455 - The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community

The Liberation of Life:
From the Cell to the Community
By Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr.
Cambridge, Cambridge University, 1981. 353 pp. $34.50.

As the title indicates, this is an ambitious and wide-ranging work. It is the result of sustained collaboration between Cobb, the well-known exponent of process theology, and Birch, an Australian biologist. It aims to present a holistic evolutionary framework for our ethical and social thinking, and it rejects both the reductive simplicities of a static empiricism and the bifurcation of the human and the natural which characterizes the various religious and philosophical forms of dualism. This involves a rejection of the mechanistic model of life found in most modern science and its replacement by an ecological model or in metaphysical terms, a turn from a world of substances to a world of events. The authors wish to move from a revised scientific and philosophical understanding of life to an ethic of life and a faith in life which will alter our approach to such issues as the treatment of animals,

456 - The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community

the preservation of the biosphere, genetic experimentation, the need for a no-growth economy, and the challenge of developing just and sustainable systems for agriculture, energy, and transportation.

This project sharply opposes the separation of science and ethics, which has prevailed in the West in the last three and a half centuries, as well as the distinctions of fact and value, of "is" and "ought" which have been taken as fundamental for most social science and ethical theory in the English-speaking world during this century. The resulting position is a pious naturalism, for three main reasons. It proclaims the natural continuity of all forms of life, it proposes to derive moral conclusions from the nature of things, and it takes as fundamental the conclusions of our scientific study of nature. It is pious in its appeal to some traditional Christian symbols and in its view of life as the primary religious and moral value, as well as in its respect for the policies and attitudes of the soft academic and environmentalist left. The nature that they take as paradigmatic for society is not "red in tooth and claw" in the manner of social Darwinism but is closer to the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah I I and to the aspirations of contemporary political herbivores.

Thus the authors assure us that in the ecological approach to economic problems there are no tradeoffs among environmental quality, employment, and reduced inflation (p. 284). They take this back but still want to use it as a stick with which to beat the dominant model of the economy. They also exhibit the puzzling but regular alternation between alarmist and utopian modes of argument that runs through most ecclesial expressions of social concern. The book, then, is more interesting for its effort to provide a "big picture" which harmonizes our theological and biological concerns, than it is as a guide for social policy.

John Langan, S.J.
Woodstock Theological Center
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.