Plathon

"Grandpa! Have you any idea of the CO2 footprint of your huge rib steak here ? You should eat less meat!" Laura says reproachfully and with a slightly smug air. Despite all the love he has for his granddaughter, Edouard immediately takes on the colour of the generous rib steak in front of him. Soon the tone rises: "postmodern!", "anthropocentric!", "anti-speciesist!", "cartesian!".
 
If ecological engagement sometimes unleashes passions, it is because it does not call into question only a few consumption habits, but rather some of our fundamental representations of the world and our relationship with nature.

A brief history of the man/nature relationship

At the end of Antiquity, Judeo-Christian thought, spreading through the Mediterranean, introduces the idea of a natural domination of humans over the rest of Creation: "Fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion every living thing that moves upon the earth" says the Book of Genesis (1:28). The human species is thus separated, distinguished from his environment. It is "apart".
 
Descartes brings us into Modernity by making reason the sole source of reliable knowledge: scientific knowledge. In this new, purely rationalist world, nature became measurable, an object of study, an inexhaustible source of scientific. Natural domination gives way to scientific mastery, and the ensuing progress of science gives rise to the hope of one day being able to "render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature" through knowledge (Discourse on the Method, 1637). A bit later, during the Age of Enlightenment, the "philosophy of progress" is born: the idea that moral progress indissolubly accompanies the progress of science and technology, and the improvement of the human condition (extending life expectation and quality, reducing suffering, etc.).
 

But the second half of the twentieth century sees the emergence of a growing suspicion towards technical progress, associated with the devastations of the World Wars and the gradual depletion of natural resources over the course of the Industrial Revolutions. The awareness rises of a situation of growing imbalance, of a risk of self-destruction of the human species by its own technique – or by the exhaustion of the resources this technical progress requires. It is the rediscovery of a truly vital interdependence between the human species and its environment, putting into question the paradigm of separation that has prevailed until then.

The "imperative of responsibility"
 
Hans Jonas's Imperative of Responsibility (1979) is published in this context. The potentially total and destructive power that humanity has acquired through technoscience must be matched, says Jonas, by a new form of responsibility: "In dubio pro malo." When in doubt, plan for the worst: if the consequences of an action cannot be fully anticipated, the worst-case scenario should always be assumed, in order to protect future generations. Which means... refraining from acting. The precedence given to the being (of nature) precedes and prevents the will (of humans).
 
This ontological perspective, when misunderstood, can feed fantasies of a mythologized nature. As early as 1958, John Galbraith presciently identified the potential hyper-consumerist excesses of capitalism (The Affluent Society), with the concept of "dependence effect". Of course a purely materialistic approach to existence does not feed dreams, and if it enters into a self-destructive spiral through a blind exploitation of resources without consideration for posterity, it can easily even arouse indignation. It is easy and tempting, by confusing consumerism with capitalism, and capitalism with Western modernity, to dream of an alternative model. Of a vanished equilibrium that must be restored. Of an essentially harmonious nature, which humans would only defile and destroy by their thirst for progress.
 
Some highly successful contemporary cultural products, such as Avatar, indulge in this myth of a lost golden age that humans have disenchanted with science, or perverted through technical progress. As if technology necessarily led to a kind of human and moral degradation – a distant echo of the myth of the "Good Savage" that prevailed in the eighteenth century.
 
But doesn't this amount to replacing an ideology accused of having subjugated nature to humans with an ideology that subjugates humans to nature? Are we not paving the way for a risky anti-humanism, by casting on human action the suspicion of systematic guilt?

Restoring the philosophy of progress in the care for posterity

It seems essential to restore to its glory the philosophy of progress inherited from the Enlightenment. It would be wrong to confuse it with the lack of care for posterity of an unbridled consumerism. This philosophy. based on the idea of human perfectibility, defines humans’ destiny as a continuous improvement of themselves through the faculties of reason. The human being is therefore a being of project, that of an indefinite progress towards the better (intellectual, moral, etc.). It is a philosophy of life that is essentially forward-looking. Care for posterity and humanity's long-term responsibility towards itself are at the very heart of the meaning of existence: "Humanity obliges itself in the figure of its own posterity [...]. It is the salvation of a possible future that binds me to posterity by a law that everyone can accept" (Monique Castillo, in Man and Nature, 2007).

An ideal rather than a myth

To reconcile the progress of humanity with the care for posterity, let us choose an ideal rather than a myth. Myths pull us backwards in the illusion of a lost golden age. Ideals inspire us and carries us forward. An ethic of abstention, centered on nature, paralyses the will to act and leads to immobilism. Let us prefer a morality of action, centered on men.
Building the future is not simply to preserving the present, in some kind of artificial immutability. It is projecting ourselves into a meaningful and inspirational vision. Our era could thus find in ecological commitment the resources of a spirituality that gives meaning to technological performance by establishing new relationships between humans and nature on a global scale.

Romain Leroy-Castillo