In 1617, a German monk named Martin Luther protested against the Catholic Church. In the picture above, he is depicted nailing the famous 95 theses onto the door of the church. Analysis of historical literature revealed that these protests would set off a chain of events essential to the industrial revolution (Heine, 2016), most particularly in its contribution to Eschatology, Election, “Democractic setup”, Ethics and Empiricism. Lynn White criticizes the industrial revolution, along with its unprecedented scientific and technological advancements, and its anthropocentrism as the cause for today’s pollution, global warming, and widespread species extinction.
Eschatology:
The Christian concept of the Last Judgement changed in the 16th Century from being an issue of the “salvation of collectives” (i.e. people and the environment) to the “salvation of individual souls”. The salvation of souls was particularly important to many Protestant sects because they wanted to know who would be saved (Heine, 2016). Hence, John Calvin, an influential theologian, attempts to discuss this issue with the concepts of Election and Predestination:
Election and Predestination:
Elect was a technical term used to indicate a status of a person: whether or not they would spend eternity of the afterlife in heaven or in hell.
Many of the protestant sects maintained a belief that even before people were born, their fates would be pre-destined. If they were predestined for heaven, then they would be part of the elect, while those who were pre-destined to hell were not part of the elect.
However, nobody could actually accurately decipher which persons are elect, therefore they decided to rely on external cues of a person’s life to discern their fate. Since they themselves wanted to be part of the elect, they felt the need to live up to these external cues of “working hard and achieving much”.
Direct Commune with God ( “Democratic setup”)
Protestantism taught individuals that they were able to commune with God directly, and that they need not depend on the Church for moral direction. Furthermore they were encouraged to disregarded all prior doctrines and exercise their ability to decide for themselves. This led to the renunciation of the environmental ethics espoused by Augustine and St Francis which were replaced by idiosyncratic perspectives and ideas (Heine, 2016).
The individualized relations between each person and God was essential to the “individualization process” of society. This emphasis on individual rights also gave rise to consumerism of the future.
The Protestant Ethic:
Max Weber, in his thesis, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, established a relationship between Protestant beliefs and the capitalist mentality.
These religious beliefs produced motivation about working diligently and accumulating wealth by framing these tasks as moral obligations. Initially, this wealth was not to be pursued for its own sake or enjoyed in lavish consumption, rather, as a moral obligation – to simply obtain as much as possible for the sake of being product. Thus, in a sense, the pursuit of wealth was an end in itself.
Another related idea attributable to Martin Luther, was the idea of a “calling”. A calling is a unique God-given purpose to fulfil in his life. People could serve this moral duty by working hard at their calling, thus work itself became a moral obligation. John Calvin expanded upon how people could work harder at their calling by advocating protestants to be entirely focused on their work, and this can be best achieved by maintaining a professional stance, detached nature, impersonal, unsentimental.
Furthermore, the self-efficacy emphasized by the Protestant movement increased their perceived agency of their actions (Heine, 2016). Thus, they saw themselves as agents who had the ability to effect change upon the world (incremental theory of the world), hence, they saw the world as something flexible and responsive to efforts to change it.
These ideas had the ability to shape not just the individuals, but also the societies build around it. These frameworks created the affordance for the exploitation of nature in the interests of economic development, by legitimizing the pursuit of work at all costs, with little or no thought given about environmental consequences. Thus, Christians started rationalizing a domination of the earth instead of stewardship.
Empiricism:
Francis Bacon, often credited as being the father of empiricism, used the imagery of nature “requiring torture to yield her secrets” (Merchant, 2008). From then on, ecological destruction became a mere means to experimentation and knowledge. Mountains become “natural resources,” primary forests are seen as “potential agriculture land”, rivers of fish are “stocks”, all fit for exploitation: a stark contrast to St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, who names them as Brothers.
Another by-product of the scientific revolution was the literal interpretation of the 6-day creation story, because they saw the Bible as a empirical text rather than an allegorical one (van Leuven, 2007). Hence the renounced traditional interpretations of the bible in favour of a literal one, thus giving rise to the prominence of dominionistic value types over the old ones.
Lynn White argues that the ethics of production and consumption, each with their own self-justifying ends, are contradictory to the environmental ethics of conservation and preservation. Therefore, he predicts future conflicts over various forms from endangered species, to logging of forested land. These ethics have also led to more waste being produced and hence more pollution generated, and more resources used to dispose them.
References:
Hanning, R. W. (1977). The individual in twelfth-century romance (p. 194). New Haven: Yale University Press
Heine, S. J. (2016). Cultural psychology. New York: W.W. Norton.
Merchant, C. (2008). Secrets of nature: The Bacon debates revisited. Journal of the History of Ideas, 69(1), 147-162.
Merchant, Carolyn (2008). “the Violence Of Impediments”: Francis Bacon And The Origins Of Experimentation. _Isis: A Journal of the History of Science_ 99:731-760.
Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant ethic and the” spirit” of capitalism and other writings. Penguin.
Van Leuven, G. (2007). Theistic Evolution an Inharmonious Compromise: A Charge for a Return to the Literal Interpretation of the Six Creation Days in Genesis.