Consumption and The
Human Good
Thursday is Earth Day. It is a day especially to reflect upon humanity's impact on the world's ecosystems generally, and upon our own individual impact upon our own ecological community. We, too, live within Earth's community of life. Like any creature, we seek our good, the human good. What is the human good that marks our best contribution to Earth, to our home world's community of innocence?
Michael Schuler, minister of First Unitarian Society, gave a good sermon last Sunday on the topic of human population.[1] It seems, he pointed out, that humanity has certainly obeyed at least one commandment of God's, in Genesis
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…" (Genesis 1: 27-29)
But Schuler noted that the human population has not become the apocalyptic problem many in the mid-twentieth century feared it would become. He offered this happy development as a sign of human goodness; human population growth has slowed largely because humans saw the problem and corrected it. Most human population growth has occurred in developing or industrializing countries, such as India or Iran, and these countries, with financial assistance from the West, have found successful means to control population growth. Schuler's point of criticism identified the massive consumption levels of the West as a far greater ecological danger than the population growth of industrializing nations. Whereas the average human consumes 31,000 calories[2] per day, mostly in fossil fuels, Schuler reported that the average American consumes 186,000 calories per day.
Schuler would have us all re-examine our consumption patterns. This advice loses none of its moral urgency by being long reiterated, but I think it does lose some of its persuasiveness. I think the loss of persuasive force lies in what environmentalists often identify as the source of the problem: the American culture of consumption. I offer that the source of our excessive consumption patterns lies in a general human, rather that specifically American, urge to consume. I note that Western-style, consumption-oriented, social and economic systems are quite popular around the world. The advice to reduce consumption I believe will possess greater force when it addresses our biological urge to consume, rather than remain rhetorically tied to American culture.
Like any other animal, we humans evolved in an environment where food and other resources were scarce; our instincts appropriately evolved to make resource acquisition an enjoyable experience. These instincts have not evolved any ability to shut-off within the current environment of plenty - our biology has not caught up with the comparatively rapid evolution of our civilizing work - and so these instincts can cause bad results.
As we humans struggle to act as good citizens of Earth's ecological communities, I suspect that we confront our biology rather than our culture. We experience ourselves, I warrant, as somewhat at cross purposes, conflicted within ourselves. In human experience, is it true that it feels right to eat less and bike to work more and it is true that it feels good to eat more and to drive more. The great religious traditions have warned for mellennia that humans, as they struggle to civilize, will confront an instinctive nature that sometimes works against the civilizing effort.
Christianity, at least in its Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant strains, also well articulates the long established understanding that civilization arises from the authentic exercise of human reason because reason allows humanity to know God, or goodness, and reason allows humanity to become self-aware of its animal drives. Knowing God and knowing our animal drives as desires rather than as compulsions, allows humanity to choose what is good against the urges of our instincts. This is "intelligence" or "reason": to choose what is good.
Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (Romans 12: 2)
But this well-trod path through the best of our Western religious humanist thinking seems to me not able thus far to incorporate the contemporary notion of humanity as simply another member of Earth's various ecological communities. After all, the animal drive to reproduce has ordered these ecological communities. Our own biological drives, which inhibit our effort at civilization, arose from an ecological community, the African Savanna. The great religious traditions seem to ask that we transcend our ecological character to find the human good. How then are we to live as authentic humans and yet remain "citizens and plain members" of Earth's ecology?
I offer - I admit I do not argue - that human understanding of goodness begins with our experience of the beauty of our ecological environment. Humanity must transcend the animal experience of its ecological environment and experience the land anew as an intelligent creature. The rational experience of our ecological environment, I assert, will effect the renewal of our minds. The great religious traditions all understand themselves as the recipients and disseminators of a moment or period of unique divine revelation: the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, or the lives of the avatars of India, or the life of Buddha, or the Angel Gabriel's revelations to Mohammed. To me, it the Earth's ecosystems that initially reveal God, Goodness, Truth and Beauty. I agree with St. Paul that we experience God "in the things that are made." To experience with intelligence the Earth's ecology is to understand Earth's ecology as displaying initial meanings of truth, beauty, and goodness. In the beauty of the Earth we humans first see God's vision and accomplishments.
To experience Earth as a rational creature is also to offer back to the Earth the rational inspirations and the rational creative actions inspired by Earth. As we transcend our animal instincts driven by reproductive ends, we experience all of Earth's life and processes not as means to those reproductive ends, but as individual things contributing to the beauty of Earth's ecology. To see another person, or plant or animal, or some landscape feature, as it contributes to a widespread beauty, rather than how it contributes to one's reproductive success, marks the ascent into civilization, marks the making of the human good. So the human good is "tenderness"; it is to bequeath to the Earth actions disciplined by the intelligent experience of ecological order, actions disciplined by the experience of the full contribution each thing makes to ecological beauty.
As we learn to experience food and other consumption items with intelligence, rather than with instinct, we will change our consumption patterns.