Environmentalism and the Doctrine of Total Depravity
Or: a personal history of my emotional paralysis in the face of overwhelming culpability
1. First, environmentalism
It’s been used to describe all sorts of things, from eco-terrorists to Extinction Rebellion protests, telling your friends to put their empty beer cans in the recycling instead of the regular bin, opting for a childless marriage, eating bugs or planting a few trees. As far as I can tell, the people around me tend to use ‘environmentalism’ as a way to refer to an urge to reduce human impact on the planet, and to encourage what we think of as planet-serving activity.
A curious feature of environmentalism is the way it’s so widely observed and so persistently mysterious. Do you know where your ‘recycled’ plastic goes once it’s been collected? If you choose a veggie burger over a meat burger from a restaurant, do you know where and how your veggies were produced, or how sustainably the meat you’ve rejected was reared? If we Just Stopped Oil, are there good indications that whatever we replace it with will ruin fewer acres of landscape or human life? Perhaps you do know these things, for which I congratulate you, and for which I probably also would find you a little tiresome to talk to or spend much extended time with, since you would be constantly spotting things I’m doing wrong in my ignorance.
But even though most folk wouldn’t be able to tell you where their plastic goes once it’s been taken away by the nice planet-conscious waste collectors, I expect few of us are willing to bear the social cost of chucking our plastic and cardboard in regular bins in full view of our peers. We understand that we must be environmentalist, but we don’t understand why or what environmentalism is beyond the slogans and headlines. In that way environmentalism is pretty much like all other pressing social issues. Consider a cost of living crisis, a rise of trans-identifying teenagers, an influx of illegal immigrants, a (mostly) democratic European nation being invaded by another (fairly) democratic European nation who refuse to stop even though we in Western Europe have all been pretty clear that we’re ticked off about it. In all of these areas, we probably know what we ought to say and do – at least in public – but we don’t really know why, and if we tried to talk about it we’d likely find we disagreed.
One of the consequences of this weird mix – strong imperative to be environmentalist plus weak understanding of how or why to be so – is that our environmentalist activity is dictated primarily by comfort and conformity, not by consequences or causality. I’ll put my cardboard in the recycling bin, if I’m at home or if I’m out somewhere and there’s a handy recycling bin. But if whatever I’m trying to recycle has two parts to it, one recyclable and one not, and I’m in a vague hurry? No, it can all go in the bin. If I’m out somewhere and I’ve finished my drink and there’s no obvious recycling bin? I’ll empty the can and carry it around in my pocket until I find an appropriate receptacle. I’ll hurl that thing into the nearest bin-like hole with Michael Jordan-esque flair. I expect you’re the same. Several people close to me have insisted that all recycling is just a government scam and it all gets sent to China to be burned anyway. I’m not unconvinced.
The point is, sure we’re all basically environmentally conscious (although I’m now realising that the ‘we’ in that sentence is a group of people I can quite quickly discern as being middle or upper middle class, urban dwelling, university educated and unlikely to vote for the Tory party. Also usually quite socially liberal, not to say actively in favour of progressive politics but definitely not a big royalist – except for sentimental she-reminded-me-of-my-granny reasons – nor pursuing a career in the financial sector. Probably white? I’m less sure about that one, but I do get a pretty clear sense that the nonwhite people I know who have an environmentally conscious vibe are – and I really don’t have a way to say this that’s less likely to make you flinch – sort of culturally white people, by which I mean see the above comments about university, urban, etc. which in the UK kind of puts you in whatever you call the category that is populated by middle-/upper-middle class university educated progressive definitely-not-orthodox-christians-but-still-totally-open-to-spiritual-things-like-I-guess-I’m-kind-of-spiritual-but-not-religious people. Oh, and I’m like 95% sure none of them would watch Premier League football – definitely not Scottish Premier League – more than once or twice a year, but they might watch rugby and comment on the different sorts of crowds you get at rugby matches compared to football matches. Anyway, sure, we are all basically environmentally conscious…) but it’s not a consciousness that gets us handing out flyers or protesting outside parliament or blowing up oil rigs or taking slightly colder showers. It hasn’t penetrated to the level of a real concern, for most of us, and therefore we haven’t bothered to acquaint ourselves with the important facts of the problem or find solutions to the specific issues in which we are implicated. Environmentalism remains, for the majority of people I know personally, a vague and impersonal problem, present to us through Attenborough documentaries and BBC headlines about Californian wildfires, and kept at bay by the placement of empty cereal boxes into big bins with green triangles on them.
Let me, for a moment, try to draw a slightly more coherent and rigorous picture of what environmentalism could look like. Incidentally, it should become clear quite quickly why most people prefer the vague and distant environmentalism that dominates our society, a theme that is part of the bigger argument of this piece.
If, as I said above, environmentalism is broadly understood as an impulse or imperative to reduce human impact on the Earth and to enable the health of the planet, I think we need to expand the category of ‘environmental activity’ to include pretty much everything humans do. Ours is a culture of hidden origins, a society woven from invisible labour and unseen industry. Remaining, as we do in Great Britain, towards the very top of global society, we have a population that has far too much self-respect (and far too many benefits payments) to be willing to work the hours or receive the wages that make cheap consumer goods possible. Therefore we depend on the basically endless suffering of people in other countries, those who work in the factories that produce our jeans, our phones and our ikea furniture. But that’s not actually what I want to talk about, since most folk draw some kind of line between ‘environment’ and ‘human beings in a place’, and so ‘environmentalism’ tends to be concerned with human wellbeing only in a second-hand way, when humans are impacted by the environment in which they live.
But the same point I just made about labour also applies, and perhaps even more so, to the more typical cases of what we think of as the ‘environment’. Animal welfare campaigners have been effective in connecting the easy, thoughtless consumption of burgers to the wasteful, cruel and destructive farming practices which provide us with cheap meat. The prominence of vegan and vegetarian converts in society is a testimony to the popular awareness of a connection between everyday food habits and systematic land-use practices. Vegans and vegetarians are usually the butt of jokes and the recipients of eye-rolls and mild condescension, especially if they try to talk to you about the reasons for their lifestyle choices. The discomfort that lurks beneath these jokes and eye-rolls is born, I believe, from the fact that vegans and vegetarians are witnesses to a mechanism of modern Western society that is not supposed to be discussed, and that in fact survives in our era only because it is protected by a kind of wilful blindness. The hushed truth is as banal as it is fundamental: everything we need to survive is drawn from the planet we live on.
That might seem a silly thing to say, but it is not. To return briefly to the human wellbeing point: if everything we need to survive is drawn from the planet we live on, and if you are not getting what you need from the place you live, then it must be coming from someone else’s place. There is nowhere else to source avocados, electricity or uranium, they have to come from this planet. If you would not be happy to have colossal beef farms or towering power plants in your back garden but you would like to have £3.50 steaks and cheap electricity, I think you probably have to accept that someone else with less options than you is going to have to swallow a lot of toxins. The NIMBYism of the West is what births the sweatshops of the East.
But anyway, I said I was going to stay away from the human side of things. Consider this instead, then. My house, where two adults live, work from home, relax, and host friends, is supplied and resourced entirely by the planet Earth. The rooms in the house have, on average, four lightbulbs and one radiator, three plug sockets and 1/5 of a shower. Not a day goes by without the hob or oven being used to cook at least one meal. The shower is used every day, and the hot water tap in the sink every other day. Two laptops are charged at least once every two days, and mobile phones every three days. The wifi is permanently on. None of the power required to perform these functions is generated in the house or its garden. In fact I have absolutely zero clue where the power in my house comes from. It is probably the single element of my daily life of which I am most ignorant. But I know it must come from somewhere, and that it’s unlikely that a significant percentage of the power comes from a wind farm, geothermal or hydro power, and that therefore every day my house is dependent upon the burning of coal, oil and gas. Being a broadly environmentally conscious person, I am against the burning of these fossil fuels, but that doesn’t prevent me from staying at my work-from-home job with its two computer screens, the permanent wifi, the regular boiling of the kettle for cups of tea, the lightbulb in the home office and the not inconsiderable amount of heating required during the winter to keep my toes from losing all sensation.
And, of course, my house is not a nudist colony. We are clothed, as humans have been ever since they became recognisably human, using materials drawn from the plants and the minerals of the Earth. When it comes to clothes I am marginally more informed about their origins than I am about my electricity, simply because my clothes are all nicely labeled with their country of origin. I own enough clothes to wear a completely different outfit every day for two weeks and still have some clean things left over. I have never, to my knowledge, bought a piece of clothing that was made in the UK. My wife occasionally makes clothing (a revealing demonstration of how much more time, money and labour are required than you might expect, to produce pieces which are ultimately not worth more in the marketplace than the factory-formed alternatives) but the fabrics she uses are also made in hidden, faraway places. Still, ignoring the human toll these pieces of clothing involve, and thinking only of the strictly environmental impacts, I have to admit that I find myself deeply culpable. To make a single pair of jeans (of which I have owned, in my life, probably upwards of thirty), you need on average eight thousand litres of water. That’s how much is in this tank:
Once again, that may not seem crazy, but remember that if this water isn’t coming from my back garden, it has to come from someone else’s. I don’t have any idea what the process of making jeans does to the water that you use for it, but I’m willing to bet several hundred pounds that you can’t drink it or wash yourself in it. So the question becomes, how much water are you willing to fill with chemicals in order to have a pair of jeans? To which the answer is, well I don’t have to do that. And that’s exactly the point. Just as vegans will avoid certain products because they know that somewhere out there an animal is made to suffer for it, so jean-wearers must know that somewhere out there a river is toxic because of the denim that circles their thighs.
As well as these less commonly discussed features, my household also consumes its fair share of meat, soft drinks, crisps and snacks and sweets, alcohol, bleach, toothpaste, shower gel, deodorant, medicine, books, diesel fuel and suncream. None of these, as you might expect, are produced in my back garden, or in your back garden, dear reader, or in the back garden of anyone I have ever met. I can only assume that this is because we are very rich, because we are very powerful, and because we are very willing to allow other landscapes, other locales, other neighbourhoods, to become factories or factory-farms or strip-mines or animal testing centres or deforested monoculture fields. Our staggering economic and political dominance of the world enables us to believe that our environmental sins are vague and mild because they are so well-hidden from us. But everything we consume, every product we buy, every piece of furniture or clothing or equipment that passes through our lives has been produced with resources drawn from the global ‘environment’, and the great majority of these have been produced not in harmony with a local economy but at the expense of it, not by people who know and love the land and its riches but by those driven to exploit the land by greed, by poverty, by necessity, and by us.
Environmentalism in the popular imagination is confined to anti-oil protests, to being in favour of wind farms, to recycling your irn bru cans, not because these are the silver bullets in a battle against climate change but because the reality of our exploitation of the ‘environment’ is so awful that we simply cannot face any more serious engagement with it. We are like the unhappily married couple who carefully note each other’s preferences for which TV shows to watch or which earrings to give as a birthday present, and direct all their relational energies towards these things, while ignoring one partner’s rampant infidelity and the other’s drug abuse. Don’t stop watching TV and buying the jewellery, you would tell them, but don't think that doing those things will make a difference to your marriage.
Everything we do is either dependent on a resource drawn from the planet or will feed back into the planet. At a basic level, our activities require energy that we get from food, and our exertions produce waste that must be deposited somewhere. In this basic dynamic, every action or inaction is an environmental one. ‘Environmentalism’, I am trying to argue, is not a separate sphere of activity, nor should it be used to refer to recycling cardboard as if that were distinct from making love or watching tiktok videos. Everything we use is drawn from the planet, everything we produce returns to the planet, and everything we do depends upon the planet. Environmentalism is not a special concern for special people, it is our common and our private life.
2. Total Depravity
Let me say first that I hate, I despise this name. It is so laden with negative cultural baggage that it is almost not worth using, except for its persistent use in the kind of theological discussions that I am hoping to draw on here.
The ‘total’ in total depravity is annoying, because it makes the phrase sound like the kind of hyperbole that we use all the time in conversation. ‘Total depravity’ becomes a piece of speech on the same level as ‘total chaos’ or ‘total loser’, or ‘Total Wipeout’. In other words, it becomes a meaningless word, because it just underlines the noun or adjective that comes after it. There’s almost no difference between ‘That guy is dumb’ and 'That guy is totally dumb’. It also has kind of skater-bro connotations, in phrases like ‘totally, dude’, which then gives ‘total depravity’ this weird hidden register of stoner conversation that just doesn’t help when you’re trying to have any kind of serious or technical conversation.
The ‘depravity’ is also not helpful for us, because ‘depraved’ is such an unusual and specific word in our culture that to use it is to mark yourself out as a very specific kind of judgmental religious person. For one thing, it’s almost always used to refer to some kind of sexual practice or inclination, and the so-called ‘depravity’ of that practice/inclination turns out not to be a feature of the practice/inclination but of the mind of the person describing it, so that what I think is depraved might be what others think should be put on billboards, etc. Basically, the word ‘depravity’ is just an unhelpful one to use outside of a reformed theology classroom, because in any other context it seems to reveal more about the sexual prejudices of the speaker than it does about anything the speaker is trying to describe.
In their older and more successful years, the words ‘total depravity’ were part of a theological system, originating with the reformer Jean Cauvin. What this doctrine referred to was the idea that the sin which entered the biblical story of the world in the garden of Eden has come to corrupt every sphere of human existence. The ‘total’ referred to the extent of this corruption, in a very specific sense: it is not, I repeat not, the idea that everything is entirely sinful all the time and nothing good can ever be done. That’s a weird nihilism, and seems pretty clearly incompatible with the idea of a good created world. Instead, ‘total’ refers to the scope of this corruption, the idea that although nothing is utterly ruined by sin, nothing is entirely untouched either. The sin, the corruption that is in the world, is ‘total’ in the sense that it is found everywhere. You can perhaps see where I’m going with this. One way of talking about this same idea would be what Philip Roth does, in a passage I’ve quoted before:
We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain
That’s a pretty good evocation of what ‘total depravity’ was first designed to mean, but it doesn’t quite go far enough, and it also has all the associations with Roth and his own (often sexual) themes.
So instead of saying ‘total’, let’s say ‘pervasive’. That’s maybe towards the upper end of vocabulary in terms of what you’d say in normal conversation, but I think that’s probably okay. And instead of saying ‘depravity’, with the sexual connotations etc., let’s say ‘corruption’, because that has both a moral side to it and a material side (officials are corrupt, Word documents get corrupted, you could just about say that a healthy plant has been corrupted by disease?). So, with that in mind, let me start this section properly.
2. Pervasive Corruption
In the last few months I’ve found myself persistently coming back to the idea of pervasive corruption, not for any elevated reasons, simply because I find it to be an endlessly useful concept for understanding my surroundings, my own actions and the actions of others. For one thing, the doctrine of Pervasive Corruption is excellent when it comes to evaluating people’s actions. If, as the doctrine suggests, every act is tainted with sin, and every good motivation contains within itself a corrupt motive, the seemingly chaotic world of human affairs becomes, not less confusing, but confusing in a more focused and intelligible way. For example: did I reach out to a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while because I missed them and wanted to hear their news, or because I wanted to tell them I had graduated from my PhD and was hoping to get a little more praise than I was currently getting? More narrow moral frameworks would make me choose between these two motives, but the doctrine of Pervasive Corruption suggests that in fact both are true, and that if I hadn’t been trying to get more praise for myself then I would surely have found some other corrupt motive lurking within my innocent WhatsApp message.
Those readers who attend church are probably familiar with a version of this idea. It is common to hear sermons on the depth and breadth of sin and the consequent need for all things to be forgiven and redeemed. But these Christian discourses, more often than not, deal only with internal and immaterial things. There is a certain sense that when it comes to things like recycling, pollution, or waste, we need other concepts and other terminology, and that somehow the language of sin and redemption is not so relevant in these areas.
Whether or not that turns out to be a correct approach, the point remains that the doctrine of Pervasive Corruption provides a useful lens for considering environmentalism. As I mentioned at the beginning, most people’s engagement with environmentalism is restricted to vague and uninformed actions such as recycling or turning off car engines while waiting at a kerb. And, as I mentioned, it seems that a lot of the motivation for avoiding more serious engagement with environmental concerns is the deep fear that once we start paying attention to how our activity impacts the Earth we will find that there is nothing we can do that doesn’t have negative consequences. That leads to the paralysis we find ourselves in, and I think it also fuels a lot of the rhetoric and social punishments directed at those who disobey the environmentalist rules. How much of the anger directed at companies dumping sewage into British rivers is born from the fact that we all know our waste has to go somewhere, most likely into the water, and that if there weren’t multimillion pound companies dedicated to handling our faeces for us we’d be just as likely to dump it over the nearest wall as we would to bury it in a sanitary fashion?
What the doctrine of Pervasive Corruption provides is the ability to speak about bad things in the world from a place of humility and self-awareness, and thus to avoid any kind of whataboutery or relativising on the part of people who are doing the things we think need to be stopped. What I mean is, if you build an environmentalist movement or position on the idea that some people are environmentally sinful and some people are environmentally righteous, not only will you alienate all of your friends, you will also be on staggeringly weak moral ground in an argument, since your opponent simply has to find one instance of negligence on your part in order to destroy your case. Hence why people arguing against veganism or vegetarianism will often resort to accusing vegans of being not vegan enough for their own rules, of eating plants and not cows for the arbitrary reason that cows have cute faces and plants don’t, etc. If, on the other hand, you can advance an environmentalist position that begins with the belief that all human activity has an environmental impact, and that all this activity will be both harmful and beneficial at different moments, then you allow yourself the possibility of addressing real problems in positive ways.
In the Calvinist system from which Pervasive Corruption is taken, Pervasive Corruption forms part of a five-ring chain (picture the olympic logo) that includes essential supplements and balances. They are essential because, taken on its own, Pervasive Corruption is a message of real doom. In relation to environmentalism, Pervasive Corruption on its own simply promises that humans can never be free from activity that harms the planet, no matter how much we learn or try to make it be not so. Without the accompanying doctrines of forgiveness and of the transformation of the forgiven one into a less sinful being, Pervasive Corruption only produces the stereotype of judgmental black-and-white Calvinists, from whom both the pious and the pernicious flee in equal numbers. This, I’m afraid, is where the issue descends from nice theory into the sludge of real human activity.
I am suggesting that, just as anyone who accepts the doctrine of Pervasive Corruption will be suicidal and distraught without the accompanying doctrine of forgiveness, so also anyone who perceives the reality of environmental Pervasive Corruption will simply either freeze or give up caring, neither of which amount to any kind of ecological righteousness. On the other side of forgiveness, however, we find another problem. We all know that a person who persistently does evil to us, and then considers themselves forgiven of their evil and continues to harm us without any transformation of their character, is probably worse to associate with than an unforgiven evildoer. With an unrepentant evildoer there is at least the chance that they may get sick of their own guilt and evil and make a change, whereas the person who constantly claims forgiveness has no motivation to change their behaviour. The transformation of evil activity into good activity is the goal, not simply the forgiveness of evil activity.
In the same way, it is clearly not enough for us to claim forgiveness for our waste and our harmful practices and simply carry on unchanged, claiming new mercies every morning. The harm suffered by five year old children in the cobalt mining industry (phone, laptop, iPad, e-bike and electric car batteries) does not diminish when I ask Jesus to forgive me for buying a new iPhone. The harm they suffer diminishes when I start to act on this maxim: everything we need to survive is drawn from the planet we live on. If the evils we depend upon are only able to persist because we commit them in poor countries full of people less important than us, we will continue to crush both them and the land they live on for as long as our resources will allow.
Just as realisation of our sinfulness is meant to lead to reformation of our actions in the spiritual sphere, so also I believe the realisation of our pervasive corruption in environmental terms must produce a kind of environmentalist reformation. If all human activity is potentially harmful to the planet, all human activity must be considered fair game for change. Try not allowing yourself to ignore the impacts of your actions, for maybe an hour of a day, maybe half an hour of a day. See if you can go for a full day without consuming or producing something that requires the exploitation and mistreatment of someone else’s land, someone else’s air, someone else’s future. Then you’ll see what I mean by ‘pervasive’.
You’ll have heard that the first step to resolving a problem is admitting you have a problem. Perhaps, in this case, the first step is admitting that someone else, somewhere else, has your problem.
Favorite lines:
NIMBYism of the West is what births the sweatshops of the East.
My house is not a nudist colony.
Very thought provoking, thank you!