Stranded Ethics
"
The ethics of the past
are not just passé, but counterproductive. Anyone clinging to them will
eventually be regarded as a fool, a fossil and a social pariah."
Robert Jay Lifton, author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, wrote an op-ed for The Sunday New York Times called The Climate Swerve, pointing out the sudden shift in awareness towards the existential
threat we face from our careless destruction of the atmospheric commons.
In his earlier work on Hiroshima, Lifton observed that such
a shift occurred some years after the bombing, when the full extent of its
horrors became more widely known. Before then, it was, while unfortunate,
morally okay under the rules of war to blow up or incinerate civilian
populations, as the allies had been doing beginning with the firebombing of
Dresden and then all over Japan. The Bomb's victims' shadows, etched in
pavement, and the torments of the hibakusha did what Picasso's Guernica and
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five had
failed to do. It transformed mass civilian incinerations into something that
was morally reprehensible, auguring the Cold War.
Of course, just because it is now universally considered
morally reprehensible does not stop rogue states from mass-slaughtering
civilians with radioactive weapons in places like Falujah, Fukushima, Gaza or
Doniesk but nonetheless the public is now outraged when it learns of these
crimes, and it wasn't as much before. Governments are forced to go to lengths
to keep these atrocities secret and to obscure the truth when it is hinted at.
Lifton wrote:
"With both nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and we are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren."
There is something more important in Lifton's essay than the
"swerve" that the author is trying so hard to sell as a meme. Almost as
a throwaway he uses a phrase that has a much deeper resonance. He calls the
ways people regard moral crimes before the swerve "stranded ethics."
Stranded ethics: ethics that governed our collective
decisions but have now lost their relevance.
Yes. We need to leave behind the stranded ethics of the 20th
century the same way we need to leave in the ground the stranded capital assets
of the fossil fuel companies and countries.
Our stranded ethics were based on growth at all costs — the
prime directive of capitalism — and damn the environment, damn social justice
and fair share, damn the future consequences. What counts, according to
obsolete dicta from an industrial age, are share values, net worth, market
share, competitiveness, national pride, ethnic pride, war footing and profits über alles.
In the stranded ethics of the past, it is more important to
have routine unemployment to support all-volunteer armies than to pay a minimum
wage adequate to support a family; it is more important to return value to
shareholders than to protect the air and waters surrounding a manufacturing
facility; and it is more important to give corporations civil rights than to
regulate influence on the regulatory process, such as by making huge donations
to sway an election.
Lifton says, "We may well speak of those shareholder-dominated principles
as … better left buried but at present … all too active above ground."
"It is a bit like the old Jack Benny joke, in which an armed robber offers a choice, 'Your money or your life!' And Benny responds, 'I'm thinking it over.'"
To truly inhabit the 21st century we will all
share a common epiphany: that we have reached the Age of Limits and the Era of
Consequences. We are at or soon approaching that inflection point. Here, now. From
that shift it will follow as inexorably as night follows day that the ethics of
the past are not just passé, but counterproductive. Anyone clinging to them will
be regarded as a fool, a fossil and a social pariah.
So for instance, if you encounter someone who still thinks
nuclear power is a good idea, they are still clinging to stranded ethics. If
you encounter someone at a wedding telling the bride and groom it would be good
to have more than two children, they have stranded ethics. You can be a little
more compassionate towards them, especially if they are elderly, because you
can appreciate what they are going through, having to change their whole
approach to the world and still live with the horrible decisions they made
earlier in their lives.
Someone who thinks it is okay to have that third kid, to
donate money to a biotech wing at a university, to not compost their kitchen
scraps, or to throw away lots of plastic like they didn't know where it is
going — has stranded ethics. Eventually peer pressure will catch up with
them.
Fishermen who use purse seine nets have stranded ethics. Japanese
"whale researchers" have stranded ethics. Rhino horn cocktail
consumers have stranded ethics. Very soon regulations and public opprobrium will
catch up to them.
Homeowners who lease their back yards to frackers have
stranded ethics. Poisoned wells and defaulted rent checks will catch up to
them. People who work at car dealerships that only sell urban land cruisers
have stranded ethics. The public will simply have stopped buying those
behemoths.
Keeping 73 prisoners who have been exonerated of any crime
imprisoned for years without trial or right of counsel after being found
innocent by judicial review, for years,
and then subjecting them to daily torture by shoving oversized and unsanitary
plastic tubes down their noses when they protest, even on the day you admit,
"We tortured some folks," thinking you were referring to a dozen
years earlier and some other administration, not to the hundreds of people you
tortured repeatedly that very same day
for speaking up in protest, is stranded ethics.
Crimes such as these have well-established mechanisms of
justice, that, while painfully slow, have no statute of limitations and apply
as equally to Heads of State as to their minions. Toadies who coddle such war
criminals as "the least worst alternative" have stranded ethics.
The late Zenmaster, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, in Zen Mind Beginners Mind said it is
important to understand that Zen is nothing special. Any roshi will say the
same. There is no attainment. Just sit. Nothing special.
As the ethics of the 20th century become
stranded, the ethics of permaculture will become invisible. Permaculture will
become the new normal. It will simply be taken for granted.
Permaculture is nothing special. Acting ethically towards
future generations is nothing special. Living today as if there really is going
to be a tomorrow is not a fringe activity. Just do it. Already, everyone else is
starting to, too.
A version of these
remarks was extemporaneously delivered at the opening plenary of the 2014 North
American Permaculture Convergence on August 31, 2014. The full plenary can be
viewed at http://youtu.be/r1vImekf4XI
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