Berkley Center

“Why is Nature not a Mother, but a Stepmother who refuses to feed us?” Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth century Russian philosopher, asked after a particularly horrible famine. “Why is it natural to ask why something exists, yet unnatural to ask why the living die?” he continued. Reflecting on the meaning of life itself, he further wondered, “Is this all for the participation of all in material comfort, or in the work of understanding the blind force which brings hunger, disease, and death?” “This is why we must transform Nature into a life-giving force,” he triumphantly concluded.

Nikolai Fedorov was a rather strange fellow. He has been called the father of transhumanism and the Socrates of Moscow; he was even an inspiration for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who famously went on to pioneer modern rocketry and astronautics. But he is not often credited as a forerunner in deeply grounded Christian ecotheology. Two questions often rouse the Russian imagination conjointly when it comes to the problems in the world: 1) What must be done? 2) Who is to blame? Fedorov, like many Russians of his time, was acutely aware of these questions and, like many people today, answered: we are to blame. 

Christian ecotheologies often come to this conclusion—and even more often return to the paradigmatic relationship between humanity and nature and how this relationship is seriously breached. Typically, the logic is this: Christianity at some point betrayed the biblical mandate of stewardship in favor of dominion. Dominionism is the cause of empire, industry, exploitation, as well as the total and complete rupture of humanity from nature. It is the source of our alienation from nature and the cause of our imagining ourselves as lords of the world over and against nature, something to be subdued—or, to the word, dominated. There are, against this, better models for ecological living. Christians, as mandated in the Book of Genesis, ought to be stewards of the environment and live in harmony with nature. This, of course, is something I agree with fully.

But the line does not stop there. What is to be done? We are to become stewards of environment and live in more-perfect harmony with nature. Christian ecotheologies—from Lynn White Jr. to Leonardo Boff all the way to Pope Francis—very frequently conclude there is something even more basic at its root. The source of our problem may be an ideology of dominionism, but the fruits of this ideology is something else: the globalization of technology, or more ominously as Pope Francis put it in Laudato Si, “the globalization of the technocratic paradigm.” Pope Francis says the basic problem to our ecological crisis is this: “the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm” (emphasis in original). This paradigm “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” It is the logic of dominionism manifested through the globalization of a uniform, omnipresent system of control made apparent through technology. It exploits not only human beings, but the environment as well.

Jacques Ellul made the same case in his genius and seminal text The Technological Society. Ellul argued that the entire system created in the post-war world operated on one principle: efficiency. Every living creature and the entire natural world only held value in its ability to be exploited and made efficient for the sake of reinforcing said system. This was taken to its logical conclusion as being an influence on the Unabomber in his manifesto The Industrial Revolution and its Consequences. The consequence, in this sense, was total control over the natural world and ultimately humanity’s subservience to the technological system—the machine. This is the stuff of dystopian science fiction, but also startlingly prescient.

Ellul and the rest of the theorists positing an adverse relationship between technology and environment (or even humanity) are obviously not wrong. But why does there still seem to be such a strong impulse within the discourse and culture to affirm the idea we might invent our way out of the crisis—or even worse, shop our way out of it? Be it clean energy, better food production, population control, etc., it seems as if there’s a never-ending parade of technological and consumer solutions just waiting to emerge which never actually do—or at least are not implemented due to political and economic reasons. Exploitation and efficiency remain the name of the game.

Fedorov foresaw this tension well before it developed. He recognized that political and economic forces would never seek to reorient our relationship because there is profit in the exploitation of the natural environment. To him, it was a distinctly Christian call and it was distinctly opposed to such exploitation. There is a definite difference between exploitation and regulation—regulation being a holy, ascetic endeavor not only applied to the virtue of one’s character, but the virtue of one’s own civilization and, eventually, the cosmos itself. Regulation is the restriction of one’s self and one’s environment for the sake of a goal: which, for Fedorov, was this reorientation with nature where our relationship is no longer adversarial, but in communion. 

Earlier this month at the Parliament of the World’s Religions there were countless panels on climate change and the planetary ecological crisis. There were so many brilliant ideas and so many concerned voices. But I cannot help but be suspicious of the growing concert which suggests we need to erase our technological progress and “return to nature”—a thought of so many panelists I heard and a common trend amongst those who blame dominionism and technology. Fedorov’s text, the only text we have attributed to him, is called The Common Cause of Humanity. While it seems many of us can agree we are to blame, there is still a great divide as to what should be done. I could never return to nature in a literal sense—I depend on the technological society and I have no intention of breaking that bond or even denying that; honestly, I love it. 

Nature is both life-giving and death-dealing. So is technology. Fedorov saw technology as something which could, through exploitation, make us subservient to profiteers and private interests. But, should we choose the path of regulation for the sake of a holy and esteemed goal—to transform nature from death-dealing into a life-giving cosmos—technology would be the tool of our liberation and precisely that which makes us love nature. 

Pope Francis lamented that “the idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable… the technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political life.” But it does not have to be this way. We must not only rebalance our relationship with nature, but also technology. Fedorov himself has wise words which encapsulate this all so well. He said this paradigm shift, the shift we should want and so desperately need, will turn nature from a “temporary enemy to an eternal friend.” This, I suggested at the Parliament, should be our common cause in our technological society.