aggressive agrarian concerns and patented, exploitative, genetically manipulated products, until they can make their own way globally. An analogous healthy reaction is the new ‘city farming’ and the return to self-sufficiency through one’s own foodstuffs. This creates new jobs at the same time.
It is also useful not to eat the foods which top the food chain but to move away from meat to vegetarian dishes. How much grain has to be used in order to produce one kilo of meat? It is not just cheaper to eat vegetarian food but fairer too, and healthier in addition. No one must suddenly become a vegetarian if his body cannot cope with the changeover to vegetarian food, but everyone can reduce his consumption of animal food to some extent, as long as this is not distasteful. The city of Bremen has declared Thursday to be a vegetarian day, following the example of some Belgian cities. That is no more than a sign or token, but it is a valuable one. Our food customs are either part of humanity’s food crisis or will become part of its conquest.
This is the message given to us by the first Christian community in the first Pentecostal event:[8] ‘Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed were his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them . . . distribution was made to each as any had need’ (Acts 4.32–35).
This community is the primal image of all Christian communities, and the origin of the fundamental idea of Christian social doctrine: solidarity. If we ask today about a new culture of solidarity in a world of individualization and globalization, we can begin here. We find three factors for the early Christian experience of the fullness of life and the overcoming of every need.
1. With great power the apostle proclaimed the resurrection of Christ. That is where it begins. In Christ’s resurrection from the death the fullness of eternally living life is thrown open. Death’s power over life has been taken away; threats of death no longer have any effect. To suffer need or want means being excluded from the enjoyment of life—not to have anything to eat and to drink; to be ill; to be lonely; and finally to lose one’s life. The greatest want we suffer is in the death of life. Every other want in life is connected with death. That is why the fear of death is so threatening that we react with the greed for life. Because we know that we have to die, we cannot get enough of life. But if with Christ the resurrection is open, then we sense a life no death can kill. That is a life of which there is enough, more than enough, not just for the living but for the dead too.
2. ‘The company of those who believed were of one heart and soul.’ A throng of people who do not know each other become a community, and this community is immediately ‘one heart and soul’. That is the experience of God’s Spirit. The Spirit overcomes the barriers that divide people from people; the oppression of one person by others stops; the humiliating of one person by other people ends; the alienation of one person from another is overcome; masters and servants become brothers; men and women become friends. The privileges and discriminations on the basis of race, class and sex disappear. In the midst of a heartless world and a society of social frigidity people become ‘one heart and soul’: a community of trust. When something like this happens, what is experienced is nothing less than God’s presence. Reciprocal recognition and mutual love overcome the fear of one another and the aggression toward each other. What the believers have in common is stronger than what divides them individually.
3. ‘No one said that any of the things he possessed were his own.’ In the Spirit of the resurrection and in the experience of the Spirit of life they share, no one needs to cling on to what he possesses any more. Anyone who lives a divinely filled life has no need for the ambiguous securities which possessions and property give him. So these things are there to be used by those who need them. Because they had ‘everything in common . . . there was not a needy person among them’. In this little Jerusalem congregation, which was probably made up of poor people, ‘there was enough for everyone’.
Is that ‘early Christian communism? Is it an unrealistic ideal? No, it is a new, realistic experience of God we can make together at any time and in every place. This other world is possible! It is a counter-image to all the societies with social inequality and want. In these societies ‘there is never enough for everyone’, so they are dominated by a struggle of each against all for the means of living and the pleasures of living—to be more precise, by a struggle of the rich against the poor, of the strong against the weak, of the healthy against the sick, of the upper classes against the lower classes. The competitive struggles in the marketplace of modern society are explained in a social-Darwinian sense as being ‘the natural rights of the stronger’, but in actual fact they are driven by the fears of death and the greed for life. Where these rule, the result is a world of social frigidity, a dog-eats-dog society in which ‘everyone is his own best friend’.
The opposite of poverty is not wealth, but community. In community individuals become rich, rich in friends who can be trusted, rich in mutual help, rich in ideas and powers, rich in the energies of solidarity. These energies simply lie fallow or are repressed. All helpful actions have come into being at the grass roots: kindergartens, neighbourhood help, care for the poor and the sick, and other citizens’ action groups.
In the economic crisis of 2008, beneath the lamentations of the consumer culture a completely different culture of solidarity emerged. The misery of the unemployed and homeless, of the impoverished and excluded, released a wave of unexpected readiness to help in the major cities of the Western world. Free meals, co-operatives, and neighbourly help were set up in a way no one had expected.[9] This saved the lives of numberless people. So we should not overcome the present economic crisis by restoring the old consumer culture, but should surmount it by developing this culture of solidarity, and by drawing up guidelines for a post-capitalist society.
The energies of the people’s solidarity also emerged in the terrorist catastrophes of 9/11, as well as after the mass murders by crazed pupils in German schools in Erfurt in 2002 and Winnenden in March of 2009. The families affected were not left alone. In the towns and villages a crowd of people unknown to each other came together to express their grief and thronged to spontaneous services in churches and in the market places in order to show their support, to participate in the mourning, and to comfort.
These forms of solidarity among people show a different culture from that of the consumer temples and the shopping malls.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ But how have liberty and equality been simultaneously realized today? It seems that the more liberty the less equality, and the more equality the less liberty.[10]
Possessive Individualism. The first definition of liberty familiar to us from political history interprets liberty as rule. Inasmuch as human history is a struggle for power, the person counts as free who acquires power and rules. The losers become un-free subjects of the free. The masters are free, the dependent are slaves, women and children are not free. The person who understands freedom as rule can only be free at the expense of other people; his freedom means dependence for others, his wealth makes others poor.
In the modern bourgeois world, freedom was made a function of ownership. Everyone has the right of disposal over his own person. Every man is his own master, every woman belongs to herself. Here freedom is understood as the autonomy of the individual over himself. C. B. Macpherson maintains that the essential nature of the human being is freedom and that freedom means the right to dispose over his own person and abilities.[11]Socially, this ‘possessive individualism’ has only one limit: the free right of disposal enjoyed by other people too. Everyone is free in himself and no one participates in other people. In the ideal case this means a society of lonely individuals who do not bother one another: ‘the lonely crowd.’[12] In this way freedom becomes a universal human right, but is this really what human freedom is?
A human being is not an individual. According to the Latin derivation, an individual, like the Greek ‘atom’, is something finally indivisible. But a person, in contrast, is a human being in the social relationships of I-Thou—we, as Martin Buber, the founder of modern personalism, showed,[13] following Feuerbach, Hegel and Hölderlin. In the social network of taking and giving, listening and speaking, experiencing and touching, recognizing and being recognized, a human being becomes a person. Persons become persons only in community, and a human community exists only in personal relationships. If a person is individualized, he is atomized and turned into a being without relation. In Greek an ‘idiot’ was a private person, unconcerned with public affairs. It used to be considered an insult to describe someone as ‘a certain individual’.
The freedom of human persons cannot be preserved through ever-greater individualization. It can only be preserved if people become capable of community, and are willing for community. That is the truth behind communitarianism and the ‘communitarian network’.[14]
Where do I feel free in the human sense? In a supermarket, where I can buy everything as long as my money holds out, but where no one knows me and even the person at the check-out doesn’t look me in the eye? Or in a local community or a congregation where people know me by name and look at me face to face, and affirm me? The freedom of the supermarket is the reality of individual freedom of choice; freedom in the community is the reality of communicative freedom. The first freedom is related to objects which can become my property; the second to persons who recognize and accept me. The first freedom is a function of my property, the second is a social function.
Communicative Freedom.The other definition we know from social history defines freedom as open community. Here freedom is not a function of property but a quality of inter-subjective relationships.[15]
The history of the German language shows that Freundlichkeit (friendliness) is the other root of Freiheit (freedom). The person who is free is friendly, gracious, open and gives freely. He lets other people share in his life and is interested in the well-being of others. Inter-subjective relationships are called free if they are marked by reciprocal recognition and mutual friendship. If I know that I am recognized and respected, I feel free and go out of myself and show myself as I am; if I feel disregarded, I withdraw into myself and defend myself. Recognition opens up a free space socially in which other people can develop freely. In a society like this the other person is not a restriction of my personal freedom; he complements it and enables it. The shared life develops out of the mutual participation in life. It is only a society of this kind that can be called a free society.
In the Christian community we call this ‘love’—in Christian social doctrine ‘solidarity’—in the political sphere ‘equality’, and, summing them up: community in solidarity. A free community is not a collection of private, free individuals, but a community in which people stand up for each other, and especially for the weak and the sick. Only the concept of communicative freedom is a concept of humane freedom.
Today we often hear about the clash of civilizations and about the necessary dialogue between the different cultures.[16] That is valuable but it is already too late. The multiplicity of human cultures and the protean variety of cultural traditions has been overlaid and relativized by a global unified culture which looks the same everywhere. The high-rise buildings in Seoul and New York, Peking and Los Angeles, Moscow and London and wherever we go, look just the same everywhere, because everywhere they are built by the same star architects, with their global reputations. Transportation problems, traffic jams and pollution are the same wherever we go. Everywhere the big hotels have the same names because they belong to global hotel chains. Everywhere the big shops offer the same products from the same global firms—Gucci, Boss or Armani. Basic English is becoming the global unified language, and in television it is Hollywood that determines the pictures which make their impression on everyone. What we ought to look at in other cultures are turned into the objects of ‘sightseeing’ which are pointed out to visitors wherever they go. ‘Global’, universalized clothing has meanwhile been adapted for China too, and has pushed out the Mao-look. It is only in India, Africa and Arabia that local costumes still survive. The global unified culture is monotonous, uniform and tedious. What has happened to the different, brightly variegated cultures of the different peoples? They are reduced to ‘folklore’, to dance groups in the Hilton Hotel, to choral groups on cruise ships. The global culture debases the cultures into becoming the objects of World Heritage programmes.
This unified global culture is not a culture of solidarity. In destroying the multiplicity of the cultures it also destroys interest in other civilizations, languages, traditions and ways of living. It is not here that we can discover the hope for a favourable future for humanity. An ethics of hope for the fullness of life resists the unified global culture and preserves cultural multiplicity because it is in that that the potentialities for the future lie. It is multiplicity that is universal, not uniformity.
4. Uwe Jochum, Kritik der Neuen Medien: Ein eschatologischer Essay (Munich: Fink, 2003). ↵
5. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, Die Wiederkehr des Körpers (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982). ↵
7. Stephen E. Toulmin and June Goodfield, Die Entdeckung der Zeit (Munich: Goldmann, 1970). ↵
12. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: Individualism Reconsidered (New York: Anchor, 1953). ↵