GREEN GROWS THE ROUSSEAU 0!

James Bowman argues that the new

environmentalism bear a disturbing family resemblance to a tyranny from which we were only just escaping

For you only have to talk to a dedicated Green partisan for five minutes to realise that his programme is about far more than just

tidying up after ourselves, which is an old and not intrinsi- cally very interesting problem. One party leader said recently that voting Green is 'like taking a vow', and the religious language is apposite. Like fundamentalist Christianity, Greenery requires that we be born again from the sinfulness of industrial materialism. Like fundamentalist Islam, it inspires single-minded, sometimes fanatic- al devotion in its followers. it is even beginning to acquire its own mysticism, if .lames Lovelock's 'Gala hypothesis' is any- thing to go by. Lovelock, a research chemist who did pioneering work for Nasa on the chemical preconditions for life on other planets, attributes to the biosphere a quasi-conscious interaction with the earth

itself for the self-regulation of our peculiar chemical soup. This is so delicately poised on the edge of an imbalance which would make life impossible that it is as if life is sustained by a sort of pantheistic god whose hobby is chemical engineering. Lovelock's use of a Greek name associated with primitive nature worship is perhaps not accidental.

Where did this faith come from? Christ- ianity, Islam, even communism grew out of more or less precisely identifiable historical

events. Greenery, appropriately enough, `just growed'. But the Green family tree does repay study nevertheless. For its roots are to be found in the revolutionary 18th century alongside those of socialism: they grow in the same soil even if they are not branches from the same trunk. Over 50 years ago, Edmund Wilson's To the Fin- land Station traced the intellectual genealo- gy of Leninist communism back to the historians and philosophers of the French revolution. What we need today is some- one who can do the same job for environ- mentalism.

He would begin with the family resembl- ances between environmentalism and socialism. Both are committed to a view of The socialist and the environmentalist also share the same view of the natural moral order, which they tend nostalgically to identify with an idea] con- dition of primitive, pre-industrial man. This moral order is constantly being threatened by bad men — profiteers or polluters — whom it is the duty of the good men to bring to justice. Both are supreme- ly confident in man's capacity to put that order to rights (the environmentalist in spite of his otherwise determinedly non- anthropocentric rhetoric); both are apoca- lyptic about what happens if they are not heeded and naïve about what happens if they are. Both tend to be associated with a mystique of 'the soil' and consider that agrarian life is superior to urban and cosmopolitan — though we haven't seen anything quite as extreme in this respect as a Khmer Vert. Yet.

Most importantly, both creeds are based upon an indisputable good: that the mater- ially fortunate should assist the less fortun- ate; that those who foul a common benefit such as air or water should be made to clean up their mess. Because all men of good will agree with these basic principles in natural equity, the socialist and the environmentalist also share a perch on the high moral ground from which it is very difficult for their opponents to dislodge them. Both, however, must be dislodged. For any social order which selects a single good principle, whether that of equality or that of tidiness, and ruthlessly makes all other good principles subordinate to it results in a tyranny.

The tyrannies into which both socialism and environmentalism are always, by the rigid application of their logic, threatening to turn are also closely related historically. Both could be said to have their origins in different but related aspects of the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of the French revolution. The socialist passion for equality derives from the basic principle that it is the natural condition of humankind: L'homme est ne fibre, et partout if est duns les fern. The corollary of this insight is the starting point of environmentalism: that the state of nature is benign.

Aldous Huxley once wrote an amusing essay entitled 'Wordsworth in the Tropics' in which he pointed out just how far removed from the state of nature one has to be to make such an assumption:

To us who live beneath a temperate sky and in the age of Henry Ford, the worship of Nature comes almost naturally. It is easy to love a feeble and already conquered enemy. But an enemy with whom one is still at war, an unconquered, unconquerable, ceaselessly active enemy — no; one does not, one should not love him. One respects him, perhaps; one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on fighting.

Thus it is just possible that it is some- thing more than greed and perversity which makes the Brazilians hack down their rain forests with such alacrity. Keith Thomas, in his fascinating study Man and the Natural World, finds that, even in England and long after Wordsworth, Glad- stone's favourite pastime of chopping down trees was, like his rescuing of fallen women, of a piece with his liberal progres- sivism: such exhibitions 'were the last relics of the long tradition that to cut down trees was to strike a blow for progress'.

Of course, Rousseau and the Romantics had strong precedents for their belief that nature on the hoof was to be preferred to that which was merely for slaughter. As understanding of nature had grown with the burgeoning of modern science in the preceding two centuries, so the primitive religious urges either to fight against or to propitiate a dangerous and capricious na- ture were giving way to a more rational view of it as uniform, predictable and, above all, manageable by man's pwn ing- enuity. Sir Isaac Newton was as responsi- ble as anyone for the rise of Deism — a species of natural religion one of whose chief differences from Christianity is that its emphasis on the system, the machine, of creation first made it possible to see human beings as a part of creation not differentin kind from other parts.

Rousseau, then, was only engaging in the popular pastime of the 18th century; which was designing a natural religion; and putting Nature into the vacant slot pre- viously occupied by God was presupposed by the century's progress towards the domestication of wild nature by science and industrial technology. The result was a faith in natural goodness which makes Candide sound like Timon of Athens and, in fact, RoUsseau said, in response to Voltaire's poem on the 1756 Lisbon earth- quake, that he was going to take him in hand de lui prouver que tout etait bien.

Rousseau's real originality, however, lay in the dethroning of reason which, under the Deist dispensation, continued to guarantee human uniqueness, and substi- tuting for it feeling and intuition, inward nature, which man shared with the rest of the sentient creation. To such a way of looking at the world, the statement that man was made in the image of God is simply incomprehensible. It must eventual- ly entail the end of human privilege in nature as surely as it meant, more im- mediately and explcikively, the end of aristocratic privilege in society. BUt it took practical revolutionaries a long time to realise these larger implica- tions. Socialism, as the name implies, was a kind of humanism of societies and always anthropocentric. Like' Christianity it assumed that the rest of the natural world was there to serve man. Where Christian- ity's justification for this assumption was that Goa had given man dominion over the rest of"creation, socialism had Marx's Labour Theory of Value, which, in addi- tion to dignifying human labour, was a means of economically and politically mar- ginalising not only capital but also nature itself. Darwin also gave powerful support to the assumption of human privilege by showing — or being taken to show — that man stood at a pinnacle of evolutionary process and was, indeed, the object that that process had been tending to produce. And if, like Wagner's gods, man had eventually to acquiesce in his own super- session, that pinnacle wasn't a bad place to be for the next million years or so.

Throughout the 19th century the time- bomb planted by Rousseau kept ticking away. Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Dar- win, first conceived of the theory of evolu- tion in his epic, The Loves of the Plants, written in heroic couplets and published in the revolutionary year, 1789; it looked forward not only to 19th-century science and its ultimate triumph in firmly placing man within and not above the natural order but also to the anthropomorphising of nature to be found in Wordsworth, whose example resonated through 19th- century English culture. The latter's great sonnet 'The world is too much with us' could be taken up today, and without alteration, as the anthem of what we might call the respectable Greens:

Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less

forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Nostalgia for primitive nature worship is rather innocuous stuff, however, in com- parison with the dark forces that lie in the background of the less respectable sort of Greenery. For conservationists read Greenpeace, for Wordsworth read Blake. To Blake, nature was no more benign than man was — and a good thing too:

Without contraries is no progression. Attrac- tion and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. But he shared with Rousseau an admira- tion for unmediated psychological reality — or what Lionel Trilling called 'authentic- ity' — and unrestrained energy: 'Damn braces; bless relaxes.' This was nature

worship that was ready to forsake the pleasant lea and that was not afraid to Plunge its hands up to the elbows in nature's blood and filth. Moreover, Blake's passion for liberty, like Rous- seau's, was readily extended to cover non-human victims:

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

In our own time, Blake and Rousseau were updated by that greatest of all Romantics, Freud, whose assumption that the shackling and binding of nature within ourselves which is the foundation of civil society was a sort of 'repression' that could and should be done away with was so influential through most of this century. Civil society itself, in fact, became con- temptible not only because it acted as a restraint upon natural impulses in man, not only because it characteristically destroyed other forms of life for its own convenience, but because it represented almost by de- finition otherness in respect to nature.

The 20th century's casting off of tradi- tional, 'civilised' restraints has manifested itself in such diverse forms as the German National Socialists' love of animals, their attachment to vegetarianism and 'naturist' pursuits, and the architectural orthodoxies by which the cities that their primitivism had destroyed were rebuilt. Le Corbusier stretched tentacles of green into the heart of his new cities — and, by his influence, many of our old ones — and strangled them as cities, as it seems to many people nowadays, out of sheer spite towards man's pretensions to a supranatural environment. Or to a nature that was distinctively human. His heirs are still at work, ruthless- ly underscoring the point that man builds nothing more than 'machines for living'.

In poetry the primitivism of D.H. Lawr- ence took up more stridently and without mysticism the Blakean theme — 'We might spare a million or two of humans/ And never miss them', he wrote, so much as a single mountain lion — and led on to Heathcote Williams's threnodies on the whales and the elephants. Once again and most emphatically, what partook of the divine and the numinous were those aspects of nature which were most visibly and inevitably opposed to man in the mass, man in society: 'In wilderness is the pre- servation of the world', as the old Sierra Club's gnomic motto had it. Whatever 'the world' was, it was obviously not le monde of 18th-century Europe, out of whose fashion for sensibil- ity and sentimentality about nature Rous- seau had forged the revolutionary creed from which are descended both socialism and environmentalism in their militant and distinctively political forms. If now the last of the socialist line appears to be moribund in its Eastern fastnesses, the title of man- kind's revolutionary faith will pass to the more vigorous collateral line. And God help us all when the heir begins to take the estate in hand.