Bridging Theoretical and Practical Reason
Bridging the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason.
We scientists don't know how to do that.
I notice this meme is doing the rounds on social media again. I agree here, disagree there, but Speth's statement is worthy of pondering.
I include below an article from a while back on Speth as making points that are pertinent in light of the current explosion of activism.
I would read this statement carefully. I read it in terms of a distinction between theoretical reason (let's say science and our knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (the field of politics and ethics, of which I consider economics to be a branch. The field of practical reason is the world of human interests and will and concerns how human beings come together to decide how to govern their common affairs, living in accordance with laws they give themselves. We cannot expect science to do the job of politics and ethics, however deficient and divorced from realities we may see those worlds at present. We have to understand the reasons for those deficiencies and detachments and correct them rather than attempt some futile search for whatever workarounds may appeal to us in our frustration. There is no avoiding having to thrash this issue out in political and ethical - practical - terms. The divorce between the theoretical and practical worlds is utterly disabling, setting the two things that are requisite for a sustainable life on a collision course with each other. Of course, if this question reduces to physics vs politics, then physics will win. Too many environmentalists state this as if it offers conclusive proof of the superiority of physics over politics. That misses the point spectacularly. It's the relation between the two that matters. To keep stating one against the other will merely ensure defeat in the attempt to resolve this problem.
Scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us the ability to act, but they do not in themselves develop the will to act. We may be able to explain the physical world through science and manipulate it through technology, but this does not resolve the problem at all, since it lacks ethical and political content and capacity. Importantly, Speth the scientist refers to the necessity of the spiritual, ethical and cultural dimension here. There is both scientific knowledge and moral knowledge and any divisions that there are between them need to be bridged so that we may come to take what we know about the world into the motivational economy of the human world. In other words, we have to overcome the dualism of fact and value. And that means bridging the gaps between knowledge, know-how, policy, will, and action.
Scrutinising Speth's statement here, I would avoid references to "selfishness, greed and apathy" and instead demand a precise institutional and structural analysis in the context of a critique of political economy. It is lazy and idle to blame human nature as such for historically specific social relations that enhance some human qualities and inhibit others. It's wrong, it misses the point, and it yields nothing with respect to changing socially structured patterns of behaviour. The point is simple: calls for action will fail for want of effective means and mechanisms of collective action, not because of faults lying in human nature. To point to greed, selfishness and apathy as the 'top environmental problems' is to get things the wrong way round. Human beings are what they are, as they always have been and always will be. Whatever character traits dominate in any particular social order or civilization begs the question as to why these rather than others. Speth, here, offers as explanations the very things that stand in need of explanation.
We need to create a social identity, and the material organisations that embody and articulate it, through which short term individual good and long term common good coincide. This identity is lacking at present, hence the problem of institutional and psychological inertia. Appeals to a common good in such socio-institutional circumstances cannot but be somewhat irrelevant, demanding a sacrifice on the part of discrete individuals that is irrational in terms of the dominant form of rationality (individuals as self-maximising beings divorced from constitutive ties and bonds). The problem is not that we don't know what the common good is (call it long term planetary health in this instance) but its unavailability in anything but abstract form within present social relations. Scientific and moral appeal to the common good presumes a social identity that does not exist at present. Without that, in ethical and institutional terms, (co)responsiveness and responsibility will always be problematic. The inner motives and the ethical and institutional infrastructure nurturing and sustaining them stand in need of creation - character formation and social formation go hand in hand.
Here is more from Gus Speth on this, which is slightly different to my points above, but really point in that direction if we are to build the inner motives upon which (co)responsiveness are based - if enough of us are willing, the article below says. Building that will, through character formation and recovering the virtues as qualities for successful living, is key.
'James Gustave Speth, who goes by “Gus” and speaks with a soft South Carolina drawl, is nobody’s picture of a radical. His resume is as mainstream and establishment as it gets: environmental advisor to Presidents Carter and Clinton, founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now a professor at Vermont Law School, and distinguished senior fellow at Demos. Time magazine has called him the “ultimate insider.”
And yet this elder environmental statesman, author of the acclaimed books Red Sky at Morning (2003) and The Bridge at the Edge of the World (2008), has grown ever more convinced that our politics and our economy are so corrupted, and the environmental movement so inadequate, that we can no longer hope to address the climate crisis, or our deep social ills, by working strictly within the system. The only remaining option, he argues in his forceful new book, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, is to change the system itself. And that, he knows full well, will require a real struggle for the direction and soul of the country."
“My motivation,” he writes, “was climate change: After more than 30 years of unsuccessfully advocating for government action to protect our planet’s climate, I found myself at the end of my proverbial rope. Civil disobedience was my way of saying that America’s economic and political system had failed us all.”
Invoking the moral legacy of the civil rights movement, this uber-environmentalist has now written a book not about climate and the environment (though the climate crisis looms large in its pages), but about America, the path we’re on, and the path we could be on — to a far better and safer future — if enough of us are willing to fight for it.
I'd just flesh this thinking out further in order to establish the connections.
Here is a substantial text from me on this.
In this book I argue for a concept of ecological virtue as a condition for constituting a flourishing earthly commonwealth. I establish the virtues as qualities for successful living within specific social relations, putting character formation and social formation together to deliver a common control of collective forces that is based upon personal (co)responsibility. In conceiving these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. The book therefore needs to be set against the background of Owen Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), where Flanagan writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’ for short, which he defines as the ‘empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing.’ Establishing these conditions in terms of the institutions, structures, practices and relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand, I seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics and politics in an ecological context, thereby outlining the contours of the Ecopolis of the future. This could be called a 'Green Republicanism,' although a properly constituted Republic embodies and articulates both environmental and social justice so as to render any such prefixes redundant. Plenty of the arguments in Being at One comes from MacIntyre and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The nonzero-sum moment, in which our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other), Stuart Kauffman on the self-organising creative universe, and many more. The originality of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of natural dependency, moral independence and social and ecological interdependence.
That defines an integral view. I've offered this for a few years, now, in the cause of the ecological transformation of politics as also the political reconfiguration of ecology. I'm afraid progress on this has been slow. There is precious little by way of integration. There is still a heavy emphasis on science, utterly denigrating other forms of being and knowing. Hence the lack of responsiveness when it comes to democratic politics. Citizens are considered empty heads to fill with scientific facts. That's not a serious politics, that's an anti-politics. I do hope a social media associate and ‘friend’ I have won’t mind me quoting what he said in response to an objection that climate action is ‘socialist,’ made by someone who claimed that it is capitalism and markets that offers the best way out of the climate crisis. But it sums up precisely what is wrong – the overrating of science, the pressing of science into doing the job of ethics and politics, and the utter devaluation of politics and the citizen voice: “Is taking action to slow the climate catastrophe socialism? The discussion should be mostly about science and how to implement policy based on science.” What about policy based on values, citizens’ views on how they wish to be governed, the principle of self-assumed obligation? Arguing for those things does not deny the importance of science in informing politics and policy. But to argue that the debate between capitalism and socialism is secondary to science is tantamount to arguing that politics is also of secondary importance (at best). It entails the view that citizens’ views and values, debates between political platforms, the social relations shaping economic activities and priorities are unimportant. And it clearly entails a privileged position for ‘science,’ that is, for those scientists who claim expertise in the area of (specific) sciences. I very much agree that there is a crisis in the climate system. But people who argue that climate scientists should be raised to positions of philosopher-rulers are bereft of a proper and legitimate politics. They put politics on ice, assert scientific truth over all things, subvert popular legitimacy, and will either succeed only in equip governments with the expertise and rationale they need to institute an environmental austerity that succeeds in preserving only prevailing social relations, not planetary boundaries, or in being ignored by the mass of the citizen body. I don’t wish to speak harshly, but I am now tired of trying to get this message through to people engaged in climate politics. Despite their pretensions of intelligence through expertise in science, those who continue to insist on science doing the job of politics and ethics are so *^%*&”^& *^&* that I despair of ever getting through to them. For all that they have the right cause, I wouldn’t trust them with an ounce of power. Asserting a politics of truth, they put real politics on ice, and would have no compunction at all in ignoring or overriding the views, interests, and concerns of citizens. In fact they are doing it now - hence the failure to constitute environmentalism as a mass movement. Not for the first time in history, we are in the presence of an elite of people overriding the political agency of the people on account of claiming to know their objective interests – or the objective interests of the planet in this case. It’s the totalitarian temptation. Of course, what will happen is that this crowd will put environmentalism in the service of the continuing capital economy, untransformed government imposing an environmental austerity that serves to preserve the very socio-economic arrangements that stand in need of transformation. And capital will continue to eat the planet. The political naivety of those who think the world turns on facts is astonishing.