America, the Environment, and the Global Economy
Spring 1997-- Global Human
Ecology:
America, the Environment, and the Global Economy
Question for Discussion: How
will rebuilt communities and local economies improve the lives of
men and women, help the family, and create a sustainable future?
Reading: Berry, pp. 144-173
Video: CBS 60 Minutes: Interviews with
Tobacco Executives
Internet Sites and Documents:
The Tobacco Papers: Tobacco Control Archives
Campaign for Global Change: The Global Economy
SIPHONING THE WORLD'S WEALTH TO CENTERS OF CAPITAL
In the last section of his essay, "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community," Berry continues to examine the relationship between our modern industrial culture and individual freedom, public trust and responsibility, and the freedoms and responsibility of communities. He argues that our modern industrial culture and economy are destroying local communities in the name of individual freedoms and profits. Without the culture, traditions, values, and support provided by intact local communities, individual freedom becomes merely the pursuit of self-liberation and pleasure at all costs. For Berry, it is precisely because our public culture is destroying and undermining communities in the name of freedom and profit that individualism, materialism, and narcissism and obsessive absorption with self dominate our society. Without the support of communities and local cultures and traditions to guide individual lives and behavior, our modern industrial society becomes a maelstrom of competing values, ethics, individual claims, and culture. Indeed, the very pluralism our modern industrial culture asks us to support and protect is the result of "the uprooting of cultures." Berry concludes that "the rhetoric of racial and cultural pluralism works against the possibility of a pluralism of settled communities, exactly as do the assumptions and the practices of national and global economies."
Needless to say, Berry rejects the easy pluralism and tolerance of our diverse, rootless, individualistic, materialistic culture. He argues that only healthy, intact communities can teach and support humane values, traditions, and ethics. Rejecting our obsession with individualism and self-liberation, Berry charges that only in communities can individuals truly be free and understand who they are and what their lives means:
"It is the community, not the public, that is the protector of the possibility of this candor, just as it is the protector of other tender, vulnerable, and precious things--the childhood of children, for example, and the fertility of fields. These protections are left to the community, for they can be protected only by affection and intimate knowledge, which are beyond the capacities of the public and beyond the power of the private citizen."
Berry is here making a much larger claim about what is required for humans to become truly human and what it takes for humans to learn to live in a place, in harmony with their neighbors, communities, and environments. He argues that protecting the environment, individual freedom, individual and social morality and ethics, and protecting and supporting marriages, families, and children can only take place in stable, intact local communities. Berry argues that if "people wish to be free, then they must preserve the culture that makes for political freedom, and they must preserve the health of the world." In our current modern industrial society, individuals are free to exploit and be exploited by others and to destroy their environments and communities in the name of their so-called freedom.
But many supporters of our modern, industrial culture would argue that Berry simply doesn't understand the true value of freedom. They would argue that the real strength and power of the modern world comes by allowing the individual to escape from the stale prison of dogma and tradition. Only with the individual rebellion and escape from communities into "self-liberation" and into an anonymous public, in which everyone is free to be themselves because no one knows or is responsible to anyone else, can we really be free.
However, Berry would argue that the so-called freedom of the modern industrial world is an illusion:
"Most [liberated] individuals choose to conform not to local ways and conditions but to a rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products. We try to be 'emotionally self-sufficient' at the same times that we are entirely and helplessly dependent for our 'happiness' on an economy that abuses us along with everything else. We want the liberty of divorce from spouses and independence from family and friends, yet we remain indissolubly married to a hundred corporations that regard us at best as captives and at worst as prey."
To put this another way, in our modern industrial society we are free to wear Nikes, drink Budweiser, drive 4x4s, and think about mindless and loveless sex. Berry doesn't see this as freedom at all. Without the security of local communities, families, and rooted traditions and values, individuals are free to wander from packaged, consumer identities, lost in a free-floating crowd of pleasure-seekers, responsible to no one and no place.
For many supporters of escape from community and tradition, Berry just simply doesn't understand what true freedom his. But Berry thinks he does:
"A community confers on its members the freedom implicit in familiarity, mutual respect, mutual affection, and mutual help; it gives freedom its proper aims; and it prescribes or shows the responsibilities without which no one can be legitimately free, or free for very long."
So how do we judge who is right? Is freedom really individual escape from community, traditions, and responsibility? Or does freedom grow out of individual responsibility and commitment to community, traditions, family, and place, as Berry argues? One way to test this is to examine a current debate about individual and corporate freedom and responsibility. Let's look at the debate over whether cigarette manufacturers are responsible for individual suffering and death as a result of smoking their product. ( See Tobacco company wins big victory in Florida trial CNN internet story.)
Tobacco company wins big victory
in Florida trial
Jury says R.J. Reynolds not responsible for smoker's death
May 5, 1997 Web posted at: 10:45 p.m. EDT (0245 GMT)
JACKSONVILLE, Florida
(CNN) -- A Florida jury decided Monday that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
should not be held responsible for the 1995 cancer death of a
three-pack-a-day smoker.
The case, brought by the sister of Jean Connor, was being closely
watched by tobacco companies and lawyers who have initiated
litigation against the industry.
Some analysts believed a verdict against Reynolds could have
opened up the floodgates for other negligence suits against
tobacco companies. The company's victory in court may also
strengthen its hand in ongoing negotiations to settle
smoking-related lawsuits brought by 25 states.
"An American jury, despite the massive amount of publicity
which has been generated over the course of the past few months,
is still willing to listen to the evidence, to follow the
law," said Paul Crist, an attorney for Reynolds, after the
verdict was read.
Angry plaintiff calls tobacco officials
'liars'
Connor was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1993 and filed a product
liability lawsuit against Reynolds. Her sister, Dana Raulerson,
took up the case as a wrongful death action when Connor died.
Raulerson and her attorneys looked stunned as the verdict was
read at about 3:25 p.m. EDT. She sat holding a strand of rosary
beads as the judge addressed the jury.
In a later interview with CNN, Raulerson said she would urge her
attorneys to appeal. She said the plaintiff's side was not able
to admit all of the evidence it felt the jury needed to see.
"[Tobacco company officials] are still liars," she
said. "They lied in that
courtroom, and they walked out of that courtroom and added a few
more."
She said her sister "was deceived and led not just into a
bad habit, but a habit that ultimately killed her."
Reynolds official: Risks of tobacco well
known
But David Donahue, a senior vice president for Reynolds, said
jurors appropriately placed the responsibility for Connor's habit
on Connor and not on R.J. Reynolds.
"Jurors understand that the risks of the use of this product
have been well known for decades, if not centuries," Donahue
said. "But our society has made the policy decision that,
against the backdrop of those known risks, these are products
which people ought to be allowed the opportunity to
purchase."
The Jacksonville jury, after a five-week trial, answered
"no" to the
following two questions put to it:
1. that Reynolds' negligence was a legal cause of Connor's
death.
2. that Reynolds' cigarettes were unreasonably dangerous and
defective and a legal cause of her death.
The five women and one man on the jury told the judge that they
didn't plan to discuss their verdict with the media.
Correspondent Robert Vito and Reuters contributed to this report.
After reading this news article and watching the 60 minutes interviews with the leading tobacco companies executives, what can we conclude about the individual freedom and responsibility of the cigarette smoker and the cigarette manufacturer for the suffering and deaths caused by cigarette smoking causes? The Florida jury apparently concluded that because the health hazards and risks of smoking are widely know that individual smoker not the company who makes the cigarettes they smoke is responsible for their own suffering. But all this begs a much larger question: Why does our society allow corporations to make and sell a product that clearly kills its victims, to the tune of about 450,000 American deaths every year caused by smoking-related illnesses? The argument that tobacco companies make is that they have the individual freedom as corporations, which are legally considered individuals with all the rights due individuals under the law, to make, sell, and advertise cigarettes. Moreover, individual Americans, they argue, have the right to choose to buy and smoke cigarettes despite the widely known health risks. Some students argued that you can't stop people from smoking; they will continue to smoke despite their knowledge that it could kill them. So we shouldn't really hold the cigarette companies liable for the free decisions of individuals to smoke or not to smoke.
But what sort of freedom is this really? Is the freedom to smoke and die from lung cancer just and individual decision that smokers make? Or is cigarette smoking encouraged and promoted by the tobacco companies. If you go to the The The Tobacco Papers: internet site and look up the documents associated with the keywords addiction, nicotine, and lung-cancer, you will discover that the tobacco companies have known sense the 1960s that cigarettes are physiologically addicting, which of the many substances in cigarettes cause and increase this addiction, and that because cigarettes are so addictive that people will smoke even though they know that doing so will later kill them. Moreover, some of the recent tobacco papers that have been leaked to the press indicated that in the 1970s and 1980s, tobacco companies have been actively trying to increase the addictive-properties of cigarettes to make it even more difficult for individuals to get hooked on cigarettes and quit smoking. In addition, the tobacco companies have know since the 1960s that because so many of their customers die from smoking that if they are going to continue to profit from selling cigarettes that they will have to cause more people to smoke. The evidence indicates that the cigarette companies have been targeting teenagers as their new customers, while at the same time denying that their product is the cause of the early deaths of middle-age and elderly smokers. The real tragedy here is that the tobacco companies are the only industry whose product annually kills its users.
But, as the recent testimony by tobacco executives demonstrates, the cigarette manufacturers are still denying that cigarettes are addictive, that they kill their users, and that they are responsible for the untimely deaths of thousands and thousands of Americans every year. Now, the executives would say they have the "freedom of speech" to make these claims, even if their own companies' records indicated that these claims are false. But by making these public denials that cigarettes are addictive and threaten individual's lives and health aren't these companies trying to reassure and even encourage smokers that smoking cigarettes is simply an individual choice that can't be proven to cause health problems? Isn't their denials that cigarettes cause health problems part of their larger strategy to encourage and promote smoking?
The questions that Berry would insist we ask are these:
1. What is the responsibility of the tobacco companies for the death of smokers?
2. What is the individual's responsibility for choosing to smoke and even choosing to die from smoking-related illnesses?
3. How does the freedom of the tobacco companies to sell products that kill over 450,000 people a year affect the larger American society?
4. Are Americans really more free because tobacco companies have the right to make, sell, and advertise cigarettes?
5. What is the responsibility of the larger society for paying for the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses?
6. What is the responsibility of the individuals in the tobacco companies for smoking-related deaths? Should they feel guilty and responsible for these deaths?
7. Why does American society allow corporations like the tobacco companies to sell products that we know kills their consumers?
8. What is the responsibility of the smoker to his family and community for choosing to smoke and choosing to even die of smoking-related illnesses?
9. Why does American society allow tobacco companies to target and convince young people to smoke, believing that they must hook young people in order to replace the older adults who have died from smoking?
10. Is the freedom to smoke and die from smoking really a freedom that American society should be prepared to protect and support?
I think that the above debate over smoking clearly demonstrates the larger contradictions between individual freedom, public or social freedom, and community freedom. Allowing tobacco companies the freedom to exploit and kill their customers is a great example of the kind of freedom that individuals have in our modern industrial society and culture. Allowing individuals the freedom to smoke and die from smoking without thinking about the larger impact of smoking and untimely deaths on families, communities, and the larger society is another example of the freedom that our modern industrial society celebrates. The freedom to act as individuals and corporations, without consideration of their responsibility to their communities and societies, is the larger freedom that tobacco companies and smokers insist on. As Berry argues, this is the freedom to exploit and be exploited by others. But is this really freedom?
Can we continue to allow individuals and corporations the freedom to pursue their own self-liberation, material interests, and selfish pleasures at the expense of our families, communities, and societies? Isn't this the very freedom that allows individuals, corporations, and governments in our increasingly global industrial society to waste non-renewable resources, destroy and pollute the environment, exploit and steal resources that peoples need to survive, and undermine the human and Earth's future in the name of the present? Isn't there, then, a fundamental contradiction between the health of communities, human beings, families, environments, and the biosphere and the freedom of individuals, corporations, and governments to profit and maximize their own individual self-interests?
Berry concludes that if we don't recognize that it is our cultural assumptions about freedom, community, sexuality, success, profits, and responsibility that is at the heart of our current global environmental and economic crisis, then we will undermine our modern industrial civilization by destroying the ability of the Earth to support modern human life. It is our cultural, economic, and political assumptions and values that threaten our future. Knowing this, we, as individuals, communities, and societies, are then free to rethink them and chart a fundamentally different course into the future. The larger question is will we discover this in time to prevent the global collapse of our civilization and the deaths and suffering of countless millions of people throughout the world.