The term “scale”, from Latin scala, means “ladder”: it is a practical and conceptual device that allows us to climb up and down various spatiotemporal dimensions in order to see things from different viewpoints. Adopting a universal scale is therefore inevitably a dynamic process. It involves coming to terms with time understood, after Bergson, as “duration”, a continuous flow into which we as observers make insertions in order to carve out some “solids” from it, to temporarily stabilize matter into entities. In an attempt to grasp the passage of time, we make incisions in it with our proprioceptive and cognitive apparatuses, and then pass off the products of these incisions as images of the world. Bringing (back) the universal scale will thus serve as a reminder for us that there is an excess to our acts of world-making and that it is perhaps imprudent or even irresponsible to forget about it in all kinds of discussions — those concerning politics, ethics or even our everyday existence. Timothy Clark points out that considerations of scale tend to undermine many policies, concepts and common-sense beliefs about what we refer to as “our world”, since any efforts to conduct environmental reform in one country, say, may be effectively negated by the lack of any such efforts in many other (frequently more powerful, wealthier and more environmentally damaging) locations of the globe. This forgetting of scale results in what Clark calls “a derangement of linguistic and intellectual proportion”, whereby filling the kettle with just enough water to make tea or buying a slightly less petrol-guzzling make of car are seen as ways of “saving the planet”. Yet it is not only many eco-activists and, more broadly, those who care about the environment and climate change, that suffer from this kind of scalar derangement. The latter malady also affects many scholars in the humanities, including those occupying themselves with problems of ethics and morality.
Adopting a similarly mechanistic approach to this presumed entity they alternatively call “the planet” and “the world”, humanities thinkers of various theoretical persuasions in various disciplines first posit and locate this entity at a distance, and then try to act on it. This leads Clark to conclude that “dominant modes of literary and cultural criticism are blind to scale effects in ways that now need to be addressed” (150). The problem with this “planetary” mode of thinking lies in the apparent grasping of complexity, which is nothing more but a form of reductionism, whereby “[r]eceived concepts of agency, rationality and responsibility are being strained or even begin to fall apart into a bewildering generalizing of the political that can make even filling a kettle as public an act as voting” (151). My attempt to outline a minimal ethics thought across a universal scale offers a partial response to Clark’s exhortation to consider scale effects seriously.
Joanna Zylinska, "Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene", pp.26-28