The Rational Universe, Creative Human Agency and the Logic of Collective Action
I see the world as 'rational' but not in some timeless sence of ideal forms, but as a co-creation involving agency, will, meaning, values and purpose. In a ceaselessly creative universe – in which cells interact with cells to form organisms, organisms interact with organisms to form ecosystems – can we see patterns of order and cooperation in the world, in cultures, economies, and societies? If natural selection and cultural evolution act on systems that exhibit spontaneous order, then maybe we could, in time, be at home in the universe.
Are we constituted by natural selection to be irrevocably motivated by short-term and immediate considerations, so much so that we are doomed to self-destruction? There are reasons to think that we can overcome the problems we face. These problems are not problems of ‘human nature’ but of its expression in particular social forms. They are problems of collective action, collective forces issuing from uncoordinated private, individual, sectional actions constraining us through want of appropriate collective mechanisms of control and comprehension.
The political problem concerns the question of whether we can develop the institutional, moral and psychological capability to avoid the tragedy of the commons. There’s no getting away from it, the crisis in the climate system presents a formidable challenge to politics. The transnational nature of environmental destruction points to the need for nation states to act together in order to address the problem. How can environmental issues enter political agendas subject to both particular interests and systemic imperatives? Can governments reconcile the particular interests within their boundaries with the universal interest? Can governments reconcile their own national interests with the international cooperation required to deal with a transboundary issue like climate change? New forms of governance, new patterns of social behaviour, transformed social relations yielding a social identity that connects individual/particular good and common good, new ways in which citizens and communities can mobilise together, practical pathways for actually taking action are all required. Not asking much, I know. But, if we are, indeed, active, conscious parts of a rational universe, charged with meaning, agency, will and purpose, if we are co-creators of this endlessly creative universe, then do we really lack the wit think of a better and fairer way of organising our common affairs, and the nerve to act effectively in realising this vision? We can conceive of better ways of doing business, controlling our common affairs, running our cities, and revitalising our communities.
The problem, of course, is one of systems, relations and institutions. At present, individual/particular rationality and freedom is generating a general irrationality and unfreedom. Confronted by growing environmental threats as the result of incremental individual actions, we are charged with the task of bringing about a non-zero sum society with a tendency to generate positive rather than negative outcomes. Cooperation and communication, embodied in systems and structures, generate the most optimal outcomes, bringing about an associative democracy in which actions proceed to the benefit of all. History is littered with badly governed societies which, instead of realising possibilities for a win-win outcome, have carried on with bad practices, all because certain particular interests have succeeded in institutionalising their power, immunising themselves from the sanctions others may pass against them, thus locking us into practices that bring about a lose-lose outcome. It’s the familiar problem of identifying free-riders and devising systems to eliminate them. The situation is irrational, and against the interests of all, including the rich and powerful themselves. Everybody - the rich and powerful included - loses when the system fails. The problem is that if some specific interests are powerful enough to be able to ignore the sanctions against them, then they can put their immediate particular interest above the long-range common good that benefits each and all. The continuous failure of global environmental conferences makes clear the extent to which our political life is subject to systemic imperatives deriving from overweening private power. There are too many vested interests, divorced from the general interest, pursuing their own ends, subverting the common good that unites all.
This a case of particular rationality producing collective irrationality. This is the predicament we find ourselves in politically when it comes to tackling the problem of climate change. The 'rational' solution is to build sufficient co-operators within the system as to make non-cooperation irrational, with sanctions meaning that the particular interests are no longer powerful enough to refuse cooperation. Do we live in a ‘rational universe’? If we do, then we need, at the level of agency, values, and will, to become aware of this and embody it in communities of practice, and institutionalise that rationality to coordinate individual, incremental choices, decisions and actions for the common good. Too lofty an ideal? The challenge we face of turning around our planetary emergency will require a revolution every bit as profound as the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, a more conscious revolution with a much shorter timescale. Still, a life-centred economy that reflects our deepest values has always been a reasonable possibility.
Music or Silence?
‘Generation after generation, men and women have recognised the essential truth of the ancient insight that rationality and order underlie the variety and confusion of nature. The image of Pythagoras himself has shifted and occasionally become distorted, but through all the centuries and all the paradigm shifts, this Pythagorean vision has never been extinguished or forgotten, and it has almost always been cherished. He and his first followers could not begin to conceive how vast a landscape lay beyond the door they opened. From unimaginably tiny flickering wisps of uncertainty to the uncountable galaxies, into multiple dimensions, and maybe even to an infinity of other universes. Yet numbers and number relationships seem to have guided the way through this labyrinth of the physical universe as effectively as Pythagoras himself could ever have hoped.
If civilisation as we know it were wiped out and only a remnant were left to start over, would someone make that same discovery? Break the code again? Surely they would! Is it not basic truth? Or ... maybe they wouldn't. Maybe the Pythagoreans got it wrong, and we have been living in a dream. Maybe the world really never got beyond a formless 'unlimited', and we are only imagining the pattern, or creating it ourselves. The human soul has not proved so easy to map with numbers. . . and yet we are the 'rational beings' on the Earth, presumably reflecting the rationality of the universe. How can it be that we are the most difficult of all territory? We do not yet know. Meanwhile most of us are too intoxicated by the music of Pythagoras to suffer a crisis of faith.
We send our tiny beeps into the far distant reaches of space, certain that any intelligent beings out there, no matter how 'other' they may be in some respects, could not have failed to discover what our world did . . . sure that our little signalled evidence of rationality will look familiar to them. In spite of the still unsolved mysteries - and the possibility that they may never be solved - our Pythagorean ideal of the unity and kinship of all being tells us this must be so.’ (Pythagoras Kitty Ferguson 2008 Icon).
Pythagoras . . . are you out there? Is anyone listening? Responding? Music or silence? To be more than an impersonal unfolding indifferent to meaning, will, value and purpose, reason must come with an ethical/psychological dimension, a (co)responsiveness that speaks to and motivates the common moral reason within each and all. Reason must be affective, appetitive. And this explains why I work in the tradition of virtue theory, developing a conception of ecological virtue so that people come to want to do the things they must do in order to flourish well. This is not about appeals to reason, evidence and morals but a (co)responsiveness that works through character construction. Virtues are different from know-how, skills and abilities but engage the will and motivate action. Knowledge in itself is not a virtue; to be a virtue it would need to have an appetitive component. Knowledge would be a virtue in the proper sense if it made an agent positively desire to grasp the true. But this is not the case. Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily make a person want to consider the truth, just able to do so.
The knowledge and ability with respect to climate change have been there for quite a while now. What is lacking is the will, character, appetite, motivation, all set within a specific social identity connecting immediate individual good and long range collective good. We need to create the habitus which enables us to acquire and exercise the virtues. It's a long term project and, in light of the climate crisis, we don't have a long term. That loss of a future is the price of the loss of the virtues in the first place, in my view. The habits we have been acquiring in recent times have been bad habits, with the virtues condemned as sins against the Gross National Product. Virtues are more than habits, they are habits chosen for reasons or, more accurately, they are about being disposed to act for good reasons. A long-term civilisational perspective, certainly. But much needed. We can do short and long term together.
Pythagoras, By Kitty Ferguson
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/pythagoras-by-kitty-ferguson-2100696.html
http://kitty-ferguson.com/pythagoras-reviews#.Vf7BcWZwbIU
http://kitty-ferguson.com/pythagoras#.Vf7BrGZwbIU
We need to identify and address the root causes of our accelerating ecological problems. We are not resolving these problems at a faster rate than we are generating them. Sooner rather than later, we need to constitute ourselves as the ‘we’, institutionally, politically and psychologically, joining together to speak with one voice for the socio-economic, psychic and institutional transformations required to generate and sustain right relationships between humans within society, between national states and societies, and between human civilisation and our planetary home.
Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together.
The very idea that we—as atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate is objectively nuts.
A must read from Naomi Klein on creating integrated solutions—ones that radically bring down emissions, while closing the inequality gap and making life tangibly better for the majority.
"The holistic leap we need is within our grasp."
"This is no pipe dream. We have living examples from which to learn."
The word "collaboration" is apposite here, from the Latin co- com- or col-, meaning "with" or "together", and laborare, meaning "to labour." To collaborate, then, is to work together with others. We labour together to reclaim our natural, ethical and political commons and constitute the common good. It means addressing the social relations that atomise us, estrange us from the sources of life, and have us competing for scarce resources. It means changing social relations that see the world in terms of scarcity, psychic as well as physical, instead of abundance. It means embracing the plenitude of life. By cooperation, we push the free-riders out to the extremes. We just need to devise the institutional infrastructures of the cooperative commonwealth.
And, of course, not all out there are prepared to collaborate. They are the free riders who hijack the cooperative endeavours and sensibilities of others and divert them to private ends. They are the ones that benefit from division and separation. We are the ones charged with recovering our physical, political and ethical commons ... and the finance and credit commons too! Public banking, mutual-credit systems, credit-clearing cooperatives, local exchange trading systems (LETS) .. community land trusts, time banks ... and a million other things that share and distribute resources cooperatively rather than privately.. It's about creating the social mechanisms that enable us to eliminate rents and push out rentiers.
http://www.thenation.com/article/we-can-only-do-this-together/
And here's a book along these lines that is well worth reading.
Common Wealth For a free, equal, mutual and sustainable society by Martin Lange 2010 Hawthorn Press
I'm a bit of an Hegelian at heart, at least with respect to Hegel's social and political thought and his notion of Sittlichkeit, combining the political community as the agency of commonality, the economy as the system of needs, and a thick welter of intermediary associations and participatory structures that give us all roles and identities within a larger society. (I’m rather more critical of notions of a world enclosed by a totalising reason). Make room in there for the life support systems of the planet, the claims of nature and natural communities and other species and ... we have something like an eco-Sittlichkeit - a system of the ethical life that embodies and expresses a social ecological freedom. I'll call it the Ecopolis as the democracy of person, place and purpose as against the atomistic model of individual interests and opinions. It's the difference between individuality and individualism.
This would be to realise the life-centred economy that embodies and articulates our highest values and realises our deepest needs. We need to redesign our economic system so that our relationship to life prevails over the pursuit of private gain and profit, and redesign our political system so that our appreciation of power is of a ‘power-with’ as distinct from a ‘power-over’ and ‘power-against’, power as growth and flourishing. To reclaim economics from the pursuit of endless growth and from the idolatry of ‘things’ – capital, commodities, money, profit and all fetish systems of power, production and politics - is to call back the wisdom of Aquinas, for whom genuine happiness requires only sufficiency of material goods and virtuous action. All very question begging in a brief text. I write of sustainable living and sufficiency, an ‘enoughness’ of life, instead of sustainable development. And I set this in the context of ecological virtue. That’s work to come. For now, all I can do is point to this obsession with growth as economic growth. We need to hear more about personal growth, what psychologist Carl Rogers called ‘personal power’ (1979) and ‘a way of being’ (1995). This would be to respond to Plato’s old call for the examined life. "The noblest of all studies is the study of what man should be and what he should pursue." (Plato, Gorgias.) That question is integral to the human life. In the ancient Greek, ethics is not just the study of a system of beliefs and morals, it is ethos, a way of life, a life which we are all called upon to live.
The environmental crisis we face is plainly a question with a scientific component. But it is by no means exclusively, or even principally, a scientific question. It is a question of a way of life, and, as such, involves all kinds of murky and messy things like values, beliefs, interests, politics, power. The simple model according to which scientists identify and analyse a threat, produce knowledge and information and citizens and governments respond and act is not how politics works. The pattern of governmental activity, and of human behaviour in general, is very different, and is structured in ways that are non-rational or arational. Reason alone is not enough. Even with agreement on the part of scientists with respect to the nature of the problem (and agreement with respect to the causes of climate change is about as unanimous as science could ever be, however much science, as we are constantly reminded, concerns the quality of evidence, not the quantity of numbers constituting a consensus), that is only the beginning of the road to effective remedial action. Governments are subject to many claims and contradictory pulls, more immediate considerations, particularly with respect to economic interests and impacts and domestic popularity and legitimacy, which are often more to the fore when it comes to framing their responses. The long-term common good – which is what a healthy, sustainable environment is for all people – easily finds itself pushed down the list of priorities. It is impossible to examine this question for any length of time before becoming convinced that the toxic byproducts of industrialization, economic growth and our techno-urban civilisation constitute a direct threat to future health and well-being unless we undertake substantial and vigorous action to check them, and quickly. Adam Smith titled his book The Wealth of Nations, but the equation of ‘wealth’ with endless accumulation of material quantities that has followed in Smith’s wake fails to respect the Old English origins of the word ‘wealth,’ referring to ‘the conditions of well-being.’ Any notion of ‘wealth’ we employ from now on must concern itself with establishing those conditions in a social, moral and ecological sense. This would recall the ancient sense of politics as creative self-realisation, politics as polites, those interested in public affairs, the politikon bion that human beings as social beings need in order to complete themselves. Politics as ‘the art of the possible’ has ceased to be relevant. ‘Possibility’ makes no sense in abstraction from the sources of life on Earth. Realpolitik has to bend the knee to ecological realities. There is no politics independent of a climate politics. This is the central question of politics, how to coordinate and canalise individual actions, choices and sectional interests and particular concerns, to the greater good. Cracking the logic of collective action is the central challenge national governments and the international system. Whether the environmental crisis we face will eventually overwhelm us depends on how quickly, substantially and effectively ‘we’ mobilize ourselves to make the required changes in our patterns of behaviour, forms of governance and lifestyles. I’ll just say that it is possible, such dramatic changes are the stuff of history. Place your bets. In the rational universe that is always in the process of being (co)created, e live forwards as if we knew: we live into mystery.
I agree with theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman: ‘Because we cannot know, but must live our lives anyway, we live forward into mystery. Our deep need is to better understand how we do so, and to learn from this deep feature of life how to live our lives well. Plato said we seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Plato points us in the right direction.’ (Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 2008: ch 14). I won’t pretend to be able to follow the mathematics of ‘the rational universe’. But I can grasp it intuitively, at the level of psychic response. In a TV interview with Michael Parkinson, promoting his series The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski stated that, despite all the hardship he and his family had suffered, he ‘never had any uncertainty about the meaning of the word “good”, the meaning of the word “true”, the meaning of the word “beautiful.”’ Despite the world of accidental events, the ultimate reality exists. That is the world we are charged with accessing, that is the ultimate test of our knowledge. In The Ascent of Man, Bronowski says something more: ‘We have to touch people’. We have to close the distance between the rational order and the human act. This is not to abandon the quest for knowledge, but to ground it in a reality that is as moral and psychic as it is physical – a personal order constituted by agency, will, meaning and purpose, not an impersonal order indifferent to human values. And that requires the reintegration of reason with our full humanity, emotions, feelings, intuitions, dreams, and visions. The unity of the true, the good and the beautiful gives us an important road map for the virtuous action required to raise a new civilisation of love around the virtues of courage, moderation, justice and wisdom. An eco-civilisation, an Ecopolis of sustainable living, sufficiency, a whole earth economy based upon a universal planetary covenant, bringing science and ethics together via the integration of ecology and ethics.
I’m half-remembering (and probably mixing up) a quote here, “there’s nothing new, just a lot of things we’ve forgotten”. (I’m thinking Aristotle, but it sounds more like Plato). There’s an awful lot of things that we’ve been forgetting. I think the deeper point is that knowledge as such doesn’t set us free or save us, this is the kind of thing that lies behind the naïve idea of progress. Well, we shouldn’t be so bewildered that that promise has not been delivered, no matter how much technical means we have at our disposal. 'Formerly’, Einstein argued, 'one had perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means and tremendous possibilities but confused goals' (Einstein quoted in Roger Garaudy The Alternative Future 1975:39). So there is no mystery why our knowledge is misfiring or being diverted into destructive channels. Times change and knowledge increases, but I hold to something that may be called the implicit philosophy, something that looks to our natural dispositions to the good. And that doesn’t depend on the quantity of knowledge at all, not in ourselves or in our society. The stock of knowledge may increase, but many decision makers fail to act on that knowledge, because they let other aspects of a situation cloud the moral dimension. But moral knowledge, knowledge of what we ought to do, I hold, is in some way innate – a capacity we all have. Experience, habit, prudence etc develop that capacity and allow us to build up the moral virtues. This is difficult to generate when civil society has fractured into an atomistic and private existence, we fail to develop that character. Instead, we are socialised into being what? Consumers in the private realm. This is the ego as a prison. I’m thinking of Aquinas now, that knowledge is not a virtue in the truest sense, because it lacks appetitive content. To be a virtue, knowledge would have to make one positively desire to grasp the true and the good. It doesn’t. Hence our bewilderment as to why so much knowledge has yet to deliver on its promises. It won’t and it can’t. Not on its own. “Having knowledge does not make one want to consider the truth; it just makes one able to do so." Along with the ability to act well, we need, above all, the will to act well. That comes from within, something we are born with. The application comes from a social context or habitus which activates and canalises our innate moral capacity, builds the right character.
But, getting back to implicit philosophy, I think Aquinas is even more interesting here in that moral “knowledge” itself is not all important. More important is how we all of us make use of what we already know, that inner moral sense we are all born with. (I wish I could remember where that quote from Aristotle came from about there being a lot of things we have forgotten, to see if and where it influenced Aquinas here). It’s not that knowledge is unimportant, just that it doesn’t make a person more virtuous. We all have this natural law within, and are all of us capable of applying this law to the variety of situations in which we find ourselves. The good person qualifies as good not on account of acquiring knowledge and being aware of calculations and consequences in the application of knowledge, but by virtue of understanding the right thing to do, drawing upon what is within, and holding to doing the right thing. Wrongdoing may be a result of forgetfulness, ignorance, etc but that unwitting wrongdoing itself results from a failure at some other level.
As for why our rulers fail to act on knowledge, well, the imperatives of money and power certainly overshadow any ethical dimension of action. Any ignorance here is a wilful ignorance, diverting our knowledge into destructive channels. I’ll admit to being a bibliophile and I am constantly amazed at the stock of knowledge in the world, beautifully written and brilliantly researched books and papers and articles on every subject. And the obvious question arises, surely we can be doing better with all of this knowledge at our disposal. We can. But in the end, it gets back to this, before the knowledge we may acquire from books and texts, we should seek the knowledge written into our hearts. We can, with the biologists, call it an innate moral grammar. In his Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul alludes to the concept of Natural Law and contends that it is written on the human heart. This law, he infers, transcends manmade laws and is accessible by human reason because it is innate and intuitive. (Romans 2:14ff). The knowledge of right and wrong is written within. This law transcends human-made laws, but is accessible by human reason because it is innate and intuitive. Natural law, then, is not the law of nature in the sense of biological or ecological principles but nature as seen through the eyes of reason. Things go wrong in the world when we ignore all of this, our rulers certainly, but we may all err in this way. The closer to power we get, it seems the more forgetful we become. We need to redefine what we mean by power, and come to see power more in terms of healthy growth and flourishing. And that would be to see ourselves, our agency, will and purpose, as playing consciously creative roles in the ceaselessly creative – and rational – universe.
‘If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.’
Romans 12:18
If we do live in a creative, self-organising universe, delivering 'order for free' (as Stuart Kauffman puts it), then we will indeed settle into place if we just do our best to avoid harm. Be a friend to all animals, human and non-human.