Consumption
and the Impoverishment of Spiritual Life and Ethics
We can best enhance our thinking
about consumption and the environment by doing what truly educated people do,
look at the larger picture. The modern age is a time of secularization and loss
of the sacred. We could describe the sacred or holy as that which deserves reverence.
Reverence for
relations constitutes a necessary condition for full appreciation of authentic
individuality and community. An attitude of reverence also stands as a
prerequisite for a healthy attitude toward our natural environment. As Royce
scholar, Fr. Frank Oppenheim, S.J. describes the meaning of reverence:
A person who has what Royce calls “the
true sense of life,” who reveres life and its relations, somehow senses within
live relationships what the Psalmist felt---such a presence of the Author of
Life that a reverend “fear of the Lord” stirs as the most appropriate response.
Other awe-inspiring moments can be found:
…in authentic educational
experiences, in deep interpersonal communications, in the genuine mutual trust
of compacting business partners as together they face a risky future, in a
scientific group’s authentic search for further findings, and in an artist’s
creative in-touch-ness with his or her inmost genius.
Of course the experiences described above in business,
science, and even in families, often lack reverence. Part of our modern problem
in our relations with each other and with the natural environment shows up in
the fact that the term “reverence” has lost much of its power. We hardly understand what it means to
“revere” someone or something. To
perceive reality as sacred means to experience life reverently; this means with
a combination of fear and love. Rudolph Otto defines “The Holy” as a Mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. This is translated literally as
the fearsome and fascinating mystery. The fear does not proceed from danger,
but from a feeling of being overwhelmed.
Love, however, motivates us to
approach the sacred with deep respect rather than to flee from it.
We, in our Western
technological society, have lost much of our capacity to appreciate the sacred
and we need to take stock of what we have gained and also what we have
lost. We cannot return to an earlier age
any more than adolescents can recapture the “magic” of childhood. But we, as a
society, can move ahead to a more mature relationship with reality.
The modern age,
inspired by the new attitude toward reason, generated science, technology,
political democracy, and capitalism, and thereby provided us with an
unprecedented personal liberty and a spectacular quantity and variety of goods.
But the modern worldview also caused a sense of emptiness that spawns many
personal and political problems. Scientific technology has given us a degree of
control over nature, along with the power and the arrogance to degrade our
environment. The modern age produced an
ethics that is exclusively anthropocentric, meaning that we humans placed our
selves at the center of the universe and valued everything else only in terms
of how it helped or harmed us.
Some writers have
traced disenchantment and the loss of the sacredness of nature back to the rise
of Greek philosophy and Hebrew monotheism. But certainly, the dissolution of
enchantment accelerated in the seventeenth century. Rene Descartes (1595 –
1650), almost universally cited as the father of modern philosophy, stands at
least symbolically at the beginning of modernity, of the Enlightenment, and the
end of the old order of holiness and enchantment.
Abandoning the
traditional philosophy, Descartes proclaimed that he would replace the
speculative ideas of scholasticism with a new philosophy that would make us the
masters and possessors of nature:
Instead of the speculative philosophy
that is taught in the schools we can find a practical philosophy by means of
which knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens,
and all other bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the crafts of
our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which
they are adapted and thus render ourselves the masters and possessors of
nature.
Descartes, along with his
contemporaries and successors who followed his mandate, provided us with an
abundance of good things including science and technology without which we
literally could not live. But there is a price to pay, and we are paying it.
The price includes degradation of our natural environment and of our spirit.
The new philosophy
fathered by Descartes changes the world from a living Thou to a dead it. The
modern world sees nature as an inanimate machine and the mechanistic view
extends to our own body and to our social entities. The human mind becomes a
detached observer and manipulator of the world. The disenchanted individual
stands alone as an atomistic unit who interacts with other individuals through
war, politics, or trade, depending on which method best secures his or her
desires. We reduce everything in nature to quantifiable characteristics as
befits a machine. We dismiss such subjective qualities as color, texture, and
taste, as well as all feelings as secondary. Theologian Matthew Fox observes
that in all of Descartes' writings about the natural world, the term
"beauty" never comes up.
The ethics of the
Enlightenment focused only on human persons and human rights so that our duties
were only to ourselves and other persons.
As expressed by the most influential philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel
Kant (1724 – 1804), we are commanded by a categorical imperative to treat each
person as an end also and not merely
as a means to our ends. This solid
but incomplete principle for dealing with persons leaves non-human nature in a
devalued condition.
The disenchanted view pervades all aspects of
life but especially the economy. Capitalism and her hostile younger sister,
Socialism, emerged as children of the Enlightenment. They hold in common the
labor theory of value that John Locke articulated in the seventeenth
century. Locke argued that things in
nature belong to us all but have no value. We humans create value when we take
things out of their natural state and mix them with our labor. The labor that
goes into fashioning a product from nature makes that object valuable and it
becomes "property" meaning one's own. We treat the whole non-human
world, from the minerals and fossil fuels under the ground to the highest of
the non-human animals, as if they have no value except as they can be used for
human consumption or capital.
Socialism arose in
response to the labor theory of value and the use of human labor as a commodity.
Karl Marx argued that private property has made us so stupid that we can think
of something being ours only if we have it as an object to possess or consume
or invest. But Marx also accepted the
labor theory of value and held that products have only the value that labor
gives to them. Marx saw labor, and therefore ownership, as collective rather
than private. Vladimir Lenin founded the Soviet Union on Marxist principles and
his interpretation of Marx led to a devastating impact on the natural
environment. The Soviet degradation of nature surpassed that of capitalism,
which at least had some countervailing forces to check the power of industry.
It is not my
intention to bash the Enlightenment and the technology of the modern era. We
could not live without it and I do not wish to bite the hand that feeds us. The
Enlightenment and the science and technology that followed gave us a greatly
improved material standard of living as well as enhanced individual rights,
liberty, and opportunity. These are gains that most of us do not want to lose.
The point of this brief summary of modern thought is not to advocate turning
back to an idealized past. Rather, it suggests the need to move forward to a
more comprehensive understanding that preserves and enhances our inter-human
ethics while surging ahead to a more integrative treatment of non-human
nature. So the point is to reflect on
what our societal antecedents have done to nature and examine our present
ethical requirements.
In the second half
of the twentieth century a developing environmental ethics served to awaken us
to the intrinsic value of the non-human world, to the value of beauty,
creation, and enchantment. In trying to reconstruct our ethical attitude,
environmental ethics has given us a viewpoint from which we can begin to
integrate nature into our ethical world. Of course artists, poets,
philosophers, and naturalists had found beauty and spiritual nourishment in
nature for some time before the twentieth century, especially in the movement
known as Romanticism, which began in the late eighteenth century as a reaction
to rationalism of the Enlightenment described above.
In 1947, Aldo Leopold published A Sand County Almanac, in which he set
out to develop a “land ethic.” He argued that ethics develops over time and
always involves the relations of individuals with each other and with their
social organizations. The historical development of ethics entails the
extension of areas of conduct governed by a sense of right and wrong. He shows
examples of these extensions in the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the
emergence of political democracy. The relation of human individuals to each
other and to our organizations became more and more inclusive. But land is
considered as mere property and not a part of life governed by ethical
considerations. Leopold summed up the absence of a land ethic:
No important change in
ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual
emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that conservation
has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that
philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make
conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
Leopold believed that the next
crucial stage in ethical development entails thinking of land, not as a
commodity, but as a community deserving love and respect.
Leopold
defined the guiding principle of a land ethic. “A thing is right when it tends
to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is
wrong when it tends otherwise.” the emphasis on integrity, stability and beauty
allows a land ethic to fit seamlessly with Josiah Royce’s teleological harmony.
While the development of
environmental ethics has prospered since 1947, there has been a strong backlash
against it by those who limit ethical treatment to humans only. The inference
drawn by the debunkers of environmental ethics goes: “If a creature cannot
reason it has no duties; if it has no duties it has no rights; if it has no
rights, it has no value except as a means to the ends of humans.” The goods of nature are reduced to a
utilitarian value---it can be good if and only if it is useful to us. A stark
example of the disrespect for non-human nature that plagues much modern
thinking shows up in an assessment by economist William Baxter. In determining
whether any resources should be spent protecting the habitat of penguins,
Baxter asserts, “Damage to penguins, or sugar pines or geological marvels is,
without more, simply irrelevant…Penguins are important because people enjoy
seeing them walk about rocks.” In this view, the non-human world has no meaning
or value apart from its usefulness or pleasure for humans. So if people find
other entertainment more fun than watching penguins, the penguins are
expendable.
Although
Baxter exemplifies a logical extension of the notion that only humans have moral
standing, his example may seem extreme, perhaps something that only an academic
economist would say. The seeming strangeness of his position may be due to the
fact that penguins resonate emotionally with many of us. We might not even know
anyone who would willingly destroy the habitat of penguins simply because the
economic value of their entertainment falls short of some other way to use
their land. But in our real economy, we exhibit many practices that are morally
equivalent to Baxter’s values. One stark example can be found in extracting
coal by mountain-top removal. This process involves blasting the mountain tops
to rubble to expose the coal, while pushing the rocks layer by layer into the
adjoining valleys, burying the streams and soil. This procedure is defended by
politicians and news media in Appalachia on
the grounds that it means cheaper electricity and preserves jobs in the mining
industry. The eco-system itself as well as the once rich diversity of plants
and animals count for nothing in the calculations of the decision makers. The
above description is not meant to deny the importance of energy and jobs. But
the one-sided emphasis on monetary gain has made us as a culture blind to the
well-being of the land and the people who live on it. Non-human living things
fall outside of moral considerations all-together.
Another example of
a cultural blindness to a land ethic can be found in the industrialization of
agriculture. Just as coal-extraction practices make electricity cheaper, the
practice of agribusiness makes food cheaper. As consumers, we seldom complain
about low prices. But the real cost is hidden. As agrarian theologian Ellen
Davis sums up the effect of our food production system:
In this half century,
(the system of petro-chemical based food production) has given North Americans
probably the cheapest food in human history but at what cost? Changes in the
composition of our top-soil(through heavy applications of chemicals);
cultivation induced erosion, drastic narrowing of our seed base (through
exclusive planting of a few hybrid strains); dangerous depletion of our water
sources through over-pumping, as well as well as chemical poisoning caused by
runoff.
An integrated approach to ethics would
not deny or ignore the importance of the economic issues. The quest for
teleological harmony requires respect for all relations, economic as well as
biological. Aldo Leopold’s criteria of stability, integrity, and beauty can
constitute a mid-twentieth century interpretation of Josiah Royce’s notion of
the good. Loyalty to loyalty requires that we integrate economic development
with ecological conservation.
My next post will deal with
developing a more complete ethics
