True cooperation must confront the necessity of forgiveness, beyond letting be. Letting things be includes “respect” and “tolerance,” even “sympathy.” 99 But we need something like the feminine warmth that Levinas describes as opening onto the infinite: gentleness, “a delightful lapse in being,” not violence, opens the ecological thought.100 According to this view, capitalist pleasure isn’t bad because it is too enjoyable but because it isn’t nearly pleasurable enough. This also goes for Chinese and Soviet Communism, with its ideology of “bourgeois comfort for all.”101 The ecological thought unfolds from this level of satisfaction. But this satisfaction is only a platform for further exploration.102
The ecological thought discovers different kinds of pleasure in feminine intimacy with the strange stranger.103 Ecological collectivity welcomes nonhumans with tenderness. Levinas gives the evocative example of the nymphs and the faun in Debussy’s ballet The Afternoon of a Faun. These strange strangers “manifest a soft warmth where being dissipates into radiance.”104 The caress of compassion is “infi nitely mysterious.”105 Perhaps within the darkness we discovered in Chapter 2 is an even stranger, more delightfully disruptive warmth, to be approached with caresses of frailty and vulnerability.106 This caress is “animal or infantile,” a “passivity.” Not being sure of what is happening, not being sure yet of who is who and what is what, this caress remains “in the no man’s land between being and not-yet-being.”107 Biological fecundity provides a basis for imagining an infinite society.108
“Letting be” is just the flip side of laissez-faire ideology. There is something passive-aggressive in the injunction to leave things alone, withdrawing human “interference.” There is something of the hunter in letting be: “Be vewy vewy quiet,” as Elmer Fudd says, on the hunt for Bugs Bunny.109 Yet I’m still responsible for the neighbor, even if she persecutes me. As the ice caps melt, perhaps we should be teaching drowning polar bears to use flotation devices. Perhaps we should be feeding the penguins until the seas contain enough fish. What needs to be removed is the barrier separating the beings we call cute (things in our garden, like pets) from the noncute (the Do Not Touch realm of Nature). “Letting be” is counter to the cute. There is a taste of scientistic coldness in it. The Earth is not an experiment. We can’t just sit back and relax and let evolution do its thing. In this respect, deep ecology, which sees humans as a viral blip in the big Gaian picture, is nothing other than laissez-faire capitalism in a neofascist ideological form.
There is a pretty obvious reason why Republicans are in such denial about global warming. Accepting the truth of global warming would mean that reality isn’t wired for libertarianism or individualism or rigid hierarchies or almost any of the other right-wing sacred cows. On the global warming and global warming denial sites I visit all too regularly, there are two major genres of statement. One is an injunction: “Well, global warming is happening, but just let Nature/evolution take its course.” This implies that we have no responsibility for, nor should we feel any guilt about, suffering beings and changing ecosystems. It also implies that somehow there is an automated process going on (called Nature) that we shouldn’t interfere with—an invisible hand hardwired into reality “over yonder” beyond our intentions, beyond society (which is itself modeled, in this view, as a social contract between freely agreeing individuals). The other genre of statement is a denial of totality: “Well, it snowed in Boise, Idaho, last week, so it’s not warming up where I am, so global warming is a crock of . . .” (These arguments are easily refuted, as I did at the start of this chapter.)
Observe that these two genres suffer from Freud’s borrowed kettle syndrome: there are too many reasons to deny global warming, reasons that contradict each other.110 Global warming is happening, and we should just let Nature take its course; global warming isn’t happening, so stop whining about it. There is a third statement genre, actually, something like: “Okay, it’s happening, but there’s no proof that we caused it” (the reactionaries’ favorite phrase is “anthropogenic global warming,” which makes it sound scary and geeky). I suppose this genre is somewhere in between denial and acceptance.
What can we learn from these genres of global warming denial? Perhaps the first is that the perceived threat is (and here I’m going to sound like Oscar Wilde) far more than merely real—it’s also a fantasmic threat, that is, a threat to reactionary fantasy as such. To accept global warming is to give up your fantasy that we are individuals who have just agreed on a level playing field to have a social contract; that capitalism is an automated process that must continue without intervention of even a mildly social-democratic kind. These two halves of reactionary sentiment are already intrinsically at odds with one another—one is about agreements freely chosen; another is about an automated process you have to leave alone. The global warming view, from the reactionary standpoint, involves inverting both halves of the sentiment. Society is not an agreement between presocial individuals but an already existing totality for which we are directly responsible.
THE END OF THE BEGINNING: THE FUTURE OF HYPEROBJECTS
Capitalism is a boiling whirlwind of impermanence. It reveals how things are always shifting and changing. But it isn’t the ultimate horizon of meaning. Capitalism does have structure—the relationship between owners and workers, for instance. It has predictability, patterns in the chaos. And, curiously, capitalism creates things that are more solid than things ever were. Alongside global warming, “hyperobjects” will be our lasting legacy. Materials from humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium will far outlast current social and biological forms. We are talking about hundreds and thousands of years. Five hundred years from now, polystyrene objects such as cups and takeout boxes will still exist. Ten thousand years ago, Stonehenge didn’t exist. Ten thousand years from now, plutonium will still exist.
Hyperobjects do not rot in our lifetimes. They do not burn without themselves burning (releasing radiation, dioxins, and so on). The ecological thought must think the future of these objects, these toxic things that appear almost more real than reality itself, like the acidic blood of the Alien in Ridley Scott’s film, which burns through metal floors.111 This blood is a science fiction version of demonic ichor.112 Reason must find a way to deal with these demonic substances. With its apocalyptic visions and thousand-year itches, Christianity isn’t ready for hyperobjects. Yet, thinking about these materials does involve something like religion, because they transcend our personal death. Living tissue is usually far more stable than chemical compounds. But hyperobjects outlast us all.
There is a joke about wanting to be reborn as a Styrofoam cup—they last forever. Hyperobjects don’t just burn a hole in the world; they burn a hole in your mind. Plutonium is truly astonishing to contemplate. We think of light as neutral or benign. Radiation is poisoned light. We think of “objects” as passive and inert, as “over there.” Just by existing, this hyperobject affects living tissue. Radioactive materials are already “over here,” inside our skin, as Marie Curie discovered to her cost. Driving past Rocky Flats, the decommissioned nuclear bomb trigger factory near Boulder, Colorado, is frightening and disorienting. Did I inhale a speck of plutonium on my way to visit my family? Hyperobjects invoke a terror beyond the sublime, cutting deeper than conventional religious fear. A massive cathedral dome, the mystery of a stone circle, have nothing on the sheer existence of hyperobjects.
Humans have manufactured materials that are already beyond the normal scope of our comprehension. As I argued earlier, we need justifications for our actions that go beyond bankrupt and downright dangerous self-interest theories. Climate change—the result of about two hundred years of human industry—could change Earth for thousands of years. Plutonium will be around for far longer than all of recorded human “history” so far. If you want a monument, look around you.
There is a way to spin this. A good example would be the ideological force of the so-called butterfly effect—the idea based on mathematical Chaos theory that a but
terfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.113 Ideologies are commands pretending to be descriptions. In this case, the statement enjoins us to think and act small. Related is the popular systems theory idea of “emergence,” that systems can organize themselves without much (or any) conscious input.114 The ideology is expressed in the “hundredth monkey principle”—once you persuade a hundred monkeys to do something, the whole tribe will do it. Even if this is true, how do you persuade the ninetieth monkey? The eightieth?
The ideology of emergence states that we don’t need to take responsibility for good decisions—they will just happen “naturally.” But to tackle pollution, climate disruption, and radiation, we must think and act big, which means thinking and acting collectively. This will take conscious input. We will have to choose to act and think together. We won’t be able to stumble upon the right solutions. Society isn’t like a bunch of molecules randomly jostling each other with Brownian motion. As Darwin argued, even butterflies value choice.115 It’s one of the abiding curiosities of capitalist ideology that it accords a gigantic value to choice in one sense, and none whatsoever in another.
Suppose that future humans achieve a society that is less materialistic than ours. This will probably be the case, if only to prevent human extinction. They will be less materialistic, but the actually existing products of profound materialism will persist, haunting them like inverse ghosts: more solid than solid, more real than real, “nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet.”116 Is it not impossible that future humans will have built something like spirituality around these materials?117 Care for the hyperobject will emerge. Return for a moment to the question of the nuclear power plant powering the fuel cell factory. What do you do with the radioactive waste? You can’t just sweep it under the Yucca Mountain carpet and hope nobody notices. You know too much—we live in Ulrich Beck’s risk society. So you have to store it, ideally above ground in monitored retrievable storage, for thousands of years. Hyperobjects are the true taboos, the demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion. The recent plan to dispose of nuclear materials by putting small amounts in regular household silverware was perhaps the most outrageous “solution” yet.118 Future humans’ treatment of hyperobjects may seem like reverence to our eyes. Isn’t it ironic that supposedly materialist, secular societies created the ultimate spiritual substances? This is truly a case of the chickens coming home to roost. With all due respect to Jacques Lacan, what to do with their poop will be the last thing on future humans’ (or humanoids’) minds.
We become aware of the worldness of the world only in a globalizing environment in which fiber optic cables run under the ocean and satellites hover above the ionosphere. There was no world before capitalism. This sounds shocking to some environmentalists, but the ecological thought is indeed shocking. We are becoming aware of the world at the precise moment at which we are “destroying” it��or at any rate, globally reshaping it. Nature appears in a world of industrial, privatized farming. Marx put it in his inimitably ruthless way: “First the labourers are driven from the land, and then the sheep arrive.”119 He forgot to add: and then Nature shows up. Things are first known when lost, as Edward Thomas wrote:I never had noticed it until
’Twas gone,—the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill
It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow’s breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as bone.
(1–8)120
Nature as such appears when we lose it, and it’s known as loss. Along with the disorientation of the modern world goes an ineffable sadness. Writing during the First World War, Thomas knew how globally disruptive events drastically change our physical and mental landscape. The First World War was a horrifying combination of modern technology and old school battle strategy, and a glimpse at Paul Nash’s painting We Are Building a New World (1918) will convince you of the environmental vision of artists at this time. Ecological disaster is a warlike experience—the Pentagon is concerned about the political consequences of climate disruption.121 The total destruction of nuclear war is upon us, in an ultra-slow-motion version. We look around and see what we are losing as a “thing” that is disappearing from our grasp and out from under our feet.
Two things that seem distinct—human society and Nature—are two different angles of the same thing. As far as location and cohabiting go, feudal peasants had no choice: neither did slaves, nor did indigenous peoples. Now we have the first stirrings of a choice: are we going to choose, and how? This is very different from saying that capitalism is the be-all and end-all of existence. Since its beginnings, capitalism has used war and catastrophe to reinvent itself. The current catastrophe is no exception. We should reject the false choice between the “politics of possibility” and a “return to nature.” Instead, let’s use this moment to imagine what sort of noncapitalist society we want.
We have reached not the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama would have it, but only the beginning.122 We have barely become conscious that we have been terraforming Earth all along. Now we have the chance to face up to this fact and to our coexistence with all beings. Freud compares psychoanalysis to reclamation work: “a work of culture, like the draining of the Zuider Zee.”123 Psychoanalysis is terraforming. Terraforming is psychoanalysis—bringing things to consciousness, owning up to our consciousness and our choices. Sorry to say, we have lost soft, squishy, irrational, authoritarian Nature. We have really lost it, because it never even existed. We have lost even the idea of it. Losing a fantasy is harder than losing a reality—just ask a therapist. Consciousness sucks. The more you’re aware of ecology, the more you lose the very “world” you were trying to save and the more things you didn’t know or didn’t want to know come to the fore. The room for acting out shrinks. But this realization also means that there is an ecological life after capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t exhaust every potential of ecological politics and ethics.
While their assertion of “the death of environmentalism” resembles my phrase “ecology without Nature,” Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are wrong. It’s no surprise that their book Break Through employs Fukuyama in full ideological mode: capitalism is the end of history—get used to it. Break Through’s subtitle is From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.124 “Possibility” is nicely poised between potentiality and inevitability. Make do with what you’re given. Nordhaus and Shel-lenbereger advocate not so much a “politics of possibility” but the usual miserable oppressiveness of the capitalist reality principle. Their argument superficially resembles mine: they claim, for instance, that a reified product called “the environment” is getting in the way of meaningful ecological politics. But Nordhaus and Schellenberger rely on limiting our scope to a narrow chink in a preexisting prison window, reducing ecological thinking to realpolitik. The injunction to get on with it and put up with the social conditions we have can easily become another brick in the prison wall that inhibits the possibility of escape. To this end, the rhetoric of sustainability becomes a weapon in the hands of global corporations that would like nothing better than to reproduce themselves in perpetuity. The current social situation becomes a thing of Nature, a tree that you’re preserving—a plastic object you must maintain on pain of death. This social situation is at the same time totally autonomous from you yourself, the actual you—it’s an “emergent” feature like a wave that doesn’t concern you as a mere droplet of water. We are back to our poor old Republican deniers and their contradictory mindset.
Far from rubbishing deep ecology as a religious objectification, we should take its claims more seriously than it takes them, and go even deeper, deeper into the mesh. We are only just beginning to think the ecological thought. Perhaps there is no end to its thinking. T. S. Eliot declared, “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (Burnt Norton, lines 44–45).125
We must do far more than bear it. There might be seeds of future ways of being together in religion, as there are in art. Perhaps the new eco-religions offer hints of postcapitalist coexistence. This coexistence is almost unimaginable, so it appears as religion. The ecological thought must conceive of postcapitalist pleasures, not bourgeois pleasure for the masses but forms of new, broader, more rational pleasure; not boring, overstimulating bourgeois reality, not fridges and cars and anorexia for all, but a world of being, not having, as Erich Fromm puts it. It must guard against ideologies of social regression—the “return to Nature” in its frightening guises. One always proposes returning to Nature from a certain position in the here and now, so that calls to go back can’t help being exercises in bad faith.126 Yet historical change may feel like taking steps backward. Capitalism has so co-opted the idea of “progress” that anything else, as one philosopher said, might feel like yanking on the emergency brake.127
Religion is a substitute for lost intimacy.128 If Nature is religion, then the intimacy it expresses as lost returns in ecology’s encounter with the strange stranger. The ecological thought successfully mourns for a Nature that never really existed anyway, except in some ideological pipe dream. But it isn’t completely “over” religion. If reason has no place for intimacy, the ecological thought will indeed seem religious. If the void opened up by the mesh seems too profound, we might be tempted to freeze it into religion.
How to care for the neighbor, the strange stranger, and the hyperobject, are the long-term problems posed by the ecological thought. The ecological thought hugely expands our ideas of space and time. It forces us to invent ways of being together that don’t depend on self-interest. After all, other beings elicited the ecological thought: they summon it from us and force us to confront it. They compel us to imagine collectivity rather than community—groups formed by choice rather than by necessity. Strange strangers and hyperobjects goad us to greater levels of consciousness, which means more stress, more disappointment, less gratification (though perhaps more satisfaction), and more bewilderment. The ecological thought can be highly unpleasant. But once you have started to think it, you can’t unthink it. We have started to think it. In the future, we will all be thinking the ecological thought. It’s irresistible, like true love.
The Ecological Thought Page 17