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Fragile environments: moral and ethical responsibility

By Michael Paton - posted Thursday, 21 December 2006


The term “moral responsibility” conjures pictures of philosophers, theologians, sociologists and anthropologists sitting around panelled rooms in profound discussion about the meaning of life.

It is, however, my background in rather different academic fields that brings me to add my thoughts from geological, geographical and historical points of view to this topic. My contribution to this conversation is from a “southern” cultural and environmental history perspective.

It derives from the view that our general understanding of eastern and western cultures is premised on a false dichotomy and it calls me to take account of differences between moral and ethical responsibility. Further, from consideration of the environmental history of China and Australia, I believe that humanity’s basic ethical responsibility is the survival of the species with any other responsibility being beholden to this tenet.

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From a southern perspective, I look to the north and outside mere geographical divisions see the idea of East and West to be a northern hemisphere political construct. And it is in politics and the media that much of the problem lies with such a construct.

Politicians and the media would have us believe that western culture is fundamentally Christian, does critical thinking and is based on the individual whereas eastern culture is Confucian, does correlative thinking and is based on the family.

The problem with this type of stereotyping is that it does not have sufficient historical credence. Eastern and western cultures are not so markedly delineated. There is, for example, some evidence for Roman settlements in China during the Late Han dynasty, but at least ever since the arrival of Marco Polo in the court of Kublai Khan there has been increasing cultural exchange from East to West and vice versa.

It is not common knowledge but two of the most famous early modern philosophers of science, Leibnitz and Spinoza, used ideas derived from China to formulate their concepts.

Another early modern scientist and philosopher of science, Francis Bacon, stated that the basis of modern civilisation was gunpowder, the compass and paper money, not realising at the time, of course, that each of these was invented and had been in use in China for hundreds of years.

An excerpt from the history of religion is another case in point: after reading a Chinese translation of the Christian Bible in the 1830s a gentleman in south-western China dreamt that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. From this dream, he and his followers proceeded to take over approximately one third of China in a movement known as the “taiping tianguo” (the heavenly kingdom of the great peace). British mercenaries stopped the movement at the gates of Nanjing thus saving the Manchu government.

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However, it is in the present day context that resonances between East and West become most apparent. Traditional Chinese practices such as taiji (or taichi from English romanisation trying to understand Mandarin through Cantonese), macrobiotics and fengshui, have all become staple in modern western culture.

In China, however, the opposite has occurred. For the past 100 years, European thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche have become more important to Chinese philosophy than Confucius, Mencius or Han Fei. Last October I spent one month teaching at a university in Wuhan and the students there were much more interested in discussing Nietzsche’s Will to Power and Man and Superman than they were in discussing any traditional Chinese thought.

Perhaps the most useful way of thinking of East and West in the context of culture may be to use the ancient Chinese cosmological system of yin and yang. In this system, yin and yang are mutually connected such that they are never found without each other. Hence eastern perspectives are defined by western and vice versa; that is, there is yin within yang and yang within yin.

Besides the problem of definition of East and West, the meaning of “moral obligation” is problematical. It leads me to emphasise the difference in meaning between morals and ethics, and argue that ethical obligation rather than moral obligation should be our priority.

I posit that moralities are overarching absolute externalities, and include such systems as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and I agree with Bertrand Russell (in A History of Western Philosophy) that marxism is a system of belief, and thus a morality. I would go even further, however, and include the belief in capitalism as similarly a moral code.

The problem with all of these different moralities is that their absolute nature gives a possible raison d’etre for war, in that two or more opposing moral codes leave no room for discussion and disagreement is final and absolute. Ethics, on the other hand, I see as a continuous social construction that allows ethical decisions to be made not in any absolute terms of belief but rather by the use of critical thinking.

I particularly argue for ethical responsibility rather than moral responsibility because of the relationship between moral certitude and war. It has been argued that war is a catalyst of progress and a basis of human evolution, but from an environmental perspective, in the long run, war is stupid.

If we consider the environmental history of China, we see that humanity has waged what Mark Elvin (in The Retreat of the Elephants: and Environmental History of China) calls “The Three Thousand Year War” on the Chinese environment through continuous competition with and negation of the “wild”.

It is not well known but elephants roamed northern China only 3,000 years ago, and elephants have completely disappeared from China today because of humanity’s short-term struggle for power and profit through what Elvin calls “war and the logic of short-term advantage” - the advantage of human being over human being with the environment as the collateral victim. This war reached its crescendo in China in the late imperial period with the wild and the environmental “sink” so decimated that famine became rife.

We read descriptions of people resorting to eating the bark from trees and the buttocks of dead bodies. It is only with modern scientific means that China can now feed itself without such catastrophes although even now there is some discussion of an imminent environmental crisis in China.

Nevertheless, if one considers the development of thought centred on dili (the principles of the earth) and fengshui (wind and water) in traditional Chinese culture, an environmental awareness is apparent, but as Elvin points out, perceptions or beliefs that were characteristically Chinese had comparatively minimal effect on interaction between humanity and the environment in relation to the short-term struggle for power and profit.

The destruction of the environment in China is an indication of what can happen to humanity when war and short-term advantage hold sway.

Australia has a very specific environment and ecology. It is basically a desert that does not look like a desert. In fact, Cook was so fooled by first appearances that he perceived the Wollongong escarpment to be like a gentleman’s parkland. The settlers on the First Fleet soon found differently when all the plants that they had brought with them and planted in a comparatively fertile place, the present day Sydney Botanical Gardens, died in the first year through poverty of soil and lack of water.

By northern standards, such conditions should make Australia a desert but its geology has had a profound effect on life here. The Australian continental plate is inordinately thick and this thickness has allowed comparatively little renewal of the land through volcanic and plutonic action over millions of years. This stability has enabled the life force to create species that thrive in this harsh environment.

Australia has an environment unlike the power centres of the world - Eurasia and North America. Europe has what Tim Flannery calls a “weed” ecology, stemming from the comparative fertility following to the geologically recent Ice Ages.

Moreover, from the perspective of the traditional Chinese conception of the “energy” of the land, both China and Northern America are abundantly fertile due to the extent of their associated mountain ranges (the Himalayas, Appalachians and Rockies), which produce an abundance of water as rivers and streams and also a great deal of top soil.

This has allowed humanity in these places to thrive using a logic of short-term advantage - at least until late imperial times in China. In contrast, Indigenous Australians had to cope with much harsher conditions, but the evidence indicates that there has been a human presence in Australia for some 50-60,000 years, which would indicate more than a little adaptive success.

The environmental history of Australia over the past 200 years of settlement by peoples from the Northern Hemisphere has seen what I would dub, following Elvin, “The Two Hundred Year War”.

Because war and a logic of short-term advantage had served the various Northern Hemisphere cultures of the new arrivals so well in their comparatively benign northern environments, the settlers in Australia were blind to the consequences of using “northern” science in such a fragile environment.

Over 200 years later, we are witness to widespread salinisation from misguided irrigation projects, streams and rivers filled with poisonous algal blooms because of the extensive use of fertilisers, and the environmental devastation wreaked by rabbits, cane toads and hoofed animals.

The wife of a Philadelphian professor of the history of science in China once asked me why we had no Johnny Appleseed myth in Australia. I replied without hesitation that it was because he would have died of thirst after three days in the Australian outback and all the apple seeds that he would have planted would have withered and died.

We must learn from our unforgiving environment that Australians have to work together for all of us to survive. The geography and geology are creating an attitude that is, hopefully, beginning to see that arguments of short-term advantage are anathema to the survival of the species.

I argue that the ethical responsibility of our “southern” culture is to point out the delicacy of ecology to regional partners whose comparatively fecund environments and economic circumstances do not encourage them to see past the short term to the real effects of such practices as widespread deforestation.

Beyond this, our ethical responsibility is to let be known the real and dire consequences of allowing the workings of society to be oiled by war and the prospect of short-term advantage.

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This article is based on a talk given at a seminar hosted by The Independent Scholars Association of Australia Inc in August 2006.



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About the Author

Michael Paton teaches in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney. His early academic training was in geology to be followed by doctoral research in the history and philosophy of science in China.

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