Liberal intellectuals have been peddling the idea that "global elites" are destroying the earth because of their "greed." They have been pointing the finger at the investor class and saying, "If only you understood how morally bankrupt and unjust your behavior is! Can't you see the brutality of this system?" Fundamentally, they imagine that the crisis of our world situation is caused by the fact that people are not "evolved" enough. I've even heard that we need to "de-volve." By framing the struggle in these terms they are falling into a trap.
Western intellectuals, whether liberal or conservative, have been brilliant in turning to cultures outside the West and explaining the myths that held those cultures together. However, when it comes to turning this type of analysis to the West the intelligentsia balks. They have said there can be no anthropology of the West because where there is no myth there can be no anthropology. They argue that our behaviors are natural, that our "reality" has been instituted by Evolution and is, therefore, not a culture at all. When the theory of Evolution was applied to purely organic species, like animals, scientific understanding of the natural world was emancipated. However, when applied to humans, Evolution is half mythic, half scientific.
The idea that Evolution brought this culture into existence emerged out of the intellectual upheaval of the late 18th century. Specifically, the narrative of Evolution enabled the bourgeois merchants and traders to challenge an order of truth that manifested power in the hands of the landed nobility. Out of Evolution, this concept of "Man" was invented, defined as a natural/purely biological organism that competes for his well-being, on the model of a natural organism. (This, of course, is the belief that Darwin would make absolute in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man.) Implicit in this new definition of Man was its conceptual Others, including non-whites, homosexuals and women. While Evolution was a discourse of liberation for the bourgeoisie against a regime of truth that had instituted the early modern state, this narrative is now anachronistic. As we can see, the narrative of Evolution is foundational to the hyper-competitive free market system that both creates and normalizes poverty.
In the terms of Evolutionary discourse, the rich have proved themselves more genetically selected than the poor. That so-called blacks, or non-whites in general, live in proportionately more poverty makes absolutely logical sense within the discourse of Evolution.
Equally, the destruction of the environment makes logical sense in terms of the West's discourse of Man as breadwinner. Our democracy is a breadwinner democracy-environmental policy will necessarily reflect the interests of those who can afford to feed it. Socialized in the ethno-class terms of Man, we, the West, will continue to destroy the environment and continue to be brutal to those within our species. We move towards unparalleled global catastrophe. The environmental movement cannot save our global habitat except by redefining our conception of what the human actually is. And therefore we are forced to move beyond the biological absolutism of Evolution.
In time, the social and environmental justice movements will recognize that we are struggling against the same system. Evolution is this system's foundational programming language. Those whom we would attack as the "greedy" are actually the embodiment of what it means to be a good man or woman according to this culture's criteria. The rich have proved themselves the selected within this social order's regime of truth. We cannot change them within the terms of their order of knowledge. Evolution, as it is applied to humans, was invented to assert the power of the bourgeoisie.
Thankfully, this foundational concept of human Evolution is not based on truth or science. Evolution has only pre-programmed our species to auto-institute its social order through narrative and language. Just as a spider spins a web out of itself and then lives on the web that it has spun, we humans are always socialized within the belief systems we have created for ourselves. Realizing this fugitive truth is our human imperative. It will cause the ground of this culture to crumble and Man will disappear like a face drawn at the edge of the sea.
You can e-mail Matt Hamburg at mrhamburg@stanfordalumni.org
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2002
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited