Spinoza believes that we are entitled to kill animals and use natural resources in pursuit of our own advantage. Our right to do so is based in our greater power. No moral codes govern our relations to nonhumans, for they take place in the ‘state of nature’, where there is no good or evil, and no law but natural right.To minimise and control our fear of one another, human beings had to form civil states, delimited realms of human activity determined by human laws. These laws reflect what a given community of humans determines is good for their flourishing. Animals and things cannot be citizens, and their flourishing is not a goal of Spinoza’s civil state, unless their flourishing has a direct impact on our own.
We should strive to support the flourishing of other animals and natural things not out of pity or guilt or fondness, but because their flourishing is essential for our flourishing. Recall that for Spinoza, ‘good’ is what we certainly know to be useful to us: we certainly know the utility of the ice caps remaining frozen, of the Amazon remaining intact, and of bees and butterflies continuing to thrive.
In Down to Earth, Latour suggests that we go beyond the civil state to form a terrestrial state, the goal of which is the flourishing of all the individuals and systems that compose it. This is a new version of the social contract story. Its classical formulation, used by Hobbes and Spinoza to think about the foundations of politics, takes place in the Holocene era, immediately preceding the Anthropocene. To neutralise their fear of mutual violence (so the story goes), human beings gave up their natural right and formed the civil state. Doing so enabled them to understand that their flourishing depended on the collectivisation of their power. Now in the late Anthropocene, we find ourselves back in the state of nature: a state of constant fear, propelled and horrified by our own natural right to do whatever we can. Perhaps we need a political solution in the form of Latour’s terrestrial state that collectivises the powers of all living beings and aims at the preservation and flourishing of life as such. Perhaps such a move would neutralise our fear of our own power.
Latour argues that we must replace the concept of nature as the framework for human action with a concept of the terrestrial. On this model, the Earth itself is understood to be a political actor, and politics becomes a sphere in which human beings have a non-central role. In a terrestrial social contract, we give up our natural right over other species, and we agree to cooperate with the not-exclusively-human others on whom we mutually depend. This vision of a politics of the Earth is not a ‘return to nature’, or an attempt to reconstruct nature prior to human intervention. This position doesn’t call for the removal of civil states or the reversal of human progress. Like all political structures, the ‘terrestrial state’ is an artificial public thing, a res publica, that must be established by its members and made to work through laws and institutions.
Author : Beth Lord
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