When the spiritual leader of the largest
division of the Christian faith says something about climate change and the
problems of technological progress, engineers of all faiths and no faith should
take notice. Last Thursday, Pope
Francis released his latest encyclical, Laudato
Si', known in English as "On the Care of Our Common Home."
Contrary to some reports, in the encyclical Pope
Francis doesn't come out in favor of Marxism, though he does say that
international efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions have failed and that
something stronger is needed. And
he doesn't say you can't be a good Catholic if you use air conditioning, though
he does use air conditioning as an example of a "harmful habit of
consumption." What he does is
to lay out a vision for how humanity can turn around from a lot of wrong paths
and get back on the right path, which is all a good sermon does anyway.
What are the wrong paths? While most environmental activists
concentrate on actions, statistics, and policies, Pope Francis goes to the
heart of the problem: sin. God's world as originally created was
good. But when man decided he knew
better than God, things started to go wrong. There's nothing new about sin, but what is new in the last
couple of hundred years is mankind's ability to transform the environment through
technology. A few hundred thousand
cave men armed with spears couldn't make much difference to the global
environment no matter what they did.
But seven billion people using massive amounts of organized
technological power and treating the earth simply as a raw-material resource
can cause tremendous harm, both to the environment and many of the poorest
people who try to live in it.
Pope Francis's roots are in the Global South,
and his concern for the billions of the poorest people around the world is
evident on every page of Laudato Si'. What if you are the father of a family
on the coast of Africa, trying to feed yourself by fishing, and some pollution
kills the fish and the ocean rises so much that your land is flooded out? What if you then move to the city and
try to commute to a low-paying job three hours a day on filthy, crowded buses
while breathing soot-filled air that gives you a lung disease that makes you so
sick that you lose your job? While
the physical environment and the marvelous biodiversity of plant and animal
life on our planet come in for mention, Pope Francis's fundamental concern is for
people, each one of whom is a child of God and deserving of respect, attention,
and love. But when giant economic
and technological systems conspire to deprive millions of their culture, their
land, and their livelihood, these folks can no longer receive what they have a
fundamental right to as human beings.
What are the answers? Pope Francis wisely refrains from
making explicit scientific pronouncements or calling for specific laws or
policies. Instead, he spends much
of his time asking for dialogue between governments and citizens, between the
privileged and the empoverished, and between scientists and religious
believers. He hopes—and there are
many places where he expresses hope—that men and women of good will, emboldened
by a vision of humanity as one family sharing one planetary household, can
change their ways for the better.
These changes include everything from family efforts to save energy and
recycle products up to stronger international agreements that could make a real
difference in the rate at which fossil fuels are being used.
At the beginning and again at the end of the
encyclical, he mentions the saint whose name he bears, St. Francis of
Assisi. St. Francis was a
revolutionary figure in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Jesus
himself. He lived in utter poverty,
but with such love for all creatures, both animal and human, that he collected
followers who sought to carry out his vision of Christian love in a unique way
that was both humble and vastly effective.
Much of what Pope Francis criticizes is the byproduct
of pride, which theologians know is the root sin, the sin that enables all the
others. If we think we have all
the answers and that the material world is simply waiting for us to bend it to
our whims, we are in fact enslaved to the sin of pride, and all the problems
mentioned in the encyclical can be traced in one way or another back to that
attitude.
On the other hand, if we look on the world as
a wonderful gift, packed with hidden prizes and meanings to be treasured, not
just exploited, we will tread more gently. We will think before we act, or buy, or sell, or
design. We will bear in mind not
only our own family, and our friends and social groups, but also others who
might be affected by what we do, or purchase, or waste. And we will change our ways
accordingly. Among other things,
that is what engineering ethics is all about.
With Laudato
Si', Pope Francis has not gone off the deep end politically or
theologically. The encyclical emerges from a deep consideration of the entire
Christian tradition and its meaning for how spiritual beings can best live in a
material world, being themselves material as well. While not many previous popes have made ecological concerns
a focus of their ministries, I think Pope Francis has chosen the right time to
do so. And anyone who has any
dealings with modern technology, whether as an engineer or an ordinary citizen
who simply lives in the modern world, needs to give serious consideration to
what he is saying.
Sources: The 45,000-word encyclical Laudato Si' can be downloaded from the Vatican website at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Besides that document, I referred to
online articles about it by Matthew Schmitz at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/pope-francis-wants-to-roll-back-progress-is-the-world-ready/
and Christiana Z. Peppard at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/what-you-need-to-know-about-pope-franciss-environmental-encyclical/.
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