APOCALYPSE
Andrew Simms’ book Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity argues for a new ‘qualitative’ conception of prosperity in order to avert the Apocalypse, by which Simms means ecological catastrophe. In this essay, I want to look not at the prosperity in the title of the book, but the Apocalypse. Perhaps, Apocalypse is something to be faced rather than avoided; perhaps Apocalypse is the great Revelation we require, forcing us to address something about ourselves and the way we live our lives.
In forcing us to confront 'apocalypse', anthropogenic global heating exposes a fault line running through our mental universe – the split between reductionism and holism. Aristotle was a great systemizer and categorizer, imposing definitions and organising the materials of the world into neat, separate boxes. The academic world is Aristotelian to the core, organising knowledge about the world into distinct departments and disciplines. There is plenty to be said for the approach. It may have been the only way our limited minds could bring the entirety of the universe within the grasp of our limited intellects. The universe is infinite, yet our cognitive resources are limited. We only have so much time, our brains can only hold so much information. So it makes sense to break things up and organise them and parcel the whole knowledge out to specialists and experts.
The problem is, we come to lose the sense of the whole picture. The earliest philosophers focuses not just on the rational approach to the universe, but expressed a taste for the mythopoetic. Unscientific, we may say, but it was a way of accessing truths that would otherwise have remained untouched, beyond the reach of our limited rational tools. The pre-Socratic philosophers, certainly, employed meta-constructs in order to make sense of their factual observations. Something of this approach carried on into Plato, the supreme rationalist, who nevertheless wrote sublimely mysterious books like the Timaeus. But even in eminently rationalist works like The Laws and Critias, Plato interwove impeccably rational accounts of prehistoric Greek climate change or natural history with a mythology that sets the facts within a morally and socially instructive context.
In this respect, Plato’s philosophy may be presented as an organic or essentialist rationalism. Plato incorporate the primal roots of Greek civilisation in his conception of creation which perceived the world to be a living organism. In Timaeus, Plato argues that the creator created ‘a single visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order’ (Plato Timaeus, trans HDP Lee, Harmondsworth Penguin 1965:54 42-3). Plato thus offered a cosmological interpretation of the world as a single, living organism.
Desiring then, that all things should be good and nothing imperfect, the god took over all that was visible .. and brought it from disorder into order…
For the God, wishing to make this world most nearly like that intelligible thing which is best and in every way complete, fashioned it as a single, visible living creature .. with sense and reason.
The important point to grasp is that Plato expressed a holistic conception of the world. Rather than a reductionism that broke the world down into parts, each to be parcelled out to a narrow specialism, Plato saw the whole picture. Plato thus recounts how the creator made:
this world a single complete whole, consisting of parts that are wholes, and subject neither to age nor disease. The shape he gave it was suitable to its nature. A suitable shape for a living being that was to contain within itself all living beings would be a figure that contains all possible figures within itself. Therefore he turned it into a rounded spherical shape… And he put soul in the centre and diffused it through the whole and enclosed the body in it. So he established a single spherical universe in circular motion, alone but because of its excellence needing no company other than itself, and satisfied to be its acquaintance and friend. His creation, then, for all these reasons, was a blessed god.
Plato 1965:44-5
In simple terms – insofar as Plato’s views could ever be expressed simply – Plato's central theme is that hubris in human action soon comes to meet its nemesis in the shape of ecocide. Plato writes that where once Attica was a fecund landscape criss-crossed by streams and rivers, now all was arid:
There are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called .. all the richer and softer parts of the soil have fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left. But in the primitive state of the country, its mountains were high hills covered with soil, and the plains .. were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains.
Plato, Critias, trans B. Jowett, Oxford, 1982, 111b,c.
Plato’s criticisms apply not only to Attica, nor only to the way that most of ancient Greece came to suffer grievous soil erosion as a result of wanton human-made development, but to a modern world bent on ecological despoliation.
The problem is that we cannot see the bigger picture. Our mentalities, our disciplinary approach to knowledge, our universities, follow in the specialising footsteps. The universal nature of the ecological crisis demand that we adopt a holistic, interdisciplinary approach, concentrating our specialist knowledge upon the one area. We are hobbled by disciplinary specialization. The meticulous attention to detail is achieved at the expense of a wider grounding, with the result that we come to know more and more about less and less until the point comes when we know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. The more we see the detail, the less we see the whole picture. To address a universal problem like ecological crisis we need to develop a generalist overview. The strengths of reductionism and specialism are many, but the fatal weakness is the narrowed vision and reduced capacity when it comes to discerning 'meaning' and ‘life’ – apparently the universe is meaningless and the Earth lacks the qualities that meet the criteria of life. Could it be that specialists are looking so closely that they can only see the world through a squint? The question needs to be addressed because more than ever experts are being called upon to deliver knowledge in a concise and comprehensible form to ease its translation into public policy and thereby change the way we live our lives. And that, too, is a collective endeavour, that is, it requires a holistic approach.
Since the crisis in the climate system is multi-faceted and far reaching in its impact and effects, the limitations of reductionism and specialisation is becoming glaringly apparent. The consequences are potentially very serious, even fatal, for the human prospect.
It is in this context that the term ‘Apocalypse', is entirely appropriate. Not merely in the sense of crisis or catastrophe, but in the sense of revelation, bringing something to light. And prophecy. The scale and the universality of climate crisis is such that scientists are no longer able to hide away in their laboratories, reporting back from the frontiers of knowledge once in a while to publish their findings, to no great excitement. Given the extent to which human action has changed and is changing the character of the physical universe, even the facts have become political. Scientists are now being drawn into a terrain they are not comfortable with and which their science, in its specialism, hasn’t prepared them for. For instance, a scientist whose expertise is atmospheric modelling may report the findings of some dry, painstaking research and suddenly find their work being criticised as political. Count how many times the work of climate scientists is described as ‘alarmist’. Climate change deniers continually use the phrase ‘climate alarmism’, and it gets repeated at every opportunity by those who know little about science but plenty about politics. The allegation of ‘climate alarmism’ thrown at climate scientists is easily understood as politically biased abuse designed to denigrate scientific research and defuse its political implications. But there is a truth in the charge that the abusers are instinctively aware of – in an era of ecological crisis, scientists have been cast into the role of a latter-day apocalyptic prophets. It seems to be a role for which they are ill-equipped. Centuries of studying the world as a meaningless machine has left scientists without a moral or political language. Criticised for political bias, accused of manipulating data, and charged with making up crisis for pecuniary motives, the scientists have merely restated the evidence and the facts, as though this would be sufficient to settle the argument.
Having been trained to examine tightly defined constructs, scientists are having to respond to arguments of a meta-constructual nature, and they appear not just unwilling but unable to deal with general, wider implications that are beyond their specialist reach. Climate crisis has cast scientists in the role of prophets, but they seem more than reluctant and less than willing to play their part. The world is crying out for Blake’s fourfold vision. The scientists, seeking the safety of their specialisms, are unable to break out of the single vision.
The position that the crisis in the climate system places scientists in can be compared to a group of doctors who are specialists investigating a patient. One tests the liver. Another the heart, another the lungs, another the kidneys. Another examines the brain. There is a failure to see the problem as pertaining to the whole body. No conclusive evidence is found, so there is a growing tendency to dismiss the problem as a delusion. The truth is, as any doctor would know, that the actual cause of the problem is more than the particular parts and pertains to the functioning of the whole living organism. But in an age brought up on mechanicism and reductionism, few are equipped with the essentialist capacity to look at the living whole.
The social organism has become like a drug addict, unable to abandon its addiction to fossil fuels. Is the patient even willing to save itself? Consumption is a disease which wastes away the body. But electoral will reveals an addiction to things that are bad for the health. We have to doubt whether 80 percent or 90 percent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of are achievable. Most of the planet of seven billion people is urbanised, and it is oil or other fossil fuels that lubricate the interconnections in the global environment. The oil is the sickness in the blood of the body. The ‘liberal world order’ imposes a competitive economics of comparative advantage that devalues social, cultural and biological diversity. But criticism of ‘globalisation’ is beyond the political pale, since it exposes the claims that trade and economic growth deliver the prosperity and social cohesion that an increasing global population requires. As though repeating those tired old nostrums will make them true, mounting evidence to the contrary. The carbon crunch is now closing in on the conventional consciousness, like organic nature swallowing up an ancient ruin. Politicians are caught between the scientific advice that we must wean ourselves off our addictions and an electorate and a business world who are the addicted.
The global financial crisis of 2008 showed just how dependent on ‘the machine’ we have become, having lived in abstraction from realities for so long. This ought to have been an apocalyptic moment, forcing us to confront reality with clear eyes. Without the massive bailout of the banks, our much vaunted global trading system would have seized up. With paralysis in the food supply, there would have been panic buying, conflict over scarce resources. That’s how brittle the power of the machine is. No matter how sophisticated, how rich, a civilisation looks, it is only a few days away from social unrest and national emergency. Detached from realities for so long, we have lost the resilience that comes with the local sourcing of our food and energy. We have been turned into a society of passive consumers, with producers confined within a mechanical straightjacket to grind out products at the lowest prices.
The idea of developing an alternative to a global economy predicated upon endless growth induces fear and revulsion; it contradicts everything we believe to be true about economic growth bringing investment, jobs, prosperity. That’s a belief system, and it continues no matter how much the facts contradict its central tenets.
The tenacity of this belief system lies behind the inability, the unwillingness, of politicians to take effective action at successive climate conferences. Short-term self-interested thinking and long-term strategic thinking for the common good are colliding here and the result is a car crash. The paradox that faces us is how we are able to restrain the self-interest of many today so that the collective interest of all may be served tomorrow within institutions and practices that are based upon and reinforce individualistic behaviour on the part of consumers and voters. Change the institutions and the practices comes the response. How? With what support? That response doesn’t answer the question at all, merely pushes it back. The social and ecological problems that confront the world are the product of supra-individual forces. The question is how we can develop the collective mechanisms of control to subject those forces to our political will and moral responsibility. There are many who express surprise at the callousness of the rich and the powerful when it comes to ‘discounting the future’. Future generations do not exist, so we are not entitled to think, act, spend the money of current generations of taxpayers by attributing our political prejudices to them. It’s a clever argument. But note how the same right wing politicians and ideologues justify austerity by claiming that it’s wrong to saddle future generations with debt. The truth is, with exceptions, the rich and the powerful as a whole have never cared much for the poor and the powerless in their own societies and have cared less for the poor and powerless in other countries. So it’s no surprise that they should care nothing for future generations. It’s all quite simple. It’s why avarice was identified as a deadly sin – it’s a sin and it’s deadly. Have a read of Dante’s Inferno, avarice is the worst of all sins. From avarice come all the other deadly sins.
The rich and the powerful will be motivated to act only when the flood water starts to lap at their own castle walls. And make no mistake, climate crisis threatens a universal deluge. The only problem is that the tipping point scenarios of the scientists indicate that by this time, it would be too late. The rich and the powerful need to get this message and get it quick – the ecological crisis is a universal crisis that affects all humankind. Whether they like it or not, there is no avoiding communism. Addictive self-interested behaviour is the driver of climate change and whilst we can seek to escape reality by indulging our consumerist fantasies, there is no escape. There is a common thread in human behaviour in a consumer society - cars, mobile phones, holidays abroad, air travel – it’s all flight. A flight from some inadequacy, some failing. But there is no flight from reality – we have only the one planet. So it makes sense to stand and face reality. Admittedly, it takes courage. It requires that individuals cease to be passive consumers leading a purely private existence and instead come to act as citizens in the public realm. People protest about the lack of democracy. It is up to them to give democratic forms active content.
In Socialism: Past and Future, Michael Harrington refers to the phrase "the slow 1929" which Alain Mine used to describe the possibility of an economic crisis as profound as the Great Depression but which proceeded in fits and starts, rather than exploding in one big event. In Harrington’s view, we are living through a "slow apocalypse," ‘a transition to a new civilization that could occur before we are even aware of it. If that revolution, which is in progress, makes us, we will lose ourselves; if we make it, there is at least hope for freedom and justice and solidarity.’ (Harrington 1993: 254).
There is no doubt that the ‘slow 1929’ is upon is. It has been since the ending of the long boom in the early 1970s, and it has started to get quicker with the financial collapse. If the climate science is broadly correct with respect to anthropogenic global heating, then we are well into the ‘slow apocalypse’. It is in our own interests to see the truth that is being revealed to us sooner rather than later. Climate change deniers use the phrase ‘climate alarmism’ in order to play on public scepticism with doom-mongers, for whom the end of the world is always nigh. In truth, as anyone who is aware of how 'apocalypse' functions in Biblical prophecy, doom and gloom is the cheap and easy end of the spectrum. Apocalypse is as much about the beginning of times as of the end, it concerns the revelation of a deeper, hidden truth. Etymologically, the Greek word apokalyptein is derived from apo-, meaning 'from', and kalyptein, 'to cover or conceal'. As anyone familiar with the Bible knows, ‘Apocalypse’ is an uncovering, a Revelation. Count how many times the words ‘I saw’ are used in the book of Revelations. ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away… I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem’. (Rev 21: 1-2). The old reality passes away when we come to see the true reality for the first time. That is precisely what the crisis in the ecological foundations of life demand from us. The word ‘Apocalypse’ has a technical meaning that implies a transformation, a personal transformation, a transformation in vision, that involves the creation of a new world, or an appreciation of the one and true world. Self-transformation and social transformation, the turning of an inverted world of inverted values and people the right way round. And this is where we come back to those who proclaim the truth are prophets of the new world to come, ‘for the old order of things has passed away’ (Rev 21: 4). It certainly seems to be passing. It is a corrupt world of social and environmental injustice, a world without hope, a world that has detached itself from the eternal trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful. Apocalypse is the time for the astonishing explosion of new hope.
The Revelation of St John of Patmos is the most well known version of Apocalypse, but there are others. Take Mary’s Song, or ‘magnificat’, at the beginning of Luke's gospel. This celebrates the divine upheaval of worldly powers in terms which certainly inspire hope:
He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
And lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And sent the rich away with empty hands.
(Luke 1: 52-53)
‘He has vexed the mighty and raised the humble’, ‘He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble’. I can read this passage in any translation.
Regardless of whether we have religious belief or not, the energising role of prophecy is clear. Apocalyptic scenarios of socio-economic and ecological crisis present us with having to choose in face of change. Failure to choose is itself a choice, in that it will result in a change that is forced upon us by external forces and events. We can certainly attempt to evade choice by do nothing. Climate change deniers complacently talk of adaptation. The content of that advice is precisely nothing. The time to adapt is now. The moment is upon us. Consumer culture has made us passive, soft and inert. Our lack of preparedness and resilience makes a sliding into barbarism highly likely. It has already started, with the collapse of empathy amongst the people with most money and power. Many are attempting to pull up the drawbridge as the flood waters rise and the suffering and dying begins. We can see that in the world now, and it is not a pleasant sight.
Alternatively, we can show moral and mental courage and look for revelation in the signs of the times. We don’t need to look hard. This entails more than a technical, financial and institutional programme of action, although it is worth emphasising that the solution to the crisis in the climate system is well within the reach of our know-how. But in a more expansive sense, crisis is an opportunity to become human. Planetary engineers such as Stewart Brand are arguing that we have, through our technology, become as gods. He argues that we have to get good at being gods. Fine. Except that entails much more than the use of technology against the planet. It entails a personal transformation, a living up to the truth, beauty and goodness of the planet. Of that moral transformation, the most important thing of all, there is nothing in the technical projections of the eco-engineers.
Technically and financially, we may well be able to mitigate the material causes of global heating, but the resolution of the crisis requires that we deal with the psychic, mental and moral causes – and that requires a fundamentally human transformation. The crisis in our social and natural environment is a crisis in a worldview and it affords an opportunity to ask and, indeed, answer the question of what it means to be human beings. Plato’s call for the examined life stands before us. Whether we choose to help one another and other species is down to us. But it is important to recognise that we have that choice. And that moral capacity on our part is a potential to grow in decency and dignity in association with others.
There is nothing inevitable about moral choice. The fact that we don’t have to make that choice is what moral autonomy is all about. We can choose the bad over the good, the ugly over the beautiful, the false over the truthful. It’s just that if we want to live well as fulfilled beings, it is necessary that we choose well as moral beings. “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). We can certainly choose death over life. With a global arms budget of $1.7 a year, we are choosing death every day of the year. With our ecologically destructive behaviour, we are choosing death.
But we have the choice, and that’s what makes us human. It’s just that in order to flourish as human beings, we need to start choosing wisely. And that is the challenge before us today. For all of the talk of ‘the God species’ amongst eco-engineers, the resolution of this crisis is fundamentally moral. Even if we could count on concerted governmental action, financial investment in Green infrastructures and technological innovation delivering on all of its promises, these responses to the ecological crisis will fall short without a bigger transformation in the human condition. We also need a change of behaviour: a shift from self-seeking focused primarily on quantitative accumulation and consumption in the private realm, and a move to the more qualitative realms of affective bonds and solidaristic ties with others in mutually enhancing relationships, depth of community, a sense of the sacred, elemental connections with the natural world, raising senses through an appreciation of beauty and a deepening of the personal life.
As problems mount up, and nothing gets done, there is a danger of crisis fatigue setting in. That is because we perceive crisis as a threat to our way of life rather than as an opportunity to embrace a new world. That is what the Apocalyptic vision and transformation is all about, encouraging us to see that the old order of things is passing away and inspiring us to act out of hope for the new heaven and the new earth that is within our grasp. Hope is the key. Fear makes us cling on to the familiar and the failing, the world that is passing. Crisis should encourage us to think about the world we live in, how we relate to it and to others, how we can envisage the future, and how our thoughts and actions as moral beings bring about the realisation of the new Jerusalem. That is the role of the 'apocalyptic imagination', taking us beyond the realm of the factual and the physical, those specialist worlds of the bureaucrats of knowledge. There comes a point when speaking truths to power brings us into the realm of prophecy. And at this point we see the world as whole again, for the first time.
So, in the end, I make no apologies for developing a moral ecology in my work, drawing upon the organic and rationalist essentialism of Plato and Aristotle, the transcendental idealism of Kant, the active materialism of Marx as well as upon the themes of social and environmental justice that run through as a constant, consistent thread throughout both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible. The essays I have collected in the three books titled The Common Ground should be read in conjunction with Immanence, Transcendence and Essence (2013), The Coming Ecological Revolution (2011), In Search of Ecopolis: The Political and Philosophical Principles of Social Ecology (2011) and Of Gods and Gaia (2012). As unfinished as those works are, they do at least attempt to address the ecological crisis with a moral and philosophical depth that is entirely lacking in works advocating planetary engineering, technical fixes, different energy infrastructures, environmental regulations and so on. To repeat, the ecological crisis is a crisis in our way of life, a crisis which goes right to the heart of what it is to be human. Failure to address that fundamental question of human being will leave any supposed ‘solution’ far short of what is required.
For far too long, our mentalities and modalities have languished in philosophical torpor and timidity. We are not short of detailed research. What we are lacking is an overarching vision that is able to connect the details together to form a bigger picture. Specialists, it seems, lack the guts to speak outside the area of their particular expertise. Or maybe they lack the ability. They fail to appreciate that it is moral agency on the part of human beings that produces the knowledge of the world that the specialists proceed to break up into discrete departments and disciplines. It is now time for the world of knowledge to realign itself by bridging the epistemological divide between the particular and the whole. Until the mechanistic paradigm took over and removed essences and organisms from the world, the greatest minds debated whether Plato or Aristotle was right. Raphael’s painting The School of Athens has Plato pointing upwards to the ultimate reality in the heavenly realm of Ideal Forms, Aristotle holding his moderating hand between heaven and earth, pointing downwards to the unfolding of natural essences here on earth.
Raphael 1509/1510 The School of Athens
The debate as to what is real continues between mathematicians and evolutionary biologists. I suggest that there is a richness and a depth in Plato and Aristotle that, overimpressed with the obvious reality of physical things, we have neglected. Mechanicism has driven purpose from nature. It’s time to bring it back. We are teleological beings, we act in accordance with purpose. Human beings require meaning. We need to re-enchant the world. Because the climate crisis is not a crisis about physical things, it’s about values, and how, in acting out of moral purpose, we come to define ourselves as human. Apocalypse is a wake-up call telling us that it is time to get real. Plato or Aristotle? As with Bach and Beethoven, I swing from one to the other. Perhaps they are both right in some way that we have yet to appreciate, or maybe, having reached our cognitive limits, can never appreciate.
Apocalypse calls upon us to envision the future. That is more than indulging in some technological fantasy. That is the easiest thing to do. More than that, we need to start asking what imaginings are required to bring about the changes in behaviour that are required. These are the difficult questions, because we are dealing with human beings, inscrutable, intractable, impossible creatures at the best of times. No wonder planetary engineers recoil from politics and ethics and take refuge in the simple world of technical gadgets and pushable buttons. But that techno-fixing is simply a moral and political evasion that leaves power unchecked by morality. And so is environmental tinkering with schemes and policies that leave the fundamental social relations in place. The prospect of ecological catastrophe should stimulate us into new thinking. That requires the hope that comes with a genuinely Apocalyptic sensibility. Fear petrifies us into inertia and inaction. So, on balance, rather than cancel the Apocalypse, I say bring it on. The old order of things is passing away, the new Jerusalem is within our sight.