Spiritual Pron

Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson in Sam Wood's Beyond the Rocks (1922), via TheLoudestVoice.

Shorter David Brooks, "Fracking and the Franciscans", June 23 2015:

Pope Francis, author of a new encyclical on the protection of the natural environment, is the kind of ideal human being I've been talking about who radiates goodness, generosity, humility, spiritual awareness. What an idiot, huh?

As with the largely leftist cast of The Road to Character, George Eliot, Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Brooks wants us to admire the Pope's deep spirituality while ignoring everything he thinks. Wonderful man, but unfortunately stupid on geological, biological, economic, and political issues; you should listen to a smart guy like Brooks, otherwise known as a narcissistic blowhard, instead.

I call it spiritual porn because of the way he objectifies the characters he admires: they "radiate" for his edification, but what goes in on their heads doesn't need to be treated with any respect, or even any particular interest. He's a masturbator of the soul: Dorothy Day's radiance gets him hot, but Day herself isn't a real person to him, just a centerfold arouser of tumescent piety.

"Fracking and the Franciscans"

Trivial point, but what does "Franciscan" mean in the headline? Does he think Francis is a Franciscan? (He's a Jesuit.) Is he using the word to refer in a broader sense to the followers of Francis of Assisi, not just the monastic order but all the admirers of his thinking, as in the beautiful Cantico del Frate Sol that give the Pope his title (Laudato Si'—English text at the link)? To St. Francis, even the sun itself is not merely a radiant object, the thing that warms our planet, but our brother too, a subject you can empathize with. Is Brooks heaping his scorn on the 13th-century Francis as well?

Seamless Garment

There are passages in his new encyclical on the environment that beautifully place human beings within the seamless garment of life. And yet over all the encyclical is surprisingly disappointing.

Does he seriously not know what "seamless garment" means? As a technical term in Catholic theology, to describe the ideological robe in which Catholics should wrap themselves, of reverence toward all of life, the life of the fetus and the soldier and the condemned murderer and all the creatures of the planet. It's seamless in terms of the theory in that it is not divided into parts that can be skipped or selected (so that "cafeteria Catholics" who don't object to capital punishment, or people like me who can't accept the idea that an unwanted fetus is a child, are doing it, according to the doctrine, wrong). To refer to life itself as a "seamless garment", something one puts on but at the same time one thing that all of us human beings are placed in together, beautifully or otherwise, is a truly weird category error.

Or "Franciscan" and "seamless garment" are just characteristic examples of the Brooksian bad writing, where he uses a word without taking any interest in its meaning but only its radiant warmth, to make the text sound sort of spiritual.

It's funny how he treats the encyclical itself like a Broadway play, with some nice bits but "over all surprisingly disappointing". World-famous theology critic David Brooks shaking his head at the current encyclical season, which doesn't have any bona fide hits as yet. He can't see that the document is meant to present a single, holistic view, in which the points he likes and the ones he doesn't like are interdependent; the seamless garment is the structure it's modeled on.

Overdrawn

Legitimate warnings about the perils of global warming morph into 1970s-style doom-mongering about technological civilization. There are too many overdrawn statements like “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

"Why, your Holiness, can't you write more like me, taking a nice judicious position and recognizing that both sides are at fault? I'm so disappointed!"

I love that "overdrawn", like Francis is going to get a warning from the word bank.

Hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.

The terms "self-interest" and "competition" appear twice and once respectively in Laudato Si', but with qualifications: we shouldn't hand over our freedom to the blind forces of self-interest; we should reject self-interested pragmatism as a philosophical foundation. The environmental movement is right to develop a critique of utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, competition, consumerism, the unregulated market) in favor of a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint (how weird is it to think of Brooks complaining about a formulation like that—no reason to think he's actually read the words, of course; his reaction is entirely partisan and dictated by his overlords at the Manhattan Institute or American Enterprise Institute). He doesn't say self-interest must cease to exist, he says it must not be permitted to take over, like an unopposed species in the moral ecology whose natural enemies have been rooted out.

Thus  in his remarks about the issues of technology, what Francis objects to is the monolithic character of market control, which forces out all other interests, of love, compassion, and stewardship:

the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.... This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.

Greed is good! Lust, too!

He neglects the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good. Within marriage, lust can lead to childbearing. Within a regulated market, greed can lead to entrepreneurship and economic innovation. Within a constitution, the desire for fame can lead to political greatness.

There's the problem, I guess. Francis's old, essentially Aristotelian concept of sin as excess, the carrying too far of something normal like a desire for sex or money, is incompatible with Brooks's postmodern idea of sin as something normal that can be good in a regulated situation like a marriage or a market.

Francis does, of course, approve of and indeed demand democratic environmental regulation:

Society, through non-governmental organizations and intermediate groups, must put pressure on governments to develop more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls. Unless citizens control political power – national, regional and municipal – it will not be possible to control damage to the environment. Local legislation can be more effective, too, if agreements exist between neighbouring communities to support the same environmental policies.

But he's not convinced that regulation is sufficient to save the earth; people need to become better.

We know, for example, that countries which have clear legislation about the protection of forests continue to keep silent as they watch laws repeatedly being broken. Moreover, what takes place in any one area can have a direct or indirect influence on other areas. Thus, for example, drug use in affluent societies creates a continual and growing demand for products imported from poorer regions, where behaviour is corrupted, lives are destroyed, and the environment continues to deteriorate.... The existence of laws and regulations is insufficient in the long run to curb bad conduct, even when effective means of enforcement are present. If the laws are to bring about significant, long-lasting effects, the majority of the members of society must be adequately motivated to accept them, and personally transformed to respond.

Guess what! He's a religious leader, I'm not surprised. Brooks, on the other hand, thinks we should read about St. Augustine and Dwight Eisenhower and enjoy how much nicer they are than we are, and that's enough moral exercise for us. We should admire Pope Francis as

 a wonderful example of how to be a truly good person

but we'd better not do as he asks us to do.

Low and steady wins the race

I hope somebody else deals with the lies in this column about how the regulated-by-greed market is taking care of everything in a way the regulated-by-morality market wouldn't. I'll just mention a couple of things:

A few years ago, a team of researchers led by Daniel Esty of Yale looked at the environmental health of 150 countries. The nations with higher income per capita had better environmental ratings. 

Well, duh. But the report concluded that the difference wasn't money, but good governance:

That's why Costa Rica did so much better than the US and Belgium, to say nothing of its economic and geographical mate Nicaragua, while Nicaragua did so much better than relatively high-income China and India.

one of the most castigated industries has, ironically, produced some of the most important economic and environmental gains. I’m talking of course about fracking.

The recent EPA report finding that the damage done to the water supply by hydrofracking does not seem to be widespread doesn't mean it isn't harmful or won't be widespread in the future, or that it won't cause other problems like the weird seismic activity in Oklahoma. The idea that it's going to save us all from coal is also far from a certainty: an analysis from last October 

published in the journal Nature shows that a gas boom would cut energy prices, squeezing out renewable energy, and is likely to actually increase overall carbon emissions. The researchers conclude that only new interventions, such as a long-sought international climate change deal or significant global price on carbon pollution, would be effective in tackling warming.

And it's far from clear that there's enough gas waiting to be obtained by the process to do the trick anyway.

You would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw and rugged capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the middle class and great gains in human dignity.

I think the kind of high-octane growth being fueled in China and elsewhere in East Asia by ruthlessly dirigiste governments isn't the kind of market solution you have in mind, and and it only works to the extent it's sustained over the long term, which depends in turn on reducing inequality, which is not really happening.

Via IMF.

And as Redhand notes in the comments that growth has also fueled some extraordinary, lethal pollution in China and Indonesia in particular, and no doubt Malaysia, Vietnam, and India and Bangladesh as well. Nor can you expect much from the kind of Burkean policy Brooks ends up advocating, as always, and the case he was making last fall for "low ideals". He's back on that today, deploring how

programs based on the purity of the heart backfire; the irony that the best social programs harvest the low but steady motivations of people as they actually are.

God forbid that the Pope should try to transform people, amirite?

Update: Steve M clarifies that the Church has not yet gone totally Commie. (I would add at least no more Commie than it was under Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, all of whom are quoted freely in the encyclical.)