Speech delivered by Tim Hollo on 24 September to Conversation at the Crossroads series “Ethics in a turbulent world”.

Good evening everyone, and thanks so much, Joseph, for the kind invitation to speak with you tonight as part of this series.

The theme of Ethics in a Turbulent Time, and Joseph’s challenge to me, asking whether ethics can help us chart a democratic course equal to the challenges of our time, is so exciting to me, it was a delight to jump on board.

What I want to bring the conversation, riffing off the themes of my book, Living Democracy, is the concept of ecological ethics – what they might be, how their erasure has brought us to this point of polycrisis and multi-system collapse, and how reclaiming them can see us shift from fearing this moment as the end of the world to embracing it as the end of the world as we know it.

Before I go any further, I do want to acknowledge that I’m speaking tonight from the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples where I live and work, and pay respects to their elders, past, present and still to come. I recognise and celebrate their deep, ongoing connection to country, their stewardship of this land since time immemorial, and the ecological wisdom of their culture, which I have been privileged to learn about from brilliant teachers, elders and friends like Professor Mary Graham, Tjanara Goreng Goreng and Nidala Barker. The Indigenous understanding of interdependence, with each other and with country, their institutionalising of relationality, informs my thinking very deeply. It is, in my view, a system of ecological ethics.

Now, when I talk about ecological ethics or politics or behaviour, I’ll not uncommonly have people respond with, “hang on, ecosystems don’t have morals”, “the natural world is inherently amoral; it doesn’t operate according to moral or ethical decision-making; it just is.”

And yes, that is true. As far as it goes. And at the same time, it is possible to look at the ecological world and draw from it clear principles that can inform and undergird moral and ethical decision-making.

If you’ll indulge me, to really draw out what I mean by this, I’d like to read a few paragraphs from the book, at the opening of the chapter entitled “what on earth is ecology?” And it goes a little something like this:

Ecology is life.

Ecology is the birds, the bees, the bushes, the bugs in the soil, the burrowing beasts, the burbling babies of human beings, the bugs in the bellies of the beasts which help them digest the remains of the birds and expel the nutrients which nourish the bushes, whose flowers are pollinated by the bees, and whose fruit the birds eat, expelling the seeds further up the mountain as they fly, enabling the bushes to grow higher up as the climate warms because humans have cut down so many trees and burned the metamorphosed remains of so many ancient buried bushes and beasts.

Ecology is the whole and its parts and the connections between them and the patterns they make as they connect and reconnect, from the smallest microbe, made up of even smaller atoms, to the whole lifeform of the biosphere itself, which ecological philosopher Timothy Morton defines as ‘a total system of interactions between lifeforms and their habitats (which are mostly just other lifeforms) … a network of relations between beings … that is an entity in its very own right’.

Ecology is the complex adaptive system of life itself as well as of each individual and recombinant being which is part of the web of life. You are an ecosystem, a complex adaptive system made up of countless lifeforms, changing as you eat and breathe. I, too, am an ecosystem, and as you read these words the ecology of me meets and interacts with the ecology of you, and the coffee I drank years ago is now stimulating your metabolism, altering your appetite and your mood such that, who knows, you may decide to set up a veggie patch, join a renewable energy cooperative, or run for parliament.

Ecology is coexistence; it’s cooperation and competition combining in complexity which isn’t always comfortable. Ecology is interdependence, the health of the whole and its constituent parts dependent on the others, and the connections between them. Ecology is ambiguity, even contradiction; it looks different depending on which direction you’re observing it from and where you think its edges lie. Ecology is ephemeral; point to it and, like the whale breaching or the sea eagle diving, it’s moved on before you can exhale. In ecology, the only thing that stays the same is change.

So, amoral? Yes, but, from this, it’s possible to draw three concepts that are inherent to health ecosystems and that, consequently, can deeply inform moral choices, ethical behaviour, ethical political action: interdependence, diversity and impermanence.

By developing an ethics around interdependence, diversity and impermanence, we can begin to see how political institutions need to be more inclusive and more deliberative, rather than exclusive and adversarial; how economic practices need to be more cooperative and regenerative, rather than competitive and extractive; how we need to move from systems of coercion to organisation around coexistence. And crucially, how our assumptions about change-making need to shift from a mechanistic model to one of emergence – working together to cultivate the circumstances out of which the world we need can emerge.

What’s sitting behind these ethical alternatives – inclusive / exclusive, deliberative / adversarial, regenerative / extractive, cooperative / competitive – is the shift, over millennia, from systems of governance – Indigenous systems – which acknowledge the darker realities of our nature and seek to suppress them through institutions and ethics that draw out our best, into systems that effectively give in to, institutionalise, our worst.

That’s what I call, in my book, anti-ecology. To quote one more paragraph:

If ecology is characterised by interdependence, diversity and impermanence, anti-ecology is defined by disconnection, domination, and the pretence of permanence. It starts by separating ‘man’ from ‘nature’, ‘man’ from ‘woman’, ‘white man’ from ‘other’, defining each as a binary, and establishing each as a relationship of dominance. It becomes the white man’s ‘burden’ to subdue the ‘other’, including women, colonised peoples, and nature. Separating ‘us’ from an objectified ‘them’, anti-ecological culture erases the respectful ‘we/ they’ interdependence, depicting us as fundamentally selfish individuals in constant competition. Anti-ecology sees land, plants, animals, and even other humans, as resources to be owned and from which to extract value. Refusing to accept limits to extraction, it invents the myth of eternal growth. It replaces a complex adaptive system with a simple machine, creating a mechanistic, deterministic mode of thought, valuing efficiency and disdaining uncertainty. By unleashing competition and driving expansion, it ironically leads to homogenisation, erasing difference by creating monocultures.

So, starting with the flip from the understanding that country owns us to the idea that we can own, enclose, seek to control land and all within and on it, these values, these ethics, start to become encoded in our systems. Those systems, as I write, following the important work of people like James C Scott, David Graeber and others, are incredibly fragile at first, because people hate them, seek self-direction, flee and rebel, and undermine them from within. Because ecosystems are self-correcting, and seek equilibrium, and are always itching at the margins, growing up through cracks in the concrete. But occasionally they succeed for a time and develop into empires. We’re living at the tail end of one of those periods, when a system of domination and separation that for the first time came to span the entire globe is reaching its only logical conclusion – collapse. Polycrisis. Multi-system collapse. The end of the world. As we know it.

Systems of government, social systems, economic systems, a whole lot of very basic stuff – everything is failing. Ecosystems are collapsing and political systems are crumbling. Governments can’t govern. Parliaments can’t parley. Corporations can’t serve the needs they’re set up to serve. You can’t get a damn tradie to do basic jobs.

Having stripped out connection and interdependence and diversity and the possibility of change, both in structures and ethics, governments and corporations have destroyed their own ability to get decent feedback – advice, through the public service or public consultation or parliament or the ballot box or customer response or even market signals. Government has become hopelessly adversarial, and made negotiation and deliberation dirty words. Protest and lobbying work less and less. Electoral systems of all kinds are breaking under the strain of splintering votes. Our Westminster system simply doesn’t know how to deal with shared power arrangements or the need for urgency. And in a world where trust and connection have been destroyed, misinformation and conspiracy theories thrive, intersecting, of course, with the collapse of education and media.

As another way in to what’s going on, it’s useful, I think, to understand governing systems, as peace and nonviolence scholar Erica Chenoweth articulates them, as forms of conflict management. The myriad of different models, are all different ways of managing conflict and making decisions, and the different models produce different outcomes.

I want to argue that what we currently have is a particularly problematic set of forms of conflict management which have created this polycrisis and cannot solve it.

It’s poor conflict management because it is based on ethics of separation, domination and pretence of permanence, with structures that are exclusive, adversarial, extractive and fixed. Good conflict management is about coming together across difference, being willing to listen to and hear different points of view, being willing to be creative, open to changing your mind. It has to be based on ethics of interdependence and diversity and impermanence, and it has to have structures that are inclusive and participatory, deliberative, regenerative and flexible.

Let’s step this through briefly.

Separation makes itself felt in the individualism that runs through our representative politics, emphasised, of course, by capitalism. We’re encouraged to always think of ourselves as individuals, and discouraged from recognising our collective power. The state is established as an entity separate from us – a distant bureaucratic and managerial entity with power over us, which we get to influence every now and then, but only through our vote.

We are excluded from parliaments, from MPs’ offices a lot of the time, certainly from Ministers’, and from decision-making processes. “Consultation”, more often than not, is so desultory that it seems designed to disempower and disenchant, discourage us from ever taking part again. Protest, of course, is a complete no no – attacked as illegitimate, labelled violent when it’s not, made illegal more and more.

I believe the way we reverse this, and cultivate a politics of interdependence, is through finding real, healthy joy together through connection with each other and the natural world. We can do that by developing agency in our own communities, through mutual aid, cooperative action and collective politics. Instead of disenfranchising “consultation”, we can develop plans ourselves, together, organising in our communities. We get so much deep joy from this, whether it’s through community renewable energy coops and microgrids or local urban agriculture or citizens’ assemblies.

When separation and domination combine, you get a system that is designed around and enforces adversarialism. How do we think conflict management is likely to go when our processes essentially replicate mediaeval tournaments, combatants seeking to defeat their opponents. Compromise becomes a dirty word. Other parties are enemies to be destroyed.

Adversarialism means our political discourse is appalling. It’s he-said-she-said, Monty Pythonesque “yes it is no it isn’t” nonsense. Governments refusing to negotiate or listen to advice from civil society whine “they won’t play with me, it’s their fault”. Protest is criminalised. Minor parties and independents are marginalised and misrepresented. The ridiculous meme of “making the perfect the enemy of the good” comes from this phenomenon. Nobody is trying for perfect. We’re so far from perfect. But negotiating parties wanting to improve and influence legislation are told to get on board or get out of the way, and ridiculed for their efforts. How is that good conflict management or decision-making?

Unfortunately, for all political participants, this flows into interpersonal behaviours in really destructive ways. The worst, in my view, is how people prioritise “being correct” instead of trying to change minds and behaviour. We get this performativity of demonstrating how in line with your team you are, and part of that is in being as dismissive of the “other” team as possible.

Instead of opening paths for people to understand our perspective, with patience and compassion, to encourage them to join our work, we make enemies of potential allies. This is the case across the spectrum – left, right and the middle.

We desperately need to rebuild the skills to come together across difference – skills that have been deliberately erased over recent generations. We need to learn to understand our entanglement, our shared, common humanity. We need to learn skills of deliberation, and we need to create space for deliberation in our politics, through well-facilitated processes at all levels. Citizens’ Assemblies, for example, are a model for conflict management and decision-making based on recognising and prioritising interdependence and diversity. These, and other similar models of participatory, deliberative democracy, don’t just reverse the exclusion of representative democracy, they also reverse adversarialism, by pitching everyone in the room as active participants in finding a creative path forward together. They are about listening to each other, learning from each other, seeking to understand others’ viewpoints, and working out how to find paths that satisfy as many as possible. It’s the opposite of winning by defeating an opponent.

Finally, permanence and impermanence – the mythology of Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” and Bismarck’s “politics is the art of the possible” are deliberately designed to make it impossible to imagine a different world, to shut you down as at best a dreamer and at worst a dangerous radical if you dare to do so. And we all believe it, to certain degrees. It’s incredibly persuasive, and deeply embedded in our worldviews, and the way we work.

One of the big challenges of a politics of impermanence, as articulated particularly powerfully by philosopher / activists Joanna Macy and Bayo Akomolafe, is to let go of control, of goals and KPIs, to “hurry up and slow down”, to trust to “emergence” – that if we establish the context for the world we want to emerge, it can and will do so.

This is, for me, a prefigurative politics, proving that a different world is possible by living it into being ourselves, community by community. It’s a pragmatic politics of grounded, material imaginaries, where change is led by behaviour itself. We don’t try to change people’s minds to make them change their behaviour. We create the spaces in which people can change their behaviour, and the ideas and worldviews will follow.

And, fundamentally, it’s an ethical politics. It’s about leading with ethical behaviour. With ecological ethics of interdependence, diversity and impermanence. In these turbulent times, these are the ethics we need to shift from the end of the world to the end of the world as we know it.

Image Source: Vengolis, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons