Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [4]
Increasingly skeptical of capitalist meritocracy and economic criteria as the implicit standards of success at the individual level and the defining measure of progress at the societal level, the post-World War II generations have redefined normative notions of well-being and quality of life in developed societies. Humanitarianism and environmentalism have become the dominant social movements, bringing environmental protection, preservation of quality of life, and other “life-political” issues, in the words of British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, to the fore.
The rise of the knowledge economy — encompassing medicine, law, finance, media, real estate, marketing, and the nonprofit sector — has further accelerated the West’s growing disenchantment with modern life, especially among the educated elite. Knowledge workers are more alienated from the products of their labor than any other class in history, unable to claim some role in producing food, shelter, or even basic consumer products. And yet they can afford to spend time in beautiful places — in their gardens, in the countryside, on beaches, and near old-growth forests. As they survey these landscapes, they tell themselves that the best things in life are free — even though they have consumed mightily to travel to places where they feel peaceful, calm, and far from the worries of the modern world.
These postmaterial values have given rise to a secular and largely inchoate ecotheology, complete with apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions of living in a fallen world, and the growing conviction that some kind of collective sacrifice is needed to avoid the end of the world. Alongside those dark incantations shine nostalgic visions of a transcendent future in which humans might, once again, live in harmony with nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life.
The contradictions between the world as it is — filled with the unintended consequences of our actions — and the world as so many of us would like it to be, result in a pseudorejection of modernity, a kind of postmaterialist nihilism. Empty gestures are the defining sacraments of ecotheology. The belief that we must radically curtail our consumption in order to survive as a civilization is no impediment to elites paying for private university educations, frequent jet travel, and iPads.
Thus, ecotheology, like all dominant religious narratives, serves the dominant forms of social and economic organization in which it is embedded. Catholicism valorized poverty, social hierarchy, and agrarianism for the masses in feudal societies that lived and worked the land. Protestantism valorized industriousness, capital accumulation, and individuation among the rising merchant classes of early capitalist societies and would define the social norms of modernizing industrial societies. Today’s secular ecotheology values creativity, imagination, and leisure over the work ethic, productivity, and efficiency in societies that increasingly prosper from their knowledge economies while outsourcing crude, industrial production of goods to developing societies. Living amid unprecedented levels of wealth and security, ecological elites reject economic growth as a measure of well-being, tell cautionary tales about modernity and technology, and warn of overpopulation abroad now that the societies in which they live are wealthy and their populations are no longer growing.
Such hypocrisy has rarely been a hindrance to religion and, indeed, contributes to its power. One of the most enduring characteristics of human civilization is the way ruling elites espouse beliefs radically at odds with their own behaviors. The ancient Greeks recited the cautionary