Pope Francis's Encyclical "Laudato Si'" - Part 2

In Part 1 of this series of posts, I talked about Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical, "Laudato Si'" ("Praise Be to You"). I referred to the passage:

How wonderful is the certainty that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles!

That passage suggested to me that the Pope knows and cares about the modern sciences of chaos and complexity. The theories developed by those sciences hold that many natural systems are both dynamically changing (no surprise there) and mathematically quite nonlinear. Nonlinearity means that changes in the state of the system are ultimately unpredictable (chaos) and/or generative of brand new varieties of order (complex adaptive systems).

Complex adaptive systems produce ever greater complexity (the varied types of elements within the system) and yet surprising order and stability (a feature which chaotic systems lack). Life on Earth evolves as a complex adaptive system. Our species is here partly because of the self-organizing dynamics of such systems, not just because of Darwinian natural selection.

Pope Francis

That's a conclusion scientists of complexity can reach by studying "nature" and modeling it on computers. But Pope Francis points out that "nature" is a smaller and more limited concept than "creation," the handiwork of God. The theology of the Catholic Church, like that of many other churches and religions, is concerned with that bigger picture — while still affirming that scientific inquiry is a legitimate pursuit, of course.

At first blush, "Laudato Si'" impresses many readers as a document that is very, very far left, environmentally speaking. It is quite easy to conclude that Francis wants national governments and international bodies to take full charge in the fight against climate change and global warming. But I have to disagree with such a simplistic reading of the encyclical. I think the Pope is championing a much more nuanced approach than just ham-fisted top-down policies issued from the "commanding heights" of governments and international institutions.

* * *

My reason has to do with how complex adaptive systems are to be understood.

In the diagram above, the "agents" down below interact in a regular, rule-based way. As a result, those agents, taken as a group, generate a stable, orderly "pattern" that characterizes the system as a whole. For example, take a flock of birds:

The flock holds together in a stable arrangement (the "pattern") even as its shape shifts continuously as the flock flies along. The individual birds (the "agents") instinctively follow a simple rule (a "regularity") that says to maintain a set distance from each neighboring bird. Following that simple rule allows flocking to occur. The flock as a whole is a complex adaptive system, in that its changing shape somehow "knows" how to adapt to changing conditions such as the wind's direction and speed.

The point here is that complex, self-organizing systems such as the one shown in the earlier diagram have both upward-pointing arrows and downward-pointing arrows. The former emerge from the interacting of the agents as they conform to their rule-based regularities. The latter represent "feedback," originating from the overall pattern that is being generated, that is sent on back down to the agents — as when each member of a flock of birds seems to "know" how to adjust to a change in wind direction.

If conservatives' criticisms of "Laudato Si'" that it is some kind of radically leftist document are correct, then the implication is that the Pope is relying on just the downward-pointing arrows — supporting top-down approaches alone — in dealing with climate change. He accordingly must be rejecting solutions that endorse the bottom-up regularities of, specifically, market-driven capitalism.

* * *

This seems to be the gripe that New York Times columnist David Brooks has with "Laudato Si'." In my view of the encyclical, the Pope is saying in this encyclical that we Christians in particular, but also everyone else on Earth, have a spiritual and a moral duty to protect the planet. Scientific and practical considerations which the encyclical spells out dictate that we can't live up to that duty if we let our standard deference to free-market capitalism and the rights of private property trump ecological exigencies.

David Brooks

Mr. Brooks is often finely attuned to such spiritual and moral considerations. But in this case he challenges the Pope almost out of hand, writing: "Hardest to accept ... is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive."

But that's not quite what Pope Francis says. He doesn't actually claim that self-interest and competition are fundamentally destructive. He affirms, in fact, the value of private economic interests. But he also subordinates those interests to what he — echoing Pope (now Saint) John Paul II — calls "a social mortgage on all private property." Francis writes in paragraph 93, section VI of "Laudato Si'":

The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of [human] goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and [per John Paul II's Encyclical Letter 'Laborem Exercens'] 'the first principle of the whole ethical and social order'. The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. Saint John Paul II forcefully reaffirmed this teaching, stating [in his Encyclical Letter 'Centesimus Annus'] that 'God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone'. These are strong words. He noted [in his Encyclical Letter 'Sollicitudo Rei Socialis'] that 'a type of development which did not respect and promote human rights – personal and social, economic and political, including the rights of nations and of peoples – would not be really worthy of man'. He clearly explained [in his 1979 'Address to Indigenous and Rural People'] that 'the Church does indeed defend the legitimate right to private property, but she also teaches no less clearly that there is always a social mortgage on all private property, in order that goods may serve the general purpose that God gave them'.

Accordingly, in certain situations "compassion, harmony and love" ought in fact to trump "arrangements based on self-interest and competition." This is what Francis is maintaining. And today's clear and present threat of human-caused global warming is one of those situations. That would seem to be a more nuanced summary of Francis's position than the one David Brooks posits.

The Pope's "social mortgage" approach to the matter is not, as Mr. Brooks claims, "relentlessly negative ... when describing institutions in which people compete for political power or economic gain." It is instead quite realistic, I'd say, given that in the eyes of our very real Creator God no person or people ought to be excluded from sharing in our planet's abundance.

The Pope would accordingly have governments and international institutions constrain free markets as needed to fight global warming and to keep developing nations with their less-well-off populations from suffering the brunt of its effects.

* * *

Buzzwords: The economy
as complex adaptive
system (click
to enlarge)

But what about the possibility of harnessing market forces that embody the "regularities" of supply and demand? Those are the forces, after all, that manifestly influence the behavior of "agents" (buyers and sellers) at the bottom level of a market-based economy, when the economy is seen as one type of complex adaptive system. What about shaping the operation of those forces as a way of combatting global warming? Might Pope Francis endorse such a possibility? Should David Brooks and other conservatives approve of "Laudato Si'," when cast in that light?

This post is already too long, though. I'll talk about those questions in my next post ...

Pope Francis's Encyclical "Laudato Si'" - Part 1

Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si'" ("Praise Be to You") is a plea for people of good will — not just Catholics like me — to take climate change seriously as a global threat that calls for all of us to change our ways. The steady emission into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are born of burning fossil fuels has to abate.

The Pope ties concern for the ecology of the Earth with religion's traditional concern for social justice: a preferential option for the poor. The poorer nations of the world are at once the most likely to suffer the harsh effects of global warming and the least responsible for creating the impending climate disaster in the first place.

We need accordingly to rein in our tendency in the richer nations to use the gifts of nature sheerly for generating wealth, as if Mother Nature were just a thing to be exploited by the few who are lucky enough to reap her economic benefits.

In the course of explaining the Catholic Church's stand against pillaging the environment, Pope Francis takes up the theology of creation rooted in the very first story of the Bible:

"In the first creation account in the Book of Genesis, God’s plan includes creating humanity. After the creation of man and woman, 'God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good' (Gen 1:31)."

Men and women are deemed "very good" — hence, social justice is a must. Everything that God made is likewise called "very good" — hence our duty to preserve and protect the Earth.

It is in the course of his discussion of creation theology that Francis says something I find quite interesting:

"How wonderful is the certainty that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles!"

That sentence suggests certain theological implications of the recent insights of science into "chaos" and "complexity."

Graph illustrating
the "butterfly effect" in
chaotic systems actually
can look like a butterfly

Chaos theory has come to the fore in the last half century, following the discovery that the unpredictability of weather — and hence ultimately of the Earth's climate — stems from infinitesimal differences in "initial conditions." This is the "butterfly effect." Due to the mathematics of chaos, illustrated by the graph at above-left, a tiny butterfly flapping its wings in Rio can in theory produce a tornado in Reno. Accordingly, the computers we use to model such things can't predict weather beyond a few days into the future.

That's because weather is one of nature's many "nonlinear dynamical systems": basically, changes occur in the state of any nonlinear dynamical system according to mathematical functions that do not graph as a straight line. These changes that occur can be unpredictable in the long run. "Chaotic" instances of nonlinear dynamical systems — not all such systems are chaotic and unpredictable — diverge so much in their states' unfolding trajectories that beyond a short period of time their future simply cannot be known in advance.

"Chaotic systems are predictable for a while," says Wikipedia's article on chaos theory, "and then 'appear' to become random." Such systems, whether natural, manmade, or purely mathematical, exhibit what scientists today refer to as "chaos." This means that the systems are not, strictly speaking, "random"; their behavior is "deterministic." If we could but know their initial conditions with perfect exactitude, we could predict their successive states with equal exactitude from the present moment right up until the end of time.

When Pope Francis speaks of "endlessly recurring cycles," on the other hand, he is talking about the opposite of chaos: order. Science recognizes two types of order in the panoply of conceivable behavior patterns of nonlinear dynamical systems. One type of orderly behavior is what happens when a marble released along the inner surface of a coffee cup, near its rim, ultimately comes to rest. After rolling down and then back up the inside of the cup and repeating that behavior for quite a while, the marble ultimately sits motionless at the cup's bottom.

The second type of order is that of "endlessly recurring cycles." The Earth orbits the Sun each year in just such a seemingly endless cycle.

So we have orderly nonlinear dynamical systems, and we have chaotic ones. Out of the scientific study of chaotic behavior has more recently emerged a companion notion, the "theory of complexity." Complexity, in this usage, has to do with nonlinear dynamical systems that are capable of "self-organization."

A flock of birds is
a self-organizing system;
the flock is an "emergent property"
of individual birds keeping a set distance
from their immediate neighbors

We typically think that organization can be imposed on a network of interacting elements that make up a nonlinear dynamical system strictly "from the top down," as when a strong leader imposes order on a gaggle of squabbling factions. Yet graceful order quite surprisingly can emerge "from the bottom up." The question of how this can happen, and can combine and interact with top-down order, is the province of complexity theory.

Scientists studying complexity have discovered that such self-organized behavior takes place at the "edge of chaos." According to M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, the edge of chaos is "the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive" (p. 12).

Nonlinear dynamical systems whose behavior exhibits spontaneous self-organization can be impelled from that beneficent edge over into the realm of outright chaos — it can happen when a Brazilian butterfly innocently flaps its wings — but can then, all by themselves, move out of chaos back over into the orderly regime. When that happens, the result is not always a return to the old, previously established order. It is rather the generation of a newer, more elaborate order. There is a concomitant gain in the system's "complexity" — the diversity or elaborateness of its interacting elements. This is, then, one meaning of the term "self-organized complexity."

Self-organized complexity is accordingly a third, quite unexpected kind of order. The order that arises in such a system is completely spontaneous. It is not static, as with a marble that eventually comes to rest at the bottom of a coffee cup, and it is not cyclical, as with a planet endlessly orbiting a star.

The human species, complexity science says, is a product of just such a process of spontaneous self-organization. That is, the evolution of life on Earth is not solely a matter of random DNA mutations sifted by Darwinian natural selection. There is something else going on. Earth's life is a "complex adaptive system" capable of generating, then preserving, self-organized, elegantly graceful, completely novel order.

So when Pope Francis says we are creatures of "infinite dignity" who are "made in God's image and likeness," and when in the same breath he says that "that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles," he seems to be affirming insights of the recent sciences of chaos and complexity into the evolution of life on Earth. At the same time, he rejects the assumption many people make that Darwin's theory of evolution implies that no Creator God exists.

In future posts, I will talk more about how complexity theory furnishes a useful lens through which Pope Francis's "Laudato Si'" may be viewed.