Charles, the Prince of Wales, has blamed a lack of belief in the soul for the world’s environmental problems, and said that the planet cannot sustain a population expected to reach 9 billion in 40 years. He said
The Prince pinned part of the blame on Galileo. Criticizing the profit imperative behind much scientific research, he said:
This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works, and how we fit within the scheme of things.
As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.
The Prince said that he believed green technology alone could not resolve the world’s environmental problems. Instead, the West must do something about its “deep, inner crisis of the soul”.
It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well. Talk of an ‘environmental crisis’ or of a ‘financial crisis’ is actually describing ‘the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul’.
Update. Christopher Hitchens is livid: Where is this ‘vapid talk about the soul of the universe’ actually headed?
A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer.
We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. … But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.
Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The ‘vacuum’ will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.
One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.