Survival of the Fittest Renamed “Sustainability”?
Apr 9th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 2 Comments |
One of the reasons I’m liking our new church is that the services often give me things to think and write about. Not being in political line with the congregation makes it interesting. But I’d often rather be annoyed by people I disagree with than by people I agree with.
I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s easier not to feel associated with annoying things.
Anyway, our pastor used the word “sustainability” on Sunday, and it got me thinking. We all love sustainability. Just like we love “green” and “clean.” Slap “sustainable” on the front of something and that automatically makes you feel good about it.
I hate being manipulated.
But I do like feeling good.
Anyway. I’ve always been disturbed by the tendency that evolutionary thinking has of working its way into morality. Specifically, “survival of the fittest” is no basis for ethics. And yet if that’s “the way of the world” — if that’s how things are “naturally” (and what’s “natural” is automatically good, right?) — then the invasion of morality by SOTF thinking is inevitable.
So I asked myself, “What does sustainability mean? Something that is sustainable is something that can last. It doesn’t have a built-in end. As opposed to unsustainable things which can’t last.”
“So what is sustaining but ’surviving’? And what is the call for sustainability but the privileging of things that last longer? Isn’t the preference for sustainability just the preference for survival? Isn’t the sustainability movement just a nice facade for introducing ’survival of the fittest’ as morality?”
Evil, for instance, seems pretty sustainable. It’s been around a very long time, anyway. What’s so great about things that last?
Ultimately, the sustainability issue has to do with the question of which activities work against the environment/planet and which are more cooperative therewith. So the preference for sustainability is actually the result of valuing more fundamental things.
And that is what saves the sustainability from being a nice way of saying “survival of the fittest.” But it’s funny how many ontological and axiological assumptions can be built into a single word.
“Something that is sustainable is something that can last. It doesn’t have a built-in end.” Is there a non sequiter (spelling?) between those two sentences? I’ve always viewed sustainabality as something that is not self-destructive, self-sabatoging, etc. For example, I might say that a ministry was self-sustaining at a church, meaning it was generating all the revenue it needed to survive. This ongoing sustainiability does not relate to it’s lifespan. Such a ministry might be ongoing, alternatively, though, it might only be planned on for a year or a month or an hour.
” Evil, for instance, seems pretty sustainable. It’s been around a very long time, anyway. What’s so great about things that last?”
People (Can’t name any names off the top of my head, sorry.) have observed that evil is ultimately parasitic. In the short run it might survive, but viewed from sufficient distance, evil is ultimately self-destructive, it seems to me.
I’d go so far as to posit that sustaianabality exists in inverse proprortion to the level of evil in a thing.
Based on this view
Sustainability is another one of those poorly defined buzz words from the pedestal. Love, justice, and equality are also some of the more popular. All have noses of wax to be twisted as the speaker deems fit for his own purposes. But, hey, it’s for the children so it’s gotta be good.