THE HUMAN WAS NOT MEANT TO FAIL
By Herman F. Greene, J.D., D.Min.
(President, Center for Ecozoic Studies, Chapel Hill, North Carolina)
Prepared for the Conference on
“Ecological Civilization, Globalization and Human Development”
Sanya, China, June 21-23, 2009
Our Present Situation
The ecologist Thomas Berry wrote that we humans came into being as part of a long evolutionary process, and “[we] would not have survived if [we] had not had some basic role to fulfill within the larger Earth community.”[1] But now perhaps we are failing in this role. The Global Footprint Network and the World Wildlife Fund report that at present humanity’s “ecological footprint” is 131% of our planet’s capacity to produce these resources.[2]
Our situation is not that some day in the future this condition might lead to an ecological crisis. Gus Speth of Yale University observes:
All we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating dramatically. . . . We are thus facing the possibility of an enormous increase in environmental deterioration, just when we need to move strongly in the opposite direction.[3]
Wolfgang Sachs of the Wuppertal Institute of Germany wrote a very important book entitled Fair Future.[4] This book deals with “questions that have again and again succumbed to collective repression: global justice and the fate of the biosphere.”[5] And it “sets in relief what everyone suspects but no one feels responsible for. How, in the future will a much larger number of people be able to make a dignified living in a world of limited natural resources? This is the key issue of the twenty-first century.”[6]
If this problem of the biophysical limits of our planet is so large, yet no one feels responsible for it, what is going on? Why are the solutions we are proposing for the ecological crisis so small and, in the large scale, insignificant such that they have no possibility of dealing with the problems incident to this crisis? Why are our governments not addressing the problems but actually making them worse—environmental efforts are overwhelmed by development initiatives?
Thomas Berry has said: “The glory of the human has become the devastation of the Earth, and the devastation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human.”[7] Why is this so?
The Greatest Need Is in Our Understanding of Ourselves as Humans
While much needs to be done in science and technology, these only address the external aspects of civilization. I believe there is a deeper need. It has to do with how we understand ourselves as humans and how we act out that understanding. This means addressing the cultural aspects of civilization, such things as community structure, roles in society, educational systems, and human understanding of meaning, purpose, fulfillment and value. We must do what is hardest of all, change human behavior.
Technology and development are not the keys to the future. In fact, in their present form, they will only make matters worse. “Ecological” refers to relationships—to understanding ourselves as humans within the larger community of life.
Understanding Limits and Our Human Capacities Are Two Keys to the Future
There are two words on which the future depends: LIMITS and HUMAN.
Limits
The profound difference in the current situation of human beings on the planet Earth over any other period in human history is that the human impact currently exceeds the LIMITS of nature’s capacity to sustain it. Lester Brown of the Eco-Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., writes:
We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. . . .
Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically [or philosophically] negotiable.
Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late.[8]
The condition for viability in the future is that humans must accept the limits that nature and the conditions of human existence impose upon us and humans must become self-limiting. This is extraordinarily difficult.
Human
This brings us to “HUMAN.” Meeting the ecological challenge is often conceived as a technological one. It is indeed that, but more fundamentally it is an issue of how we understand ourselves as humans and how we act out that understanding.
The Wisdom of Thomas Berry
In The Great Work, Thomas Berry made this famous statement about what is involved in changing civilization at this point in time: “The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human—at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience”[9]
Let’s look more closely at how Thomas Berry says we should reinvent the human. He begins by saying we must understand ourselves as a species among many species, not as beings separated from the rest of nature. He then amplifies this by saying we must see ourselves within a community of life systems in a time-developmental (or evolutionary) context. This is, after all, the reality of things. Ecological civilization will be built on such an understanding.
After providing the basic context for reinventing the human, Thomas Berry gives three means for carrying out the transformation of humans. The first is “critical reflection.” Critical reflection is the mode of species development unique to human beings. It is the means by which we examine our assumptions against the data presented by our awareness of the past, our observations of the present and our predictions of the future, and make judgments transforming our own participation in the present and future.
Critical reflection depends upon clear language. Thomas Berry writes: “One of the most essential roles of the ecologist is to create the language in which a true sense of reality, of value, and of progress can be communicated to . . . society. This need for rectification of language in relation to reality was recognized early by the Chinese as the first task of any acceptable guidance for the society.”[10] Berry was referring to The Analects of Confucius. When asked what was the first thing he would do to administer government, Confucius said, “What is necessary is to rectify names.”[11] Perhaps if he were alive today, Confucius would say, “When profit is not in actual fact profit, it should cease to be called profit. Then humans might be stirred to reform abuses too often covered up by words.”
Critical reflection also depends on the proper investigations of things. In one of the most famous passage from The Great Learning, Confucius speaks of how rulers to order their states, regulated their families, and to do that they cultivated themselves, rectified their hearts, and ultimately “extended to the utmost their knowledge [by] the investigation of things.”[12] The teaching was that families and societies fail when people “let their wishes discolor the facts and determine their conclusions, instead of seeking to extend their knowledge to the utmost by impartially investigating the nature of things.”[13]Today this investigation of things would involve the examination of the dynamics and relations of Earth and of the human role in these dynamics and relations. It would also involve the examination of human institutions and how they affect these dynamics and the allocation of resources among humans and other living beings.
The second means for the transformation of the human in Thomas Berry’s statement is “story.” By story he means the story of the universe as disclosed in modern science, but also by philosophical reflection on the scientific story. In the past, according to Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme the universe was understood, at least in the West, in a spatial, static mode. Human affairs occurred against the backdrop of an unchanging universe. Now it is understood that the universe has been involved in a time-developmental or evolutionary process from its beginning to the present. The universe is not a series of mechanical cause-and-effect relationships. Rather it is an interacting community of beings inseparably related in space and time progressing through a series of irreversible transformations. Humans were not placed in the universe by some transcendent power, but rather were a product of the universe in its evolutionary unfolding. Therefore, the capacities activated in human beings are capacities present in the universe itself. The universe expresses itself everywhere through subjectivity, diversity and communion.[14]
Chinese thought was a major influence on Berry’s apprehension of the universe. He wrote:
According to Confucian teaching, a mutual attraction of things for each other functions at all levels of reality as the interior binding force of the cosmic, social and personal life. More than most traditions, Confucianism saw the interplay of cosmic forces as a single set of intercommunicating and mutually compenetrating realities. These forces, whether living or non-living, were so present to each other that they could be adequately seen and understood only within this larger complex. Not to appreciate this comprehensive vision of the world is to miss the numinous quality of Chinese life. Because of the intensity with which the Chinese experienced this interior, feeling communion with the real, they set themselves on perfecting themselves and the universe by increasing this sympathetic presence of things to each other within a personal and social discipline rather than by intellectual analysis. Indeed the Confucian ideal of knowledge was that of an understanding heart rather than a thinking brain.[15]
The third means for changing human understanding of civilization in Thomas Berry’s statement is “shared dream experience.” As he writes: “The dream drives the action.” In the twentieth century the dominant dream of humanity was that of an industrial utopia. As J.R. McNeil wrote, of the big ideas that drove the twentieth century:
The most ecologically influential were probably the growth imperative and the (not unrelated) security imperative . . . . Both, but particularly the growth imperative meshed well with the simultaneous trends and trajectories in population, technology, energy, and economic integration. Indeed successful . . . ideas and policies had to mesh with these trends.”
. . . . Regardless of political system, policymakers at all levels from local to international responded more readily to clear and present dangers (and opportunities) than to the more subtle and gradual worries about the environment.
. . . . In this context, environmental outcomes [derived] primarily from unintended consequences.[16]
What is China’s dream? What is driving actions being taken in China?
The Wisdom of China
Let us look now at the gifts of China’s history and culture for ecological civilization and the unique contribution China can offer to all nations as they move to ecological civilization..
China’s history, whatever its virtues, offers no more encouragement that it can respond to “the gradual worries about the environment” (over immediate threats and opportunities) than Western societies. Indeed as is chronicled in The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China,[17]deforestation and other environmental degradation of China has occurred over thousands of years. Yet there are strong cultural resources on which China can draw and from which the whole world can benefit. First and foremost in my mind is the long humanistic tradition of China. While I don’t mean to romanticize the role of Confucian education in Chinese society and the Imperial examination system, I am not aware of any other society that gave such preeminence to the cultivation of humanistic values in its citizens. This education emphasized philosophy and literature. It was criticized in the 19th and 20th centuries for stultifying China’s intellectual development, especially in the area of science. Its emphasis on rote learning was also criticized. Further, while it enabled all people to aspire to leading government roles, it also excluded many able people with skills not tested by the exams.
What the exams and the emphasis on Confucian learning in traditional China demonstrate is that it is possible to orient a society toward the pursuit of wisdom and values. This model, I believe, is essential to an ecological civilization. In the contemporary world, science is ascendant in education and it is a particular kind of science, Western empirical science. This science answers “what” but not “why,” “how” but not “for what purpose?” Thomas Berry says that when science is guided by a cosmology, it becomes a wisdom, but when science thinks it is a cosmology, it becomes a danger.” By “cosmology” Thomas Berry is referring to a philosophical understanding of the nature of things and an orientation to the order of the universe. I do not know of any other way for humans—for societies—to become self-limiting than to have a humanistic education system aimed at wisdom and values.
It may be difficult for the Chinese to look back and appropriate the wisdom of its traditions. Yet, in each of Daoism, Confucianism, Marxism, and “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” there are important elements to build on for ecological civilization.
Daoism
Daoism teaches the important idea that there is some pervasive force in nature on which we can rely and to which we are accountable.
Book I of the Four Classics of Wang Di, on “The Dao and the Law,” begins:
The Dao produces law. Law is what draws the line between gain and loss, and makes clear the curved and the straight. He who grasps the Dao, therefore, produces law and does not venture to transgress it, establishes law and does not venture to oppose it. . . . [If] he is able to align himself, then he will not be confused when he sees and knows the world.[18]
I have been involved in an “Earth Jurisprudence” project. Earth Jurisprudence draws attention to the “great jurisprudence,” the laws that govern nature, and contrasts this with human laws. Increasingly human laws have become separated form the great jurisprudence. Daoism reminds us that the ultimately true and right law derives from Dao, that out of which the universe grows. It is Dao that is the origin of law. It is those who grasp the Dao who produce true law. We must make our laws coherent with the laws of nature and this law we dare not transgress.
Confucianism
Confucianism teaches the important idea that society is like a family. Society is a kin-dom, not a king-dom. Further, the governing authorities have duties to, and are accountable to, the larger order of things. Confucianism expresses “the profound Intercommunion of Heaven, earth and humans,”[19] with Heaven (tian 天)not being some transcendental realm as in the West, but being the larger order of things, and humans being the understanding heart-mind (xin 心) between Heaven and Earth.
David Hall and Roger Ames give a compelling interpretation of Confucius’ understanding of how humans interact with the world through “thinking.” They describe a set of interrelated processes associated with “learning” (xue 学) “reflecting” (si 思), “realizing” (zhi 知) and “living up to one’s word” (xin 信). In this interpretation, xue “as ‘learning’ refers to an unmediated process of becoming aware rather than a conceptually mediated knowledge of a world of objective fact.”[20] In an ecological civilization, priority in learning must be given to becoming aware. Hall and Ames continue: “A second implication of xue is that it involves the project of transmitting one’s cultural tradition and its appropriation and embodiment.] . . . Confucius [distinguished] between humanistic learning and the acquisition of practical skills . . . learning is not a means to secure livelihood, it is an end in itself.”[21] Livelihood is an outgrowth and natural part of ecological civilization, but it is not its end or purpose as it often is in contemporary education.
Si “reflecting” involves critical reflection on what one has learned. Xue, learning, necessarily has priority, because one cannot judge or evaluate what one does not know. Further, Xue, learning, is necessary “to take advantage of the contributions of those who have gone before and [to have] shared ground necessary to communicate with others.” But it is si, critical reflection, that is necessary to “the creative adaptation and extension [of what one has learned] to maximize the possibilities of one’s own circumstances,” [22] and, I would add, of one’s own generation. In terms of Thomas Berry’s call to “reinvent the human,” I believe that xue would relate to becoming aware that we are a species among species, we are a part of a community of life systems, and we are constituted and reconstituted in a time-developmental universe. Si would relate to critical reflection, story and dream experience.
As interpreted by Hall and Ames, zhi “realizing” has several meanings important to ecological civilization. The word is typically translated in English as “knowledge” or “wisdom,” but for Hall and Ames it is more active. The dual nature of zhi as knowledge and wisdom indicates the absence of the “fact/value” distinction that is common in the West. Thus there is not a distinction between one’s “objective knowledge” and the values one brings to and derives from knowledge. Secondly, “zhi refers to a propensity for forecasting or predicting the outcome of a coherent set of circumstances of which the forecaster himself is a constituent and participatory factor.” In this sense, we might say that zhi involves foresight. Perhaps foresight is the key to ecological civilization. Modernity is focused on the maximization of value in the present and the exploitation of the resources of the past. Ecological civilization, in contrast, requires the exercise of foresight to realize certain future outcomes and not to realize others, of acting even though one cannot be sure of the consequences of inaction. Foresight is also needed to prevent taking certain actions (of exercising the precautionary principle), even thought one cannot be sure of the consequences of action. Ames and Hall quote this statement by Tung Chung-shu’s [Dong Zhongshu’s] Chunqiufanlu: “One who is zhi can see calamity and fortune a long way off, and early anticipates benefit and injury. Phenomena move and he anticipates their transformation; affairs rise and he anticipates their outcome.”[23]
A third aspect of zhi is its performative aspect. Zhi makes things (i.e., one’s learning and reflection) real through action. It involves “bringing into focus one possible future out of the welter of significances deriving from the interaction or received [meanings] and novel circumstances.”[24] It is not hypothetical or speculative reasoning. “The act of focusing is creative, more closely associated with the activity of artistic production than that of hypothetical-deductive reflection.”[25] The function “of zhi is to distinguish between what is appropriate/meaningful and what is not.” To be of “two-minds” is not zhi. Zhi is to focus or integrate one’s knowledge in realization or action.[26] I think that in Berry’s statement, zhi would relate to “reinvent,” which, interpreted by zhi, would mean to “realize.” Thus, the statement could read, “The historical mission of our time is to realize (zhi) the human (ren 仁) at the species level, through critical reflection . . . .”). So “reinvent the human” would mean to realize the human in action.
And this brings us to xin (信). In the correspondence theory of knowing, which is typical in the West, truth exists as some correspondence between subjective knowledge and external objective fact. For Confucius, however, “Reality is immanent, relative and contingent. It is something achieved, rather than something recognized. . . . Truth is speech and deed that effects [(brings about)] an intended consequence.”[27] Truth is both the completion of the self and the completion of things. It requires ability (or gaining ability), not simply having good intentions or trying.[28] Confucius’ concern is on how to realize oneself as a social and political being. In the Analects (2/22) Confucius says, “I am not aware that one can become a person without living up to his word (xin).”[29] By living up to one’s word, a person becomes an achieved social and political “truth/reality.”[30] In most contemporary “thinking” about the environment, there is a sharp distinction between what people know and say, and what they do. Thus, their thoughts and words never become “the truth,” which is to say an achieved reality. If we extend Confucius’ thought beyond realizing oneself as a social and political being to include realizing oneself as an ecological being, then realizing truth through living up to one’s word (xin 信) becomes a crucial aspect of ecological civilization.
Marxism
There are several elements of Marx’s work that are important. The most important to me, which was identified by Wolfgang Sachs in Fair Future, is Marx’s “objective” theory of value. Sachs writes:
Those who hold an objective theory of value—from Thomas Aquinas through Karl Marx to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen—maintain that the quantum of labor or nature contained in a product is ultimately what determines its value. Those who hold a subjective theory of value—a small minority until the rise of neoclassical economics—insist that value depends on the scarcity of a product in the interplay of supply and demand.[31]
The issue of the value of goods and services is a primary one in ecological civilization. Economic theory tells us that money is a (1) unit of measure, (2) medium of exchange, and (3) store of value. The role of money in the international economy (with its floating exchange rates, mobility of capital, and excess amounts of exchange in the management of money as opposed to productive exchange) has become a value problem of a new type. Marx emphasized the need to establish true value in the economy.
A second area where Marx’s legacy is important concerns his understanding of “commodity fetishism [, which is] a state of social relations, said to arise in capitalist market based societies, in which social relationships are transformed into apparently objective relationships between commodities or money. . . . As it relates to commodities specifically, commodity fetishism is the belief that value inheres in commodities instead of being added to them through labor. This is the root of Marx’s critique relating to conditions surrounding fetishism—that capitalists ‘fetishize’ commodities, believing that they contain value, and the effects of labor are misunderstood.”[32] “Indeed labor itself [becomes] a commodity.”[33] This analysis is based on Marx’s objective theory of value discussed in the first paragraph of this section. Marx criticizes the social relationships that derive from a market-based economy. In such an economy, rather than money primarily being a medium of commodity exchange (commodity then money then commodity (C-M-C)), commodities become a medium of monetary exchange where the “real” value is abstracted to reside (money then commodity then money (M-C-M)). If Marx were alive today, he might extend this analysis to what Herman Daly calls the “paper economy” where value is completely abstracted to money (money then money (M-M)).[34]
There have always been markets, in other words places or means of exchanging goods and services. The market economy as we know it today is, however, new and distinct in history. The origin and nature of the modern market economy is described by Karl Polanyi in his classic work, The Great Transformation.[35] He writes about the industrial revolution of the late 18th century and early 19th century and how it transformed society.[36] According to Polanyi, industry’s new productive methods and capacity needed the investment of large sums of capital which could only be recovered over long periods of time. Industry required markets to put up that capital. The increased productive capacity exceeded regional needs, therefore markets had to expand and demand had to be continuous so that goods could be continuously produced. If goods could be continuously produced and marketed, then profits would result. Profits would buy more innovation and more productive capacity, which required even more markets for the goods produced. Markets, however, were not only needed for goods, but also for the inputs to industry—land, labor and capital. “Every element of industry [needed to be for sale],” in other words, commoditized.[37]
According to the liberal economic theories that supported the new industrial economy, if everything had a price and was freely tradable, the market would be self-regulating and the result would be efficient allocation of goods and services and rising wealth. As Polanyi points out, however, “labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself [, and] land is only another name for nature.” They are “obviously not commodities . . . produced for sale.”[38] Yet, the myth of the power of self-regulating, free markets and their benefits has been so persuasive that not only has the economy been transformed under the sway of this myth, but also society itself. The market economy required by industry resulted in the creation of the market society, a society the role of which is to promote free markets. Historically, an economy was an outgrowth of the social structure. The inversion of this in the industrial economy resulted in society becoming an outgrowth of the economy—this was “The Great Transformation.”
Herman Daly and Polanyi provide needed extensions of Marx’s commodity fetishism analysis. Daly by extending it to the recent emergence of the “paper economy” (M-M), and Polanyi by calling attention not only to the social relations involved in the capitalist economy (capital-labor), but also to the relations with nature in the capitalist economy (capital-land/nature).
The third area where Marx offers a legacy that might be drawn on in creating ecological civilization is what has come to be known as the “metabolic rift.” This has several elements. The first is that Marx viewed the world in materialist as opposed to idealist terms.
Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. [Like] Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the “real” world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly[39]
While acknowledging that the environment is in part generated by humans, Marx held that
human beings do not create nature, but only transpose it from one form into another, often with unforeseen consequences. Thus Marx quoted Pietro Verri as saying, “All the phenomena of the universe, whether produced by the hand of man or indeed by the universal laws of physics, are not to be conceived of as acts of creation but solely as a reordering of matter.” For this reason nature can only be “produced” by means of nature itself and in conformity with natural laws. The failure to understand or to follow these laws leads to ecological crises, with nature, as Engels observed, thereby taking its “revenge.”[40]
Further Marx wrote: “Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”[41] Finally, Marx understood that there was a metabolic interaction between humans and nature and that the nature of this interaction, whether it was benign or destructive, depended on social relations. John Bellamy Foster writes:
Marx and Engels wrote extensively about ecological problems arising from capitalism and class society in general, and the need to transcend these under socialism. This included discussions of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, which led Marx to develop his theory of metabolic rift between nature and society. Basing his analysis on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, he pointed to the fact that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were removed from the soil and shipped hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities where they ended up polluting the water and the air and contributing to the poor health of the workers. This break in the necessary metabolic cycle between nature and society demanded for Marx nothing less than the “restoration” of ecological sustainability for the sake of “successive generations.”[42]
To Marx and his modern interpreters, the root cause of the ecological crisis is the political-economic order. Minqi Li writes:
The social metabolic order of capitalism is inherently anti-ecological since it systematically subordinates nature in its pursuit of endless accumulation and production on ever larger scales. Technical fixes to socio-ecological problems typically have unintended consequences and fail to address the root of the problems: the political-economic order. Rather than acknowledging metabolic rifts, natural limits, and/or ecological contradictions, capital seeks to play a shell game with the environmental problems it generates, moving them around rather than addressing the root causes.[43]
All Western Marxist scholars writing on the ecological crisis that I have reviewed say the key to ameliorating the situation is to address the political-economic relations of capitalism by subjecting the accumulation of surplus value to social control.[44] Some, in agreement with Marx, advocate “the abolition of private property in the means of production, a high degree of equality in all things, replacement of the blind forces of the market by planning by the associated producers in accordance with genuine social needs,”[45] These are traditional Marxist-Leninist views, ones from which China has departed in significant ways. None of these Western Marxist scholars seem to advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat as in Marxist-Leninism, but rather call for democratic social control.[46]
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
Marxism in China has its own history. The rise of Communism in China in the 20th century came out of Chinese people’s disillusionment with the Imperial regimes, sense of humiliation by the West and Japan, and dissatisfaction with the state of economic development. The Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded in 1921 at a time that Communism was progressing in Russia as an alternative to Western forms of development. Communist ideology offered what appeared to be a practical program for action and a way of addressing social inequities. Further it offered a secular spirituality based on scientific advancement, material values, and sacrificial involvement in class struggle to bring about a just society. Also of importance, it offered a way to make a sharp break with a rejected past and a way to bring unity to the nation.
Mao Zedong (representing the “first generation of leadership of the CPC”) while emphasizing development of productive forces, placed a central focus on class struggle and purification of thought. The latter became an obsession during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 and led to stagnation of important parts of China’s life.
The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee meeting of the Chinese Community Party in 1978 marked a turning point. Now led by Deng Xiaoping (representing the “second generation of leadership of the CPC”), the party rejected rigid adherence to Mao’s dogmas and a turn to seeking truth from facts and socialist development.[47] This was the official beginning of “China’s reform and opening up.”[48] The economic reform that followed permitted a mixed economy of state ownership and private enterprise to coexist and allowed Chinese to expand foreign trade and foreign investors to invest in China. The ideological basis for this reform and opening up was that Marxism had to be adapted to the particular realities of China as a developing country. Under the “theory of productive forces,” “actual socialism or communism, being based on the ‘redistribution of wealth’ to the most oppressed sectors of society, cannot come to pass until that society’s wealth is built up enough to satisfy whole populations.”[49] In balancing interests, this theory places a high priority on productive forces (in other words, on industrialization and technology) in bringing about social change. The theory is supported by this passage from The German Ideology by Marx.
It is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world . . . by employing real means . . . slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and . . . in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is a historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse. [50]
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms are called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” They involve development of a mixed economy in order to achieve the economic development necessary to lift the people while upholding the “Four Cardinal Principles” of (1) the basic spirit of Communism, (2) the People’s democratic dictatorship political system, (3) the leadership of the Communist Party, and (4) Marxism-Leninism (though these reforms initiated a departure from Marxist-Leninist political and economic theory which continues to widen).
In the years of Jiang Zemin (representing the “third generation of leadership of the CPC”), there was further opening up and reform, which culminated ideologically in 2002 at the Sixteenth Party Congress with the “Three Represents,” under which the Communist Party to remain in the vanguard “must always represent [(1)] the requirements of the development of China’s advanced productive forces, [(2)] the orientation of the development of China’s advanced culture, and [(3)] the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China.”[51] While the meaning of the Three Represents is somewhat obscure, it is taken to legitimize the inclusion of the business class (capitalists) and entrepreneurs in the CPC and not just the proletariat. In this sense it represented further reform and opening up of China, though to many leftist critics it was a move away from core principles of Marxism.[52]
Hu Jintao (representing the “fourth generation of CPC leadership”) has taken CPC thought significantly forward. His landmark report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 15, 2007, [53] introduced the concept of the “harmonious society” and filled in the concept of “scientific development.” Along with holding up the tremendous economic development and other successes of the post-Mao years, Hu candidly acknowledged the problems that had developed in these years, such as unequal development between rural and urban areas and among regions, and human problems concerning “employment, social security, income distribution, education, public health, housing, work safety, administration of justice and public order. And, significantly, he stated: “Our economic growth is realized at an excessively high cost of resources and the environment.”[54] He called for just and harmonious social relations and also “harmony between man and nature.” He made sustainability a primary objective for future development.
We must adopt an enlightened approach to development that results in expanded production, a better life and sound ecological and environmental conditions, and build a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society that coordinates growth rate with the economic structure, quality and efficiency and harmonizes economic growth with the population, resources and the environment, so that our people will live and work under sound ecological and environmental conditions and our economy and society will develop in a sustainable way.[55]
Further Hu acknowledged China’s important new role in the world and its responsibilities concerning climate change and resource conservation.
Hu Jintao’s speech shows a very significant broadening of official Chinese thought and expansion to social and environmental concerns. These are essential for China to develop internally and to lead externally. Along with Deng Xiaoping’s and Jiang Zemin’s “reform and opening,” there is now under Hu Jintao “broadening and expansion.”
From the standpoint of ecological civilization, however, there were significant potential problems in Hu’s speech. On several occasions in the speech, Hu emphasized that economic development of China must be the central task of the Party.[56] He pledged to quadruple per capita GDP by 2020 over the year 2000 level. While he spoke of reducing resource use (presumably on a per dollar of GNP basis, rather than on an aggregate basis), he also spoke of expanding industrial development, including in agriculture. Further, Hu reaffirmed the Party’s at least nominal commitment to Marxism, while acknowledging it was “Marxism with Chinese Characteristics” and its commitment to the Four Cardinal Principles. While some leftists believe that China has abandoned Marxism, many capitalists also believe China is Communist in name only. The truth is that there is an unresolved, sometimes contradictory, mix of thought (a part of which is Marxist-Leninist) guiding China’s development. These contradictions are played out in, on the one hand, rapid economic growth, and, on the other hand, the problems detailed by Mr. Hu in his report. They are the contradictions of modernity, which Marx and Lenin sought to address—in practice unsuccessfully—and which China is now trying to address through “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Wisdom Needed for the Future
There is something needed to pull together the strains of Chinese thought to guide China into a viable future. For centuries China had the world’s greatest humanistic civilization based on Confucianism, but this civilization developed intractable problems. In the 20th century China struggled with what vision of modernity to adopt to move forward and ultimately decided on Marxism. Mao Zedong gave form to Chinese Marxism, but with limited success and sometimes tragic results. Deng Xiaoping set China on a new course with reform and opening and this was continued by Jiang Zemin as he opened the CPC internally to the business class and entrepreneurs. While economically successful, this new course has led to the problems described by Mr. Hu in his report. Now Mr. Hu has given the vision of an harmonious society and has offered scientific development, socialism with Chinese characteristics, and the Four Cardinal Principles as the means of realizing it.
Mr. Hu’s vision of the harmonious society is entirely correct in terms of ecological civilization, but the means of achieving that goal need further refinement. Hu stated that “the principal contradiction in Chinese development is the one between the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people and the low level of social production.” He went on to affirm China’s “full involvement in economic globalization,” and its path “toward an industrialized, information-based, urbanized, market-oriented and internationalized country.” That this is the course of China’s development seems evident to the outside observer. There is much that is positive about this as any visitor can see when traveling in China. The project is, however, limited not only for China but for the OECD countries and all other countries following this path. It is not that China should not produce and consume at the level of the West. China has as much right to do this as the United States does. There is no more harm done by luxury real estate developments in China than those in the United States. The problem is that there are natural, nonnegotiable limits to this mode of development.
In fairness, China and other developing nations should not be subject to constraints on development until the OECD nations change their ways. If “contraction and convergence” is the goal, then the OECD nations should contract before developing nations are asked to converge. Yet, there is a certain degree of fatalism and lack of imagination in taking such a position. As Wolfgang Sachs writes:
More justice in the world cannot be achieved by globalizing the Western model of prosperity: that costs too much money and too many resources, and it would completely ruin the biosphere. So, development stands at a crossroads: either most of the world remains excluded from prosperity, or the prosperity model is constructed in such a way that everyone can participate in it without making the planet inhospitable. It is a choice between global apartheid and global democracy.[57]
Dr. Sachs calls for developing countries to pursue a path that goes around the stages of industrial development in the West in order to arrive, even before the West, in ecological civilization. As examples of what this might entail, he holds up decentralized electricity generation, mobility without car dependence and regenerative agriculture.[58] While China is heavily burdened with the task of improving the lives of over 1.3 billion people, it is uniquely position to lead the world in leapfrogging the development path of the West to ecological civilization.
To do so, will, however, require more than science, technology and economic development. It will need a renewal of Chinese culture in order to kindle ecological imagination, a new appreciation of nature, and new values, expectations and sense of fulfillment. This renewal would link China’s present strengths with those of its past in order to meet the needs of the future. This renewal would allow China to go around the obstacles blocking ecological civilization.
If China is to offer its unique contribution to the future, it must draw on the wisdom of its traditional culture. China can do this now in a way it could not in the twentieth century, for there is now separation from the past and it is possible, in Mr. Hu’s words, to “discard the dross” while keeping what is meaningful for the future. I would say Mr. Hu is even leading the way in this recovery by evoking the ideal of the harmonious society, an ideal that draws very heavily on China’s traditional understandings.
Two Bridges Between China’s Past and Future
In closing, I would offer two related bridges between the past and the future that may be helpful to China.
One is the work of Thomas Berry, a portion of which is now available in Chinese. Thomas Berry offers a humanistic view of the transition from modern culture to ecological culture (or, as he would say, “ecozoic” culture). As I have discussed, he calls for the reinvention (or realization) of “the human” (ren 仁). His work is very powerful. It is also very friendly to China. Thomas Berry came to Beijing in 1948 to teach history and to study. A key book written by Thomas Berry, The Great Work, has been translated into Chinese and published by San Lian Press. An article of mine on Thomas Berry entitled “Thomas Berry and His Ecozoic Era,” was published in Seeking Truth, vol. 29, no. 3 (May 2002), and was re-published in Xinhua Digest (New China Digest) September 2002. And an article by Thomas Berry entitled “Affectivity in Classical Confucian Tradition” has been published in the United States.[59]
Berry provides the fundamental context for ecological civilization and makes constructive proposals for the reform of business, education, government, law and religion. In addition to The Great Work, his books include The Dream of the Earth,[60] The Universe Story[61] and Evening Thoughts.[62] A new book by Berry, entitled The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the 21st Century, will be published in fall 2009 by Columbia University Press in New York.
Another source for recovering the value of Chinese traditional culture so that it has meaning for today and for the future is the “process thought” of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead was a prominent mathematician and physicist in the early 20th century. He developed a metaphysics consistent with his scientific knowledge that understood the world as creative, organic, ever-evolving, interdependent and having a subjective as well as an objective nature. There are now process centers in Beijing, Wuhan, Xian, Yancheng, Suzhou, Zhanjiang, Hangzhou, Shangdong, Tianjin, Guilin, Heilongjang, Shenyang and Shanghai, and Whitehead’s basic works (Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, and The Aims of Education) as well as many important secondary works on Whitehead have been translated into Chinese and published in China.[63]
Alfred North Whitehead offers what David Ray Griffin has rightly called “a philosophy of constructive postmodernism.” People who work with Whitehead’s thoughts are often called “process scholars.” Process scholars both within and outside China are providing a way of understanding science, humans and nature as an organic whole. Process thought is consistent with traditional Chinese thought and enables its recovery in a constructively postmodern way.
Conclusion
Jim Berry, Thomas Berry’s brother, often said, “The human was not meant to fail.” He meant human beings, who have come so far in the development of their capacities and means of expression, were not meant to come to this point in history and then fail because we destroy our life support systems. I have heard some people say that if this happens it will just be part of the natural evolutionary process. They say evolution casts off those species that become unfit for their environment. Jim Berry, however, couldn’t accept this as a proper destiny—he believed human beings have a meaningful role to play in the future and that they will succeed in this most difficult of all transitions in human history.
I believe this too; yet, I submit we are failing. If we are to succeed, it will be because we change civilization dramatically and do this in a shorter period of time than has ever occurred in the past.
The human was not meant to fail.
[1] Thomas Berry, The Great Work (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 57.
[2] “Living Planet Report,” http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/living_planet_report/ (accessed April 13, 2009). “This ecological overshoot means that it now takes about one year and three months for the Earth to regenerate what humans use in a single year.” Ibid.
[3] James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
[4] Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius, Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice (London: Zed Books, 2007).
[5] Ibid., viii.
[6] Ibid., viii-ix (emphasis added).
[8] Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006) (emphasis added).
[9] Berry, The Great Work, 159.
[10] Ibid., 63.
[11] Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, vol. I of The Story of Civilization (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1954), 666, quoting The Analects of Confucius, 13/3.
[12] Durant, 668, quoting The Great Learning.
[13] Ibid.
[14] See generally Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
[15] Thomas Berry, “Affectivity in Classical Confucianism,” The Ecozoic Reader 3, No. 3 (2003): 3-4 (available at www.ecozoicstudies.org under tabs “Publications-The Ecozoic Reader”).
[16] McNeil, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 355-56.
[17] Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
[18] The “Yellow Emperor,” Father of the Chinese people. In 1973, many silk books were discovered in Mawangdui Han Tomb (No.3). There are four of them before the Second version of Lao-tzu. They were originally titled The Eternal Law; The Then Masterpieces; Chen(g); and The Origin of Dao. This quote is from the first chapter of the first book. This translation is by Robin D. S. Yates. Five Lost Classics: Tao, Huanglao and Yin-Yang in Han China, translated with an introduction and commentary by Robin D. S. Yates (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), 51 (footnotes omitted).
[19] Berry, “Affectivity in Classical Confucianism,” 4.
[20] David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 44.
[21] Ibid.,
[22] Ibid., 47-48.
[23] Ibid., 51.
[24] Ibid., 55.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., 55-56.
[27] Ibid., 56-57.
[28] Ibid., 60-61.
[29] Ibid., 60.
[30] Ibid., 59.
[31] Sachs and Santarius, 140.
[32] Wikipedia contributors, “Commodity fetishism,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commodity_fetishism&oldid=285721646 (accessed April 30, 2009).
[33] Wikipedia contributors, “Karl Marx,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Karl_Marx&oldid=287096545 (accessed April 30, 2009).
[34] Herman Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 39.
[35] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Ecological Origins of Our Time, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). The original edition was published in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehard of New York.
[36] The industrial revolution began in England in the late eighteenth century with changes in the production of textiles, including the spinning jenny and the water frame, and the growing use of steam engines. It continues through today.
[37] Polanyi, 75.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Wikipedia contributors, “Karl Marx,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Karl_Marx&oldid=289272983 (accessed May 11, 2009).
[40] Victor Wallis, “Capitalist and Socialist Responses to the Ecological Crisis,” The Monthly Review (November 2008), http://www.monthlyreview.org/081103wallis.php (accessed May 11, 2009) (footnote omitted).
[41] Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1974), 328, quoted in John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” The Monthly Review (November 2008), http://www.monthlyreview.org/081110foster.php (accessed May 11, 2009).
[42] Foster, citing Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 636–39, Capital, vol. 3, 754, 911, 948–49.
[43] Minqi Li, “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism,” The Monthly Review (July-August 2008), http://www.monthlyreview.org/080721li.php (accessed May 11, 2009).
[44] For example Minqi Li writes: “It does take global ‘central’ planning for humanity to overcome the crisis of climate change, if by ‘central’ one is talking about self-conscious, rational coordination by democratic institutions.”
[45] Foster.
[46] For example, Minqi Li writes: “If we do not want to undermine the ecological conditions that support civilization, what else can accomplish these goals other than socialism with public ownership of the means of production and democratic planning?”
[47] “Third Plenary Session of 11th Central Committee of CPC held in 1978,” People’s Daily Online (October 9, 2008), http://english.people.com.cn/90002/95589/6512371.html (accessed May 11, 2009).
[48] Ibid. Also see, Hu Jintao. “Report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China” (October 15, 2007), http://www.china.org.cn/english/congress/229611.htm (accessed May 11, 2009).
[49] Wikipedia contributors, “Theory of Productive Forces,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theory_of_Productive_Forces&oldid=282737181 (accessed May 11, 2009).
[50] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, B. The Illusion of the Epoch,” The German Ideology, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b2, quoted in Wikipedia contributors, “Theory of Productive Forces,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theory_of_Productive_Forces&oldid=282737181 (accessed May 2, 2009).
[51] “Jiang Zemin’s speech at the 16th CPC Congress,” (November 2002), quoted in Wikipedia contributors, “Three Represents,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Three_Represents&oldid=257855446 (accessed May 2, 2009).
[52] See, e.g., Yachting Wu “Rethinking ‘Capitalist Restoration’
in China,” The Monthly Review (November 2005), http://www.monthlyreview.org/1105wu.htm (accessed May 11, 2009).
[53] Hu Jintao, Report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (October 15, 2007).
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid.
[56] For example, Hu said “We must firmly commit ourselves to the central task of economic development, concentrate on construction and development, and keep releasing and developing the productive forces.” Ibid.
[57] Sachs and Santarius, ix.
[58] Ibid., 165-179. Sachs calls this “ecological leapfrogging.”
[59] Thomas Berry, “Affectivity in Classical Confucian Tradition,” in Confucian Spirituality, eds. Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, in World Spirituality Series: an Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, general ed. Ewert Cousins. (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co. 2003). As cited in note 15, this article has also been published in The Ecozoic Reader. Page numbers of the article in the following note are to the article as it appeared in The Ecozoic Reader.
[60] Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1988)
[61] See citation in footnote 14.
[62] Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2006).
[63] For additional information, see the website of the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China http://www.postmodernchina.org/cgi/index.php or contact the Institute directly (contact information is available on the Institute’s website). |
