Classless, amoral, and non-political. Such is the self-image of would-be planetary managers, a technocracy that works hand-in-hand with the romantic images of nature on the part of planetary fetishizers. Naturism comes in both romantic-reactionary and technocratic-futuristic forms.
I came across this article on an environmental forum.
The authors of the article are James Maskalyk and Dave Courchane. I was interested in the nature of their expertise. James Maskalyk is an emergency physician, associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and author of the forthcoming book Doctor: Heal Thyself. Dave Courchene is the founder of the Turtle Lodge International Centre for Indigenous Education and Wellness and chair of its National Knowledge Keepers’ Council.
Yet again, nothing on social sciences, political economy, ethics, sociology – the entire area of practical reason and social forms and relations. This absence is so consistent as to be systematic rather than accidental. The combination of science and nature religion/romanticism is one that expresses the dualism of bourgeois thought perfectly, reactionary in one sense, technocratic in another. It’s the kind of thinking that is forever drawing parallels with ‘new’ science – the latest fashion in physics and biology – and ancient wisdom or eastern philosophy/religion. I once found it appealing, only to soon find it dreary, repeating the same things on interconnection, balance, and harmony as if they offered explanations of and solutions to anything. They don’t. Such thinking is not only evasive, it is ideological and is characterised by a negative dismissal of people who seek to raise the difficult questions of power, class, and resources. The stock response is that such people are part of the very divisions they seek to challenge. As if ignoring such divisions by appeals to harmony and unity is sufficient to overcome them. These appeals to harmony are the soft non-confrontational option of the privileged, the entitled, and the comfortable. They present the appealing end and ideal as one that can be attained without having to confront those forces and powers which have broken up that commonality, commodified it, and parcelled it out to the market. Those who persist in claiming that human beings have forgotten they are natural beings display the remarkable ability to forget that human beings are social beings acting within determinate social relations. To ignore that sociological and historical reality in favour of bland statements of ‘nature’ is a recipe either for a) impotence or b) a general agreement that can be exploited by an environmental leadership claiming to speak with the voice of ‘nature.’
General statements yield general agreement but are of no political and sociological weight and importance in terms of a transformation that heals relations between social and natural metabolic orders: they are of no explanatory value.
"This virus emerged from pressure humans put on a global ecosystem." The day people looking at these questions put aside vague references to "humans" and instead analyse social forms and relations more precisely is the day they start to get serious in a transformative sense. What does this article give us? The wisdom and sacred teachings of a thousand years rationalized by science. "If the Earth is as alive as both climate scientists and Indigenous peoples say, and like a body, kept well by a diversity of cells, deeply connected, then the medical diagnosis that fits most neatly our modern sickness is not an infection, but a malignancy."
This appeal to ancient sacred wisdom is reactionary nonsense to the extent that it scotomizes political economy and the precise sociological, structural, and institutional forms of the 'malignancy.' The cause of crisis is not a failure of consciousness to be overcome by a fanciful reimagining of ancient wisdom and climate science, but of social practices within determinate social - and class - relations.
It is clear why people do this. Remote from the ‘gut’ issues of concern to people in the everyday social world, people are free to indulge their visions and fantasies of an ideal world, without having to test them on the hard boards of the political world. The only relation to people is that of the educator to the pupil. Naturally, ‘ordinary’ people find this an affront to their citizen agency and keep a distance, thereby confirming the ideal and elitist nature of environmentalism.
And thus we come to the notion of environmental leaders: "This must be the priority of our Group of 20 leaders."
There is an appeal to existing world leaders in politics and business, and there is a clear ambition to become those leaders. As for changing the hierarchies of leaders and led through a thoroughgoing democratisation, this is replaced by a bureaucratisation.
Too few are prepared to address the material relations and class dynamics of this malignancy.
"We have forgotten who we are... We are of the Earth, and have everything we need to heal."
This is a naturalism as a mix of romanticism and technocracy. What has been forgotten is the fact that human beings are social and historical beings, mediating their interchange with nature within determinate social forms, relations, and practices. It is the precise forms of this mediation that are of crucial importance. We may speculate as to why this question is so consistently ignored. This is an ignorance so profound and so systematic as to be ideological.
Tales like this are based on a mix of romantic and reactionary myths covered by selective appeals to science. There is no such thing as ‘the science.’ Science is being used here as a false authority and foundation, the reified voice of nature being used to constitute an authoritative moral framework, command structure, and rationalisation. The attraction of such a ‘science’ is that it enables those seeking to form a class of decision-makers to avoid ethics and politics, the democratic spheres of contention and disagreement in which citizens retain their own personal yeses and noes.
The problems are structural, not chronological, so lessons of ancient history are irrelevant, except as appeals designed to evade contentious questions of power and practice in the here and now. The appeal to indigenous wisdom is fine. I appeal to the commons ideals and communing practices of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers in the mid seventeenth century. But such appeals are futile in the face of structural and sociological forces and are hopeless in face of historic and economic expropriation. If you have no view of that process of expropriation which broke up the commons in the first place then you have nothing but pious wishes, utopian ideals, and a claim to neutral expertise and technique that can only end up in a technocratic regime.
The interesting part is the way in which general and vague 'catch-all' appeals like this which purportedly excoriate 'our' relation to 'nature' leave the precise forms of social division, hierarchy and forms of governance – and, crucially, the class power that these embody - uncriticised to move to a direct appeal to already constituted authority. 'Government must act' is a common demand; activism and campaign seek to put pressure on those 'in power' to make the right decisions. What a come down from past socialist demands to restitute power to the social body and organise it democratically! The alienation of power lies at the source of the problem. This power is to be practically reappropriated and democratised by way of its social embodiment. Such appeals to alien power align very easily with the bureaucratisation of the modern world against its democratisation. There is a complete lack of political economy and its critique in such thinking. This approach so politically naïve (or profoundly cynical in its calculated vagueness on precise social forms and politics) that it’s actually dangerous, demonstrating a tendency to magical thinking (reenchantment by invoking ancient wisdom), which can either be vapidly euphoric or nightmarishly bureaucratic (actually both, they proceed hand-in-hand in league with claims to a neutral expertise which eliminates politics and ethics and political economy as key aspects of the field of practical reason). This is reactionary piffle. It doesn’t so much solve the problem humanity faces as avoid it.
This thinking is bourgeois to the core. Marx writes well on the 'bourgeois viewpoint' in the Grundrisse:
"It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that [pre-modern] original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness [capitalist free competition] 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
Such thinking is trapped entirely within the dualism Marx describes, utterly incapable of conceiving a genuine transcendence of the capital system, ruling out socialism in any definition, and instead blending yearning and lamentation by way of a romanticism and reaction dressed up in technology and design and a reenchanted view of science (other scientists, seeing nature as an objectively valueless and purposeless world, call it 'woo'). Nature is being used transparently as a false moral referent, as though Nietzsche's 'death of God' challenge can be met so cheaply. Nature reified by the voice of science as a false projection and authoritative command in a non-politics.
It is not just that articles like this are so breath-takingly naïve, it is that the naivety is so systematic and consistent over the years that it can only denote a consistent mindset and ideological worldview. If this really is the best that regenerative minds can come up with then the entire field is one enormous blind alley, a cul-de-sac that wastes the time and energy of well-intentioned people. If this is the dominant view in environmentalism, then catastrophe and attempted rescue squads are the future (which implies that would-be planetary managers and engineers are wedded to the crisis they claim to have the tools to resolve). This is not system change and transformation, this is system preservation, since the determined evasion of material relations means that existing power relations will go unchallenged and will remain intact. Ask yourself who exactly has the capacity to push new technologies to scale to ensure such 'healing'?
Or is the proposal just to crash civilisation and administer the chaos as a necessity rationalised by appeals to an implaccable, indifferent 'Mother Nature'? I don't agree that the situation is hopeless, but this kind of thinking is, it is a cul-de-sac. But I can see why it would appeal to the bureaucrats of power, knowledge, and non-politics (it puts politics and people on ice).
I don't agree that the situation is hopeless, but I do think that this kind of thinking is.
It is the precise form of mediation between social and natural metabolisms that matter here. But as soon as people do start to get into precise forms, they are told that they are divisive and conflictual and that 'classless' and 'humanitarian' appeals to everyone and no-one (and which default to existing power) are the way forward. Statements like this are merely the beginning of transformation. It's like saying "we" should be acting for the common good. There are institutional and structural reasons why "we" are not - and why politically and sociologically there is no "we" to act. In a new book, "Making Climate Policy Work," Danny Cullenward and David Victor, argue that "understanding and planning around political economy is just as important as understanding and planning around physics. Neither can be bypassed or overcome with sheer will." Too late in the day, people are starting to look at politics, mediation and social forms and relations, political economy and its critique. But I have a view that "classless" appeals and statements that scotomize difficult questions of politics, power, and control of resources are the soft non-confrontational option of those who, being at comfortable remove from 'the economy' of capital and labour see themselves as above material interests and their divisions. Try creating that harmonious relation with nature without confronting embedded and institutionalised asymmetries in power and see how far you get (you'll get precisely where you are today, which is the brink of catastrophe and well short of the transformation required. I think people who reason this way imagine 'government' stepping in and acting as an environmental rescue squad. Without democratic participation and consent that can only mean an austerian environmental regime preserving existing social relations by authoritarian elitist imposition. The people who eschew class analysis on this in favour of presenting a "classless" self-image are members of a techno-bureaucratic class of (would be) planetary managers. Appeals to "nature" and Gaia explain precisely nothing and are part of an amoral and non-political appeal and cover (natural selection, enlightened self-interest, classless non-politics beyond left, right, and centre etc ... It takes all the difficult areas of power and asymmetrical power relations, class and class division, material roots, contradictory dynamics, accumulative imperatives, control of resources, authority out of public controversy, all to be tidied up by designers and planners with their neutral expertise. Except the claim to independence and classlessness is hogwash. The only thing to decide here is whether people are genuinely innocent, and open to wising up and toughening up politically and sociologically, or are really members of a techno-bureaucratic class who imagine themselves as planners and coordinators of a planetary management. If the latter, you must have missed the populist revolt against unelected and unrepresentative elites and experts going on in the world. The choice is between a bureaucratisation under the sign of 'necessity' (that reified voice of nature via the voice of a (particular) science) and democratisation.
Mother Nature is Boss? This is goddess of the bright green intelligent people, environmental and evolutionary leaders. And it is moral and political garbage.
