…and in part because their refusal to adhere to the demands from the political and media class for Power Point professionalization and organizational hierarchies has enabled the protests to remain real, organic, independent, and passionate.

There is much packed into this well-chosen phrasing. It strips away the neutrality professionalism usually enjoys and highlights the ways in which it is implicated in the system the protesters oppose. It makes professionalism a problem to be dealt with rather than a simple way of acting.

Now, I don’t think Greenwald is strictly opposed to professionalism; I surely am not. It is useful to see professionalism in this light, though, as one strategy among many. There are situations where it is likely to be useful and others where it is not, depending on your goals and resources.

For those firmly within the Wall Street system, professionalism is a great strategy, one they can game to their benefit. For the protesters, though, not so much.

It’s not politics per se that I want to talk about here. I want to talk about a little about professionalism as a prominent cultural value and some of the problems I see in that. I have religious communities especially in mind, but the discussion isn’t constrained to them.

[I have a broader discussion about capital and professionalism on a separate page, to keep this post more clearly focused.]

On a very basic level, professionalism and its attendant rhythms are alien to the rhythms of many forms of communal life. At the same time, the pervasiveness of capital makes it necessary for communities to negotiate with it. A large church, for example, must confront the fact that proper management of its resources demands some contact with bankers and businessmen who are immersed in capital’s time. Protecting the political freedoms of their religion, too, might entail dealing with civil systems which are more or less integrated into the time of capital.

However, communities also need to be wary about those compromises, which means they have to be both (1) aware of them and (2) conscious of possible alternatives to them. They need to draw clear boundaries between community and capital in order to protect communal life even as they adapt to the world capital has made.

Key to that preservation is the conscious education of its members of the relative value of professionalism. Professionalism needs to be seen for what it is, a strategy for navigating the world of capital, and contrasted with the values of the community.

This contrast doesn’t need to be dramatic, it just needs to be clear. The courtesy of the professional isn’t opposed to the kindness of the priest, but it isn’t identical to it, either. There is an intimacy to the priest’s kindness that is alien to the professional’s courtesy.

Maintaining the difference without turning it into an opposition is important. Deliberate use of professionalism can, for example, help the community. The cultivation of a professional persona by community members allows them to better engage political and economic resources for communal life. The courtesy of the professional can also help keep capital’s influence at arm’s length. As long as members meet the professional obligations, they often have a good deal of freedom in their private lives.

An understanding of that difference should be present at each point where the religious community has to negotiate with that world. Steps taken to secure a community’s stability in the sphere of capital should be motivated by the values proper to the community rather than be a way for the community to ‘live up to’ the values of capital.

That is a subtle difference, to be sure, but a very important one. When it is not maintained, it becomes easier for the community to idealize the professionalism of members and confuse that professionalism with the community’s values more generally.

In this, professionalism can be akin to soldiering. Both employ means for sustaining their communities which can be destructive of their community. Things like non-profit church status, university-style clergy programs, and business offices are all means toward the end of protecting and strengthening communal bonds but ought not be conflated with the ways of life that define those bonds.

The ‘business’ of the a community should not be the most prominent aspect of it for its members, though it will surely have to be prominent for at least a few. The more heavily the community’s resources are invested into maintaining a business face, the more deeply they open the community as a whole to being consumed by capital. While, perhaps, it gains more resources for survival, often what survives is just professionalism in slightly different dress.

With all this said, I want to end by pointing out the advantages of the world that things like professionalism create. The neutrality of the professional helps support* a public sphere where many sorts of communities can coexist and communicate with each other. Where this may be done freely, each community is confronted with ideas and situations that can sustain and enrich them. While communities may dissolve into this, they may also be born from it. With the danger also comes a horizon of hope and possibility.

*And the ‘helps support’ language is important. Professionalism is not identical with this public sphere, it is just one element that can contribute to it.

Here, I just want to wax poetic on the value and rewards of clear scholarly writing. Well-formed scholastic discourse, with a clear sense of its foundations and aims, is like tonic for the intellect. Lenzi does an exceptional job situating his work within his discipline and, in so doing, shines a bright light on the temperament of the field at present.

Lacking as I do a discourse community to which I could be said to belong, I am always interested to see the shapes those communities take. He is even-handed with all his colleagues work, even as he highlights contentions and difficult aspects of their projects. Already, I have a sense of other works I would like to read and the sort of cautions with which I would approach them.

His section on methodology (pp. 16-19) has thoroughly engaged me. That engagement is less a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with him, than about finding the material he discusses very relevant to the work I am doing. Responding to that relevance, clarifying it, has been illuminating.

His methodology revolves around a couple key figures, Bruce Lincoln and Russel T. McCutcheon, and an emphasis on the reifying nature of mythmaking. I want to talk in an easygoing, loose way, about all of those.

As distant as I am from the field of Religious Studies, I was familiar with the estimable work of Lincoln. McCutcheon, though, is new to me and his approach enthuses and intrigues me. The very title of the work from Lenzi quotes, Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion, inclines me to favor McCutcheon.

It does seem like a lot of ‘soft’ religion emerges out of an unhealthy scholarly ‘politeness’ toward religion. By giving undue deference to religion as bound up with mystery and the noumenal, scholarship can end up giving too little attention to the social mechanisms that define a religious community and the political ramifications of their religious claims. Those religious people ‘educated’ in this soft approach then often generalize this softness to conceal the intellectual and political faults within their communities under the soft-focus lens of spiritual mystery.

(I know, McCutcheon is probably not concerned with that; but I am.)

I quibble slightly, but significantly, with the formulation McCutcheon gives it here:

like all other aspects of human behavior, those collections of beliefs, behaviors, and institutions we classify as ‘religion’ can be conceptualized and then explained as thoroughly human activity, with no mysterious distillate left over. (quoted in Lenzi, p. 16 n. 74 from McCutcheon, p. xi)

But not because I disapprove of his effort to place religion alongside other forms of human behavior. I quibble because I doubt that any human behavior can be explained thoroughly without residue.

That doubt rests on three pillars. First, I take there to be significant limits to human understanding. While we are quite capable of forming multiple, overlapping explanations for behavior, I doubt our capacity to fully integrate those overlapping explanations into a coherent account ‘without residue.’

Second, I doubt our access to the quality of evidence required to form a complete explanation without residue. Only a portion of the evidence from the past for a behavior is available, only a portion of it is seen in the present based on the selectiveness of our perception, and the results for which behaviors are initiated are often in the not-yet of the future.

Third, I quibble with the implication that human behavior is something like a hermetically sealed container which can be divorced, without too much loss, from the impinging of factors beyond strictly behavioral responses. In the religious sphere, of course, I take the motivations of the divine to be such an impinging. This impingement isn’t unique to it, though. The builder has to deal with the impinging of weather, mudslides, and earthquakes.

(Yes, I wouldn’t be above suggesting the impingement of the divine can be quite a bit like the weather for religion as behavior–something that may not be entirely welcome to those forced to deal with it.)

His discussion of myth’s role in the reification of society is one of the better and briefest discussions I have seen on the matter. It is, for example, a significant improvement over Taussig’s in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism. Taussig seems to fall a little too far from the role of critic when he tries to suggest that indigenous religious practice is less reified than consumer discourse.

Quoting Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality, Lenzi defines reification as:

the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products–such as facts, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. (quoted in Lenzi, p. 18 n. 86, from Berger and Luckmann, p. 89)

and clarifies how this reification “goes a step beyond authorization” and makes the reified social situation into something we ought not question or change.

Describing reification so clearly, though, also reveals some of its conceptual limitations. Just as one can misapprehend the products of human activity as something other than the result of human action, so too can you swing the opposite direction and misapprehend the product of nonhuman activity as being the result of human activity.

We don’t have to assume the existence of the divine to make this point. In fact, let me illustrate this by taking the exact opposite tactic. When Marcus Aurelius is deified by the Romans and a storm taken as a sign of his divine power, we are not seeing a case of reification. We encounter the opposite, in which a natural event unrelated to Marcus Aurelius’s will, is made the result of human action.

In a more complex fashion, what begins as a human action does not remain strictly under the purview of human action. The factors behind global warming are the result of human and nonhuman influences which we can’t entirely disentangle. At this point, slowing global warming is a possibility of human action, but the opportunity to put a stop to it by strictly human action likely is not.

A ‘critical’ attitude that takes aim solely at the reifying aspects of religious mythmaking misses this sort of thing. It also overlooks how that attitude can lead toward an even more reified explanation, one that makes the abstract notion of the ‘social structure’ a direct and immediate cause of particular human behavior.

Also, by assuming that myths are reified, that they are justifying the way things are, one risks overlooking how myths can be an attack on the way things are. Myths of a heavenly order may be called forth as a challenge to the present situation, as a way of undermining the necessity of the present order.

In other words, myths can be understood as going ‘both ways.’ They can, flowing downward, serve to justify the way things are by reference to the way things ought to be. They may also be read upward, as a way of understanding how things are. In that light, mythmaking might beget rival mythmaking that demands things be different. The danger attached to divination, the danger of God or a god/dess turning against a king, reveals this dimension wasn’t entirely absent from the situation.

This seems important to keep in mind in a study about secrecy. Injunctions to secrecy can serve to protect the king from having rivals employ his own mythmaking against him. Injunctions to secrecy can also occur when a group desires to protect its mythmaking from the king. By promising to keep their myths secret, they also, implicitly, promise not to challenge the king’s mythmaking with them.

In light of her criticism of West, it is easy to read her support as a sort of pragmatic diplomacy, a way to strengthen the popular appeal of the American Left. Of course, her criticisms of West also make it appear as a remarkably shallow and not particularly committed diplomatic effort. Committed diplomatic effort would entail genuine compromise and a willingness to hear out the concerns of those like West.

Her diplomacy is clearly one of convenience, though, because as she states in her statement in the Ed Show, she doesn’t see West’s views as popular, so she doesn’t need to court them. She lacks an appreciation of religion as a way of life and understanding, employing religious language primarily to further a political programme.

This isn’t an uncommon view. I would dare say that most people, even people who explicitly identify as religious, hold views akin to Harris-Perry’s. The danger I see, though, lies in religious people buying into this language. It is one thing for the political thinker (progressive, conservative, or moderate) to forge alliances with religious people, but quite another for religious people to mistake a political agenda for a religious practice. Political agendas, progressive or not, aren’t identical with their religious beliefs.

If religious people accept that Harris-Perry and her ilk are speaking on behalf of them religiously, they will be sorely disappointed. Worse, they risk mistaking the political agenda of these progressives for religion.

While the religious qua religious must engage in political action to secure the avenues for sacred action, they need to remember that the ways of the divine are not identical to the ways of people. Politics is, first and foremost, about the ways of people. Any effort to make politics and religion identical is inimical to both.

(I would like to make clear here that there is nothing wrong with a religious person having or participating in a political programme, so long as they do not conflate the political program with their religion. In fact, since politics is about the ways of people, the religious cannot avoid politics. As they live with people, they must have some political life.)

To argue, like Harris-Perry, that “a powerful and justice-loving God is an important political tool for those who have the fewest resources to resist inequality” is to reverse the proper order necessary for faith. God is not a political tool. For the religious, politics must be a tool of the devoted for the sake of God.

To this point, it’s frustrating to read Harris-Perry write:

Despite a Democratic administration, the American Left is struggling to to create more space for itself in public discourse. To make this space progressives will need more than sterile reason, rationality, and evidence. These tools can become a kind of cynical self-righteousness that denies the powerful work of faith based claims that generate social change. An analytic lens that that reveals injustice can become paralyzing without the faith to believe that collective efforts can truly initiate change.

Faith is a practice of intellectual humility. It is a habit that reminds us of our own limitations and encourages us to remember that we don’t know everything, can’t predict every outcome, and don’t control every variable.

Because this is not what faith is.

You don’t need faith to be intellectually humble. Anyone who is deeply committed to thinking through the principles of their understanding (be it political, scientific, or religious) and the consequences of carrying it out will develop intellectual humility. No matter how great an intellect you possess, life will give you plenty of occasion to appreciate how inadequate it is to forming a complete understanding of how things work.

If you are not humble in the use of your intellect, it is either because you have not used it or you have detached yourself from the consequences of its application.

Suggesting that the American Left needs to be more open to religious perspectives in order to motivate its base is not the cure to cynical self-righteousness; it is a symptom of that cynical self-righteousness. It reduces religious faith to a tool instead of appreciating it as a way of life.

Political commitments like a concern for the welfare of a nation are not religious, yet they ought to provide political agents with the motivation necessary to appreciate how collective action creates change. If those commitments fail, it is not to religion that we need to look, but to politics itself.

Faith entails reason, rationality, and evidence. It isn’t the antithesis or ‘vital’ component of rationality. The intellectual limits that confront the scientist or the politician within their own domains, confronts the faithful, too.

The idea that there is a special certainty to religious faith is dangerous to faith as well as politics and science. For religion, it leads to a reduction of religious faith to delusional certainty. Those who cannot emulate this crude and empty certainty come to assume that they are inadequate to the challenges of faith they feel called to meet.

Outside of the religious sphere, this notion that certainty is religious leads people to endorse the worst scientific and political relativism. They come to assume ahead of time that facts can be reinterpreted so easily as to make any show of confidence unfounded. Or, just as bad, they assume that confidence rests on a ‘leap of faith’ that cannot be justified. The strength of assertion becomes as or more important than reasonable certainty based on understanding.

Again, if politics falters, it is not because it is in need of religion to bolster it, but because politics itself has become detached from the concerns of the people. Substituting religion for that drive is a recipe for disaster in a pluralistic society like our own. That strategy diminishes politics and religion both.

What interests me most keenly is the pair of interviews on the Ed Show. The interview of West followed immediately with that of Harris-Perry shows off well the conceptual distance between them and their ways of thinking. I’m pleased that the show gave each interviewee a block of time rather than simply using the simultaneous split-screen method.

That space gave each of their views room to breathe and prevented the interview from becoming an occasion for debate-style one-upmanship. The show does give Harris-Perry’s view pride of place in terms of how the host responds and in closing out the segment, but a certain bias is inescapable.

West speaks from a place intimately bound up with liberation theology. This fuses traditional prophetic modes of speech with contemporary progressive appreciation for the way in which social and economic structures perpetuate social ills.

This form of discourse puts a great moral burden on politicians. As politicians, they have more direct access to the laws that can perpetuate or alter the structures perpetuating social ills. In them, the moral weight of the prophetic discourse finds a moral agent to judge and the progressive vision a lever with which to exert force upon the damaged social system.

That prophetic speech takes its cues not from the will of the people but by appealing to a higher principle to which it demands all people ought to submit. Compromise is not proper to it.

The prophetic form of speech is also figural. That requires some explanation, too. A figure in prophetic discourse becomes an intersection of everyday reality and of the judgment of the higher principle driving the prophetic. In the figures used by prophetic discourse, the speaker passes judgment on the world.

The tricky part is that the prophetic discourse doesn’t annihilate the world in passing judgment. Quite the opposite, it maintains both by demanding we raise the world closer to the higher principles it makes manifest. Like Walter Benjamin’s storyteller, this way of speaking combs through daily life in order to find the proper figures through which higher principles may be made manifest.

If we choose to meet West on this level, then we can surely ask whether or not he is living up to the demands of it. However, we can’t disregard that the President is not living up to its demands. In fact, we have to admit that West’s own failures or successes are less important than the President’s.

Which is why the interview with Harris-Perry makes such a nice counterpoint. She doesn’t try to meet West on that level. More tellingly, it is unclear whether she (a) even acknowledges it as a distinct form of political discourse and, if so, (b) she considers it a legitimate form of political discourse.

She employs a more common form of political discourse. She identifies an interest group with which she is presently concerned, African Americans, and identifies policies that the President has supported which benefited them. She also references poll numbers to indicate the satisfaction of that group with the President’s behavior.

For Harris-Perry, the President’s pursuit of certain policies and actions, combined with the support of the group to whom they are targeted, vitiates West’s claims. The will of the people (here witnessed in the approval ratings given the President by African Americans) gives lie to West’s claims. She affirms Obama as a good politician, where ‘good’ is not linked to higher principles, but to relative ones (i.e. what other politicians do).

These differences also speak to how they use and respond to the concept of ‘blackness.’ For Harris-Perry, West’s discussion about how the President is uncomfortable with free black men becomes little more than inverse birtherism. Instead of demanding that the President reveal he is truly American, West seems to demand the President show how he is truly African American.

It is easy to see that, in part because it is easy to see how West’s response is bound up with personal hurt feelings. He clearly was hurt by his exclusion from the President’s circle of friends. Others whom he feels have put comparable amounts of effort into supporting the President have gained greater access to him, while West has progressively lost access.

When we listen to West describe that loss of access, it is also easy to hear how personal rather than political and religious elements were involved. As West talks about praying with the President, as he talks about the high standards to which he holds politicians, it sounds preachy. Just like someone might start avoiding their local preacher because they don’t want the sermon (even when they basically agree with the sermon!), we can imagine the President avoiding taking West’s calls.

How easy must it be for the President to do that, right? He always has a good reason to duck that call, right? He’s the President, his plate is always full and spilling off the sides with things to do.

But here is the figural thing again. West feels hurt and betrayed, but his concerns are not just about his hurt feelings. Without speculating about West’s exact psychological state, it is clear he had a great deal of faith in the potential for Obama to make changes in how the government operates.

West let himself be carried away by that image of hope and, having it dashed, feels all the more keenly the gap between the political situation at present and the demands of higher principles. His personal pain is, in part, a spiritual pain. The pain he felt at being excluded from the inauguration is amplified and mirrored in the pain at seeing grave injustices perpetuated.

He is sermonizing a bit, taking some bit of his life, telling a story about it, and then using that to switch up to a bigger, more important topic. He is using his own frustrations with the President, as a person, to consider the frustration he has with the President, as person and political figure, to live up to moral principles.

West isn’t just talking about any old principles, but those he sees as the highest principles of a democracy, principles that the President publicly (and presumably privately) endorses.

For West, ‘black’ (and ‘red’ and so on) takes on a figural dimension. Just like the President, black manhood embodies a junction where higher principles and the world have occasion to interact.

Harris-Perry’s jab at West, comparing him to the birthers is unfair in the extreme. West does not question the President’s manhood or his citizenship. He points out something concrete that troubles him and suggests some personal dimensions of the President’s life that might have influenced that situation. In fact, West offers up to us some fairly personal and intimate aspects of his own life in order to help illuminate that.

He identifies, as best I can see correctly, the paucity of strong African American men in the President’s inner circle. That ought to be a little troubling to us, especially when his campaign promised he would cultivate an inner circle characterized by difference and dissent.

Ideally, a democratic government should reflect its constituency. It should reflect the cultural, ethnic, racial, and gendered diversity of its people. The President ought to cultivate confidantes from that diversity, right? This President, to be sure, is not politically resistant to that diversity, right?

That he does not have that diversity, then, is suggestive of something personal, perhaps even a blind spot of the President that might not be apparent to him. That is the sort of thing we ought to be raising up for the President to see, the sort of thing that we want critical voices to point out.

If it isn’t a blind spot, if it is something that the President has cultivated in a very deliberate, conscious way, then that is an ugly blemish we ought not rush to conceal. If it is something that the President has cultivated accidentally, a mixture of deliberation guided by unconscious or partially conscious preferences, then its the sort of things progressives ought to call for the President to change.

There are  a number of reports that introduce the law fairly well:  The Guardian, Wired, Upside Down World, or the Environment News Service . While they spend overmuch time on how the law reflects an ‘indigenous’ worldview and too little time on the law itself, they provide a nice overview. Some of these reports are positively disposed toward the law, some are relatively neutral.

Commentary on the law’s passing tend to exoticize the law, likely following too closely to the sort of reports noted above. Their disposition toward the law seems to be directly correlated with their disposition toward what they imagine an indigenous worldview to entail. They tend to contrast this indigenous mindset with a Western and/or Christian mindset rooted in human exceptionalism.

Wesley Smith’s conservative response characterizes the law as “Utter madness” that “obliterates human exceptionalism.” Pagan author John (here) eagerly joins indigenous, pagan, and scientific thought together in one neat bundle but think it “unimaginable” that such a law could be passed in the U.S. where human exceptionalism is taken for granted.

Druid Alison Leigh Lilly (here) characterizes the law as

declaring the rights of nature as equal to our own and demanding protection for her cycles and systems, free of exploitation, pollution and human manipulation and disruption

while wondering how to do that when humans form a part of natural systems.

These commentaries deal tangentially with the mechanics of the law itself. The law, after all, does not take any stand on human exceptionalism. It doesn’t focus on ‘human manipulation and disruption’ but instead emphasizes industrial manipulation and disruption. Rather than question how to protect nature from humans, it emphasizes the total health of the ecosystem of which humans are a part.

The law takes the public good of people to be the basis for giving nature legal rights. The law posits a link between human well-being and the well-being of the ecosystem in which humans live. This is an elegant and powerful solution. It doesn’t require any separation of humans from nature.

It articulates nature in a plural sense, as an interlocking system of ecosystems. This shifts environmental health from an abstract global world to multiple, local zones inhabited by individual communities whose communal health becomes the barometer of ecological health. This fuses environmental concerns directly to the concerns of people living in a region.

I have found two discussions of the law’s passing that provide genuine insight into the law’s possible significance. One, following closely the commentary of a U.S. environmental lawyer Christopher Stone (on Wired’s website here), provides some parallels for the law in the U.S. context. The other, Spanish-language coverage of Bolivian political situation surrounding the law, provides some much-needed context for the association of the law with the indigenous people of Bolivia.

Wired’s article highlights the insights that Christopher Stone has had in trying to find a place for the rights of nature within the existing framework of U.S. law:

He proposed people be allowed to claim guardianship of threatened natural resources, much as family or friends become guardians of loved ones unable to represent their own interests.

This points us toward avenues for legal change in our own country that doesn’t require some wholesale change in the beliefs of U.S. citizens. This notion of guardianship shifts the discussion away from rough shoals surrounding human exceptionalism and to the more navigable waters of legal praxis.

The Spanish-language coverage focuses on the dissatisfaction of the Unity Pact of indigenous and rural workers with the law. They seem to support the way in which the law reflects their understanding  of how communities and environment are connected. However, they are dismayed at what was dropped from the final law–namely, provisos specifying the rights of locals to regulate access to their land and resources.

It’s worth noting, too, that this notion of how land and communities are connected is not strictly the result of a special ‘indigenous’ mindset. It also has its roots in Western discourse about labor, land, and community. The rights for which the Unity Pact struggles are bound up with the sort of rights negotiated in the U.S. Constitution or the Magna Carta.

The Unity Pact suggests the exclusion makes the law little more than a showpiece for the president to amplify his international standing. In amplifying his international prestige, he also furthers his national authority.

Rereading the law in this light reveals an important third dimension to this struggle–international interference in Bolivia’s development. This takes the form both of powerful nation states (like resource-hungry China) but also of international corporations who are often the ‘face’ of local resource exploitation.

The law, as passed, starts to look more familiar. Far from being an exotic indigenous notion given legal form, it is a legal effort to affirm the autonomy of the nation of Bolivia, it’s right to self-determination, and its capacity to play a leading role in the international scene.

The law’s passage achieves this through a two-fold process. First, it subsumes the right of local self-determination beneath an obligation to preserve the total system of interlocking locales. It establishes this obligation by pointing out how each local ecology influences other local ecologies, forming an interlocking and articulated whole. Second, by passing the law nationally and seeking to build support for an international version of it, Bolivia aligns itself with that obligation.

That doesn’t vitiate the importance of the law as a form of environmental action. It strengthens it. Bolivia steps toward being the voice of conscience in environmental matters. By joining those environmental concerns to the well-being of a community, Bolivia positions itself to take the lead in popular economic reform as well.

What it leaves unresolved is the degree to which the local, national, and international frames need to be integrated. In a system where every locality (be it a city, a region, or a nation) influences another locality, it is not enough that each group have final say over its own resources. There needs to be a system in place in which decisions that negatively impact another locality can be corrected.

This is, of course, is why the law has no teeth. Without concrete systems for negotiating between locales, the affirmation of each community’s obligation doesn’t quite rise above the level of good advice.

If Bolivia can realize that insight in concrete forms of negotiation and oversight, then they have the opportunity to be a leader to other nations. That would be a resounding achievement and one I would like to see a lot more nations striving toward.

There is also a potential legal strength in this dual attention to the intranational and international. The law emphasizes the importance of local communities as signs of the health of the environment while making clear that, due to the interlocking nature of the Earth system, you have to attend to the totality of local systems to make a proper judgment of ecological health.

Bolivia, of course, has good reason to be aware of this. As a nation, it has suffered heavily from industrial exploitation of natural resources. Its people are keenly aware of the way in which technologies which may have relatively ‘clean’ applications in other countries employ ecologically dirty measures locally.

This sort of law highlights that and emphasizes why international involvement is key to making the law work in the long term. If exploitation can just be relocated, the relative improvement in Bolivia will be negated by degradations elsewhere. And, as the law makes clear, those degradations have a concrete impact in Bolivis by way of the complex interlocking systems (economic as well as ecological) that join Bolivia with the rest of the world.

So much of what I find rests uneasily atop the comfortable history of cultures and nations. In place of great nations and peoples, I keep stumbling upon these half-hidden hollows teeming with shadows that comingle.

Then, sometimes, those paths open up to an overlook and look down on the valley of history. It looks to me like nothing so much as a heaving flood upon which everyone is adrift.

Except I am not really above it all. At the same time I feel like I am glimpsing it from above, I feel myself within it, adrift and cast about on the rising flood.

In those moments, I feel the deepest sympathy with Walter Benjamin. It is hard not to be overcome with horror; it is hard not to be overcome with hope.

“When it all comes down to dust, I will kill if you must, I will help you if I can”

Then, thankfully, it is back to the deer paths. There is hope to be found there, too.

Bolivia, recently, has gone and done something very interesting: la Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (some English coverage here). The law’s primary influences seem to have firm local connections to the growing influence of indigenous people in Bolivia while being directed to the international situation. Admittedly, Bolivia isn’t exactly a power player in international politics, but taking there is surely no shame in staking a claim as the conscience of the world.

There is a lot I like about the language of the law. While it is easy to get fixated on the ‘Mother Earth’ language, the legal framework behind it is even more interesting. The law specifies that the legal form of ‘Mother Earth’s’ claim is collective public interest. It stakes that public interest against the interest of commercial corporations in exploiting resources. Compare that to so much U.S. law that gives pre-eminence to the commercial corporation over the person.*

The law also specifies how human communities are themselves aspects of Mother Earth (defined as the ‘system of life’). This gives the talk of public interest added depth and focus. The ‘system of life’ includes the different ways in which actual communities of people live in the world.

It acknowledges that cultures grow up in response, and as part of, their environment. Eliminating cultural forms isn’t just a matter of eliminating ways of talking or making art, but ways of establishing relationships with particular environments. The law identifies learning from other cultures how they live with the world as a central reason for their preservation. That opens the door to communication and potential changes to all ways of life based on that intercultural dialogue.

That is a charmingly unromantic interculturalism. It doesn’t look to protect cultures for their own sake, but as part of the broader system of life. That leaves plenty of room to be critical about this or that aspect of culture and still fosters an attitude of open adaptation among all cultures. How refreshing!

While clearly influenced by Western industrial discourse about technology and knowledge, the law doesn’t privilege the industrial/post-industrial way of living. It identifies a number of forms of pollution that it produces as contrary to the collective public good and so suggests that the industrial/post-industrial way of living needs to be curtailed. The problems with that way of life, in turn, becomes compelling reason to re-evaluate other ways of life.

I quite like how the document uses the language of obligations as much as, or more than, the language of rights. I do wonder how much of that language can be traced back to Simone Weil’s** work on justice but, regardless of the source, I am enthusiastic about it.  That suggests a governmental emphasis on facilitating opportunities for citizens to perform their duties and obligations rather than on preserving personal comfort.

I’m curious to see how this develops. As the Guardian article points out, right now this is more promise than substance. It remains unclear how or if the law will be realized in legal process. Still, it buoys the spirit just to see the subject so cogently addressed at the national level (even if it isn’t in my own nation).

*Yes, technically, the notion of corporate personhood just gives the corporation equality to the person in certain situations. Once you factor in how corporations can rally their resources in a way that a person cannot, though, corporate personhood tends to give corporations an edge over real people in many legal situations.

**”An obligation which goes unrecognized loses none of the full force of its existence. A right that goes unrecognized is not worth very much.” (I think from “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations”)

Yet, many of those jobs, especially those thought of as ‘professional,’ expect those filling them to have a college degree. The breadth of education they get in college is, supposedly, ideal for making them more flexible, critical, and creative. As more and more people go to college for these reason, however, the nature of the college environment itself changes. As class sizes swell, there are fewer occasions for college classes to provide the sort of direct teacher to student encounters that are needed to sharpen students in this way.

The emphasis on getting more people into college also helps conceal some glaring inadequacies in primary education. Many primary schools suffer from crippling economic shortfalls, creating a situation where too few teachers are provided too few resources to deal with large classes of students. While there are notable exceptions to this practice, those exceptions are themselves a problem. Education shapes career opportunities, so this leads to a situation that facilitates financial (and, subsequently, political and social) inequality.

Ironically, I think part of the problem with the college system lies with the liberal arts model that justifies its capacity to produce creative and flexible minds. It creates a situation where students are expected to take courses outside a field to which they are dedicating themselves.

To accommodate this, departments offer a bevy of introductory courses which will be swollen with students filing course requirements. These very courses, supposedly the basis for college’s efficacy, become driven by standardized tests and programmatic lectures. To the extent that more personal contact occurs, it tends to be with TAs who are often just beginning to acquire expertise in their field.

The most central disciplines in the liberal arts become the most problematic. The average doctoral degree in those fields takes seven to ten years to complete, despite the fact that coursework in those fields is completed in the first three years of study. The dissertation occupies the remainder of the doctorate education. Considering that most students go on to teaching positions, rather than research position, we should have grave concerns about making this one of the major requirements for teaching at the college level.

Even for those who will likely pursue a research-driven career, they don’t seem well served by writing a research manuscript so early in their careers. Moreso than in other fields, research in the liberal arts is driven by the quality of interpretation rather than the execution of a discrete research study. The quality of interpretation is likely to improve as familiarity deepens. Scholars writing later tend to produce better, more thoughtful works. It would be far better if the dissertation process occurred later, as part of a college professor’s career track, than as part of their educational track.

This doesn’t mean that younger scholars shouldn’t be writing. There are many outlets for scholarly engagement. There are established journals through which work is vetted beforehand and discussed afterward. The internet, too, provides a vehicle for scholarly publication that, with care, can be used for discussion and development.

Worse, during the time spent pursuing the doctorate, most graduate students are employed at their home university (or nearby colleges) for extraordinarily low salaries and virtually no benefits to teach. These jobs, necessary for the student trying to complete doctoral work, subsequently serve to undercut the chances of employment for those who have completed their dissertation.

Even when employed, the bulk of cheap graduate student labor combined with the number of graduates looking for jobs serves to suppress the salaries of graduates. As teaching pays less and less, teachers are forced to teach more and more or supplement their teaching with other forms of work. Overworked teachers are not going to have the time to read, think, and write thoughtful works that deepen our understanding.

All of this makes it sounds like I’m against a liberal arts education, doesn’t it? I’m not. The values endorsed by supporters of a liberal arts education (critical, historically informed, engaged thinking)  are values I strongly endorse. I think we start too late to inculcate them properly, though. College is not the ideal situation for introducing these skills; primary schools are.

Rather than emphasize preparing students for college, primary education itself should be tasked with preparing students for life. In a complex and dynamic world like ours, the ‘liberal arts’ approach is preparation for life. That is because, at root, a liberal arts education helps students learn how to learn, how to be adapt to the present without simply abandoning the past.

I don’t think we need 12 years of primary education to do that, though. A well-structured and well-staffed educational system could provide the fundamentals of an education for living in 9 or 10 years. The last 2 or 3 years of primary education could then be replaced with vocational training. For some, especially those looking to teach, this might look like an extension of the shortened liberal arts driven primary education.

For many, though, it would be targeted to practical skills, be it computer programming, financial administration, plumbing, carpentry, or car repair. Those vocational schools could be structured more on the model of a workshop where practical experience would take center stage.

They could also serve older individuals. They would provide those already working in their fields with a chance to catch up on recent innovations or broaden their expertise. Those making major career shifts would  find targeted educational support there. That also creates a situation where established professionals mingle more often with those preparing to enter their profession.

*   *   *

Obviously, I’m speculating. Any concrete solution to the problems facing the educational system will surely be more complex and will have to take into account the broad disparities in education in the U.S. as well as take a serious estimate of the resources available for change. Those resources aren’t just financial; they include teacher and student readiness and political will.

Speculation’s virtue lies in helping re-envision how we can change. By shifting the emphasis away from higher education, I want to highlight the importance and potential of primary education. A vigorous commitment to primary education could provide most of the educational resources to students that we presently expect our colleges and universities to provide.

Fusing environmentalism and religion tends to encourage both to be less articulate and less clear-sighted. It fosters a discourse in which care of the environment is conflated with care for the sacred. While there are cases where these two kinds of care overlap, they don’t always or even often overlap.

Care for the sacred, in a religious sense, is care for the ways for interacting with the divine, however that be understood. Things that are sacred (practices, places, people) involve the intensification of that brush with the divine. Care for the sacred begins with the assumption that sacredness is a quality unevenly distributed in the world. A ‘sacred’ grove is not any old grove, but a particular grove where the divine presents itself more easily.

Care for the sacred must also come to grips with the ways that access to the divine can change, shift. Over time, a place may become less sacred, seemingly be abandoned by the presences that once moved through it. It must also consider how sacredness can be reinvigorated, amplified.

Care for the sacred needs to distinguish the different kinds of divine presence manifested and how to care for them in their particularity. There is not just one way of being sacred, but many. There are sacred agitations and sacred calms, sacred visions and sacred healings.

Environmentalism is about the preservation and maintenance of resources for life on the planet, ours and other organisms. Care for the sacred is not primary to that and may even be in opposition to it from time to time. A rare plant, for example, may be essential to the preservation of a sacred rite and be threatened by those seeking it for their rite. Some animals on the verge of extinction are threatened by those who would use them for sacred purposes.

I know, some people would dismiss those un-environmental forms of care for the sacred as empty and pernicious superstition. Sometimes, I am sure it is, just as I am sure some environmental activism is empty and superstitious. But all the time? I deeply doubt that. My experience of the divine leaves me with little doubt that the divine can be unsentimental like that. As Lao Tzu observed, heaven and earth can treat all things as straw dogs.

While the claim that ‘everything is sacred’ may be a powerful rallying cry for an environmentalist, it is also misleading. The affirmation of life’s particular sacredness is too general, too universal for environmental action. That action requires distinguishing what kinds of life are more or less essential, more or less inimical, to preserve the overall balance and diversity of a system. For example, the mass hunting of deer may be essential to preserving the floral diversity of a region.

Conditioning people to think of life generally as sacred and inviolate gets in the way of long term environmental stability which must include action that are destructive or limiting to particular living things. Sometimes, too, this will entail action harmful to people and sacred things. Environmental thought needs to think at the level of the system, of which individuals are primarily components.

Obviously, a good environmentalist doesn’t support the system out of some abstract notion that a diverse system is good. Quite the opposite, the diversity is important because it is what makes a system resilient and capable of enduring stress without collapse. The damage done to the human system as a result of that collapse is one of the key factors.

***

Here, I take a breath, a pause. Now, I change direction.

I said that environmentalism and religion shouldn’t be too closely joined, but I do think they should still be joined. Their healthy relationship is not one of (con)fusion but of independent interaction. They don’t need to be joined before the fact, but in the fact; they ought to be joined only where they come into contact (and sometimes conflict) in concrete situations.

There need to be people who care for the sacred who are willing to find new ways forward for nourishing the sacred when traditional patterns conflict with environmental concerns. There need to be environmentalists who come to terms with the way that ways of caring for the sacred are part of a community’s material life and needs to be taken, seriously, into consideration where they come into conflict with environmental goals.

In short, there needs to be an atmosphere of negotiation. Sometimes, that will be personal, like when I have to negotiate between my personal environmental and religions convictions. Many times, though, the process will be communal, too.

There are fruits of this negotiation that can stand between both sets of values, too. The sense that other forms of life on this planet have a stake in in its survival and that we are in some fashion accountable to them for destruction wrought by our lifestyle, emerges from a sense of the sacredness of life being joined to the increased awareness of our impact on the environment they live within. That is an achievement, though, whose consequences are still nascent. It can’t be asserted as if its consequences are already obvious.

***

Finally, let me end with the meditation that initiated this. Look at this tree. From an environmental perspective, it is insignificant, an outlier in a trend. Spiritually? That is another question entirely.

Why the urge to respond away her uncomfortable concerns, rather than to just sit and consider?  Consideration of her post does not equate to acquiescence to it.  Especially when the post itself is itself written from a place of consideration and not demand.

Agreement on a topic like Christmas celebration, bound up as it is with so many interpersonal situations to negotiate, isn’t likely to happen.  There is nothing wrong with not agreeing.  But why not tease out some of the real things going on in her post, consider more deeply rather than recoiling?

I notice a lot of discomfort around her suggestion for religious people of all stripes to withdraw from the gift giving frenzy.  Several people call her a scrooge, some even argue that her attitude threatens the precious jobs of those involved in the retail market.

The notion that we somehow ‘owe’ it to the retail workers is, well, deeply questionable.  As Thorn observes, part of her concern with that economy is global, for the members of the retail market we don’t see.  To produce goods cheaply enough that we in the First World can buy them en masse for our Christmas season, many, many people have to work and live well beneath our quality of life. Do we buy, buy, buy and just not worry about those whose faces we don’t see?

Even if we do just care more about the retail workers we see, there are still more things to think about.  Do we follow that up by making retail work easier?  That isn’t just a matter of supporting them politically with measures to maintain a livable minimum wage (especially since we are expecting them to buy gifts for all those people around them, too).

That also entails being good customers, respectful of those we encounter while shopping.  It entails not making a mess of the stores we frequent, not being grumpy, or short, or demanding.  It entails raising our children to hold the same values.

Do we consider how we can spend our Christmas money in ways that will most benefit those retail workers closest to us?  Do we consider whether we purchase from local business (where money spent will most likely make its way back to other retail workers in the community)?  In other words, do we think about actual retail workers or just some abstract retail worker we never really address as a person.

Beneath and alongside all of this, there is still a more persistent question, which is much harder to deal with.  Is there a way of just living differently that allows us to transform more deeply the basic ways we have for supporting each other as people, not just as workers?  I surely don’t have a ready answer to that, but thinking about ways that might be possible seems worthwhile.  Sometimes, those changes aren’t nearly as drastic as we fearfully or excitedly imagine them to be.

Worth noting, too, is that it wasn’t the case that Thorn just gave her sister, as a few people suggested, “what she thought her sister should want” instead of “what she actually wanted.”  She was financially unable to give her sister what she wanted.  Should she find someway to compromise her financial well-being to give her sister what she actually wants?

More than we would like to admit, that is what many people feel compelled to do at Christmas time.  When that holiday is ostensibly religious, there is something deeply flawed going on.  Religion of any stripe should not be about what some other individual wants, especially not over and against what we need.  It should be about the spiritual world in which both the giver and recipient are embedded.

Even those religious systems that mostly center around the ancestors and focus upon the family and home, are not well-served by this.  A religious focus on the family should focus on the family, not on the individual wants of its members.  It should affirm individuals as members of the family, not as individuals in a system that reduces them to their economic value as purchasers and producers.

Think about traditional modes of gift giving.  They focus first and foremost on affirming the social position of the recipient, not on affirming their whims.  You give less to the person, then, and more to the network.  Those gifts, too, are often going to be redistributed to others in their life, based on similar principles.  In these traditional situations, gifts are like dyes in the social blood, they light up the complex networks that keep family alive.

For those whose religious commitments extend beyond the family, this sort of consumerism is downright toxic.  Where is the sacrifice made to the divine?  Where is the time spent in prayer rather than moving through shopping malls?  Why buy expensive trinkets for the sake of mere pleasure when money and time could be spent toward communal celebrations, be they for family or other spiritual communities?

I know, I am multiplying questions rather than giving answers.  I think that is for the best, though, because there isn’t any one set of answers to these questions.  There are many answers, for the many of us and the many situations in which we find ourselves.