Well on the Way

13/06/2024

07/03/2024

Natural Justice, Natural Law

‘Natural Justice’ is a term with mixed meanings today. As a legal term, it is a rule against bias, so that everybody ideally has a fair hearing before the law, which is disinterested. (Yes, I know that many people use ‘disinterested’ now to mean uninterested; but, being pedantic, I use it correctly to mean impartial.)

‘Natural Justice’ as often used in the context of the Climate Crisis, however, is more akin to Natural Law, an idea that goes back to Aristotle and beyond, a notion that is related to Human Rights. Natural Law is a moral imperative that is universal and not related to any particular legal code. It implies –
1. In relation to the Natural World, that we have a responsibility to all life on Earth, all of which has an equal right to life and the means necessary to sustain it. This is a fundamental tenet of the philosophy of Deep Ecology; followed through it has deep implications. A fundamental message of Social Ecology is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.
2. Historically, those of us in the Global North, whose industrialised (in the past) and consumer (in the present) societies are mainly responsible for historical and present greenhouse gas emissions, have a responsibility to those in the Global South who are bearing the brunt of climate change. (The same could be said of addressing inequalities within our country, as well as between us and other countries.) Polluters should pay for the consequences of past and present colonialism.
3. Intergenerationally, we have a responsibility to future generations, which in the confected busy-ness and distractions of modern life we … tend to forget. To quote David Wiles: ‘Today’s culture is preoccupied, more than most, by the pursuit of an indivisible now, detached from past and future time’.

I shall write again of how ‘people of today relate to time in a way that is surely unique in our history… inherently destructive of the quality and value of our lives, and of the living body of Earth’ (Joanna Macy and Moly Young Brown).

An article on the Ethics of climate change can be found here: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/ethics-and-global-climate-change-84226631/.

Ethically, we have not so much a harmony of interests here, more an identity of interests, because all life shares mutual dependence on the same life-support systems. To talk of non-human nature makes as much sense ultimately as discussing non-hippopotamus nature, or non-grass snake nature or non-grass nature. Nature, in systems terms, is one and indivisible (Oh! Like God!). Everything is connected to everything else. This we must learn.

03/11/2023

A question was posed in a recent discussion that completely floored me: ‘What is the connection between Nature and spirituality?’ Well, I was flummoxed, stumped for an answer, because to me the connection is so glaringly apparent. Where to start?

Before the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, Nature was held to be imbued with soul – all of it, not just living creatures. The Ancient Wisdom considers that everything has soul: the planet, the solar system and the galaxy, onwards and upwards. Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution ‘investigates how a historic shift away from seeing Earth as a living organism, and towards seeing it as a machine, was consequently used to justify the domination of both nature and women’ (thank you Wikipedia).

Descartes (1596-1650) doubled down on Aristotle’s dualism, the thesis that mind and body are really distinct, the philosophical fault-line running through Western thought. Body is machine. ‘Nature’ is inanimate, so, in the infamous phrase attributed to Francis Bacon (1561-1626) could be ‘“tortured” or “put on the rack” in order to reveal her secrets’ by modern science and technology.

There have always been countervailing voices, of course. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote: ‘Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads’. Perhaps the Latin Prima facie, literally ‘at first sight’, or ‘at first face’, applies here, because it is this childlike ‘soft fascination’ that helps us to see, as the composer Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) has it, that ‘nature is the clothing of God’. The garment of God. This language might put off some people who are spiritual without needing a notion of God. Nonetheless…

It is our job to reanimate our world, our home, the anima mundi that connects all being and all beings, simply by noticing. Going back to the Gospels – the language still comes to mind on occasions like this, sorry - Mark chapter 8 verse 18 says: ’Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?’ This revitalising, rekindling, is in itself healing, an act of making more whole, for both us and our world, both sorely troubled, an act of restoration, replenishment and repair.