God save us even from well-meant benevolence. It is possible to be sure, in individual cases, what is or is not to an entity’s profit or harm. It seems entirely obvious that we should not wantonly do harm, but only (at the most) for our necessities. That we should do good is a much more dangerous thesis: it is not one I could conscientiously deny, but equally I cannot wholly affirm it, whether for beasts or birds or men. Very often, when we think to do good we are only enlarging our self-esteem. I have not doubt at all that that would be the chief motive in any attempt on our part to turn the wilderness to paradise, and we would therefore fail. It is better to do small works within the wilderness than one large work to change the whole. (Stephen R.L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals, p. 167)

Clark is talking here about an imagined attempt to “manage” the natural world in order to make it over into an edenic pleasure garden where all creatures are protected. Earlier he had considered the oft-repeated objection against animal rights that it would entail an obligation for us to protect the rights of animals in the wild:

To respect the interests and ways of our fellows is incumbent upon us: to respect, not necessarily to enforce them. Much of nature may often seem to be inextricably involved in a sort of reciprocated injustice, where prey and predator are at once individually at odds and racially symbiotic. There may be little we can, or should, do about this: it is not the world we think we would have chosen, but interference will usually make things worse–tares and wheat must grow together till the Day (Matthew 13:29f.). Let us abandon our own iniquities before troubling overmuch about what is done under necessity by our undomesticated kin. [D.G] Ritchie (p. 109) sneered at [H.S.] Salt that if animals had rights we must set about defending them against other animals, and organize proper juries of their peers to try the case: a symptom of Ritchie’s imperialistic outlook, that he could seriously suppose that we, the criminals par excellence, were worthy as police. (p. 35)

This laissez-faire attitude is at odds with more conventional liberal-humanitarian thinking, which tends to be deeply consequentialist. But Clark is suggesting that, when we come up against the natural world, we run into something that is beyond our powers to manage. The conditions are too complex, and the consequences too unpredictable, to yield to the utilitarian calculus. An analogy with our attempts to manage other societies – often at the point of a gun – is obvious.

But Clark’s reasoning doesn’t give comfort to traditional conservatives either, since what he is essentially urging us to recognize is that we are one species among many. And that we should take our place in the whole rather than try to master or overwhelm it. To recognize that we are part of something, and that the other parts are owed consideration, would require us to limit our own drives to reduce the natural world to so much material for our projects. Even a lot of mainstream environmentalism is characterized by a kind of technophilia and puts its hopes in the invention of some new technology that will let us keep on pretty much as before.

Clark’s point is that humanism – the idea that humans are special and therefore entitled to exploit nature pretty much as we see fit – is licensed neither by traditional philosophy and religion, or by modern science. For the traditional view we are a link in the Great Chain of Being, special, maybe, in occupying a kind of “amphibious” position between the material and spiritual realms (though, even this is debatable), but still just a part of the cosmic whole, with entire hierarchies of beings above us. Meanwhile, the worldview of scientific naturalism gives no comfort to humanism: we are just as much an accident of matter as anything else and, from an objective point of view, no more or less important than anything else.

Humanism, then, is a kind of half-way house between the old Christian metaphysic and the new scientistic one. Except, having lopped off Christianity’s spiritual supports, its valuation of human beings is rationally unsupported. And Clark sees humanism as more pernicious than either traditional metaphysics or a thoroughgoing naturalism. The latter might at least prod us to see our projects in a more proportionate light rather than of ridiculously inflated importance. Instead, humanism, the sheer assertion of our own superiority, ends up licensing all manners of depradation.

This argument is somewhat similar to John Gray’s in Straw Dogs, except Clark is far more comfortable with traditional Christian metaphysics. As a kind of Christian neo-Platonist he sees all parts of creation as participating in God, and, therefore, as worthy of consideration. I find this deep-green variety of Christian Platonism rather appealing.