Public Lecture: Science, Society and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change

Concluding Oration to “Images of Nature: Ethics and the Environment” – Part 1 of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s “Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics” series

Delivered at the Trades Hall, Carlton, July 22, 2008

I’ve talked often in the second half of the course about what I’ve called the three fundamental projects of modernity: science and technology (seen as one project), the capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. When I first talked about them I tried to show that the cultural drive that led to these three things becoming fundamental came from a peculiar ethical sphere, the sphere of Protestantism, with its work ethic and its essentially ascetic idea of duty.

[The moralistic drive of Calvinist Protestantism] was directed to the fulfilment of duty – not to live in the world, but to work in the world – for “the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs is the highest form which the moral activity of the individual can assume.” As Weber’s studies show, this resulted in the channelling of the full thrust of Christian moral motivation into inner-worldly activities that served as the driving force to implement the new developments of the modern world, particularly to capitalism, but also to science and technology and liberal politics. . . Redner, p. 176

To wind up I want to make some broad generalisations about the images of Nature that each of these fundamental projects of modernity imply. Given that each of the three fundamental projects is still with us, I want then to try to fulfil my promise from two weeks ago and say something about the particulars and perversities of the reactions taking place within each of the fundamental projects to the alarming environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.

My starting point for talking about all this is actually one of my endpoints from last week. We saw last week that for Redner culture is always technological, that technology for him goes part of the way to actually defining culture rather being external to culture or antagonistic to it, because culture, on Redner’s definition, is always made up of a technical, an ethical and a representational element. In a similar sense, I said last week, for me nature is always also culture. Nature and culture might in other words look like polar opposites, but the polarity, under close scrutiny, breaks down, in the same way the polar opposition between technique and culture breaks down. Our image of Nature is always a cultural image. There is no Nature which is strictly speaking or completely external to us (though of course there are physical systems that are more or less subject to human observation, understanding, influence and use. Nature is something that culture has always already gone to work on. That is, I understand, a vague slightly windy philosophical pronouncement. Let me give it now a more tangible meaning by saying roughly how the three keystones of modern culture, our societies’ fascination with science and technology, its economic system and its liberal democratic political system constitute or pre-form our image of Nature.

The claim that our image of Nature is always a cultural image is maybe most difficult to accept in the case of science. Science, according to a certain received picture, is the objective knowledge of Nature. And technology according to the same received picture is something like the objective mastery of Nature, based on the knowledge science provides us with.) But the received picture, I would argue, is distinctly one-sided. Nature in the case of science is already a cultural category in the sense that knowledge of nature and its physical laws is not only the object of scientific research, but also the object of society-wide expectations and meanings, expectations and meanings that get attached to the scientific enterprise of research into Nature from the beginning. The same is doubly true of technology, it is inseparable from the societal meanings and expectations it is imbued with, especially from the Industrial Revolution onwards, because technological innovation is the dynamo in many ways of the entire process of industrialisation and the industrial-scale domination of Nature. Industrialism, according to my thumbnail definition in Week 9, is best understood as technological innovation harnessed so as to enable the production of goods on a mass basis. Industrialism, in other words, is what supplies the field of expectations through which the projects of scientific representation of nature and technological manipulation of it are interpreted.

So can we speak of an overall image of Nature here? At the risk of overgeneralising you could say that the image of nature involved in the process of giving scientific representation a meaning through technical manipulation and industrial production is an image of nature as purely an object of domination. (You’d incur the risk of over-generalising of course because the image of nature as object of domination is hardly characteristic of science, technology or its industrial and economic applications in anything like the same way.) Another way of putting it would be to say that the image of nature involved in the process is thoroughly disenchanted. With scientific representation and technical manipulation as our main modes of relating to Nature, we have taken enormous strides away from the magical and mythical modes of relating to the nature which, in vastly different ways, enabled us to imagine ourselves as a part of it. This is not to say, however, that disenchantment, or an attitude of domineering instrumentalism, are in any way the inevitable or uniform products of scientific representations of Nature. If the disenchanted, rational, methodical investigation of the natural world which is both the cause and effect of modern science has on the one hand led to enormous possibilities of technological and economic use of Nature, it has, paradoxically, also led to an enormous expansion of our sensibility towards nature. It is through science that the variety, complexity and in a sense the depths of Nature are known in a new way. Science need not be the prelude to rampant instrumentalism. And anyone who looks at David Attenborough communing with tree ferns or canoodling with turtles and sees nothing but a prelude to the invasion of bulldozers and pharmaceutical companies; or who thinks Attenborough is just providing entertaining kitsch for stupefied cultural consumers should put down his social theory textbook and get a breath of fresh air. Scientific representation of Nature in this permutation has clearly made possible a sort of re-enchantment of Nature, a second secular enchantment that bears only a superficial resemblance to pre-modern mythic experiences of Nature, which themselves often bear only passing resemblance to each other.

The second fundamental project of modernity I’d like to talk about is capitalism – and it’s no accident that I’ll talk about it as the central of the three great projects of modernity. Here’s the quote from Marx I started with in week 9. In lots of ways it captures the essence of what I’ve just said about the social necessity of the interconnection between scientific representation of Nature and technological and economic domination of it:

Nature becomes . . . purely an object for men, something merely useful, and is no longer recognised as a power working for itself. The theoretical cognition of its autonomous laws appears only as the cunning by which men subject nature to the requirements of their needs, either as an item of consumption or as a means of production. Marx

It is, I say, entirely typical of Marx that he runs together theoretical scientific cognition of the natural world with economic production/consumption. That he runs the two together we can see as a sign of his refusal to see human beings’ apparently autonomous intellectual experiences of the world as part of anything less than social wholes, a refusal which means he runs the risk of over-generalising in the way I mentioned a minute ago. But this shouldn’t detract from the importance of what he’s saying in a crucial respect. The image of Nature that is foundational for the age of classical science and high bourgeois capitalism is an image of Nature as “an item of consumption or a means of production” – a phrase which, unless you’re allergic to Marx, can and should speak to you as a member of a society like our own.

The phrase is suggestive but not quite exact. Raw nature is hardly an item of consumption. So what Marx might be slightly better off saying is that nature in high bourgeois capitalism is either an input into the production process or something into which we can slough off the outputs from either the production or the consumption process. This doesn’t seem that far from what Marx means anyway, so let me run with it a little. In the second half of the course, I’ve tried to extend this roughly Marxist idea of the capitalist image of Nature somewhat – Nature, I’ve argued, is viewed within the modern  economic dispensation not just as an input or output, but, more generally, as something that can be used, changed or destroyed at will and apart from that can just be treated as an indifferent background of human activity. The latter facet of the capitalist image of Nature which shows us Nature as an indifferent background of human activity is important. The image of Nature we find, roughly, within the modern capitalist economic order would have a little more to recommend it if human beings operating within its parameters were capable, when they knocked off work and ceased seeing Nature as an item of consumption or means for production, of seeing Nature a little less as an indifferent background to their lives. That of course, Marx would say, is impossible. Production and consumption are, if you’ll excuse the pun, an all-consuming business nowadays; people in today’s societies don’t in general have any roles to inhabit that are convincing or complete alternatives to their roles as economic agents. The result of which is that Nature can never be much more than instrumentally disposable or instrumentally indifferent background, or as Marx puts it so well, Nature can’t be recognised as a power working for itself.

The third fundamental project of the modern age, liberal democracy, is perhaps more difficult to talk about as generating an image of Nature of its own. What is the image of Nature that is native to the idea or ideal of liberal democracy? As such I don’t think there is one. What there is – and what it might still be useful to talk about in this connection – is a very general background assumption about Nature that’s native to Western political societies and possibly to political societies in general. Or rather there are two assumptions, firstly that Nature is only a sort of backdrop to political life and secondly that that backdrop is essentially invariable, essentially, that is, indifferent to the uses we might put it to for our own ends.

The assumptions apply paradigmatically both to the first recognisable Western forms of political life – within the city-states of Greece – and to modern forms of political life within the enormous bureaucratically organised states that have dominated the political landscape throughout modern times. Jonas, in The Imperative of Responsibility encapsulates it when he talks about what he calls “the citadel of man’s own making” – by which he literally means the fortified Greek city-states, but which could also be taken to mean the larger political formations we call modern states:

In this citadel of his own making, clearly set off from the rest of things and entrusted to him, was the whole and sole domain of man’s responsible action. Nature was not an object of human responsibility – she taking care of herself and, with some coaxing and worrying, also of man: not ethics, only cleverness applied to her. But in the city, the social work of art, where men deal with men, cleverness must be wedded to morality, for this is the soul of its being. It is in this intrahuman frame, then, that all traditional ethics dwells, and it matches the size of action delimited by this frame.  - Jonas

Jonas’ thought is that, virtually from the time human beings started to live en masse in cities, and certainly from the time they gave themselves laws and started to reflect on the relation between laws and customs and ethical principles, the order of nature and the order of politics are radically different orders. It’s only in the realm of the political, Jonas thinks, that human beings see themselves as social or ethical beings, only when they find themselves within the political order, inside the walls of the city so to speak, that they have to take social or ethical responsibility. No social solidarity or ethical due is owed to merely natural beings or systems. Man, on this picture, can of course make incursions into the realm of the non-political, the natural, from out of the political realm and this is what he does in exercising his vast ingenuity, in making Nature serve his needs by deploying technology and so on. But the natural realm is so large and the impacts man makes within it so small that his actions within it are not something he is accountable for. They in fact bear none of the marks of politics or ethics at all. Politics, in short, is a way of ordering the powers human beings exercise vis-à-vis each other, ethics the principles they make use of to do so. And neither politics nor ethics apply to the natural world. Anyone who thought they did would be crazy, or as Aristotle might put, would himself be a beast or a God, a being merely natural or more-than-natural, but hardly a human being.

My argument, building on Jonas, is that liberal representative democracy inherits from the political systems it evolved out of this very broad picture of Nature as the beyond of genuinely human action. It is a picture it shares with many political systems that are neither liberal nor representative nor democratic, the picture of Nature as the backdrop to the human drama, as subject to change and fluctuation but not development, development being what goes on in human affairs because of their political and ethical substance, their essentially non-natural character.

Those are the three very rough images of Nature in modernity. When considered together speculatively it’s possible, I think, to get a feel for why it’s in modern times that human action has developed its own potentials to such an extent that human action itself can hardly be supported by the natural world anymore. Who can help but note that in each of the images of Nature inherent in the three fundamental projects of modernity, by no means just within the scientific or technological image of Nature, man’s relationship allows him few attitudes other than a sort of standing-over-and-against nature. Each of the three images militates quite strongly against deep cultural recognition that man co-constitutes Nature, that man is part of Nature, that man’s existence is caught up in Nature’s intricate interdependencies. To us, nowadays, it is or ought to be painfully obvious that he is thoroughly caught up in those intricate interdependencies. If not from any intuitive metaphysical glance into the interior of Nature a la Schopenhauer; then at least from a slightly more obvious quarter – from climate science itself, which tells us that the history of civilised man over the past 8000 years is worthy of being allotted a separate era in geological time itself. Within the space of 8000 years man has become a geological agent whose power is on a scale quite comparable with those forces we thought of more traditionally as the natural ones. The split second of geological time in which we stand now earth science calls the Anthropocene – the geological era of man. In it the powers at our disposal easily outbid the physical powers of the earth itself. Climate change, if nothing else, ought to make us painfully aware that outside the walls of the city we are certainly human political beings as well, and that as human beings with an ethically unchoosy way of using technology, we are also beasts with the powers of gods.

To bring things back down to earth – so that this talk doesn’t float off into the realm of apocalyptic pseudo-geology, I’m going to come back to the three fundamental projects and look at something I started to look at in the session two weeks ago on consumer individualism. What I’d like to turn to now is how the three projects of modernity have reacted so far to the environmental situation of today. My general argument, you’ll remember from a few weeks ago, was that all three of the fundamental projects respond to the way the world of nature is packing up around us with ideal images - not necessarily, I said, images of Nature, though they sometimes involve ideal images of Nature, but ideal images of themselves. I’m not sure if I gave the idea a psychoanalytic spin when I gave it its first run two weeks ago. The psychoanalytic side of it is that what the three projects are up to, in responding to the environmental trouble of today with ideal images of themselves, is a sort of act of overcompensation. The worlds of science and technology, capitalism and liberal representative democracy are faced with a profound disturbance, a profound disturbance that has been caused in an abstract sense by the way the idea of Nature is repressed, excluded, reduced and reified, within their respective spheres of activity. In each case they are responding with the time-honoured strategy of individuals faced with grave problems of their own making - with a quite aggressive re-assertion of the grander side of their own senses of themselves. This last bit is the over-compensation, though obviously it’s an act of overcompensation going on at a cultural symbolic level, rather than in the minds of particular people. (Incidentally, I’m not sure how attached I am to the psychoanalytic construction I’m putting on the whole idea. It might just be a theoretically poetic way of saying that each of the fundamental projects are responding to environmental disturbance with intensely delusional forms of business-as-usual.) 

I said two weeks ago how the idea plays itself out within capitalism, so I’ll start with capitalism this time and move on to the other two. The main phenomenon I pointed to two weeks ago and said provided capitalism with ideal images of itself was green marketing. Of course the Green Pajeros and Ronald McDonald Earth Meals aren’t in any strong sense ideal images of capitalism itself, but ideal images of the consumer way of life. Another way of putting it, without the psychoanalytic twist, is simply to say that the capitalist economic system has so far tended to see climate change and global warming as another marketing opportunity. But if we’re going to run the strong psychoanalytic version – the reason why all packaging is suddenly green-coloured, why all advertising, of anything, suddenly needs to invoke images of a wholesome natural world, a world that’s magically and counterfactually retained its natural integrity, is that such a world exists no longer in part because of the successes of the capitalist economic order. I won’t say any more about this, except to say that the phenomenon of green branding, or green re-branding, is connected, I think quite deeply, with something going on in contemporary politics. It is, I think, the way the contemporary political arena has been invaded by commercial practices and values, by mass marketing techniques and above all by the political form of advertising known as spin, that best explains mainstream political reactions to climate change. Because those two dominant spheres of life, those of the state and those of the economy, are so attuned to each other, because they’ve essentially fused with one another, as Redner points out, it should come as no surprise that those who govern us, the main representatives of the state, should find themselves quite instinctively addressing themselves to climate change with a strategy that belongs in the repertoire of  the capitalist economic system – “tackling climate change”, as the tired rhetoric has it, has turned politically into a quasi-commercial exercise in re-branding. I won’t say more. Or the only thing more I’ll say is that I encourage you to view the manoeuvring going on within mainstream politics in response to climate change through the prism of the concept of advertising. Last week’s federal government green paper is a prime example. What it amounts to is a green advertising strategy. Responsible cultural and scientific commentators have been very quick to point out that it will be lucky, if implemented, to bring the exponential growth of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions back to trajectory of steady growth. And steady growth in emissions – reproduced world-wide – we know from climate science is almost certain to lock us in the medium-to-long-term into a scenario involving 3, 4, 5 or more degrees of greenhouse warming.

I am not arguing that there’s some sort of iron necessity to the situation in which capitalism continues to precipitate us into an environmental abyss. In the days when what Weber calls the spirit of capitalism first started to turn the world on its head in the aftermath of the Reformation, when the eye for profit was linked to the search for God among the Calvinists and Puritans, capital accumulation was highly compatible with frugality, material self-restraint and high sense of responsibility – not to be sure with great natural sensibility, but nevertheless with a sense of the deep need for material self-limitation. Likewise, the dirtiest days of the industrial revolution produced romanticism, and what is partly linked to romanticism – the early conservation movement, the first ecology. So it is far from inconceivable that the collapse of our planetary life support system which we are seeing today could produce a major re-orientation of capitalism. Just as the relationship between capitalism and culture was, as Redner claims, quite a different relationship in each of the very different phases of capitalism's development, so the relationship between capitalism and its environmental fruits has been different in the past and will have to be different in future if there are going to be many more future phases of capitalist development. Consumption-based models of society and economy, it's worth remembering, are a relatively recent historical invention and it is arguable consumption-based societies that represent the most environmentally destructive profligate form of capitalist economy. On my understanding, it is in consumption-based societies that the volume, speed and intensity of production and consumption define most destructively the ideal function of the system; in consumption-based societies that the principles of oversupply and built in obsolescence are most essential to the workings of the system; in consumption-based societies, where energy intensity is systematically called for and where there is hence the greatest systemic impulse to discount the effects of production and consumption on the natural world. There could be no better example of the inertia of the system than the fact that it has taken us until we’ve almost lost the Arctic ice-cap to even contemplate factoring into the costs of production and consumption the costs of treating the atmosphere as a vast universally accessible waste-dump. 

A major re-orientation of the capitalist economic system is, on historical grounds, possible. But what would it take to bring it about? According to Clive Hamilton, in the paper he gave at the Catholic University, what would be necessary would be a widescale collapse in public faith in the consumer lifestyle. At the end of tonight I'll talk briefly about the possibility of tapping back into the cultural, emotional and ethical possibilities of a renewed asceticism, which is an abstract way of talking about what might generate Clive Hamilton’s hypothetical collapse in the consumer lifestyle. Together with this, what would need to take place – and this is talking about it in very broad terms – is that the whole Faustianism of capitalist culture would have to be turned around 180 degrees or rotated, let’s say, through 90 degrees. Capitalism's tremendous powers of invention would need to be turned to good environmental account – which doesn't mean deploying those powers of invention magically for ends other than money-making, but which does of course mean utterly transforming the economic means by which money is made. I’ve just mentioned the Faustianism of capitalist culture and the need to turn that culture around or knock it onto a different course. For those of you who don't know Faust – he is the legendary German sage who sold his soul to the Devil for the price of being infinitely stimulated, amused, uplifted and enlightened, sold his soul to the Devil on the condition that the Devil could only take possession of his soul if the Devil could present him with an experience that would satisfy Faust's insatiable drive for knowledge and novelty so well that he’d want the experience to last forever. In the greatest of all renditions of the legend of Faust, in the play of the same name by the great Goethe, Faust is clearly and intentionally nothing more and nothing less than a concentrated image of modern man, with his whole insatiable drive for ever new experiences, and with his energy, unparalleled, sometimes seemingly unmotivated, and often vastly destructive, for transforming nature and the world. [capitalism] In more recent incarnations, in Monbiot's Heat for example, where mankind's infatuation with fossil fuel is called a Faustian pact, Faust is a figure shaded into the darkest black. His bargain is the bargain of the capitalist worlds of business and government which have conjured up the very real power of env self-annihilation in the same devilish act as conjuring up the possibility of technologically defying so many of our physical limitations as embodied mortal beings. And yet by the end of Goethe's version, having been shown everything from the most naively beautiful woman in the world, wild orgies, vast fields of knowledge, space travel and the wonders of ancient Greece – and having remained unsatisfied by them all – Goethe's Faust, in advanced old age but far from unbroken in spirit, finds a sort of satisfaction in a much less exhilarating more laborious project. He turns back on itself as it were his restless proto-capitalist urge to transform the world by tearing it apart and spends his last days reclaiming marginal land from the sea on the Dutch-German border; he becomes, in other words, a proto-environmentalist and he learns to exercise an ascetic self-discipline and self-restraint that has been foreign to him for the previous 10 acts of the play. And yet Faust’s is no obvious environmental illumination. The project of living with the elements and working with them is, absolutely essentially, in the service of a human environmental scheme.

So is Goethe’s Faust conceivable as something more than an aesthetic super-image of the project of capitalist modernity? Is the end of Faust just a wish-fulfilment dream of a great German artist-philosopher? Is it conceivable as a future for the capitalist economic system and the equally restless, dynamic and furiously destructive human characters that system produces? The literal answer to the question has to be yes. It is very much conceivable in the sense of being imaginable aesthetically – as you've just heard, it was already imagined 200 years ago by a very great poet. It is also conceivable quite literally – it is a conceptual possibility in the sense that the detailed intellectual groundwork for a re-orientation of capitalism has been done. The sorts of re-interpretations of the fundamental concepts underlying the present economic order that would be necessary for the re-orientation, I repeat, have been undertaken or are being undertaken. If you want one example that's already forty years old, have a look at a paper called “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth” in a book called Beyond Economics. Its by one of the most distinguished of all American economists, Kenneth Boulding, and it’s worth reading because of what it says about the way it was possible to write economics before economists themselves started to be mass produced. In the essay Boulding tells us that GDP can be roughly understood as a measure of the rapidity and intensity of the cycle of economic production and consumption, that healthy GDP growth on its present economic interpretation is in other words a measure of environmental destructiveness. But, Boulding goes on to argue, it need not be. It would be feasible, he says, writing in 1968, to differentiate between two sorts of production – production derived from exhaustible sources on the one hand and production from renewable sources on the other; and likewise, on the consumption side, consumption whose products are unreconstructed waste and consumption whose products can go back into the productive process. I'll leave Jim Crosthwaite to talk about these sorts of things in a less amateurish way in the course that starts in September.

A theoretical re-interpretation of some of the basic concepts in capitalism’s conceptual repertoire is well underway. But something much more than that – vastly more than that, is needed. I'm not here to try out my skills as a prophet, so it'd be silly of me to say in anything more than vague terms what sort of practical re-orientation of the present economic order we're after. Because I'm a reformist and not a revolutionary, the only way out of the mess we’re in that I see is through some sort of radical re-interpretation, some sort of re-activation, of the principle of material self-restraint that was native to early capitalism, but was then forfeited as capitalism shook lose of its religious and then its ethical base. And this cultural re-activation of material self-restraint is going to have to take place in concert with an environmental resetting of the Faustian spirit of eternal dynamism, the true spirit of capitalism. So in effect what we're looking for is a sort of combination of these two elements. For the time being it's a combination that it’s not possible for us to make out in the contemporary world or even properly imagine yet. For the time being it’s possibility that it’s hard to be all that sanguine about.

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Back to the main track of the argument. Capitalism responds to climate change with ideal images of itself in the form of green advertising. Those ideal images are something like over-compensations for its repressions. Science and technology, I now want to argue, sees climate change as a new engineering opportunity, in a similar way to capitalism, which sees climate change as a new marketing opportunity. Or if that sounds a touch formulaic, science and technology, when it gets caught up in idealisations of itself, is inclined to see climate change as a pretext for the deployment of a barrage of new even higher-tech equipment, to be deployed on an even grander scale than in the recent past  (as if the technological conquests of the Twentieth Century hadn’t set in train a few environmental consequences we might want to think about before we rush ahead.)

This is not of course to say that high-tech solutions shouldn’t be a large part of the “solution” to our current environmental malaise. It’s simply to say that high-tech solutions are no panacea. Treating high-tech solutions as a panacea is and should be suspicious when it involves people with a naive faith in science and technology tapping back into the same utopian current of feeling that often worked itself out in terrifying and dystopian terms over the past centuries. The utopian image, the true wish fulfilment dream of technophilia, was once that of humanity at its ease tended by fleets of beautifully designed robots. In the era of CC the equivalent technophilic wish-fulfilment dream is something like the image of bigger less cutesy machines keeping ideal physical conditions of existence smoothly in balance and letting us go on lead the lives we’ve been leading up to now – the cloud-seeding devices that spray metallic particles into the lower atmosphere, the injections of sulphuric chemicals into the stratosphere, the fleets of mirror bearing satellites which reflect just the right amount of solar radiation back into space. My criticism of the dream is that invoked naively it muddies the waters or will be an outright tool of political deception. The clearest example of it in action in a local context is in the rhetoric surrounding the project of “clean coal technology”. Blind faith in technology obscures the obvious point of the argument about clean coal – that if the problem of anthropogenic climate change is as desperate as climate science says it is, then the prospect of an eventual switchover of some of the world’s coal-fired power-stations 20 years in the future could easily become an excuse for taking the problem seriously right now and responding with the technology we already have at our disposal.

I’ve already said that today's liberal representative democracy responds to climate change with the same self-images – the same dual strategies of denial and self-idealisation – as the world of mass marketing. To the extent that ideal images other than those of mass-marketing are in play in liberal democracy – what might they be? The fiction or ideal of liberal democracy, I would argue, is that of unpolluted (excuse the pun) individual political choice, the image of liberal democracy fairly and frictionlessly enacting the individual ethical motivations of the majority of voters, or in our case fairly and frictionlessly allowing the voters to choose between the various environmental options and the various degrees of ethical responsibility that are adopted as part of the choice between those options. It’s a pity that we haven’t been able to explore more fully the theoretical background to the construction of this political utopia and its upshot for us as individuals and as members of states. The theory, in very simple terms, is that voters in liberal representative democracies are genuinely free to choose their political representatives according to their own individual ethical and political lights and that their choices are mustered into power formations which accurately reflect them. What the theory ignores is the capacity of corporations, bureaucracies and a wide range of other forces much larger than individuals to confine individuals' choices or conscript them in the cause of wilful blindness. The reality of liberal politics in the early Twenty First Century, the era of climate change, we know, is otherwise – established business interests with disproportionate power over government; a general atmosphere of public cynicism and disengagement; cravenly populist politicians, manipulating and being manipulated by a media that in its turn acts in such a way that people are radically under-informed and radically incapable of apprehending the sensational seriousness of the situation because they are subjected to a daily farrago of trivia, gossip and false sensation.

One way of talking about the self-idealisation of liberal representative democracy is thus using the category of choice – the fantasy of political agents freely exercising their choice being central. But it would be possible and useful to formulate the same thought about choice using a much wider concept, the concept of freedom. Why the liberal democratic ideal of political freedom reduces itself so easily to a rather flimsy and unconvincing ideological fiction is because what it amounts to in practical terms in today’s consumption-based societies is the freedom to choose to prefer certain consumer goods over others, the freedom – not to choose one’s political representatives (who are chosen by party-machines), not to choose how one lives, but the freedom to choose what lifestyle to pursue through what consumer goods. It is of course easy to hear how hollow the ideal of Western freedom is when it’s invoked as a miserable cliché by George W Bush or, until recently, by that wretched individual Alexander Downer. What's more difficult to see is the uncomfortable thought that the hollow ideal is a sort of overcompensation for. That uncomfortable thought, the act of self-denial that the self-idealisations of the so-called free world are based on, is the thought that production and consumption in today’s free societies are the largest contributor of all to the pollution of the biosphere, to the collapse of biodiversity and all in all to the rapid progress we’re making towards ruining the physical life-supports of the planet. The thought, as we saw Redner putting it last week, is that our ecological and cultural sense of loss, directionlessness and destruction is, at least in part, the necessary byproduct of the freedom and openness of Western societies. 

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Recall that the [projected] title of the course is Images of Nature: An Introduction to an Environmental Ethics. [This became “Images of Nature: Ethics and the Environment”] Before I finish by saying what I think is the only environmental ethic that follows from the actual course you’ve just done, I’m going to give a sketch of a good environmental ethic that doesn’t follow from the actual course, but does allow me to do what I’d said I’d do last week – which was to relate our contemporary concept of Nature to last week’s topic, technology. The promising environmental ethic is to be found in the book I mentioned last week, Hans Jonas’ Imperative of Responsibility, the first 10 pages of which I handed out a few weeks back. The subtitle of Jonas’ book, as you’ll see, is “Towards an ethic for a technological age”. To his credit, Jonas gets a fair bit further “towards” his ethics than I’ve got towards mine in this “Introduction to an Environmental Ethic”. . . What he comes up with is nothing more nor less than a full blown ethical theory or philosophy, a complete philosophical re-interpretation of the concept of responsibility suitable for an age in which human beings’ technical might presents them both with the possibility of destroying the conditions of civilised human life suddenly (using nuclear weapons) and with the possibility of destroying those same conditions slowly in the course of decades (through sheer environmental negligence). Of course Jonas mainly spares himself the questions I’ve tried to ask about how we became so ethically disoriented in the first place and what limitations our ethical disorientation places on us as social beings. But as a philosophical re-interpretation of responsibility J’s work seems to me second to none. It seems to me also to put a pin in the balloon of the German philosopher Hegel, who had the idea that philosophy only ever arrives at the end of historical developments and brings to a pitch of conceptual perfection what’s already done and dusted as far as human life, culture and society are concerned. As Hegel puts it “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk” – Minerva being the goddess of wisdom, the owl being the wisest of birds, the flight at dusk being the conceptual journey which re-traces in philosophical terms what has already happened in the bright light of history and action. Jonas’ book about ethics in the age of high technology, which I say would make a fine ethics for the age of climate change, was written in 1983 – which is roughly the beginning of the age of climate change – incidentally the year the Australian government commissioned its first report into climate change. The owl, in other words, flew at dawn this time, and that’s often the way things go, inconvenient as that might be for Hegelian philosophers.

I’ve already approached Jonas’ theory from one point in talking about a background assumption about Nature that liberal democracy inherits from previous Western political systems simply by being a Western political system. Jonas himself actually says it’s an assumption common to all previous ethics and politics, the assumption that Nature is immutable, that Man, in spite of his boundless cleverness and technical skill, is insignificant in comparison with the natural order of things. Developing the background assumption a bit further – as we’ve seen, for Jonas the city/state, a man-made political realm, is the basic theatre for human action. The deeds men perform towards other men, that is towards themselves, are the basic object of ethical evaluation. As Jonas puts it: “All the good or ill to which man’s inventive craft may drive him one time or another is inside the human enclave and does not touch the nature of things.” (If you wanted to look at this from Redner’s point of view you’d have to say this is historically truest of what Redner calls the civic ethic, which is the ethical ideal type that Jonas is clearly using as his model. But some sort of analogous assumption about the ethical relationship between the natural and the human – the ethical non-relationship between the natural and the human – might be thought to hold roughly in other ethical traditions as well.)

To formulate it in terms of Jonas’ key concept, responsibility, the background assumption is that Nature is not an object of human responsibility. Cleverness, ingenuity – what the Greeks call practical skill (techne) and we call technology - applies to non-human Nature, ethics does not. J’s argument is that that assumption is no longer valid in an age of high technology. The evaluative standpoint the assumption grounds is a standpoint commensurate with the relatively small scale of human power, but is completely incommensurate with the enormous scale of human power in the present.

. . . this [city] of his own making, clearly set off from the rest of things and entrusted to him, was the whole and sole domain of man’s responsible action. Nature was not an object of human responsibility – she taking care of herself and, with some coaxing and worrying, also of man: not ethics, only cleverness applied to her. But in the city, the social work of art, where men deal with men, cleverness must be wedded to morality, for this is the soul of its being. It is in this intrahuman frame, then, that all traditional ethics dwells, and it matches the size of action delimited by this frame. - Jonas

In all previous ethics, Jonas says, “the good and evil about which [ethical] action had to care lay close to the act, either in the [practice] itself or in its immediate reach, and were not matters for remote planning.” From Redner’s historicist point of view, in making it sound as if that applies with exactly the same force to every past form of ethical life, Jonas is overgeneralising, but, all the same, we can take his point. Ethics, in the past, applied paradigmatically in situations that arose between human beings, he’s already told us. Now he tells us - the timeframe and the spatial frame in which actions have their ethical meaning is small; actions have the most ethical meaning in their immediate human vicinity and in the immediate human future; but when you move beyond the immediate vicinity their ethical meaning fast approaches zero. Human beings’ long-term long-range control of circumstances is limited, so ethical responsibility can’t be attributed to long-term or long-range effects of action. The longer-range effects of action belong to the realm of the unknowable. They belong in the realm of chance or fortune, literally in the lap of the gods in the case where fortune is itself personified as a god or a goddess.

What that means for Jonas – and this is a very important point for him – is that the role of knowledge in ethics is heftily discounted. If ethics just applies to my immediate human surrounds then to do the right thing I don’t need any expert knowledge of the future or any expert knowledge of the remote effects entailed by my actions. (To see that this is a bit of an overgeneralisation, we need only to think back to the session on Buddhism. Buddhism, I said, builds up a somewhat different picture of the role of knowledge in ethics, because what Buddhist enlightenment involves is a sort of esoteric insight into the remote effects of action. What understanding the second noble truth about the origin of suffering and the chain of dependent origination amounts to is having a sort of knowledge, or a sort of mystical apprehension, of the long-term ethical consequences of deeds within past and future cycles of rebirth.) But let’s concede the point to Jonas, even if it doesn’t apply exactly to the some of the ethical ideal types we’ve talked about in the course.

In past ethics, the longer-range effects of action belong to the realm of the unknowable, to chance. In past ethics the role of knowledge in ethics is discounted. If ethics just applies to your immediate human surrounds then to do the right thing I don’t need any expert knowledge of remote effects. If ethics just applies to immediate circumstances, what I need to do the right thing is, above all, good will. And good will is not a matter of knowledge. In fact, having too much knowledge, is often going to hinder the possibility of acting with good will. Cashing it out again in terms of responsibility: in the past “no one was held responsible for the unintended later effects of his well-intentioned, well-considered, and well-performed act. The short arm of human power did not call for a long arm of predictive [theoretical, scientific] knowledge; the shortness of the one is as little culpable as that of the other.”

You can see, of course, what Jonas is leading up to with this – the idea that we’re in precisely the opposite predicament today, that this changes ethics radically, the idea that we’re in the opposite predicament today because human power has long long arms. With the invention of modern forms of technology we’ve lost our innocence, which was the innocence of morality itself (This is a supremely ironic statement to make, if we recall that it was morality that did so much to heighten the possibilities of experiencing ourselves as capable of sin and guilt, in other words, if we recall how lacking in naïve innocence humanity became in its own eyes once morality became central to its conception of itself.) However the innocence of morality is by no means the only thing we’ve lost. By endowing ourselves with the power to deploy technological systems across society and across the globe we’ve also lost, most confusingly, at least some of our individual sense of responsibility. Our distinctly individual sense of ethical responsibility was part of the old ethical order which limited responsibility to immediate contexts and consequences involving determinate human actors. Our technologically acquired power of action, by contrast, is the power not so much of individual action, but of collective, systematic action, the power, in the case which is relevant in this course, to organise societies in such a way that vast CO2 emissions become a matter of social necessity. 

If the first task Jonas sets himself in carrying through his re-interpretation of responsibility is to register the large-scale disturbance in our old sense of the ethical created by the advent of high technology, then the second task is to say where this leaves us ethically. The rest of the book is then the theoretical elaboration of what he calls the “new dimensions of ethical responsibility” that follow from the long arm and increased punch of human action in a technologically advanced world. Here are those new dimensions in a nutshell. If you want Jonas’ [slightly technical] elaboration of them, the book is to be found in the Baillieu library . . . Firstly and most obviously, our sense of ethical responsibility, says Jonas, has to shift in such a way that the whole biosphere of the planet becomes what we take responsibility for. This imperative of responsibility follows directly from the fact of our extended technological powers. In a little more detail what it involves is recognising ethically the temporal and spatial reach of our actions because of the way they’ve been technologically magnified.

The second new dimension of our ethical situation calling for recognition is that human action is cumulative. As Jonas puts it, the effects of technologically amplified human action “keep adding themselves to one another, with the result that the situation for later subjects and their choices of action will be progressively different . . . from that of the initial agent and ever more the fated product of what was done before.” When the horizon of ethics was human and limited to immediate situations, the same questions of ethics posed themselves in fairly much the same form in new situations. Whatever form of ethical culture you held to – whether it was one which emphasised doing your duty or loving your neighbour or acting with great nobility and delicacy – the problem of being dutiful, loving or nobly delicate posed itself afresh, as a whole and from the start time and again. Each new situation wiped the ethical slate clean in a certain sense. In the era of high technology the slate gets progressively muddier as the effects of past action cumulatively constrain the possibilities of future action on the part of future human beings – a situation that of course applies paradigmatically to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the limitations they will impose ever more strenuously on the ethical choices and possibilities of the future.

Most importantly, the third new dimension of responsibility – relating to knowledge. “Knowledge, under these circumstances, becomes a prime duty beyond anything claimed for it heretofore, and the knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action. The fact that it cannot really be thus commensurate, that is, that the predictive knowledge falls behind the technical knowledge that nourishes our power to act, itself assumes ethical importance. The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem. With the latter. . . so superior to the former, recognition of ignorance becomes the obverse of the duty to know and thus part of the ethics that must govern the ever more necessary self-policing of our outsized might. No previous ethics had to consider the global condition of human life and the far-off future, even existence, of the [human] race. These now being an issue demands, in brief, a new conception of duties and rights, for which previous ethics and metaphysics provide not even the principles, let alone a ready doctrine.”

Theoretical scientific knowledge, knowledge that is equal to the scale of human action, becomes in itself a prime responsibility in an age of high technology. That makes our contemporary ethical predicament very different to our old one, where – classically, though in some traditions much more than others - no special knowledge, obviously no training in science, was needed to fulfil the ends of the good life. The converse of that, as Jonas goes on to say, is also important; knowledge of human ignorance, knowledge of the grave limitations of knowledge itself, takes on a new role. The gap between human technical power and human predictive power, because of the magnitude of the technical power, is greater than ever. Deploying our technical power when it is so much in excess of our predictive power becomes especially dubious.

Finally, and maybe no less importantly, the last new dimension of ethical responsibility picked out by Jonas is the imperative to treat nature as an end-in-itself rather than as a mere means to human ends. What should and shouldn’t be treated ethically as a means to ends is of course central to the whole discourse of modern ethics. According to what Jonas thinks of as the traditional ethical scheme of the past, it was only human beings who ought not be treated ethically as means. Putting aside this whole aspect of the ethical past and turning against the tendency to instrumentalise the non-human that goes hand-in-hand with seeing humans as the only beings that oughtn’t be instrumentalised for Jonas entails investing Nature with a dignity of its own, or recognising Nature as a power working for itself as Marx puts it. Just how that might happen is difficult to know and Jonas himself doesn’t give us many clues. And that is possibly because he is not that interested in assessing the cultural actualities which his ethical possibilities have to contend with. There can be no doubt that our (cultural) sense of the natural as a power working positively for itself is something modern man went a long way to giving up when, in inaugurating the project of modern natural science, he reduced Nature to the realm of sheer purposeless necessity. An overwhelming problem we face today is that, in a thoroughly disenchanted – thoroughly rationalised, secularised – world, that sense of Nature as sheer purposeless necessity has become a cultural fact and not merely a scientific posit.

In the rest of his book, Jonas develops his new ethics from out of these new dimensions of responsibility opened up by human beings’ sheer technological might. To put it in the context of some of the earlier parts of this course, we might note that the ethics of responsibility he comes up with is akin to an ethics of duty, though being vastly more intellectually articulate. And the first and foremost duty, Jonas says, is to act in such a way that a world fit for human habitation remains intact – to act resolutely on the presupposition that “there ought to be through all future time . . . a world fit for human habitation, and that it ought in all future time to be inhabited by a mankind worthy of the human name.” This he thinks is also a completely novel presupposition to be acting on. It is novel, he thinks, because it would never have been formulated in the history of ethics up to the present age, and, if it had been, it could only have been unnecessary. In the past, human beings could safely assume that there would always be a world fit for human habitation, could assume in other words that the ethical and political failures, crimes, oversights and depravities they were capable of would be visited wholly on each other and couldn’t possibly rebound throughout the order of nature in such a way as to make it difficult or impossible for human beings to have another crack at being less negligent and nasty in the future. The foremost difference between the pre-modern and the modern ethical worlds is then – that in the first, in the pre-modern technological world, it was unquestioned that man would have a presence in the world; in the latter, in the modern era of advanced technology, whether man will a presence in the world is more questionable and has itself to be the object, maybe the prime object, of the endeavour we call ethics.

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I said a couple of weeks ago, when I moved over from the bit of the course about the ethics of the past to the bit about the ethics of the present, that I didn’t want to present the ethics of the past either as intellectual curiosities or as touchstones of ethical meaning in the present. I think, in retrospect, that it’s only partly true that the ethics of the past can’t function as touchstones for leading a life in the present. In closing I want to come back to what I think is the Great Idea of the ethical past which I tried to introduce you to early in the course and which has been off the agenda for several weeks. The Great Idea is asceticism. And you’ll remember that quite a bit of the earlier part of the course went into distinguishing the various historical forms asceticism took on in ethical history, into asking how it was present in the various ethical traditions, and into seeing where it takes human beings ethically when pushed to extremes or lived out more moderately and modestly - in extreme forms it manifests itself, in early Christianity for instance, as self-punishment for the sake of God and the community turned in the direction of self-punishment for its own sake, though in cooler ethical climates, in the Confucian and Stoic ethics of duty for instance, it is nothing more than what I called an instinct of self-renunciation - something human beings have to go in for in some form because they are social beings who can’t live out all their desires, something which all ethical types and forms make use of, something that, instinctively, is I think at the heart of human beings’ achievements as cultural beings.

The reason why asceticism might have been off the agenda while I’ve talked about the ethics of the present is because of its notable absence as a force shaping social and individual life in the consumer society we live in today. The principle of renouncing your desires is quite foreign to – or at least deeply ambivalent in a society whose economic dynamism and environmental destructiveness is closely tied to its ability to mobilise human desire and conscript it in the cause of consumption (production for consumption’s sake).

So the course I’ve just presented you with is not an attempt to convince you to choose one form or another of past ethical life and try to make it live again. It is rather a sort of argument in favour of an enlightened asceticism – enlightened in the sense of involving a self-conscious attempt to pick up the ascetic thread of the ethical past, which we learn, when we study the ethical past, has to our detriment somehow been lost; enlightened also in the sense of being clear-eyed and moderate, rather than extreme and masochistic (There are, incidentally, many forms of environmentalism which urge self-restraint for the sake of self-punishment, in other words as a way for the Western world to do penance for the environmental sins of the past, and we can happily let people who adhere to them form the open-air organic monasteries of the future and leave them to their own devices).

Though I don’t think my preferences are in any way prescriptive, my feeling is that a Stoic asceticism, an asceticism of duty and responsibility, has more to recommend it than a + asceticism. This is because if a Christian asceticism is to be genuinely Christian, it’s going to have to take as its starting point, as all Christians must, the idea that our souls are God-given - a leading idea which, in my opinion, passes over quite easily into the notion that there is also something radically ungodly about us, call it Nature within us or Nature at large, which will always be capable of knocking us off our God-given spiritual course. Stoic asceticism, as I tried to argue a couple of months ago, aims at a life in accordance with Nature in general. Stoicism’s moving refrain, as formulated by Marcus Aurelius, runs as follows:

This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part. – Marcus Aurelius

This is a pronouncement which, I argued in the first part of the course, contains within it the idea that the discipline of the mind known as physics, the endeavour to understand the intricate interdependencies that we are caught up in as natural parts of a natural whole, has to issue in a discipline of desire – something we would unhesitatingly call ethics, though Marcus Aurelius calls it the other part of physics. The last but not the least reason I’m flying my preferred form of asceticism under the flag of Enlightenment is because of this interconnection there has to be between our knowledge of the physical world – its environmental capacities, limitations and tipping-points – and our attempts to pursue the ascetic discipline of desire in the form of ethics. It’s the same thing that Jonas dubs the ethical imperative to knowledge in an age of high technology - the imperative to make an ethical life attune with a scientific understanding of the physical facts that is equal to the scale of human action. In more contemporary language we could think of it as the imperative to base all our ethical, political and economic action on nothing less than a totally unflinching glance at what climate science tells us about the fragility of the planet’s life support systems. Something new, I say, will have taken place ethically when we become more knowing beings; and this is because we can only become more knowing beings by courageously, boldly and resolutely facing up to how we’re pushing the so-called earth system very close to its limits, at least as a system capable of sustaining a flourishing human life involving a flourishing human culture.