BIOLOGICAL NECESSITY, MORAL CHOICE AND CLIMATE CRISIS
It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances. Human stupidity is only exceeded by God's mercy, which is infinite.
Pope Benedict XVI
Someone says: 'I believe a God of infinite mercy created every single species and the Lord looks after us and all the animals.' Well, what about that little African boy, five years old, sitting on the banks of a river, and he's got a worm in his eye that's going to turn him blind in three years? Did this God that you talk about actually design this worm and say: ‘I’ll put it in this boy's eye?' To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see.
David Attenborough
'Where can wisdom be found?', 'Where does understanding dwell?' (Job 28:12 20).
NATURE SOLEIL VENT
“Let Me Enjoy the Earth” (Thomas Hardy)
I start, by way of introduction, with the clash between religion and science because it highlights the ambiguous place that the human species occupies within Nature. Human beings are animals with the intelligence and autonomy to act at a certain distance from instinctive animal behaviour. That would seem to imply a technical capacity and a moral capacity that defines the human species as the only animal which fits its environment to itself, rather than fits itself to its environment. That capacity is neither good nor bad in itself, it depends upon how it is employed.
“We receive but what we give;
And in our life alone does Nature live.”
(Coleridge).
David Attenborough’s case against the God of design would seem unanswerable. But what if God is nothing but the voice of the ecosystem, Nature anthropomorphised? That would mean discarding the personal God, the God of morality which gives us a relative independence of natural necessity. Which throws us at the mercy of the biological imperatives and necessities of Nature. Forget moral autonomy, we are mere captives of our species imperative to reproduce and survive. Attenborough’s perspective would seem to imply that there is no morality apart from biological imperatives. He denies the case for vegetarianism thus: ‘If you understand about the natural world, we're a part of the system and you can't feed lions grass.’ And he denies the argument that human beings have the intelligence to choose. ‘we haven't got the gut to allow us to be totally vegetarian for a start. You can tell by the shape of our guts and the shape of our teeth that we evolved to be omnivores. We aren't carnivores like lions but neither are we elephants.’ Not only does that position deny morality, it also seems to imply that evolution is a fixed, pre-determined or completed process. At some point in evolution, human ancestors became meat eaters. They were not meat eaters before this point. Using our intelligence to participate in our further evolution would appear perfectly possible, yet Attenborough asserts a rigid evolutionary determinism. A further point is that human beings evolved to eat meat raw. And yet, at some point, with the invention of fire, our ancestors started to cook. It’s called culture and it has saved the human species before and will have to save us again as we face up to the environmental crisis.
In light of this, Attenborough lending his voice to those seeking to deal with the climate crisis may well be more hindrance than help. His repeated warnings about over-population reinforce the view that ecologists are misanthropes. It’s not the numbers of people that matters so much as their environmental impact. If anyone is to be thrown off the lifeboat, it’s the global rich and powerful.
But I’m more interested in the argument from biological evolution. What if, for sake of argument, human beings really are the killer apes that many anthropologists and biologists say we certainly were in origins? Can Attenborough have a moral position at all? When he points to the worm in the little boy’s eye, the worm that will turn him blind in three years, Attenborough can only shrug his shoulders and point to Nature’s morally indifferent, meaningless imperatives. OK. But the fact that Attenborough should single this worm out to disprove the existence of God also indicates a capacity on his part to evaluate physical causality morally. As a biologist affirming the moral indifference of nature, Attenborough is not in a position to exercise moral judgement. His moral evaluation of nature’s processes indicates his possession of a moral eye. He clearly thinks that the worm eating away in the boy’s eye is morally bad, which is why he cites it as evidence against an all-powerful benevolent Creator. But that selection and that evaluation on his part is evidence of human moral capacity. And it is that moral autonomy from biological imperatives and physical causality that the Judaeo-Christian tradition affirms. That is the moral law within each and all that gives human beings a moral capacity to consciously shape their environment. Hence the possibility of medical intervention in the case that Attenborough cites. Human beings are not morally indifferent, nature is. The natural law upon which Christian ethics rests is not the law of nature, which is amoral, but nature as seen through the moral eyes of reason, through human beings, who do possess the capacity for morality.
“That man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. ” (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath).
That’s the moral capacity that a belief in God is intended to activate. That truth is known to a great writer such as John Steinbeck. ‘For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.’ It is a moral truth that evades natural scientists who seem congenitally incapable of seeing anything beyond physical nature. That’s certainly a defensible scientific position, but it is also a morally and politically disabling view. Without the moral capacity, there is a danger of dissolving a moral concern into natural imperatives. ‘It’s nature’s way’ someone caught illegally setting dogs onto hares asserted when challenged by John Craven on his BBC Countryfile. The natural is not necessarily good. Law, expressing a moral position, is supposed to trump nature in this respect.
Attenborough’s TV shows have emphasised ‘nature’s way’ in an amoral sense. Nature’s way is morally indifferent. Attenborough marshals the moral indifference of scientific understanding against the belief in God. Yet he identifies the worm eating away inside the eye as a bad. That’s a moral view which is independent of biology. Like many trapped in this sterile science-religion ‘debate’, Attenborough entirely misses the point that it is the moral capacity that human beings possess apart from biological imperatives, natural necessity and physical causality that defines human uniqueness and forms the content of the belief in ‘God’. Attenborough may disagree and, on Darwinian lines, deny human uniqueness. Does he propose leaving the little boy with the worm in his eye without medical attention, then?
In Immanence, Transcendence and Essence (what I had originally conceived as a fourth volume in this Common Ground series). I propose a way out of this dilemma by reference to the principle of self-organisation within nature, something which recognises the active role of human moral capacity within the realisation of natural purposes. For now, it is sufficient to note that it is this moral capacity that is going to be crucial in breaking the seemingly inexorable processes that are driving us to the climate abyss.
Whether or not it is this moral capacity that has enabled human beings to create a concept of God the Creator within or beyond the Creation I shall leave for another work (Immanence, Transcendence and Essence). The essential point to grasp for now is that the debate over the existence or non-existence of God is an irrelevance, for both scientific and theological reasons. Do human beings possess a moral capacity, do human beings share a moral law, can human beings recognise that moral law in each and all and thus come to constitute a universal law that respects the dignity of each person and which may be held in common by all persons on account of their essential humanity? These are the key questions.
I answer in the affirmative. Does such a universal law depend upon a belief in the existence of God? It depends on what we mean by God. The idea of the universal law certainly requires a belief in the existence of a moral law shared by each individual and all individuals, a universal that integrates all persons equally. In this respect, God is the morality we create out of biological nature.
Attenborough’s evolutionary biology falls far short of the approach we need to address the crisis in the climate system. If evolution holds in this amoral Darwinian sense, then there is no role for ethics or politics. Yet Attenborough is on record as calling upon the politicians and people of the world to act to preserve the planet and halt global heating. ‘Attenborough accuses leaders of ducking climate change issue’ (Adam Vaughan and Camila Ruz, Guardian 26 Oct 2012). Attenborough goes on to warn that it will take a terrible example of extreme weather before people will wake up and start to tackle the dangers of global warming.
I agree wholeheartedly with Attenborough’s call for action on global heating. He is right. But I question whether his philosophical foundations in biological necessity and evolution are up to the moral and political demands he makes. Surely, evolution is as evolution does. In Immanence, Transcendence and Essence, I attempt to place the whole question on essentialist foundations so that change is a matter of potentials in the process of being realised and becoming actual.
For the moment I want to expose the ethical and political limitations of evolutionary thinking conceived in the terms of the amoral biology presented by Attenborough. What if human beings have evolved to maximise their possession and use of resources in the shortest space of time? Read any account of human behaviour in different times and places, read any of Jared Diamond’s books concerning the environmental collapses experienced by past civilisations, and this theme of maximum use and consumption of resources in the shortest space of time crops up time and again. Human beings seem to have evolved to undermine the natural foundations of civilised life. The question remains, do human beings have the moral intelligence to steer their evolution in an ecologically sustainable direction? Can we supply the moral design to life on Earth? The evidence is that we certainly need to. There’s no point passively waiting for God. We need to activate our own moral law which is planted within each and all. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points to the ‘great partnership’, human beings working in partnership with God and responding to God’s call to responsibility. (J Sacks The Great Partnership 2011). In which case, evolution is a co-evolution. God is a moral and existential question that we put to ourselves.
Of course, Attenborough cannot find moral meaning when he looks into natural processes. It isn’t there, neither in nature as such nor in the scientific methodology designed to explain natural processes. Meaning is not what science looks for or is equipped to find. A scientist who concludes that moral meaning does not exist simply because science has failed to find meaning is making an invalid inference. “There is absolutely nothing in science - not in cosmology or evolutionary biology or neuroscience - to suggest that the universe is bereft of meaning, nor could there be, since the search for meaning has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion.” (Sacks 2011 ch 1). Meaning is provided only by something or someone outside the system of natural necessity and physical causality. That is certainly what human beings as moral beings do. That’s what John Steinbeck finds in The Grapes of Wrath, that’s what scientists confined to physical fact, event and cause and effect cannot see. There is a disparity in vision. Jonathan Sacks describes human beings as ‘the meaning seeking animal’. And in finding meaning, we employ the moral law within. Where that law came from, how it evolved and how we use it are all questions that can be rationally discussed. Science deals in the realm of fact, not value. A biological explanation of the moral law is possible. But that explanation is not the same thing as moral meaning. How that moral law is used is a matter of irreducible subjective experience, and on this science is silent. Some biologists are moving in the direction of deriving an ‘ought-to-be’ from the ‘is’ of biological nature. This is what atheist Sam Harris is proposing in The Moral Landscape (2010). I support his view that there is such a thing as moral truth as well as scientific truth. I believe that this project of moral biology is only possible by reinstating an Aristotelian essentialism so that the world is a field of materialist potentiality in the process of becoming actuality. And, as I make clear in Immanence, Transcendence and Essence, this position highlights an active role for creative human agency, will, consciousness, morality, the lot. The world is humanly objective, a moral and social organism.
My point for now is that the moral law denotes a moral capacity that could give rise to religious ideas, beliefs and systems, that is, to a concept of God. As moral beings we create God as an ideal to aspire to, to orient our behaviour in accordance with and to establish an end state for us to achieve. My further point is that religion is a moral technology which we employ in order to realise certain ends. Like all technologies, it can be used for the good or for the bad, and its effects can be good or can be bad. It all depends on how we employ it. Again, that is our responsibility. Either way, good or bad, a moral capacity and technology on the part of human beings forms a crucial part of determining how we mediate our interaction with our environment, social and natural. This is the realm of culture and denotes a capacity that transcends the natural and biological given to an immeasurable extent. There is no comparison between the pace of change in the past few thousand years, since the invention of agriculture, and what came before human civilisation. Indeed, the scale of the human impact is precisely what lies behind the crisis in the climate system. Here we see the damaging effects of human action transgressing planetary boundaries. The environmental crisis is a challenge to human beings to so modify and alter their practices as to respect nature’s life support systems. This challenge and response is part of human cultural and social evolution. That is, human history amounts to much more than a blind physical process lacking in meaning and morality.
Attenborough’s bland assertion that ‘we evolved to be omnivores’ needs to be challenged. Note the past tense. It is remarkably presumptuous to believe that evolution has ended and that the way that species are now is the only way that they will ever be. That statement is a denial of evolution worthy of any Biblical fundamentalist arguing that God made man in His own image and gave the Earth over to man’s dominion for all time.
The denial of moral intelligence and responsibility by reference to how evolution has led us to the present state of the planet is simply inadequate. More than ever, we need to understand who we are, how we have got where we are, and how we act to change direction and give ourselves a future worth having. Arguments which are premised upon the stem ‘we evolved to be …’ will doom us all. Attenborough demands action on global heating, climate change and the way we act on the planet. Such a call, and the effectiveness of any action which follows, could only be based upon moral intelligence and the capacity to choose. Attenborough cannot even countenance a relatively modest change in behaviour such as vegetarianism, something that is well within our grasp. I managed it easily in no time at all. Yet he points to a big problem like an exponentially expanding global population and demands that human beings act to curtail their numbers. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ God commanded in Genesis, and reproduction is what human beings have done best ever since. The human species has certainly evolved to populate the planet with its members, occupying every nook and cranny, denying other species room to live in the process. Attenborough says we should curtail our numbers, yet thinks vegetarianism is beyond us.
My point is that human beings possess the moral, cultural and technological capacity to actively participate in evolution. We play a conscious role in our own evolution. The statement ‘we have evolved’ implies a determinism that is beyond human alteration and therefore needs to be replaced by the statement ‘we evolve’ so as to recognise the radical indeterminacy of the future. Whilst evolutionary biology can explain the past and contribute to an understanding of life in the present, it can only ‘make’ the future in the sense of the blind and amoral unfolding of natural processes, of which we remain passive, unconscious bearers. Making the future as something more than natural processes is our responsibility, conceiving human beings coming to act as self-conscious creative moral agents. The past may be determined but the future is indeterminate.
So Job’s questions can be put again: 'Where can wisdom be found?', 'Where does understanding dwell?' (Job 28:12 20).
Evolution is a poor basis for the moral and political challenges that face us. The pace of change is increasingly rapid, and indicates the extent of the human technical capacity to alter and construct and endlessly modify its environment. Fifty years is a mere blip in evolutionary time, but it seems like an eternity in recent human history. The world today is a vastly different place to the way it was just half a century ago: the globalisation of economic relations, planetary-wide electronic communications and developments in robotics, a new geopolitics which points to a multi-polar world, population growth and resource depletion at unsustainable levels, advances in biological, biochemical and materials science that give human beings unparalleled power to reshape the fabric of life, and a profound disparity between the requirements of human civilisation and the Earth's life support systems. Oh, and global heating and climate change as a consequence of human activity.
The question is not how we have evolved to get to here, it’s how we continue to evolve to get out of here. At present, our technical capacity is running far ahead of our moral capacity. These developments are inextricably interconnected and mutually reinforcing, with the result that human action has escaped the control of human agents and is being experienced as a new necessity layered over biological necessity. Failure to set our technical capacity within a matrix that embodies our moral intelligence will doom the species. Our thinking needs to catch up with and bring direction to the pace and power and impacts of our actions. Rejecting God as the intelligent designer is the easy bit. It’s the next bit that’s difficult. Because the human species needs an intelligent design. If we cannot rely on God’s mercy, we had better supply that design ourselves. With industrialisation, endless economic growth, exponential population growth and relentless urbanisation, the human species has subjected the planet to an unremitting makeover. Yet the whole process lacks a point, a purpose; it merely expresses an innate species drive to conquer and colonise the world, capture resources, possess. The drive is nothing new. What is new is the way that it is now magnified by technical power.
I believe that a universal planetary ethic is in the process of emerging. We have one planet but not one world. Members of the same human species are divided quite arbitrarily by politics and by nation states. That division is breaking down. The iniquity it involves is becoming glaring and cannot survive the emergence of global communications. We are one people divided by the arbitrary politics of nation states. We can see the moral and social contradictions in our new globalised environment before our eyes – and people are starting to demand change. The moral circle is expanding.
Compare the suffering in one part of the world and the joy in another and ask where does justice dwell? In the various writings that follow in this volume and in Immanence, Transcendence and Essence, I shall be taking an ecological perspective grounded in a certain tradition of political philosophy and ethics that has its origins in Plato and Aristotle. I make no apologies for this ancient foundation. Civilisations have been built on Plato and Aristotle. The replacement of their teachings by mechanical materialism has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe. Plato and Aristotle will help us rebuild civilisation on strong foundations in two clear ways. The first is in the human desire for recognition, conceived by Plato as thymos, that part of the human soul that demands justice. For Plato, justice was the social virtue par excellence. The second is in the way that Aristotle developed this conception. For Aristotle, human beings were essentially zoon politikons, social animals who could realise their natures only in relation to others in a politikon bion, or public life.
On these foundations, a universal planetary ethic would widen the moral circle to encompass the living organism of our planetary home. Not only will there be greater cooperation between human beings in different parts of the world, there will be a greater ecological sensibility, an emergence of a bioregional politics which fits the contours of ecological place.
At least, this had better be the case. The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is now underway, a direct consequence of human activity. What is called ‘progress’ has so changed the ratio between biology and culture that the crucible of biodiversity is under increasing strain. Detached from the biological matrix, human technics have shifted into a gear so high that other species are finding it difficult to keep up. But human beings cannot insulate themselves from the unravelling of Nature’s web. As the Jewish curse goes, "May he inherit a hotel of a hundred rooms, and be found dead in every one of them." The curse is coming true. The rich and powerful, the relatively well-off and comfortable in general, may think that they are safe inside the best rooms of the five-star hotel. But the building is overheating, the air and the water are being poisoned, and others are already dying in the other rooms. In becoming estranged from nature, we have become estranged from ourselves, and as a result we have become normalised to death as a way of life. What we do not yet realise that this is not just death as a natural event, with species’ carrying on beyond its individual members. This is extinction, something final, something that brings a species to nought and renders life pointless. We have inherited the Earth, the best hotel in the galaxy. But rather than make a place for ourselves on our planetary home, we have trashed the place and as a result are becoming extinct in every room.