Defying savage commands: Critical thinking as harm reduction
In a short YouTube video, EU citizens were asked to name the biggest problem facing their country. Housing, Russian influence, government corruption, racism, and sexism were among the issues mentioned. The climate crisis, biodiversity decline and water scarcity, and/or the presence of forever chemicals in drinking water were not. The issues that came up are important, but the fact that none said anything directly ecological speaks volumes.
The urgency of ecological issues always seem to fall behind other, more immediate concerns. A psychological element is at play: people tend to be most concerned with the issues right in front of them. The ecological crisis is like the forest we can’t see for the trees, until the entire thing is washed away in a freak flood.
Socrates argued that two powerful commands compel us to make terrible decisions in the present that harm us in the future: bodily and kinship commands. Agnes Callard refers to these as savage commands in her book Open Socrates (see Chapter 3: Savage Commands). We drink excessively even though we know it will give us a hangover. We stay up too late knowing it will make us tired the next day. We put off what we should be doing for another day and live in ways we know harm people and the planet, but continue for the sake of social convention or convenience.
Bodily commands aren’t necessarily negative. When our stomach tells us we are hungry, we probably are. The problem Socrates tried to raise was that our bodies alone can’t be trusted to tell us if something is good or harmful. Our bodies might not prevent us from overeating or eating too much food that will rot our teeth and/or increase our risk of diabetes. To solve this dilemma, good outcomes have to be weighed against harm. Is it worthwhile to cause long-term suffering for fleeting enjoyment? Probably not. If we always choose to indulge in eating candy we will get cavities and diabetes. When we overindulge all together, we get an unstable climate and mass extinction.
Kinship commands are encoded in our brains from the moment we are born. They shape our understanding of the social world. They tell us to go to school then to university, get a job, get married, get a house, have children, keep up the outward appearances of the house and yard, and most of all, consume. Some jobs are undoubtedly beneficial: nurses, teachers, and janitors come to mind. Others merely produce a temporarily desirable outcome, such as more money into certain hands, but degrade ecosystems and destabilize the climate, like lawyers who defend ecologically damaging corporations.
It’s expected that children will be raised in nuclear family structures even though that has been proven to be harmful to mother and child alike, as Kristen Ghodsee shows in Everyday Utopia (see Chapter 3: Gender, Equality, and Everyday Utopia). We’re brought up to aspire to be the owners of oversized houses surrounded by lawns and pavement. An ever-expanding suburbia is paved by bulldozer-induced ecocides. The materials needed for this expansion are extracted from distant areas degraded in the extraction process.
As it is with bodily commands, we can’t rely on kinship to tell us to do the right thing. We need to question what we are doing, whether it’s necessary, and whether it’s harmful. We also need to have the knowledge to decide what’s harmful. It’s easy to make mistakes. I have been advocating for walking as a sustainable mode of transportation, and, silly me, it turns out most shoes shed microplastics, because of course they do–they’re made of plastic.
Three considerations for harm reduction
1. If a harm is caused, make it right. An example of this is if a tree is cut for wood and you plant one or more saplings in its place. This is an idea from deep ecology, but it’s likely that there are already saplings growing beneath the cut tree. Adding more could lead to overcrowding. It’s important to determine the appropriate action based on the context. It would not be okay to kill a human for their bones and replace them with another, so maybe it isn’t acceptable to kill a tree either.
Another way to look at this may be to right wrongs without causing further wrongs. In Open Socrates, Callard analyzes kinship commands through the act of revenge, and concludes, along with Socrates, that it’s never good to cause harm. Executing one person for murdering another is hypocritical. Execution is just another type of murder. In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood similarly writes about the need for forgiveness in place of revenge and imagines the difference it would have made if George Bush Jr. had responded to 9/11 with forgiveness rather than war. A million lives would have been spared.
The main objective is to cause as little harm as possible in the first place, especially when it comes to ecosystems. Contaminants produced today for fleeting conveniences will continue to cause harm for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.
2. Choose options that don’t cause harm. An example is living as lightly as possible and taking no more than is needed. We could learn from non-human animals, like beavers who build dams that increase local resilience to forest fires and droughts. Since humanity’s compounded activities are driving planetary ecological collapse, we can make a difference by simply doing less. To start: consume less energy.
3. Do things that produce additional goods. Trees, or any other plant, grow in size and the bigger they become, the more life they are able to support. In human terms, this could mean giving the planet as much space as possible for ecosystems to develop or provide a service to the preservation of life. For example, to help wild honey bees recover from the brink of extinction, conservationist Matt Somerville builds bee shelters in places that lack the old growth trees in which wild bees build their hives.
We are capable of doing much good, but to actualize that goodness we need to come to terms with a few things: humans as a species aren’t particularly special, we are not separate from nature, and we benefit from healthy, functioning ecosystems just like any other earthbound species.
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When actions are broken down to their basic motivations (even kinship commands), an origin in a bodily command can be found. No matter the size of the house or how it’s decorated, it’s still a shelter. Houses produce an ecological negative in practically all cases. Houses seal the ground, preventing anything from growing. Lawns do almost nothing to support life and don’t provide any protection for top soil on hot sunny days.
An ongoing trend, beginning in the early days of industrialization and continuing today as we progress toward increasing automation, has led to our current techno-modern ways of life. The purpose has been to maximize the rate of extraction and production to produce vast quantities of consumer products with as little human effort as possible. More recently, new automation products have been produced for home consumption: lights that automatically turn on at sunset and smart climate controls that ensure we never test how much we can see in the dark or experience anything but comfort. We have easy access to supercomputers that can generate images, videos, essays, and think for us without any effort from us. Bodily and kinship commands are already a kind of autopilot that compel us to complete tasks. The fact that we obey without thinking is the problem.
Machines that think for us are merely an extension of this problem. The push for automation will harm us in the future, not only from the increased mining required to build these machines, ground sealed by data centres, and the high levels of energy demand, but also when our overdependency on technology weakens our mental and physical capabilities to the point of helplessness.
We can rely neither on our bodies nor social conventions to compel us to do what’s right, especially when it comes to environmental ethics. We need to think critically about our choices, and in putting our thoughts into action, we will find ourselves running against immediate bodily desires and mainstream society. But like abstaining from drinking too much alcohol to avoid a hangover, the pain of perseverance will be worth it tomorrow.
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A very special thank you to Lily Edelman-Gold for the helpful comments and suggestions that helped shape this article.
Photo by the author: William Lake, Manitoba.
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