Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (12 page)

In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and wilfully abandoned our great classical-Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like virtue, love, temperance. As a result, we are totally ignorant, totally uneducated in the subject that of all conceivable subjects, is the most important, We have no idea· to think with and therefore are only too ready to believe that ethics is a held where thinking does no good. Who knows anything today of the Seven Deadly Sins or of the Four Cardinal Virtues?

Who could even name them? And if these venerable. old ideas are thought not to be worth bothering about, what new ideas have taken their place?

What is to take the place of the soul- and life-destroying metaphysics inherited from the nineteenth century? The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction. It is not as if we had to invent anything new: at the same time, it is not good enough merely to revert to the old formulations. Our task - and the task of all education - is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.

The problems of education are merely reflections of the deepest problems of our age. They cannot be solved by organization, administration, or the expenditure of money, even though the importance of all these is not denied.

We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be meta- physical. Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists. the disorder will grow worse. Education, far from ranking as man's greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction, in accordance with the principle
corruptio optimipessima.

Seven

The Proper Use of Land

Among material resources, the greatest, unquestionably, is the land, Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be. The land carries the topsoil, and the topsoil carries an immense variety of living beings including man. In 1955, Tom Dale and Vernon Gill Carter, both highly experienced ecologists, published a book call ed Topsoil and Civilisation. I cannot do better, for the purposes of this chapter, than quote some of their opening paragraphs:

'Civilised man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily. His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary master ship was permanent. He thought of himself as "master of the world", while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.

'Man, whether civilised or savage, is a child of nature - he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilisation declines.

'One man has given a brief outline of history by saying that "civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints".

This statement may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but it is not without foundation. Civilised man has despoiled most of the lands on which he has lived for long. This is the main reason why his progressive civilisations have moved from place to place. It has been the chief cause for the decline of his civilisations in older settled regions. It has been the dominant factor in determining all trends of history.

'The writers of history have seldom noted the importance of land use. They seem not to have recognised that the destinies of most of man's empires and civilisations were determined largely by the way the land was used. While recognising the influence of environment on history, they fail to note that man usually changed or despoiled his environment.

'How did civilised man despoil this favourable environment? He did it mainly by depleting or destroying the natural resources. He cut down or burned most of the usable timber from forested hillsides and valleys. He overgrazed and denuded the grasslands that fed his livestock. He killed most of the wildlife and much of the fish and other water life. He permitted erosion to rob his farm land of its productive topsoil. He allowed eroded soil to clog the streams and fill his reservoirs, irrigation canals, and harbours with silt. In many cases, he used and wasted most of the easily mined metals or other needed minerals. Then his civilisation declined amidst the despoliation of his own creation or he moved to new land. There have been from ten to thirty different civilisations that have followed, this road to ruin (the number depending on who classifies the civilisations).'

The 'ecological problem', it seems, is not as new as it is frequently made out to be. Yet there are two decisive differences: the earth is now much more densely populated than it was in earlier times and there are, generally speaking, no new lands to move to; and the rate of change has enormously accelerated, particularly during the last quarter of a century.

All the same, it is still the dominant belief today that, whatever may have happened with earlier civilisations, our own modem, western civilisation has emancipated itself from dependence upon nature. A representative voice' is that of Eugene Rabinowitch. editor-in-chief of the
Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists.

The only animals.' he says (in The Times of 29 April 1972), 'whose disappearance may threaten the biological viability of man on earth are the bacteria normally inhabiting our bodies. For the rest there is no convincing proof that mankind could not survive even as the only animal species on earth! If economical ways could be developed for synthesising food from inorganic raw materials - which is likely to happen sooner or later - man may even be able to become independent of plants, on which he now depends as sources of his food..., 'I personally - and, I suspect, a vast majority of mankind - would shudder at the idea (of a habitat without animals and plants). But millions of inhabitants of "city jungles" of New York, Chicago, London or Tokyo have grown up and spent their whole lives in a practically "azoic" habitat (leaving out rats, mice, cockroaches and other such obnoxious species) and have survived.'

Eugene Rabinowitch obviously considers the above a 'rationally justifiable'

statement. He deplores that 'many rationally unjustifiable' things have been written in recent years - some by very reputable scientists - about the sacredness of natural ecological systems, their inherent stability and the danger of human interference with them'. What is 'rational' and what is

'sacred'? Is man the master of nature or its child? If it becomes 'economical'

to synthesise food from inorganic materials - 'which is likely to happen sooner or later' - if we become independent of plants, the connection between topsoil and civilisation will be broken. Or will it? These questions suggest that 'The Proper Use of Land' poses, not a technical nor an economic, but primarily a metaphysical problem. The problem obviously belongs to a higher level of rational thinking than that represented by the last two quotations.

There are always some things which we do for their own sakes, and there are other things which we do for some other purpose. One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-to-ends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and agreement about this. Is the land merely a means of production or is it something more, something that is an end in itself? And when I say 'land', I include the creatures upon it.

Anything we do just for the sake of doing it does not lend itself to utilitarian calculation. For instance, most of us try to keep ourselves reasonably clean. Why? Simply for hygienic reasons? No, the hygienic aspect is secondary; we recognise cleanliness as a value in itself. We do not calculate its value; the economic calculus simply does not come in. It could be argued that to wash is uneconomic: it costs time and money and produces nothing - except cleanliness. There are many activities which are totally uneconomic, but they are carried on for their own sakes. The economists have an easy way of dealing with them: they divide all human activities between

'production' and 'consumption'. Anything we do under the head of

'production' is subject to the economic calculus, and anything we do under the heading of 'consumption' is not. But real life is very refractory to such classifications, because man-as-producer and man-as-consumer is in fact the same man, who is always producing and consuming all the same time. Even a worker in his factory consumes certain 'amenities', commonly referred to as 'working conditions', and when insufficient 'amenities' are provided he cannot - or refuses to - carry on. And even the man who consumes water and soap may be said to be producing cleanliness.

We produce in order to be able to afford certain amenities and comforts as

'consumers'. If, however, somebody demanded these same amenities and comforts while he was engaged in 'production', he would be told that this would be uneconomic, that it would be inefficient, and that society could not afford such inefficiency. In other words, everything depends on whether it is done by man-as-producer or by man-as-consumer. If man-as- producer travels first-class or uses a luxurious car, this is called a waste of money: but if the same man in his other incarnation of man-as-consumer does the same, this is called a sign of a high standard of life.

Nowhere is this dichotomy more noticeable than in connection with the use of the land. The farmer is considered simply as a producer who must cut his costs and raise his efficiency by every possible device, even if he thereby destroys - for man-as-consumer - the health of the soil and beauty of the landscape, and even if the end effect is the depopulation of the land and the overcrowding of cities. There are large-scale farmers, horticulturists, food manufacturers and fruit growers today who would never think of consuming any of their own products. 'luckily, they say, 'we have enough money to be able to afford to buy products which have been organically grown, without the use of poisons.' When-they are asked why they themselves do not adhere to organic methods and avoid the use of poisonous substances, they reply that they could not afford to do so. What man-as-producer can afford is one thing; what man-as-consumer can afford is quite another thing. But since the two are the same man, the question of what man - or society - can really afford gives rise to endless confusion.

There is no escape from this confusion as long as the land and the creatures upon it are looked upon as nothing but 'factors of production'. They are, of course, factors of production, that is to say, means-to-ends, but this is their secondary, not their primary, nature. Before everything else, they are ends-in-themselves; they are meta-economic, and it is therefore rationally justifiable to say, as a statement of fact, that they are in a certain sense sacred. Man has not made them, and it is irrational for him to treat things that he has not made and cannot make and cannot recreate once he has spoilt them, in the same manner and spirit as he is entitled to treat things of his own making.

The higher animals have an economic value because of their utility; but they have a meta-economic value in themselves. If I have a car, a man-made thing, I might quite legitimately argue that the best way to use it is never to bother about maintenance and simply run it to ruin. I may indeed have calculated that this is the most economical method of use. If the calculation is correct, nobody can criticise me for acting accordingly, for there is nothing sacred about a man-made thing like a car. But if I have an animal -

be it only a calf or a hen - a living, sensitive creature, am I allowed to treat it as nothing but a utility? Am I allowed to run it to ruin?

It is no use trying to answer such questions scientifically. They are metaphysical, not scientific, questions. It is a metaphysical error, likely to produce the gravest practical consequences, to equate 'car' and 'animal' on account of their utility, while failing to recognize the most fundamental difference between them, that of 'level of being'. An irreligious age looks with amused contempt upon the hallowed statements by which religion helped our for- bears to appreciate metaphysical truths. 'And the Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden' - not to be idle, but 'to dress it and keep it'. 'And he also gave man dominion over the fish in the sea and the fowl in the air, and over every living being that moves upon the earth.' When he had made 'the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind', he saw that it was

'good'. But when he saw everything he had made, the entire biosphere, as we say today, 'behold, it was very good'. Man, the highest of his creatures, was given 'dominion', not the right to tyrannise, to ruin and exterminate. It is no use talking about the dignity of man without accepting that noblesse oblige.

For man to put himself into a wrongful relationship with animals, and particularly those long domesticated by him, has always, in all traditions, been considered a horrible and infinitely dangerous thing to do. There have been no sages or holy men in our or in anybody else's history who were cruel to animals or who looked upon them as nothing but utilities, and innumerable are the legends and stories which link sanctity as well as happiness with a loving kindness towards lower creation.

It is interesting to note that modem man is being told, in the name of science, that he is really nothing but a naked ape or even an accidental collocation of atoms. 'Now we can define man', says Professor Joshua Lederberg. 'Genotypically at least, he is six feet of a particular molecular sequence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous atoms.'2

As modern man thinks so 'humbly' of himself, he thinks even more 'humbly'

of the animals which serve his needs: and treats them as if they were machines. Other, less sophisticated - or is it less depraved? - people take a different attitude. As H. Fielding Hall reported from Burma: 'To him (the Burmese) men are men, and animals are animals, and men are far the higher.