Mark Lindley

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New practices are needed when big problems arise due to new circumstances. I think that an unprecedented problem of macro-ecological degradation calls for us nowadays to reform cer­tain aspects of some great cultural traditions — economic, religious and humanistic — that are hindering our ability to cope with the problem. This essay will describe a few examples of those aspects.

Free enterprise has bestowed the benefits of 20th-century-style affluence on a large part of humanity; and it appears (since the collapse of state capitalism in the USSR less than a cen­tury after the peasant revolution against the previous Russian government) that the great tradition of free capitalist enterprise entails a degree of economic inequality enabling the rich to undertake the large-scale creative enterprises which have led, directly or indirectly, to so many splendid inven­tions and their diffusion. But now the freedom of the very rich to become a worldwide oligarchy, and of their corporations to become more powerful than most national governments, has led also to a socially dangerous aggravation of economic inequalities and to the maintenance of enterprises that are seriously irresponsible from an ecological point of view; so, the objective of prosperity needs to be counterbalanced by complementary objectives of fairness and eco­logical sustainability. (See Figure 1.)^[1]

Figure 1

Amartya Sen’s concern for one of those other two objectives — fairness — as well as for pros­perity has led him to describe freedoms as being themselves subject to human development and not bestowed by any superhuman power.^[2] This seems to me a correct premise even though I was brought up (in the USA) to believe that “all men ... are endowed by their Creator” with an inalienable right to “liberty”.^[3] I value freedoms of speech, of information etc., and I want more people to have them; but I see freedom and fairness in a more post-modern light than truth. A cor­respondence-theory concept of scientific truth (using the premise that a true statement is one which corresponds to reality) supplies a rule of thumb for determining which of any two mutually contrary statements — if both are scientific in Popper’s sense of being susceptible to dis­proof by evidence^[4] — is truer; it is the one which fits better the evidence at hand. But we haven’t such a good rule of thumb in regard to fairness and/or the relative values of different freedoms; those things are subjective. Just consider how (a) freedoms impinge upon each other (for instance, my freedoms to smoke in public and to make noise, vis à vis your freedoms to breathe clean air and to have peace and quiet) and (b) new circumstances have given rise to changes in our freedoms: for instance, the development of automobiles has given rise to rules about getting a driver’s license, keeping one’s vehicle in repair, being sober when driving, ob­serving speed limits, using headlights at night, stopping at traffic lights, etc.; and most of these rules impinge upon common-sense freedoms of yesteryear.

Sen’s Development as Freedom discusses five kinds of freedoms which he says should be cultivated and expanded:

! “Internal” freedoms: the freedom to be creative, to reason and to think in a lucid, articu­late, rational way. Some relevant topics are literacy, education, communication, the open­ness of society, and whether the minds of women are beclouded by false perceptions of the “natural­ness” of gender inequality.

! “Participatory” freedoms: democracy and political liberty and hence a society based on public debate and discussion. China has attained, according to Sen, an inadequate degree of such freedom.

! “Transactional” freedoms: the freedom to exchange and to deal with each other (such as was lacking, according to Sen, in independent India before the reforms of the 1990s).

! “Procedural” freedoms: financial regularity and the absence of corruption, of arbitrary discrimination and of inequality of treatment.

! “Protective” freedom: social safety nets to prevent people from falling down under. A lack of such freedom is apparent (to Sen and to me) in the dramatic rise of mortality rates in Russia after the collapse there of Communism.

He says that all these kinds of freedom should be expanded, for the sake of “replacing the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances”. However, I consider it important to balance this charming latter ideal with good sense as to which circumstances one should try to dominate over, and in what sense dominate, and which, on the other hand, one should accept. The ideal of seeking always to dom­inate over chance and circumstance seems to me especially quaint in view of the historically un­precedented problems of macro-ecological degradation which we are now beginning to encoun­ter: global warming, deforestation, water-tables sinking, the oceans permeated with in­organic rubbish, a growing heap of radioactive waste, tough new epidemics, etc. Problems of this kind and on this scale oblige us to acknowledge that humankind cannot change — and in that sense cannot dominate over — its basic biological and ecological circumstances. It would be mistaken, for instance, to suppose that our descendants might be able to migrate to another planet as science-fiction tales suggest.

The planet we have to live on is so much bigger than we are that its geological and meteo­ro­logical forces often outstrip our capacity to defend ourselves when they attack us, yet not so big that they are only trivially affected by our economic activities. In this light it is unfor­tunate that most of humanity today belongs to a religion which in effect venerates the Biblical teaching that God, after creating humans in His image, enjoined them to “subdue” the Earth and “have dominion over ... every living thing” on the land and in the sea and the air.^[5] Some Chris­tian apologists say that this was supposed to be merely stewardship. (A similar idea is found in Gandhi’s view that just as rich people should manage their wealth in trusteeship for the benefit of humanity, so humans should have regard for the weaker species.) But in fact the most powerful Christian societies in the 19th and 20th centuries interpreted in an aggressive and intrusive way the Biblical injunction to have dominion over the Earth. I think it is now clear that the actual Christian interpretation h^[6]as been, in reality, been far too much along the lines of “dig it up”, “burn it”, “throw it away” — that is, of free-wheeling economic and technological expansion with­out regard for the macro-ecological effects. The big Marxist governments were just as naive.

The macro-ecological effects are more complex and subtle than local blights like a pol­luted river or the immediate after-effects of a nuclear power plant gone awry. Figure 2 sum­ma­rizes, for example, the available data in regard to global warming since 1880.^[7] Given such data, propagandists paid and promoted by extremely wealthy vested interests can harp on distracting details (in this particular case, the zigzags in annual mean temperature) to argue that no overall trend has been demonstrated, and it thereby becomes all the more difficult to establish whether there is a risk, due to the unprecedented current pace of ecological degradation, to the survival of humanity in the foreseeable future.

Figure 2

Yet the stakes are so high that no palpable risk can be acceptable to any sane person. A sane person will in certain circumstances risk his or her own life, and many people consider it per­fectly sane to risk a lot of other people’s lives in a war, but nearly everyone will agree that it would be insane knowingly to risk for any cause the survival of the human species.

I recall apropos “Pascal’s wager”, so called after the 17th-century French mathematician, experimental scientist and religious writer, Blaise Pascal. His achievements included some valu­able steps in the early development of the mathematics of probability; in his religious writings he could be remarkably poetic, as when he wrote, “The heart has its reasons, unknown to reason.” His famous “wager” is like this: Suppose you can be only theist or else atheist (that is, with no pos­sibility of agnosticism). Which should you choose? Consider the stakes in the four possible cases. (1) If there is no God and you are an atheist, you win in terms of truthfulness in this life, and nothing good or bad will happen to your soul after you die (because the Western belief has been that only God could cause anything like that); (2) if there is no God and you are a theist, you lose in truthfulness during this life, but again nothing bad on that account can happen to your soul after you die; (3) if there is a God and you are a theist, you win in truthfulness in this life and also in the eternal happiness of your soul after you die; and (4) if there is a God and you are an atheist, not only do you lose in truthfulness in this life, but also your soul will be eternally damned after you die. So you had better believe.^[8]

Nowadays this has to be transformed, as follows. Whereas most people today no longer really believe in an afterlife, most of us sense that humankind is indulging in ecological gam­bling that could conceivably cause its extinction. Given such high stakes, we cannot afford to hope that any kind of divine providence will intervene to rescue us from the natural con­se­quences of such gambling. We must instead take active responsibility for maintaining our eco­logical nest even if our hearts may incline us to the religious beliefs we learned as children. (I will come back later to this point.)

Is there a palpable risk? Some related indications are published in the World Conserva­tion Union’s authoritative data as to how many species of plants and animals have been found in recent field studies to be threatened or not threatened with extinction. Among the nearly 10,000 species of birds evaluated, more than a tenth have been found to be currently “vulnerable to extinction” or even “in danger of extinction” (meaning that only a few members of the species in question are left); among the nearly 5000 species of mammals, more than a fifth; etc.^[9] The find­ings are alarming, because in a normal phase of evolution they would probably be lower by one or even two orders of magnitude. We humans are not in any such category; our numbers have been growing at an unprecedented rate in the last few decades and may to continue to do so for a few more (see Figure 3); and yet one may well doubt whether Homo Sapiens is deci­sively tougher biologically and decisively better-off ecologically than the some of the hun­dreds of other mam­malian species for which the future is bleak.

Figure 3

And there is, of course, a far greater risk of catastrophes which, though short of extinc­tion, are nonetheless highly undesirable. Here I should mention that it is misguided to regard ecological concerns as contrary to concerns for the welfare of the poor; for it is the poor who are most vulnerable to the effects of most of the of catastrophes that will be caused by the current macro-ecological degradation. They will suffer the most from the droughts, floods and storms due to weird meteorological conditions, from the higher cost of water due to lower water-tables, from the crop failures, from the new or revived diseases, and so on.

In considering such problems I am humanistic in the sense of putting the welfare of hu­manity at the peak of my concerns, but not in the sense of regarding humanity as eternal or as central to the cosmos. The cosmos is so much bigger than we are that we cannot presume to know or alter any cosmic purpose. How long will humanity last? It is not my concern beyond a foreseeable number of generations: two, three, four ... forty, something like that. Nevertheless, the ecological outlook, while not placing us at the center of the universe, gives us a sufficiently satisfactory cosmic view to cope with the lingering culture shock due to the discovery, in the 17th century, that the Earth has no privileged cosmic status.

It seems to me that:

! More and more people in civil society are sensing the problem of a looming macro-ecological menace. So there may be some hope of dealing with it in a sane way.

! It is only sane to presume that the problem is not yet so grave that a proper way to con­front it is to hold hands and sing, as if on the decks of the sinking Titanic, “Nearer, my God, to Thee”.

! However, the problem is — unlike those of war, oppression, poverty, famines, mass migration and culture shock — so unprecedented that it calls for detailed rethinking in regard to the maintenance and/or modification of freedoms. The modifications should curtail freedoms in regard to those uses of modern technological power that are evidently causing the problem.

The curtailing should consist in part of governmental threats to impose restrictions if industry does not on its own (as if voluntarily, without bureaucratic intrusion into details) meet certain national goals — such as, for instance, were negotiated at Kyoto in 1997 for carbon-dioxide emissions. Yet it is a pity when freedoms are curtailed by authoritarian governments; far better is a humane preponderance of consent over coercion; and in any case we need effective laws such as become feasible only when there is a widespread consensus as to their value. That is how the freedom to pollute the air with tobacco-smoke in enclosed public places (restaurants, audi­toriums, airplanes etc.) was curtailed in recent years in the USA: the new laws were pre­ceded by a substantial public consensus as to the cause-and-effect relation between tobacco smoke and lung cancer.

Probably the best hedge against arbitrary or mistaken curtailing of freedoms is free dis­cussion amongst a well-informed public. In this regard I worry, however, about the capacity of vested interests to wield influence by dishonest propaganda and lobbying; and in regard to India I worry as to whether she can, with her still ongoing population-explosion, attain in the 21st century a well informed public, given that the number of her illiterate citizens has already in the last 60 years grown from less than 300 to more than 400 million. I regret also that the in­genious but untrue doctrine of karma, according to which one’s misfortunes are due to bad deeds which one has committed in a previous life on Earth, is hindering India’s capacity to deal ener­getically with ecological as well as social problems. Pavan Varma’s thoughtful book, The Great Indian Middle Class, includes a chapter on the “inner landscape” describing some unfor­tunate moral consequences of the fact that the typical middle-class Hindu cosmic view has “held an in­dividual to be a cosmos unto himself”. Dr. Anil Agarwal, the founder of the well known Centre for Sci­ence and Environment (in New Delhi), has told me how his religious friends insist that asthma is always due only to an inner spiritual fault in the victim and never to particles in the air. And an experienced Gandhian social-worker, Lavanam, has told me how his first effort to teach reading to rural “Untouchables” in India was frustrated by their pious belief, due to the doctrine of inherited karma, that they ought not to learn; they told him, “It is written on our foreheads that we are to be poor and illiterate.”

A correct approach to the problems of ecological degradation lies between such fatalism and the Biblical precept of having dominion over the Earth.

In suggesting that to curtail some freedoms will be necessary if humanity is to survive, I do not mean that it would be sufficient. The consensus I have in mind is to involve a cultural maturation, especially among the affluent, whereby the modern Western idea of civilization, the idea that more is always better (more knowledge, more beauty, more comfort, more products), will be balanced by Gandhi’s complementary idea that “the essence of true civilization is voluntary restriction of wants”. Especially in the current stage of the history of capitalism, when manu­facturers are so urgently stimulating new wants by means of glittering advertisements, people who do not to a considerable extent resist by reflecting as to their true needs — by asking them­selves “When is more really better?” — can rightly be described as consumerist barbarians.

It may be appropriate to mention that as a rationalist I am struck by Gandhi’s uses of his “inner voice”, his moral intuitions. I regard intuitions as an invaluable source of ideas, but since we never know whether a given intuition is due to valid unconscious thinking or to mere bias, I think we should in due time assess it rationally, rather than automatically taking it as correct. I do not want a shriveled, Voltaire-style rationality, but a warm, robust and aesthetic one; we need good sensibilities as well as good ideas. Yet even so, it seems to me that among the alluring but misleading ideas bequeathed to us by religion are that (a) the fate after death of our individual souls is more important than the social, moral and ecological condition of our children and grandchildren, and (b) acts of piety, such as the reciting of venerated scriptures or the offering of sincere prayers beseeching God’s forgiveness, can bring about a miraculous solution of the problem of macro-ecological degradation. If an act of piety is an indispensable part of some individual’s or some group’s way of changing their practices for the better, then I am for it. And I don’t bother with trying to convert people to my religious non-beliefs, because the problem of environmental degradation is so important, and maybe so urgent, that it would be foolish to let its solution depend on something as difficult and slow as a change in people’s religious identities bestowed upon them in their most tender years. We all have to cooperate now, regardless of religious and philosophical differences, in meeting the problems of ecological degradation, and meanwhile urge business and government to take the steps that need to be taken for the sake of humanity.

Endnotes