Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (15 page)

I want to call attention to the direct causation in the typical case. Moral action is learned as freely willed single actions by a single individual that directly result in a clearly defined outcome. Strict father morality makes one tend to pay special attention to direct causation over and over throughout one’s upbringing and beyond.

The nurturant parent model, on the other hand, tends to pay attention to systemic causation. Empathy and responsibility have their effects over a period of time and a range of situations. Children learn positive attachment via regular complex interaction with a parent, in which they observe and mimic empathic and responsible behavior.

A nurturant community (“It takes a village”), where groups of people cooperate to serve the community, plays an important role in moral development. The actions of the whole population
(a complex system) have an overall systemic causal effect on the moral formation of the child.

Morality is not just obeying particular directives. Morality inheres in systemic causation, judging via long and wide experience what makes things better for people and acting accordingly overall.

Discipline is required not just to act responsibly in cases of one-on-one interaction or individual initiative (direct causation) but also to learn to notice in a systematic way what tends to help or harm others.

Character is the ability to discern through empathy how to operate in a complex social system so as to help and avoid acting in ways that harm.

Moral directives of course exist, because certain moral situations tend to recur: Be protective, be fair, be respectful, use your talents, be joyful (so as to be more empathetic), be cooperative, be honest and trustworthy, be open.

But the focus is not on direct rewards and punishments for individual acts. Good and bad things happen to you depending on your ability to function nurturantly in your community. Your feedback is complex and part of a system. And you learn to notice complex systemic causality.

This difference shows up as a moral and political difference. Conservative moral philosophy makes individual responsibility uppermost, while progressive thought centers on social and ecological, as well as individual responsibility.

Every ecosystem is a complex system governed by systemic causation. Old-growth forests, for example, are enormously complex ecological systems—not just habitats for owls. Their value is, in
part, spiritual: Each old-growth forest is a wondrously complex ecology of supreme value in itself that reflects the magnificent complexity that governed our evolution.

The issue is not just saving owls. Owls are symbolic. They eat rodents. They live in trees. Dead trees decay into nutrients for the soil, which gives life to other plants, which feed songbirds and other animals.

Such forests help define our identity—our animal nature. They tell us what it means to have co-evolved as animals with a huge variety of plants and other animals. The fact that it is a complex system governed by complex causation is part of its inherent value. It is part of environmental freedom—the freedom to connect with, commune with, and enjoy nature.

Strict father morality comes with the idea of the moral order, with man over nature, people over animals and plants—with the idea that nature is there purely for profit, to be exploited, not preserved. That is why conservatives frame the issue as owls versus people. The conservative frame of the moral order gives the answer: People are more important than owls. Trees are there for our profit.

Profit, moreover, is taken in the narrow sense of direct causation: cut down the trees (direct causation), sell them (direct causation), and do it efficiently by clear-cutting to maximize profit—for logging corporations, their management, owners, and investors.

But when systemic causation is brought into play, our understanding of profit changes. Forests prevent flooding, which destroys homes. Natural beauty brings tourists, who spend money on local businesses. The wealthy prefer vacation homes in and near forests, and they too spend money there on local businesses. That raises property values. Living and working near forests is healthy and enjoyable. “Profit” from forests need not mean just cutting down trees for corporations to sell.

Conservatives tend to approach ecological issues in terms of
direct causation—short-term jobs lost, profits lost. For what? A few owls. Progressives tend to look at ecological issues in terms of systemic causation over a long history and an indefinite future. Cost-benefit analysis uses direct causation implicitly. Do a calculation over a reasonably compact circumscribed region, a short-term starting and ending point, with only certain measurable things entering the calculation, with the values translated into monetary terms and based on the short-term corporate profits and costs. It’s all direct causal thinking, not the systemic thinking required by ecological issues.

Conservative ideology questions the significance of global warming and even questions its existence. Global warming is the granddaddy of all systemic causation issues. Without a grasp of systemic causation, it cannot be comprehended at all. It is not surprising that it is conservatives, not progressives, who are in denial over the existence of global warming.

Hurricane Katrina is a perfect illustration of systemic causation and the freedom issues that arise from it.

We know that the strength of a hurricane depends on the amount of heating over the surface of water. As a result of global warming, the heating of the gulf waters has been rising steadily over the past few decades. The rise in 2005 indicated, via statistical correlation, that the heat of the gulf would produce an extraordinary number of class-four and class-five hurricanes. A certain percentage of those hurricanes head toward New Orleans. With more and more violent hurricanes in 2005, the odds were high that a class-four or-five storm would hit New Orleans. The warning came well in advance. But it was complex and systematic,
not a direct prediction of a specific storm with a particular force on a particular date.

The issue was moral and political action. The Bush administration ignored the warnings. Increases in the odds of a class-four or-five hurricane hitting New Orleans had been predicted for years. Hurricane experts noted that the levees needed repair. Funds were allocated—and then cut by the Bush administration and designated instead for two directly caused acts: the Iraq War and a specific tax cut, mostly going to the wealthiest Americans. Political ideology, under the cognitive governance of strict father morality, ruled the day. Direct causation won out over systemic causation.

The right-wing attack on science is not an attack on all science. The sciences attacked are those that rely the most on systemic causation: evolution and global warming. There is no attack on Newtonian physics—no attack on billiard ball causation, conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, or even gravity (you drop something, it falls).

I wondered for many years how conservatives got away over and over with the bad apple defense. Take Abu Ghraib. We know that the people who carried out the torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and elsewhere were working from guidelines prepared by higher-ups, perhaps even at the level of the secretary of defense. Investigations have shown the systematic involvement of people in the military high command. Yet only some of the people actually doing the torturing have been tried and punished. The higher-ups have gone scot-free, on the bad apple defense: It was just some lower-level bad apples that caused the trouble. Why?

The people prosecuted and punished were only those involved in unitary direct torture. They were not people in a system of torture policy, all of whom played a causal role. Systemic torture policy is pooh-poohed and ignored by conservatives. It seems not to fit their system of thought.

The distinction between systemic causality and freely willed direct causality occurs repeatedly in many disputes.

• My
  wood burning isn’t responsible for the woodsmoke pollution in my city.
  

• The water taken from the river for
  my
  farm won’t kill off all the fish in the river.
  

• The old-growth redwood
  I
  am buying for my deck won’t kill off the old-growth redwood forests.
  

• My
  smoking won’t give you cancer.
  

In each case, the problem is systemic causation to which everyone contributes a little freely willed direct causal action that, in itself, has no noticeable effect; but the little causes in a system add up to a huge cause.

Conservative populism, as discussed in
Chapter 8
, makes partial use of direct causal reasoning, pooh-poohing the progressives who are reasoning systemically and empathetically in terms of how the freedom of others is violated through systemic causation. Should you feel guilty for your small direct act that, in itself, adds up to little? A sin, in the typical case, is disobedience to a clear moral directive performed in a freely willed single direct act. A sin is something you have individual responsibility for. Where there is massive systemic causation that you contribute
a tiny unnoticeable part to, is that a sin? Not from a strict father perspective. That’s one of the reasons that conservatives talk about “environmental wackos.” They tend not to count small systemic contributions as sins or immoral acts because there are no discernible consequences of the single freely willed direct act.

A typical example is the “What would Jesus drive?” campaign against SUVs. Here is the text of a progressive Christian anti-SUV ad from the January 2003 edition of
Christianity Today:

This ad campaign originated with the Evangelical Environmental Network, publishers of
Creation Care
magazine. EEN is concerned with getting progressive Christians to understand the moral imperative of environmental issues—saving God’s creation, cleaning up pollution, and preserving the environment.
One of their challenges is getting evangelical Christians to comprehend systemic causation and that it involves individual choices, which hence are matters of individual moral responsibility. Though the ad is overtly about SUVs, the issue is symbolic, intended to raise the general issue of individual responsibility for care for the environment.

Specifically, the ad raises the religious question of whether you are morally free to pollute, or whether pollution, by causing harm, impinges on the freedom of others, and hence you are not morally free to pollute. Is your small freely willed contribution to systemic pollution a sin?

The right-wing fundamentalist responses make fun of the very idea that contributing to pollution could count as a sin. If you want to get into heaven, you should avoid the real sins, things the Bible says not to do, the freely willed directly causal acts. Polluting doesn’t count as sin because, first, it is not a direct sinful act, and second, because pollution is the natural state of the earth since the Fall and you shouldn’t expect it to be pure.

Here is Terry Watkins of Dial-the-Truth Ministries:

Another response showing that contributing to pollution isn’t taken as sin is belittlement via punning. Here is Terry Watkins again:

The fundamentalist response makes a joke out of the very idea.

The libertarian response is interesting in another way. It reframes the question in terms of the market and consumer choice. Here is William L. Anderson of
The Free Market
, the Mises Institute monthly:

Framing the choice in terms of the market removes moral responsibility. The market is seen, via metaphor, as both natural and moral—moral because the invisible hand (its natural mechanism) guarantees that it will maximize benefit for all. Operating within the market is therefore not harmful to anyone and cannot interfere with the freedom of others. This is free-market freedom at work. The act of choosing could not have been a sin simply because it is in the market—a market-based choice, not a direct violation of a biblical commandment. In the market, the issue of sin is moot—you cannot sin by buying an SUV.