Pope Francis vs. the Culture of Death

What Jordan Peterson misses about Laudato Si

Dr. Jordan Peterson recently made a gripe, not uncommon from some conservatives, about Pope Francis’ concern for the environment. He complained that Pope Francis is more concerned about “saving the planet” than “saving souls”, and, in a more biting critique, he compared expressing environmental concerns to “worshiping Gaia”.

Ignoring the fact that this is a false dichotomy, as I pointed out in my previous post through the life of St. Francis, and that Pope Francis has published mostly on other topics, Pope Francis has certainly made the environment a focus of his papacy, specifically in his encyclical Laudato Si. However, I fear Jordan Peterson, and other conservatives, have frankly missed the point of Pope Francis’ emphasis on the environment. Yes, Laudato Si provides much reflection on a proper theological understanding of the human relationship with the environment, as well as an overview of environmental problems and calls for us to address them. But at the heart of the document there is an insightful cultural commentary that many conservatives would sympathize with and that everyone could stand to learn from. Namely, that our environmental problems are just another unforeseen consequence of modernity.

A symptom of a larger problem: The spiritual and cultural roots behind environmental problems

Much ink has been spilt on the roots and unforeseen consequences of various movements and thought patterns that form “modernity”. These critiques come from conservative-leaning people like Louise Perry on the sexual revolution, Patrick Deneen on classical liberalism, D.C. Schindler on views of Freedom, — not to mention Jordan Peterson himself on many different topics. The basic idea is that through the rapid social and economic changes that have happened over the past 150 years (or far longer, depending on the critic), western society has encountered many challenges which are leaving people feeling alienated, purposeless and that are ultimately hurting people, whether that’s through increased suicides, overdose deaths, abortion, euthanasia, children who experience broken homes, etc.

Pope Francis seeks to add our environmental issues as another unfortunate symptom of the larger problems that comes from modernity. While Jordan Peterson and some other conservatives might bristle at the environmental symptoms that Pope Francis is seeking to highlight, I think they would also view as problematic the core problems that Pope Francis identifies and their negative effects. They are 1) A continual domination of our lives by technology (referred to as the “technocratic paradigm”) and 2) a view that Humans and our desires are all that matter in the world, which he calls anthropocentrism.

Let’s briefly look at these and consider how these connect to other societal ills conservative thinkers have pointed out.

A Global Technocratic Paradigm

The so-called “technocratic paradigm” receives Pope Francis’ ire not because he is against technological advancement. On the contrary, he praises the good things technological innovation has brought to the world. Instead, he is critiquing a way of thinking that “[…]exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” (Laudato Si, para. 106). It views technology as a means to gain power and consequently views that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of ‘progress’ itself’ […] as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological power as such” (para. 105).

This way of thinking has led us to view nature not as something we are to care for and be in a relationship with, but something to be dominated and used up. By failing to recognize the natural limits imposed upon us by nature, we end up causing unintended harms, like oceans filled with plastic, rising sea levels, and destruction of habitats that is causing a rapid increase in the extinction of animal species.

Beyond the environmental harms, he shows how the technocratic paradigm connects to other issues that many conservative commentators have also reflected upon.

Pope Francis points out that this way of viewing the world has eroded human autonomy, since we are continually given new forms of technology that shape the way that we think and act, and we often surrender ourselves to those forces. This is because, as a culture, we cannot negotiate with technology and make sure it is serving us in the best way possible way. We too often see technology as purely neutral and fail to see that “[technological] decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (para. 107). He argues that we simply: “cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint.” (para. 106).

We can see this clearly in the rapid acquiescence to, and adoption of, Artificial Intelligence. Despite that many people, including some of its creators, warned of the risks this technology poses, AI has been rapidly integrated into our daily tools without anyone asking it to be done, and soon it may render graphic artists, designers, writers, and many other roles obsolete.

Pope Francis also argues that the technocratic paradigm has produced a globalized culture that seeks to make us all the same, deprives us of beauty and meaning, harms our ability to grow spiritually, and leaves us feeling empty inside:

[…] the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this […] Otherwise we would simply legitimate the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness. (para. 113)

Pope Francis ends up sounding more like conservative aesthetician Sir Roger Scruton than the caricature decried by Jordan Peterson and some others, and points to many problems that most conservatives would nod their heads vigorously in agreement with while pointing out how our environmental problems and these other social ills stem from the same source.

False View of Humanity’s Place in the World

Francis goes on to challenge what he calls “anthropocentrism”, or a view that man is the center of the world and is all that matters. This view gives man a total dominion over all things and disconnects us from God, who is the ground of reality itself.

Francis argues that “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble […]” (para. 117). One of the foundations that crumbles is nature, which supports us and provides us with a home. Francis argues that we are slow to recognize the harm caused to nature because we don’t even recognize the harm we cause to other people we don’t recognize as immediately useful: “When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities – to offer just a few examples – it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected.” (Para. 117).

Francis also shows how this anthropocentrism leads to a practical moral relativism with consequences going far beyond the environment:

The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects […] The same kind of thinking leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests […] In the absence of objective truths or sound principles other than the satisfaction of our own desires and immediate needs, what limits can be placed on human trafficking, organized crime, the drug trade, commerce in blood diamonds and the fur of endangered species? […] This same “use and throw away” logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary. (Para. 123).

Here we see that the relativistic, anthropocentric and technocratic throwaway culture decried by Francis for its environmental detriments is really the same “culture of death” decried by Pope St. John Paul II 20 years before Laudato Si.¹ While John Paul II primarily examined abortion and euthanasia as underpinning the culture of death, Pope Francis is recognizing how our environmental problems are just another extension of the same deadly, careless logic.

The Ultimate Call: Return to God

Within Laudato Si there is a subtle evangelical plea. Pope Francis goes farther than just calling for new laws to be passed to protect the environment. Instead, he calls for a “cultural revolution” that calls us to “slow down and look at reality in a different way” (para. 114). He calls not for replacing anthropocentrism with biocentrism (or Gaia worship, as Jordan Peterson calls it), but theocentrism:

“we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships […] A correct relationship with the created world demands that we not weaken this social dimension of openness to others, much less the transcendent dimension of our openness to the “Thou” of God. Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our relationship with others and with God. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than romantic individualism dressed up in ecological garb [..]” (para. 119)

Ultimately, Pope Francis is pointing out that we have gotten locked into modes of thinking that has placed man in the place of God, and because of that, all our relationships have become disordered.

Jordan Peterson (who, by the way, is not a professing Christian) is calling on Pope Francis to focus on saving souls, rather than the planet. By pointing to how our relationship has been altered with the environment, Pope Francis is calling for us to recognize how saving the planet is part of saving our souls in the whole sense: having a right relationship with God, others and created things.

Rather than mocking Pope Francis for this call, conservative Christians should be consistent and heed it, and seek to restore our relationship with the created order that God has given us.

1. In the words of Pope St. John Paul II, the culture of death is a culture that “[encourages] an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated”. (Evangelium Vitae, para. 12).