I once heard from a report my students gave that there is such a thing as the autogeddon theory. They said some scientists did the math and believed that we have reached a point of no return with regard to bringing about destructive changes to the earth because of rising population, massive demand for energy and water, the strain of our consumption on natural resources and habitats, and the destructive changes in the climate we are causing. It was never clear to me where they got this autogeddon theory because they were not sure themselves. However, in the subsequent years, it became clearer to all of us that no matter how much we conserve, no matter how much we reduce our population growth, we have irrevocably damaged the earth and we have already brought about massive destruction to nature. It is also clear that we will continue to do so in more massive levels when the full effects of global warming kick in.
As it stands, we have caused the extinction of more species than any natural event. We have raised the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere by 100 times since the start of the industrial revolution and there is no end to that increase in sight. It seems that it will take centuries “for global processes to reach equilibrium.” Even if we cut GDP by 2% per developed country today, we will still raise the amount of CO2 produced by industrial processes. Scientists already estimated that we have overshot the world’s capacity to sustainably support our existence by 120 percent and still we keep growing by about 200,000 people per day. It seems clearer now more than ever that we are destroying our habitable world at unprecedented rates and that we have long passed the point of no return. This means that no matter how much we conserve, reuse, recycle, reduce, live responsibly, consume less, and live with the least impact on the earth that our present state of development affords, we will never be able to restore the world to its prior state when it could sustain human life seemingly indefinitely. It’s just too late. We have eaten and polluted ourselves out of a nourishing home and created this fragile habitat.
How did we get here? There are simply too many of us and a rich minority of us are living grandly wasteful lives. A simple fact from biologist Walter Dodds. Each hamburger requires 3028 litters of water to produce and a full meal requires 5591 liters of water. Imagine how much water that is when you multiply those thousands of liters to the billions of hamburgers Macdonalds and the millions Jollibee have served. Now imagine how many millions of people actually get to eat full meals. Certainly they are not the majority of the world’s population but they are a considerable minority. Now imagine the hectares of land used to grow the corn that feeds the cows and the hundreds of species that had to give up their habitat for our burgers. To think, most of our meals and all of these burgers aren’t even good for us. And because these things we consume aren’t good for us, imagine how much governments and pharmaceuticals spend on research and development, production and distribution of the pills and teas that try to burn away the burgers we shouldn’t have eaten. Yet, his is but a fraction of our impact on the earth. Our continuous production of electronics, low and high end consumer goods, fashion, and luxury items at every level of the social strata has caused us to destroy, pollute, and deplete habitats and resources. Because we produce so much waste and require so much material to sustain us, and because there are simply too many of us, we are destroying the nourishing rock that brought us to life.
So what do we do? The more clearly the data emerges, the more clearly it seems that we have to enact radical changes in the way we live just to make sure that our home doesn’t become too hostile to us. To put it quite simply, we must repent and reform. For those of us who have realized our being in the world in such a way that has been hurtful to society and to our fellow citizens, we expect some kind of remorse—we expect some king of awakening and realization that their way of being in the world has to be reformed or realized in another way. Well, we have acted badly. Therefore, we must be expected to rethink the way we are being in the world. The way we have been for the last century, we have lived like selfish, inconsiderate, demanding, greedy, self-absorbed, arrogant, needy, and gluttonous brats who have an exaggerated sense of entitlement. It’s as if everything in this world existed for our sole pleasure and that our sole purpose is to exploit everything that will let us. Only a few of us even wonder if we were hurting other species, if we have a right to destroy their worlds, or if we should make amends for our boorish behavior. We have lived on this world like parasites without a capacity to regulate our consumption thereby causing the death of our host. We have behaved badly and have come to the end of life as we know it.
As I have always said, this moment is a tremendous opportunity for growth. However, we can only begin to grow and realize our better selves when we first acknowledge that we have realized a way of being in this world that is careless and destructive. However, most of us aren’t even close to recognizing our failings. In Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, the great American hope of this generation, the world leader who people thought was genuinely progressive and understood that significant changes had to be realized in their country’s way of living and dealing with the world and the environment, said, “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” Of course he was delivering his required rhetoric against terrorism. However, I am deeply offended by this notion that the Americans will not apologize for their way of life. Why not? It is their mad consumerist dream that filled our shared atmosphere with more than their share of greenhouse gases, that caused the floods that destroyed the lives of many people in my city, that has caused and continues to cause environmental degradation in their quest for oil, that has bullied my nation into an unfair world economic system that keeps my people poor. They won’t repent for any of that harm? They won’t apologize for their way of life that makes my children’s future uncertain and clouded over by the darkest clouds we can imagine? I think they and those that created this world order do owe us an apology. And we should repent our complicity in their destructive self-realization.
The sad and seemingly hopeless fact is that only a few people understand that the way we live is not good for us. It is a lifestyle that treats the world as a resource to use and consume as, what Martin Heidegger would refer to, as standing reserve. We look at the world as a thing waiting to be used. Its various habitats and myriad life forms are but mere resources to tap as we think of more complex ways to feed and amuse ourselves, to make our selves feel alive and immortal. Nothing, not even our fellow human beings, are thought of as individual and separate beings who have an existence that bears its own value other than that we confer. Nothing exists for us unless it is something useful or amusing or consumable. And because we have seen the world in the light of its status as standing reserve, we have refashioned it in such a way that it exists according to our demands. Our jungles are no longer primordial, our animals no longer wild, our skies no longer a transcendent sheltering dome, our seas no longer an impenetrable depth—all are touched by men with a heavy hand that cannot help but alter and destroy what it touches. And so, Mr. Obama and all the rest of humanity—especially man-kind—we have much to apologize for and much to be sorry about. We have treated our world and our fellow living beings with such utter disregard that not only have we fouled our own nest, we have driven other beings to extinction. What kind of species does that make us? The kind that no one with any sense would want to move into their neighborhood. Unfortunately, we have taken over the planet.
It is time then to admit that we have somehow come to a point when our drive to a more successful way of being in the world has become a bane to others and to ourselves. We have realized our human potential in such a way that it has become harmful and dangerous to others. We only have to admit that our way of being has not been desirable so that we can move on and become better persons. Unless we can come to that realization, we will continue to be the bad neighbor, the stupid parasite, and we will drive ourselves into extinction.
How then do we repent? Max Scheler explores the experience of repentance in his essay “Repentance and Rebirth.” Here he shows how repentance is an act born of the realization that one has concretized oneself in a way that violates the order of values, or in a way that violates or fails to realize the highest potential of my self. Somehow, perhaps because of the presence of a model person that allows me to intuit my fullest potential, or more simply because I am confronted with the pain I have caused others with my way of being, I realize that I have realized my worst possible self and that I need to renew my commitment to a more creative way of being in the world that values myself and others. According to Scheler, and I believe this is true, there is an aspect of grace in repentance.All of us, in our finitude, can only see the world according to our own system of values, according to our own rationalities. The reason we do what we do is because we think that this is the good thing to do based on our own way of understanding and valuing ourselves and others. We engage in this orgy of consumption because we thought it was the best for us—we still do. No one set out to foul the nest. We only wanted to improve our lives by getting the most while paying the least, to gain the most pleasure with the least pain. We set to have children because it was a joy and an assurance of continued existence. We built our cities because it felt like the safest way of living. We are structured by the prevailing systems of valuation that define an ethos. This ethos tells us that our way of being in the world is the most beneficial and the truest way of realizing our humanity. To realize that our way of seeing and engaging the world is actually perverted is not easy because we can only see things through our own system of values. It takes the coming of another who bears another way of being or seeing, the advent of disaster, or even just the quiet moment of sudden insight to awaken us. Best of all, it takes the miracle, rare but not unheard of, of seeing myself for an instant through the eyes of the transcendent source of the good to shatter my certainties about who I am and awaken me to the need to realize my better self. That is a rare act of grace, but every day we are challenged by others to rethink our priorities, to reevaluate our desires, to reexamine our certainties. If we are open to that grace, we can awaken to our possibilities.
In our time, in this suitable time, we are confronted by our own folly. There is no greater mirror to our souls than our ravaged world. Thusly, we are forced to confront our false conceptions and valuations of reality. The main reason for this is because we will not survive otherwise. So we can say that we are being pushed to repent our destructive way of being. Global warming is the grace that prods us to repentance. The only proper human response to such an awakening is to embrace it. Without embracing this and without repenting, we will always be caught in the ethos of our destructive selves. A destructive way of being is like a rail that keeps us running in a particular direction unless we can break from it. Thus repentance is like a disaster of sorts—a derailing that wrenches us out of our destructive self-realization so that we can reevaluate our being in the world.
Of course there will be the sorrow one feels for having to see one’s self this way. It can never be pleasant and can even be debilitating. One can feel hopeless about one’s self and fall deeper into one’s destructiveness because one may not have the will or imagination to see one’s self other than this negative realization of personhood. However, only when one embraces one’s brokenness, when one accepts that he has lived for so long according to this distorted realization of the self, can one begin to pick one’s self up and realize one’s self otherwise. Until there is no reevaluation, acceptance of one’s shortcomings, and repentance of one’s patterns of concretization, there will be no potential for rebirth. But the first step is humility.
Humility calls for our acceptance of our finitude and our brokenness in our capacity to realize our potentials as persons. If it is grace that awakens us to awaken to our destructive selves, perhaps it is also grace that will draw us to our greater potentials as persons. This time at the end of life as we know it, there is a call for rebirth. There is an urgent call for humanity to collectively awaken to more authentic ways of being in the world. What can realize such an awakening? Perhaps if there are enough of what Scheler calls model persons, i.e. bearers of systems of values that will shape a more creative way of being in the world, then we will be able to understand how we can achieve our potential. Perhaps, if more people are engaged in the task of reimagining our civilization, we will be able to pull ourselves together and build more just and less consuming economies. Perhaps, if it is not too late and if we are not in the early phases of our autogeddon.
But whether it is too late or not, we must repent and find ourselves reborn to a new way of being in the world.
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