by Stefano Vaj
On the basis of an abstract ecosystem we can moreover define, in addition to biotope and biocenosis, the habitat (that is the sum of the biotopes in which an organism can live, insofar as they possess all the requisites necessary for the life of this organism), the ecological niche (the “part” of the habitat in which a given species lives, that is the sum of the relations between the latter and the ecosystem), the ecological succession (the evolutionary transformation of a given biocenosis), the climax (the state of maximum development in conditions of equilibrium),[64] that are the main analytical categories of modern ecology, to which one may add ecological valence, that is the highest or lowest ability of an organism to adapt to variations in the environment.[65]
All this makes it clear enough that ecology does not in the least “oppose” man’s intervention on the environment. Beyond the obvious consideration that ecology, as a science (and hence as the sum of descriptive and not normative propositions), does not even “oppose” the widespread pollution and collective suicide by poison, but only informs us of the results of the factors in place, after which the decision is ours – this is true also in a deeper sense.
In fact ecology, precisely because it is a science, looks for and works out “operational definitions” of its own objects of investigation, elaborates models that allow predictions of increasing approximation, and analyses the causal relations inside the systems being studied. In other terms, like every science, it founds a possible technology, which thus allows, or rather establishes, an appropriation and domination by man of the object under examination, in this case the environment, the ecosystem, nature.
Therefore it is only by a semantic slip, albeit rather a frequent one, that from the seventies onward the term “ecology” has itself come to refer to an ideology one can define as ecologism. An ideology that has its very own expressions, but that is present in a diluted form in most mainstream persuasions, as well as in practically every European political party. Its central tenet, according to Hans-Magnus Enzenberger, can be articulated as follows: “Earth’s industrial societies generate ecological contradictions that will (necessarily) bring about its ruin in the near future.” This statement transposes statements made by Marx from the economic realm to the “naturalistic” realm: just as the contradictions internal to capitalism will lead to its perdition, so too the “ecological contradictions” will result in the end of the world or at least of the “mechanised society.”
Needless to say, such a view goes hand-in-hand with traditional right-wing nostalgia for a supposed Golden Age which science, hybris and industrial development together have destroyed.
What dominates in such camps is an abstract and universalist idea of Nature, perceived on the one hand as static, immutable, given once and for all, and on the other as totally separate from, if not opposed to, man and culture, disregarding the obvious fact that man, as a living being, undeniably remains part of nature anyway, even if one claims that our species is an “accident,” a “pathological manifestation” or a “cancer.” In truth, however, ecology itself brings into question this edenic vision (the fact that its proponents, like all Western intellectuals, live inside a hyper-protected environment, is not altogether coincidental), especially because it shows how ecosystems evolve and decline, how the equilibriums they create are in reality temporary dynamic effects, that can and do vary with time, even in the absence of human intervention, as a consequence of, among other things, the struggle of all species (or rather of the genes in their respective pools) to persist and disseminate, and of the characteristics of the biotope at a given time.
There exists in reality no preset and indefinitely self-sufficient natural equilibrium that could be “disturbed.” The success of mammals, an event surely not provoked by man, “destroyed” in a way the earlier equilibrium of the ecosystem, and created a new one. On the contrary, the immigration of a foreign species into a habitat can in principle result in most life forms’ vanishing from that environment, including the foreign species itself. Pollution, caused for example by volcanic eruptions or the release of hydrocarbons by the ocean floor, also occurs spontaneously, sterilising limited areas or subjecting the existing organisms to strong selective pressures to adapt. Some animal species, on the other hand, tend spontaneously to extinction: a human decision to keep them alive, in itself perfectly legitimate, is by no means more “natural” than the choice to eliminate a perfectly viable species, such as the smallpox pathogen.
Furthermore, this idea of Nature stems from the experience of a world that for thousands of years, as we have seen, has been remoulded by human intervention. By itself nature is neither uncontaminated, nor benign, nor adapted, but only adaptable to human life. Whoever imagines it as a cross between a zoo, a garden, an orchard and a golf course, does not realise to what extent he is influenced by a setting that is already the work of man. We have seen how the park of Versailles is in itself no more natural than the palace in its midst. The creation of agricultural areas and the adoption of crop rotation, which have been in practice since time immemorial, allow for permanently high yields that are absolutely “unnatural,” as is irrigation, or the drainage of malaria infested land. Wood fire, for all the psychological and symbolic meaning that it may possess, is a tragically inefficient heating system, highly polluting and with exorbitant environmental costs in terms of woodland and erosion. Traditional, or subsistence, ways of life harm the environment in ways befitting a spoil economy – precisely one in which the environmental factor is considered as something there to be exploited for as long one can, and not as a variable on which to act or as a resource to be managed –; and their generalisation, given current levels of world population, would plausibly imply catastrophic results.
All that seems blatantly ignored by “deep ecology” theorists, that see in “environmentalism” a new universal paradigm in the light of which man’s presence in the world should be reexamined. As much as one can share their refusal of monotheistic and scientific dualism, the same instantly degenerates into a rebuke of man’s historical and Promethean dimension, along the usual lines of the prevailing worldview,[66] and even develop into an open preaching for man’s reverting to “pure animality.”
Many neo-fascists and former neo-fascists, especially in Italy, remain as well at the forefront of the opposition against the “biological revolution,” in spite of the tension between such positions and the Faustian and/or social Darwinist legacy to which many of them like to pay lip service.[67]
The “optimistic” popularisation in Our Future Inheritance: Chance or Choice[68] by Walter F. Bodmer and Alun Jones, who in the beginning of the eighties described a world with genetic therapies, transplants, miraculous prostheses, a cure for sterility, prenatal diagnostics, extension of mean life expectation etc. does therefore represent an exception, and most liberal or right-wing militants were equally incensed by the prospects of practical applications of the new discoveries as by the research itself.
We have already mentioned the case of psychometrics, and of the research on the hereditability of mental characteristics and capacity of individuals and races, because of which Jensen and Eyesenck[69] were crucified; similarly, in its day the Italian quarterly review l’Uomo libero had amply recorded the issues arising around the ethology of Lorenz and Ardrey and the like,[70] as had before them Eléments and Nouvelle Ecole in France. Moreover at the end of the seventies the scandal of sociobiology exploded,[71] looked upon as a potential alibi for a politics of social oppression, and even saw the creation of a Sociobiology Study Group, headed by Richard Lewontin, Jonathan Beckwith and Stephen J. Gould,[72] that was to study… the sociobiologists – where “study” means basically monitoring, denunciation and ostracism.
In fact, according to the busywork by Fuschetto already mentioned, “the momentous transition marked by the genetic revolution” would boil down to two assumptions: “1) it is possible to control the unfoldment of the biological evolution (Faustian perspective); 2) it is possible to redu
ce much of human nature to genetic factors (sociobiological dogma)…It should be emphasised that the importance of the shift of these two hypotheses into true and full-blown scientific convictions is of great momentum to the goals of social organisation and political legitimacy.”[73]
The truth is that the very “nature-culture” debate, on what pertains to the one and what to the other,[74] results, in a postmodern perspective, as basically outdated and irrelevant. Genes in fact do not only act directly on our body and on our mind shaping our biology, but also do so indirectly, influencing the environment that we experience, and this not just on the cultural and macro-social level, but even at the level of the individual.
Gregory Stock writes:
A child who excels at sports is more likely to gravitate toward athletic activities, just as one who loves to read philosophy might choose more intellectual pursuits. This happens in less overt ways as well. A reclusive, rigid child almost certainly elicits different treatment from those around him or her than one who is gregarious and easygoing. Thus, self-reinforcing feedback comes into play: our biological predispositions shape our environment, which in turn reinforces our predispositions. Some of the spread that exists in estimates of the heritability of IQ, for instance, may arise because of the dissimilar ages of the subjects in different studies. By late adolescence, twins tend to be closer in IQ than they were in childhood, which may be because of their growing power to align their activities with their underlying predispositions. Similar results show up with qualities such as social behaviour.[75]
In any case, the message of sociobiology was certainly not unambiguous; to begin with, its starting point is an uncritical neo-Darwinism that it is impossible not to deem scientifically outdated;[76] furthermore it raises more radical problems, such as the fundamental reductionism of most of its exponents, who not without reason draws it closer to theories of neoliberalism or to the so-called “economical analysis of right,” that is to Milton Friedman or Richard A. Posner respectively.[77]
Nevertheless, what is of interest here is not only what sociobiological thinking can contribute to an alternative and more perceptive perspective on man’s life, but the “moral” condemnation, which has been pinned upon it as “anthropology,” that is as a “blasphemous” science, as such the carrier of a ύβρις, hybris, able to turn into a “manipulation,” be it only mental, of the human object – which is exactly that which, from the Bible to the Frankfurt School, from Abraham to Horkheimer, Habermas and Marcus, to arrive at an André Glucksmann or a Bernard-Henry Lévy, represents the original sin from which man must constantly be defended and emancipated.[78]
In the opposite camp, Gehlen agrees with the Frankfurt School to regard the traditional scheme, according to which man, by means of his intelligence, knows the world and then acts in consequence, as totally outdated.
Maria Teresa Pansera writes: “For Gehlen, on the contrary, man knows through his action, via a process of mutual interconnections between perception and motor activity. In other words, it is possible for Gehlen to understand knowing and intelligence, as specific human activities, on the basis of the concept of action: wanting to hold up the essential difference between man and animal as based on “intelligence” is a radical mistake.”[79]
Marcuse too agrees in his renowned pamphlet One Dimensional Man: “The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective domination of nature thus came to provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the ever-more-effective domination of man by man through the domination of nature.”[80] As Heidegger had already justly emphasised, the form in which technology presents itself is no longer that of a mere instrument, but of the “destiny” and “risk” inherent in man’s own very being.[81]
On the other hand, the biblical mindset and its prolongations in post-Marxist “critical theory” or in the nouveaux philosophes, are as horrified as are people like Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt - even though these had departed from biblical orthodoxy in a very different direction – by the example of “city founders,” who like Lycurgus or Romulus dared to write the Tables of the Law, and in attempting to create a new type of man, to make gods of themselves.
Thus, the “failure of Communism” and the “totalitarian degeneration” of real-socialism regimes, are in fact attributed to an insufficient vigilance against temptations of this sort, to which one should always oppose the empty Arch of irreducible individualism, of which the Western way-of-life is now believed to be a better custodian than perilous attempts at “shortcuts to Paradise.”
Yet even more symbolic is the diffidence with respect to “experimenting on humans,” not in the macro-historical and social sense, but simply scientific, and this not so much out of concern for the individuals involved, but because of its blasphemous nature and for the results of empirical knowledge to which it might aspire.
Even if utilitarianism cannot in principle oppose what is necessary for example to medical research,[82] this field is nevertheless still surrounded by a strong diffidence, even when the subjects experimented upon are volunteers, persons in a desperate clinical condition and with no alternative, people condemned to death seeking a commutation of their sentence, embryos, mere gametes, tissues or genes or even…higher animals; and in the background it dangles time and again the image of the mad scientist pursuing prohibited and diabolical research inside the Nazi concentration camp.[83]
Of course the Market can prescribe to have men poisoned inside western factories, or starve to death in slums at the outskirts of megacities, or administered lethal injections in American prisons, or bombed with depleted uranium if they are guilty of being the citizens of some “rogue State”; but a scientific experiment on human material, be it hypothetically capable of “saving a thousand lives,” deserves to be viewed with special suspicion[84]. Human beings are best merely observed, and in addition the results of these observations are constantly subjected to a critical scrutiny of a moral order that should prevent drawing conclusions from them that would be of any strong ideological or technological interest.
Faced with such temptations, a systematic “demystification” of any discourse on Man becomes a moral obligation, precisely in order to paralise any reinterpretation of “the specifically human” for the purpose of creating a “new man.”[85] Except of course that a truly postmodern interest in, for instance, sociobiology is very different from that of conservative, right-wing, circles, which allegedly would find in it arguments for the legitimisation of the social order and the hierarchies in place; and consists precisely in the reverse “realistic” demystification of the theories that see human behaviour and social structures as the product of purely external and/or contingent (Providence, the historical stage of class struggle, market mechanisms...) which would graft themselves onto a tabula rasa that not only is purely delusional,[86] but in addition is considered as untouchable as the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil.
The mercantilist, humanist and globalist logic therefore finds itself bewildered when confronted with the perspectives opening up to the “third man” – itself dreading the mechanical application of the impersonality of the Market, or at best, of an individualistic micro-hedonism, to the new world – and pretends that the extreme risk facing the third man does not exist (“let’s move ahead, keep an eye on the Stock Exchange, and hope that some way or other everything will be fine”); or else it deludes itself that it will be possible managing it merely with repressive and omissive regulations (“let’s cut the grants to research, forbid its applications, and the problem will go away”). In neither case however does it know how to address the issues concerned.
Rifkin writes:
In reprogramming the genetic codes of life, do we risk a fatal interruption of millions of years of evolutionary development? Might not the artificial creation of life spell the end of the natural world?[87] Do we face becoming aliens in a world populated by cloned, chimeric, and transgenic creatures? Will the creation, mass production, and wholesale release
of thousands of genetically engineered life forms into the environment cause irreversible damage to the biosphere, making genetic pollution an even greater threat to the planet than nuclear and petrochemical pollution? […] What will it mean to be a human being in a world where babies are genetically designed and customised in the womb and where people are identified, stereotyped, and discriminated against on basis of their genotype? What are the risks we take in attempting to design more “perfect” human beings?[88]
Francis Fukuyama, the champion of “the end of history,” draws conclusions perfectly consistent with those feelings:
The most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a “posthuman” stage of history. […] Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself […] We must make use of the State power to prevent the access to technologies which might undermine our current notion of humanity, which might allow some of us to to overcome the physical and mental limitations that we are faced with as of today.[89]
Stock agrees: “The current discussion about human enhancement is not what it seems... It is not about medical safety, the wellbeing of children, or protecting the human gene pool. At a fundamental level, it is about philosophy and religion. It is about what it means to be human, about our vision of the human future.”[90]
And yet the challenges of our time cannot be eluded, no more than the Pygmies or the Australian Aborigines managed to really “elude,” in the long term, the advent of agriculture or of the Iron Age.[91] With the fundamental difference that they at least have been able to enjoy hundreds and thousands of years of relative isolation, which today no corner of the world can no longer guarantee anyone. The destiny awaiting the world and the human species will some way or other involve all its members.