1 Nihilism Incorporated European Civilization and Environmental Destruction Arran Gare ECO-LOGICAL PRESS 1993 Contents Preface Introduction 1 1. Ecocide as Applied Nihilism 6 The degradation of non-human life. The limits of resources. The threat to the world eco-system. The exhaustion of reserves. Population growth and inequitable resource use. The urbanization of humanity. The degradation of humanity. Defence of the existing order. Conclusion. 2. Responses to Environmental Problems 36 Proposed explanations: Attitudes to the World. Population growth. Technology. Economic growth. Proposed solutions: The ethics and politics of rights theory and utilitarianism. Recourse to the tradition of Christianity. The deep ecologists. 3. Ideology, Metaphysics and Society: The Metaphysical Roots of European Civilization 72 Culture and traditional societies. Culture and civilization. The origins of Western culture. Plato. The origins of Chinese culture. The Christian synthesis. 4. Christian Neoplatonism and the Emergence of Feudal Society 97 The church and the aristocracy. Efforts to control nature. The medieval world- view and the universities. The embodiment of medieval culture. Emergent dynamics of medieval society. The final stage of feudalism. 5. Mechanistic Materialism and Capitalism: The Origins of Nihilism 127 The complicated nature of ideology in capitalist society. Background to the seventeenth century cultural crisis. Mechanistic materialism as a new world- orienation. Mechanistic materialism as ideology. The concepts of mechanistic materialism. The analogy of the machine. 6. Mechanical Nature and Mechanical Humans: The Triumph of Nihilism 153 The evolution of mechanistic materialism and of capitalism. Political economy. Darwinism and Social Darwinism. Further refinements of the mechanistic image of the world. The new world of information and cybernetics. The collapse into nihilism. Nihilism Incorporated 7. Nihilism Incorporated 178 Neurotic adaptations to mechanistic materialism - from Osiander to Lyotard and Habermas. Science. Education as indoctrination in nihilism. The free market-place of ideas. Mechanistic materialism and everyday life. Western culture against the environment. The irrelevance of ethical and political philosophy. PREFACE In this work I have attempted to explain the failure of humanity to effectively confront the global environmental crisis, and thereby to show what is required to overcome it. It is argued that the destruction of the environment on a global scale is the final outcome of the expansion and domination of the world by European civilization, a civilization which is inherently destructive and implicitly nihilistic. The failure to respond to a crisis threatening all humanity and most other life forms is symptomatic of this nihilism. Environmentalists have failed because they have not fully appreciated the nature of this civilization, an appreciation which requires an understanding of the history and dynamics of European culture and its offshoots from Ancient Greece to the present. This focus on culture does not exclude concern with the economic determinants of environmentally destructive behaviour. The work is designed to facilitate a deeper understanding of the imperatives of global capitalism, and at the same time to reveal the possibilities open to people to create a social order free of these imperatives. Nihilism Incorporated (and its sequel, Beyond European Civilization) were conceived in courses of lectures on environmental philosophy given at the University of Queensland in 1981 and at the University of Western Australia in 1983. However the writing of these books has taken place over an extended period, and further research has brought me into contact with specialists in a wide range of disciplines. This forced me to question anew the nature of inquiry, of questioning the past and constructing historical narratives, and of understanding and describing other cultures and societies. This in turn has created another problem - to what audience are these works addressed? Initially I struggled for a compromise between readability for a general audience and the standards of intellectual rigour set by the diverse and to some extent competing disciplines whose domains I had invaded. I have now come to realize that it is the acceptance of and accommodation to existing audience differentiations which fractures efforts to confront the problems of society, that it is essential to work towards the creation of an audience which destroys such differentiation if a movement able to solve these problems is to be created. These books are meant as an attempt to undermine institutionalized audience differentiation. Carrying out research and writing the books involved swimming against a number of different streams. Consequently I feel very deeply indebted to those who have supported my research. This includes students of environmental philosophy at the institutions I have taught, my colleagues in Perth: Ruth Barton, Michael Booth, Robert Flower, Barry Maund, Graham Priest, Ian Rowe, Leigh Smith and Peter Vintilla; Charles Birch who encouraged me to continue my work despite an academic environment unfriendly to efforts to transcend disciplinary boundaries, Robert Cohen for hosting my research at Boston University, Valeria Russo for sharing her profound knowledge of Marxist history of science, Douglas Weiner, whose work on Soviet environmental history and Russian culture added a whole new dimension to my work, and Val Plumwood and Richard Sylvan who have read pieces of my work and encouraged my efforts. I am particularly indebted to Richard Sylvan for his assistance in publishing the work. I am also indebted to a number of institutions. These include the Western Australian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and Curtin University for granting me a research fellowship in 1984, the Australian-American Educational Foundation for granting me a Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellowship in 1985, the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University for hosting my stay in U.S.A., and Curtin University again for a further research fellowship in 1988. Finally I am indebted to my parents, Nene and Frank Gare, and my wife, Jennifer, to whom this book and its sequel are dedicated. 30th May, 1993. INTRODUCTION Mexico City was described in a lead article in Time magazine. The article began: When the ragged and exhausted Spanish conquistadors first beheld the lake- encircled capital of the Aztecs one November morning in 1519, they were stunned by its grandeur. A shining metropolis of some 300,000 people, far larger than any city in Europe, Tenochtitlan displayed immense stone temples to the gods of rain and war and an even more immense royal palace, where Aztec nobles stood guard in jaguar-head helmets and brightly feathered robes. In the nearby marketplace, vendors offered an abundance of jungle fruits and rare herbs and skilfully wrought creations of silver and gold. 'The magnificence, the strange and marvelous things of this great city are so remarkable as not to be believed,' Hernando Cortés wrote back to the imperial court of Charles V. 'We were seeing things,' Bernal Díaz del Castillo recalled in his memoir of the Spanish invasion, 'that had never been heard of or seen before, nor even dreamed about.' A newcomer today is more apt to arrive by air, and before he even glimpses the dried-up bed of Lake Texacoco, now edged with miles of slum hovels, the first thing he sees is the almost perpetual blanket of smog that shrouds the entire city. It is an ugly grayish brown. There is something strangely sinister about it - a cloud of poison. The pilot orders the seat belts tightened and announces an imminent descent into the murk and filth.1 The lakes and flower gardens of Tenochtitlan have disappeared. In the last quarter- century Mexico City has lost 75% of its woodland, and 14 million saplings planted between 1976 and 1982 withered and turned yellow within a few years. Drawing water from the subsoil has caused parts of the city to sink, sometimes up to 30 feet. Caged birds placed in the middle of the city die within two hours and birds, their lungs laden with lead and cadmium, have begun to drop from the sky. 70% of newborn babies now have high lead content in their blood. The level of ozone tripled between 1986 and 1988. Pollution is killing 30,000 children each year through respiratory and gastro-intestinal diseases, and may be responsible for the deaths of 100,000 people a year. The vast majority of Mexico City's population of more than 20 million, the descendants of the Aztecs, are living in the appalling poverty of the slums, more than 3 million without sewage facilities. Mexico City symbolizes the success with which Western European civilization has conquered and subjugated almost every other civilization and culture over the past five hundred years, the impoverishment of the survivors of this conquest, and 1. Otto Friedrich, reported by Ricardo Chavira and David DeVoss, 'A Proud Capital's Distress: Overcrowded, polluted, corrupted, Mexico City offers the world a grim lesson', Time, August 6, 1984, pp.14-21. 2 Nihilism Incorporated the future in store for the world if this civilization continues to progress on its present path. It symbolizes the strengths and weaknesses of this civilization: the prodigious developments in technology, and the systematic blindness to, and incapacity to deal with, the destructive side-effects of these developments. This failure is most fully manifest in the destruction