Western philosophy's preoccupation with the individual as a rational being - Descartes I think therefore I am - was an irrevocable break with the philosophies learned by people born in medieval times to feudal and religious obligation. Modern philosophy's preoccupation with individuals and freedom may be fundamentally irreconcilable with ecosophy's preoccupation with the obligations of whole species to ecosystems.
Whenever words like irreconcilable and irrevocable pop up I wonder whether it is only because I'm out of ideas. Superficially ecosophy looks like many other extropian projects to repair and restore human bodies. The feature which distinguishes ecosophy from extropianism is its emphasis on limiting the affect of bodies upon ecospheres. Ecosophy emphasizes disempowering bodies, where extropians want to increase, usually with science, embodied empowerment over environments.
Donald Worster's 1995 declaration in The Shaky Ground of Sustainability:
...the progressive, secular materialist philosophy on which modern life rests, indeed on which Western civilization has rested for the past three hundred years, is deeply flawed and ultimately destructive...
and Florentine Friar Savonarola's 1498 sermon
'''In these days, prelates and preachers are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things...They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new Church after their own pattern...
take similar positions. Human activity has damaged the cosmology/ecology to such an extent that an apocalypse is likely. If you believe you have an obligation to act.
In these circumstances simply being born is fraught, and life an ordeal. I tried to characterize Savonarola's influence over Quattrocento Florence as an ordeal, a trial of ideas that mirrored the medieval concept of life as a pilgrimage, but perhaps the man was simply mad. Burning books by Petrarch, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus and Terence seems ideological, bad. Laying them out on an octagonal pyramid, ninety feet high, topped with an image of Satan, with stratified firewood representing the seven levels of hell, seems just crazy, mad.
In a perfect cosmology bodies with original sin are excluded by being imperfect. By simply existing, imperfection threatens the perfection of the cosmology as a whole. The fourth platform principle of ecosophy is
The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
In an overpopulated ecosphere human bodies are surplus as soon as they are born. Living, their redundancy poses a threat to the perfection of the ecosystem that cannot be mitigated, not even by the most extropian technological ordeal.
Perhaps ecosophy just is irreconcilable with humanism in general and extropianism in particular. Doesn't seem right to labour mightily to reconcile in death the ideas of those who never agreed in life.
I don't think that 'individual freedom' is irreconcilable with ecosophy's preoccupation with the obligations of whole species to ecosystems. Because concern over the environment is selfish and individualistic to the extent that it impacts on individuals and future generations. However, it may be 'speciest' to the extent that although 'we' have a higher regard for non-humans than we did in the past (they are no longer just objects or property), we know that they are essential for the balance our environment and necessary for our utility and so we care for them in order to ultimately expand and extend our own species.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the argument for social utilitarianism made by Peter Singer, which I'm going to paraphrase as the greatest good for the greatest number. That is a humanist argument. However, it is refuted by ecosophy in arguments like Garret Hardin's The Tragedy Of The Commons (1968) by the self-evident proposition that two variables cannot be maximised simultaneously. In other words you can have great good, or great numbers, but not both.
ReplyDeleteOf course, 'good' being the operative word here, unfortunately we must consider those in power who determine what is 'good' and who it is 'good' for. The 'greatest good' has been interpreted in a number of ways through time.
ReplyDeleteIn 1859 Charles Darwin published 'On the Origin of Species...' in which he put forward an idea of natural selection and the notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’ in relation to the ongoing evolution of man and the struggle of each species to survive in a competitive environment.
Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ was gleaned from Herbert Spencer’s 'Social Statics', 1851, in which he ‘wrote about the progressive development of society from a “lower” to a "higher" condition’. He advocated individualism, competitive capitalism and the survival of the fittest and suggested war was useful: "...severe and bloody as the process is, the killing-off of inferior races and inferior individuals leaves a balance of benefit to mankind during phases of progress in which the moral development is low (Spencer, 1972:173).
Perhaps ecosophy is concerned with erasing the notion of inferior species and elevating them to a position of equality, one on a par with humans?!
Am proceeding from the position that all species, objects and phenomena in an ecosphere have equal natural rights. Although not explicitly expressed in the platform principles of ecosophy that is implied by the first three, imo.
ReplyDeleteThere are inversions of Spencerism in ecosophy's argument that more evolved humans have less affect upon the ecosphere because they only take from it what is necessary for subsistence, the 1500 calorie a day ideal/moral argument. But it seems to me that idea has more in common with the lazy peasant argument for mutual obligation pressed by religionists, feudalists and absolutists alike during the middle ages, than with later preoccupations with race and nationalism and moral ascendancy.
Well, in that case you may have to consider Indigenous Australians who cared for the land and only killed or took from the land what they need for subsistence.
ReplyDeleteThere is no real way of "proving" whether it is a right or wrong reading of Aboriginal culture/s, but that is what the ecosophists consider. Their observations of those aspects of indigenous cultures generally that (they presume?) affect the environment are expressed as "ecological wisdom" . But there might be a way to forensically unpack that strategy and those observations and expressions and perhaps trace their origins, I speculate, to the religionist cosmologies common to the middle ages in general. I'm looking for the path now :) Suggestions?
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