This essay was first published in the German daily DIE WELT on June 5th 2004.
A New Piety
By Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch
In many western countries ecologism is developing to become a new piety.
But its followers shy away from professing their belief.
Churches are becoming steadily emptier, but there are few indications that sceptics, free thinkers and agnostics are conquering the terrain. Instead, new religious streams are spreading among the educated groups of the population: Buddhism, anthroposophy, and esotericism in all shapes and sizes. However, the strongest and most wide-spread stream strictly refuses to be called a faith: it is ecologism. Yet in Germany and a few other countries ecologism has almost reached the status of a state religion. The path into the irrational was trodden at an early stage of the movement. After all, it is not by chance that leading representatives of the green movement in the seventies came from church backgrounds. The churches in turn, amazed at the success of the new stream, are increasingly taking on the role of green NGOs (non-governmental organisations). Instead of traditional pastoral care, they now hope to reach people via ecologistic promises of salvation.
In children’s books and video clips, in early evening television series and party political programmes, ecologistic articles of faith have long been asserting themselves in public language. The traditional religious patterns are experiencing shifts in meaning, but remain in force with their symbol power. As in Christianity, the imaginative world of ecologism centres round the expectation of an endtime, for which we are to prepare ourselves by doing without and doing penance. The literature on “climate disaster” is full of such motifs. Nature is good, people are bad. And if people do not obey, then “nature”s revenge” threatens. The angry goddess of nature demands appeasement rituals, which explain the fervour with which many people separate their waste.
Natural: pure, unspoiled, holy. Man-made: sinful, dirty, spoiled. In pop culture whales have taken over the role of angels: kindly and wise higher beings who send us messages. Like the communion service in church, candle-holding chains and sit-in blockades forge the community of the faithful. And as in all religions, food taboos ensure a demarcation of the elite against the unclean heathens. “Organic” is nothing other than “halal” or “kosher”, a mental aid to consolidate the faith in every day life. (Despite many attempts to produce it, there is not yet any scientific evidence that GMO-free foods or those produced according to the guidelines of the organic associations are healthier or more nutritious.) Only the “ecological cycle” transcending the individual transitoriness in the eternal circle of nature promises redemption.
Although the new community of the faithful has grown so successfully
in the past thirty years, it still feels itself to be a small, persecuted
minority. We recently saw a pamphlet from the police trade union on protection
against sects. It lists 13 criteria on the basis of which a newcomer
can discover whether the group he or she would like to join is in fact
a sect. Nearly all these aspects also apply for the ecologistic faith
movement. Just three examples are listed here:
•
The world is drifting towards a disaster; only the group knows how the
world can be
saved.
•
The group is the elite, the other people are sick and lost – if
they do not join in or allow themselves to be saved.
•
The group rejects established science. The teaching of the group is understood
as the sole true science.
The “group” has long become a broad popular movement. The
sect adherents don’t stand on street corners holding up mission
brochures. They have occupied key positions in the state and society
and, supported by their faith, take far-reaching decisions every day
that regrettably are also binding for the non-faithful. 200 years after
the French Revolution a religion has reconquered the power in many areas
of the state. However, this is not the good old church, but a new church
co-governs from its pulpit here. “Ecologism today is one of the
most influential religions in the western world,” claimed the US
American author Michael Crichton (“Jurassic Park”) recently. “It
appears to have become the preferred religion of urban atheists." Crichton
is a good observer. As traditional Christianity is becoming eroded, ecologism
is conquering the thoughts and feelings of people in North America and
Europe. The need for religion really does appear to be an anthropological
constant. It simply seeks new forms.
However, here we are dealing with a religious confession that considers itself to be thoroughly rational, even scientifically founded. Just like the Christians and the Jews prior to the enlightenment, or many Moslems, ecologists still do not think that their belief is a faith, but instead an inventory of undeniable, natural-law facts. This is what makes it so difficult to talk to them. Discussions on ecological points of dispute often end up so irreconcilably because the opposite parties are only apparently talking about the same thing. One side talks about protecting the environment or nature and the best way to achieve this. The others implicitly find it important to give people a hold with the aid of a simple and closed picture of the world. If an entire nation is sent round in circles carrying empty cans (and if a lot of them find this a good thing), then this is evidently a matter of preserving a picture of the world and not of protecting resources. It is a hopeless undertaking to tackle religious convictions with statistics and scientific expert opinions. Anyone who does not want to lose his mind over such disputes should not consider his partner as inconsistent and mentally restricted, but instead as a deeply devout person. Admittedly this does not lead to any solution, but it makes it easier to deal with one another.
Those who follow ecologism naturally have the same right to tolerance as Christians, Jews or Hindus. In the long term, however, it will not be possible to avoid making a clear distinction again between articles of faith and ecological reason, between the church and the state. Without such a division the myths and legends will sooner or later grow over the theme of the environment. And because ecologism frequently steps forward in the habit of science, imitates its expressions and assumes its authority, a critical distance is necessary.
“We are for better or worse the heirs of the enlightenment and technical progress,” wrote Max Horkheimer, “contradicting these by regression to primitive stages does not reduce the permanent crisis they have brought forward. On the contrary, such ways out lead from historically sensible to extremely barbarian forms of social hegemony. The only way of assisting nature lies in unleashing its apparent opposite, independent thinking.” Findings achieved by independent thinking and research are often in contradiction to the articles of faith of ecologism, that has repeatedly moved further away from scientific ecology. For instance, no research scientist today will seriously claim that there is a balance in nature. The status of knowledge is that evolution advances through extreme imbalance. Despite this, the motif of the “natural balance” still belongs in every Sunday speech from Oskar Lafontaine to Peter Gauweiler (German politicians). Even the ecologist preference for all that is rural in contrast to spoiled industrial culture cannot be reconciled with ecological facts. Viewed objectively, primary economy still exerts a vast influence on landscapes, plants and animals, more than any nuclear power station and any car factory. Archaic practices such as slash-and-burn clearing, hunting, fishing, or the conversion of forests into arable land change the nature of the planet much more than modern technology which ecologists find so suspicious.
Those who conduct ecological research orient themselves openly to measurable facts. It is important here to gain knowledge and not to disseminate a new faith. Consequently scientists dealing with ecology are often not ecologists. Even more active environment protectors than one would commonly imagine want nothing to do with contemporary eco-faith, but instead link their commitment with expertise and rational thought. What they want is practical progress, clean water, conservation of animal species, or reduction of toxic waste. The well-known Munich ecologist and management member of the WWF, Josef H. Reichholf, published a pamphlet in which he protects his area of knowledge against instrumentalisation (“The false prophets”). In this he says about today’s ecologism that a third of a century ago it took over ecology and “developed to become a religion-type model of life that increasingly specifies what we have to do and what we may not do.”
Regrettably scientists and environmental protectors working on the facts of the matter find only a small audience. They work at universities and scientific institutes, as environmental officers in industry, or as nature conservation experts in national parks. Yet in the eco-associations, in the green party and the ministries it dominates, such people have no place. These are the terrain of the ecologist priest caste. Their world consists of symbols – symbols of evil and symbols of good. And woe to those who raise doubts on eternal life per “sustainability” or “climate disaster”. As Al Gore (the former candidate for the presidency of the USA) writes in “Earth in the balance”, “Denial is the strategy of those who want to believe that their addiction-dependent life can continue without bad effects on themselves and others.”
However, practical environmental policy should not create any symbols
or do away with them, but instead do nature and human health good. It
is not important that wind-generators should look like “soft technology”,
or that genetic engineering somehow appears unnatural.
The crucial point is what are the environmental consequences of wind-generators,
genetic engineering or plastic recycling. If plastic packaging is expensively
collected, sorted, cleaned and transported, although all these actions
consume much more energy than is saved in this way, this has little to
do with environmental conservation and a lot to do with dogma. Those
who complain loudly about landscape being eaten up, but massively promote
the forms of energy that take up most landscape, evidently have a problem
with this world.
Now in an age in which fundamentalist men of god trigger bloodbaths throughout the world, one is thankful for religions that do not claim any human life. Yet ecologism has lost its innocence here too. It now costs human lives, many human lives. Throughout the world one human being dies of malaria every 30 seconds. Part of the blame is borne by the western eco-elite and their submissive government representatives, who against all reason and all social conscience have enforced a short-sighted outlawing of the spray agent DDT. It killed the anopheles mosquito that carries malaria. Throughout the world the insecticide has saved millions of human lives. Malaria was once on the brink of being eradicated for ever. Then it was discovered that a few bird species had become infertile because the insect poison had accumulated in their bodies. A hazard for humans if the agent is used properly has still not been clearly proven, even after half a century of detailed studies. Despite this, a ban on use in agriculture was and is expedient, especially since the agent was introduced into the environment in exorbitant quantities there. There are in any case low-cost alternative agents for farmers – but unfortunately not for malaria control. Instead of retracting DDT expediently only in the farming sector by law, the opponents of chemistry continued to work for an absolute ban. Countries dependent on development aid were forced by industrialised nations to do without DDT in places where it was used against malaria mosquitoes. This happened even though the necessary quantities were minute by comparison with agricultural use and could have been coped with ecologically. The volume once spread on a single cotton plantation in agriculture would be sufficient to protect entire cities against the malaria mosquito. The bird world has recovered in the meantime. Yet instead of the “Silent Spring”, (title of the successful book by Rachel Carson in the early seventies), huts and villages have now become silent in many places.
Unfortunately this is not the only example. The series of ecologist crusades at the expense of others is growing. It ranges from combating green genetic engineering (and its potentials for developing countries), through the dogged determination of opponents of inoculation, up to torpedoing medical research because animal experiments are necessary for it. With religious fervour the possibilities of solving the present and future problems of human kind are undermined. The ecologists see themselves as mild and good people whose hardness has been forced by the holy cause. The idea that they are acting against human beings because they have lost their humanity appears to them to be totally ridiculous.
Idealisation of the naive and the alleged natural are “in” at the top level in state and society. The trail runs from Rousseau through the Romantics, the Wandervögel movement and rural hippies, to the ecologism of our days. Such streams were always particularly popular in the culture of the German-speaking area. Even in great grandfather’s days the melancholy and nostalgic scent of sentimentalism drifted through bourgeois living rooms. The noble savage, the unspoiled countryman, the small child, the innocent animal all served the merchants and manufacturers as a surface to project their yearnings that remained unsatisfied in hard every-day business. Grandeur and harmony were located in Caspar-David Friedrichs’ forest, by the shores of Karl May”s Silbersee Lake, or behind Peter Maffay’s seven bridges, as far away as possible from the confusing big city noise of enlightenment and all that is modern. As Isaiah Berlin wrote, a characteristic of the romantics was the process of creating myths “One must create a myth can never be fulfilled completely”. It was part of the “core of the matter to be untraceable, unreachable and pushed into the infinite.” Nobody really wants to do without the amenities of modern engineering, nobody really wants to live like the Indian Winnetou in Karl May’s novel.
However, since ecologism does not see itself as a religion, the illusion must be kept alive. That is why our suggestion for an amicable solution is: relax and confess to your faith and your yearnings. Then many an aggressive hardening of attitudes might dissolve. A consolidated religion does not have to missionise constantly and mess around in this world without halt. It reposes in itself since it knows that it is not possible to have one hundred per cent truth, beauty and goodness in this world. In this world, and especially in Ministers’ offices it is better to consider concrete results and not how close one comes to pure teaching. The division between state and church has proved successful. Let us return to it.
Copyright © 1996-2011 Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch.
All rights reserved.
