If environmental degregation is the particular "crisis" to be addressed 
(although it does not seem to me to loom as the most critical), we 
probably should recognize that this is a dynamic process, at any point 
of which there is an equilibrium between supply and demand.   It is 
easy to fault the suppliers, for they are the "they," not the "us."  As 
I suggested before, "they" drill for oil because "we" (my family) have 
several automobiles.

Such an equilibrium between two forces may be changed by altering 
either the supply or the demand.   Are we to suppose that universities 
may educate suppliers to drill less for oil to fulfill demand?  Are we 
to suppose that we may prevail upon governments to restrict production 
(at a time when rising energy costs already threaten political survival 
of some governments)?  What is the function of education, and the role 
of educators, in addressing this issue?

I suggest that we may more readily affect the demand side--not 
immediately, of course, but in the long haul--by educating the public 
in such practical matters as use of contrception to control population 
growth (contra some guardians of public morality), but even more in 
changing cultural values.  Consumerism and material trophy collecting 
is rampant, devouring resources at an alarming rate while producing 
monsterous exess of waste material.   Plastic wrapping of products 
alone uses vast quantities of the diminishing oil supply.

I think it is in the realm of values, rather than of governmental 
regulation, that educators may be most effective.


On Oct 11, 2005, at 12:07 PM, Nicholas Maxwell wrote:

> Dear Babette,
>  
>                     Some further thoughts concerning whether 
> knowledge-inquiry or greed is responsible for our current problems.
>  
>                     I agree with you, of course, that today's 
> academics cannot be held responsible for our current global problems.  
> But then that is not what I said.  What I did say is that modern 
> science and technology have made our current global crises possible.  
> If the scientific revolution of the 17th century had never happened, 
> then or later, we would not now have global warming, lethal modern 
> warfare, rapid extinction of species, etc.
>  
>                     Actually, in one of my publications I go further 
> ("Can Humanity Learn to Become Civilized?", Journal of Applied 
> Philosophy 17, 2000, pp. 29-44; and
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001709/).  There, I declare 
> that humanity is faced with two great problems of learning: learning 
> about the nature of the universe, and learning how to become 
> civilized.  And I go on to argue that we have solved the first great 
> problem of learning (when we created modern science) but have not yet 
> solved the second one.  "All our distinctively 20th century disasters" 
> I go on to argue, "have one underlying cause: we have solved the first 
> great problem of learning without also having solved the second 
> problem" (p. 30).  And in a footnote I say this:
>  
> "It may be objected: it is not science that is the cause of our global 
> problems but rather the things that we do, made possible by science 
> and technology.  This is obviously correct. But it is also correct to 
> say that scientific and technological progress is the cause.  The 
> meaning of "cause" is ambiguous.  By "the cause" of event E we may 
> mean something like "the most obvious observable events preceding E 
> that figure in the common sense explanation for the occurrence of E".  
> In this sense, human actions (made possible by science) are the cause 
> of such things as people being killed in war, destruction of tropical 
> rain forests.   On the other hand, by the "cause" of E we may mean 
> "that prior change in the environment of E which led to the occurrence 
> of E, and without which E would not have occurred".  If we put the 
> 20th century into the context of human history, then it is entirely 
> correct to say that, in this sense, scientific-and-technological 
> progress is the cause of distinctively 20th century disasters: what 
> has changed, what is new, is scientific knowledge, not human nature.   
> Yet again, from the standpoint of theoretical physics, "the cause" of 
> E might be interpreted to mean something like "the physical state of 
> affairs prior to E, throughout a sufficiently large spatial region 
> surrounding the place where E occurs".  In this third sense, the sun 
> continuing to shine is as much a part of the cause of war and 
> pollution as human action or human science and technology." (p. 42)
>  
>                         That still seems to me to be correct.
>  
>                         The really important point, however, in my 
> view, is this.  If we are to create a better world, we need to learn 
> how to do it.  And that in turn requires that we have institutions of 
> learning rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to do it.  
> It requires, in other words, that we have universities and schools of 
> just the kind Friends of Wisdom hope to help bring into existence.  If 
> we are to tackle our immense global problems in wiser, more 
> cooperatively rational ways than we do at present, we need to learn 
> how to do it, which in turn requires (as a necessary, not a sufficient 
> condition) that we have universities and schools which give priority 
> to learning how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in 
> wiser, more cooperatively rational ways than we do at present.
>  
>                         The dreadful fact is that this kind of 
> wisdom-inquiry does not exist, and has not ever existed.  Instead, as 
> I have argued at length elsewhere (see for example my From Knowledge 
> to Wisdom, chapter 6), what we have had, for the last couple of 
> centuries or so, is inquiry devoted, first, to acquiring knowledge and 
> then, secondarily, applying it to help solve social problems (what I 
> have called "knowledge-inquiry").  Once upon a time, in 
> Europe, inquiry was based on a Christian ethos.  As academia became 
> secularized, after the Enlightenment, knowledge-inquiry came to 
> dominate - at least on those parts of inquiry claiming to be 
> rational.*  It is this long-standing failure of academia to develop 
> and implement wisdom-inquiry that implicates academia in some 
> responsibility for our current situation.  One can imagine  
> wisdom-inquiry being created in the 18th century, and still our 
> current global crises emerge.  Nevertheless, failure to develop a kind 
> of genuinely rational inquiry necessary for humanity to learn how to 
> come to grips with our global problems does mean, in my view, that 
> academia, over the centuries, does bear some portion of responsibility 
> for the current situation.  Especially when inquiry as it has been 
> pursued, devoted to the acquisition of knowledge, has made current 
> crises possible.  And it means, of course, that academics today have 
> all the more acute a responsibility to do something about the 
> current academic situation.
>  
>                          Suppose you are right, and the problem is 
> greed.  If the bad consequences of greed are to be dealt with 
> democratically, this requires an electorate that knows what these bad 
> consequences are, what needs to be done about them, and cares 
> sufficiently to ensure that only those governments get elected that 
> are going to deal with the problems.  A properly educated electorate 
> is essential, and that is where universities and schools implementing 
> wisdom-inquiry come in.  We need institutions of learning that put 
> education of electorates about what we need to do about our global 
> crises at a high level of priority.  It is this which, for historical 
> reasons, we do not at present have.  That's what, in part, in my view, 
> we should be striving to help create.
>  
>                              Best wishes,
>  
>                                         Nick
> * What this misses out is Romanticism, what Isaiah Berlin has called 
> the Counter-Enlightenment, and Romantic anti-rationalism, so 
> influential on parts of the humanities today.  But in objecting to the 
> rationalism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism made a terrible 
> mistake.  What they were objecting to was not rationalism, but a 
> characteristic kind of irrationality masquerading as rationalism.  
> Romanticism, in emphasizing integrity about aims, motivations and 
> feelings, stressed vital aspects of genuine rationality, which the 
> Enlightenment, and what it resulted in, ignored, to its cost.  As I 
> have argued elsewhere (I must stop saying that), if the Enlightenment 
> had been implemented properly in the 18th century, in such a way as to 
> create wisdom-inquiry, there would have been no need for the Romantic 
> movement as something opposed to the Enlightenment.  Wisdom-inquiry is 
> a synthesis of traditional Rationalism and Romanticism, and an 
> improvement over both. 
> www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: [log in to unmask]
>> Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 3:45 PM
>> Subject: Re: Suggestion for Web Site
>>
>>
>> To Nick, and All,
>>  
>> It does not seem to me to be true that it is academia that may be 
>> held responsible for the current global crises Nick so thoughtfully 
>> outlines.  It is true that elements of industrial engineering 
>> advances are aided by academic research but, at least in the  US, it 
>> is also true that industry financially supports such research at the 
>> university level and therefore directs the direction of the same.  In 
>> part this distinction between thus directed or influenced research 
>> speaks in the distinction between ?pure? and applied research.
>>  
>> But what Nick, for want of a better word, is naming a ?lack of 
>> wisdom? (though imprudence is possibly more apt here) is really a 
>> result of selfish greed.   
>>  
>> Take the environmental damage that has been wreaked by industrial 
>> development, one can think of oil drilling at sea and in the arctic 
>> and one can certainly think of transport, where oil tankers do not 
>> only occasionally but routinely fail, wasting oil and killing 
>> sea-life not just in the immediate wake of a spill, but, new research 
>> shows, for years to come.  Think of the irrationality of continually 
>> using aging tankers to transport oil across the globe.  Why is this 
>> prima facie irrational thing done? Is it because academics have been 
>> remiss in failing to point out that this irrational?  Indeed, no 
>> materials engineering assessment would prescrie current industry 
>> practice. Nevertheless and in practice, the oil industry continues to 
>> push the limits of its fleet because it is cheaper to use existing 
>> tankers until they fail.  In other, more practical language: in the 
>> real world one does not retire a tanker before it fails, if one has a 
>> choice, but rather *when* it fails and when one has, conveniently, 
>> enough, no choice. Prognostication in these areas is an art: such 
>> vessels often survive many more journeys than one would have 
>> predicted for them and that very same fuzzy interval is worth a great 
>> deal to industry: it is a risk worth taking precisely because 
>> environmental damage and spillage can be written off and need not be, 
>> as it is not, taken into account.  The value here is not a supposed 
>> inquiry into the repeated seaworthiness of overloaded tankers.  
>> Academics are not at fault as there is no pursuit of knowledge that 
>> stands behind such decisions (how long can the old ship hold out?) 
>> but there is a pursuit of profit at any price.  Industrial 
>> innovations have developed fishing trawlers of immense scope, capable 
>> of strip-mining the ocean of every living thing in the wake of nets 
>> that effectively work as bottom rakes/scoops, attached to ships 
>> themselves with new technology for processing the catch and spewing 
>> out thousands of tons of wasted, that is: dead sea-life.  
>> Ichthyologists have been telling fisheries industries since the early 
>> sixties --- not just in industry specific organs but as popularly as 
>> publication in the *Scientific American*, that the practice of taking 
>> as much fish as possible was irrational, in today's language 
>> unsustainable.  The industry responded by intensifying capacity to 
>> its present day ?efficiency? ? imprudent and unsustainable, but 
>> ongoing. (In the sixties, when the industry was more frank, it 
>> responded to criticism by suggesting that once a specific fish had 
>> been fished to exhaustion it would of course fish a different fish.  
>> A thoughtless, insensitive, but, please note, perfectly rational 
>> response.) When, today, the Canadian government approves a barbaric 
>> culling of seals (for fur and penises, both holdovers of an 
>> uncharming past, and one wonders why Asian men have evidently not yet 
>> heard have not heard, as any western man with an email account, has 
>> heard, of viagra, which, unlike seal penises, actually works), it 
>> does so to cover the wastage of over-fishing, casting blame for its 
>> effects onto the seals (irrational as that is, the putative 
>> suggestion is believed, especially by the fishermen) but it also does 
>> so and this is the practical point of the madness and why it will not 
>> stop until there are no seals, in order to provide work for fishermen 
>> whose livelihood is vanishing with the every advance in trawler 
>> technology: The better the boats, the less work there is: good news 
>> for the fisheries, bad news for the fishermen, and far, far worse for 
>> the fish.  When the culling takes place as it does after the new 
>> seals are born, what is significant is that unlike ordinary predation 
>> in nature and not-at-all-accidentally akin to the strip-mining 
>> tactics of today?s fishing practice, the hunters (these are fishermen 
>> earning money for the first job of the year available to them) kill 
>> every single baby seal they see, that is: they kill all of them. The 
>> only seals that survive are the ones on ice-floes not visited by the 
>> hunters and financial incentives insure that these are only 
>> accidental oversights.  Fishermen today,  after all, need to be able 
>> to afford a lifestyle like that of anyone else in a developed nation 
>> and Canada?s government seeks to guarantee that to them, no matter 
>> that environmental scientists underscore that this cannot be 
>> sustained.  The idea, apparently, is that when all the seals have 
>> been killed and the herring does not return, as the herring will not 
>> return, that one will find a different fish. 
>> Anyone who dines on fish is well aware that new fish are featured on 
>> the menu.  This is not due to new science, this is due to eating fish 
>> that one formerly did not eat, in part of course because one did not 
>> have the techniques to catch them, but in far greater part (this is 
>> the real-life detail) because they were not considered optimum for 
>> consumption.   But new cooking techniques sauce even such fish today 
>> and diners enjoy them with gusto.  Orange roughy anyone? 
>>  
>> Academia is not responsible for environmental damage but industry is 
>> and this culpability is not a result of a failure of wisdom or 
>> prudence but rather to plain and routine non-concern.   The damage 
>> done to the Arctic by the oil industry is not at all unintentional, 
>> it is deliberate if it is also thoughtless, in the way small boys can 
>> go off on an expedition into the wilderness and leave a mess behind 
>> (if unsupervised), not at all unintentionally but exactly carelessly 
>> (boys who might know better, who might know that one should remove 
>> one?s detritus, taking one?s garbage with one, can choose to leave it 
>> anyway out of laziness).
>> The cause in the case of small boys (and grown-ups too, to judge by 
>> the state of some public areas in the US) is indolence.  In the case 
>> of industry the cause is selfish greed: cleaning up after oneself is 
>> expensive; controlling the fish harvest is expensive and seems 
>> pointless where other fisheries might not be so idealistically 
>> minded.  (Note that one does not see that it is rational to be 
>> prudent.)  The effects of global warming have been predicted for 
>> decades only to have industry pay scientists to debunk such 
>> predictions with all due rationality, even,  to use Nick's language 
>> here, imaginatively and critically.  All those predictions were 
>> useless, deflected and refused, but now we find ourselves in the 
>> middle of it and few scientists can be found to say what many were 
>> saying only two years ago, that weather patterns were normal. 
>>  
>> Global warming, such as it is and such as will continue, has been 
>> caused by human actions.  Rationally, one would think, having done 
>> this damage, one might make haste to undo it.  But rationality will 
>> get one nowhere because the powers that be have no intention of 
>> stopping anything while there is still money to be made (that means: 
>> stopping industry, not stopping academia, my Dean for all his faults 
>> has done nothing to cause these problems, and in the case of war, of 
>> course, military engagement supports industry in environmental 
>> devastation in the name of aid and development).   Sadly enough, with 
>> increasing chaos there are more opportunities for damage and 
>> thoughtless development (rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina on the 
>> American Gulf Coast has not sparked an outburst of rationality but 
>> wild speculation and there is money to be had as there always is in 
>> the wake of the suffering of thousands).
>>  
>> You may say, and I think I hear this well-articulated in Nick?s 
>> thoughts as the inspiration for this call for a revolution in 
>> academe, that even if the result were, contrary to fact, a call to 
>> implement rationality that the sad truth is that rational plans for 
>> the same would not be on the table.   This is, in part, true however, 
>> and  as the engineers on board have been quick to point out (though 
>> engineers more than any other academic are collusive with industry, 
>> of course, of course), it is also in part inaccurate. For academics 
>> lack power to act on their own and academics are not asked by those 
>> in power to provide plans for actions or remedies to problems.  
>> Therefore there is no point in engendering such schemes, which has 
>> not stopped some theorists from spinning precisely such plans. From 
>> Plato to Bacon and Machiavelli, Marx and Henry George, academics have 
>> theorized how societies ought to be run, well reasoned and sometimes 
>> in thorough detail.  With the exception of Marx (in woefully limited 
>> and badly deformed efforts), none of these prescriptive schemes have 
>> had any effect.  Those that have had some influence, Popper and 
>> C.I.Lewis come to mind, may be said to work not because such 
>> rationality is more compelling than antecedent efforts but because 
>> business schools have been able to use inherent amphibolies to their 
>> advantage for the sake of advancing the interests of industry not 
>> rationality.  Apart from such coopted uses, academics themselves, by 
>> and large, are out of the loop.  Nor is this likely to change, nor is 
>> there a crying need.  Indeed, money-making concerns are already 
>> well-entrenched in such advisory roles as there are and, jealous of 
>> their expert roles (and income), are loathe to have additional 
>> experts on board, especially not those with seemingly better 
>> ?credentials? as experts.  To boot, I note that when academics do 
>> work as consultants they learn that a consultant is not even an 
>> advisor but rather a facilitator.  In other words those who keep 
>> their jobs learn that industry wants to be told what it wants to hear 
>> and it doesn?t want/need any other kind of advice.  We need an 
>> old-fashioned revolution, and not just in the academy, I fear.
>>  
>> With best regards from  New York,
>>
>> Babette E. Babich 
>>  Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University 
>>   & Adj. Research Prof., Georgetown University 
>>
>> Web page address: http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/babich/babich.htm 
>>
>>  Address:
>>  
>>  Professor Babette E. Babich 
>>  Executive Editor, New Nietzsche Studies 
>>  Department of Philosophy | Fordham University 
>>  113 West 60th Street, 925H or 914 | New York, NY 10023 | USA 
>>  Office: (212) 636-6297 | Fax: (212) 927-7551 
>>  Email: [log in to unmask] 
>>  
>> New Nietzsche Studies Web Page Address:
>> http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/nns/nns_journal_description.html
>>