[P2P-F] man and nature, four part essay

[Michel Bauwens]

http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/man-and-nature-parts-i-iv-complete/

Taken from a four-part essay by Ross Wolfe:


"At some points, nature was viewed as an adversary to be feared, bringing
plague, catastrophe, and famine to ravage mankind. Often these elemental
forces were either animistically, naturalistically, or totemistically
embodied as divine powers in themselves,[1] or anthropomorphized as gods who
commanded these forces as they saw fit. When cataclysms occurred, it was
because the gods or spirits had somehow been enraged by the misdeeds of men,
and thus they unleashed their fury upon the mass of fear-stricken mortals.
In Christian times, this same logic persisted,[2] with periods of plenty
seen as signs of God’s providence and grace, while periods of blight were
viewed as God’s wrath, brought on by the sinfulness and iniquity of men.

Later, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, nature was reenvisioned as dead
matter, abiding by a set of mechanical but unknown laws, which could be
discovered and mastered through careful study and observation under
controlled conditions. As the Baconian dictum went, contra Aristotle: “the
secrets of nature reveal themselves better through harassments applied by
the arts [torture] than when they go on in their own way.”[3] Thus began the
“conquest” of nature, the quest to harness its forces so that they may serve
the ends of mankind. Robbed of their mysterious properties, natural objects
therefore became “disenchanted,” in the Weberian sense.[4] With the arrival
of the Enlightenment, as Hegel recognized, “the intellect will cognize what
is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber.”[5]

Romanticism responded to this alienation from nature with a sense of tragic
loss, and sought to regain what they saw as the fractured unity of man and
nature. The Romantics exalted the primitive, celebrating the charming
naïveté of the ancient Greeks or their modern-day counterparts, who appeared
in the form of “noble savages.” The playwright Friedrich Schiller even
dedicated an essay to the distinction between the “naïve”[6] and
“sentimental” in poetry. For modern man, he asserted, “nature has
disappeared from our humanity, and we can reencounter it in its genuineness
only outside of humanity in the inanimate world. Not our greater naturalness
[Naturmäßigkeit], but the very opposite, the unnaturalness [Naturwidrigkeit]
of our relationships, conditions, and mores forces us to fashion a
satisfaction in the physical world that is not to be hoped for in the moral
world.”[7] The Romantics thus preferred the bucolic simplicity of the small
old village to the sprawling chaos of the modern city. Vitalistic
explanations of nature, like Goethe’s and Schelling’s, were offered as
alternatives to the Democritean-Newtonian vision of the universe as composed
of dead matter and obeying a changeless set of mechanical laws.

Despite its nostalgia for a bygone simplicity of life and man’s unity with
nature, the Romantic worldview was gradually overtaken by that belonging to
the modern industrialist. To the industrialist, nature presented itself as a
wealth of raw materials waiting to be exploited. Through the application of
human labor, these natural resources could be transformed into social
products, valuable commodities to be distributed to the whole of society.
“Man when producing wealth acts upon the things which Nature supplies,”
wrote Alfred Marshall, the famous British economist. “The gifts of Nature to
man are firstly materials such as iron, stone, wood, etc., and secondly,
forces such as the power of the wind, and the heat of the sun, the source
whence all other powers are derived.” Wealth, Marshall claimed, could only
be generated through the action of men on these natural materials, whose
worthiness could only be evaluated according to their potential utility. He
continued:

   The agents of production are then Nature’s forces, and Man’s force;
man’s force being generally most efficient when it is so applied as to
control and direct nature’s forces, rather than to counteract them.
And the wealth of a country depends upon the manner in which nature’s
forces and man’s force work together in the production of wealth.[8]

One might note how much the modern industrialist’s perspective on nature
mirrors that of the Enlightenment man of science. For both, nature is
conceived as nothing more than the sum of dead matter and the mechanical
forces that compel it. The difference is that, while a Bacon or Descartes
might be interested in natural products insofar as they might understand
them, a Rockefeller or a Carnegie would be more interested in the way they
might be exploited so as to generate value.

Though Romanticism took a “dark” and urbanistic turn toward the middle of
the century (think Baudelaire and the Symbolists) all the way up to the
fin-de-siècle, many of the sentiments it originally possessed toward nature
survived alongside Europe’s rapid industrialization and urbanization in the
nineteenth century. The American Transcendentalists are only one of the more
notable movements confirming this fact. In the twentieth century, however,
the various currents stemming from early nineteenth-century Romanticism
began to reemerge, tying themselves to a number of different political
tendencies. Preservationists, environmentalists, vegetarians, and nudists
joined in with groups from all shades of the political spectrum: Teddy
Roosevelt-style big-game conservationism in America, NSDAP fascism in
Germany, the pseudo-left Front Populaire in interwar France. Following the
end of the war, these tendencies joined in with sections of the
international New Left and later the nebulous “post-ideological” Left in the
second half of the century.

For most of these groups, the environmentalists tended to view any
exploitation of nature by man as invasive, as a transgression of its
inherent sanctity. Nature for them became something of a Kantian
Ding-an-Sich, something inviolable and essentially unknowable. Its continued
“natural” existence, uncorrupted by the malign influence of society, came to
be considered a kind of virtue in itself. Untouched wilderness was thought
to constitute some sort of pristine, prelapsarian paradise existing in
perfect harmony with itself. It was thus to be set apart from any
considerations of its utility to society. Faced with the reality of the
increased industrial exploitation of natural sites, however, environmental
activists blamed the rapid destruction of the environment on the expansion
of global capitalism and corporate greed run amok. And so they marched in
protest of the further exploitation of the environment, spouting apocalyptic
rhetoric and predicting ecological catastrophe. All of humanity is doomed,
they say, should mankind not mend its ways. In some sense, this almost marks
a return to the primitive belief that the sinfulness of humanity will be met
with wrath, and it is almost ironic that the rising sea levels resulting
from the melting of the ice caps should recapitulate the biblical Flood.
Modern society for the environmentalists constitutes a sort of capitalist
Sodom and Gomorrah, which will soon be punished by Mother Nature. This is
the sort of environmentalism one often encounters today, the
dispensationalist hysteria almost eclipsing the sound scientific evidence on
which the theory of global warming is based. These are the times in which we
live.
Returning to the original purpose of this outline, however, what should all
these various historical conceptions of nature tell us? First of all, it
should tell us that the conception of nature is in large part dependent on
the society for which it is an object of contemplation. Nature, though it
probably does operate according to an unchanging set of uniform physical
laws, has a significance beyond its mere existence in itself. The concept of
“nature” also carries with it a great deal of ideological baggage, and
reflects the superstructures of thought in any given age. The problem, going
forward, is thus not merely to find some sort of solution to the prospect of
a potential ecological collapse, but to formulate nature as a social
problem. The question of humanity’s relationship to nature goes far beyond
“saving the planet” or any such platitude; it involves at its core the
disalienation of man from nature, and their reconciliation thereby. No
amount of recycling, collecting of litter, or “going Green” will solve this
fundamental issue. The resolution of the problem of man and nature can only
be reached through radical social transformation, and not by the aggregate
sum of superficial actions that only treat mere symptoms rather than the
underlying problem."

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