This sounds harmless and hippy-ish enough, until you consider its ramifications — notoriously set out by the king of eco-fascist tree-huggers, the Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola (1932-2020). Again inspired to activism by the destruction of ancient woodland, much of what’s shocking to mainstream sensibilities in Linkola’s writing comes from his blunt willingness to consider profoundly anti-humanist (which is to say non-Christian) solutions to the ecological crisis.
Every Christian or humanistic value, in Linkola’s view, is not just useless but actively pernicious. Technological progress is the enemy of the natural world, while the idea that there’s something special about humans justifies its exploitation. The belief that we’re all equal and valuable legitimises human multiplication beyond the earth’s carrying capacity, while egalitarian political systems are a disaster because they stop authoritarian political leaders from taking effective action to prevent us careering toward extinction. And human rights are not the foundation of civilisation, but “a death sentence of all Creation”.
In the place of human exceptionalism, Linkola deems diversity and harmony in the biosphere as the highest value: “The whole, the system, the maximum amount of species and diversity is the most sacred thing.” And from this it follows that there’s a natural ceiling on how many of any given species can be supported. In his view, we have long since surpassed that limit, thanks to our use of technology. Therefore, any means which might halt technological development and reduce what he calls “the human flood” are in principle justified.
For him this includes euthanasia; state control of reproduction, including forced abortions, forced sterilisation and infanticide; and even mass genocide. “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die,” he declares.
Linkola is a fringe figure in environmental thinking, a fact that attests to the hold Christian values still have, for all that observant Christianity has been declining across the West. Inasmuch as they violate these white-labelled forms of Christianity, even relatively dilute descendants of Linkola’s extreme ideas, such as the militant group Deep Green Resistance, get tarred with the “ecofascist” brush.
And Ted Kaczynski also gets cited as an eco-fascist influence — despite the fact that he and Linkola are radically at odds in some respects, such as their views on the moral standing of individual freedom. For Kaczynski, human freedom is a central good: the central problem with industrial civilisation is the way freedom is limited by the demands of industrial life. In contrast, for Linkola, an excess of human freedom is partly to blame for industrial civilisation.
But it would be simplistic to call Kaczynski the more “Christian” thinker here: he has been sharply critical (from prison) of “anarcho-primitivism”, a movement that proposes total abandonment of technology. In Kaczynski’s view, by claiming that this would produce more sex equality and sharing, and less racism and violence, this in practice smuggles “mushy utopianism” — actually a disguised set of Christian-heritage values — into a revolutionary vision that ought to be grounded and practical.
Meanwhile, more conventionally radical Left-wing environmental arguments are often overtly hostile to Christianity, usually (paradoxically) from a vantage-point that places central importance on deeply Christian-inflected tenets such as egalitarianism and the value of love.
But perhaps the question isn’t “who is the inheritor or rejector of the Christian legacy” as “which bits are being jettisoned, and by whom?”. Overtly post-Christian progressive environmentalists such as the examples linked above, for example, often reject the Christian idea that humans take precedence over the natural world, that the cosmos is ordered hierarchically, or the belief that we’re all born fallen. Green salvation, in this vision, means we need only reject hierarchy and free ourselves from the taint of civilisation for peace and harmony to reign.
Or perhaps we could abandon democracy? It is, after all, increasingly clear that few environmentalists place much faith in democratic politics to address the existential crisis most believe we now face. If Linkola thinks democracy is a disaster, and Deep Green Resistance argue for violent revolutionary eco-vanguardism, recent demands by the otherwise broadly progressive group Extinction Rebellion for a “citizens’ assembly” to address climate change also look, on closer inspection, suspiciously like an extra-democratic body of appointees.
Alternatively, instead of giving up democracy, we could give up our affinities to home and family, in defence of the universal value of human life? Gaia Vince’s 2022 Nomad Century argues for large-scale technocratic efforts to accommodate mass migration driven by climate change, a policy that presupposes the fundamentally Christian idea that all humans have equal value and it’s wrong to prioritise your kin, tribe or nation.
Of course those on Liz Truss’s side will wave away the prospect of hard choices. We can set aside eco-alarmism and go on chopping down trees that took hundreds of years to grow, in the name of growth. But even this, in effect, means choosing the fundamentally Christian faith in progress — at the expense of literally every other Christian value.
And if that seems pagan enough, out where the ashes of Christianity are cold and grey lurk those, like Linkola, who suggest we should retrieve the idea of human stewardship of the natural world — but at the expense of valuing the human full stop. And it’s in these ideas, even more than the barbarous vandalism of the “growth at all costs” cabal, or what Kaczynsky called the “mushy utopianism” of the “anarcho-primitivists”, that we see a glimpse of what a genuinely post-Christian paganism looks like.
Those progressives who cheer on the decline of observant faith in the West, and denounce the Christian Right, would do well to reflect on how much less they’re going to like the post-Christian Right.
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