FLOURISH WELL OR ABANDON HOPE
In St Helens, Merseyside, UK, the local paper the St Helens Star has been giving extensive coverage to a couple of issues. One concerns the town’s motto, the other concerns wind turbines. St Helens is a pretty ugly industrial town, an industrial wasteland struggling for life, now that the businesses have closed and the work has gone and the promises of progress through industrialisation have proven hollow, yet again). So the siting of wind turbines in the few green areas around the town is a controversial issue. But at least the debate raises the issue of renewable energy, what it is and whether or not we need it. The St Helens Star prints letters from characters who cannot even get Chris Huhne’s name right (misspelling it as Hulme), and whose sneering ignorance on renewables is buttressed by a long, long children’s poem, the moral of which is that the wind doesn’t always blow when it is needed. You know, the engineers had never realised that! So much for wind turbines. Even better, another comment dismisses all those who believe in climate change causing global warming as ‘cranks’, insisting that Man Made Global Warming is ‘increasingly discredited’. The fact that the Arctic has just melted, with sea ice at its lowest recorded level and with scientists pointing to the emission of greenhouse gases as the cause, was receiving a good deal of TV coverage at the same time. But no, news of this had clearly not reached St Helens.
Coming to the second issue, the St Helens town motto. Until the boundary changes of 1974, St Helens’ motto had been Ex Terra Lucem, (‘Out of the Earth Came Light’). It was then changed to Prosperitas in Excelsis (‘Flourishing Well’), with no great controversy. And there the matter rested until Danny Boyle decided to use the old motto in the ceremony which opened the London Olympics, highlighting the industrial revolution and Britain as the first industrial nation. The effect was immediate. Like some subordinate, downtrodden people used to being ignored, many in St Helens rose up, fingers pointing to the screen, exclaiming ‘it’s us’, as though industrialisation and the London Olympics was all about St Helens. Hilariously, the narrative seems to be along the lines of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ destroyed in the fire of industrial revolution, poverty and squalor, and reconstructed as the New Jerusalem by Attlee’s Labour government. Not so. William Blake never compromised with the kingdom of the Beast. His Jerusalem was not to be created by the Satanic means of mechanistic, instrumental reason, what Blake calls Urizen. Blake’s Jerusalem remains to be built.
But St Helens people responded with pride to the way their role in the industrial revolution was highlighted. Take the ‘St Helens First’ magazine – St Helens’ Council’s Community Magazine - of Autumn 2012. ‘The rich heritage of St Helens featured prominently in the opening ceremony of London 2012. The town’s old Latin motto, Ex Terra Lucem – Out of the Earth Came Light – was used for some of the industrial revolution scenes created by filmmaker Danny Boyle…. The motto used to feature on the town’s coat of arms and was a homage to St Helens’ mining heritage’.
What, exactly, is this heritage? As time passes, it is all the more easy to get misty eyed about the mining industry. How quickly forgotten are all the struggles over pay and conditions, the health-impairing and destroying illnesses that sent miners to early graves. And if this heritage is such a cause for pride, why did the miners have to constantly strike over pay and conditions? How many remember the General Strike of 1926, when the miners struck for nine months, and other unions gave up after nine days? Or Margaret Thatcher’s reference to the miners as ‘the enemy within’? The vilification of Arthur Scargill? How many remember the lies spread by the press about Arthur Scargill, the misinformation spread about the miners? No, we are all expected to get misty eyed about our ‘rich industrial heritage’. Council leader Marie Rimmer said: ‘What a tremendous tribute to the borough’s historic legacy and our key role in the industrial revolution which featured so prominently in the London 2012 ceremony’. She should read about the use of troops against St Helens miners whenever they complained about poor pay and conditions in the nineteenth century.
That industrial legacy is so rich that the St Helens economy is on its knees and its people are desperate for work. Which begs the question of where all those promises of progress through industrialisation went. The Earth was mined and the land built on. The result is an industrial wasteland. Those who want a return to the old motto argue that it gives us ‘hope about the future’, thinking that, somehow, those old long departed industries that exploited the workers and despoiled the land will come back. Greens are frequently accused of advocating a ‘return to nature’, but here is a yearning for a ‘return to industry’ that is hopelessly nostalgic. Greens are also accused of pitting the environment against ‘the economy’, something which a certain class of people can only understand as ‘jobs’. It is impossible to avoid such a stark contradistinction when so many people cling so pathetically to a distorted memory of a past that never was.
Notions of the ‘rich heritage’ of the industrial revolution stick in the craw as the full extent of the damage done to the environment in terms of carbon emissions causing greenhouse gases is increasingly revealed. This has to be the clearest case of cognitive dissonance in history. A people used and a town abused by industry gleaming with pride at their role in bringing about runaway global heating.
I focus on St Helens because it is a microcosm of a wider problem, that of wilful ignorance, moral cowardice and downright stupidity. That is a dangerous cocktail. The philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that some people would rather die than think, and that is precisely what they do as a result – die.
Try to raise issues of climate change in certain newspapers, and it’s open house for deniers and ignoramuses, with the standard denialist lines like ‘no conclusive evidence’, ‘no proof’, and ‘climate change is a natural thing’ trotted out endlessly. I cited three different sources with impeccable scientific credentials in letters to the Star, the government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir John Beddington, former climate sceptic Professor Richard Muller, and Oxford and Cambridge scientist Stephen Emmott. All three were presenting the latest evidence firming up the case for human made global warming and demanding action. Nothing was printed. Instead, we had letters which asserted that only ‘cranks’ subscribe to MMGW, there was no ‘conclusive evidence’ for the thesis, and that the whole case was unravelling. The latest research shows entirely the contrary. I cited it, but the letter was not published.
It should, by now, be clear how rapidly the atmosphere's carbon content has been increasing since the industrial revolution.
A record melt is reported in the Arctic, and scientists are clear that man made greenhouse gases are to blame.
The relentless loss of sea-ice from the Arctic represents a grave threat to life on earth. By some grim irony, however, this ecological crisis is being seen as a business opportunity, with oil companies competing for the rights to drill. The very commercial forces which bear the most responsibility for global warming are the ones reaping the greatest economic benefit from the climate crisis.
Professor Richard Muller is a former climate change sceptic who now argues that ‘essentially all’ of the temperature increase of 1.5F over the most recent 50 years results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. Muller now calls himself a ‘converted sceptic’, writing: "Our results show that the average temperature of the Earth's land has risen by 2.5F over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases."
It is not ‘light’ that is coming out of the earth but a potential warming of 4-5C. The government’s chief scientific adviser is predicting ‘dire consequences’ as a result.
Whilst the great objective of intergovernmental action has been to restrict the rise in average global temperature to no more than 2C, an increasing number of scientists think that a warming by 5C is becoming more and more likely.
In which case, Stephen Emmott, Cambridge and Oxford scientist warns, the world will become "a complete hellhole" riven by conflict, famine, flood and drought.
There is little hope for the future here.
Ruling out engineering solutions and technological fixes as evasions of the real problem, Emmott argues that the only answer is behavioural change. We need to have fewer things and simply be more as persons if we are to survive and thrive. It is growth in the qualities of persons that matters more than expansion in the quantities of things.
These findings should have been a wake-up call. The 'door is closing' on chance to contain global warming, says Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, the world’s foremost authority on energy infrastructures. "If we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever." Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s head of environment, calls it ‘a deafening warning on our climate’. Scientists have been raising the alarm for decades now and have issued many such warnings before. They have been ignored. The scientists may as well have been talking to themselves. In which case, Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species is appropriate reading. These scientists may as well have been performing a soliloquy as the human race comes to face the final curtain.
With reference to the melting Arctic ice caps, Damian Carrington laments that the ‘world's distress signal is ignored’ (‘We have changed the face of the planet’ The Guardian 15 Sept 2012).
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. How many people are in command of the science of climate change? More than that, the effects of climate change are not immediate, visible, apparent. To many, the climate wars between scientists and deniers are too abstract to comprehend, a war fought via computers and statistics and charts, sanitised by TV and the guardians of media balance. Dying cormorants are about the only casualties we are allowed to see. But there is more going on here than is immediately apparent. Animals have always become significant symbols at times of human crisis, issuing warnings and pointing lessons. It would be difficult to imagine a more telling metaphor for the looming climate crisis than a cormorant drowning in oil.
In the book The Miner's Canary: Unravelling the Mysteries of Extinction (1991), Niles Eldredge writes:
We destroy habitats for our own short-term economic good. We change the proportion of gases in the atmosphere, decreasing ozone and raising global temperatures. We even single out particular prey items for overexploitation, driving them to—and sometimes over—the brink of extinction.
Eldredge 1991 xv
It is now abundantly clear to all with eyes to see and the nerve to look that the global miner's canary is in desperate health. There is a mass extinction underway, and the human race will not escape its reach.
The cormorant is the symbol of a greater climate crisis. A native of the open seas, here is a bird whose feathers have been tarred, with the result that it has been forced to crawl in the swamp of ancient wastes which human technical intelligence and immoral greed has brought to the surface. At some point, the human race, in burning these ancient wastes, will likewise suffocate in an atmosphere overloaded with carbon dioxide.
The Large Family Magritte
It is in face of the looming environmental crisis that the debate concerning the most appropriate motto for St Helens must be set.
Prosperitas in Excelxis or ‘Flourishing Well’ is an appropriate motto for our times. In contrast, ‘out of the earth came light’ is too closely connected with the non-renewing carboniferous economy which has bequeathed such a legacy of toxicity and waste as to make the planet progressively less habitable. Bringing to the surface the ancient wastes which the Earth in her wisdom has kept buried beneath her skin has brought us to this ecological impasse. The extraction of fossil fuels from the earth and their burning to fuel industry amounts to the exploitation of dead matter, creating not sustainable living but a necropolis which has left a legacy of ecological devastation, extensive toxicity, and a vast amount of non-disposable waste.
The threads are so intricately meshed that the fabric of life is weakened and prone to unravel with the removal of even a few threads in the pattern of living and being, yet human beings seem oblivious to the threat their behaviour and the mass extinction it causes represents.
This exploitation has already destroyed a large proportion of the biosystem. Further, scientists such as E. O. Wilson, Peter Raven, and Norman Myers argue that the current extinction of species is a pandemic so extensive that one has to go back some 65 million years ago at the end of the Mesozoic and the beginning of the Cenozoic period for a parallel.
By exploiting nature this way we are making the planet progressively less habitable. The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is now underway, grace of humankind. The new Earth has acquired a force that can break the crucible of biodiversity, unravelling the fabric of life.
By exploiting nature this way we are making the planet progressively less habitable. On current trends, nature’s life support systems will be damaged irreparably and will no longer be capable of supporting civilised forms of life.
Scientist E.O. Wilson calls this ‘the death of life’. Wilson describes humanity as a ‘Star Wars civilisation with stone age emotions’. We are ‘a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life’. Yet he concludes that ‘people are capable of being a lot better than they have been’. They had better be.
Whilst taking Wilson’s point here, the idea that the Stone Age mentality was primitive or backward can be firmly rejected. It is now clear that hunter-gatherer societies were and are remarkably egalitarian in structure, much more peaceful and ecologically aware than current ‘civilised’ societies, and that women could well have held the more powerful position. This being the case, it is our Star Wars emotions that are the biggest threat to life.
The idea that there is a goal of life, a purpose, is at the heart of most ancient ethical theories. The picture of the sane and healthy, ‘flourishing’, personality comes from Aristotle and his concept of eudaimonia, conveying the idea of ‘enjoying a good (successful, fortunate) life' through the creative realisation of innate potentiality. The person who lives the kind of life for which human beings are most suited will be the happiest in fully realizing his or her potential.
‘Flourishing well’ in this sense is now the key to the survival of civilised life. Technology, alone and as such, is not the solution. Technology is merely an extension of what we are. If we are selfish, stupid and destructive, technology will be a faithful mirror. If we are indifferent to each other and to our environments, then technology will also be indifferent. There is a danger that, in our over-reliance on technology, we become orphans of our machine civilisation. Drawn further out of our biological and ecological matrix through our technical brilliance, we have become more dependent on an all-pervasive but ethically indifferent technology. 'Formerly’, Einstein argued, 'one had perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means and tremendous possibilities but confused goals'. Einstein’s paradox points to the inversion of means and ends which characterises modern society. Max Weber wrote of the inversion of means and ends, the way instrumental power displaced goals and purposes and imposed its imperatives ‘without regard for persons.’ Such encroachment of means upon ends, of means enlarged to displace ends and become ends, is at the heart of the modern world. We live in a Weberian world in which there is a wealth of means but a dearth of ends. For this reason, meaninglessness keeps rearing its ugly head within a wealth of material means. Left to its own dynamics, technological and industrial innovation rides roughshod over places and people. The planet is instrumentalised without regard for persons and places.
A change in behaviour means that we need to design a society which is simple in means and rich in ends. I propose ‘flourishing well’ as a life-affirming goal. The idea of flourishing runs counter to the modern tendency of means becoming enlarged to displace ends, replacing purposes with imperatives, forcing people to live according to ends which are external to them.
Aristotle's ethical philosophy is called 'eudaimonistic', from the Greek eudaimonia, meaning ‘good’ (eu) and ‘god’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘demon’ (daimon). The eudaimonistic sense of life as possessing an inherent teleology has been thoroughly uprooted in the modern world. This is what Max Weber emphasised when he characterized the modern world 'disenchanted'.
The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"
Weber, "Science as a Vocation" in Gerth and Mills 1977:155
For Weber, the disenchantment of the world is a rationalisation that lacks moral significance and content. Our fate is to live without morality, without the foundation of moral truth. Instead, there is nothing but the irreducible subjectivism of values, a polytheism of warring gods. Morality has become a value judgement, a matter of opinion.
The origin of the term ‘disenchantment’ is Friedrich Schiller and what he called die Entgotterung der Nature. This is the ‘dedivinization’ or, more accurately, the ‘dis-godding’ of nature (Herman, 1981: 57). Philosophers such as Toynbee (1974: 143-5) and Passmore (1980: 10) argue that this process of disenchantment, denying the sense of the sacred in the world, made it possible for human beings to employ their technology to exploit nature with complete indifference to the qualities of natural objects.
Weber’s disenchantment is therefore a process of ‘disgodding’, a dedivinization in which Nature is stripped of a sense of the sacred and is reduced to dead, factual matter, available for technological appropriation and commercial exploitation, to be used according to human desires and projects. Science, it is claimed, studies Nature as objective, ‘dead matter’. The phrase is significant. The word matter comes from the Latin materia, which is linked etymologically to the Latin mater, meaning ‘mother’. In rendering Nature objective as ‘dead matter’, scientists are studying the corpse of the ancient Mother Goddess. Civilisation lives off it as a necropolis.
Disenchantment is a stripping of values from the world, a demoralisation. In accordance with the instrumental rationality which is at the core of modern society, scientific reason firmly places the focus upon mechanisms, rules and laws to the exclusion of purposes, goals and principles.
To see nature as an organism infused with purposes, goals and principles is to envisage a re-divinisation that would serve to check the technological exploitation of the environment. In his book Whole Earth Discipline, engineer and scientist Stewart Brand argues that ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ He then proceeds to argue for nuclear power, biotechnology, GE food and geo-engineering in the most hubristic of terms. To ‘get good’ at living as gods requires that we re-enchant nature and recognise that our flourishing is conditional upon the proper, healthy functioning of nature as a whole. To live well as gods requires our recognition of the divinity within nature. To relocate this divinity from nature and invest it in our technology is not to get good at being gods but merely to further entrench the process of dis-godding that has brought us to this ecological impasse.
John Simmons (circle of) The Sleep of Titania
Weber describes modernity as an ‘iron cage’ which has replaced morality and moral choice and responsibility with material determinism.
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1985:181
Weber’s point is that the asceticism of religious morality created the mentality which prepared the ground for the determinism of machine production, with material things coming to acquire an inexorable, existential power over the lives of their human creators. Weber never lived to see the day that asceticism would come to be replaced with hedonism, the psychic accompaniment to the materialist treadmill of endless production and consumption, a rapacious hunger that will ensure that the earth will be plundered until it has given up its last piece of ‘free’ energy.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
Weber 1985:182
Until the inversion of means and ends is addressed, and life re-enchanted, the accumulation of quantity through the exploitation of the planet will continue to misfire, delivering material riches at the expense of human happiness.
Which begs the question of whether it is possible to explore our ecological self while imprisoned in the steel hard cage of a rationalised modern necropolis.
Weber’s description of the modern world as a ‘mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance’ is apt. The modern individual is subject to a material determinism without and an egoistic compulsion within, droning his or her life away within a material mechanism that proceeds without regard for persons, yet nevertheless inflating the importance of the most trivial things in order to make the point that, despite all evidence to the contrary, ‘I’ matter.
The motto Prosperitas in Excelxis fits the new economics, the economics we need to ensure planetary and human flourishing as a symbiotic process. Prosperity is more than material wealth. ‘There is no wealth but life’ wrote John Ruskin. Ruskin’s message has been ignored for a century and, it seems, still not enough people grasp its meaning and relevance. We need that new definition of prosperity as flourishing. The economist Tim Jackson has written the book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet to demonstrate the need to shift the economy from the endless production of quantities of things to the quality of life. To those so dull-witted as to shout utopian, the book received the endorsement of Jeremy Leggett, a venture-capital-backed energy industry boss, a private equity investor, and an Institute of Directors director of the month. At a time when we are on the brink of moving to the new economics, with political leaders such as President Sarkozy, Nobel-prizewinning economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, and psychologists like Oliver James pointing to health, well-being and happiness as key economic indicators, it is remarkably backward looking for a town that is now no more than an industrial wasteland to be getting all misty eyed for a past that never was, as though all the social injustice, squalid living conditions, poor health, industrial conflict and political oppression never happened. Those expressing nostalgia for St Helens’ industrial heritage neither know nor care about the price paid for industrial progress. And that’s what is most worrying. Those who lack knowledge of history bear tyranny and oppression easily, for they lack a standard with which to compare the present. As miserable as the conditions for the workers mining the Earth in order to fuel the capital system were, the full price for the extraction and burning of fossil fuels has yet to be paid. We are staring into the abyss of runaway climate change, and people are seduced by spectacle and image. They are like the prisoners who see the shadows cast on the wall by the fire in Plato’s cave and mistake them for the true reality, unable to see the true light that lies in the world outside. 2,400 years on from the time that Plato taught us to distinguish between appearance and reality, far too many people are still falling for the illusion.
Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison,
Whose chains and massy walls
We feel but cannot see.
Percy Shelley Queen Mab
Flourishing, as the growth of the integral human personality, isn't simply or even mainly a matter of technology or economics or material things in general. In essence, flourishing is driven by our psychology, so that the world we create around us and thrive – or otherwise – within corresponds to our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and ambitions. So those numerous prophets of economic growth, who believe that a greater quantity of material things will deliver freedom and happiness, and those many well-intentioned environmentalists who argue that the solution is a matter of cleaning up existing energy infrastructures and applying the latest technology, are deluding themselves. The scientist Stephen Emmott hits the nail on the head when he argues for a change in human behaviour. We will only change the external world and its purposes once we have looked inwardly and changed ourselves.
Individuals are quick to insist on their rights, plenty of which turn out to be conditional upon the right to endlessly expanding material development and consumption. There is no sense of moral responsibility here, no notion of balancing responsibilities within a larger, thriving organism. "I", “Me” and “Mine” before all others, charity begins at home – and in the selfish perspective it ends there. But charity that is worthy of the name leaves home, expands the circle of moral concern, strikes roots and grows in the wider world.
“This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results …. you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
The self-orientated psychology of "I", “Me” and “Mine” before the unity of each and all is the counterpart of endless material expansion. Far from enabling human beings to live well, this psychology is narrow and dysfunctional. The psychologist Erich Fromm argues that capitalism is an economic system born of scarcity, a psychological scarcity as much as a material scarcity. It is a system and a mentality which is incapable of achieving fulfilment. The system thrives by endlessly stimulating wants and keeping human beings in a constant state of dissatisfaction. The result is a pervasive anxiety, despite the endless accumulation of material quantity. Whilst human beings remain within this egoistic frame of mind, they are unable to sustain anything other than their own individual selves. That’s all that matters in an atomistic society in which each treats all others as means to personal ends, with the result that all come to be subordinated to an external material compulsion and an internal psychic compulsion. The notion of ‘sustainable development’ is anomalous in these circumstances. To argue that individuals should act in a sustainable way presupposes a social identity which does not exist. Individuals have to shift for themselves on the market, and therefore have to put their own private interests first and foremost. The social identity which connects the individual good with the general good does not exist in these conditions. There is a clear bifurcation between egoism and altruism, and appeals to a general good simply lack social relevance. Notions of any good greater than the individual betray a lofty idealism that is likely to fall on deaf ears. In a social system in which private gain takes precedence over the general good, taking on the part of the individual will always outweigh or outstrip giving to others. For this reason, "sustainable development" without a change in social relations will merely be the environmental rationalisation of more economic development. It is a contradiction in terms which brings about further environmental destruction. In contrast, a conception of ‘sustainable living’ taps into the notion of flourishing and presupposes a radical change in the human psychology. It means valuing ends over means once more.
John Maynard Keynes looked forward to the good society in which we shall once more value ends over means. Keynes, indeed, encapsulates the moral paradoxes of modernity. Distinguishing needs from wants, Keynes looked at the progress of modern technique and organisation and concluded that the time is coming when everybody would be so rich that 'we shall then once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.’ So far so good. However, Keynes warns: ‘But beware!, the time for all that is not yet. For at least another 100 years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone else that fair is foul and foul is fair : for foul is useful and fair is not'.
Even a brilliant mind like Keynes failed to spring the trap. With an economic system in which endlessly inflating wants takes the place of satisfying needs, the time for valuing ends will never come. Satisfaction implies limits and the capital system based on the endless self-expansion of values can recognise no such end point. Keynes allows the nihilism of the capital economy to blind his conscience and silence his reason. His reasoning has all the diabolism of Faust. 'If moral considerations stand in the way of progress, we must turn a blind eye to them in order that men in the future may have the morality lacking in us.' On those grounds, human beings in the future will never have morality. By setting up an opposition between material progress and moral considerations, there will never come a time for morality in an economy of endless expansion. Since capital must continually expand its values or collapse, there will never be a ‘then’ for ethics. The capital system is nihilistic in the sense of proceeding not according to ends but according to instrumental imperatives, accumulation for the sake of further accumulation. The process of accumulation lacks an ending point at which we proceed to ethics. The west has had centuries of material progress. The same period of material progress has witnessed the collapse of traditional morality. This reveals a clear error in Keynes’ thinking. By arguing that with material expansion 'we shall then once more value ends above means', Keynes tacitly acknowledges that humankind must once have valued ends above means in the past. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the Prophets!’ (Marx). That’s the principle upon which the capital system rests and that’s the principle that thrives by the stimulation of false needs, protecting profit margins by false scarcity. But if, as Keynes states, we once were able to value ends over means, why do we need to wait for some unspecified level of material wealth in the future in order to do so again?
In the 4th century BC, Xenophon wrote that ‘Earth is a goddess and teaches justice to those who can learn.’ In addition to justice there are the other natural virtues: prudence, the knowledge of natural limits; fortitude, the appreciation of natural realities; and temperance, the awareness of natural restraints. ‘The better she is served the more good things she gives in return.’ In thrall to our technology and its promise of endless material expansion, however, we are no longer capable of learning, and so we do not live well.
Deuteronomy writes of 'rejoicing in all the good the Lord your God has given you'. Thomas Hardy wrote of ‘the appetite for joy that pervades all creation.’ Such views are consistent with Spinoza’s view that God and Nature are the one and the same substance, Deus sive Natura. ‘Act well and rejoice’ (Bene agere ac laetari) argued Spinoza in his Ethics. ‘There cannot be too much joy; it is always good.’ ‘Let me enjoy the Earth’ yearned Thomas Hardy. It’s a yearning common to the species, common to all species. But to flourish well as human beings and to enjoy the Earth requires the recognition of planetary boundaries – nature’s life support systems, affirming Nature as a sacred home that cultivates the natural virtues. We need to exercise the natural virtue. We are part of the one divine substance, our flourishing is part of and conditional upon the healthy functioning of the whole, the single divine substance God/Nature. We need to re-enchant the world and reinvest it with the sense of the sacred.
Reliant on our technology, we no longer live according to the natural virtues, and so do not live well. To continue to view nature merely as dead matter available for technological mastery would further entrench the process of exploitation that has brought us to ecological crisis. We need to stop rolling all over nature and learn to live within the contours of our Earthly home.
“The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects … Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.
That man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat … The driver could not control it – straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the ‘cat, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow gotten into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him – goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor.
He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor – its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades – not plowing but surgery … The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.”
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The Faustian bargains which the modern world has been all too willing to strike with the idols of modernity – capital, commodities, money, state, bureaucracy - have put our technics in the service of materialist power and aggrandisement. This is the source of hubristic temptation, not science.
The great irony is that this culture of material progress generates a pervasive unease since, denuded of meaning and value, the world is no longer the house of Being. Only one part of the human being is satisfied. We accumulate quantity to the neglect of quality. Thus, the more we have, the less we become; the more we feed the physical self, the less happy we are within; we accumulate more possessions but have less time to enjoy ourselves; we accrue more knowledge but live with less wisdom. Far from delivering the peace, freedom and happiness promised, the worship of materialist power has brought us close to the ecological abyss.
Flourishing well is the solution. Setting a life-affirming goal, ‘flourishing well’ supplies the missing end by which to guide our technics, particularly if set within the ecosystem so as to respect planetary boundaries. There is an old saying that the rich man knows when he has enough, the poor man always wants more. The rich society is one that is based on a notion of sufficiency. To flourish well is the best that any of us can attain and that is more than good enough. The flourishing community is therefore simple in means but rich in ends, valuing the qualities of persons over the quantities of things. In other words, one needs some conception of human good, of human flourishing in a form (or range of forms) of communal life that enhances rather than inhibits the human ontology.
A flourishing society is a society that is rich in ends, a society that has scaled its means back to human dimensions and proportions, enabling human comprehension and control. A flourishing society is a society that no longer invests objects with existential significance but instead emphasises the living qualities of human subjectivity in interrelation within the web of life. Until this is achieved, the accumulation of quantity through the exploitation of the planet will continue to misfire
Reinterpreted as an ecologically inspired attitude, ‘flourishing’ values the immeasurable sources of joy available through the appreciation of the web of life. In flourishing within the single divine substance Deus sive Natura, we enrich our lives in ways which neither impair the richness and diversity of life forms nor destroy the habitat of other species. Interpreted according to the principles of diversity and symbiosis, flourishing emphasises the richness of forms, potentialities and life so that survival is defined in terms of the ability to coexist and cooperate in mutual relationships, as against the ability to exploit, destroy and dominate. Such a notion sets human flourishing within the ecosystem as a whole, respecting planetary boundaries and natural limits rather than seeing nature as dead matter to exploit, a free lunch. This means the flourishing not just of human beings but of ecosystems, rivers, mountain systems, of the Earth as a whole.
Small Composition c 1913-4 Franz Marc
As I read of the controversies concerning proposed wind-farms, I can’t help but think that they are beside the point. Salvation lies not in engineering solutions but in a change in behaviour. Our current energy patterns will sooner or later tip our finely balanced ecosystem beyond the point of no return, causing massive methane release from frozen tundra, extensive flooding, adverse weather, crop failures, plummeting fish stocks due to rising ocean acidity, and pandemic infections immune to antibiotics. We are hurtling towards a nightmare of our own making and the erection of power stations in beauty spots won’t make a jot of difference.
Governments, subject to corporate capture and short-term electoral cycles, have squandered most of the time available to begin the transition to the low-carbon economy.
Rather than indulge in a nostalgic yearning for an industrial past that never was, seduced by the false promises that material aggrandisement has never delivered and is incapable of ever delivering, it is time to recover the idea of flourishing well.
The Guardian’s head of the environment, Damian Carrington, reports on the record melt of sea ice in the Arctic and comments that the ‘world’s distress signal is ignored’. (‘We have changed the face of the planet’ 15 Sept 2012). Indeed, far from heeding the warning, the commercial interests that have been instrumental in causing the climate change that has melted the Arctic ice and now pushing for the rights to oil and gas exploration, unearthing more of the very fuels driving the warming. Carrington concludes his article on a gloomy note:
Decades from now, will today's record sea ice low be seen as the moment when our Earthly paradise gave up the ghost and entered a hellish new era? I sincerely hope not, but with this global distress signal failing to attract attention, I fear the worst.
So we are back where we started, with Danny Boyle’s Olympics extravaganza showing the descent of England’s ‘green and pleasant’ land into the hellfire of industrialisation, with no prospect of Jerusalem in sight. The prospects of Earthly paradise have never looked more distant.
In his book Civilisation, Kenneth Clark emphasises the generally favourable first reactions from politicians, industrialists, scientists and even the workers to the machinery and mechanisation in the first wave of the industrial revolution. Clark proceeds to note that: ‘The only people who saw through industrialism in those early days were the poets. Blake, as everybody knows, thought that mills were the work of Satan. 'Oh Satan, my youngest born . . . thy work is Eternal Death with Mills and Ovens and Cauldrons.' ‘It took a longish time - over twenty years - before ordinary men began to see what a monster had been created’ (Clark 1969 ch 13).
As everybody knows? Many still don’t see. How many people watching the opening to the London Olympics really understand Blake’s Jerusalem? Or how radical Blake’s repudiation of industrialisation was? Or that Blake’s real target is the rational madness of mechanistic materialism that made industrialisation possible? The general impression was overwhelmingly favourable, with many getting misty-eyed at the sight of the fires of industrialisation. The images have fostered a misplaced nostalgia with respect to the excesses of carboniferous capitalism. The extraction and burning of ancient wastes did indeed power the industrial revolution, but it has put sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere to threaten a global warming anywhere between a catastrophic 2C and a frankly ecocidal 6C. ‘Out of the Earth came light’. That may be true. But that light has also generated a global heating which will serve to bring about not Blake’s Jerusalem but a hell on Earth.
In the last lines of his last book on William Blake, Witness Against the Beast (1993), historian E.P. Thompson writes that whilst some of Blake’s arguments are obscure and even odd, ‘there is never the least sign of submission to “Satan's Kingdom”. Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast.’ The same cannot be said of those who frequently bring out Blake’s Jerusalem and imply that this Earthly paradise has either already been created or is on the way, courtesy of the very forces that Blake scorned – state, war, church, technology, industry, organised, mechanised thought, spirituality, action in general – the forces of Urizen, one and all.
Blake never compromised. Like Goethe, who pointed to the loss of soul that accompanies the Faustian bargain, Blake refused all compromise with the kingdom of the Beast. But Blake was not alone amongst poets, artists and visionaries in seeing industrialism for the rational madness it was and remains. There were others who compared industrialisation to hell. The poet Robert Burns, passing the Carron Iron Works in 1787, scratched these lines on a window-pane:
We cam na here to view your warks,
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to Hell,
It may be nae surprise.
If industrialism is Hell, then we need to look elsewhere for wisdom. The scientists are now giving us the evidence that carbon emissions are indeed going to deliver a global warming that will send us straight to hell. Scientist Stephen Emmott is touring the country giving a lecture which warns us that with 4-6C warming, the world will become a ‘complete hellhole’.
Hell? Take a look at the painting Hell Scene by Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg. It looks like a scene from the first industrial revolution. The painting dates from the 1620s.
Hell Scene Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg
Human beings being swallowed up by the industrial Moloch. ‘In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.’ (Marx Capital 1 1976:549). The painting looks just like the scenes that Boyle delivered in the Olympics opening, the scenes portraying the industrial revolution that drew such a positive response from those watching.
Compare the Swanenburg painting to the famous painting of the heat and the power of the industrial revolution, Coalbrookdale by Night from 1801.
Coalbrookdale by Night 1801 Philippe de Loutherbourg
Burns was not impressed by the sight of industrialism’s fires. He lived and learned by the light of the world: “Gie Me Ae Spark O’ Nature’s Fire, That’s A’ The Learning I Desire.”
But Burn’s intuition was right. The fires of industrialism are sending us to hell, alright. In another Guardian article (A deafening warning on our climate, 10 November 2011), Damien Carrington warns that governments ‘are now reversing at speed towards a hellish future.’
Sir David Attenborough has attributed the US denial of the evidence for climate change to the country's history. "[It's] because they're a pioneer country. There has been the wild west, the western frontier." By contrast, Attenborough reasons, people in the UK had "grown up with a mythology of black industry and wrecking the countryside". (Attenborough accuses leaders of ducking climate change issue, Guardian 26 Oct 2012). Well, it seems that for many of those living in the old industrial towns and cities, the harsh lessons of industrialisation have been lost. With the lost jobs has come a misplaced nostalgia.
Kenneth Clark writes: ‘It took a longish time - over twenty years - before ordinary men began to see what a monster had been created’ (Clark 1969 ch 13). The momentum gathering in St Helens in favour of a return to the old town motto of ‘Out of the Earth Came Light’ suggests that ‘ordinary’ people still don’t realise the price that has to be paid for compromises and bargains with the Beast.
The history books, eyewitness accounts and official reports all present a horrifying picture of dirt, darkness and disease in the industrial towns. Living conditions were extremely poor, making for high mortality figures.
Those investigating the impact of industrialisation were drawn to Manchester, the first industrial city. Friedrich Engels describes Deansgate, Manchester, as ‘a dark, unattractive hole’ ‘even in the finest weather’ (Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Allen & Unwin, London (1948: 146).
Coming to England to investigate industrialism first hand, French aristocrat and political scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville headed for Manchester. Tocqueville heard the 'crunching wheels of machinery' in the city before he saw the city itself. Tocqueville wrote of 'the noise of the furnaces', 'the shriek of steam from boilers' and the incessant, 'regular beat of the looms'. He then spotted 'thirty or forty factories rise on the top of hills' belching out their foul waste. Entering the city, he found 'fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass'. It’s a Hell Scene alright.
Historian Tristram Hunt cites Tocqueville’s observations on Manchester in his book, which is titled, significantly, Building Jerusalem (2004). Far from bringing about the Jerusalem of the Blake poem, industrialism had brought Hell. 'Often from the top of their steep bank one sees an attempt at a road opening through the debris of the earth, and the foundations of some houses or the recent ruins of others. It is the Styx of this new Hades.' With no controls on pollution emissions, the city was daily enveloped in a blanket of black smoke. ‘The sun seen through it is a disc without rays.’ (De Tocqueville, A., Journeys to England and Ireland (1835) (London, 1958; L.D. Bradshaw (ed.), Visitors to Manchester (Manchester, 1987).
John Ruskin journeyed north in evidence of the ugliness produced by industrialism, and found it in Wigan. What he saw was so horrifying that he never left the train. Ruskin wrote the Fors Clavigera specifically for the workingmen living in this industrial wasteland:
'Those children rolling on the heaps of black and slimy ground, mixed with brickbats, broken plates and bottles ... the children themselves, black and in rags evermore, and the only water near them either boiling or gathered in unctuous pools, covered with rancid clots of scum, in the lowest holes of the earth-heaps ... Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?'
John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. I p 270
‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?’ Ruskin’s question is worth repeating now that the conditions that could be found all over the industrial north of England have gone global in the name of progress. The cloak of smog, absence of sunlight and the resulting vitamin deficiency combined with shocking working conditions to bring about poor health and high mortality amongst the working classes. Surgeon C. Turner Thackrah found that 450 people died a year as a result of machine accidents alone. As he investigated further, he demonstrated the human cost of industrialisation in the scandal of mental and physical decay, impaired health and the premature death amongst the industrial working class. Poor diet lacking in protein, damp and unhealthy housing conditions, long working hours and industrial poisoning in the factories all combined to produce a 'small, sickly, pallid, thin ... degenerate race - human beings stunted, enfeebled, and depraved'. Thackrah concluded that industrialism in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds were mass killers. 'If we should suppose that 50,000 persons die annually in Great Britain from the effects of manufactures, civic states, and the intemperance connected with these states and occupations, our estimate I am convinced would be considerably below the truth.'
That’s Hades. That’s Coalbrookdale re-envisaged as Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg’s Hell Scene. Thackrah asks whether we can view with apathy 'such a superfluous mortality, such a waste of human life? (C. Turner Thackrah, The Effects of the Principal Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity (1832) (London, 1959), pp. 5-6).
Out of the Earth came not light but blackness and scum, death and disease, yet many remain in thrall to the machine gods of industrialism. Ruskin’s question must once more be put: ‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?' But if Ruskin thought Wigan the epitome of the evils of industrialisation, Matthew Arnold was in no doubt about which was the worst town in the industrial north: 'St. Helens is eminently what Cobbett meant by a Hell-hole.' (Matthew Arnold, 'The Future of Liberalism', in Irish Essays, p 111). That’s some industrial legacy! That’s some claim to fame!
‘Hell-hole’. The very thing that scientist Stephen Emmott is promising if we fail to keep global heating below 4C. Is that really what the people of St Helens want back as the world faces the threat of global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels? Is that the level of sacrifice demanded by our machine gods?
In which case, the only appropriate motto for St Helens is the one which Dante in The Divine Comedy hung over the Gates of Hell: 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here'. In the enthusiasm for fossil fuels, St Helens doesn’t need to go in for any twin-towning – it has entered into a suicide pact with the rest of the world. With a temperature rise of 4-6C as a result of carbon emissions, in the words of Rabbie Burns, ‘We gang to Hell’.
It doesn’t have to be this way. However determined the past looks in retrospect, reason equipped with its moral dimension affirms the radical indeterminacy of the future. The warnings that are coming from the world of science are conditional – if human beings fail to respond to warnings and act accordingly, if current trends continue, if human beings continue to rely on technology and economic growth rather than their own potentialities and talents, then the worst will happen. ‘Hell is truth seen too late’ (Henry Gardiner Adams). The future is always there to be created. It’s all about making the rainbow connection.
Rather than indulge in a nostalgic yearning for an industrial past that never was, seduced by the false promise of a techno-industrial future that never will be, I would strongly argue that human beings need to ‘flourish well’ if they are even to exist at all. ‘To be or not to be’ really is the question. Rather than rely on our technics in order to live off the exploitation of dead matter, wallowing in a form of parasitism as opposed to a genuine flourishing, we should, in the words of Deuteronomy, ‘choose life’, and seek our well-being through the creative self-realisation of our innate potentialities. As Aristotle, the author of the eudaimonistic argument which identifies happiness as flourishing, argued, the purpose of life is not merely to live, but to live well.