Sustainable Abundance for All

Catholic Social Thought and Action in a Risky, Runaway World

Nunez

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532613807
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What constitutes the good life and authentic Christian leadership in a high-speed technological society geared to perpetual economic growth? In a world of rapid change and heightened risks, how do we move beyond the tyranny of emergency and polarization toward a politics of engagement and time oriented to the long-term common good? Taking up key themes in the social teaching of Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, Sustainable Abundance for All argues that life in a risky, runaway world requires new forms of Christian praxis that are both forward-looking and rooted in tradition. Among the issues addressed are pathways toward sustainable development in the Anthropocene, automation and the transition to post-jobs society, the proactionary-precautionary debate over new technologies, and the dangers of becoming "people of the device." Sustainable Abundance for Alllays the groundwork for new kinds of Christian social action and prophetic witness in the twenty-first century.

1

Introduction: Where the Eco-Social Question Takes Us

It has become a commonplace recently to say that we are in a situation where the end of the world is now imaginable—but the end of capitalism isn’t.

—Brian Massumi

Humanity is now stuck with a planetary stewardship role. We are as gods and have to get good at it.

—Stewart Brand

It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

—Bertrand Russell

The Great Acceleration

Las Vegas falling quickly behind us, Manjul jacks the rented BMW X5 up to 95 mph as we race past Lake Mead on Route 93. Sanjay rides shotgun, relegating me to the back seat. These bright, successful men from Silicon Valley find the SAV’s giddy-up more intriguing than the “bathtub ring” of calcium carbonate rimming the reservoir’s shoreline. I interrupt their chatter about the virtues of V-6 engines by pointing out the hundred-foot drop in water level. I can’t resist recommending The Water Knife for a glimpse into how ugly things could get in the Southwest if the climate-science projections come to pass.

Manjul juices the Beamer into triple digits as he breezily assures me that advances in desalination, irrigation, and water recycling will solve the problem. Sanjay chimes in that his relative Manoj, a billionaire philanthropist, has developed an affordable desalination device called the Rain Maker. Stack a few thousand of them up on a hundred or so barges anchored five miles offshore, and L.A. can release its privileged claim on the Colorado. A bit nonplussed, I redirect the conversation to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an inconvenient truth twice the size of Texas floating off the coast my comrades inhabit. The two smile in tandem. Seconds later, Sanjay hands me his Android, and I slump back into the cushion to watch a YouTube video on the Dutch wunderkind Boyan Slat and his Ocean Cleanup Array.

Who knew we were getting so good at saving the planet!

Sanjay’s vision soars far higher than barges and floating booms for processing an ocean of plastic. We’ll be off to other planets sooner than people realize, he opines. What Musk is doing with Space X is just the beginning. Before I know it, he has me watching a clip of the Falcon 9 rocket landing at Cape Canaveral. This prompts Manjul, who works at Netflix, to mention that Planet of the Apes was filmed up at Lake Powell. When I suggest we turn around and visit the Nevada Test Site instead, neither is amused. How about Burning Man, then? That, at least, draws a smirk.

We’re rocketing along now at 106 mph as we cross the Hoover Dam Bridge. I ask Manjul if he might want to dial it back just a tad, seeing as how we just passed a “SPEED LIMIT ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT” sign and all. Both of them laugh. For good measure, Sanjay shows me one more miraculous video, this one a promo for Terrafugia’s TF-X. Ah, the flying car every Jetson desires! I’d almost lost hope.

A mild vertigo sets in at 111 mph. Too much screen time? Perhaps sunset at the Grand Canyon will bring us to our senses and provide some perspective on this breathless existence. With Manjul at the wheel, it won’t take long to get there.

Building huge dams and detonating atomic bombs in the desert seemed like a good idea to many in the 1950s—bold declarations of freedom from floods, hunger, and tyranny. Mechanized agriculture and precision manufacturing, nuclear energy and synthetic chemicals, cybernetics and television, jet-powered aircraft and astronautics, new vaccines—all were fast developing at mid-century. In 1949, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard of Paris observed how “modern inventions produced with increasing rapidity cannot be for Christians just another news item or a mere scientific curiosity . . . for they are the making of a new universe. And this is the universe we are called upon to save.”1 The cardinal’s reflection on the res nova of his day seems prophetic in light of emerging technologies: robotics/AI, synthetic biology, nano-materials, 3D printers, and the Internet of Things, we are told, are poised to disrupt one industry after another. As digitalization, machine learning, CRISPR, and other innovations scale up, productivity will soar. Yet accelerating automation also seems likely to generate higher levels of structural unemployment.

Consider the fate of workers in the living-wage movement. As fast-food employees fight for $15, a burger-bot built by Momentum Machines cranks out 360 gourmet hamburgers an hour. The San Francisco start-up is opening “smart restaurants” and marketing their invention to major players in the industry. Meanwhile, customer-facing automation is working well for Eatsa, which is opening new lunch spots in major cities across the country. Projected cost savings are considerable as is the expected impact on a 3.6 million fast-food workforce.

A similar dynamic is at work in other industries, both in the US and globally.2 The iPhone6 in my coat pocket is made by Foxconn, which is replacing its million-plus Chinese workers with robots. According to the World Bank, the “share of occupations that could experience significant automation is actually higher in developing countries than in more advanced ones, where many of these jobs have already disappeared.”3 About two-thirds of all jobs in the global South are vulnerable to automation in coming decades.

Both fast food and its automation exemplify what Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato si’ refers to as “rapidification” (LS #18): the relentless process of social speed-up driven by technological innovation for the sake of profit. Since 1950 the increasing power, speed, and efficiency of technology has made possible what some scholars call the “Great Acceleration.”4 Population and world GDP, damming of rivers and water use, fertilizer and paper consumption, foreign direct investment and fast-food outlets, telephones and motor vehicles, international travel and carbon-dioxide emissions—all these and much more have increased dramatically from 1950 onward, so much so that 7.4 billion humans now generate a $75 trillion world GDP (2016) and at latest tally consume about a quarter of the earth’s net primary production.

For the well-educated wizards soaring about, what does it mean to be grateful for all this abundance? And what about the mass of Muggles, growing numbers of whom deeply resent being left behind?

The Day before Thanksgiving

Coupled closely to the technological logic of efficiency are two other logics driving the Great Acceleration forward: the economic logic of capital accumulation and social logic of status-driven consumption. These entwined logics are sanctioned in turn by cultural myths that continue to shape collective identity and shared conceptions of the good life (even as rapid technological and social change leaves many in “present shock”5 and hastens the collapse of narrative meaning).

As an example, consider the two-part editorial titled “The Desolate Wilderness . . . And the Fair Land,” which has appeared on the day before Thanksgiving in the Wall Street Journal every year since 1961. The first part is not an editorial, but rather a well-known passage from colonial history: Governor Bradford’s account of the pilgrims’ tearful departure from Delfs-Haven and harrowing first contact with a “hideous and desolate wilderness.” The second, written at the apex of the American Century, seeks to renew the colonial taming of wilderness quest “in a time of troubles.” It opens with an admiring survey of what the Protestant work ethic has wrought across the continent since Plymouth landing. Beholding a “fair land,” the traveler-narrator imagines still greater days ahead: “America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.”6 Yet the mood of the country is quite different and troubling questions cannot be dismissed: America the bountiful and free is wracked by “social discord” within and under threat from “unpredictable strangers” without. Read a half-century later, it sounds all too familiar.

How can the country move forward with hope and courage? By reminding ourselves, the traveler-narrator intones, “that the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure.” By reminding ourselves “that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men . . . the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.”7 These paired texts annually reaffirm the US business elite’s self-image as pioneers of progress and keepers of the entrepreneurial spirit. Under WSJ’s neoliberal banner, the old manifest-destiny message is re-presented with hardly a blush as the best way forward even now.8 Among the affluent, its Promethean-cornucopian imagination resonates deeply.

Propelled not only by technology and capital but also by powerful storylines and the carefully calibrated economy of desire and social position, the Great Acceleration has hurtled humanity into the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which “human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita.”9 As a result, conservation biologists estimate that a third to half of the planet’s species will vanish before the close of the current century. Given the Great Acceleration’s immense momentum and cumulative, l...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Christian Futurism
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Where the Eco-Social Question Takes Us
• Part I: The Sustainable Development of Catholic Social Teaching
• Part II: Christian Praxis and Moral Leadership in a Risky, Runaway World
• Bibliography