A Civic Environmentalism and Moral Ecology: linking ethical, social, and ecological approaches in evolution and extension
It’s always good to know you have been useful for something and that your labours have not been in vain. I have worked long and hard over the years developing my philosophy of ‘rational freedom.’ I present a view that is easily caricatured as authoritarian by those libertarians who are false friends of the people. These are the people who are very big on trusting individuals to be clever enough and mature enough to make their own decisions and look after their own affairs. The greatest sages in history have always emphasized a moral and instititional guidance constraining individuals to the good, in the hope that at some point they will come to internalize those standards and be able to act well voluntarily via the inner motives rather than be constrained to the good involuntarily by external means. Living together well is a complicated business, and I thoroughly reject the simplicities of both the libertarians and the authoritarians. Truth and goodness cannot be passively given or legislated but must be actively apprehended and lived on the part of individuals.
I have a fairly distinctive philosophical, political, and moral position that bears some similarities with various positions, but always with something, and often a lot, left over. I am proud to have had John Bellamy Foster discover and praise my work. I have done good work on Marx and ecology, but I take a very different direction on ethics. I affirm the existence of transcendent standards in a way that Marx did not, at least explicitly.
I have just received this heartening message from the excellent process philosopher Arran Gare, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Arran Gare is one of the most insightful and inspiring philosophers in the world today, and I am certainly appreciative of the fact that he has discovered my work and expressed an appreciation. Arran has done superb work over the years in environmental philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of culture and the metaphysics of process philosophy. We come very close in our concerns to examine the environmental crisis with a philosophical depth, engaging in what E.F. Schumacher called a ‘metaphysical reconstruction.’ I continually underline that environmental problems will continue until people take this task of reconstruction seriously. I bitterly regret the tardiness of too many people to even see this issue as having any importance, let alone the imperative importance that it has. Without clarify on true ends, all the means in the world we have at our disposal will continue to be misapplied, often backfiring spectacularly. I have written at length on this in many places, and so will not repeat myself here. It was the central theme of the work of, for instance, Lewis Mumford, a figure on whom I have done extensive work.
It seems that my work over the years has saved him a job. The Of Gods and Gaia book he cites is a 900 page destruction of would-be planetary engineers and managers. I am certainly most appreciative of thanks here, for the very reason that that was a horrible piece of work for me to research and write. The field of eco-modernization is an entire casebook of bad ethics and wretched politics.
I remember well writing this book. Its origins lay in my being asked to write a review of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline, just a guide or a commentary, really, to be used in debates and discussions in environmental circles. I found the book so thoroughly wretched – and so utterly deceitful - that I had to take it apart passage by passage, making sure to expose the underlying conceit in all its manifestly ideological intent. I decided to take out Mark Lynas’ The God Species at the same time, for the reason its arguments seemed a perfect copy of Brand’s. I stand by the criticisms I made of James Lovelock. Very many consider Lovelock to have established the basis for a philosophy of life in his Gaia thesis. I expose the limitations of Lovelock’s thought here, as I do with respect to all the naturalisms that are offered as an eco-philosophy. Sooner or later they reduce to ecological and biological imperatives that are quite distinct from a truly ethical system, exhibiting an inherent inhumanism that paves the way for the (self-)elimination of the human species. The better formulations of this position see human beings as co-creators and co-agents within a ceaselessly creative universe. Such a view sees human will, agency, consciousness, and hence culture and civics as built into the animate, purposive universe. I certainly agree with this view as far as it goes, and have argued it at length. But I also think that that view only ‘works’ in the end on the basis of a transcendental conception of truth, goodness, and beauty, and that these three transcendents are all qualities of God. I also hold that such a conception comes with the inspirational and motivational qualities required to build the character and sustain the modes of conduct required to unify and solidify human society around a set of social practices conducive to flourishing. At present, some hundred and fifty years after ‘the death of God,’ this civilisation is faltering – designed to fail, divided to fall.
The alternatives I develop as against eco-modernization therefore entail a distinctive moral ecology, one that takes us beyond the Enlightenment claims that humans will build a Heaven on Earth by their own Reason alone. That was an ambitious idea with a great deal to its credit. But the scale of its achievements – people are healthier, wealthier, better educated, and longer lived than at any time in history, and in much greater numbers – is also the scale of its potential failures should power remain untampered. Can the institutions of liberal democratic modernity supply that tempering from within their own resources? I say ‘yes’ up to a certain point, but then require more.
There is clearly a consistency to the eco-modernizing case, and it is one that leads to a capitalist apologetics that leaves the fundamental drivers of converging social and ecological crises in place. It is certainly legitimate to argue over different technologies and energies. There will be a viable and functioning economy in any future ecological society, and the sweeping criticisms of ‘industrialisation’ and blanket demands to ‘dismantle capitalism’ and institute the degrowth economy betray a terrible abstraction from socio-economic realities that can only be disastrous in practice. The idea that ‘government’ will institute all these demands and more is pure political illiteracy that will more than likely institute a wasteland in practice. The state is not an independent instrument of the universal good – an old delusion of idealists in politics – but capital’s political command centre, one of capital’s key second order mediations, concerned with supplying the unity that capital, as a fundamentally anarchic and subjectless system of alien control cannot supply. There is no purely institutional nor technological solution to the problems we face, no design or engineering solution that we can devise in abstraction from social relations, practices, and people and put into practice. I emphasize a profound social transformation which not merely actively engages people in their communities, but is rooted in extensive participatory structures and public spaces in the hands of material organisations within a moral infrastructure.
The emphasis I place on ethics, virtues, metaphysics, and transcendent standards of truth and justice give my work on ‘rational freedom’ its distinctive quality, identifying it as a blend of left and right, socialist and conservative. I would suggest that there are few thinkers out there whose integral view is capable of encompassing the insights of John Bellamy Foster on the one side and Andreas Kinneging and Patrick Deneen on the other. I am always gratified by the appreciation that comes my way, but my work is irreducible in that it expresses a view that is distinctively my own, and unravels when reduced to a particular influence or aspect.
Basically, I develop a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology that links social and ecological approaches in evolution and extension to steer us past the twin reefs offered by the planetary engineers, on the one hand, and the planetary fetishizers, on the other. I avoid crude the dualisms which merely invert and mirror each other – setting a human (capital) worship, in which human agency and creativity is good and niggardly nature is bad, on the one side against a nature worship in which ‘man’ is bad and nature good on the other. The missing political, ethical, and civic dimension is utterly debilitating and traps environmentalism within always having to choose between narrow and deficient options.
My view sees human beings as co-creators, as partners in creation, as knowledgeable creative agents within a ceaselessly creative universe. I therefore offer an integral ecology, then, one that integrates natural processes within a social-ecological system and a moral framework. I most certainly do not regard ethics as some kind of epiphenomenon of natural processes and eschew a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism as deficient. It is here, I argue, that my view – which has broad similarities with that of others in eco-philosophy and political economy – takes a distinctive turn. Rather than this being an aberration on my part, a deviation from an otherwise sound eco-philosophy shared by many of the best thinkers, this represents a considered move on my part, the product of many years of deep thinking and careful writing.
My original plan was to write a book entitled Being and Place. The plans for that book can be found on my website
I have the extensive research notes in order and ready to write up, and one day I shall do precisely this. I have taken so long to finish this work for the reason that I sensed that the work on biology, ecology, psychology, and interconnection within and between natural processes and networks was utterly deficient in the most important quality of all – the metaphysics of morals. Without that, there is no show and no go.
To be clear, I do not repudiate the view I set out in this section of my website. On the contrary, I seek to affirm, embed, and enrich that view within an overarching and authoritative moral framework. This, I would suggest, is the distinctive part of my work. Many on the environmental left may consider an eco-philosophy modelled on nature and its inherent purpose and creativity to be sufficient, ‘God enough.’ I don’t believe it is, for reasons I set out in recent work, and in my forthcoming book on Dante Alighieri. That puts me out on a limb within environmental philosophy. To those who think I am blundering into error by way of deviation, I can only say I know exactly what I am doing, and that my choices here represent deep reflection on the issues.
Michael Shellenberger is now causing a stir with Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. I saw it coming because I’ve seen it before. One deficient position within the human-nature dualism invites the other. In other words, I consider Shellenberger to be wrong in his advocacy of eco-modernization as a solution to our crises, but that his view, like that of Brand before him, has the merit of recognizing the achievements of liberal and capitalist modernity. As left thinkers of the past did, he takes the high road of modernity. Of course, they took the high road leading beyond modernity, whereas the eco-modernizers are concerned to confine us within it, even as it turns socially and ecologically destructive. The merit of the view lies in the way that it values and revalues the liberatory potentials of human development, rather than taking a negative and destructive view that simply seeks to uproot the lot as harmful to the environment. The lack of a genuine politics, ethics, and political economy has left environmentalism with only nihilistic fantasy and idealistic fancy, something which people will, under any kind of scrutiny, find so utterly implausible as to embrace other positions as much more realistic. In fine, the only realistic scenario I can see in environmental politics as presently constituted lies in an authoritarian environmental regime under the auspices of untransformed government presiding over an untransformed capitalist economy – preserving capitalist relations under the pretence of preserving planetary boundaries. The ways in which civic participation and democratic involvement is both written off and written out of the most prominent environmental advocates tells me that we are in the presence of environmental philosopher-kings, an elite and an elect. That is redolent of both a bad politics and, as I shall shortly argue, a bad religion.
I am, therefore, well aware of the failings of environmentalism as politics and ethics, and argue strongly for a republicanism that takes the building of public community seriously. I argue this in terms of an eco-socialisation from below complementing the concerted action required above, emphasising an interimbrication of institutions and practices to furnish a comprehensive framework. I consistently argue for the building of a bridge between theoretical reason and practical reason, integrating our knowledge of the world (and the know-how we develop on that basis) with the practical means of acting on that capacity.
(Please check the ‘Field of Practical Reason’ section on my ‘Posts’ page).
I need to add something here on Shellenberger’s condemnation of environmentalism as a ‘new religion.’ That accusation is not new. Over a decade ago I was responding to accusations that ‘climate alarmism’ is a new religion. I addressed those criticisms, showing that the idea that there is a crisis in the climate system rests on good sound science – and a wealth of scientific research.
The Common Ground – vol 3: Moral Ecology (particularly ch 11 ‘The Missing Science of Ian Plimer’)
At the same time as I rebutted criticisms of a ‘religious’ climate alarmism, it struck me that ‘sceptical environmentalists’ were actually identifying the weak spot in environmentalism with respect to an utterly deficient ethics and politics, and were exploiting this deficiency to maximum effect. I wondered if it were a deliberate strategy to confine environmentalists within the sphere of a practically impotent science. The more that environmentalists were accused of not doing ‘proper science,’ merely engaging in politics and a new religion, the more they responded by restating the science. Over and again, to such an extent that they never came seriously to grips with the need to develop an effective ethics and politics, i.e. took the truth to the people to deliver change from within the public sphere. The effect of this cycle of accusation and denial was to ensure that environmentalists remained firmly on the ground of science instead of advancing, as they ought to have advanced, into the field of practical reason (ethics and politics), the place where citizens are engaged, inspired and mobilized and real movement within the social world takes place. As a result, truth remained frozen in the attic of scientific research. The consequences are a mounting crisis and mounting evidence of a crisis and an increasingly histrionic moral appeal and political pressure. For want of an effective ethics and politics, environmentalists are reduced to issuing an endless series of impotent but increasingly loud imperatives. It is at this point that environmentalism does take on the countenance of a religion, and an authoritarian politics, too. We are dealing here with what many see as the decline of Christianity and organized religion, and the loss of faith in general. In truth, it is deeper than this. When Nietzsche announced the ‘death of God,’ he was declaring the dissolution of the overarching and authoritative framework by which society had ordered its existence. Also lost were the meaning of moral terms and the claims of moral imperatives, along with the virtues and the practices of moral community. It’s not clear that people have yet to come to terms with this loss, given the extent to which they still use moral terms as if there were such a thing as moral truth and moral knowledge. When people do this, they are presuming that God – an objective morality or transcendent standard of truth and justice – still existed. They are baffled and increasingly frustrated when their moral appeals receive no response.
It is easy enough to declare the death of God. It is much less easy to extirpate the theological claims that were once attendant upon the existence of God, not least given the extent to which these claims spoke to a profound human need and longing. G.K. Chesterton has this marvellous line that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. I have heard atheists object that they don’t believe in anything but know fine well the value of the things they come to value without the need for God. ‘Nature’ is the most obvious surrogate for God. But Nature is an empty signifier and false authority when reified by science. Many will see that and make no claims by such means (many don’t and will, as in ‘follow the science,’ which is as arbitrary, meaningless, and nihilistic a claim as can be heard in ethics and politics. Who speaks for a Nature that cannot speak?) In the end, there is no morality and no politics, only a life that is here one day, gone another, and in need of no sanction, since there is no good and no bad. This is Nietzsche’s ‘beyond good and evil,’ and Weber saw right away that Nietzsche’s suspicions that human beings would not be strong enough to live in such a way would prove true. Instead, both feared, there would be endless ersatz gods and surrogate communities. The theological assumptions once attendant upon God have become unmoored and have come to attach themselves to issues and causes of common concern. We thus see this massive transfer of religious belief into social, political, and cultural spheres, theologizing interpersonal relations in ways that can only be dangerous and destructive. The people who criticize environmentalism as a religious style movement tend to be superficial in their analyses, proceeding on the assumption that since religion is irrational then any religious style movement is contrary to reason. They therefore put themselves forward as defenders of reason against the unreasoning utopians of leftist politics. This can lead to amusing knockabout, as when Greta Thunberg is caricatured as a child saint or prophet straight out of the Middle Ages, with the likes of David Attenborough at the other extreme as the mad doddery white-haired prophet of doom. This would strike home were it not for the fact that the figures caricatured have a wealth of scientific evidence to back up their claims, but there is a sense in which we are not comparing apples and pears here. When those claiming science on their side step into the field of ethics and politics, they need to do so with a genuinely ethical and political position behind them. When they use ‘the science’ as unanswerable authority dictating truths to people and politicians then they have left the realm of science behind them and entered the field of politics and ethics. This field is the field of practical reason, a field of dissensus and contention, of dialogue and dialectic, of a yes/no in which human beings thrash the truth out as moral beings and citizens. This goes missing in environmentalism as a ‘new religion.’ Worse, such environmentalism lacks the qualities of a true religion. It splits the world between good and evil, deifying one side – its own – whilst demonizing the other. When politics comes to be theologized, the disagreement which is normal comes to be delegitimized. Politics comes to fracture into precisely that terrain of warring gods by which Max Weber characterised the modern world. There results a power struggle in which compromise is impossible and no quarter can be given. Society will eat itself from within on this basis.
I spelled this out in a hard-hitting work of last year, A Home and a Resting Place. I had thought to edit or even withdraw that work, especially given its prediction that an emancipatory politics aiming at universal brotherhood would, in the absence of transcendent standards, be consummated as a universal hatred. Recent events tell me I was correct. I trust to the basic humanity and decency of people to pull back from the brink. The problem is the active minorities, those who count themselves among the elect and the vanguard on account of possessing the one and only truth, the correct ideology, who pressurize and herd people into conformity.
To come to the point, there is no substitute for true religion. The rationalist critics of environmentalism as a religion suffer from their identification of religion as irrational. In that, they repeat the very modernist delusions that have brought society to this impasse. The failure to take religion seriously means that people end up doing religion badly, and religion done badly can only end up intolerant, hysterical, even murderous. The same with respect to a genuine politics. Science is being pressed into service as ethics and politics. Not only can it not do this, the harder it is pressed as a political and ethical position, the more damage it does. We have a fake religion which has all the punitive and judgemental character of religion at its worst, but none of the mercy and forgiveness which is the true religious spirit. This fake religion of surrogate gods is ill-tempered and cut off from redemptive hope. The world is divided between sinners, who are cast straight to Hell, without hope of contrition and confession, and those who, through some overconfident hubris through the possession of knowledge, those who are without sin, who are incapable of sin. The result is a society that will tear itself apart.
These words of John Middleton Murry apply to a past political context, but can be easily updated. In The Price of Leadership, Murry writes:
It can be no cause for astonishment to the Christian mind that, in an economic order of which the characteristic is that the physical energy at the disposal of society has been multiplied a thousandfold in the last hundred and fifty years, the natural man by his natural actions should be preparing to bring moral degradation and universal catastrophe upon himself. ... It is not enough to admit that the history of postwar Europe has plainly shown that the working-class has no intention and no power to dictate, and that what happens when it is foolish enough to say that it intends to do so is that it is dictated to by a satanic nationalism. It is imperative to realise why this happens and why it must happen. It happens and must happen because, by no conceivable operation of the ordinary self of mankind, or any class of mankind, can the 'classless society' imagined by Marxist Socialism be brought into being. Such a society will be brought into being by Christian love - 'that seeketh not its own' - or not at all.
Murry 1939
Men as gods? Self-made man as the master of nowhere.
Here is Georges Bernanos writing of Hitler and Stalin:
The one exploits the mystique of race, the other the mystique of class, for the same purpose: the rational exploitation of human labour and human genius in the service of purely human values. An immense reform, with incalculable implications, when one reflects that up to now the better part of human endeavour has been devoted to the discovery, defence and celebration, not of human but of spiritual values. Millions of men have killed one another on account of metaphysical ideas to which the minds and hearts of millions have been dedicated. A fraction of the heroism expended for the conquest of eternal life would have been sufficient to found a hundred empires. Admittedly, there are many who are not yet familiar with the new point of view. But once it begins to establish itself it will spread like wildfire. One has only to remember how enormously the religious instinct has been weakened by the successes, modest and, above all, incomplete though they have been, of experimental science. And yet there was something about the purely utilitarian materialism of the 19th century which was repulsive to any noble soul. But our reformers have linked it with the ideas of sacrifice, grandeur and heroism, so that the peoples are now able to turn away from God without anguish and almost without knowing it, in a state of exaltation like that of the saints and martyrs. There is nothing to warn them that this experiment ends in a condition of universal hatred.
Georges Bernanos 1938
I would think long and hard on these words. The only revolutions that have succeeded, and which deserve to succeed, are those based on love, peace, and justice. Lose transcendent standards of truth and justice, and lose the God of Love, the transcendent source and end of all things, and all is lost.
I therefore affirm am openly theistic philosophy beyond purely natural processes. I can see the appeal of a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism that has no need of questionable assumptions with respect to God, the soul, and eternal life, for which no proof and evidence has ever been found. That naturalism, I content, fails to do justice to the spiritual dimension of life and the cosmic longing for meaning – both of which are very real and deeply felt - and, in consequence, lacks an appetitive and motivational quality, both at the personal and the communal level. The absence of a genuine religion serves to bring about a fake, inverted religion and a highly authoritarian substitute politics, presided over by a new elect. Such a theo-political force is punitive and judgemental, lacking in mercy and forgiveness. In making civil exchange a theological war between people, such a politics will drown the world in universal hatred. And I damn it to Hades, lest it drag us all there. The problem with environmentalism is not that it is religious but that it lacks true religion – and ethics and politics. It erects a substitute authoritative moral framework for the very reason that the moral imperatives it issues with respect to preserving the planet and its eco-systems requires one. My argument is simply this: such a framework is needed, is legitimate, and is possible only with the belief in God and all that follows with respect to that. A half-way house gives us the worst of all worlds.
Michael Shellenberger seems a plausible ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’ reaction against the semi-detached, overly idealistic prescriptions of an environmentalism as a scientism and a naturalism, but is merely a continuation of modernism’s own fake religion. Within these dichotomies, this is merely a further chapter in the story of self-made man and his undoing, human beings as the masters of nowhere whose bequest will be nothing. We need to look ‘beyond the wasteland,’ as Theodore Roszak argued.
Theodore Roszak, Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics And Transcendence In Postindustrial Society
Roszak sought to destroy the myth that the problems created by a technocratic culture can be resolved by technology. In the process he argued showed that the widespread acceptance of this myth is precisely what has created such problems in the first place. In this, his work follows on from Lewis Mumford, who challenged directly ‘the myth of the machine.’ The ‘myth’ being, Mumford argued, that the machine is all-powerful and irresistible – with moral reconstruction and reconversion, the bribe can be refused and a new civilisation built. Here, Roszak argues for the necessity of a new transcendent knowledge to dissolve the boundaries of society’s Reality Principle. Humanity can avoid self-annihilation only if the rhapsodic intellect of the visionary commonwealth replaces the objective consciousness of the technocratic society.
Roszak identifies objective consciousness with the scientific method as conceived in behaviorist terms and as absolutized to the extent of enclosing all of reality within its purview. Specifically, this objective consciousness is characterized by that kind of ‘objectivity’ which ‘ruthlessly excludes all theory or speculation that reads purposiveness, ethical meaning or personal communion into nature’ (Science and Spirit: Beyond the Wasteland p. 478). In other words, Roszak challenges the disenchanting science that renders the world objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless, meaning that human beings can no longer ground their desires inherently, but must project them in an endless, arbitrary, and ultimately empty way. The result of such disenchanting science is to dispose all questions concerning the true, the good, and the beautiful to the rubbish bin of history. Those who think that truth, even the truth identified with scientific knowledge, can survive the holocaust of metaphysical carnage that follows from ‘the death of God’ are mistaken, even if the full of extent of the orgy of destruction may take a long time to become clear to those clinging to science as a reality check. For the reasons given by Nietzsche, the notion of objectivity in science is as much an illusion and a chimera – a human projection – as is the notion of moral knowledge and truth.
I have covered this in previous posts and refer people to those.
This is a recent post, but there are many on this theme:
To put the point simply, truth and morality, (as science and ethics), are illusions that we have made up – or which some have made up as part of their will to power. Many who hold to the notion of truth, identifying it with scientific knowledge and fact, have complacently stood as ethics has been demoted to mere value judgement, irreducible subjective preference, mere likes and dislikes. The split between fact and value, with the former elevated over the latter as true – indeed the only – knowledge has resulted in a situation in which the value of science as the realm of reason can only be morally defended by a non-rational ethics. Weber cleaved to the notion of scientific objectivity and knowledge even as he conceded ethics to the non-rational realm of subjective judgement and choice. Nietzsche was consistent in abandoning both truth and morality as anything more than projections and perspectives in the will to power.
I am very sympathetic to Roszak’s view, it is very close to my own view. It is for the same reason that I rate Lewis Mumford and Joel Kovel, also Murray Bookchin very highly. The same with Arran Gare and his work on Schelling. Bookchin draws on Hegel, Kovel on Marx, Mumford on Plato and Aristotle and Patrick Geddes. I draw on the same influences, also Rousseau and Kant. I shall say more on this shortly.
I particularly agree with Roszak’s awareness of the extent to which knowledge supplants wisdom and the voice of the expert replaces the common moral reason in the technocratic view. I despise all such notions of the philosopher-king misinterpreted and misapplied as ‘the elect,’ ‘the party,’ ‘the revolutionary vanguard.’ These things have blighted religion and politics for centuries and continue to blight the world. Their origins lie in an anthropological pessimism on the part of a knowledgeable few who, should we ever come to analyse them, are nowhere near as knowledgeable as they think they are. At best, they know an awful lot about precious little, and mistake their narrow obsessions for the whole of reality. They lack a practical ethics and as a matter of course overlook and override the common moral reason and knowledgeable and creative agency of human beings. If there is anything my work has been concerned to do it has been to utterly uproot this theoretico-elitist model in human thought, organisation, and action as the blight it is, rendering truth cold and bloodless, a mere template for would-be totalitarian imposition. As Roszak argues, the technocracy becomes a ‘benevolent despotism of elitist expertise’ (p. 478).
I mention Roszak here for his reference to ‘the wasteland.’ It is a direct reference to T.S. Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land, which was profoundly influenced by Dante’s Comedy, particularly the ‘quest for spiritual meaning.’ At the very beginning of The Wasteland (The Burial of the Dead) the narrator expresses a very bleak outlook on life conceived as a dark and meaningless existence. He has, like Dante in the first and second canto of the Inferno, lost his way and is searching for a reason to suffer through the pain of loss and isolation. His search for a reason to live is a search for the spiritual meaning of life. My work has shifted decisively in this direction.
I also underline what E.F. Schumacher calls ‘metaphysical reconstruction.’ That takes us into a transcendent knowledge that is not merely ancient but perennial. But I do indeed agree with Roszak’s view of the visionary commonwealth, having arguing for making a home within the Earth’s commonwealth of virtue. The clue is in the word ‘virtue.’ I argue for transcendent standards which furnish a moral framework and infrastructure within which the virtues can be known, learned, and exercised.
Roszak is scathing of the technocratic worldview and its effects. The wasteland ends with the emergence of a new consciousness characterized by mystery, mysticism, religion, vision, imagination. I argue for the recovery of the mythos ruthlessly discarded by the logos so that both are reunified in a vital, purposive existence. There is plenty for which Roszak argues with which I am in fundamental agreement. He overcomes the dualism of flesh and spirit through the appreciation of the body as organism (pp. 95ff.). He revalues the sacredness of nature and affirms the continuity of humanity with nature. He also restores language to its rootedness in non-verbal communication and experience (pp. 384, 356). He also affirms the intrinsic worth of work in seeing work as a creative essence motivated by love rather than a mere means – what economists call a ‘disutility’ – for securing money (pp. 420-21; 432). He underlines an ecological sensibility to generate a sense of the wholeness of life (pp. 400 ff.). Most importantly, Roszak explicitly underlines the legitimacy and standing of values (p. 401). The new consciousness he affirms considers the ‘loss of transcendent energies… as much a privation as physical hardship’ (p. xxvii). He proclaims poet-artist William Blake as the prophet of this emerging consciousness, not Marx, whom he considers wedded to the industrial order and its mentality (p. xxxiii; xxvi). In the process, Roszak reopens ‘the metaphysical issues which science and sound logic have for the last two centuries been pleased to regard as dosed’ (p. 458). As a result, the quest for the true, the good, and the beautiful once more becomes central to human existence. And not before time, I say.
There is plenty in this thumbnail sketch with which I strongly agree. There is plenty I would qualify, too. I continue to affirm the great deal that is of value in Marx, but with significant qualifications with respect to the need to recognize transcendent truths as something more than human creations. Further, much that Roszak writes with respect to overcoming dualism, recovering the rootedness of language, establishing the status of values, affirming the creative human essence as motivated by love and so on are stated nowhere better and more beautifully than by Dante Alighieri in The Comedy. Such will be my argument in my forthcoming book, to be published in time for the 700th anniversary of the death of the peerless poet-philosopher.
We have come to learn of the impossibilities trying to live a meaningless existence as a destinationless voyage. Human beings are characterized by a cosmic longing for meaning and therefore see their lives as a spiritual quest. Roszak understands this. He notes that the question ‘how do I save my soul?’ has become the impulse driving every inquiry (p. 445). The idea that salvation is by human means and technological and instrumental power alone lies behind the perversion of spiritual and religious ideals as a secular religion on ‘progress’ delivering emancipation. The ‘progress’ offered by such science and mechanistic power delivers neither salvation nor emancipation but enslavement to an idolatrous empirical necessity, as destructive of the soul as it is of nature – it destroys the human, moral, and natural environment in equal measure. Against this, Roszak offers a new ‘progress,’ which goes by many names:
St. Bonaventure called it “the journey of the mind to God”; the Buddha called it the eightfold path; Lao Tzu called it finding “the Way.” The way back. To the source from which the adventure of human culture takes its beginning. It is this progress which the good society exists to facilitate for all its members (p.464).
Dante called it ‘the infinite way’ of God. All of these terms indicate a true reality that is beyond naming and framing, a reality that is accessible all the same, and which is for experiencing and living. In fine, what Roszak calls the rhapsodic intellect of the visionary commonwealth is rooted in, and characterized by, a wise return to the fullness of human experience (p. 459). With this restoration of health, the wasteland of technocracy gives way to a culture of wholeness and fulfilment (p. xxii).
There is plenty in Roszak’s approach which correlates with mine. I first of all like that he sees that the seemingly intractable divisions and controversies of modern politics are in some way beyond politics. I am sceptical of expressions ‘beyond politics,’ implying as they do the existence of truths outside of the political realm, which can then be used to silence and suppress debate and dialogue. I affirm the existence of such truths, but as standards informing, guiding, and orienting people, politics and practices, not dictating to them. There is, then, an originary politics that is whole and wholesome. The solutions to our intractable divisions are essentially beyond the institutions and processes of politics as practised and lie in the psychic, moral, and social conditions of doing politics well. That is a view which, for reasons Roszak gives, neither the technocratic neo-liberalism nor the Marxism of the vanguards can even comprehend let alone accept. Here, I affirm the wisdom of Socrates/Plato in affirming beauty to be the supreme political category in lighting the path to truth and goodness and inviting the heart to follow. The appreciation of the true, the good, and the beautiful ought to shape one’s politics. Plato in The Symposium writes of the divine beauty which is beheld by the eye. To invert this order to make beauty – and truth and goodness – a function of the perception and perspective of the beholder’s will to power is to fall prey to the technocratic distemper.
I also very much with Roszak’s repudiation of the false notions of objectivity spawned by behaviorism. I go beyond this specific target to examine disenchanting science as such, all such notions which expunge human involvement in ‘objective’ knowing. Reality is ‘humanly objective,’ and hence shot through with human will, consciousness, meaning, and agency. This is a view which I developed most of all in relation to Kant, Hegel, and Marx. At the same time, I recognize that it is a view which affirms what Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks regards as ‘the great partnership’ between humanity and God, human beings conceived as ‘God’s partners in Creation.’
I therefore agree with Eric Voegelin, who argues that the most important of all of man’s actions is the metalepsis, the participatory experience of man and God. Stated simply, human beings are created to adore God. This act of adoration, the ground of being, is conducted within consciousness itself. It is for this reason that I qualify and modify Roszak’s critique of ‘objective consciousness’ as such. It is for this reason I affirm transcendent standards, not to disagree with those eco-philosophical perspectives which emphasise the community of life, but to enrich and enhance them.
With this view I challenge those examples of misanthropy and inhumanism in environmental circles, whether these come from nature worshipping ecologists who employ an inverted Manichean dualism of ‘man’ bad/nature good or their technology worshipping counterparts for whom technology is good and humanity stupid. Against the way that all such thinking extinguishes the legitimate status of human beings as knowledgeable, moral agents in nature, culture, and history as a continuity, I recognize the inextricable involvement of human subjectivity within ‘objective’ knowing. Here, I underline the importance, meaning, and indeed centrality of ethical and religious questions, so as to expose the utter inadequacy of strictly technocratic, instrumental, scientistic, and naturalistic answers to such questions. Here, my thought takes a distinctive and decisive turn with respect to the affirmation of transcendent standards, exposing a host of weaknesses inherent in any environmentalism that is deficient or lacking in the metaphysical, ethical, and political dimensions. It is here that my work goes further than Roszak and many of those who develop an eco-philosophy along naturalistic lines, to the effect that any non-reductionist science they envisage in the visionary commonwealth loses the proper sense of an objectivity that is more than subjective will and choice, thereby eating up transcendent standards rather than conforming the will to them.
In other words, whilst my view on the Earth’s community of life and commonwealth of virtue is similar to that of Roszak, Gare, Capra, and many more, it is actually all of the good things such theorists advocate – which are many – but more. To see how distinctive my view is you will need to actually read my various works in depth and at length. In this short piece I can only adumbrate similarities and differences. To state the point directly, I affirm reason, in objective standards and reality, in the notion of moral knowledge and truth alongside scientific knowledge and truth, and in transcendent standards of justice. Against this, I am concerned to avoid identifying the objective consciousness as such with the reductionist ‘objectified worldview of natural science’ which Roszak, Mumford, Ellul, and others, going back to Blake, for whom science was ‘the tree of death,’ are concerned to repudiate as the technocratic consciousness which lies at the source of our ills. The result of this identification means that each, all, and every reaction against this objective consciousness (including the non-reductionist) come to be valued as liberating in being destructive of the technocracy. The tendency to see any blow against objective consciousness as a blow for liberation loses the truly liberating force of a reason that is rooted in transcendent standards of truth and justice. The result is not liberation but the indiscriminate embracing of all ways of knowing and being as equally valid. In other words, we remain firmly within the arbitrary world of Weber’s renascent gods as impersonal forces, Nietzsche’s sophist world beyond good and evil. Infinitely superior to this is Andreas Kinneging’s affirmation of ‘the geography of good and evil.’
I am therefore concerned to establish the place of objective consciousness and knowing as non-reductionist and non-disenchanting in a revitalized culture. To this end, I emphasize the necessary and integral place of transcendent standards in any culture that is recognizably human. To deny such standards is to opt for a culture that is proper to either beasts or gods, with experience suggesting much the greater likelihood of the former. Hence my fundamental repudiation of an environmentalism that takes some form of technocracy or naturalism/primitivism. The repudiation of objective consciousness/transcendent standards ultimately implies the rejection of civilization per se and all those things proper to it: politics as dissensus and disagreement with a view to agreement, dialogue, reasoned discourse, communication, planning, organization, government — in sum, a true law and order apprehended and lived by human beings as citizens within a public life and community.
I spell my criticisms of environmentalism at length here – they are criticisms which avoid the errors, the excesses, and the ideological evasions and delusions of the growing number of reactions against mainstream environmentalism.
Whilst I felt a little disloyalty to environmental friends in making these criticisms, I stand by them. As a socialist, I have seen how easily a movement can betray its ideals and principles in an impatience to secure them in the political world. In fine, short-cuts short-circuit the process. As soon as any revolution forgets that it is, first and foremost, a process and not merely an event, it is lost. The event is the culmination of a process; lose the process and you have lost the revolution.
In the end, there is no truth and morality without transcendent standards (the objective consciousness in the above analysis). The creative human essence motivated by love is, ultimately, the Greater Love which enfolds, nourishes, and moves all things. There can be no effective love without the law and order which is the fruit of these transcendent standards of truth and justice in time and place. Without these standards, all attempts at emancipation and progress are merely secular versions of salvation and redemption, and proceed by way of human self-creation and wilful projection; they are rootless and therefore fruitless. Such liberatory enterprises are marred by a paradoxical idealism and utopianism which, whilst rejecting transcendent standards, call for an emancipation which implies their existence – the society they envisage presumes the realisation of truth and morality as more than mere human projections. My view offers an open, honest, and explicit affirmation of the transcendent standards which alone make the normative claims of an emancipatory politics explicit, checking the notions of a purely human cultural creation and constructivism which, if left unchecked, are profoundly destructive of transcendent standards and hence of human society. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too; once it is gone, it is gone for good, leaving only self-creating humans of varying degrees of power seeking to impose their view of truth and goodness on all others. Instead of a genuine public life that is conducive to human flourishing, we have a Hobbesian world of constant battles.
Terry Eagleton identifies succinctly the problem I have been alert to all along:
It was not long before cultural theorists came to realize that you could not live without moral discourse altogether. Those in political power might be capable of this feat, because they could always define their power purely in administrative terms. Politics was the technical business of public administration, whereas morality was a private affair. Politics belonged to the boardroom, and morality to the bedroom. This led to a lot of immoral boardrooms and politically oppressive bedrooms. Because politics had been redefined as purely calculative and pragmatic, it was now almost the opposite of the ethical. But since it was hardly barefaced enough to shuck off the ethical altogether, politics had to be conducted in the name of certain moral values which at the same time it could not avoid violating. Power needed those values to lend itself legitimacy, but they also threatened to get seriously in its way. This is one reason why we could now be witnessing the dawn of a new, post-ethical epoch, in which world powers no longer bother to dress up their naked self-interest in speciously altruistic language, but are insolently candid about it instead.
The political left, however, cannot define the political in this purely technical way, since its brand of emancipatory politics inescapably involves questions of value. The problem for some traditional leftist thought was that the more you tried to firm up your political agenda, making it a scientific, materialist affair rather than an idle Utopian dream, the more you threatened to discredit the very values it aimed to realize. It seemed impossible to establish, say, the idea of justice on a scientific basis; so what exactly did you denounce capitalism, slavery or sexism in the name of? You cannot describe someone as oppressed unless you have some dim notion of what not being oppressed might look like, and why being oppressed is a bad idea in the first place. And this involves normative judgements, which then makes politics look uncomfortably like ethics.
On the whole, cultural theory has proved fairly unsuccessful at this business. It has been unable to argue convincingly against those who see nothing wrong with shackling or ill-treating others. The only reason it has got away with this so far is that there are few such people around.
Eagleton After Theory 2003 ch 6
I identified this very problem in the 1990s and have deepened the analysis since. If I may, ‘the Left,’ defined broadly to accommodate its various guises – liberal, environmentalist, Marxist, whatever – remains insufficiently alive to the problem of ethical – and political – disarmament here. I make this point not to be a ‘smart Alec’ saying ‘I told you so,’ but to explain how difficult, frustrating, and even painful it has been in working alone, hoping to enlighten and guide people, receiving some good feedback, but in terms of mainstream politics and culture being ignored. It is certainly nice to be appreciated, and I am humbled and gratified whenever I receive compliments. At the same time, I am keenly aware that many of my positions and interests and theories are distinctive, putting me out on a limb. I have found that nearly every time I present my work in a popular forum I am met with people offering their views, their theories, making their suggestions for further reading. They do so to make a contribution, to participate, to engage. But it can be frustrating for me given the extent to which the suggestions nearly always revert to a mode of thought whose limitations I have already moved beyond. I have taken the direction I have taken as a result of prolonged reflection. I have no academic position, I am not burdened by academic protocol, I have no full-time academic job coming with responsibilities that eat up my time. I work alone in my study/room, immersed in thought, reading, and research, and have done so since 1988. That, I would suggest, is a long time spent in contemplation. Whilst the direction that my thought has taken may seem odd, I have been on a long journey, measuring each and every step carefully. I have spent a lot of time alone in Dante’s dark forest, with no Virgil to guide me, just a lot of Virgils in the books and papers I have read. I could have made life a whole lot easier for myself by staying away from God, religion, and ethics. There is a profound reason why I have not stayed away. My direction is right and true.
I think little of the eco-modernizers of this world, and even less of the old delusion that human beings are as gods and need to get good at being gods. I think little, too, of all the ‘God that failed’ confessions from people who then proceed to give us the ‘new’ gods of development/industry/technology, which are nothing but the tired old gods of our own power in alien form. I don’t go the other extreme of the planetary fetishizers, either. I repudiate both the idolatry of human powers and nature idolatry. I state clearly and directly that there is only the one God, and that all others will consume the world with prideful self-worship or its antithesis, an indifference and inhumanism mirroring that of natural processes and biological imperatives. My work is very similar to that of Arran Gare, Ted Roszak and others, hence I do attract the interest of environmentalists. The difference is that I focus much more on ethics and politics as ethics and politics, taking process of philosophy into the field of practical reason. And I am now explicitly a theistic philosopher, taking the direction that both Joel Kovel – whom I was proud to have counted a friend – and Alasdair MacIntyre took, in their different ways. I emphasize the springs to action that come by way of the metaphysics of morals and the communities of character and practice these inspire and support. Many may think that religious and ethical turn bizarre and eccentric; I identify it as central and essential, the condition of all other possibilities and their redemption.
I would certainly recommend that people explore the impressive work of Arran Gare. If I may be so bold, there are clear similarities between Arran’s work and my own, as well as differences. I was once hugely critical of Kant, but am now more appreciative (if still critical). My interest in Kant lies in the ethics and the politics – the practical reason. I want an engaged philosophy that can take root and bear fruit in the social world. My process philosophy is one that is also explicitly theistic now, for reasons I spell out at length in my work. But I do indeed enjoy the work of Spinoza, and Schelling, and Hegel, and Whitehead, as indeed I should, seeing as I was steeped in it for long enough. In fact, it was in pondering at length a line from Whitehead in Science and the Modern World that led me in a theistic direction: ‘But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.’ (A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World ch 4). I came to see how philosophical reason undercuts itself, leading me to search for the transcendent source and end of all things.
Here are some works and guides to Arran Gare, which I hope will inspire those who are not familiar with his work to become familiar.
Arran Gare, The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future 2017
“From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization” by Arran Gare
This is a great essay on Schelling and process metaphysics published in the journal Cosmos and History. Gare makes clear the extent to which Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is compatible with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme.
“From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization”
“Schelling’s work is now more relevant than ever before. The situation we are in was very succinctly summed up by Richard Tarnas: “In the absence of any viable, embracing cultural vision, old assumptions remain blunderingly in force, providing an increasingly unworkable and dangerous blueprint for human thought and activity.” By overcoming the limitation of Kant’s philosophy, Schelling has provided the basis for definitively transcending scientific materialism, in doing so, overcoming the opposition between science and the humanities and enabling people to understand themselves as culturally formed, socially situated, creative participants within nature. Most importantly, Schelling confronted and charted a path to overcome the nihilism into which European civilization was and is descending, a nihilism that is reaching its apogee in the deification of the global market, postmodern fragmentation and the specter of global ecocide. In his later work on myth and revelation Schelling noted that “through the virtually unrestricted expansion of world relations… the Orient and the Occident are not merely coming into contract with one another, but are being compelled … to fuse into one and the same consciousness, into one consciousness that should for this reason alone be expanded into a world-consciousness.” While overcoming the parochialism of the European Weltanschauung, this will also necessitate breaking free from past forms of religion; but what is true in mythology and revelation should be preserved, providing a religious dimension to this world-consciousness. To this end, Schelling argued, it will be necessary to develop a “philosophical religion”, addressing and integrating the freedom of existence, historical phenomena and nature into an expanded Weltanschauung inclusive enough to overcome philosophy’s compulsive tendency to splinter off into mutually exclusive schools of thought. Schelling noted that at the time of his lecture this philosophical religion did not yet exist. Lovelock’s notion of Gaia, transcending the parochialism of particular civilizations, concurring with Schelling’s philosophy of nature and offering a religious dimension to scientific theory, can be seen as a significant contribution to the development of this philosophical religion. By recognizing Schelling’s place in the history of philosophy and in science we can now appreciate the process metaphysicians and the scientists influence by them not merely as isolated thinkers of brilliance, but as part of a powerful tradition of thought working towards the creation of a global civilization. This tradition is continuing Schelling’s struggle against nihilism and his integral view of humans as creative historical agents within nature, in which philosophy, science, the arts and the humanities are playing a crucial role in the self-creation of humanity and of life on Earth. We can now see the lineaments of this new civilization emerging in response to the global ecological crisis as the ecological civilization being called for by Chinese environmentalists, a call now being taken up internationally.”
This is so very similar to the approach I have taken to environmentalism. Rather than develop a process philosophy, though, I have sought to develop the politics and ethics of the Greco-Germanic tradition of rational freedom. We are working along the same lines, except that I have moved more directly into the field of practical reason. I am more critical of Lovelock and am leery of naturalisms. The above passage is more like my work from a decade ago. I have since moved on significantly with respect to transcendent standards.
I have a love-hate relationship with Kant. I criticized him heavily along the lines above, but was taken to task by some great Kantian philosophers, who argued forcefully that Hegel’s view of Kant – in which I was well versed - isn’t quite right. I looked closer, and deepened my understanding of Kant, and came to the conclusion that Kant has more to offer than I had first thought. I enjoyed being among Kantians, presenting Hegelian arguments in the name of Kant. Just to keep folk wondering and thinking, finding things they may have missed.
Most of all, though, I greatly admire the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The more I examine Rousseau, the more he appears to be the most significant, the most problematical, the most caricatured, the most misunderstood, the most profound, and the most enduring of the modern philosophers. One day, I shall get round to that book I promised the great Kantian Gary Banham I would write one day. In a conversation in Manchester in 2001, Gary praised my work on Rousseau. He told me that if I wanted to make an impact in philosophy then I should specialize in Rousseau, whom he considered to be a ‘scandalously neglected’ philosopher. Rousseau is often mentioned as an example of all that has gone wrong in the modern world. The truth is the other way round. From a position within and against the Enlightenment, Rousseau saw its fault-lines from the first.
Rousseau described ethics as ‘the sublime science of simple souls.’ In the process, he gave us a practical ethics of truth-seeking, with the focus falling on human beings as knowledgeable, moral agents who are involved in the pursuit and learning of truth as distinct from the endless and intractable disputes between philosophers over the nature of truth. Although Rousseau was scornful of metaphysics, I always consider him as a true philosopher who sought to rescue metaphysics from the sterility of the mediocre and the average. Rousseau was scornful of those professional philosophers who kept truth safely locked in the attic of Reason, as their possession, instead of moving the world and moving people from within. Such philosophers express the basic distrust of and distaste for real flesh and blood human beings, a character that philosophy has had since the death of Socrates and the trauma this caused. Rousseau is a Platonist who takes us back to a Socratic engagement and dialectic within the public square. Kant was particularly struck by Rousseau's democratic vision of simplicity and moral integrity, writing:
"I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity."
Knowledge and the desire for knowledge needs to be tempered by a respect for human beings as truth-seekers, as knowledgeable, moral agents capable of assimilating and living the truth.
Rousseau has a metaphysics of truth. Rousseau took us to the ecology of the human heart to guide us back to the simple truths of human happiness. These truths that were once apparent to us in a state of natural immediacy have now become opaque within the civil state. This doesn’t mean that Rousseau was advocating a return to nature, as shallow critics frequently claim (Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline for one). Instead, Rousseau argued that we move forwards to the realisation of our healthy natures in the civil state, under laws we have given ourselves in a genuine public community. This was a view which influenced Kant and his idea of a civic constitution and the cooperative community of co-legislators.
‘Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,’ Rousseau wrote. Some interpret Rousseau as arguing here for a freedom from chains. This is an error. Rousseau was arguing that the illegitimate chains of domination be cast off and replaced by the legitimate chains of public community, chains of a rational kind that we forge for ourselves within a society of self-assumed obligation and self-authored laws. I would qualify the ‘self’ here too, given the extent to which Rousseau affirmed transcendent standards of justice as against a conventionalism and sophism deriving from Hobbes. Hobbes’ view went on to become the dominant conception of the modern world, with the result that truth and justice have become mere functions of power. This being so, Rousseau remains very much a pertinent figure.
Rousseau gives us a normative philosophy of truth-seeking that is bounded within transcendent standards of justice, the truths of which are engraved on the human heart. With this, Rousseau sought to show what human beings must do in order to (re)discover the truths conducive to human happiness, truths that we once knew, and which, deep within the heart, still know. These are the ‘truths that pertain to the happiness of mankind.’
Rousseau is often described as a philosopher of feeling. This isn’t quite true. His work exhibits a remarkable emotional intelligence and psychic depth – more than any other philosopher I would say – but he is also incredibly logical (if I may, it may be his ruthless logic that leads to the worst aspects of his thought). For Rousseau, human beings are thinking, intuiting, sensing, and feeling beings at once. Rousseau was one of the greatest Platonists of the modern world, giving us a Platonism for the age of democracy – not so much the philosopher-ruler as the rule of philosophy via the activation of the common moral reason innate in each and all.
Rousseau gave us a Platonism of the heart and not just of the head. Like Plato, he understood that reason does not rule alone, and that a flourishing existence required the unity of all the human faculties. In my forthcoming book on Dante, I refer to Dante’s ‘heartleap.’ Reason as far as reason will go, and then something more is needed, otherwise, there is paralysis, decay, retreat, and defeat. The more reason, logic, and evidence you have, then the less of a leap you will have to make. But leap you must, given the limits of reason. Briefly, to quote Chesterton, ‘you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.’
Which brings me back to why Rousseau’s philosophy of truth-seeking is superior to endless philosophical arguments over the nature of truth. Rousseau’s view values human beings as knowledgeable, moral agents within the ceaselessly creative universe, disclosing truth by way of a creative unfolding. In fine, Rousseau saw human beings as having the root of the metaphysical matter within them.
My past work on Rousseau:
This next work explains the evolution of my thought over the years:
The following are works of mine which offer the alternative to the eco-modernization criticized above. They are works which advance a civic environmentalism and moral ecology:
Works of mine which could be described as offering a process philosophy:
I like how I describe this, as an “eco-phenomenology”: “An excursus into a sensuous ecology, what may be called a sensible transcendence.” That sounds good to me. There is some good commentary on Merleau-Ponty in here.
As for being thanked for my work, this is tremendously heartening and humbling. I haven't worked away all these years for money (I have never charged a penny) nor for academic reputation (my heart was never in the few and brief attempts to obtain an academic position I made, and I have never sought publication, not since I was told I would probably have to cut my chapter on Aristotle and add some postmodern rubbish with respect to my PhD thesis). I'm glad to have been out of it all, leaving me free to pursue a line of thought at length and in depth. I have thrived on the positive feedback of academics and scholars, both established and those making their way in. I have been honoured to have helped a number of young scholars on their way to masters degrees and PhD's, as well as publication and academic positions. I greatly appreciate their thanks. I welcome the way that they take the ideas in their own directions, often different to mine. That's the way it goes. We are truth-seekers. None of us ever come to possess the whole truth; we access little bits of it, and join it all together through dialogue, experiment, and experience. People can have no idea how good it feels when great scholars like Arran and John Bellamy Foster and others contact me and express their admiration and appreciation, and when young scholars making their own way approach me as something who has been toiling away diligently. I labour neither for fame nor for fortune, but to shed light, keep certain truths alive, unearth a few things that have been buried and forgotten, and hopefully light the way for an age that is forever in danger of losing its way.
