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edu/fr-eduardo Loyola University New Orleans, College of Social Sciences, at Miller Hall 114, Jan 29 2014

A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE ON CARE FOR CREATION Ecology to heal Fr. Eduardo Agosta Scarel, O. Carm., PhD eduardo.agosta@conicet.gov.ar ; eduardo_agosta@uca.edu.ar (First, I will present some slices on the environmental and social crisis. Then I will share with you my thoughts about the reasons why, written below)

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I understand that the way of thinking and doing and the pace of life of our globalized societies seem to sustain themselves by almost unconscious ideological premises that affect much the worldview of our cultures; it affects even our religiosity if we still have it. Here are its premises: full is better than empty, much more is better than a little, and big is better than small. With these premises as a basis, any concepts, perception and actions about reality will have to do with the visible alone. It is difficult to accept everything that does not appear before our eyes as something measurable or tangible. In our religious world the premise is seen in the words of Thomas from the Gospels: if I do not see, I do not believe; we want proof either by the light of reason or experimentation. However, this rationality does not account for the imprecise, the uncertain, the unregulated, and the indeterminate nature of chaotic processes (including the very possibility of the spiritual), for these can shatter the one-way-only rationality of a completely objective and analytic mentality. I think it is in this context that the social-bio-environmental creations crisis is enshrined, for which global warming is just a symptom like fever in the body: a warning that something is going wrong inside. Therefore the naive great pretenders will say utopically: "-it is impossible for the catastrophe to happen." "It's so vast the Earth", taking refuge - for a short time - in the goodness of rhythms and non-renewable resources of the Nature that they consider infinite, perhaps as an unconscious projection of their children's wishes. Culturally ingrained, we have in our societies people excessively activist, utilitarian and analytical, guided by an ethic of pragmatism; people unable to be comfortable in empty spaces (e.g. leisure) without having to be always and constantly occupied with chores. In my observation, this is the kind of thinking that guides our conventional lifestyles that we considered as always given. Another unhealthy social attitude is filling everything within reach making a person unable to simply look around with any other obsessive claim just to look around. In addition to this incessant search-mania to fill everything, there appears another cultural attitude that also causes social and ecological disruption: the obsessive desire to know everything, to control everything, to dominate everything, against whomever or whatever.
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Paradoxically, these search attitudes are fruitless, they generate more dissatisfaction in irreversibly deep levels of our self (interiority, interior being) and in deterioration of our eco-systems incessantly explored and exploited. The process of filling ourselves with everything promises us the best, and we accept it as valid; however, we soon get to the end, tired and bittersweet. Perhaps this is linked to a pharisaic attitude that we should take note of, by Jesus counsel (Mk 12, 38-40): our voracity leads to generating social injustice on the weakest and the poorest. Will we be able to accept the simplicity of the two coins offered by the widow and discover that it is everything and sufficient? When Greed drives Technology Since ancient times, the technology has always accompanied mankind. It wasn't anything other than an art where human intelligence is integrated to matter to produce some artifact to embellish the life of people, to improve its quality. It was the way in which the spirit of the human beings entered cosmic order to generate new unimagined forms from the hidden potentials. This institutionalized activity developed to such an extent as to belong to the human heritage, cultural artifacts, and all the things which contribute to improve human life. In this sense, all peoples have the techne, i.e. art, artistic and artisan mentality: artifacts and tools created for the manipulation of Nature. It is in this way that we are co-creators along with God the Creator. However, it seems that human beings have stopped being innocent craftsmen and have merely big gear teeth falling onto themselves with the weight of a political, economic, mono-cultural globalized social system which could be termed the greed economic-technocracy, in which the one-way narrow technical and scientific rationality has occupied the place of the spirit. Such a greed societal organization could be deployed and is still supported by an important portion of the earth population because it is founded on an inner violence that is common to all human beings. And in this sense, such a violence guarantees its own intrinsic failure. The origin of the inner violence results from an eternal dissatisfaction belonging to human existence, because of the frustration of human desires. Hence dynamism is rooted in the depths of our consciousness, and it is hard to grasp it.

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In the conscious level of our humanity the experienced dissatisfaction of our deeper wishes and whims is translated as rivalry: rivalry amongst individuals, nations; and between human beings and Nature. This human rivalry emerges within our economics relationships through the mythical social commandment of "maximizing profits", favoring an economy of material accumulation. In this way, our natural resources appear as means to channel this human rivalry, preventing our societies from entirely disappearing, which would happen if they are freely left out to the pure internal violence of human beings. The desire for power, which means maximizing benefits in the conventional economy framework, replaces the innocent search for improving life and now invades all living spaces of human desire. It happens to us all, there is almost no way out, the globalized conventional economy dictates the lifestyle, the dominant values and collective rhythms. As one example, millions in our countries no longer have Sundays off or go on holy days. There is no sacred day of real rest to just contemplate, to simply look around. This conventional economic-technocracy also commands our daily ethics. In a natural perspective human ethics can be thought as those means and ways that regulate and guarantee the human flourishing, the progress in life. The human ethics must facilitate not only the personal prosperity, but also the prosperity of the community where an individual lives in. And in this sense it opens to social justice and humanitarian aids in order that others can reach a similar flourishing life, a common standard of wellbeing. We all want that for whole world. Hence, one of the biggest challenges we have ahead is to de-construct our current concept of prosperity that has been built by the conventional economy: The human prosperity, both social and individual, refers only to the economic growth, the accumulation of material wealth. This is like this because, the (current) conventional economy relies on the logic of the dissatisfaction of the human desire. We truly believe that full is better than empty, much more is better than a little, and big is better than small. Theses commandments live in us as unconscious social premises. This is our current social logic that could destroy us, as we shall see later on. The pursuit of individual material prosperity takes its strength from the
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frustration of wishes, as manifestation of the primordial inner struggle of desires, that cannot find alternative canals to be re-oriented. This frustration generates a deep hunger of whatever supply: right now and from everywhere. Hence in the base of the relationship between consumer and producer is rivalry; rivalry between voracity and greed, demand and supply, in the level of economic activities, fostered by the globalized economy. At the same time such rivalry produces the abundance of objects/goods that relieve the tension of unsatisfied desire. Hence we have a vicious circle. The ethics of our societies therefore have been deeply transformed: the ethics is ego-centered, self-centered in order to fill everything at the expense of everything, progressing toward an hegemonic culture of consumerism (which much differs from the consumption for living), for which the vital, social, political and cultural space are expressed in the not needed basis cited above: the full is better than empty. The economic-technocracy promotes both the acceleration and the amount, as the referential path through which all human activity has to go since it is there where the humanity flourishes. There are slogans written in stone: produce more and faster, grow or die, fight unemployment: go out and buy. These are advertised as the only alternative to develop living, (or a living from the excesses). And such a growth, without regarding the complexity of the fundamental interconnections within living beings and the environment, involves irreversible evil at all levels of every natural system, human, animal, insect and plant. The rupture or unpleasantness As mentioned above, these filling-everything attitudes and economic-social commandments do not circumvent, rather they further exacerbate the deep human experience of existential dissatisfaction. Keep in mind that this experience is not a postmodernist (neo-liberal) fruit, even less an economic-technocratic one. It is an inner turmoil that we human beings of at all times and places can suffer, and that the saints not needed and usually used to call it acedia. Unrealistic wishes are often at the root of human beings unpleasantness, encoded during many years of childhood, bursting our souls with exaggerated claims. We place excessive demands on others and on the natural environment, and we get angry if they fail to respond
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to us. We believe that we can exist and demand without limits, in order to fill everything, because we think it is the best. This behavior pattern, surviving presymbolically in the unconsciousness, is linked to what psychology calls child narcissism, the omnipotence of desire, which is not easy for us to resign, and which the global conventional economy has been able to enhance and make grow from the use of the science and technology: with these two allegiances, everything possible will be desired and everything that is longed for will be declared necessary. Thus, we become naughty children shouting and kicking the toy, saying: this is really what I want! But we are always discontent, immature, having not discovered the true depth of our hearts, which is the real object of our desire. Desire is the unconscious and pre-symbolical strength of the nature of being. Then, subsequent ideologies, worldviews and, certainly, the psychology will attempt to give ideas about it and in some cases to take benefits from it. At this point we face one big dilemma: the human desire (this daily craving of always wanting "something more") is an internal dynamism that can easily be manipulated by external factors to the individual. The legality, the models, the fashion of consuming goods, are external to freedom and decision of every human being. Precisely for more than fifty years we have been facing a change in the understanding of human beings: we are no longer independent, self-sufficient individuals, guided by reason alone, and equipped with free will, as it was defined by the classical ethics. Hence we no longer consume those things we need, but everything we are offered, without distinction. Nowadays we have new, artificially created, needs that never existed before. The technological novelties appear to be little paradises of illusion, updated every day and suited for our increasingly fragmented world of desires. A second human dilemma that goes to the heart of humanity is human desire is unlimited. Jean Lacan, a psycologist who focused his studies in the records of human desire (joy, hate, etc.), concluded that In the beginning there was the ambivalence of desire. For him, the object of human desire is everything and nothing at the same time. The human desire is of the Impossible. For this reason, St. John of the Cross in his Spiritual Canticle suggests that the heart of human beings is not satisfied with less than the infinite. The infinite to which he refers clearly means searching God. In consequence when human desire dynamism is released on a global scale, natural
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resources are insufficient to satisfy it. The earth implodes. The physical limit of the planet, which is shown to be too small in comparison, is ultimately the natural limit to the dissatisfied-desire economy. For these reasons, the consumption patterns adopted by our societies are unsustainable in the long-term. For example: In the second millennium each human being consumes on average in one year the energy produced by the whole biosphere for 400 years transforming by photosynthesis solar energy into matter. That is why natural gas, oil and coal are cheap for us: the hard work has been done by others species billions of years ago. Thus we have developed childish societies that carelessly waste precious goods that other creatures have produced. Childish attitudes, such as the use of everyday disposable goods, are an open crime against next generations. The true cost of entropy (that refers to both the energy source availability or lost, and the resilience, or the capacity for self-recovery, of every ecosystem, including the human) is the existential mortgage of future generations, and the Poor of the world. In the future, our children will not have sufficient energy sources for living as now we are consuming most of the resources at the lowest economic cost (not the real entropy cost) and the maximum gain. There is an urgent need for responsibility and rationality in the use of the actually scarce natural energy sources that there are on the earth, our only one home. That is the root of the word economy indeed: (oikon nomos) = (home management). From a spiritual perspective, the genuine and deep basis in the human heart is the opening. The opening link to the other is a subjective property of the humanity. However, if we lack the experience of a middle point, we can be dragged and torn from one side to another by the extremely idealized desires which are fed by fanciful dreams or impossible ambitions. Hence the conventional economy stalks us through advertisements to manipulate us towards consumerism, which is its Achilles heel. Men and woman used to transit to clean shortcuts those that we like most in life. Defensively we send back to the bottom of consciousness everything we are scared of, or what hurts us and we do not want it in us or for us. Naively we call freedom this capability of making options for pleasure; and we do not perceive, or hint, that real freedom is only found in fidelity to the deeper quality of the human soul: the search for transcendence, that is to say, the transiting beyond the limits in all their forms. Transcendence means we are drawn to what we can hardly grasp; it remains
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beyond us. Therefore, in the depths of the human soul always nests the nostalgia of communion, of unlimited solitude and intimacy, which in turn mobilizes us to overcome the limits. The spiritual-human journey on earth. As experience shows, human beings have an innate vital impetus towards the integration of the polarities that is often and intuitively perceived as dissociating forces in their interiority, the rivalry mentioned above. These forces are the source of conflict or unpleasantness. The momentum is vital because it enables the deployment of all the most human qualities which make us go out of ourselves to search and do experimentation with others similar to us and with the natural environment. But the overflowing magnitude of this vital and inexhaustible dynamism leads to saint Augustines statement: You created us, Lord, for you, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. The finding of such intensity within the human beings heart configures the nuclear dynamism of religious experience in an anthropological perspective. The vital impetus is expressed in our religious language as that the God puts human beings on a road to God, the transcendent source and goal of their longing and desire. Put it in other words, human unlimited longings and desires are testifiers/witnesses of a Source and a Goal beyond the limits of the physical reality. The Book of Genesis states: we are made to the major excellence of sustaining a deep dialogue and communion with God, the Creator, for we are made in His image and likeness (Gen 1.27). The saints of all times says that since birth women and men are invited to a dialogue with God. Human being is, thus, invited to the divine privacy. However, the difficulty is that this vocation is confused with the innate and primary desire (psychology teaches) whose purpose is unknown in the immanent plane. Humanitys integral development since birth happens in contact with the environment and the others, structuring the primary desire in a multiplicity of wishes and desires. Thus, the human beings suffer from fragmentation: nothing at last fully satisfies the heart. However it remains subjectively, unconsciously, their concern towards one divine Centre, being their desire a testifier, as reminiscent of where the claim for salvation or health is. This imbalance between the infinite demands, the wishes, and the experience of fulfillment can be theologically ascribed
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to original sin: the breakdown of human beings intimate relationship with God. The consequence of the effects of the rupture not only falls on the humanity and societies (Gen 3-4) but also on the Nature (Gen 6-8; Romans 8, 18-25). Today more than ever the human beings perceive the cosmic implications of their discontent behavior when they freely browse through creatures (looking for) what only God can give. In their voluptuous search, sensitive ecosystems, alongside the peoples within them, irreversibly succumb to extinction upon the biosphere face. Immersed in the current conventional culture, materialistic and techno-scientific, our religious stance, the most real basis of our existence, has been suppressed. In this sense, cultural values massively spread by the media, work towards the disintegration of men and women and the natural environment by an overvaluation of the rational, the technical, and of the hyperactive life. Everything that is part of the religious experience (intuition, subjectivity, passivity, aesthetics, and ethics) is penned up because it is ideologically considered a part of a bygone and primitive world, owing to be ideologically considered part of a bygone world already, (or because they are truly inconvenient). The human being, as a single species, is before a clear repression of the most intimate aspects that allow the development, from within outward, of unprecedented wealth which cooperate with the divine mandate of stewardship on Creation (Gen 1.28). Likewise, the human being is the Lieutenant, the environments Officer/Manager and co responsible for caring for the living creatures. Therefore the global ecological crisis can be considered the crisis of creation. Hence by virtue of the divine Act of Creation, it is impossible to separate environmental crisis from social crisis, unless we accept a quite wrong understanding of the mystery of the real. Moreover, environmental problems in a region are symptoms of the dominant social injustice in it. While we are still unable to develop a culture of austerity, Justice will be a beautiful utopia which has degenerated into a superficial sensitive solidarity. Both the environmental and social crisis will continue its growing development with distinctly adverse and serious effects on creation. Thus the hegemonic paradigm of wasteful consumption generates, and will continue generating, exclusion and extreme poverty and serious impacts on the environment. While the poor are not to be charged guilty for Planet depletion, the environmental crisis can be considered a consequence of negligence suffered by most marginalized
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peoples especially because of their rate of birth. Also the few who benefit from high consumption can avoid the consequences of their actions in their countries, albeit temporarily. The poor or the impoverished societies, conversely, come irreversibly into a vicious cycle of increased environmental impact, loss of natural services and resources and increasing poverty and diseases associated with environmental degradation. Therefore there is a growing trend to move risks, productions and dirtiness, from central countries towards peripheral regions of the world in order to protect or restore their own natural environments and reduce social and political risks. In general most poor or impoverished societies have no way or means to exercise the necessary control on the operations of such activities. Such transfers do not generate real wealth, but rather they are consumers of local resources local until they are depleted, with low added-value production and with high environmental impact. However, I believe we are on the doorstep of a new global awareness, if we allow it. We began to realize that natural ecosystems may not be stolen, without considering harmony with and in the diversity of the cultures of peoples together. In a theological key, it is a return to the mystical basis of Creation. Humanity is not an exception in the Creation. Certainly the cosmological and biological, with a distinct and well-defined direction toward higher thermodynamic complexity, has made the human being emerge as the most evolved. From the Biblical and current scientific data, we come to understand that humanity is at the crossroads of the entire universe: we are simultaneously, interstellar dusts, amoebaes and Gods children. Thus, the Trinitarian mystery of God, as the last Foundation of the real, reveals a horizon for understanding reality. One could say that reality is constitutively and irreducibly Trinitarian: in each real thing there is a transcendental or metaphysical aspect, a conscious or human dimension and an energy or physical dynamism deployed in space-time. One cannot think of reality without its spiritual aspect as the essential basis, without the traits of cosmic materiality, and without the human dimension, all at the same time, in mutual interpenetration. At the root of current environmental awareness there is a mystical tension that allows man to discover himself in the real crossroads between the three dimensions. Deep in human knowledge, there is a need of infinity and what not is intelligible, as there is also an eternal tendency for the divine in time, space and mankind.
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In summary, there has always been an element of dissatisfaction in humanity. We see this, for example, in the endogenous violence that affects our societies today, the rivalry and the fight for survival. Societies oftentimes responded to such violence by channeling in a positive direction the polarized power of the human heart that otherwise would be capable of producing self-destruction. Traditions and religions, with their rites and customs, were capable of helping to contain or limit the expansion of such violent forces, by overcoming the frustration that people feel in the different dimensions of human life, sexual, affective and intellectual. Nonetheless, nowadays we live in unsacred, secular, societies which have no ways to deal with unlimited human desire other than to foster consumerism by every means possible. Today we are clearly facing the consequences of a humanity without God. Natural disasters, climate change, air and water pollution, social injustice, impoverishment of our peoples, among other environmental and social issues, have much to do with attitudes and policies that lead to unsustainable development patterns of production and consumption that are supported by an economy based on the eternally dissatisfied human desire but with no God that is capable of reorienting the force of human desires. Therefore, as citizens of globalized societies we should be able to overcome the economics of greed, which is not a natural force before we succumb but a human construction, by means of including at least one tiny drop of universal ethic, i.e., some few values that are deeply and essentially human. The current conventional economy is very far from achieving the eradication of social injustice that it generates itself because it still lies in the irrational logic of infinite growth. The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist, would say Tim Jakson (economics commissioner on the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission). Hopefully, humanity can reach an ecological awakening, social and environmental. This ecological sensitivity is present in many religious expressions around the world. It is ecumenical. The religions of the world recognize the urgent need of preserving the creation, sustained by the love of the Creator. To a certain extent, we think the current ecological as one of the many ways by which today God the
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Creator comes to visit us, way by which God continues supporting and expanding the work of creation. This ecological sensitivity, fed and oriented by the riches of the Christian spiritual tradition, can be somehow a real prophetic voice among the peoples of the Nations. A prophet feeds, nourishes and brings forth an alternative perception to the dominant consciousness and culture whilst the social establishment ignores the problem. It is for this reason that we feel the urgent need to develop an ethical framework that opens the way to economic negotiations which include the common good, the human and social development within the framework of limited resources of earth, overcoming thus the voracity of purely economic relations, as former Pope Benedict XVI pointed out in his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate (CV 51). The future we want should be guided by a profound change in the social paradigm of the selfish human being (a paradigm established, to be honest, by Adam Smith), so traditionally rooted in modern culture. We have constructed a human being named as homo economicus that can be defined as empty self. We must overcome such a concept of human being whose supreme aspiration in life is to have more and earn more at the expense of whoever and whatever, as is promoted by the archetype of the conventional economy. The new process for sustainable flourishing societies requires definitely recovering the essential and universal values of the well-living, a typical feature of indigenous culture in South America, surpassing thus the mere concept of well-being, poorly measured by material wealth. Values of the well-living include, for example, peace flowing inwardly and outwardly, leading to living harmoniously with community and nature; likewise, well-living includes the inner happiness, or inner contentment, as positive openness to life and mutual respect. Such values are essentially part of the religious (and so human) experience of the realization of the human being. We need to re-discovery the spiritual experience as an authentic human dimension that cannot be denied without serious consequences for the cosmos, the place we live in. Only in such a way, we can grow into the awareness of our poverty and vulnerability, which currently are manifested in the suffering of the whole creation of God, that is to say, in the suffering of many men and women of this world, and of nature. At the end of the path, such a challenge will allows us to discover or recover
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our authentic being as homo solidarius, i.e., our human being in solidarity with others, nature, and why not, God himself, as source of the otherness supporting the universe. Communities of faith in action We are facing a new epoch of human development. It is about the transition to a Sustainable Economy that will require new policies and new societal commitments. There is need of establishing the limits of human deployment according to the physical limits of the Planet. This means that we need to encourage the rational use of energy sources by assigning priorities to our human activities as energy targets in order to grant more possibilities of development for future generations and for more people nowadays, which is a matter of social justice. To achieve this there is need of fixing the economic model. This means that we ought to work for the development of a new economy based on human needs, a business of austerity; and not an economy of maximization of advantages against whatever or whoever. Likewise, the rational management of natural resources and technology will help to bring economic profits in the long-term. The real and present danger is the wishful thinking of maximizing profits straightaway and saving the resources of the earth at the same time. Likewise, together with the fostering of a less aggressive business practices we need to work on changing the social logic, that is based on the culture of consumerism and erosion of social and individual commitment. We cannot any longer support our lives as being myopic, individualistic novelty seekers. Put briefly, as Communities of faith we believe that human fulfillment can be achieved by going beyond ecological and psychological detriment fostered by the logic of exorbitant consumption. There is need to foster contemplative attitudes as a way of human fulfillment and transformation, achievable through prayer, community and service. The spiritual path would seek and accomplish a personal, communitarian and planetary healing as long as these attitudes of faith can help us to be aware of: Few things are really important in our lives (austerity as a personal and community lifestyle). Greater austerity in the lives of a few can change attitudes and make the essentials available for the lives of many.
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Little is often sufficient, even much (God alone suffices, Teresa of Avila used to say) Dissatisfaction is part of our life journey (something to be accepted peacefully) Human aspirations and desires are infinite because they are made for searching God. Hence it is time for contemplation, I do believe! There is no doubt that humanity faces its own self-destructive capacity. In the past this capacity may have been limited by the sacred, but now it appears to be unlimited. Without a growth in consciousness of the Divine dimension of reality, the planetary ecological catastrophe seems to be inevitable. This, therefore, is the time for contemplation in order to discover once more that the unlimited human desire is a manifestation, in people and in nature, of the human vocation for God. Bear in mind: the contemplative dynamism is going from a multiple and full universe to one of simplicity and emptiness. Our Mystics call such a purification process emptying, nudity or loneliness of the soul. As the soul is emptied of all things the soul might be filled by God who is pure simplicity. To make this way forward it is only possible from the intimate call of love that surpasses all other claims that the multiplicity of the world offers and that only a genuine experience of God can give. I believe that it is only at that moment that we can start talking honestly about justice and equity in our societies.

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