Gregory James Moses, Brisbane College of Theology
Email: gjmoses@mpx.com.au
For ANZATS Conference, Christchurch NZ, July 2000
Contents:
Introduction: see below
1. The Process-Relational Metaphysical Vision
2. 'God' and 'Trinity' in Process Relational Thought
3. The Passage to Ethics and General Features of Classic Process Eco-Ethics
4. Problems for Classic Forms of Process Eco-Theology
5. Process Relational Trinitarian Theism and its Advantages for Eco-Theology
6. Implementing the Process Relational Vision
Process Ecological Theology and the Eco-Ethics which follows from it is based in a broad metaphysical vision, a characteristic which it shares with much past theology and with the ethics of Spinoza or that of Deep Ecology (esp. Arne Naess). A major part of the paper will need to be spent on explaining this Process Relational metaphysical vision, with due regard to significant variations among process thinkers. We can then make a passage from metaphysics into theology and from metaphysics and theology to ethics, look at some of the typical characteristics of Process Ecological Ethics and finally turn our attention to some of the more or less serious problems which need to be faced in order for a truly useful process ecotheology to emerge.
In other words, everything is an environmental event or else a connected series or nexus of such events. But not only that. Everything adds something to the process, everything makes a difference, albeit oftentimes oh so slight. This latter conviction is one of the features which stops the scheme being strongly holistic to the point of being totalizing. Everything is an environmental event, but it is also a little bit individual, it cannot be entirely cashed in terms of its ensemble of social relations. The other feature is a differing relation to past and to future. An event is internally related to its past, cannot be described or conceived except as a particular way of taking account of that past. But it is externally related to the future. What it is here and now is describable and conceivable apart from the way things actually work out. Certain futures are made probable by the present events, but not entirely certain, at least not down to the last detail.
The metaphysical system thus postulates different levels of natural events, the level being proportional to the quality of reception and transformation and the consequent likely effectiveness and spread of the transmission. The higher the grade event the more the capacity for taking into account the environment and responding to it in a creative fashion. On the other hand, as stated previously, what kinds of events are possible is a function of the richness of the sustaining environment. In a too poor environment the rich events might well be the first to go. Meanwhile, the quality and effective extent of the reception, the degree of creativity or self-initiative in the transformation and the likely effectiveness of the transmission are taken as capable of almost indefinite degrees in both directions, from the smallest sub-atomic events in the midst of space to God. Human and animal consciousness, in this scheme, is thus no big deal, just something which may happen quite naturally in certain rich environments. They are a particular intensification of what is going on all over the place.
Certain key people in the process tradition go on to talk in terms of Panpsychism (Hartshorne) or at least Panexperientialism (Griffin), soul or at least experience everywhere. There are other people, including this writer, who wonder whether such expressions are worth their price on the open market. What is essential to the scheme is a multi-layered or multi-level or differentiated ontology: there are different species or levels of natural event, albeit sharing the same basic structure. Everything is a particular way of taking account of its environment and a gift by nature to the future of that environment. There are no vacuous actualities, nothing which does nothing. Though certain aggregates of smaller actualities give the impression of being rather vacuous in so far as the various contributions cancel out. But there is no need to say that soul or even experience is everywhere.
There are a variety of maximal theistic versions, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, Griffin, Suchocki, the Christian Trinitarianism of Joe Bracken to mention some of them. Typically and deriving from Whitehead, God is noted as principle of limitation providing a kind of focus for the cosmic process; also as principle of possibility and of novelty within the process. There is also a fairly common division made between the Primordial Nature and the Consequent Nature of God, with sometimes also a Projective or Superjective Nature.thrown in. Roughly, this comes down to, God as Creative, God as Receptive and God as Responsive. There is also the God as Primordial Qualification of Creativity of the Belgian philosopher Jan Van der Veken, this last being accessible as something religious people would recognize as God only on the basis of particular religious experiences. This avoids turning God into just another being amongst the beings as well as recognizing 'God' as a specifically religious notion. What all agree on is belief in a God who affects all and is affected by all, affected by the fall of the sparrow in the silent spring and the flowers of the field or lack thereof and the hair on your head falling out. This is, moreover, a God who persuades and does not determine, not by any means an overgrown absolute monarch or some kind of power-mad patriarch.
While a minimal religious naturalism may be sufficient to ground some
kind of broadening of concern and discerning of worth beyond the human
sphere (Stone 1993; see also Mesle 1993), theists propose that they have
rather firmer grounds (see esp. Cobb, in Mesle 1993).
My Brisbane friend and colleague has managed to put much of this in terms of two tables, which I will not try to emulate. He himself prefers a Zen-Process variation on Bracken, the Trinity as the perfect example of Realized Emptiness, the perfect Realization therefore of Completeness and Fulness of Life. I once had my own neo-platonic process relational Trinitarian theology, so far unpublished except as lecture notes. But I presently judge both Bracken's and John Bretz's trinitarian theologies as superior to my own. So I will leave things as they are, and do nothing more on the question beyond noting that, given only the (Christian, Islamic, Jewish) experience of the graciousness of creation, process relational theism needs something like a Trinity - or at least some kind of intra-divine relational life.
We now move to the question of how one might develop an ecological ethic out of such an ecological metaphysical, strengthened somewhat by an ecological theology.
The re-visioning of ourselves promoted by the metaphysics and strengthened by the theology might, with a bit of luck, contribute something to the re-positioning of ourselves vis a vis the rest of nature, which would seem to be the key to any satisfactory environmental ethics. There is promoted an overcoming of the dualism between human beings and the natural world. We are an emergent, creatively interacting part of nature, an intensification of what is going on 'out there', whose main difference is that we know ourselves to be such. This difference brings not so much superiority as responsibility.
In relying on this, of course, we are not relying on metaphysics or ontology or even theology as such. We are relying on our vision as a sort of replacement 'rational myth', a new and hopefully more appropriate, more adapted 'likely story' to tell ourselves and to guide our action in the mess of our individual and communal lives.
There are at least two further ways of getting or trying to get some support for ethics out of our overall vision.
In rather less ego-centric, more theological language, and following Hartshorne's image for expressing his pan-en-theism, all reality is as the Body of God. God affects everything and is affected by everything, and by what happens to everything. What hurts the environment, in almost a literal sense, hurts God. In such circumstances, loving the Lord my God with all my heart and soul and strength and mind, and loving neighbour and everything else as myself are inevitably part of the same story.
This is motivationally powerful, and probably easy to communicate.
But, by merging everything so to speak in the same pot, it does tend to
lack respect for real difference and genuine otherness. More importantly,
it gives only vague guidance in the midst of making difficult decisions
in situations of environmental conflict: what should we do, beyond doing
our best to hurt God the least?
In a typical case, value is assigned usually to a connected series of natural events or processes within a certain total context, e.g. a koala colony in an old growth forest in fair ecological equilibrium. This would involve weighing up of both intrinsic and instrumental value. However, in practice I don't think anyone does a Bentham like calculation. It is more a matter of global intuitive response sharpened up or perhaps changed by further investigation of the details, with certain strong process-motivated convictions about what the world is like in mind. Eventually, there is no decision procedure. Eventually it takes a degree of phronesis, wisdom chiselled out in practice that comes from being in the right way and knowing how to use our knowledge. But see later.
One way forward would be to assign intrinsic value in proportion to quality of natural event, that is, quality of reception, transformation and transformation etc. That is, the multi-layered or differentiated ontology maps onto a multi-layered or differentiated deontology. This has a certain elegance about it. Every actuality or series of actualities or compound individual has intrinsic value, though sometimes it is negligible. There are no vacuous actualities, nor are there any intrinsically valueless actualities.
Some process people do give the impression of wanting to go this way, for example, Jay McDaniel, Susan Buck, and some earlier work by Cobb and Griffin.
The problem with this is precisely the other side of its strength: it is altogether too interlaced with the metaphysics. In addition there is a dilemma. If 'intrinsic value' is extended all the way to sub-atomic particles its assignment is either massively counter-intuitive or else seems to rob the notion of 'intrinsic value' of any useful meaning.
So process people in practice sometimes talk of sentiency or the capacity for feeling or something like that as the ground for intrinsic value, being careful to extend this sentiency or capacity for feeling or whatever as far as they plausibly can, though not necessarily all the way.
This opens up for us but the first of the problems which process eco-ethics
in both its theological and naturalistic secular forms has to face.
There are at least two considerations that might be invoked to escape the charge of continuing anthropocentrism.
Firstly, a high degree of extrinsic value can well go with low degrees of intrinsic value. This is typical indeed of creatures at the bottom of a food chain, e.g. plankton.
Secondly it doesn't follow just from A is more valuable than B that A can do what it likes with B. No, we need another premise. In addition, B has to be necessary for the life of A or something like that. However interpreted, in affluent Western countries where one can buy wholesome vegetarian food at reasonable prices in supermarkets and health food stores, this is not enough even to justify meat eating. Whereas it quite smoothly allows eskimos and aboriginees in traditional environments to eat meat, which latter is an advantage I suspect. An alleged anthropocentrism that can't justify meat eating is not much of an anthropocentrism.
The present author is still a bit uncomfortable with it. It is at this point that one might be better off talking in terms of a differentiated rather than a multi-layered or multi-level ontology, mapping on to a differentiated deontology or value assignment. It is not necessarily the case that anything they can do we can do better. While all events have a certain common event structure (everything is a more or less creative etc. etc.), there may be specific differences in how this event structure is instantiated, which differences need not in all cases map onto the same spectrum. (Cf. Plumwood 1993.) In such situations we should not talk of high and low, just different, both ontologically and deontologically. This rather spoils the possibility of calculation in case of conflict. But it never was a genuine possibility anyway.
The present author empathizes with the critics on this one. It seems counter-intuitive. Ecosystems have a species of beauty all their own. It is not just their use value for their membership that seems to count for us.
There is at least one other revisionist version of Whitehead-derived process thinking which has some prospects of solving the problem, namely the metaphysics of energy events and fields of Joseph Bracken. According to this metaphysics, fields are equiprimordial with events. There are no fields without events, and events constitute fields. On the other hand, there are no events without fields, events put themselves together on the basis of the fields in which they find themselves. Fields carry contributions made by events through time, and events clue into the fields rather than past events themselves which are not there any more to be clued into after all. Moreover, it is the fields which carry the structure across time through changes of the elements. If fields are ontologically equiprimordial, which not deontologically? This would introduce two equiprimordial species of intrinsic value, I think, and allow us with good conscience to give ecosystems as such intrinsic value.
A further way, not inconsistent with either of the above, might be to build on Whitehead's distinction in Adventures of Ideas between Beauty and the Beautiful. Beauty is the harmony and intensity of experience. The Beautiful is what contributes to the harmony and intensity of experience. One may then ask a version of Plato's famous question (or one of his many famous questions!): is the Beautiful beautiful because it contributes to the harmony and intensity of experience, or does it contribute to the harmony and intensity of experience because it is beautiful? (See the Euthyphro.)
The bottom line, I suppose, is that it may be possible to give ecosystems value in their own right, without departing too much from even the Whiteheadian process tradition.
What makes this especially paradoxical is that people on the so-called margins are precisely the ones whose dignity requires to be defended. The ones in the main line, the fully-fledged 'persons', can typically look after themselves.
The process thinker Daniel Dombrowski, in two closely argued works (Dombrowski 1988, 1997) has shown that the argument can be pushed in the other direction. Instead of saying, babies are like pigs, therefore should be treated no differently from pigs, Dombrowski proposes, pigs are like babies and therefore should be treated no differently from babies. It is not even necessary to know why we reverence babies, just that we do so (Dombrowski 1988). Given this we should also reverence pigs. Logically we should all be vegetarians, though Dombrowski admits doing the right thing in this situation may require from some saintly virtue.
Charles Birch in his recent Living with the Animals (Birch, 1987, p. 56) is careful not to commit himself, regarding it as a complex and contentious issue which it is not his purpose to go into.
I would go one step further and argue that it is a needless complication, which tends to bring the environmental movement into disrepute among otherwise sympathetic people, derived mostly from taking our theories too seriously and thinking we can totalise the field with a single system. We human beings are into all kinds of practices that we may not understand, e.g. burying the dead. Should we stop doing that, merely because we haven't been able to rationally appropriate it? Or only bury people who have living relatives perhaps? We should try for overall consistency in our various practices, but probably all that is needed is speculative consistency rather than provable consistency, that given certain not totally implausible considerations our various practices might be consistent. (For the idea, compare Peter Forrest, God without the Supernatural, Cornell Univ. Press, 1996. Or Greg Moses, "Hume's Playful Metaphysics"...)
There are indeed I think a number of considerations consistent with the process tradition which added together might give us the appropriate pause, even apart from turning us into vegetarians. For example, process people can't blithely dismiss potentiality. Potentiality is of the essence of a Whiteheadian or a Hartshornean actual entity. Being is a potential for all future becoming, "the many become one and are increased by one" etc. The future events and environment will determine whether and how that potentiality is realized, but potentiality as such is an element of what that event is. Secondly, reverence in any case is rarely for individual events, more usually for connected systems of events taken in total context. We reverence Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones and continue to require them to be respected even when they end up in a nursing home not know where they are or why they are there. It is still Mr. Smith there and Mrs. Jones, they haven't simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Finally, there is Dombrowski's distinction between the criteria for moral agency which would presumably exclude the so-called 'marginal' individuals and the criteria for moral patiency which might well include them.
If these intra-process thought moves do not work, following Peter Forrest and others (Forrest, 2000), we might be able to supplement the 'intrinsic value' criterion with an irreplacability criterion. If I destroy your cow or your pig, I might be able to make it up to you by giving you another perfectly good cow. Not so if I destroy your baby. This is also one of the things which feels wrong to us with the conclusion of the biblical story of Job. Individual human beings, including babies, have, it appears, irreplacable intrinsic value. In the remainder of the environment, this seems to happen more on the level of the species and whole eco-systems, rather than the level of individuals.
However, let's assume that this needless distraction can be taken care
of some how or other, and get back to our main line of widening in practice
our ethical concern well beyond the human species.
However, some classic forms of process theology derived from Whitehead and Hartshorne may push this to the point of making God dependent on the world in order to be God. God needs the world in order to have a Consequent Nature, God needs at least some world, not necessarily this one, in order to be God.
As with Hegel, it sometimes seems that God becomes, in a manner, 'parasitic' on the world process in order to fulfil Godself as God. To my mind, this tends to take away the graciousness of God's Creating and the giftedness of the Creation which results. This seems to go against a rather central experience in Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
It looks like we need a way to have together the experience of creation as gift and the central core Biblical conviction that God is affected by what goes on in the World Process and in the process of our lives. Process Theology does not always find such a way.
Firstly, process relational trinitarian theism considerably enhances the process relational character of the metaphysics. God even in Godself is a fundamentally process-relational reality. God is this, not because of some kind of deficiency, needing the world in order to be God. God is this, even as God. This fundamentally Process Relational Reality in turn provides a fundamentally process relational base to a process relational universe. As in classic neo-platonic panentheism, 'exemplary causality' is added to 'efficient' and 'final' causality. In its relational character, everything mirrors, to a greater or lesser extent, the relational and the creative character of God.
Secondly, it provides some argument for giving considerable value to eco-systems as such, and not just to their ingredients. There is Someone for whom reality as a whole is valuable. To impoverish the whole, either in respect of its eco-systemic complexity or in the variety and diversity of its inhabitants, is to impoverish the divine experience is to impoverish God. (Cf. John B. Cobb, in the final chapter of Mesle 1993.) This is so whether or not we are prepared to use the image of the universe as the Body of God.
Thirdly, a process trinitarian theology enables us to maintain the graciousness of creation while still having a God who not only affects everything but is affected by everything. For process metaphysics, to be is to have power (cf. Hartshorne, Whitehead). Creating, whether ex nihilo or not, therefore involves a gracious, freely chosen self-limiting. Creating to this extent is already a kind of Divine Kenosis (cf. Peter Forrest 2000, John Bretz 2000). Given already a Primordial Trinity, then, the Creative Process is an overflow and a flowing back which is truly gracious in the sense of metaphysically not necessary. It is not something that God absolutely needs. On the other hand, it may still be, might we say, probablistically inevitable. It is hard to conceive how the richly creative relational Intra-Divine Life will not overflow into the Void and give rise to a richly relational and more or less creative Cosmic Environment.
Fourthly, Process Trinitarian Theism (indeed, any Christian/Jewish/Islamic Process Theism and even some process Buddhisms) may provide us with some subtle resources for dealing with the Problem of Marginal Cases. It is no longer necessary to base all our ethics in our general metaphysics. We can now make explicit use of the theism itself. The theism as it were comes in over the top to give a kind of 'sacralization' of already discerned intrinsic value. This is whether or not we have been able to 'found' or 'base' our ethical judgement or sentiment in some metaphysical likely story.
Furthermore, we can use our theism in a kind of reversal of the Euthyphro dilemma. Because we know God values even 'the little ones', even especially the marginal ones, we know them to be intrinsically valuable in and of themselves. As we gradually put on the mind of Christ, come to see people and all God's creatures as God sees them, (or as we gradually or suddenly approach 'enlightenment') we may well ourselves come to experience them as valuable in and of themselves.
This relies on particular experiences of particular people - Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu (cf. Kachappilly 2000), perhaps Taoist..., operating in the context of living transformative praxes. So of course it is not going to help atheistic non-Christians like Peter Singer. However, there is nothing wrong with that. We are not atheistic non-Christians. Eventually it is their problem, a serious weakness in their system, if they can't find a way of reverencing the marginal members of our own species.
1. Access the situation as broadly and as deeply as possible. This step is pretty obvious. Process thinking just adds: the relevant situation consists in all living creatures affected taken in their total context, with human beings in their concrete social reality as one player.
2. Decide on what outcomes are excluded, deciding on the non- negotiables, what is beyond the pale. This was quite easy in the bottle shop.
3. Within the scope of what remains, consider together how best to enhance the harmony and intensity of experience of all creatures involved, the best integration of unity and variety, the total thriving in a rich environment. We are interacting parts of the total natural process. How can we responsibly, artistically, most creatively participate?
4. Check what we come up with in stage 3 against 2 and 1.
5. Collective communal decision, the working towards a communal reflective equilibrium, leading to implementation, which will constitute a new situation, which may stimulate a further run through the procedure.
In our process, we make use of whatever knowledges there are at our disposal, but striving always to avoid what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which is to say, confusing abstract models, e.g. from some economic think-tank, with the total concrete reality. This makes immersion into the concrete situation itself rather important. To this extent, a friend and colleague of my John Bretz has improved a bit on the method by importing Zen techniques of situation immersion at this point.
One interesting thing about this model is that it patterns a typical process event. Step 1 = Reception, Steps 2 through 4 = Transformation, Step 5 = Transmission. Or, Steps 1 through 4 = creatively taking into account our total past environment, and Step 5 = giving ourselves in ways to be taken into account by the future of that environment. To complete the pattern: the Lure of Goodness, Truth and Beauty functions as Principle of Limitation in Step 2 and as Principle of Possibility and Novelty in Step 3. We think of ourselves in our environmental concern as a process that makes a creative, responsible input into the total process under the Lure of the Divine Mystery, or something like that.
It didn't take us long to realize that our procedure was a bit naïve. Everything depends on who does it. Process ecological ethics can't be just applying principles or balancing value. It has to do as well with character transformation, with what kinds of individuals and communities and nations we are, with ingrained changes in the way we operate. Everything is a more or less creative taking into account etc., but everything depends on the how and the how depends on the who, the character, the style of the how, which is to say, with ecological virtue. This lead in our group to a kind of definition of Process Ethics: Process Ethics = striving to intervene in our own process, individual and communal and national and international, and to embed the consequences in habitual ways of behaving, in habitual ways for that process to go, lured on by ideals which themselves keep moving.
In other words, we moved from ecological consequentialism with some touches of deontology (cf. Step 2 above) to a process ecological virtue ethic. (Compare also Plumwood 1993.)
There are at least two forces to align with.
Firstly, as the Melbourne-based process-aligned Aaron Gare has noted (Gare 1995, concluding chapter), among the forces capable of competing at the moment with the supremely totalizing force of globalizing free market economics are various forms of nationalism and regionalism and localization. It makes sense therefore to align ourselves with them: think locally, act globally. There is certainly a point here. Lots of people who never think of themselves as Greenies still do lots of recycling. People do worry about the pollution of their locality even where they might claim not to worry about pollution as such. Pauline Hanson has shown us something at least, but how to rescue it from the xenophobia? The bottom line here is, start with people where they are, with what they care for.
Secondly, as has been demonstrated graphically in the recent debate about Wik and the Reconciliation process, the religions are still with us.
It is at this point that this perhaps too philosophical paper joins strongly with the theme of this Conference on Eco-Theology. Religions are still effective in the business of consciousness raising when every other force seems to fail. Religions are in the business of personal and communal character formation via various forms of transformative practice, including prayer and meditative techniques as well as rituals and narrative-based structures of various kinds. Modern Western philosophy is not much good at this. Religions do continue to serve to broaden concern, to all the human and beyond the human, to minimise the confining and limiting influence of ego, to improve the element of transformative creativity, to open us to the immanent and transformative resources in the total process. Whatever else they do, religions can well serve to focus for us the power of the Lure to Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Harmony and Peace.
Here, process thinking seems to be on a winner, in so far as it has
already a solid and well developed theological wing across Christian denominations,
and an excellent record in cross-religions dialogue, especially with Japanese
and to a lesser extent Chinese Buddhism. Indeed, this is much more solidly
developed than its more recent ecological wing, though rather easy to integrate
as the example of John Cobb in particular makes very clear.
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Process relational thought is mostly theistic, sometimes Trinitarian. This paper argues that the theistic version has more resources for ecological commitment than the naturalistic versions, and that the Trinitarian versions are better still than the unitarian or non-commital theistic.
Classic process ecological ethics relies on the metaphysics in order to advance 'intrinsic value' well beyond the human sphere, while nevertheless allowing for degrees of intrinsic value. Typically, only individuals have such intrinsic value, whereas ecosystems have usually a high degree of instrumental value. However, some varieties of process ethics may also give ecosystems intrinsic value. Sometimes intrinsic value is extended to all actualities, sometimes only to those endowed with sentiency or feeling or something like that. The admission that intrinsic value might have degrees can have certain detrimental effects within the human sphere at the so-called margins. However, such effects can be mitigated and perhaps even eliminated, particularly if we are operating with a theistic version. There still remains a tendency towards anthropocentrism in the general system, which may require some changes in both the ethics and the metaphysics. This, too, is mitigated for theistic versions.
Process thinking can well inspire practical decision making in situations
of ecological concern, and also and more importantly the transformation
of the people who make such decisions. To be truly effective however it
cannot be just an exercise in philosophy. It needs to break beyond being
just another elite discourse. It needs to align itself with the only existing
forces capable of standing up to the current global obsession with market
forces, including both nationalism and religion. In respect of religion,
process thinking can be taken as already well advanced in this regard,
having a solid theological and religious strand already well developed
and quite congenial to ecological concern.
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