I will argue that corrupt climate science and the associated technocratic delusions are not the primary problems in the context of Political Ecology, but secondary developments made possible by a more deeper, ancient fallacy: the very idea that nature is “sacred” and that it is capable of “balance”.
In its totality, nature is value-neutral, amoral, unconscious and internally conflicted. Nature has beautiful and useful, nourishing aspects, and the primitive man relied on these entirely for his survival, but nature can be also destructive and unpredictable, and these two features seemed irreconcilable to the early man. The ancient man had to split the ‘good’ of nature (the ‘sacred mother’ that nourished the tribe) from the unpredictable destructive forces that harmed him, in order to preserve the illusion of predictable future, controllable by harmony with the ‘sacred mother’. The spectre of random annihilation by natural events was thus differentiated from the ‘sacred mother’ and typically attributed to evil spirits, gods and human magic. This ancient conceptual split had profound consequences for modern man.
If nature is sacred then the animal-in-human is also sacred, and so is the bond of man-the-animal to its natural place, whereas rational consciousness (the transcendent Human) is secondary, out of balance with nature, therefore profane. This essentially pagan/animistic ideal seeped into modern ideologies, such as “blood and soil” in the Völkisch romantic movement, or more recently reinvented as “people and place”, constituting a commitment to the primacy of the indigenous/native over non-indigenous/non-native. It is not without significance in this context that the modern term ‘Eco’ is derived from the Greek word ‘oîkos’, meaning home. In essence, the non-indigenous outsider could never “belong” to the land of the indigenous tribes and was therefore always secondary, a trespasser, always a threat to the balance with nature, a threat that had to be eliminated in order to restore the sacred balance.
Ironically, the concept of balance in nature itself a contrivance, because the natural world has no ideal state but is a process of constant transformation, mutation, emergence and extinction. When we say that natural balance is lost we typically mean only that the beautiful and useful face of nature has been damaged by death-causing pollution and physical destruction by man, but the ideological fallacy of sacredness of nature has extended the concept of imbalance to Humanity itself, specifically to the presence of non-native tribes and races on particular land, giving rise to nativist prioritarianism and indigenous supremacism. The technocrats are advocating globalism through the front door but also nativist prioritarianism and indigenous separatism though the back door of local government everywhere, presumably because it offers a means of population and movement control, as well as a method of splitting up nations into tribal micro-states that can be economically subjugated by a global administration.
In essence, by regarding nature as sacred we implicitly devalue humanity; a moral error that the aspiring technocrats are enthusiastically using against us. I suggest that in order to defeat the great technocratic deceptions we must first reject the view that nature is sacred, that it can be returned to some original balance. We must be clear on what aspects of nature are valuable (not nature as whole), why they are valuable, and how we should retain their value for future generations without undermining the source of all values, which is not nature but Humanity itself. The conception of Humanity as socially reflexive rational consciousness that generates meaning and value only collectively, by communicating in good faith with other beings of the same (rational) kind, seeing them as instances of the same fundamental value, can give us answers to all these questions.
1) To my mind, the sacredness of nature doesn't mean we should deify it at all; it rather lies in our connection to it. Humanity (and rational consciousness) seems to be an intermediary realm between the divine and nature, which means we are connected to both. Nature also seems to reflect certain aspects of the divine. In that sense, it can nourish our souls, and we have a responsibility towards it, especially the soul-nourishing aspects. (So yes, we cannot take humanity out of the picture, and we also shouldn't pretend we are "just" part of nature.) Just as it would be a mistake to confuse nature with the divine, so would it be to idealize the "noble savage". Progress is not bad in and of itself. It is about its purpose, its manifestation.
2) I understand "balance" here not as an imaginary "stand-alone" balance of ecosystems and the like, but as a balance on a higher level. Mindless unnecessary pollution and uglification of nature, to my mind, are one expression of this higher imbalance. Soul-sucking technocratic solutions are another aspect. As are soul-sucking lies, manipulations and enslavement of the mind in general.
I understand your sentiment, that there is a problem in how some humans exploit the natural world, but it seems you are flirting with the very fallacy you have previously identified (“to rule them all”), making the solution too broad or too radical for the problem at hand. I will explain.
The moral (and logical) error I am referring to would not arise only if nature were deified, but already when nature is regarded as an entity with a legitimate moral status of its own, therefore on the same moral spectrum as the moral status of humanity, and therefore in competition with the moral status of humanity. I argue that nature cannot have moral status or rights in its own right because the ontological relationship that consciousness has with nature is not the right kind to generate direct moral responsibility to nature. The short explanation is that nature is not a person (but rather the totality of things in the world that were not made by humans), and it is necessary to be a person to possess moral status; the long argument is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO
Another way, our responsibility ‘for nature’ is not responsibility ‘to nature’ but ‘to humanity’, because we all rely on various aspects of nature, and equivocating between “for” and “to” is itself a moral trap that can be amply exploited at the expense of human rights; no deification of nature is necessary to accomplish mass euthanasia or permanently locking up humans in smart cities to protect the alleged moral status of nature, even if that moral status is secondary to humans, provided someone in power decides that “we are out of balance”. I have discussed this point in more detail here: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/laudato-si-manifesto-of-moral-animism
I think I get it: nature isn't explicitly deified these days (it's secular technocracy after all), so we must guard against arguments that find a way to put nature over humanity and justify soul-sucking in the name of restoring balance. (Arguably, however, secular technocracy *implicitly* deifies nature). What I was trying to express was that I understand soul-sucking as the primary sin, so to speak, from which it follows that "locking up people in smart cities" and the like are intrinsically bad. I'm also not entirely sure that you need to be a person to have moral status (depends on the definitions I suppose), though there can be no doubt that it is of a different kind for persons. But I'll have a look at your longer argument, thanks for explaining!
"In its totality, nature is value-neutral, amoral, unconscious and internally conflicted."
This seems to me to be a quintessentially left-hemisphere definition of nature, one that conforms to the fundamentals of the 19th century naturalistic science perspective, and leaves out much of what we might worship in nature as being most sacred. There are examples of moral behaviour among animal species in the wild; higher primates and birds, for instance. Does nature consist simply of "things"/material, or is there also an inherent non-physical, consciousness aspect to nature? The naturalistic science perspective is not without its merits, but is somewhat akin to first defining "painting" as something that could only be created by Hieronymus Bosch, and then using that definition to attempt to enlighten ourselves about the mysterious and inspiring qualities of a Rubens. Such presuppositions ultimately lead to incorrect and unsatisfying conclusions, or so I think.
"There you have it: if you feel connected to your local nature instead of advocating for an abstract “planet saving,” you might as well be a deranged fascist obscurantist." Hilarious, and very good!
The conservative aspects of environmentalism have always been prominent in the United States. For examples, many huge parks are actually legally designated "Monuments." Much conservation is funded by hunters. Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold speak of wilderness as antidote. And so forth. Which is not to say we don't have many of the same problems, and others, too . . .
This literally makes me cry… how sad is it that we have learned nothing from our history and from the warnings of what is written in the bible which I know of and I’m not even a deeply religious person. When man thinks they are like God, the end is near and man does indeed believe themselves to be omnipotent now.
It blows my mind how our history is no longer valued or revered but rather smeared and ridiculed and debased simply because we live in so called modern times and have achieved some progress . It is only from looking at the past that we learn from our mistakes and we learn our lessons that guide us as to how we need to strive to live in the future. Mother Nature is so much more superior and intricate and complex and beautiful than anything man could come up with in 1000 lifetimes!
I hate the world we are forced to live in now and I can honestly say that I would choose to NOT bring children into this world where I actually have 3 grown children now who are all millennials and for their generation and the younger ones that follow all over the world these are the shittiest of times in our so called “modern” world.
I will argue that corrupt climate science and the associated technocratic delusions are not the primary problems in the context of Political Ecology, but secondary developments made possible by a more deeper, ancient fallacy: the very idea that nature is “sacred” and that it is capable of “balance”.
In its totality, nature is value-neutral, amoral, unconscious and internally conflicted. Nature has beautiful and useful, nourishing aspects, and the primitive man relied on these entirely for his survival, but nature can be also destructive and unpredictable, and these two features seemed irreconcilable to the early man. The ancient man had to split the ‘good’ of nature (the ‘sacred mother’ that nourished the tribe) from the unpredictable destructive forces that harmed him, in order to preserve the illusion of predictable future, controllable by harmony with the ‘sacred mother’. The spectre of random annihilation by natural events was thus differentiated from the ‘sacred mother’ and typically attributed to evil spirits, gods and human magic. This ancient conceptual split had profound consequences for modern man.
If nature is sacred then the animal-in-human is also sacred, and so is the bond of man-the-animal to its natural place, whereas rational consciousness (the transcendent Human) is secondary, out of balance with nature, therefore profane. This essentially pagan/animistic ideal seeped into modern ideologies, such as “blood and soil” in the Völkisch romantic movement, or more recently reinvented as “people and place”, constituting a commitment to the primacy of the indigenous/native over non-indigenous/non-native. It is not without significance in this context that the modern term ‘Eco’ is derived from the Greek word ‘oîkos’, meaning home. In essence, the non-indigenous outsider could never “belong” to the land of the indigenous tribes and was therefore always secondary, a trespasser, always a threat to the balance with nature, a threat that had to be eliminated in order to restore the sacred balance.
Ironically, the concept of balance in nature itself a contrivance, because the natural world has no ideal state but is a process of constant transformation, mutation, emergence and extinction. When we say that natural balance is lost we typically mean only that the beautiful and useful face of nature has been damaged by death-causing pollution and physical destruction by man, but the ideological fallacy of sacredness of nature has extended the concept of imbalance to Humanity itself, specifically to the presence of non-native tribes and races on particular land, giving rise to nativist prioritarianism and indigenous supremacism. The technocrats are advocating globalism through the front door but also nativist prioritarianism and indigenous separatism though the back door of local government everywhere, presumably because it offers a means of population and movement control, as well as a method of splitting up nations into tribal micro-states that can be economically subjugated by a global administration.
In essence, by regarding nature as sacred we implicitly devalue humanity; a moral error that the aspiring technocrats are enthusiastically using against us. I suggest that in order to defeat the great technocratic deceptions we must first reject the view that nature is sacred, that it can be returned to some original balance. We must be clear on what aspects of nature are valuable (not nature as whole), why they are valuable, and how we should retain their value for future generations without undermining the source of all values, which is not nature but Humanity itself. The conception of Humanity as socially reflexive rational consciousness that generates meaning and value only collectively, by communicating in good faith with other beings of the same (rational) kind, seeing them as instances of the same fundamental value, can give us answers to all these questions.
Two points:
1) To my mind, the sacredness of nature doesn't mean we should deify it at all; it rather lies in our connection to it. Humanity (and rational consciousness) seems to be an intermediary realm between the divine and nature, which means we are connected to both. Nature also seems to reflect certain aspects of the divine. In that sense, it can nourish our souls, and we have a responsibility towards it, especially the soul-nourishing aspects. (So yes, we cannot take humanity out of the picture, and we also shouldn't pretend we are "just" part of nature.) Just as it would be a mistake to confuse nature with the divine, so would it be to idealize the "noble savage". Progress is not bad in and of itself. It is about its purpose, its manifestation.
2) I understand "balance" here not as an imaginary "stand-alone" balance of ecosystems and the like, but as a balance on a higher level. Mindless unnecessary pollution and uglification of nature, to my mind, are one expression of this higher imbalance. Soul-sucking technocratic solutions are another aspect. As are soul-sucking lies, manipulations and enslavement of the mind in general.
I understand your sentiment, that there is a problem in how some humans exploit the natural world, but it seems you are flirting with the very fallacy you have previously identified (“to rule them all”), making the solution too broad or too radical for the problem at hand. I will explain.
The moral (and logical) error I am referring to would not arise only if nature were deified, but already when nature is regarded as an entity with a legitimate moral status of its own, therefore on the same moral spectrum as the moral status of humanity, and therefore in competition with the moral status of humanity. I argue that nature cannot have moral status or rights in its own right because the ontological relationship that consciousness has with nature is not the right kind to generate direct moral responsibility to nature. The short explanation is that nature is not a person (but rather the totality of things in the world that were not made by humans), and it is necessary to be a person to possess moral status; the long argument is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO
Another way, our responsibility ‘for nature’ is not responsibility ‘to nature’ but ‘to humanity’, because we all rely on various aspects of nature, and equivocating between “for” and “to” is itself a moral trap that can be amply exploited at the expense of human rights; no deification of nature is necessary to accomplish mass euthanasia or permanently locking up humans in smart cities to protect the alleged moral status of nature, even if that moral status is secondary to humans, provided someone in power decides that “we are out of balance”. I have discussed this point in more detail here: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/laudato-si-manifesto-of-moral-animism
I think I get it: nature isn't explicitly deified these days (it's secular technocracy after all), so we must guard against arguments that find a way to put nature over humanity and justify soul-sucking in the name of restoring balance. (Arguably, however, secular technocracy *implicitly* deifies nature). What I was trying to express was that I understand soul-sucking as the primary sin, so to speak, from which it follows that "locking up people in smart cities" and the like are intrinsically bad. I'm also not entirely sure that you need to be a person to have moral status (depends on the definitions I suppose), though there can be no doubt that it is of a different kind for persons. But I'll have a look at your longer argument, thanks for explaining!
"In its totality, nature is value-neutral, amoral, unconscious and internally conflicted."
This seems to me to be a quintessentially left-hemisphere definition of nature, one that conforms to the fundamentals of the 19th century naturalistic science perspective, and leaves out much of what we might worship in nature as being most sacred. There are examples of moral behaviour among animal species in the wild; higher primates and birds, for instance. Does nature consist simply of "things"/material, or is there also an inherent non-physical, consciousness aspect to nature? The naturalistic science perspective is not without its merits, but is somewhat akin to first defining "painting" as something that could only be created by Hieronymus Bosch, and then using that definition to attempt to enlighten ourselves about the mysterious and inspiring qualities of a Rubens. Such presuppositions ultimately lead to incorrect and unsatisfying conclusions, or so I think.
"There you have it: if you feel connected to your local nature instead of advocating for an abstract “planet saving,” you might as well be a deranged fascist obscurantist." Hilarious, and very good!
The conservative aspects of environmentalism have always been prominent in the United States. For examples, many huge parks are actually legally designated "Monuments." Much conservation is funded by hunters. Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold speak of wilderness as antidote. And so forth. Which is not to say we don't have many of the same problems, and others, too . . .
This literally makes me cry… how sad is it that we have learned nothing from our history and from the warnings of what is written in the bible which I know of and I’m not even a deeply religious person. When man thinks they are like God, the end is near and man does indeed believe themselves to be omnipotent now.
It blows my mind how our history is no longer valued or revered but rather smeared and ridiculed and debased simply because we live in so called modern times and have achieved some progress . It is only from looking at the past that we learn from our mistakes and we learn our lessons that guide us as to how we need to strive to live in the future. Mother Nature is so much more superior and intricate and complex and beautiful than anything man could come up with in 1000 lifetimes!
I hate the world we are forced to live in now and I can honestly say that I would choose to NOT bring children into this world where I actually have 3 grown children now who are all millennials and for their generation and the younger ones that follow all over the world these are the shittiest of times in our so called “modern” world.
Amen! Our very souls are being destroyed by the Megmachine