Economics and Ecology A Fatal Conflict and the Path to Resolving It

Abstract

Sources of the conflict Mankind has always connected its hopes for a better future with the progress of civilization, the development of which in people's minds has been determined by scientific and technological successes. The creation of the spiritual and the moral in man himself, however, was shunted more and more to the periphery of social thought. Many came to regard ethical values as excessive sentimentality, if not as harmful vestiges. These values in the life of society were replaced by militant atheism, pragmatism, technocratism, and other isms. Such views have become especially widespread in the last two centuries. This was to a decisive degree facilitated by capitalism, which strengthened the view that the material took precedence over the spiritual and the ethical, that everything was permitted in the struggle for economic and political power. Capitalism consecrated the admissibility of realizing maximum gain at any price, inter alia at the expense of the destruction of nature—the basis of h...