It looks to be pretty much all over, bar an awful lot of shouting from those who, refusing to be bound by any common standards or obligations, in the name of individuals being 'free' to do as they like, now see all manner of unrestrained and uncontrollable forces reigning down on their stupid heads. Spare me. I've wasted years trying to argue the case for the provision of effective collective media to reign in these forces, of which the crisis in the climate system is but one. Take back control? These people haven't got a clue when it comes to the forces governing the world. Climate change is not 'nature's revenge,' but is an alien nature, the product of an unmastered and irresponsible human practice. I've warned in countless works about the destructiveness of a libertarian freedom in which subjective choice trumps common standards. I may as well have been writing in hieroglyphs. It was a waste of my time and talent. I had better things to be doing with those years, for what difference any of it has made. I didn't change the world, only ruined my health and happiness. Even at this late stage all I get is the same narcissistic self-assertion from libertarians who celebrate people doing just as they please. Try constraining the climate criminals with that ethic and see how far you get - it's the one they give to governments to evade all environmental responsibility. Forget scapegoating the climate vandals and look closer to home - you have sealed your own fate. I just don't want to hear the whinging and whining when the end starts to get closer and closer with every passing year. You and your freedom to do as you please blew it. Own it.
Nations and societies are merely mirroring on a larger scale how individuals behave in a market society. What is miscalled liberty or freedom is merely a mutual self-cancellation, soon to be a mutual self-annihilation. A collective morality and politics based on common standards and a shared language has been replaced by a mutual antipathy and indifference under the sway of external forces and imperatives. All that there will be is a neurotic concern to assert control against forces which, in the absence of appropriate and effective collective media, are uncontrollable. And that neurosis will be characterized by an ever more intensive and cruel battening down of the hatches against the poor and the powerless, whose numbers will increase nevertheless. This is a desperate situation. Over the years I have argued for a world of cooperation on the basis of shared values. Those values have been negated and subverted by the assertion of a subjective choice in a neutralized terrain that institutes agnosticism on the good. It is a liberal world, the liberals won – now own the unfolding catastrophe of your own making. I'll predict that you won't, for the simple reason that you lack the nerve and the nous. Instead, there will be the continuation of neurosis and paranoia, only intensified, in the shredding of every last vestige of hope that may remain. I'm looking at this world and I am seeing nothing, and where there is nothing, no one has any 'rights,' least of all to any life, liberty, or happiness – you've fed your oafish faces on all grounds for such things. You've had your cake and eaten it – it is gone. In a world of climate catastrophe, there is a world of increasingly scarce resources, and increasing conflict and war. I've seen the future – it is murder.
I gave it my best shot, as did many others. Not nearly enough people acted with anything like the concern and commitment required, though. You see, that's the problem with the liberal view that is agnostic on the good. If everything is a matter of subjective choice, and there are no objective standards, then there can be no moral imperative to protect the environment. The choice of the exploiters, expropriators, emitters and polluters is just as valid as that of the protectors and conservationists. That's sophism – a power struggle. And when you lose to power, as you will, don't cry out to a world that doesn't care and could never care. The story of taking morality into our own hands is the story of a self-legislating reason – or self-made man and his undoing.
I've found it impossible, physically and mentally, to try to hold different strands in a fractured terrain together. It's worn me almost completely down and out. There are too many competing "goods" in play, each trumping the other. You can make a common case on a common cause, only for subjective choice to subvert the whole lot. I still say we have to constitute a commonality, a genuine public life, if the crisis in the climate system - a collective problem - is to be addressed. Unfortunately, we have lost the ontology of the good. Science can give us the facts but, morally, politically, psychologically, the world is deaf. We are deficient in the field of practical reason - and individuals are free to contract in or contract out as they see fit (aided and abetted, of course, by the social identity of a market society, separating individual good and social good). The authoritative framework at the level of value - the very motivational economy which equips us with the springs of action - has gone. The dominant view is that individuals are free to pursue the good as they see fit. It's Max Weber's view that individuals are free to choose their own gods/devils, with no way of determining right and wrong between them. Nietzsche's "perspectivism." I've tried to get this point over, but it is trumped by subjective choice and the right of people to do as they see fit continually. If there is no "good," then that applies not merely to ethics (Nietzsche's "death of God") but to the environment or "Nature". There can be no moral imperative to preserve the environment, since that imperative has lost its referent. Mentally and physically I've worked myself into hospital trying to get people to see this point - instead, an atomised (call it plural, give it a nice name) society remains fractured and trapped within a mutual self-cancellation, soon to become a mutual self-annihilation. And they call it freedom. Back in 1904 Weber characterized this society as a "mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance." Subjective choice, Milton Friedman's "free to choose", leaves each and all enslaved to external collective forces, from economic imperatives, financial crises to climate change. It's the loss of the public good in all aspects. I've given it a go for decades now, probably lost a small fortune in health and happiness along the way, as people got on with their lives, got married, bought their houses, pension plans, enjoyed themselves etc etc etc. I'm worn out. The collective action we need on climate change requires appropriate and effective collective media and mechanisms, which are psychological and moral as well as institutional and organisational. They are not there, so we look to government and law, but these things, as I argued in my Marx and Meszaros pieces this year, are very much part of capital's second order mediations, capital's political command centre, and hence implicated in the very environmental crisis they are charged to remedy. I don't have anything encouraging to say. I always said I would keep my silence if ever it came to this. Others may see a way through, and it is best to keep out of their way and let them make the attempt. I'm afraid, the great abstract figure of liberal ontology - "the individual" separated from and prior to society and public life - will not be bound by such things. We are "free to choose." And there is no "we." I'm hoping these scans give me a second chance, I need to get out and get active again, I've worried this one to near death. I'll definitely finish my Gerrard Winstanley for the summer - had the world gone in his direction in 1649, then we wouldn't be facing what we are facing now. I'm hoping for a Happy New Year now. On balance, I shall write and walk, combine Winstanley, Wigan and Wales.
The messages I deliver in these books should have been heeded a long, long time ago. It's too late now. All we are doing now is writing our own obituaries. You'd better hope that there is a God, and get on your knees and beg mercy and forgiveness. Other than that, all that there is is all that natural science tells us that there is - nothing, a bleak, meaningless, purposeless universe full of accidental humans who, instead of being thankful for the gift of life, stuffed their oafish faces to excess, in an attempt to fill the great hollow hole where the soul should be. Late and unlamented. 99% of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. Who really cares? Nature doesn't give a damn, and humans are free to believe and do as they please - and do. It's over.
Here is where the cartoon comes from: