Hegel’s Dialectic and Modern Environmentalism

It’s the birthday of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (pictured), born in Stuttgart, Germany (1770). He started out studying Christianity, and he was particularly interested in how Christianity is a religion based on opposites: sin and salvation, earth and heaven, church and state, finite and infinite.

He eventually came up with the concept of dialectic, which is the idea that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites. He argued that each political movement is imperfect and therefore gives rise to a counter-movement, which, if it takes control, is also imperfect and therefore gives rise to yet another counter-movement, and so on to infinity.

I suppose it would be fair to summarize the dialect that exists today as follows: there are people who honestly care about the well-being of others living on this planet now and in the future, and there are people who don’t. And yes, they really are at odds with one another, just like Hegel suggested they would be. To take the most extreme and obvious example, recognize that the billionaire Koch brothers and their political network are planning to spend almost $300 million during the 2014 election cycle, including a renewed effort to combat unprecedented carbon regulations unveiled by the Obama administration last month. That’s some powerful weaponry.

Realize also that there are more than 200,000 groups on Earth whose missions are environmental and social justice. That’s nothing to sneeze at either.

What happens when they collide? I guess we’ll see.