I have just read a friend saying this in response to the Planet of the Humans documentary:
‘It is very difficult to counteract the harm this film has caused. What takes years to create can be destroyed in mere moments. People need a “first principles” understanding that is more resistance to these disinformation campaigns. This isn’t the first nor the last we’ll see. Which is why learning about how to lay a solid foundation has concerned me lately.’
I’ve been writing on the need to establish foundations and first principles for years. I was on the receiving end of the height of abuse from one environmentalist for my troubles. He called me an ‘elitist Catholic bigot’ who knows nothing of real nature and was told to read Arne Naess. I loved the presumption that I hadn’t read Arne Naess, and a thousand other books in environmental ethics, and that my position had been developed in an attempt to overcome deficiencies in the field. Environmental ethics, like environmental politics, is a joke in that it doesn’t exist. That an ill-informed and outdated attack should cause environmentalists such consternation indicates what a sorry state environmental ethics and politics is in. It indicates, too, how easily environmentalists can end up compromising their principles and becoming complicit with established money and power, in the interests of getting things done. I’ve had the argument many times now with environmentalists, eminently practical men and women who are so concerned to ‘act’ and ‘get things done’ that they think a concern with first principles and foundations is evidence of ‘idle intellectualising.’ That was how one described my work a few years ago. Said action man proceeded to support every lame climate agreement, defending each and every one as a ‘beginning’ that was going to develop into something big. There’s no mystery as to why, despite decades of advance warning, the planet is in such a parlous state. The practitioners and policy-makers in environmentalism don’t have what it takes to countenance real change. E.F. Schumacher told them in clear and incontrovertible terms that metaphysical reconstruction supplying foundations and first principles is the key to effective and enduring environmental action. He wrote precisely this in the book Small is Beautiful. Although the book is well known and celebrated, its fame and popularity rest on its advocacy of scale and alternate technology. People missed the central message on metaphysical reconstruction. So Schumacher wrote a second book calling upon environmentalists to establish firm foundations and first principles entitled A Guide for the Perplexed. The book was not well read and not well received. People remain perplexed. Schumacher became a convert to Catholicism.
I’ll not write any more, simply refer people to my writings over the years. You will find plenty on foundations and first principles, none of which is ‘idle intellectualizing.’ I have heard environmentalists say that we need see environmentalism as a ‘cathedral project.’ They are right, but for that you need a cathedral philosophy. Still to this day there are people who think Scholasticism was academic, other-worldly and irrelevant to practical earthly affairs. The truth is the precise opposite. Who do you think built the great cathedrals?
But I was only talking about this the other week, in relation to the various socialist movements of the twentieth century. Many independent, self-organising socialist parties and movements hitched a ride on the back of the Bolshevik Revolution, lost their autonomy and vitality, and lost their reputation to boot. In an act of misplaced faith, they compromised their own faith and integrity. They proved incapable of withstanding the shocks that came with the revelation of the truth of Soviet Communism. The Catholic Church has been implicated in more than a few tragedies and scandals over the centuries, and yet possesses such a strong core that it has been able to survive. That core is precisely what first principles and foundations are all about. They are the transcendent standards and truths that, being independent of the laws, institutions, and practices of time and place, even though they are only incarnated in time and place, withstand and survive the vicissitudes of their particular incarnation in time and place. If you insist on resting practice on the visionless, valueless, virtueless practice of ‘what works,’ then you will find that, in the temporal realm, all things are fallible, all things corrupt, decay, and die. It turns out that renewables are not actually renewable. The wind and the sun are renewable, at least for so long as the Earth exists. But the technologies based on them are not. Shock, horror. With outdated examples and facts, Planet of the Humans has caused environmentalists to shriek and bawl as if the world was ending. They are claiming it could set back the movement for years. Surely to goodness, a movement aiming to shape behaviour and change the world should have more self-confidence and internal stability than this. There is something badly wrong here. Something amiss, something lacking. This is proof that the foundations are not solid, the grounds are deficient or lacking. Scientism and naturalism do not constitute an ethics, they are attempts by environmentalists to displace ethics. That is an error and a profound one, with practical consequences. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how are not, strictly speaking, virtues and values; knowledge and know-how yield the ability to act, but do not in themselves make people want to act – they are not appetitive. The motivational economy of human beings requires visions, virtues, and values. I am repeating myself here, I know. But that’s all I can do, having had people of practical persuasions ignore the ethical conditions of enduring and effective practice.
I’ll end by making a comment that I haven’t seen anyone make with respect to Planet of the Humans. Critics are saying almost unanimously that the Gibbs/Moore film traduces renewables by using outdated examples. The criticisms that the film is making is ten years out of date, is the claim, and renewables are far more efficient and cost-effective now. That may be so. But I remember defending renewables against critics ten years ago. I remember addressing problems of intermittency and baseload and storage, and was engaged in several exchanges with critics, in the press and elsewhere. I am no expert on energy, and so took the word of various energy experts on renewables. And I was reassured to hear how wonderful renewables are and how they will save civilization. I am now hearing the same energy experts tacitly admitting that these renewables I was active in defending ten years ago were, well, unreliable, costly, and inefficient. So I am not inclined to uncritically take their reassurance that renewables are the road to salvation now. It’s the same salvific hard-sell, and I’m not buying it. Planet of the Humans should have cut all the complicated exposé and gone straight for the jugular – mainstream environmentalism is implicated in supplying the capital system with clean energy at public expense, using up who knows how much land mass by covering the land and seascape with power stations, all to fuel further accumulation on an already ravaged planet. The film would have landed more effective and harder blows had it accepted all the elaborate claims made for renewables and then stated the plain truth that, in an economic system that demands constant, endless, accumulation that systemically transgresses every limit, there will always be an energy gap, and always be an economic growth that consumes the land and all things on it.
That’s the problem with making ‘action’ and ‘getting things done’ a priority over actually thinking things through on the basis of first principles and foundations – you become complicit with the very tools and practices that are implicated in generating the crisis in the first place. Environmentalism has been drawn into the very world it claims it wants to change. Science and technology are not ethics and politics and, too often, they become alternatives to them, surrogates, and even conscious evasions. Going back to the ancients, politics and ethics have been classed as the field of practical reason for a reason – it is here, in the world of human beings, value, stakes and interests, that knowledge gets acted on, know-how gets applied, and things get done. Environmentalism devalued that realm and rendered it secondary to the field of theoretical reason – our knowledge of the external world and how this is used to create technological know-how. Ironically, this was done out of a concern to be practical. The result has been precisely the opposite.
Feel free to explore my writings for more on this. I briefly did a Google search on ‘first principles and foundations’ and discovered this at the top of the page:
“God created human beings to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by doing this, to save their souls. God created all other things on the face of the earth to help fulfill this purpose.”
I would correct this statement slightly. It is “Earth” and not “earth.”
A proper noun.
Few realized when "Small is Beautiful" was published that E.F. Schumacher’s economic theories were underpinned by solid religious and philosophical foundations, the fruits of a lifetime of searching. In 1971, two years before the book’s publication, Schumacher had become a Roman Catholic, the final destination of his philosophical journey.
Schumacher was lauded by many when he died. In The Times, Barbara Ward, who had just published The Home of Man, recounted Schumacher's pioneering work in the field of intermediate technology. Many more celebrated him for the same reason. The Times celebrated Schumacher as a 'pioneer of post-capitalist, post-communist thought’:
There has never been any shortage of prophets and preachers asserting that mankind is moving in the wrong direction, that the pursuit of wealth does not necessarily bring happiness, that a renewal of moral and spiritual perception is necessary if disaster is to be avoided. From time to time one of these prophets evokes a response which tells as much about the time in which he lives as about the message he brings. Dr Fritz Schumacher ... was such a one.
You would have thought that celebrants may have been curious to know the philosophical and ethical roots of Schumacher’s pioneering work and practical wisdom, but it seems not. It wasn’t hidden, people just didn’t look for it, and looked away whenever and if ever it came in view. On November 30 1977 a Requiem Mass was celebrated for Schumacher at Westminster Cathedral. During the service, Jerry Brown, Governor of California, and a friend and follower of Schumacher, described him as 'a man of utter simplicity who moved large numbers by the force of his ideas and personality. He challenged the fundamental beliefs of modern society from the context of ancient wisdom.'
Amidst the laudatory valedictions his conversion to Roman Catholicism late in life was seemingly lost.
'Perhaps it was overlooked, forgotten or merely considered irrelevant. It is certain, however, that Schumacher considered his conversion of supreme importance. This can be seen from the fact that he considered his spiritual work, A Guide for the Perplexed, to be his most important achievement.
'Pop handed me A Guide for the Perplexed on his deathbed, five days before he died,' says his daughter. He told her 'this is what my life has been leading to'. Yet when she began researching her biography of her father a lot of people were 'astounded' when they discovered his conversion. 'They hadn't realized that he had become a Catholic. They thought it was a real let-down, a betrayal'.
For all the songs of praise to Schumacher's achievement, many, it seemed, had missed the point.'
Theodore Roszak in the Los Angeles Times gave the book fulsome praise in his review:
“A Guide for the Perplexed offers us a harvest of utterly sane, consoling, life-affirming insight from one of the wisest minds of our time. It is an unapologetic defense of traditional Christian humanism which, I am certain, will light many a darkened path.”
One would have hoped that to have been the case. It’s taking a while.
One lives in hope that certain friends and associates, folk my path has crossed, may well have been intrigued by my constant efforts to highlight the importance of ethics and politics in terms of practical reason, and may actually have started to read some of the things I have been writing. This sudden interest in first principles and foundations among people who I know for a fact take an interest in what I have to say gives me hope that the points I have laboured to make over the years may be getting through, here and there.
More from me on E.F. Schumacher (and R.H. Tawney).