Micah Tillman

May 8th, 2008 by Micah Tillman

I’ve got a new article up at The Free Liberal. You can read it here.

Posted in Culture, Environment, politics

9 Responses to “A Wall between Environment and State”

on 08 May 2008 at 9:29 am1Amanda

Micah, this is a great article. I’ve been reading things that are similar to what you wrote, mostly apologetics (in defense of a Christian worldview, obviously!). It is simultaneously amusing and disheartening that it seems that *some* who argue against religious influence don’t realize *he/she* is subscribing to a “Valuer” in another sense.
on 08 May 2008 at 3:46 pm2jeffsdeepthoughts

Fascinating reading.
Somebody (Hick, maybe?) listed several characteristics of religions and classified idealogies (such as communism, some forms of fascism and some types of laissez-faire capitalism) which satisfied some of these requirements as pseudo-religion. I think that some environmentalisms qualify as pseudo-religion as well.
The qualifications:
A) Moving people from self-centredness to reality-centeredness.
B) A promise of a better existence by moving making the move to reality centeredness.
(I guess in the end then it ends up being self-centered to not be self centered, or something, but this is a digression.)

It does seem to me significant though, that most thinking adherents of religion would agree that there is an experiential, individual, subjective element to religion. I think (but maybe I’m wrong) that most people wouldn’t think that they can objectively argue that there religious beliefs are true.
Environmentalists might be engaging in bad science, but it’s still science, I think. Most would claim that there beliefs are rooted in science.
Of course they have to make ethical decisions based on these, and here I suppose it looks more like religion. But I do think it’s more logical for government to erect a wall between religion and government than environmentalism and government… either the kind-of light bulb I use does or doesn’t impact the Earth. The answer to this question is much more black and white, I think, than the answer to the question “In what sense did Jesus incarnate God?” (I’m not saying that the former is more important, I’m simply saying that the lightbulb question is more easily settled by referencing evidence which is universally available.)
on 08 May 2008 at 3:54 pm3Micah Tillman

Thanks Amanda!

Indeed, the “environmentalism as religion” argument has a long history, and I’m just getting in on it now. Often the way I work through an issue for myself is to write about it.

For instance, before writing this article I hadn’t fully realized that the tension between government and religion occurred because they involve differing worldviews (i.e., they don’t share the same prime valuer).

Still working through the various issues, though.
on 08 May 2008 at 4:06 pm4Micah Tillman

Jeff–

Interesting.

My argument in the article is that all worldviews have the same structure. They all center on a source of value (a “prime valuer”). What differentiates worldviews is primarily the type of prime valuer they involve.

My claim is that governments are formed on the basis of a worldview whose prime valuer is neither a Deity nor the environment, and therefore that both religion and environmentalism enter into the same tension with government (whether or not environmentalism is a religion).

Whether religious or environmentalist worldviews are or are not scientific (in how they work themselves out, beginning with their prime valuer) is not what leads to the conflict between (and separation of) those worldviews and government.

The conflict arises because the places that environmentalism and religion begin (their prime valuers: the environment and the deity[ies]) are different from the place that government’s worldview begins.

Government’s worldview is closest to humanism, I think.
on 08 May 2008 at 7:02 pm5Andrew Stevens

I have never found the question “How can Humanity be good when humans are so bad?” to be particularly troublesome, and my ethical philosophy is not a terribly humanist one. Humans are bad compared to what? The Problem of Evil is a problem because God is supposed to be all-good and the world clearly isn’t. But nobody claims that humans are all-good and the argument that humans are particularly bad doesn’t seem very strong to me. Yes, yes, gas chambers. But those are troubling not because they’re particularly evil (the 2004 tsunami killed 294,000 within a few days and caused untold more suffering), but because humans did it in acts of volition and humans generally don’t commit that kind of evil. It is “inhuman,” so to speak, or “brutal” or “inhumane.”

“Nature,” Rose Sayer said in The African Queen, “is what we were put on earth to rise above.” Man does not always successfully rise above Nature and strive toward the Good, Truth, Reason, Humanity, or (shudder) the State, but he is more successful at it than any other creature on the planet or (as far as we know) the cosmos. There is no need to believe in the “perfectibility of human nature” to continue to espouse humanism.
on 08 May 2008 at 8:03 pm6Micah Tillman

Andrew–

I have never found the question “How can Humanity be good when humans are so bad?” to be particularly troublesome, and my ethical philosophy is not a terribly humanist one.

If you’re not a humanist, then I’m not entirely surprised that the problem of human evil doesn’t seem to pose a problem for humanism to you. You have less at stake in the argument.

Humans are bad compared to what?

To what they should be. To Goodness. To Excellence. Etc.

The Problem of Evil is a problem because God is supposed to be all-good and the world clearly isn’t.

Indeed.

But nobody claims that humans are all-good and the argument that humans are particularly bad doesn’t seem very strong to me.

But many people claim that people are basically good. A few are even as optimistic about their fellow humans as Robert Heinlien.

Against both these groups, I’d claim that humans are generally imperfect and messed-up, and that this is evidence that Humanity (the essence of humanity, what it means to be human, the Platonic Idea of the human) itself is flawed.

This makes me wonder what a worldview which took Humanity as its prime valuer would actually look like. But you’re not a humanist, so I shouldn’t burden you with answering that question.

. . . humans generally don’t commit that kind of evil.

Indeed. Thank goodness. But humans generally aren’t anything to write home about. They aren’t worthy of being put at the center of a worldview as if they were the source of value.

There is no need to believe in the “perfectibility of human nature” to continue to espouse humanism.

If humanism means the belief that humans are the most important thing in the world, then humanism is clearly false. All humans are flawed. Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Excellence, etc. are more important.

If humanism means that the essence of humanity (”Humanity” with a capital H) is the most important thing in the world, then humanism is difficult to believe. I’ve never met anyone who instantiated a human essence that was worth calling the source of value. I don’t believe such an essence exists.

Perhaps you’re working with a different definition of humanism?
on 08 May 2008 at 10:48 pm7Andrew Stevens

Mr. Tillman, I certainly agree that if we define humanism in the way that you do, then there are serious problems with it. Nonetheless, your view that it cannot be maintained assumes its falsity from the beginning. Let us take, for the sake of argument, your definition as true. It is then, within the humanist schema, not possible to weigh humanity against anything else and find it wanting since the essence of humanity is assumed to be the most important thing in the world - by definition, it cannot be found wanting against anything else. In other words, you are saying that the ex-humanists were never really humanists in the first place. I would tend to agree. I don’t think that humanism under your definition is even a possible philosophy.

However, I actually find that most so-called humanists view the good of humanity as their teleology. I.e. they are actually striving after the Good, not the Human. Humanity is their answer to the question “good for whom?”

I have no idea whether humans are basically good or not, but this doesn’t seem relevant to me. (I am, by the by, at least as optimistic as Mr. Heinlein. If that means that I believe that humans are basically good, then so be it. It certainly does not mean that I believe humans are perfect, or even perfectible.) Of all species we know of, humans are the ones most capable of good (and the one which attains it the most often) and I have to deal with the world I actually live in, not some perfect world of my imagination. I can easily imagine humans as a better species. It doesn’t take any imagination at all to imagine them as a worse one; we need only look around.

“”Yes, there is weakness, there is frailty, but there is courage also, and honor to be found in men. But you will not see that.” -Boromir, Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring

I’m not saying that you yourself are particularly guilty of cynicism about humans here, but the ex-humanists you describe generally are. I have a reflexive distrust of people who are cynical about humanity. My mother-in-law would recite as a mantra to my wife that “you can’t trust anyone except yourself.” She said this because, of course, nobody could trust her; she was (and is) always looking out for Number One. I know there are people who are trustworthy, honest, decent, just, and kind. I wonder about the trustworthiness, honesty, decency, justice, and kindness of people who don’t seem to know this.
on 09 May 2008 at 5:05 am8jeffsdeepthoughts

It seems to me that there are a wide class of issues around which a very fine line differentiates the starry eyed pollyanna from the died-in-the-wool cynic. Unlike people closer to center (and probably reality) both the pollyanna and the cynic are keenly aware to whatever X could be. The pollyanna focuses on how amazing achieving that will be. The cynic focuses on the gulf between what the current state of affairs is and what he’d like it to be.
Rather consistently with Mr. Tillman’s original hypothesis, we see both cynics and pollyannas as rather unlikely bedfellows in both religious and enviromentalists camps.

Micah, I wonder if I shouldn’t have stated my original point more in the terms of your original position. It seems to me that both the state and enviromentalists come to see the prime valuer through fairly similiar methods. Theoretically, these methods are universal, objective, atleast partially scientific. Religion reaches it’s prime valuer through quite a different method. It seems to be more likely that the enviromentalist and the governmental sort will come to see more similarities in their prime valuer.
I’m also curious how agnostics and atheists might feel about this terminology. In so much as valuer implies one who values, aren’t you begging the question a bit? Could an atheist say “I agree that I have a prime value, but this “thing” does not have the capacity to value anything else, it is not conscious and capeable of valuing things?”
on 09 May 2008 at 8:27 am9Micah Tillman

Andrew–

Fine response. I’m not sure I have anything by way of rejoinder to add.

Jeff–

There is an important ambiguity in your talk of “coming to see” and “reaching” the prime valuer. If you mean, “finding out what ways of living, what entities, what attitudes, etc. the prime valuer gives value to,” then there may be (some) differences between how religious people try to discover these things and how politicians and environmentalists try to discover these things.

But the initial choice of a prime valuer, the insight that you have discovered the source of all value, your “coming to see” that the thing which stands before you (mentally) is the prime valuer is neither objective nor scientific.

The system which is produced by this choice of prime valuer can be tested for consistency, the logic of your grammar (given what people usually mean by “value”) when you say, “Thing X is the source of value!” can be checked. But these are after the fact.

There is nothing more objective or scientific about the way a person comes to the realization that persons are the source of value (the origin of government’s worldview), or that the environment is the source of value, than there is about the way a person comes to the realization that God is the source of value.

Your ultimate principles cannot be proven. If they could be, then they wouldn’t be ultimate principles. There would be something more ultimate on the basis of which they would be provable.

With regard to the issue of whether “valuer” implies personhood:

I would have put things in terms of a “prime value” a while back, but have changed my mind since then. Such terminology would require one to identify value and the entity which one has labeled the “prime value.” And that can be problematic, in some cases.

Take for instance, if we identify the property of divinity with “the prime value.” That would mean that nothing can have value if it doesn’t have divinity. And that would mean you’d be stuck with either saying that only gods have value, or saying that everything with value is a god.

Some people may be willing to go one of those two places. But if you use the terminology of “valuer,” you have the option of seeing the “prime valuer” as the thing which, above all other entities, gives value to things. And this description will fit both persons and non-persons, without forcing you to identify the source of value with value.

I would have preferred to use term “prime envaluer” (the “primary entity which envalues — or ‘gives value to’ — other entities”), but didn’t want to have to explain what I meant by “envaluing.” *grin*

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