4
Jane Addams and the Scales of Democracy
We are bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can stand aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air.
—Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics
In April 1895, at the age of thirty-four years, Jane Addams took the first paid job of her life: garbage inspector for Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. The garbage collectors in her neighborhood, who were appointed through political favors, routinely neglected their work. The streets were so overrun that children were playing in trash and dead animals were left rotting on the side of the road. Addams hired an assistant, and the two of them woke at 5 am to follow the collectors three mornings a week, ensuring that the garbage was picked up on schedule. They also advocated for expanded service, set up new incinerators, created a recycling program for tin cans, and arranged a process for the removal of dead horses and cows.1
Twenty years later, Addams helped to found and became the first president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in this capacity she developed principles for global peace, advocated the creation of international organizations to prevent war, and advised President Woodrow Wilson on the peace treaty ending World War I. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Yet she remained a resident of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, and she always stayed connected to her neighborhood and community.
Addams’s cause, locally and globally, was democracy. To her, democracy meant that every person matters and all people are connected to one another. This was not just a political idea, but also had implications for economics, culture, and family—in all spheres of life, she argued, every voice should be heard and valued. As she wrote in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, “Our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air.” Accepting this common ground, she wrote, “brings a certain life-giving power,” because when people understand “that we belong to the whole,” and that all others do as well, then “a certain basic well being can never be taken away from us whatever the turn of fortune.”2
Those of us concerned about the violence of climate change have much to learn from Jane Addams’s commitment to democracy, and perhaps the most important lesson is the way she advocated for it across diverse scales. The multicultural community of her neighborhood helped her to better imagine planetary peace, and negotiating international agreements helped her to better understand the lives of her immigrant neighbors. To resist the violence of climate change, concerned people need to think and work across local and global problems and consider every scale in between. We need to use the personal changes discussed in the previous chapter to not only influence our neighbors but also to shape international politics. We need to learn from national movements about local issues. Climate change is a problem around the planet and in particular neighborhoods, so we need to learn to advocate democratic solutions on every scale.
LEARNING TO BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR
Jane Addams was born into a prominent and prosperous family in rural Illinois in 1860. Her father was a successful miller and a state senator who was friendly with Abraham Lincoln. Jane attended Rockford Female Seminary, where she was a star student, and then she spent a few years considering medical school, traveling in Europe, and continuing her studies. She describes these years after college as deeply frustrating because she was well educated but could find no productive way to use her education. She realized with disappointment that her society taught wealthy people to indulge in leisure rather than work and encouraged women to improve their homes but not the wider world.
Addams resisted both of these cultural norms, and she describes two experiences in Europe that changed the course of her life. The first was a bullfight in Madrid, where she watched “with comparative indifference” as five bulls and many horses were killed. When the women with whom she was traveling pointed out that she was oddly unaffected, she was disturbed by her own complacency. She writes, “I felt myself tried and condemned, not only by this disgusting experience but by the entire moral situation which it revealed.” She worried that her culture and her schooling had taught her to be a passive observer, to see violence and oppression in the world but not to be personally unsettled by them or to take any action to stop them. But now she made a commitment to change—to learn how to feel more deeply and act more resolutely.
Her second experience was a visit to Toynbee Hall, a famous “settlement house” where wealthy British men lived in an impoverished London neighborhood in order to learn about the poor and help develop solutions to their problems. She began to believe that such a lifestyle would resolve her listlessness and moral blindness. To live with the poor would give her “the solace of daily activity.”3
In 1889, Addams pooled her resources with those of a college friend, Ellen Gates Starr, to found Hull House, a settlement on the Near West Side of Chicago. This was a neighborhood increasingly populated by European immigrants, and in a time of expanding industrialization and a volatile economy, many of these immigrants struggled to find work and make ends meet. Starr, Addams, and other educated women from wealthy families lived at this settlement and volunteered their time to run programs and offer courses for their neighbors. Men joined as residents a few years later.
Hull House was motivated by religious impulses but was not a Christian institution. Addams grew up in a home shaped by Christianity, but her father was never dogmatic about religion. Though she attended a Christian college, she bristled at much of the theology taught there. However, shortly before moving to Chicago, she was baptized as a Presbyterian, and she frequently wrote about how the settlement exemplified the Christian ideal of love for neighbors. Her cofounder, Ellen Starr, was far more devout but nevertheless agreed with Addams that Hull House should be inclusive and welcoming of diverse neighbors, including those who were not Christians. They decided that, unlike Toynbee Hall and other prominent settlements, Hull House should not be an officially Christian project.4
In her earliest explanations of Hull House, Addams distinguished between the “subjective” and “objective” needs that it met. The struggling residents of Chicago’s poor neighborhoods had objective, external needs. They needed education, day care, and political voice. The wealthy, by contrast, had subjective, internal needs. They needed to find purpose and discover real-world applications for their educations. Hull House was, therefore, “an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the over-accumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.” Addams understood the rich and the poor as inextricably linked, in need of one another. Writing to privileged people like herself, she insists that a democratic society can only thrive if everyone does well: “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into common life.”5
Hull House, as Addams understood it, was primarily an educational institution, comparable to a university or college and dedicated to bringing scholarship and culture to people who would otherwise be left out of “the circle of knowledge and fuller life.”6 Therefore, she and her colleagues organized book clubs, lectures by local academics, and discussion groups. They discovered that many working people, even those exhausted by long hours of factory work, were hungry for intellectual engagement. The residents also created a kindergarten and day care program, educating and empowering thousands of children. After forty years of this work, Addams wrote of a proud moment when a journalist told her that Hull House was “the first house I had ever been in where books and magazines just lay around as if there were plenty of them in the world. . . . To have people regard reading as a reasonable occupation changed the whole aspect of life to me, and I began to have confidence in what I could do.”7
After years of this work, Addams identified flaws in her original understanding of settlement life. In hindsight, she realized that her early motivations for Hull House had been patronizing. She had assumed that her neighbors would be passive recipients of aid, gratefully receiving what the educated settlement residents had to offer. But she quickly learned that poor people, just like rich people, had subjective needs and sought purpose and engagement with their neighbors. Although she was privileged, she had much to learn from her neighbors. This became a key moral principle animating her activism: Anyone who seeks to help others must learn from them, working with rather than on behalf of those in need.
Aware of her own limitations, Addams made a rule to never speak about Hull House’s work without inviting a neighbor to join her, “that I might curb any hasty generalization by the consciousness that I had an auditor who knew the conditions more intimately than I could hope to do.”8 Thus, Hull House’s neighbors became not only recipients of programs but also collaborators, teachers, and friends.
In conversation with their neighbors, the residents of Hull House quickly saw the need for programs beyond their educational mission, and they began offering meeting spaces for community groups, assistance with legal and political struggles, and advocacy on issues like the neighborhood’s mounting trash that Addams helped to solve when she served a year as a garbage inspector. Her prominence and fame spread, and she was soon a respected figure in Chicago politics and society. This influence continued to expand, and by the turn of the century she was an internationally sought-after author and speaker. She became a valued conversation partner for notable intellectuals like the pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James.
Jane Addams lived in a society that encouraged women to demurely focus their attention on family and home life. Whether she privately agreed with such treatment of her sex is not known, but in public she did not challenge these norms. Instead, she used society’s expectations that women should focus on the private life to justify her very public efforts. She argued that her settlement work, her political activism, and her international advocacy were all logical extensions of feminine tasks. For example, when neighbors protested that garbage inspection was not a role for women, she insisted that she was simply doing the woman’s work of helping families stay clean and healthy. When she began to advocate for women’s suffrage, she insisted that women deserved a voice not for their own sake but so that they could advocate for children at the ballot box. She cleverly characterized such extensions of women’s role into the public sphere as “civic housekeeping.” Addams, who had no biological children, thereby took on the “motherly” role of household manager and caretaker to justify her activism.9
The same thinking fueled her peace activism. As she saw it, wars threatened not only the lives of the men fighting them but also the harmony of families and households. Thus, it was appropriately woman’s work to negotiate the prevention of wars and to reform politics so that all voices could be heard and world peace could be more possible. In 1906 she published Newer Ideals of Peace, which argued that simplistic, “dove-like” views of peace, such as the simple absence of conflict, were inadequate. Instead, she drew on her experiences to advocate a “more aggressive,” “active and dynamic” view of peace that prevented conflict by empowering people, ensuring that their basic needs were met, and building just governing structures.10
As World War I began, Addams helped to found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After the war, she continued to devote her attention to this cause, and she insisted that peace could not be separated from other struggles for justice. She argued that wars emerge from poverty and desperation, and so the best way to prevent them is to ensure that all people are educated and fed.
She also supported international laws outlawing war. She knew that this idea sounded naive to many, but she insisted that if human societies had learned that slavery was fundamentally abhorrent, they could learn the same about war. Offering news that would have cheered John Woolman, she wrote that “slavery has joined cannibalism, human sacrifice, and other once sacred human habits, as one of the shameful and happily abandoned institutions of the past.”11 She believed that hard work could ensure that future generations would say the same about war.
Addams still resided in Chicago and was still involved in local social activism and the struggle for international peace when she died at the age of seventy-three in 1935.
THE LEVELS OF LIVED DEMOCRACY
One cannot understand the life and work of Jane Addams without attending to the idea that animated her: democracy. Her friend and colleague John Dewey credited her with the idea that democracy is not just a political system but also a complete “way of life” that places social, cultural, and economic as well as political authority into the hands of every person.12 Democracy, as Jane Addams understood and practiced it, is about living as though people can take care of themselves when they are trusted to do so.
This principle motivated her to advocate for global peace and to move to Chicago’s Ninth Ward. She believed that all people should have the right to live fully into their potential, participate in the decisions that shaped their lives, and benefit from community along with their neighbors and the rest of humanity. The structural violence of poverty in Chicago’s neighborhoods prevented the children of immigrants from living up to their potential, and so Addams resisted poverty. The direct violence of war around the world prevented soldiers and their families from entering into community with others, and so she resisted war. The world and her neighborhood were violent and unfair, and so she devoted her life to bringing democratic equality to both.
Addams even explained her Christian faith as an expression of her “passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy.” She celebrated the theological idea that everyone is equal before God and the resulting faith’s resistance against unnecessary hierarchies and domination. Reflecting on the poverty of Jesus’s own background, she asked, “when in all history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many?”13
Addams also described the foundational motivation of Hull House as an “attempt to socialize democracy,” to ensure that everyone was fully engaged in and empowered by her community. The founding ideal of the settlement house was to offer poor people resources to engage in culture and politics while providing privileged people with a way to get to know their neighbors.14 For this reason, she resisted anyone labeling Hull House as a charitable or philanthropic institution. She worried about “an unconscious division of the world into the philanthropist and those to be helped” and instead insisted that a truly democratic effort would ultimately be for the sake of all people, recognizing their connections and their capacity to learn from their differences.15
This kind of democracy depends upon expanding moral attention, moving from individual concerns about personal virtue and family well-being to what Addams called “social morality,” which includes concern for the common good and a belief that all people depend upon and can learn from one another. This means not only caring about others but also seeking to understand them on their own terms. In Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams argues that democracy cannot be enacted by anyone alone; it requires an education about and from other people, a deep acquaintance with “that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.” When people become acquainted with this diverse experience, she believed, they will come to understand that individual needs and individual morality are utterly dependent upon communities. Individual morality is “widened until it gradually embraces all the members of the community and rises into a sense of the common weal.”16
Addams learned this lesson about “widening” moral concern as economic and technological changes were threatening to narrow the experience of workers in the industrialized world. In factories, each person’s tasks were becoming more and more specialized. This division of labor made people more efficient and more interdependent, but she worried that it could also “rob” them “of any interest” in their work: “The man in the factory, as well as the man with the hoe, has a grievance beyond being overworked and disinherited, in that he does not know what it is all about.”17 Thus, Addams observed, just as she and her peers had needed to find a way to use their education in service to others, so too did her neighbors need to understand the significance of their labor. This did not mean that a higher purpose could justify mistreating one’s workers—Addams was adamant in supporting the basic rights of all people. But she insisted that, ultimately, individual rights are never enough. Democracy only works when everyone feels like a part of their community rather than an individual separate from it.
Her peace activism was based on the same democratic awareness of interconnectedness. During the Spanish-American War, she noticed that her previously peaceful neighborhood had seen seven murders in just two months, which she credited to the “carnage and bloodshed” reported from the war. As she watched, “little children on the street played at war and at killing Spaniards,” degrading their awareness of common humanity in ways that she feared would hurt them and their communities for years to come.18 War is undemocratic, according to Addams, because it destroys communities and impedes the moral development of everyone within them. This was an observation about both a distant war and her own neighborhood.
Addams’s democratic attention repeatedly used personal experience to expand moral concern. For example, she only realized that the garbage in her neighborhood posed a health threat when her nephew came to live with her and took ill. She sent her nephew away while she dealt with the problem but was “ashamed that other delicate children who were torn from their families, not into boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me to effective action.”19 An expert at admitting to and learning from her mistakes, she worked harder to pay attention to the needs of her neighbors, to think beyond her own family, and so to behave more morally, more democratically.
However, Addams did not merely want to scale moral attention upward. She also believed that the local and personal have much to teach about the global and the political. Arguing against World War I in 1915, she asked an audience in Carnegie Hall to learn from “any peasant woman who found two children fighting,” who would say, “That can’t go on; that leads to nothing but continued hatred and quarreling.”20 She also used Hull House’s neighborhood as a model for international peace. If German and Russian immigrants could live cooperatively in Chicago, she argued, then Russia and the United States could find a way to make peace with Germany. Local examples of cooperation and peace between people of different faiths, different origins, and different social classes were models for global cooperation and peace.
Addams’s pragmatic, multiscalar approach to democracy offers a distinction between her moral vision and John Woolman’s. Although the eighteenth-century Quaker would almost certainly have celebrated her ideals, he responded to the violence of his time in a very different way, focusing on purification in order to model a better life for those around him. By contrast, Addams paid more attention to the institutions and structures that shape individual lives, focusing as much on national and international issues as on personal relationships. Though she learned to care deeply for her neighborhood, she never gave up the privilege of leaving it for lengthy vacations, and she remained wealthy all her life.21
However, Addams did consider living a life more dedicated to purification when she met one of her heroes, Leo Tolstoy, a member of the Russian nobility who famously lived as a peasant in order to follow Jesus. Tolstoy asked Addams to become more radical by joining in the manual labor of her neighbors. In response, she committed to spending two hours each morning in the kitchen cooking for the community. But she quickly gave up this idea, writing that “the whole scheme seemed to me as utterly preposterous as it doubtless was. The half dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the piles of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual and pressing human wants—were these all to be pushed aside and asked to wait while I saved my soul by two hours’ work at baking bread?”22
Addams and Woolman represent different responses to structural violence. Woolman, like Tolstoy, sought to purify himself to model a peaceful life. Addams sought instead to build democratic institutions that would nurture peace on a broader scale. However, the power of her witness is that though she worked more institutionally than Woolman, she remained a humble resident of Hull House who never dismissed the importance of individual action and personal choices. Her commitment to democracy integrates the personal, the local, the regional, the national, and the global. This is precisely the kind of activism required to develop a meaningful approach to climate justice.
CLIMATE CHANGE AS AN ISSUE OF SCALE
Climate change is a multiscalar issue. Its violence is local, regional, national, and global. This creates a choice: Where should concerned people focus our attention and efforts?
Consider the village of Kivalina, the tip of a barrier island called home by more than 300 people in the far northwest of Alaska. The island has been a traditional site for trading and hunting among the native Iñupiat people for millennia, but the village was created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1905 when it built a school and required previously nomadic natives from around the region to settle and form a town. The violence of that forced settlement is compounded today because the people of Kivalina are once again threatened. Their island is eroding as the sea ice that traditionally shielded it from ocean surges melts. Current projections suggest that, because of continued climate change, the island will be uninhabitable by 2025.
In 1992 the residents of Kivalina saw this problem coming and voted to relocate their village. But this relocation would cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and they have spent the years since 1992 trying to raise this money. They requested the help of the US government but have not yet received any. In 2008 the village filed suit against twenty-four of the world’s largest oil companies, arguing that their move is only necessary because these companies made massive fossil fuel extraction and burning possible and that the problem was exacerbated by these companies’ campaigns of misinformation about climate change. Kivalina lost that case, with a judge determining that the blame for climate change cannot be pinned on any particular corporation and denying that the native peoples of Kivalina have the standing to even bring the case. At the time of this writing, the people of Kivalina continue to seek funding as the ice around their island melts and storms grow more severe.23
For the people of Kivalina, climate change is an immediate, local problem. But of course the ice around their island is shrinking because of global phenomena—an atmosphere changed by fossil fuels burnt and forests cut all over the world. The solution to Kivalina’s problem is not solely local—its residents can only move if they are provided with resources from beyond their community. The most plausible solutions for Kivalina come from the national level because the US government that created the settlement could fund its relocation. But as I write, such national action seems unlikely, given current politics. International pressure, such as that exerted by a meaningful and enforceable global treaty on climate justice, could make national action more possible.
For a person concerned about climate change, the plight of Kivalina demonstrates the challenging moral questions of scale. As a perpetrator of climate change, do I as an individual owe the soon-to-be-displaced residents of Kivalina a debt? As a citizen of the United States, can I meaningfully advocate for them in the courts or in Congress? As a fellow human being, can I help them to be heard in the international community? At which of these scales should I devote my efforts?
These are complex and challenging questions. This section explores three scalar approaches to climate change broadly, and the following section shows how Jane Addams might help climate change advocates to work and choose between them. Although the focus of this chapter is on the academic question of moral scale, its conclusion will return to a more concrete reflection on how—and if—privileged people elsewhere can do something for the people of Kivalina, Alaska.24
Thinking Bigger: Climate Change as a Global Problem
Most moral discussions of climate change assume that a constructive response to the problem will require scaling up, encompassing a larger “we” when considering how people live together. The logic is this: Previous generations may have survived with primary concern for their close kin, for their own neighbors, or for their community or nation. But now that industrialized peoples are changing the climate, only a moral community as large as the atmosphere itself makes sense. These arguments tend to emphasize the need to expand people’s moral thinking, to enable them to think bigger, so that they can care more about other people than they have become accustomed to.25
For example, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, is addressed to “every person living on this planet” and calls for “one world with a common plan” in response to the integrated violence of climate change and poverty. The encyclical acknowledges that some decisions must be made at the local and national levels, and it mentions the importance of respecting diverse cultures, but its primary emphasis is on a global approach. If climate change is a problem threatening the entire planet Earth, then all human beings should work together in response.26
The same approach is taken in most serious political efforts on climate change. For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gathers leaders from every nation each year in hopes of negotiating further and more binding agreements. This organization’s founding document begins with an assertion that climate change is a global problem, acknowledging “that change in the Earth’s climate and its adverse effects are a common concern of humankind.”27 The international framework is offered as a product of and path toward a more global community.
A practical argument for such global attention comes from the communications expert and activist George Marshall, who draws on evolutionary biology to make the case for global moral attention. He argues that human beings evolved to deal with threats to their immediate kin. This poses a challenge: As long as people in Chicago do not feel any sense of immediate community with those in Kivalina, Alaska, they run the risk of viewing the worst effects of climate change as distant and therefore as not urgent.
Marshall recounts a conversation he had five months after Hurricane Sandy with the mayor of Sea Bright, New Jersey. The town was still only beginning to recover from the storm, and two-thirds of its residents were still homeless. Noting that climate change causes more severe and damaging hurricanes, Marshall suggested that the mayor should partner with other towns and cities threatened by climate change and demand federal action. The mayor rolled her eyes and said that climate change “is bigger than anything we could make a difference on. We just want to go home, and we will deal with the lofty stuff some other day.”28 Marshall concedes that those facing immediate threats will focus on their local needs, but he insists that other people need to learn to take on “the lofty stuff” threatening their neighbors across the country—people need to learn to think globally.
Marshall insists that people only take action to defend a community when they feel like a part of it: “If we feel an affinity with the group, then we will willingly make a contribution to prove our loyalty. In times of conflict, we may even sacrifice our life.”29 The more people understand that all other people also share one planet, that they are all part of one human family that deserves everyone’s loyalty, the more motivated they will be to act.
How Big Is the Globe?
George Marshall’s moral attention is broad, but not the broadest. He limits moral concern to human beings, resisting environmentalists’ efforts to also advocate explicitly for other species. His argument is pragmatic—noting, for example, that the polar bear is “an animal that could not be more distant from people’s real life.” So, he says, moral appeals that focus on the plight of the polar bear fail to convince anyone new to care or to act.30 For Marshall, responding to climate change is about creating a global sense of human belonging, and this means leaving out nonhuman creatures.
Of course, Marshall is not arguing that polar bears do not matter. However, he believes that the best way to get others to care about climate change is to talk about human beings rather than any other species. People can rationally understand that all species are connected, that other creatures matter. But, he argues, such claims make no appeal to the emotions that actually motivate action and behavioral change. He is confident that people can learn to care about the universal human family, but he is more skeptical that they can scale up further to a concern for all creatures. Climate ethics requires a balance between the fact that all creatures are interconnected and the countervailing fact that human beings have evolved with a limited moral concern focused on those like themselves.
Naomi Klein suggests a similar argument in her documentary film This Changes Everything. She begins the film with a confession, telling the audience, “I’ve always kind of hated films about climate change. What is it about those vanishing glaciers and desperate polar bears that makes me want to click away?” She returns to this theme toward the end of the film, explaining that polar bears “still don’t do it for me. I wish them well. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stopping climate change isn’t really about them, it’s about us.”31 So Klein’s film focuses on the human costs of climate change and the movements emerging from human communities to protect their lands, their rights, and their health. This is a common decision in many contemporary discussions of climate change.
However, in the long run, the best way to extend people’s moral attention outward, to get them to feel solidarity with all other human beings, might be to extend beyond the human species, to learn to feel solidarity with all beings. Pope Francis, for example, insists that “misguided” and “tyrannical” anthropocentrism contributes to the problem of climate change, and he emphasizes that all creatures are made and loved by God and therefore deserve human care.32
The philosopher Kate Rawles rejects anthropocentrism even more resoundingly. She calls for a “Copernican revolution in ethics” that will recognize human beings are not the center of moral concern, just as Copernicus recognized that the Earth is not the center of the known universe. Rawles insists that limiting people’s moral attention to humanity ignores the true violence of climate change, which includes “the suffering and death of individual sentient animals in their billions; the widespread extinction of other species; the degradation of extraordinarily complex ecosystems.” Once people recognize the wide and precious natural world beyond human experience and knowledge, she argues, they will see climate change not only as a human problem but also as a problem for “a vastly complex and interrelated ecological community.”33 Climate justice, she argues, requires an ethics bigger than any one species.
Pope Francis and Kate Rawles call for a moral community that extends beyond humanity. George Marshall and Naomi Klein note that such an extension of ethics comes with a practical cost, and so they emphasize the importance of human beings over other species. They all agree on the need for a more global morality, a broader sense of community, but they answer the complex questions of scale in different ways.
Crossing Scales: Toward a Planetary Climate Ethic
It is also important to consider the possibility that morality does not need to scale upward, does not need to be broader. Perhaps concerned people do not need to learn to think “bigger” but instead need to adapt to the fact that every person comes from a particular and specific place that inevitably defines her or his thinking and being in the world.
The theologian Whitney Bauman offers a caution against “global” responses to climate change, arguing that it was globalization that created the problem in the first place. Europeans carelessly expanding their impact on other continents inaugurated centuries of expansionist colonization. Inventors and businesspeople carelessly expanding their impact on the natural world created the industrial system that makes environmental degradation and overconsumption possible. In these historical examples, the impulse was positive—to explore the world, to share true faith, to increase wealth—but the results were destructive because of myriad unintended consequences. A “global” ethic, Bauman worries, indulges an age-old temptation to assume that one can understand the “other,” that other people or other species can be viewed as versions of one’s self.
Bauman is also suspicious that the kind of unity imagined by many global thinkers could ever really be possible. He does not believe that all humanity or all creatures could ever be a stable, meaningful community. Drawing on queer theory, he points out that “concepts are permeable and identities are always being constructed.” Just as there should be no single, normative way to express human sexuality, there should be no single, normative way to be human, or to be a creature. As people and creatures develop and evolve, their roles and memberships in communities will change, and so the communities themselves will inevitably change. This requires flexibility and multiplicity rather than monolithic global truths. Bauman does not hope for a united global community but instead a myriad of options, “an evolutionary rainbow of possible planetary becomings.”34
The alternative to global morality, for Bauman, is “planetary” morality, which embraces the wide diversity of life on planet Earth in each of its diverse local expressions.35 He argues that the challenge of climate change should not be met by reminders about commonality—“one human family”—nor by an attempt to expand human communities—“an integrated ecological community.” Instead, he suggests, climate change calls for a morality that celebrates differences, caring for others not because one belongs to the same group but rather precisely because one does not. Seeing the world as one human family or one community of creatures simply extends identity politics, indulging people’s impulse to only take care of those like them. Bauman hopes that concerned people can, instead, learn to care for and defend others in all their rich uniqueness.36
Although global morality seeks to expand outward, planetary morality acknowledges that each person is located in and limited to particular places. It seeks not to be more encompassing but instead to be more accepting. Planetary morality embraces diversity and responds to others’ needs simply because they are other: “We are male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, bi, trans, queer, black, white, brown Latino/a, American, Japanese, Kenyan, and more generally of specific descents, yet we are also animal, biological, planetary, and ecological, inextricably bound within and to the planet Earth.”37 All share a fate on this planet, but in very different ways. From a planetary perspective, the differences need to be emphasized and embraced far more than the commonalities.
A planetary ethic is multiscalar. It calls climate activists to be fully present to the immediate world as it is, in all its diversity—at the global, national, and local levels. Planetary thinking can acknowledge that the problem of climate change is global, but it suggests that there will never be one global answer.
Planetarity would mean caring for the residents of Kivalina not because they are human just like me but instead because they are a unique expression of humanity, melding the traditions of the Iñupiat with contemporary US culture in all its complexity. This changes how concerned people might respond to their plight; whereas a global ethic would ask how to pay for the Kivalinans to transition to another place, a planetary ethic insists upon the deeper task of empowering them to not only move but also continue their unique cultural expressions.
A planetary ethic also suggests that people should learn to care about polar bears precisely because polar bears are so different from humans, because they represent an entirely different experience of the world. Difference is to be celebrated, and so the differences between creatures matter. The previous section discussed a tension between George Marshall, who argues that it is too much to expect moral thinking beyond the human species, and Kate Rawles, who argues that the root of the environmental problem is people’s selfish attention to solely human interests. The disagreement between them is how big moral thinking should be—can people expand beyond one species, can they morally appreciate their common ground with all other creatures? Planetary morality shifts away from this question by changing the discussion away from the size of moral attention. In this perspective, there is not merely one moral sphere that either includes or excludes others. Instead, morality is about how people deal with others, with that which is not like themselves. So, a planetary ethic asks: How can people learn to care for that which is different from themselves, both within and outside the human species? Humanity is not one community but many. Other species are not one category but many. The task is to learn to embrace difference in all its forms.
And, yet, concerned people cannot do everything at once. We can work to embrace difference, but how will we balance the immediate needs of polar bears and the residents of Kivalina? Where should our moral attention be devoted first? This is one of the wicked challenges of climate change—a place where we should look for help from the witness of Jane Addams.
A MULTISCALAR RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Ultimately, I see Jane Addams’s morality as best aligned with the planetary scale of attention because she celebrates diversity and local thinking as well as broad community. Drawing from her work, in this section I argue that global morality is too unidirectional—if people only seek to expand their attention, then they risk missing the complexities of particular places. Drawing on her pragmatism, I also argue that though moral attention to nonhuman creatures is a vital ultimate goal, it is not immediately important to insist upon it. The power of planetary morality is that, like the witness of Jane Addams, it is multiscalar and adaptable.
The Local in the Global
Jane Addams was very aware of global problems, and so she worked to prevent wars, to form international organizations, and to empower the poor in every corner of the world. She learned to think beyond her own community, and she emphasized the common ground between wealthy people like herself, the poor immigrants in her neighborhood, the foreign soldiers waging war against her nation, and every mother, father, and child around the world. Although she did not use the word “global,” she frequently aspired to “universal” thinking. For example, she argued that the privileges of wealthy people “must be made universal if they are to be permanent” and that the task of religion is “to lift a man from personal pity into a sense of universal compassion.”38
Despite these universal aspirations, Addams’s work as a whole offers a corrective to any approach to climate change that is solely global. Because it attempts to be so encompassing, global thinking is necessarily abstract—to say that every human being is a member of one family is to conjure a fairly intangible idea of what it means to be “a family.” Addams always began from concrete rather than abstract ideas. She advocated democracy as an ideal, but she always emphasized the basis of democracy in local politics and elections. She asked her audience to think about a fight between two boys before scaling upward to consider continental warfare. She never fully trusted her ability to represent others with different experiences, and so she invited a neighbor to be with her when she would speak about poverty in Chicago. She therefore offers concerned people resources to ground global morality in local attention.
A moral response to climate change must include global attention—must acknowledge, with Pope Francis, that the problem involves “every person living on this planet.” Meaningfully responding to the challenges facing our human neighbors in Kivalina, Sudan, and Bangladesh requires expansive attention. However, the authority Addams drew from specific experiences in her neighborhood, from knowing one specific community in all its local complexity, suggests that such global attention will not be enough by itself.
When Addams wrote about the children of her neighborhood pretending to “kill Spaniards” during the Spanish-American War, she was making an argument about the importance of global events for local communities. She suggested that no one who wishes to make peace on the streets of Chicago can ignore a war on the other side of the world because the two are connected. But she then quickly moved to discuss the effects of a national strike on her neighborhood, observing that owners lined up against workers could also turn into “prolonged warfare,” with an equally dangerous influence on children’s mentalities. The rhetoric of a strike could too easily nurture “mutual hate” and become “a menace to social relations.”39 She viewed international violence, urban violence, and neighborhood violence all on a single continuum.
In part, this means that every person of privilege should learn about the effects of climate change on our own neighborhoods, including the local threats of natural disasters and/or scarcity. We should reach out to those around us who may already be suffering from extreme weather, reduced water supplies, or natural disasters.40 To meaningfully care about how climate change threatens the whole “human family,” concerned people must learn to care about specific families and specific persons. Jane Addams demonstrates that global morality needs the richness and complexity of local attention. This is an important lesson for anyone concerned about climate change.
Pragmatically Valuing Other Species
Jane Addams’s witness offers tools to support moral attention beyond human beings, but I think it also suggests pragmatic doubts about the priority of such work. One of the key events that motivated Addams to found Hull House was the experience of cruelty at a bullfight, and so it is clear that she believed any form of violence, including violence against nonhuman creatures, warps the human spirit. At one point, she defined the settlement movement according to its commitment “to insist upon the unity of life,” and she understood better than most people in her time that human well-being depends upon healthy environments and relationships with other species.41 Thus, it is sensible to use her witness to justify an even more expansive moral argument, accounting for the ways climate change is endangering the lives of polar bears in the Arctic and encouraging the growth of invasive species that threaten others around the world. One could, therefore, imagine Addams resonating with the call of the philosopher Kate Rawles for a “Copernican revolution” removing human beings from the center of moral consideration.
However, when Addams argued that every voice should be valued and heard, she tended to limit her moral argument to human beings—to those who could enter into political, economic, social, and cultural conversations. Learning from Addams can raise questions about the pragmatic value of too broad a scale of moral attention in a world where people are not yet good at relating to their neighbors, much less other cultures or other species.
In 1912 Addams helped to formulate a platform for the Progressive Party, which was founded by Theodore Roosevelt as he sought a second presidential term. She helped to craft a set of policies that would have given women the right to vote, limited the influence of lobbyists on elections, and extended the social safety net—all goals in which she deeply believed. However, the platform also called for the United States to build two new battleships a year, conflicting with her pacifist principles. She reflected, “I confess that I found it very difficult to swallow those two battleships.” But she nevertheless decided to support the platform as a whole, believing that the Progressives were “most surely on the road toward world peace,” despite their imperfections.42
This reflects Addams’s pragmatic style; she knew her principles and stuck closely to them, but she was willing to compromise, to prioritize action over perfection. Democracy, as she understood it, is not about always finding the right answer but rather finding the best answer on which people can agree. She never compromised her pacifism, but she was strategic about when she insisted on it. She wrote: “The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent, makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitious of social plans and experiments, ignoring this, is prone to failure.”43 Small steps in the right direction that have been democratically agreed upon are far more powerful than boldly radical statements that are widely dismissed.
In my view, climate change is caused by anthropocentric habits of thought and behavior, and it is impossible to fully and resolutely resist the violence of environmental degradation without moving toward a broader understanding of the moral community. Unlike Naomi Klein, I am moved by the plight of polar bears and am disturbed by shrinking glaciers. I am also concerned about declining rainforests and expanding kudzu and the plight of industrially raised cows and chickens and countless other effects on the nonhuman world. To me, climate change remains both a disastrous environmental problem and a human problem. However, I learn from Addams that it is more important to take positive steps forward than to insist on moral absolutes. The Copernican shift in ethics is an important goal, but no one should expect a moral revolution before beginning the work of resisting climate change.
Many people struggling for climate justice join George Marshall and Naomi Klein in being relatively unmoved by the plight of nonhuman creatures. To change their minds and build a movement around the plight of polar bears, native species, and cows will be important work for the future. However, human rights activists, native rights activists, climate hawks, and many others can all agree now that what is happening to coastal communities around the world is deeply problematic and demands a response. I do not need to convince them all that chickens and polar bears deserve moral attention to join them in resisting the violence against the people of Kivalina. Climate change is a big and wicked enough problem that there is no one approach to solving it, and no action should be held up by a standard of moral perfection.44
Ultimately, a nonviolent response to climate change calls for moral attention that includes all creatures. But, like Addams’s pacifism, those of us who believe in such a goal must recognize that we can work toward it while also collaborating and cooperating with others who do not share it. The moral value of the nonhuman world is important, but it need not be the most important or primary question right now.45
Toward a Planetary Morality
Jane Addams has much to teach those who advocate a global morality in response to climate change, whether advocating for a human family or a community of all creatures. However, my reading of her work suggests that she fits best with the planetary scale of attention, crossing multiple scales to argue against any single global family, embracing instead the diversity and complexity of evolving identities and communities.
As the theologian Whitney Bauman makes clear, a key advantage of planetary rather than global morality is adaptability. Although global approaches emphasize the need for a common moral vision and must therefore seek universal agreement on a single project, planetary approaches are open to multiple possibilities at once. Planetarity allows different peoples to try different strategies, accepting that there is no single right answer.
Jane Addams regularly praised adaptation and diversity. In Twenty Years at Hull House, she wrote: “The one thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand.”46 She had helped to found the house as an educational project where the privileged would serve the needy, but she quickly adapted as she learned from her neighbors. Hull House became the site of a wide range of programs in which diverse members of the community served as equals, teaching and empowering one another though their differences. She never sought to make her neighbors more like herself but rather to help them to be themselves while she remained herself.
Addams also demonstrated this commitment to diversity and adaptability as she scaled her attention upward to national policies and international agreements. She changed strategies and rhetoric as the nation became less accepting of her pacifism during World War I and more accepting of it afterward.47 She rejected vague appeals to a “love of humanity” throughout her life, and she was more interested in creating concrete relationships in all their complexity.48 She engaged and celebrated differences rather than seeking to abstract common ground. Although she was aware of the importance of global ideals, the ways she pragmatically brought them into conversation with local specificities suggest a more planetary approach.
Privileged persons concerned about climate change should think in dialogue with Jane Addams about how to work toward planetary democracy, how to value all voices and all perspectives, how to empower as many people as possible to have a voice and a role in shaping their future while respecting differences and engaging in particularities.
A PLANETARY PROBLEM
The witness of Jane Addams offers insight into a planetary response to climate change, one that crosses scales and values the diversity of Earth’s communities. But there are, still, no easy answers to the violence of climate change.
This difficulty is evident in any discussion of the disappearing Alaskan village of Kivalina. The injustice of what is happening to the people of Kivalina is clear and undeniable. They are already survivors of the white supremacy that displaced native peoples and devalued their culture, and they are now being driven from homes their grandparents were forced to make. Their requests for help from those who bear the most guilt for their plight—fossil fuel companies and the people of the United States—have thus far been ignored.
In the terms introduced in chapter 1, this is violence. Using the ethical principles laid out in chapter 2, it is clear that such violence calls for resistance. Privileged people share in the guilt of climate change and therefore in the guilt of slowly destroying the village of Kivalina. We are called to act, to resist violence. But how? What would a nonviolent response to Kivalina be?
Although there is no easy answer, the planetary morality derived from Jane Addams in this chapter offers a few guidelines. First, Addams saw every moral challenge as, in part, an educational challenge. Before the United States can address any problem, its citizens must learn to be concerned. Those of us who have some sense of what is happening in Kivalina should tell others and should raise the issue in political debates. This will not solve the problem in the immediate term, but it will at least help people to face the violence of climate change, perhaps contributing to a more honest national debate.49
Second, Kivalina calls all concerned people to local action. Just as Addams learned to be an international peacemaker by engaging her Chicago neighborhood, we will be best equipped to understand and empower the residents of Kivalina if we relate this problem to concrete and immediate challenges in our own communities. Those who live far away from Kivalina may not have practical or productive ways to form relationships with its residents, but perhaps we can better understand what is happening to the Kivalinans if we work to support the indigenous peoples in our own regions, whether or not their survival is directly threatened by climate change.50 For example, I can better argue that Kivalina should be treated justly if I also advocate in concrete ways for justice, treaty rights, and respect for the Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
A related way to morally engage the challenge of Kivalina is to better understand the lives of anyone who has been made homeless by forces beyond their control in one’s own neighborhood. Those of us who are concerned should engage these homeless people, help to empower them, interrogate the systems that ignore them, and support organizations that advocate on their behalf.51 Such local efforts will not directly save the residents of Kivalina, but they will help us to better understand and care for real human beings in all their complexity. Because violence is an interconnected network, it is productive to do what one can where one can.
If concerned people learn about the importance of democracy from Jane Addams, then no response to Kivalina will be complete without insisting that its residents must have the right to speak up for themselves and to determine their own future. They should be heard in the courts and in Congress. Privileged people cannot and should not speak for the people of Kivalina—they have suffered too long from other people deciding what is best for them. However, we can speak up for their right to be heard, for a political process that takes them and their interests seriously. They should have the right to speak because they are human beings. They should have the right to speak because they are US citizens. Perhaps most important, they should have the right to speak because they are members of a unique culture that has made a life on an arctic island despite a legacy of oppression and violence. Those of us who are privileged have the power to demand that our elected representatives take the Kivalinans seriously. We should keep insisting until someone listens.
This conclusion is unsatisfying. Given the realities of my nation and my life, I have no proposal that will save Kivalina. But I am committed to continuing my attention to the problem, to educating others about it, to asking those in power how they will respond, and to helping those without homes or rights in my own neighborhood. This is the best witness I can give in the face of grave injustice.
Jane Addams responded to violence by devoting her life to democracy. She insisted that every person matters, because she believed that no one can ultimately thrive unless everyone does: “Our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air.” To resist the global violence of climate change, one must seriously study the soil in which one stands and get to work with one’s neighbors cleaning the air.
NOTES
For biographies of Jane Addams, see especially Elshtain, Dream of American Democracy; Brown, Education of Jane Addams; and Knight, Jane Addams. For analyses of Addams’s thought and importance, see especially Fischer, Nackenoff, and Chmielewski, Jane Addams and Democracy; Hamington, Social Philosophy of Jane Addams; and Schneiderhan, Size of Others’ Burdens.
1.On the practical work and politics of the “garbage wars,” see especially Knight, “Garbage and Democracy.”
2.Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 120.
3.Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 77–78.
4.Knight, Citizen, 190. How deeply Addams held her faith is a matter of some scholarly debate. It seems safe to say, however, that Addams’s religious beliefs and practices, like everything else about her, continued to develop over the course of her life. Though she rarely discussed her own faith and had relatively low attachment to the Presbyterian Church or any particular congregation, she never publicly distanced herself from Christianity, and she used Christian ideals and concepts throughout her public career. See especially Stebner, “Theology of Jane Addams”; and Brown, “Sermon of the Deed,” 21–39.
5.Addams, Jane Addams Reader, 25–26; also see 17.
6.Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, 404.
7.Addams, Twenty Years At Hull House, 175.
8.Ibid., 82. On this aspect of Addams’s education, see Brown, Education of Jane Addams, chap. 13.
9.See especially Elshtain, Dream of American Democracy. Addams did help to raise a niece and nephew after their mother died, and she had many important relationships with many other children. Though she never married, she had a lifelong romantic friendship with Mary Rozet Smith, a Hull House supporter. See Knight, “Love on Halsted Street,” 181–200.
10.Addams, Newer Ideals, 5.
11.Addams, Writings on Peace, 285. For more analysis of Addams’s ideas about peace as an evolutionary possibility, see especially Green, “Lessons from Jane Addams,” 223–54.
12.Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, xi.
13.Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, 75.
14.Ibid., 206. See also Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction,” in Democracy and Social Ethics, by Addams; and Fischer, On Addams, chap. 2.
15.Addams, Jane Addams Reader, 62.
16.Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 7, 117.
17.Ibid., 93. Interestingly, she made the same argument about child labor in chapter 5 of The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. This chapter exemplifies Addams’s pragmatism; she almost certainly would have preferred that fourteen-year-old children be in school rather than in factories, but she knew that the practical realities of many poor families required that even young children work. She acknowledged this reality and insisted that, for example, a child in a sewing factory be taught that “the design she is elaborating in its historic relation to art and decoration if she understands “her daily life is lifted from the drudgery to one of self-conscious activity, and her pleasure and intelligence is registered in her product.” Addams, Spirit of Youth, 122.
18.Addams, Newer Ideals, 79. Addams also made the connection between her neighborhood and international conflict in The Second Twenty Years at Hull House, which argued that her settlement’s story could not be told apart from the story of World War II: “It is idle to speculate on what an infinitesimal unit like Hull-House or any other of the millions of units composing the social order, would have been like if the world war had never taken place. But whether we are for it or not, our own experiences are more and more influenced by the experiences of widely scattered people; the modern world is developing an almost mystic consciousness of the continuity and interdependence of mankind. There is a lively sense of the unexpected and yet inevitable action and reaction between ourselves and all the others who happen to be living upon the planet at the same moment.” Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull House, 7.
19.Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, 153.
20.Addams, Jane Addams Reader, 337. Maurice Hamington articulates the approach well: “Addams’s response to war in Europe parallels her response to problems that arose in the Hull House neighborhood: mobilize sympathetic knowledge and a community of activists to search for rational and caring solutions leading to lateral progress” Hamington, Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, 90. See also Green, “Lessons from Jane Addams.”
21.As Erik Schneiderhan explains: “Addams created boundaries. She was frequently ill and took time to convalesce without working, often for months at a time. Further, she did not use all of her money on Hull-House; she maintained a standard of living that included well-appointed housing, frequent travel, and exposure to culture through books, fine art, music, and theater.” Schneiderhan, Size of Others’ Burdens, 49.
22.Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, 152.
23.See especially “Kivalina: Village Profile,” http://nana.com/files/pdf-bios/NANA-VillageProfile-Kivalina.pdf; and Shearer, Kivalina.
24.For my previous analysis of scale as an issue of Christian ecological ethics, see O’Brien, Ethics of Biodiversity, chaps. 4 and 5.
25.This idea that we need to expand our morality is a common, although not universal, claim in environmental and ecological ethics. See especially “The Land Ethic” in Sand County Almanac, by Leopold.
26.Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §3, 164.
27.United Nations, “Framework Convention on Climate Change,” 1992, http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/
background_publications_htmlpdf/application/pdf/conveng.pdf.
28.Marshall, Don’t Even Think About it, 7.
29.Ibid., 196. He also writes: “Climate change is the one issue that could bring us together and enable us to overcome our historic divisions” (pp. 229–30).
30.Ibid., 128, 137.
31.Lewis and Klein, This Changes Everything.
32.Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §68, 118.
33.Rawles, “Copernican Revolution in Ethics,” 90–91.
34.Bauman, Religion and Ecology, 8.
35.He defines the terms this way: “Whereas globalization is the imposition of sameness over the face of the planet, planetarity is a way to think about how we are codefined and come together because of, with, and through our differences.” Ibid., 209.
36.Willis Jenkins makes a similar argument in The Future of Ethics. Although he uses the language of “global ethics,” I interpret his approach to be compatible with what Bauman labels “planetarity.” Consider chapter 3, which argues “for developing global ethics from the cross-border practices of agents collaborating to respond to planetary problems. Its more important products are not documents and declarations, but the moral creoles and middle axioms generated from pluralist reflection on shared problems” (p. 141).
37.Bauman, Religion and Ecology, 73.
38.Addams, Jane Addams Reader, 17.
39.Addams, Newer Ideals, 80. Of course, Addams did not make this argument to suggest that strikes should never occur or that striking workers were always wrong. Instead, she urged all sides to prevent strikes when possible and to ensure, when a strike is necessary, that civility and peace be given priority.
40.For attempts to chronicle and communicate the ways daily weather experiences in particular places reflect broader climatic shifts, see www.wunderground.com/climate/local.asp and http://thealmanac.org/. I do not know of a similar project that focuses on issues of climate justice.
41.Addams, Jane Addams Reader, 59.
42.Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull House, 35.
43.Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 68.
44.As discussed in the introduction, I would not label my overall approach to climate justice exclusively “pragmatic,” but this argument is nevertheless consonant with the move toward “environmental pragmatism” and “moral pluralism” in philosophical environmental ethics. See especially Stone, Earth and Other Ethics; Norton, Toward Unity among Environmentalists; and Minteer and Manning, “Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics.”
45.Using language that Richard Bohannon and I have explored in another text, I am arguing that, in the near term, we should prioritize the specific, human complaints of environmental justice over the idealized universal community eco-justice. See “Saving the World (and the People in it, Too): Religion in Eco-Justice and Environmental Justice,” in Inherited Land, ed. Bauman, Bohannon, and O’Brien, 171–87. For an excellent account of Christian ecological ethics that explicitly prioritizes eco-justice, see Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith.
46.Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, 95.
47.For an analysis of how Addams’s views of peace developed over her life, see Green, “Lessons from Jane Addams,” 223–54. For a biography that emphasizes Addams’s constantly adaptive, developmental thinking, see Brown, Education of Jane Addams.
48.Wendy Sarvasy argues that Addams was uninterested in abstract love but passionate about “forging new interdependent relationships . . . between individuals in all their complexity and specificity.” Sarvasy, “A Global ‘Common Table’: Jane Addams’s Theory of Democratic Cosmopolitanism and World Social Citizenship,” in Jane Addams and Democracy, ed. Fischer, Nackenoff, and Chmielewski, 189.
49.For one effort to educate the public about and chronicle Kivalina’s relocation, see www.relocate-ak.org/projects/.
50.See especially Harvey, “Dangerous ‘Goods.’ ”
51.See, e.g., Stivers, Disrupting Homelessness. This is not a book directly about climate change, but it offers tools for genuine engagement with homeless neighbors, with the systems that cause homelessness, and with efforts to change those systems. These are important lessons for anyone concerned about climate change.