Nietzsche and Nature

I listened to two podcasts the other day with a guy called Robert Friedland, who made a powerful set of arguments about the practical necessities which underlie the shift that the world needs to make to renewable energy. The basic idea was pretty simple: if we're going to have electric cars, we need lithium for batteries; if we're going to electrify the economy, we need copper for wires. Nonetheless, the kind of environmental movements that we've seen over the last sixty years have been hostile to this kind of extractive capitalism for obvious reasons. It's probably true that when you have decades of experience in the mining industry, everything looks like it needs more metal to come out of the ground - but it does seem like the technological deus ex machina we all hope for depends on the hard work of people like Friedland as much as it does on Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion. While the latter organisations focus on conserving what is left of the unspoilt natural world and, crucially, reducing demand for natural resources, Friedland's side of the argument advocates intensifying the process of scientific development and resource extraction begun by the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. This second approach argues that advanced technology will be so efficient that we can improve current living standards while ultimately consuming fewer resources than before; technology will follow a hockey-stick curve, where coal-fired power stations and CFCs are replaced by Dyson spheres and nuclear fusion.

Neither side, however, is making a purely practical argument: the point is not simply that the other side's policies wouldn't work. Both Greenpeace activists disgusted by genetically modified crops and Silicon Valley nerds horrified by the idea that humanity might not achieve its cosmic potential are making philosophical, moral and even aesthetic judgements about how they want the future to look.

One could cast this disagreement as one of  principle versus practice: while we would like to preserve nature as much as possible, and consumerism is distasteful, we can't really force people to lower their living standards, and some exploitation of the natural world is unavoidable. However, this view is not objective - rather, it's the product of a hegemonic culture spearheaded by David Attenborough documentaries, that has successfully persuaded most people in the West that nature is not fundamentally "red in tooth and claw", but is a nurturing mother, something to be cherished and respected, a world full of fauna and flora living if not in harmony then at least in a dynamic equilibrium. Humanity, by contrast, poses a threat to that equilibrium, and as such the correct response to the climate crisis is to reduce humanity's impact on the world wherever possible, returning to some pre-industrial state of nature. But just as it can be hard for those of us who've grown up without the threat of having to fight in a war to understand the mindset that comes with that threat, we've also lost something of an older, closer relationship with nature - and that loss has given the conservationists something of a monopoly on morality.

Systems of thought which claim such a monopoly are always to be questioned, but fortunately the history of political thought provides several interesting ways to do so. This essay is going to draw on Nietzsche, Locke, and the Bible to suggest alternative ways of understanding humanity's relationship with the natural world. Even if one disagrees with their philosophical foundations, these perspectives serve as a foil or tonic to help us think better about contemporary political movements. Indeed, Nietzsche spent his philosophical career railing against what he felt to be a suffocating moral consensus: 

People in Europe clearly know what Socrates claimed not to know, and what that famous old snake once promised to teach - people these days 'know' what is good and evil... Morality in Europe these days is the morality of herd animals: - and therefore, as we understand things, it is only one type of human morality beside which , before which, and after which many other (and especially higher) moralities are or should be possible. But this morality fights tooth and nail against such a 'possibility' and such a 'should': it stubbornly and ruthlessly declares 'I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!' - Beyond Good and Evil §202

Nietzsche's own view of nature derives from two key sources. First, Nietzsche spent the summers of his most productive years in Sils-Maria, in the Austrian Alps. Living high in the mountains, exposed to the wind and ice of the trails and passes, Nietzsche stripped away some of the illusions about the dangers in nature that we city-dwellers forget. However, the intellectual driving force was his theory of the will to power: the idea that all the drives and all the organic functions in the world ultimately come down to "one basic form of will". In his own words, "​​life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting, but what is the point of always using words that have been stamped with slanderous intentions from time immemorial?" It is natural that a thing "will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance, - not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power." If we accept this idea, it's no longer possible to contrast an innocent nature with a violent and rapacious humanity. It's not just humanity that is Fallen, but the natural world too, because the will to power is in everything. Nietzsche rejects the possibility of sustained peaceful harmony with nature:

So you want to live 'according to nature'? Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power - how could you live according to this indifference? Living - isn't that wanting specifically to be something other than nature? … While pretending with delight to read the canon of your law in nature, you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! ... you want to make all existence exist in your image alone.

…

You fail to understand 'nature' if you are still looking for a 'disease' at the heart of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or particularly if you are looking for some innate 'hell' in them-: as almost all moralists so far have done. Does it seem that moralists harbour a hatred against tropics and primeval forests? And that they need to discredit the 'tropical man' at all costs, whether as a disease or degeneration of man, or as his own hell and self-martyrdom? - Beyond Good and Evil §9, §197

In Aeschylus's Prometheus Unbound, the eponymous god gives the gift of fire to mankind, claiming as a result that "all human arts are from Prometheus". Of course, Prometheus is punished for his generosity by Zeus with an eternity of torment, driving home the idea that every achievement of human culture, every attempt to step beyond the bounds of what is natural, will ultimately bring down divine wrath. Hubris will always be followed by nemesis, and thus life itself is fundamentally tragic. Evil arises when man seeks to break the harmony of nature. If one feels a distaste for consumer capitalism and a Romantic love for the outdoors, then it's tempting to find a similar motif in the climate crisis: a divine and thus natural punishment for mankind's overweening greed and ambition. 

The Christian ideal, however, is rather different. Stressing man's unique freedom and his dominion over the natural world, humanity has not really a right but a duty to bend natural forces to his own will. While the Bible criticises the sin of pride, it is not sinful simply to exert one's creative capabilities. Nietzsche was thus actually relatively close to a Christian understanding of man's relationship to the natural world, as a resource that could and should be exploited.

But while Nietzsche outwardly disdained and even hated Christian doctrine, it formed a foundation for the thinking of early modern English writers like John Locke. Locke was a founding member of the Board of Trade and Plantations, playing an important role in the government of the English colonies in America in the 1690s. In this period, he revised his Second Treatise on Government, and the famous account of property, as that with which man has "mixed his labour", draws strongly on the book of Genesis. In particular, Locke argued that after the Fall God cursed mankind to extract a living from nature, but simultaneously gave mankind the right to make such extractions. However, this grant is limited to that which we thus improve: "As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common." This word common is crucial: 

God gave the world to men in common, but since he gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. - Second Treatise of Government §34

As such, Locke's Christianity led him to believe that it was much better for land to be used in an industrious and rational way than for it to lie uncultivated. For Locke, this justified the existence of the American colonies, and yet it did not sanctify them. Locke often clashed with the colonists, not least because of his support for the agrarian law; the idea that all land not improved or settled within three years should cease to be private property. This led him to oppose the New York colonists who sought to claim more land from the natives than they could possibly settle; an Iroquois had a stronger right to land than a feckless European who would not make productive use of it, but a rational and industrial European had a divine right to cultivate fallow land. The perspective is striking because it is so different to how we now tend to see a world grown small, bound by flight paths and pipelines. Sitting at his desk in London, Locke imagined a wild continent in need of taming by reason and industry. In hindsight, it's easy to see that vision as the hubris of nascent globalisation, and it's hard to follow the chain of his reasoning unless one accepts his Biblical premises; but Locke's arguments remind us that the wilderness is not sacred. If land is better cultivated than left fallow, the answer to the climate crisis doesn't have to be rewilding; it can be intensification, making more rational, more industrious use of the land that is available. 

What I found most striking about Friedland's point of view was not so much that he made the case for mining; rather, it was the regretful and apologetic tone in which he applauded the motives of conservationist environmentalists, while simultaneously arguing that their worldview was unrealistic. On the other hand, one doesn't have to think hard to imagine climate protesters declaring that "I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!" It'd be a good thing if people like Bob Friedland had philosophical arguments of their own to support their undeniable technical experience.