SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice: The founder of hipster foodie magazine Modern Farmer is, in 2018, rumored to be launching a “Goop for climate change.”
the pesticide Roundup: Alexis Temkin, “Breakfast with a Dose of Roundup?” Environmental Working Group Children’s Health Initiative, August 15, 2018, www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyphosateincereal.
elaborate guidance: “During a wildfire, dust masks aren’t enough!” the National Weather Service warned on Facebook. “They won’t protect you from the fine particles in wildfire smoke. It is best to stay indoors, keeping windows and doors closed. If you’re running an air conditioner, keep the fresh-air intake closed and the filter clean to prevent outdoor smoke from getting inside.”
“philanthrocapitalism”: Perhaps the most piercing account of this phenomenon is Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Knopf, 2018).
“moral economy”: This story is recounted in Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); see also Tehila Sasson’s review, published in Dissent under the headline “The Gospel of Wealth,” August 22, 2018.
asked to be entrepreneurs: Stephen Metcalf, among many others, has written memorably about this phenomenon, in his brief history of neoliberalism, “Neoliberalism: The Idea That Swallowed the World,” The Guardian, August 18, 2017.
Climate Leviathan: Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (London: Verso, 2018).
In 2018, an illuminating study: Katharine Ricke et al., “Country-Level Social Cost of Carbon,” Nature Climate Change 8 (September 2018): pp. 895–900.
Belt and Road Initiative: Perhaps the best account of this initiative is Bruno Maçães’s Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (London: Hurst, 2018). The initiative “may also promote permanent environmental degradation,” a group of researchers argued recently. (Fernando Ascensão et al., “Environmental Challenges for the Belt and Road Initiative,” Nature Sustainability, May 2018).
the possibility of disequilibrium: Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
pulls criminals out of pop concerts: According to The Washington Post’s Hamza Shaban, this happened three times in just two months in the spring of 2018: “Facial Recognition Cameras in China Snag Man Who Allegedly Stole $17,000 Worth of Potatoes,” May 22, 2018.
domestic-spy drones: Stephen Chen, “China Takes Surveillance to New Heights with Flock of Robotic Doves, but Do They Come in Peace?” South China Morning Post, June 24, 2018.
History After Progress
most unshakable creeds: It wasn’t just the promise of growth that was invented in the industrial era, but the idea of history, which promises that the past tells a story of human progress—and suggests, therefore, that the future will, too.
This progressive faith has a demotic basis, which is that daily life changed so quickly in the Victorian era that no one with eyes open could have missed it. It also has an intellectual one, which is that philosophers from Hegel to Comte proposed, at various points in the nineteenth century, that history had a shape—that it evolved, in one form or another, toward the light, of one kind or another. The idea would not have confused readers of their contemporaries Darwin and Spencer. Nor, for that matter, visitors to Queen Victoria’s Crystal Palace exhibition, the first World’s Fair, which organized national showcases into an implicit competition of relative development and more or less promised that technology would bring about a better future for all. By the time Jacob Burckhardt was writing his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which furnished the now-proverbial three-act structure of Western history—antiquity followed by the Dark Ages followed by modernity—he could imagine himself as an opponent of both Hegel and Comte and yet nevertheless produce a work that explicitly periodized the past into a single unfolding drama. That is how thoroughly the idea of progressive history had taken hold in a time of rapid social, economic, and cultural change: even critics of reflexive Western triumphalism tended to see history as marching forward. Marx is the clearest example: squint at his reimagined Hegelianism, and its shape looks a lot like the enduring wall-chart of history first published by Sebastian Adams—motivated by Christian evangelism, amazingly—in 1871. In 1920, H. G. Wells published his influential version, The Outline of History; in it, he declared that “the history of mankind,” which he traced through forty chapters from “The Earth in Space and Time” to “The Next Stage of History,” “is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily.” It sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages, and it casts a shadow over nearly every project of popular, long-view history undertaken since, from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Sapiens: That this kind of total skepticism won Harari such an admiring audience among so many leading avatars of technocratic progress is one of the curiosities of the TED Talk age. But the skepticism also flatters, especially those inclined by their own sense of accomplishment to contemplate the longest sweeps of history. Inviting you to contemplate that history, Harari also seems to pull you beyond or outside it. In this way, he shares strains of lecturesome DNA not just with Diamond but with Joseph Campbell and even Jordan Peterson. In his subsequent book, Homo Deus, Harari endorses a new contemporary myth, though he doesn’t quite recognize it as such—making his own case for the near-term arrival of a superpowerful artificial intelligence that will render everything we know as “humanity” close to obsolete.
Against the Grain: The human remains excavated from this time tell a clear story of human strife: the people were shorter, sicker, and died younger than their predecessors. The average height fell from 5′10″ for men and 5′6″ for women to 5′5″ and 5′1″, respectively; settled communities were more vulnerable to infectious disease, but obesity and heart disease also spiked. This is why it’s so that the case against civilization, as the critic John Lanchester has called it, can be made simply as a case against farming.
“the worst mistake”: Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1987.
“we might call the Liberal Story”: Yuval Noah Harari, “Does Trump’s Rise Mean Liberalism’s End?” The New Yorker, October 7, 2016.
ekpyrosis: This was the belief that, periodically, the cosmos would be entirely destroyed in what was called a “Great Year,” then be re-created and the process would begin again. Plato preferred the term “perfect year,” in which the stars would be returned to their original positions.
“dynastic cycle”: Although some accounts of the cycle offered a dozen or more phases, according to the Chinese philosopher Mencius the cycle had only three (essentially rise, peak, and decline).
“eternal recurrence”: Nietzsche first proposes this idea, that everything is bound to repeat itself eternally, as a sort of thought experiment in The Gay Science (1882). But he would return to it again and again, often describing it as something more like a law of the universe—which is similar to how it was treated by the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Greek Stoics.
“public purpose” and “private interest”: Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: In his 1987 book, Kennedy offers a relatively simple model of great-power history: growth fueled by natural resources followed by decline precipitated by military overreach.
The Progress of This Storm: The main thrust of this book, Malm’s follow-up to Fossil Capital, is that while we may believe that “nature,” as something distinct from “society,” has disappeared, in fact global warming has brought it back with a punitive vengeance.
Ethics at the End of the World
podcast “S-Town”: McLemore, whose panic may have been caused
in part by mercury poisoning, was most concerned about Arctic ice melt, drought, and the slowdown of the thermohaline convector.
“I sometimes call it toxic knowledge”: Richard Heinberg, “Surviving S-Town,” Post Carbon Institute, April 7, 2017.
“nature is thriving”: Thomas’s book is Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), and while it offers not so much a full-throated celebration of what he calls an “age of extinction” but a more modest proposal that we view the positive, generative effects of climate change alongside its crueler impacts. This is a note of contrarian optimism echoing Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in their Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene; and the Canadian, Swedish, and South African academics behind the research collaboration “Bright Spots,” who, despite considerably more concern about the effects of global warming, nevertheless keep a running list of positive environmental developments they believe makes the case for what they call a “good Anthropocene.”
“The Second Coming”: Among other things, Yeats gave Joan Didion the lines she built into her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
“immanent anti-humanism”: The program is also neatly contained in Jeffers’s most famous poem, “Carmel Point”:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
a time of approaching ecological collapse: Indeed, the manifesto continues, “human civilization is an intensely fragile construction,” and yet, they write, we are forever in denial about that fragility—our very day-to-day lives depend on that denial of fragility, perhaps as much as they depend on the denial of our own mortality. This is what the philosopher Samuel Scheffler means when he suggests that, in an agnostic world, the role once played by an afterlife in inspiring and organizing and policing moral and ethical behavior has been taken up, in part, by the conviction that the world will continue on after us when we die. In other words, the idea that life is not just worth living but worth living well, he suggests, “would be more threatened by the prospect of humanity’s disappearance than by the prospect of our own deaths.” As Charles Mann summarizes Scheffler, considering the ethical paradox of human action on climate change, “The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.”
“Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilization may become unstoppable,” Kingsnorth and Hine wrote in their manifesto. “That civilizations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.”
“We believe that the roots”: “We do not believe that everything will be fine,” Kingsnorth and Hine write. “We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.”
In the manifesto, Dark Mountain outlined what they called “the eight principles of uncivilization,” a sort of mission statement for their movement that moves from general principle and perceptions to a more focused statement of intent. “We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our time can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions,’ ” the list begins, and though they foreswear these kinds of solutions, they don’t entirely give up on response. But Dark Mountain is ultimately a literary collective—organizing festivals, workshops, and meditation retreats—and the most concrete, practical response they call for in their manifesto is in art. “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves,” namely “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature.’ ” These, they add, “are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.” In response, they promise, “we will assert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment” and “will write with dirt under our fingernails.” The goal: through storytelling, to find a new vantage from which the end of civilization would not seem so bad. In a certain way, they suggest, they themselves have already achieved this state of enlightenment. “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” they write. “Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”
Kingsnorth published a new manifesto: Paul Kingsnorth, “Dark Ecology,” Orion, November–December 2012. This manifesto includes this passage:
What does the near future look like? I’d put my bets on a strange and unworldly combination of ongoing collapse, which will continue to fragment both nature and culture, and a new wave of techno-green “solutions” being unveiled in a doomed attempt to prevent it. I don’t believe now that anything can break this cycle, barring some kind of reset: the kind that we have seen many times before in human history. Some kind of fall back down to a lower level of civilizational complexity. Something like the storm that is now visibly brewing all around us.
If you don’t like any of this, but you know you can’t stop it, where does it leave you? The answer is that it leaves you with an obligation to be honest about where you are in history’s great cycle, and what you have the power to do and what you don’t. If you think you can magic us out of the progress trap with new ideas or new technologies, you are wasting your time. If you think that the usual “campaigning” behavior is going to work today where it didn’t work yesterday, you will be wasting your time. If you think the machine can be reformed, tamed, or defanged, you will be wasting your time. If you draw up a great big plan for a better world based on science and rational argument, you will be wasting your time. If you try to live in the past, you will be wasting your time. If you romanticize hunting and gathering or send bombs to computer store owners, you will be wasting your time.
tending toward more engagement: You can see this in how quite radical thinkers about the environment and our obligations to it, from Jedediah Purdy to Naomi Klein, focus so intently on the problems of political action. In Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015), he builds an entire practical politics out of the intuition, inarguably true, that the final and total conquest of the planet by people is marked simultaneously by its degradation; and argues that the end of that long era of natural abundance demands a more democratic approach to environmental politics, policy, and law—even when, or perhaps especially because, any alteration from the present course seems almost infrastructurally impossible. In a 2017 exchange with Katrina Forrester, later published in Dissent, he elaborated:
Here is our paradox: The world can’t go on this way; and it can’t do otherwise. It was the collective power of some—not all—human beings that got us into this: power over resources, power over the seasons, power over one another. That power has created a global humanity, entangled in a Frankenstein ecology. But it does not yet include the power of accountability or restraint, the power we need. To face the Anthropocene, humans would need a way of facing one another. We would need, first, to be a we.
From a certain vantage, this may just look like conventional politics, of the kind that Kingsnorth derides as impossibly naive. They are also my politics, for what it’s worth—I nod my head in recognition when I read Kate Marvel calling for courage rather than hope, and when I read Naomi Klein rhapsodizing about a community of political resistance growing out of the local sites of protests she calls “Blockadia.” I believe, as Purdy does, that the degradation of the planet and the end o
f natural abundance demand a new progressivism animated by a renewed egalitarian energy; and I believe, as Al Gore does, that we should push technology to chase every last glimmer of hope for averting disastrous climate change—including unleashing, or indulging, market forces to help do so when we can. I believe, as Klein does, that some particular market forces have almost conquered our politics, but not entirely, leaving a bright shining sliver of opportunity; and I also believe, as Bill McKibben does, that meaningful and even dramatic change can be achieved through the familiar paths: voting and organizing and political activity deployed at every level. In other words, I believe in engagement above all, engagement wherever it may help. In fact, I find any other response to the climate crisis morally incomprehensible.
global mobilization: That this is a familiar analogy is unfortunate, because it blunts the intended impression: the Allies’ mobilization was unprecedented in human history and has never been matched since. We did not defeat the Nazis with a change to the marginal tax rate, as much as proponents of a climate tax want to see it as a single-step cure-all. In World War II, there was also a draft, a nationalization of industry, and widespread rationing. If you can imagine a tax rate on carbon that would produce that kind of action in just three decades, you have a better imagination than I do.
“eco-nihilism”: Wendy Lynne Lee, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017).
“climate nihilism”: Parker used the term in explaining his decision to quit Canada’s New Democratic Party after its premier endorsed subsidizing natural gas.
“climatic regime”: In an essay titled “Love Your Monsters,” Latour elaborated a jeremiad of environmental responsibility from Mary Shelley’s parable, one that begins with a perhaps romantic plea for a clear-eyed recognition of just what we have wrought—writing that, “just as we have forgotten that Frankenstein was the man, not the monster, we have also forgotten Frankenstein’s real sin.”
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