“The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.”
That’s not really scripture but rather a sentence from An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, the 2022 book I wrote with Wes Jackson, cofounder of The Land Institute and an early innovator in regenerative agriculture. Even though we weren’t divinely inspired, I think it’s worth repeating:
The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
That’s not a nihilistic rejection of morality. Wes and I agree that human actions can and should strive to reflect moral principles and that we need a deeper conversation about those principles and actions, now more than ever. We simply suggest that when talking politics, especially about the multiple cascading ecological crises that we face, more humility all around would be helpful.
If we are to create just and sustainable societies, we must contend with geographic and biological determinism, which is a way of saying we must be clear about how we got here and face harsh realities about what lies ahead.
Let me illustrate this another way, with a story I heard from Wes, which he heard from his friend Wendell Berry. In a small town, a guy who was not known for his sophistication or intellectual ability—what some might call “the village idiot”—came upon two men digging a large hole. “What you doing?” he asked. “Obviously, we’re digging a hole,” they replied. “Why you digging that hole?” The answer: “It’s where we’re going to bury all the sons-of-bitches in this town.” The man’s response: “Who’s going to cover them up?”
That story hints at my approach to the question in the title of this talk: Who’s to blame? We should be careful, remembering that many traditions advise humility, such as “Let they who are without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). “There but for the grace of God go I”—or, for those of us who aren’t believers, “There but for luck or fate go I”—is a good touchstone when we are tempted to claim we are certain that we know better or act more ethically than others.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before going further with “who,” let’s be clear about “what.” Blame for what?
Today, I mean “blame for everything that is going wrong these days,” and there’s a lot going really wrong. Our species is doing a lousy job of designing and maintaining large-scale societies that are consistent with basic human dignity and a sustainable long-term human presence on the planet.
The immediate objection might be the use of “our species,” given that not every member of the species has contributed to those problems or has the same power to influence outcomes. Some small-scale societies in human history have been consistent with dignity and sustainability. Some people in today’s large-scale societies work to further those goals. More on this later, but for now, please remember our scripture: The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
Today I would like to work my way through three different levels of analysis about blame, rooted in my radical feminist, left politics and ecological understanding.
One place to lay blame would be the individuals who make decisions that predictably lead to human suffering and ecological degradation. That would include politicians who pursue policies that maintain wealth inequality and reject funding basic services necessary for a minimally decent life. That would include corporate CEOs who put profit before the health of ecosystems on which our lives depend. This approach assumes that our troubles are the product either of especially bad people making decisions or of generally good people making bad decisions, whether out of ignorance, greed, or both.
But as a good leftist, I know we should go beyond individuals and blame systems that reward those kinds of policies, such as capitalism and nationalism, tainted by racism and sexism. If we were to throw out the bums—that is, the politicians and executives we believe are making bad decisions—without changing the systems of illegitimate authority and the ideologies of dominance, the new bums running things would respond to the same incentives to produce the same problems.
That’s where most good leftists stop, with a conviction that changing economic, political, and cultural systems is the ticket. That’s where I once stopped, when I was a good leftist. Perhaps because as I have grown older I have become less dependent on unfounded hope, I have tried to face the intractable nature of our problems and try to understand the larger forces that shape our world: geography and biology. We have to grapple with determinism to understand the past and the present, and to give us a shot at a future.
Determinism is a dirty word in many circles, in part out of fear that it undermines a sense of responsibility and autonomy. If people think our collective fate is locked in by forces beyond their control, why bother trying to change things? I take up this question in a new book coming out next year, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, but for now I’ll offer a quick response. I think that if we ignore those larger forces, we’re doomed to fail. The reason to move beyond blaming individuals and systems is not to avoid our political and moral obligations but to come to grips with the world we live in and the kind of animal we are. Ignoring aspects of reality that are inconvenient for our ideology is not a winning strategy.
We all have ideas about how to contribute to a better world, but no one knows which ideas will prove most important.
First, geographic or environmental determinism, the idea that a society’s cultural, political, and economic development is determined by its geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Starting with a 2020 article, I have been asking a simple question: If we accept—as we should—the anti-racist principle that there are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations, then why are human cultures in different places so different? Unless one argues that the differences are the product of supernatural forces, such as a God or gods, the only plausible explanation is geography, climate, and environmental conditions. We are one species, and there are no significant genetic differences beyond superficial physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture (and, in some cases, susceptibility to disease based on ancestors’ region of origin). Therefore, there’s no reason that humans would have created such different cultures around the world except for differences in landscapes that shaped their evolutionary history. No one doubts that about food and clothing—people in tropical rainforests don’t eat or dress like people in the Arctic because of different geographies. Is there any reason that the forces that shape food and clothing choices would not shape other aspects of culture, such as moral and political systems?
Second, biological determinism. Wes Jackson has long suggested that it’s important to understand life on Earth as “the scramble for energy-rich carbon,” reminding us that every organism, including Homo sapiens, evolves to maximize its ability to acquire and use energy. We need to accept that we are animals, not Animals+. By that, I mean that as animals we are of course different from other creatures (as all creatures are different from one another) but that we are not ontologically special, even though our cognitive and linguistic capacities are unique. The claim of specialness leads people to think of our species as Animals with a capital A, with an extra special plus, whether that status comes from God or evolution. But we are ordinary animals, engaging in the scramble for energy-rich carbon like all others. We have the capacity to curb the drive to maximize energy extraction, of course, especially once we understand the negative effects on us and the ecosystems on which we depend. But the evidence indicates that it’s not easy to stop scrambling. What Wes and I called “the temptations of dense energy” are powerful.
My point is simple: If we care about humans and nature, we should try to understand human nature. Some say that true human nature is compassionate and collaborative. Others say that human nature is greedy and self-interested. Obviously, human nature includes all these traits. Throughout time and across societies, humans have acted on all these aspects of our nature. Asserting that some traits are our “real” nature and other traits are somehow secondary is dangerous—all are part of human nature, of the way we really are. We can try to devise social institutions and practices to foster behaviors we think are positive and inhibit those we think are negative, but that requires understanding human nature, not ignoring it.
A side note: Today I’m not going to weigh in on free will, one of the oldest and most contentious debates in philosophy. Whatever one’s position on that question, we can acknowledge the role of geographic and biological determinism in setting the parameters that we operate within.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting we give up on judgment. “Judge not lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1) reminds us to avoid hypocrisy. But living in community requires us to make judgments about all kinds of things, including the ethical principles that animate our actions. As we make and enforce rules for decent behavior, however, it is important not to be judgmental, to claim that we have captured the moral high ground. Perhaps it’s best if we stop asking, "Who’s to blame?” We are more likely to advance human dignity and ecological sustainability if we focus less on “Why are those people so bad?” and more on “What forces shaped this outcome?” We can make that shift and still demand of each other accountability and answerability—accepting the consequences of our actions and doing our best to explain why we took those actions. But we can do it without arrogance.
One more thing that I’m more aware of as I have aged: Explaining in detail why things happen is really hard. That’s obvious, but easy to forget. We can work to identify forces at work in the world and, when possible, change social structures to deal with those forces. But our attempts at understanding human affairs will always be incomplete and inadequate. We will never come up with laws of human behavior as we have laws of physics. Theories in the social sciences will never have the explanatory power of theories in the core sciences. Our explanations of history are, at best, educated guesses. Complexity—in the world around us and inside our own heads, complexity beyond our comprehension—means that the certainty we seek is unattainable, another reminder of the need for humility.
But in the absence of certainty, we still must act. In the struggle for human dignity and ecological sustainability, we make our best guesses at the strategies and tactics likely to be most effective. I’m not suggesting that we stop taking those choices seriously, only that when we think we are right, we should remember that the moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
Let me speak more personally. When I was younger, I was quick to tell others what strategies they should embrace and what tactics they should use. Today, I’m less sure I have the right answers, or sometimes any viable answers at all. Even if I had answers that I was convinced are correct, I would be careful about lecturing others.
None of this means that individuals should not be accountable for their decisions, or that social systems are irrelevant to outcomes. I think I’d make a better president than the current occupant of the White House. I think there is no decent human future if we can’t transcend capitalism. But I don’t think I could solve most of our problems, nor do I think democratic socialism could. I think we are up against human nature. Geographic determinism helps us explain how we got here, and biological determinism helps us understand why it will be hard to escape the traps we built for ourselves.
Throughout history there have been, of course, many societies with ways of living that were consistent with a long-term human presence. For 95% of Homo sapiens history, and 99% of the genus Homo history, we were gathers and hunters who lived in relatively egalitarian societies and did comparatively little permanent damage to ecosystems. But after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the steady increase in the human population and hierarchical systems forever changed that.
Today 8 billion humans live in high-energy and high-technology societies. No society in human history has ever had a blueprint for how 8 billion people can live in such a world. No society has developed lifeways that can sustain 8 billion people at the current aggregate level of consumption. The best of human social arrangements—those that have produced some measure of dignity and sustainability—never had to scale up to 8 billion, and there’s no reason to think that’s possible.
I’ll close with one assessment I feel confident about: The only human future I can imagine is “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and stuff. To deal with the temptations of dense energy, we need to agree to limits. I don’t know any politician or political activist in the mainstream saying that. I have never heard anyone on the right say that. And most of my comrades on the left either avoid the question or explicitly reject that answer. Across the political spectrum, most people are betting that miracle technologies, beyond anything we can imagine, will make it possible for humanity to continue its present course, what Wes has long called “technological fundamentalism.” But relying on miracles doesn’t have a great track record, and fundamentalism is always a dead end.
Summing up, what I’m not arguing: Nothing I’ve said here should be taken as rejecting the need for political organizing today. Resisting the current regime in the United States is essential, because people are suffering and ecological damage is being magnified. The threats to democracy are real, and action to defend political freedom is important. Whatever disagreements I have with my comrades or more moderate folks are relatively unimportant in the face of deepening government repression and emboldened reactionary movements.
Summing up, what I am arguing: In the short term, we can ask who’s to blame for policy decisions that make things worse and apply pressure that leads to what we hope will be better decisions. In the longer term, we can identify the weaknesses in social systems and advocate for what we hope will be better systems. But if we are to create just and sustainable societies, we must contend with geographic and biological determinism, which is a way of saying we must be clear about how we got here and face harsh realities about what lies ahead.
Along with the immediate emergency there is an ongoing emergency. We should face the short-term threats to justice and democracy today that come from a specific political formation and the long-term crises that threaten democracy permanently. Nothing I’ve said requires us to ignore the fact that a Trump-defined MAGA Republican Party is dangerous on many levels.
But to emphasize, one more time: The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted, because collectively we face hard choices that have no easy solutions and may not have solutions at all. We all have ideas about how to contribute to a better world, but no one knows which ideas will prove most important. Our best bet is to support each other in any efforts based on a commitment to dignity and sustainability.
As we do that, we should remember the 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, in which Walt Kelly’s Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
