Virtualism, Governance and Practice

Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation

James G. Carrier, Paige West, James G. Carrier, Paige West

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.

CHAPTER 1

Virtualism and the Logic of Environmentalism

VASSOS ARGYROU

This chapter is concerned with the apparent reversal of the modernist ‘physics’ and ‘anthropology’ in environmentalism; the reversal, that is, of the modernist perception of the physical world and definition of humanity and culture.¹ The central question it raises is whether this reversal signifies rupture with Modernism, as environmentalists and, for different reasons, their Modernist critics claim, or whether, rhetoric and common sense notwithstanding, it reflects some sort of continuity. Addressing this question not only helps illuminate the relationship between environmentalism and Modernity; it also shows how environmentalism, much like Modernity, can lapse into what Carrier (1998) calls ‘virtualism’; how, that is, it constructs a vision of the world, which it takes to be reality itself, and attempts to make the world conform to it.

The idea that there is continuity between environmentalism and Modernity, rather than rupture, is not new. There is an argument from sociology according to which the core characteristic of Modernity is not rationality and science or whatever else has historically been used to isolate and define the Modern but something else. It is reflexivity, which is the practice of questioning and doubting everything, including the means by which one questions and doubts. As Giddens (1991) says, unlike the reflexivity of ‘traditional’ societies, which ceases its questioning when it reaches the authority of tradition, Modernity's reflexivity is wholesale and makes no exceptions. On the basis of this argument, postmodernism emerges as reflexive Modernisation rather than something that takes us beyond the Modern. This is because it does precisely what Modernism is supposed to do: question and doubt everything, including itself. In a similar vein, environmentalism emerges as ‘ecological enlightenment’ (Beck 1992), a radical questioning of the received wisdom about the nature of the physical world akin to the enlightened questioning of tradition and religion in the eighteenth century.

As I have argued elsewhere (Argyrou 2003), there are good grounds for refusing to take reflexive Modernisation seriously as either a theory or a myth.² But perhaps there is something to be said about the argument for continuity, provided that Giddens's and Beck's voluntarism is set aside and Modernism is posited in its full cultural density. The argument developed in this chapter is that environmentalism operates with an inherited cultural logic, which appears in the Modernist proclivity to imagine the social as a unity. This image of unity leads the Modernist to strive either to change society to fit this image or, since these are no longer revolutionary times, to reinterpret social divisions in such a way that the image's integrity and persuasive force remain intact.³ Environmentalism operates with this logic, but does more than simply reproduce it: it takes it to its logical and ontological conclusion. Over and above the unity of the social, it imagines and propagates the unity of the social and the physical. As one might expect, and as will become apparent in the course of this essay, this vision of unity is most clearly articulated by the more radical environmentalist factions. It remains implicit, which is to say unthought, in mainstream environmentalism, as, for instance, in the often-heard but rarely clarified statement, ‘we are part of nature and nature is part of us’.

Rupture

Up until the middle of the twentieth century, nature was perceived, broadly speaking, as an intractable domain of utility and danger that was to be mastered by ‘man’ and brought under his control, both conceptual and physical. This was the physics of Modernism, a view of the nature of nature that competed with, but for all practical purposes dominated, another strand of Modernism and its perception of reality, Romanticism (on the Romantic view of nature, see Berlin 1999). A corollary of this was the view that man could and should master nature, since it was to the extent that he did so that he would attain his telos and become what he was meant to be, the only relevant Subject of the world. This was the anthropology of Modernism, the dominant view of what it meant to be a human being. It was Modernist humanism in the double sense of this term: both the belief in the powers of man and the belief that all men were intrinsically the same – the idea of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’, as Tylor (1874) put it – which meant that those men who had a different perception of themselves and the world could be nothing other than culturally inferior and in need of humanisation.

There are countless examples of this Modernist humanism in the literature. Here I choose the example of the nineteenth-century historian who looks at the world and sees clearly that ‘the tendency has been, in Europe, to subordinate nature to man: out of Europe, to subordinate man to nature’. Such is the rule, and although ‘there are, in barbarous countries, several exceptions…in civilized countries the rule has been universal’ (Buckle 1878: 151). Buckle goes on to clarify, and it is worth following his clarification at some length:

It is accordingly in Europe alone, that man has really succeeded in taming the energies of nature, bending them to his own will, turning them aside from their ordinary course, and compelling them to minister to his happiness, and subserve the general purposes of human life. All around us are the traces of this glorious and successful struggle. Indeed, it seems as if in Europe there was nothing that man feared to attempt. The invasions of the sea repelled, and whole provinces, as in the case of Holland, rescued from its grasp, mountains cut through and turned into level roads: soils of the most obstinate sterility becoming exuberant, from the mere advances of chemical knowledge; while in regard to electric phenomena, we see the subtlest, most rapid, and most mysterious of all forces, made the medium of thought, and obeying even the most capricious behest of the human mind. In other instances, where the products of the external world have been refractory, man has succeeded in destroying what he could hardly hope to subjugate. The most cruel diseases…have entirely disappeared from the civilized parts of Europe; and it is scarcely possible that they should ever again be seen there. Wild beasts and birds of prey have been extirpated, and are no longer allowed to infest the haunts of civilised men. (Buckle 1878: 153–6)

The same humanist message, albeit now couched in the lexicon of modernisation and development, was very much in evidence in the 1950s and 1960s. Take, for instance, the United Nations expert advice to the ‘underdeveloped countries’:

Economic progress will not be desired in a community where people do not realize that progress is possible. Progress occurs where people believe that man can, by conscious effort, master nature. This is a lesson which the human mind has been a long time learning. Where it has been learnt, human beings are experimental in their attitude to material techniques, to social institutions, and so on. This experimental attitude is one of the preconditions for progress. (UN 1951: 13)

In 1962 the United Nations organised a conference ‘on the application of science and technology for the benefit of less developed areas’ (UN 1963) and published the proceedings in eight volumes. In the first volume, World of opportunity, the ‘less developed’ are encouraged to seize the opportunity provided by the more developed and ‘leap across the centuries’ (UN 1963: 221). The less developed did not need to reinvent the wheel, according to the United Nations experts. They could master nature and bridge the gap of centuries that separated them from the developed in a matter of decades. What they needed to achieve this feat was already at hand, Western science and technology.

By the late 1960s the perception of nature and man's relation to it begins to change. To stay with the United Nations literature, in 1972 the first conference on ‘the human environment’ was organised in Stockholm. The first statement of the declaration in the published report indicates the changes in the Modernist vision of the world and sets the mood and tone for the rest of the text: ‘Man is both creature and moulder of his environment, which gives him physical sustenance and affords him the opportunity for intellectual, moral, social and spiritual growth’ (UN 1973: 3). It would seem that man was still very much in evidence in the early 1970s, though a more discriminating reading suggests that this is not the man of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has now been reduced in size quite drastically. He is no longer master and creator but a humble ‘moulder’ of nature and a ‘creature’ in it. What we encounter in this text, then, is not ‘man’ but a new and much more modest persona, the ‘human being’. As for nature in the form of the intractable domain of utility and danger to be mastered and brought under control, it is nowhere to be found. It has been replaced by the ‘human environment’, which provides generously and takes care of the human being's many and diverse needs, from physical survival to intellectual, spiritual, moral and social growth.

How is this momentous transformation in the perception of nature and humanity to be explained? To be sure, there are well-known answers. One could argue, as most people probably would, that there was little choice in the matter. The imminent ecological collapse meant that we either change our ways or perish. But there are also well-known problems with such an argument. It assumes, as all positivism does, that facts are directly accessible without the mediation of culture. And because it operates with this assumption, it cannot explain disagreements about what is to count as a fact, or about what those things that do count mean. Take, for instance, the following facts provided by the ‘reformed’ Danish environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg:

1. Deforestation: Deforestation in the Amazon was estimated at 2 per cent per year. Lomborg (2001: 114) argues that it ‘has been about 14 percent since man arrived…[while] at least 3 percent of this 14 percent has since been replaced by new forests’. Moreover, the idea that forests are the ‘lungs of the world’ is a ‘myth’. While it is true that they produce oxygen, they consume precisely the same amount through decomposition when they die. ‘Therefore, forests in equilibrium…neither produce nor consume oxygen in net terms’ (2001: 115).
2. Acid rain: Acid rain does not kill forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The controlled experiments carried out by the American National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) demonstrated that ‘even with precipitation almost ten times as acidic as the average acid rain in the eastern US (pH 4.2) the trees grew just as fast. In fact many of NAPAP's studies showed that trees exposed to moderate acid rain grew faster;’ (2001: 179).
3. Biodiversity: Conservationists estimate that 25,000–27,000 species become extinct each year. Paul Erlich argued in 1981 that ‘half of the Earth's species [will] be gone by the year 2000 and all gone by 2010–25’ (2001: 249). More recent, and for Lomborg more objective, estimates, including those of the UN Global biodiversity assessment, place the rate of extinction at 0.7 per cent per 50 years. ‘An extinction rate of 0.7 percent over the next 50 years is not trivial…. However, it is much smaller than the typically advanced 10–100 percent over the next 50 years’ (2001: 255).
4. Ozone layer: The damage in the ozone layer, which allows more UV-B rays through the earth's atmosphere, is not as serious as environmentalists claim. Exposure to UV-B radiation as a result of the ‘hole’ in the layer ‘is equivalent on the mid-latitudes to moving approximately 200 km…closer to the equator – a move smaller than that from Manchester to London, Chicago to Indianapolis, Albany to New York, Lyons to Marseilles, Trento to Florence, Stuttgart to Düsseldorf or Christchurch to Wellington’ (2001: 276).

The point in citing these facts is not to argue that Lomborg's claims are somehow more objective than those of other environmentalists. Rather, it is that they reflect a different interpretation of the world. Like all facts, they are accessible through specific categories of perception and evaluation, which make them visible and perhaps relevant and meaningful. I say ‘perhaps’ because, as environmentalists themselves often point out, mere visibility is not sufficient to endow facts with meaning, relevance and urgency. One example should suffice here. ‘Opinion polls’, environmentalists point out, ‘confirm that many people now accept the significance of the crisis we call environmental…. Yet individually, relatively few people do anything significant about this recognition in their personal lives’ (Grove-White 1993: 29; see also Callicott 1999; Naess 1989). Such is the ‘troubling paradox’, Grove-White (1993: 23–4) says, that needs to be explained. ‘Can it be that such inconsistency reflects in part the inauthenticity of the largely “physicalist” descriptions of what is at stake?’ Are environmental facts, in other words, so ‘factual’ and ‘scientistic’ as to fail to move the wider public? Is there something else ‘at stake’, something more ‘authentic’ than scientific facts that could tip the balance? Grove-White thinks there is. ‘Scientism,’ he says, has failed to ‘engage people's full being’; it has failed because of its ‘superficial treatment of the mysteriousness and open-endedness of existence itself. There is little sign in the official descriptions of environmental problems or methodologies of the radically unknown character of the future, or of humankind's place in creation.’ The mysteriousness and open-endedness of existence, the radically unknown character of the future and humankind's place in the creation, are not strictly related to the environmental crisis. Yet for Grove-White and other environmentalists, it is precisely such things that count and account for the difference between mere knowledge and conviction, indifference and concern, apathy and action.

To understand environmentalism, then, facts are not enough. What we also need is the cultural context in which they acquire meaning, gravity, urgency. To be sure, the cultural context has already been sketched by environmentalists themselves. Szerszynski (1996: 105–6), for instance, argues that ‘even the dominant Modernist versions of environmentalism’, versions that rely heavily on science to make their case, ‘even when they take their most technocratic and seemingly morally neutral guises, can themselves be seen as crucially relying on certain moves within [the Modernist] problematic’, the question of how to ‘find meaning in a meaningless universe’. The context, it would seem, is the meaninglessness of the modern condition, a view shared by environmentalists, their critics (e.g., Ferry 1995; North 1995) and the social theorists who see environmentalism as one of the movements that grapple with this problem (e.g., Giddens 1991). On the basis of this argument, environmentalism emerges as a radical break with Modernism in a double sense. Not only does it reverse the Modernist physics and anthropology, it also overcomes Modernism's inability to provide meaning and ontological security.

There is no doubt that the environmentalist perception of nature and humanity is very different from that of the Modernist paradigm. What is not so clear is whether this change goes beyond the phenomenological level, the level of experience and common sense, and signifies a deeper rupture. What also needs to be examined is the presumed meaninglessness of the modern condition, what Weber liked to call the ‘disenchantment of the world’. His expression refers to the disappearance of the magical in nature, but it says nothing about culture. We must therefore ask whether the magical has been banished from Modernist society and culture as well. Is it really the case that although people find meaning in their private lives, such as love (Weber 1946b), the ‘meaning of meaning’ (Ferry 1995: 136) is absent and there is no unifying meta-narrative? The conventional answer is ‘Yes’. At the heart of Modernity is the idea of individual autonomy and freedom as the highest of all values, and the demand to think for oneself, the essence of Kant's answer to the question of what Enlightenment is about. Hence, as Weber (1946a: 155) saw it, there are two kinds of people. One kind is those who bear the meaninglessness of the modern condition ‘like men’. The other is those who cannot do so, but turn to mythologies like religion for support, losing their autonomy in the process.

Although it is rather rhetorical to dub the idea of individual autonomy and freedom the highest of all values, since it points directly to the sacred, it is not inaccurate. That Modernism is characterised by a cult of the individual, so that in Modernism, as Durkheim (1984 [1933]: 122) put it, ‘the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion’, is by now taken for granted. But precisely because of this, it is necessary to see how it is conceptualised and how it manifests itself in practice. My argument will be Durkheimian, namely that Modernism, far from being disenchanted and meaningless, has its own ‘sort of religion’. That is what, for reasons that will become apparent, I call ‘pure humanity’. I will also argue that environmentalism differs from Modernism only to the extent that it makes pure humanity more inclusive, to the extent that it encompasses nature itself. To substantiate these claims it will be necessary to sketch the cultural logic of Modernism, the process through which the Modernist subjectivity comes to imagine the world as a unit and then attempts to change or reinterpret the world in such a way as to make it conform to this vision – a classic example of virtualism.

The Logic of the Same

It is often said that Modernity is an ‘internally referential system’ (Giddens 1991), one that authorises its truths and forms of knowledge with reference to itself. This claim, which can be traced back to the Enlightenment, raises two questions. First, where does one need to go to have this totalised view of the world, society as a closed system without external referents? Second, and more importantly, what happens when one arrives there?

The answer to the first question is logically and historically straightforward. To see the world as a totality, one must step outside it. This, for instance, is what Kant (1781) did at the dawn of Modernity, when he posited time and space as the conditions of possibility of experience. In order to put an end to speculative philosophy and delimit the proper domain of metaphysics, he became speculative and metaphysical himself by stepping outside the world of experience, even if only once. He had to do so because no one can know the conditions of possibility of experience by means of experience itself. To know those conditions, one must rely on something other than experience, in this case the imagination.

As the story goes, stepping outside the world in order to constitute it as reality in its totality became necessary when faith in a divinely ordained world collapsed. What has not, to my knowledge, ever received serious cons...