Environmentalists are lousy metaphysicians.
To which claim environmentalism might reply, Whoever said that we ought to be metaphysicians? Here we are, keepers of the china shop of fragile nature and we’ve got lunatics in every corner randomly dropping fine crystal goblets, thoughtlessly, like demented children, and we’re rushing about trying to save one out of five, at the least, and you say we should be thinking about metaphysics?
Yes, I do say that. I do think that you should be, as Freud put it, trying to take a look over the garden wall.
Because, ultimately, environmentalism’s problems are metaphysical (or spiritual if you will) and not legal, political, bureaucratic, scientific, or, least of all, technological. This has always been the case.
After all, the origin of what we now call environmentalism was not in science and technology. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, science and technology were busy helping to create the polluting industries (the “dark satanic mills,” as William Blake wrote) that would soon enough create the need for environmentalism. Rather, the origin of what we now call environmentalism was with philosophers of the late Renaissance like Benedict de Spinoza and the poet/philosophers of German and English Romanticism. Many of these poets were a bit crazed, as poets tend to be, and had a comical tendency to drift off into the neo-Platonic mists. But they were also the first to find the voice of “honest indignation” that, for Blake, was “the voice of God.”
They objected to the rationalist dualism that separated humanity from nature, and they objected to the destruction of both the natural and human worlds that this dualism seemed to allow. Instead, figures like Goethe, Schlegel, Schelling, Novalis, and many others caught up in the philosophical fever of Romanticism argued that nature is inhabited by the divine, that humans are one with it, and that we can have transcendental experiences of the oneness of Being through immersion in the natural world. Theirs was a philosophy of yearning for the Absolute, the experience of a oneness with God. They discovered that the finite, the sensuous world, was related to the infinite. In fact, the chief point of the evolution of nature was the gradual perfection of human consciousness itself. The only thinking worthy of the name was, as Spinoza first saw, thinking that was “adequate to God.”
This was the thought to which our own Ralph Waldo Emerson was introduced during his fateful visit to England and to Thomas Carlyle. This is the metaphysical/spiritual vision that made Thoreau, Whitman, John Muir and even the Sierra Club possible.
Is it too much to say that this tradition is now mostly lost to environmentalism? That it denies the primacy of art and poetry as mediators to nature? That it has made common cause with its own enemy, the world of quantitative reason, of risk assessment, data, the “best science,” and technological fixes? That it has mostly abandoned in embarrassment the spiritual vision of Muir?
What we’ve been left with are numbers. The problem of climate change will be solved if we can reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 ppm. 350 ppm: that’s the holy grail of environmentalism. As a consequence of this approach, environmentalism can tell you that a problem exists (the polar bears are going extinct), but it can’t tell you why you should care.
Environmentalism leads now with science and technologies for creating “sustainability” and for “greening capitalism” because these are solutions that it finds within its reach. They are solutions that the “technostructure” (J. K. Galbraith) of state and corporate bureaucracy understands. But in so doing environmentalism creates, in Simone Weil’s words, a “good without light.” Karl Marx once argued that capitalism understands that it will have enemies.
But if it must have enemies it will create them itself and in its own image. Ken Burns’ recent PBS film, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, has done us the favor of showing how this worked in the development of the national park system. First, the spiritual visionaries (John Muir), then the millionaire heroes come in (Stephen Mather, George Melendez Wright, John D. Rockefeller), and finally the whole thing is turned over to biologists.
Obviously, the natural world has benefited in spectacular ways from this process. But the reigning economic order has gained something too. Instead of having to deal with the unruly, often revolutionary zeal of poets, musicians like Richard Wagner, and uncompromising spiritualists like Muir, it can now deal with something it is very comfortable with: science and quantitative reason. Risk assessment. Data. The reign of Numbers. It has also succeeded in transforming a movement that was originally not only a protest against the denaturalization of the world but the dehumanization of the world. It has remade that movement in its own image. Labor markets, working conditions, and the poor are not part of environmentalism’s problem. And it is certainly not part of an ecologist’s problem. But it should be.
The failure of science is not with science as such, its discoveries, but with its failure to become what Morse Peckham called “romantic science”; that is, a science whose first job is to use its knowledge to undermine ideologies of power, to destroy their “regnant platitudes.” Instead, science, even environmental science, has put itself at the service of these ideologies.
In the end, it is one thing to ask John D. Rockefeller to give millions for the creation of a national park, but quite another to ask him to take responsibility for how he made those millions in the first place: oil, monopolies, the exploitation of workers, and even the massacre of workers (as in the 1913 Ludlow mine massacre, although it was his son that was responsible for that). It is one thing to ask capital to contribute to certain sites that provide “spectacle,” but another to ask it to stop the profitable destruction of the rest of the world through behavior that is little more than systematic violence (factory farming, for instance). Ken Burns’ film is marked by this contradiction: his sponsors are nearly all conduits of corporate philanthropy. He knows where the boundaries of the possible are just as he knows that national parks have boundaries beyond which is the slowly dying world we are becoming ever more familiar with.
Tags: art, environmental theology, global warming, henry david thoreau, john muir, karl marx, ken burns, pbs, poetry, ralph waldo emerson, rationalism, romanticism, sierra club, spinoza, walt whitman, william blake
Metaphysics (beyond the physical world) deals with basic assumptions, that is non-provable assumptions. These generally fall into three areas--what you want, what you think God wants, and what is best for society. Any of these can be used, with the appropriate evidence, to rest an environmental ethic on. These are fully discussed in Book 4 of "In Search of Utopia", the popular free ebook series found at http://andgulliverreturns.info
My concern with White's argument is that it seems to minimalize if not overlook entirely an obvious element in the loss of metaphysics from environmentalism - organized religion. It is my observation - and hardly mine alone - that science has been given the lead role in this movement because religion has most frequently cast itself in anthropocentric terms. As Lynn White, Jr. observed as long ago as 1967, the Christian tradition is the most anthropocentric in the world and its role in validating rapacious appropriation of the world's resources has been critical: "Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference...." [The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis]
Given its critical role in most of our current social pathologies ranging from opposition to universal health care to the perceived divine validation of heterosexism, the Christian tradition of which I am an ordained minister must be called to responsibility for its share of those pathologies. While I agree that the environmental crisis is at heart a spiritual crisis, I do not see how such a crisis can be met without an intentional and critical look at the role of religious traditions in the creation and preservation of the very forces playing out in that crisis.
Really? Is it Christianity itself that caused this? Or is it a post-enlightenment worldview that separated us from nature, one that Protestantism embraced nearly wholeheartedly? The Christian tradition certainly has a lot to do penance for, but claims about it singlehandedly being responsible for the current crisis is downright false.
In fact, isn't the Bible, as Karen Armstrong suggests, the biography of God? And what if the narrative is anthropentric? We are humans, aren't we? Aren't all the stories we write actually about us? What would a story look like that wasn't about us? Sure, we can have stories about other creatures, but aren't they always a commentary on the way we are?
The fact is that the Bible says more about how we are supposed to go outside ourselves than it says about us controlling the natural world. If you recall, in many of the prophetic stories, the greed and oppression inflicted on the poor and the orphan is paralleled with the destruction of crops and waste of the landscape.
The current narrative, which is scientific rationalism, is still human-centred and envisions us as "saving the environment." We'll use our magnificent intellects to invent our way out of it. Yet, as Wendell Berry has said, we need to have a more humble attitude, that we must work with the earth that has been given rather than attempting to assert further control. This is the current crisis.
This is a powerful, accurate, and crucial critique to which contemporary environmentalists need to listen; but while the romantic tradition is necessary, it is not enough.
Many of us resonate deeply with the idea that the European and American romantic tradition is a viable alternative to the utilitarian framework contemporary mainstream environmentalists have bought.
But romanticism, while in explicit revolt against the flat utilitarianism of the rise of industrial capitalist West, all too often reinforces the worst sides of modern individualism that has been detrimental to both our natural and social ecologies. So whether an uncritical reappropriation of the romantic tradition is viable by itself is a question.
Emphatically yes, this tradition is lost to environmentalists and for this reason: the only language that is understood on Capitol Hill is the language of the dollar; the only facts that matter to Interior Department officials during hearings on such things as northern spotted owl habitat are economic and biological facts. So environmentalist long ago learned to cut their hair, dress in three-piece suits and talk the only language bureaucrats seem to understand.
The criticism of environmentalists’ deaf-ear toward workers is spot on. In the early 1990s in the Pacific Northwest, one leading ancient forest activist said, when asked about loggers and mill workers, “I’m sorry about the workers but they are not my problem.”
That the sciences have been subordinated to power is plain. But although the sciences offer accurate, fine-grained descriptions of nature and human behavior, they do not have anything to say about how we ought to respond to the realities the sciences describe.
What then are the implications of the sciences’ supposed agnostic position, especially when the sciences have such a powerful symbolic prestige in modern societies?
The sciences say nothing about what we should do and how we ought to live in relation to the realities they accurately describe. The sciences can give us an idea of the consequences of various options or courses of action but they say nothing, in short, about (moral) meaning.
Although the sciences are not concerned with questions of meaning, in “Science as a Vocation” Max Weber observes they contribute three things: technology, methods of thinking and clarity. So if this is the proper role of the sciences and not that of answering questions of moral and ultimate meaning, where then do we look or whom do we seek to show us the way?
For Weber, modern life is characterized “above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.
Seeing how there are no genuinely charismatic religious virtuosos on the horizon just now, at least not on the level of an Amos, Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, John Muir, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Weber suggests at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that we should critically reappropriate the wisdom and insight found in great religious and philosophical traditions in addition to taking responsibility for our capacity to reason.
Within most if not all of humanity’s great religious and philosophical traditions is the theme of renunciation and the virtue of moderation or temperance. Barring the appearance of a genuine religious virtuoso, environmentalists would do well, I submit, to think hard about how to draw on such traditions in ways that speak to their fellow citizens – but only if it’s genuine for them and in a way that avoids the tendencies toward unbrotherliness in Calvinist Puritanism and self-absorbed mysticism in the romantic tradition.
It's rather funny to hear about "rationalist dualism". And this in a piece about how bad others are in metaphysics! Dualism didn't arise from rationalism, but from supernaturalism, not to say irrationalism, and so did the idea that humans are separate and superior to nature. The idea certainly didn't come from Darwin. Rationalists find that the world is unitary, and that everything hangs together, especially in environmental terms. Rationalists have no problem recognizing human desires, whether for an afterlife, for food to eat, or for a beautiful world. But some of these desires are unfulfillable, and others are incompatable, taking work to reconcile- real work, not prayer.
It is precisely the value that those of us who recognize no afterlife or super-master of our fate place on our real and only home- the earth- that leads environmentalists to work towards its salvation, not to their own imaginary salvation at the hands of Jesus coming back down from the sky, etc. The writer also has little knowledge of the vast corpus of recent and moving environmental writing, from Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, to Norment's Return to Warden's Grove, and countless others. The problem is that time is short, and blunter means are needed to conceptualize the scale of the problem and motivate not just the feeling few, but the apathetic masses, to action.
Thank you for this thoughtful article, Mr. White. It calls to mind the content of the excellent book-length essay, "Life Is A Miracle," that Wendell Berry composed in response to E.O. Wilson's "Consilience." I'm torn between the two orbits, a moon that drifts closer to one or the other man's perspective depending on the day's gravity. Philosophically and cosmologically, though, I'm rooted in a Spinozan or Emersonian teological panentheism that makes me skeptical of industrialized science, no matter how much I admire the work of biologists like Dr. Wilson. Still, I'll be marching over the Brooklyn Bridge on October 24th, presumably with hundreds of people carrying "350" placards. There is space for both approaches; indeed, there must be.
If I'm nit-picky, however, I note that you're a bit dualistic and reductionist in your condemnation of the scientific world view (which you critique for its dualism and reductionism). The "reality" is decidedly more grey, is it not?
Burk, your stridency is disingenuous. Your point that supernaturalism birthed dualism is valid, but it's unfair to insist that Enlightenment rationality didn't produce a dualism of its own.
I was completely riveted by the concepts and content of the original article and of the comments that followed. All of you cited credible sources in forming your opinions. Not one of you rudely discredited the other, while all of you, obviously, are well-read, having amazing command of sentence structure and vocabulary. Your thoughts demonstrate much concern for the fate of our environment.
As for Christianity's part in the environment, including wildlife preservation, I would like to share a story with you. Every day, after work, I would park myself on the front porch with a glass of wine and a cigarette. The neighbors across the street are Fundamentalist Christians and interpret the Bible literally. More often than not, the two of them would scurry across the street to my front porch and inform me that I was truly on the wrong road to heaven. They felt inspired by God to join together to help me save my immortal soul (apparently drinking wine and smoking was their first clue that I was "not right with the Lord.".
The husband of this dynamic duo of fundamental spiritualism told me that he found a raccoon who wreaked havoc on the inside of his boat, then he vividly described how he dealt with the "scoundrel." He put the raccoon in a cage and held the cage underwater until the raccoon drowned, so I drained my wineglass and put out my cigarette, and I sadly the deliberate taking of life of an innocent creature.
I suggested that this action was unusually cruel; it was, after all, just the natural behavior of a raccoon who needed a solid base to stand on while he washed his food. I asked if it would have been kinder to release the raccoon. My neighbor seemed alarmed (I was now too far off the road to heaven--I could see it in his eyes), and he quoted the Bible on humans having dominion over the animals. His wife, by the way, had nodded in angelic agreement during his vivid description of the execution of the raccoon. Dreadful! I knew that it was hopeless to discuss his interpretation of the word "dominion." So, I invited both to sit down and told them that they were in great need of a glass of wine and a cigarette.
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