The Environmental Endgame: Mainstream Economics, Ecological Disaster, and Human Survival

Chapter 5: The Gods of the Soulless Machine: Newtonian Physics, Metaphysics, and Natural Laws

5 5 TH E G O D S O F TH E S O U L L E S S M A C H I N E Newtonian Physics, Metaphysics, and Natural Laws . . . May God keep us From single Vision and Newton’s sleep! — W I L L I A M B L A K E Let us now imagine that you have been playing the Godgame on your home computer for some time and have now have arrived at the phase of the game where the players are challenged to coordinate large-scale human activities in environmentally responsible ways on a global or planetary scale. At this point, another question appears on the screen: “What narratives define the institutional frameworks and processes that are primarily responsible for coordinating the relationship between parts (large-scale human activities) and whole (global environment or ecosystem)?” The obvious answer is the political narrative that coordinates the relationships between peoples and governments in the international community and the economic narrative that serves as the basis for coordinating virtually all large-scale economic activities. When we think about how to resolve the crisis in the global environment in these terms, the solution seems rather obvious. The international community must begin very soon to develop and implement political and economic narratives that can serve as the basis for articulating institutional frameworks and processes that can coordinate large-scale human activities in ways that can allow for the emergence of sustainable conditions in the global environment. Equally obvious, this effort must be predicated on our best scientific understanding of the actual dynamics of the interactions between parts (large-scale human activities) and whole (sustainable global environment). The principal reason why this community has failed to implement this obvious solution was discussed earlier—assumptions about the relationships between parts (sovereign nation-states and national economies) and wholes (the international system of government and the global market system) in the present system of international government and neoclassical economic theory are categorically different from and wholly incompatible with the actual dynamics of part-whole relationships in the system of life. There is, however, another, equally important reason why the international community has not given any serious consideration to this obvious solution. Most political leaders and economic planners presume that neoclassical economic theory, the economic narrative that now serves as the basis for coordinating virtually all large-scale economic activities in the global market system, is scientific. For reasons that will soon become obvious, there is no basis for assuming that neoclassical economics is a rigorously mathematical discipline comparable to physics, and the claim that the theories used by neoclassical economists are scientific is bogus. However, the intent in this portion of the discussion is not to launch an ill-mannered attack on mainstream economists or to denigrate the virtues of the free-market system. It is to make the case that the only way in which we can hope to resolve the environmental crisis while simultaneously preserving the substantive benefits of free-market economies is to develop and implement an environmentally responsible economic theory with all deliberate speed. The fundamental reason why the mathematical theories used by neoclassical economists cannot be viewed as scientific is that the natural laws that are foundational to these theories are predicated on metaphysical assumptions . In this chapter, one objective is to examine the origins of these assumptions in the work of some eighteenth-century philosophers who authored new narratives about free-market systems. The other is to demonstrate that this metaphysically based conception of natural laws was also foundational to the work of other seminally important eighteenthcentury philosophers who created new narratives about democratic systems of government. The analysis has been extended to include this second set of narratives for the following reason—this background is required to understand why the market consensus or the Washington consensus, which massively conditions the manner in which political leaders and economic planners coordinate large-scale economic activities, functions in operative terms as a quasi-religious system. 82 THE ENVIRONMENTAL ENDGAME THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE The philosophers who articulated these natural laws lived in an era in which it was still possible to imagine that single individuals could integrate all human knowledge into a cohesive intellectual framework. John Locke, who knew Newton personally because they were both members of the same intellectual society in London, posited the existence of universal natural laws that could explain the workings...