Losing Our Concepts, Reclaiming Ourselves

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

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[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.

In Place

Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 5. No. 1 (May 2012)

Available at www.humansandnature.org

            When the ideas of outstanding philosophers and novelists converge, we should pay attention. In books like Getting Back into Place and The Fate of Place, the American philosopher Edward Casey has written powerfully on the difference between the concept of place and the concept of space. Using a different vocabulary, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera presents essentially the same idea in the passage from his novel, Immortality: “A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it, has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. . . . Road and highway: these are also two different conceptions of beauty.” Kundera meditates on the distinction between a “highway” and a “road.” A highway is a meaningless line between two points. A road overflows with meaning, association, and invitation.

Kundera locates both highway and road in what he calls “space,” which is devalued by the former and brought to life by the latter. But he could have used Casey’s terminology without missing a beat and said that highways are in spaces, while roads are of places. The concept of space is essentially an abstract and geometrical one; it is the zone of pure thought where highways dwell, and the mind has no time to spare for meandering or sightseeing on its journey to some precisely specifiable point. A place, on the other hand, is a tangled bank and a winding path; it is a location of roads and side trips and unexpected turnings.

What is significant about places is not so much their physical dimensions as their imaginative possibilities. They are not occupied, like spaces, as a container of height and width and depth. They are dwelt within by living things; and through memory, myth, and meaning inanimate things can be alive in place as well. Places are the surroundings of Walden Pond and Tinturn Abbey. They are made such by the perceptions and sensibilities of Thoreau and Wordsworth and you, me, and everyone who lives a life somewhere, as opposed to nowhere or anywhere.

Did I just say that living is enough to make a space a place? Or is it a certain quality and kind of living? Does the concept of place have particular values and ideals built into its very meaning perhaps? Like Schrödinger’s cat in a box, which can be dead and alive at the same time, can somewhere be both a space and a place, depending on what happens there and the spirit in which it happens? When people talk about the project of “place making,” how casual or how deep a statement are they making? Those of us who aspire to transform what now are abstract spaces into more richly indwelt places would do well to attend to the value-laden nature of our enterprise and to be as clairvoyant as possible about what those values are.

Here is a story that might nudge us in that direction. On Friday, January 12, 2007, during the morning rush hour, the virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito for nearly an hour in the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, DC,. He played many pieces, some simple and some complex, on his instrument, which had been made by Stradivari in 1713 and is named the Gibson ex Huberman. It has a checkered history: stolen twice in the twentieth century from its previous owner, Bronislaw Huberman, it has its own tale to tell of disappearance, mystery, and reemergence. Even in the tunnels of the subway station, the sound quality was excellent. A Bell performance is something that normally countless people pay hundreds of dollars each for a ticket to hear. That day it was free—although, busker that he was, he put his open case on the floor to accept tips.

While Bell played, 1,700 people walked past (observers from the Washington Post were videotaping the scene and counting). They hurried by, on the highway from point A to point B. Only a handful tossed a bill or some coins into his case, and just seven people stopped to listen for a time. There was never a crowd; a place of connectivity never formed (Cf. Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html).

What shall we make of this? What does it tell us about place? To me it is a reminder that place functions to give us a stability of expectations. This experiment contrived by a writer for the Washington Post is perhaps a little too easy because of the radical contrast and anomaly it presented to the people in the station. On one level anyway, the way people behaved is not surprising, and their sense of place has something to do with that. Bell is not the kind of celebrity who is likely to be recognized out of context; indeed, no classical musician is (maybe Pavarotti, with his signature girth, or Leonard Bernstein in his day are the exceptions that prove the rule). Lady Gaga no doubt would have gotten a different reception, as would maybe even Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen (I date myself, I know). Also, it is not unusual to encounter musicians playing in the subway corridors, and the standard behavioral norm is not to attend their performance but to be on one’s way. So the sense in which the Metro is a place—albeit not a very attractive or inviting one—conspired to lead the people to do precisely what they did: to hurry on.

Place in its stability-reinforcing functions does not immunize us from a condition called “face blindness,” or prosopagnosia. People with this condition, like the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, cannot recognize people they know well if they encounter them out of context, in an unfamiliar setting or in the wrong place. A strong sense of place may actually dispose one to a figurative kind of prosopagnosia in that we can become so indwelling in a familiar place that we become quite disoriented when we are thrust into the anomalous situation and the unknown circumstance. I am a Hoosier who moved to New York City, and I know whereof I speak.

On the other hand, the fact that not just face blindness but also aesthetic blindness was displayed that day is harder to fathom. Bell may have blended in, but his music did not. The fact that people were not attentive to what they were actually hearing, that they seemed disabled from hearing what was actually there, is not a manifestation of their residing in a definable place with its settled routines and patterns of conduct. It is surely a manifestation of the way in which surroundings and locations, like a highway or a subway, become abstract spaces of mere transit or some other essentially instrumental and utilitarian preoccupation. This tale then is both about place as settled expectation and the absence of place (place become mere space), which deadens sense and sensibility. It shows the void in our lives that ensues when we close in, turn up our collars, and hurry on, rather than opening out to surprise and joy.

So here are at least two of the many substantive values that seem to me to reside in the concept of place. One is open familiarity. The other is mobile rootedness. You will notice that these are deliberate paradoxes. But they are not, I think, contradictions.

Without the structure of the familiar at all levels—from the sensory to the social, cultural, and religious—our world would be, as William James put it, “one great blooming, buzzing, confusion.” We need to assimilate the novelty, the otherness we encounter to that which is comprehensible to us. We do need to encounter the outsider—the stranger who is displaced or placed elsewhere—on our own terms. But these terms must not be static and frozen, for then they will not truly bespeak a place of living. We must be rooted. Like Antaeus, our strength comes from our connection to the earth. But we must also use our rootedness to move, to create in ourselves the capacity to increase our terms by embracing the terms of others.

This year the Center is beginning a new research project on Frontiers of Ethics: Care and Place, under the auspices of its Ideas of Humans and Nature Program. In moral philosophy, an ethic of care has become a well-developed alternative to other ethical approaches based on utilitarianism, the concept of rights, and distributive justice principles. These latter frameworks seem abstract, formal, and individualistic, whereas an ethic centering on the ideal and the lived experience of caring can express the concreteness of people as mortal, vulnerable, and embodied selves. However, this ethical framework and its characteristic perspective have not been brought fully to bear on questions of ethical responsibilities toward non-human life and ecosystems.

Place is another concept that currently lies at the frontiers of ethical thought. As I alluded to above, its orientation is an emphasis on specific relationships in particular places and landscapes, both natural and social. Most work in moral philosophy and Western ethics is abstract in the sense that it seeks to discover standards of right and wrong that are universally valid and applicable. Paradoxically, moral psychology tells us that ethical thinking and our sense of value are rooted in specificity, not universality—that is to say, in the lived experience of place, with specific natural and social characteristics, landscapes, and cultures.

Another Politics

Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 4. No. 3 (December 2011)

Available at www.humansandnature.org

Natural systems have functional limits; human actions have systemic consequences. What part of that don’t we understand?

Not much, actually. In truth, most human beings most of the time do understand this in a multiplicity of ways—cognitively, scientifically, experientially, ethically, and emotionally. They do so not only because of the advance of science, literacy, and education, but also because it is knowledge deeply ingrained in ordinary human experience itself, our fundamental encounter with the world as metabolic creatures. Anthropological studies of hunting and gathering cultures confirm the power of such knowledge and the essential humanity of ways of life that have been rooted in it.

Our phenomenological understanding of natural limits and the human consequences of ignoring them has been enlarged and enhanced in our time by a growing body of research and practice in ecological restoration and in the interdisciplinary field of conservation biology. Dangerous transformations in atmospheric, ocean, and polar and glacial systems have spurred massive efforts to increase our understanding of what is causing the (mainly deleterious and disruptive) changes, much as the AIDS pandemic prompted over the course of three decades a significant advance in the scientific understanding of the human immune system. Other symptoms of planetary illness have also given impetus to the search for an understanding of systemic effects on a large scale; such symptoms include alarming rates of biodiversity loss, the build-up of environmental toxins and chemicals with unknown long-term effects, and the depletion or pollution of fresh water sources.

Maybe the metaphors of the human immune system writ large and a kind of ecological acquired immune deficiency syndrome suggest some useful lines of thought. The planetary systems that support life in its most fundamental physical, chemical, and organic manifestations have boundaries and thresholds. And so do the biological and social systems that support flourishing, abundant, healthy life, with its capacity for evolutionary adaptation, its biotic diversity, its resilience.

What’s more, human beings do not stand apart from these systems of life by any means. We fully partake of, and depend upon, the systemic preconditions of life for our own survival. Yes. But, short of our very survival being at stake, a less noticed fact is that we also depend upon the systemic preconditions of flourishing life for our own humanity. What part of that don’t we understand?

Well, quite a lot, actually. We think of the human realm as set apart from the rest of the world as the only locus of meaning and value. Planetary systems, even when they are scientifically well understood, are seen as things we live off of, not as places we live within. The cultural concepts available to individuals in contemporary America to define a self-identity are growing increasingly thin and impoverished. People with a consumer’s sense of relationship and a tourist’s sense of place cannot grasp the notion that our humanity depends on healthy natural and social systems or that we have responsibility for preserving them. Aren’t most of us consumers and tourists now?

But these considerations do not get to the root of the problem for they are ideological and attitudinal. I think that the real root of our problem is properly called “political” although like our common parlance for expressing self-identity, our current language for talking about politics is deeply impoverished. Still, the problem is political in the following, fundamental sense: the problem of politics is not to seek power, but to resist it; and not to deny vulnerability and dependency, but to embrace them creatively. The problem of politics is to resist the kind of power and domination that actually render its agents impotent and enthralled. The problem of politics is to accept restraints on behalf of communal agency and relational freedom. Democratic politics says no to pride, anthropocentric narcissism, and desire, and says yes to the accommodation of natural limits in ways that are just and promote the beauty, health, and integrity of the political community.

In this formulation, I deliberately invoke the land ethic and appropriate it in the cause of what I am here calling democratic politics as the solution to the great challenge of our time. Leopold wanted human beings to think of themselves as, and to act as though they were, “plain citizens of the biotic community.” He used this democratic trope, with its classical pedigree and protestant resonance, to good effect. To be a citizen in fact is to be a plain citizen. And to be a citizen is to be just. Democracy calls for just, plain citizens. Aristotle well understood, I believe, this notion when he said that human beings were “political animals” (zöon politicon). By this he meant that humans could—and must—live in political communities if they are to live in accordance with their nature. And he defined politics in terms of creating a culture and social organization of individuals with a special kind of self-identity (citizenship), ruling themselves in common with equitable and just laws (isonomia), and seeking to achieve the human good together and the common good for all (politia or res publica). Citizenship for Aristotle was active, not passive. It consisted of ruling and being ruled in turn.

When viewed from this vantage point, it is clear that what we now call “politics” and “democracy” in the United States is quite far removed from structures and value systems that can be expected to lead toward creative accommodation and governance that is just in its trusteeship over the good of the human and the biotic community. Our current politics cannot be the crucible for the reconciliation of humans and natural systems nor of accommodation to the functional limits of those systems because it offers no counterpoint to the broader ethos and worldview of technological mastery of nature. What we call politics today is not a bridle on the orientation of mastery but a handmaiden or extension of that orientation. And this politics cannot really be a democracy in the normative sense because its values are the values of competition and mastery, not the values of citizenship and ruling and being ruled in turn. I say this despite the trappings we do have of democratic procedure, such as free and fair (i.e., purchased at exceedingly great expense and gerrymandered) elections.

What would another politics look like, and can one be devised that will govern us both for living once more within the safe operating margins of planetary systems and for controlling the consequences of our actions?

Here is a sketch of two possible answers, two available modes of another democratic politics in an Anthropocene age. The first involves a reorientation of our culture and worldview; a transformation of our “soul” as a political community, turning us from being a people of competitive consumption into a people of sustainable ecological responsibility, from “too big to fail” to “small is beautiful” (remember that?). 

The second kind of alternative democratic politics is about the institutionalization and empowerment of participatory and deliberative governance within a diverse and pluralistic society and culture, a “panarchy” as the Resilience Alliance scientists call it. This is the kind of democratic governance that grows directly out of what Hannah Arendt called “action in concert with others, shaped by debate and deliberation.”

There are some important similarities between these two types of democratic politics. They are both committed to the strategy of creating counter-publics in order to bring about change and to challenge the hegemony of mainstream culture and politics. They often share strategy and tactics and mix in real-world political activism and large-scale protest movements. I am not sure how useful this distinction is for understanding the popular protests that have taken place in many Muslim countries during the past year or recently in Russia. But they do seem to be definite elements of the Occupy movement here in the United States. Another politics does not have to supplant mainstream politics, it just needs to set cultural and social forces in motion that will alter perceptions and change the parameters of what is considered realistic in elite policy circles.

However, there are important differences as well. Worldview democracy strives to bring into being and to express deep cultural and ethical commitments. It offers not just a new direction of governance but a new form of life, a new understanding of human well-being, and a new story concerning nature, its laws, and its meanings. If this is a vision that leaders actually try to instill in the masses of people and if they can do so, then democratic change can bubble up in either the form of direct participatory democracy or via electoral mechanisms of representative democracy. If this cultural transformation of hearts and minds does not proceed well, however, leaders will be tempted to assume interpretative and expressive authority for themselves. They will become the guardians of the truths and values of the worldview and the agents of its enactment in the world. Democratic citizenship will become an unnecessary step in the process. The temptation to become a transformational leader/prophet in this more authoritarian sense is particularly strong when circumstances make one pessimistic about the willingness or the capacity of the masses to internalize new values and support change. A recent PEW survey found that 59 percent of Americans believed in global warming in 2010, compared with 79 percent in 2006.

The dilemma of deliberative democracy is rather different. It is designed to thrive on pluralism of belief and difference of opinion. But it must inculcate at lease a minimal set of value commitments to the procedures of “debate and deliberation.” Realism, reason, and integrity preserving compromise (the genius of mediation and getting to yes) are its creed. Toleration and diversity are its life-blood. Deliberative democratic governance has been shown to function well on a medium to small scale, in population units of 100,000 or less, and when its political relationships are closely embedded in non-political social or civic relationships within the community. Under these conditions, it is alert to natural, social, and historical place. It can be attentive to ecological resiliency and social justice at the same time.

On the other hand, deliberative democracy is extremely vulnerable to forces that disrupt the fabric of communities, are socially divisive, undermine trust, and drive people to close ranks into postures of defensive resentment. The global and domestic economic dislocations of the past twenty years, the sharply rising inequality in the distribution of wealth and income, the churning of the job market, and the marginalization of those without marketable skills are some of the many factors that tatter civic society, privatize self-consciousness, and undermine the possibility of the kind of citizenship that deliberative democracy in its proper form and function requires. Are these factors temporary aberrations, or are they becoming the normal institutionalized patterns of global capitalism? If they are, then we have a perfect democratic storm: humanity is exceeding the safe operating margins of planetary systems at precisely the historical moment when the political economy of the world makes it least likely that democratic governance, especially deliberative democratic governance, will be able to respond.

No one, I think—least of all me—has through-going answers to this dilemma. But many wise and dedicated people are tackling it one step and one bite at a time.

Can we find—or fashion—another economics and another politics? Just as it is imperative to become responsible, as Hans Jonas teaches us, so too it is imperative to sustain hope.

In Search of Lost Meaning, with No Time to Waste

Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 4. No. 1 (April 2011)

Available at www.humansandnature.org

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye and ear,--both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

William Wordsworth

“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”

 

I recently had the pleasure of attending a showing of Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time in Chicago. In the discussion period following the film, someone asked a pertinent and important question about why the film does not stress the problem of climate change. Now, climate change is mentioned in the movie, to be sure, but Green Fire is clearly not a reprise of An Inconvenient Truth. My colleague Curt Meine ably addressed the question and opened our eyes to the host of very complex judgments that go into the making of a documentary film that tries to interconnect—much like a Leopoldian biotic community—the biographical, the historical, and the contemporary world of ethics, politics, and policy.

Reflecting on this afterward, my jet back to New York trailing its carbon stream, I recalled how the film explained that when Leopold referred to “the land” he meant the term quite broadly. It refers not simply to the soil, but also to the water, animals, and plants. The land is a whole system of interconnections and interdependencies between organisms and inorganic chemicals; it is cycles and processes that make life possible and the web of life flourish and evolve. In short, “the land” is a synecdoche (a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole) in the writings of Leopold, who was as careful and deliberate a rhetorician as he was a scientist. I also remembered one of the people interviewed in the film saying that what Leopold called the “land ethic” was really an “earth ethic.”

Just so. The land ethic is a earth ethic, a biospheric ethic, an ecological consciousness and conscience, an ethic of care and responsibility. It is more exacting and turns our attention in different directions than the predominant ethical frameworks now discussed in mainstream social and policy debates. These are frameworks such as utilitarianism, in which human welfare and utility are the exclusive touchstone, and contractarianism, in which our obligations are created by agreements we have willfully and autonomously entered into, not duties we have inherited or responsibilities generated by the limits of nature or the vulnerability of webs of life.

The land ethic recognizes a moral inheritance beyond informed consent. Its reach is broad, and it operates across many different scales and domains—from the local farmer’s market and composting in one’s backyard to regional conservation efforts, like Leopold’s own project in the Coon Valley of Wisconsin, to political economy on a national and an international scale.

So, yes, climate change is pertinent, as is biodiversity loss, depletion of soil, water, and forest, and other concerns of contemporary conservation, many of which Leopold foresaw, some of which he did not. Many of the causes of GHG pollution and human-instigated alterations in the geophysical thermodynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans may be said to arise from a failure to take the land ethic seriously. This is not in essence a personal or a private failure; fundamentally it is an institutional and a “political” failure. When I say political failure here, I do not simply mean the current paralysis of governance and the inability of our leaders to achieve reasonable conservation and environmental policy in a timely fashion, even when it comes to something as monumental as climate change or biodiversity loss. Rather I am thinking of our present widespread failure of political imagination: that is, our utter inability to comprehend and attend to the cooperative pursuit of the common good in the service of our moral self-realization as human beings.

In Green Fire, Leopold is quoted as saying that he is interested primarily in two things: the relationship between people and the land, and the relationship among people. Conservation and social science; the land ethic and a social ethic—I gather that he did not see these inquiries as truly separate, nor did he see the moral domain as bifurcated and destined to tragic divisions and trade-offs. Therefore, crucial to the land ethic is not only science and ecology—natural reality, as it were—but also history and culture, what we might call the reality of meaning. If the land ethic is to lead to conservation, preservation, and sustainable living, it must include the task of recovery and remembering from the past, as well as emancipatory imagination aspiring toward the future. It must recover the foundations and lineaments of a lost sense of the political and reinvigorate a currently suppressed motivation to act as responsible steward-citizens.

One of the greatest challenges facing us—from the point of view of the land ethic, and from the point of view of the survival of even a minimally decent society—is the recovery and refashioning of purposive meaning. This must be done in the face of a worldview which for three centuries at least has been systematically drained and desiccated of such meaning. It must be done in order to motivate us ethically and political in constructive governance. And it must be done quickly because the clock of natural reality is ticking, and it is approaching midnight.

What does it take today to reach people, by which I mean not just exposure to people’s eyes (the kind of thing data on audiences can tell you) but also the transformation of people’s hearts? What are the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of the lost meaning that our science, ecology, economics, and policy needs to recapture?

Inventing a New Language of Dissent

Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 3. No. 1 (April 2010)

Available at www.humansandnature.org

At a pivotal moment of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar, the main character, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is trying to promote a technology for artificial photosynthesis, gives the following speech to a group of pension fund managers:

The basic science is in. We either slow down, and then stop, or face an economic and human catastrophe on a grand scale within our grandchildren’s lifetime … How do we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilisation and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous, not by going to the bottle bank and turning down the thermostat and buying a smaller car. That merely delays the catastrophe by a year or two … Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are. For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest … and the satisfaction of profit.

In a commentary perhaps on the idea expressed in this speech, or perhaps on his character’s greed, McEwan has Beard retreat backstage immediately after the speech and vomit.

At another point the novelist remarks of one of Beard’s girlfriends, “to take the matter [climate change] seriously would be to think about it all the time. Everything else shrank before it. And so, like everyone she knew, she could not take it seriously. Not entirely. Daily life would not permit it.”

Solar is supposed to be a comic novel, but what it satirizes is very serious indeed, namely, the games the world is playing with climate change; the tendency to assimilate this most epochal and apocalyptic of all threats into business as usual. How can we make daily life permit us to take it seriously? Pace Beard’s girlfriend, we must find a way to do that.

“We abuse land,” Aldo Leopold wrote in Sand County Almanac, “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.” He holds that a change in our behavior may follow from a change in how we conceive of nature and of ourselves; a change in the way we live may follow from a change in how we see. He does not speak about changing behavior within the old way of seeing by altering incentives and changing the calculus of self-interest while still remaining owners and consumers of the land. He talks about moving to a new way of seeing altogether.

I wonder if we yet comprehend the importance of this distinction. I wonder if we still believe that such a gestalt shift in perception is possible? Let’s pay close attention to Leopold’s formulation and choice of words. This is a statement of profound opposition, which begins with a simple, powerful assertion—we abuse the land. He does not say, as he easily might in keeping with the tenor of his times and his profession, that we “misuse” the land. This is not a question of inefficiency, lack of good management skills, misaligned incentives, or economic externalities and market failure. This is a question of malignancy rather than misalignment. Having set up the fundamental opposition of abuse versus right relationship, he fills it out with the language of commodity and ownership, on one side, and the language of community, belonging, love, and respect, on the other. This is the language and resonance of prophetic, not managerial discourse: Thoreau, not Pinchot; Wilberforce, not Jevons.

Leopold is recovering and deploying a particular language of dissent. Today the responsibility to oppose the abuse of the land is as valid and as pertinent as ever. The imperative of opposition and dissent calls us as urgently as it called to Leopold’s generation. But do we have a serviceable language of dissent any longer? Can we recover it? Or, if, as I suspect may be the case, much of the resonance of the prophetic tradition upon which Thoreau and Leopold could still draw is unavailable to us, can we invent it anew?

What change of vision is involved? The required vision, the content of the dissent at issue here might be described in the following way. Only human beings may have the capacity to understand and act in accordance with complex moral ideas and rules. But value in the world does not reside within human beings alone. The value in the world, for the sake of which ethics and morality exist in the first place, resides in the natural and biotic context of which human individuals and societies are a part. The content of human duty and the good for which we strive should be understood in terms of systems of interdependency, relationship, sustainability, and resiliency.

In seeing the need for a new vocabulary within which to articulate a dissent of this kind, we could do worse than take our bearings from the noted historian, Tony Judt. In a recent interview, talking about politics and society broadly and not just ecological and climate issues, he said:

We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? We can’t come together on the basis of 19th or 20th-century ideas of inevitable progress or the natural historical progression from capitalism to socialism or whatever. We can’t believe in that anymore. And anyway, it can’t do the work for us. We need to rediscover our own language of politics. (London Review of Books, 32:6 [March 2010], pp. 19-20).

            A new vision and a critical language of dissent from business as usual is approached from several different angles. The power of both an understanding of nature and an ethical vision have importantly to do with the physical nature of the place one inhabits and the ways in which one is shaped by the characteristics of that place. Seemingly starting from the other end of the spectrum, we must also appreciate the power of “no-place,” utopia to reconstruct in the space of imagination something of the shaping power of material place.

What Money Cannot Buy

Homily on John 6:1-21

Delivered at

Grace Episcopal Church

Hastings-on-Hudson, NY

July 29, 2012

“Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?" He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, "Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little." One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?" Jesus said, "Make the people sit down." Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, "Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost." So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world."

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid." Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.”

            Good morning. It is a gift and an honor to be with you this morning to lead our prayer service and to share some of my reflections on today’s lessons. And I feel a bit abashed at the task. Our Gospel reading this morning is a handful.

In this passage John brings together the feeding of the multitude with loaves and fishes and Jesus walking on the water—two images that are surely on everyone’s short list of memorable moments in the Gospel story.

Then there is the suggestive mention of Jesus fleeing from the public recognition—and a false understanding—of his kingship. In what way is the redemption of God’s love and saving grace that Jesus brings connected to our political life as human beings, and in what way is it detached from or radically transformative of politics?

As if that weren’t enough, there is also the complex rhythm of Jesus going out and coming in—his presence in the company of the people or his disciples and his absence. He is shown as being in our midst, and aloof; on the boat and off it. He sympathizes and heals and teaches, yet he is also apart from the noise, the business (and the busyness), the hustle, the hunger, the sickness, the fear, the ambition, the sheer neediness and insufficiency of our humanity. He calms the troubled waters and the busyness. He turns down the volume of fear. The moments of separation in the rhythm of this story are surely not a sign of rejection or refusal. They are an offering of another way to be and to live.

***

Each time we reread rich passages and stories like this we can get something new out of them, regardless of how familiar to us they may be. We can find in them a source of insight about our own ongoing life experiences and concerns.

In my own case, last week, while reading and thinking about the lesson from John in preparation for this morning, I was attending a conference convened in Tarrytown, NY by the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit research institute headquartered in Berkeley, CA. This was a meeting of a group of scholars and activists who are concerned with the applications of genetics, reproductive medicine, and the rapidly advancing field of biotechnology. My colleagues in this movement are concerned about the social and ethical effects of the globalization of markets, and they are critical of the market thinking evident now in science and health. I attended workshops on such topics as:

• The worldwide commercialization of, and trafficking in, human organs for transplantation, gametes from desirable sources, and gestational services from poor women who have no other lucrative skill to sell.

• Web-based businesses that are the biological equivalent of Google and Facebook. They collect DNA samples from individuals and for a fee return an analysis that may indicate markers for defective genes and risk for disease. They also sell the genetic information collected to large data banks that make money in turn by selling access to this data to researchers for new genetic tests and drugs.

The advent of the new global “bio-economy” troubles me as a citizen of a democratic republic whose moral foundations are shifting, and as a person who tries to locate his life within the faith tradition of Christianity.

I believe that texts like our reading today can offer us wisdom about the shape of our world, and help us to grope for at least a blurred vision of a better one. If we can be open to that wisdom, surely it will enable us to look at the familiar and the taken for granted with new eyes. Fish don’t know that they live in water. If they read the Bible, they would realize that they do. It is the same with us. The Gospel makes the familiar surprising. What surprises does today’s lesson offer to us about where and how we live and what is becoming of us?

***

In today’s text I discern a warning about a way of living that is too much about power and control, and too little about boundaries and patience. A warning about a life that is too much about the bottom line and too little about moral lines that should not be crossed. Running like a bright thread through this text is a warning that says: There are things more important than wants and interests. There is more to life than production and consumption. There are some things that money cannot buy. That warning has a permanent pertinence, to be sure, but rarely, if ever, has it been more crucial than it is today.

The water that we live in today is becoming increasingly an environment that makes our lives economic and, as the jargon has it, “monetized.” With a rapid pace and a global sweep, human institutions and relationships are being reconstructed on the basis of a set of ideas concerning voluntary transaction and the exchange of goods and services based on competitive advantage—making more. The goal of all this is essentially power, that is, 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. (Do you remember the song from the musical or the film Cabaret: “… a mark, a franc, a buck, or a pound…money makes the world go round.”) In the worldview to which I refer, market exchange is the paradigm of all human activities, and money is the lubricant that oils the machinery. There is and should be no area of human life that is not essentially economic. There is nothing that money cannot buy.

The value basis of our emergent economic worldview is the idea that more is better. This life always and everywhere in quest of more, and the “ethic of more” is pervasive and multidimensional. The market economy is not limited to one sphere or set of institutions. It is not something that we leave at the office, or that stays in Las Vegas. It’s logic and ethic are spreading. The market economy is fast becoming—may already have become—the market society. It is colonizing our whole lifeworld.

More is believed to be “better” in many different senses: For one thing, expanding our opportunities for transaction and exchange is thought to enrich not only our net financial worth, but also the meaning and quality of our lives, our liberty, our pursuit of happiness.

Furthermore, in the new economics the distinction between production and consumption is erased. Once upon a time, these two kinds of activity were viewed separately. And from some points of view, such as the traditional Protestant work ethic, production was thought to be morally virtuous, while consumption, particularly when it went beyond need and into luxury, was morally suspect. But in the new economics consuming more is said to be really producing more at the same time, since the more each of us consumes, the more jobs are created. The more things are consumed, the more opportunities are opened up for individuals to use their talents and their creativity to produce.

In short, the market economy is a powerful mechanism for channeling energy, skills, and creativity efficiently toward innovation and productivity. However, there is a dark side to the ethic of more, the entrepreneurial life, and the way this mechanism works. It is not all freedom of choice, creative opportunity, and the satisfaction of desire. The benefits of growth and productivity are achieved through struggle and competition, and this involves (we hope within legal limits and the cultural limits of human decency, but not always) aggressiveness, ruthless focus on the bottom line, strategic manipulation, seduction and betrayal. It involves winners and losers.

The market mechanism arranges for the right people with the most profitable skills to be occupied in profitable tasks, economically productive right roles, at the opportune time in the convenient place. In itself this achievement is not a bad thing; what is troubling is the situation in which it becomes the only thing; the predominant thing.

Unlike the power of giving that manifests itself during the picnic that Jesus hosts by the sea, this economy does not turn initial scarcity into eventual abundance. No, it starts with initial abundance, natural and human, uses it selectively and makes some of it grow, but discards the rest. The discards, the waste products of this way of life are material, of course, but they are also human and social—a growing population of marginalized people, quite literally without market value, which is to say, without value. (For a humane and refreshingly non-condescending account of a living inequality and injustice, I recommend to you a recent book by journalist Katherine Boo called Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, a first hand account of the lives of slum dwellers in Annawadi, a desperately poor shanty town near the international airport in Mumbai.)

***

Swimming in the sea of money and understanding all human relationships as market transactions and exchanges of purchase and consumption is said by many to simply be the normal and necessary way to think and act. It is our water and we are its fish. Can we gain a sense of how profoundly one-sided and strange this worldview actually is? Or, to speak more precisely, re-gain that sense of strangeness and distance from this worldview, for we had it once, and indeed not so very long ago.

The Gospel warning has two facets. One is about creative destruction, the obliteration of boundaries. In creating some kinds of goods we destroy other equally or even more valuable goods in our lives. The single-minded pursuit of the former fatally erodes and debilitates the latter. Economic growth can actually promote social desiccation. Wealth is actually “illth,” as John Ruskin so nicely put it.

The second facet is about the universal and equal dignity of human beings and social justice. With our newly opened fish eyes, we need to look beyond the mega-millions jackpot. With ears properly attuned, we need to hear behind the blare of too much hype, the cries and whispers of too little hope. It is in light of this that I read the line: “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”

Around the world nearly half of humanity is comprised of individuals without training, resources, or connections, having virtually no chance to enter into the system of money and employment, reward and social position. Somebody else’s more is their less. Many others live on a precarious edge of the global economy and the ethic of more. In 2000, according to Forbes magazine, the world’s 492 richest individuals held more combined wealth than the world’s poorest 1.5 billion people. In the same year a UN study concluded that the richest 1 percent (37 million people) had more wealth than those in the bottom 95 percent (3.5 billion people).

If the injustice and inequality that accompanies the world of economic growth and the ethic of more is disturbing, even more so is the loss of boundaries that protect areas of our lives from the advantage-oriented mentality of buying and selling. A very interesting recent book, entitled What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel discusses with many examples the disappearance of commercial free zones in society. There are prisons in California that offer cell upgrades for a fee of $127 per night to inmates who can afford them. There are companies that hire people to stand on line so lobbyists can jump the queue to get into Congressional hearing rooms. Famous athletes sport corporate logos on their clothing and equipment; ordinary people have them applied (for much less remuneration) to their foreheads and other visible parts of their bodies. And a charity in North Carolina pays $300 to drug addicted women in return for being sterilized. About this permanent sale of fertility, Sandal indignantly remarks, “This treats …women as damaged baby-making machines that can be switched off for a fee.”

Similarly, at the conference I attended, speakers discussed in detail the ways in which the human body has become a contested terrain, where older moral norms and prohibitions are rapidly giving way under pressure from scientific and technological advance and commercial pressure. A resolutely economic reinterpretation of meaning and behavior is replacing those former norms and limits. As our biotechnology expands, the human body is being made into an object for use in new ways; it is being turned into a commodity for sale by and to others. As a result, the body is seen, not as an integral part of oneself, but rather as an instrumental object to be exploited for economic gain. If Sandel is correct, we are losing our sense that there are times and places and relationships in which this spirit of buying and selling is inappropriate.

The world depicted in the Gospel lesson is not an economized world, it is a world where boundaries and Not For Sale signs still exist. And Jesus often reaffirms and defends special relationships from the acids of competition and taking. The gathering by the sea is a space of sharing, not trading. It is a place of tables for breaking bread together, which Jesus fills, tables far from removed from those of the moneychangers trespassing on the space of the Temple. And we remember what Jesus thought of and did to those tables. (We should also recall that, at times, he does the reverse: he attacks some boundaries and breaks them down; those are the boundaries of fear, suspicion, and prejudice that dehumanize and impede our openness to the Kingdom and to love.)

This is a lesson about the limits of what money can and should buy. It is about the insufficiently, not of the food available, but of the capacity of the economic life and the ethic of more to provide for human need and flourishing. Slyly, Jesus asks Philip to solve the problem in terms of buying and selling. He cannot. Why not? It is not simply because he does not have enough money. More profoundly, it is because recourse to buying is out of place and out of bounds for this occasion. If the boy nearby who has five loaves and two fish had been properly educated by today’s standards, he would have seen a market opportunity and bargained with Andrew to secure at least what little money the disciples had. No, this is neither the time for buying nor selling. What did this boy see when facing these men, men like Andrew and Jesus? Not a business opportunity. Another kind of opportunity, perhaps. What would you and I have seen?

Our lesson this morning is about another economy and how to live in it, another water and how to swim in it. The currency of this other economy is not money but mutual responsibility. The good it provides is not the more that is someoneelse’s less, but the enough that nurtures and sustains us in those aspects of our humanity that money cannot buy.