Sustained

Today in Environmental Ethics we ask if a sustainable civilization must at some point, possibly the point we passed the day before yesterday, impose limits on its own growth. Or whether it must acknowledge nature's ecological limits. But because whatever is sustainable is not necessarily good, we must also ask what in our present ways of living we ought to cease sustaining.



I say: sustain life, diversity, renewability, survival, and ultimately the conditions of human flourishing. Stop sustaining consumption for its own sake, work for the sake of consumption, environmental degradation and destruction for the sake of the work-consume-work-consume cycle of "growth."

We were talking Aristotle in CoPhi, he'd have something to say to us about real growth and flourishing, and how our infatuation with Gross Domestic Product and the like under-serves our greatest potential for arete, excellence, virtue in the deepest sense. He'd side, I'm pretty sure, with the Bhutanese and others who've proposed better measures like Gross National Happiness.

But he'd challenge us all to think more deeply than American pursuers of happiness typically do, about what happiness is really all about. Eudaimonia, I love to say, does not mean you work hard, consume excessively, and then you die. It means you only begin to live when you give up the false conceit that living successfully means getting and spending, depleting resources and accumulating consumer crap.

We're like acorns and oaks, but with a sense of self and an awareness of possibility and choice. We're happiest in the fullest eudiaimonic sense when we've indentified and then commited and strived to achieve our ownmost virtuous excellence  in every facet and dimension available to us... and have done so in a harmonious community of our peers.

"Success"--What's that, Willy James? “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.” So he told Time Machine inventor H.G. Wells. Just wish he'd not confused things by calling Pragmatism a quest for "cash value." Metaphors can enlighten but can also mislead. Point is, successful living does not correlate with your bank balance or your contribution to Jeff Bezos's bottom line.

So to answer my first discussion prompt today, Yes. I do think there are inherent "limits to growth" that should constrain cultural and personal behaviors that cannot be sustained indefinitely. As one of us pointed out in class the other day, many of us would need 3 or more earths to sustain the consumptive lifestyles we've so casually fallen into.

But here's something positive the pandemic's brought about, if only temporarily: the personal practice of mine that from an ecological standpoint has most troubled me, these many years of my employment by the big school nearly an hour down the road, has been halted since March. My daily fossil fuel burn, my commute down and back on I-24, has halted in its tracks. When we go back to "normal" I'm going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a bus commuter, even though it will lengthen the time of my commute.

Or else we're going to have to revisit a move.

But I'm still skeptical that either of those personal lifestyle changes, or any lifestyle changes no matter how prevalent across our culture, will really address the greatest threats to a sustainable civilization. To do that, we've got to go after those with a vested interest in fossil fuels. We've got to keep their reserves in the ground.

I'm skeptical in the sensible sort of way about that, not the Pyrrhonic self-devouring way. That's what we'll begin talking about today in CoPhi. Is it advisable, or even possible, to go through life without firm opinions? Is it a promising strategy for happiness to "free yourself from desires and not care how things turn out"? No and no. We've got to desire a sustainable and gratefully-inheritable home for ourselves and our successors. We've got to care.