The Motivational Economy
[Written October 2020]
This post has been incited by comments made by a number of people involved in bridging the fields of environmental campaigning and eco-design. 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. The concerns expressed by activists and designers over the need for unity raise issues of a commons that is not merely physical, something to be addressed by means of science, engineering, and technology, but is social, moral, and motivational, requiring appropriate modes of re/connection.
Despite political commitments and loyalties that are left, there is a concern expressed not merely over the polarization that is structurally embedded in the social and political fabric, but over divisions being spread and inflated in the ideological world. One person began his piece nervously by suggesting that the views he was about to express could be considered 'heretical.' That suggestion indicates the extent to which many people are feeling increasingly constrained by the dead-hand of orthodoxy stifling supposedly progressive politics. It also indicates the extent to which campaigners are fetishizing divisions all the more to be able to feed off them in perpetuity. The problem with the fight mode of political campaigning is that once a movement gets into it it tends never to get out of it – every question becomes a battle to be fought in a war that never ends. Politics thus reduces to an endless war. 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 the political/ideological divides so that different people with different views and interests may come to identify the commonalities that enable them to unite on common ground. I am interested in the concluding line uttered by one particular eco-designer used in this exchange: 'I KNOW common ground exists!' The strength of affirmation here, however, suggests a lack of certainty with respect to establishing and showing the foundations of this common ground. I argue for the existence of the common ground and I argue that knowledge of the commons – physical but also political and ethical – is possible and can be demonstrated. I am, at the same time, interested in the fact that so many people gave that sentiment a 'like.' Deep down, people know that the common ground and the common good exist. But the fact that a long discussion debating what these things could be ends with an assertive – and non-rational – ‘I KNOW’ suggests to me that so many people who are strong on technical means are uncertain with respect to morals and motivations but also ends.
The relation of theoretical reason and practical reason has very much the question I have continually addressed in my work, a work of healing as well as integration, a work 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, the personal, familial, communal, and political, embracing all peoples, identities, and cultures. This question of holistic healing is more than political in the sense of identifying and taking sides, and restores the notion of 'the political' to its 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. Beyond the zero-sum game that divides politics into ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ the concern is with the good polity, The Republic. Ecopolis as concerned with the human-nature interchange.
I have sought to achieve this good polity through my life’s work in 'rational freedom' – expressing a concern to recover the ethical and political commons as well as the physical commons. I wish it were possible to give a short view of the millions of words I must have spilled on this theme, but it is impossible. I approach ‘rational freedom’ from through a broad range of subjects and issues, seeking to develop a multi—layered approach to a multi-faceted reality. It has been an incredibly lonely path, I have to say, with conservatives considering me too radical, socialists thinking me too conservative, and liberals of all kinds rejecting any kind of commons that seems to imply a methodological - and political - collectivism. I have said all along that this dualism of individualism and holism is wrong and debilitating, originating in a liberal ontology that falsely separates two aspects of the one human reality – individuality and sociality. There can be no common ground so long as the good is made a matter of irreducible subjective choice/preference. Briefly, where ‘the good’ is a matter of subjective choice, each person able to choose the good as he or she deems fit, then any possible agreement on the good is merely pragmatic, not something determined by reference to an objective standard. I have written extensively on the problems of ensuring congruence between subjective and objective conditions of the good, so that it is possible to say more than an assertive ‘I KNOW’ that the common good exists, as in ‘I believe’ the common good to exist. It was just so curious to see people who base themselves so heavily on science and technology to defend the end they pursue so vehemently in the non-rational terms of belief. My work is all about establishing the grounds for the reclamation of the commons, avoiding the dualism of scientism and moralism, neither of whose terms are persuasive. It seems that most people who 'know' me through social media have appreciated my support for their causes and campaigns, but have either never read or understood the work I have done which has led me to those causes and campaigns. Which is a shame, because my commitments are not arbitrary, reducing to an inner feeling or belief, but have some solid reasoning behind them. I 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 at all levels and thereby re-establish common ground in the future, without at the same time rationalising and hence entrenching and extending division and disunity in the present by way of ideological assertions of harmony between all humanity. The latter presumes the very political and social 'we' that stands in need of creation.
I come now to this article, which is being shared by environmentalist campaigners.
It's an article in which a climate scientist raises issues and concerns which, at risk of offending the scientism of the age, transcend science. The debilitating nature of 'scientism' is becoming increasingly apparent. I have tried hard over the decades to raise these very issues and concerns, and have addressed them in my work, only to be 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.' That ‘rant,’ I distinctly remember, involved an argument that there are questions which science can inform but not answer – questions of value, meaning, significance, and belief. These are the moral and motivational questions that determine the extent to which action follows knowledge and the form it takes (intrinsic or extrinsic). These are key questions, with deficiencies here ensuring that knowledge and know-how falls far short of its potential. 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, tend to be all at sea when it comes to the modes of communication and persuasion that are key to social action and politics. Hence the tendency to see politics in the didactic and authoritarian forms of truth-telling. It is an indication of how far 'scientism' has become endemic in the age that perfectly reasonable arguments for a bridge to be built between the theoretical reason and practical reason are met with accusations of being anti-science. I have been met with those accusations (in truth, I have been met mostly with antipathy). But now it seems there are signs that people are learning. (It should come as no surprise to see how slow really clever people who think they already know the truth learn).
I looked at the comments the article inspired on social media. ‘What have we done?’ someone asks in response. 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, the sociological literary, even the metaphysics, that is adequate with the crisis. There is a need for clarity here: what, institutionally, and who, socially, is this 'we?' When environmentalists and campaigners refer to ‘we,’ they are making an appeal to a political and ethical framework and a social identity that does not exist, ensuring that the appeal therefore falls on deaf ears, provoking despair and depression in short order. This debilitating cycle is entirely predictable given the lack of clarity with respect to grounds. 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. The lament for the nature we have lost is hopeless on account of being socially, institutionally, and structurally clueless. Narratives of loss deny us a feasible future by trapping vision within a paralysing nostalgia for times that are beyond recall even if they ever were (which is doubtful).
'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 processes of disembedding upon which the capital system is based. The capital system is an economic system whose overriding purpose is the pursuit of exchange value through the exploitation of use value, from which it is thoroughly divorced. Appeals for action need to be made at this level. If they sail over material realities and practicalities then they will lack actionable purpose and effect.
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 nature of capital’s systemic deafness in depth in:
I further analyse the capital system as an inherently irresponsible, subjectless system of external constraint here:
In both of these works I address in depth 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 who constantly appeal to 'government' to govern for the long-term common good and act in a timely and effective way to preserve planetary boundaries. That appeal betrays an almost complete ignorance with respect to the nature and functioning of government within the capital system. The state is not autonomous within this system, transcending particular interests to secure the common good. Instead, the state is a key second order mediation within the capital system, serving as capital's political command centre; the state establishes the unity and coherence that capital itself – as a competition of capitals concerned with the self-expansion of value – cannot supply. In fine, environmentalists are seeking redress from the very institution 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. In demanding that government ensure that ‘the economy’ respects planetary boundaries, environmentalists are effectively demanding that the state become dysfunctional for the reproduction of capital – as ecologically sound that principle may be, it is politically and sociologically illiterate, feasible only by way of authoritarian imposition in the absence of societal transformation.
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.'
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, addressing the question at the level of metaphysical ideals and moral motivations as well as identities, stakes, and interests within the social formation. Gergis touches upon areas of direct experiential and existential concern. He 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 a science and technology dominated approach, from a myopic concentration on the factual, the physical, and the tangible, and start to address the more appetitive, inspirational, and motivational areas of human concern – that is, the most important and most difficult questions of practical reason. 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 Catholic 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/post-religious 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 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. The individualist fiction that they do 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. There you will find a number of in-depth treatments of problems of fact, value, action, and practical reason. (Here I refer only to my posts and not to my academic work, which can be found on the “Books” and “Papers” pages). 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,” where I argue for reason coming to take rational form within social forms. I have a category headed by “Poetry, Art, and Literature.” This is the aesthetic dimension, complementing the ethical and the scientific to establish the unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Here, I present a literary ecology to go alongside the moral and scientific ecology. There is plenty here on ecopoetics and metaphorics, underlining the capacity of stories to inspire effort and incite emotions. Then comes “Economics,” treated as a branch of ethics within the field of practical reason, then “Ecology,” and much more.
Then I come to “Climate Change and Global Heating,” addressing the scientific aspects of the environmental crisis and their implications. And then “Climate Politics,” by which I mean politics, and not the anti-politics of a scientistic environmentalism that seeks to dictate and legislate truth ‘from the outside’ – an environmental Philosopher-King taking the form of a vanguard to put politics and people on ice. I argue for the need for Green truths to cross the bridge from objective contemplation of the external world and enter the field of practical reason by engaging 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 to accompany societal change. Such notions are very different to the idea of presenting the decision-makers within existing and untransformed institutions and relations with facts and knowledge and then demanding policy and action from them. That view is crude and destined to fail, inviting perversion in practice. I proceed to examine character-construction and the acquisition of the virtues to equip people and society with an inner motive force and moral force. Such a view envisages a society of volunteers and doers, a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of the right 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 – that is, a rational environmentalism that embodies a rational freedom as against scientism and naturalism.
I feel the need to say very loudly and very clearly that I have worked consistently on those very areas of environmentalism where some are now starting to see weaknesses. It has been lonely work, falling on deaf ears in the main. The heavy science, technology, and engineering bias of the age has blinded far too many clever people to the gaps in their knowledge. As David Orr writes, “they were taught to be technicians, not thinkers, in a culture that is long on know-how and short on know-why.” Too few have been prepared to take politics and ethics seriously. This is an enormous deficiency in any movement seeking change, 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 and, through overspill and appropriation, threatens authoritarian imposition in the name of ‘necessity.’
I come next to “The Logic of Collective Action” in the “Posts” section of my Being and Place website. Here, I analyse issues of individual choice, moral responsibility, and collective action. I also have a specific section on “The Field of Practical Reason,” arguing the need for a moral and political capacity in addition to technical and institutional capacity. People are key – without a theory of agency, all the knowledge and know-how in the world will not suffice to yield change in the desirable direction. People are not merely problems in being ‘greedy’ and ‘stupid’ – which is how far too many supposedly knowledgeable people conceive the mass of humanity far too often – but solutions to the problems we face in being knowledgeable change agents. I've argued all of this at length in various posts. I have also 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 also 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 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.
I 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. Environmentalists have, by and large, passed all this work by. It shows. The debilitating deficiencies of environmentalism are glaring.
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 comes as 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 to 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 impressive knowledge. It's an illusion; it 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.
As one who has explicitly sought to foster motives, build character, nurture virtues, touch the emotions, make facts existentially meaningful, emphasis social formation, and much more besides, in order to foster the springs for individual/societal response/action, it saddens me to read this article. 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."
The concept of ‘rational freedom’ which I work with 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, (and in other works 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, but this is achieved not by suppressing emotion but by tapping, inciting, and canalising the 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. That is the view I have consistently argued for.
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. Caring for people with whom we agree is easy to do and is not actually a form of care at all, merely self-confirmation. By far and away the most difficult thing to do is to care for 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 difficult is 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, the people we disagree with, the 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 and a greater justice, one that unifies us all, to which we are all accountable and to which we should seek to conform our will and actions by way of participative being. 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 to do. 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 that is achieved 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. But I KNOW the good exists for all of that fragility and brokenness.
A few more thoughts on those issues here
I see the divisions that are about to erupt and seek a healing beyond them.
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 is that I really have pulled my tripe out on all the areas adumbrated in this interview and really have tried to get those points over to environmentalists/campaigners. Progress here has been too slow.