Politics on holy ground in fuel crisis
Famine was inflicted by God in ancient scripture, writes George Pitcher. Now it's climate change, but that's not so different
The smugness of some electric-car drivers over the past fortnight has been unbearable for those of us with motors powered by fossil fuels. But they have a point. Virtue is its own reward, they say – but it can also deliver the benefit of being able to travel to work, to hospital appointments, to dependent family.
There’s almost a ritualistic cleanliness to this. It’s as if the chosen people, those favoured by honouring their commitment to the environment, have escaped a wrath endured by careless sinners – rather as God’s retributive justice passed over the homes of the Israelite slave families in Egypt, when they painted a cross from the blood of paschal lamb on their doors.
That was the tenth and final plague – the killing of the first-born - visited on the Pharoah’s people. Apocalypticists might fancy that a pandemic such as covid heralds the End Times, an eschatological climax of human history which will judge it for its wantonness and self-destruction.
“The end of the World is Nigh”
That this plague has been followed by a mild famine in the UK – of motor fuel, supermarket provisions and (irony is dead) CO2 gas, the very human resource that is threatening the future of our planet – should have the doomsayers reaching for their “End of the World is Nigh” sandwich-boards.
But it’s not just for millennialist nut-jobs that these events are harbingers of human destruction. The case for the scourge of famine, for example, is now secularist in the sense that the human folly that precipitates cataclysmic climate collapse falls with undue weight on the poorest parts of the southern cone of our planet.
The United Nations recently reported that Madagascar is suffering the first climate-change famine after four years without rain. Its people are among populations that have done least to cause catastrophic climate change, but are bearing the brunt of its consequences.
Here is a difference between the causes of famine held by ancient religious conviction and its modern secular equivalent. It was the sinners of old that suffered in hunger – now it’s the innocents of the world suffering in poverty for the growth of industrial wealth in the northern hemisphere.
The prophet Amos, in the Jewish bible, was among the first to note a migration crisis as a consequence of famine, invoking a God who said that he:
…withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; I would send rain on one city, and send no rain on another city; … so two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water, and would not be satisfied; yet you did not return to me.
Today, it’s the prosperous industrial world that contains the rain-makers, in every sense, and the poor who migrate to them, if they are able.
God-fearing superstitions
The temptation is to see this as the god-fearing superstitions of the ancient world made obsolete by the political imperatives of the post-modern industrial complex. But actually they are more linked than they might seem to be.
It’s the rich and powerful who cause famine in the scriptures – albeit by failing to do God’s will, rather than through their carbon emissions – and the poor who suffer. So no change there.
But it’s in the proposed solutions to such crises that the similarities are most profound. In the Christian gospel, there’s the parable of the “Rich Fool”, who builds bigger barns to store his grain and enrich himself, only to be told by God that he will die that very night, so “the things you have prepared – whose will they be?”
This is usually interpreted as a censure of greed over generosity of spirit. And so it is. But it also points to the individualistic instinct to grab for oneself what it’s feared will be in short supply – such as loo rolls at supermarkets at the start of the pandemic.
The queues at petrol stations this week provided depressing evidence of the same. The popular response to a shortage of the fossils fuels that threaten climate collapse for the poorest people on the planet? Why, panic-buy fossil fuels, of course.
Political pressure
It’s one reason why appeal to individual action can’t be the principle response to the climate crisis, precisely because the instinct of rich fools is to hoard selfishly. That, in turn, means that political pressure offers the only hope of a satisfactory outcome, not least for the likes of the poor of Madagascar. But how to generate such political pressure?
Gridlocked queues for fuel won’t make a pretty sight for politicians at the climate summit COP26 in Glasgow in a few weeks. More so if their limos have to join or jump those queues. Oddly enough, it’s that kind of fear that might force practical political action rather than the kind of empty rhetoric that customarily emerges from such conferences.
And that’s what may ultimately unite the purposes of ancient religion and real politik in one of those mysterious ways that the divine is said to move in. In another way, it could make secular politics “holy”, in that political and divine intent become one.
Apologists for the British Empire in its 19th-century pomp will often say that it was god-fearing colonialists who did the civilising work of education, sanitation and health-care in occupied territories. Or fear of eternal damnation, put another way. That motivation may largely have disappeared in the modern world.
But if fear of not being re-elected has a similar effect, who can gainsay that it doesn’t fulfil the same divine purpose?
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.