UPDATE: Now with links!

The current issue of the American Conservative, in addition to featuring John‘s very cool cover story on “conservative cuisine” (which I may blog about later), carries Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan. This passage, where Dreher tries to draw a connection between Pollan’s “organic” conception of the environment and an organic conception of human society, caught my attention:

DREHER: What about human society as an organism? Many people think of Wendell Berry as a man of the Left because he criticizes humankind’s unnatural exploitative relationship to agriculture and the environment, but Berry has argued on similar grounds against the indvidualist sexual ethic pervasive in contemporary culture. Is he on to something?

POLLAN: Berry’s on to a lot of things. He’s a very wise man. Is he Right or Left? Those categories don’t fit him. He is a fierce critic of capitalism because he sees it destroying community, destroying traditional sexual relationships, destroying family. I agree with a lot of that, but not all.

There is a blind spot in a lot of contemporary conservatism–not understanding that while capitalism can be a very constructive force, it can also be very destructive of things that conservatives value.

DREHER: It’s also a blind spot of contemporary liberalism to fail to see how pursuing a sort of autonomous individualism when it comes to social forms undermines a community in the same way that capitalism does.

POLLAN: That’s right. The Left can be blind to that possibility also.

Now Pollan, being a good liberal, backs away somewhat from this idea, and with good reason – excessively “organic” conceptions of society tend to be quite illiberal. While everyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher agrees that our well-being is intimately tied up with our social context, traditional organic conceptions of society go much further than this.

The question, in essence, is whether individuals exist for the sake of society or whether societies exist for the benefit of their members. The former tended to be the pre-modern view, while the latter is more a result of a post-Enlightenment outlook. While any society may, under certain circumstances, call upon members to make sacrifices for its well-being (in times of war, say), a strong “social holism” sees the value of individuals as being entirely, or almost entirely, constituted by the contribution they make to the whole. This, in turn, has justified routinely sacrificing the interests of some group for the putative sake of the the well-being of the whole. For instance, keeping a permanent class of slaves might be justified on the grounds that it enabled a society to reach an otherwise unattainable level of art and culture.

Meanwhile, moderns generally see society as something that can, and should, be reformed in the interests of its members. Slavery is wrong, we think, because it permanently subordinates the interests of one group of people to others, regardless of what social goods it may or may not be conducive to. Likewise, over the centuries, the institution of marriage has been modified in light of widespread beliefs that it was hampering the well-being and happiness of various groups of people. Marriage based on property interest was challenged by marriage based on personal happiness. Patriarchial marriage was challenged by feminists. Exclusively heterosexual marriage is being challenged by gays and lesbians. And so on.

The underlying idea here is that social institutions exist in order to allow people to flourish and can be modified accordingly; people don’t exist for the sake of social institutions. You might even say that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

But, as Dreher suggests, an “organicist” way of thinking isn’t entirely foreign to Pollan’s outlook. Take, for instance, his discussion of animal rights in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan complains about the “individualism” of an animal rights movement that is concerned exclusively about the suffering and well-being of individual animals:

[T]he animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals. […] [Peter] Singer [insists] that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests–in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat–just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animal rights’ exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in nature? Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat? (p. 323)

Now, I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that “surely a species has interests” looks to me like it’s stealing a few argumentative bases. In fact, it’s far from obvious to me that a species has interests and I have a hard time seeing why the goods Pollan refers to couldn’t be secured by focusing on indvidual animals. After all, don’t individual animals have interests in survival and in the health of their habitat? What is gained, exactly, by positing an additional entity – the species – that has interests over and above the interests of its members?

Pollan here seems to be expressing sympahty with the ecological analogue of social holism, a view usually traced back to Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” where an action is right when “it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” This ecological holism, like its social counterpart, locates value in the whole, with the value of individuals playing a subordinate role.

In my view, the problem with ecological holism, like social holism, is that it can all too easily justify the sacrifice of sentient creatures for the alleged benefit of the whole. After all, if the value of individuals consists in their contribution to the whole, their interests don’t carry any weight apart from whatever contribution they may or may not make. Instead of being concerned with individuals, it gives overriding precedence to the whole. This is why Tom Regan dubbed ecological holism – perhaps unfairly – “eco fascism.”

Fortunately, hardly anyone actually adheres to the strong versions of social or ecological holism that would deny any intrinsic value to individuals, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Pollan does. Nevertheless, there is a real opposition between pre-modern social organicism and ecological holism on the one hand, and post-Enlightenement social ethics and animal liberation on the other which focus on the well-being of individuals. The former give precedence to the “stability” and “integrity” of the whole, while the latter focus on the interests of individuals. Both the traditional pre-modern conservative and the ecological holist can tend toward the affirmation that “Whatever is, is right.” We see Pollan doing this when he justifies meat-eating as “natural,” as though morality doesn’t often require us to do things that are “unnatural.”

I don’t think it’ll come as a shock to anyone if I put my cards on the table and say that, at least in this case, I’m with the small-l liberals, animal rightists, and other post-Enlightenment philosophies. Which is not to say that there aren’t legitimate critiques of these philosophies – especially in their more extreme individualist forms. Certainly, part of an individual’s value lies in her role in community and the good of the whole can, in particular instances, trump the good of an individual, but, overall, a community has to be judged by the extent to which it enables its members to lead flourishing, satisfying lives.