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ecocentrism versus technocentrism
Aug. 5th, 2009 11:35 pmI had been meaning to post something about this for a while, but the results of "belief poll #2" are a call for me to post something about it now.
This time the results were all about what I would have expected except for one question. The question about whether there is value in preserving the earth's ecosystem, beyond the utility derived from it by the animals inhabiting it. This seemed like a no-brainer to me. I figured anyone who had roughly the same worldview as me would pick 0, and most people would be in the 0-2 range, with a few people disagreeing and putting something middle or high. Boy was I wrong! Of course, that's the reason I do these quizzes, to find surprises and give me more insight into who believes what and why.
Not only did the few people who I figured would pick a high score pick one, but the overall distribution was much more towards the 10 side than the 0 side. It could be that people interpreted this question differently than I intended... for instance, maybe as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
inferno0069 suggests, other people have a narrower definition of utility than I. But even in that case I find it surprising that people would pick what they did.
I chose this question (and the one leading up to it replacing animals with just humans) to test for anyone partial to a philosophy I was reading about on the web recently, called Deep Ecology, or more generally Ecocentrism.
http://www.deepecology.org/movement.htm
http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/EarthManifesto.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocentrism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocentrism
I started reading up on this soon after I finished reading up on the National Socialist movement, as a continuation of my attempt to understand bizarre foreign ideas that clashed with my own. Reading up on Deep Ecology was interesting but disturbing. The main feeling I had was "oh god, so the people I thought were just straw men that conservatives like Rush Limbaugh invented to discredit environmentalism actually DO exist!" It looked (and still looks) to me like there are essentially two kinds of environmentalist... the good kind, and the bad kind.
I've never cared much about the environment and always had an instinctual dislike for things like nature, the outdoors, and animals... possibly coming from bad experiences with all of them as a kid. Not only was I allergic to animals, grass, and just about everything you can find outdoors, but I would get annoyed at my parents when they would try to pull me away from my computer and make me "go outside and play". As I grew up, I became less polarized and I began to appreciate some things about the outdoors. I enjoy a good hike or a campfire, and find the redwoods around here beautiful. But learning and growing have always been the two things I've cared about most, and it has always seemed to me that there is just not much interesting to be learned from nature, whereas there is a whole lot to be learned from technology. I enjoy a good hike now and then to take my mind off of things, but if I had to spend all the time out in nature I would probably shoot myself. I think this tendency towards technocentrism and against ecocentrism was one of the many things that attracted me so strongly to Objectivism in college and gave me a deep feeling of kindredness with Ayn Rand. Skyscrapers have always been more impressive, magestic, and beautiful to me than mountains. One is a brilliant feat of engineering and a wonder to behold, while the other is just a random pile of dirt that happened to land there. I'm not saying I don't think mountains are beautiful, I just don't think they are anywhere near as beautiful or impressive as skyscrapers, airplanes, computers, smartphones, etc. I guess they are also different kinds of beauty... the kind of beauty that nature is is just not all that exciting or interesting, it's a kind of primitive banal visceral beauty whereas technology represents a more cultured sophisticated enlightened beauty.
Sadly, I think that my natural distaste for nature made me ignore the entire environmental movement for too long. Like my father, I suspected that things like global warming were just scare tactics for people who wanted an excuse to promote the expansion of the powers of government across the globe. Only recently have I come too terms with the fact that much of the environmental movement makes a lot more sense than I'd imagined growing up. A lot of it is based on good common sense and solid scientific facts. If we continue to put too much CO_2 in the air, or continue to extinct species at the rate we're doing, we may run into big problems in future generations and our grandkids may have to spend a lot of time, effort, and money fixing things that could have been avoided by us for less effort. But despite realizing this, it seems like there still is a faction of environmentalists that I just don't get.
I feel like one's response to a question like this really betrays a lot about one's values. This seems like an issue that is so deeply embedded in my basic understanding of what life is about that it's hard for me to see Deep Ecology as anything but a joke, or a group of people who give a bad name to environmentalism. To me, the whole *point* of the earth is that it's a resource for us to *do* something with. If we're not playing with, experimenting with, and creating something better out of our environment, if we're just taking it and accepting the way it came out of the box, then I think we as a species are failing on a really basic moral level. We're not growing, we're just stagnating. In some sense, I really think it is our duty to further the acceleration of technology, to transform our environment and ourselves from dust into magic, and to build a better reality for the future. Indeed, I think if you took that away from the human species, it would take away one of the most basic points of humanity there is... arguably, there would be nothing left for us to aim for in life at all.
The problem with ecocentrism is that it places life on too equal a footing, when life is highly diverse and highly unequal. It ignores the fact that humans are the furthest along of the animals. We are not the only ones to use technology, but we are the first to have mastered it enough to transform our environment so completely and profoundly into something better. And we will do everything in our power to continue that transformation, until we design a successor species who can transform not only its environment but also its own internal world, continuously self-modifying and self-improving. The long since exponential curve of accelerating change will become superexponential, as additional levels of positive feedback kick in. Our obscure origins on the 3rd rock from an obscure ball of fire about midway out on the spiral arms of the Milky way will cease to matter at all. If it is preserved, the only value could be historical, and even then there are billions of other near identical ones that would serve as an educational tool just as well. As would a virtual simulation.
I think I take issue with the whole idea of "preserving and sustaining". As an individual, I hope that I never stop trying for long enough that I begin to stagnate and become complacent with who I currently am, sustaining in a deflating hold pattern forever after. I hope that I am always reaching for something better. But why should I hold humanity to any less standards than I hold myself to? It seems that is what the ecocentrists would like me to do.
On top of these issues, a major problem I have with them is that the Deep Ecologists believe there is intrinsic value in the earth's ecosystem. While I don't like the idea of "intrinsic value" period, if you twist my arm I will agree that it's useful to think of other sentient beings as having intrinsic value, rather than just being tools that are part of the natural resources in my environment. But of the non-human animals, very few of them could qualify as sentient, and in the plant kingdom none of them are in the slightest. So these things cannot have intrinsic value like humans (or some higher level mammals) do. They only have extrinsic value. They are a means, never an end. The Deep Ecologists simply flat out deny this--at the most fundamental level, they are confused. Not only that, but they threaten the entire environmental movement by giving anti-environmentalists something to poke fun of. The good environmentalists seek to keep people from changing the environment in ways that could be potentially harmful to future generations of humans. The bad ones sometimes literally hug trees, because they are convinced they have intrinsic value... and possibly even are under the delusion that trees are conscious.
So while I tend to get overly dramatic when I write about this stuff... I'm curious if anyone has a defense as to why they didn't pick 0 for the question about preserving the earth. Was it just that you interpreted "utility" in a pretty narrow sense, or do you in some ways actually buy into this Deep Ecology stuff?
This time the results were all about what I would have expected except for one question. The question about whether there is value in preserving the earth's ecosystem, beyond the utility derived from it by the animals inhabiting it. This seemed like a no-brainer to me. I figured anyone who had roughly the same worldview as me would pick 0, and most people would be in the 0-2 range, with a few people disagreeing and putting something middle or high. Boy was I wrong! Of course, that's the reason I do these quizzes, to find surprises and give me more insight into who believes what and why.
Not only did the few people who I figured would pick a high score pick one, but the overall distribution was much more towards the 10 side than the 0 side. It could be that people interpreted this question differently than I intended... for instance, maybe as
inferno0069 suggests, other people have a narrower definition of utility than I. But even in that case I find it surprising that people would pick what they did.I chose this question (and the one leading up to it replacing animals with just humans) to test for anyone partial to a philosophy I was reading about on the web recently, called Deep Ecology, or more generally Ecocentrism.
http://www.deepecology.org/movement.htm
http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/EarthManifesto.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocentrism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocentrism
I started reading up on this soon after I finished reading up on the National Socialist movement, as a continuation of my attempt to understand bizarre foreign ideas that clashed with my own. Reading up on Deep Ecology was interesting but disturbing. The main feeling I had was "oh god, so the people I thought were just straw men that conservatives like Rush Limbaugh invented to discredit environmentalism actually DO exist!" It looked (and still looks) to me like there are essentially two kinds of environmentalist... the good kind, and the bad kind.
I've never cared much about the environment and always had an instinctual dislike for things like nature, the outdoors, and animals... possibly coming from bad experiences with all of them as a kid. Not only was I allergic to animals, grass, and just about everything you can find outdoors, but I would get annoyed at my parents when they would try to pull me away from my computer and make me "go outside and play". As I grew up, I became less polarized and I began to appreciate some things about the outdoors. I enjoy a good hike or a campfire, and find the redwoods around here beautiful. But learning and growing have always been the two things I've cared about most, and it has always seemed to me that there is just not much interesting to be learned from nature, whereas there is a whole lot to be learned from technology. I enjoy a good hike now and then to take my mind off of things, but if I had to spend all the time out in nature I would probably shoot myself. I think this tendency towards technocentrism and against ecocentrism was one of the many things that attracted me so strongly to Objectivism in college and gave me a deep feeling of kindredness with Ayn Rand. Skyscrapers have always been more impressive, magestic, and beautiful to me than mountains. One is a brilliant feat of engineering and a wonder to behold, while the other is just a random pile of dirt that happened to land there. I'm not saying I don't think mountains are beautiful, I just don't think they are anywhere near as beautiful or impressive as skyscrapers, airplanes, computers, smartphones, etc. I guess they are also different kinds of beauty... the kind of beauty that nature is is just not all that exciting or interesting, it's a kind of primitive banal visceral beauty whereas technology represents a more cultured sophisticated enlightened beauty.
Sadly, I think that my natural distaste for nature made me ignore the entire environmental movement for too long. Like my father, I suspected that things like global warming were just scare tactics for people who wanted an excuse to promote the expansion of the powers of government across the globe. Only recently have I come too terms with the fact that much of the environmental movement makes a lot more sense than I'd imagined growing up. A lot of it is based on good common sense and solid scientific facts. If we continue to put too much CO_2 in the air, or continue to extinct species at the rate we're doing, we may run into big problems in future generations and our grandkids may have to spend a lot of time, effort, and money fixing things that could have been avoided by us for less effort. But despite realizing this, it seems like there still is a faction of environmentalists that I just don't get.
I feel like one's response to a question like this really betrays a lot about one's values. This seems like an issue that is so deeply embedded in my basic understanding of what life is about that it's hard for me to see Deep Ecology as anything but a joke, or a group of people who give a bad name to environmentalism. To me, the whole *point* of the earth is that it's a resource for us to *do* something with. If we're not playing with, experimenting with, and creating something better out of our environment, if we're just taking it and accepting the way it came out of the box, then I think we as a species are failing on a really basic moral level. We're not growing, we're just stagnating. In some sense, I really think it is our duty to further the acceleration of technology, to transform our environment and ourselves from dust into magic, and to build a better reality for the future. Indeed, I think if you took that away from the human species, it would take away one of the most basic points of humanity there is... arguably, there would be nothing left for us to aim for in life at all.
The problem with ecocentrism is that it places life on too equal a footing, when life is highly diverse and highly unequal. It ignores the fact that humans are the furthest along of the animals. We are not the only ones to use technology, but we are the first to have mastered it enough to transform our environment so completely and profoundly into something better. And we will do everything in our power to continue that transformation, until we design a successor species who can transform not only its environment but also its own internal world, continuously self-modifying and self-improving. The long since exponential curve of accelerating change will become superexponential, as additional levels of positive feedback kick in. Our obscure origins on the 3rd rock from an obscure ball of fire about midway out on the spiral arms of the Milky way will cease to matter at all. If it is preserved, the only value could be historical, and even then there are billions of other near identical ones that would serve as an educational tool just as well. As would a virtual simulation.
I think I take issue with the whole idea of "preserving and sustaining". As an individual, I hope that I never stop trying for long enough that I begin to stagnate and become complacent with who I currently am, sustaining in a deflating hold pattern forever after. I hope that I am always reaching for something better. But why should I hold humanity to any less standards than I hold myself to? It seems that is what the ecocentrists would like me to do.
On top of these issues, a major problem I have with them is that the Deep Ecologists believe there is intrinsic value in the earth's ecosystem. While I don't like the idea of "intrinsic value" period, if you twist my arm I will agree that it's useful to think of other sentient beings as having intrinsic value, rather than just being tools that are part of the natural resources in my environment. But of the non-human animals, very few of them could qualify as sentient, and in the plant kingdom none of them are in the slightest. So these things cannot have intrinsic value like humans (or some higher level mammals) do. They only have extrinsic value. They are a means, never an end. The Deep Ecologists simply flat out deny this--at the most fundamental level, they are confused. Not only that, but they threaten the entire environmental movement by giving anti-environmentalists something to poke fun of. The good environmentalists seek to keep people from changing the environment in ways that could be potentially harmful to future generations of humans. The bad ones sometimes literally hug trees, because they are convinced they have intrinsic value... and possibly even are under the delusion that trees are conscious.
So while I tend to get overly dramatic when I write about this stuff... I'm curious if anyone has a defense as to why they didn't pick 0 for the question about preserving the earth. Was it just that you interpreted "utility" in a pretty narrow sense, or do you in some ways actually buy into this Deep Ecology stuff?
