Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [7]
I was struggling to articulate a vision of social change that took us beyond social atomism and beyond “received” Marxism as well. I was influenced by environmental philosophy, Catholic social teaching, feminist philosophy and historiography. But most fun, I’ll admit, was discovering that even within the dominant, Western philosophic tradition were rich insights supporting my own intuitions and life experience. Even from Adam Smith. Yes, the same Adam Smith who many view as the Godfather of greed—the supposed celebrator of self-seeking as the engine of the economy. (Officials in the White House during the Reagan years even sported Adam Smith neck ties.) But buried has been Smith’s profoundly social vision of human nature.
Whereas in the classic Western philosophic tradition, the individual is poised defensively against society, Adam Smith perceived the individual’s sense of self and worth embedded entirely within society. Because we not only need the approval of others, but need to feel that approval is deserved, our individual well-being exists more in relationships with others than protection against others. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith pointedly reconstructed the Christian precept to love our neighbors as ourselves, writing that:
… it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour; or, what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.6
This intensely social view of our nature is increasingly confirmed by comparative sociology and anthropology. Indeed, the dominant paradigm’s notion of the autonomous individual now appears as philosophical flight of fancy! Its claim to Charles Darwin’s imprimatur is suspect when we learn that Darwin clearly believed that evolving human beings could only have expanded their societies because of a “moral sense … aboriginally derived from the social instincts.”7 Among primeval people, Darwin observed, actions were no doubt judged good or bad “solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe.” Recent studies find the roots of empathy in infancy, noting that infants react to the pain of others as though it were happening to themselves.8 And psychologists document how human expressions of fellow-feeling respond to a social context which encourages them.9 In fact, my own intuitions and experience suggest that we ignore our profoundly social nature—our need for approval and to express our feelings for each others’ well-being—only at great psychic cost.
But the environmental perspective offers a uniquely moving metaphor for such understanding of self. In 1985, I co-authored an article with environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott.10 He, more than anyone I know, views—and eloquently expresses—the social nature of human existence through the lens of ecology. His insights shaped this excerpt from our article:
Nature is not only human culture’s life support system, but its enduring paradigm as well. Human society is not simply embedded in nature. It also imitates nature in crucial ways—as the myths and ceremonies of primal peoples frankly acknowledge.
Ecological science focuses attention on relationships. It reveals that organisms are not only mutually related; they are also mutually defining. A species is what it is because of where and how it lives. From an ecological point of view, a species is the intersection of a multiplicity of strands in the web of life. It is not only located in its context, it is literally constituted by its context.
Once seen through the prism of the biotic community, then, a person’s individuality is constituted differently—not by defense against each other but in the peculiar mix of relationships we each bear to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and co-workers.11
If true,