Politics for the Restoration of Ecological Hope
I shall start with a quote from John Bellamy Foster’s article The Long Ecological Revolution published in The Monthly Review:
‘What is remarkable about the contributions to Jacobin‘s special issue on the environment and related works by its writers and editors is how removed they are from genuine socialism—if this involves a revolution in social and ecological relations, aimed at the creation of a world of substantive equality and environmental sustainability. What we get instead is a mechanistic, techno-utopian “solution” to the climate problem that ignores the social relations of science and technology, along with human needs and the wider environment. Unlike ecological Marxism and radical ecology generally, this vision of a state-directed, technocratic, redistributive market economy, reinforced by planetary geoengineering, does not fundamentally challenge the commodity system. The ecological crisis brought on by capitalism is used here to justify the setting aside of all genuine ecological values. The issue’s contributors instead endorse a “Good Anthropocene,” or a renewed conquest of nature, as a means of perpetuating the basic contours of present-day commodity society, including, most disastrously, its imperative for unlimited exponential growth.’
Beware the dangers of an environmental austerity which governments, armed with science, impose on citizens in order to preserve existing social relations. In this article, Foster argues for a genuine socialism as against those collectivist and technocratic visions that merely reproduce the abstractions of a liberal order that falsely separates the individual and the social. John Bellamy Foster’s views here very much correlate with my own work going back to the 1990s. He, like I, has been concerned to highlight the ecological significance of Marx’s thought. Unfortunately, I am still confronted with the view that Marx said nothing about ecology, has nothing to say about ecology, and, worse, his kind of socialism is just the other side of capitalism in an industrial system that damages the natural environment. Those views are wrong and profoundly so. In the first place, the word ‘ecology’ really only came into use towards the end of Marx’s life, so Marx does not use it. He does, however, refer to metabolism a lot. This is related to his essentialist metaphysics but also to his extensive researches into natural science. In the second place, Marx’s critical method is inherently upgrading and can be detached from Marx’s nineteenth century determinations to apply to contemporary social relations; in the third place, there is a world of difference between socialist and capitalist social relations, and analysis quickly shows that the collectivist programmes and regimes that have gone by the name of socialism have actually been instituted on the basis of capital rule, commodification and the accumulative dynamic. The bald statement that capitalism and socialism are the same merely states that we remain in the grip of the capital system.
I’ll make a general point here on the science and technology based environmentalism that has dominated climate politics. Those seeking to block climate action have consistently criticized the climate movement as politics masquerading as science and as a ‘new religion’ of climate ‘alarmism.’ They have also consistently criticized environmentalism as socialism in another guise. This has provoked the climate movement to enter into a denialism of their own, insisting that their claims are science and no more. That actually plays straight into the hands of the climate deniers, because it amounts to a self-immolation which confines the climate campaign to science and technology, keeping the movement for climate action deficient in the field of practical reason. Instead of denying politics and ethics, the climate movement ought to have been entering that field. Instead, it has sought to speak climate truths and planetary realities to people and politics. That’s a laudable motivation, but it isn’t politics. Similarly with religion and ethics. On the basis of a strict fact-value distinction, there has been an emphasis on telling the climate truth as revealed by fact. The problem is that facts have to become existentially meaningful before human beings respond to anything like the extent required. The demands for action have to be attached to the moral-psychological-social springs and means of action. Science is science, it isn’t religion, and fact is fact, it isn’t value. By forcing environmentalists to endlessly restate the scientific facts on climate change, the deniers have pressured environmentalists into a political and ethical disarmament. The response from environmentalists should have been to openly express an environmental ethic, one grounded in social practices and movements buttressing the concerted action required at governmental and legislative level. The same with respect to socialism. The deniers have from the first understood a truth that too many environmentalists remain in denial of – the crisis in the climate system is a ‘global’ crisis that requires ‘global,’ that is, collectivist, solutions. Instead of understanding the political economy of ecology, there has been a combination of hard science and woolly naturism in ethics and politics. Mediation matters for all of the reasons Marx spelled out. I shan’t go into detail here, simply refer people to my own books on Marx and on Meszaros cited below and ask that they also put something of the time and effort in that socialists such as I have put in.
Politics, ethics, socialism – instead of going into denial mode by retreating back to the science, the challenge to environmentalists is to make the transition from science to the field of practical reason (politics and ethics, of which economics is a branch). That involves addressing issues of power, resources, control, authority, law, asymmetrical social relations, justice, equality. None of these issues can be decided by science and there is no technological workaround that enables us to evade them. My view is that environmentalism has been badly deficient in these areas, making it far easier than it should be for the libertarians of the right to stand in the way of climate action and climate justice. Libertarians have discovered that ‘liberal democracy,’ dissolving all collective means and mechanisms for citizen association for the public good, is a perfect defence of the anarchy of the rich and powerful they pursue. By reducing ethics and politics to the right of the individuals to choose the good as they see fit, with the collective force of law existing merely to hold the ring, libertarians have found a liberal democracy that makes liberal freedoms and democratic choices safe for the moneyed and powerful. That’s a rigged game. Deep down, environmentalists know it. For all of the wealth of science and technology at their command, environmentalism has been consistently beaten in the democratic contest. Environmentalism has functioned as a pressure group seeking to publicize environmental issue, informing and educate a public, bring pressure for action upon government. The climate crisis has worsened, forcing environmentalists now to move from pressure to rebellion. At the heart of this transition is despair, a despair of politics and a despair of people.
The failure of many environmentalists to ground environmentalism in the sociological dimension and in the critique of political economy is a huge failing with potentially disastrous political consequences. The inability to make the bridge from science and technology to the field of practical reason (ethics and politics) leaves environmentalism without an effective politics, without roots in the motivational economy of human beings, and without popular support.
An environmentalism which focuses on scientific analysis buttressing legislative and regulative interventions and technological solutions will not only fail to deliver the system change required to avert catastrophic climate change, it will equip governments embedded in the capital system with the scientific rationale to impose an environmental austerity on people, not to save the planet but to preserve capitalist relations intact.
The view that John Bellamy Foster presents in this article is one that I developed at length in two pieces of work from 2018. These works emphasize the need to ground environmentalism in the critique of political economy, paying particular attention to the notion of ‘the capital system.’
I would set these works in the context of the conception of the Eco-Republic I have sought to develop over the years. Instead of levelling environmental demands upon an untransformed government functioning in the context of capitalist social relations, I argued for the socio-ecological transformation of ‘the political.’ That view argues for the constitution of a genuine public community and public order and treats individuals as (eco-)citizens who associate together in an ecological society conceived as a public life. I have set that view out in any number of works, please consult the ‘Books’ and ‘Papers’ pages.
I am keenly interested in the politics and ethics of the converging crises that are upon us – economic, social, moral, and ecological. I take it that there is such a thing as reality and such a thing as truth about that reality. The ontological and epistemological questions with respect to what we know and how we know are interesting but, in face of the crisis that threatens to overwhelm civilisation, I am keenly interested in the field of practical reason. I think we know enough to be able to proceed to practicalities. That does bring us to politics and political economy. I take eco-socialism as my starting point, but set it within a moral ecology that locates political divisions and social affairs within a unifying ethic.
The basic idea is easily understood. The crisis in the climate system is part of a general environmental crisis that embraces both the social and natural worlds. That crisis is not accidental but results from the necessary operation of the socio-economic system within which our existence is set, namely the capital system. I say ‘the capital system’ rather than ‘capitalism’ for a specific reason. The analysis and transformation of the prevailing system must go further than the institutions of capitalism to address the rule, relation, and logic of capital underlying those institutions. It is easy enough to expropriate and socialize the institutions of capitalism, it is much less easy to uproot the accumulative dynamic at the heart of the capital relation. Uprooting the logic and rule of capital is central to addressing the crisis in the climate system.
There are a number of exceedingly difficult institutional and political issues which arise from this ambition. Those arguing for system change rather than climate change have the burden of meeting the alternate institutions requirement, proposing a set of social and economic arrangements and forms of governance that do not reproduce the ills of the system being replaced, which are viable, and command the assent of sufficient numbers of people as to make them legitimate. The future society will have a polity and will have an economy – these have to be responsive to citizen and consumer demands, they have to work. That begs the further question of agency. There is a requirement of transition to meet: who will be the agents of this transition? Further, how and in what way will these agents be active in sustaining the new institutional forms? There is a further question of the political and social action to even begin the transition beyond the capital system? Without appropriate organs of material counter-organisation, there will be no transition. Instead, collective demands will continue to be levelled on an overloaded government which is established to facilitate the process of accumulation. Without adequate answers on questions of agency, support, and mediation, ideals of future society are destined to be utopian and idle, even dangerous and destructive in inspiring half-measures that block the functioning of the present system whilst doing nothing to advance its alternative.
At the heart of the question is the transition from theoretical reason to practical reason. If we continue to present the truth in abstraction from practice, then we remain in a state of passive radicalism. Such a truth is abstract and static, it doesn’t move, motivate, and inspire action and change. The problem with climate change is the centrality of science in identifying and explicating its causes and consequences. Given the rather dry and abstract nature of the analysis, the problem has always been that of it being remote to human affairs until climate events make it real – by then, however, it will be too late to act. The question, then, is how we can advance a politics which associates individuals together and motivates them to act in common cause. Human beings live in the here and now; as social beings, human beings are interested beings with particular stakes in society. The question is how to make a long range goal such as planetary health comprehensible and motivational in terms which resonate with such interested beings. The key is to create a social identity in which that long range goal focused on a common planetary good coincides with immediate self-interest, forging a solidarity between individuals within the ‘here and now’ with the ‘there’ of future society.
From years of studying history to the highest level I learned that change is the result of a combination of material interests, moral motivations, and adherence to ideals and values. There is no Archimedean point or slide rule formula which is able to tell us, either in advance of change, in the midst of change, or in retrospect, the right balance and mix of these forces, and which views in these conflicts that bring change are ‘right.’ War is chaos, and life is a battle and chaos of forces. Fuzzy and inadequate ideas and plans prosecuted with belief and vigour will be more effective than correct views and brilliant strategies with weak will. They may also prove disastrous in being detached from realities. Even faced with a record of events that were completed, historians are aware of contrary pulls and directions and possible outcomes. There are always things that may have escaped our attention, just as they escaped the attention of the agents of historical change. I’m pointing to fallibility in understanding change from the outside and in directing change from the inside. There is such a range of forces that it is wise to be distrustful of those unhampered by inhibitions to think they have found the key to change. I am cautious of mono-causal explanations. The process of historical change is interpretative with respect to interactive causation within an interconnected whole. On more than a few occasions now, expressing a particular view on the crisis besetting us, I have been berated for a ‘strategy.’ The people who think historical change can be reduced to the right strategy are utterly uncomprehending before the scale of the challenge. I am inclined to tell them to get in tune or, failing that, satisfy themselves with Lenin’s building of the revolutionary vanguard. The only effective approach is the integral one, and without that, the only thing a strategy will succeed in doing is instituting another elitist dictatorship organising society around whichever idol it chooses to worship and serve. An understanding of historical change needs to analyse material foundations, forms of governance, legal systems, moral codes, social relations, cultures and the dynamic of ideas and values. Everything, then. To pick out and privilege one or two elements – scientific knowledge and technological know-how are current favourites – is a sure recipe for failure. Because it misses the essential need to persuade and motivate people, to galvanize individuals and form them into an active citizen or social movement. There is no law of history which ensures virtuous ideas and triumph over the vicious, and none which privileges the forces of reason and freedom over the forces of unreason and unfreedom. The appeal to reason only works in conditions in which the social and moral infrastructure is such that the right characters have been formed as to ensure the right response. I made these points in my thesis on Marx, arguing that the missing moral infrastructure in Marx’s argument would serve to debilitate his argument for the necessity of socialism. Nothing happens as a result of material self-interest alone. Community, solidarity and structures of action have to be created, cultivated and sustained. Without that infrastructure enabling personal moral effort, there will be a failure in responsiveness and action. This is my criticism: statements of scientific fact followed by demands for action are lacking in the moral, organisational, and institutional infrastructure that makes the call effective. And it leaves the political and social terrain under the sway of the libertarians, disabling the public realm before the external force of economic power and its inevitable consequence, economic crisis and ecological catastrophe. I like what the economic historian R.H. Tawney wrote in this regard:
I do not believe that any alchemy exists by which historical facts and tendencies can either be made a substitute for. . . judgements of value or directly converted into them. I do not share Marx's mid-Victorian conviction of the inevitability of progress; nor do I regard social development as an automatically ascending spiral with Socialism as its climax. On the contrary, I think that, in the absence of sustained and strenuous efforts, the way is as likely to lead down hill as up, and that Socialism, if achieved, will be the creation, not of any mystical historical necessities, but of the energy of human minds and wills.
British Socialism Today in The Radical Tradition p 178
The need for system change is easily stated in the abstract. Less easy is working out its institutional requirements in such a way as to command active support in the necessary transformation. Since the crisis in the climate system requires immediate action, the temptation is to press climate demands within existing institutions. The paradox is that these institutions are geared to facilitate the process of private accumulation. A politics of immediacy therefore works within the very institutions implicated in the environmental crisis. A climate politics, one grounded in the Eco-socialism and moral ecology I espouse, therefore must necessary take a dialectical approach, intervening in the immediate sphere in an attempt to control carbon emissions whilst at the same time engaging in the more long-term project of fundamental social transformation to establish an alternative way of life that is socially just, ecologically healthy, and institutionally viable and legitimate.
The importance of political economy and public community as set out in these works is becoming apparent now that those demanding climate action are meeting with political resistance. That resistance is to be expected. Such is politics. To enter the political terrain without a politics worthy of the name is to invite defeat. Elsewhere I have called this a naïve cynicism, something which takes a hopelessly utopian or idealistic position in politics – the expectation that scientific statements of climate truths and realities would be enough to persuade governments and people to act – only to bring about inevitable defeat. I call it cynicism on account of the pronounced misanthropic strain to be found in certain forms of environmentalism. Not only is there a tendency to focus on population rather than engage in institutional and structural analysis, there is also a tendency to criticize the ‘masses’ for being greedy, stupid, and indifferent. The problem is the lack of a politics which is situated on the inside of human communities and social practices. Instead, environmentalism too often takes the form of a lecturing and hectoring from the outside. It doesn’t work and it leaves people cold. And it fails to provide the effective and appropriate means and mechanisms of collective action. That is a huge omission on the part of a movement that calls for system change.
I will repeat views I have expressed at length elsewhere – the truth cannot just be passively given, it has to be actively willed by the citizen body. That was Rousseau’s great insight in his concept of the General Will, effectively reconciling the two great aspects of western political philosophy, the notions of objective reality and truth and subjective choice within a genuine public community. In the Marx book above I also emphasise this as a crucial aspect of Marx’s politics. I provide ample textual references in that work. Here is one quote worth pondering:
Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e. from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign-slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not. (Marx EW Letters 1975).
That ‘must’ remains an imperative that seems to undercut citizen interaction and political dialogue. The phrasing is clumsy. There is such a thing as truth, but it is not something that is presented to the world from the outside, it is something developed on the inside in relation to the struggles of the people. The passage is easily enough translated into climate. It is a call to clarify the issues over which people are struggling. There is a climate truth that politics needs to get and get quickly. ‘Getting it’ involves citizens coming to understand the truth and absorb it into their demands and actions. It doesn’t involve citizens and governments kneeling down before science, or before truths which some present in the name of science.
I make these points to emphasize the democratization of power, politics, and philosophy in consistent line with the principles set out in my work over the years. I argue not so much for Plato’s Philosopher-Ruler as the rule of reason through the activation of the common moral reason of each and all. I am not prepared to sacrifice that work and those principles on account of a climate emergency. On the contrary, that climate emergency is the direct result of an atomistic society and libertarian economy that makes radicalized associative democracy the solution. I remember James Lovelock more than a decade ago envisaging the suspension of democracy to address the problem of climate change. That is profoundly misguided. Not only will such suspension fail to address climate change, it will be complicit in it – those with the power to institute such a dictatorship will almost certainly be those who are the principal agents of the climate crisis. The problem with totalitarian shortcuts to the truth is that they tend to become permanent without ever getting close to truth.
I set out my views in terms of an eco-republicanism quite deliberately – it was to avoid an all-too-predictable backlash which pointed to the contempt for democracy, citizen agency, and alternate platforms in an environmentalism that simply presses science as unanswerable truth against government and society and demand all kneel before it.
This article in The Federalist is one of many.
How an intolerant teenage environmental scold now sailing to America is helping transform the left while attacking democracy and the global
I don’t like the tone of the attacks on Greta Thunberg. But if environmentalists thought they would get a free hit in politics by putting her forward as an unanswerable authority, then they are either hopelessly naïve or utterly cynical. This kind of moral blackmail and bullying is politically deficient, and that lack of politics will only serve to undermine the cause of environmentalism.
“Thunberg and her fans are demanding that their country’s governments act to stop global warming. What’s more, they are denouncing as sellouts even those who agree with their goal but are reluctant to adopt the extremist measures such as those Thunberg’s ally Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) put forward in the Green New Deal.”
I’ve not been accused of being a ‘sellout’ yet, but there has been a noticeable cooling of relations.
You can’t circumvent democracy and talk over or past citizens and not expect to be called out. If you demand actions from government, still more sweeping legislative interventions in economic life, then you have to meet criticism rather than call outrage for being criticized.
‘Thunberg and her movement operate with some clear advantages. Since they are a children’s crusade, they are credited with the best possible motives and not asked to fully or coherently explain their goals or how they might be achieved without doing more harm than good. Their impatience with the business of democracy in which one must persuade people rather than merely issuing diktats is similarly depicted as evidence of their high ideals rather than ignorance or anti-democratic sentiments.’
I don’t like the dismissive tones of ‘children’s crusade,’ but I am more concerned with notions of an environmentalism so politically deficient that it mobilizes behind a strategy which is basically a mugging of government and the public realm.
‘The behavior of Thunberg and the kids she has helped inspire is an understandable product of the apocalyptic rhetoric of environmental extremists. Thunberg’s extremism is a direct result of the tactics of environmentalists who realized they got more attention with wild predictions of planetary doom only loosely tethered to reality than more measured discussions about the climate.
No one should be surprised that children are behaving in this way when extremists are teaching them that the world is basically coming to an end and that we’re all going to fry as a punishment for the sin of benefiting from the prosperity the Industrial Revolution and capitalism created.
Many Americans mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal plans. But Thunberg and her fans see it as a messianic blueprint to save humanity that must take priority over a lowered standard of living for humanity, economic development, individual rights, and the basics of democracy. Rather than being shocked at the children’s willingness to ride roughshod over even those who share their worries about the climate but don’t wish to get rid of modern conveniences that make everyone’s lives better, save lives, and create prosperity, onlookers cheer these children as righteous crusaders for a noble cause.’
My view is to openly argue for system change and buttress that argument with the creation of a social movement, a global civil society, with alternate forms of governance and economic provision. Fail to offer that, and you will be easily picked off. But that 'prosperity' being claimed for capitalism here is a wealth creation and distribution down to social forces other than capital. I argue these case here for eco-socialism. My concern is that environmentalists are remaining within liberal institutional arrangements in politics, culture, and economics, and so fail to see or develop the radically transformative potentials of their demands. The
‘But not all environmentalists are thrilled with her celebrity. Many understandably see her emphasis on personal behavior and people giving up meat, cheese, plastic, and air travel as bound to undermine their cause. They want the sole focus to be on governments, not the forlorn hope that people living in the 21st century will be content to live like they are in the 19th because Thunberg tells them it will save the planet.’
‘Few are noting the children’s profound hostility to the democratic process, something that necessitates treating opposing views with respect and bothering to answer criticisms. It’s not just that Thunberg is helping to distort the debate about the climate, but that the spirit of her activism is indicative of the way the left treats discussion of any issue, whether it is health care, guns, or taxes.
Greta Thunberg’s liberal cheerleaders fail to see that validating an approach that sees the only way to achieve objectives as shaming and silencing opponents does more long-term damage to democracy than anything their political opponents do.’
I've noticed. And I don’t see any of this as ‘Left.’ Tobin refers to Thunberg’s ‘liberal cheerleaders.’ It is a liberal approach that looks to government and law as abstract communities and collective purposes in an atomised society. A Left or socialist approach looks to resolidify and resocialize society through its relations, communities and practices, this forming an (ecological) self-socialization that buttresses a democratic public life and community – a situation in which government ceases to be an alien imposition on individuals but exists as the institutional pooling of popular sovereignty.
That is missing in environmental politics and notions of environmental philosopher kings, and it is that I criticize. It gives the defenders of the global heat machine that goes by the name of the capital system all the political ammunition they need to effectively marginalize and finally defeat the climate resistance. Rebellion fails for want of a political end-game.
It will succeed only to the extent that it becomes conscious of the different kind of politics implied by climate action and climate justice. To be effective, environmentalism has to develop a distinctive politics, instead of funnelling its claims through existing arrangements. Liberalism works only as a conflict pluralism in which there is not one substantive good, a good relating to ideas about an ultimate reality and objective morality, but many goods, which individuals and groups may pursue as is their choice and preference. When environmentalists claim that preserving the ecological health of the planet is a moral imperative, they need to understand that they are arguing for a substantive good. The existence or otherwise of such a good is precisely what has been at issue since Nietzsche announced ‘the death of God.’ By this, Nietzsche was pointing to the collapse of an authoritative moral framework. There can only be a moral imperative if there is a referent against which all claims can be made and evaluated. Nietzsche was pointing to the truth that in a liberal society there is no such referent and therefore all moral language is empty, mere projection. The problem is not resolved by simply saying that Nature exists. I have had environmentalist friends denounce ‘God myths’, claiming that all we have is Nature, ‘and she needs us.’ The idea that Nature is a ‘she’ who needs human beings is merely one of these ‘god myths’ in another, decadent, form. Nature, as taught by disenchanting science, is without intelligence, meaning, design, and purpose; Nature doesn’t care one way or another which species survives and which doesn’t. 99% of all species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. If there is a design, then extinction is built into the design. The very notion of ‘extinction rebellion’ implies an ethic that asserts a meaning beyond the purposeless, indifferent Nature revealed by disenchanting science. You cannot reject God and religion as made-up myths, taking your stand on a science that strips purpose, value, and meaning from the universe, and then urge human beings to act. You have just described a condition of existential loneliness and cosmic hopelessness. People are being asked to care for a Nature that could care less about them. Read on Einstein’s embrace of the ‘God of Spinoza,’ and note how he praised a nature that unfolds in a cosmic harmony that is utterly indifferent to human concerns and affairs. This impersonal god is the god of science and natural philosophy. It is entirely lacking in motivational force. The loss of a personal God, the God of Love and relationships, will prove to be the biggest environmental loss of all. There is a moral ecology. As Jonathan Sacks argues, there is such a thing as a moral environment, and we need to take at least as much care of that as we do the natural environment – because if we lack a substantive ethics, all our demands to protect nature will merely be impotent moral appeals lacking in a referent and appropriate identity. The individual good, as self-chosen, will not necessarily connect with the social or ecological good. Instead, demands for climate action will require sacrifices of self-interest that, within existing liberal relations, will be deemed irrational. In a liberal ethic, the individual is always free to refuse to participate in a common good, free to bail out, to exit and free-ride.
I take Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ very seriously as the loss of an overarching and authoritative framework, the loss of a substantive good. The words of former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, (commenting on Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling book 'Sapiens' and Douglas Murray's 'The Strange Death of Europe') are worth pondering at length. Sacks emphasises the need to take care of the human environment – the moral infrastructure – as well as the natural environment:
“The idea that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. If we lose that belief none of the other institutions of the contemporary world is going to save us. Not science, not technology, not market economics and not the liberal democratic state. For a pretty simple reason. Because science can tell us how but not why; technology can give us power, but cannot tell us how to use that power. The market economy gives us choices but doesn’t tell us which choices lead on to human flourishing and which to self-destruction. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom, but cannot itself provide the intellectual, moral or spiritual basis of that freedom. So the end result is, to put it mildly, we are in trouble. What Yuval Noah Harari and Douglas Murray are telling us is that you don’t have to be religious to recognize all the danger signals and all the early warning signs. And whether Europe dies and hands over to the barbarians or, for Yuvel Harari, humanity dies and hands over to the robots, one way or another we are at serious risk. And, therefore, my suggestion is really quite simple: all of us, religious and non-religious alike, who believe in liberal humanism, who believe in human dignity, who believe in the free society, had better come together soon to work to protect the human environment with the same passion as we have come together in the past to protect the natural environment. Because if we fail to do so, we will, by forgetting our past, lose, destroy, our human future. And if that happens, heaven help us and our grandchildren.”
To pursue and serve a substantive notion of the good requires an authoritative moral framework. Those who simply think ‘Nature’ can serve here instead of ‘God,’ since science shows the existence of the former and can find no empirical evidence for the latter, misses the point. In a liberal society in which ethics has been atomized into irreducible subjective choice, opinion, and preference, individuals are free to choose their own gods/devils, and there is no objective frame by which to evaluate those choices. The very ethical existentialism that brought down God brings down Nature, too, and all other collective purposes such as socialism. Hence the tendency of liberalism to seek redress to ‘global’ problems by resort to government and law. For reasons I gave in my books on Marx, these are mere abstract communities and collective goods which individuals are forced to embrace in the absence of a genuine commonality. The commonality that is denied in the social relations of real community is projected upwards and outwards to the level of state and law. Government is charged with imposing a common good that is absent in real society.
Without the social and structural transformation which restores the notion of a substantive good, those seeking to press such a good on the terrain of liberal individualism and pluralism will be accused of breaking their liberal premises – of absolutizing their relative good or goods and using the force of government and law to impose it on others. That is precisely the position that results when seeking socialist solutions on liberal premises. Hence my point at the beginning to move to a post-liberal society and politics, see the limitations of liberalism in falsely separating individual and society, and for environmentalism to openly embrace ethics, politics, and socialism, instead of pressing science and technology against political society as substantive, unanswerable truth. That recourse to a governmental and legislative agenda to impose a substantive good contradicts the notion of ethics as subjective choice and contradicts the basic premise of conflict pluralism. I say this not to criticize environmentalism here, but to make it conscious of its full political and ethical implications with respect to substantive notions of the true and the good. Ultimately, those notions imply a move beyond the liberal order. That is the view I have sought to impress on people with my work on ‘rational freedom.’ Press these substantive notions through the abstract communities of state and law, and you are engaging in a coercive liberalism, no longer seeking to persuade others in a plural society and political life open to alternate platforms, but forcing them into conformity with a one-note righteousness. The case may be right. I most certainly do think that we are on the brink of ecological catastrophe and civilizational collapse. My concern is for environmentalists to see that we have reached the limits of the liberal market society, see that society as a systematic ethical and political devaluation, and understand precisely why I argue for socialism as the recovery of public life and substantive notions of the good, rebuilding communities and orienting them within via social practices, modes of conduct, character forms. I am well aware that such notions of the common good and community will be rejected by liberals on account of their repressive implications with respect to being prescriptive. Climate change is forcing liberals in a very practical and immediate sense to discover that the good is something much more than subjective choice and that there is a reality beyond human will and projection. We will not get out of this crisis by individualism and pluralism; on the contrary, individualism and pluralism locks society into an endless mutual antagonism, a self-cancellation that, in time, will become a self-annihilation.
I quote: “Greta Thunberg’s unique strength when she first emerged as an activist was that, as a child, and one with Asperger’s to boot, she had almost unassailable moral authority. Her critics argued that if she was old enough to tell world leaders what to do then she should be old enough to take the heat for it, but most people recognise that hers is still an innately vulnerable age; not quite a child, not quite grown up, instinctively evoking protective feelings in anyone with an ounce of humanity. That doesn’t mean elected politicians are required to treat her every utterance as a tablet of stone, but initially even her detractors accepted that to argue back as robustly as one might with an adult would seem bullying and unkind. It is a twisted testament to her success that the gloves have now come off with a vengeance, but it’s frightening all the same.”
‘Nigel Farage and his hangers-on need a new rallying cause, so they’ve turned on this 16-year-old with frightening vitriol.’
This is happening the world over and the whole issue makes me desperately uneasy. I’ll leave aside the exoticization of Asperger’s we have been hearing in some quarters, other than to say that the idea that the condition means that Thunberg can state the pure, unadorned truth that everyone else has been conditioned not to see is pure rot. She is saying nothing others haven’t been saying for years. This is people agreeing with something they already believed in and, once again, attempting to raise it to the status of certain knowledge beyond contestation and challenge. The presentation of a person or a truth or a cause as an unassailable moral authority and, from there, an unanswerable political authority is not a strength but a weakness. It is the plainest attempt to deprive alternative platforms of a voice and of political legitimacy. That is reason enough for unease. But if the science on climate change is clear – and it is - the institutional and practical implications of acting on that science are not. If you attempt to insulate contentious political views from criticism by establishing a moral shield around them, then enemies will indeed call it out, in whichever way they deem necessary. The elevation of any figure as a moral authority in politics ought to make anyone uneasy. The fact that it doesn’t, simply because people agree with the message, indicates a depressing truth about human beings – they learn nothing, not even the hard way.
The abuse of Thunberg is appalling. But relating this to divisions of age and sex is a red herring. Environmentalists have been abused since I remember, including physical assault and murder. Any outrage, shock, and surprise here may well be disingenuous – an attempt to portray political opponents as unkind, immoral bullies who deserve to be silenced. The abusers may well merit that sentence, but here’s the problem of the Sophist age in politics – once you remove the idea of an objective truth and morality through the disenchantment of the world, it’s power and relations of power between people that decides issues. And the use of certain authorities in politics as moral shields to insulate a cause or a movement from criticism is a form of power struggle. There is a pretense of dialogue, but really it is a savvy way of winning the battle in a Sophist politics. Climate deniers have been playing hardball politics for decades. Now the response. Thunberg says she will not meet and debate with climate deniers because there is no point. I have said as much in the past, calling such people ‘nono’s,’ people who are not interested in dialogue and debate, only in negating, obscuring, nullifying, and obstructing. So appreciate that my position is not that different from Thumberg’s. What is very different, however, is the emphasis on conversation rather than command in politics. There is a big jump from publicizing the climate message and refusing to engage with deniers of climate science to thrashing out the practical realities of transition to climate stabilization in politics and economics. It is here in the field of practical reason (politics and ethics) that the use of a moral shield insulated from criticism becomes illegitimate, containing an obvious and inherent totalitarian potential. Because that insulation applies not only to climate deniers but to everyone else – the bulk of the population – who have every right to be involved in determining the conditions upon which they are governed and the terms upon which their practical means of existence are ordered. It is the relative lack of democracy in these areas that constitutes a large part of the problem civilization faces. The capital system is an anonymous, subjectless, irresponsible system of alien control which functions as an ecologically damaging social system. When people demand ‘system change,’ they need to engage in systemic analysis, identify precisely the mechanisms by which ‘the system’ operates and proceed to delineate the nature of the transition. They need to be clear on both structure and agency. These are the contentious issues. Because if we may claim near consensus among the scientists on climate science, there is no such implications as to what follows from there in terms of transitions. The views I see expressed here range right across the political spectrum, from the use of market-based instruments to regulatory regimes to redistributive regimes to a green capitalism that claims to restore the purity of markets to socialist regimes. What is to be done? The complexity of that question becomes clear as soon as we unpack it. At this point, statements such as climate justice for all are revealed to be effective only in inspiring a demand for change. Those demanding such change are asking questions of themselves. The tendency to level these demands on government or business presumes that already constituted authority, power, and control will remain fundamentally unaltered, just pressured to operate in accordance with democratic pressure from outside of the accumulative regime. That is a recipe for economic and political chaos and crisis. It is to argue that the very system implicated in environmental crisis on account of its accumulative imperative strangle its central dynamic at the request of a democratic public. Not only will that not happen, it still leaves the question of alternatives dangerously vague. Bad systems like bad theories hang around until replaced by better. In failing to provide better, that is, to present the various alternative economic models that are available in coherent, consistent form, building an active public united behind them, we merely have two worlds in collision. If the attempt is to expose the economic, democratic, and ecological contradictions of the capital system, then consider job in the process of being done. Those contradictions have been exposed before, at least the first two, and the system has survived on account of the failure of opponents to provide a viable alternative capable of commanding popular support and involvement.
“There is still a perfectly legitimate political argument to be had about the need to secure democratic consent for sweeping changes in people’s lives,” writes Gaby Hinsliff in the article cited above. That’s twenty four words in an article that contains nearly thirteen hundred words. The problem with elevating unassailable moral authority and unanswerable political authority is that the legitimacy of political argument is denied. The key question at this late stage is determining the precise institutional and structural nature of transitions and transformations and securing active consent, involvement, and support in the movement from here to there. The inadequacies and failures here are manifest and constitute the real stumbling block.
There are requirements which those demanding system change must meet:
The Critical Explanations Requirement:
Identifying the widespread and pervasive social ills or injustices of a prevailing social system is easily enough done. It behoves those demanding system change to demonstrate that such ills and injustices are endemic to the socio-economic structure and hence stand in need of radical social and structural transformation. The radical critic must provide a substantive institutional account that indicates precisely how social problems necessarily arise from the basic structure of society and are not merely accidental features which are capable of melioration by way of incremental reform. If a critic can show the former, then the case for system change has been made. Anything less, and all that is required is a moderate reform that does not require system change. On this, there is a clear divergence in political perspectives within the climate movement, so much so that we can hardly refer to a movement at all. Many push for moderate reforms within the system, many advance market based policies, others argue for socialism (itself in different varieties, from ambitious government programmes to decentralized anarchistic forms).
The Normative Theory Requirement:
Those demanding system change require a normative theory to explain the negative features as key characteristics of the prevailing system, but also to show why these are wrong. This is difficult in a modern world that has abandoned transcendent standards (truths and values which are independent of time and place) in favour of conventionalism (the view that human morals are created in time and place). Conventionalism is the dominant morality of the modern world. Nietzsche’s point with respect to ‘the death of God’ is that there is no authoritative moral framework capable of deciding between competing, self-chosen goods on the part of individuals. Morality has dissolved into mere value judgements, the subjective choice of individuals who have the right to choose the good as they see fit. We see here, with respect to climate change, the sheer incoherence and unsustainability of the modern moral project in its starkest form. It seems obvious to say that action on climate change is a ‘moral imperative,’ and many say precisely this. But this is not actually true, since in the collapse of an authoritative moral structure we lack any such referent, be it Nature or God. Influenced by Nietzsche’s revelation of the hollowness of modern morality, Weber argued that the moderns are fated (maybe even doomed) to be existentialists, each being free to choose their own gods/devils by way of wilful projection of meaning upon a meaningless world. I wonder how many of those speaking the language of moral absolutes and authority on climate change do so in other areas of life. I suspect that, on other issues of morality, they affirm subjective choice and preference. Liberalism is the dominant culture of the modern world. It has been very liberatory for those who assert the right to choose the good as they see fit. But here’s the problem, the is, after all, a ‘real world,’ an objectively substantive world beyond subjective choice and, in terms of the climate system, the civilization of existentialist free choosers is very much dependent on it. To argue for ‘climate justice for all’ is very much to argue for transcendent standards beyond individual choice. And yet the dominant ethic is one of conventionalism, constructivism, and existentialism. Liberalism. And the problem with liberalism is that the individual is free to bail out, refuse cooperation, reject any ‘moral imperative’ that isn’t binding and obligating with respect to all. The radical critique with respect to system change, citing justice at its heart, involves judgements which presuppose a normative and transcendent standard of evaluation. Where is it?
The Alternative Institutions Requirement:
Those committed to system change are required to specify a set of alternative political and social institutions that are to take the place of existing ones. In line with the requirements adumbrated above, these institutions mustn’t exhibit the same problems exhibited in the society that stands in need of transformation and must meet the conditions for a good or just society. A plausible account of how these institutions will function and are able to persist over time as stable social forms is also required.
The Transition Requirement:
The radical critic needs to address ‘the problem of the transition’ by telling a plausible, coherent, and cogent story concerning how existing institutions can and will be set on a course of fundamental change. Most of all, this story will inspire, win adherents and incite the practical efforts of enough people to make any system change not popular and legitimate but also possible through a democratic engagement and participation that leads us from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ By ‘democratic participation’ I mean ‘democratic participation.’ I don’t mean a mass education programme in which knowledgeable elites fill passive and empty heads with information. I mean character formation through social mobilisation and political organisation.
These requirements are stringent and take in forms of governance, systems of economic provision and exchange, democratic involvement, community architecture, the organisation of active consent. And they require precision with respect to institutions and structures. This is where my critical focus falls. There may well be a value in issuing general statements and demands to incite popular pressure for action on climate change. I’m going to argue, however, that the problem is not lack of awareness of the problem of climate charge, either on the part of people or governments. A relentless campaign can build and intensify pressure to an extent that governments are forced to do more, and maybe even much more, than they have been doing. But this is a gambit that fails to understand the extent to which the capital system is not a public domain subject to democratic will but a regime of accumulation. The government is charged with facilitating the process of accumulation – ‘economic growth’ in the bourgeois idiom – as a condition of its own power and popularity. Not only the rich and powerful but people in general are dependent on ‘the economy’ (capital). Undermine economic processes, and there are damaging consequences in terms of investment, income, and employment. Governments are caught between contrary pulls. To ask governments to strangulate the accumulate dynamic and institute system change to avert climate change is tantamount to declaring a movement has the power to enforce system change. If so, there is no need to ask government to do it, a movement is either powerful enough to achieve system change by its own efforts or it isn’t. The extent to which demands are being levelled on government tells me that movement isn’t powerful enough and knows it. In which case, instead of system change, the pressure for climate action will be absorbed within the prevailing and untransformed system and adapted as an environmental rationale for further capitalist austerity.
The call for human beings to take ownership of their environmental problems comes also with the corollary that they take ownership of the solutions to these problems. As soon as one mentions ‘system change’ and, even more precisely, relates ‘economic growth’ to the accumulative dynamic of the capital system, then we are beyond slogans designed to mobilize a mass, but passive, movement. It is easy to know what we are against; the difficulties and divisions come in attempting to specify what we are for. The substance of Thunberg’s message is so bald as to be uncontroversial: climate science should be heeded on the crisis in the climate system and climate justice for all. But, of course, that’s the easy bit. Gaby Hinsliff writes this on Greta Thunberg:
“A society that cannot bear to be lectured by its children, even when they’ve got a point, while the adults are behaving like spoiled toddlers refusing to clean up their own mess, is one that can never progress. Perhaps our children can finally be children again, when the rest of us grow the hell up.”
This is precisely why the entire issue disturbs me. Instead of engaging in the systemic analysis that has been required all along, politics divides over issues arising from what is basically a publicity campaign and pressure group politics. The reference to ‘adults’ in general behaving like spoiled toddlers refusing to clean up their own mess is so general as to be not merely useless but, at this stage of the game, positively counter-productive. The idea that the problem is one of adults refusing to grow up misses the real nature of the problem by a mark so wide as to make the whole situation seem hopeless. Until certain adults do grow up, politically, intellectually, and morally, and start to address the realities behind generalisations and slogans, then the problem will intensify. But in such general references to ‘adults,’ the vacuous ‘we’ and ‘humanity’ that has been heard constantly in climate coverage, we do see why climate politics has been so ineffective as to require this strange and desperate new turn. It may succeed in winning support. But it will be a passive support that, even if numerous, will count for little in practical terms – it will lack institutional, practical, moral force along the lines indicated above. It will remain within the abstractions of the modern liberal order, yet another expressed of atomised, impotent individuals massing to compel government to embody and articulate the universality and commonality that is so singularly absent in bourgeois society. It will remain, as Marx said over one hundred and fifty years ago, a belief in government as a political heaven in contradistinction to life in the bourgeois hell, as unreality relates to reality.
I shall end by commenting on an article in The Times written by Libby Purves. I shall end with the article not because I agree with its designation of environmentalists, but to warn environmentalists that unless they do the politics and ethics as well as they have been doing the science and technology, they will be wide open to the charges levelled against them as absolutists, and on impeccably liberal grounds. You have to transcend liberalism if you want to resolve the environmental crisis, in other words.
The article is entitled: ‘Extinction Rebellion prigs must get real. Climate-change extremists with their denial of hope and horror-movie scenarios risk leaving the rest of us cold.’
That’s a point that many within environmentalism have been concerned to make. I can, off the top of my head, cite at least three associates working within the field of regenerative culture and commons who consistently work on practices, psychologies, solutions, visions – Per Espen Stoknes, Daniel Wahl, Michel Baewens. There are many others who seek to inspire hope and action around a vision of a feasible future that is worth having. Such people are to be exempted from criticisms such as this.
Unfortunately, and sad to say, there are indeed a lot of ‘prigs’ around the environmental movement, too. People who harp on about the red-herring of overpopulation, who refer to the human species as a cancer on the planet, a virus, who denounce the masses as greedy, stupid, and indifferent; people who hector and lecture at every available opportunity. In trying, gently, to get environmentalism to actually relate to people on the inside, work with people on issues of concern in everyday life; in suggesting that changes to renewable energy systems, to car-free towns and cities may take a little while, on engineering grounds alone, I have been subject to lecturing. It leaves me cold now. At the time it made me very angry, not least because the people I have sought to advise on this know me as something who has been committed to the environmentalist cause since the 1980s. It seems that unless you have some expertise in science and technology, or a psychology armed with the latest neuroscience, then you are considered to know nothing. I studied High Politics for three years in my degree – how ‘real’ politics operates, decisions come to be made, elections are won – history – how ‘real’ change happens as a combination of material interests, moral motivations, and metaphysical ideals – economics from A level to masters. I was a good student, too. I would have thought that I had some expertise to offer a movement seeking to enter the political arena, influence government and citizens, and change the world for the better. For all the impact my words had on some I may as well have been writing in hieroglyphs.
The charges being made in these articles against Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion are entirely predictable and could have been avoided. That is precisely why I developed a political and moral ecology, the notion of an Eco-Republic, and a citizen science. (Be clear that the views here refer to XR UK, and not the more holocratic world movement).
Libby Purves quotes Extinction Rebellion’s co-founder Roger Hallam:
“the only way to prevent our extinction is through mass participation civil disobedience – thousands of people breaking the laws of our governments until they are forced to take action … if they don’t we will bring them down. And yes, some may die in the process.”
I need to check whether this is an accurate quote. I will say, generally, that there is something profoundly wrong in sacrificing the life and liberty of others in order to secure a political end. Liberalism insists on that view, rationalizing an economic system that does indeed secure the pleasure of some at the expense of the pain of others.
This notion of breaking laws until governments concede the demands or collapse is something that invites infinite unravelling of public order. If such action succeeds, and law-breakers become law-makers, there is nothing to prevent those opposed to the new regime doing likewise, breaking the laws until the new government gives in or collapses. This isn’t a public life, it is endless regression.
I’ll leave aside Purves’ nonsensical claims that environmentalists are not involved in ‘a scientific search for alternative power and palliative measures’ – they have done all of this, they are not enough, the problem has dragged on for so long as to make radical transformation the only way out. It is this that the likes of Purves baulk at, accusing XR of aiming at ‘total disruption of every economic and social structure.’ I would put this in terms of transformation rather than disruption, if we are indeed to engage in system change in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change. We need much more than disruption. Disruption of the mechanisms of investment, accumulation and valorisation merely produce chaos and demands for the restoration of order. Rebellion has to move quickly into transformative mode. If it doesn’t, it will provoke a reaction it cannot resist. XR and its supporters need to understand that they are raising the stakes, seeing climate change as a crisis with transformative potential. Actualising that potential requires much more than civil disobedience, law-breaking, protest, and social and economic disruption. At this point a movement needs politics, citizen involvement, an end-game. Without it, it merely raises demands it cannot fulfil. It will collapse, making the catastrophe it seeks to avert all but inevitable. Elsewhere, I have characterised this as a ‘naïve cynicism.’ That was in an article from a couple of years ago. The only reaction it provoked was upset, rejection, outrage, and a defensive assertion of being proud to be marginal and right. I make the criticisms so that environmentalism, which I take to be right, comes in from the margins and transforms politics from the inside. To do that, you need to turn people on rather than off.
Purves criticizes WR’s ‘year zero’ attitude: ‘Question this year-zero attitude to climate change and you meet contempt.’
I haven’t done too much hard questioning, but I have been met with contempt. My soft approach means that I usually meet with indifference and the occasional disdain. I have a very good memory, harbour grudges, I know the issues and the names involved. We can dismiss Purves. The motivations of those criticizing Thunberg et al are all too plain. My concern, though, is that they have enough of the truth here to make their criticisms effective. Politics is a battle for hearts and minds. And a politics that sees human beings as problems rather than solutions, as blights on the planet, rests on a fundamental misanthropy that could be designed to turn people off and bring about the very eco-catastrophe that environmentalism seeks to avert. I wonder if, subconsciously, this is less politics than a death-cult. At the extreme fringes, maybe.
‘Followers confidently expect mass extinction of species within their lifetimes.’
It is happening, that is simple fact. I’m more interested in those who predict near term human extinction.
Purves writes that ‘there is something worrying about the growing gulf between the prophets of doom and the rest of us.’ I’m worried about any gulf between a political platform I espouse and the citizen body. Without the people, an emancipatory politics will remain on the margins as a politics of permanent protest forever rehearsing its next defeat. That has been the pattern in history with respect to radical movements, it is a cycle that I have sought to break.
Purves writes:
‘There is now a growing movement called “Birthstrike” – the ultimate in environmental nihilism. Blythe Pepino, its founder, says it is not “rational” to bear children “if we’re going to be fighting for food in a couple of decades.”’
There is a danger of conflating different strands of environmentalism. I’m not sure how many of the climate rebels are doomsters. Indeed their entire point is that the situation is not yet hopeless and that radical actions are required now in order to avoid the point being reached at which collapse becomes inevitable. Bear in mind, too, the long decades of rational persuasion that has got precisely nowhere with the likes of Purves and the other critics who will defend ‘prosperous capitalism’ to its benighted end.
If the climate rebels exude a certain hopelessness and pessimism, then there is a reason for it. I still say part of that defeat has been the lack of an effective politics and ethics and the failure to build a genuine eco-citizen public in the context of an ecological self-socialization from below. In this context, climate rebellion has all the hallmarks of a desperate last stand.
‘The convinced, censorious sadness of such voices predicting Armageddon feels as if an infectious, fast-spreading depressive illness is afflicting a rising generation.’
Purves may want to ask why. She does say something which has some insight, though:
‘The vicious tone of XR fits the same pattern, because depression often contains a lot of impotent anger.’
There have been demands for climate action that have not been met; these demands require collective solutions but, in the absence of collective means and mechanisms, cannot be met. There is a political impotence at the heart of the climate movement that cannot but turn to sadness and anger. My point is that instead of being upset that others are deaf to the message – such is politics and such, certainly, is a liberal politics in which there is no substantive good to unite, inspire and obligate each and all – climate rebels need to become climate radicals in politics and ethics and attach their ideals to their organisational and institutional means of realization. By definition, that cannot be the principal organs of the very capital system implicated in the planetary unravelling. Expect government and law to be agents of a universal long term common good, and you are setting yourself up for defeat and disappointment. And sadness and anger.
Purves declares: ‘I am no denier of climate change, and would welcome any sharp – and personally expensive – measures to reduce fossil-fuel use by land, air, and sea. I was involved in an ultra-sustainable farming experiment for ten gruelling years.’
I take her at her word. Those who wish to ‘debate’ the causes of climate change I refer to the scientific statements of the principal scientific bodies on the planet. I trust science as a self-cleansing discipline, and where anyone is getting their sums wrong it is open to others to correct them. My concern is the pronounced tendency to see science as being able to do the work of politics and ethics in the field of practical reason. That’s an error and a big one, one with serious practical consequences. It leaves us with a gulf between a political platform based on climate truth and the people. That is the gap that those with a vested interest in the status quo can exploit, entrench and extend, and can do so within the institutions of liberal democracy. Here, political impotence results in political failure, generates the sadness and the anger, the hopelessness and the depression, and the shrill lecturing tone that only serves to turn people off.
This is what Purves is getting at, and she has a point:
‘I flinch at the angry, illogical and depressive thinking now spreading its tendrils through the necessary environmental movement. Some of those who demonstrate most fiercely or vow infertility actually live fully dedicated low-impact lives, and honour to them. But others don’t.’
And others can’t, not when they are struggling for income, housing, and employment in a competitive, iniquitous society. Human beings live within socially structured patterns of action and behaviour. I live in a town in which many people are dependent on food banks. The climate message of drastic changes in decades to come mean nothing to people facing problems of immediate social necessity. I should know. Years of campaigning for the Greens in such areas reinforced that message. I politely made this point, with respect to the climate message needing to be made socially relevant, only to be met with a dismissive ‘tell them “we’re doomed.”’ If that’s indicative of how environmentalists do politics and seek to relate to people, then we very well may be:
‘You could argue that all reforms need a ginger group of outspoken extremists to cut through general apathy. Fine. But in this case, the denial of hope and the horror-movie scenarios which make lovers fear to bear children feel more like what was once called the unforgivable sin: despair. When that dominates campaigning language it becomes counterproductive. It shoots itself in the foot.’
It just shoots itself in the end. The absence of a genuine ethics and politics that enables effective participation in the practical world is the initial hobbling that brings about failure, sadness, and anger. Whether rebellion is the last stand or evidence of progression to a transformative social and citizen movement remains to be seen. It has to push beyond existing institutions and relations, or it will indeed be a last stand.
I like that reference to the sin of despair. I don’t know if it is unforgivable. I know that Purves was once a Catholic, but broke with the Church half a century ago. I broke, then went back. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. If you are contrite and name your errors for what they are, sins, then there is forgiveness and redemption. Purves’ words here struck a chord with me, because they correlate with something I wrote in Dante’s Enamoured Mind in 2013:
‘The Commedia resonates because it strikes a universal chord within each and all. Dante speaks to the heart and soul of all humankind, arousing feelings and inspiring human aspiration, despite an awareness of how far the world falls short of the ideal order. It's the easiest thing in the world to despair. Dante’s Hell and Purgatory is full of those who foreclosed the ending out of despair. It’s so easy to pursue desire, to mistake the immediacy revealed by the senses to be the one and only possible world, and hence become absorbed in physical matter. It takes real moral and intellectual courage to Hope and to act out of Hope…
In which case we have no option but to get moving. We live in hope or die in despair. Dante knew that despair was the easiest and most obvious option to take. He also knew it to be false.’
Ah, souls beguiled, creatures without reverence,
who wrench your hearts away from so much good
and set your minds on emptiness!
Dante, Comedy, Paradiso 19: 10-12
Reason often tells us we are beaten, a hope nurtured by our connection to the origin and end of meaning tells us we are never beaten.
Purves ends with these words:
‘Most of us have that instinct towards cheerfulness, that humble belief that human ingenuity and goodness will somehow endure in some kind of future. We may be wrong, but the more we are battered by self-indulgent grimness, the more deaf we get to serious warnings. That’s a rhetorical balance which everyone, from Attenborough to Greta Thunberg, should be aware of.’
Don't be so po-faced and priggish, in short, it is very off-putting. Being common, folk prefer to be invited and persuaded to do something to being told.
There are so many twists and turns in the climate politics adumbrated above that it may not be clear to those untutored in dialectics what my position actually is. Am I for or against Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg? Here’s the thing. I have spent the best part of three decades warning about the problems of global heating and climate change - and I insisted on calling it global heating over a decade ago to make clear the unliveability of the conditions we face in the future if these problems are not adequately addressed. I challenged those who dismissed the climate movement as ‘the new religion of climate alarmism’ – and did so by emphasising that the case for climate change is based on good sound science, and by arguing for the old and true religion as against the violation of the planet under the auspices of the new religion of capital worship. At the same time, I emphasised the need to move beyond the science to an institutional and structural analysis, locating the climate crisis within a critique of the global political economy. The current talk of ‘adults’ as having failed is so general as to be meaningless, and dangerously so, since it points to the continued absence of a political and sociological critique and understanding. Some ‘adults’ have actively blocked climate action, other ‘adults’ have pursued limited agreements through existing institutional arrangements, other ‘adults’ still have consistently argued for the need for more radical actions and more effective policies. Evaluating success and failure is a matter of politics and political relations. There is no special status, whether based on age or gender or anything, that is capable of evading those relations. You intervene in this terrain, and you can expect criticism, opposition, and resistance. I dislike the tone of the criticisms of Greta Thunberg. But the idea that those who have succeeded in embedding and institutionalising their power and interests, and all those layers below them who are involved in relations of dependency on those power and interests, are going to accede quietly to demands for sweeping institutional and systemic changes betrays a political naivety that is scarcely credible. If this is a politics of bullying and blackmailing, then the ruling class will beat you hands down. It is their game. The combination of power and experience will beat truth and innocence every time. Not that there will be any victory accruing to them. There will be the common ruination of contending parties. When Thunberg says you cannot ignore the science, I take this merely to mean that the science on climate change is accurate. It is. If it wasn’t, then we would be hearing contrary views saying otherwise. The idea of a global conspiracy of scientific bodies and institutions is too risible to countenance for more than a nanosecond. To this extent, Thunberg is right. But that isn’t much of an extent at all. It is the political implications that render this simple truth much more complex. And this is where my own position starts to become more critical. I’m questioning the politics, not the science. Because if you don’t make the transition from scientific truth to political – and ethical – will and content, then you will be a head without a body, a knowledge ‘elite’ without a ‘mass.’ You will have no institutional alternative, insufficient popular support and legitimacy, and an ineffective political identity. It will be easy for political opponents to marginalize such opposition as extremist. Politics is a roughhouse, and the rich and powerful play to win – that’s what makes them rich and powerful. They don’t give a damn about any fact or value that obstructs their interests. To appeal to the science is ineffective with people who are deaf to fact. The same with respect to ethics. The statement that you cannot ignore the science is politically tangential. The science can be ignored, has been ignored, and continues to be ignored. That statement merely says that if civilization ignores the warnings on climate change coming from the world of science, then there will be catastrophic consequences. We know. We have been saying the same for decades. To keep repeating this message indicates that the fundamental lesson with regard to the logic of collective action within asymmetrical relations has still not been learned. And it hasn’t been learned because those demanding climate action still insist on seeing this as a scientific issue rather than a political one. Pitch physics against politics and physics will win, say the environmentalists. Except that politics is winning. The warning merely states the obvious that if civilization falls out of kilter with nature then it will fall. What that warning fails to appreciate is that the problem and its resolution lies within the realm of politics. Because it is a problem of human relations, interests, stakes, values. That’s where the movement has to go, rather than stand outside of the field giving lectures.It would be a great leap forward should climate campaigners let the truth they clearly know sink deep into their psyches, to re-emerge as a politically conscious determination to win support for a climate politics worthy of the name. The whole notion of climate denial is antiquated. The only people who don’t know that the planet is warming and don’t know the causes of that warming are those who refuse to know for political and economic reasons. Their denialism is not a denialism of the science, and failure to understand that point has led to a generation wasting their time and talent regurgitating the science in pointless, never-ending ‘debates’ that haven’t so much enlightened the public as bored them rigid and turned them off. The people standing in the way are not so much anti-science as pro-capitalist. These are the people whose economic libertarianism has inflicted the converging social, political, moral, and ecological crises upon the world. Note well my strong emphasis on reconstituting the public realm, on establishing the social conditions of the public life, and on creating an associative civil democracy rooted in local communities of virtue and practice but networking on a planetary basis. That’s the Eco-Republic I have consistently argued for. And it is a world away from present governments implicated in capital’s regimes of accumulation. My criticisms of rebellion, protest, and disobedience is that they presume a capacity to act for the long-term social and ecological health on present untransformed governments that they do not possess. Without the political substance outlined above, such oppositional movements will fail to mobilize and solidify support, will fragment as a result of contrary perspectives, will be isolated from the public (who will soon tire of disruption and their being constantly enjoined to ‘act’) and pushed to the margins. Resistance to power is not enough, a movement has to constitute its own power. Without that, and victory will go to the economic liberals whose idolatry of capital has brought civilization to the brink of eco-catastrophe. That they will point to human beings being healthier and wealthier, better educated and longer-lived than ever before, and in greater numbers, indicates that the narrative ‘capitalism is bad/evil/failed’ is too simple. We may live in what Max Weber called an ‘iron cage,’ but it is also a gilded cage, and people dependent on vast processes of investment, economic growth, and employment within that cage may well be disinclined to make an exit, even when the building is on fire. Politics, values, motivations, the construction of material counter-organs, modes of conduct, mass mobilisation – the creation of a genuine public life within the hollow shell of the old: these are the things that need to be done.Failing that, the economic liberals will continue to hit the till as a result of having the conventional political sphere under their control. These are the libertarians whose anti-government deregulatory agenda has plunged us into this mess, utterly disabling the political spheres as the sphere in which individuals come together to determine the terms by which to manage and order their common affairs. These are the libertarians who have systematically determined to render government powerless and make democracy safe for the rich and powerful. The systematic devaluation of politics has been accompanied by the diminution of the public imagination. Politics has been failing so badly for so long that people have ceased to turn to government for the satisfaction of collective demands and social purposes with anything by way of confidence and high expectations. The intention all along has been to neuter the political sphere and stymie the need for politics on the part of citizens. There has been a deliberate strategy to destroy citizens and leave society atomized into self-interested, self-maximising individuals seeking to secure their interests on untrammeled and unregulated free markets. These are the markets and market forces that libertarians want to rule the world, for the simple reason it leaves money and power unchecked. Removing the legitimate democratic self-constraint of government has the result of fracturing the citizen body into powerless atoms subject to the external constraint of the private economy. Against the ‘new religion of global warming,’ the cult of the libertarians is capital worship and the global anarchy of the rich and powerful, a depoliticized and demoralized world in which the already superrich are free to get wealthier still and have the licence to do whatever they like just to feel good for the last two minutes we have before the midnight hour strikes.
I call them economic libertarians. I have heard them describe their views as a ‘classical liberalism.’ They may well be right. It’s just that the era of classical liberalism is long over. Marx accurately described the concentration and centralisation of capital which results in a transnational monopoly capitalism. The social roots of the old liberalism are no more within the new corporate form. In these conditions, ‘classical liberalism’ serves a purely ideological function rationalizing and concealing a subservience to the expansionary accumulative imperatives of the capital economy.
If my views are critical of the current wave of climate rebellion and protest, they have naught in common with the right-wing commentators who are currently abusing Thunberg with words I don’t care to repeat and everything to do with demanding that the adults she describes as failures actually cease being political cowards, start being ‘adult,’ and start to reclaim the power and dignity of government, politics, and law from corporate control. That would be to constitute a genuine law and order, establish the institutional and social conditions of a properly ordered, responsible and cooperative world.
The approach of XR offers a propaganda gift to political rivals who can claim to be defenders of liberal democracy, of the rights of individuals to choose the good as they see fit and not have it chosen for them by self-appointed elites, and of ‘the people’ and the popular will as expressed in democratic elections. It has already been noted that some of those involved in Extinction Rebellion have stood for election several times and been rejected at the ballot box.
There are dangers, here, for other groups who join in tempted by the apparent momentum. They risk compromising their own political positions, in practice and in the public eye, becoming associated with what is effectively a movement of civil disobedience with no political end-game of its own. The movement aims to pressure governments into climate action. There is no agenda for the restructuring of power and resources and no strategy or organisation aiming for social transformation. Instead, aims are focused upon an untransformed institutional sphere operating firmly within an untransformed economic sphere. The aim is to address climate change through a legislative and regulative intervention that, effectively, is the old reformist dream that stalled in confrontation with the structural power of capital. And it will stall on that power again. Because once actions start to subvert the mechanisms of investment, valorisation, and accumulation we are involved in a crisis with revolutionary potential. It is at this point the lack of an end-game and the material organisation, will, and support to back it up, results in the dissipation of effort and energy.
The gains of pressure and support will be accrued by others.
Extinction Rebellion claims to be non-hierarchical, but this is false on a couple of levels. Its mode of thought, action, and organisation are expert and top-down, leaving little space for dissensus with respect to political goals. Its basic message is simple and non-negotiable. That message may be fundamentally right – and it is – but the problem lies organising a political movement in the image of a fixed, unalterable, and incontrovertible truth.
The organisation and strategy employed by Extinction Rebellion is deeply flawed. Any successes will be effected firmly within the prevailing social arrangements and relations implicated in climate crisis. There is a profound failure to understand the institutional and structural causes of the crisis, the nature of the state as capital’s political command centre, the nature of capital and its accumulative dynamic, and the embeddedness of social power and the constraints of system-wide imperatives. On top of this, there is a failure to understand the extent to which entire populations are involved in layers of dependency within the system, with respect to employment, income, investments and pensions. The capital system is not a public domain amenable to democratic persuasion and pressure, let alone scientific and moral appeal, but a regime of private accumulation. Government must facilitate the process of accumulation as a condition of its own power and resources, as well as authority, popularity, and legitimacy. An active, organised minority attempting to engineer changes from above and from without, in the sense of lacking material counter-organisations conferring real social content, structural capacity and material futurity, not only can be portrayed as anti-democratic by political opponents, it resuscitates the old ghost of eco-authoritarianism. If you care to read the books with which the Club of Rome followed up The Limits to Growth in the mid-seventies, you will see that they demanded that the nations of the world hand over forms of governance and the control of the economy to ecologically knowledgeable experts, with toothless talk-shops to preoccupy the people and satisfy them with the semblance of democratic participation. That sounds mightily like the state of the public realm in the era of the corporate form, of course. But the solution to an economic authoritarianism is not an ecological authoritarianism
I worry about experts imposing an ecological regime via the state. Obsessive concerns translate easily into concerns over immigration, and concerns over too many people slide too easily into a view that there are too many of the wrong kind of people, the poor, the needy, the unhealthy, those who could be considered a drain on resources. We start with an ‘ecology in one country,’ an eco-nationalism, and end with either an environmental austerity imposed by the existing nation state or an eco-populism with distinctly fascist tinges justified by environmental science.
I work for an Eco-Republic based on an interdependent human and planetary flourishing. You may consider that utopian. I insist at all times that ideals be attached to the means of their realization, means defined in terms of institutions, technologies, systems, transition strategies and also moral motivations, character traits, modes of conduct, active consent, and political will. That’s a long and hard road at a time when time is running out. Revolution is a process and not simply an event. The problem with shortcuts is that they short-circuit the process and bring about dystopia. I won't predict eco-fascism. I will predict the rise of political violence and coercion using environmental necessity as its mandate and its justification.
Climate denial is really a political denialism of unity, solidarity, cooperation, justice, equality, all the social ties and bonds that bring individuals and communities together. Climate change is a consequence of isolation and separation; it is diabolic in the true meaning of the term. Climate change and economic crises are the only communal forces the anarchy of the rich and powerful are capable of generating, the friends of the licentious and the narcissist. The social consequences of such behaviour is of no concern to such people since they are absorbed in the permanent now, fulfilling their cupidity moment by moment. They have no concept of society, no concept of others, no concept of the future. There is no reality outside of the self-serving, self-maximising, self-possessing self. Dante identified this as the greed that will consume the world. On this, Dante the poet and philosopher has proven to be Dante the prophet.
In fine, I want to hear a lot less about ‘the science’ ‘we’ can’t ignore and a whole lot more about how the human ‘we’ is divided within asymmetrical relations of power and resources, with the lawless anti-government anarchists arrogating to themselves the right to eat up every common good and purpose, social, moral and ecological and spit it out as waste. There is no ‘we’ within the divided societies that prevail under the capital system, and the sooner those seeking ‘system change’ understand this, the better. ‘Rebels’ who insist on pressing demands on an unreconstituted political and business sphere make the mistake of believing that we live within a public domain that is responsive to scientific fact, moral appeal, and democratic persuasion. That mistake, if not corrected, will prove fatal for civilisation. The capital system is a regime of capital accumulation. The imperatives of accumulation are the only laws that regime respects and obeys. You can rebel and break every law you like, but when you start to impede the mechanisms of investment, valorisation and accumulation, then you really will be involved in a revolutionary challenge to the power and rule of capital. But for that, you need a political organisation and social movement, a social force and content of people possessing the organisational and structural capacity to act. That’s what system change entails. If you think government is going to do it all for you, you must have missed the past couple of centuries of class struggle from above to stave off the socialist insurgency. I trust I make myself crystal clear.
We are between worlds.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head…
A politics of hope is always possible, no matter the odds against us. I affirm the radical indeterminacy of the future as a result of moral and political agency. Objective trends and tendencies in history are not inevitabilities and only become so through the deficiency or absence of the subjective factor – the moral, intellectual, and organisational agency of human beings. A politics of hope is engendered by communities of practice and character which foster and sustain individual and collective responsibility and a politics and economics of the common good. Such a view is not a question of taking sides in party politics but of creating the conditions of politics which makes taking political sides a meaningful and effective act. Creating such conditions means ensuring the very viability of the freedom and happiness which our most lauded political philosophies have celebrated and which emancipatory political movements have fought long and hard for. The environmental movement is one such movement; indeed, since civilization is at stake, it may well be the most important movement of all such movements in history. My interest is not in repudiating environmentalism, but equipping it with an effective moral, political, and psychic-emotional dimension, one that moves people deep within, forms hitherto isolated self-choosing individuals into citizens associating together for the common good in a genuine public life, and mobilizes people in hope of a future which enhances the human ontology rather than inhibits and ultimately destroys it. I insist, too, that such an ethic is expansive and embraces the other beings and bodies of the more-than-human world. For this, we need to fashion a compelling narrative of visions, values, and virtues that inspires hope, motivates actions and obligates people in common cause; we need a narrative that speaks to each and all, not merely to some against others, whether we consider ourselves to be the few or the many. That’s the ethic at the core of the ‘rational freedom’ I have spent a lifetime developing. That freedom ultimately locates unity within the Love that enfolds, nourishes, and sustains all. There are words here for all idealistic men and women to contemplate as they see the usual combination of events, politics, and human frailties seemingly conspire to thwart their hopes and dreams. There is plenty that happens to us on life's journey that makes us want to return our travel documents and demand a refund. But there are no refunds. We bought nothing. Life is a gift. And we don’t hand it back. Instead, something impels us to carry on moving forwards in hope and expectation; we carry on carrying on. We may not know where we are going, nor why we are going there. But we have a direction that, deep down, we feel will finally take us to the place where we ought to be:
‘Perplexities and pain remained. I had and I have fewer certainties than before, and there are many areas of the faith that I gratefully and whole-heartedly accept which are opaque to me, like the idea of life after death. But now I know that faith is a direction, not a state of mind; states of mind change and veer about, but we can hold a direction. It is not in its essence a set of beliefs about anything, though it involves such beliefs. It is a grateful and loving openness to the gift of being. The difference between a believer and a non-believer is not that the believer has one more item in his mind, in his universe. It is that the believer is convinced that reality is to be trusted, that in spite of appearances the world is very good. When we respond to that good, we are not responding to something we have invented, or projected. Meaning is not at our beck and call, and neither is reality. When we try to talk about that reality we find ourselves talking to it, not in philosophy but in adoration, for it is inescapably Personal, and most luminously itself in the life and death of Jesus. Christians are those who find in that life and death an abounding fountain of joy and hope and life; who affirm and are content to affirm what he affirmed about God, because find in that affirmation a realism which does justice to life in all its horror and all its glory. Not sad, high-minded men with a handful of high-minded, bleak ideals, but citizens of a world whose heart is love... not a law, but a liberation into true humanity; the power to love, to belong to one another, to start again when things go wrong, to be grateful, to adore.
Every one of us, every human being, confronts at some time the collapse of meaning and direction in our lives – in anxiety, in illness, in unemployment or broken relationships, in all the forces that frustrate and diminish us as persons, and, at the last, in our own deaths. The Church has no pat answers to the dilemmas of existence, only a witness to what she knows. That under the mercy of God our perplexities, our failures, our betrayals, our limitations, can open into new freedoms, if we follow the way of Jesus.
A century and a half ago, Coleridge wrote:
“Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation, but a Life; not a philosophy of life, but a Life, and a living process … try it.”
I don’t know how to better that advice.’
Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers, pp 8-9