The Scientists’ Lament
This scientists' lament is being shared widely over social media and concerns an issue I have been addressing for years – the relation between theoretical and practical reason. This lament is the latest in a long line of laments that have been heard since at least the seventies and The Club of Rome’s warnings of environmental collapse and catastrophe. That’s long enough to have learned that facts and figures alone do not motivate and inspire action and do nothing in themselves to foster the political will and collective nous for the common action required. The latter is the province of ethics and politics – of the much derided humanities, relegated to a secondary position subordinate to natural science and its impersonal, indifferent facts and physical processes. There is no mystery as to why statements of scientific fact fail to motivate action.
I’ve been addressing the problem of the relation between theoretical and practical reason for years. Science simply cannot do the job of practical reason (ethics and politics) which is being demanded of it. Laments such as this are familiar but are based on the faulty assumptions of a narrowly rational model of human understanding and agency; the relation between knowledge and action is neither so simple nor so direct as that of filling empty heads with information in expectation of automatic response. Such an approach is fitting for computers and robots, but is anthropologically illiterate – it betrays an almost complete detachment from the human factor.
I’ve tried various ways to make this point in the past, to little or no affect. So I shall try another approach by quoting Isaac Newton: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” (Isaac Newton).
I can immediately hear people of a scientific persuasion agreeing 100% with this quote. I share the frustration at the unpredictability of people. Retrospective diagnosis is treacherous ground, but it seems likely that Newton was autistic. So am I. I know the autistic mind. I know the dangers of universalising from particular experience. But I can recognise common traits, especially the search for certainty, predictability, and order, whether this is found in objects and the objective world, in logic, numbers, and facts, in an impersonal truth that is beyond the vagaries of the human ‘yes / no.’ I don’t dismiss the ‘madness’ of human beings but instead acknowledge the complex realities of the human world, premised on the existence of human beings as creative moral and knowledgeable agents. Attempts to assert a pre-political truth formulated on the basis of the natural world are an attempt to override that creative human agency, silencing and suppressing the inner ‘yes’ and ‘no’ which is the birthright of each and all.
Here, we are back to Plato’s philosopher-king and the imposition of the collective interest from above. The scientists’ lament identifies a real problem, the problem of how we can secure the common interest in teeth of the indifference, even opposition, of particular interests. This question revives the ancient tension between the special languages of philosophy and the deliberations of a democratic political community. The issue lies at the heart of democratic political theory. Plato defined democracy as a form of society which 'treats all men as equal, whether they are equal or not' and ensures that 'every individual is free to do as he likes' (Plato, The Republic, pp. 375, 376). That view, Plato thought, tends to excess.
The problem arises from the possible asymmetry between truth and democratic willing. Plato criticised democracy for being incapable of self-governance, and it has fallen to democratic theorists since to meet Plato’s criticisms of democracy as possessing an inherent tendency to excess.
Plato’s ghost of the philosopher-king continues to haunt us. The world of ideal forms beyond time and place give us a notion of a reality that is more true than the world accessible by our immediate senses. We crave the objective truth and certainty this notion promises. In a democratic politics, however, truth is something that emerges through human relations and practices. Plato was right to argue for temperateness and moderation in a well-governed people, but he erred in thinking that these qualities can only be expressed in the form of deference to objective truth and to its reputed possessors, the philosophers. (Barber 1984: 311).
In his haste to resolve a real problem, Plato sold people, politics, power and philosophy short. Plato was right to highlight the tendency of an atomistic conception of democracy and liberty to transgress limits. However, he lacks a process by which philosophy could come to rule as a form of self-rule, by educating desire from within. We need to open up public space to greater political participation and a reactivated citizenship, so that truth becomes something that is a co-creation from below rather than an imposition from above.
The notion of generating the common good as a creative act, as opposed to discovering the good as something that already objectively exists, gives us the clue. In light of the sanguinary historical experiences of authoritarianism in politics, we may be better served to avoid an ethics and politics that depends upon apodictic truth claims with respect to right conduct and the good life. That statement is controversial in that it implies that we abandon notions of objectivity, objective truth, scientific and moral truth. But this need not be the case. Aristotle could reject Plato’s general truth with respect to the ideal forms and yet still hold to the truth that emerges through concrete particulars. The view I am defending rejects the notion of truth as claims which are clearly established and beyond dispute, scientific proof, as opposed to dialectic and probable reasoning, in so far as they relate to the practical reason of politics and ethics. My view leaves plenty over for individuals to do as creative moral agents, seeing individuals as citizens capable of constituting their own political and moral life through their relations and practices. Participating in the continuous unfolding of the creative universe, we are party to the creation of truth, and to the living of truth. The cognitive and the affective go together.
To put the point simply, the temper of (democratic) politics is judicious, meaning that reasoning is more important than the (supposed and claimed) possession of truth.
We return to Plato’s problem of the relation between truth and politics. Plato argued for the figure of the philosopher-ruler to overcome political turmoil and ensure the prevalence of the common good. To many critics, though, this would be to put politics on ice. Neither truth nor the reality it applies to possess an independence of the individuals composing the demos. Here we have to make a choice between the one and the many, the philosopher-ruler and the rule of philosophy through popular agency.
As Barber comments:
If truth is the object, philosophers will do for kings. But democracy begins where truth and certitude and final solutions disappear into the murky uncertainties of the human condition, and its temper is thus necessarily judicious. Plato was right in insisting on the need for temperateness and moderation in a well-governed people, but he was wrong in thinking that moderation takes the form of deference to truth or to its putative proprietors. It is the self-governing people who most need moderation, for they have nothing but moderation to remind them of the weakness and infirmities on which their self-government relies, and by which it is justified.
Benjamin Barber Strong Democracy 1984: 311
The tension between an apodictic notion of truth and a judicious notion of truth is a tension between the claims of expert knowledge and the deliberations and decisions of a political community. Democracy does its best work when truth and certainty give way to our reasoned and practical attempts to deal with the uncertainties of the human condition. Aristotle understood well that the temper of politics and ethics is necessarily judicious, and I make great use of his emphasis on practical reasoning in various works.
I develop these arguments in depth at length in various books, eg Being at One 2016, and merely signpost in shorter essays, in the hope I may attract the attention of those busy people who spend their time stating facts (and lamenting their failure to inspire a response).
I shall quote another scientist of genius who is also thought to have been on the spectrum, Albert Einstein.
Physicist Albert Einstein was asked: "why is it that when the mind of man has stretched so far as to discover the structure of the atom we have been unable to devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying us?”
He replied: “That is simple, my friend. It is because politics is more difficult than physics.”
I keep trying to tell people who assert "the science" over and over and over and over again that their search for scientific resolutions of political and ethical questions is a dead-end - it leads to bad science and rotten politics and ethics.
There is a relation to be established between the two, which in pre-modern times was understood in terms of contemplation and action. The two are not antithetical but neither are they identical. You have to respect the active and the contemplative in their own terms. And you have to respect the distinction between the physical and the moral universe (and not dismiss the latter as merely 'made-up,' a non-rational realm without a reality of its own). Establishing the proper relation doesn't entail the one eating up the other - asserting science and the knowledge of the physical universe against ethics and politics and vice versa. That collision of the two essential aspects of reality will doom us all.
I'm glad Einstein answered the question in one line - that's all it merits. One day, people will get round to treating politics and ethics with the reverence they treat science. I think they mistake knowledge for certainty and run scared of the fact that each person has their own inner 'yes' and 'no.' That's what makes politics and ethics far, far tougher than physics and whatever neuro-nonsense is all the rage. Some people want to remove that "no" from people by presenting them with a fact and logic you can only say "yes" to. They think that that is "freedom as the appreciation of necessity," missing entirely the nature of that "appreciation" which is the necessary mediation between the two. But, of course, those who take their stand on "the science" claim that there is no such thing as "free will." We are back down to drives and their manipulation. Still, though, there remain an awful lot of people out there who are still asserting their right to say "no." They are wrong, comes the response. They may well be. They may not be. I've caught the people citing "the science" out a few times now. And, as I say, science doesn't resolve questions of value, meaning, and significance. I've seen the response to that objective - the universe is valueless, the only meaning to the game of life is to stay in the game, and human beings are insignificant in the wider scheme of things. And you think you are going to devise any kind of viable politics and ethics on the basis of that disenchanting science? More likely we will have a revanchism in the form of any number of totalitarian fundamentalisms trying to make the point, in the loudest terms, that human beings matter.
There are people who disdain politics, because basically they dislike the existence of people who won't agree. That's politics. Politics is disagreement and dissensus. There was once a commitment to the mediation which ensured the reconciliation of the One and the Many. But no more. The One is no longer negotiated. Instead there is an attempt to impose it by way of false certainties, the reified voice of Nature. Such people secede from society, in order to be able to better organise the world and order people from their Empyrean heights. They think that physics trumps politics, and repeat that point over and again as if it is persuasive. It is precisely the opposite. It is a blank and brute statement of 'necessity.' As in saying that we are shaved chimpanzees clinging to a meaningless rock that came from nowhere and is going nowhere. Or that one day we all die. It's what we do whilst me are clinging on that is of value and significance to us that matters.
There are people who, concerned to establish some overriding truth about the physical nature of the universe, turn what Martin Buber called the "I-Thou" relations between persons into "I-It" relations, for the reason that the 'It' is far easier to know, predict, and order/serve than are human beings. In the name of an indifferent Nature that is 'boss,' those who speak with the reified voice of Nature seek to 'boss' people. And the irony is that none of it resolves the fundamental problems of politics and ethics - problems which are problems of I-Thou-It relations - merely evades them.
That's not an argument against science. Only those who are in the grip of 'scientism,' the vice of the age, could take it that way. It is an argument for the worth and dignity of politics and ethics as something more than sophist power struggles and incommensurate value judgements, as a field of practical reason which is irreducible to explanations of the physical world.
On the scourge of scientism, this is a fine article on Wittgenstein's forgotten lesson: Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times.
Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson by Ray Monk
Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times.
The scientist Dr. Charlie Gardner says he is ‘dumbfounded’ by how little people seem to care for scientific facts. Imagine how dumbfounded people who studied history, politics, ethics, the humanities in general are when their work on the motivational economy – the complicated ‘yes / no’ stuff that is humanity in its myriad forms in time and place - is simply ignored by people who think that science can do the work of practical reason. The naivety is breathtaking (here I return to that yearning for an objective, impersonal truth and order untainted by human uncertainty – as an autistic person I know the craving to be free from human bias and interference, just as I know for the same reason that to secede from human society to some Empyrean height, from where to order, organise, legislate, and regulate is a cul-de-sac, a retreat from engagement that makes the failure to connect, communicate, motivate inevitable.
I pay no attention to lamentations for this very reason – the failures are predictable. I’m ‘dumbfounded’ that clever people so concerned to see knowledge acted upon for the human betterment still haven’t understood that the relation between knowledge and action is neither so simple nor so direct. That relation is mediated by the complex messy things human beings are, not least on account of being social beings embedded within socially structured patterns of behaviour and action, complete with stakes and interests. You simply cannot bracket that world out with statements like nature/physics doesn’t care about politics – that merely inverts a bad relation rather than corrects it – the solution is to put the relation and interaction between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature on a sound footing.
The lament that people don’t care is pure ignorance, blaming others for one’s own deficiencies and failures. And it prevents the self-critical reflection that is required to break the impasse.
It no longer comes as a surprise but it still saddens me that an age which prides itself on knowing so much, and which routinely takes a condescending attitude towards the past, should have failed to understand something that was so readily understood by the ancients and the medievals – that the relation between knowledge/contemplation/theory and action/practice is neither simple nor direct but mediated in various ways. The great philosophers from Plato to Kant studied the question at length. The much maligned sophists wrote on rhetoric and what it takes to communicate truth. Later, St Thomas Aquinas argued that knowledge is in itself not a virtue, on account of lacking appetitive quality. Knowledge gives us the ability to act but, alone, doesn’t make us want to act, it lacks the appetitive quality of true virtue. Those lessons, familiar to past generations, have been lost. This was a message that E.F. Schumacher sought to deliver when he argued that the most important task of the age is that of ‘metaphysical reconstruction.’
The factual world has lost its inner motive force.
The scourge of scientism, which Wittgenstein identified as the vice of the age, has blinded the moderns as to what it takes to stoke the motivational economy, both in terms of fostering the inner virtues as well as social action, a view which recognises that human action proceeds always within social identities and relations. Far too much time has been wasted simply stating facts passively from some Empyrean height above society. As anyone with the faintest knowledge of history knows, that’s not how change occurs. Change in history is a messy affair rather than some slide-rule engineering – a synergistic combination of material interests, metaphysical ideals, and moral motives, with ‘change agents’ often working at cross purposes (with themselves as well as others), but with an underlying line of development being unfolded all the same.
For Socrates, the formation of character mattered much more than the passive informing of empty heads. The rationalist model is sociologically and psychologically illiterate and politically debilitating, hence the cycle of failure and lamentation. It’s a waste of time and energy, in other words.
The idea that facts and scientific knowledge motivate, incite, and inspire change is crude and simplistic – decades of failure alone ought to have told people it is wrong.
The challenge is to mediate the relation between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the natural world, the realm of science, fact, objectivity) and practical reason (the realm of values, politics and ethics, the motivational economy, subjectivity, human agency). To simply assert the facts of the former to the latter as somehow secondary and subordinate is doomed to fail. It has, indeed, failed.
You can waste your time in lamentation. It is much more profitable to examine what you may be doing wrong and learn the relevant lessons. To blame human beings for being selfish, stupid, and indifferent is a copout. Human beings are what they are, what they always were and what they always will be. Do you think that Oliver Cromwell or anyone of ‘made history’ was working with perfect reasoning machines? If certain capacities have been lost or diverted and perverted, then discern the reasons why and see what can be done to recover the moral and intellectual virtues. Or do people think it a simple matter of engineering. God preserve us from the nudging of the neurocrats!
That anthropological pessimism is implicit anti-democratic and allows those who think they are in possession of truth to override democratic governance and civic norms. It is also a cover for one’s own political ineptitude.
It is better for those who are failing in politics to learn the reasons for their failure and change their approach to one that is more likely to succeed.
The idea that facts and scientific knowledge motivate, incite, and inspire change is crude and simplistic – decades of failure alone ought to have told people it is wrong.
Emotion has been devalued and even driven out in our modern scientistic culture. The impressive results of the scientific and industrial revolutions have encouraged a mentality which is tantamount to a new religion, a faith, certainly. The products and benefits of the scientific and industrial revolutions are visible, tangible, and quantifiable in a way that the emotions are not. But no more than economic growth is science, in and of itself, the answer to all of our problems. On the contrary, the modern belief that ‘science is everything’ spills over easily into the view that science is omnipotent, encroaching into areas where science can, at best, only inform, but never guide and direct. The result has been the predominance of material perception, based on the belief that the material stands at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of knowledge/power.
The effect on the motivational economy has been debilitating, effectively disabling the springs of action. The scientists’ lament which is the common refrain of the age comes from within the very mentality which bears the most responsibility for human unresponsiveness.
The scientific revolution rejected the superstitious and the magical to give the world a reality check. The problem is that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater, with everything intangible and immaterial discarded to, or at best devalued, to be subjected to reductionist explanation. Emotions are made mere chemical reactions to be explained by some form of neurononsense or other. These explanations may well apply at the level of quantitative fact but can say nothing about qualitative human experience, the very thing that makes a difference in life. The intangible and the immaterial were discarded, with the key components of the motivational economy made subject to scientific analysis. (The same with respect to spirituality, which always makes me sceptical of those many people, seeking a route beyond scientistic materialism and mechanicism, praise Eastern spirituality, not least on account of its supposed compatibility with western science. I find the whole thing unpersuasive, for the very reason I see the intent all too clearly – they are seeking spiritualty but are so lacking the courage of their convictions that they cling to their misplaced faith in science. As with politics and ethics, so with spirituality, those upholding science at the top of their hierarchy of power/knowledge are attempting to make science perform a job it is incapable of doing. It’s called ‘scientism,’ which Wittgenstein identified as one of the greatest vices of the modern age. Those socialised in accordance with the dominant modes of thought of the age are taking an awful long time to see the error. One would have thought that their continuous lamentations with respect to human unresponsiveness would have told at least some of them that they are missing something essential – such science is like a beautiful engine with a missing motive part.
My concern in this piece is with the components of the motivational economy, those appetitive qualities and springs of action that ensure an appropriate and effective human responsiveness to knowledge. It is plainly missing, hence the lamentation. How strange that it never seems to occur to the people lamenting that it is they, and not the people they condemn as unresponsive, who may be missing something.
The simple truth is that the human factor has gone missing, with qualitative human experience either discarded or rendered of secondary, reactive, significance subordinate to tangible, quantifiable phenomena. There is such a thing as emotional intelligence, an intelligence that is qualitative and, as such, which transcends scientistic reduction and analysis. Explanations as to how neurons pack and fire explain how neurons pack and fire and no more. The emotions concern much more than this. Emotion plays a pivotal role in all our pursuits. A life devoid of emotions is well-nigh impossible, if it is to qualify as a distinctively human life and not mere physical existence. I almost wrote that ‘a life devoid of emotions is almost inconceivable,’ but desisted, lest those already having very excited dreams over AI may come to take is as a challenge. There are times when I read the demands of the ‘follow the science’ activists, insisting that governments (and those who elect them), ‘tell the (scientific) truth,’ that I am left with the distinct impression that their ideal human being is the emotionless robot, one that has exactly the same physical and cognitive attributes as humans other than the capacity for emotions, leaving only automatic response to external sensory input. All the complicated, messy stuff is left out, all the sources of error, all that annoying freedom that comes the possession of the internal ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ All the capacity for hate goes too, and with it the capacity for love. For the antonym of love is not hate at all, it is indifference. You can see plainly that scientism and naturalism are correlates, with the emotionless automaton envisaged by such arid rationalism mirroring the cold indifference of Nature.
This is the plainest inhumanism and is utterly self-defeating. The dire warnings of catastrophe to come become self-fulfilling prophecies for the very reason that the prophets are lacking emotional intelligence. As fully informed as the robot is, it lacks the motivation to act – the inner springs are not there. This is because even the most basic drives are dependent on emotions—the one thing this robot lacks. The robot could not feel the satisfaction of eating or the need to eat; it could not experience the pain associated with hunger or the satisfaction of satiation. The robot would not pursue food and, given that it has the same physical needs of humans, would soon die.
In addition to the inner springs of action there are also the social springs. Human beings are not discrete individuals living in splendid isolation but social beings living within socially structured patterns of behaviour. Human beings are not pure, unencumbered calculators but social beings involved in relations to others, possessing stakes and interests and performing roles which comes with a complex, sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent, motivations.
At risk of causing upset, the point needs to be stated bluntly: far too many people spend far too much time at the easy end of the question (nature, physics, the quantifiable, climate facts), because they lack what it takes to address the difficult end, the end which, ultimately, makes all the difference for the better (practical reason, creative human agency mediating the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature.)
The human being without emotion is not a human being at all but a robot, with neither the motivation nor the incentive nor the will to act. Attaining social position, acquiring wealth, falling in love, ‘acting’ in any way, would make no difference to it. Hence the emptiness and ineffectiveness of the repeated declaration ‘it’s time to act!’ You would have thought that the very clever and highly informed people repeatedly urging such action over the course of decades might have begun to suspect that, perhaps, their approach is deficient in some quality or other by now.
Whilst such people know plenty of science with respect to physical reality, they know nothing of the motivational economy, a not inconsiderable deficiency given the concern to move human beings to action.
Where is the motive power that takes knowledge of the physical world from here to there? Where is the emotional intelligence? Where is the understanding of qualitative human experience?
A linguistic analysis reveals the essential truth that emotion, motion, and motivation are inextricably linked in generating action. If we add the prefix e- in Latin, meaning ‘away,’ to the Latin movere, meaning ‘to move,’ (motion), we can grasp how emotions ‘move us away’ from a passive, apathetic without appetite and desire, enthusing us with the motivation to act. It is then and only then that our knowledge comes to be attached to an inner motive force that has the responsiveness we seek. The word motive, source of the word motivation, comes from the Latin motivum, which means "a moving cause." Scientism and naturalism lack that ‘moving cause’ insofar as they focus only on a non-human nature, treating human beings as at best of mere secondary significance, subordinate to (indifferent) natural processes.
It is even possible to find environmentalists constantly showing images of nature or the universe and asserting human insignificance. It’s hard to imagine anything more likely to demotivate human beings than such a message. It seems to be an exercise in futility, so much so that it has all the character of a subconscious death-wish, proceeding by way of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Lamentable indeed.
To put the point so simply that even the quantifiers can understand it:
Emotions generate motion as fuel drives the engine. Emotions cause motion and provide a motive that provokes a response and drives action.
It is possible to have all the physical and cognitive characteristics of a normal human being, but be deficient in feeling and emotion. There has been a repeated denigration of feelings and emotions as sources of error. The sceptics here will have found their caution confirmed in an age in which so many people have been determined to advance their preferences as their truths, truths that others have to accept. Your feelings are not facts, comes the response. Which is true. There is nothing in the position adumbrated above which severs feelings and emotions from reason and reality to give each the right to assert ‘my truth.’ My point is that without emotion there will be no intrinsic motion, with knowledge receiving only an apathetic reaction. Human beings who are devoid of emotion will lack the intrinsic motivation to act, lack appetite, and aspire to nothing. Emotion is the foundation of motion via motivation, and thus plays a central role in any concern to pursue the right course of action. In the absence of inner motive power, those concerned with right actions will be forced to licence an extrinsic motive force. It is not difficult to envisage what that looks like .. the words ‘enlightened despotism’ somehow don’t do justice to the less-than-enlightened power dynamics that are the political and historical norm.
I love to quote Serge Gainsbourg here:
“À quoi servent de beaux wagons quand on n'a pas de locomotive?”
"What use/good are beautiful wagons when you don't have a locomotive?"
You can have all the beautiful facts and figures in the world, but that truth will remain passive and inert if it lacks motive force within the practical social world. You can state the truth all you like, but truth needs to be invested with a motive power if it is to be incarnated. The lesson is plain: the truth cannot be simply and passively given but must be actively sought, willed, internalised, and acted on. Creating the character traits and the psychic grounds for living in truth is precisely what virtue ethics is about. This kind of thing used to be taught. Now it’s all external education as the information of empty heads and passive bodies. It’s the wrong approach and it won’t work. It is not the informing of empty heads that makes the difference but the forming of character in the first place so that individuals become truth-seekers, people who actively will the truth. Character formation precedes effective information.
How?
It was in answering this kind of question that William Morris emphasised the building of the subjective conditions of social transformation as the most important condition of all since, in its absence, socialism or any transformative movement would be but “the mill-wheel without the motive power.” At present, we have the mill-wheel, but not the motive power.
Gus Speth is a scientist who shows some understanding of the problem.
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with thirty years of good science we could address those problems.
But I was wrong.
The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy … and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation – and we scientists don’t know how to do that.” (Gus Speth).
I would just that general references to ‘greed,’ ‘selfishness,’ and ‘apathy’ have little explanatory value and need to be defined with greater sociological and historical precision with respect to prevailing social relations and structures. Put social formation and character formation together, allying inner motives with social praxis, and we might start to see some movement.
I shall sum the main themes of my work as best I can and encourage those who agree with this article and are searching for answers to investigate further: scientific and moral truth/knowledge; overcoming the fact and value dualism; the need to cultivate the inner motives; the need to combine the exteriority and interiority of things; the need for dialectic and disclosure to tease out truth; truth-seeking; the need to proceed from first principles and firm foundations; the necessity of virtue; ecological virtues as qualities for successful living; happiness as flourishing in a public context; nature via nurture; establishing the happy habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, acquired, and exercised; character-construction; establishing the character forming culture and discipline of family, work, community, place, and polity; character formation and social formation as integrating personal and social responsiveness and responsibility; co-responsibility; character and the common good; the cultivation of virtues within the forms of the common life; fostering creative human agency; the logic of collective action: resolving the paradoxes of individual freedom and collective unfreedom; overcoming alienating dualisms and separations; materialist dialectics; the moral sense of place; finding meaning through metaphor; the ethics of enchantment; economics, ethics, and ecology; sovereignty, subsidiarity, and democratic will; political control and the globalisation of economic relations; recovering the economics of the good; sustainable living; real growth and qualitative development; the qualitative dimension of wealth; the new economics of prosperity beyond the delusions of quantitative measures; the new path to prosperity: learning to collaborate and share; socially useful production; the cooperative commonwealth; the economics of purpose; The Republic in an age of moral ecology; Ecopolis; self-regulation and the virtuous eco-community; metaphysical recovery and reconstruction; giving practical force and democratic content to the terms of political and ethical discourse; ecological virtue; the need for behavioural and societal change to proceed hand-in-hand; a society of doers and of volunteers; the case for constituting a voluntary rational self-restraint as against the imposition of an involuntary external restraint; the commitment to a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to external directives; climate politics as the reconstitution of public life; The Republic in an age of social ecology; Green Republicanism against Anti-Political Extremism: a critique of the authoritarian, elitist, and coercive implications of the politics of non-politics; The case for a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology; rational environmentalism which steers beyond the twin reefs of scientism, culturalism, and naturalism; Individual Choice, Moral Responsibility and Collective Action - Changing Ourselves and Changing the World; communing together; beyond enlightened self-interest; the Field of Practical Reason; the need to foster moral capacity alongside technological capacity; political change as the key to addressing climate change; the need to foster the political will and motivation; the need to bridge the fields of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world) and practical reason (ethics and politics); the need to connect scientific knowledge and technological know-how with ethics and politics within the motivational economy of human beings: integrating ability, capacity, will, artifice, motivations; building the political will and legitimacy for collective (climate) action; the politics of love and of friendship; civics; civic engagement; establishing a genuine public community as against environmental philosopher kings and rescue squads; against eco-authoritarianism; politics for the restoration of ecological hope; the unity of social formation and character formation (the unity of personal and social responsibility); taking practical reason seriously; making facts existentially meaningful; fostering the springs of action; inspiring environmental action; eco-praxis; making eco-citizens; the global civil society movement; networking and communing; existential truth; ecological restoration as a restorying; fostering the inner motives and virtues for collective (environmental) action; giving rational freedom appetitive resonance and force; fostering transformative motivations within communities of practice and communities of character; communalism and democratic confederalism; for the healing: the need to bridge divides and build commonalities; reasons, emotions, and motivations; the ecology of hope; looking after the human (moral, social, political) environment; the need to pay attention to the health and quality of the human environment as well as the natural environment; good government and representative government; rational freedom, public happiness and virtue; against sophism in ethics and politics; pleonexia and public life; against the moneyed nihilism corrupting public life; reconstituting public life; free choice and state authority: for genuine common force as against the external collective force generated by subjective choice; repersonalisation, responsibility, and establishing society on the principle of self-assumed obligation; rehabilitating the ethical life; virtuous communities fostering habits of the heart; the quest for community, meaning, and belonging; restoring the moral compass; liberty and license as generating a collective unfreedom; beyond libertarianism; for civility, public life, and reason; a positive and lasting peace in the presence of justice; restoring trust and connection in a new social order; liberty as licence destroys freedom; truth matters and is a work of reason; the moral law; social action and internationalism; love and the just society; the survival of the most loving; resolidifying.
I shall supply some links to just a few of the essays from the hundreds I have written over the years addressing the need to bridge the gap between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the natural world, the realm of science, facts, objectivity) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the realm of values and motivations, subjectivity, determining how we act in light of knowledge). I’ve done good work here, people need to read it – idle lamentation is a waste of time and energy. As for solving the problem – be careful not to make the problem such as to defy solution. I quote:
"Experts say only a sustained global economic meltdown—or an internationally coordinated, war-footing transition to a carbon neutral economy—could come close to slashing carbon pollution that quickly. One is as unpalatable as the other is unlikely."
To clarify: the cure is fatal to the growth economy, the disease is extinction. It’s going to take a whole lot more than stating ‘climate facts’ to resolve that one – the government to which the appeals for ‘climate action’ are addressed is a crucial second order mediation facilitating endless accumulation the ‘growth economy.’ You may well be entrenching and extending the corporate form, rebooting the capital system with clean green energy. Think on, think hard, think deeply.
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/2019/05/21/bridging-theoretical-and-practical-reason
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/the-environmental-problem-is-political-and-so-is-the-solution
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/taking-practical-reason-seriously
The Springs of Action - Making Facts Existentially Meaningful
And hundreds of others.
Feel free to explore the essays on the Posts page of my Being and Place website.
For those who are prepared to go deeper, I shall supply links to a few books where I cover the above deeply and at length.
Principles
In Search of Ecopolis: The Political and Philosophical Principles of Social Ecology (2011)
The Coming Ecological Revolution: The Principles and Politics of a Social and Moral Ecology (2011)
Reason as the Realisation of Nature: An Excursus on Philosophy, Natural Law and Ecology (2010)
Eco-Socialism
The Return of Materialist Dialectics: Review of The Return of Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2020)
Critique of environmentalism
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