The title inspired by Leonard Cohen’s Treaty off the You Want It Darker album. This album was released 17 days before he died. It explores themes about religion, death and has a particular dark humour imbued into it. I use it here to denote reconciliation between two seemingly opposing concepts discussed in the post below.
In one of my favourite songs by Leonard Cohen, he briefly draws attention to the dynamics of the relationship between the typical Christian religious person and the knowledge entity. God, who is the repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the Christian worldview, is in fact the source of western philosophy: the earliest form of philosophy was indeed theology. Thus, theology provides a lens by which Christians interact with all knowledge. In the same song Treaty, he says
In the streets, we cried out, “It’s jubilee!”. We sold ourselves for love but now we are free.
Notice the irony between selling yourself, which has connotations to slavery, in exchange for love and freedom. This is a scathing depiction of the salvation doctrine of Christianity. God, who is love himself, proposed a plan to save humanity from bondage by inviting you to be a part of his people, who are bound to worship him forever, even after they are dead.
While I don’t necessarily endorse this view, it brings to the fore what Christianity is really about: losing yourself. It is designed to be that way: you are supposed to decrease so that He, Jesus Christ, that is in you will increase (John 3:30). If you asked any informed Christian, they will give a coherent narrative that puts this sentiment into proper context. However, that doesn’t matter here because no context will take away from the fact that it involves some loss of oneself. Whether or not losing yourself is, in any sense it can be conceived, appropriate is not the subject of this post.
Recently, I came across Japanese philosophy, and it got me thinking about some observations about Ghanaians and their poor relationships with their physical and social environments. Several papers and articles confirm that, in various forms, Ghanaians generally don’t place a high priority on environmentally sustainable living. While there are various reasons that account for this, I believe a lot of the basics can be addressed by relatively few methods. And this is where religion comes in: various faith-based communities in Ghana have the influence to change the story on our grave environmental issues. I speak of issues concerning cleanliness in our townships and cities, our shameless pursuit of wealth through Galamsey which is destroying our natural environment, our traditional leaders selling any piece of land they can get their hands on to whomever regardless of their intentions, and others.
Sustainability transitions is an active and exciting area of research. It involves the study of changing established socio-technical systems to more sustainable ones through long-term, fundamental transformation processes. I’d say, maybe inaccurately, that this field attempts to use social engineering to combat environmental sustainability issues. Recently, various researchers have started exploring the role of religion in sustainability transitions. In the 2021 population census, over 90% of Ghanaians identified as either Christian or Muslim. Against this backdrop, I believe religious groups in Ghana (mainly the Muslim and Christian religions) should do more to bring awareness to environmentally sustainable living.
There are strong indications that religious actors could play a key role in shaping view of the Ghanaian society on environmental problems. Even though a study done in a region in Germany showed that religion, as a social subsystem, did not have a strong print on sustainability transitions (in their case energy transitions), it needn’t necessarily be the same for us. It is to be noted that, in that study, the other actors such as businesses, politicians, research institutes, and others were more influential. As we don’t have other social actors with a strong stance in environmental sustainability, religious groups and their leaders can step up to fill that role.
My observation is that generally, in the absence of any other influence, people in these groups have a very poor relationship with their physical and societal environment.
In western philosophy, ideas and conceptions are placed in their own world and reasoned about. Ideas are developed in isolation and connections are made between them if need be. I postulate that this is because of the religious roots of western philosophy. They had a default standpoint, and then people went out and found that this does not conform to what actually happens in the world. I feel the core of philosophy is the search of man to relate with their world. Among all this is rationalism. From early on, there seemed to be disconnect between what is believed and what is observed. So now we have people who are either extremely rational or extremely religious. You can’t have both but most people fall in the space between.
What is salient in our discussion is that, the self, whether we admit or not, has a huge fundamental impact in our quest to understand ourselves and the world around us. There are centuries of studies about the concept of self. More practically though, the sense of self is key to how you see your role in the world. I can conceive this in three ways: you believe you can play a significant role in the world, you see yourself as insignificant, or you see yourself as someone who exists outside of the world. In my experience, religious people fall into the latter two categories. I am interested on the effects of one’s sense of self on our physical and social world: that is, how we care for our environment, and how we care about our societies, and their development.
There are many Christian religious groups who have consigned themselves to be merely spectators of what goes on in the world. My opinion is that this is not a good thing. They intend to not care about the world. Further, I have seen more subtle forms of this, where people don’t care for the world around them even though they don’t realise it. In my experience, this is as a result of the heaven doctrine. Most of Christianity believed there is a better place waiting for those who live a good Christian life on earth. As such, I have seen very staunch religious groups in my country who have a very poor relationship with their environment. They feel the earth will be destroyed and we are all here temporarily anyway so they won’t bother to leave the earth better than they found it.
I have been thinking about this lately because I came across Japanese philosophy recently and it struck a cord in me. In western philosophy, it is of interest to investigate the connection between two distinct things. This thinking pervades science and scientific thinking as well. In Japan, you investigate the other thing by engaging with it. You actively engage with the other thing, and let it change you, as you also change it.
In many ways, this way of thinking is at odds with scientific or rational thinking. This is not a problem since I supposed that is how it is supposed to be. But this kind of thinking has helped advance the world so much. Up until recently in Ghana, deeply religious people refused to engage in politics. Some sects didn’t allow their members to attain higher education. But there is a third way of engaging with knowledge, which can help the earth, and maybe can satisfy some of the religious thinking. This–what has been described–is what is called Tetsuki in the Japanese philosophy.
My thinking is this: if you can stomach a fundamental change in the way you think about your relationship with the universe, you can achieve most of the things you are supposed to as a Christian, and still contribute to the world. In many ways, what we want to achieve as Christians, is already being achieved by the eastern traditions. We want total separation from our worldly desires (1 John 2:15-16, Galatians 5:19-21, Colossians 3:5, 1 Peter 2:5, …). Monks and other people are able to achieve that. They do not achieve this losing themselves: they do this by causing their whole self to interact with the body of knowledge in the universe.
So I ask again: can we sign a treaty between your love for God and your love for the world?