This post has been incited by comments offered today by a number of people involved in environmental campaigning and eco-design. Their musings raise issues of a commons that is not merely physical, to be addressed by means of science, engineering, and technology, but is moral and motivational, requiring appropriate modes of re/connection. I offer my words not as criticism – I very much share the commitment to the cause of restoring planetary health – but as an attempt to explain that my work in 'rational freedom' over the years very much addresses the concerns that they are now expressing.
One person begins nervously by suggesting that the views about to be expressed could be considered 'heretical.' Despite political commitments and loyalties that are left, there is a concern over the polarization now seemingly embedded in the social and political fabric. More important than the divide between the left and right, and the politics of ensuring 'my side wins' against the other side, is the need to heal the divisions that scar the world. The most important question of all, then, concerns how we may build productive bridges between political/ideological divisions so that different people with different views and interests may identify commonalities that enable them to unite on common ground. I am interested in the concluding line: 'I KNOW common ground exists!' And I am interested in the fact that so many people gave that sentiment a 'like.' People who are engaged in the struggle to change the world, and who may take a particular side in this struggle, are nevertheless motivated not merely to ensure that their side wins, but that a unity is attained to ensure all sides win, to the extent that there are no sides any more. There is a commonality that unites us all.
This has been very much the question I have addressed in my own work, a work of healing and integration, of reconnection and restoration, so as to overcome – and not conceal and rationalize in some ideological way – the splits and disassociations that are embedded in material relations and which are expressed on multiple levels, from personal and familial, to community and locality, to peoples and cultures. This question is more than political in the sense of identifying sides and taking sides, and restores the notion of 'the political' to it ancient sense of creative self-actualisation. The solution to bad-destructive politics is not no politics but good politics, a restoration of the ancient sense of politics as creative self-actualisation within the best regimen for human - and natural - flourishing. Ecopolis as concerned with the human-nature interchange.
I have sought to achieve this very thing through my work in 'rational freedom' my entire life - recovering the ethical and political commons as well as the physical commons. I wish I could give a short view of the million words I must have spilled, but it is impossible. I have written on a broad range of subjects and issues, seeking to develop a multi—layered approach in order to apprehend a multi-faceted reality. It has been an incredibly lonely path, I have to say, with conservatives considering me too radical, socialists thinking me to conservative, and liberals of all kinds rejecting anything that sounds like a methodological - and political - collectivism and dismissing it all. To these I say: there can be no common ground when the good is a matter of irreducible subjective choice/preference.
I have addressed these questions at length in my work on 'rational freedom.' It seems that most people who 'know' me through social media have appreciated my support for their causes and campaigns, but either never read or never understood my work. Which is a shame, because I do address all of the elements now being identified as deficient or absent in environmentalism. The trick is to identify commonality and affirm unity in order to overcome division and re-establish common ground in the future, without rationalising and hence entrenching and extending division and disunity in the present through ideological assertions of harmony between all humanity. The latter is the political and social 'we' that stands in need of creation.
I come now to this article, which is being shared by environmentalist campaigners. In this article a climate scientist raises issues and concerns which transcend science. That is not a criticism of science - which is the best reality check of objective nature that we have - but of 'scientism' - the view that science explains everything and may be extended into all areas, and that everything that falls outside of the scope of science is of little or no account. The debilitating nature of 'scientism' is becoming increasingly apparent. The devaluation of politics and ethics has hobbled movements seeking change for the better.
I have tried hard to raise these very issues and concerns, and address them appropriately, and been met with indifference in the main, and sometimes criticism on account of being anti-science and anti-technology. I have been accused of wanting to 'jettison' Einstein, Newton et al and engaging in an 'anti-science rant.' People who think that think the world is all science and no more, or that the only knowledge worthy of the name is scientific knowledge. It is an indication of how far 'scientism' has become endemic in the age that accusations of being anti-science follow perfectly reasonable arguments for a bridge to be built between the theoretical reason and practical reason.
'What have we done?' someone asks in response to this article. The fact that people even need to ask that question, phrasing it in the vague terms of 'we,' indicates the extent to which the twin estrangement of humanity and nature within an alienated system of production has proceeded. People, even those protesting the great social and planetary unravelling underway, lack the terminology that is adequate with the crisis. What, institutionally, and who, socially, is this 'we?' There is an appeal being made here to a political and ethical framework and a social identity that does not exist, and which therefore falls on deaf ears, provoking despair and depression. Such lamentation locks us within prevailing social relations, naturalising what should be historicised, closing off future transformation by way of lamentations for a past that is beyond recall. The problems confronting the world are structural, not chronological.'
My fear is that the planet’s equilibrium has been lost,' writes climate scientist Joëlle Gergis in this article, 'we are now watching on as the dominoes begin to cascade.' 'I often despair that everything the scientific community is trying to do to help avert disaster is falling on deaf ears.'
That deafness is systemic and arises from the disembedding of the capital system, an economic system whose overriding purpose is the pursuit of exchange value through the exploitation of use value, from which it is thoroughly divorced.
I analyse this systemic deafness in depth in:
Gergis notes that 'it’s often the lack of an adequate response in the aftermath of a traumatic event, rather than the experience itself, that causes the most psychological damage. And if there is no acknowledgment of the damage that has been done, no moral consequences for those responsible, it’s as if the trauma never happened.'
I analyse the capital system as an inherently irresponsible, subjectless system of external constraint here:
The two works of mine cited above address the questions that Gergis proceeds to ask:
'How can we ever re-establish trust in the very institutions that let things get this bad? How do we live with the knowledge that the people who are meant to keep us safe are the very ones allowing the criminal destruction of our planet to continue?'
The fact is that there has always been a reformist political and institutional blindspot on the part of environmentalists in their appeal to 'government' to govern for the long-term common good and act in a timely and effective way to preserve planetary boundaries. That view betrays an almost complete ignorance with respect to the nature of government within the capital system. The state is not autonomous within this system, transcending particular interests to secure the common good. Instead, as the above works of mine make clear, the state is a key second order mediation within the capital system, capital's political command centre, establishing the unity and coherence that capital itself – as a competition of capitals concerned with the self-expansion of value – cannot supply. In fine – trying to cut the jargon – environmentalists are seeking redress from the very institutional which is complicit in capital's social and ecological despoliation. The power of the state is secondary and derivative and depends upon its ability to facilitate the process of accumulation in the capital economy. Impair or obstruct the processes of investment, valorisation, and accumulation and an economic crisis threatening the legitimacy and power of the state ensues.
At a loss, Gergis speculates that part of the answer lies in Dantista T.S. Eliot’s observation that 'humankind cannot bear very much reality.' Gergis claims that to shy away from difficult emotions is a very natural part of the human condition. 'We are afraid to have the tough conversations that connect us with the darker shades of human emotion.' One of the reasons I write on Dante is precisely because he doesn't recoil from the emotional depths; Dante knows that we must descend before we can rise to the heights. Too many people wish to stay in the shallows, even as they fear the flood is about to engulf them.
My reference to Dante there draws attention to one of the ways in which I have sought to confront the living of life in all its existential depths, involving both a literary and moral ecology, getting into metaphysical ideals and moral motivations as well as identities, stakes, and interests within the social formation. Gergis touches up areas of direct experiential and existential concern.
Gergis writes:
'We are often reluctant to give voice to the painful feelings that accompany a serious loss, like the one we all experienced this summer. We quickly skirt around complex emotions, landing on the safer ground of practical solutions like renewable energy or taking personal action to feel a sense of control in the face of far bleaker realities.'
This is very true, indicating that environmentalists may at last be preparing to shift the focus away from science and technology, from a myopic concentration on the factual, the physical, the tangible, and the practical and start to address the more difficult, and more appetitive, inspirational, and motivational areas of human concern. Those who are inclined to dismiss this as anthropocentric are in danger of offering a knowledge and a technical or institutional capacity that is bereft of the springs of response and action.
Gergis continues:
'As more psychologists begin to engage with the topic of climate change, they are telling us that being willing to acknowledge our personal and collective grief might be the only way out of the mess we are in. When we are finally willing to accept feelings of intense grief – for ourselves, our planet, our kids’ futures – we can use the intensity of our emotional response to propel us into action.'
I'm less interested in notions of grief than in personal and collective ownership and responsibility with respect to actions. In the religious idiom, this is about expressing the contrition that is necessary as a condition of redemption and salvation. These are not terms that people are comfortable with in these post-Christian and secular times. My response to that is that we are not really living in a post-religious age at all. I don't believe we can ever be post-religious. Like nature, we may drive religion out through the front door with a pitchfork, but it will return in another guise by the backdoor. Because religion is part of nature, part of the nature of human beings as meaning-seeking creatures. We currently live in a post-Christian age of millenarian frenzy, reconfiguring original sin but without the mercy, forgiveness, and redemption that comes with properly ordered religion. I read critics like John Carey dismiss Dante as judgemental. This is complacent, an attempt to avoid critical evaluation by any standards that transcend subjective choice and preference. Actions have consequences. There will always be a reckoning. One way or another, we are always being judged. Human beings never choose and act in autonomy from contexts and constraints. That liberal fiction will doom any society raised in its image.
Gergis next comes to a point I have laboured long and hard in an attempt to reunify the realms of fact and value:
'As scientists, we are often quick to reach for more facts rather than grapple with the complexity of our emotions. We think that the more people know about the impacts of climate change, surely the more they will understand how urgent our collective response needs to be. But as the long history of humanity’s inability to respond to the climate crisis has shown us, processing information purely on an intellectual level simply isn’t enough.'
All I can say in response is please check the topics I have listed on my “Posts” page. I have laboured long and hard on these questions. I have written too much for my viewpoint to be easily accessible. It is probably difficult for people to know where to start. But under “Philosophy” on the “Posts” page you will find work on overcoming the fact-value dualism, the quest for truth, dialectic as the teasing out of truth, the importance of questions of value, meaning, and significance, the need for first principles. I have also written extensively on “Virtue Ethics” (also on the “Posts” page). Here I refer to the need to cultivate virtues – as qualities for successful living – within forms of the common life. There follows a focus on “Plato and Aristotle” - conservative figures I revalue with a view to establishing the foundations of an enduring eudaimonic civilisation – and “Reason and Reality.” I argue for reason to come to exist in rational from. I have a category headed by “Poetry, Art, and Literature.” This is the aesthetic dimension, complementing the ethical and the scientific – the true, the good, and the beautiful. Here, I present a literary ecology. There is plenty here on ecopoetics and metaphorics. The stories that inspire effort and incite emotions. Then “Economics,” then “Ecology,” and much more.
Also on my "Posts" page I address “Climate Change and Global Heating.” First the science and then the politics. Both matter. I have a “Climate Politics” section. By which I mean politics, and not the anti-politics of scientistic environmentalism that dictates truth from the outside and puts politics and people on ice. I argue for the need for Green truths to cross the bridge and enter the field of practical reason and engage with people as citizens in a public community.
This is followed by “The Republic in the Age of Moral Ecology.” This section looks at the institutions required for effective action within the field of ethics and politics. I argue for the need for behavioural change as well as societal change. Such notions are very different to present decision makers within existing institutions with facts and knowledge and then demanding policy and action from them. That view is crude and destined to fail. I proceed to examine character-construction to envisage a society of volunteers and doers, a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than through obedience to external directives. In fine, I develop the principle of self-assumed obligation as a principle of eco-citizenship, leading to a public community that is attuned to nature. I therefore present a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology. And a rational environmentalism that embodies a rational freedom as against scientism and naturalism.
I have to say loudly and clearly that I have worked consistently on these very areas where some environmentalists are now starting to see weaknesses. I spotted the weaknesses long ago and set to work on them. I have found the work to be lonely, falling on deaf ears. The heavy science and technology and engineering bias has blinded too many clever people to the gaps in their knowledge. Too few have been prepared to take politics and ethics - and emotions and motivations - seriously. Worse, when some finally do show interest, they remain in scientistic and technocratic mode and argue as though public community and a common ethic is a matter of engineering. This is an enormous deficiency, given that these are the fields that concern practical action. You can have all the knowledge and know-how in the world, but without the springs for action all that you have is the hope and the appeal levelled upon existing power and institutions. That approach has racked up decades of failure.
I come next to “The Logic of Collective Action.” This addresses the means and mechanisms by which discrete individuals may associate and act together to address the supra-individual forces constraining social and planetary affairs.
Remember that here I am referring only to the “Posts” on my “Being and Place” site, not to the books and papers I have posted on Academia and Humanities Commons, where I spell out all these things in much greater theoretical depth and detail. I have been busy on precisely these issues. And I believe I have analysed them with a considerable degree of depth and sophistication.
I analyse issues of individual choice, moral responsibility, and collective action. I have a specific section on “The Field of Practical Reason,” arguing for the need for a moral and political capacity and not just technical and institutional capacity. People. People are key. People are not merely problems in being greedy and stupid – which is how too many conceive people too often – but solutions to the problems we face in being knowledgeable change agents. I've argued all of this. I have argued for the need to bridge theoretical and practical reason, connecting scientific knowledge and technological know-how with ethics and politics within the motivational economy of human beings. I argue for building the political will and legitimacy buttressing the large-scale concerted climate action within a comprehensive framework that is needed. I have cautioned against the coercive environmental collectivism and eco-authoritarianism that issues from demands for large-scale action that are not grounded in an eco-citizenship. I have issued several posts to that effect.
I have another section entitled “Making Facts Existentially Meaningful.” The problems we face require more than a knowledge of facts and more than a command of technology. There are reasons why the campaign for climate action has failed to get the public on board. I therefore argue for the making of eco-citizens as being at least as important as the making of the Ecopolis. My “Posts” page therefore has a section entitled “The Springs of Action.” This concerns what it takes to inspire environmental action, by which I mean environmental action, and not environmental campaigning and protesting. As against mobilising pressure upon those in power to act, I argue explicitly for the social restitution of this power to the citizen body. There is a lot more besides all of this, which is a lot. So there are reasons as to why environmentalists have, by and large, passed it by. I still tend to attract interest from academics, students, scholars, and independent readers. I appreciate their interest and have enjoyed engaging with them. But I have really been attempting to incite a sea-change within environmentalism, one leading to the integration of all dimensions of human knowledge and action.
So it genuinely saddens me to read this article by Joëlle Gergis. It saddens me, too, too see environmentalists respond to this as if it is a bolt from the blue. The truth is that too many have paid too little attention to values and emotions on the one side and material relations and political-economic dynamics on the other. The emphasis has been on physical, tangible things like science, facts, and technology, giving the impression of having - or one day obtaining - power through the possession of knowledge. This is an illusion; such knowledge lacks the human motive force. Hence the attempts to 'educate,' that is inform, a public and mobilize it to put pressure on already constituted authority. There is a need instead to create a genuine public in the process of reconstituting authority democratically. Hence my emphasis on politics and ethics in the field of practical reason. Scientific knowledge has to be appetitive to be effective. The knowledge that changes the world is affective as well as cognitive.
The Gergis article saddened me, as one who has explicitly sought to foster motives, build character, nurture virtues, touch the emotions, make facts existentially meaningful, emphasise social formation, and much more besides, in order to foster the springs for individual/societal response/action. These were always the missing mediations in the dominant strain of environmentalism.
"I often despair that everything the scientific community is trying to do to help avert disaster is falling on deaf ears." Indeed, but this is a systemic deafness rather than a personal one, one that is built-into an alienated system of production through the estrangement of exchange value from use value. I cover all of the issues hinted at and touched up in this article, and I do so in depth. I write on the need to unify the realms of fact and value and build the bridge between theoretical reason (knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the choices, decisions humans make, actions they take).
The split between science and the humanities (my area) replicates the estrangements of humanity and nature and is debilitating. This is something I've tried to address within the organising concept of 'Rational Freedom,' reconciling objectivity and subjectivity, reason/nature and reason/culture to advance a view that is both scientific and civic/democratic (integrating objective nature and human subjectivity, to make it easier to understand). This involves revaluing the terms and values that have come to be diminished in a scientistic age.
In Political Emotions, Martha Nussbaum writes: "Ceding the terrain of emotion-shaping to antiliberal forces gives them a huge advantage in the people’s hearts and risks making people think of liberal values as tepid and boring... In the type of liberal society that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all, there are two tasks for the political cultivation of emotion. One is to engender and sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that require effort and sacrifice. The other is to keep at bay forces that lurk in all societies and, ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others."
Rational freedom affirms that the freedom of each is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all. I extend this unity to the commonwealth of life/virtue with respect to the beings and bodies of the more-than-human world.
Nussbaum is right, and I said so in Being at One - a link can be found in the "Books" section - as well as in other things I have written over the years. Progressives/liberals/leftists (whatever label we may use) have, in the main, ceded this terrain. (Not all, of course. I, for one, have explicitly sought to reclaim and revalue it). The visceral reactionary forces ranged against us - racism, sexism, nationalism, xenophobia, fascism - would suffocate should they ever be deprived of the oxygen of emotion, not by suppressing emotion but by tapping, inciting, and canalising emotional intelligence in more healthy and restorative ways. All this needs also to be linked to a critical analysis of political economy, paying attention to the specific social forms and relations mediating the metabolic interchange of humanity with nature.
'We' is a biological entity, not a social and political one. The problems confronting the world are the product of specific material relations and objective dynamics, and it is these that need to be targeted and supplanted. The problems confronting the world are structural, not chronological. There is no going back, only forward.
I shall close by returning to the concern with commonality and the common good with which I opened this piece. That introduction concerned a view of unity and the common good beyond the sides we may take in politics. I know I am in danger of annoying and irritating folk by repetition, but I really have been arguing for this.
To get through this crisis, we have to touch the emotions and bridge the empathy gap. The times ahead will be disastrous if we don’t find a way to start caring about others, not just people with whom we agree – that's easy and not actually a form of care at all, merely self-confirmation – but most of all people with whom we disagree. This is profound and true and, in the context of any number of divisions in the world, incredibly difficult. But it's not impossible.
I guess I was always one of the radicals at school, coming from a predominantly working class town, built on coal and industry, with strong traditions of solidarity. But I was always struck by things the Catholic brothers taught me, about 'others,' people who may fall outside of our immediate loyalties, people we disagree with, people who may oppose us and offend us, whose politics is not ours. The same lesson applies to those others, too, I was told. There is a greater loyalty, a greater justice, one that unifies us all, to which we are all accountable, to which we should seek to conform our will and actions. I see some reprehensible views expressed by people, and a sheer and utter stupidity and selfishness on their part that it is so incredibly difficult to empathize with them. It is much easier to be angry and contemptuous. You will find loving others as you love yourself – and forgiving them - as the toughest thing of all. It's not been difficult to see how current and long-standing divisions would turn nasty and violent. In my last week in America in April 2019 I made a big statement on this, my last day of attending the little village church. So I shall post the link below.
There is no way I conceal division and seek to suppress conflict in order to preserve the civil peace - such an approach is ideological and defaults to an iniquitous status quo that stands in need of changing. But I see change as a healing, a reconnection that overcomes disconnection, a reconciliation without retribution. I try hard not to deify (one's side and causes) and demonize (others) in the context of conflict and division. Such a thing will theologize politics and turn Earth into a Hell. Do that, and you will see nothing but demons everywhere. And think on, you may well be a demon in the eyes of those who disagree with you. I don't want to live in a society in which I have to exert an awful lot of effort trying to avoid being burned at the stake. Try to see God in the face of the other, even and especially when that other seems about as far away from justice as you could imagine. It's tough, it really is. The older I get, the more impressed I am by the fragility of people - and the fragility of the good - the brokenness, the wounds and the cries of pain, which may often be ill-diagnosed and ill-directed, but are real all the same. And I am struck by the need for the healing, for a reconciliation without revenge and retribution. And for the need for an emotional intelligence, to go with a social intelligence.
A few thoughts on those issues here
and here
I saw the divisions tearing society apart coming. I did not deny the injustices that lay at their roots. I do argue for the recognition of commonalities that ensure disagreement and dissensus - the stuff of politics - does not rent society apart.
As for 'rational freedom,' the approach I have taken has appeared to some to be conservative. It proceeds from the key themes of 'traditional' and canonical figures such as Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas and weaves them in new ways within a critical conception of modernity. Once the purview of the ruling class, I attempt to demonstrate that morality, authority, law, virtue, paideia and such like can serve and enhance the freedom of all. The freedom I espouse has roots and fruits.
All I can say by way of conclusion is that I really have pulled my tripe out on all the areas adumbrated in this interview and being discussed by some - not enough - environmentalists now; I really have tried to get those points over to environmentalists/campaigners. Progress here has been too slow.