Editors' blog
Anna Simpson, 9 Mar 2010
In last week’s episode of ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, two women vied for a rare opportunit...
Wanted: a politics of revelation
Many ‘deep greens’ are driven by a sense of reverence for the Earth. But where does that leave those who don’t connect? Far out of the mainstream of modern society, unable to influence policy or politics. So is dry pragmatism the answer? Or does the pursuit of sustainable development really need reverence at its core? In an edited version of his Forum Scholarships Alumni lecture, Ian Christie dives into this debate and emerges with a fresh prescription - for a politics of revelation. In his book, The Day Before Yesterday, Colin Tudge reviews humanity’s state of unsustainable development and writes:"So how do we get out of this mess?...the task is to develop what might glibly be called ‘the politics of reverence’, as opposed to the ‘politics of exploitation’."
Intuitively, this commands assent. Reverence - a sense of awe and wonder in the face of nature - is surely what we need in our politics. But then one turns to Michael Jacobs. In Can’t Green be Modern? (GF, issue 18, p44-45), he makes a persuasive case that deep greenery is politically suicidal. We should be able to advance environmental arguments in a far more pragmatic, piecemeal fashion, he argues.
The two points of view reflect a basic faultline in politics. This is the tension between the assertion of fundamental values, and the compromise of those values in the name of ‘realism’ - along with the possibility of making gradual progress in realising them. It is a tension of particular power and complexity for environmentalists.
So is there a way to bring reverence into politics, and does sustainable development actually need it? If the environmental stakes are as high as we all imagine, we need to decide what we think about this.
The case for reverence
The main carrier of ‘reverence for nature’ is the broad stream of writing that Michael Jacobs terms the ‘radical utopian’ current in environmentalism. It spans a huge range of ideas, including the famous theory of Gaia. It is rooted in the argument that there are deep spiritual, as well as economic and social, flaws in industrial society.
Its critique of business-as-usual is potent. The ecological ravages of industrial society point to a gaping hole in our sensibilities. What is missing is piety, or reverence, what the philosopher Roger Scruton describes as a "deep down recognition of our frailty and dependence". Tony Blair’s advisor Geoff Mulgan sees it as a quality that "plants in us a sense of responsibility towards the future, towards others, and towards the world beyond us".
The case is compelling that industrial societies have a blind spot concerning nature, future generations and our dependence on the Earth. But hard questions arise.
The trouble with reverence
Can we actually make a politics out of reverence for the Earth? And how exactly is reverence to become a major force in society? The deep green literature is strong on analysis of unsustainability, and on private epiphanies expressing reverence for nature, but weak on practical proposals for mobilising a large-scale political force. Organised religion is too marginal in our political culture to be a source of a more reverential politics. And Gaian philosophies are also out on the fringes of modern political culture.
Moreover, a politics of reverence must deal with profound clashes over priorities. In reverential outlooks, everything may resolve ultimately into a mystic harmony. In politics, there is no such resolution, and it is not only goods that clash with bads, but also goods with goods. What about cases where reverence for human rights and for animal ones collide? How much of the biological world deserves reverence, and how much can we exploit?
And what does reverence add? For example, does policy on climate change demand reverence for the atmosphere? All kinds of environmental initiatives have been introduced without much appeal to reverence. No-one worries whether chemical companies have been talked around to a new perspective on nature. What matters is whether they clean up their act.
Is there something that only reverence can supply? If we implemented the Kyoto accords, and greatly improved on them, simply out of grudging calculation that it was probably cost-effective in the long run, would something still be lacking?
Another drawback to reverence is the way it tends to inhibit innovation. It could be based more on fear than wonder, more on limits than possibilities. Consider the GMO debate. If we stop experimentation out of reverential risk aversion, might we be throwing away new forms of pollution prevention, new food supplies, even ways of regenerating biodiversity?
Above all, the idea of a politics of reverence fails to make sense in our post-Enlightenment democracy, which has turned religion into one tradition competing among many others; which is rightly sceptical of leaders, deference and grand theories of social destiny; and in which we recognise that you can’t be focused on the sacred all the time.
The danger of reverence
In modern times, reverence has become fragmented, privatised and legalised: we revere the procedural values of democracy, and we make up our worldviews from many sources. We also place a high value on irreverence, and on ethical pluralism. This is a culture where ‘awesome’ is a term applied to God, nature, photos from the Hubble telescope, Manchester United and the latest Nike trainers. There is reverence all around, but not for the same things; and any object of reverence is also a target for ridicule by the irreverent.
This presents a major problem for reverential traditions, including the deep green one: how to find a common language for public debate? The more traditions stick to their roots, the less grip they have on political debate. The more they translate what they have to say into a general vocabulary, the more pragmatic they must be, and so the more they alienate their fundamentalists. They also face accusations of hopeless nostalgia or Utopianism. The failure of John Major’s ‘back to basics’ moral crusade, and the mockery of radical greens in much of the media, remind us that trying to introduce the sublime into modern politics is closely allied to a descent into the ridiculous.
But it can also be linked to real danger. If the 20th century has taught us anything, it is that a politics founded on reverence is liable to end in violent authoritarianism. Much as we all yearn at times for a re-enchantment of the world, we must be deeply wary of any transcendental narrative about our bonds to the earth or to destiny. A total ideology is hostile to democracy; and a dominant ‘biocentric’ ideology would only emerge in the democratic world in extremis. The most likely trigger is a set of dire global eco-disasters affecting the rich world as much as the south, in which case everyone will have failed.
The point here is that there is a missing word in the phrase ‘sustainable development’, and the word is ‘democratic’. There may be many paths to sustainability, but ours must be democratic.
Those who hold deep ecological values can find a place within liberal democracy to influence policy and attitudes. But we cannot guarantee that liberal democracy will create the kind of environmental policies that proponents of a politics of reverence would like.
The inadequacy of pragmatic greenery
So there is no secure foothold for deep green reverence, either in the culture of modern democracies or in the attitudes of the public. Pragmatism rules, and we have incorporated greenery piecemeal into politics and the economy. Can’t we carry on like this? Our leaders, and most of us voters, obviously want it to be so.
But it will not do: we cannot simply rely on pragmatism in the face of the big ecological challenges. There are some compelling reasons for this.
First, supply-side changes in technology can only take us so far. Imagine the sudden invention next week of nuclear fusion and utterly ‘clean’ cars: they would be hailed as a ‘solution’ of a kind, but they would leave untouched deep questions about our attitude towards nature. In fact, they would pose them in even sharper form: how much of the world do we want to reserve for the non-human residents of the planet? There is no answer outside a debate on attitudes and ethics, in which questions about reverence would be inescapable.
Secondly, pragmatism won’t give us the sense of urgency and the willpower we need. If we wait until crises arrive it could be too late to avert worse damage. So we should cultivate an attitude which takes precaution and long-term human well-being seriously.
Thirdly, current decision-making procedures based on cost-benefit analysis don’t take sufficient account of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the choices to be made. Nor do such techniques capture the sheer fragility of some ecosystems. Our environmental assessments need a dimension of reverence.
Fourthly, we cannot rely on market valuations and property rights to preserve biodiversity. For what can be valued in the market can also be traded, with no guarantee that it will be conserved. Long-term survival can only happen if new attitudes emerge, which are not dependent on market values, to help conserve species and places.
Reverence, respect and revelation
Where does this leave us? There can’t be a uniform ‘politics of reverence’ in a post-Enlightenment democracy. But pragmatic adaptation won’t be enough to make an equitable transition to a sustainable and just world economy. So we need ways of infusing more reverence into our politics. What to do?
First, we need to work out what ‘reverence’ can mean as a highest common denominator in a plural society. It surely includes sensitivity to the well-being of future generations, respect for critical natural services, and awareness of the limits of our knowledge of how complex ecosystems respond to our interventions. But it can’t be centred on deeply contentious quasi-religious ideas about reverence for Gaia. I suggest that the highest common denominator idea is that of respect for the support systems of the Earth. How can we begin to bring such a sensibility into politics?
Legislation cannot do it, although constitutional statements on duties of sustainable development have their place. It can, however, be brought into politics via the ‘soft tools’ of deliberative processes. Above all, we need innovative education for what Geoff Mulgan terms ‘moral fluency’ - equipping citizens of all ages with a basic understanding of how decisions are made, of rights and responsibilities, and of the process of ethical debate.
What this points to is not a politics of reverence. Rather, it suggests a need for political processes to foster what Tim O’Riordan calls revelation – deliberation that opens people to new perspectives and experiences, which may in turn be the seedbed for reverence and respect. So there are 3 Rs - reverence, respect and revelation. The latter two are what we can plan for: the first is what we might hope for, but cannot make the centre of democratic politics.
What else can we do to promote this agenda? Above all, we should try to promote more learning based on the idea of revelation - grounded in experience that can influence personal values and heighten empathy. There are plenty of organisations and initiatives that provide such learning - the Forum’s Scholarships programme among them. Others include the charity Common Purpose, and the participatory ‘visioning’ forums of Local Agenda 21. We need to scale these up, and develop innovative variations. For example:
- Developing new forums for local debate on long-term issues for quality of life, through experiments with second chambers in local government - imagine a ‘House of the Local Commons’ where councillors and citizens would come together to review Local Agenda 21 plans;
- More focused and flexible forms of ‘civic jury service’ in deliberative forums;
- Making initiatives such as the Forum Scholarship programme available to people in mid-career;
- Introducing participatory initiatives, open to a much wider range of stakeholders, into the summits of decision- makers - the G8 group, the EU Council and the Davos Forum.
There are no guarantees that a process of revelation will infuse more respect and reverence into politics. But it can work: consider the examples of Michael Howard and John Prescott, former and current environment secretaries. Howard visited the rainforest during the Rio Summit, and Radio 4’s interview captured the dawning of reverence in his responses to the jungle. A pity he was moved to the Home Office... And what changes in John Prescott’s values began as he saw the bleached coral reefs of the Indian Ocean for himself in 1999? A pity that the experience was ruined by tabloid reporters intent on damning Prescott as a junketeer.
We began with reverence and Gaia, and we end with John Prescott. To many readers this might seem something of a let- down. But reverence is one thing and politics is another. Bringing them together at all means looking for common ground between wholly estranged realms of life. Reverence is not something from which we can make a new politics. But we’ve seen that it might arise from processes designed to promote revelation and respect. Eco-tourism and encounter groups for decision- makers are a crucial part of what we need, along with better deliberative democratic processes and moral education.
The epiphanies of Michael Howard and John Prescott, unlikely as it sounds, are among the best evidence of the potential of measures to bring a sense of revelation, respect and, ultimately, reverence, into practical politics.
Ian Christie is senior research associate at Demos and associate director of the Local Futures Group
Local Futures Group, 020 7242 4415; ian.christie@lfg.co.uk
2 October 2001
Registered charity number 1040519