Francis Bacon and the advancement of
learning
It was the ambition of the English thinker and politician Francis
Bacon (1561-1626) to show that science was not Mephistophelean but
Promethean, an activity not harmful but beneficial to man. His work
proved the culmination of a process from the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries which led to the rebirth of confidence in
'Nature'. By reclaiming the physical world from the grip of Satan,
Bacon successfully showed that science did not necessarily involve
a Faustian pact with the Devil, but could be reconciled with
religion. Indeed, he paved the way to a form of scientific deism,
with God the Artificer revealing himself in his created world as
much as in his scriptures.
But in his ambition Bacon also established
Western scientific project to conquer and control nature. Having
separated science from religion, it was only a short step for man
to see himself as the measure of all things. The new scientist of
the Renaissance became, a man striving for infinite power, consumed
by the ambition to become the 'great Emperor of the world'.
Bacon has long been venerated as the great
champion of intellectual liberty, as the man who drew the attention
of philosophers from abstract speculation to the direct observation
of nature. It was his method 'continually to dwell among things
soberly'. He insisted that those who 'determine not to conjecture
and guess, but to find out and know; not to invent fables and
romances of worlds, but to look into, and dissect the nature of
this real world, must consult only things themselves'. To achieve
this end, Bacon wished to keep science separate from religion,
constantly reminding his readers how the progress of science had
been hindered by the conservative prejudice of Scholastic
theologians. 'It is therefore most wise,' he wrote, 'soberly to
render unto faith the things that are faith's.'
In his enthusiastic celebration of science shorn
of sacred philosophy he inadvertently summed up the new conquering
attitude towards nature in the brave new world of Renaissance
science.
'Knowledge itself is power,' Bacon declared in
1597. Rejecting the deductive reasoning of the Scholastic
philosophers of his day, he proposed in Of the Advancement of
Learning (1605) his own inductive method of interpreting nature
by which the results of experience are studied in order to reach a
general conclusion.
Science, he argued, would restore man's dominion
over the animals which he had lost after the Fall. Having been
expelled from the Garden of Eden through eating of the tree of
knowledge, man's only way forward was to eat further of the tree
and create his own garden in this vale of tears. It would be hard
and painful work, but the goal was comfort and ease on earth. In
this way Bacon reconciled traditional Christianity with the new
technological optimism.
Bacon considered that man has a spirit or
reasoning power which makes him like God and a bodily appetite
which makes him like the animals. The virtuous man should therefore
seek 'victory over his nature' and to 'alter and subdue nature'
within himself as well as outside himself. The value of studies was
precisely because they 'perfect nature' since natural abilities are
'like natural plants, that need pruning by study'.
Bacon's considered nature incomplete and corrupt;
it was the duty of man to transform and improve it. He is not only
the lord of creation but its principle of order:
Man, if we
look to final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the world;
insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would
seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose . . . and leading to
nothing. For the whole world works together in the service of man;
and there is nothing from which he does not derive use and fruit .
. . insomuch that all things seem to be going about man's business
and not their own.
Bacon castigated his contemporaries for taking an
aesthetic interest in nature; 'we respect, contemplate and
reverence Nature,' he insisted, 'more than is fit'. It is not
something of value or beauty in itself since it 'took beginning
from the Word of God by means of confused matter, and the entrance
of prevarication and corruption'. It is therefore man's task to
improve and perfect fallen nature through his science and art. And
the way to achieve this is to try to understand it in order to
control it.
Bacon's attitude to nature comes across most
clearly in his metaphor of gardening. He felt making a garden, in
which man imposes his will on nature, to be the purest of human
pleasures. His ideal allows for the presence of the wild, but it is
carefully controlled and circumscribed. In his management plan
there would be 'a green in the entrance, a heath, or desert, in the
going forth, and the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on
both sides'. The garden itself would best be square, encompassed on
all sides with a 'stately arched hedge'. It is the model of a
bowling green, with the wilderness beyond the hedges intended to
emphasize the security and comfort within.
As Bacon makes clear in his Utopia New
Atlantis,the avowed aim of his philosophy and the end of the
foundation of his ideal society is 'the knowledge of cause, and
secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human
empire, to the effecting of all things possible'. But Bacon is not
content to observe nature and direct it; he wishes to transform it.
A central institution on the island of Bensalem is a centre for
scientific study called Solomon's House. Its spokesman anticipates
modern genetic engineering for plants and animals. He boasts that
they experiment with grafting and inoculating, making by artificial
means trees and flowers come on earlier or later than their
seasons, and to reach fruition more speedily than by their natural
course. They also make their fruit greater and sweeter, and of a
differing taste, smell, colour and figure from their natural
ones.
The most prophetic passage comes when he waxes
lyrically about the trials they make upon beasts, birds and
fishes:
We have also
parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds, which we use
not only for view or rareness, but likewise for dissection and
trials, that thereby we may take light what may be wrought upon the
body of man. Wherein we find many strange effects, as continuing
life in them, though divers parts, which you account vital, be
perished and taken forth; resuscitating of some that seem dead in
appearance, and the like. We try, also, all poisons, and other
medicines upon them as well as chirurgery as physic. By art,
likewise, we make them greater or taller than their kind is, and,
contrariwise, dwarf them, and stay their growth; we make them more
fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and, contrariwise, barren
and not generative; also we make them different in colour, shape,
activity — many ways. We find means to make conmixtures of
divers kinds, which have produced many new kinds, and them not
barren, as the general opinion is.
Bacon is the arch-imperialist of nature, wishing
to extend human control to its furthest corners. The Royal Society
was partly inspired by Solomon's House and, on its inauguration,
was proud to invoke Bacon's name.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Bacon was a
powerful statesman as well as a philosopher. Having served as
Solicitor General, he eventually became Lord Chancellor. In the
essay 'Of a King', it was his considered opinion that 'a king is a
mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own
name as a great honour' — a view which no doubt facilitated
his own placement at the court. The Romantic poet and visionary
William Blake was astonished by how much 'Contemptible Knavery
& Folly' Bacon's Essayscontained. It was only in our
century that the full nightmare of the Lord Chancellor's vision has
been realised. Blake declared 'Bacon's philosophy has Ruin'd
England'; two hundred years later one might add that it has ruined
the earth itself. It is interesting that his major work was
dedicated to King James I of England, who's claim to scholarship
rests on his monograph supporting witchcraft as an expression of
the supernatural power of the Devil.
Descartes and the mastery of nature
Bacon's European
contemporary was the Frenchman Rene Descartes (1596—1650),
who is considered the 'father of modern philosophy', also founded
analytic geometry. Physics for him was nothing but mechanics, that
is, applied geometry. All physical objects are matter in motion. It
was therefore natural for him to liken the entire universe,
including the human body, to a machine. Everything in his scheme of
things consists of matter governed by mechanistic principles. God
had set the universe in motion according to fixed mathematical
laws, no different from the laws through which a king rules his
subjects. In his
Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes
argued that the goal of science is to discover these laws in order
to understand the elements in nature in sufficient detail so that
'we might put them in the same way to all the uses for which they
are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters
and possessors of nature'. Human freedom may have been the central
goal for Descartes, but he could only see it in terms of
mastery.
Hobbes and the rights of nature
Hobbes was another
contemporary of Bacon who best summed up the imperial view of
nature in terms of its state, its rights and the social contract.
In his view, in a state of nature without the law to restrain
individuals, every man would be prey to violent invasion of his
life and property by his fellows. There would be no place for
Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and Culture of
the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be
imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving,
and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the
face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no
Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of
violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty,
brutish, and short.
For Hobbes this is not merely hypothetical, for
he claims that the 'savage people in many places in America' lived
in such a brutish manner, in a condition of 'warre, as is of every
man, against every man'. The vision has continued to haunt the
Western mind and finds expression in William Golding's Lord of
the Flies. But it is profoundly unhistorical and
unanthropological, a flight of dark imagination and pathological
dread.
The right of nature, Hobbes continues, is the
liberty of each man to use his power to preserve his own life. The
corollary is the law of nature 'a Precept, or generall Rule, found
out by Reason, by which man is forbidden to do, that, which is
destructive of his life'. But Hobbes deduces a second law of nature
for reasonable men — to lay down their right to all things
and limit their freedom if all do the same for the sake of peace.
They would, however, have to form a contract and transfer their
rights to a person or body who would make their agreement stick,
since for the cynical Hobbes 'Covenants, without the Sword, are but
Words'. Obligation to the laws of the state would last only as long
as the sovereign had sufficient coercive power to protect its
citizens. Hobbes's sovereign is a self-perpetuating and absolute
ruler who can only be changed by rebellion. As for man's
obligations to animals, they do not exist, because to make
covenants with 'brute beasts' is impossible.
Hobbes offers a brilliant analysis of Western man
in a market economy striving for more power to obtain wealth and
status. Indeed, he insists that 'the Value, or Worth
of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so
much as would be given for the use of his
Power'. At the time Hobbes's account of equal
obligation and natural right was an advance on the doctrine of the
divine right of kings. He also recognizes the equal ability, equal
right and equal obligation of all citizens. But he has a highly
atomistic view of society as composed of calculating
individuals.
The title page of Leviathan symbolically
shows a crowned sovereign whose body is made up of a multitude of
individuals. Wielding a sword in one hand and a mace in the other,
he overlooks the ordered works of man in transforming nature: a
cultivated landscape and walled city. He is flanked by a castle and
a church which represent civil and ecclesiastical authority. It is
significant that Hobbes should call his absolute state the
Leviathan, the sea monster in the Bible, synonymous with a huge and
powerful thing. He called his historical account of the Civil War
the Behemoth, another gigantic animal, probably inspired by a
hippopotamus. He wished to frighten his contemporaries with the
power of these mythical creatures which could wreak havoc on frail
humanity.
In the final analysis, Hobbes stands as the very
antithesis of an ecological sensibility with his mechanical view of
nature and man, his nightmarish depiction of the state of nature,
his celebration of power, and his artificial and absolute state.
Hobbes applies Galileo's and Bacon's mechanical philosophy to
psychology and politics with disastrous results. His system fails
to resolve the paradox that if human beings are as Hobbes describes
them, then how can they rationally decide to make a contract to
form a government or even hold together as a community? As his
contemporary Sir William Temple observed; 'Nor do I know, if men
are like Sheep, why they need any government: Or if they are like
wolves, how can they suffer it.'
Within industrialism, nonhuman nature is not seen
as what it is, but as what it has become through the adoption of
the late 16th century European imperialist view. It is regarded as
a conglomerate of resources. Forests are thought of as so many
board feet of lumber, lakes, rivers and oceans are viewed as
fisheries or sources of water or dumps, in which case they are
analyzed in terms of their "assimilation capacities" to absorb
pollution. Farms come to be seen as potential subdivisions, a
self-fulfilling perception because farm land is taxed according to
its "potential," making agriculture difficult to sustain when
pressures for suburbanization arise. Heidegger, in his critique of
technology, notes, "Everything everywhere is ordered to stand by,
to be immediately at hand . . . the real everywhere, more or less
distinctly, becomes standing-reserve."" Under industrial regimes,
nonhuman nature becomes something to be restructured in accord with
human intention, a collection of resources to be "developed" for
human use.
This was a view of nature taken by the
pre-industrial Europeans who were to colonise North America.
American relations of production were premised upon ecological
abundance, and so attached a higher value to labour than had been
the case in Europe. Returns to labour were so high in America
because returns to land were so low.
Land in New England became for the colonists a
form of capital, a thing consumed for the express purpose of
creating augmented wealth. It was the land-capital equation that
created the two central ecological contradictions of the colonial
economy. One of these was the inherent conflict between the land
uses of the colonists and those of the Indians. The ecological
relationships which European markets created in New England were
inherently antithetical to earlier Indian economies, and so those
economies were transformed—as much through the agency of the
Indians as the Europeans—in ways that need not be repeated
here. By 1800, Indians could no longer live the same seasons of
want and plenty that their ancestors had, for the simple reason
that crucial aspects of those seasons had changed beyond
recognition.
But there was a second ecological contradiction
in the human economy as well. Quite simply, the colonists' economic
relations of production were ecologically self-
destructive. They assumed the limitless availability of
more land to exploit, and in the long run that was impossible.
Peter Kalm described the process whereby colonial farmers used new
land until it was exhausted, then turned it to pasture and cut down
another tract of forest. "This kind of agriculture will do for a
time," he wrote, "but it will afterwards have bad consequences, as
every one may clearly see." Not only colonial agriculture, but
lumbering and the fur trade as well, were able to ignore the
problem of continuous yield because of the temporary gift of nature
which fuelled their continuous expansion. When that gift was
finally exhausted, ecosystems and economies alike were forced into
new relationships: expansion could not continue indefinitely.
The implications of this second ecological
contradiction stretched well beyond the colonial period. Although
we often tend to associate ecological changes primarily with
industrialism's ideology of nature that produced the cities and
factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is clear
that changes with similar roots took place just as profoundly in
the farms and countrysides of the colonial period. The transition
to capitalism alienated the products of the land as much as the
products of human labour, and so transformed natural communities as
profoundly as it did human ones. By integrating New England
ecosystems into an ultimately global capitalist economy, colonists
and Indians together began a dynamic and unstable process of
ecological change which had in no way ended by 1800. We live with
their legacy today. When the geographer Carl Sauer wrote in the
twentieth century that Americans had "not yet learned the
difference between yield and loot," he was describing one of the
most long standing tendencies of their way of life. Ecological
abundance and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of
plenty were a people of waste.
Linnaeus and the middle way
The 18th century was a
period when an attempt was made to adopt an objective attitude to
the natural world as part of the legacy of the scientific
revolution which sought to classify and analyze nature in order to
gain greater mastery over it. Linnaeus and his fellow naturalists
stand in an imperial tradition amongst the forerunners of ecology.
In his widely influential essay 'The 'Oeconomy of Nature' (1749),
Linnaeus sought to discover the hand of God in nature. In the
process, he presented an extremely static portrait of its
interactions, bound together by the chains of sustenance, in which
the human species occupies a special place of honour: 'All these
treasures of nature . . . seem intended by the Creator for the sake
of man. Everything may be made subservient to his
use. It was man's prerogative to improve nature's
economy to enrich the human economy, by eliminating the undesirable
and multiplying the useful. In this respect, Linnaeus was chosen by
the King of Sweden to carry out a survey of his country's natural
resources as a prelude to economic expansion.
However, this was carried out at a time of
transition when Linnaeus (the Swedish botanist Carl von Linne) and
others in botany to classify plants not in terms of moral status or
usefulness but according to their intrinsic qualities and
structures was quite new. Indeed, Linnaeus is said to have fallen
on his knees to give thanks when he first saw gorse in England - a
hated enemy of the agricultural improvers.
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Huxley, like many Victorian's
contemplating the rapid industrialisation of the British
countryside environment, wanted to deny man's participation in the
war for survival raging in nature. On the other hand, they could
not resist setting up their battle lines elsewhere. Manly combat
for Victorians such as Huxley and Charles Kingsley had powerful
attractions and required only a morally acceptable arena for its
pursuit. Huxley's solution was to shift the focus of violence from
a man- man to a man-nature confrontation. This was also the
recommendation of the American philosopher William James in his
1910 essay "A Moral Equivalent to War." It was seen by both men as
wholly legitimate, even honorific, to act aggressively toward
nature, so long as that aggression was performed in the name of
humanity, decency, virtue, and even health and cleanliness. They
were intent on carrying the crusade against nature to the actual
physical surface of the earth, on making the land over to serve as
a kind of visible, external evidence of their accession to grace.
Huxley's favorite metaphor for this ethic of ecological
transformation was the image of the Garden of Eden, implying a
civilized landscape surrounded by a wall to guard it from the
Darwinian chaos. This garden was to be a place of virtue, but also
of material productivity; the two ends were mutually reinforcing.
It was, however, to be an expanding kingdom that one day would
embrace the entire world. Already, in Tasmania, Huxley saw the
walls moving out to encircle new territory, where a domesticated,
"English" flora and fauna were replacing the native wilderness. If
humans would restrain their self- seeking ambitions and work for
the "corporate whole," they would see this process spread
everywhere to create "an earthly paradise, a true Garden of Eden,
in which all things should work together towards the well-being of
the gardeners." Civilization, according to nature imperialists,
became a process of pacification of nature by concerted force. In
its train would come not only a more perfectly moral world but the
rich rewards of productivity, wealth, and comfort for the human
species.
Thus, the way was open to manage nature according
to desirable economic objectives, which for the Victorians was
wealth from mass-production. Ironically, managerialism was at the
root of conservation. In the early 1900s Roosevelt's Chief
Forester, Gifford Pinchot defined conservation as "the fundamental
material policy of human civilization". He referred to forest
conservation as "tree farming." Instead of mining the woodlands,
his corps of rangers would replant cut-over lands, just as a farmer
replants his crops each year. "Forestry is handling trees so that
one crop follows another' he explained.
The purpose of Forestry, then, is to make the
forest produce the largest possible amount of whatever crop or
service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for
generation after generation of men and trees. ... A well-handled
farm gets more and more productive as the years pass; so does a
well-handled forest.
Like Francis Bacon, Pinchot saw the world as
badly in need of managing, and he was convinced that science could
teach man to improve on nature, to make its processes more
efficient and its crops more abundant. He would not go as far as
the Germans toward intensive cultivation, or establish as they did,
tree farms that resembled factories in their planned
orderliness—there was not enough manpower in America to
manage nature that intensively over so vast a space. But he would
insist that all renewable natural resources, especially forests and
wildlife, be approached in the future as crops to be planted,
harvested, and cultivated by skilled experts. And like any
efficient farmer, he could see value in the land chiefly where it
could be turned to profit.
Another aspect of the imperial view is that in a
domesticated world some species are turned into pests. They are
reduced to the status of marauder. Selected plants and
animals become outcasts and an elusive challenge to the
controlling, contriving hand of man in the agrarian economy.
Moreover certain animal predators, such as the wolf, come to
be seen as moral offenders, a species of "vermin" that must be
eradicated—by any available means. In the pursuit of economic
gain, or emotional equilibrium with nature we have singled out
enemies as well as chosen favourites. The Anglo-American mind has
exhibited a peculiarly intense moralism that, in this case, assigns
every species to an absolute ethical category: good or bad. A few
wild animals, songbirds chiefly, have been pronounced good;
everything else is of use only for target practice. And "varmint"
has been the very worst epithet in America's moral lexicon, a label
reserved for those species that plumb the depths of depravity.
Essentially these are the animals with teeth and claws: the
carnivores, including wolves, pumas, bears—and latest in
line, coyotes. The survival of the coyote represents an
outrageous defiance of man's righteous empire over nature.
Behind Pinchot's conservation philosophy lay an
environmental tradition stretching all the way back to the
eighteenth century: progressive, scientific agriculture. From the
time of "Turnip" Townshend and Arthur Young, who taught England how
to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, progressive
agriculture had always promoted a kind of conservation. Its
spokesmen had long been a force for closer management of water and
woodlands. They had awakened earlier generations to the threat of
soil erosion, developed contour ploughing, and invented chemical
fertilizers to make the earth more productive. In America they had
established a number of land grant colleges where students were
taught the gospel of wise land use.
The Imperial tradition is still with us in our
age of computer-run organizations and it was probably
inevitable that ecology too would come to emphasize the flow of
goods and services—or of energy—in a kind of automated,
robotized, pacified nature. The managerial ethos has come to the
rescue of nature. Ecologists have stepped forward to manage the
natural environment. That it has been mismanaged for so long is
urged as a sufficient reason for putting scientists and
scientifically- trained experts in charge now. Entire university
science programmes appear under the title "Environmental
Management." And indeed, our current preocupation with bioeconomics
has given would-be managers working the the strategic objectives of
biodiversity action plans plenty to work on.
The Baconian sense of mission is not yet dead. N.
P. Naumov, probably a leading ecologist in the latter day Soviet
Union, admitted that "the goal of studying the factors of
productivity is to raise it." This ideal, he suggests, may be
realized "by changing organic nature, the species content and
ratios, and the means of using and managing the populations."
