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Expert answer:Answer the question below I will upload chapters Ch. 7What is:1-environmental concern?2-Inglehart’s theory of post-materialism?3-Riley Dunlap and others’ theory of paradigm shift?4-Arthur Mol’s and Gert Spaargaren’s theory of ecological modernization?Ch. 8What is Bruno Latour’s actor network theory?Ch. 9How does Bell critique rational risk assessment?Ch. 10Using a specific example, explain how a social movement can help build an ecological society.
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The Ideology of Environmental Domination
Image 9
No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless.
—Chuang Tzu, third century bce
The view from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park is one of the world’s most famous. From this
overlook, you can see a sweeping panorama of Yosemite, which many have called the most beautiful
valley in America (see Figure 7.1). A number of years ago, Mike’s brother and his sister-in-law, Jon and
Steph, were visiting Steph’s relatives in California, and they decided to take Steph’s grandmother to see
Yosemite, where she had never been. An elderly woman, she did not walk well, so they took her only to
sites you can get to by car. You can drive right up to Glacier Point, and they did. As Jon later recounted
the story, they helped Steph’s grandmother up to the edge and stood there for a few minutes taking it
all in. Then Jon turned and asked her, somewhat hopefully, “Well, what do you think?”
She considered the question carefully, and replied, “All that forest. What a waste. There should be
people and houses down there.”
When two people look out on a scene, a scene of any kind, they are unlikely to appreciate it in just the
same way. Faced with the same material circumstances, we each see something different. Where Mike’s
brother Jon saw the beauty of wild nature in that view from Glacier Point, Steph’s grandmother saw
wasted resources. Such differences are a part of our individuality. They also reflect social differences in
the apparatus of understanding that we use to organize our experience. There are larger social and
historical patterns in the distinctive mental apparatuses we each bring to bear on the world around us.
In a word, there is ideology at work.
In this second part of the book, we take ideal factors as the point of entry into the ecological dialogue.
As we saw in Part I, the other side of the dialogue is always close at hand, and we will find that here, too.
Investigation of ideal factors inevitably leads back to material questions. But the emphasis in Chapters 7
through 10 will be on the form the environment takes in our minds. Materiality shapes the environment
everywhere we turn. But where we turn, and what we see when we do, rests heavily on long-lived and
unfolding ideologies that help us make sense of the world, and apply meaning to it. Ideas matter.
Figure 7.1 The view of Half Dome and the Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point.
Figure 37
Source: © Michele Falzone/JAI/Corbis.
Consider that environmental problems have built up over centuries, but many of those impacts have
only recently come into question. Few people in the first half of the twentieth century were concerned
about the increasing per capita appetite for resources, the spread of the automobile and its sprawling
land use, or the invention of yet another chemical or mechanical weapon for every instance of the
environment’s resistance to our desires. Early articles in National Geographic, for example, extolled the
industrial might that spawned marvel after marvel, as their titles implied: “Synthetic Products: Chemists
Make a New World,” “Coal: Prodigious Worker for Man,” “The Fire of Heaven: Electricity Revolutionizes
the Modern World,” “The Automobile Industry: An American Art That Has Revolutionized Methods in
Manufacturing and Transformed Transportation.”
In the decades from 1960 on, though, the ideological situation changed dramatically in country after
country, as Chapter 8 discusses.1 National Geographic, to continue with that barometer of Western
cultural values, began running articles with titles like these: “Our Ecological Crisis,” “African Wildlife:
Man’s Threatened Legacy,” “Nature’s Dwindling Treasures,” “Pollution: Threat to Man’s Only Home,”
“The Tallgrass Prairie: Can It Be Saved?” A different ideology had taken more general hold, at least
among the writers and editors (and, we can presume, many of the readers) of this perennially popular
magazine.
Scholars have studied the role of ideology in ecological dialogue in a variety of ways. First, they have
considered the ideological circumstances that make domination of the environment thinkable and
tolerable, focusing on understanding Western cultural attitudes that support such a relationship to the
environment. Second, scholars have explored the ideological circumstances that make such conditions
and such domination increasingly unthinkable and intolerable, focusing on the social origins of the
environmental movement. Third, they have delved into the social origin of the categories we use to
understand what nature and the environment even are. And fourth, environmental sociologists have
studied the ways our ideological presuppositions shape our understanding of the risks we face in our
ecological interactions.
In this chapter, we turn to the first of these approaches, investigating the ideological origins of the view
that human beings can and should transform the environment for their own purposes. The three
chapters that follow take up each of the other three approaches in turn.
Scholars argue that three Western intellectual traditions—Christianity, individualism, and patriarchy—
have in large part provided the ideological rationale for environmental domination. These ideologies of
environmental domination are by no means exclusively Western, but they are certainly heavily present
in the West, which may help account for the central role of Western institutions in the industrial
transformation of the Earth. As well, all three of these ideologies of environmental domination have
close links with ideas about hierarchy and inequality, suggesting an ideological connection between
environmental domination and social domination, as we shall see.
Christianity and Environmental Domination
A common explanation for the modern urge to transform the Earth is the rise of the industrial economy.
But the next question to ask is, Where did the industrial economy come from? As we suggested at
various points in Part I of this book, the development of economics should not be seen in purely
materialist terms. Ideas of work, leisure, social status, and community infuse the economy as much as
the economy infuses those ideas. Or, to put the question another way, what makes everyone in the
industrial economy so industrious? We have to work harder and harder every year, it seems, to keep our
jobs and to keep from being crushed. So why didn’t we long ago decide to slow down, sit down, even lie
down and give each other more space to enjoy our time here on Earth and with each other?
Because enough of us have convinced ourselves that it would be wrong to do, so the rest of us no longer
have much choice—or so Max Weber, perhaps the most famous figure in the discipline of sociology,
argued in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber contended that
Christianity—and, more specifically, Protestantism—was the great wellspring of the idea that hard work
is a sign of a virtuous person. It is more than accidental, said Weber, that the Protestant Reformation of
the late sixteenth century immediately preceded the development of modern capitalism and the
expansion of European economies all over the globe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries. Capitalism is, in a way, a secular version of Protestantism.
The Moral Parallels of Protestantism and Capitalism
“A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money,” Weber wrote, in the gendered
phrasing of an earlier time, “but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is
necessary for that purpose.”2 So why do we work so hard to make more money than we need? A desire
to maintain a place on the treadmills of consumption and production is part of it. But to leave the
matter there does not answer the question of how the desire to have such a place began.
The answer, suggested Weber, lies in the moral anxiety that early Protestantism inculcated in its
followers. Medieval Catholicism was more forgiving, encouraging repentance and allowing last-minute,
deathbed declarations of faith. If you were rich enough, you could literally buy your way into heaven by
funding priests to say prayers for you and by purchasing “indulgences” from the church. But in 1517, a
young professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany nailed a copy of a recent work
of his to the door of a local church—a work he called Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and
Efficacy of Indulgences. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, as the work came to be known, touched off
a storm of protest and a new religious tradition named after that storm: Protestantism. One of the early
ideas of Protestantism was to replace indulgences with a kind of final weighing up of all the good and
bad that a person had done in life. This final judgment view made it harder to overcome one’s misdeeds
and made entrance into heaven less ideologically certain.
A lot of the anxiety also stemmed from the doctrine of predestination—the idea that one is preordained
either to go to hell or to be one of the “elect” who goes on to heaven. Predestination was a common
belief of early Protestants, particularly early Calvinists, and it ratcheted up moral anxiety by several
notches. On the face of it, predestination seems a lousy way to motivate people, for it suggests that how
you act in life doesn’t matter. You are still going to go where it has been preordained that you will go. So
why not lead a carefree life of sin, laziness, and gluttony? But the trick about predestination was that no
one knew for sure who had “grace”—who was one of the elect and who was not—except through a
person’s worldly deeds. Those who were good, moral, upright, and successful in this life must be the
elect of the next life, early Protestant creeds such as Calvinism taught.
Thus, in order to convince themselves and the community that they were among the elect, early
Calvinists became ascetics, denying themselves bodily pleasures like laziness and working incredibly
hard to achieve the signs of success in this life. They worked hard “as if it were an absolute end in itself,
a calling,” Weber observed.3 And they began to rationalize the work process, making work more orderly
and efficient, in order to maximize their worldly signs of moral worth. Basically, said Weber, early
Calvinism was a competitive cult of work, denial, and rationalization. As Weber put it, “The old leisurely
and comfortable attitude toward life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came
to the top, because they did not wish to consume but to earn, while others who wished to keep on with
the old ways were forced to curtail their consumption.”4 Self-denial ruled.
These same ideas still infuse capitalist economic life today, albeit without the religious framework (at
least not explicitly) and often missing a chunk of that self-denial part. What has happened, Weber
argued, is that we have secularized the idea that hard work, rationally applied, serves as an outward sign
of how good and deserving one is. It remains one of the most basic assumptions of modern life that
those who work hard are the most deserving, the most morally worthy of our admiration and of high
salaries. Hard workers are the elect of the heaven of social esteem. They are the ones who have grace.
And now we have little choice but to be hardworking rational ascetics ourselves, even if (as is likely the
case) we do not follow the religious tenets of early Calvinism or reap the same material rewards. The
anxiety of early Protestants produced huge accumulations of wealth. If you work really hard and deny
yourself, you are indeed more likely to be able to fill your wallet fuller. Nevertheless, there is no firm
correlation between hard work and wealth, as any coal miner, factory worker, or fruit picker knows. In
fact, the hardest manual work is typically the least well paid. But at the time, Calvinists reinvested this
wealth, which led to even more wealth. And as each dedicated Protestant sought to increase his or her
comparative success, the trend toward work, rationalization, and production accelerated. The treadmills
of capitalism began turning ever faster. Soon one had to work hard, deny oneself, and rationalize one’s
life in order to attain any kind of economic foothold, for that was what everyone else was doing.
Increasingly, people came to accept the idea that those who worked hard deserved to get more and to
gain everyone’s respect. Likewise, they came to accept a corollary: that those who had less must not
have worked so hard and therefore deserved their fate. The Protestant ethic had become the spirit of
capitalism, the belief that hard work and the accumulation of wealth are the most important of human
achievements.
The history of capitalist development provides some support for Weber’s thesis. Modern capitalism
arose first in the countries with a sizable population of Protestants: England, Scotland, the United States,
and Germany. Within Europe even today, as of 2013, 8 of the 11 wealthiest countries with a population
of a million or more have a significant presence—at least 20 percent—of people who are at least
nominally Protestants (as opposed to regular churchgoers, who are few and far between in most of
Europe). The poorest European countries have comparatively few Protestants (see Figure 7.2). Outside
of Europe, we can point to the continued high per capita incomes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
and the United States. We can also speculate about South Korea, which has joined the ranks of the
richest countries, and the 18 percent of its people who identify as Protestant. To be sure, there are
some very wealthy Catholic countries, most notably Austria. And the country with the highest gross
national income per capita is Qatar, where 81.5% of the population is Muslim. But the association
between Protestantism and income remains striking in the European context a century after Weber
wrote.
Now modern capitalism has spread well beyond the confines of countries with many Protestants, and
even beyond the dominantly Christian countries. Religion is no longer the driving force. The capitalist
spirit steadily enfolds country after country into its secularized ethic of ascetic rationalism. Economic
structures have taken over from Martin Luther and John Calvin in spreading this spirit, even as this spirit
dialogically propels the structures, as in the way hard work speeds the treadmill faster and faster.
Ascetic rationalism has become what Weber termed “an iron cage.”5 As Weber put it,
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today
determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly
concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the
last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.6
In a way, we’re all Calvinists now, burning up our lives and our planet as we race along the treadmills of
capitalism.
The Moral Parallels of Christianity, Science, and Technology
Weber is not the only scholar who has traced a connection between Western religion and social
developments that greatly impact the environment. In 1967, historian Lynn White published a short
essay that remains one of the most influential and widely read analyses of the environmental
predicament: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” White’s basic argument was that
environmental problems cannot be understood apart from the Western origins of modern science and
technology, which, in turn, derive from “distinctive attitudes toward nature that are deeply grounded in
Christian dogma.”7 Not only does the economy of the West have religious origins, then, but Western
science and technology do as well.
Many ancient cultures participated in laying the foundation stones of science—notably China and the
Islamic world. Yet, White argued, “By the late thirteenth century Europe had seized global scientific
leadership.”8 The achievements of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and other early scientists were
accompanied by rapid advances in Western technology. White placed particular emphasis on the
development of powered machines: the weight-driven clock, windmills, water-powered sawmills, and
blast furnaces.
Figure 7.2 The relationship between Protestantism and per capita gross national income (GNI) in the
European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland. Countries with fewer than 1 million in population are not
included. Shading indicates countries with at least 20 percent nominal Protestants. Income data
corrected for local purchasing power, or “purchasing power parity” (PPP).
Figure 38
Source: The authors. Income data from United Nations Development Programme. (2014). Human
Development Report–2014.
Even more significant, said White, was the development of the moldboard plow in northern Europe
during the latter part of the seventh century. The moldboard plow dramatically changed human
attitudes toward the environment, he contended. Previous plows had allowed farmers only to scratch at
the ground. These shallow plows were adequate for the light soils of the Near East and the
Mediterranean, although they restricted agriculture to being pretty much a subsistence affair, with little
surplus for trade. The generally heavy soils of the North, on the other hand, required a stronger plow.
The moldboard was invented to cut more deeply into the ground, loosening up the heavy northern soils.
The difficult work of the moldboard plow normally took the pull of eight oxen, as opposed to the one or
two used by earlier plows.
Thus, the moldboard plow was essentially a powered machine. In White’s words, “Man’s relation to the
soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of
nature.”9 Formerly, we had seen ourselves on a par with the natural world. Now we saw ourselves as
standing above it, at least potentially.
Why this change? This exploitative and domineering attitude toward the environment, encompassing
both unlettered farmers and scientific intellectuals, was so specific to one region that its origins must lie
in a broad intellectual trend, White argued. The likely trend was one of the great intellectual revolutions
of the Western tradition: the Christian ethic. For at roughly the same time that northern farmers were
developing the moldboard plow to handle their heavy soils, White noted, they were also giving up
paganism for Christianity.
For the pagan, the world is full of spirits. Every rock and tree is potentially animated by something.
Nature is alive, organic, and magical. It is cyclical, and we are part of it. Early Christianity, on the other
hand, building on Judaic philosophy, saw time as linear and nonrepeating, and it saw the environment as
dead and inanimate, as separate from people. For early Christianity, the spirit world of God and the
saints was not immanent in nature—that is, suffused throughout nature, making nature a direct
embodiment of spirits—but rather transcendent above nature. God was up high in heaven, not an
animating presence down here, on the Earth.
Moreover, early Christian doctrine taught that God gave the world to human beings to exploit, to
change and re-create, much as God himself could do (which is why only human beings are made in
God’s image, some Christians believe). Changing nature was no longer a sacrilege. Indeed, all the Mosaic
religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—have commonly interpreted that it was God’s will that we
do so. In the words of Genesis 1:26,
And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the ai …
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