-
What is Social Ecology?
We are clearly beleaguered by an ecological crisis ofmonumental
proportions-a crisis that visibly stemsfrom the ruthless
exploitation and pollution of theplanet. We rightly attribute the
social sources of thiscrisis to a competitive marketplace spirit
that reducesthe entire world of life, including humanity,
tomerchandisable objects, to mere commodities withprice tags that
are to be sold for profit and economicexpansion. The ideology of
this spirit is expressedin the notorious marketplace maxim: “Grow
ordie!”- a maxim that identifies limitless growth with“progress”
and the “mastery of nature” with“civilization.” The results of this
tide of exploitationand pollution have been grim enough to yield
seriousforecasts of complete planetary breakdown, a degreeof
devastation of soil, forests, waterways, andatmosphere that has no
precedent in the history ofour species.
In this respect, our market-oriented society isunique in
contrast with other societies in that itplaces no limits on growth
and egotism. Theantisocial principles that “rugged individualism”
isthe primary motive for social improvement andcompetition the
engine for social progress stand
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50 / WE MODERN CRISIS
sharply at odds with a11 past eras that valuedselflessness as
the authentic trait of human nobilityand cooperation as the
authentic evidence of socialvirtue, however much these prized
attributes werehonored in the breach. Our marketplace society
has,in effect, made the worst features of earlier times intoits
more honored values and exhibited a degree ofbrutality in the
global wars of this century that makesthe cruelties of history seem
mild by comparison,
In our discussions of modern ecological and socialcrises, we
tend to ignore a more underlying mentalityof domination that humans
have used for centuriesto justify the domination of each other and,
byextension, of nature. I refer to an image of the naturalworld
that sees nature itself es “blind,” “mute,”“cruel ,” ”competitive,”
and “stingy,” a seeminglydemonic “realm of necessity” that opposes
“man’s”striving for freedom and self-realization. Here, “man”seems
to confront a hostile “ot harness” against whichhe must oppose his
own powers of toil and guile.History is thus presented to us as a
Promethean dramain which “man” heroically defies and
willfullyasserts himself against a brutally hostile andunyielding
natural world. Progress is seen as theextrication of humanity from
the muck of a mindless,unthinking, and brutish domain or what Jean
PaulSartre so contemptuously cullud the “slime ofhistory,” into the
presumably clear light of reasonand civilization.
This image of a demonic and hostile nature goesback to the Greek
world and oven earlier, to theGilgamesh Epic of Sumerian society.
But it reachedits high point during the past two
centuries,particularly in the Victorian Age, and persists in
our
What Is Sodal Ecology? I 51
thinking today. Ironically, the idea of a “blind,”“mute, **
“cruel,” 6, competitive,” and “stingy” natureforms the basis for
the very social sciences andhumanities that profess to provide us
with a civilizedalternative to nature’s “brutishness”and “law of
clawand fang.” Even as these disciplines stress the“unbridgeable
gulf” between nature and society inthe classical tradition of a
dualism between thephysical and the mental, economics literally
definesitself as the study of “scarce resources” (read:
“stingynature”) and “unlimited needs,” essentially rearingitself on
the interconnection between nature andhumanity. By the same token,
sociology sees itself asthe analysis of “man’s” ascent from
“animality.”Psychology, in turn, particularly in its Freudian
form,is focused on the control of humanity’s unruly“internal
nature” through rationality and theimperatives imposed on it by
“civilization’‘-withthe hidden agenda of sublimating human powers
inthe project of controlling “external nature.”
Many class theories of social development,particularly Marxian
socialism, have been rooted inthe belief that the “domination of
man by man”emerges from the need to “dominate nature,”presumably
with the result that once nature issubjugated, humanity will be
cleansed of the “slimeof history” and enter into a new era of
freedom.However warped these self-definitions of our majorsocial
and humanistic disciplines may be, they arestill embedded in nature
and humanity’srelationships with the natural world, even as theytry
to bifurcate the two and impart a unique autonomyto cultural
development and social evolution.
Taken as a whole, however, it is difficult to convey
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52 / THE MODERN CRISIS
the enormous amount of mischief this image of naturehas done to
our ways of thinking, not to speak of theideological rationale it
has provided for humandomination. More so than any single notion in
thehistory of religion and philosophy, the image of a“blind,”
“mute,” “cruel,” “competitive,” and “stingy”nature has opened a
wide, often unbridgeable chasmbetween the social world and the
natural world, andin its more exotic ramifications, between mind
andbody, subject and object, reason and physicality,technology and
“raw materials,” indeed, the wholegamut of dualisms that have
fragmented not only theworld of nature and society but the human
psycheend its biological matrix.
From Plato’s view of the body as a mere burdenencasing an
ethereal soul, to Ron6 Descartes’ harshsplit between the God-given
rational and the purelymechanistic physical, we are the heirs of a
historicdualism: between, firstly, a misconceived nature asthe
opponent of every humon endeavor, whose“domination” must be lifted
from the shoulders ofhumanity (even if human beings themselves
arereduced to mere instruments of production to beruthlessly
exploited with a view toward theireventual liberation), and,
secondly, a domineeringhumanity whose goal is to subjugate the
naturalworld, including human nature itself. Nature, ineffect,
emerges es an affliction that must be removedby the technology and
methods of domination thatexcuse human domination in the name of
“humanfreedom.”
This all-encompassing image of en intractablenature that must be
tamed by a rational humanityhas given us a domineering form of
reason, science,
What Is Social Ecology? 1 53
end technology-e fragmentation of humanity intohierarchies,
classes, state institutions, gender, andethnic divisions. It has
fostered nationalistic hatreds,imperialistic adventures, end a
global philosophy ofrule that identifies order with dominance
andsubmission. In slowly corroding every familial,economic,
aesthetic, ideological, and cultural tie thatprovided a sense of
place end meaning for theindividual in a vital human community,
thisantinaturalistic mentality has filled the awesomevacuum created
by an utterly nihilistic and antisocialdevelopment with massive
urban entities that areneither cities nor villages, with
ubiquitousbureaucracies that impersonally manipulate the livesof
faceless masses of atomized human beings, withgiant corporate
enterprises that spill beyond theboundaries of the world’s richest
nations toconglomerate on a global scale and determine themateriel
life of the most remote hamlets on the planet,end finally, with
highly centralized State institutionsand military forces of
unbridled power that threatennot only the freedom of the individual
but thesurvival of the species.
The split that clerics and philosophers projectedcenturies ego
in their visions of a soulless nature anda denatured soul has been
realized in the form of adisastrous fragmentation of humanity end
nature,indeed, in our time, of the human psyche itself. Adirect
line or logic of events flows almostunrelentingly from a warped
image of the naturalworld to the warped contours of the social
world,threatening to bury society in a “slime of history”that is
not of nature’s making but of man’s-specifically, the early
hierarchies from which
!. .:’
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54 1 THE MODERN CRlSiS
economic classes emerged; the systems ofdomination, initially of
woman by man, that haveyielded highly rationalized systems of
exploitation;and the vast armies of warriors, priests, monarchs,and
bureaucrats who emerged from the simple statusgroups of tribal
society to become theinstitutionalized tyrants of a market
society.
That this authentic jungle of “claw and fang” wecall the “free
market” is an extension of humancompetition into nature-an
ideological, self-servingfiction that parades under such labels as
socialDarwinism and sociobiology-hardly requiresemphasis any
longer. Lions are turned into “Kingsof the Beasts” only by human
kings, be they imperialmonarchs or corporate ones; ants belong to
the“lowly” in nature only by virtue of ideologiesspawned in
temples, palaces, manors, and, in ourown time, by subservient
apologists of the powersthat be. The reality, as we shall see, is
different, buta nature conceived as “hierarchical,” not to speak
ofthe other “brutish” and very bourgeois traits imputedto it,
merely reflects a human condition in whichdominance and submission
are ends in themselves,which has brought the very existence of our
biosphereinto question.
Far from being the mere “object” of culture(technology, science,
and reason), nature is alwayswith us: as the parody of our
self-image, as thecornerstone of the very disciplines which deny it
aplace in our social and self-formation, even in theprotracted
infancy of our young which renders themind open to cultural
development and creates thoseextended parental and sibling ties
from which anorganized society emerged.
What Is So&l Ecology? 1 55
And nature is always with us as the conscience ofthe
transgressions we have visited on the planet-and the terrifying
revenge that awaits us for ourviolation of the ecological
balance.
What distinguishes social ecology is that it negatesthe harsh
image we have traditionally created of thenatural world and its
evolution. And it does so notby dissolving the social into the
natural, likesociobiology, or by imparting mystical properties
tonature that place it beyond the reach of humancomprehension and
rational insight. Indeed, as weshall see, social ecology places the
human mind, likehumanity itself, within anatural context and
exploresit in terms of its own natural history, so that the
sharpcleavages between thought and nature, subject andobject, mind
and body, and the social and naturalare overcome, and the
traditional dualisms of westernculture are transcended by an
evolutionaryinterpretation of consciousness with its rich wealthof
gradations over the course of natural history.
bocial ecology “radicalizes” nature, or moreprecisely, our
understanding of natural phenomena,by questioning the prevailing
marketplace image ofnature from an ecological standpoint: nature as
aconstellation of communities that are neither “blind”nor “mute,”
“cruel” nor “competitive,” “stingy” nor“necessitarian” but, freed
of all anthropocentricmoral trappings, a participatory realm of
interactivelife-forms whose most outstanding attributes
arefecundity, creativity, and directiveness, marked
bycomplementarity that renders the natural world thegrounding for
an ethics of freedom rather thandomination.]
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66 / THE MODERN CRISIS
Seen from an ecological standpoint, life-forms arerelated in an
ecosystem not by the “rivalries” and“competitive” attributes
imputed to them byDarwinian orthodoxy, but by the
mutualisticattributes emphasized by a growing number ofcontemporary
ecologists- a n image pioneered byPeter Kropotkin. Indeed, social
ecology challengesthe very premises of “fitness” that enter into
theDarwinian drama of evolutionary development withits fixation on
“survival” rather than differentiationand fecundity. As William
Trager has emphasized inhis insightful work on symbiosis:
The conflict in nature between different kindsof organisms has
been popularly expressedin phmses like the “struggJe for
existence”and the “survival of the fittest.” Yet fewpeople realized
that mutual cooperationbetween organisms-symbiosis-is just
asimportant, and that the ‘fittest” may be theone that helps
another to survive.’
It is tempting to go beyond this pithy and highlyilluminating
judgement to explore an ecologicalnotion of natural evolution based
on the developmentof ecosystems, not merely individual species.
Thisis a concept of evolution as the dialecticaldevelopment of
evr:r-variegated, complex, andincreasingly fecund contexts of
plant-animalcommunities as distinguished from the traditionalnotion
of biological evolution based on the atomisticdevelopment of single
life-forms, a characteristicallyentrepreneurial concept of the
isolated “individual,”be it animal, plant, or bourgeois-a creature
which
What Is Sodal Ecology? I 57
fends for itself and either “survives” or “perishes” ina
marketplace “jungle.” As ecosystems become morecomplex and open a
greater variety of evolutionarypathways, due to their own richness
of diversity andincreasingly flexible forms of organic life, it is
notonly the environment that “chooses” what “species”are “fit” to
survive but species themselves, inmutualisitic complexes as well as
singly, thatintroduce a dim element of “choice”-by no
means“intersubjective” or “willful” in the human meaningof these
terms.
Concomitantly, these ensembles of species alter theenvironment
of which they are part and exercise anincreasingly active role in
their own evolution. Life,in this ecological conception of
evolution, ceases tobe the passive tabula rosa on which eternal
forceswhich we loosely call “the environment” inscribethe destiny
of “a species,” an atomistic term that ismeaningless outside the
context of an ecosystemwithin which a life-form is truly definable
withrespect to other species.*
Life is active, intemctive, procreative, relational,and
contextual. It is not a passive lump of “stuff,” aform of metabolic
“matter” that awaits the action of“forces” external to it and is
mechanically “shaped”by them. Ever striving and always producing
newlife-forms, there is a sense in which life is self-directive in
its own evolutionary development, notpassively reactive to an
inorganic or organic worldthat impinges upon it from outside and
“determines”-.*The tradltional emphasis on an “active” environment
thatdetermines the”survival”of a passive species, altered In a
coemlcgame of chance by random mutations, is perhaps another
reasonwhy the term “environmentalism,” as distinguished from
socialecology, is a very unsatisfactory expression these days.
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58 / THE MODERN CRISIS
its destiny in isolation from the ecosystems which itconstitutes
and of which it is a part.
And this much is clear in social ecology: ourstudies of “food
webs” (a not quite satisfactory termfor describing the
interactivity that occurs in anecosystem or, more properly, an
ecologicalcommunity) demonstrate that the complexity ofbiotic
interrelationships, their diversity andintricacy, is a crucial
factor in assessing anecosystem’s stability. In contrast to
bioticallycomplex temperate zones, relatively simple desertand
arctic ecosystems are very fragile and break downeasily with the
loss or numerical decline of only afew species. The thrust of
biotic evolution over greateras of organic evolution has been
toward theincreasing diversification of species and
theirinterlocking into highly complex, basicallymutualistic
relationships, without which thewidespread colonization of the
planet by life wouldhave been impossible.
Unity in diversity (a concept deeply rooted in thewestern
philosophical tradition) is not only thedeterminant of an
ecosystem’s stability; it is thesource of an ecosystem’s fecundity,
of i t sinnovativeness. of its evolutionary potential to
createnewer, still more complex life-forms and
bioticinterrelationships, even in the most inhospitableareas of the
planet. Ecologists have not sufficientlystressed the fact that a
multiplicity of life-forms andorganic interrelationships in a
biotic communityopens new evolutionary pathways of development,a
greater variety of evolutionary interactions,variations, and
degrees of flexibility in the capacity
What Is Social Ecology? I 59
to evolve, and is hence crucial not only in thecommunity’s
stability but also in its innovativenessin the natural history of
life.
The ecological principle of unity in diversitygrades into a
richly mediated social principle, hencemy use of the term social
ecology.* Society, in turn,attains its “truth,” its
self-actualization, in the formof richly articulated, mutualistic
networks of peoplebased on community, roundedness of
personality,diversity of stimuli and activities, an
increasingwealth of experience, and a variety of tasks. Is
thisgrading of ecosystem diversity into social diversity,b a s e d
o n humanly scaled, decentralizedcommunities, merely analogic
reasoning?
My answer would be that it is not a superficialanalogy but u
deep-seated continuity between natureand society that social
ecology recovers fromtraditional nature philosophy without its
archaicdross of cosmic hierarchies, static absolutes, and
____*My use of the word “social” cannot be emphasized too
strongly.Words like"human." “deep.“and “cultural,” while very
valuableas general terms. do not explicitly pinpoint the extent to
whichour image of nature is formed by the kind of society in
whichwe live and by the abiding natural harts of all social life.
Theevolution of society out of nature and the ongoing
interactionbetween the two tend to be lort in words that do not
tell usenough about the vltal association between nature and
rocietyand about the importance of defining such disciplines
aseconomics, psychology, and sociology in natural as well as
socialterms. Recent uses of “social ecology” to advance a
rathersuperfidel account of social life in fairly conventional
ecologicalterma are particularly deplorable. Boob like Habits of
the Heartwhich glibly pick up the term serve to coopt a
powerfulexpression for rat her banal ends and tend to compromise
effortsto deepen our understanding of nature and society as
interactiverather than opposed domains.
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80 / THE MODERN CRISIS
cycles. In the case of social ecology, it is not in
theparticulars of differentiation that plant-animalcommunities are
ecologically united with humancommunities; rather, it is the logic
of differentiationthat makes it possible to relate the mediations
ofnature and society into a continuum.
What makes unity in diversity in nature more thana suggestive
ecological metaphor for unity indiversity in society is the
underlying fact ofwholeness. By wholeness I do not mean any
finalityof closure in a development, any “totality” that leadsto a
terminal “reconciliation” of all “Being” in acomplete identity of
subject and object or a realityin which no further development is
possible ormeaningful. Rather, I mean varying degrees of
theactualization of potentialities, the organic unfoldingof the
wealth of particularities that are latent in theas-yet-undeveloped
potentiality. This potentialitycan be a newly planted seed, a newly
born infant, anewly formed community, a newly emergingsociety-yet,
given I heir radically differentspecificity, they are all united by
a processual reality,a shared “metabolism” of development, a
unifiedcatalysis of growth ;tis distinguished from mere“change”
that providt:s US with the most insightfulway of understanding t
Ibt,rn we can possibly achieve.Wholeness is literally the unity
that finally givesorder to the particularity of each of these
phenomena;it is what has emerged from the process, whatintegrates
the particularities into a unified form, whatrenders the unity an
operable reality and a “being”in the literal sense of the term-an
order as the
Whet/s Soda/Ecology? / 61
actualized unity of its diversity from the flowing andajmergent
process that yields its self-realization, thefixing of its
directiveness into a clearly contouredform. and the creation in a
dim sense of a “self” thatis identifiable with respect to
the”others” with whichit interacts. Wholeness is the relative
completion ofa phenomenon’s potentiality, the fulfillment of
latentpossibility as such, all its concrete manifestationsaside, to
become more than the realm of merepossibility and attain the
“truth” or fulfilled realityof possibility. To think this way-in
terms ofpotentiality, process, mediation, and wholeness-isto reach
into the most underlying nature of things,just as to know the
biography of a human being andthe history of a society is to know
them in theiraut hontic reality and depth.
‘The natural world is no less encompassed by thisprocessual
dialectic and developmental ecology thanthe social, although in
ways that do not involve will,degrees of choice, values, ethical
goals, and the like.Life itself, as distinguished from the
nonliving,however, emerges from the inorganic latent with allthe
potentialities and particularities it hasimmanently produced from
the logic of its ownnascent forms of self-organization. Obviously,
sodoes society as distinguished from biology, humanityas
distinguished from animality, and individualityas distinguished
from humanity in the generic senseof the word. But these
distinctions are not absolutes.They are the unique and closely
interrelated phasesof a shared continuum, of a process that is
unitedprecisely by its own differentiations just as the
phasesthrough which an embryo develops are both distinct
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62 1 THE MODERN CRISIS
from and incorporated into its complete gestationand its organic
specificity.
This continuum is not simply a philosophicalconstruct. It is an
earthy anthropological fact whichlives with us daily as surely as
it explains theemergence of humanity out of mere
animality.Individual socialization is the highly nuanced“biography”
of that development in everyday life andin everyone as surc!ly as
the anthropologicalsocialization of our species is part of its
history. 1refer to the biological basis of all human
socialization:the protracted infancy of the human child thatrenders
its cultural development possible, in contrastto the rapid growth
of nonhuman animals, a rate ofgrowth that quickly forecloses their
ability to form aculture and develop sibling affinities of a
lastingnature; the instinctual maternal drives that extendfeelings
of care, sharing. intimate consociation, andfinally love and a
sense! of responsibility for one’sown kin into the institutional
forms we call “society”;and the sexual division of labor,
age-ranking, andkin-relationships which, however
culturallyconditioned and even mythic in some cases, formedand
still inform so much of social institutionalizationtoday. These
formative elements of society rest onbiological facts and, placed
in the contextual analysisI have argued for, require ecological
analysis.
In emphasizing the nature-society continuum withall its
gradations and “mediations,” I do not wish toleave the impression
that the known ways and formsin which society emc:rged from nature
and stillembodies the natural world in a shared process
ofcumulative growth follow a logic that is “inexorable”
Whaf Is Soclal Ecology? I 63
or “preordained” by a telos that mystically guidesthe unfolding
by a supranatural and suprasocialprocess. Potentiality is not
necessity: the logic of aprocess is not a form of inexorable “law”;
the truthof a development Is what is implicit in any unfoldingand
defined by the extent to which it achievesstability, variety,
fecundity, and enlarges the “realmof freedom,” however dimly
freedom is conceived.
No specific “stage” of a process necessarily yieldsa still later
one or is “presupposed” by it-but certainobvious conditions,
however varied, blurred, or evenidiosyncratic, form the determining
ground for stillother conditions that can be expected to
emerge.Freedom and, ultimately, a degree of subjectivity thatmake
choice and will possible along rational linesmay be desiderata that
the natural world renderspossible and in a “self”-directive way
plays an activerole in achieving. But in no sense are these
desideratapredetermined certainties that must unfold, nor isany
such unfolding spared the very real possibilitythat it will become
entirely regressive or remainunfulfilled and incomplete. That the
potentiality forfreedom and consciousness exists in nature
andsociety; that nature and society are not merely“passive” in a
development toward freedom andconsciousness, a passivity that would
make the verynotion of potentiality mystical just as the notion
of“necessity” would make it meaningless by definition;that natural
and social history bear existentialwitness to the potentiality and
processes that formsubjectivity and bring consciousness more
visibly onthe horizon in the very natural history of
mind-allconstitute no guarantee that these latent desiderata
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64 I THE M OD E R N C R IS I S
are certainties or lend themselves to systematicelucidation and
teleological explanations in anytraditional philosophical
sense.
Our rurvey of organic and social experience maystir us to
interpret a development we know to haveoccurred as reason to
presuppose that potentiality,wholeness, and graded evolution are
realities afterall, no less real than our own existence and
personalhistories, but presuppositions they remain. Indeed,no
outlook in philosophy can ever exist that is freeof
presuppositions, any more than speculation canexist that is free of
some stimulus by the objectiveworld. The only truth about “first
philosophy,” fromGreek times onward, is that what is “first” in
anyphilosophical outlook are the presuppositions itadopts, the
background of unformulated experiencefrom which these
presuppositions emerge, and theintuition of a coherence that must
be validated byreality as well as speculative reason.
One of the IlIost provocative of the gradedcontinuities between
nature and society is thenonhie ra rch ica l rc!lationships that
exist in anecosystem, and the extent to which they provide
agrounding for a nonhierarchical society.* It is
l Ciaimr of hierarchy as a ubiquitous natural fact cannot
beignomd by still further widening the chasm between nature
andsociety-or “natural necessity” and “cultural frwdom” as it
Ismore elegantly worded. Justifying social hierarchy in terms
ofnatural hierarchy is one of the most persistent assaults on
anegalitarian eocial future that religion and philosophy have
madeover the ages. It has surfaced recently In sociobiology
endreinforebd the antinaturallstic rtamx that permeates 80
manylibemtory Ideologies in the modem era. To say that culture
isprecisely the “emancipation of man from nature” Is to revert
to
What Is Social Ecolcgy? I 65
meaningless to speak of hierarchy in an ecosystemand in the
succession of ecosystems which, incontrast to a monadic
species-oriented development,form the true story of natural
evolution. There is no“king of the beasts” and no “lowly
serf”-presumably, the lion and the ant-in ecosystemrelationships.
Such terms, including words like“cruel nature,” “fallen nature,”
“domineeringnature,” and even “mutualistic nature” (I prefer touse
the word “complementary” here) are projectionsof our own social
relationships into the natural world.Ants are as important as lions
and eagles i necosystems: indeed, their recycling of
organicmaterials gives them a considerable “eminence” inthe
maintenance of the stability and integrity of anarea.
As to accounts of “dominance-submission”relationships between
individuals such as “alpha”and “beta” males, utterly asymmetrical
relationshipstend to be grouped under words like “hierarchy”
thatare more annlogic. often more metaphoric, than real.It becomes
absurd, I think, to say that the“dominance” of a “queen bee,” who
in no way knowsthat she is a “queen” and whose sole function in
abeehive is reproductive, is in any way equatable withan “alpha”
male baboon, whose “status” tends tosuffer grave diminution when
the baboon troopmoves from the plains to the forest. By the
sametoken, it is absurd to equate “patriarchal harems”among red
deer with “matriarchal” elephant herds,
Sertre’s “slime of history” notion of the natural world that
notonly separates society from nature but mind from body
andsubjectivity from objectivity.
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66 1 THE MODERN CRISIS
which simply expel bul Is when they reach pubertyand in no sense
“dominate” them. One could gothrough a whole range of ~tsymmetrical
relationshipsto show that, even among our closest primaterelrtiver,
which include the utterly “pacific”orangntans aa well as the
seemingly “aggressive”chimpanzees, words l ike “dominance”
and“submission” mean very different relationshipsdepending upon the
species one singles out and thecircumstances under which they
live.
I cannot emphasize too strongly that hierarchy insociety is an
institutional phenomenon, not abiological one. It is a product of
organized, carefullycrafted power relationships, not a product of
the“morality of the gene,” to use E. 0. Wilson’sparticularly obtuse
phrssc! in his Sodobiology. Onlyinrtitutions, formed by long
periods of human historyand sustained by well-organized
bureaucracies andmilitary forces, could have placed absolute rule
inthe hands of mental defects like Nicholas II of Russiaand Louis
XVI of France. We can find nothing evenremotely comparable to such
institutionalizedsystems of command and obedience in other
species,much less in ecosystems. It verges on the absurd todraw
fast-and-loose comparisons between the“division of labor” (another
anthropocentric phrasewhen placed in an ecological context) in a
beehive,whose main function is reproducing bees, not makinghoney
for breakfast tables, and human society, withits highly contrived
State forms and organizedbureaucracies.
What renders social ecology so important incomparing ecosystems
to societies is that it decisivelychallenges the very function of
hierarchy as a way
Whet Is Sock/ Ecobgy? I 67
of ordering reality, of dealing with differentiation
andvariation-with “otherness” as such. Social ecologyruptures the
association of order with hierarchy. Itposes the question of
whether we can experience the“other,” not hierarchically on a
“rcale of one to ten”with a continual emphasis on “inferior”
and“superior,” but ecologically, as variety that enhancesthe unity
of phenomena, enriches wholeness, andmore closely resembles a
food-web than a pyramid.That hierarchy exists today as an even
morefundamental problem than social classes, thatdomination exists
today as an even morefundamental problem than economic
exploitation,can be attested to by every conscious feminist, whocan
justly claim that long before man began to exploitman through the
formation of social classes, he beganto dominate woman in
patriarchal and hierarchicalrelationships.
We would do well to remember that the abolitionof classes,
exploitation, and even the State is noguarantee whatever that
people will cease to beranked hierarchically and dominated
according toage, gender, race, physical qualities, and often
quitefrivolous and irrational categories, unless liberationfocuses
as much on hierarchy and domination as itdoes on classes and
exploitation. This is the pointwhere socialism, in my view, must
extend itself intoa broader libertarian tradition that reaches back
intothe tribal or band-type communities ancestral to whatwe so
smugly call “civilization,” a tradition, indeedan abiding human
impulse, that has surged to thesurface of society in every
revolutionary period, onlyto be brutally contained by those purely
societalforms called “hierarchies.”
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66 / THE MOOERN CRiSls ISocial ecology raises all of these
issues in a
fundamentiy new light, and establishes entirelynew way8 d
resolving them. I have tried to showthat nature ir always present
in the human condition,and in the very ideological constructions
that denyits presence in societal relationships. The notion
ofdominating nature literally defines all our socialdisciplines,
Including socialism and psychoanalysis.It is the apologia par
excellence for the dominationof human by human. Until that apologia
is removedfrom our senaibilltier in the rearing of the young,
theflmt step in oocialization as such, and replaced byan ecological
sensibility that sass “otherness” interms of complementarity rather
than rivalry, we willnever achieve human emancipation. Nature lives
inus ontogenetically as different layers of experiencewhich
analytic rationalism often conceals from us:in the sensitivity of
our cells, the remarkableautonomy of our organ systems, our
so-called layeredbrain which experiences the world in different
waysand attests to different worlds, which analytic reason,left to
its own imperialistic claims, tends to close tous-indeed, in the
natural history of the nervoussystem and mind, which bypasses the
chasm betweenmind and body, or subjectivity and objectivity, withan
organic continuum in which body grades intomind and objectivity
illto subjectivity. Herein liesthe most compelling refutation of
the traditionaldualism in religion, philosophy, and sensibility
thatgave ideological credence to the myth of a“dominating” nature,
borne by the suffering andbrutalization of a dominated
humanity.
Moreover, this natural history of the nervoussystem and mind is
a cumulative one, not merely a
W h a t I s Soda/ Eco/ogy? I 6 9
successive one-a history whose past lies in oureveryday present.
It is not for nothing that one ofAmerica’s greatest physiologists,
Walter B. Cannon,titled his great work on homeostasis The Wisdom
ofthe Body. Running through our entire experientialapparatus and
organizing experience for us are notonly the categories of Kant’s
first Critique and Hegel’sLogic, but also the natuml history of
sensibility as itexists in us hormonally, from our
undifferentiatednerve networks to the hemispheres of our brains.
Wemetabolize with nature in production in such a waythat the
materials with which we work and the toolswe use to work on them
enter reciprocally into thetechnological imagination we form and
the socialmatrix in which our technologies exist. Nor can weever
permit ourselves to forget, all our overridingideologies of class,
economic interest, and the likenotwithstanding, that we socialize
with each othernot only as producers and property owners, but
alsoas children and parents, young and old, female andmale, with
our bodies as well as our minds, andaccording to graded and varied
impulses that are asarchaic as they are fairly recent in the
naturalevolution of sensibility.
Hence, to become conscious of this vast ensembleof natural
history as it enters into our very beings, tosee its place in the
graded development of our socialhistory, to recognize that we must
develop newsensibilities, technologies, institutions, and forms
ofexperiencing that give expression to this wealth ofour inner
development and the complexity of ourbiosocial apparatus is to go
along with a deeper grainof evolution and dialectic than is
afforded to us bythe “epistemological” and “linguistic” turns of
recent
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70 / THE MODERN CRISIS
philosophy.* On this score, just as I would argue thatllct9nCe
is the history of science, not merely its latest‘Wage,” and
technology is the history of technology,not merely i,@ latest
designs, so reason is the historyof reason, not merely its present
analytic andcommunicative dimensions. Social history
includesnatural history as a graded dialectic that is unitednot
only in a continllllm by a shared logic ofdifferentiation and
complementarity; it includesnatural history in the socialization
process itself, inthe natural as well as the social history of
experience,in the imperatives of a harmonized relationshipbetween
humanity and nature that presuppose newecotechnologies and
ecocommunities, and in thedesiderata opened by a decentralized
society basedon the values of complementarity and community.
The ideer I have advanced so far take their pointof departura
from a radically different image of naturethan the prevailing
western one, in which
‘Our dlrrrtrourl one-rlded 1111ti rrtlonalked “clvillutlon”
barboxed this wealJ of Inner development and complexity
awry,nlqatlng it to preindurtrial Iifewayr that be&ally shaped
ourl volutIon up to I century or IWO ngo. From a rrnaory
vlewpoint,we live atrophied. indeed, starved liver compared to
hunter8and food cultlvaton, whose capacity to experience reality,
evenIn l largely cultunl Mnse, by far ovenhadom our own.
Thetwentieth century alone bears witness to an appalling dulling
ofour “rixth wnws” as well as to our folk creattvlty and
craftcreativity. We have never experienced so little 80 loudly,
SObrrrhly. so trivially. so thinly, so neurotically. For a
comparisonof the “world of experience we have lost” (to reword
PeterLaslett’r title), read the excellent personal accounts of
so-calledBurhmen, or San people, the Ituri Forrnt pygmies, and the
workof Paul Shepard on food-gatherers and hunters-not simply
asma&s of theit lifeways but of their epirtemologler.
Whrrf Is So&/ Ecdogy? I 7 1
philosophical dualism, economics, sociology,psychology, and even
socialism have their roots. Asa social ecologist, I see nature as
essentially creative,directive, mutualistic, fecund, and marked
bycomplementarity, not “mute,” “blind,” “cruel,”“stingy,” or
“necessitarian.” This shift in focus froma marketplace to an
ecological image of nature obligesme to challenge the time-honored
notion that thedomination of human by human is necessary in orderto
“dominate nature.” In emphasizing howmeaningless this rationale for
hierarchy anddomination is, I conclude-with considerablehistorical
justification, which our own era amplyilluminates with its
deployment of technologyprimarily for purposes of social
control-that theidea of dominating nature stems from
humandomination, initially in hierarchical forms asfeminists so
clearly understand, and later in classand statist forms.
Accordingly, my ecological image of nature leadsme to
drastically redefine my conception ofeconomics, sociology,
psychology, and evensocialism, which, ironically, advance a
shareddualistic gospel of a radical separation of society
fromnature even as they rest on a militant imperative to“subdue”
nature, be it as “scarce resources,*’ therealm of “animality,”
“internal nature,” or “externalnature.” Hence, I have tried to
re-vision history notonly as an account of power over human beings
thatby far outweighs any attempt to gain power overthings, but also
as power ramified into centralizedstates and urban environments, a
technology,science, and rationality of social control, and a
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c-T., .a;;.r.‘..., . . .
72 / THE MODERN CRISIS
message of “liberation” that conceals the mostawesome features
of domination, notably, thetraditional socialist orthodoxies of the
last century.
At the juncture where nature is conceived eitheras a ruthless,
competitive marketplace or a creative,fecund biotic community, two
radically divergentpathways of thought and sensibility
emerge,following contrasting directions and conceptions ofthe human
future. One ends in a totalitarian andantinaturalletic terminus for
society: centralized,statist, technocratic, corporate, and
sweepinglyrepressive. The other ends in a libertarian andecological
beginning for society: decentralized,stateless, artistic,
collective, and sweepinglyemancipatory. These are not tendentious
words. It isby no means certain that western humanity,
currentlyswept up in a counterrevolution of authoritarianvalues and
adaptive impulses, would regard alibertarian vision as less
pejorative than a totalitarianone. Whether or not my own words seem
tendentious,the full logic of my view should be seen: the viewwe
hold of the natural world profoundly shapes theimage we develop of
the social worlds, even as weassert the “supremacy” and “autonomy”
of cultureover nature.
In what sense does social ecology view nature asa grounding for
an ethics of freedom? If the story ofnatural evolution is not
understandable in Locke’satomistic account of a particular species’
evolution,if that story is basically an account of
ecosystemevolution toward ever more complex and
flexibleevolutionary pathways, then natural history itselfcannot be
seen simply as “neceasitarian,” “governed”by “inexorable laws” and
imperatives. Every
organism is in some sense “willful,” insofar as it seeksto
preserve itrelf, to maintain its identity, to resist akind of
biological entropy that threatens its integrityand complexity.
However dimly, every organismtransforms the essential at tr ibutes
of self-maintenance that earn it the status of a distinct formof
life into a capacity to choose alternatives that favorits survival
and well-being-not merely to react tostimuli as a purely
phyeico-chemical ensemble.
This dim, germinal freedom is heightened by thegrowing wealth of
ecological complexity thatconfronts evolving life in synchronicity
withevolving ecosystems. The elaboration of possibilitiesthat comes
with the elaboration of diversity and thegrowing multitude of
alternatives confronting speciesdevelopment opens newer and more
fecundpathways for organic development. Life is not passivein the
face of these possibilities for its evolution. Itdrives toward them
actively in a shared process ofmutual stimulation between organisms
and theirenvironment (including the living and
non-livingenvironment they create) as surely as it also
activelycreates and colonizes the niches that cradle a
vastdiversity of life-forms in our richly elaboratedbiosphere. This
image of active, indeed striving, liferequires no Hegelian “Spirit”
or Heraklitean Logosto explain it. Activity and striving are
presupposedin our very definition of metabolism. In fact,metabolic
activity is coextensive with the notion ofactivity as such and
imparts an identity, indeed, arudimentary “self,” to every
organism. Diversity andcomplexity, indeed, the notion of evolution
as adiversifying history, superadd the dimension ofvariegated
alternatives and pathways to the simple
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74 / THE MODERN CRISIS
fact of choice-and, with choice, the rudimentaryfact of freedom.
For freedom, in its most germinalform, is also a function of
diversity and complexity,of a “realm of necessity” that is
diminished by agrowing and expanding multitude of alternatives, ofa
widening horizon of evolutionary possibilities,which life in its
ever-richer forms both creates andin its own way “pursues,” until
consciousness, thegift of nature es well as society to humanity,
rendersthlr pursuit willful, self-reflexive, and
consciouslycrestive.
Here, in this ecological concept of naturalevolution, lim a
hidden message of freedom basedon the “inwardness of life,” to use
Hans Jonas’sexcellent expression, and the ever
greaterdiversification produced by natural evolution.Ecology is
united with society in new terms thatreveal moral tension in
natural history, just as Marx’ssimplistic image of the “savage” who
“wrestles withnature” reveals a moral tension in social
history.
We must beware of being prejudiced by our ownfear of prejudice.
Organismic philosophies can surelyyield totalitarian, hierarchical,
and eco-fascisticresults. We have good reason to be concerned
overso-called nature philosophies that give us the notionof Blut
und Boden and “dialectical materialism,”which provide the
ideological justification for thehorrors of Nazism and Stalinism.
We have goodreason to be concerned over a mysticism that
yieldssocial quietism at best and the aggressive activism ofreborn
Christianity and certain Asian gurus at worst.We have even better
reason to be concerned over theeco-fascism of Garrett Hardin’s
“lifeboat ethic” with
what Is socki Ecohqy? I 75
its emphasis on scarce resources and the so-calledtragedy of the
commons, an ethic which servicesgenocidal theories of imperialism
and a globaldisregard for human. misery. So, too,
sociobiology,which roots all the savage features of
“civilization”in our genetic constitution. Social ecology offers
thecoordinates for an entirely different pathway inexploring our
relationship to the natural world-onethat accepts neither genetic
and scientistic theoriesof “natural necessity” at one extreme, nor
a romanticand mystical zealotry that reduces the rich variety
ofreality and evolution to a cosmic “oneness” andenergetics at the
other extreme. For in both cases, itis not only our vision of the
world and the unity ofnature and society that suffers, but the
“naturalhistory” of freedom and the basis for an objectiveethics of
liberation as well.
We cannot avoid the use of conventionel reason,present-day modes
of science, and moderntechnology. They, too, have their place in
the futureof humanity and humanity’s metabolism with thenatural
world. But we can establish new contexts inwhich these modes of
rationality, science, andtechnology have their proper place-an
ecologicalcontext that does not deny other, more qualitativemodes
of knowing and producing which areparticipatory and emancipatory.
We can also fostera new sensibility toward otherness that, in
anonhierarchical society, is based oncomplementarity rather than
rivalry, and newcommunities that, scaled to human dimensions,
aretailored to the ecosystem in which they are locatedand open a
new, decentralized, self-managed public
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I
I.
..
.
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: .
:”‘-4 1
il
.. )b
,
SOCIETYANDECOLOGY
The probkms which many people face today in “defming”
thunselves,in knowing “who they are”- probkms that feed a vast
psychotherapyindustry - are by no means personal ones. These
problems exist notonly for private individuals; they exist for
modem society as a whole.Socially, we live in desperate uncertainty
about how peopk relate toeach other. We suffer not only as
individuals from alienation andconfusion over our identities and
goals, our entire society. conceivedas a single entity, seems
unclear about its own nature and sense ofdirection. If earlier
societies tried to foster a belief in the vhtues ofcooperation and
care, thereby giving an ethical meaning to social life,modem
society fosters a belief in the virtues of competition andegotism,
thereby divesting human association of all meaning -except,perhaps,
as an instrument for gain and mindless consumption.
We tend to believe that men and women of earlier times were
guidedby firm beliefs and hopes- values that defmcd them as human
beingsand gave purpose to theii social lives. We qzak of the Middle
Ages asan “Age of Faith” or the Enlightenment as an “Age of
Reason.” Eventhe pm--World War II era and the years that followed
it seem like analluring time of innocence and hope, despite the
Great Depression andthe tcrribk conflicts that stained it. As an
elderly character in a recent,
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i ’i IIi1
20 I REMAKING SOUETY
mthex sophisticated, espionage movie put it: what be mked rboul
hi8younger years during World War II were their “clarity” - a aenae
ofpurpose and idealism that guided his bchaviour.
‘Ihat “clarity,” today, Is gone. It has been @teed by
ambiguity.Ihe certainty that tcchnobgy and scicncc would Itnprovo
the humancondition is mocked by the proliferation of nuckar
weapon& by mas-sive hunger in the llkd World, and by poverty in
the Foot Wcrki. Thefervent belief that liberty would triumph over
tyranny Is beIIed by thegrowing centralization of states everywhere
and by the disunpowcr-mcnt of pcopk by bureaucracks, police forces,
and aophkdcatcdsurvcillancc tcchniqucs - in our “dcmocracics” no
Icsa than in visiblyauthoritarian countries. The hope that we would
form “one warfd.” avast community of disparate ethnic groups that
would share theirresources to improve life evcrywhcrc. has been
&at&red by a risingtide of nationalism, racism, and an
unfeeling parochialism that fostersindiffcnnce to the plight of
millions.
We believe that our values are worse than tboae held by pcopk
ofonly two or tluce generations ago. The prcscnt gcncration aceme
moresclf-ccnbcd. privatixcd, and mean-spirited by comparison with
carlicrones. It lacks the support systems provided by the oxtendcd
family.community, and a commitment to mutual aid. llte cncounkr of
theindividual-with society stems to occur through cdd -tic
agat-ci
This lack of social identity and meaning is all the more stark
in thef c of the mounting ptobkms that confront us. War is a
&tonic
:
rather lhan warm, caring people.
nditionofourtimc;cconomkunccrtainty,anall-pcrvasiveprescnce;uman
solidarity, a vaporous myth. Not least of tho probkms wocounter arc
nightmarcs ofan ecological apocalypse-acatastrophic
kdown of the systems that maintain the stability of the planet
WoI& under the constant threat that the world of life will be
irrevocablyundcrmincd by a society gone mad in its need to pw
-replacing theorganic by the inorganic, roil by concrctc, forest by
banwt earth, andthe di+ty of life-forms by simplified
ecosystem& In short, a turningback of o evolutionary clock to
an earlier, mom inorganic, mincml-
%lizcd worl at was incapable of supporting compkx life-forms of
anyt kind, includinb the human specks.
Society and Ecology / 21
Ambiguity about our fate, meaning, and purpose thus mists a
ratherstartling question: is sockty itself a curse, a blight on
life generally?Are we any better for this new phenomenon calkd
“civilization” thataccms to bc on the point of destroying the
natural world produced overmillions of years of organic
ovolution?
An entire litcmture has emerged which has gained the attention
ofmillions of rcadcrs: a literature that fosters a new pessimism
towardcivilization as such. This litcmture pits technology against
a prcsumab-ly ‘*virginal” organic natun; cities against
countryside; countrysideagainst “wildcrncss”; science against a
“rcvercncc” for life; reasonagainst the”innoccnce” of intuition;
and, indeed, humanity against thecntirc biosphere.
We show signs of losing faith in all our uniquely human
abilities -our ability to live in peace with each other. our
ability to care for ourfellow beings and other life-forms. This
pessimism is fed daily bysociobiologists who locate our failings in
our genes, by antihumanistswho deplore our “antinatural”
sensibilities, and by “bioccntrists” whodowngrade our mtional
qualitics with notions that WC are no diffcrcntin our “intrinsic
worth” than ants. In short, we arc witnessing awidcsptcad assault
against the ability of reason, science. and tcchnol- Jogy to
improve the world for oursclvcs and life gcncrally. I
‘I’M historic thcmt that civilization must inevitably bc pitted
againstnature, indeed, that it is corruptive of human nature. has
resurfaced inour midst from the days that teach back to R-u - this,
preciselyat a time when our need for a truly human and ecological
civilizationhas never been greater if we are to rescue our planet
and ourselves.Civilization, with its hallmarks of mason and
technics, is viewedincreasingly as a new blight. Even more
basically, society as aphenomenon in its own tight is being
qucstioncd so much so that itsrok as integral to the formation of
humanity is Seen as somethingharmfully “unnatural” and inherently
destructive.
Humanity, in cffcct. is being dcfamcd by human beings
themselves,ironically, as an accursed form of life that all but
destroys the world oflife and thrcatcns its integrity. To the
confusion that we have about ourown muddled time and our personal
identities, WC now have the addedconfusion that the human condition
is seen as a form of chaos produced
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22 I REMWING SOCIEn
by our proclivity for wanton desuu&m and our ability to
exercka thisproclivity all the more effectively because we possess
fcasoq aeknm,and technology.
Admittedly, few antihumnists, “biocenuists,” and
misanthropar,who theorize about the human condition, are prepatud
to folbw
theloeicofdreirpnmisestosuchanabsutdpoinLWhrrtisvi~yimportPntabout
this medley of moods and unfinished ideas is that the vatiousforms,
institutions. and relationships that make up what um should
call“rociery”arelrrOelyignorrd.Inaard,~aoweu#vrOuemrdrlilte“humanity”
or zoological terms like homo sapiens that amecal vastdifferences,
often bitter antagonisms, that exist between privikgedwhites and
peopk of colour, men and women, rich and poor, opper#lr
I
and oppresse& so do we, by the same token, uaa vague words
like“society” or “civilization” that conceal vast differences
between free,nonhierarchical, class, and statekss societies on the
one hand, andothers that are. in varying degrees, hkrarchical,
class-ridden, statist,and authoritarian. Zoology, in effect,
replaces so&By aiented eeol-ogy. Sweeping “natural laws” based
on population rwings among
j animals replace conflicting economic and social in&es&
amongpeople.
Simply to pit “society” against “nature,” “humanity” against
the“biosphere,” and “reason,” “technology,” and “scienec” against
lessdeveloped, often primitive forms of human interaction with the
natural
rid. prevents us from examining the. highly
complexdifferencesandd visions within society so necessary to
define our problems and theii
lutions.Ancient Egypt, for example, had a significantly diffant
attitude
L
to ard nature than ancient Babylonia. Egypt assumed a
tevaentialatt ude toward a host of essentially animistic natum
deities, many ofwhi were physically part human and part animal,
while Babylonians
a pantheon of very human political deities. But Egypt was noless
hi hical than Babylonia in its treatment of peopb and wasequally.
not more, oppressive ln its view of human individuality.Ctin h ting
peoples may have been as deeuuetive of wildlife,despite the’
%
trong animistk beliefs, as urban culturea which stakedout an
ovcr- ing claim to reason. When these many differences aresimply
swallowed up together with a vast variety of social forms by a
Sociery und Ecology I23
word called “society,” we do sevw vioknce to thought and
evensimple intelligence. Society per se becomes something
“unnatural.”“Reason.” “technology,” and “science” become things
that are“desbuctive” without any regard to the social factors that
conditiontheir use. Human attempts to alter the environment are
seen as threats-as though our *‘species” can do little or nothing
to improve the planetfor life generally.
Of course, we are not any less animals than other mammals, but
weare mote than herds that browse at the African plains. The way in
whichwcmmore- namely, the U&r of societies that we form and
howwe are divided against each aer into hierarchies and classes
-profmdly affects our behaviour and our effects on the natural
world.
Finally, by so radically separating humanity and sockty from
natureor naYvely reducing them to mere zoological entities, we can
no longersee how human nature is &rived from nonhuman natum and
social ’evolution from natural evolution. Humanity becomes
estranged oralienated not only from itself in our “age of
&nation,” but horn thenatural world in which it has always been
rooted as a complex andthinking life-form.
Accordingly, we are fed a steady dkt of reproaches by liberal
andmisanthropic environmentalists alike about how “we” as a species
amnsponsible for the breakdown of the environment. One does not
haveto go to enclaves of mystics and gurus in San Francisco to find
thisspeeiescentmd, asocial view of ecological problems and their
souses.New York City will do just as well. I shall not easily
forget an“environmental” presentation staged by the New York Museum
ofNatural History in the seven&s in which the public was
exposed to along series of exhibits, each depicting examples of
pollution andecological disruption. Theexhibit which closed the
presentation carrieda startling sign, “The Most Dangerous Animal on
Earth,” and it con-sisted simply of a huge mirror which reflected
back the human viewerwho stood befort it. I clearly recall a black
child standing before theminw while a white school teacher tried to
explain the message whichthis armgant exhibit tried to convey.
There wecc no exhibits of car-poqte boards or directors planning to
deforest a mountainside orgovernment officials acting in collusion
with them. The exhibitprimarily conveyed one, basically
misanthropic, message: people 45
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24 I REWWNG SOCIETY
#CA. no( 8 Rpd0W #Ocicty mb it8 wodlhy bancficir&, m
Fcrgar-dhb la ennvlnmmsnrl dldoadttm
--poorltobadwfbopmaully~~y.psopkdadatraobssthanprivibg,,drvbhar,[email protected]~nokssthanthoopprarm.Amythical
huma %pecies” hrd rapkad classas; individwlr h&raWad
hicnrchier; parsonal uucl (many of which m rhrpsa by lEmory
me&r) hd nplacad racial nlationships; cpd Uto dirsaEPomFbd who
live maagre, isobtad liar had rcih~dd ght corpar-rknr, 8df-8min#
bumucmcier, Mb Ute violent pamphmrlir of thestua
THfi REUTJONSHIP OF SOCIETY TO NATURE
Lewing aside 8uch outragamu “envifonmcntai” exhibItion Ibrmimw
privikgcd and undcrprivib~ pcoplc in the m Irma, itraans qpropriata
II this point to r&a I highly rcicvant naadz tha naadto bring
society back into tha acological picture. More than avar,
suongcqhasar mucl ba placed on tha fact that naarly ull
ccologfcalprobknu
\ (UC sociul problems, na simply a primarily the result of
rcligiou~spiritual, a poiitkxl idcologier. ‘Ihrt these idcoiogica
mry forter imti-ccologicai outlook in peopb ofrll sbata hardly
rcquiru at@&.
ut rather than simply tic idaobgier at thair fncc value, it L
CNCMlo ask from whatce thcs8 itbologks develop.
needs may compel pcopb 80 act againststrongly fall natural
values. Lumbarja& who
ampbyad to clear-cut a magnif~t forest nonnrlly httw notrad” of
traas. They have liula or no choice hut to cut tmu just u
workcn hwa liula or no choke but LO slaugittu tbmauicor
occupalion has its fair ohrm of dutruc-
to ba SUIU, including misanthropic an-who would like to )tb
humunity cxtamthtatad. BUnqjority of pcopk, this kind of work,
including such
s as mining, ut not freely chosen occupatia~. Ihay rtamfinm naad
bd, above ail. they ud tha pcoducl of social amngcmUrUover which
&dinary pcopk have no control.
To undarstand prasantday probkms - ecological IS wall uoconornic
and poiitic8l - wa must axrmina their social c8usa8 8ndramcdy them
through social mathods. “Deep.” “spiritual,” anti-
SWly and Eaology I 25
human&, utd mioMlhroplc acobgkr grawly m&bad w whan
theymfoctmoWrttan1ionon nocc Ifour obligation is to look at changa8
in 8ocirl ralatlonxhipx in odor tounderrtrnd our most rignifkanl
acological changas. these acologkxsteer w8way from 8ociaty
to%piritual.““culcral,” or vaguely dafinad“tr@dilional” sourcas.
Tha Bible did nol craata Europaan rnti-natwrllm; il sarvad to
justify an antinuttmlism that rlraady axistad ontha co&ant from
pagan limas, daspita tha animistic tr8Au of pro-Chrixtiut raiigionu
Christianity’r antjnat~4Astk influoncs bacamaupacially marked with
tha amargance of capitalism. Sociay must notonly ho btought into
the ecobgical picture to undurtand why paopktand to choose
comp&g #nsibilitba - roma, suxmgly naturalistic;orhcn, rmgly
antinatuniistic --but wa mwt p&m mom deeply intosockty itself.
WC must search out tha re&adonsMp o/sockry to nwre,the remw why
it can da~boy tha natural world, and. ritamativeiy, Ihcraasons why
it has and still can en&nce.farrer, and richly conrributelo
nalunl evolution.
I
Insofar as WC can spaak of “sockty” in any rbstmct and
general
7
rensa - and ICI us ramambar that ovary sockty is highly unique
anddiffarcnr from othara in tha long paqactiva of history - WC
UC.obligad to axamina what we can bast call l ‘sociaiixation,” not
maraly J“so&y.” Socicly is a given rmngmcnl of relationships
which WCoftan take for grantad and view in a vary fixad way. To
many paopktoday, it would scam that a markcl sociaty basad on trade
and compati-tion has axistad “fonva,” although WC may ba vaguely
mindful thatthere ware prc-market sociciics based on gifts and
cooperation. JSocirliulion, on the olhcr hand, is a ms&st u
individual livingis a process. Historically, the process of
socializing people can bavkwcd u a son of social infancy that
invoivu a painful rearing of Ihumanity to social maturity.
Whan we begin to considar 8ocialiution from an in-da@ vbw-point,
what strikes us is that sockty itsoIl in iu most primal form
stunsvary muchporn nature. &ay soci~voiution. in fact. is
virtwllyaxtansion of cm. Ax thaRoman omtor and philosophy, Cicaro.
dachued some two thousandyean ago: ”. ..by tha usa of our hands, WC
bring into being within tharaaim of Nature. a second nature for
oursalves.” Cicero’s observation,
-
26 I REMAKING SOCIEn
to be sure, is very incompktez the primeval, presumably
untonched“realm of Nature” or “fust nature,” as it has been called,
is
rewo&edinwhok~partinto”secondnrrture”nolonlybyIhe”ueeolouhsndr”Thought,
language, and compkx, very important biologlatl changesatso play a
crucial and, at times, a decisive role in developing a
“secondnature” within “first nature.”
I use the term “reworking” advisedly to focus on the bet
that“second nature” ir na simply a phenomenon that develops outside
of“first nature” - hence the special value that should be attached
toCicero’s use of the expression “within the realm of Natura..”
Toemphasize that "second nature” or, mom precisely, society (to use
thisword in its broadest possible sense) emerges from wirhir,
primeval “firrrt
I
nature” is to reestablish the fact that social life always has a
naturalisticdimension, however much society is pitted against
naturn in our think-ing.Sociofecologyckarlyex~thefact
thatsocietyisnotrsuddat%ruption” in the world. Social life does not
necessarily face nattw asa combatant in an unmlendng war. The
emergence of society b a__
1 &w ‘, nufurd fat t that has its origins in the biology of
human ~ialixation.Ihe human socialization process from which
society emerges -be
it in the form of families, bands, tribes, or more complex trpco
of humanintercourse - has its source in parental relationship
particularlymother and chiki bonding. ‘Ibo biological mother, to ba
rum, can bereplaced in this pmcess by many surrogates, including
fathers, reh-t&s, or, for that matter, all members of a
community. It L whcnmddparents and social siblings - that is, the
human community thatsurrounds the young - begin to piutkipate in a
system of care, that isordinarily undertaken by biological parents,
that society begins to trulycome into its own.
Society thereupon advances beyond a mere rqroductive grouptoward
institutionalixed human relationships, and from I
relativelyformless animal community into a clearly structured
social or&r. Butat the very inception of society, it seems more
than likely that human
[beings were socialized into “second nature” by means of deeply
in-grained blood ties, specifically maternal ties. We shall see
that in timethe structures or institutions that mark the advance of
humanity f&m amere animal community into an authentic society
began to undergofar-reaching changes and these changes become
issues of paramount
Socicr>, and Ecology I27
impoftanu in social ecology. For better or wor3t, societies
developaround status groups, hierarchies, classes. and state
formations. Butreproduction and family csm remain the abiding
biological bases for -every form of social life as well as the
originating factor in thekocialixation of the young and the
formation of a society. As RobertBriffault observed in the early
half of this century, the “one knownfactor which establishes a
profound distinction between the constitu-tion of the most
rudimentary human group and all other animal groups[is the]
association of mothers and offspring which is the sole form oftrue
social solidarity among animals. Throughout the class of mam-mals,
there is a continuous increase in the duration of that
association,which is the consequence of the prolongation of the
period of infantiledependence.“4 a prolongation which Briffault
correlates with increasesin the period of fetal gestation and
advances in intelligence.
The biological dimension that Briffault adds to what we call
societyand socialization cannot be stressed too strongly. It is a
decisivepresence, not only in the origins of society over ages of
animal evolu-tion, but in the daily recreation of society in our
everyday lives. Theappeamnce of a newly born infant and the highly
extended care itreceives for many yesrs reminds us that it is not
only a human beingthat is being repmduced, but society itself. By
comparison with theyoung of other species, children develop slowly
and over a long periodof time. Living in close association with
parents, siblings, kin groups,and an ever-widening community of
people, they retain a plasticity ofmind that makes for creative
individuals and ova-formative socialgroups. Although nonhuman
animals may approximate human formsof association in many ways,
they do not create a “second natum” that ’embodies a cultural
tradition, nor do they possess a complex language,Wl.elaborate
conceptual powers, or an impressivo capacity to restructure 1their
environment purposefully according to their own needs.
A chimpanzee, for example. remains an infant for only three
yearsand a juvenile for seven. By the age of ten, it is a
full-grown adult.Children, by contrast, are regarded as infants for
approximately sixyears and juveniles for fourteen. A chimpanzee, in
short, grows men-tally and physically in about half the time
required by a human being,and its capacity to learn or, at least to
think, is already tixed bycomparison with a human being, whose
mental abilities may expand
-
jI 28 I REMKING SOCIETYiI for dccub. By the same token,
chimpanzee urocktiona mw ofbn
idiosyncratk md fairly limited. Human associdoru,at tbe~tund,arc
basically st8bk, highly institudonalizcd. and they arc mplrad by
adcgtee of solidarity, indeed, by (I dcgrce of creativity, that hrr
1~) apalin nonhuman specks a~ far u wo know.
This polnngcd degree of human mcnA plasticity, dqncbncy,
8ndsocial creativity yields tworcsultsthat arc of
dccisivoimporturcs Fiearly human association must have fostcrcd a
strong prcdispaitiat fa
/ interdependence among members of a group - not the %rggcd
in-dividualism”m~ils6wi~independcncc.Theovawhelmingmou
‘F’I
of Mthropobgicrl evidaxa suggests that particip&n, mutual
rid,solidarity, utd empathy were the social virtues early hwnut
groupsunphasiredwilhincheircommunities.Thcidcsrhrlpboplouadcpcnd-cnt
uponcachcachothcrforthegoodlifc.indecd.forsurvival,foIfowedfrom the
prolonged dcpcndcnco of the young upm dultr. Indo-pendcnce. not to
mcntian competition, would have accmcd utterlyalien. if not
bizarre. to a creature rcamd over marty ywrc in I largelydependent
condition. Care for others would have been r#n u theperfectly
natunl outcorno of a highly occultuntcd being that was, inturn,
clearly in need of extended cart. Our modern version of
in-dividualism, more precisely, of egotism, would lava cut across
thegrain of early solidarity and mutual aid - traita, I may add,
withoutwhich such a physically fragileanimal like a humM being
could hardlyhave survived 8s M adult, much kss as a child.
Second, human intcrdepcndence must have assumed a highly
stntc-turcd form. There is no evidence that human being normally
nlate toeach other through the fairly loose systems of bonding we
find 8mmgour closet primate cousins. ‘lltat human social bondscan
be dissolvedor dcinstitutiotu&cd in periods of radical chrngo
tx cuhuml break-down is too obvious to argue here. But during
mlativsly at&k condi-tions, human aocitty was nuvw the “horde”
that anthropobgkta of rhalast century prcsupposcd as a basis for
rudimentary 804 lib. On
theconuary.~evidencewthrverthandpoinuLochafrct~rllhumw,perhaps oval
our distant hominid ancestors, lived in aorne kind ofaructurcd
family groups, and, later, in bun&, tribes. villages, 8nd
other
So&y and Ecology I 29
form. In short, they bonded togother (as they rtill do), not
onlyernotlonally and morally, but rlao ~ructtually in contrived,
clearlydcfinabk, and fairly permanent institutions.
Nonhuman animal8 may form looso communities and even
takecolkctIvc protcctfvo postures to defend tholr young fmm
pr&tora. Butsuch communidcs can hardly bo calkd atructurcd,
except in a broad,often ephemeral. sense. Humans, by mvw. create
highly formalcommunities that tend to become increasingly
structured over thecourse of time. In effect, they form not only
communitks, but a newphatomcnon called sockries.
If wo fail to distinguish animal communities from human
societies,we risk the danger of Ignoring the unipuo fcaturcs that
distinguishhuman social life from animal communities - notably, the
ability
ofrock~tochangeforbclcuorwoncurdIhcfacton~tpoductLhcseChmgCS. By
reducing 8 Wmpkx So&y to 8 met’0 community, we CMcully ignore
how mcktks differed from each other over tho course ofhisuxy. We
can also fail o un&aMd how they elaborated simpledifferences in
status into firmly established hiuarchks, or hicrarchksinto
economic classes. Indeed, wo risk the possibility of
totallymisunderstanding the very merning of terms Iiko”hkrsrchy” as
highlyorganized systems of command Md obcdicnco - thcac, as
distin-gulshcd from personal, individual, and often short-lived
dif@nccs instatus that may, in 811 too many c8scs, involve no acts
of compulsion.Wo tend, in effect, to confuse tho strictly
institutional creations ofhuman will, purpose, conflicting
interests, 8nd traditions, with com-munity life in its most fixed
forms, as though we wen dealing withinhcmnt, seemingly unaltcnbk,
features of society rather than fabri-cated structures that can bo
modified, improved, worsened -or simplyabaudoned. The trick of
every ruling elite from the beginnings ofhistory to modern times
has been to identify its own socially createdhierarchical systems
of dominatim with community lifo OS such. withthe result being that
human-made institutions acquire divine or biologi-cal sanction.
A given society and its institutions thus tend to become reified
intopermanent and unchangcablo cntidca that acquire a mywious life
oftheir own apart fmm nature - namely, the pmducts of a
seeminglyfured “human natum” that is the result of gcnctic
programming at tk
-
30 I REMAKING SOCIETY
very inception of social life. Alternatively, a given sockty 8nd
it8MUions m8y be dissolved into nature as merely 8noths fism
ofanimal community with its”alpha males,” “guardii,““l~”
and“horde”-like forms of existence. When annoying issuea like MT
andsocial conflict are raised, they are ascribed to the activity
of”genes”that presumably give rise to war and even “greed.”
in either case, be it the notion of an abstract society that
exists apartfrom nature or an equally abstract natural community
UuU ia it&tin-guishabk from nature, a dualism appears that
sharply separates societyfrom nature. or a crude reductionism
appears that dissolvu so&y MOnature. These apparently
contrasting, but closely nbted,notioru amallthe more seductive
because they are so simplistic. Although they amoften presented by
their mom sophisticated suppatem in a fairlynuanced form, such
notions are easily reduced to bumper-atick~slogans that are frozen
into hard, popular dogmas.
SOCIAL ECOLOGY
The approach to society and nature advanced by social ecology
mayseem more intellectually demanding, but it avoids the
simplicities ofdualism and thecrudities of reductionism. Social
ecology hiea to show
I how nature slowlypharcs into society without ignoring the
differencesbetween society and nature on the one hand, as well as
the extent towhich they merge with each other on the other.
Theevuyday socialixa-tion of the young by the family is no less
rooted in biology than theeveryday care of the old by the medical
establishment is rooted in thehard factsof society. By
tbesametoken, weneverceasetobemammalawho still have primal natural
urges, but we institutional& tbeae urgeaand their satisfaction
in a wide variety of social forms. Hence, the socialand the natural
continually permeate each other in the most ordinaryactivities of
daily life without losing their identity in a shared prcmxssof
interaction, indeed, of interactivity.
Obvious as this may seem at first in such day-today problems
ascaretaking, social ecology raises questions that have
far-reacbiig im-portance for the different ways society and nature
have interacted ovutime and the problems these interactions have
produced. How did adivisive, indeed, seemingly combative,
rclationshipbetween humanityand nature emerge? What were the
institutional forms and ideologies
So&y atrd Ecology / 31
that rcndeed this conflict possibk? Given the growth of human
needsand technology, was such a conflict nslly unavoidabk? And can
it be0vQcomc in a future, ecologically oriented society?
Howdoesarational,ecologicallyoriented society
fitintotheproces-8es of natural evolution? Even mom broadly, is
there any reason tobelieve that the human mind-itself a product of
natural evolution aswell as culture - represents a decisive
highpoint in natural develop-ment, notably, in the long development
of subjectivity from the sen-sitivity and self-maintenance of the
simplest life-forms to theremarkable intellectuality and
self-consciousnessof the most complex?
In asking these highly provocative questions, I am not trying
tojustify a strutting arrogance toward nonhuman lifa-forms.
Clearly, wemustbring humanity’suniquenessasaspecies,marked
byrichconcep-tual, social, imaginative, and constructive
attributes, into synchronicitywith nature’s fecundity, diversity,
and creativity. I have argued that this\synchronicity will not be
achieved by opposing nature to society.\nonhuman to human
lifeforms, natural fecundity to technology, or 8 ’natural
subjectivity to tbe human mind. Indeed, an important result
thatemerges from a discussion of the interrelationship of nature to
societyis the fact that human intelkctuality, although distinct,
also has afar-reaching natural basis. Our brains and nervous
systems did notsuddenly spring into existence without a long
antecedent natural his-tory. That which we most prize as integral
to our humanity - ourextraordinary capacity to think on complex
conceptual levels -can betraced back to the nerve network of
primitive invertebrates, thegangliaof a mollusk, the spinal cord of
a fish, the brain of an amphibian, andthe cerebral cortex of a
primate.
Hem, too, in the most intimate of our human atuibutes, we are
noless products of natural evolution than we am of social
evolution. Ashuman beings we incorporate within ourselves aeons of
organic dif-ferentiation and elaboration. Like all complex
life-forms, we are notonly part of natural evolution; we are also
its heirs and the products ofnatural fecundity.
In trying to show how society slowly grows out of nature,
however,social ecology is also obliged to show how society, too,
undergoesdifferentiation and elaboration. In doing so, social
ecology must ex-amine those junctures in social evolution where
splits occurred which
-
.____-- -___. ,- __
32 1 REMAKING SOUm
warid. ntbsr than dmplyloolhef&astbuitaonrtrowulddl&
ThisautAaivkwcutsrrouthegr8inofncariyallaurc4uooubgi-ai thinking
nd oven rociai theorizing. One of the most fixal mtiua8thst
present-dry wiogicrl thinking shnms with libet&&
Mux&m,urd consevrslrm ir the hircatc bolkf that the
“dominrd
-
34 I REMAKING SOCIETY
“alphrmrles”cekbnledamongchimpanzeesdonot~~varyfued“stat&
positions within what are fairly fluid groups. Any “status”
thatthey do achieve may be due to very diverse causes.
One can merrily skip fran one animal species to another, to be
sure,falling back on very different, asymmetrical RJISUU for
searching out“high” versus “low status” individuals. The procedure
becomes ratharsilly, however, when words like “status” are used ao
fletibly that they
Iare allowed to include mere differcnccs in group behaviour and
func-tions, rather than coercive actions.
The same is true for the word “hierarchy.” BotJt in ita origins
and itastrict maming, this term is highly social, not xook@caL A
Or& tam,initially used to denote different levels of deities
and, lata, of clergy(characteristically, Hierapolis was an ancient
Pbrygian city in AsiaMinor that was a centre for mother goddess
worship), the word hasbeenmindlessly expanded to encompass
everything from beehivo t&ticnt-ships to the erosivo offtcts of
running watcz in which a stream is seento wear down and “dominate”
its bedrock. Caring female elephants arecalkd”matriarchs” and
attentive male apes who exhibit a great deal ofcourage in defense
of Lheir community, whik acquiring very fow“privileges,” arc often
designated as “patriarchs.” The absence of an
I
organized system of rule - so common in hierarchical human
can-munities and subject to radical institutional changes,
including popularrevolutions - is largely ignored.
Again, the different functions that the presu&d animal
hierarchiiare said to puform, that is, the asymmetrical causes that
place oneindividual in an “alpha status” and others in a lessc~
one, is undersrntcdwhen it is noted at all. One might, with much
the samo aplomb, placeall tall sequoias in a *‘superior” status
0vcI smaller ones, or, momannoyingly, regard them as an”elite” in a
mixod forcst”hicrarchy”ovcr“submissive” oaks, which, to complicate
mattaa, am mare advancedon the evolutionary scak. Tho tendency to
mechanically pro& socialcategories onto the natural world is as
pnposcaws asanruempttoproject biological concepts onto geology.
Mine&s do not “reproduce”the way life-forms do. Stalagmiles and
stalactitea in cavea certainly doincrease in size over time. But in
no sense do they grow in a mannerthat even remotely corresponds to
growth in living beings. To take
Society d Ecology I35
superficial resemblances, often achieved in alien ways. and
group themIntoshared identities, is like speaking of
the”metabolism” of rocks andthe “morality” of genes.
This raises the issue of repeated attempts to read ethical, as
well associal, traits into a natural world that is only poreniialfy
ethical insofaras it forms a basis for an objective social ethics.
Yes, coercion doesexist in nature; so does pain and suffering.
Howevu. cruelty does not.Animal intention and will are too limited
to produce an ethics of goodand ovil or kindness and cruelty.
Evidence of inferential and conceptualthought is very limited among
animals, except for primates, cetaceans,elephants, and possibly a
few othu mammals. Even among the mostintelligent animals, the
limits to thought are immense in comparisonwith tho extraordinary
capacities of socialized human beings. Admit-tedly, we are
substantially less than human today in view of our stillunknown
potential to be creative, caring, and rational. Our
prevailingsociety serves to inhibit, rather than realize. our human
potential. 1
JWe
still lack the imagination to ktiow how much our finest human
traitscould expand with an ethical, ecological, and rational
dispensation ofhuman affairs.
By contrast, the known nonhuman world sezms to have
reachedvisibly fixed limits in its capacity to survive
environmental changes. Ifmere odaprtrrion to environmental changes
is seen as the criterion forevolutionary success (as many
biologists believe), then insects wouldbavo to be placed on a higha
plane of development than any mam-malian life-form. Howova, they
would be no more capable of makingso lofty an intellectual
evaluation of themselves than a “queen bee”would be oven remotely
aware of her “nzgal” status - a status, I mayadd, that only humans
(who have suffered the social domination ofstupid. inept, and cruel
kings and queens) would be able to impute to alargely mindless
insect.
None of these remarks are meant to metaphysically oppose
natureto society or society to nature. On the contrary, they are
meant to arguethat what unites society with nature in a graded
evolutionary continuumis the remarkable extent to which human
beings, living in a rational,ecologically oriented society, could
embody the creurivity of nature -this, as distinguished from a
purely udaprive criterion of evolutionarysuccess. The gteat
achiovoments of human thought, art, science, and
-
i
36 I REMAKING SOCIETY
technology serve not only to monumentalix8 cult- lkym &u
comonumenralitr nalural rwiulion itself. They povidc hcroIc
cvI&nccthat tbc human species is a watm-blooded, excitingly
versatile. andkeenly intelligent life-form - not a cold-blooded,
gcnedcallyprogrammed, and mindkss insect - that expresses MILVC’S
gmatestpowers of creativity.
Life-forms that create and consciously alter their
cnvitunment,hopefully in ways that make it more rational nd
ceologieaI, rcpmscnt
-+a vast and indefinite extension of nature into asemaung,
perhapsunbounded, lines of evolution which no branch of insects
could ever
J achieve -notably, thccvolutionof a fully
sccf-consc&u.rnaturc. If thisbc humanism - motu prcciscly,
ecological humanism - the cumntcrop of anlihumanists and
misanthropes are wclcomc to make the mostof it.
Nature, in turn, is not a scenic view we rdmhc through a
picturewindow -a view thal is frozen into a landseapc or a static
panorama.Such’Yandseapc” imagcsofnaturcmaybe spltitually ckvatIng
buttheyare ecologically deceptive. Fixed in time and plaec, this
imagery makesil easy for us lo forget that nature is not a static
vision of the natural
1 world but the long, indeed cumulative, history of natural
development.This history involves the evolution of the inorganic,
as well as theorganic, realms of phenomena. Whercvcr we stand in an
open licld,foresl, or on a mountain top, our feel rest on ages of
development, bethey geological strata, fossils of long-cxtincl
lifcfoims, the decayingremains of the newly dead, or the quiet
stirring of newly emerging life.Nature is not a”person,” a”earing
Mother,” or, in thccrudcmaterialistlanguage of the last century,
“matter and motion.” Nor is it a mclrc“process” that involves
rcpctitivc cycles like seasonal changes and thebuilding-up and
brcakingdown process of metabolic activity-some
I
“process philosophies” to the contrary notwithstanding. Rather,
naturalhistory is a curnulqbeu&&~ loward ever mom varied.
diffcrcn-tiated. and complex forms and relationships.
This evolutionary development of increasingly varicgatcd
entities,most notably, of life-forms, is also an evolutionary
development whichcontains exciting, latent possibilities. With
variety, diffcrcntiation, andcomplexity. nature, in the course of
its own unfolding, opens newdirections for still further
dcvclopmenl along altunativolincsof natural
Society and Ecology / 37
avoludon. To the degree that anlmalr becomecomplex, calf-aware,
andIncreasingly intelligent, they begin to make those clctncntaty
choicesthat influence their own evolution. They arc less and less
tbc passiveobjects of "natural selection” and mote and more the
active subjects oftheir own development.
A brown hart that mutates intoa whitconc and sees a snow-
coveredterrain in which to camouflage itself is acting on behalf of
its ownsurvival, not simply “adapting” in order to survive. It is
not merelybeing “scleclcd” by its environment; it is selecting its
own cnvironmcntand making a choice that cxprcsscs a small measure
of subjectivity andjudgcmcnt.
‘Ihc greater the variety of habitats that emerge in the
evolutionaryprocess, the more a given life-form, particularly a
neurologically com-plex one, is likely to play an active and
judgemental role in preservingitsclf.Tothecxtcnl
thatnaturalcvolutionfollowsthispathofncurologi-cal development, it
gives rise to life-forms that excrcisc an ever-widerlatitude of
choke and a nascent form of freedom in developing them-selves.
Given this conception of nature as the cumulative history of
moredifferentiated levels of material organization (especially of
life-forms)and of increasing subjectivity, social ecology
establishes a basis for ameaningful understanding of humanity and
society’s place in naturalevolution. Natural history is not a
“catch-as-catch-can” phenomenon.It is markul by tendency, by
direction, and, ns far as human beings arcconcerned. by conscious
purpose. Human beings and the social worldsthey create can open a
rcmarkabl y expansive horixon for developmentof the natural world
-a horizon marked by consciousness, reflection,
I/
and an unprecedented freedom of choice and capacity for
consciouscreativity. The factors that reduce many life-forms to
largely adaptiveroles in changing environments am nplaced by a
capacity for con-sciously adapting environments to existing and new
life-forms.
Adaptation, in effect. increasingly gives way to creativily and
theseemingly Nthbs action of “nalural law” lo greater freedom.
Whatearlier generations called “blind nature** IO dcnoic nature’s
lack of anymoral direclion, turns into “free nature,” a nature
t&Awl@& av&e and the means to relicvc the needless
tribulations of life for allspecies in a highly conscious humanity
and M ecological society. The
-
38 /REMAKING SOCWlY
“Noah Principle” of psuving every existing life-form simply fa
itsownssk~-a~iplcadnnccdbyIhcantihuman~IkvidEhrarfeld- has little
meaning without tbc presupposition, at the vay Icrst, ofthe
existence of a “Noah” - that is, a conscious life-form called
Ihumanity that mighl well rescue life- forms that natutu itself
wouldextinguish in ice ages, land desiccation, or cosmic coWons
with
’ asteroids.’ Oriuly bears, wdvcs, pumas, and tho like, am not
dafrom extinction bcuurse they are exclusively in the %uing” hands
ofa putative “Mother Nature.” If there is any truth to the theory
that thegreat Mesozoic reptiles were extinguished by climatic
changes thatpresumably followed the collision of an asteroid with
the earth, thesurvival of existing mammals might well be just as w
in ~IKIface of an qually meaningless natural catastrophe unkss them
is a
(Iamcious. ecologically oriented life-form that has tha
technobgical
’ mutnstorcscucthun.The issue, then, is not whethcz social
evolution stands oppod to
natural evolution. The issue is how social evolution c8n be
situated in/I
natural evolution and why it has been thrown - needlessly, as I
willargue - against natural evolution to the detriment of life as a
whole.The capacity to be rational and free does not assum us that
this capacitywill be rcalixed. If social evolution is seen as tJt0
potentiality forexpanding the horizon of natural evolution along
unpfece&ntcd coca-tivc lines, and human beings arc seen as the
potentiality for nature tobccorne se+lf-conscious and fmc, the
issue we face is wliy tbese potcn-tialidcs have betn warped and how
they can be realized.
It is part of social ecology’s commitment to natural avolution
thatthese potentialities arc indeed real and that they can be
fulfilled. Thiscommiuncnt stands flatly at odds with a “sce