Abstract:

The Rationality of the EcoRepublic I invite you to join me in imagining a future ecological and global version of Plato’s great rationalist utopia, the EcoRepublic. A global scientist leader, notable for his rationality and brilliant scientific knowledge, establishes a major decision-making discipline of Eco-Guardianship (called THE WAY) designed to generate a global bureaucratic-military class of rational decision-makers. Their skills, like those of Roman consuls, will be employed in the various national provinces, coordinating across world society to deal with the massive ecological problems a global capitalist economy has fathered on an injured and captive nature. The leader chooses the initial group of EcoGuardians, who go on to specify a perfectly objective, recursive process that will select their replacements and train them from infancy in every field of relevant knowledge, to become finally deci-sion-makers in THE WAY. For this reproductive purpose they employ not the Platonic method of selecting promising young rationalists from among the subordinated and devalued non-Guardian population, but the more rationally appealing method of cloning themselves. This method, which they believe offers a higher degree of control over the chaotic and troublesome sphere of nature and the body, eliminates the need for any immediate affective community other than the EcoGuardians themselves. The EcoGuardians don’t mix with the rest of the population, so as not to compromise by attachment their judgment, which often has to be harsh and punitive. They take a pledge to lead austere, Spartan lives, and always to put species’ survival and planetary health before every human desire.

Author: Val Plumwood