Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (3 page)

As the physical world is ruled by the laws of movement, so is the moral universe ruled by the laws of interest.
³

This view of ourselves has defined the meaning of our most basic social values. Freedom, for example. Freedom is “elbow room”: our capacity for self-defense, our success in fending off the intrusion of others. And what better defense than material accumulation? After all, the more we have, the freer we are from dependence upon others. To challenge the unlimited accumulation of material wealth is therefore to challenge the individual’s free development. And fairness, what is it? Whatever distribution of rewards follows from each “social atom’s” pursuit of its private interests, operating within the “neutral laws” of economic life.

This view of ourselves, driven by narrow self-interest, began to take shape in the 17th century and was picked up in the 18th by many of our nation’s founders, including John Adams. He wrote:

 … whoever would found a state, and make proper laws for the government of it, must presume that all men are bad by nature.
⁴

This combination of notions—social atomism, materialism, and the rule of human affairs by discoverable laws—has had profound implications for the social order we have created. For if indeed we are isolated social atoms, any conscious process of group decision making based on identifying
common
needs—usually called politics—is suspect. We must let absolute laws determine our fate, for self-seeking egos may well twist any other method to their private gain. Any genuine deliberative process is therefore impossible.

Instead of trusting our capacities for common problem solving, we sought desperately, and believed we had found, laws governing the social world—governing life and death matters of economics—laws that determine who eats and who doesn’t. The more choices we can leave to these laws, the better off we are.

And what are these absolute laws? In much of the West we have established at least two such laws as almost sacrosanct, and adhered to them in varying degrees of faithfulness. They are:

• the market distribution of goods and services;
  
• not private property
  per se
  but a particular variant of this institution: the
  unlimited
  private accumulation of
  productive
  property.
  

And here’s where the problem arises. It is not the institutions of the market or private property. The problem is converting these handy tools into fixed laws. What happens then? Human responsibility for consequences goes out the window.

If, for example, an inflating market pushes the price of housing out of reach of families on low incomes, leaving them on the street, hey, that’s not the community’s fault. That’s the market at work!
We’re
not responsible for that!

Or take income distribution itself. If it is the result of millions of individual free choices in the market, then as a society we’re not responsible for the outcome, no matter how wide the resulting chasm between rich and poor. Never mind that during the 1980s perhaps the greatest transfer of wealth occurred in our nation’s history—in this case from the nonrich to the rich—largely as a result of deliberate government and corporate policies. But we’re absolved of responsibility, as long as we cling to the myth that individual choices in the market “automatically” determine outcomes.
⁵

As the market defines more and more of our lives, even the most sacred of human experiences is up for sale: I was saddened but not surprised that the Reagan era brought “surrogate motherhood.” In the 1988 debate over Baby “M,” parties wrangled over a contract. Few asked what the renting of a woman’s womb portended—a world in which any value could be reduced to a market value.

What if, I asked myself, instead of our masters, the market and private productive property could become mere devices in the service of our values, in the service of community-defined ends? The catch-22 is, of course, that those community ends can only be defined through deliberation—public talk—about our values and common needs—a process precluded by the very assumptions of social “atomism” with its self-seeking limits which we’ve come unquestionably to accept.

In Search of a New Myth of Being

If social atomism and the universe as machine became the dominant “myths” of the modern era, is there an alternative? What might replace these ubiquitous claims on our collective imaginations?

To suggest an answer, let me return to my life-long focus on food. When I began this quest, I was often dumbfounded when people asked me why I chose
food
. What a funny question, I thought. Everyone knows that all living creatures must eat. If they’re not eating, what else matters?

Yet in the 1960s, I only barely understood the implications of my choice to focus on our most direct link to the nurturing earth. Yes, I was aware of being influenced by the birth of environmentalism. In the late 1960s, I attended standing-room lectures on ecology at the “free university” at Berkeley. Most of us were just learning the word for the first time. Something was in the air.

I certainly didn’t understand until much later, however, that ecology offered us a new way of thinking about what it means to be a human being.

It’s difficult to perceive this possibility in part because the message we hear from environmentalists is too often a scold. “Okay,” the environmental preachers tell us, “the party’s over. You have all overdone it. Your indulgence must stop! Accept the grim fact that on our little planet we live on limited means, on a fixed income.”

Feeling guilty as accused, it’s hard to see that while these reprimands may well be deserved there is also a richly positive message for us human beings in the discovery of “nature.” Let our guilty feelings not block our capacity to listen. For there is a beautiful irony to appreciate. While the environmental catastrophe sounds the alarm, nature also offers us insights that are essential to addressing not only the environmental crisis but other aspects of social decline as well.

As we begin to see the world through the lens of ecology, subtly, we also begin to reshape our view of ourselves.

To explain, let me again pick up my personal journey.

In 1983, when I began research for what became
Rediscovering America’s Values
, I was reacting to the 1980s celebration of narrow self-interest and a materialistic understanding of ourselves. I perceived Reaganism as the last gasp of a tired dogma. In my research and writing, I was struggling to articulate an alternative social understanding of self—self-interest not as narrow selfishness, but as deeply imbedded in relationships.

I was struggling to articulate a vision of social change that took us beyond social atomism and beyond “received” Marxism as well. I was influenced by environmental philosophy, Catholic social teaching, feminist philosophy and historiography. But most fun, I’ll admit, was discovering that even within the dominant, Western philosophic tradition were rich insights supporting my own intuitions and life experience. Even from Adam Smith. Yes, the
same
Adam Smith who many view as the Godfather of greed—the supposed celebrator of self-seeking as the engine of the economy. (Officials in the White House during the Reagan years even sported Adam Smith neck ties.) But buried has been Smith’s profoundly social vision of human nature.

Whereas in the classic Western philosophic tradition, the individual is poised defensively against society, Adam Smith perceived the individual’s sense of self and worth embedded entirely within society. Because we not only need the approval of others, but need to feel that approval is deserved, our individual well-being exists more in relationships
with
others than protection
against
others. In his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, Smith pointedly reconstructed the Christian precept to love our neighbors as ourselves, writing that:

 … it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour; or, what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.
⁶

This intensely social view of our nature is increasingly confirmed by comparative sociology and anthropology. Indeed, the dominant paradigm’s notion of the autonomous individual now appears as philosophical flight of fancy! Its claim to Charles Darwin’s imprimatur is suspect when we learn that Darwin clearly believed that evolving human beings could only have expanded their societies because of a “moral sense … aboriginally derived from the social instincts.”
⁷
Among primeval people, Darwin observed, actions were no doubt judged good or bad “solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe.” Recent studies find the roots of empathy in infancy, noting that infants react to the pain of others as though it were happening to themselves.
⁸
And psychologists document how human expressions of fellow-feeling respond to a social context which encourages them.
⁹
In fact, my own intuitions and experience suggest that we ignore our profoundly social nature—our need for approval and to express our feelings for each others’ well-being—only at great psychic cost.

But the environmental perspective offers a uniquely moving metaphor for such understanding of self. In 1985, I co-authored an article with environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott.
¹⁰
He, more than anyone I know, views—and eloquently expresses—the social nature of human existence through the lens of ecology. His insights shaped this excerpt from our article:

Nature is not only human culture’s life support system, but its enduring paradigm as well. Human society is not simply embedded in nature. It also imitates nature in crucial ways—as the myths and ceremonies of primal peoples frankly acknowledge.

Ecological science focuses attention on
relationships
. It reveals that organisms are not only mutually related; they are also mutually defining. A species
is what it is because of where and how it lives
. From an ecological point of view, a species is the intersection of a multiplicity of strands in the web of life. It is not only located in its context,
it is literally constituted by its context
.

Once seen through the prism of the biotic community, then, a person’s individuality is constituted differently—not by defense against each other but in the peculiar mix of relationships we each bear to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and co-workers.
¹¹

If true, the great environmental awakening we are now experiencing is also reshaping our sense of self. For even the most popular images of ecology involve us in perceiving relationships—the link between acid rain and the forests’ health, between the destruction of rainforests in South America and thinning bird populations in North America, between pesticides on crops and the ill health of farm-workers and consumers. They’re all about the ties among us and the rest of the natural world. That awareness of
relationship
, I believe, is permeating our consciousness, and ever-so-subtlely eroding the notion that we can stake out our own safety and happiness apart from the well-being of the communities in which we live.

Inescapably, awareness of our environment is also awareness of a “commons”—a reality on which we share dependency and therefore mutual responsibility, a commons which defies division into individual goods. I was struck recently by reports of a survey of American youth’s knowledge of geography. A shockingly large share could not name the country that borders the U.S. on the south, but almost all had heard of the ozone hole! Its consequences touch us all.

The environmental crisis teaches perhaps more graphically what is true of all our social problems: The health of the whole is literally essential to the individual’s well-being. If we are ultimately interdependent, it becomes silly to think in terms of trade-offs between social integrity and the individual’s unfettered pursuit of happiness.

I have come to think of this shift in understanding as moving us from a mechanistic to what might be called a
relational worldview
.

Rethinking Farming and Food

These thoughts provide a framework for what you will find in the chapters that follow.
Diet for a Small Planet
identifies the roots of a wasteful, destructive, and hunger-generating food system in underlying economic “rules.” In the pages that follow, you will read about how these unquestioned “rules” drive farmers to overproduce, eroding topsoil, polluting groundwater, and decimating farm communities.

But all that I lay out here can also be understood through the inherited “ether” I’ve just hinted at—the dominant mechanistic worldview. Why have we accepted these “rules” of economic life? They conform to the notion that there are laws governing the social order, just as laws of motion govern the material world. They “fit” neatly with the view of nature as giant machine. And once nature is so perceived, our job is to tinker, even redesigning nature where necessary.

Nonhuman animals become mere cogs in that machine. First Jim Mason and Peter Singer in their book
Animal Factories
¹²
and then John Robbins in
Diet for a New America
¹³
have told us in horrifying detail how first poultry and now other farm animals were denied expression of their own nature, constrained to the point of pain and ill-health—and, ultimately, reduced to nothing but “food processors” for human convenience and taste. Farm animals, as I discovered early in my research for
Diet
, are to the U.S. Department of Agriculture mere “units of production.”