A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • The limits of Pollanism

    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.

  • McKibben’s journey

    The Nation has a nice overview of Bill McKibben’s writing, focusing on some of the tensions and evolution in his thought.

    McKibben’s more recent writing (e.g. Deep Economy) has taken a turn away from the wilderness ethic and towards a focus on “durable communities” and responsible stewardship. Our technological prowess, it seems, will inevitably change the biosphere, so now the challenge is to learn to use our power responsibly. And yet, the solution isn’t just to find some sort of techno-fix for our problems, but to learn the possibilities of self-limitation:

    Even though the content of McKibben’s recent work is fairly upbeat, a tragic sense looms, because on some level we’ve already lost. We’ve lost the wild–the pure, sovereign “nature” McKibben venerated. Yet, having mourned, he has adapted his ideals. He now seems to endorse the view that, as he writes in his introduction to the anthology, “the traditional American distinction between raped land and virgin land was unhealthy, and that therefore good stewardship–husbandry, to use the old term–was required.” At least in our time, this shift represents a kind of growing up. The love of the wild involves ecstasy and innocence, properties of youth. Accepting responsibility for our role as stewards is a reconciliation to our circumstances. The world apart from man is gone; the solution to the planet’s problems is going to have to come from the species that caused them.

    To McKibben, stewardship is not a matter of further manipulating nature so as to extract carbon dioxide from the air and clear the way for the status quo. In The End of Nature, McKibben wrote that genetic engineering, while it might succeed in preserving a livable planet for humans, would represent nature’s final death throes. Today, “carbon-eating” genetically modified trees and crops appear to be on the horizon. McKibben doesn’t address these possibilities directly in his recent books. His silence suggests, at best, a lack of enthusiasm.

    For McKibben retains his profound discomfort with unbridled human power. Reasonable people–even reasonable environmentalists–can disagree about, say, the ethics of exterminating black flies with a relatively benign pesticide. There is something adolescent, perhaps, about McKibben’s insistence on braving the flies. But the alternative–expecting the world to be retooled for our convenience–is the attitude of a toddler.

    Many converts have come to the global warming cause, but most are rather like Christians motivated by fear of the Apocalypse. After all, you needn’t care about the trees or the whales or the polar bears to oppose global warming; you only need to care about yourself and your connection to the future. Of course, McKibben, too, wants passionately to avert catastrophe. But he knows that this may be at once too narrow and too ambitious a goal. On some level global warming is, to him, primarily a symptom of misguided priorities and insensitivity to the life surrounding us. Most of us root for the polar bears; we’d be very grateful to keep some semblance of the seasons, which have lent a backdrop of stability to our lives. But ultimately, we fear for ourselves, for our civilization and our grandchildren. If a technological deus ex machina could save us, we’d rejoice. Bill McKibben is looking for another kind of salvation.

  • More from Rowe

    A few days ago I wrote a post that took as its jumping-off point an article on the shortcomings of GDP by Jonathan Rowe in Harper‘s. I see here that Mr. Rowe has an entire archive of articles written from what I would describe as a generally decentralist green/left perspective that I find highly congenial. He even writes on a few occasions about possible alliances with traditionalist conservatives, “crunchy” cons and the like.

  • Of great apes and red herrings

    William Saletan reports on a movement afoot in Spain to grant “basic rights” to great apes – a group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. A resolution approved by a Spanish parliamentary committe would “commit the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses, TV ads, and dangerous experiments.”

    The resolution is based on the work of the Great Ape Project, a group co-founded by Peter Singer, whose goal is to extend “the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans” and to extend to them the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.

    Saletan, however, makes a somewhat strange claim. Since, he says, GAP’s argument for the extension of basic rights to great apes is based on certain “morally significant qualities” that scientific research has shown them to possess, the animal rights argument for the equality of all animals is thereby undermined:

    These are appeals to discrimination, not universal equality. Most animals don’t have a rich cultural life. They can’t make tools. They don’t teach languages. Singer even points out that “chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have long-term relationships, not only between mothers and children, but also between unrelated apes.” Special rights for animals in committed relationships! It sounds like a Moral Majority for vegans.

    Opening your mind to science-based animal rights doesn’t eliminate inequality. It just makes the inequality more scientific. A rat can’t match a pig, much less a boy. In fact, as a GAP board member points out, “We are closer genetically to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.”

    George Orwell wrote the cruel finale to this tale 63 years ago in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” That wasn’t how the egalitarian uprising in the book was supposed to turn out. It wasn’t how the animal rights movement was supposed to turn out, either.

    Asserting a level of basic rights for animals doesn’t depend on the kind of empirical equality that Saletan seems to think. Just as human rights don’t vary according to people’s intelligence, usefulness, artistic skill, personal charm, or physical attractiveness it’s quite possible to contend for a basic level of moral consideration for animals that isn’t tied to things like having a cultural life, making tools, etc. As Jeremy Bentham memorably put it, the question is not “Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Or, to put it more precisely, the morally significant fact about animals, at least the higher ones, is that they are beings for whom things can go better or worse, they have interests, and experience life from a particular point of view.

    Even before I read Tzachi Zamir’s fine book, I thought that the whole debate about “speciesism” was a bit of a red herring. Even allowing that human beings are superior to animals in whatever way you like, it doesn’t follow that we can simply treat them anyway we want to. An animal doesn’t have to be morally equal to a human being to deserve not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The reasoning for this conclusion proceeds from basic notions of justice, fairness, and compassion and doesn’t, as Zamir argues, require a radical revision in our concepts of human worth. Most of us already accept the idea that we shouldn’t inflict unnecessary suffering on animals; it’s just that we have a very low threshold for what we consider to be “necessary.” If we were more consistent in our application of this principle, we’d be well on the road to a full-throated program of animal liberation, or so I would argue.

    In fact, it may the very differences between animals that help ground a program of animal rights. It’s living a life befitting an ape – and not being imprisoned, experimented on, or used for human entertainment – that constitutes an ape’s well-being. We don’t need to try and make apes equal with humans, but we might want to think about letting them be apes.

    [UPDATE: Edited slightly for clairty]

  • Stimulate me, baby

    I picked up the June issue of Harper’s before a train trip a few weeks ago because of the its interesting-looking cover story on the strife in the Episcopal Church. But only last night, as was I catching up on the rest of the issue, did I come across Jonathan Rowe’s “Our Phony Economy,” which was an abridged version of testimony he gave before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce. Rowe is identified as “codirector of West Marin Commons, a community-organizing group, in California.”

    The points Rowe makes are not unfamiliar ones, but they don’t seem to have sunk in to our collective consciousness, so they probably bear repeating. In essence, he is criticizing the use of GDP to measure economic well-being, making two major points about its limitations: it doesn’t count activities that exist outside of the formal cash economy, and it counts anything within that economy, whether constructive or destructive, as a contribution to well-being. In the guise of being “value neutral” it actually obscures an accurate picture of our economic life and the values it actually serves.

    Like I said, this is a point that has been made before, particularly by ecologically-minded thinkers. It’s reinforced by the fact that the human economy is only one part of what you might call the total earth economy, and any accounting of economic activity that neglects its impact on the ecosystem is partial and misleading.

    Rowe says:

    The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 or 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

    I read this just a couple of days after receiving my “economic stimulus check” from the Treasury, so this is timely. Purist free-marketeers may accuse Rowe of attacking a straw man here, but I think it’s pretty hard to argue that our policy isn’t to encourage consumption, without much regard for what is consumed.

    What the environmental and resource crunch may require, then, is for us to think about the ends served by our economic life. It’s not enough to simply take whatever desires human beings may happen to have (or have had socialized into them) as given and use the economy as a mechanism for satisfying them, because those desires are essentially infinite, and we live in a finite world. Instead, we might need to start distinguishing more between those desires that lead to beneficial ends and those that lead to destructive ones.

    Again, nothing particularly new. But the question for me is whether this can be done in a way that respects people’s freedom. Apart from obvious physical harms, distinguishing between beneficial and destructive activities is tricky, especially without a shared philosophical framework of some sort. This is the real strength of liberalism: it promises to deliver social peace without taking a stand on controversial questions about the purpose and higher ends of living. However, if unrestrained human desire begins to bump up against very real ecological limits, this kind of neutrality may no longer be possible. Can liberalism provide an argument for self-restraint?

    Or could it be that liberalism doesn’t need to provide this kind of argument? All it needs to do, you might say, is put a price on those “externalities” generated by our economy–environmental, medical, etc.–and let the market do its thing. When it costs to pollute, people will pollute less. QED. This all assumes, of course, that we can put a non-arbitrary price on pollution, not to mention things like species extinction, destruction of wilderness, etc. And, anyway, is the worth of everything else ultimately a function of human preference, or does it have its own intrinsic, objective value? At this point we’re getting into questions that are downright philosophical, if not theological, and my skepticism that we can simply avoid the debate about ends and values returns.

    It may be, then, that democracy–understood not just as sheer majority rule but as a process for deliberating about shared goods–is necessary to fence in an economy that threatens to overturn all limits. But can our actually existing democracy even be said to approximate such a process? The jostling of interest groups and the lies of spinmeisters bear little resemblence to the ideal of a high-minded New England town meeting so beloved of proponents of deliberative democracy. Moreover, can democratic reasoning about ends, expressing itself in communal self-determination, coexist with a generous sphere of liberty for personal action? I have both libertarian and communitarian impulses, but I’m not sure there’s a politics that doesn’t require some kind of tradeoff between them. My thoughts on this are very much in flux at this point…

  • An ethic of sustainable use

    I got an e-mail with a link to this interview with Michael Pollan (You too can subscribe to the Michael Pollan e-mail list!) at this new site sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

    Three points stood out for me. One, the primary distinction between food systems is fossil fuel-based vs. solar energy based. Two, food is inherently a political issue because “your health is inseparable from the health of whole food chain that you’re a part of.” Three, there is a tension between the “wildnerness ethic” of classical environmetnalism and the “sustainability ethic” that is more focused on how we should live in the world which we inevitably change by being here. Bill McKibben describes this as the tension between the Edward Abbey outlook and the Wendell Berry outlook. Both are necessary, he says, but one emphasizes a “hands off” approach to nature while the other emphasizes the notion of good stewardship in the ways that we cultivate nature.

    Pollan thinks that we’re living in a time when we need more emphasis on the sustainability ethic:

    We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

    This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn.

    That seems right to me. As I mentioned in my previous post, Tzachi Zamir distinguishes between using and exploiting animals, where the former is sometimes permissible. We can, he says, enter into reciprocal relationships with animals that we benefit from, but which the animals also benefit from in a way that makes them better off than they would’ve been in the wild. Keeping some kinds of pets, he argues, are examples of this kind of relationship. Exploitation, on the other hand, is when the animal is made worse off than it would’ve been otherwise – we benefit at the animal’s expense.

    I’m not sure this distinction is completely generalizable, but it might help in thinking about what an ethic of sustainability (vs. one of exploitation) would look like. Organic farming vs. farming that sucks the nutrients out of land and requires chemical fertilizers to keep it arable might be an example of “use” vs. “exploitation.”

    UPDATE: Thinking about this a bit more – obviously there’s a sense in which it’s difficult to think of “the land” as having interests in the same way that animals do, nevertheless it still seems reasonable to say that it can be made better or worse off in an objective, if not subjective sense. What I mean is that the land, understood as an ecosystem, has a certain telos that can be frustrated by things we do to it. The more interesting question is whether the land can actually be made better off by us than it would’ve been if we’d simply left it alone. Or is any development simply a concession to our needs? From a theological perspective, there are reasons for thinking that the cultivated garden is superior to sheer wilderness, but there are also reasons for thinking that the wilderness is as God intended it to be. Worth thinking about some more…

  • The crunchy libertarian

    While we’re on the subject of food, I’m very much looking forward to John Schwenkler‘s upcoming article on “culinary conservatism” for the American Conservative, which he mentions here. In the same post, John makes the case for what I think it’s fair to call a libertarian approach to food production, the idea being that our current system is the result of excessive government intervention in the form of subsidies, tariffs, foolish regulations, etc. (as amply documented by Michael Pollan and others) and that small, local and organic farms would be in a better position to compete with WalMart and big ag under a more laissez-faire regime. I plead ignorance as to whether this would actually work, and I think that some regulation (at least to limit harm in the form of environmental externalities, animal cruelty, worker exploitation and so forth) is necessary, but I do find the aspiration of attaining green ends by libertarian means an appealing one.

  • Humane California

    As far as California ballot initiatives go this year, all eyes will undoubtedly be on the one to overturn the state supreme court’s recent decision on same-sex marriage. But allow me to draw your attention to another ballot intitiative of potentially far-reaching consequence: the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which would phase out phase out veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages. As Erik Marcus puts it, “There’s probably never been a more important campaign in the animal protection movement’s history, both in terms of the number of animals affected and the precedent it will set for outlawing factory farming cruelties elsewhere in the United States.” Unsurprisingly, an industry group–called, ironically, Calfornians for Safe Food–is raising funds to defeat the measure. Wayne Pacell of the Humane Society details those efforts here.

    Opposition to the most egregious practices of factory farming is something that I think pretty much all people of good will can get behind. You don’t need to be a vegan or vegetarian to think that the animals we raise for food shouldn’t be subjected to extreme confinement and their attendant cruelties. Not to mention the fact that factory farms are huge contributers to environmental despoilation and, arguably, the destruction of rural communities.

    I’m not much of a proselytizer, but if you’re a resident of the Golden State, you might want to consider voting yes on this measure. The rest of us can, if we’re so inclined, contribute to the effort here.

  • “Food nannyism” and animal cruelty

    Jim Henley offers the obvious, but no less sound for that, rebuttle to worries that lump things like banning trans fats and foie gras into the category of “food nannysim”:

    In a video bemoaning food nannies, Baylen Linnekin, who is a good guy and whose writing I enjoy, begs a question. He declares NYC’s bans on trans fats and foie gras to be the same kind of lamentable “Nanny State” restriction. This is surely true if geese are like lipids and smearing pans or mixing foodstuffs with fats is like forcing food down the throats of living birds. But if they’re not, we have issues.

    A lot of anti-animal rights arguments, especially those produced by (ahem, industry funded) think tanks, make much hay out of “nanny statism” and the supposed infringement on consumer freedom that would result from serious animal welfare measures. But, as Mr. Henley makes plain, the equation changes once sentient creatures are involved. Whatever we might think of paternalistic measures like trans fat bans, animal abuse is not a victimless crime.

  • Is same-sex marriage a threat to religious freedom?

    In the argument over same-sex marriage, social conservatives have seen a string of defeats. For all intents and purposes, they have lost the argument based on straightforward morality (“gay sex is wrong”) and the argument based on social harm (“it will undermine straight marriage”). But the last-ditch argument that, in the wake of the California ruling, seems to be getting more play is the religious freedom argument. The idea here is that traditional religious believers will be coerced into compromising their beliefs in order to accomodate gay couples. I’ve even seen some extremely hysterical people (mostly confined to blog comment threads, unsurprisingly) talking about “persecution,” the death of religious freedom in America, and so on.

    This post at the Volokh Conspiracy offers a reasoned response to all this. It examines several recent examples where SSM opponents have identified a looming threat to religious freedom and points out that, in nearly all the cases, it was either a question of a religious organization providing a public service and/or the pertinent laws were non-discrimination laws that had nothing to do with marriage per se. In other words, these were not cases of churches being forced to perform marriages between people of the same sex. The issue at hand was generally whether organizations providing public services or accomodations (whether religious or not) are free to flout anti-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation.

    This isn’t to deny that there may at times be a genuine conflict between religious principle and politically enshrined rights. But the angst about gay marriage being the death knell of religious freedom seems to be greatly overdone.