God in the Contact Zone

In Laudate Deum, his apostolic exhortation issued around this time last year, Pope Francis exhorts us to a new way of thinking marked by care for the earth, tenderness to non-human animals, and a greater sensitivity regarding our relationships with all living things. The document was largely a restatement of Laudato si’, and in places it reads like an N.G.O. report for a U.N. climate conference in Dubai last December. The Holy Father begins the final section with what is almost a summary of his argument: “God has united us to all his creatures. Nonetheless, the technocratic paradigm can isolate us from the world that surrounds us and deceive us by making us forget that the entire world is a ‘contact zone.’”

How has God united us to other creatures? Through our sympathy, or through our reason? Francis emphasizes care. He considers the sensitivity and tenderness of the Lord towards the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Alternatively, however, we might wish to unite ourselves with that surpassing divine intelligence that numbers the sparrows and that adorns each flower. Book XI of The City of God posits the rational order of creation with a striking example to wrench us away from thinking, as human beings do, in terms of our power, selfish utility, and self-preservation. Slaves have a superior dignity by dint of their participation in the rational order to that of horses and jewels, Saint Augustine insists, even though horses and jewels are often more useful and valuable to their owners. The great chain of being pulls us free from the libido dominandi and a life spent chaining other people, animals, and things to our desires.

When Pope Francis calls us towards unity with creation, he speaks to the heart rather than the head in order to gain a wider hearing. He instructs us to cherish our fellow creatures as gifts. A gift exceeds reciprocity and strict justice; the excess or gratuity of any gift elicits gratitude. Rather than bringing the Catholic intellectual tradition of justice and the common good to bear on the climate crisis, Pope Francis calls Catholics to join non-Catholics in caring for our common home. A feeling of unity with all creatures promises a broader, shared way of life: “Postmodern culture has generated a new sensitivity towards the more vulnerable and the less powerful.” Here, care is fundamental and prior to thinking. We must learn to receive being like a gift. The “technocratic paradigm” isolates us from our care for creation and numbs the new sensitivity of postmodern culture. “Setting” the world in place, or enframing it as something to be used, prevents us from a careful receptivity towards being.

Laudate Deum cites only one work devoted to philosophical questions, and it suggests the shade of Martin Heidegger. It would be churlish to claim that Pope Francis has suddenly jettisoned tradition in favor of trendy “pomo” philosophers. The little magician of Meßkirch has haunted these symposia since the days of Romano Guardini, and he is present at the sumptuous intellectual feasts that Benedict XVI hosted. Heidegger’s challenges to philosophy, and to the Magisterium so long intertwined with philosophy—like the climate crisis—rightly weigh on the mind of the Church. The modern dream of rational progress towards human empowerment is everywhere morphing into nightmarish visions, in which we glimpse rational fears. Will we vaporize the human race instantly? Are we vaporizing the atmosphere so that the planet warms so rapidly as to become increasingly uninhabitable? We have been worried about what slouches towards Bethlehem, what apocalypse will be the work of human hands, for more than a century. Yet the particular gloomy feeling from Laudate Deum, as you eavesdrop on the Holy Father instructing jet-setting princes and sheikhs, comes from the sense that Heidegger is the last thinker left in the loggia.

No, as Master Yoda says lit in red as Luke Skywalker’s X-wing roars above, there is another. In the sixty-sixth paragraph of the document, we read those few lines I quoted at the beginning of this essay and are asked to contemplate “the entire world” as a “contact zone.” A quick glance at the footnotes confirm our—forgive me for appropriating the discarded pontifical “we”—suspicion. This is a reference to Donna Haraway, the thinker most commonly associated with “cyborg feminism,” of “make kin not babies” fame, noted for her critiques of compulsory reproductive biopolitics for zoo animals. Francis appears to be referring not to the first part of her book When Species Meet, entitled “We Have Never Been Human,” but to the chapter about how she trains for agility competitions with her herding dog, Cayenne. The contact zone, marked off by yellow paint, describes the area of seesaws and A-frames through which Haraway guides Cayenne. She responds to her dog’s authority as well: “Dog is my co-pilot.” (Socrates’ description of a democracy so extreme that the bitch acts the mistress in Plato’s Republic comes to mind.) By way of some afterthoughts, Haraway informs us that “contact zone” is also academese for the improvised encounters between speakers with different native languages, including inter-species communication.

If you are fluent in English but not my theory-argot, you already entered the contact zone several paragraphs above. Why, you may still want to ask, does Laudate Deum direct us to stories about Haraway training her dog through agility courses? Perhaps the answer is that we are supposed to shut up and consider new questions: “Contact zones change the subject—all the subjects—in surprising ways,” Haraway writes. In the contact zone we do not ask, “Who am I?” We touch a dog (for example) and say, who are we? There is no human nature, only a network of inter-species relationships in which we find ourselves. We are becoming more like one another in “nourishing flows of matter and energy.” A contact zone is like a node where “an energy field created by all living beings”—that’s Obi-Wan Kenobi whom I am quoting now—is especially intense. We figure it out with our animal partners in the contact zone as we go along: “Figuring out how to do the needed sorts of experimental work, in which heterogeneous material-semiotic entanglements are the norm, should be great fun and scientifically very creative.”

This reminds me of a joke from Woody Allen’s Sleeper: “God is dog backwards. Makes you think, doesn’t it?” The joke, I think, is that it does not, in fact, make you think. Of course, the whole point for Heidegger and Haraway is to arrest timeworn ways of thought that have destined our self-destruction. Heidegger cherishes boredom. He suggests that sometimes we are so profoundly bored that we lose our sense of purpose and even function—perhaps from here we can begin to rediscover a care for the world. Twenty years ago in The Open, Giorgio Agamben adopted this back-to-square-one attitude to rethink the relationship between human beings and animals. But Haraway explicitly rejects this profound boredom in favor of the here-and-now contact zone, a flow state we enter with others, including non-humans. Yet her contact zone is not a clean break with fantasies of purpose and power. Haraway is not quite sure she completely relinquishes power and control; she doubts she treats the animal (which she has trained to compete at this ridiculous sport) as an equal. The contact zone does not absolutely escape the power plays at the core of the technocratic paradigm.

When I was a little boy, my favorite book was Dinotopia, with its lovely illustrations of that contact zone where wise and long-lived saurians nudge castaways from the Industrial Revolution to live in harmony with nature. When I was a little older, I loved the moment when Obi-Wan’s voiceover convinces Luke to use the force and switch off his targeting computer (“Reach out with your feelings!”) Since I am ambivalent about putting away childish things, I still love pagan philosophers, apocalyptic high modernists, and big ideas that can only be expressed in gobbledygook. Yet I am not sure about this contact zone. Haraway describes an intensely visceral and face-to-face relationship between a woman and her dog over a long period of intense training. She swears they both hear “the Velcro ripping when [their] cross-species conjoined mind–body” comes apart. So how can the whole world be a contact zone in this way? Did the Holy Father do the reading? Are the climate conference delegates supposed to stagger to their seats, hearing the screams of the Earth in the same way that Obi-Wan is struck by the destruction of Alderaan?

Haraway and Heidegger call for new ways of thinking about fundamental questions. Common sense and scientific progress do not promise the preservation of the human species and our planetary home. Laudate Deum does not put these in conversation with scriptural theology, but radical calls for new ways of thinking are Gospel-certified. Remember that Our Lord calls Saint Peter “Satan” for thinking as human beings do and reasoning only about preserving His earthly life. We shall not save our lives unless we are prepared to lose them. In reading Saint Augustine and his successors, this new way of thinking is a rational order that we can understand, at least somewhat. But Pope Francis does not offer new ways of reasoning about specific precepts of the common good to those who will attend the climate conference, or to those of us who have adjusted the thermostat with fear and trembling since Laudato si’. Where is the rational or proportional guidance that justice requires, when policymakers and parents face tradeoffs, and must weigh how much they care about this rather than that?

As a boy, I often sat behind an aged and tousle-haired Bill Buckley at Mass, yet I do not wish to echo him at his most petulant and childish, and say, Laudato si’, Laudato no. I may no longer hope to be a Jedi, but I am tender-hearted enough to wince at Laudate Deum a little. It is a cruel fate, somehow, for a pioneering 1970s cyber-feminist to live long enough to be quoted in a letter of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, and the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church. (What visionary strategist could have brought them together in a rebel alliance against technology? Perhaps Celia Deane-Drummond of Oxford University is the Mon Mothma of my now entirely over-extended metaphor; after all, she cites Haraway in her articles that anoint Pope Francis the priest and prophet of the Anthropocene.) But just as there is a discouraging lack of justice or right in this letter, there is nothing much wrong with it, either. The oddball out-of-left-field endorsement of Haraway’s contact zone is not only confused but also immediately qualified. Right after calling all the world a contact zone, Pope Francis calls for a “situated anthropocentrism.” There are still some holds barred in the contact zone, whatever it is.

Laudate Deum is the title of the letter, as the Holy Father reminds us in the last paragraph—Praise God. Not Laudate terram. If we do not praise God, the title implies, we shall fail to honor His creation and become absorbed in ourselves, our powers, and our projects. Yet titles can be misleading. In Lob der Erde, Byung-Chul Han, who has meditated longest about Heidegger’s profound boredom, learns to praise God by meditating on the good green Earth’s desire for resurrection. Think of how plants and animals proclaim the glory of God more reliably than the actions of human beings. And Laudate Deum: may the union we desire with Jesus Christ be our highest contact zone.