Steve Watson

Greens vs Humans

Almost all mainstream political programs have ultimately aimed at (or at least have been justified in terms of) improving the lot of humankind. In this respect you might call them Eudaimonist. Socialists think that humans will flourish better with equality maximised, liberals think the same for maximising liberty, and so on for the other standard political positions. On the other hand, we have in recent years seen an increase in political appeal of a movement that is generally labelled Green, and it is remarkable that their political aim is not Eudaimonist at all but is the protection of encouragement of non-human Nature.

It is difficult to think of any other political movement through history, or any other political philosophy likewise, that didn’t have as its ultimate end the betterment of humanity or the greater flourishing of humans. When I have asked about this in discussions the only barely reasonable responses have referred to, say, the heated controversies over the trinity in some periods of the Late Mediaeval, or over the nature of the relationship between God and Christ in Constantinople (where it was said that one couldn’t even go for a haircut without the barber interrogating you on whether Jesus was of the same or similar nature as God.) These are certainly examples of ‘popular’ obsessions with theories that don’t seem intimately related peoples’ mundane interests, but I’m not sure they’re quite what I was thinking of. I guess the question is whether if that had been proposed as a political platform it would have been essentially inimical to human interests or whether it would have been irrelevant. In fact, I hardly see it as a political question at all – but why not? Perhaps because I imagine politics as being the question of settling the rules by which people live in a political community. This isn’t a question of rules of living but of rules of believing. Beliefs are relevant to the way we live but they’re not the same thing. Many things are ‘relevant’ to modes of life without being political facts or questions. 

Another example was given which I dismissed at the time but might be more relevant given the mode of life nature of politics I’ve just proposed. It was noted that the Albigensians were committed by their beliefs to the idea that sex is wrong and damaging to the soul and that they were therefore likely to act so that they went extinct. That’s true, I said, but their politics was still centred on human flourishing because they took the souls of humans as being the entities that required to be encouraged to flourish rather than their bodies. Humans are essentially their souls, not the meat packages in which they arrive on Earth. I’m not so sure about that now, because if politics is about establishing the rules of living in a community, then because the rules that derive from Cathar beliefs are counter to the continuance of that community they cannot be seen as focussed on the happiness of the members. Or is that just a rhetorical confusion? More thought is necessary, clearly.

If pressed on this, a Green might attempt to argue that we can’t have human flourishing without a healthy planet and that this justifies their focus, but their focus is nevertheless on the flourishing of Nature, not Man, and we are a secondary good if a good at all. Moreover, one might ask how they might react if made to choose between Man and Nature – they’d deny the reality of the choice, of course, but that would be transparently a dodge: we see repeatedly that whenever there is a choice between a human good and a good for ‘Nature,’ they will act for the latter against the former. And that’s not even counting the vast number of examples of their declared enmity towards humankind. How often have we heard that humans were a plague on the planet, that the world would be better without us, that zero population is our goal, and so on. One suspects that the argument for Nature from Man’s requirements is an ad hoc response and not at all a primary motivator.

One wonders what could possibly motivate this, and I have proposed two possible answers in conversation. In the first place, Nature is being taken as a replacement God for the secular age. It is a final value-giver in a world where the alternatives are either nihilism – accepting that there is no such thing as ultimate value and that there is no greater purpose to life than the satisfaction of simple self-interest that constitutes the very lowest level of our practical reasoning – or deism – pretending that there is a higher power of the God-sort that is able to give value to things. The latter is unacceptable to us as epistemologically unjustifiable, and the former is unacceptable to us as being psychologically destructive.

In the second place, I proposed that the current nihilistic anti-humanism of the Greens is a natural exaggeration in development of the moral nihilism and anti-modernism or anti-Westernism that entered into the environmental movement when it was recognised as a potential tool in the Cold War by the communists in the West and East. Since it became impossible for the Reds plausibly to argue directly for the benefits of the Communist system following the XXth Party Congress but long before the USSR fell, the environmental movement was seen as a stalking horse to encourage anti-nuclear sentiments, anti-development, anti-whatever as a way to weaken the West from within. Like the anti-nuclear movement itself, it continues as a zombie Trotskyism long past the use-by date of its instigators.

In any case, the consequence is that we cannot rely upon the Greens to enact or support policies that benefit humans, and they may actually find that our advantages are their disadvantages. The fact that they value Man below Nature is reflected in the net-zero obsessions of our political class, as just one example. And of course, any ideology is driven by its most enthusiastic supporters and there is a tendency to head to the extremes of ideological purity. In the case of the Greens and the environmentalists in general we see this with the very commonly expressed sentiments that Man is a cancer on the planet, that ZPG is to be embraced, that the population explosion is on us, our carbon footprint will smother the world, that the world cannot support so many of us, that human extinction might be a good thing, who’d miss us, Extinction Rebellion!, and so on.