The only alternative to coercion is persuasion and education. Unfortunately these democratic methods take time, and because of the rapidity of the increase in population there is exceedingly little time. Nevertheless, since we are committed to the democratic idea, we have to think in terms of education and persuasion, and for this reason we have to think about the mental climate in which a proper approach to the planet on which we live can be made. And this involves a reconsideration of the problem of ethics, the problem of the general philosophy of life, and problems of artistic expression and artistic sensibility.
Let us begin with the ethical problem: What ought to be the relation of the human race with the world upon which it lives? I would say that the most obvious consideration emerging from the facts which were brought out in the last lecture is that the golden rule holds good not only for man’s dealings with other men, but also for his dealings with lower animals and even with the inanimate world. The rule—do unto others as you would they would do unto you—applies not merely to man but to nature in general. There is a perfectly clear utilitarian basis for this ethical point of view. If we want to be treated well by nature, we have to treat nature well; as a matter of plain fact, if we harm or destroy nature, nature will do us harm and will destroy us.
It is worth pointing out that this ethical point of view, in which nature is regarded as having rights and we are regarded as having duties towards nature, is not found within our Western tradition, nor within the theological-scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages, which still remains orthodox in the more conservative churches. Instead, we have what seems to me to be a very shocking formulation, which is that animals possess no souls. Therefore they have no rights and we have no duties towards them, and consequently they may be treated as things. I feel that this is a most undesirable doctrine and also a most unrealistic one, because not only have we no right to treat animals as things, we can go further and say that we have no right to treat things as things. When we treat even inanimate objects as things which we can exploit to our heart’s content, the consequences are disastrous. We have to treat the planet as though it were a living organism, with all the love and care and understanding which any living organism deserves. If we do not treat it in this way, then we shall destroy the world on which we live, and this destroyed world will in turn destroy us.
A very helpful idea in this context is the Greek idea of hubris. Hubris means wanton violence inspired by bumptiousness, arrogance, and the pride of power. The Greeks insisted that the gods would never put up with an arrogant man who committed hubris. And the interesting fact is that, in Greek thought, one could commit hubris not only towards other human beings, but towards nature. In Aeschylus’s tragedy of The Persians, one of the crimes of Xerxes is that he has committed hubris not only against the Greek people—by invading them—but also against nature. To us, the particular crime against nature that he committed would seem rather forgivable—he built a bridge of boats across the Hellespont—but the principle seems to be profoundly true and right: We are capable of committing crimes of violence against nature, and they are as bad in their way as crimes of wanton violence committed against men. It is unfortunate that this idea did not go on into the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the fundamental notion is that man is the lord of creation and is in some way apart from nature and free to do what he wants with it.
The idea of man’s being apart from nature is actually a fairly recent one. Primitive man never had this idea; he has always regarded himself as a part of nature, as intimately and fundamentally concerned with and imbedded in it. This idea has been expressed by primitive peoples in such notions as totemism, which defines man’s relationship to animals and even his identity with them; fertility rites, which insist on the fact that human sexual processes are identical with those of nature, and that there is a deep-rooted connection between the two; and in notions of polytheism and the divineness of natural objects. This was the primitive pattern of the world, and remnants of it went on for many centuries after the acceptance of Christianity, in the so-called witch cults in Western Europe, for example, which were essentially old fertility cults that had survived from very ancient times.
In general, however, the conception which primitive man had of his oneness with nature was abandoned throughout the civilized world during a period which began about the eighth or seventh century b.c.; the whole conception then changed to the idea that man is in some sense apart from nature and that deity is transcendent and also apart from nature. The process is seen in India with the rise of Jainism and Buddhism; it is seen in the Near East with the rise of the Hebrew prophets; it is seen in Greece with the rise of Pythagoras and the Orphic religion.
Now there has been, so to speak, a counter-revolution. In a curious way we can say that the revolution accomplished by Darwin a hundred years ago—this is the centenary of the Origin of Species—was a revolution away from the traditional Judaeo-Christian notion of man’s relationship to nature and back towards the primitive idea of man’s union with nature. We seem to have passed on a kind of spiral course through the totemistic stage—a very early stage of cultural evolution—into a more self-conscious stage in which a sharp line was drawn between man and nature, and around to a point immediately above the totemistic stage which is an analogue to it on the scientific level. We see the old intuitive feeling for nature transformed into the ideas of ecology. We see polytheism transformed into the new biological philosophy of organicism—the idea of organisms within a greater organism.
It is perfectly clear, when we come to think of it, that we are indissolubly one with nature and depend completely on the natural environment. Anybody can do a simple experiment to find out how much he depends on the natural environment even though he lives in a world of television and automobiles. He merely has to put a clothespin on his nose and tape up his mouth to find out that he can’t do without his natural environment for more than about sixty seconds.
Not only are we physically dependent on the outward environment, but we are also psychologically dependent on it in a very interesting way. This has been shown by the experiments conducted in recent years by D. O. Hebb at McGill University in Canada and John C. Lilly at the National Institute of Health in Washington on the effects of what is called ‘limited environment’. If individuals are completely cut off from external stimuli, the most extraordinary things begin happening—mostly very unpleasant. Curiously horrifying visions and nightmare thoughts invade the mind, so that we discover that stimuli from the external world are required just to keep us sane.
It is not only that we need the external world to keep us alive, we need the external world to keep us from going mad. When we go into the matter more thoroughly we find that this direct psychological and physiological dependence is not merely upon our immediate environment, it is upon environments very remote, both in space and time. It is obvious, for example, that our entire life depends upon physical events taking place in the sun. It is also quite clear that our continued existence depends upon events taking place in distant mountain ranges and in the tropical and polar regions where our weather is made.
Over-populated countries such as England and most of the Western European countries depend for their very existence on events taking place far away and completely outside their political jurisdiction. What is going to happen to Western Europe when the New World has no more exportable surpluses? (Professor Paul Sears of Yale foresees that this will probably happen by 1980.) Nobody knows, but clearly the problem is of extreme importance in our political thinking.
We are also dependent on events which took place in very remote periods of time. Most of the world is still immensely dependent upon coal and
