The Integrated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism

Front Cover
Universal-Publishers, 1999 - 534 pages

The theory and data of environmental science suggest that growth in rates of population, consumption and environmental degradation, as a result of the activities of industrialized societies, has created an ecological crisis to which modern societies must adapt. However, adaptation is problematic.

Max Weber studied adaptive social change during the industrial revolution. The evolution of this new way of life was initially problematic because individuals who established industrialism were socialized under feudalism. In this dissertation, I consider The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a theoretical treatise framed by modern human ecology in order to study social change in the context of the ecological crisis of industrialism.

The Protestant Ethic is known for describing how religious ideas influenced the unfolding of modern capitalism in the West. However, there is nothing inherent in Protestantism that requires linkage to industrialism. I argue that Protestantism has evolved, and that it need not necessarily promote environmental exploitation, although under industrialism it has. I identify a "green" subculture within Protestantism, and consider how Protestantism's weakness may also be its strength. The very sociological structure that, in the absence of ecologically realistic norms, permits widespread ecosystem degradation by industrial capitalism may also generate ecologically realistic norms for a natural capitalism.

Weber contended that rationality was problematic because it paradoxically results in a dual crisis of management and meaning where human agency becomes "imprisoned" as if in an "iron cage." The irrational continuation of environmentally degrading social practices eventually contributes to a legitimation crisis. People turn to religion as an alternative authority. If science and religion converge on environmental values, they might catalyze social change, unless they are too distorted by ideological bias. Adaptive social change only occurs if ethical and ecological values are in accordance with the sustainability of ecosystems. Hence, to adapt to the ecological crisis, sociocultural systems require socialization into ecological realism, because ecologically rational societies may still be maladaptively organized around environmentally unsustainable trajectories.

From inside the book

Contents

THE INTEGRATION OF THE PROTESTANT
216
Theological Removal of the Barriers
222
Conditions for the Development of the Ecologically Realistic Society
247
ThisWorldly Social Action
304
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
313
Le Chambon Sur Lignon
332
THE INTEGRATED PROTESTANT ETHIC
352
Ecological Rationality
373

Webers Critique of Western Civilization
141
PROTESTANTISM AND THE RATIONAL
158
Disenchantment of the Rational Societies
202
Protestantism and the Legitimation Crisis of Rational Societies
210
Ecological Realism and the Spirit of Environmentalism 396 Disenchantment and Religion
398
From Industrial to Natural Capitalism
419
A INTEGRATING HEBREW THOUGHT INTO THE GREEK
501
B MAKING SENSE OF EXILE
522

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Popular passages

Page 186 - Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground...
Page 247 - Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
Page 122 - Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs.
Page 123 - In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.
Page 165 - For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a 'meaning' of inner-worldly occurrences.
Page 150 - This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.
Page 247 - This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Page 247 - Dear friends, since God so loved us. we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another* God lives in us and his love is made complete in us...
Page 150 - But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

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