An Apologia by Colin Tudge
Many thanks to everyone who commented on my blog of September 11 suggesting that we need a new political party – “The Renaissance Party”, aka the RP. By far the majority were favourable though there were objections of various kinds to which I would like very briefly to respond. Thus:
** Some argued that a new political party at best would muddy the already turbid and turbulent waters and detract potential voters from the parties that are already on side, at least in spirit, and leave a vacuum that would rapidly be filled by Reform, or some other niche party of the Right. Instead, say the doubters, we should seek to set up a movement within an existing party – most obviously within the Greens.
But, I suggest, if we seriously care about the future of life on Earth, including human life, then we need to take the natural world far more seriously than we do. The Greens come closest — but at least in their present form in the UK, they are not green enough. For as I have suggested many a time and oft, to be truly secure (or as secure as it is possible to be) we need to give equal billing to the needs of society as a whole, the needs of individuals, and the needs of the biosphere. The fates of all three are inextricably intertwined. To these ends we need to cultivate the virtues of Compassion, Humility – and Oneness: truly to regard the human race as one big family and to regard other species as our fellow creatures (or as Robert Burns said, “our fellow mortals”).
Some members of the Green Party clearly do feel a sense of Oneness but the party as a whole seems to have lost sight of it. The new leader, Zack Polanski, is doubtless a good chap but his attitude to the biosphere seems to be conventionally anthropocentric. He has stressed the need to combat climate change by moving away from fossil fuels, and to curb deforestation and so on. But there is no feeling (or none that I can discern) that the natural world should be treasured for its own sake; that it is a privilege to share the Earth with what Miranda in The Tempest called “so many goodly creatures”; that indeed life is sacred. In truth, we cannot in the end avoid disrupting the natural world, but as the Buddhists (among others) insist, we must strive to keep the damage to a minimum. Unless measures to conserve the natural world are underpinned by mindset that is biocentric or indeed Gaiacentric then they are bound to fall short. We need to develop – or re-awaken – the sense that the gratuitous destruction of the natural world isn’t simply undesirable, isn’t simply a crime, but is a sin, an offence against the cosmos, or as some would say, against God. Wanton destruction of the natural world should not simply be unlawful. We need it to be unthinkable. Taboo.
There’s a paradox in here too. For if we seek only or primarily to conserve the natural world for our own benefit, then the natural world will continue to decline; and if we seriously want the human species to survive in a tolerable form beyond the next few decades, then we need to take far better care of the biosphere than we do, because we need wild nature to an extent and in ways that we hardly begin to understand; and if we want to keep nature safe (or as safe as is possible) then we cannot continue to think and act as if we are the only life form that really matters. In short, it is in our own selfish interests to think and act unselfishly (which of course applies to social life too). People like Trump and Farage are a million miles from understanding any of this. And alas, not even the Greens seem fully to have grasped the full implications.
Indeed, care of the natural world should be at the centre of all our strategising, alongside the care of each individual and the society as a whole. And it seems that if we take this idea seriously then we need a new platform from which to proclaim it.
** In the light of all this too one good friend of ours has said she wonders whether we intend to set up a new political party or found a new religion. In truth, many people seem to treat their own favoured political / economic ideology as a religion, whether it be Marxism or neoliberalism or some other ism. But isms are not fundamental. They are human inventions. Most fundamental I suggest are the “bedrock” principles of Morality, which I take to be the virtues of compassion, humility, and the sense of Oneness: and of Ecology, which aspires to tell us how the world really works, and how the creatures within it (including ourselves) interact. In other words, a sense of what is right, and a sense of what is real; a sense indeed of what really matters. The details of the RP’s thinking, the economic theory, the technologies and the day to day practices, are firmly rooted in the bedrock. Indeed the RP is not a religion, but it springs from the same deep metaphysical roots. (This whole notion needs further discussion at some future time.)
** Then again, is it realistic to seek to introduce new approaches into the thinking and the policies of political parties that are already well-established, with their own ways of looking at things? Why should we expect the Greens, or the Lib Dems or any other established group to welcome upstarts like the Renaissance Party? They all have enough to get on with already. Better by far to establish the RP as a force in its own right and then, if it seems desirable, to approach one or other or perhaps more than one of the established parties as potential partners. Otherwise, we will be obliged to go to them cap in hand and perhaps waste all our energies knocking at their door.
Here we might learn from evolution. Big populations tend to remain more or less unchanged over long periods – at least as long as conditions remain reasonably constant. Genetic innovations are simply swamped. Change happens when smaller groups become isolated, or semi-isolated, for whatever reason, and genetic mutations have a chance to become established. Then, at least sometimes, and probably often, the altered sub-population re-integrates with the main group and all then benefit from what Charles Darwin called “hybrid vigour”: the serendipitous merger of complementary forms.
** Finally (or at least, it’ll do for now) the RP, if and when it gets going, need not get in the way of other parties or candidates that we don’t want to interfere with. Existing parties in particular locations often cooperate for particular reasons or else stand down to make way for others with acceptable ambitions who seem to have a better chance. The precedent is well established.
My general feeling, however, is that governance as a whole needs re-thinking. What we have now in more or less every country is a struggle for more or less supreme power between rival gangs of politicians, mostly of narrow education, often badly informed, and each espousing, sometimes unto death (their own or other people’s), some obviously inadequate ideology. Clearly, this modus operandi will not do. If it did, the world would not be in such a mess.
It is essential, too (a sine qua non indeed) to make democracy work – democracy as opposed to populism. In particular we need to invoke what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”. Some doubt whether those angels really exist. They surely do, but for one reason or another they have in large part been forced into hiding. We need to make the world safe for the better angels to emerge.
To be continued …
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