Nature's Evil

PART TWO

HISTORY OF IDEAS

From Adam Smith to contemporary ‘neoclassicists’, the main thrust of economic theory has focused on the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, which raised both the haves and the have-nots to a new level of prosperity. From Richard Cantillon to Immanuel Wallerstein, the alternative tradition of social sciences has asserted that this imperial exchange has ruined the suppliers of raw materials and enriched the organisers of labour. In the twenty-first century all these contradictory but equally plausible certainties suddenly look obsolete. Throughout the century of oil, wealth had been increasingly connected to resources – moreover, they themselves have become wealth. But, at a time when the human world is running short of air, civilisation is again changing its resource platform.

With the Enlightenment, writes J. G. A. Pocock, ‘the history of things, and of material culture, became the history of ideas as well as of commerce and power; … yet all these histories rested on an infrastructure which necessarily included the history of fiction and even fantasy.’ 1 In the history of natural resources (a big part of material culture), this complex infrastructure developed in space as well as in time. Labour and knowledge are global but resources are local. Geography plays as much of a role as physics and chemistry in determining the exchange values of various sorts of raw matter. Starting with flints, from which the first axe blades were made, and ending with the rare metals that are used in smartphones, every material has its place of origin, and that place is usually very far from the consumer. The Roman Empire procured silver from Spain; the Holy Roman Empire got its silver from Peru. Spices had to be transported across three oceans; pearls and diamonds were found in the most exotic parts of the planet, and for some reason only in those places; ores, coal and oil are generously distributed in the earth’s crust, but there are few places where they are found near the surface. More often than not, transportation costs have exceeded the costs of extracting the raw material. Trade, markets and capital itself were based on these natural variations, and none of them would exist if the world had been uniform – a point well understood by the English boy king Edward VI, who wrote to Tsar Ivan IV, explaining the rationale for trade:

Marchants [who are] wandering about the world, search both the land and the sea, to carry such good and profitable things, as are found in their Countreis, to remote regions and kingdoms, and againe to bring from the same … commodities for their owne Countreis … For the God of heaven and earth, greatly providing for mankind, would not that all things should be founde in one region, to the ende that one shoulde have neede of another, that by this meanes friendshippe might be established among all men. 2

But grain, for example, can be grown practically anywhere, although the productivity of the crop varies according to conditions. The most fundamental resources – air, land and water – are still more evenly distributed. These resources are basic necessities. They exist in all inhabited parts of the earth – or, rather, people only inhabit the parts of the earth where these resources exist. But even they can run out; in fact, they constitute the limits to resources of secondary importance, guaranteeing that grain and oil will never run out. In this century, we see very clearly that air will be exhausted sooner than oil and water sooner than land. Only a third of the known supplies of oil will be used by humanity, and only about a third of the planet is suitable for human settlement. The climate crisis tells us that the future consumption of secondary resources such as oil will lead to the destruction of the fundamental resources such as air. This will be irreversible and, from the human perspective, inadmissible. The paradox is that the lack of air, which has no economic value, will leave oil, the very embodiment of this value, unsold and unburnt. The factor that limits economic growth is not the earth but the sky.

In the mid-twentieth century, the historian Karl Polanyi formulated an evident truth: ‘Production is interaction of man and nature.’ Classical political economy, he wrote, did not take natural factors into account; only human labour was deemed worthy of attention (I would add an obvious caveat: not any such labour but only that part which took place in the imperial metropoles). Polanyi was surprised that ‘nature in the physical sense was consciously excluded by Smith from the problem of wealth.’ He explained this by Adam Smith’s ‘broad optimism’; a sceptical acknowledgment of nature’s limits, so characteristic of the French physiocrats, was alien to Smith. 3 Walter Benjamin saw a similar mistake in what he called ‘vulgar Marxism’. Exaggerating the role of labour, this teaching ignored nature, treating it as ‘gratis’. Benjamin called this position naïve; instead, he wished to comprehend the ‘exploitation of nature’ and the ‘exploitation of the proletariat’ as two sides of one process. 4

Following Benjamin, the philosopher Hannah Arendt criticised the ‘glorification of labour’ that she found in ‘modern theory’. It was opposite to ‘the contempt for labour’ in ancient thought, which saw labour as the lot of slaves. From the eighteenth century labour became a source of property (Locke), wealth (Smith) and value (Marx). This glorification of labour went hand in hand with a disdain for nature. In her hierarchical system, Arendt made a distinction between labour and work. Labour is a cyclical exchange between man and nature; like the subsistence farmer, the labourer creates necessary but perishable products that he consumes straight away. Work, on the other hand, transforms nature, creating artefacts which keep their value for years or centuries. Taking matter out of nature, work produces ‘worldly things, whose durability will survive and withstand the devouring processes of life.’ Work, not labour, ‘guarantees the permanence and durability of our world.’ 5 And Arendt also saw a third category – human action, which partly, but never completely, liberates humanity from its dependence on nature .

Notes

1 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion , Vol. 4, p. 40. 2 Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea , Vol. 1, p. 3. 3 Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation , p. 112. 4 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings , pp. 393–4. 5 Arendt, The Human Condition , pp. 94, 108.