The Sixth New Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Harm the Environment

Here's another of those commandments that are imposed on everyone, whether they like it or not. And, like the one to limit the family, it seems so reasonable and innocuous--who would deliberately damage the environment?--until you have a reason for doing something that the New Moralists think is harmful, and then it's Katy bar the doors.

What I want to stress here is that this New Commandment doesn't say that it's a good thing to preserve the environment; it says it must be preserved--at all costs, even if it involves human suffering. Remember the spotted owl and the loggers' jobs? After all, who are we to put ourselves above the good of the planet?

And here's where Darwinism and the morality that follows from it rears its head once again.

What's behind this New Commandment.

You see, if we are nothing but a species that has evolved by chance, then we aren't essentially any different from any other species on the face of the earth; everything, including us, is just a more or less complex mechanism whose basic function is survival and reproduction.

But there's a slightly new aspect of evolution behind this particular New Commandment: the fact that, for some mysterious reason--or rather, for no reason at all, but just by chance--the organisms that evolve cooperate with each other. The evolutionist would say, because it's easier to survive if you're in harmony with the environment rather than against it. Of course they say this, because there's nothing else they can say without bringing a plan into the picture, and this goes directly against the agenda that is driving evolutionism: the idea that there can't be a God. So cooperation has to be just a condition for survival.

But the point is that it follows that, insofar as human activities harm the environment, they go against the basic (cooperative) essence of what we are, and so they must be stopped.

But that's just part of it. The rest of the story is that it's technology that's doing the damage; and technology is the use of human reason as divorced from instinct: a cold, mathematical, calculating, unfeeling use of reason, setting abstract goals and computing the most efficient means of getting to them, with no consideration whatsoever of our instinctive desire to fit in and become one with the rich, diverse macrocosm we find ourselves immersed in.

Remember, reason's reality, on this view, is that it is just the tool by which we serve our emotions, particularly our reproductive ones; and therefore, science and technology are a gross abuse of reason, paving over the lush landscape, spewing noxious gases into the atmosphere, stripping whole mountains of their trees and even their soil and soul to get at the coal beneath the surface--only to use that coal to heat the globe and pollute the very air we and all the other creatures around us breathe.

Walk down Fifth Avenue in New York, and all you see is blacktop, taxis, glass, and concrete. Such a thing as a tree barely grows in Brooklyn, and in Manhattan you're as likely to see one as you are a spotted owl. Instead of the sound of birds and the stridulation of crickets and cicadas, you hear car horns and street drills. Instead of people sitting on the grass contemplating hawks making lazy circles in the sky, you find pedestrians and roller bladers speeding by, all with identical frowns of concentrated depression, most with ears covered with headsets, drowning out the cacophony with their own private cacophones. Let the day be too hot, and the air conditioners overload the electrical grid, and whole states grind to a halt (as in California in early 2001), with people stuck for hours in stifling elevators, and thousands, without so much as a candle, cursing the darkness.

All this because we have lost our true identity. We have forgotten the heritage of the Native Americans who preceded us, who were one with nature and the environment, who would apologize to the deer and the antelope who so unselfishly gave their lives so that the human race also could live; and the human race gave back to nature as much as it took, until it was invaded by the technology of the white man from across the water, and its land was not only stolen from it, it was systematically and ruthlessly trashed, in the name of enlightenment and Reason as the Master of the Universe.

It has gone far enough. It has gone far too far. It must be stopped, and not only stopped but reversed. It is not simply that we are destroying our world, we are destroying our very selves. We spend our lives sitting in front of computer screens, using our magnificent muscles to tap out nonsense on keyboards, giving us carpal tunnel syndrome, eyestrain headaches, and stiff necks. But more than this, we are destroying our souls, turning them into slaves of the very machinery we claim to be using, and instead of letting our hearts roam free over the beauty and magnificence of nature, we bottle up our emotions for days on end, and wonder why we spend so much on therapy.

And the way to reverse this before it is too late is to reorient ourselves toward our true reality, which is the reality we have as part of nature; instead of subordinating ourselves to machines, we should swallow our pride and subordinate ourselves to the planet, to which we are in fact subordinate, and recognize what a magnificent thing it is, and how insignificant we are. Once we do this, peace will once again reign in our hearts, just as it did in the hearts of the aborigines we so heedlessly tore from their habitat and discarded on the dump of the reservation.

--Sound familiar? Sound noble and uplifting? Doesn't it make you want to get out and tear your clothes off and be genuine for a change! Just be careful not to do it in January.

My problem with all of this is that I go back to the days before a good deal of this technology. My parents didn't have a car when I was a kid, and so we used that wonderful non-polluting, electric public transportation, just like everybody else. I remember that we had a choice to walk up to Mount Auburn Street, ten blocks away, to the trolley line (they still use trackless trolleys on that line; it's the Boston area, after all) that went into Harvard Square (padon me, I mean Havad Squaya), where the trolleys came every fifteen minutes, or to walk three or four blocks down to Arsenal Street and hope you were lucky, since the trolleys there were twenty minutes to an hour apart. And, of course, you always chose the closer stop, and you always just missed the trolley, and you had to wait and wait and wait--and then stand up all the way (because everyone else before you had been waiting too) to Central Square, where you could get a transfer and go down into the subway to get into Boston, where you'd come up out of the underground and walk fifteen or twenty more blocks to get to your destination. The whole trip (some fifteen minutes by car) only took a couple of hours.

But we had clean air back then. We did? Everybody burned coal in those days--well, my father burned coke. The truck would come up and dump the load into the coal bin, and he would break his back shoveling it into the furnace every morning, and air would blast up through the registers, and soot would blast up into the sky, covering the trees, the sidewalks, the clapboards and everything else with fine grit.

And every fall, there was the delicious smell of the pollution of burning leaves, huge piles of them in front of every house on the block. You could smell it for weeks on end. And every spring, the little truck farmers outside the city would burn whole fields to get them ready for planting, and so the pleasant aroma would appear once again.

But since there weren't cars in the street, at least you didn't have noxious auto exhaust to drown out these smells. No. You could even play in the street, if you took a little care to step around the horse buns that remained until the street sweeper came by with his little cart. They added to the atmosphere of the cities, giving them a bucolic tinge.

And the farmers, attuned to nature, came by with their little wagons, loaded with live hens and produce, I remember. You'd order a chicken and pick it out, and the farmer would wring its neck before your eyes, and hand it to you, still squirming in post-death spasms. I don't recall his apologizing to the thing before he throttled it; but then, he wasn't an Indian, I guess. Frankly, I'd rather be confronted with the packaged chicken breast, all plucked and skinned--that doesn't even look like an animal--than deal with this. But of course, the answer to this is to be a Vegan and not kill the poor little chickens at all; just slaughter the celery.

None of this sissy air conditioning back then either; when summer came, you sweated. Or you went to the ice box after the iceman had lugged his hundred pounds on his back up the two flights of stairs and put it in the top of the box (where it would drip and fill the pan you'd have to empty or have a flood) and chipped off a piece of ice, and you sucked it and pretended that your frozen mouth made the rest of you cool, as if you were a dog. On really hot days, you spent time down in the cellar beside the coal, communing with nature in the form of black beetles and spiders, trying to read by the single 40-watt bulb in the center of the room, with the octopus arms of the furnace groping upwards all around you.

Those were the days. Thank God they're gone! If you think you're a slave to machinery now, that's nothing to being a slave to the environment. Imagine waiting three quarters of an hour in the pelting rain for a trolley that never comes, or walking fifteen blocks to school through six inches of snow. That's the time to get back to, because that's being real! Real stupid.

--And by the way, this Native American we rhapsodize about who was corrupted by the white man and his technology may have apologized to the bison he killed on the plain--but he'd kill a whole animal and slice off a hunk or two of the hump, which he would then eat, leaving the rest of the carcase lying there to rot. Rather than go back to his kill the next day, he'd kill a fresh one. Why not? They were all over the place.

And the reason the Mayans have left so many cities in the Yucatan is that they'd build one and farm the life out of the surroundings, and then just abandon it and move on to build a city somewhere else. Oh, it was just great back then. Francis Parkman in The Oregon Trail remarks at what terrific shape the Indians were in. Well, they had to be, didn't they? Hunting and gathering are back-breaking. It's no joke, you know, picking up your tepee--your whole house and everything in it--and moving it along to follow the herd as it migrates; and if you don't, you starve.

Sure, I sit at my computer, staring at the screen. And when I make a mistake, I move the cursor back and correct it, before ever I print out a page. Back in the good old days, I'd write things out longhand and cross out and insert until I couldn't read the page any more; and then get disgusted and write it out again as fast as I could, and three days later try to figure out what it was I had put down. And then I'd take it to the manual typewriter--there was finger exercise for you!--and pound out a "fair copy," messing up my fingers with maybe two carbons, the last of which you could barely see (especially the letters you made with your pinky), and read it over and realize I'd made a typo in the middle of the page, and spend fifteen minutes debating with myself whether it would make a worse impression if I let it stand or if I penned in the correction, or whether I should go through the effort of typing the whole page again. And corrections that would alter subsequent pages were simply out of the question. I remember spending hours trying to find a way to add a sentence and cut what I'd put on the rest of the page so that this would be the only page to retype. It was great practice in learning how many ways the English language can be manipulated--but the motivation wasn't finding the best way to say what you wanted; it was to get it to fit the space.

Thanks, but I'll take the computer screen. And when I walk down Fifth Avenue, I see the beauty of the buildings stretching up to the stars, stalagmites more awesome than any in Mammoth Cave. Much as I love the Grand Tetons and Yosemite, there's a lot to be said for New York; it just takes some getting used to before you really appreciate it. I know; I lived there many decades ago for a couple of years, and I still remember it fondly. As my son has discovered (he owns an apartment in midtown Manhattan), New York is a great city to live in, but you wouldn't want just to visit there; while Yosemite is the place to visit, but don't try to live in it.

--You see how easy it is to come to any conclusion you want, if you let your heart lead, and find reasons to bolster your feelings?

How true to nature is environmentalism?

So let's take a look at this cooperativeness in nature and see if it supports what the environmentalist wackos read into it.

Now it's true that organisms (in their natural habitats) do cooperate with each other. But there's no a priori reason why Organism A is better off because it happens to be helping Organism B. The only thing you can answer to this is that if it didn't help Organism B, then Organism B wouldn't be around, and it is around, isn't it? So it has to be the case that the organisms we find among us today have the characteristic of cooperating with each other. But that's still post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. It still doesn't say how it helps Organism A's survival that it benefits Organism B; all it says is that without Organism A, Organism B wouldn't be here.

The reason this is significant is that when you take an organism out of its natural habitat into another ecological situation, it can be horrendously destructive; even something as benign as the rabbit, once introduced into Australia, wreaked havoc with all kinds of other organisms there, because it didn't have natural enemies to keep the population in check. In themselves, organisms are aggressively rapacious; they don't care what they do to the environment, as long as they can flourish and multiply.

So there's no built-in drive, so to speak, to cooperate with other organisms; from what happens when organisms are taken out of the place where there's a balance because the surroundings happen to be partly benign and partly hostile, and put into a place where the balance tips toward the more benign than hostile, they gobble up the benign part with no qualms whatever. It's just, of course, that eventually, no matter what the environment, they kill off enough of the things they're destroying that they run out of food, and then their population stabilizes at this new level--but in an environment now depleted of the organisms they've destroyed. Look at the kudzu plant in Georgia--and believe me, it won't be hard to find; it's all over the skeletons of the trees it's choked to death.

But it's not just human beings that bring in foreign plants and animals. The Galapagos Islands, Darwin's inspiration, though practically on the equator, were populated by penguins without any human agency. Storms carry organisms out of their natural habitats into new ecologies, and they mess up the new situation until things more or less settle down, when some new disruption comes along to change everything again.

After all, dinosaurs roamed the earth at one time, and there was no white male human in his caravel coming over from Europe bringing to them gifts of venereal disease; something happened that wiped them all out, in spite of their foot-long teeth. The latest theory is that it was a meteor that polluted the whole world for a fair-thee-well and blocked out the sun and iced up the earth, and all the rest of it. Something that could happen tomorrow, without anything human bothering to intervene.

What I'm saying is that catastrophes like that wrought by El Niño and the 1998 hurricane in Nicaragua are natural, and as consistent with the way things are as anything else that's ever happened. But they do damage thousands of times greater than anything we puny human beings can hope to accomplish with our buzz-saws. Sure, we can cut down the jungle--excuse me, the "rain forest"--in Brazil, but all you have to do is stop cutting and wait five years--one year--and the jungle (a different one, to be sure) comes back at you. In Chichén-Itzá, they must constantly beat back the jungle, or it will take over again.

But all that's all right, of course, because it's natural. We have city-owned parkland across the street from our house, and it's been let to "go natural" because the city never got around to taking care of it; and the grapevines are doing a good imitation of kudzu, and the wild honeysuckle are turning the undergrowth into a miniature jungle; in short, it's full of garbage plants and the ruins of what they killed. It turns out that Xavier University down the street decided to use the land behind this pristine scenery, and part of their master plan was to maintain the strip of park, and make a nature trail through it. When I asked if they'd take down the eyesore vines that were choking the sycamores and oaks, the biologian in charge told me, "Well, if they're not native, we'll remove them, but if they belong there, like wild grape vines, then they'll have to fight it out with the trees." See? It's real. Just like the little patches along the expressway full of ragweed and goldenrod that have little signs that say, "Natural wildflower area: Do not mow."

I'm reminded of the story of the preacher meeting a farmer who had taken over an abandoned farm three years before. "I see that you and the Lord have done a great job here," said the preacher, and got the reply, "Yeah, well you should have seen it when the Lord had it by himself."

I'm sure you know horror stories of how the EPA makes ancient Draco look like Pericles, and how the environment is really just an excuse to make trouble for technology. Just last week, I had to take my car in for what they call an ECheck (that's right, with the little sign), and let it idle for fifteen minutes (because you're told not to shut off the motor while you wait) causing, along with the other cars in line, untold pollution while I waited to get in, whereupon they put the car on rollers, revved up the engine to autobahn speed, and rolled a fan in front of it and put an exhaust-collector behind the tailpipe--and charged me twenty dollars. This is supposed to purify the air, never mind that pre-1980 cars, which are the real polluters, don't have to measure up to the standards for the new cars, which don't pollute anyway. And diesel trucks are totally exempt. Ever been behind one of these non-polluting diesels?

But they're trying. They're doing something. And if Cincinnati doesn't meet the clean-air standards, then by golly, they'll do more of it, and get every car Echecked every year instead of every two years. (I was lucky; the machine didn't wreck my car, the way it has some.)

Just like condom distribution, it doesn't matter if it works, or even if it's counter-productive, as long as we've done something, and the more damaging to technology and Big Business the better.

For instance, a while back in Kyoto, we signed the accord that's going to make us reduce our "greenhouse" emissions by thirty per cent, in spite of the fact that the latest evidence is that there's no global warming at all. (Oh yes there is! That's Religious Right propaganda!--I write this in the coldest winter on record, both here and in Siberia, where we just got word that the computer programs are predicting much quicker warming. Oh yes? They must be like some programs I've made.)

Of course, the good guys, like China and the third world, who are by far the greatest polluters, get off the hook, since they're free from Big Technology. A few years ago, the Clinton administration concluded the Argentine phase of this farce, bribing some of the Latin American countries to come out in favor of the standards. And they agreed. Why shouldn't they, if all they have to do is make noises, and they get billions in aid? This in hopes of swaying more Senators to ratify the treaty.

Do I have to mention the agenda-driven junk science that's fully worthy of Clinton at his slickest that justifies this scare-mongering to promote this New Commandment? The actual data show no global warming, but, as I said, the computer models do. So (a) you fudge the data by leaving December out of your calculations of temperature or ignoring the ocean--"extrapolating" over it, not measuring it, or (b) even if there's no real evidence, shouldn't we be on the safe side? Computer models thirty years ago, by the way, were predicting the coming ice age. They also foretold back then how by this time, there'd be no oil, or copper, or anything else you want to name.

Computer models are the polls of New Morality science. They're fine in their place; but their place is a very small one; and when used for something like predicting what the world will be like in twenty years, they're about as useful as a yardstick for measuring distances inside the atom. You'll notice that weather reporters won't go farther out on a limb than five days or so--because they know (a) that you can remember what they said five days ago, and (b) that the weather is too complex a phenomenon to be able to get all the variables into even the most sophisticated computer--not to mention that, as catastrophe theory shows, unpredictable results can occur from insignificant causes.

But for some reason scientists get mesmerized by the fact that these models of theirs actually produce numerical results. Scientists worship numbers. I was once called in to the Dean's office years ago, to be told by an ex-physicist that I had to shape up, because my teaching, according to the student evaluations, was below average. "Wait a minute!" I said. "You've got it right down here that the average score they gave me is a 4.3 out of 5; that means that they thought I'm pretty far above average." "Yeah, but" he said--I kid you not--"the average teacher scored a 4.5; so you're not as above average as the average teacher. So you're really below average." (There are some of you saying, "Well, what's wrong with that?" I can hear you.) Since I was in physics before I got into philosophy, he didn't intimidate me, and I pointed out to him what madness this was, but made no headway. He had the number, and numbers don't lie.

But the real difficulty with environmentalism as consistent with evolution is that all life, simply because it is life, harms the environment. It can't help it. A living being, as I said, exists at a super-high energy level (its biological equilibrium); and in order to do so, it has to take in energy and material from the environment. And since living bodies don't actually repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics, this means that the energy that was locked up in the environment is released, and only some of it goes into the living body; the rest is dissipated into that heat-sink called the universe.

Of course, it's also true that living beings, in their proper habitats, turn out to be extremely efficient in their use of energy, so that, in comparison with man-made machines, very little energy is lost; and, as I said, the waste of one organism is used as the food for another, with the result that the environment tends to deteriorate very slowly.

But it's still the case that they do use up the environment; they have to, to survive. So the goal of preserving the environment, as if it were commanded by evolutionary nature, is a dream and a chimera.

And this is reinforced by the fact I was mentioning above, that the deterioration of the environment is accelerated hundreds of times over when an organism (by human or natural accident) is brought out of its ecological niche into a foreign set of organisms. But that too happens in the course of nature, and is not something that is contrary to the reality of evolution. Evolution is just chance, remember.

So where do we get this New Commandment? From thin air, and hatred of technology. To the superficial, it looks as if evolution is commanding respect for the environment; but evolving creatures in fact have no respect for it whatever; it just happens that they cooperate. But that's just an accident; cooperation is not a purpose in evolution; it simply happens--so far--to be a result.

So you can't make a natural imperative out of it; and therefore, this Sixth New Commandment is a pure moral imperative. You must preserve the environment. Why? Just because. Because you're not being true to yourself unless you fit into nature--it's inhuman not to--and help nature rather than hurting the poor thing as if you were its Master. And we will pass the most stringent laws to see that you do this whether you want to or not.

The inherent contradiction in this is twofold: first, any evolving being is for itself and to hell with the environment. That's its nature, as we can see when we remove the being from its natural habitat; the cooperation is just something that happens to occur, and from the point of view of the organism, it's unnatural. Do you think rabbits want to be eaten by hawks and coyotes?

But secondly--and this is what is galling to the New Moralist--man is in fact master of the world around him, from the lowliest virus to the great Leviathan that swims the fishy deep. Evolutionistically speaking, we're just another organism, not very well adapted by tooth and claw to making our way in this world; but we had that pesky reason develop in us, and we made teeth and claws of flint and iron, and the result is that nothing is a match for us. There's no environment we can't thrive in; there's no other organism we can't subdue--there's none we haven't subdued, making some of them, like horses, cows, and dogs, into fawning slaves at our heels. Even the raging bull is docile as a lamb once we've put the ring into its nose.

But New Moralists can't admit this, because it sounds too much like Genesis: "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth." No no no! Gaia save us! "Multiply and fill the earth!" Horrors! "Have dominion over everything!" We're just something that happened along by chance during the course of evolution; we must not arrogate to ourselves a special place in the world! (Excuse the exclamation points; but New Moralists start pounding the table when you suggest anything else.)

But the fact is, we have a special place; whether God gave it to us, or whether we got it in the course of evolution, we have one, because of our reason.

Well, then, say the New Moralists, we've got to use reason not only to thwart the reproductiveness of the reproductive urge, but to thwart reason's tendency to make life easy and pleasant; life is supposed to be hard, a struggle with nature (always cooperating, of course, you understand) for the survival of the fittest. Well, we are fittest; and we're surviving very nicely, thank you.

Precisely. That's what we've got to reverse.

Preserving species from extinction.

Think of all the species that have gone out of existence because our technology has destroyed their habitat! We can't let that happen! We can't? Why not?

Well, because! Because it's obvious! You lose a species, and it's gone forever! So what? Well, you can't do that! Why not?

I'll bet you never thought of that, did you? You've been carefully taught in our schools, which no longer teach anything but the New Morality. Why should species be preserved? The New Moralists argue that if you lose them, you lose them (and the information encoded in their genes) forever. Okay. And what's so bad about that? A world without smallpox forever and ever is a world I don't mind living in. For that matter, I wouldn't weep if mosquitoes vanished from the face of the earth. Let the frogs eat flies instead; I can live with flies.

The answer is twofold. First, if you destroy a species, you destroy all the other species that depend on it. You do? If the species is endangered, how are these other species managing? Secondly, you never know when that species is going to turn out to be useful. Oh, please! That's like the argument of the old lady who clips out interesting tidbits from the daily paper and stores them in the closet, "because you never know when I'm going to need to refer to that some day." The closets are jammed with bits of paper that she'll never refer to because there's no way she could get to what she needed, even if she remembered what it was--which she won't. And who's to say that if we let one species die off because we've changed the environment, we won't be providing the conditions for some other species twenty times more useful to emerge?

But these arguments are really beside the point; in fact, they argue against the environmentalist position, because the "usefulness" of the species looks to humans as what the species is to be used for, which directly contradicts what's behind this New Commandment: that the human is just one organism among the many, and has no special place, and is definitely not the purpose for which any other organism exists.

But more than that, it is consistent with evolution that maladaptive species die out. Of course it is. Haven't you heard of the survival of the fittest? But obviously, an endangered species is by definition maladaptive to the environment it's in. So why not let it die out?

Because the damn environment is the artificial one technology has created, you fool! We're changing the environment so fast that no species can keep up with it! If technology goes on like this, we'll wipe out the whole planet, and then die off ourselves! You Right Wing Religious Fanatics have got to be stopped before it's too late!

--But didn't we evolve? And didn't reason evolve with us? And you want to use reason to thwart the reproductiveness of the reproductive urge, which is clearly against what the reproductive urge is all about. So why can't we use reason to build for ourselves a world we like to live in; and if a snail darter or a spotted owl has to become extinct, well, that's the price they and we have to pay, that's all.

You see? You see? That's why we have to have laws against you people! You'll just wreck nature with that attitude! If we can't teach you the truth about nature, we'll just have to force you to conform to it!

But the trouble is that environmentalism is inconsistent with the principles it's supposedly based on; that's what I've been saying in this chapter. Chance evolution provides no basis whatever for imposing any restrictions on what human beings (who have evolved, after all, out of nature) do to the environment. If we're part of nature, we're part of nature; and if nature is for itself, and it's pure chance that cooperation occurs, then what's unnatural with our being for ourselves?

Environmentalism as a moral imperative is just a pure emotional reaction that has no reason behind it at all--which is consistent only with the New Morality's repudiation of reason. But that repudiation itself, as I said earlier, is inconsistent, because it supposes that reason has concluded that reason can't get at the truth, and only emotion really "knows."

So don't let these people know that water tends to collect in your back yard if you want to install drain pipes to get rid of it and the mosquitoes that breed there every spring. They'll claim it's a wetland, and get the Feds after you. (Notice the difference between a "swamp"--which has the adjective "pestilential" attached to it--and a "wetland"? It's the same thing, but it's amazing what words will do, isn't it?)

Environmentalists will deny left and right and up and down that they're trying to force their moral standards on the rest of us; but what other explanation is there for what they're doing? There's no tolerance here, there's no room for debate and honest disagreement when it comes to Saving the Planet. It's greater than all of us, and it must be yielded to; and if you won't yield, then be prepared to pay the price.

I hear you saying, "Well yes, but . . ." That's the next chapter.