The Evil of Nature
06/04/08 15:40
I wrote this piece as a letter to some unknown journal almost a year ago after reading Susan Nieman's great book of ethical philosophy on the nature of evil and its influence on modern consciousness. I haven't decided if I'll send it into a journal yet -- with additional revisions, as I think it's a bit pompous at the moment -- but I offer it here for what it's worth.
Given biologists’ history of attacks by creationists over the basis of evolution, biologists are probably more sensitized than most scientists over the ensuring that our work is value-neutral and that we adhere to the language of science. Our cautious rhetoric can hold sway on conservation issues that we feel passionately emotive about, even in private discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a biologist use the term “evil,” for instance. Evil is a word we associate with polemicist attacks on us, yet as conservation scientists we should be aware that the nature of evil is changing in the public, perhaps even the global public, and that we may need to alter our usage and sensibilities as well.
In the past two or three centuries, there have been two or three “great” Evils seen by the developed nations. The twentieth century’s most widely viewed Evil was clearly the Holocaust of Jews and other groups in Europe, an evil somehow heightened by the ordinary quality of many of the individuals like Adolf Eichmann who carried out these acts with devoted efficiency. Other mass killings in the past century have strong echoes of Eichmann’s “banality,” such as the genocides of Armenians in Turkey early in the century, the mass deaths of citizens and numerous minorities in the Soviet state under Lenin and Stalin, the cultural revolution of China, the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s, and the savage inter-ethnic and inter-religious wars of the 1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda, and the ongoing violence in eastern Congo and Sudan. There are many other events that could be added to this short list (see chapter 1 of Ferguson, The War of the World), but the lesson is clear: the twentieth century has moved the evil of humans against humans into our consciousness, with ample reinforcement. We know and accept today that the Holocaust was not an exception. We know there will be other holocausts, other genocides.
Before the twentieth century, however, another great shift in Euro-American thought occurred in how we saw evil. Susan Neimann has described how the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck suddenly, killing thousands who took shelter in the great cathedral of the city. “Nature” before this event was widely seen among Europeans as an extension of the goodness of God and the “natural ordering” of the universe. After Lisbon, our worldview shifted. We knew that Nature does not concern herself with our welfare, and that Nature’s havoc can wreak evil.
These Evils are very primate-centered and have tended to follow particular crisis-events, altering consciousness and perception rapidly. Regardless of whether we should consider the event September 11, 2001, as an Evil, the twenty-first century’s attacks are a perfect example of a crisis-event that reconfigured the perception of the relationship between developed-developing and western and Moslem-majority nations.
My unscientific intuition is that most biologists — at least, those of us who work in conservation-relevant aspects such as ecology and evolution — would add another distinct Evil: humans regularly and unthinkingly commit terrible acts against Nature. While any conservation practitioner reading this journal can immediately list a variety of examples of our Evil, as scientists we do avoid this term, perhaps even in thought. It makes us uncomfortable, giving pause. Our Evil is private.
However, I fear that another great Evil is about to alter the consciousness of many in the world, particularly in the developed and rapidly industrializing worlds: climate change.
From a conservation perspective, the awareness this Evil brings will be both dangerous and promising. Ideally, a public aware of the risks and realizations of climate change will act with judgment and a concerned firmness to reduce carbon emissions and provide adequate funding for humans and ecosystems to adapt to the emerging new climate order. However, the instantaneous acceleration from ignorance to hyperawareness can just as easily emerge as despair and anger — as a sense that too much has already been changed, that no one now alive will see the benefits of our austerity, and that no reform now can alter a dangerous endgame. Like one of Dostoyeosky’s Dmitry Karamazov, we should drink until dawn and then find a loaded pistol.
Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth showed a fascinating awareness of the twofold nature that knowledge of climate change brings with it, especially the relatively sudden jump that film was attempting to preemptively engineer. Like Gore, those of us who know about climate change can guess at how economies, cultures, and ecosystems are likely to alter; we have eaten this apple, cyanic seeds and all, and we have made peace with working for less-severe climates we are unlikely to see appear. From Evil, we find Hope, even if that hope is distant.
Surely, a crisis-event like Lisbon’s earthquake or the shaky newsreels from Bergen-Belsen in 1945 is coming. Indeed, Katrina and Rita came close to becoming vehicles to a new worldview in 2005 for many in the United States and Canada. But other candidates will appear within a few years — a massive ice separation in Antarctica or Greenland, a super-cyclone or –hurricane, thousands dying at high latitude from record heat, a biblical flood-event that costs us another great city. This crisis will fuel a burning sense that Nature doesn’t simply ignore humans. Millions may come to “know” that Nature dislikes us and has become an antagonist. We may see an awareness that Nature has become Evil, uncontrolled and angry.
As scientists, we must be prepared for the despair of our fellow global citizens. We must learn to speak the language of Evil now and be ready to turn it into a language of Hope. Clearly, the most effective approach will be to sustain the integration of climate change into all areas of national and international policy. But we must also plan for the coming crisis-event. Nonscientists (and particularly anti-scientists) will be at hand and ready to blame the coming crises on our “sins,” but we must be equally ready to demonstrate causality and to show that our greatest service is in our stewardship for the future.
In the past two or three centuries, there have been two or three “great” Evils seen by the developed nations. The twentieth century’s most widely viewed Evil was clearly the Holocaust of Jews and other groups in Europe, an evil somehow heightened by the ordinary quality of many of the individuals like Adolf Eichmann who carried out these acts with devoted efficiency. Other mass killings in the past century have strong echoes of Eichmann’s “banality,” such as the genocides of Armenians in Turkey early in the century, the mass deaths of citizens and numerous minorities in the Soviet state under Lenin and Stalin, the cultural revolution of China, the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s, and the savage inter-ethnic and inter-religious wars of the 1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda, and the ongoing violence in eastern Congo and Sudan. There are many other events that could be added to this short list (see chapter 1 of Ferguson, The War of the World), but the lesson is clear: the twentieth century has moved the evil of humans against humans into our consciousness, with ample reinforcement. We know and accept today that the Holocaust was not an exception. We know there will be other holocausts, other genocides.
Before the twentieth century, however, another great shift in Euro-American thought occurred in how we saw evil. Susan Neimann has described how the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck suddenly, killing thousands who took shelter in the great cathedral of the city. “Nature” before this event was widely seen among Europeans as an extension of the goodness of God and the “natural ordering” of the universe. After Lisbon, our worldview shifted. We knew that Nature does not concern herself with our welfare, and that Nature’s havoc can wreak evil.
These Evils are very primate-centered and have tended to follow particular crisis-events, altering consciousness and perception rapidly. Regardless of whether we should consider the event September 11, 2001, as an Evil, the twenty-first century’s attacks are a perfect example of a crisis-event that reconfigured the perception of the relationship between developed-developing and western and Moslem-majority nations.
My unscientific intuition is that most biologists — at least, those of us who work in conservation-relevant aspects such as ecology and evolution — would add another distinct Evil: humans regularly and unthinkingly commit terrible acts against Nature. While any conservation practitioner reading this journal can immediately list a variety of examples of our Evil, as scientists we do avoid this term, perhaps even in thought. It makes us uncomfortable, giving pause. Our Evil is private.
However, I fear that another great Evil is about to alter the consciousness of many in the world, particularly in the developed and rapidly industrializing worlds: climate change.
From a conservation perspective, the awareness this Evil brings will be both dangerous and promising. Ideally, a public aware of the risks and realizations of climate change will act with judgment and a concerned firmness to reduce carbon emissions and provide adequate funding for humans and ecosystems to adapt to the emerging new climate order. However, the instantaneous acceleration from ignorance to hyperawareness can just as easily emerge as despair and anger — as a sense that too much has already been changed, that no one now alive will see the benefits of our austerity, and that no reform now can alter a dangerous endgame. Like one of Dostoyeosky’s Dmitry Karamazov, we should drink until dawn and then find a loaded pistol.
Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth showed a fascinating awareness of the twofold nature that knowledge of climate change brings with it, especially the relatively sudden jump that film was attempting to preemptively engineer. Like Gore, those of us who know about climate change can guess at how economies, cultures, and ecosystems are likely to alter; we have eaten this apple, cyanic seeds and all, and we have made peace with working for less-severe climates we are unlikely to see appear. From Evil, we find Hope, even if that hope is distant.
Surely, a crisis-event like Lisbon’s earthquake or the shaky newsreels from Bergen-Belsen in 1945 is coming. Indeed, Katrina and Rita came close to becoming vehicles to a new worldview in 2005 for many in the United States and Canada. But other candidates will appear within a few years — a massive ice separation in Antarctica or Greenland, a super-cyclone or –hurricane, thousands dying at high latitude from record heat, a biblical flood-event that costs us another great city. This crisis will fuel a burning sense that Nature doesn’t simply ignore humans. Millions may come to “know” that Nature dislikes us and has become an antagonist. We may see an awareness that Nature has become Evil, uncontrolled and angry.
As scientists, we must be prepared for the despair of our fellow global citizens. We must learn to speak the language of Evil now and be ready to turn it into a language of Hope. Clearly, the most effective approach will be to sustain the integration of climate change into all areas of national and international policy. But we must also plan for the coming crisis-event. Nonscientists (and particularly anti-scientists) will be at hand and ready to blame the coming crises on our “sins,” but we must be equally ready to demonstrate causality and to show that our greatest service is in our stewardship for the future.
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