Controlled Progress

Looking back to when I first left school at the age of sixteen, I can see my scientific career as a tiny facet of the long progress of industrialism construed as the expansion of human domination over nature. In my first job as a laboratory technician industrialism was without question seen by everyone as a good thing delivering social progress. Advances were marked by those technical and cultural achievements that yielded an increased level of control over the vagaries of the external world. In fact, this concept of progress is a cornerstone in the justification of industrialism. When I was looking for job security, the British brand of industrialism had produced wealth to spare. Even after the great economic sponge of a second world war, the British economy coupled with heavy industry was able to produce scholarships and fellowships sufficient to get me painlessly to university, and on into the vision of an ever-expanding system of research-based higher education.

If I look back to the origin of the technological stream that I joined from school, I agree with Lewis Mumford that its most decisive moment was the invention of the "megamachine." In other words, my particular trajectory was part of a social cascade from applied technology that started at the very beginning of empires. Pre-industrial megamachines had been composed of human beings hierarchically organized "under the rule of an absolute ruler whose commands, supported by a coalition of the priesthood, the armed nobility, and the bureaucracy, secured a corpselike obedience from all the components of the machine." This allowed the collective labour of many to be focused on mammoth projects such as flood control or the building of roads, elaborate cities, tombs for rulers, and the like.

A British-made industrial revolution has now led to a global megamachine that affects the daily life of virtually all peoples of the globe. At local levels it organizes jobs into a mechanical pattern wherein work done is carried out at the direction of others, for ends set by others, and becomes the lot of many humans for most of their lives. Work thereby becomes a lifelong task imposed by a social order, instead of a series of sporadic events dictated by natural necessity. The state comes into being, developing institutions of socializa­tion and control. Bureaucracies and armies became organs of the mega­machine, which had to be supported by the labour of the many.

When progress is understood as a progressive domination over nonhuman nature, such a development seems like a great step forward. Through social organization, humanity becomes able to literally change the face of the earth, and compared with their ancestors only one or two generations ago, people are immortal. Technology is at first an artifact of this process of increased repression of spontaneous human activity. Later it becomes instrumental in maintaining and intensifying centralized control of human activity.

Since the 1950s, another view of progress has gradually gained ground, and at the present time sits uncomfortably alongside industrialism. It says that humans are fundamentally, creators of meaningful symbolic systems with associated values that cannot be measured scientifically, but which nevertheless have to be valued within the context of an industrial culture. The aim is to restrict industrialism so that people can live in ways that allow the spirit to flourish.

If humans are essentially generators of notional meaning, then progress is that which increases the richness of human cultural experience. If in this sense we understand ourselves primarily as producers of meaning and culture, our history no longer appears as an exponential progressive development of consumerism. If progress is the degree of cultural richness present in daily life, then the megamachine, with its increasing centralization of power and the loss of personal autonomy, is a human calamity.

History, when seen as a type of move­ment from tribal life to the modern state, appears to be ambiguous. It is associated with profound losses accompanying the technologies and hierarchical social organisations that give us control over the pieces of nature we call resources. This increase in control has afforded, for some, a greatly increased security from the vagaries of untamed nature, but the cost of this security is substantial. We have lost the face-to-face societies of "primitive" peoples, which often involved proto-democracies, flexible sex roles, and a linkage of authority and competence to the tasks immediately at hand. It has also generated a vast gap between those who can grasp the economic fruits and those who are not directly connected with their local version of the megamachine.

The obvious reactions to the critics of industrialism are either, "we can't all become primitives", or the generation of more songs of praise for the material benefits. These reactions indicate the power of a forceful image of progress that is based on the domination of nonhuman nature. However, the point is not to suggest the impossible—that we should all go "back"—but to raise a critical framework within which we can reconsider the question of what human progress really means. The aim is to consider radically alternative designs for the future, which incorporate the fruits of a more benign industrialism within a new value system.

After half a century of developing an attitude towards progress in biological research and education I have some questions. These concern my industrial culture. Now, when I return to Grimsby, which in my childhood was described as the world’s biggest fishing port, the culture of my parent’s generation is a museum exhibit. I am not at all sure whether or not mass-production of pre-packed foods that has made Grimsby the ‘food capital of Europe’ has created Grimbarians who are more socially competent, happier, more capable of love and compassion, more developed in spirit, and more autonomous in their personal lives. For evidence of global dissatisfaction we look to the North Americans, where they consistently express less satsifaction with their lives than they did four decades ago, despite clear increases in material consumption and real incomes.

Asking these questions opens the door to a closer look at the evidence about "primitive" cultures. Such evidence seems to suggest their lives are generally less constrained by the need for daily labour, with more time for music and dance, and with greater equality and freedom. Even if it is something of an illusion, it can help us effectively to question the idea that progress demands increasingly powerful technologies, an idea that is rooted in the view of progress as control over nonhuman nature. Rather than simply remaining entranced with technology and the illusion of power that it brings, we can assess new technologies within the context of life and culture.

In summary, during my lifetime there has been a significant shift in everyday thinking about our surroundings. At my own beginnings I could only think about science offering a means of controlling nature because my teachers imagined themselves as separate from nature. As an individual I could feel myself moving from a low economic base line, and progress seemed without end. But for everyone today, the reality of media-generated environmental issues shows that this open-ended view of economic development is simply not true—we are inextricably enmeshed within nature, which offers limited support for industrialism. You don’t have to have a scientific training to appreciate this. However, when we expand our understanding of our situation as an ecological one to include this embeddedness, then the concept of control misleads us into thinking there is a big fix for everything. Nature is seen through the lens of a market economy as parts of ecosystems to be plucked like fruits to be transformed into commodities. Parts are used as sewers. Most parts are invisible because, as participants in nature's feast, we do not value them as a whole. If the larger context is noticed, it becomes clear that we are not in control. Rather, we exist within a web of a complexly interrelated nature. We are parts of the web of being. It is only through this shift in the scale of thinking that allows science to be part of the social forces required to build theoretical and practical bridges for social change in the way we regard nature. I began my scientific intellectualism in the laboratory of a company that produced fish oils as a chemical by-product of the prosperous Grimsby fishing industry. Five decades on, as a leader of environmental managerialism, I am struggling with the problem that control of nature is an illusion if the factors being manipulated are seen as isolated elements and not as parts of an integrated whole.

If I were to begin my career anew, the starting point would be to seek an understanding of life as an expansion of personal development. The vision would be a flourishing of human individuals with other forms of life, rather than an increase in our domination over the rest of nature as an expansion of a global megamachine. My practical starting point would be the proposition that most people subscribe to the view that their spirit flourishes within nature. To achieve this, control over the environment has to have an important management prescription that regards nature as the real megamachine in which all species are emeshed as its cogs. Nature conservation then becomes ‘nature maintenance’ to replace missing parts, and ensure long-term interconnectivity. We know that the loss of individuals, populations and parts of populations, ramifies through the natural world. There never has been any slack in natural systems to use for transforming nature into resources. Ecosystems have never been tolerant of human exploitation. Although we can only trace the immediate impacts, there is good science that assures us that unseen ripples will continue. This aspect of catastrophe theory is good enough to support a management programme of nature maintenance as an ongoing social cost within industrialism.

At the moment it looks as if industrial agriculture, which is the nearest of our mass production systems to nature, is beginning to be curbed by a democratic process of ‘modulation’ whereby government subsidies are shifted from managing production to managing ecosystems. What comes next should be a national countryside management scheme that will ensure the efficient use of public subsidies in terms of transparent planning and local policing of outcomes. What about manufacturing and the service sectors of industrialism? The UK Consevation Management System Partnership, which I currently chair, has just completed the first EU project to pave the way for a biodiversity management system for industrial sites to benefit the local community. This marks a growing belief in business that the principle of polluter pays will eventually be extended to ensure biodiversity action plans will become the norm to embed nature behind the perimeter fence within the green assets of the local community. However, the time-scales for enforcing this kind of biodiversity strategy look exceedingly long to me.