The Age of (Moral) Ecology
We could, if our efforts to address the crisis in the climate system succeed, be entering into the age of ecology. If we want to survive, let alone thrive, we need our efforts to succeed. The environmentalism I support and promote offers a feasible, desirable alternative way of living, in so far as it succeeds in breaking free of all theoretico-elitist models of politics. What I mean by this is that there are certain groups, educated, active, informed, who see the world as some objective datum, as some kind of machine, comprising natural laws which only they can fully know. The social world is all structures and institutions which this elite organise to control and monopolise, engineering change through a top-down approach. This is not an alternative way of living, merely a continuation of the denial of popular autonomy and subjectivity. I am interested in the human roots that feed politics. The charge comes back that without top-level transformation through concerted government action, the roots will atrophy and die. The case for coordinated government action is that the crisis in the climate system is a global crisis requiring global action. This is indeed something I agree with, for all that my principal spur in politics comes from a commitment to social self-organisation, self-activity and self-government. But, without the development from below of appropriate forms of the common life, our climate politics of the common good risks being no more than a hollow shell, just elites of one kind of another arguing over the ways and means by which the world is to be engineering – and the people managed and manipulated.
I adhere to an environmentalism that remains in touch with its original concern with the quality of life, even as it addresses the key global concerns of politics. For all of my commitment to an ecological self-socialisation and social self-mediation as against government by external media, effective, comprehensive environmental protection requires the skilful deployment of the institutional apparatus of government. I hesitate to say ‘the state’ here, because I do think we can reclaim ‘the political’ by distinguishing ‘government’ - the concentration of our sovereign power - from the abstraction of the modern state, shedding all the superogatory functions associated with this institution as it arose in symbiotic relation with the capital system. You will see, I am interested in alternatives to our present social system, setting political action above in the context of a social transformation below. I am as concerned with elitist, top-down, bureaucratic political organisation as any anarchist, but recognise the need for collective action. I see both the state and capital as our own collective powers taking alien form in specific social relations, powers which we need to reclaim and organise as social powers. If people reject my emphasis on morality as an impotent moralism, saying instead that it’s all about power, I would first make sure that we are not merely conflating might and right, and are saying something more substantial than justice is the interests of the strongest. That argument is a diversion. If we have a ruling class, then they are the strongest, they have succeeded in institutionalising their power and interest, and any argument is redundant. That just leads us into a political and moral wasteland, a world where there is no reason, justice, logic, just a naked contest between power elites, those who are kings and those who would be kings. I’m not interested in philosopher-kings period, and caution against salvation through the intervention and rule of environmental philosopher-kings. Goethe saw through all such Faustian bargains that have pervaded modernity from the first, and repudiated them clearly. In Faust, he has the ‘citizen’ speak:
“He suits me not at all, our new-made Burgomaster!
Since he's installed, his arrogance grows faster.
How has he helped the town, I say?
Things worsen,—what improvement names he?
Obedience, more than ever, claims he,
And more than ever we must pay!”
And there lies our predicament, we have created a world of quantity and complexity and are being called upon to assume responsibility for our collective forces and for the collective system-wide consequences of our actions. And that requires government. And this will always contain a danger of action that is independent of and proceeds over the heads of real individuals and communities. We need to organise and act in such a way as to avoid democratic deficits. Without popular participation, no solution will be effective or enduring. The more environmentalism involves itself with political and economic power – and this is what it needs to do to be effective - the more we need to be vigilant within our social movements and organs of popular self-expression to ensure that environmentalism is more than a political eco-bluff, reinforcing the very social and political system that is exploiting both people and planet. Should this become the case, the Green movement will appear as little more than a hygiene movement, like the nineteenth century social reformers, cleaning up the capital system to ensure a prolonged bout of social and environmental exploitation. We should know that throughout history, particular interests have enriched and empowered themselves under the cloak of the general interest. The state does not necessarily embody and articulate the common good, although there has never been any shortage of claims made to that effect. My point is that the state apparatus by no means ensures an integral approach to environmental issues. Claiming to act to ensure public welfare, the state can be full of particular groups extending their own interests, so that instead of a democratisation, we get a bureaucratisation in which powers are spread around, insulated from democratic check and control.
I’m sailing in dangerous waters here. A strong claim made by deniers of anthropogenic global warming has been that the climate movement is politically motivated and unscientific and is really concerned with establishing some kind of eco-socialist regime which puts an end to free markets, free trade, private property, competition and all those things associated with a capital system that has generated wealth, brought democracy and ensured that there has never been a better time to be alive. People are healthier, wealthier, better educated, longer lived than at any time in history, and in greater numbers. Part of the appeal of climate change deniers lies in this – they see eco-scare stories and alarms as attempts to justify an environmental regulation as a collectivism that proceeds over the heads of people.
18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year.
http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocalyptic-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/
No matter the wealth of scientific research firming up the case for anthropogenic global warming, it is dismissed as a religion of climate alarmism and compared to the ‘spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions’ made in the past. And the conclusion is drawn that environmentalism is just a political racket, an eco-bluff, an attempt to smuggle in socialism by the back door.
I disagree. But I think we should be more explicit in practising politics and ethics, and cease expecting science to do the job for us. Science is being pressed to do a job it cannot do, so long as fact and value are held in separation, and environmentalism is stalling as a result. Many quote John Reisman, “Science is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. It is evidence that does the dictating.” Science is the best reality check we have, I agree. But there is more to the world than science. ‘Science proposes, society disposes’ Stewart Brand asserts in Whole Earth Discipline (Brand ch 7 2009). That is a technocracy, not a democracy. Scientists propose, subjects dispose. And in no time at all, Goethe’s citizen is complaining about the new burgomaster. The principle of self-assumed obligation holds that citizens obey only those laws they have had a hand in making. There is no such obligation in a technocracy. This is a recipe for tyranny or anarchy, the anarchy of the rich and the power as a tyranny over the people. I want a society of volunteers, not conscripts.
My argument is that not only is science our best and most reliable guide to knowledge of the real world, its findings can inform the world of politics and ethics. Our scientific understanding of the world can be integrated with the way we choose to live in the world. Which is to say that fact and value can be integrated rather than, as at present, separated, to the detriment of both.
I work with Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, often translated as ‘happiness’ but better understood as ‘flourishing’, ‘fulfilment’ or ‘well-being’. It’s an ancient tradition, but the likes of William Casebeer and Owen Flanagan have been influential in demonstrating its continued relevance. For both, morality is a matter of skill and practical knowledge. The point is that living a good life, which I take to be a life in an ecological society, is a matter of integrating knowing how, knowing that and knowing why. There is such a thing as moral truth, and “knowing that” is important in mooring our thoughts, actions, decisions and beliefs in truth claims concerning right or wrong, good and bad. Such things are not relative nor conditional upon assertions of power or what ‘works’. Still, ethics is a matter of practical reason, and practical reasoning is involved in enabling us to determine the shape and character of the good life.
Philosopher and neuro-biologist Owen Flanagan and his work on human flourishing and “neuro-eudaimonics” is well worth checking out. Stuart Kauffman in Rediscovering the Sacred is similar in taking a naturalistic approach. Flanagan doesn’t believe in Plato’s heaven of ideal forms, but he does think that eudaimonia is to be sought in the intersection of the true, the good and the beautiful. Science is talking the language of ethics and the good life. How far are we from Kant’s necessary presuppositions of the moral life? What’s the good life? Let’s translate it not as happiness but as flourishing or fulfilment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BahZpFDVbz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faSYGVmQceM
http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/Ch23Neuro-Eudaimonics.pdf
Casebeer, W. D. (2003). Natural ethical facts: Evolution, connectionism, and moral cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Flanagan, O. J. (2002). The problem of the soul: Two visions of mind and how to reconcile them. New York: Basic Books.
Flanagan, O. J. (2007). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The effectiveness and enduring success of environmentalism depends on the extent to which it effects a series of regulations that is within the control and comprehension of any rational person, and is able to motivate, involve and obligate individuals as eco-citizens from below, in a way that a platform of environmental directives from above does not.
Climate campaigning, action and policy punches way below its weight if it remains only at the level of climate change. We have to fight this at all levels, global and local, by building upon the vital needs and forms of organisation and expression of the people. It can be done. And it is being done. There has never been a time in history when people have been more active in a range of social and environmental issues, the eco-public is out there. And actions yielding tangible benefits are possible. A substantial number of environmental problems are solved by ensuring the human right to clean water and air, nutritious food, good housing, properly valued work. We know this, we’ve been trying to get this for the best part of the century. It’s socialism, comes the cry of the critics. Whatever you want to call it, it recognises the simple social truth that the human relationship with nature can be made equitable, just and harmonious only if it corresponds with and enhances human nature rather than contradicts and inhibits it.
The bourgeois critic of Marx, Max Weber identifies two moral imperatives which are specific to capitalism. In the first place there is ‘the duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed - as an end in itself’ and, in the second place, there is ‘the conception of labour as an end in itself, as a calling’ (Weber 1974:51, 63). Neither of these imperatives are natural, Weber argues.
“In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and entirely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence.” (Weber 1974:53).
Weber thus stresses the peculiar character of the ‘spirit of capitalism’.
Marx also noted the 'ascetic' spirit of capitalism as a reversal of natural categories. This character was peculiar to capitalism. Marx thus criticises the mean, life denying morality of capitalism.
“Its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings bank... Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the capitalist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth.” (Marx EW EPM 1975:361/2.)
These references to the unnatural spirit of capitalism point to something that goes beyond formal or instrumental rationality to locate human life and the way that human beings express their needs in terms of a substantive rationality. There is a philosophical anthropology at work here which demonstrates a moral concern with the appropriate regimen for human self- realisation. And it is that moral concern that I am highlighting here. Without it, what is environmentalism? Stuck in the instrumental world of means, unable or unwilling to speak the language of ends. The facts can dictate all they like, but society is a world of murk and bias, prejudice and appetite, want and need, meaning, understanding, identity, interest. It’s a democracy of desire and opinion, for good or ill. The future lies in educating desire from within, not dictating from without. There are no guarantees here, but environmentalism has a firmer foundation the more it succeeds in addressing the instinct for self-actualisation and bringing life's necessities in harmony with that end, at the same time that it addresses the great eco-issues of climate change, biodiversity, ocean acidification, water stress, etc. It is all too easier for critics and opponents to strike here, claiming that environmentalism entails an altruistic appeal to people to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of generations who do not exist and an ill-defined future that does not exist. And then comes the claim that it’s all about particular groups in the here and now seeking power under the cloak of a general ecological good. That claim is bogus but will succeed to the extent that environmentalism speaks an elitist language and seeks actions and policies that are detached from the people.
And here is my point. The great lesson that Max Weber delivered in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is this, the strongest driver of change in history has been the synergy of metaphysical and material motives. We dismiss ‘spirit’ and diminish morality at our peril.
And religion? Reading again Max Weber’s analysis of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, I agree with Joachim Radkau that ‘It would be rash to ban religion from environmental history.’ And that’s putting it very modestly. Radkau points out that ‘there are many indications that forms of natural religion — some of which do not even appear as religions — are on the rise as modernity unfolds.’ Me, I start with John Dewey’s natural piety and take things from there. But I make this point about religion, beyond the trappings and the doctrines, there is a religious experience. Religion is a way of life, it’s about what we do. What matters is not so much, so precisely, so doctrinally, what you believe in, but what you do and how you behave. Religion in this sense is about acting in ways that change you at a profound level. And environmentalism, more than anything, needs its doers.
So here is to a society doers, a society of volunteers, a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to directives. I’m not interested in despotisms and dictatorships, however enlightened and benevolent. They tend to stick around and corrupt from within, in their detachment from the base. Environmentalism requires more than the intelligent egotism of elites, it has to become inclusive. So, without apologies, I argue for the synergy of material and spiritual motivations, seeing real, profound and enduring transformation as the result of the combined interaction of the many aspects of human needs, our individuality and sociality, egoism and altruism, our reason, emotion and intuition, our interests within the material life process, our quest for meaning.
Viktor Frankl was a neurologist of some distinction and renown. He was also a Jew who spent three years in concentration camps, a prisoner of the Nazis. Knowing that it is meaning that makes life worth living, Frankl held onto his sanity by observing his fellow prisoners, as though he and they were part of an experiment.
Frankl observed first the shock and disillusionment as the Nazis dehumanised their prisoners, stripping them of every vestige of humanity: clothes, shoes, hair, names, everything but their bodies. Here is the dehumanised reality of human beings shorn of culture and reduced to their biology. The Nazis also seized Frankl's most precious possession, a manuscript containing his life's work as a scientist.
The next stage was characterised by apathy, a complete dulling of the emotions. The prisoners no longer lived, they merely survived from day to day; they had become automata. The eighteenth century materialist La Mettrie wrote of ‘man the machine’. Here were men and women reduced to machines, to their mere physical operation. It was at this point that Frankl asked the fateful question that all biological determinists and reductionists should be made to answer – what freedom is left to a person who has been robbed of everything: dignity, possessions, even the power of decision itself? The Jews had been persecuted throughout history but where formerly there had been a choice either to convert or die now, during the Holocaust, even that had been removed - there was no choice. Is there anything left to a person once everything there was to lose is about to be taken away? Frankl came to the understanding that there was one freedom that could never be taken away:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” (Frankl 1986: 86).
This is Socrates’ case for the moral dignity of human beings, that moral capacity above both mind and body. Even in the most adverse of circumstances, human beings retained freedom in the form of the decision how to respond. Frankl found his meaning in these most dehumanised of environments by observing others and by helping them to find a reason to continue living. Bertrand Russell justifies an heroic despair in face of the meaninglessness of the universe. It takes greater heroism and courage to continue to hope in the face of the adversity of the concentration camps. And that is what Viktor Frankl teaches. The complete absence of hope created a condition which Frankl called ‘futurelessness’, a deadening experience that denies life all meaning and all hope. Frankl recalls, 'A prisoner marching in a long column to a new camp remarked that he felt as if he were walking in a funeral procession behind his own dead body.' Human beings need meaning, a hope, a sense of direction towards something bigger and better, a feeling of being part of something greater than the individual ego and its concerns.
After the war Frankl wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning.
Above and beyond biology, beyond genes and neurons, homo sapiens is the rational species that seeks meaning. The human being is the meaning-seeking animal. However, to preserve meaning in dire circumstances, human beings must be able to do three things.
Human beings must refuse to believe that they are victims of fate. Within limits, human beings are free, authors of their own lives.
Human beings must understand that there is more than one way of interpreting what happens to them. There is more than one way of telling the story of life.
Human beings must realise that meaning lies outside them as a call from somewhere else.
The metaphysical and the material reinforce each other, bringing ethics and economics back to their origins in oikos, the household, our planetary home. The loss of one is the loss of the other; if we lose access to one we skew relation to the other. Without balance and harmony between reason, culture and nature, all our material power will continue to misfire. Neither the material nor the moral or metaphysical alone suffices to make for a deep and lasting transformation: what matters is the creative interaction of moral, metaphysical and material motivations. Many people were inspired by E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, and responded to its demand for an economics as if people mattered. What tended to be neglected was Schumacher’s call in that book for metaphysical reconstruction. In defending this call, Schumacher quotes Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson: 'Such a development was by no means inevitable, but the progressive growth of natural science had made it more and more probable. The growing interest taken by men in the practical results of science was in itself both natural and legitimate, but it helped them to forget that science is knowledge, and practical results but its by-products .... Before their unexpected success in finding conclusive explanations of the material world, men had begun either to despise all disciplines in which such demonstrations could not be found, or to rebuild those disciplines after the pattern of the physical sciences. As a consequence, metaphysics and ethics had to be either ignored or, at least, replaced by new positive sciences; in either case, they would be eliminated. A very dangerous move indeed, which accounts for the perilous position in which western culture has now found itself.'
As Schumacher comments, it is not even true that metaphysics and ethics have been eliminated. Instead, ‘all we got was bad metaphysics and appalling ethics.’ It has to change. We are fighting a war in a state of political and moral disarmament. Metaphysical errors lead to death. Here is the philosopher of ideas R.G. Collingwood: 'The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease.... It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world. The cause was a metaphysical cause. The "pagan" world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patristic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were. If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.'
‘This passage can be applied, without change, to present-day life, economics, politics, education, and so forth - well, I am at a loss how to finish the sentence. There would be no more human relations but only mechanical reactions; life would be a living death. Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain himself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.’ (E.F. Schumacher).
The message is simple. Let’s start punching our full human weight, calling on our many diverse attributes and getting them to work in unison. In doing this, the spiritual motivation ‘works’ less through its theological content and certainty (or lack of) than through the meaningful way of life it helps to establish.
If it is to build a new civilisation, the environmental movement has to be more than an applied science or applied ecology. There are many contradictions and convergences in the relations between ecology, economics and ethics, and it is the creative synergy of material and spiritual motivations that will lead us out of the current impasse. The crisis in the climate system is a crisis with transformatory potential. We can realise that potential only if we proceed from the solid foundation of material interests in pursuit of an ecological vision that transcends the immediate and the tangible, a vision that combines reason and emotion and thus motivates, inspires and obligates increasing numbers of people. The most powerful change-making forces in history combine egoism and altruism, the particular and the general. To dismiss spiritual elements in the environmental movement as unscientific will leave us ill-equipped to address the political, social and moral challenges of building an alternative eco-civilisation.
The religious experience has often been in conflict with, even suppressed by, the orthodoxy that is grounded in doctrine and dogma. The religion I adhere to is based on love rather than fear. And that is my general point, living by our real natures, we respond to opportunities to express creativity, spontaneity, joy and freedom, not to directives and orders handed down from above. Environmentalism needs to be a new kind of ethics and politics if we are ever to be able to turn our knowledge into positive, creative effect. We need to join the ‘knowing how’, the ‘knowing that’ and the ‘knowing why’ together.
Linking the local and the global is key so that we can realise a common vision through the expression and interplay of concrete particulars. A place-based rootedness is part of the character of environmentalism. ‘A global environmental history that uses the global perspective to simultaneously sharpen our awareness for regional peculiarities might be able to play a small part in transforming environmentalism into a secular world religion. History shows that, contrary to the "parallax" that sees only the analogies between the past and the present, something new does appear from time to time.’ And a new kind of politics is what environmental protection urgently needs today.