Spiritual Difference and Voluntary Middle-Class Restraint
Can Spiritual Values Combat Global Warming?

Mike King
London Metropolitan University
41 Commercial Road
London E1 1LA
020 7515 4583
mike.king@londonmet.ac.uk

Spiritual values can combat global warming – but only some spiritual values, and only if adopted by certain groups. I want to link two different sets of ideas together; firstly ideas about the variety of spiritual impulses that give rise to different spiritual values, and secondly about the middle-class lifestyle. Years ago I noticed – as many have – that the middle-class lifestyle has no natural ceiling. In contrast, the lifestyle of the poor has a “glass” ceiling, generally highly visible to them, but invisible to the middle-classes of the world, intent on climbing up the housing ladder, or countless other ladders of affluence. For the poor, particularly of the developing world, breaking through the glass ceiling of poverty transforms their lives, bringing relief from the stress of hunger, back-breaking toil, and disease. There is no ethics of ecology that can demand a restraint of aspiration for these people, the restraint from shattering that glass ceiling. But for the middle-classes, intent on attaining the next rung of middle-class aspiration, no step upwards carries with it any significant increase in happiness or relief from stress. There is no natural ceiling to these ambitions, and no sum increase of human good in their attainment. An ethics of restraint for the middle classes derives from the needs of the poor, and to some extent is recognised in the developed world in the concept of progressive, redistributive taxation (an idea now under threat from the “flat-tax” economics of the right). But global warming now sharpens that ethic: the lifestyle of the affluent is not just an affront to the poor, but now a threat to the planet.

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park

This small forest is one of the best-kept secrets of London’s East End. Walking through it one day I saw a man seemingly dressed as a Victorian gamekeeper: I thought I had seen a ghost. Later, in conversation with him, he confided that, looking out from the top of a tall building in Hammersmith, he had perceived London as a “city built in a forest.” I have kept that vision with me ever since.

So how can spiritual values lead to what I am calling Voluntary Middle-Class Restraint? What kind of spirituality leads to voluntary curbs on fossil-fuel use, the adoption of recycling, carbon footprint awareness, and green political choices? To answer this question we need a fine-grained method of articulating the variety of spiritual impulse. I have spent some twenty years considering this issue, aware that the question of spiritual difference is a thorny one. The history of Western religion – monotheism – has ensured that non-Christian spiritualities were vilified under the term “paganism.” This term has done two violences to non-Christian spiritualities: it both denies the validity of such spiritualities, and lumps them together as one. But the fact is that the Mediterranean at the time of Christ was a melting-pot of different spiritual traditions, catering for a wide variety of spiritual impulse. Even at the beginning of the fifth century, St Augustine was free to choose his religion from a variety of competing sects. Unfortunately, when he adopted Christianity, he did not extend that freedom of choice to others: they were to be called “heretics” who chose anything else. It has taken the Enlightenment period and the overthrow of Christianity as a political and cultural force in the West to again allow choice in the matter of religion.

But the secular world, inheriting its understanding of religion from Christianity, assumed the equation “religion = God,” and so never considered the question of the variety of spiritual impulse. At the same time the New Age seems nervous of the question, perhaps because it sees it as potentially divisive, and counter to its mantra of “all is one.” But a long look at the world’s great spiritual teachers and teachings show an extraordinary variety, and many scholars of religion and spirituality have constructed schemes to help us understand it. But rather than start with the assumptions of Western theology, I prefer to use the analogy with fine art: although the artists themselves are often engaged in the complete overthrow of previous or other contemporary art movements (as monotheism was in our parallel), culture as a whole accepts them all. The Vatican allegedly keeps copies of all the books banned under its Index, but they are stored to deny the public access to them. National art galleries, in contrast, are keen to acquire representative works from all art movements, and to exhibit them for the public. Once we see the world’s spiritual movements in this way – as treasures, or flowerings of the spirit in specific times and places – then we can honour each one, just as we honour each art movement. At the same time we can acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of different spiritualities: here we are interested in how particular spiritualities, or modalities of the spirit, as I like to call them, relate to Nature.

The terminology of Matthew Fox, founder of Creation Spirituality, is useful here. Fox uses the distinction between the via positiva and the via negativa to mean approximately a world-embracing spirituality and a world-denying spirituality. The terms originally meant something slightly different in Christian theology, but we can adapt them to cover all the worlds’ spiritual traditions by abandoning their theistic basis. The ur-religion of mankind, for which the best, though contested, term “shamanism” can stand, clearly holds Nature at its centre. Shamanism has survived at the margins into the modern world, and has been widely studied. Although less easily historically recoverable, the later religious forms of Goddess polytheism also clearly held Nature to be central. It seems only with the emergence of patriarchal religion, and then only in some parts of the world, did Nature become divorced from the spiritual impulse and the language of spirit. In Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism he makes it clear that monotheism was predicated on the break with Nature: “Religion’s supreme function is to destroy the dream-harmony of Man, Universe and God, to isolate man from the other elements of the dream stage of his mythical and primitive consciousness. … the scene of religion is no longer Nature, but the moral and religious action of man and the community of men, whose interplay brings about history as, in a sense, the stage on which the drama of man’s relation to God unfolds.”

Cultural historian Thomas Berry refers to this drama as the “anthropomorphic” stage of human development, creating a teleological impetus to a future salvation. After the Industrial Revolution that teleological impetus became bound up with what he calls the “mystique of technology.” Berry believes this will lead to catastrophe – now focussed in our minds as the disaster of global warming – unless we shift to what he calls the “mystique of the land.” Berry is right that Western monotheism, and its peculiar future-orientation led to the mystique of technology, but that is only part of the picture. Marx’s analysis of the workings of capital is another part of the picture, but the well-meaning cry of “down with consumerism” misses out a key dynamic in the relentless march of industrialisation. Marx understood capitalism as the engine that drove the ever-increasing output of material goods, extracted from workers in alienated modes of production. But the flaw in his analysis, as in most well-meaning liberal environmentalist hand-wringing, is in seeing these goods as arbitrary productions serving only the goal of the capitalist machine. Yes, many of the goods chased by the status-climbing middle-classes might well be arbitrary. But for the vast majority of the world’s poor, many of these “goods” are genuinely good because they bring relief from the harsh conditions of poverty, feudal dependency, and ill-health. It is the same industrial efficiency that produces the chocolate fountain and the village water-pump.

Fields near Oxford

I grew up under these skies, in a village near Oxford. In 2003 I met a man on this track who had worked these fields for nearly sixty years, as a farm hand covering all the skills of animal husbandry and arable farming. He had never been to London. “There’s only buildings there,” he said.

For the middle classes the mystique of technology drives them towards a virtual, nuclear, GM, hydroponic future, in which there is ultimate control of Nature … to the point where the very word will drop out of the language. A small proportion of the middle classes, represented by Berry and other serious visionaries of the ecology movement, see the danger of this technological utopia. But for the rural and urban poor, their struggle is to break through the glass ceiling of poverty … by attaining to the very “goods” that Marx so casually abstracted as the “productions of alienated labour.” No serious thinker believes that we can collectively return to hunter-gatherer economies, or even subsistence farming, hence economies are inevitably stratified in terms of efficient production and labour specialisation. Only such an industrial base can serve the world’s poor; only such an industrial base had the power to lift the vast majority of UK citizens out of poverty, and effectively into the middle classes. The landscape of a city like London is far from the mystique of the land that Berry speaks of, but every council flat and industrial estate speaks of an ethics of egalitarianism that have placed the bulk of the city’s people beyond debilitating poverty. We should not regret this. But for all those of the middle classes for whom that glass ceiling is so forgotten, we should preach a voluntary restraint.

That glass ceiling, the dividing line between the poor and the middle classes as we are defining them, assures us of basics that we are astonishingly quick to forget, like running water, electricity, gas, and sewage disposal. These are all “goods” provided in the 19th century by private capitalist enterprise, so despised by Marx. Let me take an example of such a “good,” my gas cooker. A friend, on first visiting my house, commented on it that it was nice to see an old-fashioned cooker. “What do you mean, old-fashioned?” I retorted, “That cooker was bought brand new by my mother … only twenty-five years ago.” Its technology has not changed in the intervening time, only fashion. And this is where voluntary middle-class restraint comes in: that cooker will last at least another twenty-five years, maybe more, so why trade it in? The carbon costs of manufacturing its replacement are totally unjustifiable. Yet the carbon costs of providing such a basic “good,” along with the infrastructure to support it, to the world’s poor have to be born. And surely they are negligible compared to the carbon costs of the middle-class lifestyle escalator.

Here is another example of voluntary middle-class restraint: walking instead of driving. Long before I had discovered Berry’s phrase “the mystique of the land” I was instinctively practicing it – by walking in London. My range is mainly in London’s East End, from Whitechapel in the west to Beckton in the east; from Island Gardens in the south to Walthamstow in the north: I have walked at least ten thousand miles in the last fifteen years. I walk to work, I walk to the shops, and – above all – I walk for pleasure. It is a kind of urban shamanic practice, a sensibility that draws on “tathata” or “suchness” in the Buddhist traditions; the Nature mysticism of Thoreau, Burroughs, Muir, Leopold and Dillard in the US; on Traherne and Jefferies in the UK; and on Krishnamurti and Basho. But while Muir was adamant that his spiritual home was above what he called the “bread line” – below which he could buy bread in the industrialised cities of Victorian America, and above which existed pure wilderness – I am content with the profusion of Nature that lives so much more precariously and poignantly in the modern city. I walk through the council housing estates and the industrial estates, the canals and parks, honouring each thing (like Whitman said) as good, and no two things alike. Between the artificial, dead, linear products of the human imagination range the living cyclical forces of Nature … including human beings, poignantly lost in their autistic technological imaginings.

But in Tucson Arizona I was stopped by the police … for walking. They were concerned. It wasn’t normal. In Wisconsin, in the “Sand County” of Aldo Leopold, my host drove his three-litre pickup to work every day, and worked out in the pool and gym, as his doctor instructed. His wife made the same ten-minute walk by foot, or detoured via the nature reserve where she might spot the sand-crane. America’s urban and suburban sprawls are not designed for walking, and in rural Wisconsin, under the purest of blue skies and in fine fresh air, my friend was unable to make the imaginative leap between his use of the motor vehicle and the carbon emissions that lead to global warming. So we return to the central issue here: what kind of spirituality gives rise to values that could encourage middle-class voluntary restraint? Clearly the track record of monotheism would rule it out.

David Abram is sensitive to this accusation, that monotheism has destroyed our relationship to Nature, destroyed the mystique of the land. In his wonderful book The Spell of the Sensuous, he blames the Greeks. But Hugh Brody, in his equally wonderful The Other Side of Eden, shows how the Inuit suffered at the hands of monotheism, firstly as white man curtailed the range of their hunting, and secondly as white man set out to destroy their native shamanic religion. (Global warming represents the third legacy of the white man, as the ice melts and shrinks the Inuit hunting grounds still further.) Yet we should not, in spiritual terms, vilify Christianity as it did shamanism and all other early modalities of the spirit, for this would merely perpetuate spiritual intolerance. We need to understand the great experiment of Christian monotheism up to the time of Aquinas, and beyond, as a profound encounter with the via negativa, the exploration of a spiritual interiority of love. The East too had its great via negativa experiments, mainly in India. But, as Matthew Fox shows us in his work on Aquinas, the period of Scholasticism, though not yet capable of creating modern science, was the turning point as the via negativa gradually gave way to a spirituality of the via positiva. A world-curious spirituality emerged within Christianity after the long period of world-denying inwardness, largely propelled by its suppressed Neoplatonist traditions. The so-called Dark Ages were a natural pendulum-swing away from the extroversion of the Greek and Roman adventures. Hegel pointed out that “The eye of Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world,” after the inward-lookingness of the Dark Ages; it needed the materialist revolution of the industrial period to encounter again the physical world. He also said: “The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.” Hegel wrote this two hundred years ago: how much more true today!

An East End Gasworks

This view from my study, by the Prince of Wales’s standards, is undoubtedly aesthetically bereft. But the gasometer supplies the kitchen cookers of the working-class families (as it does mine), and the “social housing” extends basic standards of living to the urban poor. These man-made structures therefore have an ethical beauty, and are anyway set off by the untameable elements of Nature: trees and sky.

But, as Ken Wilber points out, the spirituality of the German Idealists foundered on a lack of spiritual practice. Instead, it was the great Nature writers and mystics of the middle-late 19th century who developed both a spirituality and practice that truly generates the values we are looking for. Henry Thoreau on Walden Pond and Richard Jefferies in Wiltshire both independently discovered a Nature of spiritual transcendence, and a spiritual practice that made sacred the relationship of the human with the natural world: a spiritual practice of walking. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and John Burroughs all wrote a Nature of the highest spirituality, while John Muir’s autobiographical accounts and letters show us that even earthquakes inspired in him a spiritual love of the living granite beneath his feet. But strangely, my own spiritual awakening to Nature came through the encounter with Jiddu Krishnamurti, both in his lectures and his writings. His spirituality is an extraordinary balance between the via negativa of inner simplicity – such as would be quite congruent with the teachings of the Buddha – and a via positiva of the delight in Nature. Where the Buddha’s famous silence on speculative matters also extends to Nature – he has not a single word to say on the subject in the Pali canon – Krishnamurti’s extraordinary Nature writings, for example in The Only Revolution, have to be set alongside the best of Thoreau, Jefferies and Muir.

It cannot be chance that such a radical new modality of the spirit should emerge in the middle-nineteenth century: to those visionaries the threat that industrial society posed to the wilderness was already acute. Even in Jefferies’ short lifetime (1848-1887) he mourned the loss of many bird species. Yet this spirituality had little precedent in the history of the religions of the world: we have to look to the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho to find any comparable sensibility. The Zen tradition to which he turned in later life held within it the creative tension of the extreme via negativa of the Buddha himself and the exquisitely balanced via positiva of Taoism. Indeed Taoism offers a modality of the spirit whose values par excellence are what we are looking for. For those Westerners who can make such a cultural leap, Taoism, as refracted through its three great texts, the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu and the Lieh Tzu, represents a natural balance of Nature veneration and life-style restraint. Taoism also represents a radically different history of religion compared to that of the West: it was a genuinely new modality of the spirit compared to the ur-religion of mankind, just as monotheism was, but instead of destroying shamanism with unbounded ferocity as took place in the West, it simply evolved out of it. At worst, the Taoist sage might merely confound the shaman (as told in the Chuang Tzu), but this only confirms the continuity of religious thought that took place.

Shamanism represents however a radically different spirituality of Nature to that of the 19th century Nature mystics such as Thoreau and Jefferies. Michael Harner’s classic work The Way of the Shaman spells this out for us, while at the same time drawing attention to the massive growth in neo-Shamanic movements adopted by Western city-dwellers. The shamanic way of Nature is the gift that Thomas Berry quite rightly feels the Native American can provide; the Nature mysticism of Thoreau and Jefferies a quite different sensibility of the white man. Muir himself left a mixed legacy when he propounded the mantra: “the wilderness is a place where people go, but do not stay.” He had no regard for the Native American (probably because his first encounters with them were over the theft of horses from his family farm). His father, a Scottish pastor who emigrated to Wisconsin and learned farming the hard way, used to muse that the white man could support ten times the population of the Native American on a given piece of land, because of his modern farming methods. No doubt, he thought, newer methods still would drive his ilk off the land just as they had driven out the Native American. How prophetic! The small-holder has truly been driven off the land by agribusiness methods that Muir Snr. could barely have dreamt of. Yet in the spirituality of the Native American, and the spirituality of the Nature mystics like John Muir, their lies a spectrum of approaches to Nature that can appeal to all. Some, like in shamanic times, are genuinely able to approach Nature as a living world of spirits; to speak with the spirits of the trees and animals, mountains and ancestors. Rudolf Steiner, who learned much from a mysterious rural herb-vendor in southern Austria, represents perhaps an updating of that ancient spirituality. But for those who cannot enter into the world of spirits, or who even reject the idea, the Nature mysticism of writers from Thoreau to Krishnamurti engages a more aesthetic modality of the spirit, readily accessible to the modern mind.

But Christianity is not done for. While it cannot in a positive sense put forward spiritual values that actively engage with Nature, it certainly has within its via negativa genius a compassion and simplicity that challenge the untrammelled middle-class lifestyle. It only goes wrong, as Thomas Berry points out, when its own messianic teleology gets muddled up with the “mystique of technology,” or the “cult of the future” as the Prince of Wales calls it. In David Lorimer’s biography of him, The Radical Prince, we come to understand the Prince of Wales as a Christian Platonist, i.e. as deriving his values just as much from the repressed Neoplatonism of the West as from Christianity. The Neoplatonist vision, going back to Pythagoras, is of man as microcosm, a point made well by the Prince in his Temenos / Resurgence article of 2003. This vision holds for a profound connectedness between self and universe, and between self and Nature, where no act is made in isolation. Muir famously spelled this out: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” The Prince of Wales, as defender of all that is best in tradition, also defends Christianity, but we need to be able to also look clearly at its defects. The Native American and Eastern traditions help us to see that the religious history of the West has played a large role in our alienation from Nature, and hence the impending catastrophe of global warming. Monotheism needs to be treasured for its genuine assets, as the Prince does, but also constantly reminded of its need for humility.

Bow Creek

This outflow of the River Lee is dominated by the presence of Canary Wharf. If global warming causes the Thames Barrier to fail, then the creek will flood, destroying the scrap-yards, used car lots, and social housing along its banks. But the directors of the international corporations, in their headquarters high above, can make a difference: they can adopt the so-called “triple bottom line:” profits, people, planet. This ethical stance is not so implausible; similar spiritual motivations created the business manifestos of the Quaker industries.

In a short essay like this it is impossible to really do justice to the vastly different modalities of the spirit that humankind has explored over the millennia. All we have done is to pick a few to show how they generate very specific spiritual values that positively engage with Nature. By immersing oneself in such spiritual traditions one can actively develop the profound care, or even anxiety, for Nature needed to resist the depradations of the “cult of the future,” the virtual, nuclear, GM, hydroponic future where the word “Nature” can be dropped from the dictionary, never mind be spelled with capital “N.” But we cannot ask the world’s poor to do this: it is the world’s middle-classes that we have to inspire. While the Prince of Wales and Wendell Berry offer different possibilities for a sane kind of farming, the bulk of the middle-classes (as we have defined them here) cannot conceivably return to the land as small-holders. Our concept of Voluntary Middle-Class Restraint cannot be so naïve, nor can it hold the Marxist naivety that capitalism per se has to be overcome, nor can an end to labour specialisation be a possibility. Instead we have to offer what is workable. If the spiritual traditions we have discussed are promoted, and their spiritual values begin to take hold, then we can offer three simple facets to this restraint:

1.	recognise that there is no natural ceiling to the middle-class lifestyle, while making the imaginative leap to perceive the glass ceiling that holds back the poor: out of this combined insight move to a simpler life 
2.	be aware of the carbon costs of all acts of consumption, particularly travel, and act to reduce them
3.	buy only organic food, thus supporting the small-holder and hence potentially replacing the damaging Common Agricultural Policy (and US equivalent subsidies) with a natural life-line to Western farmers that does not harm developing countries.

Dr Mike King is the Director of the Centre for Postsecular Studies at London Metropolitan University. (All photos shot digitally by the author)

Short Biography of Dr Mike King
Dr Mike King is Director of the Centre for Postsecular Studies at London Metropolitan University. He is also one of the Directors of the Scientific and Medical Network, on the Steering Group for the University for Spirit Forum, and is a member of GreenSpirit. He has published over forty papers on art, science and the spiritual.