Abstract
This paper opens the third cluster of the volume by applying the analytical framework developed in the first two clusters to a specific contemporary domain in which the Teflon pattern operates with particular visibility. The domain is the public discussion of environmental policy, in which a credentialed class of officials, advocates, celebrities, and corporate leaders has articulated standards of austerity and restriction that they urge upon the broader population while themselves operating under patterns of consumption that systematically violate the standards they articulate. The argument proceeds through four interlocking analyses: the documented patterns of elite carbon consumption that exceed by substantial factors the patterns urged upon the general public; the rhetorical strategies by which the gap between elite practice and elite teaching is rendered invisible or defensible to those who articulate the teaching; the political consequences that follow when populations subject to environmental restrictions perceive the gap between what is required of them and what is permitted to those who require it; and the broader pattern of contemporary technocratic moral discourse in which environmental policy serves as a representative case rather than an isolated anomaly. The paper applies the biblical critique developed in the first cluster to the patterns it documents, demonstrating that the dynamic identified by Christ in Matthew 23 — the binding of heavy burdens upon others while refusing to move them with one’s own finger — operates with depressing precision in the contemporary environmental discussion, and that the institutional and sociological mechanisms identified in the second cluster account for the persistence of the pattern despite its visibility.
I. The Transition to Contemporary Domains
The first two clusters of this volume have established the biblical foundation and the institutional analysis that the present cluster will apply to specific contemporary domains. The biblical foundation, articulated across the first five papers, established that reciprocal accountability is a divine requirement, that the critique of religious elites was a central feature of the Lord’s ministry, that the indulgence of elite misconduct produces institutional catastrophe, that the priestly office binds its holders to standards more demanding than those binding the laity, and that the apostolic theology of leadership places teachers under a heightened accountability for the office they have undertaken. The institutional analysis, developed across the second five papers, established that elite exemption is produced through identifiable institutional mechanisms, that the cumulative effect of those mechanisms is the depletion of organizational legitimacy, that standards can be converted into political instruments through the dynamic of weaponization, that sociological dynamics surrounding elite figures produce moral insulation that no formal procedures can entirely overcome, and that the vocabulary of authentic discipleship can be appropriated as the protective cover under which the substantive demands of discipleship are evaded.
The third cluster of the volume turns from these foundations to the examination of specific contemporary domains in which the Teflon pattern operates. The cluster is structured around the observation that the dynamic identified in religious institutions appears, with equal or greater frequency, in secular institutions whose self-understanding does not include any acknowledgment of the biblical critique under which the dynamic stands condemned. The secular operation of the dynamic is, in some respects, easier to document than the religious operation, because secular institutions have not generally taken the trouble to construct the theological framework that obscures the dynamic within religious settings. The patterns appear in their unconcealed form, and the analytical work consists primarily in the recognition of patterns that are already present in the public record rather than in the construction of evidence that the institutions have attempted to suppress.
The selection of contemporary domains for examination has been guided by the criterion of representativeness rather than exhaustiveness. The five papers of the present cluster examine environmental policy, public health response, financial regulation, technocratic governance, and digital virtue. The selection is not intended to suggest that the Teflon pattern is confined to these five domains; it operates across the full range of contemporary institutional life, and the reader who has been formed by the analytical framework of this volume will recognize the pattern in many other domains besides those the cluster examines. The selection is intended, rather, to provide a sufficient sample of contemporary instances to demonstrate the universal operation of the pattern across diverse institutional contexts, and to apply the analytical framework with sufficient specificity that the framework’s utility for the diagnosis of other instances becomes evident.
The present paper, opening the cluster, examines the contemporary discussion of environmental policy. The domain has been chosen first because it presents the Teflon pattern with particular visibility, because the patterns of elite consumption that violate the standards elites articulate have been extensively documented in publicly available sources, and because the political consequences of the gap between elite practice and elite teaching have become sufficiently visible that the analytical framework finds substantial empirical material to work with. The paper does not undertake to settle the underlying scientific questions about the gravity of environmental challenges, the appropriate policy responses to those challenges, or the relative weight of competing considerations in the formulation of environmental policy. The biblical perspective the volume maintains throughout does not commit the analysis to particular positions on the underlying scientific and policy questions. The analysis is concerned, rather, with the consistency between what the credentialed environmental class urges upon others and what the same class practices in its own life, and the analysis of that consistency does not depend upon the resolution of the underlying questions about which positions are scientifically or policy-substantively correct.
II. The Documented Pattern of Elite Carbon Consumption
The first analytical task of the paper is to establish, on the basis of publicly available information, the documented pattern by which the credentialed environmental class engages in patterns of carbon consumption that substantially exceed the patterns the same class urges upon the general public. The documentation does not require the construction of any particular argument; the patterns are documented in news reporting, in academic studies, in public records of corporate and political activity, and in the various other sources that report on the activities of prominent figures. The analytical work consists in the assembly of the documented patterns and the recognition of what the assembled documentation reveals.
The pattern of private aviation among the credentialed environmental class is, perhaps, the most visible and most extensively documented instance of the gap between elite practice and elite teaching. The major international conferences at which environmental policy is articulated routinely involve the convening of substantial numbers of officials, advocates, executives, and celebrities through means of transportation that include private jets, chartered flights, and other forms of high-emission aviation. The annual conferences associated with the framework convention on climate change have been documented to involve the arrival of attendees through private aviation in numbers that have prompted significant attention even from sources that are otherwise sympathetic to the policy positions the conferences articulate. The pattern is not the product of occasional necessity; it is the standard mode of transportation for the credentialed class whose work is the articulation of policies that, if applied to the general public, would substantially restrict the availability of less carbon-intensive forms of travel.
The pattern extends beyond the conference attendance to the ongoing patterns of personal and professional life of the credentialed class. Celebrities who have publicly advocated for substantial restrictions on consumer behavior in the name of environmental policy have been documented to operate private aircraft for flights of distances that would ordinarily be covered by ground transportation or commercial aviation. Corporate executives whose firms have made public commitments to environmental sustainability have been documented to use private aircraft for the conduct of business that, by the firms’ own published criteria, ought to have been conducted through means with substantially lower carbon impact. Political officials who have advocated for policies that would restrict consumer access to various forms of carbon-intensive activity have been documented to operate, in their own personal and political lives, patterns of activity that include levels of carbon consumption substantially exceeding the levels their proposed policies would permit to others. The pattern is not isolated to particular individuals; it is broadly distributed across the credentialed class, and the documentation extends across years of consistent reporting.
The pattern of residential consumption among the credentialed environmental class displays similar features. Prominent advocates of environmental restriction have been documented to maintain multiple residences, including residences of substantial size whose energy consumption, by the metrics that the advocates’ own arguments would apply, indicates substantial carbon impact. The construction and maintenance of such residences involves the consumption of resources at levels that, if applied to the general public, would be widely characterized as inconsistent with the environmental commitments the advocates articulate. The advocates themselves typically do not draw the connection between their own residential patterns and the restrictions they urge upon others, and the credentialed environmental discourse generally does not draw the connection on their behalf. The residences remain. The advocacy continues. The gap between the two is documented in the public record but is rarely engaged as a question by the institutions that produce environmental discourse.
The pattern of corporate behavior among firms that have adopted environmental commitments displays a related but distinct dynamic. The firms publicly commit to various environmental standards, often with elaborate disclosure of the standards and their implementation. The firms’ actual operations frequently include patterns of activity that fall short of the standards they have committed to, and the disclosure of the shortfall is typically managed through reporting frameworks that obscure rather than illuminate the gap between commitment and practice. The disparity is documented in academic studies of corporate environmental reporting and in the journalistic investigations that periodically expose particular instances of the broader pattern. The firms continue to make the commitments. The shortfalls continue to occur. The disparity is sustained over extended periods, with the reporting frameworks providing the institutional cover under which the disparity is preserved.
The cumulative effect of these patterns is the production of a credentialed class whose practical conduct in environmental matters is substantially less austere than the conduct it urges upon the general public. The pattern is documented, in the various sources cited above and in many others, with sufficient regularity that it cannot reasonably be characterized as the product of occasional aberration. It is the standard pattern of the class, and the standard pattern of the institutions through which the class operates. The recognition of this fact is the foundation upon which the subsequent analytical sections of the paper proceed.
III. The Rhetorical Management of the Gap
The second analytical task of the paper is to examine the rhetorical strategies by which the gap between elite practice and elite teaching is rendered invisible or defensible to those who articulate the teaching. The strategies are not, in most cases, the products of conscious deception. They emerge from the institutional and sociological dynamics analyzed in the second cluster of this volume, dynamics that produce the conditions under which the gap can be sustained without those involved in sustaining it recognizing the role they play in its preservation.
The first rhetorical strategy is the appeal to functional necessity. The credentialed class operates in circumstances that, the argument runs, genuinely require the patterns of consumption the class displays. The international conference must occur, and the participants must reach the conference, and the most practical means of reaching the conference for participants whose schedules and security considerations require particular accommodations is the means that involves the carbon impact the conference participants exhibit. The corporate executive must conduct business across continents, and the practical operation of the business requires the rapid transit that private aviation provides. The celebrity advocate must maintain a schedule of public appearances that, given the geographic distribution of the appearances and the timing requirements they impose, is not practically achievable through means with lower carbon impact. In each case, the argument operates by treating the elite figure’s particular circumstances as falling within a category that requires the consumption the figure exhibits, while the general public’s circumstances are treated as falling within different categories that do not require such consumption. The categorical distinction provides the rhetorical cover under which the gap is preserved.
The functional necessity argument is not, in most cases, examined for its actual validity in the particular circumstances of particular elite figures. The examination would require the assessment of whether the underlying activities are themselves necessary, whether the elite figure’s participation in them is necessary, whether the timing requirements that produce the apparent need for high-impact transportation are themselves necessary, and whether the security and convenience considerations that the elite figure invokes actually correspond to genuine constraints rather than to preferred modes of operation. The examination is rarely conducted, because the institutions within which the elite figure operates do not have the incentive structure that would prompt such examination, and the elite figure himself is unlikely to undertake the examination of his own conduct. The argument is therefore available as a rhetorical resource without the underlying scrutiny that would test its application in particular cases.
The second rhetorical strategy is the appeal to relative impact. The argument operates by acknowledging that the elite figure’s individual carbon consumption may exceed that of an ordinary individual but by characterizing the elite figure’s impact through other measures that exceed the elite figure’s individual consumption. The corporate executive’s individual emissions are characterized as inconsequential relative to the policy impact the executive’s corporate position enables him to produce. The political official’s individual emissions are characterized as inconsequential relative to the legislative or regulatory impact the official’s position enables him to produce. The celebrity advocate’s individual emissions are characterized as inconsequential relative to the cultural impact the celebrity’s advocacy enables him to produce. The argument operates by exempting the elite figure from the metric that would apply to ordinary individuals on the grounds that the elite figure’s overall impact must be measured by a different metric that takes the figure’s special position into account. The argument is internally consistent on its own terms, but it produces, as a practical matter, the precise asymmetry that the present paper has been examining: the ordinary individual is held to a metric the elite figure is exempted from, on the grounds that the elite figure operates within a different framework of evaluation that the ordinary individual does not occupy.
The third rhetorical strategy is the use of carbon offsets and similar instruments to convert direct emissions into financial transactions that are characterized as equivalent to the avoidance of the emissions themselves. The elite figure whose travel patterns generate substantial emissions purchases credits from various programs that claim to offset the emissions through investments in carbon-reducing activities elsewhere. The figure can then characterize his overall carbon impact as having been brought to net zero through the purchase of the offsets, and the substantive question of his actual emissions is converted into a question about the integrity of the offset programs he has used. The credit programs themselves vary considerably in their actual effectiveness, with academic studies documenting that many of the programs deliver substantially less actual emission reduction than the credits they sell represent. The integrity of the offset programs is, however, not the central issue raised by the rhetorical use of the offsets. The central issue is the conversion of a question about personal conduct into a question about financial transactions, with the consequence that the elite figure can claim to have addressed the question without altering the personal conduct the question would otherwise have addressed. The offsets function as a kind of indulgence system in which the wealthy can purchase the moral coverage that allows them to continue the consumption that they urge others to restrict.
The fourth rhetorical strategy, often deployed when the other strategies have proven insufficient to address direct questions about the gap, is the dismissal of the questioner as ideologically motivated. The question about why the credentialed environmental class does not personally conform to the standards it articulates is characterized as a deflection from the substantive policy questions, as evidence of bad faith on the part of the questioner, or as the deployment of tu quoque arguments that ought not to be permitted to alter the substantive analysis. The strategy is, on its surface, formally correct: an argument’s substantive validity is not necessarily impeached by the conduct of those who articulate it. The strategy nevertheless functions, as a practical matter, to suppress the consideration of the gap that the present paper has been examining. The questioner who raises the gap is positioned as having committed a logical error rather than as having identified a substantive problem with the consistency between the credentialed class’s teaching and the credentialed class’s practice. The substantive problem is therefore not engaged, and the gap is preserved through the institutional management of the discourse within which questions about the gap might otherwise be raised.
IV. The Political Consequences
The third analytical task of the paper is to examine the political consequences that follow when populations subject to environmental restrictions perceive the gap between what is required of them and what is permitted to those who require it. The consequences are not, in most cases, the explicit articulation of the gap as a political issue. They are, rather, the cumulative effect of the perceived gap upon the populations’ willingness to accept the restrictions that are urged upon them, and upon the broader trust those populations extend to the institutions that produce environmental discourse and policy.
The first political consequence is the erosion of compliance with environmental restrictions that depend upon voluntary acceptance for their effectiveness. Many environmental measures cannot be effectively enforced through coercive means; they depend upon the voluntary acceptance of the populations subject to them, and the voluntary acceptance depends upon the populations’ perception that the measures are being applied consistently across the relevant categories of activity. When the populations perceive that the measures are being applied to themselves while being suspended for the credentialed class that articulates them, the voluntary acceptance erodes. The populations may continue to comply in the most visible respects, but the substantive acceptance that would have produced broader and more sustained compliance does not develop. The measures therefore achieve substantially less than the measures’ designers had anticipated, and the gap between projected impact and actual impact is documented in academic studies of compliance with various environmental programs.
The second political consequence is the development of political movements that explicitly resist the environmental discourse on the grounds that the credentialed class’s failure to practice what it preaches has invalidated the class’s standing to make the demands. The movements are not necessarily organized around any particular substantive position on the underlying environmental questions; they are organized, rather, around the rejection of the legitimacy of the credentialed class that has articulated the prevailing discourse. The political traction of such movements is documented in the electoral and political trends of multiple jurisdictions across recent decades, and the movements’ growth correlates with the increasing visibility of the gap between elite practice and elite teaching. The credentialed class typically interprets the growth of such movements as evidence of the political opposition’s bad faith or of the broader public’s failure to grasp the urgency of the underlying questions. The interpretation is itself an instance of the rhetorical strategies examined in the previous section: the credentialed class deflects attention from the gap by characterizing those who notice the gap as motivated by considerations that disqualify their observations from substantive engagement.
The third political consequence is the broader erosion of trust in the institutions that produce environmental discourse and policy. The erosion is not confined to environmental matters; it extends to the broader credibility of the credentialed class across the full range of public questions on which the class speaks. The population that has observed the credentialed class to articulate environmental standards it does not personally practice draws inferences about the class’s reliability that extend beyond environmental questions, with the consequence that the class’s pronouncements on other matters are received with the skepticism that the environmental gap has produced. The erosion of trust thus has effects that compound across the various domains in which the credentialed class operates, and the cumulative effect is the substantial weakening of the credentialed class’s overall capacity to address public questions through the institutional channels available to it.
The fourth political consequence is the gradual development, within the populations subject to environmental restriction, of a class consciousness that organizes itself around the perceived gap between the populations and the credentialed class. The populations come to perceive themselves as being asked to bear costs that the credentialed class does not bear, and the perception produces a sense of solidarity among those who bear the costs and a sense of opposition to those whose policies require the bearing. The class consciousness so produced is documented in social and political studies of various populations across recent decades, and its effects extend well beyond the specific environmental questions that initially produced it. The credentialed class has, in effect, produced a population that perceives itself as the subject of the class’s policies rather than as the partner in the development of the policies, and the perception produces political dynamics that the credentialed class typically does not anticipate and is not well-equipped to address.
V. The Biblical Critique Applied
The fourth analytical task of the paper is to apply the biblical critique developed in the first cluster of this volume to the patterns the preceding sections have documented. The application requires the recognition that the contemporary environmental discussion, despite its secular framing, produces a dynamic that the biblical literature identified and condemned in religious contexts. The dynamic operates by the same mechanisms in the contemporary secular context as it does in religious contexts, and the biblical critique that addresses the religious operation of the dynamic applies, with appropriate adjustments for context, to the secular operation as well.
The Lord’s denunciation in Matthew 23, examined extensively in White Paper 2, identifies the dynamic with particular precision. “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers” (Matthew 23:4, KJV). The Lord’s denunciation was directed at the religious leadership of His day. The dynamic the denunciation identified, however, is not confined to religious contexts. It is the dynamic of leadership classes that have constructed elaborate systems of restriction binding upon others while exempting themselves from the substantive demands of those restrictions, and the dynamic operates wherever leadership classes exist. The contemporary environmental discussion provides a representative case of the dynamic operating in a secular context, and the recognition of the case as an instance of the broader pattern is the first step toward the application of the critique to the case.
The application requires several specific observations. The first is that the credentialed environmental class has indeed constructed an elaborate system of restrictions on consumer and corporate behavior that, if implemented in the forms the class urges, would substantially alter the patterns of life available to the general public. The restrictions are real. They are articulated in policy documents, in regulatory proposals, in advocacy materials, and in the broader discourse the class produces. They are not, in most cases, articulated in coercive forms that would compel direct enforcement against individuals; they are articulated through the policy mechanisms that operate at the level of corporate and governmental action, with the practical effect being the constriction of consumer choice and the imposition of various costs on activities that the credentialed class has identified as problematic.
The second observation is that the credentialed class has not, in the main, brought its own personal conduct into substantive conformity with the restrictions it urges. The documentation of the gap was assembled in the second section of this paper, and the gap is real. The credentialed class operates patterns of consumption that, if applied to the general public, would be widely characterized as inconsistent with the environmental commitments the class articulates. The class has constructed the rhetorical strategies examined in the third section to manage the gap, but the strategies do not eliminate the gap; they only render it less visible within the discourse the class controls.
The third observation is that the pattern is, in its formal structure, identical to the pattern the Lord denounced in Matthew 23. Heavy burdens are bound. The burdens are laid upon the shoulders of others. The class that has bound the burdens does not move them with one finger. The credentialed environmental class operates the dynamic in a secular context, but the dynamic itself is the dynamic the biblical critique addresses. The application of the critique is therefore appropriate, and the critique applies with the same force in the contemporary case as it did in the case the Lord originally addressed.
The fourth observation is that the institutional and sociological mechanisms identified in the second cluster of this volume account for the persistence of the pattern. The credentialed class operates within institutional structures that produce elite exemption through the mechanisms examined in White Paper 6: the gap between formal and informal power, the operation of discretionary enforcement, the construction of insider protections, and the architecture of procedural asymmetry. The class operates within sociological environments that produce moral insulation through the mechanisms examined in White Paper 9: prestige shielding, elite networks, status preservation, and the construction of social environments in which the ordinary mechanisms of moral evaluation are systematically attenuated. The class engages in patterns of performative sacrifice through the mechanisms examined in White Paper 10: symbolic austerity, burden displacement, institutional theater, and the corruption of the vocabulary through which the substantive demands are evaded. The pattern persists not because the individuals within the class are uniquely culpable but because the institutional and sociological conditions within which the class operates produce the pattern as a structural feature of the class’s existence.
The fifth observation is that the biblical critique demands the same response in the contemporary secular case as it would in the original religious case. The leadership class that has constructed the pattern is called to bring its own practice into conformity with the standards it articulates, or to abandon the standards as standards it has no warrant to impose. The structural mechanisms that produce the pattern are called to be addressed through the construction of countermeasures that would prevent their continued operation. The vocabulary that has been appropriated as protective cover for the pattern is called to be returned to its substantive content. The populations subject to the restrictions are owed the recognition that the restrictions cannot legitimately be imposed by a class that exempts itself from them, and the political consequences that follow from the populations’ perception of the gap are the natural and predictable response to the gap rather than aberrations requiring institutional correction.
VI. The Broader Pattern and the Bridge to What Follows
The closing observation of the paper is that the contemporary environmental discussion is not isolated as a domain in which the Teflon pattern operates. It is, rather, a particularly visible instance of a pattern that operates across the full range of contemporary technocratic discourse. The papers that follow in this cluster will examine additional domains in which the same pattern operates: the response to public health crises, in which restrictions urged upon the general public have been documented to be suspended for the credentialed class urging them; the regulation of financial markets, in which standards applied to retail participants have been documented not to be applied with comparable rigor to the credentialed class participating through different channels; the operation of technocratic and managerial classes, in which burdens of compliance have been documented to be distributed asymmetrically between those who articulate the requirements and those subject to them; and the patterns of digital virtue and social punishment, in which standards of public conduct have been documented to be applied asymmetrically depending upon the ideological position of the parties involved. Each of the subsequent papers will examine its specific domain with the analytical framework the present paper has demonstrated, with attention to the documented patterns, the rhetorical strategies, the political consequences, and the application of the biblical critique.
The cumulative effect of the cluster will be the demonstration that the Teflon pattern is not a feature of religious institutions that has been exported to secular contexts. It is, rather, a feature of leadership class behavior that operates wherever leadership classes exist, in religious and secular contexts alike. The biblical critique developed in the first cluster of this volume is therefore not a critique that applies only to religious institutions and that has been forced into application to secular contexts. It is a critique of the dynamic that the biblical literature identified in religious contexts because those were the contexts in which the biblical literature was produced, but the dynamic itself is universal, and the critique applies to every instance of the dynamic regardless of the institutional context within which it appears. The recognition of this universality is the foundation upon which the remaining clusters of the volume proceed: the third cluster, which examines the contemporary domains; the fourth cluster, which examines the comparative religious traditions; and the diagnostic instruments that conclude the volume, which provide the practical tools for the identification of the pattern in any institutional context in which it may appear.
The biblical perspective the volume maintains throughout does not commit the analysis to particular positions on the substantive questions of environmental policy. The perspective commits the analysis, rather, to the recognition that the imposition of standards by a class that does not personally conform to them is a violation of a biblical principle that operates regardless of the substantive merits of the standards being imposed. The credentialed environmental class may, for all the present paper has said about the matter, be entirely correct in its substantive analysis of environmental challenges and its substantive proposals for addressing them. The substantive correctness of the analysis and the proposals does not, however, exempt the class from the biblical critique of its inconsistent practice. The class is called, by the principle the Lord articulated in Matthew 23, to move with its own finger the burdens it would lay upon the shoulders of others. The failure to do so is not a peripheral defect in the class’s discourse; it is a central feature of the dynamic the biblical critique addresses, and the dynamic stands condemned in the contemporary secular case as it stood condemned in the original religious case the Lord’s denunciation was directed against.
Notes
Note 1. The analytical decision to address environmental policy first among the contemporary domains examined in this cluster reflects the particular visibility of the Teflon pattern in this domain rather than any judgment about the relative importance of the various domains the cluster will address. The other domains, addressed in the subsequent papers, exhibit the pattern with comparable severity, and the cluster as a whole is intended to demonstrate the universality of the pattern across multiple contemporary institutional contexts.
Note 2. The paper does not undertake the resolution of the underlying scientific questions about environmental challenges or the substantive policy questions about appropriate responses to those challenges. The analytical work the paper undertakes is the examination of the consistency between what the credentialed environmental class urges upon others and what the class practices in its own life. The biblical critique applies to the question of consistency regardless of how the underlying scientific and policy questions are resolved, and the application of the critique therefore does not depend upon any particular position on the substantive questions.
Note 3. The documentation of elite carbon consumption patterns referenced in the second section is available in publicly accessible sources including news reporting on major climate conferences, academic studies of corporate environmental reporting, journalistic investigations of celebrity travel patterns, and the various other sources that report on the activities of prominent figures. The paper has not undertaken to construct any particular reading of the underlying documentation; the documentation is sufficient on its face to establish the patterns the paper examines, and the analytical work consists in the assembly and interpretation of the documentation rather than in the construction of any new empirical claims.
Note 4. The rhetorical strategies analyzed in the third section have been documented across multiple academic and journalistic studies of the discourse surrounding environmental policy. The paper has not undertaken to attribute any particular instance of these strategies to any particular figure; the strategies are widely distributed across the discourse, and the analytical interest of the paper lies in the recognition of the strategies as features of the broader pattern rather than in the documentation of particular instances.
Note 5. The political consequences examined in the fourth section have been documented in the political and electoral studies of multiple jurisdictions across recent decades. The paper does not undertake to advocate for any particular political response to the pattern; the analytical work consists in the recognition that the political consequences are the natural and predictable response to the pattern, and the recognition does not require commitment to any particular evaluation of the various political movements that have emerged in response to the pattern.
Note 6. The application of the biblical critique in the fifth section should not be taken to suggest that the biblical literature directly addresses environmental policy as a contemporary domain. The biblical literature addresses the underlying dynamic of leadership classes that exempt themselves from the standards they impose upon others, and the dynamic operates in environmental policy as it operates in other domains. The application of the critique therefore does not require the biblical literature to have addressed environmental policy directly; it requires only the recognition that the dynamic the critique addresses operates in the contemporary environmental discussion, and the application of the critique to the dynamic in its contemporary form follows from that recognition.
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