Tag: climate change

9. A philosophical view of climate change (3)

This is an extract from a discussion on the subject of climate change with a member of the audience at a talk Hlatky gave at the ABF Huset, an Adult Education Centre, in Stockholm, Sweden, on 10 February 1993. Hlatky argues, as in Post 8, that technology should always be at the service of, be relative to, biology. He also returns to the theme of identity as the underlying problem, as we discussed in our first Post on climate change (Post 7).

Stefan Hlatky: … You […] have to […] think about whether it makes sense to continue with a one-sided industrialism that isn’t adapted to biology ­– for it isn’t – waiting, in vain, for biology to gradually adapt to it, meanwhile just pushing ahead completely regardless.

Audience Member: It’s surely the use of fossil fuels – coal and oil – that are the most dangerous for us?

SH: Isn’t it that we don’t question how much energy we need, what we need energy for? Isn’t that the difficulty?

AM: Yes, you know that the world would go under in just a few weeks if you took out as much energy all over the world as we do in the Western world.

SH: Yes, and yet the market economy is spreading to the whole world now, so that the whole world is getting this craving to acquire just as many refrigerators and all sorts of things. And then refrigerators aren’t actually as important for Sweden as for warm countries. Sweden would cope better without refrigerators than they would.

AM: Who is responsible for this type of planning? Surely there should be a supranational body responsible for it which can control the development.

SH: You certainly could have one, but that’s what I am maintaining: that if we could get this other basic view out[1], the problem would solve itself. Because then people would realize that it’s Nature that organizes. So when someone comes and wants to organize something without reference to Nature, we should say to that person: ‘Leave off! First, you should recover your consciousness of Nature, and then you can talk!’

AM: What exactly should we be allowed to do? What if we set up a list of things we shouldn’t do – in order to rescue Nature. What action can we still take?

SH: As soon as you can talk with people, the problem of forbidding people doesn’t arise.

AM: Yes, but I have driven here by car, for example. I’ve driven fifty or sixty kilometres today, around a lot of places.

SH: Yes, since Sweden is set up for cars, you can’t drop the car just like that. People are right when they say ‘Without the car, Sweden will grind to a halt’. But for that reason we should be able to realize that now we shouldn’t build more unless it’s entirely with the idea of benefitting biology – and not toppling it. For there’s certainly also a biological benefit to be had from having a car.

AM: Why can’t humans provide for themselves – ‘dig where you stand’?

SH: Because of status… because everything humans experience is identity. And an identity that’s completely without perspective. For our [real] identity is Nature-determined, and then it is balanced. But a person can’t balance their [created] identity. They can’t stop at ‘Yes, I could become world champion, but I’m content with tenth place’. Or stop competing altogether – that would be even worse. Because, when it comes to identity, it’s a fight about everything, a fight that can’t be prevented. On the other hand, if you were to give people back their natural identity, then the fighting would stop. And people would end up laughing at the hunt for identity that they’d been engaged in before.

AM: But what is human identity then?

SH: A being with consciousness of the whole who can’t help loving the whole creation. And that you can rely on. But the condition for that is that the person changes the I-identity, which is the consequence of time-consciousness, to this space-based consciousness of the whole[2] …and, starting from that, they think about a creation that is valid for everyone in the same way.

AM: But you are brought up by this society to think…

SH: Yes, but imagine if a general discussion about that were to start and were to lead to an insight, so that as they bring children up people were to stop ruining every child-mind by indoctrinating it with this idea of ‘I’ [UR, pp.43-44] in this way. Then the whole problem would be done away with from the bottom.

AM: Is this the competition person?

SH: Yes, it’s the competition person, who absolutely must have an identity, because it [their real identity] has been taken away by the I-idea in childhood… through the illusion that you get your identity with the I-idea. It’s a tremendous force in this upbringing: that you get your identity through the I-idea.

AM: But if one could get people to do this, then people would become completely passive instead, perhaps, and just day-dream or something like that.

SH: That’s what people believe. Can one become passive through thinking this? It bears reflection… because it’s Nature that is active, and we have to relate to Nature. And one doesn’t have to create an identity for oneself, but one has consciousness as identity.
It’s undeniable that this hunt for identity makes people incredibly active. Just consider one sport, tennis: where everyone who’s identified with tennis is fighting and fighting and fighting. Or consider running in the forest or on the streets – because those are also identities. [Now addressing the group:] This is what Gunnar [the audience member] thinks, that it will be dull if one takes away from people this constant struggle for identity…. because it is a struggle for identity, a mutual struggle for identity. But think about it: would people then really become dull?

Footnotes

1. Hlatky is referring to his own view, which he had been presenting earlier in the talk.↩
2. Again Hlatky is referring to ideas elaborated earlier in the talk. They can be followed up in Understanding Reality [UR, p.40] (see not only the paragraph in black in this link, but also to the end of the section it is in, as well as the section headed ‘Time’ that follows it).↩

8. A philosophical view of climate change (2)

This article (already on our website) was written by Hlatky on the occasion of the very significant first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which took place in his home town, Stockholm, in 1972. Associated with the Conference was a People’s Forum, where any member of the public could make their views known. Hlatky’s own title for the article was: ‘The demands of common sense[1]on the eve of the forthcoming conference on the protection of the environment’.

Nature is absolute, technology is relative

The generally accepted idea that we can ‘improve’ Nature through technology is the basic cause of all destruction of the environment.

Nature sustains our needs. Technology comes into the picture through the fact that the needs that exist because of Nature require of us some action – a technological procedure – if we are to satisfy them.

The needs remain fundamentally unchanged (i.e. they are absolute), while the satisfaction of them is ongoing in a constant renewal, for better or worse (i.e. it is relative), in that we constantly, time and again, succeed or fail in the process.

When the technological process is faulty, the satisfaction diminishes or fails to be forthcoming; we become unsatisfied. We experience the lack of satisfaction as a fault, because it is a fault; it is not any fault in Nature, however, but in the process, thus in the technological. This means that all faults are technological; no biological faults can ever arise.

It might be thought that this is hair-splitting. So be it. But bear in mind that, even if it is, it is crucial to the whole development of our judgement[2]. For by attributing the fault to Nature, we automatically glorify technology; we give it an absolute value in its relationship to Nature. We then start looking for faults in Nature; we become dissatisfied with Nature instead of looking for the fault in our own action, in the technological. To value technology above Nature and then to look for and ‘establish’ the fault in Nature is the primary cause of all pollution of the environment.

Our[3] demands are therefore the following:

  1. To stop presenting technology as a doctrine of salvation 

This implies in practice:

(a)  To stop all the nonsensical talk about unintelligent Nature as against the intelligence of human beings who are supposed to rescue Nature with technological solutions. The absolute purpose of Nature is to endure, to go on. It does not destroy itself; nor can it be destroyed or rescued by humans. The idea of self-destruction is the speciality of human beings (war, suicide, substance abuse, environmental pollution, driving madly along the roads, and thousands of other perverse ways of risking one’s life) – all this because of the fact that, as the highest species on the Earth’s surface, humans can either choose to be more intelligent than animals, by using their ability to understand themselves as a part in the whole reality; or they can choose to misuse their intelligence by using it in the same limited way that animals use theirs: with regard only to themselves.

(b)  To stop all the nonsensical talk about nature-reserves[4]. For natural reasons every human being knows that Nature is one and indivisible, because all our experience supports this view. The research results of ecology have only lent a differentiated scientific corroboration to what common sense tells us.

By the encirclement and preservation here and there of Nature, we only create a misleading conception of it and a narrow, and therefore distorted, love of it, together with the deceptive belief that we have thereby done all that we can do. In practice these boundaries bring no protection for Nature, but only preserve the technological lunacy outside the nature-reserve.

  1. Never haggle at Nature’s cost

A doctor is not allowed to intervene and operate without a diagnosis, without there existing nature-determined causes for a technological intervention. To encourage and make propaganda for technological toys for children and grown-ups without a carefully thought-through and factually stated biological motivation is just as harmful as encouraging doctors to perform operations as ends in themselves, without regard for the patient’s health.

Technology has a decisive significance in our lives, and must under all circumstances be at the service of Nature. There is no such thing as an innocent or neutral technology, that is, a technology without any consequences. Any technology that is not biologically motivated is inevitably anti-biological. Technology as an end in itself is, firstly, the undoing of psychological (mental) health – through our identification with the technological, which automatically blinds people to the biological (the natural). And, secondly, it is the undoing of physical health and the environment. If we want to avoid the dangers of technology, we must create an insight for children into this question of principle while they are still young.

  1. An insight must be created into the paradox of discussing economics vs Nature.

Everyone knows that no one can express biological values in money or in any other unit of measurement. The practical consequence of this fact is that Nature cannot possibly come into our economic reckonings. Unconscious of this, we have fallen into the habit of immediately thinking about economics as soon as the subject of Nature comes up – as if we are convinced that we live from money and not from Nature. To place economics in relation to Nature is the gravest imaginable offence to human intelligence – to our own (when it amounts to self-deception), as much as to the intelligence of defenceless children, who thereby acquire from the very start a basic view of their situation in life that is inconsistent with reality. Economics can only go with economics, never with Nature!

A technology that cannot be pure is not worth having 

If we simply weigh up the economic pros and cons, then it is obvious that a rushed or botched job is cheaper than an intelligent construction. To use economics on the basis of faulty indoctrination and the prevailing disorientation about the basic questions of life as a way of getting people to accept botched jobs, while invoking the holy economy, requires an unnatural piece of intellectual acrobatics; it is therefore without basis and thus unintelligent, an unconscious self-destruction as we allow ourselves to be hypnotized by short-sighted gains.

If any technological solution proves to be anti-biological, that is because it has not been thought through and it must be developed further. The fact that a suicide weapon is cheap is no reason for destroying the whole of humanity.

Common sense tells us that there can never be an intelligent motive for setting anti-biological botched jobs in motion. Unfortunately we have so perfected intellectual acrobatics (unintelligence) that we are unable to come up with a natural thought, unless we happen to be sitting in front of our leisure cabin in the nature-reserve to which we have banished Nature. Nothing should be allowed other than an absolutely pure technology that Nature can absorb without being disturbed. To haggle over this demand is to chose the dirty over the pure, the unclear over the clear, the unintelligent over the intelligent, the unreasonable over the reasonable, and destruction over development.

That the demands put forward here cannot be carried out in the blink of an eye is self-evident, but if we do not define the principles unequivocally as they are in reality, then all our actions will remain confused.

Footnotes:

1. Note that the subtitle of Hlatky’s and Booth’s book, Understanding Reality, is ‘A commonsense theory of the original cause’.↩
2. ‘Judgement’ is a generic term for the conclusion or set of conclusions that each person comes to in their efforts to understand reality, and what they come to value, the judgements they make, as a result of these conclusions.↩
3. This piece was written under the auspices of Action to Broaden the Dialogue.↩
4. The idea at the time was to contribute to the protection of Nature by establishing national parks.↩

7. A philosophical view of climate change (1)

This is the first of three Posts on climate change.[1] The other two will be published over the next few weeks.

The problem

  1. We assume, in line with the view of the overwhelming majority, that the current serious changes in climate are threatening to the human species and are created by it.
  2. Philosophically, we tie the problem to the question of identity. Crucial to this is the modern identity based on the search for freedom and wealth. Hlatky describes the historical roots of this in Post 5, God or Mammon?
  3. Essentially, the fixed identities of the medieval period, based on a hierarchical society predominated over by the Church and other authorities, were replaced by an emphasis on human freedom. While the freedom of the individual from oppression by other individuals is self-evidently unobjectionable and unproblematic, this went hand in hand with the gradual rejection of any belief in a conscious original cause. Humans thus came to regard themselves as free to organise themselves solely as they saw fit and to pursue freely chosen ends, without regard for any divine order or divinely ordained leader. This extended to the use they made of Nature – no longer seen as God’s creation.
  4. Crucial to the practical furtherance of these goals has been the development of modern science (at first not atheistic, but later generally so), from the beginning of the 1600s. This has paved the way through technological advance to the possibility of greater and greater exploitation of Nature.
  5. Along with this, the digital age has served to promote the disconnect of humans from Nature.
  6. Unfettered human activity has culminated in the climate problems we see today.
  7. Because Nature is not seen as given by a God for an understandable purpose (see Post 2), the question as to whether it might be perfect for its purpose (see Post 2; also UR, p.129ff) cannot even arise. Rather, the now generally held view is that Nature is not perfect. That is, Nature is not all good, but both good and bad. It ‘blindly’ offers us, for example, only a one-off life that has no inherent meaning and in which there can be suffering.[2] Our major goal, therefore – the argument runs – must be to explore Nature with a view to gaining control over it; humans can then improve it[3], get rid of the bad, and create a better life for themselves. So Nature is no longer seen as absolute ­– at least, not in any positive sense; and human creativity has come to be seen as primary, and not as relative to Nature’s creativity.[4]
  8. The extent of this human creativity is nowadays regarded as boundless: the human species can be improved, death can be overcome; whatever problems there are will all be solved by technology, its development exponentially speeded up by artificial intelligence.[5]
  9. So the crucial step historically, in our view, has been this switch to an out-and-out identification with human creativity. And this in its turn has been facilitated by the failure of the world monotheisms to come up with a reasonable – that is, Nature-based [UR p.137], reality-based – hypothesis of the original cause. Therefore, equally importantly, they have not come up with a reasonable hypothesis of the original meaning – of our place in creation and our relation to it.
  10. This blog’s major contention is that unless this identification with human creativity is challenged and agreement reached as to our real – in our view, common – identity (see Post 3), based on a Nature-based view of the original cause and meaning, no technical solution to the problems of climate change will ever work in the long run.
  11. We may one day – even one day soon – be forced by catastrophic surface changes in Nature[6] to impose considerable lifestyle changes on ourselves and to draw back from our unfettered creative activity. This will be particularly the case where these surface changes in Nature have a negative impact on our ability to satisfy our existential needs. But the necessary changes in lifestyle will not be welcomed and fully embraced. On the contrary, a struggle for the diminishing resources will ensue, in which those who are able to afford access to them and/or can have control over them – as individuals or countries – will seek to hang on to as much of their current lifestyle as possible, challenged by those less well positioned doing the same.
  12. And, even assuming for a moment that Nature is given enough breathing space to recover itself,[7] we will be back at the business of ‘improving’ Nature in the blink of an eye unless we can agree upon a philosophy that can underpin the required lifestyle change.[8]

    The necessary philosophical re-evaluation

  13. We invite the reader to reflect on the possible contribution of Hlatky’s self-evidenced-based hypothesis of the original cause and meaning – developed in this blog and on the associated website – to the solution of the problem of climate change.
  14. To summarise Hlatky’s hypothesis: God is behind Nature in an ongoing way. Nature is God’s purposeful activity. It serves God’s – the original non-created whole’s – need to be understood by his original non-created parts. If the parts extrapolate from the experience they are able to have as human beings in creation, they can then understand that God must exist and is basically like them: he has the same need – to be understood as like and thereby loved – that they have. At the same time, the need of the parts is also satisfied, in their relationship with one another and with the whole, whom they experience indirectly through the whole’s activity, that is, Nature, creation.
  15. But to have the necessary experience in creation, the parts must have a body to connect to. This body is part of Nature and completely bound to Nature. This bondage to Nature is experienced by us via needs, which act like forces from inside us. These encourage us to do our part in sustaining the body, which otherwise Nature sustains within an overall ecology. We can ignore our needs – by refusing to eat, for example – but not the consequences of doing that, consequences which again Nature will provide.
  16. This situation does not have to be seen by us as problematic, however, since God has provided everything within Nature that is required to satisfy our existential needs. In addition, we are encouraged to play our part by the pleasure we experience in satisfying them.
  17. It is in satisfying such natural needs that we cannot avoid using Nature [UR pp.51-2]; they are the principal reason for our interaction with it. And ‘interact’ is what we should do, rather than interfere [UR p.68]. This means relating to Nature – which requires us to understand its purpose as a whole.[9]

    The solution cannot be solely technological

  18. Without Hlatky’s view (or some other equally Nature-based, reasoned view), the debate about climate change will be conducted solely in technical terms. This is the case now.
  19. Firstly, the single overriding technical question is posed: ‘Is Nature actually being adversely affected by the uses humans are making of it?’ If we assume that answer to be ‘yes’, the next technical question becomes: ‘Which of the uses we are making of Nature are particularly harmful and should be modified, curtailed or halted?’
  20. Appended to this is a debate about what technology might be applied or developed in an attempt to produce a technical solution to the problem.
  21. It will be conceded within such a view that every detail in Nature seems to have a function in a system, established solely by evolution, and that, technically speaking, we run risks when we cut across this. But that is not the same as allowing that Nature as a whole has a purpose [UR p.135]: God’s purpose (so that fundamentally it is not mechanics, but God’s need, that drives the whole activity of Nature).
  22. We leave Hlatky to summarise (UR p.42):

    Stefan Hlatky: Science can never answer the philosophical question ‘why?’, and is therefore bound to the idea of time, and to continually examining the past in order to try to foresee the future. I say that I can in principle foresee the future the moment that I understand creation as a purposeful order, an order that is changeable on the surface but not fundamentally.

    Philip Booth: You mean that, because the purpose of creation never changes, the basic order never changes?

    SH: Yes …no matter how much we interfere with creation on the surface, by polluting it, destroying forests and so on. We can confuse the order on the surface, but the order will always eventually reassert itself, from the very moment that we stop confusing it with our own creativity that is blind to Nature’s creativity.

    PB: But if we don’t think creation has an unchanging purpose…?

    SH: Then two different sets of principles rule the future. The first set of principles is that which actually rules the order of Nature. This set is determined by God’s need to be understood and therefore by his purpose in creation. The second set of principles derives from the meanings created by human beings, who have to organise themselves in some way – since life is always interaction, which includes interaction with other human beings.

    PB: And as people nowadays are generally educated by modern science without any agreement about the order of Nature, they can’t see the virtue of being ruled by the order of Nature?

    SH: That’s right. And in that case they can’t avoid having to agree about and be ruled by the different meanings or purposes human beings create, even though that process invariably brings endless conflict – which is why it was always said that wars are inevitable. And nowadays such competition about meanings – which is inevitable when there is no agreement about Nature’s meaning – has even been made into a virtue by the ideology of the market economy (see Post 5).

    Conclusion

  23. There is widespread agreement nowadays about the science of climate change – despite dissent in some important quarters. There is also widespread agreement about the technical steps that would be needed to counteract the problem – despite disagreement about the prioritising of these. The real problem is a lack of motivation, both individually and collectively, to carry out those steps. This is because we are not willing to change the lifestyle based on this identification with human creativity and based on the consequent meanings created by human beings (including, obviously, the pursuit of wealth). Or – and this has the same root – we are passive, because, in a blind faith in future human technology, we believe that human creativity will solve the problem in time.
  24. Greta Thunberg[10] and the children who have started protesting recently around the world are right to chide the adults and to seek to goad them into some action. But this action will be ultimately fruitless while it is based on this identification with human creativity. And the danger is that the children themselves will become adults who are equally wedded to it.[11]
  25. Although it would be a strange stance to expect children to take, they also need, therefore, to goad the adults into reaching some philosophical clarity and agreement (such as, for example, the possibility Hlatky offers) – without which action will be ineffective other than temporarily.
  26. None of this means that we should sit idly by until such philosophical agreement is forthcoming. But it does require the insight, which is nowadays suppressed, that such a discussion and agreement are ultimately going to be necessary – and that philosophical agreement is possible, as long as we are determined to remain reality-based in our thinking.[12]

Footnotes:
1. Reminder: this Post assumes familiarity with our About page, our Summary of Hlatky’s View page and the first four Posts. ↩
2. For the question of suffering, see UR, pp.108-9.↩
3. See Post 8, which starts its argument from this point.↩
4. For more on the historical development of this idea, see UR pp.121-3.↩
5. For a typical example of the faith in technology and AI, consider the views of Stephen Hawking. He can imagine, for example, that AI could develop a will of its own that might be in conflict with the will of humans; or, he writes: ‘It might be possible to use genetic engineering to make DNA-based life survive for at least 100,000 years’ (extracted from his last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions).
Or take what Yuval Harari says in his bestseller Sapiens: A brief history of humankind: ‘The project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.’ (p.298)↩
6. … only ‘surface’, because Nature does not change fundamentally. [UR p.100]↩
7. This leaves aside the question of whether it is too late for humans to save their species – see e.g. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. But note that it will never be ‘too late’ for Nature, since, as Hlatky points out, we can never harm Nature. Nor can we rescue it.↩
8. …much as the pursuit of wealth has been largely unaffected by the financial collapse of 2008.↩
9. For the contrast between ‘relating to’ and ‘controlling’, see UR pp.52-3  or UR p.159.↩
10. Or see her speech at the United Nations.↩
11. For the centrality of the contrast between human creativity and God’s creativity, see the conclusion of the dialogues between the two authors of Understanding Reality [UR pp.164-5].↩
12. For further reading, see UR pp.57-8 and UR p.70. For more on the subject of freedom, view this excerpt from Hlatky’s videoed talk, God and Science.↩