What can philosophy say about ecological crises?
"The environmental dangers that now face [hu]mankind put the reflexive non-scientist in an awkward situation. He must acknowledge that he can have precisely nothing interesting to say on the two most important questions in the air, namely, 'What is going to happen to us?' and 'What should we do?' It is not from a philosopher that you stand to be enlightened.
"Which is not to invalidate the attempt to contemplate, rather than simply find a way out of, our ecological dilemmas. It remains valid to try to fathom what the idea of planetary abuse has done to our minds. We may ask what the awareness of the crisis has done to our inner landscape, how it has altered the human psyche.
"One should begin by observing that there is nothing new for mankind about confronting the possibility of its own destruction. The feeling that the present order – the neat fields, the ordered laundry cupboards, the full granaries – might soon disappear, would have been intensely familiar to any inhabitant of medieval Europe. One need only study the carvings on the sides of the cathedrals to see that our imaginations have for centuries been haunted by visions of Armageddon.
"However, we have grown used to conceiving of our present environmental situation as unparalleled, perhaps because we have learnt of it through the media and because for the daily paper, everything must, from an a priori position, be novel. There never was a Lisbon earthquake or a sack of Rome. No one has ever murdered their children or wasted their fortune. This isn’t to deny some intensely novel features behind our anxieties, just to insist that we must carefully separate out the familiar, long-standing morbidity of homo sapiens from the particular features of the current predicament."
- Alain de Botton, "Ecology" in the UN Chronicle.
Populist philosopher Alain de Botton can be somewhat hit and miss, but I think this piece is well worth reading in full (see right hand column).Fears about our present situation are neither entirely novel nor merely a repetition of ancient patterns. Indeed, part of what I will be arguing in my project is that in certain important respects, we do face genuinely new challenges and fears in the various ecological and resource crises of our time. More on that in future posts, but if you want to get a gist of where I'm headed (at least insofar as the diagnosis of an historically novel issue), read the article.
H/T Stuart.
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Ecology
by Alain de Botton
The environmental dangers that now face mankind put the reflexive non-scientist in an awkward situation. He must acknowledge that he can have precisely nothing interesting to say on the two most important questions in the air, namely, “What is going to happen to us?” and “What should we do?” It is not from a philosopher that you stand to be enlightened.
Which is not to invalidate the attempt to contemplate, rather than simply find a way out of, our ecological dilemmas. It remains valid to try to fathom what the idea of planetary abuse has done to our minds. We may ask what the awareness of the crisis has done to our inner landscape, how it has altered the human psyche.
One should begin by observing that there is nothing new for mankind about confronting the possibility of its own destruction. The feeling that the present order – the neat fields, the ordered laundry cupboards, the full granaries – might soon disappear, would have been intensely familiar to any inhabitant of medieval Europe. One need only study the carvings on the sides of the cathedrals to see that our imaginations have for centuries been haunted by visions of Armageddon.
However, we have grown used to conceiving of our present environmental situation as unparalleled, perhaps because we have learnt of it through the media and because for the daily paper, everything must, from an a priori position, be novel. There never was a Lisbon earthquake or a sack of Rome. No one has ever murdered their children or wasted their fortune. This isn’t to deny some intensely novel features behind our anxieties, just to insist that we must carefully separate out the familiar, long-standing morbidity of homo sapiens from the particular features of the current predicament.
One might do worse than to date our present ecological awareness to the moment when the two bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons showed us not only that mankind was perishable (an old thought), but that it was perishable through human action (rather than because of diseased rats): in other words, that we have acquired the power to commit species-suicide. We have always known ourselves to be short-sighted and murderous. We have only in the past few generations learnt that we are also very powerful. We have been blessed with enough intelligence to alter our fates in a way no other animal can, while being denied enough wisdom to keep our baser sides under control.
(cont.)
(cont.)
Yet despite similarities, environmental destruction differs from its nuclear counterpart in a crucial component. Generals who blow up bombs know they want to kill people. Chief executives who manage lorries transporting milk from depots to supermarkets generally have no motives more sinister than the wish to make some money for their shareholders. When we use ample water to brush our teeth or fly to Florence to see some Titians, aggression is far from our minds. However, we are daily reminded that innocent quotidian actions have a cumulative destructive potential greater than an A-bomb. We have been asked to reconceive of ourselves as unthinking killers.
At the same time, troublingly, we are told that the destruction is occurring not primarily through what any one of us has done, but through what we are doing as a race. We are implicated in a crime we cannot control singly. None of us can alter the situation through a personal commitment alone. Salvation must be collective. So we are guilty, but also unusually powerless. Murderers have it easy beside the ordinary citizen of the modern world: they can at least free themselves from sin by repenting and then changing their ways through their own willpower. They have no need to secure simultaneous agreement from six billion others across a hundred and ninety two countries. Yet to give up altogether, to do nothing, is also not an option because we are sternly reminded that if everyone thought this way, we would be lost. We are returned to the Christian injunction to avoid despair, not because there is anything to feel especially cheerful about, but because hope is equated with humanity and a concern for others.
The ecological situation has forever changed our relationship to nature. An unusually warm spring day cannot now be what it was for Chaucer and Wordsworth: a manifestation of the mystery and power of the non-human realm. Since our beginnings, the experience of nature involved an encounter with the Other. The mountains and valleys reminded us that the planet was built by something other than our own hands, by a force greater than we could gather, long before we were born, and set to continue long after our extinction. We could go into nature and see that we were the playthings of forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. At first nature was God, later (in mid-eighteenth century Europe) it became a more general representative of all that exceeded man. But both as a distinctly religious and then a pantheistic experience, man’s connection to nature was essentially deflationary. Out in the deserts and mountains, we were returned to a smaller sense of ourselves.
(cont.)
(cont.)
Part of this involved experiencing time in a particular way. One would leave cities and understand that man was a highly temporary creature, while nature was eternal. Humanity’s achievements were on a pathetic time-scale next to the millennia inscribed in stones. “There is for man no antidote against the opium of time,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century, “Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks”. In the Prelude, Wordsworth prized nature for its capacity to make us feel properly, redemptively small. Its works were to be valued for holding up:
before the mind intoxicate
With present objects, and the busy dance
Of things that pass away, a temperate show
Of objects that endure
How mindsets have changed. The equation has been reversed. Men are no longer temporary and oak trees eternal. Nature no longer endures. Nature doesn’t remind us that we are small, but rather provides chilling, awesome evidence of our size and strength. We glance up to the snows of Kilimanjaro and think of how quickly our coal generators have heated the earth. We fly over the denuded stretches of the Amazon and see how easily we have gashed the earth. Nature used to terrify us, now we terrify ourselves. The natural sublime has given way to the technological sublime. The unusually warm spring day doesn’t allow us to escape ourselves. It doesn’t provide us with a traditional benefit of nature: to quieten our minds with evidence of something distinctly non-human, unconnected to our cares, gloriously indifferent to our vanities. Now the day only makes us think of our works with renewed emphasis. We are responsible for the early flowering of those Wordsworthian daffodils. Our fingerprints are all over the uncannily early return of the migratory birds. We control not only the traffic and the planes, but also the very cycle of the seasons.
Even when we are up against evidence of the more indomitable sides of nature, we’re likely to respond to its unruly force with a half-hearted compliment: ‘What a show,’ we might say on the shores of a furious winter sea, ‘nature does still have some life in it, this beast we thought we had killed…’
(cont.)
(cont.)
We have in response to our murderous behaviour become hysterically sentimental towards nature. We take pity on her. We treat her like a wounded panda. We have come far from the attitude of the Ancient Greeks who saw nature as their adversary, potentially generous, but at heart a foe. We have lost all sense of the ancient fight and now feel responsible. Despite our puny frames and lifespans, we have even succeeded in feeling guilt towards glaciers. Nietzsche knew how to rail against such concern: “Is there anything more nauseous than the sentimentality exhibited towards plants and animals by a creature who from the very first dwelt among them as a raging foe and who in the end claims to feel affection for his exhausted and mutilated victims! In the face of this kind of ‘nature’ the proper attitude of a man rational in other respects is before all one of seriousness.”
The role of the commentator on the environment is at one level to enable us to notice changes that are occurring. But at another level, it is also a question of getting us to care. And this is tall order, for we are being asked to worry about the possible reduction in the number of our species three generations hence, when we all have to deal with a far more imminent problem: our own death. We are being asked to worry about other people who are not yet born as much as we worry about ourselves. Never before in the history of humanity have we been asked to care so much about others of whom we know so little. Our empathetic powers have been stretched to breaking point.
This may be where art comes in. It is artists who are going to have to help us to picture – literally and figuratively – dangers which are generally invisible and are therefore constantly subsumed under the weight of our more mundane or personally intense concerns. Artists may have no solutions, but they are the ones who can come up with the words and images to make visible and important the most abstract and impersonal of challenges.
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