A Call to Virtue
A Call to Virtue
May 18, 2015 Issue
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Living the Gospel in the land of liberty
http://americamagazine.org/issue/call-virtue
I remember E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and its call for scale and intermediate technology. It also called for ‘metaphysical reconstruction’, saying we are suffering from ‘metaphysical disease.’ Now, 'metaphysical reconstruction' is more easily demanded than achieved. And for many it is too lofty an ambition in any case. Environmental pragmatists like Ben Minteer and Bryan Norton are arguing for a move away from philosophical attempts to define an objective foundation for environmental politics. Instead of endless debates over and between value positions, such pragmatists emphasise the creativity of politics. Many argue that we need not metaphysical reconstruction but metaphysical deconstruction and destruction. Such thinkers see the need to ground our values in metaphysical foundations as not only chimerical but anti-political. For political creativity, we need to abandon the quest for certainty. This puts politics on ice and shifts responsibilty from creative human agents to some fixed ideal relating to objective reality. Pragmatists thus repudiate the need for some transcendental objective reality and authority.
I am in agreement to a large extent with this view. Here is the view I am trying to develop in my current work. Politics, and democratic politics in particular, is more about prudence, practical reasoning and judgement than about the realisation of 'truth'. Philosopher-kings are fine for tyrannies and dictatorships, monarchies and empires. We do not need environmental philosopher-kings. The democracy of the Ecopolis is not about the realisation of a predetermined truth. An emphasis on process conceives truth to be emergent within communities of practice and modes of common living, not as the already given 'objective' foundation of the common life. Here I follow Alfred North Whitehead, co-author of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, but who criticised materialism as 'a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for mathematicians.' Against such materialism, Whitehead developed a 'philosophy of organism', based upon 'the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality, interaction, order of nature.' With this approach, Whitehead sought to go beyond a materialism that had removed purpose, value and meaning from scientific explanation. Such notions had come to be rejected as subjective, non-factual and immaterial. Unencumbered by value judgements, science is objective and valueless - like the world it purports to explain. In Process and Reality (1929) and Modes of Thought (1938), Whitehead challenged this view, arguing that nature is not the underlying causal substrate of perceptual experience but is nothing other than that which is observed by perception. Science should abandon its claims to be investigating an underlying, abstract, objective 'matter' and address itself to the relations between perceptual events. In Process and Reality, Whitehead makes it clear that we should take process and not substance to be the fundamental metaphysical constituent of the world.
Such an approach would cure the 'metaphysical disease' into which we have sunk without plunging us into endless controversies concerning abstract truths and without involving us in endless searches for the grounds of our values. Instead, we would live in a society of eco-citizens capable of generating and living by practical truths which prove their worth through sustainable living. I can fit Whitehead's philosophy of organism and process very easily with the rejection of objective foundations by contemporary environmental pragmatisms, but with certain qualifications and additions needing to be made.
Pragmatism alone is not enough. I attach the prefix 'eco' to form eco-pragmatism to make sure that this practice is principled and value-centred. In the very least, environmental pragmatism requires second order principles, it requires, in fine, some kind of foundation. It cannot be merely a self-created truth, it needs to refer to ecological principles. I don't think we can avoid metaphysics by reference to pragmatism. Metaphysical reconstruction can proceed along the lines adumbrated above with reference to Whitehead.
If that sounds a bit airy, the Weberian Joaquim Radkau, in The Age of Ecology, made this point: ‘the strongest force driving world history stems from a synergy of metaphysical and material motives.’ It’s a call to enrich enlightened self-interest, individual and collective, with moral psychological depth. The virtue tradition is all about building the character that is responsive to the information that comes our way. We build it within transformed social relations. That’s a long-term project, of course, and we don’t have a long-term. We do what we are doing, report the science, support renewables, push for the transition to the low or zero carbon economy, back the attempts to reach international agreement and force government action on this, bring business within a framework that constrains their decisions and policies in such a way that we turn destructive behaviours into non-destructive behaviours. Agreed. That’s the short term, the here and now, where we are.
But for enduring success leading to sustainable living, we need transformed social relationships. And we need the virtues, the qualities for successful living. This is the additional I referred to above when writing of the philosophy of organism and process. Connecting our knowledge and know-how up to social practices, identities and ecological virtues = qualities for successful/sustainable living in light of ecological constraints. The acquisition and exercise of the virtues are crucial to right living on this planet. We need all the other stuff, of course, the cuts in emissions, government action and coordination, the policy frameworks, the investment in renewables. And that is the stuff we do now. If we do not succeed in this area in the short run, all talk of acquiring ecological virtues and transforming society in the long run will be idle. Acquiring the ecological virtues is a long term project of social transformation and, at the moment, we don't have that long term. But we can join it all up - bridge knowledge/policy/action.
This is my area, moral ecology. And if it is irrelevant and I am wasting my time, I may as well go back to my work connecting art, architecture and nature – the built, the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Which is pleasant enough work as we count down to Armaggedon.
But I won’t. Because this project is doable. In my work, I am integrating metaphysical reconstruction - finding a transcendental objective authority in nature - that is embedded within a pragmatism/eco-praxis that looks to co-creation in the ceaselessly creative world - a world of creative unfolding, process rather than fixed substance - and linked to the virtue tradition, going further than the acquisition of the virtues to emphasise creating capabilities. That's a lot more than is contained in this article, but the article is broadly consistent with my work on virtue ethics and the need to constitute the common good, and so I shall quote it at length.
Excerpts from the article:
"Pope Francis sees a crisis of the human spirit in our time, characterized by our inability to hear the suffering of others. This is a crisis not of material want, of the scarcity of material goods as taught by modern economics, but of morals. We suffer a poverty of the spirit in the midst of material plenty, a failure to live properly in an age of unprecedented material affluence.
This is an idea that is foreign to the ideology of rights that dominates American ideological discourse.
Yet from the point of view of the Gospels, such rights are only part of the story, only one facet of our humanity. The Beatitudes, regarded by Pope Francis as key to the Gospel truth, are actually not at all about individual rights but about virtues, meaning the right path to the right kind of life. The Sermon on the Mount is not a defense of the individual but a call to humility, love and justice.
The Right Kind of Living
How strange to the American eye and ear is Aristotle’s declaration in the opening pages of The Politics that “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.” Aristotle does not mean that the state can willfully crush the individual, but rather that the individual finds meaning in life, and the path to happiness, as a citizen of the polis, the state. In a phrase that reverberates powerfully still today, Aristotle noted that “man is a social animal.”
For Aristotle and for Jesus, as in the Beatitudes, the path to happiness is through the exercise of virtue, which means the right kind of living by each individual as a member of society. Aristotle’s message is that happiness (eudaimonia) is achieved through the practice and cultivation of virtues, including moderation in the pursuit of material wealth and the exercise of good citizenship. Jesus’ message is that happiness, and indeed salvation, cannot be found through material goods, or through the pursuit of happiness as consumers and moneychangers, but through the virtues of humility and justice, including most importantly “feeding the least among you.”
The church teaches that an individual’s happiness can be achieved only in solidarity with the community, in the individual’s “firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good,” in the words of Pope John Paul II. As the church’s social doctrine declares, “The human person cannot find fulfillment in himself, that is, apart from the fact that he exists ‘with’ others and ‘for’ others”—a fact supported by psychological studies confirming that the act of giving is a powerful spur to an individual’s sense of well-being.
We face, therefore, a moral crisis, not a material crisis. We face a problem not of means but of ends. As Aristotle might have said, we have the techne (the technological know-how) but not yet the phronesis (the moral wisdom) to choose survival over death. We are trapped by an indifference that ironically has been magnified by America’s exaggerated defense of liberty at the expense of virtue. Words do matter; and the Gospel teachings, like the teachings of Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius, about the path to happiness through compassion can become our guideposts back to safety.
These goals will be a new worldwide commitment to build a world that aims to harmonize the pursuit of economic prosperity with the commitments to social inclusion and environmental sustainability."
I won't add anything. I have no need to. I have been arguing this my entire life. I came from this Catholic social ethic of the common good to study the tradition of 'rational freedom' in philosophy. That tradition goes back to Plato and Aristotle and is concerned to emphasise the unity of the freedom of each and all within the public community. In my work I have traced the development of this tradition, in its institutional and legal forms, arguing that a genuine universality and commonality needs to be forged within the associative ties and bonds of a transformed civil society. The relevant texts can be found on the Books and Pages papers. I have written extensively on Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The uniting thread has been the search for a lost unity, the overarching moral framework that has been dissolved by capitalist modernity.
Edmund Burke decried the abstracting tendencies of modern society and politics. He saw that social atomism, cold calculation and political centralisation went hand in hand, creating a surrogate unity above to compensate for the disunity below. Self-interested reason on the part of individuals in society and the cold utilitarianism of government are corrosive of the natural bonds that tie individuals together in society. When legal compulsion and political force alone compel compliance, when private interest dominates social relations, when civility is merely a matter of calculating private rewards and penalties, then "nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. . . . [Yet] these public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law."
This call to virtue is also a call to arms in defence of our Earthly home.
It seems that the organised assault on the Pope from climate change deniers, contrarians and 'free' traders has provoked the appropriate response - moral courage and real leadership. It seems that Pope Francis is going to come out fighting in the Encyclical in June. "Respect for creation is a requirement of our faith and the garden in which we live is not entrusted to us to be exploited but instead to be cultivated and tended with respect. Fight with determination against sin, waging a determined campaign against corruption that grows increasingly in the world day by day."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qFjYnVmWn0
And the point is this, engaging the affections is key to inspiring the actions, developing the capacities and sustaining the practices that alone will give us the commonwealth, what I call the Earth's Commonwealth of Virtue.
I have come to draw the conclusion that the great modern philosophers I have studied were trying to solve a problem that, within the frame of capitalist modernity, is irresolvable. Nietzsche was right, modern morality is empty. We cannot reclaim the common good on the modern terrain, for the simple reason that there is, and can never be within modern social relations, any common ground to stand upon. And so I looked again at the virtue tradition, Aristotle’s eudaimonia, happiness as flourishing, and what kind of habitus is needed to allow us to acquire and exercise the virtues. And that explains why, in 2013, having been contacted by Harvard Divinity School, I looked again at St Thomas Aquinas – and found the elements missing from the modern philosophers I had studied.
The result is a rather eclectic philosophy with a central, consistent, solid thread – the common good as based on a social identity that connects each individual with all other individuals.