Ten years ago, in Of Gods and Gaia, I analysed various proposals for planetary management and engineering to deal with the looming environmental crisis. In the absence of a critique of political economy – which these proposals explicitly ruled out – I showed how this reduced to the one mad last gamble to come with geoengineering. I exposed its delusions and the underlying desperation behind its overt hybris. I ruled it out as wrong in itself, inhuman, unnatural, undemocratic, and ecologically destructive. In Climate Rebellion, I see that one last desperate attempt taking shape as an institutional rescue squad undertaken via authoritarian governmental imposition. It is one more desperate, delusional act, inherently and I rule it out. The approach is inherently undemocratic. In fact, it is explicitly anti-democratic, in being premised on an anthropological pessimism. The defence of climate rebellion is premised on the failures of environmentalism as politics in the past few decades. That failure is identified as one of politicians and people. Significantly, the failures of those advancing the environmental cause in the political realm are ignored. It is easier to blame others than to examine one's own failures, just as it is easier to opt for institutional and technological fixes and design solutions to uprooting political economic causes and restructuring power relations.
How utterly puny these things are. And how feeble the modern mind reduced to this: how dull, how delusional, how desperate.
I revisited these collected essays from last year in light of the current controversy over 'the great reset.' I wanted to reassure myself that, in raising the spectre of the austerian green Megamachine, I had not drifted into conspiratorial delusions of a great reset being undertaken by a global technocratic elite. I hadn't. At the same time, that a technocratic elite exists in the context of globalized capitalist relations is undeniable. I've always preferred the more sociologically precise term of class to elite, mind. That such a class exists and that such a class will meet, network, and plan is clear (and why wouldn't they meet, network, and plan? It would be more surprising to be told that they didn't.) I don't think the problem is 'the great reset,' certainly not as it is presented in the libertarian nightmares of socialism. I went and checked Covid-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab. I like to make sure that my judgements are sober and that my speculations are astute, however much they may fly in the face of the conventional wisdom. Unless my speed reading has led me to seriously misunderstand the argument presented in The Great Reset, I take Schwab to be cautioning against a takeover by a global technocratic elite. He quotes Evgeny Morozov:
'On the one hand, there are progressive solutionists who believe that the appropriate exposure through an app to the right information about infection could make people behave in the public interest.
On the other hand, there are punitive solutionists determined to use vast digital surveillance infrastructure to curb our daily activities and punish any transgressions.'
I take an interest in this quote in the context of the current controversy raging over 'the great reset' because this combination of the progressive and the punitive applies very much to contemporary environmental solutions to climate change: an information campaign raising awareness allied to demands for governmental legislation and regulation curbing individual behaviour (and much more besides, how else can net zero by 2025-2050 be achieved otherwise?). This comes to the crucial point that Morozov makes, that the greatest threat to our political system, civil liberty, and democracy comes from the apparent success of technology in dealing with the pandemic coming to set the template for the solutions to all other problems. As Morozov writes, the success of technology in monitoring and containing the pandemic will then
'entrench the solutionist toolkit as the default option for addressing all other existential problems – from inequality to climate change.
After all, it is much easier to deploy solutionist tech to influence individual behaviour than it is to ask difficult political questions about the root causes of these crises.'
Schwab is thus warning of the very thing – rule by the global technocratic elite – that people are now reading into 'the great reset.' My concern here, however, is the tendency to opt for 'the solutionist toolkit as the default option,' (institutional and technological fixes) rather than engage in the must more difficult – and hence more effective and enduring – political actions and socio-economic transformations which address and uproot fundamental causes. The attempted workarounds will not produce the solutions they promise, merely entrench and extend the causes of crises in untransformed social relations.
When people urge me to stand up and shout loudly for this or that form of climate action – basically austerity and collapse – on account of time running short, my response is that if it is so late then it is more than likely too late. The idea that human society will accomplish the scale of changes demanded in such a short time – changes that have evaded us for so long – is fanciful. Because the changes are not merely institutional and technical. Those changes are the easiest, hence the constant emphasis on them. And whilst institutional and technical solutions are the default options, they are precisely because they are the easiest. And they are not solutions.
If it really is that late in the day as to demand drastic institutional and technological action, then it is really time to face the music and make our peace as best we can. I'll be damned if I shall be stampeded into joining any last minute panics, because that is all that the modern mind at the end of its tether can come up with. I think letting rip and expressing unpallatable truths with respect to the delusions of modern men as gods may well be all that is left as civilisation faces the consequences of the anti-metaphysical carnage unleashed by brute rationalism and disenchanting scientism. Those transcendent truths which I recover and restate in the process, which this age has scorned to its cost, may come in handy for whatever and whoever may come after. I have consistently underlined the fact E.F. Schumacher, whose work on appropriate scale and alternative technology every ecologist knows, insisted that the technical questions were the easiest, and secondary to the much more important task of metaphysical reconstruction. He was ignored.
I try to be positive, seeking to inspire rather than demoralize and demotivate people, but much I see seems like reheating old and limited modes of thought. Failed modalities and mentalities on steroids won't cut it, and I say so openly in Climate Rebellion. I don't expect to win friends for the piece. But I am encouraged that, in reposting this week, I received a number of messages of support, one environmentalist who was fighting the good fight in 1969, and gave it all up as hopeless twenty years ago, telling me this 'I really appreciate your take ---please let it rip!!! From your philosophical world-space, the bloodier the better!!' But those are the words of one who has tried and failed and is tired and no doubt feels like going home. I always said that when I reached that stage I would go quiet. There comes a time when we have given as much as we can. Rather than declare it game over at that point, and foreclose on possibilities that those new to the problem may see in their freshness, hand it on to those others. I'm not giving it up and not handing it over. I am saying that environmentalism can do far better than this, if it learns the lessons of its past failure – it is far too simple to say that it is wicked capitalists and stupid and greedy people to blame. And wrong. Environmentalists have had long enough to have taken the human environment as seriously as they do the natural environment, instead of reading politics and ethics through the reified voice of nature and its necessity.