This article was originally published by Joshua Mawhorter at The Mises Institute.
After the failures of socialism—economically, historically, and ethically—the Left-liberal intellectuals, not wanting to abandon socialism, employed several new strategies. It has been suggested that these several manifestations can be subsumed under one general category—postmodernism. After a review of postmodern philosophy and philosophical influences, Stephen Hicks explains his central argument in Explaining Postmodernism: “Postmodernism is the academic far Left’s epistemological strategy for responding to the crisis caused by the failures of socialism in theory and in practice.” In other words, once socialism was discredited theoretically, economically (in several ways), historically, and ethically, those who were still ideologically committed to socialism despite its failures had to try to achieve socialism and central planning by appealing to other goals. One such strategy was the pursuit of egalitarianism (i.e. “equality”) between every disparate group, even between humans and the environment. Thus, the modern environmentalist movement—influenced by prior streams of thought—was born.
Describing further his analysis as to how the public failures of socialism, plus postmodernism and modern environmentalism coalesced, Hicks writes,
The second variation was seen in the Left turn that rising concern with environmental issues took. As the Marxist movement splintered and mutated into new forms, Left intellectuals and activists began to look for new ways to attack capitalism. Environmental issues, alongside women’s and minorities’ issues, came to be seen as a new weapon in the arsenal against capitalism.
Traditional environmental philosophy had not been in principle in conflict with capitalism. It had held that a clean, sustainable, and beautiful environment was good because living in such an environment made human life healthier, wealthier, and more enjoyable. Human beings, acting to their advantage, change their environments to make them more productive, cleaner, and more attractive….
The new impetus in environmental thinking, however, brought Marxist concepts of exploitation and alienation to bear upon environmental issues. As the stronger party, humans necessarily exploit harmfully the weaker parties—the other species and the non-organic environment itself. Consequently, as capitalist society develops, the result of the exploitation is a biological form of alienation: humans alienate themselves from the environment by despoiling it and making it unviable, and non-human species are alienated by being driven to extinction.
On this analysis, the conflict between economic production and environmental health, then, is not merely in the short-run; it is fundamental and inescapable. The production of wealth itself is in mortal conflict with environmental health. And capitalism, since it is so good at producing wealth, must therefore be the environment’s number one enemy. Wealth, therefore, was no longer good. Living simply, avoiding producing and consuming as much as possible, was the new ideal.
The impetus of this new strategy, captured perfectly in Rudolf Bahro’s Red to Green, integrated with the new emphasis on equality over need. In Marxism, humankind’s technological mastery of nature was a presupposition of socialism. Marxism was a humanism in the sense of putting human values at the core of its value framework and assuming that the environment is there for human beings to use and enjoy for their own ends. But, egalitarian critics began to argue more forcefully, just as males’ putting their interest highest led them to subjugate women, and just as whites’ putting their interests highest led them to subjugate all other races, humans’ putting their interests highest had led to the subjugation of other species and the environment as a whole.
The proposed solution then was the radical moral equality of all species. We must recognize that not only productivity and wealth are evil, but also that all species from bacteria to wood lice to aardvarks to humans are equal in moral value. “Deep ecology,” as radical egalitarianism applied to environmental philosophy came to be called, thus rejected the humanistic elements of Marxism, and substituted Heidegger’s anti-humanist value framework.
(It ought to be noted that, prior to this, the moral grammar of modern environmentalism was prepared through Romanticism [late-18th to mid-19th century], especially Rousseau, with its “revolt against reason, as well as against the condition under which nature has compelled him to live,” its “grudge against reality,” its dislike of industrialization and bourgeois society, its emphasis on nature as morally superior to civilization, its suspicion of human mastery over nature, its emphasis on authenticity over progress, emotion, intuition, and moral sentiment over reason, and pastoral idealization of pre-industrial life).
The Anti-Impact Framework
In Defending the Undefendable, Walter Block makes a simple but profound point regarding the nature of human existence in his chapter on littering: “…the creation of garbage is a concomitant of the process of producing and consuming.” Extrapolating on this principle, continued human existence and flourishing depends on production and consumption, that is, human action that manipulates and transforms the physical environment in which we all exist. This was recognized by John Locke in his homesteading theory of property, in which man owns his own body, uses his body to manipulate the physical world around him, and comes to also own external property. Therefore, to inhibit humankind’s free and voluntary transformation of nature in production and consumption—so long as it does not violate the property rights of others—is anti-human and evil.
In the modern West, and areas influenced by the West, many—especially elites—have adopted and presupposed an environmental philosophy of anti-impact. Rather than property rights and freedom in service of human flourishing as the ideal standard of value by which any manipulation of the environment is judged, many have instead established minimal or no human impact on the environment as the ultimate moral standard. In other words, humans should not impact the environment; therefore, while minimal human impact is better, no human impact is ideal. Of course, this is impossible for living humans existing in time and space. Held consistently, humans are the problem, which inculcates guilt and/or leads to a deadly conclusion—humans must be eliminated. Alex Epstein writes in his Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, “The essence of ‘going Green,’ the common denominator in all various iterations, is the belief that humans should minimize their impact on nonhuman nature” (p. 199).
If anyone thinks this is exaggerated or melodramatic, consider this: if human impact is bad, and if anti-impact is the moral ideal, then even minimization of human impact on the environment is insufficient and incomplete. It is impossible for humans not to impact the environment. Further, the consistent conclusion is that there should be no humans, not just fewer humans. Now, that means that one or more of the following things must occur: many humans must not be born, and/or many existing humans must die. Epstein again writes, “by associating impact with something negative, you’re conceding that all human impact is somehow bad for the environment” (p. 199). Additionally (p. 197),
This is the logical end of holding human nonimpact as your standard of value; the best way to achieve it is to do nothing at all, to not exist. Of course, few hold that standard of value consistently, and even these men do not depopulate the world of themselves. But to the extent that we hold human nonimpact as our standard of value, we are going against what our survival requires. (emphasis added)
Thankfully, most do not hold the anti-impact framework consistently (and many may not be epistemologically conscious of their own presuppositions), but the existence of this standard makes people vulnerable to guilt manipulation. When you feel bad for existing, then you are willing to submit to a spectrum of policies and measures offered by political elites to at least minimize your impact. If you are going to continue to exist and impact the environment, then you must at least submit to whatever central planning schemes wise and unselfish “experts” propose. For example, consider the words of environmentalist Bill McKibben concerning how people would supposedly live if fossil fuel use was more than halved and witness why socialism, central planning, and environmentalism cohere so comfortably together,
Each human being would get to produce 1.69 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually—which would allow you to drive an average American car nine miles a day. By the time the population increased to 8.5 billion, in about 2025, you’d be down to six miles a day. If you carpooled, you’d have about three points of CO2 left in your daily ration—enough to run a highly efficient refrigerator. Forget your computer, your TV, your stereo, your stove, your dishwasher, your water heater, your microwave, your water pump, your clock. Forget your light bulbs, compact fluorescent or not.
As observed in McKibben’s quote above, if people feel bad for existing and are thus open to whatever they have to do to minimize their impact, then central planning, in which elites determine every aspect of what you’re allowed to do—down to whether or not you get a lightbulb—becomes obvious. In Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, Deirdre McCloskey writes, “The new alternative to central-planning socialism is environmentalism” (p. 433).
Environmentalists are often credited as being idealistic. That may be the case, but their ideal—if it is human non-impact instead of human flourishing—is anti-human and evil. They may not commit suicide to achieve their goals, but they propose suicidal, anti-human policies.
Humanizing Nature and Dehumanizing Humans
Millions of people have been killed by governments in attempts to achieve central planning designs. The type of “energy Holodomor” the anti-impact environmentalists propose would mean the deaths of billions of people. If true, this would require both elevating non-human nature to a level of moral significance that is at or above humans and simultaneously devaluing human life below nature. In case the reader thinks I exaggerate, the modern environmental movement does both.
What does the goal of “saving the planet” or “protecting the environment” mean? The environmentalists ultimately mean that the planet needs to be saved from humans. Protect the environment from what or from whom? Protect the environment for what? Protect the environment for whom? The planet needs to be protected from you. Doubtless many will argue that the environmentalists just want to “save the planet” for humans, but—with anti-impact still the ideal—this still entails comprehensive central planning to the extent that human existence must severely retrench if it cannot be eliminated.
Further, we have many of the environmentalists telling us, in their own words, that they are anti-human. The group EarthFirst literally cries, mourns, and screams over “crimes” against trees. (This is arguably also why movies like WALL-E and The Lorax are ideologically loaded with anti-impact, anti-human, anti-freedom presuppositions). A 2019 Washington Post article was titled, “Progressive seminary students offered a confession to plants. How do we think about sins against nature?” It reads, “I think there is a pressing question that many Christians and people of no faith are grappling with: What is our moral responsibility to nonhuman life-forms? If we can sin against the natural world, how do we name and atone for that sin?” It was tweeted from a chapel at Union Seminary,
Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?
Maintaining the religious-spiritual motif, we are all now “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Greta Thunberg.”
Alan Gregg wrote in Mankind at the Turning Point (1974), “The world has cancer, and the cancer is man.” In 1994, Jacques Cousteau stated, “In order to stabilize world population we must eliminate 350,000 people a day.” Prince Philip of England once wrote in a foreword to a 1987 book, “I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus, but that is perhaps going too far.” I would argue that such anti-human thinking is a cancer. David M. Graber wrote in 1989 concerning the views of Bill McKibben and himself,
That makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota a tame planet, a human-managed planet, be it monstrous or–however unlikely–benign. McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value–to me–than another human body, or a billion of them.
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line–at about a billion years ago, maybe half that–we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.
It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
These people, and any operating on the anti-impact framework, do not deserve the moral high ground they claim. They are anti-human, often openly so. Alex Epstein avers toward the end of his book, “We’re not taught that some people truly believe that human life doesn’t matter, and that their goal is not to help us triumph over nature’s obstacles but to remove us as an obstacle to the rest of nature” (p. 208). He warns further, “Make no mistake—there are people trying to use you to promote actions that would harm everything you care about. Not because they care about you—they prioritize nature over you—but because they see you as a tool” (p. 209).
We should not be surprised at the overlap between socialism and environmentalism. We should also not be surprised that the proponents of both would kill millions, or even billions, to achieve their impossible, anti-human goals. Both involve political control of others. Mises once wrote, “Every socialist is a disguised dictator.” We might add, every anti-impact environmentalist (who are typically socialists also) are would-be dictators.
Environmentalists—at least the true believers who hold the anti-impact goal consistently—want you dead; they will settle, in the short term, for you to feel guilty for existing, producing, and consuming, and be willing to comply with any degree of central planning and freedom curtailment to “save the planet” from you.
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