Alternatives Unincorporated

Earth Ethics from the Grassroots

George Zachariah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781845536886
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317545279
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The victims of environmental destruction are often sidelined in eco-theology and environmental discourse. Movements for ecological justice fail to take into account the voice of those at the grassroots. 'Alternatives Unincorporated' presents an environmental ethics that begins with those on the margins. Using the key example of the Narmada Dam in India and the popular resistance movement which built up against the project, the book examines the collective action of subaltern communities in caring for their local environment. The book frames these movements as theological texts that inform a life-affirming earth ethics. The aim of the book is to challenge prevailing social and ecological dynamics and to affirm the interconnectedness of social justice and environmental action.

1 The Crisis of Earth: A View from the Grassroots

The negation of the fundamental right to live is the everyday life experience that binds land, water, forest, and subsistence communities at the grassroots in the era of globalization. Such negations manifest in diverse ways as a reign of death, leading the movement of life into jeopardy. The reign of death becomes hegemonic when it colonizes the minds of the communities and denudes them of their sense of moral agency. Communities without moral agency are mere “dead men [sic] walking.” The ethical imperative in such historical contexts is nothing but to reclaim the moral agency of the victims of the reign of death. A critical analysis of the reign of death is, hence, the starting point in our ethical praxis as it helps us to understand the distress of the earth and its inhabitants. This chapter presents how an earth ethics from the grassroots problematizes the crisis of earth.

The Colonization of the Lifeworld

The Colonization of the Lifeworld: The Problem for an Earth Ethics from the Grassroots

The threat to the movement of life in late-capitalist societies can be narrated, analyzed, and approached in different ways. In this book we use the concept of the “colonization of the lifeworld” developed by Jürgen Habermas, to problematize the crisis of earth. Habermas uses this concept to develop his critique of modernity and advanced capitalism.

According to Habermas, society can be seen as divided into “system” and “lifeworld.” System refers to the sphere coordinated by the instrumental rationality of the market economy and the administrative state. Lifeworld, on the other hand, represents the organic sphere of communicative rationality. Cultural reproduction (the interpretation and transmission of cultural traditions from one generation to the other), social integration (the institutionalization and coordination of patterned practices of everyday life), and socialization (formation of personal identities) are the processes associated with the lifeworld.¹ Habermas then presents the colonization of the lifeworld as the pathology of modernity. The uncoupling of system and lifeworld, and its colonization, leads to the ascendancy of instrumental rationality of market and state, which then strips away the moral world and agency of the lifeworld.²

The Habermasian concept of the colonization of the lifeworld has been used by various Christian theologians and ethicists to analyze late-capitalist societies and to develop theological and ethical critiques of modernity.³ The crisis of our time is the colonization of the lifeworld. The morality of the market and the bureaucratic state has become the norm that guides decisions in the lifeworld in the contemporary world. Knowledge becomes a commodity with a price tag, and a means to have dominion and hegemony over others. The hegemony of instrumental rationality and its penetration and invasion into the lifeworld castrates the community of its moral agency. The distress of the earth which we mourn today is therefore the consequence of the colonization of the lifeworld.

David Tracy’s observation about Habermas’ critical theory of society summarizes the significance of the concept of the colonization of the lifeworld:

His critical social theory helps analyze and test the social systems of our society: the economy and political administration and their media of money and power; and their invasion, if unchecked, of the communicative rationality necessary to the social action in the lifeworld of the society; especially in the public realm. Indeed, to understand why the “public realm” has become impoverished in our society and why the lifeworld has been “colonized” by the systems of the economy and political administration demands a social analysis that can show how the communicative rationality of the “citizen” can gradually be affected by the purposive rationality of the client and the consumer in developed modern societies.⁴

The systematic societal analysis which Tracy proposes will expose us to the process of invasion and colonization that is taking place in our history such as commodification of labor and nature, desertification of rain forests for development projects, forceful displacement and subsequent refugization of subsistence communities from their commons and homelands, depletion of the biomass for commercial fishing, bio-imperialism through gene manipulation and agro-business, and the doctrine of preemptive war. These are the narratives that are silenced by the hegemonic bandwagon of progress, growth, development, and globalization. Re-engaging these narratives is the starting point of an earth ethics from the grassroots.

The Colonization of the Lifeworld: Subaltern Narratives

It was a winter night in December 1984. The city of Bhopal in India froze with the cold wind. Sometime during the night that cold wind became a hurricane of death, containing the poisonous gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the city. It was India’s Hiroshima. For thousands, it was their last night. Those who survived the gas became the living dead. The environment was yet another casualty. The lifeworld could literally smell the colonization of their being, while the state and the multinational corporation legitimized the genocide as a sacrifice that the subjects of an “underdeveloped” nation are called to bear for progress and growth.

A decade later, on the first day of 1994, as the US initiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in the jungles of the Mexican state of Chiapas there emerged a movement called the Zapatistas, out of peoples’ collective resolve to end the five hundred years of oppression and the five decades of development. They articulated succinctly their perception of the colonization of the life-world and declared basta:

[We understood] that our misery meant the wealth of a few; that on the bones and the dust of our ancestors and our children the powerful built their house. [We understood] that our steps could not enter that house, and that the light that brightened it was fed by the darkness [imposed on] our people. [We understood] that the abundance on the table at that house was fed by the emptiness of our stomachs, and that their children were borne by our misery. [That house’s] roof and walls were built over the fragility of our bodies; and the health that filled its spaces resulted from our death; and the wisdom lived in that house nourished itself of our ignorance. The peace that sheltered it was war waged on our people.⁵

Lawrence Summers, the former chief economist for the World Bank, issued a memorandum in 1991 encouraging the bank to export toxic waste to the third world because it is “economically efficient.” According to him, “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages.” He also warned the Bank of some resistance in the name of “social concerns” and “moral reasons” that “could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.”⁶

Summers’ memo was not a surprise to the third world as their history is a history of pillage in the name of progress and development. The following testimony from Guatemala is a witness to this. “I saw them bury a dead child in a cardboard box. (This is true, and I don’t forget it.) On this box there was a stamp: ‘General Electric Company — Progress is our Most Important Product’.”⁷

Bhopal and Chiapas are living examples of subaltern lifeworlds being colonized and massacred. As Summers’ memo categorically reveals, these are not accidents. These events also expose the nexus between global capital, indigenous elites, and the postcolonial state. The co-existence of massacre and accumulation is the hallmark of our times. These narratives interpret the colonization of the lifeworld as a process of disempowering a people by stripping them of their moral agency, and unleashing on them a regime of social engineering to accumulate more wealth.

The Colonization of the Lifeworld: A Theological Project

An analysis of the history of the colonization of the lifeworld will also expose us to the God-talk that has been used to legitimize the process of invasion. Differently said, the colonization of the lifeworld has always been a theological project, and God-talk has always functioned as a “sacred canopy” to face the legitimation crisis of the system. Enrique Dussel, in his exposition of modernity, conquest, and globalization, categorically presents this use of theological claims. For Dussel, the Europeans (the conquistadors) portrayed themselves as “the missionaries of civilization to all the world, especially to the barbarian people.”⁸

Dussel further traces this same God-talk in the conquest of the Spaniards, calling it the “spiritual conquest.” The conquistador invasion, like all other expressions of the colonization of the lifeworld, required divine legitimization. The following excerpt from the requirement (requerimiento) that the conquistadors read to the Indians before the battle reveals the violence of their God-talk. “If you refuse to try to protract this process by malicious delay, I certify that with the aid of God I will wage mighty war upon you in every place and in every way… I will seize your women and sons and sell them into slavery. I will rob you of all your goods and do to you every evil and injury in my power.”⁹

The insights from the Latin American narratives help us to analyze more deeply the God-talk of the colonizers. The God-talk of the colonization of the lifeworld involves three categories: the affirmation of the divinely destined agency of the colonizer to invade and conquer the Other; the teleological vision of an ideal state of maturity, progress, and growth which they want to impose upon the colonized with missionary zeal; and finally the strong sense of a deontological call to be the missionaries of this new religion. As Larry Rasmussen rightly puts it, “when Columbus sailed from Cadiz, theft was his religious right and conquest his Christian duty, necessary for the safe deliverance of the colonized themselves.”¹⁰ The following excerpt from a French document published in 1897 supporting colonialism categorically explains the deontological foundation of colonialism:

Colonization is not a question of interest but a question of duty. It is necessary to colonize because there is a moral obligation, for both nations and individuals, to employ the strengths and advantages they have received from Providence for the general good of humanity. It is necessary to colonize because colonization is one of the duties incumbent upon great nations, which they cannot evade without failing in their mission and falling into moral dereliction.¹¹

The colonization of the lifeworld has always been a project filled with violence. And more than anything else, it has been God-talk that has helped the colonizers to legitimize violence thanks to the theological concept of “sacrifice.” As Dussel rightly states, “the Indians were victimized in the name of an innocent victim and for the sake of universal rights.”¹²

The violence of colonization seeks theological legitimization in two ways: firstly, by invoking a particular interpretation of the doctrine of atonement to glorify victimization — imposed sacrifice as redemptive (civilizing); and secondly, by focusing on a utopian telos which promises progress, growth, and human rights. In this way the God-talk of colonization is a doctrine combining a masochistic soteriology with an eschatological vision of progress and development mediated by a chosen race. The “realized eschatology” of the “developed” nations is being invoked in this doctrine to invite the “underdeveloped” to convert to this religion. This spiritual conquest is fought masked in messianic claims of missionary agency and zeal to civilize and emancipate the Other, and the casualty of this subtle proselytization is the moral agency of the communities. The spirit of this spiritual conquest is well articulated in the following observation by Dussel: “Modernity elaborated a myth of its own goodness, rationalized its violence as civilizing, and finally declared itself innocent of the assassination of the Other.”¹³

Such discernment of the violence of colonization is apolitical if we fail to understand modernity as capitalist modernity. Christian social ethicists like Larry Rasmussen and Elizabeth Bounds, along with Enrique Dussel, enable us to see this perspective. For Rasmussen, capitalist modernity is “killing us. It slowly devours its own children as well as the children of others”¹⁴ whereas for Bounds, “capitalism is able to organize the most intimate areas of lives and shape profoundly our consciousness.”¹⁵ This violence and sacrifice is divinely sanctioned for the realization of the telos of the messianic project of modernity.

The sacrificial capitalist economy commenced its five hundred year history by worshipping money as its fetish and by celebrating its earthly (unheavenly) religion during the week, instead of on the Sabbath… The year 1492 ushered in a new era which has been immolating the colonized peoples of the periphery, or the so-called Third World, on a new god’s altar.¹⁶

To sum up, the colonizers have always been successful in constructing and effectively using God-talk that legitimizes different manifestations of colonization. It continues as new colonies and erasures of landscapes and livelihood emerge at the peripheries and grassroots. Such God-talk is not only hegemonic but toxic with the potential to colonize the minds of the communities.

Contemporary Manifestations of the Colonization of the Lifeworld

The historical analysis of the colonization of the lifeworld does not mean that the invasion of the lifeworld came to an end with the demise of colonialism. Clarification of certain important terms is in order here. Even though the terms colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably, we need to be aware of their distinctiveness. According to Mark Lewis Taylor, colonialism is “the organized deployment of racialized and gendered constructs for practices of acquiring and maintaining political control over other social groups, settling their lands with new residents, and/or exploring that land and its people through military and administrative occupiers.”¹⁷ Imperialism, on the other hand, refers to the organized and specific actions of the colonizers which make them “a political machine that rules from the center, and extends its control to the farthest reaches of the peripheries.”¹⁸ So colonialism can be considered as the consequence of imperialism.

The erstwhile colonized nations began to gain independence and to become sovereign nations in the last century through a process known as decolonization. However, decolonization does not mean the collapse of the reign of subjugation. Rather, subjugation — which is known as recolonization in toda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Crisis of Earth: A View from the Grassroots
• 2. The Narmada Saga: A Valley that Refuses to Die
• 3. Social Movements as Text: Subaltern Reflections on Epistemology
• 4. Mapping Grassroots Earth Ethics: Methodological Musings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index