ELEPHANT TO DANILA:
Amazing to discover someone reads this stuff. I have a factual point to
make about butterflies.
> DANILA:
> ..... However, your argument rests on assuming that
> social policy decisions will bring either "marginal improvements to human
> life" vs. "global ecosystem breakdown." But rarely are decisions that easy
> to make (the Kyoto climate treaty is an exception).
ELEPHANT:
No, too true: things are rarely that simple. To put it another way, I'm a
lot more 'simple' than they are. So are intellectuals in general. Any
prescription will, if only in virtue of being a linguistic rather than a
dynamic entity, have this failing. I suppose that's a reason for resisting,
wherever possible, the temptation to let our static patterns, including
intellectual ones, run away with us. We've gotten so far down this road
that an indian mystic holism is probably not a valid way of running the
economy just now. But still, we should be careful and cautious where we
can.
DANILA WROTE:
> For example, a person
> who owns some wild land that is the ecosystem of an endangered butterfly
> wants to use it for farmland. Here the benefit to humans seems greater
> than the loss of the butterfly; after all, there are many butterflies and
> as far as I know they aren't specialized for different functions.
ELEPHANT:
Actually they are, which tends to be the reason they risk extinction. Some
butterflies eat only a particular plant in the caterpillar stage, and there
are varying degrees of dependance on sometimes quite rare flora. Sometimes
the plant in question, after years of human encroachment, has gotten so rare
that finally one farm, or one highway development, is enough to obliterate
it, and the butterfly, from the face of the planet.
Platt would probably point out that things go extinct every day in the
normal course of things, and he'd be right. He might add that if the global
ecosystem has let this plant-butterfly subsystem get down to an acre and a
half with no noticeable ill effects on the world as a whole, then there is
nothing at stake in it's extinction. This is an attractive argument, except
that proves too much. The acre and a half situation is something alot of
species are on their way too with our help, so the argument I'm conjecturing
on Platt's behalf could apply to about half the species you care to mention,
and if you do apply it to all those species, there wouldn't be much left to
keep the system going, or even to call a 'system'. Remember that the
situation that we've inherited is something that's been worked up over
millions of years, and something which we still don't completely understand,
however great we are at landing on the moon. It's rather like an eight year
old child (let's say he gets top marks in all his classes) being given his
grandpa's pocketwatch as a present, and opening it up to see how many bits
he can remove before it goes dead.
Butterfly V. Human beings: no competition: the human being wins every time.
But what I'm saying is that we just don't understand things well enough to
know whether it is a case of Butterfly V. Human being. We don't know how
well the butterfly's existence, or rather the existence of thousands of
species whose moral situation, individually, is indistinguishable from that
of the butterfly, is linked to our own. It might, for all we know, be a
case of Butterfly & Human being V. numbskull 'intellectuals' and
agribusiness 'experts'. The precautionary principle; that's the long and
short of it. What does the precautionary principle tell us to do in any
specific case? Well that's why the UK has such interminable public
enquiries. We ought to have more.
I guess Prisig was saying something similar when he talked about the folly
of intellectuals opposing social norms just for the sake of it, as if
soceity were something dispensible: the enemy. Instead, what we should do
(if we want to call ourselves 'intellectuals') is remember how necessary
social order is, and try, with proper modesty about our knowledge, to
'tweak' it so that is cooperates with the existence of the intellectual
level as a whole - and not, mind you, with every crackpot intellectual
pattern we can come up with (even facism, anti-intellectual as it is, is an
intellectual pattern - you don't have to be consistent to be nasty.). I'd
favour a similarly careful intellectual attitude to biology, because, if
anything, biological order is more necessary to the intellectual life than
social order. Erst kommt das Brot, dan kommt die Morale.
Pzeph
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