Transformative Ecological Economics

Process Philosophy, Ideology and Utopia

Ove Jakobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351794008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

When we look at the state of the world today, what is most evident is the fact that the major problems of our time – energy, environment, economy, climate change and social justice – cannot be understood in isolation. They are interconnected problems, which means that they require corresponding systemic solutions. Today's global economy has brought about critical distress for ecosystems and societies and we have to go to the very root of the problems to find a way out.

This volume develops a synthesized interpretation of ecological economics integrating different levels: (economic) system, (business) practice and the (economic) actor. It discusses how changes on a systems level are connected to changes in practice and development of individual consciousness. Transformative Ecological Economics delves into the insight and knowledge from different sources of inspiration (thermodynamics, Darwinism, anthroposophy and Buddhism) as well as into an integrated story describing and illustrating the core ideas, principles and values that characterize a utopian society anchored in ecological economics. Implementation of the deep changes demanded depends on our ability to write a new story, a utopian one for sure, but one which is in accordance with and based on the reality in which we live.

This book will be of interest to those who study ecological economics, political economy and environmental economics.

Part I

Context of interpretation

Part I gives a frame of reference for interpreting Parts II and III. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism represents a holistic description of how everything in nature (and society) is constituted and how we can acquire knowledge of the nature of reality. Since the nature of reality is described as process, and everything is changing all the time, it is impossible to explain everything once and for all. Becoming is more real than being. According to Whitehead, philosophy starts with wonder and the task is to develop a consistent context of interpretation relevant for understanding the world we are living in.

Whitehead states that as the context of interpretation is not static we have to reflect on how to develop the best possible interpretive framework, or, in his language, “categorial scheme,” to describe and understand reality. All change depends on creativity, “the universal of universals,” the process of becoming develops in the field of tension between actuality and potentiality. If we can see the universals as no longer abstract and eternal they could be applicable to interpret reality.

I describe and discuss social change, in the spirit of Mannheim (1936) and Ricoeur (1986), as it results from the tension between ideology (referring to actuality) and utopia (referring to potentiality). Ideology always sustains the existing system while utopia aims to transform the status quo. Utopia attacks the orthodoxy of the dominant paradigm and provokes its agents. Utopia generates disturbance and alteration and is a necessity for a living society. A society without utopia would be dead.

Transferring this reasoning to economy I find a corresponding tension between green economy, rooted in the established neo-liberal economic ideology, and ecological economics as a utopian description of a potentially developing economy. Ecological economics represents a paradigm shift, suggesting solutions to many of the negative unintended consequences of the current economic system. Instead of reducing the symptoms ecological economics suggest changes on an ontological level often inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.

1Philosophy of organism

Alfred North Whitehead

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be, that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

Alfred North Whitehead

Introduction

Modern society is characterized by increasing production and consumption, resulting in a higher standard of living for some people and a lower quality of the environmental life conditions for all of us. To solve the most pressing problems we need a change which moves away from the existing mechanical worldview toward an organic understanding of the world.

We all live in the midst of an ecological crisis. It is well known that human beings have been destroying nature and the environment with science and technology. Without overcoming the ecological crisis we cannot exist any longer. The ecological crisis is fundamental and complicated in its character and scope.

(Lee 2006, p. 128)

Ormerod pointed out that mainstream economics offers a misleading view of how the world operates and that the ontological presuppositions in economics need to be critically reconsidered and discussed (Ormerod 1994). Boulding’s view is that “economics has rested too long in an essentially Newtonian paradigm of mechanical equilibrium and mechanical dynamics” (Boulding 1981, p. 17). What we need is a critical understanding of the relationship between ontology on one hand and economics on the other. The problematic assumptions about human nature and the relationship between human beings and the natural world are directly tied to the ontological presuppositions in the current economic system. If we are to change direction, we have to rethink the underlying worldview of modern economics.

In order to describe a worldview showing the fundamental interplay between human activity and environmental conditions, I find it relevant and promising to discuss Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.” Whitehead’s work in cosmology and philosophy is a major contribution to the ongoing development of the transdisciplinary field of ecological economics as an alternative to neo-classical economics. Whitehead’s way of putting things in perspective is both pertinent and illuminating. I do not think Whitehead’s philosophical position is the only view which can give a deeper understanding of holistic ontology and cosmology, but it certainly does represent a perspective that could be understood within both the Western philosophical tradition and the Eastern spiritual philosophies. Whitehead was convinced that “what is called modern science had reached a turning point, which demanded a new philosophical thought” (Stenger 2011, p. 11). Science is threatened today by the way the state and (military) industry have undertaken to enslave it “through what is called the economy of knowledge […] which blindly serves those who actualize that power to transform the world” (Stenger 2011, p. 11).

Abstractions

Ricoeur reflects on the following question: “what is reality and for whom?” Reality, ineluctably, includes all sorts of appreciations and judgments and values. Reality is not only objects but involves human beings and their thoughts and “no one knows reality outside the multiplicity of ways it is conceptualized, since reality is always caught in a framework of thought” (Ricoeur 1986, p. 171). A science that seeks to explain the concrete by way of the abstract all too easily falls prey to a form of knowledge production whose adequacy is judged instrumentally, that is, in terms of its capacity to transform and control nature, rather than ecologically, that is, in terms of its capacity to understand and relate to nature. Gandhi focused another great weakness of modern civilization when he pointed to “its failure to understand the nature and limits of reason” (Parekh 2001, p. 83). “Modern science has sacrificed intuitive understanding of the concrete passage and organic unity of the actual universe for the abstract knowledge of its mathematical formulae and mechanical models” (Segall 2013, p. 9).

Our use of abstractions is dangerous, as we tend to forget that they are indeed no more than abstractions. Even worse we also tend to mistake abstractions for concrete reality. Many of our abstractions lay claim to a completeness that they do not actually possess. Whitehead refers to this error as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But we have to be aware when we discuss this topic that “no man and no epoch can think of everything at once” (Whitehead 1967a, p. 51). Boulding points out that abstractions are essential, but, along with Whitehead, he warns against mistaking abstraction for reality. “We would be foolish to try to go for a walk across a map, but a map may be very helpful if we are going for a real walk” (Boulding 1970, p. 75).

Fallacies of misplaced concreteness flourish because the disciplinary organization of knowledge requires a high level of abstraction. The more successfully a discipline meets the criteria established for it, the higher is the level of abstraction involved as they are directly proportional and the problems connected to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness are rapidly evolving in our specialized societies. This is the reason why many practitioners of successful disciplines, socialized to accept the established paradigm, apply their conclusions to the real world without recognizing the degree of abstraction involved. To see (abstract) information as a literal product, or to make concrete things out of (abstract) cognitive and communicative matters, is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

According to Daly and Cobb Jr. no field of study outside the physical sciences has more fully achieved the ideal form of academic discipline than economics. The success of economics as a science has involved a high level of abstraction. “Precisely because of its success, it has been particularly liable to commission of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Daly and Cobb Jr. 1994, p. 25). They argue that the organization of economic knowledge in a productive perspective has been successful but it has many built-in limitations and dangers too. The result is that there is an overwhelming danger of “misplaced concreteness” involved in the conclusions drawn about the actual world. “More generally it is the fallacy involved whenever thinkers forget the degree of abstraction involved in thought and draw unwarranted conclusions about concrete actuality” (Daly and Cobb Jr. 1994, p. 36).

The consequence of abstracting economics out of nature and society is “lifeless” concepts, theories and models. Economics deprived of emotion and value is reduced to no more than a mishmash of numbers and statistics. Some of the conclusions drawn about the real world by deduction from conceptual and theoretical abstractions indicate little awareness of the dangers outlined above.

This means that economics scholars are insufficiently aware of the fact that the economic laws are dependent on the historical characteristics of the society. This leads economists “to apply them beyond their limited sphere of relevance” (Daly and Cobb Jr. 1994, p. 29). One consequence is that the laws governing an actual economic system will change if the system changes. Often when economists find “laws” that are valid in the existing system they perceive all such “laws” to be universal. Today we can observe many examples where liberal economic theories, established and validated centuries ago in Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, are implemented all over the modern world.

Economists have lost touch with, and maybe even lost the concept of, the living society because of a one-sided focus on the scientific rather than the historical study of the economy. The temporal dimension is overshadowed by the spatial. One of the main statements in “philosophy of organism” is that time and space are inseparable. Whitehead asserts that “it is not necessary for the intellect to fall into the trap, though […] there has been a very general tendency to do so” (Whitehead 1967a, p. 51). An awareness of metaphysical assumptions can help us to see the limitations of some of the scientific truth of today.

Organic ontology

Whitehead’s motivation to develop the philosophy of organism was to frame a system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. “Here ‘interpretation’ means that each element shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme” (Whitehead 1967b, p. 222). The philosophy of organism is often difficult to grasp, and many interpreters report problems in understanding Whitehead’s texts. Latour illustrates these problems in the following way:

I have always felt that Whitehead-watching had a lot to do with whale-watching as it is practiced, for instance, on the coast of San Diego in the winter. You stay on the boat for hours, see nothing, and suddenly, “There she blows, she blows!”, and swiftly the whale disappears again.

(Latour 2011, p. xv)

Whitehead wanted his theories to perform a social function and to make human life richer and more meaningful by helping us to understand our experiences in a more dynamic way. Instead of construing the task of science to be that of overcoming subjective illusion in order to reach objective reality, as many modern thinkers have done, Whitehead takes the speculative risk of defining nature “quite simply [as] what we are aware of in perception” (Segall 2013, p. 20). Whitehead’s scientific method can be compared with Goethe’s gentle empiricism which rejected simple mechanical explanations and pursued instead nature’s reasons by learning to participate more fully in the archetypal patterns interwoven with experience itself. One of the main differences between mechanistic and organic models is that “a machine can be controlled, a living system can only be disturbed” (Capra and Luisi 2014, p. 318).

I have chosen Whitehead’s philosophy of organism as an ontological frame of reference for interpreting ecological economics because it opens up a deeper understanding of economy as integrated in social and natural systems. Another reason for choosing Whitehead’s ontology is that it is often referred to as a source of inspiration in academic texts in ecological economics. Among others, distinguished scholars such as Georgescu-Roegen (1971) and Daly and Cobb Jr. (1994) refer to Whitehead’s philosophy in their analysis and descriptions of the principles of ecological economics. They argue that many of the environmental and social problems connected to mainstream economics are due to the underlying mechanistic ontology of economics. Accepting an organic ontology has important implications for both economic theory and practice. For example, it leads to an acceptance of the actors’ “co-responsibility” for the whole lifecycle of the product they use or produce.

My interpretation of “philosophy of organism” is mostly based on Whitehead’s trilogy of books, Science and the Modern World (first edition 1925), Process and Reality (based on his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, 1927/1928, first published 1929), and Adventures of Ideas (first edition 1933). These books supplement each other, and a...