Chapter 2 : 
Nature, First and Second
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19971997

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Author : Murray Bookchin

Editor : Janet Biehl

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Chapter 2: Nature, First and Second

Introduction

Amid the technological enchantment of the 1950s, proponents of
organic farming, like Bookchin himself, had to defend organic
agricultural techniques against the scorn of federal agencies and
the chemical industry, both of which were busily making pesticides
into agricultural commonplaces. Unlike today, when the value
of organic farming is recognized, in those years its value had to be
fought for.

As part of that struggle to defend organic farming, Bookchin
borrowed the concept “unity in diversity” from the German idealist
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Recast as a principle of organic
agriculture, the concept suggested an alternative farming technique
that was able to rid crops of pests, without the use of carcinogenic
pesticides. Unlike the monocultures that demanded pesticide use,
a diversity of crops in one field could play off potential pests against
one another, leaving the crops themselves pest-free. And unlike
monocultures, which are susceptible to complete destruction with
one pest infestation, ecosystems that are highly diversified yield
optimal stability. “Unity in diversity” became a catchword for
stability, not only in organic agriculture but in ecosystems generally;
it entered the vocabulary of the ecology movement as a concept
underpinning the value of diverse species in an ecosystem.

Once organic agriculture gained a measure of acceptance,
however, Bookchin himself began to use the phrase “unity in
diversity” in a different sense, giving it a more dynamic interpretation.
While stability can strengthen an ecosystem, he maintained,
it cannot make for species variegation. Diversity plays an
important role in producing not only stability but change and
innovation. Indeed, without diversification natural evolution could
not occur. Today, Bookchin uses the phrase “unity in diversity” to
refer to the increasing differentiation that a self-formative
biosphere undergoes, within the natural continuum of evolutionary
processes.

This evolutionary emphasis is what markedly distinguishes
Bookchin’s philosophy of nature from that of other schools of
ecological-political thought today. Natural evolution, he has long
argued, encompasses not only a strictly biological realm (or “first
nature”) but also a social realm (or “second nature”).[21] Far from
being inherently antagonistic to each other, first and second nature
are actually two aspects of one continuum, Bookchin maintainsat
once separate from each other but also mutually imbricated in
a shared evolutionary process. Human beings and human society,
with their potentialities for self-consciousness and freedom, differ
in profound respects from first nature yet emerge from and
incorporate it in a graded development.

Perhaps of most interest to social ecology, the evolutionary
processes in first nature generate increasing complexity and subjectivity
in life-forms. Consciousness has evolved in a cumulative process,
from the simple reactivity of unicellular organisms, to the neurological
activity of mammals and reptiles, to a culmination in human
intellection. As life-forms attain higher levels of subjectivity, they
are able to exercise greater choice in selecting and even improving
their own ecological niches.

The dim, emergent subjectivity in first nature can make only
rudimentary “choices,” but in second nature human beings,
possessed of the highest level of subjectivity, are capable of actively
and consciously altering their environments, of shaping the societies
in which they live — and of creating the ecological society that
integrates town and country, or first and second nature, in what
Bookchin would later call “free nature.”

At first glance, the great significance Bookchin attaches to human
consciousness would seem to represent a sharp demarcation
between human and nonhuman nature in his thought, one that
sets human beings on an entirely different plane from the rest of
the natural world. And it is true that he considers humanity as a
radically new development in natural evolution, manifesting the
potentiality for self-consciouseness, freedom, and innovation. He
does regard human consciousness as qualitatively different from
that of other life-forms. But by his use of the categories of first and
second nature, he also emphasizes the rootedness of human beings
in nonhuman nature.

In the mid-1980s a tendency arose within the ecology movement
that denigrated the notion that human beings are in any way
superior or more advanced than other life-forms in the biosphere.
Blaming human-centered ness, or “anthropocentrism,” as the cause
of the ecological crisis, deep ecology — with its fundamental precept
of biocentrism — advanced a notion of “biospheric democracy,”
which saw human beings as having “intrinsic worth” equal to that
of any other species. Bookchin’s sharp criticism of this tendency is
rooted in two conflicting views of humanity’s relationship to the rest
of the natural world. Where biocentrism would reduce human
beings into “plain citizens” of the biosphere, morally interchangeable
with other life-forms, social ecology asserts that human beings
are unique in natural evolution. By virtue of their powers of thought
and communication, they have the ability to create and even the
responsibility to achieve a harmonious, indeed creative relationship
with the first nature.

The nineteenth-century philosopher Johann Fichte once
remarked that humanity is nature rendered self-conscious. Although
this view has sometimes been attributed to Bookchin as
well, he actually maintains that second nature has thus far fallen
short of realizing humanity’s potentiality for creating a liberatory
society and an integrative relationship with the nonhuman world.
“Where Fichte patently erred was in his assumption that a possibility
is a fact,” he wrote in The Ecology of Freedom.



We are no more nature rendered self-conscious than we are
humanity rendered self-conscious. Reason may give us the capacity
to play this role, but we and our society are still totally irrationalindeed,
we are cunningly dangerous to ourselves and all that lives
around us.[22]



He therefore modifies Fichte’s statement to argue that humanity is
potentially nature rendered self-conscious — that it would actualize
that potential only if it were to create an ecological society.

Images of First Nature

(from “What Is Social Ecology?” 1984)

More than any single notion in the history of religion and pl<lilosophy,
the image of a blind, mute, cruel, competitive, and stingy nature has
opened a wide, often unbridgeable chasm between the social world and
the natural world and, in its more exotic ramifications, between mind
and body, subject and object, reason and physicality, technology and
“raw materials,” indeed the whole gamut of dualisms that have
fragmented not only the world of nature and society but the human
psyche and its biological matrix....

What distinguishes social ecology is that it negates the traditionally
harsh image of the natural world and its evolution. And it does so not
by dissolving the social into the natural, like sociobiology, or by
imparting mystical properties to nature that place it beyond the reach
of human comprehension and rational insight. Instead, social ecology
places the human mind, like humanity itself, within a natural context
and explores it in terms of its own natural history, so that the sharp
cleavage between thought and nature, subject and object, mind and
body, and the social and natural are overcome, and the traditional
dualisms of western culture are transcended by an evolutionary
interpretation of consciousness with its rich wealth of gradations over
the course of natural history.

Social ecology “radicalizes” nature — or more precisely, our understanding
of natural phenomena — by questioning, from an ecological
standpoint, the prevailing marketplace image of nature: nature not as
a constellation of communities that are blind or mute, cruel or
competitive, stingy or necessitarian, but, freed of all anthropocentric
moral trappings, as a participatory realm of interactive life-forms whose
most outstanding attributes are fecundity, creativity, and directiveness,
marked by a complementarity that renders the natural world the
grounding for an ethics of freedom rather than domination.

From an ecological standpoint, life-forms are related in an ecosystem
not by the “rivalries” and competitive attributes imputed to them by
Darwinian orthodoxy, but by the mutualistic attributes emphasized by
a growing number of contemporary ecologists — an image pioneered
by Peter Kropotkin. Indeed, social ecology challenges the very premises
of the “fitness” that enters into the Darwinian drama of evolutionary
development, with its fixation on survival rather than differentiation
and fecundity. As William Trager has emphasized in his insightful work
on symbiosis:



The conflict in nature between different kinds of organisms has been
popularly expressed in phrases like the “struggle for existence” and the
“survival of the fittest.” Yet few people have realized that mutual
cooperation between organisms — symbiosis — is just as important, and
that the “fittest” may be the one that helps another to survive.[23]



It is tempting to go beyond this pithy and highly illuminating
judgment to explore an ecological notion of natural evolution based
on the development of ecosystems, not merely individual species. This
is a concept of evolution as the dialectical development of evervariegated,
complex, and increasingly fecund contexts of plant-animal
communities, as distinguished from the traditional notion of biological
evolution based on the atomistic development of single life-forms, a
characteristically entrepreneurial concept of the isolated “individual,”
be it animal, plant, or bourgeois — a creature that fends for itself and
either survives or perishes in a marketplace “jungle.” As ecosystems
become more complex and open a greater variety of evolutionary
pathways, due to their own richness of diversity, increasingly flexible
species themselves, in mutualistic complexes as well as singly, introduce
a dim element of “choice” — by no means intersubjective or willful in
the human meaning of these terms.

Concomitantly, these ensembles of species alter the environment of
which they are part and exercise an increasingly active role in their own
evolution. Life, in this ecological conception of evolution, ceases to be
the passive tabula rasa on which eternal forces that we loosely call “the
environment” inscribe the destiny of a “species,” an atomistic term
that is meaningless outside the context of an ecosystem and other
species.

Life is active, interactive, procreative, relational, and contextual. It
is not a passive lump of “stuff,” a form of metabolic matter that awaits
the action of forces external to it and that is mechanically shaped by
them. Ever striving and always producing new life-forms, there is a
sense in which life is self-directive in its own evolutionary development,
not passively reactive to an inorganic or organic world that impinges
upon it from outside and determines its destiny in isolation from the
ecosystem that it constitutes and of which it is a part.

Our studies of “food webs” (a not quite satisfactory term for
describing the interactivity that occurs in an ecosystem or, more
properly, an ecological community) demonstrate that the complexity
of biotic interrelationships, their diversity, and their intricacy are crucial
in an ecosystem’s stability. In contrast to biotically complex temperate
zones, relatively simple desert and arctic ecosystems are very fragile
and break down easily with the loss or numerical decline of only a few
species. The thrust of biotic evolution over greater eras of organic
evolution has been toward the increasing diversification of species and
their interlocking into highly complex, basically mutualistic relationships,
without which the widespread colonization of the planet by life
would have been impossible.

Unity in diversity (a concept deeply rooted in the western
philosophical tradition) is not only the determinant of an ecosystem’s
stability; it is the source of an ecosystem’s fecundity, of its innovativeness,
of its evolutionary potential to create newer, still more
complex life-forms and biotic interrelationships, even in the most
inhospitable areas of the planet. Ecologists have not sufficiently stressed
the fact that a multiplicity of life-forms and organic interrelationships
in a biotic community opens new evolutionary pathways of
development, a greater variety of evolutionary interactions, variations,
and degrees of flexibility in the capacity to evolve, and is hence crucial
not only in the community’s stability but also in its innovativeness in
the natural history of life.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly
mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.
Society, in turn, attains its “truth,” its self-actualization, in the form
of richly articulated, mutualistic networks of people based on
community, roundedness of personality, diversity of stimuli and
activities, an increasing wealth of experience, and a variety of tasks.

Is this grading of ecosystem diversity into social diversity, based on
humanly scaled decentralized communities, merely analogical reasoning?
My answer would be that it is not a superficial analogy but a deepseated
continuity between nature and society that social ecology
recovers from traditional nature philosophy, without its archaic dross
of cosmic hierarchies, static absolutes, and cycles. In the case of social
ecology, it is not in the particulars of differentiation that plant-animal
communities are ecologically united with human communities; rather,
it is the logic of differentiation that makes it possible to relate the
mediations of nature and society into a continuum.

What makes unity in diversity in nature more than a suggestive
ecological metaphor for unity in diversity in society is the underlying
fact of wholeness. By wholeness I do not mean any finality of closure
in a development, any “totality” that leads to a terminal “reconciliation”
of all “Being” in a complete identity of subject and object or a
reality in which no further development is possible or meaningful.
Rather, I mean varying degrees of the actualization of potentialities,
the organic unfolding of the wealth of particularities that are latent in
the as-yet-undeveloped potentiality. This potentiality can be a newly
planted seed, a newly born infant, a newly formed community, a newly
emerging society. Given their radically different specificity, they are all
united by a processual reality, a shared “metabolism” of development,
a unified catalysis of growth as distinguished from mere “change” that
provides us with the most insightful way of understanding them that
we can possibly achieve.

Wholeness is literally the unity that finally gives order to the
particularity of each of these phenomena; it is what has emerged from
the process, what integrates the particularities into a unified form, what
renders the unity an operable reality and a “being” in the literal sense
of the term — an order as the actualized unity of its diversity from the
flowing and emergent process that yields its self-realization, the fixing
of its directiveness into a clearly contoured form, and the creation in
a dim sense of “self” that is identifiable with respect to “others” with
which it interacts. Wholeness is the relative completion of a phenomenon’s
potentiality, the fulfillment of latent possibility as such, all its
concrete manifestations aside, to become more than the realm of mere
possibility and attain the “truth” or fulfilled reality of possibility. To
think this way — in terms of potentiality, process, mediation, and
wholeness — is to reach into the most underlying nature of things, just
as to know the biography of a human being and the history of a society
is to know them in their authentic reality and depth.

The natural world is no less encompassed by this processual dialectic
and developmental ecology than the 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 all the potentialities and particularities that
it has immanently produced from the logic of its own nascent forms of
self-organization. Obviously, so does society as distinguished from
biology, humanity as distinguished from animality, and individuality
as distinguished from humanity in the generic sense of the word. But
these distinctions are not absolutes. They are the unique and closely
interrelated phases of a shared continuum, of a process that is united
precisely by its own differentiations, just as the phases through which
an embryo develops are both distinct from and incorporated into its
complete gestation and its organic specificity.

This continuum is not simply a philosophical construct. It is an earthy
anthropological fact that lives with us daily as surely as it explains the
emergence of humanity out of mere animality. Individual socialization
is the highly nuanced “biography” of that development in everyday life
and in everyone, as surely as the anthropological socialization of our
species is part of its history. I refer to the biological basis of all human
socialization: the protracted infancy of the human child that renders
its cultural development possible, in contrast to the rapid growth of
nonhuman animals, a rate of growth that quickly forecloses their ability
to form a culture and develop sibling affinities of a lasting nature; the
instinctual drives that extend feelings of care, sharing, intimate
consociation, and finally love and a sense of responsibility for one’s
own kin into the institutional forms we call society; and the sexual
division of labor, age-ranking, and kin-relationships that, however
culturally conditioned and even mythic in some cases, formed and still
inform so much of social institutionalization today. These formative
elements of society rest on biological facts and, placed in the contextual
analysis I have argued for, require ecological analysis.

Participatory Evolution

(from “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” 1986, rev. 1994)

Ecologists generally treat diversity as a source of ecological stability,
in the belief that while the vulnerability to pests of a single crop treated
with pesticides can reach alarming proportions, a more diversified crop,
in which a number of plant and animal species interact, produces
natural checks on pest populations.

But the fact that biotic — and social — evolution has been marked
until recently by the development of ever more complex species and
ecocommunities raises an even more challenging issue. The diversity
of an ecocommunity may be a source of greater stability from an
agricultural standpoint; but from an evolutionary standpoint, it may
be an ever-expanding, albeit nascent source of freedom within nature,
a medium for providing varying degrees of choice, self-directiveness, and participation by life-forms in their own development.

I wish to propose that the evolution of living beings is no mere passive
process, the product of exclusively chance conjunctions between
random genetic changes and “selective” environmental “forces,” and
that the “origin of species” is no mere result of external influences that
determine the “fitness” of a life-form to survive as a result of random
factors in which life is simply an object of an indeterminable “selective”
process. The increase in diversity in the biosphere opens new evolutionary pathways, indeed, alternative evolutionary directions, in
which species play an active role in their own survival and change.

However nascent, choice is not totally absent from biotic evolution;
indeed, it increases as species become structurally, physiologically, and
above all neurologically more complex. As the ecological contexts
within which species evolve — the communities and interactions they
form — become more complex, they open new avenues for evolution
and a greater ability of life-forms to act self-selectively, forming the
bases for some kind of choice, favoring precisely those species that can
participate in ever-greater degrees in their own evolution, basically in
the direction of greater complexity. Indeed, species and the
ecocommunities in which they interact to create more complex forms
of evolutionary development are increasingly the very “forces” that
account for evolution as a whole.

“Participatory evolution,” as I call this view, is somewhat at odds
with the prevalent Darwinian or neo-Darwinian syntheses, in which
nonhuman life-forms are primarily “objects” of selective forces
exogenous to them. No less is it at odds with Henri Bergson’s “creative
evolution,” with its semimystical elan vital. Ecologists, like biologists,
have yet to come to terms with the notion that symbiosis (not only
“struggle”) and participation (not only “competition”) factor in the
evolution of species. The prevalent view of nature still stresses the
exclusively necessitarian character of the natural world. An immense
literature, both artistic and scientific, stresses the “cruelty” of a nature
that bears no witness to the suff~ring of life and that is “indifferent”
to cries of pain in the “struggle for existence.” “Cruel” nature, in this
imagery, offers no solace for extinction — merely an all-embracing
darkness of meaningless motion to which humanity can oppose only
the light of its culture and mind. Such formulations impart a
sophisticated ethical dimension to the natural world that is more
anthropomorphic than meaningful.

But even if the formulation is anthropomorphic, it bespeaks a
presence in natural evolution — subjectivity, and specifically human
consciousness — that cannot be ignored in formulating an evolutionary
theory. We may reasonably claim that human will and freedom, at least
as self-consciousness and self-reflection, have their own natural history
in potentialities of the natural world — in contrast to the view that they
are sui generis, the product of a rupture with the whole of development
so unprecedented and unique that it contradicts the gradedness of all
phenomena from the antecedent potentialities that lie behind and within
every processual “product.” Such claims are intended to underwrite
our efforts to deal with the natural world as we choose — indeed, as
Marx put it in the Grundrisse, to regard nature merely as “an object
for mankind, purely a matter of utility.”

The dim choices that animals exercise in their own evolution should
not be confused with the will and degree of intentionality that human
beings exhibit in their social lives. Nor is the nascent freedom that is
rendered possible by natural complexity comparable to the ability of
humans to make rational decisions. The differences between the two
are qualitative, however much they can be traced back to the evolution
of all animals....

Despite the monumental nature of his work, Darwin did not fully
organicize evolutionary theory. He brought a profound evolutionary
sensibility to the “origin of species,” but in the minds of his acolytes
species still stood somewhere between inorganic machines and
mechanically functioning organisms. No less significant are the
empirical origins of Darwin’s own work, which are deeply rooted in
the Lockean atomism that nourished nineteenth-century British science
as a whole. Allowing for the nuances that appear in all great books,
The Origin of Species accounts for the way in which individual species
originate, evolve, adapt, survive, change, or pay the penalty of
extinction as if they were fairly isolated from their environment. In
that account, any one species stands for the world of life as a whole,
in isolation from the life-forms that normally interact with it and with
which it is interdependent. Although predators depend upon their
prey, to be sure, Darwin portrays the strand from ancestor to
descendant in lofty isolation, such that early eohippus rises, step by
step, from its plebeian estate to attain the aristocratic grandeur of a
sleek racehorse. The paleontological diagraming of bones from
former “missing links” to the culminating beauty of Equus cabal/us
more closely resembles the adaptation of Robinson Crusoe from an
English seafarer to a self-sufficient island dweller than the reality of
a truly emerging being.

This reality is contextual in an ecological sense. The horse lived not
only among its predators and food but in creatively interactive
relationships with a great variety of plants and animals. It evolved not
alone but in ever-changing ecocommunities, such that the “rise” of
Equus cabal/us occurred conjointly with that of other herbivores that
shared and maintained their grasslands and even played a major role in
creating them. The string of bones that traces eohippus to Equus is
evidence of the succession of ecocommunities in which the ancestral
animal and its descendants interacted with other life-forms.

One could more properly modify The Origin of Species to read as
the evolution of ecocommunities as well as the evolution of species.
Indeed, placing the community in the foreground of evolution does not
deny the integrity of species, their capacity for variation, or their unique
lines of development. Species become vital participants in their own
evolution — active beings, not merely passive components — taking full
account of their nascent freedom in the natural process.

Nor are will and reason sui generis. They have their origins in the
growing choices conferred by complexity and in the alternative
pathways opened by the growth of complex ecocommunities and the
development of increasingly complex neurological systems — in short,
processes that are both internal and external to life-forms. To speak of
evolution in very broad terms tends to conceal the specific evolutionary
processes that make up the overall process.

Many anatomical lines of evolution have occurred: the evolution of
the various organs that freed life-forms from their aquatic milieu; of
eyes and ears, which sophisticated their awareness of the surrounding
environment; and of the nervous system, from nerve networks to brains.
Thus, mind too has its evolutionary history in the natural world, and
as the neurological capability of life-forms to function more actively
and flexibly increases, so too does life itself help create new evolutionary
directions that lead to enhanced self-awareness and self-activity.
Selfhood appears germinally in the communities that life-forms establish
as active agents in their own evolution, contrary to conventional
evolutionary theory.

Society as Second Nature

(from Remaking Society, 1989)

Society itself in its most primal form stems very much from nature. Every
social evolution, in fact, is virtually an extension of natural evolution
into a distinctly human realm. As the Roman orator and philosopher
Cicero declared some two thousand years ago: “by the use of our hands
we bring into being within the realm of Nature, a second nature for
ourselves.” Cicero’s observation, to be sure, is very incomplete: the
primeval, presumably untouched “realm of Nature” or “first nature,”
as it has been called, is reworked in whole or part into “second nature”
not only by the use of our hands. Thought, language, and complex, very
important biological changes also play a crucial and, at times, a decisive
role in developing a second nature within first nature.

I use the term reworking advisedly to focus on the fact that second
nature is not simply a phenomenon that develops outside of first
nature — hence the special value that should be attached to Cicero’s
expression “within the realm of Nature.” To emphasize that second
nature, or more precisely society {to use this word in its broadest
possible sense), emerges from within primeval first nature is to
reestablish the fact that social life always has a naturalistic dimension,
however much society is pitted against nature in our thinking. Social
ecology clearly expresses the fact that society is not a sudden eruption
into the world. Social life does not necessarily face nature as a
combatant in an unrelenting war. The emergence of society is a natural
fact that has its origins in the biology of human socialization.

The human socialization process from which society emerges — be it
in the form of families, bands, tribes, or more complex types of human
intercourse — has its source in parental relationships, particularly mother
and child bonding. The biological mother, to be sure, can be replaced
in this process by many surrogates, including fathers, relatives, or for
that matter, all members of a community. It is when social parents and
social siblings — that is, the human community that surrounds the
young — begin to participate in a system of care, that is ordinarily
undertaken by biological parents, that society begins to truly come into
its own.

Society thereupon advances beyond a mere reproductive group
toward institutionalized human relationships, and from a relatively
formless animal community into a clearly structured social order. But
at the very inception of society, it seems more than likely that human
beings were socialized into second nature by means of deeply ingrained
blood ties, specifically maternal ties.... Reproduction and family care
remain the abiding biological bases for every form of social life as well
as the originating factor in the socialization of the young and the
formation of a society. As Robert Briffault observed in the early half
of this century, the “one known factor which establishes a profound
distinction between the constitution of the most rudimentary human
group and all other animal gr.oups [is the] association of mothers and
offspring which is the sole form of true social solidarity among animals.
Throughout the class of mammals, there is a continuous increase in the
duration of that association, which is the consequence of the
prolongation of the period of infantile dependence,”[24] a prolongation
that Briffault correlates with increases in the period of fetal gestation
and advances in intelligence.

The biological dimension that Briffault adds to society and
socialization cannot be stressed too strongly. It is a decisive presence,
not only in the origins of society over ages of animal evolution, but in
the daily recreation of society in our everyday lives. The appearance of
a newly born infant and the highly extended care it receives for many
years reminds us that it is not only a human being that is being
reproduced, but society itself. By comparison with the young of other
species, children develop slowly and over a long period of time. Living
in close association with parents, siblings, kin groups, and an everwidening
community of people, they retain a plasticity of mind that
makes for creative individuals and ever-formative social groups.
Although nonhuman animals may approximate human forms of
association in many ways, they do not create a second nature that
embodies a cultural tradition; nor do they possess a complex language,
elaborate conceptual powers, or an impressive capacity to restructure
their environment purposefully according to their own needs.

A chimpanzee, for example, remains an infant for only three years
and a juvenile for seven. By the age of ten, it is a full-grown adult.
Children, by contrast, are regarded as infants for approximately six
years and juveniles for fourteen. A chimpanzee, in short, grows mentally
and physically in about half the time required by a human being, and
its capacity to learn, or at least to think, is already fixed by comparison
with a human being, whose mental abilities may expand for decades.
By the same token, chimpanzee associations are often idiosyncratic and
fairly limited. Human associations, on the other hand, are basically
stable, highly institutionalized, and marked by a degree of solidarity,
indeed by a degree of creativity, that has no equal in nonhuman species
as far as we know.

This prolonged degree of human mental plasticity, dependency, and
social creativity yields two results that are of decisive importance. First,
early human association must have fostered a strong predisposition for
interdependence among members of a group — not the “rugged
individualism” we associate with independence. The overwhelming
mass of anthropological evidence suggests that participation, mutual
aid, solidarity, and empathy were the social virtues early human groups
emphasized within their communities. The idea that people are
dependent upon each other for the good life, indeed for survival,
followed from the prolonged dependence of the young upon adults.
Independence, not to mention competition, would have seemed utterly
alien, if not bizarre, to a creature reared over many years in a largely
dependent condition. Care for others would have been seen as the
perfectly natural outcome of a highly acculturated being that was, in
turn, clearly in need of extended care. Our modern version of
individualism, more precisely of egotism, would have cut across the
grain of early solidarity and mutual aid — traits, I may add, without
which such a physically fragile animal as a human being could hardly
have survived as an adult, much less as a child.

Second, human interdependence must have assumed a highly
structured form. There is no evidence that human beings normally relate
to each other through the fairly loose systems of bonding found among
our closest primate cousins. That human social bonds can be dissolved
or deinstitutionalized in periods of radical change or cultural
breakdown is too obvious to argue here. But during relatively stable
conditions, human society was never the “horde” that anthropologists
of the last century presupposed as a basis for rudimentary social life.
On the contrary, the evidence points to the fact that all humans, perhaps
even our distant hominid ancestors, lived in some kind of structured
family groups, and later in bands, tribes, villages, and other forms. In
short, they bonded together (as they still do), not only emotionally and
morally but also structurally in contrived, clearly definable, and fairly
permanent institutions.

Nonhuman animals may form loose communities and even take
collective protective postures to defend their young from predators.
But such communities can hardly be called structured, except in a
broad, often ephemeral sense. Humans, by contrast, create highly
formal communities that tend to become increasingly structured over
the course of time. In effect, they form not only communities but a new
phenomenon called societies.

If we fail to distinguish animal communities from human societies,
we risk minimizing the unique features that distinguish human social
life from animal communities — notably, the ability of society to change
for better or worse and the factors that produce these changes. By the
same token, if we reduce a complex society to a mere community, we
risk ignoring how societies differed from each other over the course of
history, and understanding how simple differences in status were
elaborated into firmly established hierarchies, or hierarchies into
economic classes. Indeed, we risk misunderstanding the very meaning
of the term hierarchy, which actually refers to highly organized systems
of command and obedience — as distinguished from personal,
individual, and often short-lived differences in status that in many cases
involve no acts of compulsion. We tend, in effect, to confuse the strictly
institutional creations of human will, purpose, conflicting interests,
and traditions, with community life in its most fixed forms, as though
we were dealing with inherent, unalterable features of society rather
than fabricated structures that can be modified, improved, worsenedor
simply abandoned.

The trick of every ruling elite from the beginning of history to modern
times has been to identify its own socially created hierarchical systems
of domination with community life as such, with the result that human-made
institutions acquire divine or biological sanction. A given society
and its institutions thus tend to become reified into permanent and
unchangeable entities that acquire a mysterious life of their own apart
from nature — namely, the products of a seemingly fixed “human
nature” that is the result of genetic programming at the very inception
of social life. When annoying issues like war and social conflict are
raised, they are ascribed to the activity of genes....

Social ecology ... avoids the simplicities of dualism and the crudities
of reductionism by trying to show how nature slowly phases into
society, without ignoring the differences between society and nature
on the one hand, and the extent to which they merge with each other,
on the other. The everyday socialization of the young by the family is
no less rooted in biology than the everyday care of the old by the
medical establishment is rooted in the hard facts of society. By the same
token, we never cease to be mammals who still have primal natural
urges, but we institutionalize these urges and their satisfaction in a wide
variety of social forms. Hence the social and the natural continually
permeate each other in the most ordinary activities of daily life without
losing their identity in a shared process of interaction, indeed of
interactivity.

Obvious as this may seem at first in such day-to-day problems as
caretaking, social ecology raises questions that have far-reaching
importance for the different ways society and nature have interacted
over time and the problems these interactions have produced. How did
a divisive, indeed seemingly combative relationship between humanity
and nature emerge? What were the institutional forms and ideologies
that rendered this conflict possible? Given the growth of human needs
and technology, was such a conflict really unavoidable? And can it be
overcome in a future, ecologically-oriented society?

How would a rational, ecologically-oriented society fit into the
processes of natural evolution? Even more broadly, is there any reason
to believe that the human mind — itself a product of natural evolution
as well as culture — represents a decisive high point in natural
development, notably in the long development of subjectivity from the
sensitivity and self-maintenance of the simplest life-forms to the
remarkable intellectuality and self-consciousness of the most complex?

In asking these highly provocative questions, I am not trying to
justify a strutting arrogance toward nonhuman life-forms. Clearly, we
must bring humanity’s uniqueness as a species, marked by rich
conceptual, social, imaginative, and constructive attributes, into
synchronicity with nature’s fecundity, diversity, and creativity. This
synchronicity will not be achieved by opposing nature to society,
nonhuman to human life-forms, natural fecundity to technology, or a
natural subjectivity to the human mind. Indeed, an important result
that emerges from a discussion of the interrelationship of nature to
society is the fact that human intellectuality, although distinct, also
has a far-reaching natural basis. Our brains and nervous systems did
not suddenly spring into existence without a long antecedent natural
history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our
extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels — can
be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the
ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an
amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

Here too, in the most intimate of our human attributes, we are no
less products of natural evolution than we are of social evolution. As
human beings we incorporate without ourselves eons of organic
differentiation and elaboration. Like all complex life-forms, we are not
only part of natural evolution; we are also its heirs and the products
of natural fecundity.

In trying to show how society slowly grows out of nature, however,
social ecology is also obliged to show how society itself undergoes
differentiation and elaboration. In doing so, social ecology must
examine those junctures in social evolution where splits occurred that
slowly brought society into opposition to the natural world, and
explain how this opposition emerged from its inception in prehistoric
times to our own era. Indeed, if the human species is a life-form that
can consciously and richly enhance the natural world rather than
simply damage it, it is important for social ecology to reveal the factors
that have rendered many human beings into parasites on the world of
life rather than active partners in organic evolution. This project must
be undertaken not in a haphazard way, but with a serious attempt to
render natural and social development coherent in terms of each other,
and relevant to our times and the construction of an ecological
society....

What unites society with nature in a graded evolutionary continuum
is the remarkable extent to which human beings, living in a rational,
ecologically-oriented society, could embody the creativity of nature —
this, as distinguished from a purely adaptive criterion of evolutionary
success. The great achievements of human thought, art, science, and
technology serve not only to monumentalize culture, they serve to monumentalize natural evolution itself They provide heroic evidence
that the human species is a warmblooded, excitingly versatile, and
keenly intelligent life-form — not a cold-blooded, genetically programmed,
and mindless insect — that expresses nature’s greatest powers of
creativity.

Life-forms that create and consciously alter their environment,
hopefully in ways that make it more rational and ecological, represent
a vast and indefinite extension of nature into fascinating, perhaps
unbounded lines of evolution that no branch of insects could ever
achieve — notably, the evolution of a fully self-conscious nature....
Natural history is a cumulative evolution toward ever more varied,
differentiated, and complex forms and relationships.

This evolutionary development of increasingly variegated entities,
most notably of life-forms, contains exciting, latent possibilities. With
variety, differentiation, and complexity, nature, in the course of its own
unfolding, opens new directions for still further development along
alternative lines of natural evolution. To the degree that animals become
complex, self-aware, and increasingly intelligent, they begin to make
those elementary choices that influence their own evolution. They are
less and less the passive objects of “natural selection” and more and
more the subjects of their own development.

A brown hare that mutates into a white one and sees a snow-covered
terrain in which to camouflage itself is acting on behalf of its own
survival, not simply adapting in order to survive. It is not merely being
“selected” by its environment; it is selecting its own environment and
making a choice that expresses a small measure of subjectivity and
judgment.

The greater the variety of habitats that emerge in the evolutionary
process, the more a given life-form, particularly a neurologically
complex one, is likely to play an active and judgmental role in
preserving itself. To the extent that natural evolution follows this path
of neurological development, it gives rise to life-forms that exercise an
ever-wider latitude of choice and a nascent form of freedom in
developing themselves.

Given this conception of nature as the cumulative history of more
differentiated levels of material organization (especially of life-forms)
and of increasing subjectivity, social ecology establishes a basis for a
meaningful understanding of humanity and society’s place in natural
evolution. Natural history is not a “catch as catch can” phenomenon.
It is marked by tendency, by direction, and as far as human beings are
concerned, by conscious purpose. Human beings and the social worlds
they create can open a remarkably expansive horizon for development
of the natural world — a horizon marked by consciousness, reflection,
and an unprecedented freedom of choice and capacity for conscious
creativity. The factors that reduce many life-forms to largely adaptive
roles in changing environments are replaced by a capacity for
consciously adapting environments to existing and new life-forms.

Adaptation, in effect, increasingly gives way to creativity, and the
seemingly ruthless action of “natural law” to greater freedom. What
earlier generations called “blind nature” to denote nature’s lack of
moral direction turns into free nature, a nature that slowly finds a voice
and the means to relieve the needless tribulations of life for all species
in a highly conscious humanity and an ecological society.... The issue,
then, is not whether social evolution stands opposed to natural evolution.
The issue is how social evolution can be situated in natural
evolution and why it has been thrown — needlessly — against natural
evolution to the detriment of life as a whole. Our capacity to be
rational and free does not assure us that this capacity will be realized.
If social evolution is the potentiality for expanding the horizon of
natural evolution along unprecedented creative lines, and human beings
are the potentiality for nature to become self-conscious and free, the
issue we face is why these potentialities have been warped and how
they can be realized.

It is part of social ecology’s commitment to natural evolution that
these potentialities are indeed real and that they can be fulfilled....
Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use
its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations,
scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for
that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots
in social problems.

On Biocentrism

(from Re-enchanting Humanity, 1995)



The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere
have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual
form of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization.
This basic intuition is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere
as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.[25]



This stunning doctrine literally defines deep ecology. “Deep” it is in
every sense — not only in the intuitions that the authors and their
acolytes hold, but in the many presuppositions they make.... On the
other hand, we may decide to agree with Robyn Eckersley, a champion
of biocentrism, that no such abilities are necessary, that the
“navigational skills of birds” are themselves on a par with the wideranging
intelligence of people.



Is there not something self-serving and arrogant in the (unverifiable)
claim that first nature is striving to achieve something that has presently
reached its most developed form in us — second nature? A more
impartial, biocentric approach would be simply to acknowledge that
our special capabilities (e.g., a highly developed consciousness, language
and tool-making capability) are simply one form of excellence alongside
the myriad others (e.g., the navigational skills of birds, the sonar
capability and playfulness of dolphins, and the intense sociality of ants)
rather than the form of excellence thrown up by evolution.[26]



Whether birds have “navigation skills” — which assumes conscious
agency in negotiating their migratory flights over vast distances with
clear geographical goals — or primarily tropistic reactions to changes
in daylight and possibly the earth’s magnetic fields of force, need not
occupy us here. What counts is that Eckersley’s state of mind, like that
of deep ecologists generally, essentially debases the intellectual powers
of people who, over previous centuries, consciously mapped the globe,
gave it mathematical coordinates, and invented magnetic compasses,
chronometers, radar, and other tools for navigation. They did so with
an intellectuality, flexibility, and with techniques that no bird can
emulate — that is, with amazing skillfulness, since skill involves more
than physical reactions to natural forces and stimuli.

When Eckersley places the largely tropistic reactions of birds on a
par with human thought, she diminishes the human mind and its
extraordinary abilities. One might as well say that plants have “skills”
that are on a par with human intellectuality because plants can engage
in photosynthesis, a complex series of biochemical reactions to
sunlight. Are such reactions really commensurate with the ability of
physicists to understand how solar fusion occurs and of biochemists
to understand how photosynthesis occurs? If so, then corals
“invented” techniques for producing islands and plants “invented”
techniques for reaching to the sun in heavily forested areas. In short,
placing human intellectual foresight, logical processes, and innovations
on a par with tropistic reactions to external stimuli is to create a
stupendous intellectual muddle, not to evoke the “deep” insights that
deep ecologists claim to bring to our understanding of humanity’s
interaction with the natural world.

Eckersley’s crude level of argumentation is no accident; Devall and
Sessions prepare us for it by approvingly citing Warwick Fox to the
effect that we can make “no firm ontological divide in the field of
existence: That there is no bifurcation in reality between the human
and the non-human realms ... to the extent that we perceive
boundaries, we fall short of deep ecological consciousness.”[27]

No one has quite told whales, I assume, about this new evolutionary
dispensation. Still less are grizzly bears, wolves, entire rainforest
ecosystems, mountains, rivers, “and so on” aware of their community
with human beings. Indeed, in this vast panoply of life-forms,
ecosystems, mineral matter, “and so on,” no creature seems to be
capable of knowing — irrespective of how they communicate with
members of their own kind — about the existence or absence of this
“firm ontological divide” except human beings. If, as Devall and
Sessions seem to believe, there is “no firm ontological divide” between
the human and nonhuman realms, it is unknown to every species in
the biosphere, let alone entities in the abiotic world — except our own.

In fact, the “ontological divide” between the nonhuman and the
human is very real. Human beings, to be sure, are primates, mammals,
and vertebrates. They cannot, as yet, get out of their animal skins. As
products of organic evolution, they are subject to the natural vicissitudes
that bring enjoyment, pain, and death to complex life-forms
generally. But it is a crucial fact that they alone know — indeed, can
know — that there is a phenomenon called evolution; they alone know
that death is a reality; they alone can even formulate such notions as
self-realization, biocentric equality, and a “self-in-Self”; they alone
can generalize about their existence — past, present, and future — and
produce complex technologies, create cities, communicate in a
complex syllabic form, “and so on”! To call these stupendous
attributes and achievements mere differences in degree between human
beings and nonhuman life-forms — and to equate human “consciousness”
with the “navigational skills” of migratory birds — is so preposterously
naive that one might expect such absurdities from
children, not professors.

What apparently worries deep ecologists about this “divide,” with
all its bifurcations and boundaries, is not so much that its existence is
obvious as that it is inconvenient. Beclouding their simplistic monism,
we may suppose, is a fear of the dualism of Erné Descartes, which they
feel obliged to dispel. Ironically, they seem incapable of coping with
this dualism without taking recourse to a Bambi-style anthropomorphism
that effectively transforms all nonhuman beings into
precisely what they profess to abhor — namely, anthropomorphisms. If
they cannot make human beings into nonhuman animals, they make
nonhuman animals into human beings. Accordingly, animals are said
to have “skills” in much the same sense that human beings do. The
earth has its own “wisdom,” wilderness is equated with “freedom,”
and all life-forms exhibit “moral” qualities that are entirely the product
of human intellectual, emotional, and social development.

Put bluntly: If human beings are “equal in intrinsic worth” to
nonhuman beings, then boundaries between human and nonhuman
are erased, and either human beings are merely one of a variety of
animals, or else nonhuman beings are human....



Having entangled the reader with extravagant claims for a set of
unsupported personal beliefs, Devall and Sessions proceed in the name
of an exclusively human “active deep questioning and meditative
process” to reduce readers to the status of “‘plain citizens’ of the biotic
community, not lord or master over all other species.”[28]

Devall and Sessions use words with multiple meanings to give the
most alienating interpretation to people. Whatever the democracy could
possibly mean in the animal world, human beings are not mere “plain
citizens” in a biospheric democracy. They are immensely superior to
any other animal species, although deep ecologists equate superiority
with being the “lord and master of all other species,” hence an
authoritarian concept. But superior may mean not only higher in rank,
status, and authority but “of great value, excellence; extraordinary,”
if my dictionary is correct. That superiority can simply mean “having
more knowledge, foresight, and wisdom” — attributes we might expect
to find in a teacher or even a Zen master — seems to disappear from
the highly selective deep ecological lexicon.

Deep ecology’s contradictory presuppositions, intuitions, anthropomorphisms,
and naive assertions leave us spinning like tops. We are
enjoined to engage in “deep questioning” in order to decide on
intuitive grounds that we are intrinsically no different in “worth” or
“value” from any “entity” in the “ecosphere.” Yet the “deep questioning”
so prized by Devall, Sessions, Naess, eta!., is something that no other life-form can do — brsides us. In the vastness of the ecosphere,
nothing apart from human beings is capable of even voicing the notion
of “biocentric egalitarianism,” much less understanding any notion
of “rights,” “intrinsic worth,” or “superiority” and “inferiority.” It
is the ultimate in anthropomorphism to impute a moral sense to
animals that lack the conceptual material of abstract thought provided
by language and the rich generalizations we form in our minds from
our vast repertoire of words.

Strictly speaking, if we were nothing but “plain citizens” in the
ecosphere, we should be as furiously anthropo-centric in our behavior,
just as a bear is Ursa-centric or a wolf Cano-centric. That is to say, as
“plain citizens” of the ecosphere — and nothing more — we should, like
every other animal, be occupied exclusively with our own survival,
comfort, and safety. As Richard Watson has so astutely noted: “If we
are to treat man as part of nature on egalitarian terms with other
species, then man’s behavior must be treated as morally neutral” — that
is, as amoral. In which case, Watson continues, “we should not think
there is something morally or ecosophically wrong with the human
species dispossessing and causing the extinction of other species.”[29]

Yet deep ecologists ask us precisely in the name of a biospheric
“citizenship” not to be occupied exclusively with our survival. Put
simply: Deep ecologists ask us to be “plain citizens” and at the same
time expect — even oblige — us to think and behave as very uncommon,
indeed quite extraordinary ones! In a perceptive article, critic Harold
Fromm states this contradiction with remarkable pithiness:



The “intrinsic worth” that biocentrists connect with animals, plants,
and minerals is projected by the desiring human psyche in the same way
that “the will of God” is projected by human vanity upon a silent
universe that never says anything.... The “biocentric” notion of
“intrinsic worth” is even more narcissistically “anthropocentric” than
ordinary self-interest because it hopes to achieve its ends by denying
that oneself is the puppeteer-ventriloquist behind the world one
perceives as valuable.[30]



As biocentrists, deep ecologists ask us to take the role of the invisible
puppeteer — pulling the strings and ignoring the fact that we are pulling
them.


     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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     Chapter 2 -- Publication : November 30, 1996

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