Nature, Virtue and Everyday Life

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 8 – Nature, Virtue and Everyday Life

(I have skipped over chapters 5-7 because, while interesting, they do not help me much with my thinking about my PhD.)

This chapter is about how people are seeking to “reorder their relationship with non-human nature” (138). One example he uses is Vegetarians, who have strong feelings about how they should live their lives in relation to nature; they serve as an example of “living according to one’s principles… and ordering one’s own life in a morally excellent way in relation to them” (133). To explain this behavior, Szerszynksi uses virtue theory, which “focuses neither on acts nor consequences but on character as the primary locus for moral judgement (see Kruschwitz and Roberts, 1987; French et al., 1988)” (131). Virtue theory helps us understand the ways in which nature has become politicized (135).

And it might, therefore, be a useful thing to explore in terms of understanding why we behave the way we do, and why sustainability has become such an important issue of late. Equally, Bordieu’s concept of habitus might come in handy here, because it explained “how ways of thinking are absorbed as habits into the body, but are also socially located (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984)”; and how different manifestations of this habitus represent “different social groups” that then “try to reorder the moral hierarchies of society in order to ensure they are higher than other groups” (135). Szerszynski writes: “What has all this got to do with green consumerism? Firstly, like the popular religion of the early modern period, both in the sense of investing everyday actions – shopping, cooking, discarding – with sacral significance, and in terms of involving a certain habituation of bodily action, the going through of formulaic movements in given contexts…. Secondly, like popular religion, this kind of ecological piety helps to stabilize self and society in a world understood as permeated with risk and hazard…. Thirdly, like those of early modern popular religion, the rituals and taboos of green consumerism can be seen as expressive as much as instrumental, as serving to affirm the identity of the individual and their social bonds with others, as much as to navigate around a risky world” (138).

The point is that we have a choice – indeed, we are “obliged” to choose – in modernity “by what codes and through what patterns we live our life” (127). (Traditionalists, too, are of course making this choice.) What is ‘right’ is no longer ordained in the way it once was (when life was “dominated by a justice-based emancipatory politics concerned with the liberation of groups and individuals from tradition, inequality and oppression” (127?)); and now we have to ask ourselves questions about “how one should live” (127?). People are responsible now for their own self-realization (this seems to agree with Maslow’s hierarchy literature); and they must make a sense of the world for themselves by making choices that embody their moralities.