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FREEDOM AND NECESSITY IN NATURE
A Problem in Ecological Ethics
One of the most entrenched ideas in western thought is the notion
that nature is a harsh realm of necessity, a domain of unrelenting
lawfulness and compulsion. From this underlying view, two extreme
either/or attitudes have emerged. Either humanity must yield with a
religious, a more recently, "ecological" humility to the dicta of
"natural lawt and take its abject place side by side with the lowly
ants on which it "arrogantly" treads or it must "conquer" nature with
its technological and rational astuteness-an enterprise, I may add,
that may very well entail the subjugation of human by human in a
shared project to ultimately "liberate" all of humanity from the
compulsion of "natural necessity."
This quasi-religious quietism, typified by certain schools of
"antihumanism" and sociobiology, and the more conventional
activism, typified by the liberal and Marxian image of an omniscient
humanity cast defiantly in a Promethean posture, often
interpenetrate each other with quixotic results. Modern science
unwittingly takes on an ethical mantle of its own-despite all its
claims of value-free "objectivity"-when it commits itself to a
concept of nature as comprehensible, as "orderly" in the sense that
nature's "laws" are causally unyielding and hence necessitarian.
The Greeks viewed this orderly structure of the natural world as
evidence of an inherently rational nature, of the existence of nous or
logos, that produced a subjective, if not spiritual, presence in
natural phenomena as a whole. Yet with only a minimal shift in
emphasis, this very same notion of an "orderly" nature can also yield
the dismal conclusion that "freedom is the recognition of necessity"
(to use Frederick Engels' rephrasing in Anti-Duhring of Hegel's
definition). In this latter case, freedom is subtly turned into its
opposite: the mere consciousness of what we can or cannot do.
Such an internalized view of freedom, subject to the higher dicta of
"Spirit" (Hegel) or "History" (Marx), not only served Luther in his
break with the Church's hierarchy; it provided an ideological
justification for Stalin's worst excesses in the name of "dialectical
materialism" and his brutal industrialization of Russia under the
aegis of society's "natural laws of development." It may also yield a
forthright Skinnerian notion of an overly determined world in which
human behaviour is reducible to mere responses to external or
internal stimuli.
Leaving these extremes aside, western conventional wisdom still
sees nature as a "realm of necessity"-morally, as well as
materially-which constitutes a challenge to humanity's survival and
well-being. Despite the considerable intellectual heritage which
embraces both dystopian thinkers like Hobbes and utopian ones like
Marx, the very self-definition of major disciplines embodies this
tension, indeed, this conflict.
Economics has been forged in the crucible of a Snecessitarian," even
a "stingy"nature that opposes its "scarce resources" to humanity's
"unlimited needs." Sociology has been guided by the need to explain
the emergence of arational man" from "brute animality," a project
that still awaits its fulfilment in a rational society that presumably
will succeed a mindless natural world from which contemporary
Sirrationalities" are said to emerge.' Psychology, certainly in its
psychoananlytic forms, and pedagogy stress the importance of
controlling human "internal nature" with the bonus that the
sublimination of individual energy will find its expression in the
subjugation of external nature.
Theories of work, society, behaviour, even sexuality, turn around an
image of a necessitarian nature that must in some sense be
manipulated to serve human ends-presumably on the old theory that
what is human is "rational" per se and what is natural is "irrational"
in that it lacks any elements of choice and freedom. Nor has nature
philosophy been less tainted by this necessitarian image. Indeed,
more often than not, it has served as an ideological justification for
a hierarchical society, modelled on a hierarchically structured
"natural order."
This image and its social implications, generally associated with
Aristotle, still lives in our midst as a cosmic justification for
domination in general-in its more noxious cases, for racial and
sexual discrimination, and in its most nightmarish form, for the
outright extermination of entire peoples. Raised to the level of a
moral calling "man" emerges from this massive ideological
apparatus as a being beyond nature, a creature in whom "Spirit" or
'''God" has imparted a supranatural quality of a transcendental kind
and mission to govern an ordered universe that has its inception in a
supernatural world.
OVERCOMING DUALISM
To overcome the problem of the conflict between necessity and
freedom-basically, between nature and society-we must go beyond
the building of bridges between the two, such as we find in value
systems that are based on purely utilitarian attitudes toward the
natural world. The argument that our abuse of nature subverts the
material conditions for our own survival, although surely true, is
crassly instrumental. It assumes that our concern for nature rests
on our self-interest, rather than on a feeling for the community of
life of which we are part, albeit in a very unique and distinctive
way.
Given such an argument, our relationship with nature is neither
better nor worse than the success with which we plunder the natural
world without harming ourselves. This is a warrant for undermining
the natural world provided we can find workable or adequate
substitutes for existing life-forms and ecological relationships,
however synthetic, simple, or mechanical they may be. Time has
shown that it is precisely this view that has played a major role in
the present ecological crisis a crisis that results not only from
physical disruption but also from a serious derangement of our
ethical and biotic sensibilities.
In any case, bridge-building preserves a dualism that works with the
nature/society split but presumably "reconciles" it structurally by
merely "bridging" a gulf that accounts for the division between the
natural and social worlds. This kind of mechanical thinking also
gives rise to splits between body and mind, reality and thought,
object and subject, country and town, and, ultimately, society and
the individual. It is not far-fetched to say that the primary schism
between nature and humanity, a schism that may well have its
original source in the hierarchical subordination of women to men,
has nourished splits of enormous scope in everyday life as well as in
our theoretical sensibilities.
To overcome these dualisms simply by reducing one element of the
duality to the other is no less a serious fallacy. The universal anight
in which all cows are black," to use He el's phrase in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, purchases unity at the expense of the very
real variety and qualitative differences that surround us and nourish
creative thinking. Such reductionism yields a crude mechanistic
spiritualism that is merely the counterpart of the prevailing
mechanistic materialsm. In both cases, the need for a nuanced
interpretation of complex phenomena that takes delicate
distinctions and gradations into account in any explanation of
development is sacrificed to a simplistic dualism that dismisses
the need to emphasize the phases that enter into any process.
Alternatively, it embraces an equally simplistic "oneness" that
overrides the immense wealth of differentia to which the present
biosphere is heir-the rich, fecund and interconnected constituents
that make up our evolution and that are still preserved in nearly all
existing phenomena.
It is surprising that ecology, one of the most organic of our
contemporary disciplines, is itself so lacking in organic ways of
thinking. I refer to the need to inwardly derive differentia from each
other, the full from the germinal, the more complex from the
simpler-in short, to think biologically, not merely to "deduce"
conclusions from hypotheses in typical mathematical fashion, or
simply to tabulate and classify "facts." Whether as ecologists or
accountants, we tend to share the same mode of reasoning so
prevalent today, one that is largely analytical and classificatory
rather than processual and developmental. Appropriate as analytical,
classificatory and deductive modes of reasoning may be for
disassembling or reassembling automobile engines or constructing
buildings, they are woefully inadequate in ascertaining the phases
that make up a process, each conceived in its own integrity, yet part
of an ever-developing continuum.
It is becoming a cliche to fault "separation" as the source of
apartness in our highly fragmented world. We must see that every
process is also a form of "alienation" in the very non-Marxist sense
of differentiation in which the whole is seen as the richly varied
fulfilment of its latent potentialities.2
Underlying this distinction between alienation conceived as
opposition on the one hand and self-expression or self-articulation
on the other is an all-pervasive epistemology of rule that sorts
difference as such (indeed, the "other" in all its forms) into an
ensemble or pyramid of antagonistic relationships structured around
obedience and command. The modern ethical procedure for
assembling all phenomena into an "order of one to ten" and "benefits
versus risks," each "summed up" by ascertaining a "bottom line" (the
businesses here, is as delicious as the image of marriage, child-
rearing, and education as "investment") testifies to a conception of
variety not as unity, but as a problem of conflict. That the "other"
can be seen as part of a whole, however differentiated in one degree
or another, eludes the modern mind in a flux of experience that
knows only division as conflict or dissolution.
The real world is indeed divided antagonistically and herein lies its
tainted character which must be remedied by struggle as well as
reconciliation. But if the thrust of evolution has any meaning, it is
that a continuum is precisely processual in that it is graded as well
as united, a flow of derived phases as well as a shared development
from the simpler to the more complex. The reality of conflict must
never override the reality of differentiation as the long-range
character of development in nature and society.
PARTICIPATORY EVOLUTION
What then, does it mean to speak of complexity, variety, and unity-
in-diversity in the overall thrust of developmental processes?
Ecologists have generally treated diversity as a source of ecological
stability, an approach, I may add, that was still rather new some
twenty-five years ago. Experiences in agriculture showed that the
treatment of single crops by pesticides could easily reach alarming
proportions and seemed to suggest that the more diversified a crop,
the more plant and animal species interacted to produce natural
checks on pest populations. Today, this notion, like the value of
organic methods of agriculture, has become commonplace in
present-day ecological and environmental thinking-a view which
this writer pioneered together with a few rare colleagues like
Charles S. Elton.
But the notion that biotic-and, as we shall see, social evolution has
been marked until recently by the development of ever more complex
species and ecocommunities (or "ecosystems," to use a very
unsatisfactory term) raises an even more challenging issue.
Diversity maybe regarded as a source not only of greater
ecocommunity stability, it may also be regarded in a very
fundamental sense as an ever-expanding, albeit nascent, source of
freedom within nature, a medium for objectively anchoring varying
degrees of choice, self-directiveness, and participation by lifeforms
in their own evolution. I wish to propose that the evolution of living
beings is no passive process, the product of chance conjunctions
between random genetic changes and "selective" environmental
"forces," that the "origin of species" is no mere result of external
influences that determine the "fitness" of a life-form to "survive" as
a result of random factors in which life is merely an "object" of an
indeterminable "selective" process.
I wish to go beyond the increasingly popular notion that symbiosis is
quite as important as "struggle" to contend that the increase in
diversity in the biosphere opens increasingly new evolutionary
pathways, indeed, alternative evolutionary directions in which
species play an active role in their own survival and change.
However rudimentary and nascent it may be, choice is not totally
absent in biotic evolution. Indeed, it increases as individual animals
become structurally, physiologically, and, above all, neurologically
more complex. Mind has its own evolutionary history in the natural
world and, as the neurological capability of life-forms to function
more actively and flexibly increases, so too does life itself help
create new evolutionary directions that lead to enhanced self-
awareness and self-activity.
Finally, choice becomes increasingly evident as the ecological
contexts within which species evolve-the communities and
interactions they form-themselves become more complex so that
they open new avenues for evolution, a greater ability to act self-
selectively, forming the bases for some kind of choice, fostering
precisely those species that can participate in ever-greater degrees
in their own evolution, basically in the direction of more complex
life-forms. Indeed, species and the ecocommunities in which they
interact to create more complex forms of evolutionary development
are, in increasing degree, the very "forces" that are often treated as
the external agents that account for evolution as a whole.
I wish to propose that this view, which I call a "participatory
evolution," is very much at odds with the prevalent Darwinian or
neo-Darwinian syntheses in which a non-human life-forms are seen
primarily as "objects" of selective forces exogenous to them. It is
also at odds with ] Henri Bergson's "creative evolution" with its
semi-mystical elan vital. Ecologists, no less than biologists, have
yet to come to terms with the notion that symbiosis (not only
"struggle") and participation (not only "competition") factor in the
evolution of species. The prevalent view of nature still stresses the
"cruelty" and "necessitarian" character of the natural world, a view
that is as moral as it is physical in its overtones. An immense
literature, no less artistic than scientific, stresses the "unseeing
muteness" of a nature that bears no witness to the suffering of life
and has no ears to the cry of pain in the "struggle for existence."
"Cruel" nature in this imagery offers no solace for extinction-
merely an all-embracing darkness of mean ingless motion to which
humanity can only oppose the light of its culture and mind, in short,
a stoic worldview that ethically expires in a sigh of resignation and
loneliness.
We may reasonably ask whether human will and freedom, at least as
self-consciousness and self-reflection, have their own natural
history in developments within nature | itself-or whether they are
simply sui generis, a self aggrandizing rupture with the whole
principle of development, such that will and freedom are so
unprecedented and so self-contained in their uniqueness that they
contradict our conception that all phenomena are emergent: that
phenomena are graded from antecedent potentialities that lie behind
and within every "product" of a processual kind. Such a claim to
uniqueness is as self-serving as it is selfaggrandizing. It
underwrites our claim to be justified in dealing with the natural
world as we choose-indeed, in Marx's words in the Grundisse to
regard it merely as "an object for mankind, purely a matter of
utility. . ."
The dim choices that animals exercise in their own evolution are not
the will that human beings exhibit in their social lives. Nor is the
nascent freedom conferred by natural complexity the same as the
rational decisions that human beings bring to the service of their
own development. Our prejudice against the concept of complicity
between evolving life-forms and the environmental forces that
"select" them has its pedigree in the Newtonian mechanism that still
clings to evolutionary theory into our own time. The "inert" matter
and mechanical operations, hypostasized by Newton and the
Enlightenment thinkers have their counterpart in the contemporary
image of all non-human life-forms as basically inert. All
antiCartesian protestations to the contrary, non-human life-forms
are still viewed as little more than machines. Structurally, we may
fill them out with protoplasm, but operationally they are imparted
with as little meaning as we impute to mechanical devices, a
judgment that is not without its economic utility. Despite the
monumental nature of his work, Darwin did not orgarlicize
evolutionary theory. He conferred a sense of evolution on the "origin
of species," but species in the minds of his acolytes still stood
somewhere between inorganic machines and mechanically
functioning organisms.
No less significant are the empirical origins of Darwin's own work, a
work that is deeply rooted in the Lockean atomism that nourished
nineteenth-century British science as a whole. Allowing for a
reasonable amount of shading and nuance that exists in all great
books, The Origin of Species is an account of origins in a fairly
isolated sense, notably, the way in which a species originates,
evolves, adapts, survives, changes, or pays the penalty of extinction.
Any one species can stand for the world of life as a whole in
isolation from the life-forms that normally interact with it.
Although predators depend upon their prey, to be sure, the strand
from ancestor to descendant stands in lofty isolation such that early
eohippus rises, step-by-step, from a plebeian dog-like estate to the
aristocratic grandeur of a sleek race horse. This paleontological
diagramming of bones from what were formerly "missing links" to
the culminating beauty of Eguos caballus more closely resembles the
adaptation of Robinson Crusoe from an English seafarer to a self-
sufficient island dweller than the reality of a truly emerging being.
This reality is contextual in an ecological sense. The modern horse
did not evolve alone. It lived not only among its predators and prey
but in creatively interactive relationships with a great variety of
plants and animals. It evolved in ever-changing ecocommunities such
that the "rise" of Equos caballus occurred conjointly with other
herbivores that shared, maintained, and even played a major role in
creating their grasslands. The string of bones that traces eohippus
to Equus is really evidence of the succession of the ecocommunities
in which the animal and its ancestor interacted with each other.
One could more properly modify The Origin of Species to read as the
evolution of ecocommunities as well as the evolution of species.3
Indeed, to place the community in the foreground of evolution is not
to deny the integrity of species, their capacity for variation, and
their development. Quite to the contrary: species become vital
participants in their own evolution active beings, not merely passive
components which thus takes full account of their self-directive and
nascent freedom in the natural process.
Will and reason are not suigeneris. They have their origins in the
growing choices conferred by complexity, the alternative pathways
opened by the growth of complex ecocommunities, and the
development of increasingly complex neurological systems-in short,
processes that are both internal and external to life-forms. They
appear germinally in the communities which life-forms establish as
active agents in their own evolution, a view that cuts across the
grain of conventional evolutionary theory in which non-human life-
forms are seen as little more than passive objects of natural
selection apart from their ability to produce random variations. Even
genetic changes seem to occur in patterns that cohere into organs
and organ systems whose capacity to serve biotic needs are hard to
understand as products of mere chance events.
Does this warrant the need to introduce an elan vital or a hidden
hand that has entered into western thought as "Spirit," "God," or
"Mind," a predetermining agent that presides over the development of
life-forms? I think not even if only because the concept of such a
hidden hand restores the very dualities that underpin hierarchy and
the conception of all differentiation as conflict. We may well ask
ourselves if we have ever understood life itself as a creative and co
ative phenomenon when we see it as little more than a factor in
production, a "natural resource," placed in the service of wealth
rather than a reproductive process, promised in the very way life is
constituted.
Again, we encounter a western sensibility that is alien to
processual thought, development, and its phases, an inability to see
nature as a phenomenon whose basic organization challenges our
mechanistic and analytic modes of thought. Dualism inheres in our
mental operations so profoundly that the conative striving of life-
forms toward freedom and self-awareness tends to slip into
supernature rather than nature, reductionism rather than
differentiation, succession rather than culmination.
This much is clear: The way we position ourselves in our view of the
natural world is deeply entangled with the way we view the social
world. In large part, the former derives from the latter and serves,
in turn, to reinforce social ideology. Every society extends its own
perception of itself into nature, k whether as a tribal cosmos that is
rooted in kinship
communities, a feudal cosmos that originates in and; underpins a
strict hierarchy of rights and duties, a bourgeois cosmos structured
around a market society that fosters human rivalry and competition,
or a corporate cosmos, diagrammed as flow charts, feedback
systems, and hierarchies that mirror the operational systems of
modern corporate society.
That some of these images reveal an aspect of nature, whether as a
community or a cybernetic flow of energy, does not justify the
universal, almost imperialistic, claims that they stake out over the
world as a whole. Ultimately, only a society that has come into its
"truth," to use Theodor Adorno's term-an ecological society-can
free us from the limits that oppressive and hierarchical societies
impose on our understanding of nature.
ECOLOGICAL ETHICS: AN OBJECTIVE GROUND
Granting the limitations which every society in its own one-
sidedness imposes on our thinking, herein lies an objective ground
for an ethics, indeed, for formulating a vision of the "true society"
that is neither hierarchical at one extreme nor relativistic at the
other. I speak of an ethics that neither justifies atavistic appeals to
"blood and soil" and modernistic appeals to "law" ("dialectical" or
"scientific") on the one hand, nor the wayward consensus that
justifies capital punishment during one year and confinement during
another. Freedom becomes an end in itself-as se f-reflexivity, self-
management, and, most excitingly, as a creative and active process
that, with its ever-expanding horizon and growing wealth of
diversity, resists the moral imperatives of a rigid definition and the
jargon of temporally conditioned biases.4
"Reverence" for nature, the mythologizing of the natural ;4 world,
and the so-called "biocentric" hypostasizing of the natural over the
human all degrade nature by denying the natural world its
universality as that which exists everywhere, free of all dualities
like "Spirit" and "God," indeed, a nature that encompasses the very
congregation of worshippers, idolators and "antihumanists" who
subtly deny their own specificity as part of nature.
A "revered" nature is a separated nature in the bad sense of the term.
Like the idols which human beings create from the depths of their
imagination and worship from afar with the mediation of priests and
gurus, and in temples with incantations and rituals, this separated
nature becomes reified, a contrived phenomenon that helps set the
natural world apart from the human during the very act of
genuflecting and voicing incantations before a mystified "it." Much
has been said about the alienation produced by work, anomie, fear,
and insecurity: but a nature reconstructed into forms apart from
itself, however "reverentially," is no less an alienated nature than
the Marxian image of nature as a "mere object of utility."
Herein lies the paradox of "biocentricity" and "antihumanism,"
indeed, any "centricity" toward nature: the 0 alienation and
reification of nature to a point where the "reverence" for the natural
world negates any existential respect for the diversity of life.
Preliterate peoples are no less locked into this paradox than their
so-called civilized cousins. Happily, they are simply incapable,
whether by inclination, r technical development or tradition, of
inflicting too much harm on the natural world, although they are not
immune to this charge as the extermination of so many great
mammals of the late Pleistocene seems to indicate.
What is perhaps more irksome than this overblown "biocentricity"
that denies humanity's real place in nature is the vision of a natural
world-overburdened by "reverence" and dissolved into a mystical
"oneness"-that preserves and even fosters the traditional split
between nature and society, the basic source in my view of
philosophy's theoretically elaborate separation of the concept from
the real world. One thinks, here, of the traditions created by Plato in
the ancient world and Kant in the modern.
A nature that is reverentially hypostasized is a nature that is set
apart from its own place in humanity in the very real sense that
human reason, too, is an expression of nature rendered self-
conscious, a nature that finds its voice in one of its own creations.
It is not only we who must have our own place in nature but nature
which must have its place in us in an ecological society and in an
ecological ethics based on humanity's catalytic role in natural
evolution.
Nor should we ignore the fact that the "reverence for nature," so
poetically cultivated by the Romantic tradition, has been warped by
"biocentrically" oriented "antihumanists" and acolytes of "natural
law" into the insidious image of a humanity that is "dominated by
nature"-the converse of the old liberal and Marxian image of a
nature "dominated" by man. In both cases, the theme of domination is
re-instated in ecological discourse. If liberal and Marxist theorists
prepared the ideological bases for "controlling" and plundering the
natural world, "antihumanists" and "natural law" devotees may be
preparing the ideological bases for controlling and plundering the
human spirit. Indeed some "natural law" acolytes have already
justified the use of authoritarian measures to control population
growth and to legitimate the forcible expulsion of urban dwellers
from large, congested cities as though a society that harnesses
human beings can be expected to leave the natural world intact.
A humanity that has been rendered oblivious to its own
responsibility to evolution-a responsibility that brings reason and
the human spirit to evolutionary development, diversity, and
ecological guidance such that the accidental, the hurtful and the
fortuitous in the natural world are diminished-is a humanity that
betrays its own evolutionary heritage." It surrenders its species-
distinctiveness and its uniqueness. It is grossly misleading to
invoke "biocentricity,n "natural law," and "antihumanism" for ends
that deny what is most distinctive in all human natural attributes.
I speak of humanity's ability to reason, to foresee, to will and to act
insightfully on behalf of directiveness within nature and enhance
nature's own development. It is also an insult to nature to separate
these subjective attributes from nature, to deal with them as though
they did not emerge out of evolutionary development and are not
implicitly part of nature in a deeper sense than the "law of fang and
claw" that we so flippantly impute to natural evolution as a
metaphor for the "cruelty" and "harshness" of that evolutionary
process. Nature, in short, is defamed in the very process of being
hypostasized over humanity at one extreme or subordinated to
humanity at the other. Here, the faulty reasoning based on
"deduction," so commonplace today in conventional logic, claims its
toll at the expense of an organismic form of reasoning based on
derivation, as rooted in a dialectical outlook.
Social ecology, by definition, takes on the responsibility of evoking,
elaborating, and giving an ethical content to the natural core of
society and humanity.5 The steady denaturing of humanity by
"biocentricity" in all its forms or by the reduction of human beings
to commodities is not a metaphor; it is compellingly real and in both
cases involves the denaturing of humanity into a mere object.
The commodification of humanity takes its most pernicious form in
the manipulation of the individual as a means of production and as a
means of consumption.
Here, human nature is either employed (in the literal sense l of the
term) as a technique in production or a technique in j consumption,
a mere device whose creative powers and authentic needs are
equally perverted into objectified phenomena. As a result, we have
today not only the "fetishization of commodities" (to use Marx's
famous formulation) but the fetishization of needs.6 Human beings
thus become separated from the natural world and from their own
nature in a real split that replaces the theoretical one attributed to
Descartes. In this sense, the claim that capitalism is a totally
"unnatural order" is only too accurate.
To recover human nature is to "renature" it, to restore its continuity
with the creative process of natural evolution, its freedom and
participation in that evolution conceived as a realm of incipient
freedom and as a participatory process. Here, it is freedom and
participation-not necessity and the hierarchical organization of
relationships-that must be emphasized, an emphasis that involves a
radical break with the conventional western image of nature.
SOCIAL ECOLOGY
Social ecology, in effect, stands at odds with the notion that culture
alone is the realm of freedom. Indeed, it tries to root the cultural in
the natural and to ascertain the gradations that unite them. To
identify society as such with the present society, to see in
capitalism an "emancipatory" movement precisely because it frees
us from nature is not only to ignore the roots of nature in society; it
is also an attempt to identify a perverted capitalist society with
"humanism" and thereby to give credence to certain atavistic trends
in ecological thinking that appear under the name of "antihumanism."
The power of social ecology lies in the association it establishes
between society and ecology, the social conceived as a fulfillment
of the latent dimension of freedom in nature, and the ecological
conceived as the organizing principle of social development-in
short, the guidelines for an ecological society.
The great divorce between nature and society-or between the
"biological" and the "cultural," as Europeans like to put it-is
overcome by shared concepts of development as such; increasing
diversity; the wider and more complete participation of all
components in a whole; ever more fecund potentialities that expand
the horizon of freedom, self-directiveness, and selfrerlexivity.
Society ceases to be sui generis. Like mind-which has its own
natural history in the evolution of the human nerve network from
simple invertebrates through ever-complex ganglia, the spinal cord,
"layered" brains and cortices (each functionally incorporating the
others such that they exist as a united apparatus in human beings as
well as neurologically less complex animals)-social life too,
emerges from the loosely banded animal community to form the
highly institutionalized human community.7
Ultimately, it is the institutionalization of the human community
that distinguishes society from the non-human community-whether
for the worse as in the case of weak, unfeeling tyrants like Nicholas
II or Louis XVI who were raised to commanding positions by
bureaucracies, armies, and social classes or, for the better, in forms
of self-governance and management that empower the people as a
whole. We see no such contrived institutional infrastructures in
non-human communities, although the rudiments of a social bond do
exist in the mother-offspring relationship and in common forms of
mutual aid.
The social bond that human parents create with the young as the
biocommunity phases into the social community is fundamental to
the emergence of society and it is retained in every society as an
active factor in the elaboration of history. It is not only that
prolonged human immaturity develops the lasting ties so necessary
for human interdependence, a fact which Robert Briffault so
forcefully pointed out in The Mothers. It is also that care, sharing,
participation, and complementarity develop this bond beyond the
material division of labour, which has received so much emphasis in
economic interpretations of social origins.
This social bond gives rise to a fascinating elaboration of the
tentative parent-offspring relationship: love, friendship,
responsibility, loyalty-not only to people but to ideals and beliefs,
and hence makes belief, commitment and civil communities possible.
It also gives rise to a constellation of functions each unique in its
creativity, often highly personalized, and richly developed into
different cultures based on gender, age, intercommunity
relationships, myths specific to women and men, even differences in
body language and behavioural traits.
I do not wish to reduce the cultural expression of these functions to
their biological sources. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the
sources do not disappear but work subtly within society, culture,
and even the human psyche as wellsprings of ever new elaborations
of social and personal association. In any case, to speak of "society"
without recognizing that men and women, to deal with one of the
most basic and ever-present divisions within humanity, have often
formed separate fraternities and sororities in preliterate and well
into historical societies is to ignore two sources of human
development which still require careful study as alternatives to the
present course of social evolution. The militarized, indeed, warrior
society in which we live was made by men; its culture, traceable
back for thousands of years, still works upon our civilization with a
vengeance that threatens the very existence of social life itself. To
go backward in time and in mind to its beginning is not atavistic.
The thorough exploration of its origins, development, and forms may
be indispensable for going forward in any rational and meaningful
sense of the term.
Social ecology, in short, challenges the image of an unmediated
natural evolution: the image of the human mind, society, and even
culture as suigeneris, of a non-human nature that is irretrievably
separated from human nature, and, ethically, of a defamed nature
that finds no expression in society, mind, and human will. It seeks to
throw a new, critical, and meaningful light on the phased, graded,
and cumulative development of nature into society, richly mediated
by the prolonged dependence of the human young on parental,
particularly maternal, care (a biological fact that is rich in social
and ethical implications), on the blood tie as the earliest social and
cultural bond that extends beyond immediate parental care (still
another biological fact of social importance that enters into clan
and tribal communities), on the so-called "sexual division of labour "
(no less biological in its origins than social in its elaborations into
gender-oriented cultures), and on age as the basis of status and the
origins of hierarchy (but no less a biological fact in its early
phases).
The historic effort, political as well as ideological, to rid us of this
prehuman "slime" of our natural origins has served only to make us
its unknowing victims in the sense that we have followed its most
necessitarian instead of libertarian paths of development: toward
the nascent elements of struggle that inhere in the prey-predator
relationship, toward the celebration of death in what E.E. Thompson
has called "exterminism" rather than its acceptance in the larger
cycle of life, toward a process of destructuring the elaborate
food-webs that are a metaphor for natural complexity rather than
their elaboration. Our civilization has turned into one vast hurricane
of destruction and threatens to turn back the evolutionary clock to a
simpler world where the survival of a viable human species will be
impossible.
With a growing knowledge of the need for care, fondling, and
attention that fosters healthy human consociation, with technical
disciplines that open the way for a creative Nmetabolism" between
humanity and nature, and with a host of new insights into the
presence of nature in so much of our own development toward
"civilization," can it be denied any longer that nature is still with
us-indeed, that it has returned to us ideologically as a challenge to
our exploitation of "natural resources" and our simplification of the
biosphere? That we can no longer speak meaningfully of a "new" or
"rational" society without also tailoring our social relationships and
institutions to the ecocommunities in which our social communities
are located? In short, that any viable future society must be an
ecological society, all its presumable "autonomous" cultural
artifacts and uniquely human achievements aside? It is myopic to
reduce nature to mere "slime" when, because of the very sensibility
that deals with the natural world as such, we are sinking into it
with a vengeance. The ecological principles that enter into bi tic
evolution do not disa pear from social evolution any more than the
natural history of mind can be dissovled into Kant's ahistorical
eplstemology. Quite the contrary: the societal and cultural can be
seen as ecologically derivative, as the men's houses and the women s
homes in tribal communities so clearly illustrate 8 The relationship
can also be seen as a cumulative one while still remaining highly
original and creative in its own right Perhaps most significantly,
the societal and the cultural can be seen as a clerivative-and
cumulative-in terms of a nature that is definable as a realm of
freedom and subjectivity, yet without ceasing to be the most
self-conscious and selfreflexive expression of that natural
development.
Herein lies the ground for an ecological ethics of freedom that
provides an objective directiveness to the human enterprise. We
have no need to degrade nature or society into a crude biologism at
one extreme or a crude dualism at the other. A diversity that
nurtures freedom, an interactivity that enhances participation, a
wholeness that fosters creativity, a community that strengthens
individuality, a growing subjectivity that yields reason-all are
desiderata that provide the ground for an objective ethics They are
also the real principles of any graded evolution, one that not only
renders that past explicable but also renders the future meaningful.
An ecological ethics of freedom cannot be divorced from a technics
that harmonizes our relationship with a nature-a creative, not
destructive, "metabolism" with nature. An ecotechnology is a moral
technology. There is a profoundly ethical dimension to the attempt
to bring soil, flora, and fauna (or what we neatly call the food chain)
into our lives, not only as "wholesome" sources of food but as part of
a broad movement in which consumption is no less a creative
process than production- originating in the soil and returning to it
in a richer form all the components that make up the food cycle.
Here, consumption goes beyond the pure economic domain of the
buyer-seller relationship, indeed, beyond the domain of mere
material sustenance, and enters into the ecological domain as a
mode of enhancing the fecundity of an ecocommunity. An ecological
technology-for consumption no less than production-serves to
increase natural complexity, not simplify it, as is the case with
modern technics.
By the same token, an ecological ethics cannot be divorced from a
politics of participation, a politics that fosters self-empowerment
rather than state empowerment. Such a politics must become a truly
peopled politics, organic in the sense that political participation is
literally protoplasmic and peopled by assemblies, face-to-face
discussion that is reinforced by the veracity of body language as
well as the reasoning process of discourse. The political ethics that
follows from this ground is meant to create a moral community, not
simply an "efficient" one; an ecological community, not simply a
contractual one; a social praxis that enhances diversity, not only a
political culture that invites the widest public participation.
Within this nexus of ideas, commitments, and sensi- tt bilities,
human freedom can be brought to the service of natural fecundity, a
participatory society to the service of complex and interactive
ecocommunities, creative people to the service of a more organic
community, and mind to the service of a more subjectivized nature.
To say that nature belongs in humanity just as humanity belongs in
nature is to express the need for a highly reciprocal relationship
between the two instead of one structured around subordination and
domination. Neither society nor nature dissolve into each other.
Rather, social ecology tries to recover the distinctive attributes of
both in a continuum that gives rise to a substantive ethics, wedding
the social to the ecological without denying the integrity of each.
ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Life must again be returned to Life-vividly, expressively, actively-
not by retreating into the passive animism of early humanity, much
less the inert matter of Newtonian mechanism. Society must recover
the plasticity of the organic in the sense that every dimension of
experience must be infused with the vitality of life and an
ecological sensibility. It makes all the difference in the world if we
cultivate food, for example, in order to maintain the soil as well as
our physical well-being. Inasmuch as agriculture is always a
culture, the difference in our methods and intentions is no less
cultural than the composition of a book on engineering. Yet in the
first case, our intentions are informed by an ecological sensibility;
in the second, by economic considerations at best and greed at
worst. So, tocX, in the production of objects. It makes all the
difference in the world if craftpersons work along the grain of the
materials on which they exercise their creative powers or warp the
materials in order to serve the ends of mass production. In these
examples, our choice is either an ecological or an economic one and
in both cases is profoundly influenced by social institutions. Hence
the inseparability of the social from the ecological. In the end, our
choice-that primal exercise of freedom-will be between an
ecocommunity or a market community, a society infused by life or a
society infused by gain.
It is enough to recognize that nature, conceived as a realm of
potential freedom, is basically part of that choice to demonstrate
that an ecological sensibility is always a social one and a social
view point is always, at least implicitly, an ecological one.
Whatever our choice may be, even the rejection of an ecological
viewpoint affirms its existence, and in the very act of rejection
will be expressed by the "revenge" nature will claim for being
factored out of social development.
Finally, the recognition that nature is a realm of potential freedom
that phases into society as a realm of authentic freedom raises an
important issue for theories about the emergence of society,
particularly from a feminist perspective.
Woman's domestic world has been dishonoured and dealt
with shabbily by man's civil world. From Aristotle's day to
fairly recent times the domestic world has been seen as little
more than a privatized domain of biological "necessity" that
exists exclusively to satisfy the male's "animal" needs for food,
shelter, reproduction, and physical renewal. The male's civil world,
in turn, has been traditionally counterposed to the female's domestic
world as the realm of culture, rational consociation, and freedom.
This duality has made it difficult to see woman's domestic sphere,
once the authentic centre of tribal society, as the cradle of society
itself, the all-important phase where the biological is transmuted
everyday into the social and the natural into the cultural-more by a
process of integration than by substitution. Here the duality between
biology and society or nature and culture is not only overcome: the
social and cultural worlds are literally formed out of the biological
needs for care and institutionalized consociation.
The graded continuum between nature and society is thus "filled out"
processually by the mediating domain of women's domestic world
and the mystery that produced society as the "leap" dispelled.
Anthropologically, woman's domestic world was the arena not only
for the socialization of the young into a permanent and organized
community in which the individual acquired his or her identity and
satisfied his or her emotional needs (needs that were formed and
enlarged by the domestic sphere); it was also home in the ecological
sense that men and women, young and old, formed as the environment
for their sense of place in the world and the ecocommunity in which
they lived.
I say "home" in the sense of a treasured place enhanced by tradition,
the imprint of the past, long-gone generations to which we still
belong, a personal remembrance of our origins and our individual
development, the palpable stuff from which we have formed our
biography, a loyalty to the land and community that surrounds it, a
dedication to the preservation of its uniqueness and meaning for us.
All of these sentiments have yet to be fully incorporated into the
splendid work of the bioregionalists, who call for a sense of
regionality in terms of watersheds and the flora and fauna with
which we share a given area.
Today, what we misname "home" is not a place, but a residence that
often is as transient as the cheap commodities that circulate
through our lives and like the jobs we tentatively occupy as rungs in
the climb up the corporate ladder. The traditional ecological home to
which I have alluded was largely created by woman-though not
without the oppressions and insults that man inflicted on her. There
she played the indispensable role of giving it life, continuity, and
care. If we are homeless, today, it is less because we have lost our
"openness" to "Being" as Heidegger might say, than because we have
degraded woman and home, reducing her to a "homemaker" and
reducing home to a plastic ranch-house in a santitized suburb.
The domestic world still remains the immediate source of
humanity's emergence from nature into society, indeed, the domain
that includes both and phases them into an organic continuum
without losing the integrity of either one. The attempt of man's civil
society totally to subordinate the domestic world-to reduce it to
woman's "place in the kitchen"-violates not only the biosocial
medium for the individual's own phasing into society; it preserves
the Cartesian dualism that has been used not only to seek the
domination of nature but the domination of human by human-
particularly of woman by man.
In our own time, we are bearing witness to the total
commodification of the remnant domestic and civil worlds, to their
reduction to a common world of things in which a market economy
threatens to become a market society. No restoration of a domestic
or civil society is possible or even desirable. Rather, the future in
any rational sense depends upon the development of an ecological
society that will integrate the virtues of domestic and civil life in a
new, balanced, and moral social dispensation a social dispensation
that transcends both past and present.
CONCLUSION
To know "the world we have lost," to use Peter Laslett's words, is to
lay the ground for hope and social reconstruction, indeed, to
establish criteria drawn from the past that will provide us with the
coordinates for a harmonious future. The fecundity and potentiality
for freedom that variety and complexity bring to natural evolution,
indeed, that emerge from natural evolution, can also be said to apply
to social evolution and psychic development. The more diversified a
society and its psychic life, the more creative, and the greater the
opportunity for freedom it is likely to offer-not only in terms of
new choices that open up to human beings but also in terms of the
richer social background that diversity and complexity create. As in
natural evolution, so too in social evolution we must go beyond the
image that diversity and complexity yield greater stability-the
usual claim that ecologists make for the two-and emphasize that
they yield greater fi creativity and freedom.
The terrible tragedy of the present social era is not only that it is
polluting the environment but also that it is simplifying natural
ecocommunities, social relationships, and even the human psyche.
The pulverization of the natural world is being followed by the
pulverization of the social world and the psychological. In this
sense, the conversion of soil into sand in agriculture can be said, in
a metaphoric sense, to apply to society and to the human spirit. The
greatest danger we face apart from nuclear immolation is the
homogenization of the world by a market society and its
objectification of all human relationships and experiences.
If history is a bloody "slaughter bench," to use Hegel's phrase, it is
covered not only by the blood of "civilization's" innocent victims but
also by that of the angry men and women who have left us a legacy
of freedom. The legacy of freedom and the legacy of domination have
been mingled up to now i in a dialectic that mutually defined them
and affected the horizon of both a shared horizon in which freedom
and domination were mutually intermingled. If we are to rescue
ourselves from the homogenizing effects of a market society, it is
necessary that history, humanity's waning memory, be rescued from
this society's pollution and simplification of the past, a process
that has already gone very far in Marxism, liberalism and pop
culture.
More than at any time in the past, the two legacies must be
disengaged from each other and set in opposition to each other. The
loss of the legacy of freedom and the lessons it imparts to future
struggles for freedom will produce irreparable results-for we will
have lost not only our sense of natural development and the graded
evolution which gave rise to society. We will have become
completely immersed in a concept of the social that has no past
beyond the present and no future beyond the extrapolation of the
present into the years ahead. The idea that there can be fundamental
and qualitative change in the present era will have been lost in a
'Xnowness" that is eternal in every respect but its quantitative
expansion and contraction.
NOTES
1. Characteristically, one thinks of the pathetic argument advanced
in psychoanalysis of an inherent (read: "natural") dimension of the
human psyche that is guided solely by self-interest and the impulse
for immediate gratification which education and "civilization"
redirects toward creative ends.
2. Despite some recent nonsense to the effect that the "Frankfurt
School" reconnoitered a nonhierarchical and ecological view of
society's future, in no sense were its most able thinkers, notably
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, resolutely critical of
hierarchy and domination. Rather, their views were clearly
pessimistic: reason and civilization, for be tter or worse, entail the
need by "uncompromising individuals [who] may have been in favour
of unity and cooperation...to build a strong hierarchy... The history of
the old religions and schools like that of the modern parties and
revolutions teaches us that the price for survival is practical
involvement, the transformation of ideas into domination./' Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New
York, Herder & Herder, 1972. orginally published in 1944). pp 213,
215. The power of these thinkers lies in the problematical nature of
their work, not in the solutions they had to offer. Attempts to make
them into "social ecologists,/' much less precursors of
"bioregionalism/' and the like involve a gross misreading of their
ideas, or worse, an attempt to impute ideas to them without a
serious study of their works.
3. Darwin did not deny the role of animal interactivity in evolution,
particularly in the famous Chapter III of The Origin of Species,
where he suggests that "ever-increasing circles of complexity/'
check populations that, left uncontrolled, would reach pest
proportions. But he sees this as a /'Battle withinbattles [which]
must be continually recurring with varying success." (p.58)
Moreover, /'The dependency of one organic being on another"-is
secondary to the struggle "between individuals of the same species."
(p.60) Like most Victorians, Darwin had a strongly providential and
moral side to his character: awe may console ourselves,/' he tells
reassuringly, "that the war of nature is generally prompt, and that
the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply,/'
(p.62) Indeed: "How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how
short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results,
compared with those accumulated by Nature's productions during
whole geological periods! Can we wonder, then, that Nature's
productions should be far 'truer' than man's productions: that they
should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions
of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of a far higher
workmanship?/' (p.663 (Gtations from Modern Library Edition, New
York) These remarks do not make Darwin an ecologist, but are the
marvelous asides to a thesis that emphasizes variation, selection,
fitness, and above all, struggle. Yet one cannot help but be entranced
by a moral sensibility that would have been magnificently
responsive to the message of modern ecology and deserves none of
the onerous rubbish that has been imputed to the man because of
social Darwinism.
4. Hence freedom is no longer resolvable into a strident Hegelian
negativity or a trite instrumental positivity. Rather, in its
openendedness, it contains both and transcends them as a continuing
process. Freedom thus resists precise definition just as it resists
terminal finality. It is always becoming, hopefuRy surpassing what
it was in the past and developing into what it can be in the future.
Neither a Hegelian "Absolute/' nor identity philosophy has any
meaning in the realm of freedom, a realm that is not cor.strained by
any fixed boundaries apart from its respect for individual rights.
5. This project is not an abstraction. It is elaborated in considerable
detail in my book, The Ecology of Freedom (Montreal, Black Rose
Books, 1990) and should be carefully examined by the interested
reader.
6. Ibid., pp 6849.
7. The extent to which an ecological approach spares us some of the
worst absurdities of sociobiology and biological reductionism is
illustrated by the highly popularized notion that our deep-seated
"reptilian" brain is responsible for our aggressive, "brutish," and
cruel behavioural traits. This argument may make for good television
dramas like "Cosmos" but it is ridiculous science. Like all the great
animal groups, most Mesozoic reptiles were almost certainly gentle
herbivores, not carnivores-and even many of the carnivores were
probably neither more nor less aggressive, "brutish," or "cruel" than
mammals. The images we have of Tyranosaurus rex (the generic
name is a delicious example of sociological nonsense created by
taxonomists) may seem inordinately frightening, but they grossly
distort reptilian lifeforms on which the carnivore preyed. If
anything, the majority of Mesozoic reptiles were probably very
pacific and easily frightened, all the more because they were not
particularly intelligent vertebrates. What remains unacknowledged
in this imagery of fierce, fire-breathing, and "unfeelingly cruel"
reptiles is the implicit assumption of different psychic
sensibilities in reptiles and mammals, the latter presumably being
more "sensitive" and "understanding" than the former. Thus we are
talking about a psychic evolution in non-human beings that goes
together with the evolution of intelligence. Yet confronted with the
unstated premises of such evolutionary trends, few scientists would
find them comfortable.
8. The insidious nature of expressions like "woman's place in the
division of labour" is seen in the denial implicit in these terms of
woman's contribution to the making of human culture. When culture
and woman's development of it along sororal lines is reduced to
labour-or even, more "generously," to the economy-the whole
problematic of cultural development becomes safe and sanitized, not
to speak of liberalized and Marxified. We no longer have to concern
ourselves with the early role sororal cultures played in history, the
alternatives they opened to the emergence of a male-oriented
warrior "civilization,' the terrible role this civilization played in
history (natural as well as social), and the sensibilities it
introduced. "Woman's place in the division of labour" becomes merely
an economic problematic not a cultural and moral one. Hence it can
be comfortably resolved by raising women's incomes, managerial and
professional status, quotas in industry-by doing everything that
avoids recognizing woman as a reproducer of life rather than a
producer of commodities.