Environmental Repentance

The company I work for, the Mosaic Foundation - a non-profit that seeks to help women and children while promoting greater understanding of the Arab World, is working on a major grant for this coming year that will address water access and sanitation and how it affects society's most vulnerable: women and children. Anyone who knows my family knows that my father is obsessed about water. Growing up, we were always the first to have low-flow toilets (which instilled in a me a fear of overflowing toilets that persists to this day), low flow faucets, drip irrigation (for the roses), and, of course, timers on our showers to keep us wasting too much water, which we generally ignored when my father was not at home. So I was generally more in my comfort zone than my fellow employees as we discussed these issues with the technical people we are partnering with. I knew something of aquifer depletion, watersheds, osmosis desalinization, and so forth.

Despite my rudimentary familiarity, I have been reading extensively on the subject in several books including, "Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource" by Marq de Villiers and "Last Oasis" by Sandra Postel. At the core of both books, and numerous others, is the idea that water scarcity cannot be solved solely through technological innovation. What must occur is that society at large must change fundamentally its attitude toward water and stop regarding water as a free given, but as a finite, fragile resource that must be conserved and protected. This, they argued, would lead to changes in behavior regarding water and ultimately to, as Ms Postel terms it, a new water ethic.

As I read this, I was brought forcefully back to my youthful Sunday school classes. This was repentance! Every piece fit: recognition that our actions were harming the environment, remorse for our past bad actions and a desire to change, restitution through environmental restoration, reformation through changing water use habits and, in a new agey sort of way, absolution by coming to more connected to nature and our place within ecosphere (i.e. atonement with the natural world). Every step as my youthful instructors had sermonized was present.

Repentance is changing behavior to be in harmony with spiritual realities and eternal law; ought not all behavior therefore be subject to repentance including pillaging our natural resources and our water? It made sense. What strikes me, though, and here I will tempt the stagnant cesspool (to expand an appropriately hydrological metaphor) of politics - something I normally avoid - is that people on the so-called "left" reject the idea of repentace as being "right wing" or "conservative."

Let me state that I detest the terms Right, Left, Conservative, and Liberal. I almost never use them in describing myself or anyone else. There is so little agreement as to their meaning that in public discourse they become more than confusing, they become dangerous. All words are subject to being understood by different groups differently (ask a Mormon and an Evangelical what grace means and watch the fireworks!), but these four terms have been more abused than any other similar set of terms. Ambrose Bierce, an American humorist from the early 20th century, once defined Liberal and Conservative as follows:

Conservative: A old liberal

Liberal: A young conservative (Source: The Devil's Dictionary)

A British comedian, whose name I forget, one said of Britain when trying to describe its political parties to an American audience that there were, in fact, two parties in England: the Labor Party, or as Americans would call it, the Liberals, and the Conservative Party, or as Americans would call, the Liberals. These terms are so fluid, so relative, that in cross-ideological terms they are useless. A Liberal in the 1880s would be a Conservative in the 1980s while the conservatives of 2000s would could actually be termed Neoliberal in their approach to government, but conservative in policy. A Liberal in 1990s would be a progressive in the 1890s and on and on. It can give you a headache. I propose the following definitions: a conservative is anyone who calls themselves a conservative and a liberal is anyone who calls themselves a liberal. Not quite a tautology, but it plays dangerously close to the edge.

My reasoning for going into this aside, is to set up what comes next. Among many described as Leftist or Liberal in America, meaning that they advocate a policy of using government power to recreate society through redistribution of wealth and who are the inheritors of the social progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth, there is tendency to eschew any and all religious colorings in policy to the extent that now they often bend over backward to avoid letting the majority cultural norms have any say on policy (and even go to the extreme of letting minority views rule). This movement generally has environmental protectionist leanings and believes that government should be the locus of societal change, including of environmental protection. The Progressives, at least 100 years ago, believed that social mores and practices followed scientifically describable patterns and could be controlled and developed. This led to social engineering programs and ultimately to the excesses of forced sterilization and eugenics programs, which were supported, regrettably, by so-called liberals and conservatives alike. How would you describe a person like Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor who advocated both socialism, nativism (i.e. restricting immigration, esp. to non-whites), and eugenics? It seems like a strange amalgation of right and left as frequently defined today. You can see why I hate those labels.

Returning to the "Left." As typically understood, this movement is for environmental protection through government action, minority rights, affirmative action, gay rights, abortion, and so on. In essays and speeches I have heard over the years, proponents of this viewpoint argue that we must accept others as they are. This seems to me to be espousing total moral relativism, but though their words seem to indicate this, leftists cannot mean it, for that idea, taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that we could not require intolerant people to tolerate others, which would contradict a whole slew of leftist legislation which require us to tolerate others regardless of race, religions, ethnicity, etc. I recall a conversation I had as a Mormon missionary with someone who argued that I had no business telling other people to change their behavior (i.e. calling them to repentance). He apparently did not see the irony in telling me to stop telling other people to stop doing something. He felt that tolerance was the highest good, though he could not, apparently, tolerate my intolerance!

I have come to realize that the basic principles of the gospel, most especially faith and repentance, are near universal, even amongst the non-religious. To act one must have faith. We would not work if we did not believe we would get paid. Now, we have experiences that teach us this faith is warranted, but ultimately, I do not know that I will get paid. Confidence in the company and in the ability of the judicial system to defend should my rights be trampled ensure that I am confident enough to keep working. A farmer does not know his harvest will come when he plants, but he has experience that tells him it will if he does certain things like water and weed his crops. Repentance is changing one's behavior either to accord with one's prior beliefs (a behavioral realignment, perhaps), or to accord with new-found beliefs as in conversion. How we know what we know is another matter. I am not speaking of faith in terms of how we come to believe, but rather faith as an operational, motivating principle. Under this definition, then, it is faith when scientists shoot a rocket to Mars to be guided by the mathematics of Newton and Einstein even though the knowledge and/or assumptions underlying it were gathered empirically. That is because we are discussing how this knowledge/belief drives us to behave not how it originated.

It is a mistake, therefore, for "Leftists" to claim they do not believe in repentance. They do. They are calling for people to change their behavior to stave off global warming. This is not say I think that we ought not work to conserve and recycle. In fact, I am a big advocate of it and likewise I believe that in all probability anthropogenic global warming is real. I am merely saying that the Left and the Right (understanding all my prior caveats) both believe in repentance, it is merely that they have different values and standards toward which they seek to conform behavior. It would seem, then, that left and right are really more alike than I suspect truly partisan practitioners would likely admit. They just cannot see it and so spin their tires arguing about all the wrong things. However, the right thing to argue about is even more intractable for it concerns the origins of our beliefs, the beliefs which, by faith, compel us to repent.