BarcelonaPope06162016

4960 Words

Pope Francis Explains Pragmatism to the World: Integral Ecology, Pragmatism

and the Work of Communication
Presented to: The Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) Bridging Gaps
Conference
Barcelona July 2016

Prof. Carl Bybee

Director, Oregon Media Literacy Project
School of Journalism and Communication
200 Allen Hall
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403
bybee@uoregon.edu / 541-346-4175

The Pope's big surprise with Laudto Si: Not just a spiritual plea to be nice to the
planet and to poor people, but a stunning call to re-imagine what it means to be
modern (Francis, 2015).
But the is whether or not most of us got the surprise. For many the surprise was
that the Pope linked two issues we preferred to think of as separate or at least
disconnected: climate change and savage economic inequality.
But the Pope had an even bigger surprise for us, one that many of us couldn't even
hear or understand because it seemed he was speaking in a new and strange language,
and, because of what for us seemed the deep irony of the message: The Pope, as a
world religious leader of an ancient and pre-modern institution, was laying out a way
of understanding the modern world that was much more modern than most of us
moderns were willing to consider or imagine.
In effect, he was laying out an answer to the charge made against western culture
by our French friend, philosopher, anthropologist and science and technologies
studies scholar, Bruno Latour. To Latour's challenge, "we have never been modern,"
by which Latour meant truly and meaningfully modern, the Pope had a reply: "Here's
how"(Latour, 1993). And it wasn't by suggesting that we go back to a pre-modern
understanding of the world and embrace a mystical religious world view. And it
called, I think, for a dramatic re-visioning of the central work of today's media studies
scholars.
So here is what I would like to do in this brief talk today. What was and is the
Pope calling for in Laudato Si, the so-called "green encyclical"? And why is it both so
hard to understand and yet so crucial that we do? And how can the work of American
Pragmatists, and particularly work by and following John Dewey, help us understand
the new vision of modernity that the Pope is calling for and can actually contribute,
enrich and extend this work in a way that meets the Pope and helps us all to
understand the stakes and the hope--- physical, material, cultural and spiritual---
offered to all living creatures and to our living planet by potentially embracing this
new way of understanding modernism.
So let's get started.

What was and is the Pope Calling for in Laudato Si, the So-Called "Green
Encyclical"?

First let's take a quick look at a representative example of what the mainstream
news media thought the Pope was saying. Let's take, for instance, the CNN piece
titled " Pope Francis: 'Revolution' needed to combat climate change" (Burke, 2015).
CNN describes the encyclical as a "stern lecture"…."slamming a slew of modern
trends"…..from the " the heedless worship of technology, our addiction to fossil fuels
and compulsive consumerism" and leaving " little doubt about who to blame. Big
businesses, energy companies, short-sighted politicians, scurrilous scientists, laissez
faire economists, indifferent individuals, callous Christians and myopic media
professionals."
In other words, the encyclical titled after, in CNN's words an " archaic Italian
phrase" was to be understood as the recycling of "the now-familiar themes of his
papacy" allowing the Pope to "put his signature stamp on a controversial topic and his
moral clout on the line."
And all of this in a story by their religion editor, Daniel Burke.
Clearly, Mr. Burke was neither listening, or if listening, he could not hear or
understand the profound new vision of modernism that the Pope was laying out-----
not just a simple spiritual endorsement of climate science---- but a rethinking of the
relationship between science and religion itself.
Was this just a recycling of "the now-familiar themes of his papacy"? I don't think
so.
I want to argue that the Pope surprises us all by challenging modernism, not from
the expected pre-modern perspective of fundamentalist religious leaders and texts, but
from a deep critique of modernism on its own terms.
For the Pope (Francis, 2015) there are two modernisms, the modernism we know
and tolerate, and which precludes us from seeing any other modernism, the
modernism he calls "the dominant technological paradigm" and a new vision of
modernism, what he calls "integral ecology" which takes as its starting point that it is
imperative that we study the relationship between living organisms and the
environment in which they develop" and further that "it cannot be emphasized enough
how everything is interconnected."
Let's take a quick look at our current modernism: the dominant technological
paradigm.
He writes that "a certain way of understanding human life," what he calls the
"dominant technological paradigm" has "gone awry." This is not a condemnation
based on some fixed spiritual standard, it is an observation that seeing the world in a
particular way has consequences, consequences that may not have been intended but
still can be observed and evaluated.
In this observation he is already beginning to sound more modern than many of us
moderns. Technology is not to be understood as some absolute truth or some
uncontrollable force of nature, but as one way among others for both making sense of
our world and for effecting a certain pattern of relationships between us and the world
we live in. It is open to reflection, evaluation and if necessary, reconsideration.

What is the Dominant Technological Paradigm?

Pope Francis (2010) writes: " it is the way that humanity has taken up technology
and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm.
This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational
procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This
subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which
in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if
the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open
to manipulation."
In this amazing passage, the Pope argues for a sophisticated re-understanding of
both the work of science and the meaning of technology. Science is not just a simple
procedure for measuring and controlling a pre-existing reality. Science itself as a
cultural activity, one among many, establishes a particular kind of relationship
between humans and the living world. Science, if it not understood as one among
many tools for encountering the world, but instead is understood as the absolute
means for knowing the world absolutely, has profound and damaging consequence.
We come to understand ourselves, as subjects disconnected from the world we study.
We see ourselves as having all the agency and all the right to do what we like with the
objectified world. It is there for only our use and exploitation. There is no call to see,
understand and value the immensity of our interrelationship with the world we, in an
empoverished view of science, "study."
As the Pope writes: "Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for
a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by
the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if
from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things,
attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or
forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer
extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.
This has made it easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves
so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. "
This is not a simplistic, moral condemnation of the dangerous reductive character
of narrowly understood empirical science, it is a complex, sophisticated and modern
examination of how tools, even world shaping tools like science, are never mere
tools, they are always mediations that reshape the relationship between us and the our
environment. We act on our environment, our environment acts on us. We are
mutually created. This is not mystical religious doctrine, this is what science itself
tells us. This is the distinction between what Latour has called the dominant
fragmenting sciences and the emergent unifying and ecological sciences (Latour,
2008). And it is where a more inclusive understanding of science and spirituality can
in fact meet.
 And here we also see Pope Francis carrying forward his argument for taking
another look at what we mean by technology itself. These are not simply
technological objects, they are human-made tools, human-made mediations, carry
human-made values and desires in reshaping our relationships to the living world.
As the Pope writes: "Modern anthropocentrism has paradoxically ended up prizing
technical thought over reality, since “the technological mind sees nature as an
insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as
raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a
mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference”.[ 92] The
intrinsic dignity of the world is thus compromised. When human beings fail to find
their true place in this world, they misunderstand themselves and end up acting
against themselves."
And it is in this sophisticated rethinking of the work and meaning of science and
of technology, that we see the Pope arguing for a modernity that puts human beings
back into the world, of the world, where individualism is not understood as separation
from living world, but living responsibly in relationship to the living world. Not an
egocentric anthropomorphism, but a humble and appreciative awareness of the human
place in contribution to the living world.
To say that the Pope is merely recycling of "the now-familiar themes of his
papacy" would seem to have utterly missed the point. So what does the Pope's new
modernism look like----- what is his call for an "integral ecology"?

What is Integral Ecology?

An ecology that attends to the "relationship between living organisms and the
environment in which they develop." A recognition of nature that "cannot be regarded
as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live….we are
part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it." An "economic
ecology" which moves beyond reductionist notions of standardizations and narrowly
conceived economic efficiencies, to "a broader vision of reality," which sees the "the
protection of the environment is in fact an integral part of the development process
and cannot be considered in isolation from it.'"
An "integral ecology" that, for instance, recognizes "the reasons why a given area
is polluted requires a study of the workings of society, its economy, its behavior
patterns, and the ways it grasps reality."
…"the ways it grasps reality"…. Here we see the Pope directly pointing to the
work of media scholars… communication as the work both of grasping reality, but
also the work of holding and sustaining and interweaving the relationships and
connections that make life, human culture and human community possible, possible
always in continuous relationship to each other and the living world……. And we can
also see how the work of media scholarship can get in the way of hearing this new
vision of modernism… if our understanding of communicaton as grasping of
"reality", as mere representation is trapped in a dualistic understanding of the
subject/object relationship, of our relationship to our environment, then the work of
communication can be seen as perpetuating a kind of denial----- a denial of
relationship, of interconnection and certainly of our interpenetration, a term I will get
back to in a bit, with the world.
For the Pope and the community of thinkers, theologians and scientists who
worked with him, "integral ecology" also calls for a new understanding of the act of
inquiry itself. The Pope writes, "it is no longer possible to find a specific, discrete
answer for each part of the problem. It is essential to seek comprehensive solutions
which consider the interactions within natural systems themselves and with social
systems." …."The interactions within natural systems themselves and with social
systems." Inquiry needs to get more "materialist," more "empirical," more
"evolutionary," more embodied, more systemic/relational, not less.
And he warns " that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of
information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a
broader vision of reality."
Fragmentation as perhaps the most crucial, unrecognized forms of ignorance of
our time.
Again the Pope is pointing to a modernism more modern than many of us have
been willing to fully consider. Inquiry is both a means of knowing and a means by
which we are tied to and re-shaped by what we know. There is no room for the
narrow, scientistic idea of value-neutrality in knowing or the humanistic pretense of
some mystical/ideal aesthetic value. We come to know what we decide to pay
attention to and how we decide to engage with whatever we pay attention to-----
mediated by the tools we create to know.
And here again, the Pope offers a stunning and complex empirical and
philosophical point drawn from the idea of integral ecology that offers up a richer
more modern view of the world than many of us moderns have been willing to
acknowledge. The world, realty, the universe and what contains the universe are
beyond our knowing absolutely, and certainly beyond our knowing through any one
limited method of engagement, even if that engagement is so-called science. What is
needed is a humble recognition, based on a fuller understanding of our tools, our
relationship to our tools and the limits of our tools, what we could call a respectful
methodological pluralism.
As the Pope writes, "A science which would offer solutions to the great issues
would necessarily have to take into account the data generated by other fields of
knowledge, including philosophy and social ethics; but this is a difficult habit to
acquire today." A very difficult habit given a culture locked into the a narrow
technological mindset/spirit set.
As the Pope writes, "we are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental
and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and
environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating
poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature."
And why is the Pope's call for a new modernism, an integral ecology, both so hard to
understand and yet so crucial that we do?
I think by now the answer to this question is becoming clear. It asks that we take a
harder, more careful look at this thing called science which has unleashed enormous
powers from the earth and put them in the hands of humans….. leading us to an
inflated sense of importance for our own species and to a sense of separation from our
 own bodies and our own living world. But it is important to be clear here: the Pope is
not commending science, he is asking that we see it in a more proper perspective, in a
human perspective that asks of us to take responsibility for its uses and outcomes. It is
not something beyond or above us. It is not some new false secular god. It is a way of
negotiating our relationship to the earth and to each other that can be directed by the
values we choose to hold dear and not by the belief that it is value-free.
And it asks us to re-consider our relationships to all of the things that surround us
that we have written off as mere objects-----both technological and natural. We are
our technology and our technology is us. We are not humans set apart from nature,
but humans as part of nature. Our heightened awareness of an integral ecology asks
us to surrender a vision of ourselves as little gods, but lonely and disconnected little
gods, and instead offers us the opportunity to come home to our brothers and sisters
and planet.
These ideas are not so new. They have increasingly been coming from
marginalized ecological scientists, environmental philosophers, ecopsychologists,
theologians, and more. What is new is the Pope's effort to recognize these ideas,
embrace them, articulate them and articulate a space drawing on these ideas where
science, spirituality, the environment and social justice all meet.

Integral Ecology and the American Pragmatists

Who would have expected the Pope working from his seemingly anachronistic
spiritual domain making such a historic effort to move toward a integral
ecology version of modernism? And what resources do we have from a
secular, scientific, empirical world waiting to meet him? This is, I think, the
importance of American Pragmatism and the work of John Dewey.
Dewey, nearly a century ago, was at work developing an empirical and what we
might call, ecological, alternative to the emerging vision of modernism, which the
Pope has called, in its present form, the dominant technological paradigm.
The work of Dewey and the pragmatists has over the last twenty years emerged
from the margins of philosophy and philosophy of science to mark out for many a
third approach to understanding modernism. While there are many dimensions to the
pragmatist project, particularly relevant here are Dewey's interrelated concepts of
cultural naturalism, philosophy of technology, logic of inquiry, and radical
empiricism.
A few words about these concepts.
Dewey's position grows from his argument that what we have called the
materialist view of modern science was not materialist enough and further
undervalued the great contribution of the scientific method. By not being materialist
enough, Dewey argued that the emerging narrow definition of science failed to take
into its material account neither the scientist nor the instruments of inquiry.
For Dewey inquiry itself is embedded in a rich, changing, complexly related context
which must be accounted for in any full understanding of what it is that science does.
The unfortunate illusion that the scientist acts alone, using mere tools of inquiry to
discover a pre-existing reality does a great disservice to fully understanding the real
power of scientific inquiry.
 For Dewey the scientist is always already embedded in a cultural context. The
questions of concern do not emerge from the so-called objects of the world, but from
the interests of the scientist/inquirer in an effort to solve the problems of living and
thriving in a complex and ever-changing environment. The universe and the
unfolding interrelated events that are taking place are infinite. The attention of the
inquirer is directed toward aspects of the environment which are immediately of
importance…. To aspects of the environment which pose problems for existence and
enjoyment of the living creature. The inquirer is always an organism in not apart from
an environment.
Tools are shaped to mediate the encounter between the living creature and the
living world. In their construction and use the living creature and the environment are
both transformed. A tool is never simply a mere tool, it is a fully cultural artifact of
action and engagement. Whether the tool is a lever, a wheel, a drawing, language, a
methodology for inquiry, or a steam engine. Its potency is both for the immediate task
for which it is designed and for the cultural memory that is embedded in it as an
object itself.
For Dewey the great achievement of science based inquiry, is not the lonely
discovery of an isolated scientist of some absolute truth about the world. Instead it is
the achievement of a cooperative and reflective process of engagement, and collective
memory of the outcomes of those engagements, which have the capacity to direct
future action. Knowledge is not out there contained in the essence of some object, but
the active process of growing a publicly shared and publicly tested understanding of
individual and collective experience.
Cultural naturalism recognizes the historical building process of always changing
and contingent knowledge, through our active engagement with the environment. It is
the outcome of the material engagement of our bodies with the environment.
The Pragmatist philosophy of technology recognizes the active, living, human
designed and human transforming quality of our tools. Our tools do things, but they
do things in certain ways because they are expressions of particular interests we have
in our relationship to each other and to the living world. To treat them as mere
objects, mere tools, is to forget our relationship to them and to both dismiss our
interrelationship to the tools we bring into being and our responsibility for how both
we and the environment are transformed by them.
And for Dewey and the pragmatists, inquiry is always a socially informed and
social process. And its outcome is always a social kind of knowledge, carrying the
imprint of the cultural forces, desires and needs that produced it, and having its
validity only in terms of its usefulness in application--- a usefulness to be publically
judged in terms of its outcomes on all who are effected by its implementation.
Inquiry, like living itself, is social and interactive with other living creatures and with
the living world through and through.
Meaning and values are always intertwined. Their supposed separation by a crude
modernism has created endless problems for the so-called modern….. most
significantly, once it was unfortunately accepted that science could be separated from
values, the entire problem of how to invent an ethics to guide the application of
science became the endless and ineffective preoccupation of a century of philosophy
and public policy. A radical empiricism takes all of these dimensions of experience
into full account.
And for Dewey and the pragmatists, if the concept of cultural naturalism directs
our attention to science and inquiry as a human built, value laden means of being in
the world, the concept of logic itself is no different. It is yet another tool…. There is
no absolute logic. There are logics which can be constructed and have value…. The
value can only be understood in their application and in the social and public
assessment of their outcome. Narrowly understood empirical science is only one
among an infinite number of ways to engage with our being in the world. Again, the
value of these engagements can only be ascertained through reflection and public
evaluation of their outcomes.

John Dewey meets Pope Francis

The Pope in the green encyclical laid out a vision for a new and more meaningful
Modernism. A modernism marked by a deep awareness of the spiritual, cultural,
economic and ecological interconnectedness and interdependence of all living
creatures and all living creatures in a relationship to a living world. The Pope
proposed a way to re-imagine both science and religion itself. But it wasn't a vision
that wasn't necessarily fully heard because of the stereotypes and biases we have of
what religion means or what a world religious leader can say and not say.
We weren't really expecting him to explain how we could re-imagine and re-
understand our living relationship to our planet or how he could offer a world
changing view of how we understand economics and technology and science in
relationship to our cultural practices. We expected him to stay in his corner of the
cultural universe, the religious corner, the spiritual corner. We didn't expect him to
make a powerful and compelling argument that the separation of science and religion,
science and values, has done us great harm.
One hundred years ago John Dewey saw how emerging modernism was about to
substitute a dogmatic truth of a narrowly conceived and narrowly understood sense of
science for a rich, complex, holistic, materialist and experiential view of social
inquiry. Dewey wasn't anti-science, he was anti-scientistic… he was anti-reductionist.
His science was an ecological science… a human science of interrelationships within
cultural and environmental contexts, an ecological science that recognized the
interpenetration of values and knowing, and that held out the hope for a growing
awareness of how values and desire guided action and how action could be evaluated
in terms of fulfilling the values that communities recognized, articulated and held
dear. There was no "pure" science. There were no "mere" tools. There were no
individuals who possessed meaning outside of their relationship to community. He
saw, in pragmatism as an alternative to crude modernism, the rise of a new and
powerful way of thinking about and understanding and acting on our experience in
the world. In this new way of seeing and understanding our experience in the world
based on shared, public investigation and public reflection, action in the service of
human fulfillment in relationship to their environment was the method of science. We
can see why Dewey is being hailed today as a central ecological philosopher.
 The parallels between "integral ecology" and "pragmatism" I hope are now
increasingly clear.
And what I believe pragmatism offers to the Pope is a historical context from a
secular philosophic tradition that puts humans back into the world and which joins
inquiry, technology and values. And puts the work of the Pope and Laudato Si in
alliance with the historical and continuing work of pragmatism to build a new
ecological modernism…. An integral ecology.
And finally it offers up both to the Pope and to media studies scholars a call to
value and re-value the work of communication in the production, practice and
maintenance and continual realization of an integral ecology.

Integral Ecology and the Work of Communication

To create the space for seeing and understanding ourselves and the living world
from an integral ecology perspective and developing the capacity to act from this
perspective, it is necessary that the work initiated by Laudato Si and many others,
critiquing and reframing our understanding of scientistic modernism, what the Pope
calls the dominant technological paradigm, be carried forward, deepened, and
extended.
It is here where the work of John Dewey and other American Pragmatists becomes
central and crucial.
The power of Dewey's critique of scientistic modernism, a critique which was
capable both of showing its flawed elevation of science to the new status of an
absolute secular religion of transcendent knowledge and to articulating a compelling,
alternative empirical ecological modernism rested substantially on his work helping
us to re-understand communication.
In Dewey's view communication was both the means and practice of all qualities
of relationality. Communication itself was first and foremost a relational act. No
communication, no relationship. And at the same time it was the means for bringing
into awareness the nature and quality of relationships themselves.
In this sense, communication is a precondition for thought. Communication brings
into existence the tools for shared understanding and for reflection…. The
imaginative possibility of considering and reconsidering what is taking place, what
has taken place, and what might take place.
And for humans communication both depends on the existence of community and
at the same time makes community possible. No communication, no community. No
community, no communication.
And this is the first point where Dewey and the pragmatists can enrich our
understanding of the meaning and practice of integral ecology as a more modern
modernism. Humans are human by nature of their living in deep association with each
other, in deep interdependence with each other. But it is the very awareness of this
association which a scientistic and individualistic modernism denies and hides.
Valuing communication as the ongoing and under-recognized work of community,
and the means by making visible our deep dependence on each other as well as the
living world, and the consequences of our actions on each other and the living world,
needs to be one of the central lines of approach to realizing an integral ecology.
 The second point is that contrary to the scientistic belief that knowledge making is
an individualistic affair of discovering a pre-existing reality, understanding the
integral connection between communication and inquiry, reveals the always social
character of knowledge…. in the social constructivist character of its production, but
also crucially in its testing and in its constant revision. Knowledge which is not public
is not knowledge, but a effort to corner the common well-being of interrelationship
and community for private interest. Those in media studies that cling to a
representationalist or correspondence understanding of meaning continue to align
themselves with the narrow modernism critiqued by the Pope and by pragmatists.
Recognizing that our individual minds are the direct outcome of our experience of
association and community through and with communication contributes centrally to
the realization of integral ecology.
And finally, for our consideration here, the third point….. communication is the
means by which subject and object are interpenetrated….. not just held in relationship
but come into being as interrelated…. No object, no subject. No community, no
individual. In this powerful sense of being as action, we look again at technology and
see not mere tools, but the ways we have chosen consciously or without
consciousness to be in relationship to each other and to the living world. Surrendering
the idea of our separation from both so-called nature and technology can provide us
with another frame of reference for taking responsibility for our place in the world
and at the same time in developing the capacity to see and experience with awe and
reverence our place in the living world.
The Pope and empiricists like John Dewey can agree, that the earth can speak, and
when it speaks, it speaks for us, and when we speak, we speak not only for ourselves
but from and for the earth… this is not mere poetry, mere metaphor, but the material
ground of our existence… where science, communication, spirituality and poetry
meet.

Thank you.

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