Re:Faith and Climate Change

This post was originally a comment on a link shared by a friend. The original article can be found at The Economist.

Re-posted after a quick fact check/edit for the blog!

I got on a plane, and noticed a priest spread out on his First Class seat. At that point it struck me that I had an opinion on this  article.

I reckon our clergyman is an A-list guy in the church hierarchy (I’m assuming, he would know of the commitment to cut carbon emissions at our multi-faith League of Nations party). And yet, he didn’t seem like a very carbon-responsible person; I think Ban Ki-moon should be heartbroken over this, he got played!

In their attempts to stretch their carbon credits, CEO’s would try and fly commercial, sometimes even business! They would try and compensate for irresponsible behaviour by buying credits, etc.  Think about it- even our evil all-for-profit businesses are trying to be subtle about their carbon footprint. It’s shocking that on that ultra long-haul Boeing jet, Capitalism comes across looking a bit better than Catholicism in the climate change stakes!

To be fair, I’m convinced that if our A-list priest understood the gravity of climate change problem, he would care. He’d be setting an example by traveling economy and having a lower carbon signature, in line with his other extreme moral instincts, you know, like not getting married!

The ‘glorious system of greed’ understands it’s financial incentive in delaying the ’sinking of Maldives’ better than Deoband’s grasp of it’s moral imperative to act in this matter. This epic-fail is symptomatic of a larger problem of mediocrity that is gnawing at the soul of our religious leadership.

Leveraging our faith infrastructure to spread awareness on an important social cause is a compelling plan, I’m sold on it. However, I wonder if it’s a scalable (/deployable) solution? A system that has consistently pleaded ignorance to it’s social responsibilities, cannot suddenly be considered bankable.

Yes, we have had religious leadership come out and in support of social causes (HIV in middle Africa, female infanticide in India), but their coming out party is almost always a day after the epidemic’s tipping point. We need visionary leadership, not one that is merely reactive.

And then there’s the credibility question:

On most occasions, I have a severe believability problem whenever our faith leadership speaks out on matters other than doctrine- they are often dogmatic, sometimes simply out of their depth. A discredited sales force is definitely not the team you want to go to war with. The power to persuade comes from a deep rooted conviction in the idea you’re trying to sell. If you have no clue how Chlorofluorocarbons work, and you have an agenda that seeks the audience to give up material upside for an abstruse incentive, you’re starting out with a huge disadvantage.

The terminal mediocrity of our religious leaders has left them looking like the masters of a kitschy low-information-signal(often rhetorical issues that are much easier to grasp for folks with average ability) and nothing more. Rakhi Sawant and a majority of our faith leadership suffer from the same problem- they have the megaphone but no-one will believe either when they talk about climate change, or stem cells. The message might be right, but the messenger is broken!

I feel there might be a talent problem at the heart of the credibility conundrum. It might be innocent, below par IQ’s that cause these guys to misread, misguide and misinterpret; their wayward thinking sends mixed signals. Folks who take consequential decisions on climate change are going to base them on a tricky trade off between economic inducements and some of organic chemistry’s ugliest reactions. Smart money says that a vast majority of the religious leadership would not understand either. At today’s skill level, our priests, mullahs and clerics would end up losing a lot of debates, very quickly, when called to defend their(hypothetical) call for action (Big-oil has huge corporate-communication budgets!). It’s possible that a particularly passionate sermon may get factory-hands to demand responsible carbon emissions, but would such a call hold if the factory management has compelling financial incentive to keep polluting. Or would it be better if we focused on bringing about a balance of legislative checks and financial rewards for the folks who run these factories?

I have a plan to fix this (ahem!!). This will take time but I promise you it will give us a good shot chance of fixing the talent (and credibility) problem that cripples us. We can then engage these leaders who, are said to have ‘the largest, widest and deepest reach’.

Madrasas (and most other religious seminaries) have consistently shored up the back-end of the talent pool (my single person mental Gallup Poll results are overwhelmingly supportive of this conclusion). I think there should be a mandatory IQ test for folks who get into these schools, given the respect-capital(and it’s potential use) they have on graduation. Let’s try something with a fancy name- The MAT (Madarsa Aptitude Test), it should be designed to be an extremely annoying exercise (in the interest of fairness, it should be structured exactly like the SATs): let’s have a 4 hour computer adaptive test with 3 sections , 1 on moral science (and how un-cool it is to want to physically hurt other people!), 1 analytical section(puzzles and elementary math) and an open book exam essay: “Why I want to be a priest, and not Mark Zuckerberg?”. I think there’s promise in this thought, making the standardized MAT exam a mandatory prerequisite for all religious seminaries (common entrance exam for all religions, yes!!) would ensure we only get the best, of the rest! It is also a killer business model (/captive market) for ETS?!

This will also help us resolve the issue of the vast constituency of ‘believers’ who do not believe in the theological leadership just because they don’t trust them to be smart enough in some matters. Imagine if religious schools were a meritocratic system? Don’t we believe things that are said based who said them (I’d totally believe Feynman on Quantum Mechanics even if he was kidding!. Much like most of us believed the folks who claimed they had the Large Hadron Collider figured. Appears, they didn’t, and yet we thought they did. They had to, they had all the acronyms going for them SAT/GRE/PhD/CERN?). So let’s get our mullah’s an acronym too and let’s get them all to take an exam. And then they would be set to fight for the right causes. We’re sure to see them fighting harder for IPCC.
I think the religious leadership’s billing as Maldives soul savior is undeserved, it’s a bit like Obama and the Nobel; a compliment given in the hope that they will come good. I say they won’t, not unless they solved a few partial differential equations first.

Al Gore, might actually be Secretary Moon’s man if he’s looking for heroes. That man knows his CFCs. I wish he fought as hard as to be President, we would have had the world’s most passionate advocate for the climate change agenda at the helm of the world’s biggest polluter. That might have been game-changing.

And, we would not have had another ‘President’ Bush, which would have been a spectacular thing for our planet. Only if Gore fought harder. Imagine that?