DEPTH CONSERVATIONISM: A MARXIST IDEOLOGY?
Jones, Jack
Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not men, can remain. . . . Man or Nature must succumb; if the one is to live, the other must fall. HEGEL As long as I am President, what has been divinely...
...But between this attitude and the one that is, as we shall see, at least implicit in conservationism, there exists a radical incompatibility...
...Who Thinks Radically...
...Immediate conservationist measures are justified primarily by their deeper, more general and profoundly humane or libertarian implications: (1) Any check upon industrialization or the consumption of natural resources would thereby immediately reduce by so much the absolute growth of culture and repression...
...The prudential conservationist, who is chiefly involved with the objective material or economic side of the matter, has recognized as a real and serious possibility what to most people seems to be only a gratuitous, improbable, and unwelcome speculative hypothesis—that at some time the rates of population growth and resource depletion may outrun the ability of the cultural power to keep on providing some acceptable level of material or physical well-being or, at least, sufficiency...
...Perhaps we have been fundamentally misled by the dead "materialism" of Marx, from which nothing further can reasonably be expected to grow than more of what already has...
...27, 1972, p. 1; also Dennis L. Meadows et al., eds...
...it is in a sense even antibiological...
...Great credit is due to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, among whom the esprit fort of conservationism seems to have been Interior Secretary Udall...
...In 1970 he said the Hudson would be pristine by 1975...
...Thus the significance of human population growth is not primarily biological...
...The event will work a profound transformation upon each party involved...
...But perhaps only so far...
...Let us value history's gift and not miss these opportunities...
...Conceivably, a new kind of alliance is in the making—one between the post-Marxist and post-Freudian thinkers, and those who represent the now more and more visibly "vampirized" aspects of external natural reality...
...13 13 Jack Jones, "Art Between Magic and Revolution," Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1976...
...But if present trends continue, by the end of the next century more than 30 billion people will have no additional natural resources to consume— except each other...
...And there are the inevitable occasional runaway accidents...
...nor that we now have, or will have in the West in the present century, an insurmountable overpopulation and/or resource-depletion problem...
...Who Thinks Right...
...LYNDON B. JOHNSON, Oct...
...5And last March, "The Ecological Movement in France has suddenly emerged as a potent political force...
...It cannot deal with the wider and deeper theoretical and social difficulties of whose existence, indeed, many conservationists are even unaware...
...This does direct economic harm and is also becoming increasingly costly to remove or palliate...
...Then the American Congress, in an antitechnological growth "first," refused to appropriate funds to develop supersonic transport...
...For the fundamental condition of the modern progress ideology has remained untouchedi...
...nor how and in what way we should immediately busy ourselves with the matter...
...In this conception there may be hope of gaining control over the cultural chaos of today...
...We may be surprised by what, at first sight, appears to be a striking anomaly—that, while all this has been going on, the "highbrow" intellectual circles (grouped about the four or five most influential journals of the English-speaking world) have remained 209 largely apathetic, if not hostile...
...That is the fundamental obstacle past which both types of conservationism have been hitherto unable to make much headway...
...1976...
...All this might eventually flourish by the name of "depth-conservationism," "depth-socialism," "multidimensional socialism," or perhaps even "scientific socialism" (if only because perhaps the irrational factor in human nature finally will have been rightly understood and mastered...
...Dali somewhat factiously explained to Time: "Gris created beautiful cubism and Picasso continued it...
...Coal reserves will probably last two or three centuries, perhaps somewhat longer...
...In this short time also, the already troublesome water problems, in America and elsewhere, will become acute...
...As concerns the technically possible carrying capacity of the earth, a great deal depends upon future scientific or technological developments and the risky assumption that these can be unfailingly applied despite conceivable political hindrances or natural catastrophes...
...if one is to live, the other must fall...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, selfaddressed envelope...
...whereas the Western primary-rational ideology is in its profane phase more realistic, and permits of an objectively greater degree of political, economic, and internal freedom, but it is superficial...
...On the other hand, it may also be that the prudential conservationists, the bird watchers and their birds, must all alike perish if they fail to find their general philosophy...
...Here and there, efforts to clean up the water and air have been partially successful, but often only temporarily, and previously unknown further pollutions are recurrently detected...
...However, assuming this and usually also the continuation of present consumptive trends, estimates have accordingly ranged from 3 to 30 billion, or even more...
...and (and with his wife Anne, the main scientific text) Population, Resources, Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freedman, 1970...
...He believes that sensory contact with the nonhuman or noncultural, with animals, plants, land, sea, air, and ample space stimulates and preserves certain bioemotional or aesthetic experiences desirable or even vitally necessary to man...
...he may not be willing to see the issue otherwise defined or further generalized...
...It has to be remembered that, allowing for expected population increases, total consumption may have increased five- to sixfold by the year 2,000...
...and now, only 40 years later, it stands at 3 to 4 billion...
...There would still be all the creative potentialities within the new context...
...The tone of the Conference of the American Institute of Planners, reported the New York Times (Oct...
...or, if so, that they can and should simply be gotten used to...
...you cannot (the anarchists and some conservatives to the contrary) limit modern political overorganization or the "bureaucracy," without also limiting industrialization, and so forth...
...In 1965, when Nelson A. Rockefeller was still pushing the notion that government could do everything, he predicted bathers in the river by 1970...
...Marx never understood this psychological factor theoretically...
...That is, to explicate Freud's theme a little, without the repression of certain aspects of natural biopsychological functioning and its direct mode of consciousness, the symbols or abstractions that constitute cultural reality cannot arise in the mind...
...It is not only the intuitive eyes of art that have discerned therein some intangible negative or cruciferous factor, proportionally (or hypercubistically) at work...
...advise upon 211 interim measures, such as reducing pollutions...
...Our culture consists in this: that more and more of our instincts become subject to repression, for which there are beautiful illustrations, particularly in poetic productions (see Rank ) . 12 12 In Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds...
...The international theoretical and ideological struggle for it in some important respects has already begun...
...into the psychological sciences or into the human heart, in relation to internal natural reality...
...The conservationists have drawn up their battle line across a single province of the general contradiction between culture and nature, of whose vast dominions through cultural time and space they have still but comparatively little idea...
...I, 1976, p. A18...
...The prudential conservationist cannot tell you that by the criterion of physical survival or well-being (when applied to the culture as a whole), measures must now be taken to limit populations and the consumption of resources...
...Psychological conservationism takes different forms and degrees...
...But even through these forced detours and mazes of immediate policy, the goal of an eventual stabilization of the relation between nature and culture might be pursued...
...217 behind or ahead of that stage already reached by Western culture generally...
...Now myself has created one complete Hypercubist painting...
...This would not mean only a negative stoppage or limitation of human effort, for it could be selectively redirected into ways not further or at least less destructive of nature and of the whole cultural enterprise...
...15 It seems that man must now embark upon a 14Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol...
...Thus, since 1650, in approximately .00035 to .000175 percent of the human span, there will have come to exist approximately 1,200 percent or 5.5 billion net more people...
...Here we cross the border into the second general type of conservationism, which is concerned with the psychological, subjective nonmaterial, or aesthetic value to humanity of the natural environment...
...3 The following month, the even more widely publicized Club of Rome report was released...
...W Barry Commoner...
...218...
...1 Last year the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it has found all over the country not merely PCBs but several dangerous pesticides in mother's milk...
...Though for some time, as has been suggested, excess population may be stacked in rising tiers, moved to artificial constructs on or under the oceans, or even (if this should ever become possible), exported to outer space, none of these expedients could in the end keep up with the fantastic potential of unchecked population increase...
...But, with the help of Freud and Rank, it may be that human self-comprehension and self-restraint can be elevated to that point at which such things will never happen again...
...Perhaps some ground can even be recovered here and there from the Iron Law in both the external and the internal senses...
...To take an example, and apart from the dubious implication that nature is best communed with through an automobile windshield, the 600 feet of nature on either side of a federal highway granted to us by the "Conservation Congress" is a rather Orwellian substitute for the many thousands of miles that must inevitably be lost by the direct and indirect consequences of the federal building programs Moreover, even the 600 feet are by no means permanently secure, for they, and both the old and new federal parks and reservations, are all bound to find themselves under the ever greater counterpressures of the more fundamental Hypercubist trends...
...The prolonged apathy of the intellectuals toward conservationism really expresses the fact that in the end conservationism cannot be absorbed by any versions of the progress ideology, including those that fancy themselves to be the most "radical" or "revolutionary...
...HEGEL As long as I am President, what has been divinely given by nature will not be recklessly taken away by man...
...At a 1909 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud rejected Adler's Marxist utopianism as follows: . . . progress can be described as a repression that progresses over the centuries...
...Human Context (London), Autumn 1975...
...One of the relatively minor but troublesome facets of the Hypercube is the increasing contemporary pollution of land, water, and air...
...Its primary weaknesses, however, have tended to slowly erode its other strengths, as has been particularly evident in the past decade (196777...
...1! Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man's Fate (New York: Mentor, 1959), Exploring New Ethics For Survival (New York: Pelican, 1972), which includes "The Tragedy of the Commons...
...Five Versions of Psychological Man," Salmagundi, Summer-Fall 1972...
...Abraxas, Spring 1971...
...Probably not much 18 See my essay-review of his edition of From Under the Rubble in the International Philosophical Quarterly, Spring 1977...
...Hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be spent in the next decades on water and air depollution, and even so this will be only partially effective...
...21, 19 f. be more critically reviewed, but this essay is not the place...
...Its confrontation now lies directly ahead...
...A derivative conviction is that the enterprise does not really involve significant losses...
...Natural-resource conservationism is only one aspect of an emergent general opposition to the overweening exploitation of nature for the sake of cultural "surplus value"—whether as "Capital" or the "Revolution...
...in all essentials the general argument remains the same...
...But Dali seems to have accomplished rather more than this—a profound and comprehensive vision, which will be difficult to surpass, of the relationship of the recent psycho-historical evolution to the contemporary order...
...Hyperrationalist Marxism, though delusional, is profoundly so...
...3 N YT, January 14, 1972, p. 3. 4 NY T, Feb...
...The point for our time, as Rank had recognized, is that because this belief is psychologically natural and inherent, it has not at all disappeared with religion but has persisted and determined much in modern thought and behavior that is mistakenly assumed to be "rational," including much in socialist theory and history...
...by 1825 it had doubled, by 1925 or so it had redoubled...
...More recently another, and perhaps potentially the largest such spill in history, though this time halted fairly soon, has poured millions of gallons into the North Sea...
...24, 1965), was one of "harsh and unrelieved self criticism" with no effective remedies in sight.* III eanwhile, by 1978, there has been no fundamental change, although the ecological awareness of the general public has much broadened and deepened, sometimes beyond the ken or control of the established ideological leaderships...
...one and the same turnabout, a single decision, would deliver us from both dangers...
...But the difficult truth is that none of the enacted or envisaged reformist measures will be able to keep pace with the galloping destruction of nature by the modern cultural development— they are only temporarily palliating or disguising it...
...2) Any reduction in the rate of population increase would likewise decrease by so much the absolute mass or quantity of man-borne culture and repression...
...The Poverty of Power (New York: Knopf...
...In the past decade or so, we may have been converging, from the conservationist and many other directions, on the essential postMarxist theme—that, as culture expands in mass and intensity, whether at a normal or revolutionary pace, it inevitably draws further away from internal and external nature, whose formerly viable qualities are more and more slipping away...
...This reinterpretation inevitably demands another consideration of the legacy of Freud: Freud's insight that the central conflict within human nature is one between culture and internal natural reality, which is of incalculable value...
...The rates of consumption increase and resource depletion have been even faster (double or more the population increase) and, if all these hypertrophies continue, it can be foreseen that our species may eventually strip altogether the relatively thin film of life from the surface of the planet...
...At the beginning of 1972, a group of English scientists issued an ecological "Blueprint for Survival," then compared by some with the Communist Manifesto...
...q To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...Ehrlich has been a most effective agitator on the popular level, and has written perhaps the single most authoritative ecological text...
...Nor did these problems yield to the ministrations of the considerably more shallow and short-sighted business ideologists, who later dominated the Nixon administration...
...This was his "Iron Law...
...Overindustrialization, overpopulation, overconsumption, overorganization, overurbanization, overeducation, etc...
...This "Iron Law" rules over human culture in respect to both internal and external nature...
...lotlardin, the wittiest and most "tough-minded" of the three, tends to overgeneralize from the biological to the cultural (but every socialist should know of his essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," a small masterpiece of reasoning against the laissez-faire principle)!' IV The problem really lies and can only be resolved in the broader and deeper ideological context...
...This theme has appeared before...
...Future events may include the first nuclear powerplant blowup, and the first terrorist use of nuclear blackmail...
...For, as we have seen, the prudential conservationist usually cannot prove the present necessity of drastic conservationist measures, which can be justified only in terms of intangible "values...
...7 Robert Heilbroner, "The Human Prospect," New York Review of Books, January 24, 1974...
...The most fundamental level of human causality may be neither "economic" nor "material," nor yet sociological, political, or military, but psychological...
...Mishan in Encounter...
...Gradually it was disclosed to me," Solzhenitsyn has written, "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between classes, but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts...
...This is the puzzlingly "irrational" belief that in the Western tradition usually goes by the name of the "soul" or "God...
...That is, you cannot limit industrialization or consumption without also limiting populations (if the standard of living is not to fall...
...With present trends, the world's population will reach at least 6 billion by the end of this century...
...However, man could doubtless subsist on lower consumptive levels and thereby defer for another century or so the point of absolute population saturation...
...9 Commoner has more recently attempted to join the ecological to the socialist cause, but in this regard is dangerously inexperienced in politcal history and theory...
...Encounter, May 1973...
...What we have been striving to establish here is only the abstract desirability and possibility of such a stabilization of cultural development...
...2) the immediate desirability of psychological natural-resource conservationism...
...This is relatively true even of such highly sophisticated activists as Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Garrett Hardin...
...In consequence, the socialist movement has been unable to protect itself against the reappearance in the 20th century, under seemingly "rational" auspices, of powerful irrationalities (including the sacrificial holocausts of Russia, Germany, and China...
...15 In Sakharov Speaks (New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 58...
...A few individuals develop, like Thoreau, full-blown sophisticated nature philosophies, modern intellectualized, neoBaalist counterparts of the ancient modes of nature worship that once existed universally, before the great monotheistic repressions...
...To an extent not yet fully determined—possibly much greater than now supposed—this pollution has been eroding human health and is likely to continue doing so...
...In all psychological conservationism, however, there is the implicit thesis that all value or freedom cannot be affirmed in terms of acculturated material or physical security, wellbeing, or gain...
...Considered "melodramatic" though admittedly impressive by some critics, the painting depicts, in the precise aberrant detail of the surrealist master, a crucified figure that may represent the innovator, Christ, modern man, or the artist—perhaps all at once...
...This year, Charles Samowitz, the city's water commissioner, said there would never again be swimming in the Hudson...
...This has been primarily the accomplishment of a number of "middlebrow" independent humanists, scientists, journalists, and government officials...
...Some of the earlier conservationist alarms to this effect were evidently premature...
...The conservationist movement owes nothing to these circles, whose occasional and belated acceptance of conservationism's advances elsewhere is still obviously of the most nominal or minimal kind...
...16 This would also subsume the otherwise too often shallow and insipid idea of moderation, and all that in the history of thought and sensibility we call profound...
...Among all the conservationist variations, however, it seems that two main divisions exist, although there is some overlapping, which may be designated as the "prudential" and the "psychological...
...215 V W ith these more general ideas we now come back to the ecological cause...
...7 (Some other ideas of Solzhenitsyn need to 16 A theme I pursued in my essay "The Idea of Socialism: the Ninety-Degree Turn...
...The human global population climbed slowly to approximately the half-billion mark by 1650...
...Let us now adopt a "minimum working 8 Edward J. Mishan, "The Spillover Enemy," Encounter, December 1969...
...and that the former can be lost in the acquisition of the other...
...THIS IS The expansion of human culture, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has in many direct and indirect ways, including the vastly amplifying factor of increased populations, destroyed or damaged a natural environment—land space, plants, animals, water, and air—which is not inexhaustible...
...Against this egotism or faith in the culture, the prudential conservationists have little further recourse...
...From this point onward the article has been considerably updated and revised (only slightly in the preceding pages...
...How to Be a Survivor (New York: Ballantine, 1971...
...Meanwhile, within the intellectual demimonde the situation has not fundamentally changed either, though here and there the ecological theme has been broached, notably by Robert Heilbroner in the New York Review of Books,' and by Edward J. 5 N Y7, Dec...
...An eventual halt in the further growth of human popula210 tion and resource depletion, by whatever means, voluntary or involuntary, is an absolute inevitability—the only question is when...
...Yet, to demonstrate that there must eventually be a limit to the business, that as it goes on it will become increasingly complex and costly, and that such side effects as pollution may be alleviated but probably cannot be removed—this is not yet to maintain that the net advantages of modern progress outweigh its disadvantages...
...This Rank conceptualized as our inherent naturalpsychological belief in omnipotence and immortality (often projected outward on various avatars...
...Some are preoccupied with this or that facet to the principled or de facto exclusion of others, or with the general problem...
...Such a happy coincidence is rare...
...It cannot be overemphasized, however, that accepting so much of Freud does not entail accepting any of his biological, sexual, infantile, intrafamilial, Oedipal specifics—at least as far as matters of general cultural interpretation are concerned...
...We have already reached the level of the most conservative technical estimate, and it is clear that—at least in the modernized areas of the world—there is still a considerable margin of growth...
...Human Context, Autumn 1972...
...This article was first published in the Polish-language journal Kultura of Paris (December 1964, JanuaryFebruary 1965...
...This struggle may give a deeper meaning and new impetus to both the now generally, if conventionally, accepted objectives of reformist conservationism, and to the political conservation of half the world against further totalitarian erosion...
...9 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968...
...Moreover, Freud believed that this negative relationship between natural and cultural reality was of a cumulative character...
...The whole idea, he says, of endless, infinite progress has turned out to be an insane, ill-considered dash into a blind alley . . . . the solution to both [the ecological and the totalitarian] problems are identical in many respects...
...He may conceivably be demented enough to prefer to do this rather than to check his population growth and its inherent factor of resource depletion (which would continue even with lower per capita rates of consumption...
...Some comprehensive plan must be developed for the orderly retardation and eventual stabilization of all the major hypertrophies...
...See also my contribution on Rank to the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Crowell, Collier & Macmillan, 1968), and "Does God Exist...
...But at what stage would it be desirable and possible to fix the point of balance between nature and culture...
...The End of Affluence (New York: Ballantine, 1974...
...For fuel, we will then be largely dependent upon artificially generated atomic energy, unless solar energy sources can also be developed...
...And now, for the first time, it has become a matter of official policy to limit consumption—though so far in relation to the dwindling energy resources, and only by means of somewhat reduced rather than zero growth...
...Conceivably, suggests one authority, the absolute limit might not be reached before the 100- or 200-billion mark...
...Charles Kaiser, in the New York Times (hereafter NYT), Aug...
...What is to be hoped for is some general ideological peaceful "convergence" in which, on one side, the Marxist criticism of "capitalism" and, on the other, the often too superficial Western criticism of "totalitarianism" would be transformed into the joint criticism of hypertrophic cultural evolution itself...
...Though objectively irrational and illusory, it is, subjectively, psychologically a reality, truth, and value, for which, and for both personal and social ends, men and women have often sacrificed many real things, sometimes including life itself...
...Of course, the global situation cannot be stabilized unilaterally, and meanwhile the West has to meet all competitive exigencies, which will often compel the further development of its own cultural powers...
...Other nonrenewable natural resources, such as manganese, tungsten, and copper, will also have been exhausted within a relatively few decades, and many other metals are growing ever more scarce and costly to extract and utilize...
...To Grow or Not to Grow...
...Usually, the psychological conservationist is affirming his objection to the contemporary order only in respect to its invidious relationship to the natural environment...
...But let us approach the Hypercube through that relatively untraveled byroad of thought known as natural-resource conservationism...
...This linkage between the ecological and the antitotalitarian cause has been affirmed by Solzhenitsyn, in this respect more profound than Sakharov or Medvedev...
...Among the more sensational have been the breakup of the supertanker Torrey Canyon in 1967, and the oil-well blowout off the Santa Barbara coast in 1969...
...e., that the indefinite expansion of culture is absolutely necessary, possible, and desirable, at least short of what would surely cause actual physical extinction (unless this hazard too may be taken, as is sometimes tacitly suggested...
...H The interpretation of this ominous situation varies appreciably even among professional conservationists...
...This would be a genuine "historical compromise...
...In this "base" there take place the conflicts and events of which all else in culture, including its relation to the natural environment, are the "superstructural" expressions...
...6 NYT, March 20, 1977, p. 14...
...The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971...
...Science and Survival (New York: Viking, 1967...
...In 1965, after a decade of urban planning and somewhat influenced by reformist conservationism, "the nation's urban planners were told . . . [that] there is little likelihood [that the cities] will be transformed soon into the Great Society projected by President Johnson...
...Of fairly recent origin and quite obscure position in intellectual history, a decade ago conservationist ideas generated their own "population explosion...
...14 In his famous 1968 program, Sakharov also had warned against ideological absolutism: "The division of mankind threatens it with destruction...
...For it is the intellectuals (whether of left, center, or right, though especially those of the left) who have been the more thoroughly habituated to think and judge in terms of the long dominant socioeconomic progress ideology—for which, in general, all evil cometh of insufficient cultural development...
...This principle would give us, in theory, the power to choose where we would stand—whereas now we are swept along, willy-nilly, in our daily adaptation to the seemingly irresistable and omnipotent demands of "the system...
...It is still only partially realized that most of the cultural hypertrophies are interdependent...
...a revised, abridged English version appeared in the Centennial Review (Summer 1966...
...The recent vast power blackouts in the northeast are a strong hint that various mechanical, natural, and especially cultural failures are conceivable that in the increasingly artificial environments might at length bring about true disaster...
...To paraphrase one of Marx's epigrams, perhaps only in ecology can the larger philosophic opposition to the hypertrophic trends of culture find its "material weapon," its effective practical arguments and justification...
...That fresh and unforeseen difficulties would likely arise from these new lines of policy is undeniable...
...Such formally diverse realms of thought as philosophy, psychology, economics, political science, theology, have on occasion produced like intuitions...
...It is the deeper trends and their correlations that must be faced...
...Even were these and other such shortages generated by the distension of modern culture alone, they would still be serious, but the effects are multiplied by the skyrocketing domestic and international populations...
...11, p. 174...
...Any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations, is madness and a crime...
...In this respect we must recognize that culture is not a "natural" growth but an unnatural, costly, and even potentially fatal hypertrophy...
...6 Kennedy and Johnson both believed that it was only necessary to bring sufficient energy and intelligence to bear, within the context of the progress ideology—but this, of course, has since proven illusory, in regard to ecological and many other problems...
...1, 1976...
...4) above all, because of the Iron Law of all cultural increase, which in certain respects leads us subjectively and objectively toward increasingly unnatural ways of living, and ideologically toward totalitarianism and further holocausts...
...Nature recreation runs the gamut from what may be casual, almost entirely profane, nature visitation or tourism, through the quasi-rationalistic respect (exemplified in some of Hemingway's characters) of the sportsman or hunter for the environment of their calling, to the neoanimistic, near-religious devotion of some types of "bird-watcher" or "nature-lover...
...For both, despite some doubts and confusions, most fundamentally accept (whether explicitly or tacitly) the general progress ideology of our time, of which they see their conservationism as but a necessary or desirable modification or reform...
...An average of 10 percent of the vote...
...Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), vol...
...The restoration of this power of choice to man is far more radical a suggestion than any reform or revolution that has or can be proposed within the conventional progressThe greatest handicap of the West in its protracted struggle with totalitarianism has always been ideological and theoretical—not economic, military, or political...
...However, this was indubitably a tentative step in the right direction...
...The following are among the more disturbing facts and extrapolations that abound in conservationist works...
...And yet, while it undermines modern ideological convictions, reformist conservationism is not equipped to serve as an alternative general social ideology...
...in fact, he unwittingly expressed it himself in various ways (but this is another story...
...Beyond that, if population growth still continues, there is an inevitable final end, no matter how ingenious the resorts of science and technology may become...
...The possibility now emerges of a unitary interpretation of their joint decline throughout the history of culture...
...and by redistributing energies and resources within the present level of culture and repression...
...At present and rapidly accelerating rates of consumption, certain of the world's natural resources, hundreds of millions of years in the making, such as petroleum and natural gas, may have vanished forever by the end of the century or shortly afterward...
...Unless we disown our hominid ancestors, our species has existed from between 1 to 2 million years...
...As a new kind of dialogue emerges, the older misleading and sterile socioeconomic conventions, founded upon and limited by the pre-Freudian illusion of the identity of more cultural power and more "freedom," no doubt will be eventually left behind, while interest shifts to the hard realities, the difficulties, and the new possibilities that can emerge only from a fundamentally post-Marxist comprehension...
...214 definition" of the idea of socialism—as that of the value and necessity of long-range, indepth planning...
...But the expansion of the battle by "depthconservationism" means that the cause no longer depends upon our being finally driven to the wall of objective technical necessity, nor upon moot estimates of the psychological value to humanity or its relation to the natural environment alone...
...Sometimes they betray that they wish they could prove to be objectively necessary what may be only subjectively so, in the name of certain subjective, intangible "values" that the prudentialists themselves may be unable or unwilling to specify and defend...
...II (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 615...
...The more familiar shape of the instrument of execution has weirdly expanded into a cruciform "Hypercube...
...Sooner or later, domestic and global measures must be taken to reduce and/or finally stabilize at a break-even point the present blindly voracious consumption of natural resources...
...also his book (New York: Norton, 1975...
...also in "Who Thinks Left...
...Before attempting to develop this theme, we must briefly recapitulate the conservationist argument as it now stands...
...This would mean the conservation of at least what primary freedoms and external natural resources we now have—by not adding unnecessarily to (and perhaps abandoning some of) the burden of culture...
...4 Partly under its influence, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the world's greatest living writer, took up the theme (as further described below...
...18) VI n the long run, there is not much point in trying to arrest only such secondary aspects of the problem as water and air pollution...
...Even before that, we may have to begin living on cultured algae and mining bare rock, seawater, and sunlight for materials and energy...
...only one feature of Dali's work is truly original...
...17 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp...
...3) domestic and especially international ethical and political considerations, for it becomes both inexpedient and impossible to ignore the gross and increasing differentials between pervasive luxury and waste on one end of the economic scale, and genuine distress on the other...
...Later, I shall indicate some of the parallels...
...We may have entered the honeymoon period of reformist conservationism...
...This need not at all commit us to any of the Marxist or populist specifics...
...President Carter in effect has revived the earlier Democratic impulses, with the benefit of another decade of experience...
...This is "the notorious crime of society as a whole" in our time, and this dilemma cannot be identified with and blamed upon any particular race, nation, or class—and any spurious revolutionary purgation, as by the Marxist class-war ideology, can only worsen the already quite adequate speed of folly...
...It may be that, through some version of depth-conservationism, the Western strong points can be infused with a new theoretical and ideological profundity...
...Only thereby, it seems, can the objectives of reformist conservationism be finally secured...
...To this sort of conservationist, the increasingly real prospect of a world with finally nothing left in it but cultural artifacts, including humanity itself, seems a nightmare...
...The Limits to Growth (New York: Signet, 1972...
...The hedonistic and technical estimates of the point at which it would be desirable, or necessary, to halt and stabilize differ considerably...
...2 It has not yet been determined whether or not this may mean the separation insofar, perhaps forever, of mother and child...
...This is not really the anomaly it seems to be...
...Within the government itself, this was a period of covert reaction, though lip-service was paid to the growing strength of conservationist opinion elsewhere...
...The natural environment continues to be eaten up at an accelerating rate...
...A good deal of the natural environment, therefore, ought to be preserved against cultural erosion for this reason alone if for no other...
...In view of the relatively trivial "sacrifices" entailed, to speak of this as "the moral equivalent of war" is perhaps to expend rhetoric better reserved for something more substantial...
...23, 1965 I n 1955, the Metropolitan Museum somewhat unpredictably acquired its first and only Dali...
...America is now in an excellent practical position to make the great discovery that -enough is enough, and to set an example to the world in making not eternal "waragainst-" but a final and durable "peace-withpoverty...
...So far, in most of the world, no significant population control programs 212 exist, and those that do all together constitute only a small fraction of what is necessary to cope with the magnitude of the problem...
...For insight in one way or another into the existence of the Iron Law, or into the existence of forgotten, lost or repressed contents below normal or profane cultural egotism seems to be, in the final analysis, just what we mean by the profound...
...Apart from such untoward but educational events, the major landmarks in the development of the conservationist theme include the wonderful "Earth Day" of 1970, when hopeful multitudes crossed the conventional barriers of ideology, occupation, race, age, and sex...
...These modest prudential cautions have not (until recently) made much of an impression...
...It is arguable that, in America at least, perhaps also elsewhere in the West, the average "standard of living" may well be already too high in terms of many considerations: (1) the imminent necessity of domestic and global prudential conservationism...
...are the main aspects of the basic picture...
...There is another important factor in human psychology, not well understood by Freud, but later brought out by his at one time closest associate and intended successor Otto Rank...
...In the past two years, these ideas have been pouring at an ever faster rate into the awareness of the general public...
...213 There have been a number of lively international ecological conferences—a particularly fascinating straw in the wind blew through the fourth international World Wildlife Conference in December 1976 when Jack Mundey, "a former secretary of the Australian Communist party," called for "a new form of socialism, with an ecological heart...
...It is indeed profoundly true that "Man or Nature must succumb...
...216 new sort of ideological and political struggle...
...The psychological conservationist, on the other hand, is able to interpret and defend these values only in relation to external nature—a ground much too narrow and inadequate, theoretically...
...The prudentialist can tell you only that sooner or later this must be done...
...8 But so far the effect upon Hypercubist intellectuality has been marginal...
...warn that there is some objective hazard in assuming that science and technology will unfailingly and indefinitely provide all the necessary powers upon which everything must now be staked...
...THE EDITORS adaptive ideology (whether of left, center, or right...
...2 N Y 7, April 30, 1977, p. 22...
...Recent efforts to "humanize" urban architecture or the city, that is, make it into a less unnatural environment, may also be considered as one aspect of psychological conservationism...
...It may be, among other things, that the idea of "socialism" can regenerate and reflower in its originally humane and rational import only if it now sinks its roots deeply into the "life sciences"—i.e., the ecological sciences, in relation to external natural reality...
...Its unexpected entry into ideological history may turn out to have been the turning point...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
