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Staying In Balance



Interesting critique of Michael Pollan by Jason Godesky in a recent post. You can read the thread for more background, but I think we can extract what Jason says here for the purposes of starting a new conversation on the subject of balance:

Here, the point is this: yes, nature drives all species to compete as aggressively as they can, but the result of that competition is balance.

In this context, how do we go about defining and understanding balance? To me, it seems that to argue that nature is in balance, we cannot say that nature is in a state of stasis. Nature does not stand still. It does not resist change. We don’t need to resort to philosophy to see that. We can just look out our doors and windows.

What then is balance? Is it more like the concept of checks and balances within a government with multiple branches? The executive limits the judicial branch limits the legislative limits the executive and on and on. This seems more in line maybe with what Godesky is referring to by balance.

So then, if nature is a competitition which leads to balance, then maybe balance simply means that the competition continues? If that’s what Godesky means (which arguably it may not be), then we’re left with a tautology: competition = competition, or competition leads to competition. Is that what nature is? (See also the deadly dangers of the word “is”)

I realize I may be misinterpreting (and for all you know, I may be doing so intentionally in order to provoke conversation), but this understanding - if it’s really representative - may explain what primitivism and the anti-civilization movements are all about: preserving competition. Civilization, in this reading, becomes bad for the same reason that monopolies become bad in capitalism, because they prevent competition, and thus throw things out of balance.

But that leads us to some other questions: if nature is all about competition and capitalism is too, are they somehow the same, or at least logical outgrowths of the same underlying premise? Are those who rail against civilization actually doing so because they truly support and want to revert back to the same ideals upon which civilization was based in the first place, but which it has veered away from, because it has begun to become monopolistic? Is what they are doing trying to find a place for the “small business man,” esoterically speaking?

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2 Reader Responses

  1. Jason Godesky Says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 10:00 am

    Nature’s balance is undeniably a dynamic equilibrium. And you’re right, civlization’s threat to nature can be compared to a monopoly’s threat to a market. The difference is that while a monopoly can dominate a market and the market will continue to exist, civilization is still dependent on nature, regardless of its delusions otherwise. In undoing that balance, civilization undermines its own foundation. As Daniel Quinn wrote in “The New Renaissance“:

    As people like to say nowadays, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. The people who keep track of these things and make it their business to predict such things agree that the human population is going to increase to ten billion by the end of the century. It isn’t just the doom-sayers who say this. This is a very conservative estimate, recently endorsed by the UN. Unfortunately, most of the people who make this estimate seem to have the idea that this is workable and okay.

    Here’s why it isn’t.

    It’s obvious that it costs a lot of money and energy to produce all the food we need to maintain our population at six billion. But there is an additional, hidden cost that has to be counted in life forms. Put plainly, in order to maintain the biomass that is tied up in the six billion of us, we have to gobble up 200 species a day–in addition to all the food we produce in the ordinary way. We need the biomass of those 200 species to maintain this biomass, the biomass that is in us. And when we’ve gobbled up those species, they’re gone. Extinct. Vanished forever.

    In other words, maintaining a population of six billion humans costs the world 200 species a day. If this were something that was going to stop next week or next month, that would be okay. But the unfortunate fact is that it’s not. It’s something that’s going to go on happening every day, day after day after day–and that’s what makes it unsustainable, by definition. That kind of cataclysmic destruction cannot be sustained.

    …

    But all too many people–most people, I’m afraid–tend to think, “Well, so what? Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community. Since we’re separate, it doesn’t matter how many species we destroy–and since we’re superior to them anyway, we’re actually improving the world by eliminating them!”

    We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.

    I hope it’s evident that this is not a sustainable way to maintain a brick building. One day, sooner or later, it’s going to collapse, and the penthouse is going to come down along with all the rest.

    Making 200 species extinct every day is similarly not a sustainable way to maintain a living community. Even if we’re in some sense at the top of that community, one day, sooner or later, it’s going to collapse, and when it does, our being at the top won’t help us. We’ll come down along with all the rest.

    Here, Quinn is talking about something much more frightening than I am: an ecological collapse, where we’re not dealing with the end of our civilization and some die-off, but the extinction of our species, and most of our ecosystems with us. That makes the collapse of civilization look like a walk in the park. Now I differ from Quinn: humans are extremely resilient, but civilization is incredibly fragile. I think our civilization will fold well before we face that kind of nightmare. But these are the stakes we’re talking about. This is what we mean when we talk about nature being “in balance,” or civilization disrupting that balance. I think in its purest form, capitalism might emulate a kind of ecosystem. Unlike many other primitivists, I have no problem with capitalism–the problems with it are the problems of any agricultural economy, and they stem from the nature of agricultural production, and are shared by feudalism, patronage, Communism, and every other system that a farmer has ever used. But the metaphor breaks down because unlike the market, the ecology is more than just an abstraction or a game. It is real. It’s the foundation of everything else. We can live happily without a market, but without an ecosystem, there is nothing. We can’t knock our own foundation out from underneath ourselves, and expect that pattern to continue for very long.

  2. springhuman Says:
    September 19th, 2006 at 10:10 am

    very good!!!

    About 9 months ago I quit my teaching job (sociology, college) and became my companion’s business partner. He makes custom mountain jewelry and we’re making our (little, challenging and fulfilling) living through web sales. I’m the webmistress/business person.

    The change threw me into a panic, even a spiritual/intellectual crisis of sorts, having had a more typical take on capitalism, competition, making money, etc. What I’d say now is that it’s easy to have theories and opinions when you’re handed a paycheck - you get a false sense of not participating in the system. When your every activity is about attracting folks to buy the stuff you make so that you can eat and keep the internet connected and the electricity on, etc., then you do see capitalism as natural, in it’s distilled and simple form (making, selling and buying stuff).

    Barter was an earlier form (and something we still do - I recently made a website for an artist and got a painting in exhange). And there were hard bargaining and monopolistic types then too, for instance the Tlingit Indians of the northwest. They also warred and had generational slaves.

    This whole primitivist thing makes me think of the old standard, “The grass is always greener…”, and more exotic and therefore more interesting. I live near the southernmost glacier in north america (Palisade). It’s vanishing. But is anyone studying it? A few folks, but the geologists with clout are all off studying the more hip ones in the far off places.

    ~ Lauren



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