of ontological or methodological hybridism, in which the dynamic interpenetration of the social and natural again becomes invisible and, as a consequence, unalterable. It is rather achieved through the development of a property dualism, which recognises that everything is connected to everything else (the Alpha of ecological science) and that some parties behave disruptively within that web (the Omega).
Thus relations of production are material and social but not natural. The carbon cycle is material and natural but not social. Through some events in time, the former moved to take up residence within the latter (like a chainsaw in a forest) – the historical moment depicted in the lithograph from Labuan. Only by seeing the British imperialists as agents on a very, very special mission, cutting their path through a nature whose ways were unknown to them, can we understand the causes and import of their actions. Nature did not impel them to search for coal; society did not set up the atmosphere. The fallout materialised at the intersection.
SOME PROBLEMS IN PROPERTY DUALISM
There is something unfortunate about Descartes and the philosophy of mind setting the terms of this debate. The mere positioning of society as analogous to the mind suggests an idealist baggage. Furthermore, a thought does not consume synapses or neural networks in order to live. No one has heard of a person who has exercised her mind so expansively and gluttonously that she has scooped out half of her brain, in the way it is possible for a human community to, say, deplete its soil through over-intensive farming. Thoughts are not metabolising creatures; their relation to the brain is not absorptive, dissipative, potentially exhaustive like that between humans and the rest of nature. Hence there is a risk of going astray along the parallel, and it is increased by certain problems in property dualism as a philosophy of the mind, on which its critics hammer hard. To be sure, it is difficult to imagine how a mental substance and a physical substance can interact. But why should it be any easier to see how mental and physical properties could do so? If something has a non-physical character – a thought, for instance – how could it exercise influence on something as resolutely physical as the movements of a body? Property dualism, say the critics, has applauded itself for ejecting Descartes’ causal interaction problem only to invite it in through the back door. Positing any sort of mental causation of the behaviour of physical objects – notably human bodies – merely restates the insoluble riddle on another level.36
Against this wounding charge, property dualists have devised several defences. Some retort that physical and mental properties are linked together in this particular kind of causation, the two sets not mutually exclusive but rather interdependent and jointly efficacious. Some suggest that certain physical events are ‘enabled’ by states of mind, while others posit the existence of ‘psychophysical laws’ whose inner workings we have yet to understand, but the traces of which we come across constantly.37 If the conundrum has not to this date received a satisfactory and widely accepted solution, there is one very compelling reason to believe that some sort of solution must exist: the phenomenon of human action, topic of the next chapter. If I want to raise my arm in a salute, I do it. If I am subject to an electric shock or epileptic convulsion, my arm might swing upwards in the same movement, but only the former event counts as an action. The readily ascertainable fact that actions happen in this world strongly indicate that mental properties can have causal impact on bodies, even if we do not yet know exactly how they go about doing it. The prices to be paid for accepting any of the two main alternatives – substance dualism, which clearly rules out interaction, and physicalism, which eradicates everything mental – seem prohibitive, leaving us with property dualism as the lodestar with the greatest promise for further explorations.38
But here we shall halt and not go any deeper into the labyrinth of the philosophy of mind. Instead, we shall reformulate property dualism as a specific position on nature and society. The simplest way to understand the category of substance, for our purposes, is to think of an answer to the question ‘what kind of a thing is this?’ A property, on the other hand, is that described by an answer to the question ‘what is this thing like?’ Thus we can say that a flag is a physical thing, made up of atoms and other particles, and so is the stone. But the flag is red and flaps in the wind, whereas the stone is grey and falls to the ground almost as soon as it has been thrown. The two entities are of the same substance, but they have different properties pertaining to colour, shape, mass and weight, and this presents us with no mystery.
Now we can specify four tenets of our property dualism: 1.) Natural and social properties are distinct types of properties. 2.) Natural and social properties attach to material entities of one and the same substance. 3.) An entity can have both natural and social properties, so that it is a combination of the two. 4.) Social properties ultimately depend on natural properties, but not the other way around.
The distinction is one of reality, not a fancy of classification. It can be confirmed, in line with the above test, by asking a question that must necessarily be aetiological: is this property a result of relations between humans, or of structures and processes independent of human activity? Furthermore, we can now easily see that causal interaction poses no problem commensurate to that in the philosophy of mind, for social properties are not immaterial or mental any more than natural ones are.39 The traffic between the two involves no crossing between the non-physical and the physical. If humans have minds, it must be because their complex bodily constitutions have given rise to them, which means that they have minds by nature; hence mental properties are inscribed on the natural side of the coin as much as on the social. It follows that social causation of the behaviour of physical objects is no ontological puzzle.
At this point, we need to take note of another definition of nature: as all that is. Some would say that nature is the cosmos as a whole, the infinite totality in which everything exists, the universe of the physical (and perhaps also the divine). On this view, the gentrification of a neighbourhood is exactly as natural as the rotation of a planet, since both take place within all that is. But using ‘nature’ in this rather trivial sense would be to miss what is at stake in the debate under consideration; no one questions the cosmos, save perhaps for the most dyed-in-the-wool transcendentalists, and no one juxtaposes the cosmic to the social. It is nature, on the realist definition, that occupies both roles. In no way does that definition imply, however, that the social stands on the side of, runs parallel to or floats somewhere above the natural: to the very contrary. Because it is of material substance, and because the material world is natural at root – nature having been alone until society sprung up in its midst – something social must have something natural as its substratum. Being material means being bound up with nature. If relations of production are material, they are also, by definition, built on and maintained through the natural. It is the material that connects the other two in the triangle, but not as a symmetrical or neutral baseline, for matter must fundamentally obey the laws of nature.40 On the realist as much as on the cosmic definition, there is no being outside of nature. If this sounds paradoxical, it is because it is so, in a way eloquently rendered by Soper: ‘Nature is that which Humanity finds within itself, and to which it in some sense belongs, but also that from which it seems excluded in the very moment in which it reflects upon either its otherness or its belonging.’41 We shall try to specify this precarious position more fully and, crucially, return to the notion of ‘substratum’. For now, all of this might become a little clearer if we turn to the concept of emergence.
The classical example of emergence is water. That liquid can douse flames, even though one of its constituent parts (hydrogen) is highly flammable on its own, while the other (oxygen) makes things burn faster. H2O freezes at zero degrees, whereas at that temperature H and O would both be gases. As the atoms are fixed in a certain arrangement at the level of the molecule, something novel emerges at that level, and the same goes for any number of other molecules, such as CO2, which has the ability to wiggle in a way that blocks infrared light and sends it back from where it came, notably the earth, trapping heat inside the system. On its own, an atom of C or O could do nothing of the kind. Other famous examples include beehives and anthills: the individual bee or ant has a limited repertoire,
