Politics and the Gita - IV

Gamdhi lived by the principles of truth that he got from Gita. So also would be the claim by Godse. During the trial after Gandhi's assassination, Godse said in his final statement, “My respect for the mahatma was deep and deathless. It therefore gave me no pleasure to kill him. Indeed, my feelings were those of Arjuna when he killed Dronacharya, his Guru at whose feet he learned the art of war”. But Godse could not forgive Gandhi for his pro-Muslim bias. Godse said “I felt convinced that such a man was the greatest enemy, not only of the Hindus, but of the whole nation.” 

One of the main reasons that Godse gave for killing Gandhi was the latter’s refusal to conform to the principles of realpolitik. He wanted to remove his brakes on the Government of India so they could conduct statecraft on the basis of ruthless realpolitik.  He thought that there was plenty of latent support in the country for his line of thinking and that posterity would vindicate him. GD Khosla, former Chief Justice of Punjab, who heard Godse’s appeal and sent him to the gallows said in his book, The Murder of the Mahatma, that if the verdict had been left to the audience, Godse would have gone scot-free for his assassination of Gandhi. 

Thus four people - Ambedkar, Gandhi, Tilak and Godse, three of whom revered the Gita - concluded that the central message of the Gita supported the convictions that they already held. Godse’s reading of the Gita appears to gather more supporters in contemporary India just as he had predicted. Several episodes of the podcast The Seen and The Unseen discuss a theory that I agree with - Indian society is largely conservative and inward-looking. 

Akshaya Mukul's book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India shows how a publishing house, established a century ago, went on to become influential in promoting an idea of Hindu India, and initiated Islamophobia and cow protection that continue to this day. The Gita Press is the largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. All regular Hindu religious texts - Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata - were published by it. Since it started, the press has published almost 410 million copies of the Gita, nearly 70 million copies of the Ramcharitamanas and 94.8 million copies of monographs on "the ideal Hindu" woman and child. It is a convenient tool of the Hindu Right groups like Hindu Mahasabha, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Jana Sangh and odd organisations like Ram Rajya Parishad.

It has two magazines. Kalyan has a monthly circulation of more than two lakh and mostly sells in north and east Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. It also has an English monthly called Kalyana-kalpataru, started in the early 1930s, that sells in south India and among the diaspora in the US and other countries. Gita Press has been at the forefront of the demand for a Hindu nation right from the beginning. After 1947, the Gita Press talked of not letting Muslims join the Indian Army and forming a Hindu militia. Cow protection has been a key theme of the Gita Press's existence. 

The purpose of another of its publications, Hindu Sanskriti Ank, that had contributors like the Shankaracharyas, Mahant Digvijaynath, MS Golwalkar, Swami Karpatri Maharaj and many others, was to establish the supremacy of the sanatan Hindu dharma. This was achieved through emphasis on the comprehensive nature of Hindu culture with its long tradition of education, philosophy, medicine, architecture, science, music, language and literature, besides its numerous religious texts and ritual practices. Many of these articles had political and communal overtones.

It used the message and tenets of sanatan Hindu dharma to homogenise Hindu religion and take the message of the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and other such organisations to ordinary Hindu homes. The political message that it carries - a trend right from 1926 - helps in carrying out the propaganda in favour of its larger mission of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan.

Whole Numbers and Half Truths by Rukmini S. reveals some sobering statistics. For decades, we are fed the myth that Indians are basically liberal and secular. But a number of polls have shown that Indians have a lower commitment to democratic principles than most major countries. Indian respondents have an even lower number with respect to regard for civil rights than Pakistani respondents. The percentage of Indian respondents who thought that a strong leader would be "very good" for India was higher than even Russia. (And my guess would be that the majority of the respondents would have been educated city dwellers.)

India ranks poorly regarding respondents who believe in media freedom, free operation of opposition parties, the holding of regular, honest elections with a choice of at least two political parties and the existence of a fair judiciary. In 2019, Indians were among the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working. A survey of 4 Indian states - Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha - shows that 3/4 of respondents expressed a majoritarian form of nationalism. As levels of education rose in the survey, so did support for restrictions on free speech. 2/3 of Hindus said that it was important to be a Hindu to be "truly" Indian.

Politics and the Gita - III

Ambedkar had a very critical view of Gita, which he says provides a philosophic basis to the Varna system. Ambedkar believed that the Manusmriti, the Vedas and the Gita are all woven in the same pattern and same threads run through them. He denounces those who say that Manusmriti is problematic, but Gita is good. For him, all religious books of Hinduism – other than Upanishads – were written by the Brahmins who injected the same doctrine in all these books. Ambedkar writes that it is actually Gita in which the caste system is systematically ordained and explained. Ambedkar argues that: 

If Krishna were to appear as a lawyer acting for a client who is being tried for murder and pleaded the defence set out by him in the Bhagavad Gita, there is not the slightest doubt that he would be sent to the lunatic asylum.  

For Ambedkar, Gita is a discourse on the law. He deploys the metaphors of the courtroom, and Krishna as a defending lawyer. The Gita captures that moment when the necessity of war interrupts the ethical demands of brotherhood. In Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, the authors say that according to Ambedkar, the Gita defends war on two grounds. 

1. It says that because the world is perishable and “man is mortal”, he is “bound to die”. What difference does it make for the wise whether “man dies a natural death or whether he is done to death as a result of violence”? “Life is unreal”, he continues, “why shed tears because it has ceased to be?"
2. It says that it is a mistake to think that the body and the soul are one. The key difference is that the body is perishable while the soul is eternal and imperishable. When death occurs it is the body that dies. The soul never dies. As the soul is never killed, killing a person can never be a matter of any movement. War and killing need therefore give no ground to remorse or to shame. 

To Ambedkar, this would actually seem to be an “unheard of defence of murder”. The representation of life as deathless abstraction provides the philosophical justification for untouchability which is the reduction of life to “mere existence” and the mystification of the law as divine will. The Gita reduces the body to mere existence and is therefore  dispensable. It justifies suffering of the self as absolute obligation to God, and in more public moments, to the nation or swaraj.

It does not differentiate between suffering caused by an ethical stand and suffering caused under force. No distinction is made between an intimate bodily injury that is not practiced by the self but inflicted by fellow men and legitimised by the law. It is explained away as the sufferer’s fate.  

 For Ambedkar, the divine status accorded to Krishna and the Gita hides the historicity of its beginnings and prevents criticism. To him, Krishna is basically a fallible warrior. Throughout the Mahabharata, for instance, Krishna remains a subject of abuse because of his “low origins” and “loose morals”. He is the classic Machiavellian figure whose name attaches to “intrigue” and violation of “rules of war”.  Interested more in its spuriously modern authority than in its scriptural antiquity, he is relentless in his emphasis of the Gita’s uncertain authorship. It is not, according to him, “a single book written by a single author”.

What is, then, according to Ambedkar, the politics of the Gita? Not only is Krishna, by deliberate mutation, made a god amongst other gods, a godliness which is inconsistent with his status as a fallible man throughout the Mahabharata, he is also suddenly made a “representative” par excellence, within the event of the Gita, of all other forms of gods.  

He accuses the Gita of reinforcing Chaturvarnya, or the Law of Four Varnas. Krishna says that a person should not create doubts in others about Karma which of course includes the observance of the rules of Chaturvarnya. That is another way of saying that you must not agitate or excite people to rise in rebellion against the theory of Karma. It tells that every one should do the duty prescribed for his Varna and no other and warns those who worship him . . . that they will not obtain salvation by mere devotion but by devotion accompanied by observance of duty laid down for his Varna. In short, a Shudra however great he may be as a devotee, will not get salvation if he has not observed the duty of the Shudra — namely to live and die in the service of the higher classes.

This advice stabilises the caste system by invoking fate. For a shudra is born a shudra by his fate, and must aspire to salvation only as a shudra. This is how the potential of any revolutionary “counter-violence”, according to Ambedkar, is suppressed in the Gita. The system is further stabilised by creating an ethics of non-violence. Not only is the shudra barred from insurgency against fate in the name of devotion; those who provoke him are barred too with the threat of retribution. It is this suppression of counter-revolution which Ambedkar argues is the “soul” of the Gita that goes by the name of fate and the trope of “salvation”.

Ambedkar's anger is apparent in the words he uses in the interpretation of both Krishna and the Gita: “absurdity”, “stupidity”, “abhorrent”, “puerile”, “fool’s errand”, “childish”, and “lunatic asylum”. I can understand his anger. Some months after my stroke, I was at the receiving end of this "God's child" stuff a couple of times and I was not amused. I saw a cartoon which states, "Oh, I know that He works in mysterious ways. If I worked so mysteriously, I will get fired."

It is often noticed that god is said to be close to people with various disabilities and ailments. I once asked the nurse to do some channel surfing when I saw a program entitled "God's children". I need not have guessed the general theme of the program - it was about a genetic disease that made teenagers look like they are seventy (Progeria, the disease that the character played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie Paa suffered from.) God's children indeed!

Politics and the Gita - II

The first strategy in Gandhi’s reading of the Gita was to treat the text as an allegory. The battle of Kurukshetra was not, in Gandhi’s view, “a battle which took place so many thousand years ago; it is one which is raging all the time, even today". He regarded the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas as an allegory for the battle “between the innumerable forces of good and evil which become personified in us as virtues and vices.” Even winning the war did not bring happiness, it brought only regret and remorse to all, proving that "mere material gains never brought peace within.” 

He holds that "Every one of us is a mixture of good and evil. . . The difference that there is between human beings is the difference of degree." In interpreting the battle in the Mahabharata, he says that, "Duryodhana and his supporters stand for the satanic impulses in us, and Arjuna and others stand for Godward impulses. The battle-field is our body. The poet-seer, who knows from experience the problems of life, has given a faithful account of the conflict which is eternally going on within us." (Navajivan, 11-10-1925) 

According to him, the notion of avatar is a result of human imagination. What humans imagine Krishna to be is more important than the historical Krishna. He thought that an avatar did not mean any descent of God into human form but the ascent of humans into divine status. Those who stood against the wickedness and immorality of the time were looked on as avatars and thus it was open to every human being to be an avatar. For him, therefore, the Gita becomes above all a book of ethics, emphasising selfless devotion in the cause of human brotherhood.     

In reading the Gita in this manner, Gandhi marks a sharp distinction between his approach to the text and that of his political predecessors, particularly the Extremists. During his time in the Yerwada Jail (1922-24), he read around 150 books including the entire Mahabharata along with all the available translations of Gita including Tilak’s.  Gandhi agreed with Tilak about the importance of doing the right action and following truth as per Gita. However, he disagreed with Tilak about how to do the right action. Gandhi drew the message of non-violence and ahimsa from Gita. 

Gita advocates three paths: Karma yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Gyana Yoga; without preferring one over the other. In Tilak’s interpretation of Gita, Karma Yoga (action) rules supreme, and takes precedence over the Bhakti Yoga (devotion) and Gyana Yoga (knowledge). He justified action, even when it became violent like killing, as long as it is without personal interest or motive. 

Gandhi however interpreted that action without expectation of fruit (anasaktiyoga) was the essence of the entire work. The crux of this difference was illustrated in Gandhi's paper Young India where he said that Tilak considered everything fair in politics, an idea of politics that he did not accept. Tilak objected to the remark and said in a letter to Young India:

I write this to you to say that my view is not correctly represented therein. Politics is a game of worldly people, and not of sadhus, and instead of the maxim "Overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good" as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krisna "In whatsoever way any come to Me, in the same way I grant them favour". That explains the whole difference and also the meaning of my phrase "responsive cooperation". Both methods are equally honest and righteous but the one is more suited to this world than the other. 

Gandhi answered:

I naturally feel the greatest diffidence about joining issue with the Lokamanya in matters involving questions of interpretation of religious work. But there are things in or about which instinct transcends even interpretation. For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth, can and must be applied. 

If it be true that God metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to others, it follows that if we would escape condign punishment, we may not return anger but gentleness even against anger. And this is the law not for the unworldly but essentially for the worldly. With deference to the Lokamanya, I venture to say that it betrays mental laziness to think that the world is not for sadhus. The epitome of all religions is to promote purushartha, and purushartha is nothing but a desperate attempt to become sadhu, i.e., to become a gentleman in every sense of the term. 

Finally, when I wrote the sentence about "everything being fair in politics" according to the Lokamanya’s creed, I had in mind his oft-repeated quotation "evil unto evil". To me it enunciates bad law. And I shall not despair of the Lokamanya with all his acumen agreeably surprising India one day with a philosophical dissertation proving the falsity of the doctrine. In any case I pit the experience of a third of a century against the doctrine underlying "evil unto evil". The true law is "truth even unto evil".

Politics and the Gita - I

When India was under colonial rule, the official policy of the British government was to regard the social and religious spheres as "apolitical". Thus censorship and legal action were restricted to other spheres of life that were regarded as political. This meant that religious metaphors were often used to convey political messages to the masses, since they were safe from action by officials.  Even though the vast majority of people were illiterate, these messages were comprehensible to them but the rulers had no idea what was being said. The political ideas that were implied in these religious messages were spread through the press, popular images and talks. 

The Mahabharata, having many parables and fables, became a favourite medium for spreading political messages. The Gita forms the central drama of the Mahabharata. It takes the form of a dialogue between its hero, Arjuna, and his divine charioteer, Krishna. This conversation occurs in the no-man’s-land between opposing armies, where Arjuna has halted his chariot to wonder at the senselessness of a war that requires the killing of his relatives, friends and teachers. Krishna’s role in the dialogue that follows is to rouse Arjuna to action by preaching to him the doctrine of acting out of duty alone, without the desire for any particular result. 

The Gita was not widely read in India till it was re-discovered in the colonial period, thanks to the interest it had generated among different sections of European and American readership. Though other ancient texts, like the Arthashastra might vie with the Gita in terms of international celebrity as a text of political philosophy, only the latter became a source for Indians. Modern interpretations of the Gita have focussed on war and violence, rather than peace and stability. Tilak, Aurobindo, and many other so-called Extremists tended to justify their actions by quoting the Gita. 

In 1915, while he was in prison at Mandalay, Burma, Tilak wrote Shrimad Bhagvad Gita Rahasya, a Marathi language book.  In Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, the authors say that it is the analysis of Karmayoga which finds its source in the Bhagavad Gita. According to Tilak, the real message behind the Bhagavad Gita is Nishkam Karmayoga (selfless action), rather than Karma Sanyasa (renouncing of actions), which had become the popular message of Gita after Adi Shankara. He defended action, even violence, as long the action was selfless i.e. without personal interest or motive.

In his commentary, Tilak focused on the themes of sacrifice and detached action as the key. He opposed all interpretations that concluded that knowledge or devotion were the ideal paths to self-realisation and freedom. According to him, the pursuits of knowledge or devotion, while worthwhile in themselves, left the central dilemma of the Gita unresolved - whether or not to kill one's kinsmen. While he accepted the virtue of truth and non-violence, he marked out exceptions. "Forgiveness in all cases or war-likeness in all cases is not the proper thing", he said.

When Tilak mentions the anti-hero Duryodana, it is to point out his utter failure to sacrifice his self-interest which brought about the war. He criticised Hobbs, arguing that the latter's concept of sacrifice for the sake of another person’s interest was merely a "long-sighted variety of selfishness". Tilak's ideal person was a warrior who was identified by his ability to act without desire. But the detachment was not that of a celibate monk but of a person who was engaged with the world. He debunked renunciation which had long been idealised in the Indian tradition.

His ideal person did not call for a submission to the prevalent norms but fought for the suspension of these norms during exceptional events like famine or war. Like Arjuna, he is prepared to kill in order to restore the moral order.  Even before writing about the Gita, Tilak had said that "political questions are all Kshatriya [warrior] questions." Tilak's Gita was a call to recognise and declare colonial India a state of exception where what was practised in normal times had to be suspended.

Gandhi’s initial differences about the interpretation of the Gita was with Savarkar and other revolutionaries he had met in London at the start of the twentieth century. He was not willing to accept an interpretation of the Gita that argued for violence and warfare as part of a political strategy. Gita was his most treasured scripture but even to this text, he consciously gave his own interpretation. He contended that the Gita was not about the ethic of war but about the ethic of right action. He said: 

The author of the Mahabharata has not established the necessity of physical warfare; on the contrary he has proved its futility. 

One major problem that Gandhi constantly wrestled with was the worth and authority of scriptures. Although he valued the writings, he rejected any fundamentalist interpretations of it. He did not view the scriptures of any religion to be beyond moral scrutiny. He viewed them as human creations that had to be interrogated. If the text contradicted his lived experience, he rejected it. He thought that the scriptures must be interpreted according to the needs of society as it evolved. What in the scriptures did not accord with reason could not be accepted. Every claim made on behalf of revelation should be capable of being tested "on the anvil of truth with the hammer of compassion".  

The glomar response

What bizarre tale can tie together a sunken nuclear submarine, a mechanical claw, an eccentric billionaire, some manganese, and some Cold War intrigue? That can only be Project Azorian, you murmur. If you do, you have probably listened to a Radiolab podcast called Neither Confirm Nor Deny which is how I learnt about it. This story relates to one of the most massive covert operations ever handled by the CIA. It resulted in the existence of a phrase that has had journalists and lawyers scratching their head for 50 years.

In January of 1968, a U.S. Naval ship was captured after leaving Japan. This made the U. S. worried that the Soviets had their code books and they thought that they should try to get even. Two months later, a Soviet nuclear submarine suffered an internal explosion while on a routine patrol mission and sank in the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Hawaii. The Soviets undertook a massive, 2-month search, but never found the wreckage. However, the unusual Soviet naval activity prompted the U.S. to begin its own search for the sunken vessel, which they found in August 1968. To the US, the soviet sub, if recovered, would provide invaluable information for the intelligence community since it contained code books, missiles, and nuclear-tipped torpedoes.

The problem was that the submarine was three miles below the surface of the ocean, and the pressure at that depth was roughly 7,500 pounds per square inch. No one had recovered anything from such a depth. To get a sense of the scale of the task involved, the Titanic was about 1.5 km shallower. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is presumed to be at around 800m less depth. Moreover, the recovery had to be done in secret, lest a very real war should break out should the Russians find out. But the temptation to obtain cryptographic equipment that would allow them to decipher Soviet naval codes was too great, so the CIA began a covert operation called Project Azorian.

They'd have to lift something like 6 million kgs. They got some engineers together in top secret to brainstorm ideas to reinvent the science of deep sea recovery. They finally decided to build a huge, eight-fingered claw and put it in a boat, bring it out on the high seas, and then lower the claw on a three-mile long piece of pipe string. They would position the claw over the submarine and yank it off the bottom of the ocean, pulling it back into the boat. Gates would open on the bottom of the boat and the claw and the submarine would come into a chamber.  

They got the money and the approval from the president. But they still needed a cover story. So they called up the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and told him to pretend to have a sudden interest in manganese mining from the bottom of the ocean. So his people built a massive ship called The Hughes Glomar Explorer - It was built by a company called Global Marine. Global Marine - GloMar. Altogether, 6 years, and $800 million (more than $2 billion today) worth of unparalleled espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency was invested in the project.

In July of 1974, they got the boat to the right spot, and they lowered the claw. The claw descended three miles to the bottom of the ocean where the submarines was located. The claw had lights and cameras on it so they could see what was happening. The claw wrapped its massive claw hand around this sub and began to pull it back up. 14,000 feet, 12,000 feet ... But there is an age-old problem that often costs mice and men a lot of pain; a pain that the poet Burns so correctly identified - their best laid schemes tend to go astray. About 2.7km from the surface, there seemed to be a bump but everything looked normal on the television screens. 

But then it suddenly occurred to the operators that these television images had not been refreshed. And when they refreshed those images and got the real time picture of what was going on, it showed that most of the submarine - the part with the nukes, with the missiles, maybe with the codebooks, and all the stuff they wanted - had broken off, and years of work, millions of dollars just slowly sank to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, a ragtag crew aboard a Soviet tugboat was only 150 feet away keeping a watch on the Americans. On August 6, 1974, with their lost submarine literally right under its nose, the Soviet boat decided it had seen enough of all this “deep ocean mining,” and left for home.

2/3 of their haul might have fallen away, but the men aboard Glomar knew they still had something on the line. What about the part that remained? What they found in that piece has never been disclosed. Not long after that disappointing loss, the story starts to break in the press. Journalists start calling up the CIA, and they have to figure out what to say and what not to say. This a was tricky task because of a diplomatic element and a legal element.  US didn't want the Soviets to know either what  had been found out or what hadn't been found out; hence the dilemma.

If the US said the truth - that they didn't recover any information on Soviet missiles - then that would tell the Soviets that they don't have to worry about the security regarding their warheads. But the US wanted them to worry. But if they said that the US did recover information on the missiles, but were not telling, then it would be lying which could not be done. Why?  Because of something called the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA. The law says that anybody, any American should be able to ask the government for documents and the government has to respond. 

But every CIA employee is legally bound to protect intelligence sources and methods. It's not an option, it's a law. So the CIA found itself in a soup - Under the FOIA law, the public has a right to know. On the other hand, the CIA has a legal obligation to not tell. The CIA has to say something, it has to be truthful when it says it, but it also cannot reveal anything. Enter a lawyer who devised a solution in half an hour. Here's what he came up with.

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified and could not be disclosed. 

Journalists fought it in court, and the fight went on for years, but eventually the government won. The judge agreed to their logic, that sometimes, revealing even the existence of documents endangers national security. Since that initial Glomar Response in 1975, more and more government agencies have begun to use it. And it is not the obvious ones related to national security issues. Thus, you now get such a "Glomar response" from the Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Department of Energy, Center for Disease Control.  

The government may ultimately lose in all of these cases, but it will lose at a time when the public debate will have moved on to something else. The popular perception about the Glomar Response is that it's just a delaying tactic. By the time the truth finally comes out, people don't actually care anymore. It's ancient history. It embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets. 

The first tweet by the CIA showed that it had a sense of humour - "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." The tricky evasion has become the bane of watchdogs and journalists -- but its utility for those seeking to keep things beyond prying eyes has withstood the test of time, as evidenced by its proliferation, even among private companies and celebrities like Will Smith, Pixar characters, legislators.

The wickedest of all problems - X

Giving more information does not change people’s attitudes. The vast majority of scientific communications is still in the form of data and graphs. In order for there to be any meaningful action, it is not enough to convince the rational part of the brain with data and graphs but the emotional part of the brain must also be convinced. Giving technical answers to technical questions without making use of the myths and philosophies available in a tradition does not move most people. As communications guru Frank Luntz advised Republican candidates on messaging climate change, “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”

People obtain their information through the people they trust. Attitudes on climate change is now a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us. This is where religion can play a crucial role. Previous social justice movements like anti-slavery campaigns,  civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti-debt, and anti-poverty campaigns, arose through church networks. Climate scientists with strong religious faith say that their religious belief and their scientific research are entirely compatible. They believe that God creates the laws and their role as a scientist is to discover them. 

2015 produced two very important publications on climate change: the first was Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si, while the second was the Paris Agreement on climate change. One was written by a former teacher of literature and the other by a multitude of diplomats and delegates, Both are founded on an acceptance of the research produced by climate science. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh compares the two documents. 

He writes that as a primarily religious document, it might be thought the pope’s Encyclical would be written in a vague and elaborate style and the Agreement would, by contrast, be crisp and to the point. But actually the opposite is true. The Encyclical is remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction; it is the Agreement, rather, that is very  artificial in its wording and complex in structure. It has eighteen densely printed pages with one large block of text consisting of only two sentences, one of which runs on for no less than fifteen pages! 

This part of the Agreement has thousands of words separated by innumerable colons, semicolons, and commas and only a pair of full stops. The Agreement has thirty-one ringing declarations with phrases like "Recalling decision 1/CP.17 on the establishment . . ." or "Further recalling relevant decisions . . ." It indulges in wishful thinking, repeatedly invoking the impossible: for example, the aspirational goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade — a target that is widely believed to be already beyond reach.

Laudato Si, on the other hand, addresses complex questions with clarity. It does not suggest that miraculous interventions may provide a solution for climate change. It does not hesitate to take issue with past positions of the Church, as, for example, in the matter of reconciling an ecological consciousness with the Christian doctrine of Man’s dominion over Nature. It is fiercely critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.” It insists that it is because of the “technocratic paradigm” that “we fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological growth.”

In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast, there is not the slightest acknowledgment that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text. It merely acknowledges that “climate change is a common concern for humankind." It is as if the negotiations had been convened to deal with a minor annoyance. 

In contrast to the Agreement’s careful avoidance of disruptive terminology, Laudato Si challenges contemporary practices. Obscurity and technical jargon fills the official discourse on climate change and its style as well as its vocabulary conveys the impression of language being deployed as an instrument of concealment. Strangely, Laudato S’ seems to anticipate this possibility: in a passage that refers to the way that decisions are made in “international political and economic discussions,” it points to the role of 

“professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power [who] being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population.” 

In Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall says that religious groups have not incorporated the issue of climate change into their world-view unlike previous social movements like those against slavery or apartheid. But there are climate scientists with strong religious faith like Katherine Hayhoe who is the director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University and is also an evangelical Christian who is married to a pastor. She says:

The facts are not enough. When we look at the planet, when we look at creation, whatever it is telling us is an expression of what God has defined it to be. So instead of studying science, I feel like I'm studying what God was thinking when he set up our planet.

The language won't move people like me but there are a far greater number of people for whom what she says makes perfect sense. George Marshall says that both religion and climate science face the same cognitive difficulties. Both require people to believe something on the authority of the communicator; both manifest in events that are distant in time and place; they challenge our normal experience and assumptions about the world; and they require people to accept certain short-term costs in order to avoid uncertain long-term costs. The difference is that religion has these difficulties to a much greater degree. 

Marshall writes that the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate told him, "We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world's most famous climate scientists are telling us?" He writes that maybe by resolutely keeping religion and science apart, environment scientists "have ignored the most effective, tried, and tested models for overcoming disbelief and denial".

The wickedest of all problems - IX

One major problem in dealing with climate change is the difficulty human brains have in thinking about the many scales of time involved. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that humans must combine two perspectives that involve vastly different time scales - one pertaining to "the planet” and the other to "the globe”. We need to look at humans today from both of these perspectives at once if you want to understand the planetary environmental problems humans face today, 

"The planet” is the Earth system – the earth as a planet in which biological and geological processes connect to create a “system”-like entity that has kept complex multi-cellular life going for more than half a billion years. "The globe” is what humans have created – it refers to the technological connectivity that binds this world together to make human flourishing possible on a very large scale. Global processes – the growth of European empires, global technologies, and a world market - have started impacting the domain of the planetary (the workings of the Earth system).

The scientific literature on climate change brings to our attention the role played by nonhuman creatures (microbes, fungi, planktons, plants) and entities (glaciers, forests, deep seas, oceanic currents, the Siberian permafrost, polar ice caps) in keeping the earth habitable for complex forms of life. We don’t have to forget human desires and priorities but have reached a position in history where we also must become more aware of how this planet “works,” what makes it a life-bearing planet and how life has, in turn, changed this planet.

The global COVID problem can be thought of as the “planetary” clashing with the “global”. Humans are the vector for spreading SARS-COV-2 because we live in congested cities, and are extremely mobile in search of profit and livelihood. That’s global history. But our bodies have also become evolutionary pathways for the virus, and that is an event in the history of biological life on the planet. This virus has been living in the guts of bats for millions of years. Its history belongs to deep, planetary history. 

Elizabeth Colbert calls the current rapid disappearance of species The Sixth Extinction. Far worse extinctions have happened in the past and the earth has recovered. But recovery and restabilisation occur at planetary, not human, time scales — that is, millions of years after the disturbing event. At this scale, we are powerless to harm; the planet will take care of itself. Our planet is not fragile at its own time scale but this time scale is irrelevant to humans in normal times.

The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. Around 56 per cent of all the CO2 that humans have liberated by burning fossil fuel is still aloft. The consequences we suffer at any one point in time are the result of past emissions. Because of this long CO2 lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere.

Our economic model has no simple way to account for environmental costs. Agriculture does not take into account the costs of soil depletion. Fossil fuel burning does not take into account modification of the atmosphere. People do not pay for the CO2 they emit. Habitat destruction does not take into account the destruction of species. Fishermen do not pay for the fish they take from the sea; lumber, oil, coal, and mining companies do not pay for their resources, aside from the cost to buy the land. Economic costs are only those of extraction and delivery — Earth is free.

Some people say that we’re not going to solve the climate crisis until we get rid of capitalism. Maybe there’s something to the argument but it’s just not relevant. There’s no conceivable possibility of the kind of social change that they’re talking about within the timescale that’s necessary to solve this problem. Couple of decades means urgent. This doesn’t mean everybody’s going to die in 20 years. It means processes will be set in motion that won’t be reversible. After that, you can’t do anything to control it. 

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes that a veteran Israeli religious politician Yosef Burg used to tell a joke about two Israelis discussing philosophy. One says to the other, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” and the other answers, “I’m an optimist, of course. I am certain that today will be better than tomorrow.” I am a similar optimist. Surprisingly, religion might have some valuable lessons for secular thought and the two need not be regarded as opposites. (And I say this even though I am not religious at all.)