I deliberately kept the title of this course as vague and as general as I could, so as not to commit myself too far in advance or to pretend that I know too much. Our business will be to take various aspects of the human situation to see how bridges can be built between facts and values. I shall start with a consideration of man in relation to the planet, for we live on this particular planet and, whether we like it or not, we have to get on with it indefinitely. Unfortunately, I am sorry to say, all the stuff about going to Mars and so on seems to be pretty good nonsense. It is very much more important to see what we can do with Earth, and unfortunately what we are doing with Earth is disastrously bad. I shall try first of all to set forth the facts of what we are doing with our planetary environment and consider what the ethical corollaries of these facts are and what Weltanschauung would help us to remedy them. Then I shall talk about the relationship between the sources that are available now and those that will be available in the future. I will build a slight, hypothetical bridge into the future.
After that I think we shall turn to the strictly biological problems of the human individual and discuss man from the point of view of heredity and from the point of view of environment, and try to establish some kind of balance between these two factors which so profoundly influence our existence. The problem of man in society will follow, and there I shall spend a good deal of time in discussing what seems to me the most profoundly important sociological factor of modern times: the growth of technology and what may be called the technicization of every aspect of human life. Then I will move on to other aspects of the social life, and in due course I hope to get down to the problem of the individual, the problem of human potentialities and what can be done to realize those that at present remain to a large extent latent in a large portion of the people. Needless to say, in this connection there will have to be discussions of art and of the problems of creation and insight.
We shall wander very far afield in this search for bridges. By the time we are at the end we shall have covered a great deal of ground, and we will also be extremely bored with what I have to say, but fortunately I shall then quietly disappear.
Man and His Planet
What is our relationship with the planet? What are we doing with the world on which we are living and how are we treating it? How is it likely to treat us if we go on treating it as we are now?
I shall begin to answer these questions with two quotations from the Bible. The first comes from the Psalms: ‘The trees of the Lord are full of sap: the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted’ (Psalms 104: 16). The second comes from the Song of Solomon, where the face of the beloved is compared to the cedars: ‘His countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars’ (Song of Solomon 5: 15). These great trees have a kind of mythical quality. We have all heard of them from our earliest years; hospitals are named after them, and they have become a sort of household word. I remember when for the first time I went to the Middle East, one of the things I was most interested in seeing was precisely the cedars of Lebanon.
Lebanon is a very small country which consists of a coastal strip not more than a few miles wide at the foot of towering mountains which go up to about ten thousand feet. The mountain range is a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles long, twenty-five or thirty miles wide, and I expected, when I drove up into it, to find the cedars of Lebanon in profusion, as undoubtedly they once were. We drove and drove for hours up enormous hills and finally, after mile upon mile of absolutely barren country, came upon an enclosed space in which there were approximately four hundred cedars. Flying over the range later on, I saw two or three other such groves, and I believe there are in all perhaps fifteen hundred or two thousand cedars left. This is all that remains of the gigantic forest that supplied King Solomon with the timbers for his temple—if you remember, Solomon made a treaty with Heiram, King of Tyre, in which Heiram agreed that the timbers should be brought down to the coast, towed in floats to whatever port was appointed by Solomon, and then dragged to Jerusalem—and that for centuries supplied Egypt, which grows no trees of its own except palm trees, with all the timber it required.
This illustrates in a very striking way what man has been doing to his planet over the course of the centuries. He has found profusion in nature and in all too many cases he has completely devastated what he has found. Here we had a magnificent forest: these trees are very fine. You must have seen them in botanical gardens—the specimens grow all over Europe now, where they have been imported, and do very well in temperate climates. But, as Chateaubriand pointed out, ‘les forêts précèdent les peuples, et les déserts les suivent’ (forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them). During the time he has been on earth—which is anything from a half million to perhaps a million years—man has been increasingly a profound geological force. He has changed the face of the planet upon which he lives, sometimes for the better, but in all too many cases for the worse.
In the nineteenth century, the environmentalist school spoke of environment as conditioning and creating cultures but left out of account altogether the fact that cultures condition the environment—that man has certainly done almost as much to change the environment as the environment has done to mould the course of history.
In general, we may say that the realization that man is a changer of nature did not begin until the late eighteenth century. The first great classical work on the subject was written in 1865 by George Perkins Marsh, who was the first American Ambassador to the new Kingdom of Italy. In this book Marsh collected all of the European material to date on the subject of man and nature and set it forth in a kind of philosophical context. One of the precursors in the field, it remains an extremely valuable book.
Let us begin by talking about the positive contributions which man has made to changing the planet. For example, most ecologists will now agree that the tropical grasslands, and quite possibly the grasslands of the temperate zone, were actually created by man and have been maintained by him in their open grassy state for hundreds of thousands of years. I suppose the most important of man’s contributions are those he has made in bringing valuable plants or animals from one part of the world to another. In classical times such trees as the peach, the plum, the walnut, and the almond were brought from the Near East, the Middle East, and even the Far East to the Mediterranean; such valuable fodder plants as alfalfa and certain types of clover were brought from the Mediterranean and domesticated throughout Europe and later on in the New World; and such plants as peas and vines were carried from the West to China. The introduction of potatoes into the Old World from the New was revolutionary, as was the importation into Africa, Asia, and Southern Europe of Indian corn, from South and Central America.
What is true of plants is also true of animals. The most obvious case is the importation of the horse into the New World. The American Indians did all their hunting on foot before the Spaniards and the first English settlers introduced the horse. The North American Indians then rapidly took to this new quadruped, and you will see the same thing in South America. The only domesticated animal which the Incas, for example, possessed was the llama—the alpaca and the vicuna—which, in a pinch, can carry about twenty or thirty pounds on its back. But this was all they had, except for human beasts of burden, for transporting goods up and down those extraordinary mountain trails in the Andes. They have also adopted the sheep, which has entered into the Indian folklore of the Andes, and has become a kind of native animal there.
An interesting importation, from the East to Europe, was that of the cat. It came from Egypt (the local wild cat of Western Europe was never tamed) and didn’t make itself much at home in Western Europe until the early Middle Ages. We can see, in the old fairy story of Dick Whittington, for example, how extremely valuable cats were and how remarkable they seemed. In the Saxon law preceding the Conquest of England a cat was so valuable that anybody who killed someone else’s cat was expected
