Environment and Spirituality

Last night, I attended my first session of a sub-group the UUHK. Actually, it was supposed to be the fourth and last one of the series but for one reason or another I was never able to make it previously. The group was small: the chairman, a senior radiologist and his wife now a full time housewife, a social worker who recently switched from a Baptist to a Methodist church, a student of theology at the HKCU,  with ambition to be an Anglican priest, a young girl who just learned about talk on the internet and another young man who has been a rather detached Protestant. We discussed the last two chapters of a book by a liberal Chinese Protestant theologian called Kung Lap Yan (龔 立人):  his Engaged Spirituality: Essays on Ethics, Society and Religion, 糾纏的靈性 (2006)

Kung thought that global warming, rising sea level, reduction of the size of our polar ice caps, el Niño, the rapid rise in use of fresh water, the quantity of fish caught are clear red lights that our environmental damage and depletion have reached dangerous levels. Yet due to the rapid spread of economic globalization, few governments are really serious about problems of our environmental pollution and depletion of natural resources. To him, such problems are indissolubly linked to the question of the inequitable distribution and use of natural resources and aggravation of the unequal distribution of wealth between the richer and the poorer nations. If we ignore the two latter problems, then the poorer nations will yet again be further victimized as the dumping ground of toxic and other industrial waste or the site for polluting factories. For this reason, he thinks that environmental ethics always involves also the question of social justice. He seeks to understand the problem from the perspective of Christian beliefs and the concept of the Sabbath via our behavior as consumers to show how our lifestyle is intimately connected with ecology and to reflect on our role in environmental protection.

Consumerism is deeply enmeshed with the global economy. Only when there are consumers can the manufacturers keep their factories running and the economy going. Therefore continuous consumption is necessary for production. For this reason, advertising keeps our desire for continous consumption at white heat: we are taught not only that we need certain houses, certain foods, certain services to satisfy our basic or primary needs but that we need products which are the most classy, the most fashionable, the most glamourous. Products are built not to last in what is called "planned obsolescence" so that we need constant upgrade ie. they are artificially generated socio-psychological needs or desires. Basic needs have been transformed into "life-style" tastes or desires. Only when the consumers are encouraged to buy their products will the manufacturers be able to improve thier production facilities and more economical methods of production to satify the spiralling consumer demands. Therefore consumerism affects not merely the economy. It has already penetrated into sphere of cultural values through repetition, habit training, sublimal perusuasion, product image etc. in the manner I talked about in an earlier blog about social psychology. Kung's quarrel is not with packing and imaging of the products but with the fact that they are really designed not in the true interest and benefit of the consumer but only the profit of the manufacturers and their promoters.

Another quarrel Kung finds with current consumerism is that the consumer is encouraged to pay attention on low cost, on bargain prices and not on other issues, and to ignore the consequences of their unlimited consumption on pollution of the environment and rapid depletion of the earth's natural resources. This shows itself in the rapid replacement rates of mobile phones (usually 6 month product cycle), computers and other digital products, thus increasing the quantity of outdated models still basically serviceable, encouraging a philosophy of " I consume, therefore I exist" and of self-centredness, with complete disregard of his own social responsibility, erroneously thinking that once he paid his monthly charges for the garbage disposal, his responsibility to society ends, ignoring completely that the quantity of garbage he produces may also be in itself a problem. In short, even our values have become commodified and we treat Nature the same way as any other consumer products. Kung does not object to consumption as such. All he wishes to see is a more rational and more socially and environmentally responsible kind of consumption..

To resolve the problem, Kung thinks that we need to pay attention to 4 values: a systematic approach based on the what is best not just for human beings as a sub-system but the earth as a whole;  the level of production and consumption which to him, should be tailored to the level of environmental toleration; continual encouragement of diversity rather than uniformity by allowing proper time for the earth's renewable resources to replenish themselves naturally and in its own time and according to its own rhythm and finally, more attention to co-operation, complementarity, symbiosis rather than on competition, aggression and domination and working to re-establish the relevant ecological balance. Whilst economic factors are important, they should not be the only or exclusive factor to be taken into consideration in our decision making process.

However, to Kung, even the ideal of sustainable development itself is incomplete because of its tendency to quantify Nature without due regard to our need to love the environment and the current omission of the even more fundamental question of social justice and the inequality of wealth between the richer and poorer nations which lies at the heart of an even deeper level for radical transformation of our thinking about the environment. What we need is more consumer education on the need to protect our environment. 

To Ro Harlem Brundtland who first invented the concept of sustainable development in the 1970s, it was intended more as a symbol of the direction in which we should go more than a concrete programme for the materialization of such an ideal. But nonetheless, according to Paul Ricoeuer, a symbol has a potential for transforming our world: it has a certain surplus of meaning whose realization provides a possibility of transcendence. A symbol enables us to have a certain sense of freedom rather than limitation and may propel us forward  us into the realm of hitherto unknown possibility and may thus form the basis a paradigm shift. In fact, according to Kung, we already have a powerfully ready-made symbol which Christian environmentalist may usefully consider, the concept of the Sabbath. In the Exodus, God said, "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. For six dqays you shall labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a Sabbth for Yahweh your God. You shall no no work that day, neither you nor your daugher nor your servants, men or women nor your animals nor the alien living with you. For in six days, Yahweh made the heavens, earth and sea and all that these contain, but on the seventh day, he rested; that is why Yahweh has blessed the Sabbth day and made it sacred." (Exodus 20 8-11) The Sabbth is a day for celebration and is a day of hope for freedom from toil and liberation from poverty . Even according to Jewish custom, a woman who has served as a sold slave shall be freed on the 7th year and when she is freed, she must be given sheep, something from his fields, wine etc. and even fields must be left fallow once every 7th year and everything produced by such a field in the seventh year must be given to one's servants, maids, hired laborers and foreigners lodging with one as food and also to the animals on one's farm. The Sabbth was made for man and not man for the Sabbath was Jesus's message. Therefore we are given the Sabbath for itself and not so that we may rest to enable us to work better on Monday! Therefore the Sabbath is the ultimate goal of all work. To Kung, the Sabbath suggest that we should be transformed from a consumer of the earth to its priest. The priest is the mediator between God and man and the priest is not a lord but the servant of the land. We should regard ourselves as the priest of the land and therefore be responsible for its well being, not to dominate it so that we may exploit it!

In December, 1997, we had the bird flu and as a result all the chickens were killed. The Buddhists later performed a ceremony for the killed chickens to facilitate them on their way to another life in accordance with their beliefs. But the Christians only prayed for our own health but not the health of the birds although we share the common fate of being creatures of God. We had no sympathies for the chickens who died as a result of our action.

To me, whether we should grieve for the mass killing of the chickens will depend to a very large extent upon our concept of the value of the lives of the chickens. This kind of callousness is very different from the attitude of the Red Indians before their hunt. They respect the animals they hunted and they knew that they had to hunt for survival only. But there was no respect shown to the chickens. What does that tell us of our current attitudes to the other creatures of this earth. Not only do we have no concept of our responsibility to the other creatures of this earth as part and parcel of the eco-system of the globe, we have on account of our emphasis on profit,trampled on all other values and in particular of the need to treat other human beings as a human being whose rights must be respected. Unless we radically revise our values, I do not think there can be any meaningful changes in our attitude towards pollution and environmental protection.