ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
to engage with nature and each other constructively rather than destructively. Cooper
rightly acknowledges that this dynamic connects environmentalism with modernity.
He observes that “environmental writers tend to dwell on economic interest” (CN: 84)
and that environmentalism’s “primary concern is with the human benefits prioritised
in a technological society” (CN: 40). What Cooper does not observe – few writers
ever do – is that the phoney happiness promoted by consumerism likewise constitutes
a collective action problem and requires a solution. The whole of society is harmed
when companies profit by peddling fakery.
The connection between objectivity and collective action derives ultimately from
science, an undertaking which is governed and therefore mostly characterised by
rigorous standards of practice, whereby commitments to both impartiality and norms
of conduct are mutually reinforcing (see Harris 2012). Modernity is science writ large.
In this light, each aspect of Cooper’s focus on the individual (perspectivism and anticollectivism) can be seen to merge as the basis of his opposition to each aspect of
modernity (objectivity, enterprise, law and integration); indeed, Cooper hints at these
interrelationships when he reports approvingly that Daoism declines any “judgment of
things as right and wrong, true or false” (cited in CN: 35).
In turn, the crucial role that science plays in human flourishing reveals the
insufficiency of Cooper’s aspiration to achieve ethical conduct without any
commitment to collective action: just as you can’t have two for the price of one
(reality for the price of perspectivism) in epistemology, you can’t have two for the
price of one (ethical conduct for the price of individualism) in moral philosophy. This
consideration adds weight to the surface inadequacy of many of Cooper’s defences,
which come later in the book, of ethical individualism in relation to the environment;
his reminder that many “creatures, and some people” will “prosper” from global
warming, such that “the perception of crisis or catastrophe is a perspectival one” (CN:
145); his warning that “attempting to conserve an animal or plant species . . . may be
an artificial and fruitless effort to deny nature’s transformative character” (CN: 148);
his downbeat recommendation that “honest recognition of the very limited nature of
one’s own contribution prompts reflection on the place that activist commitment
should have in one’s life”; and his quoting of the founder of Orthodox Daoism of
America: “I see no crisis” (CN: 145). (As to whether Cooper fully agrees with this
claim, it is hard to tell: at important critical junctures he sometimes recourses to
indirect locutions, e.g., “that’s a claim which some will challenge” and “the Orthodox
Daoist just cited might not unreasonably reply that . . .” [CN: 145].)
That many of modernity’s problems stem from a dearth of objectivity connected to a
deficit in collective action shows that, far from being a cure to such problems,
Cooper’s individualism is symptomatic of them – an intellectualisation of society’s
obsession with appearances, and a rationalisation of prevalent anti-collective attitudes.
To some extent Cooper is protected by the remoteness of the actual consequences of
his views – our barbaric pre-modern past is in the past, and our future environmental
crises are in the future – but he cannot avoid, I believe, the shortcomings which afflict
his theory of convergence. People cannot, surely, converge with nature while denying
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