Naess, Arne

The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Trumpeter (1993)ISSN: 0832-6193How Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology MovementBehave in Order to Affect Society and CultureArne NaessUniversity of OsloHow Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order toAffect Society and Culture 2Arne Naess is with the Council for Environmental Studies atthe University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of numerousworks, including the recently translated Ecology, Community andLifestyle. He is one of the leading thinkers in ecophilosophy.C.A. Bowers has written a helpful and provocative article which touches uponthis question. 1 Summing up, he states that:An awareness of culture in terms of a semiotic perspective may helpus affect changes at a pre-reflective level of awareness and meaningthat is beyond the reach of the printed word. Thus, the real challengeis to broaden the approach to ecosophy in a way that takes intoaccount the primacy of culture – in all its dimensions. (Bowers)What some of us write who are not only supporters, but also theorists of themovement, seem to rely abnormally on “the reach of the printed word”. Onelegitimately asks whether we do anything else than writing and giving speeches.And if we do other things, why don’t we say so?Gandhi was both a supporter and a theorist of a gigantic movement. It is alwaysinstructive to see what kind of practice he was engaged in. Always a campaignincluded a constructive program. The supporters declared themselves eager tohelp and cooperate in the daily work of opponents as well as supporters. “Trustbegotten in the pursuit of continuous constructive work becomes a tremendousasset at the critical moment.” (Young India, 9.1.1930). It is decisive that theopponents trust you. Talk is of course not enough, and who reads what youwrite?In a modest way, a constructive program was carried out in a conflict in ArcticNorway. We obstructed the preliminary work for building a dam. Some localpeople in favor of the dam were furious. When they approached our camp, therule was to invite them to coffee. That is a culturally based sign of peace andgoodwill and it is difficult to reject an obviously seriously meant invitation. Thepeople were given plenty of time to vent their anger. Before leaving, supportersof the direct action asked sincerely whether they could be of any help. Many ofthe angry people were family farmers and the supporters asked whether therewere fences to be repaired etc. Through the constructive program it was easyto make people listen to our views how they could get a necessary amount ofelectricity without the dam.In short: the supporters tried to understand adequately the general culturaldeterminants of the opponents and act in a decent way as judged from theircultural point of view. Unfortunately there was a relatively clear line of division:the angry locals had in general less formal education than the locals who wereCopyright 1999 TrumpeterHow Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order toAffect Society and Culture 3against the dam. In such a case it is of course a plus to mobilize supporters whotalk and act in a way that is completely familiar to the formally less educated,the family farmers and labor people. Talking in local schools it was difficult tomake the people in favor of the dam speak up: to speak in favor of the dam wastaken to be a sign of lack of education. What always helps, is to do somethingtogether, practical and constructive.Theorists are often badly equipped to do constructive work, but fortunatelythat constitutes only a very tiny minority of the supporters of the deep ecologymovement.Supporters in industrial countries who focus on the population problems havenaturally more than enough to do in their own countries, but if they ventureto accomplish some-thing (locally), say, in Kenya, the acculturation process isformidable. Women who try to increase female influence in matters of procre-ation, must live in the village as much as practically possible in harmony with itscultural traditions. They must serve the community in a convincing way and gettrusted. It is a form of constructive program in the sense of Gandhi. Obviouslypeople from the West cannot, and should not, have any decisive influence in thepopulation conflicts. And if the culture is a so-called traditional one, the wayto proceed demands considerable work before anything can be done directly inthe area of population policies, in cooperation with locals who share our views.In Uruguay, social ecologists who also are supporters of the deep ecology move-ment, work among the ’poor’ whose old traditions contain many ecologicallysound ways of production and consumption, trying to revive and strengthenthem and warding off the unecological ways introduced by Westerners and thepower elite of their own country. Here also the cultural aspect is of paramountimportance. Supporters from the West are nevertheless capable of cooperationwith a minority in the traditional society and widen that minority. Not muchof the supporters’ time is spent on writing and theorizing.Supporters work on personal, social and political levels. On the personal level Iassume that people have a significant range of freedom of decision, a considerablerange of choices. They may have within a certain framework the opportunityto work out their own guidelines of conduct in life. The way I talk about ecoso-phies, it justifiably evokes concern that I overestimate the freedom to choosebasic guidelines in life, and also overestimate the importance of personal (“indi-vidual”) choices in a society where a large degree of conformity and consensusreduces or seems to reduce devastating con-flicts. My answer: people tend tounderestimate their own potentials. They need to hear more about alternativeways of behavior and thinking.The technique of working out premise/conclusion surveys of (parts of) ecoso-phies is a very special and “Western” technique. For people with certain kindsof background, it is not only a convenient but potentially wholesome activitywhen trying ’to live according to one’s teaching’. It helps development in the di-Copyright 1999 TrumpeterHow Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order toAffect Society and Culture 4rection of ’living according to reason’ as viewed by philosophers and others whohave a Spinozist bent. That is, judging decisions to be irrational or a-rational,which are not consistent with one’s ultimate premises - one’s basic beliefs andattitudes. It is a common feature in life that changes of basic beliefs and atti-tudes occur with difficulty, and the efforts to articulate verbally what happensare important for some persons. But for most supporters of the deep ecologymovement, it would presumably not be helpful at all to work in the way I dowith myself. Working in community and society my special terminology andmy diagrams may rarely be useful.Tools used when thinking and arguing for and against a decision in a partic-ular situation may seem rational, intuitive, individualistic or collectivistic. Itdepends on one’s ’meta-thinking’, thinking about thinking and arguing. Withmy background, the use of premise/conclusion models does not preclude highestimation of ways of life and of deciding matters in traditional societies. Nordoes it preclude trying to find out what can be learned from such societies.Cultural traditions are not monolithic or like crystals, either continuing essen-tially unchanged, or destroyed and crushed. “The are two points that must bebalanced”, says Hilary Putnam, “both points that have been made by philoso-phers of many different kinds: (1) talk of what is “right” and “wrong” in anyarea only makes sense against the background of an inherited tradition; but (2)traditions themselves can be criticized.” 2The criticism does not need to be determined by influence from a differenttradition. That is, a member of a definite tradition may experience thingswhich makes the member severely critical of an important detail in his owncultural tradition without in that case being influenced by a ’foreign’ traditionor culture. According to at least one tradition, extraordinary fatness is takento be proof of extraordinary health and an adequate defence against illnesseswhich kill others. From this it seems to have been inferred that such people areimmune to AIDS. A member of the tradition may find it difficult to understandthe death of a very fat person reported to have died of AIDS: perhaps the doctoris wrong or the traditional belief is wrong. Even if somebody is a full memberof the tradition, the second option is realistic.There is an open question: how should we interpret “sense” in the above quo-tation from Putnam? If a member of tradition A says to member of a traditionB that something the B-member does is “wrong”, B may not understand theword “wrong” ? When we talk, what we say is only “understandable againstthe background of an “inherited” linguistic “back-ground”. But I may say to amember of a very different tradition from mine that what that member does iswrong. Perhaps I may be criticized for this by some cultural anthropologists,but the member may perfectly well understand what I mean, and answer thatperhaps I am right, perhaps not. Two requirements for this to happen are (1)that I have learned the verbal language or body language, of the other tradition,and that there is a distinction right/wrong in their tradition which roughly cor-Copyright 1999 TrumpeterHow Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order toAffect Society and Culture 5responds to that of mine. As far as I can judge from my own experience, thereexist such correspondences across many cultures. For instance it is understoodwhen we criticize a certain kind of cruelty (according to our own tradition) themembers of another tradition condone because is part of an old ritual.From the above I conclude that there may be senses of “sense” which makeswhat Putnam says under (1) adequate, but there is at least a sense of “sense” inwhich talk about what is right and wrong (but not necessarily about “right” and“wrong”, using those terms) make sense – in spite of deep cultural differences.We are not imprisoned in traditions! Under- estimation of cultural traditions asa determining factor of a person’s thinking and acting should be fought, but thisfight is itself based on an assumption of the inadequacy of complete ’culturaldeterminism’: the view that what we think and do is entirely determined bytraditions.According to Putnam what he calls a “cultural relativist” can say “Well then,truth - the only notion of truth I under-stand - is defined by the norms ofmy culture”. 3 Such a point of view leads to inconsistency or worse. Twomain points in discussing the concept of different ecosophies are (1) the vastimportance of cultural determinants of the thinking and acting of an ecosopher,and (2) the importance of the wide range of potential personal creativity. Thecreativity may have had bad conditions in the formative years of a person, butthe rule is that even in such a case the person in a sense recreates a culturaltradition when ’internalizing’ most of its norms. Anyhow, serious research withthe goal to describe a culture as a whole will end with descriptions which dependon a more or less arbitrary framework, and mostly end with an acknowledgementof vast simplification. This may give the reader the false impression that aculture ’has’ a strict coherence of definite sets of norms. It is understandablethat the people doing research within what is often called cultural anthropologydon’t like to use the term “culture”. What is a culture?What is above said regarding theories about traditions and cultures applies totheories about interpretation (in a wide sense) within the hermeneutic trend inphilosophy. An expression like ’the social construction of reality’ is useful asa slogan, but a society, even less than a culture, has a system of ’norms andhypotheses’ rigid enough to determine a definite view of reality.The statement that “you are not expected to agree...but to learn the meansfor developing your own systems or guides, say, Ecosphies X, Y, or Z” reflectsthe liberal assumption that decisions should be based on the free choice andrational judgment of the individual. Locating the ultimate authority for thisdecision within the individual would be totally inconceivable in cultures basedon pre-modern cosmologies.” (Bowers). This is a statement about my statementwhich I find interesting, but somewhat misleading. My experience in traditionalsocieties has led me to believe that the range of personalities and range of choicesof lifestyles may be quite considerable there. Some of the differences seem smallfor us, but they are considerable within their culture and consequences are asCopyright 1999 TrumpeterHow Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order toAffect Society and Culture 6drastic as joining a ’far out subculture’ in a rich industrial society. It is not myexperience that ,for instance, ’poor’, illiterate, family farmers in the mountainsof Hindu-kush (Pakistan) make less “decisions...based on the free choice andrational judgment of the individual”. As Muslims of sorts they may be saidto locate “the ultimate authority” for a decision, not within their own person.They would refer to their own community and to Allah. I am speaking aboutthe 70 porters we hired to help our expedition to carry provisions in very ruggedmountainous terrains, including glaciers. Our interaction with our porters wasintimate, dramatic, and offered excellent opportunity to study differences ofpersonal character. The differences were deep! One of them was a thief, let mehere call him Abdul. Sometimes when we could not find something, for instancea tool, one of our porters would say, “Abdul may have stolen it.” Usually itwas found. I liked Abdul and he probably understood that, and when we werecrossing a valley he stole some apples for me. The glint in his eyes seemed to besaying, “of course I am going to steal as much as I can from you, but I like you.”I do not pretend to know much about his total view, but I do think that he, inhis way, was able to articulate some of it. As a ’deviant’, as a person refusingto follow a lot of the norms – and hypotheses – of his community, he probablyengaged in some wonderful verbal articulation expressing general guidelines inlife.In short, I do think that my talk about total views is roughly applicable topersons in traditional societies. They have, in part, ’their own way’ of life. Andthe expression ’their own’ does not imply opposition to any main tradition intheir community. Bowers quotes me as follows: “saying ’your own’ does notimply that the ecosophy is in any way an original creation by yourself. It isenough that it is a kind of total view which you feel at home with, ’where youphilosophically belong’. Along with one’s own life, it is always changing.” If youfeel very much at home with the traditions of your community, your way may becompletely within the limits of the traditionally tolerated range of differences.Because a traditional society is always changing, there is intense discussionscentering on particular traditions. The range changes, gets wider and narrower.I am not sure I know what Bowers means by “liberal assumption”, and “con-tinuing commitment to the basic tenets of liberalism.” It is difficult for me tothink within the terminology of “ideological liberalism” and “ideological con-servationism!”. But when I read that Gary Snyder’s bioregionalism appears“to be based on essential values and assumptions that can only be describedas ideologically conservative”, I tend to like to be classed that way myself. Itis, on the other hand, inevitable to be classed as “individualistic”, the way Ioften focus on personal choice. It is a focus that is very different from that ofcolleagues in sociology and political science. “You overrate the capacity andopportunity of people to choose!” This may be the case, but I believe sincerelyin the vast strength and importance of historical, social and political determi-nants of personal decisions. From a statistic comparing the number of times Iuse the terms ’choice’ and ’personal’ with the number of times a sociologist usesCopyright 1999 TrumpeterHow Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order toAffect Society and Culture 7the term ’society’, not much can be inferred about our total views.Point 6 of the 8 points of deep ecology as I see it, is thought to express what mostsupporters of the deep ecology movement agree about on a fairly abstract level,and it suggests that the work to be done is largely social and political. Thereis little basis for an assumption that supporters of the deep ecology movementare politically passive, or that supporters in industrial societies do not look forthings we may learn from non-industrial societies.Bowers points to important sources of contemporary in-sight - sociology ofknowledge, cultural anthropology and a certain trend in semiotics. He sum-marizes the key assertions of a part of sociology of knowledge in a way thatmakes them roughly acceptable if I am permitted to insert some words of cau-tion:(1) The person’s taken for granted sense of “reality” is /largely/socially constituted; (2) what is /conceived as/ “real” is /largely/dependent upon multiple pathways and patterns of communication;(3) the cognitive schemas acquired through communication with sig-nificant others become internalized as the individual’s /early/ inter-subjective self; and (4) the socially shared typifications, assumptions,and categories that provide the schemas necessary for thought andcommunication are also part of the self-identity process.The insertion “early” is meant to emphasize the mature person’s own creativethinking and feeling when participating in the formation of his social and eco-logical self. The in-sertion “conceived as” is important, because certain philoso-phers, especially within the hermeneutic movement, write and talk as if theymeant that what is real is determined by humans. The various formulations oflaws of gravity are all humans creations, but not what they are intended to referto, however inadequately. (Just as the impact of logical positi-vism in its timeelicited strange views, the enthusiasm for existentialism, the late Wittgenstein,ordinary language philosophy, each had its climatical overstatements. Now it istime for hermeneutics and postmodernism, it seems.)It may be held that Warwick Fox and I do too little to address the culturalaspects of the ecological crisis, but we are very clear about the many-sidedefforts needed. With this admission of fallilibility, I shall end my notes on thearticle by Bowers. Ecological awareness and cultural awareness should developtogether, and also be articulated together.Copyright 1999 TrumpeterNotes1. “Some Questions about the Theoretical Foundation of Warwick Fox’s Transper-sonal Ecology and Arne Naess’ Ecosophy T”, this issue of The Trumpeter.2. See Hilary Putnam’s article in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?,Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman & Thomas McCarthy, (Ed.), MIT Press, Cam-bridge, Massachusetts, 1987.3. Idem, p. 232.Citation FormatNaess, Arne (1993) How Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Orderto Affect Society and Culture Trumpeter: 10, 3. http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.10.3.14Document generated from IXML by ICAAP conversion macros.See the ICAAP web site or software repository for details

How Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order to Affect Society and Culture

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How Should Supporters of the Deep Ecology Movement Behave in Order to Affect Society and Culture

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The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)