THE FOG OF DENIAL
By themselves epistemological, existential and psychological problems of comprehension make it difficult enough for individuals to face the ecological threat. Yet political and business leaders and their ideologues in the media do not illuminate the situation, but further obfuscate it by a sustained project of misinformation and denial. They plunge themselves and their citizens into a fog of denial: disseminating illusions, distorting language, giving false reassurance whilst manipulating fears, and above all banishing from the political arena the most subversive force of all, creative human agency, normal human feeling, morality.
A frozen human praxis remakes the human being in the image of a world that has escaped the control of the human agents who originated it. It is no surprise, then, that no government has yet dared bring into question the main postulates of an ecologically destructive civilisation. The system drives itself, and all of us within its imperatives. To the extent that the system wins a kind of autonomy, human moral choice becomes inertial. Governments are locked in the postures of economic competition and increasingly adopt competitive characteristics in their politics and culture. What is justified as rational self-interest by each government becomes irrational, generating mutual antagonism at a time when international cooperation is required.
In joining together to become a humanity strong enough to control the system, we may begin the political work necessary to create a social order appropriate to human needs. A world which corresponds to and enhances the human ontology rather than inhibits it.
In the context of ecological crisis, hope is a moral and political practice. To shift from cognition to action is to go beyond a contemplative posture which observes and analyzes the events as they unfold before us, and which, as a passive approach, demobilizes and overwhelms us with a world seemingly beyond our control. Action has an energizing effect in that it redefines the world before us as no longer an objective, external datum but as a field of material immanence. The world before us is our own practical field, our collective action having a vitalizing effect, generating newfound feelings of creativity and power. Indeed, even if undertaken in protest and struggle, action is a kind of self-empowerment in the face of a hostile reality. However doomed we may seem to be in relation to climate crisis, collective action redefines our relationship to our future. Through collective action, we replace the primacy of the climate threat with the primacy of our creative project to combat it.
We see here Plato’s shift from contemplation to action, from philosophy to politics, and the tension and ambivalence such a shift could cause amongst those committed to a cognitive analysis of the world and its unfolding. There comes a point when we need to go beyond what science reveals about the nature of physical reality and instead act as intelligent, moral, creative agents of our own reality. Certainly, Plato’s notion of the philosopher-ruler contains a tension between the philosopher's sense of the purity and perfection of the world of ideas and the politician/citizen’s commitment to act in this world of everyday life. Plato perceived a wrenching distance to exist between the clarify of the world of Being and the murk and bias of the world of Becoming. Plato was unable to quite bridge that divide, hence his recourse to the artificial device of the philosopher ruler. Plato’s brief political activities ended in disaster. Philosophers cannot rule, no more than science. We are dealing with the need to bridge the gap between the ought-to-be and the is, and here knowledge must become a praxis yielding a superior sense of reality. An epistemology which sees the world as the product of human self-creation indicates that in the absence of action, the world cannot but appear alien, as an objective datum external to us, its events a passive process of objective determination beyond our comprehension and control. This fetish world seems to function according to its own imperatives, independently of human decision and action, and normalised and acquiesced in. The challenge is to see the world as a human self-creation, penetrating the veil of reification by identifying the concrete human agents behind the finished world. Today, more than ever, this demand for praxis have become a necessity in our attempts to understand the reality of ecological crisis and resolve it. The ecological and economic crisis has become so threateningly out of control that only an active mode of apprehending the problems that beset us can recover a sense of the as fluid and unfinished, of trends and tendencies as capable of redirection. The human origins of the world remain hidden until we begin to lay hold of the levers for change. Whilst the effects of a world spinning out of control are inhuman, 'there is no non-human situation.' (Sartre). Today, as technics shape our world and eco-catastrophism proceeds as if of its own volition, we need to act on Antonio Gramsci’s insight that reality is ‘humanly objective’ (Gramsci Prison Notebooks 1971:445). The world that appears to be spinning out of control is not an objective datum external to human beings, but is shot through with human will and consciousness. This is to appreciate the ‘objective’ world as the embodied expression of the creative power of human subjectivity. Meaning can be recovered through the human praxis which challenges and subverts the non-human facade that seems to be closing in on us from all sides.
Acting collectively not only changes the world, it does so in ways that change the actors themselves, bringing about a totally different reality. By joining together, individuals as agents create new possibilities of perception. Climate change is a problem that threatens us all. Joining together in a common cause makes possible the collective sharing of a collective problem. The isolated individual cannot achieve this mode of experience but instead remains passively dependent upon external processes and events. Collective action generates the possibility of collective perception and experience, revealing the world to be a human world. As isolated atoms analysing the world from the outside, the world remains inaccessible, beyond our control. Those who engage in reality changing praxis are able to give expression to those layers of their experience and understanding which normally remain mute through the absence of appropriate categories of thought and feeling. In coming together to intervene in the world and act, individuals form themselves into a collective subject, generating collective modes of experience and perception. The formation of this collective subject affirms human agency as the creative force in the world, not only restructuring the ways in which we perceive and experience the world, changing ourselves in the process, but changing the world itself.
It is possible that individuals, overwhelmed by the manifestations of crisis all around, could fail to appreciate their capacity for change and self-change through the formation of their own collective power. Joining together is a necessary but not sufficient condition of generating power. Deprived of warm and affective social bonds for so long, it is easy for individuals to value the sense of collectivity as an end in itself, satisfying a long thwarted social need. The warmth of community could make such an impression that it could eclipse the purpose for joining together – the need to change the world. The warmth with which complete strangers greet each other in their common cause is not just that of individuals sharing a goal. It is the communal warmth of human beings as social beings, the various ‘I’s’ coming to form a self-activating ‘we’, developing a growing awareness of their power to intervene in the world to change it for the better, but above all of sharing a specific goal - the ecological society as the good society. Campaigns, demonstrations and movements may seem to meet with continual defeat, as one gathering of political leaders after another evades the climate crisis, but these collective actions are moments of a continuous self-creation that will give humanity an irrefutable touchstone of truth in the difficult years to come.
And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live—for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
If there is no guarantee of eventual triumph in this struggle, then neither is there any certainty that defeat is inevitable. Action or inaction is a choice of sorts. A self-fulfilling prophecy can be fulfilled either way. There are, after all, many reasons for hope. In joining together and valuing each step as an advance, we empower ourselves, form ourselves into the collective subject-object in making history. We may prefer that philosophy be the leisurely practice of the ivory tower, but today to the philosophical commitment to truth, humanity, life, means doing battle with the death-dealing insanities of the world.
And for this reason, we must learn to cultivate the pleasures of collective action, not only for the warm social bonds we create for our own individual good but to create the world as a whole as the peaceable kingdom.
Edward Hicks c1834 Peaceable Kingdom
By constantly overlooking the world constituting power of human agency, shifting responsibility to economic growth and technics, we have left the door open for the ruthless, the selfish and the clever to gain ‘dominion’ of the world and distort its original meaning, turning stewardship within Nature into the ‘empire of man’ over Nature (as scientist Robert Boyle put it, as a goal to be achieved). But nature herself will wrest dominion from such grasping hands, as they dissipate the resources upon which their power and wealth depends. And at that point we will need to stir ourselves into building a society within planetary boundaries, a world in which each and all and environing nature are understood integrally by those who come together to become the makers of the future.
It would appear a truism that all civilisations that have fallen have fallen because they have misdiagnosed their problems and failed to see where the threat to their survival lay. That seemingly trite observation actually contains a profound meaning and should make people think about what they are ignoring in our own society – it should give us cause to look at our own society. Scientists would appear to have done a good job in identifying the sources of our climate problems – carbon emissions leading to global warming. Yet climate change deniers like Benny Peiser are leading an idiot chorus claiming ‘we don’t know’. The problem is not that we don’t know, it’s that we don’t want to know.
Political leaders have continually failed to lead. They suspect that the people don’t want to be led on this issue. One can attribute this to political and psychological inertia, of the institutions which purport to govern our lives but also of the people themselves. Having been brought up on the promise of an endless accumulation of material quantity, the idea that a society organised around economic growth is failing and that we need to find an alternative induces what amounts to an existential crisis for most people. Many would prefer to remain in denial. Fine. But they should not be allowed to claim ignorance on this. The evidence is publicly available for free.
The story of the Fall, the myth of Prometheus, the flight of Icarus, the legend of Faust and many other tales express this existential dread of discovery, knowledge and power going too far. Human beings express an intuitive fear that the power of our technics may come to replace the old natural necessities with invented material necessities, burying essential human needs even more completely. The needs for personal development, for social life, for creative expression are, in the very least, as much ‘real’ necessities as making money, exchanging commodities, buying and selling. The need for constant innovation and production is only of human value to the extent that they serve human ends. If this world of ends is overwhelmed by the world of material necessities, then human beings may lose the will to live. Material necessities deliver the means for living, but only human ends can set the parameters for living well. This means looking after the human necessities that alone bring real and enduring fulfilment. Thus we find individuals turning their back on high paid, high powered jobs and downsizing, discovering themselves through uncomplicated ways of life, a life that is simple in means but rich in ends (Devall 1990). This is to employ technics as a means to the ends of a satisfactory human life, enhancing our nature within by working with the nature without.
As the twentieth century ‘progressed’, discussions of the good life and the good society slowly but surely dropped out of the public arena. Nobody in business and politics likes to admit that there is a contradiction of values between material necessities and human needs, and that includes the people themselves as voters, workers and consumers. Economic growth brings jobs and money and goods. The general belief of the new idolatry of economics is that the good life is conditional upon material expansion, a mere function of material means. Serve the means and the end will be delivered automatically. To philosophise about the nature of the good would be to question the certainties which feed the existential hopes by which we live. So Philosophy is out.
A civilisation based upon fossil fuels has taken the place of culture. This ‘civilisation’ is not sustainable. The earth's resources of fossil fuels are finite and non-renewable, so, whether consumption is static or exponential, the energy from this source must one come to an end. There is nothing to be gained from denying the inescapability of this conclusion, and everything to be gained from planning ahead and building new energy infrastructures. Whereas once we looked upwards to the starry heavens above for spiritual meaning, with industrial and technological progress we have effectively horizontalised the infinite. We seek progress as endless, infinite expansion on a planet of finite resources. Thus the false religion of materialism ensures spiritual and physical dissolution. We need to recover a proper sense of ends.
There is a need therefore to distinguish between a civilisation dependent upon fossil fuel energy and culture as such. A culture may require energy but it is not dependent on it. Culture is more than energy systems, it concerns not means but ends. Culture builds civilisations with values and ideas, energy merely fuels those civilisations and has nothing to say about ends.
In refusing to address the problems of a failing civilisation, we express our loss of nerve, the loss of our faith in ourselves as custodians of our own culture. In addressing the crisis of a fossil fuel dependent civilisation, we come to re-affirm the priority of culture, thus recovering the end of the good society and restoring means to their appropriate place. By civilisation people mean economic growth, investment and production, material living standards: by defining this as civilisation and turning it into an end in itself, we have reduced culture to a secondary status as a mere consequence.
The question is whether we seize the opportunity to build a new prosperity of a sustainable kind or whether, through greed, fear and wilful ignorance, we remain in denial, live to excess in the present and in consequence deprive others of a future. To answer that question positively, we must begin now to plan and organise a civilisation of sustainable living that works within the contours of planetary boundaries, if we desire sustainability as opposed to ecological dissipation and bankruptcy, the unavoidable ending point of our current trajectory, regardless of, maybe even because of, the successes of our new technologies. The creation of clean energy infrastructures is far from being the measure of our success in achieving the ecological society — as some environmentalists seem to think. This is because they approach the problem from the perspective of political possibilities instead of fundamental ecological realities.
Above all, a genuinely Green politics must avoid settling for a meagre pragmatism that is satisfied with the provision of clean and renewable energy infrastructures as the be-all and end-all of ecological politics. Whilst such infrastructures will give our industrial civilisation a healthier existence it could also give prolong its existence, fuelling even further development to the detriment of the environment. It does not resolve the fundamental problem of the ecological crisis and instead turns a social and moral problem concerning a way of life into a technical problem requiring technical resolution. Already, technoscience in the service of capital is proselytising about ‘engineering the future’. And engineering human beings too, no doubt. The ecological crisis is not primarily or even mainly a technical problem but a crisis in a way of life. This is not a crisis in energy supply. The energy crisis is merely a subsidiary part to a greater crisis.
We need a change in behaviour, a change which would amount to the realisation of the human essence. We need to create a new sustainable way of life on the basis of the ecological ethic of each and all within planetary boundaries. If we do not grasp that ethic and apply it imaginatively to new modes of thinking and living, then there will be no way of avoiding the accumulation of crises building to a final eco-catastrophe, attacked in piecemeal fashion by various new technologies, all of which may postpone the final exhaustion of resources but which are ultimately incapable of avoiding the collapse of civilisation. Biospheric facts will impose an ineluctable reality upon our political illusions, technological fantasies and economic dreams. It is better to let our reason educate us, employ foresight and thus accept voluntarily the facts of planetary boundaries and work within them, rather than have nature impose these facts protestingly, as an amoral necessity indifferent to human happiness and suffering.
Fossil fuel civilisation is a world of illusion. Overimpressed by our technical ingenuity, we have allowed ourselves to be seduced into believing that we could build a civilisation of ever-expanding material quantity on top of finite nature, an endless economic growth that could embrace the entire world. Politicians of all the main parties, in every country, sell the same dreams of economic growth. They say that riches are the ideal of the poor man. Politicians have discovered that the bulk of the votes available at election time lie in selling people their fantasies back to them. ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ It is indeed ‘the economy’, and it is indeed ‘stupid’. And the politicians are and so are the voters. Any politician could be quoted here, promising economic growth, jobs, money, throw in something sexy like technology and science, a world of material quantity in which everyone who works, strives, saves has a place. The tragedy is that even when the economy delivers, people are not happy but stressed, and that when the economy fails, people are even more stressed and demand that the economy be put back together. The fantasists who populate the world of politics exploit both the dreams and the fears of the voters, and all subscribe to the belief that economic growth is the key to the meaning of life. It’s a cargo cult. The limitations imposed upon our fantasies by biospheric realities have yet to infuse and restrain political thinking with a real objectivity.
Since the industrial revolution we have come to be accustomed to a constantly expanding economy, making ever increasing demands for energy. Since this is all we have known for the past 250 years, we assume that this is a natural and inevitable state of things. We have normalised an exceptional economic system and therefore cannot conceive of an alternative to endless economic expansion. These assumptions have naturalised what should be historicised. We have mistaken a particular historical circumstance for the end of history. Setting our social and economic system within living organisms in their environment, particularly in relation to food, land and soil, water, air, in other words, nature’s life support systems, quickly disabuses us of this error.
The belief that the world can be saved by a combination of economic growth and technics absolves us from the need to assume moral responsibility for our actions in relation to each other and to the environment and conveniently fits the contours of the very industrial system fuelling environmental destruction.
Politicians and governments ought to be developing energy infrastructures that are appropriate to planetary boundaries and connecting these with changes in our way of life. But this is what governments, dependent upon growth in the private economy, cannot do without the intervention of a strong citizen movement concerned to reclaim the public domain for creative self-realisation. This is to plan and organise in terms of a humanity that has come to know and acknowledge its place in the universe and to have concern for all those living things in their interconnection within the web of life. Underlying all action is the planetary rule that the limits of human society are prescribed by the laws of natural organic growth.
The future of human civilisation must be set within this ecological perspective. This is a revolutionary demand, since it cannot but subvert the very mechanisms of investment, accumulation and valorisation which are the foundation of the capital economy. As misguided on ecology as climate change deniers are, their political instincts are correct when they see the threat that ecology poses to the capital system – the planet can die before the economy. When this conflict between ecology and capitalist economics, either human agents form a political coalition that transforms the economic and political regime, or they retreat and limit their demands to some form of co-determination, exercising greater influence in government policy-making to develop a cleaner capitalism.
To think that human beings will respond to an appeal to science and reason is wildly utopian. It took some two centuries for Galileo’s heliocentric conception of the universe to gain general recognition. A rapid conversion to the reality revealed by science requires that cognitive praxis be linked to a reality changing, mentality changing eco-praxis. Short of this, no-one is going to demand an end to the very economic growth that most people believe their lives depend upon. It is not enough to argue that health and well-being are being damaged by this system of endless growth. People are dependent upon the economy and so will serve it rather than the ecology of the planet; they will attack the ecological foundations of life on Earth rather than ‘the economy’ upon which they depend for their monetary resources. The future of humankind depends upon our ability to resolve paradoxes of this kind, and this requires much more than science, reason, logic and evidence. People need to learn these lessons and these lessons need to be embedded in our institutions, structures and social relations so that, everyday, individuals act for the good of the whole as they act for their own good.
The Harvest Moon 1833 Samuel Palmer
Working with the grain of nature, becoming a part of nature’s endless cycles and rhythms, becoming at one with the world.
The expansionary economic system in which people work and upon which people depend for money is on a collision course with the ecology upon which well depend for life. This raises the fundamental philosophical question: What is life for? Plato argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. In the context of looming ecological crisis, the unexamined life will lead to life not being lived at all.
The apostles of endless economic growth never cease to preach that human beings and their habits, practices and institutions must be ever ready to change. No matter what the problem, ‘change’ is always the solution. Workers must be prepared to move wherever the work is, to work whatever the hours are, to train, and then re-train, give up rights, no matter how much such demands destroy the ties of family, neighbourhood and community upon which society depends. ‘Progress’ measured in monetary terms depends upon the severing of the warm, affective, emotional ties that knit a society together. This is a dehumanisation that is utterly self-defeating in that it destroys the social and moral matrix within which any viable economic order has to be set. The demands for ceaseless change may be compelling in terms of the atomising logic of the market, but they are shallow, socially and anthropologically illiterate. They can be seen for what they are, readings of human nature and society that are deduced from textbook economics, that proceed as though the system and its imperatives are the only agents and that human beings, the true creators of history, are merely pawns.
These deductions are shallow and lack any real depth. Freedom and happiness relate to the fulfilment of the human ontology, not to the serving of systemic imperatives; they are the result of human beings coming to feel themselves as conscious agents of their own lives, located within a place they can call their own.
Unable to break free of enslavement to the imperatives of economic growth, governments and politicians lack the nerve to address the real problem of human freedom and happiness in the modern world. Reason has always existed, wrote Marx, just not always in rational form. The reasonableness of human relations is being suffocated by the rationale of economic growth. Natural limits may restore reason to human affairs, finally delivering the planetary lesson concerning the impossibility of indefinite economic growth in conditions of definite boundaries. Natural necessity, which the apostles of capital claim to have conquered, will likely return to free us from the compulsions of economics, if we lack the nerve and the nous to do it ourselves. Whilst this may leave us poorer in material means, we should become richer in ends. Economics will finally be back where it belongs, as a mechanism mediating our interchange with nature, and of no greater significance than that. Until we learn this lesson, either by our own reason or by natural necessity, we shall fall far short of the changes needed to create the sustainable society.
We need to reject the philosophy of endless change in pursuit of an ever elusive progress as a false philosophy, a philosophy which invests things with existential significance whilst treating human agents as their appendages. Indeed, the apostles of change are the most hidebound conservatives of all, in that the changes they advocate are only ever ones of degree, never ones of kind. They demand the same things, only faster, higher, bigger, better, longer. Their future is never anything other than the present enlarged. In the context of ecological crisis, such a future is ecological catastrophe and the end of civilisation. The philosophy of change is the plainest rationale for the same old economic growth and needs to be abandoned for a change in philosophy. And this would amount to a genuine philosophy. This is difficult to argue, given the extent to which industrial society has substituted technical logic for philosophical thinking. As a result, our political and business leaders are utterly incapable of seeing that a change of philosophy is needed, instead resorting to the same old mantra of ‘change’, as though this was in itself a philosophy. It isn’t. It’s a belief system, one organised around a false god at that.
Nature is beautiful because the ladies like it that way.
Charles Darwin didn’t just write about natural selection. Darwin’s ‘other big idea’ is the evolution of beauty in nature through sexual selection by female choice.
Darwinian aesthetics: sexual selection and the biology of beauty by Karl Grammer, Bernhard Fink, Anders P. Moller, and Randy Thornhill).
Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology. Erika Lorraine Milam. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.)
http://birdsofparadiseproject.org
But is sexual selection just eugenics with a pretty face? A gentler form of eugenics, in contrast with the survivalist eugenics of the medical labs and concentration camps? But eugenics all the same? We are not oil paintings. We can’t all sing and dance. Where do the people that Nietzsche abused as ‘the bungled and the botched’ go? Who speaks for them? The moral of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris is that the externally beautiful can be internally ugly, that what appears ugly on the outside can have a heart of gold on the inside. The outsiders, the outlaws, the people who live on the margins – the people whom Jesus Christ walked amongst - live by a shared moral code that those within official society pay lip service to but ignore in their social practices. Official morality can often be no more than an idolatry of words. It is those on the outside who can see society for what it is and dispense a true morality.