It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worth-less, in community life.
In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage.
In the land of elsewhere free#
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The Community Concept All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in meeting such situations. An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but no obligations. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. The Golden Rule tries to integrate the individual to society, democracy to integrate social organization to the individual. Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society. The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals the Mosaic Decalogue is an example. It was simpler, for example, to define the anti-social uses sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullet and billboards in the age of motors.
The complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increase with population density, and with the efficiency of tools.
Politics and economics are advanced syrnbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been re placed, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. An ethic, philosophically is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action in the struggle for existence. Its sequence may be described in ecological as well as in philosophic terns. The Ethical Sequence This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only. The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus' Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong. This hanging involved no question of propriety. When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his house-hold, whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.
0 kommentar(er)
