Interlude:

Stewardship

I probably sounded in the last chapter as if I was totally against any protection of the environment, because the New Morality subscribes to something somebody said centuries ago, "He who is not with me is against me." And after all, if you repudiate the environmentalist agenda, then this has to mean that where you're coming from is the Big Business, Republican, Religious Right, sexist, homophobic, racist agenda, and we know what you people are all about! In fact, Alan Dershowitz during the impeachment mess let the cat out of the bag when he ranted against those who were for impeachment: "It doesn't matter whether he wins in the Senate or not. We can't let those people who are evil--really evil--score a victory and impeach him after we've got this far!"

There it is, out in the open. It isn't that New Moralists disagree with traditionalists. There's no tolerance for them whatever--the Third New Commandment, in spite of its wording, doesn't allow it--and once the exemplar of the New Morality got hold of the reins of power, anything was legitimate to keep him from being knocked out of the saddle. Remember, truth for these people is agenda and nothing more. And if they didn't defeat this move, the Old Morality might come back, and that must not happen! Think of the environmental catastrophe, for just one thing! It's okay to trash the White House when you leave it, apparently, but the environment is another story.

Still . . .

The fact that the New Moralists have an agenda shouldn't blind us factualists to the reality of the situation. If you look at the living world around you, it smashes you right between the eyes that the organisms cooperate with one another, in spite of each one's tendency to be for itself against everyone else; it's the most irenic and pacific warfare ever waged.

What I was arguing in the preceding chapter is that this cooperation can't be deduced from survival of the fittest plus chance; these would predict exactly the opposite of what we see. Therefore, the cooperation must have been imposed on the world by the invisible hand that's manipulating the progress of evolution in the first place.

And that, and the manifest mastery we have over the world we have contact with, should tell us something: (1) that this is the direction the world should take, based on the Creator's view of things, and (2) that now that we're in charge, it's our job to manage the world consistently with this direction.

Stewardship and love.

This is stewardship. In one way, it's quite similar to New Morality environmentalism, and in another it's poles apart from it.

First of all, human beings are the first bodily creatures to have been endowed with the ability to think objectively (to understand relationships), as I sketched in the interlude after the First New Commandment; so we are the first to be able to know who we are, and how we fit into the world, rather than simply being objects which react to the world they live in (however complex that reaction might be).

We are also the first beings who can set goals for ourselves and work to see them realized. But because we can see relationships, and think objectively, not everything we do, and not all goals we set, have to be self-centered. I can realize, for instance, that my wife has her own goals, goals which I can help her achieve (she's writing a book in English, for instance, and I can proofread it for her and correct the understandable mistakes and oddities of phrasing that a non-native-speaker is apt to make). Because I can think objectively, I don't have to say, "What's in it for me if I do this?" I can put her goal as the goal of my actions and work for it, irrespective of whether it advances me toward my own (or even gives me any satisfaction) or not.

And here is where I part company with the Ayn Rand type of rationalist, with whom I am much in sympathy in many ways. Rand, having come from Communist Russia, was so repelled by the Russian notion of "self-sacrifice for the good of all" (which traces itself back beyond Marx to Auguste Comte) and the soul-destroying tyranny of Communism, that she had a mental block against all forms of altruism, which blinded her to the validity of any argument for God's existence, because that would lead to love as a virtue. Unfortunately, in this she was agenda-driven, and fell into the very trap she was trying to escape.

You see, when I help my wife with her book, I'm not harming myself in any way; in fact, since she's a very good Plato scholar, I've learned a lot that I wouldn't otherwise have learned. But that's not the point. The point is that my reason allows me to prescind from my own interest, and look at her interest, and make her interest my own.

This is love. Humans are the first beings on earth to have evolved capable of love. Now love implies, more than anything else, respect for what one loves; a subordination of one's own goals to the goal in something else--though not, I hasten to add, a repudiation of one's own reality in pursuing the other's goal. This would be a contradiction and immoral. Morality, after all, is acting consistently with what you are; and while it is consistent (because we can think) to act for the good of another, it is clearly inconsistent to do damage to yourself in pursuing the good of another. This is what Rand railed against, and she was right. It's just that she thought all love entailed this.

You have to put this together with what I said earlier about goodness and badness, or you'll misunderstand it. Remember, goodness consists in having the facts match the ideal you constructed in your own mind, and so there's no such thing as "objective goodness," as if you could discover what the ideal is "out there."

Then how can we love, if loving means doing what's good for someone else? Isn't this imposing our idea of goodness on the other person (or the other thing in general)? No. That's the common notion of love, but it's a mistake. Many is the wife or husband whose life is made miserable because the spouse "knows what's good for him" (excuse me if I write this from the man's point of view; it works both ways) and is busy trying to make him over into that ideal image she's conceived of what he "really is" if he'd only put his mind to it. That, in the extreme, is the very opposite of love; instead of helping the other person and subordinating yourself to the other, you're subordinating him to your idea of what he "ought" to be, and he becomes your slave, however much you might tell yourself it's "for his sake."

No, since there is no objective meaning to what is "good for" someone, then loving the person consists in finding out what goals the person has set for himself; and these then become what's good for him in the only meaningful sense--and you then make these goals your goals, and so his "true reality" (the reality he has conceived as his "true reality") becomes part of your "true reality." It isn't that this is what you're trying to do; it's just that because his happiness as an independent individual is now (as a goal in your life) a component in your happiness, you are spiritually "with" him in a way you can't be if you try to subordinate his reality to your a priori notion of what he "ought" to be. In that latter case, you are really the sole goal of your actions; in the former, he is the goal, and that makes both of you a "we" instead of two "I"s that just happen to be in the same place. Loving is making another's goal a goal of your own life. If you want to put it this way, it is a willingness to be used by another--though not, as I said, a willingness to be abused--and its paradoxical result is spiritual togetherness and the absorption into one's personality of the other--but always as an independent other.

No doubt this sounds very existentialist and metaphysical. So be it. It just happens to be true; and it follows from the fact that we're beings who can think. Contrast this with the New Moralist's view of love as instinct--expressed, for example, in the "love" that is involved in the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison. There's no love there, in the sense I'm talking about it, on either side. Each of them subordinated themselves only to their own satisfaction, really, using the other for their own purposes; and those purposes, in the last analysis, were nothing more than the immediate gratification of an urge--hardly different, as I said, from urination.

But what's all this got to do with evolution and environmentalism?

Loving a person might be called the highest sense of love, because you're submitting to the other person's freely-chosen definition of his "true self"; only persons can freely choose their own goals. Still, every other living body has a goal, because every living body has a biological equilibrium which as an individual it actively heads toward in growth and strives to maintain in its mature state. But in a living body, this "goal" is no more specific than the mature state; what the animal or plant does while mature is basically just adapt itself to its changing situation so as to maintain this mature state as long as possible.

But, given that there is an objective goal involved here, you can, if you want, try to discover what this goal is, and you can make as a goal in your own life helping this corner of the world be what it is trying to be. There's no law of human nature that says it's inconsistent to subordinate yourself to the good of things beneath you. And when you do, these creatures become part of that expanded reality you have because you have made something other than yourself a goal in your own life, and submitted to it.

And you do submit, when you inconvenience yourself for an animal or a plant, cooperating with it so that it will be all that it can be. I remember that, when my dog Luthien was alive, I would sometimes pass a neighbor as each of us was doing his daily chore of walking his dog. As the dogs sniffed each other one evening, I remarked, "Isn't it fascinating how we're servants of our own slaves." He laughed and agreed with me. True, in the long run I got a lot more out of my "relationship" with Luthien than she did; because while both of us got affection, I also learned a good deal, while she only adapted her instinct in ways that served my purposes. You do the same thing, to a lesser extent, when you dig and plant and weed the garden so that the flowers will prosper and give you the pleasure of seeing and smelling their beauty.

(On this point, the Lord's opinion of sex can be discovered from a fact I'll bet you never thought of: flowers are plants' sex organs, and see how they flaunt them! Think about that; that's profound.)

You can't love the planet itself or anything inanimate in this way, because as inanimate it doesn't have a goal in any meaningful sense. When it's in equilibrium, it just happens to be at the lowest energy-level it can have, and can't "go anywhere" because it can't give itself energy, and it can't lose any because it's already lost all it can lose. And it doesn't actively resist any energy that falls on it; if the outside energy can change it, it changes.

Thus, there's no way you can project a meaning for "good" and "evil" onto it, the way you can for a living body, because with a living body you can see what it's trying to do. The inanimate object isn't trying to do anything, really. So if you burn hydrogen, the unstable mixture is "trying" to be water; but if you pass an electrical current through water, the unstable water is trying to become hydrogen and

oxygen again. Which is "good" and which is "evil"? It depends on what you want, not what the object wants; it just mechanically, mindlessly seeks the lowest energy-state.

Still, there's a sense in which you can respect the reality of an inanimate object, and cooperate with it instead of fighting it. Take your car. You can turn on the ignition and immediately burn rubber as you zip out of the driveway onto the street at fifty miles an hour. You can stop on a dime and corner on two wheels and all the rest of the things teenagers like to do, and you can neglect to change the oil--and then wonder why the car won't run after twenty thousand miles. A car is a wonderful tool for getting you from Point A to Point B in comfort beyond the wildest dreams of Louis XIV; but it has its own way of doing this, and you are wise if you submit to its reality, so that its reality will serve you to the best of its ability. Is this love for your car? My wife sometimes wonders if she should sue Mitsubishi for alienation of my affections, so I guess you could call it a kind of love. Guys will understand.

Environmental values vs. environmental morals.

So yes, you can love the world of inanimate and living objects, even though they're not people. But there's this difference between these things and people: only people have rights. And here's where a factualist parts company with the New Moralist environmentalists. They want you to subordinate yourself to The Planet and to Nature because you're being inconsistent with yourself if you act as their master, since all you are is a product of evolution, which is the real reality. Hence, for these people, "loving" Nature is a moral imperative; you must cooperate with the world you live in; and if you don't, you can be forced to do it, because if you don't, you've violated the right it has against you.

But this is nonsense. As I said when discussing the Second New Commandment of not forcing your morals on anyone else, and especially in the interlude after it on freedom, values, and morals, it is persons who have rights because they set goals and can work to achieve them, and it's inconsistent to use your self-determination to prevent another self-determining being from determining himself.

But animals and plants, though they have goals, don't set them; they're not persons, and (not being able to think and see the relationships between themselves and others), they can't enter the reciprocal arrangement that rights imply: I'll let you alone if you let me alone. They are at the mercy of their instinct, as we are not, unless we choose to be.

Further, as I mentioned, the only meaningful goal a plant or an animal has is its mature state, not any specific action. Animals and plants have no ambition: no drive to "better themselves" once they reach maturity. A drive toward the future only occurs in the growth phase of their lives, in the early part; after that, though they are open to all sorts of action, and can be trained to do wonderful things, they have no built-in tendency to use these talents unless a situation comes up in which they're called for.

For this reason, there's nothing inconsistent with with making a slave of an animal; it has no "will of its own"; it just has all these potencies which can be trained--and turned to our purposes

(I know, I know; the New Moralists rant and rail that this is all we are, too; but all you have to do is open your eyes to see the difference, once it's pointed out to you. You train an animal, not because it has a "love of learning" you can tap into, but because it wants to be fed, or has a pack instinct you exploit. But as Maria Montessori and every human educator worth his salt has known from Plato on up, you educate humans by opening up vistas of possibility before them, and their innate urge to "make something of themselves" leads them on to heights you (and they) didn't know they had in them. The sad thing about contemporary education, New Morality style, is that, with its emphasis on "self-esteem" rather than ambition, it's actually training kids as if they were animals, and the kids are responding like animals: waiting until the treat comes and caring nothing about what they're learning.)

It's interesting that the New Moralists, who would degrade us to Clintonian sex-machine status, at the same time have fallen for the Disnification of the animal kingdom, having Bambi and Thumper talk to each other, foresee the future and worry about it, and think in terms of good and evil. But Robert Burns was right in his ode to the mouse (you know the poem, the one that ends with "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"). He saw the mouse run away in terror as he slashed its nest in mowing; but the mouse only reacted to the present, while he looked into the future and foresaw and feared all kinds of things that weren't there. We're the same as animals only in a superficial way; fundamentally, we're totally different, precisely because of this trait we have.

The animal-rights people don't realize what they're doing when they claim animals have rights against us. If they have rights, it can only be because they can set goals for themselves; and if they can, then the fundamental right they have is to freedom: to be able to pursue the goals they set for themselves. If they have rights, they can only be restrained from doing what they choose to the extent that they are doing damage to the actual reality of other persons.

It follows from this that they can't be tied up, they can't be restrained from having sex with any other animal they want to have sex with, they definitely can't be neutered, they can't be "put to sleep" when they get old or sick, and on and on and on. If what they do is self-destructive, then, provided they want to do it, they can't be prevented from doing it; their notion of what is good for them is to prevail, because, insofar as they are persons, "good for them" means "the goal they choose for themselves."

But as usual, people who take New Morality positions want it both ways. They want to be able to dictate what they think is good for animals as well as for the rest of us unenlightened people, while they want no restraint on what seems good to them, because we traditionalists don't understand the true reality of what we are; we think we can think, and we don't realize that instinct, as it always does, trumps thought. That they got to this by thought and not feeling doesn't matter; they've concluded that thought is subordinate to feeling, and therefore, it's a fact, and the rest of us have to submit to it.

But once you recognize the difference between the human world and the non-human world, then love in the sense of respect for the non-human does not mean subordinating oneself to its "will," because it has no will. We are free to set goals for creatures, and they are as perfectly fulfilled (or rather, as fulfilled as they can be) by pursuing the goals we train them to work for as they are if we leave them alone and they simply sleep and eat and reproduce.

And this implies that our relation to the environment is not a question of morals, but of values. We can submit to the reality of nature and the objects around us, and, based on our examination of the cooperation of nature, we should, perhaps. We should cooperate with nature, both the living and the non-living. But since there are no rights involved here, cooperativeness in this case means that we should respect its reality as we direct it toward our goals, not that we should defer to it as if it were another person with a mind of its own.

Thus, for instance, it was perfectly consistent with me and my dog when I trained her to bark at strangers and to eat at a certain time every day, not to snap a bone out of my hand when I gave it to her, not to beg when we were out on the patio eating, to sit when I wanted her to, to heel when we were out walking, and all the rest of it. In return, I gave her food and water and warmth in winter, and pattings and affection, which she returned a hundredfold. She was my slave, and was perfectly content with being my slave.

It would be immoral to use a human being this way, even a human being who was willing; because a human being is supposed to direct his own life towards his own goals as defined by him, not to be under orders as if his will and everything about him were outside him in the master who "knows what's good for him." No one except the person himself can know "what's good for" a human being, because the human being creates it for himself by using his own mind. When you own a human being, you degrade him to the status of an animal who has nothing but instinct.

(I should point out that some human beings--the insane and severely retarded, as well as children--are permanently or temporarily handicapped, and can't use their ability to choose without harming themselves, because they don't see that their actions have consequences other than the ones they would like to see happen. In that case, one can legitimately take over control; but this is analogous to putting a prosthesis on a crippled person. It is not that these people are animals; it's that their defects make them unable to use their intellects.)

The point is that if we're going to cooperate with the non-human environment, we have to cooperate with it as it in fact is, not make it into a kind of lesser version of humanity--still less into a god who is giving us orders, as some of the New Age people would have it, when they claim (as they did in fact) that earthquakes are the earth's response to the Republican attempts to impeach Bill Clinton and the "partisan bickering" they decry.

It is not a question of right and wrong, when we are dealing with the environment; it is a question of good and bad. We have to ask ourselves, "What will be all of the effects of these actions of mine, not just the one I would like to happen? On balance, does it seem better for me to do these actions with all of these effects, or to do something else, which will have different effects?" You and your goals are the arbiters of where the world is headed under your direction; you need not follow "evolution," as if it were some divine plan; humans are the rulers of evolution from now on. That's a fact, and if there is a divine plan, then that's what the divine plan seems to be, both from reasoning about it based on evolution up to now, and from reading about it in the Bible.

Let me illustrate by a couple of examples. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the "greenhouse gases" emitted by our machinery are causing global warming (though I have very, very serious misgivings, as I said, about the "science" that seems to indicate this). Then, before we panic, let's consider what it implies. Basically, it implies that everyone in the Northern Hemisphere has moved a hundred miles or so south. What's so traumatic about that? It means that more of Canada will be habitable, that those parts of the tropics not cooled by ocean breezes (after all, we're talking an average of a degree or two) will be less congenial to life without air conditioning. Insofar as the icecaps melt a bit, then the oceans will rise, pushing the beachfront property back; but the increase in the size of the oceans will increase the cooling aspect of the oceans and also the flora which is by far the greatest absorber of carbon dioxide--and the likelihood is that there will be a stabilization that's not traumatic or catastrophic. Further, any change is going to be very slow; and as the change occurs, the probability is that we will gradually adapt.

For instance, it's obvious that some day we're going to run out of fossil fuel. But instead of panicking and calling for the forcible introduction of electric cars (which, after all, use energy that is largely produced by burning coal, the worst of the fossil fuels environmentally--because the environmentalist wackos won't allow it to be produced by nuclear power, just because of the name "nuclear"), when petroleum begins to get scarce, the energy companies will be looking around for a cost-effective alternative, and we'll move, perhaps, to hydrogen-cell cars. The point is that there's no hurry; and the very last thing we should be doing is jacking up the price by legislative fiat, as if there were a shortage that everybody knows doesn't really exist.

Let me give another example: old-growth forests. Now in the course of evolution, it is an exceedingly unlikely eventuality that there would ever be old-growth forests, because there's such a thing as lightning and drought, and forests, as anyone in California can tell you, tend to turn into tinder-boxes which burn down to ashes at the least provocation, setting whole states on fire. And that this is in accordance with evolutionary nature is clear from the fact that some seeds of trees will not germinate except under intense heat, such as from a forest fire.

So trees burn down, and with them all the species that lived under them; and the whole thing starts all over, and the ecology is transformed.

What this means is that old-growth forests are museums of trees. They aren't "leaving nature alone"; they're the result of human intervention preventing the natural destruction of these magnificent behemoths of the plant world. And to the extent that we prevent their burning, we allow them to grow and deepen the shade under them, killing off the species that used to thrive in the light that's no longer there.

Well, what's wrong with that? Nothing at all. The question is whether we want museums of trees (I would think we would want some, to remind us of what trees can do if they're preserved from their enemies), but how many and how extensive is up to us. But let's not pretend that we're "following what nature wants" when we do this. Let's not be like that biologist who wants the park across the street from my house to be "natural," when it can't be natural, given the situation it's in. A place that has weeds growing unchecked (which is what he means by natural) has a certain kind of beauty; but it is not in itself "objectively better" than the carefully manicured gardens around Versailles. It depends on what we want; there is no meaning to "what Nature wants."

And as the burning down of millions of acres in the West during the summer of 2000 shows, there are side-effects to short-sighted "conservation" which can be positively catastrophic. Not allowing loggers to thin out the forests and not allowing clearing of underbrush turned those millions of acres into firebombs waiting to explode once we got a prolonged drought. Those who followed the "moral imperative" to "protect the forest" are the ones responsible for burning it down.

The question is whether we treat the earth in its present state as something sacred and not to be tampered with, and therefore think of things in terms of right and wrong--leading to the junk science whose purpose is to scare people into doing the right thing--or whether we recognize it as flexible, and ask what we're doing, what its effects are likely to be, and whether it's worth it to stop doing it, to change what we're doing, or to go on as we are. It's only with the latter--the stewardship--mentality that we can sit back and study what all the short-term and long-term effects will be not only on the environment but upon ourselves and our goals, and thus use our reason and not our feelings and accomplish something positive.

In places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, there's a lot to be said for reducing emissions from automobiles and factories, because of the peculiar nature of the air patterns there. But globally? Those oceans are awfully big.

And if we do look at things calmly, instead of as the New Moralists would have it, with panic at a crisis unless we do something, then perhaps we can do what makes sense, instead of the stupid things we're doing in the name of the environment, which, as I said, make us feel good because we're "addressing the problem," in spite of the fact that the letter gets returned to us for insufficient postage.

But in the last analysis, to the traditionalist who is willing to accept that there is a God, and who entertains the possibility that the Bible actually is the voice of that God speaking to us in ways he couldn't speak simply through the Book of Nature, the issue is more serious, though still not a matter of morals, or right and wrong.

There are hints in both evolution and the Bible, if you try to put both together, that at the end of history--of evolution--things aren't just going to vanish, with us existing as just pure minds, but that an equilibrium will be imposed on everything; and we, with our unchangeable bodies, will live on a new, stable earth, forever.

If this is what is facing us after that cataclysmic last day, then I suspect that the world we will live in forever (the one imaginatively depicted by John in Revelation as the city of twelves, the New Jerusalem), will be the world as we have made it to be. Just as we ourselves will be forever what we have, in our ambition, made of ourselves; so our world, our environment, will be no more and no less than what we have built it into, because the world has no built-in goal. Just as we set goals for ourselves, we are the part of the world that sets its goal for it--we are its mind and will, if you want--and so it will be what we have chosen it to be.

This puts upon us an awesome responsibility. The world that God remakes when he says, "Now I am making everything new," will not be the world we would like to have, but the world we have chosen to have. Having created us as creators, not only of ourselves, but creators--in the sense of transformers--of our environment, God has no "stake," so to speak, in what this world will be, any more than he has a stake in what we make of our individual selves; in both cases, the result (with his help) will be just what we want it to be, no more and no less.

Which means that it's up to us. Do we want a world that looks like the South Bronx, or one that looks like Manhattan? One that looks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, or one that looks like the stripped hills of Pennsylvania? I would like to see a world with cities, for all their asphalt and concrete, and farms, and parks, and I would like to see vast wilderness too; I would like to see a world without slums, without the sorry squalor accompanying the breathtaking vistas of the Yucatan. But that's my ambition. What our ambition is remains to be seen.

It's all up to us. Even the New Moralists realize it's all up to us. My problem with them is that they look on it in moral terms, and want us to avoid doing evil to the Planet, and therefore impose all kinds of self-defeating Draconian solutions on the evil they see happening, laying guilt-trips on us because we're doing what they don't like.

But if we change our attitude and become factualists, we can see the world as it is, and see what directions we can lead it in, and take realistic steps to get there, and if we don't get there all at once, there's nothing to worry about, because we're not righting a wrong, we're leading the world into a place we'd like to live in. If it takes a thousand years to get there, so be it. If all we take right now is one small step, it's a step in the right direction.