You always know you are in trouble when you wake up with a crowd gathered around you, and someone with a pained, concerned expression makes an attempt to reassure you with the words “You are going to be alright”. Except that I got it in the form of a question. No one seemed very convinced by my drowsy "yes." I thought I'd been having a nice dream, with birds singing and fresh breeze under the trees, it seemed like heaven. That said, I hadn't felt well at all and should really have been at home. It's not a good idea to soldier on, least of all when you have felt yourself passing out along the way.
I’ve been suffering from a virus recently, but decided to do my little mailing job today, bringing much good news and good things to the good people of St Helens. And my usual good cheer. But it was too much and after three hours I had run out of energy. I couldn't stay on my feet any longer and was badly in need of a rest. I sat down under a tree and promptly collapsed. I was out cold for who knows how long.
So I’d like to take the opportunity here to pay a little tribute to my friends and neighbours in my little community here in St Helens. I was revived and rescued by the people I meet every week, people I stop and chat to, particularly the elderly man with the dog that does all manner of tricks for me every week when I deliver. (The dogs keep me royally entertained on my rounds. I once spent the best part of an hour trying to find a dog after it had run off on my round. I have to be careful opening gates, the little dogs take the chance to run off, to where the Lord alone knows. The big dogs just bark and snarl at you). That’s the thing about people, neighbourhoods, and communities – just take the time to be with others and join in the pool of life, and not only will you find it to be time well spent, you will also find that it all comes back to you in one form or another. I spend time every week with people, offering a few words and witty tales here and there, or just lending people with something to say a pair of ears to hear their tales. Often, people just want someone to listen to them, so I’m all ears. And it all goes round. I got picked up, dusted down, and taken home, an elderly gentleman taking my heavy mailing bag and trolley to my door.
We must always ask, "Who is my neighbour?" And take the time to find out. I had that question answered clearly today, and it warms the cockles of the heart to know that there are people out there who have concern for others and are prepared to act on that concern.
There’s nothing difficult to it, since the connections between each and all are rooted in sympathy and empathy. You can say these qualities have been naturally selected. I don’t doubt that that may well be as true as the science says it is. I saw Tony Benn speak many times, and the simplicity of his argument said it all for me. “I think that the moral basis of the teachings of Jesus - Love thy neighbour - is the basis of it all. Am I my brother's keeper? An injury to others is an injury to all, you do not cross a picket line; and that comes from the book of Genesis and not the Kremlin.”
The golden rule is a universal, or is as near to a universal ethic as we can get. You can take that ethic from where you like, so long as you take care to practise it; there’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost arguing the point. ‘The rule is fundamental to all moral reasoning’, argues biologist E.O. Wilson, and he is correct. The Golden Rule, in all its variants, forms the core of any viable common ethic. Challenged to explain the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot, Rabbi Hillel replied, ‘Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. All else is commentary.’ And the notion of reciprocity lies at the heart of the ‘Golden Rule’ — do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is a positive statement, in that it enjoins us to treat others as we would want them to treat us, rather than acting in response to how we have been treated in the past. The Golden Rule has been expressed in a variety of ways in different times and places, but the form is basically the same (Zoroaster, Confucius, Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), the Buddha, the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the Book of Leviticus, Hillel, Jesus, Mohammed, Kant, and many more. (For references, see Swidler, ed. 1999: 19-21.) It’s everywhere. In For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic, Leonard Swidler, head of the Center for Global Ethics at Temple University in Philadelphia, establishes the Golden Rule as the fundamental rule of ethics. (Swidler, ed., For All Life, pp. 29-36.) The golden rule is a universal across time and place and therefore offers the basis for an ethic which all men and women of good will would find plausible, persuasive, and practicable - something that all would recognize and act upon. It’s our best hope. Practicable and inclusive, it is, as Tony Benn said, the basis of it all.
In making this point, I recognize the need for practice. The rule is practicable. But I would reject the principle-ist approach that so paralyses ethics. I was helped today by people who wouldn't have the first idea what I'm talking about above, and would be puzzled by my need for definition and rational articulation. General principles need to be constantly interpreted, changed and applied anew light of complex and changing experiential circumstances. I agree with John Dewey here: "Even if all men agreed sincerely to act upon the principle of the Golden Rule as the supreme law of conduct, we should still need inquiry and thought to arrive at even a passable conception of what the Rule means in terms of concrete practice under mixed and changing social conditions. Universal agreement upon the abstract principle even if it existed would be of value only as a preliminary to cooperative undertaking of investigation and thoughtful planning; as a preparation, in other words, for systematic and consistent reflection."(1932: 178).
Such reason is reflexive rather than abstract and fixed. And it builds upon a core empathy and sympathy within each and all. That is the real grounding of moral concern. And that's what makes the Golden Rule practicable rather than a cheap, impotent, abstract moralizing.
Not yet, not here in St Helens at least, and I don’t think we are unique. I haven’t forgotten a certain person who caused such upset recently by referring to migrants as ‘cockroaches’ and claiming not to care about their deaths. Outrageous, yes, and people expressed outrage. I’m just not impressed by such people. I can find better people than that living in my community, and that is where we should focus our energies. If we are going to publicize people, then lets highlight and value the people who have kept hold of the warm, affective, solidaristic ties that bind people together in a lively and neighbourly community. Sometimes, I wonder whether I am guilty of a tendency to idealize and romanticize the communities of the old industrial towns and cities of the North of England. I’ve written and given talks on Liverpool and Manchester, and I have emphasized the virtues and values the solidarity that can be found in these cities. I’ve always felt that Margaret Thatcher’s dream of fostering an ‘enterprise culture’ never felt right in these areas, characterized as they are by a sense of solidarity and reciprocity which is rooted in the experience of working class struggle. Appreciating that the point referred to individual responsibility, choice, involvement – which I do agree with, as far as those things go – Margaret Thatcher’s statement ‘there is no such thing as society’ never felt right. Individuality and sociability are two sides of the same human coin, and the absence of one skews the character of the other. We need both; we need others in order to be ourselves.
As the magnificent metaphysical poet John Donne put it, ‘No man is an island … Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ That’s the kind of metaphysics we can all grasp. We are individuals, certainly, and I insist that any ethics, codes, laws, obligations are felt rather than merely recognized and accepted. The word 'responsibility' is connected to the Latin respondere, and this points to our capacity to respond and take responsibility as individuals, to a responsiveness that is both personal and communal. This entails a notion of rekindling community:
“Creating community therefore means learning to share feeling; both in its joys and in the burdens of suffering. This implies developing the capacity to respond to others. That word comes from the Latin verb, respondere, and from it we derive responsibility. As such, the cultivation of responsibility emerges as a core dynamic in rekindling community.”
McIntosh 2008: 72
McIntosh, Alastair., 2008. Hell and High Water, Berlinn McIntosh, Alastair., 2008. Rekindling Community, Green Books
With an individual responsiveness there is also a co-responsiveness. As social beings we are interdependent individuals. We are connected to one another by ‘sympathy’ and connected each to all through ‘society’; we are connected to the Earth by ‘soil’, and to the ground of our being by ‘soul’. We are therefore active members of the commonwealth of life, the “membership one of another”.
That notion of our "membership one of another" is biblical and can be found, for instance, in Romans 12:5: "So in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." This is St. Paul’s heavenly interconnection through love as the “communion of the saints”. The only saints we have here in St Helens are those that play for the local rugby team, the reigning Super League champions if you please and the most successful team in Super League history. But there is a divine spark in us all – and each of us can see a little of ourselves in the face of another as a result. The argument is that Christians, though very different as persons, are made one and ‘are one body’ by their belonging to and in Christ. As a result of this, they are responsible for each other. They are ‘individually members one of another’ (Revised Standard Version). We are indeed our brother’s and sister’s keeper. If this were not the case, I’d still be slumped under a tree instead of tucked up safely in my bed. But the ethic comes from our innate moral grammar, something written on the human heart rather than in some code that people subscribe to as a matter of rational choice. The code helps, though, in giving explicit form to the ethic within, drawing that ethic out and drawing people into its common recognition and practice.
To be an activist is to be both politically and spiritually engaged, to be involved immanently and transcendentally with Life.
We can embrace this insight into membership from other routes, and expand it beyond the human, even, to embrace plant, animal, natural communities. The ethic concerning the commonwealth of life applies to all, beyond immediate ties and loyalties to kith and kin, enjoining us to embrace each and all equally, whatever our faith or lack of it, and to embrace, respect and revere all other communities on our planetary home. We have to find a way of putting our originary and our socially acquired natures back together. This one world is a world of universal kinships and co-operations. Our political principles and ethical considerations may be expressive of our moral independence as thinking, choosing, valuing beings, but our ethics and politics have only a relative autonomy. Our practical reason and existence must be based on the web of life, recognizing the interdependence and mutual support of all living creatures, as well as the greater dependence of all life upon the sun. Biologists point to the genetic unity of life. All organisms are descended from the same ancestral life form. We are bonded to the living environment by the genetic unity of all life, kinship and ancient history. As Carl Sagan says, ‘But deep down, at the molecular heart of life, we’re essentially identical to trees’. The trees! My resting place today!
Albert Schweitzer's last book was entitled The Teaching of Reverence for Life. Here, he outlined the development of an ethical or moral consciousness in human culture. At the primitive level, he explained, moral concern and responsibility is limited to the family and the tribe. "The first step in the evolution of ethics is an enlargement of the sense of solidarity with other human beings." That ‘sense of solidarity’ and its enlargement to embrace others is key. And by others, I mean not just human but also non-human animals, and even further. “Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.” (Albert Schweitzer). “A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.” (Albert Schweitzer).
Albert Schweitzer, The Teaching of Reverence for Life. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 9.
This awareness of our common membership of this planet, and our resulting dependence on and responsibility for each other, our social and life support networks, our ecosystems, biodiversity, the lot, is fundamental. John Donne’s truth ‘No man is an island entire of himself’ can be expanded to refer not just to our dependency on each other, our social dependency but to our natural dependency.
This belonging to each other, not just to our family, but to others and to our planetary home, brings obligations and benefits, and these both tie us and free us. Secure in that knowledge that we can attend to our work and our duties (the things that only we as individuals can do) we can relax and enjoy life, warmed and enlivened by the awareness that we are joined together at the conscious level and, more profoundly, if more inexplicably and mysteriously, at the unconscious level. Actualizing such membership we come to feel that we belong, that we appreciate our uniqueness as we come to relate to others. We all each of us belong to each other. This ethic affirms the unity of each and all. But that’s me, a Platonic, Aristotelian, Judaeo-Christian, Taoist, Pagan, mystical, rationalist, anarchist, Marxist, Thomist, Hegelian, communitarian, Green socialist republican councilist democrat who can dance in the moonlight and run with the hares. People may find that an incoherent cocktail. If I’m inconsistent, so what? We live in a ceaselessly creative universe that enjoins us to be makers and not tools. And we can embrace multiplicities. I once did the Belbins Team Roles test and emerged as a Plant. Look it up.
I’m happy with being a Plant. I make a good Plant. I just need watering every now and then, and then I’m fine. I carry on.
Rational Freedom
There is, however, a consistent ethic to this position. I call it ‘rational freedom.’
This ‘rational’ principle entails mutuality, solidarity, and reciprocity in affirming that the freedom of all individuals is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of each individual. So long as two or more human beings exist there will be interaction, relationship, inter-subjectivity, a social context and milieu. Any genuine freedom has to recognize the fact that the social world is supra-individual and rests on the quality of social relationships. This affirms principles of reciprocity, mutual respect, communication, communality, solidarity as integral to freedom, happiness, creative self-realization, flourishing. The 'rational' here comprehends subjectivity as an intersubjectivity which secures the unity of the freedom of each and the freedom of all. This tradition rejects the atomistic model of freedom as self-cancelling in equating freedom with unrestricted individual choice and the unregulated pursuit of self-interest. The 'rational’ conception defines freedom as conceivable only by locating individual interactions within a network of relationships.
Where does ‘the individual’ and individuality fit in this strong emphasis on our membership one of another? I remember being taken aback by Joseph Femia’s criticism of Marx’s ‘thickly textured communitarianism,’ not least because it was clear to me that Marx was as concerned with a realized individuality – as distinct from a narrow and narrowing individualism – as he was with a realized communality. I thought Femia was simply wrong, and that he was wrong on account of his classically liberal grounds of individual-society dualism. There is no dualism, but neither should one term be collapsed into the other to form an homogeneous unity. The legitimate claims of both individual and society should be recognized. Individuality does not militate against membership one of another, just as that unity does not militate against individuality. Femia's liberal criticism of Marx of some homogeneous communitarianism is just plain wrong. Marx's political ideal is an 'association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all' (Manifesto of the Communist Party 1973:87). Whilst the precise social institutions of that ethic have remained elusive in practice, its commitment to the unity of individuality and sociability is clear. This ideal exposes the heteronomous character of capitalist society, in which the ends of some are favoured over others, and rejects it in favour of communism as a moral community which embodies the autonomy of each and all. Marx thus respects Kant’s ethic of ends in a way that the capitalist class system does not.
In defining this ‘rational’ ethic, Kant is not a bad place to start. Kant’s concept of rational being, legislating universally by all maxims of its will so as to judge itself and its actions from this perspective, leads directly to the Formula of the End in Itself: 'Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end' (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 1991:91). Kant's reference to 'humanity' rather than 'persons' is significant. In addressing the universal humanity in each individual, how humanity can and ought to be, Kant's ethics are social rather than private. Duties to oneself are duties to all.
As an ideal, the realm of ends exists as a criterion by which to critically evaluate the existing political order. This has radical, future oriented possibilities as an ideal civil constitution in which coercion has been replaced by moral reason.
Discussing Plato's idea of the perfect city, Kant envisages:
“A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws which ensure that the freedom of each can co-exist with the freedom of all others.” (CPR 1965 B.373-374).
Kant affirms a conception of human flourishing and potentiality in repudiating the thesis that makes corrupt human nature responsible for imperfect political institutions. Identifying the cause of imperfection with 'the neglect of the pure ideas in the making of the laws' (Critique of Pure Reason 1965: 312), Kant explains corrupt human nature by imperfect institutions which ought, therefore, to be transformed and placed on a moral basis.
Jurgen Habermas defines this 'rational' concept concisely. Freedom, even personal freedom, is conceivable only in 'internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships', in the context of the communicative structures of a community, so that 'the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others'. There is a need, then, to ‘analyse the conditions of collective freedom' so as to remove the 'potential for Social-Darwinist menace' inherent in individualist conceptions of freedom. 'The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions' (Habermas 1992: 146). From Plato and Aristotle to Habermas, this 'rational' conception holds that freedom is achieved through the unity of individuals as against their separation. Our being lies in community, in the unity of each with all.
The Habermas quote comes from his aptly titled book “Autonomy and Solidarity”. Individuality and sociability are two sides of the same human nature, developing and growing together in the appropriately ‘happy habitus’. There is no thickly textured communitarianism subsuming the individual here. We can embrace the other’s talent and skill and see such distinctiveness as part of our difference, and in doing this in appropriate forms of common life we can let that person be and, more than this, enable and encourage their further development of their diverse aptitudes. There is no need to become competitive about our different levels of attainment. Instead of the self-cancellation that comes in a competitive, atomistic society, there is mutual self-enhancement. Fulfilling one’s potential in any aspect of life comes at the expense of denying others their chance to do the same and to develop their gifts and interests only within specific social relations. And such competition generates individual freedom only in the form of a collective unfreedom. In an atomistic civil society, the individual ‘is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers.’ (Marx OJQ 1975: 220). The collective constraints of economic imperatives, global competition, military rivalries and climate change spring to mind, except that these crises are human-made, revealing our own powers out of control and taking alien form. Some dismiss morality and agree with Thrasymachus that justice is merely the interests of the strongest. Life is all about power and struggles for power .... As though power has nothing to do with morality, with eudaimonia, with happiness or flourishing. The world is full of power, our institutional-systemic world shows nothing but our own power in alien form - state, bureaucracy, capital, money, commodities and all manner of counterfeit communities and false idols. Freedom, happiness, flourishing, and self-realisation are to be attained through the practical reappropriation of this power from the external, ossified forms in which it has become encased, and its reorganization and exercise as social power. And whatever else that is in institutional terms, it is certainly a moral project. Ethics and politics are intertwined and imply the existence of and commitment to the appropriate habitus for human self-realization. So I'll make a moral argument, not in the sense of abstract appeals, which is a moralism, but in the political sense which is rooted in communities of practice. It's all about achieving a way of life that enables us to become what we have the potential to be. And that is plenty. But it involves commitment, patience, time, effort, sacrifice. But we have it in us. There is a core of goodness in us and in the world, and that is what we can work with.
It is part of the educator’s calling to encourage individual aspiration and ambition while protecting the general interests and welfare of the class. And the same applies to those charged with serving the public good in politics. The word politics comes from the ancient Greek ‘polites’, referring to those concerned with public affairs. The antonym, ‘idiotes’, refers to those concerned only with private affairs. There is nothing wrong with such private concerns as such, it is just that it makes for an incomplete freedom. Human completion requires the public realm, that public life or politikon bion that is central to Aristotle. Politics is collective human self-realization.
Is it nature or nurture? The question is redundant. It is nature via nature. We are born with an innate moral grammar and possess certain predispositions, but how these turn out, are developed, and canalised depends upon the creation and cultivation of dispositions, dispositions to act in certain ways, socially just and ecologically wise ways, if we are to flourish. Such skillful nurturing generates an ethos that welcomes individuality and difference, but integrates each and all within the greater truth that we need and depend on each other in society. When well cared for, and sustained within a form or forms of the common life, the group or class or community of which we are members, be it great or small, is a good medium for keeping that balance between individuality and commonality, autonomy and solidarity, and for enabling each and all to flourish.
Flourish is one of my favourite words. I relate it to growth, a creative unfolding, the actualization of potentialities. "The purpose of life on earth is that the soul should grow - So grow! By doing what is right." (Zelda Fitzgerald). Do we need "right reasons" to do the "right thing"? I look for them and I supply them. Philosophy has a worth in supplying these reasons. But I'm interested in creating the right character and developing those qualities for right living in the appropriate habitus so that we come to do the right thing because we know intimately, indeed, feel, that it is the right thing. Well, “the soul is awakened through service” (Erica Jong). Or, “soul appears when we make room for it” (Thomas Moore). Or, “I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy next to me” (Woody Allen).
Enough philosophizing, things are all very simple really. As my coal miner granddad used to say, “you are no better than anyone else … but no worse.” And it was an ex-coal miner who picked me up and dusted me down and took me home today.
What is it to be human?
Being with others, interacting with them, and sharing life’s experiences together tells us more about what it is to be human than any amount of abstract theorizing. This is where sympathy and empathy are at work, uniting us and countering the way that ideology can set us apart. If we were asked what it is to be human, we could no doubt resort to the many words written on human nature in the fields of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, biology, psychology. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience are now the big things, explaining how human beings ‘really’ think and act, what they ‘really’ are. It all smacks of a certain kind of reductive behaviourism to me. Life lived in community with others is reality enough, life lived in the depths of human experience. You can study life in all its richness there, and you don’t need to be an expert in any ‘ology’ to engage in the investigation. At some point, we need to move beyond the facts about human nature to what it is and means to be human.
And that means that we value a person not on account of ‘what’ they are but on account of ‘who’ they are. We value a person because they ‘are’ much, not because they ‘have’ much. We are the wealth of our connections and relations. We therefore cease to think about what a person is, in any material or physical sense, and instead start to appreciate what that person means to us. We don’t look at their jobs or occupations or social standing or affluence but instead appreciate the role they play in our lives, how they make us feel, the way they influence our lives. And we soon realize that our world would be a much emptier and much more impoverished place were they not around. In other words, in evaluating what it is to be human, we are much more interested in what a person means to us than what they are sociologically, biologically, economically. It is in that wealth of connections that we come to see our own value; we come to see our lives as valuable to others as well as to ourselves. Personality is something that actualized in community with others. Where there is no community, there can be no personality. We live in relation to others. Being a person is about more than our personal achievements, the money we make, the possessions we own, and the social status we have. Those things all reveal what we are but not who we are. Expressing ‘who’ we are is much more complicated, more elusive, and brings us face to face with our own fragility, our vulnerability, and our dependence on others. We are beyond the egoism associated with the minimal self here. Instead, we are in the realm of social being and the maximal self, something which accents our relations with others. The value of a person is embodied and articulated in relations with others. What counts is not self-image and self-definition, which are both very familiar in an age of self-promotion, but what a person means to others. Which means that we belong to others and not just to ourselves. Finding, valuing and appreciating that belonging is an integral part of our being. The lessons are clear. In addressing the question of what it is to be human, we should be informed by neuroscience, psychology, biology, sociology, anthropology or, my own personal choice, history, the human story. But we should not reduce human beings to the account of human nature presented by these sources. That would be life reduced to a single dimension, all objective fact emptied of meaning and content. The philosopher John Searle’s challenge to neuro-determinists and reductionists remains: 'How is it possible for physical, objective, quantitatively describable neuron firings to cause qualitative, private, subjective experiences?' (Searle 1995.) We still await an answer. Those experiences are not problems to be explained, they are simply the stuff of life as it is lived. And it is the living that matters, not its explanation and rational justification. There must be more to life than the ‘objective’ facts and explanations offered by our various disciplines. That ‘more’ is to appreciate what a person means to us, and to value what we all mean to each other in our wealth of interconnections. That 'more' is the capacity to see a person's potential for flourishing, to appreciate what they are, what they mean to us, and to see our own health and well-being, as well as our own futures, in the faces of others. It is to be concerned the life that is rich in ends. The question as to what it is to be human can only have an ongoing answer that is unfolded in the world of experience. Love and be loved, and you will know.
This rambling little essay is all about that concern with where and how and with whom life flourishes. It is about interrelationship, between human beings in community and between the human and natural community – soil, soul, society, spirit. The flatlands of the dominant society we now live in manufactures ‘individuals’ in standardized ways; it is a monoculture, a training for the dronehood. School, work, debt, careers, pensions .. That song is not our song, it is the official anthem of the abstract institutional apparatus that has been raised over our heads, where we are seduced into giving over our lives in return for the promise of becoming ‘clever, classless, and free’. It is a false prospectus, the bribe offered by the megamachine. It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for a world of zero-hours contracts, student loans, debts, pensions, financial insecurity …
We have been deprived of our voices in the mainstream world. It is in the close connections with others in community that the gates of the soul remain open, where we find grounding, where we replenish our social roots.
A person is rich if his or her life is a life of meaning and value, and if that meaning and value is attained in relation to others. The health, happiness, and well-being of each and all is interconnected. We each of us flourish as others flourish. Freedom, as a meaningful term, comes in appreciating what unites us as social and cooperative beings, not in giving licence to the things that separate us.
Community is crucial to what it is to be a person, it is the place where we find and may express meaning and value in relation to others. There is, after all, such a thing as society. We are social beings. Individuality and sociability express two aspects of the same human nature. Lose one, and we lose the other. A community is more than an aggregate of self-acting, self-important, self-aggrandizing individuals, and life is more than the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all.' The person grows out of community and grows into community. And a person matters by virtue of what he or she means to others in that community. Without that meaning, a merely personal value is hollow, and is felt as such. So many apparently intractable issues in our social and political affairs will be resolved more fruitfully if we start from the premise that we are social and ecological beings affected by our environing relations and dependent upon on our human and natural communities. We make common cause for the common good by standing on common ground. Let’s be active in promoting community, soil and soul against the enclosers, expropriators, exploiters, and emitters. ('E's' are most certainly not good).
Real community, real empathy, and real solidarity. Here lies my real objection to the unsocial socialization of the globalization of economic relations. Never has the world been so together and yet the people in it so divided from each other. This unification has been an impersonal process, and we need stand in need of a re-personalisation. Competition, the commodification and exploitation of nature and of labour, might-is-right militarism, usury are all things which violate our covenant in the community of life. I can argue this on ecological and naturalist grounds, and on Aristotelian, Thomist, Marxist, anarchist grounds. I can argue this case on the grounds of Burkean conservatism just as easily as I can argue it on revolutionary socialist grounds. The simple truth is that our natural cooperative sensibilities and capabilities have been hijacked by free riders and diverted to private ends, abusing our social power as well as our natural birth right, and violating the pillars of community that unite us as one in membership with our neighbours.
The remedy for our predicament lies in our natural sociability, sympathy, and empathy. We can dispense with controversies over invisible hands and free markets, it is in this natural sociability that Adam Smith and David Hume did their best work. The remedy to our unsocial and unecological way of life lies in our discerning and valuing what it is that gives life; not just existence and survival, but life abundant, a flourishing life that is grounded in love. We live by the ends we give ourselves in this discernment, seeking nothing less than the holiness of life on Earth, creating A Sacred Place to Dwell (Henryk Skolimowski 1993), seeing Earth as Sacred Community (Thomas Berry 2006), no longer seeing the world as objectively valueless, but seeing the value inherent in our planetary home. Reinventing the Sacred (Stuart Kauffman 2008); Rekindling Community (Alastair McIntosh (2008); Respect for Nature (Paul Taylor 1986); The Good Society (Robert Bellah 1991); The Person and the Common Good (Jacques Maritain); Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (Peter Brown 2009). Run those book titles together in a connecting theme and you will appreciate where I’m coming from. And where we ought to be going. Appreciate real wealth, it’s a moral imperative.
Take time for people, time for nature, it’s time well spent.
I’ve heard it called ‘oikophilia’, love of place. Or heimat, homeland, the love of home. This is something that turns us away from the seductions and blandishments of the technological order and back towards building and dwelling. These are fine words, but what matters is the practice. Any home, any love, and any place is only as good as the practices sustaining them, giving them life and spirit. And that means joining with others in order to live the social life, it means acting out of sympathy and empathy to create qualities of neighbourliness, thereby creating and sustaining neighbourhoods. This is not the work of a summer’s day but is generational, something that requires patience, commitment and sacrifice, each generation passing on to the next all that they have learned, a tacit knowledge and competence and concern, imbuing those who are to follow with a culture of stewardship that we have, in our own practices, displayed. I’m afraid that Marx’s words from 1847 ring true today with respect to the attempts to break up collective ties and connections and turn individuals into atoms to be flogged on the global market. The bourgeoisie ‘has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'... drowning our connections ‘in the icy water of egotistical calculation’ and resolving ‘personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - free trade.’
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) anyone? Such a regime will generate ways of living that will subvert the public realm, democratic expression, solidarity and the feelings of neighbourhood. The impersonal realm will expand accordingly, with government and politics becoming no more than public management and manipulation claiming to be acting on behalf of the nation as a whole, but in truth acting as a surrogate for private interests with private priorities. By acting to enhance, rather than inhibit, love of place and love of home, and not alienating away social powers to the external forces of business and politics, we will create the character and ecological virtue we need, which is precisely what we need to do if we are to make the earth a home to us, and no longer a place of exile dominated by our own powers in alien form. We need to love life as a whole as well as each other. Love is the very model of a just society. ‘Love means creating for another the kind of space in which he can flourish, at the same time as he does this for you. It is to find one's happiness in being the reason for the happiness of another’. (N Moss Managing the Planet 2000 I). Norman Moss, Managing the Planet: The Politics of the New Millenium 2000 Earthscan
The external trappings and mediation of business and politics as usual, all the systemic imperatives and handed down edicts, serve to conceal power behind anonymity and generate irresponsibility, apathy and indifference, debilitating the capacity of citizens to act for themselves. We need a repersonalization, a responsiveness, a structure of feeling that is embedded at the heart of society, a society of volunteers and not a society of conscripts. We do the right thing because we feel, through knowing deeply, that it is the right thing. And we respond to fact, evidence, logic, knowledge, and reason and act accordingly because we have the character that is alive to such appeals.
Housing the Sacred
As we build and dwell, so shall we live. We can continue as an alien presence, but not for long. Or we can make our peace with the earth, and with each other, and build a home.
And the basic requirement of such building is that it enables us to be fitting members of the community of life, the community of neighbours. We can call this housing the psyche. Or housing the sacred.
Respect for the sacred goes hand in hand with the love of beauty. At least it did for the likes of Burke, Kant, Rousseau, Schiller and countless poets and artists. Ethics should be reunited with aesthetics since neglecting the relation between the two has resulted in a gap between theory and practice that is not sustainable. Aesthetics, ethics, and natural piety have kept watch over our environment, restraining the appetites that have ever stood poised to appropriate, expropriate, use and exploit. I don’t doubt that a thousand philosophical arguments can be raised against me here, but so much the worse for philosophy, I say, it isn’t the be-all and end-all. Love and beauty are that irreducible, self-evident bedrock we need to halt the urges to exploit and destroy, those worst aspects of human nature which our rational systems have unleashed and further stimulate in the name of individual freedom. It’ll be our ruination, I say. Love and beauty, I can’t think of any other way of expressing it, still less any way of proving anything. It’s in the grammar, we just need to unlock it.
Burke emphasized the ‘little platoons’ which together constituted a self-active and vital society of active members. Society, he argued, depends upon relations of affection and loyalty, and these relations can only be generated from below, through face-to-face interaction proceeding through intermediary associations – families, local communities, clubs, societies, colleges, churches etc. These are the places where individuals learn to interact as free social beings, and develop the capacity to respond to others and take responsibility for actions and accounting to their neighbours. The vanguards in politics seek to take control of and monopolize the institutions and structures that serve to secure some particular goal. We have seen plenty of top-down social engineering in recent years, and it continues apace. If we let this take over environmentalism then we really are doomed, since it will represent the colonization of the force for life. On the ground, down below in the grassroots, where we find the human roots that feed a genuine politics of flourishing, we find those small connections and ties of friends and neighbours, those little platoons in which individuals make space for themselves, and space for others, space to grow.
In Coal, Capital and Culture, an analysis of changing conditions in former mining areas, Warwick and Littlejohn define a concept of ‘local cultural capital’ in terms of the strength that the community draws from social networks ‘based in kinship, friendship and neighbourliness in household and community settings.’ These networks held the community together in a ‘period of change’ which saw the destruction of the local economy. They were the social cement and moral backbone of towns and villages across the land (Turner 2000:2). Those qualities still exist, both in communities and in individuals. We are up against an atomizing, privatizing political engineering which is socially and anthropologically illiterate, which takes certain aspects of human nature – ‘greed’, self-interest – and presents them as the whole. Public spirit is an attribute of local communities. It grows, as Burke argued, from the 'little platoon', and it can grow to become the conscience of greater communities. Our loyalties need to expand, from a position in the immediate family is the source and object of social loyalty, to a recognition of the web of obligations to strangers. But that expansion making for a universal ethic depends on social proximity, relations of reciprocity, interconnection within communities scaled to human proportions and dimensions.
Love of place and love of home is a call to responsibility and a rebuke to that ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ that Marx condemned in the emerging bourgeois society. Such love demands that we go much further than the calculation of rational or enlightened self-interest. We can’t win that game, however much we may argue for the win-win of a positive sum society. I could cite Robert Wright here and point to his argument for the emergence of such a society, with no extraneous morality required, since natural selection is doing the job for us. (Robert Wright, Nonzero - History, Evolution and Human Cooperation, 2001 Abacus). The cooperative commonwealth is within global reach, but I have learned to be sceptical of the cunning of Reason, and natural selection. The problem with game theory is that it presumes the very thing that should be in question, which is the motivations of the players. In card games, this assumption is unproblematic. But in society, where there are conflicts between self-interested agents - where, as Marx demonstrated, individual freedom entails a self-cancellation - we need some way of forging new ties and bonds between individuals so as to generate new motivations. And then, with the appropriate social identity in cooperative social relationships, we may respond and give positive, full, social expression to our cooperative capabilities and sensibilities.
Take climate change and the way that those making the calculations and decisions are discounting the future and, frankly, shutting the door on future generations. And why not? Those future generations don’t exist, so how can they register their preferences on the market? It is illicit, in these terms, for anyone to register their preferences by proxy. And so we all lose the future for sake of a few dollars more in the present. There’s something rotten in this kind of reasoning, and I will happily repudiate it.
Why take action on climate change? You will all have your own reasons, simplest of all being the right thing to do is the right thing to do, and to respect the very things that give and sustain life is the right thing to do. But at some point, we will say that we take action for the sake of future generations. And I really don’t give a damn for economic reasoning and calculations here. I’ll risk being called naïve. I’ve been called much worse things. Going back to love of place and love of home and linking these with Kant’s ethics of ends, we are enjoined to respect and love the things which make for our commonwealth of life, and not use and exploit them, to treat the things that comprise our earthly home in the same way that we treat persons, never merely as means, but as ends in themselves. It’s a mighty old task demonstrating any of this in terms of ethics, and well-nigh impossible in terms of economic reasoning and calculation. But here’s the problem, we live in a rationalized world that, in the words of Max Weber, proceeds ‘without regard to persons.’ And if that makes for a dehumanization, then it gets worse in making for environmental despoliation. This disenchanted world has emptied the natural world of all value except monetary value. It proceeds without regard for human and non-human animals, human and natural communities, it sees everything as exploitable, usable resources. And that can never end well.
I’ve never seen the case for future generations put better than the way Edmund Burke puts it. Society”, argued Edmund Burke, is “a contract… between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are to be born”. Burke’s words are pertinent. Our high-carbon society promotes the selfish interests of present generations at the expense of all future ones. I’m not happy with the idea of contracts, they speak of the kind of atomism and calculation we need to move away from. But we need a new social contract or compact between generations, a covenant if you like. Whichever way we phrase it, this ethic gives us an intergenerational foundation and fairness for future generations as we bring the fossil fuel age to an end.
Burke’s notion of society as an association of those who have gone before us, but who live on in our memories and our love, of those who are living and those who are unborn gives us the clue as to how responsibility for future generations is grounded. It is grounded in love. And that love which is directed to the unborn is part of our embrace of the unknown, that preparedness to live into mystery precisely because we see, we know, from experience that life and the world has meaning. Whilst we cannot know the future and cannot know the people who will live in that future, we do know the past, we do know past generations, and they remain alive in us as objects of love. And Burke’s great idea is that it is by caring for them that we also come to care for the unborn. You may interpret this in whichever way you like. I see our role in securing a sustainable, flourishing future for others as redeeming the promises – the ideals, dreams and visions – that past generations bequeathed to us. If we can plant in our hearts and minds this familial, trans-generational conception of life, then we will give ourselves the chance that we may yet succeed in moderating our desires and, as a result, give future generations the opportunity to live, and even live well. The key question here is not why we want what we don’t need – countless millions spent in advertisement can explain that one – but why we don’t want, demand, and achieve what we do need – a question that is all the more baffling when what we do need does not have to be bought in the shape of commodities. We are moving beyond crude monetary measurements of prosperity and entering a new qualitative era.
FROM QUANTITY TO QUALITY The concept of wealth as life is a qualitative conception that focuses on the potentialities and capacities of human beings, the actualization of social being, the development of community, the flourishing of all organic life and the plenitude of living systems.
Qualitative development is driven by economic activities that restore health and vitality to human communities and ecosystems. Quantitative development, driven by the dynamic of capital accumulation, is ecologically destructive.
The final chapter of Tim Jackson’s book, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (2011), examines the many and varied opportunities for achieving "a lasting prosperity." Jackson advocates a grassroots transformation of our lives, listing things that we can all do and engage in. Instead of seeking prosperity in the consumption of "stuff," we need to cut back and seek a new type of prosperity outside the conventional trappings of material affluence: within relationships to others, the family, a renewed sense of community and in a functional society that gives meaning to our lives, turns our work into a vocation and enables us to place a value on the future.
“Prosperity is not synonymous with material wealth. And the requirements of prosperity go beyond material sustenance. Rather, prosperity has to do with our ability to flourish: physically, psychologically and socially. Beyond mere subsistence, prosperity hangs crucially on our ability to participate meaningfully in the life of society. This task is as much social and psychological as it is material. But the appealing idea that (once our material needs are satisfied) we could do away with material things flounders on a simple but powerful fact: material goods provide a vital language through which we communicate with each other about the things that really matter: family, identity, friendship, community, purpose in life.” (Jackson 2011).
Precisely. In my own work, I emphasize the democracy of place, purpose, and personality in the flourishing functional society over against the democracy of egoistic desire and opinion that prevails under the dysfunctional capital system. The distinction differentiates the liberty that comes from unity in a common and just purpose from the licence of individualism. Is it capitalism or socialism? "Does it really matter?" Jackson asks. "Perhaps we could just paraphrase Star Trek's Spock and agree that it's capitalism, Jim. But not as we know it." And here we can breathe new life in the old Green slogan, ‘neither right nor left but in front’. The centre ground upon which a true democracy of place, purpose and personality rests stands in need of creation. That is our task in our eco-praxis.
And it is within reach. Listen to what Jeremy Leggett, author of Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, says: “And for what it's worth, as a creature of capitalism - a venture-capital-backed energy industry boss, a private equity investor, and an Institute of Directors director of the month - I am convinced that capitalism as we know it is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies and threatening our children with an unlivable world. Tim Jackson has written the best book yet making this case, and showing the generalities of the escape route. The specifics, post-Copenhagen, are all down to us.”
I am trying to frame a picture of human character and motivation that is able to conceive a (co-)responsiveness to the myriad social and environmental crises that beset us. My remarks are unlikely to persuade those who make rational self-interest the sole or principal ground for decision-making in our political and economic affairs. But what, I ask, has the appeal to enlightened self-interest really achieved? The case is eminently rational, I agree. But its appeal to the free-riders, expropriators, enclosers and all who depend upon them has been minimal. I’ll go as far as I can with the argument for the win-win positive sum society and how natural selection shows the cooperative society of the future to be emerging. But the rational argument is necessary but not sufficient. I call facing the crisis in the climate system the Last Great Cause. Fail, and we’ve had it, succeed, survive, and … we will have cleaned up our act. But it’s a lost cause if we cannot relate our knowledge and technique to the motivations and incentives and appetites that would induce individuals to associate together and take on this cause as active, informed, knowledgeable eco-citizens, advancing the cause in their actions and practices rather than passively surrendering initiative to their representatives. Here is where we can make common cause and constitute the common good on common ground. That common ground is composed of place and home and the love of both and all that enters into their vitality.
I am not making a nostalgic argument here, invoking some past community now fading into history. Any home that we should be going to is always to be achieved. Where is the home you will build for me? Where shall my resting place be? Where and how do we house the sacred? House the psyche? By living into the future in this creative, participatory universe and creating home anew, not as a memorial, a lament for times and people past, but as a place where life is lived, and where love, affection and solidarity are ever renewed, a place which embodies the insurgency of life, and where we may awaken to the aliveness, creativity and spontaneity of life.
Each and all are being appropriated in mind, body, and soul, enlisted in a cause designed to dominate and, ultimately, destroy life on Earth. The last word may well belong to one of the Freikorps members, forerunners of the Nazis, who, writing his own epigram and epitaph, could have been writing for all of us: 'Only now do we recognize how little at home we are within ourselves' (quoted by Theweleit 1987: 243).
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1987 [1977])
Become what you are, said Nietzsche. Human beings should only have such powers that they can creatively live up to is something else Nietzsche said. It is indeed all about power, but that is the morality I'm talking about, responsibility, responsiveness, realization, a way of life, living well, flourishing. And that involves the development of character, tapping into motivations, incentives, appetites, desires, the way we think, act, live. Living creatively is a moral imperative.
Our future, if we are to have one, lies in joining forces with those unofficial agents and agencies who, within the shell of the decaying industrial order, are building a new kind of society based upon a new form of wealth, the wealth of life, of the morality of flourishing well. These are the people who are responding to Gaia’s reminder to one and all of the most ancient philosophical wisdom: nothing to excess and know thyself. These were two of the three phrases carved into the temple at Delphi. The third seems equally apt to where we are today: make a pledge and mischief is nigh. (Plato, Charmides 164d–165a). Don't overeach when it comes to reason, whether in the form of science, technology, or ethics. Beware the abstracting forces which turn our own natural capacities and instincts against us in alien form.
These are times which are calling upon us to pledge our love for the Earth and for each other. And act on it. ‘Such is the cry of the Earth to its own sweet child in time.’ (McIntosh 2008: 250). We need to respond to that cry. For an age of mischief is most certainly nigh in this rationalized mechanarchy of the global megamachine.
The humane, ecological, way forward is for us together to create a shared safe space for all of us, a commonwealth in which all life may flourish. At some point, each of us has to face the world and ask the question, ‘if not me, then who?’ If we can manage to answer this question together, we may well have a future worth having.
And here is my point, home is a place where we care for persons and things on account of their intrinsic value, and where we are cared for. So, I thank the good people who picked me up and took me home. But in a very real sense, I already was home.
And on that note, I’m going to rest and get some sleep, because I’m all worn out. But I’m going out on a song. I’ll let my man Luciano Pavarotti sing my song. I love the video, we can all add our voices in this life. I always liked Kenneth Clark’s attempt to explain the appeal of opera.
“What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation - a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. 'What is too silly to be said may be sung' - well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious - these things can also be sung and only be sung.”
Oddly enough, this reminds me of working on building sites and the odd builder – usually my dad – who would break out into a few lines from some great song from the operas. I’ve come across one or two Caruso’s and Gigli’s in my day – and more than a few Tom Jones’ for that matter. Impressive voices, definitely, but I am sure they were making a lot of the words up as they went. Such is life in this endlessly creative universe. As for Pavarotti, bravo! I don’t half miss the big guy. All life here. The aliveness of life. And, thanks to the good people of my own home town, I’m still going, if not exactly up and running (yet!).
Non ti Scordar di me (Don’t forget me!)