A friend responded to the last post on nature. I understood them to be essentially making three points:
Point one: The division between human and nature is similar to the division between body and soul, essentially ficticious.
Point two: As Humans are natural phenomena, everything they have done is natural. So nature is damaging itself.
Point three: Any act has unforeseen consequences and the world exists in geological time, consequently we have no hope of a political solution to climate change or ecological degradation.
This is my attempt to deal with these issues.
Point 1: The idea of ‘nature’ is a human construct. Like Bateson and others I prefer to think of ecologies and systems. These ideas do challenge ideas of separation, but I’d also like to suggest that the conceptual differences between ‘mind and body’ and ‘human and nature’ are different. The degrees of separation and independence are not the same.
Firstly, there is a non-human world which has, in many senses, little to do with me. I am not it, and it is not me. It has gone on for billions of years without me. It will go on, hopefully for more billions of years, without me. Currently, humans cannot survive without the non-human, and they have emerged out of it – yet once emerged, humans are no longer just a non-reflective part of the rest of the ecology. They are never the whole of the system, and could even be thought of as having a potential to differ from the rest of the system.
However, my body and me do not exist separately in this sense. I can only learn and act with this body. If one dies the other dies. My body is not non-human. It is what makes me human. There is no sense of independence of one side from the other, unless you believe in immortal souls – and that is probably the basis of the idea of separation. There is nothing obvious in the idea of the two being potentially separate or independent.
This takes us to point 2.
Point 2: This potential to be different may not be unique to humans, but there are human constructions which would not exist without humans. Just as there are destructions of ecological systems which would not happen without humans.
It seems to me, there is a problem with dismissing the term ‘nature’ and then keeping the word ‘natural’ to apply to everything which happens on earth and take a position in which human acts and decision become irrelevant, or perfectly in keeping with the rest of the eco-systems. Without this somewhat indiscriminate application of the idea of ‘natural’, there is a sense that humans are ‘extra’ to nature, despite emerging from nature.
Paving a forest is not ‘natural’, as in the world without humans, or human equivalents, this could not occur. Again it emerges out of an ecology, but is destructive of the ecology in a way that the ecology could not achieve without humans. Humans are special, but they are not so special they are above nature. This seems hard for people in the west to grasp. People seem to want humans to be either above nature, or just another bacteria of no real consequence.
To restate: while humans emerge from an ecology of ecologies, the consequences of their acts and decisions can be destructive to the rest of the ecology, and they can be aware of this. In that sense they can be contra-‘natural’ or contra-ecological. This is not a purely human phenomena, other organisms have changed the world’s ecology, but those organisms do not appear to have decided to do this, and have done it slowly enough for other life forms to evolve to deal with, and take advantage of, the transformation. The change has been ecological. Again this is not saying humans will destroy the world, eventually new life will arise, but possibly human life will not survive the rapid changes we are inducing in our ecology, and I personally would find that sad.
Point 3: While it is true that many other creatures seem intelligent or self-aware, it also seems that humans are both intelligent and self-aware to an extent which is unusual. This does not mean that humans are intelligent or self-aware without limits, but it does mean that we have a greater degree of responsibility for our actions. If a bacteria developed which ate everything in its path, then we would probably try and defeat it, but we would not hold it morally culpable. If humans destroy everything in their path then, most humans in their path would say the destroyers should, and perhaps could, have made a different decision. Indeed it appears to be the case that humans, and many creatures, can make decisions.
Finding the right time scale on which to live and make decisions, is likely to be vitally important for life in general. Some decisions or reactions have to be made immediately if you are to survive. Some decisions reflective creatures have more time to make, and for some decisions the creatures may need to think about the time frame for the effects of that decision, whether it is hours, days, months, years, centuries and so on. Thinking either in too long time frames or too short time frames can be deleterious to effectiveness.
Looking at making political or ethical decisions within a time frame of geological time is a good way to achieve demotivation. This is probably why many of the people who embrace climate do-nothingness, or those few non worried scientists, appear to prefer thinking in geological time frames. In terms of geological time, human lives do not matter, creatural lives do not matter, even species survival does not matter. The rocks go on. Life goes on, and it is way outside our sphere of activity.
Nothing matters so we don’t have to make decisions, we don’t have to struggle, we don’t have to worry, we do not have to take any responsibility for any of our own actions in geological times. We can, inadvertently, just let powerful people get on with destroying life chances for everyone, for their temporary benefit – because you can be sure the rulers of the world are not thinking in geological terms. Indeed it seems a common complaint that business does not think beyond the next quarter, which is probably too short a time frame for long term social survival, and increases the risks of any climate change….
One thing that seems to happen regularly when people discover complexity theory, is the assertion that because you cannot control everything in fine detail, you cannot influence anything, or make any decision that is wiser or better than any other. As a consequence, some people argue that complexity theory is wrong, while others argue that politics is wrong. In both cases people seem to be saying that because we cannot do everything perfectly, we can do nothing. This seems silly, and we make decisions and act in our lives all the time despite the fact that these decisions don’t always have the expected consequences. Indeed, most of us might be bored if they did.
It then seems strange to argue that human oppression of other humans is nothing new, and that some humans suffer disastrously because of this. This again seems an abdication, a demand for perfection of complete non-oppression, or a refusal to deal with difficulty. We may not remove hierarchies completely, but that does not mean that some hierarchies are not better than others, and we should not strive for better hierarchies. It also seems odd to tie this in with geological time, as in geological time, these kinds of destructive human hierarchies are extremely new. They are probably at most 10,000 years old, which is nothing.
As a side note, it seems to me, that the so-called hierarchies found in ecological systems are not the same as hierarchies in human systems, it is just a metaphor being taken for reality; ecological hierarchies don’t deliberately oppress in an attempt to generate their own benefit.
Humans are capable of living without mass destruction of global ecological systems, if they learn to adapt to systems or discover how change those systems in beneficial ways, that continue in human time frames. We know this. Some complex civilisations have lasted for considerable periods of time. This means that it is possible to live with ecologies. Difficult, but possible. It is partly a matter of choosing the right frameworks.
Making all human behavior ‘natural’ and thinking in geological time frames are probably not the right frameworks.
Tags: 'nature', climate change, complexity, ethics
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
April 11, 2019 at 2:49 am |
Jon,
We agree on so many more things than we disagree on that the differences between us are matters of emphasis, or perhaps simply of temperament, rather than substance. But for me, and I hope for you, it’s clarifying to explore these differences. There is so much to discuss here. Rather than respond directly to your points or try to frame an overall perspective, I will muse about some key terms in our debate.
I have only a few settled prejudices and even fewer settled opinions, so these musings are really questions and thought experiments, not answers.
Paul
The natural and the human
By saying that the human:nature opposition is like the mind:body opposition, I only meant that both are deeply embedded in common ways of thinking ( ‘Western’, ‘liberal’, ‘male’ – let’s set aside where it comes from). Thus, on the one hand we commonly say we ‘have’ our bodies, not that we are our bodies, while on the other we speak of ‘harnessing’ or ‘destroying’ or ‘restoring’ nature, not of altering our physical relationships with planet earth.
I did not mean to imply that human:nature opposition is similar in kind to the mind:body opposition. It may be, but that is a different issue.
The Human
Let me muse a bit more on the human. Is it single or multiple? It is an ancient tradition that humans originated from one mating pair. After Darwin a dissident school postulated that differences among human groups stemmed from different ancestral lines. Recent biological and recent paleontological evidence appears to show that human ancestry – perhaps like all species – is neither multilinear nor unilinear, but diverse, tangled and fused. There is neither a single human nature, nor distinct human natures, but spectra of human natures, with clumping in multiple dimensions of difference.
While ostensibly referring to a type of animal, ‘human’ more often refers to the actions and thoughts of that animal: the differences of cognition and skill – rationality, memory, language – that constitute the difference between it and other animals, and usher in the Holocene or late Pleistocene ‘tipping point’, which now retrospectively looks like an all but inevitable slide towards the present ecological crisis.
None, or almost none, of the supposedly ‘human’ ways of thinking and acting – rituals, artefacts, large social groupings, exchange, deference, instructing , disputing, organizing, music, oratory, art, writing, commodities, money, genetic manipulation and solar panels etc – are intrinsic to homo sapiens. Most haven’t existed at all for most of the species’ existence. The few behavioural constants – the basic Paleolithic toolmaking kit, the use of fire, the Acheulian axe, dance, music, decoration, mimesis, perhaps even articulate language – are not exclusive to homo sapiens, but shared with other hominid species, and perhaps more widely.
Finally, from a biological point of view the behavioural and cognitive aspects of the human organism that distinguish it from other living things are far less significant than its tissues, metabolism, modes of perception and mobility, immunity to disease, capacity to reproduce etc. Humans differ from other animals in quite trivial ways. They are a transient manifestation of an awesome chemical phenomenon that began billions of years ago.
Some more thoughts about agency
Charlie Martin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Martin) had a seminar trick. Indicating the glass of water in front of him, he would challenge participants to levitate it by the power of thought. The student who reached across the table and lifted it with his hand went to the top of the class.
That is a paradigm case of agency: we form an intention, and then use our bodies and whatever else we can to make the intention a reality. People are very good at that sort of thing, especially when it involves the hands, thanks to our primate inheritance. Witness a musician, a painter, a gamer. Thanks to sociality and language they also amazingly good at collective action. Witness a musical band, a dancing troupe, or a group of people building a house.
But such feats are only possible in relatively isolated environments over rather short time intervals. The more exposed a system is, and the longer the time between the intention and, the harder it gets to make reality conform to intentions. The gap between intention and bodily movement is typically microseconds, much quicker than conscious awareness, and then they are lost forever. But people have discovered ways of ‘freezing time’ – the durability of painting media, the solidity and bonding of a building, writing and musical notation, audio and visual recording. Laws and customs do something similar, preserving past intentions. Of course the results all eventually succumb to the second law of thermodynamics. But more importantly, their future effects vary depending on the wider context. Leonardo paints someone and carries the result around with him until his death. And what happens? A few centuries later it ends up behind bullet proof glass, being squinted at by millions.
For a luminous example of the weakness of human agency, consider how well or badly most people manage their own lives. Here they are, faced with a task which is the most important thing of all for them and which they know most about – indeed, in a sense it is the only thing they know about. And how well do they do? Most don’t know what they want. If they do, they will find their choices limited by circumstances. If they formulate a plan to get what they want, they may find that they cannot stick to it. And if they do know what they want, formulate a plan and stick to it, they are more than likely knocked off course by unexpected events or contingencies – a company goes out of business, an investment fails, children are born or not born, accidents, diseases, wars, floods … In effect, no one is really in charge of their own life.
If no single person is in charge of their own life, how can it be possible for humanity to be in charge of its destiny?
Politics
Finally, here is a way to think about politics.
Politics is the competitive pursuit of desires among humans. Desires like individual comfort and satisfaction, recognition and esteem by (real or imagined) friends, and the discomfiture and fear of enemies.
Politics A, politics at its most basic, is individuals competing with other individuals to realize their desires. It is seen whenever small groups of people are thrown together. Humans share Politics A not only with other primates, but with all social mammals, and probably with many social animals. Nepotism, bribery, bullying, favoritism and seduction are not separate from politics, but its essence.
‘Proper’ politics, politics B, begins when groups of individuals recognize common or reciprocal interests and team up: that is, it involves not just competition but also cooperation. Usually this involves group identification: individuals now understand their interests not only their own personal desires but the interests of members of their subgroup. Politics B is more mediated and complicated than Politics A: people are no longer competing members of a single group, but competing and cooperating members of nested competing groups. But the goals and methods are those of Politics A: the satisfaction of desires by mobilizing a repertoire of behaviors, ranging from persuasion to violence.
Politics C occurs when political actors identify their interests not just with their own desires and the interest of their subgroup, but with the largest, most inclusive group: they want to facilitate the satisfaction of the desires of everyone in that group, placing a restraint on the competition of subgroups and individuals. (This is the ‘Hobbesian transition.’)
Politics D –ideological or grand narrative politics – emerges when people, as well identifying with their own groups , begin to identify with humanity as a whole. The way for this was prepared by the missionizing religions that seem to first appear in conquest empires around 250 BCE (notably Buddhism, Christianity, Manicheism, Islam), and which offered spiritual salvation to all peoples – or, in the case of Buddhism, to all sentient beings. Much later, the growing literacy and availability of books in 18th century Europe abetted a more ‘secular’ identification with humanity as a whole. (National ideology is peculiar: for it the desirable goal for humanity as a whole is to be engaged in Politics C.)
Politics D is the most hopeful, but also the most fragile and dangerous kind of politics. The methods have not changed since Politics A, but the stakes are much higher, because the goals are much more ambitious and at the same time more nebulous. It is no longer primarily concerned with present satisfactions for a limited group but with rewards for everyone in a future that has no definite beginning or end.
The ethical questions that beset environmental ethics – ‘trolley problems’ and issues about how can we know what we owe people of whom we know nothing, or who haven’t been born yet– actually apply to all ideological politics, from Bolshevism to neoliberalism.