Development, biospheric ethics and a new way forward

The demographic transition

Of course, we are assured that development will provide people with a new form of security, one provided by membership in the growing formal economy. As people become more secure, we are told, they will then have fewer children, as has happened in the West. What the development industry does not tell us, however, is that it is economic development that created the insecurity in the first place.

To assume that the ‘demographic transition’ will occur in the Third World is in any case an act of faith. We are not at all sure why the population rate has fallen in the West. Is the fall in fact due to increased security? Or are other factors implicated, such as the fear of the future which looks ever grimmer? Or even the serious pollution of human spermatozoa which has radically reduced the sperm count of young males in the Western world and made a considerable proportion of them ‘functionally sterile’?

Moreover, the economy of the Third World is not expanding nearly fast enough to absorb the growing hordes of unemployed in the cities and is never likely to; hence the security that participation in the formal economy could provide is available to an ever smaller proportion of the population. Indeed, the Third World can never conceivably attain the level of material prosperity we know at present in the West, which has indeed been associated (however superficially) with a reduction in fertility.

What is certain is that the much anticipated ‘demographic transition’ is not occurring in the Third World today. As Lester Brown notes:

“The ‘demographic transition’ that has marked the advance of all developed countries may be reversed for the first time in modern history. African countries have now moved beyond the first stage of this transition, with the equilibrium between high birth and death rates. But virtually all remain stuck in the second stage, with high birth rates and low death rates. In this stage, population growth typically peaks at three percent or so per year.”

If the rate of population growth has fallen slightly in the dry tropics today, it is probably because of an increased death rate from famine, malnutrition and the diseases to which underfed people are particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it is only through such crude means that development can help control the very population explosion that it has itself brought about.

Impact of consumption

Even if the demographic transition did occur, it could not conceivably solve the real problem. A growing population is not intolerable per se but because of the increasing impact it must have on the natural environment. This impact is greatly magnified by the increase in material consumption made possible by economic development. To seek to reduce population by systematically encouraging economic development is thus self-defeating since it can only increase consumption and thus environmental destructiveness.

The new way forward

These two quite clearly misguided policies (on aid and on population) are symptomatic of the current ‘development ethic’ which propagates the notion that the solution to all of humanity’s problems lies in more and more economic growth, particularly in those parts of the world where sustainable, traditional cultures once flourished before they were forced to participate in the world market.

How can we reverse the devastating effects of development on the Third World, and indeed on the industrialised countries themselves?

The answer is that we need to return to a low energy, low resource, low pollution society – and very quickly; such a society must necessarily conduct its economic and indeed its political affairs on a very much smaller scale – which means catering to a very much smaller market. The correct unit for economic activity is clearly the family and to a lesser extent the community. It is only in this way that economic activities can satisfy social, religious and ecological needs – not merely narrow economic ones as is necessarily the case when they are fulfilled by corporations.

Since humans, during 95 percent of their tenancy on this planet, have lived in tribal societies that conducted their economic activities in precisely this way, it seems clear that we must derive our inspiration from that experience. If we examine the way traditional peoples conducted their affairs, we will see that in general they are difficult to improve on. My colleague Nicholas Hildyard and I studied traditional irrigation systems and wrote about them in our book The Social and Environmental Effect of Large Dams. This is clearly the case with their agricultural and horticultural and indeed pastoral practices in general. The literature on this subject is enormous and all of it tends to confirm this thesis.

The basis of the sustainable lifestyles of tribal or ‘vernacular’ societies was undoubtedly the observance of traditional laws which were seen to maintain the order of the Cosmos. So long as that order was maintained, then people prospered: if it was perturbed, if ‘the balance of nature’ was upset, then disaster inevitably followed.

The vernacular person’s fundamental role in life was thus to maintain the order of the Cosmos by performing prescribed rituals, taking part in the prescribed ceremonies and in general by observing traditional laws of society. People understood this law to be a moral one, and one which applied not only to human beings but also to nature and, indeed, to the Cosmos itself.

What is moral behaviour?

Father Placide Tempels in his celebrated book Bantu Philosophy notes:

“Moral behaviour for the Bantu is behaviour that serves to maintain the order of the Cosmos and hence that maximises human welfare: Immoral behaviour is that which reduces its order, thereby threatening human welfare . . .”

This statement could apply equally well to vernacular societies in all parts of the world. In many of these societies, the pattern of behaviour that is judged to be ethical was referred to by a word that both denotes the order of the Cosmos and, at the same time, the ‘path’ or ‘Way’ that must be followed in order to maintain it.

Among the Ancient Greeks the word used was Dike, which also meant ‘righteousness’ or ‘justice’. The Chinese Tao is a very similar concept which refers to the daily and yearly ‘revolution of the heavens’. According to de Groot, Tao

‘represents all that is correct, normal or right in the universe; it does indeed never deviate from its course. It consequently includes all correct and righteous dealings of men and spirits, which alone promote universal happiness and life.’

All other acts, as they oppose the Tao, are “incorrect, abnormal, unnatural” and they must bring “misfortune on the bad.”

The Buddhist notion of Dharma, the Persian Asha and the Vedic Rita are very similar concepts: all refer to the Way that human beings must follow if they are to maintain the order of the Cosmos, the only Way that is truly moral since to maintain it is to assure the welfare of the world of living things, while to diverge from it can only cause disasters like floods, droughts, epidemics and wars.

Although many tribal peoples do not appear to have formulated the notion of the Way in so explicit a manner, their notion of morality remains the same. Moral behaviour is still that which conforms to the traditional law and which, at the same time, serves to maintain the order of the Cosmos. Immoral behaviour, on the other hand, is that which is taboo. Roger Caillois writes,

“An act is taboo if it disrupts the universal order which is at once that of nature and society. . . as-a result the Earth might no longer yield a harvest, the cattle might be struck with infertility, the stars might no longer follow their appointed course, death and disease could stalk the land.”

‘Progress’ (or the economic development with which it is equated) is quite clearly immoral and hence opposed to the ‘Way’ because it involves the systematic substitution of the technosphere or manmade world for the biosphere or natural world from which it derives its resources and to which it consigns its ever more voluminous and ever more toxic waste products. As the technosphere expands, so must the biosphere disintegrate and contract. Economic growth, in fact, is a measure of biospheric disintegration and contraction. The two processes are but different sides of the same coin.

This means that the ethic of progress – in effect, the ethic of perpetual technospheric expansion – is in reality no more than an ethic of biospheric destruction. It is not an ‘evolutionary ethic,’ as Waddington and Huxley saw it. On the contrary, it is an anti-evolutionary ethic. It serves to sanctify the reversal of the evolutionary process.

A biospheric ethic

A biospheric ethic, an ethic compatible with the ecological view of the world we live in, would be very different from that proposed by the industrialised world view. It would above all be one which enables humans to assist in the achievement of Gaia’s overall goal of maintaining the biosphere’s stability or homeostasis in the face of change, whereas immoral behaviour would be that which reduces Gaian homeostasis and hence disrupts the basic structure of the Cosmos.

The question now is: how can the critical transition of industrialised society to one based on a biospheric ethic be achieved?
The answer is only by the adoption of a carefully integrated programme, and we must assume, however unlikely it may be, that it will be adopted by the government of a major industrial nation.

The programme, as we shall see, will have to be divided into distinct parts. These will all be initiated at the same time, though they will proceed at a different pace as they encounter different degrees of inertia. By its very nature, however, the programme would have to be stretched out over a considerable period of time. One cannot transform a society overnight in an orderly way. In addition, the programme would have to be accepted as a whole. One cannot phase out non-sustainable activities without causing all sorts of problems such as inflation and unemployment, unless at the same time one phases in, to replace them, other more sustainable ones. Nor can one phase in the latter without first phasing out the former so as to free labour and resources for this purpose.

For that reason, it is naive to suppose that a government elected for a five-year period can implement anything more than a patchwork of short-term expedients. It is essential that it obtain from the electorate a mandate to implement at least the first part of the programme. To obtain such a mandate, it must first of all make the electorate clearly aware of the extreme gravity of the global situation and hence of its own national one – which, so far, governments throughout the world have systematically played down.

A programme for change

If the programme is to be fully integrated it must be designed to reverse all the essential trends set in motion by the industrial process. The programme can be shown to consist of six functionally distinct stages (though it is not suggested that they actually occur in that order, since positive feedback would cause them to be constantly affecting each other).

The first stage is the development of a very specific world view, whose main features we have already briefly outlined. As Weber was the first to point out, without the current technologically based world view, there would probably have been no industrialisation.

A new world view must replace it. A study of the value systems of traditional stable societies reveals that, though they may vary in many details, their basic features are very similar. In fact it can be shown that, for society to remain stable, a number of basic principles must underlie the world view upon which is based its stable relationship with its social and physical environment. Let us briefly consider the basic principles underlying the aberrant world view of industrialism, in order to see how they may be modified to give rise to an adaptive and hence stable social behaviour pattern.

Humanism

It is essential to the world view of industrialism that humans should not be regarded as an integral part of nature but rather as above it, and thereby largely exempt from the laws governing the behaviour of other forms of life on this planet. To justify this, industrialists can postulate a number of abstract entities whose possession by humans is supposed to distinguish them from the other, less fortunate forms of life. Thus only humans have a soul, they alone display consciousness, their behaviour is supposed to be intelligent, while that of other forms of life is said to be governed by ‘blind’ instinct. Only human societies are supposed to be capable of cultural behaviour.

Such notions are unknown among traditional societies for whom nature is holy and cannot be disrupted without incurring the wrath of the gods. It is by desanctifying nature that it has become socially feasible to destroy it, and by sanctifying human progress in its stead that the process has been able to proceed at the present disastrous pace. For ‘humanism’ we must substitute ‘naturalism’ – respect for the natural world of which we are an integral but only a modest part.

Individualism

Individualism is the notion that a person’s duties are primarily to him or herself. This notion is in keeping with our total ignorance of the nature of natural systems of which we are a part: the family, the community and ecosystem, and of how they are related to each other. For an individual to be a member of a community, his or her behaviour must be subjected to the appropriate set of constraints. A community is an organisation.

As such it displays order, defined as the influence of the whole over the parts. This influence is achieved by subjecting the parts to constraints which will limit their range of choices by causing them to become differentiated. ‘Individualism’ is another word for chaos. It is unacceptable in a stable self-regulating society, as it is in any stable self-regulating natural system. For ‘individualism’ we must substitute ‘communitarianism’ – the need to subject what may appear to be our individual interests to those of the community and the ecosystem.

Materialism

Materialism is closely related to individualism. In traditional societies people’s goals are largely social. The accumulation of material goods plays no part in the strategy of their lives. Material goods only become necessary when they are required for the purpose of satisfying biological and social needs. Karl Marx was wrong when he referred to religion as the opiate of the people. People have always been religious. Religion is an essential part of their sociability, which assures the stability of their social environment. It is not religion, in fact, but materialism that is the opiate of the people.

Scientism

Scientism is the notion that scientific knowledge can serve as the basis for social and ecological control. Let us not forget that there is no precedent for stable societies based on objective scientific information. Until now they have invariably been based on traditional and very subjective information designed to adapt a particular society to its specific environment, rather than all societies to all environments. It can be shown that only such cultural information satisfies basic cybernetic requirements.

We must develop increasing respect for the information organised into the cultural pattern of remaining traditional societies. This is essential to the task of social decentralisation. For ‘scientism’, in fact, we must substitute ‘culturalism’.

Technologism

The notion that there is a technological solution to all our problems is a myth closely associated with scientism, since the solutions which scientific information can give rise to are technological ones. These, however, can play no part in the strategy of nature. We must develop instead a quasi-religious respect for the natural systems that make up the biosphere, whose normal functioning provides the only lasting solution to such problems.

Institutionalism

This myth is also closely related to the preceding ones. If benefits are material and technological, then one must create the optimum conditions in which they can be dispensed. Such conditions do not exist in the home, or in a vernacular community. Therefore institutions are set up to provide them. Ignorance of social and ecological cybernetics leads to the essential self-regulating nature of natural systems being ignored, while it is assumed that their control can be more effectively assured by institutions – that is, external or asystemic controls. For institutionalism we must also substitute a respect for the self-regulating nature of natural systems – a key component of culturalism and ecologism.

Economism

Economism is the notion that things must be done because they are economic – that is, so as to maximise the return on capital or on other factors of production. This notion is totally consistent with the others. If all benefits are material, technological or institutional, economic growth must be the means of maximising them and hence of best promoting human welfare. For ‘economism’ must be substituted ‘ecologism’, the notion that things must be done to satisfy not a single end but all the basic (often competing) requirements of the community and its natural environment.

Reform of the educational system is needed to assure the general adoption of the new world view. It would have to become considerably more decentralised, and the curriculum would also be changed so that the accent might shift from the random accumulation of data to the acquisition of the cultural information favouring the appropriate socialisation process.

The second stage in the implementation of this new way forward is the development of the technology required for achieving its goals. What is required is a shift – from capital intensive industry to developing the ‘appropriate’ technology for decentralised living.
The third stage is the transformation of society so that instead of satisfying the requirements of the production – consumption process, it would once more be composed of people who are, above all, members of families, communities and ecosystems, and whose behaviour is basically that required to satisfy the requirements of these systems and hence of the larger system of which they are a part, the biosphere. The process will come about automatically as society is decentralised and conditions are created in favour of the restoration of the family, the community and the ecosystem, at which point economic activities will gradually become subordinated to social ones.
The fourth stage is to reverse the system of capital generation, by means of the production-consumption process. Some capital will undoubtedly be required to finance the early stages of the programme designed to prevent social and economic collapse, and to modify the infrastructure of society in such a way as to favour its decentralisation. Slowly the need for capital will be reduced as systemic resources replace asystemic ones.
The fifth stage is the reversal of the process which built up the industrialised world: by radically reducing the scale of the production process and producing goods that are ever less destructive to the natural environment.
The sixth stage is reducing the scale of technological activities to permit the restoration of the self-regulating social systems which make up the natural world, on the basis of whose normal functioning these problems could be solved.

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