Santorum on Earth and Man
by Adam Robbert
Rarely do I ever come across a statement that holds the exact opposite position of my own. Surely disagreements arise but rarely on the level of being diametrically opposed. Then I came across THIS article and interview with presidential candidate Rick Santorum yesterday. From the article:
Rick Santorum on Sunday condemned what he called President Barack Obama’s world view that “elevates the Earth above man,” discouraging increased use of natural resources.
The GOP presidential candidate also slammed Obama’s health care overhaul for requiring insurers to pay for prenatal tests that, Santorum said, will encourage more abortions.
A day after telling an Ohio audience that Obama’s agenda is based on “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible,” Santorum said he wasn’t criticizing the president’s Christianity.
“I’ve repeatedly said I don’t question the president’s faith. I’ve repeatedly said that I believe the president’s Christian,” Santorum told CBS’ ”Face the Nation.”
“I am talking about his world view, and the way he approaches problems in this country. I think they’re different than how most people do in America,” he said in the broadcast interview.
The former Pennsylvania senator said Obama’s environmental policies promote ideas of “radical environmentalists,” who, Santorum argues, oppose greater use of the country’s natural resources because they believe “man is here to serve the Earth.” He said that was the reference he was making Saturday in his Ohio campaign appearance when he denounced a “phony theology.”
I’m not entirely sure where to begin here. The fact that Santorum thinks climate change is a conspiracy to centralize government power? The fact that any religion that views the Earth as primary amounts to a phony theology? The fact that Santorum is kind enough to ‘believe’ that Obama is really a christian? Or how about Santorum’s suggestion that Obama’s (weak) environmental policies constitute a ‘radical environmentalism’?
Whats astonishing is not so much that there are people who actually agree with Santorum but that there are so many of them that he actually has a shot at being the republican presidential candidate. It seems I am a supporter of phony theology. But that, of course, begs the question, what constitutes a true theology anyway? What a strange state of affairs.
Who knew Obama would turn out to be such a radical Islamic environmentalist!?! He sure hides it well.
In all seriousness, I think Santorum is taking political discourse in this country in exactly the direction it needs to be taken. Yes, please, let’s talk about world views and theologies and stop pretending that politics could ever take place in an arena unsullied by so-called religious concerns. The longer the Left pretends that issues of the State can be meaningfully separated from issues of the Church, the longer it will fail to recapture the American imagination from the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that conservatism has dragged it down into. Politics has already been evangelized by the Right, and I fear that if the Left insists on secularism as the only possible counter to the sacred histories of the Right, it will remain in a defensive posture, always playing catch up.
Climate Change IS a religious issue if there ever was one. The consequences of inaction are nothing less than the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of much of life on earth within the next century. There are a few “radical environmentalists” who get this, and who feel the sense of urgency of our situation. But many on the Left would rather avoid the clear signs of the end times in order to avoid changing their bourgeois morals and routines. Leftist multicultural tolerance is no longer an adequate response to our situation. Not when the common denominator of human culture is consumerism and global capitalism, which in the end produces only monoculture wastelands. We need a post-partison “multinaturalism,” perhaps–a form of politics that fosters ecological diversity across all domains, with the common denominator being the cosmos.
Politics is about vision, about rhetoric. The conservatives know this, and so they play to the theological imagination of Americans rather than to their secular rationality. Progressives need to become explicit about their own cosmotheandric gospel: what is the role of the human being on the earth? What is to be our ultimate concern in a post-industrial, post-growth society? Are there any candidates up to the challenge of facing the actual time and place of our politicking?
I’m in full agreement here, Matt. The negative approach taken by the left–where the right is simply deconstructed over and over again–is inadequate. A serious approach to a multinatural ecological ethics has to offer something to the religious and secular minded alike. And, given that the majority of the people on Earth are religiously minded, it might even be wise to put the weight on how we might conceptualize ecological ethics in terms of religious practices and values (perhaps like the forum on religion and ecology at Yale). But I have a few misgivings about this line of thinking too.
First, its not clear how many people actually use their religious beliefs to make decisions about ecology. My sense is that the situation is quite a bit more complicated than simply straightening out so-and-so’s religious beliefs so that they accord with ecological values. In this sense actively making religion an ecological issue seems necessary as its not necessarily the case that people’s religions beliefs have anything to do with how they treat the environment (compartmentalization seems to trump coherent value systems in such cases).
Second (and this is not in response to any of your above comments per se), I think we also need to better theorize how it is that worldviews actually participate in the unfolding of society. I am often disappointed by these discourses in that I don’t think its the case that “Worldview Y” = “World X” as is sometimes posited. In other words we need a better understanding of the ontology knowledge (mind, worldview etc.) and how these relate to the material ecologies of Earth.
My fear is that thinking the relationship between worldview and world too quickly will result in an over-emphasis on the need for a change in human interiority (which is already greatly over-valued). In other words, I don’t want people to get the impression that if they just their mind, values, or perception that this will create change in the world.
Surely a change in values counts as a change in the world, but this may not be the change we are looking for. Take for example when we say something like ‘today’s world is yesterdays imagination,’ we put too much emphasis on the whole concept of worldview in general and its impact on the world. So, lets put worldviews on the table for discussion, but lets also be rigorous about what it is exactly that worldviews do –as actors — traveling through society.
I think the disconnect you bring up between world views, values, and actions is symptomatic of capitalist social relations. Certainly, we live in a world of interlocking and overlapping ecologies that is far more complex than anything we can think about or imagine in a clear and distinct way. There are no sound bites capable of encapsulating our situation. But politics, if it is anything, seems to be the attempt human beings make to bring their values and the actions together by way of democratic discourse, even if this discourse is forever ongoing since it always falls short of producing a complete vision of reality. We talk to each other in an attempt to become more conscious of our situation and to decide what is to be done about it, despite all the unknowns. Part of becoming conscious is gaining as much insight as is possible into the nature of the world we live in.
In our consumerist society, values have become more like consumable goods, something you buy into or vote for, rather than bring about actively by actually changing the way you live. Political candidates are brands: we wear their pins and bumper stickers as identity statements and assume merely having an opinion about abortion or climate change is enough to sustain a democracy.
http://www.iai.tv/video/the-world-after-ideals
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/senator-santorums-planet.html