Distinguishing Good Catastrophism from Bad Catastrophism

Last updated on: February 10, 2017 at 5:03 pm by D. G. Hart

Distinguishing Good Catastrophism from Bad Catastrophism 2017-02-10T17:03:10-04:00 D. G. Hart

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Again, a hearty thanks to President Trump for restoring clarity to national conversations about a myriad of subjects. Today’s insight comes from E. J. Dionne’s column that attempts to put lots of distance between President Trump and Pope Francis through Stephen Bannon:

On the surface, some of Bannon’s economic views would seem to match Francis’s. In his speech broadcast to the group in Rome, Bannon spoke against “a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people.”

But as Faggioli notes, Bannon links his criticism of capitalism to nationalism, which makes his views more similar to those of far-right groups in the 1920s and ’30s such as Action Francaise, a French nationalist group condemned by the Vatican. Francis’s economics, on the other hand, focus on global concerns, including climate change.

Lesson one: Nationalism bad, globalism good.

Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Boston College, argues that Bannon’s view is also at odds with Catholicism’s tradition of rejecting an “apocalyptic” take on the world. The church, she said, has taught that “you don’t get to God’s Kingdom by blowing up what’s here.”

Lesson two, don’t blow up the world.

But that’s not what Pope Francis taught according to Ross Douthat:

Dynamists of the left tend to put their faith in technocratic government; dynamists of the right, in the genius of free markets. But both assume that modernity is a success story whose best days are ahead.

Catastrophists, on the other hand, see a global civilization that for all its achievements is becoming more atomized and balkanized, more morally bankrupt, more environmentally despoiled. What’s more, they believe that things cannot go on as they are: That the trajectory we’re on will end in crisis, disaster, dégringolade.

Like dynamists, catastrophists can be on the left or right, stressing different agents of our imminent demise. But they’re united in believing that current arrangements are foredoomed, and that only a true revolution can save us.

This is Pope Francis’ position, and the controlling theme of his encyclical. It includes, as many liberals hoped and certain conservatives feared, a call to action against climate change, which will no doubt cause Republicans to squirm during political campaigns to come.

But reading “Laudato Si’ ” simply as a case for taking climate change seriously misses the depth of its critique — which extends to the whole “technological paradigm” of our civilization, all the ways (economic and cultural) that we live now.

This is a document aligned with the scientific consensus on climate that excoriates the modern scientific mind-set as, in effect, a 500-year mistake. It’s a document calling for global action, even a “new world political authority,” that’s drenched in frank contempt for the existing global leadership class. It’s a document that urges a rapid move away from fossil fuels while explicitly criticizing the leading avenue for doing so — a cap and trade regime — as too “quick and easy,” too compromised by greed and self-interest, to “allow for the radical change which present circumstances require.”

And while it includes hopeful passages, the encyclical’s most pungent lines are apocalyptic: “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.”

This pungency is what really distinguishes “Laudato Si’ ” from prior papal documents.

Note to self: be careful since some Roman Catholics think Douthat doesn’t have the training or authority to interpret a papal encyclical.

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