Cruelty and Sustainability

“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals.”

- Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal

Not far from where I live in the Sonoran Desert, there is a huge saguaro cactus forest. The forest stretches for miles, and is thick with thousands of the plants, young and old. Some of these are truly majestic, towering fifty feet or more above the desert floor, with multiple arms stretching towards the blue Arizona sky.

The saguaro does not get its first arms until it is at least 75 years old or older. The many-armed giants tower over the dusty landscape and can be hundreds of years old. Yet the desert surrounding them exhibits a peculiar quality: it is devoid of other vegetation save a few small flowering bushes.

Accounting for this barrenness requires understanding the saguaro life-cycle, which was first framed within an ecological succession perspective by John Vandermeer in 1980. Saguaros are relatively fragile plants when they are small, and start their lives right next to what is known as a nurse tree. This nurse tree shades the growing cactus from the relentless summer sun and acts as a warming blanket to ward off the terrible frosts of winter. Eventually, as the saguaro grows and matures, it kills off the nurse plant due to competition for resources, and the nurse plant becomes the victim of its own beneficence.

However, as the saguaro plants reach the end of their life span, they collapse and die under their own weight. The nurse trees, having spread their seeds far and wide, grow and thrive once again. This dynamic is seen many times over as the classic predator-prey relationship of population ecology. Although the succession, death, and rebirth of the nurse trees may take centuries to play out, it happens with inexorable certainty. A similar case exists with humans and the ecosystems that support our well-being.

Time and time again, human civilizations have risen into glory and collapsed into nothingness. According to Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter, there are several sets of factors that can account for these collapses. These can be summarized as (a) depletion of one or more vital resources on which the society depends for its existence, and (b) insufficient responses to changing conditions due to internal divisions such as class conflict, social contradictions, or elite mismanagement and misbehaviors.

Our human cognitive abilities enable us to recognize more clearly problems that occur quickly: we are creatures of contrast. When change happens quickly, it is easy for us to recognize it and take action. Gradual, incremental change is a different story, most often resulting in boiled frog syndrome. We are blind until it is too late. Global ecosystem degradation is such a change, with fundamental conditions taking centuries to shift.

The Earth’s ecosystems are the only means of supporting life on the planet. We cannot simply import a new atmosphere or generate new clean set of oceans. Unlike the nurse trees and the saguaros, once these global ecosystems are depleted, damaged, or destroyed, they can be very slow to recover - and, if the damage is sufficient, some may never come back at all, and the cycle of life will be broken. The risk is that because we are blind to the global ecological impacts of the industrial mode of living, we are placing ourselves at risk for not just collapse but also extinction.

The fundamental problem of human existence according to Clive Ponting is “to find a way of extracting from the different ecosystems in which people have lived enough resources for maintaining life – food, clothing, shelter, energy, and other goods.” As successive civilizations have adopted increasingly complex technologies to deal with this problem, the unintended consequences have become increasingly severe. In today’s world, these consequences have grown to the point where they are threatening all human and non-human life.

We are killing the nurse tree, and when it dies it will not come back within normal human lifespans. We are at risk of depleting the very resources that protect us from the forces that will cause our eventual destruction. In a perverse way we are fortunate as the ecological changes we are seeing are occurring in a time span so short as to be observable by humans. In the midst of these changes, our penchant for taking action to shift our course seems ossified, caught in the unstoppable drive towards a dismal destiny of a ruined world.

With today’s scientific knowledge, we have the ability to make choices to preserve and protect the vital resources on which we depend for our very existence, and that protect us from the freezing cold of outer space and the blistering radiation from the sun. We can sustain our civilization indefinitely provided we make sensible choices. The nurse tree does not have to die in order that we may flourish.

Such positive decisions seem somehow out of our grasp. We know what must be done to preserve our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend, yet we cannot do it. We seem to be chained to a wall, and we are not able to reach out beyond our conditioned selves. We watch in horror as the machine of destruction grinds on.

Our “stuckness” is rooted in the human proclivity for cruelty. Our moral sense enables us to make both the right choice and the wrong choice: it is both our blessing and our curse. We can know what is right and good, and what is wrong and evil, and have the ability to choose to do good or evil. For example, good can be summarized in the land ethic stated by Also Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Cruelty can then be defined as choosing to do wrong while knowing what is good – for example, destroying the integrity, stability, and beauty of the world’s ecosystems.

Such destruction has been one of unkind hallmarks of human societies. The history of the world encompasses progressive waves of barbarism, with untold human suffering being dealt by the hand of man in ever more ingenious ways. Today, this suffering has grown to a global scale supported by incredibly powerful machines of death. We have advanced to the point where we can sit in air conditioned rooms and kill hundreds of people on the other side of the planet without ever having to meet our supposed enemy in person. Our machines enable us to live a sanitized existence, cleansed of the blood we are spilling. Such desensitization has become a form of machine-based absolution. We do not have to be physically present to inflict pain and death on others. Our screens forgive us our trespasses.

Our human suffering has unfortunately been reproduced a hundredfold within the world’s natural environment. The externalities generated by our linear machine-based economy pollute our land, water, and skies. Yet our computer screens and our glittering glass-filled offices shield us from the direct realization of the billions of tons of pollution we inject into the world each day, along with the concomitant death and destruction. We seem to be engaged on a deliberate path to mar the world with the ugliness of industrial civilization, destroying both the integrity and stability of the world’s ecosystems. The recent changes in ocean and atmospheric composition are clear markers of our progress on this journey.

Our choice to do evil marks our weakness. As Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm both knew, human aggression is a core part of our nature. As Albert Bandura stated, aggression can support one’s self-efficacy and reinforce one’s self-worth as having power and control over one's life. The key is to realize that we can channel our aggression into actions for either good or for evil. We choose evil because of our limited perceptions of the world, ignorance of laws and moral guidelines concerning right action, or by making a deliberate choice to do wrong. The clear majority of evil choices are made from ignorance: not understanding that the endless pursuit of material goods and having more provide illusions of happiness, when true happiness resides in a full awareness of being and existing in generative relationships with others and the natural world.

It is making the deliberate choice to do wrong in order to exercise power that is our limiting social contradiction. Within any human society, many of those who seek power for its own sake become blind to its ramifications: they become inured to cruelty. When power as an absolute goal reigns supreme, one succumbs to a fatal flaw in human nature - choosing wrong because of the need to demonstrate one's power and self-efficacy.

Individuals seeking power often rise to positions of authority in government, business organizations, and military officialdoms. Reinforced by the dissolution of affective ties to others and the natural world because of both hierarchical social norms and the physical separation created by a machine-based existence, these supposed leaders promulgate policies that result in more power for themselves and their friends while inflicting cruel outcomes on the majority. Such policies reflect increased power as an absolute devotion, reinforced by the sanitizing effects of modern technology.

When these power-seeking individuals rise to positions of influence and create social institutions, cruelty can become part of the circumstances of everyone's daily lives. The risk is that our hearts become hardened as we internalize cruelty, and eventually we come to worship destructiveness and power-seeking as the right way to live. We accept evil choices as inevitable, pressured by social convention, legal hindrances, and the dread of ostracism - of being “the other.” Our acceptance causes us to remain indifferent and passive to cruel actions while our protections against the end of birth are crumbling around us. It is these barriers that must be overcome if we are to build a sustainable world.

Our problem is that once our nurse tree dies, we will die along with most of the rest of the world. But our nurse tree does not have to die. There is no biological imperative requiring others to suffer in order for us to live. We have both the capacity to find the courage to free ourselves from the chain of illusions we have created, as well as the knowledge to build a balanced world. We can make choices for good, and create policies that support the well-being of humans and the natural world. It is up to us throw off the chains of indifference and ignorance, and to find the wisdom to create a future that works for all. 

References

Bandura, A. (1994). Self-efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71-81). New York: Academic Press.Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse. New York: Penguin Group.

Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Owl Books.

Ponting, C. (1992). A new green history of the world. New York: Penguin Group.

Tainter, J. A. (1988). The collapse of complex societies. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Twain. M. (1962). The lowest animal. In Letters from the Earth (pp.232-242). New York: Harper Collins. 

Vandermeer, J. (1980). Saguaros and nurse trees: A new hypothesis to account for population fluctuations. The Southwestern Naturalist 25(3), 357-360.