Summary on Chapter from Modules 05-08 philosophy

M06Lec01: Social Ecology This lecture will help you understand: • What Social Ecology is • The connection between social

hierarchy and domination and the domination of nature

• The connection between sustainability and democracy

• 5 essential characteristics of Social Ecology

• A critique of Deep Ecology

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006)

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006)

• Social theorist, who began writing in the 1960s about the connections between social domination and the domination of nature.

• His philosophical views have been characterized as “social ecology.”

What Is Social Ecology?

• “Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today” (“What Is Social Ecology?” 2003)

Roots

• Marxian Socialism – Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Libertarian Anarchism

– Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921)

Anti-Hierarchy

• Unlike traditional Marxists, Bookchin does not believe that the primary form of social hierarchy and domination rests with economic classes.

• In addition, unlike the anarchists, Bookchin does not beslieve that the modern nation- state is the primary agent of social domination.

Other Forms of Domination

• young by the old • women by men • one ethnic group by another • “masses” by bureaucrats • countryside by town

Ecofeminism

• The “logic of domination” (Karen Warren)

• Hierarchies imply the existence of at least two groups, one of which holds power over the other. This power enables the “superior” group to command obedience from the “inferior” group.

Ideological Domination

• Hierarchy “is also a state of consciousness” as well as a social condition.

• People can be oppressed by their consciousness, their understandings and beliefs, as much as by external forces.

• The worst slavery is when slavery becomes inclination (e.g., serfs doff their caps to their feudal masters!)

Domination of Nature

• “The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man. . . . But it was not until organic community relation . . . dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation.” (Post- Scarcity Anarchism, 1972)

Modern Capitalism

• “This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. . . . The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.” (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1972)

Marx Turned on His Head

• Bookchin suggests that social structures of domination preceded the domination of nature.

• Denies any economic or historical determinism to the connection between social domination and the domination of nature.

Free and Democratic Society The non-hierarchical or just community: • Rejects domination in any form, whether domination

of humans or nature. • Democratic values such as full participation and

freedom are the norms. • Decision-making authority is decentralized. • Individuals complement and cooperate with each other

but do not dominate each other. • Indeed, the ideal “anarchistic community would

approximate an ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced, and harmonious.

Sustainable Agriculture

• Sustainable agriculture decentralizes and diversifies decision-making authority. In this sense, it is truly a democratic practice.

• Decisions are made directly by the people most affected by them.

• Sustainable agriculture reinforces a lifestyle in which local communities become sustainable and self- sufficient.

• In this type of world, humans experience true freedom, and only in this type of community are humans able to live in harmony with their natural environment.

5 Essential Characteristics of Social Ecology

1. Rational 2. Organismic 3. Revolutionary 4. Green 5. Humanistic

1. Rational

• “Social ecology is neither deep, tall, fat, nor thick. It is social. It does not fall back on incantations, sutras, flow diagrams, or spiritual vagaries. It is avowedly rational. It does not try to regale metaphorical forms of spiritual mechanism and crude biologism with Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or shamanistic Eco-la-la. It is a coherent form of naturalism that looks to evolution and the biosphere, not to deities in the sky or under the earth for quasi-religious and supernaturalistic explanations of natural and social phenomena.”

2. Organismic

• “Philosophically, social ecology stems from a solid organismic tradition in Western philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus, the near-evolutionary dialectic of Aristotle and Hegel, and the superbly critical approach of the famous Frankfurt School.”

3. Revolutionary

• “It is revolutionary, not merely radical. . . . It is rooted in the profound eco-anarchistic analyses of Peter Kropotkin, the radical economic insights of Karl Marx, the emancipatory promise of the revolutionary Enlightenment as articulated by the great encyclopedist Denis Diderot, the enragés of the French Revolution, the revolutionary feminist ideals of Louise Michel and Emma Goldman, the communitarian visions of Paul Goodman and E. A. Gutkind, and the various ecorevolutionary manifestos of the early 1960s.”

4. Green • “Politically it is Green, and radically Green. It takes its

stand with the left-wing tendencies of the German Greens and extraparliamentary street movements of European cities, with the American radical ecofeminist movement that is currently emerging, with the demands for a new politics based on citizens' initiatives, neighborhood assemblies, New England's tradition of town meetings, with unaligned anti- imperialist movements at home and abroad, with the struggle by people of color for complete freedom from domination by privileged whites and from superpowers on both sides of the iron curtain.”

5. Humanistic

• “Morally it is humanistic in the high Renaissance meaning of the term,” which requires “a shift in vision from the skies to the earth, from superstition to reason, from deities to people, who are no less the products of natural evolution than grizzly bears and whales.”

“First” and “Second” Nature • “Human beings always remain rooted in their biological

evolutionary history, which we may call ‘first Nature,’ but they produce a characteristically human social nature of their own which we may call ‘second nature.’ And far from being ‘unnatural,’ human second nature is eminently a creation of organic evolution's first nature.” (“What Is Social Ecology?”) – Humans are not simply the “equal biotic citizens”

described in biocentric ethics, the land ethic, and deep ecology. Humanity as a part of natural evolution-and the only part capable of sophisticated, rational thought has a responsibility to act as steward of the natural evolutionary process.

Bookchin’s Critique of Deep Ecology

• Misanthropy • Mysticism (“ecobabble,” “eco-la-la”) • Anti-Humanism and Freedom

Misanthropy

• In his polemic against Deep Ecology, Bookchin highlighted the extreme views of members of Earth First!, a radical environmental advocacy group that emerged in the Southwestern United States in 1979, co-founded on by Dave Foreman and other deep ecologists.

The Scandal • These views suggest that famine

and AIDS, for example, were “nature’s revenge” for overpopulation and ecological destruction.

• The implication was that starving children in places such as Ethiopia and Somalia should be allowed to die in the name of some natural ecological law concerning carrying capacity and population dynamics.

Anti-Humanism

• “There is no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf” (James Joyce)

James Joyce, 1882-1941

Problems with Biocentric Equality

• “One of the problems with this asocial, ‘species-centered’ way of thinking, of course, is that it blames the victim. Let’s face it, when you say that a black kid in Harlem is as much to blame for the ecological crisis as the president of Exxon, you are letting one off the hook and slandering the other”.

Third World Critique

• Also see Guha’s “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.”

Coda • There was a rapprochement between

Bookchin and Foreman in Defending the Earth: A Debate (1991)

Dave Foreman, 1947-

Murray Bookchin, 1921-2006