The official opening of the LSE Faith Centre featured a dialogue between former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, and renowned sociologist Prof. Bruno Latour, chaired by the LSE Director Prof. Craig Calhoun, on the theme of Religion and the Environment. In this post the Faith Centre Coordinator Jacob Phillips highlights the resonances between some of the themes of this discussion and the work of the LSE Faith Centre itself. 

The official opening of the LSE Faith Centre featured a discussion between Rowan Williams and Bruno Latour on  religion and the environment, chaired by the LSE Director Craig Calhoun. At first glance, this could seem a little incongruent; the apparently disparate themes of religion and ecology being hotly debated in a centre for religious observance and interfaith encounter in an institution which specialises in economics. However, these factors connected and intertwined in a remarkable fashion throughout the discussion, making this event a very fitting one to mark the opening of the Centre.  The Faith Centre is a place to explore one’s own tradition and encounter other traditions, to have ungrounded fears and presuppositions challenged, and to experience new insights and realisations, and uncover unseen aspects of one’s own standpoint. Throughout the dialogue between Williams and Latour, these aspects to the work of the LSE Faith Centre recurred frequently, as both thinkers approached religion and the environment in terms of challenging presuppositions, bringing fresh clarity and realisation to our approaches, and uncovering implicit or hidden aspects of religion as a resource for meeting the challenges of the impending ecological crisis. In short, many of the virtues required as a response to the ecological crisis, are related to aspects of the work of the Faith Centre itself.

In the first case, Williams and Latour spoke of the environmental challenge as something challenging our preconceptions about human life and our interrelatedness to the planetary system. For example, Williams’ opening remark was that, from the perspective of the sacred, ‘the category of ownership is unusable’ because anything we come into contact with is already related to manifold other things, and so we do not have final jurisdiction on anything, including, presumably, natural resources, and basic necessities like land and water. Latour took up Williams’ remark, and also challenged our assumptions somewhat closer to home. He argued that some of the economic theory for which LSE has built its global reputation is based on the ‘the poison of ownership’; the illusion that free markets can be centralised to detriment of other aspects of life, or what he termed ‘a great indifference to externality’. At this point Latour coined some typically provocative statements, claiming not only that the Faith Centre could be the antidote to the poison of ownership being taught elsewhere at LSE (!), but also that ‘economics and ecology are at war’. Calhoun also added to this, by stating that economics is merely another one of the faiths we might find in the Faith Centre, which Williams extended by pointing out the deep mythological constructs at work in the dominant economic narrative of our time.  Later in the discussion, Williams mentioned Doris Lessing’s novels, in which human beings are described as a race which is inherently incapable of knowing what to fear – creatures who seem intrinsically bound to fear imaginary, illusory problems. The implication here was that fearing a lack of economic growth is foolhardy, when one considers the disastrous ecological consequences of endless growth for the environment on which we depend.

Also in keeping with the work of the Faith Centre, this discussion focussed on the need to bring people to new insights and flashes of realisation, in a way analogous to the moments of sudden clarity which can come when people of different of different faiths and worldviews constructively encounter each other close proximity. Indeed, disclosure or insight was a primary theme of this discussion, not least because it is closely related, in the Christian tradition, to the notion of apocalypse; which means in the original Greek ‘revelation’ in the sense of ‘disclosure’. Latour highlighted an unhelpful misconception of apocalyptic religiosity leading to climate fatalism or negationism, and implied that reconfiguring the notion of ownership to mean something like ‘disclosure’ would be commendable for our current situation. Williams was clearly taken with this, and went on to discuss the etymology of the term in further depth.

Finally, just as the Faith Centre is proving to be place fostering the deepening and extending of existing knowledge of one’s own tradition, Williams and Latour both showed how engaging with the environmental challenge should unearth hidden depths within the trajectory of human development to help meet the demands presented by what Latour terms ‘the eruption of Gaia’. One example of this is shown in Williams’ further discussion of authentic Christian apocalyptic language – with its common reference to the end of time and the destruction of the cosmos – as something which should actually bring a heightened and intensified sense of responsibility, compassion and concern for the planet and everything in it. Williams closed by drawing on his own religious tradition, with a quote from the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, ‘if I knew the world would end tomorrow I’d plant a tree’. He commented that, ‘tree planting is just something that wise human beings do’, so even when we do not know the point of doing something, he argued we should engage with the challenges ahead and continue to strive for wisdom in the face of seemingly limitless adversity. Against the background of ever-increasing global tensions between different religions, this closing statement by Williams gives a wonderful mandate to the LSE Faith Centre, as a place for widening horizons, challenging perceptions, cultivating good practice, and fostering mutual understanding between the different faiths and worldviews on the LSE campus, a place for planting the seeds of wisdom which could bear fruit in the lives of LSE students for years to come.