Evolution doesn’t look ahead at all: as we’ve seen, DNA mutation is random with respect to current need. So we might as well admit that arguments based on utility are based on a teleology that the mesh just doesn’t possess. The ecological thought compels us to recalibrate our sense of justice. And who precisely is doing the recalibrating? Problems with consequentialism imply problems with the notion of a (single, solid, independent) self. To believe in a self is actually to believe in an object, although it may seem a subtler kind of object than a brick or a chair. The no-self view is actually more “subjective,” in a way. By not holding an objectlike picture of myself in mind, by being true to my inability to pin myself down, I’m being more honest. The ecological thought includes the subject, as our trip through dark ecology showed. The subject isn’t an optional extra. Subjectivity is like a waterbed: push it down in one place, and it pops up in another. Thinking that personhood is the enemy of ecology is a big mistake. Unfortunately, it’s fashionable to do so—another thing that joins postmodernists and deep ecologists. The ecological thought undermines metaphysics, whether your metaphysics says that there is one thing, or two things, or many things, or infinity things, or nothing.
Finding a progressive way to talk about population is one of Parfit’s principal aims. William Godwin and Percy Shelley had a crack at a critique of Malthus in the early nineteenth century; their argument, frequently cited, is that Malthus deliberately ignores distributional inequities. Earth could support an awful lot of life forms if they all had enough to live on. Parfit, conversely, goes deeper. He exposes ideas based on self-interest theory, such as Malthusian population theory, to repeated prisoner’s dilemma tests, which they fail. Along with radiation and pollution, population is one of the transpersonal, long-term, big picture things that we must now consider. A strong example of a more recent version of Malthusian self-interest theory is Garrett Hardin’s infamous consequentialist “tragedy of the commons,” which has had an inordinate effect on environmental thinking.
FORWARD ECONOMICS
Some crude economic ideologies oppose ecological progress, such as the facile neoliberal complaint that renewable energy would “hurt” the economy or that taxes on fuel are just lining the pockets of the government. Aren’t all taxes doing this? Isn’t that what a tax is? Some would prefer to put off carbon trading and solar power and await a perfect solution, like a toilet that teleported your waste into a black hole. We might have to wait an awfully long time for perfect recycling—it would require an ability to reverse entropy. This objection is related to the common psychological problem of not wanting to admit that there is a humiliating stain somewhere. Yet ecological ideologies often set limits. It seems absurdly churlish to question them. Who can deny the global food crisis, limits to the supply of gasoline, the general lack of enough to go around, the sense that the population is out of control?
Let’s be churlish for a moment. A certain refusal to see the wood for the trees is built into capitalist ideology and reality. The division of labor means that people can’t be as flexible as a testing ecological emergency requires. The system encourages the shock troops (such as truck drivers) to go on strike about rising oil prices and yell “Drill, baby, drill!” (the war cry of the 2008 Republican Convention). People keep playing zero sum games—looking after ecology means hurting the economy, and vice versa. Is it possible to fix this myopia within capitalism?
Capitalism ultimately can’t sort things out. It’s reactive; what we need is proactive. Consider hydrogen fuel: since fuel cells cost a lot of carbon to make, a sensible short-term solution would be to build a nuclear power plant to power a fuel cell factory (gulp). No corporation could do this spontaneously and alone, without social planning and choice. There is a bigger picture here. Since the so-called invisible hand of the market “decides” how to sort things out at the very moment at which it is ruining things, by the time the market “sorts it out,” there will be nothing to sort out. Just as the two World Wars were appropriate disasters for the age of nationalism, so global warming is appropriate to the age of globalization. The two World Wars were nationalism run amok, something the system couldn’t handle. Global warming is the symptom that global capitalism can’t handle. The only solution is conscious cooperation. Far from aiding cooperation, ideological languages of passive immersion in Nature actually militate against it: either they support some version of laissez-faire, or they advertise regression to precapitalist social forms.
Perhaps the secret link between capitalism and scientism (scientific ideology, not science) is the weird sadistic distance implied in the almost experimental “Let the chips fall where they may” attitude—“Let it be” type artists beware. In Terry Gilliam’s ecological apocalyptic time-loop movie, Twelve Monkeys, the lunatic who releases the virus that wipes out almost all humans doesn’t even open the vial of deadly pathogens himself.73 He allows an airport security officer to open it. The look on his face, the curious, fascinated “Hmm, I wonder what will happen if . . . ?” is horrifying. “Letting be” could be the message that makes someone press the button. I guess I prefer ecological noir to “let it be” art.
Gilliam’s lunatic is obsessed with overpopulation. Malthus infests environmental ideology in various ways. By universally applying Malthus to all life forms, Darwin strangely canceled what was noxious about Malthus’s work: that it was specifically designed to promote welfare cuts—an “is” used as a mighty “ought.” Unlimited Malthusianism has no scary teeth: self interest only makes sense when there’s a self distinct from others. But Hardin’s idea of “the tragedy of the commons” grates on my left ecologist nerves. It’s one of those things you hear people telling you to just accept as an inevitable part of reality. The “tragedy of the commons” is the idea that conflicting selfish interests will eventually deplete common property.74 Hardin assumes that the “commons” is separate and autonomous: it “works by itself”; it replenishes itself. But that idea was already dead by the end of the eighteenth century. Hardin clearly never lived near any commons. There is only one way, and that is forward, which means talking about collective land, making conscious decisions, engineering, and so on. Ecology isn’t about “resources,” infinite or not. “Resources” is one of those ideas of something “over yonder” that the ecological thought deletes. Nor is there a counterfantasy of superabundance: this is defunct early capitalist language.75
What would you do if you were a prisoner who was given the choice of remaining silent or betraying another suspect, supposing the following to be the case?1. If you both betray each other you will receive five years in jail.
2. If one of you betrays and the other is silent, the betrayed one will receive ten years in jail.
3. If you both remain silent, you will each get six months for a minor charge.
This is the prisoner’s dilemma. The ecological thought is about considering others, in their interests, in how we should act toward them, and in their very being. Parfit helps us to transcend the “tragedy of the commons” view by allowing us to see how self-interest is at best indirectly self-defeating. Instead of lamenting an inevitable tragedy, we find ourselves having to make economic choices. Parfit imagines two future situations. In the first, there are many, many more humans than there are now, on the order of trillions, spread across many worlds. These people live close to a state of bliss. In the second, there are still more uncountable multitudes of people living on countless billions of worlds. These humans live close to what Parfit calls “the bad level,” just above the level of sheer survival.76 Even according to modified theories of self-interest that take others into account, the second model is preferable to the first one, because the mere existence of a human life is better than its nonexistence. See the problem? You could modify self-interest to include your family members, or all your descendants, or all of those plus their friends. However wide a circle you draw, you have to face the fact that, according to your theory, the bad level is better than utter bliss for several trill
ion sentient beings.
I’m not alone in thinking that consequentialism and hedonism won’t do. John Vucetich and Michael Nelson argue that hoping for a better future is precisely what blocks ecological action. Vucetich and Nelson maintain that we should abandon hope (as they put it), if only because it’s too easily hamstrung by that other environmentalist meme, the threat of imminent doom.77 We should act ecologically out of a modified Kantian duty that doesn’t depend on a powerful aesthetic experience such as the sublime to ground it. If it absolutely must depend on an experience, perhaps it should be a downgraded version that includes various experiences that Kant wants to edit out of the aesthetic, such as disgust—because the life forms whom we’ve got under our skin aren’t something we can spit out. (Ecology without Nature argues that the trouble with the aesthetic dimension is that you can’t just exit from it, rather like Alice trying to leave the Looking Glass House. Any postenvironmentalist ecological view must include the aesthetic.)78 Perhaps the sentiment we’re going for is not “We can because we must,” but rather “We must because we are.”
This means that we must base ecological action on ethics, not aesthetics. Ecological action will never feel good and the nonworld will never seem elegant. This is because we are not embedded in a lifeworld and can thus never get our bearings sufficiently to achieve the appropriate aesthetic distance from which to experience that kind of refined pleasure. Hedonistic forms of consequentialism—ideas, however expressed, that ecological concern makes us or others feel better—don’t work. Environmental politics has been barking up the wrong tree, trying to make people feel or see something different. “If only we could see things differently” can be translated quickly into “I won’t act unless suitably stimulated and soothed by a picture of reality built to my preexisting specifications.” This is now impossible. We can’t con ourselves into a touchy-feely reason to act.
This is beginning to look much more like Kantian ethics than the authoritarian voice of aesthetic compulsion. There is a twist, which is that Kantian duty gets its cue from a quasi-aesthetic experience that Kant calls sublimity, so we haven’t totally edited the aesthetic out of the equation. We can’t escape the experiential dimension of existence, and wouldn’t be awful if we could? Yet the ecological thought drops Kantian aesthetics, too, if by that we mean being able to spit out disgusting things (the premise on which Kantian taste is built). We can’t spit out the disgusting real of ecological enmeshment. It’s just too close and too painful for comfort. So it’s a weird, perverse aesthetics that includes the ugly and the horrifying, embracing the monster. Ultimately it means not swapping our dualism and our mechanism for something that seems nicer, such as vitalism or monism. We have to make do with the nasty stuff that has been handed to us on our plate. That includes the fact of consciousness, which forever puts me in a paradoxical relationship with other beings—there is always going to be an ironic gap between strange strangers. This is good news, actually, because it means I can be ecological without losing my sense of irony. Irony isn’t just a slogan on a cool t-shirt; it’s the way coexistence feels. Don’t just do something—sit there. But in the mean time, sitting there will upgrade your version of doing and of sitting.
FORWARD POLITICS: STYLES OF COLLECTIVITY
This openness serves as an operating system for politics: it doesn’t tell you what to do, exactly, but it opens your mind so you can think clearly about what to do. That we can actually use our minds to transcend our material conditions is the reason why the Kantian sublime is so utterly different from Edmund Burke’s version. Burke’s sublime is solid and awesome and powerful—there is no arguing with it; you just have to capitulate to it. His models are monarchy and mountains. There is too much of this kind of sublime in environmental aesthetics. This is why I just can’t trust touchy-feeliness to think through the ecological emergency. It’s seductive to imagine that a force bigger than global capitalism will finally sweep it away. But what if this thought were coming to us from within capitalism itself? What if capitalism itself relied on fantasies of apocalypse in order to keep reproducing and reinventing itself? What if, finally, Nature as such, the idea of a radical outside to the social system, was a capitalist fantasy, even precisely the capitalist fantasy?
Politics in the wake of the ecological thought must begin with the Copernican “humiliations”—coming closer to the actual dirt beneath our feet, the actuality of Earth. The ecological thought has no storyline. It is too much to throw up one’s hands and say that life is cruel, like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel. Irony—economically expressed in the bumper sticker “You don’t have to believe everything you think”—is perhaps the beginning of ecological democracy.79 But irony doesn’t necessarily mean detachment. Here are some affective states that we will encounter in pursuing the ecological thought: anger, compassion, confusion, curiosity, depression, disgust, doubt, grief, helplessness, honesty, humiliation, humility, openness, sadness, shame, and tenderness. None of these are necessarily incongruent with irony. In terms of how much they open us to the ecological thought, I’d rank compassion, curiosity, humility, openness, sadness, and tenderness the highest. Shame, which has been having a run for its money in recent philosophy, is still too dualistic to get things flowing. 80 Like the denouement in an M. Knight Shyamalan movie, inside the uncanny horror and fear is an almost unspeakable sadness. On the inside, true compassion might feel like helplessness. Yet it would consist in refraining from violence and aggression. Out goes authority and harmony. In comes cooperation and choice.
Evolution helps us see the properly ethical, philosophical, and political scope of animal rights. Animal rights may develop into questions of inter-and intraspecies cooperation. We already employ goats to mow lawns. Dolphins have harried fish toward the nets of West African fishermen so that they could share them. Pythagoreanism treated all living things as kindred.81 Animals were put on trial in the Middle Ages.82 But species don’t exist. Amazingly, perhaps this fact means that evolution implies that we can make nonbiological choices. Fully accepting the ecological thought would be preparing oneself for true transcendence—true because one wouldn’t be rejecting ecology.83 Animals are not animals. Humans are not animals. Animals are not human. Humans are not human. DNA has no flavor. Nor is DNA a “blueprint” as the common prejudice believes—it’s a set of algorithmic instructions, like a recipe book. There is no picture of me in my DNA. Our biological humanness consists in 0.1 percent of our genome: how in the world can we use this “is” to establish an “ought”?
According to this view, far from being classified as human, embryos could be classified as amoebae, since they share far more characteristics with them than with beings like mammals. Reductionism must be followed right the way through: then we can truly start building “ought”s without “is”s.84 For example, the existence of universal cultural traits doesn’t imply that they have a genetic basis.85 If everything is biologically determined in some sense, then so is free will—then so what?86 Since you can’t base an “ought” on an “is,” sociobiology can’t base itself on, or make, moral or political judgments concerning society.
Some people have already tried modeling the complex kinds of democracy that take nonhuman beings into account.87 A workable model will require some minimal (perhaps as minimal as possible) definition of collectivity. 88 Collective intimacy can’t be about feeling part of something bigger or losing yourself in an intoxicating aesthetic rush: that way fascism lies.89 Ecological collectivity decisively can’t be rooted in “place”: as Levinas asserts, quoting Pascal, “my place in the sun” marks the beginning of all usurpation.90 “Place” contains too much “at-homeness,” too much finality, for the ecological thought. Localism, nationalism, and immersion in the ideological bath of the lifeworld, won’t cut it anymore.91 What we need is “a community without presuppositions and without subjects.”92 We need collectivity, not community. If this collectivity means not being part of something bigger, it must be a collectivity of weakness, vu
lnerability, and incompletion. Ecology without Nature is ecology without holism.
Ecological collectivity must think profoundly about choice: “history does nothing” (Marx).93 Collectivity isn’t just a whole bunch of “I”s, nor can it simply be a modified version of “alongsideness,” of just happening to be next to one another.94 Ecological collectivities must make space for introversion and reflection, including meditative practices. Ecological collectivities must be open, not closed totalities. They would involve “radical passivity.”95 If we take seriously the charge that the problem with science isn’t the ideas it develops but the attitudes it sustains, then ecological society must work directly on attitudes. This means, ultimately, working on reflection, and this means meditation, if it’s not just to involve replacing one set of objectified factoids with another. Meditation doesn’t mean becoming “one with everything” or tuning in to (nonexistent) Nature—how could you? Meditation means exposing our conceptual fixations and exploring the openness of the mesh. Politics might begin to include (difficult word!) spirituality, in the sense of a radical questioning and opening: “losing oneself in things, losing oneself to the point of not being able to conceive of anything but things.”96 Meditation does not mean emptying the mind or suppressing the intellect. It doesn’t mean doing nothing. Meditation will be part of nontheistic “spirituality” and politics.97 Meditation implies an erotics of coexistence, not just letting things be.98 Meditation is yoga, which means yoking: enacting or experiencing an intrinsic interconnectedness. This yoga doesn’t have to do with yin–yang balance. It has to do with difference.
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