Bruce Jennings
Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 5 No. 2 (September 2012). Available at www.humansandnature.org
Let me begin with two propositions.
The first is generally true of the human condition as such; the second has not
always been true, but it is true of the situation of humans and nature at the
opening of the twenty-first century—urgently true.
First, how we understand ourselves
as human beings and our place in the web of life shapes what we do, not only to
each other, but also to the natural environment as a whole. Second, the reality
of ecological limits and bio-physical planetary boundaries will transform major
forms of human activity—especially the intense resource and energy utilization
and waste generation that passes through an economic system—and will turn
upside down core concepts with which we now define meaning and purpose in our
lives.
Environmental philosophers and conservationists
have long stressed this first insight. Aldo Leopold, for instance, maintained
that “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When
we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love
and respect.” From this point of view, then, there is an essential link between
conceptions of humanness and economic activity. Broadly defined, economics
concerns how we produce and reproduce the material requirements of our life
over time. An economy is an institutional structure combining human creativity
and labor with natural resources in the production and exchange of goods and
services. Economics never forgets what philosophy sometimes does—namely, that
human beings exist in a material world and are mortal, vulnerable, embodied
creatures of need and want.
Yet this connection between the idea
of humanness and economic activity, while found in all cultures and in all
periods of human history, is never merely abstract but always takes on concrete
conceptual and institutional forms. Leopold’s observation, made in the context
of America in the mid-twentieth century, was grounded in a capitalistic market
society in which the connection between ideas of humanness and economic
practices pivoted around notions of commodity, private property, and ownership.
When people understand who they are and what they can and should do through the
lens of such categories, they tend to overlook the interconnected properties of
living systems. They cannot see the land. Instead they dissociate natural
reality into discrete resources and raw materials that have no value in and of
themselves but are solely the potential instruments of fulfilling human needs
and wants. This is one example of how humanness and economics may be connected,
but it is not the only one. (Leopold evokes a vivid alternative conception:
another humanness of membership and interdependence and another economics of
caring, careful, frugal, and respectful use.) Yet it is the one that dominated
Western society in Leopold’s day, and it continues to dominate, not only
America, but much of the world today.
If how we understand our humanity
shapes how we behave toward and use nature and how we meet our needs and wants
through economic activity, is the converse also true? If our economic patterns
of behavior and institutional practices were to be significantly transformed,
would we be forced to rethink the fundamentals of our humanness?
I think the answer is yes, and this
brings us to the second proposition above. Consider how many of our
contemporary economic beliefs and behaviors are the foundations for our sense
of a meaningful life, self-identity, and self-esteem, and then consider the
proposition that those beliefs and behaviors are rapidly becoming ecologically
untenable and unsustainable. Environmental science and testable modeling
related to climate change and the thresholds of bio-physical systems all offer
a warning about a way of living that is too much about power and control and
too little about boundaries and patience. This warning calls our attention to a
life that is too much about the bottom line and too little about moral lines
that should not be crossed.
Such warnings seem to gain little
traction. In large part this is because our societies are enthralled by a
historical transformation, underway at least since the 1970s, that is
restructuring economic systems and reinforcing a philosophy of humanness
associated with the notion of homo economicus. This viewpoint takes
humans as creatures of want and as rationally competitive and aggressive
beings, strategically self-interested and oriented almost exclusively to
extracting value from natural sources and from exchange with other individuals
or groups. With a rapid pace and a global sweep, human institutions and relationships
are being reconstructed on the basis of competitive advantage—making more.
The goal of all this is essentially power, that is to say, the satisfaction of
expanding wants and desires—having more.
The medium of these transactions is
the market: the system of buying and selling. And currency—money—is the
universal, fungible instrument of those market transactions. In the worldview
to which I refer, now often called “neoliberalism,” market exchange is the
paradigm of all human activities. Aristotle believed that human beings were
political animals, most fully at home in political community deliberating about
the common good. Stoics, like Seneca and Cicero, sought to achieve individual
happiness by freeing oneself of the unnecessary fears and desires that tether
one’s sense of self-worth to market-defined success or status. Neoliberalism
roots the humanness of homo economicus in entrepreneurial discipline,
precisely what Aristotle considered of secondary human importance and the
Stoics sought to transcend altogether. For the great modern thinkers who helped
to construct the “spirit of capitalism,” such as John Locke and Benjamin
Franklin, this discipline is the vocation or calling given to humankind to
transform natural creation into useful property. For post-religious and
postmodern thinkers, this discipline has morphed into a kind of game, liquid
and fluid, subject to essentially arbitrary combinations and significations.
For those inclined to apply economic theory to social and legal studies, there is
no area of human life that is not essentially economic. There is nothing that
money cannot buy, nothing that more effective strategic decision-making cannot
improve.
And there is a (sometimes
suppressed) value judgment at the heart of this symbiosis between neoliberal
capitalism and homo economicus. It is the idea that more is better.
Economic life is always and everywhere in quest of more, and its (universal, no
longer exclusively Protestant) ethic is pervasive and multidimensional.
The market economy is a powerful
mechanism for channeling energy, skills, and creativity efficiently toward
innovation and productivity. Yet the market mentality is not limited to one
sphere or set of institutions, not something that we leave at the office or
that stays in Las Vegas. Its logic and ethic are evangelical. The market economy
is fast becoming—may already have become—the market society. Its
metaphors and its dispositions are colonizing virtually all aspects of daily
life. The single-minded pursuit of economic advantage and wealth can erode
other valuable goods in our lives and debilitate them. In this way, wealth can
become “illth,” as John Ruskin so nicely put it. The market takes natural and
human capacities, uses them selectively and makes some of them grow, but
discards the rest. The material waste products of this way of life are
ecologically destructive. No less morally destructive is the discarding of
people as so much waste—a growing population of marginalized men, women, and
children, quite literally without market value, which is to say, without any
value.[1]
The dominant cultural force of our
time is an unsustainable form of living and its correlative conception of
humanness—a “restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death,”
as Hobbes said, not putting too fine a point on it. What then if we take
seriously the possibility that it is so deeply ingrained in our sense of
meaning that we will lose our concepts without it? If this way of life cannot
continue unchecked much longer—a generation or two at most—what new synthesis
can emerge between our self-understanding and our mode of making a living?
When a society loses the concepts
through which it has traditionally made sense of itself, it experiences a
debilitating disorientation. In his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of
Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear presents a remarkable study of the
experience of cultural devastation among the Crow people from the late
nineteenth century. It provides a cautionary tale for any society facing a
fundamental shift from one way of life to another in the span of one or two
generations. Lear anticipates what could well be our coming situation:
. . .if a
people genuinely are at the historical limit of their way of life, there is
precious little they can do to “peek over to the other side.” Precisely because
they are about to endure a historical rupture, the detailed texture of life on
the other side has to be beyond their ken. In the face of such a cultural
challenge, . . .there is ever more pressure to explain things in the
traditional ways, yet there is an inchoate sense that the old ways of
explaining are leaving something unsaid. And yet one doesn't yet have the
concepts with which to say it.
If we lose our capitalistic and
entrepreneurial concepts of humanness and economy, what conceptions can take
their place? What kind of person would be called forth in an ecological
economy? How can selves be nurtured so as to become respectful householders and
trustees of the natural world and the common good? How can the current
neoliberal world of extractive liberty and possessive individualism be restored
to a world of caring relationships, respectful of human dignity and the
integrity of the land?
Today the chasm is growing between
the vision of ecological economics and the everyday lifeworld of individuals.
The terms that people use to define a self-identity and to comprehend their
situation are growing increasingly thin and impoverished from both an
ecological and a humanistic point of view. People with a consumer’s sense of
relationship and a tourist’s sense of place cannot grasp that our well-being
depends on healthy natural and social systems. We shall have to lose our concepts
in order to reclaim our genuine selves. Somehow, the experience of relationship
and place must be altered and enriched—from consumers to trustees; from
tourists to householders and citizens. But the alteration of that ordinary
experience—a transformation of the sense of self and the motivational bases of
moral imagination—is not something that can be socially engineered or taken
lightly, much less something that will emerge spontaneously from the invisible
hand of the marketplace or the free play of signifiers in a liquid society.
At the close of his great work, Democracy
in America, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed intellectual and moral awe in
the face of an old world dying and a new world gradually being born. We need
not feel that our lifeworld of meaningful agency has disappeared or that we are
wandering in darkness, however, for there is much constructive intellectual
(and political) work to do. The most urgent need, no doubt, is to stem the tide
of the bio-physical degrading of our natural world. A second imperative task,
related and also urgent, is to reclaim, restore, or reconstruct anew our
conceptual world. We have lived for some time now with a conceptual vocabulary
for describing our moral lives that is much sparser and less articulate than
our actual lives themselves. Despite expressing ourselves for the most part
individualistically, we nonetheless manage to tap into an underlying moral
resiliency and thereby preserve pockets—no, actually rather expansive
landscapes—of life lived caringly and communally. There are signs, however,
that this fund of moral resiliency is becoming depleted, even as its natural
counterpart of ecological resiliency is also being stressed beyond its
tolerances.
Ecological economics and our
philosophical understanding of the relationship between the human and the
natural are symbiotic, and both need to articulate a sense of equal civic
respect, parity of power and position, and a developmental, open-textured type
of personal agency and identity formation. This is a recipe for rich lives in a
socially and naturally thick and relational interdependent world. This sense
has not been extinguished. This meaning has not been lost. It remains the
perennial possibility of human life, even if historically fugitive and
fleeting.
Notes
[1] For a humane and refreshingly
non-condescending account of people living lives of inequality and injustice,
see K. Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai
Undercity (New York: Random House, 2012), a firsthand account of the lives
of slum dwellers in Annawadi, a desperately poor shanty town near the
international airport in Mumbai.
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