Which Future? Choosing Democracy, Climate Health, and Social Justice

By David Greene

Which Future? will change forever the possibilities you imagine for the future. Relentless climate disruption and severe societal inequities threaten Earth's well-being and humanity's future. But are chaotic, dystopian scenarios inevitable? Not if we recognize our collective choices as the very foundation of these destructive forces. Which Future? presents a bold, provocative alternative to conventional thinking, based on an imaginative synthesis of 21st century cognitive, cultural, and biological sciences. First, it explains how, because human reality is socially constructed, we have the power to control our own destiny. Second, it spells out the way humanity is interconnected with nature, so that our very survival depends on keeping nature healthy. Finally, it fleshes out the full worldview of "natural humanism," built on the values of true democracy and sound natural science, a vision of people interconnected with the planet and each other, and morally committed to everyone's well-being and fulfillment. (The print edition is 241 pages.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Greene
• Release date: Jan 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987022511

Book preview

Introduction

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history

– Walter Lippman (1922)¹

I wrote this book in response to an existential threat to humanity: our planetary climate crisis. We know we must act urgently to transform the global economy to minimize carbon emissions. Yet active resistance to change, inertia, and apathy combine to defuse the urgency. So if we are to redirect society toward sustainability before it is too late, we face another critical imperative: to change human thinking about our relationship to Earth and to each other.

Which Future? aims to change human thinking, one reader at a time. First, it explains how human reality is socially constructed, so that it is clearly within our power to change our own belief systems. Second, it describes how humanity is interconnected with nature, so that our very survival depends on keeping nature healthy. Third, it presents the full worldview of natural humanism, which provides a vision of people interconnected with the planet and each other, and committed to everyone’s well-being and fulfillment.

Since the advent of Darwin, ecology, and, more recently, cognitive and cultural psychology, we no longer understand ourselves or the world as our nation’s founders did. Which Future? advances a moral philosophy grounded in 21st-century knowledge of ourselves and our planet. A multi-disciplinary synthesis, the book provides an original, contemporary rationale for the sustainability and social justice goals widely shared by progressive thinkers around the world.

The worldview of natural humanism is built on a few key premises that lead to insights, values, and principles that many people already embrace, but which are ignored or marginalized because they cannot be reconciled with the established neoliberal political regime. This book pulls these pieces together into a coherent moral framework from which I derive the kinds of institutions, policies, and practices needed if humanity is to thrive or even survive the climate crisis. I purposely stop short of prescription, believing that diverse, culturally-specific solutions should emerge from democratic deliberation.

I offer Which Future? to readers as a timely and hopeful vision of human potential, and of the scope and depth of the transformation in thinking our species urgently needs to save ourselves from self-destruction.

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The climate crisis looms over humanity and dwarfs everything else in ultimate importance. Now is a unique, unprecedented moment in history in which our entire species has a clear common interest in avoiding climate catastrophe. Such a superordinate threat should bring the global community together, and it would, if only we all perceived it the same way. Alas, we do not. The reality of climate change is too immense, complex, and abstract for most people to grasp. It is both an immediate threat and a long-term catastrophe in the making. It implicates our entire way of life, overwhelming attempts to simplify the issues. For these reasons among others, most Americans are either ignorant, apathetic, or hopeless, or they are in denial about it.

I first became aware of global warming in the 1980s, when it was still called the greenhouse effect. As years passed, it became increasingly apparent that the fossil fuel industry was actively sowing disinformation to create confusion about climate change, thereby suppressing political momentum to respond appropriately. Over the decades, worldwide carbon emissions continued to increase dramatically, while escalating predictions of dire consequences from the global science community appeared to fall on deaf ears.² Then, in 2018, a devastating report from the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change stated the overwhelming scientific consensus that the world had only about one decade left to utterly transform its energy systems or risk catastrophic ecological and social disaster.³ In response, in 2019, mainstream journalists finally began describing the reality of the situation as the climate crisis, and during the 2020 U.S. election campaigns, for the first time, some candidates referred to climate change as an existential threat to humanity.

Helping to guide our species toward an ecologically sustainable way of life is the first focus and goal of Which Future?. The second focus and goal is to accelerate progress toward justice, meant in its broadest sense to encompass the general principles of inclusion, equality, fair distribution of resources, due process, and freedom from coercion—principles that beg to be embedded in the specific contexts of racial, economic, and climate justice. The twin goals of sustainability and social justice are joined together not only in the practical sense that we cannot achieve one without the other, but also in the existential sense that both goals are rooted in relationships of interconnection and interdependence. In Which Future? I examine these principles and the moral issues they raise through the lens of humanism; specifically, the humanist foundational imperative to promote and celebrate the health, well-being, and fulfillment of all human beings. Sustainability and justice are the intertwined and complementary lodestars toward which this moral compass points.⁴

A New Moral Compass

This century’s climate crisis and glut of injustice are consequences of longstanding institutions, laws, policies, and practices of industrial civilization which will be very costly and painful to change. Moreover, and importantly, these institutions and practices are justified by conventional beliefs that give them the patina of normality and inevitability. Some of these beliefs have long histories, tracing their roots to great minds of the 17th and 18th centuries such as John Locke and Adam Smith, whose ideas are still referenced in daily opinion pieces. Authority figures routinely validate and reinforce the status quo in terms that are essentially baked into the culture. The popular word for this established regime is neoliberalism, which I use often in this book to refer to the political economy strongly favoring privatization of public resources and minimal government regulation that, in its current iteration, dates back to the start of the Reagan administration four decades ago.⁵ Mainstream media are devoted to legitimating established thinking or questioning it only within narrowly drawn boundaries. Problems are defined and new challenges are described using familiar terms and received wisdom. In all these ways conventional storytelling and beliefs serve to actively resist change. This conservative, inertial tendency is antithetical to an urgency to transform our way of life.

If urgency is required and conventional beliefs actively resist change in the face of new perils, the need for a new moral vision seems obvious. In Naomi Klein’s words,⁶

Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

In thinking about how to meet this need—about what a new moral vision should accomplish—I came to two clear conclusions. First, to integrate the imperative of ecological understanding with interconnected justice issues, we must replace the twin towers of the neoliberal worldview: the privilege of self-interest and greed at the heart of Economic Man and the notions of supremacy and domination built into the Social Darwinist view of humanity. Second, to get to the heart of the matter, we must make a clean break with the historical roots of neoliberalism and formulate the new moral system through the lens of 21st-century reality, resting on 21st-century premises.

The phrase 21st century is shorthand for all the ways that we understand ourselves and our planet differently now than our nation’s forefathers did when they cast the original die for our political economy. Our current understandings encompass changes over the last century in our knowledge of evolution and ecology (i.e., the dynamic history of our planet, and of life on earth, and how all of life is interrelated), and insights from the cognitive and social sciences (about human brains, minds, culture, and society). A moral system grounded in today’s knowledge makes different assumptions about the nature of reality, history, our planet, and our species than the corresponding prior assumptions built into the theories behind and terminology of neoliberal economic and political discourse. As Walter Lippman’s epigraph asserts, these concepts are the core elements of all moral codes.

I typically call natural humanism a worldview—another word for an all-encompassing belief system—but it could just as well be called a conceptual framework or a social, moral, or political philosophy. It is an original synthesis of Big Ideas from the cognitive, social, and biological sciences. The heart of the project was to identify the core fundamental premises from which to construct this new contemporary worldview. Premises are the essential distinguishing feature of any belief system or conceptual framework. I aspired to make these premises as self-justifying as possible by grounding them in empirical knowledge and a species-wide universality. I then used them to address enduring moral dilemmas, instinctively believing that the resulting worldview would cohere and make sense as a whole.

Core Premises of Natural Humanism

Natural humanism rests on two foundational premises: naturalism and social constructionism. Naturalism is logically prior to social constructionism because its first axiom is that the natural world is the only world that exists. The concept of a supernatural or transcendent source of truth, explanation, or virtue is solely a creation of the human imagination. Humanity is made entirely of nature. We (including our bodies, cultures, economies, and beliefs) are encompassed by and enmeshed in the natural world, continuously interacting with nature on a hierarchy of levels from metabolism within individuals through our whole species with the whole biosphere. Given this premise, the only possible grounding and source of authority for a moral philosophy is to be found in nature, including a naturalist interpretation of human needs.⁷

Social constructionism is best understood in the context of the human condition, our unique niche in nature. Humans are at once fully animal and distinctively mindful, the only species living in civilizations of their own creation. By virtue of this unique niche, a wide range of existential dilemmas are common to the subjective experience of all human beings, individually and collectively. Like all animals, our biological propensities are predetermined by evolutionary history. And, like all higher primates, humans are biologically prepared for active social, emotional, and mental lives.

However, our unique, definitive biological heritage is our capacity for open-ended symbolic representation, with which we collectively construct our own social reality in the medium of culture. Humans construct social reality (including language, traditions, norms, laws, institutions, and identities) through continuing interactions with their respective local, national, and global cultures. Although some other animals create elements of their own cultures, only humans are literally constituted by culture through their interactions with the culture in which they are raised.

At the same time, humanity is an interconnected part of nature, totally dependent on nature’s health for our existence and survival. Human freedom can exist only within nature’s constraints, which include the laws of physics, the ecological dynamics of life on earth, and our individual and species biological needs and limits. Within these constraints, human possibilities are open-ended—unlimited—which is existentially both liberating (hopes and dreams) and frightening (terror and despair). Ultimately, it is up to us to determine how our given biological propensities will be actualized and institutionalized in culture.

These premises together imply a natural unity in diversity. Through universal, species-wide inheritance all humans share the same biological inclinations, existential dilemmas, and constructed social realities. Still, as diversity is ubiquitous in nature, our species manifests great diversity among cultures, each the product of its own unique history and circumstances. As a result, individuals growing up in each culture interact with its unique blend of constitutive elements and internalize the many components of social reality in culturally-specific flavors. Individual variation within each culture adds yet another level of diversity to humanity.

In light of the intrinsic diversity among and within cultures, an additional core premise of natural humanism is the moral imperative of pluralism. From cognitive science we know there are no facts without some frame or theory within which to identify them. All frames, theories, and similar conceptual filters manifest the knower’s perspective. All knowledge is understood from some perspective; there is no such thing as pure, transcendent, perfectly objective knowledge.

Further, there can be no best or universal perspective because ultimate reality is so vast and complex, far beyond comprehension from any one perspective. Thus, all viewpoints are intrinsically limited and incomplete. For this reason, the proper grounds for valid (socially agreed-upon) knowledge must be cultural practices that embody or embrace multiple perspectives and, therefore, provide a principled basis for legitimate moral authority. Besides pluralism itself (inclusive diversity), the best examples of such practices are deliberative democracy and the skeptical empiricism of the scientific community.

The worldview of natural humanism emerges as the implications of these core premises are fleshed out over the twelve chapters to follow. These premises imply a distinctly different worldview than that of neoliberalism. In fact, they challenge its very foundations.

Challenges to Neoliberalism’s Foundations

One foundation of neoliberalism is a fixed view of human nature; in particular, the archetype of a self-interested individual. This economic man archetype has survived centuries of unquestioned acceptance among political economists and the public alike in no small part because of the underlying assumption that self-interest is inevitable and immutable.

In contrast, natural humanism posits an open-ended foundational human condition in which all humans are born incomplete hybrids of inherited emotional (animal) predispositions and unlimited mental capacities. We inherit tendencies, not necessities, and we do not inherit culture, we create it for ourselves. Because our human condition allows for an open-ended plurality of cultures, norms, institutions, and beliefs, how humans relate to the natural world and to each other is always open to new possibilities, new inventions, and new results (discussed in chapter one).

In particular, domination hierarchies and economic man institutions—the two main pillars of the neoliberal regime—are ripe for replacement by new, constructive, moral, and sustainable ways of living. These alternatives, embodied in natural humanism, are developed in the chapters to follow. The central issues to be explored can be briefly summarized as follows:

As to the first pillar, authorities in support of domination hierarchies (prime examples are Earth belongs to humans, colonialism, slavery, racism, and patriarchy) use presumptive supremacy to legitimate unequal, exploitive power and money regimes (chapters three, eight, and nine). However, as we know today, (a) humanity’s fate has always been up to Nature, not vice versa (chapter six); (b) genetically and existentially, humans are all one species; alleged superiority is a discretionary cultural relation, not a fixed biological one (chapter eight); and (c) the actual order of life on Earth consists of networks of interdependent ecologies, within which domination hierarchies exist only as means to limited ends in local contexts (chapter five).

So natural humanism rejects as illegitimate all forms of authority claimed or taken in the name of an alleged natural order or higher power. There is simply no such order or power, no such source of legitimate authority. Legitimate authority requires transparent accountability and derives from collective decisions of free and willing followers to grant such power to a leader, position, or principle (chapter three). The ideal expression of legitimate authority is self-government, as manifested in an inclusive and egalitarian participative democracy (chapter ten).

As to the second pillar, the sanctity of private property rights is the linchpin of neoliberal economics. While government power is inherently constrained by law, merchant power is unconstrained by default. The burden of proof is on the public to justify constraints on the uses of private property and the pursuit of profits. In particular, private property owners acting lawfully do not have to account on their balance sheets for externalities such as the environmental and social commons. The most fundamental costs thus ignored, and borne by the public, are (a) the destructive climate effects of burning fossil fuels and (b) the denial of social justice from the domination of political power by private capital.

From the perspective of natural humanism, we cannot survive without healthy physical and social environments (chapters nine and ten); Earth’s biosphere and humanity’s social fabric belong to everyone, the common property of our species. Rather than build a political economy around the archetype of an individual profit-seeking economic man, natural humanism embeds and interconnects all humans within the environmental and social commons that sustain and nourish them.

Both private property rights and profit-seeking could—and in the U.S. undoubtedly would—remain major elements of the political and economic system. But they may trump the interests of the environmental or social commons only if an exception is granted explicitly by an inclusive democratic process on a case-by-case basis. By default, the burden of proof is on private property owners to justify taking from common resources without prior negotiated restitution and appropriate limitations. Thus, natural humanism flips the script of neoliberalism at its core.

The issues described here arise organically at many points in the chapters ahead. The combined effect of the foundational differences between the worldviews of neoliberalism and natural humanism is a profound divergence between them, which is summarized by Table 1 in the book’s concluding chapter. However, the primary purpose of this book is not to critique neoliberalism per se, but rather to develop and justify a manifestly better, alternative way of life. Natural humanism has its own logic and moral foundation that must stand on its own feet. The structure of this book is crafted to present the best case for this worldview, from its premises and moral principles through their full implications.

A Roadmap of the Book

Which Future? is sequenced in three parts that build cumulatively to convey the full picture of natural humanism. The first two parts provide foundational knowledge of society and nature necessary to understand the moral system that integrates them. Part III presents and elaborates the moral code itself, and then imagines how a natural humanistic society might function.

The book begins with chapters on Culture, Sense Making, and what it means to say that we effectively live in our Belief Systems. Part I as a whole explains the social construction of reality and introduces many topics that will be brought up again later, including existential dilemmas, paradigms, and a central issue of natural humanism, identifying the sources of legitimate authority. The key takeaway from Part I is that because human reality is socially constructed, we are not so much inheritors of a given world as creators of it. We can replace today’s dominant but dysfunctional neoliberal worldview by changing the way we think about ourselves and the world. Social constructionism is a truly empowering perspective.⁸ Embracing our role as co-constructors of our own belief systems energizes us to take on challenges ahead.

Part II contains four chapters about how nature works, how humanity fits