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Title: Society and Ecology Author: Murray Bookchin Language: en Topics: green, social ecology Source: Retrieved on April 27, 2009 from http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bookchin/sp000514.txt
The problems which many people face today in “defining” themselves, in
knowing “who they are” — problems that feed a vast psychotherapy
industry — are by no means personal ones. These problems exist not only
for private individuals; they exist for modern society as a whole.
Socially, we live in desperate uncertainty about how people relate to
each other. We suffer not only as individuals from alienation and
confusion over our identities and goals; our entire society, conceived
as a single entity, seems unclear about its own nature and sense of
direction. If earlier societies tried to foster a belief in the virtues
of cooperation and caring, thereby giving an ethical meaning to social
life, modern society fosters a belief in the virtues of competition and
egotism, thereby divesting human association of all meaning — except,
perhaps, as an instrument for gain and mindless consumption.
We tend to believe that men and women of earlier times were guided by
firm beliefs and hopes — values that defined them as human beings and
gave purpose to their social lives. We speak of the Middle Ages as an
“Age of Faith” or the Enlightenment as an “Age of Reason.” Even the
pre-World War II era and the years that followed it seem like an
alluring time of innocence and hope, despite the Great Depression and
the terrible conflicts that stained it. As an elderly character in a
recent, rather sophisticated, espionage movie put it what he missed
about his younger years during World War II were their “clarity” — a
sense of purpose and idealism that guided his behaviour.
That “clarity,” today, is gone. It has been replaced by ambiguity. The
certainty that technology and science would improve the human condition
is mocked by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, by massive hunger in
the Third World, and by poverty in the First World. The fervent belief
that liberty would triumph over tyranny is belied by the growing
centralization of states everywhere and by the disempowerment of people
by bureaucracies, police forces, and sophisticated surveillance
techniques — in our “democracies” no less than in visibly authoritarian
countries. The hope that we would form “one world,” a vast community of
disparate ethnic groups that would share their resources to improve life
everywhere, has been shattered by a rising tide of nationalism, racism,
and an unfeeling parochialism that fosters indifference to the plight of
millions.
We believe that our values are worse than those held by people of only
two or three generations ago. The present generation seems more
self-centred, privatized, and mean-spirited by comparison with earlier
ones. It lacks the support systems provided by the extended family,
community, and a commitment to mutual aid. The encounter of the
individual with society seems to occur through cold bureaucratic
agencies rather than warm, caring people.
This lack of social identity and meaning is all the more stark in the
face of the mounting problems that confront us. War is a chronic
condition of our time; economic uncertainty, an all-pervasive presence;
human solidarity, a vaporous myth. Not least of the problems we
encounter are nightmares of an ecological apocalypse — a catastrophic
breakdown of the systems that maintain the stability of the planet. We
live under the constant threat that the world of life will be
irrevocably undermined by a society gone mad in its need to grow —
replacing the organic by the inorganic, soil by concrete, forest by
barren earth, and the diversity of life-forms by simplified ecosystems;
in short, a turning back of the evolutionary clock to an earlier, more
inorganic, mineralized world that was incapable of supporting complex
life-forms of any kind, including the human species.
Ambiguity about our fate, meaning, and purpose thus raises a rather
startling question: is society itself a curse, a blight on life
generally? Are we any better for this new phenomenon called
“civilization” that seems to be on the point of destroying the natural
world produced over millions of years of organic evolution.
An entire literature has emerged which has gained the attention of
millions of readers: a literature that fosters a new pessimism toward
civilization as such. This literature pits technology against a
presumably “virginal” organic nature; cities against countryside;
countryside against “wilderness”; science against a “reverence” for
life; reason against the “innocence” of intuition; and, indeed, humanity
against the entire biosphere.
We show signs of losing faith in all our uniquely human abiliti — our
ability to live in peace with each other, our ability to care for our
fellow beings and other life-forms. This pessimism is fed daily by
sociobiologists who locate our failings in our genes, by antihumanists
who deplore our “antinatural” sensibilities, and by “biocentrists” who
downgrade our rational qualities with notions that we are no different
in our “intrinsic worth” than ants. In short, we are witnessing a
widespread assault against the ability of reason, science, and
technology to improve the world for ourselves and life generally.
The historic theme that civilization must inevitably be pitted against
nature, indeed, that it is corruptive of human nature, has surfaced in
our midst from the days that reach back to Rousseau — this, precisely at
a time when our need for a truly human and ecological civilization has
never been greater if we are to rescue our planet and ourselves.
Civilization, with its hallmarks of reason and technics, is viewed
increasingly as a new blight. Even more basically, society as a
phenomenon in its own right is being questioned so much so that its role
as integral to the formation of humanity is seen as something harmfully
“unnatural” and inherently destructive.
Humanity, in effect, is being defamed by human beings themselves,
ironically, as an accursed form of life that all but destroys the world
of life and threatens its integrity. To the confusion that we have about
our own muddled time and our personal identities, we now have the added
confusion that the human condition is seen as a form of chaos produced
by our proclivity for wanton destruction and our ability to exercise
this proclivity all the more effectively because we possess reason,
science, and technology.
Admittedly, few antihumanists, “biocentrists,” and misanthropes, who
theorize about the human condition, are prepared to follow the logic of
their premises to such an absurd point. What is vitally important about
this medley of moods and unfinished ideas is that the various forms,
institutions, and relationships that make up what we should call
“society” are largely ignored. Instead, just as we use vague words like
“humanity” or zoological terms like homo sapiens that conceal vast
differences, often bitter antagonisms, that exist between privileged
whites and people of colour, men and women, rich and poor, oppressor and
oppressed; so do we, by the same token, use vague words like “society”
or “civilization” that conceal vast differences between free,
nonhierarchical, class, and stateless societies on the one hand, and
others that are, in varying degrees, hierarchical, class-ridden,
statist, and authoritarian. Zoology, in effect, replaces socially
oriented ecology. Sweeping “natural laws” based on population swings
among animals replace conflicting economic and social interests among
people.
Simply to pit “society” against “nature,” “humanity” against the
“biosphere,” and “reason,” “technology,” and “science” against less
developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural
world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and
divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their
solutions.
Ancient Egypt, for example, had a significantly different attitude
toward nature than ancient Babylonia. Egypt assumed a reverential
attitude toward a host of essentially animistic nature deities, many of
which were physically part human and part animal, while Babylonians
created a pantheon of very human political deities. But Egypt was no
less hierarchical than Babylonia in its treatment of people and was
equally, if not more, oppressive in its view of human individuality.
Certain hunting peoples may have been as destructive of wildlife,
despite their strong animistic beliefs, as urban cultures which staked
out an over-arching claim to reason. When these many differences are
simply swallowed up together with a vast variety of social forms by a
word called “society,” we do severe violence to thought and even simple
intelligence. Society per se becomes something “unnatural.” “Reason,”
“technology,” and “science” become things that are “destructive” without
any regard to the social factors that condition their use. Human
attempts to alter the environment are seen as threats — as though our
“species” can do little or nothing to improve the planet for life
generally.
Of course, we are not any less animals than other mammals, but we are
more than herds that browse on the African plains. The way in which we
are more — namely, the kinds of societies that we form and how we are
divided against each other into hierarchies and classes — profoundly
affects our behaviour and our effects on the natural world.
Finally, by so radically separating humanity and society from nature or
naively reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can no longer see
how human nature is derived from nonhuman nature and social evolution
from natural evolution. Humanity becomes estranged or alienated not only
from itself in our “age of alienation,” but from the natural world in
which it has always been rooted as a complex and thinking life-force.
Accordingly, we are fed a steady diet of reproaches by liberal and
misanthropic environmentalists alike about how “we” as a species are
responsible for the breakdown of the environment. One does not have to
go to enclaves of mystics and gurus in San Francisco to find this
species-centred, asocial view of ecological problems and their sources.
New York City will do just as well. I shall not easily forget an
“environmental” presentation staged by the New York Museum of Natural
History in the seventies in which the public was exposed to a long
series of exhibits, each depicting examples of pollution and ecological
disruption . The exhibit which closed the presentation carried a
startling sign, “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth,” and it consisted
simply of a huge mirror which reflected back the human viewer who stood
before it. I clearly recall a black child standing before the mirror
while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which this
arrogant exhibit tried to convey. There were no exhibits of corporate
boards or directors planning to deforest a mountainside or government
officials acting in collusion with them. The exhibit primarily conveyed
one, basically misanthropic, message: people as such, not a rapacious
society and its wealthy beneficiaries, are responsible for environmental
dislocations — the poor no less than the personally wealthy, people of
colour no less than privileged whites, women no less than men, the
oppressed no less than the oppressor. A mythical human “species” had
replaced classes; individuals had replaced hierarchies; personal tastes
(many of which are shaped by a predatory media) had replaced social
relationships; and the disempowered who live meagre, isolated lives had
replaced giant corporations, self-serving bureaucracies, and the violent
paraphernalia of the State.
Leaving aside such outrageous “environmental” exhibitions that mirror
privileged and underprivileged people in the same frame, it seems
appropriate at this point to raise a highly relevant need: the need to
bring society back into the ecological picture. More than ever, strong
emphases must be placed on the fact that nearly all ecological problems
are social problems, not simply or primarily the result of religious,
spiritual, or political ideologies. That these ideologies may foster an
anti-ecological outlook in people of all strata hardly requires
emphasis. But rather than simply take ideologies at their face value, it
is crucial for us to ask from whence these ideologies developed.
Quite frequently, economic needs may compel people to act against their
best impulses, even strongly felt natural values. Lumberjacks who are
employed to clear-cut a magnificent forest normally have no “hatred” of
trees. They have little or no choice but to cut trees just as stockyard
workers have little or no choice but to slaughter domestic animals.
Every community or occupation has its fair share of destructive and
sadistic individuals, to be sure, including misanthropic
environmentalists who would like to see humanity exterminated. But among
the vast majority of people, this kind of work, including such onerous
tasks as mining, are not freely chosen occupations. They stem from need
and, above all, they are the product of social arrangements over which
ordinary people have no control.
To understand present-day problems — ecological as well as economic and
political — we must examine their social causes and remedy them through
social methods. “Deep,” “spiritual,” and humanist, and misanthropic
ecologies gravely mislead us when they refocus our attention on social
symptoms rather than social causes. If our obligation is to look at
changes in social relationships in order to understand our most
significant ecological changes, these ecologies steer us away from
society to “spiritual,” “cultural,” or vaguely defined “traditional”
sources. The Bible did not create European antinaturalism; it served to
justify an antinaturalism that already existed on the continent from
pagan times, despite the animistic traits of pre-Christian religions.
Christianity’s antinaturalistic influence became especially marked with
the emergence of capitalism. Society must not only be brought into the
ecological picture to understand why people tend to choose competing
sensibilities — some, strongly naturalistic; others, strongly
antinaturalistic — but we must probe more deeply into society itself. We
must search out the relationship of society to nature, the reasons why
it can destroy the natural world, and, alternatively, the reasons why it
has and still can enhance, foster, and richly contribute to natural
evolution.
Insofar as we can speak of “society” in any abstract and general sense —
and let us remember that every society is highly unique and different
from others in the long perspective of history — we are obliged to
examine what we can best call “socialization,” not merely “society.”
Society is a given arrangement of relationships which we often take for
granted and view in a very fixed way. To many people today, it would
seem that a market society based on trade and competition has existed
“forever,” although we may be vaguely mindful that there were pre-market
societies based on gifts and cooperation. Socialization, on the other
hand, is a process, just as individual living is a process.
Historically, the process of socializing people can be viewed as a sort
of social infancy that involves a painful rearing of humanity to social
maturity.
When we begin to consider socialization from an in-depth viewpoint, what
strikes us is that society itself in its most primal form stems very
much from nature. Every social evolution, in fact, is virtually an
extension of natural evolution into a distinctly human realm. As the
Roman orator and philosopher, Cicero, declared some two thousand years
ago: “...by the use of our hands, we bring into being within the realm
of Nature, a second nature for ourselves.” Cicero’s observation, to be
sure, is very incomplete: the primeval, presumably untouched “realm of
Nature” or “first nature,” as it has been called, is reworked in whole
or part into “second nature” not only by the “use of our hands.”
Thought, language, and complex, very important biological changes also
play a crucial and, at times, a decisive role in developing a “second
nature” within ”first nature”.
I use the term “reworking” advisedly to focus on the fact that “second
nature” is not simply a phenomenon that develops outside of “first
nature” — hence the special value that should be attached to Cicero’s
use of the expression “within the realm of Nature...” To emphasize that
“second nature” or, more precisely, society (to use this word in its
broadest possible sense) emerges from within primeval ”first nature” is
to re-establish the fact that social life always has a naturalistic
dimension, however much society is pitted against nature in our
thinking. Social ecology clearly expresses the fact that society is not
a sudden “eruption” in the world. Social life does not necessarily face
nature as a combatant in an unrelenting war. The emergence of society is
a natural fact that has its origins in the biology of human
socialization.
The human socialization process from which society emerges — be it in
the form of families, bands, tribes, or more complex types of human
intercourse — has its source in parental relationships, particularly
mother and child bonding. The biological mother, to be sure, can be
replaced in this process by many surrogates, including fathers,
relatives, or, for that matter, all members of a community. It is when
social parents and social siblings — that is, the human community that
surrounds the young — begin to participate in a system of care, that is
ordinarily undertaken by biological parents, that society begins to
truly come into its own.
Society thereupon advances beyond a mere reproductive group toward
institutionalized human relationships, and from a relatively formless
animal community into a clearly structured social order. But at the very
inception of society, it seems more than likely that human beings were
socialized into “second nature” by means of deeply ingrained blood ties,
specifically maternal ties. We shall see that in time the structures or
institutions that mark the advance of humanity from a mere animal
community into an authentic society began to undergo far-reaching
changes and these changes become issues of paramount importance in
social ecology. For better or worse, societies develop around status
groups, hierarchies, classes, and state formations. But reproduction and
family care remain the abiding biological bases for every form of social
life as well as the originating factor in the socialization of the young
and the formation of a society. As Robert Briffault observed in the
early half of this century, the “one known factor which establishes a
profound distinction between the constitution of the most rudimentary
human group and all other animal groups [is the] association of mothers
and offspring which is the sole form of true social solidarity among
animals. Throughout the class of mammals, there is a continuous increase
in the duration of that association, which is the consequence of the
prolongation of the period of infantile dependence,” a prolongation
which Briffault correlates with increases in the period of fetal
gestation and advances in intelligence.
The biological dimension that Briffault adds to what we call society and
socialization cannot be stressed too strongly. It is a decisive
presence, not only in the origins of society over ages of animal
evolution, but in the daily recreation of society in our everyday lives.
The appearance of a newly born infant and the highly extended care it
receives for many years reminds us that it is not only a human being
that is being reproduced, but society itself. By comparison with the
young of other species, children develop slowly and over a long period
of time. Living in close association with parents, siblings, kin groups,
and an ever-widening community of people, they retain a plasticity of
mind that makes for creative individuals and ever-formative social
groups. Although nonhuman animals may approximate human forms of
association in many ways, they do not create a “second nature” that
embodies a cultural tradition, nor do they possess a complex language,
elaborate conceptual powers, or an impressive capacity to restructure
their environment purposefully according to their own needs.
A chimpanzee, for example, remains an infant for only three years and a
juvenile for seven. By the age of ten, it is a full-grown adult.
Children, by contrast, are regarded as infants for approximately six
years and juveniles for fourteen. A chimpanzee, in short, grows mentally
and physically in about half the time required by a human being, and its
capacity to learn or, at least to think, is already fixed by comparison
with a human being, whose mental abilities may expand for decades. By
the same token, chimpanzee associations are often idiosyncratic and
fairly limited. Human associations, on the other hand, are basically
stable, highly institutionalized, and they are marked by a degree of
solidarity, indeed, by a degree of creativity, that has no equal in
nonhuman species as far as we know.
This prolonged degree of human mental plasticity, dependency, and social
creativity yields two results that are of decisive importance. First,
early human association must have fostered a strong predisposition for
interdependence among members of a group — not the “rugged
individualism” we associate with independence. The overwhelming mass of
anthropological evidence suggests that participation, mutual aid,
solidarity, and empathy were the social virtues early human groups
emphasized within their communities. The idea that people are dependent
upon each other for the good life, indeed, for survival, followed from
the prolonged dependence of the young upon adults. Independence, not to
mention competition, would have seemed utterly alien, if not bizarre, to
a creature reared over many years in a largely dependent condition. Care
for others would have been seen as the perfectly natural outcome of a
highly acculturated being that was, in turn, clearly in need of extended
care. Our modern version of individualism, more precisely, of egotism,
would have cut across the grain of early solidarity and mutual aid —
traits, I may add without which such a physically fragile animal like a
human being could hardly have survived as an adult, much less as a
child.
Second, human interdependence must have assumed a highly structured
form. There is no evidence that human beings normally relate to each
other through the fairly loose systems of bonding we find among our
closest primate cousins. That human social bonds can be dissolved or
de-institutionalized in periods of radical change or cultural breakdown
is too obvious to argue here. But during relatively stable conditions,
human society was never the “horde” that anthropologists of the last
century presupposed as a basis for rudimentary social life. On the
contrary, the evidence we have at hand points to the fact that all
humans, perhaps even our distant hominid ancestors, lived in some kind
of structured family groups, and, later, in bands, tribes, villages, and
other forms. In short, they bonded together (as they still do), not only
emotionally and morally, but also structurally in contrived, clearly
definable, and fairly permanent institutions.
Nonhuman animals may form loose communities and even take collective
protective postures to defend their young from predators. But such
communities can hardly be called structured, except in a broad, often
ephemeral, sense. Humans, by contrast, create highly formal communities
that tend to become increasingly structured over the course of time. In
effect, they form not only communities, but a new phenomenon called
societies.
If we fail to distinguish animal communities from human societies, we
risk the danger of ignoring the unique features that distinguish human
social life from animal communities — notably, the ability of society to
change for better or worse and the factors that produce these changes.
By reducing a complex society to a mere community, we can easily ignore
how societies differed from each other over the course of history. We
can also fail to understand how they elaborated simple differences in
status into firmly established hierarchies, or hierarchies into economic
classes. Indeed, we risk the possibility of totally misunderstanding the
very meaning of terms like “hierarchy” as highly organized systems of
command and obedience — these, as distinguished from personal,
individual, and often short-lived differences in status that may, in all
too many cases, involve no acts of compulsion. We tend, in effect, to
confuse the strictly institutional creations of human will, purpose,
conflicting interests, and traditions, with community life in its most
fixed forms, as though we were dealing with inherent, seemingly
unalterable, features of society rather than fabricated structures that
can be modified, improved, worsened — or simply abandoned. The trick of
every ruling elite from the beginnings of history to modern times has
been to identify its own socially created hierarchical systems of
domination with community life as such, with the result being that
human-made institutions acquire divine or biological sanctity.
A given society and its institutions thus tend to become reified into
permanent and unchangeable entities that acquire a mysterious life of
their own apart from nature — namely, the products of a seemingly fixed
“human nature” that is the result of genetic programming at the very
inception of social life. Alternatively, a given society and its
institutions may be dissolved into nature as merely another form of
animal community with its “alpha males,” “guardians,” “leaders,” and
“horde”-like forms of existence. When annoying issues like war and
social conflict are raised, they are ascribed to the activity of “genes”
that presumably give rise to war and even “greed”.
In either case, be it the notion of an abstract society that exists
apart from nature or an equally abstract natural community that is
indistinguishable from nature, a dualism appears that sharply separates
society from nature, or a crude reductionism appears that dissolves
society into nature. These apparently contrasting, but closely related,
notions are all the more seductive because they are so simplistic.
Although they are often presented by their more sophisticated supporters
in a fairly nuanced form, such notions are easily reduced to
bumper-sticker slogans that are frozen into hard, popular dogmas.
The approach to society and nature advanced by social ecology may seem
more intellectually demanding, but it avoids the simplicities of dualism
and the crudities of reductionism. Social ecology tries to show how
nature slowly phases into society without ignoring the differences
between society and nature on the one hand, as well as the extent to
which they merge with each other on the other.The everyday socialization
of the young by the family is no less rooted in biology than the
everyday care of the old by the medical establishment is rooted in the
hard facts of society. By the same token, we never cease to be mammals
who still have primal natural urges, but we institutionalize these urges
and their satisfaction in a wide variety of social forms. Hence, the
social and the natural continually permeate each other in the most
ordinary activities of daily life without losing their identity in a
shared process of interaction, indeed, of interactivity.
Obvious as this may seem at first in such day-to-day problems as
caretaking, social ecology raises questions that have far-reaching
importance for the different ways society and nature have interacted
over time and the problems these interactions have produced. How did a
divisive, indeed, seemingly combative, relationship between humanity and
nature emerge? What were the institutional forms and ideologies that
rendered this conflict possible? Given the growth of human needs and
technology, was such a conflict really unavoidable? And can it be
overcome in a future, ecologically oriented society?
How does a rational, ecologically oriented society fit into the
processes of natural evolution? Even more broadly, is there any reason
to believe that the human mind — itself a product of natural evolution
as well as culture — represents a decisive highpoint in natural
development, notably, in the long development of subjectivity from the
sensitivity and self-maintenance of the simplest life-forms to the
remarkable intellectuality and self-consciousness of the most complex.
In asking these highly provocative questions, I am not trying to justify
a strutting arrogance toward nonhuman life-forms. Clearly, we must bring
humanity’ s uniqueness as a species, marked by rich conceptual, social,
imaginative, and constructive attributes, into synchronicity with
nature’s fecundity, diversity, and creativity. I have argued that this
synchronicity will not be achieved by opposing nature to society,
nonhuman to human life-forms, natural fecundity to technology, or a
natural subjectivity to the human mind. Indeed, an important result that
emerges from a discussion of the interrelationship of nature to society
is the fact that human intellectuality, although distinct, also has a
far-reaching natural basis. Our brains and nervous systems did not
suddenly spring into existence without a long antecedent natural
history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our
extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels — can be
traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia
of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and
the cerebral cortex of a primate.
Here, too, in the most intimate of our human attributes, we are no less
products of natural evolution than we are of social evolution. As human
beings we incorporate within ourselves aeons of organic differentiation
and elaboration. Like all complex life-forms, we are not only part of
natural evolution; we are also its heirs and the products of natural
fecundity.
In trying to show how society slowly grows out of nature, however,
social ecology is also obliged to show how society, too, undergoes
differentiation and elaboration. In doing so, social ecology must
examine those junctures in social evolution where splits occurred which
slowly brought society into opposition to the natural world, and explain
how this opposition emerged from its inception in prehistoric times to
our own era. Indeed, if the human species is a life-form that can
consciously and richly enhance the natural world, rather than simply
damage it, it is important for social ecology to reveal the factors that
have rendered many human beings into parasites on the world of life
rather than active partners in organic evolution. This project must be
undertaken not in a haphazard way, but with a serious attempt to render
natural and social development coherent in terms of each other, and
relevant to our times and the construction of an ecological society.
Perhaps one of social ecology’s most important contributions to the
current ecological discussion is the view that the basic problems which
pit society against nature emerge form within social development itself
— not between society and nature. That is to say, the divisions between
society and nature have their deepest roots in divisions within the
social realm, namely, deep- seated conflicts between human and human
that are often obscured by our broad use of the word “humanity”.
This crucial view cuts across the grain of nearly all current ecological
thinking and even social theorizing. One of the most fixed notions that
present-day ecological thinking shares with liberalism, Marxism, and
conservatism is the historic belief that the “domination of nature”
requires the domination of human by human. This is most obvious in
social theory. Nearly all of our contemporary social ideologies have
placed the notion of human domination at the centre of their theorizing.
It remains one of the most widely accepted notions, from classical times
to the present, that human freedom from the “domination of man by
nature” entails the domination of human by human as the earliest means
of production and the use of human beings as instruments for harnessing
the natural world. Hence, in order to harness the natural world, it has
been argued for ages, it is necessary to harness human beings as well,
in the form of slaves, serfs, and workers.
That this instrumental notion pervades the ideology of nearly all ruling
elites and has provided both liberal and conservative movements with a
justification for their accommodation to the status quo, requires
little, if any, elaboration. The myth of a “stingy” nature has always
been used to justify the “stinginess” of exploiters in their harsh
treatment of the exploited — and it has provided the excuse for the
political opportunism of liberal, as well as conservative, causes. To
“work within the system” has always implied an acceptance of domination
as a way of “organizing” social life and, in the best of cases, a way of
freeing humans from their presumed domination by nature.
What is perhaps less known, however, is that Marx, too, justified the
emergence of class society and the State as stepping stones toward the
domination of nature and, presumably, the liberation of humanity. It was
on the strength of this historical vision that Marx formulated his
materialist conception of history and his belief in the need for class
society as a stepping stone in the historic road to communism.
Ironically, much that now passes for antihumanistic, mystical ecology
involves exactly the same kind of thinking — but in an inverted form.
Like their instrumental opponents, these ecologists, too, assume that
humanity is dominated by nature, be it in the form of “natural laws” or
an ineffable “earth wisdom” that must guide human behaviour. But while
their instrumental opponents argue the need to achieve nature’s
“surrender” to a “conquering” active-aggressive humanity, antihumanist
and mystical ecologists argue the case for achieving humanity’s
passive-receptive “surrender” to an “all conquering” nature. However
much the two views may differ in their verbiage and pieties, domination
remains the underlying notion of both: a natural world conceived as a
taskmaster — either to be controlled or obeyed.
Social ecology springs this trap dramatically by re-examining the entire
concept of domination, be it in nature and society or in the form of
“natural law” and “social law.” What we normally call domination in
nature is a human projection of highly organized systems of social
command and obedience onto highly idiosyncratic, individual, and
asymmetrical forms of often mildly coercive behaviour in animal
communities. Put simply, animals do not “dominate” each other in the
same way that a human elite dominates, and often exploits, an oppressed
social group. Nor do they “rule” through institutional forms of
systematic violence as social elites do. Among apes, for example, there
is little or no coercion, but only erratic forms of dominant behaviour.
Gibbons and orangutans are notable for their peaceable behaviour toward
members of their own kind. Gorillas are often equally pacific, although
one can single out “high status,” mature, and physically strong males
among “lower status,” younger and physically weaker ones. The “alpha
males” celebrated among chimpanzees do not occupy very fixed “status”
positions within what are fairly fluid groups. Any “status” that they do
achieve may be due to very diverse causes.
One can merrily skip from one animal species to another, to be sure,
falling back on very different, asymmetrical reasons for searching out
“high” versus “low status” individuals. The procedure becomes rather
silly, however, when words like “status” are used so flexibly that they
are allowed to include mere differences in group behaviour and
functions, rather than coercive actions.
The same is true for the word “hierarchy.” Both in its origins and its
strict meaning, this term is highly social, not zoological. A Greek
term, initially used to denote different levels of deities and, later,
clergy (characteristically, Hierapolis was an ancient Phrygian city in
Asia Minor that was a centre for mother goddess worship), the word has
been mindlessly expanded to encompass everything from beehive
relationships to the erosive effects of running water in which a stream
is seen to wear down and “dominate” its bedrock. Caring female elephants
are called “matriarchs” and attentive male apes who exhibit a great deal
of courage in defense of their community, while acquiring very few
“privileges,” are often designated as “patriarchs.” The absence of an
organized system of rule — so common in hierarchical human communities
and subject to radical institutional changes, including popular
revolutions — is largely ignored.
Again, the different functions that the presumed animal hierarchies are
said to perform, that is, the asymmetrical causes that place one
individual in an “alpha status” and others in a lesser one, is
understated where it is noted at all. One might, with much the same
aplomb, place all tall sequoias in a “superior” status over smaller
ones, or, more annoyingly, regard them as an “elite” in a mixed forest
“hierarchy” over “submissive” oaks, which, to complicate matters, are
more advanced on the evolutionary scale. The tendency to mechanically
project social categories onto the natural world is as preposterous as
an attempt to project biological concepts onto geology. Minerals do not
“reproduce” the way life-forms do. Stalagmites and stalactites in caves
certainly do increase in size over time. But in no sense do they grow in
a manner that even remotely corresponds to growth in living beings. To
take superficial resemblances, often achieved in alien ways, and group
them into shared identities, is like speaking of the “metabolism” of
rocks and the “morality” of genes.
This raises the issue of repeated attempts to read ethical, as well as
social, traits into a natural world that is only potentially ethical
insofar as it forms a basis for an objective social ethics. Yes,
coercion does exist in nature; so does pain and suffering. However,
cruelty does not. Animal intention and will are too limited to produce
an ethics of good and evil or kindness and cruelty. Evidence of
inferential and conceptual thought is very limited among anima]s, except
for primates, cetaceans, elephants, and possibly a few other mammals.
Even among the most intelligent animals, the limits to thought are
immense in comparison with the extraordinary capacities of socialized
human beings. Admittedly, we are substantially less than human today in
view of our still unknown potential to be creative, caring, and
rational. Our prevailing society serves to inhibit, rather than realize,
our human potential. We still lack the imagination to know how much our
finest human traits could expand with an ethical, ecological, and
rational dispensation of human affairs.
By contrast, the known nonhuman world seems to have reached visibly
fixed limits in its capacity to survive environmental changes. If mere
adaptation to environmental changes is seen as the criterion for
evolutionary success (as many biologists believe), then insects would
have to be placed on a higher plane of development than any mammalian
life-form. However, they would be no more capable of making so lofty an
intellectual evaluation of themselves than a “queen bee” would be even
remotely aware of her “regal” status — a status, I may add, that only
humans (who have suffered the social domination of stupid, inept, and
cruel kings and queens) would be able to impute to a largely mindless
insect.
None of these remarks are meant to metaphysically oppose nature to
society or society to nature. On the contrary, they are meant to argue
that what unites society with nature in a graded evolutionary continuum
is the remarkable extent to which human beings, living in a rational,
ecologically oriented society, could embody the creativity of nature —
this, as distinguished from a purely adaptive criterion of evolutionary
success. The great achievements of human thought, art, science, and
technology serve not only to monumentalize culture, they serve also to
monumentalize natural evolution itself. They provide heroic evidence
that the human species is a warm-blooded, excitingly versatile, and
keenly intelligent life-form — not a cold-blooded, genetically
programmed, and mindless insect — that expresses nature’s greatest
powers of creativity.
Life-forms that create and consciously alter their environment,
hopefully in ways that make it more rational and ecological, represent a
vast and indefinite extension of nature into fascinating, perhaps
unbounded, lines of evolution which no branch of insects could ever
achieve — notably the evolution of a fully self-conscious nature. If
this be humanism — more precisely, ecological humanism, the current crop
of antihumanists and misanthropes are welcome to make the most of it.
Nature, in turn, is not a scenic view we admire through a picture window
— a view that is frozen into a landscape or a static panorama. Such
landscape images of nature may be spiritually elevating but they are
ecologically deceptive. Fixed in time and place, this imagery makes it
easy for us to forget that nature is not a static vision of the natural
world but the long, indeed cumulative, history of natural development.
This history involves the evolution of the inorganic, as well as the
organic, realms of phenomena. Wherever we stand in an open field,
forest, or on a mountain top, our feet rest on ages of development, be
they geological strata, fossils of long-extinct life-forms, the decaying
remains of the newly dead, or the quiet stirring of newly emerging life.
Nature is not a “person,” a “caring Mother,” or, in the crude
materialist language of the last century, “matter and motion.” Nor is it
a mere “process” that involves repetitive cycles like seasonal changes
and the building-up and breaking-down process of metabolic activity —
some process philosophies to the contrary notwithstanding. Rather,
natural history is a cumulative evolution toward ever more varied,
differentiated, and complex forms and relationships.
This evolutionary development of increasingly variegated entities, most
notably, of life-forms, is also an evolutionary development which
contains exciting, latent possibilities. With variety, differentiation,
and complexity, nature, in the course of its own unfolding, opens new
directions for still further development along alternative lines of
natural evolution. To the degree that animals become complex,
self-aware, and increasingly intelligent, they begin to make those
elementary choices that influence their own evolution They are less and
less the passive objects of “natural selection” and more and more the
active subjects of their own development.
A brown hare that mutates into a white one and sees a sn covered terrain
in which to camouflage itself is acting on behalf of its own survival,
not simply adapting in order to survive. It is not merely being
“selected” by its environment; it is selecting its own environment and
making a choice that expresses a small measure of subjectivity and
judgement.
The greater the variety of habitats that emerge in the evolutionary
process, the more a given life-form. particularly a neurologically
complex one, is likely to play an active and judgemental role in
preserving itself. To the extent that natural evolution follows this
path of neurological development, it gives rise to life-forms that
exercise an ever-wider latitude of choice and a nascent form of freedom
in developing themselves.
Given this conception of nature as the cumulative history of more
differentiated levels of material organization (especially of
life-forms) and of increasing subjectivity, social ecology establishes a
basis for a meaningful understanding of humanity and society s place in
natural evolution. Natural history is not a “catch-as-catch-can”
phenomenon. It is marked by tendency, by directions and, as far as human
beings are concerned, by conscious purpose. Human beings and the social
worlds they create can open a remarkably expansive horizon for
development of the natural wor -a horizon marked by consciousness,
reflection, and an unprecedented freedom of choice and capacity for
conscious creativity. The factors that reduce many life-forms to largely
adaptive roles in changing environments are replaced by a capacity for
consciously adapting environments to existing and new life-forms.
Adaptation, in effect, increasingly gives way to creativity and the
seemingly ruthless action of natural law to greater freedom. What
earlier generations called “blind nature to denote nature’s lack of any
moral direction, turns into “free nature, a nature that slowly finds a
voice and the means to relieve the needless tribulations of life for all
species in a highly conscious humanity and an ecological society. The
“Noah Principle” of preserving every existing life-form simply for its
own sake — a principle advanced by the antihumanist, David Ehrenfeld —
has little meaning without the presupposition, at the very least, of the
existence of a “Noah” — that is, a conscious life-form called humanity
that might well rescue life- forms that nature itself would extinguish
in ice ages, land desiccation, or cosmic collisions with asteroids.
Grizzly bears, wolves, pumas, and the like, are not safer from
extinction because they are exclusively in the “caring” hands of a
putative “Mother Nature.” If there is any truth to the theory that the
great Mesozoic reptiles were extinguished by climatic changes that
presumably followed the collision of an asteroid with the earth, the
survival of existing mammals might well be just as precarious in the
face of an equally meaningless natural catastrophe unless there is a
conscious, ecologically oriented life-form that has the technological
means to rescue them.
The issue, then, is not whether social evolution stands opposed to
natural evolution. The issue is how social evolution can be situated in
natural evolution and why it has been thrown — needlessly, as I will
argue — against natural evolution to the detriment of life as a whole.
The capacity to be rational and free does not assure us that this
capacity will be realized. If social evolution is seen as the
potentiality for expanding the horizon of natural evolution along
unprecedented creative lines, and human beings are seen as the
potentiality for nature to become self-conscious and free, the issue we
face is why these potentialities have been warped and how they can be
realized.
It is part of social ecology’s commitment to natural evolution that
these potentialities are indeed real and that they can be fulfilled.
This commitment stands flatly at odds with a “scenic” image of nature as
a static view to awe mountain men or a romantic view for conjuring up
mystical images of a personified deity that is so much in vogue today.
The splits between natural and social evolution, nonhuman and human
life, an intractable “stingy” nature and a grasping, devouring humanity,
have all been specious and misleading when they are seen as
inevitabilities. No less specious and misleading have been reductionist
attempts to absorb social into natural evolution, to collapse culture
into nature in an orgy of irrationalism, theism, and mysticism, to
equate the human with mere animality, or to impose a contrived “natural
law” on an obedient human society.
Whatever has turned human beings into “aliens” in nature are social
changes that have made many human beings “aliens” in their own social
world. the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, and of
men by men. Today, as for many centuries in the past, there are still
oppressive human beings who literally own society and others who are
owned by it. Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity
that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements,
technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity
for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological
problems will have their roots in social problems.