Oldal 102 [102]
OCR
100 | THe Puttosopuy or Eco-Potitics The more comprehensive the critique, the sooner this need arises. This is a dangerous moment in movements’ lives. The temptation is great to limit their program to the aversion of the bad and to identifying the means necessary for this. Istvan Bibö, in his study The Meaning of European Social Development, rightly attributed the failure of the socialist experiments to a lack of realistic notions about the desirable state of society. Instead, they placed the emphasis on the “revolutionary” means of seizing power. The improperly thought-through utopias about the abolition of private property and full equality led, together with the cult of revolutionary violence, to twisted, bloody dictatorships worldwide. The social reformers, on the other hand, had to content themselves with achievements that served to bolster capitalism instead of overthrowing it. Let us draw from this the conclusion that there has to be something between a systematic critique of society and a strategy aimed at seizing power, on which depends the relevance of a given political worldview: what kind of world would they actually like to live in? Let us call this the goal of the given movement and not confuse it for a moment with the political means used to achieve it. It is my conviction, however, that determining these goals is not primarily a theoretical question to be answered in the depths of a library. The goodness of the chosen procedures and goals are justified primarily by having been tried and tested and proven themselves. Perhaps we can state as a central thesis that the adherents of an ecological (vulgarly: green) worldview want to maintain the rich diversity and variability— ability to change — of lifeforms in every case and, where necessary, to restore it, in society as well as in nature. It follows from the principle of diversity that they can want many different things under differing historical circumstances. It is not necessary for them to think the same about the good life and even less to demand such concepts, apart from a few basic principles, from others. The consequence of the defence of diversity is nevertheless not the contingency of possible good goals. For the rich diversity of lifeforms is not due in either society or nature to the independence of optional variants, but precisely to the ordered nature of their coexistence. The knowledge of the relations sets limits to this relativism. ‘The ecological movements deny the right to existence of practices that destroy diversity and they protest against violent interventions against the spontaneous order of coexistence. ‘The recognition that these can be eliminated only through systemic change gives their conviction a decidedly political character. What, therefore, do the Greens want?
