Fostering Transformative Motivations within Communities of Practice
I’ve been re-reading Lewis Mumford recently, noting the contemporary relevance of his views with respect to the crisis in the climate system and the actions that are required of men and women, in their communities as much through their governments, to address that crisis. Mumford has plenty of pertinent words to offer on questions of planning, design and organisation, but what is striking about his views is the extent to which his environmentalism makes affections and motivations, homeostasis, community, and resilience central to policy, both as drivers of change and as outcomes. In other words, large-scale ambitions for change are not merely a matter of top-down social engineering and reordering, centralising initiative and control, but of organic growth and culture, diffusing that initiative and control throughout communities of practice. This is an important point to establish. In The Age of Ecology, Joaquim Radkau writes that ‘the strongest force driving world history stems from a synergy of metaphysical and material motives.’ If we understand metaphysical here in terms of the psychic and symbolic essence of human beings as meaning-seeking creatures, then Mumford’s work clearly offers great insight into this synergy.
Mumford’s environmentalism has a moral, philosophical and psychological depth in that it grounds large-scale ambitious plans for changes within the practical reasoning and motivations of ‘ordinary’ men and women in the context of the warm, affective ties and bonds in their communities. The point is pertinent. The resolution of the problems we face is not just a matter of institutional, legal, and technical action. Radkau comments:
Climate policy goes down a blind alley if it is nothing other than climate policy; it will have a truly global basis only when it builds upon vital needs of people alive today. As Hegel rightly pointed out in his lectures on aesthetics: 'Man is essentially here and now.' For all the talk of sustainability and biodiversity, we should not forget that environmentalism has a much more solid foundation in life's necessities than in concern for a distant, ill-defined future; it stands a chance of lasting success only if it appeals primarily to man's instinct for self-preservation, not just to a selfless dimension (or rather: to spiritual dissolution of the self into a greater whole). The one does not exclude the other.’
Radkau, 2014: 430
The lesson is that to be successful, environmentalism needs to address the affective dimension of change in history and address the problems to be resolved to the motivational economy of human beings. The demands for action on global warming and climate change need to be considered in this light. These problems are ‘global’ problems that require large-scale solutions which transcend the normal modes of practical reasoning on the part of individuals. The problem, however, is that the large- and small-scales have parted company, leading to an emphasis on top-down governmental action divorced from individuals in their communities. The problem is not merely a political one, still less a scientific or technical one, but involves a psychic, moral and spiritual challenge to change our way of life as a whole. When the principal agencies of such change come from above and outside the human beings to be changed, the fundamental transformation required fails to take place. The approach fails to treat human beings as the creative, knowledgeable, moral agents of their own transformation.
Rainer Maria Rilke concludes his Archaic Torso of Apollo with these words, ‘for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.’ Here, Apollo is summarising the religious imperative, but those words resonate in the contemporary literature on climate change. The claim is repeated continually. Yet too often the demands for action are translated into the form of goals and policies for agencies in government and business standing outside of and above individuals in their communities. Very rarely is serious attention given to the deeper question of how ‘ordinary’ men and women are to obey such a command in their lives and in their communities; very rarely are individuals treated as agents of this change. Instead, they are to be acted upon and changed from above. In consequence, the deeper change in the way of life does not take place.
We need to go to the heart of the motivational economy of action and change and understand what it takes for people to unite behind a purpose. This is to give goals and strategies an affective content by making facts existentially meaningful, generating the kind of fellowship from within organic cultures that give communities resilience. Fostering that capacity is key to communities becoming able to respond to emergencies, take ownership of problems and take responsibility for changes to be made.
Mumford openly and repeatedly writes in the language of organic order, function and purpose. He writes:
An age that worships the machine and seeks only those goods that the machine provides, in ever larger amounts, at ever rising profits, actually has lost contact with reality; and in the next moment or the next generation may translate its general denial of life into one last savage gesture of nuclear extermination. Within the context of organic order and human purpose, our whole technology has still potentially a large part to play; but much of the riches of modern technics will remain unusable until organic functions and human purposes, rather than the mechanical process, dominate.
Mumford 1962 in Miller ed. 1986: 82
Mumford writes that civilisation turns in and against itself when the will to order ceases to be self-sustaining and inherently purposeful, when life becomes empty, and the sacrifices we make and the burdens we carry become greater than the tangible rewards. ‘Civilisation begins by a magnificent materialisation of human purpose: it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it.’ (Mumford 1957 ch 3).
For Mumford, this sudden evaporation of meaning and value, often coming at the time a civilisation seems to be at its height, is one of the enigmas of history: ‘we face it again in our own time.’ He writes on the constant assertions in the contemporary world that life is meaningless:
‘If human life has no purpose and meaning, then the philosophy that proclaims this fact is even emptier than the situation it describes. If, on the other hand, there is more to man's fate and history than meets the eye, if the process as a whole has significance, then even the humblest life and the most insignificant organic function will participate in that ultimate meaning.’
Mumford 1952: 61/62
That’s the language of Aristotelian teleology and essentialism, although Mumford draws upon a wide range of sources in making that point. But Mumford draws on Aristotle repeatedly on this point. He makes a point of arguing that Aristotle was not handicapped by the restricted conception of causality that seventeenth-century physics imposed upon modern thought, a conception which serves ‘to keep all changes on the plane of the external and the observable.’ Aristotle ‘realized, as a later generation will perhaps again realize, that “purpose” is engrained in all natural processes, not superimposed by man, though purpose no more admits the ulterior explanation than does causality.’ (Mumford 1966: 215). That view expresses a clear hope that ‘purpose’ will be recovered in the teeth of scientific and philosophical resistance and restored to its true place in the art of practical living.
In identifying the importance of purpose, growth, self-actualisation, and inherent potential, Mumford had understood the essentialist metaphysics which formed the core of Aristotle’s philosophy. This was the way people thought and acted in the past. There is no reason to think that they were wrong on this. Quite the contrary, in fact. There is plenty of reason to think that human beings are innately sensible of the truth, stated most eloquently and systematically by Aristotle, that the effective action which makes for successful living, which Aristotle calls ‘flourishing,’ requires the acquisition and exercise of virtuous habits and the right character, equipping human beings with purpose, meaning, will, motivation, character and the capacity to act. All of these are elements of practical reasoning.
I have, therefore, argued consistently argued for human nature and essentialism in my work.
The lesson for environmentalism is clear. Large-scale ambitious projects for resolving problems or initiating changes will succeed only by being rooted in small-scale practical reasoning, in communities of practice, in moral/metaphysical motivations as well as material interests, and in attachment to place. Without these things, demands for action which entail large-scale institutions and structures acting upon individuals and communities may succeed in changing the external casing, but not the content. A top-down engineering approach can achieve certain things, but it does not amount to a change in a way of life. The approach I advocate recognises that in any demands for changes in a way of life, it is individuals living in specific relation to others in place who have to act, not simply be acted upon, and it is individuals who have to accept and co-operate, as a matter of will, with the decisions and policies made in their name, and make whatever changes are necessary for the sake of the health and well-being of future generations and ecosystems. It is arguable that contemporary environmentalism, particularly that environmentalism which demands ambitious, large-scale institutional and governmental action and fundamental changes in our way of life, has been insufficiently alive to this aspect. Their alarms may be well-grounded in fact and research, but presented in the way they have been presented, they have had the effect of frightening people and paralysing will and effort, rather than recruiting individuals as citizens and inviting and inspiring their creative agency.
I would offer another approach, one that can envisage extensive change in which large-scale planning and small-scale practical reasoning proceed hand in hand. This offers an approach that is able to address environmental problems in a way that is in keeping with the motivations and actions that spring organically from the routines of everyday life. Such an approach brings environmental problems down to human scale and makes them comprehensible as our problems which we will take responsibility for solving by joining together in common cause, activating our innate moral equipment.
That, in fine, develops an integral environmentalism which combines both the human and moral ecology and the physical ecology. The approach presents environmentalism in all its facets. The approach establishes the point that environmental problems are ones for all of us to resolve in the everyday life world, and are not to be confiscated by extraneous institutions and bodies in government and business. That latter approach is the kind of abstraction from the sources of life, power and meaning that has generated environmental problems in the first place:
If the values of civilisation were in fact a sufficient fulfilment of man's nature, it would be impossible to explain this inner emptiness and purposelessness. Military defeats, economic crises, political dissensions, do not account for this inner collapse: at best they are symptomatic, for the victor is equally the victim and he who becomes rich feels impoverished. The deeper cause seems to be man's self-alienation from the sources of life.
Mumford 1957 ch 3
Problems will be addressed and resolved only if people are motivated to confront them in the first place, and that involves treating human beings as knowledgeable moral agents, not merely in terms of being informed by the facts of the matter, but most of all in being morally equipped, at the level of character, with the capacity to respond, assume responsibility and take ownership of problems. The task of government or any larger institutional framework in this respect, then, is to create the conditions which fosters the emergence of will and motivations on the part of individuals as citizen-lawyers in their own communities. The approach emphasises place and place-based meaning. This can be described as oikophilia, a feeling and love for home. Building home and being at home is at the heart of the approach and embraces the entire history of human civilization. Mumford makes this point with respect to architecture, the history of the city and the urban environment. The city came before the state, he emphasises. That point is not merely of historical significance, but of is practical contemporary relevance when it comes to right living in accordance with balance, scale and symmetry. Large-scale, goal driven, global, political schemes are empty unless grounded in local communities and initiatives, civil associations and small-scale ties and practices.
It is therefore worth emphasising the implicit ‘living’ philosophy that lies at the heart of Mumford’s analyses and histories with respect to cities and culture. This philosophy highlights the enduring, organic, quality of small-scale practical reasoning, buttressing the more ambitious large-scale plans that may well be required. That living philosophy accents the ways in which human beings are rational moral beings capable of being the agents of change by generating co-operative solutions to problems that cannot be addressed adequately by either the individual or by the centralized state.
This, I take to be the Mumfordian conception of the good life as the moral life, one in which practical reason is rooted in social practices, communities, love of home, and the sympathies that bind individuals to their fellows. So many radical campaigns and demands for action are negative and exhibit a crisis-alarmism that is unpersuasive. These induce fear and paralysis rather than inspire change. Mumford takes us much further in accenting what we are for, not merely what we are against: ‘we have to become fully activated human beings, every part of us, tremendously alive and ready to take charge, and this can’t be done by people who in escape, who have formed the habit of total rejection. We must know what we want, not just what we don’t want.’
Lewis Mumford from BBC documentary Towards Tomorrow A Utopia 1968
Mumford emphasises the small-scale work that expresses and supports the low-impact way of life. This is not a matter of opposing small-scale to large-scale but of integrating the two through establishing appropriate scale. Depending on the issue, it is sometimes appropriate to scale upwards as well as downwards. The challenge is to embed the large-scale actions, governmental initiatives and planning required in smaller-scaled actions so as to devise a way of sharing problems, identifying them as our problems and building collaborative structures in resolving them. We are becoming aware that top-down solutions are predicated upon actions, appeals and incentives that do not exist within given social identities, they are too abstract to have social relevance and so either fall on deaf ears or have to be imposed from above (to be rejected from below more often than not). The question before us is how to create relations, structures and communities of free co-operation, collective will and motivation. I think the views sketched above show the way to answer that question.