Of Social Ecology
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
104 RET}IINKING ECOFEMINIST POLMICS clearly are, we wiII pay dearly for the loss of rational poli activity. A mystical tendency that indulges our fantasiesand st renders us captive to a commodified society may eventually, spite its good intentions, help to deprive us of our freedom individuals and to diminish our activism as social beings' Chapter 5 Historically, the Left has always tried to appeal to the best people, to their highest moral and intellectual selves'Mind, cri initttittg, and intellectuality are precious human attributes cannot be surrendered without leading to easily manipulated ceral reactions evoked by magic, rituals, and ultimately " Dialectics in the Ethics sive leaders" for ends other than freedom. As the Senecawriter Mohawk has forthrightly put it, "[t seems like every time say they'll do the thinking for you, they fuck you over"'I w of Social Ecology responsible people, doing the best thinking, not somebody v dreamed something."" As the forms of our domination increasinglysophisticated, it behoovesus to boldly "dare to know, in Kant's phrase, rather than to play childish games of "truth As a dialectical philosophy, social ecology arguesthat hu- dare." manity must be understood os the history of humanity, and that nature must be understood as the history of nature. ]ust so, it also arguesthat sciencemust be understood as tle history of science.It advancesthe view that there is much to be gained from examining the role that previous cosmologistsplayed in the developmentof our own in considering the problem of nature and humanity's relationship to each other, and that earlier peoples in Western culture have asked important questions tlat our present-day sci- enceignores. In particular, earlier cosmologistsaddressed and tried to explain-to the best of their ability-at least one very important question that modern science, to its detriment, fails to confront. This is the fact that, on the one hand, there is order in the natural world, and, on the other hand, that human beings have a rational faculty that is capable of comprehending it in varying degrees.Indeed, the human mind sometimesseems as if it were magnificently developed for understanding the order in the natural world. ]ust as the world is, at least in part, ordered in a certain way, the human mind is so organized as to be able to comprehend it at various levels of adequacy. 105 POLMCS 106 RETHINKING ECOFEMINIST Ethics of SocialEcology 707 This fact must have struck people in early periods of social in the world," without attempdng to justify it metaphysically, development as a remarkable "correspondence."For millennia, philosophically, or cosmologically,let alone scientificalv.' human reason and Despite they explained the "correspondence" between science's efficacy in bringing some understanding of The the inteltigible order in nature by at organismic analogy' nature'soperations, "science, in effect,has been permitted to iive rational human mind could understand the world because the a lie," writes Murray Bookchin. Science cosmic macrocosm-Iike the individual microcosm-had a human kind of mind. The various meanings of the Greek word logos has presupposed,with astonishingsuccess, tlat nature is encompassboth the mind's power of comprehension and the fact orderly, and that this order lends itself to rational interpretation of the cosmos' comprehensibility. Logosreferred both to the imma- by the human mind, but that reasonis exclusively the nent intelligibility that is discoverable in nature, as well as to the subjectiveattribute of the h observer,not of the phenomena mind that could discover it. This congruency between the rational 'man observed....science,in effect, hal becomea mind and the rational cosmosexplained how thinking can compre- temple built on the foundation of seemingly hend the world. Hence, the origin of the word "logic" from logos. .,ruins,', animistic and metaphysical without implied the ability to discuss in a rational way, as in Logos also which it would sink into the watery morassof its dialogues (from the Greek dia-logos),how ideas undergo develop- own contradictions.3 ment. Far from defining reason ot Iogos as opposed to nature, mind or nous that "was Mind was Socrates,Plato, and Aristotle studied a "erected into a second type of substancethat served as R. G. Colling- always first and foremost mind in nature," writes a ready dumping-ground for everything in experiencewhich phys_ notes, the fact ics did wood. For Aristotle, as fohn Herman Randall, fr., not read in mechanical naturej, as Randall obserues.lThe not a problem, but the most qualities "that men can know their world [was] of things, like the wetness of water and the coldness of world."' ice, were significant fact, both about us and about the shoved into this "dumping-ground," as Griffin and other through the ancient and ecofeminists This tradition of /ogoswas continued argue.Butit was not simply the qualities of things that it was transformedinto a rigid were so medieval periods.On the one hand, dispensed with. so was the deveripmenfal causality so and immutable natural law by the Stoics and Christians. On the typical of organismic life. serf-directiveness and tenden"v-th"r" developmental and dialectical too were other hand, it was perpetuated in its relegated to the merely subjective, by virtue of their association form by mystics. With the emergenceof modern science,the order with the "final causes"of medieval scholasticism. human mind in a new form: mathe- Indeed, of nature seemedopen to the modern sciencedefined itself most expricitly not by comprehensibleand irrr open book in trying to matics. The cosmos was dominate women and nature but by its attack on the But mathematics preserved logos in only its Scholastics' matlematical terms. "final causes,,,an issue that perhaps the from the mathe- major "orrriitrrt"d most rigid hypothetico-deductive form. Missing battleground between science and schorastic thlorogjr. ..To to explain Aristotle's "most signifi- the extent .paradijm, matical /ogos was any ability that mechanism became the prevalent of was Renaissance cant fact," or why it was that the now-mathematical cosmos and Enlightenment science,i writes Bookchin, ..the It becamea merely "metaphysical" notion intelligible to the human mind' of 'final cause' became the gristmiil on which science sharpened question, and the successorsof Descartes"abandoned the attempt its scalpel of 'obleciivity,' sc"ientistic.disinterestedness,, to prove this conespondence," as Randall observes.Ratler, they total rejection of $,,e". values in the scientific organon.,, The that "the order of men's scientifrc oacklash simply made the assumption against scholasticism was accompanied by a backrash ideas was, in the nature of things, the same as the order of obiects 108 RETHINKING ECOFEMINIST POLITICS Ethics of SocialEcology 109 against organicism generally, in "an exaggeratedrejection of nature was cast in largely antagonistic tems, and progress was organicism."u identified as the technical ability to use nonhuman nature to serve In delivering its "sustained polemic," to use Collingwood's the ends of the marketplace. Human destiny was conceived as the phrase, againstthe Scholastic theory of final causeswith its immu- redemption of society from a "demonic" natural world. Writes table, predetermined teleological ends, early science eliminated Bookchin, "The subjugationof human by human...was now cele- any notion that there was any potentiality or nisus in nature to brated asa common human enterpriseto bring nature under human realize implicit forms that have not been fully actualized. In short, control."' mechanistic science, Iike the putatively organismic approach many ecofeminists, spilled out the baby with the bathwater' In course of fighting one extreme, Scholasticism, it moved to anol The Problem of Instuumentalism extreme, mechanism. When the laws of physics, so suitable for understanding The mind had become a dumping ground of sorts inorganic nature, were applied to human society in various scien- mechanism established no intelligible place for mind in the tistic branches of knowledge, the result was to fuel the rise of an world that it was describing. The mechanistic worldview and instrumental social ethos. Human society doesnot operate accord- mathematical /ogoscould explain everything, it seemed,except ing to physicalist laws; to try to induce it to do so meansrendering human mind that perceived it, Descartes' res cogitans. The humanity homogeneous,lifeless, passive, and malleable.This was mind in its Newtonian aspect could not explain organisms organi not simply a matter of ideology. Forceswere at work in Western ismically; developments, developmentally; history, historically; society that stood to make great use of the instrumental ethos that society in ways appropriate to human social development' In explained people in terms of collections of isolated bodies in with the mathematical logos,the human mind and human eternally lawful motion. For one, the ethos of instrumentalism could not be explained intelligibly at all, let alone explain perfectly suited the emerging nation-state and its unrelenting cen- human ability to comprehend mathematical order. The tralization, bureaucratization,and domination. If people could be between nature and mind, writes Bookchin, was "replaced by reduced to units, they could be manageableand susceptibleto unbridgeable dualismbetween mentality and the external world. administration.If they could be instrumentalizedas workers, they Despite the social