Here's Lvlk ( p17 new book )
" Unless we see the Earth as a planet that behaves as if it were alive, at least to the extent of regulate its climate and chemistry, we will lack the will to change our way of life and to understand we have made it our greatest enemy."
It strikes me this can mean, "unless we believe something ( some necessary myth ) A necessary good - saving the planet - won't happen."
In this case, I can see the scientific objections, because Lvlck is using Gaia polemically rather than offering it as watertight science - whatever that is.
None the less, by identifying agency as not the the subjective fact of the individual organism, species, 'ambitious' dna but the objective totality of planetary whole acting in itself own intrests to regulate itself, at times out of sync with the darwinian narratives Lvlk is doing something that has a philosophical pedigree which is recognisable.
In the last century Marx demonstrated that the "autonomous" agencies of the law and parliament, while appearing to work in the interests of "justice" and "democracy" at root served the interests of Capital. Freud demonstrated that human motivation was complex, that people were motivated by perverse interests that only seemed of benefit them in larger, incomprehensible, ways. Nietzche showed the roots of much of Christian thought as a spiteful and violent aggressivity that turns in on natural process and seeks to nuture it.
When Dawkins came along in the 90s and said, no, no - all these ( basically modernist narratives ) were wrong; that the true agency was not in productive labour, our erotic life or our life as natural sensuous beings but in the struggle for genetic dominance it always seemed too neat a fit with the prevailing ideology of the times - reactionary - to be in any deep sense true or useful.
In this sense, I guess you can read the Lovelock/Hawkins debate as yet another instance of where one thinker begins with the isolated subject and the other with the totality.
I was saying on this BB a month or so ago that I can't anymore believe the ego is as it appears to be; autonomous, transparent, clear in its motivation and a sufficient objective fact for itself. And, it strikes me, if you set out from this point - or if this is your experience of yourself, the world, the way things are - its not too much of a conceptual leap to understand the real processes occuring at the level of totality.
In a way Marx, Freud, Nietzche paved the way for this, as they all deconstruct the ideas of closed systems and uncomplicated causalities. They all show that "self-interest" is extremely hard to identify and isolate and define. Systems overlap.
Dawkins and Lvlck share the idea of biological agency, a naturalism that seems to be part of a consensus of our times and true to me at least. That Life precedes and drives the ( human ) subjects that live it; that Life can drive us to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of our young seems to me to be part of a contuning displacement of Cartesian Western subjectivity that you can see, for example, in Foucault's "Les Mots et les Choses."
He says there, rather prophetically imho, that "man" - as the autonomous subject of first recourse, has only been around since the Renaissance, when he was, first "invented."
The forces; natural, economic, ecological, ideological, erotic - of our age, seem to me to be conspiring in any number or directions to do exactly as Foucault proposed - to "erase the subject man, like a drawing drawn in the sand by the sea."
Bracketing the political, there's more that unites than divides thinkers who recognise this effacing - and work towards integrating it with a greater respect for the totality of life and our interdependancy with other beings.
What is difficult is to try and convince ourselves how true this is and not simply how necessary.
) which seems to absorb and use both theories unproblematically...
