HEAVENS’ PERFORMANCE
2010
A review of Here on Earth by Tim Flannery, Penguin
Tim Flannery is a university professor who read English literature and history, an historical ecologist, palaeontologist, zoologist, explorer and environmental activist. In his work and in his activism he draws upon a wide range of materials and sources to cultivate a holistic or Gaian view of the planet and of our place in it. He has the breadth of vision and depth in learning we need to address the crisis confronting our civilisation. He believes that specialists need to come out of their bunkers and pool their expertise for the greater understanding of the whole. If we fail to develop that holistic conception, human civilisation is more than likely doomed.
Flannery remembers the moment in 1993 when he came to embrace the holistic mode of thinking well. "I can tell you exactly when it was - I still remember it." He had spent the best part of a decade worrying about the paucity of large mammals in his homeland. "The little Tasmanian devil, about that big, that's the top carnivore! That really worried me. And finally I woke up in bed one night - I was working in New Guinea and may well have had a slight fever - and I understood what it was. The soil.
"All of a sudden I could see my own country through new eyes. I understood why there were so many species of lizards, why koalas had lost half their brains, why kangaroos hopped. All of a sudden it all made sense. That's when I started to understand that Australia was an incredibly special place. And it also changed my view of Aboriginal people."
Flannery developed his argument in 1994’s The Future Eaters. Rejecting the consensus view that climate change was responsible for the way Australian flora and fauna had evolved, Flannery pointed to a lack of nutrients in the earth itself. He further argued that Aboriginal people, far from being primitive and under-developed, had played a crucial role in sustaining the continent's ecosystem for tens of thousands of years. Burning land in rotation, plants were always in various stages of regrowth, forest fires were checked and food and shelter were always available for animals. These means helped to recycle some of the poorest land on the planet, ensuring the conditions for sustainable life. A cultural network extended across Australia, ensuring that the Aboriginal people could seek assistance from contacts in distant places when suffering, for example, periods of drought. There is a soft culture at work in this kind of sustainability that is quite distinct from the hard culture of tools and technology which is implicated in the assault on the land. Within a few decades of the arrival of white settlers and their firestick approach to burning and with the cloven hoofed animals, delicate ecosystems were broken up and sent into retreat. And it was called ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’. We shall see.
The essential role of people in ecosystems all over the world lies at the core of Flannery’s work. At the centre of Flannery’s new book, Here on Earth, is James Lovelock's idea of the planet as Gaia, a living, self-regulating organism. Human beings are unique in the extent to which they modify the environment to fit themselves, rather than fitting themselves to their environment. Cast out of the Garden of Eden, human beings are forever wandering the land in search of a home. Flannery has the answer to our eternal wandering – it’s in us and all around us - we belong to and are part of nature: "We actually are Earth. We really, really are just animated bits of the Earth's crust, so to talk about us and the Earth is the wrong paradigm. It's not us and Earth. We actually are Earth, and if they don't grasp that..."
He’s right. I have a great book by Barbara Griggs, entitled Reinventing Eden - the past, the present and the future of our fragile earth (2001 Quadrille Publishing). The book is organised into four parts, showing the extent to which human beings are not just dependent on the four elements Air, Earth, Light and Water, but actually are those elements. The chapter titles in the book say it all - the first breath, air therapy, down to earth, sacred animals, earth therapy, the therapeutic earth, the rhythm of life, the light of life, the healing power of light, our world of water, our body of water, water therapy, the therapeutic bath… Each section ends with an action plan for healthy living - clean air, good earth, natural light and water. Planetary and human flourishing go hand in hand as two aspects of the same thing.
A number of feminist artists have highlighted our connections with nature in various ways throughout their work.
Ana Mendietta Silueta works
As Flannery argues: ‘Another way of thinking about life is that we are all self-choreographed extravaganzas of electrochemical reaction, and it is in the combined impacts of those reactions, across all of life, that Gaia itself is forged. Thinking of life as something separate from Earth is wrong.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 4).
But, judging by the way we conduct our interchange with nature, we take nature for granted and exploit it as a free lunch, little realising that we are cannibalising ourselves.
Flannery's analysis of the ecological destruction wrought by the human species makes human extinction a real possibility. A species that can be so destructive for so long is heading for the rocks. The Future Eaters describes the Maori living in the condition of continual, cannibalistic warfare after they had hunted their food sources to extinction. Flannery gives one example after another from all over the world demonstrating the seemingly congenital human failure to think ahead, and, as a result, to stupidly imprudently and greedily gobble up plentiful natural resources until they are gone.
When asked about the pace of climate change and the possibility of weaning human beings off their bad consumptive habits and their addiction to fossil fuels, Flannery claims "we have some time." "Not that much, but we have some". We’ve always had time. To be told this is neither cause for optimism nor pessimism. Using that time well is a matter of moral and intellectual capacity and choice, of reason with its ethical dimension supplementing its technical dimension.
Flannery is a scientist who began his career in palaeontology. He could also be described as a romantic, as one who seeks and celebrates communion with nature. In Australia's vast outdoors, he discovered a mysterious and beautiful landscape that was beyond imagining. He desired "to know the landscape in the way one knows the body of a lover". He learned to hunt but, as he grows older, his sensibilities are changing: "you feel more empathy for the animal, I think."
He lives with his wife Alexandra on the Hawkesbury river, in the middle of nowhere in New South Wales. There is no mains power or water supply, no road, no sewerage. If the solar panels don't generate enough electricity, they use battery back-up. Heat is generated by a wood-burning stove, with logs cut from 1,000 hectares of forest. "It's staying in touch with nature. Not everyone has that drive. Not everyone wants to stay in touch with the moon and the tides and the fish and the birds and the growth of trees and the seasons, but I do."
Living close to and in touch with nature is integral to Flannery’s solution to what can be called the problem of the individual and the collective, how to act in unison as individuals so as to ensure the common good of each and all. At present, our political and economic systems are geared to pandering to individual self-interest, with the result that all come to be subject to a universal constraint that blocks the emergence of the common good and is therefore inimical to the true interests of the individual.
The atomistic model of freedom sees human beings not as social beings but as individual voters and consumers. The problem is that a freedom equated with unrestricted individual choice and the unregulated pursuit of self-interest is self-cancelling. Each individual competes with and checks other individuals, with the result that all are subject to a collective unfreedom.
Marx states the problem of relating individual and collective freedom well when he criticises the liberal individualism of bourgeois market society:
individuals seem independent (this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is more correctly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to engage in ex change within this freedom; but they appear thus only for someone who abstracts from the conditions, the conditions of existence within which these individuals enter into contact (and these conditions, in turn, are independent of the individuals and, although created by society, appear as if they were natural conditions, not controllable by individuals).
Marx Grundrisse 1973: 163/4
Resolving this paradox is key to human survival and flourishing. Flannery establishes the conditions for collective freedom in an ecological context. He argues that as human society evolves into a single, global super-organism, individuals come to acquire increasingly specialised roles, with the result that our importance as individuals dwindles. Is this an affront to human dignity? It depends on how one interprets individual freedom. Human beings are social beings; we need each other in order to be ourselves. Human beings are also natural beings; we need a place within a greater whole in order to thrive. What the liberal view sees as individual freedom is prone to degenerate into egoism and a pandering to the physical self. Far from delivering freedom, such a view chains human beings to natural necessity in the form of wants, desires and impulses. The world of business advertisement and political electioneering exploits such egoism to the maximum in order to manacle individuals to the system by their own choice and their own consent. So there is plenty to be said for diminishing the sense of self and everything to be said for putting an end to the ego. Human beings are happy when they escape the prison of the ego and come to identify with something greater than themselves. It is our responsibility to ensure that we remain rounded, fully functioning beings, transcending any specialisms so as to become capable of performing more than task. Flannery has identified the dangers of ending up like ants or termites within an ecological super-organism – he emphasises not just the physical processes of biology and ecology but most of all the moral capacity of human beings.
This emphasis on moral ecology is important. Flannery argues that we need to get in touch with and live in closer contact with nature. He argues that ‘we actually are Earth’. But this does not mean that we become thoroughly absorbed in physical nature, losing our moral autonomy, quite the contrary. We are going to have to draw upon that moral intelligence if we are to escape our ecologically self-destructive habits. We are going to need our natural reason in order to restraint and guide our natural instincts.
There is a sense of paradise lost in much of what Flannery writes. He is keenly aware of what has already been lost. He describes the Australasian lands before the arrival of humans as a lost world of biodiversity.
Throughout Here on Earth Flannery describes evolution as "heavens' performance," a phrase he takes from a Chinese translation of the word 'evolution' as tian yan. The heavens in this instance mean all of creation. We have here a much richer, more expansive conception of evolution than that contained in purely physical processes. This is a conception with a moral, even a spiritual dimension.
Flannery criticises Richard Dawkins's continual attacks on religion, emphasising that humanity must pass through the valley of the shadow of death in order to ensure survival. The language, with its Biblical connotations, is chosen deliberately, "because it resonates with people and is beautiful and carries with it a sense of relationship with each other and the world that is tremendously important."
That is an excellent point. Biology and ecology as explanations of physical things, processes and causality can never be enough. We need a moral ecology, something that recognises meaning and personal relationship in addition to physical processes and natural boundaries.
In a chapter calling for human beings to embrace biophilia as a condition of their own survival, Flannery quotes the Bible: ‘A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one another.’ (John 13). Flannery wants us to love life as a whole as well as each other.
I am certain of one thing—if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth.
Flannery 2010 ch 23
What makes Here on Earth most interesting is the extent to which Flannery appreciates the moral implications of ecology and evolutionary biology. Flannery addresses the moral implications of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It soon becomes apparent that Flannery is a sharp and penetrating critic of Darwinian thinking, particularly the concept of "the survival of the fittest". "The main problem with it is that it just entirely misses a sense of what evolution has created. Evolution hasn't created a survival of the fittest world, it's created a world of extraordinary collaboration and cooperation and coevolution."
Flannery praises Darwin, but he is acutely aware of the moral blindspot in the evolutionary argument.
The essence of Darwin's insight is thus very simple. More are born than can survive, and those best fitted to the circumstances into which they are born are most likely to survive and breed. This selection of individuals, generation after generation, over the vastness of geological time, causes descendants to differ from their ancestors. There is no morality in this argument—no overall superiority of one individual, class or nation over another— for as the environment changes so do those selected as the 'fittest'. But it did reveal a terrible truth—the weak (poorly adapted) must die if evolution is to progress..
Flannery 2010 ch 1
Flannery restores Alfred Russell Wallace to his rightful place as the co-discoverer of evolution. Wallace understood evolution as a coevolution and in consequences was "never scared of the implications of evolutionary theory". However, Wallace’s ideas were politically and socially unfashionable and were thus lost from view. The anarchist and geographer Kropotkin also tried to argue for social cooperation in Mutual Aid, but his view too was largely ignored. The notion of survival of the fittest and the idea of life as a competitive struggle fitted the market society created by the capital economy. Evolution came to be read through the distorting lens of Social Darwinism. Today, we have neo-Darwinism. But it is not the only show in town. The Gaia thesis of James Lovelock has shown how we are all part of a single self-regulating system. In addition, Bill Hamilton at Oxford and E.O. Wilson at Harvard have shown the extent to which our biological inheritance causes us to behave in ways which are not simply determined by genetic self-interest. In one way or another, the idea of coevolution and how the planet functions as a single self-regulating system is not just gaining ground but is carving out a creative role for morality and intelligence in shaping a future civilisation.
We are going to need that moral intelligence in addition to our technical intelligence.
if we wish to keep our planet fit for life, some of the most routine and humble things we do must change. For as long as we've existed our conception of waste disposal has simply been shifting objectionable matter from one of Earth's organs to another. Whether it's been a human body or a banana skin, we've buried it (returning it to the earth), burned it (returning it to the atmosphere) or tossed it into the sea. On a small scale, this approach to waste disposal works pretty well. But it most decidedly will not do in the twenty-first century, for the very essence of much pollution derives from human actions that weaken the elemental imbalance between Earth's organs. Over the vastness of geological time Gaia's housekeeping has put every element in its place. Carbon has been withdrawn from the atmosphere by plants and geological processes, until just a few parts per ten thousand remain. Iron has been stripped by hungry plankton from the seas, as have mercury, lead, zinc, uranium and a great many other elements, all of which have been safely sequestered deep in Earth's rocks. But now the human burrowers in the Earth have arrived, and, as we tunnel into those buried troves, we undo the work of aeons.
Flannery 2010 ch 4
Flannery points out that human beings have combined cultural evolution with technology in a way that allows us to mimic key aspects of evolution by natural selection, but speed it up ten thousand times. ‘Thus we make spears rather than evolve fangs, and weave clothes rather than grow furry coats; and it's this ability, which has been with us from the very beginning, that makes humans so formidable’ (Flannery 2010 ch 6). And it makes humans dangerous and destructive. Self-destructive, in fact.
Evidence of humanity's power to disrupt ecosystems dates almost to the moment our species left its ancestral African homeland. We've eaten our way through one resource after the other as we've spread around the planet, and only after long experience in one place have we acquired the wisdom of managing the land. As a result, it is our misfortune to be only now, perhaps, tentatively emerging from a world in which human genius was so without wisdom that it fractured and disfigured nature's evolutionary bonds to the point of our own self-destruction.
Flannery 2010 ch 6
We seem incapable of appreciating the full richness of nature. Instead of appreciating nature’s plenitude, finding fulfilment therein, we inflate our wants to infinity so that plenitude can never be enough.
Flannery is under no illusions about the human species. If human beings are in the grip of an evolutionary determinism, then there is no hope. Since pouring out of Africa some fifty thousand years ago, human history has been a tale of environmental plunder, pillage and pollution that has destroyed one ecosystem after another. To break that cycle, we need to develop and use our intelligence and our moral capacity, harness our technical power to wiser ends.
By seeing human beings as of the earth, Flannery is on the right lines, giving us the means of fulfilment through the recognition of planetary limits. There is nothing that does not gain from its relation to the very perfection and plenitude of being. In arguing that human beings have the capacity to achieve a cooperative, sustainable, Gaian future, Flannery would call this whole ‘Nature’. The religiously inclined would call it ‘God’. Spinoza calls it both, as Deus sive Natura. Lovelock calls it Gaia. For all of their similarity, these conceptions are not actually the same, and the difference can make all the difference. In the theological conception, there is a transcendence which gives meaning to purely material processes. Darwin was fascinated by worms and the essential role they played in the ecosystem, the way they churned over the land and kept it fresh and healthy. Darwin draws attention to the importance of even the tiniest parts of Nature. In the theological conception of the plenitude of Being, even the worm is a more important worm because an Infinite Being conferred upon it being and a purpose in being. That is not Darwin’s view. To the materialist, there is no such purpose at all in nature. Materialism can provide no principle of personal value. It insists upon life’s materiality and its transience. Flannery is correct to argue that we actually are Earth. But in a materialist conception, we are born of matter for no great purpose, last briefly on the surface of inanimate matter for no great purpose, and are then merged again into the great mass of unliving matter. According to strict biological materialism, humanity, life as such, is no more than a physical accident. There is no mind at work, no special reason, no special purpose with which humanity is endowed. That might be a biologically defensible proposition, but it is to see humankind, life as such, as nothing. If all human beings are equal to something, then they are equal to each other. That is how a belief in God raises human dignity. But if we replace this conception of God with a conception of purely physical Nature, then we retain the view that all human beings are equal, it’s just that they are equal to nothing.
The great merit of the position that Flannery develops in Here on Earth is that it defines what I would call a ‘moral ecology’. This position recognises the role of human morality and intelligence in realising a Gaian mode of living. Flannery states explicitly that ‘respect for nature and respect for our fellow human beings are inextricably interwoven.’ (Flannery 2010: ch 8).
The eco-feminist Carolyn Merchant has written a brilliant book called Earthcare (1995 Routledge). In it, she argues the case for a partnership ethic of earthcare. ‘A partnership ethic sees the human community and the biotic community in a mutual relationship with each other.’ (Merchant 1995: ch 10). This view states that the flourishing of the human and the nonhuman community is achieved through their mutual, living interdependence.
That, in broad terms, is my view, it’s Flannery’s view and it’s Merchant’s view. For Merchant, a partnership ethic has four precepts:
Equity between the human and nonhuman communities.
Moral consideration for humans and nonhuman nature.
Respect for cultural diversity and biodiversity.
Inclusion of women, minorities, and nonhuman nature in the code of ethical accountability.
The key precept here is ‘moral consideration’. In strict materialist terms, that consideration is not inherent in biology and ecology. I agree with Flannery that we belong to and are a part of nature. ‘We actually are Earth’ says Flannery. We come from dust and return to dust. But what we do in between is not merely a matter of biological and ecological determinism, the transitory passing of purposeless matter. Flannery understands and expresses this point very well.
But there is no doubt that the electrochemical processes that are life are entirely consistent with an origin in Earth's crust—our very chemistry tells us that we are, in all probability, of it. This concept of life as living Earthly crust challenges the dignity of some. It should not. We have long understood, from biblical teaching and practical experience, that we are naught but earth: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the English burial service puts it. Indeed, 'dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return' are among the oldest written words we have.
Flannery 2010 ch 4
The problem with an immanentist approach based on either biology or ecology is exemplified by the work of Francis Crick, the co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the double-helical structure of DNA, Crick reveals the lack of purpose that a strictly scientific materialism entails:
'You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'
The problem is that Crick, in paraphrasing Lewis Carroll’s Alice, has badly missed the point. Alice was addressing not human beings but a pack of cards, inanimate objects which were claiming the existential significance that properly belongs to human beings. That’s the illusion that was being shattered. Alice was highlighting morality as what distinguishes human beings from physical things and causality. The full quote from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is: ‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!' (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).
Human beings are moral beings capable of exercising moral choice and taking moral action independently of physical impulse and causality. Human beings can care and do care for each other in a way that inanimate things and physical processes do not. My point is that a Gaian ethic must embody this moral capacity, both with respect to the way that human beings relate to each other and the way that they relate to their planetary home. Any civilisation in which human beings cease to care for each other, or for anything outside of their own egos, seeing others as mere things, will fall down as quickly and as easily as a house of cards. We need a real home, a planetary home, not illusions based on investing inanimate things with existential significance. Human beings grow to their full size in becoming moral beings, capable of moral choice, living in relation to others, in relation to their built and natural environment. Human beings are much more than a pack of cards, much more than biological imperatives and ecological processes. Without a sense of what Merchant calls ‘earthcare’, we become careless with respect to the ecosystems of the Earth. Under the spell of mechanistic materialism, we have been reckless with respect to the conditions of life.
Flannery asks whether Gaia is akin, in its level of organisation, to an organism, an ant colony or an ecosystem. Flannery’s answer is that the level of organisation that can be achieved using geo-pheromones is perhaps best described as a 'commonwealth of virtue'.
In such a commonwealth the various elements are sorted and stored in the most appropriate planetary organ. Non-living parts of the system are coopted for the benefit of life, and there is no 'waste' because species recycle the by-products of others. And there is a tendency, over time, towards increased productivity and interdependence. All of this is achieved in the absence of a command-and-control system, and with only limited ability to elicit specific, system-wide responses.
Flannery 2010 ch 5
A commonwealth of virtue defined in such a way is pretty much what an ecosystem is, the remaining questions relating to how ecosystems are formed and what binds them into coherent entities. Alfred Russel Wallace speculated on the nature of evolutionary processes in a country that remains physically unchanged, ‘just letting heavens' performance run on and on’ (Flannery 2010 ch 5).
But those ancient practices just might teach us something more—that people blessed with healthy, diverse ecosystems are likely to endure and prosper. I say this because environments with intact keystone species are more productive, and therefore better habitats for humans. (Flannery 2010: ch 8)
Flannery argues that human beings should adopt the concept of biophilia so as to appreciate biodiversity as a condition of flourishing. He takes the idea from the work of evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson. Wilson is so impressed by the human urge to preserve biodiversity as to propose that a fundamental love of nature forged in the human species some time in our evolutionary past. He gave this fundamental love the name of 'biophilia', and developed his hypothesis in a book of the same name. Wilson sees biophilia at work whenever human beings appreciate nature, protect it or even help the animals in some way. Of course, Richard Dawkins can always be relied upon to rain on the parade of anyone concerned with morals, imagination, cooperative instincts, social and environmental justice, and a vision of a better future. And, true to form, Dawkins doubts that evolution by natural selection could ever produce such an outcome. I doubt that natural selection could ever produce anything that has any meaning, any purpose, any imagination, anything at all that makes life worthwhile. I doubt that Dawkins’ neo-Darwinism, exalting meaningless materialism, could ever produce anything by way of a flourishing species, let alone a viable civilisation. Has Dawkins’ natural selection ever offered us anything of any meaning in ethics and politics, in human life and culture? I may have missed it. Human beings are meaning seeking creatures. Wilson’s biophilia is entirely plausible as a powerful evolutionary explanation of human behaviour. It makes sense that a flourishing species must, as it evolves, learn to value its environment.
But to be fair to Dawkins, his biological instincts are right. His meaningless, mechanical materialism is so ingrained that he seems programmed to smell the vices of religion, morality and vitalism at a million paces. It is what led him to castigate Lovelock’s Gaia thesis when it first appeared. His disagreement with E.O. Wilson over biophilia has deeper roots. Dawkins’ instincts are right. There is more than biology at work here. For the term ‘biophilia’ originates not with the biologist Wilson, but with the German social psychologist Erich Fromm, a man whose work can best be described as a humanist and ethical marxism.
I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.
Fromm, E. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1965
The interesting thing about Fromm is that whilst he is not a religious believer, his moral perspective is steeped in Judaism and Christianity, and emphasises human moral capacity independent of natural processes and imperatives. The man knows the Bible and has absorbed its lessons. He condemns idolatry and compares it with Marx’s alienation thesis. Importantly, Fromm’s conception of biophilia builds on this moral autonomy to draw us beyond biological processes to achieve a new unity, with each other, as in the Judaeo-Christian ethic, but also with the whole organism within which human activity is set. Fromm's biophilia guides human beings to a future in which human and environmental flourishing are inextricably connected. But it emphasises the importance of moral intelligence.
Fromm’s emphasis on moral capacity corrects the tendency of biologists to perhaps downplay human dignity when writing of the centrality of interconnectedness within the superorganism. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake argues the same thing, and it can lead to the accusation that such a view reduces human beings to the status of ants, unthinking actors who are fitted to their place within a whole that possesses overarching significance. In this view, the whole entity is more competent and productive than the sum of its parts. Flannery writes here that ‘superorganisms comprise individuals whose degree of integration and organisation sits between that of an ecosystem and a multi-cellular creature such as ourselves.’
Coming from a background in political philosophy, I can immediately identify the dangers of investing the whole with a status that is greater than and independent of the parts. I can already hear liberal critics alleging totalitarianism here, in the same way that they accused Hegel and Marx of investing the state with a supra-individual significance that is potentially oppressive of real individuals. It’s not that the biological argument for superorganisms is wrong, it isn’t; it’s just that it needs to be supplemented with a recognition of the moral autonomy and capacity of human beings.
And that’s what Flannery does. Flannery is well aware of the problem. He cites Plato’s argument that 'the best ordered state is one in which as many people as possible use the words "mine" and "not mine" in the same sense of the same things... What is more, such a state most nearly resembles an individual'. Those are the principles upon which an ant colony works, Flannery notes. Plato understood that humanity would not take readily to such a system, and so was led to propose a programme of eugenics to create a race more amenable to the idea …. With his accent on morality, Flannery avoids the pitfalls of biology in politics and marks out the pathway to a common good by affirming the dignity of all the parts within the whole, rather than fitting them and subordinating their ends to the end of the whole.
As things turned out, our species hit upon another schema to order its societies—one which is entirely inimical to Plato's solution. Called the democratic process, it puts the individual and his or her will front and centre. Plato had much to say about it—all under the heading of imperfect societies—and democracy must be classified in this way when compared to the societies of ants, which perform like pieces of well-oiled machinery. But democracy is uniquely suited to the ordering of societies of willful and self-centered apes. (Flannery 2010 ch 10).
It’s an old question from political philosophy – how do we develop the capacity to identify our individual self-interest with the greater good of the whole and so move to a peaceful, just and egalitarian society that functions in the interests of each and all? A moral ecology is not a case of individuals sacrificing themselves for the whole. That would be inimical to human freedom, thus defeating the whole purpose of evolution if it is defined in terms of the flourishing of the individual members of a species, not merely as the survival of the species as a whole.
Flannery makes the realisation of democracy central to resolution of the conflict between individual and collective freedom.
The growth of democracy is vital to a sustainable future. It alone can provide security and secure rights, such as property rights to the individual, which ensure that most have 'something to lose' and so will not steeply discount their futures. While the number and strength of democracies are growing, we still have a very long way to go before we live in an entirely democratic world.. (Flannery 2010 ch 21).
Egoistic self-interest dissolves common bonds, erodes the value we put on our ties with others, and ultimately reduces our sense of the future into the immediate present.
Civilising such powerful interests, which are deeply rooted in libertarian culture, is an extraordinary challenge—and already one element looks set to be the test bed of whether humanity can overcome such suicidal self-interests.
Flannery 2010 ch 15
Flannery sees hope for the universal ethic in the fact that, ‘despite our huge population, humans are one of the most genetically uniform of mammal species, there being more genetic diversity in a random sample of about fifty chimpanzees from west Africa than in all seven billion of us.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 10).
Human beings share an essential humanness and this makes possible a commonality of human understanding. The problem is that, regardless of this commonality, human beings have ‘been very good at living as if our family, our clan or our nation is the only truly civilised and 'proper' group of people on Earth, and believing this has enabled us to kill and rob and maim each other without seeing that we are thus damaging ourselves.’ It’s the age old question of how we can forge bonds of commonality and universality out of societies that are often fractious, competitive and separate individuals from each other, setting communities and nations against each other. But the basis for the peaceful, just and egalitarian society exists in the essential humanness we share with each other. As Flannery argues, ‘in this commonality lies the foundations of our universal human civilisation, as well as its hopes for a future.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 10). And Flannery is also correct when he argues that ‘the glue that holds complex superorganisms together is not genetic, but social—yet it is enhanced by a sufficiently narrow genetic base to enable universal understanding.’ The glue that holds complex superorganisms together is not biologically given but is social, cultural and moral. Dawkins, sticking to his narrow conception of natural selection, may well be sceptical. That’s fine. But it means that he has nothing of value to contribute to the debate. So we can move on.
We in effect became the most powerful of evolutionary forces, bending natural selection to our own ends, and so creating creatures the likes of which had never existed before and which could survive only in a miniature ecosystem of our own making.
Flannery 2010 ch 10
The task before us is to morally, consciously and creatively live up to this evolutionary power we have developed. This is more than genetic inheritance. Flannery recognises that a human superorganism is ‘a complex of ideas’. ‘While we humans may be built by our genes, our civilisations are built from ideas.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 11). And it is interesting to note how enduring ideas are. The moral and intellectual legacy is more robust and more enduring than physical and technical power: ‘Despite the ultimate collapse of Rome, some aspects of Roman civilisation never vanished. Its language and laws survived in various forms, for example. But the great infrastructure—the roads, the water-supply systems and the integrated reach for resources they facilitated—was not maintained.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 11). Whilst human superorganisms exchange goods and ideas, it is the transfer of ideas which is enormously beneficial. Whilst physical resources may be dissipated and technical powers may falter, it is never possible for humanity to ever know less than it once knew. The stock of ideas can only ever increase, never diminish. Once an idea exists, it always exists, even if it may be forgotten. Learning only ever accrues, it can never diminish. I can remember reading this point being made by R Buckminster Fuller in Utopia or Oblivion (1972) and thinking that an awareness and dissemination of this fact gives us a powerful source of optimism for the future.
Flannery brings his arguments for the realisation of democracy, for a Gaian holism and for a universal ethic based on essential humanness together to define a planetary commonality that is capable of resolving ‘the tragedy of the commons.’ Flannery proposes the sustainable management of the global commons through the ability to exclude outsiders; clear, mutually agreed rules about who is entitled to do what; the ability to monitor the resource; conflict resolution mechanisms. This is all possible. Human surveillance is now able to detect transgressors and monitor resources globally. ‘What we still lack are the political aspects—the clear, agreed rules, the penalties and the conflict resolution—and until we achieve them through the only feasible mechanism we currently possess, which is a global treaty, we are likely to continue to fail to manage our global commons, to the detriment of all.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 21).
Flannery takes a holistic approach to the ecology of places and proposes a treaty administered through a future Gaian Security Council, sufficiently empowered and constituted so as to be the ultimate authority over global commons.
I wish him well. This would amount to the realisation of Dante’s ideal of ‘universal monarchy’, Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’, of all those schemes for world government and world peace advocated by such great minds as Pufendorf, Grotius, Leibniz, Russell. If we can achieve this Gaian planetary politics and ethics, then we can achieve international socialism to boot. It would be a global commonwealth of virtue. Those who stand to lose from such a thing will organise and fight back – they already are, and their power can be seen at every climate conference. Flannery is under no illusions. ‘It's hard to imagine the nascence of such an organisation today, but the children of a globalised world, looking back at our abject failures, might give it birth. The trouble is that the threats to our environment just keep growing and now have the potential to overwhelm us before we achieve such wisdom.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 21).
Peace Garden
Are we writing for ourselves or for future generations? First principles are first principles and apply in any time and place. We can adopt them according to what Cicero called right reason. Or we can fail and go to a well deserved demise, bequeathing those principles to those charged with the responsibility of rebuilding on the basis of our ruins.
For Flannery, environmentalism amounts to much more than reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we are emitting into the atmosphere, and he’s right. Imagine that we discover a form of no-carbon energy and use it to fuel the current rapacious economic system. Carbon emissions would be zero, but we would be very far from living in an ecological civilisation. Technologies deal with the means for getting from here to there, the realisation of an ecological civilisation depends upon harnessing our technical and instrumental means to an ecological end. Flannery claims that "re-wilding the planet is going to become the great project of the 2lst century; you can already see it beginning, but it's going to become quite an obsession". “If we wish to increase nature's influence a re-wilding is required—a reconstruction of vital ecosystems on a scale sufficient to allow them to operate optimally without intrusive human management.”
There is something magnificent about the idea of a wild and free planet, one whose functioning is maintained principally by that commonwealth of virtue formed from all biodiversity.
The source of Flannery’s optimism may be his background in palaeontology. ‘It just gave me a fantastic sense of time and context." The philosopher Spinoza argued that we achieve freedom when we see the world ‘under the aspect of eternity’ (sub specie aeternitatis) and not just ‘under the aspect of time’ (sub specie durationis). It seems that Flannery, having learned to think in unimaginably vast timeframes of millions, even billions of years, has acquired something of this cosmic optimism. The transitory affairs and obsessions of human life need to be set within a much bigger picture in order to have a greater sense of what, ultimately, is important.
This perspective certainly comes in handy when it comes to appraising the world of politics. ‘How can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?’ asks Plato. Such a spectator thinks nothing at all of political life, even less of a political realm populated by overpaid rubber-stampers, time-servers, careerists and lickspittles of power, mouthpieces of the industrial lobbies. Such people are powerful in only the most transitory and ephemeral of terms. Flannery dismisses political attempts to oppose and unravel green legislation as an irrelevance. These characters in the world of business and politics who are involved in the systematic pillaging of the planet are thoroughly small and insignificant when set in the context of the bigger picture, they lack the wit and the capacity to live the lives they have. And the human species is capable of much better. "I get an immense sense of meaning from the thought that perhaps we are the very first intelligent super organism to evolve. And perhaps it is our destiny to carry life to the rest of the universe as far as can be imagined. "It's a bit sci-fi, I know, but that seems to be the position we're in. And to throw that away just because we can't rein in our greenhouse gas production? Ludicrous."
As he brings his book to a close, Flannery returns to Darwin.
"Had I just a moment with a resurrected Darwin, I'd like to share with him the spectacle of heavens' performance as we now understand its from the moment of Earth's creation, through to the plains of Africa where our species took shape, and on to this century. We'd watch this Earth - a sphere of stupendous complexity - transforming itself over an immensity of time, guided by the evolutionary process that he so brilliantly elucidated.
"If were granted one conversation with Darwin, I'd ask him what he made of Bill Hamilton's last project. Hamilton was using computer models to investigate whether evolution builds ecosystems that over time, become more resilient I and stable: as he put it, how likely is it that a 'Genghis Khan species' will soon arrive and destroy all? It's a question that we, as individuals and as a global civilisation, must answer.”
We will have to choose one way or the other, and soon. ‘For the best of our science and plain commonsense are telling us that our influence on Earth is eroding our future, and that we cannot escape responsibility.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 23).
Darwin gave us this extraordinary gift of elucidating the evolutionary mechanism, but over the last 150 years we've been very poor at taking that foundation of knowledge and trying to understand the planet as a whole and how it works. Reductionist science, where you take the world apart into ever smaller units, is tremendously powerful. But at some point someone has to take a holistic view to make sense of it all and perhaps that's the sort of scientist I am. That Bill Hamilton's last project remains unanswered shows us how little we still understand about evolution's legacy.
Flannery advocates a large view of who we are and of what the world is so that we are able to reach our full potential. Affirming a holistic, Wallacean understanding of how ecosystems, superorganisms and Gaia herself have been built through mutual interdependency, Flannery establishes the conditions for human and planetary flourishing.
For all of the history of our destructive behaviour, ‘we should take solace from the fact that, from the very beginning, we have loved one another and lived in company, thereby, through giving up much, forging the greatest power on Earth.’ (Flannery 2010 ch 23).
Tired of fighting the forces of global capital, state power and climate change denial, many environmentalists are prone to write off the cause of social and environmental justice as hopeless. The cause is far from hopeless. Taking a longer perspective, we are witnessing the dying days of a particular mode of social organisation. It’s decay and death is not the fall of civilisation as such, far from it. Flannery shows us the possible alternative society that lies before us:
But there is another possibility—that we will use our intelligence to avert catastrophe and secure a sustainable future. We now have most of the tools required to do this and, after ten thousand years of building ever larger political units, we stand just a few steps away from the global cooperation required. But do we have it in us to take those last steps ? Between our evolved genes and our social structures, are we constituted so as to cooperate at a global level?
The immediate challenge before us is to manage our atmospheric and oceanic global commons, with nations ceding real authority in order to act in common to secure the welfare of all. And to succeed, that means the assertion of the primacy of politics over economics, capital and private power. This is the biggest flaw in Flannery’s book – the absence of political economy. If the power of capital is not addressed, the call for the enforcement of common rules for the common good will be ineffective. That is precisely what governments have been trying and failing to achieve at successive climate conferences. Flannery’s appeal to long term common interests presupposes a social identity that does not exist. The ecological case needs to be set within specific social relations. Without that being done, there is a danger that the argument will lack social relevance.
We need to stop our dismantling of Earth's life-support system, recognise our essential oneness with each other and with nature, and unite in action to secure our common wealth.
Far from being gloomy, Flannery believes that we are on the verge of a profound change in Gaia:
if the global human superorganism survives and evolves, its surveillance systems and initiatives to optimise ecosystem function raise the prospect of an intelligent Earth—an Earth that would, through her global human superorganism, be able to foresee malfunction, instability or other danger, and to act with precision. If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were, as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, 'one entire, perfect living creature'.
As I read Here on Earth, my excitement grew and grew. I could feel the adrenalin rising as I turned the pages. Point after point, argument after argument, expressed my own values and ideas. At a certain point, I will have to confess, I was overtaken by a certain depression and even jealousy. Tim Flannery, I realised, had written the book that I had been preparing to write for a few years now. Apart from the absence of political economy – which is a big absence, given the way that the capital system is implicated in the transgression of planetary boundaries – Here on Earth is the book I have always wanted to write. It is said that if you are going to write a book, then write the book you would want to read. I don’t need to. I’ve just read it. I thoroughly recommend the book. Flannery has signposted the way to the flowering of a new ecological civilisation in the future, once the rational madness and mechanical ugliness of the present social disorder has passed.