Preface to the Second Edition

This edition of The Philosophy of Social Ecology has been so radically revised and corrected that in many respects it is a new book. I have retained in most of their essentials the essays that appeared in the first edition, but I have significantly altered many of my original formulations. I have also added a new essay, “History, Civilization, and Progress” written early in 1994, which critically examines in general terms the social and ethical relativism so much in vogue today.

Most of the essays in this book were written as polemics, directed against various tendencies that surfaced in the American ecology movement in the 1980s. “Toward a Philosophy of Nature,” published in Michael Tobin’s misnamed collection, Deep Ecology, in 1985 but written three years earlier for the journal Telos, was directed against the then-current enthusiasm for turning systems theory into ecological philosophy. “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” published in the Canadian journal Alternatives in 1986, challenged the neo-Darwinian view of the natural world fostered by a cluster of very conventional ecologists and initiated my critique of “biocentrism.” “Thinking Ecologically,” initially published in 1987 in another Canadian journal. Our Generation, was written to criticize the New Age “paradigm” that was then being inflicted on the ecology movement, as well as certain leaders of Earth First!, who were then advancing a crudely misanthropic message from their stronghold in the American Sunbelt. Appearing here in the order in which they were written (except for the introduction), they are thus set in very distinct time frames, with emphases appropriate to issues that have emerged over the past fourteen years. I wish to thank all previous publishers of these essays for their permission to republish them, both in the original and in this revised edition.

Although times have changed since these essays first appeared, the problems they tried to address are still with us. Gregory Bateson’s views no longer enjoy the preeminence that they did in the 1980s, for example, but his subjectivism and many of his arguments played a major role in forming the innerworldly, relativistic, and personalistic Zeitgeist of present New Age ideologues, while systems theory approaches still surface in many current theoretical works on ecology. Fritjof Capra is still fostering his eclectic medley of science and mysticism, of Prigoginian systems theory and “California cosmology.” “Biocentrism,” antihumanism, deep ecology, and neo-Malthusianism have become even more popular than they were when I wrote “Thinking Ecologically.” New views have melded with older ones: today, it is philosophical relativism and postmodernism that are percolating through the ecology movement; hence the new closing essay, “History, Civilization, and Progress.” In revising all the essays, I have tried to generaiize the views expressed in the original versions to make them as relevant as possible to present-day discussion. Let me add that without the assistance and editorial insights of Janet Biehl, to whom this book is dedicated, these revisions would have bee n difficult to make. I would also like to express my thanks to Nathalie Klym at Black Rose Books for her valuable work in producing this book.

Two other changes in the present edition should be singled out. First, I have excised favorable references to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno. like Leszek Kolakowski, I have come to regard much of Adorno’s work as intellectually irresponsible, wayward, and poorly theorized, despite the brilliance of his style (at times) and his often insightful epigrams. This is not to reject his defense of speculative reason against positivism — which was what initially attracted me to his work and to the Frankfurt School — even as h is writings exude enormous pessimism about reason and its destiny.

Second, I have removed my favorable allusions to ideas that have since become central to ecofeminism. The exciting challenge that radical feminism posed in the early 1970s was its universal condemnation of hierarchy as such, which appealed to me since I myself had made such a condemnation more than a decade earlier. Even in the late 1970s, when ecofeminism emerged, claims of the “innate” superiority of females over m ales and of women’s superior emotional and cognitive abilities, and opposition to “logocentrism,” were not yet prominent. Only later was ecofeminism reduced to the antirational and crudely visceral level of a Starhawk, where invocations of magic, goddess worship, and witchcraft become “feminist” ways of eluding reality. Too many ecofeminists, albeit not all, now tend to privilege women over men cognitively and morally, while the original universalist and egalitarian approach of the feminist movement has withered significantly.

Whether the reader agrees with all my views or not, these essays, I believe, are required reading for anyone who wishes to understand social ecology. They seek, more suggestively than exhaustively, to establish its philosophical foundations and modes of thought. (Let me insist that they are the works of neither a “Hegelian,” a “neo-Hegelian,” nor a “post-Hegelian,” to use current academic jargon, but rather of a dialectician upon whom Hegel exercised a considerable influence.) A rounded understanding of social ecology as I have formulated it, however, also requires a reading of at least two of my other books, Remaking Society and Urbanization Without Cities, which explore social ecology’s historical and political aspects.

Recent developments in quasi-leftist social thinking have obliged me to significantly alter the way I conceive nature, society, and reason, as well as history, civilization, and progress, as the reader will find in the closing essay. All these words have a multiplicity of meanings, but the meanings that are most pervasive today are not the ones that I intend when I use these words. Nowadays, for example, the ecology movement most often regards nature either as a “social construction” or a “wilderness” of one sort or another, while others see society as any aggregation of life-forms, including flocks of birds and herds of deer. Both within and without the ecology movement, reason is regarded as a mental skill, history as a mere succession of events, civilization as a Eurocentric prejudice, and progress as a myth. Years of give-and-take with both supporters and opponents of my views have obliged me to slowly but consciously give these words a more specific philosophical meaning than they have in conventional discourse. Some of these changes are discussed in the new introduction to the Black Rose edition of The Ecology of Freedom; others require elucidation here.

As I explain in the introduction to this book. Nature properly encompasses everything around us, from the organic beings that we normally designate as “natural” to the lifeless moon that appears on relatively cloudless nights — that is, the totality of Being. However, if we are to use the word Nature in any more specific sense, we should use an adjective before it to describe what aspect of “nature” we are talking about — something that I often did not do in these essays, owing to the time period in which they were written. The reader who encounters the word nature herein, unmodified by any adjective, should now take it to refer to my notion of “first nature,” or the cumulative evolution of the natural world, especially the organic world. This first nature exists in both continuity and discontinuity with “second nature,” or the evolution of society. As I discuss in some detail in “Thinking Ecologically,” second nature develops both in continuity with first nature and as its antithesis, until the two are subbed into “free nature” or “Nature” rendered self-conscious in a rational and ecological society.

Society, in turn, is more than mere consociation or community. It is institutionalized community, structured a ro und mutable organizational forms that may range from totalitarian despotism to libertarian municipalism. As such, society is specific to human beings; indeed, an expression like “social insects” is, from my standpoint, nonsensical and oxymoronic, conflating a fixed, genetically programmed aggregation of animals with the developmentally structured consociation of humans. As for reason and rationality, when I use these terms without any qualifying adjective, I mean dialectical reason, a secular dialectical logos, as contrasted with instrumental or conventional reason, an ordinary mental skill. History, as I argue in the final essay, is the cultural and social unfolding of reason, not simply a succession of events over time, for which I reserve the word Chronicles. Civilization is the actualization in varying degrees of historical unfolding, while Progress is, more loosely, the self-directive activity of History and Civilization toward increasing rationality, freedom, and self-consciousness in relationships between human and human, and in the relationship of humanity to the natural world.

Let me state as clearly and firmly as possible that I do not regard History and Progress as unilinear, inevitable, teleological, or in any sense predetermined. The power of speculative reason to logically project beyond the given into what is yet to come if humanity acts rationally — a power that is one of our highest human attributes — does not mean that what rationally “should be” will indeed necessarily “be.” To constitute the all-important standard by which we may judge the rationality of a society is a firmly held function of dialectical reason. We would lose ourselves in a quagmire of solipsistic relativism if we were to abdicate the power of reason to “judge” History, Civilization, and Progress. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool antirationalists and relativists exercise this power, irrespective of their convictions against doing so. As any thinking person would agree, people do indeed imagine the world as it might be, in contrast to what it is in reality, even in their daydreams. They do have the wildest fantasies about their culture and its environment. And they do hold the most seemingly unrealistic constellations of images and “patterns of culture” about basic aspects of their experience. None of this do I deny — quite the contrary, humanity’s continual struggle with its imagination lies at the very heart of the tensions within early society, which in turn has historically led to varying degrees of rational self-understanding as well as frightening, often atavistic regressions.

Given these observations, it would be simplistic and one-sided to ignore the moral and cultural paradoxes embedded in social development. Humanity did not emerge ab novo, without roots in animal evolution. The human being has been and still is an animal with emotional states that are animalistic, like “fight and flight” reactions and tormentingly basic fears. But humans are also animals of a very special kind: we are highly intelligent by comparison with other species — indeed, qualitatively so — and as such, we have the ability not only to adapt to our environments but intentionally to alter them significantly. In short, we can do m ore than adapt; we can innovate, although we do not always innovate willingly if we can survive in a given environment without doing so.

Our intelligence is also highly problematic. It makes not only for innovation but for foresight, fantasy, imagination, creativity — and cruelty. Indeed, much personal and social irrationality stems from the intentionally, will, self-assertiveness, and fantasies of our animality informed by our intelligence. As Marx suggested, we still live in prehistory and have yet to find our way toward a self-conscious, humane, cooperative, and empathetic social life. With our animalistic as well as human attributes, we evolve in an ever-changing world and face stark problems of survival and well-being. Apart from those people who inhabit places with benign physiographic conditions, we are subject to material insecurity, contesting wills, challenges to our sense of self and self-regard, fears of disease, diminishing physical powers with age, frightening dreams, and so forth. We address these abiding problems with relatively developed minds that are still encased, as it were, in extremely potent animal attributes.

History is the painful movement of human beings in extricating themselves from animal existence, of the emergence of tensions from a combination of nonhuman and human attributes, and of progressively advancing toward a more universally human state of affairs, however irregular or unsteady this advance may be. The problems that humans retain from early society continue to exist in one way or another to this day, and their resolution in part or whole is one of the meaningful goals of History, even as new problems arise over the course of time. Nor is there any certainty that these problems will be resolved. A descent into barbarism — a problematic that Marxists were raising during the grimmest years of World War II — is just as possible as the attainment of a rational society.

But to deny, because of such starkly conflicting alternatives in social development, that there are rational criteria by which we may judge that Progress is myopic, or even that Progress has occurred, is self-deceptive. It is all too easy to rebuke History if one minimizes the genuine advances that have been made in culture, social relations, and technics. All doubts about History, Civilization, and Progress aside, it is undeniable that we have divested ourselves of many of the kinship ties that parochialized us into tribal groups, and that we have accepted — albeit with many qualifications — our status as a human species rather than as a folk. We have created cities that are open to strangers, we have advanced technology to the point that a sufficiency in the means of life could be available to all in a rational society, and we have increased our knowledge of the natural world to almost sublime proportions. Not only do we kill each other with terrifying brutality, given our combination of animality with intelligence, but we help each other on a massive scale with extraordinary sensitivity.

Here, I believe, we are obliged to make a serious decision about how we look at the past. Either we will relativize History by emphasizing the power of the irrational over human behavior and the endless differences that distinguish cultures from one another; or we will emphasize the remarkable coherence of various cultures and generalize from their similarities, even as we appreciate their differences. Choosing the first alternative would ultimately diminish social development to a disconnected archipelago of wholly unique cultures whose only Coherence is psychosocial and internal; while the second alternative would allow for a dialectically rational understanding of History and a ground for ethics. If our animalistic capacity for irrational behavior gains priority over our humanistic potentiality to act rationally, and if social development becomes only an ensemble of Chronicles (if even that) rather than a History of maturation, there is no basis for striving to achieve a rational society.

What, then, of those social failures, aberrations, horrors, and breakdowns that belie humanity’s unilinear progress toward Civilization and freedom?[1] Without in any way understating this problematic, we must be wary of overstating it by dissolving social development in psychosocial interpretations, thereby minimizing the very reality of social maturation as such. There has been a historical social development, all its many setbacks notwithstanding, setbacks that can in part be attributed to elites of agonistic men whose power gave them the scope to play out their destructive fantasies, impulses, and designs on a large social stage. In their activities they have “gone too far” so to speak, demonically pushing cultures beyond the rational framework of their historical time. Such distortions become especially problematical during times of transition, when established social formations are being negated and new ones are emerging with uncertainty and ambiguity. This overextension of the “negative” (to use Hegel’s term) occurred at numerous times and in numerous places, when “antitheses” became ends in themselves and did not develop as a rational or progressive transcendence. Neither tribal, feudal, autocratic, republican, nor even classical democratic political systems have been historically immune to this phenomenon.

And yet it would be a gross simplification of social development to ahistorically dichotomize the hierarchical, class, and even state formations of the past, on the one hand, and the torturous efforts of humanity to advance toward freedom, on the other. Paradoxically, in its emergence out of barbarism—indeed, out of simple animality — humanity may have had to depend upon priests, chieftains, and perhaps state-like formations to overcome parochialism, lack of individuality, kinship bonds, gerontocracies, and patriarchies, to cite some key social features of tribal and even civilized cultures. “Evils” these are, to be sure, but, if we are to believe Michael Bakunin, “socially necessary evils,” a phrase with which he historically characterized the state and that Peter Kropotkin echoed in his famous Encyclopedia Britannica article, “Anarchism” The groundwork for making a civilizatory process possible — notably the emergence of cities, territorial forms of consociation, writing, an expanding moral sensibility, a rational and incipiently secular outlook on the world, technological advances that led to agriculture, metallurgy, and relatively sophisticated crafts — all may have required what we would regard today as unacceptable institutions of social control but that at an earlier time may have been important in launching a rational social development.

In any case, to ahistorically counter pose “virtue” to “evil” without any historical qualifications and mediations can be very naive. In much earlier historical eras, “good” and “evil” had not even acquired the definitions they have today, after thousands of years of human social development. The state’s invasion of patriarchal authority; its substitution of a relatively rational system of law for the patriarch’s arbitrary and absolute authority over all other members of a family or clan; and the abrogation of blood vengeance as a way of resolving conflicts — all, to cite some significant advances, played a role that was relatively liberatory in its historical context, give n a general framework of domination in early hierarchical societies. Patriarchs, for example, would have seen the state’s function in this respect as “evil.”

Like the historical replacement of kinship ties with civic ties, barter with markets, agrarian isolation with cities, particularism with growing universalism, and superstition with secularism, there were certain forms of socially regulative institutions that, while oppressive in modern eyes, opened possibilities for liberatory developments that otherwise might never have emerged. But although the very real barbarism of past and present remains an “evil,” as Bakunin observed, it was not a historical “necessity” in any sense akin to Bakunin’s, for we can never know what rational alternatives may have existed at any time. At no time can we surrender to the “inevitability” of domination in certainty that latent liberatory possibilities do not exist.

In no sense, then, should my remarks be seen as an “excuse” for barbaric behavior, past or present. Rather, I intend them in great part to be the premise for trying to understand how it is that the irrational dimensions of the past, with their many barbarities, never completely stifled the rational development of humanity and yet may have even interacted with it at times to yield social advances within a broadly evil framework. It behooves us to study the historical and social interactions between the legacy of freedom and the legacy of domination, in degree as well as in kind, not to simplify them or even brush them aside with psychosocial categories or ahistorically enumerate them on a social ledger of debits and credits. If we are to think in a graded and nuanced manner, with a modicum of intellectual responsibility, about the past and present, we are obliged to explore the social conditions in which — offensive as it may seem to “politically correct” modern minds — certain forms of domination paradoxically provided the stimulus for increasing freedom, culturally if not institutionally.

Do we have no other ground than our personal preferences for dealing with the social issues of the past and present? Attitudes, wishes, desires, and imagined ways of life are deeply rooted in existing social conditions — not even our most liberating “preferences” have solely personal origins. Today they reflect possibilities and hopes that were not available to the radical culture of only a few generations ago. The cry to “demand the impossible,” which surfaced among French students in May-June 1968, rested massively on the extraordinary possibilities that advances in technology and material life had opened up, not simply on alienation — which, in fact, these very advances significantly generated.

The essays in this book critique the common view that — owing to the “impossibility” of formulating an objective criterion for determining what is rational or irrational, real or imaginary, true or false, good or evil, self-determining or authoritarian — our attitude that freedom is desirable and tyranny hateful must have only a contingent subjective basis. When this attitude is formed in abstracto, without any roots in historical development or material preconditions, it remains theoretically unjustified and a mere matter of opinion. Unfortunately, this is an indulgence we can ill afford. The condition of the world is far too desperate and chaotic for us, often from the fastness of the academy, to advance a moral, social, and cultural incoherence that rests primarily on attitudes, tastes, and matters of opinion that themselves beg for rational explanation.