Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on September 25, 2022 | 82 Comments
Here, I’m going to respond to Sean Domencic’s commentary on my article ‘Genesis and J. Baird Callicott’ published in my last post, and try to pick up on as many of the comments beneath it as I can (albeit too briefly or evasively, I regret). Sean’s commentary is an exemplary exercise in constructive criticism of a kind that’s all too rare, and also a lovely piece of writing in its own right. My thanks to him for taking the trouble to produce it.
I’ll engage with Sean’s commentary in a moment, but it’s been quite a while since I published the article it engages with (fourteen years, to be precise), so first I’m going to assess some of the positions I took there from the present perspective of my somewhat older self.
Looking back on it now, I have to concede that the view I took of human action in the world in my 2008 article was pretty bleak: “at the end of all our labours we shall still be hungry, and ignorant, and unredeemed”. I think it’s sage advice from Sean and other commenters to lighten up a bit. In my defence I’d say that I was trying to stress the need to be humble more than the need to be miserable, but I’d now row back a bit from the full-on tragedian take. Instead of ‘tragedy’, perhaps ‘difficult dilemmas’, ‘insuperable trade-offs’ or some such language might better serve. All the same, God’s curses in the Yahwist source do still sound pretty bleak to my ears: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in sorrow shall you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to you … in the sweat of your face shall you eat bread, till you return to the ground…for dust you are, and into dust shall you return”.
Talking of thorns and thistles, it’s probably relevant that I wrote my article just when I was beginning to establish my own small market garden, after a few years of reading and learning about organics, permaculture and other alternative or nature-friendly forms of farming. I think I was partly writing against an over-easy assumption commonly inflicted upon unsuspecting students by writers, teachers and other gurus in that world that if you just stick to their methods and embrace the balance of nature then your cup of plenty will overrun.
That’s rarely how it feels starting out as a fledgling commercial organic grower, battling market prices and obstructive bureaucracies as well as any number of crop pests and diseases. As I saw it then and largely still do, nature is less a balance than a stalemate, the sum total of a myriad organisms well fitted by a long evolutionary process to getting what they want from one other, albeit not without a struggle. I guess part of my thought process was that we in the alternative farming movement needed to get real and embrace the struggle like other organisms a little more.
But re-reading my piece again now, fresh from my recent critique of George Monbiot and his argument that farming is intrinsically destructive of the natural world, again I think I pressed my position a little too far in the tragic direction in a way that implicitly aligns with Monbiot. Both Monbiot and my 2008 self argue that agricultural interventions in the natural world inflict an unavoidably heavy cost, which leaves the door open to Monbiot’s view that it’s better to do away with farming altogether and replace it with something better, like the studge factories he favours.
Both my 2008 self and my 2022 one would unite around the view that studge factories are not better and will ultimately inflict an even heavier cost than most farm systems. The tragedy, or the trade-off, isn’t allayed so easily. Still, I don’t provide many resources in my 2008 article to resist whatever the latest dumbass idea might be for ‘saving’ humanity and nature from each other with some novel bit of high-tech whizz-bangery (one of Sean’s criticisms of it that I concede). I like Greg and Eric’s suggestions just to do the best you can in farming and not get too worked up about it. But for that to work systemically, I think there’s probably a need for a stronger underlying moral philosophy – and this is what Sean offers in his commentary.
Talking of high-tech whizz-bangery, space precludes me from discussing the role of science in our agrarian future which Clem raised in relation to Sean’s commentary (I do discuss it a bit in Chapter 16 of A Small Farm Future). In a nutshell, I’d suggest that the working scientists of today would do future generations a big favour if they strive to dissociate the name of science from its present entanglements with high-energy, high-capital, labour ‘saving’, export-oriented commodity farming favoured by governments and corporations (I recommend Glenn Davis Stone’s recent book The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World on this point).
A final point before I turn to Sean’s remarks. I remain critical of over-easy solutionism in the alternative agriculture or neo-agrarian movement as much as in high-energy modern agriculture. I’m probably as much if not more despairing now about what’s in store for humanity than I was in 2008, but in a more strictly agricultural sense I think I have lightened up a little. I still think we have to eat our bread in the sweat of our face, but alongside Greg I believe that ultimately people do find a way through the thorns and thistles towards a manageable, if always imperfect, agricultural practice. I’ll say more about that at the end of this post.
So now I’ll turn to Sean’s critique. I won’t try to summarize it – you can read it for yourself here. The key to it in my view is the wonderful and intricately argued section ‘Life as a gift’, which includes a lengthy quotation from John Paul II in which the theologian-pope propounds a different interpretation of the Eden story to my own.
Now, I can be a combative soul at times, but even I baulk at arguing scriptural interpretation with a pope. More to the point, I basically accept the logic of Sean’s (and John Paul’s) argument in this whole section. It’s clearly the case that God didn’t just fire Adam and Eve from the team, contract not renewed, condemning them and (metaphorically) us their descendants to a wholly alienated and disenchanted eternity. As Sean rightly implies, there’s an implicit commitment to at least the theoretical goodness or redeemability of humanity in my account, and I erred in failing to incorporate this explicitly. I find much of Sean’s more detailed argument about the Christian interpretation of this point fascinating and convincing. Here’s my attempt to gloss it briefly in secular terms: there is something true and good in the world beyond any specific instantiation of it in human practice, but from a human perspective it can be mobilized only in human practice.
This is basically a non-modern or anti-modern position with big implications for the nature of political society – another interesting arena of debate that I’ve had with Sean and others and that I plan to address in the future (and, with apologies, Evan, I must reserve discussion of your points about citizenship until that occasion. Likewise thanks to Don for your kind remarks and your excellent idea of a ‘Romantic Anti-Capitalism’ reader, which perhaps we can pick up again when we get further into the politics).
Anyway, all this is to say that I basically accept the logic of Sean’s exposition of the gift, and his correction or extension of the arguments in my article.
Things get slightly trickier when we turn to practical implications. To get into that, here are a couple of quotations from Sean’s piece:
Man is simultaneously limited by the Divine Order of natural law and given dominion over Creation, which he must ‘till and keep’ for the glory of God. In short, man is the ‘jewel of creation’
It is possible for human dominion to simultaneously remain humble and to avoid arrogating God’s sovereignty to itself, because humanity is contained in the divine hierarchy.
Before proceeding, I probably need to say something about the concept of ‘hierarchy’. I think Sean is referring to a more technical meaning of the word than its everyday modern use to mean a ladder-like ranking of who’s up and who’s down, like a football league table. Instead, hierarchy really means a differentiated structure of parts and encompassing wholes. It can be illustrated with this diagram, which relates to present concerns.
There is a biosphere on Earth we call ‘nature’. It contains human beings, and many other kinds of organism. This is an encompassing whole. But at the level of the human, we differentiate ourselves from nature. We are human, a part of nature, but also differentiated from it – things that may apply at the level of the natural don’t necessarily apply at the level of the human. Nor is this hierarchy necessarily ranked – neither humans nor nature are necessarily the better part. But if the hierarchy is ranked, the ordering can be reversed at different levels of encompassment. From a human perspective, for example, the life of an individual human always counts for more than the life of an individual fly, whereas at the more encompassing level of the whole of nature this isn’t necessarily the case.
The same diagram can serve for a different hierarchy – Sean’s ‘divine hierarchy’ – if we relabel the encompassing whole as the divine or the godhead instead of nature. But in this case there’s a one-way ranking. The human is inferior to the divine, respectively the receiver and the giver of the gift.
Perhaps we can also bring the two diagrams together. The divine encompasses nature, which encompasses humanity. The divine stands above both, whereas humanity as the ‘jewel of creation’ normally stands above nature, but also sometimes (ultimately?) stands beneath and serves it.
A couple of points here, the first of them something of a side issue that perhaps can be discussed another day. I’d suggest that my tragic interpretation of the Eden story remains basically valid but it is, as it were, a ‘lower’ truth that’s contained within the human part of the hierarchy, and it’s reversed by the higher truth that Sean invokes of divine love. To be honest, I find it hard not to read the Eden story as an account of the sundering of humanity from nature and the origin of the nature/human hierarchy – the origin, too, of a certain tragedy, or at least of certain ‘insuperable trade-offs’, in humanity’s self-conscious alienation from nature. But that doesn’t negate the encompassment or redemption at a higher level that Sean discusses. Possibly, it does raise questions about how to construe the rational, interior, personal human consciousness and its origins that he also discusses, but lest I end up arguing with the pope after all, I think I’ll leave that thought there. I’m not sure the origin of consciousness is a vital point of difference in this discussion.
The bigger issue for me is Sean’s critique of my hesitancy, not only in my 2008 article but also in my more recent book, about articulating what he calls “specific doctrines about how the world works, how it ought to be, and how to change it”.
Since debating with him post-publication of my book, I’ve been on something of a path of convergence or part-convergence with Sean’s natural law approach. I agree with him on the need for a first principles rather than an empirical approach to defining the parameters of the good life in ways that engage and motivate people, and I accept that my writings to date have barely done this. Indeed, I’ve been taken to task by less sympathetic critics than Sean on the same point along the lines of “OK, OK, so a small farm future – but how?”.
I suspect Sean and I agree that the answer to that ‘how’ isn’t some modernist piece of quick fix solutionism – market incentives, class struggle, nationalist assertion or some such. I’m coming to think instead that the ‘specific doctrines’ undergirding a small farm future will only emerge long-term through deep cultural change, even if the collapsing certainties of the modern world order might hurry it along a bit. In this, they might resemble the slow emergence of the natural law tradition Sean invokes, just as a more unified later medieval political culture in Europe reconfigured itself out of its classical and Christian precursors in the collapsed shell of the Roman empire.
As I’ve already said, I plan to engage with the politics of this long transition another time. What Sean gives us in his commentary is an overarching intellectual framework for it. To my mind this is a considerable gift, but it hasn’t entirely satisfied some of the other commenters on this site. They’ve argued that in view of the disintegrative forces at large in the world today, time isn’t on our side in building a new political culture equal to the challenges of our times – and if we can’t build it soon enough, those disintegrative forces may prevent us from building it at all. Joe Clarkson pushes this line further, arguing “I suggest that we just let everyone do what they want based on their best judgement/prejudice/stupidity and let evolution sort it out. That’s what happens anyway; why fight it?”
I’d argue that that’s pretty much what modern political and moral philosophy has done, and evolution is beginning to have its say on the matter. If we’re to escape the harsh judgments it’s likely to hand down (possibly harsher yet than God’s judgments upon Adam and Eve) then I think we do need to fight it. And to fight it, we’ll need better ways of constructing our societies than we’ve managed of late. To me, Sean’s approach seems helpful in this respect.
In a response to such objections under an earlier post of mine, Sean wrote:
I agree with Chris that citizens will have [to] construct their social order, but I propose an addendum: that they ought to construct it based as closely upon reality as they can manage. If they do a half-decent job at constructing a public square which is genuinely ‘commensurable’ between citizens (unlike that of modern ideology) by being true to the reality in which we all share, then they will return to the natural law tradition, one way or another.
I think that’s a good response, although I do have some misgivings about it. I’m also aware that some people will find this whole discussion pretty abstract and pointlessly intellectual in the light of present pressing realities. To me, it’s not pointless because – as I’ve just said – we need better ways of constructing our societies than we’ve managed of late, and discussions like this are one part of that building work.
Still, it’s true that these discussions are quite intellectual and abstract. So I do wonder if Sean’s criticism that my writings don’t give enough of a bold political vision or something for people to get excited about in their hearts might also apply to his own analysis?
Anyway, in A Small Farm Future I tentatively moved beyond what Sean nicely calls the ‘bucket of ice cold Somerset existentialism’ on offer in my 2008 article towards an engagement with civic republicanism, virtue ethics and perhaps the natural law traditions that he upholds. All this was something of a gap in my education that I’ve only lately started to fill – my debates with Sean have unquestionably helped with the filling, and thanks to his input I think I’ll be able to offer an improved grasp of the politics of small farm societies in the future.
I also largely agree with another of Sean’s comments that
There’s a modern(ist) temptation to try to propose an ideology which will “end history” and solve all the problems of fallible, sinful/selfish human beings forever. I don’t claim that natural law politics is offering that….There will always be many different interpretations, especially when applied to more and more particular situations, but fortunately a lot of the difficult theoretical thinking has already been done, and we can continue to draw on that traditional wisdom.
But here I would add that we’re now facing some unprecedented ‘particular situations’, and if we manage to restore the importance of that traditional wisdom or even remember it as we face them, a lot of difficult work still remains to be done to breathe life into them anew. What will certainly fail is any attempt to impose natural law politics top down as a quick fix solution to the ills of the present. In this respect, the pushback from various traditional Catholics and secular conservatives against the idea that Sean and I among others have had of creating a broad-based Distributist Congress to engage in this work that includes non-Catholics and non-conservatives hasn’t filled me with confidence. Is the traditional wisdom Sean upholds strong and supple enough to overcome the ideological schisms of the present and build bridges across contemporary religious and political divides?
The ills of the present that I mentioned stem in considerable part from human hubris in our modern sense of ourselves as conquerors of nature. In my 2008 article, I therefore invoked the Eden story as a tale of human nemesis salutary for present times, but I do believe Sean is right to suggest I overdid it in supposing it to be little more than that. Still, I worry that he pushes too far the other way with his account of humanity as ‘the jewel of creation’ and his conviction that it’s possible for human dominion to simultaneously remain humble and avoid arrogating God’s sovereignty to itself. I accept his point that the Christian tradition offers some defences against hubris, but I’m not sure they’re strong enough – which is partly why we’re in our present predicaments, and also why attempts to build a new distributism already seem mired in schism. Inasmuch as those defences involve recourse to higher truths than earthly human affairs, I worry that the gatekeepers of these higher truths in tradition-ordered societies can too easily corrupt themselves and their subordinates with all too human power games.
These misgivings parallel ones raised by Eric and Andrew. Yet while they’re important, I think they’re less significant than the genuine improvements to my vision that Sean’s commentary effects. Here, I agree with Andrew that a moral-religious vision of the kind Sean provides is more likely to succeed in placing the necessary limits around human behaviour than a tragic one, especially if it’s satisfactorily embodied in politics – politics being the missing term here that I suspect we’d all agree needs more fleshing out (something, once again, that I intend to do as soon as I can). I’d only add that tragedy probably can’t be banished altogether, because any adequately complex morality probably involves worldly contradiction, and contradiction breeds tragedy. Or at least dilemmas.
Meanwhile, I wonder if it’s also worth thinking about the embodiment of human morality in ecology, which in fact was a key motivation for Callicott’s original piece.
In my 2008 article I mentioned the idea that humans fit the ecological niche of ‘patch disturbers’, alongside others of our kind such as elephants and beavers. But I didn’t make much of the point, and I think I erred in what I did make of it by talking (albeit with an element of irony) about ‘the patch-disturbing evil within our hearts’. As I now see it, ecologically and morally, through the lens of Aldo Leopold’s land ethics or Sean’s Christian virtue ethics, I’d say that patch disturbance can be good or it can be bad, depending on circumstances (one of the problems with George Monbiot’s ecological vision is that he seems to see no circumstances in which human patch disturbance can ever be good). Contemporary fossil-fuelled global capitalism represents ecological patch disturbance on an epic scale, and it is not good.
But some years down the line in my career from my 2008 article, I’m a bit more relaxed about certain kinds of human patch disturbance than I was back then. So I wonder if there’s scope for a kind of secular-ecological version of the Christian morality of redemption that Sean sketches when he writes: “It is true to say that we are “frustrated gods” if we can only grasp at divinity; but we are joyfully divinized if we receive the Gift of God: the most perfect of gifts, in which He gives Himself to humanity, in the Person of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Perhaps, if only as an imperfect analogy, we might say that likewise we are frustrated ecomodern gods if we grasp at interacting with zero impact on the biotic community of organisms conceived in some state of perfect balance, but if we can joyfully empty ourselves into a role as knowing patch-disturbers seeking the gift of sustenance from the world like (but also unlike) other organisms, life becomes more hopeful.
Maybe, then, patch disturbance or keystone species behaviour is a higher-level ecological practice than the stalemate of nature, just as – following the logic of hierarchy I outlined above – virtue ethics is a higher-level ethical practice than living tragically in nature.
I fear we’re a pretty long way from any such higher-level ecological practice as a species right now, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of achieving it in the long term. With a few more years under my belt as a disturber of the earth than in 2008, I’ve learned quite a bit more about making a livelihood from it. This includes knowing more about how little I know about things I didn’t even know I didn’t know back then. So whereas in 2008 I was a bit paralyzed by the tragedy of not knowing what I was doing, I now draw more comfort from the fact that, painfully and incrementally, nowadays I don’t know what I’m doing at slightly more expansive and sophisticated levels of ignorance.
The Yahwist narrative is, as Joel implies in his comment, deeply concerned with agriculture and agricultural relations. If that’s not already obvious in the story of Adam and Eve, it becomes crystal clear in the story of their sons, Cain and Abel. Joel asks how this plays in the context of aboriginal cultures, such as the Australians subjugated by the European descendants of Cain.
Others can answer that better than me, and I’ve already run on too long, but what I’ll say in brief is that I think there’s a global need now to develop local societies as if they’re aboriginal ones even though we know they’re not – and the Yahwist narrative together with Sean’s natural law framework can help in the task. I don’t think the possibly implied distinction between agricultural and foraging societies is important any more. But I do think the greater emphasis on equality in certain aboriginal cosmological hierarchies of individual-community-divinity than in the Christian divine hierarchy might be.
Anyway, to finish on a practical note I believe we need to develop right agricultures that are patch disturbing at the appropriate scale. And since we’ve recently been talking about wheat harvesting here, I’ll leave you with a photo of the most scale-appropriate technology for cutting and threshing the main ingredient of the staff of life that we’ve yet hit upon here at Vallis Veg, courtesy in part from a gift freely given by a valued member of the Small Farm Future community. In the sweat of our face…
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In this respect, the pushback from various traditional Catholics and secular conservatives against the idea that Sean and I among others have had of creating a broad-based Distributist Congress to engage in this work that includes non-Catholics and non-conservatives hasn’t filled me with confidence.
Is this something you’re at liberty to expand upon?
It’s all on Twitter: not a place (nor a debate) worth spending too much time on!
the pushback from various traditional Catholics and secular conservatives against the idea that Sean and I among others have had of creating a broad-based Distributist Congress to engage in this work that includes non-Catholics and non-conservatives hasn’t filled me with confidence
Nor me; though it has also helped me to find some more like-minded people with similar interests. So there’s that.
Thanks Chris for continuing to hack at the weeds that have overgrown this path.
I fully sympathize with the “…small farm future – but how?” question, but even if a large number of us knew the exact answer and worked our hardest to enact it, there is still no guarantee of success.
Accordingly, I have a strong attraction for Joe’s “…let evolution sort it out…” approach.
Although I’m not averse to a little communitarian effort. Still, my hopes are very low.
My first guess at an effective approach may sound awfully new-agey, but what has worked for me is to set my intentions to a particular goal, and as I make daily decisions, continue toward that goal. In the present tense, it seems like nothing is happening, but looking back at a few years, it’s shocking how much change can happen in tiny increments.
Yes, “…ideological schisms of the present…”. Precisely what many of your arguments with various ‘experts’ here have been about, eh?
My guess is that those ideological schisms will become very much less meaningful (in the near future) when our next meal will hinge on how we treated our local soil this afternoon.
And “…patch disturbance can be good or it can be bad…”.
Amen to that.
Though it seems to me that much of the difference comes down to the scale of the disturbance.
I applaud both Chris and Sean for their placement of first principles first.
But maybe I should also say that I regard the establishment of ‘first principles’ or religion to be a component of Joe’s evolutionary process too.
I’d vote for one of the first principles to be an attempt at tolerance of others’ first principles. There are few ecological disasters more destructive than war.
Thanks Eric! A counter-proposal to consider: Jesus of Nazareth was very /intolerant/ of a lot other’s first principles (especially the pagan Romans), but He had a very unique way of proclaiming the Truth of His own first principles: peacefully, lovingly, suffering and dying for them.
If your first principles include that I should not exist, we have a problem.
Thanks Chris for this great reply with so much to discuss! I have a dreadfully busy weak ahead, but I hope to prioritize a reply to this soon. So many topics you raise to make for great discussion.
Thanks for the comments. Look forward to your reply Sean, when you get the chance. So I’ll pick up further discussion after that.
Indeed there’s a case for not taking the death-by-soundbite world of Twitter too seriously. On the other hand, I’d consider some of the protagonists to be real players with views that are representative of ones that are out here in the world, so it’s an issue… Anyway, I hope to discuss this more in due course.
Further biblical support for the idea of stewardship, I think, can be found in Psalm 104 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20104&version=NIV) which amplifies the Genesis creation story and a Gift if ever there was one. That dominion over the Earth did not equate to licence is also suggested in Job Chapter 38, which also extols the virtues of Creation, but commences with the following admonishment:-
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?…
Thanks for this Chris, a very interesting meditation on all sorts of elements within this conversation. I like the way you’ve put your own writing into the context of your life at the time.
I’m interested in what you find valuable in Sean’s interpretation. Several times you state that it’s a better way, or a higher order way, to understand the Genesis story, or that it provides a useful intellectual framework. However, it seems to me that you don’t really accept most of it. The exception is the idea of the gift, which you reframe as the ‘gift of sustenance’ provided by the world.
Your disagreement seems to me to centre on hierarchy. Sean’s vision is, I think, articulated around a patriarchal order, in which humanity are children (or servants?) in God’s house. You map that onto the notion of humanity as dependent on Nature, but I don’t think that gets us very far because the implications of Sean’s interpretation are essentially moral (that humanity should follow God’s laws), whereas I don’t think you see humanity’s dependence on Nature as necessarily conferring any particular moral injunctions.
Of course, the whole point of this discussion is focused on morality. Given that humans have a choice about how they treat the world, how then should they treat it, and how can particular choices be justified? If we are to follow the moral tenets that emerge from Sean’s story, we have to commit to his version of Christian belief. Your story is secular and your main point concerns the basic structuring of human awareness and imaginative capacity set within the wider world – there is no real moral component to that story, instead it emphasises trade-offs and dilemmas. Humans can still act any way they like, it’s just that they’ll likely come to different kinds of grief depending on which way they turn.
But I think you do come closer to a moral element towards the end when you state the importance of equality to your outlook. Equality is a moral injunction because it affects choices – require that humans should do certain things even where they can do others. It doesn’t emerge from either yours or Sean’s analysis of the Genesis story though – indeed, I don’t think it would sit well with the implications of Sean’s natural law approach.
But I do think that it has very interesting implications when applied to your points about patch disturbance. One of the most objectionable elements of Monbiot’s ecomodernist vision is the autocratic human society that would need to be created in order to keep humanity locked away from pristine Nature and dependent on industrial studge. An acceptance of patch disturbance that also insists on equality in human society prompts the creation of very different kinds of community.
Sometimes your writing puts me in mind of the kind of discussions that characterised seventeenth-century debates on liberty and the kinds of society that promoted it. This is no doubt in part because of your interest in civic republicanism, which also informed some of those discussions. But I wonder if it might also offer you a way of promoting the kind of society that we all agree is needed. Liberty is still a resonant concept, and one in which moral injunctions can find a grounding.
Joe Clarkson pushes this line further, arguing “I suggest that we just let everyone do what they want based on their best judgement/prejudice/stupidity and let evolution sort it out. That’s what happens anyway; why fight it?”
I’d argue that that’s pretty much what modern political and moral philosophy has done, and evolution is beginning to have its say on the matter. If we’re to escape the harsh judgments it’s likely to hand down (possibly harsher yet than God’s judgments upon Adam and Eve) then I think we do need to fight it.
What is ‘it’ we need to be fighting? If ‘it’ is evolution, then my follow-up would be “Good luck”. But in one sense or another from our distant ancestors to our gene editing neighbors we have been bent on fighting evolution for a very long time. Some might argue with a little bit of success. But there is still the issue of what exactly does success look like.
If ‘it’ is the human behavior under past and present political and moral philosophy – then is the fight we need to wage one to find a better path? Then if once we coalesce around such a different path our efforts will again be subject to some adjudication; evolution, or the judgement(s) of a deity. Once such a judgement comes down, will we all agree on it? Will we accept it?
What is IT ?
It is financialation of everything , everything must have a price in dollars and cents , the most beautiful paintings are valued not as paintings but as what someone will pay for it . even your body has a price with my health insurance it’s three million dollars !
They know the price of everything and the value of nothing .
Thanks for the new comments – appreciated. I’ll await Sean’s response before responding to them much further myself, but for now a few remarks for clarification just in respect of Clem & Kathryn’s comments.
Clem, the ‘it’ I was referring to indeed was evolution, and the sense I meant it conforms very much to your point that we’ve been fighting it for a long time with some success, but also with some doubt about what ‘success’ means. At its barest, the fight is to stay alive and to reproduce (in this sense, I’m not convinced there’s a parallel in culture). More generally, I see it as a matter of call and response – nobody and nothing can entirely control the response, but given that humans (pre or post Eden…) have some self-consciousness about it we do have the capacity to condition the response by controlling our call. So if, for example, I say we shouldn’t burn through remaining fossil fuel reserves and render humanity almost certainly extinct by raising average global temperatures by 8 degrees, I don’t think a good response would be to say ‘well, you can’t fight evolution’.
That, however, has been pretty much exactly the response of various modernist ideologies such as eugenics and laissez faire economics, which have adopted an empirical rather than ‘first principles’ ethical position in respect of issues such as famines and illnesses – per Diogenes’s point. So to Kathryn’s point I’d suggest that while a first principles approach to ethics does not in itself guarantee it will endorse anyone’s right to exist (and therefore might very well be problematic), it’s more likely to do so than empirical ones, as per doctrines such as Jeremy Bentham’s or Carl Schmitt’s.
However, I do agree that there are some difficulties concerning agreement over first principles ethics and who gets to gatekeep them, which is where the political complement to this post comes in. And I will write about this…soon. Provided the British government’s current experiments in empirical ethics allow it.
I mean, I don’t think the current British government is experimenting with empirical ethics, I think they’re experimenting with looting. But thank you: yes, while a “first principles first” approach doesn’t exclude the possibility of horror, but a purely empirical approach almost guarantees that “might equals right” will rear its ugly head
I think one thing that muddies the waters here is when people attempt to impose what they see as virtues (or even second-order principles) on others. Clearly, people who think homosexual relationships (for example) are inherently sinful should refrain from having them; but I’m much less convinced by efforts to prevent others from having those relationships, or from having them recognised on their own terms, or by efforts to claim that such relationships are a new and evil development, or whatever.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t attempt to identify or develop first principles and work from them; but rather that a certain amount of humility in the interpretation and application of those principles to the real lives of real people is important. It would be heretical of me to add anything to the Apostle’s Creed, but I am frequently concerned (and sadly not surprised) by the behaviour of some of my siblings in Christ, and I sometimes wish the relevant churchmen had included something more specific about how we are to treat one another in their formulation rather than leaving us to work out the implications for ourselves. (Apparently Jesus telling people, sometimes at great length, to love their neighbour as themselves is insufficient for this to have taken root in some cases.)
That’s all very bleak, or perhaps tragic is the better word. But my question is really the same as my twitter question about eugenics etc: how do we include as many people as possible, without exposing one another to actual danger?
…guess I’d argue that looting is an example of empirical ethics, along the lines of “I do because I can”. I have an element of sympathy when poor people loot, on the “well they started it” principle. Not, of course, a justification that applies to the British government.
I agree, though, that it’s easy to slip from defining first principle virtue into mere social ranking, that humility in relation to people’s behaviour is an important defence against it, that Jesus’s teachings contribute to that defence, and that alas those teachings and parallel ones have often not been taken to heart by Christians and non-Christians alike.
I’ll try to address your question about danger when I write about virtue politics. I find it difficult territory. On the one hand, it strikes me that there can be a bit of slippage among liberals/leftists from a right to question someone’s values to a ‘right to exist’. On the other hand, I’m sympathetic to slippery slope arguments – and when we’re in a country where letting people drown at sea has almost attained mainstream acceptability I fear we’re a long way down it.
“when we’re in a country where letting people drown at sea”
Who is holding a gun at their heads making them get in a boat ?
Many people are drowning in the Rio Grande crossing from Mexico ( 200+) this year so far , two million have crossed the border this year counted by border patrol plus perhaps as many as another million have slipped across unseen , Eagle Pass has run out of space in the graveyard the bodies , they are found out on ranches , one rancher finding a body a month this year .
Open borders are giving us another genocide conveniently ignored by the media ,many Texas border towns are bankrupt some are even firing teachers , roads go unprepared hospitals close , crime exploded , many ranchers now carry a loaded pistol after they and their vehicles have been shot at .
Some of the border crossers are going back , they have found that the USA is just another failed state , billionaires run the country the rest are just the same peasants as their own country , paid more but just as poor .
Who is holding a gun at their heads making them get in a boat ?
Depends. In Central America it might be a drug cartel. In the Middle East (Syria) it might be Bashar al-Assad.
Cuba
Haiti
Venezuela
Columbia
Honduras
…
not too many folks headed toward those borders.
There are difficulties here in the US. But on the whole they tend to look small compared to other spots on the planet.
You couldn’t pay me to move to the USA, so people who go there must be pretty desperate. 200 deaths in 2 million crossings seems like pretty good odds, especially if you’re certain you’ll die if you stay where you are.
Too bad about the lack of gun control, too; it’s hard to fathom that level of violence, here.
If it’s such a failed state, have you thought about leaving? Why/why not?
I have a huge amount of sympathy for poor people who engage in behaviour labelled by the right-wing press as “looting”. In many cases I wonder whether “opportunistic reparations” might be a more accurate framing.
I don’t mind having my values questioned, in good faith. I don’t mind having my actions challenged, especially if I am doing harm, though I won’t claim to always enjoy the process. These are not usually threats to my existence or expressions of a desire for me to not exist; they can be, at best, real indications of esteem, insofar as they indicate that people believe I can do better.
But I’m not going to stop being disabled or queer or foreign or female, and there is plenty of evidence that some people really would rather I don’t exist, or else exist only to serve their needs, on the basis of those traits. There is plenty of evidence that this would be a thousand times worse if my disabilities were more obvious or severe, or if I had brown skin, or if I happened to have a wife rather than a husband.
I don’t really know how to counter these ideas. For me it comes back to humanism, and Christian humanism at that: the idea that every person born has immutable worth and value is, for me, inextricable from my religious beliefs about the nature of humanity. I don’t mind if others have a different route to the same conclusions, and I’m always happy to discuss what that humanism means for how we actually live our lives.
I don’t think you can single-handedly make the dangers of fascism go away. I do think being clear that fascism is a danger, and that it is unwelcome, is an important part of not attracting fascists to a discussion. I think it is especially important in a discussion in which imposition of “traditional” or “conservative” values (scare quotes because their own claims about such traditions are often a bit dodgy) is seen as desirable by a large (or perhaps merely loud?) contingent.
The drug cartels are already here , that’s why Texas big city murder rates are getting out of control , the Governor has declared the cartels terrorist groups , many border crossers pay between 10and 20% of their earnings to the cartels , this is for life , they are cartel slaves , if they go back to where they come from they are murdered , that’s the gun at their head .
I like the phrasing of “empirical ethics” versus “virtue ethics”!
On second thought, perhaps I’d rather juxtapose “evolutionary ethics” versus “virtue ethics”, since both are genuinely empirical: one according to reductionist mechanism and the other other according to classical philosophy.
(Aside: please forgive poor grammar, I shouldn’t attempt to write comments on my phone really)
Chris,
Thanks again for this great response: I’ve basically written another post! I’ll start with justifying our conversations, some points of agreement, and then move on to address three concerns of yours that you raise.
TRUTH, AND OTHER INVISIBLE REALITIES
I think the fruitfulness of this conversation is grounded on a mutual pursuit of Truth. You write that you agree with “the need for a first principles rather than an empirical approach to defining the parameters of the good life in ways that engage and motivate people, and I accept that my writings to date have barely done this.” I’ve seen some people in the comments question the “abstractness” of these conversations. I won’t deny that our topic here is abstract, but I take issue with the idea that this makes it either useless for “real life” or impossible for finding common ground. A wise man once said that “life is more than food and the body more than clothes” (Luke 12:23): conversations about visible realities (like producing food and fuel) are more useful to our “animal” desires for food, shelter, etc, and they are more easy to come to agreement on. But conversations about invisible realities (like love, friendship, familial bonds, virtue, duty, culture, religion) are utterly essential to our distinctly human desires for happiness and fulfillment, even if they are very difficult to find agreement on. I propose the difficulty to find agreement is not based on the /un/reality of these things (is anyone here going to say that love isn’t real?), but because our knowledge of invisible realities requires both empirical-but-non-numerical observation and virtuous living–neither of which are popular in our modern ideologies of mechanistic individualism.
To those who dismiss all forms of common knowledge (“scientia”) about invisible realities, all of this may seem like silly language games. But for those open to the idea, I think the very proposal is “a bold political vision.” Recall that on the modernist notion of reality, “love”, “family”, and “beauty” are either entirely subjective and/or entirely reducible to physical phenomena of atoms and void. The classical philosophic tradition has a broader view of Reality, which seeks the Truth of these wonderful things which give our life meaning, and I think that rather than ivory tower quibbling, this is “something for people to get excited about in their hearts.” As Chris glosses it in “secular terms”: “there is something true and good in the world beyond any specific instantiation of it in human practice” (though, of course, we can only ever observe it through human practice).
THE MEANING OF HIERARCHY
I’m glad that you brought up hierarchy in the philosophic sense. In modernity, we tend to always imagine hierarchy as the imposition of an external, stronger power which extracts something from a weaker victim. You try to get away from that by proposing “hierarchy really means a differentiated structure of parts and encompassing wholes.” That’s a better definition: as an example, in the human body, the brain is “greater” than the foot, because it is more integral to the life of the body. But there’s also a deeper meaning to hierarchy in classical philosophy when we consider those ‘invisible realities’ I like to talk so much about. In this view, something is “lesser” when it is a relative analogy of the thing that is “greater.” Said another way, the “lesser” /participates/ in the “greater” by finding its fulfillment in the “greater. For example, the art of rudder-making is determined by the art of ship-making. The greater thing (ship-making) is prior and superior to the lesser thing, not in a way that externally dominates it, but in a way that communicates reality down from expansive things to specific things. Without ships, there are no rudders. Through this line of reasoning, many philosophers (of diverse religious backgrounds) arrive at the conclusion that there is a Source (a.k.a. Pure Being, Being Itself, God) which is “greater” than all limited beings which /participate/ to varying degrees and in diverse ways in Infinite Being. Everything that /exists/ is subordinate to the Source of Existence, not because the power of the Almighty is being violently or externally forced on us, but because what I call “me” would not exist without my Creator.
With all of this said, this makes it true amoung created things that “if the hierarchy is ranked, the ordering can be reversed at different levels of encompassment.” Is a chair or a bed “better”? Well, are you sitting or sleeping? Is the baker or an engineer “better”? Well, do you want bread or a house?
But it’s also true that some things participate in Being in a uniquely encompassing manner, as “cornerstones” or “lynchpins” of Truth and Goodness being communicated down through the hierarchy. This is where the idea of the “Chain of Being” comes in. But I’ll drop that point for a moment before returning to our discussion of man’s place in the cosmos.
REASON AND FAITH
You seek to harmonize our reads on Eden saying, “I’d suggest that my tragic interpretation of the Eden story remains basically valid but it is, as it were, a ‘lower’ truth that’s contained within the human part of the hierarchy, and it’s reversed by the higher truth that Sean invokes of divine love.” I more or less agree.
In Catholic philosophy, we have a distinction between things that can be known by natural Reason (philosophy) and things known by supernatural Faith (theology). In this case, I can agree that Reason can conclude that the world is “fallen,” i.e. subject to unavoidable pain, suffering, and futility; but that I know by Faith in Jesus Christ that the world remains suffused with the spirit of its original gift. These truths–as all truths of philosophy or theology–come from different sources, but are harmonious. This same distinction is behind my general appeal to the “natural” virtues (justice, prudence, temperance, courage) and the classical philosophic tradition: the Catholic Church has observed, confirmed, and synthesized these ideas with the Gospel (which adds the “theological” virtues: faith, hope, and love), but She doesn’t claim that only Catholics can know or practice the things which many philosophers learn by reason. (I’ll also note, per MacIntyre, that reason isn’t purely individual, but an inherently social and traditional faculty!)
However, as Andrew has pointed out, while you generously acknowledge the Catholic claims about the Gift are “higher truths,” you don’t necessarily accept their source. Reason can tell us a good deal about the /nature/ of the Divine, humanity, and Creation… but it can’t answer certain foundational narrative questions about how these things fit together within (eschatological) history: /why/ are we here? What comes /next/? /How/ do we fit into the cosmic narrative? Answering those questions is precisely what unifies the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. But if those are not accepted as God-breathed, then what other source for this narrative do we turn to? This, too, I’ll return to in a moment, as I move to your concerns.
CONCERN I: Objective Truth may be Politically Intolerant
There are some people (*cough* New Natural Law goons *cough*) who use the language of natural law, seeking to “update” it to modern conditions, but are really just doing conservative liberalism. I appreciate that you grasp that wide gulf between natural law theory and liberalism, the former being “a non-modern or anti-modern position with big implications for the nature of political society.” (Some have proposed we take a “meta-modern” position…)
Now I want to be entirely clear that I have ZERO interest in the modern nation-state taking up performative traditionalism and making, as you say, “any attempt to impose natural law politics top down as a quick fix solution to the ills of the present.” That’s exactly what Fascism was, and what certain elements of the Reactionary-Right are trying to do now. As my colleague Michael Hanby has written critiquing this doomed project: “technological revolution governs us more deeply than the rule of law ever could.” There can be no serious nor successful return to the natural law tradition without a return to ecological economics.
Still, I think that return can and must happen more quickly than you suggest. You suggest a “slow emergence” like that of the middle ages out of the “collapsed shell” of Rome. But as you also point out: time is not on our side. I think we need more of a renaissance than a re-emergence. It seems (to me) that your concern is that there are so many ugly (and they are beastly!) reactionary and right-wing associations with natural law and classical philosophy that they could not be reliably used to further a liberatory project.
I propose that just as “the working scientists of today would do future generations a big favour if they strive to dissociate the name of science from its present entanglements [liberal capitalist technocracy],” that’s precisely what needs to be done with virtue ethics &c from its present entanglements [reactionary politics], and we Distributists are the ones to do it.
You ask “is the traditional wisdom Sean upholds strong and supple enough to overcome the ideological schisms of the present and build bridges across contemporary religious and political divides?” Before answering that, I think we need to ask a more important question: is this traditional wisdom /true/? If so, it is our only worthwhile choice, and it will surely provide whatever we need. I notice that a large number of eco-leftists types will praise “traditional wisdom” and “ancient philosophy” in various forms… but remain unwilling to commit to any of them. I think that position leaves us in the halls of postmodern academia: endlessly deconstructing ourselves, but never building an alternative. Every building requires a foundation, and we remain facing the choice for our own: classical philosophy (which considers invisible realities and the authority of Truth and Goodness) and modern ideology (which reduces all things to private gain and mechanistic power). Perhaps it’s a point worth debating, but I see all the “third options” between the two as incoherent mixtures, often made by modernists who want the veneer of antiquity without the obligations.
CONCERN II: Existing Religious/Philosophical Institutions are too Inflexible
A related concern is that the gatekeepers of all things Old will prevent them from being used to the service of all things New.
First, I’ll note that philosophy has no gatekeepers: anyone can read Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, or MacIntyre. If someone believes in their rational arguments for Truth or Goodness, she isn’t automatically signed up in the Registry of Platonists and billed for dues–though she may find herself morally and intellectually compelled to start living differently. And the very fact that I can include MacIntyre (still living!)–who began his work as a Marxist and found virtue ethics necessary to critique capitalism–on the list shows the supple flexibility of classical philosophy to provide guidance and answers to our modern questions and crises.
But the Catholic Church, I have to admit, has gatekeepers: Bishops, Popes, Councils, Doctrines, Creeds. Indeed the image of keeping the gate is quite literal: “And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven” (Matthew 16:19). We see this as a gift from God, to keep wayward humanity from going astray (as we so often do) and to preserve the teachings of Jesus Christ both unsullied from distortion and eternally relevant to the present day. On this point of being relevant, you note that “there’s a global need now to develop local societies as if they’re aboriginal ones even though we know they’re not.” I agree, and can point to some excellent resources which point out the ecological through-line which exists not only in Genesis, but in the entire Biblical narrative. My inspiration into all these conversations is also strongly guided by Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ which calls for “ecological conversion and spirituality,” a turning away from “throwaway, consumerist culture” and rooting ourselves in what we hope may become a “cultural ecology” (which he links to indigeneity). (Laudato Si’, to be clear, is not just a private musing, but an “encyclical”, which is a binding teaching document of the Church.)
Nonetheless, many eco-leftists look to the historic sins of the Church, of which there are many, and want to break off into some altogether new religious identity. For the primitivists, Kacynski, for example, proposes that we need an ideology/religion of “Nature” (in the footnote of ISAIF 184, he dismisses Catholicism as “stagnant”). New Agers and Neo-Pagans (Wicca being a popular form, among many stitched together “nature-based” religions) propose some kind of vague, broadly egalitarian worship of the natural world. But I think these strains of thought are all essentially sophistry: religion makes claim about the Divine (the foundation of reality, in a metaphysical sense) and our relation to the Divine (which includes publicly recognizing this Reality through social-rituals). If the Coven of Druids wants to burn sage to Odin as a hobby, it’s very unimposing, but if they want to engage with politics, they must either do so on the terms of the prevailing ideologies or through some kind of truly neo-pagan politics, which will then proceed to build the sort of social structures which (if successful) will eventually commit the sins of tyranny. The fact that liberalism, socialism, and nationalism have become religions in the name of “secularism” is proof that there is no society without gatekeepers of higher truths, whether a tribal lineage of Storykeepers, a Levitical Priesthood, or a gnostic cabal of murderous human sacrificers (Economists).
So it is true that “the gatekeepers of these higher truths in tradition-ordered societies can too easily corrupt themselves.” But, I’ll note, that Christianity does something unique on this front. While, as above, the Church claims very universal gate-keeping on faith and morals (even to the point of infallibility), She also preaches that every Christian is baptized into the prophetic vocation of Jesus Christ. The Spirit goes where He wills, not merely through the Church’s ministers, and so He is everywhere calling the Church (both leaders and members alike) to repentance, renewal, and development. This is, for example, why you find St. Catherine of Sienna (a mystic woman) chastising the Avignon Popes. Or the Second Vatican Council whipping away many reactionary attachments forged in the 19th century. As David Bentley Hart puts it in a (characteristically) poetically insightful thought not entirely agreeable essay: “Even in its most redoubtable and enduring historical forms, Christianity is filled with an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of dissolution that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable, but that instead insists upon dispersing itself into the future ever again, to destroy what confines it and to start anew, to begin again in the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter. There is, simply said, a distinct element of the ungovernable and seditious within the Gospel’s power to persuade, one that we ignore only at the cost of fundamentally misunderstanding its most essential character.” For the Christian, the Kingdom of God (as I’ve pointed out before, an utterly unique concept) is always “at hand.”
And this brings us to:
CONCERN III: Humanism doesn’t seem to line up with Ecological Ethics
I think we agree that distributist farming (and other land-ethic civilizational practices) has the most limited and balanced ecological cost: “patch disturbance or keystone species behaviour is a higher-level ecological practice than the stalemate of nature.” But you “worry that [I] push too far the other way with [my] account of humanity as ‘the jewel of creation’ and [my] conviction that it’s possible for human dominion to simultaneously remain humble and avoid arrogating God’s sovereignty to itself.” So you say later on that we may need “the greater emphasis on equality in certain aboriginal cosmological hierarchies of individual-community-divinity” than the more patriarchial hierarchies of Christianity.
Two simple counterpoints: first, I question how much an egalitarian cosmos /generally/ exists in aboriginal metaphysics. The Great Spirit is a common figure across cultures. In animist worship of natural things (the sun, the sea, the mountain, etc), certain landmarks tend to dominate as supreme. And because animals, stars, and landmarks are /not/ actually the Divine, there have to be some “priests” (shamans, etc) who mediate and maintain the superstitions and customs associated with these idols. As such systems of “localized” gods become large-scale, this becomes an easy way for the tyrannical temple complexes to develop, as DOE admits as a backdrop to whatever egalitarianisms did exist in antediluvian days.
Second, the Christian emphasis on the dignity of the human person is the only reason we have values like universal human rights. The fact that we want distributism for the sake of liberty, equality, and fraternity of the whole human race is because we locate in human life the most important thing in the cosmos: humans are the reason that justice, beauty, and love can be articulated and enjoyed. In classical philosophy, man’s dignity is found in that he is a bridge between the material and immaterial: he is a fusion of body and soul. Humans are the ones who communicate rationality, by our ability to know Truth and morally act for the Good, down from the Divine into the material world. I don’t see any way that something /other/ than humanity can be acknowledged in this role… without ultimately leading to the subjection and sacrifice of human beings to an irrational object elevated as an idol.
I hesitate to engage again, but I’ll give it a go since my name and prior comment have been repeatedly mentioned.
My “why fight it” comment was made in the context of a discussion about man’s relationship to the land and, I thought, how best to organize that relationship in the context of a small farm future. Within that context, there appeared to be a very cordial dispute about the best way to approach the organizing process, a dispute which resulted in two different approaches, which I’ll too-briefly summarize as follows:
Chris’s position – “I argued that the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden dramatized human hubris in supposing ourselves to have godlike powers of judgment, and the consequent nemesis of our Fall and subsequent career as self-conscious, failed, would-be gods who can never get their interventions in the natural world quite right”.
Sean’s position – Our “only choice is to return to classical philosophy inquiry about what is true, good, beautiful, natural, just, etc—and to treat these questions with the same seriousness that the worshipers of Growth, Progress, and Money treat their predictions and prophecies about the Market”.
I sympathize completely with Chris’s approach, in which we can never have complete, godlike knowledge about what might work and what won’t. That approach also means we must therefore remain humble about specifying the political structure(s) of a small farm future. Chris seems bothered by the inherent uncertainty and attracted to Sean’s confident certainty, but I suggest that the ultimate in humility is not to even attempt the specification process (something that has been struggled with here at long length) and just let things work themselves out. Some things will work, and carry on, and others won’t and will die out. Let our small farm future evolve.
I don’t like Sean’s approach and my comment about evolution was an attempt at a somewhat wry reference to what happens when religious dogma about what is “true, good, beautiful, natural, just” is taken as a final authority. “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” is a phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of the Albigensian Crusade, prior to the massacre at Béziers on 22 July 1209. Loosely translated as, “Kill them all; let God sort them out”, it shows the power of religious certainty when making decisions about the moral characteristics or behaviors of other people. As an atheist, I shy away from that kind of certainty. Sean apparently does not.
Letting evolution “sort it out” is what must be done when we don’t have the certainty of religion and must look around, see how the world really works and let that reality affect our judgement. When we do, we find evolution at the core of biology (indeed, just about everything).
Letting evolution sort it out also has the advantage of centering our approach to politics on an existential foundation. Not only does “existence precede essence”, in Sartre’s sense that we create the essence of what we are as individuals after we come into existence, but it also cautions us about how little sense it makes to spend time and energy talking about the essence of things that don’t exist. In the realm of biological creatures, where humans are irrevocably placed, existence (evolutionary survival as a species) is the summum bonum. You can talk about Divine Truth all you want, but the survivors write the bibles.
My comment also suggested that the same evolutionary reasoning could be applied to human cultures. Cultures evolve and cultural fitness is evidenced by evolutionary success. Success is again defined by survival. I think if we want to fight that process by specifying cultural optimization from first principles, we are doomed to failure. We may get lucky and specify the structure of a culture that actually survives, but the odds are against it.
Nonetheless, it is certainly possible to make aesthetic judgements about different cultural characteristics, including religion, science, technology and many others. I certainly have my aesthetic biases and we could talk at length about what is culturally lovely or ugly (modernity is ugly), but that’s for another day (or never).
Joe, I don’t adopt Sean’s position, but I must admit that I don’t find yours any better. Despite claiming a humble position with respect to the world, you seem very certain of the ultimate power of evolution.
Evolution is a concept – a representation of how we humans understand change to occur in the world among certain kinds of organism, which we have created and developed through collective endeavour and discussion over time. As a concept used for discussion and thought, evolution is an invisible thing, but not thereby a non-existent thing, as I’m sure you’d agree.
But you seem to want to make it the supreme governing principle in the world – and by that, I mean that you seem to want us to use it as a way of shutting down other ways that we might engage with the world. Instead, you propose what look to be supreme maxims: that success be defined by survival, and that survival should be one criterion by which we judge the fitness of cultures. When looking out across the world at the many ideas that people have about changing their cultures and building new ones to better flourish in the world, you seem to say: “Ignore them all. Let evolution sort them out.”
And yet I don’t believe you yourself live by the maxims of evolution. When you ‘look around’ and ‘see how the world really works’, you don’t rely solely on your own experiences. You use all sorts of shared concepts to think about it, to discuss it with others, to learn from them and to pass on your own knowledge. You engage in a wider human world, bigger than the specific ecological niche you carve out for yourself, so it’s very much a choice to say that it’s pointless to contribute to broader conceptual discussions about different approaches to living in the world, and will judge everyone else solely on the post-facto criterion of whether they survive. By appealing to evolution to justify that choice, you’re trying to make it look natural, just part of how the world works, but the mere fact that you contribute so many interesting comments to Chris’s blog, seeking to pass on knowledge, to learn, and to change minds, shows that it’s not how the human world works at all.
Nobody knows the future, but that doesn’t stop any of us from trying to shape it. In any case, cultures aren’t really organisms that live and die, they’re fields through which we engage and collaborate with one another. Change is their only real law, and all of us who live through them will die in the end. In my view what truly matters is whether we flourish during our time here, and discussing how best to do that seems very worthwhile.
Andrew,
To your point that I “engage in a wider human world, bigger than the specific ecological niche (I) carve out for (my)self, so it’s very much a choice to say that it’s pointless to contribute to broader conceptual discussions about different approaches to living in the world” – I never said that different approaches to living in the world were pointless (nor discussions about them), only that how well those approaches will work out in the future is difficult to know and will be measured by whether they persist, not by whether they are underpinned by religious doctrine.
I will also say that the system dynamics of biological and cultural evolution are so complicated that it is difficult to predict which approaches will be fit and which will be unfit. We can all marshal evidence for what will succeed and what will fail; I do it all the time when I rail against the damage modernity is doing to the living world. But, to me, a couple of things are clear: predictions about future success for any given approach are very difficult and should be based on evidence (I’ll say it, scientific evidence) and that success for living creatures, including us humans, means not going extinct.
We should remain humble about the limits to human knowledge, though. Even wiith mountains of scientific evidence, I doubt that it is possible to design a successful culture from scratch. The interplay of cultural variability and environmental selection is well worth studying, but it is so complicated that it is difficult to understand what happened after the fact, much less predict what’s going to happen in the future. It would be like asking a biologist to design and build a completely new creature that could thrive in the jungles of Borneo for a million years, something that would be impossible, even if he could build any creature he wanted, but something that natural selection does endlessly.
The same difficulty applies to designing the perfect culture for a small farm future. It’s hard enough finding a few leverage points that might nudge humanity in the direction of a small farm future, (leverage points we haven’t found yet, by the way) it’s impossible to figure out what kind of politics those farmers should have that will work out for the next X number of years. I would love to see someone develop the powers of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory (from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy), but I know it’s just fiction.
I do think there is solid evidence that a culture of small farming has more adaptive fitness than an industrial civilization built on a one-time slug of fossil fuels, but there is little evidence in the historical record that tells us which political structure we should pick for a small farm culture. Human history is filled with lots of different small farm cultures and political systems, cultures and systems that lasted many millennia. Evolution did the picking in the past and will do it in the future. Isn’t that enough?
Joe
Do you think Sean is trying to make claims about what will work for survival, or about what principles we might follow to make that survival worthwhile? It seems to me that he is trying to articulate a vision of a community which is not only surviving, but also good and just and virtuous.
Yes, Kathryn, that is exactly what Sean is doing, and that’s the problem. Whose goodness, whose justice and whose virtue?
Joe
Perhaps one key to this is in how we manage differences of belief about what is good, what is just etc, and the constant temptation to compel others to abide by our standards.
How can we find values in common without discussion? I think that we can’t. And if “let evolution sort it out” is not going to mean “the social group most willing and able to shoot people is the last one standing” then I think we *do* need to at least agree on not killing one another when we find ourselves in competition for resources.
Conversely, how can anyone make truly virtuous choices (by whatever definition of virtue) if compelled? A referendum at gunpoint is not democracy; a charitable donation made under threat of lethal force is not compassion. Imposing virtue on another is somewhat nonsensical.
So another way to frame the whole thing, I think, might be to ask how we can work toward conditions in which all people have, at least, the option of virtue, the option of participation in some kind of mutual flourishing. I don’t think that can include force, whether that force comes from a religious authority or the barrel of a gun.
I agree, but it may not be possible for humans to live without eventually using force against each other. While the capability for violence might be part of our nature, we have managed to survive on this earth for a long time despite that being the case. Violence against “enemies” has long been an integral part of most cultures without worldwide ill effect. It has never been maladaptive until recent centuries. Please note my reply to Andrew, below.
Thanks for the response, Joe.
I do think it may be possible for humans to coexist without doing terrible violence to one another; perhaps that makes me a naive optimist. But even if I am wrong and peace (without compulsion!) is impossible, I think it is worth trying to get as close as we can.
Further, I don’t think I necessarily agree that pre-modernity, violence was not “maladaptive”. Evolution is about fitness to survive and reproduce in a given environment; that environment changes (even without human intervention, though currently our actions are the biggest drivers of environmental change), and every individual who has ever been murdered before reproducing could have been someone with the unique genetic material to enable us to survive… something. Lack of diversity is inherently maladaptive in a changing environment, and lethal violence by its very nature reduces diversity.
But even if that weren’t the case I wouldn’t be okay with murder, partly because a society in which people are free to murder one another without reprimand is not one I want to live in, and not one in which I would last very long.
And even if *that* weren’t the case, I might well argue that murder is wrong because of the effect on the murderer. We could get into the cultural or social effects there, but I think it would be pretty difficult for me to separate it from my religious beliefs. But even on a practical level, if your go-to way of solving problems is to kill people, you’d better hope you don’t kill the only person in the area who knows how to set a bone, or make a sharp blade, or whatever. Once someone is dead they can never help you again.
This probably isn’t the time or place to get into discussions on when killing another human in the course of self-defence is warranted, “just war” theory, and so on. These are hard enough problems even when everyone in the conversation agrees that killing is generally wrong.
I’d second all Kathryn’s points here. Joe, since our earlier discussion the ‘evolutionary’ terminology you’re using to describe human societies has really jumped out at me – ‘maladaptive’, ‘fitness’ – and at the risk of sounding like a stuck record I think it’s really important to stress the capacity of humans to change their behaviour, and so counter ‘environmental’ dangers that they might otherwise succumb to.
A big part of the reason that people find it so hard to change now is the effect of large-scale power structures that make it hard to organise sufficiently to make a difference – it’s not simply because of our ‘nature’, we’re not just naturally averse to changing anything even when it seems most necessary. Graeber and Wengrow’s book was in part about the human capacity to experiment with social organisation and asked specifically we seem to have gotten stuck at our current juncture.
If there are some who resort to violence when things get difficult (and of course there are) then being prepared to defend ourselves is important, but it’s no solution, any more than women-only train carriages are a solution to misogynistic violence. We have to try to build peaceful societies.
Joe,
I can abhor and condemn the murders of the Albigensian Crusades as a betrayal of the Gospel and of the natural law. But how can your evolutionary ethics do so? On that view, it’s just the Catholic culture engaged in “survival of the fittest” against the Cathar culture, and there’s no room for moral outrage at the cruel certainty of anyone.
Are you, as an atheist, /certain/ that invisible truths have no place in politics, and that we can only evaluate the world according to the interaction of physical/biological/sociological forces? If so, I think there may be some atrocities that /your/ certainty needs to answer for… (Cavanaugh’s “Myth of Religious Violence” is an important study here)
It’s just the Catholic culture engaged in “survival of the fittest” against the Cathar culture, and there’s no room for moral outrage at the cruel certainty of anyone.
That’s pretty much it, except that while there’s plenty of room for moral outrage everywhere, there’s no “invisible truth” that provides certain justification for that outrage.
Just about every human behavior and atrocity that are possible to be outraged about have been accepted as normal, even exemplary, by some culture or another. This is why it can be so easy to slaughter each other.
And while I certainly have the average ability to be outraged (don’t get me started on Donald Trump), I know that my outrage is a product of my upbringing and social conditioning, not something that is justified or underpinned by an eternal truth writ large across the heavens.
I found cultural relativism a hard pill to swallow after being brought up in, and indoctrinated by, my culture. At first it was depressing to find out that my opinion of what was great and good were specific to my culture and that people from other cultures might have different views. It certainly took the edge off any ambitions for “success”.
It got a little easier to accept after living in a couple of different cultures for a few years each, but I still have the prejudices and habits of thought typical of a modern white American. I don’t try to fight it too much, since I live in the US, but I don’t let it overwhelm me with anger at “strange and deviant” activities in other cultures either.
Cultural relativism is a religious doctrine of the materialist ideology of Liberalism, by which many of our ruling class are indoctrinated. It should not be forgotten how friendly the New Atheists have been with the last few decades of “anti-terrorist” warmongers and neoliberal techno-optimists. Why do you allow this superstitious belief to overwhelm you with disdain for the many “strange and deviant” cultures and religions who belief in objective Truth and Goodness? Indeed, why even bother arguing against Theists and Virtue Ethicists, when you acknowledge the unknowability and amorality of everyone’s philosophic claims?
Fascinating back-and-forth as ever brings the zen-inflected last verse of the pretty song Truth Serum to mind:
People people there’s a lesson here plain to see,
There’s no truth in you
There’s no truth in me
The truth is between
The truth is between
I’ll link to the more rousing recent track though – songs often partake in my processing of life in dark times and light – with the wry last lines ‘Two million years of data, humans still in mode Beta, despite natural information.’ Natural information … that’s kind of what runs through the mind whenever I draw a fresh bucket of water up from the well. It’s cloudy now (lots of rain).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SlfltG9Wdc&list=RD4SlfltG9Wdc&start_radio=1
So many words. So little useful information.
Philosophizing about a future society is not very helpful when we don’t know what next year’s weather will be. Any new moral code is going to have to supplant the current dominant religion of money and greed.
On evolution – birds communicate and learn from each other. Their head is no wider than your thumb.
‘Any new moral code is going to have to supplant the current dominant religion of money and greed.’
Surely a project worth carrying forward then, if we want to unseat that dominant religion?
As I understand it there’s certainly some question as to whether some birds, especially corvids, possess some version of a theory of mind, but even if they do, that’s not the same as conceptual thought, mediated by a rich and varied linguistic ability.
Evolution has great explanatory power as an idea, but let’s keep it in its lane. The evolution of organisms through natural selection relates simply to whether their heritable characteristics are a help or a hindrance to their reproduction within the vicissitudes of their environments. Humans are able to alter their attitudes, behaviours and technical abilities and strategies through conceptual reflection, so even measuring them only by the narrow yardstick of successful reproduction, they are far from having to rely solely on heritable characteristics.
The humanities and social sciences have learned the hard way that applying evolutionary models developed through the study of biology and ecology to human societies and cultures never really works, and often has regrettable outcomes.
If evolutionary models don’t apply to human societies and cultures, what principles do you propose to explain their evolution? Or are you saying that “evolution” is a descriptive term that can never be applied to changes in human behavior over time? If so, that’s going to be very limiting when seeking explanations of cultural change.
I like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s description of the importance of evolution from his book The Phenomenon of Man:
“Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”
This from a man who was a Jesuit priest.
Joe, thanks for your replies to both my comments. I’ll reply here to both.
I think evolution is an idea that can be used to explain the persistence or disappearance of particular genetic adaptations within biological species over long periods of time, or something to that effect. I don’t see the benefit of trying to increase its scope or turn it into some kind of all-encompassing metaphor, especially as you’re using the idea that societies or cultures evolve in order to argue that we don’t need to look to any other explanations for cultural change (in this case, that there’s essentially no pressing reason to talk about the roles of moral or religious reasoning in our societies and whether those roles can be reworked).
Human genetics remains subject to evolutionary selection in some ways – as for example when a global pandemic sorts through those who have greater or lesser immunity to it. In an even more dramatic sense, climate chaos is ramping up the kinds of environmental vicissitudes that will kill people no matter what genetic variations their bodies might harbour.
But outside theses sorts of considerations humans do not ‘evolve’ in any kind of appreciably important ways – genetic drift over decades and centuries is not going to have massive effects on societies and cultures.
Understanding cultural change is a fascinating project that keeps people like myself, a historian, employed, because there’s not one dominant or most effective way to do it. Ironically, I think this is because we have evolved to be creatures capable of conceptual thought. That makes us very different from other animals, in that things like attitudes towards morality can have large effects on the organisation of societies.
I take your point about the difficulty of planning out a new society de novo, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. To me, this post and the discussion is about identifying a problem and thinking about what kinds of intervention might help resolve it, or at least put us on a better path.
For what it’s worth, I also have issues with Sean’s approach that I’m still thinking through, but I do think the task here is very much worth the effort.
Whether next year’s weather is good or ill, whether the harvest is foul or fair, we can and ought to know the just and upright way to distribute whatever we have to those in need.
It has been a long wind up. Where’s the pitch ?
What are the first principles that define the parameters of the good life in ways that engage and motivate people ? What moral principles are going to get every Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Atheist, Socialist, Capitalist, ecoModernist … saying ‘you know, these Distributists really have it figured out. Let’s let bygones be bygones and get on with this’ ?
‘[W]e locate in human life the most important thing in the cosmos: humans are the reason that justice, beauty, and love can be articulated and enjoyed.’
This lovely sentence states a ‘truth’ that I am happy to acknowledge. I think many people, of many religions or none, would also acknowledge it – perhaps it’s even the ‘pitch’ that Greg requests. If we acted in accordance with it, the world would be a better place.
Clearly, though, what I’ve just written looks very naive, because many people don’t act as if this was a true, and it’s not clear how we could persuade them to. Treating a commitment to justice, beauty and love as an (the?) important element in any plan to shape the future is far down the list of priorities for many, as some comments here have shown, perhaps because it’s simply not recognised as an acceptable form of ‘serious’ strategising. To paraphrase Kathryn above, are we in danger of forgetting to ask what would make survival worthwhile?
Of course, if we did accept the importance of a just and virtuous life, questions remain about how it should be lived – I do take seriously points made by Greg and Joe about the variety of definitions people might produce for justice and virtue. Personally I can’t accept Sean’s route to the sentence I quoted above (I see justice, beauty and love as human, not Divine), and I object to the social structures and strictures that are often proposed in the name of natural law – for example, the justification of patriarchal authority as an expression of love, or the designation of actions such as abortion as sinful.
Nevertheless, if the need to create a society in which people are at least able to seek after justice, beauty and love was taken seriously, we might find that we could all agree on more. As the world stands today, it would actually be quite radical to insist that the lives and well-being of others matter, and that that should be the lodestar for all our strategies and plans. In a world made increasingly chaotic by climate change, war and disease, the insistence that nobody be left behind is revolutionary!
Andrew
It was revolutionary two thousand years ago, too. Unfortunately the person (who, incidentally, I believe is fully human *and* fully Divine — to state that something can be only one or the other is a false dichotomy) advocating for this went and got himself crucified…
This is, of course, an oversimplification too. Jesus was not the first or only person to promote the Golden Rule. But the powerful of the day didn’t take it very well, and perhaps that is something to remember in our own efforts.
“In a world made increasingly chaotic by climate change, war and disease, the insistence that nobody be left behind is revolutionary!”
The fact that a “revolution” is now necessary is just an artifact of our relatively new modern world. For hundreds of thousands of years people lived their lives without posing any threat to the ecosphere at all. They lived those lives in a wide variety of cultures that were a response to their natural and human environment. They lived, loved, fought and died as an integral part of the natural world.
It was only when the pursuit of goodness, truth and justice was accompanied by guns, germs and steel, eventually amplified by fossil fuel energy, that thousands of ancient indigneous cultures around the world were destroyed. But for the spread of modern colonialism all over the world they might have lasted for millions of years. Those indigenous cultures were, of course, unfit for their new environment of great power competition.
The only reason we moderns need to have these conversations about a revolution and a small farm future is that we destroyed a perfectly sustainable and benign small farm / gatherer past. It now remains to be seen whether we are fit enough to survive in an environment that still contains millions of years of preserved sunlight (after using about half of it to wreck the climate and wreak other untold damage). So far, the evidence indicates that we are not.
Thanks Andrew for a well reasoned reply.
And while I understand your objection to Joe’s broad view of the scope of evolution, personally I’d draw my view wider than yours. It’s complicated. Can we really determine where our intellect/will leaves off and the forces of nature take up?
Certainly it isn’t a distinct line in the sand to be discovered. Though I will readily acknowledge that you doubtless have much more information and experience relevant to locating that line.
So I don’t feel any need to argue where the line may be, really.
But this exactly:
“…it would actually be quite radical to insist that the lives and well-being of others matter…”
I could not agree more.
But what I’m going to argue here is the definition of “others”.
I read a book about bears, “In the Company of Bears” by Benjamin Kilham, where he argues that bears have a very finely developed sense of justice. Just as one instance of non-human species defining what we are prone to call human values. And beauty? We have trouble agreeing about that within our own species, I think it is going way too far to assert that other species can’t define beauty.
As for the articulation part… sure, articulation in a way that we humans understand. Perhaps our not seeing other beings articulating justice, beauty, and love is due to our failure not theirs.
So I do not “…locate in human life the most important thing in the cosmos: humans are the reason that justice, beauty, and love can be articulated and enjoyed.”
Human life is important. And whatever way I might sound in the comments section here, I don’t have any animus against religion. But one of the major failings of the big monotheisms (among others) is their insistence that our species is the crown of creation.
Funny that nobody ever seems to talk about God’s response to Job being evidence that God thought of our species as just one among many. If one even treats the book of Job as more than a human invention.
This next part is more of a response to Sean, but I’m putting it here…
I do not believe that divine revelation is the only path to truth, and justice, beauty, and love. Yes, I am questioning the existence of truth writ large.
No, I do not believe that this dooms us to violence and despair. I believe that we can arrive at justice, beauty, and love by finding first principles that are well suited to producing them. Divine revelation may be one of the ways of finding such first principles, but it is hubris to assert that divine revelation is the only way. An arbitrary (or evolutionary) path can get us there too.
And what about other current examples of evolutionary development? What do justice, beauty, and love look like in the insect world? Is our view the only correct one because of our different anatomy and our ability to conceptualize gods?
I believe that we can arrive at justice, beauty, and love by the following first principles:
It is good to be alive.
Treat others as you would be treated.
As Andrew says above, these principles have not been very effectively applied amongst our species lately.
I will say one more thing.
I have stared into the face of a bear. For what felt like a very long time, and from what turned out to be a safe distance. And I can say that the only species that I know of that is any danger at all to me is my own.
Thanks Eric. I’d certainly acknowledge the significance of the forces of nature, broadly conceived, on the development of human societies – especially in our current era! But I think the significance of human genetics on such development is far less important, or at least confined to very specific areas, such as relative immunity to diseases.
You’ve opened an intriguing line of thought concerning non-human notions of justice, beauty and love. I would have to insist that humanity has a more complex set of capacities for all three, but perhaps it’s more of a sliding scale featuring some animals as well, and not a clean break between one kind of existence and another – I’ll have to chase down the book you mentioned. It seems to me that thinking agilely with concepts is very much a human trait, but the grey area between us and some other animals is doubtless a fascinating place. Certainly animals can have rich emotional lives, if my dog’s any guide!
What this all means ethically is definitely worth more discussion.
Sorry Chris, I’ll shut up now.
Sean wrote, “Whether next year’s weather is good or ill, whether the harvest is foul or fair, we can and ought to know the just and upright way to distribute whatever we have to those in need.”
Nothing external to our individual selves is stopping us as individuals from currently distributing whatever we have to those in need, in whatever way we individually believe is just and upright. There is something to be said for being the change you want to see in the world.
Marshall Rosenberg, author of Nonviolent Communication, has said that people don’t like to be “should upon”. (Say it quickly if the play on words is not apparent.) The ten commandments (and other doctrines) have been around for thousands of years, and yet the “should” approach doesn’t seem to be working well. Distributism lines up pretty well with my personal values, but how can it be developed without becoming yet another set of “shoulds” that will be similarly ignored by many?
It strikes me that in discussions here at the clubhouse of the Small Farm Future fan club, there are still significant divisions regarding what should be done. Since actions speak louder than words, perhaps we could start with our individual lives, living in ways we personally consider to be “just and upright”, setting an example in our spheres of influence (family, acquaintances, churches or other groups). Love, commitment, and generosity can be contagious.
I certainly agree: there’s no good preaching what we do not practice. However, every human action has an intention, and every intention has a moral quality. We are always operating by a set of internal “shoulds” when we intellectually deliberate about what we should or should not do.
I think the Ten Commandments, the Cardinal Virtues, and the Golden Rule have worked quite well. The problem is those (all throughout history) who refuse to be submit to moral restraints and instead serve their private gain over and against the common good.
That’s the central contention of both the virtue ethics and the Christian condition: the source of evil in the world is not a particular group of people, nor arbitrary Fate, nor cruel and uncaring gods… but the struggle between virtue and vice, holiness and sin, justice and tyranny.
I don’t agree that we are always operating by a set of internal “shoulds” which inform our deliberations. Many actions come naturally, without internal (deliberated) “shoulds”.
In my experience, what’s done in caring and loving relationships isn’t prompted by “shoulds”, and is not done to be “virtuous”.
Habits come naturally, but a man can be a habitually loving father or a habitually abusive one. We must always evaluate our habits according to morality.
And of course perfect love transcends the motivations of moral legalism, but we need moral law to even try advancing towards perfect love, a state which exceeding few people (of which I am NOT one) achieve in this life.
How would you suggest that Distributism could be practiced by someone before they advocate for it?
I have a few ideas if you want to read them…
I was asking Sean what ‘practicing what one preaches’ looks like in the context of advocacy for distributism, but I’m happy to learn from anybody about ‘walking the talk’.
To give some examples pertinent to members of this particular forum, I know that Chris has provided a place to stay for people who would be otherwise unhoused, and I’ve had my share of sofa surfers over the years. At my church we grow vegetables in the (comparatively small) churchyard for use in the soup kitchen, and one of my activities is teaching garden volunteers (soup kitchen guests or volunteers and also congregation members, as well as the vicar) a bit of gardening too. None of this is conditional, we aren’t compelling anyone to dig potatoes, but all of it involves using the resources we do have access to in pursuit of solidarity with and greater autonomy for everyone involved.
Similarly, in my household we attempt some (rather modest) level of localism in the food we buy, and as great a degree of self-provisioning as we can with access to a couple of allotments, the back garden of our (rented) house, and a fairly wide range of foraging on what could be called commons (London has more public parks than most cities, and it’s rare for me to visit one without seeing something edible, though the harvest is greatest in autumn). I also encourage my neighbours to get involved in growing some vegetables.
These are small and by some measures insignificant efforts but they do, I think, all point to the possibility of some system outside of either financialised capitalism or state socialism; and they all bring current benefits not easily quantified within those systems. I’m not yet sure that I would call myself a distributist rather than, say, a Christian anarchist, but I’m certainly interested.
I expect that as a Catholic Worker, Sean would have more extensive experience of intentionally putting aspects of distributism into practice in his own life and household. He and I have some things in common (theism, to start with), but are very different in other respects (I expect on a lot of issues I come out more ‘progressive’ and he as more ‘conservative’ — though those are mostly not the issues we discuss here), and so the ways in which we attempt to put distributism (or something next to it) into practice will also have different emphases. An atheist distributist might have different strategies again.
“Do good, avoid evil” is the most general way to phrase virtue ethics. But that can be infinitely specified, since all our intentional actions are moral.
Perhaps, as one example focused on virtues related to money and possessions, I’ll refer you to this excellent Podcast season on “Good Money”, exploring the classical virtue of liberality, amount others: https://tradistae.com/2021/09/18/an-introduction-to-good-money/
Interesting article, thanks Sean. It seems that the widespread goal of accumulating wealth has been replaced here by concerns about “building up virtue”, perhaps as a means to obtain rewards in the afterlife? I wonder what a secular version would look like, based on intrinsic motivation (applicable to both the religious and non-religious).
Thanks for the examples, Kathryn, and your thoughts on “the ways in which we attempt to put distributism (or something next to it) into practice.” I’d like to see a distributist strategy that could get widespread support, regardless of religious affiliation.
It is an interesting thought that “every human action has an intention, and every intention has a moral quality”.
Every so often I have a worker who can figure out the wrong way to do anything. Or I can tell them specifically what to do, and while they may get close, it is not quite right. Not always but often enough. I’d always put it down it ignorance or incompetence.
It is the end of the season. We’re busy and I just let someone go. Maybe that explains the sense of relief I feel.
I was offline over the weekend – thanks everyone for sustaining the discussion and raising so many points of interest. No need to apologise or shut up, Joe!
I think my best option is to write another blog post by way of response, rather than trying to pick up the major themes from these comments with further comments here from me. I’ll aim to do that within the next few days. And then move on to other things – although much that’s discussed here relates to questions of politics that I’ll be raising soon.
This about sums things up .
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/victor-davis-hanson-thinnest-veneer-civilization-remains
Yes, but Victor Davis Hanson thinks there is a way to keep modern civilization going if the stupid leftists and woke progressives would just get out of the way. He is mistaken. There is no political party or method of social organization that can substitute for high levels of energy use per capita. When that energy goes away, as it will soon, so will modern civilization.
In fact, now that modern civilization is global and so very complicated, I suspect that it will collapse rapidly if key participating economies stop growing and go into continuous recession. But I may be too optimistic about that, rapid collapse of modern civilization being my fondest hope. It’s going to happen sooner or later and sooner would be best for the planet and future generations. We might as well get ready,
I find this statement to be repulsive:
the Christian emphasis on the dignity of the human person is the only reason we have values like universal human rights. The fact that we want distributism for the sake of liberty, equality, and fraternity of the whole human race is because we locate in human life the most important thing in the cosmos
I do not locate in human life the most important thing in the cosmos. Human life is just another life, and one that is bothering many other lives at that. I can not take seriously any statements of concern for the living planet that includes such bald human supremacy.
humans are the reason that justice, beauty, and love can be articulated and enjoyed.
Unsurprisingly, this is simply a statement of faith, not of science. This is not known, and scientifically, can never be known.
But I think it encapsulates a significant part of the problem in its blind grandiosity: it is absolutely bigoted human supremacy, it is unfounded in fact, it can never be proven—and yet it is proclaimed as certainty.
Ruben
I think Sean may have been referring here to the way the Renaissance and Enlightenment thought led to Christian Humanist philosophy and then, eventually, to secular humanism. Certainly I read it as a statement about the development of these ideas.
I think there is a strong argument within the Christian Humanist framework that humans are *not* “better than” other creatures, but still have a special role to play as stewards of Creation. I sortof think it’s a silly argument, though; whether or not we are “suppose to” be caring for/exercising dominion over/whatever the Earth, current evidence suggests that we *are* more than capable of messing it all up very badly at great cost to the entire system. We do have that power, no matter how we try to pretend otherwise.
A better question than whether we should have that power is around how we *can* use it to establish something more like balance, for the common good of humanity and all creatures. In this, I do think Western modernity suffers from a sort of impoverishment of imagination.
I find it hard to articulate how difficult to understand the idea of humans stewarding creation is. It like someone is explaining a very difficult concept to me in a language that neither of us speaks, so I keep turning the volume up to help me understand.
Regardless, I think ants are doing a noticeably better job stewarding creation than humans are.
In non-religious terms, I would look at the concept of humans being “patch disturbers” or “keystone species”. Beavers are another example. We have an ecological niche..
The reality is that we *do* exert power over our surroundings, and so it is also our responsibility to do so in ways that are sustainable and constructive.
I absolutely agree we’re currently doing a rubbish job of this.
Joe, you speak so plainly and clearly about evolution, even through confusion about the map of our concept of evolution and the terrain of the changes of life on this planet, so I couldn’t pick a spot to share this anecdote.
John Todd, the ecological designer of “Living Machine” water and sewage treatment systems, says simply that humans are not capable of understanding or predicting the fine details of how a group of organisms will work together and will stabilize into a little ecosystem.
After many failures they started just stocking the systems with thousands of species; maybe 2,500 species, of which 200 or so would persist in the stable system. They let evolution sort it out.
Ruben, I fear I align with your ‘human supremacists’, so thought I ought to respond. Of the quotes that you take from Sean’s piece, I too would question whether we owe the idea of universal human rights to Christianity, but I don’t think its neccessarily Christian or faith-based to see the differences between humanity and other organisms as significant. The fact that humans are currently bothering many other creatures on this earth on a scale and comprehensiveness outside the capacities of any of those other creatures would support that.
In terms of the unique human capacity to articulate justice, beauty and love, I didn’t read that to imply that other animals can’t experience what we would call justice, beauty and love in some way, but it’s the ‘what we would call’ part of that sentence that’s important. Humans are the only animals capable of associating those feelings with concepts that we can then manipulate – we are the only animals that who can change our societies deliberately, intentionally, outside of the pure contingency that enables other animals to escape the negative effects of changes in their environments.
It’s not an article of faith to ‘believe’ that, because observations of our history – indeed, the very fact that we have some idea of the past that’s worth thinking about – demonstrate it. Meanwhile, my dog may love chasing a stick, and sometimes even bringing it back to me, but she never takes it home to contemplate its beauty while eating her breakfast.
I would also suggest that you’re not above a bit of human supremacy if your second post is anything to go by. You tell the tale of a human who wanted a sewage treatment system, and was prepared to sacrifice the lives of members of thousands of spieces (over 90% of the spieces he introduced) in order to get it. Now I don’t really have a problem with this, but I think it undercuts your protestations of human supremacy – these were presumably micro-organisms, so perhaps you’re only a mammalian supremecist, or something like that, but you do at least appreciate that humans impose a kind of hierarchy of needs on the other creatures of this world. As Kathryn says, it’s what we do with that power that matters.
Finally, I don’t think what you describe there is ‘evolution’ anyway. It’s more like the dynamics of ecosystem creation – as far as we know there were no genetic mutations within the communities concerned that caused only ‘fitter’ contigents of some of those species to survive. If we took your tale as an analogy for human society, I think you’d be desribing a world in which humans were dominated by the desire to fight each other for resources, and were prepared to fight it out, all against all, until those who were left saw the benefit of a kind of social contract (or stable ecosystem) to guard their own rights while acknowledging others. Is that really the basis on which you think humanity should face the future, letting ‘evolution sort it out’?
Thanks for putting so much thought into your response Andrew. I will try to be as articulate.
its [not] neccessarily Christian or faith-based to see the differences between humanity and other organisms as significant.
I agree the differences between humans and other organisms are significant.
For example, bees can smell electricity. Can you imagine how much more efficient our utilities would be if installers and lineworkers had such capacity and were not labouring with sadly too-human stunted and incapable senses?
Albatrosses can sleep half their brain while flying. Again, imagine what humans could do if we did not have such a rudimentary meat suit.
But seriously, we do have thumbs. I think is the main thing that has allowed us to cause such impact on the rest of the ecosphere.
So I do think the differences are significant, but I don’t think significant differences qualify to locate humans as the most important life in the cosmos.
Humans are the only animals capable of associating those feelings with concepts that we can then manipulate – we are the only animals that who can change our societies deliberately, intentionally, outside of the pure contingency that enables other animals to escape the negative effects of changes in their environments.
I actually think you are just wrong about this. Did you know that crows can communicate hatred of certain individual humans on to subsequent generations of unrelated crows.
Have you seen the videos of ravens tobogganing? In other words, using tools for play?
We have almost no knowledge of the behaviour of creatures we know to be brilliant and have complex social structures, like whales and dolphins, so you certainly can not know your statement to be true.
you do at least appreciate that humans impose a kind of hierarchy of needs on the other creatures of this world
I understand that human impose our hierarchy of needs on the world. What I do not believe is that human needs are more important than the needs of any other organism. Obviously we think they are more important, but we also once thought we simply had to have a certain kind of running shoe or we would just die. We thought that granite countertops would make us happy.
With every mouthful a blue whale can ingest half a million krill. Half a million little lives, with parents, and possibly children.
Now, I personally doubt that krill are conscious, or have emotions.
But I also do not believe that being conscious or having emotions should give us dominion over the world.
Yes, we have dominion over the world, not for better, but for worse, but we have that not because we deserve it, or because Sky Daddy gave it to us, but rather because we are social, have thumbs, and ate meat. Roll of the dice, and if it had rolled just slightly different we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.
Meanwhile, orcas, which are clearly conscious and have emotions, play with their food in ways we find brutal.
Why do we find that brutal…? Human supremacy. We have decided that causing certain kinds of pain in certain situations is barbaric.
Meanwhile, causing other kinds of pain in other situations is normal, glorified, business as usual, or just what the bastards deserve.
If you want to delve into the rich and bizaree human history of causing truly esoteric forms of pain…well, you know what book to read.
So no, I don’t think that allowing a tankful of various organisms to die is human supremacy. We allow countless tidal pools to dry up every day, snuffing out innumerable creatures. Should we not?
Dying is what life does. The idea that death should come in bed at the end of a “full” life is a madness quite possibly limited to the human mind, prone to delusions as we are.
If only we weren’t crippled with such inadequate hearing, we might be able to hear the screams of creatures dying all around us at all times, along with the first gasps of those being born.
Did you know that a lonely elephant has called to whales, because both of them voice in deep subsonic?
We are surrounded by death and life, and point of John Todd’s strategy is that is exactly what nature does. Accepting that we are not perceptive enough to see the tidal pool that is drying up around us is not human supremacy.
Finally, I don’t think what you describe there is ‘evolution’ anyway. It’s more like the dynamics of ecosystem creation – as far as we know there were no genetic mutations within the communities concerned that caused only ‘fitter’ contigents of some of those species to survive. If we took your tale as an analogy for human society, I think you’d be desribing a world in which humans were dominated by the desire to fight each other for resources, and were prepared to fight it out, all against all, until those who were left saw the benefit of a kind of social contract (or stable ecosystem) to guard their own rights while acknowledging others. Is that really the basis on which you think humanity should face the future, letting ‘evolution sort it out’?
This is perhaps the most religious of your points.
So yes, the main action is likely “survival of the fittest”, though I think it is inconceivable that there is not genetic or epigenetic change occurring, given the reproductive time of bacteria is measured in minutes.
Evolution is not progress to some point that humans consider good, or efficient, or dominant, or majestic, or funny looking, so there certainly is evolution—descent with modification—occurring in the sewage systems.
But yes, the big action is survival of the fittest, which as you say is really contingents of organisms. It is not the fittest organism it is the most cooperative group of organisms.
Contingent is funny word there. Contingent on what? What is this contingent contingent on?
Well, not on supremacy. The group survives because everybody has their little place, their little role, their little scrap that they eat so they grow big before they are themselves eaten.
This is not a story of fighting over resources, this is a story of maximizing the use of resources. Every photon that hits the earth is transformed, and passed on, handed around, recycled. Sometimes the photon is eaten, and then the eater is eaten. Sometimes the photon is shat out and the shit is eaten.
You are trying to tell a moral story with this, but in fact you still tell a story of supremacy. You are not seeing past the punitive to the cooperative.
Now, this still is not a comfortable binary of good vs. evil. Humans are splashing around in our tidal pool, with our particular and beautiful capacities. We have developed amazing lifeways that allowed us to fit niches all around the planet. Not only should we keep growing and evolving, but we will because that is what organisms do. Humans gonna human.
And I think we should evolve new lifeways that discard our supremacist cults and seek return in healthy contingents.
But seeking to better maximize loose photons is not supremacy, it is not a faith that we will achieve comprehension, that we will harness sufficient energy, that we will terraform earth.
That would require an evolutionary leap we have not made.
To put it plainly, a foremost expert in the world was unable to find contingents that would survive in his systems. Using just a few thousand of the millions of species on the planet, he could not execute a basic, quotidian task, which is performed effortlessly in ecosystems around the world.
Our brains are not capable, and likely our sense are not either. We took a massive evolutionary leap to get even this far, little runts of the litter that we are, and the odds may not be with us making a massively larger leap that would also need to bring in genetics from outside our phylum.
Todd had to let evolution sort it out.
The evidence, scientific and historical, lies against our supremacy, which again, is different from the power of our opposable thumbs.
With scientific and historical evidence against it, what foundation is left?
Thanks for the comprehensive reply Ruben. Let me start with where we agree:
‘Yes, we have dominion over the world, not for better, but for worse, but we have that not because we deserve it, or because Sky Daddy gave it to us, but rather because we are social, have thumbs, and ate meat.’
I’d probably make more of our big brains and how that affects our sociality, but essentially I agree – our superiority in the world is not due to winning the ‘most beloved of God’ comptetion, but to evolution, which led the human genome to where it is today.
But it is still a position of superiority. I take your point about the different sensory capacities of other organisms, but our human minds enable a different kind of sensitivity, to concepts, ‘invisible things’. Likewise, I acknowledged earlier in a reply to Eric that some other animals may possess this capacity in a rudimentary way – corvids, primates, dolphins and whales I think about covers it – but again, the human version of this capacity appears far more complex than anything these others possess.
But is acknowleding this ‘human supremacy’? You seem happy to admit our de facto dominion of the earth, even if we don’t deserve it. You seem to object to our judgements of other creatures’ behaviour in ‘human’ terms – now I agree that we humans can be hypocritical (violence ‘wrong’ there, but ‘right’ here), but I don’t understand why we shouldn’t make judgements about the extra-human world.
You also provide a judgement of your own, that death should always be welcomed as an essential part of the natural world (us included) – I agree it’s essential, but why the scorn for those who would like to die happy in their beds at the end of a long life? Are we not allowed to make judgements about different kinds of death?
In fact you seem to dislike the notion of humans deciding anything much at all. You suggest that Todd’s undertaking involved ‘allowing a tankful of various organisms to die’, but he didn’t just allow it – it wasn’t just a case of him not being ‘perceptive enough to see the tidal pool that is drying up’, it was a process that he delibertaly put into effect, knowing that the interactions of the various organisms would stabilise in a way useful to his own design. That’s fine by me, but he wasn’t just ‘letting evolution sort it out’, he was actively using a ‘natural’ process to advantage.
I must admit, I’m not entirely clear on your point in your last section about evolution, but again I think it comes down to whether or not humans should be waying up decisions or not – whether they should see their place in the world as one informed by ‘morality’. You object to me telling a moral story, but I would say that as humans that’s what we all do (‘humans gonna human’). You’re also telling a moral story by suggesting that our progress in the world should be ‘evolutionary’, by which I think you mean that we should develop new lifeways to better fit the niches offered by the world.
What that forcloses, I think, is that we should shape those niches according to our own thinking and judgement. That doesn’t mean desigining everything down to the last little organism – Todd’s example shows how humans can collaborate with ‘natural’ processes – but it does mean taking a view on the world we want to build and justifying it accordingly.
As far as I can see, you want to avoid this justification – you want a human society more at home within the other ‘natural’ processes that constitute the world (fair enough, me too!), but you want evolution to ‘sort it out’. I’m still not really sure what that would mean, but I fear it would mean ascribing developments that might well involve human loss and tragedy to a kind of natural nemesis against our ‘human supremacy’. That is one choice of course, but it is still a choice – I don’t think you can escape its moral implications by pretending that it’s ‘natural’, ‘evolution’ or whatever. Better in my opinion to be proactive about such judgements – discuss what would be ‘best’ for everyone (human and non-human) and work towards it.
What is best and who controls th e narrative ?
When the UN stated yesterday that it OWNS the science and has partnered with Google to make sure only UN approved global warming searches information shown , searchers are then sent to the UN official website .
How can any decision be made when one side censors usefull information ?
There are other search engines
There are other ways to find information beyond sitting on your arse listening to someone tell you what to think, or keying a handful of letters into a search engine.
Censorship is an active suppression or prohibition. Pushing your way to the top of the stump and turning the volume to 11 on the amp might look like censorship to an unimaginative audience, but it lines up more as the effort of a bully in the pulpit.
What is your definition of useful information? In what context? Useful for today and the next 24 hours? Useful for our children and the offspring of ants still present in 25 years?
I will agree that a UN person suggesting that someone might “own the science” is a pretty disgusting turn of phrase – one the paints the person using it as owning an overly simplistic and unrealistic view of science in the first place. So I’d like to see her apologize for the poor choice of words. But getting past the ugly sound bite you come back to the responsibility of the viewer (or listener) to do their own homework. If Google won’t help, try another route. But be careful not to limit the effort to only one source either.
“…but it does mean taking a view on the world we want to build and justifying it accordingly.”
We have all seen where a dominant world view can take us through unintended consequences, or not. It all gets built and justified and has led us to disaster.
There has to be more to it.
The ‘morality’ of capitalism is consistent and air tight. God could even be on the side of the richest, lavishly rewarding them for their good deeds.
90+% of all searches are done on Google , our local high school kids have computers that only have Google as a search engine , downloading another one is forbidden ..
My definition of usefull information is to look very closely at anything the msm does not like or cover or classes as disinformation !
Thanks back at you, for continuing to polish these ideas, Andrew.
I’d probably make more of our big brains and how that affects our sociality
Yes, this is what I was pointing to when I said we ate meat. That is likely what allowed our brains to grow so big.
but it is still a position of superiority. I take your point about the different sensory capacities of other organisms, but our human minds enable a different kind of sensitivity, to concepts, ‘invisible things’. Likewise, I acknowledged earlier in a reply to Eric that some other animals may possess this capacity in a rudimentary way – corvids, primates, dolphins and whales I think about covers it – but again, the human version of this capacity appears far more complex than anything these others possess.
I think this is a big point of conflict between us.
What I hear is that you are taking a small and very well-defined capacity, and expanding it to a state of superiority. So, I think at a minimum you need to define what you think superiority is.
I agree that the human version of this capacity for abstract thought is more complex than that of any other species—as far as we know. Again, orcas have been swimming the seas for 40 million years, whereas we have only been modern humans for 300,000 years. I think it would be presumptuous for us to decree they have less going on in their brain than we do.
What I have been trying to point out to you is that other species have other ways of knowing the world. Epistemic privilege like this means we cannot know the world as they do, and we will never be able to.
With our remarkable brains and agile tongues we are still not capable of asking an orca how their day is going.
So to say that we are better than them has to be extremely tightly fenced. Yes, we have capacities that they do not have, just as they have capacities that we do not have. Some of these capacities may rival or exceed our own remarkable capacities, just in ways that we can not know, and can not even conceive exists.
This conversation is made more difficult because superlative words have been larded with history.
I have been using human supremacy to draw obvious parallels with white supremacy, another faith unmoored from reality.
I said dominion to try avoid the connotations of superiority, but that word still stinks of the divine right of kings.
Superior is like efficiency; we must always ask superior at what?
A superior swimmer is seldom a superior runner. A superior cook may not be a superior farmer.
So you say humans have a position of superiority, and I ask, of what?
I agree that humans have done a hell of a job of rapidly changing the ecosphere. We are still very small beans compared to the Cyanobacters, which caused a mass extinction and triggered an ice age. We should keep trying though!
We can’t fly, we can’t dive deep, we can’t run very fast. We are group of mediocre generalists, and compared to other generalists, we have not yet endured even a fifth as long as crows, a tenth as long as deer, or even 1% as long as cockroaches.
But yes, as far as we know, we are the best at using abstract thought.
And yes, in about the last 3% of human history since we began agriculture, a portion of us have formed a cult that asserts this capacity for abstract thought makes us “superior”.
On the face it is an odd assertion, since it has gone hand in hand with rendering our surrounding unable to support us. So superior at what?
We are not healthier or happier, with absolutely skyrocketing diseases of industrialization. We do not have more leisure time or make more art. When you look at what most of use our capacity for abstract thought for, it is quite dispiriting. As a matter of fact, we regularly engage in warfare that would make the Assyrian Empire blush and feel inadequate.
Superior at what?
I often enjoy my capacity for abstract thought. My whole life I have wished I could fly with the birds and/or have a prehensile tail, but I would not trade my abstract thinking for even those two marvelous upgrades.
So yes, humans are the superior abstract thinkers. Unfortunately that capacity is inadequate to the task that other species have mastered, that of not destroying the ecosystem we live in.
Specifically, how do you define superiority?
why the scorn for those who would like to die happy in their beds at the end of a long life? Are we not allowed to make judgements about different kinds of death?
I guess I should have emphasized the should in “The idea that death should come in bed at the end of a “full” life is a madness quite possibly limited to the human mind, prone to delusions as we are.”
I feel no scorn for people who want to die in bed. I also hope to die in bed.
In fact, I think it would be great if we applied our abstract thinking to ensure humans died in bed after a long and happy life. With plummeting life spans, sadly we are doing the exact opposite.
I completely understand the desire; what I reject is the entitlement, the idea and action that our death in bed is worth paying for with extinct species and sterilized ecosystems.
I am also saddened by the harm caused by the delusion.
I think it is very North American, and certainly quite modern, but there is a cult of youthful vitality. This is absolutely a core cultural trait that sequesters huge amounts of attention and discourages recognition of the conditions of life.
We have a loud narrative of Success; of what Success looks like, that is blaring from loudspeakers 24/7.
Sadly, in all that noise more and more of us are dying from cancer, from heart disease, and now from COVID. People drop out of life to care for family members, trying to scrape by on part-time work and assistance cheques, and we do not change our narrative of Success one dot.
I know a family who currently has their five year old in palliative care, after two years of battling brain cancer. Brain cancer, with their toddler. And yet all the loudspeakers play is Vitality! Success! Granite countertops! Electric cars!
This family can only be utterly destroyed at the grief of this, the impossible pain of holding a living child dying day by day in their arms, but they are ignored, they have dropped off the screen, because this is not death in bed at the end of a full life. Buy Granite Countertops!
What a great gift it is to die old and happy in bed. But it is that great gift because children die horribly, spouses are lost to dementia, car wrecks tear bodies into pieces, war and famine and drought carry people away every single day.
We are just like all the other species on the planet because we are one of all the other species on the planet.
We are just stupid enough to think our abstract conceptualizations mean we should die old in bed.
Superior at what?
In fact you seem to dislike the notion of humans deciding anything much at all…
…I think it comes down to whether or not humans should be waying up decisions or not – whether they should see their place in the world as one informed by ‘morality’. You object to me telling a moral story, but I would say that as humans that’s what we all do (‘humans gonna human’). You’re also telling a moral story by suggesting that our progress in the world should be ‘evolutionary’, by which I think you mean that we should develop new lifeways to better fit the niches offered by the world.
What that forcloses, I think, is that we should shape those niches according to our own thinking and judgement.
As far as I can see, you want to avoid this justification – you want a human society more at home within the other ‘natural’ processes that constitute the world (fair enough, me too!), but you want evolution to ‘sort it out’. I’m still not really sure what that would mean, but I fear it would mean ascribing developments that might well involve human loss and tragedy to a kind of natural nemesis against our ‘human supremacy’. That is one choice of course, but it is still a choice – I don’t think you can escape its moral implications by pretending that it’s ‘natural’, ‘evolution’ or whatever. Better in my opinion to be proactive about such judgements – discuss what would be ‘best’ for everyone (human and non-human) and work towards it.
There is so much in here that I couldn’t even really edit the paragraphs down.
Let’s start with “but it is still a choice”
Humans do far, far less choosing that we think. A fraction of our behaviours are consciously chosen in any meaningful way. This myth of choice is of course another liturgy in the recent Cult of Superiority.
You are saying we can choose to avoid human loss and tragedy, that allowing natural processes to decide is “giving up”.
I guess I can’t avoid talking about Free Will.
We don’t really have it. Sam Harris wrote a very convincing book on it, which is less surprising because he is a neuroscientist.
Where did we choose to desertify the grain fields of Egypt? Where did we choose to kill all the largest land mammals? Where did we choose to die of heart attacks? Where did we choose to ignore an airborne pandemic? Didn’t you hear? COVID is over.
Where did we choose to destabilize our climate, to destroy the civilizational works of recent centuries?
All that abstract thought and we are dying younger and poorer now than in the last century.
So, I am saying we DO NOT have a choice.
We can’t choose evolution, it is happening whether we like it or not. We have worked ourselves into a situation in which we no longer have the fittest adaptations, and Mother Nature always bats last.
We can’t choose to not be human supremacist, we simply aren’t. We cannot perform the basic tasks of not poisoning the food and water we need to survive. People can label us however they like, but reality intrudes.
So…
I am trying to tell a tale of morality.
I am trying to tell what is happening and will be happening to humans, and how to deny that is to create much greater suffering than otherwise.
I think a great contributor to what is happening is that we have cast ourselves as supreme. In reality we have a very limited ability to usefully apply abstract thoughts, and we have sadly been unable to apply our abstract thought to maintaining an ecosystem and lifeway we can survive in for the long term.
I think all species shape their niches and we should too. We can either do so in a way that aligns with how the ecosphere functions, or we can die confused. We seem to be on the latter path.
Superior at what?
Joe mentioned the Do the Math post on the Cult of Civilization, which is directly relevant, and is linked below.
Also relevant is Human Exceptionalism | Do the Math
Thank you Ruben, you write forcefully about your views on this. You relate a litany of human failures that I can hardly deny, so I suppose it is our responses to those failures that differ so much.
Words are tricky here. Superior? Perhaps distinct, or unique, would be better. But these won’t do because you’ll just tell me truthfully that other species are different or unique in any number of ways. But I think conceptual thought has a much greater capacity to effect change than any other distinctive attribute – that’s precisely why we’ve managed to have such large effects on the world over 300,000 years even though orcas have been swimming in the oceans for 40 million.
But it’s about more than just the relative effectiveness of different capacities. Other species have other ways of knowing the world, sure, but I think only ours thinks collectively about the ways that we know the world, as you and I are doing here. Conceptual thought isn’t just something that each individual human mind has the ability to do, it is something that opens those minds to each other – concepts are created and manipulated between people, not within them. That is why we are able to collaborate and accomplish such transformations (for good or ill), and also why we are able to form societies of many different kinds (whether egalitarian, hierarchical, etc.). The fact that we don’t see such frequent variations and transformations in other animal societies suggests to me that this is something we humans alone are able to achieve.
Superiority? You’re right, it’s the wrong word, because we can lament so much of what we’ve achieved. But we can’t escape our abilities, they are part of who we are as a species. So no, our fate as a species is not solely subject to evolution, because we are able to change our environmental circumstances where they might otherwise have threatened us – we do not need to rely on genetic mutations to change our ‘fitness’ for any given environment. Whether we will be the architects of our own destruction remains to be seen, but can’t simply be predicted.
We may find we quibble over the definition of free will, but I certainly insist that what is commonly understood by that term is real enough. The ability to think abstractly, to change ourselves and our environments in considered fashion, is proof enough for me. So whether or not we’ve chosen in the past to do things well or badly, the fact is that we are able make informed choices, to see the place of choice in the course of events, to be tortured by the agony of making difficult choices, and to know when we’ve avoided such choices when perhaps we shouldn’t have. That’s just who we are as a species, we can’t escape it. So if something looks like a choice, it is one, and to cry ‘evolution’ in order to avoid it is simply dishonest. Whether our choices have the desired effects or unintended consequences is another matter.
You end with this:
‘I think all species shape their niches and we should too. We can either do so in a way that aligns with how the ecosphere functions, or we can die confused. We seem to be on the latter path.’
Despite our disagreements I largely agree. See how you have presented a choice there. Perhaps, if you believe that evolution is the ultimate arbiter, then the latter path is inevitable and this discussion is just so much thumb-twiddling. But I believe we can make a considered choice about how to shape our future on this planet, and that we are the only species that can say as much.
On corvids, specifically crows, I enjoyed Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s ‘Crow Planet’ some years ago.
A review from the NY Times brings some of it back:
Did you know that crows recognize human faces? To prove this, [Haupt] writes, a researcher at the University of Washington conducted an experiment. Volunteers who had captured and banded crows (something crows resent) while wearing caveman masks were cawed at and dive-bombed whenever they re-entered crow precincts. When the same volunteers walked through the crow zone with their faces hidden by Dick Cheney masks, “the crows left them entirely alone.” (Presumably, this reflected no political bias.)
(from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Schillinger-t.html).
But thinking of these bird brains’ evolutionary fitness recalled an account given in ‘Freaks’ by Daniel P. Mannix concerning a type of circus freak called pinheads – people born with a condition called microcephaly – whose small skulls taper to point. A certain Anton Le Vay, who worked with pinheads in circuses, recalls “They’re the only people I know who are completely happy. They don’t worry and have nothing to worry with… Like children, they loved to dress up.”
The passage concludes that most pinheads ‘have no sexual capacities’.
On topic post from Tom Murphy on the cult of civilization:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
Direct link to that post is The Cult of Civilization | Do the Math
Wow. Some wry hilarity from Chris, thank you. And some wildly (intentionally) funny moments from all the commenters along the way. The number 1 rule in our house is PARTY! Which is more difficult than you would think – if you party to hard, your unable to party; your party could make someone mad, that would spoil the party – its tricky. You should try it.
This has been like a deep wordy party and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Im looking forward to the next one. Now we need to get out there and distribute some joy from our mutual understanding of each others party style!