Rethinking nature, culture, and freedom

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Steven V. Hicks

However, having paved the way for material prosperity, political democracy, individual liberty, and the rights of difference and diversity, modernity took a number of wrong turns and soon arrived at the kind of social and political impasse that we face today. Philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Habermas, and Foucault, among many others, have spent a considerable amount of time and effort discussing modernity's mistakes; for example, how modern post-Enlightenment science became scientism, which, in turn, colonized the world of everyday life, transforming political decisions into technocratic ones. To even touch upon their analyses is far beyond the scope of this essay. My point for now is simply this: the solution to modernity's shortcomings and discontents--including its degradation of the natural environment and denigration of certain valid aspects of more traditional, premodern cultures--is not to "will backwards" and to regress to premodern social formations (as, e.g., in the case of National Socialism and its politics of Blut und Boden, or in the case of certain contemporary fundamentalist/theocratic regimes); instead, it is to be found in an effort to develop a form of postmodernity that integrates what is valid and noble about modernity, while moving beyond its current limitations and impasses. (16) And this brings us, once again, to the theme of this volume: rethinking nature, culture, and freedom. Let me briefly focus on three general aspects of this theme.

1. The problem of the physical sustainability of the natural world. Human beings at the beginning of the 21st century continue to exhaust, at an ever-increasing rate, the most accessible but nonrenewable natural resources, and they do so without being capable of replacing them with renewable resources. Likewise, they exploit these exhaustible natural resources through production methods that often destroy the natural conditions for human life without enabling us to restore those conditions. As a result, we see an unprecedented increase in concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere produced by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels at greater rates and the clearing of rainforests and vegetation from wilderness areas, leading to global warming, rising sea levels, extinction of species, and the loss of entire ecosystems. As Peter Kemp rightly notes: "We may therefore leave future generations a world with material conditions inferior to those known to us. We need education for responsibility towards the Other in a world of the future where our descendents would not have to blame us for our exploitation of physical capital." (17)

In this volume, Professor Keping Wang reminds us of the rich Chinese ethical tradition in which human and environmental interaction is considered, discussed, and valued. He further suggests that something like this ethos, creatively developed and reinterpreted into a modern pragmatic alternative for human fulfillment and ecoenvironmental protection, is what the West now requires if the natural world is to be sustained. Along similar lines, James P. Sterba urges us to rethink the requirements of "global justice" in such a way that "all living beings," and not just human beings, are taken into account. Only in doing so, he argues, can we begin to fashion geopolitical policies that will favor the long-term survival of the human species as well as the return of humans to their proper environmental niche where, unlike now, they will be in balance with the rest of the biotic community. Finally, Charles S. Brown and Marc Lucht offer up some pragmatic as well as aesthetic insights that, they believe, can better help to situate us within, rather than pit us against, the natural world. It is their hope that such alternative pragmatic, ethico-aesthetic concepts of value will begin to reorient investigations in environmental philosophy by providing a more realistic view of the relation between human beings and nature than one finds in so many contemporary environmental theories, such as "land ethics" theories, "deep ecology" theories, and "earth first" theories. If successful, their new "pragmatic realism" can perhaps better guide our future environmental thinking on matters of law, policy, and activism.