Natural Religion 08
Chapter eight — Continuation
Continuation
“And so I profess my Faith… The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation.”
Goodenough sees the emergent phenomenon of life as a natural miracle: “Life does generate something-more-from-nothing-but, over and over again, and each emergence, even though fully explainable by chemistry, is nonetheless miraculous”. Therefore, she argues — “the moral fabric of an earth cult is to care” for the continuation of life.
Life is a small subsystem in a peripheral corner of the universe which learned to reproduce itself. By reproducing its ability to reproduce, life was able to create a spatio-temporal continuum in the universe where life could keep existing, albeit not always in the same form because of random replication mistakes (mutations), unstable environmental pressures (climatic changes) and complex inter-life dynamics between species and individuals within a species (natural selection). Hence the life continuum is constantly evolving, with individual and species that go extinct and new ones taking their place. It is interesting to note how life, in its pursuance of continuity, has to effectively counteract the general tendency towards entropy. It is true that in the process of doing that, we actually create more total entropy, mostly in the form of heat waste. Nonetheless, life is a system able to decrease its internal entropy by feeding on the external available energy (see Schrodinger paradox).
As Deacon suggests, “life uses the second law against itself”. Life, while being subject to both the 2nd law of entropy and the power law of distribution, is not subservient to neither of them. Life is its own master: it achieves its own aim of self-perpetuation by using energy to temporarily neutralize entropy.
If we have a purpose, it’s because we are alive (if we were dead, we’d have no more purpose and just drift away). Hence the universal pre-condition in order to have purposes, the fundamental purpose, is life itself.
As Goodenough puts it, it’s like “a circle that grabs it own tail”: the mythical Ouroboros.
The purpose of life is not to be searched for outside, in the cold universe. It is rather the love for life itself, which pulses within each and every one of us. Or, in Deacon’s terms, the reciprocal synergistic constraints which hold us together and prevent our own ending.
For Goodenough, morality is thus founded on a credo of continuation — which she claims needs no further justification — and is summarised as that which helps communities and the individual members flourish, meaning, to be “well adapted to the particular environmental circumstances in which one find oneself, to be healthy and resilient and resourceful.” In short flourishing is good.
“A flourishing bacterium or tree or mouse can be said to be a good bacterium or tree or mouse. A good willow maximizes the potential for willowness in all its manifestations: bark quality, disease resistance, pollen production, […]
Social animals like ourselves […] remain self-interested, but we also cooperate in various vital activities such as food acquisition and protection from predators. Therefore, the mandate is both to flourish as an individual and to flourish in community.
A good wolf is a flourishing animal and a member of a flourishing pack; he is genetically scripted both to take care of his own needs and to cooperate with others in the hunt.”
As Darwin had realized over a century ago, even the higher moral faculties of the human species originally stem from this primeval “social instinct” which binds together “associated animals” with a “feeling of love for each other”:
“any animal […] endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience.”
Darwin calls the social instinct “sympathy”, and explains that while this feeling was initially exclusive for offspring and members of the community, natural group selection might have later helped to reinforce it, since “those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
Humans are also social animals, and so it’s no surprise if they are also born with an inherited tendency to be faithful to their comrades, and with some capacity for self-command and obedience towards the leader of their group, especially in case of danger. But what happens when the aquired instinct for social coherence clashes with the original instinct of self-preservation? Usually self-preservation wins. Self-preservation instincts like hunger or fear are too visceral to be controlled by the conscious mind, and in extreme cases they almost automatically superseed any moral consideration. Although in the case of humans, their symbolic-discursive mind cannot avoid reflection: “past impressions and images are incessantly passing through their mind with distinctness”, compelling them “to compare the [momentary] impressions of, for instance, past hunger, vengeance satisfied or danger avoided at the cost of other men, with the [persistent] feeling of sympathy and good-will to their fellows”, and eventually leading them to the realization that what they did was wrong.
This sense of dissatisfaction is — for Darwin — our conscience, which tells us to “obey the moral sense” (what we ought to do), and “reproves us if we disobey it.”
As we’ve seen at the end of chapter 5, Darwin sees the history of humanity as a continuous dilatation of sympathy from the borders of a tribe to those of a city, then to those of a nation and finally to those of the planet. At the peak of the Enlightenment, human morality found its higher expression in Kant’s categorical imperative:
“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
Kant was basing his maxim on the presupposition that “every rational being exists as an end in itself.” He was thus borrowing Artistotle’s definition of bios, which he used to mean good life or qualified life, and which — contrary to zoe — is exclusive to humans (rational animals) who live in the context of the polis. For Aristotle moral life was thus achieved by engaging in politics, and good meant good for the city.
But today the city has turned into a global civilization that monopolizes the Earth’s resources and consumes them faster than they can renew. Industrial civilization has “flourished” too much, and its existence has now become a threat to the ecological balance of the planet and ultimately to the survival of humanity itself.
It appears that once again — and this time more radically than ever — our aquired instinct for social coherence is clashing with the original instinct of self-preservation. As a species we realize that our rational and technological capacities have evolved too fast, upsetting the equilibrium of the biosphere, and now need to be rebalanced by an ecological conscience that is aware of the structural symbiosis that ties our species together with the planetary web of life, the larger system of which we are all part.
In order to define an updated moral code that can guide us out of this mess, we must conform it with what our new evolutionary cosmology tells us about the state of the world. The new categorical imperative will thus read:
“Act in accordance to the continuation of life on Earth, and hence to the preservation of a future for the human race.”
As humans, we must recognize that we are also part of life. The fundamental purpose of our existence is to act in such way as to perpetuate humanity and life as whole. In a strictly evolutionary sense, that is what we are born to do.
To live entires quite literally a responsibility (an ability to respond) towards the continuation of life itself. Based on this assumptions, we can formulate a general statement of a life-sustainable morality in thermodynamical terms, so that:
“Good is what favors the continuation of life, and bad is what accelerates its entropic decline towards death.”
The future reveals to be the most profound dimension of our new responsibility, and the ethical consequences are quite suggestive: a true love for humanity and life involves also to the generations yet to come. Traditionally, moral choices were conceived regarding the present or the immediate future, the only foreseeable time-span on which one could judge the effects of his actions. Today we know that our actions — by affecting the entropic process — will determine the living conditions of the future generations, and even the total duration of life’s journey on Earth.
Prof. Rue concludes: — “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to value anything above the enduring prospect of life.” — and goes on to argue: “If the ultimate value is the continuation of life , then it makes perfect sense to repay our gratitude for the evolutionary past by endowing the future. Everybody’s story spawns not an ancestor cult, but a descendant cult.”
The idea of ‘humanity’ implies of course all the generations that preceded us, and which prepared the ground as well as the spiritual and material contents of our lives: the cities we live in, the language we speak, the tools we use, the food we eat. We should be grateful to our ancestors who left us a chance. But we must also learn from their mistakes, since that’s the only way to live.
Humans may indeed represent life’s frontier of emerging complexity, but we must understand that increasing complexity is not the only way of life. Life is not trying to achieve complexity per se: in its effort of reproducing itself, evolutionary dynamics led life to experiment with new strategies of survival which involved complex nervous systems: as a species, we are now called to prove if this complexity path is really functional to life at all. What we bring to the table could be extremely valuable: the ability to accumulate cultural knowledge to an extent no organic life form ever could; the ability to forecast the future based on that knowledge; the ability to become aware of our own cognitive processes. But all this will end up in the dustbin of evolution, if we don’t recognize the radical interconnection and interdependence that binds us together with every other living being.
We humans must realize that we’re not the only ones nor “the chosen ones”. We are just the last borns of an immense phylogenetic descendance that goes back billions of years. We share the planet with millions of other species, and our survival is closely linked with theirs. As the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his book “Full House” (1996), for complex organisms to emerge there must be a much larger substrate of simple ones.
In what became know as the Gould curve, he showed that the ratio between simple and complex organisms is fixed and the only way to generate higher complexity is basically to “hike up the curve” — to increase the total number of living creatures.
But the planet has limited space and life’s population dynamics have always been constrained by life’s own photosynthethic efficiency, which — although miraculous — is able to use only a fraction of the total share of energy coming from the Sun. Therefore — given the current biospheric imbalance and its related threat of an imminent ecological catastrophe — our priority as humans is to consciously halt the reckless growth of our species and gradually stabilize our numbers and consumption to sustainable levels.
Professor Rue outlines the options that humans have used across our species’ history when similar imbalances have occurred. They include:
- sit back — do nothing and let starvation and disease take their course;
- hunker down — consume less;
- kill off — reduce the population via war, infanticide;
- spread out — move some of the population;
- wise-up — which is the ultimate purpose of Religious Naturalism:
“To live in harmony with reality is to have a fighting chance. But if we live at odds with reality then the odds are that we shall be prematurely swept or worn into oblivion.”
This insight, for Rue, works as a definition for wisdom:
“Wisdom just is a way of thinking that puts the odds in our favor. Wisdom is the intellectual and moral wherewithal to live in harmony with reality.”
Wisdom dictates therefore that we respond to how things are — that we recognize the global problematique and its anthropogenic causes, mostly overpopulation and overconsumption.
We need to select an appropriate option from those available:
“The wise-up option — writes Rue — opposes the denial of the sit-back option, the folly of the spread out option, the desperation of the kill-off option, and the austerity of the hunker down option. It takes seriously the limits of natural systems and seeks the social and psychological means by which our species may live sustainably within them.
[…] Wising up in response to the global problematique calls us to decouple self-esteem from destructive behaviours, and instead to link the achievement of self-esteem to behaviours that enhance the integrity of natural and social systems. This calls for a transformation of values at a very fundamental level.”
In other words Rue — in agreement with Goodenough — claims that we need a religious approach to wising up, which means that we need strategies for symbolically manipulating our emotions and behaviours.
“… by modifying key symbols it becomes possible to redirect the emotional responses (and therefore the behaviours) of individuals. The secret to wising up in response to the global problematique will be to come up with the right symbols that will engage the emotions in a new way, such that the result of our doing so will be to enhance global solidarity and cooperation. To simplify, our task is yet again to enlarge the tribe, that is, to expand by symbolic means the range of our affection, sympathy, gratitude, and guilt to include all members of our species, even those of future generations.”
Rue finally talks of a needed “transformation of social reality” with “new institutions and organisations at all levels, as well as the demise of others.”
“What is called for is a moral calculus that will motivate individuals to act in ways that will reduce population and material consumption”, he argues, and then breaks down the project into three main supporting strategies:
- ecotherapy — whose imperative is “to foster the conditions for biospheric integrity, that is, to act in ways designed to maximise biodiversity.”
- psychotherapy — whose imperative is “to act in ways that engage the abilities of persons to achieve wholeness, thereby to maximise the goods inherent in motivational systems.”
- politics — whose imperative is “to conform to social norms, thereby to maximise social solidarity and cooperation.”
But at this point we must beware of committing the same mistake of the old traditions, and become too complicit with the power establishment. The UN — the closest we have to a planetary authority — has indeed adopted some eco-friendly terminology in their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda for 2030, but their plan lacks a comprehensive transitional strategy, deals with each problem as a separate issue instead of looking at the larger picture, and often ends up mistaking a mere symptom for the problem itself.
For example, most of their “sustainable development” models are focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc.) in order to revert the infamous warming effect on global temperatures. But even if it’s true that we must shift from a fossil fuel economy to a renewables economy as fast as possible, why focus only on the temperature change? It’s a bit like trying to cure a fever by applying an ice-pack on the forehead.
This mindset leads to agreements like that of Paris, where our leaders pledged to “limit the temperature increase to +1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels instead of a projected +2 °C increase above pre-industrial levels”. That doesn’t sound like a measure aiming to solve the problem, but rather like a desperate tamper solution which can at best buy us some time and delay the inevitable disaster!
We must speak the truth to power: such an approach is perfectly useless. As the Club of Rome had admitted in their “First Global Revolution” (1993):
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together.
But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, […] namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome.”
To conclude — solving the global crisis requires a holistic approach, which means the answer doesn’t lie in battling with symptoms like temperature, but in addressing every aspect at once and getting to the root cause of the disease. After decades of irresponsible procrastination our civilization is truly on the verge of collapse and needs to be reset. We’re not going to save ourselves by aiming at half a degree more or less, but by radically changing how we live, as individuals and members of a planetary society: our habits, relationships, organizations, laws and moral values. In Indira Gandhi’s inimitable words:
“The inherent conflict is not between conservation and development, but between environment and reckless exploitation of man and earth in the name of efficiency. Historians tell us that the modern age began with the will to freedom of the individual. And the individual came to believe that he had rights with no corresponding obligations. The man who got ahead was the one who commanded admiration. No questions were asked as to the methods employed or the price which others had to pay. The industrial civilization has promoted the concept of the efficient man, he whose entire energies are concentrated on producing more in a given unit of time and from a given unit of manpower. Groups or individuals who ar less competitive and according to this test, less efficient are regarded as lesser breeds — for example the older civilizations, the black and brown peoples, women and certain professions. Obsolescence is built into production, and efficiency is based on the creation of goods which are not really needed and which cannot be disposed of when discarded. What price such efficiency now, and is not recklessness a more appropriate term for such a behaviour?[…]
All the `isms’ of the modern age — even those which in theory disown the private profit principle — assume that man’s cardinal interest is acquisition. The profit motive, individual or collectives, seems to overshadow all else. This overriding concern with self and Today is the basic cause of the ecological crisis.[…]
Pollution is not a technical problem. The fault lies not in science and technology as such but in the sense of values of the contemporary world which ignores the rights of others and is oblivious of the longer perspective.[…]
The most urgent and basic question is that of peace. Nothing is so pointless as modern warfare. Nothing destroys so instantly, so completely as the diabolic weapons which not only kill but maim and deform the living and the yet to be born; which poison the land, leaving long trails of ugliness, barrenness and hopeless desolation. What ecological projects can survive a war? […]
It is clear that the environmental crisis which is confronting the world, will profoundly alter the future destiny of our planet. No one among us, whatever our status, strength or circumstance can remain unaffected. The process of change challenges present international policies. Will the growing awareness of “one earth” and “one environment” guide us to the concept of “one humanity”?Will there be a more equitable sharing of environmental costs and greater international interest in the accelerated progress of the less developed world? Or, will it remain confined to a narrow concern, based on exclusive self-sufficiency?
…Life is one and the world is one, and all these questions are inter-linked. The population explosion; poverty; ignorance and disease, the pollution of our surroundings, the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and biological and chemical agents of destruction are all parts of a vicious circle. Each is important and urgent but dealing with them one by one would be wasted effort.
It serves little purpose to dwell on the past or to apportion blame, no one of us is blameless. If some are able to dominate over others, it is at least partially due to the weakness, the lack of unity and the temptation of gaining some advantage on the part of those who submit. If the prosperous have been exploiting the needy, can we honestly claim that in our own societies people do not take advantage of the weaker sections? We must re-evaluate the fundamentals on which our respective civic societies are based and the ideals by which they are sustained. If there is to be a change of heart, a change of direction and methods of functioning, it is not an organization or a country-no matter how well intentioned — which can achieve it. While each country must deal with that aspect of the problem which is most relevant to it, it is obvious that all countries must unite in an overall endeavour. There is no alternative to a cooperative approach on a global scale to the entire spectrum of our problems. […]
We do not want to put the clock back or resign ourselves to a simplistic natural state. We want new directions in the wiser use of the knowledge and tools with which science has equipped us. And this cannot be just one upsurge but a continuous search into cause and effect and an unending effort to match technology with higher levels of thinking. We must concern ourselves not only with the kind of world we want but also with what kind of man should inhabit it. Surely we do not desire a society divided into those who condition and those who are conditioned. We want thinking people capable of spontaneous self-directed activity, people who are interested and interesting, and who are imbued with compassion and concern for others. […]
It will not be easy for large societies to change their style of living. They cannot be coerced to do so, nor can governmental action suffice. People can be motivated and urged to participate in better alternatives. […] It has been my experience that people who are at cross purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill-at-ease with themselves. Modern man must re-establish an unbroken link with nature and with life. He must again learn to invoke the energy of growing things and to recognize, as did the ancients in India centuries ago, that one can take from the Earth and the atmosphere only so much as one puts back into them. In their hymn to Earth, the sages of the Atharva Veda chanted — I quote:
<<What of thee I dig out, let that quickly grow over,
Let me not hit thy vitals, or thy heart.>>
So can man himself be vital and of good heart and
conscious of his responsibility.”
