A Dangerously Disrupted Metabolism with Nature
When comparing the giving of an account of human nature with that of the ‘natural history’ of any other species, I mentioned that today this could not be done without reference to the threats and hazards that it faces.
This applies just as much to humans as to other species. While in the midst of a pandemic it is tempting to see the threat to our species as coming from nature, especially as a series of devastating diseases have their origins in a viral ‘leap’ between other species and our own. But this is to take the causal chain only so far. The growing weight of evidence points to the conditions that make such leaps possible resulting from the overwhelming colonization of wildlife habitats by human activity. Pandemics can be seen as, along with climate change, biodiversity loss, oceanic pollution and many other worrying processes, symptoms of a profoundly pathological and hazardous new phase in the relations between human societies and (the rest of) nature. Paradoxically, this crisis can be understood as an unforeseen consequence of our evolved capacities to socially coordinate our need-meeting activities and develop the cognitive and practical-technical means to enhance our metabolism with the rest of nature.So, how could our competitive advantage over all other species have been transformed into an existential threat to our own species as well as to them? Sayer’s philosophical anthropology offers the starting point for an answer to this question, recognizing humans as both social and historical beings. The emergent powers inherent in our flexible sociality are the basis for the intergenerational transfer of cultural and technical innovations, and, with that, long-run tendencies to accumulate new capacities for coordination and transformation not only of our relations to each other but also to the rest of nature (or, perhaps, transformation of our relations to nature as a necessary corollary of our changed relations to one another).
Our historical success was an enhanced capacity to draw upon nature and to transform its products into means for our subsistence and well-being. From that condition there emerged a qualitatively different sort of relation to the rest of nature. This is one in which whole tracts of external nature are systematically transformed so as to yield more means for specifically human subsistence than they would if left unaltered. The emergence of horticulture, agriculture and the domestication of animals were early phases in that transition, and mark the beginnings of a distinct human socio-ecological formation. They mark the beginnings, too, of a long-term historical process of a human socio-economic and technical project of mastery of the forces of nature. The scale, scope and dynamics of this have now reached the point of so disrupting the complex web of interdependencies upon which our metabolism with nature depends that human extinction is now clearly foreseeable.At the same time, our evolutionary history has endowed us with capacities for coordinating and transforming our relation to the rest of nature. It has also endowed us, as Sayer argues, with the capacities to form commitments to and deep affective ties with one another as well as with other species and shared physical spaces. There is nothing inevitable about the destructive and self-destructive dynamics of currently prevailing economic, social and political systems. This, of course, poses deep questions about what might enable the emergence of new relations to each other and to nature that might offset these destructive tendencies - what social forces might bring about change, and what sort of alternative, socially just and nature-sustaining society could be envisaged? These questions are legitimate, and, it seems to me, overwhelmingly important, topics for social scientific research as well as social movement and political activity. Whilst there is a continuity here with the critical realist view of critical social science as intimately connected to an emancipatory project, the challenge posed by the growing crisis in our relation to nature modifies it in important respects: human well-being depends not only on emancipation from oppressive and stultifying forms of human domination but also on grounding the hoped-for emancipated social relations in new practices and recognitions of community with the rest of nature.
So, what do social sciences offer for both the critical and creative dimensions of such an alternative way of social being? A critical review of just a few candidates for these tasks will form the main content of the next chapter.