A Morally Mature Culture

By Carolyn Raffensperger, SEHN executive director

In 2009, I wrote an essay about a morally mature culture. I am revisiting the concept (and the essay) because of the looming environmental disasters that dominate our nightly news—when the fall of democracy isn’t occupying the airwaves. Disasters like the worsening water quality in Iowa, or the Canadian wildfires that make the northern tier of the United States so smokey the air isn’t safe to breathe, or the floods that are decimating entire communities in the Southeast—all pointing to a culture on the wrong path, neglecting our collective wellbeing. 

Are we making policy and law that will prevent the destruction of the Earth? No. We are not. I’ve been aghast at the laws that Iowa makes in the face of our water quality crisis and the executive orders of the Trump administration that promote more fossil fuel extraction when we having amped up hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Do we take immediate emergency measures to stop nitrates from flowing into the waterways or to address increasing CO2 in the atmosphere? No. We do not. We pass laws banning cell phones in schools but turn a blind eye to the accelerating development of energy and water-guzzling technologies like carbon capture and storage and data centers. 

I first heard the words “moral maturity” in an essay about the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel by environmental writer Ben Webb. In that essay, Webb described the spiritual state presumed by the Christian church calendar in the fall and early winter as “morally mature.” During the fall and early winter, the church is focused on the writings of the prophets of the Bible, many of whom called for repentance, for entire nations to turn the other way. To fully understand the prophetic voice calls for moral maturity, which is an ability to understand right and wrong and act on that knowledge. What, I wondered in response, does the Earth require of a culture at this time in the evolution of humanity? Morally mature sounds about right. This leads to the question, “what does a morally mature culture look like?” What might our environmental prophetic voices of today be telling us?

My benchmark cultures of moral maturity are the Apache and Pueblos of the Southwest, as well as other Indigenous cultures that have developed the etiquette for living with each other and the etiquette for living successfully in place for many generations. Their rules for living in place are predicated on an ethic of care for the land so that it will be there for generations to come. It takes deft cultural skill to live in place for thousands of years without destroying the land and water. The Apache and Puebloan ceremonies, tools, stories, architecture, and foods are skillfully woven into the ecology in such a way that the land can sustain generation upon generation of their people.

Let me offer my thesis upfront after observing those Indigenous cultures: a morally mature culture is ecologically wise. It has covenants of mutuality that promote reciprocity both within the human community and between humans and the natural world. Essentially, a morally mature culture recognizes that we are all in this together and provides the means for being in it together over many generations. 

Culture, in the anthropological sense, includes all the tools, language, stories, and behaviors that organize our lives and that can’t be reduced to human biology. Culture sets the rules for how we relate to each other. And for most of our history, culture dovetailed human behavior with a particular place, whether it was a desert, a prairie, forest, or tundra. Culture is really about relationships: our relationships with each other, and our relationship to a specific place. Culture is designed to keep us out of trouble with all our relations. Therefore, it stands to reason that a morally mature culture would have healthy and wise relationships both within the human community and with the larger community of the natural world. Moral maturity of a culture embodies the wisdom that comes from close monitoring and, when necessary, recalibrating these relationships so that they are healthy and resilient. The only way that they can be healthy and resilient is if there is mutual giving and taking, which is the very nature of reciprocity. Reciprocity is essential because it guarantees that each being or community contributes its unique gifts and doesn’t take more than its share. Organisms that take more than their share risk destabilizing a community.

The problem with the dominant American culture is that it is no longer brokering healthy relationships with the natural world, while at the same time, human relationships seem increasingly focused on those with technology. Our primary relationships are with computers, telephones, cars, and the central air conditioner, not with pollinators or predators, plants that give us oxygen and food, animals that have their multifaceted and mysterious lives within our ecosystems. Even our key rite of passage is getting a driver’s license rather than going into the wilderness to fast and dream.

If we are to develop moral maturity as a culture we will have to evolve beyond our technophilia and develop principles for covenants with the natural world and with each other.

We can do this. Here are a couple of ways we’ll recognize healthy covenants and real moral maturity. 

First, we will have principles for coping with both scarcity and abundance. The reasons for this are intuitively clear. Whether resources are scarce or abundant, we have to decide how to use and allocate them. When we decide unwisely we suffer from disruptions and chaos between people and we hamper or even destroy the Earth’s ability to regenerate. Both inequality and ecosystem degeneration rupture our community connections and the reciprocity that tend those connections.

Second, the technologies that we develop must fit into the ecology in which they are situated. We must find the wherewithal to say “no” to agricultural and industrial practices that destroy our land and water. Accordingly we need to evaluate proposed projects by their cumulative impacts on land, air, and water. Would we even consider carbon capture and storage pipelines or large data centers for AI or cryptocurrencies if we honor the limits of a given ecology?

Third, a morally mature culture will have resilient mechanisms for addressing crises and future generations. Crises are surprises in the immediate moment. Future generations challenge us to plan ahead, far ahead. Immature responses to crises can shred our covenants by hardening borders, narrowing community membership criteria, increasing hierarchy, and therefore creating unequal access to resources. Morally mature responses are born out of anticipation and preparation. In other words, they encompass adaptation, renewal, and wholeness, that all lead to resilience in the face of crises. It does take planning ahead to build in anticipation and preparation to our laws and policies. Nowhere is that more evident than the long-term planning and thinking that is required to protect the well-being of future generations. Morally mature cultures are able to practice care and restraint on behalf of those to come. This means that a culture is able to delay gratification as a community matter.

Fourth, we will use health as a measure of how we are doing and make adjustments based on health indicators. Public health, ecosystem health, environmental health are all fields that can help us gauge whether we are on the right track or not. Perhaps these health experts are the prophetic voices of our day.

Planning for the protection of future generations poses a special challenge. The current generations can rightfully claim that future generations can’t participate by giving back to us and that we can’t really speak for them. But that belies the fundamental truth that this generation inherited everything we have from previous generations. The reciprocal relationship, and therefore the covenant, is with our ancestors. We honor that covenant by becoming good ancestors ourselves. In this sense, moral maturity is an expression of gratitude for our inheritance and the care we take with all that we have been given on behalf of future generations.

The precautionary principle is one mechanism for exercising moral maturity.  The principle is a close relative of the Golden Rule, which compels me to treat you as I wish to be treated. The Golden Rule is central to the covenants of mutuality. Similarly, the precautionary principle asks us to act in such a way that we prevent harm to the wider community. The principle is also one of the bedrock standards of public health: prevention of suffering rather than treating the problem after the fact. The great environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams once told me that the precautionary principle was restraint in the name of reverence. Reverence and restraint is what moral maturity looks like in public.