LOOKING AFTER THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT
I probably spend far too much on social media, but it keeps me connected and there are a lot of sane people on there that I know offering sound and sensible information and advice. There has, however, been a lot of people expressing a certain jaundiced relish at the recovery of nature as a result of the lockdown of human society in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, there have been far too many responding in this way. I think there are many who are innocently concerned merely to point out the damage that ‘human’ activity has been doing to the planet, showing the benefits for us all should ‘we’ come to give nature some respite. It’s an obvious point and people take the opportunity to make it. But a carelessness here could easily tip over into something incredibly nasty. A lot of well-intentioned people could unintentionally be nurturing the grounds for a very vicious and dangerous politics. It is important to state in the first instance that many celebrating the evidence for planetary healing aren’t exactly saying that it is a good thing that so many people are dying and suffering. But very many do seem to be oblivious to the immense damage this virus is doing to the lives of people. Of course, if economic activity collapses the demands that humans are making upon nature will fall. So what? That’s just a statement of the obvious. That so many are taking the opportunity to make that statement merely serves to show how bereft of politics and institutional understanding many of those seeking to defend the planet and advance the environmental cause really are. There seems to be no understanding whatsoever of the implications of socio-economic crisis and crash, which itself reveals how little thought such people have given to the requirement of deep socio-structural transformations necessary to put planetary healing on a permanent and not merely temporary basis.
This crisis may open the eyes of people to the inherent flaws of the capital system, and incite a green and socialist political awakening, but I wouldn’t bank on it. I have heard precisely these same claims in every crisis past. You would think that people would learn the hard way if they learn at all, but past experience shows that if people don’t learn one way they show little aptitude for learning in other ways. My dad used to tell me that things will only change if things get really bad. I always corrected that view. When things get really bad, people cling even more firmly to what they know. It tends to be elites and authorities who change in such circumstances. The idea that collective humanity will learn from this crisis is mere wishful thinking, betraying the absence of anything like an effective politics as a learning mechanism. How soon people forget. We have just lived through the deepest economic depression since the 1930s. We know what caused the collapse, we know who the architects of that crash were, and yet the great public remained passive in face of a massive state bailout – ‘socialism’ for the rich and powerful, austerity for the poor benighted masses. If you don’t have political understanding, organisation, and capacity, you have nothing. And that’s precisely the reason for the harsh words I am directing towards those who are taking this opportunity to deliver messages and orders from ‘Mother Nature.’ That reliance on a nature that could care less one way or the other is merely a surrogate for an effective politics. It is an expression neither of real joy or power, but of a ressentiment born of futility and hopelessness. Without an effective politics, one that draws on unity, organisation, and understanding, the lessons of this crisis will not be learned and the episode will be as quickly forgotten as other crises have been in recent years. Nothing learned and everything forgotten. Because, in the absence of a genuine politics, organisation, and understanding, people are concerned most of all to go back to the ‘normality’ they know. Government intervention and expenditure is not socialism, it is an attempt to stabilize and survive so as to enable to return of normality.
So the defence that very many people posting about planetary healing aren't actually saying it is a good thing that people are dying or losing their jobs, businesses, and income, their love of and loyalty to nature does seem both misplaced and callous. Misplaced, because the blessed nature they worship doesn’t give a damn either way, and callous because it shows complete indifference to the suffering of the only creatures on this planet who could ever give a damn. And it is politically inept, too, in that it is advancing platforms in environmentalism that could never be popular and command the active consent and involvement required for the substantial social transformations required to put planetary healing on a permanent systematic basis. If anyone needed an explanation as to why, with a wealth of scientific knowledge and technological know-how at its command, environmentalism has failed to make political inroads, then here is one reason – an almost complete divorce from the real concerns of real people.
But, yes, obviously, as a result of quarantine the dreaded ‘humans’ are polluting a lot less giving us the opportunity to see what a difference for the better it would be if ‘human activity’ could be cut back. I’ve put a deliberately bland spin on the comments I have been reading in order to excuse the merely well-intentioned people who wish to express their concern for nature. But I’m not inclined to be lenient on a question like this. Such people are politically and intellectually soft and flabby and wide open to a descent into more vicious strains of the same argument. Because there are a lot of people who are either strongly implying or openly saying that it is good that people are dying and that what is vaguely called ‘industrial civilisation’ is imploding. I’m not dead yet, but I’ll bet that my little job in the local community will go shortly. Already countless numbers of people are losing their jobs and business, low paid workers, small businesses, people who work in the service industry. Are we really expected to express glee that the skies and rivers have turned blue and that animals have returned when the lives of so many have been blighted. There has to be a class aspect to this socially and politically blasé attitude. The attitude makes environmentalism look like the politics of the comfortable. The positive glee at the collapse of industrial civilisation and celebration of the revenge of what is revealingly called ‘Mother Nature’ has another, deeper, motivation. Frankly, the return of the Goddess cult in an urban culture is always the sign of decadence.
There are many people who are seeing increased government intervention and promises of expenditure and making the claim that the world is going socialist! Of course, many who do this speak in jest and irony, rightly pointing out that the very things which we have been told are impossible are indeed possible. Austerity was always a political choice and imposition and a contrary approach to depression was always possible, if the will was there. We should know, though, that those charged with maintaining the capital system and facilitating the process of accumulation would not have that will. Those who persist in making these arguments at the level of reason, evidence, and logic will continue to be defeated politically. There is no greater, more empowering, knowledge than self-knowledge, and the greatest self-knowledge of human affairs we could have comes with the awareness that we live in a political world that revolves around class struggle. Fail to register that fact and you will be forever mystified at the way that decisions are made and resources allocated. And you will forever make the mistake of thinking that any governmental intervention and action is socialist. Such thinking works within the institutional separation of public and private, state and civil society, government and market that is central to liberal dualism. These are merely two cheeks of the same backside. The same point applies to those who are now extolling the virtues of localism and civil society. We ought to have learned by now that there is nothing virtuous about either of these things in themselves. On the contrary, either can be narrow, insular, parochial, oppressive, iniquitous, divided, with government often having to step in to ensure universal care and concern. The arguments calling for greater emphasis on local communities and civic associationalism need to be buttressed with an argument for a transformed civil society as part of a wider transformation of the capital system. The idea of a state becoming socialist just because it starts to intervene in greater areas of civil life and spend money is fanciful. Such a state is not socialist, it is a rescue squad for the capital system. The scale of intervention and expenditure may well be needed, but socialism as a political movement and philosophy is about constituting an entirely new way of life, not trying to save the capitalist socio-economic system. Those who speak this way are precisely the same liberal reformists whose timidity and shallowness has blighted social democracy throughout its entire history. Such people have always been content with the basic parameters of the private capital economy, sanctioning the use of government only to correct market failure and secure public goods. Their ‘socialism,’ then, is no more than a commitment to the mixed economy. Even now they fail to see that state intervention is merely exhibiting the contradictory dynamics of a capital system that is nearing its socio-ecological limits. The state serves as the political command centre of the capital system and so, of course, intervenes to ensure the conditions of social reproduction and accumulation. What these attitudes reveal is that the understanding of and commitment to socialism on the part of many is barely even skin-deep.
I’m not interested in pointing fingers and settling accounts right now. I’ll let my past work explain my position on ecology. But I am thoroughly turned off by many of the comments celebrating the fact that nature is recovering and animals flourishing the general closing down of human activity. Not only do such comments serve no end – for the reason that there is no positive ecological programme behind this planetary healing, only a harsh necessity that could, if unchecked, become even harsher – it is offensive. There is a need for clarity on this point and check against divisiveness over false antitheses. Such views turn people off, not least on account of its inherent misanthropy. That kind of thinking is a blight in environmentalism and reveals it to be an anti-politics unconcerned with actually persuading and involving people in social transformation.
The most significant comment I’ve heard on coronavirus (other than the essential facts) is this: however we ponder and work out the long term implications with respect to rearranging our relations with each other and with nature, no country has as yet found an exit strategy from this crisis. Bear that in mind before celebrating the sightings of dolphins in the Thames. No doubt animal and plant life will flourish in the absence of human beings. Only misanthropes could welcome the prospect of a planet without the human species. This thinking is the very opposite of what we need now. This moment is the moment for the best of humanity to rise to the challenge before, eclipsing the worst aspects of selfishness, fear, and stupidity. I fully humanity to rise to the challenge, not least because we are already witnessing that. In exiting this crisis we may in the process bring about any necessary re-arrangement to enable planetary healing to continue on an ongoing basis. But if that happens it will only be because certain human beings have collectively come together in order to make it happen. It depends on what you consider the endgame to be – an ecological society based on human and planetary flourishing or a planetary ecology without human beings, or with humans living a primitive existence that is neither true to human nature nor to nature (hence my reference to decadence).
I would just be cautious of using crisis to advance a political point or social system, because it could very well backfire. Necessity is seldom a good argument, however much it may be sometimes an unavoidable one. People patently don't want to be doing any of this, hence the fear and panic. They will throw off the constraint as soon as they can and go for broke again. There is no intellectual and moral transformation giving content to the ecological transformation of politics in these developments, merely the imposition of necessity. There has to be a voluntary embrace of the public good, and hopefully people will learn that the freedom of each and all - along with other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world - is coexistent. The external constraint and institutional force associated with crisis is neither an argument nor an ethic, it is a force that people will throw off as soon as they can.
As for the statements that I am reading to the effect that nature is benefiting and will benefit further from this crisis, and that the recovery rates of 98% mean there is nothing to worry about in any case – and I’ve read too many such statements now – this merely confirms everything that is wrong about a certain strain of environmentalism to me. I’ve been in the company of such people over the years and have heard phrases like “it’s time to cull the herd” from them. I quote that a lot, because it is a direct word for word quote given to me by people who were environmentalists of leftist persuasion. Which governments would they trust to do the culling, I’ve asked them. And which people do they see as being culled? People like me? People with underlying long-term health conditions? People who are economically “unproductive”? I’m in any number of vulnerable categories when it comes to culling. Who do you think will have the power of decision here? I’m done with people who think like this and ruthlessly expose the way they use “Nature” as the instrument of ressentiment and revenge. That thinking is a political cul-de-sac at best. I shudder to think what it represents at its worst. The graphic shows how easy it is for some nasty strains to coalesce and form into Ecofasism.
How many people are predicted to contract the illness? A lot. You can find the figure. 150 million says one estimate. To my mathematically challenged mind, that that means an awful lot of people will not recover. At 98-98% recovery, that means 1.5 million deaths. I’m not actually moved by the size of numbers here. Every single human being is worthy of concern and respect; every person is of value and is to be valued. It could be you or one of your loved ones among that number. It could also be one the people that Jacques Brel sings of in “Les Désespérés,” the hopeless ones who have no-one and disappear without a sound. They still count. Every person counts and counts equally. I don’t care for callous calculation and assertions of the greater good of a false god of “Nature” here. I don’t even care about calculating odds and risk in an attempt to discern what is acceptable, for the good of the whole, not least when that whole is a “Nature” that could care less. How about those people who will be left with permanent lung damage as a result of this illness, people who will never be able to live full lives again? I lived with my father and his chronic lung illness for fifteen years and more and I can tell you it is hard and unpleasant, having to live carving out tiny little victories every day whilst knowing you are fighting a long defeat. Do you find that prospect appealing? Those who take glee in nature’s flourishing as a result of human death and misery, do you even care? And don’t hide your callousness behind nature, because nature doesn’t care. In these godless times life is just an accident and means nothing, earth is just a planet that came from nowhere and is going nowhere. It is only known for having conscious intelligent beings like humans on it. Outraged and upset by my words? Good. Because you need a rude awakening. Because not only does human society depend upon that awakening, so does the health of the planet you love. A misanthropic environmentalism does nothing to ‘save the planet,’ merely reinforces the human-nature antithesis that sets both on a collision course that cannot end well.
I’ll continue to argue for the right way of securing human and planetary flourishing, one that values human beings, whilst recognizing what difficult, contrary and frustrating creatures human beings can well be. Inhumanism is not acceptable to me. The threat of one million or more deaths is a matter of profound concern. The threat of permanent health damage is likewise a matter of profound concern. It is a moral imperative to do what we can to prevent the spread of this virus and keep numbers affected as low as possible. We need to listen to advice, be sensible, and take all suggested precautions. Your life and the lives of those you love could depend on it. And the lives of those who have no one, Brel’s désespérés, the people who disappear without a sound far too often in the normal course of things. Let's not go back to "normal." Normal wasn’t working. But crisis, crash, and necessity is not the basis for a new normal.
In fine, I really don’t want to be hearing how nature and animals are flourishing in the current period. Statements like that without supporting argument and qualification merely reinforce the human-nature antagonism rather than transcend it.
Contesting the ecological degradation and destruction wrought by industrial civilisation on nature does not necessarily make a person a misanthrope or some other such thing, I can see the defence. But I note in that defence the extent to which politically neutral references to ‘industry,’ ‘civilization,’ and ‘humanity’ dominate. The deleterious impact upon nature has been systematically wrought, and any respite which is the result of crisis will merely be temporary in the absence of systemic transformation. Without clarity with respect to the capital system, identifying specific social forms and relations, references to economic depression or illness or some other such calamity befalling humanity is merely a form of ressentiment, not real power and not real joy. It’s a dead-end born of a hopeless politics. The old order will re-establish the old growth imperatives and the destruction will continue. It is that that exposes the deficiencies of positions which are glad for the return of blues skies and waters and animal populations. These gains of human crisis will only be temporary. It is not ‘humanity’ or ‘industry’ that is systematically driving ecological degradation and destruction but a very particular economic system. Fail to specify precise social forms, structures, and relations and you have nothing but a pious moralism, a cynical idealism that sets impossible ideals unattached from their means of realisation, in preparation for failure, defeat, and righteous but hopeless lamentation.
We require the voluntary transformation of social relations to bring about a socially and ecologically viable way of living, and it is in this light I would set comments with respect to the involuntary pressure that crisis and catastrophe exerts from the outside. We should, of course, get the message and act on it. But it is not ‘Nature’ sending that message, and to argue as if it is is to remain within reified relations that keep us trapped within false dualism. Our commitments should be to the cause of human and planetary interdependence, human beings and non-human beings and bodies whose common health and flourishing is autonomous of the very particular economic system that is implicated in socio-ecological destruction.
But yes, agreed that in the past week .. air quality has improved and pollution declined, the homeless housed, evictions banned, water shut offs suspended, the debt system halted, universal basic income proposed across the political spectrum, people are expressing concern for the elderly and the vulnerable and are giving thanks and praise for key workers, as well as coming to recognize often neglected workers as key, mutual aid networks are growing, people are volunteering and putting a shift in in their local communities keeping places safe and healthy, and life is slowing down to a more natural pace (my pace) and making and keeping contact with their loved ones. We are being told something. I’ve been saying the same thing. I have the motto embroidered on my cap: ‘go slowly and go far, all that you own is just borrowed for a short time.’ It’s in Welsh, though. You now have time on your go slow to learn Welsh.
I would hope that a new communalism and associationalism could spring from the re-energised local efforts to help each other throughout the crisis, building a new social solidarity around the mutual aid groups that are springing up. I’ll end with a couple of articles:
"The 21st century will be an era of confronting limits, whether of economic growth or natural resources, and we are likely to find ourselves needing to learn once again how — or when, or in what manner — to trust our neighbours." I don't like attention grabbing headings. They not only grab the attention, they take debate in the wrong direction. Obviously, being on social media, I wouldn't agree with the call to "get off social media." I have valuable connections here. (I'm reading some right rubbish, too, from people I really should just cut out). I don't much care people telling others what to do etc. But there is much here to ponder. I'd just add there is no virtue in civil society as such, it can be an iniquitous and divided space. We need a transformed civil society. I remember Robert Nisbett in 1970's "The Quest for Community" arguing for a laissez faire’ of social associations and groups. We can look at Kropotkin or Bookchin, whoever. There are a lot of sources to draw on. Rethinking society.
“The peddlers of conspiracy theories are now, naturally, peddling coronavirus-flavoured conspiracy theories. The same FBPE-ers who not long ago fantasised about Brexit-voting pensioners dying off are now accusing Boris Johnson of wanting to ‘cull’ the elderly to save on social care fees. Meanwhile, Owen Jones calls for his supporters to mobilise around five demands – and also for suggestions as to what those five demands should be.
As the crisis escalated last week, the increasingly frenzied culture-war weaponisation of this deadly and disruptive virus struck me first as tin-eared, then baffling, and finally monstrous. What do people think they are doing, scrabbling for points in another round of biff-bam-pow when, as Graeme Archer put it, a virus is trying to kill us all?”
“Contributing to the like-and-share spectacle of social media gives us an illusory closeness to national decision-making, and a sense of contributing to matters of state. So as the systems that underpin our society of spectacle fall away one by one, millions flock to help in the only way the spectacle has to offer: “the debate”.
“groups are now forming all over the country, as people realise that to cope in this strange new reality we need less performative outrage and more practical offline action. Cheeringly, a growing chorus of voices is challenging those still stuck on politics-as-performance. Ever more of us are opting to “stop being angry and scared on Twitter and do something more useful”, as Centre for Policy Studies director Robert Colvile put it.
The internet is the locus for a culture of performative outrage that feels increasingly ill-suited to a time of national crisis. But it also has phenomenal power to connect people in practical ways, to do things in real life. We are seeing social media increasingly used in service of local networks, rather than replacing them.
“Though we are being told to stay physically apart, connections are being formed. Local groups are beginning to coalesce into larger-scale hub-and-spoke networks, and organisers are sharing ideas and best practice via groups such as Covid-19 Mutual Aid or the list hosted by the anarchist website Freedom News.
My prediction is that this will be significant. Our nation has had its civil society capacity reduced by both the right and left, in the name of (respectively) market and state, and this outbreak of new, mutualistic networks could have a powerful effect well beyond the coronavirus crisis.
“these green shoots of civil society regrowth that are beginning to appear may become increasingly valuable. The 21st century will be an era of confronting limits, whether of economic growth or natural resources, and we are likely to find ourselves needing to learn once again how — or when, or in what manner — to trust our neighbours.
The hologram is flickering. We are catching glimpses of a different society beneath the spectacle, one that is more place-bound, more mutualistic and more viscerally focused on everyday survival. Growing numbers are turning away from the spectacle and seeking to refocus the power of the internet on enabling real, meaningful offline networks. We should nurture those networks, because we are likely to need them during a difficult and trying time.”
“The welfare state is not equipped for pandemic or economic trauma. Its NHS gigantism and lumbering benefits regime are slow moving and often inhumane. Private citizens are having to use technology to fall back on otherwise eerily medieval forms of support. My street has a WhatsApp group to help the housebound elderly. A Gloucestershire pub is home-delivering its drinks, and food. A Devon farmer offers drive-in produce, with volunteer dance classes, hairdressing and a nursery.
These and a thousand other ventures are struggling to relieve distress, loneliness and, in many cases, financial ruin. But they are handicapped by the disappearance over recent decades of all that is vital in British neighbourhoods: high streets, police stations, banks, libraries, youth clubs, day centres and cottage hospitals. People have been forced back on neighbours, on geography. When systems fail, geography matters.
“A new Beveridge should grasp the gaps in social cohesion that are being revealed by coronavirus. The components of a “village” matter – be it rural hamlet, market town or city street – and they are not binary. They are not conditioned by a corporatist state on the one hand and a capitalist free-market on the other. An intermediate tier of “association” has been ripped away, the businesses, the encounters and activities that lubricate community.
“Like a brick removed from a wall, each closure of a local institution may be an economy. Close them all and social association collapses. We lose what de Tocqueville called democracy’s “mother science … the spirit of association”. Its absence turns nations into “atomised” states, vulnerable to autocratic populism.
This final comment nails it, pointing to the need for an environmentalism that takes care of the human environment, not just the natural environment.
“The British government is already compiling “public goods” to be expected – and subsidised – from farmers, in place of EU agricultural policy. They are identifying birds, bees, soil, trees, hedgerows, streams, even beauty. But if birds and bees merit such guardianship, why not the environment of human beings? What about the “public goods” that are embraced by towns and cities?
Government seems to value the institutions of nature, but not those of humanity. During the last great crisis, we were delivered a blueprint for a welfare state. Now we need one for welfare communities, and they are not the same thing.”