QUANTUM SHIFT IN THE GLOBAL BRAIN

HOW THE NEW SCIENTIFIC REALITY CAN CHANGE US AND OUR WORLD

ERVIN LASZLO

INNER TRADITIONS                    2008

www.InnerTraditions.com

PART IX

 

Chapter 6: A Planetary Ethic

We have arrived at a historic bifurcation, at the critical phase of the global Macroshift. While we now find ourselves on a descending path toward growing social, political, and environmental crises, we could also enter on an ascending path leading to a system of social, economic, and political organization that is peaceful and capable of ensuring sustainability for human communities and the planetary environment.

The choice is open, and making it depends on our values, beliefs, and vision and – as we shall see – on our ethic.

In a globally interacting and interdependent world the dominant ethic cannot be local, regional, or ethnic. It cannot be only a Christian ethic, or Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu ethic – it must bring together all the ethics that guide people’s behavior: what is needed is a planetary ethic.

The principles of an effective planetary ethic need to be translated into codes that define the kind of behavior all people can agree is moral and desirable. Finding such codes is in everybody’s best interest.

In the past, creating and disseminating moral codes was the task and the privilege of the great religions. Examples of such codes are the Ten Commandments of the Jews and Christians and the Buddhist Rules of Right Action. But today the power of religious doctrine–based codes for moral behavior has been diminished by the advance of science. Yet, even if science has displaced religion as a source of authority, scientists have not come up with alternative moral codes. There have been a few attempts, but they were abandoned.

• In the 1990s both scientists and political leaders began to recognize the need for principles that would state universal norms for behavior.

In April 1990, in the “Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities,” the InterAction Council, a group of 24 former heads of state or government declared, “because global interdependence demands that we must live with each other in harmony, human beings need rules and constraints. Ethics are the minimum standards that make a collective life possible. Without ethics and the self-restraint that are their result, humankind would revert to the survival of the fittest. The world is in need of an ethical base on which to stand.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization of leading scientists, concurred. “A new ethic is required,” claimed a statement signed in 1993 by 1,670 scientists, including 102 Nobel laureates, from 70 countries. “This ethic must motivate a great movement, convincing reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and reluctant people themselves to effect the needed changes.” The scientists noted our new responsibility for caring for the Earth and warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and out global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” Human beings and the natural world, they said, are on a collision course, one that could so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life as we know it.

In November 2003, a group of Nobel Peace laureates meeting in Rome affirmed, “Ethics in the relations between nations and in government policies is of paramount importance. Nations must treat other nations as they wish to be treated. The most powerful nations must remember that as they do, so shall others do.” and in November 2004, the same group of laureates declared, “Only by reaffirming our shared ethical values – respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms – and by observing democratic principles, within and amongst countries, can terrorism be defeated. We must address the root causes of terrorism – poverty, ignorance and injustice – rather than responding to violence with violence.”

To convince modern people to adopt behaviors appropriate to the conditions that now reign on Earth – something that many people are reluctant to do – there must be meaningful codes to guide people’s behavior: all people’s behavior. Such codes need to be distilled from a planetary ethic appropriate to the interdependence and shared destiny of the human community.

ECOLOGICAL ETHICS: THE FIRST STEP TOWARD A PLANETARY ETHIC

In the field of ethical theory the closest development to a planetary ethic is the branch of environmental ethics known as ecological ethics. Ecological ethics aims at harmonizing the rhythms, dynamics, and conscious or unwitting effects of human life on nature with the rhythms and dynamics of nature. At its best, an ecological ethic is an ethic of sustainable human impact on the biosphere.

The field of ecological ethics is a newcomer in the spectrum of ethical theories. For virtually the entire duration of Western intellectual history ethical discussion failed to manifest a direct concern with obligations that humans might have toward the environment.

• Ethical commitments and moral obligations rested on a human person-to-person basis.
• Ethical commitment has then been extended to communities other than one’s own. Moral philosophers consider that a moral community has ethical commitments not only to its own members but to communities throughout the continents.
• With the advent of the debate on our responsibility to future generations, ethical commitments have also been extended to human communities across time as well as space.
• Humans clearly have intrinsic value, and in the 1980s the question arose whether intrinsic value must be limited to humans.

 

REVERENCE FOR NATURAL SYSTEMS

In a planetary ethic Albert Schweitzer’s famous tenet, reverence for life, serves as a basis for attributing intrinsic values to things around us. Life, as scientists know, is not an entirely separate category: it is a set of phenomena – such as metabolism and reproduction – that appear at a certain point in the evolution of complexity.

• In this process there is no place where we can draw a line between life and non-life.
• Some systems still straddle the divide; viruses, for example, appear to be physical-chemical nonliving systems when separated from a host and living systems when associated with a host.

Thus the kind of system to which a planetary ethic can attribute intrinsic value is not just the living system but the general category of system in which the living system arises. The simplest denomination of this general category is “natural system.”

• A natural system is a broad but not universal category; if all systems in the world were natural systems, the definition would lose meaning.
• In a deep spiritual sense intrinsic value can be attributed to all things in space and time – to the universe in its totality.
• But this all-inclusive valuation fails when it comes to deriving practical criteria for moral behavior.

In a planetary ethic we attribute intrinsic value to natural systems (that is, to systems that arise, subsist, and evolve basically independently of conscious human planning and execution) and instrumental value to systems that are relevant to the existence of natural systems.

• A first delimitation of the concept of the universe as a natural system is the consideration that our planet’s biosphere is such a system.
• The biosphere as a whole is a natural system, but without further specification it is still too vast to permit the derivation of practical codes of moral behavior.
• In a planetary ethic individual human beings as well as the communities formed by human beings qualify for intrinsic value. This does not mean that all things in nature would do so.
• Together with the sun – which provides the free energy that drives the planet’s biological and ecological processes – they constitute the physical environment of living systems. These entities qualify for the attribution of instrumental value.

Let us summarize. A planetary ethic attributes intrinsic value to the web of life that has evolved on this planet and also to the things, from algae to ecologies and human beings and societies, that have emerged in that web and form part of it. It attributes instrumental value to the physical environment of the web of life, including the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the geosphere, since it provides resources and physical and chemical conditions for the subsistence and evolution of natural systems.

THE DERIVATION OF PRACTICAL BEHAVIORAL CODES

The above concepts appear abstract and theoretical, yet they have application in practice: a set of meaningful moral codes can be derived from them. These codes respond to specific criteria. They specify behavior consistent with the intrinsic valuation of natural systems and the instrumental valuation of systems in their relevant environment.

Two kinds of code need to be distinguished. One is the maximum code: it commits individuals to positive ends that contribute to the existence and evolution of natural systems in the biosphere, above all, to human beings and their communities. The other is the minimum code: it requires that, at the least, individuals limit the negative impact of their behavior on natural systems.

The Maximum Code

In a first approximation the maximum code can be formulated as follows: Act so as to maximize the sustained persistence of the biosphere. This code requires that we take care of nature and adapt ourselves to its patterns and refrain from reducing biodiversity, disturbing natural balances, and modifying or destroying vital energy and information flows.

• To remain valid and effective, moral behavior must be adapted not to the current state but to the foreseeable evolution of the intrinsically valued natural systems.
• We should rephrase the maximum code to state: Act so as to further the ongoing evolution of the biosphere.
• On a second look, even the modified maximum code turns out to be flawed. This is because biological and sociocultural-technological evolution on this planet has an unsettling feature: it is constantly accelerating.
• Not only have more and more forms of life evolved in the course of the last 3.5 billion years, but the rate at which they evolve has also been speeding up.
• At the dawn of the modern age the evolution of human societies was accelerated by powerful technologies.
• Sooner or later the processes of societal change will accelerate beyond the capacity of flesh-and-bone humans to keep up.
• A range of ecological catastrophes could be triggered, and ultimately our species would join the ranks of over 99% of vertebrates that have become extinct since the Cambrian period.
• The indicated maximum code must aim at stabilizing the process at a humanly favorable level. Thus the correct formulation of the code is: Act so as to further the evolution of a humanly favorable dynamic equilibrium in the biosphere.

The above formulation is indisputably anthropocentric, but not unduly so. It rests on the consideration that as a species we have the natural capability, and hence the natural right, to exercise our drive for collective survival. Doing so is defensible as long as it does not interfere with the similar capability – and right – of other species. Respecting the maximum code would largely (if not completely) satisfy this proviso. Interventions that seek to establish a form of dynamic balance in the biosphere that is hospitable to humans and favorable to their well-being are likely to involve safeguarding most (though perhaps not all) the species and ecologies that currently exist. In the final count what is good for humans is good – with at the most a very few exceptions – for all life on Earth.

The Minimum Code

Ensuring the dynamic of the biosphere at a humanly favorable level requires a thorough restructuring of human relations to the environment, transforming them from the currently unsustainable to a long-term sustainable mode. It also requires the transformation of the institutions of human societies so they can coexist with each other and with nature productively and in peace. These transformations call for a fundamental change in the behavior of individuals, nations, and businesses. Consequently the maximum code, though a long-term goal and an ideal, is utopian in the short-term as a guide to action. It needs to be complemented with a behavioral code that is more immediately practicable. This calls for adding a “floor” to the maximum code “ceiling.” This floor is the minimum code for acceptable moral behavior: the sine qua non of action that can qualify as moral.

The minimum code updates the classical laissez-faire tenet, “Live and let live.” The classical tenet is outdated: On an interdependent and increasingly crowded and resource-depleted planet, letting people live in any way they may wish is not morally permissible. The rich and the mighty would (as they already do) consume a disproportionate share of the planet’s resources and voluntarily block access to vital resources by the less privileged. Thus we need a minimum code that asks people to respect the conditions under which all people can live. The indicated minimum code is: Live so that others can also live.

• Respecting even the minimum code calls for changes and adaptations. The privileged still live in a way that the less privileged could not duplicate.

In the fifth century BCE, in the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote,

One’s individual life serves as an example for other individuals; one’s family serves as a model for other families; one’s community serves as a standard for other communities; one’s state serves as a measure for other states; and one’ country serves as an ideal for all countries.

The minimum code is to ensure that the example set by one individual is worthy of becoming a standard, a measure, and perhaps an idea, for all others.

IN SUMMARY

If accepted and adopted, the maximum and the minimum codes for moral behavior would ensure a reasonable chance of achieving a sustainable and humanly favorable dynamic equilibrium in the biosphere. The minimum code would defuse resentment and animosity arising from uneven levels of economic development; it would reduce the potential for conflict based on inequalities in living standards and access to resources. The maximum code, in turn, would create an impetus to move purposefully to the next plateau of dynamic equilibrium between human societies and their life-supporting environment.

In the final analysis the minimum would create breathing space, buying time for the necessary behavioral changes, while the maximum code would offer an ideal toward which to strive when the time is ripe for such changes.

Chapter 7: The Culture of Holos

Moving toward a civilization of Holos is not merely an option: it is a survival imperative. Fortunately it is not feasible, nor is it unprecedented. The kind of shift it entails is part of the evolution of human societies, an evolution that began with the mythic civilizations of the Stone Age, continued with the theocratic civilizations of the archaic empires, and moved to the human reason-based civilizations initiated by the ancient Greeks. Now the reign of Logos is drawing to a close: the short-term rationality underlying the currently dominant form of civilization produces more heat than light – more negative social, economic, and ecological consequences than positive, humanly desirable outcomes.

The time has come for a further shift: from a civilization of Logos to a civilization of Holos.