What we're looking for isn't a way to deal with the whole of the natural world, which after all we've already dominated rather successfully, but rather a way to deal with humans in particular.
Further, we would like to accomplish this without changing the way we deal with the world as a whole because, again, the exploitation of available resources whenever possible has been a very successful strategy for producing wonderful results, physical feats of human will unmatchable by any human body.
But as humans increase in number, we become much more of a factor in our own environments; the natural world as a whole is populated more by humans, and so in dealing with the natural world we are dealing with humans much more often than we have to when smaller population densities are the norm. Put another way, as more resources are tied up in sustaining human lives, human lives occupy a greater share of the pool of resources available to our species.
Where we encounter conflict is in attempting to manage our human-form resources the way we do resources in other forms. People don't like being treated the way people like treating things, and with enough people to deal with this starts to really, really matter. The only obvious solutions to such conflict I can see are either reducing the presence of humans in the natural world, and thus allowing exploitation to continue as a viable strategy; or changing the attitude of our relationship to the rest of Nature to something less exploitative, less objectionable when applied to humans, and thus allowing our population to continue growing without artificial restraints.
What we cannot do, what we obviously don't stand for, is when we surround ourselves with other people and then proceed to rape them in the manner in which we rape areas of woodland or waterways; humans have an unfortunately high incidence of saying no to things.
Are you amenable to discussion on this forum? If so, I have polite criticism for you. If not, then I say "Yeah, people should treat each other nicely"
ReplyDeleteBut of course, criticize away :)
ReplyDeleteSince nice people always start a discussion with an agreement( and I'm trying to be a nicer person)--I very much like how you framed the issue, as the struggle between the historically most successful strategies for dealing with the external world and finding a way to move forward, bypass the bad stuff that comes from infinite expansion, and find a way to keep the good.
ReplyDeleteI was confused on some points though.
"What we cannot do, what we obviously don't stand for, is when we surround ourselves with other people and then proceed to rape them in the manner in which we rape areas of woodland or waterways; humans have an unfortunately high incidence of saying no to things. "
You choice of metaphor confuses the point here, I think(or it just confuses me). You posit that we rape waterways and woodlands, because they can't say no, but we can't rape people because they do say no. As a point, rape can only occur if the object of ones attention says "no" or otherwise fails to consent, and is capable of having an opinion. This is why you cant rape a chair-no matterv what you do to it. To the best of my experience, chairs don't exhibit behavior indicative of having opinions. People can be raped, woodlands cannot.
Perhaps "exploit" would be a better word, or "selfishly utilize without regard for the consequences"? I think I'm close to grasping what you're trying to say, but your conclusion is unclear(at least to me).
You also say "People don't like being treated the way people like treating things, and with enough people to deal with this starts to really, really matter"
Could you expound on this? I'm not sure why it would matter how you treat other people when there's lots more people, but it matters less or doesn't matter when there are fewer. I'm not arguing the point, just seeking clarity.
My compliments on your restraint! I hardly feel offended by your disagreements at all, and am in fact foolish for withholding a post about argument I conceived last night on the grounds that you might be discouraged from discussion.
ReplyDeleteAs to my use of the rape concept, you may recall from high school my moral emphasis on the practice of consideration, or rather my condemnation of being inconsiderate. I believe a lack of mindfulness(empathy) to be at the root of most suffering humans cause each other, including incidences of rape.
I think that this attitude of irresponsible exploitation corresponds to the attitude we commonly take with the non-human living world, that it isn't people so we don't have to care about changing it to suit our needs unless those changes directly affect other humans.
This is happening when a pig farm destroys a waterway because no one else owned it, or the land outside city limits is cleared and developed in the course of a city's growth. We follow a policy of treating anything that isn't owned by a human as free for anyone to do with as they please, then wonder why it's so hard to stop people from finishing off endangered species & dumping motor oil in sewer drains.
If someone walked into your home, pushed you down, and took anything they wanted; didn't treat you like an adversary or a peer, didn't show you respect, just took all your coolest stuff & bound you in a corner you when you got in the way. This would be a violation, an act most definitely analogous to rape between humans(even if the one thought the other wasn't really capable of caring either way).
Before leaving the rape subtopic, I'll mention that your example of raping a chair misplaces the point of action within the system I'm building here; a chair cannot be raped, of course, but is a fair indication that a tree somewhere has been. The living, in other words, are what I'm trying to find a way to describe & treat as people.
As to the hypocrisy of treating things differently than we wish to be treated: it is of course unfair, and no less so when fewer are victimized by it. But justice is a social concept, and only exists between humans(or within other social species), not between humans and non-humans. I could never call my behaviour toward a tree unjust or unfair, yet doing so with other humans maintains a balance of our relative strengths and benefits, establishes a basis for social order.
ReplyDeleteWe have, in other words, one policy of interaction followed with respect to the human living, and another with the non-human living. Our policy with each other includes more of responsibility and consideration, but only because it has to; where less energy is required to utilize a resource, as in harvesting natural resources willy-nilly, it is of course the more practical strategy to do so.
(At this point, I don't present my above objections to exploitative behaviour; whatever the long-term consequences, in the present following a lower-cost strategy of resource management is the obviously more effective, and will be judged along such lines.)
But when humans are more numerous, more energy is being invested in sustaining their lives; when this reaches the point of (perhaps) causing energy scarcity, we look for ways it may be reclaimed. But the energy of human action isn't something that may be reached by drilling or harvesting, because as humans we believe in things like rights and choices; we feel entitled to our energy in a way trees cannot, and we defend it more effectively than cows do. Rather, human energy is exploited by appeals to conscience, by emotive manipulations and human interactions.
This is nothing like a more noble or less mean way of doing things; it is simply a strategy which is adapted to the resources at hand. It is the more effective way of moving human energy around, much as a less considerate approach is more effective in moving non-human energy around.
But as more and more energy becomes tied up in people, the strategies we as a species follow to utilize that energy will have to become more like those we use on people and less like those we use on trees.
The human strategy, though, is more costly; convincing someone to let themselves be used takes more time and energy than simply using them. This means that the more energy there is in humans, the less there is available for collective use, since no one is willing to give all their energy into producing a chair the way a tree does when cut down & milled.
If, however, this shift in strategy becomes too costly, or if maybe we as a species aspire to do more with our energy than simply reproduce to our limits(like space travel or whatnot), the proportion of harvested energy that gets allotted for sustaining human lives will have to be redirected to other, non-human lives which are more easily exploited.
I still think the rape analogy is weak, but your follow up was clear. I must ponder on this, before responding.
ReplyDeleteApologies that my reply turned into two consecutive wall-o-texts; I honestly just hadn't developed this line of thought this much before you asked me to clarify it..
ReplyDelete