Rationality And Nature

A Sociological Inquiry Into A Changing Relationship

Raymond Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367320126
• eBook ISBN: 9780429972829
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Divergent beliefs about humanity's relationship to nature collide as the second millenium ends. One belief emphasizes that a distinctive characteristic of humans—reason—enables them to reshape and master nature. Another insists that nature is not so plastic, hence humans must adapt to nature and render development sustainable, or even limit growth. "Social ecology" asserts that environmental problems result from institutional hierarchies and suggests decentralized institutions and egalitarian ethics. According to "deep ecology" such problems originate in cultures assuming only humans are worthwhile, thus it stresses the intrinsic value of nature. Feminists are torn between values based on the equality of men and women and ecofeminist values postulating that women are inherently closer to nature than men. Rationality and Nature critically assesses these conflicting cultural tendencies. Waste has been the forgotten element of political economy. Western society has sophisticated methods of financial accounting but does little to account for the losses—financial and human—of waste. Raymond Murphy proposes in this book a theory of environmental debt as a source of capital accumulation. He develops a model of "environmental classes" that helps us to understand the political and economic basis of conflict over the environment. Environmental degradation did not occur on a vast scale until science and applied science were developed. Are they responsible for it and can they be reoriented toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature? Other ways of bringing about a symbiotic relationship are also explored in this book: compulsion, ecological values, ecological experience, and ecological knowledge.

Part One
The Intensification of Rationalization and Its Alternatives

1
Rationalization Under the Premise of Plasticity

In 1798 Thomas Malthus (1798, 1801) published his theory of the relationship between social action and the processes of nature. He argued that human population grows geometrically but agricultural production, or more generally the means of subsistence, only grows arithmetically. Thus population increases beyond the means to sustain it, the excess population that cannot be sustained by the natural environment is eliminated, and then the population and the means of subsistence grow once again at their respective rates until their interaction produces the next crisis. Boom and bust cycles are, according to this theory, written into the relationship between humans and their natural environment. Malthus concluded that, although population growth could be limited by "preventive" checks (birth control, infanticide) and by "moral restraint" (sexual abstinence), it is usually brought back to equilibrium by "positive" checks (famine, epidemics, and war). He arrived at this conclusion because he believed that sexual abstinence was improbable and, like many Protestant ministers of that age, that birth control was morally repugnant. The famines in Ireland in the 1700s and early and middle 1800s seemed to support his theory.

The Intensification of Rationalization Under Plasticity

The relationship between humans and nature has appeared in the two centuries following Malthus to be a great deal more malleable than he believed. The means of subsistence have grown much faster than the population, to the extent that most industrialized nations now have a continual surplus in their production of food. Population is limited by the "preventive" check of birth control to the point that, if there were no immigration, those nations would decline in population despite a great leap forward in life expectancy. Until environmental problems became increasingly severe, it seemed that both the population side and the means-of-subsistence side of the Malthusian dilemma had been transformed by human rationality: nature had been mastered, the dilemma solved, Malthus refuted. The development of a modern rational society, and in particular the development of science and technology, led many people in the industrialized world to look upon the theory of Malthus as a mere curiosity in the history of ideas: an intellectual museum piece. Furthermore, his theory had other limitations even in his own day. It was class biased. Malthus obscured the fact that the crises he described decimated the poor but hardly touched the rich, severely affected the conquered Catholics of Ireland but less so the conquering Protestants, etc. He failed to perceive the social determination of human vulnerability to his laws (see Moore Lappe and Collins 1970).

At the beginning of the Twentieth century, Weber (1958: 139) characterized the intellectualized culture in the modern, rationalized world as the following belief: "there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. ... One need no longer have recourse to magical means, ... Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means."¹ Belief in mysterious forces is replaced by belief in the power of knowledge and by instrumental rationality in the form of technology. The world becomes disenchanted as belief in magical and religious spirits is eroded. This dynamic of intellectualization has been strongly associated with the pursuit of mastery, notably, of nature. "What men want to learn from Nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 5).

Nature, and the relationship of humans to nature, are seen in this intellectualized, rationalized worldview as plastic: humans can mold and reconstruct the natural environment. They have confidence that they can "master all things," in particular nature and the environment, through their planning by technical means and calculations. A senior population economist with the United Nations, Paul Shaw, argues that since the time of Malthus people have been forecasting disaster. '"It has never happened.' Technology is the crucial difference between humans and animals, and in the past, technology has always increased the carrying capacity of the earth, says Shaw. 'Why should it be any different now?'" (Southam 1989: 7). If one resource runs out, a better one will be found in time. If coal becomes scarce, oil will be substituted. If oil resources become depleted, energy will continue to be supplied by nuclear fission reactors. If fission reactors prove too dangerous, then humans will develop a benign process of nuclear fusion.

Hamilton (1973:41), who was the industrial editor of the New Scientist, has given a strong expression of this view that human rationality is no longer subject to the constraints of nature, because rationality has rendered the natural environment plastic. "Technology can achieve practically anything today if we spend enough on it. It gives Man unprecedented powers over his environment and over himself. .... There are few technological barriers left in the way. Virtually everything is possible for those with the money and the will. The barriers are political, economic, social."

Enterprises and states have acted as it the relationship or humans to their natural environment were plastic, treating pollution and depletion of resources as inconsequential. They have justified their actions by developing the corresponding ideology. Humans are assumed to have superpowers, capable of manipulating, domesticating, remolding, reconstructing, and harvesting nature. Editorial pages of newspapers carry articles entitled "Ecologists take heed: The End is not near" and argue that "if Eden exists it lies in our capacity to control our environment, not to retreat from scientific progress and human ingenuity" (Howard 1989: B3). Such assumptions have provided the basis of the legitimating ideology for the exploitation of nature. They have led to the assumption that future discoveries will repair present damage. The plasticity premise is the cultural support for discounting the effect of dumping waste in the environment, for depleting its resources, and degrading it.

In 1967 the futurists Kahn and Wiener (1967: 116) argued that the "capacities for and commitment to economic development and control over our external and internal environment and concomitant systematic, technological innovation, application, and diffusion, of these capacities are increasing, seemingly without foreseeable limit," In 1972 Maddox (1972: 65-6) stated that "sheer physical exhaustion of the resources of space-ship earth is obviously an exceedingly remote possibility." These conclusions were arrived at not so much because of the discovery of enormous resources but much more so on the basis of a faith in the capacity of humans to reshape nature to meet their needs. Beckerman (1974) argued that "man is the measure of all things," that it is not nature itself but man's reason that gives nature the characteristics it possesses, and that nature, far from becoming depleted, expands as human reason grows. Humans, through their rational, enterprising activity transform what was not previously a resource into one. Oil was just a gooey liquid in the ground until humans extracted it and transformed it into a source of energy. Beckerman (1974: 229) gives the example of ore that was discarded in 1880 as uneconomical because it had less than 3 percent copper. Such ore can now be refined economically with copper contents as low as 0.4 percent. Not only have new deposits of resources been found when needed, but also substitutes for previous resources have been developed. If a resource becomes depleted, humans will rationally discover a replacement (Hess 1979: 73).

Shortage has, according to this line of thought, been made obsolete by scientific and technological development (Smith 1979; J. Simon 1981; Simon and Kahn 1984, Wattenberg 1984). Since price is assumed to be a measure of scarcity, the decrease in the price of many natural resources that has occurred over the long term, relative to other goods and services, is taken to indicate that those resources are becoming less scarce (Dryzek 1987: 14-5). J. Simon (1981: 42) answers with a resounding "yes" his question: "Can the supply of natural resources really be infinite?" The Earth can be reshaped to achieve plenitude. "Some proposals have recently been put forward for using nuclear power to heat the deep-sea water in the Caribbean sea, so that the phosphorus-rich water rises to the surface in an area of abundant warmth and sunshine, with consequent expected rapid growth of plankton, and of edible fish" (Clark 1970: 170). This is seen by Clark (1970: 170) as "science fiction come true." Shortage will not be a problem, provided that humans continue to strive to master nature. If shortage there ever is, it will not be of natural resources but rather of rationality and technology when backward, anti-rational ideologies are allowed to gain ascendancy. Even the rapid increase in world population is perceived in terms of its sunny side, resulting in books entitled Population Growth: The Advantages (Clark 1975) and The Ultimate Resource (Simon 1981), namely the amount of people.

Expectations of growth are deeply ingrained (Cotgrove 1982; Milbrath 1984; Dunlap and Van Liere 1984). The Reagan era in the United States was, among other things, an anti-environmental backlash against new movements premised on the idea of ecological limits (Mitchell 1990; Dunlap and Scarce 1991; Dunlap and Catton 1993b: 3). Its reversal of long-term U.S. support for population control was related to this mastery-of-nature line of thought (Holden 1984; Dunlap and Catton 1993b).

Humans use technology to fashion nature in their image, and, when the need arises, they can solve the problems provoked by the use of technology itself. "When one has wealth and technology without worrying about how to use them, problems are created. But the moment that serious concern arises over their actual and potential uses, the problems can usually be alleviated or prevented" (Kahn 1979: 74-5). This view is characterized by an unbounded faith in the superior strength of human reason over natural forces. Human reason can be counted on to vanquish and remold nature. Scientific discoveries and technical solutions are found when needed. Rationality enables humans to become the only living species that is "exempt" (see the critique by Dunlap and Catton 1979, 1993a) from dependence on nature, the only species that does not have to adapt to the forces of nature. This assumption of the social reconstruction of nature by humans according to their needs and wants underlies the "cornucopian faith" (Dryzek 1987: 14) that economic growth can continue without foreseeable limit and without exhausting the resources of "space-ship earth." The very titles of the books by proponents of this view, The Doomsday Syndrome, and Doomsday Has Been Canceled, as well as the interpretation of public reaction to technological risk as pathological phobic thinking (Sjoberg 1987), suggest that concern about the limits fixed by nature to economic growth is not founded on facts rooted in reality, but on a social psychological sickness.

Humans have already constructed factory farms in which the lives of other living species are transformed so as to make them more useful to humans than they would be in their natural habitat.

In the United States, over 90 per cent of all chickens, 30 per cent of turkeys and nearly 40 per cent of pigs are born and bred under controlled conditions. The animals are regarded as units for converting given amounts of feed into outputs of protein, fat and so on, for human consumption. In order to minimize the space they occupy and make the farmer's job easier, they are often enclosed in small pens which allow them enough room to move but not enough to dissipate their energies in free movement. ... Such methods can bring quicker, fatter returns than free-run open-air farming. (Hamilton 1973: 237)

Humans show off their mastery of wild-animal species and indeed of nature itself through nostalgic references on coats of arms of territories. Thus the American eagle, the Canadian beaver, and the Swiss bear, decimated in their respective territories by humans, are reduced to a remembrance similar to a notch on a cowboy's gun.

In his article "What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?" the resource economist Krieger (1973) reminds us that society conditions the way we experience nature, and therefore concludes that advertising and the rewriting of history can be used to condition humans to find appealing plastic trees, artificial prairies, and other simulated forms of nature. Since society, and not nature, determines what appeals to humans, the natural environment is not only malleable, it is disposable. The artificial is taking over from the natural as humans weed the Earth of undesired pests and bring out its full potential.

In this view, there is no conception of limits and requirements of the human-supporting natural environment. Rather there is a "faith that there will always be another resource to move on to ... [and] a metaphysical commitment to the existence of ever more resources and 'sinks' for pollutants as we use up current ones" (Dryzek 1987: 19-20). Nature as an active force disappears from view, replaced by nature as a passive, mastered material to be shaped and reshaped. "Space-ship Earth" is a telling metaphor. The planet Earth is perceived as having become constructed by humans, much like a space-ship is socially and technically constructed, obeying the commands of its human constructors and operators in mission control. In fact, An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller 1971) had already been published by 1971. The obedience of the planet to the dynamics and laws of nature has been replaced by its obedience to the directives of its new human masters. Nature recedes into passivity as humans take control.

Nature's evolution is seen as too slow and inefficient and is being supplanted by rationally planned action to humanize the Earth (Dubos 1980). "Through chemical technology, Man can adapt and improve on naturally occurring materials; he can make them more cheaply from alternative sources, with more consistent quality and higher standards of quality and performance; and he can formulate materials of all kinds with properties quite outside the scope of natural substances" (Hamilton 1973: 69). The belief that nature is being improved upon by human rationality prevails in this way of thinking.² "Each of the vast number of other transmutations that he has attempted and achieved is a cause for self-congratulation, a feeling of satisfaction that another corner of Nature's kingdom has fallen to his power" (Hamilton 1973: 78).

History is perceived as having a discontinuity: the point at which human reason expels nature from the dynamic of history. "Progress is seen as the extrication of humanity from the muck of a mindless, unthinking, and brutish domain or what Jean Paul Sartre so contemptuously called the 'slime of history,' into the presumably clear light of reason and civilization" (Bookchin 1987: 50). In this worldview, consciously implemented mechanisms are taking over nature's regulation, "Should we find it desirable, we will be able to turn the Sahara Desert into farms and forests, or remake the landscape of New England, while we create the kind of future we dream. ... We are the legitimate children of Gaia; we need not be ashamed that we are altering the landscapes and ecosystems of Earth" (Vayk 1978: 61). Even new forms of life are being created by human reason as instruments to achieve specific goals. For example, a genetically engineered micro-organism has been produced that can live off oil spills. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that this bacterium was a human invention rather than a product of nature, and hence patentable. Since then, genes with specific applications (usually medical) and hitherto unseen forms of life have been fabricated, ruled products of human reason rather than of nature, and patented.

Humans are seen as on the threshold of a grand transition: "the transition from being a passively produced organism to being the active controller of life and destiny" (Christian 1981: 381-2). It is as if scientific knowledge were almost complete, and nature had no more major surprises for humans. In the more extreme philosophical statements of this view, humans are perceived as evolving away from their roots in material nature toward a pure consciousness: "cosmic evolution ... is completed in and as human evolution, which itself reaches ultimate unity consciousness and so completes that absolute gestalt toward which all manifestation moves" (Wilber 1983: 100. See also Wilber 1981).³

This vision of progress in terms of human reason rationally dominating both nature and society characterized the thinking not just of right-wing futurists, but much more generally of intellectuals in the period from the Enlightenment until the outbreak of present environmental problems. The French philosopher Ferry (1992: 219-20), marshalling support from Sartre, Kant, and Rousseau, sums up Enlightenment philosophy as arguing that humans are anti-nature beings par excellence: they revolt against nature and free themselves from it, thereby becoming authentically human and ascending to the ethical and cultural spheres. Firestone (1970) constructed an antibiological feminism by arguing that reproduction should be removed from women's biology and become a technological procedure.

The sociologist Daniel Bell (1960, 1973, 1977) optimistically claimed that the planning of post-industrial society enables indeterminacies to be progressively reduced and social change to be controlled, and that if limits to growth exist they are social not material. Other well-known sociologists (Dahrendorf 1977, Lipset 1979, Nisbet 1979) also refused to accept the idea of ecological limits. Dunlap and Catton (1993b: 11) documented that in this respect mainstream sociology resonated well with the Reagan administration. They (Dunlap and Catton 1979, 1993a, 1993b) have argued that mainstream sociologists reacted this way precisely because they had constructed a sociology that was written as if humans were exempt from ecological constraints and independent from their ecosystem.

Berger and Luckmann (1967: 1) summarized the core argument or their influential book The Social Construction of Reality as follows. "The basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and subtitle, namely, that reality is socially constructed. ... [They] define 'reality' as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot 'wish them away')." In short, phenomena that we recognize as beyond being 'wished away' are none the less socially constructed. Nature is conspicuous by its absence in this argument.

This thesis of the social construction of reality is based on the assumption that the relationship between humans and their natural environment can be characterized by an immense plasticity and that humans, rather than having a nature, construct their own nature: "the human organism manifests an immense plasticity in its response to the environmental forces at work on it.... While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces himself" (Berger and Luckmann 1967: 48-49). This in turn is based on the premise of a radical discontinuity between humans and non-human animals. Whereas the latter have a closed and fixed relationship to their natural environment, humans have an open relationship.

It refers to the biologically fixed character of their [non-human animals] relationship to the environment, even if geographical variation is introduced. In this sense, all non-human animals, as spe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE The Intensification of Rationalization and Its Alternatives
• PART TWO The Sociology of Environmental Degradation
• PART THREE Toward a Symbiotic Relationship with Nature
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Book and Author