MOTH Governance

MOre Than Human

A transition to the Anthropocene — the Human Age — means that previously it wasn’t the Human Age.¹ All ages that have gone before were non-human dominant. Humans fit into a larger whole, from when they started to exist (evolve) at all. To keep hold of some wisdom and reality in making our transition, we should keep hold of MOTH, the More-Than-Human.

In grad school in the ’90’s, I studied environmental science from both an evolutionary and ecological perspective. Ecological science informs conservation (since the species and systems ecologists were studying kept getting wiped out from under them), and conservation science informs public policy, including funding. From environmental policy it’s natural to shift into environmental ethics and the philosophy behind why nature should be preserved.

Even back in the day, there was a clear distinction between anthropocentric ethics and biocentric ethics. There’s plenty of concern for the environment to go around, but an anthropocentric ethic centers around human welfare. Functioning ecosystems, natural places, thriving species, and the physical planet itself (its geology, climate, soils, waters) all serve as resources for human use. “Use” need not be exclusively materially consumptive. It includes recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, even “existence value.” I may never see the Antarctic personally, but it’s valuable to me nonetheless that it exists.

Contrast anthropocentric with biocentric ethics. Non-human creatures and natural entities have moral status, they have value, ethical standing — maybe even legal standing or rights — irrespective of human use. Bring whatever meta-ethical framework you like: Kantian (rights-based), utilitarian, etc. to ground this claimed moral standing.² The point is that there are ethical obligations not to harm or destroy non-human beings even if humans didn’t exist.

The dilemma that captivated me most at the time, to the extent I even wrote a doctoral dissertation on it, was the logical inconsistency I thought I saw between evolutionary principles, which through and through underly ecology as a science, and ecologically motivated biocentric environmental ethics. As I saw it a biocentric ethics would require altruistic human behavior. Anthropocentric ethics, by contrast, where humans are self-interestedly concerned with environmental values could be evolutionary adaptive enough. Biocentric ethics would be hard-pressed to evolve or continue to exist since they would be maladaptive and (ultimately) make their holders go extinct. Of course, I was well aware that “ethics” are not genetic traits subject to heritable variation and natural selection! To try to make sense of the conundrum, I got all caught up in theories of cultural evolution — not Dawkins’ infamous “memes” but my graduate advisor’s far more sophisticated work built upon population genetics models.³

All that to say, there’s a philosophical/scientific problem, now fairly deeply buried in my personal timeline (or so I thought), that — I just found out — has capacity still to strike close to home.

---

My recent interests — as regular readers know — have to do with democracy (and history, economics, political thought) as practiced in the Anthropocene. How are humans going to be good, collectively?

Coinciding with the material shifts of Anthropocene, there is the well-known political trend in modernity, post-Enlightenment, toward democracy, toward participatory government by “the people” — however controversial democracy’s well-functioning has become in recent years. Democratic “reform” for me thus includes questions not only concerning the everyday functioning of our politics (for example here in the US, not to mention around the world), but also of whether and how democracy as a recently-emergent political system is going to be able to handle — if it can — the challenge of human planetary dominance in this new age. Collectively, how are we going to be good?

Part of my preoccupation is to look beyond election reform and voting (why is democracy always reduced to voting as the only, or the most salient, activity of a people?) to things like citizen’s assemblies and deliberative democracy or Hannah Arendt’s wider philosophy of human labor, making, thought, and action.

Imagine my surprise when old and new utterly collided in an essay by

DemocracyNext

founder

Claudia Chwalisz

:

⛰️ Governing with the more-than-human world

The post links to the full PDF version of her essay (discussed below), which is an agenda-setting discussion paper prepared for a gathering to be held this month at The Hague. A subsequent paper is to follow.

---

Inspired deeply by a 1997 book by David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Chwalisz offers a provocative reflection on what it might possibly mean for there to be More-Than-Human governance in a democracy. She asks,

• What does ‘more-than-human’ even mean?

• Why should we care?

• How could we do this in practice?

Her reflections are tentative and questioning, not determinative or prescriptive. Thankfully she eschews simplistic (downright silly) suggestions such as to “place a plant at the deliberation table.”

Deeper foundational principles are at stake, and a different mode of human perception of place. These principles and perceptions bridge directly across and connect the human experience of being part of Nature as a whole (pre-Anthropocene) with the human experience of democracy (now contested, when we need it the most) — and vice versa.

As I started writing, the connections suddenly seemed obvious. Our relationship with the living world comes forth in questions about belonging, connection, borders, citizenship, time, place, and community. These are all the foundations behind ‘democracy’, upon which our institutions, practices, and rituals get formed. Without a solid foundation, we cannot have a solid democracy.

At a time when there is widespread consensus about ‘democracy in crisis’ all over the globe, going back to the fundamentals about agency, trust, connection, belonging, curiosity, and other relational elements is essential. Expanding that beyond the human-centric lens to recognise we are in relationship not just with each other but with the living world - that we are not separate to it, but a part of it - is equally essential.

Source: MOTH Governance pdf, p. 8

I’m not sure about the paper’s tentative conclusion re: what might be done in practice. Chwalisz lists three main options (p. 21):

1. Rights-based: A legalistic approach to expanding legal rights to elements of the living world like rivers and plants, as well as animals.

2. Expanding representation: Creative approaches to finding ways to ‘represent’ the living world in human deliberations and decision-making processes.

3. Artistic practices: Theatre and other arts-based practices that create opportunities for people to embody and ‘put themselves in the shoes of’ other aspects of the living world, without it being necessarily in a decision-making context

These don’t sound much different from what I was reading and thinking about back in the ’90’s as biocentric ethics. It will be interesting to see what the conference comes up with and what the follow-up paper might propose. In any case, as long as it doesn’t become too flaky or esoteric, I’m heartened to learn of the MOTH-governance initiative.

Please do have a read of the whole essay and share your impressions.

---

In closing, at another point in Chwalisz’s reflection, where she’s pulling directly from David Abram as inspiration, I found myself again experiencing some déjà vu. She quotes from Abram’s book (p. 16 in the pdf):

“For at the very moment that human populations on every continent have come to recognize the planet as a unified whole, we discover that so many other species are rapidly dwindling and vanishing, that the rivers are choking from industrial wastes, that the sky itself is wounded. At the very moment that the idea of human equality has finally spread, via the printed word or the electronic media, into every nation, it becomes apparent that it is indeed nothing more than an idea, that in some of the most ‘developed’ of nations humans are nevertheless destroying each other, physically and emotionally, in unprecedented numbers – whether through warfare, through the callousness of corporate greed, or through a rapidly spreading indifference.”

At the very moment when…

I would reverse the order of these juxtapositions. At the very moment when we discover that species are vanishing, rivers are choking, the “sky itself is wounded,” at that very moment humans on every continent have come to recognize that the planet is a unified whole — and that it’s in our hands, that we are fledgling moral agents with power to act for good or ill. At the very moment when even in the most ‘developed’ nations humans are still destroying each other through war, greed, and indifference, the idea of human equality has finally spread, via the printed word or the electronic media, into every nation. Democracy is a standing system, which we can shore up or throw over.

I have long believed — and this is a religious belief, grounded in faith in the Christian God — that humans are supplied with the “solution” to a problem precisely when it finally (exhaustingly) becomes apparent to them. Call it salvation in extremis. The shocking thing is that the answer is as hard to perceive as the problem, and it will lie right there in the very perception of the problem itself.⁴

My favorite example comes from the Copernican revolution. In the early modern period, at the very moment when humans become capable through the invention of advanced instrumentation, when we become powerful enough technologically, to see and even to aim for the stars, what do we find out? Precisely at that moment, we find out that as a species, on this planet we now dominate, emerging into scientific modernity, priding ourselves on Enlightenment, embracing the secular discard of archaic, primitive, mythical gods and every earthly Power greater than ourselves, precisely at that very moment, we find out that, as a species, as a planet, we are not the center of the universe.

We are mere mote.

And there, there, is MOTH.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

1. It’s probably time I attempt to get my terminology straight. Geologists define the big time periods this way:

• An eon is the largest geochronologic time unit … There are four formally defined eons: the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic.

• An era is the second largest geochronologic time unit … There are ten defined eras: the Eoarchean, Paleoarchean, Mesoarchean, Neoarchean, Paleoproterozoic, Mesoproterozoic, Neoproterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, with none from the Hadean eon.

• There are 22 defined periods, with the current being the Quaternary period. As an exception two subperiods are used for the Carboniferous Period.

• An epoch is the second smallest geochronologic unit. There are 37 defined epochs and one informal one. There are also 11 subepochs…

• An age is the smallest hierarchical geochronologic unit … There are 96 formal and five informal ages.

• A chron is a non-hierarchical formal geochronology unit of unspecified rank…

Source: Wikipedia

The Anthropocene had been proposed to be an epoch, following the Holocene, Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene, and Paleocene, all within the Quaternary and two prior periods, all within the Cenozoic era from about 66mya (million years ago). The ‘cene’ comes from the Greek kairos meaning “new,” and the identifying part or prior epochs corresponds to the following not-terribly-enlightening descriptors: whole (holo), most (pleisto), more (plio), less (mio), few (oligo), dawn (eo), and old (paleo). Thus prior to the Human Epoch (had it been approved) there was: the wholly new, the most new, more new, less new, few new, dawn of the new, old new. Thanks, geology. That’s so helpful. (“Cenozoic,” by the way, means the “new life” era.) I’m going to go with “age” for describing the Anthropocene from here on out: “the humanly new.” Geologically speaking, it’s the smallest unit. Unspecified “chron” will not do.

2. To take a simple example, Peter Singer’s “animal rights” are actually based on a utilitarian calculus that recognizes animal suffering. Since animals are sentient beings (they clearly are capable of suffering), their pain or pleasure must figure into the moral calculus. Human sentience may count for more in the calculation, but numbers count, and the contribution of animals adds up.

3. My advisor was Peter J. Richerson, who worked with his colleague Robert Boyd on what’s come to be known as Dual Inheritance Theory. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Jan 2024 issues of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions feature their work in the context of the Anthropocene!

4. Theologically speaking, we’d be in the realm of appearance, manifestation, revelation: apocalypsis, theophaneia, anthropophaneia.