Last autumn I wrote this for somebody perplexed by the term ‘Deep Green’, and why many members of the Green Party felt anxious about its direction. I thought I’d publish my take here for others thinking the same question.
Tag: <span>philosophy</span>
Don’t think of an elephant! Ever since I read the work of George Lakoff I’ve been fascinated by framing. But a new report by the think tank Green House contains some useful and stimulating critiques of the Common Cause approach.
In politics, as in sport and Eurovision, we all like to fit the facts to our pre-conceived ideas. Tribes and factions interpret results as a vindication of their point of view.
One of the many abuses of the English language in mainstream political parlance is the denigration of ideology. Defending his government’s cuts to public spending, David Cameron wrote in 2011 that: This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country’s problems, not by ideology. More recently, Nick Clegg attacked Michael Gove’s education policies as ideological, reportedly saying: Parents don’t want ideology to get in the way of their children’s education In fact, Nick Clegg really appears to have it in for ideology because he attacks it all the time. He said a couple of weeks ago: I don’t take an ideological approach to public spending. But it isn’t just our dear leaders trying to avoid the whiff of ideology. You hear it all the time – the Government’s cuts are “ideological” (i.e. bad), the Green Party’s opposition to nuclear is “ideological” (i.e. invalid).…
The population debate rumbles on. David Attenborough crashed back into the debate with a pretty crass set of remarks about not sending food aid to places struck by famine, earning lots of impassioned responses. The activist-comedian Robert Newman wrote an interesting piece pointing out that population growth is tailing off so claiming it really isn’t the issue, and so it continues, round and around. At the Green Party autumn conference, I attended an early morning panel discussion on population. We heard from a speaker from Population Matters, who argued that our impact on the rest of nature is a function of our population, our affluence (and inequality) and our technology. I explored this “IPAT” formula a bit in my previous blog entry. Then Sebastian Power made more or less the same case as Newman – that we suffer from (in his words) “rich white men” consuming too much, not too…
Following my previous blog post about the Young Greens and lots of discussion with friends and fellow party members, I want to set out clearly why ecology defines my philosophical basis rather than social and environmental justice.
To avoid misunderstandings from the outset, I think social and environmental justice are important, but they don’t define my political philosophy.
The new philosophical basis of the Green Party says:
A system based on inequality and exploitation is threatening the future of the planet on which we depend, and encouraging reckless and environmentally damaging consumerism…. The Green Party is a party of social and environmental justice, which supports a radical transformation of society for the benefit of all, and for the planet as a whole.
This sounds great! What could be wrong with that? I hope I might persuade you why I don’t think it is quite right, or at least encourage more thought and debate about political philosophy and the precise meaning of different terms.
I joked a couple of days ago that I should set-up a Young Greens for the Environment grouping in the Green Party. I wasn’t being facetious, because I think there is a lack of environmentalism (or perhaps even a current of anti-environment thought) within the Young Greens (the organisation, distinct from the many Greens who are under 30). By all reports, Young Greens were out in force at this weekend’s party conference, along with older members who have joined in recent years in search of a left-of-Labour party with realistic electoral prospects. Their scalp was a change to the party’s philosophical basis, removing clauses like this: Life on Earth is under immense pressure. It is human activity, more than anything else, which is threatening the well-being of the environment on which we depend. Conventional politics has failed us because its values are fundamentally flawed. And replacing them with clauses like…
OK, it isn’t really. But an event at City Hall today threw up some difficult lessons for economists from other academic disciplines. After a massive crisis in the global financial system, which was triggered by and hugely deepened a cyclical recession, it’s a pretty easy time to have a dig. So here they go! Paul Ormerod kicked off with lessons from physics. The big one was: use empirical evidence and discovery to test, falsify and improve theories. In economics, evidence has very little status whilst most theory is developed in ignorance of evidence. His pet example was the work done on networks and effects such as herding (e.g. fashions and fads), which has barely scratched the surface of classical economic theory. Luc Bovens gave a fascinating dissection of the financial crisis using Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics. Who is morally culpable for the crisis, he asked? In the tradition of all good…