Fostering the Inner Motives and Virtues for Environmental Action
I am reading conservative criticisms of what they call a ‘coercive environmental socialism.’ That term is applied to the Green New Deal and to the attempts by climate activists and extinction rebels to force governments into environmental actions. As an eco-socialist of long standing, I need to respond to this designation. This notion of ‘coercion’ arises in the context of the classic liberal separation of the state and political action on the one hand and civil society and private choices on the other. According to liberalism, the individual is free to choose the good as he or she sees fit so long as that freedom does none harm and is within the law. Anything beyond that is an infringement on individual liberty. It follows that any collective purpose pursued through political action is at least potentially repressive or constraining of individual liberty, however necessary in social or ecological terms. For it to be otherwise requires changing the terms on which modern governance is based.
I would also set this notion of coercion within the old paradox of emancipation. The old materialist doctrine held that circumstances condition human character; if circumstances are corrupt, then the people shaped by them are likewise corrupt, too corrupt, indeed, to be able to emancipate themselves let alone society. A theoretico-elitist approach to knowledge and politics follows from this view. An elite ‘from the outside’ of society’s environmental determinism is thus proposed as the agency of revolutionary transformation. This knowledgeable elite has somehow escaped the materialist premise to become the transformative agent. The masses remain passive and, instead of acting, are acted upon by the knowledgeable elite. Marx was the most vehement opponent of such elitist politics, seeking to distinguish himself from those he castigated as ‘alchemists of revolution,’ ‘would-be universal reformers,’ and ‘workers’ dictators.’ From first to last Marx insisted that the emancipation of the working class is an act of the working class themselves, and it is this notion I want to develop in such a way as to replace the notion of coercion with the notion of volunteering.
After decades of asserting a politics that is ‘neither left nor right,’ claiming that capitalism and socialism are two sides of the same industrial coin, Greens are now talking the language of ‘system change.’ Badly. They are translating a critique of political economy into environmentalist terms, still talking of economic growth and degrowth instead of analysing processes of accumulation. There is little or no class analysis, simply bland references to ‘we’ and ‘the people’ and ‘humanity’ in general. The same apocalyptic countdown, the same appeal to necessity, the same fear, the same political and moral bullying by climate numbers. In all of this, Greta Thunberg serves as a moral shield that rationalizes the putting of politics on ice. I’m not remotely interested in dividing the world into Manichean for- and against- Greta camps, these are far from the only political possibilities. If environmentalists force politics into these choices, then they will be beaten, and their concerns taken up in other ways. If they succeed, the result will be an explicitly authoritarian politics in which there will be no arguing with environmental philosopher kings. Forms of governance and forms of economic provision will be mediated via elitist modes claiming to be acting for the best interest of planetary health. The result will be institutional modes remote from democratic check and control.
I bitterly resent that after decades of carefully reclaiming socialism from the totalitarian prison it had been confined within for the best part of the twentieth century, people with no roots in socialism, people who argued – and can still be found arguing – that capitalism and socialism are the same ecologically damaging forms of industrialism – have burgled their way into the politics of ‘system change,’ only to leave the critique of political economy, class analysis, and the politics of self-emancipation and self-socialisation well and truly out to give a restatement of the very environmentalist determinism Marx fought long and hard to uproot from radical politics.
The fact that I am an eco-socialist means that I can see this ‘system change’ proposed by those around XR and the Green movement for what it is – a bastardized socialism as an authoritariansm which serves as a vehicle for middle class totalitarians who think their possession of truth gives them the righteous power to manipulate people and reality.
I repeat my consistent argument that the environmental crisis is as much a social, moral, and cultural crisis as it is an ecological crisis. That is, the crisis in the physical ecology is itself symptomatic of a crisis in human relations between each other within society and between human and natural communities. The crisis is global in the sense of generating vast collective forces outside the control of the limited media of human society. Human actions need to scale up to address the ‘global’ nature of the crisis. At the same time, this crisis also demonstrates the tyranny and violence of abstraction that issues when power, initiative, and responsibility are abstracted away from human control, either in terms of individuals, communities or entire nations. The system is an organized collective and individual irresponsibility.
The movement for environmental action and responsibility makes a mistake, however, when it proceeds directly to the ‘global’ level or collective level and seeks to engineer change over the heads of the people, even against their views and practices. Any enduring environmentalism has to ‘take’ by being rooted in the cultural, social, and historic soil. Large-scale ambitious projects for environmental action are certainly required in an age of global collective forces impacting on human and natural communities externally. These projects, however, will succeed only to the extent that they are grounded in communities of character and practice, fostering the inner motives of people, stimulating practical reasoning and participation, and encouraging responsibility. Attempts to engineer change through expert initiative can succeed to a certain extent, but fall short for the failure to change the very thing that stands in need of changing – the motivational economy at the heart of human society. A motive is an inner state that energizes, incites, inspires, activates, moves, directs, and canalizes behaviour and action in specific directions. In the absence of intrinsic motivation, there is a need for extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic is far more effective than extrinsic. I would refer here to a eudaimonic flourishing and growth in which virtues and motives shape the narrative self within a moral and social ecology. Ultimately, it is individual human beings themselves who need to not only act, but see the need for action. That is, individuals need to recognize environmental problems for what they are and take ownership of them; and that requires the creation of effective communities enabling such ownership. Individuals have to accept (co-)responsibility with others for the generation of environmental problems and enter into co-operative relations with others with respect to the decisions taken to address these problems. At the heart of such co-operation is the principle of self-assumed obligation, the idea that individuals are only legitimately bound by laws that they have had a hand themselves in making. The loss of that principle is fatal to any movement, indicating not merely a denial of democracy, and hence a loss of legitimacy through the withdrawal of popular support, but a denial of the creative agency of the citizen body, and hence a loss of popular social content rooted in places and practices. People will be more inclined to make sacrifices for the future moral, social, and natural ecology if they can see the reason for such sacrifices and are actively involved in their undertaking. Those who argue that addressing climate change requires ‘system change’ need to absorb that lesson. Without internal motivational and associational content, schemes for far-reaching institutional changes, involving exorbitant expense as well as fundamental transformation in our way of life, become empty impositions that succeed only in instituting a totalitarian control far removed from visions of the fundamentally self-regulating ecological society. Such vast, ambitious schemes are less a coherent response to the violence and tyranny of abstraction that lies behind the environmental crisis as an expression, even an extension, of it. The abstraction of knowledge, power, and control which characterises the modern Megamachine, a death machine removed ever further from the sources of life and meaning, continues in the garb of an environmental authoritarianism. Such a ‘global’ politics, like the threats of the ‘end of the world’ in accordance with the countdown on the doomsday clock, do not encourage citizen action and initiative but paralyze those essential qualities by fear. Instead of recruiting individuals to volunteer in an environmental associationalism, such a politics deters, treating the body politic as inert and passive to be educated, informed, and mobilized by a knowledgeable elite. That is a patently elitist politics in an age when people are rejecting elites for their culpability with the globalisation of liberal relations and the way in which these are implicated in the unravelling of the communities and connections that nurture a sense of meaning, identity, and belonging. The constant cries of alarm and demands for action deter individuals, deny hope, and are psychically and socially debilitating. Such an approach alarms citizens; it may inform people, but it does not recruit them to the cause. Because, once the alarm has been raised and the demand for action issued, it remains as unclear as ever what the collective means and mechanisms of effective environmental action are. All that there is is an emphasis on personal lifestyle changes – an austerian environmentalism that places the accent on retrenchement in consumption, travel, even sex, with the monitoring of family numbers – and large-scale ambitious government interventions. The psychic effect is debilitating, with individuals having to engage in a denialism of switching the noise off just to get through such a miserable life without going mad. That suggests another point I make – survival itself is not an end likely to inspire and motivate. Having portrayed human life in such bleak, destructive, and meaningless terms, mere survival cannot be an effective end. The human species and human life has to be worthy of survival and be understood in such terms as a matter of one’s inner being. A movement that sees human social life in terms of disinfectants and hygiene will not encourage individuals into making sacrifices for future generations. If life is as bleak as it is portrayed, then it is hardly worthy of being saved. Make the case for human achievements, civilization, the range of human activities, and present a vision of the flourishing society, and you will tap into human motivations. Take the view that everything is a legitimate agent in nature except human beings, take the view that the human species is a virus or a cancer on the planet, and make the claim that there is not an environmental problem on earth that couldn’t be solved or improved without the existence of human beings – a frequent claim, one that has been made regularly by Sir David Attenborough – and you help to foster a mentality that prepares for the end of human life. Such views prepare the psychological ground for the self-destruction of human civilisation.
I argue for a very different way of addressing environmental issues, one that is not only in keeping with human nature, and which explicitly argues on essentialist grounds that there is such a thing as human nature, but seeks human flourishing in interdependence with a planetary flourishing. Such a philosophy of living springs not from an abstract rationalism and epistemological systems but from the communities of the everyday social lifeworld. Instead of detailed programmes implemented by governments and instead of engineering solutions in the hands of experts, I accent communities of character and practice which foster a tendency for individuals to take ownership of problems as the collective consequences of their actions, developing the appropriate means and mechanisms for resolution. Any governmental action that will be necessary – which is a lot given the ‘global’ nature of the forces engendering the environmental crisis – will be buttressed and legitimised by an ecological self-socialization that proceeds from below. Environmental problems will appear as they truly are, our problems, for which we can start to resolve through participation in communities of practice enabling the use of our innate moral equipment and practical reasoning. In other words, not only will individuals take ownership of environmental problems but, most importantly, of the solutions to them. That is essential to guard against yet further abstraction of initiative and control, and with it responsibility, whether in terms of money or finance or knowledge and expertise. I am all in favour of radical solutions and actions with respect to system change, but it has to be a truly radical change of system, going much further than institutional and technical issues to engage individuals directly. That view is diametrically opposed to those who envisage radical solutions dependent on their expertise and their statements of truth – solutions which they take leadership of over against the popular will, however it may be expressed.
Environmental problems are problems that are holistic in nature and scope. It follows that they need to be addressed at all levels, proceeding from actions rooted in everyday social circumstances; they are not to be broken up and parcelled out to different expert bodies and elite agencies, abstracted away, monopolized and instrumentalized by bodies removed from popular scrutiny and control. The resolution of environmental problems is possible only if individuals are motivated in sufficient numbers to address them, as individuals but also, and most importantly, as communities. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto. At the heart of the environmental problem is the fracturing and dissolution of the social environment. Resolution charges us with the task of resolidification. The environmental transformation of ‘the political’ in this respect concerns the creation of the appropriate habitus in which the right kind of motives emerge and solidify around relations and practices fostering trust and enabling responsibility. These motives emerge within a love of home and attachment to place. If there is a need for global schemes of action, these will succeed only to the extent they given enduring content in the form of local initiatives proceeding through associational and civic space. Large-scale problems require large-scale actions but they require more than that. Since overscale is part of the environmental problem, the challenge is to restore social affairs to human dimensions and proportions. That points to human-scale institutions of friendship as against over-scale systems of abstraction. It is in this respect that my argument runs in a contrary direction to an environmentalism that is focused on ‘global’ problems and speaks the language of science and technology in politics – the disdain for politics in this respect translates all too easily into disdain for the citizen voice. Not enough people, comes the lament, know enough. Politics, in other words, is approached in terms of truth and knowledge, correct thinking and solutions. Citizens are not citizens legitimately determining how their common affairs are to be resolved, but empty heads to be filled with information, ordered from the outside. This is a particularly brittle and ineffective Enlightenment psychology that totally ignores the importance of fostering the practical reasoning and inner motives by way of which individuals emerge as rational moral beings capable of analysing problems and reaching co-operative solutions to problems that only very inadequately addressed at the level of individual and state. The approach I take offers a way of navigating the twin reefs of social atomism and political centralism, both of which are integral parts of the environmental problem, not solutions to it. The environmental problem arises from the loss of balance and symmetry which occurs with a systematic uprooting and dis-placement of people, so that people are no longer able to comprehend the places in which they live as a home. The institutional and structural causes behind this loss need to be analysed closely. Following Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, I would refer to this loss in terms of a disembedding which fragments society into an atomism of individuals severed from senses of belonging, community, traditions, and moral and communal controls. This points to an abstraction of control and power from communities. That refers to the rise of both the centralized state as well as the commodification, enclosure and extension of monetary relations. Instead of an internal self-regulation, society comes to be governed by an external institutional-systemic control, not only disempowering individuals but fostering an anonymity that encourages irresponsibility.
The environmentalism that I support emphasizes the maintenance of a moral and social ecology. The agency of real individuals is at the heart of that ecology, since it is through such motivated and interested actions that social organisms adapt and thrive. The ‘rational freedom’ I espouse holds that the freedom of each is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom of all. But that freedom within society does not exhaust the purpose of politics as ‘politikon bion’ or public life. Such freedom is set within the wider context of a flourishing which is respectful and planful in relation to the health and vitality of the social and natural environment. This refers not only to ecosystems and the functioning of natural communities but also precious social and cultural resources which have emerged over time and which are embodied in traditions, mores, and customs as well as more formally in laws and institutions. It is such things that make society work. An environmentalism which is defined in this way recovers the purpose of politics as an internal self-ordering through fostering the qualities for self-governance, resisting both the tendencies to abstraction and regulatory solutions which attempt to control them in external fashion, reordering society from the outside in accordance with some overarching ideal. Environmentalism in an age of abstraction is therefore challenged to address the abstraction of control in such a way as to avoid contributing to its extension and entrenchment. That involves developing an approach which enables resilience and fosters resistance to the entropic forces that threaten to disturb social and ecological equilibrium.
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Environmental health and vitality depends upon ensuring the strength of initiative at the local level. A social and cultural ecology therefore emphasizes warm, effective ties and bonds between individuals, local identities, proximal relations, the strength of loyalties and solidarities between people in community, and fostering long-term commitment through consensual devotion to common ends that are determined in accordance with transcendent standards of truth and goodness. Whist a rationalism in politics can tend to be abstractly global or universal in its aims, an environmentalism of the kind I espouse is embedded, participatory, and organic in a historic and social as well as a natural sense. The local and the global are thus established on a continuum, ensuring the resilience of social capital and communities against the forces of anarchic and atomising abstraction.
Such an environmentalism reenvisages politics as something that is concerned less with the abstraction of power and its utilisation in schemes of manipulation and management of people and reality and more with the maintenance and repair of homeostatic systems — a self-correcting and self-regulating order. The emphasis, then, is upon preserving homeostatic systems in politics, economics and society: systems of exchange, traditions, customs and mores as well as the common law, families, neighbourhoods, communities and the various intermediary associations that comprise a healthy and functioning society. The aim is to establishing the conditions for the self-governing and self-policing society based upon self-correcting social systems and the behaviours that are appropriate to them. Such a social system is based on automatic stabilizers which ensures constant adjustment in terms of the congruity between functional requirements and the needs and motives of individuals.
A successful environmental policy proceeds by respecting and grounding itself upon these mentalities as expressed in proximal relations. It is through these mentalities that stewardship takes conscious living form in that they entail an ongoing feedback which serves to check and monitor actions and consequences.
The understanding of environmentalism entailed here accents trusteeship, dialogue, solidary exchange, and a politics of friendship and love as against command and control. It takes no great insight to see that the pursuit of an individual self-interest without recognition of natural limits constitutes a threat to planetary health. So far, so obvious. It takes a little more insight to see such behaviour as contravening social limits, threatening to subvert the social order. It takes a little more to see social and natural communities as bound within an understanding of the greater whole, with self-interested behaviour as a moral violation. It follows from this understanding that the wisest course of action is to preserve and buttress the customs, mores, and ‘habits of the heart’ that place a socially mediated constraint on human appetites, providing the social supports that serve to replenish the sources of social contentment, and prohibit the passing on of the costs and consequences of actions to those who did nothing to incur them. That is also a matter of institutional and structural transformations. My argument does not set local and global in antithetical relation, as alternate courses of action, but establishes them on a continuum.
The great disjunction to be overcome is that that may exist between social equilibrium and ecological equilibrium. What renders harmonisation between these two difficult is the fact that human beings exist in a political world based on asymmetrical relations of class, power, and control based on the distribution of resources. Human interests within society lack symmetry, making it difficult for human society to seek, let alone attain, symmetry in relation to natural communities.
This is most evident with respect to the prevailing capital system, within which the system of representative government is embedded. Representative governments achieve a stability and a legitimacy in the context of the very economic growth which is considered to threaten to health of the planetary ecology. Whilst the calls for a degrowth instituted via government have an ecological rationale, they lack in a social rationale. The power and resources of government are secondary and derive from the capital economy. The popularity and stability of government is very much dependent on the performance of ‘the economy,’ that slippery euphemism for capital and its accumulative dynamic. The mechanisms of that economy cannot be obstructed without there being damaging social and political consequences, however much ecologists say some such thing is required for planetary health. The asymmetry between the social environment and the natural environment here challenges humans to overcome their divisions within society in order to establish the harmony they need between social and natural environments to preserve their existence. It is clear that, beyond a certain level of development, societies do not require more growth but stabilization. The accumulative imperatives of capital, however, enforce further growth, for the sake of growth. No representative government can block these imperatives without significantly harming its own prospects. This observation reveals the institutional and systematic pressures standing in the way of all attempts to regulate the global economy by way of binding treaties that aim to constrain ecologically damaging economic activity. Politicians are being asked to make pledges that they will know will either undermine their own popularity or place burdens on others, who will less keen to undertake them. Without the authoritative structure enabling enforcement, such treaties are no more than pious promises.
The solution is not a command and control one, either politically or economically, since this merely invests bureaucratic agencies with substantial power removed from the people and their communities. The solution is to devise social arrangements so that the costs and consequences are born directly. That restores self-regulation and self-correction within the social system, putting an end to incentives to free-riding. Part of this system of self-governance is the strengthening of the inner motives to enable us to restrain appetites directly.
That strengthening of motives and motivations through character formation and the cultivation of the virtues appears such an obvious thing to do, restoring communities and devolving power and resources to the lowest level of competence, yet meets with little response compared to ambitious projects of government action and regulation. The danger of the latter lies in identifying environmentalism with a prohibition and inhibition that is externally imposed. Such a thing will be felt as burdensome and tiresome; worse, it makes it possible for political opponents to pose as liberators, defenders of individual liberty, in challenging laws and restrictions. There is a danger of coming to identify environmentalism with an external regulation which seeks to coerce individuals into correct behaviour. Infinitely superior to this approach is to cultivate the (ecological) virtues in the first place, so that individuals come to undertake voluntarily whatever sacrifices may be necessary for environmental health. People will do more as a matter of free choice than they will when subject to legal and institutional force. The problem with environmental prohibition and protection lies in identifying the cause of environmentalism with bureaucratic regulation and governmental interference. It makes environmentalism appear to be inimical to individual freedom. The challenge is to enrich this freedom socially, seeing the individual as living in relation to others.
We are, in fine, in search of the motives, virtues, and character traits that serve to preserve and enrich a shared inheritance that now stands under threat of predation and exhaustion.
An enlightened self-interest based on dominant instrumental rationality is not the answer. Rational self-interest is subject to problems of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma, and succeed in averting 'the tragedy of the commons' only with great difficulty. Omstrom has done superb work here. The problem with games theory, though, is that it is presumed on the very assumptions that need to be changed. For similar reasons, social contract constructs merely restate the original difficulty in coming up with their solutions: why is it reasonable for self-interested individuals to abide by social constraints that curtail their interests in some way, rather than pretend to abide by them whilst furthering their interests on the presumption that others will do likewise.
The evident solution is to foster the motives that transcend such calculations of self-interest. In contradistinction to contractarian thinking premised on the ego and its interests, the challenge is to cultivate the inner motives so that the right response can be elicited in members of society and called upon to serve the long-term ecological goal knowing that the call will receive a voluntary response. Hence my reference to the building of communities of character and communities of practice. Without those, demands for environmental action cannot but be experienced by individuals as abstract and top-down, being issued from outside by experts, elites, bureaucrats charged with responsibility and the power of initiative. My argument seeks to diffuse that responsibility and power throughout the community through the embedding of right actions within right relationships.
Burke referred to the ‘little platoons,’ Tocqueville to civil associations fostering the habits of the heart, Hegel for non-contractual obligations running throughout the system of the ethical life, building from the family and civil society running through the economy as a system of needs and culminating in the state as the ethical agency securing the universal interest. Bertrand Russell wrote that freedom for Hegel meant obeying the dictate of the Prussian state. Russell’s comment is not simply wrong, nor even ignorant, it is bigoted and betrays a liberal prejudice that can see morality, law, community, and authority outside of the individual as abstract and potentially repressive. It is precisely that false antithesis between the individual and the collective interest, between individuality and sociality, that I seek to challenge and replace with an understanding that sees personality and communality as two sides of the same human nature. I would go further and introduce the spiritual dimension here, introducing motives oriented towards service to something greater than the ego, placing actions above the inducements to serving mere self-interest.
The concern with establishing communities of virtuous practice and character formation doesn’t seem to loom large in environmental circles, least of all those concerned with political goals to be realized by a government reordering of society from above (note, such external coercion and regulation is inevitable in the context of a continuation of the institutional separation of state and civil society characteristic of the liberal order). The idea is solid, though, in that it does precisely what needs to be done, reconfiguring human motives and morals in such a way that calculations of rational self-interest cease to be the sole ground for actions, thus reducing the need for governmental and legal coercion and regulation. Environmental education, protection, and regulation is very much a blunt instrument that identifies others as a passive and external to be cajoled and encouraged into action, instead of being knowledgeable, moral agents to be incited from within via the inner motives. Environmentalism is forever having to make strenuous external efforts in the absence of the incentives that induce human beings in general to respond to and correct environmental stresses and strains.
Rather than attempt to resolve environmental and social problems at a governmental level that remains separated from society and communuty, we should seek the reassertion of local initiative and control based on self-government, adopting actions and practices that are in tune with local loyalties and customs. The most effective and enduring policies are those which strike strong roots and grow from there, consonant with the moral and psychic archaeology of human settlement and place-based communal meaning. Ambitions plans for global action may well be required to address problems that are global in scale, but to be effective and enduring these must proceed from small-scale practical reasoning that proceeds within the shared love of a shared place, community, and culture. Responsibility depends upon an identity and ownership that builds a family of motives that strike deep roots in the human psyche.
I emphasize the civil associations, autonomous bodies, the communities of virtuous practice, and the various colleges and communities that form in the associational space of civil society beyond the control and province of the state and economy. These intermediary forms refer to associations of individuals existing for the sake of membership and solidarity, forming the very stuff of social life, being capable of renewing society from within, without the instigation of extraneous bodies pursuing a political purpose or cause. The public spirit we need is an attribute of these associations and communities, it is within those proximal relations that the inner motives that respond to calls for action come.