Laying the Bogey of Eco-Authoritarianism to Rest
Introduction
I start by noting the extent to which defenders of the institutions of liberal democracy, private property, and capitalism are big on accusations that environmentalists are authoritarians out to circumvent democracy.
‘This article explores how dreams of an eco-dictatorship have arisen out of a context of declining faith in liberal democracy and liberal capitalism to cope with environmental crisis.’
The argument here is familiar. It arises from a particular conception of freedom. It is the same conception which long ago identified socialism as the road to serfdom, a claim made by Max Weber and which became the title of a famous book by Hayek. The quick response to this kind of assertion is to point out that capitalism long ago ceased to be liberal, that we have entered the age of transnational monopoly capitalism, that the corporate form has long since erased the social roots of the liberalism that supports the concept of individual liberty in these works, and that the liberal democratic state has been subject to corporate capture. As against these ideological claims, I would seek the roots of authoritarianism in the twin forces of social atomism and political centralism endemic to ‘liberal capitalism.’
There is a delicate dialectic, tainted with bitter ironies, at work in what follows. It is so delicate that careless readers may mistake the message and see me as joining with liberal critics of socialist totalitarianism, extending the accusation of authoritarianism to environmentalism. So I shall briefly spell out the philosophical roots of my critique.
To reject authoritarianism is not the same thing as to reject authority. And to establish the case for authority is not to embrace authoritarianism. It is to seek to secure the conditions of a true liberty as against licence. The only way out of this crisis is a rational freedom that recognises the need for communities of legitimate self-constraint. There are no libertarian fantasies to be had here. The very opposite, in fact. Aristotle rejected an atomistic freedom as involving the licence of an individualism which is 'divorced from law and justice' (Aristotle, Politics I.ii 1981:59/60). That individualism is also divorced from Nature and works to undermine the social and ecological conditions of human existence. The definition of authority in this tradition of rational freedom will no doubt be condemned as authoritarian by the defenders of ‘liberal democracy.’ Aristotle’s response is to argue that living in accordance with the constitution is not 'slavery' but 'self-preservation’ and ‘salvation’ (Politics V. ix 1981:332; Politics trans Barker 1958:1310a). Aristotle follows Plato in identifying an excessive personal liberty estranged from connections with public life, community, and nature with license. The roots of authoritarianism lie in this liberty as license. Such liberty, Aristotle argues, ensures a large body of support for demagogues (P 1981: 373/5).
Much like the mythical Atlas, environmentalists have been charged with the task of carrying the struggle against capitalist license as a burden on their shoulders. In taking responsibility for the collective forces unleashed upon the planet by free-riders, environmentalists are effectively accepting a punishment that should properly be inflicted upon those who have lived by a parasitism upon nature and society. In taking responsibility, they become the visible face of these forces, and are open to being blamed for their depredations. In seeking to re-institute authority in a licentious age, they risk veering in the direction of authoritarianism. They may be forced in that direction in being charged with the task of securing the basis of a viable civilization in face of almost overwhelming and seemingly uncontrollable forces, with time increasingly running out. For daring to challenge the capitalist hegemony and the vice-like grip it has on the planet, environmentalists are charged with replaced capitalist austerity with a rational self-restraint which induces humanity to respect social and natural limits. That’s an authority that can be constituted on a democratic basis and integrated with solidarity and autonomy. It eschews the tendencies to authoritarianism which are the product of the social atomism and political centralism of capitalist relations. If I am critical of environmentalists below – and I am – then bear in mind this acknowledgement that environmentalists have been saddled with one almighty challenge, the challenge of realizing all the greatest ideals of political philosophy in no time at all.
The spectre of eco-fascism
Let’s start by making a simple point: science is science, politics is politics, ethics is ethics, fact is fact, value is value. That point is made to establish boundaries, respect disciplines, and underscore the need for proper relations. The problems come when, instead of integrating these things in a holistic approach that give due respect to each, there is a blurring of distinctions and, worse, an encroachment of one on the terrain of another or all others. Instead of mixing our logics, we establish the true relations between them. Science is not politics and ethics, fact is not value, the former are not supreme over the latter, you cannot derive an ‘ought to be’ from an ‘is’ in some simple, uni-linear manner. Do this, and you will soon be bogged down in an endless war of incommensurate terms, logics, and values. To take the stand that truth or reason or fact is non-negotiable, as implied in statements to the effect that you cannot argue with the science, misses the point that politics is precisely about negotiation, dialogue, citizen interaction and exchange, argument, deliberation, judgement. That doesn’t entail a denial of science or a denial of fact, but the deliberation over the implications for practical political and social affairs of the knowledge yielded in the sphere of theoretical reason. One large aspect of the confusion here is the failure to take politics and ethics as seriously as the legitimate spheres of practical reason in which human beings as social beings determine their conditions of living well together. Of course the implications of scientific findings are of direct relevance in making these practical judgements, science as being the best check against reality we have; but acting on scientific knowledge and reason remains a matter of judgement and value as well as of social stakes and interests. The task is to bring these two worlds into relation. To state a truth and then declare it to be unarguable and non-negotiable is immediately to neuter politics – there is nothing for citizens to argue about, their role is entirely the passive one of learning a truth dictated from the outside. That will leave citizens cold and keep truth frozen and immobilized, unrecognized and unacted upon.
I am currently reading warnings about the rise of something called ‘eco-fascism.’ We may even call this a return. When I first got involved with Green politics in the 1980s, I can remember the accusation that Greens were ‘eco-fascists’ being used. I distinctly remember Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown referring to Greens as ‘eco-fascists.’ The claim came down the tendency of Greens to issue dire warnings about the state of the environment and demand radical actions from government, regardless of popular support and consent. These were things society simply had to do if it was to survive. That tendency is still pronounced, hence the criticisms I make here and elsewhere. I say criticisms. This emphasis on the dignity of politics, the need for citizen engagement, and working through the institutions of democracy constitutes advice.
I don’t want to go over the question as to whether environmentalism is a left or right issue in politics. Conservative thinkers like Roger Scruton and John Grey have emphasized that environmentalism is a conservatism, speaking the language of limits and living a life of restraint within limits. For them it is the left pursuing delusions of progress through science and technology that fails to recognize limits. One could also point to the conservative credentials of early environmentalists. It’s a big subject that I don’t have time and space to address, other than pointing out that accusations of ‘ecofascism’ have been levelled by both environmental left and right against both the environmental left and right. In this article I am more concerned with temptations of eco-authoritarianism through too hard an emphasis on scientific truth and knowledge and the concomitant devaluation of citizen agency and interaction, democratic will, and political dialogue and discourse. I leave the misanthropic obsessions with over-population, denunciations of human greed and stupidity, and the designations of human species as a cancer and virus on the planet to one side. I’m afraid to record that, on far too many occasions now for comfort, I have met people who are reasonable, intelligent, highly qualitied and expert, who coldly declare that there are too many people, that people are generally despicable, that it is ‘time to cull the herd,’ that poor people are ‘surplus’ to social requirements and should be allowed to kill themselves through poor diets and lifestyle choices, and that we need wars to curb population within sustainable limits. I’ve heard this from people on the environmental left. They are not fascists, but such thoughts prepare the intellectual and psychic terrain for a very nasty brand of politics. I’m reading this line from the Christchurch killer's manifesto: 'There is no conservatism without nature, there is no nationalism without environmentalism.' So is environmentalism left or right or neither: ‘neither left nor right but forwards.’
Jeff Sparrow comments:
We're much more accustomed to think of the far right pushing anti-environmentalism than ecology. An opposition to environmentalism usually facilitates rightwing populist talking points: in particular, the notion of an out-of-touch and treacherous elite, imposing its progressive agenda on the nation's common folk. Yet before the shooter in El Paso opened fire in a Walmart, he, too, released a manifesto in which he voiced his concern about ecological destruction.
This is what the El Paso shooter wrote:
'The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted ... Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic and electronic waste ... Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land.'
Those are views which the anti-environmentalist right would typically associate with the environmentalist left. In truth, such views are neither left nor right, they are statements of fact backed by a wealth of evidence. The issue, then, concerns the political implications of fact with respect to how we come to act upon the evidence of environmental degradation and destruction.
The El Paso gunman declared his basic solidarity with the political perspective articulated by the Christchurch murderer, who openly declared himself a fascist. Hence we can expect an explosion of articles and blogs on social media referencing ‘ecofascism.’ We shall see. Natasha Lennard writes on the need for environmentalism to be careful not to create a narrative and a rationale that allows the extreme right to co-opt the environmental struggle to its own agenda
Against the perilous climate change denialism typical of U.S. conservatives, environmental decimation is broadly seen as a liberal and left concern. But eco-fascism has seen a notable reemergence among far-right groups and festering corners online in the U.S. and Europe. While campaigning for the European elections, Marine Le Pen of France’s far-right National Rally party promised to make the “first ecological civilization” of a “Europe of nations,” claiming that “nomadic” people with “no homeland” do not care about the environment. Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer wrote in a 2017 manifesto, “We have the potential to become nature’s steward or its destroyer.”
It is beholden on those of us fighting for climate justice to ensure that not an inch is given to those who would use the fact of environmental degradation as grounds for racist nationalism and, as the El Paso and Christchurch shooters encouraged, genocide. This means maintaining a vigilance against not only the most explicit eco-fascists and their “blood and soil” sentiments, but also against arguments (which have emerged, too, in some parts of the so-called left) around population control and the threat of mass migration to resources both economic and environmental.
It is when one reads of this that it becomes apparent how utterly complacent those environmentalists who have denigrated politics in face of science have been. That same point applies to the endlessly repeated claim that nature doesn’t care whether the left or right prevails in politics, that there is no difference between capitalism and socialism, and that environmentalists are neither left nor right but in future. Human beings don’t live in the future, they live in the here and now. And these claims to be somehow above politics come to grief in the confrontation with an unregenerate fascist monster. The claims to embrace a new politics cut no ice when the issues of the old politics have still to be resolved.
The denigration of the human species as violent, aggressive, destructive, and greedy is something I have heard far too many times in environmental circles. I have heard the human species frequently described as a virus and a cancer. I have heard certain deep ecologists openly expressing their hatred of human beings, openly declaring that they are looking forward to the destruction of civilization. At extremes, I have heard people claim that the sooner the human species is off the planet the better. There is the constant harping on about over-population. The ideals I have sought to establish through politics and ethics have met with indifference, treated as secondary to science, or utterly scorned. Consistently, political and ethical questions have been reduced to scientific and technical issues. ‘It is for science to decide these issues,’ is an assertion I have been confronted with on issues that most certainly were a matter of politics – government policy and economics. The great fallacy of the modern world, scientism, is rife throughout the environmental movement, as is misanthropy. A movement which is animated first and foremost by the destruction that ‘humanity’ wreaks on the planet has a seriously misanthropic streak. Time and again I have argued for the need to be specific with respect to social relations and social forms, only for that concern to be dismissed as entailing a commitment to socialism. Socialism, it is understood, is the same as capitalism, as the left is the same as the right. That political naivety is not merely rot, it is dangerous rot that renders environmentalism, talking the language of harsh necessity and struggle for survival, wide open for appropriation by the extreme nationalist and fascist right. I have also cautioned against the systematic breaking of the law in order to coerce governments into taking certain actions. Not only is it anti-democratic, it rather naively presumes that only right-minded people, people whose cause we agree with, will engage in such a politics. How would you feel if eco-fascism grew into a fair-sized movement and started to engage in such anti-democratic tactics? Threatened and afraid, I would suggest. The dominant scientism of the environmental movement has left it remarkably weak on the political and ethical side, hence its difficulties in making advance on the political terrain, despite a wealth of science and technology in its favour. A strong narrative of environmental destruction and necessity combined with a weak popular base and democratic legitimacy is not a good combination. It is entirely possible to envisage the environmental narrative being appropriated to serve other political agendas, either an environmental austerity under the auspices of governments concerned to protect capitalist relations in ecologically straitened circumstances or an environmental populism serving a far-right politics.
Once and for all, take politics and ethics seriously and show more precision with respect to the specific causes of environmental destruction, instead of speaking blandly of ‘we’ and ‘humanity’ analyse social relations, propose alternative social forms and forms of mediation. And stop referring generally to ‘Nature’ as if this concept actually means something. Abstracted from specific social relations and forms by which human society mediates its interchange with its environment, ‘Nature’ means precisely nothing. We should have no patience whatsoever with those who think ‘Nature’ is an argument. Such references to ‘Nature’ are intellectually lazy and politically evasive. Not only does such thinking debilitate the political effectiveness of environmentalism, it leaves the door open for appropriation by those with other political agendas.
I write out of a concern to check tendencies to authoritarianism and elitism within even mainstream environmentalism. I see in these tendencies a substantial part of the explanation for the political failure of environmentalism. I note, also, that it gives the political enemies of climate action and climate justice an effective way of countering environmentalism simply by taking a stand on the institutions of liberal democracy. In consequence, I see also the possibility of a genuinely democratic environmentalism coming to be pushed to the margins and replaced by a top-down bureaucratic authoritarianism armed with a scientific rationalization to impose an environmental austerity to preserve existing power relations. I now double-down on vague references to ‘we’ and ‘humanity’ when it comes to identifying the causes of climate change and delineating responsibilities with respect to climate action. The environmental crisis is the result of specific social relations within which certain, identifiable, agents have had a far more deleterious environmental impact than others. Similarly, the insistence that ‘we must act’ is politically and socially meaningless, lacking in any identifiable referent. There is simply no unified public capable of acting in this way. As I shall argue, this is an old dream of environmentalism, one entirely lacking in institutional reality and democratic legitimacy. It is not a solution to the problem, it is an evasion of it. The problem with that idealized fantasy of a world government is that it can equip already constituted governments to act, legislate, and regulate out of a purported environmental necessity. There is a need for clarity with respect to specific social relations and forms of mediation so as to check tendencies to scapegoat the mass of humanity for environmental crises whose causes are located in specific social arrangements. That means integrating the twin-causes of social justice and environmental health within a politics of hope, checking tendencies to authoritarianism (whether these occur out of choice, desperation, or rationalization), and laying the bogey of eco-fascism or any other kind of fascism to rest once and for all.
I have addressed the issue at length in various writings and refer people to those. The basic problem is the potential asymmetry and disjunction that exists between truth and will. That points to the possibility that object and subject may diverge, pointing to the need to bridge the gap by bringing them into relation. The point is that statements of scientific fact and moral principle, the things which motivate people to join and promote a political cause, may diverge from and run ahead of democratic willing and consent. Politics is about mediating that gap. That involves much more than the former coming to inform, educate, order, and direct the latter. There is a role for leadership in politics. But leadership involves taking the led with you to such an extent that they become capable of leading themselves. In other words, the truth cannot just be passively given by a minority of the educated but must be actively willed by the mass of those who have understood, accepted, absorbed, and internalised it.
Knowledge, Certainty, and Tolerance
My immediate concern is to establish that point to guard against the incipient tendencies to authoritarianism and elitism in a political movement that grounds itself so deeply in the natural sciences and which conceives actions and solutions so much in technical and engineering terms. Such a politics leaves little for people to do as citizens other than obey.
When I was a young boy, there were two television programmes which fired the imagination and contained passages which stayed with me for life. One was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, about the arts and humanities. The other was Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, concerning natural science. I was much more excited by the arts and humanities than I ever was with the sciences, it has to be said. Knowledge of the objective world didn’t move me at all. I have met people who have said much the same thing about the arts and humanities. Science alone generates true knowledge, everything else is ‘made up,’ entertainment, or anthropocentric (a big sin in environmental quarters). That mutual antipathy points to the need to bring object and subject into relation. Fail to do that, and the gap between these two worlds opens up, leading to those claiming to act on knowledge acquiring the characteristics of authoritarianism and elitism in politics. I responded very much to Bronowski’s lessons with respect to science as a philosophy and a practical humility. In The Ascent of Man, Bronowski made a distinction between knowledge and certainty. He writes:
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
Truth is knowledge and knowledge is truth, and a successful ordering of the world through politics requires that this truth become the object of (democratic) willing. There is, however, no absolute knowledge or truth which yields certainty, giving its proponents the power and initiative to act at a distance removed from, and elevated over, citizens. Bronowski writes:
But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.
Bronowski writes of ‘the crucial paradox of knowledge.’ We devise ever more precise instruments with which to observe nature with ever more fineness, only to discover than the observations remain fuzzy. We are thus discomfited to see that our observations of nature seem to be ‘as uncertain as ever.’ ‘We seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity every time we come within sight of it.’ (Bronowski 2011 ch 11 ). The paradox of knowledge ranges from the atomic scale to the scale of man.
We look at the position of a star as it was determined then and now, and it seems to us that we are closer and closer to finding it precisely. But when we actually compare our individual observations today, we are astonished and chagrined to find them as scattered within themselves as ever. We had hoped that the human errors would disappear, and that we would ourselves have God's view. But it turns out that the errors cannot be taken out of the observations. And that is true of stars, or atoms, or just looking at somebody's picture, or hearing the report of somebody's speech.
Bronowski 2011 ch 11
There is no God’s eye view and science cannot perform the God-trick. There can be knowledge, there is no certainty. Errors are inextricably bound up with the nature of human knowledge. Bronowski proceeds to discuss Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty. He makes the important point that ‘uncertainty’ is a ‘bad name’ for a good principle. Because in science or outside of it, we are not uncertain. The rejection of a certainty based on the delusions of absolute knowledge and truth does not imply a condition of uncertainty. We should, therefore, describe a Principle of Tolerance, since our knowledge is confined within a certain tolerance.
Science has progressed on the understanding that the exchange of information between man and nature, and between human beings in society, can only proceed within a certain tolerance. ‘All knowledge, all information between human beings can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance.’ And this, Bronowski argues, ‘is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or even in any form of thought that aspires to dogma.’ (Bronowski 2011 ch 11 ). This is where I come to ‘fascism.’
The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance fixed once for all the realisation that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930’s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.
Bronowski 2011 ch 11
The world becomes inhospitable to contrary voices, to the normal exchanges of politics, to dialogue, to ethics and the imagination. The craving for absolute certainty and the belief that one possesses absolute knowledge widens the gulf between truth and principle on the one hand and democratic willing on the other and builds a steel-hard wall between them:
The paradox of knowledge and the principle of tolerance go right to the heart of the human dilemma. This dilemma has two aspects:
One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
Bronowski 2011 ch 11
Bronowski describes the accusation that science dehumanises people as ‘tragically false.’ He points to the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz where millions of human beings were ‘turned into numbers.’ This was not done by science but by arrogance, dogma and ignorance. ‘When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.’ (Bronowski 2011 ch 11 ). Bronowski refers to ‘ignorance,’ but the point is that those acting in this way were remarkably knowledgeable. They were not so much ignorant of the consequences of their actions as indifferent. They were dead or deaf to empathy, sympathy, soul, and spirit. The belief that one possesses absolute knowledge and certainty deafens a person to other, contrary, voices.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible….
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
Bronowski 2011: 284-285
I was struck forcibly by those words the first time I heard them and they have stayed with me. The lesson is one that has been central to my work within the field of ‘rational freedom.’ I am most concerned to develop a politics worthy of the name, and avoid the statement and possession of scientific fact and moral principle becoming the basis of a ‘push-button order’ that puts politics and people on ice. Politics is a world not of truth, still less absolute truth, but of judgement; it is a world of dialectic and dialogue rather than certainty. The problems come when the various contending parties in politics come to think that they possess absolute knowledge and assert their views with such certainty as to brook no opposition. Human beings may well have given up God, but they have not ceased to hunker after the possession of the God’s-eye view. In relativizing the absolute, many have become inclined to absolutize the relative, hence the increasing entrenched and angry ‘debates’ in politics, feeding as they do on divisions that run deep in society. That itch for absolute knowledge and power is a positive blight in politics. The belief that one possesses absolute certainty issues in some very unpleasant and unappealing character traits. It makes it much easier for those seeking to block actions that should be taken by appealing to uncertainty. I remember a debate that took place at Radio Merseyside hosted by Roger Phillips. It involved Benny Pieser, who we may describe as a climate denier. He would reject the term, but he has been a consistent and systematic naysayer with respect to climate science. Pieser played a straight bat throughout the proceedings, appealing to the audience’s lack of scientific knowledge and understanding. The truth is we don’t really know what is causing climate change, he reasoned, and afterwards Phillips and members of the public discussing the exchange joined in agreement. ‘We don’t really know,’ many repeated. Actually, we do know. What had happened here is that, in a political forum, people had been giving the impression of absolute knowledge and certainty, for the not unreasonable reason that the crisis in the climate system is such as to demand immediate, effective action. Cue those stalling for action attempting to render the situation much more opaque than it is. It is manifestly false to claim that ‘we don’t really know’ what causes climate change. We must have more scientific knowledge on this than anything. In the necessary simplification of truth and knowledge in the field of politics, communication, and practical action, the impression can be given by proponents of climate action that they are speaking from a position of an absolute certainty: there is no debate, the science is clear, unarguable and unanswerable etc. Cue the reaction which appeals to citizens thinking they are being lectured to and ordered by taking its stand on uncertainty and, even, ignorance (‘we don’t really know’). We know plenty, we know more than enough. But that knowledge is not certainty. The way forward is to proceed through the Principle of Tolerance and engage in dialectic and dialogue in the field of practical reason. Instead of entrenching and even extending the gap between truth and knowledge on the one hand and human will and action on the other through a misguided certainty, we have to bring scientific fact, moral fact, and democratic willing into integral relation. With the failure to do that means that the commitment to knowledge and truth as non-negotiables possessing overriding significance becomes the psychic preparation for entry into the push-button order of the Megamachine. I’m afraid I have heard environmentalist friends, faced with human pain, suffering, and death, make the statement that the truth, however harsh, trumps all sentiment and emotion. Statements like that make me wince, precisely because it indicates precisely the inhuman ignorance Bronowski excoriated. ‘We have to touch people,’ Brownowski emphasized. Some people, armed with truth and knowledge, could care less about questions of people, motivations, values, and will. I emphasize this motivational economy constantly for the simple reason it is frequently overlooked by those hooked on objective reality and truth, that is, the scientific investigation of the material world. If human beings, ethics, and psychology enter the objective world, it is through the findings of neuroscience. There is a neglect of human beings as anything other than objects. People know-nothing and should simply kneel before the truth. Of course, the people who think this way are convinced that they possess more of this truth than others. They don’t. They mistake some of the truth for the whole truth. Overimpressed with what little they do know, they are unaware of how much they don’t. They lack the common touch, they lack connection with the common moral reason of each and all. They say that truth trumps will, entirely missing that enduring change for the better proceeds by truth in alliance with will.
One problem with uncertainty is that it translates very uncomfortably into politics. It is good at telling government and law what it can’t do and shouldn’t try to do. It fits a deregulatory approach which leaves society exposed to the external constraint of systemic imperatives and economic markets. Uncertainty too easily becomes anonymity, irresponsibility and unaccountability. It exposes those in public office to further ridicule with respect to apparent impotence and incompetence. In acknowledging uncertainty, a politician, bureaucrat, regulator or expert has to make a public statement to the effect that this or that policy could result in a bad outcome, but that there is no way of saying in advance what the odds for or against are.” Such people will be treated as incompetent and hence unfit for office. In the end, it renders the whole notion of office subject to ridicule, bringing about a further diminution in public expectations and the public imagination. Uncertainty makes plain that the temper of politics is judicious. This is the big problem with an environmentalist politics that is so heavily based on science. In fact, insofar as we are not actually doing politics, merely stating scientific facts on climate change, we are on a collision course. Once we move from fact to questions of value, significance, and meaning, science falls silent. There has to be a bridge and a transition connecting the two realms. To proceed from a position of scientific certainty into the realm of uncertainty without building a bridge and support mechanisms is to invite a head-on collision of forces coming from two entire opposites. To saddle the world of political judgement with false expectations of certainty on account of being based on a ‘non-negotiable’ and ‘unarguable’ science is to put those responsible for policy and leadership in an extremely exposed and untenable position. Whatever certainty we may have in science, politics is not a field of certainty but depends on judgement, values, beliefs, and popular demands, all of which are much more difficult to express than facts and figures.
Integrating Truth and Will
To project this question to the grand scale of political philosophy, I would underscore the pertinence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s concept of the General Will is precisely about removing the gap between truth and will, seeking to establish an authentic public community based on the legitimate self-constraint of an obligation voluntarily assumed and agreed. The genius of Rousseau’s thought is to have reconciled the two great modes of human thought: that of reason and nature as the realm of objective reality, knowledge, and truth, and that of human society and culture as the realm of will and artifice. Rousseau’s ‘General Will’ is effectively truth and knowledge democratized, internalized, rationalized and articulated through will. Importantly, this does not imply a self-rationalizing and self-projecting will imposing truth and meaning upon an objectively meaningless and valueless world, but a will that is democratized and rationalized in accordance with transcendent standards of truth and justice and embodied in the just polity as an authentic public community. Whether Rousseau’s Social Contract succeeded in realizing this integration of truth, will, and artifice is open to debate. In the very least, I would argue that Rousseau points us in the right direction. I would argue very strongly that the ambitions of climate politics and climate justice require precisely the integration of modes of thought, action, and organisation (political institutions, community and social practices) that Rousseau sought to establish. That synthesis of all that is of value in the tradition of political philosophy and ethics is something I have consciously pursued in my own work on moral ecology. In that work, I have attempted to reduce and ideally remove the gap between scientific knowledge and moral principle on the one hand and human will and action on the other. Success in that ambition means avoiding a debilitating split opening up between disclosure – the idea that truth and goodness are objective properties inhering in the world which it is our duty to discover and reveal – and imposure – the idea that truth, value, and meaning are wilful human projections upon an objectively valueless and meaningless world. There is an asymmetry between these two worlds. The task is to ensure that this asymmetry does not form itself into a disjunction through the assertion of one mode against the other.
Excluding the human touch, reducing citizen agency to obedience to truth – or obedience to those who speak for science/nature and channel the truth – cuts us off from a vision of an expansive, authentic, and legitimate public community and makes no provision for the fertilization and dissemination of truth and knowledge through the will and activity of vital and creative human agency. Success in this endeavour depends on how we come to mediate the potential asymmetry between truth and knowledge on the one hand and will and action on the other. ‘It needs a whole society to give the symmetry we seek,’ advised Emerson. A great error is committed if we come to seek symmetry through just the one side of the two great modes of truth/knowledge and will/action, setting disclosure and imposure in antithetical relation. Neither aspect can flourish alone in separation from and opposition to its counterpart. The missing subjectivity is also the missing objectivity since the absence of the one skews and imbalances the relation the other requires in order to properly express and fulfil its qualities. One day, there will be an agency which will no longer signify claims made against the world, one day these apparent opposites will be seen to be complementary, realizing life and existence through a fusion of disclosure and imposure which embeds human beings as co-creators in an inherently creative and participatory universe. This is what I have sought to do in my philosophical work, fusing nature and the reason of natural philosophy on the one hand with artifice, will, and the reason of moral philosophy on the other. I have worked in the tradition of modern praxis philosophy, particularly Kant and Marx, developing notions of human beings governing themselves as colegislators through a self-legislative reason. I now temper that view with an emphasis on transcendent as opposed to conventionalist standards. That view is there in Rousseau, the greatest of the modern Platonists, the man who gave us a Plato for the age of democracy. This approach makes the transition from contemplation to action (the gulf before which Plato stalled), combining objectivism and subjectivism, innatism and culturism. This view presents a nature via nurture, eschewing any Romantic yearning to return to some lost natural state as a decadent delusion in order to proceed forwards to the realisation of human nature. The important thing about Rousseau’s General Will is that it combines notions of objective reality and transcendent truths with notions of subjective will - the true and the good are not just given, but come to be willed, and in coming to recognise and will the true and the good, and come together in agreement to live by laws in which we have had a hand in making, conforming ourselves to the true and the good, human beings achieve freedom and happiness in an authentic public community that combines autonomy, solidarity, and authority.
Science, Politics, and Democracy
To come to the specific point at issue.
You have to be careful with questions of certainty and uncertainty, knowledge and judgement, fact and value. Mixing these up offers an escape route to those who have a vested interest in evading and denying the truths revealed by science on environmental questions, precisely on account of their institutional, material and practical implications.
How this works is revealed by the words of Christopher Caldwell, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, who declares that “with questions of global warming, the problems of credibility are already large, even without fresh incitements to politicization.” That statement involves two things that need to be distinguished and carefully delineated:
1) it implies that the science behind climate change and global heating is contentious, suffering from ‘credibility.’ This is not so. There is near unanimous consensus that global heating is due entirely to human causes. Here is an attempt to create uncertainty where there is a degree of certainty. I’d go further than this reference to ‘human,’ too, and refer specifically to carboniferous capitalism as a global heat machine. Deniers know the truth of this, and understand keenly the political threat implicit in the science on climate change. They have been alive to this from the first and have openly accused environmentalists of being socialists in the guise of science. Unfortunately, environmentalists have displayed much less political insight and consciousness here and have insisted on taking their stand on science, repeating the science over and again, rejecting any political intent and motivation on their part, wasting their time and talent. This is where the second point kicks in;
2) the statement implies that the whole issue of climate change is not science but politics. Cue the defensive response which involves climate scientists and campaigners in a rejection of politics and a restatement of science. That amounts to a political self-immolation on the part of environmentalists. This is the very thing which climate deniers have sought to achieve – it serves to keep environmentalists from properly engaging on the field of practical reason (politics and ethics), the field of human will, motivations, and actions – the place where people get moving and things get done. The consequence of that depoliticization is that the climate campaign is rendered ineffective, disarmed, and safe. All it can do is keep restating the science and the facts in the hope that, somehow, without political, social, and institutional mediation and force, the ‘non-negotiable’ and ‘unarguable’ case for climate change comes to be acted upon. With no connection to the springs and means of action, it won’t, not in a collective sense with respect to social structures and economic systems.
'Her radical approach is at odds with democracy.'
The sharp antithesis of theoretical reason (science, the knowledge of the objective world/nature) and practical reason (politics/ethics), involves environmentalism in a political battle that it lacks the resources to win. It can win on the science, but human beings are social beings as well as natural beings, and live in a political world of power, conflict, resources, and interests. If physics trumps politics on the level of natural reality, then politics wins hands down every time on the political terrain. Either way, it is an utterly false opposition and needless battle. The failure to bring theoretical reason and practical reason into their proper relation, recognizing and respecting the legitimate claims and functions of each sphere, will ensure eco-catastrophe and the collapse of civilization. Instead of being worried about accusations of ‘politicization’ and thus fighting shy of politics, the environmental movement has to be much more effective in the political realm by indicating how the truths and facts of the human interchange with nature pan out in terms of social relations, law, authority, control, distribution of resources, power and how these take organisational and institutional forms within viable transition strategies. Only by engaging that terrain properly will it be possible to devise a practicable and realizable ‘ought to be’ on the basis of what we know objectively about the ‘is,’ an ‘ought’ that is possible, necessary, desirable, and capable of commanding the active support of sufficient numbers of people to bring it about.
Promoting uncertainty with respect to the findings of climate science is a classic denier trope. It also fits with ‘free’ market economics, as one of Hayek’s key arguments against the top-down bureaucratic planning of socialist command economies. To contend that there is near scientific consensus on human-made climate change here is to miss the point. There is a consensus on the science, and any doubt about scientific findings here remain open to scrutiny and testing. There are no credible alternative explanations for global heating. And to anticipate a further red-herring criticism, we know that something isn’t true in science simply because there is a consensus: the consensus on climate change is as the result of a wealth of good sound science.
And we can be specific: global heating is human-made with respect to modern techno-urban industrial capitalism. The annoying thing here is that the climate deniers have a much keener awareness of the political implications of climate change than those seeking to raise public awareness of the crisis in the climate system. The deniers have seen the threat to the status quo in politics and economics from the very first, and have openly accused the environmental movement of being socialist and communist. That has been met with a denial, not only of socialism and communism, but also of politics. That denial betrays a basic scientism that lies at the heart of environmentalism, which is the source of its ineffectiveness in winning the hearts and minds of citizens on the political terrain. You won’t win in politics if you are only armed with science. Claims of necessity in politics have been unpersuasive and usually breed scepticism and resistance. The sharp antithesis between science and politics/ethics and between fact and value makes it easier for those concerned to obstruct climate action to confine environmentalism within the realm of passive truth, detached from the means of expression and action and thereby rendered impotent. The more that deniers have accused climate campaigners of politicized science, the more that campaigners have shied from the political implications of climate action and depoliticized their campaign. Things have changed recently in this respect, but maybe not as much as people may think. The current wave of protests and demonstrations are manifestly political, but there is a precise meaning of politics here that is being missed. Statements of scientific fact combined with demands for action is not the same thing as a politics that engages with others, solicits and wins active support and consent, mobilizes people around platforms, and argues, negotiates, and dialogues with others with a view to winning majorities which legitimize legislative programmes. Instead, it is a non-politics, a politics on ice. And it allows those seeking to stall action to counter effectively, making the claims that climate campaigners are anti-democratic in seeking to circumvent conventional political and legal channels by going over the heads of the electorate to coerce democratically elected governments into action (go try it in Russia, China, Brazil, Indonesia and India, comes the demand from those concerned to highlight such pressure as a bullying that presumes the good nature of the bullied). They also strike effectively against calls for degrowth, portraying this commitment as something which will bring about the collapse of the economic system to create an economic wasteland that threatens the wealth and livelihood of millions. If you are demanding system change, then you have to engage in a systemic analysis, know what it is you are changing from and transitioning to in terms of investment, employment, motives, and the provision of goods and services, relations of production, distribution, and consumption and, having done that, solicit not only the support but the active participation of individuals as citizen agents and economic agents. That’s a big ask. It’s not the work of a summer’s day. It is a long-term project of civilizational change at a time when the onus is on short-term actions to save the civilization we have. There has to be a twin-track approach by which the short and the long term mesh here.
I am not encouraged by the extent to which observations such as these, presented in terms of the case for socialism, have been met with the curt response that socialism is merely the counterpart to capitalism as two sides of the same industrial system. I read those demanding climate action claiming that nature doesn’t care whether capitalism or socialism prevails. That is precisely the politically and sociologically illiterate claim I have been concerned to criticise, because it is tantamount to environmentalists saying that they don’t care about the nature of political and social organisation. That indicates precisely what this kind of environmentalism is missing – a motivational dynamo, social purchase, and institutional teeth. The social relations mediating and organising the human relation to nature is precisely what is at issue here, identifying both the cause of the problem with respect to exploitative and extractive capitalist relations and its solution with respect to collaborative, respectful, and planful relations. To say that the determination of the precise relation to nature doesn’t matter merely indicates the political-economic blindspot that ensures the failure of environmentalism as politics. Environmental crisis and its resolution is not exclusively nor even mainly a scientific and technical issue. The grip of scientism, the belief that all things can be reduced to science, holds environmentalism in a grip that will prove fatal.
The failure of many environmentalists to establish the proper relations between knowledge, know-how, government, policy, law, action, social interests, values, ideals is curious given the extent to which interactive cooperation and the interconnection of all things is central to ecology. There is no reason at all why an interimbrication of a natural and social ecology shouldn’t be easy to accomplish. It is in light of this failure that those seeking to stall climate action are able to strike hard. Caldwell thus makes the familiar case for delaying action on climate change: “Climate change is a serious issue. But to say, ‘We can’t wait,’ is to invite a problem just as grave.” This is a sophisticated form of denial, because it concedes that climate change is a serious problem. It has to concede that point, because it is now glaringly obvious. The climate crisis that we were once told was a mere alarmist threat ‘made up’ for political reasons is now upon us. The stalling in the past has brought the problem upon us. The procrastination penalty we now have to pay will merely get bigger as time passes.
But we can’t resolve this issue by stating that the likes of Caldwell are simply wrong on this and that ‘we must act.’ Who is ‘we’, where does the burden for acting fall, and what actions are to be undertaken. This is where demands for climate actions tend to become vague and confused. There are plans and policies and transition strategies – which are to be selected and by whom? What are the means of implementation?
Let’s presume that the scope and scale of the climate crisis that is upon us is as great as climate scientists and campaigners argue. We can make that presumption because it is backed by a wealth of evidence so great and so consistent over time as to be overwhelming. But here comes the difficult bit. Nothing, absolutely nothing, follows from that recognition in terms of the precise political, institutional, and economic forms of action. Vagueness in this respect allows those seeking to obstruct the action needed to address the climate crisis to intervene, confuse, and paralyse as in the past. Take the question of energy infrastructures: do we go 100% renewable or is there a role for nuclear in the mix? The battles rage on that question. Do we push for a green industrial revolution or do we abandon industrialism entirely for permaculture? There are more conflicts here. And these are fairly straightforward technical issues compared to political questions concerning citizen expectations with respect to material life and the provision of goods and services.
Necessity is never a compelling argument in politics. Necessity is the tyrant’s plea. To say that the evidence for climate change is compelling (and it is) and therefore ‘we must act,’ is to say nothing politically and institutionally – it says nothing about the means and mechanisms of action, the social forms of the sustainable society, the democratic organs of social control, social support and active consent. All that we have are radical demands levelled by active, organised minorities upon untransformed governmental institutions and economic systems. Deniers can be accused of seeking to distract attention from the growing intensity of the climate crisis upon us. They may well be. But if they are, then their effectiveness lies in pointing to a political and institutional vacuum at the heart of the climate campaign. To oppose scientific knowledge to such stalling here is ineffective, simply because the issue is a political and not a scientific one. To ask governments to legislate a degrowth economy by removing the central accumulative dynamic from the capital economy betrays a political illiteracy that is breath-taking. Governments are embedded within a regime of accumulation and must facilitate that process of accumulation as a condition of their own power, resources, and popularity/legitimacy. Government is not a public domain responsive first and foremost to democratic persuasion and rational and moral appeal. That has to be made clear, inviting as it does accusations that environmentalism is ‘veering in a socialist direction’ (as one perceptive (!) environmentalist commented on my work). If you can’t escape the constricting labels and abuse of your political opponents and go running scared of their accusations, then you simply lack the nerve and nous to constitute a new social order. Just ask government to do it for you. But remember, as you do, many others are also pressing their demands on government.
There are two issues being conflated here: 1) the immediate actions which existing institutions must take to avert catastrophic climate crisis and 2) the long term institutional transformation attendant upon ‘system change, not climate change.’ With respect to the former, in politics we have no option but to start where we are and, in the absence of alternate institutions, have no option but to press urgent demands through existing institutions. In the end, the same problems will keep returning without the widespread transformation envisaged by the latter. The challenge is to undertake a twin track approach which combines this short term with a long term transformative project.
The science on this is indeed crystal clear: global carbon emissions must be cut drastically by 2030 in order to avert the worst effects of even moderate global warming. I leave the numbers to others, because so much of this seems like plucking numbers out of the air and multiplying them by a factor of whatever. I think we are on course for a 2C temperature increase, and I think that’s a very modest claim. It could be that 4C is already baked in. I’m more interested in the politics and economics of this question, which are the great invariables whose precise nature is shaped by human action or inaction. The figures suggest very strongly to me that the climate deniers are right – that such ambitions imply a curtailment of mechanisms of extraction, exploitation, and accumulation so severe as to constitute a revolutionary socialist subversion … And that suggests very strongly to me that the Eco-socialists are right. And it tells me that the real delay here is among those who still think that it is possible to tame the capital system through a little green reforming within and through prevailing institutions. We have done the greenwash and the green capitalism, only to discover what would have been patently obvious to any Marxist and socialist – the growth imperatives of the capital economy are inherently destructive with respect to the social and natural ecology.
There’s a big call to be made here. In making the case for socialist transformation I was dismissed recently as an ‘extremist’ and told that ‘left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.’ The implication of that criticism is that a legislative and regulative approach to emissions will serve to render the capital system ecologically benign, leaving us to carry on consuming and growing with no collapse in standards of living. That’s a reasonable argument that everyone with a stake in the status quo can agree with. People like me are merely putting right-minded people off environmentalism. Note, though, there is not a word from such environmentalists about the fundamental inequalities that are currently tearing the social fabric apart, not to mention the rampant consumerism and egoism tearing the moral fabric apart, the powerlessness and the hopelessness issuing in violence of all kinds. And note, too, not a word about the debt-ridden, unstable economy that is eating society apart from within and sent entire nations into penury. All is not well with the present economic system, even before we consider its environmental impact.
My criticisms of environmentalism here are not a rejection of environmentalists on account of their being radical, but express an awareness that they are not being anything like radical enough. Put simply, their demands for action are not backed by institutional and organisational and political force. The demands are thus idealistic and utopian in being unattached to the means of action and realization. The inevitable result is that some demands will come to be canalized through governmental institutions and suitably modified and distorted to fit the capital system; the rest will be marginalised and suppressed.
Political Struggle
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian claims that climate deniers know that “the jig is almost up” and that both science and public opinion is firmly behind Greta Thunberg on this. He may well be right. But I repeat my point with respect to truth being confined within a passive radicalism in the absence of appropriate and effective means of action. Science is science and checks itself. The arguing with the science is done by the science. As for the public being behind Greta, I’d simply say that good people are in agreement with good things, and that statements of principle can be so general as to command a common assent that, practically, is worthless. Environmental destruction is bad and we should believe in good things and so on and so forth. I’m disinclined to get excited over statements of such generality and confess to an irritation that so many can respond so positively to statements that say so little. The devil – and disagreement – is in the detail. The important agreement that changes the game comes here. The question is how, politically and institutionally, we are to deliver through the interpenetration of scientific truth and democratic will. Fail to answer that question practically and we will remain in a stand-off between abstract and passive positions, which itself is merely a continuation of the delay sought by the deniers from the first. In the delay, the constant crisis mode of environmental campaigning will become tiring; the public itself will soon tire of permanent crisis, and the climate fatigue we have seen from the public in the past will kick in again, this time possibly taking the form of climate surrender and hopelessness. I doubt the issue will go away this time though, because climate change is upon us and is certain to get worse. The impacts will be physical and tangible. I’m concerned with the vitality of the springs of action, though. The view that climate crisis is so great that we only have so much time left to deal with it can only be employed so many times before its effects wear off. I have a book by Bill McGuire entitled Seven Years to Save the Planet. I took the book very seriously indeed. It was detailed with a mass of evidence concerning the entire planetary ecology. The book was written more than a decade ago. Such claims have been many over the decades. At some point, people either stop taking such claims seriously – the deadlines come and go and the world doesn’t end – or see the situation as already beyond hope.
There is another aspect to this I want to comment on. Chakrabortty points out that climate deniers are “being nastier, more abusive and more personal” and trying to push “a culture war to cover up for its paucity of evidence and arguments.” There is a danger of missing the real reason why climate deniers are being effective here. And there is a danger of missing precisely what it is that environmentalism lacks in order to be effective.
I have seen criticisms of Greta Thunberg which are truly sickening, and which may come to rebound big-time on those making them. They deserve to. But they may not, for the reasons I have been giving throughout this piece. Necessity is not an argument. Assert power as unanswerable science and you will breed resistance. Chakrabortty accuses climate deniers as trying to push “a culture war to cover up for its paucity of evidence and arguments.” This view is complacent, in that it presumes that a wealth of evidence and arguments firmly grounded in science will suffice to bring political victory. The ‘culture war’ that Chakrabortty refers to is in fact a political war, and politics is about much more than science, truth, and knowledge. The victory here cannot be presumed but has to be won, and won by engaging individuals as citizens and earning their support and consent. Fail to do that, and it will be relatively easy for political enemies to denounce the demands for sweeping change as reckless, the talking over people as an elitist ordering containing totalitarian potentials, the legislative and regulative agenda as burdensome and repressive, and the Green economy as a threat to income and employment. All of those concerns have to be addressed and countered with viable, plausible and popular alternatives. The good news is that it can be done. The ecological society will be a good place to live. Bring people the good news instead of attempting to coerce them with the bad.
The existence of a climate crisis says absolutely nothing about how society is to deal with that crisis through politics, policies, laws, and economic systems. ‘You cannot ignore the science,’ says Greta. On the crisis in the climate system you certainly cannot ignore the science. But climate denial has never been about the science. The arguments over the science have always been a phony war. The real war is taking place in the political world. And to the extent that environmentalists are still arguing over and insisting on the science instead of working out the political and organisational implications of ecological transition and the eco-society indicates the extent to which they have yet to engage the political terrain properly. There are Green parties, of course, and they have been winning seats and doing good work from council level to national and international level. In government they have also come to find what socialist and social democratic parties found long ago in office – political power is secondary and derivative and constrained by the systemic imperatives of the capital economy.
The personal attacks are inevitable. The outrage serves to portray one’s political opponents as thoroughly reprehensible people. It’s a game. No one gets a free hit and free ride in politics. We can express outrage at the vituperative nature of these attacks, and make plain the sheer nastiness of those determined to keep hitting the till for private gain on the planet until the whole ecology unravels and collapses. It would be better to avoid that outcome. And to do that, it would be wise to note the criticisms of circumventing democracy and the political sphere by the attempts to use science to dictate truths to governments and citizens. That may well prove an effective criticism in the absence of a distinctive politics that seeks to engage and persuade citizens and forge a new eco-public. Don’t give your political opponents ample opportunity to criticize by issuing demands for action which are institutionally vague, politically dictatorial, and lacking in active consent and support.
'Her radical approach is at odds with democracy.'
I would suggest more attention is paid to the accusations that climate radicalism is at odds with democracy and take the opportunity to integrate climate demands with the notion of an Eco-Republic. The genuine public community this entails stands in sharp contradistinction to the hollowed out state of capitalist society and the way it serves as a surrogate for private business and financial interests.
There is a big promotion of the issue of climate change in the news media, both print and television. People may hope that the message that climate change is real and is happening will get through to galvanize the public and induce governments to act. There may well be an impact in all these areas, but I suspect that any changes that result will fall far short of the transformations required. I argue this for a number of reasons. In the first place, the number of actual climate deniers is relatively small. Most people accept the reality of climate change. That’s a passive acceptance for the most part and doesn’t necessarily translate into active environmental citizenship, either on a personal or a collective and political level. So there is scope for galvanising the public into action here. In the second place, climate communication may serve to turn a passive awareness into active compliance with environmental actions already underway. That will have an impact. But we know that even with complete compliance, these measures alone can never sum to the scale of climate retrenchment needed with respect to carbon emissions. In the third place, then, there remains that need for profound institutional and structural transformation with respect to the social system as a whole. And that brings me back to the first two points. Those involved in active denial are working for a class who have succeeded in institutionalising and entrenching their power within existing institutional arrangements. Their resistance to the message of climate politics is only superficially a rejection of science and is fundamentally a rejection of the substantial social transformations involved in responding to climate crisis. Such people will never be persuaded by reason and evidence and morality. Instead, they will argue back, and forcefully, that fact and value support their case for capitalism as the system which has liberated most people from poverty than any other, provides material goods of such quantity that environmentalists complain about the excesses of consumer society, and which has provided the material support for the extension of political liberty, formal equality, and democratic governance. I can argue the corporate capture of the public sphere, they can argue back that it is open to the people to vote otherwise. The biggest struggles in history, Hegel argued, were not the struggles of right against wrong but the struggles of right against right. I suggested above that Chakrabortty may well be complacent in accusing climate deniers of seeking to wage a ‘culture war’ as a result of having a paucity of scientific evidence on their side. That culture war is simply normal politics, and struggles in the political world are settled by much more than truth. If you think I am claiming that truth doesn’t matter, then go back and re-read until you have grasped the point about bringing truth and will into relation. The view that truth trumps all things and is non-negotiable is the basis for an utterly inept politics. You can know everything there is to know and still fail to communicate.
The current wave of climate publicity seems largely tangential in that it is addressed to the bulk of people who have long since accepted the reality of climate change. It may galvanize the public and turn passive acceptance of the science into an active demand that government act upon it. To that extent it has a use. But it only brings us back to where we already are – the entrenched class of expropriators, exploiters, and emitters who have their hands on the levers of power and decision making as well as in the till. That entrenched power is important when it comes to winning any culture war and political struggle. The expectation seems to be that governments will act against such a class under pressure from a mass electorate making demands for climate action. Whilst this is possible, it seems somewhat fanciful and flies in the face of all that we know of what Ralph Miliband called The State in Capitalist Society. The capital system is not a public domain amenable to democratic persuasion and rational and moral appeal, but a regime of accumulation. The role of government within such a regime is not to do the bidding of the electorate but to manage the demands of the citizen body whilst facilitating the process of accumulation. To complicate matters further, the individuals composing the electorate are also workers and consumers themselves with a vested interest in the health of the capital economy. Unless you have created a social movement aiming at an alternative economic order, people will look to government to secure and preserve the health of ‘the economy,’ that slippery euphemism for capitalism. If the issue resolves into economy vs ecology, then it is easy to see governments choosing the economy and gaining mass support in the making of that choice. At some point the demands for climate action will issue in a direct challenge to the mechanisms of investment, accumulation, and valorisation. At that point, the movement for change will have to have the strategy, the politics, the organisational capacity, and the popular agency to move forwards to institute an alternative society and economy, or it will have to retreat and submit to the parameters of existing society – parameters that we know to be implicated in causing the climate crisis. At this point, the question comes down to the agency of change, the structural and organisational capacity to act, and the sanctions that may be applied against the entrenched class of free-riders.
Eco-Authoritarianism and the Possible Disjunction Between Truth and Willing
I just have a terrible feeling of a deja vu destined to recur on an escalating scale until collapse comes. Those concerned about the environmental issues confronting the modern world should put aside their evident disdain of politics and take the ecological transformation of ‘the political’ seriously as a mutual re-education. If the conventional political sphere has to change, then so, too, must environmentalism determine to engage in politics as politics, and not merely seek to speak science to politics and people and expect obeisance.
When I first became involved in Green politics, I was soon made aware of the accusation from mainstream politicians, not all right wing conservatives, that Greens were ‘eco-fascists’ dictating unpalatable policies to politics. That particularly applied to population but found expression too in the taste for authoritarian politics, legislation, taxation, and regulation, saddling the population with burdens for the good of the environment and, hence, indirectly, for their own good. Later, reading further, I became aware of a very right-wing and authoritarian strain to ecology, with philosophical roots going back to Malthus and Smuts. I have sought to challenge this tendency to eco-authoritarianism head-on in my writings. I would refer people here to The Coming Ecological Revolution; Of Gods and Gaia; and Being at One. In the latter, I refer to William Ophuls’ explicit eco-authoritarianism and his open embrace of a politics that dictates the truth to people. In Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977), Ophuls argues that only a government possessing great powers to constrain individual behaviour in the ecological common interest is capable of dealing effectively with the tragedy of the commons, overcoming the short-term calculations of utility that lead individuals to destroy their environment. Ophuls argues that ethical change is not only insufficient, it may well be irrelevant when it comes to resolving the environmental problems we face:
Individual conscience and the right kind of cultural attitudes are not by themselves sufficient to overcome the short-term calculations of utility that lead men to degrade their environment. Real altruism and genuine concern for posterity may not be entirely absent, but they are not present in sufficient strength to avert the tragedy. Only a government possessing great powers to regulate individual behaviour in the ecological common interest can deal effectively with the tragedy of the commons.
Ophuls 1977: 154
Ophuls jumps too far and too quickly from this awareness of the inadequacy of moral change alone to the case for authoritarian government. It’s supplying that missing democratic mediation with which I am concerned in this piece. I had thought that environmentalism had, in the years since 1977, cured itself of its itch for absolute knowledge and power, its tendency to switch from scientific knowledge to certainty to political authoritarianism. The real problem to be addressed here is the problem of how we can establish a government out of a pluralism of interests that serves the long term general interest of all. The problem relates to the tension between the realm of theoretical reason and the realm of practical reason, between, that is, the specialist and expert languages of science and philosophy and the judicious temper of politics and the deliberations of a democratic political community. At the heart of this problem is the possible asymmetry and disjuncture between truth and willing – between scientific fact, moral principle, and pure reason, on the one hand, and democratic willing and practical reason, on the other. My work within the field of ‘rational freedom’ has been concerned with building the bridges that mediate the transition and interchange between these realms.
I consider it somewhat disheartening, then, to find conservative critics being able to criticize the environmental movement on account of its alleged authoritarian, dictatorial, and anti-democratic tendencies. It should be easy to counter by reference to the corporate capture of the state under capitalism. But that would risk a degeneration into comparing which form of anti-democracy is superior to the other. I have yet to hear the old accusation of ‘ecofascism,’ but the words ‘extremism,’ ‘absolutism,’ and ‘authoritarianism’ are in the air. And these designations stem precisely from the failure to develop and sustain an inherently and actively democratic eco-citizenship within a genuine public. I’m reading articles by outraged conservative critics accusing environmentalists of being enemies of individual liberty and democracy, and the capitalist economy which is the material support of both. We can accuse this outrage of being manufactured and hypocritical, but that accusation cuts both ways – it is one political platform defending itself against a rival political platform, each accusing the other of base motives, each accusing the other of being undemocratic. Those without a dog in the fight should be able to recognize the rhetorical style by now, it is familiar. And since that is the case we should also be able to guess how this latest entry should pan out in time – as yet another self-cancellation. If we don’t break this cycle of constant negation in politics with the creation of a genuine politics and democratic public community, then one day it will end in a mutual self-annihilation.
The puritanical approach to individual lifestyle and the identification of climate action with punitive, repressive measures of curtailment is unappealing. If they must be done, then they have to be accompanied by an appealing politics, a participatory politics in which we create a society of volunteers. We need to create and sustain a social movement buttressed by explicitly political ideals of an alternative society, themselves buttressed by a character-forming discipline rooted in work, family, community, and place. Without that, the punitive and regulative approach will prove unappealing and generate a libertarian backlash that will be fatal to climate politics. In his book Science and the Modern World, philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead writes in praise of Voltaire, saying that ‘he hated injustice, he hated cruelty, he hated senseless repression, and he hated hocus-pocus. Furthermore, when he saw them, he knew them.’ Whitehead goes on to point out, though: ‘But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants.’ If we are to inspire people to create the alternate future society, we need to be about more than repression, curtailment, inhibition, and abolition, purging our ecological sins in the expectation that what remains will be ecologically pure and healthy. What will remain will be the capital system and the diabolic formula that private vices sum to public virtue. We cannot engage in the politics of Nurse Ratched and expect to be popular; nor will the politics of hygiene and disinfectant work. A state in which each is constantly monitoring the carbon footprint of the other lacks the warm, affective ties of a genuine community, and fails to create and sustain the solidarity of a genuine associative democracy. Instead, we enter a world of ecological sin, punishment and purgation with sanctimonious, holier than thou, self-righteous prigs as individual and even more tyrannical gods of judgement and vengeance. That society will be insufferable. It kills joy and hope, kills enthusiasm dead. Where there is power there is resistance, wrote Michel Foucault. That severe ecological regime will provoke a yearning for liberation. Instead of cultivating ecological virtues and encouraging people into them, it will coerce and bread resistance. And I write this as someone who argues for the recovery of the virtues as against a libertarianism that seduces individuals with promises of freeing them from their inhibitions.
That is the very dubious dynamic at the hair-shirted end of environmentalism. Many are prepared to make extensive changes in their own lives for the good of planetary health. Good on them. The problems come when some of these seek to coerce others through government and law to make the same changes and sacrifices, without realizing a) that different personal and social circumstances bring differential burdens of such lifestyles; b) the success or otherwise of such behaviour depends upon its voluntary nature, itself a product of character formation; and c) is itself a form of climate denialism to the extent that it becomes the exclusive focus of environmental change, to the neglect of the much more important and more effective institutional and structure transformations.
There is no antithesis here, no alternate choices between the personal and the social and institutional. To the extent that a disjunction opens here, there is a real risk of a passive radicalism channelled through the abstract communities of existing institutions. By that, I refer to the politics of permanent protest in which demands for change and action which should be undertaken through the organisational forms of those making them are – in the absence of those forms – levelled on ‘government.’ Government is certainly necessary. Climate change is a global problem requiring global solutions. There is a clear need for concerted action across nations via a comprehensive, just, and effective framework. These large-scale ambitious projects and programmes of climate action are certainly necessary. These, however, will only work to the extent that they are grounded in proximal communities, practical reasoning, communities of character and practice, and love of place. The problem with an environmental politics as active, organized minorities seeking to coerce change through permanent protest is that it reduces to the demand that ‘somebody somewhere do something.’ The point is that those insisting, loudly and actively, on the need to address anthropogenic climate change are adamant that ‘somebody,’ ‘somewhere else,’ do ‘something.’ Government and business are being issued with orders to drastically reduce carbon emissions. I’d be very careful of issuing the demand that ‘something should be done’ to government. What, precisely, that ‘something’ is, beyond the general instruction to reduce carbon, is not clear. Governments, subject to all manner of pressures and influences by way of money and power, will fill the blanks in in ways we may well not like. Other than that, I don’t see a viable politics that is capable of winning supporters and constructing their will and capacity to constitute an alternative social order. It seems that government will do it all, setting the framework for business to make the transition. In effect, it is an environmental reformism. It may have the same level of success as the old social democratic reformism, but will eventually run into the same structural constraints. That was the reason we could never attain socialism. The loss of socialism is a big loss, I would say. But survivable. The failure of environmental reformism, however, will bring a loss with respect to the planetary ecology that will not be survivable.
Nature Worship and Liberal Decadence
I am currently reading of members of Extinction Rebellion falling out with each other. Some wanted to use drones to disrupt the flights of holiday makers, others were outraged and objected, not merely because such a move amounts to an act of violence against others, but would also disrupt their own plans to fly out and enjoy themselves in various parts of the world. The right wing media love to be outraged in this way, quickly expressing their horror at all the waste left behind at Glastonbury, not to mention the hypocrisy of Emma Thompson flying first class across the world to deliver a message to us plebs to stop enjoying ourselves so much and cut our carbon footprint. But my experience of social media is that most people will express a genuine sadness at the foul and depraved way in which human beings behave. If they don’t quite go so far as to confess their own ecological sins daily, they are quick to confess the sins of others and demand that the greedy and stupid among us come to see the error of their ways and change. For the good of the planet. I don’t know if people are genuinely contrite, or whether they are using the Royal ‘we’ when they bemoan the extent to which ‘we’ the people are selfish, destructive, and wasteful oafs. People have been offsetting their guilt for years; they feel so bad in committing their sins that they believe that the God they don’t believe exists will turn a blind eye to their carrying on committing them. It’s the age of a pick-and-mix narcissistic spiritualism, the age in which consumers in the marketplace of morals make the proud boast that ‘I’m spiritual but not religious.’ To me, that sounds like the self-absorbed boasting about what nice and caring persons they really are, believing in all nice things for all people, but caring not to be bound and constrained by the raw realities of living a life of service and sacrifice to something other than the god-like ‘I.’ I hold it in contempt. And I’m not alone. Robert Winston, Britain’s leading fertility expert and practising Jew, says much the same thing in his book The Story of God (2005):
There is a rather selfish quality to some New Age religion, a focus on individuals getting what they want…. However, a cursory glance at the titles on offer in an average high street bookshop suggests that much New Age religion is focused upon individuals, not on society: Empowering Your Life With Dreams; The Alchemy of Voice; Transform and Enrich Your Life Through The Power Of Your Voice; The Power of Oneness — Live The Life You Choose…
Moreover, some New Age religions promise not just happiness, peace, fulfilment and so on, but often material wealth.
New Age religion is a kind of 'spiritual Thatcherism', stressing both the power of individual choice and the ultimate desirability of worldly success.
You did not have to be there to perceive, most vividly, that hell was possible on earth, and that there could be little more terrible than man's inhumanity to man. The wrath of God, accordingly, began to seem less of a threat than the possibility of a man-made Third World War or a fresh Holocaust. Again, in steps New Age religion, providing a revised format for the way we envisage our higher powers, stressing them as kindly, compassionate, forces for good.
Winston 2005 ch 9
I would tie these observations in with the cult of ‘Nature’ and Nature worship observable at the ‘deep green’ end of environmentalism.
Some environmentalists take great delight in insisting that Nature is bigger than humanity, that Nature, as revealed by science, trumps politics (note the corollary, that the voice of scientists trumps the citizen voice), that Nature is ‘boss’ and that Nature cares nothing of human concerns. It sounds like Nietzchean ressentiment to me, an expression of a desire for vengeance on the part of those losing out in the political struggle, presented in the guise of a punishing, pitiless Nature. Nietzsche was very big on this pitiless character of nature. It wasn’t his god, though. In The Fear of Freedom (1960), Erich Fromm exposes the worship of Nature as a subservience to a vast and ruthless power. He notes how those lacking in power and lacking the capacity to exercise for freedom seek to ground their will for power in the laws of nature. This also springs from the wish for submission to a power outside oneself, as expressed particularly in Hitler's crude popularization of Darwinism. (Fromm 1960 ch 6). The insistence by environmentalists that, in the words of James Lovelock, that ‘it is our duty to survive’ by learning how to serve Nature (Lovelock ch 3 2009) savour a great deal of what Erich Fromm writes about Hitler. I make the point not to accuse environmentalism of Nazism – that old trope used by real right wing extremists serving false idols of money and power – but to highlight troubling implications in the facile notion that ‘Nature’ alone is sufficient to serve as an ethic. Fromm wrote The Fear of Freedom in 1960, long before the tendencies to the worship of Nature in certain strains of modern environmentalism. His views have another target. Fromm’s point is that the symbols of the ‘superior power’ that Hitler seeks submission to - God, Fate, Necessity, History, Nature, the symbols have same meaning to him - denote ‘an overwhelmingly strong power.’ (Fromm 1960 ch 6). There seems to be a certain satisfaction of repressed desires not to mention a taste for violence and vengeance in certain celebrations of Mother Nature as a boss about to revenge herself on her aberrant and ungrateful human children.
The explanation of all of this is clear and simple: delusions of progress through men as gods create a wasteland and cause a Romantic yearning to go back to the world we have lost, the pure world that never was. Romanticism turns into decadence in short time. Camile Paglia writes this about the late era of the Roman Empire:
Then and now, worship of the Great Mother in an urban era is decadent. Imperial Romans no longer lived in and by the cycle of nature. The Great Mother went from fertile life force to sadomasochistic sexual persona. She was the ultimate dominatrix. In late Rome, men were passive to history. Decadence is the juxtaposition of primitivism with sophistication, a circling back of history on itself. The Roman Great Mother, with her multiple names and symbols, was heavy with the past. Her pregnancy was curatorial, another Alexandrian museum.
Paglia 2001 ch 4
‘Mother Nature is boss’ is a slogan written on the walls of the modern urban world. It has the stench of decadence, indulgence, cowardice, and despair all over it.
There is a pronounced sense of this feeling in the half-hearted, even contemptuous, engagement with politics. A couple of years ago I characterized it as a ‘naïve cynicism,’ pitching ideals at the high end of innocence so as to invite an inevitable defeat and bring about the very eco-catastrophe that intervention is intended to avert.
Those who promise that ‘Nature’ will have her revenge are those who have lost out in politics and society are seeking to revenge themselves through ‘Nature.’ It’s not ‘Nature’ at all, but a projection that seeks satisfaction by identifying with the destructive environmental consequences of humanity’s self-estrangement as a result of alien mediation. Fromm’s words suggest precisely this reading:
The power which impresses Hitler probably more than God, Providence, and Fate, is Nature. While it was the trend of the historical development of the last four hundred years to replace the domination over men by the domination over Nature, Hitler insists that one can and should rule over men but that one cannot rule over Nature… He ridicules the idea that man could conquer Nature and makes fun of those who believe they may become conquerors of Nature “whereas they have no other weapon at their disposal but an 'idea'". He says that man "does not dominate Nature, but that, based on the knowledge of a few laws and secrets of Nature, he has risen to the position of master of those other living beings lacking this knowledge". There again we find the same idea: Nature is the great power we have to submit to, but living beings are the ones we should dominate.
Fromm 1960 ch 6
Fromm points out the implications:
This instinct of self-preservation leads to the fight of the stronger for the domination of the weaker and economically, eventually, to the survival of the fittest. The identification of the instinct of self-preservation with power over others finds a particularly striking expression in Hitler's assumption that "the first culture of mankind certainly depended less on the tamed animal, but rather on the use of inferior people". He projects his own sadism upon Nature who is "the cruel Queen of all Wisdom", and her law of preservation is "bound to the brazen law of necessity and of the right of the victory of the best and the strongest in this world.”
That passage should be born in mind when discussing the arguments of environmentalist who insist that scientific observations of the workings of Nature is the most important knowledge there is and that it is such knowledge that constitutes the norms of rationality against which human beings should be judged.
Too many environmentalists act out of a belief that Nature is all powerful and that the human species is too ill-adjusted to be worthy of survival.
There are environmentalists who would hit back at my critical views and accuse me of peddling politics in place of environmentalism, and a socialist politics to boot. Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, made has expressed criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez’s much-vaunted “Green New Deal.” He points out that the “Green New Deal” isn’t very green at all. In fact, it amounts to a political attempt to engineer a transfer of wealth and power from the rich to the poor rather than deal with the environment at all. More than that, it is claimed, it merely purports to be such a transfer, even though the intention is for the money to go anywhere but to the poor. A fake establishment environmentalism and a fake establishment radicalism, then. So it is claimed. That’s not my concern here, so I’ll leave investigation of the matter for another time.
The Authoritarian Designs of the Club of Rome
I want to bring the discussion back to the spectre of eco-authoritarianism or eco-fascism. It’s an old spook. The final years of Murray Bookchin’s life were mired in controversy over his courage and commitment in exposing the misanthropy of those whose perspectives threatened to turn ecology into the new dismal science. I’ve read enough to know that Bookchin misrepresented deep green ecology in many respects. I’ve also read enough to know that his emphasis on reason, confederal politics, and social ecology is also the right one, pointing to a missing social, philosophical, and institutional dimension in environmentalism, hence its continuation as a movement incapable of coming in from the margins. It can’t embed power and when it does intervene in politics it does so with a decidedly authoritarian tone. The Limits to Growth published by the Club of Rome in 1972 will be fifty years old shortly. Its alarming predictions of the consequences of pursuing infinite growth on a planet of finite resources have proven to be sadly accurate. Rather than get involved in celebrations of tales of dire prophecies fulfilled, I am more interested in the criticisms of the publication that came at the time by socialists such as Istvan Meszaros. The limitations of a science and technology based environmentalism are never more evident than in The Limits to Growth and its aftermath. There is no critique of political economy in the book, only an overwhelming emphasis on environmental facts and figures, with no attempt to relate the phenomenon of infinite growth to capital’s accumulative dynamic detached from and deaf to the sphere of use values. Over the years I have become accustomed to greens and environmentalists claiming that Marx and Marxists have nothing to say on ecology. That view is so profoundly wrong and ignorant as to betray a definite prejudice that exposes the weak-spot of environmentalism. I analyse this at length in a couple of books from 2018 and suggest readers turn for further enlightenment there.
Marxists like Meszaros argued openly that the ecological crisis is the product of a capital system that systematically pursues exchange values at the expense of the health of use values. Meszaros was arguing this before the Club of Rome issued The Limits to Growth, just as Murray Bookchin argued the environmental despoliation of capitalism before Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The domination of science and technology in the environmental movement has led not merely to a certain contempt for politics, but to a certain neglect of those who have from the first connected the environmental crisis to specific social relations, demanding an effective democratic politics of social transformation. I have ceased responding to environmentalists who continue to equate socialism with the centralised command economy of the Soviet Union and who continue to claim that Marx and Marxists and socialists have nothing and have had nothing to say on ecology. I have long since concluded that such people consider that no-one outside of science and technology circles have any relevant knowledge to contribute to environmentalism. And therein lies the elitist and authoritarian potentials of environmentalism. And its political failures. I thoroughly reject it.
When the fiftieth anniversary of The Limits to Growth arrives in a couple of years, I expect the world to be deluged with a wealth of ‘I told you so’ Jeremiahs whose pain at grim prophecies fulfilled is expressed with a kind of perverse pleasure at having been among the few who warned of the calamity to come. Such people will be vocal on the direst of predictions as having been fulfilled, praising the authors for their insight and courage. At the same time I will lay odds that they will be silent on the incredibly inept politics which followed in the aftermath of The Limits to Growth. These people were evidently not politicians and exhibited a political cluelessness that was breath-taking in the attempt to follow up the findings and respond to the warnings issued in The Limits to Growth. We hear a lot of The Limits to Growth. We hear nothing of the books with which the Club of Rome followed up The Limits to Growth. These books purported to offer a solution to the environmental the problem. The first three books in the series were entitled Mankind at the Turning Point (1975), Reshaping the International Order (1976), and Goals for Mankind (1977). If you have never heard of them, then that is probably because all involved would prefer you not to know of them. These books argued that a politics of the most anti-democratic, elitist, authoritarian stripe would be necessary to avert environmental disaster. The rational solution, determined by scientific analysis of the problems faced by the world, would be for all the nations of the world to hand over the forms of governance and the running of the global economy to an unelected elite of experts, under whose benevolent despotism the institutions of democratic representation would be denuded of all power and turned into mere debating societies, keeping citizens preoccupied with exchanging shadows on the wall while real decision-making power was monopolised by corporate-bureaucratic committees removed from public check and accountability. At a stroke, all the difficult problems of politics and economics are resolved!
We come now to the issue of population and “population control.”
The elites running the “grand green design” since the Club of Rome’s Sir Alexander King began the Limits to Growth study in 1970 knew that green “low energy flux density” sources of energy would constrict global population and that is exactly what they wanted. Sir Alexander King said so much in 1990 when he wrote:
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
Sir Alexander King was, after all just following the lead of UNESCO founder (and Eugenics president) Sir Julian Huxley who wrote in 1946:
“Political unification in some sort of world government will be required… Even though… any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
It’s like the old question of who guards the Guardians had never been asked and would never be asked. As to the question of who appoints the Guardians, just ask who has the money and power to make such appointments. And while you are at it, ask yourself why people of money and power would make such appointments. Anyone who thinks that this is a way out of environmental crisis is a political naif, most certainly useful idiots when it comes to setting up an environmental dictatorship of the officials in the service of the continuation of the capitalist Megamachine.
If you think I’m exaggerated or arguing by way of caricature, I would welcome you to read any or every one of the books for yourself, if you can find them. You can find the idea in other books, mind. That very ideal of the environmental philosopher king, itself a crude and bastardized misreading of Plato’s elaboration of principle in The Republic, has been the wet dream of the west’s ‘neither left nor right’ ‘beyond capitalism and socialism’ environmental ‘independents’ for a long time now. Fifty years on there will be much lamentation and regret about unheeded warnings and missed opportunities in the aftermath of The Limits to Growth. There will be precious little recognition that one of the strongest reasons for failure here was not just the opposition of the possessing class and its support structures in politics, culture and economics, but the fact that the authoritarian, repressive, and anti-democratic agenda laid out by the Club of Rome and this kind of elitist environmentalism was distinctly unappealing and not surprisingly left most people cold. The people were wise on this. I saw John Bellamy Foster’s work on Marxism and ecology being praised recently on social media, and noted the hostile tones of certain environmentalists – ‘where were the socialists when …?’ was one response – I have seen this question asked many times - along with references praising the work of environmentalists who have over the years called attention to the ecological crisis to come if humanity didn’t mend its ways. It’s fair to acknowledge the work of environmentalists in raising the alarm here. But the whole notion of a humanity mending its ways is a political and institutional question, and that will involve those old struggles of power, interests, resources and, dare I say it, class. For all of the claims to be engaged in a ‘new politics,’ the struggles we face in politics very much concern the issues of old politics. The idea that these will be resolved by scientific reason and technological workarounds is fanciful. But I wish you well. A world of reason would be nice, particularly if it is a world governed by that common moral reason that Kant wrote of.
Climate Crisis and Democracy
Those who think that Marx, Marxism, and socialism have nothing to say on ecology need to read my work on Marx above closely, (and that of Foster and many others, for that matter). Because Marx did emphasize the ecological contradictions of capital, alongside its economic contradictions and democratic contradictions: it’s all the one struggle for the one justice against the one power/ring to rule us all. But I shall answer environmentalists’ questions as to where the socialists were in the 1970s and 1980s: they were organising in their workplaces and their communities to find tooth and nail against a neoliberal agenda designed to crush the forces of labour and restructure power and resources firmly in favour of capital. There is the source of environmental destruction, and the socialists fought it with a serious politics. Can environmentalists, armed with all the science and technology in the world, claim that they are as effective in doing the same? Neither left nor right? Nature doesn’t care whether socialism or capitalism prevails? Trying to win a political struggle without a definite political identity? No wonder all claims are drawn on government and business, no wonder all demands are made to government and business – they are the only available power centres.
I can see real dangers of the Green movement giving governments in hoc to global capital the scientific rationale to institute an environmental austerity that does nothing to save the planet, and everything to preserve capitalist relations intact. A great number of people saw the environmentalism of The Limits to Growth as involving a dismal Malthusianism, and rejected it for that reason.
Hence the bitter and debilitating paradoxes generated by an environmentalism that, instead of a genuine holism that integrates knowing and being, continues to be fractured along the specialisations and antitheses introduced by capitalist modernity, continues to exalt science as the supreme form of knowing, continues to see technology as the principal agency of progress, and continues to devalue politics, will, opinion, norms and values, and culture. The predictions contained in The Limits to Growth were broadly accurate. But life and politics isn’t about predictions. Society isn’t a mechanism full of levers and buttons, employed by humans as robots and cog-workers functioning in service of the Megamachine. The book is accurate, but its precision comes on all the easy things – it’s the human stuff that is the difficult stuff. And it’s for the thrashing out and arguing of the difficult stuff that we have politics, and it is to ensure a semblance of order and unity and respect that we have ethics. Without a politics and ethics worthy of the name, we have the fantasies of would-be global environmentalist philosopher kings.
The bitter irony of this whole predicament is that both sides of this false dichotomy have a substantial part of the truth. It’s just that they also have a substantial part of the error too. The tendency of certain strains of environmentalism to present an eco-authoritarianism to resolve the issues of climate change doesn’t mean that they have the science wrong. They don’t, they have the science right, and if civilization continues to use the atmosphere as a dumping ground for trillions of tonnes of greenhouse gases then there will be catastrophic climate destruction in the future. At the same time, the fact that climate deniers are undoubtedly engaged in trench warfare defending the institutions and mechanisms of capitalism against legislative and regulative encroachment does not mean that it is right to circumvent democracy, coerce government by extraneous pressure, and override the principle of self-assumed obligation. It isn’t right, it is wrong. It is also wrong when this subversion of democracy happens as a result of corporate capture and the external constraint of capital’s systemic imperatives of accumulation …
The solution is to eliminate the false and join the truthful together by supplying the missing mediation between knowledge, know-how, value, will, action, motivation, government, policy. Like I’ve been saying for years and years. Remember me? I’m the poor sod who has written millions of words in order to break the impasse and avoid this entire debacle. I could write a book on my bad experiences trying to get this message across, the contempt, the dismissal, the abuse, the plain indifference. I’ll resist the temptation to quote one of my favourite Liverpool singers, Ian McNabb, who recently claimed that ‘the opposition to the right is so %$£&*% dumb’ to succeed. But, as singers and philosophers lacking any expertise in science and technology, what on earth have we got to offer? I once posted an article on social media on the world’s leading living philosophers. I had a technologist comment that if there are so many philosophers in the world, why is the world in such a mess. I responded by saying that the world has very many more scientists, technologists, engineers, and designers, very many of whom work within the military-industrial Megamachine, and suggested that this went a long way towards explaining why the world is precisely in that mess. He didn’t reply.
The Men as Gods Delusion and The End of the World
I have long ceased to disguise my contempt for those screaming about ‘the end of the world’ being right. This is how it ends when humanity succumbs to the oldest delusion in the book, the ‘men as gods’ delusion. We are made in the image of God, and should aspire to realizing that divinity. If there is anything that could give humans the claim to be as gods, then my money would be on language, song, and music. Least of all I would look at technology. Language, song, and music are our use of our natural, dare I say divine, endowments. Maybe technology, within those ‘limits’ environmentalists speak of, could count. But as the ability to manipulate and coerce nature and people, technology seems more infernal than divine. The world is good, it doesn’t stand in need of technological change and improvement. We don’t need technology to take us somewhere better than we are. Read the opening to Genesis and note how many times God declares the Earth to be good. It must be seven or eight times. God ends by declaring the Earth to be ‘very good.’ But not good enough for some. If something ain’t broke, then let’s keep fixing it until it is. And the wielding of technology to that end is not evidence of divinity.
Of course it ends with ‘the end of the world.’ How else could it have ended? People seem to have thought they had supplanted God through the power of technology, achieving immortality through their machine gods. The end of physical life is no cause for existential crisis on the part of those with religious faith. I find the shrill histrionics here psychologically interesting. It is as if those crying the most about the end of the world really had thought modern humans had supplanted God and that their technological power had given them the ticket to eternal life. Now they risk being orphaned by their machine gods, they cry about the environmental crisis as an ‘existential crisis.’ I think their understanding of an existential crisis is very different to that of a St Augustine or a Kierkegaard. I get the impression that by this they simply mean physical existence, and think nothing at all of the soul and the spirit. And there is the source of the hysteria – the moderns are cut off from the transcendent source and the transcendent end of all things, and the transcendent hope that gives us meaning, purpose, and direction. They are cut off from the true end which orders all things. They are engaged on a destinationless journey in which meaning and value is a mere matter of existential projection and will. Climate crisis and the prospect of ecological catastrophe has just rendered that world of wilful imposition utterly empty and pointless.
A disenchanting science has stripped value and meaning from the universe. There is no God, no design, no purpose, and no end. We are embarked on a journey without destination. We are born, we work and pay taxes, we die. We live in prophetless and godless times, Max Weber wrote. The moderns took this as a liberation, the promise of Heaven on Earth through the technological manipulation of matter and people. And now, close to the final hour, people have found the opposite to be true:
Life is frightened out of its highly enlightened wits by the return of ancient nightmares: the tales of the sorcerer's apprentice, of dwarfs with magic powers. The promise of Heaven for the poor in spirit is understood to mean that, on earth at least, they should be educated into clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell.
Erich Heller The Disinherited Mind
Not that anthropogenic climate change is the end of the world; it is the end of the world of men as gods. The Earth will carry on and could care less. For all of the guff about rejecting God and religion, since all we have is Nature and ‘she needs us,’ Nature could care less about human beings.
Nothing really seems to matter much when your Planet is needlessly collapsing and dying. Big important ideas to base your life upon are in short supply. Pretty much god myths, stuff, and clans are all we got. There is nature. And she needs us.
Atheist materialists mired in misery and despair at the finitude of all things, quel surpris. Anyone who claims that ‘big important ideas to base your life on’ are in short supply is either an ignoramus or a misanthrope. I cite this relentlessly bleak and dreary article as a typical example of the decadence and mush into which the intellect that fall when indulging itself too long at this end of environmentalism as a naturalism. Having been quick to denigrate the ideas of others and demand ‘big ideas,’ I had expected some ‘big’ thinking in this article. Instead, all we get is ‘Nature’ and the elevation of a bleeding obvious and utterly trite observation of the importance of nature to life to high, in fact only, principle. It’s the fact that so many respond to this kind of dreck that intrigues me. I checked this Glen Barry out and discovered a virulent anti-religious bigotry. I note the complete absence of a critique of political economy in his articles. He writes:
There is no god, and god pollution must be resisted if we are to survive. Those who don’t believe superstitious god myths have every right to speak up – at least as much as those promoting a plethora of god myths – as we watch the damage done to ecology, truth, peace, and society by adherence to unknowable fairy tales in an age of science and ecocide.
You can never know my dismay and outrage as society and governments – with innumerable social and ecology crises threatening the very existence of us all – are run by mythical edicts from absent gods rather than by truth, logic, wisdom, and knowledge. There can be no human progress or even survival from ecocide if the bastardized words of mythical ancient carpenters and warlords are all we have to go on.
That's not all that there is to the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that's not all we have to go on, either. So we get rid of God and religion and the environmental crisis ends … Because this global heat machine that goes by the name of industrial capitalism is all in the service of ‘invisible, non-existent gods.’ This character must have been living in a cave, or may merely be locked into outmoded delusions of his own. Because this is the old Enlightenment myth, the myth that science and technology will suffice to build Heaven on Earth. He writes:
We need to stop quibbling about whose invisible god is better and focus upon rational solutions to observed decline in the physical reality surrounding and nurturing us, which is collapsing and dying.
To which I can only ask: where on earth have you been? Charges such as this would make some kind of sense were we living three or four centuries ago. Barry writes as if we are still living in the Age of Faith rather than the age of science, reason, technology, industry, progress, capitalism … This modern world put an end to God and religion a long time ago. Arguments over God have nothing to do with the contemporary crisis. Eco-catastrophe is very much a modern crisis, self-made rational man as the author of his own undoing. Eco-catastrophe is very much the product of the men as gods delusion advocated in these articles by Dr Glen Barry.
‘All we have and need is each other, kindred species, ecosystems, and the biosphere.’ How very benign. Of course, this character has just rubbed me up the wrong way with his bigoted assault. So I shall respond in kind and claim that his assertion of all species living in harmony is eco-la-la. You will find that it is not so easy for human beings to get along with each other by just pointing to and worshipping nature.
‘Nature is my religion.’ I’ve addressed all of this above. It’s not worth another second of my time.
In terms of this kind of naturalism, there is no point to the game of life other than staying in the game. The human species won’t be the first species to go to extinction. Some 99% of all species that have existed have gone extinct. Such is Nature’s way. Humans may well have been destructive, they have been creative too. We were charged from the first to use rather than misuse the gift of free will. That’s what the religious ethic teaches. But we thought ourselves to be clever enough to ditch that restrictive ethic. We don’t need any ‘god myths’ that don’t identify we humans as gods – that is the biggest and most destructive myth of all. Freeing ourselves from moral limits within God in the first instance, humans have proceeded to free themselves from natural limits. The principal agency of this severing of bonds to nature, community, and society has been capital. Capital is the new idol demanding human sacrifices. And so on we go to self-destruction.
The idea that governments and society are run by religion and not by forces and imperatives arising from money and power – both in terms of the direct pressure of the dominant classes and the systemic imperatives of the capital economy – is laughable. Note the presentation of the argument in terms of ‘truth, knowledge, logic, and wisdom,’ and then note the ignorance, the falsehood, and the complete absence of wisdom. The traditions that this character denigrates by caricature offer immense reserves of wisdom. But, of course, wisdom is the last thing the non-wise can see. These ‘atheist ranters’ – I quote - come out in force on social media, where they talk themselves into the belief they are clever by a constant referencing of reason, science, fact, and logic. To prove it, they deride religious believers as backward, stupid, and bigoted and prattle on about ‘invisible friends’ and ‘sky fairies,’ as though such things added anything of substance to the ‘argument.’ Such things are not what religious folk believe in and are not what religious commitment is organised around. But those for whom there is nothing beyond the tangible and observable will, of course, not see it. And in their lack of understanding, they resent that others have something they lack and turn on religion with a zeal, particularly organized religion. They cite a wealth of evidence that religions have been involved in a whole lot of human misery. Hence the statement that religion has been the cause of more trouble on earth than anything. The conclusion follows that if we should just abolish religion all the conflicts would disappear. If I had a pound for every time I have heard that one … Religion is one of many things human beings do. We are being asked to believe that without religion human beings would cease fighting over land, resources, politics, ideas, sport, sex, anything and everything. In making this point to those who claim religion is the source of all conflict and thus conflict would end if there were no religion, I am generally met with the claim that the human species is wretched. I respond back with the view that that is part of the point made by the great religions, the sinful nature of human beings and the need for humility and contrition. The other part is that the condition is not irredeemable. Significantly, those who take their stand on reason, truth, knowledge, and logic can only give us the hard facts of life with respect to a wretched human nature. If you think that truth, knowledge, and logic will alter that state then you are a fool. Human beings are meaning-seeking, symbol-making creatures. They are indeed the most rational of beings. Human beings will fight over symbols and murder for principles. The reference to the evil that human beings do, in all aspects of life, points to the human reprobation that is redeemed by the grace and love of God. Remove God and there is no redemption, only reprobation. No wonder the atheist materialist irreligious zealots are so hopeless and miserable.
Characters like these actually debase the atheist position, insofar as atheism concerns the affirmation of life without the need for extraneous invented principles. Their gross simplifications and caricatures suggest that they don’t actually have much faith at all in their position and know it to be uninspiring, so they spend most of their time droning their ignorant, bigoted persona into their keyboards, as if taking part in some rebel enlightenment. They just make people wonder why, if life and nature are so wonderful, and why, if all we have is kinship with each other and with other beings and bodies, they are possessed with such loathing. One could almost believe that it is a projection of self-loathing, itself the product of a self that, in abandoning God, has curved in on itself and found only the emptiness within.
I am struck by the bleak, hopeless, and misanthropic tone of such writing. And I am struck by the sheer quantity of it. In one sense, it is entirely predictable. Modern disenchanting science not only stripped the universe of value, purpose, design, and meaning – and certainly of any reason and intelligence associated with God – it turned the world over to technological manipulation in order to serve human ends. Voices from within the world of modern science most certainly made the promise to create Heaven on Earth and turn the world into the ‘Empire of Man.’ Boyle was far from alone in making this promise. Ironically, those who are the most virulent in denouncing religion for all that is wrong in the world still make this promise, little realizing that the Hell on Earth we are witnessing is their promise fulfilled – that’s the only way the ‘men as gods’ delusion can end.
The response back is to affirm through word and deed that “God is.” This is to emphasize the reality of God through action and practice. What critics of religion still fail to grasp is that religion is not an intellectual proposition to be passively analysed, dissected and proven or otherwise; it is an ethos, a practical, a way of life, an ethic that draws individuals out of themselves to expand their being in relation to something greater than they are, God, society, and the universe. The Love of God is an invitation to human beings to fall in love outwards. It should be no surprise that those cut off from that love should retreat within themselves until their heart is confined in the prison of the ego, becoming colder and more bitter in that condition of estrangement and isolation. When such people do look outwards, they project a bile and self-loathing upon others and upon the world. It’s not just believers who are on the receiving end. Human beings in general are the target. And, sinners as we are, there is never a shortage as to why we may righteously loathe humans. The world, too. Not Nature, the new god, of course. But politics, society, civilization, anything and everything that human beings do is a plague and pox on the planet.
By living in thought and action on the premise that ‘God is,’ the presence of God is felt. God is known in relationship. God will never be found in the conceptual prisons of the mind. Pope emeritus Benedict XVI writes: “In this way the sentence ‘God is’ ultimately turns into a truly joyous message, precisely because He is more than understanding, because He creates - and is - love.” The Love that grounds the Goodness of the Creation lights the way and invites the heart to follow. In affirming the reality of God, we come to see that that Goodness is real. It follows that those who deny this reality lack the light that enables them to see this Goodness in others and in the world. They live in darkness, and project its ‘truth, knowledge, and logic’ on the world in the form of a bleak misanthropy. Of course they tell us that life and the universe is meaningless! Because that is precisely what their blinkered reason tells them. But if life is pointless and purposeless, then nothing is more pointless and purposeless than the science, philosophy, and reason that says it is so. And herein lies a substantial part of the explanation for the existential crisis of the modern world. This crisis is a crisis of faith. This began as the challenge and overthrow of God and religion, with theological assumptions once attendant upon God becoming attached to human industrial and technological powers. In terms of material quantities, the promises of progress have been more than fulfilled. Human beings are healthier and wealthier, better educated and longer lived than in any previous civilization, and in greater numbers. So why the bleak misanthropy? This great success story is the cause for an obsessive preoccupation with overpopulation. Psychologists like Jung and Frankl, writers like Mumford, and theologians like Buber grasped the truth long ago when writing of modern men and women searching for soul and community in an age of purposeless materialism. No amount of material quantity can fill the big, gaping hole where the soul once was. The machine gods have delivered on quantity but failed on quality.
To blame religion for this state of affairs is the ultimate in bad faith and denial. If you want redemption you have to express contrition and identify and name sin for what it is. It is over one hundred and thirty years now since Nietzsche announced the “death of God”. He was really making public a truth that was implicit in the modern mechanistic worldview. Thomas Hobbes’ atomistic materialism, which saw the world as a purposeless circulation of power, had said as much. Hobbes saw the world as competitive to its core: one accumulates or gets accumulated. Hobbes looked at the world and did not see Goodness and Love. Instead he saw the ‘war of all against all,’ bellum omnium contra omnes. Without a strong authority to keep order, life is ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ Without God, ultimately, no such order is possible. Instead, we live in a civil society which is the sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, each sees the other as a rival for scarce resources and seeks to use the other as a mere means to personal ends. The strong predate on the weak, the rich on the poor, and the end result of this zero-sum game is zero. It’s a world of power without end and without limit, and in the end such power eats up the world and finally consumes itself. An authority based on nothing more than power is no true authority at all. Where there is nothing to begin with, it doesn’t matter which sides in the power struggle prevail, since ultimately they have nothing to win in a world in which humans have been disinherited and disowned by their own powers.
In such a world there is no principle, only power and, in contrast to the equality of all with respect to principle, power is asymmetrical. Some are more powerful than others. Society reduces to a zero-sum game in which some gain at the expense of others. The losers have no redress: there is nothing and no-one to appeal to. Neither Truth nor Justice count; they actually cease to exist. The ‘invisible, non-existent’ God is soon followed by a non-existent Truth and Justice. Power is its own argument and its own justification.
In this Hobbesian world of power struggle, competition, and predation, morality is dissolved into the marketplace of personal choice. We lose the moral compass. Life becomes directionless and desitinationless, driven mainly by the arbitrary power that prevails at any given moment. People feel life as meaningless; buffeted by events beyond their control, they see their situations as hopeless. They live under the sway of abstract, uncontrollable forces that threaten to bring all their good efforts and driving to nought. Hearts harden as individuals withdraw from such a world. In the end, hearts harden and the soul withers and dies. We need to call back the soul to awaken the heart and respond to the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty of the world. Since ‘God is,’ those three transcendentals are. I am struck by the extent to which many protesting the state of the world proceed from its ugliness, from the destruction wrought by human beings and civilization, but not from beauty. They would claim that they do by pointing to Nature. But the striking thing about this Nature is the absence of human beings and human activities from its portrayal. Human beings seem not to be a legitimate part of Nature. Deep down, there seems to be a death-instinct at work which not merely anticipates, but looks forward to the elimination of the human species from the Earth. Such a mentality has all the hallmarks of tiredness and exhaustion, the loss of hope and confidence that accompanies every fall of civilization.
I proceed from Beauty. Beauty is the supreme political category in that it lights the way to Truth and Goodness and invites the heart to follow. That invitation is to all of us. Beauty is the unifier in a world of division and separation. As one of the few things that disenchanted individuals respond to any more, beauty is a bastion of evangelisation. Beauty moves and inspires individuals, calls them out of themselves and motivates them to act. Beauty speaks to us and we respond. Present human beings with beauty, and they will heed the call to fall in love outwards. Through Beauty, human beings can be turned on to Truth and Goodness, and thereby turn their lives around in turning the world the right way round. The three great transcendentals are all qualities of God and exist in interconnection: in accessing one, you will be drawn to the others in short order.
The misanthropic Earth-worshipping decadence that some have fallen into fails to see that the same disenchanting science which brought the ‘death of God’ also brought the death of Nature as animate and purposive. They seem to think that they can reinstate the God of physical Creation without the need for the God of Love, the personal God of relationships, relationships to others and to the world. You will find God in relationship. Lose that relationship and you will lose God. The modern world is characterised by severance from the bonds and ties of identity, community, belonging, and meaning. No wonder individuals lose sight of God. They lack relation and conclude God doesn’t exist.
God exists, God is now, God is near. We live under the divine aspect of eternity. The affirmation of the eternal nowness of God is vitally important in encouraging and enabling us to withstand the trials and tribulations of living and inspire us to carry on on our pilgrim journey on Earth. We journey forwards in transcendent hope in full knowledge of our connection to the source and end of all things. To affirm the eternal presence of God is to participate in an awesome reality. This invitation into a world of Truth and Goodness contrasts markedly with the view of disenchanting science that the universe is objectively valueless and meaningless. It should come as no surprise, with this as the dominant narrative of the modern world, that human beings should come to see their existence as worthless, directionless, and destinationless. The disenchantment of the world invites misanthropy. The death of the human subject soon follows the death of God. The culture that such a narrative breeds is first a list for power, then a despair. Human beings discard God and go it alone, only to find that in their victory they are the dispirited masters of nowhere. And then those who despair may react violently in expressing the misery of their powerlessness and hopelessness. Mass shootings, violence, anger, protest, shouting, all of it suggests the cry of despair to me.
The root of this despair is the belief that God does not exist. In affirming that God exists, life becomes a prayerful of giving of thanks for all that exists. In denying that God exists, life becomes onerous and miserable. God is ‘invisible, non-existent,’ claims Dr Glen Barry. What does exist and is all too visible is war, torture, crime, violence, aggression, exploitation, pollution, murder, guns, knives, greed, gluttony, sloth, rape, cruelty – all over the world. So much for the 'we need each other' ethic and kinship. We see here why humanism collapses in on itself. I’ve noticed that the people I characterised as misanthropic Nature-worshipping decadents are big on the ecological sins of human beings. The problem is that there is no redemption in Nature. You learn the laws and ways of Nature and work within limits, or you are eliminated. Survival is the name of the game, not salvation. Theological concepts are meaningless in such naturalist terms. But they are vitally meaningful in human terms. Cultivating the virtues is about living in right relation. The virtue ethic I espouse advocates material sufficiency and virtuous action within right relationships in accordance with God’s divine plan of Justice. If you think that a tad sulphurous, then consider that it offers a path to redemption for all us sinners. And consider, too, that that was the view of E.F. Schumacher, a man highly respected in environmentalist circles. Schumacher is celebrated for his work on appropriate technology and eco-design. His call for metaphysical reconstruction on the lines adumbrated above is much less well known. Schumacher taught that unless the work of ecological restoration is set within true ends, it will fail to develop the right character traits and fail to motivate right actions. It would succumb to the blinkered pragmatism of prevailing technics.
Without the Love, Light, and Life of the Everlasting Gospel, human beings fall into the inertia of the heart. The depths of the depravity into which human beings can fall is no mystery whatsoever to those with a religious background. Only those who begin from a prideful and idealized notion of human reason and power can be mystified by the sins that human beings can and do commit. Christianity proceeds from the humility of Christ on the cross and thereby affirms a very different, much less arrogant, form of power. Note the contemptuous words of Glen Barry here, when he refers to the words of ‘mythical ancient carpenters.’ No doubt he would think the same of the example of Christ on the cross. He claims to be armed with truth, knowledge, logic and, note, wisdom. I see only an overweening arrogance. And cowardice. These are not the first times in which human beings have been tested, and far from the worst, too. If the scale of the problems before us are great, then so too are the tools at our disposal for their solution. What is lacking is character and confidence, hope and inspiration. What is lacking is point and purpose. There is none in Nature other than survival. Survival is not enough. It is not a motivational goal. If life is as bad as people such as Barry say it is – and he is far from being alone – then the case for survival is entirely lacking in motivational content. Human beings want redemption; they want salvation.
The realization that the world we have created is somewhat less than ideal, and that human beings are somewhat less than rational and logical, has come as a shock to those who have dreamed of building Eden by science, technology, and industry. Christians have always understood that we live in a fallen world and are working with a fallen human nature. They express outrage, give vent to their anti-religious bigotry, and indulge their taste for misanthropy. It’s a cul-de-sac, a decadence born of despair in estrangement from the source of Truth and Goodness. The principal challenge that the Christian ethic teaches is that of how to live well and appreciate the redemptive possibilities open to us in a fallen world. The task is to establish the happy habitus which allows us to know, learn, acquire, and exercise the virtues. This is to establish communities of practice, faith, virtue, and character.
Christ invites us to see the Good and to live the Good. The world that the moderns have created in the image of disenchantment obscures this Truth and Goodness and works against our recognition of these qualities. We are challenged to countermand the invitations into sinfulness and live a life of virtue in imitation of Christ.
Christians are enjoined to respond to God’s invitation to participate in the divine plan for Justice and recognize in thought and deed the Truth and Goodness of the world. There is a duty to spread the knowledge that we live in a meaningful, purposeful universe and that our lives came from somewhere and are going somewhere. Our lives have direction and have a destination once we come to participate in God’s goodness.
Recovering the Critique of Political Economy
In these days of whirling confusion, all things, as Leonard Cohen sung, are sliding in all directions. We have lost the objective standards by which we could evaluate and orient actions. The cabal of wealth who have succeeded in institutionalizing and embedding their power are wedded to the global heat machine taking civilization to oblivion. Accumulation is the new god, Moses and all the prophets, as Marx wrote. That machine is demanding human sacrifices by the million, and sacrifices of ecosystems and species. Marx referred to the ‘dialectical inversion’ that takes place in the capitalist system, dragging human beings ‘beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.’
But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.
Marx CI 1976 ch 25
Marx describes a condition of alienation. There is no cabal or conspiracy of capitalists in charge of this planetary death machine: it operates according to its own imperatives, which engulf the capitalist class as well as the proletariat. Many are tempted to condemn the capitalist class as themselves eco-fascists, taking pleasure out of division and destruction, but the truth is that the members of this class are mere personifications of capital in an alienated system of production in which no-one is in control, all are controlled. The systemic imperatives of capital control the lives of all with what Max Weber called ‘irresistible force.’ In the same passage, Weber referred to the ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity, saying that the last days will be characterised by a ‘mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance.’ There is some satisfaction in designating the people who seem to preside over this global heat machine as ‘eco-fascists,’ but I think the truth is far more discomforting than that. I don’t think the people in control take any kind of perverted pleasure out of the incarceration of populations, genocide, ecocide, and social division. I think they are indifferent. I don’t think they are ‘in control.’ I think they are servants of institutional and systemic imperatives and, as part of that service, seek to manage and manipulate populations and environments. If they appear not to give a damn, it is precisely because the system they serve doesn’t care. Accumulation is the sine qua non of the system, the ultimate non-negotiable.
The substance of environmentalism lies in an appreciation of interconnection, balance, and harmony. That was long considered to be the lesson that ecology taught as a science. As a science, though, ecology is less clear on these things than ecologists once thought. Those who replace God with Nature are really replacing on thing they reject as a human construct with another human construct. Nature may be much less about balance and harmony than many ecologists believe. My concern, then, is to establish interconnection, balance, and harmony less as intrinsic properties of the universe that humanity has to adhere to than as regulative ideals that humans are involved in some way in co-creating. The real balance is a balance between natural communities and human communities, understanding that humans are culturally creative parts of nature, creative by nature. The challenge is to get the relation of Creation and human sub-creation right. That challenge is met by developing and sustaining practices that in the least do no harm to the planet and ideally are perfectly consonant with the healthy flourishing of the planetary ecology. The diversity, richness, and splendour embedded in functioning ecosystems as well as the other beings and bodies comprising the more-than-human world indicate an intrinsic worth that merits human awe and respect. These are not to be sacrificed to the idols of a Megamechanical human civilization that, subservient to an alienated system of production, is functioning is a planetary death machine. The resolution of the converging crises that beset the current civilisation, which are moral, social, and cultural as well as natural, require deep transformations, both on a personal and a collective level. I am always loath to call for sacrifice in politics. Historical experience has taught us to be highly sceptical of the language of sacrifice in politics. It also tells us that ‘making history’ does indeed require immense personal effort and deep commitment and risk, since all that we love, cherish, and hold most dear is often at stake. That is the case now. I write so much of the religious ethic for many reasons. I do not think humanity will be able to respond adequately to the demands of this crisis without a courage and faith in face of an uncertain future, without a transcendent hope, without a commitment to sacrifice and service to ends other than personal interest. The idols of current alien civilization have been demanding human sacrifices by the millions these past couple of centuries and, will climate change, will claim even millions more. We need to choose life and restore a genuine religious ethic in service of true ends.
Beyond the Bourgeois Viewpoint
Let’s be honest, the crying that we hear is all about ourselves, not the damage we do to nature. We are upset, and wish to express, and hopefully share, our pain. To whom do we cry, though? Because if Nature doesn’t care for human affairs, and doesn’t care whether the human species survives or not, as naturalists constantly tell us, then Nature doesn’t hear our cries either. Nature doesn’t cry, human beings do. And honesty here has the merit of reinstating the personal God. That’s a merit because with that comes a whole panoply of effective moral motivations.
It will take more than reason, truth, knowledge, and logic devoted to mere survival to pull humanity through this existential crisis. This crisis is more than physical and concerns the cosmic quest for meaning and the salvation of the soul. You cannot produce a long list of reasons as to why human existence is bad and human beings are wretched and then demand action to ensure survival. Human beings and the way they live have to be worthy of survival. A continuation of a miserable existence is not sufficient to motivate the effort needed for survival. There has to be a transcendent force orienting vision and effort beyond the given world, presenting an ideal that is worthy of becoming the object of active willing. To state that life is wretched and then demand action for its continuation could be designed to fail – it may well betray the death-instinct of an inherent, irredeemable misanthropy: the quest for survival will fail to inspire effort and motivate action and thus fail in its ambition, because deep down those making the call dislike the damage that humans do to each other and to the planet and cannot see them doing any other.
There is a difference between a contradiction and a cry. You can solve a contradiction by sitting quietly in a room, thinking, using conceptual ingenuity, reframing. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves the world unchanged. But faith does not leave the world unchanged. You cannot solve a cry by thinking. Moses, weeping for his people, is not consoled by Leibniz's admittedly brilliant proof that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
At present, ‘we’ – who? – are being asked to care for a Nature that is cold, indifferent, and pitiless and cares less for any species that lacks the wit to survive. That call will leave people cold, and has left people cold. The attempts at Old Testament prophecy and the issuing of threats straight from the Book of Revelations say everything about a civilization that has lost touch with both Nature and God. People know that we are in the midst of an existential crisis, but lack the moral and psychological resources to give true expression to the depth of pain they feel. So they project ecological sin upon Nature and promise punishment at the hands of a vengeful Gaia! The generation that is ‘spiritual but not religious’ has no way of expressing the depth of the crisis we are in; their apocalyptic obsessions reveal nothing at all other than the ability to read the writing on the wall of the civilization that is about to fall. The prophets can see nothing beyond the parameters of that civilization. Karl Marx explains all of this in terms of the limitations of the ‘bourgeois viewpoint.’ Seeing the end of history in competitive capitalist society, when confronted with cracks in the perfect image, the bourgeois can only look backwards yearning for a pre-modern harmony, but is utterly incapable of envisaging a future alternative society:
It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.
Marx Gr 1973: 162
That end is on the horizon, and it won’t be blessed. The bourgeois viewpoint still not advanced beyond the antithesis between a lost natural society and a present capitalist society. The continued reluctance of many environmentalists to countenance socialism as anything other than a bureaucratic industrialist society at least as destructive of nature as capitalism indicates it still hasn’t advanced beyond this antithesis. In which case the end will surely come. In which case, the apocalyptic obsessions of a certain strain of contemporary environmentalism is revealed to be bourgeois to the core. It claims to be against the capitalist system, but it is not so against it as to attempt to create an alternative system with which to replace it. Instead, it hankers after a pure, pristine, benign nature in which all species are kin to each other. Romanticism turns in time into Decadence. Capitalist society is in its late or decadent phase. Marx thought that human beings, being rational and creative creatures concerned with happiness and freedom, would have joined together to institute the socialist society long before now. So what is stopping us now? There’s no point, comes the claim, since socialism is at least as bad. Make it better then! It is your responsibility, as the change-agents of politics. Act and organise to ensure that future society is good! Whatever label you want to place on it. Democracy, cooperation, justice, collaboration! Call it by whatever name you will! Just act and organize to bring it about? No. We’ll yearn for an original natural fullness that went with the Garden, and stand by passively as capitalism brings about the end of civilisation. Decadence.
Eric Swyngedouw’s view is pertinent in this respect:
Such ecologies of fear ultimately conceal, yet nurture, a conservative or at least a reactionary message. While clouded in rhetoric of the need for radical change in order to stave off immanent catastrophe, a range of technical, social, managerial, physical, and other measures have to be taken to make sure that things remain the same, that nothing really changes, that life (or at least our lives) can go on as before.
Swyngedouw in Karin Bradley, Johan Hedrén ed., Green Utopianism: Perspectives, Politics and Micro-Practices p 29
Marxist philosopher Frederic Jameson observes that for some ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’ (Jameson 2003: 76). That’s the problem with ‘idolatry’ and ‘worship’ in whatever form: instead of an informed view of the metabolic relation between humanity, society and nature, there is a division that forces one to take the side of one abstraction as against another. That is the view I challenge in my Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration book, emphasising Marx’s critique of naturalism on account of its abstract character divorced from social forms and from practice.
That view calls for politics, organisation, and the creation of the social forms and relations of a viable alternate society. It has nought whatsoever to do with apocalyptic scenarios designed to frighten people into contracting in on the agendas of ambitious ‘would-be universal reformers.’ That last phrase come from Marx writing in The Communist Manifesto. It is an apt phrase, and it emphasizes the extent to which Marx himself was a democrat alert to the anti-democratic implications of those who sought to bring ‘truth’ to politics:
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.
Marx MCP Rev1848 1973
That’s not a rejection of truth at all, the very contrary. It offers a dynamic way of integrating disclosure and imposure through mediation and agency in determinate historical and social conditions. This entails a definite rejection of ‘truth’ in the hands of those with political agendas that proceed over the heads of the people and its investment in the people themselves as knowledgeable change-agents. I argue for the integration of truth and democratic will, the assimilation of truth and its willing through a democratic culture. I have heard some environmentalists claim that the people don’t know enough and are too stupid to learn. Maybe the educators themselves don’t know enough and are too arrogant and too conceited to understand their lack.
Fire and flood is sure to come. There is going to be a whole lot of water going in places where it hasn’t gone before and in a quantity never before seen. Let’s go the whole hog while we are in the mood and predict extreme weather, crop failure, desertification, species extinction, ice-melt… Hang on, these are no longer predictions at all, they are observations. OK then, let’s carry on making these observations. Let’s give up those puny and pathetic imitations of Biblical prophecy, seeing as we don’t believe in God anymore, only our god-like selves, and just carry on writing our obituaries with science. The economy will collapse in time. It probably already has done. Debt and bailouts at present amount to pumping life into a corpse. Those resources, I suggested years ago, should have been used to transition society to a public economy. Some such thing is the norm in history. Capitalism is the aberration, and it soared and crashed and is now burning the planet. The odd thing about this age of ‘men as gods’ is how timid their actions are in face of their idols of money and power, in contrast to the vividness of their fantasies with respect to science and technology. It’s easier to blame God. God is an invisible, non-existent sky-fairy, of course, but we will blame God all the same. The people who argue like that have, in their bigotry, missed an obvious corollary of their position. If there is no God and never has been a God, then the authors of this catastrophe engulfing civilisation are human beings, and all those great powers of science, industry, technology, and reason are implicated in the deluge. This problem is self-authored: own it! There is a direct correlation with the expansion of human technical and industrial power and the climate crisis. No God and no true religion brought humanity to the brink of self-destruction, just the idolatry of men as gods.
Climate Politics, Action, and Justice
If you are still with me then well done. I write in the awareness that most people will have long drawn their conclusions and bailed out long ago. But there is wisdom to be had here, for those with the gumption to persevere whilst being discomfited. And the lesson is of critical political and practical importance, determining the extent to which environmentalism may finally come to succeed in bringing climate truths and realities into politics, thereby saving us at the final hour, or will continue to fail and wail in the long slow apocalypse that is upon us.
The great problem confronting the climate movement is that, in the absence of a genuine and effective political and social organisation, those seeking to delay and stymie climate action in order to protect and preserve the capital system have discovered a political weak-spot in environmentalism which may well prove to be its undoing. The opponents of climate action and proponents of capitalist economics have discovered a very effective politics with which to counter demands for ‘system change’ rather than climate change. They have discovered that those who demand that government institute climate action do so not out of a position of strength but weakness. By constantly demanding that ‘somebody somewhere do something’ climate rebels effectively admit that that they lack the power to be those somebodies and lack the knowledge to present a ‘something’ with substantive institutional and economic form. I make that claim knowing fine well that there are environmentalists working in the fields of commons transitions and collaborative networks who are offering very definite somethings – I am intrigued to know why so many people get involved in protests, demonstrations, and campaigns and so few in the work of construction. I am attempting to provoke activists to become active in the work of constituting and running the new social order. Should they do so, we would no longer be absorbed in speaking climate truth to power but would be embodying it in new systems of social and ecological power. We need to constitute the new social order ourselves. We need to be those ‘somebodies.’
Campaigners are certainly right to demand that governments live up to their climate commitments, and certainly right to demand that governments do much more. Governments have been slacking and, given the opportunity, will slack all the more. Campaigners are right to put the pressure on and keep the pressure on. But there is a need for a twin-track approach that sets immediate tasks and demands within the context of substantial long-term social transformation. We cannot ask government to realize environmental utopias. In fact, to demand of government that ‘something should be done’ is dangerously vague, inviting the reduction of environmental visions to the exigencies of money and power within prevailing social relations.
As to the precise details of the environmental utopia, these are many and often contradictory. Some opt for a legislative and regulative approach within an untransformed capital system, others demand radical structural transformation. Some want taxes, others eschew politics altogether. Some want 100% renewables, others advocate nuclear. In fine, the ‘something’ that campaigners and protestors want government to do is somewhat less than clear. The political opponents of climate action have discovered that those who whine endlessly that climate change isn’t being addressed, who have succeeded in having climate change mentioned every day, don’t take their claims about the catastrophic future we face as a result of anthropogenic global heating seriously enough to walk their talk of system change. Those that do don’t ask or expect governments in symbiotic relation with capital to do it for them – government action in this respect is only effective when set in the context of a substantial social and structural reordering which is the direct responsibility of environmental activists. There is work here, and all praise to those engaged in eco-design and economic recalibration here. But where are the numbers? Where are the people? Most importantly, where among the people are the agents with the structural capacity to act? Where is the material futurity? The prefiguration? Where are the alternate social practices, communities of ecological virtue, and economic systems that are worthy of people’s support, commitment, and participation? At risk of upsetting delicate sensibilities, I take umbrage with Greta Thunberg’s comments on the fire that engulfed the cathedral of Notre Dame. Act on climate change like you did on Notre Dame, she demanded at the European Parliament. That demand seriously irked me. Who? Who acted on Notre Dame? Instead of attempting to hijack the time, money, resources, commitment, and goodwill of those who determined to rebuild Notre Dame, it is for those who talk the biggest talk on climate change come to show the same level of centuries’ old devotion and walk the walk. You act! Why are you so incapable? Why can’t you raise sufficient support for your cause as to be able to engage in transformative actions? Why do you have to go to the very institutions and organisations instrumental in causing climate crisis to demand resolution of that crisis?
With respect to environmentalists’ reaction to Notre Dame, I was struck by the begrudging tone. Notre Dame, for obvious reasons, made headlines, and some environmentalists couldn’t resist complaining that the destruction of nature is of much greater importance. And they couldn’t resist belittling the concern of those upset by the fire. They need to temper their enthusiasms. And many did, rightly indicating that the issue is one of care, for both nature and culture. They did, eventually, that is, clearly worried that the resentful tone being struck could prove to be counterproductive, proving the opponents of environmentalism right when they accuse environmentalists of inflicting a monomaniacal, one-tone, coercive righteousness upon the world. Notre Dame hit the headlines, and the first – and in many cases last – reaction as to why are people worried about this instead of talking about climate change. This idea that climate change doesn’t get covered is wearing thin – it is covered daily. The tone was not merely nasty, it indicated precisely what is missing in environmentalism of this kind – it exhibited a hectoring and lecturing tone that is big on telling others what to do, but desperately short on engaging and persuading others and involving them in effective action and transition.
Instead of viable transition strategies capable of winning the support and sustaining themselves through the participation of the people, we are treated to constant references to a vague ‘we’ that is urged to join together to save the planet. That ‘we’ doesn’t exist politically and environmentalists speaking in such vacuous terms simply ensure the continued failure of environmentalism as politics. Human beings are located within asymmetrical relations of power and class position. The political task is to forge a collective ‘we’ out of those divisions. Appeals to a general ‘we’ appeal to a social identity that does not exist but which stands in need of creation, an identity that joins immediate self-interest with long range social interest. We are back to where we were when Marx designated the proletariat as the ‘universal class,’ the class whose emancipation will ensure the emancipation of all, the class upon whose exploited labour the capitalist society rested, the class with the structural capacity to act. Where is the proletariat? Is anyone bothered to look? I was told by eco-designer Daniel Christian Wahl that ‘us and then thinking is an anachronism.’ We should mark his words well. His book Regenerative Cultures is excellent, precisely the kind of constructive thinking I am calling for above. We live in an ‘us and them’ society was my response. If you want – as I do - to create the classless society, then you will have to engage in class struggle in the present society. Because any attempt to change a class divided society will involve you in a challenge to the dominant class who, understandably, are unpersuaded by the need to change. If you don’t wage class war from below, rest assured the ruling class will be waging it very effectively from above. That is precisely what they have been doing on climate change, and all the scientific knowledge and technological know-how at the command of environmentalism has proven utterly incapable of countering them. A classless politics in a class society will fail for want of a critical and practical purchase on social reality. In Being at One I advanced an argument for encouraging free-riders – call them the dominant class – into co-operation through the creation and networking of clusters of co-operators. I would much prefer that route to the future ecological society than class struggle.
I make no apologies for possibly upsetting certain delicate sensibilities and their sweet dreams of a reason that appeals to all equally. Those dreams are themselves the product of a fairly privileged lifestyle bought by capitalism at the expense of nature and labour, and the defenders of capitalism know it and declare it openly. Hence the familiar baiting of environmentalists as middle class hypocrites who can indulge their green fantasies because they live at some remove from the hard economic realities the poor plebs have to face daily; hence the ease with which climate regulations, laws, and taxes can be presented as burdens upon the poor and working class; hence the danger that Green politics could be realized as a twenty-first century hygiene movement equipping capitalism with clean energy for a further burst of expansion. And the poor exploited workers remain poor exploited workers at the end of it all.
I’m not saying I believe that is what environmentalism is about. I am saying I am worried about evasions when it comes to politics, political economy, and class analysis. Because evasions make it easy for the political opponents of environmentalism to portray the environmental movement in the above terms.
The Green Party is the only party I have ever been a member of. I have been advancing the environmental cause since the 1980s. I was part of the big push for a Red-Green alliance in the 1980s. I see Ecosocialism as the way forward. I see the Green hostility to socialism as bourgeois to the core, revealing that wing of environmentalism to be hopelessly liberal, liberalism in its decadent phase, and going down with the system it is psychologically buried within even as it complains about it.
Does anyone remember the good old days in the 1980s when environmentalism was non-political? James Lovelock does. Those were the good old days, he says. We were urged to look after nature. And so we did, and the more effective we became at this, the more we were accused of ‘being political.’ Lovelock doesn’t like political environmentalism and sees it as divisive, and pursuing extraneous agendas. Like socialism. Politics’ of course, became a dirty word in the 1980s. Not this or that government but government itself is the problem, declared the economic libertarians, the narcissistic exponents of a billionaires’ anarchism. At the same time, environmentalism saw the height of its political ambition and wisdom in the enactment of environmental reforms into law. And succeeded to some extent. Only to allow the libertarians to resuscitate their crusade against government restriction and the dead-hand of bureaucracy and thus pose as the emancipators of the people yet again. That politics is locked into the phony war of liberals of the right against liberals of the left. The result of this mutual self-cancellation is the neutering of the political sphere to enable the anarchy of the rich and powerful to flourish. Whilst we all pursue our particular goods on a demoralized terrain, the rich continue to hit the till. The liberal democratic framework, claiming to be agnostic on the good, presides over a ‘conflict pluralism’ that allows those with money and power to dominate. Democracy is checked, subverted, and nullified by democratic means. It’s as sweet as a nut. And politics is effectively gelded. This is the same political sphere to which climate protestors present their demands for radical climate action. We have had Labour and Socialist governments across Europe, backed by millions’ strong trade union movements, attempting radical agendas, only to be brought down by economic crises, investment strikes, capital flights. The road to ‘parliamentary socialism’ proved a dead-end, and so it will prove for environmental reformism.
Beware the lament that the reason that there has been little urgency on climate action on the part of governments because of the lack of coverage of climate change. That’s not the reason. We need to identify and analyse the institutional and structural causes and constraints which served to defeat socialist reformism in the past. Because these will assuredly defeat environmental reformism in the present and future too. And there has been climate coverage. I now see and hear pronounced climate coverage in press and television. When still nothing happens by way of effective action, beware the collapse of hope and withdrawal of interest on the part of people. People cannot live in a state of crisis and chaos for long. There has to be effective action, meaning that there is an onus on the part of campaigners to provide the means of effective action. Where are the means of collective action? There is a heavy emphasis on lifestyle. Yet again. Been there, done it. It’s not enough. The failure to scale up to the level of action required will result in a collapse in climate change activism and a collapse in the climate cause. And that’s when the hankering after the eco-authoritarianism which has always been there will raise its ugly head again. The people and their demands will fall away, leaving governments with the rationale and the justification for an environmental austerity that preserves capital as it continues its rapacious exploitation of people and planet.
Truth, Reason, and Democratic Willing
I’ve been reading Thomas Jefferson again lately. I read him in depth in the 1990s and found him most insightful. This particular quote is pertinent:
No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth...
I hold it, therefore, certain, that to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent. The panic into which they were artfully thrown in 1798, the frenzy which was excited in them by their enemies against their apparent readiness to abandon all the principles established for their own protection, seemed for awhile to countenance the opinions of those who say they cannot be trusted with their own government. But I never doubted their rallying; and they did rally much sooner than I expected. On the whole, that experiment on their credulity has confirmed my confidence in their ultimate good sense and virtue.
Thomas Jefferson, To Judge John Tyler Washington, June 28, 1804
We return to truth and reason and their entry into politics through democratic willing. That’s the solution. And it means getting serious about politics, building and sustaining communities of practice, new forms of governance and economic provision; it means engaging citizens, winning adherents, creating structures of ecological virtue, building a social movement, integrating the social and the natural environment, stepping up, making the connections, scaling up, scaling down, establishing power, competence, and responsibility at appropriate levels, establishing linkages, understanding the ways in which human beings are immersed in culture and are naturally creative; it means going forwards to the realization of nature, rather than harking backwards in hopeless decadence to a nature that never was. (To unpack all these phrases, you will have to read my many millions of words elsewhere. I took the time to write them, the least you could do is take a little time to read at least some of them, before going back to claiming its ‘time to act.’ It’s now time for me to put my feet up).
Step up the pressure, up the ante, create the momentum for change – and engage in effective action. You can’t sustain a politics of crisis for any length of time. We are in the middle of a crisis with transformative potential (as political theorist David Held wrote in the 1980s … Making the point that potentials get unactualized and opportunities get missed). If the climate challenge is checked and defeated, then the current wave of activism and environmentalism will dissipate and fragment, and people who have invested their time and effort will go elsewhere. Where, who knows? I have written on the urban social movements in Spain, whose members left and joined the Socialist party as soon as democratic politics became legal. The movements, once great successes, fell apart. I have written on the industrial unionists and the revolutionary syndicalists, the terrors of the establishment. They raised prospects of a self-governing socialism from below, but ultimately failed on account of being unable to act at appropriate scale. Former members threw their hands in with the Communists after the Bolshevik revolution. It was a waste and a detour. Socialism remained as far away as ever, the energies getting diverted into sterile channels.
The views I have expressed here and in other places on environmentalism recently are contentious and likely to provoke and upset in equal measure. My experiences on social media have told me that very few people take the time to read long comments, let alone essays, that are full of nuances and unfamiliar arguments. People like their views to be confirmed; they don’t like to be challenged. Of those few that read, there are fewer still who actually take the time to reflect and understand. And to be fair I don’t make life easy for myself. It seems I bury my points within an argument with so many twists and turns that it is not clear when I have stopped circling and have taken a stand. There is, I assure you, a clear point. I have had my words twisted around even further, though, so as to make me one of the elitists and authoritarians, not to mention climate deniers, I most certainly am not. It is a strange world in which to express criticism of certain strains of environmentalism serves to put you on the side of climate deniers. Apparently, if you put aside the issue of climate change in order to get people to envisage the ecological society as the kind of society they would like to live in, whether or not a looming eco-catastrophe made it a necessity, you are involved in denying climate science. That has been put to me. I responded that I have never challenged the science on climate change. My sin, it transpired, lay in failing to stress the centrality of climate science, talking as if we can leave it out of any account of the future ecological society. To which I say, the ecological society is a good society in its own terms, regardless of anything science says in its favour or against. If science argues against that vision of an ecological society, I will say I have an ethics and political philosophy which argue for it and are strong enough to make that argument stick. And I’ll stand on that view against anyone propagating the fallacies of scientism in the name of environmentalism. Because that, as sure as anything, will serve to ensure the failure of the environmental cause.
And anyone who thinks I’m selling out should simply re-read and keep on re-reading until they finally get the point, because they are the kind of shallow thinkers trapped within slogans, simplicities, and shadows who really need to get the point. I’m trying to get people off the barricades to buy in. Oh, and ‘grow up’ in the sense of addressing institutions, structures, systems, transitions, consent, and participation.
The article notes that much of the opposition to climate change stems from an opposition to socialism.
“To take climate change seriously would be to open the door to a ‘radical questioning of the way that you run your economy and the role of the government.’”
But of course! And the questioning is merely the beginning. We need to go beyond issuing demands to rethink every aspect of our way of life, how society functions, our modes of thought, action and organisation. Is society sustainable or not? Is the human species worthy of survival or not?
Are human beings actually up to running a socialist society?
It’s a serious question. Because if socialism requires a level of rationality and altruism on the part of human beings that runs contrary to basic features of human nature – particularly self-interest – then the opposition to socialism is understandable. Instead of a heaven on earth in a universal brotherhood and sisterhood, we may plunge into a political, economic, and moral wasteland through lofty expectations concerning human power and knowledge.
There may be good reasons as to why people are resistant to socialism as an alternative, and it is for socialists to meet those objections rather than dismiss them. To remain stuck in a ‘debate’ concerning the truth or otherwise of climate science is merely tangential. I don’t know if nature really does abhor a vacuum, but I do know that politics does. Any gaps and spaces left over by vagueness in institutional thinking tend to be filled by bureaucracies of one form or another. It’s why I double-down on talk of ‘we’ and ‘humanity.’ We can be more precise than this. It may well be that there is more chance, and more to be gained by, a reformation of the present capitalist system to make markets function properly as there is of a transformation leading to a socialist economy. My suspicion is that the dominant strain of environmentalism is liberal to the core, demanding ‘system change’ whilst really meaning a governmental reformation that cleans up the capital system for a further burst of expansion. In that sense, the environmental movement is a twenty-first century hygiene or Progressivist movement seeking to fuel capitalism with clean energy. That’s a benign view of developments. The less benign view is that the environmental movement is being played, unknowingly, equipping governments with the scientific rationale to continue to contain the democratic insurgency within an austerian straightjacket, ostensibly to ‘save the planet’ but in truth with the explicit purpose of preserving capitalist power relations intact, insulated from popular challenge and change.
In his final lectures, William Morris returned to the question of ‘how far the betterment of the working people might go and yet stop short at last without having made any progress on the direct road to Communism.’
Remember what Max Weber wrote of Marx, stating that instead of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ socialism would be characterised by the ‘dictatorship of the officials.’ Critics think that prophecy was fulfilled as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but Weber would see it as applying generally in terms of the western reformist tradition too. ‘The world is going your way at present, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end. (William Morris, talking to Sidney Webb in 1895, quoted in R. Page Arnot, William Morris: The Man and the Myth, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1964). Socialism did indeed go Webb’s way, in the sense of becoming a rationalized, bureaucratized attempt to regulate capitalism from above via the moral authority of the state. Such socialists discovered a hard Marxist and capitalist truth the hard way, the price being paid by those millions of working class socialists who saw not only their labour but now their ideals, values, and politics alienated from them to take estranged, hostile form against them. That’s Marx’s lesson on emancipation as being a self-emancipation or being no emancipation at all. That’s the reason for my scepticism of knowledgeable elites assuming leadership in politics. ”Revolution is not a thing you can let others do for you” (Mau Kai Yey, talking to Jan Myrdal, Report from a Chinese Village, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967).
Towards the end of his life, Morris pondered
“Whether ... the tremendous organization of civilized commercial society, is not playing the cat and mouse game with us socialists. Whether the Society of Inequality might not accept the quasi-socialist machinery ... and work it for the purpose of upholding that society in a somewhat shorn condition, maybe, but a same one ... The workers better treated, better organized, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich ... than they have now.”
From this vantage point in history, that is a very rosy scenario. Things may be much worse than that. The people will be better organized and ordered, not to govern themselves, but to preserve capitalist power relations within the age of environmental austerity to come. And environmentalists have presented the system with all the scientific rationale it needs to impose such an austerian regime.
Conclusions
If you have managed to reach the end, then well done. Because if you have, then it is more than likely you have got the point. Those who have taken my words as a repudiation of environmentalism, as a denial of anthropogenic global heating, as a denial of the need for radical systemic transformation will have given up early. Which is a shame. Because it is those people who are most in need of the lessons delivered here. If you think I am lukewarm on Greta Thunberg, then you are also wrong. I find the fawning over her by adults who know the hard realities of politics embarrassing to environmentalism. If these are the adults she accuses of having failed in the past or of failing in the present, they are also the adults who could teach idealists who think that climate demands are simply for the asking a lesson about power, class, material interests, division, disagreement, structured patterns of behaviour, the constraints and parameters upon the political sphere than ensure that no politician has a free hand. I’ll put it this way. In 2000 there was a nationwide poll in the United Kingdom to determine who people thought was the greatest ever Briton. The winner was Winston Churchill. My response was to point out the limitations of this greatest of all Britons when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1925, he took Britain back on the Gold Standard at the pre-war parity of £1=$4.87 because that’s what the world of finance wanted. Churchill knew it was wrong, he knew it would prove economically disastrous and politically dangerous. But he did it anyway. The greatest ever Briton was politically powerless to do otherwise working within the parameters of power in a capitalist economy. “I would rather see finance less proud and industry more content,” he declared. The decision caused the General Strike, civil strife, depression, and unemployment. Instead of saying adults have failed us, if you really want to make any progress on issues demanding redress, you have to engage in the institutional and structural causes of failure. I’m seeing precious little of this and, having spent decades arguing for precisely this, I’m not inclined to keep my temper. In fact, I am inclined to anger when hearing general statements and abstract demands. Some may see such things as inspiring those who are new to environmental issues. And then what? I see a calculated vagueness that may succeed in the short run, but which will fall apart when subjected to the questioning that is certain to come. I see no end-game. I see no attempt to constitute a viable alternative. I see yet another variant of the plague of the modern world, the exertion of an extra-political pressure and a power without responsibility. This works by charging governments, subject to various pressures and forces, with the task of meeting impossibly high demands. Such pressures can render government impossible. The Brexit debacle indicates precisely this, exciting people with unrealistic demands and fantasies and charging government with the responsibility of meeting them. I don’t see too much by way of a commitment to specific actions and policies. I see assertions of principle so broad as guaranteed to command wide assent, and that is precisely what has happened. But that success is insubstantial precisely because it is agreement on principles few would disagree with. Greta says we should respect the science. Who says otherwise? Identify who doesn’t respect the science, and then understand the political and economic interests behind their denial. Maybe that’s the point of the pressure, to expose the real material interests behind those denying science and reason. Again, though, I ask who, precisely, this ‘we’ is; I would ask who doesn’t respect the science; and I would see the material causes behind this lack of respect. There are interests and forces in the world that don’t respect the science precisely because of its political implications. We know this and we have learned this the hard way. Do we really need to keep learning these old lessons? These forces and interests are not for persuading. So the implication is that this is a gambit based on bullying and intimidation, raising popular pressure to such an extent that governments will simply have to concede the point. There will be action. The effects of climate change are being felt, and that alone will raise demands for action. But beyond that, government action will be applied, at most, to particular economic interests, and certainly not to the capital system as a whole. That may be enough to satisfy those who think the problem is one of a handful of emitters and polluters and not the system as a whole. I think the problem is one of the endlessly expanding capital system eating up the resources of the world. Greta also likes to argue for ‘climate justice for everyone.’ Justice is for everyone, or it is no justice at all. We can all agree with justice. Political philosophers have argued since ever about the nature of justice. It comes with a wide range of very different institutional arrangements and property regimes, though. Things get tricky when we get down to specifying the details. Keep it general, ratchet up the pressure, and let governments work out the specifics seems to be the strategy. If that is the case, it means that environmentalism as politics resolves itself into the demand that governments should govern. The very best of luck with that one. We’ve been kind of trying to establish that very point for the best part of two centuries against the rule of capital:
the bourgeoisie has … since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Justice for all?
The crisis in the climate system will most certainly make civilized life well-nigh impossible at some time in the future if radical action is not taken now. We cannot stop climate change now, only mitigate its effects and seek to avert catastrophe. The situation is so desperate as to warrant alarm calls and protests. If you think I am denying any of this here or elsewhere, I would suggest that you read again and understand that I am saying precisely the opposite. And read again to see that I am not rejecting rebellion but, rather, calling for revolution. The police have just defined Extinction Rebellion as “Extremism Rebellion.” That’s neither true nor fair. The extremists are governing over us and have been for a long time now. These are the forces that have expropriated the commons, hollowed out society, destroyed the centre ground, unravelled communities, set people against one another, sent the world to extremes, and brought civilization to the brink of collapse. It’s going to take something radical to overturn their perverted, inverted order. It’s going to take something more than protest and rebellion. It’s going to take revolution. And that will take people with the intellectual, psychological, organisational, and structural capacity to engage in revolution.